La riflessione sullo statuto epistemologico e sul funzionamento politico del discorso biologico – nel suo carattere eterogeneo, plurale e conflittuale – è un tema centrale nelle opere di Michel Foucault e Georges Canguilhem. A partire dall’analisi delle relazioni e delle tensioni tra i loro orientamenti teorici, questo studio propone una rilettura critica delle loro ricerche, integrandole e utilizzandole nei dibattiti epistemologici e politici contemporanei. In tal senso, la filosofia biologica di Canguilhem permette di riesaminare la concezione foucaultiana della storia, della (...) società, della soggettività, della tecnica, dell’ambiente, e di reinterrogare in una prospettiva socio-ecologica ed eco-storica lo spazio d’intervento delle tecnologie biopolitiche. (shrink)

In this article I analyze the justification of rawlsian anti-perfectionism, present in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. My aim is to show how justice as fairness, Rawls's conception of justice, lacks stability because of it. As an alternative to his anti-perfectionism, I propose, in the second part, the idea of progress as practical perfectionism by John Dewey. I argue that a perfectionist liberalism of this kind does not undermine reasonable pluralism as Rawls argued. Also I argue that (...) it is indispensable to establish a liberal society that is stable. In the end, I briefly show how the private sphere could be affected once the idea of progress is part of a conception of liberal justice. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo trata de la cuestión del hombre como animal político (ζῷον πολιτικόν), como se desprende tanto de las obras ético-políticas de Aristóteles como de sus textos más puramente biológicos. Frente a algunos problemas de las principales escuelas de pensamiento (la hipótesis racionalista, el abordaje biológico y la hipótesis de Mulgan), en este artículo el problema de la política humana está vinculado al de la comunidad (κοινωνία), a la que también pertenece el hombre, donde la comunidad resulta ser la (...) piedra angular para entender el significado de esta “política”. (shrink)

The following article is about the famous question of man as a political animal, that emerges from the ethical-political and biological works of Aristotle. In view of the problems connected with the main interpretations, we will try to link the problem of human politics to the horizon of the community, which is the real key to understand the meaning of this “politics”.

L’un des principaux arguments évoqués contre l’art contemporain au début des années 1990 en France (lors du débat autour de ce qui fut appelé la « crise de l’art contemporain ») consista en l’affirmation que puisqu’aujourd’hui n’importe quoi peut être de l’art, alors l’art d’aujourd’hui c’est n’importe quoi. Ce texte entend montrer que ce raisonnement en deux parties relève d’une confusion qui, une fois clarifiée, permettra de cerner la spécificité de l’art contemporain et des jugements qui peuvent être émis à (...) son égard. (shrink)

The most recent tool for acting on the world, the exosomatization of cognitive activities, is often considered an autonomous and objective replacement of knowledge construction. We show the intrinsic limits of the mechanistic myths in AI, from classical to Deep Learning techniques, and its relation to the human construction of sense. Human activities in a changing ecosystem – in their somatic and sensible dimensionalities proper to any living experiences – are at the core of our analysis. By this, we stress (...) the key role of the knowing subject, far away from any allegedly objective big collections of data. The production of organized structures of physics, biology and in societal analysis will be compared and distinguished by trying to set on more robust grounds the constructive as well as the disruptive roles of entropic, negentropic, anti-entropic dynamics that are different concepts in different domains, to be handled with care: the use of machine learning and optimization methods as tools and models to analyse and manage human activities in view of their scientific and political ideology of technoscientific governance. They suppose that which they try to produce is objective, that is, standardized and controllable behaviours. In this dialogue we stress a mirror symmetry between the lack of theoretical interpretation of scientific data and the lack of democracy in this fiction of neutrality. Moreover, bad analogies constitute an obstacle to grasp the anteriority of biological and ecological constraints which enable and limit all artificial products of human intelligence. We will thus stress biological specificity, the role of normativity and constraints in evolution, of labour in structuring the human historical construction of sense by common activities. (shrink)

