In a series of papers published in the sixties and seventies, Jaakko Hintikka, drawing upon Kant’s conception, defines an argument to be analytic whenever it does not introduce new individuals into the discussion and argues that there exists a class of arguments in polyadic first-order logic that are to be synthetic according to this sense. His work has been utterly overlooked in the literature. In this paper, I claim that the value of Hintikka’s contribution has been obscured by his formalisation (...) of the original definition. Therefore, I provide (i) a brief reconstruction of the historical framework of the problem and the revolutionary import of Hintikka’s contribution, (ii) a clarification of the most complicated steps of Hintikka’s elaboration of his insight, (iii) a criticism of several features that play a fundamental role in Hintikka’s formalisation and (iv) a selection from Hintikka’s own material of some valuable suggestions towards a clear and workable formalisation. As for the pars construens, I isolate in the approach of depth-bounded first-order logics (D'Agostino et al. 2021) an alternative formalisation of the notion of syntheticity as the introduction of new individuals in the reasoning, and I show that it is not affected by the same difficulties as Hintikka’s proposal. In so doing, I hope to have contributed to the realisation of the project of rehabilitating Kant’s analytic–synthetic distinction in the context of modern first-order logic with the purpose of showing, against the logical empiricist movement, that logic is not analytic. (shrink)

In her recent book The Limits of Blame, Erin Kelly argues that we should rethink the nature of punishment because delivering blame is, contrary to the widely held view, not among the justifiable aims of a criminal justice system. In this paper, firstly, I discuss her case against criminal blame. Kelly argues that the emphasis on blame in the criminal justice system and in public discourse is one of the main causes of the stigma and exclusion faced by those convicted (...) for a crime. This claim might appear puzzling and, while she provides other convincing arguments against criminal blame, Kelly does not extensively defend this particular argument. To offer support for this view, I reflect on the often overlooked distinction between moral blame and criminal blame to show how the latter, unlike the former, is exclusionary and stigmatising. Secondly, I address the claim put forth by Kelly that blame should play no role in the criminal justice system at all. In light of her argument about the optional nature of moral blame, I explore the possibility that the state should leave open to victims the option to blame criminal wrongdoers in restorative justice conferences. I argue that in such contexts blame would not have the same exclusionary features of criminal blame in traditional settings and that it could serve some valuable aims articulated by communicative theories of punishment, such as the restoration of moral relationships. (shrink)

Discusses managing the environment from philosophical, scientific, and political perspectives.

This article aims at achieving a detailed qualitative vision of the chronic disease in the adolescent population and its specific issues. To that end, a first-person experiential research based on significant events regarding healthcare pathways was developed. Six interviews were conducted with three practitioners. The results of this researchallow us to identify spaces of configuration in terms of parenthood, of therapeutic alliances and of negotiating care strategies between teenagers, parents and professionals.Which co-construction spaces should be built with the teenagers in (...) conflict or in rupture or with the suffering parents? Which positions should be adopted by practitioners to avoid or postpone chronicity? (shrink)

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance the (...) discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature. (shrink)

Causal Dispositionalism provides an account of causation based on an ontology of causal powers, properties with causal essence. According to the account, causation can be analysed in terms of the interaction of powers and its subsequent production of their effect. Recently, Baltimore, J. A. has raised a challenge against two competing approaches, the compositional view and the mutual manifestation view, to explain what makes powers interactive – the interaction gap. In this paper, we raise the challenge of explaining what makes (...) powers productive – the production gap. While Baltimore’s verdict is tentatively favouring, we find both approaches wanting. Our conclusion is that Causal Dispositionalists should take Baltimore’s and our critique seriously. Powers cannot cause their effects just by bearing the name “causal”. To deserve their names, more metaphysical details are needed. (shrink)

This essay examines the sanitary policies for the protection of overseas communities that Italian fascism employed during the empire. From 1935–1936, the vast scale of the Ethiopian campaign, as well as intensive colonisation programmes, gave new political visibility to the issue of safeguarding Italian settlers from the risks of the tropical climate. In this period, the problem of how Italians could adapt to overseas environments moved beyond the boundaries of scientific discussion to become a major concern of colonial rule. Analysing (...) both the medical literature and archival sources, this essay examines the concepts and practices that underpinned the fascist project for the “reclamation” of the empire: from the intensification of hygienic propaganda, to the redefinition of the medical-geographical boundaries of tropical risk, and to the expansion of social security benefits, which were extended to harms caused by tropical diseases. Finally, it investigates how the notion of acclimatisation was transformed within the context of the regime's imperial ideology, showing how the conception of the tropics as a pathogenic space remained widespread, fuelled by the regime's organicistic vision and its concerns for upholding the racial prestige of Italians in the colony. (shrink)

