This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philologist by training, an author of scholarly studies on the nineteenth-century poet Leopardi, and a Marxist by conviction. With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism. Whereas the (...) philosophical legacy of the later Engels has been decried by most prominent Marxists since the 1920s, Timpanaro eloquently defends its essential purpose and relevance, by unfashionably re-emphasising the permanent weight of nature within history. In doing so, he returns to the heritage of Lucretius and Leopardi, and argues for a more consistent materialism that is at once more pessimistic and more hedonistic than any other contemporary version of Marxism. Timpanaro emphasises the insuperable limits of frailty and mortality as unalterable conditions of society whose transformation is the goal of revolutionary socialism. Timpanaro vigorously attacks what he regards as the widespread entente between a diluted Marxism and a fashionable idealism in the west, whether in the form of an “existentialist” or a “structuralist” union of the two. The aversion of the former to the work of Darwin and Engels receives a spirited refutation, no less than the indulgence of the latter towards the work of Saussure or Levi-Strauss. A special introduction written for this English edition deals with the phenomenon of the recent revival of “vulgar materialism” in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the fields of psychology and anthropology, and its relationship to racism. On Materialism will be one of the central focuses of cultural and intellectual controversy within and beyond Marxism in the next decade. (shrink)

BackgroundSonographic mesenteric pattern in celiac disease (CD) suggests a hyperdynamic circulation. Despite the well-known CD-related neurological involvement, no study has systematically explored the cerebral hemodynamics to transcranial Doppler sonography.Materials and methodsMontreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) were assessed in 15 newly diagnosed subjects with CD and 15 age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy controls. Cerebral blood flow (CBF) velocities and indices of resistivity (RI) and pulsatility (PI) from the middle cerebral artery (MCA), bilaterally, and the basilar (...) artery (BA) were recorded. We also assessed cerebral vasomotor reactivity (CVR) through the breath-holding test (BHT).ResultsWorse scores of MoCA and HDRS were found in patients compared to controls. Although patients showed higher values of CBF velocity from MCA bilaterally compared to controls, both at rest and after BHT, no comparison reached a statistical significance, whereas after BHT both RI and PI from BA were significantly higher in patients. A significant negative correlation between both indices from BA and MoCA score were also noted.ConclusionThese treatment-naïve CD patients may show some subtle CVR changes in posterior circulation, thus possibly expanding the spectrum of pathomechanisms underlying neuroceliac disease and in particular gluten ataxia. Subclinical identification of cerebrovascular pathology in CD may help adequate prevention and early management of neurological involvement. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

This book is about the relationship between different concepts of freedom and happiness. The book's authors distinguish three concepts for which an empirical measure exists: opportunity to choose, capability to choose, and autonomy to choose. They also provide a comprehensive account of the relationship between freedom and well-being by comparing channels through which freedoms affect quality of life. The book also explores whether the different conceptions of freedom complement or replace each other in the determination of the level of well-being. (...) In so doing, the authors make freedoms a tool for policy making and are able to say which conception is the most effective for well-being, as circumstances change. The results have implications for a justification of a free society: maximizing freedoms is good for its favorable consequences upon individual well-being, a fundamental value for the judgment of human advantage. (shrink)

In the paper we argue that truth-relativism is potentially hostage to a problem of exhibiting witnesses of its own truth. The problem for the relativist stems from acceptance of a trumping principle according to which there is a dependency between ascriptions of truth of an utterance and ascriptions of truth to other ascriptions of truth of that utterance. We argue that such a dependency indeed holds in the case of future contingents and the case of epistemic modals and that, consequently, (...) the relativist about these domains cannot exhibit witnesses to his relativism. In the appendix we provide some results on the relation between trumping and multi-order relativism. (shrink)

