We present recent results on the model companions of set theory, placing them in the context of a current debate in the philosophy of mathematics. We start by describing the dependence of the notion of model companionship on the signature, and then we analyze this dependence in the specific case of set theory. We argue that the most natural model companions of set theory describe (as the signature in which we axiomatize set theory varies) theories of $H_{\kappa ^+}$, as $\kappa (...) $ ranges among the infinite cardinals. We also single out $2^{\aleph _0}=\aleph _2$ as the unique solution of the continuum problem which can (and does) belong to some model companion of set theory (enriched with large cardinal axioms). While doing so we bring to light that set theory enriched by large cardinal axioms in the range of supercompactness has as its model companion (with respect to its first order axiomatization in certain natural signatures) the theory of $H_{\aleph _2}$ as given by a strong form of Woodin’s axiom $(*)$ (which holds assuming $\mathsf {MM}^{++}$ ). Finally this model-theoretic approach to set-theoretic validities is explained and justified in terms of a form of maximality inspired by Hilbert’s axiom of completeness. (shrink)

I shall commence with an eminently subjective statement: reading this book was a pleasant experience. Let me explain why, then, hence providing a somewhat more objective set of reasons for the posi...

For several decades now a set of researches from a wide range of different sectors has been developed which goes by the name of “science of complexity” and is opposed point by point to the paradigm of classical science. It challenges the idea that world is “simple.” To the reductionist idea that each process is the sum of the actions of its components it opposes a holistic view. The aim of the present article is to analyze the epistemological status attributed (...) in the science of complexity to several fundamental ideas, such as those of scientific law, objectivity, and prediction. The aim is to show that the hope of superseding reductionism by means of concepts such as that of “emergence” is fallacious and that the science of complexity proposes forms of reductionism that are even more restrictive than the classical ones, particularly when it claims to unify in a single treatment problems that vary widely in nature such as physical, biological, and social problems. (shrink)

The Master Argument from Hallucination is one of the most discussed challenges to Naïve Realism. Naïve Realists have thoroughly scrutinised a number of strategies for resisting it. However, they have generally dismissed out of hand what I call the Monist Strategy, according to which the hallucinations invoked by the argument also consist of a relation of perceptual awareness with the mind-independent environment. In this paper, I consider whether this often-implicit dismissal is justified. I suggest that the core of resistance plausibly (...) lies in an assumption regarding the causal requirements for the obtaining of the relation of perceptual awareness invoked by Naïve Realists. Drawing on the existing literature (Raleigh, 2014; Ali, 2018), I consider and elaborate ways in which the Monist Strategy might be developed consistently with this assumption. I suggest that there are indeed reasons to question the viability of this project. However, I argue that it is not entirely clear why Naïve Realists are forced to buy into this assumption. If they were willing to reject it, I contend, a compelling version of the Monist Strategy could be developed. According to such a view, at least some hallucinations are episodes of perceptual awareness of regions of space. (shrink)

Despite the growing interest in sentience, especially regarding sentience in non-human animals, there is little agreement around its evolutionary origin and distribution, ontological status or ethical relevance. One aspect of this work-in-progress situation is a panoply of definitions of sentience to be found in the literature, from intensional ones appealing to ontological features (such as awareness, agency, consciousness) to implicit extensional ones based on physiological, morphological or behavioural features. We review and classify some of the most common definitions of sentience (...) to underline how they inevitably rely on pragmatical interests and ontological commitments which, when not explicitly declared, lead to pitfalls and fallacies when the definition is applied in practice. We claim that the obstacles, impasses and complications in the definition of sentience are consubstantial to its interest- and theory-laden, subjective nature. We suggest that, given these features, each definition should only be used in the limited epistemic and practical area it is produced for, while the general discourse around sentience is better developed through metaphorical rather than definitional language. (shrink)

