This article presents the main features of the work of Domenico Vandelli (1735-1816), an Italian-born man of science who lived a large part of his life in Portugal. Vandelli's scientific interests as a naturalist paved the way to his activities as a reformer and adviser on economic and financial issues. The topics covered in his writings are similar to those discussed by Linnaeus, with whom Vandelli corresponded. They clearly reveal that the scientific preparation indispensable for a better knowledge of (...) natural resources was also a fundamental condition for correctly addressing problems of efficiency in their economic allocation. The key argument put forward in this article is that the relationship between natural history and the agenda for economic reform and development deserves to be further analysed. It is indeed a central element in the emergence of political economy as an autonomous scientific discourse during the last decades of the eighteenth century. (shrink)
In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, (...) temporality and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence. (shrink)
The standard view of classical cognitive science stated that cognition consists in the manipulation of language-like structures according to formal rules. Since cognition is ‘linguistic’ in itself, according to this view language is just a complex communication system and does not influence cognitive processes in any substantial way. This view has been criticized from several perspectives and a new framework (Embodied Cognition) has emerged that considers cognitive processes as non-symbolic and heavily dependent on the dynamical interactions between the cognitive system (...) and its environment. But notwithstanding the successes of the embodied cognitive science in explaining low-level cognitive behaviors, it is still not clear whether and how it can scale up for explaining high-level cognition. In this paper we argue that this can be done by considering the role of language as a cognitive tool: i.e. how language transforms basic cognitive functions in the high-level functions that are characteristic of human cognition. In order to do that, we review some computational models that substantiate this view with respect to categorization and memory. Since these models are based on a very rudimentary form of non-syntactic ‘language’ we argue that the use of language as a cognitive tool might have been an early discovery in hominid evolution, and might have played a substantial role in the evolution of language itself. (shrink)
"Symmetry" was one of the most important methodological themes in 20th-century physics and is probably going to play no lesser role in physics of the 21st century. As used today, there are a variety of interpretations of this term, which differ in meaning as well as their mathematical consequences. Symmetries of crystals, for example, generally express a different kind of invariance than gauge symmetries, though in specific situations the distinctions may become quite subtle. I will review some of the various (...) notions of "symmetry" and highlight some of their uses in specific examples taken from Pauli's scientific oevre. This paper is based on a talk given at the conference "Wolfgang Pauli's Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science", May 20.-25. 2007, at Monte Verita, Ascona, Switzerland. (shrink)
General Relativity offers the possibility to model attributes of matter, like mass, momentum, angular momentum, spin, chirality etc. from pure space, endowed only with a single field that represents its Riemannian geometry. I review this picture of `Geometrodynamics' and comment on various developments after Einstein.
We characterize the collapse of Buss' bounded arithmetic in terms of the provable collapse of the polynomial time hierarchy. We include also some general model-theoretical investigations on fragments of bounded arithmetic.
We consider the problem of uniqueness of certain simultaneity structures in flat spacetime. Absolute simultaneity is specifiled to be a non-trivial equivalence relation which is invariant under the automorphism group Aut of spacetime. Aut is taken to be the identity-component of either the inhomogeneous Galilei group or the inhomogeneous Lorentz group. Uniqueness of standard simultaneity in the first, and absence of any absolute simultaneity in the second case are demonstrated and related to certain group theoretic properties. Relative simultaneity with respect (...) to an additional structure X on spacetime is specified to be a non-trivial equivalence relation which is invariant under the subgroup in Aut that stabilises X. Uniqueness of standard Einstein simultaneity is proven in the Lorentzian case when X is an inertial frame. We end by discussing the relation to previous work of others. (shrink)
