Alessandro Ferrara explains what he terms "the democratic horizon" - the idea that democracy is no longer simply one form of government among others, but is instead almost universally regarded as the only legitimate form of government, the horizon to which most of us look. Professor Ferrara reviews the challenges under which democracies must operate, focusing on hyperpluralism, and impresses a new twist onto the framework of political liberalism. He shows that distinguishing real democracies from imitations can be (...) difficult, responding to this predicament by enriching readers' understanding of the spirit of democracy; clearing readers' views of pluralism from residues of ethnocentrism; and conceiving multiple versions of democratic culture, rooted in the diversity of civilizational contexts. (shrink)

_Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity_ is a challenging consideration of what remains of ambitious Enlightenment ideas such as democracy, freedom and universality in the wake of relativist, postmodern thought. Do clashes over gender, race and culture mean that universal notions such as justice or rights no longer apply outside our own communities? Do our actions lose their authenticity if we act on principles that transcend the confines of our particular communities? Alessandro Ferrara proposes a path out of (...) this impasse via the notion of reflective authenticity. Drawing on Aristotle, Kants concept of reflective judgement and Heideggers theory of reflexive self-grounding, _Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity_ takes a fresh look at the state of Critical Theory today and the sustainability of postmodern politics. (shrink)

Within the author’s long-term project of updating John Rawls’s paradigm of “political liberalism” to a historical context different from the original one, this paper focuses on how political liberalism can help us understand populism and help liberal democracy survive the populist upsurge. In the first section, political liberalism is argued to be of help in directing our attention to three constitutive aspects of all sorts of populism: the conflation of “the people” with the electorate and the electorate with the nation, (...) the attribution of constituent power to the electorate, and a penchant for so-called “justified intolerance.” In the second section, enfeebled democracies and postliberal democracies are discussed as two distinctly dangerous outcomes of populist contagion. Finally, in the third section the containment of populism is argued to require targeting the socioeconomic factors undergirding the populist upsurge and the jettisoni... (shrink)

Artículos Ciudadanía y sociedad civil en las democracias contemporáneas. Citizenship and civil society in contemporary democracies. de La Vega, Marta El poder simbólico de los medios de comunicación.The transformations of the political in the field of the symbolic.González Broquen, Ximena La rutinizacion de la indiferencia ética y el aplanamiento de los valores en la Argentina actual. Ethical indifference routine and smoothing moral in contemporary Argentine. Meabe, Joaquín E. Jürgen Habermas: entre la ética del discurso y la ética de la especie. (...) Jürgen Habermas: between the ethics of discourse and the ethics of the species. Moreno Lax, Alejandro Derechos humanos y proceso justo.Human rights and rightful process. Ramos Pascua, José Antonio El Fedón o la trascendencia del alma.Phaedo or the inmortality of the soul. Robledo Rodriguez, Alejandro La enseñanza del derecho en los países de derecho escrito.Legal education in civil law systems. Rodríguez Ferrara, Mauricio De cómo los latinoamericanos percibimos la pena de muerte. How latin-americans view the death penalti. Rodríguez Ferrara, Mauricio La doctrina platónica del alma en el 'Timeo'.The platonic doctrine of soul in 'Thimaeus'. Suzzarini, Andrés Interdisciplinares Bajo los murmullos: tributo a Juan Rulfo. Under the whispers: a homage to Juan Rulfo. Camacho Crispín, Marco Antonio Recensiones Semblanza del jurista venezolano Tulio Chiossone. Belandria, Margarita Informaciones Índice acumulado. (shrink)

During the twentieth century, the view that assertions and norms are valid insofar as they respond to principles independent of all local and temporal contexts came under attack from two perspectives: the partiality of translation and the intersubjective constitution of the self, understood as responsive to recognition. Defenses of universalism have by and large taken the form of a thinning out of substantive universalism into various forms of proceduralism. Alessandro Ferrara instead launches an entirely different strategy for transcending the (...) particularity of context without contradicting our pluralistic intuitions: a strategy centered on the exemplary universalism of judgment. Whereas exemplarity has long been thought to belong to the domain of aesthetics, this book explores the _other_ uses to which it can be put in our philosophical predicament, especially in the field of politics. After defining exemplarity and describing how something unique can possess universal significance, Ferrara addresses the force exerted by exemplarity, the nature of the judgment that discloses exemplarity, and the way in which the force of the example can bridge the difference between various contexts. Drawing not only on Kant's _Critique of the Power of Judgment_ but also on the work of Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas, Ferrara outlines a view of exemplary validity that is applicable to today's central philosophical issues, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism, and religion in the public sphere. (shrink)

