Agalmato-eroticism is usually shown in the ancient world as a literary myth; it had lasted in the works of those poets such as Ovid and those writers of varia variorum like Pseudo Luciano in his Amores, who devoted to it their analyses and reflections. The best known example of Agalmato-eroticism is certainly the one which refers to Pygmalion’s story, who carved an ivory statue of a maiden and fell in love with it, then asked the ancient Greek goddess of love (...) and beauty Aphrodite, to change it into a woman. What appears emblematic in this story — that we might call of Metamorphosis — is its collocation: that is, between the prior event in the story of the Propetidi, and the conclusion referring to the story of Adonis, after a series of events deriving from the transformation of the statue in human being. Every event of agalmato-eroticism is a disruption of the natural order of things which cannot be without consequences. Through the illustration of Agalmato-eroticism the authors provided a very strong account of what it meant for a man to love a statue: to loose himself; and suicide and oblivion were the fundamental aspects of the defeated subject who remained confined in his own solispism. (shrink)

La pubblicazione di questo volume risponde a diverse esigenze. Prima fra tutto di stimolare un dibattito interdisciplinare intorno a uno fra gli argomenti che maggiormente suscitarono l'interesse di Francesco Iengo: il concetto di metropoli, o meglio la macroarea concettuale, a cui si collega la riflessione sulla società e sulla civiltà moderna e sull'idea stessa di modernità. Ulteriore preoccupazione è stata quella di di evitare il classico omaggio "alla memoria" confrontandoci con lavori scientifici di Iengo in modo interlocutorio, eludendo malinconiche rimembrwnze (...) e sterili piaggerie accademiche. Il risultato è un quadro collettivo movimentato e ampio che spazia storicamente e geograficamente, in una varietà di approcci e di spunti, tra estetica, filosofia, letteratura, antropologia, cinema. (shrink)

How can one in practice go about introducing ethical values systematically into a business organisation? The process described here was presented to the annual meeting of European Business Ethics Centres, held in Prague in 1993. Dr Di Toro is Research Fellow in Business Administration, Environmental and Social Sciences Department, School of Economics, University of Siena, Piazza S. Francesco 17, 53100 Siena, Italy.

How can one in practice go about introducing ethical values systematically into a business organisation? The process described here was presented to the annual meeting of European Business Ethics Centres, held in Prague in 1993. Dr Di Toro is Research Fellow in Business Administration, Environmental and Social Sciences Department, School of Economics, University of Siena, Piazza S. Francesco 17, 53100 Siena, Italy.

The Test Your Memory is a brief self-administered, cognitive screening test, currently used in several settings. It requires minimal administrator supervision and the computation of the final test score takes approximately 2 min. We assessed the discrimination ability of the Italian version of the TYM in detecting Mild Cognitive Impairment in clinical setting. TYM-I was administered to 94 MCI patients and 134 healthy controls. The clinical diagnosis of MCI was considered as the gold standard. An extended formal neuropsychological test battery (...) was used to define MCI subtypes. Receiver Operating Characteristic analyses were conducted to find the optimal cut-off and measure discrimination ability of TYM-I in detecting MCI. TYM-I had a similar area under the curve point estimate as Mini Mental State Examination. A TYM-I score lower or equal to 36 was found to be optimal cut off to detect MCI. The TYM-I showed the highest discrimination ability among individuals aged more than 70 and high educational level. The amnestic MCI subtype patients, compared to non-amnestic MCI patients, had worse performance in recall, orientation and visuospatial abilities TYM-I subscores. The TYM-I is a valid screening test in detecting cognitive dysfunction, easily carried out in clinical practice. The TYM-I subscores may allow to identify amnestic and non-amnestic MCI subtypes. (shrink)

Questo primo volume degli "Scritti di Ugo Bianchi" - "Religions in Antiquity" - raccoglie contributi relativi a temi e problemi del cristianesimo antico. Con esso si realizza un progetto, formulato in anni lontani (1983) dallo stesso autore, che contemplava varie sezioni di cui l'ultima - "Christiana" comprendeva i saggi che costituiscono la prima metà del volume; a questi ne sono stati aggiunti altri, sulle medesime tematiche, che risalgono ad anni successivi. Precede i saggi un contributo di carattere metodologico ("Tipologia storica (...) delle religioni e comparazione: il caso del dualismo"). "Ugo Bianchi, nel suo lungo itinerario scientifico che abbraccia alcune delle più significative aree del vasto panorama delle esperienze religiose della storia umana, non ha mai proposto una "teoria" interpretativa generale e onnicomprensiva di esse, quale molto spesso - con esiti e fortune diversi hanno fatto tanti storici delle religioni. Egli, al contrario, ha mostrato riserbo o vera e propria diffidenza nei confronti di tali "teorie" che il progresso della ricerca e la riflessione critica hanno sempre in varia misura smentito o ridimensionato. Di fatto, lo studioso ha costantemente riconosciuto la debolezza intrinseca di tali tentativi alla luce delle mobili e differenziate realtà che la storia ci consegna e che solo a prezzo di un'analisi comparativa condotta con duttilità e rigore..." (dall'Introduzione Giulia Sfameni Gasparro). (shrink)

