Mario Bunge, author of the monumental Treatise on Basic Philosophy, is widely renowned as a philosopher of science. In this new and ambitious work he shifts his attention to the social sciences and the social technologies. He considers a number of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, law, history, and management science. Bunge contends that social science research has fallen prey to a postmodern fascination with irrationalism and relativism. He urges social scientists to re-examine the philosophy and the (...) methodology at the base of their discipline. Bunge calls for objective and relevant fact-finding, rigorous theorizing, and empirical testing, as well as morally sensitive and socially responsible policy design. (shrink)

The notion of a hypothesis being deployed essentially in the derivation of a novel prediction plays a key role in the deployment realist reply to Laudan’s and Lyon’s attacks to the No Miracle Argument. However Lyons criticized Psillos’ criterion of essentiality, urging deployment realists to abandon this requirement altogether and accept as true all the assumptions actually deployed in novel predictions. But since many false assumptions were actually deployed in novel predictions, he concludes that the “no miracle argument” and deployment (...) realism fail. I reply that the essentiality condition is required by Occam’s razor, and a “no miracle argument” deprived of that condition is a straw man. While Lyons’ criticisms of Psillos’ formalization of essentiality may be well taken, I suggest that there is a simpler formulation which escapes those criticisms and is enough to deal with the supposed counterexamples to the No Miracle Argument and deployment realism: a hypothesis is essential when it does not have a proper part (in Yablo’s sense) from which the prediction could also be derived. I then show how this condition rescues deployment realism from Lyons’ purported historical counterexamples. Essentiality in this sense cannot be detected prospectively, but this is just what we should expect, and far from causing problems for deployment realists, this frees them from unreasonable obligations. (shrink)

Franco “Bifo” Berardi tells us that the current transformation of every domain of social life into economy has led to “the subjugation of the soul to work processes.” There is a newfound love of work and, consequently, writes Berardi, “no desire, no vitality seems to exist anymore outside of the economic enterprise.” Concerned as it once was with “fostering the soul,” and concerned as it now is with preparing students for the job market, what role might education have in Berardi’s (...) musings? Can “creativity,” “self-actualization” and “curiosity,” which are so valued in education, still speak and help foster a sense of the soul that exceeds economy and work? In this paper, I explore these questions by providing an account of what is at stake in Berardi’s conception of the soul and its subjugation to work. I draw on his ideas to critically appraise the seemingly-benign aspirations of the “creative class,” a term coined to signal a new era for human flourishing afforded by shifts towards personal creativity in the digital economy. I then move to consider how, in particular, the ubiquitous promotion of “creativity” and “curiosity” in education tends to replicate a form of learning that puts the soul to work, as it were, promoting a narrow, self-enterprising subject with a frantic instrumental orientation towards the world. I conclude with a discussion on how demands on learners, to be always curious, innovative, nimble and open to discovery lead to panic, collapse and depression: the diseases of the soul. (shrink)

This collection of essays, written on four continents by scientists, philosophers and humanists, was initially presented to Karl R. Popper on his sixtieth birthday as a token of critical admiration and in recognition of his work. But the volume also stands on its own as a remarkable series of statements utilizing Popper's critical vision in the study of philosophy proper, logic, mathematics, science as method and theory, and finally to the study of society and history. What is remarkable is that (...) Popper worked in all of these areas, not in a cursory or discursive way, but with the utmost clarity and rigor.. The core position of this volume and its contributors is that the progress of knowledge is not a linear accumulation of definitive acquisitions but a zigzagging process in which counterexamples and unfavorable evidence ruin generalizations and prompt the invention of more comprehensive and sometimes deeper generalizations, to be criticized in their turn. A critical approach to problems, procedures, and results in every field of inquiry is therefore a necessary condition for the continuance of progress. The title of this volume then is, in a sense, an homage to Popper's critical rationalism and critical empiricism. The essays are a tribute to his unceasing and uncompromising quest, not for final certainty, but for closer truth and increased clarity. Among the contributors are outstanding figures in philosophy and the exact sciences in their own right, including Herbert Feigl, R. M. Hare, J.O. Wisdom, Nicholas Rescher, David Bohm, Paul K. Feyerabend, F. A. Hayek, and Adolf Grunbaum. Social science contributions include Hans Albert on social science and moral philosophy, W. B. Gallie, on the critical philosophy of history, Pieter Geyl on The Open Society and its Enemies, and George H. Nadel on the philosophy of History. (shrink)

One issue underlying all others when technology transfer occurs is the need to build capacity. This capacity is needed in order to know what to buy, when to buy, from whom to buy, and how to buy. These decisions should always be taken by those working within a country's economy, particularly the decision on what to buy, which is value laden.

