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)

The goal of this article is to address the problem of inconsistent models and the challenge it poses for perspectivism. I analyze the argument, draw attention to some hidden premises behind it, and deflate them. Then I introduce the notion of perspectival models as a distinctive class of modeling practices whose primary function is exploratory. I illustrate perspectival modeling with two examples taken from contemporary high-energy physics at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which are (...) designed to show how a plurality of seemingly incompatible models is methodologically crucial to advance the realist quest in cutting-edge areas of scientific inquiry. (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)

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)

Recently, social neurosciences have been interested in the investigation of neurophysiological responses related to the experience of positive emotions, such as gratitude, during social interactions. Specifically, the aim of the present research was to investigate whether gratitude related to gift exchange could favor cooperative behavior and bond construction, by improving behavioral and autonomic responsivity. At this regard, the autonomic synchronization and behavioral performance of 16 friends coupled in dyads were recorded during a joint attentional task. Gift exchange could be occurred (...) either at the beginning or in the middle of the task. For the recording of simultaneous autonomic activity [heart rate and skin conductance level ], a hyperscanning biofeedback paradigm was used. Intra-subjective analysis showed an increase in behavioral [accuracy ] and autonomic responses when the gift exchange took place at the beginning of the task rather than in the middle. Moreover, inter-subjective analysis revealed an increase in behavioral performance and greater autonomic synchronization of HR index. The present research, therefore, shows how gratitude and trust experienced following gift exchange can modify participants’ reactions by creating a shared cognition and the adoption of joint strategies. (shrink)

Nowadays philosophers as intellectuals are strongly encouraged to be more active on their cultural scene and particularly to direct their efforts towards creating or reconstructing possible bridges of communication. As is well known, some of the distances between intellectual worlds are often matters of ‘styles of writing,’ as well as socio-historical controversies which can be reconsidered in a different light at successive generational readings. In this view, both historical and theoretical...

L’articolo in una prima parte ripercorre le dinamiche del fenomeno memoriale nella configurazione di paesaggi globali (mnemoscapes), evidenziandone il presentismo e riconoscendolo come postmemoria. Queste considerazioni motivano uno sguardo antropologico-critico su attori.trici e terreni inediti come le memorie criminali delle donne genocidarie in Rwanda, affrontate nella seconda parte nel confronto con i livelli di giustizia e nelle contraddizioni del richiamo “pacificatorio” ai ruoli di genere socialmente accettati, in aperto contrasto con l’efferatezza della violenza perpetrata.

The present study examined the role of morality, competence, and attractiveness as perceived from faces in predicting hiring decisions for men and women. Results showed that for both female and male applicants, facial competence significantly predicted the hiring decision directly and indirectly, through the mediation of the overall impression. Decisions concerning female applicants were, however, significantly predicted by multiple dimensions—that is, facial morality, facial competence, and attractiveness—with the mediation of the overall impression. Facial competence was the only significant predictor of (...) impression and, in turn, hiring decision about men. These findings resonate the mottoVirtutem forma decorat, “Beauty adorns virtue,” painted by Leonardo da Vinci on the reverse side of the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, and suggest that women’s chances of getting a job are less than those of men whenever they do not show a moralandcompetentandattractive face. (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.

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 aim of this paper is to take Galileo's mathematization of nature as a springboard for contrasting the time-honoured empiricist conception of phenomena, exemplified by Pierre Duhem's analysis in To Save the Phenomena , with Immanuel Kant's. Hence the purpose of this paper is twofold. I) On the philosophical side, I want to draw attention to Kant's more robust conception of phenomena compared to the one we have inherited from Duhem and contemporary empiricism. II) On the historical side, I want (...) to show what particular aspects of Galileo's mathematization of nature find a counterpart in Kant's conception of phenomena.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------. (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)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

In the texts collected in the second volume of the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Husserl extensively discusses experiences of joy (Freude). By considering Husserl’s examples related to joy not as mere illustrations, but as a guiding thread for the identification of experiential structures, this article shows how these examples are not only significant for the general theory of intentionality of affective and emotional non-objectifying acts, but also provide valuable insights into the specific phenomenon of joy itself. Specifically, the article (...) demonstrates how the distinction between joy, sensory pleasure, and liking provides insights into the intentional structure of joy as a responsive affect. On the basis of these distinctions, the article raises the normative question about the appropriateness of affective and emotional responses. It argues that the appropriateness of joy should be assessed from two perspectives: in relation to the value that justifies an affective response and in relation to a personal motivational nexus. From the former perspective, joy can be normatively assessed. However, when only considering the latter perspective, joy cannot be assessed according to objective normative standards. Finally, building on these findings, the article explores how the phenomenology of joy and motivation may be connected to the specific experience of depth and discusses the role of joy for a phenomenological investigation of the personal self. (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)

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)

Philosophie des expériences radicales est un ouvrage riche et ambitieux à de nombreux points de vue. Stéphane Madelrieux montre dans quelle mesure l’expérience constitue l’une des catégories majeures de la philosophie française contemporaine, bien qu’elle ait du mal à être reconnue comme telle, soit du fait de la variété des penseurs l’ayant discutée, soit en raison de sa moindre visibilité par rapport aux catégories qui sont “calquées sur le nom des courants manifestes (vie, existence, struc...

