Argument from analogy is a common and formidable form of reasoning in law and in everyday conversation. Although there is substantial literature on the subject, according to a recent survey ( Juthe 2005) there is little fundamental agreement on what form the argument should take, or on how it should be evaluated. Th e lack of conformity, no doubt, stems from the complexity and multiplicity of forms taken by arguments that fall under the umbrella of analogical reasoning in argumentation, dialectical (...) studies, and law. Modeling arguments with argumentation schemes has proven useful in attempts to refine the analyst’s understanding of not only the logical structures that shape the backbone of the argument itself, but also the logical underpinning of strategies for evaluating it, strategies based on the semantic categories of genus and relevance. By clarifying the distinction between argument from example and argument from analogy, it is possible to advance a useful proposal for the treatment of argument from analogy in law. (shrink)

In contemporary discussions of abortion, both sides argue well-worn positions, particularly concerning the question, When does human life begin? Though often invoked by the Catholic Church for support, Thomas Aquinas in fact held that human life begins after conception, not at the moment of union. But his overall thinking on questions of how humans come into being, and cease to be, is more subtle than either side in this polarized debate imagines. Fabrizio Amerini--an internationally renowned scholar of medieval philosophy--does (...) justice to Aquinas's views on these controversial issues. Some pro-life proponents hold that Aquinas's position is simply due to faulty biological knowledge, and if he knew what we know today about embryology, he would agree that human life begins at conception. Others argue that nothing Aquinas could learn from modern biology would have changed his mind. Amerini follows the twists and turns of Aquinas's thinking to reach a nuanced and detailed solution in the final chapters that will unsettle familiar assumptions and arguments. Systematically examining all the pertinent texts and placing each in historical context, Amerini provides an accurate reconstruction of Aquinas's account of the beginning and end of human life and assesses its bioethical implications for today. This major contribution is available to an English-speaking audience through translation by Mark Henninger, himself a noted scholar of medieval philosophy. (shrink)

It has been recently suggested that a semantic theory for deontic modals should be neutral between a very large range of normative and evaluative theories. This article aims to clarify this talk of neutrality, in particular its scope and motivation. My thesis is that neutrality is best understood as an empirical thesis about a fragment of natural language that includes deontic modals – not as a new, sui generis methodological constraint on natural language semantics.

In diesem Aufsatz suche ich zu zeigen, a) daß Leibniz eine Lehre vertrat — den Superessentialismus -, nach der keine Eigenschaft, die ein Individuum i besitzt, i fehlen könnte, ohne daß es aufhörte, als i zu existieren/zu sein ; b) daß es im Hinblick auf die Wahrheit von a) keinen Unterschied in irgendeinem Sinne macht, wie der Begriff einer wesentlichen Eigenschaft bestimmt wird; c) daß nach Leibniz' Auffassung vollständige individuelle Begriffe individuelle Wesenheiten/Essenzen sind oder repräsentieren ; d) daß folglich die (...) Unterscheidung zwischen vollständigen und unvollständigen Begriffen in Wirklichkeit eine Unterscheidung zwischen individuellen und spezifischen Wesenheiten/Essenzen ist; e) daß letzteres eine Differenzierung zwischen einem modal nicht-unterscheidenden und einem modal unterscheidenden Sinn von ”wesentlich“ voraussetzt; und schließlich f), daß die Unterscheidung zwischen Prädikation per se und Prädikation per accidens sich mit der Unterscheidung zwischen vollständigen und spezifischen Begriffen überschneidet. Der Rest des Aufsatzes ist einer Analyse weniger wichtiger Einzelheiten der Interpretation gewidmet. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the French philosopher René Descartes was far more involved in the study of plants than has been generally recognized. We know that he did not include a botanical section in his natural philosophy, and sometimes he differentiated between plants and living bodies. His position was, moreover, characterized by a methodological rejection of the catalogues of plants. However, this paper reveals a significant trend in Descartes's naturalistic pursuits, starting from the end of 1637, whereby he (...) became increasingly interested in plants. I explore this shift by examining both Descartes's correspondence and several notes contained in theExcerpta anatomica. Grounded in direct observations, Descartes's work on vegetation provides a modest, though not unimportant, contribution to a natural-philosophical approach to the vegetal realm. This had a direct bearing on his lifelong ambition to explain the nature of living bodies and also fuelled the emergence of botany as a modern science. (shrink)

