In this Introduction to the Chinese translation of Pico Della Mirandola's Oratio on the Dignity of Man, Pier Cesare Bori traces the origin of this fundamental text of modern humanist thought and discusses its present value in the contemporary intercultural and inter religious dialogue. The Chinese translation will enhance this dialogue and contribute to its actualization.

In the last years, starting from the study of the foundations of human rights, Pier Cesare Bori has focused his research on the exegesis of Genesis 1, 26-28, according to which man is created in the image of God. In the Christian framework the imago Dei has led to different interpretations: a charismatic and eschatological, an ontological and a functional one. To solve the contradictions between these different exegesis of imago Dei Bori has suggested to consider (...) a larger context, looking not only at the Christian tradition, but also at the other monotheisms, cultures and religions. The proceedings here presented are the result of this attempt to develop new approaches to the study of the topic of imago Dei. It has been undertaken by an international group of scholars from different research fields (history, theology, hermeneutics, philosophy, exegesis) during a few days of scientific exchange and dialogue. (shrink)

Includes a translator’s preface, note on the text, and suggestions for further reading.

In 1622, Francis Bacon published his Historia naturalis et experimentalis. Many of the features of Bacon's natural and experimental histories were entirely new. This paper studies this literary form as a new epistemic genre. In particular, it analyzes its origin and evolution in Bacon's work, focusing on how its basic template and features were influenced by his specific epistemic requirements. It shows that Bacon devised these features in the process of developing a Historia mechanica, or a history of the mechanical (...) arts, drawing on the particular case of the technical recipe. Since antiquity, the recipe had been the dominant epistemic genre for recording and communicating technical knowledge. However, this paper suggests that the recipe format did not meet Francis Bacon's epistemic needs. In particular, the format was incompatible with the goal of keeping experimentation and its reporting open-ended and flexible. More generally, the acknowledgment of the provisional, historical character of knowledge was a tenet of what Bacon called an “initiative” method of knowledge transmission, or a method of “probation.” According to this approach, knowledge “ought to be delivered and intimated, if it were possible, in the same method wherein it was invented” and discovered. Only the display of its tentative features would encourage and stimulate others to improve and advance it. The format of the new genre of natural and experimental histories grew out of Bacon's dissatisfaction with the way in which recipes hid the imperfection of the process of knowledge production. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Francis Bacon’s observations on institutions for the advancement of knowledge and technical innovation. Early references to establishments for the promotion of knowledge can be found initial in Bacon’s early works, in the 1590s. Bacon’s journey to France in the second half of the1570s played a role in shaping these early conceptions. In particular, Bacon was likely acquainted with Jaques Gohory’s Lycium philosophal and Nicholas Houel’s Maison de Charité Chrétienne. In the period following the composition of The Advancement (...) of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon focused his attention on the foundation of a college for inventors. Practical plans for the establishment of a college were discussed in the Commentarius solutus (1608). Bacon’s proposals addressed his general concerns for the production of technological innovation in Stuart society; both the college of the Commentarius and the imaginary institution of Salomon’s House in the New Atlantis (1626) can be seen as inventor’s utopias, where innovators are freed from the pressures of the world of crafts. Analogous continental project likely inspired such institutions. Again, the case of France may be relevant; around the time of Bacon’s proposals for his college, Henri IV was actively fostering collaboration among skilled inventors under royal patronage, and outside the strict control of the guild system. (shrink)

For more than a century now, researchers have acknowledged the existence of seemingly arbitrary crossmodal congruency effects between dimensions of sensory stimuli in the general population. Such phenomena, known by a variety of terms including 'crossmodal correspondences', involve individual stimulus properties, rely on a crossmodal mapping of unisensory features, and appear to be shared by the majority of individuals. In other words, members of the general population share underlying preferences for specific pairings across the senses. Crossmodal correspondences between complementary sensory (...) cues have often been referred to as synesthetic correspondences but, we would argue, differ from full-blown synesthetic experiences in a number of important ways, including the fact that there are no idiosyncratic concurrent sensations. Recent psychophysical evidence suggests that such crossmodal correspondences can modulate multisensory integration by helping to resolve the crossmodal binding problem. Here, we propose a model to account for the effects of crossmodal correspondences between complementary auditory and visual cues and critically review their relation to full-blown synesthesia. (shrink)

Negri, a leading Marxist philosopher, has inspired anti-empire movements around the world through his writings and personal example. This work, which began as a conversation between Negri and literary critic Casarino, is the most complete review of the philosopher's work.

