The prehistory of science and technology studies -- The Kuhnian revolution -- Questioning functionalism in the sociology of science -- Stratification and discrimination -- The strong programme and the sociology of knowledge -- The social construction of scientific and technical realities -- Feminist epistemologies of science -- Actor-network theory -- Two questions concerning technology -- Studying laboratories -- Controversies -- Standardization and objectivity -- Rhetoric and discourse -- The unnaturalness of science and technology -- The public understanding of science -- (...) Expertise and public participation -- Political economies of knowledge. (shrink)

In trying to explain the possibility of akrasia , it seems plausible to deny that there is a conceptual connection between motivation and evaluation ; akrasia occurs when the agent is motivated to do something that she does not judge to be good . However, it is hard to see how such accounts could respect our intuition that the akratic agent acts freely, or that there is a difference between akrasia and compulsion. It is also hard to see how such (...) accounts could be extended to the realm of theoretical reason, but this is generally not taken Ito be a problem, because it is generally assumed that there is no similar phenomenon in the realm of theoretical reason. This paper argues that there is such a thing as theoretical akrasia, and that we can find a characterization of this phenomenon in Descartes’s Meditations. Drawing on certain passages in the Meditations, we can construct an account of theoretical akrasia; this account can then be adapted to resolve the original problem of akrasia in the realm of practical reason. The account asserts that there is a conceptual connection between motivation and evaluation in free action; it also enables us to show how the akratic agent is still acting freely when he does something that he does not judge to be the best all things considered. (shrink)

This article systematically reviews published studies of the association of pharmaceutical industry funding and clinical trial results, as well a few closely related studies. It reviews two earlier results, and surveys the recent literature. Results are clear: Pharmaceutical company sponsorship is strongly associated with results that favor the sponsors' interests.

This philosophical introduction to and discussion of social and political studies of science argues that scientific knowledge is socially constructed.

The relationship between Adam Smith's official methodology and his own actual theoretical practice as a social scientist may be grasped only against the background of the Humean project of Moral Newtonianism. The main features in Smith's methodology are (i) the provisional character of explanatory principles, (ii) 'internal' criteria of truth, (iii) the acknowledgement of an imaginative aspect in principles, with the related problem of the relationship between internal truth and external truth understood as mirroring 'real' causes. Smith's Newtonian (as opposed (...) to Cartesian) methodology makes room for progress in social theorizing as it allows for a decentralization of the various fields of Moral Science, contributing to the shaping of political economy. On the other hand, the Cartesian legacy in Smith's Newtonian methodology makes the relationship problematic between phenomena and principles. (shrink)

Roughly 40% of the sizeable medical research and literature on recently approved drugs is “ghost managed” by the pharmaceutical industry and its agents. Research is performed and articles are written by companies and their agents, though apparently independent academics serve as authors on the publications. Similarly, the industry hires academic scientists, termed key opinion leaders, to serve as its speakers and to deliver its continuing medical education courses. In the ghost management of knowledge, and its dissemination through key opinion leaders, (...) we see the pharmaceutical industry attempting to hide or disguise the interests behind its research and education. (shrink)

“Scientific theories are maps of the natural world.” This metaphor is often used as part of a deflationary argument for a weak but relatively global version of scientific realism, a version that recognizes the place of conventions, goals, and contingencies in scientific representations, while maintaining that they are typically true in a clear and literal sense. By examining, in a naturalistic way, some relationships between maps and what they map, we question the scope and value of realist construals of maps—and (...) by extension of scientific representations. Deflationary philosophy of science requires more variegated stances. (shrink)

In this article we argue for an extension of Pere Alberch’s notion of developmental morphospace into the realm of cognition and introduce the notion of cognitive phenotype as a new tool for the evolutionary and developmental study of cognitive abilities.

