Economics has developed into one of the most specialised social sciences. Yet at the same time, it shares its subject matter with other social sciences and humanities and its method of analysis has developed in close correspondence with the natural and life sciences. This book offers an up to date assessment of economics in relation to other disciplines. -/- This edited collection explores fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, sociology, architecture, and literature, drawing from selected contributions to the (...) 2005 Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET). There is currently much discussion at the leading edges of modern economics about openness to other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology. But what we see here is that economics has drawn on (as well as contributed to) other disciplines throughout its history. In this sense, in spite of the increasing specialisation within all disciplines, economics has always been an open discipline and the chapters in this volume provide a vivid illustration for this. -/- Open Economics is a testament to the intellectual vibrancy of historical research in economics. It presents the reader with a historical introduction to the disciplinary context of economics that is the first of its kind, and will appeal to practising economists and students of the discipline alike, as well as to anybody interested in economics and its position in the scientific and social scientific landscape. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction: Economics in relation to other disciplines Richard Arena, Sheila Dow and Matthias Klaes Part I. Economics in relation to the humanities and social sciences 1. The social science of economics Brian J. Loasby 2. Economics and literature Bruna Ingrao 3. Happiness: what Kahneman could have learnt from Pietro Verri Pier Luigi Porta Part II. Economics in relation to the life and natural sciences 4. Newtonian physics, experimental moral philosophy and the shaping of political economy Sergio Cremaschi 5. Evolutionary biology and economic behaviour: re-visiting Veblen's instinct of workmanship Mark Harrison 6. Medicine and economics in pre-classical economics Alain Clément and Ludovic Desmedt Part III. Economics and mathematics 7. Mathematics as the role model for neoclassical economics Nicola Giocoli 8. The role of econometric method in economic analysis: A reassessment of the Keynes-Tinbergen debate, 1938-43 Giovanna Garrone and Roberto Marchionatti IV. Economics and architecture 9. Economics and architecture Maurice Lagueux 10. Economic policies and urban development in Latin America Michele Alacevich and Andrea Costa V. Economics and geography 11. ‘Space’ in economic thought Giovanna Vertova 12. Economics, geography and colonialism in the writings of William Petty Hugh Goodacre Part VI. Economics and sociology 13. Economics and sociology: Gustav Schmoller and Werner Sombart on social differentiation Joachim Zweynert 14. Is Homo Oeconomicus a 'bad guy'? Isabelle This Saint-Jean -/- . (shrink)

En un estilo claro, despojado de t rminos t cnicos, Alberto Clemente de la Torre traza un recorrido por los principales t picos de la f sica cu ntica destinados a todos aquellos que quieren descubrir uno de los temas m s sugerentes de la ciencia contempor nea, sin exigirles Para ello conocimientos previos.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic, now a global health crisis, has surprised health authorities around the world. Recent studies suggest that the measures taken to curb the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak have generated issues throughout the population. Thus, it is necessary to establish and identify the possible risk factors related to the psychosocial and psychophysiological strain during the COVID-19 outbreak. The present extensive literature review assesses the social, psychological, and physiological consequences of COVID-19, reviewing the impact of quarantine measures, (...) isolation, vast human loss, social and financial consequences in the family’s economies, and its impact on the psychological health of the population. We also discussed the effect of psychophysiological factors, considering the impact of physical inactivity and modifications in nutritional habits, at psychological and physiological levels. The present review includes an actualized to date bibliography, articles for which were methodologically analyzed to verify they met the standards of quality and scientific accuracy. Authors understand the pandemic as a multifactorial event for which only a profound and extensive analysis would lead to better compression and efficient intervention in the near future. (shrink)

