Can art, religion, or philosophy afford ineffable insights? If so, what are they? The idea of ineffability has puzzled philosophers from Laozi to Wittgenstein. In Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion and Philosophy, Silvia Jonas examines different ways of thinking about what ineffable insights might involve metaphysically, and shows which of these are in fact incoherent. Jonas discusses the concepts of ineffable properties and objects, ineffable propositions, ineffable content, and ineffable knowledge, examining the metaphysical pitfalls involved (...) in these concepts. Ultimately, she defends the idea that ineffable insights as found in aesthetic, religious, and philosophical contexts are best understood in terms of self-acquaintance, a particular kind of non-propositional knowledge. Ineffability as a philosophical topic is as old as the history of philosophy itself, but contributions to the exploration of ineffability have been sparse. The theory developed by Jonas makes the concept tangible and usable in many different philosophical contexts. (shrink)

Dieses Buch untersucht, was in den jeweiligen Theorieansätzen mit Bildhandeln‹ gemeint ist, indem eine Reihe von philosophischen und kunstwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen zum Verhältnis von Bild und Handlung vorgestellt und systematisiert werden. Vier paradigmatische Handlungstypen werden voneinander differenziert, die spezifische Verwendungsmöglichkeiten von Bildern umfassen. Die ersten zwei – Bildspiele‹ und Bildakte‹ – beruhen auf der sprachphilosophisch motivierten Prämisse, dass die Verwendung von Bildern der Struktur eines Sprachspieles oder eines Sprechaktes entspricht. Diese Prämisse bezieht sich auf Verwendungsweisen, durch die materiellen Gegenständen der Bildstatus (...) zugeschrieben wird. Demgegenüber werden zwei weitere Bildhandlungstypen vorgestellt, wonach Bilder nur dann verwendet werden können, wenn ihr Bildstatus bereits feststeht. Diese Bildhandlungstypen werden mit einem Vergleich von Bildern und Werkzeugen sowie der Kategorie Probehandlungen‹ thematisiert. (shrink)

La rhetorique n'est pas la discipline qui s'occupe essentiellement des figures de rhetorique: celles-ci ne sont plus qu'un outil parmi d'autres pour persuader et convaincre un auditoire. Dans toute sa generalite, elle constitue une theorie de l'argumentation, qui se sert de raisonnements qu'Aristote qualifiait de dialectiques. En ce sens la rhetorique, qui englobe la dialectique des Anciens, est le pendant de la logique formelle, car c'est l'instrument indispensable de toute pensee qui ne se reduit pas a un calcul. Toute deliberation, (...) toute discussion, toute controverse, toute presentation d'idees nouvelles qui fait appel a la raison, est obligee d'y recourir. La rhetorique est ainsi l'instrument indispensable de toute pensee et de toute philosophie critique. L'etude des techniques d'argumentation, et de leurs presupposes, longtemps negligee par le rationalisme classique, d'inspiration mathematique, est presentee dans ses perspectives historiques et philosophiques. (shrink)

Substantial research demonstrates that ethical leaders improve a broad range of outcomes for their employees, but considerably less attention has been devoted to the performance and success of the leaders themselves. The present study explores the extent to which being ethical relates to leaders’ performance and promotability. We address this question by examining ethical leadership from the two ethical perspectives most common in Western traditions—i.e., the “right” and the “good”—and whether one might be more closely associated than the other with (...) performance and promotability evaluations. Results from 117 employee-supervisor-manager triads show that supervisors with a deontological outlook are more likely to be seen as ethical leaders and that utilitarian leaders are more likely to earn higher performance evaluations. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on ethical leadership. (shrink)

Titel oversat: Islamisk, medicinsk etik i det tyvende århundrede.

