An outstanding question for Hybrid dual process models of reasoning is whether both basic and more complex forms of conditional inference result...

In this Introduction we lay out the context of a ‘Continental philosophy of biology’ and suggest why Georges Canguilhem’s place in such a philosophy is important. There is not one single program for Continental philosophy of biology, but Canguilhem’s vision, which he referred to at one stage as ‘biological philosophy’, is a significant one, located in between the classic holism-reductionism tensions, significantly overlapping with philosophy of medicine, philosophy of technology and other themes moving away from the more common existential and (...) phenomenological motifs of post-war European thought. Chapters examine (among other themes) his relation to Lebensphilosophie, to authors such as Kant, Nietzsche and Marjorie Grene, and to current theoretical biology. (shrink)

Are there any universal entities? Or is the world populated only by particular things? The problem of universals is one of the most fascinating and enduring topics in the history of metaphysics, with roots in ancient and medieval philosophy. This collection of new essays provides an innovative overview of the contemporary debate on universals. Rather than focusing exclusively on the traditional opposition between realism and nominalism, the contributors explore the complexity of the debate and illustrate a broad range of positions (...) within both the realist and the nominalist camps. Realism is viewed through the lens of the distinction between constituent and relational ontologies, while nominalism is reconstructed in light of the controversy over the notion of trope. The result is a fresh picture of contemporary metaphysics, in which traditional strategies of dealing with the problem of universals are both reaffirmed and called into question. (shrink)

In one of his last writings, Life: Experience and Science, Michel Foucault argued that twentieth-century French philosophy could be read as dividing itself into two divergent lines: on the one hand, we have a philosophical stream which takes individual experience as its point of departure, conceiving it as irreducible to science. On the other hand, we have an analysis of knowledge which takes into account the concrete productions of the mind, as are found in science and human practices. In order (...) to account for this division, Foucault opposed epistemologists such as Cavaillès and Canguilhem to phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but, also, and more particularly, he opposed Poincaré to Bergson. The latter was presented by Foucault as being the key-figure of the ?philosophy of experience? at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fifteen years later, in his Deleuze and in the Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou again uses this dual structure in his interpretation of the past hundred years of French thought. He employs a series of oppositional couples: himself and Deleuze, Lautmann and Sartre, and, finally, Brunschvicg and Bergson. On the one hand a ?mathematical Platonism? and on the other a ?philosophy of vital interiority.? This Manichean reading of philosophy, and the strategic use of the figure of Bergson has, itself, a long tradition. It was also proposed by Althusser who, following Bachelard, opposed his standpoint to any form of ?empiricism.? Althusser developed his thought from a tradition of Marxist thinkers and ideologists, which included Politzer's and Nizan's critique of bourgeois philosophy and, even before that, neo-Kantians such as the philosophers of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. The aim of this essay is to deconstruct and to put into its precise context of production this series of genealogies which entails the mobilization of Bergsonism and of the name ?Bergson.? By doing so, I hope to weight the importance of Bergsonism in twentieth-century French philosophy, in both its ?positive? and its ?negative? aspect. The essay will proceed regressively, taking into account figures such as Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze, Foucault, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, but also Polizer, Brunschvicg and Alain. The conclusion of the essay is an attempt at reading the ?Bergson renaissance? in the light of new discoveries in genetics and the cognitive sciences and to tie it to the renewal of studies in the history of French philosophy. (shrink)

_The Decision Between Us _combines an inventive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy with queer theoretical concerns to argue that while scenes of intimacy are spaces of sharing, they are also spaces of separation. John Paul Ricco shows that this tension informs our efforts to coexist ethically and politically, an experience of sharing and separation that informs any decision. Using this incongruous relation of intimate separation, Ricco goes on to propose that “decision” is as much an aesthetic as it is (...) an ethical construct, and one that is always defined in terms of our relations to loss, absence, departure, and death. Laying out this theory of “unbecoming community” in modern and contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, and calling our attention to such things as blank sheets of paper, images of unmade beds, and the spaces around bodies, _The Decision Between Us _opens in 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and Roland Barthes published _Writing Degree Zero_, then moves to 1980 and the “neutral mourning” of Barthes’ _Camera Lucida_, and ends in the early 1990s with installations by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Offering surprising new considerations of these and other seminal works of art and theory by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Catherine Breillat, _The Decision Between Us_ is a highly original and unusually imaginative exploration of the spaces between us, arousing and evoking an infinite and profound sense of sharing in scenes of passionate, erotic pleasure as well as deep loss and mourning. (shrink)

