- "La piů grande figura religiosa del cristianesimo moderno" č quella di Sebastian Franck, che, perseguitato dai teologi di tutte le Chiese, visse povero ed errabondo, «mantenendo la visione piů viva e luminosa delle grandi veritÀ del cristianesimo ed immedesimandole con la sua personalitÀ e la sua vita». La sua opera maggiore, i Paradoxa, scritta nella scia della mistica medievale germanica, mostra che il cristianesimo consiste essenzialmente di una vita nello spirito, basata su conversione e distacco, indipendentemente da teologie e (...) credenze, da libri sacri, culti, cerimonie e Chiese. (shrink)

Induismo -- Buddhismo -- Ebraismo -- Islam -- Cristianesimo.

I take a survey of M.Vannini's views on authentic religious life, commenting on his theses. While I assent to most of his arguments, I reject some of his grounding claims.

The present paper attempts to show that a 1915 article by Erich Kretschmann must be credited not only for being the source of Einstein’s point-coincidence remark, but also for having anticipated the main lines of the logical-empiricist interpretation of general relativity. Whereas Kretschmann was inspired by the work of Mach and Poincaré, Einstein inserted Kretschmann’s point-coincidence parlance into the context of Ricci and Levi-Civita’s absolute differential calculus. Kretschmann himself realized this and turned the point-coincidence argument against Einstein in his second (...) and more famous 1918 paper. While Einstein had taken nothing from Kretschmann but the expression “point-coincidences”, the logical empiricists, however, instinctively dragged along with it the entire apparatus of Kretschmann’s conventionalism. Disappointingly, in their interpretation of general relativity, the logical empiricists unwittingly replicated some epistemological remarks Kretschmann had written before General Relativity even existed. (shrink)

This paper analyzes correspondence between Reichenbach and Einstein from the spring of 1926, concerning what it means to ‘geometrize’ a physical field. The content of a typewritten note that Reichenbach sent to Einstein on that occasion is reconstructed, showing that it was an early version of §49 of the untranslated Appendix to his Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre, on which Reichenbach was working at the time. This paper claims that the toy-geometrization of the electromagnetic field that Reichenbach presented in his note should (...) not be regarded as merely a virtuoso mathematical exercise, but as an additional argument supporting the core philosophical message of his 1928 monograph. This paper concludes by suggesting that Reichenbach’s infamous ‘relativization of geometry’ was only a stepping stone on the way to his main concern—the question of the ‘geometrization of gravitation’. (shrink)

This article presents and discusses one of the most prominent inferential strategies currently employed in cognitive neuropsychology, namely, reverse inference. Simply put, this is the practice of inferring, in the context of experimental tasks, the engagement of cognitive processes from locations or patterns of neural activation. This technique is notoriously controversial because, critics argue, it presupposes the problematic assumption that neural areas are functionally selective. We proceed as follows. We begin by introducing the basic structure of traditional “location-based” reverse inference (...) and discuss the influential lack of selectivity objection. Next, we rehearse various ways of responding to this challenge and provide some reasons for cautious optimism. The second part of the essay presents a more recent development: “pattern-decoding reverse inference”. This inferential strategy, we maintain, provides an even more convincing response to the lack of selectivity charge. Due to this and other methodological advantages, it is now a prominent component in the toolbox of cognitive neuropsychology. Finally, we conclude by drawing some implications for philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Reductionists in biology claim that all biological events can be explained in terms of genes and macromolecules alone, while antireductionists argue that some biological events must be explained at a higher level. The literature, however, does not distinguish between different kinds of molecular explanation. The goal of this article is to identify and analyze three such kinds. The analysis of molecular explanations herein carries an important philosophical implication; in shunning crude reductionism and extreme versions of holism, we can combine the (...) insights of thoughtful reductionists with sophisticated antireductionism. When this is done, the question of explanatory reductionism becomes less substantial than often supposed. (shrink)

