The dynamics of general relativity is encoded in a set of ten differential equations, the so-called Einstein field equations. It is usually believed that Einstein's equations represent a physical law describing the coupling of spacetime with material fields. However, just six of these equations actually describe the coupling mechanism: the remaining four represent a set of differential relations known as Bianchi identities. The paper discusses the physical role that the Bianchi identities play in general relativity, and investigates whether these identities (...) --qua part of a physical law-- highlight some kind of a posteriori necessity in a Kripkean sense. The inquiry shows that general relativistic physics has an interesting bearing on the debate about the metaphysics of the laws of nature. (shrink)

Antônio de Castro Alves was born on 1 March 1847 on the Fazenda das Cabaceiras (Cabaceiras Farm) in the state of Bahia, and died in July 1871 in Salvador, the state capital. For this short twenty-four year span of his life he represented, as no one else in Brazil did, the myth of the Romantic poet and hero.His literary vocation became clear very early on. Coming from a well-to-do family, he studied law in Recife (the capital of Pernambuco), Salvador and (...) São Paulo. He fell in love with a Portuguese actress, Eugênia Câmara, ten years older than himself, and had the deep experience of a love affair with her that shocked the moral provincialism of contemporary Catholic monarchist Brazil. Like many writers of the period he wrote plays, and had great success with the drama Gonzaga, or the Minas Revolution, about the (abortive) attempt to free Brazil from the Portuguese yoke, which had been made in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. But it was in poetry – Espumas flutuantes (‘Floating Foam’, 1870) as well as the posthumous A cachoeira de Paulo Alfonso (‘Paulo Alfonso's Waterfall’, 1876) and Os escravos (‘The Slaves’, 1883) – that Castro Alves stood out on the country's literary scene. (shrink)

A philosopher and political thinker describes a new political grammar free of modernist assumptions. In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Biopolitics, biopowers, control, the multitude, people, war, borders, dependency and interdependency, state, nation, the common, difference, resistance, subjective rights, revolution, freedom, democracy: these are just a few of the themes Negri addressed in these experimental laboratories. Postmodernity, Negri suggests, can (...) be described as a “porcelain factory”: a delicate and fragile construction that could be destroyed through one clumsy act. Looking across twentieth century history, Negri warns that our inability to anticipate future developments has already placed coming generations in serious jeopardy. Describing the years 1917-1968 as the “short century,” Negri suggests that by the end of it, all of the familiar markers of modernity had lost their relevance. Confronted with an intolerable reality, indignation and the revolutionary will to transform the world have both taken new forms and must be understood anew, free of modernist assumptions. In the impassioned debates recounted in this book, Antonio Negri attempts to describe the formation of an alternative political horizon and looks for a way to define the practices and modes of expression that democracy could take.Antonio Negri is a philosopher and essay writer. A political and social activist in the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, he taught political sciences for many years and has written numerous books on political philosophy including Marx beyond Marx, The Savage Anomaly, Insurgencies ; and in collaboration with Michael Hardt, Empire and Multitude. (shrink)

Antônio de Castro Alves was born on 1 March 1847 on the Fazenda das Cabaceiras (Cabaceiras Farm) in the state of Bahia, and died in July 1871 in Salvador, the state capital. For this short twenty-four year span of his life he represented, as no one else in Brazil did, the myth of the Romantic poet and hero.His literary vocation became clear very early on. Coming from a well-to-do family, he studied law in Recife (the capital of Pernambuco), Salvador and (...) São Paulo. He fell in love with a Portuguese actress, Eugênia Câmara, ten years older than himself, and had the deep experience of a love affair with her that shocked the moral provincialism of contemporary Catholic monarchist Brazil. Like many writers of the period he wrote plays, and had great success with the drama Gonzaga, or the Minas Revolution, about the (abortive) attempt to free Brazil from the Portuguese yoke, which had been made in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. But it was in poetry – Espumas flutuantes (‘Floating Foam’, 1870) as well as the posthumous A cachoeira de Paulo Alfonso (‘Paulo Alfonso's Waterfall’, 1876) and Os escravos (‘The Slaves’, 1883) – that Castro Alves stood out on the country's literary scene. (shrink)

