Great progress to digitize the world’s available Biodiversity and Biogeography data have been made recently, but managing data from many different providers and research domains still remains a challenge. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in Biodiversity sciences suggests that existing standards, such as the Darwin Core terminology, are inadequate for describing Biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. As a contribution to fill this gap, we present an ontology-based system, called BiGe-Onto, (...) designed to manage data together from Biodiversity and Biogeography. As data sources, we use two internationally recognized repositories: the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Ocean Biogeographic Information System. BiGe-Onto system is composed of BiGe-Onto Architecture a conceptual model called BiGe-Onto specified in OntoUML, an operational version of BiGe-Onto encoded in OWL 2, and an integrated dataset for its exploitation through a SPARQL endpoint. We will show use cases that allow researchers to answer questions that manage information from both domains. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente trabajo analiza si los Sistemas de apoyo a la decisión (DSSs) y otros asistentes para su uso, como las Reflection machines o los Personal Assistants that Learn (PAL), contribuyen de hecho a una mejora cognitiva, como habitualmente se tiende a asumir. Es decir, se examina si su potencial para expandir e impulsar la acción de las facultades cognoscitivas se ve efectivamente actualizado y, en consecuencia, si sirven para reafirmar el sentido capacitante de la IA y la extensión (...) de la agencia del sujeto a través de ella. Para ello, se pone de manifiesto que el diseño y aplicación de estos sistemas están mediados por una comprensión del conocimiento que actúa a modo de marco que limita sus posibilidades de mejorar las capacidades cognoscitivas humanas. Se analizan las condiciones en que la mejora cognitiva es posible a través del uso de estos sistemas, que remiten a una aproximación integradora que no tiene en cuenta solo el factor tecnológico, sino que repara en cómo, en su uso, intervienen factores gnoseológicos, así como psicológicos y sociológicos, que median en la capacidad efectiva de estos sistemas de ampliar las facultades de conocimiento, y de los que las tecnologías se sirven para ejercer su influencia. Abstract: The present article questions whether Decision Support Systems (DSSs) and other assistants for their use, such as Reflection machines or Personal Assistants that Learn (PAL), do in fact contribute to cognitive enhancement, as it is usually taken for granted. In other words, it is analysed whether their potential to effectively expand or augment cognitive capacities is actualised and, therefore, if the capabilities and the agency of the person appear in fact extended through artificial intelligence. For that purpose, it is highlighted that the design and implementation of AI systems are dependent on a certain understanding of human knowledge that acts as a framework that limits their actual capacity to enhance the cognitive faculties of the mind. The conditions under which this cognitive enhancement is possible through these systems are analysed and require an integrative approach that not only takes technology into account but realises that, in its use, gnoseological, as well as psychological and sociological factors are involved and mediate in the actual capacity of these systems to extend cognitive functions. These factors are also crucial for these technologies to exert their influence. (shrink)

La influencia de Hipócrates como padre de la Medicina es patente, sobre todo a través del “Juramento hipocrático” que ha iluminado el ejercicio de la profesión desde hace veinte cinco siglos. Las versiones modernas de estos postulados, constituyen el marco ético y deontológico de esta ciencia, que también es arte. La bioética surge para enriquecer esa práctica, también cuando la investigación científica utiliza seres humanos, y propone la dignificación de la persona y el respeto a los derechos humanos universales. Ante (...) la aceleración del desarrollo técnico y científico es imprescindible reforzar la reflexión ética con el fin de que la ciencia permanezca al servicio del hombre y no en detrimento suyo. De ahí la necesidad de un “Juramento del bioeticista”. (shrink)

