The global age is distinguished by disobedience, from the protests in Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the anti-G8 and anti-WTO demonstrations. In this book, Raffaele Laudani offers a systematic review of how disobedience has been conceptualized, supported, and criticized throughout history. Laudani documents the appearance of "disobedience" in the political lexicon from ancient times to the present, and explains the word's manifestations, showing how its semantic wealth transcended its liberal interpretations in the 1960s and (...) 1970s. Disobedience, Laudani finds, is not merely an alternative to revolution and rebellion, but a different way of conceiving radical politics, one based on withdrawal of consent and defection in relation to the established order. (shrink)

The well-replicated observation that many people maintain mental health despite exposure to severe psychological or physical adversity has ignited interest in the mechanisms that protect against stress-related mental illness. Focusing on resilience rather than pathophysiology in many ways represents a paradigm shift in clinical-psychological and psychiatric research that has great potential for the development of new prevention and treatment strategies. More recently, research into resilience also arrived in the neurobiological community, posing nontrivial questions about ecological validity and translatability. Drawing on (...) concepts and findings from transdiagnostic psychiatry, emotion research, and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, we propose a unified theoretical framework for the neuroscientific study of general resilience mechanisms. The framework is applicable to both animal and human research and supports the design and interpretation of translational studies. The theory emphasizes the causal role of stimulus appraisal (evaluation) processes in the generation of emotional responses, including responses to potential stressors. On this basis, it posits that a positive (non-negative) appraisal style is the key mechanism that protects against the detrimental effects of stress and mediates the effects of other known resilience factors. Appraisal style is shaped by three classes of cognitive processes – positive situation classification, reappraisal, and interference inhibition – that can be investigated at the neural level. Prospects for the future development of resilience research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper analyzes how national institutions impact corporate social responsibility practices for small- and medium-sized enterprises in the food-processing industries of France and Morocco. In this study, CSR practices are defined around two main dimensions: corporate performance and the CSR approach. Qualitative data were collected during semi-structured interviews with SME managers in charge of CSR issues. We then performed a content analysis. Our study shows that there is a distinct difference between the CSR practices adopted by SMEs in France and (...) Morocco. Indeed, the findings suggest that under the rule-based governance system of France, most SMEs view CSR as an economic tool and it is adopted as an opportunity-seeking perspective anchored in the search for global performance. The findings also show that under the relationship-based governance system of Morocco, SMEs mainly see CSR from a constraint-reducing perspective. However, some Moroccan SMEs have begun to see the economic opportunities of CSR, especially in accessing foreign markets. (shrink)

Computers have become omnipresent in recent decades, affecting all aspects of modern life and influencing creative pursuits in art, architecture, music, and film. One consequence of this seemingly irreversible trend is its effect on the perception of the aesthetic object, and indeed of nature itself. Dawn of a New Feeling acknowledges that computers have become a formidable tool for creating new and entertaining art forms, while contending that virtual reality is not conducive to meditations on the aesthetic object. Virtual or (...) augmented reality, Raffaele Milani argues, is illusory and blunts the viewer’s capacity for feeling a genuine connection with a work of art. First describing how modernity and post-modernity are entangled with virtual reality, engendering linguistic and anthropological confusion in which art seems to have lost its meaning, Milani then contrasts these developments with classical art forms and reflects on the ways in which traditional art objects stimulate an appreciation of nature, which, upon contemplation, appears as an aesthetic object itself. The saturation of our culture by mass media, he argues, can give rise to a renewed desire to experience a more intimate communication with nature. By identifying reading, contemplation, and care for nature as activities that help us to escape the mental atrophy of a web-dominated world and find refuge from the chaos of virtual mediation, Dawn of a New Feeling offers a reinterpretation of contemplative approaches to appreciating aesthetics and to understanding the profound nature of artistic vision. (shrink)

