The COVID-19 pandemic invites a question about how long-standing narratives of alterity and current narratives of disease are entwined and re-enacted in the diagnosis of COVID-19. In this commentary, we discuss two related phenomena that, we argue, should be taken into account in answering this question. First, we address the diffusion of pseudoscientific accounts of minorities’ immunity to COVID-19. While apparently praising minorities’ biological resistance, such accounts rhetorically introduce a distinction between “Us” and “Them,” and in so doing produce new (...) and re-enact old narratives of alterity. Second, these unsubstantiated narratives thrive on fake news and scarcity of data. The second part of this commentary thus surveys the methods through which the COVID-19 test is administered in various countries. We argue that techniques used for data collection have a major role in producing COVID-19 data that render contagion rates among migrants and other minorities invisible. In the conclusion, we provide two recommendations about how COVID-19 data can instead potentially work towards inclusion. (shrink)

This volume is a collective exploration of major themes in the work of Crispin Wright, one of today's leading philosophers. These newly commissioned papers are divided into four sections, preceded by a substantial Introduction, which places them in the context of the development of Wright's ideas. The distinguished contributors address issues such as the rule-following problem, knowledge of our meanings and minds, truth, realism, anti-realism and relativism, as well as the nature of perceptual justification, the cogency of arguments such as (...) G. E. Moore's celebrated proof of an external world, and skepticism about the material world. Some papers explore the relationship of Wright's ideas with those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose influence has always been a prominent aspect of Wright's philosophy. The essays collectively testify to the enormous interest and relevance of Wright's seminal contributions for present-day debates in areas as diverse as the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology, and significantly advance research in these areas. The volume also contains Wright's substantial responses to his critics, which offer the most up-to-date versions of his ideas and a vigorous defense of his philosophy. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of “alterity processing” to account for the simultaneous enactment of individual “Others” and emergent European orders in the context of migration management. Alterity processing refers to the data infrastructures, knowledge practices, and bureaucratic procedures through which populations unknown to European actors are translated into “European-legible” identities. By drawing on fieldwork conducted in Italy and the Hellenic Republic from 2017 to 2018, this article argues that different registration and identification procedures compete to legitimize different chains of (...) actors, data, and metadata as more authoritative than others. Competing procedures have governance implications, as well, with some actors being included and others being excluded. Furthermore, there is evidence that—despite procedural rigidities—applicants themselves propose alternative chains of actors, data, and metadata that are more meaningful to them. In this tension, it is not only the individual Other that is enacted but also specific bureaucratic orders cutting across old and new European actors and distinctive understandings of “Europe.” From a technology studies perspective, this article engages in a dialogue with the emergent debate on Hotspots, the scholarship about the infrastructural construction of Europe and political sociology. (shrink)

In _Hinge Epistemology_, eminent epistemologists investigate Wittgenstein's concept of basic or 'hinge' certainty as deployed in _On Certainty_ and show its importance for mainstream epistemology.

It is a striking feature of philosophical reflection on the self that it often ends up being revisionary of our commonsensical intuition that it is identical to a living human being with, intrinsically, physical and psychological properties. As is well known, Descartes identified the self with a mental entity, Hume denied the existence of such an entity and Kant reduced it to a transcendental ego—to a mere condition of possibility for experience and thought. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein followed Kant —or, (...) at any rate, the Kant made available to him through reading Schopenhauer—then, later, denied the existence of such an entity and proposed the no-reference view about at least some uses of “I”. Finally, Anscombe radicalized Wittgenstein’s views and claimed that no use of “I” is ever referential. It must be acknowledged that, despite the oddity of these views, philosophers have always arrived at their respective positions on the nature of the self through rational reflection: being impressed with some feature allegedly special to the use of “I” they have felt compelled to account for it by postulating a realm of super-entities which could explain such seeming peculiarities. Confronted with this tradition of revisionary accounts of the self, at least some contemporary theorists are now approaching the issue with a diagnostic eye, trying to identify the features that have led philosophers to embrace such positions, with the aim of offering a better understanding of them that could “give philosophy peace”. That is to say, that could make them compatible with the commonsensical view that selves are identical to living human beings and that “I”, either in speech or in thought, is a genuinely referential expression. So, for instance, Christopher Peacocke opens his influential and thought provoking “Self-knowledge and illusions of transcendence”1 with the following remarks. (shrink)

