Mitchell Franklin's contributions to American legal thought were in large part the result of his devotion to the study of the United States' Romanist legal heritage. A leading theme of his work is that the Roman legal tradition presents more promising prospects for progressive legal developments than the Anglo-American common law tradition. Thus, Franklin became an advocate of Roman-style codification of American law which began with the American revolution and has continued. His Romanist position sharply distinguished Franklin from almost all (...) American jurists of this century, even those considered liberal and progressive. Thus, Franklin criticized Holmes for his Anglophilic Humean1 conceptions of law and judicial hegemony. (shrink)

I temi della corporeità, della sporcizia, della materialità, in una ricerca esasperata di realismo.

Il dibattito bioetico sulla regolamentazione delle decisioni di fine vita ri­ce­ve per lo più impulso da casi individuali che vengono portati all’attenzione del­l’opinione pubblica. Il ruolo che hanno avuto per gli Stati Uniti le vi­cende biografiche di Nancy Cruzan e di Terry Schiavo è sta­to svolto in Ita­lia da Piergiorgio Welby ed Eluana Englaro. Le vicende giudiziarie hanno tro­­vato difficoltà a essere decise perché la legge si è rivelata inadeguata ad at­tribuire significati univoci a concetti come ‘accanimento terapeutico’ e (...) ‘trat­tamenti futili’. Il dibattito è stato ul­te­riormente complicato dall’uso di im­magini e da emozioni. La ricerca di una legge condivisa ha trovato in Ita­lia un ostacolo nella contrapposizione di atteggiamenti irriducibili. Il con­di­zio­­namento più negativo sembra essere l’intento di fare una legge ‘contro’ una delle posizioni ideo­logiche in gioco.The bioethical debate concerning regulations of end-of-life decisions has star­ted mainly from the analysis of individual cases, since these cases usually draw public attention. In the United States the life-stories of Nancy Cru­zan and Terry Schiavo have played an important role, whereas in Italy we have been focusing on the cases of Piergiorgio Welby and Eluana En­glaro. In all these cases the laws of the country have proved inadequate to de­fine the meaning of ‘futile medical care’. The debate has become even mo­re complicated because of intellectual and emotional implications. In Ita­ly the pursuit of an agreement from the legal point of view has found ma­ny obstacles and has basically displayed strongly conflicting views. The main problem in the Italian case seems to be the pursuit of an impartial law, nei­ther favouring nor contrasting one of the views at stake. (shrink)

With the Science of Logic, Hegel poses a radical challenge to philosophy: a self-presentation of thought that, by not assuming anything outside itself, achieves its self-knowledge. From the possibility of such a project depends that of the autonomy of thought, that is, of a thought that gives itself its own law.Some classical readings consider this enterprise to be unsuccesful or not to be fully accomplished in the Logic. According to Dieter Henrich, Hegel's Logic would fall into a circle, because would (...) be burdened by the presupposition of the structure of thought itself, which should rather result from the logical process. For Robert B. Pippin or Terry Pinkard, instead, the instance of autonomy of thought would be realized not in the logic, but only at the level of the spirit.In contrast to such interpretations, we will try to show that precisely in the Logic the thought determines itself as autonomous. In its self-presentation thought, that has itself as its object, produces its own structures, which are not prior to the movement. And once it has come to know itself as such a process, thought ceases to presuppose itself as an object and poses its own form for itself. (shrink)

