From the Proceedings of the meeting Mind and Life XII, 'What is matter, what is life?', held in Dharamsala, India, in 2002, in the presence of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is universally acknowledged as the prominent reference textbook for the diagnosis and assessment of psychiatric diseases. However, since the publication of its first version in 1952, controversies have been raised concerning its reliability and validity and the need for other novel clinical tools has emerged. Currently the DSM is in its fourth edition and a new fifth edition is expected for release in 2013, in an intense intellectual debate and in a (...) call for new proposals. (shrink)

Ercole è il mito universale della salvezza, presente in tutte le culture, dall’Etiopia all’Arabia, dall’Egitto alla Mauritania, da Cartagine alla britannica Oggia (una gigantesca incisione dell'età del ferro lo disegna sull'intero ...

‘Engineered’ and ‘organic’ have always represented two sides of a challenge that went along with human evolution. Since the dawn of its existence, humankind has been trying to adapt ‘Nature’, the phenomenal world, to his goals, through projects, techniques, instruments, devices, machines, in a process that received propulsion and acceleration from the advent of symbolic ability. Inside the phenomenal world, the ‘organic’ – the material carbon-based dimension on which life is founded, according to the sciences – has always represented a (...) very important subsystem, mainly the world of the living. The ‘organic’ as food, support, pleasure, invention, care, with human skill, has been developing since prehistory, to select, hybridize and breed animals and plants, through more and more successful techniques ranging from crossbreeding to genetic manipulation and engineering. But also as ways to take care of the human body and life with tools, dresses, signs, machines and medical treatments. Scientific evolution has led to the capacity to deeply modify existing organisms and create new ones, new species that would never have evolved naturally. One major technique to describe and simulate the world and to interoperate with Nature is digital technology. Artificial intelligence, artificial life and robotics are mainly digitally based, working at the edge of Nature and the engineered. Digitally based technologies such as 3D printing and the Internet of Things can get to an intimate relationship among the engineered, the organic and Nature, blurring the divide between matter and language, life and code, ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. Hence, through sciences and technologies humanity is creating a Third Life originating from knowledge and culture, which is independently and autonomously evolving, expanding Nature from inside the realm of Nature. (shrink)

Nietzsche, para Heidegger, não teria levado a termo a desvalorização dos valores considerados até então válidos. A transvalorização, ao invés de garantir a renovação da condição existencial do homem, antepõe, à tematização do ser, o nada mudado em vontade e representação. O querido, contra os pressupostos da vontade de poder, se esclerosa na tangibilidade das coisas sem a possibilidade do além por meio do qual Nietzsche pensava superar o niilismo. A transvaloração conserva em tal aspecto a lógica dos velhos valores (...) por conta de uma vontade fixada na presumida concretude da enticidade. Nietzsche é o paradigma de uma metafísica que pensa o ser dentro da não verdade ou de uma verdade transformada na relação sujeitoobjeto. Por tudo isso, a transvaloração, longe de fundar uma nova posição de valores, é adscrivível à nadificação do sujeito, constantemente correlacionado ao objeto. O super-homem não é senão uma super-objetividade que se ilude de reviver na mais completa plenitude, com base no platonismo invertido. Contra Nietzsche, os niilismos se assemelham por não poderem não pensar o ser ao modo de um ser-aí: uma paranoica divinização da corporeidade dentro da realidade mundana. Palavras-chave: Nietzsche. Heidegger. Kant. Transvaloração. Metafísica. Niilismo. (shrink)

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate (...) background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom. (shrink)

1. Critica de capire e altri scritti. 2. Scritti kantiani. 3. L'analitica trascendentale. 4. Il problema della scienza e il giudizio storico.

Nel mio articolo propongo una lettura dei §§ 79-84 della Critica del Giudizio, parte della sezione Metodologia del Giudizio teleologico. Dapprima mi interrogo sul significato di una Methodenlehre del Giudizio teleologico, che rintraccio in un’attività metariflessiva del Giudizio; procedo poi ad una lettura analitica del testo nelle sue varie articolazioni, nella quale passo in rassegna le questioni attinenti alla specificità dello statuto epistemologico della teleologia, alla possibile convivenza tra finalismo e meccanicismo nella scienza della natura, all’origine della vita, allo scopo (...) ultimo della natura e allo scopo finale della creazione; approdo, infine, ad un’interpretazione per cui l’intera teleologia rationis humanae, che si estende dalla teleologia naturale alla teleologia morale passando per l’antropologia e per la filosofia della storia, viene in questa sezione riarticolata intorno ad un nuovo fulcro concettuale di livello trascendentale, che può garantire l’effettivo collegamento tra queste diverse parti della filosofia proprio perché esso non si esercita in forma di dominio legislativo, ma in forma di riflessione sul molteplice empirico e sulla causalità teleologica propria dell’uomo. (shrink)

1. Teoria del diritto -- 2. Teoria della democrazia -- 3. La sintassi del diritto.

The first part of this paper aims to highlight the analogies between Schutz’s vision of the natural attitude and Wittgenstein’s vision of a phenomenon that concerns the same problematic field, i.e. certainty, the belief of common sense that is free of all doubt, that the world “out there” is as it appears, absolutely real. These certainties form the basis, the foundation of language games and therefore of knowledge in general and in its entirety. This foundation is unfounded and yet indispensable. (...) The second part of the paper examines an important topic analysed by Wittgenstein, related to the aforementioned problem: the language transposition of pre-predicative, pre-reflective and non-propositional certainties, the cornerstones of which are “hinge propositions”, whose hybrid nature can be identified in the shift from empirical propositions to grammatical rules. (shrink)

In this paper we compare the strategies applied by two successful biological components of the ecosystem, the viruses and the human beings, to interact with the environment. Viruses have had and still exert deep and vast actions on the ecosystem especially at the genome level of most of its biotic components. We discuss on the importance of the human being as contraptions maker in particular of robots, hence of machines capable of automatically carrying out complex series of actions. Beside the (...) relevance of designing and assembling these contraptions, it is of basic importance the goal for which they are assembled and future scenarios of their possible impact on the ecosystem. We can’t procrastinate the development and implementation of a highly inspired and stringent “ethical code” for human beings and humanoid robots because it will be a crucial aspect for the wellbeing of the mankind and of the entire ecosystem. (shrink)

Game-based approaches are emerging in many fields, such as education, social sciences, marketing and government. Most studies debate its role in consolidating learning, guided by both internal and external rewards. These approaches are also being applied in rehabilitation, where patients must undergo a re-learning process of motor gestures after an injury to a body structure. In physiotherapy, much importance is given to analytical-functional movement aspects, but less to the recovery of the complete experience, including motivation, perception, and emotional experience of (...) the patient during the process. The aim of this narrative review is to investigate the role of subjective experience in the application of gamification in physiotherapy, considering the added value it provides to recovery by involving neural structures, not just motor functions. By analyzing the most investigated aspects in using gamification in rehabilitation, we will outline the primary methods of investigation into the engagement and emotions involved in the process. Through a selection of scientific articles found on main databases, we identified articles investigating the patient’s experience. The analysis of these articles was based on aspects related to the recovery of movement, the technology used, as well as the methods of investigation and collection of qualitative data regarding the emotions and perceptions of patients during the gamification experience. The results are divided into two primary topics. Overall, this review supports the idea that gamification could represent a rehabilitation approach integrating physiotherapy, more suitable for the final stages of recovery, such as returning to work or sports. (shrink)