The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant both as a source of insight into the influences on the eighteenth-century philosopher's intellectual development and as one of the earliest and most sophisticated examples of philosophical autobiography. Referring to himself in the third person, Vico records the course of his life and the influence that various thinkers had on the development of concepts central to his mature work. Beyond its relevance to the development of the New Science, the Autobiography is also (...) of interest for the light it sheds on Italian culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Still regarded by many as the best English-language translation of this classic work, the Cornell edition was widely lauded when first published in 1944. Wrote the Saturday Review of Literature: "Here was something new in the art of self-revelation. Vico wrote of his childhood, the psychological influences to which he was subjected, the social conditions under which he grew up and received an education and evolved his own way of thinking. It was so outstanding a piece of work that it was held up as a model, which it still is.". (shrink)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The standard edition of Vico's works is by Fausto Nicolini (8 vols. in 11; Ban, 1911-41). For a bibliography, see Benedetto Croce, ...

Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, historian and jurist of the Age of Enlightenment. He was the first exhibitor of the fundamentals of social sciences and seminotics. He inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history.

Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, historian and jurist of the Age of Enlightenment. He was the first exhibitor of the fundamentals of social sciences and seminotics. He inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history.

This article discusses the human capacity to seek meaning and more, feeling last for life. For this, serves up a double contribution: the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, founder of Logotherapy, and statements voiced in the first chapter of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. Both have several points of convergence.

_A fresh translation of _The New Science_, with detailed footnotes that will help both the scholar and the new reader navigate Vico’s masterpiece_ _The New Science_ is the major work of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. First published in 1725 and revised in 1730 and 1744, it calls for a reinterpretation of human civilization by tracing the stages of historical development shared by all societies. Almost unknown during his lifetime, the work had a profound influence on later thinkers, from Montesquieu (...) and Marx to Joyce and Gadamer. This edition offers a fresh translation and detailed annotations which enable the reader to track Vico’s multiple allusions to other texts. The introduction situates the work firmly within a contemporary context and newly establishes Vico as a thinker of modernity. (shrink)

: In his autobiographical account, the Munqidh min al-Dalāl, al-Ghazālī reflects on his conversion from skepticism to faith. Previous scholarship has interpreted this text as an anticipation of Cartesian positions regarding epistemic certainty. Although the existing similarities between al-Ghazālī and Descartes are striking, the focus of the present essay lies on the different philosophical aims pursued by the two thinkers. It is thus argued that al-Ghazālī operates with a broader notion of the Self than Descartes, because it is inclusive of (...) the body. And it is shown that the two philosophers use completely diverging paradigms. While Descartes models his notion of evidence after mathematical certainty, al-Ghazālī draws his famous 'ilm al-yaqīnī (certain knowledge) from a religious context. (shrink)

Malebranche and the Search after Lost Identity. Legacy and Uncertainty of His Philosophy between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Starting from the Œuvres complètes edited by Robinet, the article summarizes the vicissitudes through which the French historical scholarship with its leading figure Victor Cousin have restored the imagine and the correspondence of Malebranche, beginning with the dissemination of the original documents, conserved throughout the eighteenth century by P. Lelong, P. André, and finally P. Adry. In spite of his great historical (...) contribution, the French scholarship generally stressed an inadequate assessment of this philosophy, sharply suspected of spinozism, a judgment inherited by the handbooks of the history of philosophy edited between the XIX and the XX Century, as proved by the case of Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie by Überweg. The article concludes with three minimalist but creative readings of Malebranche by Proust, Heisenberg, Dalì. (shrink)

A translation that provides a complete picture of Vico as a forerunner of constructivist epistemology. It demonstrates that he was a critic of the enlightenment, a significant humanist and culture theorist who influenced Karl Marx and James Joyce.

Im Bemühen darum, das philosophische und wissenschaftliche Werk des Jubilars zu würdigen, entstand ein thematisch und methodisch geschlossener Sammelband mit 34 Beiträgen zur Philosophie und Geistesgeschichte der Renaissance. Epochenübergreifend wird darin aufgezeigt, wie philosophische Probleme transformiert werden: sei es, daß sie neuen systematischen Zusammenhängen angepaßt werden oder daß sie sich in diesen neu stellen. Darüber hinaus bietet der Festschriftband eine Reihe von Aufsätzen zur Renaissancephilosophie. Insbesondere jene Beiträge, die neues Licht auf den Zusammenhang von Mathematik und Methodenproblem in der Philosophie (...) dieser Epoche werfen, dürften für die Forschung von höchstem Interesse sein. (shrink)

: This essay highlights how contemporary Muslim fundamentalists reduce Islam's rich and complex intellectual legacy to a set of authoritarian rules. The three branches of classical Islamic education-theology, jurisprudence, and ethics-are particularly targeted. The reductionist pattern applied to these areas is designed to eliminate both the scholarly space of inquiry and the room for individual reflection traditionally granted to its followers by Islamic religion. The essay ends with an analysis of the language used by Osama bin Laden in various documents (...) over the last ten years that show how he has abused Islam's jurisprudential tradition to confer on him a convenient likeness of legality. (shrink)

This powerful new translation makes it clear why this work marked a turning-point in humanist thinking as significance as Newton's contemporary revolution in ...

