Découvert et transcrit par Francesco Saverio Nisio qui en a complété les références bibliographiques, ce texte, proposé en 1880 par le jeune Lucien Lévy à la Revue des études juives qui venait de se créer, et resté inédit depuis, met l’accent sur « l’exactitude et la profondeur des observations » psychologiques de Spinoza, « grand métaphysicien », c’est-à-dire « grand artiste », dans l’ Éthique.

Cette lecture du livre de Gregory Cormann, Sartre. Une anthropologie politique. 1920-1980, est centrée sur la relation de Sartre avec Lucien Lévy-Bruhl sur le thème des émotions, développée dans son dernier chapitre. Cela conduit aussi à suggérer, sous ce rapport, un lien entre Günther Anders Stern e Sartre.

Husserl develops his reflection on ethics mainly in his lecture courses. These lectures can be divided into two parts, according to a principle that is both chronological and pertaining to content, and following thus the respective editions in the Gesammelte Werke.1 The common aspect of the two different phases of Husserl’s research can be detected in the critical confrontation with Kant’s practical philosophy, starting with the question concerning the formality.

Nel suo celebre Principio speranza, Ernst Bloch interpreta il tema della speranza, autentico crocevia della modernitÀ, in una prospettiva di continuitÀ fra il cristianesimo ‘eretico' e il materialismo storico, nella quale il primo, per cosě dire, trae legittimitÀ dal secondo, come religione in ereditÀ. Prendendo in considerazione le teorie di Metz e Moltmann, che disegnano una ‘nuova teologia politica', si puň rintracciare in Bloch un'atipica ‘teologia politica'della speranza volta al futuro, in evidente contrasto con la ‘teologia politica' di Carl Schmitt (...) e con tutte le altre formulazioni politiche della Konservative Revolution, ‘religiosamente' volte al passato? (shrink)

La récente édition de l’inédit de jeunesse de Lévy-Bruhl sur la psychologie de Spinoza permet de donner tout son poids à la déclaration livrée beaucoup plus tard par l’historien de la philosophie moderne, dans une lettre à Evans-Pritchard, sur l’inscription de sa recherche dans un dialogue avec Spinoza et Hume. On relit cet inédit en soulignant l’importance de la logique des sentiments dans l’ Éthique, en mettant en relation l’appartenance de Spinoza au champ cartésien avec l’associationnisme de la tradition empiriste, (...) et on encadre ainsi l’œuvre de Lévy-Bruhl dans toutes ses phases. On esquisse également un parallèle avec Derrida, qui resterait à approfondir. (shrink)

On peut trouver dans l’œuvre de Lévy-Bruhl des traces de la présence de Spinoza, en particulier de sa conception de la connaissance du troisième genre, ou « science intuitive ». Il apparaît que Lévy-Bruhl a travaillé à une « new science of metaphysics », aussi bien dans ses œuvres d’histoire de la philosophie que dans ses ouvrages ethnologiques.One may find in Lévy-Bruhl’s works traces of Spinoza’s presence, in particular of his conception of « knowledge of the third kind », i.e. (...) « intuitive science ». It thus appears that Lévy-Bruhl worked on a « new science of metaphysics » both in his historical researches and in his ethnological works. (shrink)

Paragonare l'approccio di Husserl e Freud al conflitto tra filosofia della visione del mondo e il metodo della ricerca scientifica non solo è possibile, ma anche espostemologicamente sensato. In questo studio saranno presi in considerazione soprattutto due testi: Filosofia come scienza rigorosa di Edmund Husserl e le ultime conferenze di Sigmund Freud dedicate alla Introduzione alla psicoanalisi. Sia Husserl che Freud hanno sviluppato un approccio radicalmente negativo all'idea della “Weltanschauung”: in Freud questa concerne in primo luogo la sfera dell'ideologia religiosa (...) mentre in Husserl investe ogni sorta di relativismo, scetticismo e storicismo. Nonostante il comune giudizio negativo, bisogna riscontrare una profonda differenza tra i due autori: mentre Husserl lavora allo sviluppo di una "scienza filosofica" sostenuta dall'idea dell'intuizione eidetica, l'idea freudiana di scienza è basata sull'elaborazione intellettuale di quei fatti che vengono resi oggetto di osservazione. Questo significa inoltre che l'idea di scienza di Husserl mira a un livello sovra-temporale, mentre quello freudiano descrive una ricerca che, con tutti i suoi sforzi, resta senza fine e costantemente aperta alla dimensione del futuro. (shrink)

Discussion held in April at a Political Studies Association Roundtable in Manchester, England, on G. A. Cohen’s book If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?. --- Michael Otsuka's contribution sub-titled: "Il personale e politico? Il confine tra pubblico e private nella sfera della giustizia distributiva" = "Is the personal political? The boundary between the public and the private in the realm of distributive justice.".

