Against the assumption that legal and normative systems are coextensive with geopolitical units and national spaces, the article advocates for the need to study how different legal and normative semiospheres, within the same geopolitical unit and national space, often give rise to ‘normolects’ that are transversal to socio-economic classes, ethnicities, and cultural lifestyles. The concept of legal and normative ‘imaginaries’ is useful to come to terms with the legal and normative semiotic ideology of such normolects, including their non-verbal dimension and (...) legal-normative semiotic ideologies. More generally, the article prompts legal scholars, and particularly semioticians of law, not to focus exclusively on inter-cultural awareness in legal-normative language but to concentrate also on intra-cultural awareness. As a case study, the article analyses a drawing through which the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visualized and advertised for a bill of reform of the Italian judicial system by his Minister of Justice, Angelino Alfano. The semiotic analysis of this visual artifact casts new light on the controversial political and judicial figure of Mr Berlusconi. The drawing is read as a visual embodiment of the conflict between two different legal and normative ideologies within the present-day Italian political and judicial arena. The paradoxes that underpin this iconography of law and mar a rational confrontation of legal-normative arguments in contemporary Italy are uncovered. (shrink)

This article examines how Italian commercial broadcast news on Mediaset’s three terrestrial channels has covered the transition to digital terrestrial television. Mediaset is the largest commercial broadcaster in the country and is owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. By drawing on critical discourse analysis of broadcast news, it is argued that linguistic elements such as pronouns, choice of words, and metaphors, together with tendentious editing and framing of interviews, were part of a strategy of positive representation of (...) the broadcaster’s interests in the transition and negative representation of media policies opposing such interests. In particular, the analysis brings to the surface the ideological usage of interviews. Interviews in this case did not function as an act of control over the powerful, but as a way to illuminate the broadcaster’s strategic interests while obfuscating the reasons behind attempts to regulate the transition to digital television and open the market to competition. The data attest that the way in which news programs covered the digital transition exposes the connections between media content, media ownership, and governmental institutions. Indeed, all three news programs, TG5, TG4, and Studio Aperto, despite their different target audience and the reputation of one of them as the most objective and authoritative newscast on Italian commercial television, echoed each other in unified support of the sort of interests and media legislation that best fitted the corporation, especially at times when those interests were threatened. The corpus consists of 13 newscasts grouped in two clusters aired in 2006 and 2009. The main participants in the story were Mediaset’s president, often interviewed as the ‘expert’ on the TV industry, the communications minister for the center-left Prodi government, and the communications undersecretary for the center-right Berlusconi government. Citizens and consumer groups were never given the opportunity to voice their positions or be an active part of the narration. (shrink)

Silvio Berlusconi constitue un phénomène original, et même un cas unique, puisqu'il est le seul chef d'entreprise du secteur des médias qui accède, à deux reprises, aux fonctions de Premier ministre dans une grande démocratie. L'arrivée au pouvoir du dirigeant de la grande entreprise de la communication répond à la crise de la représentation politique et inaugure dans l'Europe latine, une «néo-politique». Comme toute figure symbolique, l'image de Berlusconi est ambivalente et ne peut laisser indifférente. Si (...) class='Hi'>Berlusconi suscite tant de réactions d'adhésion ou de rejet, c'est parce qu'il inscrit toute son activité publique dans l'espace de l'image, de la séduction et de l'émotion, plus que dans le champ rationnel et traditionnel de la représentation politique. Il sait être l'ordonnateur du débat public en le dramatisant autour de clivages simplistes, notamment pour ou contre l'État, pour ou contre l'impôt... Il promeut ainsi une politique faite de passions et de croyances, comme dans une fiction télévisuelle. Le phénomène ne relève pas pour autant du populisme, voire du « télépopulisme ».Silvio Berlusconi represents an original phenomenon, or even a unique case, in that he is the only company manager from the world of media who twice rose to the office of Prime Minister in a major democracy. The coming to power of the manager of this large media firm is an answer to the crisis of political representation; it ushers in a "neo-policy" in Latin Europe. Like any symbolical figure, Berlusconi's image is ambivalent and cannot leave indifferent. If Berlusconi gives rise to so many reactions of support or rejection, that is because he places his whole public activity in the field of image, seduction and emotion rather than in the rational and traditional field of political representation. He knows how to organize public debate by dramatizing it around simplistic divides, such as for or against State, for or against taxes... Thus he promotes politics built on passions ans beliefs, as in a television fiction. For all that, the phenomenon does not fall into populism, nor even into "telepopulism". (shrink)

