The present Festschrift was born as a tribute to the scientific production of Rémi Brague. This study collects the interventions of several thinkers, with different scientific profiles, who, fond of reality, have reflected on, and been in dialogue with his thought. Brague has explored many spheres: anthropology, metaphysics, religion, history of religions, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and cosmology – where he recalled those anchors in the sky where mankind throws its roots. We have decided to entitle this collection Europa cura te (...) ipsam! inspired by on the admonition of the famous Medice cura te ipsum. As Brague has repeatedly obser- ved, and recently with no little pessimism, it is now up to Europeans to recover their history and look to their future. We hope that the present work can be a stimulus for today’s thinkers and for generations to come, certain that the search for truth is an endless inquiry where harmony and cooperation among thinkers constitute progress. -/- Contributors: Leonardo Allodi, Rafael Alvira, Jean Baechler, Damiano Bondi, Thomas Buchheim, Virgil Ciomos, Rocio Daga Portillo, Marco Damonte, Chantal Delsol, Phil Devine, Thérèse-Anne Druart, Travis Dumsday, David C. Flatto, Michal Gierycz, Elisa Grimi, John F. X. Knasas, Hans Maier, Sante Maletta, Fr Antonio Malo, Fr Giulio Maspero, Ilaria Vigorelli, Fr Piotr Mazurkiewicz, Isabelle Moulin, José Ignacio Gómez Murillo, Maurits Potappel, John M. Rist, H. Em. Card. Angelo Scola, Hans Seitschek, Wilhelm Vossenkuhl. (shrink)

Recently, animal studies has started to gain popularity. This interdisciplinary field investigates the human- animal relationship from different perspectives, including philosophy, cultural studies, and biology. In 2008, at least three books explored themes related to animal studies : Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal ; Jodey Castricano, Animal Subjects: An Ethics Reader in a Posthuman World; and Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, et al. Philosophy and Animal Life. Each volume approaches animal studies from a different viewpoint, but they also (...) share many themes. This review paper discusses the differences and similarities between the volumes and highlights the directions in which animal studies is developing. It is argued that an emphasis on "direct" perception or experience of animality and heterogeneity, and an exploration of otherness, are elements that all these books share, and that are relevant to animal studies. (shrink)

As it comes to animal ethics, broad versions of contractualism are often used as a reason for excluding animals from the category of those with moral value in the individualistic sense. Ideas of “reciprocity” and “moral agency” are invoked to show that only those capable of understanding and respecting the value of others may have value themselves. Because of this, possible duties toward animals are often made dependent upon altruism: to pay regard to animals is to act in an other-regarding (...) manner instead of mutual benefit. There are three main versions of altruism in animal ethics. The first one of these is the most traditional, and emphasises benevolence as a source of moral regard. The second concentrates on the notion of value, and claims that animals have value in the individualistic sense despite being incapable of moral agency. The third resists overt theory-dependency, often included in the second version, and concentrates more on the elements of “context” and “identification”. Out of these, a combination of the last two is identified as the most fruitful basis for altruistic animal ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I will analyse the conception of human rights, considering, in particular, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Human rights, following the common-sense approach, are of course a sacred element for each individual and a necessary premise for an ethics that points to human flourishing. Here, the concept of human rights concerning the subject’s beliefs and the context in which the subject acts will be analysed. At the centre of this paper, there will be an analysis of (...) the universality of human rights. In particular, I will take in consideration the position of J. Maritain, who found in praxis – and who was aware of the horrible totalitarianisms of the twentieth century – the common ground for a definition of human rights. I will also consider, therefore, the objections addressed to the definition of human rights, and the Cairo Declaration, which stands in evident contrast with the 1948 Declaration. Furthermore, I will focus on different backgrounds of the declarations and their attempt at universality. The government of a society is responsible for the co-existence of its citizens and for the respect and protection of each individual. In this sense, civil ethics has to be based on human dignity and human rights. (shrink)

A couple of doubts are raised concerning Hofweber’s internalist view of our talk about properties. The first doubt relates to the argument used in support of the internalist view of talk about properties: I suspect that one of the premises of the argument is not granted and therefore that the argument’s conclusion is undermined. My second doubt concerns a claimed consequence of Hofweber’s internalist view, i.e. conceptual idealism. It seems to me that conceptual idealism is incompatible with the internalist view (...) of talk about properties. (shrink)

