Secondo un programma di ricerca inaugurato da Darwin e oggi sempre più popolare, gli aspetti fondamentali della nostra psicologia morale sono il prodotto della selezione naturale. Le nostre convinzioni morali, così come la nostra tendenza a comportarci in accordo con queste convinzioni, sarebbero il risultato di processi analoghi a quelli che hanno prodotto il collo delle giraffe e le ali degli uccelli: la ragione per cui siamo convinti di dover tener fede alla parola data è che questa credenza è stata (...) adattiva per i nostri antenati, che ce l'hanno trasmessa. Il libro introduce i lettori a questo affascinante ambito di ricerca, spaziando dalla teoria dei giochi evolutiva alla selezione parentale e alla selezione di gruppo, per poi passare a discutere le conseguenze di tali risultati per la questione della natura della morale, sostenendo che se la nostra psicologia morale è davvero il prodotto della selezione naturale allora dovremmo abbandonare l'idea che esistano norme morali oggettive. (shrink)

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

This paper employs some outcomes (for the most part due to David Lewis) of the contemporary debate on the metaphysics of dispositions to evaluate those dispositional analyses of meaning that make use of the concept of a disposition in ideal conditions. The first section of the paper explains why one may find appealing the notion of an ideal-condition dispositional analysis of meaning and argues that Saul Kripke’s well-known argument against such analyses is wanting. The second section focuses on Lewis’ work (...) in the metaphysics of dispositions in order to call attention to some intuitions about the nature of dispositions that we all seem to share. In particular, I stress the role of what I call "Actuality Constraint". The third section of the paper maintains that the Actuality Constraint can be used to show that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist (in so doing, I develop a suggestion put forward by Paul Boghossian). This immediately implies that ideal-condition dispositional analyses of meaning cannot work. The last section discusses a possible objection to my argument. The point of the objection is that the argument depends on an illicit assumption. I show (1) that, in fact, the assumption in question is far from illicit and (2) that even without this assumption it is possible to argue that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist. (shrink)

The paper discusses an objection, put forward by - among others - John McDowell, to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s non-factualist and relativist view of semantic discourse. The objection goes roughly as follows: while it is usually possible to be a relativist about a given domain of discourse without being a relativist about anything else, relativism about semantic discourse entails global relativism, which in turn entails subjective idealism, which we can reasonably assume to be false. The paper’s first section sketches Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s ideas (...) about semantic discourse and gives a fully explicit formulation of the objection. The second section describes and briefly discusses the formal apparatus needed to evaluate the objection - which is basically equivalent to John MacFarlane’s recent development of David Kaplan’s classic semantic framework. Finally, the third section explains in detail why the objection fails. I show that even though relativism about semantic discourse does entail a form of global relativism, the relativism in question does not entail anything like Berkeleyan or Fichtean idealism. This particular kind of relativism holds that which character (in Kaplan’s sense) is associated to a given utterance depends on what MacFarlane calls “the context of assessment”. (shrink)

This paper argues that most of the alleged straight solutions to the sceptical paradox which Kripke ascribed to Wittgenstein can be regarded as the first horn of a dilemma whose second horn is the paradox itself. The dilemma is proved to be a by‐product of a foundationalist assumption on the notion of justification, as applied to linguistic behaviour. It is maintained that the assumption is unnecessary and that the dilemma is therefore spurious. To this end, an alternative conception of the (...) justification of linguistic behaviour is outlined, a conception that vindicates some of the insights behind Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical solution of the paradox. This alternative conception is defended against two objections (both familiar from McDowell's works): (1) that it would imply that for the linguistic community there is no authority, no standard to meet and, therefore, no possibility of error and (2) that it would lead to a kind of idealism. (shrink)

The paper discusses Saul Kripke's Normativity Argument against semantic dispositionalism: it criticizes the orthodox interpretation of the argument, defends an alternative reading and argues that, contrary to what Kripke himself seems to have been thinking, the real point of the Normativity Argument is not that meaning is normative. According to the orthodox interpretation, the argument can be summarized as follows: (1) it is constitutive of the concept of meaning that its instances imply an ought, but (2) it is not constitutive (...) of the concept of a disposition that dispositions imply an ought, hence (3) no dispositional analysis of meaning can work. According to my alternative reading, the point of the argument is another one, namely that while (1) dispositionalism is committed to the thesis that speakers have non-inferential knowledge of their unmanifested linguistic dispositions, (2) speakers, as a matter of fact, do not have such a knowledge. A point that is in principle independent from the issue of the normativity of meaning. (shrink)

