A special issue of Chiasmi, the A-class trilingual publication about Merlau-Ponty’s thought, that celebrates the 110th birthday of the French phenomenological philosopher by realising rare or unpublished dialogues and texts.

Trilingual publication concerning Merleau-Ponty's thought. This issue includes an excerpt from the unpublished course on the problem of speech and the philosopher's theories on literature and literary language.

This book is the result of an international conference that took place in Rome on September 13th-14th 2019, entitled “Resounding Spaces: Music and Atmospheres”. The main topic was the relationship between music(s) and concepts like resonance, atmosphere, and mood. Talking about “music(s)” and not “music” (in singular) is a necessity because of the academic backgrounds of the authors: philosophers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, aestheticians of music, composers, etc. have given their particular contribution, within their own discipline, enriching the volume with very different points of view.

This book reports not only a didactic experience but also research, offering a training model on peace mediation. The female protagonists of this research experience the role of trainers of other compatriots through a new didactic model. Compared to other books, the volume proposes for the first time a reflection of research - action on the themes of peace, security of the female gender. The peculiarity of this book is to propose a research path that looks at the future prospects of women as expert teachers of mediation and integration processes.

Accompanied by Virgil, Dante visited all nine circles, where the irredeemable wicked are punished for eternity; but in the belly of that appalling place he found no trace of the disabled. And yet, at that time, they were considered bearers of the maximum sin, the physical and mental non-conformity to the paradigm of the human species, as to say to the image of God. The tenth circle is that piece of hell that must be sought on earth. Always being outside a norm is considered an attack on the natural order of things, a danger to be fought with all energy. The presence of characters that differentiate an individual from the majority of his peers is capable of producing a social disadvantage, a handicap and relegates him to the margins of the community to which he belongs, when he does not completely expel him. Over the centuries the meaning of disability has been much more akin to that of guilt and sin, or of uselessness; sometimes even of crime.The book illustrates how disability was defined at different times, and how it is defined and considered today.

What is the imagination’s role in human cognition and culture? This book explores the hypothesis that such role is larger than we commonly think: imagination is the key to understand many important domains of our lives – including religion, superstition, and ideology – that are often taken to be the province of belief alone. Combining traditional methods of philosophical inquiry with relevant findings from cognitive and social sciences, the author seeks to provide solid empirical support for that hypothesis, on the one hand, and to explore its important theoretical and practical implications, on the other. A novel, substantive theory of the imagination emerges as a result. Imagination, on this view, does not just allow us to escape from reality into fictional worlds, but plays a key, direct role in our representation of (and practical engagement with) the real world itself.

The relationship among neo-nationalisms, populisms and racisms has long existed in the political landscape of western societies and, today, it is a key issue to understand current affairs and the popularity of racist, anti-Semite and Islamophobic positions. This book provides a lucid and accurate analysis of European and American social contexts, including United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and United States, where the socio-political debate is dominated by neo-nationalist instances.

In the ancient world, many units of measurement were based, approximately, on some parts of the human body: arm, cubit, span, inch, foot; or on their functions: pace, half hour, league… I wondered if there might be some parts of the body, which weighed 4.25g: in other words, half a siqlum or half a giĝ. And I identified, albeit with wide variations, these parts in the foreskin which Abraham/Hammurabi cuts off as a symbol of a new faith, reviving - I cannot say how consciously - an ancient, now forgotten tradition which stands at the base of that antique unit of measurement with an abstract value and the form of a Ring to be worn as a bracelet or anklet on or in one’s own body (eg. nose rings, called nezem in Hebrew, and still in use as ornaments in many populations, in India for example; and earrings). These rings would therefore have had a weight and a composition of precious material equivalent to a coin. Such coin could be connected to the Pukku, ring, belonged to Gilgamesh, which could have been the non-Indoeuropean root PKK from which Benveniste derived the word Pecunia (money), as being therefore much older than the term Pecus (herd, flock). In my work, this is the origin of the coin: round, empty, portable, also deriving from the discarded foreskin, thereby generating symbolic rings long before the Lydia of Croesus. It certainly does not arise from a non-existent god of the underworld who would defecate gold: in other words, that so often cited Mammon who has persecuted us for 2,000 years.

History of Cinema Without Names is an editorial project which gathers research papers presented at Gorizia Conference, Italy. It promotes a new research perspective on the notions of film authorship, style, and genre, with the aim of re-articulating their theoretical definition.