Early modern automata, understood as efforts to ‘model’ life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. They challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported ‘mechanistic’ worldpicture, its ontology and its goals, and on the other hand (...) an attempt to understand ourselves and animals more broadly as flesh-and-blood, affective entities (that is, not just breathing and perspiring, but also desiring and ‘sanguine’ machines, as La Mettrie might have put it). In what follows I reflect on the complexity of early modern mechanism faced with the (living) body, and its mirror image, contemporary theories of embodiment. At times, embodiment theory seems to be governed by a fascination with what the Artificial Life researcher Ezequiel Di Paolo has called ‘biochauvinism’ (Di Paolo, “Extended Life”): an unquestioned belief that ‘living bodies are special’. Yet how does the theorist define this special status? The question is apparently a simple one, or at least promptly yields an aporia which appears simple: to borrow a provocative phrase from Terry Eagleton, embodiment theory is obsessed by the body but terrified of biology. Yet at the same time, at least since Hubert Dreyfus and Andy Clark’s groundbreaking works, embodiment has been a legit part of cognitive science, yielding the even more recently emerged field of ‘embodied cognition’ (see the work of Larry Shapiro), which seeks to depart from traditional cognitive science, especially the latter’s understanding of cognition as computational, in order to instead underscore “the significance of an organism’s body in how and what the organism thinks,” in Shapiro’s words. (shrink)

Abstract We propose a metaethical view that combines the cognitivist idea that moral judgments are genuine beliefs and moral utterances express genuine assertions with the idea that such beliefs and utterances are nondescriptive in their overall content. This sort of view has not been recognized among the standard metaethical options because it is generally assumed that all genuine beliefs and assertions must have descriptive content. We challenge this assumption and thereby open up conceptual space for a new kind of metaethical (...) view. In developing our brand of nondescriptivist cognitivism we do the following: (1) articulate a conception of belief (and assertion) that does not require the overall declarative content of beliefs (and assertions) to be descriptive content; (2) make a case for the independent plausibility of this conception of belief and assertion; and (3) argue that our view, formulated in a way that draws upon the proposed conception of belief, has significant comparative advantages over descriptivist forms of cognitivism. (shrink)

Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life—sometimes dramatically. This fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential form of learning. This article presents an associative exemplar‐based model that accounts for the improvement without a change in mechanism. It provides a unified account of children's growing abilities to (a) learn a new word given only 1 or a few training trials (“fast mapping”); (b) acquire words that differ only slightly in phonological (...) form; (c) generalize word meanings preferentially along particular dimensions, such as object shape (the “shape bias”); and (d) learn 2nd labels for already‐named objects, despite a persisting resistance to doing so (“mutual exclusivity”). The model explains these improvements in terms of increased attention to relevant aspects of form and meaning, which reduces memory interference. The interaction of associations and reference in word learning is discussed. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 597-607, September 2021.

C. I. Lewis’s version of pragmatism, which he called “conceptualistic pragmatism,” has been little studied and is nowadays overlooked, eclipsed by the more famous pragmatisms of Dewey and James. However, it was Lewis’s version that came to dominate the formation of post-1945 pragmatism in the United States. It provided the framework in which Quine (his former student), Sellars, Davidson, Rorty and Brandom operated. Roughly, that structure involved a passive, sensory ineffable given and an ordering and classification of the given by (...) a priori categories. Comprehending those categories was a matter of apprehending a priori truths, but those categories were also changeable. Rational change involved giving some up and substituting others to meet certain basic human interests. We thus have the picture of mind and world that culminates in a certain sense in Brandom’s philosophy: External causal inputs linked to an internal normative inferential network which then results in causal outputs of linguistic shape. This is very different from the classical German idealist conception of mind and world, which takes the distinguishability-but-inseparability of concept and sensory intuition as its core. (shrink)

This essay is on the concept of global democracy. We discuss the historical development of the concept of democracy and the material bases for the possible emergence of a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth in the future. We confront the problem of contested meanings of democracy, the roots of the modern concept in the European Enlightenment, the problem of Eurocentrism in the formulation of a global philosophy of democracy, the relationship between capitalist globalization and antisystemic movements and the need (...) for globalization from below. (shrink)

Adorno, like Hegel and Kant, addressed himself to the limits of thought, the bounds beyond which we cannot go since to go beyond them is to stop making sense at all. However, Adorno also thought, following a line of thought that flowers in Hegel and Marx, that what seem to be limits of thought can turn out in historical circumstances merely to be limitations that can be overcome with changed social and political circumstances. This is the core of Adorno's theory (...) of “non‐identity.” This in turn requires him as he recognizes to take on all the Hegelian criticisms of such a view and to show how the negative dialectic not only escapes them but offers a new paradigm of dialectical thought. (shrink)

Lane et al. are right: Troublesome memories can be therapeutically recontextualized. Reconsolidation of negative/traumatic memories within the context of positive/prosocial affects can facilitate diverse psychotherapies. Although neural mechanisms remain poorly understood, we discuss how nonlinear dynamics of various positive affects, heavily controlled by primal subcortical networks, may be critical for optimal benefits.

