Inflamm‐aging is a relatively new terminology used to describe the age‐related increase in the systemic pro‐inflammatory status of humans. Here, we represent inflamm‐aging as a breakdown in the multi‐shell cytokine network, in which stem cells and stromal fibroblasts (referred to as the stem cell niche) become pro‐inflammatory cytokine over‐expressing cells due to the accumulation of DNA damage. Inflamm‐aging self‐propagates owing to the capability of pro‐inflammatory cytokines to ignite the DNA‐damage response in other cells surrounding DNA‐damaged cells. Macrophages, the major cellular (...) player in inflamm‐aging, amplify the phenomenon, by broadcasting pro‐inflammatory signals at both local and systemic levels. On the basis of this, we propose that inflamm‐aging is a major contributor to the increase in cancer incidence and progression in aged people. Breast cancer will be presented as a paradigmatic example for this relationship. (shrink)

Per il papa e l'imperatore -- Francisco de Vitoria -- Domingo de Soto -- Luis de Molina -- Francisco Suárez.

In this paper, I shall set out the pros and cons of assigning legal personhood on artificial intelligence systems under civil law. More specifically, I will provide arguments supporting a functionalist justification for conferring personhood on AIs, and I will try to identify what content this legal status might have from a regulatory perspective. Being a person in law implies the entitlement to one or more legal positions. I will mainly focus on liability as it is one of the main (...) grounds for the attribution of legal personhood, like for collective legal entities. A better distribution of responsibilities resulting from unpredictably illegal and/or harmful behaviour may be one of the main reasons to justify the attribution of personhood also for AI systems. This means an efficient allocation of the risks and social costs associated with the use of AIs, ensuring the protection of victims, incentives for production, and technological innovation. However, the paper also considers other legal positions triggered by personhood in addition to responsibility: specific competencies and powers such as, for example, financial autonomy, the ability to hold property, make contracts, sue. (shrink)

This paper presents a full-fledged structural account of Husserl’s notion of attitude, revolving around the phenomenological concept of “unity of saliency” (Einheit der Bedeutsamkeit). It also identifies three apriori laws of saliency and spells out the different contexts in which the concept of attitude can be applied.

What role does habit formation play in the development of sport skills? We argue that motor habits are both necessary for and constitutive of sensorimotor skill as they support an automatic, yet inherently intelligent and flexible, form of action control. Intellectualists about skills generally assume that what makes action intelligent and flexible is its intentionality, and that intentionality must be necessarily cognitive in nature to allow for both deliberation and explicit goal-representation. Against Intellectualism we argue that the habitual behaviours that (...) compose skilful action are accompanied by their specific, non-cognitive form of intentionality: this is motor intentionality, which is purposive and adaptive while involving no explicit deliberation or goal representation. Our account of habit based on Motor Intentionality explains why the formation of motor habits can sometimes act as the sole basis of skilful acquisition: Motor Intentionality is inherently purposeful because it is an embodied source of sensorimotor anticipation, pre-reflective motivation, and pragmatic know-how. Skill development through exercise always builds on a motor intentional component even when it is guided by Deliberate Practice to the point that, pace Intellectualism, Deliberate Practice is disclosed, not constrained, by habit formation. As suggested by the fact that repetitive exercises can play a major role in the development of flexible and intelligent sport skills, automatism is not a drawback for strategic control and improvisation but rather their pragmatic foundation. (shrink)

For fifty years the philosophy of language has been experiencing a stalemating conflict between the old descriptive and internalist orthodoxy (advocated by philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Searle) and the new causal-referential and externalist orthodoxy (mainly endorsed by Kripke, Putnam, and Kaplan). Although the latter is dominant among specialists, the former retains a discomforting intuitive plausibility. The ultimate goal of this book is to overcome the stalemate by means of a non-naïve return to the old descriptivist-internalist orthodoxy. (...) Concerning proper names, this means introducing second-order description-rules capable of systemizing descriptions of the proper name’s cluster to provide us with the right changeable conditions of satisfaction for its application. Such rules can explain how a proper name can become a rigid designator while remaining descriptive, disarming Kripke's and Donnellan’s main objections. In the last chapter, this new perspective is extended to indexicals in a discussion of David Kaplan’s and John Perry’s views, and of general terms, in a discussion of Hilary Putnam’s externalism. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 2, pp 157 - 183 This paper suggests interpreting Husserl’s thesis of the “fictional destruction of the world” in the light of the eidetic method of variation. After having reconstructed Husserl’s argument and shown how it relies on the methodologically regimented joint venture of free fantasy and bounded concepts, the author concludes that the a priori of a world, namely its empirical style, is tantamount to the a priori of a world that can be possibly (...) experienced by some conceivable form of consciousness. If consciousness is a priori bound to transcendence, such transcendence is not necessarily supposed to be the transcendence of a world, for a non-world would be enough to entertain the intentional directedness. This twofold claim allows for a novel interpretation of Husserl’s principle of the asymmetry between world and consciousness. (shrink)

