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Recent super-resolution imaging technologies enable tracing chromatin conformation with nanometer-scale precision at the single-cell level. They revealed, for example, that human chromosomes fold into a complex three-dimensional structure within the cell nucleus that is essential to establish biological activities, such as the regulation of the genes. Yet, to decode from imaging data the molecular mechanisms that shape the structure of the genome, quantitative methods are required. In this review, we consider models of polymer physics of chromosome folding that we benchmark against multiplexed FISH data available in human loci in IMR90 fibroblast cells. By combining polymer theory, numerical simulations and machine learning strategies, the predictions of the models are validated at the single-cell level, showing that chromosome structure is controlled by the interplay of distinct physical processes, such as active loop-extrusion and thermodynamic phase-separation.

Within cell nuclei, several biophysical processes occur in order to allow the correct activities of the genome such as transcription and gene regulation. To quantitatively investigate such processes, polymer physics models have been developed to unveil the molecular mechanisms underlying genome functions. Among these, phase-separation plays a key role since it controls gene activity and shapes chromatin spatial structure. In this paper, we review some recent experimental and theoretical progress in the field and show that polymer physics in synergy with numerical simulations can be helpful for several purposes, including the study of molecular condensates, gene-enhancer dynamics, and the three-dimensional reconstruction of real genomic regions.

The Seven Palaces of the Sky in the Pirelli HangarBicocca represent an artistic document of primary significance concerning the meaning of modernity. They are set in the context of a Modern Architecture and seem to be in a conflictual relationship with it. We have to do with a conflict regarding the concept of time in the late-Modernity and the way in which it is lived and conceived. The Seven Palaces of the Sky are ready to fall down while the Architecture of HangarBicocca is devoted to a rationalistic eternity. From this local conflict the text draws some considerations on the destiny of our time and of the conception of it., Bollettino Filosofico, Vol 32 (2017): Poesia e filosofia a confronto. A partire dal moderno

Edgar Wind’s The Experiment and Metaphysics examines, in the sense of Goethe’s morphological project, the common structures of scientific and artistic thinking in the light of the reflective value of the image and the technological processes of research and construction of reality. In Wind’s philosophy of em- bodiment the image plays a role in the artistic field comparable to the function of experiments in science. The picture is neither a ‘copy’ nor just a ‘part’ of reality, but rather an ‘embodiment’: at the same time the ‘result’ of human activity and a ‘condition’ for all interpretation of the world. It opens up as an embodiment to a temporality which is not just linear but ‘configured’, i.e. morphologically con- stituted. The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct the main articulations of the wind proposal, while testing the possibility of linking image and technology ex- periments through the interactions of current augmented reality.

Starting from Goethe. Currently, there exists no discipline whose specific boundaries could be defined as MORPHOLOGY. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace out its history in ample terms and to define its scope broadly by understanding it as the place where the semantics of FORMS are defined and where they are connected to a reference IMAGE. The central link in the field of MORPHOLOGY is FORM-IMAGE, and it refers to those dynamics of the FORM and to the DYNAMIC SYSTEMS that have taken hold in late modernity and that continue to grow today.

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was born in St. Petersburg on April 17, 1895 and died in Leningrad on August 22, 1970. Despite remaining in the same city, the events of history caused those places, over the course of (his) time, to take on a whole new meaning and a very different flavor. Of course, to a folklorist like Propp, used to reflecting on the distance of millennia, those seventy-five years will have been nothing. Though the fact remains that the monumental epochal shifts he witnessed (the Russian Revolution and the long cultural and political Soviet regime that followed) feature heavily in his brilliant work.

The concept of TYPE and the reference to a modality of thought characterized by a typological STYLE undoubtedly constitute characteristic elements of the morphological discourse, whether considered in its Goethean meaning, analysed starting from the many philosophical, naturalistic, poetological sources that come together in Goethe’s thought, or still because of the modern and contemporary developments that arose from the Goethean perspective in philosophy and in the natural sciences.

Diagrams are two-dimensional representations of a domain in which relations among elements like points, lines, open/bounded regions on a plane match relations among the elements of that domain. Diagrams are means of surrogate reasoning, namely of exploring the possibilities to reduce or eliminate the uncertainty imparted by a problem through operations on external aids. The study of diagrams addresses formal and cognitive issues.

