Im Mittelpunkt der vorliegenden Studie steht die Frage nach der Tragweite und Anwendungsrelevanz der Methodenlehre Émilie du Châtelets für die Physik im 18. Jahrhundert, mit der sich die Französin an der Diskussion um Energie- und Impulserhaltung und um das Prinzip der kleinsten Wirkung beteiligte. Andrea Reichenberger zeigt, dass Prinzipien und Hypothesen für Émilie du Châtelet als Fundament und Gerüst wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis gelten. Im Zusammenspiel beider Komponenten erweisen sich das Prinzip des Widerspruchs und das Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes als regulative (...) Leitlinien und Handlungsmaxime für die auf Hypothesen gestützte Theoriebildung und -begründung. Die sich daraus ergebenden Konsequenzen für den Status und Inhalt der Newtonschen Axiome werden exemplarisch aufgezeigt. (shrink)

In Hannah Arendt's political theory, thinking does not precede action; instead, thinking follows from action, because thinking is ‘apolitical’. Arendt first determines politics (action) as the opposite of philosophy (thinking) and later explains the primacy of politics: politics, which follows from the reversal of the metaphysical hierarchy, can be reconstructed as anti-metaphysics. However, the method of reversing the metaphysical hierarchy is fraught with difficulties that justify the critique of the primacy of politics as the central condition of a political theory, (...) because the price of the primacy of politics is the loss of the individual’s autonomy. Because one cannot understand Arendt's political theory (in terms of content) without recognising the (systemic) dichotomy between politics and philosophy, this book contains a glossary which explains what meaning the terms listed have in her political theory. (shrink)

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)

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)

Edmund Husserl is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl's writings on the natural and (...) human sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl's thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally. (shrink)

This article discusses Charles Taylor's analysis of the ‘politics of recognition’, which reveals that the major versions of the latter share an ideological conception of Eros as a binding, unifying force. Such striving for oneness is seen as key to forming harmonious, just communities and nations, and ultimately global cohesion. I refer to this as the ‘ideology of Eros’. However, Taylor highlights an ironically divisive opposition concerning how to realise such oneness, based on incompatible foundational principles: ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. Instead (...) of a choice, Taylor opts for the demanding political task of ongoing negotiation between them. I augment Taylor's analysis by re-evaluating the figure of ‘non-recognition’ arising from Lacan's critique of the ‘ideology of Eros’, which is centred on Socrates’ encounter with Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium and to which he adds his notion of genuine love, which affirms an ethic of healthy ‘non-recognition’. I argue that this ethic supports the difficult political task that Taylor rightly calls for. (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)

Pretendo defender a compatibilidade da concepção de objeto desenvolvida na Dedução Transcendental das categorias do entendimento da primeira edição da Crítica da Razão Pura com as demandas da filosofia crítica, ainda que pese em contrário o uso da expressão “objeto transcendental” por parte de Kant. Sugiro que o uso de tal expressão guarde justamente uma transição entre o conceito de objeto como coisa em si e o novo conceito de objeto do conhecimento em sentido crítico.

Questo articolo è dedicato al De Aucupio di Pietro degli Angeli da Barga, altrimenti conosciuto come ‘il Bargeo’ (1517-1596), e alla trama di corrispondenze tematiche che questo poema intreccia con la parafrasi degli Ixeutica di Dionisio (III-V sec.), presumibilmente nota al poeta tramite la mediazione di Conrad Gessner. Dopo un’introduzione sui protagonisti della questione, ci si concentrerà su un caso esemplare, corredato di apparato critico, tratto dal De Aucupio, e sulle possibili fonti impiegate dal Bargeo.

A cross-species perspective can extend and provide testable predictions for Savage et al.'s framework. Rhythm and melody, I argue, could bootstrap each other in the evolution of musicality. Isochrony may function as a temporal grid to support rehearsing and learning modulated, pitched vocalizations. Once this melodic plasticity is acquired, focus can shift back to refining rhythm processing and beat induction.

This paper aims to analyze one of the highest achievements of humankind, the classical tragedy, via the application of the heuristic paradigm proposed by Aristotle in his Physics, the fourfold determination of the concept of cause. This scientific methodology – one of the most effective viatica for a comprehensive response to the question of the nature of an object – informs the inquiry into the universal nature of tragedy, its hypercomplexity and hence its ethical and human relevance. Firstly, the concept (...) of tragedy is dissected into its four causes – material, formal, efficient and final; given that the object of research is at the same time tragedy in general and this specific tragedy , each cause is subdivided in two, a distal one and a proximal one . Then, the methodology of the four causes is applied to the formal cause alone, the tragic conflict, in an attempt to better understand tragedy’s quiddity. The results of this more specific causal determination are finally applied to the four causes of tragedy, supporting the hypothesis of a close relationship between hybris, amartia, tragic conflict and education of the phronesis. (shrink)

Human genetic research databases cast a new light on the controversial issue of which uses of the human body are morally permissible. More specifically, banking human tissue raises issues relating to the ownership of the samples that the participants have donated, to the ownership of the data that are derived through processing the donated samples, and to the management arrangements that better balance the interest of genetic research with the protection of participants' rights. Winickoff & Winickoff suggest that the charitable-trust (...) model is a superior legal arrangement for biobanking compared with private biobanking. This paper critically assesses Winickoff & Winickoff's claim by highlighting some areas of implementation where such a model could be problematic. The charitable trust is certainly an advantageous arrangement because (1) it favors the separation between control and use of the samples, (2) it provides a procedural mechanism that facilitates the participation donor groups in the biobank management and (3) it mediates the different interests that are affected. On the other hand, the charitable-trust model leaves unresolved several issues--among them the ownership of the sample, the right of withdrawal, access and funding mechanism. I conclude that further theoretical and empirical analysis is required in the area. (shrink)

The article reviews Italian semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco’s vision of semiotics as a discipline, the aim of which is to study the ‘whole of culture’. It focuses especially on Eco’s trajectory out of structuralism and on the development of a cognitive semantics based on strong pragmatist principles, that inform his notion of interpretability as the key process of semiosis and on the encyclopedia as the format more apt to describe the cultural space. After a consideration of the interface between (...) the cognitive, the pragmatic and the cultural dimensions of semiosis, the article highlights a few open problems in contemporary, culturally-oriented sociological theory that could benefit from a deeper engagement with these concepts. (shrink)