Orthodox decision theory is fanatical in the way it treats small probabilities of enormous value, if unbounded utility functions are allowed. Some have suggested a fix, Nicolausian discounting, according to which outcomes with small enough probabilities should be ignored when making decisions. However, there are lotteries involving only small-probability outcomes, none of which should intuitively be ignored. So the Nicolausian discounter needs a procedure for distinguishing the problematic cases of small-probability outcomes from the unproblematic ones. In this paper, I present (...) a dilemma for Nicolausian discounting: the view must be coupled either with a procedure that delivers fanatical verdicts of its own, as bad as those of orthodox decision theory, or with one that entails intransitive cyclic preferences. (shrink)

This study analysed the effects a values education programme can have on the feelings of self‐realisation, self‐concept and self‐esteem of Romany adolescents in southern Spain. To do this, an experimental group received a values education intervention but a control group did not. The intervention programme was adapted to the Romany culture. The self‐realisation, self‐concept and self‐esteem of both groups were evaluated using the Self‐Concept and Realisation Questionnaire. Statistical analyses showed the existence of significant differences between the experimental and control groups (...) on the variables studied. Based on the results, we suggest that a values education programme like this, that has been culturally adapted, can make a positive impact on the self‐realisation of young people from a marginalised community. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:At St. Isidore’s Franciscan College in Rome, the following maxim attributed to St. Patrick is inscribed above the door-way of the church: Si quae difficiles quaestiones in hac insula oriantur ad Sedem Apostolicam referantur; ut Christiani ita et Romani sitis.1 The college was founded in 1625 by Luke Wadding, O.F.M. and, under his direction, became a major seat of theological learning and political influence for the Irish in Rome.2 (...) In the nineteenth century, the Friars Minor of the Province of Ireland assigned many documents from St. Isidore’s for use in their Irish friaries. In 1872, amid the unrest caused by the Risorgimento, medieval and early-modern Irish Franciscan manuscripts were transferred to Dublin.3 At the Merchants’ Quay Convent, the librarians T.A. O’Reilly, O.F.M. and E.B. Fitzmaurice, O.F.M. divided the manuscripts into sections with alphabetically ordered shelf-marks.4 This practical approach followed the long-established system used at Italian libraries and archives in Franciscan custody.5 From 1947 until 2000, the manuscripts of the Irish Friars Minor were kept at the Franciscans’ Dún Mhuire House of Studies in Killiney, County Dublin, before their transfer to the Archives, University College Dublin.The ‘D’ collection is preserved in twenty-six sets of volumes, folders and boxed papers. The greater part consists of Luke Wadding’s correspondence, relating to his activities as theologian, historian, Irish agent in Rome and consultor to several congregations and commissions at the papal secretariat.6 In the 1920s, Paul Grosjean, S.J. included four manuscripts then housed at Merchants’ Quay in a catalogue of hagiographical works.7 Clement Schmitt, O.F.M. treated of a collection of the Franciscan documents kept in Dublin in 1964.8Letters to and from Luke Wadding are also preserved at the Vatican Library; the Archivo Generale at the General Curia of Friars Minor, Rome; the Biblioteca Landiana, Piacenza; the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples; the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan; the Archives of the Bollandists, Brussels; the Archives Générales de Royaume, Brussels; the Von Harrach Archive, Vienna; and the Franciscan friary of St. Jerome in Vienna.9Compared to some six hundred that Luke Wadding received, “the text of approximately one hundred of his letters, in whole or in part, has survived.”10 Nearly all Wadding’s extant correspondence dates from the three decades after the publication of his Acta legationis on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in 1624. Most of his letters were sent from St. Isidore, some from the friaries of Aracoeli and San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, and a few from Naples.11Luke Wadding was born in Waterford on October 16, 1588, the eleventh of fourteen children.12 He was baptized two days later on the Feast of St. Luke. His father Walter was a well-established Waterford merchant and his mother Anastasia a kinswoman of the prominent Lombard family of Waterford. After the death of his parents, Luke left Ireland with his elder brother, Matthew, who enrolled him at the Irish Jesuits’ College in Lisbon. At seventeen years of age, Wadding made his way to Matozinhos in northern Portugal, near Oporto, where he entered the Franciscan Order. On completion of his novitiate, Wadding’s superiors sent him to the University of Coimbra and from there, to Salamanca. At Easter 1613, Luke Wadding was ordained to the priesthood after his studies. He was then appointed as a professor of theology at the Franciscan College of León and later at his own alma mater, Salamanca.13Called to the Spanish capital, Luke Wadding stayed at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in the south-east of Madrid where “lived not only the heads of the Franciscan Order in Spain but also the principal preachers.”14 Such was the distinction Wadding achieved that he was chosen by Philip III for the office of theologian in the embassy sent to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in Rome.15 He lived there for almost forty years, in which time he founded St. Isidore Franciscan College, the.. (shrink)

