Alethic pluralism holds that there are many ways of being true. Such a view has been challenged to make sense of the standard account of logical validity as necessary truth preservation. In this paper, the recent solution elaborated by Aaron Cotnoir, based on an algebraic approach, is shown to be untenable. Some reflections about the relation of many-valued logics with truth pluralism are also discussed.

The model presented by the authors can explain an inherent contradiction in people's naïve theory of time. In this commentary I suggest a way in which another paradox of our phenomenal temporality may be addressed along these lines. In the final section, I also discuss some concerns that may arise about the clear-cut distinction between humans and non-human animals.

In this paper I develop a conception of joint practical deliberation as a special type of shared cooperative activity, through which co-deliberators jointly accept reasons as applying to them as a pair or group. I argue, moreover, that the aspiration to deliberative “pairhood” is distinguished by a special concern for mutuality that guides each deliberator’s readiness to accept a given consideration as a reason-for-us. It matters to each of us, as joint deliberators, that each party’s (individual) reasons for accepting something (...) as a reason-for-us support a conception of our relationship as one characterized by mutual, non-instrumental concern for one another. (shrink)

Concretism is the ontological thesis according to which possibilia are concrete entities. The paper first outlines concretism, arguing that its sole founding thesis is that individuals across possible worlds are individuated by similitude. Among other things, this means that there is no need to postulate that there is no overlap among worlds. The main virtues and vices of concretism are then reviewed, and a novel vice is put forward: a failure in the reduction of modality due to the modal character (...) of intrinsicness. (shrink)

Can genetic testing and manipulation be done ethically? -- Is the use of human embryos in stem cell research ethical? -- Chapter 3:is assisted reproductive technology ethical?

This article offers an assessment of Henricus Regius’s (1598-1679) pre-Cartesian sources and their role in his appropriation of Descartes’s ideas, via two main questions: 1) Who was Regius, doctrinally speaking, before his exposure to Cartesianism? And 2) how did he use Descartes’s theories before his quarrel with Descartes himself in the mid-1640s? These questions are addressed by means of a textual analysis that concerns his theory of matter. In this article, I will show that 1) Regius started out with a (...) scientific program he had found in Ramism and the medical theories of Heurnius and Santorio. 2) On this basis, he developed a physiology encompassing Descartes’s theory of blood circulation and sensory perception. 3) Regius completed the resulting physiology with a theory of matter more developed than Descartes’s, and which he appropriated from Santorio, Basson, and Gorlaeus. (shrink)

Though widely derided by popular psychologists and self-help writers as an emotionally toxic and destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary moral philosophers. Blaming wrongdoers has been thought to express deep commitment to moral values and norms, to be intimately bound up with practices of holding others responsible, and to be an important exercise of moral agency. In this paper I push against the grain of such defenses of blame just enough to articulate what seems right in the more (...) popular lines of critique. I distinguish between blame as a reactive attitude and blaming as a speech act, and argue that some disagreement over the value of blame can be explained by the fact that blaming, as a speech act, takes several distinct forms. Critiques of blame, I suggest, properly target what we might call judgmental or strongly verdictive blaming, the sort of blaming that passes judgment on the wrongdoer him- or herself, and treats him or her as deserving of the blamer’s hostile or “punishing” reactions. This kind of blaming, I argue, tends to foreclose engagement in further moral dialogue with wrongdoers, an effect that is particularly destructive in therapeutic contexts. In such contexts, it is often more appropriate—and more constructive—to hold others answerable without blaming them in the strongly verdictive sense. I argue, moreover, that strongly verdictive blame may be similarly destructive outside of straightforwardly therapeutic contexts, and I challenge the idea that there is in any case a sharp or clear dividing line between therapeutic and non-therapeutic responses to wrongdoers. Holding answerable in a non-judgmental mode is a response that may have a therapeutic dimension, but it nonetheless engages a wrongdoer as a moral peer and partner in moral dialogue. This account of non-judgmental answerability, I suggest, captures much of what moral philosophers have taken to be valuable about blame, while accommodating the insights of those who criticize its more toxic forms. (shrink)

