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This article arises from my clinical experience in the "Distracted Stork" Service of the Institute of Higher Education and Family Psychotherapy in Florence and in the staff of the Demetra Assisted Procreation Center in Florence and aims to delve deeper into the specific complexities of fertilization with donation of gametes and to offer clinical observation and intervention tools to professionals working in this delicate area of intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work, Identity and Gift. Throughout history work has changed its meaning and imaginary. Born as a need it was the expression of a collective struggle against human weakness and limits. It became a duty for those who could not avoid it and finally a generative mechanism of identity. Work put a mark on the body, it determines the subject's self-perception, it shapes social relationships. In this work the author aims at analysing the possible nexus between work, identity and gift as the framework for a collaborative and positive society. The isolation of the modern man, focused on competition and on consumption cannot make room for stable social relationships and let emerge a new kind of work imaginary or a new kind of imaginary work.

Gift and “dolus”: from digital turn to technostress The digital revolution, by reconfiguring our way of being in the world as a stay-always-on, has altered the principle of separation between online and offline. Continuous and unrestricted connection can have negative effects on quality of life and productivity, compromising individual psychosomatic equilibrium. The health effects associated with the pervasive use of digital devices and their applications are often summarised under the term “technostress”. Protracted exposure to an excessive information load determines a response involving the activation of psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunological processes whose alteration plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis of the symptoms most frequently associated with technostress. We call this response “e-inflammation”.

La legge della fiducia by Tommaso Greco is not just a good book: it is an important book. Its well-deserved success clearly testifies such a relevance. In my comment, however, I propose a reading of trust in terms of a gift, and not of a law. Crucially, taking up the work done by Jacques Derrida on his essay devoted to Marcel Mauss's analysis of gift, I will attempt to show how trust can be interpreted as a pure - and not only as a ceremonial - gift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to propose an historical analysis of the fragment FGrHist 128 F3 (= Strab. XV 3, 21) of the historian Polykleitos of Larissa. Polykleitos reports mostly administrative and economic news on the Persian Great King’s activity and testifies to a new approach to the study of the Persian Empire and its tribute system compared to Herodotus: these are complex evidences clarified in the light of the Aristotelian reflection on the oikonomia and the politics of Macedonians in Asia.

Besides sound, the essence of music is inherent in the materiality of the objects that graphically represent, concretely produce, and ideally describe that sound: books, instruments, paintings. The history and didactics of music, therefore, must also include these objects among its research and teaching contents, especially if these are aimed at illustrating the meaning and role of music in a specific era or environment. With a methodological support from anthropological studies on the notion of gift, on the social meaning of collecting, and on the symbolic functions of objects owned, requested or donated, this study probes into the hermeneutic effectiveness of this perspective by specifically investigating the musical collecting of the Duke of Urbino, Guidubaldo II Della Rovere. The study reveals how much the Duke's interests for musical objects have contributed to define his identity and his role in relations with foreign gentlemen of his time.

