Chronology of Samuel Butler -- Introduction -- 1. Butler and the science of the mind: a pan-European discussion -- 2. Evolution: from literature to science and back again -- 3. The rise and fall of Butler's fame -- 4. An amateur among the professionals -- Conclusion: another story to tell.

Cognitive Grammar postulates two modes of cognitive processing for the structuring of complex scenes, summary scanning and sequential scanning. Generally speaking, the theory is committed to basing grammatical concepts upon more general cognitive principles. In the case of summary and sequential scanning, independent evidence is lacking, but Langacker argues that the distinction should nonetheless be accepted as it buys us considerable theory-internal explanatory power. For example, dynamic prepositions, to-infinitives and participles (e.g., into, to enter, entered ) are distinguished from finite (...) and bare verbs in terms of summary vs. sequential scanning. In this paper, we try to show that various theory-internal and theory-external arguments do not seem to support the two scanning modes. In particular, we offer a detailed examination of causatives (e.g., get, make ) and argue that their complementation patterns are difficult to reconcile with differences in scanning. We conclude that the status of, and need for, summary and sequential scanning in (Cognitive) grammar is doubtful, especially if grammar is approached from the viewpoint of the language learner/user. It follows also that the parcelling of some form-function mappings may prove less clear-cut than previously assumed. (shrink)

Roger Ames and François Jullien are eminent scholars writing on ancient Chinese thought, yet they have followed quite different paths in their academic research. In this paper I will argue that, although their styles, theories and motivations are sometimes dramatically different, both authors share an interest in combining philosophy and sinology in an effort to unveil the existence of a radical contrast between China and the West. I will explain that language is at the center of the affirmation of Chinese (...) otherness, insofar as it is seen as a reflection of the processual inclinations of ancient China. Thus, Ames and Jullien have developed a hybrid Chinese-Western language that seeks to bridge East and West, while at the same time respecting the boundaries and preserving the strangeness of both traditions. (shrink)

Butler’s idea of evolution was developed over the publication of four books, several articles and essays between 1863 and 1890. These publications, although never achieving the success expected by Butler, proposed a psychological elaboration of evolution, called ‘unconscious memory’. This was strongly in contrast with the materialistic approach suggested by Darwin’s natural selection. Starting with a historical introduction, this paper aspires to ascertain the logic, meaning and significance of Butler’s idea of ‘unconscious memory’ in the post-Darwinian physiological and psychological Pan-European (...) discussion. Particular attention is devoted to demonstrating that Butler was not only a populariser of science but also an active protagonist in the late Victorian psychological debate. (shrink)

L’articolo si struttura in tre parti. Inizialmente definisce una serie di riquadri per delineare lo sfondo morfo-genetico del prendere forma e affermarsi del capitalismo infrastrutturale e di piattaforma. In secondo luogo, si presentano le caratteristiche attuali di piattaforme e infrastrutture, la loro articolazione reciproca e la relazione con una costellazione di altri poteri. Il terzo passaggio discute i termini attraverso cui il potere descritto dalla convergenza tra “piattaformizzazione delle infrastrutture” e “infrastrutturazione delle piattaforme” definisce forme inedite rispetto al passato avanzando (...) tre proposte di analisi: la necessità di “superare” la codificazione del “potere infrastrutturale”, l’emersione del “potere algoritmico” e la sua natura “duale”. (shrink)

We interviewed Galileo Morandi, a young Italian architect working in a research project on architecture and new technologies and author of several publications about the relation between city, territory and project. The discussion starts and finishes in a place where Morandi studied and worked, Dubai – example of a city in rapid growth and in its way iconic representation of the new globalized cities – passing through Milan and Los Angeles, the new Chinese town and a village in the mountains. (...) The role played by city plans allows to discuss the contemporary city between an architectural perspective and a political awareness. The result is a first partial experiment to connect different urban perspectives. (shrink)

During the Twentieth century, Tocqueville has been presented as the «oracle» of democracy, shown by him in De la Démocratie en Amérique as a system shaped up by the constant pressure of the égalité's principle. In recent years, however, a new image of this author is presented by many scholars, following above all the analysis of his writings on the Algerian colonization. Commonly interpreted as marginal, this section of Tocqueville's theoretical work is instead discussed here as a tool to redefine (...) his pivotal concepts of equality and democracy. The article is developed discarding an interpretation of Algerian production as, alternatively, Tocqueville's exception or his truth. It is otherwise presented here within the twine of his complex theoretical fabric. (shrink)

We present here the original translation of an article published in 1989 by Henri Lefebvre on Le Monde Diplomatique. A short but extremely dense piece, where Lefebvre's vision finds a synthesis and the premises for its overcoming at the same time. The introduction to the article historically frames Lefebvre's work, showing the genesis of this article and discussing some of its main topics. Furthermore, the introduction critically analizes the contemporary Lefebvre's reinassance and proposes some interpretations for a contemporary translation of (...) the most important topics addressed by Quand la ville se perd dans la métamorphose planétaire. (shrink)