The attraction of a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot-such feelings permeate our lives, yet we usually dismiss them as insubstantial or meaningless. With The Logic of the Lure, John Paul Ricco argues that it is precisely such fleeting, erotic, and even perverse experiences that will help us create a truly queer notion of ethics and aesthetics, one that recasts sociality and sexuality, place and finitude in ways suggested by the anonymity and itinerant lures of cruising. Shifting our attention (...) from artworks to the work that art does, from subjectivity to becoming, and from static space to taking place, Ricco considers a variety of issues, including the work of Doug Ischar, Tom Burr, and Derek Jarman and the minor architecture of sex clubs, public restrooms, and alleyways. (shrink)

In the literature there are two well-established but opposite readings of Arendt: as an agonistic theorist and as a deliberative one. In between these two positions a smaller number of scholars have argued that in Arendt these two dimensions can to a large extent be reconciled. This paper follows this third path but tries to bring it one step further. In particular, it defends the idea that those scholars who have proposed this third reading of Arendt have fallen short of (...) revealing the degree to which deliberation and agonism are, for her, interwoven. Through an original reading of Arendt’s views on judgment, persuasion, distinction and Eichmann’s banality, the paper clarifies why, for her, agonism and deliberation are not only compatible but actually mutually dependent. In other words, it clarifies why she believes that there can be no deliberation without agonism and no agonism without deliberation. (shrink)

The present study explored several dispositional factors associated with individual differences in lay adult’s interpretation of when an arguer is, or is not, committed to a statement. College students were presented with several two-person arguments in which the proponent of a thesis conceded a key point in the last turn. Participants were then asked to indicate the extent to which that concession implied a change in the proponent’s attitude toward any of the previous statements in the argument. Participants designated as (...) ‘liberal’ used the concession to infer substantial change in commitment to earlier statements in the argument. A group designated as ‘conservative’ were reluctant to make any such inferences. A discriminant analysis indicated that variables assessing participants’ attitudes toward argument as well as their cognitive and communication styles jointly predicted their liberal or conservative status. The discriminant function and follow-up group comparisons indicated that liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in argument. This included a greater tendency to use argument as a source of knowledge. Liberals also employed a more sophisticated message design logic than conservatives on a communication task. The groups did not clearly differ with respect to participants’ implicit theory of argument, though trends were present that merit attention in future research. Implications of these findings for future research on lay interpretations of commitment are discussed. (shrink)

Coherent-ambiguity aversion is defined within the smooth-ambiguity model as the combination of choice-ambiguity and value-ambiguity aversion. Five ambiguous decision tasks are analyzed theoretically, where an individual faces two-stage lotteries with binomial, uniform, or unknown second-order probabilities. Theoretical predictions are then tested through a 10-task experiment. In tasks 1–5, risk aversion is elicited through both a portfolio choice method and a BDM mechanism. In tasks 6–10, choice-ambiguity aversion is elicited through the portfolio choice method, while value-ambiguity aversion comes about through the (...) BDM mechanism. The behavior of over 75 % of classified subjects is in line with the KMM model in all tasks 6–10, independent of their degree of risk aversion. Furthermore, the percentage of coherent-ambiguity-averse subjects is lower in the binomial than in the uniform and in the unknown treatments, with only the latter difference being significant. The most part of coherent-ambiguity-loving subjects show a high risk aversion. (shrink)

