Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

Il testo esamina, alla luce dell'ultimo inedito di Ugo Spirito, pubblicato a mia cura, le posizioni di Ugo Spirito riguardo al problema di Dio, mettendone in rilievo la profobnda continuità e coreneza.

La domanda "chi è l´uomo?" è un interrogativo esistenzialmente cruciale per ognuno di noi: non lo si può eludere. Per chi accoglie la Rivelazione cristiana la domanda si fa ancora più coinvolgente perchè la Sacra Scrittura ci insegna che l´uomo è creato a immagine e somiglianza di Dio e l´immagine perfetta di Dio è il Figlio Unigenito, Gesù Cristo. San Tommaso approfondisce queste categorie bibliche nella sua prima opera sistematica, lo "Scritto sulle Sentenze", aprendo delle prospettive quasi del tutto ignorate, (...) come la relazione tra immagine di Dio e la coscienza di sé, o la presenza dell'immagine di Dio anche nella corporeità umana. Inoltre, egli sviluppa il tema dell´assimilazione a Dio e della divinizzazione dell'uomo mediante l'immagine divina prodotta dalla grazia santificante e dalla gloria eterna. (shrink)

In this study I aim at providing a new assessment of Ockham’s proof for God’s existence. After reconstructing Ockham’s views of the relationship between philosophy and theology , I move to examining Ockham’s criticism to some traditional arguments , before to scrutinizing closely Ockham’s argument. My main conclusion is that Ockham did not want to elaborate a new proof but to qualify the proof stemming from efficient causality, which he considers the only available way of demonstrating God’s existence.

Within the Neoplatonic tradition, the absolute transcendence of the First Principle—the One-Good, from which the whole reality in its various articulations derives—plays a crucial role. This philosophical perspective implies, particularly in Plotinus and Proclus, some fundamental philosophical consequences, above all the transcendence of the Principle with respect to being and thought as well. This necessarily implies that the One-Good must be conceived of as beyond the intelligible Beauty itself. In this paper I aim to examine the theoretical implications and consequences (...) of this perspective with specific reference to the conception of God’s absolute transcendence outlined within two texts of the Corpus Areopagiticum, overall characterized by the reworking of some fundamental Neoplatonic concepts in the context of Christian theology: the De divinis nominibus and the De mystica theologia. Indeed, in the De divinis nominibus it is shown that the names/predicates attributed to God in the Sacred Scriptures must be understood only in an allegorical-symbolic meaning, because God is above any possible definition. Not even the character of Beauty can be attributed to him, since he radically transcends it: in fact, God constitutes the absolute foundation and the very first source of Beauty itself. Therefore, God must be understood as ἀκαλλής, that is, “devoid of the connotation of Beauty”, precisely because he completely transcends it. In line with this theological and theoretical perspective, in the De mystica theologia a form of radical and absolute apophatism is developed, which in turn must ultimately lead to its own overcoming for the sake of the henosis, the mystical union with God. (shrink)

“Perspective is much more than a secret technique for imitating a reality… It is the invention of a world dominated and possessed through and through.” These inimical words by Maurice Merleau-Ponty encapsulate a customary philosophical position, as explicit and implicit references to early modern culture by critical theorists and continental philosophers lead to an uninviting and even sinister picture. Because of its emphasis on the human eye, quantitative spatial relations, and the virtual incising of pictorial space via linear perspective, the (...) Renaissance was cast as a formidable villain in order to uphold modern artistic production. It is an accusatory characterization.. (shrink)

Sentencing in homicide depends on how psychiatrists view the issues of Section 2. In most killings that do not involve clear-cut mental disorder, strong emotions and stress play a part. Both can be cited in aid of diminished responsibility. If doctors cite them, however tentatively, it becomes feasible for the court to review any mitigating factors and to choose an appropriate penalty. Otherwise, the mandatory penalty is imposed. Thus doctors, by opining not on the medical but on the legal and (...) moral aspects of Section 2, decide who shall automatically get a life sentence and who shall not. Anomaly and injustice are the results. They would be remedied by the abolition of the mandatory sentence for murder. (shrink)

This investigation draws from research on negative polarity item (NPI) illusions in order to explore a new and interesting instance of misalignment observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative markers. Previous research has shown that unlicensed NPIs can be perceived as acceptable when occurring soon after a structurally inaccessible negation (e.g. ever in *The bills that no senators voted for have ever become law). Here we examine the opposite configuration: grammatical sentences created by substituting the NPI ever with the negative (...) adverb never (e.g. The bills that no senators voted for have never become law). The processing and acceptability of these sentences was studied using three tasks: a speeded acceptability judgment (experiment 1), a self-paced reading task (experiment 2), and an offline acceptability rating (experiment 3). The results are consistent across measures in showing that the integration of the adverb never is disrupted by the linearly preceding but structurally inaccessible negative quantifier no in the relative clause. In our view, this pattern of results is in line with Parker and Phillips’ (2016) proposal that NPI illusions arise when the context containing the inaccessible negation has not been fully encoded by the time the NPI ever is encountered, making the embedded negative quantifier transparently available as a licensor. In a similar vein, the disruption effects observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative elements could arise if the negative quantifier is still being integrated when never is encountered, forcing the parser to deal with two negative elements simultaneously. This interpretation suggests that the same incomplete encodings that could be ameliorating the online perception of unlicensed NPIs could also be responsible for deteriorating the perception of the sentences under investigation here. This would represent an illusion of ungrammaticality. Furthermore, these results provide evidence against the speculation that NPI illusions are the consequence of misrepresenting ever as its near neighbor never, given that continuations with never are judged as unacceptable in spite of their grammaticality. Together, these findings inform the landscape of hypotheses on NPI illusions and offer valuable insights on the complexity of multiple negation and the relation between processing difficulty and acceptability. (shrink)

Theories of language production propose that utterances are constructed by a mechanism that separates linguistic content from linguistic structure, Linguistic content is retrieved from the mental lexicon, and is then inserted into slots in linguistic structures or frames. Support for this kind of model at the phonological level comes from patterns of phonological speech errors. W present an alternative account of these patterns using a connectionist or parallel distributed proceesing (PDP) model that learns to produce sequences of phonological features. The (...) model's errors exhibit some of the properties of human speech errors, specifically, properties that have been attributed to the action of phonological rules, frames, or other structural generalizations. (shrink)

This article studies an illuminated manuscript of St. Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos: Vat. lat. 451 (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana). The manuscript was commissioned by the bishop Giovanni Capogallo, when he was in Lombardy in close contact with the court of the duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The article examines the cultural milieu of Pavia in the early 15th century, highlighting the role of the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine in the monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. (...) The two incipit pages ff. 1r and 239r, illuminated by Michelino da Besozzo, are an example of the International Gothic style and this article analyses not only their stylistic aspect, but also their allegorical meaning, as an interesting case of decoration of a patristic text. (shrink)

The paper discusses some recent suggestions offered by the so-called sensorimotor (or enactivist) theorists as to the problem of the explanatory gap, that is, the alleged impossibility of accounting for phenomenal consciousness in any scientific theory. We argue in the paper that, although some enactivist theorists’ suggestions appear fresh and eye-opening, the claim that the explanatory gap is (dis)solved is much overstated.

Interactive theories of lexical retrieval in language production assume that activation cascades from earlier to later processing levels, and feeds back in the reverse direction. This commentary invites Pickering & Garrod (P&G) to consider whether cascading and feedback can be seen as a form of forwarding modeling within a hierarchical production system.