This paper treats a classical topic of scientific epistemology from a new point of view. It considers biology to be a science intermediate between physics and sociology, and the transition from physics to biology as proceeding upwards. As a consequence, any type of reductionism will be avoided. The foundation of sociology can now be viewed as an extension of physics and biology. Indeed social reality is built by means of constitutive rules that create those social facts that have been denominated (...) ‘institutional'. Having argued for the connection among values and norms and actions, the problem is that of justifying this connection. Can values and norms be reasons that explain action? Can reasons be understood as causes? In this paper the thesis is advocated that reasons are not sufficient for causally explaining actions. Taking up the classical analysis of ‘practical inference', I want to point out that, if from the reasons for action logically followed the action itself, the reasons would be sufficient causes of the action: indeed, this would eliminate free will. For this reason, we must examine the problem of free will. My conclusion is in favor of the position of B. Libet, who has demonstrated free will experimentally, and therefore the nondeterministic nature of the practical-inferential model. (shrink)

Ostrich presentists maintain that we can use all the expressive resources of the tensed language to provide an explanation of why true claims about the past are true, without thereby paying any price in terms of ontology or basic ideology. I clarify the position by making a distinction between three kinds of explanation, which has general interest and applicability. I then criticize the ostrich position because it requires an unconstrained version of the third form of explanation, which is out of (...) place in metaphysics. (shrink)

In his paper, Vardoulakis traces a genealogy of the concept of the ‘ineffectual’ that dominates many discussions in continental political philosophy back to Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the early 1920s. Although I sympathize with Vardoulakis’s suspicions concerning the ‘ineffectual’, I think his genealogy misses the main aspects of Heidegger’s analysis of praxis. In particular, Vardoulakis’s reading relies on two fundamentally ill-conceived assumptions: (a) that Heidegger’s thought can be read as a continuous endorsement of a series of fundamental claims, in (...) particular, the rejection of instrumentality, the critique of modern technical thinking, and a praise of a certain form of ineffectual meditative thought as an alternative; and (b) that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in general and of the Nichomachean Ethics in particular has, as its main aim, to ground in Greek thinking such form of ineffectual meditative thought. In this comment, I will challenge both these assumptions. I will claim that Heidegger’s project in the 1920s is oriented to provide an answer to the question that shaped the debate between Marburg Neo-Kantians, on the one hand, and Husserl, on the other: namely, how is it possible to account for lived experience and its categorial articulation. For Neo-Kantians such as Natorp (e.g. [1912: 28]), all conceptual understanding is an understanding of objects. Subjectivity as the pure form of activity—the Kantian I think—could not be understood but merely postulated. Hence, it is in principle impossible to account for subjectivity without objectifying it. This was a serious and potentially devastating objection to phenomenology’s fundamental project. It is in this context that Heidegger turns his attention to Aristotle’s ethics, precisely as a way of accounting for the kind of relationship between my understanding of experience and experience itself. Aristotelian praxis (and phronesis as the kind of ‘knowledge’ associated with praxis) provides a model for such understanding. Therefore, Heidegger has no interest in ethics or in developing a theory of action in the 1920s in general or when reading Aristotle in particular. Vardoulakis’s understanding of Heidegger’s mistranslation—even if there is one—can only make sense in hindsight, when reading those texts in the light of the later Heidegger’s interest in avoiding technical calculation and promoting a meditative thinking. If we abandon Vardoulakis’s assumptions, Heidegger’s analysis of praxis and, in particular, his reading of Aristotle’s hou heneka can be understood under a different light. Understanding the meaningful structure of the world as existing for the sake (hou heneka, umwillen) of Dasein is not so much a reflection on the role of ends in action—technical or otherwise—but an analysis of the way in which any understanding of the world and of our actions within it is an understanding of who we are and of the structures that constitute the very being of our subjectivity. This may suggest that there is in the early Heidegger a way out of the dilemma between ineffectuality and instrumentalism, a path that, perhaps, provides an alternative for contemporary ethics and political thinking. (shrink)

Propõe o ensino das duas linguagens fundamentais - de Língua Materna e de Matemática - através da argumentação para que se articule o ensino de todas as disciplinas. Ao final, faz uma proposta global de avaliação para a escola, centrada em textos argumentativos, transformando a "cola" consentida em consulta necessária.

