This book reclaims Hegel's notion of the "end of art"-or, more precisely, of "art's past character"-not just as a piece of the history of philosophy but as a living critical and interpretive methodology. It addresses the presence of the past character of art both in Hegel and contemporary philosophy and aesthetics. The book's innovative contribution lies in unifying the Hegelian thesis with discussions of contemporary art and philosophy. The author not only offers a Hegelian exegesis but applies the idea of (...) the past character of art to themes that are both related to Hegel's philosophy, such as the French Revolution and the modern state, Kantian aesthetics, and religion and the sacred space disclosed for art, and going beyond Hegel, such as Celan's poetry, Gramsci's criticism of Croce, human rights, and even the grunge rock band Pearl Jam. Conversely, such non-Hegelian explorations will help enlighten what may look like a specific thread of Hegel's aesthetics, but can be used to shed light on some core motives of his philosophy. The author's interpretation of art's past character reclaims the full value, attractiveness, and philosophical soundness of Hegel's thesis, while rejecting its interpretation in terms of a complete dissolution of the aesthetic element into the philosophical one. Hegel and the Present of Art's Past Character will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Hegel, philosophy of art and aesthetics, history of philosophy, political philosophy, and art theory. (shrink)

This article builds on the hypothesis that theoretical approaches to philosophy of technology are currently stuck in a false alternative: either embrace the “empirical turn” or jump back into the determinism, pessimism, and general ignorance towards specific technologies that characterized the “humanities philosophy of technology.” A third path is however possible, which consists of articulating an empirical point of view with an interest in the symbolic dimension in which technologies and technological mediations are always already embedded. Bourdieu’s sociology of the (...) symbolic forms represents an important and mostly unexplored resource in this respect. In this article, we introduce the notion of technological capital and its tree states—objectified, institutionalized, and embodied. In the first section, we briefly account of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology. Specific attention is then devoted to postphenomenology. We depict three perspectives in postphenomenology: standard postphenomenology, in which one single human-technology-world relation at a time is considered; the attempt of some technological mediation theorists to articulate postphenomenology and actor-network theory ; the original effort in Ihde, which is currently practiced by a minority of postphenomenologists, to combine an interest for the empirical dimension of technological mediations with an attention to the social and cultural conditions of possibility in which these mediations are embedded. In the second section, we consider some recent critiques of the limits of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, especially related to postphenomenology. Furthermore, we argue that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology may benefit the philosophy of technology. One might say that according to a Bourdieusian perspective, technologies are, in their invention, implementation, and use, embedded in symbolically organized interactions among social actors or groups. The notion of technological capital is introduced. A specific attention is given to its embodied state, which is related to the habitus. Such concept suggests that, to rephrase the famous sentence by Heidegger, “the essence of technology is not totally technological.” In the conclusion, we consider three risks related to a Bourdieusian approach to technology: transparency, determinism, and absolutism. (shrink)

In this paper, I will first of all claim that once one takes proper names as indexicals of a particular sort, indexinames for short, one may account for some tensions that affect our desiderata regarding the use of such names in sentences directly or indirectly involving fiction. According to my proposal, a proper name “N.N.” is an indexical whose character is roughly expressed by the description “the individual called ‘N.N.’ (in context)”, where this description means “the individual one’s interlocutor’s attention (...) is called to by means of ‘N.N.’ (in context)”. This character is a partial function that maps narrow contexts onto referents. Such contexts are enriched narrow contexts, for they also include an ‘acquisition’ parameter, i.e., a parameter filled by a naming practice constituted by a dubbing, which consists in calling via the name one’s interlocutor’s attention to something (if any), and usually also by a certain transmission chain. I will also claim that such a proposal works independently of one’s ontological stance on fictional entities, that is, independently of whether one believes either that there are or that there are no such entities. Moreover, I will claim that such a proposal is better than similar indexicalist proposals such as the one put forward by Tiedke (2011), Finally, I will try to show how this proposal can deal with some objections one may raise against an indexicalist treatment of proper names. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Charles L. Stevenson’s metaethical view. Since his metaethical view is a form of emotivism, I will start by explaining what the core claims of emotivism are. I will then explore and comment on the specific claims of Stevenson’s proposal. Last, I will offer an overview of the objections that have traditionally been raised against emotivism.

