This book disentangles the complex meanings of responsibility in nanotechnology development by focusing on its theoretical and empirical dimensions. The notion of responsibility is extremely diversified in the public discourse of nanoscale technologies. Addressed are major disciplinary perspectives working on nanotechnology, e.g. philosophy, sociology, and political science, as well as the major multidisciplinary areas relevant to the innovation process, e.g. technology assessment and ethics. Furthermore, the interplay between such expertises, disciplines, and research programmes in providing a multidisciplinary understanding of responsibility (...) is emphasized. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

This article puts forward some observations about the literary form of Documentalità. The genre to which Documentalità belongs is undoubtedly the philosophical treatise. This is a novelty, because the philosophical treatise is not a popular literary form with contemporary philosophers. But it is a genre that proves to be functional in the project of philosophical reconstruction pursued by Ferraris, and that do not necessarily conflict with the Derridean roots from which Documentality moves.

This article puts forward some observations about the literary form of Documentalità. The genre to which Documentalità belongs is undoubtedly the philosophical treatise. This is a novelty, because the philosophical treatise is not a popular literary form with contemporary philosophers. But it is a genre that proves to be functional in the project of philosophical reconstruction pursued by Ferraris, and that do not necessarily conflict with the Derridean roots from which Documentality moves.

È noto come il capolavoro di Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, sia stato fin dal suo apparire oggetto privilegiato dell’interesse dei filosofi: non sarebbe pertanto fruttuoso, in questa breve recensione, limitarci a porre l’attenzione su tale osservazione. Forse meno noto, e in ogni caso meritevole d’essere posto in evidenza e degno di attenta considerazione, è il fatto che anche negli ultimi anni, i primi del secolo appena nato, si sia assistito, in Italia come in ambito internaz...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di FerrarisTom BaileyAlfredo Ferrarin, editor. Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di Ferraris. Pisa: ETS, 2006. Pp. 172. Paper, € 13.Maurizio Ferraris’ Goodbye Kant! Cosa resta oggi della Critica della ragion pura (Milan 2004) has been a notable success in the field of popular philosophical writing in Italy. With refreshing irreverence and wit, the book mounts a sustained (...) attack on the supposed confusions of Kant’s first Critique, and bemoans their influence on later philosophy. In particular, Ferraris [End Page 328] argues that by attempting to found the necessary features of experience on physics, Kant confuses experience and ontology with science and epistemology and arrives at the implausible conclusion that our experience and knowledge, and perhaps even the existence, of things depend on how our minds are structured. Unsurprisingly, Goodbye Kant! has provoked strong reactions from Kant scholars. Alfredo Ferrarin’s Congedarsi da Kant? collects four particularly considered responses, along with a reply from Ferraris himself.The book begins with Ferrarin’s contribution, which focuses on Ferraris’ claim that, for Kant, the sensible experience of an object necessarily requires a concept of that object. With reference to spatial intuition, the three-fold synthesis, and Kant’s example of a savage seeing a house for the first time, Ferrarin argues that Kant in fact defends the independence of intuition from concepts, such that intuition is possible and can provide certain cognitive results without our having any particular concept of what the object of intuition is. Ferrarin also insists that, in claiming that “[t]he I think must be able to accompany all my representations,” Kant considers having an experience to imply only the possibility—and not, as Ferraris claims, the necessity—of the experience being consciously thought, and that Kant considers imagination not as a “creative” psychological activity within experience, as Ferraris implies, but rather as a certain normative activity that experience presupposes. Instead of basing experience on physics, then, Ferrarin argues that Kant distinguishes experience from science and considers both to be made possible by certain general a priori forms of sensing and conceiving of objects.In the following article, Claudio La Rocca takes issue with Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project in the Critique. For La Rocca, Kant is concerned with the conditions under which discourses or experiences have sense for a subject, and, specifically, with how referring to empirical objects differs from referring to the objects of, say, hallucinations, aesthetic experiences, or moral reasoning. On La Rocca’s account, referring meaningfully to an object presupposes shared rules which identify that kind of object and distinguish it from others, and which are “spelled out” in experience even before being “read” conceptually. However, unlike the distinctions between kinds of empirical objects, the general distinction between empirical objects and objects of other discourses or experiences cannot itself be derived from experience, since experience presupposes it. Thus La Rocca presents Kant’s basic project as the identification of the a priori rules which distinguish empirical objects as such, rather than the idealist project attributed to him by Ferraris, that of showing how the existence or properties of such objects depend on