The moving spotlight account (MS) is a view that combines an eternalist ontology and an A-theoretic metaphysics. The intuition underlying MS is that the present time is somehow privileged and experientially vivid, as if it were illuminated by a moving spotlight. According to MS-theorists, a key reason to prefer MS to B-theoretic eternalism is that our experience of time supports it. We argue that this is false. To this end, we formulate a new family of positions in the philosophy of (...) time, which differ from MS in that, intuitively, they admit a plurality of moving spotlights. We argue that these ‘deviant’ variants of MS cannot be dismissed as conceptually incoherent, and that they are as well-supported by our experience as is MS. One of these variants, however, is consistent with the B-theory. Thus, if our experience of time supports MS, then it supports the B-theory as well. (shrink)

The notions of subject matter and aboutness have been objects of considerable attention among philosophers over the last few years. Current theories of subject matter take sentences to be the primary bearers of subject matter: “sentences have aboutness properties if anything has” (Yablo, Aboutness, Princeton University Press, 2014). However, some subsentential expressions can also be thought of as being about something. Moreover, it appears that the subject matters of sentences depend in a systematic way on the aboutness properties of their (...) subsentential components. In this paper, we focus on the question of what predicates are about. We provide an account of predicative subject matter in which subject matters are assigned to predicates in a natural way, and which can be smoothly integrated with some existing accounts of sentential subject matter. We also argue that the notion of predicative subject matter is a worthy object of study, both within the current debate on subject matter and in its own right. (shrink)

Dans la mythologie grecque, Prométhée - le 'prévoyant' - déroba le feu aux dieux et le transmit aux hommes. Zeus, courroucé par ce transfert technologique, condamna Prométhée à un châtiment itéré à l'identique, à l'infini, algorithmique. Le problème que pose l'ancien mythe est celui des limites de la connaissance. En termes modernes, jusqu'à quel point pouvons-nous transformer la nature sans une connaissance des conséquences de nos actions sur elle? Cette question nous pousse à analyser les limites des sciences : à (...) une techno-science devenue toujours plus invasive, la science répond en se donnant à elle-même des limites"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Riprendendo quanto George Edward Moore scrive a proposito del concetto di “bene” (“good”), Hans Kelsen sostiene che il concetto di “dovere” (“Sollen”) sia un concetto semplice, un concetto ultimo, e in quanto tale né definibile, né analizzabile. Questa tesi di Kelsen sembra essere smentita dalle ricerche che sono state condotte parallelamente da Georg Henrik von Wright e Amedeo Giovanni Conte a partire dagli anni '80 del XX secolo. Von Wright e Conte hanno, infatti, distinto dal concetto di “dovere deontico” (“deontic (...) Ought”), il dovere par excellence, altre specie di dovere che essi considerano categorialmente irriducibili al concetto di dovere deontico come il “dovere tecnico” (“technical Ought”) e il “dovere anankastico”. È proprio all'indagine di queste due specie di dovere adeontico che è dedicato il libro Anankastico in deontica. (shrink)

Action dans l'espace, l'infini, la cognition humaine (link to the English text).

Abstract:Starting from the Iberian reaction to Machiavelli's ideas about religion and war, this article compares and connects Spanish and Portuguese theories of empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Writings by Francisco de Vitoria, Martín de Azpilcueta, and Juan de Solórzano Pereira, as well as by less well-known thinkers, are used to trace the main legal and theological debates over empire that developed across the Iberian world. It is argued that the exchange of ideas about war and religion between Spain (...) and Portugal culminated in the theorization of a single global empire during the period of the Iberian Union (1580–1640). (shrink)