Search results

Leonardo's life and work coincide with the time the modern world was born, involving a strong change in the relationship with the territory and an acceleration of human subjugation of nature. Leonardo's artistic and technical work moves between two polarities: the idea of a generating nature and the human aspiration to domination, with a vision of knowledge not yet fragmented by the specialism of modernity. Leonardo's multifaceted activity is a child of his age: of a Renaissance that was more innovation than method and of a period in which political transformations and a demographic recovery drew new attention to the territory.

Nature in the city represents a crucial topic in defining citizens' quality of life. With the rise of new climate and energy challenges aimed at greater environmental sustainability, this issue has taken a renewed centrality in the urban environment as well. Urban Nature in Paris is a text on the socio-political trends affecting urban space and its relationship with nature, here understood with reference to vegetalisation. Individualization, representation, and global competition are thus the main tendencies that characterize the processes and practices of urban greening. These trends are strongly linked, even if these links are not always evident and obvious. On the one hand there is individualization, conceived as a new scale within which we try to frame contemporary processes of citizen participation in the care of urban green space; on the other hand there is representation, as a means through which to capitalize on and valorize the fragmented and individualized actions of urban greening; and finally there is global competition, in which urban nature from a simple sphere of local public action, becomes an international political arena in which some cities seek to assume leadership. Starting with an analysis of the dynamics that have appeared in recent years in Paris, this volume seeks to make these trends visible, showing the emergence, evolutions, relationships, and consequences, of these processes of urban greening.

Leonardo's multifaceted experience has often been celebrated as a key historical legacy placed in a distant past. However, an interdisciplinary investigation of Leonardo's thought, studies and design intentionality, trying to combine art and science, has highlighted the cornerstones of an ante litteram territorialist vision. To the finished product, Leonardo always prefers the knowledge of the most intimate relationships among components of the territory, always understood as a living being, thus giving posterity an immense gallery of possibilities. Therefore, Leonardo's complex and integrated vision is a viaticum for the project of today's manifold territory.

This article examines travel letters that Ljubomir Nenadović (1826-1895) wrote from Switzerland (1847), Italy (1850-1851) and Germany (1870). Marking three different phases in the literary biography of their author, these texts provide evidence of the travel letter's polyphonic nature. We argue that the dynamic shape and narrative texture of Nenadović's letters find their source in the nature of the differences that he observes and identifies, differences that distinguish these countries from his Serbian homeland and, more generally, from the cultural and geographic space of the Slavs.

Automi, realtà virtuale e formiche ("Automata, virtual reality and ants") proposes an analysis of the complexity of the war phenomenon through three different approaches: in the microphysics of the individual action, in simulated reality and in a metaphor with the biological environment. The investigation into the nature of the interactions between man and machine presents the attempt to dominate the Clausewitzian uncertainty of the battle through an automated, post-human system. This seems to be resolved in the Omega Point, which the theologian de Chardin had identified as a point of escape from entropy and from the disorder of reality. There is neither a scientific solution, nor a theological fate. Intelligence is shared through the semantics of the satellite, of the drone and through the information passing from machine to machine. While the warriors will act as a swarm, by sharing a huge amount of data, each one of them on the exocrine glands of the machine, St. Basil was right when he warned that whoever claims to speak on the nature of things (and therefore on war) should first of be able to speak of the nature of the ant.

This volume examines how the definition of art is not to be considered the prerogative of philosophical and aesthetic disciplines, but should rather assume decisive importance for the legal protection of the art object. Based on this premise, this work retraces the evolution of the concept of art and its limits in the case law of US courts, focusing on the constitutional aspect of the freedom of artistic expression. This volume notes how the cases in which judges must decide whether or not an object constitutes a work of art can say much more about the nature of judgement than about the nature of art itself.

This article treats the glottogenesis or emergence of Slavic and examines different theories regarding the nature of influences on the Slavic language first from Iranic and subsequently from Proto-Romanian. We also consider the thesis that Slavic represents a further evolution of Baltic.