the mind or how our experience of them depends on the concepts or scientific theories we have of them.Paolo Parrini adopts a slightly different approach by arguing that it is Ferraris, and not Kant, who fails to distinguish adequately between experience, ontology, and epistemology. In particular, Parrini insists that, rather than basing experience or ontology on science, as Ferraris claims, Kant aims to show that a priori concepts are necessary to distinguish the objective from the subjective in ordinary experience, and that Ferraris’ own realism naively ignores certain crucial distinctions between what is experienced, what exists, and what we know. Parrini thus undertakes to defend not only Kant, but also certain post-Kantians—and the logical empiricists in particular—against Ferraris’ criticisms.In the final response to Ferraris, Massimo Barale further questions Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project. By considering only the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, Barale insists that Ferraris treats the most elementary, and even preliminary, parts of Kant... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di FerrarisTom BaileyAlfredo Ferrarin, editor. Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di Ferraris. Pisa: ETS, 2006. Pp. 172. Paper, € 13.Maurizio Ferraris’ Goodbye Kant! Cosa resta oggi della Critica della ragion pura (Milan 2004) has been a notable success in the field of popular philosophical writing in Italy. With refreshing irreverence and wit, the book mounts a sustained (...) attack on the supposed confusions of Kant’s first Critique, and bemoans their influence on later philosophy. In particular, Ferraris [End Page 328] argues that by attempting to found the necessary features of experience on physics, Kant confuses experience and ontology with science and epistemology and arrives at the implausible conclusion that our experience and knowledge, and perhaps even the existence, of things depend on how our minds are structured. Unsurprisingly, Goodbye Kant! has provoked strong reactions from Kant scholars. Alfredo Ferrarin’s Congedarsi da Kant? collects four particularly considered responses, along with a reply from Ferraris himself.The book begins with Ferrarin’s contribution, which focuses on Ferraris’ claim that, for Kant, the sensible experience of an object necessarily requires a concept of that object. With reference to spatial intuition, the three-fold synthesis, and Kant’s example of a savage seeing a house for the first time, Ferrarin argues that Kant in fact defends the independence of intuition from concepts, such that intuition is possible and can provide certain cognitive results without our having any particular concept of what the object of intuition is. Ferrarin also insists that, in claiming that “[t]he I think must be able to accompany all my representations,” Kant considers having an experience to imply only the possibility—and not, as Ferraris claims, the necessity—of the experience being consciously thought, and that Kant considers imagination not as a “creative” psychological activity within experience, as Ferraris implies, but rather as a certain normative activity that experience presupposes. Instead of basing experience on physics, then, Ferrarin argues that Kant distinguishes experience from science and considers both to be made possible by certain general a priori forms of sensing and conceiving of objects.In the following article, Claudio La Rocca takes issue with Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project in the Critique. For La Rocca, Kant is concerned with the conditions under which discourses or experiences have sense for a subject, and, specifically, with how referring to empirical objects differs from referring to the objects of, say, hallucinations, aesthetic experiences, or moral reasoning. On La Rocca’s account, referring meaningfully to an object presupposes shared rules which identify that kind of object and distinguish it from others, and which are “spelled out” in experience even before being “read” conceptually. However, unlike the distinctions between kinds of empirical objects, the general distinction between empirical objects and objects of other discourses or experiences cannot itself be derived from experience, since experience presupposes it. Thus La Rocca presents Kant’s basic project as the identification of the a priori rules which distinguish empirical objects as such, rather than the idealist project attributed to him by Ferraris, that of showing how the existence or properties of such objects depend on the mind or how our experience of them depends on the concepts or scientific theories we have of them.Paolo Parrini adopts a slightly different approach by arguing that it is Ferraris, and not Kant, who fails to distinguish adequately between experience, ontology, and epistemology. In particular, Parrini insists that, rather than basing experience or ontology on science, as Ferraris claims, Kant aims to show that a priori concepts are necessary to distinguish the objective from the subjective in ordinary experience, and that Ferraris’ own realism naively ignores certain crucial distinctions between what is experienced, what exists, and what we know. Parrini thus undertakes to defend not only Kant, but also certain post-Kantians—and the logical empiricists in particular—against Ferraris’ criticisms.In the final response to Ferraris, Massimo Barale further questions Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project. By considering only the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, Barale insists that Ferraris treats the most elementary, and even preliminary, parts of Kant... (shrink)