I periferien af demokratiets ånd eksisterer den stærke leder, der ønsker at blive be- tragtet som legitim varetager af folkesuverænitetens vilje, der ligger til grund for demokratiet. Inspireret af Max Webers teori om karismatisk lederskab, undersø- ger denne artikel, hvordan den stærke leder kan betragtes som demokratisk legi- tim, såfremt folket overbevises af lederens karisma. Artiklen analyserer, hvordan karismatiske ledere stjæler det politiske rampelys ved at engagere dem selv, deres privatliv og deres personlighed i deres politiske virke, og dermed politiserer (...) det menneskelige. Artiklen fokuserer på de italienske politikere, Silvio Berlusconi og Matteo Salvini og betragter dem som arketyper. Berlusconi er karismatisk, idet han er ekstraordinær og etablerer en vertikal magtstruktur mellem sig selv og sine væl- gere, mens Salvinis relation til vælgerne er horisontal, da han på karismatisk vis udstiller sig selv om bemærkelsesværdig almindelig. Endelig argumenterer artiklen for, at karismatisk lederskab er et nyttigt begreb til at belyse, hvordan underhold- ning og personliggørelse indvirker på moderne politik. (shrink)

In 2006, acclaimed Italian film director Nanni Moretti released Il caimano [“the Caiman”], a surreal depiction of Silvio Berlusconi’s career as controversial businessman and politician. In one of the last sequences, an indicted Berlusconi leaves the courthouse of Milan, while his supporters besiege its premises and set them on fire. Admired for his capacity of prophetically foreseeing the developments of Italian society, Nanni Moretti’s apocalyptic vision was confirmed by reality on March 11, 2013, when a group of (...) deputes and senators from PDL, Silvio Berlusconi’s political party, ‘besieged’ the courthouse of Milan in order to interfere with the new trials the political leader was involved in: an affair of prostitution of minors, known as “the Ruby case”, and the alleged corruption of a senator. Since when Silvio Berlusconi has been the center of the Italian both political and juridical arena, and with the increasing representation of his trials in Italian and international media, the courthouses of such trials, and particularly that of Milan, have turned more and more into the theater of a socio-political showdown, in which what matters though is not only what takes place in the Court, but also, and perhaps even more, what happens in the area surrounding its premises. Here pro- and -anti Berlusconi partisans have gathered daily in order to manifest their stand to both the citizenry and the media; here media professionals have been stationed 24/7, waiting for the next scandal; and here a dramatic battle line between the political power and the juridical one inexorably materializes with all the violent evidence of its proxemics. The essay analyzes through semiotics a series of verbal and especially visual texts representing the courthouses of Silvio Berlusconi’s trials, with the goal of understanding what this imagery reveals of the current trends of Italian socio-political and juridical arena. More broadly, the essay compares this case study with other instances of courthouses besieged by crowds, so as to semiotically seize the delicate equilibrium of the judiciary proxemics between totalitarian and populist ideologies of law. (shrink)

This quote from Silvio Berlusconi is part of the speech he held on April 18, 1994 during the celebrations for AC Milan’s third consecutive scudetto under his management. Suppose we take this claim seriously: what is the logic at play when soccer is linked to other spheres of life? In particular, in what ways is a team a metaphor for its patrons?