What is the origin and meaning of our aesthetic sense? Is it genetically encoded or is it culturally inherited? The aim of the essay is to answer to such issues by defining the emergent and meta-functional character of the aesthetic attitude. First, I propose to include the faculty of desire in the free play of the cognitive faculties at the center of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The following step is given by a brief analysis of Darwin’s controversial remarks on the (...) pre-human birth of aesthetics and its relationship with sexual selection (§§ 1-2). The point of discontinuity between a mere animal aesthetic sense and a proto-human one is then found to become indeterminate of desire in the correlative diversification of aesthetic attractors (§§ 3-4). Successively, I deal with the supervenience character of the aesthetic and its anticipatory value. After a short genealogy of the notion of supervenience, I then develop its affinity with that of epigenesis (§§ 5-6). Afterwhich follows a review of two contemporary evolutionary perspectives on aesthetics: T. Deacon’s essay on the “aesthetic faculty” and J. Tooby and L. Cosmides thesis on the evolutionary meaning of the aesthetic-fictional activities (§§ 7-8). Conclusively, the epigenesis of an aesthetic mind is considered as the unity between the breath of aísthesis and the breath of linguistic sign (§§ 9-10). (shrink)

This monograph offers a novel, neurocognitive theory concerning words and language. It explores the distinction between inferential and referential semantic competence. The former accounts for the relationship of words among themselves, the latter for the relationship of words to the world. The author discusses this distinction at the level of the human brain on both theoretical and neuroscientific grounds. In addition, this investigation considers the relation between the inf/ref neurocognitive theory and other accounts of semantic cognition proposed in the field (...) of neurosemantics, as well as some potential implications of the theory for clinical neuroscience and the philosophy of semantics. Overall, the book offers an important contribution to the debate about lexical semantic competence. It combines a strong philosophical and linguistic background with a comprehensive and critical analysis of neurosemantic literature. Topics discussed lie at the intersection of philosophical semantics, linguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical psychology. Due to its interdisciplinary orientation, coverage is rich in introductory remarks and not overly technical, therefore it is accessible to non-experts as well. (shrink)

There are many benefits of using argumentation-based techniques in multi-agent systems, as clearly shown in the literature. Such benefits come not only from the expressiveness that argumentation-based techniques bring to agent communication but also from the reasoning and decision-making capabilities under conditions of conflicting and uncertain information that argumentation enables for autonomous agents. When developing multi-agent applications in which argumentation will be used to improve agent communication and reasoning, argumentation schemes (reasoning patterns for argumentation) are useful in addressing the requirements (...) of the application domain in regards to argumentation (e.g., defining the scope in which argumentation will be used by agents in that particular application). In this work, we propose an argumentation framework that takes into account the particular structure of argumentation schemes at its core. This paper formally defines such a framework and experimentally evaluates its implementation for both argumentation-based reasoning and dialogues. (shrink)

In a recent poem, Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland, German writer Durs Grünbein suggests that a snowy, white landscape inspired the young René Descartes to theoretically define nature. Indeed, Descartes's reduction of nature to extended matter composed of particles in movement and abiding by the laws of nature entails a reduction of all bodies' diversity to a mechanistic system in which all secondary qualities are mathematically framed. The description of colors in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii exemplifies this reduction (...) of nature to a geometrical grid with no differences—Jean-Luc Marion (Sur... (shrink)

Intended to be a volume accessible to a wide range of readers, the fifty chapters of this sizeable book provide an illuminating overview of seventeenth-century philosophy. Examining Descartes and C...

To be both a clinician and a scientist—what is usually called a clinician scientist or clinical investigator—is easy neither from an ethical nor from a methodological standpoint. On the one hand, it requires care, cure of the patients, and good ethical practice. On the other, excellent skills in experimental design and data analysis are necessary. In addition, the correct choice of a disease as a model to be studied is very often hampered by the obvious ethical constraints of working with (...) human beings, thus limiting the experimental armamentarium in the hands of the clinician scientist. Yet, Henry Beecher succeeded in both. He was an excellent clinician and scientist and put forward ideas and concepts that today... (shrink)

ZusammenfassungAuf der Grundlage einer Vielzahl von Quellen, darunter Manuskriptnotizen und eine breite Auswahl an veröffentlichtem Material, bietet dieser Artikel zum ersten Mal in englischer Sprache eine Analyse von Landis Werken vor ihrem medizinischen und philosophischen Hintergrund. Ich behaupte, dass Landis Werk zwar charakteristisch für das paduanische Milieu des 16. Jahrhunderts ist, dass aber seine Herangehensweise an methodische Fragen der Anatomie und der Kunst sowie seine Paraphrase von Aristoteles’ De anima es ermöglichen, ihn in der Mitte der häretischen Tradition zu verorten, (...) die von Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) bis Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) reicht. (shrink)

This chapter is dedicated to the Cassirer’s theories concerning The Logik of Humanities and others Cassirer’s Essais on the «Philosophy of Culture.» The first part presents the concrete passages of mutual criticism on language and its relations with art and in relation to the interpretation of the modern history of philosophy. Brief final remarks recapitulate some radically different ways of understanding idealism with respect to the spiritual activity of man in the history.