Intellectual character education has been primarily expressed in terms of educating for intellectual virtues (EFIV). This aim of teaching intellectual virtues has received some challenges, such as how it fails to articulate adequate action guidance through exemplarist pedagogy, and how it neglects the pervasiveness of intellectual vice among students. To respond to these challenges, this paper considers the aim of educating against intellectual vices (EAIV) – teaching students not to develop intellectual vices or weakening those that they have already developed (...) – which comes with the emergence of vice epistemology. More specifically, I look at how negative epistemic exemplars can be used as a classroom strategy for EAIV, and demonstrate how this could address the aforementioned weaknesses of EFIV. (shrink)

Perhaps more than any philosophy written in the past few centuries, the work of Friedrich Nietzsche has given rise to controversy, misunderstanding, and dissent. Today Nietzsche is remembered as the revolutionary author of such polemical ideas as the death of God, the revaluation of values, the will to untruth, and the Übermensch. Yet is Nietzsche’s philosophy as atheistic, relativistic, nihilistic, and immoral as some commentators have claimed? Or ought we perhaps to give more credence to Nietzsche’s own assertion that one (...) writes books “precisely to conceal what one harbors” (BGE, 9, 289)? If “whatever is profound loves masks” (BGE, 2, 40) then might Nietzsche’s more daring claims be interpreted as clever masks behind which he conceals a deeper philosophy and on which he reveals a hidden truth? Is it not possible that the standard readings of Nietzsche are in fact misreadings—that his work invites misreading, that it is intentionally unclear, deceptive, disguised? The goal of this volume is to reread Nietzsche for all that he shows and all that he hides. It is to dig deeper into his work in order to challenge misreadings of old and invite misreadings anew—as, indeed, his work itself calls for and demands. (shrink)

This paper studies the relationship between promoting people's welfare and respecting their autonomy of choice under risk. I highlight a conflict between these two aims. Given compelling assumptions, welfarists end up disregarding people's unanimous preference, even when everyone involved is entirely rational and only concerned with maximizing their own welfare. Non-welfarist theories of social choice are then considered. They are shown to face difficulties, too: either they fail to respect the value of welfare in at least one important sense, or (...) they end up prioritizing different people's welfare differently in non-risky choices, on the basis of their attitudes to risk, which are intuitively irrelevant in this context. (shrink)

There’s something paradoxical with a person saying ‘I am humble’; it doesn’t seem so humble to self-attribute humility in general, and intellectual humility in particular. In light of the recent interest in educating for intellectual virtues, this paradox has interesting implications to educating for intellectual humility. In particular, one might wonder how a teacher can be a model of intellectual humility to her students. If a teacher says something like ‘Here’s me being an exemplar of intellectual humility’, the paradox above (...) takes on a pedagogical angle. In this paper, I analyze the paradoxes in self-attributing and learning intellectual humility using three different accounts of this virtue, before proceeding to untangle what could be called the ‘Modeling Paradox’ of teaching intellectual humility and figure out whether this virtue can be non-problematically demonstrated to one’s students. (shrink)