The term fractal was first coined by the Polish-born, French-American mathe- matician Benoît Mandelbrot in the mid 1970s (cf. at least Mandelbrot 1975; Stewart 2010). It comes from the Latin word fractus “which has the same root of fraction and fragment and means “irregular or fragmented” (cf. Mandelbrot 1982: 3, in Emmer 2012: 7). Furthermore “it is related to frangere which means to break" (cf. Mandel- brot 1982: 4, in Emmer 2012: 7). Loosely speaking, a fractal is a mathematical object, such as a curve, or, more generally, as a set, “that displays exact or approx- imate self-similarity on different scales” (cf. at least Birken and Coon 2008: 134). Put in more technical terms, a fractal is a geometrical set characterized by the so-called property of internal homothety (cf. Mandelbrot 1975; Vialar 2009). It is a version of a Euclidean concept known precisely as homothety (cf. at least Dodge 2012; La Mantia 2004). As it is well known, homotheties are applications of the plane R2 or of the space R3 onto itself.

Complex and in many ways enlightening, the history of this concept presents the succession of an eighteenth-century phase in which the descriptive and structural meaning prevails, and of an nineteenth-twentieth-century phase in which, vice versa, the concept is charged with highly negative evaluative meanings, to the point of becoming salient in Nazi ideology as the indicator of an anti-model to be annihilated in the name of a totalitarian program connoted at the same time and alternatively in a biological-racial and artistic-stylistic sense.

Representation is a primitive notion of many philosophical theories and of cognitive science. It is assumed as an intuitively understandable label assigned to the functions by which a biological or an artificial agent takes part in the world in an epistemological or a behavioral manner. It is employed to define the conditions for the semantic individuation of the states of the agent. The notion of representation was introduced systematically in the Scholastics’ view of cognition. In modern philosophy, the term is often used as a verb. Representation becomes the function of a class of mental states. In contemporary philosophy, the debate over the semantic individuation of states is intertwined with biology and cognitive science.

The concept of evidence is implied by distinct kinds of cognitive and reasoning processes carried out in ordinary experience or in specialized domains of knowledge, like science, philosophy, logic and mathematics. Theories have been developed along three orthogonal axes. Along the first axis, theories are located according to their view on evidence as a necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge. Along the second axis, theories are located according to the cognitive characterization of evidence. On the third axis, theories are distinguished by the individuation of the bearers of evidence.

The concept of EMERGENCE today knows a fortune that goes beyond the scope of epistemology and the philosophy of science making it one of the leading concepts in the field of theories of COMPLEXITY and innovation and thus risking, at the same time, to disperse its undoubted conceptual power in some descriptive indeterminacy.

Gestalt is a concept introduced to solve the problems of unity, connection and order that objects manifest in experience. Philosophers trained at Franz Brentano’s teaching began to work on it to address epistemological and ontological questions about perception, cognition and the structure of objects. This work was seminal for Gestalt psychology, from the research of the Graz and Berlin Schools, carried on by Cesare Musatti, Fabio Metelli, Gaetano Kanizsa, Paolo Bozzi in Padua and Trieste, Albert Michotte and Paul Fraisse in Louvain, to that of Edgar Rubin and David Katz, but also of Karl Buhler, Egon Brunswik and Ludwig Kardos in Wien. Common is the tenet that the world looks as neither a disparate set nor a formless continuum of sensations, rather as articulated in unities with different degrees of connection or separation.

Phenomenology and ontology. In the Goethean project of MORPHOLOGY, some basic theoretical LINES can be seen which have not ceased to profoundly influence the further development of methodological reflection on living FORMS and their becoming, on the relationships between FORM and IMAGE, and not least on the configurations of knowledge in the light of the decisive encounter with FORM and IMAGE.