The process of merging the political, economic and media power in Italy and the role of the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi are discussed. “La Repubblica” and “L’Unita” publications are investigated (2009–2010) and compared via the famous European media as “The Financial Times”, “The Times”, “The Independent”, ”Le Monde”, “La Liberation”, “Le Nouvel Obstrvateur”, “El Pais” and “Der Spigel”. In particular the author pays the attention to polemics devoted to the information freedom protection. The existence of media empires (...) in modern mass media hinders one of the main functions of the press, namely the spreading of objective and full information on all sides of the society life directed by plurality in informational and analytical material. At the same moment in time the mass media influence on the fates of the leading political figures, Silvio Berlusconi in particular. A topical problem of complex relations of modern press and different political, social and power structures is analyzed on the Italian example. (shrink)

After the 1980s, the political communication and the mise en scène of politicians have become increasingly hybrid, mixing political representation with entertainment. Politicians like Silvio Berlusconi, Beppe Grillo, and even Barack Obama bring their bodies to the center of mass media political representation. They use their bodies not simply as a medium of communication but also as a source of entertainment for their audience. Before Silvio Berlusconi decided to enter politics, the former Brazilian President, Fernando Alfonso (...) Collor de Mello, showed us already in 1989, and in a very emblematic way, how the combination of politics and entertainment functions as one of the main tendencies of political communication. The analysis of his mise en scène brings this practice to the light and shows us a new phenomenon of mass media: the third body of the politician. (shrink)

The Italian Republic was created at the close of World War II by the political forces that had taken part in the Resistance, with an explicitly anti-fascist ideological foundation. However, the official commitment to anti-fascism and democracy was belied by the continuing role of neo-fascist parties and organizations in the political system. This role was firstly as a potential alternative source of support for the ruling Christian Democrats, and secondly as the key element of a hidden network ready to use (...) violent and undemocratic means to condition the normal political process. This network moved into action at the height of the “strategy of tension” (1969–80). Analysis of this period leads us to reassess the nature of postwar Italian democracy. In the “Second Republic” (post-1994) Silvio Berlusconi has promoted a revisionist approach to Fascism and the Resistance as part of his own strategy to maintain himself in power, while also espousing a plebiscitarian conception of democracy that presents certain analogies with the methods and style of the Fascist regime. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, Vattimo’s “Weak Thought” has been an emendation of his previous revolutionary and dialectical reading of Nietzsche. Marxist terrorism in Europe exposed the indissoluble link between dialectics and violence, and consequently Vattimo’s revision was a rejection of any reconstructive effort for a new political and social order. But in the age of Silvio Berlusconi, Vattimo rediscovered the joy of political commitment. Ecce Comu was a call to pursue “a project of human emancipation” founded “on the search (...) for equality.” More recently, Of Reality and Hermeneutic Communism are a rejection of neoliberal philosophies and constitute a jump back to the 1970s. Vattimo aims once again to change the world and reality, a reality that other philosophies (Ferraris’s New Realism) simply contemplate as a pure fact. Vattimo defends the “revolutionary” meaning of hermeneutics against realism’s conservative tendencies and develops a project close to Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis.”. (shrink)

Sufficient syntactic conditions for canonicity in intermediate and intuitionistic modal logics are given. We present a new technique which does not require semantic first-order reduction and which is constructive in the sense that it works in an intuitionistic metatheory through a model without points which is classically isomorphic to the usual canonical model.

We characterize (both from a syntactic and an algebraic point of view) the normal K4-logics for which unification is filtering. We also give a sufficient semantic criterion for existence of most general unifiers, covering natural extensions of K4.2⁺ (i.e., of the modal system obtained from K4 by adding to it, as a further axiom schemata, the modal translation of the weak excluded middle principle).

The logicD-J of the weak exluded middle with constant domains is proved to be incomplete with respect to Kripke semantics, by introducing models in presheaves on an arbitrary category. Additional incompleteness results are obtained for the modal systems with nested domains extendingQ-S4.1.

