If all dependent expressions were adjacent some variety of immediate constituent analysis would suffice for grammar, but syntactic and semantic mismatches are characteristic of natural language; indeed this is a, or the, central problem in grammar. Logical categorial grammar reduces grammar to logic: an expression is well-formed if and only if an associated sequent is a theorem of a categorial logic. The paradigmatic categorial logic is the Lambek calculus, but being a logic of concatenation the Lambek calculus can only capture (...) discontinuous dependencies when they are peripheral. In this paper we present the displacement calculus, which is a logic of intercalation as well as concatenation and which subsumes the Lambek calculus. On the empirical side, we apply the new calculus to discontinuous idioms, quantification, VP ellipsis, medial extraction, pied-piping, appositive relativisation, parentheticals, gapping, comparative subdeletion, cross-serial dependencies, reflexivization, anaphora, dative alternation, and particle shift. On the technical side, we prove that the calculus enjoys Cut-elimination. (shrink)

Nell'attuale societA globale, dominata dalla massimizzazione dell'agire funzionale e dal conseguente paradosso antropologico dell'autofinalizzazione dei media (tecnica, denaro, informazione, consenso, successo, potere), la risorsa sempre piU scarsa E diventata il senso con la conseguente e inevitabile riduzione delle persone a funzioni di un apparato tecno-plutocratico al servizio di pochissimi potentati finanziari, industriali, mediatici e militari. Pertanto, la motivazione a essere-vivere, non solo a sopravvivere, e l'omogeneo fine umano di pienezza, inteso come orizzonte piU ampio e ricco dell'azione umana, costituiscono oggi (...) il punto di massima emergenza per lo sviluppo della societA e la contestuale promozione della comunitA. Il rischio sempre piU forte dell'affermazione della societA totalitaria, dove in nome della sicurezza le persone sono disposte a rinunciare alla libertA, sancisce l'urgenza del passaggio dal principio di separazione a quello di integrazione, che promuove il primato dell'essere sull'avere-apparire. CiO favorisce la scoperta e la scelta consapevole del proprio essere e del corrispondente fine umano di pienezza quale prerogativa fondamentale per vivere la libertA personale e comune nella storia. Alla luce di questo giudizio storico, a cinquant'anni dalla morte, avvenuta prematuramente a Roma il 3 febbraio 1964, la Fondazione Gramsci, in collaborazione con il Dipartimento di Filosofia dell'UniversitA "La Sapienza" di Roma, ha organizzato un seminario di studi sulla persona e il pensiero del filosofo torinese Felice Balbo. Il suo ricco itinerario e i suoi molteplici rapporti con la storia e la realtA del proprio tempo lo hanno portato all'elaborazione di una originale e piU che mai attuale filosofia dell'essere indispensabile per affrontare e risolvere i principali nodi storici del nostro tempo. Saggi di Marcello MustE, Vittorio Possenti, Giorgio Rivolta, Giulia Boringhieri, Giovanni Turbanti, Ferruccio Ricciardi e Mario Fadda. (shrink)

In the De mineralibus, Albert the Great clearly states that minerals do not possess life, since – following the Aristotelian path – life is always connected with the operations of the soul. Nevertheless, dealing with the virtues of stones, Albert speaks about a curious difference between “living” and “dead” stones: living stones are substances that possess virtues caused by their forms, while non-living stones are called stones only equivocally because their virtues have expired. Moreover, throughout his work, Albert often seeks (...) help from the biological world to explain the nature and the processes of mineral substances: the coming-into-being of stones and metals is often compared to the generation of plants and animals; places where minerals are formed act as the mother’s womb for the embryo; sulphur and quicksilver are said to be the father and the mother of all metals; etc. The tendency to biologise inorganic nature is a key strategy that Albert uses to explain the processes and functions of the mineral world. (shrink)

The relation between the moral account of the capital vices and the philosophical analysis of the passions of the human soul undergoes an important turning point from the 11th century onwards during the recovery of medical knowledge in the medieval West. In this wave of fervour towards a physiological approach in the investigation of the nature of man, the vice of acedia - as described by the Christian moral tradition - and the melancholic temperament - the result of a millenary (...) reworking and technicalisation of medical knowledge - found a point of contact in the passion of sadness. If authors such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, following the Christian heritage, characterised acedia as an escalation of the passion of sadness, the medical tradition from Hippocrates and Galen to Avicenna and Constantine recognised sadness as one of the most distinctive manifestations of the melancholic temperament. The aim of this study is to demonstrate, by retracing some aspects of this interweaving of traditions after the year 1000, how Dante’s description of the sinners of acedia in Canto VII of the Inferno takes up the legacy of this hybridisation between the Christian description of acedia and the physiological description of melancholy. (shrink)