Osvalds Zebris’ stories capture those moments of existence visible only to the most attentive observer, laying particular attention on language and an idiosyncratic vision of the world. His characters seem bound to an irrevocable desinty, even if all of them are given a choice in the end, the freedom to decide their own lives. The stories are brought together by the enigmatic, ephemeral, recurring character of Mihails, who connects the dots of freedom between each of them.

Michel Foucault claimed that the term biopolitics can be fully understood only within the context of modern forms of governing society. From this perspective, the development of modern medical knowledge, the re-organization of the hospital as a health institution, the growing attention to issues related to birth and population, and the rise of biological racism can be attributed to the influence of economic rationality on the most influential political strategies. In this book, Marzocca further explores the crucial role that the family structure has played throughout the history of biopolitics, explaining how family is firstly a place of government of life as well as a means to extend various forms of biopower to the whole society. By analysing the works of key figures in the debate on biopolitics – such as Agamben, Negri, Esposito, Rose, Cooper, Lemke, among others – this volume offers a systematic examination of this notion also in relation to the current ecological crisis, addressing fundamental problems of modern and contemporary political thought.

Choosing, deciding and changing constitute the common thread of everything that we want and that we do. The deep transformation of all social system, in all its dimensions has profoundly resented of the diverse possibility or in other respects, of the absence of possibility, precisely of choosing, deciding and changing. What are we really choosing today? The hetero-direction and the conditioning seem to have become the norm, individuals are passively accustomed to an input that come from subjects and locations not identifiable. Annamaria Rufino analyzes the mystifications of new social and political “geographies” of the middle-global world that disseminate topos which they self reproduce, generating untying between our will and our real capacity of doing. Invasive dynamics overlap imperceptibly the human relations, also permeating and infecting them. The risk is, then, the loss of control of the experience, main cause of the incapacity of choosing, deciding and changing.

The middle - globality is the time of the “not occurring”. The uncertainty of not existing, in all its – individual, social, institutional and economical – manifestations dizzily transforms the social system, destroying it in the immediacy of here and now, contributing then to generate words, images and gestures that are expressed very often in violence and uncertainty. A violence above all, of “system”, of complex definition and solution. The Annamaria Rufino’s pamphlet, leads the gaze behind the scenes of a communicative representation for which everyone is co-author, often unaware and “transitional”. As total institution, the communication “force” to be negation of our existence, as victims of a disarming narration, where the presumption of consciousness denies the historical inheritance, which has been the cornerstone of the modern society that is struggling, despite everything, for the construction of the future.

The theme of this pamphlet is the knowledge, reread in its own origins and in the transformations of the middle-global world where the deep meaning appears lost in the conscious awareness. The risks, fears and conflicts that cross the society, especially in its own virtual dimension, seem to affect the sense and memory of the humanistic culture, as conscious relationship between knowledge and reality and then, make us forget the meaning of freedom as common value. Annamaria Rufino with this pamphlet “throws a stone into a pond, not only for the contemporary melancholy but also for the conventional praise of the only communication, individualization and liberation, of the there is no alternative…”. This is not an academic text but a book “against the world position statement as it is, for the world as it could be”. (J. Spurk)

Nowadays we are used to think of design in terms of quality and beauty of the tangible or intangible artefacts that are generated by an industrialised system. Considering objects, graphic representations, interfaces or services, the main difference between craftsmanship and design stays in the replicability and scalability of the proposed solution measured against an existent market and its hierarchical dynamics. This implies an order that on the surface seems to be naturally stirred by the so-called “taste”, or a series of trends that reflect the preferences of the overall public: however, looking closer, all the design production involves a carefully controlled balance driven by economical, political and social interests.

The reduction of the shares of internal sovereignty, the emergence of transnational or international authorities, the overcoming financial systems’ power, underline the inadequacy of governments based on the obsolete dimension of “nation”. Hence the lack of power to determine the future of all people, in particular the Communities forgotten or disregarded because considered minorities for the nation. The imperial rule might guarantee in the future the equal people’s dignity, providing that it represents the fusion of earthly and sacred characters with which it was endowed during its splendour in the Middle Age. Even if this design could appear as a utopia, or just thence, Men must pursue it, neither with hope of immediate success, nor fear of failure, sine spe ac metu.