Is there a circular relationship between trust and ethics? Is it possible to alter their relationship, changing the perception that social actors have of them? How has trust changed in the transition from modernity to post-modernity and how does it change in times of crisis? Starting from the epistemological assumption that progress in the social sciences is determined by the change in the theoretical horizon produced by “a reformulation of metaphysical assumptions”[1] and combining this path with the relational perspective, according to which “not the facts, but the relationship between the facts is what requires analysis”[2], we will examine definitions, meanings, functions and relationships between trust and ethics. Following the theoretical logical method, we will understand that trust and ethical behaviour are particular forms of gift[3] that co-own each other. As such, they are ambivalent in nature and their circle can also produce dysfunctional outcomes that depend on the ability of social systems to modify collective perceptions through forms of communication, in the awareness that distrust constitutes an ineliminable and, paradoxically, preparatory element for the restoration of the trust circle. The relational circle between gift, trust, collective ethics and personal morality does not end with distrust, but changes in a contingent way, determining perverse effects: correct behaviour could produce, unintentionally, a disaster; incorrect actions could generate unforeseen positive effects.The perverse effects cannot be defined as exceptional - as is believed in the theory of rational choice - but recurrent because daily practices are marked by an intuitive, emotional and moralistic trust circle that prevails over logical reasoning, as ascertained by both relational theory and behavioural economics. Functionalist paradigms cannot engineer and optimise the performance of trust. [1] See J. Alexander's strong programme in S. Segre, Le teorie sociologiche contemporanee, Carocci, Rome, 2019, p. 12. It is not enough to observe reality, it is necessary to interpret it, taking into account theories and traditions whose foundations have a metaphysical character. [2] F. Ferrarotti, La sociologia come analisi critica della società, in R. Cipriani (a cura di), Nuovo Manuale di Sociologia, Maggioli, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna, 2018 p. 24. [3] The classical meaning in M. Mauss, Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques, 1ª ed. 1925, revisited by G. Satta, L’ambiguità del dono. Note su dono, violenza e potere nell’Essai di Mauss, in V. Rasini, Aggressività. Un’indagine polifonica, Mimesis, Milano 2011.

The article, in the epistemological debate of the social sciences and in particular within “third” perspectives between the two traditional ones, holism and individualism, presents an epistemological-methodological proposal for social relations analysis. Emerging from the convergence of Paradigm of gift and Social Network Analysis, it shows how the first can find a valid and coherent “complement” in the methodological apparatus of the second, to go “on the field” of empirical observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper brings forward an analysis of the Orthodox icon, made by deploying the model of semi-logical hexade which describes the situation of creative communication. Starting with the presentation of the socio-cultural context in which the icon appears and continuing with the other parameters of the hexade – the purpose which justifies the activation of the creative act, whom is this icon addressed, who created it, what psychological mechanisms have concurred to its birth and which is the result of this creative process – our focus has been the defining and description of what the icon is.

The importance attributed to the figure of volunteering in the recent code of the Third Sector induces us to reflect on the deeper nature of this activity. Volunteering activity, in fact, is closely related to gratuitousness and gift. In going deeper into this concept, the article opens with the analysis of gift in Paul Ricoeur, who reworked the theory of gift in Marcel Mauss intersecting it with the theme of recognition. The “gift” was a concept used to emphasize and enhance the social economy, especially by the Social Doctrine of the Church, giving an esteemed recognition to so- cial solidarity cooperatives. The latter are a significant part of the third sector and are considered as the expression of a civil society. All this is inserted and operates within a system based on the principle of subsidiarity which recognizes and promotes the social articulation in which those very intermediate bodies of society that operate in order to satisfy certain needs from the point of view of social solidarity find themselves.

The article aims to summarize the main features of Elena Pulcini’s social philosophy, starting with her latest work entitled Between care and justice. Passions as social resources. Empathy, compassion and indignation are just some of the moral sentiments that show the limits of the anthropological model of homo oeconomicus; at the same time, these sentiments are at the center of a new theoretical paradigm that combines care and justice in order to avoid the partiality of unilateral ethical-political models: just as justice can become unfair, if careless, care work can easily assume the unrecognizable semblances of exploitative relationships when conceived and practiced regardless of a fair material and symbolic recognition of its performances. The intellectual testament of Elena Pulcini is as an urgent invitation to overcome the widespread emotional illiteracy and proposes a promising strategy to face the challenges due to the space-time distance of the Other in the global age.

