Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...) The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. (In particular, the preference for attractive partners is arguably both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.) One can try to resist this conclusion in several ways. I consider three possible replies. The first has to do with the possibility of controlling our partner preferences. The second pertains to attractiveness and “good genes”. The last attempts to link certain aspects of attractiveness to a prospective partner’s personality and values. I argue that the first two replies fail conclusively, while the third only amounts to a limited defense of a particular kind of attractiveness preference. So the idea that we should often avoid preferring attractive partners is compelling. (shrink)

Kalisch et al. argue that appraisal and reappraisal are key mechanisms promoting resilience; however, experimental findings seem to contradict this simplistic view. We argue that a deeper look at affective neuroscience may provide complementary and stronger evidence on how emotional reactivity and emotion regulation may affect resilience.

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)

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)

To be an Aristotelian about universals is to hold that universals depend for their existence on their exemplifiers. An argument against Aristotelianism about universals has recently been put forward by Costa to the effect that a contradiction follows from assuming a certain formulation of Aristotelianism together with some highly plausible principles governing the notions employed in that formulation. In this paper, we provide different ways of articulating the Aristotelian position which, while being related with some of the main contributions in (...) the current Aristotelian tradition, do not fall prey to the argument. (shrink)

When you and I share an experience, each of us lives through a we-experience. The paper claims that we-experiences have unique phenomenality and structure. First, we-experiences’ phenomenality is characterised by the fact that they feel like ours to their subject. This specific phenomenality is contended to derive from the way these experiences self-represent: a we-experience exemplifies us-ness or togetherness because it self-represents as mine qua ours. Second, living through a we-experience together with somebody else is not to have this experience (...) in parallel with the experience of the other. Rather, the paper argues that a we-experience is partly co-constituted by the experience of the other. After offering an account of the phenomenality and constitution of we-experiences, which traces these two elements back to the subject’s self-understanding as a group member, the paper argues for the claim that an experience’s for-us-ness is committal to this experience being co-constituted by another we-experience. (shrink)

When you and I share an experience, each of us lives through a we-experience. The paper claims that we-experiences have unique phenomenality and structure. First, we-experiences’ phenomenality is characterised by the fact that they feel like ours to their subject. This specific phenomenality is contended to derive from the way these experiences self-represent: a we-experience exemplifies us-ness or togetherness because it self-represents as mine qua ours. Second, living through a we-experience together with somebody else is not to have this experience (...) in parallel with the experience of the other. Rather, the paper argues that a we-experience is partly co-constituted by the experience of the other. After offering an account of the phenomenality and constitution of we-experiences, which traces these two elements back to the subject’s self-understanding as a group member, the paper argues for the claim that an experience’s for-us-ness is committal to this experience being co-constituted by another we-experience. (shrink)

The two sections of this volume present theoretical developments and practical applicative papers respectively. Theoretical papers cover topics such as intercultural pragmatics, evolutionism, argumentation theory, pragmatics and law, the semantics/pragmatics debate, slurs, and more. The applied papers focus on topics such as pragmatic disorders, mapping places of origin, stance-taking, societal pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. This is the second volume of invited papers that were presented at the inaugural Pragmasofia conference in Palermo in 2016, and like its predecessor presents papers by (...) well-known philosophers, linguists, and a semiotician. The papers present a wide variety of perspectives independent from any one school of thought. (shrink)

The dominant conception of delusion in psychiatry (in textbooks, research papers, diagnostic manuals, etc.) is predominantly epistemic. Delusions are almost always characterized in terms of their epistemic defects, i.e., defects with respect to evidence, reasoning, judgment, etc. However, there is an individualistic bias in the epistemic conception; the alleged epistemic defects and abnormalities in delusions relate to individualistic epistemic processes rather than social epistemic processes. We endorse the social epistemological turn in recent philosophical epistemology, and claim that a corresponding turn (...) is needed in the study of delusions. It is a turn from the (purely) individualistic conception, which characterizes delusions only by individualistic epistemic defects and abnormalities, to the (partially) social epistemic conception, which characterizes delusions by individualistic as well as social epistemic defects and abnormalities. This paper is intended as an initial step toward such a social epistemological turn. In particular, we will develop a new model of the development of delusions according to which testimonial abnormalities, including testimonial isolation and testimonial discount, are a causal factor in the development of delusions. (shrink)

The paper offers a systematic reconstruction of the relations that, in Husserl’s work, bind together our shared social world (“the spiritual world”) with shared intentionality. It is claimed that, by sharing experiences, persons create social reasons and that these reasons impose a normative structure on the social world. Because there are two ways in which persons can share experiences (depending on whether these experiences rest on mutual communication or on group’s identity), social normativity comes in two kinds. It is either (...) directed (it has an addressee) or it is collective or absolute (it applies to all group members). Social normativity should be distinguished from axiological normativity: The first is grounded in shared intentionality, the second in values. (shrink)

This chapter argues that quantum indeterminacy can be construed as a merely derivative phenomenon. The possibility of merely derivative quantum indeterminacy undermines both a recent argument against quantum indeterminacy due to David Glick, and an argument against the possibility of merely derivative indeterminacy due to Elizabeth Barnes.