This paper focuses on the framework for the compositional relations of properties in the sciences, or "realization relations", offered by Ken Aizawa and Carl Gillett (A&G) in a series of papers, and in particular on the analysis of "multiple realizations" they build upon it. I argue that A&G's analysis of multiple realization requires an account of levels and I try to show, then, that the A&G framework is not successful under any of the extant accounts of levels. There is consequently (...) a real concern tha thte A&G framework for realization may not be viable. (shrink)

The Mind-Brain Identity Theory lived a short life as a respectable philosophical position in the late 1950s, until Hilary Putnam developed his famous argument on the multiple realizability of mental states. The argument was, and still is, taken as the definitive demonstration of the falsity of Identity Theory and the foundation on which contemporary functionalist computational cognitive science was to be grounded. In this paper, in the wake of some contemporary philosophers, we reopen the case for Identity Theory and offer (...) a solution to the problem of multiple realizabilty. The solution is based on the necessity, at the time of establishing identity relations, of appealing to the notions of “homology” and “analogy” developed in the nineteenth century by Richard Owen. We also suggest that these notions are useful in order to correct certain shortcomings of some recent attempts at rebutting the Multiple Realizability argument. (shrink)

In recent years, there have been several high-profile recalls of hybrid products. If consumers perceive a global firm to be responsible for the recall, then it will reduce their brand equity. Therefore, global firms may respond in ethically questionable ways to justify themselves to important stakeholders and avoid blame. Understanding how stakeholders attribute blame for crises involving hybrid products is important to shed light on the unethical manner in which global firms might avoid blame in such situations. The research reported (...) here shows that in a hybrid product crisis, consumers show a bias in favor of the brand company and against the manufacturing company. This bias is more pronounced when the country of manufacture has an unfavorable image or when consumers lack familiarity with the recalled brand. Ambiguous recall announcements by companies that fail to provide a specific and clear reason for the product defect prompt consumers to assume that a manufacturing flaw caused the product defect. As a result, consumers reduce their attribution of blame for the brand company, and thus its brand equity is maintained. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a new system of logic for existence and essence, in which the traditional distinctions between essential and accidental properties, abstract and concrete objects, and actually existent and possibly existent objects are described and related in a suitable way. In order to accomplish this task, a primitive relation of essential identity between different objects is introduced and connected to a first order existence property and a first order abstractness property. The basic idea is (...) that possibly existent objects are completely determinate and that essentially identical objects are just different individuations of the same individual essence. Accordingly, essential properties are defined as properties that are invariant with respect to this kind of identity, while abstract objects are determined by being characterized by essential properties only. Once such ideas are implemented, a number of classical intuitions about objects, their essence, and their way of existence can be consistently interpreted. (shrink)

This chapter discusses some strategies pharmaceutical companies employ to establish influence and even hegemony over domains of medical knowledge: marketing products via medical research and education. The chapter thus contributes to understanding the political economy of knowledge in this industry. As a counterpart to traditional epistemology, studying the political economy of knowledge shifts attention from individual claims and their justifications to some of the forces available to shape terrains on which claims are produced, distributed, and consumed.Of pharmaceutical companies’ clinical research, (...) 70–75% is performed by contract research organizations. CROs conduct trials with one eye to the drug approval process and the other to the marketing of products. On the basis of trial data, analyzed by pharmaceutical company statisticians and scientists, publication planners design suites of scientific manuscripts and hire ghostwriters to write them. These are then given to academic authors, who generally have had little prior connection to the research, analysis, or writing. The manuscripts are published in medical journals appropriate for the audiences the companies wish to reach.The doctors and researchers with whom companies engage most closely are generally termed key opinion leaders. In addition to authoring manuscripts, KOLs serve companies in a number of roles, but most prominently as speakers—at professional meetings, in after-dinner and similar settings arranged by sales representatives, and in continuing medical education courses, which doctors must take to keep their licenses. Research, education, and marketing, then, are often fused. (shrink)

