Velle malum ex pura libertate: Duns Scoto e la banalità del male

Hannah Arendt e Hans Jonas highlight one specific aspect of Duns Scotus's thought: the wide autonomy that the Franciscan theologian allows to human will. In particular, Scotus admits that the very aim of human behaviour can be freely chosen by man, rather than being (as it was commonly believed at that age) a natural and cogent propensity towards good. In Arendt's opinion Scotus opens the way to modernity, an age in which man is both the producer and the defender of all values, creator of history and responsible for it. Arendt's interpretation is acceptable, however it is necessary to highlight with great care the limits of human freedom, in particular if an evil goal can be found among the freely chosen aims. Scotus strongly denies that evil can be desired for itself: creation is intrinsically positive because being and good can be converted into each other; thus Scotus holds a conception of evil actions that appears surprisingly modern. When Scotus maintains that for man the worse fault is to choose evil for his own freedom, the Franciscan theologian takes leave from the ethical conceptions of his age which blamed sins on the weakness of human will, prone to the external temptations of an errant reason or to the urge of physical passions: in Scotus’s conception, human will has in itself the reasons of sin, traceable in a sort of indetermination due to the constitutive finity of man, which has the power of leading man astray in spite of his autonomy naturally directed towards good. However, with this operation Scotus denies any grandiosity of the evil behaviour. Evil does not prove itself at the highest degree in rationally evil projects; instead, as our experience nowadays shows, evil reflects the senseless emptiness of a human being ready to commit evil actions for the vain achievement of himself as free

Libertà e contingenza della fruizione beatifica nello scotismo del primo '300

Este estudo tem como objeto a recepção da teoria scotista da vontade no início do século 14. Interesse precípuo é o modo como autores, sobretudo franciscanos, a partir das Universidades de Paris e de Oxford, discutiram sobre a possibilidade de uma escolha livre ou de um ato da própria vontade, por parte dos bem-aventurados, quando da visão de Deus. Para tanto, pressuposições gerais da teoria scotista da vontade são apresentadas, bem como as inovações dos filósofos influenciados por Scotu

A variational technique for the computation of the vibration frequencies of mechanical systems governed by nonsymmetric matrices

AbstractIn this paper an algorithm for the solution of linear eigenvalue problems governed by ill-conditioned nonsymmetric matrices that are typical in dynamic structural analysis in the presence of nonconservative loads is proposed. The real eigenpairs (x,λ) are formulated as the minimizers of a suitable non-negative functional, which plays a role analogous to that of the Raleigh quotient for positive definite matrices. The proposed method, which is similar to a Rayleigh iterative scheme, has proven itself to be substancially unaffected by extremely high dispersions of the real eigenvalues. The method is illustrated by means of examples that correspond to beams subject to nonconservative loads

A variational Bayesian method for inverse problems with impulsive noise

We propose a novel numerical method for solving inverse problems subject to impulsive noises which possibly contain a large number of outliers. The approach is of Bayesian type, and it exploits a heavy-tailed t distribution for data noise to achieve robustness with respect to outliers. A hierarchical model with all hyper-parameters automatically determined from the given data is described. An algorithm of variational type by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the true posteriori distribution and a separable approximation is developed. The numerical method is illustrated on several one- and two-dimensional linear and nonlinear inverse problems arising from heat conduction, including estimating boundary temperature, heat flux and heat transfer coefficient. The results show its robustness to outliers and the fast and steady convergence of the algorithm.Comment: 20 pages, to appear in J. Comput. Phy

Liberi di peccare. Tommaso d\u2019Aquino ed Enrico di Gand sull\u2019ostinazione dei dannati,

Il contributo mostra come Enrico di Gand e Tommaso d'Aquino sviluppino soluzioni diverse per giustificare l'ostinazione al male del dannato pur in presenza del libero arbitrio che tende al bene