Gianni Vattimo, a leading philosopher of the continental school, has always resisted autobiography. But in this intimate memoir, the voice of Vattimo as thinker, political activist, and human being finds its expression on the page. With Piergiorgio Paterlini, a noted Italian writer and journalist, Vattimo reflects on a lifetime of politics, sexual radicalism, and philosophical exuberance in postwar Italy. Turin, the city where he was born and one of the intellectual capitals of Europe (also the city in which Nietzsche (...) went mad), forms the core of his reminiscences, enhanced by fascinating vignettes of studying under Hans Georg Gadamer, teaching in the United States, serving as a public intellectual and interlocutor of Habermas and Derrida, and working within the European Parliament to unite Europe. Vattimo's status as a left-wing faculty president paradoxically made him a target of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, causing him to flee Turin for his life. Left-wing terrorism did not deter the philosopher from his quest for social progress, however, and in the 1980s, he introduced a daring formulation called "weak thought," which stripped metaphysics, science, religion, and all other absolute systems of their authority. Vattimo then became notorious both for his renewed commitment to the core values of Christianity (he was trained as a Catholic intellectual) and for the Vatican's denunciation of his views. Paterlini weaves his interviews with Vattimo into an utterly candid first-person portrait, creating a riveting text that is destined to become one of the most compelling accounts of homosexuality, history, politics, and philosophical invention in the twentieth century. (shrink)

An important yet often unacknowledged aspect of moral discourse is the phenomenon of moral impossibility, which challenges more widely accepted models of moral discussion and deliberation as a choice among possible options. Starting from observations of the new possibilities of anti immigrant attitudes and hate crimes which have been described by the press as something being “unleashed,” the paper asks what it means for something to enter or not the sphere of possibility in the moral sense, and whether it is (...) ever desirable for something to remain or be pushed back outside the realm of the morally possible. Three forms of moral impossibility are identified: the unconceived, the unthinkable, and moral incapacity. Through the discussion of a stark fictional example of moral impossibility, the paper concludes that while the category of moral impossibility cannot settle disagreement, it sheds light on some of the most fundamental aspects of moral life. (shrink)

In this book, Gianni Vattimo examines the notion of "difference" in scientific knowledge and contemporary mass society and illustrates the importance of Nietzsche and Heidegger in both formulating the concept and exploring its implications for current debates on the nature of modernity.

How do we see the world aright? This question is central to Iris Murdoch’s philosophy as well as to that of her great source of inspiration, Simone Weil. For both of them, not only our action, but the very quality of our being depends on the ability to see things as they are, where vision is both a metaphor for immediate understanding and a literal expression of the requirement to train our perception so as to get rid of illusions. For (...) both, too, the method to achieve this goal is attention. For both, finally, attention requires a dethronement of the self, considered as the source of illusion. In this paper I investigate what moral perception means for each of these philosophers and how it operates through attention and its relationship with the self. I will show that, despite many striking similarities, Murdoch’s project does not equal ‘Weil minus God’, but offers a different concept of the self, a different understanding of its removal, and therefore a different picture of attention and moral perception. In evaluating both views, I will gesture towards a third way represented by Zen Buddhism, which both philosophers variously consider but do not embrace. (shrink)

The phenomenon of moral transformation, though important, has received little attention in virtue ethics. In this paper we propose a virtue-ethical model of moral transformation as character transformation by tracking the development of new identity-defining (‘core’) character traits, their expressions, and their priority structure, through the change in what appears as possible or impossible to the moral agent. We propose that character transformation culminates when what previously appeared as morally possible to the agent now appears impossible, i.e. unconceived and unthinkable, (...) moving through stages of transformation where some possibilities gradually disappear while others open up. While we show an example of moral transformation towards virtue, we allow that such transformation can occur in the opposite direction, hence we make claims about ‘character traits’ rather than virtues of vices. Through the example of former slave-trader Rodrigo’s transformation in the film The Mission, we follow the parallel development of new objects of value and ways of valuing (with respect to a group of indigenous people of South America) with the closing down of the possibility of disrespecting and harming them, to the end-point of transformation, where allowing their capture is for Rodrigo both unconceived and, when conceived, unthinkable. (shrink)

Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy (...) conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings--in technology, empire, and industrialization--are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known work on the weakening of religion, _Hermeneutic Communism_ realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought. (shrink)

