These pages deal with the often original way in which Vittorio Sainati has been able to appropriate and interpret issues widely spread among the philosophers of his generation. He opened a path of thinking whose point of departure is an anti-metaphysical retrieval of the speculative tradition of Italian neo-idealism and whose results consist in the autonomous elaboration of a form of hermeneutics that takes into serious consideration the ontological underpinnings of languages it is bound to assimilate.

This essay talks about the concept of ‘metaphysics’ as it was interpreted by Carlini, leading it back to a transcendental perspective of Kantian ascendancy. ITn particular, the work attempts at an in-depth study of the Carlinian conception of transcendental as “something that proves constitutively defined by its ability to make transcendency possible”.

Riassunto: Il 12 e il 13 gennaio 2017 si è svolto a Pisa un seminario di studi su La filosofia di Massimo Barale. Di seguito si presenta un resoconto degli interventi tenuti in quell’occasione dagli ultimi allievi di Massimo Barale e da alcuni degli studenti che hanno seguito i suoi ultimi corsi. Gli interventi abbracciano gran parte degli interessi e degli studi di Massimo Barale, dalla critica al metodo adottato da Kant nella Critica della (...) ragion pura alla valorizzazione della prospettiva della Critica del Giudizio condotta sulla scia dell’influenza di Eric Weil, dalla sua originale interpretazione delle prospettive dell’idealismo tedesco e della fenomenologia di Husserl e di Sartre sino al suo confronto con le filosofie della mente, per concludersi con una discussione dei limiti e delle potenzialità della rivalutazione di Barale del punto di vista trascendentale in filosofia. Parole chiave: Massimo Barale; Filosofia trascendentale; Idealismo tedesco; Fenomenologia; Filosofia della mente Massimo Barale’s Philosophy: In the following article, I will provide an account of the conference on The Philosophy of Massimo Barale, held in Pisa 12-13 January 2017. Younger scholars who had studied with Professor Barale or attended his last classes discussed Barale’s work and ideas. Some of them analyzed Barale’s criticism of Kant’s method in Critique of Pure Reason and his appreciation – in line with Eric Weil – for the perspective of the Critique of Judgement. Other scholars explored Barale’s interpretations of Classical German Philosophy and Phenomenology. One talk dealt with Barale’s discussion of the perspective of philosophy of mind and the last three talks focused on the limits and the potential of Barale’s revaluation of a transcendental point of view in philosophy. Keywords: Massimo Barale; Transcendental Philosophy; German Idealism; Phenomenology; Philosophy of Mind. (shrink)

Contributed articles previously published in several journals on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004.

With his fight against the sea monster Medusa, Perseus embodies for Warburg the “world-directed energy”. Warburg's “energetic aesthetics” could be interpreted then as nothing but another version of the hypertrophic, despotic subject Ferraris has often written about. We will show it that is not the case by considering the relationship that Warburg draws between Perseus and Hamlet.

Lettura prospettica di un caposaldo del pensiero hobbesiano: il sorgere del rapporto tra l'uomo ed il potere, tra la naturale condizione umana e la nozione di civiltà, attraverso due frammenti particolarmente rappresentativi della concezione hobbesiana del passaggio dallo stato di natura alla civiltà: il tredicesimo capitolo del Leviathan, sulla condizione naturale dell'uomo, ed il quinto capitolo, sulle cause ed origini della civitas, del De cive, giacché la mera esistenza dell'uomo ed il suo riconoscimento di una legge naturale, a giudizio di (...) Hobbes, non implica affatto necessariamente una qualsiasi forma consolidata di organizzazione sociale. Sebbene il De cive (pubblicato in latino nel 1642 e, in inglese, nel 1651) preceda cronologicamente il Leviathan (pubblicato, viceversa, dapprima in inglese, nel 1651, poi in latino, nel 1668), nell'ordine logico dell'esposizione qui presentata, il brano del Leviathan può essere considerato propedeutico al quinto capitolo del De cive, delineandone i presupposti, segnatamente la condizione di continuo pericolo per tutti causata dallo stato generale di reciproca guerra, che costituisce forse l'aspetto più noto (e frainteso) del pensiero hobbesiano. Per una migliore comprensione dei testi e delle differenti (spesso opposte) interpretazioni cui hanno dato vita, si è ritenuto di proporre, per quanto concerne i brani di Hobbes, tanto la loro traduzione in lingua italiana quanto le stesure originali in latino e inglese, presentate con i testi a fronte; tale scelta fornisce l'opportunità di osservare l'accurata scelta di alcuni dei vocaboli chiave della filosofia di Hobbes, la cui trasposizione da una lingua all'altra è stata spesso causa di fraintendimenti o volgarizzazioni in tutto o in parte ingiustificate. Allo scopo di offrire una più completa prospettiva del pensiero hobbesiano delineato nei brani selezionati, si è ritenuto di affiancare ad essi dei frammenti di interpreti novecenteschi (con delle sintetiche schede bio-bibliografiche) di alcuni concetti formulati da Hobbes e, segnatamente, di F. Tönnies, M. Horkheimer, L. Strauss, C. Schmitt, T. Parsons, N. Bobbio, H. Warrender. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 143-162, January 2022.

