Includes a translator’s preface, note on the text, and suggestions for further reading.

ABSTRACTAt the heart of the criminal reform proposed in Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 Dei delitti e delle pene are the principles of penal parsimony derived from a precise interpretation of the social contract. Punishment, being no more than a necessary evil devoid of any intrinsic virtue, must serve no more than a preventative function to the smallest possible extent; its application strictly bound by the principle of legality. Beccaria’s criminal philosophy, therefore, attempts to drastically reduce the power of (...) the penal institution. After recounting its principal aspects, this article seeks to propose a new interpretation of Beccaria’s theory from the perspective of its historical context. The Italian Enlightenment philosopher did not so much express indignation against the barbarism of the Milanese penal system, but rather instigate a rebellion against the political dominance of its patriciate, whose power had long been validated by its juridical functions. In this respect, Beccaria sought to combat the political hegemony of the jurists, concluding his treatise by excluding juridical thought from, and thus removing the intellectual foundations of, the practice of criminal law. (shrink)

Le texte de Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), publié pour la première fois en 1764, a joué un rôle primordial dans l’Europe des Lumières : véritable best-seller de l’époque, devenu aussitôt un classique non seulement en Italie mais dans une bonne partie de l’Europe et tout particulièrement en France, il est l’une des sources principales de notre doctrine pénale moderne. Si cet ouvrage reste d’actualité pour bonne partie du monde contemporain, c’est d’abord parce qu’il contient la toute première ar..

In this paper I outline and criticize Judith Shklar’s and Richard Rorty’s ‘liberalism of fear’. Both political thinkers believe liberalism to be characterized by a fundamental opposition to cruelty , which they regard as the least liberal of the features that may distinguish any given human community. In order to demonstrate the limits of the Shklar–Rorty thesis, I make use, in the first place, of John Kekes’s critique of liberalism as to show that liberalism allows for cruelty in so far (...) as it grants wider margins of agency to the members of the community. In the second place, I make use of Cesare Beccaria’s reflections on the cruelty implied by liberalism assuch, in so far as this political doctrine endorses the institutions of penal justice and private property. Key Words: Cesare Beccaria • cruelty • ethics • fear • justice • John Kekes • liberalism • politics • property • punishment • Richard Rorty • Judith Shklar. (shrink)

Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments has had a profound impact on, and made significant contributions to, among others, the study of law, justice, crime, and punishment. Unsurprisingly, there is a voluminous literature on this text. This article subjects Beccaria’s treatise to an exegetical reading and focuses on the aesthetic inquiry at heart of the text. Beccaria professes to undertake a rigorous scientific inquiry into crime and punishment. He repeatedly invokes language from modernity and the enlightenment—e.g., (...) probability, correlation, and other mathematical tools (e.g., geometry)—to ground the scientific nature of his treatise. Yet, what Beccaria engages with is aesthetic and what is produced is not scientific knowledge but aesthetic knowledge. Rather than read this as a criticism, the article highlights how the concept of justice—like beauty or virtue—is, and can only or largely be, a matter of aesthetic inquiry, and explicates why Beccaria’s text ought to be read as an aesthetic inquiry into justice. (shrink)

El artículo hace un análisis del discurso de Beccaria contenido en su libro Dei delitti e delle pene y extrae las ideas relativas a la percepción como argumento considerable dentro de su propuesta político-criminal para fundar la utilización de ciertos instrumentos de la penalidad, con base en su pensamiento sobre la estética, entendida como un estudio sobre la percepción, realizado en algunas investigaciones personales. Igualmente, toma ciertas ideas de la epistemología gravitante de la época, para fundar su desiderátum político-criminal.

The impact of Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments on English discussions of punishment in the twenty-five years following its publication is assessed, with attention being paid to Beccaria's combination of contractarian and early utilitarian thinking. It is argued that Beccaria's influence was particularly striking in England in that he stimulated two disparate strands of reform thinking. The first being exemplified in the work of William Eden, and taking the form of a contractarian, humanitarian version, which owed something (...) to William Blackstone, but was ultimately quite distinct. The second represented in Jeremy Bentham's theory of punishment with its emphasis overwhelmingly on utilitarian calculation. (shrink)

C’est en territoire italien, à l’université de Naples, qu’est créée la toute première chaire d’économie, inaugurée en 1754 par Antonio Genovesi. La seconde chaire italienne est inaugurée en 1769 à Milan par Cesare Beccaria. Ces professeurs doivent répondre à une exigence de justification et de définition : pourquoi un nouveau savoir, et quelle est sa compétence ? Le savoir économique apparaît alors comme la première des « sciences humaines » qui n’ait pas vocation à interpréter des textes, puisqu’elle (...) se donne pour tâche d’analyser des choses. À l’ère de l’herméneutique succède celle de l’anthropologie. En ce sens, l’économie prolonge un geste déjà tenté par le droit naturel moderne, qui avait voulu soustraire la science du droit au règne des textes. Mais en prolongeant ce geste, elle veut aussi dépasser cette discipline, comme une jeune science qui non seulement pallie les imperfections de son aînée, mais prend définitivement sa relève. (shrink)