A variety of evidence demonstrates that memory is a reconstructive process prone to errors and distortions. However, the complex relationship between memory encoding, strength of memory reactivation, and the likelihood of reporting true or false memories has yet to be ascertained. We address this issue in a setting that mimics a real-life experience: We asked participants to take a virtual museum tour in which they freely explored artworks included in the exhibit, while we measured the participants’ spontaneous viewing time of (...) each explored artwork. In a following memory reactivation phase, participants were presented again with explored artworks, followed by novel artworks not belonging to the same exhibit. For each of these objects, participants provided a reliving rating that indexed the strength of memory reactivation. In the final memory recognition phase, participants underwent an old/new memory task, involving reactivated vs. baseline targets, and activated and baseline lures. The results showed that those targets that were spontaneously viewed for a longer amount of time were more frequently correctly recognized. This pattern was particularly true for reactivated targets associated with greater memory strength. Paradoxically, however, lures that were presented after targets associated with higher reliving ratings in the reactivation phase were more often erroneously recognized as artworks encountered during the tour. This latter finding indicates that memory intrusions, irrespective of the viewing time, are more likely to take place and be incorporated into true memories when the strength of target memory is higher. (shrink)

The last decade has seen great progress in the study of the nature of crossmodal links in exogenous and endogenous spatial attention . Exogenous spatial cuing studies of human crossmodal attention and multisensory integration. In C. Spence, & J. Driver , Crossmodal space and crossmodal attention . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.], for a recent review). A growing body of research now highlights the existence of robust crossmodal links between auditory, visual, and tactile spatial attention. However, until recently, studies of (...) exogenous and endogenous attention have proceeded relatively independently. In daily life, however, these two forms of attentional orienting continuously compete for the control of our attentional resources, and ultimately, our awareness. It is therefore critical to try and understand how exogenous and endogenous attention interact in both the unimodal context of the laboratory and the multisensory contexts that are more representative of everyday life. To date, progress in understanding the interaction between these two forms of orienting has primarily come from unimodal studies of visual attention. We therefore start by summarizing what has been learned from this large body of empirical research, before going on to review more recent studies that have started to investigate the interaction between endogenous and exogenous orienting in a multisensory setting. We also discuss the evidence suggesting that exogenous spatial orienting is not truly automatic, at least when assessed in a crossmodal context. Several possible models describing the interaction between endogenous and exogenous orienting are outlined and then evaluated in terms of the extant data. (shrink)

Semblanza de G. Tagliacozzo a través de las distintas voces que, desde su infancia hasta su muerte, lo llamaron en su vida: las primeras vocaciones de grandeza , las voces de la academia , la voz de América , la impelente voz de Vico , la voz de los caminos que la naturaleza recorre .Semblance of G. Tagliacozzo through the voices that he followed from his younger age to his death: the first calls for greatness , the voices of academy (...) , the voice of America , the impelling voice of Vico , and the voice of the ways that nature runs. (shrink)

English, French, German, and Italian, with summaries in the same languages.

Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, he was also a man with solid roots in his own time. He taught in Naples and Rome, then for the ten years 1939-1948 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the few university teachers who, when the oath of loyalty to the Italian fascist regime was introduced in October 1931, opted not to accept that act of submission. His memoirs, Fantasmi ritrovati, were published in 1966; (...) the book, now out of print, conjures up a tableau vivant of half a century of intellectual encounters in Italy and Europe between the wars. Among the portraits he paints there is the astounding story of those crucial days in June 1924 when the fascist government became a full-blown regime. This article presents extended extracts from that story. (shrink)

Just like the self, sensations and emotions expressed in literature are elusive issues. Necessarily separated from living reality and yet, in a sense, a mirror of it, linguistic coding of bodily feeling and emotional feeling became subject of avid interest among scholars of historical emotion research and the history of mentality in intra- and intercultural perspectives. This volume combines eleven essays with critical discussions concerning the bidirectional network of sense perception and emotion. Exploring the theme from different angles - psychological, (...) medical, and literary - From Skin to Heart highlights the intimate interrelationship between bodily sensations, states of mind, and the emotions from pain, illness, and self-destruction to love-sickness and self-sacrifice in early Chinese poetry and ethics and late imperial lyrics and narrative. The partly descriptive, partly analytical essays are contributions of a new wave of Continental and American sinology that, inspired by cultural studies, discourse analysis, and rhetorical analysis, offers fresh views on body and psyche as locked into and emerging from Chinese primary sources. An appendix provides additional examples of the rich linguistic material referring to phenomena of sense perception and the affective sphere and their interdependence. (shrink)

