What is education? What options does the educator have and what is expected from those who are being educated? What do education in the sense of paideia and the Christian educatio have in common? And what is the difference between those two notions? What does it mean to succeed in the drama of life and the world? Can the insightful (theoria) seeking of wisdom (sofia, sapientia) be separated from the effective (praxis) seeking of reason (fronésis, prudentia)? What is the purpose (...) of scholé and can it be experienced in schools today? How do today's schools prepare the youngest generation for the task of enhancing civil society? Is everyone able to relate to good? What does it mean to testify to the idea of good? These and other questions are asked in a dialogue of two teachers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, respectively, who are concerned with philosophy, theology and pedagogy. The aim of the dialogue is to enter the Living school of thought, as founded by the Czech philosopher Radim Palouš (1924–2015), and to consider anew the topics he opened in his works. The dialogue embarks on a journey of searching for wisdom, by listening to words and the Word, by perceiving and contemplating experience, through reason and intuition, dialogue and acceptance in silence. It involves taking a closer look into the world that concerns everyone who are pupils, students, educators, teachers, educators – those who seek and who are sent, those longing and facing misunderstanding. It is an invitation to reflect on human life with humility and the awareness of human responsibility, in the hope that the pursuit of good, truth and beauty is intertwined with the task of succeeding as humans. (shrink)

This paper outlines a truth-conditional view of logical form, that is, a view according to which logical form is essentially a matter of truth-conditions. The main motivation for the view is a fact that seems crucial to logic. As _§_1 suggests, fundamental logical relations such as entailment or contradiction can formally be explained only if truth-conditions are formally represented.§2 spells out the view. _§_3 dwells on its anity with a conception of logical form that has been defended in the past. (...) _§§_4-6 draw attention to its impact on three major issues that concern, respectively, the extension of the domain of formal explanation, the semantics of tensed discourse, and the analysis of quantication. (shrink)

Several scholars have recognized the limitations of theories of moral reasoning in explaining moral behavior. They have argued that moral behavior may also be influenced by moral identity, or how central morality is to one’s sense of self. This idea has been supported by findings that people who exemplify moral behavior tend to place more importance on moral traits when defining their self-concepts (Colby & Damon, 1995). This paper takes the next step of examining individual variation in a construct highly (...) associated with immoral behavior — psychopathy. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a greater degree of psychopathic traits have a weaker moral identity. Within a large online sample, we found that individuals who scored higher on a measure of psychopathic traits were less likely to base their self-concepts on moral traits. In Study 2, we test whether this reduced sense of moral identity can be attributed to differences in moral judgment, which is another factor that could influence immoral behavior. Our results indicated that the reduced sense of moral identity among more psychopathic individuals was independent of variation in moral judgment. These results suggest that individuals with psychopathic traits may display immoral behavior partially because they do not construe their personal identities in moral terms. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

Though widely derided by popular psychologists and self-help writers as an emotionally toxic and destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary moral philosophers. Blaming wrongdoers has been thought to express deep commitment to moral values and norms, to be intimately bound up with practices of holding others responsible, and to be an important exercise of moral agency. In this paper I push against the grain of such defenses of blame just enough to articulate what seems right in the more (...) popular lines of critique. I distinguish between blame as a reactive attitude and blaming as a speech act, and argue that some disagreement over the value of blame can be explained by the fact that blaming, as a speech act, takes several distinct forms. Critiques of blame, I suggest, properly target what we might call judgmental or strongly verdictive blaming, the sort of blaming that passes judgment on the wrongdoer him- or herself, and treats him or her as deserving of the blamer’s hostile or “punishing” reactions. This kind of blaming, I argue, tends to foreclose engagement in further moral dialogue with wrongdoers, an effect that is particularly destructive in therapeutic contexts. In such contexts, it is often more appropriate—and more constructive—to hold others answerable without blaming them in the strongly verdictive sense. I argue, moreover, that strongly verdictive blame may be similarly destructive outside of straightforwardly therapeutic contexts, and I challenge the idea that there is in any case a sharp or clear dividing line between therapeutic and non-therapeutic responses to wrongdoers. Holding answerable in a non-judgmental mode is a response that may have a therapeutic dimension, but it nonetheless engages a wrongdoer as a moral peer and partner in moral dialogue. This account of non-judgmental answerability, I suggest, captures much of what moral philosophers have taken to be valuable about blame, while accommodating the insights of those who criticize its more toxic forms. (shrink)