Animal ethics committees (AECs) appeal to utilitarian principles in their justification of animal experiments. Although AECs do not grant rights to animals, they do accept that animals have moral standing and should not be unnecessarily harmed. Although many appeal to utilitarian arguments in the justification of animal experiments, I argue that AECs routinely fall short of the requirements needed for such justification in a variety of ways. I argue that taking the moral status of animals seriously—even if this falls short (...) of granting rights to animals—should lead to a thorough revision or complete elimination of many of the current practices in animal experimentation. (shrink)

To date, 1.7 million US military service personnel have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, one in five are suffering from diagnosable combat-stress related psychological injuries including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). All indications are that the mental health toll of the current conflicts on US troops and the medical systems that care for them will only increase. Against this backdrop, research suggesting that the common class of drugs known as beta-blockers might prevent the onset of PTSD is drawing (...) much interest. I urge caution against accepting too quickly the use of beta-blockers for dealing with the psychological injuries that combat experiences can wreak. Beta-blockers are thought to work by disrupting the formation of emotionally disturbing memories that typically occur in the wake of traumatic events and that in some people manifest as PTSD. Focusing on a single dimension of soldiers' experience in combat, namely, their perpetration of other-directed violence, I argue that some of the emotional memories blunted by beta-blockers play important roles in the recovery of moral aspects of soldiers' selves damaged by experiences of combat violence — specifically, in the achievement of a state of grace— and, therefore, that the use of beta-blockers may come with distinct moral costs. (shrink)

The critical examination of current hypotheses is one of the key ways in which scientific fields develop and grow. Therefore, any critique, including Haidle and Schlaudt’s article, “Where Does Cumulative Culture Begin? A Plea for a Sociologically Informed Perspective,” represents a welcome addition to the literature. However, critiques must also be evaluated. In their article, Haidle and Schlaudt review some approaches to culture and cumulative culture in both human and nonhuman primates. H&S discuss the “zone of latent solutions” hypothesis as (...) applied to nonhuman primates and stone-toolmaking premodern hominins. Here, we will evaluate whether H&S’s critique addresses its target. (shrink)

This article deals with various responses to the phenomenon of Orientalism. Since the publication of Edward Said s book _Orientalism_, there has been an ongoing discussion about the influence of Orientalism on contemporary social sciences in the East. In the West, Orientalism was an original theory, but in the East its acceptance was tantamount to an assimilation of foreign point of view on social reality. I argue that it is a symptom of provincialism among scientists from the East. Even though (...) most of them tried to overcome Orientalism, they used the same categories and methodology. In this sense they repeated its mistakes and misunderstandings. This article analyzes different attempts of overcoming Orientalism and shows why they are provincial. (shrink)

Details goverment, private, and international response to the policy recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

This article examines some interlinear and marginal notes on Henry Aristippus' translation of the Platonic Phaedo transmitted in Leiden, UL, BPL Ms. 64. The content of these notes also appears in H...

Humans naturally perceive visual patterns in a global manner and are remarkably capable of extracting object shapes based on properties such as proximity, closure, symmetry, and good continuation. Notwithstanding the role of these properties in perceptual grouping, studies highlighted differences in disembedding performance across individuals, which are summarized by the field dependence dimension. Evidence suggests that age and educational attainment explain part of this variability, whereas the role of sex is still highly debated. Also, which stimulus features primarily influence inter-individual (...) variations in perceptual grouping has still to be fully determined. Building upon these premises, we assessed the role of age, education level, and sex on performance at the Leuven Embedded Figure Test—a proxy of disembedding abilities—in 391 cisgender individuals. We also investigated to what extent shape symmetry, closure, complexity, and continuation relate to task accuracy. Overall, target asymmetry, closure, and good continuation with the embedding context increase task difficulty. Simpler shapes are more difficult to detect than those with more lines, yet context complexity impairs the recognition of complex targets to a greater extent. Concerning demographic data, we confirm that age and educational attainment are significantly associated with disembedding abilities and reveal a perceptual advantage in males. In summary, our study further highlights the role of shape properties in disembedding performance and unveils sex differences not reported so far. (shrink)

--- abstract is not requested by Editor.