Realitism: the postmodern attack on reality -- Realism: things that have existed since the beginning of the world -- Reconstruction: why criticism starts from reality -- Emancipation: unexamined life has no value.

Introduction to New Realism provides an overview of the movement of contemporary thought named New Realism, by its creator and most celebrated practitioner, Maurizio Ferraris. Sharing significant concerns and features with Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, New Realism can be said to be one of the most prescient philosophical positions today. Its desire to overcome the postmodern antirealism of Kantian origin, and to reassert the importance of truth and objectivity in the name of a new Enlightenment, has had (...) an enormous resonance both in Europe and in the US. Introduction to New Realism is the first volume dedicated to exposing this continental movement to an anglophone audience.Featuring a foreword by the eminent contemporary philosopher and leading exponent of Speculative Realism, Iain Hamilton Grant, the book begins by tracing the genesis of New Realism, and outlining its central theoretical tenets, before opening onto three distinct sections. The first, 'Negativity', is a critique of the postmodern idea that the world is constructed by our conceptual schemas, all the more so as we have entered the age of digitality and virtuality. The second thesis, 'positivity', proposes the fundamental ontological assertion of New Realism, namely that not only are there parts of reality that are independent of thought, but these parts are also able to act causally over thought and the human world. The third thesis, 'normativity,' applies New Realism to the sphere of the social world. Finally, an afterword written by two young scholars explains in more detail the relationship between New Realism and other forms of contemporary realism. (shrink)

The seventeenth century saw dramatic advances in mathematical theory and practice. With the recovery of many of the classical Greek mathematical texts, new techniques were introduced, and within 100 years, the rules of analytic geometry, geometry of indivisibles, arithmatic of infinites, and calculus were developed. Although many technical studies have been devoted to these innovations, Mancosu provides the first comprehensive account of the relationship between mathematical advances of the seventeenth century and the philosophy of mathematics of the period. Starting with (...) the Renaissance debates on the certainty of mathematics, Mancosu leads the reader through the foundational issues raised by the emergence of these new mathematical techniques, including the influence of the Aristotelian conception of science in Cavalieri and Guldin, the foundational relevance of Descartes' Geometrie, the relation between geometrical and epistemological theories of the infinite, and the Leibnizian calculus and the opposition to infinitesimalist procedures. In the process Mancosu draws a sophisticated picture of the subtle dependencies between technical development and philosophical reflection in seventeenth century mathematics. (shrink)

Maurizio Ferraris | : L’une des réponses au paradoxe de la fiction consiste à dire que les émotions que nous éprouvons face aux oeuvres de fiction ne sont pas véritables. Mais qu’est-ce que pleurer ou rire pour de vrai ? En fait, presque toutes les formes de rire ou de larmes, et de réactions émotionnelles, sont compatibles avec la fiction, y compris celles qui sont des émotions vraies. Ce qui pose problème dans le paradoxe est la prémisse selon laquelle (...) nos croyances au sujet de la fiction doivent être vraies ou fausses. | : One of the answers to the paradox of fiction consists in claiming that the emotions that we feel about fictions are not genuine emotions. But what is it to laugh or to cry genuinely? In fact, almost all kinds of laughter and of cry are compatible with fictions, including genuine ones. What is wrong in the paradox of fiction is the premise according to which our beliefs about fictions have to be true or false. (shrink)