L’articolo affronta gli interessi storico-artistici del letterato e storico Francesco Saverio Quadrio (Ponte in Valtellina 1695-Milano 1756), noto soprattutto per i suoi studi sulla storia della poesia e della sua terra natale, la Valtellina. Nei suoi libri Quadrio ha raccolto e combinato diverse informazioni anche su artisti e opere d’arte. Non tutte le notizie raccolte sono affidabili, ma i suoi studi sono comunque stati una delle fonti per l’aggiornamento di volumi importanti per la loro grande diffusione internazionale, come (...) gli studi di Johann Caspar Füssli o il famoso Dictionary of Painters Pilkington. Si è perciò cercato di comprendere il metodo di lavoro di Quadrio, indagando l’origine delle sue ipotesi, ma anche gli effetti di queste nella storiografia successiva. (shrink)

English version of: "Il personale e politico? Il confine fra pubblico e privato nella sfera della giustizia distributiva." --- Italian text published in Carter, Ian, Otsuka, Michael and Trincia, Francesco Saverio Discussione su "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?" di G.A. Cohen. Iride, XIV. pp. 609-634. ISSN 1122-7893.

It is a venerable slogan due to David Hume, and inherited by the empiricist tradition, that the impossible cannot be believed, or even conceived. In Positivismus und Realismus, Moritz Schlick claimed that, while the merely practically impossible is still conceivable, the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable. -/- An opposite philosophical tradition, however, maintains that inconsistencies and logical impossibilities are thinkable, and sometimes believable, too. In the Science of Logic, Hegel already complained against “one of the (...) fundamental prejudices of logic as hitherto understood”, namely that “the contradictory cannot be imagined or thought” (Hegel 1931: 430). Our representational capabilities are not limited to the possible, for we appear to be able to imagine and describe also impossibilities — perhaps without being aware that they are impossible. -/- Such impossibilities and inconsistencies are what this entry is about... (shrink)

2020 update of the entry "Properties".

Pragmatic vindicatory genealogies provide both a cause and a rationale and can thus affect the space of reasons. But how far is the space of reasons affected by this kind of genealogical argument? What normative and evaluative implications do these arguments have? In this paper, I unpack this issue into three different sub-questions and explain what kinds of reasons they provide, for whom are these reasons, and for what. In relation to this final sub-question I argue, most importantly, that these (...) arguments are ambiguous about what they give us reasons for, meaning that they can be interpreted both as justifications for recognizing the normative standing of certain norms, values, and practices - and thus for living by them - and as excuses for those that do so. I illustrate this point by reference to the genealogical vindication of honour cultures, showing how the vindicatory argument can illuminate such case as one of excusing moral ignorance. Drawing on legal theory and moral philosophy, I show that different evaluative and normative implications hang on the result of the interpretation as either justification or excuse, and show that this ambiguity is a virtue rather than a limitation. (shrink)

A dialetheia is a sentence, A, such that both it and its negation, ¬A, are true (we shall talk of sentences throughout this entry; but one could run the definition in terms of propositions, statements, or whatever one takes as her favourite truth-bearer: this would make little difference in the context). Assuming the fairly uncontroversial view that falsity just is the truth of negation, it can equally be claimed that a dialetheia is a sentence which is both true and false.

There is a principle in things, about which we cannot be deceived, but must always, on the contrary, recognize the truth – viz. that the same thing cannot at one and the same time be and not be": with these words of the Metaphysics, Aristotle introduced the Law of Non-Contradiction, which was to become the most authoritative principle in the history of Western thought. However, things have recently changed, and nowadays various philosophers, called dialetheists, claim that this Law does not (...) hold unrestrictedly – that in peculiar circumstances the same thing may at the same time be and not be, and contradictions may obtain in the world. This book opens with an examination of the famous logical paradoxes that appear to speak on behalf of contradictions (e.g., the Liar paradox, the set-theoretic paradoxes such as Cantor’s and Russell’s), and of the reasons for the failure of the standard attempts to solve them. It provides, then, an introduction to paraconsistent logics – non-classical logics in which the admission of contradictions does not lead to logical chaos –, and their astonishing applications, going from inconsistent data base management to contradictory arithmetics capable of circumventing Gödel’s celebrated Incompleteness Theorem. The final part of the book discusses the philosophical motivations and difficulties of dialetheism, and shows how to extract from Aristotle’s ancient words a possible reply to the dialetheic challenge. How to Sell a Contradiction will appeal to anyone interested in non-classical logics, analytic metaphysics, and philosophy of mathematics, and especially to those who consider challenging our most entrenched beliefs the main duty of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