This paper intends above all to highlight three fundamental interconnected questions: (1) without reifying it in a theoretical-systematic philosophy, to highlight Derrida’s Deconstruction as a “philosophical idiom” – that of différance or of the ab-solute otherness – endowed, therefore, with specific “theoretical” assumptions (khôra, messianic and trace); (2) to highlight and to clarify the meaning of the “Derridian exception” concerning the issue of the animal and animality within the context of the sacrificial philosophical-cultural Westernness; (3) to highlight the relevance of (...) the issue of the animal and animality in order to re-think, in new terms, the question of the human itself – still essentially structured in the light of a metaphysical subjectivity –, underlining the invaluable contribution of Deconstruction to rethink the exceptionality of the human among the living beings and to bring the war for compassion to a successful end, thus contributing to the emergence of new Lights for the promise of the “coming” [“à-venir”] of another humanity and, consequently, of another civilization. (shrink)

according to Plotinus, it is possible for the soul of the philosopher to follow a way of ascension towards the superior realities. This way is composed of two parts. The first one goes from the sensible world to the Intellect and the second, from the Intellect to the one. In this paper, I investigate the trópos and mēkhanaí, as Plotinus writes in I, 6, necessary to this journey.

Political theory is a field that finds nourishment in others. From economics, history, sociology, psychology, and political science, theorists have drawn a rich repertoire of schemas to parse the social world and make sense of it. With each of these encounters, new subjects are brought into focus as others recede into the background, ushering a change not only in how questions are tackled but also in what questions are thought worth asking.

This edited collection of eight original essays pursues the aim of bringing the spotlight back on Anton Marty. It does so by having leading figures in the contemporary debate confront themselves with Marty’s most significative contributions, which span from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and ontology to meta-metaphysics and meta-philosophy. -/- The book is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to themes in philosophy of language, which were at the centre of Marty’s philosophical thinking throughout his (...) life. The second part focuses on the problem of the objectivity and phenomenology of time and space, upon which Marty was working in the final years of his life. The final part turns to Marty’s meta-metaphysical and meta-philosophical considerations. The intended audience of this book are primarily scholars and students interested in the relevant contemporary debates, as well as scholars working on the Austrian tradition. (shrink)

The philosophy of Aristotle and its impact on the process of empirical scientific inquiry has been substantial. The influence of the clarity and orderliness of his thinking, when applied to the acquisition of knowledge in nursing, can not be overstated. Traditional empirical approaches have and will continue to have an important influence on the development of nursing knowledge through nursing research. However, as nursing is primarily a practice discipline, the transition from empirical and syllogistic reasoning is problematic. Other types of (...) inquiry are essential in the application of nursing knowledge obtained by empirical scientific approaches and to understand how that knowledge can best be used in the care of patients. This paper reviews the strengths and limitations of syllogistic reasoning by applying it to a recently published study on temperature measurement in nursing. It then discusses possible ways that the empirical knowledge gained from that study and confirmed in its reasoning by logical analysis could be used in the daily care of critically ill patients. It concludes by highlighting the utility of broader approaches to knowledge development, including interpretative approaches and contemporary empiricism, as a way to bridge the gap between factual empirical knowledge and the practical application of that knowledge in everyday clinical nursing practice. (shrink)

