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.

“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.

“With rationality we must imperatively go as far as it can take us. Since it does not lead us to the ultimate goal, that is, to know what is real, we must then rely on less certain guides.” A fundamental text by Bernard d’Espagnat, physicist, philosopher and director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Paris-Orsay. In an authentic and direct way, d’Espagnat investigates and verifies the very foundations of physics and the relationship between it and the philosophy of knowledge.

An important essay by the well-known French biophysicist and philosopher of Algerian origin, this volume offers a meditation on the living that goes beyond biology to cross the sciences of nature, the sciences of man, the experience of Jewish thought, life and death, towards a new knowledge of the world that has to choose: ethics or biology?