Nella sua straordinaria opera scientifica, Franco Selleri si è sempre opposto alla rinuncia alla comprensione della struttura della realtà e della natura degli oggetti fisici, che egli considera come l’elemento caratterizzante delle principali teorie della fisica del Novecento e che è stata stigmatizzata da Karl Popper come tesi della “fine della strada in fisica”. Sin dalla fine degli anni ’60, egli ha sviluppato quella riflessione critica nei confronti delle teorie fondamentali della fisica moderna, in particolar modo della teoria delle particelle (...) elementari e della meccanica quantistica, e in un secondo tempo delle teorie relativistiche, che contraddistingue il suo programma di ricerca. Nel corso della sua intensa e infaticabile attività scientifica, Selleri è entrato in proficuo contatto con molti grandi fisici e filosofi della scienza, instaurando un intenso dialogo critico con Louis de Broglie, John Bell e Karl Popper. Le sue originali e non convenzionali ricerche lo hanno portato a risultati significativi non solo nell’ambito dei fondamenti della fisica, ma anche della storia e della filosofia della fisica. Per questo abbiamo voluto dedicare un numero speciale di Isonomia al nostro impareggiabile amico e collega, sia per la sua passione instancabile e la sua profonda conoscenza dei fondamenti formali, concettuali e filosofici delle teorie della fisica contemporanea, sia e forse ancor più come maestro di una prospettiva perennemente critica che egli ha sempre seguito e proposto con particolare rigore ed estrema determinazione. (shrink)

Within the author’s long-term project of updating John Rawls’s paradigm of “political liberalism” to a historical context different from the original one, this paper focuses on how political liberalism can help us understand populism and help liberal democracy survive the populist upsurge. In the first section, political liberalism is argued to be of help in directing our attention to three constitutive aspects of all sorts of populism: the conflation of “the people” with the electorate and the electorate with the nation, (...) the attribution of constituent power to the electorate, and a penchant for so-called “justified intolerance.” In the second section, enfeebled democracies and postliberal democracies are discussed as two distinctly dangerous outcomes of populist contagion. Finally, in the third section the containment of populism is argued to require targeting the socioeconomic factors undergirding the populist upsurge and the jettisoni... (shrink)

An influential theory has it that metaphysical indeterminacy occurs just when reality can be made completely precise in multiple ways. That characterization is formulated by employing the modal apparatus of ersatz possible worlds. As quantum physics taught us, reality cannot be made completely precise. I meet the challenge by providing an alternative theory which preserves the use of ersatz worlds but rejects the precisificational view of metaphysical indeterminacy. The upshot of the proposed theory is that it is metaphysically indeterminate whether (...) p just in case it is neither true nor false that p, and no terms in ‘p’ are semantically defective. In other words, metaphysical indeterminacy arises when the world cannot be adequately described by a complete set of sentences defined in a semantically nondefective language. Moreover, the present theory provides a reductive analysis of metaphysical indeterminacy, unlike its influential predecessor. Finally, I argue that any adequate logic of a language with an indeterminate subject matter is neither compositional nor bivalent. (shrink)

This study on the contemporary relevance of Rousseau’s ethical and social thought, the “ethic of authenticity,” responds to the tensions of modern morality and rivals the answers generated by the more mainstream tradition of the “ethic of autonomy.”.

Translated from the 1989 Italian edition, Ferrara (sociology, U. of Rome) intertwines an exploration of the ethical and social thought of 17th-century French philosopher Rousseau, with an analysis of contemporary culture through those ...

This text is an integrated and comprehensive account of theories of justice and judgement in contemporary political and moral philosophy. It offers a critical examination of judgement and normative validity in the recent works of Rawls, Habermas, Ackerman, Michaleman, and Dworkin. Ferrara demonstrates how the understanding of justice and normative validity, since the linguistic turn in philosophy, is defined in terms of reflective judgement. This demonstration comprises of an historical overview of the judgement model in contemporary political philosophy that focuses (...) on Rawls on ` justice as fairness' and Habermas on the discourse theory of law and the public sphere. The discussion then examines situated judgement; the work of Ackerman on the function of the constitution; and Michaelman on deliberative democracy. Justice and Judgement concludes with an exhaustive and exacting discussion of universalism and contemporary liberalism; and the judgement view of justice. The key themes of this examination are the good; equal respect; and reflexive judgement. (shrink)