Se accettiamo l’ipotesi di Nietzsche, ampiamente sviluppata da Heidegger, che prevede l’affermarsi planetario di un’epoca in cui il senso della vita sarà completamente assente, un solo compito si offre alla filosofia e, nella sua accezione più larga, alla cultura: “DARE UN SENSO – questo il compito che resta assolutamente da assolvere”. Di là dal nichilismo, scrisse Nietzsche, la creazione di un senso permette al caos, nascosto in fondo all’uomo così come ai confini dell’universo, di trasformarsi in stella. In un testo (...) del marzo 1888, il pensatore chiede all’uomo di “costringere il suo caos a diventare forma; a diventare logico, semplice, univoco, matematica, legge. È questa qui la grande ambizione”. Il canto poetico di Zarathustra annuncerà, analogamente, l’imperativo di una cultura che dà all’esistenza la sua legge: “Riesci a costringere le stelle a ruotare intorno a te?”. E tale insegnamento è così precisato: “Bisogna che ancora si porti dentro di sé un caos per potere far nascere una stella danzante”. L’immagine della stella evoca per Nietzsche l’origine del mondo e l’esplosione della vita: ma allora, è l’oblio della stella a fondare il nichilismo. Questo termine, reso popolare da Turgenev e Paul Bourget prima di Nietzsche, deriva dal latino ne hilum, l’assenza di “ilo”, la cicatrice lasciata sul seme dalla rottura del funicolo. Questa giuntura, attraverso cui scorrono i succhi nutritivi della pianta, è fonte di vita e, metaforicamente, donazione di senso. Quando il condotto della vita è chiuso o nascosto, non è possibile nessun orientamento e la fine scompare insieme con il senso che ad essa conduceva. Se applichiamo questo termine al nostro presente malessere, possiamo vedere che il significato di una cultura è legato costantemente alla sua comparsa e al suo scopo. L’epoca della completa assenza di senso è dunque quella in cui l’origine di una cultura, nel suo abbrivio o nella sua genealogia, è sistematicamente negata, al punto da occultare il suo fine, inteso come punto d’arrivo e, insieme, come destinazione. Che si tratti di scienza, di filosofia, di politica o di arte, le attività umane e i prodotti che ne risultano abdicano, così, ad ogni pretesa di senso e si limitano, a costo di rinunciare a costruire un mondo, alla immersione nel circolo del consumo. Nel presente lavoro si tenta di definire una direzione del pensiero che consenta alla filosofia di uscire dal nichilismo. In questo senso, si vi si pone a tema quel capitolo della filosofia che va sotto il nome di “post-nichilismo”, che non è, però, da intendere come una semplice e, probabilmente, perdente avversione empirica o sentimentale al clima generale dell’“insensata” nostra epoca. Kant aveva riconosciuto a David Hume il merito di averlo risvegliato dal “sonno dogmatico”; pare necessario cogliere nel nichilismo teoretico un’occasione analoga. Il “sonno” che ha colto l’Occidente risiede nella volontaria chiusura dello sguardo di fronte alla “catastrofe” che si annuncia e che non investe solo il pensiero. La filosofia, in un ultimo risveglio, non può che tentare di mostrare il panorama che si aprirebbe alla nostra vista, se solo si avesse l’ardire di orientare lo sguardo verso la nostra originaria destinazione per illuminare il nostro apparentemente ineluttabile futuro. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophies of America Reader: From the Popol Vuh to the Present ed. by Kim Díaz and Mathew A. FoustBernardo R. Vargas (bio)The Philosophies of America Reader: From the Popol Vuh to the Present. Edited by Kim Díaz and Mathew A. Foust. