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)

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)

The article defines the research field of a semiotically oriented philosophy of digital communication. It lays out its methodological perspective, pointing out how the fake has always been at the center of semiotic research. It traces the origin of deepfakes back to the conception of GANs, whose essential semiotic workings it expounds on. It enucleates the specificities of the digital fake, especially in the production of artificial faces. It reviews the deepfake phenomenon, enunciating its most recent statistics, prevalent areas of (...) application, risks, and opportunities. It surveys the most current literature. It concludes by emphasizing the novelty of a situation in which the fake, in human societies and cultures, is produced mostly by machines. It stresses the desirability for a semiotic and interdisciplinary study of these productions. (shrink)

The article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic theoretical framework for the intelligibility of the meaning of belonging, one of the most fundamental concepts in present-day cultures and societies. After defining belonging as a spatial enunciation that brings about 1) the frontiers of a space of belonging; 2) the consequent opposition between an environment of belonging and one of non-belonging; and 3) the relation between, on the one hand, the subject of enunciation and, on the other hand, the opposition /environment of (...) belonging/ versus /environment of non-belonging/, the article articulates a typology of “figures of crossing,” in which belonging is manifested through the narrative dialectics between placement and displacement. In the theoretical framework of tensive phenomenology and semiotics, four macro-regimes of belonging are singled out: “sedentary estrangement,” “nomadic belonging,” “nomadic estrangement,” and “sedentary belonging.” Moreover, four semantic paths dynamically representing the transition between these regimes are identified: “exile/invasion,” “cosmopolitanism/curiosity,” “acclimation/tolerance,” and “alienation/suspicion.” In the conclusion, the theoretical framework developed by the article is proposed as instrument for the analysis of the “rhetorics of belonging” in present-day cultures and societies. (shrink)

Scholarly dissatisfaction with Aristotle’s fallacy of accident has traditionally focused on his examples, whose compatibility with the fallacy’s definition has been doubted time and again. Besides a unified account of the fallacy of accident itself, the paper provides a formalized analysis of its several examples in Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi. The most problematic instances are dealt with by means of an internal reconstruction of their features as conveyed by Aristotle’s text and an extensive survey of their interpretation in the Byzantine and (...) Latin exegetical tradition. Carefully handled a doxographical approach, as opposed to rapid results oriented practices, proves to be most effective in that it supplies both useful albeit ordinarily overlooked insights and a comprehensive framework of reference for further investigations. (shrink)

Identification is a primary need of societies. It is even more central in law enforcement. In the history of crime, a dialectics takes place between felonious attempts at concealing, disguising, or forging identities and societal efforts at unmasking the impostures. Semiotics offers specialistic skills at studying the signs of societal detection and identification, including those of forensics and criminology. In human history, no sign more than the face is attached a value of personal identity. Yet, modern forensics realizes that the (...) face can mislead and, inspired by eastern models, adopts fingerprinting. In the digital era, however, fingerprinting first goes digital, then it is increasingly replaced by facial recognition. The face is back in digital AI forensics, together with a tangle of sociocultural biases. Semiotics can play a key role in studying their surreptitious influence. (shrink)

Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in legal ontologies (...) and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 631-655.

The essay investigates the anthropological concept of personhood from the point of view of the dialectics between two fundamental elements of the socio-cultural, linguistic, and semiotic construction of the self-identity of the human species: on the one hand, the human face and, on the other, the non-human muzzle. After demonstrating that their semantics is contrastively articulated in all Indo-European languages, and after showing that such contrast is featured also in several non-Indo-European languages, including those referring to supposedly alternative “ontologies of (...) nature”, the essay criticizes such opposition through a close reading of Lévinas, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida’s philosophical texts on the face and on animality. Ultimately, it proposes that the construction of the animal muzzle as an interface of non-personhood is instrumental to the substitution of the human victim in the sacrifice that establishes the human community. Only through eradicating the primordial stigmatization of the muzzle, however, will a non-violent foundation of human personhood and community be possible. (shrink)

The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.

We question memory reconsolidation and emotional arousal as sufficient determinants of therapeutic change. Generating new feelings and meanings must be contrasted with activating and stabilizing the evolving memories that reflect those novel experiences. Some therapeutic changes are not attributable to a memory model alone. “Emotional processing” is also needed and is often an undeclared form of complex executive problem solving.

