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)

A series of recent debates in experimental economics have associated demand effects with the artificiality of the experimental setting and have linked it to the problem of external validity. In this paper, we argue that these associations can be misleading, partly because of the ambiguity with which “artificiality” has been defined, but also because demand effects and external validity are related in complex ways. We argue that artificiality may be directly as well as inversely correlated with demand effects. We also (...) distinguish between the demand effects of experimentation and the reactions that they may trigger and that might endanger experimental validity. We conclude that economists should pay more attention to the way in which subjects construe the experimental task and learn to exploit subjects’ reactivity to expectations in their experiments. (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)

Hípias Menor apresenta a conversação que tem lugar na conclusão da conferência dada por Hípias sobre os poemas homéricos diante de um público numeroso. Sócrates deseja interrogar o sofista sobre um aspecto particular de sua exegese homérica, aquele da descrição dos personagens de Aquiles e de Ulisses: o primeiro, o mais simples e sincero (ou verdadeiro, haploústatos kaì alethéstatos), seria melhor que o segundo, que é dúplice (polútropos). A simplicidade de Aquiles deveria revelar a sinceridade, enquanto a duplicidade (ou melhor (...) a multiplicidade, polú-tropos) de Ulisses indicaria um caráter ambíguo e enganador. Parece então que a quem sabe muitas coisas pertence a capacidade de enganar, precisamente utilizando os muitos conhecimentos que possui, enquanto a sinceridade constituiria um traço específico de quem, não possuindo conhecimentos, não pode senão revelar-se pelo que é. O paradoxo ético que disso deriva é examinado através de uma análise dos argumentos desenvolvidos no diálogo. (shrink)

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

This book explores our changing relationship with meat as food. Half storytelling and half historic work, it analyzes the way in which humans have dealt with the idea of eating animals in the Western world, from 1900 to the present. The story part of the book follows the rise and fall of meat, and illustrates how this type of food has become a problem in a more emotional way. The historical component informs and offers readers key data. The author draws (...) on theories of circular societies, smart cities and smart countries to explain how and why forms of meat production that were common in the past have since all but disappeared. Both components, however, explain why meat has been important and why it has now become a problem. In tracing the fall of meat, the author identifies a host of dilemmas. These include fossil energy, pollution, illnesses caused by eating meat, factory farming, and processed foods. Lastly, the book offers a possible solution. The answer focuses on new forms of meat obtained without killing animals and in a sense resembles renewable energy. Overall, this unique cultural history offers revealing insights into how meat affects social relations, interpersonal relationships, and humanity as a whole. (shrink)

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 expression "image" is characterized, starting with the Greek language, by a certain ambiguity, since it can point to an iconic sign or to an allegoric-figurative sign. However it is possible to find out in the history of ancient thought an acceptation of "image" where these features are both present, that is agalma whose first meaning in the lexicon of classic Greek is "sacred image". Neoplatonism particularly uses this expression as one of the key term of its doctrine about the (...) methods through which it is possible to reveal the divine. Agalma in that way was conceived as an iconic sign (a statue or a mimetic figure) whose morphological elements are the vehicle of allegoric meanings; these meanings then are able to refer to transcendent realities. So the capacity to reveal the God's nature is attributed to iconic image that becomes a sign no longer bound exclusively to material dimension (as it has been described, for instance, by Augustine and other late ancient and medieval thinkers). (shrink)