Since the Middle Ages, hospitable courts played a central role in the complex judicial landscape of the pre-modern age for the conflict resolution of parties of different regional origins, because civil disputes could be dealt with more quickly if at least one plaintiff or defendant was a (legal) stranger. With the obvious relationship between (social) belonging and law established by these courts, questions of asymmetries in law come to the fore, which under the common keywords of inequality, integration and exclusion (...) are a leading interest of research in the history of law, culture and crime, but which have so far hardly been dealt with in research within the framework of civil court practice. The Duisburg Hospitable Court shows that the historical civil proceedings concerning non-repaid loans, undelivered goods or disputed estates were no less important for social stability and order in the pre-modern period than criminal proceedings, even though social integration and exclusion were not the core issues of a civil lawsuit. Since the Middle Ages, hospitable courts concerned themselves with communication and trade practices and at the same time constituted an institution that offered legal security for both foreigners and locals. This was still true in the early modern period, which generally stands for a time that became increasingly hardened towards strangers and people on the move. (shrink)

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action-guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy.

The demand for social justice, especially in the context of the welfare state, is often framed as a demand of solidarity. But it is not clear why: in what sense, if any, is social justice best understood as a demand of solidarity? This article explores that question. There are two reasons to do so. First, very little has been written on the concept of solidarity, and almost nothing on why and how solidarity can both give rise to and be the (...) target of a moral obligation. The first aim of the article is to fill this gap. The second aim of the article is to explore the normative implications of this account of solidarity for the commitment to social justice at the heart of the welfare state, and in so doing, to put into question the idea that shared experience or shared identity are either necessary or sufficient bases for social justice qua solidarity. (shrink)

Human cerebral organoids (HCOs) are three-dimensional in vitro cell cultures that mimic the developmental process and organization of the developing human brain. In just a few years this technique has produced brain models that are already being used to study diseases of the nervous system and to test treatments and drugs. Currently, HCOs consist of tens of millions of cells and have a size of a few millimeters. The greatest limitation to further development is due to their lack of vascularization. (...) However, recent research has shown that human cerebral organoids can manifest the same electrical activity and connections between brain neurons and EEG patterns as those recorded in preterm babies. All this suggests that, in the future, HCOs may manifest an ability to experience basic sensations such as pain, therefore manifesting sentience, or even rudimentary forms of consciousness. This calls for consideration of whether cerebral organoids should be given a moral status and what limitations should be introduced to regulate research. In this article I focus particularly on the study of the emergence and mechanisms of human consciousness, i.e. one of the most complex scientific problems there are, by means of experiments on HCOs. This type of experiment raises relevant ethical issues and, as I will argue, should probably not be considered morally acceptable. (shrink)

I advance an objection to Graham Priest’s account of fictional entities as nonexistent objects. According to Priest, fictional characters do not have, in our world, the properties they are represented as having; for example, the property of being a bank clerk is possessed by Joseph K. not in our world but in other worlds. Priest claims that, in this way, his theory can include an unrestricted principle of characterization for objects. Now, some representational properties attributed to fictional characters, a kind (...) of fictional entities, involve a crucial reference to the world in which they are supposed to be instantiated. I argue that these representational properties are problematic for Priest’s theory and that he cannot accept an unrestricted version of the principle of characterization. Thus, while not refuting Priest’s theory, I show that it is no better off than other Meinongian theories. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

This English translation of the author's original work has been thoroughly revised, expanded and updated. The book covers logical systems known as type-free or self-referential . These traditionally arise from any discussion on logical and semantical paradoxes. This particular volume, however, is not concerned with paradoxes but with the investigation of type-free sytems to show that: (i) there are rich theories of self-application, involving both operations and truth which can serve as foundations for property theory and formal semantics; (ii) these (...) theories provide a new outlook on classical topics, such as inductive definitions and predicative mathematics; (iii) they are particularly promising with regard to applications. Research arising from paradoxes has moved progressively closer to the mainstream of mathematical logic and has become much more prominent in the last twenty years. A number of significant developments, techniques and results have been discovered. Academics, students and researchers will find that the book contains a thorough overview of all relevant research in this field. (shrink)

