This new edition of Introduction to Lattices and Order presents a radical reorganization and updating, though its primary aim is unchanged. The explosive development of theoretical computer science in recent years has, in particular, influenced the book's evolution: a fresh treatment of fixpoints testifies to this and Galois connections now feature prominently. An early presentation of concept analysis gives both a concrete foundation for the subsequent theory of complete lattices and a glimpse of a methodology for data analysis that is (...) of commercial value in social science. Classroom experience has led to numerous pedagogical improvements and many new exercises have been added. As before, exposure to elementary abstract algebra and the notation of set theory are the only prerequisites, making the book suitable for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. It will also be a valuable resource for anyone who meets ordered structures. (shrink)

By taking seriously an Adornian suggestion, according to which art should be understood as something that “has become what it is”, the main purpose of this essay is to provide an essential reconstruction of Adorno’s aesthetic program. The latter places art within a curve, or constellation, that has the experience of the “shudder” as its anthropological beginning and an ending corresponding to the current context, characterized by the widespread diffusion of the aesthetic dimension (thanks to the “logic” of fashion). Our (...) reconstruction aims to suggest that critical theory is fatally inclined towards this aesthetic constellation as a whole, and therefore it deserves today special attention by virtue of a parallelism with the aestheticizing developments of late-capitalism. As a consequence, Adorno may be considered a (critical) philosopher of globalization, insofar as his theory is aesthetic in a pregnant sense. His aesthetic constellation might in fact encompass the constitutive elements, or at least some essential elements, which are useful to bring the “aesthetic form of life” to the fore. (shrink)

In order to grasp the link between the “natural” and the “historical” that characterizes the reality of art, this paper aims to an examination of the concept of “artistic field” in contrast with “art world”. The notion of field reflects the dynamical status of the reality of art as institutional process, that roots in the sociological and anthropological experience of human being in his interaction with his environment. The analysis of this interaction carried out by Pierre Bourdieu and Arnold Gehlen (...) shows how an institution such as art arises as stabilization of nature and “habitualization” of experience structures which are operating already at the level of perception and which culminate in the praxis of figuration. This means that an artistic field implies an historical and material (rather than formal) apriori, that the notion of “art world” tends to hide and to repress. (shrink)

1. Fino a qualche decennio fa l’estetica rappresentava l’approdo vagheggiato da filosofi insofferenti nei confronti del sistema socio-culturale vigente oppure nei confronti dell’intera metafisica occidentale. Penso a Marcuse e ad Adorno, ma anche a chi ha intravisto nel gioco nell’arte la matrice della rivelazione dei più essenziali misteri dell’essere. I tempi sono cambiati. Se siamo qui a interrogarci sul futuro dell’estetica, essa quanto meno non appare più l’approdo utopico di allora. epp...

This paper aims to outline the importance of Valéry with respect to some cornerstones of Adorno’s aesthetic theory as a negative-dialectical thought. Adorno’s concept of aesthetic experience finds in Valéry as an “Artist” (not simply as a “Künstler”) a sort of lieutenant: he helps to specify notions like “apparition”, “form”, “configuration”, and above all the idea of the aesthetic as a relation by which something happens in the field of human experience without being a determinate, or determinable, content of it.

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

The main experiments concerning the Aharonov–Bohm phase shifts, seen in an electron interference pattern, and their Boyer semiclassical explanations are reviewed. A new experiment is also presented which emphasizes the subtleties involved in the interpretations of the magnetic Aharonov–Bohm phase shift as a result of a non-dispersive or dispersive effect.