Some of the best recent work on Roman priesthoods under the Republic has engaged with the issue of priestly authority and its role in defining the place of priesthoods vis-à-vis other centres of power, influence and knowledge. The aim of this paper is to make a contribution to this line of enquiry by focussing on the concept of priestlyauctoritas, which has seldom received close attention. The working hypothesis is that the study of priestlyauctoritasmay contribute to a broader understanding of the (...) place of priesthood in Republican Rome, and especially in the Late Republican period, from which most of the evidence derives. The link between religious authority and religious expertise requires special attention. (shrink)

What is an apparatus? -- The friend -- What is the contemporary?

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben presents an account of the political upheavals that ensued as the COVID-19 pandemic brought his country—and with it his countrymen's personal liberties—to a crashing halt. While controversial, Agamben’s reflections on the transformation of Western democracies hold implications far beyond any present crisis.

Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, belonging to that tradition of Italian Oriental studies that stretches from Ignazio Guidi to Leone Caetani, Carlo Alfonso Nallino and Francesco Gabrieli - he was also a man with solid roots in his own time. He taught in Naples and Rome, then for the ten years 1939-1948 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the few university teachers who, when the oath of loyalty to the Italian (...) fascist regime was introduced, in October 1931, opted not to accept that act of submission. (shrink)

La letteratura slava ecclesiastica durante l'intero arco della sua storia vive in primo luogo di traduzioni, eseguite soprattutto, seppure non esclusivamente, a partire da modelli greci. Mentre tuttavia sul piano storico-letterario l'attenzione si concentra per ovvie ragioni sulla produzione originale, in sede di analisi linguistica le opere di traduzione mantengono, o almeno dovrebbero mantenere, un ruolo fondamentale. A questo proposito ci si può addirittura spingere ad affermare che uno dei motivi per i quali a tutt'oggi mancano una storia complessiva e (...) un grande dizionario storico della lingua slava ecclesiastica risiede verosimilmente proprio nella carenza di ricerche approfondite intorno a molte traduzioni slave ecclesiastiche. Su tale sfondo va letto il libro che qui si recensisce, incentrato sul lessico delle versioni di cinque cronache bizantine, composte in ordine cronologico da Giovanni Malala, Giorgio Amartolo, Simeone Logoteta, Costantino Manasse e Giovanni Zonara, e tradotte in slavo ecclesiastico in tempi e luoghi diversi. Come si ricava dalla breve premessa di A. Guillou (p. 3), lo studio di Katia Tchérémissinoff è approdato alle stampe solo dopo un lungo intervallo dalla sua composizione; un intervallo che la bibliografia usufruita, ferma in buona sostanza al 1980, permette di quantificare in vent'anni. Prima di esaminare il volume più da vicino, il recensore purtroppo non potrà non registrare (e lamentare) il numero esorbitante di errori di stampa che coinvolgono anzitutto i nomi degli autori e i titoli delle opere citate, come per es. Bujuklev in luogo di Bujukliev (p. 19, n. 29), Sandelf per Sandfeld (p. 24, n. 37), Aitzemuller invece di Aitzetmüller (p. 30, n. 52); M. A. Meščeskij per N. A. Meščerskij (p. 42, n. 72; e vd. anche p. 98, n. 157); e quindi, “Das slavische Zort für Kirsche” (in luogo di “Das slavische Wort für Kirche”, a p. 149, n. 240), “Costantinopple byzantine” (p. 186, nn. 303 e 304, e passim), “Byzantinische Uhrkundenlehre. I. Die Kaiser Uhrkunden” (p. 196, n. 310), e così via. Dove però deve essere stato il diavolo in persona a metterci lo zampino, è nelle citazioni slave ecclesiastiche nelle quali, nonostante la revisione cui è stato sottoposto il volume (vd. p. 3), gli errori, grandi e piccoli, semplicemente non si contano: il che di certo non agevola il compito del lettore, sia egli più o meno esperto di slavo ecclesiastico. (shrink)