We are delighted by the broad, intense, and fruitful discussion in reaction to our target article. A major point we take from the many comments is a prevailing feeling in the research community that we need significantly and urgently to advance resilience research, both by sharpening concepts and theories and by conducting empirical studies at a much larger scale and with a much more extended and sophisticated methodological arsenal than is the case currently. This advancement can be achieved only in (...) a concerted international collaborative effort. In our response, we try to argue that an explicitly atheoretical, purely observational definition of resilience and a transdiagnostic, quantitative study framework can provide a suitable basis for empirically testing different competing resilience theories (sects. R1, R2, R6, R7). We are confident that it should be possible to unite resilience researchers from different schools, including from sociology and social psychology, behind such a pragmatic and theoretically neutral research strategy. In sections R3 to R5, we further specify and explain the positive appraisal style theory of resilience (PASTOR). We defend PASTOR as a comparatively parsimonious and translational theory that makes sufficiently concrete predictions to be evaluated empirically. (shrink)

One may discuss the role played by mechanical science in the history of scientific ideas, particularly in physics, focusing on the significance of the relationship between physics and mathematics in describing mathematical laws in the context of a scientific theory. In the second Newtonian law of motion, space and time are crucial physical magnitudes in mechanics, but they are also mathematical magnitudes as involved in derivative operations. Above all, if we fail to acknowledge their mathematical meaning, we fail to comprehend (...) the whole Newtonian mechanical apparatus. For instance, let us think about velocity and acceleration. In this case, the approach to conceive and define foundational mechanical objects and their mathematical interpretations changes. Generally speaking, one could prioritize mathematical solutions for Lagrange’s equations, rather than the crucial role played by collisions and geometric motion in Lazare Carnot’s operative mechanics, or Faraday’s experimental science with respect to Ampère’s mechanical approach in the electric current domain, or physico-mathematical choices in Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. In this paper, we will focus on the historical emergence of mechanical science from a physico-mathematical standpoint and emphasize significant similarities and/or differences in mathematical approaches by some key authors of the 18th century. Attention is paid to the role of mathematical interpretation for physical objects. (shrink)

The recent discovery of a fragmentary manuscript of Utpaladeva’s long commentary (Vivṛti or Ṭīkā) on his own Īśvarapratyabhijñā-kārikā (ĪPK) and Vṛtti enables us to assess the role of this work as the real centre of gravity of the Pratyabhijñā philosophy as a whole, though the later Śaiva tradition chose instead Abhinavagupta’s Vimarśinī as the standard text. This brilliant, and more compact and accessible, text was copied and copied again during the centuries and became popular in south India too, where a (...) number of manuscripts in the principal southern scripts are still available. The success of a particular commentary is very often the indirect cause of the decline of the others, which are less and less read and, consequently, copied, until their complete or almost complete loss. Of the lengthy and difficult Vivṛti by Utpaladeva—corresponding to the extent of 8,000 ślokas (hence the traditional denomination of Aṣṭasāhasrī)—the fragmentary śāradā manuscript that has come to light covers only the section ĪPK I.3.6 through I.5.3. Although the portion of the recovered text is comparatively short (33 folios), it proves to be particularly important in the economy of Pratyabhijñā philosophy due to the crucial points being dealt with there at great length, always in a hard-fought debate with the logical-epistemological school of Buddhism. (shrink)

Rationalitat hat religiose und andere metaphysisch anspruchsvolle Grossen in ihrer ehemals privilegierten Stellung als Begrundungsinstanzen in der Moralphilosophie abgelost. David Gauthier hat mit Morals by Agreement hier fur den moralischen Kontraktualismus die bisher am besten elaborierte Theorie vorgelegt, die auch die Methoden der modernen Entscheidungs- und Spieltheorie einbezieht. Die zentrale Herausforderung besteht in dem Erbringen des Nachweises, dass es in einer Gesellschaft mit ungleicher Machtverteilung fur alle Personen rational ist, einen Kooperationsvertrag einzugehen, der von Anfangsbedingungen der Gleichheit ausgeht. Iturrizaga stellt (...) in seiner tief greifenden kritischen Analyse diesen Nachweis in Frage und liefert dabei zugleich eine umfassende Darstellung der Theorie Gauthiers.". (shrink)

