“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?

The fact that the ‘law of desire’ can only find a limit in the ‘desire for law’ is not just a play on words: it is one of those necessarily equivocal expressions with which language must strive to illuminate the paradoxical structure of ‘moral discourse’.

Vladimir Jankélevitch (1903-1985) taught at the universities of Toulouse, Lille and the Sorbonne. His philosophical works include: H. Bergson, 1931, L'odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling, 1933, Traité des vertus, 1949, Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, 1957, La mort, 1966. A pianist and musicologist, he has written essays on Liszt, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. Recent translations of La musica e l'ineffabile and La coscienza ebraica have been published in Italian.