This article addresses the notion of “illusions of the multitude”, or the ideas created by the imagination in the analysis that Baruch Spinoza makes in his works. The text aims to explore the following questions: What characteristics reveal the ideas originating from the imagination? What role do these ideas play in the political and so- cial space? First, I emphasize Spinoza’s explanation of the imagination, as a first mode of knowledge. Secondly, I delve into the characteristics of the ideas that (...) stem from it and the affections that accompany them. Finally, I analyze their effects on the political and social space. (shrink)

El contexto rural colombiano, en los años noventa, se configuró, a partir de un discurso de desarrollo que desconoció y estigmatizó a la población campesina. En este sentido, “el trabajador agrario”, tal y como lo considera la Constitución Política de 1991, no refiere a la realidad específica de las comunidades campesinas, sino a un “pequeño productor”, que como lo indica el Informe de Desarrollo Humano de 2011, representa a individuo con un rol secundario, que con asistencia crediticia y técnica puede (...) ponerse a nivel, pero solo como productor de mediana escala. El presente artículo de reflexión tiene por objetivo analizar los efectos biopolíticos que ha tenido la visión política del desarrollo implementada en el campo colombiano, en esta época, haciendo énfasis en la forma como se han establecido las necesidades para esta población. (shrink)

Human errors are widely considered among the major causes of road accidents. Furthermore, it is estimated that more than 90% of vehicle crashes causing fatal and permanent injuries are directly related to mental tiredness, fatigue, and drowsiness of the drivers. In particular, driving drowsiness is recognized as a crucial aspect in the context of road safety, since drowsy drivers can suddenly lose control of the car. Moreover, the driving drowsiness episodes mostly appear suddenly without any prior behavioral evidence. The present (...) study aimed at characterizing the onset of drowsiness in car drivers by means of a multimodal neurophysiological approach to develop a synthetic electroencephalographic -based index, able to detect drowsy events. The study involved 19 participants in a simulated scenario structured in a sequence of driving tasks under different situations and traffic conditions. The experimental conditions were designed to induce prominent mental drowsiness in the final part. The EEG-based index, so-called “MDrow index”, was developed and validated to detect the driving drowsiness of the participants. The MDrow index was derived from the Global Field Power calculated in the Alpha EEG frequency band over the parietal brain sites. The results demonstrated the reliability of the proposed MDrow index in detecting the driving drowsiness experienced by the participants, resulting also more sensitive and timely sensible with respect to more conventional autonomic parameters, such as the EyeBlinks Rate and the Heart Rate Variability, and to subjective measurements. (shrink)

Technologies like passive brain-computer interfaces can enhance human-machine interaction. Anyhow, there are still shortcomings in terms of easiness of use, reliability, and generalizability that prevent passive-BCI from entering real-life situations. The current work aimed to technologically and methodologically design a new gel-free passive-BCI system for out-of-the-lab employment. The choice of the water-based electrodes and the design of a new lightweight headset met the need for easy-to-wear, comfortable, and highly acceptable technology. The proposed system showed high reliability in both laboratory and (...) realistic settings, performing not significantly different from the gold standard based on gel electrodes. In both cases, the proposed system allowed effective discrimination between low and high levels of workload, vigilance, and stress even for high temporal resolution. Finally, the generalizability of the proposed system has been tested through a cross-task calibration. The system calibrated with the data recorded during the laboratory tasks was able to discriminate the targeted human factors during the realistic task reaching AUC values higher than 0.8 at 40 s of temporal resolution in case of vigilance and workload, and 20 s of temporal resolution for the stress monitoring. These results pave the way for ecologic use of the system, where calibration data of the realistic task are difficult to obtain. (shrink)

Il termineha cominciato a essere impiegato nel nostro paese con riferimento all'integrazione sociale di gruppi minoritari solo a partire dagli anni sessanta, per sostituire il concetto ormai logoro di. Prendendo in esame le piů recenti normative italiane ed europee l'articolo mostra come le nuove politiche disegnino un ritorno, al di sotto di una terminologia rimasta immutata, alla concettualitÀ assimilazionista. Questo ritorno, in controtendenza rispetto alla progressiva giuridificazione e proceduralizzazione dell'appartenenza messa in moto dall'emergere nel secondo dopoguerra della politica dei diritti (...) umani, sembra spingere le nostre societÀ politiche indietro verso una pericolosa ri-sostanzializzazione del concetto di cittadinanza in un processo che, lungi dall'aprire spazi di convivenza culturalmente plurali, sembra condurre concretamente verso una sempre piů spregiudicata e discriminante selezione migratoria funzionale a perpetuare quella sistematica inferiorizzazione economica e simbolica degli immigrati in cui consiste e di cui si nutre il razzismo istituzionale europeo. (shrink)

Sir William Hamilton's theory of the quantification of the predicate is presented and discussed with reference to the contemporary debate on logic.

Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century current historiography doesn't seem to offer a satisfactory reconstruction of medieval terminism, so as to be able to solve the problems of interpretation regarding to the notion of ‘intensio’. In order to analyse appropriately the relationship between the notion of ‘intensio’ and the mathematical representation of its ‘latitudo’, a thorough examination of the semantic nature of the notions of intensive qualities and of their logical behaviour is here attempted.

L’autore presenta lo sviluppo del proprio metodo a partire dal background psicologico sperimentale da cui proviene e dal quale ha preso le distanze, a partire dal desiderio di studiare l’essere umano con un approccio globale, un metodo scientifico non frammentario. L’incontro con la filosofia di Edmund Husserl ha connotato questo suo percorso, in essa egli ha scoperto un approccio che rendesse possibile la ricerca sui fenomeni umani proprio con i criteri che andava inseguendo. Il metodo di ricerca che ha quindi (...) elaborato si basa sul lavoro di Husserl e di Merleau-Ponty. L’articolo descrive brevemente questo metodo.The author explains that his background was in experimental psychology but that he wanted to study the whole person and not fragmented psychological processes. He also desired a non-reductionistic method for studying humans. Fortunately he came across the work of Edmund Husserl and discovered in the latter’s thought a way of researching humans that met the criteria he was seeking. Eventually he developed a phenomenological method for researching humans in a psychological way based upon the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. This article briefly describes the method. (shrink)

We make several remarks concerning properties of functions in parabolic De Giorgi classes of order p. There are new perspectives including a novel mechanism of propagating positivity in measure, the reservation of membership under convex composition, and a logarithmic type estimate. Based on them, we are able to give new proofs of known properties. In particular, we prove local boundedness and local Hölder continuity of these functions via Moser’s ideas, thus avoiding De Giorgi’s heavy machinery. We also seize (...) this opportunity to give a transparent proof of a weak Harnack inequality for nonnegative members of some super-class of De Giorgi, without any covering argument. (shrink)

What contribution can visual art practice bring to interdisciplinary research? And how to give an account of practice-led research that acknowledges the need for interdisciplinary intelligibility? I consider these two questions by reflecting on the methodology--which I call "critical practical analogy" (CPA)--that I have developed while investigating the metaethical implications of French philosopher Simone Weil's notion of attention, during my practice-led PhD. In order to address the first question, I consider as a case study a research art project that employs (...) CPA, and I explain how CPA proved instrumental in overcoming the impasse that I reached by purely theoretical investigation of Weil's discourse on attention and how it opened a distinctly artistic way forward in my research. In order to address the second question, I consider a problem posed by the interdisciplinary nature of my research (covering art and philosophy). I show how, through the application of CPA to the case study, I articulated an exegesis of my research that was intelligible across these two heterogeneous fields of investigation. In conclusion, I give some reasons for my hope that CPA may possess some heuristic and exegetical applicability in practice-led interdisciplinary research beyond my own research. (shrink)

This book is intended as a historical and critical study on the origin of the equations of motion as established in Newton's Principia. The central question that it aims to answer is whether it is indeed correct to ascribe to Galileo the inertia principle and the law of falling bodies. In order to accomplish this task, the study begins by considering theories on the motion of bodies from classical antiquity, and especially those of Aristotle. The theories developed during the Middle (...) Ages and the Renaissance are then reviewed, with careful analysis of the contributions of, for example, the Merton and Parisian Schools and Galileo's immediate predecessors, Tartaglia and Benedetti. Finally, Galileo's work is examined in detail, starting from the early writings. Excerpts from individual works are presented, to allow the texts to speak for themselves, and then commented upon. The book provides historical evidence both for Galileo's dependence on his forerunners and for the major breakthroughs that he achieved. It will satisfy the curiosity of all who wish to know when and why certain laws have been credited to Galileo. (shrink)