Michela Massimi is a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh and was the keynote speaker for Philosophy as a Way of Life. She is currently the PI for an ERC-funded project ʽPerspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge, and Truth from a Human Vantage Point.ʼ Massimi has extensive experience working on interdisciplinary projects and has frequently engaged in public philosophy. In this interview, she discusses the future of research in the UK post-Brexit, the challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary (...) research, shares some thoughts on the history of philosophy and science and our relationship with it, and emphasises the importance of bringing philosophy into the public sphere. She also offers advice for early career researchers and graduate students in philosophy. (shrink)

There is hardly another principle in physics with wider scope of applicability and more far-reaching consequences than Pauli's exclusion principle. This book explores the principle's origin in the atomic spectroscopy of the early 1920s, its subsequent embedding into quantum mechanics, and later experimental validation with the development of quantum chromodynamics. The reconstruction of this crucial historic episode provides an excellent foil to reconsider Kuhn's view on incommensurability. The author defends the prospective rationality of the revolutionary transition from the old to (...) the new quantum theory around 1925 by focusing on the way Pauli's principle emerged as a phenomenological rule 'deduced' from some anomalous phenomena and theoretical assumptions of the old quantum theory. The subsequent process of validation is historically reconstructed and analysed within the framework of 'dynamic Kantianism'. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a realist about science if one takes seriously the view that scientific knowledge is always perspectival, namely historically and culturally situated? In this book, Michela Massimi articulates an original answer to this question. The book begins with an exploration of how scientific communities often resort to several models and a plurality of practices in some areas of inquiry, drawing on examples from nuclear physics, climate science, and developmental psychology. Taking this plurality in science (...) as a starting point, Massimi explains the perspectival nature of scientific representation, the role of scientific models as inferential blueprints, and the variety of scientific realism that naturally accompanies such a view. Perspectival realism is realism about phenomena (rather than about theories or unobservable entities). The book defends this novel realist view, which places epistemic communities and their situated knowledge center stage. The result is a portrait of scientific knowledge as a collaborative inquiry, where the reliability of science is made possible by a plurality of historically and culturally situated scientific perspectives. Along the way, Massimi offers insights into the nature of scientific modelling, scientific knowledge qua modal knowledge, data-to-phenomena inferences, and natural kinds as sortal concepts. Perspectival realism is ultimately realism that takes the multicultural nature of science seriously and couples it with cosmopolitan duties about how one ought to think about scientific knowledge and the distribution of the benefits resulting from scientific advancements. (shrink)

Time, control and risk are interrelated concepts that provide a valuable framework for exploring the connections among various performative practices and their cultural functions. By referencing sports, circus arts, and musical performance, this article examines the similarities and differences between musical reproductive performance and improvisation. It focuses on the concept of transformational processes through analogies.

This topical collection was an invitation to offer a better understanding of the philosophical view called “perspectivism” and its relevance to science by exploring a variety of metaphysical and epistemological issues arising from perspectivism in science. The papers here collected deliver on this two-fold goal. I will not try to summarise each of them, but suffice to say that they map onto three broad inter-related themes, which I shall call scientific practice, normativity, and history.

Forse si tratta solo di un’analogia, ma la distinzione tardo-medievale tra potenza assoluta e ordinata di Dio presenta un’aria di famiglia con alcune argomentazioni di carattere ermeneutico ­– psicanalitico dei primi decenni del XX secolo: in entrambi i casi ci si trova alle prese con quello che si potrebbe definire discorso sull’origine, quell’origine da cui, in qualche maniera, nasce un ordine.