In this research, we evaluate the response of Brazilian consumers to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives accompanied by a price increase. We demonstrate that the extent to which Brazilian consumers perceive a company to be socially responsible (i.e., their CSR perceptions) is related to both the basic transactional outcome of purchase intentions as well as two relational outcomes: the likelihood to switch to a competitor and to complain about the CSR-based price increase. More interestingly, we find that these relationships are (...) jointly mediated by the consumers’ perceptions of price fairness and feelings of personal satisfaction. Perhaps most interesting, we find that these mediating effects vary with consumer purchasing power; the mediating effect of price fairness on purchase intention is stronger for lower income than for higher income consumers, whereas the mediating effects of personal satisfaction on switching and complaining intentions are stronger for higher income than for lower income consumers. (shrink)

Background: Chronic Pain (CP) has serious medical and social consequences, and leads to economic burden that threatens the sustainability of healthcare services. Thus, optimized management of pain tools to support CP patients in adjusting to their condition and improving quality of life is timely. Although Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is considered an evidence-based psychological approach for CP, evidence for the efficacy of online-delivered ACT for CP is still scarce. At the same time, studies suggest that self-compassion mediates the change (...) in disability and psychopathological symptoms in ACT interventions for CP, although self-compassion is not a specific target in ACT. Thus, an explicit focus on self-compassion might increase the efficacy of ACT interventions for CP, although this hypothesis has not been tested. This study aims to develop an eHealth ACT and compassion-based self-management intervention for CP, the iACTwithPain, and to compare its efficacy in improving health outcomes to a similar ACT-only intervention and a waiting list group. Methods: The eHealth platform that will host the interventions will be developed using a flat design identity and will be interactive. The iACTwithPain intervention will comprise 8 weekly self-management sessions, and will be developed taking into consideration the psychological flexibility model applied to CP, with the addition of explicit compassion-based components. To analyse whether the iACTwithPain intervention will present superiority in improving CP’s impact and related health markers over the two other conditions, this study will follow a RCT design with three arms. CP patients will be recruited through direct contact with patient associations and healthcare services and a national press release in Portugal. Outcome measurement will be conducted at baseline, post-intervention and at 3- and 6-months follow-ups. The interventions’ acceptability will also be assessed. Discussion: The iACTwithPain intervention is expected to improve CP patients’ psychosocial functioning, quality of life, and empowerment, by promoting adaptive disease management and regulation of pain-related internal experiences. Results will contribute to a better understanding on the pertinence of adding compassion elements to ACT for CP and to reach an optimized intervention for CP. (shrink)

This paper adopts a symmetrical approach tocontroversies over R.H. MacArthur and E.O. Wilson'sequilibrium model of island biogeography, in order toshow how different interpretations of the model dependupon different philosophical understandings of theapplication of models and theories. In particular,there are quite distinct domains to which the modelcould apply; in addition, some equivocation amongthese domains is important to the model's success.Therefore, apparently inconsistent interpretations,interpretations that fit into roughly instrumentalist,realist and rationalist conceptions of science, may bemutually supporting in practice. Descriptions ofscientific practice, then, (...) should not adjudicate amongthese interpretations, but should instead recognizeways in which successful models translate amongdomains, and in so doing can become realistic,instrumentally successful, or rationally established.As complex social objects, models can afford complexrepresentational relations. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a growing interest, both within theoretical biology and the philosophy of biology, in the possibility and desirability of a theory of development. Among the many issues raised within this debate, the questions of the spatial and temporal boundaries of development have received particular attention. In this article, noting that so far the discussion has mostly centered on the processes of morphogenesis and organogenesis, we argue that an important missing element in the equation, namely the development of (...) language and cognition in general, may play an important role in settling the issue of temporal boundaries. After examining the idea that the development of language, cognition, and action are bona fide biological processes, we explore the consequences for a general theory of development of taking them into consideration. (shrink)