This essay aims to summarize and explore two issues that, in the exegetical and representational traditions of the biblical text, have triggered a myriad of semiotic intelligences. First, the nature of Cain’s face at the moment of the sacrifice refused him by the Lord, a face variously interpreted as angry, sad, dejected, depressed, dark. Second, the nature of the sign imposed by God on Cain following Abel’s fratricide. After exploring Jewish and Christian exegesis, ancient and modern, with some reference to (...) contemporary narrative versions (and especially to Saramago’s _Cain_), the reflection will turn to the question of whether this kind of exegetical questioning can be part of the objects of a discipline like semiotics, the modern science of signs. (shrink)

Hasdai Crescas (1340-1411) fue un filósofo, rabino y figura pública que vivió en un período muy turbulento para las comunidades judías ibéricas y provenzales de la Baja Edad Media. Crescas lanzó una crítica vehemente contra el paradigma aristotélico recibido de la _falsafa_, que fue utilizado por Maimónides para sustentar y probar la existencia, unidad e incorporeidad de Dios, conceptualizado en la _Guía de los perplejos_ como el ser necesario absolutamente trascendente en relación con el ser contingente, es decir, el mundo. (...) En _Or Hashem_, Crescas elabora un concepto alternativo del ser necesario, en el que las dos nociones antitéticas de inmanencia y trascendencia divinas se relacionan con la distinción en el ser necesario entre su esencia simple y sus atributos infinitos. La esencia simple, una e inefable del ser necesario, se expresa en infinitos atributos en el acto eterno y constante de otorgar en la univocidad del ser su bondad y su actualidad a los infinitos seres contingentes. Crescas defiende que el universo, aunque ontológicamente contingente, es infinito en su actualidad. Dios es así concebido como la primera causa, eterna y constante, entelequia y “Lugar del Mundo”. (shrink)

Um pouco como sucedeu com Portugal, Hoje de José Gil, esta edição de As Farpas surgiu num contexto do espaço mediático português muito marcado por um momentâneo extre­mar das suas características mais venais, o que, se teve algum proveito em termos de vendas, contribuiu também para que a recepção imediata desta edição reproduzisse acriticamente os tropos e os topos do costume sobre Eça (Ramalho é como se nem estivesse lá...). Sem lamen­tação nem indignação, não custa compreender que, além das...

Latin commentators came across the « Third Man » in Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi. The way they dealt with the argument is a fair illustration of how they were both faithful to the text and innovative in their understanding of its most challenging issues. Besides providing a detailed survey of all manuscript sources, the introductory essay shows that Latin interpretation originates from a mistake in Boethius’ translation which radically transformed the argument. The edition makes available for the first time a considerable (...) amount of new documentary evidence which made it possible to solve the riddle of the Latin « Third Man ». (shrink)

The aim of this article is to look at the historiographical phenomenon of Scotism in the light of its diffusion in Puglia region from the period following the death of John Duns Scotus (1308) to the 18th century. The intellectual link between Scotist thought and Puglia already arose in the time immediately following Scotus’ death, with the figure of William of Alnwick (bishop of Giovinazzo in 1329/1330), and it is further confirmed and fostered by the widespread presence of Franciscan convents (...) in the region. These convents constitute study centres (schools, Studia, libraries, etc.) promoting cultural debates and the formation of a substantial number of intellectuals who adhere to the Scotist magisterium. These are authors who, seemingly from a peripherical area with respect to the major centres of Scotism, as a matter of fact participate dynamically, through their works and teaching, in the most important theological and philosophical debates of the time relating to the doctrine of Duns Scotus. (shrink)

Ao cabo de toda uma carreira universitária que quase pode ser confundida com a reflexão sobre Hume em língua portuguesa, a ponto de outros interesses, capazes de originar empresas como a tradução do Leviathan de Hobbes (também na INCM), serem como que laterais ao percurso do seu autor, João Paulo Monteiro publica Realidade e Cognição, uma obra que não se afasta dos domínios de gnoseologia e epistemologia contemporâneas que lhe são familiares nem da influência humeana que aqui surge explicitam...

