Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the main exponents of evolutionary thinking in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. He gave that kind of thinking an unprecedented metaphysical turn. In consequence of his versatility he also encountered the notion of truth-making, which he connected with his ever-present concerns about time and duration. Eager to stress the dimension of radical change and of novelty in the nature of things, he rejected (in one form) what he called “the retrograde movement of (...) the true” while championing it – with undeniable delight in the air of paradox – in a derivative form. In the paper I explain what “the retrograde movement of the true” consists in – in its two forms. (shrink)

Table des Matières: -/- Introduction; -/- Chapitre Premier: La conception de la philosophie chez Thomas Reid; -/- Chapitre 2: Le Rôle épistémologique du sens commun; -/- Chapitre 3: La justification des principes du sens commun; -/- Chapitre 4: La perception sensible; -/- Chapitre 5: La perception sensible (suite); -/- Chapitre 6: Les facultés intellectuelles autres que la perception sensible; -/- Chapitre 7: Les facultés actives; -/- Chapitre 8: Le "common sense" chez Reid et quelques conceptions antérieures de la raison naturelle; (...) -/- Conclusion. (shrink)

Dans son œuvre L’Amour et L’Occident, Denis de Rougemont a pris pour thème l’amour courtois tel qu’il s’exprime dans la poésie des troubadours du XIIe siècle et dans le roman courtois du XIIIe siècle. Cette définition de l’amour, nouvelle et d’influence majeure, découle selon lui d’une dissidence religieuse, le catharisme, dont elle transpose les contours au vécu de l’amoureux face à sa Dame. Rougemont fait remonter à cette création médiévale beaucoup de facettes de la « passion » telle que la (...) connaissent les temps plus récents. L’article documente à ses débuts la polémique suscitée par le livre, en utilisant des documents restés longtemps inédits (Marrou, Gilson, Massignon). Il met en place les deux niveaux du débat, portant l’un sur la méthode historique, l’autre sur la perméabilité des strates religieuse et profane dans la réalité sociale. (shrink)

The article confronts one of the ἄποpοι λόγοι discussed in ancient Eristic-Stoic logic: the famous “cuckold” (κερατίνης), where an interrogator has his respondent to admit to have been or still be cuckolded. The source of the problem is a principle of dialectics related to the principle of the excluded-middle according to which a question admits only a positive or a negative answer. To the question “Have you ceased to be cuckolded?” both answers seem to presuppose that the respondent has been (...) cuckolded. To solve the problem one can either deny the dialectical principle of the excluded-middle or (as Stoic logic does) introduce the idea that negation refers not simply to the predicate (as in Aristotelian logic) but to the entire proposition (by denying the existence of the subject, for example). (shrink)

A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.

The article deals with the question of the relationship between physical modes and moral modes in Samuel Pufendorf’s theory of natural law. By distinguishing these two kinds of modes (which are both modes of natural substances) Pufendorf anticipates the “law of Hume”, according to which the is and the ought are incommensurable. According to Pufendorf, Grotius and Hobbes’ conception of the state of nature is at fault because these authors make natural law a fact that would not be accompanied by (...) imposition and from which deontological notions would thus flow in a natural way. According to Pufendorf, on the contrary, deontological modes go hand in hand with the moral modes which are attached to certain natural substances only because of a divine imposition which wanted to make man a naturally sociable being. (shrink)

Conference Proceedings (ASPLF Conference “Le Beau” in Iaşi, Romania, August 23-27, 2016). -/- Sections: 1. Le beau dans l'histoire de la philosophie; 2. Le beau à travers les cultures; 3. Beauté de la pensée et beauté du langage; 4. Ontologie et métaphysique du beau; 5. Le beau dans la nature et dans la société; 6. Beauté, éthique, politique; 7. Les catégories esthétiques; 8. L'esthétique et la vie quotidienne; 9. Renouvellement et perspectives de l'esthétique. -/- Conference sections: 1. The Beautiful in (...) the History of Philosophy; 2. The Beautiful across Cultures; 3. Beauty in Thought and Beauty in Language; 4. Ontology and Metaphysics of the Beautiful; 5. The Beautiful in Nature and in Society; 6. Beauty, Ethics, Politics; 7. Aesthetic Categories; 8. Aesthetics and Everyday-Life; 9. New Perspectives in Aesthetics. (shrink)

