The aim of my paper is to highlight that for Peirce the reality of God makes sense of the whole scientific enterprise. The belief in God is a natural product of abduction, of the "rational instinct" or educated guess of the scientist or the layman, and also the abduction of God may be understood as a "proof" of pragmatism. Moreover, I want to suggest that for Peirce scientific activity is a genuine religious enterprise, perhaps even the religious activity par excellence, (...) and that to divorce religion from science is antithetical to both the scientific spirit and the real Peirce. Understanding the real Peirce requires to deal with his religious concerns, which are increasingly recognized as being perhaps as philosophically important as his scientific concerns. Since a key notion in this project is the idea of "il lume naturale" that Peirce borrowed from Galileo, I want also to pay attention to that expression which during years I have been following through Peirce's papers and books. -/- In order to try to explain some of this, my paper is arranged into four brief sections after this already long introduction: 1) God and scientific inquiry; 2) The belief in God as a product of abduction; 3) Galileo and Peirce: Il lume naturale; and by way of conclusion 4) Some remarks on the religious framework of Peirce's approach. (shrink)

Nella problematica generale dei rapporti tra Dio e l'uomo rientra il problema del diritto naturale. Tale problema si e manifestato in modo particolare nel secolo XVII come dimostra lo studio di Ugo Grozio (1583-1645). L'attualita delle sue idee e vivo anche oggi sia in Italia che all'estero; Grozio e ricordato soprattutto dai giuristi, nonostante la sua attivita si sia svolta anche in altri campi come dimostra l'opera bibliografica di Meulen J. Ter e Diermanse. Molti studiosi elogiano le sue impostazioni (...) giuridiche come per esempio G.B. Vico che lo chiama iurisconsultus generis humani. D'altra parte ci sono anche molti critici poco entusiasti del suo pensiero e che anzi lo accusano considerandolo l'iniziatore di una nuova corrente dottrinale che rompe la vera linea del diritto naturale iniziata dai greci, perfezionata dai romani e ripresa dalla scolastica. Da tutto questo appare chiaro che non e facile entrare nel pensiero del giurista di Delft. Questo lavoro vorrebbe dare una risposta al problema del diritto naturale e del suo rapporto con Dio. Si vuol vedere come si puo accordare la famosa affermazione una sola volta nel Prolegomena 11 del De iure belli ac pacis, che le norme del diritto naturale alocum aliquem haberent etiam daremusanon esse Deum, aut non curari a beo negotia humanaa la quale sembra separare il diritto dalla Divinita con la convinzione veramente religiosa di Grozio e con i suoi continui richiami all'autorita delle Sacre Scritture, dei Padri della Chiesa e dei teologi. (shrink)

Tra il 1950 e il 1976, malgrado le prove e i contrattempi, Patočka ha ripreso spesso la sua meditazione sul mondo nel quale viviamo e dal quale la scienza ci allontana nello momento stesso in cui ne scopre l’oggettività. I dieci saggi qui raccolti permettono di seguire l’itinerario di pensiero che ha portato il filosofo ceco a porre la questione di una fenomenologia trans-soggettiva e a ripensare, in questa prospettiva, il concetto aristotelico di movimento. Lungo il percorso appare evidente che (...) dal 1910 Husserl liberava il significato fondamentale del “problema” di un mondo naturale; tuttavia, soltanto una fenomenologia che porta a compimento ciò che la Kehre heideggeriana inaugura, ha qualche possibilità di reperire le giustificazioni di un quotidiano in cui mito, lavoro e scienza trovano senso in queste grandi manifestazioni della libertà con l’altro che sono il sacrificio e la cosiddetta vita normale. (shrink)

In addition to being a founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce was a scientist and an empiricist. A core aspect of his thoroughgoing empiricism was a mindset that treats all attitudes as revisable. His fallibilism seems to require us to constantly seek out new information, and to not be content holding any beliefs uncritically. At the same time, Peirce often states that common sense has an important role to play in both scientific and vital inquiry, and that there cannot (...) be any “direct profit in going behind common sense.” Our question is the following: alongside a scientific mindset and a commitment to the method of inquiry, where does common sense fit in? Peirce does at times directly address common sense; however, those explicit engagements are relatively infrequent. In this paper, we argue that getting a firm grip on the role of common sense in Peirce’s philosophy requires a three-pronged investigation, targeting his treatment of common sense alongside his more numerous remarks on intuition and instinct. By excavating and developing Peirce’s concepts of instinct and intuition, we show that his respect for common sense coheres with his insistence on the methodological superiority of inquiry. We conclude that Peirce shows us the way to a distinctive epistemic position balancing fallibilism and anti-scepticism, a pragmatist common sense position of considerable interest for contemporary epistemology given current interest in the relation of intuition and reason. (shrink)

