Gathers the pre-Sand Country Almanac writings of Aldo Leopold, showing that he was not born an ecologist, but evolved over time through experimentation and thought.

The IKt-algebras that we investigate in this paper were introduced in the paper An algebraic axiomatization of the Ewald’s intuitionistic tense logic by the first and third author. Now we characterize by topological methods the subdirectly irreducible IKt-algebras and particularly the simple IKt-algebras. Finally, we consider the particular cases of finite IKt-algebras and complete IKt-algebras.

Human coalitions frequently persist through multiple, overlapping membership generations, requiring new members to cooperate and coordinate with veteran members. Does the mind contain psychological adaptations for interacting within these intergenerational coalitions? In this paper, we examine whether the mind spontaneously treats newcomers as a motivationally privileged category. Newcomers—though capable of benefiting coalitions—may also impose considerable costs (e.g., they may free ride on other members, they may be poor at completing group tasks). In three experiments we show (1) that the mind (...) categorizes coalition members by tenure, including newcomers; (2) that tenure categorization persists in the presence of orthogonal and salient social dimensions; and (3) that newcomers elicit a pattern of impressions consistent with their probable ancestral costs. These results provide preliminary evidence for a specialized component of human coalitional psychology: an evolved concept of newcomer. (shrink)

This article analyses the origin of TI 49–51 on the basis of several posthumous fragments from the autumn of 1887, which had been reworked in 1888. This analysis highlights significant connections that got lost along the way to the final version of these aphorisms, such as Nietzsche’s comparison between Goethe and Spinoza which, in 1887, was the beginning of his updated reflections on Goethe. The origin and context of these aphorisms allow for a better understanding of the long-established image of (...) Goethe expressed in the aphorisms of Twilight of the Idols and their close connection to the new reflections on Goethe as they had already come to the fore in Human, All Too Human when Nietzsche distanced himself from Wagner’s ideas. This also presents the opportunity for a more careful consideration of Nietzsche’s conception of European culture and its intellectual heritage and his relation to Napoleon as well as his characterization of the eighteenth-century and the need for self-overcoming during the nineteenth-century. Nietzsche considered this self-overcoming to be an important aspect of his thinking, and Goethe was an important precursor for Nietzsche’s conception of self-overcoming. (shrink)

If the laws of nature are as the Humean believes, it is an unexplained cosmic coincidence that the actual Humean mosaic is as extremely regular as it is. This is a strong and well-known objection to the Humean account of laws. Yet, as reasonable as this objection may seem, it is nowadays sometimes dismissed. The reason: its unjustified implicit assignment of equiprobability to each possible Humean mosaic; that is, its assumption of the principle of indifference, which has been attacked on (...) many grounds ever since it was first proposed. In place of equiprobability, recent formal models represent the doxastic state of total ignorance as suspension of judgment. In this paper I revisit the cosmic coincidence objection to Humean laws by assessing which doxastic state we should endorse. By focusing on specific features of our scenario I conclude that suspending judgment results in an unnecessarily weak doxastic state. First, I point out that recent literature in epistemology has provided independent justifications of the principle of indifference. Second, given that the argument is framed within a Humean metaphysics, it turns out that we are warranted to appeal to these justifications and assign a uniform and additive credence distribution among Humean mosaics. This leads us to conclude that, contrary to widespread opinion, we should not dismiss the cosmic coincidence objection to the Humean account of laws. (shrink)

Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a 'typical' dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light --a different light-- on philosophical debates on the laws of (...) nature. In the explanation of such patterns, the specific form of the underlying dynamics is almost irrelevant. The conditions required, given a free state-space evolution, suffice to account for the coarse-grained lawful behaviour. An analysis of such conditions might thus provide a different account of how regular behaviour can occur. This paper focuses on drawing attention to this type of explanation, outlining it in the diverse areas of physics in which it appears, and discussing its limitations and significance in the tractable setting of classical statistical mechanics. (shrink)

It is not uncommon in the history of science and philosophy to encounter crucial experiments or crucial objections the truth-value of which we are ignorant, that is, about which we suspend judgment. Should we ignore such objections? Contrary to widespread practice, I show that in and only in some circumstances they should not be ignored, for the epistemically rational doxastic attitude is to suspend judgment also about the hypothesis that the objection targets. In other words, suspension of judgment “propagates” from (...) the crucial objection to the hypothesis. In this paper I study under which conditions this phenomenon occurs, and discuss its significance for the topics of skepticism, scientific realism, and peer disagreement. (shrink)

Antisthène (444-365 av. J.-C.) est le fondateur de l'école cynique. Cet ouvrage restitue la vraie figure d'Antisthène, altérée par la tradition qui le présente abusivement comme un sophiste, un éristique ou un théoricien de la légitimité exclusive des jugements d'identité. L'auteur le replace dans la lignée socratique et décrit sa réflexion sur la philosophie du langage et la sophistique.