In 1665 Athanasius Kircher published the treatise Mundus Subterraneus, to ex-plore the complex relationships between the visible forms of the landscape and the reasons that produce them. Kircher was peer of Claude Lorrain, who gave a critical contribution in founding landscape as an artistic genre, making indistinguishable its existence as a real place and its representation as a picture. Compared to Kircher, Lorrain had the greatest influence on Western landscape culture. Yet today, thanks to scholars and landscape architecture practitioners, Kircher’s (...) intuition seems effective to describe the contemporary idea of landscape as a performative field, encompassing all living forms, soils and waters, and intangible substances working together, impossible to understand just by the investigation of their visible forms. Today landscape exists because it is perceived and because it works: Lorrain and Kircher have finally met. (shrink)

This book offers a cutting-edge perspective of design for space to increase astronauts’ wellbeing and performance creating a more sustainable and inclusive environment, but without to forget beauty. The relevant aspect is that these design principles are now also supported and promoted by the European Community with the New European Bauhaus project. It is legitimate to affirm that Space Design is a precursor and inspiring these principles. Space exploration has shown us how results of space research inspire management policies addressing (...) important earth issues such as the responsible use of resources as well as ethical behavior leading to sustainable and inclusive choices. The International Space Station (ISS) is the most successful virtuous example of circular economy and sustainability by almost totally recycling the waste produced. Recently the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the first call for “parastronauts” opening the fly possibilities to people with physical disabilities and thus affirming the principle of inclusion in space. Thanks to design—a bridge between science, technology, and beauty—space opens up to new creative experiments, placing the human being at the center of the interplanetary exploration programs to ensure extra-terrestrial habitats safer, more comfortable, and efficient, where crew will feel “like at home”. (shrink)

Summary This paper argues that Lampito, the Spartan character who takes part in the pacifist plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BC), has been inspired by both parents of Agis II, the king of Sparta who led the war against Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian War and fortified Deceleia in 413 BC. Agis’ mother bore the quite rare name of Lampito as well; his father, the ‘pacifist’ King Archidamos II, voted against the war at the Spartan Assembly in 432. (...) Aristophanes knew of Archidamos’ speech from oral tradition, possibly from the report of the Athenian ambassadors at Sparta or, alternatively and more probably, from public readings of Thucydides’ account of the pre-war debate that took place in the Spartan Assembly. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to focus on the most unusual application of the Lateran bull Apostolici regiminis, the founding document of the inquisitorial legislation which regulated the teaching activity of philosophy professors by forcing them to refute any heterodox theory and to teach the doctrine of faith. In 1519, the inquisitor of Bologna Giovanni de’ Torfanni censored the book Defensorium, in which the secular Aristotelian philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi developed against his colleague Agostino Nifo a long series of arguments (...) in favor of the mortality of the human soul without match them with their respective Christian refutations, as prescribed by the papal bull. Nevertheless, as a result of a not well documented negotiation with the competent authorities, Pomponazzi was relieved of all obligations, provided that he submitted his book to the emendations of the Dominican theologian Crisostomo Javelli. Pomponazzi accepted the agreement and Javelli drew up a list of forty-two solutions to as many mortalistic arguments found in Defensorium. Javelli’s list – titled Solutiones rationum animi mortalitatem probantium quae in Defensorio contra Niphum excellentissimi Petri Pomponatii formantur – was then attached to Defensorium and in this way Pomponazzi gained permission to print and sell his book. After a short reconstruction of the key steps of this affair, the present work provides a critical edition of Javelli’s Solutiones, based upon both the sixteenth-century editions of the text, the first one contained in Defensorium, the other included in Pomponazzi’s Tractatus acutissimi, utillimi, et mere peripatetici. (shrink)

Relativism, an ancient philosophical doctrine, is once again a topic of heated debate. In this book, Maria Baghramian and Annalisa Coliva present the recent arguments for and against various forms of relativism. -/- The first two chapters introduce the conceptual and historical contours of relativism. These are followed by critical investigations of relativism about truth, conceptual relativism, epistemic relativism, and moral relativism. The concluding chapter asks whether it is possible to make sense of relativism as a philosophical thesis. -/- (...) The book introduces readers to the main types of relativism and the arguments in their favor. It also goes beyond the expository material to engage in more detailed critical responses to the key positions and authors under discussion. -/- Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary, Relativism is essential reading for students of philosophy as well as those in related disciplines where relativism is studied, such as anthropology, sociology, and politics. (shrink)