In metasemantics, semantic dispositionalism is the view that what makes it the case that, given the value of the relevant parameters, a certain linguistic expression refers to what it does are the speakers’ dispositions. In the literature, there is something like a consensus that the fate of dispositionalism hinges on the status of three arguments, first put forward by Saul Kripke ‒ or at least usually ascribed to him. This paper discusses a different, and strangely neglected, anti-dispositionalist argument, which develops (...) some remarks first put forward by Paul Boghossian and Anandi Hattiangadi and revolves around the idea that semantic dispositionalists have no way to justify their privileging certain dispositions, the ones they take to be reference-determining, over all the others. After some background (Section 1) and a first presentation of the argument (Section 2), I discuss three ways a dispositionalist might try to answer it and find them all wanting (Section 3). (shrink)

The paper puts forward a new skeptical solution to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox, a solution which revolves around the idea that human communication does not require meaning facts - at least as defined by Kripke. After a brief discussion of the paradox, I explain why I think that Kripkenstein’s solution needs revision and argue that the main goal of a skeptical solution to the rule-following paradox should be that of showing that communication does not require meaning. After that, I offer (...) two arguments for the thesis that communication does not require meaning. The first argument instantiates a rather direct strategy and focuses on the description of a concrete case of communication without meaning. The second one is more indirect in that I start by describing a world in which, although there are meaning facts, communication does not depend on them. The paper’s last section deals with the issue of meaning talk. (shrink)

Nelle "Ricerche filosofiche" e in altre opere Wittgenstein discute un argomento per la conclusione che non esiste qualcosa come il seguire una regola. Questa conclusione, a sua volta, sembrerebbe implicare che le parole del linguaggio non hanno un significato. E quest’ultima conclusione, infine, sembrerebbe implicare che la comunicazione è impossibile. Questa linea di pensiero è, ovviamente, paradossale: il comunicare è un fenomeno non solo possibile, ma assolutamente comune. La serie di argomenti in questione deve quindi, da qualche parte, nascondere un (...) errore. Ma dove? "Seguire una regola" introduce il lettore ai tentativi di rispondere a questa domanda che si sono succeduti negli ultimi quattro decenni, a partire dalla pubblicazione dell’epocale "Wittgenstein su regole e linguaggio privato" di Saul Kripke. (shrink)

Kripkenstein’s challenge is usually described as being essentially about the use of a word in new kinds of cases ‒ the old kinds of cases being commonly considered as non-problematic. I show that this way of conceiving the challenge is neither true to Kripke’s intentions nor philosophically defensible: the Kripkean skeptic can question my answering “125” to the question “What is 68 plus 57?” even if that problem is one I have already encountered and answered. I then argue that once (...) the real nature of Kripkenstein’s challenge is properly appreciated, one extremely popular strategy to try to meet it, what usually goes by the name of “semantic dispositionalism”, loses much of its appeal. Along the way, I also explain that Kripkenstein’s challenge is actually two distinct challenges ‒ one concerning the mental state of meaning, or intending, something by a sign and the other concerning the meaning (referentially conceived) of linguistic expressions. (shrink)

Even though he is not very explicit about it, in “Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language” Kripke discusses two different, albeit related, skeptical theses ‒ the first one in the philosophy of mind, the second one in the philosophy of language. Usually, what Kripke says about one thesis can be easily applied to the other one, too; however, things are not always that simple. In this paper, I discuss the case of the so-called “Normativity Argument” against semantic dispositionalism (which I (...) take to be epistemological in nature) and argue that it is much stronger as an argument in the philosophy of mind than when it is construed as an argument in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In his well-known essay on Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke maintains that dispositional analyses of meaning cannot work mainly because the concept of disposition is descriptive, whereas that of meaning is normative. Unfortunately, neither Kripke nor his followers have ever spelled out this “argument from normativity” in full detail. As a result, the argument does not have good press. This paper offers an explicit version of the argument. In particular, (1) I try to explain what the claim that meaning is normative amounts (...) to, (2) I try to clarify what supports it, and (3) I sketch a valid version of the argument. (shrink)