We applied a technique borrowed from the field of bioethics to test whether justice-related factors influence laypersons’ decisions concerning business ethics. In the first experiment, participants judged the acceptability of remuneration policies and in the second that of executive bonuses. In each study, participants judged a set of 36 situations. To create the scenarios, we varied retributive justice—the amount of remuneration; procedural justice—the clarity of the procedure that determined the remuneration; distributive justice—the extent of the distribution of bonus payments amongst (...) employees; and restorative justice—a special compensation for hazardous working conditions or accidents at work. K-means clustering of all 36 judgments revealed four different personal positions in both experiments. One group of people readily accepted all situations. The other three groups’ judgments were mainly a function of distributive justice modulated in different ways by the context determined by the other variables. Furthermore, people conceive of distributive justice as categorical: Acceptability judgments only increase if companies give bonuses to all employees. Granting bonuses to a subset does not increase acceptability. Our results are useful for policy makers and provide business ethics researchers with a novel technique. (shrink)

Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics: It is the magistracy, the “ordinary mode,” to which they turn to deal with “extraordinary accidents,” political and military emergencies. Machiavelli's gaze is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: Although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that (...) were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli's discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will briefly tackle the more general question of the relationship between politics and law in his work as a whole. (shrink)

Climate change governance is extremely challenging because of both the intrinsic difficulty of the issues at stake and the plurality of values and worldviews. For these reasons, the ethical concerns that characterise climate change should also be meaningfully addressed through a specific version of procedural justice. Accordingly, in this article we adopt an impure notion of procedural justice. On this theoretical basis, we define relevant fairness criteria and contextualise them for climate governance systems. Then, we empirically justify fairness criteria against (...) a critical and divisive element for the future governance of the Green Climate Fund, i.e., the no-objection procedure. The article concludes with some considerations prompted by the analysis. (shrink)

Scott Sehon recently argued that the standard notion of determinism employed in the Consequence Argument makes it so that, if our world turns out to be deterministic, then an interventionist God is logically impossible. He further argues that because of this, we should revise our notion of determinism. In this paper I show that Sehon’s argument for the claim that the truth of determinism, in this sense, would make an interventionist God logically impossible ultimately fails. I then offer and respond (...) to a weaker version of the argument for the claim that we should revise our notion of determinism. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

The role of conscious attention in language processing has been scarcely considered, despite the wide-spread assumption that verbal utterances manage to attract and manipulate the addressee’s attention. Here I claim that this assumption is to be understood not as a figure of speech but instead in terms of attentional processes proper. This hypothesis can explain a fact that has been noticed by supporters of Relevance Theory in pragmatics: the special role played by speaker-related information in utterance interpretation. I argue that (...) representation of the speaker in working memory reliably enhances the activation of speaker-related information and, consequently, the role it plays in determining the content of interpretations. (shrink)

My main purpose here is to provide an account of context selection in utterance understanding in terms of the role played by schemata and goals in top-down processing. The general idea is that information is organized hierarchically, with items iteratively organized in chunks—here called “schemata”—at multiple levels, so that the activation of any items spreads to schemata that are the most accessible due to previous experience. The activation of a schema, in turn, activates its other components, so as to predict (...) a likely context for the original item. Since each input activates its own schemata, conflicting schemata compete with (and inhibit) each other, while multiple activations of a schema raise its likelihood to win the competition. There is therefore a double movement—with bottom-up activation of schemata enabling top-down prediction of other contextual components—triggered by multiple sources. Another claim of the paper is that goals are represented by schemata placed at the highest-levels of the executive hierarchy, in accordance with Fuster’s model of the brain as a hierarchically organized perception action cycle. This account can be considered, in part at least, a development of ideas contained in Relevance Theory, though it may imply that some other claims of the theory are in need of revision. Therefore, a secondary purpose of the paper is a contribution to the analysis of that theory. (shrink)

Narratives are ever-present in medicine and care: patients, relatives, doctors, nurses and pastoral workers tell quite different stories. The present volume examines the question of the significance of narratives for the ethical judgement in medicine and care and illustrates what theological reflection can contribute to the current discussion about the ethics of medicine and care. The focus of the volume is on the theological discussion on the ethical issues of medicine and care which is enriched by contributions from literary studies, (...) philosophy, nursing science and the ethics of medicine and care. (shrink)

This article provides a contribution to the concept of a peace ethics which understands human peacemaking as a churchly practice accepting and joining in God's reconciling works. From a pacifist stance, the author argues that ecclesial ethics allows a forceful reframing of the just war tradition as it is developed in the largely unknown Reformed confessions of the l61 h century. A theological exploration of the peace church's pathos drives the author towards a rediscovery of the church's central worshiping practices, (...) such as eucharist, as distinctively peacemaking practices. Following John Calvin's and Karl Barth's ethical account, the mode of peacemaking is defined as a hastening that waits. (shrink)