Several scholars have criticized the histories of early modern philosophy based on the dichotomy of empiricism and rationalism. They view them as overestimating the importance of epistemological issues for early modern philosophers (epistemological bias), portraying Kant's Critical philosophy as a superior alternative to empiricism and rationalism (Kantian bias), and forcing most or all early modern thinkers prior to Kant into the empiricist or rationalist camps (classificatory bias). Kant is often said to be the source of the three biases. Against this (...) criticism, this paper argues that Kant did not have the three biases. However, he promoted a way of writing histories of philosophy from which those biases would naturally flow. (shrink)

Some people have stressed that there is a close analogy between meaning experiences, i.e., experiences as of understanding concerning linguistic expressions, and seeing-in experiences, i.e., pictorial experiences of discerning a certain item – what a certain picture presents, viz. the picture’s subject – in another item – the picture’s vehicle, the picture’s physical basis. Both can be seen as fusion experiences, in the minimal sense that they are experiential wholes made up of different aspects. Actually, two important similarities between such (...) experiences may lead one to think that they are experiences of the same type. In this paper, however, I will try to show that notwithstanding such similarities, these experiences are typologically different. For there are two dissimilarities between such experiences that are more relevant on this typological concern than their similarities. Indeed, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are first of all recognitional experiences of a sort that makes them perceptual experiences as well. Moreover, again unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are fusion experiences in the substantial sense that the experiential whole is more than the sum of its experiential parts taken in isolation, for when such parts figure in that whole, they interact with each other. In a nutshell, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are proper fusion experiences. (shrink)

Unamuno saw in his defense of religious faith a response to Nietzsche’s criticisms of the Christian, agapeic way of life. To Nietzsche’s claim that engaging in this way of life is something antinatural and life-denying, insofar as it goes against the (alleged) natural tendency to increase one’s own power, Unamuno responded that an agapeic way of life is precisely a direct expression of this natural tendency. Far from being something that goes against our natural inclinations, Unamuno says, an agapeic way (...) of life is a life-affirming exercise, something we are led to given our own natural condition. Hence, the aim of this essay is to comment on Unamuno’s criticism of Nietzsche and to point out the philosophical relevance of Unamuno’s attempt to provide a natural foundation for religious faith when assessing Nietzsche’s criticisms of the possibility of carrying out a Christian, agapeic way of life. (shrink)

In the philosophy of fiction, a majority view is continuism, i.e., the thesis that ordinary names, or genuine singular terms in general, directly refer to ordinary real individuals in fiction-involving sentences – e.g. “Napoleon” in the sentences that constitute the text of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But there is also a minority view, exceptionalism, which is the thesis that such terms change their semantic value in such sentences, either by directly referring to fictional surrogates of those individuals – what we (...) may call exceptional hyperrealism about fictional characters – or by acquiring a semantic value that turns them into nonreferential terms, involving no ontological commitment to such characters – exceptional irrealism about fictional characters. In this paper, first of all, I want to support hybrid exceptionalism, according to which both parties are partly right and partly wrong. In the fictional use of fiction-involving sentences, those terms directly refer to ordinary real individuals, as continuists claim, while both in the internal and the external metafictional use of fiction-involving sentences, such terms change their semantic value, as exceptionalists claim. (By contrast, for pure exceptionalists such terms either always refer to fictional surrogates or are nonreferring on all such uses.) Moreover, I will argue that hybrid exceptional hyperrealism must be preferred to hybrid exceptional irrealism: in the latter uses, I claim, such terms directly refer to fictional surrogates. (shrink)

