Il primato della contingenza e la premessa politica del discorso etico: riflessioni sulla filosofia del giovane Heidegger

More than trying to make explicit an ethical discourse that – for whichever reason – would have remained only implicit in Heidegger’s philosophy, the aim of this article is to trace, in Heidegger’s work, the eventual presence of the structural premises for such a discourse. Premises which, in our perspective, can be brought back to the following two elements: first of all, to the character of contingency of experience and absence of ontological foundation, which only makes ethics a genuine discourse of responsibility and not a simple application of pre-given rules; and, second (given such lack of ontological foundation), to the unavoidable political institution of this same discourse. Now, the pivotal point of this article is that such premises, in Heidegger’s work, far from being traceable in Being and Time or in his later works, are to be rather found in his previous texts, and precisely in his early Freiburg lectures (from 1919 to 1923), in which his thought appears to be still not so much seduced by an ontological drive

Legge della pluralità o armonia del potere? Annotazioni su una possibilità di pensare Arendt contro Arendt

In this article I intend to trace and discuss a contradiction, which – I believe – lies in Arendt’s thought: the one between her concept of plurality and her concept of power. In a more specific way, I will argue that Arendt, by admitting only an intransitive understanding of power, betrays her vision of plurality, as this one cannot exclude a transitive conception of power. Furthermore, I will try to detect how this same contradiction reflects itself in another topical place of Arendt’s thought, i.e. her critical opposition to political representation. Here the direction of my arguing can be expressed by a simple question: isn’t maybe representation a much more adequate way to correspond plurality than Arendt’s tendency to acclaim an aggregative and quasi-organic collective participation

A-Legality: Journey to the Borders of Law. In Dialogue with Hans Lindahl

This paper delineates and discusses the overall theoretical trajectory of Hans Lindahl’s work Fault Lines of Globalization. Furthermore, through a strategy of joint thinking – or dialogue – with the author, the article hits a double target. On the one hand, it gives the reader the oppor-tunity to better grasp some aspects and features of the author’s philosophical background. On the other, it fleshes out some crucial passages of the book with the aim of a further clarification and more accurate inspection

Order as Unclosed Scene: the Alienness of Origin between Translation and Tragedy

Every order lies on the claim or pretension to give itself as an accomplished realm, i.e. as a closed scene which is capable to give shape, orientation and sense to the totality of elements embraced by it. Yet, from the same operation of ordering, a paradox soon arises, in that no order can avoid its contingent genealogy, that means: it cannot avoid the fact that, in enclosing and including something, it must simultaneously exclude something else, which, therefore, can always challenge and threaten its stability or total “delimitation”. In this sense, that which is excluded can be seen as an alien element, which structurally prevents order from a definite closure and thus keeps it in a permanent (historical and nondialectisable) movement. Now, what I would like to convey in my following reflections is that this dynamics of impossible closure of order, given to a non-appropriable alienness, is exactly the one operative in the realms of translation and tragedy, so that, once we carefully investigate these realms, we may dare to affirm that saying that orders are unclosed scenes is as much true as to say that they are constantly “in translation”, always “in tragedy”

Filosofia del soggetto e mediazione interpretativa: sulla fenomenologia ermeneutica di Paul Ricoeur

Several attempts, which have recently tried to empower again the philosophical crossing between phenomenology and hermeneutics, call for a re-examination of the main topics and themes at stake in such a project, which has dominated in many ways part of the 20th Century Continental Philosophy. However, given such a perspective, what I would like to show in the following essay is that, far from insisting again on the primacy of the thought of an author like Hans-Georg Gadamer, it could be of higher suitability to address the thought of another philosopher: Paul Ricoeur. Particularly, by reconsidering the main steps of his phenomenological- hermeneutical project, I would like to stress how Ricoeur’s philosophy, in comparison to Gadamer’s approach, is not only able to display a larger spectrum of confrontations, but also a stronger theoretical structure, which has its pivotal point in the notion of an interpretative deconstruction of the titanic subject through the appropriative mediation of the narrative text

Metal abundances in extremely distant Galactic old open clusters. II. Berkeley 22 and Berkeley 66

We report on high resolution spectroscopy of four giant stars in the Galactic old open clusters Berkeley~22 and Berkeley~66 obtained with HIRES at the Keck telescope. We find that $[Fe/H]=-0.32\pm0.19$ and $[Fe/H]=-0.48\pm0.24$ for Berkeley~22 and Berkeley~66, respectively. Based on these data, we first revise the fundamental parameters of the clusters, and then discuss them in the context of the Galactic disk radial abundance gradient. We found that both clusters nicely obey the most updated estimate of the slope of the gradient from \citet{fri02} and are genuine Galactic disk objects.Comment: 20 pages, 6 eps figures, accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa

The Human SLC25A33 and SLC25A36 Genes of Solute Carrier Family 25 Encode Two Mitochondrial Pyrimidine Nucleotide Transporters

The human genome encodes 53 members of the solute carrier family 25 (SLC25), also called the mitochondrial carrier family, many of which have been shown to transport inorganic anions, amino acids, carboxylates, nucleotides, and coenzymes across the inner mitochondrial membrane, thereby connecting cytosolic and matrix functions. Here two members of this family, SLC25A33 and SLC25A36, have been thoroughly characterized biochemically. These proteins were overexpressed in bacteria and reconstituted in phospholipid vesicles. Their transport properties and kinetic parameters demonstrate that SLC25A33 transports uracil, thymine, and cytosine (deoxy)nucleoside di- and triphosphates by an antiport mechanism and SLC25A36 cytosine and uracil (deoxy)nucleoside mono-, di-, and triphosphates by uniport and antiport. Both carriers also transported guanine but not adenine (deoxy)nucleotides. Transport catalyzed by both carriers was saturable and inhibited by mercurial compounds and other inhibitors of mitochondrial carriers to various degrees. In confirmation of their identity (i) SLC25A33 and SLC25A36 were found to be targeted to mitochondria and (ii) the phenotypes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells lacking RIM2, the gene encoding the well characterized yeast mitochondrial pyrimidine nucleotide carrier, were overcome by expressing SLC25A33 or SLC25A36 in these cells. The main physiological role of SLC25A33 and SLC25A36 is to import/export pyrimidine nucleotides into and from mitochondria, i.e. to accomplish transport steps essential for mitochondrial DNA and RNA synthesis and breakdown

Mesoscopic continuous and discrete channels for quantum information transfer

We study the possibility of realizing perfect quantum state transfer in mesoscopic devices. We discuss the case of the Fano-Anderson model extended to two impurities. For a channel with an infinite number of degrees of freedom, we obtain coherent behavior in the case of strong coupling or in weak coupling off-resonance. For a finite number of degrees of freedom, coherent behavior is associated to weak coupling and resonance conditions