What is freedom? Can we measure it? Does it affect policy? This book develops an original measure of freedom called 'Autonomy Freedom', consistent with J. S. Mill's view of autonomy, and applies it to issues in policy and political design. The work pursues three aims. First, it extends classical liberalism beyond exclusive reliance on negative freedom so as to take autonomous behavior explicitly into account. Second, it grounds on firm conceptual foundations a new standard in the measurement of freedom that (...) can be fruitfully coupled with existing gauges. Third, it shows empirically that individual preferences for redistribution and cross-country differences in welfare spending in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries are driven by the degree of 'autonomy freedom' that individuals enjoy. By means of an interdisciplinary approach and a sophisticated econometric methodology, the book takes an explicit stand in defense of freedom and sets the basis for a liberalism based upon people's actions and institutions. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

This paper introduces considerations about constraints in the construction of measures of an agent's freedom. It starts with motivating the exercise from both the philosophical and the informational point of view. Then it presents two rankings of opportunity sets based on information about the extent of options and the constraints that a decision maker faces. The first ranking measures freedom as variety of choice; the second as non-restrictedness in choice.

In this paper, I offer a pluralistic framework for disagreement and I develop a strategy to account for the varieties of disagreement on the basis of the varieties of the truth across different domains of discourse. Truth-pluralism is thus sufficient for delivering pluralism about disagreement—that is, diaphonic pluralism.

Dissoi Logoi 4.6 presents a beautiful self-refutation argument, which I analyse here, offering a different assessment of its relation to self-contradiction and the Liar paradox from the only one available in the literature.

_Rawls: An Introduction_ is a uniquely comprehensive introduction to the work of the American philosopher John Rawls, who transformed contemporary political philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s, political philosophy seemed to have reached a dead end characterized by a loose predominance of utilitarian theses. Rawls’s conception of liberalism placed civil liberties and social justice at its core, and his extraordinary influence has only been confirmed by the extent of the criticism he has provoked. The book is divided into three parts (...) which correspond to Rawls’s three major books. The first concentrates on _A Theory of Justice_ and examines the way in which Rawls’s general vision of social justice is presented. Maffettone also includes here a discussion of some of the most important critiques of Rawls. The second part of the book highlights _Political Liberalism_, with a chapter dedicated to the “passage” from _Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism_. Finally, the third part provides a discussion of _The Law of Peoples_. This work is acomprehensive examination of these three major texts by a renowned Rawls scholar and will appeal to all philosophers and social scientists for whom it is essential to understand the key theories of this most influential of political philosophers. (shrink)

The hydrodynamical formalism for the quantum theory of a nonrelativistic particle is considered, together with a reformulation of it which makes use of the methods of kinetic theory and is based on the existence of the Wigner phase-space distribution. It is argued that this reformulation provides strong evidence in favor of the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it is suggested that this latter could be better understood as an almost classical statistical theory. Moreover, it is shown how, within this (...) context, the Wigner and the Margenau-Hill functions are not equivalent, and that the latter is essentially unsatisfactory, as well as the associated symmetrization rule. Arguments in favor of a stochastic picture of the phenomena at the microscopic level are also presented. (shrink)

Disagreement plays an important role in several philosophical debates, with intuitions about ordinary or exotic cases of agreement and disagreement being invoked to support or undermine competing semantic, epistemological and metaphysical views. In this paper we discuss cases of interworld doxastic disagreement, that is to say, cases of doxastic disagreement supposedly obtaining between individuals inhabiting different possible worlds, in particular between an individual inhabiting the actual world and his/her counterpart in another possible world. We draw a distinction between propositional and (...) attitudinal disagreement, bring it to bear on the issue of the conditions of this kind of disagreement, and raise some metaphysical and epistemological worries about the claim that an individual inhabiting the actual world can disagree with an attitude or a speech act of his/her own counterpart, or of another individual, in a different possible world. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against John MacFarlane’s radical relativist semantics. By developing an argument of Ross & Schroeder I claim that belief in this relativist theory is incompatible with being a rational agent that acts in accordance with the norms of assertion and retraction. My conclusion is therefore that MacFarlane's semantics is committed to postulating that competent speakers are ignorant of the very theory that provides a – putative – correct account of their linguistic behaviour.

