MISSION


In March 1998 Totò Notarrigo died, being greatly missed by his friends.

He was one of the promoting partners of Mondotre/Quaderni, a monothematic review where the results of a long lasting theoretical and epistemological elaboration – il lasted twenty years – , the outcome of endless talks, of his lessons (Totò, alias Salvatore, Notarrigo was professor of Advanced Physics at the Physics Department of Catania University) and of a wide research programme inquiring into a lot of knowledge fields, were published.

We were convinced that a fatefull scientific paradigm was successful between the end of the 19th and the 20th century. This paradigm rooted deeply in Plato's and Aristotle's ancient thought: the unity of science was broken, logic, physics, mathematics and philosophy were separated, and the empiristic paradigm stood out. The separation between quantity and number, i. e. physics and mathematics, was introduced by Plato and was begun again by Dedekind at the end of the nineteenth century. The Aristotelian grammatical logic revived under the false guise of mathematical logic. All sciences, the economic one included, suffered from the empiristic paradigm: Marx's scientific research programme, the physical economics, was swept away.


Such a change affected especially physics, the science which has been the most closely linked to mathematics since the time of Pythagoras. We think such a change didn't arise out of science itself, but it was imposed by the new social-economic conditions created by the industrial revolution, i.e. the same mechanism managing human society, largely spontaneous and hard to rule. Yet we think that even the effectiveness of this sort of mechanism ran out, as the irrimediable contradiction between the industrial development and the environmental crisis shows: this is the not very distant cause of the repeated crisis to hoard the sources of energy often resulting in wars, representing the last and ultimate, attempts made by an old order falling into decay. That is the reason why we think it is useful to intervene in the cultural paradigms discussion now: they seem far from the actual problems of our society, but by no hidden ways, they strengthen the no more suited convinctions with the insufficient interpretative paradigms of reality.


It was a question of recovering the Italic scientists-phylosophers' ancient ideal, that is a unitary and indivisible science with no separations among the different knowledge fields, so physics, mathematics, logic and philosophy went together. We began a long way to reappropriate and to revise that ancient Italic thought that went under the names of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Democritus, Archimedes, ecc. and that by means of Galilei's and Newton's rediscovery got to Boltzmann and Peano.

Unfortunately, in 1994 Mondotre/Quaderni was forced to stop his publications. Moreover, Totò's death, in 1998, hit hard that programme's course: he was a physicist with a lot of interests, a good judge of the structures of science and the original and clear mind of the group.

But in these last years many friends, physicists and phylosophers, scattered over Italy and abroad, as well as the publishing and cultural groups have spurred and driven us to resume our programme.

Therefore with great personal and financial sacrifices, in memory of Totò Notarrigo, modestly we continue our scientific-philosophical elaboration programme, we believe it is what Diogene Laerzio called “la scuola italica”, i.e. the Italic thought school: it inspires our new review, Mondotre, the world of ideas, that are not only Pythagoras', Parmenides', Democritus', Archimedes', Galilei's, Newton's, Boltzmann's, Peano's ideas but our Notarrigo's ones too.



(Translation from Italian into English by Piera Bombaci and Ida Fioria)