The article introduces the Vygotskian tradition in the realist theoretical discussion of the structure-agency problem. Archer's concept of internal conversation is discussed in terms of internalization and externalization of conversational dynamics. The article addresses in particular the methodological issue of observing how external events trigger internal use of language, and how these internal dynamics are externalized. The experience of talk is proposed as a conceptual key to the understanding of internal conversations and of the relation between structured activity and agency. (...) The experience of talk is defined with the help of the notions of emotional experience, personal sense and inner speech, as they are conceptualized in activity theory and in particular in the works of L.S. Vygotsky and A.N. Leont’ev. Students’ experiences of critical conversational events with teachers are analyzed on the basis of written autobiographical accounts. The experience of talk emerges from the analysis as a form of emotional experience in which the horizon of the individual's subjective view relates to specific circumstances external to the individual. Autobiographical accounts of critical conversations are suggested as a type of data which allows access to the experience of talk. (shrink)

The thesis addresses the issues of error through misidentification and immunity to error through misidentification in relation to the problem of the first person. First, it provides an explanation of error through misidentification. Secondly, it shows that there are two possible ways of understanding immunity to error through misidentification. It is then argued that the first understanding of immunity to error through misidentification leads to what is labelled "the trilemma about the self". That is to say, either we provide an (...) explanation of immunity to error through misidentification, but we subscribe to two contentious metaphysical views about the self-the Cartesian and the Idealist; or else we hold the view that the self is identical with a human being, but we have no explanation of immunity to error through misidentification. It is then shown that in order to solve the trilemma, a different understanding of immunity to error through misidentification must be offered. After discussing various possible understandings of immunity to error through misidentification, a sound account of it is finally provided. Moreover, it is shown how non-inferential, introspection-based mental self-ascriptions can comply with it, in such a way that they turn out to be logically immune to error through misidentification. Finally, by drawing on Evans' and Peacocke's accounts of the possession conditions of the first person concept-in which IEM I-judgements play a central role-, it is shown that it is a concept of a human being who thinks of herself as such. Hence, our first person concept is firmly anti-Cartesian and anti-Idealist. As a consequence, it is maintained that not only is there no need to hold the Cartesian and the Idealist metaphysics of the self in order to explain why some I-judgements can be immune to error through misidentification, but it is also argued that one can no longer be either Cartesian or Idealist. For that would expose one to conceptual incoherence. (shrink)

Let G be the direct sum of the noncyclic groupof order four and a cyclic groupwhoseorderisthe power pn of some prime p. We show that ℤ2G-lattices have a decidable theory when the cyclotomic polynomia equation image is irreducible modulo 2ℤ for every j ≤ n. More generally we discuss the decision problem for ℤ2G-lattices when G is a finite group whose Sylow 2-subgroups are isomorphic to the noncyclic group of order four.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 41-46 [Access article in PDF] On What There Really Is to Our Notion of Ownership of a Thought Annalisa Coliva JOHN CAMPBELL'S REPLY to my paper aims at reestablishing the point that there are two strands to our notion of ownership of a thought. There are two ways of cashing out this idea. 1 First, one could say that A is the (...) owner of a thought if and only if both the following two independent conditions apply 2 : (1) X is introspectively aware of a token thought and (2) X is the person who formed that token thought. Second, one may hold that there are twodifferent and independent notions of ownership of a thought, call it O1 and O2, corresponding to (1) and (2), respectively. For brevity, I will refer only to the first interpretation. But what I will be saying will apply, mutatis mutandis, to both.On this view, thought insertion would be a case in which someone thinks that (1) is satisfied, while (2) is not and, therefore, denies that the thought she is introspectively aware of is her own. 3 Campbell's explanation of thought insertion is quite clear: the subject has prima facie reasons to think that she is not the person who formed that token thought—maybe because she does not experience that thought as formed by herself—and, therefore, has prima facie reasons to deny that she is its owner, but she is mistaken in identifying the producer of the thought and what she says is false, yet reasonable. 4 Notice, however, an important consequence of Campbell's model. If (1) and (2) are independent conditions, then one could obtain without the other. Hence, it must be conceivable that one is introspectively aware of a thought that one has not produced. Indeed, cases of multiple personality, if taken literally, might be taken as examples of this kind of situation: person A and person B inhabit the same body, A can have access to B's thoughts, yet B remains their producer. So A could actually say something like "I'm thinking (i.e. I am immediately aware) that p, but this is not my thought (it is not the thought I produced), it's B's (the thought that B produced)" and what she would be saying would in fact be true.Yet, a simple-minded reaction one may have toward this line of explanation is this: If the subject is either saying something false, but reasonable, or, indeed, something altogether true, when she says "I'm thinking 'Kill God,' but this isn't my thought, it's Chris'," why should we consider her report as an expression of some kind of cognitive illusion, 5 which we take as a symptom of mental illness, as opposed to, at most, a possible mistake in identifying the producer of the thought? And, connectedly, why should we try to cure her, rather than just, at most, correct her? [End Page 41]Hence, the whole dispute between Campbell and me hinges on whether it is logically possible for one to be introspectively aware of a thought and yet not be its producer. Campbell claims that it is, whereas I deny that this is a genuine possibility. He holds that these are two independent conditions and that the one can obtain without the other, whereas I hold that they are not independent and that they stand or fall together. Campbell is fully aware of being making a surprising claim because, as he points out, "[The two strands in the ordinary notion of ownership of a thought] do not ordinarily even seem to come apart" (Campbell 2002, italics mine). Yet he offers in its support no more than an analogy between being the person who produced a certain signature and being the person who produced a given token thought. Let us look at it closer.Consider the following situation: a person NN looks at a piece of paper with NN written on it and wonders whether she is the... (shrink)