Form constancy denotes the appearance of the invariant shape of objects in the environment, notwithstanding the variability due to changes of the viewpoint, caused by subjects movement, to objects displacement, to illumination, lightness, color, and texture whose variation can affect the internal and external boundaries of the surfaces that fall in the simultaneous or successive views of solid objects. In early psychology of perception, shape invariance was called form constancy to highlight the perceptual ability to derive something constant from the changing forms of the multiple views of objects. Shape is an attribute of 2D surfaces and 3D objects, which are invariant across the transformations in the coordinate system of the viewer. The perception of shape can be decomposed in viewer-centered and object-centered factors.

The basic idea of measurement is that objects exhibit an attribute for which questions like “do objects exhibit the attribute to the same degree or for any pair of them does one exhibit it more or less than the other?” make sense. It implies ordering objects that show an equal, a greater or lesser amount of one attribute, The notion of order is captured by the concept of a binary relation that is at least a weak order. Stevens (1946, 1951) classified four types of scales through which the assignment of objects to numbers can be achieved. These two approaches converge on the Representational Theory of Measurement, according to which it is the construction of functions from a set of data to a set of numbers, which map the structure they both share (isomorphism). In metrology, models are built to account for the interaction of what is measured with measurement instruments and the environment.

In geometry, shape is the object of theorems associated to a class of transformations. It corresponds to the invariant properties of regions, figures, solids, which are not altered by transformations. The concept of shape implies the concepts of space, upon which transformations are acted, and metric, if distance is preserved, or a measurement function. The invariant properties of shape are fundamental to perception too. However, the classes of transformations build a hierarchy along which shape is more and more abstract from the Euclidean to the topological group, and accordingly, a greater number of perceptual properties are being lost. The science of perception addresses also the question about the perceptual primitives for shape recognition.

Aristotle’s rhetoric inscribes the discourse on PATHOS within a powerful systematic framework, destined to permanently influence the historical debate, as it identifies in the form of argumentation the structure of a technical elaboration of the elements involved in the persuasive discourse.

The term visualization is employed to refer to the capacity of making visible properties, relations, objects and state of affairs which either are no longer presented through perception or depends upon concepts and theoretical definitions, which regard domains that lie outside the scope of perception. In the strict sense, visualization is the kind of experience akin to perception, which is enabled by the structure and the function of imagery. From a functional standpoint, then, the capacity of visualization relies on a not arbitrary mapping between visual-spatial representations and what they stand for. In this broader sense, it is connected with perception and rule-based qualitative reasoning. In ordinary experience, visualization may concur to route finding and understanding the function of mechanical systems through a “mental animation”. Visualization subserves also the realization of artworks and mathematical reasoning.

Aesthetics, structure and perception of the living form. Since its modern disciplinary foundation, AESTHETICS has developed a position of great interest in defining the relationship between sensitive knowledge, FORM and the question of living FORM. In fact, defining as the aim of AESTHETICS the “perfectio cognitionis sensitivae”.

Although the expression πλαστική τέχνη [plastic art] has Greek origins, the derivative term “plasticity” enters the European languages only in the Modern Age. The term has a double meaning: it indicates, at the same time, the art of manipulating a ductile substance and the ability to transform oneself to recreate formal qualities in response to external events (positive meaning of plasticity) or to cancel pre-existing formal configurations, originating morphological novelties (negative meaning of plasticity). For this reason, the birthplace of plasticity is the domain of art but the term is used with different connotations also in the morphological, physicochemical and medical fields.

The article aims to show the critique of domination and power by means of some texts by Blaise Pascal. The topic focuses on cognitive activity and the faculty of knowledge.

Since its earliest attestations, the Greek word συμμετρία (composed of συν [together] and μετρία [measure]) oscillates between two different meanings, linked to a static and to a dynamic conception.

No concept in ecology has been more variously defined or more universally confused than ‘niche’.

The contour is the locus at which the parts of opaque solid objects appear to form an edge because it corresponds for the viewer to the projection of the rim, namely the curve that divides the surfaces into visible and invisible parts. The rim between the visible front and the invisible rear side is projected onto the contour that is the envelope of all the curves of equal depth. Although the rim and the contour run into depth, they are distinct concepts that regard the object-centred and the viewer-centred description. The outline is the boundary of the surface delimited by the contour, which fills a spatial region. Rubin (1921) discovered the property that allows the contour and the outline playing a crucial role in perception by studying the figure–ground phenomenon. The geometrical and perceptual properties of the contour and the outline support the perception and the production of pictures.