I discuss the second of the three theses advanced by Anscombe in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The focus is the nature of entities to which – if Anscombe’s diagnosis is correct – ought and cognate modals are assumed by modern moral philosophers to refer. I reconstruct the alternative account offered by Anscombe of viable and justified ‘Aristotelian’ modals – as contrasted with mysterious and unjustified ‘Kantian’ modals; I discuss the nature and status of ‘Aristotelian necessity’ to which such legitimate modals refer (...) to. I conclude with the claims that Anscombe’s account of modern moral philosophy is viciously parochial, reducing it to Oxford philosophy from the Thirties and Forties and its immediate antecedents; that her historical reconstruction is vitiated by lack of awareness of the existence of law-views of morality preceding Christian theology, artful anticipation of secularization in order to fit her picture of modern moral philosophy as the ‘day after’ of Christianity; that Aquinas’s and her own view of natural morality as made of rational moral judgments laws is incompatible with both her predilection for ‘divine law’ instead of plain down-to-earth ‘natural law’; that her strained reconstruction of a Christian-Jewish-Stoic view of morality as law promulgated by God has little to share with any reconstruction of the Biblical moral traditions meeting academic standard and in more detail there is no possible translation of Torah as Law; and that her criticism hits just targets from the old little British world she was familiar with, while leaving Kantian ethics unaffected. -/- . (shrink)

In recent years numerous attempts have been made by analytic philosophers to naturalize various different domains of philosophical inquiry. All of these attempts have had the common goal of rendering these areas of philosophy amenable to empirical methods, with the intention of securing for them the supposedly objective status and broad intellectual appeal currently associated with such approaches. This volume brings together internationally recognised analytic philosophers, including Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen and Robert Audi, to question the project of naturalism. (...) The articles investigate what it means to naturalize a domain of philosophical inquiry and look at how this applies to the various sub-disciplines of philosophy including epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of the mind. The issue of whether naturalism is desirable is raised and the contributors take seriously the possibility that excellent analytic philosophy can be undertaken without naturalization. Controversial and thought-provoking, Analytic Philosophy Without Naturalism examines interesting and contentious methodological issues in analytic philosophy and explores the connections between philosophy and science. (shrink)

La filosofía de la ciencia se desarrolló durante la primera mitad del siglo xx bajo el supuesto de que la ciencia podía caracterizarse por la estructura lógica tanto del conocimiento articulado en las teorías más exitosas como de sus explicaciones. En la segunda mitad del siglo xx se cuestiona fuertemente esa idea, pero se sigue asumiendo que la filosofía de la ciencia debe hacerse siguiendo los cánones de una epistemología fundamentalista que considera que el avance de la ciencia pasa por (...) una ontología cada vez mas austera guiada por la idea de "mientras menos mejor". Desde esta perspectiva fundamentalista, el que las diferentes ciencias hablen de diferentes tipos de cosas es un obstáculo al entendimiento, producto de la imperfección del conocimiento actual. Este ideal nos invita a pensar que la epistemología debe hacerse reflexionando sobre el conocimiento articulado en nuestras teorías más austeras y nos compromete con propuestas reduccionistas problemáticas que no permiten explicar la diversidad de recursos epistémicos que de hecho utilizan los científicos. En este libro promovemos una epistemología que no sigue el lema de "mientras menos mejor", sino el de "organizar nuestros recursos epistémicos de manera que se genere entendimiento". Así, la misma estructura de las explicaciones y las prácticas (que incluye métodos y normas respecto de lo que se considera plausible y valioso) es lo que nos da la pauta para responder a la pregunta de qué es lo que hay. Esta estrategia epistémica nos obliga a hacer una filosofía de la ciencia muy cercana a la ciencia, reconociendo la pluralidad de sus métodos, objetivos y prácticas, sin reducir la filosofía de la ciencia a la sociología o a cualquier otra ciencia en particular. (shrink)

This paper examines whether Bratman’s succeeds in provides a reductive account of collective intention.

