The Calcolo geometrico (1888) seems to have been a turning point in the scientific career of Giuseppe Peano (1858?1932) because with this book he started publishing in logic. Looking for motivations of his early interests in the field one is naturally led to investigate the background of that book. Besides his previous work in mathematical analysis, methods and results of some Italian mathematicians and?above all?the spread of Grassmann's theories in Italy played a significant role: this point seems to have been (...) often underestimated by the historians of the subject. The connections between Calcolo geometrico and other related areas are also discussed. Peano's handwritten remarks and references taken from his own working copy of the Calcolo geometrico constitute the appendix of the paper. ?Simbolismo da alas ad mente de homo? (Peano 1913, 390). (shrink)

SAGGI DI VITTORIO MARCHIS, UMBERTO BOTTAZZINI, FABIO TOSCANO, MASSIMO NEGROTTI, GIUSEPPE O. LONGO, STEFANO A. E. LEONI, ALBERTO CASADEI, SILVANO TAGLIAGAMBE.

La crisi dello strutturalismo e i confini della semiotica in un volume importante della produzione di Eco. Un libro che trova la sua continuazione ideale in 'Lector in fabula'.

La conoscenza che abbiamo del testo del Libellus ad Leonem X, noto anche come De Officio Pontificis ad Leonem X, redatto dai camaldolesi veneziani Tommaso Giustiniani e Vincenzo Querini , ruota intorno al codice che “extabat MS in Bibliotheca Monasterii S. Mariae Carcerum, nunc in Bibliotheca S. Michaelis Muriani”1 identificabile con il manoscritto Muraniano 1071, oggi conservato presso la Biblioteca del Monastero di Camaldoli.2 Si tratta del codice che è stato utilizzato, secondo quanto dichiarato dallo stesso Mittarelli,3 dai camaldolesi Giovanni (...) Benedetto Mittarelli e Anselmo Costadoni 4 per la loro edizione negli Annales Camaldulenses.5 Vi è una notazione .. (shrink)

A literary prank leads to deadly danger in this “endlessly diverting” intellectual thriller by the author of The Name of the Rose (Time). Bored with their work, three Milanese book editors cook up an elaborate hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with occult groups across the centuries. Becoming obsessed with their own creation, they produce a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled—a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum. (...) But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real. When occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth. Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Umberto Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment. "An intellectual adventure story…sensational, thrilling, and packed with arcana."—The Washington Post Book World. (shrink)

On the Shoulders of Giants collects previously unpublished essays from the last fifteen years of Umberto Eco's life. With humor and erudition, one of the great contemporary thinkers takes on the roots of Western culture, the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the imperfections of art, and the lure of mysteries.

pt. 1. Dal nichilismo alla dignità dell'uomo. -- [pt. 2]. Esistenza e sacro.

In preference aggregation a set of individuals express preferences over a set of alternatives, and these preferences have to be aggregated into a collective preference. When preferences are represented as orders, aggregation procedures are called social welfare functions. Classical results in social choice theory state that it is impossible to aggregate the preferences of a set of individuals under different natural sets of axiomatic conditions. We define a first-order language for social welfare functions and we give a complete axiomatisation for (...) this class, without having the number of individuals or alternatives specified in the language. We are able to express classical axiomatic requirements in our first-order language, giving formal axioms for three classical theorems of preference aggregation by Arrow, by Sen, and by Kirman and Sondermann. We explore to what extent such theorems can be formally derived from our axiomatisations, obtaining positive results for Sen’s Theorem and the Kirman-Sondermann Theorem. For the case of Arrow’s Theorem, which does not apply in the case of infinite societies, we have to resort to fixing the number of individuals with an additional axiom. In the long run, we hope that our approach to formalisation can serve as the basis for a fully automated proof of classical and new theorems in social choice theory. (shrink)

Antonio Rosmini is considered by many to be greatest Italian - or even European - thinker of the nineteenth century. But for christians he is also a saint. Here, marking ten years since his beatification in 2007, is an updated biography.