Surnames of grandparents were collected from children in the primary schools of the AlbanianItalian and Greek–Italian villages of southern Italy and Sicily. The coefficients of relationships by isonymy show almost no relationship with ethnicity. Ethnolinguistic minorities of southern Italy and Sicily are geographically subdivided into two main clusters: the first cluster comprises the Albanian, Croat and Greek communities of the Adriatic area; and the second cluster comprises the Albanian and Greek communities of the Ionian, Thirrenian and Sicilian areas.

Surnames were obtained for the second half of the 20th century from civil and religious marriage registers on fifteen Provençal-Italian and five Italian villages of Cuneo Province, Italy. To insert in the analysis an outward comparison, surnames from two Italian villages of Turin Province, one parish of Turin, one village of Alessandria Province and one village of Asti Province were also collected. Ethnicity does not seem to be the main factor affecting the present genetic structure of the Provençal-Italians. They are (...) an open community, and evidence the end of the genetic isolation of the alpine populations. (shrink)

(1994). A research note on European broadcasting culture. World Futures: Vol. 39, The Evolution of European Identity: Surveys of the Growing Edge A Report by the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 155-159.

The invention of Bitcoin in 2008 as a new type of electronic cash has arguably been one of the most radical financial innovations in the last decade. Recently, developer communities of blockchain technologies have started to turn their attention towards the issue of governance. The features of blockchain governance raise questions as to tensions that might arise between a strictly “on-chain” governance system and possible applications of “off-chain” governance. In this paper, we approach these questions by reflecting on a long-running (...) debate in legal philosophy regarding the construction of a positivist legal order. First, we argue that on-chain governance shows striking similarities with Kelsen’s notion of a positivist legal order, characterised by Schmitt as the machine that runs itself. Second, we illustrate some of the problems that emerged from the application of on-chain governance, with particular reference to a calamity in a blockchain-based system called the DAO. Third, we reflect on Schmitt’s argument that the coalescence of private interests is a vulnerability of positivist legal systems, and accordingly posit this as an inherent vulnerability of on-chain governance of existing blockchain-based systems. (shrink)

The article examines the main ideological content of the work of the community of scientists and philosophers, which entered the history of philosophy under the name “The Vienna Circle”. Representatives of this association viewed their main methodological task in the logical analysis of the language of science in order to eliminate metaphysical – pseudoscientific – concepts. They investigated the structure of scientific theories, the functions of the theory – explanation and prediction, the processes of justification, confirmation and refutation of (...) theories. Their results were widely recognized, set down essential influence on scientific problems as well as style of philosophical and academic studies, and are still included in textbooks on the philosophy of science. The members of the Vienna Circle created the first holistic concept of science, which gave impetus to subsequent developments in the philosophy of science and served as example for the construction of similar concepts. The socio-ideological prerequisite of this philosophical movement was the task of creating a new scientific view of the world, opposing philosophical pessimism and anti-scientism. This worldview, however, was not naive-scientististic, but presented a synthetic project at the intersection of natural science, philosophy, art and social pedagogy. (shrink)