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. Pp. 480. Paperback $46.75, isbn 978-1-4742-9626-7.Philosophy in the United States continues to be among the least diverse disciplines in the humanities, dominated (...) statistically by white males, with the next largest group being white female philosophers.1 This lack of diversity affects how we define philosophy and who counts as a philosopher. As the editors of The Philosophies of America Reader, Kim Díaz and Mathew A. Foust, put it, "Just as history has fashioned and popularized distorted accounts of the 'discovery' of America, it has done the same in its presentation of American Philosophy" (p. xv). This exemplary collection of essays from across the Americas allows the readers and instructors to reimagine what we construe as philosophy and who we imagine an American philosopher to be.The editors offer diverse essays covering an impressive timeframe, ranging from the Popol Vuh, whose oral tradition from Guatemala predates Spanish colonization and was recorded in the mid-1500s, to contemporary philosophers such as Gregory Pappas. The collection excels in offering texts that typical philosophy anthologies are unlikely to include, which the editors call "unusual suspects" that have been historically marginalized, while also maintaining more familiar or "classical" figures (pp. xv–xvi). These "unusual suspects" include women, Latinx, American Indigenous, Black, and Caribbean thinkers.The Philosophies of America Reader offers various resources to enhance the student and instructor's experience. The book is structured into four themes: (1) Selfhood and Identity, (2) Knowing and Learning, (3) Aesthetics and Spirituality, and (5) Violence and Peace. The editors design these themes to fit the traditionally understood areas of philosophy of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Even if the instructor's course description does not specifically target American Philosophy, these thematic categories are valuable for th ose who wish to incorporate a more diverse reading list. For example, these essays could easily apply to courses such as Critical Philosophy of Race, Introduction to Philosophy, or Introduction to Ethics. Each thematic section also features a "For Further Reading" segment, which includes selected secondary sources to broaden research or substitute texts. In addition, the editors provide a detailed [End Page 1] syllabus example, including a Course Description and Outline of the Course for a bi-weekly class, which is neatly divided into a 16-week reading schedule. They also include instructive sections such as a Note to the Teacher to aid in thinking through how to interact with the unfamiliar texts and a Note to the Student to guide their disposition and readings.Moreover, the text presents introductory essays for each thematic section. These essays provide an overview of the content and delve into the author's positionality, such as their geography, context, motivations for writing, race, ethnicity, and native tongue. The introductions are philosophically robust yet accessible to new philosophy students and are not filled with unnecessary philosophical jargon.Due to its large scope of thinkers, this text offers a vibrant opportunity to dialogue with philosophers who share or differ in their perspectives across the major thematic categories. The editors emphasize that although this is not a history of thought, the texts present lineages of progression, elaboration, and disagreement intended to guide instructors in connecting the texts with their students (p. xx). Furthermore, this allows the reader and the instructor to avoid isolating their discourse to a particular time, geography, gender, or race and ethnicity. In addition to the biographical and contextual information given in the introductions, a small yet helpful detail is a timeline of the selections that further contextualizes the readings.I wish to underscore two key clusters of essays amidst the vast array of 50 readings related to Asian-American and Mexican-American discourse for the instructor's consideration, particularly those teaching in the United States. These two large population groups deserve consideration as enrollment rates for Asian Americans and Hispanics (of whom Mexicans are the largest population... (shrink)