The study of film entered a new era after World War II, as cinema became an acceptable focus for intellectual inquiry. The many ways in which cinema has been imagined, studied, and discussed in the last fifty years are the subject of this comprehensive overview of film theory in the United States and Europe since 1945. Francesco Casetti groups his essays around principal movements in film studies. In the first part of the book, he reviews the attempts at defining the (...) "essence" of cinema during the 1950s. Then he explores disciplinary approaches to cinema--psychological, sociological, semiotic, and psychoanalytic--popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, he focuses on "field" theories--cinema and politics, the critique of representation, feminist film theory, neo-disciplinary tendencies, cultural and aesthetic studies, and the new approaches to film history. Theories of Cinema was originally published in Italy, where it won the Premio Domenico Meccoli--Scrivere di cinema 1993 of the Centro dello Spettacolo in Rome. This is its first English translation. The author has revised and updated this edition to cover the years 1945-1995. (shrink)
Theory of language is an important factor in the plans of political and educational reform drawn by Italian philosophers of the eighteenth century. Analysis of language is a technique they often resort to when discussing the foundations of political philosophy and the ways and means of social communication. Interesting suggestions concerning philosophy of language can be found in the works of writers on political economy and philosophy of jurisprudence (Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri, Cesare Beccaria, Melchiorre Gioia, Gian Domenico Romagnosi, (...) among others), where subjects such as abuse of words and linguistic arbitrarism are connected to theoretical and practical problems of the transition from feudal to bourgeois régime. (shrink)
The Anderson-Friedman absolute objects program has been a favorite analysis of the substantive general covariance that supposedly characterizes Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR). Absolute objects are the same locally in all models (modulo gauge freedom). Substantive general covariance is the lack of absolute objects. Several counterexamples have been proposed, however, including the Jones-Geroch dust and Torretti constant curvature spaces counterexamples. The Jones-Geroch dust case, ostensibly a false positive, is resolved by noting that holes in the dust in some models (...) ensure that no physically relevant nonvanishing timelike vector field exists there, so no absolute object exists. The Torretti constant curvature spaces case, allegedly a false negative, is resolved by testing an irreducible piece of the metric, the conformal metric density of weight -2/3, for absoluteness; this geometric object is absolute. A new counterexample is proposed involving the orthonormal tetrad said to be necessary to couple spinors to a curved metric. The threat of finding an absolute object in GTR + spinors is overcome by the use of an alternative spinor formalism that takes a symmetric square root of the metric (with the help of the matrix diag(-1,1,1,1)), eliminating 6 of the 16 tetrad components as irrelevant. The importance of eliminating irrelevant structures, as Anderson emphasized, is clear. The importance of the choice of physical fields is also evident. A new counterexample due to Robert Geroch and Domenico Giulini, however, finds an absolute object in vacuum GTR itself, namely the scalar density $g$ given by the metric components' determinant. Thus either the definition of absoluteness or its use to analyze GTR's substantive general covariance is flawed. Anderson's belief that all absolute objects are nonvariational (that is, not varied in a suitable action principle) and vice versa is also falsified by the Geroch-Giulini counterexample. However, it remains plausible that all nonvariational fields are absolute, so adding nonvariationality as a necessary condition for absoluteness, as Hiskes once suggested, would likely leave no useful work to the Anderson-Friedman condition of sameness in all models. Simply having only variational fields in an action principle (suitably free of irrelevant fields) might be a satisfactory analysis of substantive general covariance, if one exists. This proposal also resembles the suggestion that GTR is "already parameterized," if one decides to parameterize theories by defining the nonvariational fields in terms of preferred coordinates called clock fields. More questions need to be addressed. Which fields should be tested for absoluteness: only primitive fields (which ones?), or all or some (which?) of their concomitants also? Geroch observes that some kinds of geometric objects, such as tangent vectors, scalar densities, and tangent vector densities of non-unit weight, satisfy the condition of sameness in all models if they merely fail to vanish. If these "susceptible" geometric objects can hardly help being absolute, to what degree are they, or the theories harboring them, responsible for this absoluteness? The answer to this question helps to determine the significance of the Geroch-Giulini counterexample. (shrink)
Highlights of this volume from the 2004 Annual European Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) include a tutorial survey of the recent highpoints of universal algebra, written by a leading expert; explorations of foundational questions; a quartet of model theory papers giving an excellent reflection of current work in model theory, from the most abstract aspect "abstract elementary classes" to issues around p-adic integration.