Fitch's Paradox and the Paradox of the Knower both make use of the Factivity Principle. The latter also makes use of a second principle, namely the Knowledge-of-Factivity Principle. Both the principle of factivity and the knowledge thereof have been the subject of various discussions, often in conjunction with a third principle known as Closure. In this paper, we examine the well-known Surprise Examination paradox considering both the principles on which this paradox rests and some formal characterisations of the surprise notion, (...) crucial in this paradox. Standard formalizations of the Surprise Examination paradox in modal logic do not seem, at first glance, to depend on either factivity or knowledge-of-factivity, but we will argue that both factivity and knowledge-of-factivity play a key implicit role in the paradox. Namely, they are implicitly, perhaps unintentionally, used in order to simplify the definition of surprise. We analyze modal logical formalizations of three versions of the paradox concluding that the Surprise Examination paradox is the result of two flaws: the assumption of knowledge-of-factivity, and the over-simplification of the definition of "surprise" accordingly. By fixing these two flaws, the Surprise Examination paradox vanishes. (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)

This paper is an example of how contextual information interacts with the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs) in discourse. When we encounter an NP escorted by the definite article or a proper name, the expectation is triggered that the speaker is referring to some referent x that the hearer can normally identify. Strawson and Russell have agreed that a referent must be associated with a definite description so that the assertion containing it can be said to be true. In the (...) case where a description does not refer to anything, the assertion is considered by Russell to be false, while Strawson says that the issue of truth or falsity does not arise. In this paper, we examine a case in which contextual information interacts with the interpretation of NPs in discourse and the hearer is not expected to identify a referent when hearing a proper name. In this case, the issue of truth or falsity does not arise, because the hearer does not identify the referent. In fact, s/he does not intend for the discourse to about a referent at all. These situations are primarily represented by sentences uttered during the course of a grammar lecture, in which the lecturer is explaining a rule of language and does not focus on external reality. The hearers are aware of this focus and do not process the NP (in general a proper name) to identify a specific referent. This discourse is of three types, which will be discussed at the end of this paper. -/- Keywords: reference; pragmeme; presupposition; fictional discourse; exemplification acts. (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic presuppositions. I also propose that we should be interested in conversational presuppositions, which could also be called speaker-meant presuppositions or speaker's presuppositions. I also distinguish between potential and actual presuppositions. I propose that, in some cases, presuppositions can be conversationally implicated and cancellation is possible. I specify what the hard cases are and I try to explain them through ontological considerations. I try to reduce the hard cases through (a) the notion (...) that all actual presuppositions are speaker-meant; (b) the distinction between ontological and linguistic presuppositions; and (c) the uncontroversial notion that even ontological presuppositions are susceptible to semantic under-determination that has to be tackled though pragmatic intrusion. Pragmatic intrusion for presuppositional cases, however, cannot really amount to completing or expanding or in any case computing an explicature in an ordinary sense, as explicatures have to do with truth-conditions and aim to create propositionally complete forms that are truth-evaluable, unlike propositional fragments or schemata that are usually expressed in sentences (; , 2012). They are processes similar to explicatures, but since presuppositions are only pre-conditions for an utterance's being true or false (; Macagno; 2016; ; ), we cannot say that these processes are completely like those of explicatures. Nevertheless, they are pragmatically-motivated, even if hard to cancel. (See on lack of cancellability or on entrenched meanings.) This more or less brings my approach in line with contextualism (even if I accept semantic invariantism, along the lines of or (Invariantism is also shared by , in a form that is compatible with her contextualism.)). (shrink)

The present article conceptualizes morally controversial innovations as a category of innovations that raise ethical issues due to their potentially undesirable long-term consequences on society or the natural environment. Then, it analyzes the case of biofuel crops by applying an extended version of the theory of planned behavior, which includes moral norm and ethical self-identity. The obtained results show that attitude and subjective norms are positively related to farmers' intention to grow biofuel crops. Yet the intention of those farmers with (...) a higher ethical self-identity is also influenced by perceived behavioral control and moral norm. In particular, moral norm negatively affects their intention to grow biofuel crops, thus restraining the adoption of this innovation. Implications for theory, as well as for policymakers interested in promoting the diffusion of morally controversial innovations, are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Discourse on Florentine Affairs contains a proposal for constitutional reform in which Machiavelli directly addresses Pope Giovanni de’ Medici. With the aim of contributing to the recent radical republican readings of Machiavelli, this paper argues that the best way to understand the Discourse is to read it as an example of Machiavelli’s use of irony. Machiavelli disguises his radical republican ideas in the Discourse with paradoxes, omissions and implausible reforms that, though clearly leaning towards a popular republic, are (...) presented as part of the oligarchic or princely option that was defended by the Medici. His subtle critique of the Medici’s client-based politics, his implicit rejection of the oligarchic mixed regime, his description of the institution of such pro-popular magistrates as the Provosts and the Gonfaloniers of the Companies of the People, make one suspect that Machiavelli is hiding a disguised preference towards a popular, rather than a mixed, republic. (shrink)

