Dans cet article, nous essayons de rendre compte de l’importance d’un principe qui commande une partie significative de la philosophie de l’histoire de Jan Patočka : l’histoire est caractérisée par une alternance d’essors et de déclins, alternance qui est déterminée par la tentative de l’existence de s’élever au-dessus des simples impératifs vitaux et par le risque toujours présent de retomber dans ce que Patočka appelle le projet de la « vie nue », enchaînée à elle-même. Ce principe s’appuie à son (...) tour sur la thèse suivant laquelle la finalité du mouvement vital est la recherche de sa propre conservation et reproduction. Nous analysons la présence de ces thèses patočkiennes à trois niveaux : le rôle du mouvement vital dans le mouvement de l’existence et notamment dans le travail ; le passage de la pré-histoire à l’existence historique proprement dite ; la description de deux phénomènes marquants de la contemporanéité, à savoir la domination de la technique et la guerre. Nous concluons en soulevant quelques questions critiques, concernant en particulier l’ambiguïté de la notion de vie, qui prend de fait des figures différentes dans les textes patočkiens. (shrink)

Through an immanent reversal of Husserl’s approach to the problems of genesis, writing, and time, Derrida radicalizes the phenomenology of historicity in the direction of a contamination between the empirical and the transcendental. In this paper, I argue that this also entails a transformation of the very concept of tradition: every tradition is always already tainted by the possibility of constitutional crisis and oblivion and it can only be questioned by thought after the historical fact. I conclude with an account (...) of the general meaning of Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology, and indicate its importance for his later work. (shrink)

La première rencontre de la pensée husserlienne avec la question de l’historicité, de façon exemplaire dans La philosophie comme science rigoureuse, ne semblait pas promettre de longs développements : c’était la possibilité même d’une rencontre réelle qui était mise en question, et ce à cause des éléments constitutifs mêmes de la phénoménologie, à savoir sa démarche eidétique et transcendantale. En tant que domaine de la factualité contingente et variable, milieu de ce qui est déjà donné au s...

Y a-t-il, et dans quelles limites, un « moment anthropologique » de la phénoménologie de Patočka? Si on ne trouve pas dans les textes de Patočka la réalisation explicite d’un projet d’anthropologie philosophique, la question du possible rapport de son œuvre à un tel domaine se pose néanmoins pour deux raisons. En premier lieu, ses textes contiennent une série d’analyses qui, tout en n’étant pas placées sous l’intitulé « anthropologie », peuvent être envisagées comme relevant de ce domaine :...

In this article, I seek to account for the importance of a principle which governs a significant part of Patocˇka’s philosophy of history. For Patocˇka, history is characterised by an alternation of rises and falls; this is determined, on the one hand, by the attempt of the existence to rise above the simple imperatives of biological life; and, on the other, by the ever-present risk of falling back into what Patocˇka calls the project of “bare life,” bound to itself. I (...) analyse the presence of these claims in Patocˇka’s work at three levels: first, the role of the dynamic of life within the dynamic of existence, and in particular within the practice of work; second, the transition from prehistory to historical existence proper; and finally, the description of two striking phenomena of modern life, namely the domination of technology and war. I conclude by raising some critical questions, concerning in particular the ambiguity of the notion of life and the ethical perspectives that Patocˇka outlines as a way out. In my analysis I try to show that Patocˇka’s position is constructed in a dialogue with Arendt and Heidegger and implies in some respects an anticipation of the problems of biopolitics. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to highlight the main features of Derrida’s interpretation of Heidegger in his 1964–65 lecture series Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l’histoire. Taking the issue of historicity as the main interpretive thread, the paper argues that, in Derrida’s view, Heidegger’s position constitutes a significant progress with regard to mainstream philosophical tradition. For Heidegger, historicity is originary and non-ontic; conceiving of it in this way enables us to overcome the primacy of the present and the (...) subjectivist metaphysical approach which authors such as Hegel and Husserl still display. The paper then reconstructs Derrida’s critique of the chapter on the historicity of Dasein in Being and Time, as well as his approach to the history of Being through the topic of the metaphor. The critical force of this reading will be supported by an analysis of some of Derrida’s later writings, which also enable us to sketch some possible avenues for future research, in particular on the relationships between writing and history and on Heidegger’s concept of Versammlung. (shrink)

La question de l’histoire a joué un rôle à la fois central et problématique dans la phénoménologie, et ce à partir de l’œuvre de Husserl lui-même. Malgré sa critique acérée de l’historicisme au nom de l’idéal de la philosophie comme science rigoureuse, malgré le caractère menaçant de l’histoire pour une phénoménologie qui se veut transcendantale et eidétique, le thème ne pouvait pas ne pas s’imposer à Husserl, non seulement dans le cadre de sa réflexion sur l’histoire européenne au moment de...

Recordando a Bachelard a medio siglo de su muerte (2011) -- Filosofia de la relatividad (2011) -- La proliferación de los conceptos de especie en la biología evolucionista (2010).