Um aspecto poucas vezes (se é que alguma vez) referido a propósito deste livro de José Gil é o modo como sintetiza tantos aspectos da sua obra anterior. O que é tanto mais interessan­te quanto o faz recorrendo quer a noções centrais dela como a aspectos quase desconhecidos, e isto através de uma reflexão sobre mentalidades que não é muito frequente destacar-se nos seus trabalhos. Mais ainda do que «a intensidade que uma relação com este país supõe» (p. 142), que (...) José Gil refere ao terminar, e... (shrink)

Este trabalho, uma das primeiras obras dedicadas ao significado do Tratado de Lisboa (2007) nas suas vertentes política, histórica e jurídica, constitui não apenas uma reflexão clara e bem fundamentada sobre o seu objecto (o que já seria notável dada a sua complexidade e ainda relativa novidade) mas serve ainda ao leitor, especialista ou não nas matérias da União Europeia, como um guia para a análise do Tratado de Lisboa e do processo que lhe deu origem, a falhada «Constituição Europeia», (...) a d... (shrink)

This study traces the fundamental stages of Benedetto Croce’s moral thought, focusing on the concept of ‘ethical-utility’ (etico-utile). In his texts, Croce understands utility as inseparable from morality. Moral action is good precisely because it is first and foremost useful. He distinguishes between a merely personal utility (which is the basis of all economic and moral action) and a utility that may develop into universal-utility (ethical- utility). Compared to the economic individual who aims at private profit, the moral person would (...) instead tend to privilege the profit that concerns the ‘greater number’, going so far as to make his own individual interest coincide with interest in the universal good. The pursuit of common utility thus seems to be the distinctive attitude of morality (and also of politics). This utility, in favour of the interest of the community does not mean altruism; rather, the moral act requires to be put before any personal interest and the interest of others, in order to favour, ultimately, only that of the Spirit. This concept of ‘ethical-utility’, theorised by the Neapolitan thinker, seems to have been materialised in the only political-legislative act, promoted by Croce himself: the law for the protection of the Italian landscape heritage (no. 778 of 11 May 1922). Croce’s law is in fact characterised by a defence of the national cultural and environmental heritage motivated precisely by the concept of the latter’s ‘public interest’. (shrink)

Two assertions of Halford et al. are critiqued: their claim of priority in relational complexity analysis and the sufficiency for cognitive development of their relational-complexity analysis of tasks. Critical discussion of concrete task analyses (i.e., the relational complexity of proportionality problems, of balance scale problems, and the Tower of Hanoi) serves, by way of counterexamples, to highlight problems in their method.

A indústria cultural tem nos aniversários mais diversos oportunidades de (auto) celebração com virtualidades cada vez mais exploradas. Neste caso interessa-nos a celebração dos 150 anos do nascimento de Freud, embora outros exemplos, à primeira vista até mais originais, fossem possíveis (como a ainda recente azáfama em torno dos 250 anos do terramoto de Lisboa). O que torna o caso dos 150 anos de Freud tão interessante é ver como em seu torno se procedeu à habitual evocação festiva, típica da...

Este pequeno volume (160 pp.) reúne as intervenções no colóquio com o mesmo título realizado na Faculdade de Ciências Humanas no ano de 2004. O habitual lapso de tempo prolongado entre estes encontros e a publicação dos seus resultados resulta, neste caso, interessante, atendendo às evoluções que se verificaram em tantos (todos?) os temas propostos pela organização desta conferência internacional e desenvolvidos pelos participantes (no caso da intervenção de José Cutileiro, esse lapso é abert...

The meta-semiotic ideology that underpins most contemporary semiotics seems at odds with the one that underlies the attempt at planning and creating a new language. Semiotics, as well as modern linguistics, has increasingly evolved into a substantially descriptive endeavor, excluding any consistent normative purpose. Faithful to the epistemology of Ferdinand de Saussure, semiotics does not primarily aim at either pointing at some supposed flaws of such or such language or at proposing some new linguistic forms meant to fix them. The (...) article analyses linguistic utopias from the perspective of present-day semiotics. (shrink)