Within the entering in the global era, the city is come back again as a strategic architrave of the world's infrastructure – while the State, the historical figure through which Modernity was organized, has been declared in crisis long time ago. Despite the broad spectrum of urban reflections, there still is a deep lack of political theory of the city. The globalization of the city – within the pathway of the planetary urbanization – is the object of the article, that (...) elaborates on a twofold level: on one hand, a genealogical trace of that process is proposed – articulating it by distilling urban political thought from different authors and historical episodes; on the other hand, the article suggests a theoretical and methodological horizon through which to grasp the contemporary global transitions, labelled as “seeing like a city”. (shrink)

This work presents the case of the Yanomami indigenous people from Brazil that were the object of US ethnography initiated in the 1960s. The research brought harmful repercussions to the life of the Indigenous people of Brazil for several decades, and it took more than 40 years until the beginning of a process of reparation involving the Brazilian government and American universities. Objective: to discuss the meaning of the return of Yanomami blood samples, as well as contributions from the epistemologies (...) of traditional Indigenous knowledge to the debate about research ethics and the structuring of means for the social control of researchers and the protection of participants in scientific studies, having as an example the Yanomami indigenous people from Brazil, subjected to noxious ethnography in the 1960s and the 1970s. This work used data reports recorded in secondary sources. In this article we argue that Bioethics needs to further diversify its epistemological foundations and to consider epistemologies and cosmologies beyond the frontiers of Western science, as the case of the abusive research involving the Yanomami indigenous people in Brazil reveals. We argue that traditional knowledge, such as those of indigenous and quilombolas, with their epistemologies and cosmologies, are fundamental for the election of less colonized and more efficient principles of research ethics, regarding the protection of the participants' rights in scientific studies. Traditional indigenous populations can teach us a great deal about doing research. (shrink)

The decolonial theory understands that Western Modernity keeps imposing itself through a triple mutually reinforcing and shaping imprisonment: coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being. Technical design has an essential role in either maintaining or overcoming coloniality. In this article, two main approaches to decolonizing the technical design are presented. First is Yuk Hui’s and Ahmed Ansari’s proposals that, revisiting or recovering the different histories and philosophies of technology produced by humankind, intend to decolonize the minds of (...) philosophers and engineers/architects/designers as a pre-condition for such decolonial designs to take place. I call them top-down approaches. Second is some technical design initiatives that, being developed alongside marginalized/subalternate people, intend to co-construct decolonial sociotechnical solutions through a committed, decolonizing, and careful dialog of knowledge. I call them bottom-up approaches. Once that is done, the article’s second half derives ontological, epistemological, and political consequences from the conjugation of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Such consequences challenge some established or not yet entirely overcome understandings in the philosophy of technology and, in so doing, are meant to represent some steps in PT’s decolonization. Even though both top-down and bottom-up approaches are considered, the article’s main contributions are associated with decolonial technical design practices, whose methodologies and outcomes are important study cases for PT and whose practitioners can be taken as inspiring examples for philosophers who want to decolonize/enlarge PT or make it decolonial. (shrink)

Decolonial approaches to technical design are part of a broader category of design methodologies, which actualize unfulfilled sociotechnical potentialities. In this paper, I present some decolonial theory concepts and discuss three decolonial approaches to illuminate philosophical debates that: 1) Can find in them clear traces of a third set of elements that shape every design/technology, along with the well-analyzed technical-scientific and ethical-political ones. In dialogue with Walter Vincenti and some others, I call these elements structured procedures, imagery lexicon, and aesthetical (...) values, which constitute the central aspects of Eugene Ferguson’s art of engineering; 2) Identify, starting from some Gilbert Simondon’s and Andrew Feenberg’s ideas, any invention as triply situated ; 3) Can be taught by these decolonial approaches about some of the mainstream philosophy of technology’s colonial limitations, becoming thus able to widen it. (shrink)

Andrew Feenberg is an essential author in the field of philosophy of technology. His ideas are particularly relevant in revealing the political dimension of technology, be it shaping society or being shaped by society. However, current Feenberg’s reflection fails to consider the internal domain of technical disciplines more rigorously. Indeed, he usually stops his analysis in the border between lifeworld (where the democratizing mobilizations occur and new/different requirements or values arise) and the technical disciplines. To identify and overcome this failure, (...) I articulate some elements from Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Yuk Hui. I also present the example of three decolonial (or empowering) technical interventions, which illustrate: how what Santos and Hui theorize is already being developed by some technical interventions in the Global South, and the impacts of such interventions on the technical teams (and, through that, also on the technical disciplines). (shrink)