Synthetic biology aims to synthesize novel biological systems or redesign existing ones. The field has raised numerous philosophical questions, but most especially what is novel to this field. In this article I argue for a novel take, since the dominant ways to understand synthetic biology’s specificity each face problems. Inspired by the examination of the work of a number of chemists, I argue that synthetic biology differentiates itself by a new regime of articulation, i.e. a new way of articulating the (...) questions and phenomena it wants to address. Instead of describing actual existing biological systems, the field aims to describe biological possibilities. In the second part I corroborate this hypothesis through a comparison between early research in the field of the origins of life and contemporary synthetic biologists, who are not so much interested in the historical origin of life on Earth, but rather in a universal biology of the possible origins of any life whatsoever. (shrink)

According to Relational Quantum Mechanics the wave function \ is considered neither a concrete physical item evolving in spacetime, nor an object representing the absolute state of a certain quantum system. In this interpretative framework, \ is defined as a computational device encoding observers’ information; hence, RQM offers a somewhat epistemic view of the wave function. This perspective seems to be at odds with the PBR theorem, a formal result excluding that wave functions represent knowledge of an underlying reality described (...) by some ontic state. In this paper we argue that RQM is not affected by the conclusions of PBR’s argument; consequently, the alleged inconsistency can be dissolved. To do that, we will thoroughly discuss the very foundations of the PBR theorem, i.e. Harrigan and Spekkens’ categorization of ontological models, showing that their implicit assumptions about the nature of the ontic state are incompatible with the main tenets of RQM. Then, we will ask whether it is possible to derive a relational PBR-type result, answering in the negative. This conclusion shows some limitations of this theorem not yet discussed in the literature. (shrink)

Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening is often credited as being one of the first works to focus on the role of experimentation in philosophy of science, catalyzing a movement which is sometimes called the “philosophy of experiment” or “new experimentalism”. In the 1980s, a number of other movements and scholars also began focusing on the role of experimentation and instruments in science. Philosophical study of experimentation has thus seemed to be an invention of the 1980s whose central figure is Hacking. (...) This article aims to assess this historical claim, made by Hacking himself as well as others. It does so first by highlighting how a broader perspective on the history of philosophy reveals this invention narrative to be incorrect, since experimentation was a topic of interest for earlier philosophers. Secondly, the article evaluates a revision of this historical claim also made by some philosophers of experiment: the rediscovery narrative, which frames Hacking and others as having rediscovered the work of these earlier authors. This second narratives faces problems as well. Therefore we develop a third narrative which we call the contextualist narrative. Rather than considering experimentation in an essentialist manner as a fixed research object that is either present or not in the work of specific authors, experimentation should be addressed through a narrative that asks in what way it becomes a philosophical problem for certain authors and for what purpose. Such contextualization enables a repositioning of Hacking’s philosophy of experiment in relation to the specific debates in which he intervened, such as the realism-antirealism debate, the Science Wars and the debate on incommensurability. (shrink)

In this short paper we consider Linnebo's thin/thick dichotomy: first, we show that it does not overlap with the very common one between abstract/concrete objects; second, on the basis of some difficulties with the distinction, we propose, as a possible way out, to move from thin/thick objects to thin/thick concepts.

In this paper, we try to build a semiotics of stereotypes through the key idea of enunciation. We investigate stereotypes of Persons with Disabilities in the context of social media networks (e.g., Facebook, Instagram) by adopting a semiotic perspective. The mainstream idea about stereotypes is that they are necessarily something negative, that must be avoided to maximize inclusivity and fairness. However, in our view, stereotypes are the background of our perception of the world, and we cannot escape from them, because (...) when we leave behind a stereotype, it is only for adopting a new one built on a different basis. Therefore, it is crucial to understand stereotypes and the way they are expressed, since they are one of the enunciating instances that circulate in the space of the Encyclopedia. Through a semiotic point of view, we will follow how stereotypes transform, showing the way they change the modes of existence of meanings, shifting between the virtualized, the potentialized, the actualized, and the realized. Analyzing a huge corpus of social network messages built by the partners of the European project MeMe (Me & the Media: Fostering Social Media Literacy competences through Interactive Learning Settings for Adults with Disabilities), we will show how the advent of social media affected the research field of disability studies. Later, we will point out the variations of the classic stereotypes that have been addressed in the new participatory context of social media through the semiotic theory of enunciation. (shrink)

