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)

An analysis of three pictorial works by Ugo Nespolo is put forward: "Barbe posticce" (1977); "Guardar Manzoni" (1974); "Il museo: Fontana" (1975). It is claimed that such works embody meditations on the concept and the varieties of representation, that they prompt critical reflections on the role of museums in art-making, and that they suggest an alternative route to that of the 'dematerialization' of the art object for the understanding of contemporary art.

Nespolo’s artworks of the late 60s are conceivable as heritage of Dada. Objects and materials are combined in accordance with a specific logical direction also based on philosophical and literary suggestions. The simple materials are present also as a declaration of a Dadaist negation.

Written on the occasion of Ugo Nespolo’s first exhibition, this paper is about his activity as a painter and, at the same time, as a young intellectual who was critical toward the contemporary age. Nespolos artistic works are characterised by a “projecting attitude”: to project a shape or a visual combination on canvas means for Nespolo to affirm his critical reasons. Therefore, through his artworks the viewer has the emerging of the possibility to engage a mind journey.

Deliberately with the elaboration of his late 60s’ artworks Nespolo adopts a fragmentary approach toward reality. Through his objects and materials he offers to the viewer a possible ideal reconstruction of his combined elements and object-machines. Through these ones he creates a sort of mental laboratory that suggests to the viewer the possibility to be transported by the shapes of his artworks and to participate to his logical, but also ludic and ironic, artistic proposal.

What follows is a kind of short “glossary” that aims to address the main issues that the viewer can find standing in front of the complex and varied creative production of Ugo Nespolo. The sequence of these items, or reading notes, despite being fairly free and non-systematic (and only partly chronological) in all respects the internal logic of the Nespolo’s research. A search that has developed and articulated over time in many directions but that has always maintained its (...) extremely consistent identity. In this sense, each item is linked to the others, forming a network of references aimed to a satisfactory overview. (shrink)

The combination of single material elements characterises Nespolo’s artworks since the 60s. The primacy of art factuality - to do art manually - emerges both in his geometrically structured works and in his machines and wooden uniconic structures. These are all combined and based on the strategy of puzzle and on a reflection about the mental attitude to do art. For these reasons, it is possible to consider Nespolo as a forerunner of Conceptual Art.

On the background of Nespolo’s cinema there are on the one hand the new rules and the new structures assigned by art to itself during the Twentieth Century. On the other hand the “logic of dada”, based on the immediacy of the creation through a gesture of everyday objects presentation. Therefore, by exploring the experimental use of camera and of its technical possibilities, what Nespolo does is avant-gardist cinema in two senses: as an elaboration of visual image that (...) represents surrealistic and improbable worlds; as a way to establish linguistic connections with cultural development of society, as shown by his film about Italian artists of Arte Povera. (shrink)

In the field of social objects, in the hierarchy of values (and often of prices) a special place is occupied by those inscriptions that should move us or amuse us, frighten us or make us think, or even just make us look good into society: that is, the works of art. The artwork begins to exist only when we have an expression and an inscription. This teaches us — and Ugo Nespolo knows it better than anyone else — how (...) important the work (understood as labour) is in art: craft is the father of all arts, and, in the end, it is true that genius is first of all diligence. (shrink)

In this paper I try to shed light on the relationship between Ugo Nespolo and the Fluxus group, which the artist contributed to import to Italy in the late Sixties. I then argue that, thanks to the fact that Nespolo’s artworks (especially in the avant-garde period) are documents, it is possible to look in a new and different way at an (anti)artistic movement that sought, in vain, to undermine the idea of objectivity and authorship of the work of (...) art. (shrink)

Ugo Nespolo (1941) ha attraversato gli ultimi cinquant’anni sperimentando in quasi tutti i campi dell’arte ed esprimendo con ironia e atteggiamento ludico la propria poetica di confine, tra avanguardia e pop. Alla sua ricerca artistica - che spazia dalle installazioni oggettuali ai dipinti, dalle performance alle sculture, dalla produzione cinematografica a quella grafica e illustrativa - è dedicato questo numero speciale “Rivista di estetica” che offre riflessioni di carattere critico/letter...

Starting from three works by Ugo Nespolo dedicated to pop and maintaining Warhol as a reference figure, this essay seeks to outline some crucial points of pop aesthetics: the idea of an artificial and constructible aesthetic and the consequent marginalization of nature; the construction of the pop beauty as phenomenology of iconic expendability; the network of media images as the final result of the dialectic between art and industry.

