The work we present has a double purpose: sketching some thinking guidelines to overcome the typical Sicilian Mafia mindset and, at the same time, helping to reinforce the theoretical–methodological paradigm of group analysis by means of a dialogue with the concept of relational good. In this framework of dialogue and confrontation, since psychical, social, and economic developments influence each other, they can determine a strong repercussion in the social context of individuals. Relational good thus becomes not only an interdisciplinary intersection, (...) but also a tool that can significantly help fulfilling suitable programs of local development. (shrink)

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical (...) and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

This work would like to be a contribution for a more thorough knowledge of the phenomenology of the Mafia in Lombardy. It is a study carried out according to an ethnographic approach, which proposes the analysis of a cultural artifact aiming at understanding the logics and structure of the Mafia organization from different social interlocutors’ representations and lived experiences.

A new hypothesis on the basic features characterising the Foundations of Mathematics is suggested. By means of them the entire historical development of Mathematics before the 20th Century is summarised through a table. Also the several programs, launched around the year 1900, on the Foundations of Mathematics are characterised by a corresponding table. The major difficulty that these programs met was to recognize an alternative to the basic feature of the deductive organization of a theory - more precisely, to Hilbert’s (...) main tenet. Ironically, already half a century before the births of these programs the alternative organization has been substantially represented by Lobachevsky's theory on parallel lines. Moreover, although each program’s founder recognised the basic features in a partial way only, all together these programs represented just the four possible foundational approaches. (shrink)

This paper means to demonstrate the theoretical-and- methodological potential of a particular pattern of thought about culture. Employing an end-means and absolute value plus concept of reality approach, the continuous model of culture aims to embrace from one holistic standpoint various concepts and debates of the modern human, social, and political sciences. The paper revisits the debates of fact versus value, nature versus culture, culture versus structure, agency versus structure, and economics versus politics and offers the concepts of the rule (...) of law, state capitalism, a dialectical model of progress, and interpretative qualitative research, as well as of cultural diffusion, autonomy, alienation, and individuality. This model distinguishes between the ideal-symbolical and the instrumental functions of culture, sees culture as being sewn from universal binaries, and provides a certain understanding of the cognitive function of a value judgment, with positivism so far vague about the topic. It, too, suggests an extra method for investigating culture : the comparative literature study of culture enables social science to view literature as its potential in-depth interviewee— a case for arguing for a certain conception of interdisciplinarity as well. In addition, it predicts that cultural particularism or individuality remains an essential factor of human existence. Analyzing the issue of Eurocentrism in social science, the model finds modernity ’s concept of reality to be involved in ” methodological ” intellectualistic reductionism, characterizing it since the empiricism/ rationalism origination. Systematically confusing the universal oppositions in a Eurocentric manner, intellectualism becomes a contributing factor in unfolding post- modernity. (shrink)

Over the years, research in the field of narratological studies has converged towards a unitary vision of narrativity, which is based on a shared interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics. The object of this article is to describe the main characteristics of an alternative model of narrativity, which I propose to call “Nietzschean narratology”. In particular, I emphasize the role that the notion of melancholy plays within the model of aesthetic experience of The Birth of Tragedy. I wish to show that, in (...) this work, Nietzsche criticizes the artificiality of the Aristotelian catharsis, by opposing to it the naturalness of the “Dionysiac melancholy” which, according to him, vivifies the Attic drama. (shrink)

Nations usually define themselves in positive terms; they proclaim themselves strong and victorious, or developed and prosperous. But what does it mean when the opposite is true - when negative feelings like regret, nostalgia, melancholy and fatalism are said to be the true essence of a culture? And what does it mean when these feelings are encapsulated in a single, untranslatable word?Bringing together three such word-concepts from Europe's periphery - saudade in Portugal, the Czech litost of Milan Kundera and Orhan (...) Pamuk's of Istanbul - this book investigates claims that they embody the historical experiences and character of a people. In each case, it explores the historical, cultural and psychological mechanisms behind the invention of negative autostereotypes to offer new ways of thinking about individual and collective identities. This eclectic and broad-ranging study is not only a historical survey of emotions, but also a meditation on hope, belonging and the search for authenticity in the modern age. (shrink)

