Paolo Palmieri - Böcker

This book explores the life of Galileo Galilei through a philosophical and scientific lens, utilizing an innovative hermeneutic perspective that places his work in the wider context of early modern hermeticism, religious heresy, and libertinism. As the first comprehensive study of Galileo’s life and work from a phenomenological and existentialist viewpoint, Paolo Palmieri calls into question the positivist myth of Galileo, the founder of modern science, and interrogates the positivist historiography that has shaped the myth since the historic publication of the monumental edition of Galileo’s works at the turn of the twentieth century. The book highlights the entanglement of Galileo’s natural philosophy with his private unorthodox convictions about Christian theology, Biblical hermeneutic, sexuality, and the hidden traditions of Italian heretics and libertines. The text demonstrates the philosophical, pedagogical, and political implications of this new reading of one of the founding fathers of modernity for both the sciences and the humanities. Addressing hotly debated questions of ethnicity, racism, subjectivity, the self, and pedagogy, this study will be of particular interest to scholars who teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in history of science, philosophy of science, phenomenology and existential philosophy, cultural studies, Italian studies, humanism, and the European Renaissance.

The Theory of Social Pulsation is a new social theory elaborated from the social phenomenology and philosophy of sciences’ standpoint. It represents an innovative interpretation of social phenomena postulated as active states of social actors including individuals, social groups, and social facts (organizations, institutions, systems). As an active state of social actors, pulsation is defined by eight variables that constitute social phenomena as a whole: (a) intention, (b) reaction, (c) reflection, (d) communication, (e) institutionalization, (f) internalization, (g) structuration, and (h) innovation. Ivo Komsic argues that social states are pulsating and within those states, social causality is transferred from one social actor to another. Social actors continuously transfer social causality from one to another, depending on the intensity of its pulsation. Balanced or unbalanced, functional or dysfunctional, consensual or imposed, a system will be classified in the presence or absence of one of these phenomena, by its greater or lesser intensity. The theory posits a new paradigm that tends to overcome the "eternal" problem in sociology—relations between individuals as social actors and social structure, that is, "social statics" and "social dynamics," the role of the great historical personalities and the "objective law of history," freedom and necessity in social action, micro and macro social levels.The model of social communication analyzed in the book can be used as a general model of social and political communication, particularly in multiethnic and multicultural societies considering the contemporary state of affairs globally.

The ideal of higher humanism challenges our modern civilization and its diminished image of the human being. A critique of the ideologies of "bourgeois humanism" provides a pathway toward the renascence of human identity and human dignity. Historical illustrations, drawn from the higher heritage of humanity, revive values long forgotten. Ash Gobar re-argues the great argument for the impact of the "philosophy of life" upon the "quality of life." This is a timely work: the call of a modern philosopher to awaken the conscience of humanity from its existential vertigo.

A Translation of Luigi Paolucci’s On Birdsong is the first English translation of a groundbreaking memoir on birdsong by the Italian naturalist Luigi Paolucci. It is accompanied by extensive annotations and an introductory essay by the translator, Paolo Palmieri, that examines the scientific and philosophical questions raised by birdsong in relation to the history and philosophy of science, phenomenology, and the theoretical problems of the demarcation of the human and non-human animal. Paolucci’s memoir focuses on firsthand ecological research and offers a fundamental theory of birdsong as language and music. Paolucci studies songbird species and behavior by bringing to bear linguistics, music and sound theory, and the debate on evolutionary theory and animal cognition. In the introductory essay, Paolo Palmieri adopts a phenomenological approach in order to investigate the problem of animal suffering and ethics, animal reasoning and will, the neurophysiology of hearing in humans and birds, and the relation between birdsong and laughter. This book will appeal to a large audience of philosophers, post-humanists, historians of science, animal cognition theorists, birdsong scientists and naturalists, and students. This book will also be valuable to the general public who is interested in the ethical debates on the presence of non-human animals in our society.

Sacred Science is an analysis of post-war discourses concerning health and illness. These discourses are an attempt to grasp the meaning of health in our modern human condition, and as such they provide both new insights into the genealogy of conceptualizations of both health and illness, but also serve as a viable hermeneutic summary of many important textual moments in the recent history of health studies, including Foucault, Gadamer, Illich, Sontag, and others. This book is the result of a phenomenological disquisition of the ideas employed by health scholars and philosophers, and its import rests both on its uniqueness in the relevant fields and its new ideas, including ‘indefinitude’, ‘deontic facticity’, and illness as the experience of the simultaneous ‘inexistence’ of both life and death.

The Profound Limitations of Knowledge explores the limitations of knowledge and argues that neither reasoning nor direct or indirect observations can be trusted. We cannot even assign probabilities to claims of what we can know. Furthermore, for any set of data, there are an infinite number of possible interpretations. Evidence suggests that we live in a participatory universe—that is, our observations shape reality.