Les pensées de Brad Will, empoignant sa caméra en plein échange de tirs entre des paramilitaires du PRI1 et l’Assemblée populaire des peuples de Oaxaca , furent peut-être une succession d’images : le jeune militant au visage couvert lui criant d’arrêter de filmer ; l’homme corpulent à sept mètres de lui incitant les autres à continuer d’avancer, vers les coups de feu ;..

On the basis of a new criterion for a property to be perceivable–a property is perceivable iff it is not only given immediately and non-volitionally, but also grasped via a holistic form of attention–in this paper we will claim that not only facial properties, but other high-order properties located in a hierarchy of high-order properties, notably gender and racial properties, are perceivable as well. Such claims will be both theoretically and empirically justified.

The 26 essays collected in this volume explore some crucial aspects of the philosophical and scientific traditions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Using a historical-philological approach, the volume brings to light unpublished documents and offers new reconstructions of the intellectual paths of authors such as Meister Eckhart, Nicole Oresme, John Buridan, Siger of Brabant, William of Ockham, Peter Pomponazzi, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

The chapter provides a response to Patrick Toner, “Critical Study of Fabrizio Amerini’s Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life,” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 2, 211–28. The chapter corrects two misrepresentations in Toner’s review. First, it proves that, given Aquinas’ assumptions on substantial form and human soul, Aquinas could not give up his preference for delayed hominization of the embryo even if he were acquainted with contemporary embryology. Aquinas takes as the starting point of his embryology (...) Aristotle’s characterization of the human soul as the act of an organic physical body having life potentially, and this characterization leads him to the conviction that the human soul can enter into the human body only after the principal vital organs are formed. Second, the chapter corrects Toner’s unusual interpretation of the clause “organic” in the Aristotelian characterization of the human soul, by specifying the different senses of potentiality in Aquinas’ embryology. The chapter reaffirms the core idea that establishing when the hominization of the human embryo begins is not decisive for rejecting abortion. The chapter suggests relating the question of abortion to the identity or continuity of the human embryo rather than to the beginning of hominization. (shrink)

" This Volume tries to cover some important parts of the whole spectrum of European Studies. The essay of Fabrizio Sciacca begins with the issue of human rights. Sciacca relates the development of human rights regimes within the European Union to the general question of human rights education, without which human rights must keep abstract legality" (Hauke Brunkhorst, Preface).

The concept of corporate social responsibility has been the subject of several academic contributions, but in the health sector the development of an interest in this subject is very recent. Although many practices in healthcare are already socially responsible, progressing from a series of socially responsible behaviours to a socially responsible organization entails a more consolidated awareness of the health sector’s mission and the needs of its participants. In this paper, we will review the different studies published that address the (...) relationship between the healthcare sector’s corporate responsibility and society, with the aims of individuating the prevailing foci that are emerging and categorizing the proposed contributions according to these foci: social responsibility and organization; social responsibility and social impact; social responsibility and competitiveness. Finally, the paper finishes with a personal definition of CSR and its correlated ethical roots. (shrink)

Does Aquinas have a theory of social ontology? It is not easy to answer this question. On the one hand, Aquinas never discusses the ontology of those entities that we today consider significant for social ontology. On the other hand, though, there are places where Aquinas addresses the mereological question of the relation between aggregates and the individuals that compose them, and these places are significant for bringing to light what Aquinas had to say, if anything, about social ontology. In (...) the end, Aquinas grants social aggregates a place within Aristotelian ontology. My claim here is stronger, however. As a follower of Aristotle, Aquinas cannot avoid having a theory of social ontology, however inchoate this theory may be. In this paper, I show that his theory is metaphysical in character rather than cognitive or linguistic; nevertheless, it also considers the three primitives that, according to John Searle, are at the basis of any social construction, namely collective intentionality, assignment of function, and constitutive rules and procedures. I shall prove that Aquinas’s theory lies between reductionism and realism when it answers the question of the nature of social aggregates, and between naturalism and constructionism when it comes to explaining their origin. (shrink)