According to Paul Boghossian, the claim that the concept of linguistic meaning is normative has no plausibility whatever. In this paper, I criticize Boghossian's argument for this conclusion and maintain that there is a strong case for saying that the concept of meaning is normative. First, I sketch an easy to handle version of the argument in question. Then, I use MacFarlane's work on the significance of "true" to maintain that the argument relies on an illicit assumption. Finally, I show (...) what supports the claim that meaning is normative by reflecting on the structure of an explanation of a case of successful communication in terms of meaning. (shrink)

"Mente e mondo", il libro che raccoglie le tanto celebrate quanto discusse "John Locke Lectures" di John McDowell, appartiene ad un genere filosofico classico, quello dell'"indagine sui poteri della mente umana". Secondo McDowell, un'indagine di questo tipo è necessaria alla risoluzione di alcuni fra i principali problemi epistemologici e semantici. Attraverso una dettagliata analisi dei lavori di McDowell ed un'approfondita discussione del problema del "seguire una regola" e del connesso paradosso di Kripke-Wittgenstein, questo volume cerca di dimostrare che la posizione (...) di McDowell è la conseguenza di una concezione errata delle nozioni normative ed una forma di quello che Sellars chiamava "Il mito del dato". (shrink)

Sharon Street defines her constructivism about practical reasons as the view that whether something is a reason to do a certain thing for a given agent depends on that agent’s normative point of view. However, Street has also maintained that there is a judgment about practical reasons which is true relative to every possible normative point of view, namely constructivism itself. I show that the latter thesis is inconsistent with Street’s own constructivism about epistemic reasons and discuss some consequences of (...) this incompatibility. (shrink)

After having given in the "Essay" a definition of freedom which straightforwardly entails its compatibility with – among other things – God's foreknowledge, Locke surprisingly writes in a 1693 letter to Molyneux that he does not see how human liberty can coexist with divine prescience. I argue that the confession to Molyneux can be made consistent with the "Essay"'s definition by embracing the view that the problem Locke had in mind when he drafted it was not a problem concerning the (...) reality of human freedom but, rather, its value. (shrink)

L'articolo discute "A Midsummer’s Night Sex Comedy", film del 1982 di Woody Allen, concentrandosi sulla dialettica tra i personaggi di Andrew (Woody Allen) e Leopold (José Ferrer) e in particolare sul loro atteggiamento nei confronti del soprannaturale. Sostengo che per comprendere appieno questa dialettica è necessario abbracciare una concezione in senso lato wittgensteiniana di che cosa vuol dire che qualcosa è soprannaturale.

Un'introduzione ad alcune delle idee principali della filosofia di Thomas Reid, scritta per la traduzione italiana del saggio sulla memoria, dai "Saggi sui poteri intellettuali dell'uomo".

Una difesa di una soluzione antirealista al paradosso del seguire una regola.

L'articolo discute due problemi intorno alla metafisica della prescienza. Nella prima sezione mi concentro su di un argomento che vorrebbe mostrare che non esiste nulla di simile. Nella seconda discuto la relazione tra la prescienza del nostro stesso comportamento, o "autoprescienza", e quella che possiamo chiamare "la fenomenologia della libertà". Per quanto riguarda il primo problema, utilizzo la discussione di David Lewis del Paradosso del Nonno per sostenere che l'argomento in questione trascura un'importante caratteristica della semantica di "potere". Per quanto (...) riguarda il secondo problema, sviluppo alcune osservazioni di Paul Horwich per mostrare che, nonostante le apparenze, l'autoprescienza non è necessariamente incompatibile con la fenomenologia della libertà. (shrink)

"Empirismo e filosofia della mente", di Wilfrid Sellars, è un testo classico della filosofia analitica. A più di mezzo secolo dalla sua comparsa, molte delle tesi che Sellars vi sostiene (sulla natura dei concetti psicologici, sul ruolo epistemico della percezione, sulla distinzione tra descrittivo e normativo) sono ancora al centro del dibattito e filosofi come Robert Brandom e John McDowell hanno riconosciuto il loro debito nei confronti del lavoro di Sellars. Le lezioni raccolte in questo volume, pensate per essere una (...) guida allo studio, ricostruiscono l'argomentazione di Sellars cercando di chiarirne la struttura, di illuminarne i passaggi più oscuri e di fornirne una chiave di lettura. (shrink)

