Research

La natura della mente. Da Cartesio alle scienze cognitive

What is the mind? How does it relate to the body? What are the foundations of our cognitive capacities and of personal identity? This volume offers a critical history of research on these questions from the seventeenth century to the present, highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between contemporary studies and their modern antecedents. It also provides critical, up-to-date accounts of the works of classic authors such as Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant and Freud, and examines the philosophical foundations of the models of cognitive neuroscience, with particular attention to issues such as the metaphysical interpretation of scientific data, materialist reductionism and the animal mind.

Publisher’s page

Mechanism, Life and Mind in Modern Natural Philosophy

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology.

Publisher’s page

Soul, Mind and Brain from Descartes to Cognitive Science

This interdisciplinary book ties the historical work of Descartes to his successors through current research and critical overviews on the neuroscience of consciousness, the brain, and cognition. This text is the first historical survey to focus on the cohesions and discontinuities between historical and contemporary thinkers working in philosophy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience.

Publisher’s page

Il libro della natura, vol. I

Philosophy and the modern sciences are historically rooted in the same field of inquiry and often continue to address common questions. The book brings out this kinship by examining fundamental theories and problems of modern science.

Publisher’s page

Il libro della natura, vol. II

Philosophy and the modern sciences grew out of the same field of inquiry and continue to address common questions, yet today they are often regarded as two entirely different forms of knowledge. The volume brings out their kinship by examining the problems and theories that most stimulated philosophical reflection on the sciences in the twentieth century.

Publisher’s page

Dalla parte di Alice

This book addresses a central theme of modern philosophical and literary culture, the interweaving of personal identity and narrative imagination, and identifies a crucial ambivalence in it: the imaginary can serve as a way of reworking reality and individual life, but it can also become a place where reality is concealed and alienation takes hold.

Publisher’s page

Quaestio. Il libro filosofico dall'antichità al XXI secolo

A collection of essays on philosophy and the books (structure, production, transmission and reception of philosophical books) from papyri to digital media.

Publisher’s page

Meccanica quantistica, rappresentazione, realtà

Quantum mechanics is one of the most powerful and successful theories of contemporary science, yet from the outset it has been accompanied by intense debate about its interpretation and its ultimate validity. The authors describe the unresolved issues in the physical and mathematical formulation of the theory and propose a rethinking of its various interpretations.

Publisher’s page

La filosofia della natura in Kant

A comprehensive reconstruction of Kant's philosophy of nature, from the early works to the last manuscripts.

Publisher’s page

Demonstrative and Non-demonstrative Reasoning in Mathematics and Natural Science

Publisher’s page

Principi metafisici della scienza della natura

A translation of the work in which Kant set out to connect the “Critique of Pure Reason” with physics (with facing German text, an introductory essay and critical apparatus).

Publisher’s page

L'anello che non tiene

The book tells the incredible story of what befell J.R.R. Tolkien in Italy: from the 1970s onwards, the author of The Lord of the Rings became the object of a bizarre instrumentalisation in this country.