This article seeks to reconcile a fundamental normative tension that underlies most international reconstruction efforts in war-torn societies: on the one hand, substantial outside interference in the domestic affairs of such societies may seem desirable to secure political stability, set up inclusive governance structures, and protect basic human rights; on the other hand, such interference is inherently paternalistic—and thus problematic—since it limits the policy options and broader freedom of maneuver of domestic political actors. I argue that for paternalistic interference in (...) foreign countries to be justified, it needs to be strictly proportional to domestic impediments to self-government and basic rights protection. Based on this claim, I model different degrees of interference that are admissible at particular stages of the postwar reconstruction process. Extrapolating from John Rawls'sLaw of Peoples, I suggest that full-scale international trusteeship can be justified only so long as conditions on the ground remain “outlaw”—that is, so long as security remains volatile and basic rights, including the right to life, are systematically threatened. Once basic security has been reestablished, a lower degree of interference continues to be justified, until new domestic governance structures become entirely self-sustaining. During this second phase of postwar reconstruction, external actors ideally ought toshare responsibilityfor law-enforcement and administration with domestic authorities, which implies in practice that domestic and international officials should jointly approve all major decisions. I discuss various approximations of such shared responsibility in recent international peace operations and speculate about how best to ensure a timely transition toward full domestic ownership. (shrink)

Classical arguments about the legitimate use of force have profoundly shaped the norms and institutions of contemporary international society. But what specific lessons can we learn from the classical European philosophers and jurists when thinking about humanitarian intervention, preventive self-defense or international trusteeship today? The contributors to this volume take seriously the admonition of contextualist scholars not to uproot classical thinkers' arguments from their social, political and intellectual environment. Nevertheless, this collection demonstrates that contemporary students, scholars and policymakers can still (...) learn a great deal from the questions raised by classical European thinkers, the problems they highlighted, and even the problematic character of some of the solutions they offered. The aim of this volume is to open up current assumptions about military intervention, and to explore the possibility of reconceptualizing and reappraising contemporary approaches. (shrink)

This essay addresses the methodology of philosophy of science and illustrates how formal and empirical methods can be fruitfully combined. Special emphasis is given to the application of experimental methods to confirmation theory and to recent work on the conjunction fallacy, a key topic in the rationality debate arising from research in cognitive psychology. Several other issue can be studied in this way. In the concluding section, a brief outline is provided of three further examples.

How are individuals socialized today? To answer these questions, a unique investigation has been carried out using two scales of analysis: the scale of the cosmopolitan world as well as the scale of everyday life and socialization to otherness.

Quest'opera fa parte di un più vasto lavoro di ricerca sul neo-idealismo italiano in rapporto alla politica. Il titolo - filosofia e politica - è di per sé significativo: sta a indicare chiaramente la direzione e il tipo dell'indagine, che non è empirica ma trascendentale, non riguarda cioè la dottrina politica e le scelte pratiche di Croce, staccate dall'organismo del pensiero in cui s'incorporano e analizzate alla luce di alcune categorie, magari psicologiche e sociologiche; ma riguarda i presupposti teoretici che (...) stanno a fondamento di quella dottrina e di quelle scelte. Scartato, perché fuorviante, il metodo di quelle due «false scienze» che sono la psicologia e la sociologia, l'Autore ha tentato un discorso schiettamente filosofico, che è poi discorso di fondazione e di deduzione. Per questo è stato necessario procedere a una lettura integrale di Croce, avendo in una mano l'esperienza dei «testi» e nell'altra quella categoria della «totalità», che è più facile da invocare che da impiegare. Ma è stato necessario anche dare al lavoro un «taglio» particolare, in modo da evitare le semplificazioni eccessive e le sintesi sommarie, per andare direttamente al cuore dei problemi. L'impostazione metodologica ha richiesto da una parte l'adesione all'universo spirituale dell'autore studiato, e dall'altra l'obiettivo distaccato scientifico: due condizioni fondamentali, queste, che solo in apparenza si escludono, perché in realtà si conciliano riassumendosi nel concetto di «critica interna». DAL TESTO - "A ragione Croce afferma che il liberalismo è grandemente debitore all'estetica e alla filosofia dell'economia che hanno asserito la spiritualità del corpo, l'interiorità dell'oggetto nel soggetto, sì che il suo destino è legato a quelle due scienze che unificando Dio e mondo, idea e fatto, garantiscono, contro ogni disposizione autoritaria, la spontaneità e i contrasti delle forze spirituali; e a ragione afferma che l'autoritarismo politico e morale si congiunge a tutte quelle concezioni che hanno un riferimento trascendente e oltremondano. (da Archiviostorico.info). Ristampa del libro edito da Bulzoni, nel 1976. (shrink)