Aquí lo que me interesa es, primero, distinguir dos problemas de justificación con respecto a la inferencia inductiva: por un lado, el de una justificación persuasiva de este tipo de inferencia y, por otro lado, el de una justificación explicativa de tal inferencia. En segundo lugar, intento mostrar que el argumento de Ramsey-de Finetti a favor de las reglas inductivas de la lógica bayesiana no es capaz de proporcionar una justifi-cación persuasiva de estas reglas. Finalmente, propongo una justificación explicativa para (...) las reglas de condicionalización bayesianas en términos de un argumento trascendental de inspiración kantiana y de estilo davidsoniano.Here, I am interested, firstly, in distinguishing two justification problems concerning inductive inference: on the one hand, the problem of a persuasive justification of induction and, on the other, the problem of an explicative justification of this sort of inference. Secondly, I intend to show that Ramsey-de Finetti’s argument in favor of Bayesian inductive rules cannot provide a persuasive justification for these rules. Finally, I propose an explicative justification for Bayesian conditionalization rules in terms of a transcendental argument of Kantian inspiration and Davidsonian style. (shrink)

By means of models in toposes of C-sets (where C is a small category), necessary conditions are found for the minimum quantified extension of a propositional (intermediate, modal) logic to be complete with respect to Kripke semantics; in particular, many well-known systems turn out to be incomplete.

The role played by continuous morphisms in propositional modal logic is investigated: it turns out that they are strictly related to filtrations and to suitable variants of the notion of a free algebra. We also employ continuous morphisms in incremental constructions of (standard) finitely generated free ????4-algebras.

The pandemic period has placed the organizations in a state of great tension. It has generated a situation of confusion, lack of rules, and production-related criticalities that have called into question the very existence of many productive realities. This article aims to highlight the dimensions of care and ethics put in place by HR managers in COVID-19. The objective that animated the authors have focused on the HRM level of medium and large companies in Italy to highlight the protective actions (...) toward people and the organization in the period COVID 19, highlighting what were the ethical values and actions of care put in place. In this article, we wanted to give voice to managers who had management tasks in their organizations by asking them to tell us how they dealt with the challenges imposed by the emergency. In the research, we start from a way of understanding workplaces understood as a “process of ongoing social relationship” within which the HR function is dedicated to the care of the quality of relationships. HR managers have to manage a complex role of mediating between the interests of people and employers by trying to find good mediations. (shrink)

We show that the variety of Heyting algebras has finitary unification type. We also show that the subvariety obtained by adding it De Morgan law is the biggest variety of Heyting algebras having unitary unification type. Proofs make essential use of suitable characterizations (both from the semantic and the syntactic side) of finitely presented projective algebras.

By using some classical reasoning we show that any countably presented formal topology, namely, a formal topology with a countable axiom set, is spatial.

We investigate finitarity of unification types in locally finite varieties of Heyting algebras, giving both positive and negative results. We make essential use of finite dualities within a conceptualization for E-unification theory 733–752) relying on the algebraic notion of a projective object.

This article argues that we cannot separate theology on the one hand and politics, law and economy on the other when trying to understand how to deal with religious and cultural diversity. Through an historical examination of the formation of the right to religious liberty in the West, it shows that the European secular state is still deeply indebted with its theological presuppositions. This conclusion explains why systems of religiously based personal regimes are much less widespread in Europe than in (...) other parts of the world. It also suggests that the best way to manage cultural and religious diversity in Europe consists in strengthening the pluralistic components of the European legal systems, as already shown by recent reforms in the field of family and commercial law. (shrink)

Vision is the main entrance for environmental input to the human brain. Even if vision is our most used sensory modality, its importance is not limited to environmental exploration. Rather it has strong links to motor competences, further extending to cognitive and social aspects of human life. These multifaceted relationships are particularly important in developmental age and become dramatically evident in presence of complex deficits originating from visual aberrancies. The present review summarizes the available neuropsychological evidence on the development of (...) visual competences, with a particular focus on the associated visuo-motor integration skills in health and disease. With the aim of supporting future research and interventional settings, the goal of the present review is to constitute a solid base to help the translation of neuropsychological hypotheses into straightforward empirical investigations and rehabilitation/training protocols. This approach will further increase the impact, ameliorate the acceptance, and ease the use and implementation of lab-derived intervention protocols in real-life situations. (shrink)

