Custom is a complex phenomenon, and one that is hardly given a satisfying account, especially if it is assumed, as many legal positivists do, that law is only produced through acts of will. After examining five main reasons for the complexity of custom, I will consider Uberto Scarpelli’s thesis that customary law can be given an account within legal positivism through a reinterpretation of norm-generating facts as the manifestations of a will. But what kind of will is implied (...) here, and how can the underlying norm be inferred? I will first briefly examine Gaetano Carcaterra’s analysis of abduction as a method to infer norms from behaviors, and then distinguish six different forms of will possibly implied in a behavior which is relevant for the formation of a customary norm. I will finally focus on norm-oriented, or nomotropic will, and especially on nomotrophic will, that is, the will –implied and expressed in the reaction to the violation of a norm– that the infringed norm be valid. (shrink)

Enrico Opocher, one of the most important Italian legal philosophers in the last century, died on March 3, 2004. For almost four decades, he was Director of the prestigious Insitute of Philosophy of Law and Comparative Law in the University of Padua. Together with Norberto Bobbio, Sergio Cotta, Uberto Scarpelli and few others, he represented a generation as well as a season of deep renewal in Italian philosophy of law and politics. In the legal thought of the postwar (...) period, Opocher became the point of reference for all those who neither wanted to join the old tradition (substantially neo-scholastic) of natural law thinking, nor believed in Kelsen’s triumphant legalistic normativism. My contribution is devoted to focusing on that part of Opocher’s thought in which the Paduan philosopher defines “justice” as “a value which makes the law count” (in the sense of its “duration”) and puts in contact this peculiar concept of justice with the problem of the verification of truth in trials and lawsuits. My thesis comes from the analysis of the Opocher’s conception of “judicial truth” as a truth obtained by reflecting facts which are relevant to norms. In the course of my analysis, I criticize all interpretations which reduce judicial truth-seeking to the empirical method. My aim is to move it from the level of mere factual description to the one of “logical demonstration according to the circumstances”. This movement from the descriptive niveau to the argumentative one, will be justified through the adoption of the perspective of classical rethorics, based on Aristotle and Cicero, which shows how judicial truth (intended in the sense of entymematic demonstration) was much more coherent with the very idea of Opocher’s conception of justice. (shrink)

In the series Collezione di Filosofia published by Taylor of Turin since 1947, some of the most significant works on Italian existentialism have appeared. The series was inaugurated by two books by the writer of this article: Introduzione all esistenzialismo, second edition, 1947 ; and Filosofia religione scienza, 1947. These were followed by Pietro Chiodi, L'esistenzialismo di Heidegger, 1947; Armando Vedaldi, Essere gli altri, 1948; Uberto Scarpelli, Esistenzialismo e marxismo, 1949; Enzo Paci, II nulla e il problema dell'uomo, (...) 1950; Luigi Pareyson, Esistenza e persona, 1950; and Armando Vedaldi, Struttura della proprietà, 1951. (shrink)

Uberto Decembrio's Four Books on the Commonwealth (De re publica libri IV, ca. 1420), edited and translated by Paolo Ponzù Donato, is one of the earliest examples of the reception of Plato's Republic in the 15th century. This humanistic dialogue provides a thoughtful insight on themes such as justice, the best government, the morals of the prince and citizen, education, and religion. Decembrio's dialogue is dedicated to Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, the 'worst enemy' of Florence. Making use (...) of literary and documentary sources, Ponzù Donato convincingly proves that Decembrio's thought, sharing many points with the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni, belongs to the same world of Civic Humanism. (shrink)

