Les commentateurs latins ont rencontré pour la première fois le « Troisième homme » d’Aristote dans le chapitre vingt-deux des Sophistici elenchi. Cette rencontre illustre bien à la fois leur respect de la lettre et la radicalité de certaines de leurs innovations. Influencée par la traduction de Boèce, leur exégèse de l’argument a tenu compte de l’ensemble des indications du texte tout en lui conférant une tournure inédite.

Édition du troisième sophisma « Omnis homo de necessitate est animal » du ms. Paris, BnF Lat. 16135. Le texte anonyme, contenu aux f. 99rb-103vb, appartient à la seconde collection de sophismata transmis dans ce codex légué à l’Université de Paris par Étienne de Genève socius du Collège de Sorbonne, après avoir été maître ès arts à Paris dans les années 1270. Il offre un panorama des principales positions soutenues au xiiie siècle par les Antiqui et les Moderni sur (...) la sémantique des termes vides, la distinction entre l’esse essentiae et l’esse existentiae, l’être effectif et l’être logique, le temps et la modalité. (shrink)

Using neoPiagetian theory of mental attention (or working memory), I task-analyze two complex performances of great apes and one symbolic performance (funeral burials) of early Homo sapiens. Relating results to brain size growth data, I derive estimates of mental attention for great apes, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and modern Homo sapiens, and use children's cognitive development as reference. This heuristic model seems consistent with research.

Profundamente influenciado por la ideología arquitectónica centrada en la destreza manual y (el diseño de) la forma como medio de construcción ético-política de la ciudad, la trilogía del Homo faber desarrollada por Richard Sennett entre 2008 y 2018 resulta completamente obsoleta e incapaz de hacer frente al desafío tecnológico ante el que nos encontramos. El presente artículo expone los puntos de contacto que su obra mantiene con una visión mítica de la sociedad preindustrial propia de los neoluditas, con el (...) objetivo de mostrar la insuficiencia y parcialidad de su propuesta, así como de evidenciar el carácter ideológico y occidentalocéntrico de la misma, normalmente utilizada para legitimar la sostenibilidad del desarrollo técnico y político occidental frente a las críticas recibidas por la versión universalista y tecnocrática del racionalismo ilustrado con la que se ha identificado a Occidente en las últimas décadas. (shrink)

Identification is a primary need of societies. It is even more central in law enforcement. In the history of crime, a dialectics takes place between felonious attempts at concealing, disguising, or forging identities and societal efforts at unmasking the impostures. Semiotics offers specialistic skills at studying the signs of societal detection and identification, including those of forensics and criminology. In human history, no sign more than the face is attached a value of personal identity. Yet, modern forensics realizes that the (...) face can mislead and, inspired by eastern models, adopts fingerprinting. In the digital era, however, fingerprinting first goes digital, then it is increasingly replaced by facial recognition. The face is back in digital AI forensics, together with a tangle of sociocultural biases. Semiotics can play a key role in studying their surreptitious influence. (shrink)

Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in legal ontologies (...) and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated. (shrink)

Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in legal ontologies (...) and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated. (shrink)

Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in legal ontologies (...) and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated. (shrink)

Humble leadership can be described as a positive psychological feature that allows leaders to admit their limitations, be open to new ideas, and give a voice to others while also recognizing their merits. The present study (n = 268 participants) explored the persuasive effects of a female politician communicating a humble stance by considering the role emotional displays at play (joy, calmness, sadness, and anger) when discussing a moral issue (hosting immigrants). The results revealed that the politician elicited positive emotions (...) and evaluations of her competence and benevolence, especially when exhibiting a sad facial display, by contributing to the intention to accept the moral gist of her persuasive message. Overall, these ‘gendered’ effects are discussed in relation to the ‘political authenticity’, which can be perceived as high especially when the humble message is connected with several social reasons, as is the case with gender or social status. (shrink)

