Recentemente, sulla rivista «Nature», i progressi empirici della teoria dell’evoluzione sono stati descritti nei termini di un confronto tra «riformisti», i quali auspicano una revisione dell’approccio neodarwiniano standard attraverso l’inclusione di fattori e processi fino ad ora trascurati, e «conservatori», secondo i quali l’attuale programma di ricerca evoluzionistico, basato sulla variazione genetica e sulla selezione naturale, «va bene così». Il dissidio, che concerne principalmente il problema del riduzionismo genetico, sembra non portare a nessun risultato. I riformisti mettono in luce dei (...) fattori molto importanti, ma paiono non portare ancora nessuna proposta coerente quanto alla struttura di questa versione estesa della teoria evoluzionistica a venire. I conservatori si mettono sulla difensiva, facendo affidamento soltanto su quelle aggiunte che non modificano il nucleo neodarwiniano quanto ai suoi tratti essenziali, mantenendolo ben saldo nei vecchi connotati. Analizziamo qui il suddetto dibattito, proponendone un’interpretazione. La biologia evoluzionistica è un campo di ricerche in rapida espansione. L’oggetto del contendere è la modalità di estendere e aggiornare il nucleo centrale dell’eredità darwiniana. La nostra ipotesi è che, nel campo della biologia evoluzionistica attuale, si stia producendo un avanzamento del programma di ricerca, la cui struttura è composta da una serie di pattern evolutivi integrabili e compatibili tra di loro. Nel corso della sua storia la biologia evoluzionistica si è infatti accresciuta tramite l’inclusione progressiva di modelli diversi, senza che questo significasse una revisione del nucleo della teoria. La «teoria gerarchica» di Niles Eldredge è un esempio di struttura globale che si propone come fine quello di incorporare e unificare i pattern evoluzionistici attualmente accettati. (shrink)

L’Ipotesi del Continuo, formulata da Cantor nel 1878, è una delle congetture più note della teoria degli insiemi. Il Problema del Continuo, che ad essa è collegato, fu collocato da Hilbert, nel 1900, fra i principali problemi insoluti della matematica. A seguito della dimostrazione di indipendenza dell’Ipotesi del Continuo dagli assiomi della teoria degli insiemi, lo status attuale del problema è controverso. In anni più recenti, la ricerca di una soluzione del Problema del Continuo è stata anche una (...) delle ragioni fondamentali per la ricerca di nuovi assiomi in matematica. L’articolo fornisce un quadro generale dei risultati matematici fondamentali, e un’analisi di alcune delle questioni filosofiche connesse al Problema del Continuo. (shrink)

An introduction to Kripke’s semantics for propositional and quantified modal logic (with special reference to its historical development from the original 1959 version to the extended versions of 1963 and 1965) and to his theory of truth.

In this article, I deal with the role of hypothesis in the scientific methodology of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and René Descartes. The first paragraph is about hypothesis in Newton's lexicon, especially trying to understand the meaning of his famous hypotheses non fingo. The second paragraph deals with Bacon's methodology, arguing especially that his epis-temology was the first to propose an artificial way for inductive inferences, also giving up all hypothesis in science. The third paragraph shows how Descartes, following Bacon's (...) traces and reading his methodology in the light of the idea of a Mathesis Universalis based on mental evidence, structures a full hypothetical-deductive methodology, charging metaphysics with the analytical phase and depriving experiments of any role in it. The fourth paragraph, on Newton again, tries to understand Newton's specific account of hypothesis as an auxiliary phase in the scientific discovery, and what really differentiates Newton from his contemporaries, Boyle and Hooke. (shrink)

A debate is growing today about the ontological status of disposition in relation to the modality of natural law. This debate arose after the failure of Humean actualism to explain the basis of causality. Categoricalism tries to overcome the weaknesses of actualism by restoring the concept of disposition that is reduced to a set of categorical properties. Through such a move, categoricalism hopes to explain the basis of the disposition and yet fails to guarantee the necessity of natural law. Another (...) alternative is to formulate a variant of dispositionalism in which dispositions are regarded as fundamental properties that are irreducible to categorical properties. Dispositionalists attempt to set up a concept of disposition which acknowledges the existence of unactualized disposition and guarantees the necessity of natural law. This essay, however, will demonstrate that dispositionalists’ solution is not free from the similar dilemma which haunts categoricalism. Keywords: Actuality, categorical property, dispositional property, supervenience, causality, finkish disposition, antidote, necessity. Abstrak: Dewasa ini berkembang perdebatan tentang status ontologis disposisi dalam kaitannya dengan modalitas hukum alam. Perdebatan ini mengemuka selepas kegagalan aktualisme Humean dalam menjelaskan landasan kausalitas. Kategorialisme mencoba mengatasi kelemahan aktualisme dengan mengembalikan konsep disposisi yang direduksi pada sekumpulan sifat kategoris. Melalui langkah ini, kategorialisme berharap dapat menerangkan landasan dari disposisi, tetapi sesungguhnya gagal mengajukan suatu konsepsi tentang hukum alam yang niscaya. Alternatifnya adalah merumuskan suatu varian dari disposisionalisme di mana disposisi adalah sifat fundamental benda yang tidak tereduksikan pada sifat kategoris. Kaum disposisionalis berupaya membangun konsepsi tentang disposisi yang, di satu sisi, mengakui adanya disposisi yang tidak teraktualisasi dan, di sisi lain, menjamin keniscayaan hukum alam. Akan tetapi, melalui artikel ini akan ditunjukkan juga bahwa solusi disposisionalis tersebut tidak lepas dari dilema serupa yang menghantui kategorialisme. Kata-kata Kunci: Aktualitas, sifat kategoris, sifat disposisional, kebertopangan, kausalitas, disposisi-pelenyapan, penawar, keniscayaan. (shrink)