The term eidetics denotes the domain of eidetic imagery and its study. The standard phenomenon of eidetic imagery consists in seeing a stimulus that is no longer present, when the experimenter is allowed to infer from subjects’ reports or experimental protocols that “seeing” is different from remembering or experiencing an after-image. After a prolonged period from mid-1930 to about 1960 in which the interest in this phenomenon had died out, research was resumed on the grounds of findings which seemed to point at the ability of extracting information from no longer present stimuli, which showed to be different from sensory and recognition memory. The functional role of eidetic imagery in connection to cognitive processes seems still elusive.

The essay shows, between autobiography and theoretical reflection, the link between metaphysics and poetry in the reflection of the philosopher Leonardo Samonà. The author uses the concept of "retraction" to cross both the vision of Samonà's metaphysics and the vision of poetry.

Organization is the explanandum that philosophical and scientific theories take into account for objects, individuals and their assembly, whose structure is characterized by the interdependence of parts to such an extent that it cannot be explained through decomposition. Organization is a critical attribute of nearly, minimally and not decomposable systems. The more interdependent are the parts, the more integrated is the system. Correspondingly, the organization can be intended as the mark of the trade-off between the interaction among parts or sub-systems and within them. Organization may come about in many forms. the concept of organization has been brought in many domains to advocate the structural specificity of the phenomena of interest and to demand the autonomy of the correlated theory.

The term UMWELT spreads in the German language from the beginning of the nineteenth century, to indicate—both in a general relational and sociological sense, and in more specific reference to the peculiarities of PERCEPTION considered as an essential biological characteristic—the external world that surrounds and accompanies living organisms.

The term derives from the Greek word μεταμόρφωσις (composed of μετα, prefix indicating the transformation, and μορφή, “form”) and has two closely related meanings.

The first issue of Word, the Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, published in April 1945 by Roman Jakobson and André Martinet, both exiles living in the USA, features one of the first articles by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958) (L’analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie) and the last essay by Ernst Cassirer (2002) (Structuralism in Modern Linguistics), who died a few weeks before its publi cation. This is the official birth of structuralism, a term seemingly coined by the author of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen in his posthumous essay with its testimonial quality.

There are many different ways of defining the word “semantics”. For instance, according to Eco (2017: 550–551), it is possible to distinguish at least five senses of semantics. That is to say: a. Semantics as the study of the meaning of terms removed from any context [...]; b. Semantics as the study of content systems or structural semantics [...]; c. Semantics as the study of the relation between term (or sentence) and referent, or as the study of reference [...]; d. Semantics as the study of the truth conditions of propositions expressed by sentences; e. Semantics as the study of the particular meaning that terms or sentences assume in context or in the text as a whole [...]; With particular reference the last sense, we will try to examine two key concepts of semantic analysis: the concept of compositionality and this one of semantic potential.

A graph is any abstract object that consists of vertices and edges. This entry presents the main attributes of vertices and edges.

The word “pattern” is a very complex term. Generally, it refers to “an arrange- ment that reveals an order, or design, which is meaningful” (cf. Thaker 1999: 427). But a quick look at many of its different domains of application (e.g. theoretical biology, mathematics, aesthetics, linguistics, etc., etc.) proves that “pattern” has a semantic potential richer than one usually expressed by such a definition. For instance, in the framework of the so-called combinatorics on words (cf. at least Lothaire 2012), a pattern is “a word over an alphabet of variables and is meant to describe some kind of repetitive structures” (cf. Rampersard 2017: 98). Therefore, in this first theoretical approach, “the pattern XX over the single variable X is meant to describe the repetition of the same word twice in succession” (cf. Rampersard 2017: 98).

“Homology is probably the most important concept in comparative biology. It has been treated in different ways, however, and more than one concept of homology is probably defensible” (Minelli 1994: 18); “Homology is one of the terms most widely employed in biology. Together with species, gene and a few others, it is likely to occur in texts devoted to the most diverse biological disciplines, from MORPHOLOGY to systematics to molecular genetics.