Fiammetta Palladini's work is one of the most important discussions of Pufendorf to appear in the latter part of the twentieth century. It cut through the existing field of Pufendorf studies, laying bare its inherited templates and tacit assumptions. Palladini was thus able to peel back the 'Grotian' commentary in which the great thinker had been shrouded, revealing a Pufendorf well-known in the 1680s-a formidable and dangerous natural jurist and political theorist-but doubly obscured in the 1980s and still today, (...) by a philosophical history that flies too high to see him, and by a commentary literature that too often does not like what it sees. David Saunders' remarkable translation carries Palladini's argument into English with maximum fidelity. (shrink)

L’ipotesi da cui muove la scelta di temi ed autori di questo percorso è quella di aprire esplorazioni ed incursioni nelle pieghe della cultura umana per cogliere le frizioni e le smagliature tra etica e politica in vista della possibilità, data o negata, di riconfigurare sé stessi e la cultura di cui ogni uomo è forza viva, mutante e trasfigurante. Un viaggio tra luoghi e stanze parallele, che a volte si svelano comunicanti, altre volte solo tracce di afone esistenze. Indagine (...) della storia e tentativo di una ermeneutica politica non riduttivistica, che intercetti intimamente la concezione e la struttura antropologica a fondamento di una società e di una sua organizzazione politica. La sfida di fondo di questo lavoro è quella di ripensare il posto dell’uomo nell’ordine dei significati del corpo, e ricondurre la corporeità nell’ordine dei significati di una antropologia politica. Da questa ipotesi, viene proposto un itinerario che intercetta alcuni dualismi e fratture come nuclei di criticità da cui muovere e infiltrarsi nelle intersezioni simboliche tra piano etico e piano politico dell’esistenza. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the indirect realists’ recourse to mental representations does not allow them to account for the possibility of hallucination, nor for the presentational character of visual experience. To account for the presentational character, I suggest a kind of intentionalism that is based on the interdependency between the perceived object and the embodied perceiver. This approach provides a positive account to the effect that genuine perception and hallucination are different kinds of states. Finally, I offer a (...) tentative suggestion as to how a hallucinatory experience may still be mistaken for a genuine perceptual experience. (shrink)

No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications. Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it (...) is central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal. This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism (and hence of atheism and moral indifference) that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. A more precise account of the latter gives a better prospective from which to look at the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes. ☆ The publication of this text, in this form, may require some explanation. In what it now appears the very distant June 1989, the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen organised an International Workshop on ‘Unsocial Sociability: Modern natural Law and the 18th-Century Discourse of Politics, History and Society’. The proceedings of that Workshop were never published, even though individual contributions have piecemeal appeared since then. My own contribution consisted in a short extract from a chapter from my book Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes. Per una reinterpretazione del giusnaturalismo moderno (Bologna, 1990), which appeared in print the following year. For this reason, I considered the separate publication of that intervention as superfluous. Rather naively I underestimated the fact that the publication of my book in Italian restricted its circulation in the Anglo-American academic circles, and even if occasionally quoted, the book would not be much read. Recently, following the solicitations of many friends to present in English part of the theses developed in that book, I had decided to have my intervention at the Göttingen Workshop finally published. After all, this had amply circulated as a manuscript and been cited by many in that form. But while I was planning to revise that manuscript, I was presented with the draft translation of the second chapter of my book done by Dr. Melissa Calaresu of Cambridge University, when she was still a graduate student. It is probably better to leave aside the story of why Melissa did that translation, but I am extremely grateful to her for having allowed me to use it as the basis for this piece, which is therefore a revised version of the second chapter of my Italian book on Hobbes. I have decided to publish it in English with some hesitation, at least for two reasons. First, because with the publication in English of only part of my book I may risk to reinforce a rather simplified interpretation of my work, and consequently of Pufendorf's thought, that his main contribution lies in his doctrine of socialitas and of the state of nature. I am instead firmly convinced that the most important parts of my own work are those that are still untranslated, that is those on the nature of moral obligation and that of moral entities, beside the comparison I make in the second part of the book between the first and the second edition of De iure. Secondly, because during the intervening years I have distanced myself from a conception of the history of philosophy understood as an internal analysis of the texts, and have become more attentive to the context in which to place philosophical texts. I have therefore developed a slight impatience towards the rather nick-picking analysis of texts, which with a certain virtuosism I performed in the book. Nonetheless, since even after so many years I do not believe that the theses I developed in that book have lost their force, I am happy for this partial translation, with some essential bibliographic updating, to appear, in the hope that such theses will be finally discussed for what they are and not on the basis of second-hand reports. I am grateful to Dario Castiglione for his precious help with the final revision of the text, and to Richard Whatmore and Brian Young for their willingness to publish this translation in their Journal. (shrink)