The article proposes two anthropological movements as guidelines for an education in democratic citizenship more capable of overcoming reductionisms and trivializations: a return to oneself, suggested by Hannah Arendt and a movement towards others, suggested by Edgar Morin. The text also takes the opportunity to formulate a reflection on the relevance of the global educational challenge of compulsory schooling for the construction of a more sensitive and open humanity.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of his passing, this special book features studies on Alexandre Koyré, one of the most influential historians of science of the 20th century, who re-evaluated prevalent thinking on the history and philosophy of science. In particular, it explores Koyré’s intellectual matrix and heritage within interdisciplinary fields of historical, epistemological and philosophical scientific thought. Koyré is rightly noted as both a versatile historian on the birth and development of modern science and for his interest in philosophical (...) questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. In the 1940s and 1950s his activities in the United States established a crucial bridge between the European historical tradition of science studies and the American academic environments, and an entire generation of historians of science grew up under his direct influence. The book brings together contributions from leading experts in the field, and offers much-needed insights into the subject from historical, nature of science, and philosophical perspectives. It provides an absorbing and revealing read for historians, philosophers and scientists alike. (shrink)

Developments in fields as diverse as biotechnology, animal cognition, and computer science have cast serious doubt on the common belief that human beings are unique and that only they should have dignity and basic rights. A movement referred to as ‘new dignitarianism’ has recently reclaimed human dignity to fend off the threats to human uniqueness that it perceives to arise from these developments. This ‘new’ dignitarianism, however, is not new at all. Drawing on a debate between two Enlightenment philosophers, this (...) article shows that dignitarianism has already surfaced in the eighteenth century as the negative image of another movement: naturalism. Building on this historical account, I propose to understand dignitarianism and naturalism as opposing ideal-types on a normative spectrum. Doing so allows us to see a thus-far neglected problem, which I call the Zero-Sum Problem: any gains a concrete theory makes by approximating one ideal-type, it loses by moving away from the other. I end by showing how accepting this fact is a first step to more practically viable theories that attempt to find a middle ground between the two ideal-types. (shrink)

A somewhat problematic book has recently been devoted to one of the most fascinating works of Kashmirian Śaiva Advaita: the Śivadṛṣṭi by Somānanda. This furnishes the occasion for broader reflection on the role of philology in dealing with the complex texts of the Pratyabhijñā tradition.

Emotions are discrete, automatic responses to universally shared, culture-specific and individual-specific events. The emotion terms, such as anger, fear, etcetera, denote a family of related states sharing at least 12 characteristics, which distinguish one emotion family from another, as well as from other affective states. These affective responses are preprogrammed and involuntary, but are also shaped by life experiences.

This essay discusses the relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man for contemporary radical politics. It approaches the topic from an unconventional perspective: the untimely nature of One-Dimensional Man, i.e., its being conceived in the 1940s as an answer to the crisis of Marxism after the defeat of European communist revolutions in the early twentieth century, and published in the 1960s in the very moment when the postwar stabilization was to collapse. From this perspective, its relevance for a political theory and (...) praxis of global radical movements is not to be found in its main concepts and categories, but on its shortcuts and limits, especially those related to political subjectivity. Shortcuts and limits which are, mutatis mutandis, still ours. (shrink)

This paper is the second part of our recent paper ‘Historical and Epistemological Reflections on the Culture of machines around the renaissance: How s cience and t echnique Work’ (Pisano & Bussotti 2014a). In the first paper—which discussed some aspects of the relations between science and technology from Antiquity to the Renaissance—we highlighted the differences between the Aristotelian/Euclidean tradition and the Archimedean tradition. We also pointed out the way in which the two traditions were perceived around the r enaissance. t (...) he Archimedean tradition is connected with machines: its relationship with science and construction of machines should be made clear. i t is enough to think that Archimedes mainly dealt with three machines: lever , pulley and screw (and a correlated principle of mechanical advantage ). As underlined in the first part, our thesis is that many machines were constructed by people who ignored theory, even though, in other cases, the knowledge of the Archimedean tradition was a precious help in order to build machines. Hence, an a priori idea as to the relations between the Archimedean tradition and construction of machines cannot exist. i n this second part we offer some examples of functioning machines constructed by people who ignored any physical theory, whereas, in other cases, the ignorance of some principles—such as the impossibility of a perpetuum mobile —induced the attempt to construct impossible machines. What is very interesting is that these machines did not function, of course, as a perpetuum mobile , but anyway had their functioning and were useful for certain aims, although they were constructed on an idea which is completely wrong from a theoretical point of view. We mainly focus on the r enaissance and early modern period, but we also provide examples of machines built before and after this period. We have followed a chronological order in both parts, starting from the analysis of the situation in ancient Greece. t herefore, in the first part, we have examined the relations between the Aristotelian/Euclidean and Archimedean traditions from ancient Greece to the early modern age. i n this second part, we analyse the relations of Archimedean tradition/ construction of machines from ancient Greece to the 19 th century, focusing on the mentioned period. We remind the reader that our aim is to prove an epistemological thesis, not to provide a complete historical endeavour. As a correlated article, the reader will find three previous paragraphs in the first above-mentioned article (Pisano & Bussotti, 2014a). (shrink)

