Computing, today more than ever before, is a multi-faceted discipline which collates several methodologies, areas of interest, and approaches: mathematics, engineering, programming, and applications. Given its enormous impact on everyday life, it is essential that its debated origins are understood, and that its different foundations are explained. On the Foundations of Computing offers a comprehensive and critical overview of the birth and evolution of computing, and it presents some of the most important technical results and philosophical problems of the discipline, (...) combining both historical and systematic analyses. -/- The debates this text surveys are among the latest and most urgent ones: the crisis of foundations in mathematics and the birth of the decision problem, the nature of algorithms, the debates on computational artefacts and malfunctioning, and the analysis of computational experiments. By covering these topics, On the Foundations of Computing provides a much-needed resource to contextualize these foundational issues. -/- For practitioners, researchers, and students alike, a historical and philosophical approach such as what this volume offers becomes essential to understand the past of the discipline and to figure out the challenges of its future. (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 physical activity and sport are key elements for a healthy lifestyle. However, a little-investigated element is the presence of a possible relationship between school or academic performance an...

The physical singularity of life phenomena is analyzed by means of comparison with the driving concepts of theories of the inert. We outline conceptual analogies, transferals of methodologies and theoretical instruments between physics and biology, in addition to indicating significant differences and sometimes logical dualities. In order to make biological phenomenalities intelligible, we introduce theoretical extensions to certain physical theories. In this synthetic paper, we summarize and propose a unified conceptual framework for the main conclusions drawn from work spanning a (...) book and several articles, quoted throughout. (shrink)

The paper considers sentences in which “now” occurs in initial position and shows that the meaning they convey differs from the meaning of sentences that are otherwise identical except for “now” occurring in final position. We argue that the occurrence of “now” in initial position triggers a particular kind of modal reading for the sentence to which the adverb is prefixed. A general notion of modal forcing is proposed to provide a uniform account of this kind of reading. Armed with (...) this account, we offer a solution to two tense-modal puzzles, which have to do with fatalism and the possibility of a changing past. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859–1940), the most prominent member of nineteenth-century French spiritualism, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as a practice which consists in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In this article, I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative intellectual practice was the (...) result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existent spiritualist framework, between, on the one hand, neo-Kantianism and, on the other hand, evolutionism which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging social sciences. Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

Raises the radical question of how Dante’s understanding of poetry shaped his theology, his ethics, and, more generally his sense of the organization of knowledge or encyclopedia.

This article considers the function and value of the mythos in Plato's Statesman. As first, I recall the context of the story and its function within the framework of diairetic inquiry about the definition of the real politician. Secondly, I point out that the formulation of the myth is based on a series of traditional stories to which a historical-reconstructive method is applied. I then highlight the ways of reasoning used by the characters in order to reconstruct a rational and (...) plausible account from the mythical tradition. Finally, I try to show that the story, even though it cannot reach the truth of the most stable objects of knowledge, displays a certain degree of plausibility, based on the internal coherence, on the respect of a series of principles admitted as true and, eventually, on its correspondence with the mythical tradition. (shrink)

La crisi della politica affonda le sue radici in uno spazio povero di riflessione culturale. Le scelte dell’Europa, dopo le due guerre mondiali, pesano come macigni sul futuro dei giovani i quali si trovano disorientati dalla crisi della politica e dell’economia dovuta, secondo l’Autore, alla loro separazione dall’etica. Nel libro viene auspicato un rinnovamento di fondo della concezione della politica, per realizzare il bene comune e promuovere la coscienza morale concretizzando una democrazia matura.