This article examines Statius' Silvae 2.1 as a "frame tale," a way of seeing the social expectations for how grief and love between a man and a boy should be expressed. Melior grieves for the loss of his beloved Glaucias, who died at the age of twelve, but their rapport is doubly problematic from the standpoint of contemporary Roman morality, first because it extends from the paternal to the erotic, and second because Glaucias' servile status is ambiguous. In authorizing Melior (...) to mourn his puer delicatus, the poem offers insight into the Roman understandings of sexuality, personal comportment, and public morality. (shrink)

Among the various attempts to re-humanize economics, the ‘humanomics’ proposed by Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson stands out. We contribute to the “humanomics project” by mapping its territory – core, periphery and frontiers – with an eye, also, on future explorations. First, we critically study the core: Smith and Wilson’s interpretation and experimental application of Adam Smith’s ideas on beneficence and injustice. Using the distinction between reciprocal cooperation and reciprocal kindness, we provide a different interpretation of Smith which helps to (...) better understand the difference between exchange and trust, based on mutual advantage, and (reciprocal) beneficence proper. Secondly, we turn to the periphery, going beyond the ‘dichotomous representation of the human personality’ – personal-social/impersonal-economic – and showing other possible worlds: nuances of humans equally worthy of study, such as the personal-economic and the impersonal-social. Thirdly, we argue that the humanomics project should keep its frontiers as open as possible to human diversities and frailties. (shrink)

According to Merleau-Ponty, institution has to do with the deposit of a sense. This operation invokes a gesture of completion that is left to a future of recovery, modifications and alterations that expose that deposited sense to dialectical tensions between orthodox conservation and inevitable deviations. The decisive issue at stake is then announced precisely around this ambivalent status of the institution, which becomes the guardian of the deposited sense, not to fix it in a systematized repetition but to welcome, measure (...) and ensure its evolution. Thus “instituting” indicates the ouverture d'un champ, the possibility of setting the sense in a container with an extensible shell. It deals with the capacity of preserving the duration of the sense originally deposited but also of increasing the quality of its substance in the course of history. On these dynamic potentialities of the “deposited” and administered sense Merleau-Ponty’s notes manage to glimpse an essential technical quality that, for example, Christianity has been able to exploit to the maximum. (shrink)

This dissertation distinguishes Hume's anti-rationalist position from irrationalism. Hume's skepticism is a form of anti-rationalism, basically a defense of common life and tradition against the conceit of the rationalists' concept of reason. Modern rationalism is based on two fundamental dogmas. The first is the "principle of autonomy," which leads to the systematic elimination of the other as the irrational. In modern epistemology this means the disappearance of intentionality and, at the summit of modern moral philosophy, all forms of heteronomy are (...) held to coincide with immorality. Hume attacks as absurd the notion that the self is the center of all morality and rationality because there is no such a thing as the absolute self . He reduces the idea of the absolute self to a speculative chimera. To be sure, to say that there is no absolute self does not mean that there is no self: the alternative of either autonomy or heteronomy is false. There is only a relative self and a relative other, and this analysis is the core of the book Of the Passions in the Treatise. ;The second fundamental dogma of modern rationalism is the reification of the category of quantity. This is also expressed by the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and by the notion that the real is merely a primary quality . Hume overturns this dogma: secondary qualities are actually primary. This is the most fundamental meaning of the cardinal principle of the Treatise, "the primacy of impression over ideas", i.e., the primacy of experience over reason. Hume concentrates his analysis on the passions, but he uses this term in a special sense. Passions are not obstacles to knowledge but conditions of its possibility. Passions such as contempt, fear, love, hatred, hope, envy, pride, and humility, are perceptions and interpretations of the world. ;The passion of sympathy occupies a special place. Sympathy is simply the anatomy of friendship, adequately understood. Hume's ethics of sympathy is based on the elimination of the fictional absolute and isolated self. In common with the ancients, Hume locates friendship at the center of moral philosophy. (shrink)

A consistency default is a propositional inference rule that asserts the consistency of a formula in its consequence. Consistency defaults allow for a straightforward encoding of domains in which it is explicitely known when something is possible. The logic of consistency defaults can be seen as a variant of cumulative default logic or as a generalization of justified default logic; it is also able to simulate Reiter default logic in the seminormal case. A semantical characterization of consistency defaults in terms (...) of processes and in terms of a fixpoint equation is given, as well as a normal form. (shrink)

Reconociendo la insoslayable ambigüedad que afecta a la relación entre retórica y filosofía en la obra viquiana, este trabajo se preocupa por resaltar la continuidad entre el Vico retórico y el Vico filósofo, antes que por indagar las diferencias entre ambos. Semejante continuidad se percibe en la imaginación y en la persuasión. Ambos tópicos son tratados en profundidad en la Scienza Nuova, pero ponen de manifiesto consideraciones teóricas sobre la retórica que arrancan especialmente de las Institutiones Oratoriae.