The secretory system of plant cells sorts a large number of soluble proteins that either are secreted or accumulate in vacuoles. Secretion is a bulk‐flow process that requires no information beyond the presence of a signal peptide necessary to enter the endoplasmic reticulum. Many vacuolar proteins are glycoproteins and the glycans are often modified as the proteins pass through the Golgi complex. Vacuolar targeting information is not contained in glycans as it is in animal cells; rather, targeting information is in (...) polypeptide domains as it is in yeast cells. Several such domains have now been identified, but these show little or no amino acid sequence homology. We discuss the possibilities that targeting of protein to plant vacuoles may involve receptors as well as aggregation of protein at low pH. (shrink)

Classical modalism about essence is the view that essence can be analysed in modal terms. Despite Kit Fine's influential critique, no general refutation of classical modalism has yet been given. In the first part of the paper, I provide such a refutation by showing that the notion of essence cannot be analysed in terms of any sentential operator definable in the language of standard quantified modal logic. As a reaction to Fine's critique, some have defended sophisticated modalism, which attempts to (...) analyse essence in an enriched modal language quantifying over both possible and impossible worlds. In the second part of the paper, I argue that sophisticated modalism falls prey to variations on Fine's counterexamples to classical modalism. I conclude that the most promising approaches to understanding the notion of essence consist in taking essence either as primitive or as analysable via a combination of modal and non-modal notions. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that while people hold the capacity to control their data in high regard, they increasingly experience a loss of control over their data in the online world. The capacity to exert control over the generation and flow of personal information is a fundamental premise to important values such as autonomy, privacy, and trust. In healthcare and clinical research this capacity is generally achieved indirectly, by agreeing to specific conditions of informational exposure. Such conditions can be openly stated (...) in informed consent documents or be implicit in the norms of confidentiality that govern the relationships of patients and healthcare professionals. However, with medicine becoming a data-intense enterprise, informed consent and medical confidentiality, as mechanisms of control, are put under pressure. In this paper we explore emerging models of informational control in data-intense healthcare and clinical research, which can compensate for the limitations of currently available instruments. More specifically, we discuss three approaches that hold promise in increasing individual control: the emergence of data portability rights as means to control data access, new mechanisms of informed consent as tools to control data use, and finally, new participatory governance schemes that allow individuals to control their data through direct involvement in data governance. We conclude by suggesting that, despite the impression that biomedical big data diminish individual control, the synergistic effect of new data management models can in fact improve it. (shrink)

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical (...) and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

Say that metaphysical indeterminacy occurs just when there is a fact such that neither it nor its negation obtains. The aim of this work is to shed light on the issue of whether orthodox quantum mechanics provides any evidence of metaphysical indeterminacy by discussing the logical, semantic, and broadly methodological presuppositions of the debate. I argue that the dispute amounts to a verbal disagreement between classical and quantum logicians, given Eli Hirsch’s account of substantivity; but that it need not be (...) so if Ted Sider’s naturalness-based account of substantivity is adopted instead. Given the latter approach, can anything be said in order to tip the balance of the dispute either way? Some prima facie reasonable constraints on naturalness entail that the classicist is right, and the quantum world is therefore determinate. Nevertheless, there are reasons for weakening those constraints, to the effect that the dispute remains very much open. Finally, I discuss alternative accounts of metaphysical indeterminacy, and argue that they are unsuitable for framing the quantum indeterminacy debate. (shrink)

I articulate a Global Best-System Account (GBSA) of laws of nature along broadly Mill–Ramsey–Lewis lines. The guiding idea is that the job of laws is to capture real patterns across time—where a pattern is real if it allows to compress information about matters of particular fact. The GBSA’s key ingredient is a definition of ‘best system’ in terms of a ranking method that meets a number of desiderata: it is rigorously defined; it outputs the ranking based on the candidate systems’ (...) epistemic virtues; it is objective, in that the output does not depend on one’s choice of basic concepts; it avoids two trivialization results (by Lewis, and Arrow-Okasha); and it does not appeal to naturalness, or other metaphysical notions in that vicinity. Although the GBSA is independent of the controversial thesis of Humean Supervenience, it satisfies the weaker thesis that laws of nature supervene on the total physical state of the world. Moreover, the resulting notion of lawhood is hyperintensional, unlike the neighboring notion of nomological necessity. Finally, GBSA-laws do not track naturalness, contra the Lewisian orthodoxy. (shrink)

A new open science culture is emerging within the current system of the life sciences. This culture mixes an ethic of sharing with features such as anti-bureaucracy rebellion, hedonism, search for profit. It is a recombination of an old culture, the Mertonian ethos of modern open science, and a new one: the hacker ethic. This new culture has an important role in the evolving relationship between science and society. And it maintains a political ambivalence. Biohackers are rebel scientists and open (...) access advocates who challenge today’s Big Bio’s concentration of power. But at the same time they live in a new territory of accumulation that never excludes entrepreneurship and profit. (shrink)