I argue that (i) even though Adam Smith’s four stages theory has been criticized with good reasons as both vitiated by undue generalization from modern Europe to the first stage and made bottom-heavy by assumptions of modern episteme, yet, in his writings an alternative view emerges where the savage is not just crushed under the weight of want and isolation but is endowed with imagination and sympathy; (ii) his picture of the fourth stage is, far from a triumphal apology of (...) Capitalism, a tragic diagnosis of an inner tension between ambition and greed and their unintended beneficial effects; (iii) the tensions in the picture are not just a report of tensions out there, but also depend on Smith’s pre-comprehension of the phenomena he tries to account for; (iv) and yet, the tragic character of this picture is to be credited to his integrity; I summarize peculiarities of Smith’s peculiar outlook, post-empiricism, as well as its potentialities (sect 2). I then reconstruct his view of development of language and science, suggesting that his theory of association of ideas and imagination provides a consistent account of both science and lore, yielding a comparatively less ethnocentric evaluation of the savage mind (sect. 3). I reconstruct his virtually twofold reconstruction of subsistence in the rude and early state, arguing that he tends to ascribe inability to evolve to want and isolation and describes his own view of evolution as a necessary path but also that in several passages imagination and sympathy do play a role also for the savage (sect. 4). I compare Smith’s view of the first stage with his diagnosis of commercial society arguing that his reconstruction is burdened by eighteenth-century ideology as well as by modern episteme and I conclude with an ambivalent appraisal of Smith’s comparison between the polished man and the savage. -/- . (shrink)

Despite the recent attention given to moral character in moral psychology and moral philosophy, there is little evidence on how the folk concept of character is structured. Virtue ethics literature...

The paper discusses the relationship between Adam Smith’s economic doctrines and his ethical doctrines in the light of the “Lectures on Jurisprudence”. The main claim is a comparatively autonomous status of economic discourse, an autonomy granted not by dismissal of ethical claims but instead precisely by a given constellation of claims, on liberty, justice, equality, prudence and benevolence.

I argue that Adam Smith, far from being a utilitarian as claimed by Alain Caillé, was instead a semi-sceptical philosopher who defended a pluralistic normative ethics of prudence, justice, benevolence, and, far from being the founder of the science of a system self-produced by the interaction of individual self-interests, was a sharp critic of the practices of the commercial society of his time in the name of liberty, justice, and equality. In a word, was from being the putative father of (...) Capitalism, Adam Smith was the father o a liberal left and a forefather of the present-day critics of globalization. (shrink)

A short reconstruction of the analytic-synthetic method, a key idea in Medieval and Early Modern Logic.

I discuss first Adam Smith’s ethical theory and the peculiar function played by the quadrangle of sympathy, the social function of sympathy with the rich and powerful and the unavoidable corruption of moral sentiments it carries. Secondly, I examine human nature in Smith’s work, and show how diverging tendencies are carried by different social roles. Thirdly I discuss the modest normative claims advanced by his ethical theory and show how these are not from utilitarian ones, how ethical pluralism is mirrored (...) in Smith’s triad of private virtues, prudence, justice, benevolence and of public virtues, liberty, justice, equality, how these are far from being utilitarian virtues, being rather the result of overlapping between several reasonable normative ethics. Fourthly I discuss Smith’s attitude to merchants and master-manufacturers, showing how, far being the theorist of ‘bourgeois virtues’, he was a radical critic of both the aristocratic establishment and the new emerging class in the name of oppressed. My conclusion is that ‘The Wealth of Nations’ is not an argument for self-regulating markets but instead an argument for a less authoritarian society where political authority, under pressure from a newly formed public opinion made by people in the middling ranks of life, would cease favouring the most powerful pressure group and leave ‘civil society’ in a condition where an adjustment in the distribution of wealth, revenue, knowledge and power could take place through a quasi-spontaneous process. (shrink)

In ‘The Status of Content,’ Paul Boghossian points out an embarrassment in which A.J. Ayer finds himself in his extensive irrealism. Ayer embraces both an emotivist theory of ethics and a deflationary theory of truth. According to an emotivist theory, sentences that look like perfectly good declarative sentences, such as ‘One ought not to kill,’ should be interpreted as non-declarative sentences. According to a deflationary theory of truth, ‘truth’ is not a predicate of sentences, and sentences of the form ‘“p” (...) is true’ are equivalent to sentences of the form ‘p.’ Boghossian argues that emotivism and deflationism turn out to be incompatible.Boghossian's criticism should not be presented before we ask this question: What motivates Ayer's subversion of surface grammar? A typical motivation to provide an analysis of a certain region of discourse is to find a way in which patterns of inference and compositionality could be more perspicuously presented. (shrink)