Mathematical apriorists usually defend their view by contending that axioms are knowable a priori, and that the rules of inference in mathematics preserve this apriority for derived statements—so that by following the proof of a statement, we can trace the apriority being inherited. The empiricist Philip Kitcher attacked this claim by arguing there is no satisfactory theory that explains how mathematical axioms could be known a priori. I propose that in analyzing Ernest Sosa’s model of intuition as an intellectual virtue, (...) we can construct an “intuition–virtue” that could supply the missing explanation for the apriority of axioms. I first argue that this intuition–virtue qualifies as an a priori warrant according to Kitcher’s account, and then show that it could produce beliefs about mathematical axioms independent of experience. If my argument stands, this paper could provide insight on how virtue epistemology could help defend mathematical apriorism on a larger scale. (shrink)

La distopía o utopía negativa es un subgénero que ha hecho famoso la literatura inglesa, particularmente desde las obras de George Orwell (1984, de 1948) y Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, de 1932). Sin embargo, suele pasarse por alto que la primera antiutopía moderna pertenece a un autor ruso, Evgueni Zamiátin: la novela Nosotros (My), de 1922, producto de una modernidad tardía. Esta obra estableció los paradigmas que caracterizarían de ahí en más formalmente a la distopía. En 1968, los hermanos (...) Arcadi y Boris Strugatsky, principales referentes de la ciencia ficción soviética en aquellos años, reelaboraron a partir de estas bases una ciudad ya no distópica sino infernal y oscuramente irracional, eje de su novela Ciudad maldita (Grab obrechonni), una distopía ya en clave posmoderna, llevándola a un auténtico (e irresuelto) planteo sobre la naturaleza del mal. A partir de un marco teórico que vincula la evolución de las utopías negativas con la ciencia ficción, nuestra hipótesis implica que esta novela, curiosa síntesis de ciencia, política, esoterismo y literatura, define un nuevo tipo de obra distópica. El paisaje de ruinas que implica, tan caro a la ciencia ficción posterior a la caída del Muro de Berlín, se vuelve un sistema de sinécdoques que representa, desde la estética del fragmento, un profundo nihilismo donde la posmodernidad adquiere la forma de abismo. (shrink)

This book proposes a way to think and speak about God in and through our contemporary, secular society, bridging the theist/atheist divide by considering the divine through the lens of aesthetics. It represents a timely contribution to Continental philosophy of religion that includes some of the most respected and important voices in the field.

This study describes the weekly variations of well-being ratings relative to fatigue, stress, delayed-onset muscle soreness, sleep quality, and Hooper questionnaire throughout the season. In addition, the well-being variables for the playing position in different moments of the season were discussed. Twenty-one elite young soccer players U17 took part in this study. From the beginning of the pre-season, well-being status was monitored daily by the HQ method throughout 36 weeks, including four periods: pre-season, early-season, mid-season, and end-season. Players trained at (...) least 3 times per week throughout the season. The main outcome was that, in weeks 33 and 28, the highest [wFatigue: 15.85 ± 3.38 arbitrary units ; wHQ: 48.86 ± 9.23 AU] and the lowest wFatigue and wHQ occurred, respectively, although the lowest level of wDOMS happened in week 28, while the highest wDOMS was observed in week 5. The highest wSleep and wStress were observed in weeks 8 and 34, respectively, while the lowest wSleep and wStress were marked in week 29 coincidentally. In the HQ between every weekday, except recovery day, and the day of the match, considerable highest HQ was only revealed in 2 days after MD in contrast to overall team comparison. In the present study, we observed that the well-being changes between different phases of the season as well as between weeks and days of the week with the MD are significant. These results provide a great point of view for coaches and practitioners about well-being variations over a season in elite youth soccer level. As a result, coaches will be more aware about non-functional overreaching and taking measures to prevent it. (shrink)

How should we choose on behalf of people with different attitudes to risk? Simon Blessenohl has recently argued that this question poses a dilemma: it seems that sometimes we must choose either acts that everyone disprefers or else acts that are sure to turn out worse than some other act. In this article, I offer a complaints-centered account of how to take people’s attitudes to risk into consideration in our decision-making, and then I show that it provides a way out (...) of Blessenohl’s dilemma. (shrink)

