CHAPTER Structure and function In physical systems made by a large number of basic constituents one can observe collective properties which find their ...

No paradox exists in the fact that, in the Special Relativity, for the mass of a material body, considered in motion at constant speed, whose measure is u, the formula: m = m0/√ can be written, while for a photon the same formula holds, when between its source and the observer a state of relative motion at constant speed, whose measure is u, exists and it is observed along the direction perpendicular to the direction of his speed.

L'a. esamina il concetto di `amor vitae' come spiegazione della vita cosmica nel pensiero leonardiano e ritiene che questo costituisca la caratteristica inconfondibile della sua personalità. Nel secondo scritto l'a. si occupa del pensiero religioso di Leonardo «che ebbe soltanto fede nella religione serena e confortatrice della natura».

Several studies in experimental philosophy and semantics have shown that a substantial number of English speakers consider a statement true even if it does not align with the facts, as long as it is justified from the speaker's perspective. These findings challenge the prevailing view among philosophers that truth is uniformly based on a statement's correspondence to reality and suggest that for some speakers truth is sensitive to epistemic perspectives. In this study, we show that this behavior depends on how (...) the critical question assessing the statement's truth is phrased. When participants were asked whether the proposition itself is true (e.g., "Is it true that [the uttered proposition]?"), almost everyone answered negatively. It is when the original speaker was mentioned in the question (e.g., "Is what [the speaker] said true?" or "Is [the speaker]’s answer true?") that around half of the participants answered positively. We explore four possible explanations for this behavior: (1) "true" might be ambiguous between a basic correspondence sense and a coherence sense, which may be activated in some people by the explicit mentioning of the speaker; (2) "true" could be a context-sensitive expression with an implicit perspective parameter such that some speakers shift to the speaker’s perspective when prompted by the question; (3) those who select "true" might ad hoc relativize the term to the speaker’s perspective; (4) those who select "true" might unconsciously substitute it with "truthful". In addition, we discuss the implications of the findings for other philosophical discussions concerning norms of assertion, sincerity, and the theory of reference. (shrink)

Los encuentros de los europeos con los indios de América plantearon, a través de las crónicas de viajes, la revocación de tradicionales hipótesis filosóficas sobre los primitivos y los gigantes y la emergencia de la cuestión sobre la noción de "diferencia" entre culturas, así como la necesidad de unos nuevos principios de la historia. Reflexiones todas ellas precisas sobre el problema de la experiencia y su sentido en la Scienza nuova , donde las dos ciencias de lo antiguo y de (...) lo moderno anudan las cuestiones de la experiencia y de su inteligibilidad. Los principios de la ciencia viquiana toman impulso de la etnografía amerindia, p.e. de Oviedo y de Acosta, y también de la Escolástica Española .When the Europeans met the American Indians, the travel chronicles gave rise firstly to a rejection of the traditional philosophical hypothesis which hitherto have been held on the primitives and the giants and secondly to the question related with the notion of "differences" between cultures and the want to defining new principles for historical inquiries. Those were reflections connected with the problem of experience and its meaning within the New Science in which both sciences, the ancient and the modern, bond together questions related with experience and its own rationality. The principles of the Vichian science may be traced back to the American-indian ethnography, from Oviedo or from Acosta, for example, or even from Spanish Scholastic movement. (shrink)

Comprising some of the key texts, this collection illustrates not only Kant's influence on British thought in the 19th century, but also gives a greater insight into British intellectual attitudes of that time.

The rich blend of theories and experiences that made the history of physics possible still now enlightens the scientific method. We stress the need to learn from this method the force of making its principles explicit, while developing a rich diversity of theories, which are often incompatible. Unity is preserved by common founding principles and their mathematical form, such as the understanding of conservation properties (energy, momentum etc.) in terms of symmetries. When moving from the inert to the living state (...) of matter, new challenges are posed, beginning with biological “heterogenesis”, as “genesis of and from diversity” in a changing space of pertinent observables and parameters: the Darwinian ecosystem. The question that is posed is how we may consistently embed the theories of the inert into biology. By naturalization we mean an analysis of physics as part of the sciences of nature, not as the science governing them all. In particular, the founding symmetry principles of physical theories, often used to “naturalize” (but, actually, to “physicalize”) other sciences, will instead be framed in more general dynamics which deal with fundamental changes of symmetries, as they apply, in our views, in all historical sciences, beginning with biology. This paper will accordingly explore the notion of (non-)conservative extension of theories in a precise mathematical sense. We stress a perspectival epistemology that promotes a dialogue of theories, in search for bridges or even unity, inspired by the method of “unification” at the core of major theoretical inventions in physics. Our main motivation is the need to go beyond the strong dualistic separation of space (or of the more general “phase space”) as a pre-given container of the dynamics of matter, that biased physics from Aristotle to Newton and, in a technically different way, even Einstein. (shrink)