La menzogna è irrinunciabile per vincere in politica? Davi ci spiega quali sono i meccanismi di persuasione a cui ricorrono taluni politici per farsi eleggere e quali le responsabilità di quegli elettori che scelgono comunque di votare chi sostiene anche ciò che non può essere vero. È indubbio che la comunicazione politica si rifaccia al simbolismo e al linguaggio delle favole; non necessariamente per occultare la realtà, ma più direttamente per esprimere con maggiore efficacia il suo messaggio. Alle celebri favole (...) di 'Biancaneve', 'Cenerentola', 'Il brutto anatroccolo' sono ricorsi infatti uomini politici del calibro di Berlusconi, Prodi, Nixon, Carter, Mitterrand e partiti quali la Democrazia Cristiana; l'hanno fatto per conquistare voti ma anche per attivare ampi meccanismi di consenso che attingessero direttamente dall'inconscio collettivo. Le conseguenze - ammonisce l'autore - possono essere molto serie, come nel caso dell'attuale politica americana che ha portato la manipolazione e l'inganno a essere riconosciuti come tratti identitari della presidenza di George W. Bush. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to propose a unified approach to the split scope readings of negative indefinites, comparative quantifiers, and numerals. There are two main observations that justify this approach. First, split scope shows the same kinds of restrictions across these different quantifiers. Second, split scope always involves low existential force. In our approach, following Sauerland, natural language determiner quantifiers are quantifiers over choice functions, of type <<,t>,t>. In split readings, the quantifier over choice functions scopes above other (...) operators (such as intensional verbs like must or can). Determiner quantifiers leave a choice-function trace when they move and this trace combines with the noun restriction, which is interpreted low. That split scope always involves low existential force is derived, without stipulation, from Kratzer’s idea that low existential force can be achieved via binding (into the noun restriction). (shrink)

Images are objects of work in the laboratory. On its face, this work is achieved through talk Yet the talk attached to these images makes reference to other images, which are drawn from varcous environments. In this article, four such environments are identified: the domain of laboratory practice; the context of invisible physical reactions; the future image as it will appear in publication; and the domain of case precedents and reference scenarios from the field. The work of image analysis brings (...) the outside of the image into it and takes the inside out. Thus it can be seen that images are not just taken, they are designed and made. (shrink)

Among scholars it is common to assume that Aristotle’s practical syllogism does two jobs. It is often taken to explain both animal motion and human deliberation. I will call this the “two-jobs view of the practical syllogism”. In what follows, I will argue that the two-jobs view of the practical syllogism is not working. I will then try to give a very brief and incomplete sketch of how to conceive of a non-two-jobs view of the Aristotelian practical syllogism. Finally, I (...) will discuss two possible problems for the non-two-jobs view. (shrink)

I show that in his De motu animalium Aristoteles proposes a teleology of the practical on the most general zoological level, i.e. on the level common to humans and self-moving animals. A teleology of the practical is a teleological account of the highest practical goals of animal and human self-motion. I argue that Aristotle conceives of such highest practical goals as goals that are contingently related to their realizations. Animal and human self-motion is the kind of action in which certain (...) state of affairs that realize values are mechanized. (shrink)

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Proof and Computation, held in Marktoberdorf, Germany, July 20 - August 1, 1993.

How do animals make themselves move? Unlike most modern theories, Aristotle answers this question through a general theory of animal movement valid for both humans and animals. This book interprets this theory and analyses its fundamental concepts.

Plato's depiction of the world soul's cognitive activity in Timaeus 37 A 2‐C 5 offers a general account of intellectual cognition. He gives this account by describing the activity of an ideal cognitive agent, involving the very same comparative mechanism that governs human intellectual activity, namely, the active production of a propositional grasp of sameness and difference that things have in relation to each other in several respects. Plato depicts the world soul's intellectual activity as entirely devoid of immediate forms (...) of cognition such as perception and/or intellectual intuition: everything the world soul cognizes is the outcome of its active comparison of things with each other. In particular, there is no direct cognitive grasp of the being of things. The paper ends with a suggestion as to how to understand Plato's account of the world soul's activity as an instance of the ‘like is known by like’ principle of cognition. (shrink)

This important and challenging book is the fruit of many years of engagement with Aristotle’s thinking about the soul-body relation by one of the most distingui.