In Plat. Prot. 349d2-351b2, first Socrates leads Protagoras to acknowledge that wisdom and courage are the same thing, then Protagoras accuses him of having put in his mouth words that he never said. Starting from a new reconstruction of the logic of Socrates’ demonstration, I will show how this is more complex, sophistic, and corresponding to Protagoras’ accusation than what is usually believed.

This paper aims to explore an important concept in the work of the later Rawls: the idea of the reasonable. While the concept has its roots in both Aristotle and Kant, Rawls develops a unique account of the reasonable in the light of his theory of political liberalism. The paper includes Rawlsian responses to the practical challenges of radical democrats on the one hand, and epistemological challenges to the reasonable on the other. It concludes that Rawls’s account of the reasonable (...) helps to bridge the gap between liberal theory and democratic practice. (shrink)

The full significance of phenomenological experience was one of Pasolini's favourite subjects, declined in terms of 'Reality as Language'. Another semiotic theme of Pasolini as a cinema theorist, was the idea of individual existence as a sequence shot, to which the editing operation constituted by death gives order and sense. The article, based onFabbri, Peirce and Ricœur, suggests an interpretation of that idea, in the direction of the narrative constitution of personal identity – as an effect of final subjectivity.

Questo utile ed interessante volume – frutto di una tesi in Filologia bizantina elaborata presso l'Università Cattolica di Milano sotto la guida di C. M. Mazzucchi – offre l'editio princeps della Parafrasi Ambrosiana allo Strategicon di Maurizio, un manuale di tattica militare fra i più significativi della letteratura greca, composto verisimilmente nell'ultima decade del VI secolo ovvero agli inizi del VI; la parafrasi, a sua volta, è testimoniata dal codice Ambrosianus B 119 sup. = gr. 139 (A), una importantissima raccolta (...) di tattici greci le cui caratteristiche paleografiche rinviano agli anni immediatamente successivi alla metà del X secolo; di più, l'esame interno del manoscritto permette di corroborare e precisare questa deduzione, riportandoci con tutta probabilità all'ambiente di corte ed ad una delle personalità più significative e potenti di quegli anni, Basilio παϱαϰοιμώμενος, figlio naturale di Romano Lecapeno e fratellastro dell'imperatrice Elena, la consorte di Costantino VII Porfirogenito: ne sono prova, fra l'altro, le eccezionali caratteristiche librarie e la presenza di un dizionario nautico – i cosiddetti Naumachica di Basilio – preceduto da esametri e da un proemio espressamente dedicati al Παϱαϰοιμώμενος, dati che sembrano riportarci ai preparativi per una spedizione navale per Creta che già negli anni 958–959 si andava allestendo. (shrink)

Describing the will and the extent of its causal power over human actions, Joseph Priestley famously compared the mind to a stone, as both are subject to deterministic laws: “Though an inclination...

Archibald Pitcairne’s medical writings are inspired by Newton’s Principia mathematica, as the Scottish physician assumed Newtonian physics as a model for scientific inquiry that should be applied to other branches of natural philosophy, including physiology and pathology. The ideal of a comprehensive mathematical science was very appealing to late seventeenth-century intellectuals, including physicians. This essay focuses on how Pitcairne tried to implement these ideas. In particular, I argue that Pitcairne’s medical thinking is based on three philosophical assumptions: first, a methodological (...) assumption, for which medical knowledge should be sought in the form of a deductive system; second, an epistemological assumption, that is, that our knowledge of physiological processes is sound only when we reduce them to a set of mathematical laws; and, third, an ontological assumption that identifies blood as the substance on which animal life most directly depends. I also suggest that such ideas should be studied against the backdrop of Pitcairne’s general mindset, including his personal sympathy for political conservativism. I further argue that his insistence on the reduction of natural processes to mathematical relations and his search for the universal order of nature also connect to his religious and political ideals. (shrink)

