Logic and Knowledge -/- Editor: Carlo Cellucci, Emily Grosholz and Emiliano Ippoliti Date Of Publication: Aug 2011 Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3008-9 Isbn: 1-4438-3008-9 -/- The problematic relation between logic and knowledge has given rise to some of the most important works in the history of philosophy, from Books VI–VII of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Mill’s A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. It provides the title of an important collection of papers (...) by Bertrand Russell (Logic and Knowledge. Essays, 1901–1950). However, it has remained an underdeveloped theme in the last century, because logic has been treated as separate from knowledge. -/- This book does not hope to make up for a century-long absence of discussion. Rather, its ambition is to call attention to the theme and stimulating renewed reflection upon it. The book collects essays of leading figures in the field and it addresses the theme as a topic of current debate, or as a historical case study, or when appropriate as both. Each essay is followed by the comments of a younger discussant, in an attempt to transform what might otherwise appear as a monologue into an ongoing dialogue; each section begins with an historical essay and ends with an essay by one of the editors. -/- Carlo Cellucci is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza,’ Italy. He is currently completing a book entitled, Remaking Logic: What is Logic Really? -/- Emily Grosholz is Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. She is the author of Representation and Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and the Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2007). -/- Emiliano Ippoliti is a Research Fellow at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza,’ Italy. His main interests are heuristics, the logic of discovery, and problem-solving. He is currently working on a book, Ampliating Knowledge: Data, Hypotheses and Novelty. -/- TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ................................................................................. xxv -/- Section I: Logic and Knowledge -/- Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 The Cognitive Importance of Sight and Hearing in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Logic (Mirella Capozzi) Discussion .............................................................................................. 26 (Chiara Fabbrizi) Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 33 Nominalistic Content (Jody Azzouni) Discussion ............................................................................................... 52 (Silvia De Bianchi) Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 57 A Garden of Grounding Trees (Göran Sundholm) Discussion.......................................................................................... .. 75 (Luca Incurvati) Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 81 Logics and Metalogics (Timothy Williamson) Discussion.......................................................................................... 101 (Cesare Cozzo) Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 109 Is Knowledge the Most General Factive Stative Attitude? (Cesare Cozzo) Discussion.......................................................................................... 117 (Timothy Williamson) Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 123 Classifying and Justifying Inference Rules (Carlo Cellucci) Discussion.......................................................................................... 143 (Norma B. Goethe) -/- Section II: Logic and Science -/- Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 151 The Universal Generalization Problem and the Epistemic Status of Ancient Medicine: Aristotle and Galen (Riccardo Chiaradonna) Discussion.......................................................................................... 168 (Diana Quarantotto) Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 175 The Empiricist View of Logic (Donald Gillies) Discussion.......................................................................................... 191 (Paolo Pecere) Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 197 Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Theory: Herbert Simon’s Unifying Framework (Roberto Cordeschi) Discussion.......................................................................................... 216 (Francesca Ervas) Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 221 Evolutionary Psychology and Morality: The Renaissance of Emotivism? (Mario De Caro) Discussion.......................................................................................... 232 (Annalisa Paese) Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 237 Between Data and Hypotheses (Emiliano Ippoliti) Discussion.......................................................................................... 262 (Fabio Sterpetti) -/- Section III: Logic and Mathematics -/- Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 273 Dedekind Against Intuition: Rigor, Scope and the Motives of his Logicism (Michael Detlefsen) Discussion.......................................................................................... 290 (Marianna Antonutti) Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 297 Mathematical Intuition: Poincaré, Polya, Dewey (Reuben Hersh) Discussion.......................................................................................... 324 (Claudio Bernardi) Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 329 On the Finite: Kant and the Paradoxes of Knowledge (Carl Posy) Discussion.......................................................................................... 358 (Silvia Di Paolo) Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 363 Assimilation: Not Only Indiscernibles are Identified (Robert Thomas) Discussion.......................................................................................... 380 (Diego De Simone) Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 385 Proofs and Perfect Syllogisms (Dag Prawitz) Discussion.......................................................................................... 403 (Julien Murzi) Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 411 Logic, Mathematics, Heterogeneity (Emily Grosholz) Discussion.......................................................................................... 427 (Valeria Giardino) -/- Contributors........................................................................................ ..... 433 Index............................................................................................... ......... 437 -/- Price Uk Gbp: 49.99 Price Us Usd: 74.99. (shrink)

