Torrengo, Giuliano_Propositions and the Metaphysics of Time.

Sceptics about substantial disputes in ontology often argue that when two philosophers seem to disagree on a quantified claim, they are actually equivocating on the notion of existence that they are using. When temporal elements play a central role, as in the debate between presentists and eternalists, the hypothesis of an equivocation with respect to existence acquires more plausibility. However, the anti-sceptic can still argue that this hypothesis is unjustified.

Although G. A. Cohen's work on Marx was flawed by a lack of gender-awareness, his work on Rawls owes much of its success to feminist inspiration. Cohen appeals effectively to feminism to rebut the basic structure objection to his egalitarian ethos, and could now appeal to feminism in response to Andrew Williams's publicity objection to this ethos. The article argues that Williams's objection is insufficient to rebut Cohen's ethos, inapplicable to variants of this ethos, and in conflict with plausible gender-egalitarian (...) ethoses. The article also advocates an understanding of basic structuralism and publicity consistent with feminism, and argues that Rawlsians need not reject plausible domestic egalitarian ethoses on either publicity or liberty grounds. To Michèle, G. A. Cohen's Harriet Taylor. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the fiction of the retroaction of the condition in contracts, a very old tool of law which may be traced back to Roman antiquity. In the first part, I introduce the notion of a contract with a suspensive condition, i.e. a contract whose efficacy is subordinated to a future uncertain event. As will be addressed in the second part, this kind of contracts is often linked to the fiction of the retroaction of the condition (...) (e.g. the French Code Civile 1179 and the Italian Codice Civile 1360): When the condition of the contract is fulfilled we should do as if the condition was fulfilled at the very time of the stipulation of the contract. In the third part, I turn to an attempt by the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to rationalize this fiction: Although – as every fiction – false, the retroaction of the condition allows us to reach true conclusions with respect to a deterministic metaphysics. Eventually, after having raised some objections to the Leibnizian account, I develop an alternative rationalization of the fiction: The fiction does indeed lead us to true conclusions because the same conclusions may be reached by relying on an equity-principle or, alternatively, on a merely possible yet expedient law. (shrink)

A pesar de que los filósofos modernos se caracterizan por ser versados en muchas disciplinas y ciencias, pocos son los intelectuales que, como Leibniz, logran formular una comprensión del mundo en la que cada una de estas disciplinas se articula con las demás. Esto hace que la propuesta filosófica y científica del hannoveriano, a diferencia de otras propuestas filosóficas de la modernidad, sea lo suficientemente compleja y robusta como para responder muchas problemáticas contemporáneas. Dada la amplia diversidad de temáticas que (...) aborda Leibniz a lo largo de su vida, sin embargo, el presente libro pretende reflexionar tan sólo sobre los alcances de algunas de estas problemáticas, las cuales se encuentran divididas en cinco grupos o ejes temáticos.El primer grupo de textos, así, aborda problemas relacionados con su metafísica y su caracterización dinámica del mundo. El segundo comprende aquellos textos relacionados con lógica, argumentación y filosofía del lenguaje, mientras que en el tercero se hace alusión a su caracterización de la belleza cara a su noción de orden y armonía. En el cuarto grupo nos encontramos una serie de textos que exploran la relación entre su propuesta filosófica y otras disciplinas, tales como las ciencias naturales, la literatura y la psicología. Finalmente nos encontramos con aquellos textos relacionados con su filosofía práctica, en particular con sus escritos sobre jurisprudencia y filosofía política. (shrink)

En este trabajo realizo un examen crítico del reciente libro de Silvana Gabriela Di Camillo sobre la crítica de Aristóteles a la teoría platónica de las Ideas. El libro de Di Camillo es un trabajo muy serio cuya lectura recomiendo ampliamente. Sin embargo, considero que cuatro de las principales tesis que la autora defiende tienen varias dificultades y mi objetivo aquí es presentar argumentos detallados en contra de ellas: la interpretación de la distinción entre argumentos más y menos rigurosos del (...) tratado Sobre las Ideas; la tesis de que la separación es el blanco esencial de las críticas aristotélicas a las Ideas; la interpretación de las opciones que Platón tiene para responder al argumento del tercer hombre, y la tesis de que la separación de las Ideas debe entenderse como homonimia. In this paper I examine Silvana Gabriela Di Camillo's recent book on Aristotle's criticisms of Plato's theory of Ideas. Di Camillo's book is a very serious work that I highly recommend. Nevertheless, I consider that four of the main theses that the author defends face several difficulties and my aim here is to offer detailed arguments against them: the interpretation of the distinction between more and less accurate arguments of the treatise On Ideas; the thesis that separation is the essential target of Aristotle's criticisms against Plato's Ideas; the interpretation of the options available to Plato to reply to the third man argument; and the thesis that the separation of Ideas should be understood as homonymy. (shrink)

