This article highlights that ancient philosophy regenerated the practice of parrêsia following the crisis into which it had fallen in the polis. Through this, it established a strong relationship between freedom , truth , and politics , constantly eluding the risk of using “true speech” as a tool of rationalizing the exercise of power. The primary outset for the argument will be the course held by Foucault in 1982-1983 ( Le gouvernement de soi et des autres ). The paper holds (...) that philosophical parrêsia asserted itself as a practice that could not be anything but “transpolitical,” while remaining similar to the ideal of freedom as active participation in public life – at least in the case of Socrates and the Cynics. According to Foucault, after a long period of disuse due to the predominance of theology and pastoral power, philosophical parrêsia was able to flourish in modernity. This occurred above all with Kant through the critical ontology of the present. On my part, I try to show how philosophical parrêsia in liberal society runs the risk of being neutralized by the predominance of economic “true speech” and by the prevalence of the idea of freedom as the pursuit of private interests. This is done by re-reading certain indications provided by Foucault himself in his course of 1978-1979 ( Naissance de la biopolitique ). Moreover, in the last sections of this paper I suggest lines of research that could grasp the difficulties that philosophical parrêsia encounters in the age of neoliberal hegemony and global media coverage. (shrink)

This contribution explores disability rights protection in Inter-American States within the framework of the OAS and in the context of the obligations established under the CIADDIS and the CRPD. Following the classical division between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ rules, the contribution first sketches key regulatory initiatives in the area of disability rights and second considers compliance and enforcement mechanisms. Along these lines, the first section illustrates similarities and differences between the CIADDIS and the CRPD and, within this framework, essential regional regulatory (...) initiatives. The second section assesses disability rights in select countries, based on periodic reports under the CIADDIS and CRPD. The section examines the four largest countries by population in the region, notably, the United States of America (US), Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. The third section explores the enforcement of disability rights via key cases before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IAComHR) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR). The purpose is providing a comprehensive understanding of disability rights in the region and identifying key regulatory problems and ways forward. (shrink)

Michel Foucault claimed that the term biopolitics can be fully understood only within the context of modern forms of governing society. From this perspective, the development of modern medical knowledge, the re-organization of the hospital as a health institution, the growing attention to issues related to birth and population, and the rise of biological racism can be attributed to the influence of economic rationality on the most influential political strategies. In this book, Marzocca further explores the crucial role that the (...) family structure has played throughout the history of biopolitics, explaining how family is firstly a place of government of life as well as a means to extend various forms of biopower to the whole society. By analysing the works of key figures in the debate on biopolitics - such as Agamben, Negri, Esposito, Rose, Cooper, Lemke, among others - this volume offers a systematic examination of this notion also in relation to the current ecological crisis, addressing fundamental problems of modern and contemporary political thought. (shrink)

We obtain an algorithm to compute finite coproducts of finitely generated Gödel algebras, i.e. Heyting algebras satisfying the prelinearity axiom =1. We achieve this result using ordered partitions of finite sets as a key tool to investigate the category opposite to finitely generated Gödel algebras . We give two applications of our main result. We prove that finitely presented Gödel algebras have free products with amalgamation; and we easily obtain a recursive formula for the cardinality of the free Gödel algebra (...) over a finite number of generators first established by A. Horn. (shrink)

The author, with the reflection of St. Thomas as his point of departure, retrieves the central concepts of law and of nature, and with these develops a critique of modern presentations of law and of the State. In particular, relying on relationship as constitutive of human experience, he arrives at a radical critique of any concept that attributes to the State the founding role of juridical experience. In this way, overturning the thought expressed by St. Thomas, he develops implicit presuppositions (...) from it and so arrives at the total rejection of any juridical legitimation of the death penalty as the most complete expression of the effort to «remove a righ t to have rights». (shrink)