Citation: Marina Christodoulou, “I Own therefore I Am. The Ontology of Property”, In Why Does What Exists Exist? Some Hypotheses on the Ultimate “Why” Question, edited by Mariano L. Bianca,Paolo Piccari. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021, pp. 169-182. Contributors: Mariano L. Bianca, Konstantinos Boultzis, Marina Christodoulou, Maurizio Ferraris, Marco G. Giammarchi, Enrico Guglielminetti, Roberta Lanfredini, Fabio Minazzi, Crister Nyberg, Paolo Piccari, Paolo Rossi. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6294-8; ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6294-3 -/- -------------- -/- The concept of Property is what (...) attaches us to Existence, Property, and Life, instead of non-existence, non-Being and Non-life (or Death). I occupy, I possess, I own, therefore I am, therefore I exist. I own a body, therefore, I am a being; I also own a self, therefore I am. -/- What exists exists because we have the notion, the concept, the idea, the habit of property and of ownership. There is something rather than nothing because we own it. Why private property? Because we have the notion, the concept, the idea, the habit of property and of ownership. There is private property because we need to own things, including ourselves, and we need to own because we need to sign and vice versa. (shrink)

Italian political thinker Paolo Virno argues that the category of "multitude" is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of "people." Globalization is forcing us to rethink some of the categories—such as "the people"—that traditionally have been associated with the now eroding state. Italian political thinker Paolo Virno argues that the category of "multitude," elaborated by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth century, is a far better tool to (...) analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of "people," favored by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the notion of multitude, defined it as shunning political unity, resisting authority, and never entering into lasting agreements. "When they rebel against the state," Hobbes wrote, "the citizens are the multitude against the people." But the multitude isn't just a negative notion, it is a rich concept that allows us to examine anew plural experiences and forms of nonrepresentative democracy. Drawing from philosophy of language, political economics, and ethics, Virno shows that being foreign, "not-feeling-at-home-anywhere," is a condition that forces the multitude to place its trust in the intellect. In conclusion, Virno suggests that the metamorphosis of the social systems in the West during the last twenty years is leading to a paradoxical "Communism of the Capital.". (shrink)

The period from 1900 to 1935 was particularly fruitful and important for the development of logic and logical metatheory. This survey is organized along eight "itineraries" concentrating on historically and conceptually linked strands in this development. Itinerary I deals with the evolution of conceptions of axiomatics. Itinerary II centers on the logical work of Bertrand Russell. Itinerary III presents the development of set theory from Zermelo onward. Itinerary IV discusses the contributions of the algebra of logic tradition, in particular, Löwenheim (...) and Skolem. Itinerary V surveys the work in logic connected to the Hilbert school, and itinerary V deals specifically with consistency proofs and metamathematics, including the incompleteness theorems. Itinerary VII traces the development of intuitionistic and many-valued logics. Itinerary VIII surveys the development of semantical notions from the early work on axiomatics up to Tarski's work on truth. (shrink)

In this article I defend two theses. The first is that the centrality of recording in the social world is manifested through the production of documents, a phenomenon which has been present since the earliest phases of society and which has undergone an exponential growth through the technological developments of the last decades. The second is that the centrality of documents leads to a view of normativity according to which human beings are primarily passive receptors of rules manifested through documents. (...) We are not intentional producers of values. The latter, as I shall suggest in my conclusion, should be viewed as being ‘socially dependent’ rather than ‘socially constructed’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I assume that, if knowledge does not refer to something other than itself, the words ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘epistemology’, ‘ontology’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘reflection’ would be meaningless. I define the transcendental fallacy as involving faith in the existence of a spirit independent from matter, capable of producing representations and things. In terms of matter and memory, the fact that the past is repeated by matter is even more important than the fact that it is recalled by memory, because without (...) matter there would be no memory and no ability to remember. I remind the reader that only individuals exist and that the first character of individuals is that they are external with respect to others. Finally, I consider how epistemology should be considered in terms of Pentecostal meaning and emergent meaning: Pentecostal meaning follows the path Meaning → Expression → Inscription. Emergent meaning goes from Inscription → Expression → Meaning. (shrink)