In this event-related potential study a masking technique that prevents conscious perception of words and non-words through attentional distraction was used to reveal the temporal dynamics of word processing under non-conscious and conscious conditions. In the non-conscious condition, ERP responses differed between masked words and non-words from 112 to 160 ms after stimulus-onset over posterior brain areas. The early onset of the word–non-word differences was compatible with previous studies that reported non-conscious access to orthographic information within this time period. Moreover, (...) source localisations provided evidence for automatic activation of prelexical phonological information, whereas no evidence for non-conscious semantic processing was found. When subjects were informed about the masking technique, lexical differences occurred at later time intervals, suggesting conscious access to additional word related information. These results indicate that early visual word processing does not depend entirely on attentional resources, but that non-conscious processing probably is restricted to rather lower-level linguistic information. (shrink)

Philosophers interested in the theoretical consequences of predictive processing often assume that predictive processing is an inferentialist and representationalist theory of cognition. More specifically, they assume that predictive processing revolves around approximated Bayesian inferences drawn by inverting a generative model. Generative models, in turn, are said to be structural representations: representational vehicles that represent their targets by being structurally similar to them. Here, I challenge this assumption, claiming that, at present, it lacks an adequate justification. I examine the only argument (...) offered to establish that generative models are structural representations, and argue that it does not substantiate the desired conclusion. Having so done, I consider a number of alternative arguments aimed at showing that the relevant structural similarity obtains, and argue that all these arguments are unconvincing for a variety of reasons. I then conclude the paper by briefly highlighting three themes that might be relevant for further investigation on the matter. (shrink)

Two agents endowed with different categorisations engage in bargaining to reach an understanding and agree on a common categorisation. We model the process as a simple non-cooperative game and demonstrate three results. When the initial disagreement is focused, the bargaining process has a zero-sum structure. When the disagreement is widespread, the zero-sum structure disappears and the unique equilibrium requires a retraction of consensus: two agents who individually associate a region with the same category end up rebranding it under a different (...) category. Finally, we show that this last equilibrium outcome is Pareto dominated by a cooperative solution that avoids retraction; that is, the unique equilibrium agreement may be inefficient. (shrink)

In the present article, I review some evidence that shows how body odor disgust sensitivity plays a central role in the so-called behavioral immune system, a set of processes aimed at detecting, emotionally reacting, and behaviorally avoiding pathogen threats. I also report empirical evidence on how the BODS relates to social attitudes such as authoritarianism, xenophobia, and condemnation of “impure” moral violations. This research is interpreted from an Evolutionary psychology framework.

Le texte de l'article de Marco Agnetta & Nathalie Mälzer « Henri Meschonnics holistischer Rhythmusbegriff und einige seiner Implikationen für die Translationswissenschaft » paru dans B. R. Gibhardt, Denkfigur Rhythmus : Probleme und Potenziale des Rhythmusbegriffs in den Künsten, Hannover,‎ Wehrhahn Verlag, 2020, pp. 105-115 est accessible gratuitement ici. I. Einleitung »Du musst alles hundert Mal sprechen, ins eigene Ohr. Du kannst vergessen, was die Worte bedeuten. Nennen wir es - Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article.

Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent _performs_ interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recent publications, Peter Langland-Hassan has proposed a number of arguments which purportedly should lead us to conclude that enactive approaches are unable to account for pretense without paying a way too (...) severe theoretical price. In this paper, we will defend enactive approaches to pretense, arguing that they can in fact explain pretense without incurring in the negative theoretical consequences Peter Langland-Hassan fears. To this effect, we start by exposing Langland-Hassan’s challenge (§2), to then highlight its core assumptions and demonstrate their falsity (§3). Having done so, we argue that none of the theoretical consequences Langland-Hassan fears follow (§4), and in fact enactive approaches to cognition may be explanatorily superior to the one Langland-Hassan favors (§5). A brief conclusion will then follow (§6). (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag möchte ich mich darauf beschränken, einige Aspekte von Fichtes Verhältnis zu Kant zu berücksichtigen, die mir sowohl für das Verständnis Fichtes als auch für das Verständnis Kants sehr lehrreich zu sein scheinen. Denn die Einsicht in die unterschiedlichen Auffassungen des alten und des jungen Denkers läßt um so mehr da, wo der zweite meint, den ersten bloß zu wiederholen, treu zu interpretieren oder allenfalls treu weiterzudenken, den Geist der beiden philosophischen Ansätze am deutlichsten zutage treten. Den manchmal (...) unbestimmten Ausdruck »Geist« darf man in diesem Fall wohl verwenden, da die Textstellen, die dem Vergleich feste Bezugspunkte angeben, nicht isoliert dastehen, sondern jeweils in zwei verschiedene und scharf konturierte philosophische Ansätze hinein konvergieren. (shrink)