This paper addresses the status of the act of sharing a message in a social network. Scholars do not agree on what kind of act sharing is and what kind of communicative and illocutionary act is performed when a post is shared. We defend the view that sharing is an act similar to photocopying and distributing a document. Such an act is a basic act that can be used for communicative aims in certain contexts but that is not necessarily communicative. (...) One can repost for several reasons—to manifest agreement or derision, to inform, to please the author, to show activity on social networks, to have an economic return—and only some of them are communicative. However, even when reposters do not perform a communicative act, they are not relieved of every responsibility; in fact, the responsibilities of reposters are like those of the persons who copy and distribute something. (shrink)

In the following interview with Manlio Iofrida, Aldo Giorgio Gargani retraces the fundamental moments and key phases of his intellectual development: his early childhood and adolescence in Genoa, strongly marked by the influence of his artist father and of the social context of the immediate post-war situation; his studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and subsequently at the University of Oxford, which resulted to his first book on Wittgenstein; the achievement during the 1960s of a distinctive philosophical (...) position of his own, reflected in the publication of the book Il sapere senza fondamenti [Knowledge without Foundations]; the renewal of philosophical culture in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, in which Gargani himself was one of the main protagonists; the return to an engagement with Wittgenstein, after a period in which he had dedicated himself principally to literary questions and concerns, one pursued specifically in the context of the new issues raised at the beginning of the 21st century. This historical and autobiographical reconstruction of his intellectual career is accompanied at every turn by philosophical reflections on our contemporary situation and by specific critical responses to other contemporary philosophical trends and developments: the interview thus constitutes a telling summation of the fundamental themes and aspects of the author’s thought in general. (shrink)

Can stable regularities be explained without appealing to governing laws or any other modal notion? In this paper, I consider what I will call a ‘Humean system’—a generic dynamical system without guiding laws—and assess whether it could display stable regularities. First, I present what can be interpreted as an account of the rise of stable regularities, following from Strevens [2003], which has been applied to explain the patterns of complex systems (such as those from meteorology and statistical mechanics). Second, since (...) this account presupposes that the underlying dynamics displays deterministic chaos, I assess whether it can be adapted to cases where the underlying dynamics is not chaotic but truly random—that is, cases where there is no dynamics guiding the time evolution of the system. If this is so, the resulting stable, apparently non-accidental regularities are the fruit of what can be called statistical necessity rather than of a primitive physical necessity. (shrink)

This paper has a twofold aim. The first is to offer a precise definition of soft fact. Without such definition it is impossible to assess the Ockhamist solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom in an accurate way. The second purpose is to identify the costs of such a solution, distinguishing them from some of the other costs usually ascribed to Ockhamism, which Ockhamism does not actually need to pay. In particular, it is argued that Ockhamism is (...) committed to the view that a true future exists and to a form of backward causation. (shrink)

The Choquet expected utility model deals with nonadditive probabilities (or capacities). Their dependence on the information the decision-maker has about the possibility of the events is taken into account. Two kinds of information are examined: interval information (for instance, the percentage of white balls in an urn is between 60% and 100%) and comparative information (for instance, the information that there are more white balls than black ones). Some implications are shown with regard to the core of the capacity and (...) to two additive measures which can be derived from capacities: the Shapley value and the nucleolus. Interval information bounds prove to be satisfied by all probabilities in the core, but they are not necessarily satisfied by the nucleolus (when the core is empty) and the Shapley value. We must introduce the constrained nucleolus in order for these bounds to be satisfied, while the Shapley value does not seem to be adjustable. On the contrary, comparative information inequalities prove to be not necessarily satisfied by all probabilities in the core and we must introduce the constrained core in order for these inequalities be satisfied. However, both the nucleolus and the Shapley value satisfy the comparative information inequalities, and the Shapley value does it more strictly than the nucleolus. (shrink)