En este artículo analizo el concepto de la democracia como un sistema de justicia procedimental en contraste con la democracia como mecanismo de toma de decisión y ejercicio del poder político de Schumpeter. La idea de la democracia como un sistema de justicia procedimental que expongo está vinculada al pensamiento de John Rawls. Al final del artículo muestro cómo esta conceptualización, en el contexto de las sociedades plurales, garantiza en mejor medida las libertades y la igualdad generando condiciones de estabilidad (...) institucional. (shrink)

Over the years of the printing of the Utopia by Thomas More, the paradigm of the bene ordinata res publica takes shape in Italian culture. It is a model both political and urbanistic, which is inspired by the neo-Platonic revival of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth century and concretized by the «new style» of Renaissance architects. The rationalization of the civitas, evident from the geometric definition of the urban plans, introduces a principle of order and measuring to which it is assigned (...) the task to re-form and harmonize the multiple instances of a real State – naturaliter unstable, corrupt, conflictual – within the form of an achievable eutopia. (shrink)

In this article I analyze the justification of rawlsian anti-perfectionism, present in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. My aim is to show how justice as fairness, Rawls's conception of justice, lacks stability because of it. As an alternative to his anti-perfectionism, I propose, in the second part, the idea of progress as practical perfectionism by John Dewey. I argue that a perfectionist liberalism of this kind does not undermine reasonable pluralism as Rawls argued. Also I argue that (...) it is indispensable to establish a liberal society that is stable. In the end, I briefly show how the private sphere could be affected once the idea of progress is part of a conception of liberal justice. (shrink)

Cet article commence par revenir sur certains thèmes et enjeux des contributions présentées dans le volume. Il évoque ensuite les problèmes liés aux paradigmes épistémologiques employés dans l’étude du rapport entre animaux et religions antiques, en proposant quelques pistes de réflexion pour la recherche sur ce thème.

Au cours du xix e siècle, les théories transformistes et l’évolutionnisme permettaient de penser d’une nouvelle manière l’historicité de la nature et de la vie, y compris celle de l’homme. Historisation de la nature et naturalisation de l’homme marchent ensemble, mais la forme attribuée à la temporalité naturelle et la place de l’homme dans l’histoire de la vie restent sujets à des conceptions fort différentes dans les champs scientifiques et philosophiques et continuent à être objet de discussion tout au long (...) du xx e siècle. La question de l’articulation entre l’historicité biologique et anthropologique joue également un rôle décisif dans les œuvres de Friedrich Nietzsche et de Michel Foucault. Nous essayerons ici de contextualiser leurs réflexions à ce sujet, de montrer leurs relations et leurs spécificités, ainsi que leur actualité. (shrink)

This paper discusses the representation of foreign gods as demons found in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. It investigates the category of δαιμόνιον in some Septuagint texts against the background of the Hellenistic literature, and the relationship between the notion of demon and that of idol. In doing this, it shows the relevance of the Septuagint for a better understanding of religious notions emerging during the Hellenistic period. Moreover, focusing on some uses of εἴδωλον in the Pentateuch, the (...) paper proposes a new interpretation for the word in the Greek version of the decalogue, in light of papyrological evidence. (shrink)

«Mettre les faits d’accord avec la philosophie de Platon»: voilà une maxime qui remonte au Commentaire de Proclus au premier livre des Éléments d’Euclide, oeuvre centrale pour la constitution du savoir au Cinquecento et plus particulièrement pour la définition du statut opératoire des mathématiques. Au cours du XVIe siècle, Euclide apparaît en effet comme le véritable médiateur entre platonisme et aristotélisme, au demeurant moins par son oeuvre de géomètre que par son geste épistémologique qui semble tracer l’unique voie possible pour (...) accéder à la connaissance de toutes les choses, soit sensibles soit métaphysiques. Les interprétations de Jacopo Mazzoni ("In universam Platonis et Aristotelis philosophiam praeludia, sive de comparatione Platonis et Aristotelis", 1597) et de Francesco Barozzi ("Opusculum, in quo una oratio, et duae quaestiones: Altera de certitudine, et altera de medietate mathematicarum continentur", 1560), que j’examine dans mon article, offrent deux perspectives différentes, qui redonnent une actualité philosophique au néoplatonisme mathématique de Proclus. (shrink)