Starting from the assumption that the ability to see patterns and thus abstract from actual events and properties of specific objects is universal, the article reviews different conceptualizations of and attitudes toward the terms ‘theory’ and ‘model’, identifying two co-existing and opposing tendencies: the love for details and the attraction to generalizations that can cover a wide range of phenomena. Using as a backdrop seven theses here reproduced in the Appendix, the article also examines the implications of taking the notion (...) of interaction as primary in the analysis of language and culture. Such implications involve the need to identify useful units of analysis and evaluative measures for competing theories and models. (shrink)

The present paper proposes to establish the data that can be drawn securely from a controversial testimonium on an oration of Cato contained in a late antique panegyric.13.3), and to illustrate some of its textual and exegetical problems. Further, in the light of a hitherto overlooked comparison with a gloss of Festus, proposals are made: for a new constitutio and interpretation of the text of the panegyric; and for the identification of a textual citation from the orations of Cato the (...) Censor, and the identification with Cato of the anonymous antiqui to whom Festus attributes the use of the rare substantive oliueta in feminine singular with the sense of ‘gathering of olives’. Finally some considerations are offered on the possible sources used by Festus and by the panegyrist. (shrink)

Seit den Anfängen der Philosophie in der Antike bis heute währt das Fragen um das Nichts. Dabei steht es in unterschiedlichen Kontexten: Theologie, Ontologie, Ethik, Erkenntnistheorie, Logik und Ästhetik. Trotz einer unleugbaren Kontinuität zur antiken und mittelalterlichen Beschäftigung mit dem Nichts bildet die europäische Moderne eine originäre und innovative Erkenntnis und Erfahrung des Nichts aus, die nicht zuletzt das Aufkommen des Nihilismus bescheinigt. Dieser Band versucht einen umfassenden Blick auf das Themenfeld «Nichts - Negation - Nihilismus» zu werfen und insbesondere (...) zu erörtern, worin die Kontinuität und Diskontinuität der europäischen Moderne zu Antike und Mittelalter bestehen. (shrink)

The value of solidarity, which implies mutual concern and support, is often conveyed in our everyday moral and political language. But what is its conceptual relationship with justice? Influential positions in this debate may argue for the opposition between the two concepts: justice is impartial and universal, while solidarity is partial and limited. The present paper aims to shortly explore a range of theories that may exemplify possible answers to this position, from communitarian and realist views, which ultimately confirm the (...) opposition, to political solidarities, which claim an instrumental need for solidarity as a reaction to injustices. Special attention will be paid to Habermas’s compatibilist account of solidarity as the “reverse side” of justice. The paper contends that a compelling answer should preserve the difference between the two spheres and the essential features of solidarity by also sketching a concept of solidarity as a social duty arising from our moral interdependence. (shrink)

Il saggio prende in esame due punti della teorizzazione di Harry Frankfurt in merito alla moral agency. Il primo č la corretta concettualizzazione del momento della ‘decisione' all'interno della catena deliberativa. Vengono esaminati tre passaggi critici: a) la base normativa a cui la decisione risponde; b) la teoria della ‘unificazione della persona' attraverso la decisione e c) la distinzione fra ‘scelta' e ‘decisione'. Il secondo punto č l'ambiguitÀ insita nel concetto di ‘doveri d'amore' proposto da Frankfurt. A questo proposito vengono (...) esaminate: a) la distinzione fra amore "attivo" e "passivo" e b) la mancata tematizzazione della "legittimitÀ dell'amore", ovvero del rapporto fra l'amore in quanto relazione sociale e i quadri interpretativi della cultura entro cui si sviluppa. (shrink)

Lewis proposed to test the validity of a modal thesis by checking whether its possible-world translation is a theorem of counterpart theory. However, that criterion fails to validate many standard modal laws, thus raising doubts about the logical adequacy of the Lewisian framework. The present paper considers systems of counterpart theory of increasing strength and shows how each can be motivated by exhibiting a suitable intended model. In particular, perfect counterpart theory validates all the desired modal laws and therefore provides (...) a way out of the logical objection. Finally, a weakening of perfect counterpart theory is put forward as a response to some metaphysical objections. (shrink)