An increasing number of Italian scholars are beginning to share the idea that the conceptual basis of legal positivism (LP) is wrong, particularly in the field of Public Law. According to a group of theories called “neoconstitutionalism,” constitutionalism is to be understood not only as a principle based on the need to impose legal limits to political power, but also as an aggregation of values capable of continually remodelling legal relationships, positioning itself as a “pervasive” point of reference for legal (...) experience. A recent essay by Professor Antonio Baldassarre, President Emeritus of the Constitutional Italian Court, about the “misery of legal positivism” is a good expression of this view. In this article, the ideas outlined by Baldassarre are examined and criticized. The paper also tries to defend a version of legal positivism, which has both a conceptual and prescriptive meaning, relating to decisions made on the basis of rules. This view is based on the two correlated concepts of primary formalism and secondary formalism of “competence and procedure.”. (shrink)

What is alike between aesthetic and linguistic? And what is basically unlike? This paper focuses on this ambiguous relation in order to point out how the aesthetic expressiveness is an original one. And it's from the point of view of the dialectical nexus between aesthetic experience and language that interesting suggestions are drawn here from different authors (Adorno, Borges and the Italian novelist Luigi Meneghello).

This paper focuses on the notion of experience, whose conceptual analysis seems to be often neglected or at least not sufficiently made explicit in the current discourse on Everyday Aesthetics. In our investigation this notion will be tackled, in particular, through the lens of such concepts as Erlebnis, Erfahrung, and Lebenswel t, which are drawn from the continental philosophical tradition. Purpose of the paper is to present a provisional framework aimed at clarifying that a more accurate conceptualization of experience allows (...) for a better contemporary reflection on the aesthetics of everyday life. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the notion of experience, whose conceptual analysis seems to be often neglected or at least not sufficiently made explicit in the current discourse on Everyday Aesthetics. In our investigation this notion will be tackled, in particular, through the lens of such concepts as _Erlebnis, Erfahrung_, and _Lebenswel_t, which are drawn from the continental philosophical tradition. Purpose of the paper is to present a provisional framework aimed at clarifying that a more accurate conceptualization of experience allows for (...) a better contemporary reflection on the aesthetics of everyday life. (shrink)

This papers aims at showing how Dewey’s legacy can contribute to better understand the correlation between the problem of meaning and the description of the aesthetic in the framework of a specifically enactivist approach to the model of the extended mind. My thesis is that Dewey’s characterization of this issue has a general theoretical import in that it makes it inappropriate to speak of “aesthetic meanings,” or even of “meanings of the aesthetic.” It instead highlights the aesthetic character of meaning (...) as such, that is, how an experiential phenomenon can be meaningful insofar as it is characterized in an aesthetic sense. Accordingly, we will speak here of “aesthetic meaningfulness.” To this extent, after a comparison between Dewey and Quine about the “praxis of meaning,” a dialogue will be established with two recent perspectives openly informed by Dewey’s work: Mark Johnson and Shaun Gallagher’s. (shrink)

The first Aisthesis’s Special Issue collects the contributions to the conference “Riconcepire l’estetica. Prospettive a confront” that have been held in Florence in February 2012, organized by “Aisthesis”, “Rivista di Estetica” and “Seminario permanente di estetica”(SPES) in the perspective to contribute to a radical reconfiguration of conceptual domain of aesthetics.

In order to investigate the possibility to develop Wittgenstein's suggestions about aesthetics, this paper will focus on the organic perspective elaborated by Richard Wollheim in «Art and Its Objects». In this regard we will try to emphasize how the concept of art as a "form of live" - explicit in Wollheim - involves the analysis of the practices embodied in the experience of art starting from those of representation. The inception modes of such practices of representation need to be described (...) in the use of specific anthropological abilities related to perception patterns that go beyond the mere statement of facts, in a fusion among aesthetic, cognitive and emotional levels. Deepening the relationships both between lived experience and expression, and expression and understanding, we will try to point out how Wollheim (and Wittgenstein) places any rhetoric of the ineffable out of the game, even regarding the analysis of the aesthetic experience. (shrink)

"First published by Oxford University Press, 1916."--Title page verso.