This article will examine some theses that Badiou developed in the first period of his philosophy, when he was close to the theoretical horizon of Althusserianism. The article traces a route back from the Manifesto for Philosophy to some yet unpublished notes, dating from the late Sixties, on an aborted collective project on materialist philosophy. While, according to the later Badiou – who is also the most well-known – contemporary philosophical discourse should recover the Platonic gesture after Heidegger, it will (...) be shown that the early Badiou, by debating the nature of the Platonic gesture with Macherey, seems to conceptualise philosophical discourse and its function under the inseparable link of dialectical materialism and historical materialism. The article ends with some open questions for a possible theory of discourse that would build on Badiou’s theoretical insights. (shrink)

The book's aim is to give a working representation of what metaphysics is today. The historical contributions reveal the roots of metaphysical themes and how today's methods are linked to their Aristotelian and Leibnizian past. The volume also touches on the relationships between ontological and linguistic analysis, the questions of realism and ontological commitment, the nature of abstract objects, the existential meaning of particular quantification, the primitiveness of identity, the question of epistemic versus ontological vagueness, the necessity of origin, the (...) nature of natural necessity, the possibility of intermittent existence, the notion of a temporal part and its place in an account of persistence, the question of identity and change across time and possible worlds, and many more. Readership: A toolbox for any researcher in metaphysics and an essential source for any PhD student with ontological interests. (shrink)

During his late period, Nietzsche is particularly concerned with the value that mankind attributes to truth. In dealing with that topic, Nietzsche is not primarly interested in the metaphysical disputes on truth, but rather in the effects that the "will to truth" has on the human being. In fact, he argues that the "faith in a value as such of truth" influenced Western culture and started the anthropological degeneration of the human type that characterizes European morality. To call into question (...) the value of truth is therefore necessary, if one wants to help mankind to find her way in the labyrinth of nihilism. -/- In this new addition to Nietzsche scholarship, Gori explores the origin and aim of the philosopher's late perspectival thought by merging the theoretical with the historical approach, with a special focus on the epistemological debate that influenced Nietzsche. As a result, the book provides a contextual reading of the issue that supports the idea that Nietzsche’s attitude in addressing the problem of truth is, in a broad sense, pragmatic. (shrink)

We may well be witnessing a decisive event in the history of knowledge as diversity is becoming one of the premier values of late modern societies. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become epistemically consequential. This article examines how two of its varieties, viewpoint diversity and educational diversity, have come (...) to transform the moral economy of science. Both aim at multiplying perspectives on a given subject, but their political subtexts differ markedly. The valorization of educational diversity followed a US Supreme Court decision in 1978 that enabled universities to advance social justice, if they justified race-conscious admissions in terms of the pedagogic benefits of a more diverse student body for all. By contrast, the proponents of viewpoint diversity aim at the reform of scientific knowledge production and distribution rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. We examine the political epistemology of viewpoint diversity by analyzing a controversy between social psychologists who, amid the American culture wars of the 2010s, debated how to rein in their political biases in a scientific field supposedly lacking political diversity. Out of this scientific controversy grew Heterodox Academy, an activist organization promoting viewpoint diversity in higher education. By relating and comparing viewpoint and educational diversity, we clarify what is at stake epistemically in the US-centric moral economy of diversity. (shrink)

The business world is facing a very complicated situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Small- and medium-sized companies —both in Spain and at the global level—are seeing their survival jeopardized by a fall in revenues. This scenario is aggravated in the case of micro-SMEs headed by female entrepreneurs. Accordingly, micro-SMEs, particularly those led by female entrepreneurs, need to reinvent themselves to overcome the current adversities that could lead to the destruction of their businesses and hence their jobs. One of the (...) ways to do this is to take advantage of digital transformation. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze which variables influence the financial results of female-led Spanish micro-SMEs when they carry out social marketing actions. For that purpose, an online survey was designed and analyzed using the “PROCESS” macro. Results show that social media marketing actions have significant effects on financial performance. (shrink)

