In the mid-1980s, Dario Donatelli participated in a laboratory study of the effects of around 800 h of practice on digit-span and increased his digit-span from 8 to 104 digits. This study assessed changes in the structure of his memory skill after around 30 years of essentially no practice on the digit-span task. On the first day of testing, his estimated span was only 10 digits, but over the following 3 days of testing it increased to 19 digits. (...) Further analyses of his recall performance and verbal reports identified which mechanisms of the original memory skill he could retrieve or reacquire over the 3 days of practice. We discuss theoretical implications for the retention of skilled memory performance, the effects of age-related changes in memory on it, and for the future study of the effects of disuse on exceptional performance and complex skill. (shrink)

The notion of forms of life points to a crucial aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach that challenges an influential line in the philosophical tradition. He portrays intellectual activities in terms of a cohesion of things held together in linguistic scenes rooted in the lives of people and the facts of the world. The original inspiration with which Wittgenstein worked on this approach is still relevant today in the recent technological turn associated with AI. He attacked a conception that treated human (...) activities as material to be examined by external models of rationality. Along with other modernists such as Musil, he saw the danger of losing faith in human intellectual and moral capacities. In contrast, Wittgenstein elucidates and substantively defends an idea of forms of life in which the great normative enterprises, from science to the works of the imagination, are based on our individual capacity to take the next step from a normative authority that rests entirely with us, as agents who can claim it in the name of others, in the name of arithmetic, in the name of our native language, in the name of justice, and so on. Forms of life are the place to look to claim this authority over the mistrust we feel compelled to cultivate in our human endeavors. (shrink)

J. S. Mill lays great emphasis on the importance of the notion of the individual as a progressive being. The idea that we need to conceive the self as an object of cultivation and perfection runs through Mill’s writings on various topics, and has played a certain role in recent interpretations. In this paper I propose a specific interpretation of Mill’s understanding of the self, along the lines of what Stanley Cavell identifies as a “perfectionist” concern for the self. Various (...) texts by Mill, ranging from the Logic to On Liberty, show an understanding of the self in which both the theoretical and the practical domain are presented as being internally connected to the transformation of the self. Mill elaborates a criticism of a notion of truth articulated by doctrines having a life independent of the self, as well as a notion of choice which is not the expression of one’s inner self. This internal relation of truth and choice to the self generates a special dialectic within the self, which Mill explores in On Liberty’s second and third chapters by means of several contrasts, such as passive vs. active knowledge, living vs. dead beliefs, or being oneself vs. liking and choosing in crowds. (shrink)

Je pose une question concernant la place du Tractatus de Wittgenstein dans la tradition éthique. Le Tractatus et la tradition éthique Les remarques que je ferai sont à considérer dans le contexte d'une interprétation du Tractatus qui a été qualifiée de lecture résolue de cette œuvre, ainsi que de la philosophie de Wittgenstein en général Comme l'a écrit Cora Diamond, le Tractatus travaille sur la libération des besoins et des désirs philosophiques, une libération de la philosophie effectuée avec des outils (...) philosophiques : la situation du Tractatus est similaire à celle évoquée dans les Recherches et dans l'œuvre ultérieure, qui se consacre également au projet de se libérer de la philosophie pour le bien de la philosophie. (shrink)

The article explores aspects of the notion of forms of life in the Wittgensteinian tradition especially following Iris Murdoch’s lead. On the one hand, the notion signals the hardness and inexhaustible character of reality, as the background needed in order to make sense of our lives in various ways. On the other, the hardness of reality is the object of a moral work of apprehension and deepening to the point at which its distinctive character dissolves into the family of connections (...) we have gained for ourselves. The two movements of thought are connected and necessary. (shrink)

ara La Mettrie, o estudo da natureza inicia-se no homem cuja estrutura deve ser considerada em comparação com a dos animais, estando todos submetidos às mesmas leis e sujeitos à destruição. Ao adotar o ponto de vista médico, La Mettrie aproxima a filosofia da medicina. A partir dessa aproximação, o presente trabalho tem por objetivo abordar como se dá a vinculação entre medicina e filosofia, enfatizando o entrelaçamento entre os pontos de vista médico, filosófico e moral. To La Mettrie, the (...) study of nature begins in the man whose structure should be considered in comparison with that of animals, all being subjected to the same laws, and subject to destruction. By adopting the medical point of view, La Mettrie brings close philosophy and medicine. Following this approach, this paper aims to address how the close connection between philosophy and medicine is possible, by emphasizing the entanglement between medical, philosophical and moral points of views. (shrink)

Je vais évoquer ici la pertinence des concepts d’éthique au moyen de quelques réflexions sur le concept d’être humain. C’est là une notion cruciale parce que nous comprenons ce que signifie s’engager dans certaines activités dans la mesure où elles sont perçues comme humaines. La pensée morale est l’une de ces activités ; et par « moralité »..

This article suggests a reading of the significance of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for ethics, in the light of Cora Diamond’s resolute reading. The contrasts between sense and nonsense and between ethics and science are commented on and are connected to a further contrast between a specialized response to language and the world and an unspecialized response characteristic of the humanistic disciplines. The Tractatus is seen as a work which diagnoses the loss of such a fully human unspecialized sense of things and (...) which wishes to recover this possibility for its reader. On the basis of such reading, the article also suggests how to connect the significance of the later Wittgenstein for ethics with the Tractatus. A connection can be established by following Iris Murdoch’s notion of conceptual clarification. (shrink)

With the celebrated frontispiece to the New Science (1744) and through an immediate comparison of this image to the ancient moral fable inscribed in the Tablet of Cebes the Theban, Vico ingeniously employs a then well-known common topic and a conventional emblematic device to inaugurate his topics-based philosophy. A topical knowledge of the human cannot, for Vico, be seized by precept only; it must be undergone as an active and imaginative recovery of the topics through memory. In times of need, (...) topical memory is consequential for civil wisdom and historical consciousness. An aptitude for the practic of topics is manifest in the manmade figurations of fable and poetry and in the requisite and recollective resynthesis of them. By modeling, exemplifying, explaining, and soliciting this aptitude for topical knowledge, Vico provides a multifold teaching on the acquisition of civil wisdom. (shrink)

This special issue on Forms of Life was conceived on the top floor of a café overlooking one of Rome's wonderful Piazzas, after a conference, hosted by Piergiorgio Donatelli, on Forms of Life and Ways of Living. Piergiorgio, Sandra Laugier and I thought the subject cried out for a small collection of essays in which several voices would elucidate the genesis, use and potential of Wittgenstein's concept of form of life -- and we committed to producing it. This is (...) the fruit of our Roman resolution. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. (shrink)

Introduction to the symposia on Pragmatism and Perfectionism appered on the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 2 issue 2, 2010.

Reúne textos sobre a história e seu objeto, desde o século XVII até a contemporaneidade, compondo uma amostragem do que se tem trabalhado no âmbito da filosofia da história, mais expressivamente no Brasil.