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political (...) projects. In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes his Tractatus with the injunction, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." As the concluding proposition of a tersely written, tightly organized work, the reader would expect it to have a strong bite. Yet the statement has been variously ignored, dismissed, and misunderstood, interpreted as the inspired words of a mystic or as the final banishing of metaphysics from philosophical discourse. It is with the help of Janik and Toulmin’s work that it becomes (...) clear how the proposition serves as the crown to a book which Wittgenstein maintained was primarily an ethical work. In presenting the Viennese Weltanshauung [[sic]] of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there emerges the picture of a society where appearances ruled in all areas of cultural life, in the government, and in the arts. Viennese society was characterized by a vast impotent bureaucracy, the Strauss waltz, and the feutillion. The leader in the inevitable reaction was Karl Kraus. He instigated a critique of Viennese society through an ingenious and refined use of cultural modes of expression. Along with him, leaders emerged for each of the special arts, language, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, who, in their own particular role, tried to restore truth and responsibility to the affairs of men. The development of the characters and the issues involved make this book important. Of lesser value, unfortunately, are the chapters dealing specifically with the work of Wittgenstein, who is represented as one of the emergent leaders. Although we are rhetorically persuaded that his talk of "simples," "representation," "depicting," or "language games" is tied up with the critique of a fundamentally sophistical intellectualism, we are not led on to seeing how the critique was carried out.—W. A. F. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:98 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY quoted in great numbers. The other is Kern's philosophical competence and his skill in handling complex problems. The book is divided into two parts. Part I gives the reader a brief historical survey of Husserl's changing attitudes toward Kant and the neo-Kantians (especially Natorp and ttickert). Indicating the influences which shaped Husserl's thinking during the years of his studies at the universities of Berlin and (...) Vienna, Kern traces Husserl's development throughout his career as a thinker and a writer. But this survey (pp. 1-50) provides merely the general framework within which the intensive and detailed analyses of Part II (pp. 51-424) must be viewed. Two appendices, an extensive bibliography, and a name index complete the work. The detailed discussions of Part II are, of course, the really important contributions to our understanding of Husserl's relation to Kant and the Kantians. As was to be expected, Husserl found in Kant's works formulations of problems and profound insights that he regarded as crucial to any philosophy. At times, however, Husserl was sure that because of mistaken assumptions, insufficiently clarified presuppositions, and methodological deficiencies Kant himself had not fully realized his intentions. Still, it is evident that, in time, Husserl found himself increasingly in sympathy with Kant's postion. In fact, in the end he used Kant's term "transcendental idealism" to designate his own philosophy. In the course of this development, however, Husserl's thinking underwent various changes and reversals. The detailed analyses of them make fascinating reading and are most revelatory of Husserl's own struggles with obtrnsive problems. In Chapter z of Part II (pp. 55-134), the author discusses Husserl's criticism of Kant's positionwKant's conception of the apriori, his strict separation of "sensibility" and "understanding," his presupposition of a "natural world view," his failure to ask sufficiently radical questions concerning the foundations of knowledge, his lack of a proper method of analysis, and his "psychologism." In the course of his own development, however, Husserl modified and, in some respects, even reversed his criticisms of Kant. Chapters ~, m, re and v of Part II, dealing with problems of formal and transcendental logic, with the possibihty of metaphysics on Kantian principles, and with the complex problems of subjectivity, bear witness to the fact that Huseerl often changed his opinion of Kant's work. Of special interest, however, is Chapter vz. It is devoted to a comparison of Husserl's and Kant's "transcendental idealism" and reveals most strikingly the similarities of the two positions. The chapter dealing with Husserl's relation to l~atorp and Rickert, interesting in its own way, is essentially only a footnote, as it were, to the rest of the hook; but it completes the survey. As I said before, this book gives us not only a remarkable insight into the various phases of development in Husserl's thinking and is therefore indispensable to a real understanding of Husserl's intentions and achievements; it also lets us see Kant's philosophy in a new and revealing perspective--both as to its value and it deficiencies. Only a detailed study can do justice to this book. W. H. WF~mMF~STZR Florida State University Ludwig Wittgenstein. Zettel. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. (University of California Press and Basil Blackwell, 1967. Pp. v + 124 [German and English on facing pages]. $6.95.) The paragraphs in this volume, the editors tell us, were collected in a box-file by Wittgenstein from a period beginning in 1929,though the bulk of them come from typescripts dictated between 1945 and 1948. The editors credit Peter Geach with the major work of arrangement. Whoever is responsible did a superlative job, a remark that holds as well for Miss Anscombe's translation. The editors and Mr. Geach have performed an invaluable service to those interested BOOK REVIEWS 99 in Wittgenstein and--quite apart from Wittgensteinian exegesis--in the problems treated in these pages. The philosophical topics are those of the Investigations (PI) and The Remarks on the Foundations o] Mathematir~ (RFM)---e.g., the attack on... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Carnap's Logical Positivism Quine's Naturalism The External/Internal Distinction and the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction The Indeterminacy of Translation Quine's Conception of Philosophy I: Metaphysics Quine's Conception of Philosophy II: Ontology Quine's Influence References.

Richard Rorty has drawn a distinction between three ways philosophers in the 20th Century have conceived of the enterprise of philosophy. There are those who see it as the guardian of the sciences, those who treat it as a kina of poetry, and those who view philosophy as a political exercise. In this paper, I try to show that Wittgenstein, despite certain popular conceptions of his project, belongs more in the third group than in the other two. The paper focuses (...) on Wittgenstein's notes On Certainty in order to reveal the structure of Wittgenstein's notion of epistemological privilege and how it depends on communal agreement and behaviour. The system of conventions and commitments on which our vanouis practices are grounded is not justifiable. It is a matter of forms of life. (shrink)