Knowledge transfer across different contexts has become an increasingly prevalent feature of current science. As such, it is a relevant topic also for history and philosophy of science. This special issue presents a set of papers that study knowledge transfer in various disciplines. The contributions approach the topic from either an integrated history and philosophy of science perspective, 2) a systematic philosophical perspective, or 3) a historical perspective. This overview article is organized in three sections. The introduction provides some background (...) and context of the topic. The second section specifies the three components of knowledge transfer, i.e., knowledge, context, and the transfer process. It motivates our take on this topic and then outlines the central ideas of each paper. The third section reflects on the kinds of methods used to study processes of knowledge transfer. The article concludes by highlighting some of the features of such processes, some of the main challenges and obstacles that those processes involve, and possible ways of dealing with them. (shrink)

Cooperatives are facing the challenge to be competitive in the market, without losing their traditional values of mutuality and democracy. To do that, they need to re-construct open and participative dialogue with their employees and members based on more democratic forms of communication and engagement. From this point of view, the measurement and communication of sustainability aspects may allow a dialogue to be mobilized with shareholders and stakeholders without losing the attention on competitive factors. Based on these premises, the article (...) analyses the experience of a 5-year action research project , carried out within Unicoop Tirreno, an Italian consumers' cooperative, and aimed to implement different tools for sustainability accounting and to embrace a more open dialogue with stakeholders, in particular with employees and members. In this process of change, the tools implemented for sustainability accounting played a key role in supporting the cooperative to reinterpret its own values and in stimulating a new and participative management approach. The results indicate a virtuous circle between the management and measurement of cooperative principles and the management and measurement of sustainability issues. (shrink)

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) legislation changed in 2021; persons without a reasonably foreseeable natural death (RFND) could now be eligible for MAID and would have to wait at least 90 days before their intervention. This legislative change caused a new ethically complex question to arise, which we explore in this commentary, namely: Where should individuals without a RFND wait (for 90 days) in a publicly funded health system?

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōra in Plato's Timaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōra offers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōra can exceed its reduction (...) to the maternal-feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns. (shrink)

The moment we live in is a moment of multiple crisis – environmental, political, economic, and viral – a moment, that is, where the reality of damage, fallibility and faultiness, and the ensuing fear, anxiety, rage, trauma, protest, and mobilisation have reached a critical point. Past and present narratives of crisis and trauma can help navigate this process. In this article we have chosen to focus on Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (1923) and Hideo Kojima’s videogame Death Stranding (2019) for several (...) reasons. The most important of all are Svevo’s and Kojima’s choices to deal with the trauma of crisis by emphasising and investigating the process leading to crisis, and of focusing on the zone in-between the ‘normal’ and the unknown. In so doing both narratives underscore the significance of ruins, desolation and the broken as a backdrop for rediscovering everyday life and forging meaningful connections in a fragmented world. (shrink)

Images are not neutral conveyors of messages shipped around the globe to achieve globalized spectatorship. They are powerful forces that elicit very diverse responses and can resist new visual hegemonies of our global world. Bringing together case studies from the field of media, art, politics, religion, anthropology and science, this volume breaks new ground by reflecting on the very power of images beyond their medial exploitation. The contributions by Hans Belting, Susan Buck-Morss, Georges Didi-Huberman, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Ticio Escobar among (...) others testify that globalization does not necessarily equal homogenization, and that images can open up alternative ways of picturing what is to come. (shrink)

Anerkennung ist ein schillernder Begriff, der erst seit wenigen Jahrzehnten Aufmerksamkeit findet, aber in Ethik, politischer Philosophie und Kritischer Theorie mit großen Erwartungen verbunden wird. Sein Ursprung in den Intersubjektivitätstheorien Fichtes und Hegels lässt hoffen, dass er von sich aus Impulse für Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit in sich trägt. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es eine Entdeckung ersten Ranges, dass ein Denker wie Nietzsche den Begriff der Anerkennung in durchaus grundlegender Weise verwendet, ohne den erst Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts mit ihm verknüpften (...) Hoffnungen zu widersprechen. Nietzsches Verständnis von Anerkennung zeigt sich in seiner Lebensphilosophie. Wie die Individuen konkret "einander nöthig" sind, arbeitet Sarah Bianchi anerkennungstheoretisch für das ganze menschliche Leben in seinen verschiedenen Dimensionen heraus. Qua Anerkennung sind die Individuen vom Selbstverhältnis, über zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen bis hin zum Recht und Staat existentiell verwoben. (shrink)