This book proposes a radically evolutionary approach to biolinguistics that consists in considering human language as a form of species-specific intelligence entirely embodied in the corporeal structures of Homo sapiens. The book starts with a historical reconstruction of two opposing biolinguistic models: the Chomskian Biolinguistic Model (CBM) and the Darwinian Biolinguistic Model (DBM). The second part compares the two models and develops into a complete reconsideration of the traditional biolinguistic issues in an evolutionary perspective, highlighting their potential influence on the (...) paradigm of biologically oriented cognitive science. The third part formulates the philosophical, evolutionary and experimental basis of an extended theory of linguistic performativity within a naturalistic perspective of pragmatics of verbal language. The book proposes a model in which the continuity between human and non-human primates is linked to the gradual development of the articulatory and neurocerebral structures, and to a kind of prelinguistic pragmatics which characterizes the common nature of social learning. In contrast, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic skills that mark the learning of historical-natural languages are seen as a rapid acceleration of cultural evolution. The book makes clear that this acceleration will not necessarily favour the long-term adaptations for Homo sapiens. (shrink)

Any living organism interacts with and responds specifically to environmental molecules by expressing specific olfactory receptors. In this paper, this specificity will be first examined in causal terms with particular emphasis on the mechanisms controlling olfactory gene expression, cell-to-cell interactions and odor-decoding processes. However, this type of explanation does not entirely justify the role olfactory receptors have played during evolution, since they are also expressed ectopically in different organs and/or tissues. Homologous olfactory genes have in fact been found in such (...) diverse cells and/or organs as spermatozoa, testis and kidney where they are assumed to act as chemotactic sensors or renin modulators. To justify their functional diversity, homologous olfactory receptors are assumed to share the same basic role: that of conferring a self-identity to cells or tissues under varying environmental conditions. By adopting this standpoint, the functional attribution as olfactory or chemotactic sensors to these receptors should not be seen either as a cause conditioning receptor gene expression, or as a final effect resulting from genetically predetermined programs, but as a direct consequence of the environmental conditions olfactory receptor genes have explored during evolution. The association of odorant patterns with specific environmental or contextual situations makes their relationship semiotically triadic, due to the emergence of an interpretant capable of perceiving odorants as meaningful signs out of a noisy background. This perspective highlights the importance of odorant-receptor relationships as respect to the properties of the interacting partners. It is our contention that only when taken together can these different explanatory strategies provide a realistic account of how olfactory receptor genes have been structurally and functionally modified during evolution. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between pragmatics and the other components of grammar. Specifically, it aims to determine whether pragmatics is a distinct module of grammar coming into play at some point in the derivation process to connect the sentence with the context. The conclusion is that, based on the phenomena considered in this work, pragmatics rather than being a separate module, is distributed in the various components. It is shown in fact that the context immediately intervenes at the representative (...) level to yield the correct syntax to be fed to the sensorimotor system on one side, and to the conceptual one on the other. The empirical focus of the article is on a specific type of questions in Italian, namely surprise and surprise-disapproval questions, because they are most sensitive to pragmatic factors. The syntactic, prosodic, and gestural components of these constructions will be examined, highlighting their most important characteristics. (shrink)

Dzhaparidze, G., A generalized notion of weak interpretability and the corresponding modal logic, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 61 113-160. A tree Tr of theories T1,...,Tn is called tolerant, if there are consistent extensions T+1,...,T+n of T1,...,Tn, where each T+i interprets its successors in the tree Tr. We consider a propositional language with the following modal formation rule: if Tr is a tree of formulas, then Tr is a formula, and axiomatically define in this language the decidable logics TLR (...) and TLRω. It is proved that TLR yields exactly the schemata of PA-provable sentences, if Tr is understood as “Tr is tolerant”. In fact, TLR axiomatizes a considerable fragment of provability logic with quantifiers over ∑1-sentences, and many relations that have been studied in the literature can be expressed in terms of tolerance. We introduce and study two more relations between theories: cointerpretability and cotolerance which are, in a sense, dual to interpretability and tolerance. Cointerpretability is a characterization of ∑1-conservativity for essentially reflexive theories in terms of translations. (shrink)