I examine the central theoretical construct of ecological psychology, the concept of an affordance. In the first part of the paper, I illustrate the role affordances play in Gibson's theory of perception. In the second part, I argue that affordances are to be understood as dispositional properties, and explain what I take to be their characteristic background circumstances, triggering circumstances and manifestations. The main purpose of my analysis is to give affordances a theoretical identity enriched by Gibson's visionary insight, but (...) independent of the most controversial claims of the Gibsonian movement. (shrink)

The sense of agency is the experience of being the origin of a sensory consequence. This study investigates whether contextual beliefs modulate low-level sensorimotor processes which contribute to the emergence of the sense of agency. We looked at the influence of causal beliefs on ‘intentional binding’, a phenomenon which accompanies self-agency. Participants judged the onset-time of either an action or a sound which followed the action. They were induced to believe that the tone was either triggered by themselves or by (...) somebody else, although, in reality, the sound was always triggered by the participants. We found that intentional binding was stronger when participants believed that they triggered the tone, compared to when they believed that another person triggered the tone. These results suggest that high-level contextual information influences sensorimotor processes responsible for generating intentional binding. (shrink)

Real engines of the artificial intelligence revolution, machine learning models, and algorithms are embedded nowadays in many services and products around us. As a society, we argue it is now necessary to transition into a phronetic paradigm focused on the ethical dilemmas stemming from the conception and application of AIs to define actionable recommendations as well as normative solutions. However, both academic research and society-driven initiatives are still quite far from clearly defining a solid program of study and intervention. In (...) this contribution, we will focus on selected ethical investigations around AI by proposing an incremental model of trust that can be applied to both human-human and human-AI interactions. Starting with a quick overview of the existing accounts of trust, with special attention to Taddeo’s concept of “e-trust,” we will discuss all the components of the proposed model and the reasons to trust in human-AI interactions in an example of relevance for business organizations. We end this contribution with an analysis of the epistemic and pragmatic reasons of trust in human-AI interactions and with a discussion of kinds of normativity in trustworthiness of AIs. (shrink)

In der zeitgenössischen Erkenntnistheorie ist die Idee verbreitet, dass der Erwerb von Wissen davon abhängig ist, dass das Subjekt des Wissens an einer bestimmten Lebensform teilhat, die grundlegender als sein Wissen ist. Das ist eine Lesart der Position Wittgensteins, deren exemplarischer Vertreter etwa Stanley Cavell ist. Meine These dagegen lautet, dass die Lebensformtheorie einem erkenntnistheoretischen Dogma aufruht, dessen Überwindung Wittgensteins eigentliches Anliegen war: Es ist das Dogma, dass die grundlegende Bedeutung des Wissensbegriffs in der Beschreibung eines einzelnen Aktes besteht, und (...) nicht in der Beschreibung von etwas, das auf einer logisch anderen Ebene steht: nämlich einer Fähigkeit. Damit soll nicht bestritten werden, dass die Idee einer bestimmten Lebensform wesentlich ist für die Beschreibung erkenntnisfähiger Subjekte. Doch diese ist nicht grundlegender als die Idee des Wissens selbst. (shrink)

While the concept event has been an important tool in our thinking about causation and action, the concept process has not been appealed to so readily. However, recently, several philosophers have...

One of the major issues for user assistance systems consists of “providing help at an appropriate level”. In this paper we analyze the problem of modeling task experience — a prerequisite for provisioning adequate help. In contrast to level-based approaches we propose an ontology-based model, which allows fine-grained modeling of task experience using the concepts of the task domain as granules. The model is semantic in the sense that it allows to take advantage of the relations between concepts to provide (...) novel semantic services and interactions. We present the SACHS (Semantic Annotations for a Controlling Help System, a semantic help system for a spreadsheet-based financial controlling system) software as an exemplary application of the proposed task experience model. (shrink)

We present original remarks on some possible applications of classical results of Calculus. Suggestions to the higher schools teachers are also given.

