The machine world we have created is gradually taking on autonomy and power. To remedy this catastrophe, to avert this dispossession, we rely on communication. A magical concept, the new science and liturgy of our new century. Communication, in all its forms, will save our society. Are we sure? Here the author promotes the systematic exploration and radical critique of this new science (which already has its schools, its laboratories and its great priests). Lucien Sfez is professor of political science at the University of Paris. His numerous works have contributed extensively to modern political science.

Scientific effectiveness has imposed the critical search for truth as the ultimate criterion in education, with the hope of a harmonious encounter between truth, individual freedom and social justice. But the subtlety of the ethical and social problems posed by science and technology without providing the means to resolve them makes the Socratic ideal explode. It is the revenge of Protagoras and opinion, of the poetic and the rhetorical. Hopefulmonster has published in Italian the two essays by the same author: Tra il cristallo e il fumo, 1987 and A torto e a ragione. Intercritica tra scienza e mito, 1989.

This essay, long a classic and only now translated into Italian, constitutes an essential reference for the problem of scientific creativity. The result of the reflections of one of the greatest mathematical minds of the twentieth century, it is nourished by a constant direct and indirect dialogue with some of the greatest thinkers, scientists and artists: Poincaré, Einstein, Bergson, Valéry, James, Elmholtz, Bernard, Polya, Galton, de Broglie and others. Jacques Hadamard (1865 - 1963), the initiator of modern functional analysis, made fundamental contributions to numerous fields of mathematics.

Jacques Solomon Hadamard (1865-1963) was a French mathematician, best known for his proof of the prime number theorem, which he proved in 1896.

What are the origins of the construction of power, of the use of violence as a conscious instrument, of bloodshed as the foundation of the collective, which form the basis of the thought and practices of our civilisation? When Rome decided to build the Capitol, a human head with an intact face was discovered beneath the foundations. It was as though the soldier depicted in the foreground of the work by A. Caron (1521-1599) opening the book, standing in triumph on a round podium, had just found it. The exhibition shows how one shows a trophy. One might say that these battles, these assassinations take place on the plinth, on the very supports of the monuments. These fundamental battles are the subject of this book, called the Libro delle fondazioni (Book of Foundations). Foundations of stone walls on flesh, foundations of the city, of its history, its culture, its spectacles, its politics: but also of our own. An essay in the philosophy of knowledge, this book is a search for reality distorted by ideological formations, and traces the possible outlines of a knowledge and a thought constructed outside the fury of verbal struggles and the delimitations of power. These are the terms of a culture, nature, civilisation, which here, in negative and in positive, find a new determination.

“Considering equality as a value to be realised obscures the sense of the equality we currently experience: when men are equal, decisions of collective interest are taken by majority vote according to the principle ‘one man one vote’, but nothing suggests we may attribute the virtue of justice or knowledge to this majority”. Castellano's essay offers an in-depth investigation into the political power of truth and the theory of pluralism.

The scientific community has begun to question one of the pillars of modern thought: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. If it is a slow, continuous process whereby one species gradually changes to a new one, as Darwin believed, why are there missing links in the fossil record? Based on their detailed research, two eminent palaeontologists, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould concluded that a species, once evolved, rarely undergoes change and that the evolution of a new species occurs only periodically, in relatively rapid bursts. Strutture del tempo by Niles Eldredge (the article he wrote with S. J. Gould in 1976 is appended) is the most complete and compelling exposition of what has been called the 'theory of punctuated equilibria', known in Italy only through a few elementary and popular essays.
 

Niles Eldredge was born in Brooklyn in 1963, is a paleontologist and curator of the invertebrate collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Together with Stephen J. Gould he developed the theory of punctuated equilibria, one of the most original in contemporary Darwinism. His most recent books include Strutture del tempo (Hopefulmonster, 1991) and l canarino del minatore (Sperling & Kupfer, 1994). For Einaudi he published Ripensare Darwin. Il dibattito alla Tavola Alta dell'evoluzione ("Biblioteca Einaudi", 1999), La vita in bilico ("Einaudi Tascabili", 2000) and Perché lo facciamo ("Gli struzzi", 2005).