O Argumento da Terra Gêmea Moral (ATGM) é o desafio semântico central para o Realismo Moral Naturalista (RMN). À fim de evitar tal problema, os defensores do RMN têm articulado uma série de réplicas ao ATGM. Neste artigo, abordo algumas dessas réplicas e defendo a tese de que elas não refutam o ATGM. Considero duas propostas em específico: o Argumento da Tradução, de D. Copp, e o Argumento do Fim da Investigação Moral, de A. Viggiano. Apresento essas objeções, mostro em (...) que sentido pretendem responder ao ATGM e argumento que cada uma delas é vulnerável a vários problemas. Concluo que os ataques de Copp e Viggiano ao ATGM devem ser recusados e que o desafio semântico ao RMN persiste. (shrink)

En el siglo XX, se ha intentado articular el convencionalismo lingüístico de maneras distintas. Uno de los enfoques más prometedores fue el que propuso David Lewis a finales de los años 60 e inicio de los 70. Lewis subsume las regularidades convencionales que subyacen a la actividad de hablar un lenguaje bajo los estados de equilibrio más generales que resultan de cualquier tipo de comportamiento cooperativo racional. En este artículo propongo que, pese a su atractivo, las convenciones lewisianas deberían ser (...) abandonadas a favor del convencionalismo lingüístico del segundo Wittgenstein. Mi motivación para recomendar tal giro es que la propuesta de Lewis no es capaz de ofrecer una respuesta satisfactoria a la objeción de Donald Davidson, de acuerdo con la cual la teoría convencionalista de Lewis no puede explicar la ocurrencia sistemática de malapropismos en nuestro uso ordinario del lenguaje. En las últimas secciones del artículo, me dedico a mostrar cómo las convenciones wittgensteinianas sí pueden explicar el fenómeno de los malapropismos. (shrink)

According to Michael Dummett, deductive inference stands in need of justification which must be provided by the theory of meaning for natural language. Such a theory, he insists, should deliver an explanation for the two essential features of deduction: validity and fruitfulness. Dummett claims that only a molecularist theory of meaning could offer the desired justification. In this paper, I will consider and criticize his solution to the problem of the justification of deduction: the so-called molecular verificationist explanation. My aim (...) here will be to show that Dummett's solution does not succeed in reconciling the conflicting demands of the respective explanations of validity and fruitfulness. (shrink)

Die Entwicklung der Rationalität ist eine Erfolgsgeschichte. Denn die Rationalität war und ist der Motor der abendländischen Kultur und der Grund dafür, dass sie in der Neuzeit allen anderen Weltkulturen machtpolitisch überlegen ist. Zwischen dem 8. und 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr. formierte sich das logische Denken gleich auf mehreren Feldern: Durch die Erfindung der philosophischen Wissenschaft, die Geometrisierung des Raumes und der Schlachtordnung, die Berechnung der Zeit, durch die Geldwirtschaft und die neuen Organisationsformen des Politischen wurde Rationalität zum Synonym für (...) Fortschritt. Auch die Begriffe Freiheit und Demokratie gehören in diesen Zusammenhang. Silvio Vietta zeichnet diese Erfolgsgeschichte nach, beschreibt aber auch ihre Gefahren und Kurzschlüsse. In der Konsequenz entwickelt er eine : ndere9 aisthetisch rückgebundene und reflexive Rationalität, die uns aus den gegenwärtigen Krisen herausführen könnte. (shrink)

This article suggests developing the concept of spiritual ecology into that of balanced spiritual ecosystems. Philosophies, theologies, education systems, political parties, and gender-based and ethnic identity politics need to be critiqued both from within and without so that they can finally contribute to the creation, maintenance and flourishing of balanced spiritual ecosystems.Contribution: Spiritual ecology is a concept on which converge different worldviews. This article recommends using balanced spiritual ecosystems, instead. The new concept could provoke further reflection on how our -ontologies (...) and communities co-exist and whether they do it organically and spiritually. This article befits HTS’s interest in ‘theology and nature’. (shrink)