Notwithstanding the recent prominence of the term “problem” in the humanities, few scholars have analysed its history. This essay tries to partially fill that lack, principally covering the period from late modernity through to the 1960s, in order to understand the role that the term plays in “Continental” philosophy, with special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze. This analysis focuses on the strategies employed by different agents to define “philosophical” problems, or “philosophical” ways of posing problems. The term, originally (...) used in antiquity by knowledge-producers located in an autonomous position, implied an idea of cognition oscillating between production and reproduction. Once the term escaped the context of geometry, it was involved in symbolic struggles that radicalized during modernity. The Kantians placed “philosophy” in a supposedly neutral position of science treating “the problem of all the problems” and invented a new genre, the “history of philosophy,” focusing on the analysis of “philosophical problems.” This approach had great institutional success in the German and French universities and clashed, during the twentieth century, with another usage of philosophy as a practice of “dissolution of problems,” developed in the United Kingdom and the Austro-Habsburg Empire. (shrink)

We analyze the results from three different risk attitude elicitation methods. First, the broadly used test by Holt and Laury, HL, second, the lottery-panel task by Sabater-Grande and Georgantzis, SG, and third, responses to a survey question on self-assessment of general attitude towards risk. The first and the second task are implemented with real monetary incentives, while the third concerns all domains in life in general. Like in previous studies, the correlation of decisions across tasks is low and usually statistically (...) non-significant. However, when we consider only subjects whose behavior across the panels of the SG task is compatible with constant relative risk aversion, the correlation between HL and self-assessed risk attitude becomes significant. Furthermore, the correlation between HL and SG also increases for CRRA-compatible subjects, although it remains statistically non-significant. (shrink)

In this paper Giuseppe Bianco analyzes the ideological and epistemological coordinates and the space of possibilities proper to the cluster of philosophy students of which Tournier was part between 1943 and 1948; to do so he reconstructs their evolution in a context dominated by the currents of Neo-Scholasticism, Personalism, phenomenology, Marxism, and Existentialism. Finally, he focuses on the importance of Jean-Paul Sartre for these young people, underlining their particular interpretation of his work.

Artefacts do not always do what they are supposed to, due to a variety of reasons, including manufacturing problems, poor maintenance, and normal wear-and-tear. Since software is an artefact, it should be subject to malfunctioning in the same sense in which other artefacts can malfunction. Yet, whether software is on a par with other artefacts when it comes to malfunctioning crucially depends on the abstraction used in the analysis. We distinguish between “negative” and “positive” notions of malfunction. A negative malfunction, (...) or dysfunction, occurs when an artefact token either does not or cannot do what it is supposed to. A positive malfunction, or misfunction, occurs when an artefact token may do what is supposed to but, at least occasionally, it also yields some unintended and undesirable effects. We argue that software, understood as type, may misfunction in some limited sense, but cannot dysfunction. Accordingly, one should distinguish software from other technical artefacts, in view of their design that makes dysfunction impossible for the former, while possible for the latter. (shrink)

Even more than for other treatments, great importance must be given to informed consent in the case of electroconvulsive therapy. In a percentage of cases, the symbolic connotation of the treatment, even if mostly and intrinsically negative, may actually be a determining factor in the patient’s motives for giving consent. On an ethical and medicolegal level, the most critical point is that concerning consent to the treatment by a psychotic subject with a severely compromised ability to comprehend the nature and (...) objective of the proposed therapy, but who nonetheless expresses his consent, for reasons derived from delusional thoughts. In fact, this situation necessarily brings to light the contradiction between an explicit expression of consent, a necessary formality for the commencement of therapy, and the validity of this consent, which may be severely compromised due to the patient’s inability to comprehend reality and therefore to accept the proposal of treatment, which is intrinsic to this reality. With the use of an electric current, the symbolic experience associated with anaesthesia, and the connection to convulsions, ECT enters the collective consciousness. In relation to this, ECT is symbolic of these three factors and hooks on to the thoughts, fears, feelings and expectations of delusional patients. These are often exemplified in the violent intervention of the persecutor in the patient with schizophrenia, the expected punishment for the ’error’ committed for which the depressed patient blames himself and the social repression of the maniacal patient’s affirmation of his inflated self-esteem. (shrink)