The philosophy of Aristotle and its impact on the process of empirical scientific inquiry has been substantial. The influence of the clarity and orderliness of his thinking, when applied to the acquisition of knowledge in nursing, can not be overstated. Traditional empirical approaches have and will continue to have an important influence on the development of nursing knowledge through nursing research. However, as nursing is primarily a practice discipline, the transition from empirical and syllogistic reasoning is problematic. Other types of (...) inquiry are essential in the application of nursing knowledge obtained by empirical scientific approaches and to understand how that knowledge can best be used in the care of patients. This paper reviews the strengths and limitations of syllogistic reasoning by applying it to a recently published study on temperature measurement in nursing. It then discusses possible ways that the empirical knowledge gained from that study and confirmed in its reasoning by logical analysis could be used in the daily care of critically ill patients. It concludes by highlighting the utility of broader approaches to knowledge development, including interpretative approaches and contemporary empiricism, as a way to bridge the gap between factual empirical knowledge and the practical application of that knowledge in everyday clinical nursing practice. (shrink)

This book is centrally concerned with crucial theoretical and practical aspects of teaching in the national and global borderlands of gender, race, and sexuality studies. The cross-cultural feminist focus of this anthology allows the contributors to consider the various ways in which global and national frameworks intersect in the classroom and in students' thinking, and also the ways in which power and authority are developed, directed, and deployed in the feminist classroom. This volume provides a critical elaboration of provocative, self-reflexive (...) questions for feminist cultural and intellectual practice for the 21st century. In doing so, the volume provides a site for engaged feminist self-criticism for the specific purpose of reinvigorating a critical pedagogical practice grounded in multicultural feminist identities. (shrink)

This review-essay explores approaches to the thought of the creative Soviet Marxist thinker Evald Ilyenkov as discussed in a recent book edited by Alex Levant and Vesa Oittinen, Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism. The book consists of a series of commentaries and contextual essays which centre on the translated text of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal. The approach the authors take to Ilyenkov’s work differs from previous ones of exploring the totality of Ilyenkov’s thought or (...) eclectic aspects of it. By commenting on and contextualising Ilyenkov’s major text on the Ideal they locate the contribution of Ilyenkov in dialogue with traditions of classical European philosophy, and Western and Soviet Marxism, and in his importance to contemporary issues in philosophy and other disciplines. A deep analysis of Ilyenkov’s dense and often complex text is also given. By doing so the authors highlight the immense contribution of Ilyenkov to contemporary thought. (shrink)

In this paper, we articulate a version of non-standard A-theory—which we call Flow Fragmentalism—in relation to its take on the issue of supervenience of truth on being. According to the Truth Supervenes on Being (TSB) Principle, the truth of past- and future-tensed propositions supervenes, respectively, on past and future facts. Since the standard presentist denies the existence of past and future entities and facts concerning them that do not obtain in the present, she seems to lack the resources to accept (...) both past and future-tensed truths and the TSB Principle. Contrariwise, positions in philosophy of time that accept an eternalist ontology (e.g., B-theory, moving spotlight, and Fine’s and Lipman’s versions of fragmentalism) allow for a “direct” supervenience base for past- and future-tensed truths. We argue that Flow Fragmentalism constitutes a middle ground, which retains most of the advantages of both views, and allows us to articulate a novel account of the passage of time. (shrink)

There seems to be a "what it is like" to the experience of the flow of time in any conscious activity of ours. In this paper, I argue that the feeling that time passes should be understood as a phenomenal modifier of our mental life, in roughly the same way as the blurred or vivid nature of a visual experience can be seen as an element of the experience that modifies the way it feels, without representing the world as being (...) in a certain way. I defend my positions against the deflationary view according to which the passing of time does not have a specific phenomenal character, and the representationalist view according to which the feeling of time passing is a feature of the representational content of our experience, like being red or yellow. (shrink)

Journal Name: The Law & Ethics of Human Rights Issue: Ahead of print.

