Understanding Institutions proposes a new unified theory of social institutions that combines the best insights of philosophers and social scientists who have written on this topic. Francesco Guala presents a theory that combines the features of three influential views of institutions: as equilibria of strategic games, as regulative rules, and as constitutive rules. -/- Guala explains key institutions like money, private property, and marriage, and develops a much-needed unification of equilibrium- and rules-based approaches. Although he uses game theory concepts, (...) the theory is presented in a simple, clear style that is accessible to a wide audience of scholars working in different fields. Outlining and discussing various implications of the unified theory, Guala addresses venerable issues such as reflexivity, realism, Verstehen, and fallibilism in the social sciences. He also critically analyses the theory of “looping effects” and “interactive kinds” defended by Ian Hacking, and asks whether it is possible to draw a demarcation between social and natural science using the criteria of causal and ontological dependence. Focusing on current debates about the definition of marriage, Guala shows how these abstract philosophical issues have important practical and political consequences. -/- Moving beyond specific cases to general models and principles, Understanding Institutions offers new perspectives on what institutions are, how they work, and what they can do for us. (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)

This paper discusses Habermas’s argument that justice requires solidarity as its ‘reverse side’, whereby the former provides the necessary global framework for establishing intersubjective solidarity whilst the latter constitutes an important precondition for igniting social and political change in the direction of social justice. In this paper I argue that such a paradigm of reciprocity might be fruitfully complemented by a less apparent yet substantial nexus: that between solidarity and perceived injustice, which I contend also triggers the emergence of solidarity. (...) Drawing from Arendt’s thematisation of solidarity as a principle that stems from human suffering and recent scholarship on transitional post-conflict justice, I analyse the negative and reactive aspect of solidarity and the role of negative emotions in its emergence. (shrink)

Expressively equivalent logical languages can enunciate logical notions in notationally diversified ways. Frege’s Begriffsschrift, Peirce’s Existential Graphs, and the notations presented by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus all express the sentential fragment of classical logic, each in its own way. In what sense do expressively equivalent notations differ? According to recent interpretations, Begriffsschrift and Existential Graphs differ from other logical notations because they are capable of “multiple readings.” We refute this interpretation by showing that there are at least three different kinds (...) of such multiple readings. While readings of the first kind do not capture any essential difference among notations but only among vocabularies, corresponding to readings of the second and the third kind two general parameters according to which notations may differ are defined: linearity vs. non-linearity, and tabularity vs. non-tabularity. This answers the question of how there can be substantially different but expressively equivalent logical notations. (shrink)

La question de l’analogie – fondamentale pour toute la néoscolastique, de Gilson à Maritain – trouva sa consécration en 1932 dans le fameux Analogia entis d’Erich Przywara. À la suite de l’influence de Przywara, l’analogie a eu un rôle décisif aussi dans la pensée d’Edith Stein. Mais en décrivant la dialectique phénoménologique entre être fini et être éternel Stein confère à l’analogie de l’être une tournure que l’on peut qualifier de « personnelle ». Il s’agit du rapport entre deux « (...) je suis » : le « je suis » humain et créatural et le « je suis » divin. L’analogia entis originelle est donc pour Stein le rapport entre deux personnes. (shrink)

1. Da Leibniz a Kant.--2. L'algebra della logica.

This paper outlines a version of instantaneous presentism, according to which the present is a point-like instant, and defends it from two prominent objections. The first one has to do with the difficulty of accounting, from the point of view of instantaneous presentism, for the existence of events that take time, dynamic events, which cannot be confined to a single instant. The second objection is of a Zenonian nature and arises once time is viewed as a continuum that can be (...) subdivided ad infinitum. In response to the first problem, it is argued that the presentist can appeal to past and future instants as long as it is not assumed that there are events that occur at them. Once they are granted, one can then appeal to "past-oriented" and "future-oriented" properties such as *was P at t* (or *will be P at t*), where t is a past or future instant, in order to view dynamic events as occurring at the present instant. In response to the second problem, one must accept the idea that, as a new instant becomes present, there is no preceding instant which is immediately past. There can only be infinitely many past instants with increasingly lower degrees of pastness. (shrink)

A quick overview of the main ethical and ethical-political alternatives facing our moral predicament in the so-called Anthropocene, striking a note of relative optimism. (I'll be happy to share an English version on request.).

This paper builds on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s theory of metaphorical concepts to propose that our conception of truth as correspondence with reality is metaphorically based on our conception of perceptual fields. In particular, it is argued that parts of reality, as metaphorically understood in terms of parts of perceptual fields, can play the role of objective truth-makers for sentences with empirical content; for instance, they meet the constraints on correspondence put forward by Barry Smith. Finally, Richard Boyd’s account of the (...) function of metaphor in science is utilized to ground the nonfictional and referential status of truth-maker and related notions. (shrink)

I shall explain the notions of propositions and states of affairs as they are understood in the current ontological debate and I shall briefly relate them to similar notions in Aristotle and some Medieval authors. In contrast with the point of view of some philosophers who identify propositions and states of affairs, I shall argue that they need to be sharply distinguished. I shall then move on to a problem for propositions and, above all, states of affairs, known as Bradley’s (...) regress, and hint at discussions of this or analogous puzzles in the philosophical tradition before Bradley. Finally, I shall present my own approach to this issue, Fact Infinitism, focusing on why it would have been hardly acceptable before ontology came to have the Cantorian conception of the infinite at its disposal. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the basic meaning of ousia in Plato’s philosophical use of the term. “Basic” is not intended as “the strongest”, let alone “exclusive”, insofar as the semantics of ousia encompasses a variety of philosophical meanings. On the contrary, the basic meaning is proposed to be the elementary semantic component of ousia, which is present in the background of Plato’s quasi‑technical use of the term and marks the difference from its ordinary meaning. In view (...) of this, a “genetic” aspect is firstly considered, that is, the connection with the Socratic question “What is X?”. Thereafter, a brief mention to Plato’s conception of language and its relation to reality is made, focusing on the notion of eponymy. This because Plato’s coinage of the philosophical semantics of ousia gives this term the role of an eponym, in the sense that its prominent value is the reference to the Forms, but this does not exclude that it may refer to other types of entities. In the last two sections of the paper, a number of passages from Plato’s works are examined to show that the basic meaning of ousia ultimately is “determined existence”, inasmuch as it designates any thing existing with its own peculiar feature. For ousiai can be empirical things as well as Forms, which implies that the meaning of Plato’s ousia should not be understood in the light of an substance/accident relation. (shrink)

"Questo volume esamina la dottrina epicurea dei minimi che rappresenta un nodo cruciale della filosofia di Epicuro e un autentico punto di svolta rispetto all'atomismo di Leucippo e Democrito. Il libro è organizzato in tre capitoli dedicati rispettivamente: all'analisi filologica e teorica delle fonti primarie, alla ricostruzione del contesto storico-filosofico a cui la dottrina dei minimi verosimilmente fa riferimento, e, infine, all'approfondimento dello sviluppo della teoria dei minimi in ambito prevalentemente geometrico all'interno della scuola di Epicuro. L'esame critico delle fonti (...) antiche, anche attraverso l'attenta analisi della letteratura secondaria, conferma il ruolo decisivo giocato dai minimi nella scienza della natura epicurea. Si tratta della prima monografia interamente consacrata allo studio di questa significativa dottrina in tutta la sua ampiezza storica e teorica."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)