This paper develops an analysis of the relation between fiction and make-believe based on the achievements of imagination. The argument aims at a “reciprocal supplementation” between two approaches to fiction. According to one approach, pretense or make-believe structures play a crucial role in our experience of fiction. Discussing Husserl’s view on bound imagining and Walton’s account of fiction as make-believe, I show why pretense and make-believe cannot thereby be reduced to the mere reproduction of something we would experience as original. (...) According to the other approach, which is presented in Ricoeur’s work on imagination, fiction exemplifies a productive or creative power of imagination that is not active in pretense or make-believe activities. The reciprocal supplementation between these two approaches concerns the following aspects: on the one hand, I wish show why Husserl and Walton allow us to rectify Ricoeur’s claim that make-believe is only reproductive. On the other hand, taking up some of Ricoeur’s insights, I wish to clarify why such an impact should be understood in terms of transformation. (shrink)

One of the difficulties nurses experience in clinical practice in relation to ethical issues in connection with young oncology patients is moral distress. In this descriptive correlational study, the Moral Distress Scale-Paediatric Version (MDS-PV) was translated from the original language and tested on a conventional sample of nurses working in paediatric oncology and haematology wards, in six north paediatric hospitals of Italy. 13.7% of the total respondents claimed that they had changed unit or hospital due to moral distress. The items (...) with the highest mean intensity in the sample were almost all connected with medical and nursing competence and have considerably higher values than frequency. The instrument was found to be reliable. The results confirmed the validity of the MDS-PV (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.959). This study represents the first small-scale attempt to validate MDS-PV for use in paediatric oncology-ematology nurses in Italy. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a semantic account of temporally mismatched past subjunctive counterfactuals. The proposal consists of the following parts. First, I show that in cases of temporal mismatch, [past] cannot be interpreted inside the proposition where it occurs at surface structure. Instead, it must be interpreted as constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation. This has the effect of shifting the time of the evaluation of the conditional to some contextually salient past time. Second, I will propose (...) specific felicity conditions (presuppositions) for subjunctive conditionals and I will argue that there is a strict correspondence between the time of evaluation in the truth conditions of a conditional and the time relevant for the felicity conditions. In other words, if the time relevant for the accessibility relation has been shifted to the past, then the conditional's presupposition will make reference to a past context. On the other hand, if no past is constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation, the conditional's felicity will make reference to the current (main) context. Third, I will argue that the intuition that the antecedent of mismatched counterfactuals is not true is a scalar implicature arising from a competition not between assertions but between presuppositions. Finally, I will investigate the repercussions of my proposal for the general theory of modality. (shrink)

In this chapter, I evaluate the thorny issue as to whether Thomas Kuhn’s view supports a form of realism or relativism. I consider two prominent realist readings of Kuhn, offered respectively by Hoyningen-Huene and Giere, and some of the challenges each of them faces. I offer then a reading of Kuhn’s contentious claim about “working in a new world” in terms of what I call naturalized Kantian kinds. I show how this reading can escape some of the challenges and deliver (...) a mild form of realism. (shrink)

Structural realism was born in the attempt to reach a compromise between a realist argument and an antirealist one, namely the ‘no miracle’ ­argument and the ‘pessimistic meta-induction’, respectively. According to the ‘no miracle’ argument, scientific realism is the only philosophy that does not make the success of science a miracle. The only way of explaining why science is so ­successful in making predictions that most of the time turn out to be verified, is to believe that theoretical terms refer, (...) that theories in mature science are true or at least approximately true, and that the same term refers to the same thing even if it occurs in different theories. It is the referential nature of scientific theories that explains the success of science. (shrink)