« Qu’est-ce que le langage et à quoi sert-il ? » -/- « Qu’est-ce qu’un signe linguistique et en quoi consiste sa signification ? » -/- « Quels sont les effets que les expressions linguistiques produisent, les contraintes qu’il faut respecter et les précautions qu’il convient de prendre lorsqu’on les utilise ? » -/- Ce complexe de questions, dont on peut retracer l’origine dans un certain nombre de textes de l’Antiquité, oriente depuis les enjeux fondamentaux de la réflexion sur la (...) nature et le sens des expressions linguistiques ainsi que sur les conditions effectives de leur utilisation. Au fil des débats philosophiques, littéraires et autres, cette compréhension du langage s’est déclinée en une variété de manières d’entendre ce que, pour une expression linguistique ou une suite d’expressions linguistiques données, « signifier » veut dire. Les contributions de ce numéro thématique se sont concentrées sur les idées linguistiques que les auteurs de langue et culture grecque – confrontés, plus ou moins explicitement, à la question « comment penser le langage ? » – ont développées afin de rendre compte du phénomène complexe de la signification comme propriété des signes linguistiques, corrélat d’un contenu de pensée ou encore comme produit d’une pratique réglée d’échanges. (shrink)

Aux prises avec une archive en pleine expansion et une littérature secondaire dont la masse a atteint et, notamment depuis son tournant numérique, largement dépassé un seuil critique, l’archéologie philosophique a fait le deuil du rêve micrologique de « tout lire, tout étudier » que Michel Foucault s’était pourtant donné pour idéal régulateur en s’interdisant d’effectuer un tri en amont des « choses dites dans une culture, conservées, valorisées, réutilisées, répétées et transformées ». Il importe désormais moins de décrire la (...) totalité d’un champ que de tracer et de croiser des itinéraires. En gros, il s’agit de « raconter des intrigues », selon la formule bien connue de Paul Veyne. Arrimée à la philologie et à l’histoire des corpus, cette théâtralisation du travail philosophique n’est cependant pas arbitraire. Comme l’explique Alain de Libera dans l’un des rares propos métarchéologiques qu’il a livrés en marge de son œuvre canonique, face à l’« accumulation folle de connaissances et d’informations » qui caractérise l’environnement actuel de la recherche, « le rôle de l’historien-archéologue est d’identifier les bonnes structures ». Comment s’y prend-il ? « Il y a pour ce faire – poursuit Alain de Libera au cours du même « Grand entretien d’Actu-Philosophia » – un critère d’identification heuristique : la simplicité. La force d’une hypothèse de travail se mesure au nombre d’éléments qu’elle est capable d’intégrer et d’unifier, en un mot : de “simplifier” ». Parmi les intrigues qui ont marqué l’histoire récente de l’archéologie à vocation philosophique il y a sans doute l’« ἐπιστήμη alexandrinienne » qu’Alain de Libera a identifiée en étudiant les doctrines anciennes et médiévales de l’abstraction et qu’il a baptisée de la sorte pour souligner le rôle qu’Alexandre d’Aphrodise a joué dans sa genèse. Pour peu qu’il soit convaincu de son intérêt intrinsèque, le lecteur, surtout s’il se trouve être un antiquisant ou un médiéviste, résistera difficilement à la tentation de se demander s’il est possible de procéder à une extension – même ponctuelle – du « réseau aphrodisien » : peut-on élargir avec le même succès son domaine d’application en testant son pouvoir d’inclusion dans d’autres cas que celui de la filière qu’il était initialement destiné à synchroniser ? C’est une ébauche de simplification de cet ordre que mon hommage voudrait esquisser à partit de quelques textes qu’Alain de Libera a lui-même étudiés et selon une trajectoire parallèle à celle qu’il a lui-même tracée. (shrink)