This book considers the way that Cesare Beccaria's slim 1764 volume On Crimes and Punishments influenced policy developments worldwide and over decades, if not centuries, after its publication. For those who turn to Beccaria's work today, the encounter is shaped by that knowledge. Appreciative of his book's dual nature as historical document and repository of ideas, the contributions in this collection address different aspects of the criminal justice theory Beccaria offered his readers and face up to (...) methodological questions raised by meeting a historical text of this kind - unsystematic and by modern standards often under-argued - with modern scholarly conventions in mind. Contributions in the first part of the book engage with Beccaria's 'political theory of criminal justice' through the lenses of political and penal philosophy. How do we get from Beccaria's blending of social-contractarian foundations and proto-utilitarian policy analysis to the concrete set of criminal justice practices Beccaria presents as justified? This leads across to the second part where contributors approach Beccaria's ideas with present-day reforms and developments in mind. Many of his policy proposals and arguments remain significant from our contemporary perspective, their limitations and omissions proving as instructive for the contemporary scholar as their more prescient elements. The third part offers those looking at Beccaria's work today a glimpse into the practical difficulties facing the firebrand author turned public servant during his long career in the Habsburg-Lombardian administration. It puts his work into the broader context of pathways to criminal justice reform in northern Italy, Habsburgian Lombardy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Beccaria's day. (shrink)

One important limitation of the current renditions of interpretivism is that its emphasis on the moral dimension of sport has overlooked the aesthetic dimension lying at the core of this account of sport. The interpretivist’s failure to acknowledge and consider the aesthetic implicitly distances this realm from the moral. Marcia Muelder Eaton calls this distancing the separatist mistake. This paper argues that interpretivism presupposes not only moral but also aesthetic principles and values. What it sets out to demonstrate is that (...) interpretivism is an integralist, or nonseparatist, account of sport, one in which ethical and aesthetic values are not exclusive. Making explicit and specifying interpretivism’s combined moral-aesthetic approach to sport not only helps to better distinguish the whole range of values that make up sport as well as their interconnection but also encourages sportspeople to pursue more coherent sport and, thus, more enriching lives. (shrink)

In 1939, the influential psychophysicist S. S. Stevens proposed definitional distinctions between the terms ‘number,’ ‘numerosity,’ and ‘numerousness.’ Although the definitions he proposed were adopted by syeveral psychophysicists and experimental psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s, they were almost forgotten in the subsequent decades, making room for what has been described as a “terminological chaos” in the field of numerical cognition. In this paper, I review Stevens’s distinctions to help bring order to this alleged chaos and to shed light on (...) two closely related questions: whether it is adequate to speak of a number sense and how philosophers can make sense of the claim by cognitive scientists that numbers are perceptual entities. Moreover, I offer further support to Stevens’s distinction between numerosity and numerousness by showing that they are relational properties that emerge through different relationships between agents and their environments. The final conclusion is that, by adopting Stevens’s distinctions, numbers do not need to be seen as perceptual entities, since the so-called number sense is better described as a sense of numerousness. (shrink)

It is common in contemporary sport to liken the notion of the team to that of the family. That is, the family is used to evoke team life. Portraying the team as a family usually implies a positive evaluation. Despite its prevalence, the team as a family equation has not been analyzed in the sport philosophy literature. Thus, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it explores whether the team is to be equated with the family. To discuss the (...) nature of the family and the team, I draw together the work of several sport philosophers with that of Laura Wildemann Kane. Second, and considering what characterizes the team, this article investigates whether teammates have special responsibilities to one another by virtue of their relationship and the value attached to it. I propose that the team as a family equation does not align with the constitution of these two social groups and that teammates have special responsibilities to one another, but such responsibilities are different from those observed in the family. (shrink)

Despite society’s increasing sensitivity toward green production, companies often struggle to find effective communication strategies that induce consumers to buy green products or engage in other environmentally friendly behaviors. To add clarity to this situation, we investigated the effectiveness of negative versus positive message framing in promoting green products, whereby companies highlight the detrimental versus beneficial environmental consequences of choosing less versus more green options, respectively. Across four experiments, we show that negatively framed messages are more effective than positively framed (...) ones in prompting consumers to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. More importantly, we find that anticipated shame is the emotion responsible for this effect. Furthermore, both environmental concern and the type of product promoted serve as moderators; thus, the mediating role of anticipated shame is attenuated when environmental concern is low and the product is a luxury one. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our work, along with its limitations and some directions for future research. (shrink)

Nos anos 1970s, Hilary Putnam defendeu a tese que designadores de espécies naturais, como “água”, “tigre” e “ouro”, são termos indexicais que mudam de significado a cada contexto. No entanto, Tyler Burge rejeitou essa tese, e Putnam veio a adotar a posição de Burge. A rejeição de Burge está apoiada na distinção entre crenças de dicto e crenças de re. Nesse artigo veremos os pontos de contato entre as posições de Putnam e Burge, a posição de Putnam nos anos 1970s, (...) os principais argumentos de Burge contra a tese da indexicalidade dos designadores de espécies naturais e a diferença entre crenças de dicto e crenças de re. (shrink)