This work is an attempt to lay foundations for a theory of interactive computation and bring logic and theory of computing closer together. It semantically introduces a logic of computability and sets a program for studying various aspects of that logic. The intuitive notion of computational problems is formalized as a certain new, procedural-rule-free sort of games between the machine and the environment, and computability is understood as existence of an interactive Turing machine that wins the game against any possible (...) environment. The formalism used as a specification language for computational problems, called the universal language, is a non-disjoint union of the formalisms of classical, intuitionistic and linear logics, with logical operators interpreted as certain—most basic and natural—operations on problems. Validity of a formula is understood as being “always computable”, and the set of all valid formulas is called the universal logic. The name “universal” is related to the potential of this logic to integrate, on the basis of one semantics, classical, intuitionistic and linear logics, with their seemingly unrelated or even antagonistic philosophies. In particular, the classical notion of truth turns out to be nothing but computability restricted to the formulas of the classical fragment of the universal language, which makes classical logic a natural syntactic fragment of the universal logic. The same appears to be the case for intuitionistic and linear logics . Unlike classical logic, these two do not have a good concept of truth, and the notion of computability restricted to the corresponding two fragments of the universal language, based on the intuitions that it formalizes, can well qualify as “intuitionistic truth” and “linear-logic truth”. The paper also provides illustrations of potential applications of the universal logic in knowledgebase, resourcebase and planning systems, as well as constructive applied theories. The author has tried to make this article easy to read. It is fully self-contained and can be understood without any specialized knowledge of any particular subfield of logic or computer science. (shrink)

Die Erforschung des historischen und systematischen Kontextes von Kants Philosophie weist bis auf den heutigen Tag signifikante Lücken auf. Dies gilt umso mehr für unser Verständnis der Bedeutung der gegenüber Kants Philosophie erhobenen Einwände und Kritikpunkte sowohl für die verschiedenen Entwicklungsphasen seiner Philosophie wie für ihre Rezeption und Darstellung in späteren Jahrhunderten. Die im vorliegenden Band versammelten Beiträge wollen einen Beitrag zur Schließung dieser Lücken leisten. Sie gehen auf Vorträge zurück, die auf dem VII. Multilateralen Kant-Kolloquium zum Thema „Kant und (...) seine Kritiker – Kant and his critics – Kant et ses critiques“ gehalten worden sind, das vom 28.-30. April 2017 an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg stattfand. There are still significant gaps in the study of the historical and systematic contexts of Kant’s philosophy. This is true even more of our understanding of the significance of the objections and criticisms levelled at Kant’s philosophy and of the development of his philosophy and its reception and depiction in later centuries. The essays in this volume seek to close these gaps. They are based on the papers given at the 7th multilateral Kant Colloquium with the theme “Kant und seine Kritiker – Kant and his critics – Kant et ses critiques” which took place from 28th-30th April 2017 at the Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg. (shrink)

The paper demonstrates that a detailed analysis of Hegel’s criticism of rationalist metaphysics in the “Vorbegriff” (Preliminary Conception) chapter of the Encyclopedia Logic can shed light on the following critical features of Hegel’s metaphysics: (1) advancing semantic holism as an alternative to semantic atomism; (2) renouncing the projection of a substance-attribute formal structure onto actuality; (3) dismissing sense perception as the source of conceptual content; and (4) rejecting dualist ontology.

This book argues that the Doctrine of the Concept is the centerpiece of Hegel’s philosophical system and, through a close analysis of this final part of the Science of Logic, presents a detailed account of the key features of Hegel’s ontology.