In a recent essay in this journal, Ross Cameron presents a novel solution to the problem of musical creation.1 The solution is of the ‘using a sledgehammer to crack a nut’ variety, since side by side with a dissolution of the problem of musical creation, his approach, if successful, would yield a swift answer to pretty much every central question in the ontology of art, and, for that matter, to a wide variety of perennial metaphysical difficulties. Nothing of this magnitude (...) should be nonchalantly swept aside. Unfortunately, Cameron's approach does not survive close scrutiny. (shrink)

John Searle argues that fictions are constituted by mere pretense—by the simulation of representational activities like assertions, without any further representational aim. They are not the result of sui generis, dedicated speech acts of a specific kind, on a par with assertion. The view had earlier many defenders, and still has some. Stefano Predelli enlists considerations derived from Searle in support of his radical fictionalism. This is the view that a sentence of fictional discourse including a prima facie empty (...) fictional name like “Emma Woodhouse” in fact “is not a sentence, and it encodes no proposition whatsoever.” His argument is broadly abductive; he claims that this view affords compelling explanations of features of fictions he finds well-established, among them that fictions without explicit narrators nonetheless have covert ones. Here I take up his arguments, in defense of the dedicated speech act view. I thus address pressing issues about the status of fictional names and the nature and ubiquity of narrators in fictions. (shrink)

A summary of François Recanati's book Literal Meaning, followed by his response to the critical reviews of the same book by Stefano Predelli and Manuel García-Carpintero. /// Este texto da respuesta a los que, en este mismo número, Predelli y García-Carpintero dedican a mi libro Literal Meaning. En la primera seccíon hago un breve resumen de esta obra; en la segunda respondo a los comentarios críticos de Predelli y en la tercera a los de García-Carpintero.

ABSTRACT In this review I discuss Stefano Predelli’s book Proper Names: A Millian Account. The book provides a defense of the traditional Millian view according to which proper names are non-indexical, rigid devices of direct reference. In addition, Predelli discusses some usual interpretations as misconceptions and it contests many common objections. I provide an overview of its chapters and consider some of its strengths and weaknesses.

Both in historical debates and in recent discussions, the Guise of the Good Thesis represents a genuine dogma of rationalism in moral philosophy. Many influential commentators have maintained that Kant belongs in that camp, even that he “explicitly endorses” the Thesis. Attributing the Thesis to Kant, however, faces scarce textual support and amounts to a dubious understanding of the relationship of Kant’s moral philosophy to previous rationalist views. I suggest that, in Kant’s view, the Thesis only applies to the determination (...) of the will through the moral law. The principle that prior rationalists regarded as descriptive acquires in Kant’s terms a normative status. (shrink)

The System of Ethics was published at the height of Fichte's academic career and marks the culmination of his philosophical development in Jena. Much more than a treatise on ethics narrowly construed, the System of Ethics presents a unified synthesis of Fichte's core philosophical ideas, including the principle I-hood, self-activity and self-consciousness, and also contains his most detailed treatment of action and agency. This volume brings together an international group of leading scholars on Fichte, and is the first of its (...) kind in English to offer critical and interpretive perspectives on this work, covering topics such as normativity, belief, justification, desire, duty, and the ethical life. It will be an essential guide for scholars wanting to deepen their understanding of Fichte's ethical thought, as well as for those interested in the history of ethics more broadly. (shrink)

Autonomy is one of the central concepts of contemporary moral thought, and Kant is often credited with being the inventor of individual moral autonomy. But how and why did Kant develop this notion? The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant's Moral Philosophy is the first essay collection exclusively devoted to this topic. It traces the emergence of autonomy from Kant's earliest writings to the changes that he made to the concept in his mature works. The essays offer a close historical and (...) philosophical analysis of what prompted Kant to develop his conception of autonomy, charting the historical background which prompted his search, and thoroughly analysing different stages of his writings in order to see which element of autonomy was introduced at which point. The resulting volume will be of interest to both scholars and students of Kantian moral philosophy, as well as to anyone interested in the subject of autonomy. (shrink)