Many philosophers regard collective behavior and attitudes as the ground of the whole of social reality. According to this popular view, society is composed basically of collective intentions and cooperative behaviors; this is so both for informal contexts involving small groups and for complex institutional structures. In this article, I challenge this view, and propose an alternative approach, which I term institutional externalism. I argue that institutions are characterized by the tendency to defer to elements that are external to the (...) content of collective intentions—such as laws, declarations, and contracts. According to institutional externalism, those elements are the grounds of institutional statutes, rights, and duties. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that the adoption of an unrestricted principle of bivalence is compatible with a metaphysics that (i) denies that the future is real, (ii) adopts nomological indeterminism, and (iii) exploits a branching structure to provide a semantics for future contingent claims. To this end, we elaborate what we call Flow Fragmentalism, a view inspired by Kit Fine (2005)’s non-standard tense realism, according to which reality is divided up into maximally coherent collections of tensed (...) facts. In this way, we show how to reconcile a genuinely A-theoretic branching-time model with the idea that there is a branch corresponding to the thin red line, that is, the branch that will turn out to be the actual future history of the world. (shrink)

This article analyses Valla’s historiographical stance in the light of his dialectical assumptions about possibility, verisimilitude, and truth. I argue that, at variance with most humanists, Valla believed that historical truth should satisfy the requirements of logical necessity, being therefore incompatible with verisimilar reconstructions of past events. However, Valla also realized that a critical method of assessment grounded in verisimilitude was indispensable to the analysis of doubtful accounts and traditions. In order to explore these matters, Valla developed a genre distinct (...) from history proper and closer to the forensic, inquisitorial tradition. While history had to deal with necessary truths, the aim of ‘historical inquisitio’ was to draw probable conclusions from pieces of conjectural evidence. According to Valla’s dialectical principles, these conclusions were not absolutely true but could be considered true thanks to the notion of intellectual acumen, which allowed Valla to take a leap from the field of possibility or verisimilitude to that of truth and necessity. (shrink)

Las llamadas manāqib (sg. manqaba) son un género literario bastante extendido en los últimos siglos. Algunas de estas manāqib han sido publicadas en ediciones críticas, y su circulación entre los estudiosos suele referirse a la historia norteafricana o a ciertos aspectos de la religiosidad popular. Sin embargo, este tipo de obras ha recibido una atención muy limitada desde el punto de vista lingüístico, a pesar de que presentan características propias de las variedades habladas del árabe. Por lo tanto, las manāqib (...) constituyen una de las pocas fuentes que pueden utilizarse para analizar el árabe hablado y escrito en el pasado. El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la lengua de la obra titulada Rawḍat al-azhār wa-munyat al-sādāt al-abrār fī manāqib Sīdī ʿAbd al-Salām al-Asmar, una colección de manāqib relacionadas con el santo sufí libio ʿAbd al-Salām al-Asmar de la ciudad de Zlīten (siglo XV), escrita por Karīm al-Dīn al-Baramūnī al-Miṣrātī. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 491-515, Winter 2021.

G. A. Cohen's critique of Rawls's defence of economic incentives echoes some of J. S. Mill's insights on the subject. Some of Cohen's arguments, however, clash not only with those of Rawls but also with each other as well as with Mill's. A similar charge, however, may be made against Rawls. This article has conciliatory ambitions. It suggests reconciling each author with himself, as well as with each other, by focusing onthe worthof liberty. It stresses the importance of non-pecuniary occupational (...) inequalities and proposes various measures to enhance the worth of the occupational freedom of those with fewer options. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge's Global Resources Dividend relies on a flat tax on the use of natural resources to fund the eradication of world poverty. Hillel Steiner's Global Fund taxes the full rental value of owned natural resources and distributes the proceeds equally. The paper compares the Dividend and the Fund and defends the Global Share, a novel proposal that taxes either use or ownership, does so (when possible) progressively, and distributes the revenue according to a prioritarian rather than a sufficientarian or (...) egalitarian principle. (shrink)

The commitment of transplant physicians to protect the physical and psychological health of potential donors is fundamental to the process of living donor organ transplantation. It is appropriate that strict regulations to govern an individual’s decision to donate have been developed. Some may argue that adherence to such regulations creates a doctor-patient relationship that is rooted in paternalism, which is in drastic contrast with a doctor-patient relationship that is rooted in patients’ autonomy, characteristic of most other operative interventions.In this article (...) we analyze the similarities between cosmetic plastic surgery and living donor surgery as examples of surgeries governed by different ethical principles. It is interesting that, while the prevailing ethical approach in living donor surgery is based on paternalism, the ethical principle guiding cosmetic surgery is respect for patients’ autonomy. The purpose of this article is not to criticize either practice, but to suggest that, given the similarities between the two procedures, both operative interventions should be guided by the same ethical principle: a respect for patients’ autonomy. We further suggest that if living organ donation valued donors’ autonomy as much as cosmetic plastic surgery does, we might witness a wider acceptance of and increase in living organ donation. (shrink)

In their manuscript, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) argue that controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) is compatible with the dead donor rule (DDR) by describing the DDR and the incor...