Biomedical research, on the one hand, contributes to important goals from generation of knowledge about the human body to the development and testing of therapeutics of all kinds. On the other hand, it can produce serious and sometimes unforeseeable consequences. In the ethical analysis of these two aspects of biomedical research, two important argumentative strategies play a major role. First, slippery slope arguments are used to warn of potential risks and to highlight knowledge-based limitations. Second, a dual-use problem describes the (...) challenge that already established techniques can be used for both morally wrong and morally right purposes. These two argumentative strategies appear to share several similarities, which will be investigated in this article. For this purpose, the article will first provide clear working definitions for both types of argument. This lays the foundation for the further ethical analysis. In a second step, and in order to investigate the similarities and differences of the argumentative strategies with an example from current ethical debates, CRISPR-Cas9, a currently very promising tool of genome editing, will be examined. The extent to which the possible applications of this genome editing tool can be addressed by slippery slope arguments or the dual use problem will be investigated. For this purpose, selected studies involving the use of CRISPR-Cas9 will be examined. Based on this two-step, analytic and example-based comparison of slippery-slope argumentation and dual-use considerations, the article will detail the ethically relevant difference between the two argumentative strategies and at the same time contribute to the ongoing ethical debate about CRISPR-Cas9. (shrink)

Victory is the ultimate aim in high performance sports; when it comes to team sports, the goal is the key that allows players to achieve that victory. This is the case with futsal which, due to its internal structure as well as the speed in the development of its game, makes the achievement of a goal not an isolated event, but rather more than one goal must be scored to achieve victory. The aim of the present study is to analyze (...) the construction of offensive sequences that have resulted in goal-scoring in the two main European futsal leagues, the Spanish and the Italian, as well as to identify the patterns relating to offensive actions that have ended with a goal being scored. Observational methodology was used to develop the research and an ad hoc observation instrument was developed for this purpose. The data was analyzed using inferential statistics as well as sequential analysis of delays in a diachronic analysis to identify the patterns of offensive actions. The results obtained enable recognition of a league’s idiosyncrasy patterns in goal-scoring in each of the leagues studied. The results obtained will allow experts to have a better understanding of how goals are scored and how to establish more specific training tasks, in both attack and defense. (shrink)