Presented in this study is an analysis of the electronic properties of doped diamond calculated using the Vienna ab initio simulation package, employing density functional theory within the generalized-gradient approximation. The dopants studied here have been inserted substitutionally into a 64-atom diamond supercell and include the single-electron acceptors boron and aluminium, the single-electron donors nitrogen and phosphorus and the double-electron donors oxygen and sulphur. Co-doping of diamond with sulphur and boron has also been briefly examined. The doped supercells have (...) been relaxed, followed by calculation of electronic properties from the electronic density of states such as the indirect bandgap E g , the valence bandwidth and an examination of the acceptor and donor states in the bandgap. It is anticipated that this study will provide a useful comparison of the third- and fourth-row donors and acceptors in diamond. (shrink)

The revival of interest in Carnap’s philosophy over the past two decades has shed much light on particular aspects of his intellectual development and its context. We now have a better appreciation of the background and motivation of the Aufbau. 1 The radical nature of the Syntax program has fmally, more than half a century after its first publication, begun to be acknowledged.2 And the later Carnap has also been re-assessed; the previously widespread impression that Quine was “right” and Carnap (...) “wrong” in the analytic-synthetic debate has yielded to a more balanced view3, and the broad outlines of Camap’s late philosophy have begun to emerge. (shrink)

In this study an analysis is presented of the bonding and structural properties of dehydrogenated and hydrogenated doped cylindrical diamond nanowires calculated using the Vienna Ab Initio Simulation Package, employing density functional theory within the generalized-gradient approximation. The dopants studied here have been inserted substitutionally along the axis of an infinite one-dimensional diamond nanowire and include the single-electron acceptor boron and the single-electron donor nitrogen. The doped nanowires have then been re-relaxed, and properties compared with the undoped structures. The (...) structural properties of relaxed nanowires considered here include an examination bonding via the electron charge density, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the effects of dopants on the stability of diamond nanostructures and nanodevices. (shrink)

In this study an analysis is presented of the bonding and structural properties of dehydrogenated and hydrogenated doped cylindrical diamond nanowires calculated using the Vienna Ab Initio Simulation Package, employing density functional theory within the generalized-gradient approximation. The dopants studied here have been inserted substitutionally, equidistant along the axis of an infinite diamond nanowire. These dopants include aluminium, phosphorus, oxygen and sulphur. The doped nanowires have then been re-relaxed, and properties compared with previously calculated results for undoped, boron-doped and (...) nitrogen-doped structures. Structural properties of relaxed nanowires considered here include an examination bonding via the electron charge density, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the effects of dopants on the stability of diamond nanostructures and nanodevices. (shrink)

Volume 51, Issue 10, September 2019, Page 981-990.

Ernst Haeckel was convinced that the origin of language was the keyto understand human evolution. The distinguished slavist AugustSchleicher was his original inspiration on that matter but hiscousin Wilhelm Bleek was the deciisive source for his views of human language. Bleek lived in Southern Africa, studied Xhosa andZulu, and had the rare opportunity to learn the bushman languagewhich, with its characteristic clicks, suggested the form of theoriginal human language in its evolution from ape-like sounds.Haeckel's view of anthropology based on cultural (...) elements ratherthan physical characters alone was shared by other scholars includingthe Vienna-based Friedrich Mueller who applied Haeckel's approachin his studies during the voyage of the Habsburg ship ``Novara.'' Haeckel's anthropological views were heavily entangled with contemporaryconceps of race so that he and Mueller related different languages todifferent human groups both from a cultural and racial angle. Suchracialist attitude presented obvious political implications which allauthors mentioned denied vehemently. (shrink)