Autonomy, at least in one sense of the term, requires sovereign authority over one’s choices and actions. In this paper, I argue that such authority is relational in at least two respects. First, I argue that sovereign authority may be shared – and, indeed, must be shareable – with others through the exercise of normative powers. Second, I argue that normative powers are themselves relational powers, powers that depend in part on the recognition of agents as having an equal basic (...) authority to exercise such powers in the first place. Drawing on feminist speech-act analyses of silencing and subordination, I examine how failures of uptake for exercises of normative powers compromise personal autonomy. (shrink)

This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate causation (of finite modes) do not always go together in Spinoza's thought. We show that there is good reason to doubt that this is the case in Spinoza's early Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well‐being. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza defends an account of God's immanent causation without fully endorsing the account of activity as adequate causation that he will later introduce in the Ethics (...) (E3def2). We turn to an examination of how God's immanent causation relates to the activity of finite things in the Ethics. We consider two ways to think about the link between God, seen as immanent cause, and the activity of finite things: namely, in terms of entailment and in terms of production. We argue that the productive model is most promising for understanding the way in which the activity of finite things and God's immanent causality are connected in Spinoza's (mature) philosophy. (shrink)

Both Aristotle and Kant note that the highest form of friendship enables individuals of good virtue to reveal themselves to one another. I argue that Aristotle and Kant emphasize complementary aspects of self-disclosure in friendship: whereas Kant acknowledges the inherent value of self-disclosure in friendship, Aristotle suggests that joint perception in friendship is instrumentally valuable in the acquisition of self-knowledge. I also argue that although Aristotle has a more developed account of friendship, Kant advances a superior account of self-disclosure in (...) friendship in his later remarks on friendship in the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. (shrink)

Analizamos aquí un conjunto de narrativas de docentes de escuela secundaria durante la pandemia de COVID-19 en la Argentina. Los resultados muestran la transformación de su práctica ante la virtualidad forzada y la pérdida de la materialidad de la escuela. La institución aparece así como el lugar de “lo común” y de fortalecimiento de los vínculos en un contexto de incertidumbre.

Recent feminist accounts of autonomy have focused both on autonomous agents’ relationships to others and on their self-regarding attitudes or self-relations. This chapter focuses on the attitude of practical self-care, arguing that autonomous agents must care about themselves in a sense that amounts to caring about their practical reasons. While self-care is primarily a self-relation, it also implies a form of interpersonal relationality. Caring about one’s reasons requires caring about intersubjective assessments thereof, and the relation of self-care thus implies openness (...) to the reasons of others and a disposition to hold oneself answerable for one’s identity-constituting concerns. (shrink)

In der Tugendlehre Kants findet die allgemeine ethische Orientierung, wie sie der Kategorische Imperativ ausdrückt, Anwendung auf die Bedingungen der menschlichen Existenz. Die vorliegende Untersuchung rekonstruiert den Kantischen Ansatz vor dem Hintergrund der gegenwärtigen, vor allem aristotelischen Tugendethik und löst dabei den Kantischen Tugendbegriff kritisch von seinen zeitbedingten Prägungen. Auf so erneuerter Grundlage wird eine transzendentalphilosophische Ethikkonzeption entfaltet, die den methodischen und inhaltlichen Einsichten der jüngeren Theorieentwicklung Rechnung trägt. Zu den Ergebnissen zählt die Bestimmung einzelner Tugenden, deren ethische Orientierung an (...) konkreten Strukturen unserer alltäglichen Praxis demonstriert wird. (shrink)

Much recent research on child language has been inspired by linguistic principles uncovered by linguists working in the generative framework. Developmental psycholinguists have demonstrated young children’s mastery of a variety of linguistic principles; mostly syntactic principles, but also some semantic principles. The present paper contributes to research on the acquisition of semantics by presenting the findings of a new experiment designed to investigate young children’s knowledge of downward entailment, which is a basic semantic property of Universal Grammar. Section 2 describes (...) how downward entailing operators work in natural languages. Section 3 addresses the issue of how a child could master the complex behavior displayed by downward entailing operators across natural languages. That section also reviews the findings of previous research on children’s knowledge of downward entailment. Section 4 presents the new experiment which was designed to investigate whether children’s knowledge of downward entailment extends to one of its logical properties, as illustrated by one of De Morgan’s laws. Section 5 offers some brief remarks on future research. (shrink)