The paper comprehensively responds to critical comments by F. Michelman, D. Rasmussen, J. van der Walt, S. Winter, P. Niesen, and B. Schupmann on Sovereignty Across Generations. Constituent Power and Political Liberalism. The themes debated include: whether Rawls’s dualist view of democracy, including his idea of legitimation by constitution, intimates or calls for a concretistic view of a subject of constituent power as creator of the constitutional order (Michelman); the relation of the normative to the historical in political liberalism and (...) whether Plato’s allegory of the cave is helpful for elucidating the meaning of the ‘most reasonable for us’ (Rasmussen); Rawls’s stance vis-à-vis the unbridgeable divisiveness of pluralism, the virtuality of overlapping consensus, and the dissolution of constituent power into a panoply of constituent powers (Van der Walt); democratic sequential sovereignty contrasted with serial sovereignty, the sensibleness of distinguishing legal principles from the cognitive assumptions undergirding their application, the justification of sequential sovereignty, and the nexus of vertical reciprocity and freedom across generations (Winter); the implications of the gap between ‘the people’ and the population for constitutional legitimacy, and the distinct prospects for a Habermasian and a political liberal conception of constituent power to be applicable at a supranational level (Niesen); the cogency and effectiveness of ‘implicit unamendability’ for safeguarding constitutional essentials compared with entrenching them via eternity clauses, the extent to which measures of militant democracy are compatible with political liberalism (Schupmann). (shrink)

Il significato della metafora sta nelle nuove relazioni che si instaurano fra i termini, dunque essa fa esplodere il carattere puramente estensionale della classificazione porfiriana.

O objetivo deste trabalho é estudar a relação que se estabelece entre as características da fenomenologia filosófica, a natureza do conhecimento que dela deriva e o modo como interfere sobre a produção do conhecimento em comunicação. Em primeiro lugar, observa-se a concepção de comunicação como processo transmissivo desenvolvida pelos clássicos estudos de mídia ou pelos processos de comunicação de massa. Em seguida, aproximam-se comunicação e semiótica como campos epistemológicos que, embora desenvolvam mútuas influências científicas, são, não raro, considerados áreas científicas (...) distintas atualmente, observa-se a emergência de outras bases de reflexão que podem aproximar a comunicação e a semiótica, enquanto áreas científicas. (shrink)

Translated from the 1989 Italian edition, Ferrara (sociology, U. of Rome) intertwines an exploration of the ethical and social thought of 17th-century French philosopher Rousseau, with an analysis of contemporary culture through those ...

In this paper I respond to Lois McNay’s article “The politics of exemplarity: Ferrara on the disclosure of new political worlds.” After contextualizing her appraisal of my views on exemplarity within the current debate about critical theory and postcolonialism, and after clarifying my interpretation of Kant’s notion of sensus communis, I defend the function that this concept plays within an immanent and experience-near approach to critical theory. Sensus communis is what makes of a subjective grievance a cogent critique. I (...) then elucidate how the transcontextual communicability of human flourishing can be understood, along lines still compatible with Kant’s theory of judgment. In the final section of the paper, McNay’s suggestion to reconceptualize critique in experience-near terms is integrated as a genealogical reconstruction of sensus communis as nourished by encounters with experiences of injustice. (shrink)

This text is an integrated and comprehensive account of theories of justice and judgement in contemporary political and moral philosophy. It offers a critical examination of judgement and normative validity in the recent works of Rawls, Habermas, Ackerman, Michaleman, and Dworkin. Ferrara demonstrates how the understanding of justice and normative validity, since the linguistic turn in philosophy, is defined in terms of reflective judgement. This demonstration comprises of an historical overview of the judgement model in contemporary political philosophy that (...) focuses on Rawls on ` justice as fairness' and Habermas on the discourse theory of law and the public sphere. The discussion then examines situated judgement; the work of Ackerman on the function of the constitution; and Michaelman on deliberative democracy. Justice and Judgement concludes with an exhaustive and exacting discussion of universalism and contemporary liberalism; and the judgement view of justice. The key themes of this examination are the good; equal respect; and reflexive judgement. (shrink)