This book presents a historiographical and theorical analysis of how Husserlian Phenomenology arrived and developed in North America. The chapters analyze the different phases of the reception of Edmund Husserl’s thought in the USA and Canada. The volume discusses the authors and universities that played a fundamental role in promoting Husserlian Phenomenology and clarifies their connection with American Philosophy, Pragmatism, and with Analytic Philosophy. Starting from the analysis of how the first American Scholars of Edmund Husserl's thought opened the door (...) to the reception of his texts, the book explores the first encounters between Pragmatism and Husserlian Phenomenology in American Universities. The study focuses, then, on those Scholars who fled from Europe to America, from 1933 onwards, to escape Nazism - Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Herbert Spiegelberg, Fritz Kaufmann, among the most notable - and illustrates how their teaching provided the very basis for the spreading of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. The volume examines, then, the action of the 20th Century North-American Husserl Scholars, together with those places, societies, centers, and journals, specifically created to represent the development of the studies devoted to Husserlian Phenomenology in the U.S., with a focus of the Regional Phenomenological Schools. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the production of a vast amount of COVID-19-themed brand commercials, in an attempt to exploit the salience of the topic to reach more effectively the consumers. However, the literature has produced conflicting findings of the effectiveness of negative emotional contents in advertisings. The present study aims at exploring the effect of COVID-19-related contents on the hemodynamic brain correlates of the consumer approach or avoidance motivation. Twenty Italian participants were randomly assigned to two different groups that (...) watched COVID-19-related or non-COVID-19-related commercials. The hemodynamic response [oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin modulations] within the left and right prefrontal cortices was monitored with Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy while brand commercials were presented, as the prefrontal lateralization was shown to be indicative of the attitude toward the brand and of the approach-avoidance motivation. First, the findings showed that the COVID-19-related contents were able to prompt emotional processing within the PFC to a higher extent compared to contents non-related to COVID-19. Moreover, the single-channel analysis revealed increased O2Hb activity of the left dorsolateral PFC compared to the left pars triangularis Broca’s area in the group of participants that watched the COVID-19-related commercials, suggesting that the commercials may have driven participants to dedicate more attention toward the processing of the emotional components compared to the semantic meaning conveyed by the ad. To conclude, despite expressing unpleasant emotions, commercials referring to the highly emotional pandemic experience may benefit the advertising efficacy, increasing the capability to reach customers. (shrink)

This article aims to show the validity of an actualization of William James’s pragmatist epistemology of psychology for the construction of personal identity. Following Giovanni Maddalena’s theoretical hypothesis of “gesture” as a complete synthetic tool for the acquisition of knowledge, an in-depth analysis of the continuous and dynamic conception of personal identity proposed by James may be helpful today to better develop the emotional-somatic dimension of synthetic reasoning. As far as the epistemology of the Self is concerned, significant continuities and (...) discontinuities are drawn from James’s naturalized integrated conception of personal identity in the light of this new Peirce’s inspired interpretation. This attempt is part of a wider project in which recovering the character of psychological and ontological processual continuity in James’s epistemology makes a considerable contribution to the development of a comprehensive understanding of mental models, one that avoids to tighten up these models as it happens in most of the contemporary epistemologies of the self. (shrink)

Première traduction européenne des Principles of Psychology, celle du psychologue et psychiatre Giulio Cesare Ferrari est aussi la première traduction presque intégrale des deux volumes de l’ouvrage. Elle marque le début d’un travail intense de traduction des œuvres de James en italien, qui ne sera égalé que plusieurs années après en France et en Allemagne. Elle se situait dans un moment culturel très dynamique où le rôle scientifique et culturel de la psychologie et de la philosophie faisait l’objet de grands (...) débats en Italie. Le cadre théorique et la mentalité « antiscolastique » de la psychologie de James reflétaient une nouvelle perspective naturaliste et une attitude de rupture profonde avec la tradition philosophique et psychologique précédente. (shrink)

Moving from pragmatism and drawing on a fascinating and accurate interpretation of Richard Rorty’s work, Rosa Calcaterra’s Contingency and Normativity. The Challenges of Richard Rorty (Brill-Rodopi, 2019) proposes a philosophical investigation of the relationship between normativity and contingency. Calcaterra’s longstanding familiarity with pragmatist philosophy strongly marks her attitude towards these topics and their related issues. The author takes up some of the pragmatists’ constructiv...