Causal Modeling Semantics (CMS, e.g., Galles and Pearl 1998; Pearl 2000; Halpern 2000) is a powerful framework for evaluating counterfactuals whose antecedent is a conjunction of atomic formulas. We extend CMS to an evaluation of the probability of counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents, and more generally, to counterfactuals whose antecedent is an arbitrary Boolean combination of atomic formulas. Our main idea is to assign a probability to a counterfactual (A ∨ B) > C at a causal model M as a weighted (...) average of the probability of C in those submodels that truthmake A∨ B (Briggs 2012; Fine 2016, 2017). The weights of the submodels are given by the inverse distance to the original model M, based on a distance metric proposed by Eva, Stern, and Hartmann (2019). Apart from solving a major problem in the epistemology of counterfactuals, our paper shows how work in semantics, causal inference and formal epistemology can be fruitfully combined. (shrink)

In the contemporary landscape about temporal experience, debates concerning the “hard question” of the experience of the flow—as opposed to debates concerning more qualitative aspects of temporality, such as change, movement, succession and duration—are gaining more and more attention. The overall dialectics can be thought of in terms of a debate between the realists (who take the phenomenology of the flow of time seriously, and propose various account of it) and deflationists (who take our description of temporal phenomenology as “flowy” (...) to be spurious, and propose various explanation of this spuriousness). In this paper we look inside the realist side. We distinguish primitivist realism, according to which the feeling of time flowing is an irreducible sui generis phenomenology, and various forms of reductionist realism, according to which the experience of the flow is ultimately explainable in terms of a more basic phenomenology. We present reasons to be sceptical against the various reductionist proposals. The conclusion is thus disjunctive: either primitivism or deflationism is the correct account of the purported experience of the flow of time. (shrink)

Turing’s much debated test has turned 70 and is still fairly controversial. His 1950 paper is seen as a complex and multilayered text, and key questions about it remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing select learning from experience as the best approach to achieve machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence only to trade it out for conversational question-answering in 1950? Why did Turing refer to (...) gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? In this article, I shall address these questions by unveiling social, historical and epistemological roots of the so-called Turing test. I will draw attention to a historical fact that has been only scarcely observed in the secondary literature thus far, namely that Turing’s 1950 test emerged out of a controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably out of debates with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen in its historical context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as essentially a reply to a series of challenges posed to him by these thinkers arguing against his view that machines can think. Turing did propose gender learning and imitation as one of his various imitation tests for machine intelligence, and I argue here that this was done in response to Jefferson's suggestion that gendered behavior is causally related to the physiology of sex hormones. (shrink)

Active labor-market policies have developed significantly over the past two decades across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, with substantial cross-national differences in terms of both extent and overall orientation. The objective of this article is to account for cross-national variation in this policy field. It starts by reviewing existing scholarship concerning political, institutional, and ideational determinants of ALMPs. It then argues that ALMP is too broad a category to be used without further specification, and it develops a typology (...) of four different types of ALMPs: incentive reinforcement, employment assistance, occupation, and human capital investment. These are discussed and examined through ALMP expenditure profiles in selected countries. The article uses this typology to analyze ALMP trajectories in six Western European countries and shows that the role of this instrument changes dramatically over time. It concludes that there is little regularity in the political determinants of ALMPs. In contrast, it finds strong institutional and ideational effects, nested in the interaction between the changing economic context and existing labor-market policies. (shrink)

I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters (...) of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the current debate on how imitation in early Greek epic can be identified and assessed. Two divine scenes in Iliad Book 7 and Odyssey Book 13 are compared in the light of their traditional background and contextual significance. It is suggested that there are grounds to interpret this as a case of imitation on the Odyssey poet’s part which, however, was not necessarily meant to elicit recognition of the subtext. A methodological point is made (...) by showing that it is possible to argue for a specific intertextual relation by considering the traditional techniques involved. (shrink)

Resumo Plotino é um pensador estranho para o filósofo contemporâneo: nas suas Enéadas, ele discute experiência mística e prática filosófica como se fosse uma mesma coisa. De fato, no pensamento plotiniano, o ápice da vida filosófica é a contemplação mística: não pensamento irracional, mas uma forma supra-racional de consciência que é alcançada pela prática ascética e pelo procedimento dialético. Este artigo tenta entender o que é a experiência mística em Plotino. Na verdade, uma leitura atenta dos textos das Enéadas que (...) tratam do assunto mostram que não existe apenas um, mas dois tipos de contemplação mística supra-racional: a experiência da alma humana unida ao Intelecto divino e a experiência da alma humana unida ao Um, o princípio supremo da realidade de acordo com a filosofia plotiniana. Ambos são tipos de intuição intelectual interior, mas, se a experiência mística do Intelecto é a contemplação da totalidade do mundo inteligível, a contemplação do Um é a intuição da identidade pura, além de toda a diferença. Palavras-chave: Plotino; Neoplatonismo; Mística.Plotinus is a strange scholar to the contemporary philosopher: in his Enneads, he discusses mystical experience and philosophical practice as if they were the same thing. Indeed, according to his thoughts, the summit of philosophical life is mystical contemplation: not irrational thinking, but a supra-rational form of consciousness achieved through ascetic practice and dialectical procedure. This paper attempts to understand the mystical experience in Plotinus. In fact, a close reading of the texts of the Enneads on the subject demonstrates that there are not only one, but two kinds of supra-rational mystical contemplation: the experience of the human soul united to the divine Intellect and the experience of the human soul united to the One, the supreme principle of reality according to Plotinus's philosophy. Both are kinds of interior intellectual intuition, but if the mystical experience of the Intellect is the contemplation of the whole of the intelligible world, the contemplation of the One is the intuition of pure identity, beyond all difference. Key words: Plotinus; Neo-Platonism; Mysticism. (shrink)