English summary: Aldo Giorgio Gargani innovates in his use of Wittgensteinian concepts to argue that the formation of scientific and philosophical knowledge is not a linear progression, but a collection of instruments or conceptual and behavioral models, decisional procedures that are born of the different forms of human life as extensions of their anthropological contexts. Through this book Gargani demonstrates how Wittgensteins thinking can be used a truly efficient toolbox. French description: Aldo Giorgio Gargani (1933-2009) fait dans ce (...) livre un usage novateur des concepts wittgensteiniens pour soutenir que la formation du savoir scientifique et philosophique n'est pas une progression lineaire, cumulative et definitive de techniques cognitives: le savoir est plutot un recueil d'instruments, d'habitus conceptuels, de modeles comportementaux, de conduites operationnelles et de procedures decisionnelles qui naissent des formes de vie des hommes, en tant qu'extensions de leurs contextes anthropologiques. Si l'expression savoir sans fondements est maintenant tres repandue dans les sciences humaines, c'est Gargani qui a magistralement elabore toutes les consequences de cette idee, et son livre est l'analyse la plus riche de ces rituels epistemologiques qui decoulent de notre agir humain, lui-meme depourvu de fondements. A travers ce livre on voit comment la pensee de Wittgenstein peut etre utilisee comme une boite a outils veritablement efficace. (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish two possible families of semantics of the open future: Linearism, according to which future tense sentences are evaluated with respect to a unique possible future history, and Universalism, according to which future tense sentences are evaluated universally quantifying on the histories passing through the moment of evaluation. An argument in favour of Linearism is based on the fact future tense does not exhibit scope interactions with negation. Todd (2020, 2021) defends Universalism against this argument proposing (...) an error theory, according to which the speakers engaged in non-philosophical conversations implicitly assume a linearist semantics of the future. In this paper, I show that an error theory is not needed for defending Universalism and that the scopelessness of negation can have another explanation. The absence of a wide-scope reading of negation characterises many other linguistic constructions: counterfactuals, vague predicates, generics and plural definite descriptions. My main thesis is that, their considerable differences aside, these constructions have something in common: they are true when the predicate applies to the members of a set, false when the predicate does not apply to the members of the set and indeterminate in the intermediate cases. When negation interacts with such constructions tends to take the narrow scope reading only. I review two types of explanations for this behaviour, one semantic and the other pragmatic. Since this explanation for the scopelessness of negation is at least as good as that of Linearism, I conclude that the argument against Universalism is ineffective. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to compare different conceptions of the role of (normative) coherence in the legal field. More precisely, it aims to deepen Neil MacCormick's theory of legal reasoning, in which coherence is essentially considered an interpretative tool, and Ronald Dworkin's legal theory, in which coherence occupies a more crucial place. The main results of this paper can be summarized in two points. A) For Dworkin, coherence is not just an interpretative standard but constitutes the hard core (...) of his theory of law. B) As a consequence of A, Dworkin's reflections on coherence (as an interpretative standard) cannot be separated from his theory of law grounded on the concept of integrity. (shrink)

The algorithm has become an increasingly important concept in understanding human behavior in recent years. In the case of sport, human bodies are seen as superficial to the driving force of the algorithm, whether it be genetic, behavioral or surveillance-technological algorithms (Harari Citation2015, 2020; Zuboff Citation2019). However, the French mathematician and philosopher Michel Serres (1930–2019) structurally relate algorithms to sports and bodily experience at multiple places in his oeuvre. According to Serres, sport actually enables us to reprogram and rewrite our (...) behavior, moods and thoughts, and therefore modifies our algorithmic status (Serres Citation1999, Citation2019). Against deterministic conceptions of the body, Serres argues that human bodies possess a ‘metamorphic’ nature that is similar to the procedural character of computer programs. This paper investigates the relationship between the algorithm and bodily existence through a reading of both Harari and Serres on sport. It will be argued that, against deterministic conceptions of the algorithm, the algorithm can actually broaden an understanding of the role of sports and physical activity. (shrink)

Leopold first discusses the conservation of natural resources in the southwestern United States in economic tenns, stressing, in particular, erosion and aridity. He then concludes his analysis with a discussion of the moral issues involved, developing his general position within the context of P. D. Ouspenky’s early philosophy of organism.