Whereas intersectionality presents a fruitful framework for theoretical and empirical research, some of its fundamental features present great confusion. The term ‘intersectionality’ and its metaphor of the crossroads seem to reproduce what it aims to avoid: conceiving categories as separate. Despite the attempts for developing new metaphors that illustrate the mutual constitution relation among categories, gender, race or class keep being imagined as discrete units that intersect, mix or combine. Here we identify two main problems in metaphors: the lack of (...) differentiation between positions and effects and the problem of reification. We then present a new metaphor that overcomes these two problems: a basket of apples. We argue that considering social positions as the diverse properties of different apples avoids reification by considering categories as properties and not as objects themselves, and at the same time it allows us to think about the effects dimension from a plural and contextual approach. With this shift, we propose a reframing of the discussion in debates on intersectionality theory on the relation among categories, their in/separability and fragmentation. (shrink)

The present article explores the epistemological conditions of intercultural encounters. Based on an analysis of Raimon Panikkar's intercultural hermeneutics, we argue that intercultural encounters cannot take place adequately when they are based on purely rhetorical rationality or rational persuasion. We point to the limitations of grounding intercultural relationships on dialectical dialogue and, therefore, of educating them by simply enhancing discursive capacities. We underline the need for other epistemological conditions that should be fostered in order to move forward on the path (...) to actual interculturality. These can be summarised by what Panikkar calls "conversion", an epistemic framework of love—personal relationality, that goes beyond objectifying rationality—for the communication between (culturally different) subjects. We conclude that the culturally diverse human condition refers to being encountered and being understood on a level that is not merely logical or linguistic. What can be understood of a person with another cultural background goes beyond what can be comprehended by logical rationality or captured by veritative judgements about objects. In other words, in intercultural encounters, ontological, rather than merely logical truth is at stake, which means that the presence of the other can lead to experiences of meaning: it reveals a being that calls for conversion. Conversion demands an ontic action on the part of the subject, not merely an epistemological one, that cancels the violence that rational persuasion might entail. (shrink)

What is mathematics about? And if it is about some sort of mathematical reality, how can we have access to it? This is the problem raised by Plato, which still today is the subject of lively philosophical disputes. This book traces the history of the problem, from its origins to its contemporary treatment. It discusses the answers given by Aristotle, Proclus and Kant, through Frege's and Russell's versions of logicism, Hilbert's formalism, Gödel's platonism, up to the the current debate on (...) Benacerraf's dilemma and the indispensability argument. Through the considerations of themes in the philosophy of language, ontology, and the philosophy of science, the book aims at offering an historically-informed introduction to the philosophy of mathematics, approached through the lenses of its most fundamental problem. (shrink)

The classification of medical interventions as either invasive or non-invasive is commonly regarded to be morally important. On the most commonly endorsed account of invasiveness, a medical intervention is invasive if and only if it involves either breaking the skin (‘incision’) or inserting an object into the body (‘insertion’). Building on recent discussions of the concept of invasiveness, we show that this standard account fails to capture three aspects of existing usage of the concept of invasiveness in relation to medical (...) interventions—namely, (1) usage implying that invasiveness comes in degrees, (2) that the invasiveness of an intervention can depend on the characteristics of the salient alternative interventions, and (3) that medical interventions can be invasive in non-physical ways. We then offer the beginnings of a revised account that, we argue, is able to capture a wider range of existing usage. Central to our account is a distinction between two properties: basic invasiveness and threshold invasiveness. We end by assessing what the standard account gets right, and what more needs to be done to complete our schematic account. (shrink)

AI-based technologies are increasingly pervasive in a number of contexts. Our affective and emotional life makes no exception. In this article, we analyze one way in which AI-based technologies can affect them. In particular, our investigation will focus on affective artificial agents, namely AI-powered software or robotic agents designed to interact with us in affectively salient ways. We build upon the existing literature on affective artifacts with the aim of providing an original analysis of affective artificial agents and their distinctive (...) features. We argue that, unlike comparatively low-tech affective artifacts, affective artificial agents display a specific form of agency, which prevents them from being perceived by their users as extensions of their selves. In addition to this, we claim that their functioning crucially depends on the simulation of human-like emotion-driven behavior and requires a distinctive form of transparency—we call it emotional transparency—that might give rise to ethical and normative tensions. (shrink)