Maurizio Ferraris explores how, through the reading of Proust's _In Search of Lost Time_, one can explore memory, art, and society, using the book as a guide for living life.

In this article, Ferraris examines the notion of sacrifice in the philosophy of Heidegger. Focusing specifically—but not exclusively—on Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie, Ferraris shows that sacrifice is a fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s thematization of human finitude. More specifically, Ferraris shows the central role played by sacrifice in highlighting the radical level of truth and authenticity that the event of death carries within itself. Hence, Ferraris argues that it is through sacrifice—and mourning—that we understand what death is, (...) as the self-transcendence of Dasein makes the transcendence of Being possible. (shrink)

Perhaps the most relevant aspect of the ongoing philosophical transformation is the splitting of binomial speculation-idealism. Indeed, one can be both realist and speculative. The paper aims to show it through a definition of negative, positive, and speculative Realism and emphasises the speculative concept of hysteresis, i.e. the survival of effects to their own causes. Indeed, it is the fundamental principle at the basis of what exists (ontology), what we do (technology), what we know (epistemology), and finally of teleology (that (...) is, of the interruption which, by putting an end to a process, simultaneously assigns a purpose to it). (shrink)

Il vero punto, nel confronto tra realisti e postmodernisti, non è ovviamente l’affermazione o negazione dell’esistenza del mondo esterno, ma il costruzionismo: quanto incidono gli schemi concettuali nella costruzione della realtà naturale e sociale? Infatti nessun realista negherebbe che l’IVA dipenda da schemi concettuali . Quello che il realista si chiede è, appunto, fin dove si spinge l’azione degli schemi concettuali, ed è qui che si manifesta il dissidio tra realisti e postmodernisti. Questi ultimi sono molto più generosi nella lista (...) delle parti di realtà che sono socialmente costruite, al punto da affermare, in taluni casi, che noi non abbiamo mai accesso a un mondo "là fuori”, ma solo con ciò che viene costruito dai nostri schemi concettuali.The actual issue at stake, in the confrontation between realists and postmodernists, is not whether you should accept or deny the existence of the external world, but the scope of constructionism: how far conceptual schemes bear on the construction of natural and social reality? Indeed, no realist would deny that the VAT depends on our conceptual schemes, which does not mean that it is purely subjective: you don’t decide whether you have to pay the VAT, it depends on where the purchase takes places. The realist just asks where the sphere of influence of conceptual schemes stops, and here the disagreement with the postmodernists begins. The latter are much more generous in listing the parts of reality that they consider socially constructed, up to maintaining that we do not have any access to the world “out there”, but only to what our conceptual schemes construct. (shrink)

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, raises an interesting philosophical issue, namely, how can one be in touch with past things if they no longer exist? It provides us with a way to address this issue by outlining an ontological view according to which past things still exist within a four-dimensional world. Although one cannot be in touch with past things by means of ordinary perception, one can do so by combining perception and memory. In this sense, In Search (...) of Lost Time helps us to reconcile a four-dimensionalist ontology according to which things have both spatial and temporal parts with a realist phenomenology according to which experience gives us access to things as they are. In so doing, Proust’s masterpiece allows us to shed some light on what it means for a subject of experience to exist in a four-dimensional world. (shrink)

An analysis of the history and social role of mobile phones today is followed by a proposal of a philosophical theory of objects, which is meant to be complementary to Searle's 'collective intentionality', that places writing at the basis of social reality.