In December 1924 Wolfgang Pauli proposed the idea of an inner degree of freedom of the electron, which he insisted should be thought of as genuinely quantum mechanical in nature. Shortly thereafter Ralph Kronig and, independently, Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck took up a less radical stance by suggesting that this degree of freedom somehow corresponded to an inner rotational motion, though it was unclear from the very beginning how literal one was actually supposed to take this picture, since it (...) was immediately recognised (already by Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck) that it would very likely lead to serious problems with Special Relativity if the model were to reproduce the electron's values for mass, charge, angular momentum, and magnetic moment. However, probably due to the then overwhelming impression that classical concepts were generally insufficient for the proper description of microscopic phenomena, a more detailed reasoning was never given. In this contribution I shall investigate in some detail what the restrictions on the physical quantities just mentioned are, if they are to be reproduced by rather simple classical models of the electron within the framework of Special Relativity. It turns out that surface stresses play a decisive role and that the question of whether a classical model for the electron does indeed contradict Special Relativity can only be answered on the basis of an exact solution, which has hitherto not been given. (shrink)
In statistical thermodynamics the 2nd law is properly spelled out in terms of conditioned probabilities. As such it makes the statement, that `entropy increases with time' without preferring a time direction. In this paper we try to explain this statement---which is well known since the time of the Ehrenfests---in some detail within a systematic Bayesian approach.
: Numerical tables are important objects of study in a range of fields, yet they have been largely ignored by historians of science. This paper contrasts and compares ways in which numerical tables were used by Galileo and Mersenne, especially in the Dialogo and Harmonie Universelle. I argue that Galileo and Mersenne used tables in radically different ways, though rarely to present experimental data. Galileo relied on tables in his work on error theory in day three of the Dialogo and (...) also used them in a very different setting in the last day of the Discorsi. In Mersenne's case they represent an important but so far unrecognized feature of his notion of universal harmony. I conclude by presenting a classification of different ways in which tables were used within the well-defined disciplinary and temporal boundaries of my research. In doing so, however, I provide a useful tool for extending similar investigations to broader domains. (shrink)
This note provides a summary of the meaning of the term `Superselection Rule' in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum-Field Theory. It is a contribution to the Compendium of Quantum Physics: Concepts, Experiments, History and Philosophy, edited by Friedel Weinert, Klaus Hentschel, Daniel Greenberger, and Brigitte Falkenburg, to be published by Springer Verlag.
Collapse models predict the spontaneous collapse of the wave function, in order to avoid the emergence of macroscopic superpositions. In their mass-dependent formulation, they claim that the collapse of any system’s wave function depends on its mass. Neutral K, D, B mesons are oscillating systems that are given by Nature as superposition of two distinct mass eigenstates. Thus they are unique laboratory for testing collapse models that are sensitive to the mass. In this paper we derive—for the single mesons and (...) bipartite entangled mesons—the effect of the mass-proportional CSL (Continuous Spontaneous Localization) collapse model on the dynamics on neutral mesons. We compare the theoretical prediction with experimental data from different accelerator facilities. (shrink)
Mirror neurons may play a role in representing not only signs but also their meaning. Because actions are the only aspect of behavior that are inter-individually accessible, interpreting meanings in terms of actions might explain how meanings can be shared. Behavioral evidence and artificial life simulations suggest that seeing objects or processing words referring to objects automatically activates motor actions.