Some studies highlighted that patients with narcolepsy type-1 experience high lucid dream frequency, and this phenomenon has been associated with a creative personality. Starting from the well-known “pandemic effect” on sleep and dreaming, we presented a picture of dream activity in pharmacologically treated NT1 patients during the Italian lockdown. Forty-three NT1 patients completed a web-survey during Spring 2021 and were compared with 86 matched-controls. Statistical comparisons revealed that: NT1 patients showed greater sleepiness than controls; controls showed higher sleep disturbances than (...) NT1 patients, and this result disappeared when the medication effect in NT1 was controlled; NT1 patients reported higher lucid dream frequency than controls. Focusing on dreaming in NT1 patients, we found that nightmare frequency was correlated with female gender, longer sleep duration, higher intrasleep wakefulness; dream recall, nightmare and lucid dream frequency were positively correlated with sleepiness. Comparisons between low and high NT1 lucid dreamers showed that patients more frequently experiencing lucid dreams reported a greater influence of dreaming during wakefulness, especially concerning problem-solving and creativity. Overall, our results are consistent with previous studies on pandemic dreaming carried out on healthy subjects. Moreover, we confirmed a link between lucidity and creativity in NT1 patients. Considering the small sample size and the cross-sectional design, our findings cannot provide a causal relationship between lucid dreams and the COVID-19 lockdown. Nevertheless, they represent a first contribution to address future studies on this issue, suggesting that some stable characteristics could interact with changes provoked by the pandemic. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende dilucidar la expresión utilizada por Tomás de Aquino “vuelta al fantasma”, con la intención de esclarecer lo que entiende por “vuelta”. Se argumenta que el marco conceptual subyacente al “giro intelectual” se encuentra en dos fuentes islámicas que fueron ampliamente influyentes en la psicología filosófica latina del siglo XIII, y que presentan conceptos técnicos específicos de la “vuelta” como un tipo de dependencia. Las obras son: Liber de Causis, de autor anónimo; y Liber de anima, del filósofo (...) persa Avicena. Así, este artículo busca recuperar este marco histórico subyacente, examinando cómo estas dos fuentes clave conciben la “vuelta” y cómo Tomás de Aquino incorpora estas fuentes en su concepción de la “vuelta al fantasma”. (shrink)

Rotating shifts are common among nurses to ensure continuity of care. This scheduling system encompasses several adverse health and performance consequences. One of the most injurious effects of night-time shift work is the deterioration of sleep patterns due to both circadian rhythm disruption and increased sleep homeostatic pressure. Sleep problems lead to secondary effects on other aspects of wellbeing and cognitive functioning, increasing the risk of errors and workplace accidents. A wide range of interventions has been proposed to improve the (...) sleep quality of nurses and promote an increase in attention levels. In recent years, particular attention has been paid to individual and environmental factors mediating the subjective ability to cope with sleep deprivation during the night shift. Given the predictive role of these factors on the negative impact of a night shift, an individualized intervention could represent an effective countermeasure by ensuring suitable management of shift schedules. Therefore, the aims of this mini-review are to: provide an updated overview of the literature on sleep problems in night shift nurses and their adverse consequences; and critically analyze the psychosocial factors that mediate the negative impact of shift work with the ultimate goal of defining an effective countermeasure based on an individualized approach. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that Thomas Aquinas offers an alternative model of abstraction (the Active Principle Model) that overcomes the standard objections to abstractionism and expands our view of what an abstractionist theory might look like. I contend that this alternative model of abstraction has been invisible in plain sight, in Aquinas’s references to the mind’s abstractive mechanism as an “intellectual light.” Such language is not metaphorical but rather technical, signaling that intellectual abstraction is to be modeled on (...) the activity of physical light as he understood it from theories proposed by Avicenna and Averroes. The Active Principle Model requires us to rethink Aquinas’s account of how we come to know essences—a process that turns out to be much more tentative and incremental than previously thought. (shrink)

Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal present. Despite deceptively different phrasing, Aquinas develops a remarkably similar (...) view when, in order to accommodate Aristotle’s view of memory to Augustine’s, he insists that an implicit self-awareness “time-stamps” all intellectual acts. According to their shared approach, diachronic unified consciousness is the result of the curious way in which the mind is both drawn into and transcends the temporal succession of its own acts. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is commonly thought to have become a topic of serious philosophical inquiry during the early modern period. Already in the thirteenth century, however, the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas developed a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge, which Therese Scarpelli Cory presents as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating Aquinas's theory within the mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human nature, Cory investigates the kinds of self-knowledge that Aquinas describes and the questions (...) they raise. She shows that to a degree remarkable in a medieval thinker, self-knowledge turns out to be central to Aquinas's account of cognition and personhood, and that his theory provides tools for considering intentionality, reflexivity and selfhood. Her engaging account of this neglected aspect of medieval philosophy will interest readers studying Aquinas and the history of medieval philosophy more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III by John F. WippelTherese Scarpelli CoryWIPPEL, John F. Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. ix + 321 pp. Cloth, $65.00; eBook, $65.00This volume is the third in what can now be considered informally a series of volumes collecting some of John F. Wippel's most important writings. (Two previous volumes, Metaphysical Themes in (...) Thomas Aquinas and Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II, were published in 1984 and 2007, respectively, by the same press.) In this volume, Wippel has collected nine of his articles or book chapters, originally published from 2002–2019, on a wide range of topics: (1) "Aquinas on Separatio and Our Discovery of Being as Being," (2) "Thomas Aquinas on Philosophy and the Preambles of Faith," (3) "Cornelio Fabro on the Distinction and Composition of Essence and Esse in the Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas," (4) "Cornelio Fabro on Participation and Aquinas's Quarta Via," (5) "Aquinas on Creation and Preambles of Faith," (6) "Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form," (7) "Thomas Aquinas on the Separated Soul's Natural Knowledge," (8) "Metaphysical Themes in De Malo I," and (9) "Metaphysical Composition of Angels in Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Godfrey of Fontaines."Such collections provide a valuable opportunity for the author's retrospective on the work thus collected. In this respect, it is especially worth noting the usefulness of the introduction to this volume, in which Wippel has provided a detailed précis for each included chapter. The introduction thus serves as a helpful roadmap to orient new and returning readers of Wippel's work to some of his most important writings.In a book review of this length, it is impossible to summarize adequately the content of each essay. Indeed, it would be redundant to try, given the much more authoritative content of Wippel's own introduction to the volume. Consequently, I will limit myself to highlighting one of the notable inclusions in this collection, namely, chapter 6, "Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form." Despite the modest title, the piece is an extensive and wide-ranging study of the development and fate of Aquinas's controversial doctrine, the anxieties it raised among his contemporaries, and the debate that raged at Paris in the late thirteenth century, and during which the doctrine appears to have narrowly escaped inclusion on the list of condemnations of 1270. Wippel correlates some interesting historical anecdotes and documentary evidence with Aquinas's series of changing formulations in discussions of the unity of substantial form. He is thereby able to document a particularly nuanced case in which Aquinas attempts to make his own thought clearer in the face of a developing controversy, but without giving up on the essentials of his own position.Nonetheless, Wippel points out that Aquinas never fully resolved the theological criticisms lodged against his position. Within the debate over the number of substantial forms in a substance, the identity of Christ's dead body in the tomb between the crucifixion and resurrection ended up becoming a test case: What makes Christ's living body and his dead body in the tomb both be identically the same body? The problem is as follows: [End Page 371] Since substantial form is what secures the identity of a substance across time, if there is just one substantial form in a human substance, and that form (the human soul) departs Christ's body in his death on the cross, then after his death whatever is left can no longer be identified as Christ's body. It must be some new substance with its own substantial form.For opponents, this difficulty was fatal. How did Aquinas respond? Disappointingly, he only asserts that Christ's dead body is numerically identical with his living body, just not "in every way"—but without explaining why he thinks this identity is preserved. It is left to Giles of Rome to fill out a tentative solution: Although the matter of Christ's body does take on a new substantial form, it remains Christ's, because it remains united to the person of the Word.The problem is... (shrink)

In Aquinas, the senses are widely construed as “gatekeepers” restricting the possible content of our embodied intellectual thought. But if this is true, how can Aquinas justify his extensive theorizing about incorporeal substances, and how can he account for human experiential self-awareness? This paper argues that, for Aquinas, the scope of our embodied experience is not limited to objects of sense, but extends to our intellects and everything ontologically “below” them; we can and do conceptualize something incorporeal—the intellectual soul—as it (...) is in itself and not merely by comparison to bodies; this concept of ‘incorporeality’ is precisely a concept of ‘intellectuality.’ The restrictions embodied human intellects encounter in attempting to know entities “above” us arise less from their incorporeality than from a fundamental mismatch between our attempts to conceptualize them in terms of what they have in common with us, and their simplicity. (shrink)