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)

This conclusion of the debate on anthropology’s role in cognitive science provides some clarifications and an overview of emergent themes. It also lists, as cases of good practice, some examples of productive cross-disciplinary collaboration that evince a forward momentum in the relationship between anthropology and the other cognitive sciences.

Gao presents a new mentalistic reformulation of the well-known measurement problem affecting the standard formulation of quantum mechanics. According to this author, it is essentially a determinate-experience problem, namely a problem about the compatibility between the linearity of the Schrödinger’s equation, the fundamental law of quantum theory, and definite experiences perceived by conscious observers. In this essay I aim to clarify that the well-known measurement problem is a mathematical consequence of quantum theory’s formalism, and that its mentalistic variant does not (...) grasp the relevant causes which are responsible for this puzzling issue. The first part of this paper will be concluded claiming that the “physical” formulation of the measurement problem cannot be reduced to its mentalistic version. In the second part of this work it will be shown that, contrary to the case of quantum mechanics, Bohmian mechanics and GRW theories provide clear explanations of the physical processes responsible for the definite localization of macroscopic objects and, consequently, for well-defined perceptions of measurement outcomes by conscious observers. More precisely, the macro-objectification of states of experimental devices is obtained exclusively in virtue of their clear ontologies and dynamical laws without any intervention of human observers. Hence, it will be argued that in these theoretical frameworks the measurement problem and the determinate-experience problem are logically distinct issues. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the prospects of a Neo-Aristotelian position—according to which the difference between the human species and non-human animals is a difference in ‘form’—in the context of the question of how the human form of life is related to the idea of education. Two interpretations of this idea have been suggested by contemporary Neo-Aristotelian philosophy that offer contrasting accounts of the role played by education. According to the first, the idea of a formal difference goes with a (...) notion of potentiality, according to which the distinctiveness of the human is mainly a product of education, and hence a matter of second nature. According to the second, the idea of the human is the idea of a formally distinctive kind of first nature that explains the very possibility of education. I maintain that both interpretations do justice to an important aspect of human life yet fail fully to grasp the significance of the notion of ‘form’ that they employ. I argue that to embrace the insight that the difference of the human is a difference in ‘form’, we must think of the human as a form of life whose very concept contains the concept of education. The concept of education, I argue, is a logical concept, contained in the concept of life that it describes. (shrink)

Un commentario al § 381 delle "Ricerche filosofiche" di Wittgenstein.

The present study seeks to accomplish three goals: to shed light on the problem of reason in Husserl’s co-inherited philosophical project, to elucidate his transcendental critique of reason, and to present Husserl's idea of reason in its distinctive features. A historical excursus first provides a frame to understand the necessity of a critique of reason, its proper subject-matter, and its function for the project of genuine philosophy. In particular, this historical reflection identifies the form that a critique must assume in (...) order to fulfil its philosophical-scientific task. The focus is then directed at Husserl's methodological recalibration of the problem of reason. Husserl's ‘prinzipielle Kritik’ is elucidated in his transcendental reassessment of the headings ‘reason’ and ‘unreason,’ and is thought in connection to the concept of Selbstbesinnung. Lastly, Husserl’s idea of reason is reconstructed in relation to, and in disambiguation from, the concepts of self-evidence, logos, synthesis, fulfilment, positing, etc. Reason, as teleological rule and structural form of transcendental subjectivity, is clarified in its dependence on, and irreducibility to, the problems of constitution and in light of the question of its objective/subjective character. (shrink)