Recent animal research suggests that it may soon be possible to support the human fetus in an artificial uterine environment for part of a pregnancy. A technique of extending gestation in this way (“ectogestation”) could be offered to parents of extremely premature infants (EPIs) to improve outcomes for their child. The use of artificial uteruses for ectogestation could generate ethical questions because of the technology’s potential impact on the point of “viability”—loosely defined as the stage of pregnancy beyond which the (...) fetus may survive external to the womb. Several medical decisions during the perinatal period are based on the gestation at which infants are considered viable, for example decisions about newborn resuscitation and abortion, and ectogestation has the potential to impact on these. Despite these possible implications, there is little existing evidence or analysis of how this technology would affect medical practice. In this paper, we combine empirical data with ethical analysis. We report a survey of 91 practicing Australian obstetricians and neonatologists; we aimed to assess their conceptual understanding of “viability,” and what ethical consequences they envisage arising from improved survival of EPIs. We also assess what the ethical implications of extending gestation should be for newborn and obstetric care. We analyze the concept of viability and argue that while ectogestation might have implications for the permissibility of neonatal life‐prolonging treatment at extremely early gestation, it should not necessarily have implications for abortion policy. We compare our ethical findings with the results of the survey. (shrink)

On the underwater environment and the mechanisms of deterioration of the materials likely to found on a shipwreck, and the theory and practice of conserving the artifacts recovered. Covers on-site storage, transport of artifacts, and requirements for exhibition after conservation treatment. Di Stefano (political science, U. of Washington) offers a new perspective on the dimension of gender in modern political thought in order to elucidate what is specifically masculine in political theory. Attempting to clear some conceptual space for feminist (...) political theory, she provides critical readings of Hobbes, Marx, and J.S. Mill. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

The five-volume set Kant and Philosophy in a Cosmopolitan Sense contains the proceedings of the Eleventh International Kant Congress, which took place in Pisa in 2010. The proceedings consist of 25 plenary talks and 341 papers selected by a team of international referees from over 700 submissions. The contributions span 14 sections: Kant’s Concept of Philosophy; Theory of Cognition and Logic; Ontology and Metaphysics; Ethics; Law and Justice; Religion and Theology; Aesthetics; Anthropology and Psychology; Politics and History; Science, Mathematics, and (...) the Philosophy of Nature; Kant and the Leibnizian Tradition; Kant and the Philosophical Tradition; Kant and Schopenhauer; and Kant’s Heritage. Thanks to cooperation from the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft, the 2010 conference was the first in the history of the International Kant Congress to include a session on Kant and Schopenhauer. -/- . (shrink)

The adjective ἱερός is a central term in Greek religion and is used in various contexts. Generally translated ‘sacred’, it indicates that an object has been conceded to the gods and is now in relation with them (relation of belonging, protection, etc.). It appears frequently in Greek inscriptions in the expression τὰ ἱερά, to designate sacred objects or, in a more abstract meaning, sacred matters.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a foremost singer of qawwâlî. This Muslim devotional music, which is prominent in South Asia, has been developed since the fourteenth century by the Sufi circles of the Chishti brotherhood in order to preach and communicate the teachings of the saints. Inspired by mystic spirituality, Nusrat's music travelled through the East and the West, absorbing some of the features of the musical cultures with which it came in contact. It also travelled through time, transforming the (...) traditional style of the ancient chanted poetry into new forms of musical expression. Nusrat's life and his artistic vicissitudes show the postmodern destiny of qawwâlî as a religious kind of music that apparently went through a process of desacralization and profanation as a result of multiple interpretations by different audiences. In order to discern the conditions of significance, semiotics reconstructs the relation between text and context of interpretation on the ground of structural pertinences. In this way, semiotics offers an analytical standpoint alternative to the postmodernist approach to postmodern cultural phenomena. By surveying the forms of listening that are structurally provided by the textual discourse, semiotics investigates the destiny of the musical and religious meanings of qawwâlî in relation to the process of intercultural translation. (shrink)

