Over the coming decades, the so-called telematic technologies are destined to grow more and more encompassing in scale and the repercussions they will have on our professional and personal lives will become ever more accentuated. The transformations resulting from the digitization of data have already profoundly modified a great many of the activities of human life and exercise significant influence on the way we design, draw up, store and send documents, as well as on the means used for locating information (...) in libraries, databases and on the net. These changes are transforming the nature of international communication and are modifying the way in which we carry out research, engage in study, keep our accounts, plan our travel, do our shopping, look after our health, organize our leisure time, undertake wars and so on. The time is not far off when miniaturized digital systems will be installed everywhere - in our homes and offices, in the car, in our pockets or even embedded within the bodies of each one of us. They will help us to keep control over every aspect of our lives and will efficiently and effectively carry out multiple tasks which today we have to devote precious time to. As a consequence, our ways of acting and thinking will be transformed. These new winds of change, which are blowing strongly, are giving birth to a new culture to which the name ‘digital culture’ has been given. It is timely that a study should be made of the different aspects and consequences of this culture, but that this study should not be just undertaken from the point of view of the simple user who quickly embraces the latest successful innovation, in reaction essentially to market forces. The major challenge for this culture resides not so much in the development of even more tiny microchips, faster processors or more refined software, but in the honing of conceptual instruments which will give us the ability to analyse and evaluate the radical changes that this revolution is bringing about and which it will continue to provoke in all of our lives. (shrink)

Hobbes et la pensée politique moderne. Yves Charles Zarka. Paris, PUF (Fondements de la politique), 1995. pp. 308.198FF. ISBN 2–13–047140–4 El mundo en René Descartes. Laura Benitez. Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1993. pp. 163. ISBN 968–36–2812–5. Leibniz e la ‘topica’ aristotelica. Giovanna Varani. [Ricerche di filosofia e di storia della filosofia a cura del Dipartimento di filosofia dell'Università di Verona, 20] Milano, Istituto di propaganda libraria, 1995. pp. 230, L. 29,000. ISBN 88–7836–418–5. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy (...) and the Invention of the Microscope. Catherine Wilson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 pp. x + 280. $39.50, £32.00. ISBN 0–691–03418–4. British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment. Edited by Stuart Brown, Volume V, Routledge History of Philosophy. London and New York, Routledge. 1996. pp. 395. ISBN 0–415–05379‐X. The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society, by E. J. Hundert (Ideas in Context). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. pp. xii + 284. £35.00. ISBN 0–521–46082–4. Critique of Pure Reason. Immanuel Kant. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Introduction by Patricia W. Kitcher. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company. 1996. pp. lix + 1030. £15.95 paper. ISBN 0–87220–257–7; £29.95 cloth. ISBN 0–87220–258–5. Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty. Edited by Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. ix + 310. £35.00. ISBN 0–521–55312–1. Essays in the History of Philosophy. Nicholas Rescher, Avebury Publishing Company, 1995, pp. 373. £42.50. ISBN 1 85628 970 2. Philosophical Dialogues Plato, Hume, Wittgenstein. Edited by Timothy Smiley. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995. pp. x + 83. £9.95. ISBN 0–19–286184–0 Women Philosophers. Edited by Mary Warnock. J. M. Dent, The Orion Publishing Group; London, 1996. pp. xlvii + 301. £20.00. ISBN 0–460–877738–0. S. L. Frank. The Life and Work of a Russian Philosopher 1877–1950. Philip Boobbyer. Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 1995. pp. xii + 292. ISBN 0–8214–1110–1. (shrink)

Leśniewski’s systems deviate greatly from standard logic in some basic features. The deviant aspects are rather well known, and often cited among the reasons why Leśniewski’s work enjoys little recognition. This paper is an attempt to explain why those aspects should be there at all. Leśniewski built his systems inspired by a dream close to Leibniz’s characteristica universalis: a perfect system of deductive theories encoding our knowledge of the world, based on a perfect language. My main claim is that Leśniewski (...) built his characteristica universalis following the conditions of de Jong and Betti’s Classical Model of Science (2008) to an astounding degree. While showing this I give an overview of the architecture of Leśniewski’s systems and of their fundamental characteristics. I suggest among others that the aesthetic constraints Leśniewski put on axioms and primitive terms have epistemological relevance. (shrink)