The paper provides a thorough account of the relationship between Ernst Mach’s thought and that of an apparently more intellectually distant near-contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche. The consistency of their views is in fact substantial, as I try to show within the paper. Despite their interests being different, both Mach and Nietzsche were concerned with the same issues about our intellectual relationship with the external world, dealing with the same questions and pursuing a common aim of eliminating worn-out philosophical conceptions. Moreover, it (...) can be argued that both Mach and Nietzsche converged on what we now know as the problem of realism versus anti-realism in the philosophy of science, and that they both rejected ‘representational’ (realist) conceptions of science in favour of a certain sort of pragmatic anti-realism, whose focus was on the role science plays as a means of orientation. (shrink)

During the second decade of the 20th century Hans Kleinpeter, an Austrian scholar devoted to the development of the modern science, published some brief papers on Nietzsche’s thought. Kleinpeter has been one of the main upholders of Mach’s epistemology and probably the first who connected his ideas with the philosophy of Nietzsche. In his book on Der Phänomenalismus (1913) he described a new world view that arose in the 19th century, a perspective that ‒ according to him ‒ completely contrasted (...) the mechanistic and metaphysical world view of the old school of scientific inquiry. The main outcome of the scientists whose name was related with this perspective (e.g. Clifford, Maxwell, Kirchoff and, obviously, Mach himself) has been the refusal of the absolute value of any “truth”. Kleinpeter’s statements on this topic are a good example of the rising of a Scientific Philosophy, whose development involved many scientists and thinkers that later set up the Verein Ernst Mach and the Wiener Kreis. On the other hand, his interest on Nietzsche is a relevant case of reception of the latter’s thought, that Kleinpeter puts into the context of the contemporary epistemology. In fact, he considers Nietzsche as one of the main upholders of the phenomenalistic world view, and states that he «took part at the same renewal of philosophical investigation that arose from the latest results of scientific inquiry» during the 19th century. A renewal whose main outcomes has been presented by John Stallo in his book on The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1881), which Kleinpeter translated in German and published in 1901. According to Kleinpeter, in Nietzsche’s writings (mostly unpublished) one can find a theory of knowledge quite close to the one presented by both Mach and the new born Pragmatism, i.e. the complete refusal of an absolute truth and, therefore, the development of an antimetaphysical world view. In my paper I’ll discuss the main statements presented by Kleinpeter on this topic and show which of Nietzsche’s ideas has actually been in compliance with the main outcomes of late 19th century science. Thus, I’ll carry out a reconstruction of an unfamiliar side of the first period of reception of the philosophy of Nietzsche and its relevance to the development of a new (scientific) world view. (shrink)

In this paper I deal with Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in the context of 19th century epistemology. In particular, I argue that, even though Nietzsche shows the ontological lack of content of truths (both on the theoretic and on the moral plane), he nevertheless leaves the space for a practical use of them, in a way that can be compared with William James' pragmatism. I thus deal with Nietzsche's and James' concept of "truth", and show their relationship with some outcomes (...) of Ernst Mach's epistemology. (shrink)

ITA: Quello del “buon europeo” è in Nietzsche un tema significativo, che si presenta originariamente connesso alle riflessioni di Nietzsche sulla cultura europea, arricchendosi col tempo di una portata filosofica che si lega agli obiettivi del suo pensiero maturo. Scopo del presente articolo è di mostrare la genesi e l’evoluzione di tale concetto, a partire dalle sue prime occorrenze in Umano, troppo umano I fino al suo compiuto sviluppo negli scritti del 1885-87. Tale studio permetterà di evidenziare il particolare valore (...) che Nietzsche attribuisce ai “buoni europei”, in quanto promotori dello sviluppo spirituale conseguente alla compiuta liberazione della morale cristiana. ENG: The “good European” is a rich and important topic in Nietzsche. It is first related to Nietzsche’s early reflections on European culture, and during the 1880’s it gains philosophical value, being strictly connected with the purposes of Nietzsche’s mature thought. The aim of this paper is to track the genesis and development of the notion of “good European”, from Human, all too Human I to Nietzsche’s writings from the years 1885-1887. That investigation shall particularly show the meaning and value that Nietzsche attributes to the good Europeans; as for him, they are in fact the leaders of the spiritual development that follows the overcoming of Christian morality. (shrink)