The book illustrates, between past and present, the impact of hate speech on actions, investigating, more precisely, the different languages that have conveyed, witnessed or sanctioned forms of hate. The book offers a multi-disciplinary perspective, including essays of historical, social, linguistic, literary and juridical-social nature in order to identify the forms of hate speech.

The investigation into the living being and sensation conducted by Aristotle in De Anima and his biological works highlight many theoretical correspondences with Merleau-Ponty's notion of perception and the ontology of the sensible emerging from the Phenomenology of Perception and the Courses on Nature. In Aristotle and in Merleau-Ponty epistemological rehabilitation of the sensitive experience leads, at the ontological level, to the theorization of a new idea of living subject and Nature: the biological synol in Aristotle and the notion of Leib in the terms of chiasm in Merleau-Ponty. Furthermore, the Aristotelian notion of synol shows strong similarities with Merleau-Ponty's conception of living body (Leib). On one hand, the speculative results obtained by Aristotle in his biological research (where it emerges that most of the vital functions are realized through a total co-penetration of soul and body), and on the other the theory of the synol that he drew up in De Anima (according to which living substance is an indissoluble unity of matter and form), show many points of contact with the idea of embodiment that traverses the whole of Merleau-Ponty's work starting from the Phenomenology of Perception.

The paper presents a reasoned review of digital resources useful for historians and the teaching of public history. This review will not be limited only to the tools of search and treatment of sources on the web, but will be directed above all to provide a guidance framework - which will be by the very nature of the digital constantly evolving over time - of those tools, methods and narratives that make use of digital to enhance teaching and research.

Not simply as an object but rather as an immersive agency in which nature, knowledge, technique merge. The transcendence of the actual and the virtual into a "third" element is construed and analyzed in this book through conceptual schemes that rely on a post-binary or non-binary understanding of coincidences, triangulations, hybrids, or post-human combinatorics. What is ultimately explored is how transcendence is ejected from strictly theological, philosophical, or scientific groundings and emerges as a germinating point of becoming (something else)

This volume deals with the 'hidden secrets of nature' in the natural magic of Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535-1615). The topic is analysed in relation to the internal debates of the Neapolitan Aristotelianism of the 16th century and to the proposals of the magic tradition of the Renaissance. This book also deals with the problem of witchcraft, a phenomenon which is not purely philosophical, but connected historically to Della Porta's struggle against any form of superstitious explanation for natural secrets, including the roughest ones.

This study proposes a reading of the financial statements of co-operatives operating within the Florentine metropolitan area, with a view to underscoring business aspects of a quantitative and monetary nature. The entrepreneurial nature of the co-operatives is taken as read, focusing as with any other corporate entity on assets and economic results as indicators of success. The financial statements were collected from co-operatives with their registered offices in the provinces of Florence, Prato and Pistoia for the financial years 2004-2007, and the accounts were then aggregated, reclassified and analysed. The observations on the resulting data are then broken down by province and by type of co-operative (A or B). - Il presente studio propone una lettura dei bilanci delle cooperative sociali operanti all'interno dell'area metropolitana fiorentina, al fine di evidenziarne le caratteristiche quantitativo-monetarie d'impresa. Si considera come pienamente affermata la loro natura imprenditoriale, dedicando attenzione alle risultanze patrimoniali ed economiche quale modalità tipicamente aziendale di rappresentazione e misurazione del successo. Si è proceduto a raccogliere i bilanci d'esercizio delle cooperative sociali con sede legale nelle province di Firenze, Prato e Pistoia relativamente agli anni di competenza 2004-2007, ad aggregare, riclassificare ed analizzare tali rendiconti e, infine, a commentare i dati ottenuti, articolando le osservazioni per provincia e per tipologia (A o B) di cooperativa.

Peasant revolts were widespread in late medieval Europe. Based on the extensive investigation of the project La signoria rurale nell'Italia del tardo medioevo, this essay examines the numerous cases of peasant rebellion in the Italian peninsula, scarcely known to historians – who have mostly focused on urban uprisings – and never assessed on a large scale. The comparative perspective allows to analyse the causes, contexts, relevance, and results of such revolts, as well as to understand not only the features of lordships in late medieval Italy, but also the nature of the relationship between lords and subjects.