It’s widely accepted that normativity is not subject to truth values. The underlying reasoning is that truth values can only be predicated of descriptive statements; normative statements are prescriptive, not descriptive; thus truth value predicates cannot be assigned to normative statements. Hence, deonticity lacks logical semantics. This semantic monism has been challenged over the last decades from a series of perspectives that open the way for legal logics with imperative semantics. In the present paper I will go back to Kant (...) and review his understanding of practical judgments, presenting it as supported by a pluralistic semantics. From this perspective a norm of Law is a logical expression that includes as content a generic description of a possible behavior by a generality of juridical agents, and assigns to that content the assertion of its obligatory character, accompanied by a disincentive for non-compliance. From this perspective legal norms can be syntactically formalized and assigned appropriate semantic values in such terms that they can be incorporated into valid inferential schemes. The consequence is that we can put together legal logics that handle both the phenomenal and the deontic dimensions of legality. (shrink)

The chapter reconstructs and criticizes one of Anscombe's famous three these, namely the claim that a ‘philosophy of psychology’ is a preliminary task to the construction of any possible ethical theory, or that moral philosophy ‘should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’. The claim is that Anscombe’s idea of a philosophy of psychology cannot be simply identified with that of moral psychology with which we are familiar (...) now; that her main claim, namely that actions are analogous to language is quite promising; that among the implications there is not only a criticism to consequentialism but also acknowledgement of a central role for judgement, and accordingly not just a blunt refusal, but instead an unaware rediscovery of Kantian ethics; that her rediscovery of the idea of virtue is promising enough, albeit misunderstood by Anscombe herself when she presents it in terms of coming back to Aristotelian and Thomist ethics as contrasted with modern moral philosophy. (shrink)

Horace's Satires owe debts of influence to a wide range of genres and authors, including, as this study demonstrates, the moral tradition of Epicureanism. Focusing on the philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, it argues that the central concerns of his work lie at the heart of the poet's criticisms of Roman society and its shortcomings.

Standpoint theory makes the claim that there are social positions from which privileged perspectives on knowledge can be obtained. This article describes some arguments that stake out relatively narrow grounds for the relevance of standpoint theory to science and technology: namely, the oppressed are in a potentially good position to understand social relations. Although these grounds seem narrow and apparently irrelevant to the bulk of the activity of the sciences, recent work in science and technology studies indicates that social relations (...) are topics and resources as much in physics and mathematics as in primatology and psychology. So, if we accept the arguments for standpoint theory, the social picture of science should lead us to recognize the wide-ranging applicability of standpoint theory to science. (shrink)

A discussion of the relationship between Ricardo and his Unitarian Minister Thomas Belsham, a New Testament scholar and the author of a philosophical treatise inspired by the Hartley-Priestley philosophy.

En este trabajo me propongo desarrollar un estudio crítico de la concepción mecanicista de la explicación científica. En primer lugar, argumento que la caracterización mecanicista de los modelos fenoménicos (no explicativos) es inadecuada, pues no ofrece un análisis aceptable de los conceptos de modelo científico y similitud, que son fundamentales para la propuesta. En segundo lugar, sostengo que la caracterización de los modelos mecanicistas (explicativos) es igualmente inadecuada, pues los análisis disponibles de la relación explicativa de relevancia constitutiva implican una (...) tesis metafísica que es rechazada por los mismos mecanicistas. Concluyo que el mecanicismo no ofrece todavía una elucidación aceptable de la explicación científica. In this paper, I offer a critical assessment of the mechanicist approach to scientific explanation. Firstly, I argue that the mechanicist characterization of (non explanatory) phenomenological models is inadequate, since it does not develop an explication of the concepts of scientific model and similarity, which are indispensable to the approach. Secondly, I claim that the mechanicist conception of (explanatory) mechanicist models is inadequate as well, since all the available analices of the explanatory relation of constitutive relevance imply a metaphysical thesis that is rejected by the mechanicists themselves. I conclude that mechanicism needs to be emended if it aims to be considered as a genuinely illuminating approach to scientific explanation. (shrink)