The conference entitled ‘Best Practices in Clinical Ethics Consultation and Decision-Making’, held in London 8–9 July 2010, was the first of its kind dedicated to identifying best practices in clinical ethics consultation and decision-making. Academics, health and social care professionals, clinical ethics committee members, lawyers, service users and carers from the UK, USA, Europe, Canada, Australia and Asia attended lectures, workshops, parallel paper sessions and clinical ethics case discussions across adult, maternity, children's, older persons, mental health and learning disabilities settings. (...) Seventy-eight best-practice points impacting on the quality of clinical ethics consultations and subsequent decisions were identified and grouped into eight themes: who tells the story; how the story is told; how the analysis, discussion and subsequent decisions are made; how values are weighted and balanced against one another; who decides; how the decision is made; how group dynamics and conflict are handled; how decisions are recorded. (shrink)

In Kant's "fact of reason," there is an apparent paradox of our being subject to laws of which we must regard ourselves as the author, while at the same time being normatively bound by the same laws that we cannot see ourselves as authoring. Working out the implications of this apparent paradox generated much of the response to Kant in post-Kantian idealism. Wilfrid Sellars notes the same paradox when he speaks of the "paradox of man's encounter with himself" in "Philosophy (...) and the Scientific Image of Man." Like some of the idealists, Sellars thus opted for "two track" system of philosophy that combines the two tracks in a metaphor of "stereoscopic vision." This paper argues that understanding Sellars 's own thought in terms of the issues that formed the dynamic of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany puts us in a better position to understand why Sellars 's own conception of experience and of the unreality of the manifest image is not completely consistent with the argumentative direction of his thought. Understanding Sellars in this way helps us understand the limits of post-Kantian idealism just as understanding the dynamic of post-Kantian idealism gives us a more nuanced version of Sellars 's conception of experience. (shrink)

Are leaders morally special? Is there something ethically distinctive about the relationship between leaders and followers? Should leaders do whatever it takes to achieve group goals? Leadership Ethics uses moral theory, as well as empirical research in psychology, to evaluate the reasons everyday leaders give to justify breaking the rules. Written for people without a background in philosophy, it introduces readers to the moral theories that are relevant to leadership ethics: relativism, amoralism, egoism, virtue ethics, social contract theory, situation ethics, (...) communitarianism, and cosmopolitan theories such as utilitarianism and transformational leadership. Unlike many introductory texts, the book does more than simply acquaint readers with different approaches to leadership ethics. It defends the Kantian view that everyday leaders are not justified in breaking the moral rules. (shrink)

The paradox of analysis asks how a putative conceptual analysis can be both true and informative. If it is true then isn’t it analytic? And if it is analytic then how can it be informative? Our proposed solution rests on a distinction between explicit knowledge of meaning and implicit knowledge of meaning and on a correlative distinction between two kinds of conceptual competence. If one initially possesses only implicit knowledge of the meaning of a given concept and the associated linguistic (...) expression, then a conceptual analysis can be both analytic and informative. (shrink)

A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology, by BrandomRobert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. pp. xiv + 836.

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications held in Naples, Italy, in October 2003. The 40 revised full papers presented have gone through two rounds of reviewing and revision. All current issues of theoretical, experimental and applied fuzzy logic and related techniques are addressed with special attention to rough set theory, neural networks, genetic algorithms and soft computing. The papers are organized in topical section on fuzzy sets and systems, (...) fuzzy control, neuro-fuzzy systems, fuzzy decision theory and application, and soft computing in image processing. (shrink)