In Italien erlangte Hans Jonas, ähnlich wie in andersen Ländern, öffentliche Anerkennung dank seines Werks Das Prinzip Verantwortung, das 1990 ins Italienische übersetzt wurde. Die Übersetzung weckte das Interesse einer breiten Öffentlichkeit sowohl an seinem bioethischen Ansatz als auch an seinen früheren philosophisch-biologischen Schriften. Die Besonderheit des italienischen Kontexts besteht jedoch darin, dass der Philosoph in der akademischen Welt bereits lange vor seiner eingangs erwähnten allgemeinen Anerkennung und ›Entdeckung‹ in der Öffentlichkeit durch seine Arbeiten über die spätantike Gnosis gut bekannt (...) war. (shrink)

An enquiry into the relevance of Hans Jonas' thinking to present-day debates, including transhumanism, posthumanism, and human enhancement.

According to Hans Jonas (1903–1993), the modern technological progress endowed humanity with wondrous power, which in the long run risks altering the nature of human action. This is especially true for the realm of collective action, the effects of which evidence an unpredicted issue: the ecological crisis, which is the “critical vulnerability” of nature to technological intervention. This discovery brings to light that the whole biosphere of the planet has been added to that which human beings must be responsible for (...) because of their power over it. There is, however, a further dimension of vulnerability (and responsibility) to be considered, namely the one which characterizes organic life as such. Indeed, the essence of all living organisms–human beings included–is characterized by vulnerability, given their precarious and unstable condition of “needful freedom” towards the environment. Nevertheless, terrestrial life fl ourished through a multifaceted and unplanned (thus, again, vulnerable) evolution of living forms, ranging from bacteria to human beings – these evidencing a unique degree of freedom, which Jonas refers to as a “metaphysical gap” towards other living beings. The problem is that the present-day technology provides the possibility to manipulate the very essence of life and human nature. Is this process to be accepted and accomplished? And what about the related risks? Indeed, according to Jonas, issues such as genetic manipulation, euthanasia, organ transplantation, assisted reproduction, exploitation of other living beings etc., raise ethical dilemmas which can be addressed thanks to the idea of vulnerability. (shrink)

Numerosity perception is a key ability for human and non-human species, probably mediated by dedicated brain mechanisms. Electrophysiological studies revealed the existence of both early and mid-latency components of the Electrophysiological (EEG) signal sensitive to numerosity changes. However, it is still unknown whether these components respond to physical or perceived variation in numerical attributes. We here tackled this point by recording electrophysiological signal while participants performed a numerosity adaptation task, a robust psychophysical method yielding changes in perceived numerosity judgments despite (...) physical numerosity invariance. Behavioral measures confirmed that the test stimulus was consistently underestimated when presented after a high numerous adaptor while perceived as veridical when presented after a neutral adaptor. Congruently, EEG results revealed a potential at around 200 ms (P2p) which was reduced when the test stimulus was presented after the high numerous adaptor. This result was much prominent over the left posterior cluster of electrodes and correlated significantly with the amount of adaptation. No earlier modulations were retrievable when changes in numerosity were illusory while both early and mid-latency modulations occurred for physical changes. Taken together, our results reveal that mid-latency P2p mainly reflects perceived changes in numerical attributes, while earlier components are likely to be bounded to the physical characteristics of the stimuli. These results suggest that short-term plastic mechanisms induced by numerosity adaptation may involve a relatively late processing stage of the visual hierarchy likely engaging cortical areas beyond the primary visual cortex. Furthermore, these results also indicate mid-latency electrophysiological correlates as a signature of the internal representation of numerical information. (shrink)

Femtosecond laser microfabrication has emerged in the last decade as a powerful technique for direct inscription of low loss optical waveguides in practically any transparent dielectric substrate, showing outstanding versatility. Prototyping of new devices is made rapid, cheap and easy: optical circuits are written directly buried in the substrate, using the laser beam as an optical pen, without any need of costly masks as required by conventional photolithography. Many proof-of-principle demonstrations of integrated optics can be obtained, including splitters, directional couplers, (...) and Mach–Zehnder interferometers. Actually, the road towards applications has just been opened, and the unique capabilities of femtosecond laser micromachining will enable achievements inconceivable with other technologies. In this work, the femtosecond laser fabrication technique is discussed, together with its application to the realization of integrated photonic quantum circuits. (shrink)