In this article I examine the notion of human dignity as it appears to ground fundamental human rights, both in the Universal Declaration of 1948 and in the Swiss Federal Constitution. I claim that it is hard to find good arguments in favour of the idea that human dignity should be understood as the intrinsic value of human beings qua human beings. Dignity in this sense is traditionally identified as something a human being cannot lose. I argue that this criterion (...) should be put aside and that we should rather talk of active and passive attributions of dignity. I claim that the latter type of attribution appeals to the idea of standards of life which each specific type of creature should fulfil in order for its life to be considered as a dignified life for that type of creature. Next, I argue that the notion of well-being grounds the normativity of passive attributions of dignity and address a few objections against this view. Finally, I show how this view accommodates the idea expressed in the Swiss Federal Constitution, that creatures other than human beings can have dignity. (shrink)

In 1824 Sadi Carnot published Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu in which he founded almost the entire thermodynamics theory. Two years after his death, his friend Clapeyron introduced the famous diagram PV for analytically representing the famous Carnot’s cycle: one of the main and crucial ideas presented by Carnot in his booklet. Twenty-five years later, in order to achieve the modern version of the theory, Kelvin and Clausius had to reject the caloric hypothesis, which had influenced a few (...) of Carnot’s arguments. Relying on the possibility of studying the history of science by means of logical investigation, in this paper I shall propose an historical/epistemological research on Sadi Carnot’s original thermodynamics theory in which the French scientist presents more than two principles, all of which are expressed by double negated sentences (generally speaking) within non-classical logic. (shrink)

In The Aesthetics of Grace: Philosophy, Art, and Nature, Raffaele Milani traces the fascinating history of the idea of 'grace' from ancient times to the 1700s. Although this term has been displaced by other concepts with the advent of modernism and postmodernism, the complex ideas related to the notion of 'grace' remain an important aesthetic category, and Milani presents an impressive panorama of reflections on and interpretations of the subject. The subtitle of the work indicates the broad scope of (...) a study that recounts the origins of the term in Latin gratias (favor, regard, or gift), corresponding to the Greek Kharites (givers of beauty and charm). The volume then goes on to examine the Middle Ages, when the concept acquires a more specifically religious meaning (divine mercy, thanks), the Renaissance, when the terms 'gracefulness' and 'elegance' come to dominate in the treatises of the time, and the Ages of Romanticism and Neoclassicism, with their particular treatment of the topic. In the process, Milani meditates on the visual representations of these multiple meanings in the form of second-century frescoes, fifteenth-century paintings by Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Da Vinci, Mantegna, Correggio, and Carracci, seventeenth-century canvases by Poussin and sculptures by Bernini, and eighteenth-century sculptures by Antonio Canova and paintings by Fragonard. This engaging work weaves with skill and subtlety philosophical, theological, and artistic ideas into a stimulating tapestry. (shrink)

During his stay in Padua ca. 1592–1610, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was a lecturer of mathematics at the University of Padua and a tutor to private students of military architecture and fortifications. He carried out these activities at the Academia degli Artisti. At the same time, and in relation to his teaching activities, he began to study the equilibrium of bodies and strength of materials, later better structured and completed in his Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences of 1638. This paper examines (...) important details of four works dating to the Paduan period: Breve instruzione dell’architettura militare; Trattato di Fortificazione; Le Mecaniche; Le operazioni del compasso geometrico et militare. The two works on military architecture and fortifications were compiled from notes taken by students, and are not by Galileo’s hand, but are still illustrative of his work and thinking at the time. (shrink)