This special theme issue of Big Data & Society presents leading-edge, interdisciplinary research that focuses on examining how health-related information is circulating on social media. In particular, we are focusing on how computational and Big Data approaches can help to provide a better understanding of the ongoing COVID-19 infodemic and to develop effective strategies to combat it.

The essay is dedicated to war considered through the reflections of Roger Caillois and in particular through certain motifs – feast, sacred, vertigo – that allow us to grasp its ‘metaphysical’ intention, i.e. capable of looking at war as the point of chiasmatic reversibility of life and death.

Sezione 1. Sullo sviluppo del concetto di creazione. L'idealismo magico. Creation, idealism and a new aestheicism.--sezione 2. Estetismo assoluto-una teoria della scienza. Coscienza ed energia-sul problema del rapporti tra psicologia e fiscia. Le monde n'est-il qu' un rêve? Vie et esthéticité. Aestetismus und der Ernst des Lebens (aus zwei Briefen).

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)

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)

A fronte di rapide trasformazioni geo-politiche globali, il tema dei diritti fondamentali - quale sia la loro struttura, quali debbano considerarsi tali, in qual modo li si possa garantire, quale il rapporto con la cittadinanza e la democrazia - acquista sempre maggiore rilevanza nella discussione pubblica. Luigi Ferraioli propone su questi problemi un'originale e innovativa riflessione, suscitando un dibattito in cui si coniugano rigore scientifico e passione civile.

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

The question considered is whether it is possible to trace a theoretical strategy for a criminal policy on the basis of Marx's work. The answer offered is that Marxian political and economic analysis does not supply any general theory of criminality and that any attempt to formulate such a theory (as in Lenin, Paukanis or Gramsci) necessarily leads to authoritarian and regressive conceptions of crime and punishment. Nevertheless the authors maintain that it is possible to trace three theoretical suggestions within (...) Marxian thought which allow of a fruitful approach to the criminal question. The first suggestion relates to the economic roots of many aspects of modern criminality; the second regards the Christian and bourgeois superstition of moral liberty and individual culpability; the third suggestion deals with the lack of a guaranteed social space as the prime root of crime. These theoretical suggestions permit clarification of the social character of penal responsibility and this character points to the need for the socialization (but not deregulation) of criminal treatment. (shrink)

In the course of 1901, V. Crémieu published the results of some experiments carried out to test the magnetic effects of electric convection currents. According to Crémieu, his experiments had proved that convection currents had no magnetic effects and consequently they were not equivalent to conduction currents, that is they were not ‘real’ electric currents. These negative results conflicted with those of well-known experiments carried out by other researchers, in particular with Rowland's experiments, and with Maxwell's, Hertz's and Lorentz's theories, (...) which was more shocking. The publication of Crémieu's experiments raised a controversy which involved directly or indirectly some leading French and British physicists, and led Rowland together with his student Pender to re-perform his experiments. Pender's results confirmed those preiously obtained by Rowland, in striking conflict with those of Crémieu. The importance of Crémieu's experiments was stressed by Poincaré in some of his publications, where he analysed and criticized various aspects of the question. However, he was involved more deeply: his correspondence with Crémieu shows that many of the experiments performed by Crémieu were conceived by Poincaré and carried out with his guidance. To put an end to the controversy, Poincaré obtained Kelvin's support to organize Crémieu's and Pender's joint experiments. The results of these experiments showed that the conflicting results obtained previously were due to an ‘anomalous’ behaviour of the dielectrics used by Crémieu in his apparatus. (shrink)

Una proposta di lettura ";trascendentalista"; del ";De ente"; di Tommaso d'Aquino. Il venir meno dei presupposti per fondare un rapporto forte tra discorso e realtà.

Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of simplicity, and those that can be defined precisely strongly depend on the language in which the theory is formulated. The language dependence is a natural feature—to some extent—but it is also believed to be a fatal problem, because, according to a common general argument, the simplicity of a theory is always trivial (...) in a suitably chosen language. But, this trivialization argument is typically either applied to toy-models of scientific theories or applied with little regard for the empirical content of the theory. This paper shows that the trivialization argument fails, when one considers realistic theories and requires their empirical content to be preserved . In fact, the concepts that enable a very simple formulation, are not necessarily measurable, in general. Moreover, the inspection of a theory describing a chaotic billiard shows that precisely those concepts that naturally make the theory extremely simple are provably not measurable. This suggests that—whenever a theory possesses sufficiently complex consequences—the constraint of measurability prevents too simple formulations in any language. This explains why the scientists often regard their assessments of simplicity as largely unambiguous. In order to reveal a cultural bias in the scientists’ assessment, one should explicitly identify different characterizations of simplicity of the assumptions that lead to different theory selections. General arguments are not sufficient. (shrink)

In this paper, I will survey the “received view” of the interpretation of relativity theory in Natorp and Cassirer. Neo-Kantian and non-neo-Kantian scholars (such as Hentschel or Ferrari) usually distinguish Natorp’s reading from Cassirer’s by virtue of “immunising” and “revising” strategies. “Immunisation” consists of a strict defence of Kantian philosophy, while “revision” pertains to the modification of Kantianism depending on relativity theory. In this respect, I will suggest some arguments that will put things in perspective. In particular, I will show (...) that Natorp’s interpretation is justified considering the state of physical research in 1910. By the same token, I will highlight where Cassirer leverages immunising strategies. However, I will demonstrate that, in contrast to Natorp, the influence of general relativity (GR) is pivotal to Cassirer and it does have an impact on his whole epistemology (and philosophy), implying a highly radical reform of pure intuition in light of general covariance. I will also add that Cassirer may have a bearing on Einstein as to the possibility of reconsidering his former censure of Kantian philosophy. (shrink)