It is often said that television series are nowadays as good as films, or even better than them, but the philosophical inquiry into the former remains much less developed than the philosophy of film. A handful of recent books (e.g., Nannicelli 2016, Shuster 2017, Andrzejewski and Salwa 2018, Bandirali and Terrone 2021) have tried to fill the gap, but there is much work still to be done. Significant contributions to the aesthetics of television series are coming from television studies and (...) fil... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the function of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism within Adorno’s thought. In order to do so, I have chosen to focus on the issue of the social significance of the work of art and the role played by the concept of literary material. Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, can be read as a reinterpretation of the idealist aesthetic model based precisely on a non-idealist notion such as that of aesthetic material.If one is (...) to allow a seemingly brutal simplification, there are two ways to think about the social meaning of literature. One identifies somehow the subject of the text, assesses whether or not this challenges the society from which the literary work stems, and on this ground establishes its social character. According to this perspective, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl can be seen as socially engaged literature, while Proust’s Recherche cannot, or can only to a lesser extent. The other approach argues instead that any literary work, and in any of its instances, says something about the society in which it takes shape. In this contribution I would like to focus on this latter approach. In particular, I am interested in understanding how literature is connected to society, that is, through which identifiable elements literary works express certain aspects of society. The Hegelian idealistic idea according to which Greek tragedy expresses the constitutive features of Athenian society, and which is found again and again in the authors who in various ways have taken up Hegel’s legacy, is generally accepted as such and valued for the explanatory opportunities it offers. It is my opinion, however, that one notion in particular can be retrieved within the whole inherited baggage of that aesthetic tradition, which may be able to further clarify the relationship between literature and society. This concept is that of material and the author who has most thoroughly investigated it is Adorno. In this paper I will try to outline the main features of a counterintuitive notion such as that of “literary material” and thereby explain why it plays such an important role in Adorno’s rework of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism. The concept of material, in fact, is key to the definition of another aesthetic category around which, according to Adorno, most of the problems connected to works of art gravitate, that is to say, the notion of form. From Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, one of his most insightful readers, Peter Szondi, draws the main principle for his study of the historical form of modern drama, namely the idea that form is essentially a precipitation, a sedimentation of contents. The work of art, then, at least according to this definition, is essentially identified by its form. Or, better said, the artwork must be interpreted as the way in which a certain (historical) content sediments in a certain external form. That the form of the work of art is precipitated content means, in simple terms, that no effective disjunction can be assumed between form and content. This is how Adorno reinterprets the concept of “identity of form and content” stressed by classical aesthetics. The content is such only insofar as it is precipitated into a certain form. This amounts to saying that no objective distinction can be established between one and the other. Now, if one were to ask how the form is made, Adorno’s answer is quite straightforward: the form is made by means of organization and, precisely, by means of the organization of the material. As one reads in Aesthetic Theory, in fact, “the substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials,” and the particular form of an artwork is defined as the “organization” of its “materials” (Adorno 1970, transl. 1997: 201). The concept of material, therefore, is key to the definition of the very notion of work of art in its constituent components, namely the relationship between form and content. In this paper I will first of all clarify the notion of artistic material in general and subsequently I will turn to strictly literary material. Finally, and this is the main goal of this essay, I will show to what extent this definition of the material possibly contributes to a better understanding of a widely and variedly debated literary phenomenon of our time, namely the form of the so-called postmodern novel. (shrink)

Este artigo procura apresentar algumas considerações acerca do entrecruzamento do pensamento político de Hannah Arendt e a questão ambiental. Para tanto, o seguinte questionamento servirá de guia para a reflexão aqui pretendida: se o âmbito natural é perturbado pelas ações humanas, é razoável a crença de que a própria ação humana possa ser capaz de frear o atual cenário de catástrofe? Assim sendo, assume-se, aqui, como procedimento metodológico uma análise bibliográfica que recorre ao livro A condição humana (The human condition, (...) 1958 [2010]) e alguns ensaios da coletânea Entre o passado e o futuro (Between Past and Future, 1961 [2009]). De modo geral, busca-se desenvolver o argumento de que embora não se possa enquadrar Hannah Arendt no rol das “historiadoras das ciências”, tampouco uma “pensadora da ecologia”, é certo que ela nunca deixou de se interessar e comentar os eventos científicos de seu tempo, bem como de se preocupar com as consequências das ações humanas. Logo, os assuntos relacionados aos avanços tecnológicos e científicos constituem assuntos de primeira grandeza e importância tanto para o mundo quanto para a política. Em suma, pretende-se sustentar a hipótese de que para Hannah Arendt, a imagem adotada da natureza – ao menos desde a época moderna –, e as ações humanas cometidas a partir desta compreensão, afetam diretamente nossa existência política. (shrink)