Economists and other social scientists in this century have often supported economic arguments by referring to positions taken by philosophers of science. This important new book looks at the reliability of this practice and, in the process, provides economists, social scientists, and historians with the necessary background to discuss methodological matters with authority. Redman first presents an accurate, critical, yet neutral survey of the modern philosophy of science from the Vienna Circle to the present, focusing particularly on logical positivism, (...) sociological explanations of science (Polanyi, Fleck, Kuhn), the Popper family, and the history of science. She then deals with economic methodology in the twentieth century, looking at a wide range of methodological positions, especially those supported by positions from the philosophy of science. She considers the myth of the feasibility of falsification in economics and, within the context of its significance for economics, discusses the interpretation of Kuhn's philosophy of science as consensus and the danger such a view represents to science. Appendices review the history of the is-ought dispute and list economists whose first works deal with methodological topics. Comprehensive, readable, and accessible to those with little background knowledge, Redman's book will appeal to a wide range of social scientists and philosophers of science. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wittgenstein considered himself an exile and indeed was a self‐imposed exile from his native Vienna; that this condition of exile is important for understanding Wittgenstein the man and his philosophy; and that exile as a condition has become both a central characteristic condition of late modernity (as much as alienation was for the era of industrial capitalism) and emblematic of literary modernism. The paper employs the notion of ‘exhilic thought’ as a central trope for understanding (...) Wittgenstein and the topography or geography of his thought and suggests that philosophy might begin to recognize more fully the significance of location and place in order to come to terms internationalization, multiculturalism and globalization, and with postmodern notions of subjectivity that embrace aspects of the condition of being an exile. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence by Ezio VailatiJan A. CoverEzio Vailati. Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 250. Cloth, $45.00.When Leibniz received the 1710 issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in early 1711, he read John Keill’s public charge that he had stolen the calculus from Newton. Leibniz twice sought amends (...) from the Society in the form of a retraction, in response to which a committee was formed to investigate and issue a report. The resulting Commercium epistolicum, written by the good Isaac Newton himself and condemning Leibniz, was published in early 1713. In Vienna at the time, Leibniz learned of its contents in a June letter from Johann Bernoulli, who complained about this “scarcely civilized way” of holding what was in effect a tribunal from which the chief witness was absent. By year’s end Leibniz had enlisted Wolff to see into print Leibniz’s anonymous statement—overstatement, in fact—of his case, and nine months later Keill replied with an equally overstated rejoinder. Late autumn of 1714 found Leibniz back in Hannover, suffering from gout and the tiresome pressure to advance his work on the history of the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg. If only he felt better and had more free time, he could collect his mathematical papers and set an end to the dispute by writing his own Commercium epistolicum: as it was (Leibniz told Wolff in the spring of 1715), he had no intention of giving Newton’s cronies the luxury of his time.The Leibniz-Clarke exchange began in the shadows of this dispute, contributing to Leibniz’s already established distaste for parts of British philosophy. Already in 1690 he was describing (to Huygens and others) Newton’s gravitational attraction as “inexplicable.” Soon after Leibniz was surprised to discover that Locke had accepted Newtonian attraction in the second edition of the Essay—surprised, at least, until he came to see it as part and parcel of the dangerous idea that God could attach any old property whatever to matter if He chose, including thought. Materialism and frequent miracles [End Page 533] were just around the corner, and from there it was a short distance to the mortality of the soul, and a mean view of God’s power; the decay of natural theology itself could only follow. Leibniz’s misgivings didn’t see the light of day in the early 1700s, when he penned them in the Preface to the Nouveaux Essais; but he went out of his way to work an explicit complaint about Mr. Newton and Mr. Locke into the Théodicée of 1710 (§19 of the Preliminary Discourse). The calculus dispute followed. By the time Leibniz got round to writing Princess Caroline about the dispute in a letter of May 1715, he was insisting that the Newtonians deserved public censure, and that the Britons deserved Leibniz as historiographer of England. For her own part, Caroline now wondered if Samuel Clarke, who had translated Newton’s Opticks into Latin, would in the end be unbiased enough to translate Leibniz’s Théodicée into English. Moreover Caroline doubted that Clarke’s notion of the soul was theologically innocent. Replying in November, Leibniz summarized his view that natural religion was in great decline in England, and the famous exchange began.Despite there being no monograph devoted to it until now, the Correspondence ıs (and was) famous. If a book-length study is overdue, so perhaps are three reminders—that a significant portion of the Correspondence is devoted to issues other than space and time and gravitation, that the depth to which its issues are pursued was compromised by impatience on the side of both parties, and that Clarke’s philosophical views aren’t so well-understood as Leibniz’s own. Nowhere does Vailati set out to make these points explicitly, but they emerge over the course of his book, and together with exegetical soundness are its chief contributions. While this volume makes no historical or philosophical waves, it indirectly (perhaps unwittingly) explains why none are readily forthcoming in a book... (shrink)

Reviews the book "The Vienna Circle. Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical Empiricism," by Friedrich Stadler.

Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes his Tractatus with the injunction, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." As the concluding proposition of a tersely written, tightly organized work, the reader would expect it to have a strong bite. Yet the statement has been variously ignored, dismissed, and misunderstood, interpreted as the inspired words of a mystic or as the final banishing of metaphysics from philosophical discourse. It is with the help of Janik and Toulmin’s work that it becomes (...) clear how the proposition serves as the crown to a book which Wittgenstein maintained was primarily an ethical work. In presenting the Viennese Weltanshauung [[sic]] of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there emerges the picture of a society where appearances ruled in all areas of cultural life, in the government, and in the arts. Viennese society was characterized by a vast impotent bureaucracy, the Strauss waltz, and the feutillion. The leader in the inevitable reaction was Karl Kraus. He instigated a critique of Viennese society through an ingenious and refined use of cultural modes of expression. Along with him, leaders emerged for each of the special arts, language, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, who, in their own particular role, tried to restore truth and responsibility to the affairs of men. The development of the characters and the issues involved make this book important. Of lesser value, unfortunately, are the chapters dealing specifically with the work of Wittgenstein, who is represented as one of the emergent leaders. Although we are rhetorically persuaded that his talk of "simples," "representation," "depicting," or "language games" is tied up with the critique of a fundamentally sophistical intellectualism, we are not led on to seeing how the critique was carried out.—W. A. F. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:98 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY quoted in great numbers. The other is Kern's philosophical competence and his skill in handling complex problems. The book is divided into two parts. Part I gives the reader a brief historical survey of Husserl's changing attitudes toward Kant and the neo-Kantians (especially Natorp and ttickert). Indicating the influences which shaped Husserl's thinking during the years of his studies at the universities of Berlin and (...) Vienna, Kern traces Husserl's development throughout his career as a thinker and a writer. But this survey (pp. 1-50) provides merely the general framework within which the intensive and detailed analyses of Part II (pp. 51-424) must be viewed. Two appendices, an extensive bibliography, and a name index complete the work. The detailed discussions of Part II are, of course, the really important contributions to our understanding of Husserl's relation to Kant and the Kantians. As was to be expected, Husserl found in Kant's works formulations of problems and profound insights that he regarded as crucial to any philosophy. At times, however, Husserl was sure that because of mistaken assumptions, insufficiently clarified presuppositions, and methodological deficiencies Kant himself had not fully realized his intentions. Still, it is evident that, in time, Husserl found himself increasingly in sympathy with Kant's postion. In fact, in the end he used Kant's term "transcendental idealism" to designate his own philosophy. In the course of this development, however, Husserl's thinking underwent various changes and reversals. The detailed analyses of them make fascinating reading and are most revelatory of Husserl's own struggles with obtrnsive problems. In Chapter z of Part II (pp. 55-134), the author discusses Husserl's criticism of Kant's positionwKant's conception of the apriori, his strict separation of "sensibility" and "understanding," his presupposition of a "natural world view," his failure to ask sufficiently radical questions concerning the foundations of knowledge, his lack of a proper method of analysis, and his "psychologism." In the course of his own development, however, Husserl modified and, in some respects, even reversed his criticisms of Kant. Chapters ~, m, re and v of Part II, dealing with problems of formal and transcendental logic, with the possibihty of metaphysics on Kantian principles, and with the complex problems of subjectivity, bear witness to the fact that Huseerl often changed his opinion of Kant's work. Of special interest, however, is Chapter vz. It is devoted to a comparison of Husserl's and Kant's "transcendental idealism" and reveals most strikingly the similarities of the two positions. The chapter dealing with Husserl's relation to l~atorp and Rickert, interesting in its own way, is essentially only a footnote, as it were, to the rest of the hook; but it completes the survey. As I said before, this book gives us not only a remarkable insight into the various phases of development in Husserl's thinking and is therefore indispensable to a real understanding of Husserl's intentions and achievements; it also lets us see Kant's philosophy in a new and revealing perspective--both as to its value and it deficiencies. Only a detailed study can do justice to this book. W. H. WF~mMF~STZR Florida State University Ludwig Wittgenstein. Zettel. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. (University of California Press and Basil Blackwell, 1967. Pp. v + 124 [German and English on facing pages]. $6.95.) The paragraphs in this volume, the editors tell us, were collected in a box-file by Wittgenstein from a period beginning in 1929,though the bulk of them come from typescripts dictated between 1945 and 1948. The editors credit Peter Geach with the major work of arrangement. Whoever is responsible did a superlative job, a remark that holds as well for Miss Anscombe's translation. The editors and Mr. Geach have performed an invaluable service to those interested BOOK REVIEWS 99 in Wittgenstein and--quite apart from Wittgensteinian exegesis--in the problems treated in these pages. The philosophical topics are those of the Investigations (PI) and The Remarks on the Foundations o] Mathematir~ (RFM)---e.g., the attack on... (shrink)