‘Philosophical dialogue’ indicates both a form of philosophical inquiry and its corresponding literary genre. In its written form, it typically features two or more characters who engage in a discussion concerning morals, knowledge, as well as a variety of topics that can be widely labelled as ‘philosophical’. Our philosophical dialogue takes place in Krakow, Poland. It is a rainy morning and two strangers are waiting at a tram stop. One of them is dressed neatly, and cannot stop fidgeting with his (...) closed umbrella. The other was caught unprepared by the morning downpour and water is dripping from his worn, soaked jacket. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 1 Seiten: 67-88.

Presenting a critical history of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century, focusing on the transition from logical positivism in its first half to the ...

This thesis argues that the concept of contingency plays a central role in Althusser's recasting of Marxist philosophy and in his attempt to free the Marxist conception of history from concepts such as teleology, necessity and origin. It is critically placed both against those readings that see the emergence of the problematic of contingency only in the late Althusserm and to the most recent attempts to establish a straightforward continuity in Althusser's work. Drawing on published and unplublished material and covering (...) the entirety of Althusser's philosophical itinerary, the thesis seeks both to unearth the latent presence of this problematic, and its various implications, at each stage in the development of his work. It seeks to clarify, in a systematic way, the conceptual consequences of Althusser's commitment to contingency to the received understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology and political action. In particular, it argues that the standpoint of contingency allows us to locate in Althusser's 'Structural Marxism' the emergence of a 'logic of irruption' and structurally under-determined development of becoming. By emphasising this logic of contingency, it then seeks to produce a more nuanced assessment of his theory of ideology through the introduction of the concept of 'overinterpellation'. It finally attempts to distinguish two moments in the emergence of a materialism of contingency, first political and then philosophical; the problematic coexistence of these two aspects helps to account for the unstable charactoer of Althusser's late philosophical project. (shrink)

This essay presents an argument against the token-reflexive approach to the semantics for indexical languages. After some preliminary remarks in section one, sections two and three explain why some traditional arguments against token-reflexivity are ultimately ineffective. Section four puts forth a more persuasive argument, to the effect that token-reflexive views overgenerate with respect to results of analyticity. However, as section five explains, defenders of the alternative, type-oriented view have all too often wasted the advantage offered by their approach: the unmotivated, (...) independent restriction of semantic evaluation to so-called ‘proper’ indexes is responsible for undesirable conclusions, similar to those to which token- reflexive theorists are committed. (shrink)

This book seeks to rectify misrepresentations of Popperian thought with a historical approach to Popper’s philosophy, an approach which applies his own mature view, that we gain knowledge through conjectures and refutations, to his own development, by portraying him in his intellectual growth as just such a series. Gattei seeks to reconstruct the logic of Popper’s development, in order to show how one problem and its tentative solution led to a new problem.

Despite his well‐known deductivism, in his early (unpublished) writings, Popper held an inductivist position. Up to 1929 epistemology entered Popper's reflections only as far as the problem was that of the justification of the scientific character of these fields of research. However, in that year, while surveying the history of non‐Euclidean geometries, Popper explicitly discussed the cognitive status of geometry without referring to psycho‐pedagogical aspects, thus turning from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science. As a consequence of (...) his reflections on the problematic relationship between geometrical‐mathematical constructions and physical reality Popper was able to get over a too direct notion of such a relationship, cast doubts on inductive inference and started conceiving in a new (strictly non‐inductivist) manner the relationship between theoretical and observational propositions. (shrink)

William Kneale famously noted that "it is obviously trifling to tell [a man] that Socrates was called Socrates" . Leaving aside some debatable details in Kneale's example, it would indeed seem trivial to tell someone that, say, Socrates bears "Socrates."The reason why this sort of communication strikes us as eminently uninformative has occasionally been treated as the symptom of a semantic phenomenon—more precisely, as evidence in favor of nominal descriptive approaches to the semantic behavior of proper names such as "Socrates." (...) According to these approaches, it is obviously trifling to tell someone that Socrates bears "Socrates" because the descriptive condition of bearing "Socrates" is part of the meaning of "Socrates" in some semantically significant sense of "meaning." The aim of this essay is to present a novel counter-argument against nominal descriptivism, and to defend a nondescriptivist explanation of cases such as . In particular, it is argued that nominal descriptivism is independently untenable, since it yields incorrect logical verdicts, and even disregarding its independent inadequacy, nominal descriptivism does not provide an analysis of the peculiar status of preferable to the treatment proposed in what follows. (shrink)

La prima parte del saggio si sofferma sul conflitto e sulle possibili convergenze tra il concetto di individualismo e quello di socialismo: sebbene siano stati spesso pensati in contraddizione, individualismo e socialismo possono anche essere visti come due concetti sinergici e complementari. Ciň č possibile se si assume la validitÀ della tesi, sostenuta da autori come Guyau e Kropotkin, secondo la quale nell'autentico sviluppo dell'individuo non c'č posto per la sopraffazione ai danni dell'altro. La seconda parte dell'articolo si sofferma sul (...) rapporto fra individualismo e modernitÀ, mostrando come la modernitÀ sia stata intesa sia come l'epoca della individualizzazione, sia come il tempo della omologazione massificante; e si conclude con l'idea che la nostra epoca sia caratterizzata piuttosto da molte forme di pseudo-individualismo. (shrink)

