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.

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).

A journey – via Venice, Lugano, Berlin, Aix en Provence, New York and Venice again – into Carpaccio’s fragmented body of work. A journey through stories, myths, methods and ideas; an adventurous and fervent journey. A journey into Carpaccio’s work that is part of a cycle on painting (M. Serres has written about other painters: Poussin, Vermeer, Latour, Turner, Bonnard, and on sculpture), which in turn is part of a cycle on art, in an even larger cycle on the form of mental production. These are the patient stages of a long journey undertaken more than twenty years ago. All of Serres’s philosophy is presented in the form of a journey, a journey full of the passions and tribulations of Hermes/Mercury, god of crossroads. Hermes passes everywhere in space and time, between the formal and physical sciences, from their birth in antiquity to their current state; he crosses the critical pass that separates and unites the “hard” sciences and the humanities; sciences, stories and myths; sciences, art and the history of religions. Each stage corresponds to a book or part of a book, in the cycle entitled Hermes e altrove (Hermes and elsewhere). As the movement proceeds, the picture becomes more coherent. A global image emerges as an open promise. Is it perhaps that of a modern-day philosophy?

“What is the soul, and to what extent, under what conditions, does psychoanalysis force us to think differently about it? What is language and how can we talk about it? What is the mathematical, physical, biological, socio-historical object, and how does it reveal and at the same time hide itself from the extraordinary enterprise that is modern science? From what and through what can we talk about economics, equality, justice, politics? An unrestrained, gratuitous and compulsory ambition: to clarify the strange fact of knowledge, to explore its current situation, to search for meanings that go beyond it”.

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922) has lived in France since 1945. He co-founded the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and was its main animator. He has published numerous works on social analysis and political philosophy.