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)

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)

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 ...

Against the tradition, which has considered measurement able to produce pure data on physical systems, the unavoidable role played by the modeling activity in measurement is increasingly acknowledged, particularly with respect to the evaluation of measurement uncertainty. This paper characterizes measurement as a knowledge-based process and proposes a framework to understand the function of models in measurement and to systematically analyze their influence in the production of measurement results and their interpretation. To this aim, a general model of measurement is (...) sketched, which gives the context to highlight the unavoidable, although sometimes implicit, presence of models in measurement and, finally, to propose some remarks on the relations between models and measurement uncertainty, complementarily classified as due to the idealization implied in the models and their realization in the experimental setup. (shrink)

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)

This article examines recent theories of democratic citizenship as well as the institutional separation of religion and politics in light of shortcomings with the traditional secularization thesis. Due to the fact that juridical norms and forms of consciousness develop at a more rapid pace than religious ones, received accounts of both democratic equality and toleration need to be reconceptualized. Questions concerning the legitimacy and neutrality of religious reasoning in democratic politics, as pursued in the work of Rawls and Habermas, also (...) need to be informed by further reflection on the confessional context and other empirical features of post-secular societies. Comparing the politics of same-sex marriage in Canada and Italy helps to illustrate this point. (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)

El presente trabajo reconstruye algunas de las tesis centrales de la familia realista-liberal de la democracia en relación con los liderazgos políticos y la participación política de la ciudadanía en sus dos fases de pensamiento: desde el elitismo hacia la poliarquía. Posteriormente se formulan algunas de las críticas que los teóricos deliberativos le realizan a este modelo en relación con el carácter minimalista de la participación y sus dificultades para combatir posibles poderes exógenos a la política. En este sentido, se (...) presentan tres pilares del modelo deliberativo para superar esta aparente debilidad del modelo realista-liberal y generar autonomía política o, al menos, combatir su heteronomía a través de: 1) la transformación de preferencias, 2) el ejercicio de una razón comunicativa, y 3) una fundamentación epistémica de las creencias morales. (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)

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)

In the global world, momentous migratory tides have produced hyper-pluralism on the domestic scale, bringing citizens with radically different conceptions of life, justice and the good to coexist side by side. Conjectural arguments about the acceptance of pluralism, the next best to public reason when shared premises are too thin, may not succeed in convincing all constituencies. What resources, then, can liberal democracy mobilize? The multivariate democratic polity is the original answer to this question, based on an interpretation of Rawls (...) which revisits Political Liberalism in the light of The Law of Peoples . The unscrutinized assumption is highlighted, often read into Rawls’s Political Liberalism , that a polity moves homogeneously and all of a piece from religious conflict to modus vivendi, constitutional consensus and finally to overlapping consensus. Drawing on The Law of Peoples , a different picture can be obtained. (shrink)

Reflexive pluralism is here put forward as the conception that is most reasonable for supporters of political liberalism to hold at a period when the reasons justifying acceptance of political and religious pluralism seem inadequate.

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)

The present paper is an inventory and a description of the known manuscripts of the Nyāyamañjarī, meant as a tool for philological research on Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s magnum opus. The inventory is gradually built through a systematic analysis of archival data found in catalogi catalogorum, bibliographies of catalogues, individual catalogues, unpublished lists, and editions of the Nyāyamañjarī. The list is followed by a concise description of each manuscript, including an external description, an outline of the contents, and historical information.

ABSTRACT The paper critically evaluates Rahel Jaeggi’s concept of form of life. Particularly, it deals with the question of why one should want to criticize forms of life or society in the first place. While Jaeggi mentions issues of rationality and success, the paper refers to issues of suffering. Therefore, it introduces firstly the concept of pervasive doctrine, which aims at complementing, not at substituting, Jaeggi’s concept of form of life. A pervasive doctrine is composed by (1) a coherent system (...) of believes, by (2) a coherent set of values inspired by these believes, as well by a set of (3) norms and of (4) social practices organized around (1) and (2). It is pervasive insofar as it aims at explaining and regulating every aspect of the life of individuals and communities. The paper establishes, secondly, a connection between pervasive doctrines and systemic suffering, i.e. a suffering whose roots lie in the very way society is structured and the power relations within it that have been distributed along its history. Analysing the effects of pervasive doctrines in provoking systemic suffering is offered as a complementary critical strategy to the critique of forms of life provided by Jaeggi. (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 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.

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)

This article aims at exploring one specific facet of pluralism: How can we conceive of a variety of democratic cultures that are not just local adaptations of one basic western-centric understanding of the democratic ethos? Drawing on Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian sources, a convergence among diverse democratic cultures is cursorily highlighted on such elements as the priority of the common good, the acceptance of pluralism, the desirability of collegial deliberation, the equality of citizens, and the value of individuality. (...) Then two important points of dissonance are analysed in greater detail – the idea of the priority of rights over duties and the role of political conflict within a democratic polity – and shown not to be correlative with a divide between western and non-western contexts. Finally a typology of 4 kinds of democratic cultures is outlined. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta un enfoque del problema de la relación entre abducción y percepción en la filosofía de C. S. Peirce, tratando de mostrar la percepción y la abducción, o hipótesis, como procesos creativos capaces de introducir una novedad en el conocimiento. En primer lugar se muestra cómo cada conocimiento, incluso el lógico, está fundamentado en la experiencia de la percepción, y cómo esta presupone una continuidad cosmológica entre la mente y el mundo para poder funcionar. Sucesivamente se pone en (...) evidencia cómo la hipótesis no es nada más que aquel procedimiento que reconoce, como un relámpago, esta continuidad cosmológica de experiencia entre la mente y el mundo. Finalmente, la abducción se configura como un razonamiento que, libremente, obstruye y modifica el flujo continuo de. (shrink)

How much is a moral judgment on a single act influenced by circumstances which have little to do with the nature of the act itself? How much have certain moral judgments to do with the common history and shared experience of a certain group of individuals? Using two cases taken from life (a German musician and a German CEO behaving both in a morally wrong way but with very different consequences from the point of view of moral judgement and with (...) very different reactions from the German public), the article tries to give an answer to these questions, touching issues like: guilt, moral responsibility, collective responsibility, and collective identity. (shrink)

In questo saggio si esamina il modo in cui viene concepito il rapporto tra pluralità del bene e universalità della giustizia all'interno del dibattito filosofico politico di matrice liberale dell'ultimo decennio. Vengono ricostruite tre diverse strategie concettuali con cui è stata sviluppata una concezione "situata" della giustizia come imparzialità fra concezioni del bene concorrenti -- la strategia del perfezionismo liberale , quella del proceduralismo e quella della ragione pubblica -- e in particolare il modo in cui dalle diverse ottiche è (...) affrontato il problema della giustificazione politica ovvero della legittimazione. Per ciascuna di queste strategie vengono indicati punti di forza ed elementi di debolezza e viene infine sostenuta la superiorità della strategia rawlsiana della ragione pubblica relativamente alle altre. (shrink)