The concept of fitness, central to population genetics and to the synthetic theory of evolution, is discussed. After a historical introduction on the origin of this concept, the current meaning of it in population genetics is examined: a cause of the selective process and its quantification. Several difficulties arise for its exact definition. Three adequacy criteria for such a definition are formulated. It is shown that it is impossible to formulate an adequate definition of fitness respecting these criteria. The propensity (...) definition of fitness is presented and rejected. Finally it is argued that fitness is a conceptual device, a useful tool, only for descriptive purposes of selective processes, changing from case to case, and thus devoid of any substantial physical counterpart. Any attempt to its reification is an apport to the metaphysical load evolutionary theory has inherited from Natural Theology. (shrink)

The paper presents important new information about the life of Jean Barbeyrac, the famous Huguenot translator of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Cumberland. Based on extensive research in the Secret State Archives (Geheimes Staatsarchiv) and the archive of the French Church (Französicher Dom) in Berlin, it discusses two previously unknown letters of Barbeyrac to court officials, and the role of this interaction in his departure, in 1710, to the University of Lausanne. It also reintroduces a relatively unknown work by Barbeyrac on gambling, (...) the Traité du Jeu (1709), and clarifies the role of various personages in the French Colony of Berlin in the early eighteenth century. The investigation articulates various family relationships of Barbeyrac and follows him to the University of Groningen (in 1717)—a relatively unexplored period of his life—whose archives have recently yielded a comprehensive inventory of his possessions. Also, by analyzing documents dealing with the life of Barbeyrac's brother, Jacques, the paper contributes to our understanding of the early modern pastorate in Brandenburg (Prussia). A prelude to a larger study of Barbeyrac and the Huguenot diaspora in Berlin, it focuses on essential texts, both old and new, which are needed for an adequate understanding of this formative period of the early German Enlightenment and its main figures. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 36, Issue 1, pp 40 - 61 In this review article of Henk Nellen, _Hugo Grotius. A lifelong struggle for Peace in Church and State, 1583–1645_ the story of Grotius’s life is outlined and issues of interpretation are discussed. It is argued that this biography supports the argument that Grotius towards the end of his life was close to becoming a Catholic. It seems plausible that Grotius’s principled refusal to request permission to return to the Republic may (...) have been connected to his disappointment about his own less principled behaviour in 1618. (shrink)

The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial (...) services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. (shrink)

We investigate the higher-order modal logic , which is a variant of the system presented in our previous work. A semantics for that system, founded on the theory of quasi sets, is outlined. We show how such a semantics, motivated by the very intuitive base of Schrödinger logics, provides an alternative way to formalize some intensional concepts and features which have been used in recent discussions on the logical foundations of quantum mechanics; for example, that some terms like 'electron' have (...) no precise reference and that 'identical' particles cannot be named unambiguously. In the last section, we sketch a classical semantics for quasi set theory. (shrink)

The issue of what consequences to draw from the existence of non-classical logical systems has been the subject of an interesting debate across a diversity of fields. In this paper the matter of alternative logics is considered with reference to a specific belief system and its propositions :the Azande are said to maintain beliefs about witchcraft which, when expressed propositionally, appear to be inconsistent. When the Azande have been presented with such inconsistencies, they either fail to see them as such (...) or else accept them as non-problematical. Is our knowledge of logical truths a relative and culturally determined phenomenon, or is there some (transcendent) criterion that allows us to adjudicate between alternative logical systems? The authors propose an approach for resolving disputes about the status of Azande reasoning which assumes a paraconsistent framework, thus providing a new perspective on this debate. (shrink)