Ontology, in its philosophical meaning, is the discipline investigating the structure of reality. Its findings can be relevant to knowledge organization, as well as models of knowledge can in turn offer relevant ontological suggestions. Several philosophers in time have pointed out that reality is structured into a series of integrative levels, like the physical, the biological, the mental, and the cultural one, and that each level plays as a base for the emergence of more complex ones. Among them, more detailed (...) theories of levels have been developed by Nicolai Hartmann and James K. Feibleman, and these have been considered as a source for structuring principles in bibliographic classification by both the Classification Research Group (CRG) and Ingetraut Dahlberg. CRG's analysis of levels and of their possible application to a new general classification scheme based on phenomena instead of disciplines, as it was formulated by Derek Austin in 1969, is examined in detail. Both benefits and open problems in applying integrative levels to bibliographic classification are pointed out. (shrink)

Conflicts between our best philosophical theories (BPTs) and our common beliefs are widespread. For example, if eliminativism is our BPT, then our BPT conflicts with common beliefs about the existence of middle-sized composite artifacts. “Compatibilism” is the name usually given to a theoretical attitude, according to which, in the case of a conflict between BPT and a common belief P, we should try to find a reconciliation. The two major variants of compatibilism are “semantic compatibilism” (SC) and “cognitive compatibilism” (CC). (...) According to SC, to be reconciled with BPT is the “real” version of the content of our ordinary assertions; according to CC, to be reconciled with BPT is the mental state we are “really” in while thinking P. In this paper, we present a new kind of compatibilism, epistemic compatibilism (EC). According to EC, to be reconciled with BPT is the explanation of why we believe that P. After presenting EC, we will argue that it fares better than SC and CC for at least two related reasons: EC does not rely on any form of what we call semantic or cognitive “recarving”; thus, EC avoids some sceptical problems that aect the other two versions of compatibilism. (shrink)

The vision and mission statements of 24 environmental organisations were analysed under the premise that the language used in these statements reflects and influences the priorities of their operation. A dominant perspective, hinging on the concept of 'sustainable development', merged the profile of government agencies and non-governmental groups. The language reflected an utilitarian ethics: the environment was more generally portrayed as resources than as nature. Aesthetic remarks were exceptional, even among groups focusing on wildlife. Despite a broadly claimed link between (...) human welfare and habitat viability, environmental issues were not broadly referred to by humanitarian organisations, while conservation groups comply with societal priorities and needs. Organisational statements seem more concerned about political legitimation by audiences with specific expectations than about articulating purposes with internal structural consequences or goals that advocate change or reflect organisational uniqueness. (shrink)

Within continental philosophy of biology the work of Michel Serres has not received a lot of attention. Nonetheless, this chapter wants to argue that Serres was part of a group of thinkers – together with Jacques Monod and Henri Atlan – that started to think about biology in terms of second-order cybernetics and information theory. Therefore, this chapter aims to do four things. First of all, it maps the relation between Serres and Canguilhem, one that was mediated by authors such (...) as Louis Althusser or Jacques Monod. Secondly, it fleshes out Serres’s own ‘biophilosophy’. I label this alternative tradition as a ‘biophilosophy without a subject’. Finally, this chapter explores the consequences of this alternative biophilosophy through a brief examination of two authors whose work lies in the line of this tradition: René Girard and Bruno Latour. Though at first sight different, they both draw inspiration from this biophilosophy to develop a framework that, paradoxically, ‘jumps over’ the subject. Hence, the reason why biology is neither a prominent theme in Girard’s nor in Latour’s work. This is not because of a lack of biophilosophy, but because of an implicit one: a biophilosophy without a subject. (shrink)

In this article we consider argumentation as an epistemic process performed by an agent to extend and revise her beliefs and gain knowledge, according to the information provided by the environment. Such a process can also generate the suspension of the claim under evaluation. How can we account for such a suspension phenomenon in argumentation process? We propose: (1) to distinguish two kinds of suspensions – critical suspension and non-critical suspension – in epistemic change processes; (2) to introduce a Paraconsistent (...) Weak Kleene logic (PWK) based belief revision theory which makes use of the notion of topic to distinguish the two kinds of suspensions previously mentioned, and (3) to develop a PWK-style argumentation framework and its expansion. By doing that, we can distinguish two kinds of suspensions in an epistemic process by virtue of the notion of topic. (shrink)

la82 12.00 Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 O presente artigo procura apresentar as linhas gerais da teoria óptica de Hobbes. Antes de examinarmos o desenvolvimento de seus estudos ópticos, porém, faremos um breve resumo de concepções ópticas anteriores na tentativa de situar o leitor no contexto da história da óptica.