Celebrated as the equal to the great philosophers of old, namely Plato and Aristotle, whom – as Cassiodorus put it – he taught to speak Latin better than they spoke Greek, Boethius aspired to fully emancipate Roman culture from its Greek models through translations and exegesis so faithful they would leave nothing more to be desired from the original. The essay focuses on Boethius philhellenism, without complexes insofar as it had little to do either with the mixed feelings of his (...) Roman predecessors or with the plundering agenda of his Christian contemporaries. Special attention is paid to the close relationship Boethius established between word for word translations and multi-layered commentaries which he thought of and – albeit partially – carried out as part of the same scholarly endeavour. Devoid of literary pretentions as well as free from aspirations to autonomy, Boethius literal rendering and scrupulous interpretation were meant to be completely self-sufficient. Together they stand out as both the most innovative and the most conservative features of his ambitious cultural project. -/- Célébré comme l’égal des grands philosophes du passé, auxquels il aurait appris à parler Latin mieux qu’ils ne parlaient Grec, Boèce a caressé le rêve d’une émancipation radicale de la culture romaine vis-à-vis des modèles grecs qu’il se proposait de traduire et interpréter assez fidèlement pour que la comparaison avec les sources ne soit plus nécessaire. De son effort de livrer un Aristote et un Platon latins à la hauteur des originaux grecs, nous étudions l’étroite solidarité qui relie la traduction mot-à-mot des textes grecs et la restitution scrupuleuse de leur sens. Cette double tâche, que Boèce a conçue et menée d’un seul tenant, nous est dès lors apparue comme le reflet d’un philhellénisme sans complexes, tout aussi éloigné des sentiments ambivalents que nourrissaient vis-à-vis des hellènes ses devanciers romains que des efforts visant à domestiquer l’héritage classique auxquels se livraient certains de ses contemporains de même confession que lui. Affranchis de tout rêve d’autonomie, les traductions et les commentaires de Boèce se conçoivent comme parfaitement autosuffisants. Ensemble ils constituent ce qu’il y a à la fois de franchement novateur et de profondément conservateur dans son projet de faire parler Latin les sources grecques. (shrink)

Few arguments from the past have stirred up as much interest as Aristotle’s “Third man” and not so many texts have received as much attention as its account in chapter 22 of the Sophistici elenchi. And yet, several issues about both remain highly controversial, starting from the very nature of the argument at stake and the exact signification of some of its features. The essay provides a close commentary of the text, dealing with its main difficulties and suggesting an overall (...) interpretation of Aristotle’s discussion of the “Third Man” argument. (shrink)

Pour des raisons essentiellement liées à la vocation des textes où la notion de présupposition a fait son apparition, c’est la présupposition d’existence qui s’est imposée la première à l’attention des philosophes du langage. Elle a également déterminé l’orientation des débats en les focalisant sur quelques problèmes traditionnels, au premier chef desquels le problème de l’absence de référence de certaines expressions et celui des imperfections du langage naturel. Contrairement aux noms propres et aux descriptions définies, les termes qui signifient des (...) universaux ont joué un rôle très marginal dans la discussion de ce qui est présupposé par les énoncés que nous échangeons. Ce sont pourtant les noms d’espèces et de genres qui ont été associés les tout premiers à des phénomènes qui relèvent de la présupposition. Afin de montrer que cette association n’a rien perdu de son intérêt, nous avons étudié le traitement qu’Aristote réserve à la famille de paralogismes qui exploitent la similarité morphologique entre noms propres et noms communs pour rattacher la même présupposition d’existence aux uns et aux autres, alors même que cette présupposition est légitime dans un cas (celui des expressions qui désignent des choses particulières), abusive dans l’autre cas (celui des expressions qui signifient des universaux). (shrink)

Les commentateurs latins ont rencontré pour la première fois le « Troisième homme » d’Aristote dans le chapitre vingt-deux des Sophistici elenchi. Cette rencontre illustre bien à la fois leur respect de la lettre et la radicalité de certaines de leurs innovations. Influencée par la traduction de Boèce, leur exégèse de l’argument a tenu compte de l’ensemble des indications du texte tout en lui conférant une tournure inédite.

One of the singularities of Latin exegesis of Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi, is that it arbitrarily brought together two families of fallacies, the «figure of speech» and the «accident», despite the fact that they are on either side of the divide between sophisms related to expression and sophisms independent of expression, a divide that lays at the heart of Aristotle’s taxonomy of sophistic arguments. What is behind this surprising identification? The talk is meant to show that it actually originates from a (...) curious mistake in Boethius’ translation of Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi, 22, 178b 36-37 which radically transformed the nature of the argument at stake. While it was originally an example of the fallacies related to the «figure of speech», Boethius’ translation wrongly brings about two arguments instead of one, both related to the «accident». This explains why authors from the Latin tradition came to think that fallacies of «figure of speech» were linked to fallacies of «accident» closely enough to ask whether they actually fell outside expression, even though it does not at first glance appear that such a possibility was allowed or even suggested by Aristotle’s text. This odd question illustrates some of the remarkable features of the medieval archive and how some of its most peculiar problems came to be. It specifically allows us to reconstruct the mechanisms through which a minor disturbance in the letter of the text leads to a whole new way of organising its exegetical material. (shrink)