We show that the complete first order theory of an MV algebra has equation image countable models unless the MV algebra is finitely valued. So, Vaught's Conjecture holds for all MV algebras except, possibly, for finitely valued ones. Additionally, we show that the complete theories of finitely valued MV algebras are equation image and that all ω-categorical complete theories of MV algebras are finitely axiomatizable and decidable. As a final result we prove that the free algebra on countably many generators (...) of any locally finite variety of MV algebras is ω-categorical. (shrink)

The arguments offered by Jaswal & Akhtar to counter the social motivation theory do not appear to be directly related to the SMT tenets and predictions, seem to not be empirically testable, and are inconsistent with empirical evidence. To evaluate the merits and shortcomings of the SMT and identify scientifically testable alternatives, advances are needed on the conceptualization and operationalization of social motivation across diagnostic boundaries.

We present a uniform version of Di Nola Theorem, this enables to embed all MV-algebras of a bounded cardinality in an algebra of functions with values in a single non-standard ultrapower of the real interval [0,1]. This result also implies the existence, for any cardinal α, of a single MV-algebra in which all infinite MV-algebras of cardinality at most α embed. Recasting the above construction with iterated ultrapowers, we show how to construct such an algebra of values in a definable (...) way, thus providing a sort of “canonical” set of values for the functional representation. (shrink)

We start from Marra–Spada duality between semisimple MV-algebras and Tychonoff spaces, and we consider the particular cases when the \-skeleta of the MV-algebras are restricted in some way. In particular we consider antiskeletal MV-algebras, that is, the ones whose \-skeleton is trivial.

In this paper we first provide a new axiomatization of algebraically closed MV-algebras based on McNaughtonʼs Theorem. Then we turn to sheaves, and we represent algebraically closed MV-algebras as algebras of global sections of sheaves, where the stalks are divisible MV-chains and the base space is Stonean.

The New Economic Windows Series, derived from Massimo Salzano's ideas and work, incorporates material from textbooks, monographs and conference proceedings that deals with both the theoretical and applied aspects of various sub-disciplines ...

In this paper we study the set of MV-algebras with given prime spectrum and we introduce the class of spectral MV-algebras. An MV-algebra is spectral if it is generated by the union of all its prime ideals (or proper ideals, or principal ideals, or maximal ideals). Among spectral MV-algebras, special attention is devoted to bipartite MV-algebras. An MV-algebra is bipartite if it admits an homomorphism onto the MV-algebra of two elements. We prove that both bipartite MV-algebras and spectral MV-algebras can (...) be finitely axiomatized in first order logic. We also prove that there is only, up to isomorphism, a set of MV-algebras with given prime spectrum. A further part of the paper is devoted to some relations between bipartite MV-algebras and their states. Recall that a state on an MV-algebra is a generalization of a probability measure on a Boolean algebra. Particular states are the states with Bayes’ property. We show that an MV-algebra admits a state with the Bayes’ property if and only if it is bipartite. (shrink)

Circulation of ideas among philosophers is the core of Philosophy itself. The lack of this circulation can lead to obscurantism and cultural provincialism. The latter, for instance, afflicted Italy during the first half of the 20th century because of the close-minded neo-idealism of Croce and the mutual indifference of science and philosophy. Antonio Gramsci tried to overcome the problem of provincialism. In this essay, I explain how he attempted to overcome it. I focus on his conceptual categories like heg (...) emony, organic intellectual, national-popular and so on. (shrink)

A philosopher and political thinker describes a new political grammar free of modernist assumptions. In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Biopolitics, biopowers, control, the multitude, people, war, borders, dependency and interdependency, state, nation, the common, difference, resistance, subjective rights, revolution, freedom, democracy: these are just a few of the themes Negri addressed in these experimental laboratories. Postmodernity, Negri suggests, can (...) be described as a “porcelain factory”: a delicate and fragile construction that could be destroyed through one clumsy act. Looking across twentieth century history, Negri warns that our inability to anticipate future developments has already placed coming generations in serious jeopardy. Describing the years 1917-1968 as the “short century,” Negri suggests that by the end of it, all of the familiar markers of modernity had lost their relevance. Confronted with an intolerable reality, indignation and the revolutionary will to transform the world have both taken new forms and must be understood anew, free of modernist assumptions. In the impassioned debates recounted in this book, Antonio Negri attempts to describe the formation of an alternative political horizon and looks for a way to define the practices and modes of expression that democracy could take.Antonio Negri is a philosopher and essay writer. A political and social activist in the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, he taught political sciences for many years and has written numerous books on political philosophy including Marx beyond Marx, The Savage Anomaly, Insurgencies ; and in collaboration with Michael Hardt, Empire and Multitude. (shrink)

In this essential rereading of Spinoza's (1632-1677) philosophical and political writings, Negri positions this thinker within the historical context of the development of the modern state and its attendant political economy.