Though not as widely studied as the Research Article, the abstract has attracted increasing interest among researchers over last decades. A number of contrastive or comparative studies of abstracts in English and other languages have already been carried out considering mainly the hard sciences and some soft sciences such as linguistics and history, however no cross-cultural analyses have been conducted so far between RA abstracts in English and RA abstracts in French published in the legal field. This paper seeks to (...) investigate genre variation and changes in frame sequences comparatively in English and French RA abstracts from criminology journals. Using a genre analytical approach to qualitative and quantitative data, the paper reports on two comparable corpora, i.e. English and French, of electronically retrieved abstracts from Criminology Journals published in 2014. The two corpora are composed of three journals per language, namely Criminology, Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology for the English corpus, and Champ Pénal, Criminologie, Revue Canadienne de Droit Pénal et Criminologie for the French corpus. The analysis will be carried out following two main steps, i.e. a macro-analysis and a micro-analysis. In the former step, the corpora are compared by the analysis and discussion of the basic IMRD rhetorical move structure for the RA often proposed in the literature and the additional five moves model postulated by Dos Santos with the aim of investigating the linguistic and rhetorical variation in the abstract genre from a cross-cultural perspective. In the latter, we look at frame sequences combining forms of self-mentions and frame markers, i.e. personal patterns, impersonal patterns and locational patterns. Provisional results show that the abstracts under investigation largely follow the international conventions based on the norms established by the English-speaking international academic community. However, variation across the two cultures emerged from the linguistic realizations of framework sequences. Cross-cultural implications are discussed at the close. (shrink)

En écho de l’article du Rabbin Krygier, E. Bianchi constate que l’exégèse biblique n’est pas parvenue à une position unanime concernant l’attitude de Jésus envers le shabbat dans les différentes « situations de vie » que reflète la rédaction actuelle des textes des controverses de Jésus sur le Shabbat. Sans entrer dans ces problématique, E. Bianchi cherche à faire émerger l’aspect kérygmatique présent dans ces controverses chez les Synoptiques comme chez Jean, retenant également certains textes pauliniens. Après quoi, (...) il traite de l’émergence du Dimanche, « premier jour de la semaine », lié à l’événement de la résurrections et par conséquent « jour dominical concret » par la célébration du Christ ressuscité présent dans l’Assemblée réunie pour l’écoute de la Parole et le repas eucharistique. Reconnu « temps sacramentel », le dimanche dut se détacher des pratiques juives entrant dans le processus de l’identification des chrétiens.As an echo to the article of Rabbi Krygier, E. Bianchi observes that biblical exegesis has not arrived at a unanimous position concerning the attitude of Jesus towards the Sabbath in the various “life situations” reflected in the current textual wording of Jesus' debate about the Sabbath. Without entering into this controversy, E. Bianchi tries to bring out the kerygmatic aspect present in these controversies in the Synoptics, in John, as well as in certain Pauline texts. He goes on to discuss the emergence of Sunday, “the first day of the week,” that is tied to the resurrection event and hence a “concrete Lord’s day,” by the celebration of the resurrected Christ present in the Assembly joined together to hear the Word and to share the eucharistic meal. Recognized as “a sacramental time,” Sunday had to be detached from Jewish practices entering into the process of the identification of Christians. (shrink)

Presented is the research and professional development results carried out by teachers on the use of educational technologies in the classroom in the course of an experimentation based on the PoliCultura&Moodle didactic format. The training course was designed as an integrated model of presence and online activities and focuses on the use of LCMS Moodle as a resource for achieving a deeper interaction with both the institutions involved in the projects and with students as well as for supporting and disseminating (...) the educational activities carried out in the classroom, with an online environment that would enable the exchange, the interaction and sharing of the study content. (shrink)

Martin Gustafsson and Richard Sørli. The Philosophy of J. L. Austin. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780199219759 Reviewed by Claudia Bianchi.

