The New Economic Windows Series, derived from Massimo Salzano's ideas and work, incorporates material from textbooks, monographs and conference proceedings that deals with both the theoretical and applied aspects of various sub-disciplines ...

The interpretation of Hegel has been a focal point of philosophical controversy ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, both among Marxists and in the major European philosophical schools. Yet despite wide differences of emphasis most interpretations of Hegel share important similarities. They link his idea of Reason to the revolutionary and rationalist tradition which led to the French Revolution, and they interpret his dialectic as implying a latently atheist and even materialist world outlook. Lucio Colletti directly challenges (...) this picture of Hegel. He argues that Hegel was an essentially Christian philosopher, and that his dialectic was explicitly anti-materialist in both intention and effect. In contrast to earlier views, Colletti maintains that there is no contradiction between Hegel’s method and his system, once it is accepted that his thought is an exercise in Absolute Idealism stemming from a long Christian humanist tradition. He claims, on the contrary, that intellectual inconsistency is rather to be found in the works of Engels, Lenin, Lukás, Kojève and others, who have attempted to adapt Hegel to their own philosophical priorities. Colletti places his argument in the context of a broad re-examination of the whole relationship between Marxism and the Enlightenment, giving novel emphasis to the relationship between Marxism and Kant. He concludes by re-asserting the importance in Marxism of empirical science against the claim of “infinite reason,” while at the same time showing how Marx did transform key ideas in Hegelian thought to construct a consistently materialist dialectic. (shrink)

To approach the poem-fragments of Empedocles as a discourse emerging from the drama of living, is to allow their performatively theorized snapshots to return from mere stills to moving images of practice in modulated stages of training. This study will propose two ways of approach: aesthetically, and as a transformative spiritual exercise (askēsis). The aesthetic way employs four terms from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, and the way of spiritual exercise follows Hadot’s four stages of a Goethe inspired practice from his text, (...) Don’t Forget to Live. Adorno’s four terms (fragmentary, enigmatic, fixated, shudder), work as a frame for Empedocles’ poem-fragments (and those of other Presocratics), that dovetails with PWL practices, and examples of self-transformation, both personal and historical. Nested within each of Hadot’s four stages, including a conclusion on the “deaths of Empedocles,” I have placed and re-ordered a selection of Empedocles’ fragments in my translation that reframe the poem-fragments back to their continuing ways of coming back to life as memento vivere. This study, stages, and examples serve as a guide to a larger project involving a re-translating and re-sequencing (re-ordering) of all of Empedocles’ extant fragments. Such a task hopes to add to the PWL’s cartographic and hermeneutic project of the arts of living, teachers of ways of living, and as an alternative and vibrant history of philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

This article deals with the methodologies commonly used in the framework of the structural approach to social representations. It concerns free and hierarchical evocations, the characterization questionnaire, the similarity analysis, the basic cognitive schemes model, the attribute-challenge technique and the test of context independence. More than a simple review of these methodologies, it offers a critical approach concerning the problems encountered and related to: thresholds or “cutoff points” used to diagnose the structure and the accuracy of the structural diagnosis, grouping (...) methods employed to reduce the corpus of verbal associations, the dilemma between reliability and feasibility, especially in field research, the adequacy and number of modalities of response in the framework of the structural diagnosis. Following this evaluation, this article suggests potential solutions to overcome these methodological limitations. Moreover, as methodological issues are closely related to theoretical questions, the link between social representation theory and identity approaches is discussed. (shrink)

A partir de la situación crítica de la modernidad, el autor afirma que todo ser humano perspicaz y amante de la vida se pregunta con angustia por nuestro destino colectivo. Como una respuesta a esta interrogante, el presente artículo examina diversas perspectivas evolucionarias universales de amplia escala temporal, apoyándose particularmente en el enfoque de la Fe Bahá’í, desde la que presenta un análisis sobre el rol de la religión, para abordar finalmente aquellos procesos que podrían orientar a una sociedad civil (...) mundial hacia una espiritualidad encarnada en los procesos sociales, desde nuestra condición actual concebida como el momento de la gran bifurcación y de la era de las comunidades. (shrink)

Comments on the view of life shared by existential protagonists in six works by Woolf, Greene, Golding, Faulkner, Ellison, and Malamud.