The paper lists several editions of Euclid’s Elements in the Early Modern Age, giving for each of them the axioms and postulates employed to ground elementary mathematics.

In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual networks and lexicons. This article distinguishes these three concepts (...) and shows that adopting each one of them has different impacts on Kuhn’s model of science. After distinguishing and assessing the concepts of taxonomy, network, and lexicon, it will be argued that the latter not only fits the Kuhnian model of science better, but it also helps capture the wide sense of Kuhn’s early concept of a paradigm. (shrink)

This book presents a systematic exploration of the subjective experience, keeping the investigation for the most part within a subjective first person perspective through the use of “vignettes” as sources of data. It also uses incorporates a ‘"third person” objective approach when that is relevant. The goal of Journeys in the Mind is to capture and convey the operations of the mind: both the shared blueprints common to the elaboration of subjective knowledge as well as the immense fishnet of personalized (...) variables that operate in each mental phase-space and act upon the blueprints to continuously recategorize them into sets of coherent, dynamic outcomes, or mental landscapes. Dr. Sanguineti's meditative perspective holds the promise to enrich the way we understand the workings of the human mind. (shrink)

In his mature writings, Kuhn describes the process of specialisation as driven by a form of incommensurability, defined as a conceptual/linguistic barrier which promotes and guarantees the insularity of specialties. In this paper, we reject the idea that the incommensurability among scientific specialties is a linguistic barrier. We argue that the problem with Kuhn’s characterisation of the incommensurability among specialties is that he presupposes a rather abstract theory of semantic incommensurability, which he then tries to apply to his description of (...) the process of specialisation. By contrast, this paper follows a different strategy: after criticising Kuhn’s view, it takes a further look at how new scientific specialties emerge. As a result, a different way of understanding incommensurability among specialties will be proposed. (shrink)

To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their engagement in this collective activity. Our (...) classification offers, on the one hand, a model of how the ethical aspects of science are taken into consideration by scientists and, on the other, some indications on how to institutionalize ethics in science. (shrink)

Identifying, classifying, and analyzing arguments in legal discourse has been a prominent area of research since the inception of the argument mining field. However, there has been a major discrepancy between the way natural language processing (NLP) researchers model and annotate arguments in court decisions and the way legal experts understand and analyze legal argumentation. While computational approaches typically simplify arguments into generic premises and claims, arguments in legal research usually exhibit a rich typology that is important for gaining insights (...) into the particular case and applications of law in general. We address this problem and make several substantial contributions to move the field forward. First, we design a new annotation scheme for legal arguments in proceedings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that is deeply rooted in the theory and practice of legal argumentation research. Second, we compile and annotate a large corpus of 373 court decisions (2.3M tokens and 15k annotated argument spans). Finally, we train an argument mining model that outperforms state-of-the-art models in the legal NLP domain and provide a thorough expert-based evaluation. All datasets and source codes are available under open lincenses at https://github.com/trusthlt/mining-legal-arguments. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is widely considered as one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, while his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is regarded as one of the most influential works in the philosophy ofscience. At the same time, however, his place within philosophy of science remains ambiguous. On the one hand, despite the popularity of SSR, there is no proper ‘Kuhnian school of thought’ in HPS. On the other hand, the interest towards Kuhn does (...) not seem to fade away and the number of publications about his work does not seem to decrease. We suggest that there are at least three different ways to go ‘beyond SSR’: (i) by scrutinising the development of Kuhn’s thought, from his pre- to his post-SSR writings; (ii) by contextualising Kuhn in the philosophical milieu of his time, thus interpreting his view as emerging from the intellectual exchanges he had with contemporary philosophers; (iii) by reinterpreting and developing some of his most known ideas, in ways that perhaps Kuhn himself was not able to contemplate. (shrink)

