The Renaissance movement known as humanism eventually spread from Italy through all of western Europe, transforming early modern culture in ways that are still being felt and debated. Central to these debates—and to this book—is the question of whether (and how) the humanist movement contributed to the secularization of Western cultural traditions at the end of the Middle Ages. A preeminent scholar of Italian humanism, Riccardo Fubini approaches this question in a new way—by redefining the problem of secularization more carefully to show how humanists can at once be secularizers and religious thinkers. The result is a provocative vision of the humanist movement. Humanism and Secularization offers a nuanced account of humanists contesting medieval ideas about authority not in order to reject Christianity or even orthodoxy, but to claim for themselves the right to define what it meant to be a Christian. Fubini analyzes key texts by major humanists—isuch as Petrarch, Poggio, and Valla—from the first century of the movement. As he subtly works out these authors’ views on religion and the Church from both biographical and textual information, Fubini reveals in detail the new historical consciousness that animated the humanists in their reading of classical and patristic texts. His book as a whole shows convincingly just how radical the humanism of the first half of the fifteenth century was and how sharply it challenged well-entrenched ideas and institutions. Appearing here in English for the first time, his work provides a model set of readings of humanist texts and a critical perspective on Italian humanism that will alter and enrich discussion and understanding of the nature of the humanist movement.
Ranging from Antiquity to contemporary analytic philosophy, it provides a concise but thorough analysis of the arguments developed by some of the most outstanding philosophers of all times. Besides the aesthetics of music proper, the volume touches upon metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of language, psychology, anthropology, and scientific developments that have influenced the philosophical explanations of music. Starting from the very origins of philosophy in Western thought (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle) the book talks about what music is according to Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, the Romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Susanne Langer, Bloch, Adorno, and many others. Recent developments within the analytic tradition are illustrated with particular attention to the ontology of the musical artwork and to the problem of music and emotions. A fascinating idea which recurs throughout the book is that philosophers allow for a sort of a secret kinship between music and philosophy, as means to reveal complementary aspects of truth.
This volume provides a unified mathematical introduction to stationary time series models and to continuous time stationary stochastic processes. The analysis of these stationary models is carried out in time domain and in frequency domain. It begins with a practical discussion on stationarity, by which practical methods for obtaining stationary data are described. The presented topics are illustrated by numerous examples. Readers will find the following covered in a comprehensive manner:At the end, some selected topics such as stationary random fields, simulation of Gaussian stationary processes, time series for planar directions, large deviations approximations and results of information theory are presented. A detailed appendix containing complementary materials will assist the reader with many technical aspects of the book.
A companion volume to It is a New Kind of Diaspora. Taking up where that book leaves off, it traces some of the consequences of the emigration of German and Austrian psychoanalysts to London, particularly in the context of the British Psycho-Analytical Society's "Controversial Discussions". The first part of the book, "Tradition and Change" traces some general issues related to the Discussions, in particular drawing on documentary sources from the Archives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. The second part focuses on one crucial issue in the Discussions - the differing interpretations formulated about the psychic life of babies during the first six months of life. Throughout this section, and the rest of the book, the author constantly stresses the larger social and political contexts within which psychoanalysis exists. The last part examines the legacy of the Discussions in the work of one of the most distinguished Kleinian analysts, Hanna Segal, and in particular her work on creativity and aesthetics.
This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the theory of smooth manifolds, maps, and fundamental associated structures with an emphasis on “bare hands” approaches, combining differential-topological cut-and-paste procedures and applications of transversality. In particular, the smooth cobordism cup-product is defined from scratch and used as the main tool in a variety of settings. After establishing the fundamentals, the book proceeds to a broad range of more advanced topics in differential topology, including degree theory, the Poincaré-Hopf index theorem, bordism-characteristic numbers, and the Pontryagin-Thom construction. Cobordism intersection forms are used to classify compact surfaces; their quadratic enhancements are developed and applied to studying the homotopy groups of spheres, the bordism group of immersed surfaces in a 3-manifold, and congruences mod 16 for the signature of intersection forms of 4-manifolds. Other topics include the high-dimensional h h-cobordism theorem stressing the role of the “Whitney trick”, a determination of the singleton bordism modules in low dimensions, and proofs of parallelizability of orientable 3-manifolds and the Lickorish-Wallace theorem. Nash manifolds and Nash's questions on the existence of real algebraic models are also discussed. This book will be useful as a textbook for beginning masters and doctoral students interested in differential topology, who have finished a standard undergraduate mathematics curriculum. It emphasizes an active learning approach, and exercises are included within the text as part of the flow of ideas. Experienced readers may use this book as a source of alternative, constructive approaches to results commonly presented in more advanced contexts with specialized techniques.
This book provides the non-Italian scholar with an extensive picture of the development of Italian economics, from the Sixteenth century to the present. The thread of the narrative is the dialectics between economic theory and political action, where the former attempts to enlighten the latter, but at the same time receives from politics the main stimulus to enlarge its field of reflection. This is particularly clear during the Enlightenment. Inside, this book insists on stressing that Galiani, Verri, and Beccaria were economists quite sensitive to practical issues, but who also were willing to attain generally valid conclusions. In this sense, "pure economics" was never performed in Italy. Even Pareto used economics (and sociology) in order to interpret and possibly steer the course of political action. Within this book it illustrates the Restoration period (1815-48). There was a slowdown of the economists' engagement, due to an adverse political situation, that prompted the economists to prefer less dangerous subjects, such as the relationship between economics, morals, and law (the main interpreter of this attitude was Romagnosi). After 1848, however, in parallel with the Risorgimento cultural climate, a new vision of the economists' task was eventually manifested. Between economics and political Liberalism a sort of alliance was established, whose prophet was F. Ferrara. While the Historical school of economics of German origin played a minor role, Pure Economics (1890-1940 approx.) had a considerable success, as regards both economic equilibrium and the theory of public finance. Consequently, the introduction of Keynes's ideas was rather troubled. Instead, Hayek had an immediate success. This book concludes with a chapter devoted to the intense relationships between economic theories, economic programmes and political action after 1945. Here, the Sraffa debate played an important role in stimulating Italian economists to a reflection on the patterns of Italian economy and the possibilities of transforming Italy's economic and social structure.
The authors prove the existence and the linear stability of small amplitude time quasi-periodic standing wave solutions (i.e. periodic and even in the space variable x) of a 2-dimensional ocean with infinite depth under the action of gravity and surface tension. Such an existence result is obtained for all the values of the surface tension belonging to a Borel set of asymptotically full Lebesgue measure.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.