The first seminar (delivered on zoom) will set the stage from a historical standpoint.  In the first part a brief look will be given at the Sapiens cognitive revolution, the cosmological archaic worldview and the (purported) passage from Mythos (according to some: the first form of scientific language before the invention of writing) to Logos. The second part will be concerned with some key notions of Western thought such as the ideas of Kósmos, Necessity, Dynamis, Causation, Nomos, Laws of Nature, and the difficulties inherent to the formalization of the idea of chance and randomness.

Mauro Sellitto is researcher at the Department of Engineering, Università della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", working on non-equilibrium statistical physics and complex dynamics. His long-time interests in science, broadly understood as a global, cultural, historical and human endeavor, has led him to collaborate in the past few years with the publishing house Adelphi, for which he has edited several books and written some essays.