What has been the fate of Christianity since Nietzsche's famous announcement of the "death of God"? What is the possibility of religion, specifically Christianity, thriving in our postmodern era? In this provocative new book, Gianni Vattimo, leading Italian philosopher, politician, and framer of the European constitution, addresses these critical questions. When Vattimo was asked by a former teacher if he still believed in God, his reply was, "Well, I believe that I believe." This paradoxical declaration of faith serves as (...) the foundation for a brilliant exposition on Christianity in the new millennium--an age characterized by a deep uncertainty of opinion--and a personal account of how Vattimo himself recovered his faith through Nietzsche and Heidegger. He first argues that secularization is in fact the fulfillment of the central Christian message, and prepares us for a new mode of Christianity. He then explains that Nietzsche's thesis concerns only the "moral god" and leaves room for the emergence of "new gods." Third, Vattimo claims that the postmodern condition of fragmentation, anti-Eurocentrism, and postcolonialism can be usefully understood in light of Joachim of Fiore's thesis concerning the "Spiritual Age" of history. Finally, Vattimo argues for the idea of "weak thought." Because philosophy in the postmetaphysical age can only acknowledge that "all is interpretation," that the "real" is always relative and not the hard and fast "truth" we once thought it to be, contemporary thought must recognize itself and its claims as "weak" as opposed to "strong" foundationalist claims of the metaphysical past. Vattimo concludes that these factors make it possible for religion and God to become a serious topic for philosophy again, and that philosophy should now formally engage religion. (shrink)

As attention, in philosophy, is mainly discussed in the philosophy of mind, its ethical aspects have remained relatively unexplored. One notable exception is Iris Murdoch. Another philosopher, Maur...

If Annette Baier is right that ‘some degree of trust is … the very basis of morality” (Baier 2004, 180) , it is surprising that a philosopher so interested in moral psychology and interpersonal relationships such as Iris Murdoch does not explicitly discuss trust in her work. However, on closer inspection, Murdoch’s proposal of an ethics focused on realism, unselfing and attention crucially depends upon the possibility of trust – trust in reality, and in one’s own capacity for moral vision. (...) Connecting Murdoch's project with feminist philosophy and especially feminist epistemology, and drawing on the philosophy of trust developed by C. Thi Nguyen and Karen Jones, this chapter argues for a vision of 'trust in the world' implicit in Murdoch's work, where trust emerges not in the domain of personal relationships, but in our attitude towards reality, including moral reality, that is not perceived by us as merely something inert. (shrink)

Drawing upon the notion of the uncanny, this article examines my documentary photography concerning the ‘everyday’ indeterminate and potentially ominous spaces around the London transport system following the bombing incidents on the 7th July, 2005. The photographs consist of reframing images found which draw attention to the lingering reminders of terrorism within the cityscape. This paper examines also how issues of representation, race, suspects, victims, protest,defiance and accusations can be evoked in the ficto-critical use of urban documentary photography.

In the August riots in England 2011, web sites provided up-to-date access to bare witness to the unsettling events that conveyed the essence of contemporary war and crisis reporting. These characteristics include events happening in real time, dramatic accounts, continuous coverage and multimedia footage, with also the inclusion of eyewitness stories and images. The rhetoric of war was used and dramatic photographs played a pivotal role in conveying the civil unrest as a ‘war zone.’ Significantly, the local environment becomes the (...) place for potential trauma, but also a space where the spectacle of violence, destruction, as well as community spirit are foregrounded. This article examines the background to the riots and the vernacular of war photography and the cultural landscape civil unrest and urban space. (shrink)

This paper is a reflection on an experiment undertaken during a Medical Ethics lecture delivered to a group of medical students in the UK as part of a project for a programme in Higher Education Practice. The aim of the project, following Paulo Freire’s idea of ‘liberating education,’ was to identify students’ ethical assumptions and biases in relation to a problem of resource allocation in healthcare, and their role in decision-making. The experiment showed the importance placed by medical students on (...) disputed values such as free will, desert, social worth and body image, and highlighted the difficulty and importance of bringing students’ process of moral decision-making to awareness in ethics teaching, in order to a) decrease the role of implicit bias in students’ decision making and b) allow students to decide whether they in fact agree with assumed values and ethical frameworks that influence their thinking. (shrink)