Human rights have become an important ideal in current times, yet our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous less enlightened one. This book explores the historical and theoretical dimensions of this paradox. Divided into two parts, the first section offers an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights are represented as the eternal human struggle to resist opression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At (...) the time of their birth in the 18th Century and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of law and society. The radical rhetoric of rights and its apparently endless expansive potential has led to its adoption by governments and individuals alike seeking to justify their actions on moral grounds and has undermined its radical edge. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. The classical critiques of Kant, Burke, Hegel and Marx illuminate traditional aproaches to the concept of human rights. The work of Heidegger, Sartre and psychoanalysis is used to deconstruct the metaphisical essentialism of bothe universalists and cultural relativists. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a moral stand point which both transcends the present and is historically relevant. (shrink)

It is becoming clear that many of today’s management theories are inadequate theoretically and practically to move understanding, scholarship, and practice to where it needs to be for scholars, business leaders, and policy makers to cope with an increasing fraught world. This Special Issue’s focus is on sustainability. Sustainability challenges need to incorporate multidisciplinary interventions and the trans- and interdisciplinary nature of solutions. To actively seek transformation toward sustainability, fundamental and innovative short-term as well as long-term efforts are required in (...) society, economy, technology, and education, including our understanding of human behavior and attitudes toward the management of the environment. This introductory piece presents natural science theories as a promising approach for achieving progress toward transformation for sustainability. (shrink)

In this paper we provide frame definability results for weak versions of classical modal axioms that can be expressed in Fitting's many-valued modal languages. These languages were introduced by M. Fitting in the early '90s and are built on Heyting algebras which serve as the space of truth values. The possible-worlds frames interpreting these languages are directed graphs whose edges are labelled with an element of the underlying Heyting algebra, providing us a form of many-valued accessibility relation. Weak axioms of (...) the form we treat here have been examined from the completeness perspective and further explored for applications in non-monotonic reasoning. Here, we introduce more weak many-valued modal axioms and prove a frame correspondence result for all of them. The classes of corresponding labelled frames possess algebraic properties which are strongly reminiscent of many classical ones, such as the Church-Rosser property, reflexivity, transitivity, partial functionality, etc. (shrink)

Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics.

The aim of this essay is to present a reading of Plato's utopianism, as expressed mainly through the 'big letters' of the Republic, which will lead us beyond Karl Popper's and Leo Strauss' modernist understandings of Plato and of his world. The author argues that, despite the 'transcendent' aspects of Platonic utopianism, the ideal city should be understood neither as a blueprint to be realized through some totalitarian political project nor as a mere fiction that cannot by definition give rise (...) to a viable existential prospect. The power of Platonic utopianism lies in its articulation to a value-laden cosmological continuum, which may be understood in terms of the self-instituting (through political persuasion and story-telling activites, among others) capacities of ancient Greek city. The utopian perspective is marked by shareability of political reason and by mutuality between participants in a common discursive venture rather than by individualist authoritarian projections or by harmless (that is, non-political in it orientation and ideological in its repercussions) day-dreaming. Even if Plato's philosophical project aspires to transcend the boundaries of ancient Greek cosmos, Platonic politics cannot be separated from its historical context, that is, the circumstances that gave rise to philosophy as a silent perhaps, but revolutionary, in it intentions political act. (shrink)

We prove frame determination results for the family of many-valued modal logics introduced by M. Fitting in the early '90s. Each modal language of this family is based on a Heyting algebra, which serves as the space of truth values, and is interpreted on an interesting version of possible-worlds semantics: the modal frames are directed graphs whose edges are labelled with an element of the underlying Heyting algebra. We introduce interesting generalized forms of the classical axioms D, T, B, 4, (...) and 5 and prove that they are canonical for certain algebraic frame properties, which generalize seriality, reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity and euclideanness. Our results are quite general as they hold for any modal language built on a complete Heyting algebra. (shrink)