This poem is evidence of a fifty-year long artistic partnership whose origins are to be found in the texts that the great Genoese poet devoted to the first Ugo Nespolo’s exhibition (1966).

The philosophy of film usually presupposes two main assumptions or dogmas. First, films are autonomous audiovisual structures that can be instantiated by particular screenings. Second, the cinematic experience is a surrogate of the audiovisual perception. Experimental cinema can defy these assumptions by making films that either lack an autonomous structure or do not provide spectators with an audiovisual experience that emulates ordinary perception. The paper analyzes Ugo Nespolo’s experimental films precisely as peculiar attempts to defy the two dogmas of (...) the philosophy of film. (shrink)

Pop Art is one of the most prominent artistic movement of the Nineteenth century whose legacy is very influent also in this century. After a brief historical reconstruction of the origins of Pop Art in Great Britain and in the United State, the paper will offer a comparison between the Warholian way of interpreting Pop Art — a realistic way — the Lichtensteinian way, which is fantastic, and the personal interpretation offered by Ugo Nespolo whose Pop is fabulist and (...) fabulous. (shrink)

The nature of matter and the idea of indivisible parts has fascinated philosophers, historians, scientists and physicists from antiquity to the present day. This collection covers the richness of its history, starting with how the Ancient Greeks came to assume the existence of atoms and concluding with contemporary metaphysical debates about structure, time and reality. Focusing on important moments in the history of human thought when the debate about atomism was particularly flourishing and transformative for the scientific and philosophical spirit (...) of the time, this collection covers: - The discovery of atomism in ancient philosophy - Ancient non-Western, Arabic and late Medieval thought - The Renaissance, when along with the re-discovery of ancient thought, atomism became once again an important doctrine to be fully debated - Logical atomism in early analytic philosophy, with Russell and Wittgenstein - Atomism in Liberalism and Marxism - Atomism and the philosophy of time - Atomism in contemporary metaphysics - Atomism and the sciences Featuring 28 chapters by leading and younger scholars, this valuable collection reveals the development of one of philosophy's central doctrines across 2,500 years and within a broad range of philosophical traditions. (shrink)

In this contribution, I explore the treatment that Plato devotes to Protagoras’ relativism in the first section of the Theaetetus (151 E 1–186 E 12) where, among other things, the definition that knowledge is perception is put under scrutiny. What I aim to do is to understand the subtlety of Plato’s argument about Protagorean relativism and, at the same time, to assess its philosophical significance by revealing the inextric¬ability of ontological and epistemological aspects on which it is built (for this (...) latter aspect, I refer to contemporary discussions of relativism, mainly to Margolis’ robust relativism). I then turn to Aristotle’s treatment of Protagoras’ relativism in Metaphysics Γ, sections 5 and 6, in order to show that Plato and Aristotle surprisingly share the same view as regards the philosophical content of Protagoras’ relativism (in doing so, I take position against the standard opinion among scholars that Plato and Aristotle understand Protagoras’ relativism in different, even incompatible, ways). What I ultimately aim to demonstrate is that Protagoras’ relativism, as understood by both Plato and Aristotle, is a coherent, even attractive, philosophical position. (shrink)

This book explores how the design, construction, and use of robotics technology may affect today's legal systems and, more particularly, matters of responsibility and agency in criminal law, contractual obligations, and torts. By distinguishing between the behaviour of robots as tools of human interaction, and robots as proper agents in the legal arena, jurists will have to address a new generation of "hard cases." General disagreement may concern immunity in criminal law (e.g., the employment of robot soldiers in battle), personal (...) accountability for certain robots in contracts (e.g., robo-traders), much as clauses of strict liability and negligence-based responsibility in extra-contractual obligations (e.g., service robots in tort law). Since robots are here to stay, the aim of the law should be to wisely govern our mutual relationships. (shrink)

The Cyrenaic school of philosophy (named after its founder Aristippus’ native city of Cyrene in North Africa) flourished in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Ugo Zilioli’s book provides the first book-length introduction to the school in English. The book begins by introducing the main figures of the Cyrenaic school beginning with Aristippus and by setting them into their historical context. Once the reader is familiar with those figures and with the genealogy of the school, the book offers an overview (...) of ancient and modern interpretations of the Cyrenaics, to provide readers with alternative accounts of the doctrines they endorsed and of the role they played in the context of ancient thought. Finally, the book offers a reconstruction of Cyrenaic philosophy and shows how the ethical side of their speculation connected with the epistemology and ontology they endorsed and that, as a result, the Cyrenaics were able to offer a quite sophisticated philosophy. Indeed, Zilioli demonstrates that they represented, in ancient philosophy, an important and original metaphysical position and alternative to the kind of realism endorsed by Plato and Aristotle. (shrink)