The present paper gives a topological solution to representability problems related to multi-utility, in the field of Decision Theory. Necessary and sufficient topologies for the existence of a semicontinuous and finite Richter–Peleg multi-utility for a preorder are studied. It is well known that, given a preorder on a topological space, if there is a lower semicontinuous Richter–Peleg multi-utility, then the topology of the space must be finer than the Upper topology. However, this condition fails to be sufficient. Instead of search (...) for properties that must be satisfied by the preorder, we study finer topologies which are necessary or/and sufficient for the existence of semicontinuous representations. We prove that Scott topology must be contained in the topology of the space in case there exists a finite lower semicontinuous Richter–Peleg multi-utility. However, the existence of this representation cannot be guaranteed. A sufficient condition is given by means of Alexandroff’s topology, for that, we prove that more order implies less Alexandroff’s topology, as well as the converse. Finally, the paper is implemented with a topological study of the maximal elements. (shrink)

Elizabeth Taylor: The Queen and I is a remarkable collection of Gianni Bozzacchi’s photographs of Elizabeth Taylor, most of them previously unpublished, capturing her as a film star, a woman, and a personal friend.

Was Iris Murdoch a virtue ethicist? At first sight, it would appear that she was not. She does not offer an explicit definition of account of the term ‘virtue’, and there are significant differences between her views and those of standard Aristotelian virtue ethicists. There is no reason, however, to think that the standard Aristotelian view represents the only legitimate form of virtue ethics. In this chapter, I begin by recalling (in section 1) the main commonalities between Murdoch’s criticisms of (...) the prevailing moral theories of her time and those of other first-wave virtue-ethicists. I then highlight (in section 2) some cornerstones of Murdoch’s peculiar approach to morality, which represent the background against which her account of virtue is developed, and I propose to trace these cornerstones back to a more diverse range of influences than the standard version of Aristotelianism. In section 3, I sketch the basics of Murdoch’s account of virtue, and I argue that there are at least three routes to vindicate it as a genuine virtue-ethical approach: the Buddhist, the Kantian and the Socratic-Aristotelian. I explore each of these routes in turn in sections 4, 5, and 6. In conclusion, I argue that the virtue-ethical field would benefit a great deal from the kind of pluralistic account of virtue that Murdoch offers. (shrink)

This is a short piece offering a rarely-mentioned reason for ethical veganism, which applies to cases in which not consuming animal products makes no practical difference to the animals (say, they have been bought by someone else and would be thrown away). The reason for not consuming animal products, regardless of the magnitude of the impact, is that doing so would be a betrayal: a betrayal of the animal who had to endure physical and mental pain, or whose life was (...) untimely ended, for making said ‘product’. This reason for not taking part in the consumption of animals, besides explaining these marginal cases, extends further and in fact contributes to the larger reason for veganism as such. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed analysis of Ilyenkov’s conception of the relationship between the logical and the historical. It posits that Ilyenkov, by overcoming the theoretical impasses of mainstream Soviet Marxism, was the first thinker to recognize the centrality of this relationship in dialectics. Through a brief overview of the official conception of Diamat, I explain that the latter broadly understood the relation of the logical and the historical in a rather superficial way. I then argue that Ilyenkov’s approach to (...) dialectics as the ascent from the abstract to the concrete, combined with his research orientation towards the method of Marx’s Capital and his reevaluation of Hegel’s philosophy led him to a much deeper understanding of the inner unity of the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete and the relation of the logical and the historical. In reconstructing Ilyenkov’s analysis on this matter, I explain how the unfolding of the categories throughout the ascent from the abstract to the concrete is inextricably intertwined with the relation of the logical and the historical. Therefore, the article concludes by arguing that Ilyenkov’s analysis marks a significant advance in the understanding of dialectics in the history of Marxism, and a core aspect of this deeper understanding is his systematic approach to the relationship of the logical and the historical. (shrink)

Econophysics is a branch of economics that applies concepts and methods from physics to the financial markets. This article focuses on the approaches to quantum finance developed by Kirill Ilinski and Belal E. Baaquie to deal with the uncertainty characterizing financial time series. Allegedly, their models rest on a formal analogy between quantum mechanics and finance. In order to evaluate them, we raise the question what is really quantum in quantum econophysics. We then argue that the supposed analogy breaks in (...) an important manner, which is relevant to explain the empirical success of the proposed models. (shrink)

The aim of this critical note is to discuss Heraclitus' use of analogy as a pattern of thought not only with argumentative value but also ontological and epistemological status. Heraclitus' analogy is of two kinds and is expressed in the use of the adverbs ὥσπερ ("as") and ὅκωσπερ ("just as"). The first is used as an explanatory device, while the second denotes the ontological homogeneity of logos. Analogy reveals not only the inherent opposition of logos in each single thing, but (...) also the interdependent common interrelation between things. (shrink)

The populism that is sweeping Latin America seeks, like democracy, to enact the sovereign rule of the people. Nevertheless, democrats and populists diverge over how to establish a just and enduring political order.