Aristotle normally used historical notations to support his arguments. This is somewhat true for all the works of the corpus, but above all for Politics: the nature, objectives, and methodology of the investigations in this treatise present the strongest links with actual and concrete data, and therefore with historia. Obviously even the Aristotle of Politics is not a historian who wants to report known historiographical traditions; however, regardless of his intentions, there is no doubt that the work in question contains (...) precious ‘fragments’ of history which, in general, confirm or supplement our knowledge. There are, however, cases in which the Aristotelian exempla end up filling in the omissions and gaps of the available sources, such as the cursory reference to the nomos of the Aphytaians, which appears in the section of book 6 dedicated to the so-called agricultural democracy. (shrink)

Pretende-se oferecer aqui uma justificativa, tal como ela parece ter sido indicada por Platão no Teeteto, para o método de Sócrates, anunciado em Apologia como uma anthropíne sophía, capaz de avaliar os diferentes tipos de conhecimento. O recurso à imagem da maiêutica, no Teeteto, traz a representação de um aspecto desse método, posterior à refutação, em que o examinador ou parteiro elevam as opiniões do interlocutor até um princípio transcendente, para mostrar-lhes ou sua vacuidade ou sua solidez. Por fim, o (...) Diálogo de Platão parece não apenas representar o método de Sócrates, mas se inspirar nele para a composição do seu discurso, que joga com a forma de fazer ver e com aquilo que se vê a partir dele. (shrink)

Recent studies have pointed to the existence of a strong relationship between memory and mental representation, while others have shown that images are open to reinterpretation and manipulation; this volume offers a historical overview of the problem as well as a review of the research in psychology and related fields.

El propósito central enfatiza la comprensión histórico-cultural de la diversidad y la diferencia como productoras de escenarios donde la tolerancia debe redimir la exclusión y fomentar la equidad; explica, reflexiva y críticamente, algunas ideas que subrayan la urgen te necesidad de replantear los d..

In this article, we scrutinize views that justify exclusionary policies regarding transgender athletes based primarily on physiological criteria. We introduce and examine some elements that deserve...

This paper argues that racism should not only be conceived as a moral concept whose main aim is to condemn severe wrongs in the domain of race. The paper advances a complementary interpretation of racism as an explanatory concept--one that plays a key role in explaining race-based social problems afflicting members of subordinate racialized groups. As an explanatory concept, the term 'racism' is used to diagnose and highlight the causes of race-related social problems. The project of diagnosing race-based social problems (...) contributes to the pragmatic anti-racist end of developing better political and policy strategies for solving these social problems. The paper defends this interpretation of racism as an explanatory concept through a critical engagement with Urquidez's moral-philosophical account of racism. (shrink)

Los convulsos acontecimientos de estos últimos años han demostrado, a escala global, cuán enajenante es nuestra experiencia presente del tiempo. Las tendencias actuales de la teoría crítica y otros enfoques histórico-sociológicos insisten en el ritmo devorador de la aceleración (P. Virilio; H. Rosa) y en la reconfiguración temporal a partir del “presentismo” (Koselleck; F. Hartog). Sin embargo, sabemos que estas cuestiones distan de ser absolutamente nuevas, y que ya preocupaban a los filósofos y a los fenomenólogos en la primera mitad (...) del siglo XX. La publicación reciente de los últimos tratados del Ereignis y de los Cuadernos negros, redactados en los años 1930 y 1940, nos permite acceder a una reflexión original sobre lo que Heidegger nombra la maquinación o fabricación [Machenschaft]. Nos gustaría analizar la manera en la que, a partir de la fabricación, se puede replantear el sentido de nuestra experiencia temporal íntima frente a la situación moderna. Más concretamente, ahondaremos en las formas en las que la primacía de la fabricación funciona como cerrazón de posibilidades, llegando a impedir que pueda ocurrir algo realmente “histórico”. (shrink)

Much media attention has been given to the potentially shifting voting patterns of the U.S. Hispanic population in the 2020 election. However, far less attention has been given to the implications...

Portuguese introduction to volume 2, issue 2.

The fallibility of deduction is the thesis that a thoughtful speaker-reasoner can wrongly believe that an inference is deductively valid. The author presents an argument to the effect that the fallibility of deduction is incompatible with the widespread view that deduction is epistemically unfruitful (the conclusion is contained in the premises, and the transition from premises to conclusion never extends knowledge). If the fallibility of deduction is a fact, the argument presented is a refutation of the doctrine of the unfruitfulness (...) of deduction. But its relevance goes further, because the argument reveals a connection between two different problems: a solution to the problem of fruitfulness (how can deductive inferences increase our knowledge?) is a starting point for a solution to the problem of fallibility (how can deductive inferences be wrong?). To solve the problem of fruitfulness, Michael Dummett proposed some general ideas concerning meaning and inference. Starting from these meaning-theoretical ideas, one can develop an explanation of the fallibility of deduction. The general explanatory strategy does not depend on the choice between a theory of meaning centered on truth, verification, inferential role, or on other key notions. (shrink)