The end of human history is an event that has been foreseen or announced by both messianics and dialecticians. But who is the protagonist of that history that is coming—or has come—to a close? What is man? How did he come on the scene? And how has he maintained his privileged place as the master of, or first among, the animals? In The Open, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the “human” has been thought of (...) as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether. In an argument that ranges from ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish texts to twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kojève, Agamben examines the ways in which the distinction between man and animal has been manufactured by the logical presuppositions of Western thought, and he investigates the profound implications that the man/animal distinction has had for disciplines as seemingly disparate as philosophy, law, anthropology, medicine, and politics. (shrink)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language and all but one appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several central concerns of Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and (...) Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. (shrink)

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem (...) of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals. (shrink)

Parthood and composition are everywhere. The leg of a table is part of the table, the word "Christmas" is part of the sentence "I wish you a merry Christmas", the 13th century is part of the Middle Ages. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg compose Benelux, the body of a deer is composed of a huge number of cells, the Middle Ages are composed of the Early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages. Is there really a general theory (...) covering every instance of parthood and composition? Is classical mereology this general theory? Are its seemingly counter-intuitive features serious defects? -/- Mereology: A Philosophical Introduction addresses the multifaceted and lively philosophical debates surrounding these questions, and defends the idea that classical mereology is indeed the general and exhaustive theory of parthood and composition in the domain of concrete entities. -/- Several examples of parthood and composition, involving entities of different kinds, are scrutinised in depth. Incidentally, mereology is shown to interact in a surprising way with metaontology. Presenting a well-organized and comprehensive discussion of parthood and related notions, Mereology: A Philosophical Introduction contributes to a better understanding of a subject central to contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

Arguing that Western power is both "government" and "glory," this book reveals the "theological-economic" paradigm at the origin of several of the most important components of modern politics and illuminates the function of consent and the ...

"The texts published here reproduce, with some variation, those of five lectures held at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture between October 2012 and April 2013.".

In his earlier work, Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China, Paulo Santangelo embarked on an incisive analysis of Li Zhi's philosophical contributions, noting the necessity to compile evidence underscoring the significance of individual freedom and responsibility. This led him to explore the reevaluation of the individual from the latter part of the Ming dynasty to the early Qing dynasty. His aim was to trace the evolution of the valorization of individual will and desire, culminating in the construction (...) of a more autonomous selfhood. Drawing on an extensive array of sources from both Eastern and Western traditions and spanning various disciplines, Santangelo's study meticulously addresses questions of philosophical and ethical comparability. This book stands as a vital resource not only for those engaged in Chinese intellectual history and moral philosophy but also for scholars interested in understanding these issues on a global scale. (shrink)

The volume is a collections of essays aiming to reconstruct the basic elements that compose the multifaceted discourse on emotions in traditional China. A number of well-known specialists reflect on some fundamental philosophical and linguistic concepts.

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer was one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. It was also the beginning of a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of Western politics and thought. The Use of Bodies represents the ninth and final volume in this twenty-year undertaking, breaking considerable new ground while clarifying the stakes and implications of the project as a whole. It comprises three major sections. The first uses Aristotle's (...) discussion of slavery as a starting point for radically rethinking notions of selfhood; the second calls for a complete reworking of Western ontology; and the third explores the enigmatic concept of "form-of-life," which is in many ways the motivating force behind the entire Homo Sacer project. Interwoven between these major sections are shorter reflections on individual thinkers, while the epilogue pushes toward a new approach to political life that breaks with the destructive deadlocks of Western thought. The Use of Bodies represents a true masterwork by one of our greatest living philosophers. (shrink)