The relation between Garin and Cassirer is still an insufficiently investigated topic, here proposed also in light of their personal connections and documents. This relation represents an important episode in the Nachwirkung of Cassirer in Italy. Garin was deeply influenced by Cassirer’s historical research and philosophical thought, in the shaping of his own research fields and in the methodological debates about the history of philosophy.

Accused to be leading a plot against the Spanish government in Calabria in 1599, supposedly supported by a Turkish fleet, Campanella was almost labeled as a renegade. On the contrary, while in jail, he deepened his prophetic interpretation of the history, and of the future of the world, offered theological and political confutation of Islam, and began shaping a wider idea of the role of this religion in the ‘apocalyptic’ times. Not focusing on the Turkish menace only, he tries to (...) integrate some of the Muslim kingdoms in his appeal to the universal recognition of the Christian revelation as ‘natural reason’. In his main work about this topic, Quod reminiscentur, completed in 1618, but published only in the 20th Century, Campanella presents different strategies of conversion of Islamic peoples, depending on the various historical features of Islam, and adapted to the diverse societies involved. Giovanni Botero’s Relationi universali was a very important source of Campanella’s historical and geographic information about Islam, but the philosopher developed an original prophetic and political vision of Church, conversion and apocalypse, alternative to that dominating in the Counter Reformation. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate whether, and how, corporate management strategically uses disclosure to manage the perceptions of different organizational audiences. In particular, we examine the interactions between the FIAT Group and three of its key organizational audiences—the local press, the international press, and the financial analysts, which are characterized by different levels of salience for the company. We focus on both how management reacts to the optimism level existing within each audience and how the narrative disclosure tone adopted by (...) FIAT influences the ex-post optimism in the local and international press or in the financial analyst community. We investigate the disclosure of the FIAT Group over a 6-year period , during which 70 price-sensitive press releases were published. On the basis of 1,887 news articles published in Italian newspapers and 411 analyst reports, we report evidence of different strategic patterns in the interaction processes between FIAT and its audiences. Our findings also indicate some differences in the way FIAT is affected by, and in turn, affects the sentiment of each audience, thus highlighting that the salience of the stakeholder is an important driver of the adoption of impression management techniques. Taken together, our findings point to issues related to setting the “tone at the top” and potential ethical matters. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to determine and analyze the meaning of the transitio and the posset that not only enable the radical modal experience of the Amor Dei intellectualis but which are also central features in the attainment of human perfection and of the highest knowledge. I wish to answer the following questions. What power is attributable to the Amor Dei intellectualis? In other words, what is the power that corresponds to human perfection and to the possession of (...) blessedness? And why does Spinoza explain this relation in terms of love? In this article, I intend to give a possible definition of human nature, a definition whose determination implies a maximal affirmation of modal power. At this point more questions arise: by attributing this maximal power to human nature, are we underlining a specific necessity, i.e., a constitutive relation capable of giving a specific form to this power and to human nature? Does the third kind of knowledge imply modifications in human nature itself, e.g., in the body or soul? Finally, does the correlation between the third kind of knowledge and the Amor Dei intellectualis allow for the determination of a model of human nature that surpasses the one given by Spinoza in the preface to part four of the Ethics? (shrink)

This paper investigates how Merleau-Ponty and Simondon conceived the theory of information and, in particular, assessed its validity as an instrument of analysis in multiple fields of knowledge. Specifically, the comparison will analyze the relationship between organism and environment, which is central both to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature and to Simondon’s theory of individuation. For both authors, the analysis of processes of interaction between organism and environment is characterized by the search for a type of causality that distinguishes itself from (...) mechanism, which reduces these interactions to a sum of independent parts occasionally tied by a causally determined relation. However, while Merleau-Ponty views the categories introduced by the theory of information as a mere reconstruction of the mechanistic perspective, Simondon revises these categories to overcome mechanism and move towards the construction of a model of experience based on relation. (shrink)

The quantum Zeno effect is often studied and understood in term of nonunitary evolutions, involving projections à la von Neumann (measurements). We propose a dynamical explanation of this effect, which involves only unitary operators. The limit of infinitely frequent measurements is critically discussed: it is unphysical, yet interesting and peculiar.