The New Rhetoric is founded on the idea that since “argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced,” says Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, and they rely, in particular, for their theory of argumentation on the twin concepts of universal and particular audiences: while every argument is directed to a specific individual or group, the orator decides what information and what approaches will achieve (...) the greatest adherence according to an ideal audience. This ideal, Perelman explains, can be embodied, for example, "in God, in all reasonable and competent men, in the man deliberating or in an elite.” Like particular audiences, then, the universal audience is never fixed or absolute but depends on the orator, the content and goals of the argument, and the particular audience to whom the argument is addressed. These considerations determine what information constitutes "facts" and "reasonableness" and thus help to determine the universal audience that, in turn, shapes the orator's approach. /// The adherence of an audience is also determined by the orator's use of values, a further key concept of the New Rhetoric. Perelman's treatment of value and his view of epideictic rhetoric sets his approach apart from that of the ancients and of Aristotle in particular. Aristotle's division of rhetoric into three genres–forensic, deliberative, and epideictic–is largely motivated by the judgments required for each: forensic or legal arguments require verdicts on past action, deliberative or political rhetoric seeks judgment on future action, and epideictic or ceremonial rhetoric concerns values associated with praise or blame and seeks no specific decisions. For Aristotle, the epideictic genre was of limited importance in the civic realm since it did not concern facts or policies. Perelman, in contrast, believes not only that epideictic rhetoric warrants more attention, but that the values normally limited to that genre are in fact central to all argumentation. "Epideictic oratory," Perelman argues, "has significant and important argumentation for strengthening the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds.” These values are central to the persuasiveness of arguments in all rhetorical genres since the orator always attempts to "establish a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience.”. (shrink)

In this chapter we will argue, firstly, that Bacon’s engages in a pecu-liar form of mathematization of nature that develops a quali-quantitative methodology of measurement. Secondly, we will show that medicine is one of the disciplines where that dual way of measurement is practiced. In the first section of the chapter, we will expose the ontology involved in the Baconian proposal of measurement of nature. The second section will address the place that mixed mathematics occupies in Bacon’s scheme of scientific (...) branches and will suggest that a proper advancement of medicine can generate a new branch of mixed mathematics. The next section will reconstruct Bacon’s approach to measurement and expose its quali-quantitative import. In the last section, we will show some examples of medicine in which this quali-quantitative measurement is applied. (shrink)

Silvia Castellazzi shows how companies can implement their corporate responsibility and support employability and access to training in an incentive-compatible manner. The study provides insights into unrealized cooperation and disincentives which prevent companies from investing in a shared pool of employable and skilled people. The research draws on the theoretical framework of the economic ethics and on in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in two European countries. Findings show that incentives for investments in training are selective and might reinforce path-dependencies (...) and exclusion, while not supporting cooperation and productive competition. The study also shows the value of conceptualizing employability as a social rather than a psychological contract to facilitate investments and the implementation of corporate responsibility. Contents Trends and Conflicts in Employability and Provision of Training Incentives Structures and Stakeholders' Strategies A Social Contract for Employability Target Groups Researchers in business ethics, employee relations, further education and training HR and training managers; CSR managers The Author Silvia Castellazzi works as account manager in the corporate education division of MIP Graduate School of Business (Politecnico di Milano). Her research interests and activities are focused on professional and executive education, corporate responsibility and decision-making, the future of work and new forms of work organization. (shrink)

Pluralist mathematical realism, the view that there exists more than one mathematical universe, has become an influential position in the philosophy of mathematics. I argue that, if mathematical pluralism is true (and we have good reason to believe that it is), then mathematical realism cannot (easily) be justified by arguments from the indispensability of mathematics to science. This is because any justificatory chain of inferences from mathematical applications in science to the total body of mathematical theorems can cover at most (...) one mathematical universe. Indispensability arguments may thus lose their central role in the debate about mathematical ontology. (shrink)

This book discusses the justifications and limits of cultural nationalism from a liberal perspective. Chaim Gans presents a normative typology of nationalist ideologies, distinguishing between cultural liberal nationalism and statist liberal nationalism. Statist nationalisms argue that states have an interest in the cultural homogeneity of their citizenries. Cultural nationalisms argue that people have interests in adhering to their cultures and in sustaining these cultures for generations. Gans argues that freedom- and identity-based justifications for cultural nationalism common in literature can (...) only support the adherence thesis, while the historical thesis could only be justified by the interest people have in the long-term endurance of their personal and group endeavors. The Limits of Nationalism examines demands often made in the name of cultural nationalism, such as claims for national self-determination, historical rights claims to territories and demands entailed by cultural particularism as opposed to cultural cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

_First English translation of Sini’s important work on the influence of writing and the alphabet on Western rationality._.

Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation _Horizon 2020_. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public at various stages of research. Establishing such dialogues between different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial in order to attain epistemic as well as social desiderata at the intersection between science and society. However, whether these dialogues can actually (...) help attaining these desiderata is far from obvious. This paper discusses some of the costs, risks, and benefits of dialogical public engagement practices, and proposes a strategy to analyse these argumentative practices based on a three-tiered model of epistemic exchange. As a case study, we discuss the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, arguably a result of suboptimal public engagement, and show how the proposed model can shed new light on the problem. (shrink)

I argue that recent attempts to deflect Access Problems for realism about a priori domains such as mathematics, logic, morality, and modality using arguments from evolution result in two kinds of explanatory overkill: the Access Problem is eliminated for contentious domains, and realist belief becomes viciously immune to arguments from dispensability, and to non-rebutting counter-arguments more generally.

The existence of fundamental moral disagreements is a central problem for moral realism and has often been contrasted with an alleged absence of disagreement in mathematics. However, mathematicians do in fact disagree on fundamental questions, for example on which set-theoretic axioms are true, and some philosophers have argued that this increases the plausibility of moral vis-à-vis mathematical realism. I argue that the analogy between mathematical and moral disagreement is not as straightforward as those arguments present it. In particular, I argue (...) that pluralist accounts of mathematics render fundamental mathematical disagreements compatible with mathematical realism in a way in which moral disagreements and moral realism are not. 11. (shrink)

Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory (...) platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and interviews, which were done both with the management of the site, and with the visitors themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The interviews with the site's management also illuminate the commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged and managed. (shrink)

En estas páginas se publican mis respuestas a una encuesta incluida en el libro Galfione, María Carla y Moine, Facundo José, eds., La inquietud por la filosofía. Ensayos sobre canon, historia y crítica, Córdoba, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, 2023, pp. 178-182. Las preguntas de la encuesta son las siguientes: 1. ¿Cree que tiene sentido hacer hoy historia de la filosofía, como objeto de investigación y/o enseñanza? ¿Por qué y cómo?; 2. ¿Pueden ayudar las reflexiones de (...) Foucault para esa historia, como "caja de Herramientas"? ¿Por qué? ¿Cómo?; 3. ¿Qué hacer con el canon filosófico? ¿Hay que conservarlo, transmitirlo, inculcarlo?; 4. ¿Cómo entiende la crítica en tanto actividad reflexiva que atraviesa el discurso filosófico? ¿Encuentra alguna potencialidad o productividad en pensar la crítica de cara al canon filosófico?; 5. ¿Cree conveniente, a la hora de pensar el pasado y el presente del saber filosófico, inscribirlo en un presente, en determinadas instituciones, en un marco que lo excede histórica y discursivamente? ¿Qué entiende que resulta del saber filosóficoposicionado en esos marcos?; 6. ¿Cuál cree que es el grado de persistencia del pasado o del canon al pensar la filosofía en su exigente vínculo con el presente? O, de otro modo, ¿tiene la historia de la filosofía y su práctica algún lugar en la constitución del presente? (shrink)

In the past generation, restitution law has emerged as a global phenomenon. From its Oxbridge home, restitution migrated to the rest of the Commonwealth, and ongoing Europeanization projects have brought the common law of restitution into contact with the Romanist concept of unjust enrichment, further internationalizing this movement. In contrast, in the United States, scholarly interest in restitution, in terms of books, articles, treatises, symposia and courses on restitution, is meager. Similarly, while restitution, equity and tracing cases receive considerable treatment (...) at the highest levels of the English judiciary, US courts seem uninterested in these issues, rarely producing the theory-laden opinions that have become quite common in the House of Lords. The situation is particularly curious because restitution is generally thought to be the invention of late nineteenth-century American scholars. This article explains this divergence. I argue that the Commonwealth restitution discourse is largely a product of pre- or anti-realist legal thought which generates scepticism within the American academic-legal establishment. The article identifies the two dominant camps in American private law thought—left-leaning redistributionalists and the centre-right legal economists—and shows that neither has any use for the Commonwealth's discourse. I conclude by analysing the emerging drafts of the Restatement of Restitution and forecast the future of American restitution law. (shrink)