The article deals with present day challenges related to the employ of technology in order to reduce the exposition of the human being to the risks and vulnerability of his or her existential condition. According to certain transhumanist and posthumanist thinkers, as well as some supporters of human enhancement, essential features of the human being, such as vulnerability and mortality, ought to be thoroughly overcome. The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, we wish to carry out (...) an enquiry into the ontological and ethical thinking of Hans Jonas, who was among the first to address these very issues with great critical insight; on the other hand, we endeavour to highlight the relevance of Jonas’ reflections to current challenges related to bioscience and biotechnological progress. In this regard, we believe that the transcendent and metaphysical relevance of the «image of man» introduced by Jonas is of paramount importance to understand his criticism against those attempts to ameliorate the human being by endangering his or her essence. (shrink)

In this paper we offer an overall account of the complex and multilayered Italian reception of Hans Jonas’ philosophy, with an eye to its specific features compared to what happened elsewhere. After an introductory foreword the paper is structured in four sections and a brief conclusion, each of which deals with a peculiar aspect of Jonas’ thought: ethics and bioethics, philosophical biology and ontology of life, gnostic and religious studies, studies in the history of philosophy. In the final section we (...) sum up the overall meaning of the «Wirkungsgeschichte» of Jonas’ philosophy in Italy and highlight possible lines of research still to be accomplished. (shrink)

A comparison between the thinking of Hans Jonas and Joseph Ratzinger on Darwinism and Intelligent Design.

In the last year of the Great War, Italy was also hit by the Spanish flu. The Civic Hospitals faced a deadly disaster with insufficient resources. All the heavy workload fell on the female nursing staff, who were the only ones able ensure the continuity of the hospital services. This study aimed to explore the impact of the influenza on the health of the nurses at the Maggiore Hospital in Milan during the second and third epidemic waves. Historical research was (...) conducted between February and May 2020. Primary sources were retrieved from the historical archives of the Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico and the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the autumn of 1918, the Maggiore Hospital in Milan changed its organization to hospitalise patients affected by the influenza pandemic. Although the hospital managers wanted to protect their healthcare staff from the risks of contagion by means of prophylaxis rules, 388 lay nurses and 80 religious sister nurses were affected by this insidious disease. The second and third waves of the pandemic claimed 25 victims of duty. Remembered for their altruism and spirit of abnegation, the hospital community honoured their sacrifice, and the citizens expressed their gratitude. (shrink)

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy (...) and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively, voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates—if and when they want and for specific aims—with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society. (shrink)

Parkinson's disease patients receiving dopaminergic treatment may experience bursts of creativity. Although this phenomenon is sometimes recognized among patients and their clinicians, the association between dopamine replacement therapy in PD patients and creativity remains underexplored. It is unclear, for instance, whether DRT affects creativity through convergent or divergent thinking, idea generation, or a general lack of inhibition. It is also unclear whether DRT only augments pre-existing creative attributes or generates creativity de novo. Here, we tested a group of PD patients (...) when “on” and “off” dopaminergic treatment on a series of tests of creative problem-solving, and related their performance to a group of matched healthy controls as well as to their pre-PD creative skills and measures of inhibition/impulsivity. Results did not provide strong evidence that DRT improved creative thinking in PD patients. Rather, PD patients “on” medication showed less flexibility in divergent thinking, generated fewer ideas via insight, and showed worse performance in convergent thinking overall than healthy controls. Pre-PD creative skills predicted enhanced flexibility and fluency in divergent thinking when PD patients were “on” medication. However, results on convergent thinking were mixed. Finally, PD patients who exhibited deficits in a measure of inhibitory control showed weaker convergent thinking while “on” medication, supporting previous evidence on the importance of inhibitory control in creative problem-solving. Altogether, results do not support the hypothesis that DRT promotes creative thinking in PD. We speculate that bursts of artistic production in PD are perhaps conflated with creativity due to lay conceptions of creativity. (shrink)

One 1120 pages volume, with 4000 entries covering - Western philosophy: authors, schools, concepts and terminology; - religions, cultural anthropology, eastern philosophies; - Psychology and psychoanalysis; - linguistics and semiotics; - sociology and political theory.

