The author traces the main outlines of the scientific work and teaching of the late Professor Giuliano Marini, who was a distinguished member of the Scientific Board of the «Archivio di storia della cultura» since its foundation in 1988.

This paper treats a classical topic of scientific epistemology from a new point of view. It considers biology to be a science intermediate between physics and sociology, and the transition from physics to biology as proceeding upwards. As a consequence, any type of reductionism will be avoided. The foundation of sociology can now be viewed as an extension of physics and biology. Indeed social reality is built by means of constitutive rules that create those social facts that have been denominated (...) ‘institutional'. Having argued for the connection among values and norms and actions, the problem is that of justifying this connection. Can values and norms be reasons that explain action? Can reasons be understood as causes? In this paper the thesis is advocated that reasons are not sufficient for causally explaining actions. Taking up the classical analysis of ‘practical inference', I want to point out that, if from the reasons for action logically followed the action itself, the reasons would be sufficient causes of the action: indeed, this would eliminate free will. For this reason, we must examine the problem of free will. My conclusion is in favor of the position of B. Libet, who has demonstrated free will experimentally, and therefore the nondeterministic nature of the practical-inferential model. (shrink)

This study examined potential sources of grammatical gender variability in heritage speakers of Italian with a focus on morphological markedness. Fifty-four adult Italian HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed an online Self-Paced Reading Task and an offline Grammaticality Judgment Task. Both tasks involved sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical noun-adjective agreement, manipulating markedness. In grammatical sentences, both groups showed a markedness effect: shorter reading times and higher accuracy for sentences containing masculine nouns as compared to sentences with (...) feminine nouns. In ungrammatical sentences, although both groups were sensitive to ungrammaticality, only HSs showed a markedness effect, that is, they had significantly longer RTs and higher accuracy when violations were realized on feminine adjectives. Proficiency in the HL was a significant predictor of accuracy and RTs at the individual level. Taken together, results indicate that HSs acquire and process gender in a qualitatively similar way to homeland native speakers. However, RT evidence seems to suggest that at least under particular experimental methods, markedness considerations are more prevalent for HSs resulting in a speed-accuracy tradeoff. (shrink)