The article aims to summarize the main features of Elena Pulcini's social philosophy, starting with her latest work entitled Between care and justice. Passions as social resources. Empathy, compassion and indignation are just some of the moral sentiments that show the limits of the anthropological model of homo oeconomicus; at the same time, these sentiments are at the center of a new theoretical paradigm that combines care and justice in order to avoid the partiality of unilateral ethical-political models: just as justice can become unfair, if careless, care work can easily assume the unrecognizable semblances of exploitative relationships when conceived and practiced regardless of a fair material and symbolic recognition of its performances. The intellectual testament of Elena Pulcini is as an urgent invitation to overcome the widespread emotional illiteracy and proposes a promising strategy to face the challenges due to the space-time distance of the Other in the global age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mario Vergani's book Nascere. Una fenomenologia dell'esistenza is a great contribution to rethinking finitude and the human condition in a phenomenological key. In the dialogue with Vergani two questions come to the fore. The first question concerns the semantic of the gift and its philosophical value for developing a phenomenology of birth. The second question pertains the nature of power and the critique to Arendt's conception of this political category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the phenomenology of the gift in Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son and in Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary. Both texts are contemporary reinterpretations of the Gospels and they are resurrecting the Word through the process of defamiliarization. In Mailer’s text this takes the shape of a full-fledged narrative of the Gospels in which we are very sparingly given the author’s insight on the events. In Toibin’s novel we are assisting at a fist-person narrative of Mary, the mother of Christ, who is telling her version of the events around Christ’s death. Both texts present themselves as a necessary correction to the mistakes made by the apostles in writing the Gospels. These novels will be interpreted through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s theories on the gift. In The Gift of Death Derrida viewed God’s gift to the world through the sacrifice of Christ as fraught with shortcomings. Norman Mailer’s novel rediscusses some of these limitations and puts into a new light Christ’s relationship with the Father. In his own analysis of the phenomenology of the gift, Jean-Luc Marion put forward the notion of “saturated reader” which entails the reader (understood in the large sense of the word) faced with the exceeding revelation of God. Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary constructs such a reader and foregrounds in an original way the phenomenology of the gift

This essay tries to rethink the mission of the Church within the western cultural context. The path followed, which can avoid the drift of a mission colluded with violence as much as the one reducing it to dialogue in absence of truth, is that of the gift. It is showed how the Church is born from the divine gift and how one of the fundamental aspects of its mission consists in being in good reciprocity with the Father-giver, which is expressed in fraternal reciprocity. Nevertheless, the gift is received as such only if it is made available to others, in the same form. The Church then finds itself owing everyone (Rm 1,14) a proclamation, a charity practice a presence in the public space. In light of the paradigm of the gift we can see the connection linking such aspects of the mission and we can grasp, in the form of the gift, the way in which the mission of the Church turns out to be still plausible in the current cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the cultural, political and spiritual trends apt to promote the conditions for public happiness. In a society dominated by economy human existence suffers division, eradication and submission to the claims of global power systems, like the finance driven market. The adaptation of individuals to the induced form of life, in this society, is based on the adoption of a separation system such that each one believes to be isolated. First of all, therefore, it is necessary to develop forms of community sociability. Experiences of open and fair communities liberate people from their forced isolation. In particular, the article shows the turnabouts required for a radical transformation of economy, apt to make it more adequate in relation to the needs and aspirations of human kind.