I propose in this paper a reflection, a self-analysis, about my extensive teaching experience, not from a formal point of view of the specificity of the program and the subjects of my courses, but about the singularity of the teaching activities. The commitment with the students, with the topic taught and with the Institution in which I have the honor to work, constitute the fundamental motive that leads and conducts my profession as teacher. My explanation displays ten items. Each of (...) them presents a speculation about one of the ideal elements of the good teacher all of us aim to be. For that reason this essay is not a positivist description of the teaching reality, but it expects to reconstruct the critical demarcation between the ideality which all of us try to achieve and the empirical reality that constantly pull us in the opposite direction. The coercion without coercions of the exemplariness pushes us to maintain alive the faith in the appropriation of the nature and soul of the ideal teacher. (shrink)

After almost two years of armed conflict between Arab militias and African farmers in Sudan, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1556 in July 2004, calling upon the Sudanese government to end the violence or face possible diplomatic and economic sanctions. The militias, known as the Janjiwid, arose after African farmers in the Darfur region formed the Sudanese Liberation Army and attacked the government in February 2003. Human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, claim that the government gave the (...) militias logistical assistance to attack the farmers. Since 2003, tens of thousands have been killed and more than a million people displaced from their homes, pushed into concentration.. (shrink)

In this paper the author reflects upon the past, the present and the future of philosophical education within the framework of a democratic mode of living, integrating three levels of argumentation: an autobiographic level, triggered by the encounter with an old school notebook that belonged to the author’s father; a conceptual level, in which the author recalls John Dewey’s pragmatist approach to philosophy; and a descriptive and proactive level, in which the author examines recent developments concerning the teaching of philosophy (...) and proposes a perspective on philosophical education in tune with these. The author underscores the importance of different displacements and transformations undergone by the practice of teaching philosophy during the last century, and sets up a contrast between the old practices, intended to provide a “correct view of the world”, and the urge for philosophy to provide a critique of society and knowledge. In this way, the author draws on Dewey’s ideal, according to which philosophy should carry out both a critique and a reconstruction of present experience. Finally, the author sets forth ten challenges for future philosophical education. (shrink)

The 'Enciclopedia Filosofica' is an encyclopaedia of philosophical topics promoted by the Centre for Philosophical Studies of Gallarate and published, in its third and last edition in 2006, by the Bompiani publishing house in Milan. The first edition of the 'Enciclopedia Filosofica' was promoted by the Centre for Philosophical Studies of Gallarate in the 1950s, seeing the light in 1957-58. A second edition, published by the Sansoni publishing house in Florence, was published in 1968-69 and reprinted in 1979. The third (...) and last edition, published by Bompiani in 2006, is intended to cover the whole of philosophical knowledge and related disciplines with over ten thousand entries edited by about a thousand academics, both Italian and non-Italian, and distributed in twelve volumes for a total of 12,496 pages. (shrink)

Antonio Rosmini is considered by many to be greatest Italian - or even European - thinker of the nineteenth century. But for christians he is also a saint. Here, marking ten years since his beatification in 2007, is an updated biography.

Il sansimonismo, sistema culturale della civiltà tecnologica, di A. Cattabiani.--Nota dell'Editore.--Introduzione.--Beniamino Constant.--I San-Simoniani.--Appendice: L'utopismo di Carlo Fourier.

Columbia University Press's multivolume _Prison Notebooks_ is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, _Quaderni del Carcere_, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters. This set includes notebooks 1 through 8 with (...) all attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

On raconte qu'après la désignation comme Premier consul, Napoléon montra à des invités La Science de la législation de Gaetano Filangieri, le "jeune homme qui est notre maître à tous". Presque au même moment, ces volumes se trouvaient aussi sur le bureau de Benjamin Constant. La fortune et la circulation de cette oeuvre au sein de l'Europe des Lumières et du XIXe siècle sont l'objet de cet ouvrage, qui décrit les débats qu'elle a alimentés afin de comprendre pourquoi les hommes (...) de lettres et les politiques continuèrent à s'intéresser à ce classique de la pensée républicaine du XVIIIe siècle pour se fondre dans la nouvelle Europe du XIXe siècle."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In Subversive Spinoza , Antonio Negri spells out the philosophical credo that inspired his radical renewal of Marxism and his compelling analysis of the modern state and the global economy by means of an inspiring reading of the challenging metaphysics of the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza. For Negri, Spinoza's philosophy has never been more relevant than it is today to debates over individuality and community, democracy and resistance, modernity and postmodernity.

Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) was one of the most original political thinkers in Western Marxism and an exceptional intellectual. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom, yet he wrote extensive letters while incarcerated, rich with insight into the physical and psychological tortures of prison. In meticulous detail, Gramsci records how political prisoners, himself included, contend with the fear of illness and death and the rules and regulations that threaten to efface (...) their individuality. Forming an incomparable link between Gramsci's intellectual passion and his emotional vulnerability, _Letters from Prison_ shows a man reconstructing his life while being separated from it, struggling to recapture the primary relationships that once defined his identity. Frank Rosengarten divides more than four hundred Gramsci letters into two companion volumes, complete with a chronology of the thinker's crucial life experiences, biographical notes on his correspondents, and a bibliography of works cited in his letters. (shrink)

This article addresses an open problem in the area of cognitive systems and architectures: namely the problem of handling (in terms of processing and reasoning capabilities) complex knowledge structures that can be at least plausibly comparable, both in terms of size and of typology of the encoded information, to the knowledge that humans process daily for executing everyday activities. Handling a huge amount of knowledge, and selectively retrieve it according to the needs emerging in different situational scenarios, is an important (...) aspect of human intelligence. For this task, in fact, humans adopt a wide range of heuristics (Gigerenzer & Todd) due to their “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1957). In this perspective, one of the requirements that should be considered for the design, the realization and the evaluation of intelligent cognitively-inspired systems should be rep- resented by their ability of heuristically identify and retrieve, from the general knowledge stored in their artificial Long Term Memory (LTM), that one which is synthetically and contextually relevant. This requirement, however, is often neglected. Currently, artificial cognitive systems and architectures are not able, de facto, to deal with complex knowledge structures that can be even slightly comparable to the knowledge heuris- tically managed by humans. In this paper I will argue that this is not only a technological problem but also an epistemological one and I will briefly sketch a proposal for a possible solution. (shrink)

. 1. Introduĉão histórica ao pensamento jurídico, épocas medieval e moderna --.

This selection of papers is concerned with the history of linguistics in Spain, dealing with the evolution of linguistic ideas from the Middle Ages and the European context of the linguistic debates in Spain to the 20th century, concluding with Malkiel's appraisal of Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968). The volume includes papers on Antonio Nebrija and Sanctius, probably the best-known grammarians of the Iberian peninsula, but - as the other papers suggest - there is much more to be known about (...) the Spanish linguistic traditions. The papers in this volume were previously published in Historiographia Linguistica XI:1/2 (1984). (shrink)

Antonio Negri, one of the world's leading scholars on Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and his contemporary legacy, offers a straightforward explanation of the philosopher's elaborate arguments and a persuasive case for his ongoing relevance. Responding to a resurgent interest in Spinoza's thought and its potential application to contemporary global issues, Negri demonstrates the thinker's special value to politics, philosophy, and related disciplines. Negri's work is both a return to and an advancement of his initial affirmation of Spinozian thought in _The (...) Savage Anomaly_. He further defends his understanding of the philosopher as a proto-postmodernist, or a thinker who is just now, with the advent of the postmodern, becoming contemporary. Negri also connects Spinoza's theories to recent trends in political philosophy, particularly the reengagement with Carl Schmitt's "political theology," and the history of philosophy, including the argument that Spinoza belongs to a "radical enlightenment." By positioning Spinoza as a contemporary revolutionary intellectual, Negri addresses and effectively defeats twentieth-century critiques of the thinker waged by Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

What kind of relationship subsists between an "organism" and a "monas dominans"? In some texts, Leibniz claims that the soul "actuat" the organic body and in the late debate with Stahl he describes the "monas dominans" as a "monas actuatrix". But how does the monas "actualize" the organic body? And what is implied by Leibniz's use of the word "agere" to describe this? Is it also possibile to describe this event in terms of "whole/part" relationship? The aim of this paper (...) is to sketch out the status quaestionis of the topic by discussing some of the most recent studies. More specifically to propose an interpretation of the "monas dominans" as the "nota distinguens" of the whole organism. (shrink)