This chapter will explore the reception of Condillac in Argentina from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, focusing on two cases. First, the reception by nineteenth-century professors of idéologie (Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur, Juan Manuel Fernández de Agüero, Luis José de la Peña, and Diego Alcorta) that was mediated by the interpretations of Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Pierre Jean Cabanis, and Pierre Laromiguière. Second, the reception in the early twentieth century by José Ingenieros, whose narrative was conditioned by his (...) own political and philosophical agenda. In each case, we can identify different receptions that must be interpreted not only in light of the philosophical concerns of the authors who made them but also in light of the wider cultural and political context in which they emerged. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Condillac was received as a philosopher who integrated the new philosophical canon that would replace the Scholastic canon that had been imposed by the colonial regime. In the early twentieth century, Ingenieros inserted Condillac into a narrative that, starting with Bacon and Locke, culminated in positivism, a current that, in his view, offered the best framework to make Argentina shine in the concert of civilized nations. (shrink)

This article presents the first, systematic analysis of the ethical challenges posed by recommender systems through a literature review. The article identifies six areas of concern, and maps them onto a proposed taxonomy of different kinds of ethical impact. The analysis uncovers a gap in the literature: currently user-centred approaches do not consider the interests of a variety of other stakeholders—as opposed to just the receivers of a recommendation—in assessing the ethical impacts of a recommender system.

The Scottish Enlightenment shaped a new conception of history as a gradual and universal progress from savagery to civil society. Whereas women emancipated themselves from the yoke of male-masters, men in turn acquired polite manners and became civilized. Such a conception, however, presents problematic questions: why were the Americans still savage? Why was it that the Europeans only had completed all the stages of the historic process? Could modern societies escape the destiny of earlier empires and avoid decadence? Was there (...) a limit beyond which women's influence might result in dehumanization? The Scottish Enlightenment's legacy for modernity emerges here as a two-faced Janus, an unresolved tension between universalism and hierarchy, progress and the limits of progress. (shrink)

While the practice of Western medicine is known today to doctors of all ethnic and religious groups, its standards are subject to the availability of resources. The medical ethics guiding each doctor is influenced by his/her religious or cultural background or affiliation, and that is where diversity exists. Much has been written about Jewish and Christian medical ethics. Islamic medical ethics has never been discussed as an independent field of ethics, although several selected topics, especially those concerning sexuality, birth control (...) and abortions, have been more discussed than others. Islamic medical ethics in the 20th century will be characterised on the basis of Egyptian fatawa (legal opinions) issued by famous Muslim scholars and several doctors. Some of the issues discussed by Islamic medical ethics are universal: abortions, organ transplants, artificial insemination, cosmetic surgery, doctor-patient relations, etc. Other issues are typically Islamic, such as impediments to fasting in Ramadan, diseases and physical conditions that cause infringement of the state of purity, medicines containing alcohol, etc. Muslims' attitudes to both types of ethical issues often prove that pragmatism prevails and the aim is to seek a compromise between Islamic heritage and the achievements of modern medicine, as long as basic Islamic dogma is not violated. (shrink)

What are the relevant values to the appraisal of research programs? This question remains hotly debated, as philosophers have recently proposed many lists of values potentially relevant to scientific appraisal. Surprisingly, despite being mentioned in many lists, little attention has been paid to fruitfulness. It is unclear how fruitfulness should be explicated, and whether it has any substantial role in scientific appraisal. In this paper, I argue we should explicate fruitfulness as the capacity to develop of research programs. Moreover, I (...) provide a novel strategy to assess and compare the fruitfulness of programs focused on their research questions and heuristics. To illustrate how this strategy would work, I will discuss a case study, namely the adaptationist program in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

Puts leading Italian thinkers into conversation with established Continental philosophers concerning the future of the nature of the human, technology, metaphysical foundations, globalization, and social and political oppression.