Protagoras was an important Greek thinker of the fifth century BC, the most famous of the so called Sophists, though most of what we know of him and his thought comes to us mainly through the dialogues of his strenuous opponent Plato. In this book, Ugo Zilioli offers a sustained and philosophically sophisticated examination of what is, in philosophical terms, the most interesting feature of Protagoras' thought for modern readers: his role as the first Western thinker to argue for relativism. (...) Zilioli relates Protagoras' relativism with modern forms of relativism, in particular the 'robust relativism' of Joseph Margolis, gives an integrated account both of the perceptual relativism examined in Plato's Theaetetus and the ethical or social relativism presented in the first part of Plato's Protagoras and offers an integrated and positive analysis of Protagoras' thought, rather than focusing on ancient criticisms and responses to his thought. This is a deeply scholarly work which brings much argument to bear to the claim that Protagoras was and remains Plato's subtlest philosophical enemy. (shrink)

The paper examines today’s debate on the new responsibilities of Internet service providers in connection with legal problems concerning jurisdiction, data processing, people’s privacy and education. The focus is foremost on the default rules and safe harbour clauses for ISPs liability, set up by the US and European legal systems. This framework is deepened in light of the different functions of the services provided on the Internet so as to highlight multiple levels of control over information and, correspondingly, different types (...) of liability. The new responsibilities of ISPs concern the original “end-to-end” architecture of the medium and policies on design rather than responsibility for user content and individual messages. (shrink)

This paper starts with an examination of the terms use d to designate the face in different languages, in particular in Italian, comparing these with the definitions provided by some authoritative dictionaries as well as with their etymology. This exploration yields some remarkable results: firstly, it appears that the face is indeed a term that has a material meaning, but at the same time it is a social object; secondly, the importance of the communicative function emerges, which makes the face (...) similar to the mask and in some ways to the arbitrariness of language. All this suggests that the philosophical status of the face is that of ‘transcendence’ which is a condition of that state of freedom that we attribute to ourselves and that can be defined as ‘human exception’. (shrink)

The paper focuses on concerns and legal challenges brought on by the use of algorithms. A particular class of algorithms that augment or replace analysis and decision-making by humans, i.e. data analytics and machine learning, is under scrutiny. Taking into account Balkin’s work on “the laws of an algorithmic society”, attention is drawn to obligations of transparency, matters of due process, and accountability. This US-centric analysis on drawbacks and loopholes of current legal systems is complemented with the analysis of norms (...) and principles of the EU data protection law, or “GDPR”. The aim is twofold. On the one hand, the intent is to shed light on some crucial differences between the US and EU law on the regulation of algorithmic operators, both public and private. Whereas, in the USA, scholars debate whether and to what extent new duties and responsibilities of algorithmic operators, e.g. information fiduciaries, have to amend the current framework of self-regulation and light government—as shown by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy report from November 2016—in EU law much of the new duties and responsibilities of algorithmic operators have been passed upon them as data controllers. Whether such approaches will successfully tackle the normative challenges of the algorithmic society is, on the other hand, an open issue that will likely represent the main topic of debate over the next years. Disagreement may concern: the terms framing the legal question in e.g. statistical purposes of the data processing; how such terms are related to each other in legal reasoning ; and legal hard cases that will increasingly have to do with the principles that are at stake also but not only in data protection. By entrusting such legal hard cases to algorithms, or some sort of smart artificial agent, humans still bear full responsibility for the judgment of what is socially, ethically, and legally “plain” and “hard” in social affairs. The balance between delegation of decisions to algorithms and non-delegation will be the leitmotiv of the algorithmic society. Since the devil is in the detail, the current paper is devoted to some of them. (shrink)