Spinoza speculated on how ethics could emerge from biology and psychology rather than disrupt them and recent evidence suggests he might have gotten it right. His radical deconstruction and reconstruction of ethics is supported by a number of avenues of research in the cognitive and neurosciences. This paper gathers together and presents a composite picture of recent research that supports Spinoza’s theory of the emotions and of the natural origins of ethics. It enumerates twelve naturalist claims of Spinoza that now (...) seem to be supported by substantial evidence from the neurosciences and recent cognitive science. I focus on the evidence provided by Lakoff and Johnson in their summary of recent cognitive science in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999); by Antonio Damasio in his assessment of the state of affective neuroscience in Descartes’ Error (1994) and in The Feeling of What Happens (1999) (with passing references to his recent Looking for Spinoza (2003); and by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues in the neural basis of emotional contagion and resonance, i.e., the neural basis of primitive sociality and intersubjectivity, that bear out Spinoza’s account of social psychology as rooted in the mechanism he called attention to and identified as affective imitation. (shrink)

Recent neuro-psychoanalytic literature has emphasized the view that our subjective identity rests on ancient subcortical neuro-psychic processes expressing unthinking forms of experience, which are “affectively intense without being known” (Solms and Panksepp, 2012). Devoid of internal representations, the emotional states of our “core-Self” (Panksepp, 1998b) are entirely “projected” towards the external world and tend to be discharged through instinctual action-patterns. However, due to the close connections between the subcortical and the cortical midline brain, the emotional drives may also find a (...) way to be reflected within an intrinsic self-referential processing, evident when the organism is not actively engaged with the external world. Thanks to such endogenous functioning, the core-Self emotional dispositions are not overtly executed, but they are organized within coherent dynamic mental structures, called “feeling-toned complexes” by C.G. Jung and “unconscious phantasies” by Melanie Klein. The intrinsic self-referential dynamism of the ‘brainmind’ originated from REM sleep arousal and then evolved in the resting-state activity of a complex of cortico-limbic midline brain structures (CMS), also called Default Mode Network (DMN). From our neuro-ethological perspective, it is sustained by an “introverted” SEEKING activity leading to the subjective exploration of internally constructed virtual scenarios. This “mind wandering” function, implicated in dreaming, fantasy processing, remembering and thinking, is the essence of the imaginative function and constitutes the first form of reflection, where intentions and drives gain a primordial form of conscious (but not self-conscious) representation. During postnatal development, this original (“archetypal”) imaginative function is slowly attuned in a relational “transitional” space and may be expressed first in non-verbal and eventually in abstract-verbal social communicative patterns. Our view has noticeable implications for psychotherapy. Instead of trying to directly modify interpersonal, extrinsic relationships (a top-down approach), dysfunctional emotional-relational patterns may be modified by a process in which the patient is helped to let-go of the perceived feeling-objects in favor of an immersion, via the actual feeling, from the superficial level of perception towards a void feeling-state, empty of images. Only starting from this “anoetic” feeling-state, the deep imaginal creative and re-structuring self-referential activity may be reactivated by a process of spontaneous imagination. (shrink)

The study of Buddhist texts can inform us of the way scriptures were composed, as well as illuminate the reasons behind their production. This study examines the phenomenon of borrowing and reusing portions of texts without attributing them to their ‘legitimate authors’ within the Buddhist world of contemporary Tibet. It shows that not only is such a practice not at all infrequent and is often socially accepted, but that it is used in this case as a platform to advance specific (...) claims and promote an explicit agenda. Therefore, rather than considering these as instances of plagiarism, this essay looks at the practice of copying and borrowing as an exercise in intertextuality, intended as the faithful retransmission of ancient truths, and as an indication of the public domain of texts in Tibet. (shrink)

Una risposta alla prolusione di Zeller.-Della libertà morale.-I problemi della filosofia della storia.-In memoria del Manifesto dei comunisti.- Del materialismo storico.-Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia.-Da un secolo all'altro.-Storia, filosofia della storia, sociologia e materialismo storico.

Text of 1735 and 1936 eds. of the Meditationes, with concordances, reproducedon 3 microfiches (11 x 15 cm.) in pocket.