El artículo pretende analizar el concepto de utopía como central en la teoría crítica de Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). En primer lugar, abordaremos el debate que el autor desarrolla con Max Horkheimer. En el ensayo fundamental «Teoría tradicional y teoría crítica», Horkheimer subraya la importancia de la utopía para construir una imagen del futuro, pero desconfía de las potencias utópicas y de sus vínculos idealistas. En «Filosofía y teoría crítica» (1937), Marcuse responde a esta postura: la teoría crítica no debe temer (...) a la utopía. En lugar de dejarla para un futuro incierto, Marcuse señala que las promesas utópicas ya se ofrecen en el presente y que el pensamiento crítico también debe tomar nota de ello. Años más tarde (1967), Marcuse reconoce el cambio de la perspectiva utópica basada en la sociedad del trabajo. Con la tecnología, las relaciones sociales se transforman. Pero esto no significa que las energías utópicas estén agotadas, como afirma Jürgen Habermas. Por el contrario, son muchas las luchas sociales que surgen en este periodo. En fin, con Marcuse, las energías utópicas se renuevan, recuperando un nuevo sentido de libertad y necesidad que surge de estas luchas. 190-206. (shrink)

This text through the direct use to Foucault’s work and using the concepts of ‘care of the self’ and biopolitics is questioning and analyzing resistance and practices of freedom. Mainly, from the Foucault’s courses at the College de France and the methodological tools found there, here I present a discussion about Gilles Deleuze’s contributions to Foucault’s thought and I develop a dialog where I try to explain the concepts of domination, power, ethics, esthetics and the relationship of the self with (...) himself. (shrink)

This paper discusses an argument for scientific realism put forward by Anthony Quinton in The Nature of Things. The argument – here called the controlled continuity argument – seems to have received no attention in the literature, apparently because it may easily be mistaken for a better-known argument, Grover Maxwell’s “argument from the continuum”. It is argued here that, in point of fact, the two are quite distinct and that Quinton’s argument has several advantages over Maxwell’s. The controlled continuity argument (...) is also compared to Ian Hacking’s “argument from coincidence”. It is pointed out that both arguments are to a large extent independent from considerations about high-level scientific theories, and that both are abductive arguments at the core. But these similarities do not dilute an important difference related to the fact that Quinton’s argument cleverly seeks to anchor belief in unobservable entities in realism about ordinary objects, which is a position shared by most contemporary scientific anti-realists. (shrink)

We show that (contrary to the parallel case of intuitionistic logic, see [7], [4]) there does not exist a translation fromS42 (the propositional modal systemS4 enriched with propositional quantifiers) intoS4 that preserves provability and reduces to identity for Boolean connectives and.

We prove a generalization of the hyper-game theorem by using an abstract version of inductively generated formal topology. As applications we show proofs for Cantor theorem, uncountability of the set of functions from N to N and Gödel theorem which use no diagonal argument.

Este artigo descreve e comenta a criação, por parte de Allan Kardec, de um complexo arcabouço de divulgação de sua produção no novo campo de estudos a que denominou “Espiritismo”, ou “ciência espírita”. Embora não fazendo parte do mundo acadêmico, no sentido institucional do termo, o pesquisador francês efetivamente se aproximou, no desenvolvimento dessa interface com o público, daquilo que à época começava a se tornar padrão nas áreas mais maduras da ciência. Criou uma sociedade de estudos, a Sociedade Parisiense (...) de Estudos Espíritas, em que fatos, hipóteses e métodos eram apresentados e discutidos, antes de eventualmente serem incorporados em textos e divulgados mais amplamente. Para essa divulgação, conjugou a publicação de livros temáticos a uma revista de assuntos espíritas gerais, a Revista Espírita, para veicular ensaios e resultados preliminares, servindo também de via de mão dupla para a interação com assinantes e correspondentes, interessados em contribuir com a elaboração da teoria espírita. Dado, porém, que o Espiritismo não era, nem pretendia ser, uma disciplina científica inserida no meio acadêmico oficial, existem diversas diferenças entre essas duas instituições espíritas e suas análogas na academia. Estas diferenças são aqui apontadas, explicadas e justificadas, como aspectos típicos do programa kardequiano. (shrink)

