This article discusses possible ways to account for how solidarity comes to be constituted. Beyond accounts tying solidarity either to identity, or to the adherence to a common normative framework, recent scholarship has underscored the role played by collective action in bringing about solidarity. In this paper, I agree that collective action has been often overlooked as a fundamental element in constituting solidarity but warn against the risk of conceptualizing the source of solidarity exclusively in terms of action. Instead, I (...) propose to understand solidarity as resulting from the continuous interaction between two different dimensions of solidarity: constitutive solidarity that centres on collective action, and constituted solidarity which centres on given identities. My paper begins by distinguishing the two meanings of solidarity – constituted and constitutive. The first referring to an (instituted) set of mutual obligations applying to a given group, the second referring to solidarity as underlying social bond, which establishes the solidarity group in the first place. The paper then goes on to discuss three different accounts of constitutive solidarity: identity-based, obligations-based and action-based. I argue that only the action-based account can conceptualise the coming about of new forms of solidarity and the changing scope of the solidarity group. Yet, such accounts are unable to conceptualise how constitutive solidarity can come to ground constituted forms of solidarity, able to endure through time. On this basis, I propose to interpret constitutive and constituted solidarity as two ‘moments’ of solidarity, one symbolically grounding the other, even if not through linear causation. Rather, constitutive solidarity is constantly evolving and constantly contributes to remap the identities depicting social reality, which ground constituted forms of solidarity. (shrink)

Review of Jürgen Link, Normalismus und Antagonimus in der Postmoderne. Krise, New Normal, Populismus, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018.

According to virtue epistemology, the main aim of education is the development of the cognitive character of students (Pritchard, 2014, 2016). Given the proliferation of technological tools such as ChatGPT and other LLMs for solving cognitive tasks, how should educational practices incorporate the use of such tools without undermining the cognitive character of students? Pritchard (2014, 2016) argues that it is possible to properly solve this ‘technology-education tension’ (TET) by combining the virtue epistemology framework with the theory of extended cognition (...) (EXT) (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). He argues that EXT enables us to consider tools as constitutive parts of the students’ cognitive system, thus preserving their cognitive character from technologically induced cognitive diminishment. The first aim of this paper is to show that this solution is not sufficient to solve the TET. Second, I aim to offer a complementary and more encompassing framework of tool-use to address the TET. Then, I apply it to the educational uses of ChatGPT as the most notable example of LLM, although my arguments can be extended to other generative AI systems. To do so, in Sect. 1.1, I present Pritchard’s framework of cognitive character and virtue epistemology applied in education, to which I am committed in this treatment. In Sects. 2 and 3, I respectively illustrate Pritchard’s (2014) solution to the TET, and I highlight the general limitations of his proposal. Thus, in Sect. 4.1 I characterize ChatGPT as a computational cognitive artifact using Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts. In Sect. 4.2, I introduce my proposal, which combines Pritchard’s account of virtue epistemology with Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts to address the TET. Finally, in Sect. 5.1, I present some epistemically virtuous uses of ChatGPT in educational contexts. To conclude, I argue in favor of a multidisciplinary approach for analyzing educational activities involving AI technologies such as ChatGPT. (shrink)

Skepticism is both a historical and foundational problem in epistemology. Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has provided a new expression of its threat. The Debasing Demon appears to generate a novel form of radical doubt, one that has gained prominence in recent debates. Instead of targeting the connection between belief and truth, it undercuts the link between belief and evidence (or reasons). This contribution presents the Debasing Demon Problem, analyzing its reach. It will provide an account for explaining how its threat is (...) raised, explore its relationship to classical varieties of skepticism, and assess some of the main objections against it. It will be argued that Schaffer’s Demon institutes a consistent epistemic threat, one that might represent the main variety of skepticism to be tackled in epistemology. Some consequences of this analysis are then presented concerning how to face this open problem. (shrink)

In public political deliberation, people will err and lie in accordance with definite patterns. Such discourse failure results from behavior that is both instrumentally and epistemically rational. The deliberative practices of a liberal democracy cannot be improved so as to overcome the tendency for rational citizens to believe and say things at odds with reliable propositions of social science. The theory has several corollaries. One is that much contemporary political philosophy can be seen as an unsuccessful attempt to vindicate, on (...) symbolic and moral grounds, the forms that discourse failure take on in public political deliberation. Another is that deliberative practices cannot be rescued even on non-epistemic grounds, such as social peace, impartiality, participation, and equality. To alleviate discourse failure, this book proposes to reduce the scope of majoritarian politics and enlarge markets. (shrink)