Theory change is a central concern in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. In this paper, we investigate the relationships between two ongoing research programs providing formal treatments of theory change: the (post-Popperian) approach to verisimilitude and the AGM theory of belief change. We show that appropriately construed accounts emerging from those two lines of epistemological research do yield convergences relative to a specified kind of theories, here labeled “conjunctive”. In this domain, a set of plausible conditions are identified which (...) demonstrably capture the verisimilitudinarian effectiveness of AGM belief change, i.e., its effectiveness in tracking truth approximation. We conclude by indicating some further developments and open issues arising from our results. (shrink)

The present paper proposes a definition for the complex polysemic concepts of consciousness and awareness (in humans as well as in other species), and puts forward the idea of a progressive ontological development of consciousness from a state of ‘childhood’ awareness, in order to explain that humans are not only able to manipulate objects, but also their mental representations. The paper builds on the idea of qualia intended as entities posing regular invariant requests to neural processes, trough the permanence of (...) different properties. The concept of semantic differential introduces the properties of metaphorical qualia as an exclusively human ability. Furthermore this paper proposes a classification of qualia, according to the models–with different levels of abstraction–they are implied in, in a taxonomic perspective. This, in turn, becomes a source of categorization of divergent representations, sign systems, and forms of intentionality, relying always on biological criteria. New emerging image-of-the-world-devices are proposed, whose qualia are likely to be only accessible to humans: emotional qualia, where emotion accounts for the invariant and dominant property; and the qualic self where continuity, combined with the oneness of the self, accounts for the invariant and dominant property. The concept of congruence between different domains in a metaphor introduces the possibility of a general evaluation of truth and falsity of all kinds of metaphorical constructs, while the work of Matte Blanco enables us to classify conscious versus unconscious metaphors, both in individuals and in social organizations. (shrink)

This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account, which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will show, the evidential account exhibits some distinctive logical features that deserve careful consideration. On the one hand, it departs from the material reading of ‘if then’ exactly in the way we would like it to depart from that reading. On the other, it significantly differs from the non-material accounts which (...) hinge on the Ramsey Test, advocated by Adams, Stalnaker, Lewis, and others. (shrink)

Computational techniques comparing co-occurrences of city names in texts allow the relative longitudes and latitudes of cities to be estimated algorithmically. However, these techniques have not been applied to estimate the provenance of artifacts with unknown origins. Here, we estimate the geographic origin of artifacts from the Indus Valley Civilization, applying methods commonly used in cognitive science to the Indus script. We show that these methods can accurately predict the relative locations of archeological sites on the basis of artifacts of (...) known provenance, and we further apply these techniques to determine the most probable excavation sites of four sealings of unknown provenance. These findings suggest that inscription statistics reflect historical interactions among locations in the Indus Valley region, and they illustrate how computational methods can help localize inscribed archeological artifacts of unknown origin. The success of this method offers opportunities for the cognitive sciences in general and for computational anthropology specifically. (shrink)

Both in the bibliography and in the citation in the text, Michelle Gibbons’ article below has been mistakenly attributed to “Gibson.” The proper reference to the article should be: Gibbons, M.. Reassessing discovery: Rosalind Franklin, scientific visualization, and the structure of DNA. _Philosophy of Science, 79_, 63–80.

Is the ubiquity of contemporary popular music akin to a deliberate aggression to the hearing, making the listening experience devoid of any sense? If so, is there any strategy to morph this supposed confusion into meaningful stimuli? Relying on epistemology, we attempt at promoting the act of listening as a proper way of world-making and refer to Mark Reybrouck, Bruno Nettl, Steven Brown and Joseph Jordania—among others—to gather appropriate heuristic tools. In the last part of the essay, we advance the (...) concept of timbral quotation as an additional means to grasp meaningful cues in the timbrical richness of contemporary popular compositions. We shall sustain the particular fitness of this tool especially with regard to nowadays’ Western popular music, more and more timbre-centered rather than harmony-centered. (shrink)