L’articolo affronta il problema delle interazioni fra cittadini romani e indigeni nel territorio di Bergomum, municipium della regio xi - Transpadana, attraverso l’esame delle formule onomastiche riscontrabili in alcune iscrizioni. In particolare, l’analisi della documentazione epigrafica agirà su un doppio binario, prendendo in considerazione sia formule di onomastica idionimica – tipicamente indigene e presenti anche dopo la concessione della cittadinanza romana alla Transpadana alla metà del I secolo a.C. – sia formule fedeli al modello romano dei tria nomina, che testimoniano (...) un’ascendenza celtica e una certa persistenza di abitudini locali. Le prove fornite dall’onomastica, dunque, saranno utili ad indagare come gli abitanti “indigeni” di Bergomum abbiano affrontato la romanizzazione del loro territorio e attraverso quali meccanismi vennero integrati nella struttura sociale romana; ciò anche attraverso il confronto con realtà circonvicine, prima fra tutte la Colonia Civica Augusta Brixia. (shrink)

Focusing on the relationship between two important scientists in the development of ecological thought during the first half of the twentieth century, this paper argues that Yale limnologist G. E. Hutchinson's adoption of the biogeochemical approach in the late 1930s builds on the 1920s work of the Russian scientist V. I. Vernadsky. An analysis of Hutchinson’s scientific publications shows that he first referred to Vernadsky in 1940, on two different occasions. This article analyzes the dynamics of Hutchinson’s formulation of the (...) biogeochemical approach, providing historical context and linking its early application to the existing limnological tradition. (shrink)

Risposte alle censure dell' "Ateismo triunfato" (1631).--Documenta ad Gallorum nationem.--Consultationes aphoristicae gerendae rei praesentis temporis cum Austriacis ac Italis ad hispanismi delectionem perficiendam (1635).--Compendium veritatis catholicae et falsitatis sectariorum de praedestinatione.--Censure al "De praedestinationes" (1636).

1. Prodromus philosophiae instaurandae. De sensu rerum et magia. Apologia pro Galileo.--2. Realis philosophia epilogistica. Astrologicorum libri VII.

1. Critica de capire e altri scritti. 2. Scritti kantiani. 3. L'analitica trascendentale. 4. Il problema della scienza e il giudizio storico.

The relentless exploitation of the earth's resources and technologys boundless growth are a matter of urgent concern. When did this race towards the limitless begin? The Greeks, who shaped the basis of Western thinking, lived in mortal fear of humanity's hidden hunger for the infinite and referred to it as hubris, the one true sin in their moral code. Whoever desired or possessed too much was implacably punished by nemesis, yet the Greeks themselves were to pioneer an unprecedented level of (...) ambition that began to reverse that tabu. If it is true that no culture can truly repudiate its origins, and that gods who are no longer potent can vanish but still leave behind a body of myth which coninues to live and assert itself in modernized garb, then our concern with the limits of growth reflects something more than an awareness of new technological problems - it also brings to light a psychic wound a a feeling of guilt which are infinitely more ancient. (shrink)

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate (...) background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom. (shrink)

I argue that the key to understand many fundamental issues in philosophy of science lies in understanding the subtle relation between the non-empirical cognitive values used in science and the constraints imposed by measurability. In fact, although we are not able to fix the interpretation of a scientific theory through its formulation, I show that measurability puts constraints that can at least exclude some implausible interpretations. This turns out to be enough to define at least one cognitive value that is (...) able to penalize, without damages, precisely those bad features that deceive purely empirical assessments. This leads to the formulation of a simple model of scientific progress, that is based only on empirical accuracy and conciseness. The model is confronted here with many possible objections and with challenging cases of real progress. Although I cannot exclude that the model might be incomplete, it includes all the cases of genuine progress examined here, and no spurious one. In this model, I stress the role of the state of the art, which is the collection of all the theories that are the only legitimate source of scientific predictions. Progress is a global upgrade of the state of the art. (shrink)

KOINONIA/ASETT MINGA/MUTIRÃO DE REVISTAS DE TEOLOGIA LATINO-AMERICANAS Tiempos oscuros, tiempos de monstruos: Teología de la liberación y desafíos culturales (Dark times, times of monsters: liberation theology and cultural challenges).

Probabilism, the view that agents have numerical degrees of beliefs that conform to the axioms of probability, has been defended by the vast majority of its proponents by way of either of two arguments, the Dutch Book Argument and the Representation Theorems Argument. In this paper I argue that both arguments are flawed. The Dutch Book Argument is based on an unwarranted, ad hoc premise that cannot be dispensed with. The Representation Theorems Argument hinges on an invalid implication.

Gli emarginati diventano protagonisti di una storia alternativa all'epica cavalleresca e aristocratica.

La piega critica del realismo filosofico di Tommaso rivela una realtà inaferrabile dischiudendo al soggetto nuove possibilità conoscitive, che ci restituiscono un Tommaso un po' meno tomista.

Una proposta di lettura ";trascendentalista"; del ";De ente"; di Tommaso d'Aquino. Il venir meno dei presupposti per fondare un rapporto forte tra discorso e realtà.

Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of simplicity, and those that can be defined precisely strongly depend on the language in which the theory is formulated. The language dependence is a natural feature—to some extent—but it is also believed to be a fatal problem, because, according to a common general argument, the simplicity of a theory is always trivial (...) in a suitably chosen language. But, this trivialization argument is typically either applied to toy-models of scientific theories or applied with little regard for the empirical content of the theory. This paper shows that the trivialization argument fails, when one considers realistic theories and requires their empirical content to be preserved . In fact, the concepts that enable a very simple formulation, are not necessarily measurable, in general. Moreover, the inspection of a theory describing a chaotic billiard shows that precisely those concepts that naturally make the theory extremely simple are provably not measurable. This suggests that—whenever a theory possesses sufficiently complex consequences—the constraint of measurability prevents too simple formulations in any language. This explains why the scientists often regard their assessments of simplicity as largely unambiguous. In order to reveal a cultural bias in the scientists’ assessment, one should explicitly identify different characterizations of simplicity of the assumptions that lead to different theory selections. General arguments are not sufficient. (shrink)

This paper exhibits a general and uniform method to prove axiomatic completeness for certain modal fixpoint logics. Given a set Γ of modal formulas of the form γ, where x occurs only positively in γ, we obtain the flat modal fixpoint language by adding to the language of polymodal logic a connective γ for each γΓ. The term γ is meant to be interpreted as the least fixed point of the functional interpretation of the term γ. We consider the following (...) problem: given Γ, construct an axiom system which is sound and complete with respect to the concrete interpretation of the language on Kripke structures. We prove two results that solve this problem.First, let be the logic obtained from the basic polymodal by adding a Kozen–Park style fixpoint axiom and a least fixpoint rule, for each fixpoint connective γ. Provided that each indexing formula γ satisfies a certain syntactic criterion, we prove this axiom system to be complete.Second, addressing the general case, we prove the soundness and completeness of an extension of . This extension is obtained via an effective procedure that, given an indexing formula γ as input, returns a finite set of axioms and derivation rules for γ, of size bounded by the length of γ. Thus the axiom system is finite whenever Γ is finite. (shrink)