Philosophy has not yet recovered from the "divine language" of theology, although in its historical search it gradually digressed from the search of God as a possible object of questioning. Eventually it accepted the "atheism in principle" of the scientific constitution of the world. The crucial turning points of this path are Plato, Aristotle, Mediaeval Scholastics with Aquinas at its front, Nietzsche and his ontic assertion of overman. The coexistence of philosophical and theological thought thereby mirrors itself in the creation (...) of the mutual conceptual constructions. When thought as transcendence and omnipotence, the metaphysical God is solely a God outside the world. Both philosophy and theology belong to a time of rejecting the world and nourishing a terrible thought of the absence of God. The hermeneutic reflection on the openness of the world keeps us safe from the temptation to comprehend God's absence as something terrifying. The absence is a sign of divine mystery, which no forceful investigation is in power of violating. (shrink)

The article presents the results of a more extensive work on soviet historiography of philosophy. the first thing to note is that there is a well-developed soviet historiography of philosophy. it has developed remarkably since 1947--including expansion of the history of the philosophy of the peoples of the soviet union. the article also discusses the principles that underlie soviet historiography of philosophy: partisanship, and the unity of historicism and internationalism. an examination of the discussions about the object of history of (...) philosophy as a science shows that the basic statement is that philosophy develops according to laws. (shrink)

The book introduces to the analytic philosophy of language by presenting the main classical authors and texts of the XX Century, as well as the key problems and concepts of this discipline in their historical context. Ch. I: general introduction to the philosophy of language. Ch. II: Frege. Ch. III: Russell. Ch. IV: Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Ch: V: Neopositivism and verificationism. Ch. VI: Carnap's intensional semantics. Ch. VII: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Ch. VIII: Quine. Ch. IX: theories of direct reference. Everything is (...) explained in plain but precise language, with many examples. Thus, the reader realizes how each author addresses the problems set by earlier investigations, in turn opening new problems for discussion and advancing the state of the art. The critical comparison among different positions raises possible objections and answers, introducing to the rational debate in the style of analytic philosophy. Whenever required the book also introduces basic notions of logics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, foundations of mathematics, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Each argument is dealt with on three distinct levels: introductory, intermediate, advanced. Therefore, the book can be helpful to beginners, to graduate students, and to researchers. (shrink)

The contributions to this book touch the different aspects of Popper's philosophy of science.

Here we prove the existence of sheaf cohomology theory in arbitrary o-minimal structures.

The aim of the present paper is to list the usual and some possible meanings--or at least those the writer found the most interesting--of the word 'level,' to specify them briefly, to illustrate them, and to propose some problems in which those concepts are involved. Should this semantical clarification prove useful in clearing the ground for ontological speculation, the thesis would be confirmed that there is no conflict between semantics and ontology as long as the former does not deny the (...) legitimacy of inquiries into the denotata of certain universal words, and as long as metaphysics is not reluctant to linguistic hygiene. (shrink)

Generalmente los comentadores han abordado la temática de la intuición en la filosofía de Spinoza desde la perspectiva de la problemática de lo que en la Ética aparece como ciencia intuitiva o tercer genero de conocimiento. En el presente artículo, en cambio, intentamos mostrar que hay en los escritos de Spinoza un concepto de intuición más amplio que el que está implícito en la ciencia intuitiva, del cual esta no sería más que una subespecie. Como paso previo para alcanzar dicho (...) fin, intentaremos mostrar que la concepción de la intuición que sostiene Spinoza está estrechamente emparentada con la concepción cartesiana -de la cual ofrecemos un breve esbozo en el primer apartado- y que ambas concepciones tienen como fundamento la naturaleza de la idea. Generally, critics had tackle the issue of intuition in Spinoza’s philosophy from the point of view of the problem of what in the Ethics is called intuitive science or third kind of knowledge. In the present paper, instead, we try to show that there is in Spinoza`s writings a wider concept of intuition than that which is implied in the intuitive science, being the later no more than a sub-kind of the former. As a previous step to achieve this target, we try to show that Spinoza`s conception of intuition is narrowly tied with the Cartesian conception -of which we offer a brief draft in the first part- and that both conceptions are based on the nature of the idea. (shrink)

En este artículo se presenta una exposición sistemática del concepto de ideología que Luis Villoro construye a lo largo de su trayectoria filosófica, como base para plantear la crítica de las ideologías y la crítica de la forma-ideología en tanto tarea práctico-social del pensamiento filosófico, en ..

This book will undoubtedly be useful to scholars and graduate students interested in the relationships between self-consciousness, emotion, the brain, and the...

Os estudos acerca da estética musical de Eduard Hanslick geralmente enfatizam sua tese negativa, causadora de inúmeras controvérsias e discussões. A investigações de sua tese positiva é geralmente deixada de lado pelos musicólogos. Neste artigo são discutidos não apenas os fundamentos da tese negativa, mas também os da tese positiva, bem como as noções de forma, conteúdo e Conteúdo espiritual. Ao mesmo tempo, examinamos em que medida os pontos de vista de Hanslick são tributários das concepções de alguns autores franceses (...) do século XVIII, bem como de autores roânticos como Wackenroder, Tieck e Hoffmann. (shrink)