The 'Enciclopedia Filosofica' is an encyclopaedia of philosophical topics promoted by the Centre for Philosophical Studies of Gallarate and published, in its third and last edition in 2006, by the Bompiani publishing house in Milan. The first edition of the 'Enciclopedia Filosofica' was promoted by the Centre for Philosophical Studies of Gallarate in the 1950s, seeing the light in 1957-58. A second edition, published by the Sansoni publishing house in Florence, was published in 1968-69 and reprinted in 1979. The third (...) and last edition, published by Bompiani in 2006, is intended to cover the whole of philosophical knowledge and related disciplines with over ten thousand entries edited by about a thousand academics, both Italian and non-Italian, and distributed in twelve volumes for a total of 12,496 pages. (shrink)

The paper aims to examine the role of Benet Perera’s and Roberto Bellarmino’s exegetic models in the development of the relationship between the nascent Galilean science and post-Tridentine catholic theology. It intends to show that, during the early decades of seventeenth century, the Catholic Church dealt with the Scientific Revolution with the same hermeneutical tools that it had employed to confront the Protestant Reformation half a century before. However, new science involved a philosophical and scientific culture change so vast (...) and intricate that those models turned out to be inadequate to understand the birth and characteristics of the new era. (shrink)

L’articolo indaga l’opera di Paolo Rosa e di Studio Azzurro a partire dal suo rilievo politico. L’articolo rielabora il concetto, formulato originariamente da Walter Benjamin ne L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, di “politicizzazione dell’arte”. Mentre per Benjamin la politicizzazione dell’arte riguarda il movimento di emancipazione delle masse da opporre alla “estetizzazione della politica”, il concetto si presta qui a una nuova interpretazione. Riprendendo il titolo di un saggio scritto da Rosa insieme ad Andrea Balzola, l’articolo mostra come (...) l’arte debba “uscire fuori di sé”. In altre parole, l’artista deve abbandonare le consuete modalità della creazione e della fruizione, per istituire nuove condizioni di interazione all’interno degli ambienti prodotti attraverso la creazione di immagini. In questo modo, l’opera di Rosa e Studio Azzurro recupera in una nuova accezione l’“aura” dell’opera d’arte. (shrink)

Attraverso lo studio di due singolari planimetrie inedite e non datate viene fatta luce su una pagina sconosciuta della museologia palermitana: la proposta, mai attuata, di Antonino Salinas, appoggiata anche da Giuseppe Fiorelli e da Paolo Boselli, di trasferire tra il 1887 ed il 1910 tutte le raccolte archeologiche, di arte medievale e moderna dai locali dell’ex convento dei padri Filippini all’Olivella nel complesso medievale di Palazzo Chiaramonte o Steri. L’infelice scelta post-unitaria di destinare l’ex convento a sede del (...) Museo di Palermo, l’Esposizione Nazionale del 1891/1892 ed il “taglio” della via Roma, praticato nei primi anni del ‘900 per la realizzazione della nuova grande arteria cittadina, sono i moventi, che sollecitano gli attori della vicenda a sollevare la questione. La ricerca documentale, che descrive gli eventi sino al 1932, svela molte delle dinamiche e delle problematiche inerenti ai fatti come la possibile costituzione di un nuovo polo museale, una suggestiva area urbana riqualificata, che risulta quasi un intero quartiere dedicato ai musei. Il nuovo progetto espositivo del Salinas è in linea di continuità con la ben nota idea dell’archeologo palermitano di celebrare la “storia delle arti di tutta la Sicilia” ed allo stesso tempo anticipa alcune delle scelte espositive, che saranno adottate in seguito dal Marconi e dall’Accascina: un unicum tra i coevi musei nazionali della penisola. (shrink)

This high-level study discusses Newtonian principles and 19th-century views on electrodynamics and the aether. Additional topics include Einstein's electrodynamics of moving bodies, Minkowski spacetime, gravitational geometry, time and causality, and other subjects. Highlights include a rich exposition of the elements of the special and general theories of relativity.

Recordando a Bachelard a medio siglo de su muerte (2011) -- Filosofia de la relatividad (2011) -- La proliferación de los conceptos de especie en la biología evolucionista (2010).

The seventeenth century saw dramatic advances in mathematical theory and practice. With the recovery of many of the classical Greek mathematical texts, new techniques were introduced, and within 100 years, the rules of analytic geometry, geometry of indivisibles, arithmatic of infinites, and calculus were developed. Although many technical studies have been devoted to these innovations, Mancosu provides the first comprehensive account of the relationship between mathematical advances of the seventeenth century and the philosophy of mathematics of the period. Starting with (...) the Renaissance debates on the certainty of mathematics, Mancosu leads the reader through the foundational issues raised by the emergence of these new mathematical techniques, including the influence of the Aristotelian conception of science in Cavalieri and Guldin, the foundational relevance of Descartes' Geometrie, the relation between geometrical and epistemological theories of the infinite, and the Leibnizian calculus and the opposition to infinitesimalist procedures. In the process Mancosu draws a sophisticated picture of the subtle dependencies between technical development and philosophical reflection in seventeenth century mathematics. (shrink)