The contribution describes the legal phenomenon as a playing field characterized by a progressive regression of the law, understood as a sovereign will from top to bottom, both in the vision of formalist legal positivisms in continental Europe and in realist terms, in the United States. Soft law represents the main strategy to subordinate the law to the interests of the economy, elasticizing environmental law, making it favorable to the market, reducing ecology to the simplistic metric of CO2 emissions. The (...) consequence is a retreat of the statist vertical normativity of law which is not replaced by a de facto power granted to those who control the technology, built by design to close spaces for pluralism and democratic action, in the interest of surveillance and concentrated power in private and government oligopolies. The author concludes by advocating the urgency for genuinely innovative categories, particularly in the legal education, such as the commons, capable of including sustainability into a “new ecological jurisprudence committed to inclusion and solidarity rather than exclusion and struggle”. (shrink)

In this chapter, we evaluate the politically generative dynamic of urban space. Notably, we put forward the notion of the ‘multiplier effect’ of the urban, referring to its ingrained tendency to multiply resistance to oppression and violence being exerted against subaltern groups and minorities and, in doing so, to turn this multiplied resistance into an active force of social change. We, therefore, look at the twofold valence of ‘resistance’: negative and affirmative. Resistance initially takes form as a defensive response to (...) oppression and violence. When this happens, the urban becomes the living platform for a multiplying dynamic of encounter and, potentially, of inter-group solidarity, thus laying the foundations for a cooperative – rather than competitive, as in neoliberal rationality, or inimical, as in national-populist reason – way of ‘being together’. After having developed this argument against the backdrop of the women’s movement in Tehran and the urban disobedience to anti-immigration policies in Italy, our chapter concludes by reflecting on the multiplier effect of urban resistance within the current context of national revanchism. (shrink)

This article examines some of the most relevant issues concerning P2P systems so as to take sides in today's strongly polarized debate. The idea is to integrate a context-based perspective with an ontological representation of informational norms; thanks to a procedural outlook which is presented in terms of burden of proof More particularly, we examine three ''roads." First, the topological approach to complex social networks allows us to comprehend the laws according to which information is distributed through P2P systems and (...) how a "short route" has joined, and sometimes replaced, the traditional "long route" between creator, business, and the public. The second road is the context-based perspective elaborated by Helen Nissenbaum, and developed by Francis Grodzinsky and Herman Tavani: The goal is to determine the norms that govern such an informational flow as norms of appropriateness and distribution. The final road is the informational viewpoint on ethics proposed by Luciano Floridi with the idea that standard ethical theories cannot easily be adapted to deal with the new informational issues emerging with digital technology. While empirical evidence on the impact of P2P systems is still quite controversial, it is crucial to determine on whom the burden of proof falls in a given context, on censors or advocates, by singling out both the default norms and exceptions in the use and development of P2P software. (shrink)

The paper examines some aspects of today’s debate on trust and e-trust and, more specifically, issues of legal responsibility for the production and use of robots. Their impact on human-to-human interaction has produced new problems both in the fields of contractual and extra-contractual liability in that robots negotiate, enter into contracts, establish rights and obligations between humans, while reshaping matters of responsibility and risk in trust relations. Whether or not robotrust concerns human-to-robot or even robot-to-robot relations, there is a new (...) generation of cases involving human-to-human contractual and extra-contractual liability for robots’ behaviour because, for the first time, legal systems hold you responsible for what an artificial system autonomously decides to do. (shrink)

The study empirically investigates the relationship between corporate governance and the triple bottom line sustainability performance through the lens of agency theory and stakeholder theory. We claim, in fact, that no single theory fully accounts for all the hypothesised relationships. We measure sustainability performance through manual content analysis on sustainability reports of the US-based companies. The study extends the existing literature by investigating the impact of selected corporate governance mechanisms on each dimension of sustainability performance, as defined by the GRI (...) framework. Our approach allows to identify which governance mechanisms foster triple bottom line performance, also revealing that some mechanisms fit only specific dimension of sustainability. The fact-based findings provide support for a new beginning in the theorising process in which the theories must try not only to provide rationale for the impact of corporate governance on sustainability, but also to explain which dimension of sustainability might be more affected. The most important implication for practitioners is the support for sustainability practices, which may be gained through implementation of particular corporate governance mechanisms. The findings contribute also to the improvement of the ongoing standard setting process, in particular as it concerns the in-depth revision of the economic dimension of sustainability carried out under the new GRI framework. (shrink)