Ostrich presentists maintain that we can use all the expressive resources of the tensed language to provide an explanation of why true claims about the past are true, without thereby paying any price in terms of ontology or basic ideology. I clarify the position by making a distinction between three kinds of explanation, which has general interest and applicability. I then criticize the ostrich position because it requires an unconstrained version of the third form of explanation, which is out of (...) place in metaphysics. (shrink)

Outside Europe landlocked states are poor: 16 are extremely poor and another 16 very poor. The Sustainable Development Goals recognise their lack of sea-access as a major cause of their reduced chances of escaping poverty and reaching the stated goals. This paper proposes including corridors to the sea and other forms of sea-access among the SDGs. It also discusses objections to doing so that appeal to the rejection of global egalitarian arguments, to the possibility of compensating those countries for their (...) disadvantage rather than removing it, and to the territorial rights of the coastal countries. The paper concludes that none of these objections to the corridors, and a fortiori to the less ambitious remedies of the Almaty and Vienna Programmes, withstands scrutiny. (shrink)

Opponents of presentism have often argued that the presentist has difficulty in accounting for what makes true past-tensed propositions true in a way that is compatible with her metaphysical view of time and reality. The problem is quite general and concerns not only strong truth-maker principles, but also the requirement that truth be grounded in reality. In order to meet the challenge, presentists have proposed many peculiar present aspects of the world as grounds for truths concerning the past, such as (...) uninstantiated haecceities, Meinongian non-existents, ersatz times, and dispositional and distributional properties. The main problem with all such solutions is that any explanation of what grounds a TptP that involves the past is eo ipso a better explanation than any that involves only the present. Thus, the quest for an account of grounding for TptP that is compatible with the presentist ontology and ideology is doomed to be explanatorily deficient with respect to eternalism. In a recent article, Ben Caplan and David Sanson have claimed that presentists should change their strategy and, rather than seeking for exotic grounds for TptP, should adopt a more liberal view of explanation. That is, they should allow themselves to resort to “past directed” explanations, even if they do not accept the past in their ontology and ideology. I argue that such a proposal is not compatible with the tenet that there is a substantial distinction between the ideology of such a version of presentism and that of eternalism. Therefore, the presentist cannot endorse such “deflationist” explanations as an easy way out to the problem of the grounding of TptP. (shrink)

We investigate the effects that different levels of transparency may have on a simple nudge. Using an incentivized task and eliminating possible confounds due to strategic reasoning, we examine how different types of information (positive, negative, or a combination of the two) affect the impact of a nudge on behaviour in an experimental task. Our results indicate that providing reasons in favour of the nudge increases its efficacy, while warning subjects about its potential drawbacks does not significantly reduce it.

A propósito de una reciente biblografía, este trabajo apunta algunas cuestiones esenciales de la teoría del derecho de Grocio, y en relación con ella algunos puntos importantes de la filosofía de Vico.Related with a recent bibliography, this paper arises some fundamental questions about Grocio's legal theory and the relationship it has with Vico's philosophy.

Cet article étudie la réflexion de Pierre Gassendi sur la puissance divine, son rapport à la rationalité humaine et aux lois de la nature. La pensée du philosophe de Digne sur cette question a souvent donné lieu à des interprétations historiographiques marquées par la comparaison avec la théologie de Descartes, laquelle était vue comme l’expression d’une orientation de la pensée radicalement opposée. Néanmoins, à la lumière de la relecture d’une série de textes de Gassendi (principalement tirés de son Syntagma philosophicum (...) ), il apparaît que ces deux auteurs sont loin d’être irréconciliables et que leur opposition découle moins de deux visions divergentes de la puissance de Dieu que de deux méthodes antagonistes pour fonder et justifier leurs thèses respectives sur la nature. (shrink)

Estas páginas esbozan algunas claves de investigación que buscan trazar un horizonte interpretativo a propósito de una crítica de la razón evaluadora y sus implicancias ético-políticas en educación. De aquí la necesidad de analizar las relaciones de dicho tipo de racionalidad con la alteridad, preguntándonos por sus lugares y efectos en los procesos educativos. Por ello se propone una primera definición de esta racionalidad, para luego caracterizarla y profundizarla críticamente, lo cual permitirá identificar distintas formas de plantearse el problema de (...) la evaluación —históricamente abordado desde miradas ajenas al campo de la filosofía de la educación y de la ética como ramas de la filosofía práctica—. Nuestro planteo pone en cuestión las retóricas técnicas, psico-didácticas o sociológico-pedagógicas, que hace siglos se preguntan cuál sería la mejor forma de evaluar o directamente coadyuvan a naturalizar la razón evaluadora. Finalmente, intentamos pensar gestos micro-políticos de una potencial educación no-evaluadora y, por tanto, no-fascista. (shrink)