The Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx's work results from a failure to understand his mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx's oeuvre, Silva isolates the central elements of his style: the search for an architectonic unity at the level of the text, his capacity to express himself dialectically at the level of the sentence, and, above all, his great gift for metaphor.

The recent proliferation of AI scandals led private and public organisations to implement new ethics guidelines, introduce AI ethics boards, and list ethical principles. Nevertheless, some of these efforts remained a façade not backed by any substantive action. Such behaviour made the public question the legitimacy of the AI industry and prompted scholars to accuse the sector of ethicswashing, machinewashing, and ethics trivialisation—criticisms that spilt over to institutional AI ethics boards. To counter this widespread issue, contributions in the literature have (...) proposed fixes that do not consider its systemic character and are based on a top-down, expert-centric governance. To fill this gap, we propose to make use of qualified informed lotteries: a two-step model that transposes the documented benefits of the ancient practice of sortition into the selection of AI ethics boards’ members and combines them with the advantages of a stakeholder-driven, participative, and deliberative bottom-up process typical of Citizens’ Assemblies. The model permits increasing the public’s legitimacy and participation in the decision-making process and its deliverables, curbing the industry’s over-influence and lobbying, and diminishing the instrumentalisation of ethics boards. We suggest that this sortition-based approach may provide a sound base for both public and private organisations in smart societies for constructing a decentralised, bottom-up, participative digital democracy. (shrink)

Es, quiza, la coleccion mas abierta que existe en cuestiones de etica, aunque se ha ocupado tambien de antropologia, estetica, ontologia, teoria del conocimiento e historia de la filosofia. El primer titulo que se publico en la coleccion fue la gran Historia de la filosofia y de la ciencia en tres volumenes de Ludovico Geymonat. A este le han seguido obras de A. J. Ayer, A. MacIntyre, Ernst Tugendhat, Antoni Domenech, Anna Estany, Agnes Heller, F. Fernandez Buey, Carlos Paris, (...) Emilio Lledo, Manuel Sacristan, John Rawls o Ludwig Wittgenstein. Victoria Camps ha dirigido, ademas, una gran Historia de la etica, en tres volumenes, en la que han colaborado los mejores especialistas espanoles. (shrink)

Dedicata a interrogare le categorie di metafora, mito e modernità, la riflessione di Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) è senz'altro una delle più inquiete, profonde e decisive del secondo Novecento. Il presente volume ne offre una serrata ricostruzione evolutiva, partendo da un'analisi della prima, inedita fase del suo pensiero, e descrivendone la trasformazione nel corso del primo ventennio (1946-1966). Mostrando come la sua indagine si sia sistematicamente nutrita di un confronto "corpo a corpo" con la storia del pensiero cristiano - Agostino, Pascal, (...) Kierkegaard -, vengono allora esplorate le radici teoriche profonde della tesi della legittimità dell'età moderna, quale contraccolpo conseguente all'entrata in crisi dell'assolutismo teologico di matrice agostiniana. Ne emerge così un'immagine nuova della proposta filosofica e antropologica di Blumenberg, in costante debito critico nei confronti della memoria cristiana della cultura occidentale, seppure ritrattata in prospettiva nietzschiana. (shrink)

The SARS‐CoV‐2 virus is responsible for the COVID‐19 pandemic the world experience since 2019. The protein responsible for the first steps of cell invasion, the spike protein, has probably received the most attention in light of its central role during infection. Computational approaches are among the tools employed by the scientific community in the enormous effort to study this new affliction. One of these methods, namely molecular dynamics (MD), has been used to characterize the function of the spike protein at (...) the atomic level and unveil its structural features from a dynamic perspective. In this review, we focus on these main findings, including spike protein flexibility, rare S protein conformational changes, cryptic epitopes, the role of glycans, drug repurposing, and the effect of spike protein variants. (shrink)

This article argues that the discovery of Pythagorean volumes in Numa's tomb in 181 b.c. may have played a significant role in the conception of the meeting between Numa and Pythagoras in the last book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, since several features of this event integrate very well into the discourse at the heart of Book 15 on the Greek origins of Roman culture and literature, on the immortality of poetry, and on the relationship between poetry and power. The article further (...) argues that Ennius’ Annals Book 15 may have covered the events up to 179, if that really was the year of Nobilior's dedication of the Aedes Herculis Musarum, and included the discovery of Numa's books in 181; and hence that Ovid may have used the Ennian account of this discovery as a model for the Numa–Pythagoras episode, appropriating the poetic and political meaning that it already had in Annals Book 15. (shrink)

Can conscious awareness be ascertained from physiological responses alone? We evaluate a novel learning-based procedure permitting detection of conscious awareness without reliance on language comprehension or behavioural responses. The method exploits a situation whereby only consciously detected violations of an expectation alter skin conductance responses . Thirty participants listened to sequences of piano notes that, without their being told, predicted a pleasant fanfare or an aversive noise according to an abstract rule. Stimuli were presented without distraction , or while distracted (...) by a visual task to remove awareness of the rule . A test phase included occasional violations of the rule. Only participants attending the sounds reported awareness of violations and only they showed significantly greater SCR for noise occurring in violation, vs. accordance, with the rule. Our results establish theoretically significant dissociations between conscious and unconscious processing and furnish new opportunities for clinical assessment of residual consciousness in patient populations. (shrink)

Il volume comprende i saggi dei seguenti autori: Corrado Mangione, Enrico Bellone, Giulio Giorello, Marco Mondadori, Gabriele Lolli, Silvano Tagliagambe, Francesco Barone, Umberto Bottazzini, Vincenzo Cappelletti, Domenico Costantini, Piero Mangani, Carlos Minguez, Alberto Pasquinelli, Rossano Pancaldi, Mario Servi.

How important is the experience of risk in business endeavors for self-respect and moral development? Tomasi prompts this question with his attempt to reconcile Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness with free-market capitalism, by claiming that economic activity is a way for people to exercise their autonomy, responsibility, and self-authorship, including through voluntary risk-taking. Critics argue that the social environment generated through market institutions is ill-suited for developing a sense of responsibility and autonomy among citizens. We refine the case for (...) economic liberty by looking at the link between risk-taking and attitudes toward democratic citizenship. We highlight the critical role of ethical business practice as a contributor to the stability of liberal-democratic societies. (shrink)

What is morally valuable—if anything at all—in entrepreneurship? Existing normative takes can be broadly categorized as belonging to two main views: a backward and a forward-looking approach. The former sees entrepreneurial activity as a permissible emergent product of individuals’ interactions within the boundaries of people’s existing rights; the latter looks at entrepreneurship in the broader context of market processes and emphasizes its role in generating Pareto-improvements in social welfare. In this paper, I suggest that certain instances of entrepreneurship can be (...) intrinsically valuable when they constitute Millian Experiments in Living, that is when entrepreneurial ventures are the expression of an entrepreneur’s conception of the good. Engaging in entrepreneurial activity which reflects one’s conception of the good helps individuals in cultivating their individuality and originality by means of subjecting their normative beliefs to empirical scrutiny, thus allowing one to confirm, revise, or refine them. (shrink)