In 1626, the Neapolitan Ottavio Sammarco published the Discorso politico intorno la conseruatione della pace dell'Italia in which the author referred to the King of Spain as arbiter among the Italian princes and his ministers in Italy as efficient instruments to ensure the stability. This piece of political literature shows an explicit practical orientation, through which the author carries out a systematisation of the political means to achieve quietness in Italy. In articulating the praxis into formal language, Sammarco looks (...) to the past searching for the wisdom of History and uses Tacitus’ account to build a discourse around the tools and mechanisms for preserving stability and avoiding conflicts. The aim of this article, in the first instance, is to examine Sammarco's discursive programme and the purpose of his discourse; in the second place, how Tacitus serves the author's aim and how his account means a fundamental anchor. Furthermore, it will be useful to trace how the political language that transforms the continuous threat of war into politics is modelled by 1626 in Italy and how Sammarco contextualizes his political vocabulary within the Spanish Monarchy political dialectic at the beginning of XVII century. (shrink)

The so‐called problem of irrelevant conjunction has been seen as a serious challenge for theories of confirmation. It involves the consequences of conjoining irrelevant statements to a hypothesis that is confirmed by some piece of evidence. Following Hawthorne and Fitelson, we reconstruct the problem with reference to Bayesian confirmation theory. Then we extend it to the case of conjoining irrelevant statements to a hypothesis that is dis confirmed by some piece of evidence. As a consequence, we obtain and formally present (...) a novel and more troublesome problem of irrelevant conjunction. We conclude by indicating a possible solution based on a measure‐sensitive approach and by critically discussing a major alternative way to address the problem. *Received December 2008; revised August 2009. †To contact the authors, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Turin, via Sant'Ottavio 20, 10124 Turin, Italy; e‐mail: [email protected] ; [email protected] or [email protected]. (shrink)

Jednym z głównych pytań w filozofii logiki jest to, czy jest jedna, czy wiele logik. Pytanie to doczekało się różnych odpowiedzi, które formułują opozycyjne stanowiska: monizm logiczny contra pluralizm logiczny. Za reprezentatywnego przedstawiciela monizmu uznawany jest Willard Van Orman Quine, a pluralizmu — Susan Haack. Oba te stanowiska są kontynuowane współcześnie: monizm (m.in. Michael Dummett, Graham Priest, Timothy Williamson) oraz pluralizm (m.in. Jc Beall i Greg Restall, Johan van Benthem, Ottavio Bueno i Scott Shalkovski, Stewart Shapiro i Roy Cook). (...) Monizm jest znacznie mniej preferowany niż pluralizm. W artykule wskazano na źródła pluralizmu w logice (m.in. wieloznaczność spójników języka naturalnego, prawdy i wynikania) oraz przywołano argumentacje wybranych przedstawicieli tego stanowiska. (shrink)

This paper is a review essay of Ottavio Marzocca, Biopolitics for Beginners. Knowledge of Life and Government of People, Milan/Udine: Mimesis International, 2020. Pp. 457. ISBN: 9788869771781 (paperback). It focuses on Marzocca's investigations into biopolitics, a topic of which the author offers an original ecological reconfiguration. The proposed reflections, which address the recent pandemic crisis of COVID-19, are developed from the work of Foucault but are not limited to this thinker. In fact, they offer an articulate examination of the (...) issue by also taking into broad consideration the thought of authors such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Donzelot, Robert Castel, Pierre Rosanvallon, Nikolas Rose, Melinda Cooper and Gregory Bateson. (shrink)

I challenge a claim that seems to be made when nominalists offer reformulations of the content of mathematical beliefs, namely that these reformulations are accessible to everyone. By doing so, I argue that these theories cannot account for the mathematical knowledge that ordinary people have. In the first part of the paper I look at reformulations that employ the concept of proof, such as those of Mary Leng and Ottavio Bueno. I argue that ordinary people don’t have many beliefs (...) about proofs, and that they are not in a position to acquire knowledge about proofs autonomously. The second part of the paper is concerned with other reformulations of content, such as those of Hartry Field and Stephen Yablo. There too, the problem is that people are not able to acquire knowledge of the reformulated propositions autonomously. Ordinary people simply do not have beliefs with the kind of content that the nominalists need, for their theory to account for the mathematical knowledge of ordinary people. All in all then, the conclusion is that a large number of theories that suggest reformulations of mathematical content yield contents that are inaccessible for most people. Thus, these theories are limited, in that they cannot account for the mathematical knowledge of ordinary people. (shrink)