We discuss the role of perceptron (or threshold) connectives in the context of Description Logic, and in particular their possible use as a bridge between statistical learning of models from data and logical reasoning over knowledge bases. We prove that such connectives can be added to the language of most forms of Description Logic without increasing the complexity of the corresponding inference problem. We show, with a practical example over the Gene Ontology, how even simple instances of perceptron connectives are (...) expressive enough to represent learned, complex concepts derived from real use cases. This opens up the possibility to import concepts learnt from data into existing ontologies. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the role played by Ernst Mach on Nietzsche’s thought. Starting from the contents of his Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, I’ll show the close similarities between their view on both human knowledge and the scientific world description. In his writing on science Nietzsche shares Mach’s critique to the 19th century mechanism and its metaphysical ground, as much as his way of defining the substantial notions such as matter, ego and free will. Moreover, my investigation will (...) make it clear that Mach cannot be seen as a direct source of Nietzsche’s thought, since the latter wrote many times on the same subjects long before his first reading one of his works. Rather, it is possible to consider the writings of Lange, Spir and Spencer as the first sources of Nietzsche’s views on the main themes Mach dealt with in his work from 1886. (shrink)

This essay aims to shed new light on Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology through the analysis of the problem of incommensurable, by taking into consideration Gaetano Chiurazzi’s work, Dynamis. Ontologia dell’incommensurabile. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expression is assumed as the reading key of this comparison: it allows to connect the theme of incommensurability (considered in the first part) both to the problem of history and of intersubjective relationship (analyzed in the second part), and to the fundamental problem of perception (third part). In particular, (...) the analysis of the concept of expression will stress the ontological value of the phenomenological description of perception, pointing out a particular affinity between the ontology of incommensurable and the phenomenological approach. Therefore, the discovery of incommensurability and the phenomenological method will be interpreted as two different starting points for one and the same path, which leads to a non-substantialist and relational conception of Being. Rather than providing a new interpretation of this definition of Being, this comparison aims to make it clearer and better understandable, by underlining some of its essential aspects. In particular, I will consider the possibility to interpret consciousness and the subject as expressive events, analyzing the philosophical consequences of this definition. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticism towards the substance-concept „I“ plays an important role in his late thought, and can be properly understood by making reference to the 19th century debate on the scientific psychology. Friedrich Lange and Ernst Mach gave an important contribution to that debate. Both of them developed the ideas of Gustav Fechner, and thought about a „psychology without soul“, i.e. an investigation that gives up with the old metaphysics of substance in dealing with the mind-body problem. In this paper (...) I shall deal with both Lange and Mach (whose writings has been read by Nietzsche), in order to shed some light on Nietzsche’s rejection of the „I“ in philosophy. (shrink)

What is freedom? Can we measure it? Does it affect policy? This book develops an original measure of freedom called 'Autonomy Freedom', consistent with J. S. Mill's view of autonomy, and applies it to issues in policy and political design. The work pursues three aims. First, it extends classical liberalism beyond exclusive reliance on negative freedom so as to take autonomous behavior explicitly into account. Second, it grounds on firm conceptual foundations a new standard in the measurement of freedom that (...) can be fruitfully coupled with existing gauges. Third, it shows empirically that individual preferences for redistribution and cross-country differences in welfare spending in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries are driven by the degree of 'autonomy freedom' that individuals enjoy. By means of an interdisciplinary approach and a sophisticated econometric methodology, the book takes an explicit stand in defense of freedom and sets the basis for a liberalism based upon people's actions and institutions. (shrink)