The article compares David Humes’ and John Searle’s positions concerning the relation between descriptive and evaluative statements. Although the two positions seem to be just opposite in that Hume denies the derivability of the ought from the is, while Seale accepts it, the author shows that Hume and Searle have many similarities, for for both obligations rely upon the institution of promising. The difference is that for Hume the speech act of promising as such does not have intrinsic evaluative impact. (...) Only in the civil state can the calm passions emerge which give to the motivation to act its ought-character. For Searle, on the contrary, the evaluative character is intrinsically linked to the speech act of promising, so that it becomes possible to derive the ought from the is. At the end the question of the relation between institutional and moral institutions is addressed. (shrink)

LES APPARENCES: ANALYSES PREALABLES L'ontologie des apparences I : questions terminologiques L'ontologie des apparences II : les entia apparentia La sémantique des apparences DES APPARENCES AUX FONDEMENTS Aspects catégoriels : la substance La simplicité comme condition de la substance L'activité comme condition de la substance DES FONDEMENTS AUX APPARENCES La production des apparences I : l'étendue La production des apparences II : la diffusion La production des qualités sensibles I BILAN Dire ce qu'il en est du corps Les propositions réduplicatives.

Conference Proceedings (ASPLF Conference “la Nature” in Lausanne, August 25-28, 1994). Conference sections: 1. La nature; 2. Nature, pouvoir, société; 3. Attitudes culturelles, artistiques, esthétiques et religieuses face à la nature; 4. La nature dans les sciences; 5. Nature et société; 6. Nature, éthique et droit; 7. La nature dans la philosophie antique et médiévale; 8. La nature dans la philosophie moderne et contemporaine; 9. La nature et les théorisations de l’humain.

The article proposes a comparison between certain aspects of Samuel Pufendorf's (1632-1694) conception of natural law and certain aspects of John Searle's social ontology. As in Pufendorf the entia moralia are superimposed on the entia physica, of which they constitute modes that ground systems of norms (natural or positive), so in Searle the institutional facts that are created by certain speech acts of the performative type are superimposed on the physical facts. The difference between Pufendorf and Searle is that the (...) latter understands all institutional facts as extrinsic to the physical facts (as a consequence of the peculiarity of their self-referentiality). For Pufendorf, on the other hand, moral modes are intrinsic to certain entia physica endowed with reason and will, whereas certain legal relations, like property, are extrinsic. (shrink)

The article proposes a comparison between the “retrograde” conception that Bergson has of truth and his atypical interpretation of the concept of possibility. These conceptions are developed in two articles collected in La pensée et le mouvant. The “retrograde” conception of truth starts from the observation of the temporal gap between an event and the formulation of the judgment that relates it and finds its condition of truth in it. The retrograde movement consists in putting aside the temporality proper to (...) the judgment and to “eternalize” it, so that the truth precedes the event. With respects to the possible Bergson has a similar conception: the events that are realized in the present are conceived by language as realization of previous possibilities. According to Bergson, language has thus the “magic power” of influencing the past retroactively. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the diffusion of the ideas of the Scottish philosophical school (Reid, Smith, Stewart) in France in the early nineteenth century and the role played by the Geneva philosopher Pierre Prevost. Prevost emphasizes the originality of the Scottish school compared with the French and German school in his writing “Reflections after my translation of the posthumous works of Adam Smith” of 1797. From at least 1792 already Prevost had begun a correspondence with Dugald Stewart, which lasted until the (...) death of the latter in 1828. About twenty letters of Stewart to Prevost are preserved in Geneva. Through the mediation of Prevost the Scottish Enlighteners influenced the development of French philosophy from Ideology towards Eclecticism (Degérando, Pictet, Royer-Collard, Cousin). (shrink)