This article examines recent theories of democratic citizenship as well as the institutional separation of religion and politics in light of shortcomings with the traditional secularization thesis. Due to the fact that juridical norms and forms of consciousness develop at a more rapid pace than religious ones, received accounts of both democratic equality and toleration need to be reconceptualized. Questions concerning the legitimacy and neutrality of religious reasoning in democratic politics, as pursued in the work of Rawls and Habermas, also (...) need to be informed by further reflection on the confessional context and other empirical features of post-secular societies. Comparing the politics of same-sex marriage in Canada and Italy helps to illustrate this point. (shrink)

After focusing on the understanding and the prospect of post-secular society (2008), probing the fruitfulness of expanding multiculturalism into multicultural jurisdictions (2009) and investigating a possible realignment of major liberal notions (2010), in 2011 the so-called ‘trap of resentment’ has been at the center of the İstanbul Seminars. The three sections of this special issue – which collects together the contributions discussed in İstanbul between 19 to 24 May 2011 – are devoted to various facets of the task of inverting (...) the trend and setting a virtuous circle of understanding and trust across cultural and religious divides: (a) identifying the sources and consequences of xenophobic and anti-Moslem resentment as well as the possible remedies (Abdullahi A. An-Nacim, Claus Offe, Rajeev Bhargava, Stefano Allievi, Volker Kaul, Ayan Kaya); (b) rethinking and redesigning the received models for the peaceful coexistence of diversity (Charles Taylor, Anthony Appiah, Alessandro Ferrara, Beate Roessler, David Rasmussen, Fuat Keyman); and (c) tracing and assessing the emerging patterns of the political transformation of Islam (Akeel Bilgrami, José Casanova, Fred Dallmayr, Zaid Eyadat, Dick Howard, Nouzha Guessous). (shrink)

In 2020, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, academics and scientists began to question the triage criteria for allocating insufficient healthcare resources, trying to ethically justify the answer to the question, Who should receive medical care first? In this article, I will argue that even if we apply triage criteria, we won't be able to avoid the violation of human dignity or of the right to life and to health care. I will then suggest that, maybe, the real ethical (...) triage dilemma lies not in the question, Who should receive medical care first? but in the question, How are we to decide who should receive medical care first? (shrink)

Cristina Lafont’s Democracy Without Shortcuts enriches the discussion of deliberative democracy with new insights. After discussing her three objections against Waldron’s denunciation of judicial review as antidemocratic, the main flaw of Waldron’s thesis is argued to remain out of focus. The constitution is understood by him as owned by the living citizens, in a pattern of serial sovereignty that raises three problems: (a) the ‘wanton republic’; (b) the under-individuation of the polity; (c) generational inequality. The answer to Lafont’s question ‘Can (...) We Own the Constitution?’ (Section Three) is then argued to be that only ‘we the people’, including past, present and future ‘free and equal’ generations, own the constitution. The living citizens are the segment of ‘the people’ endowed with agency, have a voice, can modify the inherited political scheme, but cannot legitimately disfigure it, under penalty of destroying the regulatory function of the constitution. (shrink)

The paper discusses some thematic issues that emerge from the Kantian study of diseases of cognition and volition, taking into consideration his anthropological works and some problems emerging from his main critical works. Starting from the explanation of the taxonomy of the main mental illnesses, some epistemological themes will be illustrated, linked to the fallible relationship between transcendental truths and the empirical dimension of knowledge and to the Kantian concept of error. Subsequently, the study of affects and passions, conceived as (...) illnesses of volition, will show the difficulties linked to a total involvement of reason in moral action, concerning the shortcomings of human action with respect to the principle of responsibility. Finally, the paper will focus on the role of legal imputability in relation to moral responsibility and to mental diseases. (shrink)

Ferrara, Jacobson, and their colleagues illuminate how community schools become a comprehensive, place-based strategy that both supports high-quality teaching and learning and addresses out-of-school barriers to success.