Volume 19, Issue 9, September 2019, Page 37-39.

A critical survey of the main philosophical theories about events and event talk, organized in three main sections: (i) Events and Other Categories (Events vs. Objects; Events vs. Facts; Events vs. Properties; Events vs. Times); (ii) Types of Events (Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, and States; Static and Dynamic Events; Actions and Bodily Movements; Mental and Physical Events; Negative Events); (iii) Existence, Identity, and Indeterminacy.

Neste artigo, temos como objetivo perscrutar o funcionamento da verbo-visualidade de uma perspectiva dialógica do discurso, utilizando, como material de análise, uma videomontagem humorística acerca do ator político Dilma Rousseff, durante a campanha presidencial brasileira do ano de 2010. Primeiramente, procuramos refletir acerca de alguns pressupostos teórico-metodológicos de Bakhtin e de Brait, qual seja, o de verbo-visualidade, alicerçado na concepção bakhtiniana de linguagem. Em um segundo momento, detivemo-nos na análise do texto objeto do artigo, que se pautou na seguinte indagação: (...) como contribuem e funcionam os elementos verbais e visuais para produção e direcionamento de sentidos na videomontagem? Nossa hipótese é a de que os discursos carregados pela montagem criam uma trilha ideológica de sentido que leva os interlocutores a interpretar a então candidata como uma pessoa sem discurso, manipulável. Diante do exposto, tentaremos demonstrar a hipótese que sustentamos. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory.

This unique textbook states and proves all the major theorems of many-valued propositional logic and provides the reader with the most recent developments and trends, including applications to adaptive error-correcting binary search. The book is suitable for self-study, making the basic tools of many-valued logic accessible to students and scientists with a basic mathematical knowledge who are interested in the mathematical treatment of uncertain information. Stressing the interplay between algebra and logic, the book contains material never before published, such as (...) a simple proof of the completeness theorem and of the equivalence between Chang's MV algebras and Abelian lattice-ordered groups with unit - a necessary prerequisite for the incorporation of a genuine addition operation into fuzzy logic. Readers interested in fuzzy control are provided with a rich deductive system in which one can define fuzzy partitions, just as Boolean partitions can be defined and computed in classical logic. Detailed bibliographic remarks at the end of each chapter and an extensive bibliography lead the reader on to further specialised topics. (shrink)

In this article Roberto Balzani, the mayor of Forlì, remembers Roberto Ruffilli, 25 years after his murder. The remembrance reconstructs the steps of his academic career and of his political commitment. Ruffilli graduated at the Catholic University of Milan; his researches in contemporary history placed him in an original position if compared with the Italian studies of the time. The constant attention towards the history of administration and the transformations of the state is the basis on which Ruffilli (...) built his proposals concerning the reform of the insitutional and political system. Balzani concludes the article by affirming that the problems of today aren't any different, that is why Ruffilli's proposals still demonstrate their modernity. (shrink)

According to a leading view, emotions such as admiration, contempt, pride, and shame are important vehicles of agential development. Through admiration and contempt, we establish models and countermodels against which to shape our character; through pride and shame, we get a sense of how we measure up to them. Critics of this view object that these emotions always deliver uncompromising evaluations: admiration casts people in a completely positive light, while contempt casts aspersion on them. Therefore, insofar as they lack the (...) capacity for nuance, these emotions are systematically unfitting and misleading. This paper discusses this objection as originally formulated by John Doris as well as Macalester Bell’s response. Drawing from research on emotional intentionality, it will be argued that Doris’ and Bell’s accounts are respectively misguided criticisms and inadequate defences of these emotions. Their mistake lies in an invalid transition from the claim that these emotions are intentionally directed towards persons to the claim that they deliver global evaluations of those towards whom they are directed. By rejecting this inference, it will be shown that these emotions can deliver nuanced and fitting evaluations in a way Doris’ objection overlooks and Bell’s response precludes us from articulating. (shrink)

This book by Roberto Esposito - a leading Italian political philosopher - is a highly original exploration of the relationship between human bodies and societies. The original function of law, even before it was codified, was to preserve peaceful cohabitation between people who were exposed to the risk of destructive conflict. Just as the human body's immune system protects the organism from deadly incursions by viruses and other threats, law also ensures the survival of the community in a life-threatening (...) situation. It protects and prolongs life. But the function of law as a form of immunization points to a more disturbing consideration. Like the individual body, the collective body can be immunized from the perceived danger only by allowing a little of what threatens it to enter its protective boundaries. This means that in order to escape the clutches of death, life is forced to incorporate within itself the lethal principle. Starting from this reflection on the nature of immunization, Esposito offers a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary biopolitics. Never more than at present has the demand for immunization come to characterize all aspects of our existence. The more we feel at risk of being infiltrated and infected by foreign elements, the more the life of the individual and society closes off within its protective boundaries, forcing us to choose between a self-destructive outcome and a more radical alternative based on a new conception of community. (shrink)