I reconstruct Adam Smith’s theory of irony and its application. I illustrate how he defines it as a combination of something “grand” with something “mean” and how this is consistent with his anti-Cartesian and post-skeptic epistemology. I suggest that, for Smith, “systems” of any kind, from Cartesian physics to philosophical monotheism, Stoic ethics, and the “mercantile system” draw their apparent plausibility from some disease of human imagination. I argue that in every field, including political economy, in his view, the philosopher’s (...) task is partially sceptical and partially ironical. That is, it is the task to fight erroneous systems by showing how these arise from unwarranted associations of ideas between apparently “grand” ideas —say, the public interest— with “mean” ones, say, the merchants’ self-interest. In this light, the phrase “invisible hand” turns out to be both an ironic joke and one more application of Smith’s post-skeptical theory of knowledge whose target is dismantling all kind of “invisible” entities that human imagination tends to create. (shrink)

The present paper argues that the Venezuelan-Chilean philosopher Andrés Bello constitutes an important but heretofore neglected prefiguration of Richard Rorty. I argue for this thesis by articulating first an Inter-American philosophical narrative (based on previous work by Alex Stehn and Carlos Sanchez) that enables me to highlight certain common characteristics in philosophical projects that flourished across the Americas. Having done this, I show that Rorty’s anti-representationalism and anti-foundationalism are prefigured in Bello’s most important philosophical treatise, Filosofía del Entendimiento, to the (...) extent that Bello recognizes the problems posed by the ocular metaphors that are systematically used by Early modern philosophers such as Descartes or Locke, and suggests their elimination and replacement by other metaphors. Finally, I conclude that, if my arguments are correct, the intellectual geography of neo-pragmatism needs to be expanded beyond traditional geographies such as Europe and the US. (shrink)

A brief presentation of life, activity and publications of an Italian philosopher, the founder with Guido Calogero of the Liberal-Socialist movement under the Fascist regime and the theorist of non-violence and omnicracy as the key ideas for a new left, beyond reformism and third-International state-socialism.

In recent decades, philosophers of science have devoted considerable efforts to understand what models represent. One popular position is that models represent fictional situations. Another position states that, though models often involve fictional elements, they represent real objects or scenarios. Though these two positions may seem to be incompatible, I believe it is possible to reconcile them. Using a threefold distinction between different signs proposed by Peirce, I develop an argument based on a proposal recently made by Kralemann and Lattman (...) (in Synthese 190:3397–3420, 2013) that shows that the two aforementioned positions can be reconciled by distinguishing different ways in which a model representation can be used. In particular, on the basis of Peirce’s distinction between icons, indices and symbols, I argue that models can sometimes function as icons, sometimes as indexes and sometimes as symbols, depending on the context in which they are considered and the use that they are developed for because they all have iconic, indexical and symbolic features. In addition, I show that conceiving models as signs enables us to develop an account of scientific representation that meets the main desiderata that Shech (in Synthese 192:3463–3485, 2015) presents. (shrink)

The genealogical deconstruction of the notion of "good" by F.Nietzsche in Genealogy of Morals highlights the arbitrariness of the Platonic unification of various kinds of good, a unification that is still shared by both objectivists and subjectivists. For the same reasons, the attempt of G.E. Moore and other neo-intuitionists to define a single property that is common to all uses of the term "good" and the specular denial of the existence of this property by the emotionalism of A.J. Ayer and (...) Ch.L. Stevenson perhaps debate a false problem. The revival of various forms of Aristotelianism has proposed again Aristotle's answer to Plato: when we say something is good, we want to know what is good, and the answer will be different for different goods. (shrink)