Adriano Ardovino, Raccogliere il mondo. Per una fenomenologia della rete [Angela Maiello] • Clive Bell, L’Arte [Filippo Focosi] • Alessandro Bertinetto, Il pensiero dei suoni. Temi di filosofia della musica [Domenica Lentini] • Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature. How Mind Emerged From Matter [Mariagrazia Portera] • Roger Scruton, La bellezza. Ragione ed esperienza estetica [Filippo Focosi] • Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience. Sigfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theoder W. Adorno [Domenico Spinosa] • Lawrence Barsalou, scritti sulla “Grounded Cognition” [Gialuca (...) Consoli] • Dis-forme , Università degli Studi di Palermo, 28-29 maggio 2012 [Michele Bertolini e Pietro Conte]. (shrink)
En regardant en arriere ä l'itineraire philosophique de Ricceur, nous sommes tentes d'y saisir une logique de developpement qui semble decrire un mouvement en Spirale. C'est pourquoi dans des ouvrages les plus tardifs nous trouvons un retour de cette recherche sur la volonte - inscrite en fait dans le cadre d'une anthropologic philosophique - qui avait inspire son projet de jeunesse. Appelons-le 'mouvement en Spirale' et non : retour circulaire aux origines, car entre le debut et la fin i l (...) n'y a pas de coincidence mais enrichissement apres un long detour ä travers l'univers du langage et de la textualite. II ne s'agit pas pour autant d'imaginer une suite du genre : Philosophie de la volonte, hermeneutique, ä nouveau Philosophie de la volonte ou de Taction. Le terrain de l'hermeneutique, une fois conquis, n'est en realite jamais abandonne, dans la mesure oü i l est impossible de se passer de la mediation du langage. Le phenomene se donnant grace au pouvoir revelatif du langage nous permet de saisir les multiples aspects de l'homme agissant et souffrant. La Philosophie de Ricceur, est, plus qu'une "Philosophie du langage", une "philosophie ä travers le langage", c'est-ä-dire qu'elle traverse le phenomene du langage dans toute sa richesse sans jamais oublier qu'ä travers le langage nous parlons de quelque chose et que le langage ne doit pas devenir - si non pour une abstraction deliberee et consciente - un Systeme clos en lui-meme sans reference au monde et aux interlocuteurs du discours : cette consideration reste valable meme par rapport au dernier ouvrage oü la dialectique entre memoire et histoire est toujours liee ä la dialectique entre discours oral et discours ecrit et done au double travail de l'ecriture et de la lecture. Notre hypothese de travail est qu'on pourrait retrouver dans cette traversee du langage une sequence ä la fois historique (selon l'ordre de la decouverte) et theorique (selon un certain ordre hermeneutique) de trois paradigmes : Symbole, texte, traduction, qui nous donnent une sorte de boussole pour nous orienter au cours du long voyage. (shrink)
We prove that there are uncountably many sets that are low for the class of Schnorr random reals. We give a purely recursion theoretic characterization of these sets and show that they all have Turing degree incomparable to 0'. This contrasts with a result of Kučera and Terwijn [5] on sets that are low for the class of Martin-Löf random reals.
We compare two different notions of generic expansions of countable saturated structures. One kind of genericity is related to existential closure, and another is defined via topological properties and Baire category theory. The second type of genericity was first formulated by Truss for automorphisms. We work with a later generalization, due to Ivanov, to finite tuples of predicates and functions. Let $N$ be a countable saturated model of some complete theory $T$ , and let $(N,\sigma)$ denote an expansion of $N$ (...) to the signature $L_{0}$ which is a model of some universal theory $T_{0}$ . We prove that when all existentially closed models of $T_{0}$ have the same existential theory, $(N,\sigma)$ is Truss generic if and only if $(N,\sigma)$ is an e-atomic model. When $T$ is $\omega$ -categorical and $T_{0}$ has a model companion $T_{\mathrm {mc}}$ , the e-atomic models are simply the atomic models of $T_{\mathrm {mc}}$. (shrink)
Simulations with neural networks living in a virtual environment can be used to explore and test hypotheses concerning concepts and language. The advantages that result from this approach include (1) the notion that a concept can be precisely defined and examined, (2) that concepts can be studied in both nonverbal and verbal artificial organisms, and (3) concepts have properties that depend on the environment as well as on the organism's adaptive behavior in response to the environment.