L'articolo si sofferma su alcuni aspetti della disputa fra realismo e idealismo nella comprensione della politica. Dopo aver delineato una rapida sintesi di alcune delle principali tesi del ‘realismo politico', l'articolo mette in risalto alcune difficoltÀ interne e contraddizioni che sembrano minare la validitÀ di questo punto di vista. Ma neppure la visione normativista o kantiana della politica č priva di problemi irrisolti. Pertanto, l'autore ritiene che entrambi i punti di vista sulla politica ne colgano alcuni aspetti essenziali, e che (...) perciň la riflessione sulla politica non possa privarsi di nessuno di essi, ma passi necessariamente per la loro sempre problematica e instabile combinazione. (shrink)

La questione della decadenza dell'individuo, o addirittura della sua liquidazione nella societÀ di massa, č un teai centrale della teoria critica della societÀ di Adorno e Horkheimer, sviluppato non solo nella, ma anche in molti testi di Adorno e negli importanti scritti pubblicati ora in italiano. Il problema che emerge da tali testi č: mentre la teoria adorniana insiste fortemente sul tema della decadenza dell'individuo, la teoria sociale contemporanea sembra invece a prima vista andare in una direzione opposta. Oggi molti (...) scienziati sociali, come per esempio Zygmunt Bauman, descrivono la societÀ contemporanea come caratterizzata da crescenti processi di individualizzazione. Nasce dunque la domanda: chi ha ragione? I teorici della obsolescenza dell'individuo o quelli della crescente individualizzazione? Il testo cerca, ripartendo da Adorno, di svolgere qualche considerazione su questo tema. (shrink)

L’obiettivo di questo saggio è duplice: da una parte, riconsiderare in quali termini la figura di Carl Schmitt possa essere considerata quella di un «pensatore europeo»; dall’altra, mettere in luce la particolare idea di Europa che agita molti degli scritti schmittiani dagli anni venti del Novecento fino al secondo dopoguerra. Tutto lascia supporre Schmitt sarebbe un fiero critico dell’assetto politico europeo attuale. Il problema colto da Schmitt è la frizione tra una costruzione giuridica meramente formale e una entità giuridicamente definita (...) ma dotata anche di vitalità politica. Lontana dall’essere il luogo per eccellenza della decisione, Schmitt intuisce che l’Europa comunitaria sarà un burattino, formalmente perfetto e tuttavia privo di quella vita che soltanto il «politico» è capace di donare. (shrink)

This volume features forty-two essays written in honor of Joseph Agassi. It explores the work and legacy of this influential philosopher, an exciting and challenging advocate of critical rationalism. Throughout six decades of stupendous intellectual activity, Agassi called attention to rationality as the very starting point of every notable philosophical way of life. The essays present Agassi’s own views on critical rationalism. They also develop and expand upon his work in new and provocative ways. The authors include Agassi's most notable (...) pupils, friends, and colleagues. Overall, their contributions challenge the received view on a variety of issues concerning science, religion, and education. Readers will find well-reasoned arguments on such topics as the secular problem of evil, religion and critical thinking, liberal democratic educational communities, democracy and constitutionalism, and capitalism at a crossroad.“/div>divTo Joseph Agassi, philosophy is the practice of reason, where reason is understood as the relentless search for criticisms of the best available explanations that we have to the world around us. This book not only honors one of the most original philosophers of science today. It also offers readers insights into a school of thought that lies at the heart of philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract. The aim of this paper is first to defend the intuition that truth is grounded in how things are and, second, to argue that this fact is consistent with Minimalism. After having cashed out that intuition in terms of explanatory claims of the form ‘if it is true that p, it is true that p because p’, I set out an argument against Minimalism which is based on the same intuition, and I argue that a strategy the minimalist could (...) adopt to resist the argument, i.e. to deny the correctness of the intuition, is flawed. Then I explain why the intuition is correct and I make some claims concerning the kind of explanations which are involved in it. Now the stage is set up to present the right way for the minimalist to resist the argument. I finally answer some objections. (shrink)

Herbert Simon’s work presents a curious anomaly to the historian and philosopher trying to understand the development of classic Artificial Intelligence (AI). Simon was one of most influential figures in AI since its birth, and yet it is always with some difficulties that his work can be made to fit within the received canon of AI’s development and goals. In fact, he differed from every other figure in early AI on most counts: in terms of the recognized intellectual heritage of (...) AI, of his own background and training, of the goals he set for his own AI work and the assessment criteria he accepted. I will argue that these differences provide important clues toward a reevaluation of the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Herbert Simon’s work that may change our current understanding of both. On the one hand, classic Artificial Intelligence (or Complex Information Processing, as Simon preferred to call it for a number of years), provided the tool he needed to pursue a much broader research agenda that strove to encompass human beings in their cognitive, emotional, social, and political dimensions. On the other hand, AI’s curious status as the discipline that straggles the boundaries between engineering, science, and philosophy can be recast as the tool that allowed researchers to pursue philosophy’s old goals with an alternative methodology. From this perspective, Simon’s version of Artificial Intelligence becomes a full-fledged form of ”anti-philosophy” as ambitious and broad-ranging as old-fashioned metaphysics and as revolutionary as the latter in the radical refashioning of its methodology. It follows that a philosophical assessment of AI, at in least in its Simonian incarnation, must be more farreaching than it is usually thought. At the methodological level, it must discuss whether AI’s invention of computer simulation as the tool that overcomes the a-priori/a-posteriori distinction by actually producing the behavior it wants to explain is really adequate to the job at hand.. (shrink)

This book seeks to rectify misrepresentations of Popperian thought with a historical approach to Popper’s philosophy, an approach which applies his own mature view, that we gain knowledge through conjectures and refutations, to his own development, by portraying him in his intellectual growth as just such a series. Gattei seeks to reconstruct the logic of Popper’s development, in order to show how one problem and its tentative solution led to a new problem.