Approaches to the “Indian Issue” which fail to go beyond the mere charting of evolutions in legal norms or the articulation between neoliberalism and multiculturalism do not allow us to take the full measure of indigenous policies, in terms of the goal set for the enlargement of the spaces for public interpellation and the reconfiguration of ideas and practices pertaining to citizenship. Starting from the Argentine experience, the aim of this article is to examine the question of the sedimentation of (...) neoliberal procedures, in a context marked by the will to re-appropriate national and popular sovereignty over territories and resources. The Indian question thus poses both the problem of the model of development that has been adopted and the question of the characterizing of the pleb (the category of the popular, or of those most underprivileged) as a part of the populus, that is, as part of the people of the nation, and therefore of the demos, understood as the space open to those who can legitimately give form and content to populus and who can put words on the world. (shrink)

The coordinated expression of the Hox gene family encoding transcription factors is critical for proper embryonic development and patterning. Major efforts have thus been dedicated to understanding mechanisms controlling Hox expression. In addition to the temporal and spatial sequential activation of Hox genes, proper embryonic development requires that Hox genes get differentially silenced in a cell‐type specific manner as development proceeds. Factors contributing to Hox silencing include the polycomb repressive complexes (PRCs), which control gene expression through epigenetic modifications. This review (...) focuses on PRC‐dependent regulation of the Hox genes and is aimed at integrating the growing complexity of PRC functional properties in the context of Hox regulation. In particular, mechanisms underlying PRC binding dynamics as well as a series of studies that have revealed the impact of PRC on the 3D organization of the genome is discussed, which has a significant role on Hox regulation during development. (shrink)

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Are some evils unforgivable? How should we respond to evils? Card offers a secular theory of evil--representing a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic approaches--that responds to these and other questions.

1-2. Carteggio Gentile-Jaja -- 3-7. Lettere a Benedetto Croce -- 8. Carteggio Gentile-D'Ancona -- 9. Carteggio Gentile-Omodeo -- 11. Carteggio Gentile-Chiavacci -- 12. Carteggio Gentile-Pintor -- 13. Carteggio Gentile-Calogero (1926-1942) -- 14. Carteggio Gentile-Donati.

Die Untersuchung des unbedingten Grundsatzes der Erkenntnis ist - in Verbindung mit den Begriffen des Bewusstseins, der Anschauung und des Unendlichen - der Kern des Deutschen Idealismus von Fichte, Schelling und Hegel. Nach Fichte muss man das absolut erste und unbedingte Prinzip des gesamten menschlichen Wissens aufsuchen, damit die Philosophie tatsachlich Wissenschaft der Wissenschaft oder Wissenschaftslehre sein kann. Daher rekonstruiert der Autor zunachst Fichtes kritisch gegen Kant gerichtete Radikalisierung des Konzepts der Subjektivitat und die Uberschreitung der Grenze zur intellektuellen Anschauung. (...) Im zweiten Teil werden dann neue Perspektiven in der Analyse von Schellings Idealismus vorgeschlagen: Vor dem Hintergrund einer Analyse der intellektuellen, der asthetischen und der produktiven Anschauung bei Schelling wird das Verhaltnis zwischen Naturphilosophie und Transzendentalphilosophie behandelt. Im dritten Teil des Buches werden Hegels Kritik an Fichte und Schelling sowie an Kant (in der Enzyklopadie) und schliesslich die Bedeutung der Begriffe des Selbstbewusstseins und des Unendlichen vom transzendentalen Idealismus bis hin zu Hegels absolutem Idealismus untersucht. Der Kulminationspunkt ist dabei die alle Bereiche der theoretischen Philosophie durchziehende Wechselbeziehung zwischen dem Endlichen und dem Unendlichen. (shrink)

"El título de este trabajo puede parecer pretencioso; sin embargo, mi intención ha sido muy modesta, puesto que he querido solamente resumir en capítulos sumarios un curso de lecciones dictadas este año en la Universidad de Pisa, a los estudiantes de la Facultad de Jurisprudencia. El curso estaba consagrado a las cuestiones fundamentales de la Filosofía del Derecho, es decir, a aquellas cuestiones que comúnmente pasan por alto los especialistas de esta disciplina, demasiado inclinados a enredarse en el empirismo de (...) la Enciclopedia Jurídica, y por la cual, merced a ellos, no se advierte cómo aquella Filosofía puede ser considerada de otra manera. La Filosofía del Derecho justificará su existencia mientras sea Filosofía, a la cual no se llega partiendo del Derecho, como tampoco se llega partiendo de ningún otro concepto empírico, puesto que todos los conceptos, cuando están rigurosamente determinados, son ya filosofía, y no pueden, por consiguiente, germinar en otro lugar que no sea su terreno". Giovanni Gentile. (shrink)

This essay argues that current advocacy of lesbian and gay rights to legal marriage and parenthood insufficiently criticizes both marriage and motherhood as they are currently practiced and structured by Northern legal institutions. Instead we would do better not to let the State define our intimate unions and parenting would be improved if the power presently concentrated in the hands of one or two guardians were diluted and distributed through an appropriately concerned community.