In this chapter I develop a version of Evans’ challenge for MacFarlane’s assessment-sensitive relativism. The argument is meant to show that, contrary to MacFarlane’s intentions, the correctness of an assertion is a relative matter if the area of discourse has an assessment-sensitive semantics. Thus MacFarlane’s truth-relativism is an inherently unstable doctrine for it is unclear how we should behave in order to achieve the goal of an assertion.

ABSTRACTEcumenical Alethic Pluralism is a novel kind of alethic pluralism. It is ecumenical in that it widens the scope of alethic pluralism by allowing for a normatively deflated truth property alongside a variety of normatively robust truth properties. We establish EAP by showing how Wright’s Inflationary Arguments fail in the domain of taste, once a relativist treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of that domain is endorsed. EAP is highly significant to current debates on the nature of truth insofar as (...) it involves a reconfiguration of the dialectic between deflationists and pluralists. (shrink)

According to deontic justice theory, individuals often feel principled moral obligations to uphold norms of justice. That is, standards of justice can be valued for their own sake, even apart from serving self-interested goals. While a growing body of evidence in business ethics supports the notion of deontic justice, skepticism remains. This hesitation results, at least in part, from the absence of a coherent framework for explaining how individuals produce and experience deontic justice. To address this need, we argue that (...) a compelling, yet still missing, step is to gain further understanding into the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms of deontic justice. Here, we advance a theoretical model that disentangles three key processes of deontic justice: The use of justice rules to assess events, cognitive empathy, and affective empathy. Together with reviewing neural systems supporting these processes, broader implications of our model for business ethics scholarship are discussed. (shrink)

According to some Philosophy for Children theorists, the pedagogy of the Community of Inquiry hinges upon the acceptance of a pragmatist epistemology. The underlying idea is that it is possible to participate, and to justify participation, in a community of inquiry only if some pragmatist view of truth and knowledge is true and accepted by the participants engaged in dialogue. In this article we argue that this claim is false. In this way, we want to free the pedagogy of the (...) Community of Inquiry from some epistemological assumptions that we regard as unwarranted. To support our contention, we shall highlight two distinctions that are important in order to appreciate the connection between epistemology and education: first, the distinction between the disposition of intellectual humility and the belief in fallibilism; second, the belief in the existence of Cartesian certainties and the attitude of psychological certainty. Finally, we also argue that to vindicate dialogic inquiry it is neither necessary to adopt a pragmatist theory of truth, nor is it necessary to regard warranted judgement as the primary aim of inquiry. In contrast, we argue that truth is the aim of inquiry, and so is the aim of children when they participate in a dialogic inquiry. In this way we also suggest a justification of philosophy with children that does not instrumentalize it. (shrink)

Marsilio Ficino, fonti, testi, fortuna, convegno svoltosi à Firenze nell'ottobre del 1999, viene a chiudere la serie degli incontri internazionali coordinati dal Comitato Internazionale Marsilio Ficino e ora pubblicati a Londra e a Parigi. Il volume offre le versioni aggiornate delle conferenze pubbliche tenute all'Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento in quella occasione sull'opera ed il pensiero di Ficino, dal Quattrocento al Seicento. Il suo taglio prevalentemente filologico costituisce un imprescindibile complemento alle pubblicazioni del 1984-86, sempre in onore del Ficino, (...) di cui arrichisce le conclusioni con nuove prospettive di ricerca e nuove scoperte sul maggior filosofo del Quattrocento italiano. Un indice dei nomi agevola la consultazione del lettore, che troverà in questo libro uno strumento di ricerca fondamentale. (shrink)

We address the problem of observables in generally invariant spacetime theories such as Einstein’s general relativity. Using the refined notion of an event as a “point-coincidence” between scalar fields that completely characterise a spacetime model, we propose a generalisation of the relational local observables that does not require the existence of four everywhere invertible scalar fields. The collection of all point-coincidences forms in generic situations a four-dimensional manifold, that is naturally identified with the physical spacetime.