Armstrong famously argued in favour of introducing totality facts in our ontology. Contrary to fully negative (absence) facts, totality facts yield a theory of “moderate” or “partial” negativity, which allegedly provides an elegant solution to the truthmaking problem of negative claims and, at the same time, avoids postulating (many) first-order absences. Friends of totality facts argue that partial negativity is (i) tolerable vis-à-vis the Eleatic principle qua mark of the real, and (ii) achieves a significant advantage in terms of ontological (...) parsimony. But are totality facts, which are partially negative, really more ontologically acceptable than fully negative facts? In this paper, we argue that, comparatively, the case for totality facts is weaker than commonly assumed and that, ultimately, the answer is negative. (shrink)

In the later Byzantine age, historical sources mention many examples of prophecies concerning Chremetismomancy, the divination by horses' neighs. As far as we know, however, we have no earlier documents about this practice from ancient or from medieval Greece. Under the Komnenoi and Palaiologoi, to the contrary, important prophetic neighs are quoted by Anna Komnene, by Niketas Choniates and Nikephoros Gregoras. Wonders which were worked by neighing horses are of very great political consequence, relating to crucial moments such as an (...) emperor's military victories, a prince's succession to the imperial throne or the deposition of a ruler. In Gregoras' Roman History, it is not a living animal responsable for the nocturnal neighs, but a painted one at a chapel in the palace. It is very interesting to examine these narrative plots and historical accounts, as they convey many informations about Byzantine society. In particular, the strong disposition for magic, even at top-level of the society, should be emphasized. The philomantic emperors par excellence are Manuel I Komnenos and Andronikos II Palaiologos, the author of a themation, an astrological interpretation of horses' neighs, together with his faithful Logo the tes Theodoros Metochites, an expert at astrology and hemerology. The advance of such divinatory practices in the late Byzantine centuries should be related to home instability and enemies' threats on the boundaries. Chremetismomantic omina clearly focus on this particular climate of terror and uncertainty which forms the ideal ground for any attempt to foretell the future. Therefore, these practices were no laughing matter for Byzantine writers and their readers: only Nicetas Choniates' shy irony may argue us out of believing this. (shrink)

Una significativa acquisizione, nella cornice della letteratura palmomantica, perviene dal ms. Laur. Plut. XXVIII, 14, che tramanda pure un trattato πεϱι αλλομένων μελων, cap. υξβ′, 462°, ff. 306r-v, vagheggiato da G. Vitelli nell'edizione di P. Flor. III 391 e pubblicato, quindi, da E. Rostagno, che si rivela un gemello del testimone vindobonese, H, censito da H. Diels e presentato quale un ramo della sua tradizione tripartita. Il testo del Laur. permette inoltre di migliorare notevolmente il dettato e la coerenza linguistica (...) della versione H, emendandone i segnali di incipiente collasso casuale. Il Laur. XXVIII, 14 rappresenta del resto un esemplare tipico di codice collettaneo astrologico, vergato negli ultimi decenni del XIV sec., una miscellanea apotelesmatica di epigrafi, pseudepigrafi e adespoti. (shrink)

This Article draws lessons from Italian history as to how the state may possibly intervene in economic crises without jeopardizing the economy or affecting competition. It first describes how and why Italy got to the point in the 1930s where the government had to save the financial system. That was accomplished by setting up a public financial holding company, which became the majority shareholder of banks and companies in the telecommunications, steel, shipping, engineering, and energy industries, among others. The so-called (...) IRI formula has long been considered a model both in the European Union and outside it, with many countries setting up similar companies. Initially, the IRI performed well in Italy and acted as a market player. In the 1960s, however, its performance deteriorated under pressure from political parties. This degeneration combined with pressure from the European Union prompted Italy to gradually privatize the state-owned companies, a process that ended only recently. Ironically, the pendulum is now swinging back. In preparation for the next crisis, Italy is currently planning to go “back to the state.” The Article presents different ways of public intervention in the economy and offers suggestions for future reforms. (shrink)