Can literature help us in a time of crisis? Yes, in many and unexpected ways, as Simone Weil’s literary work shows. Reading Weil’s unfinished tragedy Venice Saved in the context of her poetry, philosophy and politics, we argue that it is an example of literary work that can engender transformation, for three reasons: its presentation and encouragement of attention to beauty; its tragic tension, forcing a deeper vision of the world; and its use of the poetic word. These elements, we (...) conclude, make literature a prime tool for inner and outer transformation, especially when everything seems to be lost. (shrink)

It is well known that interval orders are particularly interesting in decision theory, since they are reflexive, complete and nontransitive binary relations which may be fully represented by means of two real-valued functions. In this paper, we discuss the existence of a pair of nonnegative, positively homogeneous and semicontinuous real-valued functionals representing an interval order on a real cone in a topological vector space. We recover as a particular case a result concerning the existence of a nonnegative, positively homogeneous and (...) continuous utility functional for a complete preorder on a real cone in a topological vector space. (shrink)

An outstanding reference source to the full span of Murdoch's work, comprising 37 specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of leading scholars. This is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. Divided into five parts, the volume covers the following areas: -/- - A guide to Murdoch's key philosophical texts, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. - Core themes and concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, (...) such as love, moral vision, and attention. - Murdoch's engagement with the history of philosophy, including Plato, Kant, Hegel, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein. - Interdisciplinary connections with art, literature, and religion, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. - Murdoch and contemporary philosophical debates, including feminism, virtue ethics, and metaethics. - The application of Murdoch’s thought to applied ethics, including animal ethics, psychiatric ethics, and the environment. -/- Although recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in Murdoch’s philosophy, The Murdochian Mind is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. As such it will be of great interest to students of philosophy, especially ethics and aesthetics, as well as those in related disciplines such as literature, religion, and gender studies. (shrink)

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the foremost French philosophers of the 20th century; a mystic, activist, and writer whose profound work continues to intrigue and inspire today. -/- Mirror of Obedience collects together Weil's poetry and autobiographical writings translated into English for the first time. It offers a rare glimpse into a more personal and introspective Weil than we usually encounter. She was writing and re-working her poems until the end of her life and in a letter from London (...) to her parents, dated 22 January 1943, she expressed the wish for her verses to appear together in print in chronological order, a wish which this volume honours. -/- Weil was a thinker who wrote with discipline and spareness and cherished the poetic form for its power to compress language and distill meaning. In these poems and literary writings, we see her own efforts to craft poems as essential expressions of thought, bringing into view another aspect of Weil's quest for beauty and truth. (shrink)

This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions (...) and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psychology, and the philosophy of attention. (shrink)

In this paper we use the framework of generalized probabilistic theories to present two sets of basic assumptions, called axioms, for which we show that they lead to the Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics. The key results in this derivation are the co-ordinatization of generalized geometries and a theorem of Solér which characterizes Hilbert spaces among the orthomodular spaces. A generalized Wigner theorem is applied to reduce some of the assumptions of Solér’s theorem to the theory of symmetry in (...) quantum mechanics. Since this reduction is only partial we also point out the remaining open questions. (shrink)

The first book-length philosophical study on the Presocratic influences in Plotinus’ Enneads.

Faced with current urgent calls for more trust in experts, especially in high impact and politically sensitive domains, such as climate science and COVID-19, the complex and problematic nature of public trust in experts and the need for a more critical approach to the topic are easy to overlook. Scepticism – at least in its Humean mitigated form that encourages independent, questioning attitudes – can prove valuable to democratic governance, but stands in opposition to the cognitive dependency entailed by epistemic (...) trust. In this paper, we investigate the tension between the value of mitigated scepticism – understood as the exercise of reason-based doubt in a particular domain – and the need for trust in experts. We offer four arguments in favour of mitigated scepticism: the argument from loss of intellectual autonomy; the argument from democratic deficit; the argument from the normative failures of science; and the argument from past and current injustices. These arguments highlight the tension between the requirements for trust and justified scepticism about the role of experts. One solution, which we reject, is the idea that reliance, rather than trust, is sufficient for the purposes of accommodating experts in policy matters. The solution we endorse is to create a ‘climate of trust’, where questioning experts and expertise is welcomed, but the epistemic trust necessary for action upon information which the public cannot obtain first-hand is enabled and encouraged through structural, institutional, and justice-based measures. (shrink)

Introduction -- The philosophers -- Principles -- Cosmos -- Being -- Soul -- Knowledge -- Ethics -- Conclusion.

