A short fragment from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Contrat social on the behaviour of the English voters and the limits of their participation in parliamentary elections may be a helpful starting point for a survey of some issues regarding the lessons that the historical development of the British electoral practice are likely to teach to the Italian reader who is used to pay some attention to the present debate on the electoral reform. Leggi tutto »
With authentic revolutionary spirit, Olympe de Gouges, who became an essayist and a playwright at the time of the French Revolution, writes a manifest, Les Trois Urnes, in which she exhorts the exponents of the newly established power to call for free French elections and let the people take up political responsibility in terms of deciding the form of government that better fits the principles of the Declaration of Rights. Leggi tutto »
The aim of this essay is to investigate the concept of elections in relation to the crisis of political representation. The first objective is to review the details of the adoption of the “elective principle,” especially through the contribution of Bernard Manin. The second step is to consider the political effects of the adoption of the idea of “deselection.” Leggi tutto »
The paper begins with a contrast between two competing paradigms of play: the child and the adult athlete. It then argues that Plato rejects the former but strongly affirms the latter as a model of philosophy – indeed, of the best human life – itself. Leggi tutto »
The word used for “serious,” in the Pāli language of the Buddhist Canon, is garu (the equivalent of the Sanskrit guru); however, in the canonical texts, one cannot find the derivative abstract noun garutā. Instead, there is another key term that could be translated as “seriousness”: appamāda. Before his passing away, the Buddha told his disciples: “Strive on with appamāda”. Now, appamāda is a negative concept (a-ppamāda) that can be translated in many ways: for example, absence of negligence, distraction or laziness. According to Buddhaghosa’s commentary, the phrase of the Buddha means: “Carry out all things that need to be done with uninterrupted awareness”. Leggi tutto »
this paper, we consider a phenomenology of seriousness after the Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla. Thought about as an intentional relation between a subject and values (or rules), seriousness is represented in subjective behavior as commitment, loyalty, and adherence to values (or rules). We consider the displacement of that commitment via disruptions that invert values. Following Portilla, we refer to these displacements as relajo. Leggi tutto »
This essay intends to offer an approach to charis and kairos viewed not as separate but as intertwined. This happy interlacement is a specificity of the Homeric tradition, specifically found in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. A poet like Hesiod will have the greatest difficulty in conceiving the proximity of kairos and charis without a negative side (Pandora, a trap for men).