The essay investigates the anthropological concept of personhood from the point of view of the dialectics between two fundamental elements of the socio-cultural, linguistic, and semiotic construction of the self-identity of the human species: on the one hand, the human face and, on the other, the non-human muzzle. After demonstrating that their semantics is contrastively articulated in all Indo-European languages, and after showing that such contrast is featured also in several non-Indo-European languages, including those referring to supposedly alternative “ontologies of (...) nature”, the essay criticizes such opposition through a close reading of Lévinas, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida’s philosophical texts on the face and on animality. Ultimately, it proposes that the construction of the animal muzzle as an interface of non-personhood is instrumental to the substitution of the human victim in the sacrifice that establishes the human community. Only through eradicating the primordial stigmatization of the muzzle, however, will a non-violent foundation of human personhood and community be possible. (shrink)

Umberto Eco’s essential contribution to semiotics consisted in finding a theoretical equilibrium between deconstructive tendencies, aiming at presenting cultural habits as pure conventional but naturalized products, and motivational trends, claiming the natural fundament of constructed cultural habits. Fully comprehending and turning into analytical frame the concept of sign in Charles S. Peirce was instrumental to reach such equilibrium. In no other aspect of Umberto Eco’s semiotics it manifests itself with more evidence than in the characterization of indexes. The article seeks (...) to propose a general theorization of their semiotic nature, starting from Umberto Eco’s interpretation of Peirce. (shrink)

Hasdai Crescas (1340-1411) fue un filósofo, rabino y figura pública que vivió en un período muy turbulento para las comunidades judías ibéricas y provenzales de la Baja Edad Media. Crescas lanzó una crítica vehemente contra el paradigma aristotélico recibido de la _falsafa_, que fue utilizado por Maimónides para sustentar y probar la existencia, unidad e incorporeidad de Dios, conceptualizado en la _Guía de los perplejos_ como el ser necesario absolutamente trascendente en relación con el ser contingente, es decir, el mundo. (...) En _Or Hashem_, Crescas elabora un concepto alternativo del ser necesario, en el que las dos nociones antitéticas de inmanencia y trascendencia divinas se relacionan con la distinción en el ser necesario entre su esencia simple y sus atributos infinitos. La esencia simple, una e inefable del ser necesario, se expresa en infinitos atributos en el acto eterno y constante de otorgar en la univocidad del ser su bondad y su actualidad a los infinitos seres contingentes. Crescas defiende que el universo, aunque ontológicamente contingente, es infinito en su actualidad. Dios es así concebido como la primera causa, eterna y constante, entelequia y “Lugar del Mundo”. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 631-655.

The meta-semiotic ideology that underpins most contemporary semiotics seems at odds with the one that underlies the attempt at planning and creating a new language. Semiotics, as well as modern linguistics, has increasingly evolved into a substantially descriptive endeavor, excluding any consistent normative purpose. Faithful to the epistemology of Ferdinand de Saussure, semiotics does not primarily aim at either pointing at some supposed flaws of such or such language or at proposing some new linguistic forms meant to fix them. The (...) article analyses linguistic utopias from the perspective of present-day semiotics. (shrink)

Religion can bring about social harmony as well as social conflict. Religious law is a key element in both cases. Scholars can explain how religious law changes according to historical and socio-cultural context. They can also help reengineering prescriptions that cause social conflict. Changes in religious law can be explained according to a chronological rhetoric (certain agents cause certain changes) or according to a logical rhetoric (a change acquires its meaning in opposition to other possible changes). The two approaches are (...) complementary, but the semiotics of religious law predominantly adopts the second one. In both cases, the explanation of how a religious law changes and the reengineering of a religious prescription are related activities. The semiotics of religious law is particularly equipped to propose alternatives for conflicting prescriptions. However, there is a difference between showing that some alternatives exist and advocating which alternatives should be taken. Whilst the latter position is similar to that of semiotic guerrilla warfare, the former rather configures the semiotics of religious law as a therapy. Semiotic guerrilla warfare stresses the need to demystify the discourse of power that subjugates individuals or groups to a certain religious law. Semiotic therapy does not focus on demystification but on reconciliation. The task of the semiotic therapy of religious law is to show that situations of social conflict generated by certain prescriptions can be decreased or eliminated by adopting alternative paths of meaning. The semiotic therapist of religious law can be effective in showing these alternatives only if some pragmatic and semantic preconditions are met: a correct involvement with the sets of religious core values at stake and an articulated analysis of the paths of meaning to which these values give rise. (shrink)

The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.

The essay seeks to single out, describe, and analyze the main semiotic features that compose the fundamentalist understanding of authoriality. Given a definition of authoriality as the series of semiotic dynamics that induce a reader to posit a genetic relation between an author and a text, the fundamentalist authoriality is characterized as displaying six main traits. First, centrality of the written text: in order to postulate a perfect coincidence between a transcendent intentio auctoris (intention of the author) and an immanent (...) intentio lectoris (intention of the reader), fundamentalist exegetical and juridical hermeneutics must be anchored to a stable message, canonized into a written verbal text or into a corpus of written verbal texts. Second, fundamentalist authoriality rests on the assumption of the immutability and mono-centrism of the religious semiosphere that irradiates from the written text. Third, literalism, infallibility, and non-contradiction are attributed to the relation between the written text, its exegetical hermeneutics, and the pragmatic normative orders to which it gives rise. Fourth, fundamentalist authoriality rules out any potential duplicity of the operations that ‘extract’ meaning from religious texts. Fifth, the assumption of the immutability of the religious text leads to exclusion of any operation that might alter the form of both its expression and content, hence to stigmatization of translation. The sixth feature of fundamentalist authoriality encompasses all the previous ones: in fundamentalism, a religious text is not actually a text anymore, but a mirror, whose passive reflection of the exegete’s mind undermines the semiotic nature of the relation between the reader and the text. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Heft: Ahead of print.

Este texto apresenta as linhas mestras do pensamento de António Sérgio sobre Filosofia do Conhecimento e ensaia uma interpretação delas face ao pensamento português seu contemporâneo.

A vast literature exists on the concept of “linguistic ideology.” Scholars generally agree on defining it as a set of ideas that the members of a community hold about the role of language in the community. Nevertheless, scholars generally disagree on whether these ideas are explicit or implicit. Different views on this point imply different methodologies: the analysis of explicit considerations on language in the first case, that of a more multifarious material in the second one. However, excluding implicit ideas (...) from the analysis is too restrictive. A better option is to distinguish between explicit beliefs and implicit assumptions. Whereas the first ones must be studied through socio- or ethno-logical methods, the second ones must be studied through semiotics: the discourses that are produced in a community are considered as signs of implicit assumptions that such community holds about language. The paper deals with a case-study: the semiotic ideology behind denegation in the contemporary Italian political discourse. (shrink)

Against any obscurantist stand, denying the interest of natural sciences for the comprehension of human meaning and language, but also against any reductionist hypothesis, frustrating the specificity of the semiotic point of view on nature, the paper argues that the deepest dynamic at the basis of meaning consists in its being a mechanism of ‘potentiality navigation’ within a universe generally characterized by motility. On the one hand, such a hypothesis widens the sphere of meaning to all beings somehow endowed with (...) the capacity of moving and/or perceiving movement. On the other hand, through a new evolutionist interpretation of the concept of generativity, such a hypothesis preserves the peculiarity of human meaning, meant as essentially founded on a certain intuition of infinity. Two corollaries stem from this hypothesis: first, religiosity can be considered as a matrix of grammars of infinity, aiming at regimenting its flight of potentialities. Second, non-genetic transmission of cultural information exerts determinant influence also at the level of that very deep mechanism of the human predicament that is the cognitive navigation of motor potentialities. A re-reading of the structuralist epistemology, scientific literature on the nervous cells of jellyfish, and some recent experiments on the mirror neurons of dancers, as well as certain intuitions of Teilhard de Chardin, are the main arguments of the paper. (shrink)