Thema der kleinen und bemerkenswerten Spätschrift des Aristoteles ist die Beantwortung der Frage ›Wie bewegt die Seele den Körper?‹, d.h. der Frage nach dem Auslöser der Selbstbewegung von Lebewesen. Dies beinhaltet alle gewollten oder auch ungewollten Akte der Selbstbewegung animalischer und menschlicher Organismen. Damit steht die Schrift in der Mitte zwischen der allgemeinen Bewegungslehre des Aristoteles und der in seinen früheren Schriften abgehandelten Biologie und Psychologie, auf die er hier häufig zurückgreift. In 'De motu' wird eine umfassende biologische Theorie des (...) animalischen und menschlichen Handelns formuliert, die handlungstheoretischen und physiologischen Fragen gleichermaßen gerecht zu werden sucht. Auch äußert Aristoteles sich darin erstmals zum berühmten ›angeborenen Pneuma‹, in dem er eine vermittelnde Instanz in der Bewegungsübertragung sieht. Diese Ausgabe bietet die Schrift, die seit der Edition von Martha Nussbaum (1978) in den Blickpunkt der Forschung geraten ist, in einer Neuedition des griechischen Originaltextes von Oliver Primavesi und in einer neuen deutschen Übersetzung und Erläuterung von Klaus Corcilius. Der griechische Text konnte an vielen Stellen durch die Heranziehung des zweiten selbstständigen Überlieferungszweiges verbessert werden, der allen früheren Herausgebern unbekannt geblieben war und den Oliver Primavesi 2011 auf dem 19. Symposium Aristotelicum zu 'De motu' vorgestellt hat. (shrink)

Describes the classicall law theory basics. Translaltion from German.

Ralf Dahrendorf (1929-2009) established modern sociology as a normal science in the traditional university in post-war Germany. After ten years as a Full Professor, he joins the German liberal party, then in opposition. He stands successfully in a regional and then a national election (Landtag, Bundestag). He serves as junior minister under chancellor Willy Brandt and becomes a European commissioner less than a year later. Upon his resignation from the European Commission, he makes the UK his home and becomes a (...) British subject, becomes knighted and later appointed Lord. The second half of his life, as an intellectual amid the powers and a liaison between England and the continent, as a self-described 'straddler', may have been even greater in importance than the first, with his meteoric rise as a highly visible professor of sociology and as German politician of national prominence. His analysis of society and democracy in Germany, though dated (1965) appears still for the most part as valid. Historically, his own elite positions mark transition periods in the process of generational change. (shrink)

After a short description of the Aristotelian examples for practical syllogisms, the essay gives an overview of the interpretations of the practical syllogism since the 1950s. These interpretations can be divided into two main groups: while the first group connects the practical syllogism with practical thinking, the second, smaller group considers it as an illustration of the causal explananation of actions. The essay closes with some remarks on the reasons for these different interpretations.

This chapter first argues against the widely accepted “mentalist” interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of the perception of external objects. On that view, the perception of objects results from an act of synthesis of the diverse perceptual input provided by the different sense modalities. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of perception does not require such mental “construction” of external objects. For him, we unfailingly perceive external objects by way of modally specific perception: perception without qualification is primarily of external 3-D objects, (...) while modally specific perception is of perceptual qualities. As the special senses cannot operate in isolation from the perceptual system as a whole, it follows that we see colors, hear sounds, etc., and thereby perceive the objects whose colors and sounds they are. The second part offers a causal interpretation of Aristotle’s definition of perception as “reception of the form without the matter,” according to which the causal history of sensory affection fixes the content of the resulting act of perception: perception is cognitive in virtue of being the matterless presence of external things’ qualities in the perceiver. (shrink)