When we appraise others as talented or virtuous, we esteem them: we register admiration of their traits and virtues. It is generally believed that, unless they involve a violation of respect, distributions of esteem are not a concern from the point of view of justice. In this paper, I want to dispute this commonly-held view. I will argue that attributions of esteem can become problematic when a particular trait becomes such a uniquely relevant source of social esteem in a community (...) that its absence becomes a reason to regard others as less than full members of the community. For instance, in contemporary capitalist societies those perceived as lacking certain socially valued traits and unable or unwilling to make certain kinds of contribution to the community, such as those who are unemployed or have committed criminal offences, are widely disesteemed and also regarded as inferior qua members of the community by others. From the fact that they fail to possess particular qualities a broader negative judgment of their ability to contribute to the community is inferred. Moreover, their failure to gain esteem in these pervasive domains eclipses their possession of other esteem-worthy traits as well as other positive contributions they might have made to society. This perception of inferiority renders it impossible for them to live on equal terms with other citizens. I argue that as egalitarians we should oppose these distributions of esteem. (shrink)

This essay explores the fear of secession in two different context: the exit of a member State from EU and the secession of a territorially concentrated group from a member State of the EU. The case of the recent Brexit and the crisis in Catalonia are taken as case studies to comprehend theoretically which secession could «constitute» EU as a Federation. In the second part, I exemplify how from the international perspective secession can be considered as an «ultimate right» and (...) that if one can talk of such a thing as legality when referring to secession that can be done only in the sense of a liminal legality: a legality that reside in the border area between the internal and the international legal order. In the last part of the essay, I shall try to use Catalonia as test to evaluate both the opinion of the International Court of Justice on Kosovo and the famous Reference of the Canadian Supreme Court on Québec. In the conclusion of the essay, I will also verify if Catalonia can be read through the lens of the Just-Cause Theories of Secession. (shrink)

La metafora poetica: un andar a tentoni capace di conoscere empaticamente le cose trasportandole in un Altro senso.

This article discusses the removal of voting rights from those convicted of crimes. I focus on two recent defences of penal disenfranchisement: firstly, I question one justification of the view that voting rights are conditional on the fulfilment of certain responsibilities that offenders fail to meet. Secondly, I criticise an expressivist justification of disenfranchisement based on the idea that it is uniquely suited to express dissociation from serious wrongdoing. While embracing the expressivist perspective of the latter line of argument, I (...) argue that disenfranchisement also expresses attitudes that are incompatible with the commitment to equality. Disenfranchisement conveys the judgment that offenders are not fit to participate in the democratic process. In doing so, it violates the duty of the state to treat all its citizens with equal respect and undermines offenders’ equal status. Moreover, this policy fosters objectionable inequalities of esteem: other members of the community are very likely to internalise the judgment that offenders are second‐class citizens and to regard them as inferior, which in turn undermines their status in society. (shrink)

As Price (2009) famously mused, if a philosopher were to be magically transported, perhaps through means of time travel, from the 1950s to the modern day, they would indeed be shocked by the resurgence of metaphysics in the analytic tradition. Most of all, perhaps, they would be shocked by the popularity of power metaphysics. What a strange item to have in a philosopher’s curriculum, they might think: after all, didn’t David Hume claim that “[t]here are no ideas which can occur (...) in metaphysics more obscure and uncertain than those of power, force, energy, or necessary connection”? Indeed, much has changed since then. At the pain of using overly vague terminology, we can call “power metaphysics” the subdiscipline of metaphysics interested in the development and evaluation of a family of positions which we will refer to under the umbrella term of “dispositionalism”. According to dispositionalists, the world we inhabit is also populated by genuine and irreducible powers, dispositions, and capacities of objects. (shrink)

This article discusses the removal of voting rights from those convicted of crimes. I focus on two recent defences of penal disenfranchisement: firstly, I question one justification of the view that voting rights are conditional on the fulfilment of certain responsibilities that offenders fail to meet. Secondly, I criticise an expressivist justification of disenfranchisement based on the idea that it is uniquely suited to express dissociation from serious wrongdoing. While embracing the expressivist perspective of the latter line of argument, I (...) argue that disenfranchisement also expresses attitudes that are incompatible with the commitment to equality. Disenfranchisement conveys the judgment that offenders are not fit to participate in the democratic process. In doing so, it violates the duty of the state to treat all its citizens with equal respect and undermines offenders’ equal status. Moreover, this policy fosters objectionable inequalities of esteem: other members of the community are very likely to internalise the judgment that offenders are second‐class citizens and to regard them as inferior, which in turn undermines their status in society. (shrink)