Defeasible conditionals are statements of the form ‘if A then normally B’. One plausible interpretation introduced in nonmonotonic reasoning dictates that ) is true iff B is true in ‘most’ A-worlds. In this paper, we investigate defeasible conditionals constructed upon a notion of ‘overwhelming majority’, defined as ‘truth in a cofinite subset of \’, the first infinite ordinal. One approach employs the modal logic of the frame \\), used in the temporal logic of discrete linear time. We introduce and investigate (...) conditionals, defined modally over \\); several modal definitions of the conditional connective are examined, with an emphasis on the nonmonotonic ones. An alternative interpretation of ‘majority’ as sets cofinal ) rather than cofinite ) is examined. For these modal approaches over \\), a decision procedure readily emerges, as the modal logic \ of this frame is well-known and a translation of the conditional sentences can be mechanically checked for validity; this allows also for a quick proof of \-completeness of the satisfiability problem for these logics. A second approach employs the conditional version of Scott-Montague semantics, in the form of \-many possible worlds, endowed with neighborhoods populated by collections of cofinite subsets of \. This approach gives rise to weak conditional logics, as expected. The relative strength of the conditionals introduced is compared to KLM logics and other conditional logics in the literature. (shrink)

Este livro inclui as palestras apresentadas no XIII Congresso Internacional de Estética, ocorrido em Belo Horizonte em outubro de 2017, cujo título, “Os fins da arte”, explora o duplo sentido do termo “fim” que, polissêmico, indica término, conclusão e epílogo, assim como o propósito, a meta, o objetivo, a motivação, e ainda o limite e a decadência. O uso plural desse termo amplifica, ainda, suas possibilidades de interpretação. Os textos deste livro mostram de modo evidente o quanto a questão do (...) “fim” contribui de maneira estratégica para pensar a arte durante o último século e o início deste. O livro conta com textos dos filósofos e filósofas da arte Márcia Ferreira Gonçalves, Gunter Gebauer, Rosa Gabriella Gonçalves, Giorgia Cecchinato, Alessandro Bertinetto, Cliff Hill Kormann, Rodrigo Duarte, Rita Velloso e do filósofo francês David Lapoujade, um dos principais nomes da filosofia na atualidade. (shrink)

Jurisprudence is the prudence of jus, law's consciousness and conscience. Throughout history, when thinkers wanted to contemplate the organisation of society or the relationship between authority and the subject, they turned to law. All great philosophers, from Plato to Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber had either studied the law or had a deep understanding of legal operations. But jurisprudence is also the conscience of law, the exploration of law's justice and of an ideal law or equity at the bar (...) of which state law is always judged. Jurisprudence brings together 'is' and 'ought', the positive and the normative, law and justice. But after a long process of decay, legal theory is today characterised by cognitive and moral poverty. Jurisprudence has become restricted and academically peripheral, a guidebook to technocratic legalism and a legitimation of the existent. Critical jurisprudence returns to the classical tradition of a general philosophy of law and adopts a much wider concept of legality. It is concerned both with posited law and with the law of the law. All legal aspects of the economic, political, emotional and physical modes of production and reproduction of society are part of critical jurisprudence. This widening of scope allows a radical rethinking of the nature of rights, justice, sovereignty and judgement. A political philosophy of justice today must examine the political economy of law; transitions from Empire to nation; ideological and imaginary constructions through which we understand ourselves and relate to others; ways in which gender, race or sexuality create forms of identity that both discipline bodies and offer sites of resistance. Law's complicity with political oppression, violence and racism has to be faced before it is possible to speak of a new beginning for legal thought, which in turn is the necessary precondition for a theory of justice. Critical Jurisprudence offers an ethics of law against the nihilism of power and an aesthetics of existence for the melancholic lawyer. (shrink)

This article examines the relevance of a theory of the multinational state for the evaluation of claims for self-determination and secession. Considerations of ?ethnocultural justice? imply that the recognition of the multinational character of a state ? or the granting of some of the minority nations' demands ? is a matter of justice. If these requirements are not met, secession could be justified. Indeed, if secession needs a just cause (as it has been argued), a failure to build a truly (...) multinational arrangement can be a valid reason for a minority nation to secede. An approach like the one proposed would also contribute to the resolution of some of the key problems of the three main theories of secession and their appeals to nationalism, choice and remedial rights. (shrink)

entry for the Entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007.