With the presentation of freedom and of its opposite, slavery, we tried to understand the reason that caused Paul to write to the Galatians. The research was based on occurrences of eleuth root, which are present in 2: 4; 3: 28; 4: 22, 23, 26, 30, 31; 5: 1, 13, that is, in all its thematic parts: autobiographical, doctrinal and hortatory. In addition to eleuth root, we met two other terms within the same semantic field of freedom or liberation: exelētai, from exaireō, with the meaning of "tear away", "save", "free from danger" (1: 4); and exagorasē, from exagorazō, which means "free", "make good use of" (3: 13; 4: 5). These terms show a multidimensional freedom, condensed in freedom from sin and from this evil eon, as well as from the Jewish Law. The gift of freedom is highlighted by the indicative of salvation obtained in Christ, a gift watched and envied by some false brothers, who had infiltrated in the Galatian communities, in order to lure them into slavery (2: 4). In 3: 10, 13 Paul highlights also the liberation of the obligation of the Law. For Paul, to impose the Jewish Law, with its requirements, it would be synonymous with the return to the elements of the world (4: 3, 9), a return to being children (4: 1), that is, incapable of taking responsibility, worthy of freedom obtained in Christ. The intention of Paul is directed toward the invitation to become mature Christians, passing from the state of nēpios (4: 1) to huiothesia (4: 5b), remaining in the freedom offered from Christ, as a gift. In other words, for Paul, if there is the indicative, it follows also the imperative, as evidenced already in 5: 1, 13, 25, that is, the gift becomes responsibility. From the double aspect of slavery, under the pagan mentality and under the Law, it is evidenced that the freedom in Galatians can be analysed from an anthropological-ethical point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About the utility and liability of the “accursed share” in the economy of imaginary. The “Evil” as excess, waste, total consumption; or “bad”, “accursed” because it destabilizes the current “state of affairs”. This essay is intended to expose the economic theory of G. Bataille by a short reading of The limit of utility and of The Accursed share, where he explains his theory of a “general economy” in opposition to what he called the “restricted economy”, corresponding to the whole of economic sciences. According to the fact that economics just study production/extraction, distribution and consumption of matters and goods by the narrow scope of the “isolated situation” of individualistic interest, he tries to go further beyond this classical perspective with a redefinition of the evaluation/exploitation process and the relation between useful and useless. In this way he discovers the paradox of prosperity, its curse: prosperity is “excess” (prodigality) but it’s always destined to became “waste” (squandering). Finally a reading back of Bataille’s insights it is carried out through a comparison with the analysis M. Anspack runs in his A charge de revanche, a book in which he outlines a wide overview of reciprocity in human relationships and in economic phenomena.

This research is the result of an interest linked to social groups as targets of the digital market. The study presents the preliminary considerations of the analysis on contemporary online gift read in the light of the most recent studies of digital anthropology, in an attempt to place it in a context of reference and actors who practice it daily. The genesis of the research is connected to the growth of YouTube from a video platform to an extraordinary detonator of cultural phenomena demonstrated, since its inception in Italy in 2007, by the growing importance of social networking in the opening of new market niches almost contemporary to the new aggregative spaces represented by online communities. The latter are investigated not only through You Tube, but also through the reality of the Facebook groups "I'll give it to you if you come and get it" and similar, that seem to represent the future prospects of the gift on line.

The article focuses on the analysis of the methods of acquisition and supply of objects in an emporium of exchange and barter, the “Senza Monete”, located in Orvieto, in the province of Terni. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I would like to put forward some reflections on consumption and exchange by analyzing the ways of circulation of goods within this peculiar association reality. The results that emerged during the research highlight gift-related dynamics, which sometimes go beyond the barter principle that regulates most exchanges within the Emporium. The interviews addressed to the members have also shown an interesting heterogeneity within the process from approaching to consumption, demonstrating how a strong, sometimes contradictory, critic towards consumerism impacts most of their choices, when these are not dictated by financial needs. The “Senza Monete” presents itself as a paradigmatic case, a place that offers a second chance to objects thanks to the time donated voluntarily by a team of people who is trying to cope with an increasingly felt social and economic crisis.

Pluralism within the contemporary interreligious societies is a topic that relates to the broader relationship between identity and integration. The paper explores this subject, through the "case study" strategy on the interreligious dialogue promoted by the Focolare Movement since the '60s, and the theoretical perspective of the Paradigm of Gift. The paper aims at analysing whether this type of interreligious pluralism expresses "dialogical coexistence", i.e. coexistence in which identity and integration are both respected and supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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ABSTRACT The contemporary philosophical debate about "gift" brought into light above all by French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, brought about new and live discussions regarding what gift is and what is its nature. The present article analyses whether or not love can be regarded as a gift or, rather, follow the same problem showed by Derrida. According to him, every gift carries an internal contradiction and can never be and, therefore, will never be gift. A gift is impossible. What is as gift to people (someone freely gives something to someone), is, actually a commodity, an economical circle for Derrida. This article seeks to inquire whether can or cannot love follow the same gift pattern or if it, rather, builds his own path and follows its own internal logic. Is it possible to analyze love following on the footsteps of phenomenology? If love can be analyzed in a phenomenological fashion - reduction of love - then a new horizon will be opened.