That we can learn something from literature, as cognitivists claim, seems to be a commonplace. However, when one considers matters more deeply, it turns out to be a problematic claim. In this paper, by focusing on general revelatory facts about the world and the human spirit, I hold that the cognitivist claim can be vindicated if one takes it as follows. We do not learn such facts from literature, if by “literature” one means the truth-conditional contents that one may ascribe (...) to textual sentences in their fictional use, i.e., in the use in which one makes believe that things unfold in a certain way. What we improperly call learning from literature amounts to knowing actually true conversational implicatures concerning the above facts as meant by literary authors. So, in one and the same shot, we learn both a general revelatory fact and the fact that such a fact is meant via a true conversational implicature by an author. The author draws that implicature from the different truth-conditional content a sentence possesses when the sentence is interpreted in a fictional context, meant as Kaplan’s (1989) narrow context, i.e., a set of circumstantial parameters (agent, space, time, and world). (shrink)

Annihilationism claims that earthly death is followed by a divine judgment after which the wicked are condemned to a second death, while those who have lived their earthly life according to God's commands are blessed with a heavenly eternal existence. The aim of this essay is to show that, contrary to what defenders of annihilationism argue, the claim that God's victory over evil requires the complete eradication of all sin does not suffice alone to justify annihilationism.

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Esta experiência interdisciplinar buscou como desafio discutir entre adolescentes de uma escola pública do Município de Vila Velha/ES o conceito de patrimônio cultural e, a partir desse conceito, reconhecer os bens materiais e imateriais formadores do patrimônio daquele município. O trabalho de campo resultou na criação estética coletiva de uma leitura do Convento da Penha, que foi retratado pela técnica de mosaico em papel. A obra encontra-se em exposição permanente no hall da escola (...) denominada Unidade Municipal de Ensino Fundamental” Profa. Nair Dias Barbosa”, situada em Vila Velha – ES. Palavras chave: Convento da Penha. Lugares de memória. Identidade Cultural. (shrink)

The fierce debates surrounding the 'emergence' of Muslim communities in Europe ensued in the resurgence of nationalism. The current article introduces an original criticism to the ongoing debates surrounding the return of Europe's national pride. This article suggests that Muslim demands for freedom of religion that were founded in Islamic theological perspectives, have catalyzed the restriction of liberal universalistic perspectives to such freedoms. In this study I present how such demands facilitated the advancement of a newly crafted liberal form of (...) nationalism, best identified in Europe's progressing limitation of the right of freedom of religion in various European nations. (shrink)

The rise of regional identities in Europe is a process largely welcomed by liberals and especially applauded by radical democratic and postcolonial theorists. Yet this trend towards post-nation-state identity is not only attractive to democratic and postcolonial theories, but is also an integral part of current neo-fascist ideologies. This article examines the intellectual origins of rightwing ethnoregionalism and the idea of ‘exclusionist multiculturalism’ through the works of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Alain de Benoist. It also compares the idea of (...) exclusionist ‘regional’ multiculturalism with liberal multiculturalism and defends a democratic, civic republicanism as an alternative to both. (shrink)