The question of whether the phenomenon of passionate love is a natural phenomenon, as for naturalist psychologists, or rather a cultural product of Western civilization, was asked already by Nietzsche. This article deals with Denis de Rougemont’s essay L’amour et l’occident, in which the Swiss French intellectual answers the question decidedly in the sense of the second alternative. According to Rougement, passionate love finds its source in the movement of Catharism, which developed in Southern France in the 12th and 13th (...) centuries. Courtois love is expression of a transfigured love towards God combined with a gnostic disdain of the created world. The article also discusses the critiques that have been raised against Rougemont’s thesis, but emphasizes that Rougemont’s thesis has to be read at a higher level of explanatory abstraction than that of its critiques. (shrink)

The article deals with the aesthetic dimension of humour. The author starts with Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labour as a set of tasks necessary for the reproduction of biological life and praxis as an expression of freedom. In the same way the humour would be detached from the “working communication” of everyday life. Humour represents a “break” with ordinary modes of communication. This is done through “transpositions”, which can take the form of objectual transpositions (which play on the equivocal references (...) of a term), verbal transpositions (which contrast the uttered hypertext with a more usual hypotext; self-deprecation is a special case of verbal transposition) or metacognitive transpositions (like the “lapalissade”). The aesthetic value of humour is increased by the simplicity of the means used to obtain the contrast. (shrink)

The article focuses on the Philosophy of Freedom of the Swiss philosopher Charles Secrétan (1815-1895) and on the attempt to reconcile freedom as the fundamental experience for the human being with the alleged necessitarianism that would result from the positive sciences. The notion of “fall” as it is found in the Christian tradition allows Secrétan to rediscover an original dimension from which we can conceive the laws of nature as contingent. It is space and time that impose their constraints and (...) lead to the mismatch between the different faculties (sensitivity, imagination, intelligence, will) that is constitutive for the human experience and that prevents us from “being at any moment the whole of ourselves”. A peculiarity of Secrétan’s conception of space is that he does not see it as a condition for the numerical plurality of human beings. (shrink)

The article confronts one of the ἄποpοι λόγοι discussed in ancient Eristic-Stoic logic: the famous “cuckold” (κερατίνης), where an interrogator has his respondent to admit to have been or still be cuckolded. The source of the problem is a principle of dialectics related to the principle of the excluded-middle according to which a question admits only a positive or a negative answer. To the question “Have you ceased to be cuckolded?” both answers seem to presuppose that the respondent has been (...) cuckolded. To solve the problem one can either deny the dialectical principle of the excluded-middle or (as Stoic logic does) introduce the idea that negation refers not simply to the predicate (as in Aristotelian logic) but to the entire proposition (by denying the existence of the subject, for example). (shrink)

In commemoration of Ferdinand Brunner (1929-1991), a short biography of this important figure in Swiss and French intellectual life.

The part‐whole and element‐system relations are usually not given a temporal interpretation. Taking a thesis of Father Bochenski as a starting point , the author first gives an adequate temporal interpretation of this thesis. Then, he shows that a divergence arises, in non‐static systems, between the system itself and the mereological sum corresponding to it at a certain instant. Therefore, any reductionism has to confront the generally neglected problem of this divergence. Résumé Les relations partie‐tout et élément‐système ne sont pas (...) habituellement interprétées de manière temporelle lorsqu'elles sont approachées de manière formelle. On prend ici pour point de départ une thèse formulée par le P. Bochenski, "tout élément d'un système est une partie propre de ce système", dont on donne d'abord une interpretation temporelle adéquate. On met ensuite en évidence la divergence, pour les systèmes non statiques, du système et de la somme méréologique qui lui correspond en un instant donné. Le réductionnisme doit done affronter le problème généralement négligé de cette divergence. -/- Zusammenfassung Gewöhnlich werden die Relationen zwischen Teil und Ganzem und zwischen Element und System nicht zeitlich interpretiert, wenn sie formal behandelt werden. Von einer These von P. Bochenski ausgehend versucht man zuerst, dieser These eine angemessene zeitliche Interpretation zu geben. Dann zeigt man, dass es bei nicht‐statischen Systemen eine Divergenz zwischen dem System und der ihm zu einer bestimmten Zeit entsprechenden mereologischen Summe gibt. Das sich daraus für den Reduktionismus ergebende Problem wird meist vernächlassigt. (shrink)