This text is based on a reflection on the context and meaning of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s visit to Mexico in February-March 1949 and the lectures he gave at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). I rely on the information, analysis and notes of Merleau-Ponty that Michel Dalissier offers us in his book Inédits I-II. I devote myself particularly to commenting on the cultural experience that this trip represented for Merleau-Ponty – his relationship with (...) the Mexican philosophy of the Hiperión group – as well as his conception of culture and the relationship between cultures that he exhibits at the time and in the general construction of his own work and philosophy. I support the thesis that the question of a plurality of cultures and interculturality can only be thought in a rigorous way – without falling into cultural relativism or an abstract universalism – through a phenomenological-existential reformulation of the « universal, » as Merleau-Ponty outlines it in the Mexico Conferences. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the impossibility of considering food as ‘a thing.’ It addresses the legal profiles of food from an interdisciplinary perspective by treating the production, signification and consumption of food as semio-spatial categories. The argument starts from the foundational premise that the dynamics of food, as a magmatic flow, comprehensively connect and transform all human activities and ecological aspects of life. Like a stream of radial projections in a mass of fluid, food functions as a semiotic membrane, embodying (...) the fundamental relationality of each human body to the whole globe. The main implication subsequently drawn from this view of ‘food’ is that to eat is always and everywhere to incorporate the entire world. Since food is the epitome of the space and time proactively and enactively involved in its production, in terms of both human activities and natural resources, by the mere fact of eating no human being can avoid recognizing themselves as a space–time cannibal. The consequences of this conclusion for food justice and its spatial dynamics are enormous, and even more so in light of the current ecological crisis. The essay thus critiques many categories related to the food politics of the ecological footprint, including sustainability, bio-diversity, food systems, and the circularity of food and resources. One proposed alternative offered is a chorological reading of human rights and their possible use as semantic-spatial transducers of the activities and phenomena inherent in the ‘food-as-omnilateral-relationship.’ The dynamic and transformative relationship between space, human rights and ecological change emerges clearly. Human action, and thus law are, then, constitutive ‘ingredients’ of food, which comes to the fore as a ubiquitous icon of the interpenetrative relationship between humanity and the becoming of the Earth; being and becoming blur. In the same vein, spaces and actions, facts and values are transformed into moving elements of an overall evolving situation that makes each a means of the other and thereby a generative factor of its significance. (shrink)

Review of: Communauté (Gemeinschaft), Martin Buber (2018) Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 157 pp., ISBN 978-2-84162-432-4, p/bk, €10.

The present text reviews the treatment of psychologism after the ‘Logical Investigations’. Its aim is to fill a gap in the Husserl an research about this topic, which focusing on the above-mentioned work, provides a homogenous treatment of the later position without considering the possibility of evolution. A primary result of our investigatión is the distinction of six stages in the above-mentioned development. These are established in correlation to the development in connected themes such as the theory of psychology, of (...) the reduction and of the self-constitution of subjectivity. In this context, the Husserlian around 1927 concerning the idea of an final understanding and final overcoming of the transcendental psychologism stands out, as does the later identification in ‘Crisis’ between transcendental phenomenology and psychology. Such identification revises the presupposition present :from 1906 onwards that· included in the context of a regional ontology, which puts aside the idea, decisive in 1927 of a ‘refined’ transcendental psychologism made possible by the development of this psychology. (shrink)

SÍNTESE - O artigo trata, dentro da perspectiva de Heidegger, da culpa/dívida e da responsabilidade em sua fundamentação ontológica, tanto na perspectiva de uma ontologia fundamental de Ser e tempo, quanto na interpretação não metafísica do Lógos de Heráclito. Como resultado, apontase para o fundamento da lógica/linguagem e da ética no Lógos originário de Heráclito, encaminhando a necessidade de uma nova concepção da essência do homem.

L’interview retrace la carrière universitaire de l’historien Mario Kessler, né en RDA. Il a étudié l’histoire à Iéna et à Leipzig, a rédigé ses thèses de doctorat et de post-doctorat alors qu’il se trouvait encore en RDA, mais a dû trouver sa voie dans un système universitaire entièrement nouveau en 1990. Il y est parvenu sans changer sa position politique de socialiste critique. Grâce à la formation universitaire de sa famille et à sa connaissance de la littérature occidentale, il (...) disposait déjà avant 1989 d’une avance en matière de connaissances, qu’il a pu mettre à profit, par exemple lors de ses nombreux postes de professeur invité et de ses séjours de recherche aux États-Unis. Il n’a jamais oublié ce qu’il devait à ses professeurs et compagnons universitaires de l’Est et de l’Ouest. (shrink)

This text was published in n. 1/1987 of «Filosofia politica». We thank the authors, the director of the journal and the editor il Mulino for giving permission to republish it.

A análise dos cânones conciliares e das epístolas pontifícias mostra que os cristãos estiveram diretamente envolvidos com eventos espetaculares e, não obstante as reiteradas proibições por parte da hierarquia, a dança e a música permaneceram centrais seja na vida pública seja na privada, ingressando inclusive nos ritos e nos edifícios cristãos.