Studies on the 1616 and 1633 actions brought against Galilei by the Index and the Inquisition generally presumed that part of the documentation was still to be unveiled. This assumption was frequently accompanied by the hypothesis that some available documents were forgeries, merely composed to justify the 1633 condemnation. New documents from the Archive of the Roman Inquisition, including a censure of Saggiatore, official acts concerning the public dissemination of the verdict, and applications for permission to read Galilei¹s works, show (...) that the 1984 edition of his trial was not exhaustive. It is argued, however, that these documents were not concealed intentionally by the Holy Office and their not being found so far has been mainly due to the poor organisation of the Archive. Gianfranco Catelli, Gouhier e la cosiddetta dottrina della terza nozione primitiva In questo studio non si condivide l’opinione, dominante per molti decenni, che il cosiddetto dualismo cartesiano sia dovuto ad un “malinteso”, che può chiamarsi originario, dato che a rimanerne coinvolti furono alcuni tra i primi seguaci della filosofia di Cartesio. Una presa di posizione, questa, che, già sviluppata in altri precedenti lavori, viene qui riproposta relativamente a H. Gouhier, lo studioso che più di ogni altro, con ricchezza di documenti e sottigliezza di analisi interpretative, ha sostenuto la tesi del “malinteso” e ha individuato nella dottrina della terza nozione primitiva la spiegazione autenticamente cartesiana del rapporto sussistente tra anima e corpo. Una interpretazione di cui nel presentge studio si mostra tutta la debolezza, soprattutto se la si considera alla luce dell’altra dottrina, anch’essa cartesiana, ma di gran lunga più articolata, che fa del rapporto tra anima e corpo un nesso da spiegarsi in analogia al rapporto che nel linguaggio intercorre tra il segno e il suo significato. (shrink)

Sono certo sarebbe stato più prudente iniziare e concludere questa mia lectio prestando fede – e mettendo in pratica – quanto scrive Ludwig Wittgenstein nel 1932 in Pensieri diversi, quando dice: «In arte è difficile dire qualcosa che sia altrettanto buono del non dire niente». Ma tant’è: nelle cose del mondo, quando non si può negare una certa vanità, ci si inerpica spesso per sentieri difficili e impervi. M’incammino quindi, con qualche titubanza, nel tentativo di indicare il mio modo di (...) e... (shrink)

Spatial perception and spatial representation are not less central to experimental psychology than to visual art. Geometry allows their description and formalization. Therefore, geometrical language can be considered as a kind of generative grammar, which is embedded in the human perceptual experience of space. The paper outlines the suggestion that Euclidean geometry, along with most perspective geometries, even when applied to geometrical problem solving, have phenomenal bases, since they emerge from direct experience of the world, and not necessarily from higher (...) order cognitive processes. (shrink)

Umberto Eco’s semiotics, unlike that of most of his colleagues, has always claimed to be a philosophical research. For Eco, general semiotics, that is, the research on the functioning of signs, was a fundamental part of philosophy, because the knowledge of objects and the formulation of the ideas that characterize them takes place by means of signs. This paper shows how Eco’s semiotic work derives from his philosophical training and how interest in the mass media and political commitment have not (...) changed the nature of his philosophical project. His research itinerary is compared with that of other semiotics scholars to show the originality of his approach. (shrink)

In my research published last year, i.e. Homo homini deus. Per un'introduzione al pensiero giuridico di Francis Bacon, I have analytically presented the Aphorismi de Jure gentium maiore sive de fontibus justiciae et iuris and I have closely studied the relationship between the legal and political philosophy of the Lord Chancellor and the civil science of Thomas Hobbes1. In the present essay I will try to summarize some of the main reasons why I think that manuscript of Chatsworth House, discovered (...) to be Bacon's only in 1980, is so important. It clarifies, with its twenty aphorisms, some crucial principles of Bacon's civil philosophy that would probably remain otherwise shadowed. So, here I will take as an excellent example that concept of sovereignty which is presented in the Aphorismi. His famous silences - for which the Lord Chancellor has been often considered the worthy, English heir of Machiavelli: 'We're much beholden...'2, - will be better understood at the light of this 'new' text. However, there is not only this sort of silence that Baconian scholars have to face and to understand, also a historiographical tradition has been consolidated in the twentieth century that has almost forgotten Bacon's civil philosophy. Those Bacon's legal and political texts that have been still considered and analyzed by philosophical critique, have been generally misunderstood. So, in order to avoid as far as possible such a fate for the Aphorismi de Jure gentium maiore either, it is necessary to consider that historical context which, as we shall see, depends very much on separating Bacon as a political thinker from his younger contemporary, Thomas Hobbes. (shrink)