The article deals with the concept of “justness” as it is treated by the Genevan psychologist Henri-Fréderic Amiel (1821-1881) in his Journal. Justness has its seat in the domain of “doing” rather than in the domain of “saying” or “thinking”: its non-propositional nature entails that one can “do just” while having false beliefs and vice-versa. The virtue of justness concerns the sphere of interpersonal interactions and goes hand in hand with moderation as virtue concerning the sphere of personal action. In (...) both cases, it is an excess of effort on the part of the will vis-à-vis the intelligence that keeps one away from virtue. This “Taoist moment” in Amiel also implies a critique of the activism of modern Western civilization and of the overweight of rules (“categorical imperatives”) that accompany it. (shrink)

The contrast between Thomas Reid's epistemological concerns and a common core of the classical approach to epistemology is the following one: Reid abandons the classical use for criteria of knowledge and pushes the problem of the justification of beliefs to the level of the mental faculties from which the beliefs arise. A similar shift plays various roles in Keith Lehrer's coherentist epistemology. However, this shift raises several difficulties: (i) the impact of epistemological concerns on actual intellectual inquiries gets lost; (ii) (...) the favored model of justification lacks in generality; (iii) 'vertical justification' (which proceeds via the faculty) is not independent from 'horizontal justification' (not proceeding via the faculty). (shrink)

The author gives an account of how a set of themes that we nowadays call metaethics contributes to shaping Nietzsche’s approach to morality. Initially, moral judgement, or value judgement, in order to be acceptable for the philosopher, should be similar to a judgement made in the field of natural sciences. The impossibility of moral judgement to satisfy such a requirement precipitates the loss of morality, at least in Nietzsche’s “first way” (in Human too Human). The position thus joined comes with (...) a great disadvantage: it removes action. Faced with such a disadvantage, Nietzsche is forced to change his way of understanding the nature of moral judgement. At this point, in his “second way”, he embarks in experiments engaging a completely different approach to moral judgement. It is as such that he becomes almost a “metaethician”, while ultimately leaving the status of moral judgement in indecision. (shrink)

In the philosophical tradition marked by Descartes and empiricism, the idea of epistemic justification was most often seen in terms of construction on foundations that would be as many immediately justified starting points. The article exposes a completely different approach to the question, due to the philosopher Keith Lehrer. In this approach the epistemic justification derives from a coherence relationship between beliefs that are never immediately justified starting points. What is then decisive for the justification of a belief is to (...) discard or neutralize all the objections that can be raised against it. From an example, the article presents this approach to epistemic justification and exposes a difficulty that it encounters. (shrink)

The article is about a course of dialectic in Latin language that Pierre Prevost (1751-1839) had prepared for the use of the students of the Académie de Genève. This document testifies to the reception of the Scottish philosophy, especially of Reid, by Prevost. On the model of the Logique de Port-Royal the course is articulated in a part on the art of exposing truths already reached (the dialectic properly speaking: ideas, judgements, reasoning) and in a part on the discovery of (...) new truths (the logic: truth, error and method). It is especially in this second part, under the rubrics of truth and error, that Reid’s influence is to be found: the criterion of truth is common sense, which bases certainty and recognizes the evidence; errors stem from the limits of common sense. (shrink)

The article deals with the issue of public items (objects, processes, events) in the philosophy of Leibniz. Starting from the famous passage of the Monadology which illustrates his conception of the substance by the image of a city perceived from different perspectives, the author shows how Leibniz conceives the public character of certain items, i.e. the reality of the phenomena that express them, not only in disagreement with the causal model, according to which public items would be the causal source (...) of shared perceptions, but in disagreement even with the correspondence model, according to which shared perceptions would correspond to external objects. The key to understand the position of Leibniz is rather to look at his concept of the compossible, which makes it possible to explain the congruence between shared perceptions without having to resort to the concept of correspondence. (shrink)

The article proposes an interpretation of the role of practical reason in Hume. The starting point is the distinction between strong practical reason and weak practical reason. The distinction concerns the assignment of values to states of affairs: strong practical reason is itself involved in this assignment of values, whereas weak practical reason only deliberates on the basis of given assignments. According to the author of the article Hume, showing how our choices are produced from a mechanics of passions, refutes (...) not only strong but also weak practical reason. In the last part of the article the author, relying on the distinction that Hume makes between calm and violent passions, attempts to defend a rationalist conception of the deliberative dynamic, which reserves for reason an arbiter role on the passions. (shrink)

Platonic realism has little place for conceptual invention. The possibilities of conceptual inventivity are assessed in the paper.