Montesquieu's respect for moderation is almost universally acknowledged, but not very well understood. In recent scholarship, his moderation has been interpreted as inclusive and pluralistic with a view to the range of regimes that are hospitable to liberty. This paper challenges this currently dominant interpretation of Montesquieu by revisiting his understanding of moderation. On reflection, he does not simply discourage radical change, he even provides advice as to when and how such change is to be enacted. French absolute monarchy requires (...) fundamental change, not least because monarchy as such is not sufficiently accommodating to liberty. While the English commercial republic is better suited to liberty than French monarchy, there is no doubt that monarchy is more attractive than commercial republicanism. Montesquieu offers a profound and perhaps unsettling account of the possible incompatibility of honour, generosity and greatness of spirit, on the one hand, and safety and liberty, on the other. (shrink)

Consciousness is connected with the fact that a subject is aware and open to the manifestation of whatever appears. Existence, by contrast, is used to express the fact that something is given in experience, is present, or is real. Usually, the two notions are taken to be somehow related. This chapter suggests that existence is at best introduced as a metaphysical (or meta-experiential) concept that inevitably escapes the domain of conscious experience. In order to illustrate this claim, two case studies (...) are considered. The first case is provided by Descartes’s famous treatment of consciousness and existence in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The second case is meant to contrast the Cartesian approach by taking the opposite route, as delineated by Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) in his ‘fundamental ontology’. (shrink)

We investigate the initial segments of the Medvedev lattice as Brouwer algebras, and study the propositional logics connected to them.

In this paper I criticize Claude Romano’s recent characterization of Husserl’s phenomenology as a form of Cartesianism. Contra Romano, Husserl is not committed to the view that since individual things in the world are dubitable, then the world as a whole is dubitable. On the contrary, for Husserl doubt is a merely transitional phenomenon which can only characterize a temporary span of experience. Similarly, illusion is not a mode of experience in its own right but a retrospective way of characterizing (...) a span of experience. Therefore, Husserl cannot be plausibly characterized as either a disjunctivist or a conjunctivist. The common premise of both theories – namely, that perception and illusion are two classes of conscious acts standing on equal footing – is phenomenologically unsound. I propose to call Husserl’s theory a hermeneutical theory of perception, i.e., one that interprets perception as a temporal and self-correcting process. In the last part of the paper I argue that Husserl’s positive appraisal of Cartesian doubt is only pedagogical in nature. Husserl does not take Cartesian doubt to be practicable, but the attempt to doubt universally has the positive effect of revealing transcendental subjectivity as the subject matter of phenomenology. (shrink)

In order to rebut G. E. Moore’s open question argument, ethical naturalists adopt a theory of direct reference for our moral terms. T. Horgan and M. Timmons have argued that this theory cannot be applied to moral terms, on the ground that it clashes with competent speakers’ linguistic intuitions. While Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment shows that our linguistic intuitions confirm the theory of direct reference, as applied to ‘water’, Horgan and Timmons devise a parallel thought experiment about moral terms, (...) in order to show that this theory runs against our linguistic intuitions about such terms. My claim is that the Horgan–Timmons argument does not work. I concede that their thought experiment is a good way to test the applicability of the theory of direct reference to moral terms, and argue that the upshot of their experiment is not what they claim it is: our linguistic intuitions about Moral Twin Earth are parallel to, not different from, our intuitions about Twin Earth. (shrink)

Un commentario al § 381 delle "Ricerche filosofiche" di Wittgenstein.