Social science inquiries of American agriculture have long recognized the inextricability of farm households and farm businesses. Efforts to train and support farmers, however, often privilege business realm indicators over social issues. Such framings implicitly position households as disconnected from farm stress or farm success. This article argues that systematically tracing the pathways between farm households and farm operations represents a potentially powerful inroad towards identifying effective support interventions. We argue childcare arrangements are an underrecognized challenge through which farm household (...) dynamics directly influence agricultural production. We draw on interviews and focus group data with farmers in the Northeastern United States to understand how farmer–parents access and negotiate childcare. Farmer–parents value raising children on farms, but express reluctance to expect current or future labor from them. Years with young children thus represent an especially vulnerable phase during a farm’s trajectory. We identify and analyze social, economic, and cognitive pathways through which childcare impacts farm operations. Social pathways include relationship tensions and gendered on-farm divisions of labor; economic pathways include farm layout and structure; cognitive pathways include how farmers think about and plan for their operations. Explicitly acknowledging such issues can better equip farmer–parents to anticipate and plan for conflicting demands on their time. (shrink)

On several occasions in his work, R. S. Peters identifies a difficulty inherent in teaching that underscores the complexity of this relationship: the teacher has the task of passing on knowledge while at the same time allowing knowledge that is passed on to be criticised and revised by the learner. This inquiry asks: first, how does Peters envisage these two tasks coming together in teaching, and, second, does he go far enough in developing what it means for the teacher to (...) recognise the difference and otherness of the learner? At the heart of the matter in answering these questions is how to conceive of the connection between learning and the transformation of the individual. Before turning to Peters, this inquiry begins by discussing connections between transformation and learning in classical and contemporary philosophical discourse. In this context, notions of discontinuity and interruption are shown to be central to understanding transformational learning processes. Peters' thought is then located within this discourse and taken up in three central ways: (1) by analysing his notion of teaching (2) by examining the ideas of learning and transformation embedded in his concept of teaching, and (3) by inquiring into how these issues relate to his idea of philosophy of education as a central part of teacher education. (shrink)

The aim of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it is an attempt at systematizing a series of reflections elaborated by a number of studies appeared in the last decade. This research comes from scholars in different disciplines, but who identify, even in their internal differences, with a method of analysis rooted in the Italian Workerist thought of the 1960s. On the other hand, it tries to clarify an issue that has provoked much debate in the last few (...) years, especially in the field of heretic and heterodox thought, that is to say, the analysis of the salient characteristics of the current state of capitalism. In the last two decades, innovations in the fields of transportation, language and communication started to gather around a new single paradigm of accumulation and valorization. The new capitalist configuration tends to identify in “knowledge” and “space” as commodities a new foundation for dynamic skills of accumulation. We advance that the contemporary form of capitalism is defined in a univocal way as cognitive biocapitalism. Independently of the dominant convention, contemporary capitalism is always in search of new social and vital circles to absorb and commodify, involving more and more the bare vital faculties of human beings. (shrink)

Both Heidegger's Being and Time and Helen Keller's The Story of my Life address the problem of what it means for humans to be optimally human. In reading these texts together, I hope to show that Helen's life-story confirms Heidegger's existential analyses to some extent, but also, importantly, poses a challenge to them with respect to the interrelated issues of disability, language and others. Heidegger's hermeneutic explication of what it means to be human is intended to uncover supposedly basic human (...) existential structures. As a fore-structure for this explication, Heidegger projects an already able-bodied, self-sufficient adult, resolutely engaged in daily activity. I shall argue, however, that it is due to this starting-point in adult-Dasein that Heidegger's existential analyses miss important insights concerning the meaning of being human to be gained from Helen's experience. Starting from the essentially disabled child-Dasein, Helen describes her struggle to achieve the very condition that Heidegger assumes from the start, first through rescue by the other as teacher, who offered the gift of language and community, and thereafter in her grasp of language as a “pharmakon.” I hope to show in the end that Helen's experience of a struggle for humanity offers the model for an alternative projection, that of an essentially disabled and needy Dasein, which, I believe, provides a more viable fore-structure than Heidegger's for a hermeneutics of humanity. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(1) 2003: 98-112. (shrink)