Spesso i filosofi paiono pensare di poter trarre conclusioni radicali sulla base di una semplice discussione di scenari immaginari, scenari che a volte sembrerebbero tratti da un racconto di fantascienza. Questo stile argomentativo lascia molti studenti (e anche alcuni filosofi di professione) perplessi: come può il semplice riflettere su di uno scenario immaginario permetterci di trarre conclusioni su come stanno le cose nella realtà? Questo volume cerca di giustificare l'uso di esperimenti mentali in filosofia, concentrandosi su due casi studio, entrambi (...) tratti dalla letteratura sull'identità personale: la trasformazione di un essere umano in un'entità sintetica, e la divisione di una persona in due individui distinti. (shrink)

Traduzione italiana del saggio sulla memoria di Thomas Reid, dai suoi "Saggi sui poteri intellettuali dell'uomo".

Online controlled experiments, also known as A/B tests, have become ubiquitous. While many practical challenges in running experiments at scale have been thoroughly discussed, the ethical dimension of A/B testing has been neglected. This article fills this gap in the literature by introducing a new, soft ethics and governance framework that explicitly recognizes how the rise of an experimentation culture in industry settings brings not only unprecedented opportunities to businesses but also significant responsibilities. More precisely, the article (a) introduces a (...) set of principles to encourage ethical and responsible experimentation to protect users, customers, and society; (b) argues that ensuring compliance with the proposed principles is a complex challenge unlikely to be addressed by resorting to a one-solution response; (c) discusses the relevance and effectiveness of several mechanisms and policies in educating, governing, and incentivizing companies conducting online controlled experiments; and (d) offers a list of prompting questions specifically designed to help and empower practitioners by stimulating specific ethical deliberations and facilitating coordination among different groups of stakeholders. (shrink)

The impact of large digital corporations on our freedom is often lamented but rarely investigated systematically. This paper aims to fill this desideratum by focusing on the power of social media corporations and the freedom of their users. In order to analyze this relationship, I distinguish two forms of freedom and two corresponding forms of power. Social media corporations extend their users’ freedom of choice by providing many new options. This provision, however, comes with the domination by these corporations because (...) it is based on their power of uncontrolled interference. Users could escape this domination through exit. One reason why they do not choose this option is that they would lose the benefits associated with the network effects provided by social media services. A second reason is that the power of social media corporations runs so deep that they are able to manipulate the autonomous decision-making processes of their users. Users are provided with many new avenues for authentic self-presentation on social media. By using them, however, users need to conform to a web interface that is designed by corporations to undermine self-control. Through these two mechanisms, corporations are able to promote an interest in users to present themselves on their platforms. Insofar as this works, they secure the users’ compliance to their domination through subjectivation. This double conjunction of choice and domination, on the one hand, and autonomy and subjectivation, on the other, makes the case that the very power of corporate social media stems from their intrinsic connection to genuine practices of freedom. (shrink)

One of the most enigmatic and inevitably most suggestive words that Hölderlin’s philosophical work delivers to us is the neologism introduced in the summer of 1799: aorgisch, aorgic. A principle that is both ontological and mimetic, the aorgic undoubtedly represents the presence of the sublime in Hölderlin, albeit concealed terminologically, but also a particular declination that makes it not always easy to assimilate to the theories of the eighteenth-century and romantic sublime. This paper attempts to probe the role played by (...) the aorgic in the configuration of an aesthetics of the tragic by considering two precise moments: the writing, Grund zum Empedokles, which seeks to give speculative legitimacy to the unfinished tragedy on Empedocles, and the notes that accompanied the translations of Sophocles that Hölderlin published in 1804. Interpreted as the dimension of the formless, but also of the possible, the aorgic is necessarily thought by Hölderlin always next to its opposite pole, the organic, that is the dimension of the human in the broad sense (art, culture, history). The relationship between these two poles is not only dialectical, along the lines of Fichte’s Wechselwirkung, but also analogical, recovering that relationship between physis and techne that Aristotle had already indicated in the second book of Physics. The aorgic therefore represents the necessary alienation to which nature is subjected in order to become culture (or art), a passage that, from the point of view of traditional aesthetic categories, could be read as the transition from the (natural) unrepresentability of the sublime to the (cultural) configuration of the beautiful: from chaos to form. (shrink)