Donor conceived persons are likely to have a lower quality of life than persons who are genetically related to both parents. Empirical evidence is presented to corroborate this point. The evidence is subdivided into three sections: (1) negative experience of the donor conception itself, (2) negative effects of secrecy and openness and (3) negative effects of donor anonymity and donor identifiability. The principle of procreative beneficence requires parents to select the child with the best possible life. Given the difference in (...) quality of life, intended parents should try to have a genetically related child. This finding is also a strong reason for society to invest public resources in the development of techniques that enable people to create genetically related children. (shrink)

This paper provides a thorough analysis of two often informally stated claims. First, successful argumentation in the sense of persuasive argumentation requires agreement between the interlocutors about the rationality of arguments. Second, a general agreement about rationality of arguments cannot itself be established via argumentation, since such an attempt leads to an infinite meta‐regress. Hence, agreement about the rationality of arguments is a precondition for successful argumentation. As the paper argues, these plausible claims hold under the assumption that interlocutors are (...) subjectively rational and follow their own standards of rationality when engaging in argumentation. (shrink)

The proof paradox results from conflicting intuitions concerning different types of fallible evidence in a court of law. We accept fallible individual evidence but reject fallible statistical evidence even when the conditional probability that the defendant is guilty given the evidence is the same, a seeming inconsistency. This paper defends a solution to the proof paradox, building on a sensitivity account of checking and settling a question. The proposed sensitivity account of legal proof not only requires sensitivity simpliciter but sensitivity (...) of each relevant step of the proof procedure and/or sensitivity concerning all relevant alternatives. This account avoids problems that have been identified for other sensitivity views of legal proof. Moreover, it is argued that sensitivity, rather than safety, is the crucial modal condition for legal proof. It is, finally, shown that the provided account can fruitfully support very different existing views on the relationship between knowledge and legal proof. (shrink)

Questions surrounding deep disagreement have gained significant attention in recent years. One of the central debates is metaphysical, focusing on the features that make a disagreement deep. Proposals for what makes disagreements deep include theories about hinge propositions and first epistemic principles. In this paper, I criticize this metaphysical discussion by arguing that it is methodologically flawed. Deep disagreement is a technical or semi-technical term, but the metaphysical discussion mistakenly treats it as a common-sense concept to be analyzed and captured (...) by our pre-theoretical intuitions. Since the literature on deep disagreement is subject to this fundamental confusion and deep disagreement is not a helpful umbrella term either, I propose eliminating the notion of deep disagreement from the philosophical discourse. Instead of analyzing the nature of deep disagreement, we should develop theories about different forms of disagreement, including disagreement about hinge propositions and disagreement about epistemic principles, and, in particular, a theory of rationally irresolvable disagreement. (shrink)

That bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning fail to instantiate persuasive argumentation is an often informally presented but not systematically developed view. In this paper, I will argue that this unpersuasiveness is not determined by principles of justification transmission but by two straightforward principles of rationality, understood as a concept of internal coherence. First, it is rational for S to believe the conclusion of an argument because of the argument, only if S believes sufficiently many premises of the argument. Second, if S (...) doubts that a source _O_ is reliable and believes that information _i_ is delivered by _O_, then S rationally suspends judgment about the truth of _i_. This paper aims to accomplish two tasks. First, it provides a thorough analysis of why bootstrapping argumentation is not an instance of rational persuasion. Second, it contains a more general theory about preconditions and limits of persuasive argumentation. (shrink)

In his logical treatises, John Mair develops a method and a set of rules for the verification of modal propositions, which is in the spirit of his predecessors Ockham and Buridan, but ultimately goes beyond them. He calls this method positio de inesse. It is also by this method that the truth conditions for divided modal propositions are set out. There is a standard interpretation of it as a form of reductionist method, and scholars have been tempted to think that (...) it was motivated by an implicit rejection of de re modal properties shared by Mair and other sixteenth- century nominalists. After presenting the background to Mair’s writings on the semantics of modal propositions, in this paper we revisit Mair's version of the method of positio de inesse. We argue that it is based on some basic semantic rules and contend that this procedure analyzes divided modal propositions into singular de re sentences referring to possible objects. Consequently, we conclude that this method does not reflect a reductionist approach to modal discourse. We instead provide an alternative interpretation. (shrink)