Readers of Hegel’s philosophy will welcome Nicholas Mowad’s interpretation of Hegel’s anthropology not just as a fundamental addition to Hegel scholarship, but also, and more fundamentally, as a necessary invitation to read Hegel in a new key. This entails paying attention to questions of embodiment, race, and gender that are intrinsic to Hegel’s philosophical anthropology. The book’s chief merit lies in the way Mowad convincingly shows that issues of race and gender cannot be avoided while reading Hegel, and that Hegel’s (...) approach to such themes is firmly rooted in the experience of nature as a locus of transformation and critical distance from entrenched racial and gender disparities.Mowad concentrates on the... (shrink)

In 1791, two years after the proclamation of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, the playwright, essayist, philosopher and revolutionary Olympe de Gouges wrote a short work entitled The Rights of Woman, the core of which is the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. As is already clear from the title, with her writing de Gouges intends to highlight the gendered character of the 1789 Declaration. To this end, the author first (...) of all points out the contradictory nature of this Declaration: the rights it proclaims as universal apply, in law and in fact, only to human beings of the male gender. De Gouges also reformulates the claims of the Declaration so that they apply equally to men and women. This essay focuses on two themes of particular importance within de Gouges' reformulation: the claim of freedom of expression and the extension of the social contract to relationships. In dealing with these themes, de Gouges elaborates far-reaching theoretical insights that are significant not only for gender studies, but also for political philosophy and the philosophy of law. In fact, de Gouges' reflections, while placing themselves within the natural law tradition, reject and overturn some of its fundamental assumptions. Prominent among these are the subtraction of the family sphere from the equal regulation of relations between individuals, which instead characterises relations between citizens in the public sphere, and the abstraction from differences on which the particularism of rights, though proclaimed as universal, is based. (shrink)

O artigo apresenta uma reflexão, no ambiente acadêmico, sobre as relações interdisciplinares, que são distintas da disciplinaridade e da multidisciplinaridade, estas já bem sedimentadas. Para tanto, compreende a disciplina como um campo específico de conhecimento, em termos teóricos e metodológicos, situando a interdisciplinaridade como uma resposta às limitações impostas pela especialização disciplinar. A partir de uma metodologia que utiliza a revisão bibliográfica como elemento central, conclui que a vocação do campo de conhecimento das Ciências das Religiões para a interdisciplinaridade se (...) dá pela disposição e possibilidade teórica e organizacional de pesquisadores, de diferentes áreas de conhecimento,compartilharem de um mesmo espaço acadêmico. Destaca a identidade das Ciências das Religiões, enquanto disciplina, e remete para a importância de diálogos interdisciplinares para a produção de novos conhecimentos. Recorda finalmente o trabalho pioneiro de Max Muller, considerado um dos fundadores da área de Ciências das Religiões, cujo método por ele proposto, chamado filológico, dá pistas para a aplicação do conceito de interdisciplinaridade. (shrink)

Sartre and Nizan, politique of words The aim of this article is to discuss and compare the main points of Nizan’s and Sartre’s views of committed literature. Discarding the claim to be objective and neutral, Nizan states that to abstain is to make a choice. Therefore, he critiques the intellectuals to be guilty of an abdication of responsibility. In his writings Nizan posed some questions, which became crucial for the postwar debates on the engagement of the intellectual. These questions constitute (...) a central aspect of Sartre’s writings after World War II, where Sartre criticizes writers who had not taken a stance against oppression and delineates the axes of a theory of committed literature. As a result of the comparative analysis between the two authors, it is shown that Sartre articulates an important point that Nizan have missed, namely that there is a praxis, which is specific to literature and that we should part from it in order to understand commitment. Thus, at the difference of Nizan, Sartre points out that the liberating dimension of literary criticism should not be too quickly confused with armed criticism. (shrink)

El concepto de gobierno es inseparable del de opinión pública en la medida en que la supervivencia de todos los gobiernos depende críticamente de la conformidad de la opinión pública. Pero las democracias protegen mejor a sus gobernantes de la amenaza que encierra la opinión pública que las dictaduras. Por una parte, las elecciones confieren a los gobernantes democráticos una legitimidad de origen de la que carecen muchos dictadores por haber alcanzado el poder a través de métodos considerados ilegítimos. Por (...) otra parte, mientras la receptividad ante las demandas de la opinión pública suele reforzar la legitimidad de ejercicio de los gobiernos democráticos, se interpreta generalmente como signo de debilidad de las dictaduras. La vulnerabilidad de las dictaduras ante la opinión pública les lleva a adoptar inmediatamente medidas para defenderse de ella, combinando actuaciones represivas que inhiben a la población de expresar sus preferencias auténticas con otras que controlan los flujos de información que circulan en la sociedad. En un régimen de opinión pública cerrada no puede emerger una sociedad civil capaz de desafiar seriamente al poder. Pero si repentinamente la población comienza a acceder a información innegable que pone en evidencia la mendacidad de los gobernantes, la opinión pública cerrada puede derrumbarse rápidamente y precipitar la caída del gobierno. (shrink)

Empathy is a term used increasingly both in moral theory and animal ethics. Yet, its precise meaning is often left unexplored. The book aims to tackle this by clarifying the different and even contradictory ways in which “empathy” can be defined.