Sartre’s account of the emotions presupposes a conception of human nature that is never fully articulated. The paper aims to render such conception explicit and to argue that frustration occupies a foundational place in Sartre’s picture of affective existence.

Human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) advocates for the integration of social aspects into AI explanations. Central to the HCXAI discourse is the Social Transparency (ST) framework, which aims to make the socio-organizational context of AI systems accessible to their users. In this work, we suggest extending the ST framework to address the risks of social misattributions in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in sensitive areas like mental health. In fact LLMs, which are remarkably capable of simulating roles and personas, may lead (...) to mismatches between designers' intentions and users' perceptions of social attributes, risking to promote emotional manipulation and dangerous behaviors, cases of epistemic injustice, and unwarranted trust. To address these issues, we propose enhancing the ST framework with a fifth 'W-question' to clarify the specific social attributions assigned to LLMs by its designers and users. This addition aims to bridge the gap between LLM capabilities and user perceptions, promoting the ethically responsible development and use of LLM-based technology. (shrink)

A growing number of consumer technology companies are aiming to convince older people that humanoid robots make helpful tools to support aging-in-place. As hybrid devices, socially assistive robots (SARs) are situated between health monitoring tools, familiar digital assistants, security aids, and more advanced AI-powered devices. Consequently, they implicate older people’s privacy in complex ways. Such devices are marketed to perform functions common to smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo) and smart home platforms (e.g., Google Home), while other functions are more specific (...) to older people, including health and safety monitoring and serving as companions to mitigate loneliness. Privacy is a key value central to debates about the ethics of using SARs in aged care, yet there has been very little interchange between these debates and the robust theoretical discussion in the legal literature about the future of privacy and AI governance. Drawing on two qualitative studies of older people’s views on consumer SARs, the paper contributes novel findings about older people’s thinking on privacy and data governance at the intersection of their experiences with present day digital technologies and projections for future AI systems, and places their views in dialogue with debates about the future of privacy protection and AI governance. (shrink)

Powers, capacities and dispositions (in what follows I will use these terms synonymously) have become prominent in recent debates in metaphysics, philosophy of science and other areas of philosophy. In this paper I will analyse in some detail a well-known argument from scientific practice to the existence of powers/capacities/dispositions. According to this argument the practice of extrapolating scientific knowledge from one kind of situation to a different kind of situation requires a specific interpretation of laws of nature, namely as attributing (...) dispositions to systems. My main interest will be to discuss what characteristics these dispositions need to have in order to account for the scientific practice in question. I will furthermore assess whether the introduction of dispositions in the context of the extrapolation argument can be described as a ‘revitalization’ or as a ‘return’ to those notions repudiated by early modern philosophers. More particularly I will argue for the following claims: I. In repudiating scholastic terminology, including substantial forms with their causal powers, post-cartesian philosophers focussed on a concept of causation that was much stronger than 21st century conceptions of causation. For this reason alone, whatever ‘causal’ is supposed to mean in today’s causal powers, embracing causal powers is not a simple return to a pre-cartesian notion. II. The dispositions presupposed in scientific practice need not (and should not) be construed in causal terms (whether strong or weak). III. While some early modern philosophers contrasted the characterisation of the natural world in terms of substantial forms (and their causal powers) on the one hand and a mathematical characterization on the other and suggested that these approaches are incompatible, the dispositions postulated by the extrapolation argument to account for scientific practice are themselves characterized in mathematical terms. More precisely: The behaviour the systems are disposed to display is – at least in physics – often characterized in mathematical terms. IV. The dispositions assumed in the law-statements in scientific practice are determinable rather than determinate properties. (shrink)

A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that encourage (...) political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer's theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states' capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction:the European Union and the Law of Peoples The Argument of Law of Peoples Standards and Grounds for International Stability Human Rights in Federations The Argument of Law of Peoples for Inter‐people Inequality Distributive Justice in Federations Federal and Global Implications Toleration and Stability Reconsidered Acknowledgments Notes.