Among scholars it is common to assume that Aristotle’s practical syllogism does two jobs. It is often taken to explain both animal motion and human deliberation. I will call this the “two-jobs view of the practical syllogism”. In what follows, I will argue that the two-jobs view of the practical syllogism is not working. I will then try to give a very brief and incomplete sketch of how to conceive of a non-two-jobs view of the Aristotelian practical syllogism. Finally, I (...) will discuss two possible problems for the non-two-jobs view. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience or Interpretation:"What You See Is Not What You Read"Klaus OttmannMuseums of modern and contemporary art are growing at an unprecedented rate. New museums are being founded and existing ones are expanding exhibition spaces and acquiring more and more works of art. Concurrently, cultural institutions compete with a growing number of art fairs, biennials, galleries, and public collection spaces.Since the 1980s the focus of museums increasingly has been (...) on education and interpretation, which among other things has created a boom for audio guides and scholarly exhibition catalogs at the expense of the unmediated experience of works of art. Perhaps what is needed are exhibitions that present art again primarily as "experience," with minimal curatorial and didactic intervention. [End Page 13]I have borrowed the title of my essay from a lecture that was given by Nicolas Serota, the director of the Tate galleries in London, in 1996. His lecture was subtitled "The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art."But the question of the presentation of art, and specifically, that of experience vs. interpretation, by no means originated in the last decades. It is at least as old a question as modern art itself, going as far back as the nineteenth-century French intellectual dispute on the museum between the poet Paul Valéry and the novelist Marcel Proust, as recounted with a sympathetic voice by the German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno in a short essay with the minimalist title "Valéry Proust Museum."There is much to be learned from reading this small text. Paul Valéry criticized the museum of his time (the Louvre) for creating confusion in the mind of the spectator by reducing the experience to the level of information only. No one would want to listen to ten orchestras at once, he argued, yet we are forced to apprehend, at the same moment, a seascape, a portrait, and a still-life, or worse, painting styles completely incompatible with each other. He warned that excess of information would lead to impoverishment of the senses, as art was becoming a matter of education. Valéry's view could be regarded as the conservative position.Marcel Proust's view was more modernist: he regarded the museum as the best place to view art. Devoid of décor and other commonplace distractions, its galleries symbolized for him the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create works of art.Both Valéry and Proust emphasized that art should be enjoyed. But while for Valéry art lost its vitality in the museum and effectively "died," Proust saw an afterlife of art in the museum and in the subjective stream of consciousness of the viewer.For Adorno, both views were too one-sided and extreme. Valéry's absolute unwavering contemplation of pure art takes the risk of neutralization, unless the work can point beyond itself toward a social context. Thus, a work of art is neither an embodiment of a Platonic idea, as Valéry believed, nor is it exclusively a reflection of the soul, as Proust understood it. Rather, in Adorno's view, art is a "force field" between the art and the viewer, both passive and active.In his 1931 lectures on "Art as Experience," the American philosopher John Dewey said:The trouble with existing theories [of art] is that they start from ready-made compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that "spiritualizes" it out of connection with the objects of concrete experience. The alternative, however, to such spiritualization is not a degrading... materialization of works of fine art, but a conception that discloses the way in which these works idealize qualities found in common experience.1 [End Page 14]In my book The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition, I describe the creative act as an active-passive leap that the artist is impelled to make and the viewer is challenged to repeat.Wittgenstein often spoke about the inexpressible, that which is beyond the limits of language. He called it "running against the boundaries of language." It is something any poet, musician, or painter is familiar with; they all run against boundaries of language, sound, or color... (shrink)

This paper discusses Aristotle's notion of the practical syllogism. It is argued that the notion of ‘practical’ reasoning in the sense of reasoning which implies motion in one sense or the other is alien to Aristotle's philosophy of nature. All (at least in type) the relevant passages will be discussed. The outcome is that there are three different contexts in which it would be justified to speak of practical syllogisms: (i) human deliberation, (ii) the illustration of the triggering cause of (...) animal motion, and (iii) the teleological ex post explanationof human action. (i) is genuine, but non-deductive reasoning which does not immediately result in action/motion, whereas (ii) is not genuine reasoning, but an analogy with deductive reasoning. Finally, the relation between (i) and (ii) in Aristotle's theory of animal motion will be discussed. (shrink)

Introduction The contributors to this volume were asked to write on some aspect of a problem area which has been the focus of much controversy, ...

The theory of nonlinear complex systems has become a successful and widely used problem-solving approach in the natural sciences - from laser physics, quantum chaos and meteorology to molecular modeling in chemistry and computer simulations of cell growth in biology. In recent times it has been recognized that many of the social, ecological and political problems of mankind are also of a global, complex and nonlinear nature. And one of the most exciting topics of present scientific and public interest is (...) the idea that even the human mind is governed largely by the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems. In this wide-ranging but concise treatment Prof. Mainzer discusses, in nontechnical language, the common framework behind these endeavours. Special emphasis is given to the evolution of new structures in natural and cultural systems and it is seen clearly how the new integrative approach of complexity theory can give new insights that were not available using traditional reductionistic methods. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explain Aristotle’s definition of the vegetative part of the soul in the De anima from a methodological point of view. I discuss Aristotle’s conception of the soul and his conception of “parts of the soul” before I turn to his definition of the vegetative part of the soul in De anima II 4. I argue that the definition of the vegetative capacity is deliberately abstract so as to cover its various activities under one (...) common heading. I also argue that the De anima deliberately avoids a positive and determinate description of the activity of the soul that is properly responsible for the vegetative functions, and that Aristotle offers such a positive and determinate description in his works dedicated to the actions and affections “common to body and soul”. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive roadmap to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. The Handbook brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of the relationship between the mechanisms of the brain and the psychology of mind. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. Drawing on a wide range of neuroimaging techniques, (...) neuropsychological assessment, and clinical research, scientists are beginning to understand the biological mechanisms for emotions. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as: How do people experience life emotionally? Why do people respond so differently to the same experiences? What can the face tell us about internal states? How does emotion in significant social relationships influence health? Are there basic emotions common to all humans? This volume brings together the most eminent scholars in the field to present, in sixty original chapters, the latest research and theories in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression; Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Adaptation, Culture, and Evolution; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade. (shrink)