This article will attempt to show that from the beginning of the letter of Eusebius of Nicodemia to Paulinus of Tyre, the meaning of ὁμοούσιος should be sought in the opposition on the part of the Council of Nicea to the divisive doctrine of hypostases by Arius and his followers. The assertion of the similarity or identity of nature or ousia between the Father and the Son that ὁμοούσιος suggests is traceable to the teaching of Alexander of Alexandria, but also (...) of Eusthatius of Antioch, so that it could be thought that in Nicea a convergence between the two major opponents of Arius could have taken place, in the same way in which it had occurred over the Antiochene formula of 325. Analysis of the doctrine of ὁμοούσιος by Athanasius confirms that the term was opposed to the divisive interpretation of the hypostases within Arianism. The second part of the article, takes into consideration the study on the interpretation of the Nicene ὁμοούσιος proposed by P. F. Beatrice. The Author argues that Beatrice’s thesis, which attempts to trace the introduction of the term in the Nicene Creed back exclusively to Constantine, with the agreement of Eusebius of Caesarea, is not backed by the documentation at our disposal. (shrink)

This study intends to show how the essential elements in the debate over the divinity of the Son provoked by Arianism are already present within the Alessandrian Church during the first decades of the 3rd century. From the works of Origen it becomes apparent that his teaching on the eternity of the Logos intends to oppose those who asserted a temporal beginning thus separating the Logos from the divinity of the Father, which allows us to define them as radical supporters (...) of the theology of the Logos. Against this doctrine, there is an identified opposition which probably utilized the term ὁμοούσιος to indicate to the contrary the divinity of the Son; nevertheless Origen, while proposing that the Son is generated from the ousia of the Father, does not share this teaching because in his theology the Son remains subordinate to the Father. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859–1940), the most prominent member of nineteenth-century French spiritualism, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as a practice which consists in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In this article, I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative intellectual practice was the (...) result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existent spiritualist framework, between, on the one hand, neo-Kantianism and, on the other hand, evolutionism which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging social sciences. Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

Throughout his career Aquinas held to the Avicennian doctrine that the nature or essence of sensible substances is somehow indifferent. According to Aquinas's version of this well-known doctrine an essence as such posssesses only those characteristics which are specified in its definition. The essence of a human being, for instance, possesses as such animality and rationality and nothing else. On this view, all the other characteristics and in particular general properties like being one or many, universal or particular, do not (...) belong to essence as such, but are attributed to it only in so far as it enjoys a particular mode of existence. Essence, for instance, is in itself neither universal nor particular, but is universal in so far as it exists in the intellect and particular in its extra-mental existence in different individuals. Although Aquinas is entirely consistent all through his career in maintaining that essence as such is neither universal nor particular, there is a point of viw from which the essence of a sensible substance can be regarded as universal or common, namely the point of view of inviduation. (shrink)

The moving spotlight account (MS) is a view that combines an eternalist ontology and an A-theoretic metaphysics. The intuition underlying MS is that the present time is somehow privileged and experientially vivid, as if it were illuminated by a moving spotlight. According to MS-theorists, a key reason to prefer MS to B-theoretic eternalism is that our experience of time supports it. We argue that this is false. To this end, we formulate a new family of positions in the philosophy of (...) time, which differ from MS in that, intuitively, they admit a plurality of moving spotlights. We argue that these ‘deviant’ variants of MS cannot be dismissed as conceptually incoherent, and that they are as well-supported by our experience as is MS. One of these variants, however, is consistent with the B-theory. Thus, if our experience of time supports MS, then it supports the B-theory as well. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article cherche à éclairer l’élection de Martial Gueroult (1891-1976) à la chaire d’Histoire et technologie des systèmes philosophiques en 1951, et, indirectement, le succès de son approche « structurale » de l’histoire de la philosophie. Ceux qui occupaient des rôles clés dans la gestion de l’économie disciplinaire des sciences humaines ne devaient pas contredire dans leur travaux les axiomes qui avaient réglé la pratique de l’histoire de la philosophie depuis le début du XIXe siècle tout en faisant montre (...) d’innovation dans ce champ. Dans un premier temps nous résumons la méthode historiographique proposée par Gueroult ; un deuxième temps l’inscrit dans une tradition d’historiographie de la philosophie ; le troisième temps situe sommairement la pratique de l’histoire de la philosophie au Collège de France et à la Sorbonne ; dans de quatrième et cinquième temps nous décrivons les rapporteurs et les candidats lors de l’élection au Collège de France, et les pièces pertinentes ; enfin nous considérons les stratégies adoptées pendant la campagne qui ont pu déterminer le résultat de l’élection. (shrink)