We show that modal logics characterized by a class of frames satisfying the insertion property are suitable for Reiter's default logic. We refine the canonical fix point construction defined by Marek, Schwarz and Truszczyński for Reiter's default logic and thus we addrress a new paradigm for nonmonotonic logic. In fact, differently from the construction defined by these authors. we show that suitable modal logics for such a construction must indeed contain K D4. When reflexivity is added to the modal logic (...) used for the fix point construction then we come to the Marek Schwarz and Truszczyński framework for Reiter's default logic. Our framework, in fact, is appropriate also to the family of modal logics in between S4 and S4f. If, instead, reflexivity is dropped, then we show that a new family of modal logics is gained, namely the modal logics in between KD4 and KD4Z. The upper bound can be extended to the modal logic KD4LZ whenever the propositional language taken into account is finite. (shrink)

Early diagnosis of leaf diseases is a fundamental tool in precision agriculture, thanks to its high correlation with food safety and environmental sustainability. It is proven that plant diseases are responsible for serious economic losses every year. The aim of this work is to study an efficient network capable of assisting farmers in recognizing pear leaf symptoms and providing targeted information for rational use of pesticides. The proposed model consists of a multioutput system based on convolutional neural networks. The deep (...) learning approach considers five pretrained CNN architectures, namely, VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet50, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB0, as feature extractors to classify three diseases and six severity levels. Computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the model on the DiaMOS Plant dataset, a self-collected dataset in the field. The results obtained confirm the robustness of the proposed model in automatically extracting the discriminating features of diseased leaves by adopting the multitasking learning paradigm. (shrink)

Among the possible ways of gaining moral knowledge, moral perception figures as a controversial yet fruitful option. If moral perception is possible, moral disagreement is addressed not by appealing to principles but to the process and the objects of perception, and moral progress occurs not through deliberation but by refining one’s perceptual faculties. The possibility of “seeing clearly and justly” is at the heart of Iris Murdoch’s thought, but Murdoch herself does not put forth a systematic argument for this view. (...) In this paper I propose an argument for moral perception based on Murdoch’s philosophy, while engaging with contemporary debates in moral perception. The key idea I take from Murdoch is that perception is conceptually laden, where concepts are understood as ways of grasping the world according to human concerns. Murdoch’s position enables us to solve a difficult tension: explaining the motivating force of perception while maintaining objectivity in ethics. This view of moral perception also constitutes a radical position in the debate, where even the most optimistic defenses appeal to the supervenience of values on facts. If Murdoch is right, however, we perceive complex properties, including values, directly, so that appeal to supervenience becomes unnecessary and some of the grounds for the very distinction between fact and value are put into question. (shrink)

I : PETRARCH'S BRITAIN 1: Piero Boitani: Petrarch and the barbari Britanni II: PETRARCH AND THE SELF 2: Jennifer Petrie: Petrarch solitarius 3: Zygmunt G. Baranski: The Ethics of Ignorance: Petrarch's Epicurus and Averroes and the Structures of the De Sui Ipsius et Aliorum Ignorantia 4: Jonathan Usher: Petrarch's Second Death III: PETRARCH IN DIALOGUE 5: Francesca Galligan: Poets and Heroes in Petrarch's Africa: Classical and Medieval Sources 6: Enrico Santangelo: Petrarch reading Dante: the Ascent of Mont Ventoux 7: John (...) Took: Petrarch and Cino da Pistoia: A Moment in the Pre-history of the Canzoniere IV: PETRARCHISM AND ANTIPETRARCHISM IN ITALY 8: Abigail Brundin: Petrarch and the Italian Reformation 9: Hilary Gatti: Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno 10: Diego Zancani: Renaissance Misogyny and the Rejection of Petrarch 11: Letizia Panizza: Impersonations of Laura in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Italy V: PETRARCHISM: ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH CONNECTIONS 12: Michael Wyatt: Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England 13: Stephen Clucas: Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia and European Petrarchism 14: John Roe: The Comedy of Astrophil: Petrarchan Motifs in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 15: Syrithe Pugh: Sidney, Spenser and Political Petrarchism 16: R. D. S. Jack: Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet VI: PETRARCH AND THE MODERNS: ITALY AND BRITAIN 17: Pamela Williams: Leopardi and Petrarch 18: Ela Tandello: Between Tradition and Transgression: Amelia Rosselli's Petrarch 19: Martin McLaughlin: Nineteenth-century British Biographies of Petrarch 20: Peter Hainsworth: Translating Petrarch. (shrink)