No single moral theory can instruct us as to whether and to what extent we are confronted with legal loopholes, e.g. whether or not new legal rules should be added to the system in the criminal law field. This question on the primary rules of the law appears crucial for today’s debate on roboethics and still, goes beyond the expertise of robo-ethicists. On the other hand, attention should be drawn to the secondary rules of the law: The unpredictability of robotic (...) behaviour and the lack of data on the probability of events, their consequences and costs, make hard to determine the levels of risk and hence, the amount of insurance premiums and other mechanisms on which new forms of accountability for the behaviour of robots may hinge. By following Japanese thinking, the aim is to show why legally de-regulated, or special, zones for robotics, i.e. the secondary rules of the system, pave the way to understand what kind of primary rules we may want for our robots. (shrink)

In the two golden centuries that followed the death of Socrates, ancient philosophy underwent a tremendous transformation that culminated in the philosophical systematizations of Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools. Fundamental figures other than Plato were active after the death of Socrates; his immediate pupils, the Socratics, took over his legacy and developed it in a variety of ways. This rich philosophical territory has however been left largely underexplored in the scholarship. This collection of eleven previously unpublished essays by leading (...) scholars fills a gap in the literature, providing new insight into the ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology as developed by key figures of the Socratic schools. Analyzing the important contributions that the Socratics and their heirs have offered ancient philosophical thought, as well as the impact these contributions had on philosophy as a discipline, this book will appeal to researchers and scholars of Classical Studies, as well as Philosophy and Ancient History. (shrink)

In order to present a hopefully comprehensive framework of what is the stake of the growing use of robot soldiers, the paper focuses on: the different impact of robots on legal systems, e.g., contractual obligations and tort liability; how robots affect crucial notions as causality, predictability and human culpability in criminal law and, finally, specific hypotheses of robots employed in “just wars.” By using the traditional distinction between causes that make wars just and conduct admissible on the battlefield, the aim (...) is to clarify how advancement of military robotics technology is transforming a 2,000-year-old legal debate on the concept of “just war.” For the first time, legal systems will hold political authorities and military commissioners responsible for what an artificial soldier autonomously decides to do. The paper examines how the new scenario affects both principles of military conduct and notions of justice in resorting to war. (shrink)

The Jewish Law (Halakahh) is probably the older legal system working in our time. It is established on a hierarchy of different texts. The oldest and more authoritative is the Torah (the five books of Moshe), then come the Mishnah, the Talmud, the compilation as Maimonide’s Mishne Torah and Caro’s Shulchan Arukh, then the responsa of the rabbis. While the authorship of the later texts is more or less clear, the one of the Torah is highly problematic, also in the (...) self-understanding of Jewish hermeneutics. This question is discussed in the present paper not from a philological-historical point of view, but from a semiotic one, trying to understand what devices and regimes of enunciation are enacted by the text in order to establish its semiotic-juridical effects. A special double enunciation frame is proposed as the mark of the legislative power in the text, in correlation with another textual device, a sort of divine “signature”. The further evolution of the authorship of the Jewish Law is discussed in its relation with the question of the autonomy in the interpretation of the sacred text. (shrink)

The Μικρομεγάλη Ἰλιάς, the first work written by John Tzetzes, consists of 1.676 hexameters and numerous scholia. It narrates the events of the Trojan war from the conception of Paris to the fall of the city. This paper analyses the poem and its structure. In his later Exegesis to the Iliad, Tzetzes states that the Μικρομεγάλη Ἰλιάς allows to “learn thoroughly, in every detail” the history of the war. Following this evidence, the macro- and the microstructure of the poem are (...) analysed in order to understand how Tzetzes structured his literary work and to what end. The last paragraph deals with the title Μικρομεγάλη Ἰλιάς. (shrink)

In the “Vienna lecture”, the whole of the world’s history is at one moment depicted through the allegory of a wavy sea without borders. In The Idea of Phenomenology, the philosopherstoryteller is caught up in a heavy sea, but at the end, they finally manage to “drop the anchor on the shore of phenomenology”. With the break into the “mainland of absolute givenness” through phenomenological reduction, allegorical representation should lose its philosophical justification. However, metaphors which evoke allegories continue to proliferate (...) even in the most rigorous phenomenological descriptions. Despite its inherent metaphoricity, so vivid that at the crucial points of Husserl’s analyses often reappears a mythical clash of land and sea, the phenomenological interpretation of the world seems nonetheless essentially non-allegorical. (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 this paper I offer a reconstruction of the account of meaning and language the Cyrenaics appear to have defended on the basis of a famous passage of Sextus, as well as showing the philosophical parentage of that account.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.