Thomas Reid’s influence on continental and especially on French philosophy at the beginning of the 19th century has to be considered against the background of the crisis of the philosophical project of the moderns. This project, which is intimately related to the rise of the modern scientific world image, has one of its major tenets in the so called “theory of ideas” introduced by Descartes and developed further by Locke. By emphasizing the role of our active faculties in the formulation (...) of judgements, Reid rejects this theory. One of the consequences of this rejection is the distinction Reid makes between sensations, which are passive, and perceptions, which are active. Maine de Biran picks up Reid’s emphasis on our active powers but reinterprets it on the light of his theory of the “primitive fact” that external objects resist our efforts to move them, thus providing a unifying principle for Reid’s “principles of common sense”. (shrink)

The letters published here belong to the ‘Fonds Pierre Prevost’ held by the Library of Geneva. Our presentation of the letters is modelled on that of the published correspondences of Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Our aim in transcribing the letters that follow has been to establish a clean and reliable text with minimal editorial intervention. We have made no attempt to normalise the spellings, capitalisation, and apparently aberrant usage found in the letters or to modernise the punctuation, and we (...) have not expanded the contractions that occur in the original texts. However, Prevost’s contractions in Letters 13 and 15 are likely to provide major problems for most readers, and we have therefore added an appendix in which these contractions have been written out. (shrink)

The text shortly introduces Rousseau’s De l’imitation théatrale (1764). Rousseau’s writing is basically a translation of the first pages of Book X of Plato’s Republic. On the one hand, Rousseau shares with Plato the ethical rigor that, in view of a certain political project, leads to the moral condemnation of theatrical practices. On the other hand, the metaphysical assumptions on which Plato’s critique relies are much heavier than those of Rousseau, whose sensualistic nominalism is incompatible with the metaphysical realism about (...) universals that underlies the arguments of Book X of the Republic. In this respect, it is surprising that Rousseau refers to Book X rather than Book III, in which the same critique of theatrical spectacles is developed from a psychological and moral point of view. (shrink)

Summary The correspondence in this issue of History of European Ideas has not previously been published. It is the surviving part of the epistolary exchange between Dugald Stewart and the Genevan professor and man of letters Pierre Prevost (1751?1839) from the 1790s to the 1820s. To this are added several closely connected letters to and from their associates. This correspondence is striking evidence of the republic of letters continuing to flourish in the aftermath of the French Revolution, illustrating the transmission (...) of works, the role of go-betweens, the provision of letters of introduction and the formation of intellectual and personal alliances. Not least, the letters tell us much about the ideas of those involved, and about the formation, development, and relation of these ideas to published works. This is particularly significant for Stewart, most of whose letters and papers are lost. (shrink)

The article compares Descartes’ and Leibniz’ use of the concept of a machine. For Descartes, the activity of the engineers rises to become the model for the scientific enterprise: one proceeds from the simple and the familiar to explain the complex. In this way one can escape the sheer astonishment about the complexity of the machines and their effects. This mechanical model is extended also to the explanation of the living beings. Also Leibniz regards living beings as machines. The difference (...) between living and inanimate machines is that in the case of the former their parts are machine-like all the way down, to the infinite. Another peculiarity of the living machines is their infinite convolution that allows them to maintain their individual identity over time. The author also points to the self-similar character of the folds. (shrink)