Optimization is about finding the best available object with respect to an objective function. Mathematics and quantitative sciences have been highly successful in formulating problems as optimization problems, and constructing clever processes that find optimal objects from sets of objects. As computers have become readily available to most people, optimization and optimized processes play a very broad role in societies. It is not obvious, however, that the optimization processes that work for mathematics and abstract objects should be readily applied to (...) complex and open social systems. In this paper we set forth a framework to understand when optimization is limited, particularly for complex and open social systems. (shrink)

The law of prior entry was one of E.B. Titchener’s seven fundamental laws of attention. According to Titchener : “the object of attention comes to consciousness more quickly than the objects which we are not attending to.” Although researchers have been studying prior entry for more than a century now, progress in understanding the effect has been hindered by the many methodological confounds present in early research. As a consequence, it is unclear whether the behavioral effects reported in the majority (...) of published studies in this area should be attributed to attention, decisional response biases, and/or, in the case of exogenous spatial cuing studies of the prior-entry effect, to sensory facilitation effects instead. In this article, the literature on the prior-entry effect is reviewed, the confounds present in previous research highlighted, current consensus summarized, and some of the key questions for future research outlined. In particular, recent research has now provided compelling psychophysical and electrophysiological evidence to support the claim that attending to a sensory modality, spatial location, or stimulus feature/attribute can all give rise to a relative speeding-up of the time of arrival of attended, as compared to relatively less attended stimuli. Prior-entry effects have now been demonstrated following both the endogenous and exogenous orienting of attention, though prior-entry effects tend to be smaller in magnitude when assessed by means of participants’ performance on SJ tasks than when assessed by means of their performance on TOJ tasks. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used (...) to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy. (shrink)

This study presents and develops in detail (a new version of) the argumental conception of meaning. The two basic principles of the argumental conception of meaning are: i) To know (implicitly) the sense of a word is to know (implicitly) all the argumentation rules concerning that word; ii) To know the sense of a sentence is to know the syntactic structure of that sentence and to know the senses of the words occurring in it. The sense of a sentence is (...) called immediate argumental role of that sentence. According to the argumental conception of meaning a theory of meaning for a particular language yields a systematic specification of the understanding of every sentence of the language which consists in a specification of the immediate argumental role of the sentence. The immediate argumental role is a particular aspect of the use of a sentence in arguments. But it is not the whole use in arguments, nor is the whole use in arguments reducible to the immediate argumental role. That is why, by accepting the argumental conception of meaning, we can have epistemological holism without linguistic holism. The argumental conception distinguishes between the understanding and the correctness of a language. Such a distinction makes it possible to account for our understanding of paradoxical languages. Redundancy theory of truth, realistic conceptions of truth or epistemic conceptions of truth are all compatible with an argumental conception of sense. But here it is argued that an epistemic conception of truth is preferrable. Acceptance of the argumental conception of meaning and of an epistemic conception of truth leads to a rejection of the idea of analytic truth. The argumental conception is pluralistic with respect to the understandability of different logics, and neutral with respect to their correctness. (shrink)

Niccolò Machiavelli's support for what he calls governo largo, or popular government, is usually contrasted with the diffidence towards it of Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine aristocrat. The article argues that both these authors grounded their vision on Polybius' theory of “mixed government,” though adapting it in different directions. In examining this difference, the article reaches the conclusion that it concerns far less the degree of popular participation in political decision-making and government than the value that Machiavelli and Guicciardini respectively ascribe (...) to it in comparison with that of safety-liberty. In this respect, their theories may be viewed as anticipating the tensions between democracy and the rule of law, the co-presence of which provides the essential foundation of the structure of present-day constitutional democracies. (shrink)

Highlights the central place of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, in "Truth and Method" philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's work, brings out differences between his thought and that of Heidegger and connects him with discussions and ...

The article examines Hans Kelsen's and Carl Schmitt's lines of thought concerning the relationship between constitutional and international law, with the aim of ascertaining their respective ability to capture developments affecting that relationship, even those of a contradictory nature. It is significant that, while the rise of wars of humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War era has evoked Schmitt's concept of the bellum iustum, the evolution in the direction of the “constitutionalisation of international law” has drawn attention to Kelsen's theoretical (...) approach. However, these assumptions rely heavily on the opposing objectives that the two authors claimed to pursue, such as, respectively, the search for the ultimate seat of political power and a pure theory of law. Things are more complicated, both because these objectives by no means exhaust Kelsen's and Schmitt's lines of thought, and because the conception of sovereignty as omnipotence, at the core of the Weimar controversy, is now behind us. (shrink)