Various U.S. laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Food Quality Protection Act, require additional protections for susceptible subpopulations who face greater environmental health risks. The main ethical rationale for providing these protections is to ensure that environmental health risks are distributed fairly. In this article, we (1) consider how several influential theories of justice deal with issues related to the distribution of environmental health risks; (2) show that these theories often fail to provide specific guidance concerning policy (...) choices; and (3) argue that an approach to public decision making known as accountability for reasonableness can complement theories of justice in establishing acceptable environmental health risks for the general population and susceptible subpopulations. Since accountability for reasonableness focuses on the fairness of the decision-making process, not the outcome, it does not guarantee that susceptible subpopulations will receive a maximum level of protection, regardless of costs or other morally relevant considerations. (shrink)

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are _conditioned_ by the brain, but do not _emerge_ from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, as (...) proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of _samatha_, refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit. In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of _vipasyana_, or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, and the theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind. A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have come to understand emotions as dynamic and socially constructed—the product of interdependent cultural, relational, situational, and biological influences. While researchers have called for a multilevel theory of emotion construction, any progress toward such a theory must overcome the fragmentation of relevant research across various disciplines and theoretical frameworks. We present affect control theory as a launching point for cross-disciplinary collaboration because of its empirically grounded conceptualization of social mechanisms operating at the interaction, relationship, and cultural (...) levels, and its specification of processes linking social and individual aspects of emotion. After introducing the theory, we illustrate its correspondence with major theories of emotion construction framed at each of four analytical levels: cultural, interactional, individual, and neural. (shrink)

This chapter first surveys general issues in the epistemic internalism / externalism debate: what is the distinction, what motivates it, and what arguments can be given on both sides. -/- The second part of the chapter will examine the internalism / externalism debate as regards to the specific case of the epistemology of memory belief.

volume 1. Developing institutional theory -- volume 2. New research agendas -- volume 3. Applying institutional theory.

The acquisition of a new skill usually proceeds through five stages, from novice to expert, with a sixth stage of mastery available for highly motivated performers. In this chapter, we re-state the six stages of the Dreyfus Skill Model, paying new attention to the transitions and interrelations between them. While discussing the fifth stage, expertise, we unpack the claim that, “when things are proceeding normally, experts don’t solve problems and don’t make decisions; they do what normally works” (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, (...) 1988, pp. 30 – 31). This leads us to offer an account of the “perspectival deliberation” that arises for experts and masters and that is distinct from the calculative deliberation characteristic of the lower stages of skillfulness. (shrink)

'The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color-line.' Originally published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a classic study of race, culture, and education at the turn of the twentieth century. With its singular combination of essays, memoir, and fiction, this book vaulted W. E. B. Du Bois to the forefront of American political commentary and civil rights activism. The Souls of Black Folk is an impassioned, at times searing account of the situation of African (...) Americans in the United States. Du Bois makes a forceful case for the access of African Americans to higher education, memorably extols the achievements of black culture (above all the spirituals or 'sorrow songs'), and advances the provocative and influential argument that due to the inequalities and pressures of the 'race problem', African American identity is characterized by 'double consciousness'. This edition includes a valuable appendix of other writing by Du Bois, which sheds light on his attitudes and intentions. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

In February 54b.c. Cicero concludes a missive to his brother with a passing and – for us – tantalizing remark:Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. sed cum veneris. virum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris; hominem non putabo. Quintus had, it seems, readDe rerum natura, or at least parts thereof, just before he left Rome for an undisclosed location nearby, and he shared his enthusiasm with his brotherper codicillos. Meanwhile, he was corresponding with Julius (...) Caesar, whose staff in Gaul he was about to join. When, a few months later, he was stationed with Caesar, he was involved in another literary affair, this time concerning his brother who wrote to him, inquiring about his autobiographicalDe temporibus suis:quo modo nam, mi frater, de nostris versibus Caesar? nam primum librum se legisse scripsit ad me ante, et prima sic ut neget se ne Graeca quidem meliora legisse; reliqua ad quendam locum ῥᾳθυμότερα (hoc enim utitur verbo). dic mihi verum: num aut res eum aut χαρακτὴρ non delectat?(Q.fr.2.15.5). (shrink)