Psychological game theory, as defined by Colman, is meant to offer a series of solution concepts that should reduce the indeterminacy of orthodox game theory when applied to a series of situations. My main criticism is that, actually, they introduce a second-order indeterminacy problem rather than offering a viable solution. The reason is that the proposed solution concepts are under-specified in their definition and in their scope.

Rachlin's argument rests on his definition of an altruistic action. Three main features characterize this definition: An altruistic act (1) always has a negative value, (2) is a subset of self-controlled actions, and (3) is meaningful only in the context of repeated interactions. All three features are highly questionable.

Recent advancements in the brain sciences have enabled researchers to determine, with increasing accuracy, patterns and locations of neural activation associated with various psychological functions. These techniques have revived a longstanding debate regarding the relation between the mind and the brain: while many authors claim that neuroscientific data can be employed to advance theories of higher cognition, others defend the so-called ‘autonomy’ of psychology. Settling this significant issue requires understanding the nature of the bridge laws used at the psycho-neural interface. (...) While these laws have been the topic of extensive discussion, such debates have mostly focused on a particular type of link: reductive laws. Reductive laws are problematic: they face notorious philosophical objections and they are too scarce to substantiate current research at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience. The aim of this article is to provide a systematic analysis of a different kind of bridge laws—associative laws—which play a central, albeit overlooked role in scientific practice. (shrink)

Most of the arguments usually appealed to in order to support the view that some abstraction principles are analytic depend on ascribing to them some sort of existential parsimony or ontological neutrality, whereas the opposite arguments, aiming to deny this view, contend this ascription. As a result, other virtues that these principles might have are often overlooked. Among them, there is an epistemic virtue which I take these principles to have, when regarded in the appropriate settings, and which I suggest (...) to call ‘epistemic economy’. My purpose is to isolate and clarify this notion by appealing to some examples concerning the definition of natural and real numbers. (shrink)

This paper provides an ethical intepretation of the Nash choice rule. In a setting in which (cardinal) utilities are interpersonally comparable, this procedure is characterised by an impartiality requirement and by the assumption that choices are not responsive to the agents' relative ability to convert resources into utility.

Notwithstanding the widely accepted view that rights establish normative constraints on authority’s powers, command is still a core notion in modern philosophical jurisprudence. Nevertheless, if Herbert Hart is correct in his analysis on the deficiencies of the traditional command theories, a command is binding only if there is a right of being obeyed implying authority. My main objective in this paper is to make explicit the semantical and normative relations between rights and commands. In the first part, after some remarks (...) on Hobbes’ semantics, I will note that, although commands are performative utterances paradigmatically addressed to “inferiors”, claims, on the contrary, are utterances addressed also to “superiors”. In the second part, assuming Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s distinctions between claims, privileges, powers and immunities, I will discuss Joseph Raz’s theory that authorities have a right of being obeyed. Looking for a more coherent theory, and taking a little bit of distance from Raz’s definitions, I will present some refinements in the semantics of authority. My main point is that a command is valid only if it presupposes a right of being obeyed, a right that would be a claim-right in Hohfeld’s sense; but since all claims are correlated to duties, this entails that the duty of being obeyed cannot be created by any acts of the authority which holds the claim. Anyway, since claims purport to present reasons for action, a command can only constitute a reason for action for persons who have a duty of obeying other persons with claims of being obeyed. In that case, commanding involves making an appeal not to fear, but to respect for authority. (shrink)

Este estudio se define y articula a partir de la pregunta por el significado, sentido y estructura de la noción de “historia del pensamiento”, tal como ésta emerge y actúa desde los últimos pronunciamientos e intervenciones de Foucault, de un modo singularmente claro y revelador a partir de la primera versión del Prefacio a la “Historia de la sexualidad”, texto del que nos ocupamos con atención prioritaria a lo largo de este trabajo.