L’arte come paradigma ideale in Filone d’Alessandria

For Philo the unique true artist is God who makes the Great City, the world. He designs a plan and, being the author of the eternal paradigms, he produces many perfect shows: the dance of the stars, the heavenly music, the echo of non-visible sounds. In the human world, art to be true art and not a form of falsehood, must follow noetic patterns. We can see this aspect in the visual arts, where an artist acts -Bezalel- who draws inspiration from divine indications. Phidias too, even if he is not inspired, brings the ideal types in the matter. There is an ontological descent from the divine work to the products imitating ideal paradigms, to the artifacts gifted with an empirical agreeableness, even if they do not ascend to the idea. In the literary field too, the texts of authors such as Solon or Plato show elements of truth: they are third level works, but they are not negative. The status of the theatre is quite different: the performances seem necessarily to involve forms of falsehood, simulation, deceit. My hypothesis is that the theatre has a particular role: it is its own nature to be false, not simply illusion, but real deception. It is not a question of being an inferior copy of an ideal eternal model, but of being actually falsehood and lie. Thus, for Philo theater is at a muchinferior level than the other arts and in this, Philo is quite different from Plato

Il sogno di Europa e il ratto di Zeus

The aim of this paper is to give an account of the origin of the name “Europe” given to the continent and to narrate the myth of the girl so called abducted by Zeus. The myth of Europe that sees the derivation of the European population from the Phoenician people is close to that of Cadmus, Europe’s brother. The whole story makes continuous references to links between Phoenicia, Crete, and Boeotia, to the exchanges between Asia and Europe and to the intermingling of populations

Lingua e voce di Dio: Monadicità e diadicità nell’ esegesi di Filone alessandrino

This article deals with the relationship between simple, monadic, divine words and the words of men linked to corporeity, devoid of clarity and univocity. For the divine word to be grasped by men a kind of transformation is necessary. One can hypothesize the existence of an archetypal, primordial language, in imitation of the essence of things. It is the language of Adam: given the perfection of a still pure soul, not affected by infirmity, illness or passion, the progenitor seized immediate impressions, grasped the meaning of things whose natures could be enunciated and thought at the same time. It is the original perfect language and is perhaps common to humans and animals if in the Garden of Eden the words of the serpent were understood by Eve. A distinction is drawn between the language of Adam, mimetic of the language of God and the mosaic language in which we have the translation of the divine word in human language. This, despite that, for Moses too it is said that the names correspond to the description of things. A further passage takes place with the passing from one language into another. God addresses different kinds of communication to different people according to their capacities. It is a “translation” of a noetic language that can speak monadically ”“ and it is the case of communication to Moses ”“ or assume the form of names and verbs proper to human language ”“and it is what happens with the Septuagint, translators like Aron.L’articolo si interroga sulla relazione tra parole divine, semplici, monadiche e il dire degli uomini legato alla corporeità, privo di chiarezza e di univocità. Perché la parola divina sia colta dagli uomini è necessaria una sorta di trasformazione. Si può ipotizzare l’esistenza di un linguaggio archetipico, primordiale, ad imitazione dell’essenza delle cose. È la lingua di Adamo per cui, data la perfezione di un’anima ancora pura, non intaccata da infermità, malattia o passione, il progenitore coglieva le impressioni immediate, afferrava il significato delle cose le cui nature potevano essere insieme enunciate e pensate. È la lingua perfetta originaria ed era forse comune ad uomini ed animali se nel giardino dell’Eden le parole del serpente erano comprese da Eva. Si passa dal linguaggio di Adamo, mimetico rispetto al linguaggio di Dio, alla lingua mosaica in cui interviene la traduzione del linguaggio divino in linguaggio umano. Questo, nonostante che, anche per Mosè sia detto che i nomi corrispondono alla descrizione delle cose. Un ulteriore passaggio avviene con la traduzione da una lingua in un’altra. Vi è un trascorrere tra comunicazioni di Dio che si volge all’interlocutore in maniera differente a seconda delle sue possibilità. Si tratta di “traduzione” di una lingua noetica che può esprimersi monadicamente ”“ ed è il caso della comunicazione a Mosè ”“ o assumere già la forma di nomi e verbi propria del linguaggio umano ”“ ed è quanto avviene con i Settanta, traduttori al pari di Aronne

Popper: Miseria e storicismo: Una recensione di Francesca Calabi e Giulio Giorello

Nel gennaio del 1975 la casa editrice Feltrinelli pubblicò The Poverty of Historicism di Karl Popper nella traduzione di C. Montaleone. Con Giulio Giorello discussi a lungo il testo e insieme scrivemmo la recensione/articolo qui sotto riportata. Vivevamo insieme da anni, in un clima di grande vivacità culturale, di collaborazione, di stimoli e di scambi teorici, come appare anche da questo articolo. Fin da una prima lettura si può notare quanto sia importante l’apporto di Giulio e si può seguire l’andamento delle nostre discussioni.  Per ragioni contingenti non pubblicammo il testo che io ora presento nella sua veste originaria: essa presenta qualche incongruenza di editing nella citazione dei titoli e qualche correzione a mano: mi è sembrato giusto mantenere l’articolo come era

Azurin for Biomolecular Electronics: a Reliability Study

The metalloprotein azurin, used in biomolecular electronics, is investigated with respect to its resilience to high electric fields and ambient conditions, which are crucial reliability issues. Concerning the effect of electric fields, two models of different complexity agree indicating an unexpectedly high robustness. Experiments in device-like conditions confirm that no structural modifications occur, according to fluorescence spectra, even after a 40-min exposure to tens of MV/m. Ageing is then investigated experimentally, at ambient conditions and without field, over several days. Only a small conformational rearrangement is observed in the first tens of hours, followed by an equilibrium state

Identification of a novel zinc metalloprotease through a global analysis of clostridium difficile extracellular proteins

Clostridium difficile is a major cause of infectious diarrhea worldwide. Although the cell surface proteins are recognized to be important in clostridial pathogenesis, biological functions of only a few are known. Also, apart from the toxins, proteins exported by C. difficile into the extracellular milieu have been poorly studied. In order to identify novel extracellular factors of C. difficile, we analyzed bacterial culture supernatants prepared from clinical isolates, 630 and R20291, using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. The majority of the proteins identified were non-canonical extracellular proteins. These could be largely classified into proteins associated to the cell wall (including CWPs and extracellular hydrolases), transporters and flagellar proteins. Seven unknown hypothetical proteins were also identified. One of these proteins, CD630_28300, shared sequence similarity with the anthrax lethal factor, a known zinc metallopeptidase. We demonstrated that CD630_28300 (named Zmp1) binds zinc and is able to cleave fibronectin and fibrinogen in vitro in a zinc-dependent manner. Using site-directed mutagenesis, we identified residues important in zinc binding and enzymatic activity. Furthermore, we demonstrated that Zmp1 destabilizes the fibronectin network produced by human fibroblasts. Thus, by analyzing the exoproteome of C. difficile, we identified a novel extracellular metalloprotease that may be important in key steps of clostridial pathogenesis