It is a classical argument against the objectivity of the flow of time that it would not be possible to make sense of its direction without stepping into a vicious circularity. This paper is dedicated to discuss some of the objections Tim Maudlin has recently put forward against this argument, while outlining an alternative and more effective way out of it.

Contrary to Guala, I claim that several mechanisms can explain punishment in humans. Here I focus on reputation-based cooperation – and I explore how it can lead to punishment under situations that may or may not be perceived as being anonymous. Additionally, no particular mechanism stands out in predicting an excess of punishment under constrained lab conditions.

This article argues that historical epistemology offers the history of philosophy and science more than a mere tool to write the history of concepts. It does this, first of all, by rereading historical epistemology through Michel Foucault's “techniques of the self.” Second, it turns to the work of Léon Brunschvicg and Gaston Bachelard. In their work we see a proposal for what the subjectivity of scientists and philosophers should be. The article thus argues that their work is driven by a (...) normative psychology: a set of prescriptions for which mental constitution a scholarly self has to have. In the Conclusion, it returns to existing analyses of “open‐mindedness” as a virtue and explores in what way these cases challenge these analyses, as well as to what extent Foucault's “techniques of the self” can be applied to other cases in the history of French philosophy. (shrink)

Beall (2016) proposes to read the middle-value of Weak Kleene logic as off-topic. This interpretation has recently drawn some attention: for instance, Francez has pointed out that Beall's interpretation does not meet some important requirements to count as a truth value. Moreover, Beall is silent about what a topic (or a subject matter) is. But arguably, what is a topic? is a crucial question, and an answer is really important to fully understand his proposal. Thus, our goal here is to (...) help to remedy this deficiency, and show how Beall's interpretation of Weak Kleene truth-values interacts with the notion of topic. To do that, we formalize his motivating ideas and draw some consequences from them. (shrink)

Se busca establecer una relación, no satisfactoriamente explorada, entre la fenomenología merleaupontiana del tiempo y un problema central de la “theory of time” analítica, la paradoja de McTaggart. Al clarificar, en polémica con Priest (1998), el auténtico sentido del “subjetivismo” merleaupontiano con respecto al tiempo, se señala cómo establecer una confluencia entre el acercamiento fenomenológico y las tesis desarrolladas por Michael Dummett como respuesta a la mencionada paradoja. Con los señalamientos de Dummett y la interpretación de Bimbenet acerca del “perspectivismo” (...) merleaupontiano, se intenta una solución “situacional” a la paradoja. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta considerações sobre possíveis infl uências teóricas de Theodule A. Ribot sobre S. Freud por ocasião de suas formulações teóricas iniciais sobre o psiquismo. Infl uências a partir de noções como memória e consciência, mas especialmente de cerebração inconsciente. Essas serão investigadas especialmente nas obras Les maladies de la mémoire e Projeto de psicologia, respectivamente. Destacamos que essa influência se deu pela contribuição e mediação de J. M. Charcot, tal como apresentada em Leçons sur les maladies du système (...) nerveux faites a la Salpêtrière – Tome III, 1887), dedicada à abordagem da histeria psíquica/ideativa. Apresentaremos as duas primeiras obras destacando o que entendemos como infl uências, heranças e inclusive divergências entre os autores, mas especialmente destacando uma linha de continuidade entre eles, para a qual Charcot teve papel fundamental. Esperamos que nossa pesquisa proporcione melhor esclarecimento sobre o estatuto inicial do psiquismo concebido por Freud bem como sobre a emergência de uma explicação alternativa que propiciou a introdução de uma instância psíquica inconsciente tal como a conhecemos. (shrink)