The essay reconstructs the political discourses of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, concerning communism and its actuality for the contemporary debate. Both philosophers have a main role in the global philosophical scene in which they maintain different but partially complementary positions. Except for some philosophical divergences, they both affirm the necessity to reopen a theoretical effort, which could eventually develop an idea of communism and communist practices able to face new challenges imposed by capitalistic globalization. Badiou intends to spread the (...) idea of communism through a theoretical and political procedure called "ideation", which should create new militants and followers to the communist revolutionary event. According to this view the State remains the main enemy to this possibility. Žižek, on the contrary, seems to look with favour on the Lacanian dynamic of denegation which could recreate the necessary conditions for the repetition of the communist revolution; which, this time, instead of ending up in tragedy or in farce, should produce a sort of enlightened new statism. (shrink)

Dieser Band bietet eine Auswahl der Beiträge der Tagung "Modalität und Evidentialität", die vom 31. Mai bis 2. Juni 2010 an der Leibniz Universität Hannover stattfand, sowie weitere einschlägige Aufsätze. Die Tagung führte die Tradition der Treffen des Arbeitskreises "Modalität im Deutschen" fort und nahm mit dem Schwerpunkt "Modalität und Evidentialität" ein in der Linguistik aktuelles und intensiv diskutiertes Thema auf. Evidentialität, d.h. die sprachliche Kennzeichnung der Informationsquellen für Äußerungen, und Modalität sind eng verwandt, weshalb sich der Band intensiv mit (...) grundsätzlichen Fragen nach dem Verhältnis zwischen diesen beiden Kategorien befasst. Es wird gefragt, ob und wie die semantisch-funktionalen Domänen Modalität und Evidentialität und ihre Realisierungsformen im Deutschen (und in anderen Sprachen) voneinander zu unterscheiden sind und wie genau ihr Verhältnis zueinander am besten beschrieben werden kann. Über die Frage der kategoriellen Einordnung hinaus werden auch synchrone und diachrone Aspekte der Grammatikalisierung evidentieller und modaler Ausdrucksmittel sowie funktionale Differenzierungen in textsortenspezifischen und kontrastiven Blickwinkeln erörtert und so das Spektrum relevanter Probleme in diesem Feld bearbeitet. Die spezifischen Erkenntnisse zum Deutschen, die dieser Band bietet, sind bedeutsam für die germanistische sprachwissenschaftliche Forschung und auch für die Grammatikschreibung des Deutschen, die der Evidentialität bislang keine angemessene Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt hat. (shrink)

The present paper aims at reviewing the complex of “Santa Agnese fuori le mura”, the most important architectural ensemble along the Via Nomentana, and one of the most renowned sanctuaries of the suburban landscape of Rome. This paper focuses, in particular, on today’s church, built right over the martyr’s burial by Pope Onorius between 628 and 635 A.D., and attempts to reconstruct its original appearance, taking into account both the status quaestionis and literary sources. Finally, research findings have been translated (...) into a 3-D reconstruction of the church, in order to highlight the ancient close relationship between the building and the adjacent land, which was compromised following the renovation works carried out at the beginning of the 17th century. (shrink)

In Aristotle’s Politics viii 7, 1341b 38–40, there is a reference to some books peri poietikes in which katharsis will be explained more clearly. The future tense of the verb is important and may be the sign of the aristotelian origin of the reference; it would prove in an indisputable way that, when writing Pol. vii–viii, Aristotle thought of a Poetics as the obvious sequel for the discussion about educational problems. So, the logical connection of the argument in Politics and (...) Poetics is in agreement with (and is confirmed by) the famous definition of tragedy in Poet. 6, 1449b 24–28: here Aristotle says that the various items of the definition must be obtained from “the things already said”, but the reference is not fully satisfied by Poetics 1–5: in these chapters no mention is made of katharsis, pity and fear. For these items the reference is satisfied only by the text of Politics viii 7, and the two references, Pol. viii 7 to a Poetics, Poet.6 (by implication) to Pol. viii 7, agree about the sequel of the books and strengthen each other. But the topics of katharsis and education never are fully clarified, neither in the Politics, nor in the Poetics. (shrink)