Frank Michelman’s recent book Constitutional Essentials. On the Constitutional Theory of Political Liberalism is discussed from a specific angle, related to how Rawls’s ‘deflection procedure’ – called by Michelman ‘justification by constitution’ – is affected by two recent innovations in the paradigm of political liberalism: first, the extension of reasonable pluralism to a family of liberal political conceptions of justice that coexist in a liberal-democratic society; second, the idea of legitimation based on the criterion of reciprocity, aimed at supplementing the (...) liberal principle of legitimacy. In the attempt to probe Michelman’s assessment of the impact of these two innovations, three critical points are mentioned, for each of them, that suggest a somewhat more sceptical attitude than Michelman’s about the capacity of ‘justification by constitution’ to remain substantially unaltered, once these innovations are in place. (shrink)

A musical experience is marked by the synthesis of passion and rationality, emotion and understanding, and body and mind. Ferrara demonstrates that each method of musical analysis confines musical significance to a single level. He devises an "eclectic method" that provides bridges for musical sound, form, and reference. In response to the multiplicity of levels of musical significance Ferrara's eclectic method draws upon a wide-ranging number of conventional and nonconventional approaches to musical analysis which results in a dialectic (...) of methods. (shrink)

Drug resistant epilepsy is one of the most complex, multifactorial and polygenic neurological syndrome. Besides its dynamicity and variability, it still provides us with a model to study brain-behavior relationship, giving cues on the anatomy and functional representation of brain function. Given that onset zone of focal epileptic seizures often affects different anatomical areas, cortical but limited to one hemisphere, this condition also let us study the functional differences of the left and right cerebral hemispheres. One lateralized function in the (...) human brain is emotional prosody, and it can be a useful ictal sign offering hints on the location of the epileptogenic zone. Besides its importance for effective communication, prosody is not considered an eloquent domain, making resective surgery on its neural correlates feasible. We performed an Electronic databases search (Medline and PsychINFO) from inception to July 2017 for studies about prosody in epilepsy. The search terms included “epilepsy,” “seizure,” “emotional prosody,” and “vocal affect.” This review focus on emotional prosody processing in epilepsy as it can give hints regarding plastic functional changes following seizures (preoperatively), resection (post operatively), and also as an ictal sign enabling the assessment of dynamic brain networks. Moreover, it is argued that such reorganization can help to preserve the expression and reception of emotional prosody as a central skill to develop appropriate social interactions. (shrink)

The article, through the case study of Chile, explores the interconnections between archives, human rights and transitional justice. Chile represents a unique case globally for the early creation of thousands of records documenting the human rights violations committed under Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. In post-Pinochet Chile, the human rights archives have provided extremely important sources of evidence that have proven crucial in the development of transitional justice mechanisms. Truth commissions have, in turn, created their own archives, which have strongly contributed to (...) later processes of reparation, justice and memory. The article aims to develop a better understanding of the multiple roles that archives have played as tools for achieving truth, justice and reparation over the long transitional period in Chile. The article argues that a combination of several factors and the intervention of different actors led to the archives having a significant impact in the development of subsequent transitional justice mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper engages with Ferrajoli’s contribution to the philosophical debate on constitutional democracy and in particular his conception of ‘structural entrenchment’, or the basis upon which one can defend the normativity of the Constitution as ‘higher law’, which can trump or limit legislation, without infringing democratic principles. Ferrajoli’s own understanding of ‘structural entrenchment’ is compared to Rawls’s and Dworkin’s arguments in support of it. Ferrajoli’s position is neither grounded on a philosophy of history, as in Rawls, nor on a version (...) of moral realism, as for Dworkin, but on a formal understanding of the nature of fundamental rights, and in a conception of democratic sovereignty as ‘joint ownership.’. (shrink)