The results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2001) were published in 2003. In addition to data about the reading achievements of 10?year?olds in 35 countries, PIRLS 2001 also collected questionnaire information from children, their teachers, headteachers and parents. The results showed not just how well students can perform in various reading tasks, but also the relationship between reading abilities and other characteristics, including the characteristics of their homes and schools, the students' attitudes to reading, reading enjoyment, (...) self?confidence, engagement and perceptions of their reading abilities. Surprisingly enough, children in England were reported as having poor attitudes to reading, compared to children in many other countries, despite high achievement on the reading tests. This paper raises some concerns about the interpretation of results from the study, suggesting a more complex picture than that presented in the summary index published in 2003. Our secondary analysis of the attitude and achievement data from PIRLS shows that pupils with low ability levels have misunderstood the questions which tested their attitudes towards reading. The authors point out that caution is needed when making cross?country comparisons to avoid naïve approaches to interpretation. (shrink)

Background:Personal values influence nursing students’ development of professional values, which affect professional outcomes, and how nursing students react to different situations. Personal values can be shaped by different factors, including culture, gender, and age.Aims:To explore personal values held by nursing students, and to verify if and how gender and year of study affect nursing students’ personal values.Research design:A multicenter, cross-sectional study was used.Participants and research context:The whole population of nursing undergraduate students available at the time was recruited from eight centers (...) of two Universities, composing a sample of 947 students. Demographic data were collected and it was administered the Portrait Values Questionnaire.Ethical considerations:Ethical approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Boards of the University of the participating centers.Findings:The study sample was mainly composed of young (92.6%, n = 877), female (77.3%, n = 732), Italian (95.8%, n = 907), and unmarried (98.6%, n = 934) nursing students. The most important value for nursing students, consistently through the years of nursing school, was Self-transcendence, which has the motivational emphasis on helping others and selflessness. Then, we found that male students had higher levels of Power (p < 0.001) and Achievement (p = 0.031), while female students outscored male students in Benevolence (p = 0.005) and Security (p = 0.006). Year of study showed no statistically significant difference.Discussion:Nursing students express high levels in hetero-directed values. Male nursing students, although they choose a stereotypically feminine profession, outscored females in stereotypical masculine values such as dominance and success. This is the first study that describes the personal value profile of undergraduate nursing students, according to the Theory of Basic Human Values, and it is a starting point for future research.Conclusion:Nursing educators might want to consider the findings from this study while guiding students in developing awareness for their personal values. (shrink)

The _Maimonides Review_ is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles, which seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies.

The goal of this paper is to offer a compositional semantics for subjunctive and indicative will conditionals, and to derive the projection properties of the types of conditionals we consider and in particular those of counterfactual conditionals. It is argued that subjunctive conditionals are "bare" conditional embedded under temporal and aspectural operators, which constrain the interpretation of the modal operators in the embedded conditional. Furthermore, it is argued that a theory of presupposition projection à la Heim together with the present (...) proposal about their logical form explains the projection facts. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the aspectual, marginality, and concessive uses of the grading particles still and already can be reduced to the fol lowing three classes of focus sensitive-grading particles: additive particles like too, scalar particles like even, and exclusive particles like only. The meaning differences among the occurrences of still (and already) are mostly reduced to the differences among these three classes of grading particles. In turn, these differences are shown to correlate with what type of object (...) is denoted by the phrase in the scope of the particle. The proposal has repercussions also for the focus-sensitive particle again. I investigate the latter too, and I propose a parallel between the temporal and nominal domains where the contrast between still and again is analyzed along the lines of the contrast between definite and indefinite noun phrases. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a unified analysis of a number of pragmatic anomalies that have been discussed in the literature. The paper’s main goal is to account for Sobel sequences of conditionals and sequences of disjunctive sentences, but I will also propose that this analysis can be extended to sequences of sentences with superlatives. The starting point is the observation that, while all these sequences are felicitous in one order, they are infelicitous when the order is reversed. Previous proposals (...) have focussed on particular types of infelicitous sequences Ken Hale: A life in language, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001; Moss in Noûs 46:516–586, 2012; Lewis in Noûs 52:481–507, 2018; a.o.), or a subset of all the phenomena cited above Linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches on implicatures and presuppositions. Palgrave McMillan, Basingstoke, 2017; a.o.). I propose that sequences of sentences belonging to the same structured set of alternatives T are subject to a Specificity Constraint : sequences are acceptable if both alternatives are dominated by the same number of nodes in the structured set of alternatives T. Violations of SC can be avoided by strengthening the weaker alternative. However, covert strengthening violates an economy condition if the overtly stronger alternative is among those made salient by the preceding utterance in the sequence. I propose that the set of alternatives made salient by an utterance of a sentence s consists of s’s sisters and mother in T. I will show that the strengthening mechanism varies depending on the kind of sequence we have. (shrink)