From Brouwer To Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s offers the first comprehensive introduction to the most exciting period in the foundation of mathematics in the twentieth century. The 1920s witnessed the seminal foundational work of Hilbert and Bernays in proof theory, Brouwer's refinement of intuitionistic mathematics, and Weyl's predicativist approach to the foundations of analysis. This impressive collection makes available the first English translations of twenty-five central articles by these important contributors and many others. (...) The articles have been translated for the first time from Dutch, French, and German, and the volume is divided into four sections devoted to (1) Brouwer, (2) Weyl, (3) Bernays and Hilbert, and (4) the emergence of intuitionistic logic. Each section opens with an introduction which provides the necessary historical and technical context for understanding the articles. Although most contemporary work in this field takes its start from the groundbreaking contributions of these major figures, a good, scholarly introduction to the area was not available until now. Unique and accessible, From Brouwer To Hilbert will serve as an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in the philosophy of mathematics, and will also be an invaluable resource for philosophers, mathematicians, and interested non-specialists. (shrink)

This paper deals with a case of Virgilian ambiguity, namely the famous hemistich at Aen. 4.298 omnia tuta timens. By highlighting a plausible reading with a causal force (‘fearing everything too calm’, ‘because of the excessive calmness’), it seeks to demonstrate that this hemistich is an ambiguous passage. This view is confirmed through the imitation by Valerius Flaccus, who, in alluding to the Virgilian passage (Argonautica 8.408–12), highlights its ambiguity by including both of the most plausible readings.

Volume 19, Issue 9, September 2019, Page 37-39.

Can taxation and the redistribution of wealth through the welfare state be conceived as a modern system of circulation of the gift? But once such a gift is institutionalized, regulated and sanctioned through legal mechanisms, does it not risk being perverted or corrupted, and/or not leaving room for genuinely altruistic motives? What is more: if the market’s utilitarian logic can corrupt or ‘crowd out’ altruistic feelings or motivations, what makes us think that the welfare state cannot also be a source (...) of corruption? To explain the standard answers to the abovementioned questions as well as their implications I will first re-examine two opposing positions assumed here as paradigmatic examples of other similar positions: on the one hand, Titmuss’s work and the never-ending debate about it; on the other, Godbout’s position, in-so-far as it shows how Titmuss’s arguments can easily be turned upside down. I will then introduce and reinterpret Einaudi’s “critical point” theory as a more complex and richer anthropological explanation of the problems and answers considered herein. Through the analysis of these paradigmatic positions I will develop two interrelated arguments. 1) The way these problems are posed as well as the standard answers to them are: a) subject to fallacies: the dichotomy fallacy and the fallacy of composition; b) too reductive and simplistic: we should at least try to clarify what kind of ‘gift’ or ‘corruption’ we are thinking about, and who or what the ‘giver’, the ‘corrupter’, the ‘receiver’ and/or the ‘corrupted’ party are. 2) The answers to these problems cannot be found by merely following a theoretical approach, nor can they be merely based on empirical evidence; instead, they need to take into account the forever troublesome, ambiguous and unpredictable matter of human freedom. (shrink)

A significant body of research concludes that stable beliefs of perceived consumer effectiveness lead to sustainable consumption choices. Consumers who believe that their decisions can significantly affect environmental and social issues are more likely to behave sustainably. Little is known, however, about how perceived consumer effectiveness can be increased. We find that feelings of guilt and pride, activated by a single consumption episode, can regulate sustainable consumption by affecting consumers’ general perception of effectiveness. This paper demonstrates the impact that guilt (...) and pride have on perceived consumer effectiveness and shows how this effect rests on the ability of these emotions to influence perceptions of agency. After experiencing guilt or pride, consumers see themselves as the cause of relevant sustainability outcomes. The process of causal attribution associated with these emotions influences consumers’ use of neutralization techniques. Through the reduction in consumers’ ability to neutralize their sense of personal responsibility, guilt and pride positively influence perceived consumer effectiveness. The inability to rationalize-away their personal responsibility, persuades consumers that they affect sustainability outcomes through their decisions. The research advances our understanding of sustainable consumption and identifies a new avenue for the regulation of individual consumer behavior that has significant implications for the development of sustainable marketing initiatives. (shrink)

The study of evil and the different forms in which it manifests itself has long been the interest of a significant number of scholars, mainly philosophers and theologians. Yet, following the libera...

A critical survey of the main philosophical theories about events and event talk, organized in three main sections: (i) Events and Other Categories (Events vs. Objects; Events vs. Facts; Events vs. Properties; Events vs. Times); (ii) Types of Events (Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, and States; Static and Dynamic Events; Actions and Bodily Movements; Mental and Physical Events; Negative Events); (iii) Existence, Identity, and Indeterminacy.