This text aims to rethink educational activity inspired by the thought of the philosopher Ignacio Ellacuría, in what we have synthesised as a pedagogy of poverty. This should be understood as a pedagogy that, in the neoliberal context of Western societies, takes poverty as its motor—its efficient cause—and as its essence or fundamental structure—its formal cause –, in the duality of dimensions of its genitive. It is concretised in what is presented as Problem-Based Service-Learning (PB-SL). Through specific pedagogical guidelines for (...) implementing this methodology, this study indicates how the teaching action can show the learner what is immediate, what is not constructed, what consciousness does not establish but rather encounters: reality—weak, limited, imperfect, needy; in short, poor—as a problem and, in its deficiency and insufficiency, as a task towards which the subject has a responsibility. This reveals the fundamental anthropological structure to the learner: its intrinsic relational character—its reality as a being-in-a-suffering-world, who lives-with and lives-to save the needy who share its humanity. It is then possible to perceive the scale of the ultimate aim of PB-SL: the need to create the social conditions for a praxis that enables a dignification of reality. (shrink)

Resumen La cuestión de la relación entre ciencia y fe ha adquirido nuevo vigor en los comienzos del siglo, cuando, tras años de especialización y separación fragmentaria de los saberes, que conducían a la esquizofrenia cultural del cognoscente, se empieza a percibir de manera cada vez más nítida la necesidad de su integración para dar cuenta de la multidimensionalidad de lo real. Tras poner de manifiesto la aparente tensión entre cultura y trascendencia como realidades que conviven en el ser humano, (...) se rastrea la posibilidad que Panikkar propone de una ciencia que, sin eliminarse a sí misma, sin cancelar la mediación que ella misma constituye ni despojarse de sus maneras y métodos propios, sin siquiera abandonar el plano de la pura inmanencia, reconoce en él lo divino: la infinita trascendencia del cuerpo -su carácter siempre abierto al misterio- y su infinita inmanencia -su profundidad insondable-. Esto tiene lugar en la forma concreta que el autor propone de una teofisica, de modo que con ella no ocurre algo semejante a lo que Wittgenstein indica respecto a la escalera de la que, una vez arriba -lograda la significación de lo Absoluto- puedo desprenderme, sino que, en ella, la escalera -la dimensión física- se conserva y se supera.The issue of the relationship between science and faith has acquired greater relevance since the beginning of the century, time in which, after years of specialization and fragmentation of human knowledge, which have led to a cultural schizophrenia of the knower, there is a growing awareness of the need to integrate both to account for a multidimensional reality. After noticing the apparent tension between culture and the divine as realities that coexist in human beings, it is examined Panikkar’s proposal of a science that, without eliminating itself, without cancelling the mediation that it constitutes, nor divesting itself from its own methods, not even without abandoning immanence, recognizes in itself the divine: the infinite transcendence of the body -its character always open to mystery- and its infinite immanence -its unfathomable depth-. This corresponds to the author’s theophysics, so that, in it, it does not happen something similar to what Wittgenstein indicates about the ladder of which one can get rid once up -when the significance of the divine has been attained-, but in it the ladder -the physical dimension- is preserved and surpassed. (shrink)

I discuss Clark’s predictive processing/extended mind hybrid, diagnosing a problem: Clark’s hybrid suggests that, when we use them, we pay attention to mind-extending external resources. This clashes with a commonly accepted necessary condition of cognitive extension; namely, that mind-extending resources must be phenomenally transparent when used. I then propose a solution to this problem claiming that the phenomenal transparency condition should be rejected. To do so, I put forth a parity argument to the effect that phenomenal transparency cannot be a (...) necessary condition on cognitive extension: roughly, since internal cognitive resources can fail to be transparent when used, by parity, external resources can fail to be phenomenally transparent too. Further, I argue that phenomenal transparency is not even a reliable indicator of cognitive extension; hence its absence should not be considered a problem for Clark’s extended mind-predictive processing hybrid. Lastly, I consider and allay a number of worries my proposal might raise, and conclude the paper. (shrink)