Edmund Husserl is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl's writings on the natural and (...) human sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl's thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally. (shrink)

We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for them is evaluated. The framework we offer acknowledges the force of some (...) of the objections to basic emotion theory whilst demonstrating that the notion of a basic emotion, once properly reformulated, is still of scientific value. (shrink)

This paper offers a theory of spatial indexicals like _here_ and _there_ on which such expressions are variables associated with presuppositional constraints on their values. I show how this view handles both referential and bound uses of these indexicals, and I propose an account of what counts as the location of the context on a given occasion. The latter is seen to explain a wide range of facts about what the spatial indexicals can refer to.

In this groundbreaking book, Andrea R. English challenges common assumptions by arguing that discontinuous experiences, such as uncertainty and struggle, are essential to the learning process. To make this argument, Dr. English draws from the works of two seminal thinkers in philosophy of education - nineteenth-century German philosopher J. F. Herbart and American Pragmatist John Dewey. English's analysis considers Herbart's influence on Dewey, inverting the accepted interpretation of Dewey's thought as a dramatic break from modern European understandings of education.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Nihilism Skepticism Nihilism and Skepticism.

Epistemische Tugenden sind Eigenschaften des forschenden Subjekts, die in wissenschaftlichen Kulturen als Bedingung fur die Produktion, Vermittlung oder den Erwerb von Wissen angesehen werden. Sie lassen sich nicht auf ein abstraktes Sollen reduzieren, wie es oft von Ethikkommissionen oder politischen Bewegungen an die Wissenschaft herangetragen wird. Die methodische Erzeugung von Wissen ware kaum moglich, wenn es nicht erkenntnisfordernde Tugenden wie Geduld, Aufmerksamkeit, Genauigkeit, Intuition, Wahrhaftigkeit, Neugierde, Strenge oder Zuverlassigkeit gabe, die den an sich prekaren Erkenntnisprozess stabilisieren und in eine bestimmte (...) Richtung lenken. Die Beitrage dieses Sammelbandes befassen sich mit epistemischen Tugenden aus (wissenschafts-)historischer, philosophischer, medien- und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf dem Verhaltnis von wissenschaftlichen und soziokulturellen beziehungsweise moralischen Normen. Mit Beitragen von: Lorraine Daston, Martin Doll, Andreas Gelhard, Raymond Geuss, Ruben Hackler, Michael Hagner, Jens Kertscher, Markus Krajewski, Marcel Lepper, Martin Mulsow, Oliver Nievergelt, Tanja Paulitz, Robert Proctor, Katja Sabisch, Sandro Zanetti, Cornelia Zumbusch. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between democracy and republicanism, and its consequences; and articulates new theoretical insights into connections between liberty, law and democratic politics.

This book reconsiders the major current topics in the philosophy of perception using olfaction as the paradigm sense. The author reveals how many of the most basic concepts of philosophy of perception are based on peculiarities of visual perception not found in other modalities, and addresses how different the philosophy of perception would be if based on olfaction. The book addresses several aspects of olfaction, including perceptual qualities, percepts, olfaction and cognitive processes, and consciousness. The first part of the book (...) considers perception with respect to its ability to guide behaviors and to make information available to cognitive processes. The author continues by addressing the differences between conscious and non-conscious olfactory perception, and presents an argument for an important role of attention in conscious processes. The book concludes by discussing the function of conscious brain processes and their link to guiding behaviors in complex situations. (shrink)

In den letzten Jahren hat sich eine Vielfalt unterschiedlicher Gremien zur Ethikberatung entwickelt: vom Konsil mit einem einzelnen Berater bis zum Ethikkomitee. In dem Band werden die Ethikberatung, ihre Entwicklung und Anwendung, sowie die Gründung von Gremien in Krankenhäusern, Pflegeeinrichtungen, Hospizen und von niedergelassenen Ärzten anhand von Fallbeispielen erläutert. Dabei schlagen die Autoren eine Brücke zwischen traditioneller philosophischer Ethik und anwendungsbezogener klinischer Ethik. Auch rechtliche Fragen werden erörtert.