In the following three chapters, Ferraris examines the universalization of the domain of interpretation with Heidegger, the development of Heideggerian philosophical hermeneutics with Gadamer and Derrida, and the relation between hermeneutics and epistemology, on the one hand, and the human sciences, on the other.

The mnemonic arts and the idea of a universal language that would capture the essence of all things were originally associated with cryptology, mysticism, and other occult practices. And it is commonly held that these enigmatic efforts were abandoned with the development of formal logic in the seventeenth century and the beginning of the modern era. In his distinguished book, Logic and the Art of Memory Italian philosopher and historian Paolo Rossi argues that this view is belied by an (...) examination of the history of the idea of a universal language. Based on comprehensive analyses of original texts, Rossi traces the development of this idea from late medieval thinkers such as Ramon Lull through Bruno, Bacon, Descartes, and finally Leibniz in the seventeenth century. The search for a symbolic mode of communication that would be intelligible to everyone was not a mere vestige of magical thinking and occult sciences, but a fundamental component of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought. Seen from this perspective, modern science and combinatorial logic represent not a break from the past but rather its full maturity. Available for the first time in English, this book (originally titled Clavis Universalis ) remains one of the most important contributions to the history of ideas ever written. In addition to his eagerly anticipated translation, Steven Clucas offers a substantial introduction that places this book in the context of other recent works on this fascinating subject. A rich history and valuable sourcebook, Logic and the Art of Memory documents an essential chapter in the development of human reason. (shrink)

Summary This article presents three hitherto unpublished letters by Frank Plumpton Ramsey on the foundations of mathematics with commentary. One of the letters was sent to Abraham Fraenkel and the other two letters to Heinrich Behmann. The transcription of the letters is preceded by an account that details the extent of Ramsey's known contacts with mathematical logicians on the Continent.

This paper analyzes the interlink among managerial experience, capabilities, and social capital in relation to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities of multinational enterprises' (MNEs) subsidiaries in an emerging market context. Based on the empirical sample of 104 subsidiaries of 28 Italian MNEs operating in India, we found that CEO managerial capabilities are positively associated with CSR activities. However, interestingly, our findings also show that subsidiary CEO (managerial) experience is negatively associated with CSR activities in emerging markets. Therefore, our study is (...) one of the few that highlights the negative repercussions of experience in the context of CSR activities in emerging markets. Moreover, our findings show that while social capital alleviates the negative influences of CEO experience on CSR activities, it does not enhance the role of CEO managerial capabilities in CSR activities. As such, our study contributes to research on business ethics with a focus on sustainable development in business. (shrink)

In societies with a non-elementary degree of complexity, we find institutions, social roles, promises, marriages, corporations, enterprises, and the large variety of what we can label “social objects”. On the one hand, we commonly speak and think of such entities as if they existed on a par with entities such as tables and persons. On the other hand, there is a clear link between what people think and how people behave and the social domain. We argue that the widespread “reductionist” (...) approach in social ontology fails to account for both those aspects of social reality, and put forward a new approach. The main idea is that a particular kind of social objects, namely documents – and more generally records of social acts – are the ground of social reality. The fundamental difference from the reductionist approach is that the content of collective intentions will turn out to be not so important in accounting for the ontological variety of complex social realities such as ours. (shrink)

A philosophical exchange broadly inspired by the characters of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues. Hylas is the realist philosopher: the view he stands up for reflects a robust metaphysic that is reassuringly close to common sense, grounded on the twofold persuasion that the world comes structured into entities of various kinds and at various levels and that it is the task of philosophy, if not of science generally, to “bring to light” that structure. Philonous, by contrast, is the anti-realist philosopher (though not (...) necessarily an idealist): his metaphysic is stark, arid, dishearteningly bone-dry, and stems from the conviction that a great deal of the structure that we are used to attribute to the world out there lies, on closer inspection, in our head, in our “organizing practices”, in the complex system of concepts and categories that unrerlie our representation of experience and our need to represent it that way. (shrink)