This article tries to show the strict interdependence of the concepts of text, time, and truth in relation to textual transmission. It develops the thesis that the identity of the text is a function of a series of actors working on the historic, cultural, religious, and other levels. It offers the example of the origination of the Old Testament, which is considered the real foundational act of Western practices of identity construction/reconstruction. This event generated the metaphysics of the text that (...) produced the overlapping of theological and philological truth. Nonetheless, the digital dimension seems potentially able to call into crisis the pact of identity that is based on the assumed stability of the written document and the idea of time that derives from it. The present scenario sees a tension between the data preservation/retrieval paradigm and the creative/performative style of online writing. We are facing a dialogue and interaction with and between machines that the methods and traditional tools of the humanist sciences find increasingly difficult to understand, describe, and map. In questo articolo si cerca di mostrare la stretta interdipendenza dei concetti di testo, tempo e verità in relazione alla storia della trasmissione dei testi. Viene avanzata la tesi che l’identità del testo sia funzione di una serie di attori che agiscono sul piano storico, culturale, religioso, ecc., e a tale proposito viene portato l’esempio della nascita dell’Antico Testamento, vero atto fondativo delle pratiche occidentali di costruzione/ricostruzione dell’identità. Dalla metafisica del testo generata da questo evento scaturisce la sovrapposizione di verità teologica e verità filologica. Ma la dimensione digitale sembra potenzialmente in grado di mettere in crisi il patto identitario fondato sulla presunta stabilità del documento scritto e sulla concezione tempo che ne deriva. Lo scenario presente vede una tensione fra il paradigma della conservazione/retrieval dei dati e quello produttivo-performativo delle scritture online. Un dialogo e un’interazione con e fra le macchine che i metodi e gli strumenti tradizionali delle scienze umanistiche fanno sempre più fatica a comprendere, descrivere, mappare. (shrink)
This paper dialogues with the contributions included in Francesco Fiorentino and Domenico Firomonte’s edited volumes and Massimo Riva’s book from the point of view of feminist literary criticism. This diverse positioning in relation to the work of women writers has allowed feminist criticism to develop a path that has deconstructed the Italian literary canon and the promotion of critical stances that are no longer abstract or monologic, but rather situated in the point of view of the subject and its (...) relational component. Works by Italian women writers present themselves as a body of texts of high material density that transfer questions of textual mobility both within digital and print culture onto the subject and its style of enunciation. L’intervento dialoga con i contributi dei volumi a cura di Francesco Fiorentino e Domenico Fiormonte e con il libro di Massimo Riva a partire dall’esperienza della critica letteraria femminista italiana. Il suo diverso posizionamento rispetto alle opere delle scrittrici ha permesso l’articolarsi di un percorso che ha decostruito il canone della tradizione letteraria italiana e l’affermarsi di posizioni critiche non più astratte e monologiche, ma situate a partire dal soggetto e dalla sua componente relazionale. Le opere delle scrittrici italiane si rappresentano infatti come un corpo testuale dall’alta densità materica, che sposta sul soggetto e sul suo stile dell’enunciazione le questioni di mobilità del testo, sia esso virtuale o cartaceo. (shrink)
On his way to General Relativity (GR) Einstein gave several arguments as to why a special relativistic theory of gravity based on a massless scalar field could be ruled out merely on grounds of theoretical considerations. We re-investigate his two main arguments, which relate to energy conservation and some form of the principle of the universality of free fall. We find that such a theory-based a priori abandonment not to be justified. Rather, the theory seems formally perfectly viable, though in (...) clear contradiction with (later) experiments. (shrink)
This note highlights the difficulties of reading the vocabulary of the De civitate Dei and makes annotations to the introduction of the new Italian translation of the De civitate, edited by Domenico Marafioti with an extensive introduction and notes: Sant’Agostino, La città di Dio, a cura di Domenico Marafioti, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano 2011 (Oscar Grandi Classici), 1632 pagine. ISBN 978-88-04-60888-2.
The title of this paper is inspired by the book edited by Domenico Fiormonte entitled Canoni liquidi (Liquid Canons). Of course, the adjective “liquid” refers to Zygmunt Bauman’s term at which my critique is also indirectly aimed. The title of Fiormonte’s book seems to suggest equivalence between textual “mobility” and “liquidity.” Yet the “liquefying” of (literary) canons and the emergence of new intrinsically kinetic or fluid forms of mobile textuality requires a critical assessment that does not prematurely celebrate the (...) funeral of the text as we know it but pays close attention to what seems to be waiting for us beyond the text, as suggested in Francesco Fiorentino’s recent edited volume. This means paying attention to what in my recent book, Il futuro della letteratura (The Future of Literature), I call digital incunabula: objects/textual tools, devices programmed in a twofold, reciprocal sense, whose linguistic properties and rules interact and interfere with the algorithmic procedures of artificial languages. In this programmed and programmable interaction and intermediation one can perceive the horizon of incomprehensibility of posthuman language, providing a new aporetic dimension to Gadamer’s assertion that “the being that can be understood is language.“ This assertion is by now the most significant issue in the horizon of literary (digital) arts. (shrink)