In this paper we use a series of examples to show how oppositions and dichotomies are fundamental in legal argumentation, and vitally important to be aware of, because of their twofold nature. On the one hand, they are argument structures underlying various kinds of rational argumentation commonly used in law as a means of getting to the truth in a conflict of opinion under critical discussion by two opposing sides before a tryer of fact. On the other hand, they are (...) argument structures underling moves made in strategic advocacy by both sides that function as platforms for different kinds of questionable argumentation tactics and moves that are in some instances tricky and deceptive. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a basis for a systematic development of signaling theory on CSR initiatives. The paper proposes signaling theory as a framework supportive of a strategic CSR approach; maps extant research on signaling through CSR initiatives; offers a comprehensive assessment of the most diffused CSR initiatives and discusses their eligibility as signaling devices; and outlines a research agenda to further develop and test signaling theory in business ethics. Specifically, the study reconsiders some key assumptions, (...) identifies key gaps in empirical validation, and proposes directions to extend multiple signal, signaling pattern, and target cases. (shrink)

Presuppositions are pragmatically considered as the conditions of the felicity of a speech act, or discourse move; however, the decision of setting the conditions of a move, which the hearer needs to accept in order to continue the dialogue, can be thought of as a speech act of a kind. The act of presupposing depends on specific conditions and in particular on the possibility of the hearer to reconstruct and accept the propositional content. These pragmatic conditions lead to epistemic considerations: (...) How can the speaker know that the hearer can reconstruct and accept a presupposition? A possible answer can be found in an argumentative approach grounded on the notion of presumptive reasoning. On this perspective, by presupposing the speaker advances a tentative conclusion about what the hearer may accept, hold, or know proceeding from factual, linguistic, and epistemic rules of presumption. (shrink)

The 14 essays collected in this volume explore the various aspects of Augustine’s philosophy and its medieval reception: by considering his education and the development of his thought as conveyed by a series of philosophical images and styles, the volume reconstructs the recurring motifs of his intellectual journey (the anti-Manichean polemic, his political vision, the role of reason, and the theory of war) and their fortune in authors such as Thomas Aquinas, Nicole Oresme, Gregory of Rimini, and Robert Grosseteste.

In this paper my objective is two-fold. First, I will try to provide further arguments in favour of the view defended in my earlier paper¹. In particular, I will try to show (in § 1) that a plausible understanding of the notion of a complete concept, coupled with (what I take to be) a reasonable interpretation of Leibniz's intriguing talk of severa “possible Adams” (§ 2), leads quite naturally to the view that Leibniz was committed to the doctrine of world-bound (...) individuals. Second, I will try to show (in § 3) that a suggestive way of saving contingency in the framework of Leibniz's theory of complete concepts is bound to fail : and the reasons for this failure will provide further evidence in favour of the view under present discussion. The remaining sections of the paper (§§ 4-6), will be concerned with fixing and making precise some of the loose ends of the previous three sections. Thus §§ 4 and 5 will be devoted to an analysis of Leibniz's use and understanding of the notions of contingency and necessity, and essence and accident, respectively. It will be shown that Leibniz's use and understanding of those notions is perfectly consistent with his commitment to the doctrine of world-bound individuals. In § 6, finally, I will try to indicate exactly how David Lewis' Counterpart Theory can be brought to bear upon Leibniz's theory of complete concepts, and, specifically, how it ought to be interpreted in that context. (shrink)

L’article présente l’édition critique du Traité sur l’être de raison de François de Prato, précédée d’une introduction historico-philosophique. Ce traité est une des premières réactions italiennes à la diffusion de la philosophie du langage et de la logique de Guillaume d’Occam. François y argumente contre la réduction occamiste de l’être de raison aux actes de connaissance, entendus comme des entités existant ‘subjectivement’ dans l’intellect. En suivant Thomas d’Aquin et Hervé de Nédellec, il développe au contraire une théorie relationnelle et ‘objective’ (...) de l’être de raison. (shrink)

There is a chapter in the history of ideas which, at least since the 1960s, appeared to have been definitively resolved. French Marxism of the 1930s has thus been reduced, whether by its supporters and opponents or by historians, to the status of a mere avatar of Stalinist diamat, albeit with certain variations which can be traced back to the national heritage of materialism and rationalism. The paper presents the main results of a research project whose purpose is to reconstruct (...) the developments which have led to the formation of such an image. The aim is to recover the possibility of apprehending afresh the various competing trends which, at the time, were engaged in a discursive struggle, the object of which was the definition of dialectical materialism. Hegel’s name, invoked in the context of epistemological discourses and to oppose the dominant academic tradition, thus emerges as a major philosophical reference for those currents which, at the termination of this ideological conflict, ended up on the defeated side. (shrink)