The brief life of the Accademia del Cimento (1657–1667), the first known society with a purely experimental programme,11 Over the period of a year and a half in 2020–2021, I had the honor to join the European-funded research group Tacitroots under the direction of Professor Giulia Giannini, at the Università Statale di Milano. My task was to research the instruments of the Accademia del Cimento through the lens of social and cultural history. I therefore approached these instruments as cultural products, (...) investigating the agencies that shaped them: specifically, I was interested in the processes involved in their design and construction. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101025015. is entangled with the most surprising advancements in the history of scientific instruments of that century, from the telescope to the microscope, the thermometer to the barometer, the hygrometer to the pendulum as a time-regulator, and more. The making of instruments at the Florentine court shows the interaction of princely, scholarly and artisanal actors. This paper explores this collaboration and shows how the supposed “invisibility’ of artisans depended on their proximity to the academicians and princes, who mainly communicated verbally with them, directly or through middlemen. The visibility of artisans increases proportionally to their physical distance from the Court. In this essay I unveil the identity of the artisans of the Cimento and, finally, attempt to attribute five instruments (some lost and others still extant) to specific makers, shedding light also on relations between the artisan and his patron. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Since the 1980s, technical-scientific knowledge, instrumental and cognitive values as well as ethical-political values are acknowledged as constitutive parts of technology and its development. However, a fourth category of elements that shapes design continues to be largely neglected or unknown: image collections, aesthetical values, and structured procedures. Disregarding such elements impose limits on the technical development. In this manuscript, I present this fourth category elements, its impact on the designing practice, and a way of pluralizing its contents. I also (...) sketch two of the most successful approaches for democratizing the technical development. Then, I discuss: some limits and potentialities of democratizing technology; an actualization of part of Simondon’s understanding of technical development; the theoretical and practical necessity of decolonizing (or continuing the decolonization of) the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

This article proposes a cost-benefit analysis of argumentation, with the aim of highlighting the strategic considerations that govern the agent's decision to argue or not. In spite of its paramount importance, the topic of argumentative decision-making has not received substantial attention in argumentation theories so far. We offer an explanation for this lack of consideration and propose a tripartite taxonomy and detailed description of the strategic reasons considered by arguers in their decision-making: benefits, costs, and dangers. We insist that the (...) implications of acknowledging the strategic dimension of arguing are far-reaching, including promising insights on how to develop better argumentation technologies. (shrink)

In this article we strive to provide a detailed and principled analysis of the role of beliefs in goal processing—that is, the cognitive transition that leads from a mere desire to a proper intention. The resulting model of belief-based goal processing has also relevant consequences for the analysis of intentions, and constitutes the necessary core of a constructive theory of intentions, i.e. a framework that not only analyzes what an intention is, but also explains how it becomes what it is. (...) We discuss similarities and differences between our approach and other standard accounts of intention, in particular Bratman’s planning theory. The aim here is to question and refine the conceptual foundations of many theories of intentional action: as a consequence, although our analysis is not formal in itself, it is ultimately meant to have deep consequences for formal models of intentional agency. (shrink)

L'obiettivo del presente articolo è l'osservazione storica delle politiche della memoria nel Brasile contemporaneo, con particolare attenzione al periodo tra il 2019 e il 2022 (governo Bolsonaro). Dall'analisi delle azioni giudiziarie proposte da diversi attori sociali e politici, l'articolo propone una riflessione sulle temporalità coinvolte nelle politiche della memoria nel contesto post-dittatoriale, soprattutto dalla prospettiva delle vittime del regime.

We present an analysis of emotional experience in terms of beliefs and desires viewed as its minimal cognitive constituents. We argue that families of emotions can be identified because their members share some of these constituents. To document this claim, we analyze one family of emotions—which includes the feeling of inferiority, admiration, envy, and jealousy—trying to show that the distinctiveness of each emotion is due to the specific compound of beliefs and desires it implies, whereas the kinship among related emotions (...) is due to their sharing of cognitive or motivational components. Finally, we address the gestalt problem, that is, the question of how it is possible that emotions, although consisting of several “atomic” elements, are felt as unitary experiences. (shrink)

The ongoing process of revising and rethinking the foundations of economic theory leads to great complexities and contradictions at the heart of economics. ‘Economics of innovation’ provides a fertile challenge to standard economics, and one that can help it overcome its many criticisms. This authoritative book from Cristiano Antonelli provides a systematic account of recent advances in the economics of innovation. By integrating this account with the economics of technological change, this exceptional book elaborates an understanding of the effects (...) of the introduction of new technologies. This excellent, comprehensive account from respected expert Antonelli will be much appreciated within the innovation economics community, yet it is also a book that should be read by all those with either a private or professional interest in economic theory. (shrink)

A tradução anotada do Minos, acompanhada de uma valiosa introdução e de notas explicativas, de autoria do Professor Bruno Amaro Lacerda, lançada pela Editora Max Limonad no ano de 2021, é uma importante contribuição para os Estudos Clássicos e também para os interessados em Filosofia do Direito.