I aim at explaining the sense in which the notion of improvisation is important for the ontology of art. In the first part, I criticize the widespread assumption of the repeatability of a musical work without transformation of its identity and defend Conversational Improvisational Emergentism (CIE) as the specific contribution of improvisation to musical ontology: in an improvisation, values and meanings of what has been played constrain what follows and are themselves retroactively (trans)formed by what follows; likewise, the performing interpretations (...) of musical works and traditions reinvent their meanings and evaluation criteria, responding to past interpretations and opening up (as well as binding) possibilities for future interpretations. In the second part, I extend the scope of my investigation to art more generally. By critiquing the principle of «no evaluation without identification» and referring to Peter Lamarque’s and Joseph Margolis’ views about art ontology, I propose a transformative theory of artworks, which is based on the thesis of the improvisational “nature” of artistic practices (a thesis that I conceive of as a particular form of CIE). Its core point is that evaluative and performative interpretations of artworks (re)shape creatively, and retroactively, the meanings and the flexible identities of artworks. Accordingly, the artworks’ meanings and identities emerge (and are (trans)formed) through the cultural improvisational interactions in which artworks participate. (shrink)

This study aims at a better understanding of Peirce’s conception of a philosophy of history. Peirce has a well defined place for historiography in his classification of the sciences, but what he has to say about history as a philosopher is not primarily referring to it as a form of historiographic knowledge, but to history as a process and a medium. As a process, history is, fundamentally, a cooperative activity of man resulting in civilization and capable of varying categoriological degrees (...) of directionality that reflect the ‘agents’ knowledge’ of history incorporated in the communicative practices of their community. As a medium, history – in the light of the cosmogonic narrative of Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics and of his mature conception of the summum bonum – is one of two forms of expression of the Absolute. Our paper studies the development of these conceptions from the Schellingian influences on “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization” (1863), to “Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “Evolutionary Love” (1892). Throughout this development, Peirce remains primordially interested in the philosophy of history as a mode of normatively conceiving of history (as a medium) in a way that enables us to pragmatically project our cultural development as a process in which an increasing control over our own history is actualized. (shrink)

It is shown, assuming the existence of a Woodin cardinal δ, that every tree ordering on some limit ordinal $\lambda < \delta$ with a cofinal branch is the tree ordering of some iteration tree on V.

O propósito deste artigo é mostrar a relação entre a experiência perceptiva e o raciocínio abdutivo em C.S. Peirce. Ademais, apresento a abdução como uma expressão lógica, prática e criativa apta a introduzir uma novidade no reino do conhecimento, através de um sistema de signos gráficos. A noção peirciana de experiência está relacionada com a de uma práxis interpretativa e criativa, que não se limita ao recebimento ou registro de dados pré-constituídos passivamente. Nesse sentido, a abdução é o hábito lógico (...) vivo que explica o mundo percebido como um caso particular de um mundo concebível, no qual uma regra geral ou hipótese é efetivo. Apresentarei a abdução como um raciocínio que infere a causa a partir do efeito, o antecedente a partir do consequente, a ordem geral de um fato percebido particular e um “extra comum”. A abdução não apenas estabelece um fato singular, mas torna o fato visível dentro de um novo contexto de relações possíveis. Assim, quando vemos uma figura, nós não vemos somente uma mera figura, mas uma figura “como se” ela fosse o resultado percebido de um sistema geral de relações possíveis. O gesto da mão dá existência à figura e a torna visível para nós, pois ela descobre essas relações que constituem o contexto de interpretação da figura. Nesse aspecto, o gesto gráfico consiste na concretização prática que permite uma interpretação topológica possível do mundo real percebido. (shrink)

Neste e no próximo artigo, buscamos articular a visão compreensiva arquitetônica de Peirce a respeito do fenômeno da retórica relacionando sua abordagem em Ideas, Stray or Stolen, about Scientific Writing com seu tratamento na classificação muito negligenciado das ciências práticas. Neste artigo, primeiro, reconstruímos o principal eixo conceitual de Ideas, Stray or Stolen, que é erguido pelos termos ‘arte universal da retórica’, ‘retórica ordinária’, e ‘retórica especulativa’. Na medida em que este eixo nos guia para a classificação dos estudos especiais (...) da retórica que Peirce propõe na seção final de Ideas, Stray or Stolen, a cuidadosa reconstrução deste eixo constitui um dever hermenêutico, a negligência do qual impediria uma compreensão adequada do que Peirce está classificando no fim de sua abordagem mais madura da Retórica Especulativa. Em seguida, procedemos à exposição das raízes aristotélicas da concepção de Peirce da arte universal da retórica e analisamos a relação intrínseca que a semiose retórica tem com o summum bonum como uma de suas formas evolutivas históricas. Se esta interpretação da concepção de retórica do Peirce é adequado, no entanto, devemos esperar que ele nos dê em algum lugar uma descrição da capacidade de evolução da retórica – e portanto, de crescer – antes de tudo. Será a tarefa de um segundo artigo subsequente mostrar que e de que maneira a concepção de Peirce da a retórica como ciência prática e faculdade instintiva enraizado no “instinto gráfico” responde pela sua capacidade para o crescimento. (shrink)