Platonic religiosity is the first of two volumes devoted to the analysis of religiosity or religious feeling (pathos) in Plato. -/- (Back cover) Platonic Religiosity is a hermeneutical attempt to read Platonic works from the perspective of their religiosity. The aspects examined in the book are limited for the moment to the most basic, perhaps even the simplest, dimensions of religious feeling, those involving the representation of a relationship between man and divinity, Earth and Heaven, "low" and "high". Low and (...) high are spatial metaphors constitutive of our thinking. Although, in this case, they indicate the link between man and the super-sensible world, they also presuppose, at all times, the devout feeling (and the risk) of an insurmountable distance and remoteness that divides men from the numen. The need to affirm the relationship partly overcomes the presence of this feeling of distance, but never manages to neutralise it completely. -/- Religious feeling as such always oscillates between two terms: the need to establish a relationship with the divinity, and thus to guarantee its proximity to man, and the affirmation of its transcendence, namely the distance that divides us from the numen, up to the point, eventually, where the danger becomes the greatest: the denial of the god by man (atheism) or the human feeling of being abandoned by the god. The presence of these oscillations in the Platonic texts is analysed in several chapters of the book, devoted to different themes, such as the representations of reciprocity (do ut des), the images of the friendly god and the hostile god, the feeling of the threshold, prayers and invocations, verecundia and nostalgia, the feeling of dependence, the notion of prescience, assimilation to the god, the different types of ineffability, the role of atheism and incredulity, and lastly the notion of conversion, which substantiates Platonic religiosity by characterising it in the sense of a redemption-belief. (shrink)

Reciprocal libertarianism is a version of left-wing libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian distribution of resources according to reciprocity. In this paper, I show that reciprocal libertarianism is a coherent and appealing view. I discuss how reciprocal libertarians can handle conflicts between self-ownership and reciprocity, and I show that reciprocal libertarianism can be realised in a framework of individual ownership of external resources or in a socialist scheme of common ownership (libertarian socialism). I also compare reciprocal libertarianism with left-libertarian (...) approaches: I argue that a reciprocity-sensitive version of left-libertarianism (reciprocal left-libertarianism) is coherent and morally superior to traditional left-libertarianism, on grounds of incorporating a distinctively solidaristic and recognition-oriented aspect of equality. The policy implications of reciprocal libertarianism will differ depending on which rights people can have over external resources, but all reciprocal libertarian views acknowledge the existence of social rights that people have as co-operators. (shrink)

The conversation between Giorgio Barberio Corsetti and Pietro Montani, led by Dario Cecchi, focuses on some of the principal aspects of the career and work of Paolo Rosa and Studio Azzurro, by making reference also to the occasion when the director and the philosopher met the artist and his team. Of such an artistic path, they have been particularly emphasized the interest for the dialogue among different artistic languages (theatre, video art); the attention to the way images are able (...) to refresh the meaning of action and word within theatre and performing arts generally speaking; the relationship between art and technics in the perspective of a “poetic” (or better “poietic”) use of technologies and media; the importance given to the public (ethical and political) dimension of images and art installations, able to working through the sense of belonging to a community. (shrink)

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in (...) philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

The absence of an English translation of Gonzaga's writings, both as a whole and separately, , inspired me to undertake it with the aim of making it more accessible to the public. If I were to talk briefly about the outline, the first original French version of the text appears as an anonymous author's work. In that first version signed by Sir Thomas Witth whom nothing is known about, Gonzaga doesn’t appear. His name hadn’t been appearing in the first booklet (...) for seven years until it appeared as translator in the 1807 version. Researchers concur that this was actually a trick which Gonzaga has been hiding behind because he probably never had the courage to introduce himself as the author. It is claimed that it has been conducted a lot of research in order to recover the text of Sir Thomas Witth or other possible authors with a similar name but any satisfactory solution to the riddle has not yet been given. Regarding historical data carried out during my research, I would like to offer my opinion that there is the Scottish philosophy of Common Sense hidden behind this pseudonym which deserves attention. (shrink)

We normally suppose that any artwork “is about” something. The aim of this paper is to show that, even if we can often successfully treat artworks like (historical, sociological, biographical, economical, psychological…) documents, such a circumstance isn’t essential in order to make of an object (a building, a photo…) an artwork (nor it is, parenthetically, the fact that the object in question can be judged as a “beautiful” object, in any sense of this word). The only important circumstance is that (...) an object is adequately documented to be an artwork. (shrink)

In recent decades a growing number of analytic political philosophers have started to pay attention to the ethics or morality of international economic integration. In this paper we offer an overview of the normative questions related to international trade. The paper has eight parts and focuses on these topics starting from a conceptual definition of trade: the legal, institutional and governance dimensions of international economic exchange and related ethical questions; the idea that trade has distributive effects within participating countries; the (...) distinction between the ethics of production and consumption; two specific international markets, the market for natural resources and that for weapons. (shrink)

The article makes two substantive contributions to the existing literature on the ethics of international assistance and global justice. First, it builds what we take to be a widely held set of propositions about international assistance into a consistent view, and articulates a strong case against its desirability. Second, it sketches a more attractive alternative. To do so the article uses Sen’s idea of agent-oriented development as a starting point while at the same time providing a generalization of Sen’s account (...) and a justificatory framework that does not rely on the capability approach. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content as an (...) ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