Whereas intersectionality presents a fruitful framework for theoretical and empirical research, some of its fundamental features present great confusion. The term ‘intersectionality’ and its metaphor of the crossroads seem to reproduce what it aims to avoid: conceiving categories as separate. Despite the attempts for developing new metaphors that illustrate the mutual constitution relation among categories, gender, race or class keep being imagined as discrete units that intersect, mix or combine. Here we identify two main problems in metaphors: the lack of (...) differentiation between positions and effects and the problem of reification. We then present a new metaphor that overcomes these two problems: a basket of apples. We argue that considering social positions as the diverse properties of different apples avoids reification by considering categories as properties and not as objects themselves, and at the same time it allows us to think about the effects dimension from a plural and contextual approach. With this shift, we propose a reframing of the discussion in debates on intersectionality theory on the relation among categories, their in/separability and fragmentation. (shrink)

Resumen El presente artículo plantea la necesidad de un acercamiento histórico a los textos filosóficos tomando como ejemplo el caso de la propuesta ética de David Hume. Se muestra el interés de Hume por insertarse en el diálogo intelectual de su época y su propósito de integrar el método científico en las ciencias morales y cómo la crítica que hace a la razón debe ser comprendida bajo esta luz. Para ello se menciona el ambiente intelectual de la época y las (...) posturas en conflicto en el debate filosófico del siglo XVIII: el escepticismo-relativista, el racionalismo exagerado y el sentimentalismo ingenuo, señalando que, en el fondo, Hume no puede ser excluido totalmente de ninguna de estas posturas pero tampoco encasillado en alguna de ellas.This article raises the need of a historical approach to philosophical texts taking as an example the case of David Hume’s ethics proposal. It shows Hume`s interest in participating actively in the intellectual dialogue of his time and his intention to integrate the scientific method into the moral sciences and how his critique of reason must be understood in this light. To do this, we quickly mention the intellectual atmosphere of the time and the positions in conflict in the philosophical debate of the 18th Century: relativistic skepticism, radical rationalism and naive sentimentality, noting that, deep down, Hume cannot be excluded completely from any of these positions but not typecast in any of them. (shrink)

In the last decades it has become clear that medicine must find some way to combine its scientific and humanistic sides. In other words, an adequate notion of medicine requires an integrative position that mediates between the analytic-reductionist and the normative-holistic tendencies we find therein. This is especially important as these different styles of reasoning separate “illness” (something perceived and managed by the whole individual in concert with their environment) and “disease” (a “mechanical failure” of a biological element within the (...) body). While the demand for an integrative view has typically been motivated by ethical concerns, we claim that it is also motivated, perhaps even more fundamentally, by epistemological and methodological reasons. Evidence-based bio-medicine employs experimental and statistical techniques which eliminate important differences in the ways that conscious humans evaluate, live with, and react to disease and illness. However, it is precisely these experiences that underpin the concepts and norms of bio-medicine. Humanistic disciplines, on the other hand, have the resources to investigate these experiences in an intersubjectively testable way. Medicine, therefore, cannot afford to ignore its nature as a human science; it must be concerned not only with disease and illness, but also with the ways in which patients as persons respond to malady. Insofar as attitudes and expectations influence the criteria of illness and disease, they must be studied as part of the genuine subject matter of medicine as a human science. In general, we urge that this is a necessary step to overcome today's trend to split evidence-based and clinical medicine. (shrink)

We prove that the opposite of the category of coalgebras for the Vietoris endofunctor on the category of compact Hausdorff spaces is monadic over $\mathsf {Set}$. We deliver an analogous result for the upper, lower, and convex Vietoris endofunctors acting on the category of stably compact spaces. We provide axiomatizations of the associated (infinitary) varieties. This can be seen as a version of Jónsson–Tarski duality for modal algebras beyond the zero-dimensional setting.