In this paper, against a new imagination-based account defended by Anna Ichino in some recent works, I defend the intuitive and traditional idea that so-called religious beliefs are indeed those doxastic attitudes that they are traditionally taken to be, i.e., bona fide beliefs. Yet I take that the objects of such beliefs amount to be different from what religious believers consciously take them to be; namely, they are mythological characters, a species of fictional characters – namely, fictional characters not consciously (...) recognized as such – instead of being concrete individuals possibly endowed with supernatural powers. Yet religious believers also unconsciously recognize the fictional nature of religious objects of belief as mythological characters, as their behavior ultimately shows. This account indeed allows me to give a different yet still doxastic explanation of the two main reasons that Ichino advocates in favor of her account; namely, the incompatibility of so-called religious beliefs with other beliefs and their imperviousness to evidence, especially of a negative kind. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Anthony Everett has mounted a very serious attack against realism with respect to fictional entities. According to Everett, ficta raise deep logico-ontological worries, for they violate some basic logical laws and are problematically indeterminate with respect to both their existence and identity. Since an antirealist account for sentences apparently committing us to ficta is available, no such committment is really needed. In this paper I will try to show, first, that the antirealist account Everett proposes for (...) those sentences is not convincing. Moreover, by relying on the Meinongians’ distinctions between i) predicative and propositional negation and ii) either modes of predication or kinds of property, I will argue that the logico-ontological problems Everett arises against ficta can be solved. Finally, I will try to show that both the ‘modes of predication’- and the ‘kinds of property’- distinctions (especially the first one) are not so problematic as Everett holds. (shrink)

This paper discusses Immanuel Kant’s views on the role of experiments in natural science, focusing on their relationship with hypotheses, laws of nature, and the heuristic principles of scientific enquiry. Kant’s views are contrasted with the philosophy of experiment that was first sketched by Francis Bacon and later developed by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Kant holds that experiments are always designed and carried out in the light of hypotheses. Hypotheses are derived from experience on the basis of a set (...) of heuristic principles. The function of experiments is testing hypotheses in order to either reject them as false, or else to transform them into empirical laws of nature. To this end, we must integrate the hypotheses that are confirmed by experiments with the a priori principles which are the foundations of natural science. Compared with Bacon, Boyle, and Hooke, Kant has elaborate views on the one hand, on how our theoretical and pre-theoretical assumptions bear on experimental practice, and on the other hand, on how the results of experimental activity can be integrated with theories to advance our knowledge of nature. However, Kant overstates the dependence of experiments on theories. (shrink)

In this paper I want to hold, first, that one may suitably reconstruct the relevant kind of mental representational states that fiction typically involves, make-beliefs, as contextually unreal beliefs that, outside fiction, are either matched or non-matched by contextually real beliefs. Yet moreover, I want to claim that the kind of make-believe that may yield the mark of fictionality is not Kendall Walton’s invitation or prescription to imagine. Indeed, in order to appeal in terms of make-believe to a specific form (...) of imagination that fiction distinctively involves, one must move away from the realm of norms in order to attain a cognitive realm; namely, one must look at a specific form of metarepresentational state. This metarepresentational state of make-believe is a second-order representation that is about both real beliefs and make-beliefs, as the first-order representations it compares by acknowledging their contextual distinctness. (shrink)

Maurizio Ferraris’ theory on social entities presents many interesting analogies with artefactualist theories on fictional entities. Like artefactualism, however, it probably needs some integration. As Ferraris himself acknowledges, mere dependence on subjects does not by itself qualify an entity as social. Moreover, the very same definition of a social entity as an inscribed (social) act seems to yield merely necessary, but not sufficient, identity conditions for such an entity. To my mind, what is needed is a normative element. For a (...) social entity is an intrinsically normative entity, which is (inter alia) composed by something like Searle’s constitutive rules. (shrink)

In this paper, I first want to vindicate Wollheim’s idea that seeing-in, taken as the twofold phenomenologically sui generis experience which picture perception consists in, accounts for the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. Following Wollheim’s usage himself, by “perceptual constancy” I will mean a particular phenomenon of perceptual robustness, namely the fact that a picture’s subject is experienced as undistorted from any point of view in which a spectator may regard a picture. Moreover, I will properly take into consideration the specific (...) impression of “being followed” by the gaze of a picture’s subject in portraits (and alike pictures), which in these cases is a consequence of perceptual constancy. For this impression corroborates a particular reading of what the seeing-in experience really consists in. According to such a reading, in the configurational fold of that experience one experiences both the merely visible surface properties and the design properties of the picture’s vehicle, where such design properties also include the so-called grouping properties of the vehicle. On the basis of such a fold, moreover, in the recognitional fold of the seeing-in experience one knowingly illusorily sees the picture as its subject. (shrink)