Realist ontologies about history stress that entities such as documents, their sources, and events whom they are talking about are objectively given in the ontological reality of social history, beyond our skills to recognize them. Thus, how is it possible to understand the extension of the ontological independence of historical findings and where does our (mis)interpretations of those findings begin? As every realist ontological commitment must provide us with a suitable tool to solve the age-old problem of findings’ reliability, in (...) this paper we analyze how such realist views, like Searle’s Collective Intentionality, cannot be a solution, meanwhile, on the other hand, other realist purposes could represent valid alternatives. In fact, Searle’s theory surely accounts for the constitution of such social objects as false historical acts, but its definition of function of status (FS) as “X count as Y in C” permits, even only in principle, that the same entity X, which has counted as Y, in the far-off times historical context C0, could “re-count” as Y  Y in a more recent context Ct  C0, after an involuntary forgery too. Being by definition iterative, FS could iterate clamorous twists, also ad libitum, making future historians’ shared intentionality lose the contact with the reality of original status’ functions. On the contrary, Ferraris’ Documentality satisfies this historical reliability test, because its definition of a social object as inscription of an act distinguishes between what a fact/event/object X of the past has been, and what characteristics this same X must possess to become a document, discerning, this way, voluntary from unintentional effects of the creation of an object/event/fact, to instantiate a social fact, or to cause an historical event, and their different taxa of historicity. (shrink)

This book explores what it means to exist in virtual worlds. Chiefly drawing on the philosophical traditions of existentialism, it articulates the idea that — by means of our technical equipment and coordinated practices — human beings disclose contexts or worlds in which they can perceive, feel, act, and think. More specifically, this book discusses how virtual worlds allow human beings to take new perspectives on their values and beliefs, and explore previously unexperienced ways of being. Virtual Existentialism will be (...) useful for scholars working in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, media studies, and digital game studies. (shrink)

Playing in counterpoint with the general theoretical orientation of the book, this chapter does not focus its attention on the recording and archiving capabilities of the digital medium. Instead, it proposes an understanding of the digital medium that focuses on its disclosing various forms of “doing.” Gualeni’s chapter begins by offering an understanding of “doing in the digital” that methodologically separates “doing as acting” from “doing as making.” After setting its theoretical framework, the chapter discusses an “interactive thought experiment” designed (...) by the author that is analyzed as a digital artifact leveraging both dimensions of “doing in the digital” for philosophical purposes. In extreme synthesis, one could say that this chapter is about several kinds of soups. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on Kant’s notion of autonomy in his moral philosophy by considering Kant’s critique of the rationalist theories of morality that Kant discussed in his lectures on practical philosophy from the 1760s to the time of the Groundwork. The paper first explains Kant’s taxonomy of moral theories and his perspective on the history of ethics. Second, it considers Kant's arguments against the two main variants of ‘rationalism’ as he construes it, that is, perfectionism and theological voluntarism, pointing (...) out the similarities to previous criticisms. Third, the paper argues that Kant’s discussion of the 'rationalist' views does not amount to an unqualified dismissal, but to an attempt at working out a novel rationalist position. Kant’s criticisms of rationalist views suggest that his project emerges from the failures of previous rationalism, with the aim to work out a rationalist view that can account for moral obligation by integrating insights from the theological conception. The combination of perfectionism and theological views yields the basic outline of the idea of autonomy, consisting in the lawgiving function of a rational will as a key to the legislation of a necessary law. (shrink)

We present a possible computational content of the negative translation of classical analysis with the Axiom of (countable) Choice. Interestingly, this interpretation uses a refinement of the realizability semantics of the absurdity proposition, which is not interpreted as the empty type here. We also show how to compute witnesses from proofs in classical analysis of ∃-statements and how to extract algorithms from proofs of ∀∃-statements. Our interpretation seems computationally more direct than the one based on Godel's Dialectica interpretation.

This essay focuses on a little-understood phase of Franco Moretti’s work that spans 1976 to 1986. My aim is to shed light on Moretti’s cultural background as it was formed in that period and to account for the transition from the Trotskyist, politically-militant stance of his first book, Literature and Ideologies in England in the 1930s, to the idiosyncratic, seemingly disengaged character of Signs Taken for Wonders and The Way of the World. Adorno’s concept of ‘unrestrained individuation’ plays a crucial (...) role in the argument. Following a personal political crisis, Moretti opted to enact a form of critical individuation, encoding the explicit social antagonism of the earlier years within a highly personal style and a new theoretical eclecticism. In this way, by disguising it as an alluring form of individualism, Moretti managed to smuggle an antagonistic critical discourse into an increasingly neoliberal world that would soon prove hostile toward it. (shrink)

We introduce a two‐dimensional metric (interval) temporal logic whose internal and external time flows are dense linear orderings. We provide a suitable semantics and a sequent calculus with axioms for equality and extralogical axioms. Then we prove completeness and a semantic partial cut elimination theorem down to formulas of a certain type.