This paper aims to contribute to the present debate about business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that the Journal of Business Ethics is hosting. Numerous contributions argued theoretical frameworks and taxonomies of CSR practices. The authors want to ground in this knowledge and provide further evidence about how companies adopt CSR practices to address stakeholders’ claims and consolidate their trust. Evidence was provided by a longitudinal case study about an Italian food company that is one of the largest producers (...) of baby food. This company reshaped its corporate strategy along three decades through the adoption of CSR practices in order to win stakeholders’ trust about food safety and supply chain behaviour. The empirical exercise was informed by a literature review of the relevant contributions in terms of CSR business practices and levels of efforts to adopt them. In light of this review, the authors adopted for the research framework the taxonomy of business practices proposed by Spiller (2000, “Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society”, Journal of Business Ethics 27, 149-160) and the levels of commitment towards CSR proposed by Stahl and Grigsby (1997, Strategic Management; Total Quality & Global Competition (Blackwell, Oxford)). The main findings are discussed in order to argue theoretical implications and identify further areas of research and debate. (shrink)

The example of the Spanish poet’s amnesia, mentioned by Spinoza in the scholium of proposition 39 of part IV of the Ethics in order to elucidate his conception of death, has given rise to many controversies in the scholarly interpretations, which in most cases maintain that the poet dies and that Spinoza himself thought this way. However, the matter is more complex than it at first appears and in this article I take a different path by reconstructing this scholium anew (...) and providing an alternative interpretation. The comparison with selected passages of part V highlights the presence of a bi-conditional between the ratio of motion and rest that a body possesses, and its aptitude to be affected and affect in many more ways. In particular, the latter allows us to acknowledge the continuity of the poet’s individuality, expressed in his mind–body union grounded by the parallelism theory. As a result, the poet case has a crucial explanatory role for Spinoza’s theory of the eternity of the human mind and if one misunderstands the former, the latter is also misconceived. (shrink)

The article exposes an appreciation of the importance of the notion of catharsis of Antonio Gramsci for the political struggle of the subalterns. It is a reflection on the characteristics and conditions that generate an ethical political elevation of the local economic and corporate struggle of the popular sectors as well as the union of political currents of the left around a common project built in the social struggle, project of a universal nature linked to the proposal of a hegemonic (...) alternative, of the constitution of an integral autonomy of these in the perspective of a national and international dispute over ideological political leadership and hegemony. This notion is particularly necessary in Latin America and in Mexico due to the conditions of organic and current political crises and the need for a popular unity before the enthronement of neoliberalism as a form of transnationalized domination that seeks to maintain the subordination of countries to the great powers and large capitals even at the expense of the decomposition of the State and the resort to violence. (shrink)

The Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) represents a set of life-long disorders. In particular, subjects with ASD can display momentary behaviors of acute agitation and aggressiveness called crisis behaviors. These events are problematic for the subject and care providers but little is known about their occurrence, namely, possible relations among intensity, frequency, and duration. A group of ASD subjects (n=33) has been observed for 12 months reporting data on each crisis ( n = 1137 crises). Statistical analysis did not find significant (...) results, while the relation between crisis duration and frequency showed a good fit to a “power law” curve, suggesting the application of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) model. The SOC is used to describe natural phenomena as earthquakes, bank failures of rivers, mass extinctions, and other systems where a type of “catastrophic events” is necessary to maintain a critical equilibrium. In a sense, subjects at risk of crisis behavior seem to fit the same model as seismic zones at risk of earthquakes. The employment of the same strategies, as those successfully developed for known SOC systems, could lead to important insights for ASD management. Moreover, the SOC model offers possible interpretations of crisis behavior dynamics suggesting that they are unpredictable and, in a sense, necessary. (shrink)

OElig;he thesis is sustained that the definitions of fundamental geometric entities which open Euclids Elements actually are excerpts from the Definitions by Heron of Alexandria, interpolated in late antiquity into Euclids treatise. As a consequence, one of the main bases of the traditional Platonist interpretation of Euclid is refuted. Arguments about the constructivist nature of Euclids mathematical philosophy are given.