The book aims at a comprehensive account of the relationship between Wittgenstein s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Russell s philosophy as it developed between 1903 and 1918. The focus is on the central nucleus of the Tractatus, i.e., on its ontology and the picture theory of language. On Russell s side, the multiple-relation theory of judgment has been chosen as the leading theme around which the presentation of several other issues is organized. Whereas the similarity between Russell s and Wittgenstein s (...) problems is pointed out, the deep difference between their solutions is acknowledged, in particular with reference to the opposition between objects and names on the one hand, and facts and propositions on the other.". (shrink)

In this paper I generalize the new approach to nonmonotonicreasoning that was presented in [6]. This generalization results in the inconsistency-adaptive logic PRL . I give proof theory, semantics, mention interesting properties,and comment on the reconstruction and amelioration of other nonmonotoniclogics and mechanisms.

O presente artigo investiga a conexão entre modalidade e tempo em dois mestres de artes Parisienses ativos na primeira metade do século 14, João Buridan (c.1290-c.1361) e João de Jandun (c.1286-c.1328). Busca-se elucidar a abordagem de ambos acerca da natureza dessa relação em um conjunto de textos pouco explorados nos debates sobre a interpretação de modalidades medievais, a saber, os comentários ao fim do primeiro livro do De Caelo de Aristóteles. A interpretação da relação entre o ‘necessário’ e o que (...) ‘sempre é’ nesse texto recebera interpretações divergentes sobre a controversa assimilação de necessidade e omnitemporalidade em concepções pré-modernas das modalidades. Por meio da análise do debate em torno das passagens Aristotélicas do De Caelo, posto por ambos os filósofos pertencentes ao milieu da Faculdade de Artes em Paris, o artigo demonstra que tal assimilação não era consensual. Através do contraste entre as análises de Jandun e Buridan, conclui-se que, embora Buridan acomode a necessidade temporal pressuposta no De Caelo enquanto necessidade condicional, ele desenvolve uma crítica da validade geral dos argumentos de Aristóteles no que tange a modalidades absolutas. (shrink)

It is often stated that joint actions are linked to so-called _directed duties_. It is not just that we should “do our part” in a joint action simply because it is the right thing to do or because it is in our best interest. Instead, we “owe” it to the other participants. Despite its _prima facie_ plausibility, this claim is not well understood. Is it true that duties in joint action are directed? Which notion of directedness is relevant to understanding (...) the normativity of joint action? I first argue that we can characterize the notion of directed duties in joint action in terms of a network of inferentially related normative relations and practices. I apply this analysis to show that duties in joint action _are_ directed. This analysis supports the view that the normativity in joint action is special as it involves what Stephen Darwall calls “individual authority” without entailing “representative authority”. A perhaps surprising conclusion derived from this account is that actions in joint action are owed to everyone involved in the group equally. This supports Margaret Gilbert’s joint commitment account of joint intention. (shrink)

L’amore per i libri e le biblioteche di un grande filosofo.

This essay questions the self-sufficiency of abstract, non-consequentialist, principles as a defence of a libertarian regime. The argument focuses on the difficulties involved in attempts to defend the priority of negative rights if an attractive conception of freedom and an agent-relative view about our reasons to respect rights are to be upheld. The paper closes by suggesting how libertarianism could gain support from various, and perhaps mutually irreducible and even conflicting, considerations in a wide consequentialist system.