A book review of Susanne Ravn, Simon Høffding, and James McGuirk, eds., _Philosophy of Improvisation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Theory and Practice_. London: Routledge, 2021, vii + 218 pp. ISBN 9780367540210.

The centuries-long evolution of the iconography of Niccolò Machiavelli is itself a chapter in the history of Machiavelli’s reputation. As intuited by one of his foremost biographers, Oreste Tommasini, portraits of the Florentine are probably best considered as visual expressions of philosophical and literary anti-Machiavellism, which exercised, in their own way, a negative influence on the reception and interpretations of his writings. The Machiavelli who we have seen represented over the course of history in paintings, prints, and engravings may be (...) nothing more, therefore, than a Machiavellian persona: the visual translation of a conventional and stereotypical interpretation, which considers the author of The Prince to be the champion of a politics based on duplicity, cunning, deceit, and guile. This essay examines the origins and dissemination over the centuries of ‘La Testina’, one of the most celebrated and widely publicized portraits of Machiavelli. The conclusion, after comparing all of the extant variants of this portrait, is that it is an unfaithful and invented graphic representation of Machiavelli, whose fortunes in publishing and in the collective imagination have kept pace with the spread of a demonizing interpretation of Machiavelli, the master of evil, well-rooted even today in mass popular culture. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead famously compares the philosophical method of knowledge acquisition with the process of flying an airplane. Likewise, “shamanic flight” marks stages of cognitive processing in navigation through perceptible and imperceptible worlds. This article focuses on the cosmovision of the Amazon people Huni Kuin, the Whiteheadian method of imaginative rationalization, and the concept of Amerindian perspectivism. This study also investigates shamanism as an experience of knowledge generation. Furthermore, “shamanic flight,” as an ecstatic technique experienced in many diverse Amerindian rituals, (...) will be explored as a method in the discovery and organization of nonhuman alterities. Finally, Amazonian-based shamanic epistemology will be discussed within a “multinaturalist” ontology. (shrink)

Whiteheadian concepts of life, food, "empty" and "occupied space" provide a theoretical basis to unpack an ontogenetic perspective on aging. Focusing on the so-called "Selective Optimization with Compensation " strategy, this work will explore this concept in relation to some scientific evidence in the fields of "epigenetics " and molecular nutrition. Further, the role of caloric restriction in health and longevity will be discussed as a SOC strategy, based on the metabolic theory of aging. SOC strategy applied to the processes (...) of aging, when linked with Whitehead's philosophy of organism, makes it possible for us to think about life as a selective process provided by "empty space. " A continuum within the physical field optimizes a "living society," which evolves in permanent social deficit, by means of compensation by nutritional metabolism. (shrink)

The article presents some critical remarks on the recent book by Sabino Chialà: La perla dai molti riflessi. La lettura della Scrittura nei padri siriaci, Magnano 2014.

This edited volume on contextualism and pragmatics is interdisciplinary in character and contains contributions from linguistics, cognitive science and socio-pragmatics. Going beyond conventional contextual matters of truth-conditions and pragmatic intrusion, this text deals with a variety of issues including hyperbole, synonymy, reference, argumentation, schizophrenia, rationality, morality, silence and clinical pragmatics. Contributions also address the semantics/pragmatics debate and show to what extent the theory of contextualism can be applied. This volume is based on a unitary research project financed by the University (...) of Messina and appeals to students and researchers working in linguistics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics (...) of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse. (shrink)