Integrating information systems has become a key goal for governments worldwide. Systems of “authentic registers,” for instance, provide government agencies with information from databases acknowledged as the only legitimate sources of data. Concerns are thus arising about the risks for democratic accountability constituted by more and more integrated governmental IS. Studies call for a new research agenda that investigates the redistribution of authority and accountability entailed by interoperable IS. This article contributes to this endeavor by suggesting the “vectorial glance” as (...) a research framework that works along two lines. First, by recovering the science and technology studies notion of “infrastructural inversion,” it looks at the technical minutiae of interoperability projects as strategic sites where institutional shifts—and eventually state transformation—can become visible. Second, by defining interoperability as a performative process of boundary reordering, it opens research to the possibility that institutional identities be reconstituted along different lines. Just as vector graphics are based on paths that lead through control points without being bound to underlying pixels, so the vectorial glance runs across boundaries without implicitly assuming that they are immutable and/or a priori relevant for the analysis. This article draws on a case study observed while working at a major project of civil registers integration in Italy. (shrink)

Moore’s proof of an external world is a piece of reasoning whose premises, in context, are true and warranted and whose conclusion is perfectly acceptable, and yet immediately seems flawed. I argue that neither Wright’s nor Pryor’s readings of the proof can explain this paradox. Rather, one must take the proof as responding to a sceptical challenge to our right to claim to have warrant for our ordinary empirical beliefs, either for any particular empirical belief we might have, or for (...) belief in the existence of an external world itself. I show how Wright’s and Pryor’s positions are of interest when taken in connection with Humean scepticism, but that it is only linking it with Cartesian scepticism which can explain why the proof strikes us as an obvious failure. (shrink)

Since the end of the Second World War, for more than half a century, foreign aid has been an important component of North/South relations, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. From the very beginning, it has been conceived and presented as a technical enterprise aimed at promoting the development and modernization of recipient countries and at complying with the rich States' obligation to assist and transfer resources to poor countries. These assumptions still affect the theory and practice of foreign aid, (...) hindering its analysis and evaluation. The main purpose of this essay is to highlight, on the basis of the results of some recent historical investigations on the matter, that foreign aid is a tool of foreign policy, a practice that has political origins, aims and effects that interfere with both the relation between aid and development and the definition of a duty of material aid. (shrink)

This article introduces the methodology of the ‘Ontology Explorer’, a semantic method and JavaScript-based open-source tool to analyse data models underpinning information systems. The Ontology Explorer has been devised and developed by the authors, who recognized a need to compare data models collected in different formats and used by diverse systems. The Ontology Explorer is distinctive firstly because it supports analyses of information systems that are not immediately comparable and, secondly, because it systematically and quantitatively supports discursive analysis of ‘thin’ (...) data models – also by detecting differences and absences through comparison. When applied to data models underpinning systems for population management, the Ontology Explorer enables the apprehension of how people are ‘inscribed’ in information systems: which assumptions are made about them, and which possibilities are excluded by design. The Ontology Explorer thus constitutes a methodology to capture authorities’ own imaginaries of populations and the ‘scripts’ through which they enact actual people. Furthermore, the method allows the comparison of scripts from diverse authorities. This is exemplified by illustrating its functioning with information systems for population management deployed at the European border. Our approach integrates a number of insights from early infrastructure studies and extends their methods and analytical depth to account for contemporary data infrastructures. By doing so, we hope to trigger a systematic discussion on how to extend those early methodical innovations at the semantic level to contemporary developments in digital methods. (shrink)