To an education policy increasingly subject to the rules imposed by market, production and competition expectations, I mean to counteract a policy of restitution, such as the commitment to protect every young person from the pressure of exploitation and to reward it through the preparation of vivid, intense, meaningful experiences, aware that only the gift, in its broadest sense, can repay the human singularity of the inevitable limitations and wounds that every “existence” (Dasein) entails.

The act of giving, in a pedagogical point of view, interlaces often with the act of giving himself and with the free and responsable will of encountering the other by his humanity. The main characteristic of giving is the gratuitousness: the human being can be educated aim for freedom and generosity about being able to give and give himself without fee. He who instead receives the gift had to be grateful: the gratification takes shape as an essential element in the educational life of the subject.

The text deals with the theme of gift from the point of view of the pedagogical paradigm of “cura sui” as an “arms” of the educator: both as a community ethics and as an action in the relationship.

The article the theme of gift in a complex and globalized society: the author deals with the logic of reciprocity and conviviality, by in political and democratic point of view.

The retail surface is the result of an institutional frame who rules the way by which people interacts with commodities. It is therefore a source of information about social dynamics, an anthropological source, who must be understood on the field. This paper shows that linking goods to free gifts, a well-known sales strategy, works through the basic relational value of “trust”, usually considered far from the typical habitus of trade relations but instead fundamental to let selling good express theyr own “commodity candidacy”.

The article focuses on the recent debate, about gift and the non-market economies, born especially around the new lecture of classical texts of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi. The article is meant to show that the renewed interest is rooted in the contemporary crisis of relationships, of social ties, and in the effects of commodification of the utilitarian market economies. The theme of the gift is a narrative and theorethical tool to rethinking about the exchange and the social relationships throughout, both from the affective and private point of view than economical and collective too.

This article analyzes the Economy of Communion in Freedom (EoC), an economic phenomenon that was born in 1991 in Brazil and is nowadays widespread worldwide , with some 860 companies informing their actions towards the primary objective to create a society without poverty, in order to achieve a more general aim: “make humankind one family”. Hypothesis of this article is that the EoC, due to his embeddedness in a particular cultural practice, inserts into capitalist system typical elements from a gift-reciprocity system, similar to the one observed by anthropologists in archaic and traditional societies, able to create “reciprocity” and “properly social bonds” beside the instrumental and powerfull relationships. To investigate this hypothesis the EoC is seen as a process, paying attention to the forms of exchange implemented, and as a sociological place focusing the analysis on the actions and relations system, targeting in particular three groups of actors: 1. entrepreneurs, 2. poors that are aid recipents, and 3. management committees that are centrally or locally responsible of the distribution of such aid. The research has been informed by data collected through an on-the-field observation period in Brazil, with qualitative techniques and tools (documents and interviews) and having as theoretical perspective the Paradigm of gift of the M.A.U.S.S. (Mouvement Anti-utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales).

In this article I correlate the concept of gift ‒ referring to Marcel Mauss and his theory of giving-receiving-reciprocating ‒ with three specific areas in the field of intellectual disability: voluntary associations, cooperatives of social services and social cooperatives that promote employment opportunities for people with intellectual disability. My first analysis is that the social services are perceived by users with disability and their families as a donation that is afferent with the gift (and not in the sense of Marcel Mauss) rather than the law.

The rediscovery, in the times of the crisis, of John Maynard Keynes’s proposals for postwar reform of the international economic order invites historians of economic thought to clarify the purposes of Keynes’s international diplomacy. Drawing on categories borrowed from the sociological and anthropological literatures (particularly the gift), the article proposes an original, interdisciplinary view of Keynes’s diplomacy, allowing a revival of Keynes’s peculiar vision of the complexity of international economic relations for the analysis of the current global and European economic disorder.

