Infinity and the Sublime

In this paper we intend to connect two different strands of research concerning the origin of what I shall loosely call "formal" ideas: firstly, the relation between logic and rhetoric - the theme of the 2006 Cambridge conference to which this paper was a contribution -, and secondly, the impact of religious convictions on the formation of certain twentieth century mathematical concepts, as brought to the attention recently by the work of L. Graham and J.-M. Kantor. In fact, we shall show that the latter question is a special case of the former, and that investigation of the larger question adds to our understanding of the smaller one. Our approach will be primarily historical.Comment: 29 pages and 3 figure

Advice to a Princess: the literary articulation of a religious, political and cultural programme for Mary Queen of Scots, 1562

No abstract available

The Historical Development of the Logica vetus

Resum disponible en anglèsThis paper is a historical survey of the logica vetus, which is distinguished by characterizing and contextualizing the main contributions of the most significant logicians of that period

A evolução histórica da Logica vetus

Este artigo é uma exposição panorâmica da história da logica vetus, que se distingue por caracterizar e contextualizar as principais contribuições dos lógicos mais expressivos do período em questão.This paper is a historical survey of the logica vetus, which is distinguished by characterizing and contextualizing the main contributions of the most significant logicians of that period

Bibliographia Boethiana II

Segunda de las tres partes que componen la Bibliographia Boethiana, dedicada a la vida, época, obra e influencia de Anicio Manlio Severino Boecio. Esta segunda entrega reúne los estudios más importantes sobre su pervivencia durante la Edad Media

Economic and Social Thoughts of Ivan Pososhkov (1652-1726)

In this paper, I will try to address some criticism to Bruno Leoni’s general theory of law and society. In his well known book Freedom and the Law (1961) –in the opinion of some Italian scholars, to be considered a libertarian Manifesto–, he stressed at least five main points: i) legislation is incompatible with the long-run certainty of the law, that is when the law is not properly the result of the exercise of the arbitrary will of particular men; ii) courts of justice describe or discover the law, and do not make the law; iii) courts cannot be considered as legislators, not only because of their psychological attitude towards the law, which they discover, and do not create, but above all because of their fundamental dependance on the parties concerned in their process of making the law: so, a court must not be allowed to reverse its precedents – at least to a certain extent; iv) the whole process, and so the law, can be described as a sort of vast, continuous, and chiefly spontaneous collaboration between the judges and the judged in order to discover what the people’s will is in a series of definite instances –a collaboration that in many respects may be compared to that existing among all the partecipants in a free market; v) in our time, the mechanism of the judiciary in certain countries where supreme courts are established results in the imposition of the personal views of the members of these courts, or of a majority of them: it is a somewhat contradictory introduction of the legislative process under the deceptive label of lawyers’ or judiciary law at its highest stage. It seems to me that Leoni’s theory of law and society as a normative doctrine for a «libertarian», or «post-hayekian», society is not entirely successful: in particular, topics as the relation between law and legislation, the proper sense of legal concepts (if any), and the possibility to survive for individual freedom as a non-historical but ideological concept within an open, i.e. democratic , society, will be put under scrutiny in the paper, according to Leoni’s doctrine of law as an individual claimhistory of economic and social thought, Russia

Early Carthusian Script and Silence

At its founding and during its first three decades, the Carthusian order developed a distinctive and forceful concept of communication among the members and between the members and the extramural world.2 Saint Bruno’s life, contemporary twelfth-century exegesis, and the physical situation of La Grande Chartreuse established the necessary context in which this concept evolved. A review of historical background, the relevant documentary texts, and early development demonstrate the shaping of two steps in this concept. Close reading of the principal testimonies of Carthusians Bruno, Guigo I, Guigo II, and some other witnesses, as well as of some passages in Saint Augustine, argues that Carthusian scribal work was more preliminary practice for spiritual development than it was the sacralization of codices and texts. The two-step structure, composed of contrary movements of presentation and effacement, guarded what the Carthusians regarded as spiritual activity within a changing historical environment and became a fundamental part of Latin Christian mysticism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries