Bracciano Smart Lake Produce science by telling science. Bracciano smart lake is an example of how, at the time of social media we can do information and communication and produce science in the same action. The Accademia dei Lincei’s prize sanctions the high quality of the work done.
Art and material technology in the Encyclopédie The Diderot’s article Art of the Encyclopédie is not only an essay about the classic division between liberal and mechanical arts but also a new way of advocating the second ones. Discussing the importance of the machines and the topic of the distribution of ideas, Diderot doesn’t renounce to pull out from such a technical voice...
In Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998), people live in a city that is constantly in the dark. The city is in fact a laboratory constructed by a race of Strangers who live below the urban surface to do experiments aimed at discovering what makes human beings human. The Strangers will survive only by becoming like them. To find out what humanity is, but assuming it is essentially related...
High-energy physics is posing a long series of questions, relating elementary particles to the symmetries that govern fundamental forces and to the intimate fabric of our universe. The recent discovery at CERN of the Higgs boson is just the first goal of the rich LHC physics program.
Immateriality. Sociological Analysis of Digital Imagination The widespread success of new communication technologies is inextricably linked to what by many has been called «digital revolution». This phenomenon is merely a step, albeit decisive, of a long process in which the symbolic dimension played a decisive role. It is therefore necessary, for a proper understanding of the...
On Truth and Fake in a Gravitational Sense, or about virtual Virtuosities The discovery of the existence of gravitational waves not only represents the experimental proof of Einstein’s theory, but also an improvement of the world of Physics. In fact, gravitational waves are directly connected to the structure of the radiant objects, it is just like they gave us back a “snapshot...
Speculation and testability in cosmology: in defense of the method The direct detection of the gravitational waves offers new means for the exploration of the cosmos: we can investigate the centre of supernovae, the physics of black holes and gamma flashes, and even push (in the future) our gaze at the early stages of life of the Universe. Cosmological research has allowed us to...
Space, Time, Self: new digital Ontologies The digital is deeply transforming reality. This is much obvious and uncontroversial. The real questions are why, how, and so what. The digital “cuts and pastes” reality, in the sense that it couples, decouples, or recouples features of the world—and therefore our corresponding assumptions about them—which we never thought could be...
Simulating Conflicts to learn how to manage them: THE ACCORD Online role-play simulation game has recently received more attention in the training and education fields as a mechanism for providing generative learning in simulated contexts. Simulations can provide a solid platform upon which role-play games can be created and used to promote soft skills development. This form of...
To know how as community Value. Towards a diffused Fablab, beyond the digital Rhetoric A large movement of scientists and citizens ask for Open Access, Open Data, Open Science. Until XVII century, transparency is a fundamental value of modern science. To communicate “all to all” has a great epistemological function in scientific production. But in ourdays open access, open data...
Emergent Life Forms between Enhancement and Medicalization The connection between biotechnologies and subjectivation processes has become a central topic in biopolitical and bioethical debates. The March 29, 2017, at the University of Salerno, there was a meeting in which this issue was discussed in the perspectives of human enhancement, posthuman and medicalization. It was...
How is going Human Evolution (and must go)? When one Expert is not enough The artificial evolution has been added to the natural one, to such an extent that they are more and more intermingled nowadays and this requires us to focus on the implications of the widespread desire of perfection. Far from neglecting those implications, they have however been answered separately, with...
Towards open science A large movement of scientists and citizens ask for Open Access, Open Data, Open Science. Until XVII century, transparency is a fundamental value of modern science. To communicate “all to all” has a great epistemological function in scientific production. But in our days open access, open data, open science assume new relevance because the new relations...
Incompetent patients between advance directives and the objection to moral authority The present paper aims at focusing on some of the arguments for or against the possibility for incompetent individuals to exercise their will through living will. After providing clarification about the specific subject of investigation (of the paper) and the context in which informed consent has...
Gravitational astronomy: listening to the whispers of the universe It was about 10 am, Greenwich time, on September 14th 2015 when scientists detected something which had never been detected before: the “sound” of two colliding black holes which, after orbiting around each other for billion years, approached closer and closer until colliding, giving rise to a single huge black...
Wittgenstein on Hypothesis and Natural Laws: a consideration about the ontological task of scientific theories In the critical literature with analytical orientation it is well-established the thesis that Wittgenstein has never abandoned, even in the last stages of his thought, a rigidly verificationist (i.e. reductionist) conception of the scientific method, underestimating the...
The Virtual of Phenomenology in Physics. The Theory of Relativity like proof bench of Temporality and Kinaesthesia. From Einstein and Husserl’s manuscripts The search for objective knowledge purports to aim at a reality independent of our experience of it, but we find ourselves dependent upon our sense experience as the only possible access to this purportedly independent reality...
The Smile: a virtual and virtuous Expression In the theory of Helmuth Plessner, an eminent contemporary philosopher of anthropology, smile is a miming expression independent from laugh. Laugh represents an interruption of a special situation: it is a manifestation of disorder and confusion. Smile is on the contrary a controlled mediation of man in regards to the world. The nature...
The Power venerated for its Impotence: Pierre Clastres and the “savage” (An)Archaeology of the Political The paper aims to analyse the crux of the reflection of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres within the discursive regime of late modernity: is a stateless society really conceivable? And the image of a non-coercive power that goes beyond the image of Western power as a...
Digital Materialism: Approaches and Perspectives in Media Studies This paper explores theoretical and methodological frameworks into the complex interdisciplinary field of Digital Materialism as media theory. From a starting point of the notion of “digital materiality”, as a core concept to develop an epistemological shift towards “material turn”, we aim to illustrate different...
The technological Circle: from Man to Robot and return Robotics raised new questions in the already complex relationship between technology and ethics. Robots, more than any other machine, come close to human abilities of acting and interacting. Robots are created by human intelligence, they are perceived however through the collective imagery of post-humanistic culture. To...
Crispr-Cas9, The Convention of Oviedo and future generations This paper takes into account an aspect of the current genomic editing debate and precisely the ban on inherited genetic modifications provided by the art. 13 of the Oviedo Convention. The inconsistency of this ban with regard to the most widespread position in the scientific community (the "moratorium" on clinical...
A Wound on Poetry: a Reading of Pasolini’s Teorema Through analyzing Pasolini’s Teorema, the intention of the paper is to suggest that besides a sublimated effervescence that, according to Durkheim, blends people together, there is also another force that does not let itself be sublimated and for this reason checkmates the Symbolic order of society. This force is the death drive...
«The powerful, non-organic life which grips the world». Vitalism and Ontology in Gilles Deleuze It is well known that Gilles Deleuze is the heir of a complex vitalistic tradition, beginning with Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and spanning through an important part of 20th century French philosophy. According to this line of thought, philosophy has to sharpen its vision in...
Human post‐Human. Towards homo technologicus? The fifth edition of TriesteNext, European Exhibition of scientific research has gathered students and young graduates, scientists and philosophers, businessmen and men of the institutions in order to discuss the latest achievements and future developments of scientific research, from biotechnology to logistics, from robotics to...