In this paper we first develop a Dialetheic Logic with Exclusive Assumptions and Conclusions, DLEAC. We adopt the semantics of the logic of paradox (LP) extended with a notion of model suitable for DLEAC, and we modify its proof theory by refining the notions of assumption and conclusion, which are understood as speech acts. We introduce a new paradox – the rejectability paradox – first informally, then formally. We then provide its derivation in an extension of DLEAC contanining the rejectability (...) predicate. (shrink)

This short piece is the introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Virtue and the Law’ published by Jurisprudence in March 2019 (vol 9, issue 1). It explains the scope of the project and its place in the unfolding of virtue jurisprudence that has occurred in the past few decades, as well as introducing the topics addressed in the volume. In the first couple of pages the authors/editors outline a very brief genealogy of virtue jurisprudence and of its relation to both (...) legal theory and virtue theory. The rest of the text presents the contributions to the volume in turn, identifying some of the substantive issues addressed by each of them and their place in the investigation of the interface between virtue theory and legal theory. (shrink)

In this sequel to Healing Civilization, Dr. Naranjo addresses the cultural and ecological crisis of the 21st Century. He reviews a number of theories and approaches to bettering society and advocates, in particular, the innovation of making the educational system more ethically and spiritually directed--more inner directed than devoted to sustaining current economic or cultural models for society. Naranjo examines the relationship between past historical eras and cultural progress and the growth and development of the individual child from infancy to (...) maturity and old age. While sober in tone regarding these various global crises, the author maintains an optimistic view based on the continuing spiritual development of humanity. (shrink)

The target article by Corballis presents an interesting and novel theoretical perspective on the evolution of language, speech, and handedness. There are two specific aspects of the article that will be addressed in this commentary: (a) the link between Broca's area and gestural communication in chimpanzees, and (b) the issue of population-level handedness in great apes, notably chimpanzees.

The 1930s–1940s underwent profound structural economic and political turmoil following the collapse of the nineteenth century liberal market economies. The intellectual debates of the time were dominated by the question of whether Marx’s theory of the tendency of rate of profit to fall was true, or what consequence could be imagined in the survival of capitalist societies. Placed in the middle of such debates was also the reorganization of national productions into war economies. By means of reconstructive analysis, the paper (...) provides a critical overview of the debates that took place within the circle of the Frankfurt School during those years. It also advances an interpretive thesis suggesting that remedies to capitalist crises of the time turned state powers into privatized, illiberal coercive entities. Coercion and privatization reinforced each other. This general tendency is well illustrated by the famous Pollock-Neumann debate. These intellectuals expressed views not only intended to shed light on the historical period of time, but also to formulate long-term considerations on the authoritarian trends embedded in our contemporary democracies. Through historical reconstruction, the paper’s aim is to identify a long-term structural thread of transformation starting from the transformation of the German economy in 1930s and touching upon post Second World War problems of states’ restructuring along privatization/coercion divides. (shrink)

Jax Teller, Clay Morrow, and the other members of SAMCRO are first and foremost bikers and mechanics who fix bikes. Many bikers experience riding as therapeutic, since a good ride can help a suffering soul to forget the worries of life. Martin Heidegger argues that practical skills, such as the ones Tig needs to repair bikes, are the most fundamental form of knowledge. Many bike owners don't feel confident when they have to do repairs and finally face the dreaded encounter (...) with the un‐ready‐to‐hand. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig notes, that many bike owners are afraid to get their hands dirty with engine oil. Caring for a piece of technology is exactly the opposite of treating it instrumentally. As Pirsig explains, even fixing a mechanical problem can become an occasion of participation, unity, and reconciliation with the world. (shrink)

Intervistati sul valore di questo testo, gli autori hanno dichiarato: «o questa affermazione è falsa, oppure questo è il miglior eserciziario di logica che sia mai stato scritto». Se la loro affermazione vi risulta poco comprensibile, ma avete intenzione di capirci qualcosa di più, questo eserciziario può fare al caso vostro! È uno strumento che integra ed estende un comune manuale di logica – ma che non si sostituisce ad esso, mancando la parte teorica –, ed è pensato per coloro (...) che hanno intrapreso lo studio della logica per la prima volta e desiderano farne pratica. Il testo si rivolge principalmente agli studenti universitari che seguono un corso base di logica, ma anche a chi sta tentando di barcamenarsi con questa disciplina al di fuori dell’ambiente accademico. Se sarete disposti a mettervi in gioco e a spremervi un po’ le meningi, scoprirete che o l’affermazione degli autori è falsa o questo è davvero il miglior eserciziario di logica che sia mai stato scritto! (shrink)