Computing, today more than ever before, is a multi-faceted discipline which collates several methodologies, areas of interest, and approaches: mathematics, engineering, programming, and applications. Given its enormous impact on everyday life, it is essential that its debated origins are understood, and that its different foundations are explained. On the Foundations of Computing offers a comprehensive and critical overview of the birth and evolution of computing, and it presents some of the most important technical results and philosophical problems of the discipline, (...) combining both historical and systematic analyses. -/- The debates this text surveys are among the latest and most urgent ones: the crisis of foundations in mathematics and the birth of the decision problem, the nature of algorithms, the debates on computational artefacts and malfunctioning, and the analysis of computational experiments. By covering these topics, On the Foundations of Computing provides a much-needed resource to contextualize these foundational issues. -/- For practitioners, researchers, and students alike, a historical and philosophical approach such as what this volume offers becomes essential to understand the past of the discipline and to figure out the challenges of its future. (shrink)

Open futurism is the indeterministic position according to which the future is ‘open’, i.e., there is now no fact of the matter as to what future contingent events will actually obtain. Many open futurists hold a branching conception of time, in which a variety of possible futures exist. This paper introduces two challenges to branching-time open futurism, which are similar in spirit to a challenge posed by Fine to tense realism. The paper argues that, to address the new challenges, open (...) futurists must adopt an objective, non-perspectival notion of actuality and subscribe to an A-theoretic, dynamic conception of reality. Moreover, given a natural understanding of “actual future”, it is perfectly sensible for open futurists to hold that a unique, objectively actual future exists, contrary to a common assumption in the current debate. The paper also contends that recognising the existence of a unique actual future helps open futurists to avoid potential misconceptions. (shrink)

The paper examines Aquinas’s understanding of purely mental objects, i.e. things that have no existence outside the mind but only therein. According to the traditional story, Aquinas’s treatment of purely mental objects is mainly driven by semantic concerns and in particular by the need to explain the reference of terms denoting inexistent objects. The paper tries to counterbalance the traditional picture by showing how inexistent objects can be accommodated within Aquinas’s ontology. More particularly, Aquinas distinguishes different kinds of inexistent objects (...) on the basis of their different extra-mental ground: privations and negations, possible objects and impossible ones. (shrink)

This paper explores taste fragmentalism, a novel approach to matters of taste and faultless disagreement. The view is inspired by Kit Fine’s fragmentalism about time, according to which the temporal dimension can be constituted—in an absolute manner—by states that are pairwise incompatible, provided that they do not obtain together. In the present paper, we will apply this metaphysical framework to taste states. In our proposal, two incompatible taste states (such as the state of rhubarb’s being tasty and the state of (...) rhubarb’s being distasteful) can both constitute reality in an absolute manner, although no agent can have joint access to both states. We will then develop a formalised version of our view by means of an exact truthmaker semantics for taste assertions. Within this framework—we argue—our linguistic and inferential practices concerning cases of faultless disagreement are elegantly vindicated, thus suggesting that taste fragmentalism is worth of further consideration. (shrink)

CHAPTER Structure and function In physical systems made by a large number of basic constituents one can observe collective properties which find their ...