In this paper we present a general theory of normal forms, based on a categorial result for the free monoid construction. We shall use the theory mainly for proposictional modal logic, although it seems to have a wider range of applications. We shall formally represent normal forms as combinatorial objects, basically labelled trees and forests. This geometric conceptualization is implicit in and our approach will extend it to other cases and make it more direct: operations of a purely geometric and (...) combinatorial nature will be introduced in order to give a mathematical description of the basic logical/algebraic constructions .We begin by recalling the above-mentioned categorial construction: we need a careful inspection of it because in the various examples considered later we plan to deduce from it in a uniform way the normal forms and the description of finitely generated free algebras. This method always works whenever we can describe the category of algebras corresponding to the logic under consideration as a T-objects category. When this simple description seems not to be available, still the general theory might be of some interest, because a description of the category of algebras as a T-objects category plus equation is possible .The central part of the paper is more advanced and specific: we show how the general approach presented here can provide some insights even in the basic case of the modal system K. Section 4 contains a contribution to the theory of normal forms, namely the description of the uniform substitution. This result will enable us to give a duality theorem for the category of finitely generated free modal algebras and in Section 5 to provide a characterization of the collections of normal forms which happen to be normal forms for a logic, thus giving a description of the lattice of modal logics.Section 6 deals with some applications: we shall show how to use normal forms in order to prove for the modal system K the definability of higher-order propositional quantifiers and of the tense operator F .As to the prerequisites, the paper is almost self-contained. The reader is only assumed to have familiarity with standard techniques in algebraic logic ). Knowledge of the basic facts about adjoint functors is required too, see e.g. McLane or the appendix. (shrink)

A. M. Pitts in [Pi] proved that HA op fp is a bi-Heyting category satisfying the Lawrence condition. We show that the embedding $\Phi: HA^\mathrm{op}_\mathrm{fp} \longrightarrow Sh(\mathbf{P_0,J_0})$ into the topos of sheaves, (P 0 is the category of finite rooted posets and open maps, J 0 the canonical topology on P 0 ) given by $H \longmapsto HA(H,\mathscr{D}(-)): \mathbf{P_0} \longrightarrow \text{Set}$ preserves the structure mentioned above, finite coproducts, and subobject classifier, it is also conservative. This whole structure on HA op (...) fp can be derived from that of Sh(P 0 ,J 0 ) via the embedding Φ. We also show that the equivalence relations in HA op fp are not effective in general. On the way to these results we establish a new kind of duality between HA op fp and a category of sheaves equipped with certain structure defined in terms of Ehrenfeucht games. Our methods are model-theoretic and combinatorial as opposed to proof-theoretic as in [Pi]. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Metamorphosis is a term inherent to colonial reality in which ontological and identity paradigms and conceptions reveal a recurring question in African literature: Who am I? Based on this, this article aims to analyze the phenomenon of metamorphosis/transmutation as a characteristic of real-animist texts, which is an aesthetic consequence arising from the animistic conception of perceiving the world. We will discuss how the presence of the imaginary of traditional African religiosity translates into recurrent unusual episodes, such as transmutations, through (...) the works of African writers such as Nigerian Amos Tutuola, Angolan Décio Bettencourt, and Mozambican Mia Couto. Finally, we will observe that the presence of this phenomenon translates not only into a mythical imaginary but also into becoming-individual and becoming-nation in societies fragmented identity-wise by colonialism. (shrink)

La dicotomia tra sapere e sapienza, presente fin dai primordi nella speculazione, ritorna prepotentemente alla ribalta nell’attuale contesto, assumendo spesso una connotazione fortemente interdisciplinare. I contributi accolti nel volume rappresentano, nella loro eterogeneità (che spazia dall’ambito filosofico a quello giuridico, a quello sociologico e a quello del linguaggio espressivo) un momento di riflessione odierna sulla dicotomia sopra indicata, in cui l’approccio sincronico si alterna a quello diacronico e in cui alla prospettiva analitico-ricognitiva si accompagna quella ermenuetico-interpretativa.