Medical complicity in torture is prohibited by international law and codes of professional ethics. But in the many countries in which torture is common, doctors frequently are expected to assist unethical acts that they are unable to prevent. Sometimes these doctors face a dilemma: they are asked to provide diagnoses or treatments that respond to genuine health needs but that also make further torture more likely or more effective. The duty to avoid complicity in torture then comes into conflict with (...) the doctor’s duty to care for patients. Sometimes the right thing for a doctor to do requires complicity in torture. Whether this is the case depends on: the expected consequences of the doctor’s actions; the wishes of the patient; and the extent of the doctor’s complicity with wrongdoing. Medical associations can support physicians who face this dilemma while maintaining a commitment to clear principles denouncing torture. (shrink)

Hecuba's grief upon learning of Hector's death in Hom.Il. 22.430‒6 and in the presence of his corpse later on inIl. 24.747‒59 seems to foreshadow the queen's miserable fate in the aftermath of the fall of Troy. In the subsequent literary tradition, the character of Hecuba ends up merging with the destiny of her city: as Harrison points out with reference to Seneca'sTroades, Hecuba, the Latin counterpart of Greek Hekabe, functions as a metaphor for the fall of Troy (118), even represents (...) the fallen Troy itself (128). In turning into an exemplar of maternal grief, she also comes to embody the vicissitudes of fortune. In these pages, I am interested in exploring a possible wordplay on the queen's name in Seneca'sTroades, which may have originated, as I suggest, from Hecuba's distinctive posture in Euripides’ diptychHecubaandTrojan Women(for convenience's sake I will employ the Latin form of the name throughout these pages with the exception of a few passages, in which the Greek form ‘Hekabe’ will be used in order to bring to the fore an etymological connection I will discuss below). (shrink)

According to Rorty, philosophy is most of time the result of a contest between an entrenched vocabulary, which has become a nuisance, and half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. In this paper, I will explore the contest between the entrenched vocabulary of imagination (and ‘the imaginary’ as its necessary counterpart) and a half-formed vocabulary that promises a lot of interesting things: the vocabulary of the ‘the imaginal’. After introducing the concept of the imaginal, I will move on to (...) show its force and, in particular, the role it plays in contemporary politics and in so-called post-Fordist capitalism. (shrink)

In contemporary science uncertainty is often represented as an intrinsic feature of natural and of human phenomena. As an example we need only think of two important conceptual revolutions that occurred in physics and logic during the first half of the twentieth century: (1) the discovery of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics; (2) the emergence of many-valued logical reasoning, which gave rise to so-called ‘fuzzy thinking’. I discuss the possibility of applying the notions of uncertainty, developed in the framework (...) of quantum mechanics, quantum information and fuzzy logics, to some problems of political and social sciences. (shrink)

Compromise arises in contexts where irreconcilable claims must nonetheless somehow be resolved. Ordinary people in everyday life, politicians and artists, doctors engaging in research, humanitarian workers providing aid in the midst of war – all of them will have faced situations where compromise appeared to be the only reasonable option, and yet will have felt that there was nevertheless something deeply wrong with it. The aim of this paper is to help make sense of that sentiment. The focus of this (...) paper will be on some aspects of the morality of compromise. Its lynchpin will be to construe compromise as a joint action, in particular, a joint wrongdoing – taking part in, and sharing responsibility for, the doing of things that are wrong from the point of view of those who are the parties to the compromise. The question of ‘what is wrong with compromise?’ is thus recast as a question of ‘what is my part in the wrongs being done as part of the compromise?’ It is tempting to suppose that a compromise serves to dilute personal responsibility, parsing it out among parties to the compromise. Viewing a compromise as a joint action, in contrast, will help us to see how a compromise actually increases responsibility among parties to it. They are now jointly collaborating in some action that each of them sees as wrong, at least in part (albeit in differing parts). Discussions of compromise traditionally prioritize the inter-personal aspect – compromise, in the transitive form of ‘compromising with’ someone. But I argue that the intransitive form – ‘compromise of’ – deserves pride of place. The reason for prioritizing the intransitive ‘compromise of’ is simple: that is what is involved in the intra-personal calculation that must, of necessity, go on inside one's own head in the process of deciding whether or not to agree to a 'compromise with' someone else. In this paper I shall concentrate specifically on compromises of principles, or (more precisely) on ‘matters of principled concern to the compromising parties’. Not only is that the most troubling and morally problematic sort of compromise, it is also logically the most central case. I demonstrate that that is so by shifting the focus from inter-personal compromise to the more fundamental intra-personal process underlying it – the compromise we are involved in when adjudicating among our own conflicting values, to decide whether or not to agree to a compromise of the inter-personal sort. This is the subject of the first section of the paper below. Compromise involves resolving conflicts of principles through mutual concessions that are accepted and undertaken by all parties. Doing so may be on-balance desirable, not only from some larger perspective (of social peace, or whatever) but also from each party's own perspective. Nevertheless, from each party's perspective, compromise necessarily involves interacting with, and sometimes contributing to, wrongdoing. Morally, something is lost, even if more is gained on balance. (shrink)