In 1988, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski published his essay Metaphysical Horror, conceived as a philosophical and historical interpretation of the vicissitudes of metaphysics in Western philosophy. At the same time, Kołakowski's attempt to map out the history of that metaphysical horror was a way to escape from it. Put differently, he traced the evolution of metaphysical horror—from metaphysics to antimetaphysics—in Western philosophy while simultaneously pleading for the preservation of metaphysics, be it in a very specific shape. To clarify Kołakowski's (...) idiosyncratic position regarding the status of metaphysics, the author's exposition falls into two parts, each in three steps. In the first part, mainly drawing upon a textual analysis of Metaphysical Horror, Kołakowski's portrayal of the evolution of Western metaphysics toward its marginalization in contemporary philosophy is summarized. Subsequently, his own concept of hermeneutical metaphysics in relation to the everlasting importance of man's metaphysical need for the Absolute is presented. In the second part, set up as an exercise in intellectual history, Kołakowski's concept of hermeneutical metaphysics is situated against the double background of his Oxford environment and of that of an Eastern-European ally regarding the vicissitudes of the metaphysical tradition. The conclusion is double. First, this twofold background makes it clear why his hermeneutical metaphysics is at the same time a historical metaphysics and a moral ontology, dependent on man's everlasting metaphysical need for the Absolute. Second, it clarifies why his hermeneutical metaphysics takes a unique position in contemporary philosophy, different from the current concept of analytic metaphysics, on the one hand, and from the present-day concept of post-metaphysics in Continental philosophy, on the other. (shrink)

This article focuses on the completely neglected relation between Collingwood and Heidegger's concepts of metaphysics by highlighting their respective reactions to Alfred J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap. In his article “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” from 1931, Carnap exposed the metaphysical statements, used by Heidegger in his inaugural lecture What is Metaphysics?, as pseudo-statements. Three years later, Ayer published the article “Demonstration of the Impossibility of Metaphysics”.In the late 1930s, Ayer's position was attacked by Collingwood in (...) An Essay on Metaphysics. In the British debate, the tables of the German debate were thus turned. Whereas the analytic philosopher Carnap reacted against the metaphysician Heidegger, the metaphysician Collingwood reacted against the analytic philosopher Ayer. Accordingly, a correct understanding and evaluation of the relation between Collingwood's and Heidegger's concepts of metaphysics are dependent on knowledge of their respective reactions to Ayer and Carnap.Three steps are taken. First, the discussion between Carnap and Heidegger is presented. Second, the friction between Ayer and Collingwood is outlined. In the final section, the similarities and differences between Collingwood and Heidegger's concepts of metaphysics are explored and situated within their divergent views on the Western history of philosophy. (shrink)

Il mistero delle immagini e un libro sconosciuto.

This book addresses selected central questions in phenomenological psychology, a discipline that investigates the experience of self that emerges over the course of an individual’s life, while also outlining a new method, the formal indication, as a means of accessing personal experience while remaining faithful to its uniqueness. In phenomenological psychology, the psyche no longer refers to an isolated self that remains unchanged by life’s changing situations, but is rather a phenomenon which manifests itself and constantly takes form over the (...) course of a person’s unique existence. Thus, the formal indication allows us to study the way in which ipseity relates to the world in different situations, in a way that holds different meanings for different people. Based on this new approach, phenomenological psychotherapy marks a transition from a mode of grasping the truth about oneself through reflection, to a mode of accessing the disclosure of self through a work of self-transformation that requires the person to actually change her position on herself. By putting forward this method, the authors shed new light on the dynamic interplay between a person’s historicity and uniqueness on the one hand, and the related physiopathological mechanisms on the other, providing evidence from the fields of genetics, cardiology, the neurosciences and psychiatry. The book will appeal to a broad readership, from psychiatrists, psychologist and psychotherapists, to researchers in these fields. (shrink)

when r. g. collingwood began to write his autobiography in 1938, he was only 49 years old, still very young for drawing up a final balance. Only three years earlier, he had been appointed to the prestigious Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy in Oxford. By then, Collingwood was already severely ill and he knew that he only had a few more years to live. Therefore, he did not only present his past evolution in his autobiography; his attention rather went to (...) those subjects for which he feared there was not enough time left to elaborate. The project that in his mind deserved the most attention was the defence of the possibility of a contemporary metaphysics. Less than one year later, Collingwood elaborated this .. (shrink)

Naturalism in philosophy is characterized by the assumption that nature is the whole of reality. Thus, the naturalist must try to show how concepts considered irreducible and trans-natural by traditional transcendental philosophy can be reduced to categories of natural science. In this article I analyze two strategies of reducing the notion of identity in naturalism proposed respectively by Quine and Wittgenstein. Key words: Naturalism, Identity, Quine, Wittgenstein.