In recent decades, it has often been argued by environmental ethicists that human beings and the natural world ought to be considered as equals in some basic sense. The aim of this paper is to make sense of this view by examining what role, if any, the idea of equality ought to play in environmental ethics. Specifically, we have two aims: the first aim is to identify those environmental claims that are distinctively egalitarian. The second aim is to show these (...) claims do not rest on a principled and convincing justification. Our main contention is therefore that equality has no place in environmental ethics. There are other promising ways to argue that our relationship with the natural environment must be fundamentally revised. By bringing clarity to this debate and dispelling the possibility of equality-based arguments, we hope to contribute to this endeavor. (shrink)

Brentano’s suggestion that intentionality is the mark of the mental is typically spelled out in terms of the thesis that all and only mental states are intentional. An influential objection is that intentionality is not necessary for mentality. What about the idea that only mental states are intentional? In his 2008 paper published in Analysis, Nes shows that on a popular characterization of intentionality, notably defended by Crane, some non-mental states come out as intentional. Crane replies that the concept of (...) representation solves the problem. In this paper, I argue that no representational account of intentionality meets Nes’s challenge. After distinguishing between two notions of representation, I contend that there are two versions of Crane’s representational account, but neither of them is able to solve the problem posed by Nes. (shrink)

In this paper, we embark on the complicated discussion about the nature of vice in Virtue Ethics through a twofold approach: first, by taking seriously the claim that virtues (and certain flavours of vices) are genuinely dispositional features possessed by agents, and secondly, by employing a pluralistic attitude borrowed from Battaly’s pluralism (2008). Through these lenses, we identify three varieties of viciousness: incontinence, indifference, and malevolence. The upshot is that the notion of vice is not as categorically homogeneous as that (...) of virtue: some states of viciousness consist in interference of present virtuous dispositions, or mimicking of absent vicious ones, whereas others can be considered genuine dispositions themselves. Furthermore, this set-up can provide an interesting, albeit highly idealized story as to how, through the interference in one’s environment, one gets acquainted with vice in various degrees. Finally, this approach can be illuminating vis-à-vis Virtue Ethics in general; e.g. we can employ it to discuss more productively Johnston’s (2003) objection to Hursthouse’s (1999) account of moral conduct. Finally, this approach can be illuminating vis-a-vis Virtue Ethics in general; e.g. we can employ it to discuss more productively Johnston’s (2003) objection to Hursthouse’s (1999) account of moral conduct. (shrink)

In this thesis, I offer a study of a metaphysical theory that has acquired popularity in recent years: Dispositionalism. Dispositionalism is first and foremost an actualist, property-based theory of modality. The ontology of dispositionalism postulates, primus inter pares, that there are properties with a modal nature. Dispositionalists call these properties powers, mostly because of the role they play in doing what the argument says they should do: explaining natural modalities, i.e. first-order physical regularities. Albeit the view has increased in popularity (...) in recent years, not much attention has been dedicated to investigating which theory of properties best fits the requirements from the metaphysics. The present thesis aims​ to remedy this. (shrink)

This paper first presents two prominent and antagonistic accounts of political freedom that identify the latter either with the expression of a collective, sovereign will, or with an open process of mutual recognition and consent-based association in action. In the paradigmatic formulations that Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt give of these two models of freedom, one can detect, however a common methodological assumption. In both cases political freedom is conceived as actualizing itself in some original or founding act or acts. (...) Challenging this assumption by means of a deconstructive perspective on the suppose origin of modern political freedom and democracy, the paper then goes on to formulate an alternative conception of political freedom in this way shows that democratic freedom, though it may already be in place, has constantly to actualize itself in a self-determining process. (shrink)

This essay intends to fill some gaps in my L’ordinamento della libertà concerning, in particular, the role played by “one’s own arms” and “religion” in the Machiavellian conception of freedom and its reality in the Florentine republic. The analysis confirms that freedom, according to Machiavelli, does not coincide with the absoluteness of the will, but with the ability to fight both with weapons and with religious symbols, also bringing into play their lives if necessary, within a defined context in order (...) to transform it. (shrink)

Who wouldn’t want to hear it said of their new book, ‘nothing would improve this’? Stephen Mumford wouldn’t! His Absence & Nothing: The Philosophy of What T.

Human nature is something of a taboo on the left wing of contemporary political theory and scarcely more than a commonsense assumption on its right wing. This article aims to expose the taboo and to challenge the assumption. There is no way, we argue, to defeat conservative political theory without delving into political anthropology. With this purpose in mind, our article analyses the writings of Marx and Engels, and Simondon’s concepts of the transindividual and technics. It shows that Simondon’s theory (...) of technics allows new interpretations of many of the themes scattered in Marx’s and Engels’s works and helps to formulate a materialist political anthropology which entails a political project of liberating ‘human nature’ _from_ labour. (shrink)