Cristina Lafont’s Democracy Without Shortcuts enriches the discussion of deliberative democracy with new insights. After discussing her three objections against Waldron’s denunciation of judicial review as antidemocratic, the main flaw of Waldron’s thesis is argued to remain out of focus. The constitution is understood by him as owned by the living citizens, in a pattern of serial sovereignty that raises three problems: the ‘wanton republic’; the under-individuation of the polity; generational inequality. The answer to Lafont’s question ‘Can We Own the (...) Constitution?’ is then argued to be that only ‘we the people’, including past, present and future ‘free and equal’ generations, own the constitution. The living citizens are the segment of ‘the people’ endowed with agency, have a voice, can modify the inherited political scheme, but cannot legitimately disfigure it, under penalty of destroying the regulatory function of the constitution. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the notion of religious transcendence was a latecomer in human evolution. It did not appear before the Axial Age, and in its extreme form as a realm of ultimate meanings beyond human reach it had only a locally and temporally bounded existence. Once it appeared, however, the idea of religious transcendence set an evolutionary dynamic in motion, which soon led to various forms of “immanent transcendence,” starting from the “Papal Revolution” and continuing with the (...) Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Kantian notion of the transcendental and its Hegelian and Habermasian modifications. In my conclusion I briefly discuss two alternative versions of modern immanent transcendence—cognitive and exemplary—and their consequences for political philosophy. (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)

This contributed volume aims to reconsider the concept of individuation, clarifying its articulation with respect to contemporary problems in perceptual, neural, developmental, semiotic and social morphogenesis. The authors approach the ontogenetical issue by taking into account the morphogenetical process, involving the concept of individuation proposed by Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. The target audience primarily comprises experts in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students. The challenge of the genesis and constitution of "units" has always (...) been at the center of philosophical and scientific research. This ontogenetical issue is common to every discipline but it is articulated in different ways: in phenomenology of perception the constitution of perceptual units is at the base of gestalt field theories, in theoretical neuroscience synchronized neural assemblies are considered as correlates of conscious processes, in developmental embryogenesis the constitution of organs is the principle outcome of morphodynamic evolution while in social morphogenesis the constitution of coherent units is common to segmentary, gerarchic and functional differentiation. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This essay is about the difficulties connected with grounding human rights philosophically in a multicultural context. These difficulties are argued to derive from the tension between our aspiration to universal validity and our shared belief in the constitutive role of life-forms, traditions, cultures, and vocabularies vis-à-vis our conceptions of justice. Rawls's and Habermas's approaches to the justification of human rights are then briefly reconstructed and assessed. A symmetrical distribution of strong and weak points is argued to obtain. In the light (...) of this reconstruction, the author explores the potential of his judgment view of justice for providing a justification of the universality of human rights not vulnerable to the difficulties of the other examined approaches. (shrink)

ABSTRACT ‘We’ is said in many ways. This paper investigates Kurt Stavenhagen’s neglected account of different kinds of ‘we’, which is maintained to be one of the most sophisticated within classical phenomenology. The paper starts by elaborating on the phenomenological distinction between mass, society, and community by claiming that individuals partake in episodes of experiential sharing only within communities. Stavenhagen conceptualizes experiential sharing as a meshing of conscious experiences infused by a feeling of us-ness. The remainder of the paper focuses (...) on Stavenhagen’s distinction of various senses of us: when individual share preferences, have mutual respect, or emotionally evaluate the world according to a cultural tradition, they elicit a sense of us of different kind and, thus, form communities of different kind. Within phenomenology, Stavenhagen should be credited with the merit of having unearthed the aggregative, we-generating force of preferences, of respect, and of (certain) emotions. (shrink)

‘We’ is said in many ways. This paper investigates Kurt Stavenhagen’s neglected account of different kinds of ‘we’, which is maintained to be one of the most sophisticated within classical phenomen...

A proof P of a theorem T is transferable when a typical expert can become convinced of T solely on the basis of their prior knowledge and the information contained in P. Easwaran has argued that transferability is a constraint on acceptable proof. Meanwhile, a proof P is fixable when it’s possible for other experts to correct any mistakes P contains without having to develop significant new mathematics. Habgood-Coote and Tanswell have observed that some acceptable proofs are both fixable and (...) in need of fixing, in the sense that they contain nontrivial mistakes. The claim that acceptable proofs must be transferable seems quite plausible. The claim that some acceptable proofs need fixing seems plausible too. Unfortunately, these attractive suggestions stand in tension with one another. I argue that the transferability requirement is the problem. Acceptable proofs need only satisfy a weaker requirement I call “corrigibility”. I explain why, despite appearances, the corrigibility standard is preferable to stricter alternatives. (shrink)

Models are indispensable tools of scientific inquiry, and one of their main uses is to improve our understanding of the phenomena they represent. How do models accomplish this? And what does this tell us about the nature of understanding? While much recent work has aimed at answering these questions, philosophers' focus has been squarely on models in empirical science. I aim to show that pure mathematics also deserves a seat at the table. I begin by presenting two cases: Cramér’s random (...) model of the prime numbers and the function field model of the integers. These cases show that mathematicians, like empirical scientists, rely on unrealistic models to gain understanding of complex phenomena. They also have important implications for some much-discussed theses about scientific understanding. First, modeling practices in mathematics confirm that one can gain understanding without obtaining an explanation. Second, these cases undermine the popular thesis that unrealistic models confer understanding by imparting counterfactual knowledge. (shrink)