The links between the philosophies of Montaigne and Bruno are explored here for the first time, in this speculative comparison that focuses as much on rhetoric and ethics as on ontology and anthropology.

We consider R-torsionfree modules over group rings RG, where R is a Dedekind domain and G is a finite group. In the first part of the paper [4] we compared the theory T of all R-torsionfree RG-modules and the theory T0 of RG-lattices , and we realized that they are almost always different. Now we compare their behaviour with respect to decidability, when RG-lattices are of finite, or wild representation type.

The new edition of this manual brings together a decade's teaching in bioethics. It confronts new questions and monitors the latest far reaching experiments, whose results and publications need to be properly understood.

À partir du thème élaboré par Hobbes de la nécessité d'un passage de la multitude au peuple pour fonder l' État absolu, Giorgio Agamben se demande si l'on peut penser la puissance humaine à partir de la seule « gloire » de Dieu, c'est-à-dire de l'affirmation absolue de son impuissance. L'originalité d' Agamben est de faire de cette notion théologique un paradigme politique dérivé des notions juridiques d'Homo sacer et de sacratio. Starting from the theme elaborated by Hobbes of the (...) necessity of a passage from the multitudes to a people to permit the foundation of an Absolute state, Giorgio Agamben wonders whether one may establish human power from the starting point of God's "glory" alone, i.e. the absolute affirmation of His powerlessness. Agamben 's originality rests in turning such a theological notion into a political paradigm derived from the legal notions of both Homo sacer and sacratio. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage interroge le sens de la relation entre lien magique et métamorphose en essayant de dégager des perspectives philosophiques et politiques spécifiques à la Renaissance et à l'âge classique. La pensée de Giordano Bruno demeure dans cette optique une référence essentielle. Le philosophe nolain n'a de cesse de réfléchir sur le sens de cette relation, puisque c'est à travers elle qu'il construit aussi bien l'art de la mémoire que la pratique magique comme art du lien. Des thèmes comme celui (...) de la fureur héroïque, de la différence entre l'homme et l'animal, de l'action magique ne sont compréhensibles qu'à partir de la relation constitutive entre le lien et la métamorphose. C'est par conséquent en étudiant les "liens de la métamorphose" que l'on peut faire apparaître la constitution d'un spectre de savoirs (magie, philosophie, politique) traversant l'histoire européenne de la Renaissance et de l'âge classique. Cela permet également d'insister sur le rapport que ces savoirs entretiennent avec les pratiques sociales. La philosophie et la magie, loin d'apparaître comme des savoirs abstraits et purement nominaux, s'affirment en réalité comme des discours performatifs légitimant la constitution des liens civils et sociaux. Il s'agit en définitive ici de reconstituer à nouveaux frais des séquences historiques et philosophiques qui tracent les relations entre une sphère des savoirs et une pratique de l'institution du social, dans une perspective comprenant aussi bien des auteurs de la Renaissance (Machiavel, Giordano Bruno) que de l'âge classique et baroque (Hobbes, Graciân)."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The study of pairs of modules (over a Dedekind domain) arises from two different perspectives, as a starting step in the analysis of tuples of submodules of a given module, or also as a particular case in the analysis of Abelian structures made by two modules and a morphism between them. We discuss how these two perspectives converge to pairs of modules, and we follow the latter one to obtain an alternative approach to the classification of pairs of torsionfree objects. (...) Then we restrict our attention to pairs of free modules. Our main results are that the theory of pairs of free Abelian groups is co-recursively enumerable, and that a few remarkable extensions of this theory are decidable. (shrink)