The earth is the archetypal image of the origin of humanity, but throughout the history of Western culture it has given way to other, more heavenly allegories. Enlightenment as a paradigm of knowledge consolidated itself in Western philosophical thought in a very convincing way as a production of meanings. Through this rereading of the first Greek metaphysics, thought gradually distanced itself from its materiality, from its humanity, from the possibility of admiring the concrete world, getting closer and closer to the (...) need to create abstract objects, which, as ethical limits, political, aesthetic and epistemological, we end up meeting again in our lives. Visibility seems to be the basis of a Western mental habitus: recognition, officiality, legitimacy and certainty become visible signs with which we compare and validate our own experiences. The earth, as a less transparent element, with greater ability to hide, occult, encrypt represents, however, an image that is better suited to the discussion plan proposed in this text. The relationship with reality, in terms of visibility and invisibility, requires a new perception of the world: the underlying structure no longer assumes a transcendent level, but is understood as a plane of immanence, in which meaning is interior, produced by compositions; an amalgam of networks that intertwine in an imperceptible, invisible underground plane. What we propose here is not a vertical perspective, but a horizontal one like the ground. It is from this earthly thought that we want to reflect on what happens in philosophy and childhood; in philosophy with childhood and in the childhood of philosophy. In the present attempt of an ecophilosophy of education, the discussion plan requires a deviation from the guiding images with which we learn to do research. The intention of the following investigation is to look for another type of map: a kind of subterranean cartography, which pays attention not to what we can see, which has well-defined names and categories, but to what is hidden and inhabits a plane that is muddy, earthly, indistinguishable and absolutely alive. According to the Lipmanian model of Philosophy for Children, the subterranean and rhizomatic processes of the research community will be examined, comparing them to other collective movements that characterize the vegetable communities of plants that inhabit the natural world. Finally, three concepts considered relevant to escape the limits found in some contemporary pedagogical postures will be illustrated, suggesting other paths in the relationship between philosophy, childhood and education: reciprocity, passivity and invisibility. (shrink)

Il presente studio si pone in ideale continuità con l’opera di Marcello Gigante Nomos Basileus, analisi fondamentale della nascita e delle interrelazioni tra diritto naturale, diritto divino e diritto positivo nel mondo greco, prendendo le mosse proprio dal punto in cui questi aveva interrotto la sua indagine, ossia sulle concezioni platoniche del nomos e le sue connessioni con il divino, l’anima e l’educazione. In Platone sono rintracciate le premesse teoretiche della concezione, poi diffusa in età ellenistica, imperiale e tardo-antica, (...) e solitamente attribuita agli stoici, del sovrano come nomos empsychos legge incarnata, fonte del diritto positivo in quanto è legge esso stesso. In Platone esiste uno stretto rapporto tra diritto naturale, diritto divino e diritto positivo: che il nomos empsychos sia espressione della legge di natura risulta dal principio platonico secondo cui natura è per l’uomo l’anima e principalmente la dimensione intellegibile e divina che è in essa. I governanti degni promulgano leggi positive che scaturiscono dalla loro anima divina: così può essere garantito il fondamento divino e naturale delle leggi positive. -/- . (shrink)

Negli scritti dei primi anni trenta Adorno si propone di superare l’antitesi fra natura e storia senza ricadere in un modello fondativo di conciliazione. Attraverso una critica della ripresa nella filosofia contemporanea dell’ac­cezione mitica della natura come origine e come invariante , Adorno intende recuperare il carattere polisemico dell’esperien­za della natura e del suo intreccio paradossale con la storia. Il concetto di ‘seconda natura’, ripreso attraverso il confronto con Lukács e con Benja­min, e connesso con le nozioni di ‘caducità’ e (...) ‘allegoria’, si rivela così de­cisivo per comprendere il senso dialettico della storia naturale. In his writings of the early thirties Adorno intends to overcome the an­tithesis between nature and history without falling into a foundationalist model of conciliation. Through a criticism of the reprise in contemporary philosophy of nature’s mythical meanings, as origin and in­variant , Adorno wants to retrieve the polysemous character of nature’s experience and its paradoxical relation with history. The concept of ‘second nature’, as read through Lukács and Benjamin, and connected with the notions of ‘caducity’ and ‘allegory’, reveals itself to be decisive in understanding the dialectical meaning of natural history. (shrink)