This critical essay evaluates the potential integration of distinct kinds of expertise in policymaking, especially during situations of critical emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This article relies on two case studies: herd immunity and restricted access to ventilators for disabled people. These case studies are discussed as examples of experts’ recommendations that have not been widely accepted, though they were made within the boundaries of expert epistemic authority. While the fundamental contribution of biomedical experts in devising public health policies (...) during the COVID-19 pandemic is fully recognized, this paper intends to discuss potential issues and limitations that may arise when adopting a strict expert-based approach. By drawing attention to the interests of minorities, the paper also claims a broader notion of “relevant expertise.” This critical essay thus calls for the necessity of wider inclusiveness and representativeness in the process underlying public health policymaking. (shrink)

In the space of four years, from 1826 to 1829, the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal published three anonymous articles seemingly advocating doctrines inspired by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Decades of scholarship have initially attributed the most outspoken of the three articles, the 1826 “Observations on the Nature and Importance of Geology,” to Robert Grant, and subsequently to Robert Jameson, thanks to a critical reassessment by James Secord. More recently, scholars have also ascribed to Jameson an article published in 1829, “Of the Continuity (...) of the Animal Kingdom by Means of Generation from the First Ages of the World to the Present Times.” A third short contribution, the 1827 “Of the Changes which Life has Experienced on the Globe” has been credited to the Franco-German Ami Boué. Research undertaken over several years has led to the identification of the three authors hiding behind the veil of anonymity. They were not the ones scholars have agreed upon, nor were they really “Lamarckians.” The discussion of the ways in which the three texts reached Edinburgh broadens our understanding of the daily working practices of contemporary periodicals and of the networks of circulation of texts at the Continental level. Finally, when considered within their proper conceptual and social context, the three articles throw light on the many ways in which, during the 1820s, European amateurs, naturalists, and journalists debated the succession of life forms throughout the history of the Earth. (shrink)

Anaphoric deflationism is a prosententialist account of the use of “true.” Prosentences are, for sentences, the equivalent of what pronouns are for nouns: as pronouns refer to previously introduced nouns, so prosentences like “that’s true” inherit their content from previously introduced sentences. This kind of deflationism concerning the use of “true” (especially in Brandom’s version) is an explanation in terms of anaphora; the prosentence depends anaphorically on the sentence providing its content. A relevant implication of this theory is that “true” (...) is not understood as a predicate and that truth is not a property. Primitivism, defended by Frege, Moore, and Davidson, is associated with two ideas: (1) that truth is a primitive and central trait of our conceptual system and (2) that truth, as such, cannot be defined. This second claim can be called “negative primitivism,” and it especially points out the facts about the “indefinability” of truth generally advocated by primitivists. In what follows, a connection is established between the deflationist’s rejection of the predicate and of the property and facts (and primitivist ideas) about the indefinability of truth. This connection establishes a common framework to lend further explanatory power to both options. According to the resulting view, this indefinability can explain the appeal and soundness of a deflationist dismissal of predicates and properties dealing with truth. (shrink)

The mention of a “Dog” (Κύων) by Aristot. Rhet. 3,10,1411a24-25 should be interpreted as a reference to Diogenes the Cynic, and not to Antisthenes, as was argued by Goulet- Caze.

This article examines the ethics of ambiguity formulated by existentialist authors in the 1940s, linking it to turn-of-the-century debates on ethics between philosophy and the social sciences. The underlying thesis is that, rather than representing a radical conceptual novelty, the ethical thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, strained between freedom and situation, constitutes a revisiting and updating of philosophical positions from the landscape of the Third Republic. To demonstrate this, the thought of Frédéric Rauh is examined. Indeed, anticipating (...) what de Beauvoir would later call “ambiguity”, Rauh sought to develop an ethics of action that would constitute a third way between sociological objectivism and the empty abstractions of idealism and rationalism. By reconstructing the transitions from one generation and historical context to the next, the article shows how, and through which mediators, the existentialists were well aware of this debate and, in their own way, developed a philosophy of action, of ethical experience, similar to Rauh’s. (shrink)

Alternative agricultural systems, like organic and local agriculture, are becoming increasingly important in Europe to the detriment of conventional methods. As a matter of fact, sustainable agriculture, which started as a niche sector, has been able to conquer a significant share of the European agro-food market. Institutional promotion along with increasing consumer demand has allowed for the development of different agricultural models, from the farm to the fork, with an increasing focus on the ethical issues associated with the agro-food production (...) system. For instance, the organic agriculture agro-food chain is based on four principles, namely health, ecology, fairness and care with the goal of competing in the global agro-food market while respecting the environment, livestock, producers, and consumers. Within these themes, the seed market represents an extremely complex part of the whole picture. The present paper analyses the historical evolution of the seed sector by identifying the main issues related to sustainable agricultural systems and protection of biodiversity. It follows the identification of different seed markets based on different farm types. The two aspects are then discussed and matched in order to identify the main issues characterizing the sector. A review of possible solutions to those problems, taking into account their ethics, is also provided. (shrink)

I. Del regno terreno.--II. Del regno celeste.--III. Del regno papale.

Taking into consideration two famous philosophical perspectives (Danto’s and Walton’s, respectively) on artistic categories (“style”, principally), this paper focuses on a peculiarity of Paladinos works: the robust interplay between their transparency (when taken as a medium) and the opaqueness of their contents (when taken as images).