Vagueness is a familiar but deeply puzzling aspect of the relation between language and the world. It is highly controversial what the nature of vagueness is -- a feature of the way we represent reality in language, or rather a feature of reality itself? May even relations like identity or parthood be affected by vagueness? Sorites arguments suggest that vague terms are either inconsistent or have a sharp boundary. The account we give of such paradoxes plays a pivotal role for (...) our understanding of natural languages. If our reasoning involves any vague concepts, is it safe from contradiction? Do vague concepts really lack any sharp boundary? If not, why are we reluctant to accept the existence of any sharp boundary for them? And what rules of inference can we validly apply, if we reason in vague terms? Cuts and Clouds presents the latest work towards a clearer understanding of these old puzzles about the nature and logic of vagueness. The collection offers a stimulating series of original essays on these and related issues by some of the world's leading experts. (shrink)

In Truth and Objectivity, Crispin Wright argues that because truth is a distinctively normative property, it cannot be as metaphysically insubstantive as deflationists claim.1 This argument has been taken, together with the scope problem,2 as one of the main motivations for alethic pluralism.3 We offer a reconstruction of Wright’s Inflationary Argument (henceforth IA) aimed at highlighting what are the steps required to establish its inflationary conclusion. We argue that if a certain metaphysical and epistemological view of a given subject matter (...) is accepted, a local counterexample to IA can be constructed. We focus on the domain of basic taste and we develop two variants of a subjectivist and relativist metaphysics and epistemology that seems palatable in that domain. Although we undertake no commitment to this being the right metaphysical cum epistemological package for basic taste, we contend that if the metaphysics and the epistemology of basic taste are understood along these lines, they call for a truth property whose nature is not distinctively normative—contra what IA predicts. This result shows that the success of IA requires certain substantial metaphysical and epistemological principles and that, consequently, a proper assessment of IA cannot avoid taking a stance on the metaphysics and the epistemology of the domain where it is claimed to be successful. Although we conjecture that IA might succeed in other domains, in this paper we don’t take a stand on this issue. We conclude by briefly discussing the significance of this result for the debate on alethic pluralism. (shrink)

The focus of the article is the notion of normativity in logic and politics and their possible intersections. The twentieth-century divide between the analytical and the continental idea of logic is explored, by noting that they both – with significant differences – can be seen as proposing a ‘bottom-up normativity’, which may have immediate political effects. Logical normativity postulates universality, and a connection between reality and reason able to orient actions universalistically. For a bottom-up conception (as specifically advanced by Deleuze’s (...) logic of sense), the universalistic approach does not descend from above on an elusive reality but is a self-organization of multiple processes occurring in a horizon which is typically affected by political facts and choices. (shrink)

In Truth and Objectivity, Crispin Wright argues that because truth is a distinctively normative property, it cannot be as metaphysically insubstantive as deflationists claim. We offer a reconstruction of Wright’s Inflationary Argument that highlights the steps required to establish its inflationary conclusion. We argue that if a certain metaphysical and epistemological view of a given subject matter is accepted, a local counterexample to the Inflationary Argument can be constructed. As a case study we focus on the domain of basic taste. (...) We develop two variants of a subjectivist and relativist metaphysics and epistemology that seem palatable in that domain and we show that the Inflationary Argument doesn’t go through in the domain of basic taste thus construed. We conclude by briefly discussing the significance of this result for the debate on alethic pluralism. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate whether and to what extent scientists (e.g. inquirers such as epidemiologists or virologists) can have rational and fruitful disagreement with what we call post-enquirers (e.g. conspiratorial anti-vaxxers) on topics of scientific relevance such as the safety and efficacy of vaccines. In order to accomplish this aim, we will rely and expand on the epistemological framework developed in detail in Ferrari & Moruzzi (2021) to study the underlying normative profile of enquiry and post-enquiry. We take it (...) that our analysis provides an effective explanation of why standard argumentative strategies such as fact-checking and debunking cannot work in the context of disagreement between scientists and denialists unless they are coupled with a discussion of the values that are endorsed by the scientific community. (shrink)