In this article by way of reply, the author responds to the challenging comments on The Democratic Horizon provided by Michelman, Benhabib, White, Scheuerman and Laden. In response to Michelman, some reflections are propounded (1) on the function of judicial review, in order to alleviate the tension between two understandings of the mandate of the highest interpreter of the constitution as aimed at remedying either an occlusion of democratic authorship or a shortfall of agreement, and (2) on the need to (...) rethink how the authority of the supreme interpreter relates to the will of the people in a deeply changed historical context. In response to Benhabib, the author discusses the new limits of the accommodation of diversity in Fairburg, a fictional polity that expands the Rawlsian standard of ‘ reasonable disagreement’, and defends the normative relevance and democratic credentials of his notion of ‘ multivariate polity’. In response to White, after recalling the importance of putting the ‘democratic ethos’ at the center of a reflection on the democratic quality of complex societies where formal procedures often mask elitist substance, the author defends the ‘political, not metaphysical’ credentials of ‘openness’ (as well as of ‘exemplarity’ as the ‘upstream source’ of openness) and accepts a complementarity of ‘openness’ and ‘presumptive generosity’. In response to Scheuerman, the author restates his focus on the democratic ethos as a supplement to, not a replacement of, the reflection on democratic procedures and defends the conceptual diversity of governance from government. In response to Laden, the author highlights the diversity of contexts to which his own and Laden’s versions of ‘democratic justification’ are responding and defends a more moderate version of ‘openness’, which still keeps constitutional essentials and political values shielded from ongoing questioning. Finally, the author interprets the debate aroused by The Democratic Horizon as indicative of the persistent vitality of the Rawlsian legacy in the 21st century. (shrink)

In this paper the notion of sensus communis, as articulated by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is discussed from the vantage point of the author's project of exporting the model of exemplary universalism underlying reflective and, specifically, aesthetic judgment beyond the realm of aesthetics. In the first section, the relevance of such a project relative to an appraisal of the new and unsuperseded philosophical context opened by the Linguistic Turn is elucidated. Then the centrality of sensus (...) communis, for making sense of the specific universalism inherent in reflective judgment, is highlighted. In the second section, the limitations inherent in two opposite strategies for conceptualizing sensus communis are discussed: namely, the hermeneutic idea of a `horizon' and the phenomenological notion of a life-world on one hand, and the Kantian minimalist, naturalized concept of sensus communis on the other. The former is argued to become entangled in relativism, the latter to run against our intuitions concerning the inter-subjective constitution of the subject. In the final section, a third notion of sensus communis is offered, still compatible with the Kantian conception, different from the Gadamerian concept of a tradition or to the phenomenological notion of Lebenswelt, yet still capable of offering a plausible ground for the exemplary universalism of aesthetic judgment. Expanding on Kant's view of aesthetic pleasure, sensus communis is understood as consisting of a universal capacity, on the part of every human being, to sense from within a plurality of coordinates the flourishing of human life and what favours it. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of future cosmopolitanism, building on a minimal reconstruction of what cosmopolitanism has been in the past. It will elucidate the notion of ‘political’ cosmopolitanism in its relation to a certain methodological option which is designated by the shorthand term ‘judgment’. Cosmopolitanism is not a new idea but a new version of it is constituted by ‘political’ cosmopolitanism, bound up with a judgmentbased, as opposed to principle-based, understanding of normativity.

Il presente articolo intende riflettere su come l’analogia sia intesa e trattata dalla classe di metodi formali di trattamento dell’informazione che si occupano di analizzare il testo scritto. In particolare, si considera come si possano costruire macchine che “comprendono” le analogie. A tal fine ci si avvarrà di esemplificazioni tratte dal _De Civitate Dei_ di Agostino d’Ippona. Le prime indagini compiute su tale corpus, seppure limitato, conducono a riflettere sulla portata teorica e storiografica del trattamento automatico dell’analogia anche nel formulare (...) o avvalorare ipotesi interpretative. _This article aims to reflect on how analogy is understood and treated by the class of formal information processing methods that deal with analysing written text. In particular, we consider how machines that ‘understand’ analogies can be constructed. For this purpose, exemplifications from Augustine of Hippo’s _De Civitate Dei _will be used. The initial investigations carried out on this corpus, albeit limited, lead one to reflect on the theoretical and historiographical significance of the automatic treatment of analogy also in formulating or supporting interpretative hypotheses._. (shrink)