What good is Kant's philosophy for current philosophy of science? There has been an increasing interest in Kant and philosophy of science in the past twenty years. Through the reconstruction of a variety of Kantian legacies in the development of nineteenth and twentieth century physics and mathematics, this edited volume explores the relevance that Kant's philosophy still has for current debates in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of physics.

In this paper, I assess recent claims in philosophy of science about scientific perspectivism being compatible with realism. I clarify the rationale for scientific perspectivism and the problems and challenges that perspectivism faces in delivering a form of realism. In particular, I concentrate my attention on truth, and on ways in which truth can be understood in perspectival terms. I offer a cost-benefit analysis of each of them and defend a version that in my view is most promising in living (...) up to realist expectations. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What did you know about Pragmatism when you started? Where did you start as a student? Charlene Haddock Seigfried – I came to pragmatism by way of existentialism. During the late sixties, I took my first graduate class at the University of Southern California – an introduction to empiricism – which I didn’t like at all, and I also attended a lecture on existentialism, which intrigued me. But I was always interested in social (...) and political issues and I was m... (shrink)

Ce premier symposium en langue française inaugure une nouvelle série de symposiums qui viendront enrichir la section multilingue de l’European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. Cette série vise à contribuer à la discussion des publications récentes qui traitent du pragmatisme ou proposent des confrontations avec ce courant de pensée. Elle s’insère dans la section multilingue, dont l’ambition est de permettre aux nombreuses voix internationales qui composent la scène pragmatiste c...

Nel leggere il recentissimo lavoro di Rosa Calcaterra, una selezione di saggi pubblicati tra il 2003 e il 2016, rivisti o integrati in vista di questa nuova pubblicazione, emerge a chiare note la forza della sua interpretazione dell’unità programmatica dei pragmatisti vecchi e nuovi, o meglio del pragmatismo in quanto “stile di pensiero calibrato su precisi obiettivi teoretico-metodo-logici” (Calcaterra 2024: 7). Anticipatrice rispetto al mainstream odierno che il suo lavoro ha senza dubbio...

The solidarity economy has been interpreted as being characterised by a political dimension: however, empirical and theoretical analysis supporting this statement is still embryonic. Drawing on a qualitative study in the city of Barcelona, this article analyses the political dimension of the solidarity economy and its transformative character with respect to neoliberalism by engaging with critical approaches related to the social movement studies. The main objectives were to investigate factors enabling the upsurge of solidarity economy organisations and how the opposition (...) of social movement participants to neoliberal rationalities impacts on the way the solidarity economy is conceived and implemented in practice. The results highlight three main dimensions in which the political dimension is reflected, and some general as well as context‐specific factors enabling the upsurge of solidarity economy organisations. Findings show how the compensative rationale that distinguishes most approaches in the field of social entrepreneurship studies is contested by the solidarity economy: its transformative character is reflected in discourses and practices that define the solidarity economy as a prefigurative socio‐economic project. (shrink)