This introduction provides a re-reading of Luigi Einaudi’s "On Abstract and Historical Hypotheses and on Value Judgments in Economic Sciences", focusing on how Einaudi conceived the relationship among economics, the humanities and values. In particular, its aim is: (§ 1) to explain the reasons why this essay can be considered a confession of a humanist-economist who constantly stepped “beyond the hedge of the garden reserved to the economist”; (§ 2) to clarify the nature of one of the main doubts that (...) Einaudi had concerning the issue of value judgments, with specific reference to the problem of entanglement of fact and value; (§ 3) to cast further light on why, at the end of his life, Einaudi claimed: “I proudly place economic disciplines within the humanities”. (shrink)

When more scientists describe independently the same species under different valid Latin names, a case of synonymy occurs. In such a case, the international nomenclature rules stipulate that the first name to appear on a peer-reviewed publication has priority over the others. Based on a recent episode involving priority determination between two competing names of the same fungal plant pathogen, this letter wishes to open a discussion on the ethics of scientific publications and points out the necessity of a correct (...) management of the information provided through personal communications, whose traceability would prevent their fraudulent or accidental manipulation. (shrink)

The medieval experience of the Franciscans is marked by the decision of acting in different societies. In this context the awareness of their presence bring them to focus on the requirements that, by themselves, can legitimize the political authority.If in Scoto legitimacy is exclusively founding by the consensus of the people who voluntarily choose to confer its power to an authority, if in Ockham the legitimacy of power is conditioned by the double principle of circumnstantiality and functional efficency, in Eiximenis (...) the basis of the authority is submit to a double temperament. First of all the authority can never be considered as an exercise of plenitudo potestatis due to a constitutional principle: the ruler of a community derives his power not only from the consensus but from an agreed pact in which is clearly fixed circles and ends of his action. The second one regards the co-essential condition of the legitimacy: the power of the ruler has a strictly functional justification. This kind of authority must ensure not only the classicals peace and justice, it has to become an engine of the process looking for the “millor estament de la cosa pública”, for the economic emprovement of the subjects belonging to the political communitiy, but also of those who could enter in it by a specific and very well circunscribed pathways of integration. (shrink)

This paper investigates the concept of étendue intelligible, as used by Malebranche to frame a metaphysical theory on top of the concept of space, a new perspective on ideas and a solution to Cartesian issues about the nature of thought and its relationships with extension. In particular, attention is paid to the reasons why the étendue intelligible is, for Malebrance, the joining link between the human mind and God. Such a connection is emphasized not only for its metaphysical meaning but (...) also for the intrinsic relevance of a topological view of ideas. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Heft: Ahead of print.

Decoherence is one of the most serious drawback in quantum mechanical applications. We discuss the effects of noise in superconducting devices (Josephson junctions) and suggest a decoherence-control strategy based on the quantum Zeno effect.

Review of Jonathan Barnes, Truth, etc.: Six Lectures on Ancient Logic, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007.

Les réfutations sophistiques ont joui, au cours du Moyen Âge, d’une considération peut-être même supérieure à leurs mérites, mais par un juste retour des choses, elles ont été presque complètement négligées pendant l’époque contemporaine. Cet ouvrage — dont l’analyse avait été plus l’occupation préliminaire des médiévistes que l’intérêt central des aristotélisants — est maintenant l’objet d’une excellente étude par Louis-André Dorion, une étude qui réintroduit cet ouvrage «dans le courant de la recherche», fournissant une introduction tant historique que systématique, une (...) traduction fidèle et lisible à la fois et un commentaire constitué de quatre cent quatre-vingtune notes qui abordent des problèmes philosophiques, linguistiques, logiques et philologiques avec une compétence admirable. L’introduction traite de plusieurs questions qui nécessitaient une mise au point: l’origine et la signification du titre, la place originale des RS parmi les œuvres logiques d’Aristote, la chronologie, le contexte historique et culturel, la division du texte des RS, les problèmes liés à la taxinomie des paralogismes, les dettes d’Aristote à l’égard de Platon, etc. (shrink)

How can gift and gift-giving studies be relevant to the study of institutions and vice versa? This is the question we broadly address in the introduction to this symposium while drawing on the contributing articles and sketching out a possible future research in a perspective of integration between these two fields of study. Is the gift an institution? What types of methodological approaches would be most suitable in view of such integration? We define the gift as transfers underpinned by institutions, (...) including customs and norms. We contend that the institutional thought can employ empirical and qualitative research methods used by anthropology and that there are important and fruitful lines of tension between gift-giving and institutions – from the relationship between freedom and obligation to the role of third sector between state and market – worthy of further research in the future. (shrink)

Taking as its starting-point Guido Calabresi’s latest book – The Future of Law and Economics – the present article aims to explore the often neglected issue of value judgments and normativity in Law and Economics. I will show the importance of enquiring Calabresi’s methodological distinction between Law and Economics and Economic Analysis of Law and the related bilateralism thesis in order to understand the problematic relationship between methodological value judgments and ethical value judgments, the ‘distance’ between Calabresi and Posner and (...) the problematic notion of reformism. Then I will try to introduce a different notion of normativity. I will also show the existence of an unresolved tension in Calabresi’s methodological discourse between a positive approach, which seems to be privileged in this book, and his insistence on the inevitability of value judgments in economic analysis. Finally, I clarify the reasons for the ‘ignorance’ of values by the economist by distinguishing between economists’ “lack of self-awareness”, economists’ idolatry and the economists’ lenses. (shrink)