This essay explores the debate concerning the idea of democracy in the French Revolution. It shows that this idea is based upon representative democracy as well as direct democracy, maintaining a complex and precarious equilibrium between the two. It investigates the different political-institutional means used in those years, the parliamentary debates and the three constitutions, focusing on concepts such as representation, electoral mandate and primary assemblies. Representative democracy and direct democracy turn out to be neither distant from nor alternative to (...) each other, but interdependent and mutual. (shrink)

Cimatti and Salzani have put together a rich collection of essays on animal studies that provides an exhaustive overview of how Italian contemporary philosophers are engaging with animal ethics, antispeciesism, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and biopolitics. This edited volume represents an important development in the “animal turn” in the humanities, particularly because it is published in English, allowing for a more efficient dialogue between “Italian theory” and philosophers around the world. This is, in fact, the first collection that will give an international (...) audience access to the rich and varied contribution of Italian contemporary philosophy in the burgeoning field of animal studies. It is also important to point out that all the authors—who are either well-established erudite thinkers or bright and innovative new voices in the panorama of Italian philosophy—effectively engage with recent and prominent scholarship in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism, and biopolitics, such as the work of Zizek, Esposito, Hardt, Calarco, Braidotti, and Wolfe.The volume is clearly intended for an academic audience: professors, scholars, and graduate students studying not only philosophy, Italian studies, environmental humanities, and animal ethics, but also political science, ethology, comparative literature, art history, and religious studies. In addition, the book could also find an audience in animal rights and environmental activists who are interested in the philosophical aspects and ethical and political implications of their actions.The division of the book into three sections (“Animality in the Italian Tradition,” “Animality in Perspective,” and “Fragments of a Contemporary Debate”) provides the reader a clear trajectory from the Italian philosophical tradition to the current debate on “animality.” In the first section, in fact, the authors engage with the rich and complex tradition of both Italian animal philosophy and advocacy. In the three essays that make up this section, the authors provide a compelling historical perspective of the anti-Cartesian and antidualistic aspects of Italian thought, tracing its pre-Cartesian origin and post-Cartesian developments through the work of Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. This section also includes essays outlining the development of animal bioethics in Italy, which emerged from the work of animal advocacy pioneer Aldo Capitini and continued to have an important impact on Italian culture thanks to the antispeciesist movement and debate, of which the third essay of this section provides an exhaustive intellectual history.The second section of the volume, comprised of six essays, provides an overall view of the ongoing philosophical debate on animality that traverses Italian posthumanism, feminism, theology, biopolitics, environmental ethics, and Marxist thought. Here the authors engage with some of the prominent voices in the contemporary Italian philosophical landscape, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Roberto Marchesini, Antonio Negri, Maria Turchetto, Adriana Caravero, Luisa Muraro, and Paolo De Benedetti. As pointed out by the editors in their introduction, this section does not intend to offer a complete account of the extensive and heterogenous exchanges occurring inside the Italian biological turn, but instead aims at investigating its most compelling approaches and effectively links them to the ongoing transnational debate.The rich historiography and analysis of the first two sections is complemented, in the third section of the volume, by the speculative approach that strongly characterizes all five final essays. Here we can find some of the most exciting and original developments in Italian scholarship on animal philosophy. This section is, therefore, the most effective in presenting the distinctive approach of contemporary Italian philosophers in rethinking animality and the human-animal interplay, in particular inside the historical and epistemological frame of the Anthropocene. For instance, Massimo Filippi explores how slaughterhouses have become exemplary spaces to investigate the calculation that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides humans and animals, which removes animality and excises the other, which forcefully bans any imagining of the monstrously other, of the other-than-human, and that produces, among others and besides It-Self, the Woman, the Homosexual, the Abnormal, the Migrant, the Criminal, and the Animal. (p. 225)Structuring his argument on the real and metaphorical “mathematics of sacrifice” at work in the slaughterhouse (p. 226), Filippi engages with the processes that enable human ontological privilege, with intraspecific and interspecific mechanisms of discrimination, and with philosophical, political, and ethical implications of meat production.For a second and final example, ethologist Roberto Marchesini—one of the most original and prominent voices in animal studies—focuses on redefining the paradigm of “animality.” In his essay, Marchesini questions behaviorism and the automatism of learning, key aspects that have been prominent in defining animality in many fields, from biology to philosophy. Building from his groundbreaking and extensive work in ethology and zooanthropology, he argues for an “elaborative model” of animality (animal as subject) against the fallacy of the “automatism-based model” (animal as mechanism): Subjectivity is the implicit condition of the animal being, an expressive dimension that may also be unconscious but that precedes from (i) a constructivist conception of behavior, which we could explain by considering it a work in progress, always open and never predetermined, but equally never imposed and nonetheless always co-factorial to external contributions, and (ii) a propositional view of the individual, or rather from being supported by verbal structures such as to delight, to fear, to want, which join themselves to modal predicates declined according to context, but which likewise render the individual the protagonist. (p. 247)Animal studies has established itself as one of the most exciting areas of research inside the biological turn of the humanities worldwide and, by collecting such a large number of compelling and provocative theories from Italian contemporary philosophy, the impact of Cimatti and Salzani's volume will be twofold: It will enrich and expand a developing discussion in the environmental humanities and in animal studies while establishing the centrality of Italian thought in such an important and, in the Anthropocene era, necessary debate. (shrink)