Alphonse Guillebert (1792-1861), pastor, teacher and politician, was one of the leading figures of the Academy of Neuchâtel, founded in 1838 and opened to students in the autumn of 1840. In this article, we will first offer a brief biography, then indications on the various facets of the written work of our author. We have used only a part of the available sources and we are therefore aware that further study would be worthwhile. In the following, we describe the philosophy (...) course of Guillebert, and finally we look at an essay – the Dissertation sur l’unité en philosophie – in which he was more personal than in his teaching. Marked by the French intellectual climate of the first half of the nineteenth century, our author was able, by opening himself to Germany, to introduce his listeners to the main philosophical doctrines of his time. (shrink)

The text shortly introduces Rousseau’s Lettres Morales, which result from the conversations he had with Mme Houdetot in the years 1757-1758. It is interesting to notice that in contrast to other important philosophical works based on a love relationship (one can think of Plato’s Symposium and the role of Diotima, but also of Boethius’s Philosophia in the Consolatio or Dante’s Beatrice in the Divine Comedy), in Rousseau’s letters it is the man who has the leading role, whereas the woman figure, (...) Sophie, is characterized by youthful spontaneity and even a certain naivety. (shrink)

The author, referring in particular to Jonas Cohn’s Theorie der Dialektik, interprets Hegel’s dialectic in the light of the Aristotelian principle of the priority of actuality over potentiality. The principle finds application especially in the field of the Hegelian conception of the history of philosophy, which is thought from the point of view of Absolute Knowledge as actuality of the Spirit. In this regard the main issue is to understand the nature of the limitations that Spirit encounters on the way (...) of the actualization of its potentialities. The most extreme form of limitation is contradiction, which historically is given in the form of conflict between philosophical doctrines. Some philosophers, like Kant, sees limitation as intrinsic to cognitive activity. According to Hegel, the thought of limitation is contradictory, since it presupposes the thought of what lies beyond the limit. (shrink)

The authors begins with the observation that jokes can have a different moral import: some may even be edifying. Is humor therefore to be integrated into an overall moral perspective? One of the leading philosophers of the 19th century, S. Kierkegaard, pleaded for such an integration. The best way to understand why he took such a stand is to articulate the edifying jokes - or rather the humor that underlies them - in terms of Kierkegaard's notion of indirect communication. However, (...) this pushes the problem one step further: the main challange being to understand why indirect communication should be expected to have a positive moral import. (shrink)

The article discusses in detail Nicholas Rescher’s book Scientific Progess: A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science (1978). Rescher discusses the possibilities of further progress for science. According to Rescher there are no limits by principles to scientific progress. Among the positions which postulate an end of scientific progress there are some which see the reason in the finiteness of nature, others in the finitude of our intellectual resources. According to Rescher science arises from the interaction (...) between nature and our intellectual instruments, and the combinatory of these interactions in infinite. On the other hand, there is an economic limit to scientific progress, due to the growth of the marginal costs of the scientific enterprise: the costs grow exponentially, that is to say that the yields grow only logarithmically compared to the investments. (shrink)

The article sketches the biographies of the professors for Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Neuchâtel since its foundation in the year 1909, against the background of the intellectual climate in protestant French Switzerland.

The articles critically discusses K. Lehrer’s book Thomas Reid (1989). In particular, the author criticizes some central aspects of Reid’s epistemology of common sense. Two points are particularly problematic: 1) the identification of common sense beliefs: how are the contents of common sense beliefs specified or individuated? The author shows that there are two possibilities for the identification of common sense beliefs – on one understandings these beliefs are explicit, on the other they are implicit and have to be made (...) explicit by philosophers – and that both are problematic. 2) The authority of common sense beliefs: according to Reid the source of their authority is their innate character, but this is problematic. The author concludes that the actuality of Reid lies less in his epistemology than in his psychology, which will be continued by Brentano and Husserl. (shrink)

In the concrete exercise of practical reason, certain pieces of knowledge are required: they relate to the obligations to which the agent is committed (according to the deontological orientation in practical philosophy), to the actions themselves, as well as to the situations in which the agent operates. It appears that these pieces of knowledge are themselves required by what may be called here “second-order obligations”. The purpose of the article is to identify the place of these obligations and to show (...) the link that they establish between practical and theoretical reason. (shrink)