This article develops a conceptual framework that explains how organizations can influence employees’ attitudes and behaviour through their corporate social responsibility activities. There are plenty of studies to suggest the financial benefits of CSR. However, studies are scarce to link CSR with non-financial measures of organizational effectiveness, such as, affective commitment, job engagement and organizational citizenship behaviour. Moreover, studies are rare to delineate the process through which CSR can bring positive attitudes. Thus, this article focuses on organizational prosocial identity as (...) a mediating variable. The role of communicating CSR activities is almost negligible and to address this gap, this article considers CSR communication as a moderating variable. Drawing from literature, this article argues that the success of an organization lies in enhancing positive attitudes among employees and probably, one of the ways to promote this is through CSR. Based on this assertion, the framework identifies CSR activities towards four stakeholders and its impacts on employees. Several research implications are proposed based on the propositions highlighted in this article. (shrink)

Despite growing awareness of the benefits of large-scale open access publishing, individual researchers seem reluctant to adopt this behavior, thereby slowing down the evolution toward a new scientific culture. We outline and apply a goal-directed framework of behavior causation to shed light on this type of behavioral reluctance and to organize and suggest possible intervention strategies. The framework explains behavior as the result of a cycle of events starting with the detection of a discrepancy between a goal and a status (...) quo and the selection of behavior to reduce this discrepancy. We list various factors that may hinder this cycle and thus contribute to behavioral reluctance. After that, we highlight potential remedies to address each of the identified barriers. We thereby hope to point out new ways to think about behavioral reluctances in general, and in relation to open access publishing in particular. (shrink)

In this paper a new trajectory-based representation to non-relativistic quantum mechanics is formulated. This is ahieved by generalizing the notion of Lagrangian path which lies at the heart of the deBroglie-Bohm “ pilot-wave” interpretation. In particular, it is shown that each LP can be replaced with a statistical ensemble formed by an infinite family of stochastic curves, referred to as generalized Lagrangian paths. This permits the introduction of a new parametric representation of the Schrödinger equation, denoted as GLP-parametrization, and of (...) the associated quantum hydrodynamic equations. The remarkable aspect of the GLP approach presented here is that it realizes at the same time also a new solution method for the N-body Schrödinger equation. As an application, Gaussian-like particular solutions for the quantum probability density function are considered, which are proved to be dynamically consistent. For them, the Schrödinger equation is reduced to a single Hamilton–Jacobi evolution equation. Particular solutions of this type are explicitly constructed, which include the case of free particles occurring in 1- or N-body quantum systems as well as the dynamics in the presence of suitable potential forces. In all these cases the initial Gaussian PDFs are shown to be free of the spreading behavior usually ascribed to quantum wave-packets, in that they exhibit the characteristic feature of remaining at all times spatially-localized. (shrink)

Cooperatives are facing the challenge to be competitive in the market, without losing their traditional values of mutuality and democracy. To do that, they need to re-construct open and participative dialogue with their employees and members based on more democratic forms of communication and engagement. From this point of view, the measurement and communication of sustainability aspects may allow a dialogue to be mobilized with shareholders and stakeholders without losing the attention on competitive factors. Based on these premises, the article (...) analyses the experience of a 5-year action research project , carried out within Unicoop Tirreno, an Italian consumers' cooperative, and aimed to implement different tools for sustainability accounting and to embrace a more open dialogue with stakeholders, in particular with employees and members. In this process of change, the tools implemented for sustainability accounting played a key role in supporting the cooperative to reinterpret its own values and in stimulating a new and participative management approach. The results indicate a virtuous circle between the management and measurement of cooperative principles and the management and measurement of sustainability issues. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is a statement that Benjamin makes in a group of notes he writes for his project of a detective novel. Benjamin writes here that «criminal and detective could be so friends [so befreundet sein] as Sherlock Holmes and Watson». We’ll try to understand the meaning of this statement through the investigation of the detective topic in two moments of its fore and afterlife: its fore life in Benjamin’s meditation on the baroque and its after (...) life in Sherlock Holmes’s most recent apparition, in the BBC series Sherlock. One of the most interesting elements of this series is in fact the relationship – which is barely sketched in Conan Doyle’s stories – between Sherlock Holmes and his antagonist, the maths professor Jim Moriarty. We’ll see that in Benjamin’s notes for a detective novel the criminal is not a maths professor but a psychoanalyst. What is the difference, anyway, between professor Moriarty’s knowledge and Sherlock’s knowledge? In fact, we will find out that criminal and detective are closer to one other than what we may be induced to think – close but not coincident. (shrink)

A formal sequent system dealing with Menelaus' configurations is introduced in this paper. The axiomatic sequents of the system stem from 2-cycles of Δ-complexes. The Euclidean and projective interpretations of the sequents are defined and a soundness result is proved. This system is decidable and its provable sequents deliver incidence results. A cyclic operad structure tied to this system is presented by generators and relations.

In this paper we present the syntax and semantics of a temporal action language named Alan, which was designed to model interactive multimedia presentations where the Markov property does not always hold. In general, Alan allows the specification of systems where the future state of the world depends not only on the current state, but also on the past states of the world. To the best of our knowledge, Alan is the first action language which incorporates causality with temporal formulas. (...) In the process of defining the effect of actions we define the closure with respect to a path rather than to a state, and show that the non-Markovian model is an extension of the traditional Markovian model. Finally, we establish relationship between theories of Alan and logic programs. (shrink)

We present an account of semantics that is not construed as a mapping of language to the world but rather as a mapping between individual meaning spaces. The meanings of linguistic entities are established via a “meeting of minds.” The concepts in the minds of communicating individuals are modeled as convex regions in conceptual spaces. We outline a mathematical framework, based on fixpoints in continuous mappings between conceptual spaces, that can be used to model such a semantics. If concepts are (...) convex, it will in general be possible for interactors to agree on joint meaning even if they start out from different representational spaces. Language is discrete, while mental representations tend to be continuous—posing a seeming paradox. We show that the convexity assumption allows us to address this problem. Using examples, we further show that our approach helps explain the semantic processes involved in the composition of expressions. (shrink)