The relatedness between a country or a firm and a product is a measure of the feasibility of that economic activity. As such, it is a driver for investments at a private and institutional level. Traditionally, relatedness is measured using networks derived by country-level co-occurrences of product pairs, that is counting how many countries export both. In this work, we compare networks and machine learning algorithms trained not only on country-level data, but also on firms, which is something not much (...) studied due to the low availability of firm-level data. We quantitatively compare the different measures of relatedness, by using them to forecast the exports at the country and firm level, assuming that more related products have a higher likelihood to be exported in the future. Our results show that relatedness is scale dependent: the best assessments are obtained by using machine learning on the same typology of data one wants to predict. Moreover, we found that while relatedness measures based on country data are not suitable for firms, firm-level data are very informative also for the development of countries. In this sense, models built on firm data provide a better assessment of relatedness. We also discuss the effect of using parameter optimization and community detection algorithms to identify clusters of related companies and products, finding that a partition into a higher number of blocks decreases the computational time while maintaining a prediction performance well above the network-based benchmarks. (shrink)

For the last 15 years, companies have extensively increased their environmental disclosure relative to their environmental strategy in response to institutional pressures. Based on a computerized content analysis of the annual reports of the 55 largest French industrial companies, we describe environmental disclosure with respect to the different strategies implemented by companies over a period of 6 years. The results show that environmental disclosure becomes more and more technical and precise for all the companies. Environmental innovations are presented as a (...) means of increasing energy efficiency and of obtaining a competitive advantage in green market products. The environmental management system implemented by proactive companies allows them to improve their environmental performance. However, the results show that the economic situation significantly influences the way environmental issues are addressed. (shrink)

Die Autorin analysiert die politische Konzeption des Messias als König und Gesetzgeber bei Maimonides in seinen Briefen, in Pereq Heleq sowie in Mishneh Torah. Besonderes Augenmerk liegt auf folgenden Schwerpunkten: a) die Konzeption des König-Philosophen bei Platon und Aristoteles; b) die karäischen Einflüsse auf Pereq Heleq sowie die Einflüsse der Mu'taziliten und der Ash'ariten durch die karäische Vermittlung; c) die individuelle und gemeinschaftliche Dimension des ́olam ha-ba im Werk Maimonides'; d.) die Beziehung zwischen Philosophie und Gesetz im Mishneh Torah und (...) deren eschatologische Konzeption im Vergleich zu Al-Farabis politischen und religionsphilosophischen Werken. Die Analyse basiert auf einer ausführlichen Lektüre der jüdischen, arabischen und judäoarabischen Quellen. Ziel der Autorin ist es, eine Lücke zu schließen in der politisch-philosophischen Kette zwischen Platon, Aristoteles, Al-Farabi und Maimonides in Bezug auf den messianischen König. Anhand der Denkstrukturen der jüdisch-islamischen Epoche zwischen dem 8. und dem 12. Jahrhundert wird der politische Charakter des König-Messias sowie seine spezifische Darstellung im intellektuellen Milieu von Maimonides konstruiert. (shrink)

Islamic philosophy developed within a highly diversified doctrinal and religious tradition, and consequently represents a very complex phenomenon encompassing many different political, intellectual, dogmatic, and spiritual movements. Insight into the historical circumstances that shaped Islamic thought is necessary for an understanding of Arabic philosophical concerns in the early period of Islam and for subsequent Muslim intellectual interests. It also helps, of course, in approaching topics, themes and genres of Islamic philosophy that cannot be appreciated by applying only the standards set (...) by occidental thought. Questions of philosophical significance relating to the Quran, the humanistic disciplines (particularly language and history), juridical theology or Shī‘ite spirituality will therefore be treated in this paper with the same measure of consideration as the Western‐originated concepts of the rationalist schools in Islam. Only in this way can we avoid the temptation to restrict our discussion to those few Muslim thinkers who, in constructing their philosophical systems, have stood on the shoulders of the ancient Greek philosophers, and whose books have therefore become known to the Latin West. (shrink)

The launching of philosophical pursuits undertaken in an East-West trajectory at the first East-West Philosophers’ Conference in 1939 represents a turning point in philosophy. However, as groundbreaking as this approach was, it left out all philosophical cultures that did not fit the initial framework. Islamic philosophy, being viewed as neither Western nor Eastern (Asian), was thus marginalized from the start. I introduce “Bricolage” – a method emphasizing curiosity, humility, and playfulness – as a more nuanced way of engaging with diverse (...) philosophical traditions. “Bricoleurs” are interculturalists who remain open to the use of different methodologies: they are “flâneurs” walking through diverse philosophical landscapes for sheer intellectual pleasure. (shrink)

Hilbert’s axiomatic approach to the sciences was characterized by a dynamic methodology tied to scientific and mathematical fields under investigation. In particular, it is an analytic art for choosing axioms but, at the same time, it has to include dynamically synthetic procedures and meta-theoretical reflections. Axioms have to be useful, or capture something, or help as part of explanations. The Andréka-Németi group use several formal axiomatic theories together to re-capture, predict, recover or explain the phenomena of special relativity, general relativity (...) and classical kinematics. Their scientific methodology is close to Hilbert’s conceptions of how science should be done ideally. In this paper, we compare Formica’s reading of Hilbert’s axiomatic method to the method used by the Andréka-Németi group. (shrink)

Introduction to Marsilio Ficino's Philosophy (English translation): Intellectual Development: The Discovery of a Philosophical Gift. The Organic Worldview: Man as "Intellectual Hero." Psychology: The Soul as "the Midpoint of Everything." Epistemology: The Mind as "Infinite Power." Metaphysics: The Mind-Soul as "Intellect and Will." Aesthetics: The Soul as "Artist." Reception and Updated Bibliography (selection).

English translation of paper title: Action and Passion in the Renaissance. The Womanly and the Manly in Agrippa, Postel, and Bovelles. This paper uses the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa and the Querelle des Femmes as historic backgrounds for how Agrippa of Nettesheim, Guillaum Postel, and Charles de Bovelles reconcile the notions of "male" and "female" in their respective philosophies.