Post-colonial theories present narratives of discontent based on resentment toward colonial exploitation and cultural hegemony. The substance matter of post-colonial narratives (their first-order argument) is sound. Post-colonial theories often rely on a post-modern philosophical argumentative structure (their second-order argument). The second-order argument is not able to support the first-order argument. In particular, the nihilist consequences of post-modernism make impossible the construction of a (post-colonial) discourse through which the discontent is transformed in a basis for a reasonable political action. The lack (...) of such a discourse is a source of intellectual despair and predisposes to political fragmentation. Moreover, protest without arguments often coincides with violence. Within a liberal view of justice it is possible to represent post-colonialism as a critical stance. (shrink)

According to the form of logical pluralism elaborated by Beall and Restall there is more than one relation of logical consequence. Since they take the relation of logical consequence to reside at the very heart of a logical system, different relations of logical consequence yield different logics. In this paper, we are especially interested in understanding what are the consequences of endorsing Beall and Restall’s version of logical pluralism vis-à-vis the normative guidance that logic is taken to provide to reasoners. (...) In particular, the aim of this paper is threefold. First, in Sections 2 and 3, we offer an exegesis of Beall and Restall’s logical pluralism as a thesis of semantic indeterminacy of our concept of logical consequence – i.e. understood as indeterminacy logical pluralism. Second, in Sections 4 and 5, we elaborate and critically scrutinize three models of semantic indeterminacy that we think are fit to capture Beall and Restall’s indeterminacy logical pluralism. Third, in Section 6, following Beall and Restall’s assumption that the notion of logical consequence has normative significance for deductive reasoning, we raise a series of normative problems for indeterminacy logical pluralism. The overall conclusion that we aim to establish is that Beall and Restall’s indeterminate logical pluralism cannot offer an adequate account of the normative guidance that logic is taken to provide us with in ordinary contexts of reasoning. (shrink)

Starting with the assumption that liberalism is under attack both from political and from philosophical alternatives, this paper is limited to a discussion of one family of critical arguments toward liberalism, namely the arguments that stress the importance of process as contrasted with substance. According to these arguments philosophical and political liberalism is based on substantive principles of justice, whereas a proper democratic theory should be founded on more procedural theories of justice. Such criticism ranges from democratic deliberative approaches to (...) republican theories of politics. I examine some of these critiques of liberalism - from Habermas to Cohen, Gutmann and Thompson, from Pettit to Sunstein and Michelman - and conclude that all of them arrive at a final impasse: either they smuggle into their critiques substantive parts of liberalism or their theories do not match our philosophical and political needs. That is why I maintain that sometimes the therapy (namely democratic deliberation and republicanism) can be worse than the disease (namely liberalism). Key Words: deliberative democracy • justification • legitimation • liberalism • political philosophy • republicanism. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between the concepts of justification and legitimation with a view to offering a normative standard for global justice compatible with cultural pluralism. According to this distinction, justification is presented as an idealized, substantive and top-down enterprise rooted in the moral and metaphysical substrate of a specific culture. On the other hand, legitimation has a procedural and factual connotation and derives its strength from the success of some culturally independent but historically situated practice (bottom-up approach). Building on this (...) distinction, I argue that justification and legitimation should be made complementary for the sake of cross-cultural dialogue. (shrink)