El fenómeno originario de la pertenencia explicita uno de los problemas fundamentales de la tradición filosófica continental: la relación cuerpo-mundo. Dicha relación se ha construido tradicionalmente a partir de la propia mismidad del sujeto (Yo) o de su corporalidad, afirmando que es porque tengo un cuerpo que puedo decir que pertenezco a un mundo. Ante esta problemática se alza una fenomenología de la pertenencia propuesta por R. Barbaras, la cual expresa la necesidad de re-pensar la concepción de la subjetividad, así (...) como la necesidad de una inversión en la relación cuerpo-mundo a partir de la pertenencia al mundo del propio sujeto. Ahí es donde aparece el verdadero sentido y alcance ontológico de la experiencia del cuerpo puesto que tener un cuerpo no significa otra cosa más que pertenecer y la aparición sólo podrá darse desde dentro del mundo, a partir de nuestra inscripción en él. Así, la ecología corporal constituirá un ejemplo específico que muestra el alcance de dicha inversión y explicitará el parentesco ontológico entre el cuerpo y el mundo. (shrink)

"Klug werden heißt nach alledem, sich öffnen können für die Erfahrung der eigenen Möglichkeiten und der Bescheidung auf sie." Ein spannendes und flüssig geschriebenes Buch zum philosophischen Thema Klugheit. Die Analyse verschiedener Klugheitskonzepte von Aristoteles bis in die Neuzeit führt Andreas Luckner zu der Erkenntnis, dass Klugheit gerade für moralphilosophische Überlegungen relevant ist - im Gegensatz zur weit verbreiteten Auffassung, Klugheit stehe in Opposition zu moralischem Denken und Handeln. Pluspunkte besonders flüssig und lesbar geschrieben müheloser Einstieg in die Tiefen der (...) Problematik anhand anschaulicher Beispiele aus dem Alltag Entwurf eines modernen Klugheitsbegriffs auf der Basis von Orientierung und Vertrauen in der Begegnung mit der Welt. (shrink)

Dieser Band wirft ein neues Licht auf Byzanz - als geographischen, aber vor allem als kulturellen Knotenpunkt. Denn wie kaum eine andere Region ist Byzantium über gut ein Jahrtausend durch seine ebenso zentrale wie fragile geographische Lage, aber auch durch sein Prestige wichtig für die Begegnung von Kulturen, Personen und Institutionen rund um das Mittelmeer. Hierbei stellt sich aus byzantinischer Perspektive die "antike" und "mittelalterliche" Welt als ein in wesentlichen Zügen kontinuierlicher Kulturraum dar, der bis an die Schwelle der Neuzeit (...) reicht und sich vor allem durch seine große Rezeptivität auszeichnet. Thematisiert werden daher vor allem die Wechselseitigkeit kultureller und epistemischer Rezeptions- und Transformationsprozesse und ihre jeweiligen Wissensformen. Diese Wissensformen beziehen sich auf die Ordnungsstrukturen, die der Erkenntnis und den Wissenschaften, der Sprache und medialen Repräsentation sowie den institutionellen und soziologischen Bedingungen zugrundeliegen, sowie auf die diesen korrespondierenden Gegenstände des Wissens. In diesem Austausch begegnet Byzanz auch den transformierten Spuren, welche die griechische Kultur zuvor bei ihren eifrigen Nachahmern hinterlassen hat. (shrink)

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance the (...) discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature. (shrink)

Armstrong famously argued in favour of introducing totality facts in our ontology. Contrary to fully negative (absence) facts, totality facts yield a theory of “moderate” or “partial” negativity, which allegedly provides an elegant solution to the truthmaking problem of negative claims and, at the same time, avoids postulating (many) first-order absences. Friends of totality facts argue that partial negativity is (i) tolerable vis-à-vis the Eleatic principle qua mark of the real, and (ii) achieves a significant advantage in terms of ontological (...) parsimony. But are totality facts, which are partially negative, really more ontologically acceptable than fully negative facts? In this paper, we argue that, comparatively, the case for totality facts is weaker than commonly assumed and that, ultimately, the answer is negative. (shrink)