The Acquaintance Principle is the principle according to which judgements concerning the aesthetic value of a work of art proffered by a critic must be based on the critic’s experience(s) or acquaintance with the work itself. The possible exception to this principle would be experiences obtained through other means of transmissibility, related in a particular way to the work in question, that can eventually provide the critic with an adequate basis for judging the artwork. However, recent philosophers claimed that some (...) works of conceptual art show the principle to be false. I argue that, if properly understood, the Acquaintance Principle is a truism, that works of conceptual art do not pose any particular problem to it, and also suggest some implications of the principle. (shrink)

Aristotle's discussion of time is part of his Physics, which was an important part of the philosophical curriculum of late antiquity. Aristotle says that it is because nature is a principle of change that people must establish what change is. This chapter focuses on his scientific treatment of time. Aristotle begins his discussion of time by engaging in the examination of a set of puzzles (aporiai). He clearly indicates that this examination is embedded in the two‐stage inquiry. Aristotle develops, within (...) his positive account of time, the conceptual tools to deal with a puzzle. The chapter shows how the definition of change advanced in the third book of the Physics contributes to the discussion of time developed in the fourth book. (shrink)

What distinguishes theology from the other uses of language? Is theology a specific language, or is it a specific situation of language, a specific way to consider language? I start with the issue of language’s inadequacy before divine revelation. By analyzing the variety of answers to this inopia verborum, I show that the theological inadequacy of language is not conceptual, but formal: it concerns the metalinguistic definition of inadequacy. Then, I formalize the relationship between metalanguage and object language, and I (...) argue that theology applies precisely to this formal relationship. From this, I deduce that the function of theology is to question the need for metalinguistic foundation and validation—given that this need characterizes human language, that is, what is not divine revelation. I end with two applications: on one hand, to the axiomatization of theology; on the other hand, to the methodology for inter-religious dialogue. (shrink)

This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative study to understand how active adherence to the Christian faith influences the way SME owner–managers conceptualise their business practices. The study was based on in-depth interviews with 21 Christian SME owner–managers in Germany and the UK. Using a socio-psychological approach, the data analysis yielded a range of linguistic and conceptual resources that are peculiar to Christian discourse and that have the potential to influence business activity in rather distinctive ways. This paper (...) particularly focuses on those Christian concepts that could be regarded as distinct ‹frames’ for action. It outlines what effect these concepts had on the respondents and how they were related to business practices. The paper also discusses how this study could inform further research into the influence of other socio-cultural forms of identity on economic actors’ conceptualisations of their own practice. (shrink)

1. La logica è la teoria del ragionamento corretto. O come si dice di solito, è una teoria normativa del ragionamento. Non intende fornire una descrizione del modo in cui di fatto si ragiona, ma cerca piuttosto di chiarire in che modo si dovrebbe ragionare. Questo però non significa che la logica possa prescindere dall’osservazione dei ragionamenti che di fatto sono ritenuti corretti. Qualsiasi teoria che pretenda di fissare norme per un certo ambito deve tenere conto dei giudizi preteorici i...

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 9 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 128-150.

Kritik: Peter Remmers, Film als Wissensform. Eine Philosophische Untersuchung der Wahrnehmung filmischer Bewegungsbilder, Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter 2018.

Where was God? Where was the intelligent designer of the universe when 1.5 million children were turned into smoke by zealous Nazis? Where was the all powerful, all knowing, wholly good being whose very essence is radically opposed to evil, while millions of children were starved to death by Stalin, had their limbs chopped off with machetes in Rwanda, were turned into amputees by the diamond trade in Sierra Leone, and worked to death, even now, by the child slave trade (...) that, by conservative estimates, enslaves 250 million children worldwide?Without divine justice, all of this suffering is gratuitous. How, then, can a wholly good, all-powerful God be believed to exist? The existence of evil is the most fundamental threat to the traditional Western concept of an all-good, all-powerful God. Both natural evil, the suffering that occurs as a result of physical phenomena, and moral evil, the suffering resulting from human action, comprise the problem of evil. If evil cannot be accounted for, then belief in the traditional Western concept of God is absurd. (shrink)