Após a onda de desconstrução do pensamento que marcou a última década da filosofia entre nós, talvez tenha chegado o tempo do refluxo do pensamento, a saber, o tempo de debater a existência de um cânone filosófico brasileiro, justamente quando a legitimidade da ciência e, sobretudo da filosofia, é posta em questão. O ponto pede atenção: desde o século XVI, há ensino de filosofia nestas terras, então, quais seriam as razões para afirmar ou negar a existência de uma filosofia brasileira? (...) Para responder à questão, na primeira parte deste artigo, situamos uma ideia de cânone filosófico à luz da produção acadêmica nacional; na segunda, analisamos a possibilidade de um conceito restrito e um amplo de cânone passando da literatura à filosofia; na terceira, comparamos cinco pares antitéticos de definições filosóficas de autores brasileiros e, finalmente, analisamos como a produção filosófica dentro do Sistema Nacional de Pós-Graduação (SNPG) tem viabilizado ou não o debate acerca da legitimidade da filosofia brasileira. (shrink)

Our fellows furnish us the constantly needed supplement to our own fragmentary meanings. That is, they help is find out what our own true meaning is.Very little has been written on Royce’s reception and mentions of Nietzsche that engage the issues of the early dissemination of Nietzsche’s texts in the United States, Royce’s study and knowledge of the range of Nietzsche’s texts, or the mentions of Nietzsche in Royce’s texts from 1906, and up to the posthumously published article “Nietzsche”. This (...) leaves one on a jetty between purely speculative approaches to Nietzsche’s presence in the philosophical works of whoever might strike the fancy of the moment, or... (shrink)

El Árbol de la vida es una traducción de la filogenia en una imagen. Es elaborado por medio de un proceso complejo de abstracción de notas morfológicas y genéticas. El árbol formaliza lo que la biología evolutiva detecta acerca de la conexión de los seres a lo largo del tiempo. El Árbol es un producto semiótico. No incluye ninguna explicación sobre el proceso evolutivo, sino que simplemente indica la comunidad de los seres vivientes y su probable origen común. El Árbol (...) permite otras lecturas, más allá de su sentido unívoco, hacia una visión integral del fenómeno de la vida. Aun cuando el Árbol de la vida sea una construcción científica, él opera como un símbolo, con capacidad de generar una comprensión metacientífica de la vida. (shrink)

Trinity, freedom and dialogue not only represent three themes of Nicholas Cusanus' thought, but provide a possible hermeneutic key to reading his work and understanding his philosophy. Through a historico-philological and theoretico-speculative investigation, an attempt is made to investigate Cusanus' complex reflection on the One and his reflections on the concept of man and religion. If Cusanus has collated Platonic and Neoplatonic reflection, in particular from Plato, Proclus and Dionysius, he managed at the same time to direct their teachings towards (...) the Trinity. In his last works he reformulates his theory of the First Principle by endeavouring to thematize and give greater emphasise to the freedom of the One. But if freedom denote divine acting, it cannot but imprint also the being of his image, that is to say of man, whose mind is defined as viva imago Dei. Only by starting out from these presuppositions can the dialogical perspective be understood that he elaborated as response to the burning issue then current in his day of encounter, namely the meeting and clashing among the different cultures and religions. At the bloody conquest of Constantinople at the hands of the Turkish army (1453), just at the moment when all Europe was crying out for a recourse to arms and a crusade, the German philosopher and cardinal laid aside the merely denigratory and condemnatory designs against Islam in an attempt to make Christians realise that by putting faith in the one God there existed scope for possible mutual understanding and communion, that was essential for embarking on the way towards peace. (shrink)