The idea of a distinctively political normativity came under sustained fire lately. Here I formulate, test, and reject a moderate and promising way of conceiving it. According to this conception, political normativity is akin to the kind of normativity at play in all-things-considered judgments, i.e., those judgments that weight together all the relevant reasons to determine what practical rationality as such requires to do. I argue that even when we try to conceive political normativity in this all-things-considered way, and even (...) when we do not concede from the get-go that moral reasons necessarily trump or override normative reasons of a different kind, political normativity is still reducible to morality, because the peculiar content of all-things-considered political oughts can be explained by the interplay of general moral principles and contextual facts that do not obtain exclusively in political scenarios. If my arguments are correct, I provide political realists with one more reason to withdraw from the metaethical battle over the idea of a distinctively political normativity and show that the moralist approach is defensible against a prima facie promising, but ultimately untenable, alternative. (shrink)

Objective correlates—behavioral, functional, and neural—provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance on these correlates should not lead to the ‘fallacy of misplaced objectivity’: the assumption that only objective properties should and can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is intrinsically— its subjective properties—not just what we can do with it extrinsically. And it must be explained; otherwise the way experience feels would turn out to be magical (...) rather than physical. We argue that it is possible to account for subjective properties objectively once we move beyond cognitive functions and realize what experience is and how it is structured. Drawing on integrated information theory, we show how an objective science of the subjective can account, in strictly physical terms, for both the essential properties of every experience and the specific properties that make particular experiences feel the way they do. (shrink)

Background Providing understandable information to patients is necessary to achieve the aims of the Informed Consent process: respecting and promoting patients’ autonomy and protecting patients from harm. In recent decades, new, primarily digital technologies have been used to apply and test innovative formats of Informed Consent. We conducted a systematic review to explore the impact of using digital tools for Informed Consent in both clinical research and in clinical practice. Understanding, satisfaction and participation were compared for digital tools versus the (...) non-digital Informed Consent process. Methods We searched for studies on available electronic databases, including Pubmed, EMBASE, and Cochrane. Studies were identified using specific Mesh-terms/keywords. We included studies, published from January 2012 to October 2020, that focused on the use of digital Informed Consent tools for clinical research, or clinical procedures. Digital interventions were defined as interventions that used multimedia or audio–video to provide information to patients. We classified the interventions into 3 different categories: video only, non-interactive multimedia, and interactive multimedia. Results Our search yielded 19,579 publications. After title and abstract screening 100 studies were retained for full-text analysis, of which 73 publications were included. Studies examined interactive multimedia, non-interactive multimedia, and videos, and most studies were conducted on adults. Innovations in consent were tested for clinical/surgical procedures and clinical research. For research IC, 21 outcomes were explored, with a positive effect on at least one of the studied outcomes being observed in 8/12 studies. For clinical/surgical procedures 49 outcomes were explored, and 21/26 studies reported a positive effect on at least one of the studied outcomes. Conclusions Digital technologies for informed consent were not found to negatively affect any of the outcomes, and overall, multimedia tools seem desirable. Multimedia tools indicated a higher impact than videos only. Presence of a researcher may potentially enhance efficacy of different outcomes in research IC processes. Studies were heterogeneous in design, making evaluation of impact challenging. Robust study design including standardization is needed to conclusively assess impact. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that one approach to normative political theory, namely contextualism, can benefit from a specific kind of historical inquiry, namely genealogy, because the latter provides a solution to a deep-seated problem for the former. This problem consists in a lack of critical distance and originates from the justificatory role that contextualist approaches attribute to contextual facts. I compare two approaches to genealogical reconstruction, namely the historiographical method pioneered by Foucault and the hybrid method of pragmatic genealogy (...) as practiced by Bernard Williams, arguing that they both ensure an increase in critical distance while preserving contextualism’s distinctiveness. I also show, however, that only the latter provides normative action-guidance and can thus assist the contextualist theorist in the crucial task of discerning how far certain contextual facts deserve their justificatory role. I prove this point by showing how a pragmatic genealogy of the practice of punishment can inform the contextualist’s reflection about the role this practice should play in a transitional scenario, i.e. in the set of circumstances societies go through in the aftermath of large-scale violence and human rights violations. (shrink)