Weak filters were introduced by K. Schlechta in the ’90s with the aim of interpreting defaults via a generalized ‘most’ quantifier in first-order logic. They arguably represent the largest class of structures that qualify as a ‘collection of large subsets’ of a given index set |$I$|⁠, in the sense that it is difficult to think of a weaker, but still plausible, definition of the concept. The notion of weak ultrafilter naturally emerges and has been used in epistemic logic and other (...) knowledge representation (KR) applications. We provide a comprehensive exposition of weak filters and ultrafilters, comparing them with their classical counterparts that have found very important applications in logic, set theory and topology. Weak (ultra)filters capture the ‘majorities’ of social choice theory (which coincide with the commonsense understanding of a ‘large subset’) and in that respect, they outperform classical (ultra)filters in their role as ‘collections of large subsets’. Yet, they lack some of the elegant properties of classical (ultra)filters that make them an almost perfect match for logical theories. We investigate the extent to which some important classical results carry through in this new setting, and we focus on genuinely weak filters and genuinely weak ultrafilters. For weak ultrafilters, we proceed to provide concrete examples, answer questions of existence and characterize their construction. The class of weak (ultra)filters represents a genuine contribution of KR to set theory that might be of some interest to set theorists too and we initiate this study by providing a glimpse on natural set-theoretic questions. (shrink)

This study integrates corpus-assisted text analysis with frame semantics to study a social problem. Taking a cognitive-linguistic approach to critical discourse studies, in this article I examine the linguistic construction of minors in a corpus of 489 articles from the Uruguayan newspaper El País in the context of the so-called ‘Criminal Imputability Referendum’. Throughout, I focus on the construal operation of framing and identify a host of discursive patterns via which minors and adolescents are recurrently placed within the semantic frame (...) CRIME, and within this, they profile the frame elements of perpetrators of violent crimes rather than victims. I argue that, in the context of the referendum, these discursive strategies run the risk of facilitating the consolidation of a strong conceptual link whereby youth become readily associated with criminality, and are subservient to the political views of groups supporting a lower cut-off age for criminal responsibility and more stringent punishments. The observations arrived at in this instance set the foundations for a future experimental study testing whether the discursive patterns unearthed here have an effect on how readers conceptualize minors outside the texts. (shrink)

The largest proportion of microRNAs in humans (ca. 40–50%) originated in the phylogenetic grouping defined as primates. The dynamic evolution of this family of non‐coding RNA is further demonstrated by the presence of microRNA unique to the human species. Investigations into the role of microRNA in cancer have until recently mainly focused on the more ancient members of this RNA family that are widely conserved in the animal kingdom. As I describe in this review the evolutionary young lineage and species‐specific (...) microRNA could be important contributors to cancers, especially in particular organs in primates compared to more distantly‐related research models. Elucidating the biological significance of primate and human‐specific microRNA in cancer could have important implications for cancer research and the use of non‐primate animal models. (shrink)

In this paper, we advocate the usage of the family of Heyting-valued modal logics, introduced by M. Fitting, by presenting a simple 3-valued modal language and axiomatizing an interesting 3-valued logic of belief. We give two simple bisimulation relations for the modal language, one that respects non-falsity and one that respects the truth value. The doxastic logic axiomatized, apart from being interesting in its own right for KR applications, it comes with an underlying 3-valued propositional logic which is a syntactic (...) variant of the ‘logic of here-and-there’, whose importance in KR and Logic Programming is well-known, it is endowed from its very inception with a Gentzen-style proof theory from [Fit92] and a completeness theorem from [KNP02], it can be equivalently seen as a logic describing the epistemic agreement of two interrelated agents: a K45 agent who ‘dominates’ an S5 agent, as we show here, its satisfiability problem is NP-complete, i.e. at the lower level one can expect for applied logics. This is the first concrete example of an epistemic logic from Fitting's framework, that has been overlooked hitherto, despite its many attractive characteristics. (shrink)

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