It is now a commonplace that emotions are not mere sensations but, rather, conceptually contentful states. In trying to expand on this insight, however, most theoretical approaches to emotions neglect central intuitions about what emotions are like. We therefore need a methodological shift in our thinking about emotions away from the standard accounts' attempts to reduce them to other mental states and toward an exploration of the distinctive work emotions do. I show that emotions' distinctive function is to engage us (...) with both objective and personal values. Attention to emotions' work reveals that it is precisely their “unruliness” that allows them to play meaningful roles in our lives. (shrink)

L’opera più importante per la filosofia dell’azione dopo l’Etica di Aristotele: così Donald Davidson ha definito il libro di Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Intention, che Elisa Grimi ci presenta oggi attraverso questa preziosa guida alla lettura, il primo testo di questo genere in lingua italiana. dalla Prefazione di Cyrille Michon. Che cosa sia un’intenzione, quale sia il ruolo che essa svolge all'interno di un’azione, se vi si possa trovare traccia della vera intenzione del soggetto guardando l’azione che compie: questi (...) e molti altri sono gli interrogativi ai quali Anscombe tenta di rispondere. Intention non è un’opera di etica o di politica ma si muove su uno sfondo etico o politico, uno sfondo da cui lo scritto trae la propria forza e il proprio spirito. L’intenzione infatti è capace di modellare l’azione e generare una storia. Come un mazzo di fiori scelto ad hoc è capace di suscitare emozioni e sentimenti e, allo stesso tempo, custodire la promessa di una storia a venire. (shrink)

Quanti granelli di sabbia ci vogliono per fare un mucchio? In che istante si cessa di essere bambini? Quanti soldi ha il meno povero tra i poveri? E' ovvio che a domande del genere non siamo in grado di dare una risposta precisa. E in questo fatto ovvio e apparentemente innocuo si annida il germe di un paradosso, noto fin dall’antichità e chiamato Sorite. Oggi i filosofi sono tornati a occuparsi del problema e, nel tentativo di venirne a capo, hanno (...) scoperto di dover affrontare alcune profonde questioni relative alla natura del linguaggio e della logica. Il libro di Elisa Paganini offre una presentazione articolata di questa avvincente problematica. (shrink)

Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture explores the multifaceted moral meanings allocated to non-human suffering in contemporary Western culture.

The supporter of vague objects has been long challenged by the following ‘Argument from Identity’: 1) if there are vague objects, then there is ontically indeterminate identity; 2) there is no ontically indeterminate identity; therefore, 3) there are no vague objects. Some supporters of vague objects have argued that 1) is false. Noonan (Analysis 68: 174–176, 2008) grants that 1) does not hold in general, but claims that ontically indeterminate identity is indeed implied by the assumption that there are vague (...) objects of a certain special kind (i.e. vague objects*). One can therefore formulate a ‘New Argument from Identity’: 1′) if there are vague objects*, then there is ontically indeterminate identity; 2) there is no ontically indeterminate identity; therefore, 3′) there are no vague objects*. Noonan’s strategy is to argue that premiss 1′) is inescapable, and, as a consequence, that Evans’s alleged defence of 2) is a real challenge for any supporter of vague objects. I object that a supporter of vague objects who grants the validity of Evans’s argument allegedly in favour of 2) should reject premiss 1′). The threat of the New Argument from Identity is thus avoided. (shrink)

La relación entre maternidad y trabajo ha sido materia de políticas públicas desde comienzos del siglo XX, pero en las últimas décadas ha adquirido nuevas connotaciones por el aumento de la participación laboral femenina. Ello no ha conducido a una eliminación de las discriminaciones que enfrentan las trabajadoras por su condición (real o potencial) de madres, ni a una organización del mercado de trabajo que permita articular demandas laborales y familiares, ni una redistribución del trabajo reproductivo. Para analizar cómo actores (...) involucrados en la formulación de políticas relacionadas con esta temática concebían la relación entre trabajo y maternidad y las tensiones que derivaban de ella, se entrevistó a un grupo de actores sociales provenientes de tres ámbitos. Dos ideas caracterizan sus concepciones: las normas de protección a la maternidad en el trabajo afectan negativamente la empleabilidad femenina y la relación maternidad trabajo es difícil porque la organización del mercado de trabajo dificulta la articulación de responsabilidades laborales y familiares. Respecto de las tensiones, se constataron en diferentes dimensiones: económica, demográfica, ejercicio de derechos y sociocultural. (shrink)