This short article intends to honour the poet Yves Bonnefoy who died recently. His “passing away” as a perpetual movement seems to confirm his poetics of presence which he had been evoking throughout his life. The author addresses some aspects of Bonnefoy’s poetics of time as a perpetual threshold, involving decreation of symbols and concepts. Between them lie death and the grave.

This article focuses attention on the philosophical and anthropological resources of Franciscan sensibility at a time, like ours, characterized by the presence of the "most disturbing of all guests", and that is nihilism. The intent is to show the possibilities that these resources open beyond nihilism itself and therefore rediscover that at the bottom of all beauty there isn't anything inhuman or a nightmare of nonsense, but the oblative freedom of the Lover; a God of gratuity and not God the ultimate foundation, impersonal, hostage to metaphysical reason. The fi rst part of the work attempts to answer a question that can be traced back: after the fall of the "global absolute", after the metaphysical tiredness of contemporary man, the inability to use effi ciently the conceptual tools of the past, what remains? The second part, by leveraging oblique freedom, understood as the essential quality of God and man and the qualifying trait of the Franciscan School, as Todisco's accurate studies have found, highlights the positive prospects that the post-modern condition opens, in spite of the disturbing presence of scientifi c-technological rationality. The conclusion, as underlined by Todisco, reaffi rms a profound conviction: this is the time of Franciscan logic, a logic of gratuity, which can and must help to orientate us philosophically and anthropologically in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having as a background the rich, profound and multi-annual scientific production of Orlando Todisco, this contribution, rather than analyzing and commenting on the texts dealing with socio-economic issues, simply limits itself to follow and intercept the relationship, correlation and conjugation between the "epistemology of the Franciscan School, equally in the sense of historical and doctrinal as well as the philosophical-theological; and in the socio-economic and political implications, highlighting a specific, current and stimulating common research path with many areas still to be discovered and dissected. Todisco's attention to philosophical themes of a practical and social dimension, above all, arises from the real and concrete questions of ethical, anthropological and social relevance that lead him from the feast of creative freedom to the logic of Franciscan thought to be applied in the socio-economic value of the bond and the conjugation according to which the true is true if it is in serving of the good and the good is good if it is free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article the theme of gift in a complex and globalized society: the author deals with the logic of reciprocity and conviviality, by in political and democratic point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To an education policy increasingly subject to the rules imposed by market, production and competition expectations, I mean to counteract a policy of restitution, such as the commitment to protect every young person from the pressure of exploitation and to reward it through the preparation of vivid, intense, meaningful experiences, aware that only the gift, in its broadest sense, can repay the human singularity of the inevitable limitations and wounds that every "existence" (Dasein) entails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The act of giving, in a pedagogical point of view, interlaces often with the act of giving himself and with the free and responsible will of encountering the other by his humanity. The main characteristic of giving is the gratuitousness: the human being can be educated aim for freedom and generosity about being able to give and give himself without fee. He who instead receives the gift had to be grateful: the gratification takes shape as an essential element in the educational life of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text deals with the theme of gift from the point of view of the pedagogical paradigm of "cura sui" as an "arms" of the educator: both as a community ethics and as an action in the relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The volume Il dono nel tempo della crisi. Per una psicologia del riconoscimento is a text which presents us with the current crisis in our social system: politics, the economy, religions, and the human community in general. Moreover, this study advances the possibility of a way out from the crisis by the full realisation of the human, described by the authors with the expression Homo reciprocus or the man of relations, of openness, of receptivity and of gift. In fact, the cone of light chosen by the authors of this study is that of the reciprocal man, the one who, in recognising himself fully, has need of the other. With the use of biblical, theological, philosophical, historical and literary categories, the article attempts a critical and dynamic rereading of the book and of the subjects raised by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article intends to honour the poet Yves Bonnefoy who died recently. His "passing away" as a perpetual movement seems to confirm his poetics of presence which he had been evoking throughout his life. The author addresses some aspects of Bonnefoy's poetics of time as a perpetual threshold, involving decreation of symbols and concepts. Between them lie death and the grave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]