The dispute on mongrelization starts to play a fundamental role in Latin America inside the modernist debates about the national unity between the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century, to later acquire an unprecedented global diffusion in the eighties and the nineties of the last century. Using the writings of the Bolivian sociologist Silvia River Cusicanqui and of the Argentinian anthropologist, who has long since been active in Brazil, Rita Segato, the essay reconstructs the (...) historic and political happening of metissage in Latin America. The authors show that it is an historical concept which worked as an instance of legitimation both in the period of colonial oppression and later in the epoch of republican modernization. It represents the instrument to hide – if not to delete – the original character of modern State; for this reason it has been able to play a fundamental role in the epoch of liberalism as much as in the neoliberal one. However in mongrelization what is also at stake is that it can express the radically de-colonizing impulse of the differences as forms of litigation which inhabit the complex contemporary Latin American territories. (shrink)

Stories express hypotheses, interpretations of the world that have a certain degree of probability. To demonstrate this thesis I have adopted the notion of hypothesis, in a sense very close to the Meinongian concept of assumption, and a ‘metric’ conception of the values of the truth or falsity of a proposition – as that has been proposed in several ways by Peirce, Vasil’ev and Meinong. To show the the cognitive value of literary texts, and therefore their truth value, I take (...) my move from chapter 9 of Aristotle’s Poetics, where he holds that poetry is imitative of reality, not in the sense of history – which relates what has happened – but rather, in so far as it expresses “the kinds of things that might happen, that is, that could happen because they are either probable or necessary.” The probable admits variations of degree. By means of an examination of the Meinongian concepts of assumption and objective (i.e. state of affairs), which also allow different modes of gradation, I introduce, with examples drawn from Dante’s Divine Comedy and The Description (Tradimento) by Machiavelli, a theory of degrees of truth that makes it possible to apply the concept of probability to literary as well as to historical texts. Finally, I connect the universal character of the literary text with the ontological notion of incomplete object and argue that a fictional object, as it is incomplete, is not an individual but a type. (shrink)

Riassunto : Tra le più recenti riflessioni sulla mente umana, il quadro teorico della “mente estesa” ci dipinge come dei cyborg naturali provvisti di menti “superdotate”, ottenute grazie alla capacità di sfruttare le risorse tecnologiche e ambientali in modo integrato a nostro vantaggio. In questo articolo si ripercorre la genesi teorica di questo modello a partire dalle critiche alla scienza cognitiva classica, basata sul modello delle computazioni su rappresentazioni, e in particolare all’individualismo metodologico. Successivamente, si analizza il principale argomento filosofico (...) fornito a sostegno della mente estesa, fondato sulla plausibilità del concetto di “credenza disposizionale estesa”. Vengono poi discussi i principali aspetti problematici rilevati nel modello e proposte alcune repliche. Si conclude evidenziando che il principale merito del modello consiste nella proposta di una visione integrata della mente umana, tra biologia, cultura e tecnologia. Parole chiave : Mente estesa; Fallacia causale-costitutiva; Criterio del cognitivo; Cyborg naturale; Credenza disposizionale The Extended Mind Hypothesis: An Anthropology of Natural Cyborgs: The “extended mind” framework depicts humans as natural-born cyborgs equipped with supersized minds, thanks to their ability to exploit technological and environmental resources in special and integrated ways. In this paper, the historical background of the extended mind model will be outlined – starting with the criticisms to classical cognitive science, particularly to methodological individualism. Then, the main philosophical argument given in favour of extended mind, based on the plausibility of the notion of extended dispositional belief, will be presented and thoroughly discussed. Many of the problematic aspects of the extended mind model – namely the problem of criteria, the causal-constitution fallacy and the mark of the cognitive – will be considered. Our conclusion is that, despite its several theoretical difficulties, the model has the main advantage of proposing a vision of the human mind in which biology, culture and technology are integrated. Keywords : Extended Mind; Causal-constitution Fallacy; Mark of the Cognitive; Natural Cyborg; Dispositional Belief. (shrink)

In the article’s first section, the author clarifies how the metaphilosophical question can be interpreted. In the second and third sections, a Hegelian phenomenological method is applied to the diachronic theoretical development of feminist philosophies – especially two of its moments, sexual difference thought and Judith Butler’s version of queer theory – to understand whether any indications emerge from this development concerning the contents, model of rationality, identity, and methods of these philosophies. The Hegelian metaphilosophical premise is that we can (...) understand what it means to do feminist philosophy only by observing, like the Owl of Minerva, the history of its theoretical development and interpreting the indispensability of each of its moments, and, at the same time, the presence in them of elements for their dialectical sublation. At the end of this analysis, some conclusions for the future of feminist philosophies are drawn. The author argues that the evolution of feminist philosophies shows that they cannot have a defined content or method. They are intrinsically open to their destabilization and sublation, passing from questions about women to general philosophical questions. How to understand the latter – and whether to welcome this ‘sunset’ as a positive, eminently queer event – is the topic of the final reflections. (shrink)