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)

Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700. By Joseph R. Dennis. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 379. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 390. $49.95.

Le corps est désormais partout – non seulement il accompagne notre existence de tous les jours , mais il est aussi au centre de multiples représentations . Son statut, cependant, est loin d’être clair et évident. D’une part, il est considéré comme ce par quoi l’on peut montrer quel genre d’individu on est. D’autre..

Laws of nature play a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy and are crucial to understanding his philosophy of science in particular. In this volume of new essays, the first systematic investigation of its kind, a distinguished team of scholars explores Kant's views on the laws of nature in the physical and life sciences. Their essays focus particularly on the laws of physics and biology, and consider topics including the separation in Kant's treatment of the physical and life sciences, the (...) relation between universal and empirical laws of nature, and the role of reason and the understanding in imposing order and lawful unity upon nature. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of Kant's philosophy of science, and to historians and philosophers of science more generally. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the relevance of Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology for questions related to normality and to the different kinds of deviation from what is taken tobe normal. The article begins with a discussion of two limit cases in the understanding of the concepts of normality and deviation: a strictly normative understanding, according to which each deviation is norm-deviation, and a descriptive understanding, according to which deviation is what underlies individuality. Considering Waldenfels’ responsive philosophy in connection with Kurt (...) Goldstein’s and George Canguilhem’s philosophies of the organism, both understandings are critically discussed. In particular, the article shows how both views turn out to be one-sided and should be revised on the basis of a responsive account of the organism (particularly of the human organism) and its situated relation to circumstances, events, and affordances in the world it inhabits. The analysis of the different forms of responsiveness of the human organism, and notably the distinction between ‘catastrophic’ or pathological and ‘creative’ or organising kinds of responsiveness, can allow us to develop a relational and dynamic account of normality and deviation. Accordingly, neither normality nor deviation should be taken as univocally defined states; they should rather be reassessed on the basis of the processes in and through which order is interrupted, disturbed, and possibly reshaped or newly instituted. (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)

Success-to-truth inferences have been the realist stronghold for a long time. Scientific success is the parameter by which realists claim to discern approximately true theories from false ones. But scientific success needs to be probed a bit deeper. In this article, I tell three tales of scientific success, by considering in turn success from nowhere, success from here now, and success from within. I argue for a suitable version of success from within that can do justice to the historically situated (...) nature of our scientific knowledge. The outcome is a new way of thinking about success-to-truth inferences along perspectivalist lines. (shrink)

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)

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)

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, we study the distribution and interpretation of a non-temporal use of the future tense in Italian, called ‘presumptive’ or ‘epistemic’, which we label here PF. We first distinguish PF from its closest modal relatives, namely epistemic necessity/possibility/likelihood modals, as well as weak necessity modals. We then propose an account of PF in declaratives and interrogatives that treats it as a special comparative subjective likelihood modal, and test its empirical predictions. A theoretical lesson drawn from this detailed study (...) of the semantics of PF is that semantics needs sharpened theoretical tools to be able to capture the fine-grained distinctions languages make when it comes to signaling modulated epistemic commitment to a proposition. (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)

The second half of the nineteenth century was a crucial moment for the institutionalization of psychology from European experimental studies that became increasingly popular in the United States. The relationship between pragmatist philosophy and biology is deeply linked to psychology, and in particular to the physiological and Darwinian psychology elaborated by William James. This article focuses on a portion of the much broader debate involving some of the leading American exponents of the new psychology with the intention of highlighting important (...) methodological and theoretical issues that arose concerning the relationship between biology and philosophy within an evolutionary framework, issues in some ways still relevant today. (shrink)

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...

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.

Tenth-century Islamic alchemy attributed different roles to the figure of Hermes, all of which were retained in later alchemy. The playful changing of perspectives, in which Harmis al-Harāmisa perpetually changed his connotation, allowed for a complex game played at the border between science and literature. In the process, he turned from representing the venerable author of the early alchemical texts - master over ancient wisdom and scientific 'subject' - into an 'object' of research, into an allegory of the nucleus of (...) the Great Work, and into a mysterious image of the secret that he himself had handed over to men. (shrink)