The global justice debate has been raging for forty years. Not merely the terms and conditions, but, more deeply, the epistemic, existential and ethical grounds of the international relations of persons, states and institutions are being determined, debated and negotiated. Yet the debate remains essentially a parochial one, confined largely to Western intellectuals and institutional spaces. An Introduction to the field is therefore still urgently required, because it remains necessary to include more ‘global’ voices into this debate of worldwide reach (...) and significance. The book addresses this need in two closely related ways. In Part I, it introduces the main contours of the debate by reproducing three of the most fundamental and influential essays that have been composed on the topic — essays by Peter Singer, Thomas Pogge and Thomas Nagel. In Part II, it makes a decisive critical intervention in the main stream of the debate through exposing the participation deficit afflicting the theorization of global justice. This part begins with a well-known essay by Amartya Sen, who famously referred to the ‘parochialism’ of the global justice debate in making a break with the Rawlsian paradigm that has dominated the field until now. Finally, a series of lively essays newly composed for this volume reflect on the possibilities for deparochializing global justice opened up by Sen’s work in this area. The book will be useful for students of international relations, postcolonial studies, political theory, and social and political philosophy, as well as for those engaged in studies of globalization or global studies. (shrink)

This article raises some structural and theoretical problems in comprehensively reading Rawls. The first part divides Rawls’s oeuvre into two periods: the period marked by his most significant work A Theory of Justice (1971), and the period represented by Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples (1999). The article examines ideas from all three books. The author first tries to show the continuity of Rawls’s liberalism, the best example being the development of the idea of the priority of right (...) over the idea of the good, and the development of the ideal of equality. The second aim is to explain the idea of public reason, introduced in Rawls’s second period, and related objections, while examining three basic forms of justification in Political Liberalism. The author also takes into account Rawls’s criticism of the idea of political philosophy, which he sees as too keen to solve the needs of political society and less willing to explore the philosophical doctrine’s potential, and his idea of philosophical liberalism as opposed to political liberalism. The third part of the article stresses the principles and norms of international law and practice, and explains what Rawls calls “realistic utopia” and some related problems. (shrink)

The article aims at showing Salvatore Veca’s philosophical thought, from the classical figures of the beginnings of his reflection (in particular Kant and Marx), to his encounter with Rawls’ political philosophy and up to the recent developments. The author also emphasises the importance of Salvatore Veca as a philosopher tout court and public intellectual.

In this paper, I take a fresh look at Husserl's key distinction between objectifying and non‐objectifying acts, which roughly amounts to a distinction between presentational and evaluative experiences. My goal is to provide a clear and unified reconstruction of Husserl's argument for the thesis that non‐objectifying acts are necessarily founded in objectifying acts, a thesis that is highly controversial in and beyond Husserlian scholarship. In the first section, I reconstruct Husserl's view in the Logical Investigations, according to which only objectifying (...) acts establish an independent intentional relation to their objects, and argue that it is justified by the positing function of objectifying acts. In the second section, I address two problematic interpretations of this view and, after criticizing them, I present what I take to be Husserl's core argument for his position. In the third section, I turn to the revision of the view of the Logical Investigations that Husserl proposes in the wake of his transcendental turn, especially in Ideas I and II. On Husserl's revised view, all acts are objectifying, including emotional acts [Gemütsakte]. This revision has led scholars to consider Husserl's view aporetic. I propose an alternative interpretation that dispels the purported aporia. I conclude with some remarks on the costs and benefits of my reading, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Husserl's view in general. (shrink)

This is the first complete critical commentary of Husserl s seminal work Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. Leading international scholars offer a close reading, examining arguments and phenomenological descriptions, connecting them to Husserl s earlier and later works, and engaging important secondary sources. The book will be invaluable reading for scholars and students of phenomenology and 20th century philosophy.".

This Introduction to the special issue on “Skepticism and Justification” provides a background to the nine articles collected here and a detailed summary of each, which highlights their interconnections and relevance to the debate at the heart of the issue.