International Relations scholars have been reluctant to engage with questions of friendship in the international system. This may be a consequence of the predominance of (neo)realism in IR and its implications – to view the international arena as an anarchic, self‐help system, where states are trapped in the security dilemma. However, over the last six decades, some regions have overcome the security dilemma and states have constructed peaceful relationships based on mutual trust and confidence, resembling friendship at the interstate level. (...) Building upon securitization theory, this essay distinguishes between different perceptions that states may have of their own security, and links them with different types of regional peace. It proposes a two‐phase process whereby relationships may move from negative to positive peace, suggesting different mechanisms for each phase. It illustrates this model by examining the Argentine–Brazilian détente of the late 1970s and the determination to build a zone of positive peace in Latin America’s Southern Cone. (shrink)

In this paper I begin to fashion a theory of musical form that I call historical formalism. Historical formalism posits that our perception of the formal properties of a musical work is informed by considerations not only of artistic categories but also of the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural circumstances within which that work was composed.

: This paper combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and‘new materialist’ thought, while, at the same time, remaining within the ambit of a more classically ‘historical’characterisation of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Karen Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science to Wiener’s cybernetic theory ofsociety. The political stakes common to these forms of what I call ‘banal’ materialism, Simondon attacked (...) ontologically,epistemologically and politically. The conceptual tools Simondon’s philosophy of individuation elaborates prove tosupport a ‘non-banal’ materialist critique of the alleged ‘unsocial sociability’ of human nature theorised in modernpolitical theory. A genuine materialist approach, as I will argue, allows us to shift political thinking from politicsconceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation. (shrink)

On a dreary spring morning in late October 2006, two policemen drove their cruiser up Nkonjane Road in the K Section of KwaMashu, a former “Africans only” township about fifteen kilometers northwest of Durban. As the cruiser passed over K Section’s softly sloping hills, two men sat handcuffed together in the back. The officers parked the car in front of a house where a woman had reported being raped a few days prior. Leaving the two suspects in the car, the (...) officers alighted and walked up to the home. After greeting the victim, they asked her to step outside to identify the men. The victim, upon seeing the two men seated in the squad car, loudly screamed that they were the rapists... The crowd... (shrink)

This volume offers a new framework for understanding expertise. It proposes a reconceptualization of the traditional notion of expertise and calls for the development of a new contextual and action-oriented notion of expertise, which is attentive to axiological values, intellectual virtues, and moral qualities. -/- Experts are usually called upon, especially during times of emergency, either as decision-makers or as advisors in formulating policies that often have a significant impact on society. And yet, for certain types of choices, there is (...) a growing tension between experts’ recommendations and alternative views. The chapters in this volume critically assess the idea of whether possessing epistemic authority can automatically make someone’s assertions necessarily more grounded than others. They not only evaluate the epistemological implications of this idea but also reflect on its ethical, socio-cultural, and political consequences. The interdisciplinary framework advanced across the chapters seeks to overcome certain limitations that underlie current models of expertise by adopting more inclusive and representative decisions that can improve the perceived neutrality of experts’ decisions. Increasing neutrality means reducing cases in which an unidentified bias – be it a scientific one or not – puts any of the individuals involved in a specific public choice at a systematic disadvantage. -/- Philosophy, Expertise, and the Myth of Neutrality will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of the social sciences, public policy, and sociology. (shrink)

Defining biomimetics as the imitation of models, systems and elements of nature for the purpose to solve human complex problems, the essay considers some examples of that activity, like display technologies, and nanoscientific innovations. According to the literature on the subject, the further section of the article examines the possibility of giving a conceptual framework for biomimetic processes, starting from the observation of its current insufficient development both on the logical level and on a wider philosophical one. The fourth section (...) discusses the way through which an approach oriented to philosophical anthropology and recent perspectives on imitation can help us to understand this kind of phenomena at the intersection of human and animal fields. In the final sections, the text discusses the consequences of the biomimicry approach in the specific case of architecture and tries to draw some conclusions on the way an anthropology and an aesthetics of human mimicry and imitation can be re-shaped including biomimetics among their assumptions. (shrink)

Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. Drawing on literature, art, and photography, it explores how the Victorian mathematical conception of form still resonates today.