Nicola Guarino is widely recognized as one of the founders of applied ontology. His deep interest in the subtlest details of theoretical analysis and his vision of ontology as the Rosetta Stone for semantic interoperability guided the development and understanding of this domain. His motivations in research stem from the conviction that all science must be for the benefit of society at large, and his motto has always been that ontologies are not just for making information systems interoperable, but – (...) more importantly – for ensuring that systems’ users understand each other. He was among the first to recognize that applied ontology must be an interdisciplinary enterprise if it is to capture the intended meaning of the terms used by an information system. (shrink)

This book seeks to explain the critiques of humanism and the "negative" philosophical anthropologies that dominated mid-century philosophy and traces the ...

Il saggio propone una traccia di ricerca per l’elaborazione di una teoria politica della cooperazione, ovvero per la considerazione del fenomeno cooperativo come caratterizzato da una peculiare modalità di azione collettiva, non ricompresa nella celebre distinzione hirschmaniana tra Exit, Voice e Loyalty. Chi partecipa all’impresa cooperativa non crede nelle possibilità di successo sia dell’opzione voice che di quella exit, ma pratica una forma diversa di azione che si basa sulla fiducia in se stessi e nei soci che hanno interessi comuni. (...) Questa forma di azione collettiva può essere preliminarmente definita come entry. L’entry riporta all’interno del mercato chi aveva scelto l’opzione exit, conservando al tempo stesso quella carica di contestazione delle relazioni capitalistiche tipica dell’opzione voice. L’impresa cooperativa, in virtù di questa doppia caratteristica dell’azione dei suoi soci, rappresenta quindi un’opzione, oltre che economica, anche politica. (shrink)

This book argues against the widely celebrated utopia of -transparency- by showing, across a panorama of postwar French thought, how attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted.

We extend de Finetti's No-Dutch-Book Criterion to Gödel infinite-valued propositional logic.

En este artículo se pretenden reconstruir las premisas fundamentales del pensamiento político de Dante, que plantea una nueva concepción de la relación entre Iglesia e Imperio. En particular, se señalan tres ideas fundamentales: la ciencia como perfección última del alma humana; la operación propia del género humano en la actuación de toda la potencia del intelecto posible; y, por último, la cuestión del fin natural y sobrenatural del hombre. A continuación, se analiza la presencia de la interpretación del aristotelismo de (...) la Facultad de Artes de la Universidad de París y del averroísmo presente en el planteamiento dantesco, en particular haciendo referencia a las diferentes interpretaciones de Gilson y Nardi. Finalmente, se proponen como clave de interpretación global del pensamiento político dantesco la cuestión del traspaso de las llaves de Jesús a Pedro y la relación entre naturaleza y gracia en disonancia con la interpretación de Tomás de Aquino. (shrink)

The publication of the Report of the International Bioethics Committee of Unesco on Social responsibility and health provides an opportunity to reshape the conceptual framework of the right to health care and its practical implications. The traditional distinctions between negative and positive, civil-political and economic-social, legal and moral rights are to be questioned and probably overcome if the goal is to pursue ‘the highest attainable standard of health’ as a fundamental human right, that should as such be guaranteed to every (...) human being. What we are called upon to, is the commitment not to exclude now and forever anyone from having access to the ‘excellence’ of scientific and medical progress. Therefore, the addressees of this ‘responsibility’ cannot be just the governments and the states within the limits of their ‘jurisdiction’. The challenge is to tackle at the same time the social and global determinants of health. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I will establish a conversation between Rorty and the recent proposal of post-critical pedagogy. The assumption is that through this dialogue some tenets of the latter could find a Rortyan redescription that avoids the risk of ‘metaphysical’ formulations, whereas Rorty’s ideas can increase in their relevance with respect to education thanks to the post-critical perspective. In particular, the conversation will develop by focusing on the shared attitude towards the critical-negative attitude of poststructuralist thought, the significance of the (...) subject-matter in education and an interpretation of pedagogical hermeneutics through the lens of the Rortyan idea of edification. In the conclusion, by distinguishing two views of hope – an eventist and a transitionalist – it is argued that it is precisely in this theme, which seems to be a privileged meeting ground for Rorty and post-critical pedagogy, that there may lie a major fault line. (shrink)