At the end of the XVIIth century Nicholas Malebranche intervened in the «quietist dispute» in his Treatise on the Love of God (1697). This short treatise presents an anti-quietist standpoint based on the philosopher’s systematic analyses in the fields of theology and of psychology of the feelings and of the will. This article shows how Malebranche takes up the challenge of quietism, the logical heart of which, here reconstituted rigorously, is found in other moral philosophies. The requirement of impartiality produces (...) a paradox when the agent at the same time has to define and take responsibility for his own behaviour, and potentially forget himself due to his requirement of impartiality. Finally, Malebranche avoids this paradox by attributing a very important place to the notion of order, by means of which he fits in with his own analyses on the theme of Providence. (shrink)

The author focuses on the role that the epistemic practice of questioning, as it is presented in the Platonic dialogues, plays by Socrates. A comparison with Hintikka’s theory of questioning in proposed: in Hintikka’s account it is the questioner who endeavours to obtain new knowledge by asking someone who presumptively possesses that knowledge, whereas Socrates questions his interlocutors to wake in them the awareness of a knowledge they don’t know to possess. The origin of this knowledge is to be searched (...) in the ideal “vision” that pertains to the immortal soul. But the dialogic practice aims also to the propositional articulation of the knowledge we become aware of: we must become able to “give reasons” (λόγον διδόναι) for our beliefs. This is the source of the Aristotelian theory of argumentation developed in the Topics. (shrink)

Starting from an anecdote reported by Ernst Mach in the Analysis of Sensations, the author shows how the distinction between intentionality de re and intentionality de se can contribute to solving the individuation problem, at least for those individuals who are capable of self-referentiality. Intentionality is expressed linguistically in the form of the oratio obliqua, in the context of which the subordinate can be false even when the whole is true. The analysis of the conditions of falsity of the subordinate (...) tells us that this can be false either because the predicate does not fit to the subject or by a failure of reference, conceived according to the descriptive theory of reference. The intentionality de se is peculiar precisely by the fact that in this case the reference cannot fail and uniquely individuates the haecceitas of the intentional subject. (shrink)

Starting from the recognition of the difficulty of establishing peace and the observation that several attempts to terminate conflicts end in failure, the author puts forward the argument that peace is a state that is essentially a by-product, according to the definition given by Jon Elster in his homonymous paper of 1981. Such states are characterized by the fact that they can only be brought about by actions aimed at other ends, i.e. non-intentionally. According to the author it is in (...) the light of this notion that we must consider the strategies implemented by the pacifying power in a so-called pacification war. In fact, what follows from such a war is rarely peace. The question arises to know how much the pacifying power is conscious of this fact and what follows from it both politically and morally. (shrink)

The article provides a critical overview of the main theses contained in the book The First Person by Roderick Chisholm. Chisholm's main thesis is that of the priority of the reference de se over reference de re. Chisholm develops firstly a theory of properties according to which these must be able to remain unexemplified. This excludes from the outset that we can reinterpret the indexical term “I” (the first person) in the sense of a property, since an indexical term always (...) refers to an existing particular object, so that the property in question would necessarily be exemplified. The sentences relating to the first person (de se) are not propositions but attributions, from which one can derive both the sentences de re as well as sentences de dicto (intentional attitudes). These sentences can have as subjects persons other than the “I”. (shrink)

When we deal with the concept of identity in political sociology (e.g. national identity, regional identity, etc.) we have first to ask some general question about the concept of identity and distinguish between numerical identity (which encompasses identity through time) and specific or type identity. Some theses can be advanced about identity in political sociology: 1) The identity in question is type identity; 2) This type identity is an artefact; 3) This artefactual identity concerns only those traits that are accidental, (...) i.e. not essential for their bearer; 4) The concerned traits should be either non-relational or relational but implying non-relational traits; 5) in order to define the identity of a group, the traits should be choose not only so that all the group members possess them (weak identity) but also so that only the group members possess them (strong identity). (shrink)

We often have judgments of moral condemnation on our fellow men. When we take seriously our individual and collective experience of moral judgment, we realize, however, that, in order to be properly brought to bear, judgments of moral condemnation must satisfy certain standards that are most often implicit. These norms form what we will call an "ethics of moral condemnation". Once unveiled, these standards surprise us with their rigor.