A propósito de una reciente biblografía, este trabajo apunta algunas cuestiones esenciales de la teoría del derecho de Grocio, y en relación con ella algunos puntos importantes de la filosofía de Vico.Related with a recent bibliography, this paper arises some fundamental questions about Grocio's legal theory and the relationship it has with Vico's philosophy.

In their manuscript, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) argue that controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) is compatible with the dead donor rule (DDR) by describing the DDR and the incor...

The Turing test has been studied and run as a controlled experiment and found to be underspecified and poorly designed. On the other hand, it has been defended and still attracts interest as a test for true artificial intelligence (AI). Scientists and philosophers regret the test’s current status, acknowledging that the situation is at odds with the intellectual standards of Turing’s works. This article refers to this as the Turing Test Dilemma, following the observation that the test has been under (...) discussion for over seventy years and still is widely seen as either too bad or too good to be a valuable experiment for AI. An argument that solves the dilemma is presented, which relies on reconstructing the Turing test as a thought experiment in the modern scientific tradition. It is argued that Turing’s exposition of the imitation game satisfies Mach’s characterization of the basic method of thought experiments and that Turing’s uses of his test satisfy Popper’s conception of the critical and heuristic uses of thought experiments and Kuhn’s association of thought experiments to conceptual change. It is emphasized how Turing methodically varied the imitation game design to address specific challenges posed to him by other thinkers and how his test illustrates a property of the phenomenon of intelligence and suggests a hypothesis on machine learning. This reconstruction of the Turing test provides a rapprochement to the conflicting views on its value in the literature. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the inherent temporal orientation of fear, a matter on which philosophers seem to have contrasting opinions. According to some, fear is inherently present-oriented; others instead maintain that it is inherently future-oriented or that it has no inherent temporal orientation at all. Despite the differences, however, all these views seem to understand fear’s temporal orientation as one-dimensional—that is, as uniquely determined by the represented temporal location of the intentional object of fear. By contrast, we present a (...) view that introduces a two-dimensional account of fear’s temporal orientation. On such a view, we can say that fear is inherently future-oriented, independently of its being about something in the present or in the future. (shrink)

Several alternatives vie today for recognition as the most plausible ontology, from physicalism to panpsychism. By and large, these ontologies entail that physical structures circumscribe consciousness by bearing phenomenal properties within their physical boundaries. The ontology of idealism, on the other hand, entails that all physical structures are circumscribed by consciousness in that they exist solely as phenomenality in the first place. Unlike the other alternatives, however, idealism is often considered implausible today, particularly by analytic philosophers. A reason for this (...) is the strong intuition that an objective world transcending phenomenality is a self-evident fact. Other arguments—such as the dependency of phenomenal experience on brain function, the evidence for the existence of the universe before the origin of conscious life, etc.—are also often cited. In this essay, I will argue that these objections against the plausibility of idealism are false. As such, this essay seeks to show that idealism is an entirely plausible ontology. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta o conceito de gênero em educação, mostrando sua incorporação como uma categoria útil de análise no campo da dança, no qual as discussões sobre gênero aparecem muito raramente, especialmente quando se analisa a produção brasileira. Utilizando estudiosos(as) do campo dos estudos pósestruturalistas de gênero, reflito sobre a necessidade de incorporação de tal conceito às investigações sobre as questões sociais que envolvem a dança.