For addressing the problem of negotiating social orders in a way that protects one’s humanity, I have considered Deleuze and Guattari’s intriguing claim in Anti-Oedipus that “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch‘. I outlined the associated principles of schizoid living developed in Anti-Oedipus via a critique that reverses the value of two Freudian concepts, namely, ”neurosis’ and ”psychosis’. I then cited some of the book’s eulogising ”praise poetry’, which (...) describes the ”schizo’ and connected it to a contemporaneous text, J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, that addresses the same ethical problem of negotiating social orders. Through the activities and reflections of the novel’s protagonist, Michael K, who might be thought of as “a schizophrenic out for a walk‘, I showed that Coetzee explores various forms of resistance. He investigates the impotence of resistance as the active construction of an alternative story from the alienated position of the ”other’. I pointed out that this strategy fails because it remains within the neurotic desire to construct a coherent narrative. Similarly, I indicated that resistance fails as a gesture of pure refusal akin to schizophrenic antiproduction, because the neurotic response re-appropriates this extremity through self-serving gestures of externalisation. Finally, I pointed out how Coetzee alludes to a kind of resistance that might be called schizoid and that changes the rules of the game. In the novel, K experiments with the first and second options, but cannot make life possible, either as a servant to a social order, on his own terms, or on the absolute outside. Echoing the question posed by Deleuze and Guattari of whether the schizoid ”men of desire’ they praise exist yet, K only dreams of the third option in the novel’s final lines, which detail the thoughts of a man dying of starvation. (shrink)

I discuss Descartes’ metaphysics of selfhood, and relevant parts of contemporary philosophy regarding the first person. My two main concerns are the controversy that surrounds Descartes’ conception of conscientia, mistranslated as ‘consciousness’, and his conception of selfhood and its essential connection to conscientia. ‘I’-thoughts give rise to the most challenging philosophical questions. An answer to the questions concerning the peculiarities of the first person, self-identification and self-ascription, is to be found in Descartes’ notion of conscientia. His conception of selfhood insightfully (...) informs his conception of personhood. I offer a unified account of selfhood, conscientia, the first person, and personhood anchored in the self’s authority of reason and autonomy of freedom. (shrink)

Several attempts have been made previously to provide a biological grounding for cognitive architectures by relating their components to the computations of specific brain circuits. Often, the architecture's action selection system is identified with the basal ganglia. However, this identification overlooks one of the most important features of the basal ganglia—the existence of a direct and an indirect pathway that compete against each other. This characteristic has important consequences in decision-making tasks, which are brought to light by Parkinson's disease as (...) well as genetic differences in dopamine receptors. This paper shows that a standard model of action selection in a cognitive architecture cannot replicate any of these findings, details an alternative solution that reconciles action selection in the architecture with the physiology of the basal ganglia, and extends the domain of application of cognitive architectures. The implication of this solution for other architectures and existing models are discussed. (shrink)

In this article Mare liberum is placed within the context of seventeenth-century European politics. It focuses on the development of conventional relations between European States regarding their interests outside of Europe and their importance concerning the status of Asian and African 'actors'. It turns out that in spite of Mare liberum's high-sounding proclamation of equality of non-European sovereigns with European States, Grotius's position as well as Dutch policy was inspired by self-interest and was essentially opportunistic. The Dutch Republic – as (...) well as other European States – used the 'liberal' principles of Freedom of trade and the Universality of the Law of Nations to attack the Portuguese/Spanish claims of monopoly. However, as the Dutch Republic, Great Britain and France developed their own 'Spheres of Interest' in Asia, Africa and the Americas, they effectively excluded would-be competitors. Indeed, in the eighteenth century the 'pacte colonial' constituted a distinctive characteristic of the conventional and customary 'European Law of Nations'. As non-European political actors in the eighteenth century relatively lost military and political power, the European States finally relegated them to an inferior position, beyond the charmed circle of full 'subjects of Public International Law'. The article also is a contribution to the ongoing discussion about the relation between European imperialism and the development of the doctrine of European International Law. (shrink)

The Center for 21st Century Studies, a UW System Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee campus, is a postdoctoral research institute founded in 1968 to foster crossdisciplinary research in the humanities. This series of occasional, on-line Working Papers provides a forum for rapid distribution of ideas in texts that are not yet ready or suitable for publication in more formal academic publications, but still offer valuable content. Usually the authors of Center Working Papers will be Center (...) fellows, invited speakers, or others with significant ties to the Center, although we reserve the right to make exceptions. We regret that we are unable to consider unsolicited submissions. (shrink)

Philosophia brings together, for the first time, the work of three major women thinkers of this century, producing a developing commentary on the human condition as an alternative to the mainstream, masculine, philosophical tradition.

By means of the examples of classical and Bohmian quantum mechanics, we illustrate the well-known ideas of Boltzmann as to how one gets from laws defined for the universe as a whole to dynamical relations describing the evolution of subsystems. We explain how probabilities enter into this process, what quantum and classical probabilities have in common and where exactly their difference lies.