One 1120 pages volume, with 4000 entries covering - Western philosophy: authors, schools, concepts and terminology; - religions, cultural anthropology, eastern philosophies; - Psychology and psychoanalysis; - linguistics and semiotics; - sociology and political theory.

In un periodo in cui la storiografia filosofica italiana andava ridefinendo la sua identità, dopo la crisi dell’"egemonia" crociana e gentiliana, quella di Valerio Verra è stata senz’altro una delle figure più notevoli. A lui si deve infatti la ridefinizione di alcune tra le più importanti categorie storiografiche, e l’idea che la ricerca storica sia indispensabile per riconoscere, al di là di preconcetti teorici, la natura e i compiti della filosofia contemporanea. A due anni dalla morte, queste pagine ne (...) analizzano l’attività di storico della filosofia nel contesto in cui si è formata, mettendone in evidenza tematiche, metodi e criteri. (shrink)

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been incapable of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead (...) that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon agential demotion. (shrink)

Many extant theories of placebo focus on their causal structure wherein placebo effects are those that originate from select features of the therapy (e.g., client expectations or “incidental” features like size and shape). Although such accounts can distinguish placebos from standard medical treatments, they cannot distinguish placebos from everyday occurrences, for example, when positive feedback improves our performance on a task. Providing a social-epistemological account of a treatment context can rule out such occurrences, and furthermore reveal a new way to (...) distinguish clinical placebos from standard medical treatments. (shrink)