In this book, originally published in 2007, Chiara Bottici argues for a philosophical understanding of political myth. Bottici demonstrates that myth is a process, one of continuous work on a basic narrative pattern that responds to a need for significance. Human beings need meaning in order to master the world they live in, but they also need significance in order to live in a world that is less indifferent to them. This is particularly true in the realm of politics. (...) Political myths are narratives through which we orient ourselves, and act and feel about our political world. Bottici shows that in order to come to terms with contemporary phenomena, such as the clash between civilizations, we need a Copernican revolution in political philosophy. If we want to save reason, we need to look at it from the standpoint of myth. (shrink)

Clinical Ethics Committees (CECs), as distinct from Research Ethics Committees, were originally established with the aim of supporting healthcare professionals in managing controversial clinical ethical issues. However, it is still unclear whether they manage to accomplish this task and what is their impact on clinical practice. This systematic review aims to collect available assessments of CECs’ performance as reported in literature, in order to evaluate CECs’ effectiveness. We retrieved all literature published up to November 2019 in six databases (PubMed, Ovid (...) MEDLINE, Scopus, Philosopher’s Index, Embase and Web of Science), following PRISMA guidelines. We included only articles specifically addressing CECs and providing any form of CECs performance assessment. Twenty-nine articles were included. Ethics consultation was the most evaluated of CECs’ functions. We did not find standardized tools for measuring CECs’ efficacy, but 33% of studies considered “user satisfaction” as an indicator, with 94% of them reporting an average positive perception of CECs’ impact. Changes in patient treatment and a decrease of moral distress in health personnel were reported as additional outcomes of ethics consultation. The highly diverse ways by which CECs carry out their activities make CECs’ evaluation difficult. The adoption of shared criteria would be desirable to provide a reliable answer to the question about their effectiveness. Nonetheless, in general both users and providers consider CECs as helpful, relevant to their work, able to improve the quality of care. Their main function is ethics consultation, while less attention seems to be devoted to bioethics education and policy formation. (shrink)

The objectives of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies were summarized by his creator as: interdisciplinarity, construction of world views and broad dissemination of scientific knowledge. In compliance with the third of these objectives, we provide a rigorous but accessible popular science version of a research article published by Aerts and Sassoli de Bianchi, where an extended version of the quantum formalism was proposed as a possible solution to the measurement problem. We hope that through articles of this (...) kind, written with an educational spirit and addressed to both academic and nonacademic readers, the interdisciplinary dialogue about foundational issues will be stimulated and the gap between the different sciences reduced. (shrink)

Founding our analysis on the Geneva-Brussels approach to quantum mechanics, we use conventional macroscopic objects as guiding examples to clarify the content of two important results of the beginning of twentieth century: Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen’s reality criterion and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We then use them in combination to show that our widespread belief in the existence of microscopic particles is only the result of a cognitive illusion, as microscopic particles are not particles, but are instead the ephemeral spatial and local manifestations of (...) non-spatial and non-local entities. (shrink)

The current situation around COVID-19 portrays a threat to us in several ways: It imposes uncertainty, a lack of control and reminds us of our own mortality. People around the world have reacted to these threats in seemingly unrelated ways: From stockpiling yeast and toilet paper to favoring nationalist ideas or endorsing conspiratorial beliefs. According to the General Process Model of Threat and Defense the confrontation with a threat - a discrepant experience - makes humans react with both proximal and (...) distal threat responses. While the proximal response manifests in behavioral inhibition that leads to heightened anxious arousal and vigilance, distal responses seek to lower behavioral inhibition and the associated state of anxiety and vigilance through engaging in distal defenses. In the present research, we propose that the reactions to COVID-19 may represent distal defense strategies to the pandemic (in the form of environmental or group related worldview defenses) and therefore can be explained and forecasted by the model. Thus we hypothesized increased perceived COVID-19 threat perception to lead to a proximal threat response in the form of heightened behavioral inhibition. This, in return, should enhance the use of distal defenses (i.e.: several ingroup biases, system justification and conspiratorial beliefs) overlapping with the reactions observed as a response to COVID-19. This hypothesized mediated effect of increased perceived COVID-19 threat on distal defenses was tested in two pre-registered studies: In Study 1 (N = 358) results showed perceived COVID-19 threat to be related to behavioral inhibition and in turn to be associated with increased distal defenses (i.e., higher entitativity, control restoration motivation, passive party support). In Study 2 (N = 348) we manipulated COVID-19 threat salience and found results suggesting the distal defenses of system justification and conspiratorial beliefs to be mediated by the proximal threat response. The results of the present research hint towards a common mechanism through which the seemingly unrelated reactions to COVID-19 can be explained. The results might help to predict future behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and design measures to counteract detrimental effects of the pandemic. (shrink)

Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining (...) the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophy, law and political science, and on a wealth of practical experience delivering emergency medical services in conflict-ridden settings, Lepora and Goodin untangle the complexities surrounding compromise and complicity.

Why government outsourcing of public powers is making us less free Many governmental functions today—from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation—are outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatized government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot. In this boldly provocative book, Chiara Cordelli argues that privatization constitutes a regression to a precivil condition—what philosophers centuries ago called "a (...) state of nature." Developing a compelling case for the democratic state and its administrative apparatus, she shows how privatization reproduces the very same defects that Enlightenment thinkers attributed to the precivil condition, and which only properly constituted political institutions can overcome—defects such as provisional justice, undue dependence, and unfreedom. Cordelli advocates for constitutional limits on privatization and a more democratic system of public administration, and lays out the central responsibilities of private actors in contexts where governance is already extensively privatized. Charting a way forward, she presents a new conceptual account of political representation and novel philosophical theories of democratic authority and legitimate lawmaking. The Privatized State shows how privatization undermines the very reason political institutions exist in the first place, and advocates for a new way of administering public affairs that is more democratic and just. (shrink)

SPECIAL SECTION: BUILDING UNIVERSES: THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND MATHEMATICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF COSMOLOGY (EIGHTEENTH–TWENTIETH CENTURIES) .

Friedrich Albert Lange is usually regarded as a representative of physiological neo-Kantianism or as a forerunner of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. In this paper I try to reconstruct Lange’s theory of values to argue that his philosophy is better framed as an intermediate point in the development of the two-world theory (facts/values) between Hermann Lotze and Southwestern neo-Kantianism.

Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir a relação entre a construção de uma postura individualista como estratégia de cuidado de si dentro do contexto atual em que vivemos. Para tanto é realizado uma reflexão a partir da idéia de “sociedade de consumidores” trazida por Zygmunt Bauman, buscando construir uma relação desta com diferentes campos de atuação do sujeito humano. O que encontramos é uma postura que busca defender o indivíduo de possíveis riscos, sendo o outro, seu principal alvo de controle. (...) Dessa forma, constrói-se um individualismo que não pode ser confundido com a postura ascética do cuidado de si grego que possuía em seu conceito a dimensão trágica como suporte a política da existência. Ao final, concebe-se a resistência às políticas de controle de desejos como saída aos dispositivos presentes na sociedade de consumo. (shrink)

The article examines Voltaire's hypochondriac obsession with death and illness, as can be seen in his Correspondence throughout his entire life. His death is described by his secretary Wagničre in Mémoires sur Voltaire and by Condorcet in Vie de Voltaire. Both of them talk of his belief in reason and deism. As regards Voltaire's attitude toward death in the last years of his life, he at times seems to play with the idea of death, as in his Épître ŕ Horace. (...) More often, he is questioning the philosophical meaning of death where the individual disappears and only the species survives. Voltaire values "philosophical death" and believes that philosophy can help us to accept life and death. (shrink)

The article discusses both the affinities between Vauvenargues and Spinoza, and the way Laurent Bove examines the relation. Despite all the efforts made by Vauvenargues to mislead his readers and, especially, the censorship, Bove’s endeavor consists in reconstructing Vauvenargues concealed metaphysical premises. As we explore Vauvenargues’ philosophy, in which Pascal plays a major role, it becomes clear the conceptual twists made by the provençal writer in favor of a kind of philosophy where the finite, man’s ontological condition, is valued – (...) and that is a sort of spinozism. (shrink)