Adriana Zarri, teóloga y eremita italiana, vivió profunda y activamente el contexto eclesial posterior al Concilio Vaticano II. Entre los aspectos distintivos de su pensamiento y su estilo de vida se destaca una profunda relación con la naturaleza. Es su “espiritualidad del jardín”, que nació de su experiencia en los eremitorios que habitó. Para Zarri, la hierba, las flores y los frutos del huerto son medios de comunicación con Dios y formas de conocerlo más profundamente. De esta conexión con los (...) elementos naturales surgen diversas formas de oración, que se convierten en vehículos de su pensamiento teológico. La sistematización de estos contenidos se entrelaza con Laudato si', para resaltar el carácter profético de su pensamiento. (shrink)

Accidents involving autonomous vehicles raise difficult ethical dilemmas and legal issues. It has been argued that self-driving cars should be programmed to kill, that is, they should be equipped with pre-programmed approaches to the choice of what lives to sacrifice when losses are inevitable. Here we shall explore a different approach, namely, giving the user/passenger the task of deciding what ethical approach should be taken by AVs in unavoidable accident scenarios. We thus assume that AVs are equipped with what we (...) call an “Ethical Knob”, a device enabling passengers to ethically customise their AVs, namely, to choose between different settings corresponding to different moral approaches or principles. Accordingly, AVs would be entrusted with implementing users’ ethical choices, while manufacturers/programmers would be tasked with enabling the user’s choice and ensuring implementation by the AV. (shrink)

This book explores the significance of rhetoric from the perspective of its complex relationship with philosophy. It demonstrates how this relationship gives expression to a basic tension at the core of politics: that between the contingency of its happening and the transcendence toward which it strives. The first part of the study proposes a reassessment of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric, as it was discussed by Plato, Aristotle, and above all Cicero and Quintilian, who ambitiously attempted to bring (...) them together creating an ideal that is at the roots of the humanist tradition. It then moves to twentieth-century political theory and shows how the questions that emerge from that quarrel still strongly resonate in the works of key thinkers such as H. Arendt, L. Strauss, and R. Rorty. The volume thus offers an original contribution that locates itself at the intersection of politics, rhetoric, and philosophy. (shrink)

The ‘constructivist turn’ in political representation literature has clarified that representation is crucial in forging identities – through the creation of ideological and symbolic representations that mobilize and coalesce otherwise scattered and undefined social forces – and thus also why it is essentially an interpretative and performative activity. In this article I argue that, as a consequence of this emphasis on interpretation and performativity, this approach makes clear why the ethos of representatives is important in representation. To prove this, I (...) employ some insights from rhetoric. Rhetorical persuasion and democratic representation, indeed, call for a similar kind of judgment, as they both need to mediate between opposing exigencies: rhetoric between attentiveness to the specificity of the audience and the creation of new beliefs, and representation between being responsive to specific interests and giving them a new articulation. Mediating this tension requires an exercise of judgment that, being directed toward the future, inevitably introduces uncertainty into the relation. This is why both in rhetoric and representation the ethos is an essential element. However, as I argue in the conclusion, the personal qualities that should be considered relevant here are above political qualities, rather than technical or moral ones. (shrink)

El cotejo de L. Zea con J. Ortega y Gasset es fundamental para com- prender cómo el circunstancialismo y el perspectivismo historicista del filósofo madrileño contribuyeron a que se constituyera la iden- tidad hispanoamericana. Zea, discípulo de J. Gaos, se inspira en la tradición filosófica mexicana de Caso, Vasconcelos, Ramos, y va madurando su propia toma de conciencia acerca de la condición hispanoamericana. Así, se abre dialécticamente a la filosofía euro- pea, supera el nacionalismo ideológico mexicano de principios de mil (...) novecientos y llega hasta la filosofía de la liberación. De esta manera, la filosofía de Zea se adueña de las ideas de un humanismo cosmopolita en cuyo interior los individuos, los pueblos y las naciones toman conciencia de sus peculiaridades y saben abrirse a un pensamiento universal. (shrink)