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.

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.

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.

“The aim of this work is to show that there are different rationalities, different ways of being ‘right’, all of them legitimate though different, in the manner in which they account for the data of our senses”. This is how the author introduces his dissertation on the territories of reason, the subject of this volume. Henri Atlan, a doctor and biologist born in Algeria in 1931, currently teaches at the Universities of Paris and Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous studies on cell biology, biophysics and artificial intelligence. His formal theory of self-organisation has inspired fruitful intellectual explorations in various disciplines. In Italy he is known for his essay Tra il cristallo e il fumo, published by hopefulmonster in 1987.