The paper presents and discusses the Hubble tension with respect to recent results in cosmology. I shall argue that the measurements from the James Webb Space Telescope and TRGB stars calibrations allow us to infer that the estimates of H0 with late universe methods are robust. Building on from robustness analysis, I conclude that the resolution of the tension cannot be expected to come from new systematics, but rather from new physics.

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched (...) to each other. Reidentification, the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants. The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research. (shrink)

Munch-Jurisic’s book thoroughly describes several cases of severe distresses reported and expressed by perpetrators of tremendous acts such as mass murders. Arguing against a simplistic reading according to which these signs of distress are straightforward manifestations of some innate moral nature, and against the optimistic reading according to which they will lead to prosocial behaviors, Munch-Jursic offers compelling reasons to adopt a more complex theory of emotion. In this commentary, I aim to stress the implications of her book for the (...) debate on moral enhancement and for emotion theory in general. However, while I concur with Munch-Jurisic that emotion theory must make room for complexity and indeterminacy, I challenge her claim that motivational theories of emotion are ill-equipped to face the challenges she poses. (shrink)

We investigated motor resonance in children using a priming paradigm. Participants were asked to judge the weight of an object shortly primed by a hand in an action-related posture or a non action-related one . The hand prime could belong to a child or to an adult. We found faster response times when the object was preceded by a grasp hand posture . More crucially, participants were faster when the prime was a child’s hand, suggesting that it could belong to (...) their body schema, particularly when the child’s hand was followed by a light object . A control experiment helped us to clarify the role of the hand prime. To our knowledge this is the first behavioral evidence of motor simulation and motor resonance in children. Implications of the results for the development of the sense of body ownership and for conceptual development are discussed. (shrink)

(2013). Distributed intentionality: A model of intentional behavior in humans. Philosophical Psychology: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 267-290. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2011.641743.

Many approaches to quantum gravity -the theory that should account for quantum and gravitational phenomena under the same theoretical umbrella- seem to point at some form of spacetime emergence, i.e., the fact that spacetime is not a fundamental entity of our physical world. This tenet has sparked many philosophical discussions: from the so-called empirical incoherence problem to different accounts of emergence and mechanisms thereof. In this contribution, I focus on the partial order relation of causal set theory and argue that (...) causation can be characterized as an a-temporal constraint over the kinematic space defined by the theory. The relation constrains the growth of a new element/event with respect to the other elements/events of a given set. Therefrom, the flow of time emerges from the collection of the possible growths of the given set, where each possibility is characterized by a classical probability assigned by the dynamics of the theory. (shrink)

Der profilierte Marx-Forscher Marco Iorio liefert eine kundige Einführung für jeden, der unvoreingenommen wissen will, was Karl Marx denn nun wirklich zu sagen hat. In dieser kritischen und konstruktiven Gesamtinterpretation kommen alle wichtigen Themen zur Sprache: von Geschichtsphilosophie und Gesellschaftstheorie über ökonomischer und politischer Theorie bis hin zu revolutionstheoretischen und moralphilosophischen Problemstellungen. Die berücksichtigte Sekundärliteratur deckt sämtliche aktuell relevanten Strömungen ab, darunter analytischer Marxismus, Postkolonialismus, Poststrukturalismus, Post- bzw. Neomarxismus. Damit eignet sich die Einführung auch hervorragend als Kursbuch für Lehrveranstaltungen und (...) als studienbegleitende Lektüre. (shrink)