El autor pasa revista a la concepción de la historia como disciplina que exhibe el filósofo Fernando Miguel Pérez Herranz. El motivo de este concienzudo análisis es la publicación en marcha del magno proyecto Más allá de imperios y naciones (4 vols.) iniciado en 2023 y que ya cuenta con dos tomos en el mercado: Rutas, fronteras y complejidad y Singularidad imperial: del Mediterráneo al Atlántico. Esta concepción del estatuto gnoseológico de la historia tiene en Lindos y tornadizos (2016) y (...) en Ambiguus proetus (2019) dos momentos esenciales que dibujan el paso Herranz a su perspectiva (la morfología filosófica) en el debate entre Gustavo Bueno y Ricardo Sánchez Ortiz de Urbina a cuenta del sujeto trascendental. En tal contexto cobran relevancia las hipercategorías formuladas por Pérez Herranz y cuyo estatuto resulta problemático. (shrink)

In his highly regarded history of the rise of clinical trials in America, HarryMarks describes how their widespread adoption resulted largely fromthe efforts of ‘therapeutic reformers’ who sought to replace the individualexpertise of clinicians with the ‘science of controlled experiment’. Thetransition described by Marks resembles in many respects the transition fromthe ‘truth-to-nature’ objectivity of individual experts to a ‘mechanical’ formof objectivity portrayed by Daston and Galison. In particular,Marks details the passage from a regime of trust in expertise and experts to (...) aregime based on the mechanical generation of data, the elimination ofhuman judgement and the adoption of a ‘view from nowhere’ where individual and group idiosyncrasies are systematically suppressedthrough recourse to quantitative methods.[...]. (shrink)

Along with a well-honoured tradition, we will accept that intentionality is at least a property a thought holds necessarily, i.e., in all possible worlds that contain it; more specifically, a necessary relation, namely the relation of existential dependence of the thought on its intentional object. Yet we will first of all try to show that intentionality is more than that. For we will claim that intentionality is an essential property of the thought, namely a property whose predication to the thought (...) is true in virtue of the identity, or nature, of such a thought. More particularly, for us intentionality will again be a relation, yet a relation of ontological dependence of the thought on its intentional object; specifically, the relation for the thought of being constituted by its object. Moreover, we will try to show that if intentionality is such a constitutive relation for the thought that has it, certain metaphysical consequences ensue. First, an objectual thought, a thought whose content basically consists in its intentional object, is nothing but that object in a certain cogitative modality, or, which is the same, as playing a certain motivational role for the subject entertaining the thought itself (at a certain time). Second, if an objectual thought is nothing but an intentional object in a cogitative modality, such a thought, not only as a type, but also as a token, is an abstract entity. More specifically, an objectual thought-type, an abstract object par excellence, is indeed instantiated by objectual thought-tokens which are again abstract particulars, yet of a specific kind: namely, tropes of a relational sort depending for their existence on their bearers (and possibly also on their temporal location). (shrink)

Creationism with respect to fictional entities, i.e., the position according to which ficta are creations of human practices, has recently become the most popular realist account of fictional entities. For it allows one to hold that there are fictional entities while simultaneously giving such entities a respectable metaphysical status, that of abstract artifacts. In this paper, I will draw what are the ontological and semantical consequences of this position, or at least of all its forms that are genuinely creationist. For (...) some people, these consequences will sound as plagues against the position; for some others, especially realists on ficta, they are welcome results. Although I hold that all forms of genuine creationism have these consequences, I will conclude by explaining why I take moderate creationism, according to which ficta are created by means of a reflexive stance on the make-believe practice grounding them, to be the best of these forms. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende discutir os conceitos de direito natural e propriedade no Iuri universi distributio (1578) e as suas conseqüências políticas no Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) e no Les Six Livres de la République (1576), de Jean Bodin.