This paper discusses three relevant logics that obey Component Homogeneity - a principle that Goddard and Routley introduce in their project of a logic of significance. The paper establishes two main results. First, it establishes a general characterization result for two families of logic that obey Component Homogeneity - that is, we provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for their consequence relations. From this, we derive characterization results for S*fde, dS*fde, crossS*fde. Second, the paper establishes complete sequent calculi (...) for S*fde, dS*fde, crossS*fde. Among the other accomplishments of the paper, we generalize the semantics from Bochvar, Hallden, Deutsch and Daniels, we provide a general recipe to define containment logics, we explore the single-premise/single-conclusion fragment of S*fde, dS*fde, crossS*fdeand the connections between crossS*fde and the logic Eq of equality by Epstein. Also, we present S*fde as a relevant logic of meaninglessness that follows the main philosophical tenets of Goddard and Routley, and we briefly examine three further systems that are closely related to our main logics. Finally, we discuss Routley's criticism to containment logic in light of our results, and overview some open issues. (shrink)

As the worlds of economics, politics, culture, and communications face a growing wave of globalization that will likely continue, ethical challenges for journalists have also gone global. I propose a clear division between ethics codes for media owners, the public, and professional journalists and present a set of considerations and specific rules applicable only to the last group. In this article I advocate a universal code of journalistic ethics but point out problems and warn against dangers that have made the (...) application of such codes difficult in the past. A universal code should consider the voluntary nature of such an endeavor, the cultural and economic differences in various journalistic traditions, and the problem of producing solutions acceptable to all involved. (shrink)

A discussion with Roberto Andorno about global bioethics and biolaw, the Coronavirus pandemic, and its impact on human dignity and rights. Can we foresee the emerging new profile of global bioethics and biolaw in the post-Coronavirus era? How significant are they going to be in the future, after the enormous pressure that the Coronavirus pandemic has exercised on key political, legal, and ethical values? Must the voice of bioethicists -compared to the ‘hard’ scientific data- be louder in the future (...) concerning decisions about emergency social and medical measures? Is there a hope that public empowerment will support robust, global public engagement and meaningful deliberation? How much does Roberto Andorno’s view on human dignity reveal a supposed commitment to moral realism? The massive deaths of elderly people living in hospices of Sweden, Spain, and Italy, based on an implicit ‘fair innings’ view, has recently posed certain questions on the moral unacceptability of such practices. The same questions arise in the case of the legalization of euthanasia grounded on the implicit acceptance of the view that life is not worth living under certain circumstances. Is it possible that the human rights bodies worldwide will acquire executive power, and how could this become possible? How influential the ‘precautionary principle’ can become regarding clinical and research ethics in the future? How urgent is the importance of the introduction of bioethical education in the curricula of ‘hard’ empirical studies? Roberto Andorno discusses with us all these controversial and under heated public debate issues, giving sometimes provocative answers. (shrink)

A wide family of many-valued logics—for instance, those based on the weak Kleene algebra—includes a non-classical truth-value that is ‘contaminating’ in the sense that whenever the value is assigned to a formula φ⁠, any complex formula in which φ appears is assigned that value as well. In such systems, the contaminating value enjoys a wide range of interpretations, suggesting scenarios in which more than one of these interpretations are called for. This calls for an evaluation of systems with multiple contaminating (...) values. In this paper, we consider the countably infinite family of multiple-conclusion consequence relations in which classical logic is enriched with one or more contaminating values whose behavior is determined by a linear ordering between them. We consider some motivations and applications for such systems and provide general characterizations for all consequence relations in this family. Finally, we provide sequent calculi for a pair of four-valued logics including two linearly ordered contaminating values before defining two-sided sequent calculi corresponding to each of the infinite family of many-valued logics studied in this paper. (shrink)

Introduction : nothing in common -- Fear -- Guilt -- Law -- Ecstasy -- Experience -- Appendix : nihilism and community.

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in (...) philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

This paper argues that some of the misunderstandings surrounding the meaning and function of the concept of human dignity in bioethics arise from a lack of distinction between two different roles that this notion plays: one as an overarching policy principle, and the other as a moral standard of patient care. While the former is a very general concept which fulfils a foundational and a guiding role of the normative framework governing biomedical issues, the latter reflects a much more concrete (...) and context-specific understanding of the patient as a “person”. The importance of dignity as a policy principle will be described by appealing to the distinction between principles and rules as developed by some legal philosophers. The value of dignity as a standard of patient care will be illustrated with the help of concrete examples and by drawing on the taxonomies of dignity proposed by Jonathan Mann and other scholars. The overall scope of the article is to highlight this double and complementary role of human dignity in bioethics. (shrink)

This article discusses the controversy between Schelling and Eschenmayer regarding the Freiheitsschrift of 1809. Eschenmayer, a follower of the ideas of Jacobi, accuses Schelling of degrading God in applying to Him human concepts. Schelling, on the contrary, thinks that the faith needs the understanding.