The modern world was in part born as a reaction against Aristotelianism. However, the image of Aristotle to which modern philosophers reacted was partial, to say the least. Paradoxical though it may seem, today, more than twenty-three centuries on, we may now be in the most advantageous position for understanding the Stagirite's philosophy and applying it to contemporary problems. The present book contributes to the forming of an idea of Post-modern reason inspired by a constellation of Aristotelian concepts, such as (...) prudence (phronesis), practical truth (aletheia praktike), science in act (episteme en energeiai), metaphor (metaphora), similarity (homoiosis) and the imitation-creation pair (mimesis-poiesis). They all form an interconnected network and together they make up an idea of reason that may prove suitable for the present. These concepts offer the most promising basis for undertaking a series of urgent reconciliations: of facts and values, of means and ends, of theoretical and practical reason, of intelligence and emotion. Aristotle's notions could help solve many dualisms of modern times. He offers a third way between identity and difference in ontology and politics, between algorithm and anarchism in methodology, between naïve realism and plain relativism in epistemology, between equivocity and univocity in language, between Enlightenment and Romanticism in culture... On the way, this shift facilitates the relationships between science, arts and ethics - the three parts of the sphere of culture which Modernity had separated - as well as the integration of the sphere of culture itself with the world of life. (shrink)

An introduction to propositional logical and first-order logic.

Within feminist theory and a wide range of social sciences, intersectionality has emerged as a key analytic framework, challenging paradigms that consider gender, race, class, sexuality, and other categories as separate and instead conceptualizing them as interconnected. This has led most authors to assume mutual constitution as the pertinent model, often without much scrutiny. In this essay we critically review the main senses of mutual constitution in the literature and challenge what we take to be a problematic assumption: the problem (...) of reification, here understood as the conceptualization of social categories as entities or objects. We then present the properties framework, together with the emergent experience view, which conceptualizes categories and social systems in a way that maintains their ontological specificity while allowing for their being deeply affected by each other. (shrink)

Sartre maintains that “all consciousness is consciousness of something.” Idiosyncratically, he also understands this “intentionality principle” to entail that what consciousness is “of” is necessarily distinct from it (or “outside of” it, or “transcendent to” it). Nonetheless, he also maintains that all consciousness is necessarily conscious of—or rather, “(of)”—itself in a non‐intentional (in his terms: “non‐positional/non‐thetic”) manner. Given that this non‐positional/thetic self‐consciousness is not intentional, it is evidently immune to the “difference” principle, but this is less clear with respect to (...) self‐reflection (which Sartre simply calls “reflection”). It seems impossible for reflection to be “intentional” because intentionality entails difference—yet it also seems problematic to consider reflection “non‐intentional” because it then becomes difficult to distinguish reflection from non‐positional/thetic self‐consciousness as such (which is inherently “unreflective”). This can be called Sartre's “dilemma of reflection.” While Sartre seems to alternate between portraying reflection as intentional and as non‐intentional (it generally appears like the former), this paper argues that it should be conceived as both according to different respects. By piecing together various passages of Sartre's texts and drawing out their implications, Sartre can be shown to have the resources for an answer to his own dilemma. (shrink)

Most of the arguments usually appealed to in order to support the view that some abstraction principles are analytic depend on ascribing to them some sort of existential parsimony or ontological neutrality, whereas the opposite arguments, aiming to deny this view, contend this ascription. As a result, other virtues that these principles might have are often overlooked. Among them, there is an epistemic virtue which I take these principles to have, when regarded in the appropriate settings, and which I suggest (...) to call ‘epistemic economy’. My purpose is to isolate and clarify this notion by appealing to some examples concerning the definition of natural and real numbers. (shrink)

Dr. Marco Forgione (University of Milan), COSMOS team member, interviewed Prof. Peter Galison (Harvard University) in occasion of the event “Photographs from Outer Space”.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'legalistic mistake'. The use of “legal‐like” terms abounds outside the legal domain. But sometimes the users of these terms commit the fallacy Joel Feinberg called the legalistic mistake. On widening the use of such legal‐like terms, we must be cautious, for we might find ourselves guilty of making inferential mistakes or even proffering pure nonsense. The error, according to Feinberg, is committed by “one who, in stating a moral (...) question using a legal‐like term, uncritically imports the precision of that term in its strict legal sense, while excluding appeal to the kinds of criteria which alone can decide its use”. In “On Being 'Morally Speaking a Murderer’” Feinberg introduced the idea that, sometimes, using legal notions outside legal contexts may lead to a peculiar kind of fallacy he called the legalistic mistake. (shrink)