Relativism, the position that things are for each as they seem to each, was first formulated in Western philosophy by Protagoras, the 5th century BC Greek orator and teacher. This book focuses on the challenge to the possibility of expert knowledge posed by Protagoras, together with responses by the three most important philosophers of the next generation, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus. In his book Truth, Protagoras made vivid use of two provocative but imperfectly spelled out ideas. First, that everyone is (...) a ‘measure’ of the truth, and that everyone is already capable of determining how things are, since the senses are the best and most credible guides to the truth. Second, given that things appear differently to different people, there is no basis on which to decide that one appearance is true rather than the other. Plato developed these ideas into a more fully worked-out theory, which he then subjected to refutation in the Theaetetus. Aristotle argued that Protagoras’ ideas lead to skepticism in Metaphysics Book G, a chapter which reflects awareness of Plato’s reaction in the Theaetetus. Finally, Democritus incorporated modified Protagorean ideas and arguments into his theory of knowledge and perception. There have been many important recent studies of these thinkers in isolation. However, there has been no attempt to tell a single, coherent story about how Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle responded to Protagoras’ striking claim, and to its perceived implications about knowledge, perception, and truth. This book offers a new account of this important chapter in the development of Greek epistemology. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo trata de la cuestión del hombre como animal político (ζῷον πολιτικόν), como se desprende tanto de las obras ético-políticas de Aristóteles (la Política) como de sus textos más puramente biológicos (la Investigación sobre los animales). Frente a algunos problemas de las principales interpretaciones de esta cuestión, en este artículo se vincula el problema de la politicidad humana con el de la comunidad (κοινωνία), a la que también pertenece el hombre: de hecho, el hombre es uno ζῷον πολιτικόν (...) porque es uno ζῷον κοινωνικόν. (shrink)

Il Rinascimento è un atelier nel quale si compongono in maniera originale esperienze e concetti radicati in tradizioni antiche ed eterogenee e destinati a esiti diversi. Saperi nuovi o rinnovati si caricano di valenze dottrinali inattese e concorrono ad arricchire il patrimonio concettuale degli uomini. Nella propensione a diffondere e frantumare la filosofia in una pluralità di artes e nel dialogo reciproco al quale queste sono richiamate, sta una peculiarità del pensiero rinascimentale, del quale i saggi qui pubblicati sono esemplificazione.

Much has happened in the field of contemporary epistemology since Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized” was published in 1969. Even before Ronald Giere published his article “Philosophy of Science Naturalized,” naturalized philosophy of science had been influenced by the so-called historical approach. Kuhm, Lakatos, Feyerabend and Laudan all contributed importantly to this trend. In this light it has emerged, without a doubt, that philosophy of science is closely related to epistemology. This volume explores some of the relevant relations and will be of (...) interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science. (shrink)

This is the first book to bring together Western and Chinese perspectives on both moral and intellectual virtues. Editors Chienkuo Mi, Michael Slote, and Ernest Sosa have assembled some of the world’s leading epistemologists and ethicists—located in the U.S., Europe, and Asia—to explore in a global context what they are calling, "the virtue turn." The 15 chapters have never been published previously and by covering topics that bridge epistemology and moral philosophy suggest a widespread philosophical turn away from Kantian and (...) Utilitarian issues and towards character- and agent-based concerns. A goal of this volume is to show students and researchers alike that the turn toward virtue underway in the Western tradition is being followed by a similar turn toward virtue in Chinese philosophy. (shrink)