ABSTRACT Truth-conditions are systematically determined when they are the output of an algorithmic procedure that takes as input a set of semantic and contextual features. Truth-conditional sceptics have cast doubts on the thesis that truth-conditions are systematic in this sense. Against this form of scepticism, Schoubye and Stokke : 759–793) and Dobler : 451–474.) have provided systematic analyses of utterance truth-conditions. My aim is to argue that these theories are not immune to the kind of objections raised by truth-conditional sceptics. (...) In particular, I argue that the use of Questions Under Discussion and ways of being is problematic. (shrink)

Following the book Algebraic Set Theory from André Joyal and leke Moerdijk [8], we give a characterization of the initial ZF-algebra, for Heyting pretoposes equipped with a class of small maps. Then, an application is considered (the effective topos) to show how to recover an already known model (McCarty [9]).

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end I (...) take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

In the present interview, Jürgen Habermas answers questions about his wide-ranging work in philosophy and social theory, as well as concerning current social and political developments to whose understanding he has made important theoretical contributions. Among the aspects of his work addressed are his conception of communicative rationality as a countervailing force to the colonization of the lifeworld by capitalism and his understanding of philosophy after Hegel as postmetaphysical thinking, for which he has recently provided a comprehensive historical grounding. The (...) scope and relevance of his ideas can be seen from his reflections on current issues, ranging from the prospects of translational democracy at a time of resurgent nationalism and populism, to political developments in Germany since reunification, to the role of religion in the public sphere and the impact of the new social media on democratic discourse. (shrink)

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order to (...) criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing, discursive injustice :440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion. The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words is (...) distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression. (shrink)

One way to silence the powerless, Langton has taught us, is to pre-emptively disable their ability to do things with words. In this paper I argue that speakers can be silenced in a different way. You can let them speak, and obscure the meaning of their words afterwards. My aim is to investigate this form of silencing, that I call retroactive distortion. In a retroactive distortion, the meaning of the words of a speaker is distorted by the effect of a (...) subsequent speech act by a different speaker. After introducing this notion, I explore some reasons why retroactive distortions can be difficult to challenge and argue that, besides constituting a communicative injustice, they can eliminate topics from public consideration and therefore erode public debate. (shrink)

According to Mitchell Green, speech act theory traditionally idealizes away from crucial aspects of conversational contexts, including those in which the speaker’s social position affects the possibility of her performing certain speech acts. In recent times, asymmetries in communicative situations have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers: several scholars view hate speech itself in terms of speech acts, namely acts of subordination. The aim of this paper is to address one of the (...) main objections to accounts of hate speech in terms of illocutionary speech acts, that is the Authority Problem. While the social role of the speaker is the focus of several approaches, the social role of the audience has too often been neglected. The author will show that not only must the speaker have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to perform speech acts of subordination, but also the audience must typically have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to either license or object to the speaker’s authority, and her acts of subordination. (shrink)

Social death, central to the evil of genocide, distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

This essay examines how rape of women and girls by male soldiers works as a martial weapon. Continuities with other torture and terrorism and with civilian rape are suggested. The inadequacy of past philosophical treatments of the enslavement of war captives is briefly discussed. Social strategies are suggested for responding and a concluding fantasy offered, not entirely social, of a strategy to change the meanings of rape to undermine its use as a martial weapon.

Die vorliegende Studie erschließt erstmals umfassendden Zurechnungsbegriff in Kants praktischer Philosophie. Ein Zurechnungsurteil bringt zum Ausdruck, dass eine Handlung auf den freien Willen einer bestimmten Person zurückgeführt wird. Zurechnung ist ein zentraler Begriff des Rechts und von grundlegender Bedeutung für unsere alltägliche Praxis, wenn wir andere Personen loben, tadeln oder dankbar sind. Eine fundamentale Relevanz des Zurechnungsbegriffs zeigt die Autorin auch für Kants praktische Philosophie auf. Ausgehend von Kants Definition des Zurechnungsbegriffs in der Metaphysik der Sitten wird deutlich, wie Zurechnung (...) mit anderen zentralen Begriffen von Kants Handlungs- und Moraltheorie verknüpft ist: sowohl für die Auflösung der Freiheitsantinomie als auch für den Begriff der Person als freiem, moralischem Subjekt und Träger eines Gewissens ist Zurechnung ein Schlüsselbegriff. Am Leitfaden des Zurechnungsbegriffs entsteht ein differenziertes Bild der praktischen Philosophie Kants, das diese auch aus heutiger Sicht attraktiv und tragfähig erscheinen lässt. In systematischer Hinsicht schlägt die Arbeit einen Bogen zu aktuellen Debatten und zeigt, dass Kants Theorie in zentralen Punkten anschlussfähig ist. (shrink)