Nel suo pionieristico lavoro Conditions in Königsberg and the Making of Kant's Philosophy, Giorgio Tonelli lamentava l'assenza di un'indagine approfondita sul contesto intellettuale di Königsberg e sull'eventuale influenza che esso esercitò su alcuni aspetti del pensiero di Kant. Questo libro vuole colmare questa lacuna prestando particolare attenzione alla tradizione aristotelica, alla Schulphilosophie, e alla corrente dell'eclettismo, che dominarono l'ambiente regiomontano sino all'avvento della filosofia critica kantiana. Il lavoro mostra come dai fallimenti dei progetti logici e metafisici precritici, legati alle influenze (...) ricevute dall'ambiente di Königsberg, Kant abbia tratto le idee e gli spunti per la stesura della Kritik der reinen Vernunft. (shrink)

This book fills a major gap in the ever-increasing secondary literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought by providing a dedicated and coherent treatment of the many, various and interesting things which Arendt had to say about law. Often obscured by more pressing or more controversial aspects of her work, Arendt nonetheless had interesting insights into Greek and Roman concepts of law, human rights, constitutional design, legislation, sovereignty, international tribunals, judicial review and much more. This book retrieves these aspects of her (...) legal philosophy for the attention of both Arendt scholars and lawyers alike. The book brings together lawyers as well as Arendt scholars drawn from a range of disciplines (philosophy, political science, international relations), who have engaged in an internal debate the dynamism of which is captured in print. Following the editors' introduction, the book is split into four Parts: Part I explores the concept of law in Arendt's thought; Part II explores legal aspects of Arendt's constitutional thought: first locating Arendt in the wider tradition of republican constitutionalism, before turning attention to the role of courts and the role of parliament in her constitutional design. In Part III Arendt's thought on international law is explored from a variety of perspectives, covering international institutions and international criminal law, as well as the theoretical foundations of international law. Part IV debates the foundations, content and meaning of Arendt's famous and influential claim that the 'right to have rights' is the one true human right. (shrink)

In this contribution, I explore the possibility of characterizing the emergence of time in causal set theory (CST) in terms of the growing block universe (GBU) metaphysics. I show that although GBU seems to be the most intuitive time metaphysics for CST, it leaves us with a number of interpretation problems, independently of which dynamics we choose to favor for the theory —here I shall consider the Classical Sequential Growth and the Covariant model. Discrete general covariance of the CSG dynamics (...) does not allow us to individuate a single history of the universe (defined by a causal history of different causal sets), thereby making the claim that ‘the past exists’ at best problematic. In addition, because the evolution of the universe in CSG dynamics leads to an outward branching causal tree, it becomes impossible to determine a proper ‘line of becoming’, thereby blurring the presentists’ claim that only the present exists. Similarly, the covariant approach runs into the same, if not even more severe problems, since each configuration of the universe would amount to a set of possible causal sets, thereby making the individuation of a single configuration of the universe —and thus the physical interpretation of the theory— implausible. (shrink)

Emoticons and facial emojis are ubiquitous in contemporary digital communication, where it has been proposed that they make up for the lack of social information from real faces. In this paper, I construe them as cultural artifacts that exploit the neurocognitive mechanisms for face perception. Building on a step-by-step comparison of psychological evidence on the perception of faces vis-à-vis the perception of emoticons/emojis, I assess to what extent they do effectively vicariate real faces with respect to the following four domains: (...) (1) the expression of emotions, (2) the cultural norms for expressing emotions, (3) conveying non-affective social information, and (4) attention prioritization. (shrink)

In the substitutional framework, validity is truth under all substitutions of the nonlogical vocabulary. I develop a theory where □ is interpreted as substitutional validity. I show how to prove soundness and completeness for common modal calculi using this definition.