Until is a notoriously difficult temporal operator as it is both existential and universal at the same time: A∪B holds at the current time instant w iff either B holds at w or there exists a time instant w' in the future at which B holds and such that A holds in all the time instants between the current one and ẃ. This “ambivalent” nature poses a significant challenge when attempting to give deduction rules for until. In this paper, in (...) contrast, we make explicit this duality of until by introducing a new temporal operator ∇ that allows us to formalize the “history” of until, i.e., the “internal” universal quantification over the time instants between the current one and ẃ. This approach provides the basis for formalizing deduction systems for temporal logics endowed with the until operator. For concreteness, we give here a labeled natural deduction system N(LTL∇) for a linear-time logic LTL∇ endowed with the new history operator. We show that LTL∇ is equivalent to the linear temporal logic LTL with until, which follows by formalizing back and forth translations between the two logics. We also define an indirect translation from LTL∇ into LTL via temporal logics with past operators; such a result provides an upper bound to the problem of satisfiability for LTL∇ formulas. (shrink)

The concept of tacit knowledge is widely used in social sciences to refer to all those knowledge that cannot be codified and have to be transferred by personal contacts. All this literature has been affected by two kind of biases : (1) the interest has been focused more on the result (tacit knowledge) than on the process (implicit learning); (2) tacit knowledge has been somehow reduced to physical skills or know-how; other possible forms of tacit knowledge have been neglected. These (...) two biases seem interconnected one with each other. A greater consideration of the role and relevance of implicit learning allows us to consider tacit knowledge as something more than pure physical skills or know how. This is the first step in order to develop more detailed categorisation of the different forms that tacit knowledge can assume. (shrink)

My paper aims to find potential elements of comparison between ancient oratoria popularis and modern populist oratory. I will consider case studies drawn from Gracchan speech style and from the oratory of Donald Trump.

La percepción sensorial nos habla de la percepción del mundo. Es por eso que, descifrar el modo en que los médicos percibían a la enfermedad y al enfermo en un determinado marco histórico, nos permitirá reconstruir y re-componer los valores culturales de ese momento. Buscaremos delinear a través del material heurístico seleccionado este redescubrimiento del cuerpo, en donde el abordaje sensorial será un puente para comprender la complejidad de la enfermedad. La primera aproximación del médico se hará a través del (...) tacto. En este sentido, por la contigüidad y la proximidad, la mano y el tacto han estado, desde tiempos remotos, ligados a la curación y al alivio del dolor. (shrink)

Artists have been one of the occupational categories that has suffered the most from the economic crisis due to COVID-19. Artists’ “portfolio careers”, generally based on freelancing and self-employment not protected by regulations and welfare, are one of the main reasons of this financial emergency. Their odd forms of employment are rooted – among other things – in a peculiar understanding of artistic work, which I call artistic work exceptionalism (AWE). AWE sees artistic work as essentially different from regular jobs. (...) It finds its conceptual source in Western philosophical aesthetics, which presents the making of art in contrast with regular jobs. In this paper, I take issue with AWE and show its limits and negative implications. By placing emphasis on the heretofore neglected relationship between art and work, I argue that, in principle, creating art is (or should be regarded as) in continuity with other forms of employment, and therefore there is much to be learned from other professions at the level of artistic labor reforms. I call this view artistic work normalism (AWN). In defending AWN, my goal is not to desecrate artists’ occupation. Quite the contrary, my theoretical framework stems from a desire to recognize the social value of the arts. I propose two different approaches to the economics of art promoting artists’ well-being and the exercise of creativity: strengthened public art funding and the financialization of art. (shrink)

This paper criticises Kevin Toh’s expressivist reconstruction of H. L. A. Hart’s semantics of legal statements on the grounds that two implications of Toh’s reading are arguably too disruptive to Hart’s theory of law. The first of these implications is that legal statements are rendered indistinguishable from statements of value. The second is that the concept of a rule of recognition is rendered dispensable. I argue for the unacceptability of these consequences from a Hartian standpoint in the first two sections (...) of this paper. The last two sections present an alternative view of Hart’s semantics of legal statements, according to which legal normativity is explained in terms of conformity to patterns of validity that by themselves neither provide objective reasons for action nor entail subjective acceptance of such reasons. (shrink)