The purpose of this article is studying An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ by Immanuel Kant —a renowned text in the field of philosophy— assuming the dimension of the public as a central piece of analysis. In order to do that, the lectures of Michel Foucault on the same text are presented in the first place. Second, the diagram formed by the terms öffenlicht and Publikum is approached by pointing out their articulating elements and the tensions produced from (...) their different uses. Finally, the uses and senses of what is public are reflected upon, while trying to characterize the current model of political rationality. This mutual operationalization between the uses of the public in the text is noticeable as a particularly relevant and pertinent instance to evaluate diverse processes and phenomena, all related to the problem of government in its political dimension. (shrink)

In this paper we will focus on the following points in Epictetus. First, we will concentrate our attention on the celebrated distinction between things up to us and things not up to us. Second, we will survey the distinction between the material and its use. According to this distinction, all external things are not up to us and consequently have no intrinsic value, although, as materials for the capacity of choice, their use has value, since humans can use things well (...) or badly. Third, we will demonstrate that the use of the materials corresponds to the use of presentations. Finally, we will present the three topics of Epictetus’ philosophy: the topic relative to desire, the topic relative to impulse and the topic relative to assent, being the first concerned with judgments about things and our desires; the second, about impulses and adequate actions; and the third, about assent and persuasiveness of presentations. The knowledge contained in these three topics constitute, for Epictetus, what we should know to make good use of presentations and, consequently, to achieve the human good, which is a capacity of choice according to nature that has at its disposal a comprehensive set of correct opinions about reality. (shrink)

Neste artigo, faremos uma análise da noção socrática de technê, que se desdobra em dois sentidos: uma sabedoria instável, humana e crítica (uma sophia de Dédalo), e uma sabedoria estável, divina e ideal. Ambas seguem o critério racional, o que implica uma concepção da alma segundo a qual as motivações são estritamente racionais.

El presente artículo analiza algunos de los dilemas definitorios más relevantes del campo de la educación inclusiva. Sus desarrollos cognitivos actuales no son más que un peculiar sistema de ignorancia sancionada que opera con gran fuerza a través de la metáfora del engañador-engañado, es decir, una espacialidad argumentativa que nace engañada y que produce múltiples formas de engaño. Lo que conocemos como educación inclusiva no es más que una racionalidad que trabaja sin referencias objetivas sobre sí mismas. Lo cierto es (...) que la inclusión es un fenómeno dinámico y variable, cuyos significantes cambian, mutan y se transforman sistemáticamente de acuerdo con el contexto que dialoga. Es esto lo que permite sostener que la inclusión es un concepto maleta –esta metáfora nos informa cómo algo puede servir para múltiples cosas–, con usos y aplicaciones diferentes. Es un fenómeno y un cuerpo de conocimiento no fijo que, a partir de él, permite leer una multiplicidad de categorías teóricas y prácticas sociales. De ello se infiere que no estamos tratando con un cuerpo de conocimientos fijos. El conocimiento auténtico de la educación inclusiva ni su repertorio metodológico pueden escaparse de las relaciones de poder. Ambos están profundamente arraigados en aquello que se proponen comprender. Su conocimiento nunca es políticamente neutral. El trabajo concluye observando que una de las tensiones más relevantes que enfrenta la construcción epistemológica de la educación inclusiva consiste en aprender a utilizar en el trabajo empírico sus fundamentos cognitivos para evitar que su práctica no pueda defender las desigualdades sociales –estructurales y relaciones– que pretende comprender. Tomar la educación inclusiva como cualquier enfoque teórico que analiza problemas sociales puede incurrir en una praxis laxa que conduzca a la producción de más errores que respuestas. (shrink)

El presente trabajo analiza algunas tensiones claves en el estudio de las imágenes de la educación inclusiva. Su dimensión estética encuentra una alta fertilidad analítica a través del sintagma ‘estética del disenso’. Esta etiqueta desempeña un papel central en el pensamiento de Rancière, cuyos significantes sobre lo estético se juegan en los dispositivos de reorganización de la experiencia sensible, explorando la naturaleza de los gestos, las miradas y los susurros de las palabras y de los registros imagéticos con los que (...) entramos en contacto al interactuar con un determinado fenómeno. Entre sus principales conclusiones, destaca la necesidad de asumir el estudio estético de la educación inclusiva es, desplegar un proceso de reconsideración y/o traducción del atributo ‘político’ en lo más profundo de nuestro aparato imaginativo y/o perceptivo. Se observa, además, educación inclusiva construye un código intelectual que tienden a desestabilizar su orden de dominación o aparato de ficcionalización que ha subyugado la comprensión auténtica de sus signos. Se trata que aprendamos a develar el régimen de pensamiento específico que ella construye, a objeto de poder ingresar en él, para desplegar otras formas de ver y modos de pensar sobre algo. (shrink)

El artículo examina el sentido de la metafísica a partir de Kant. El objetivo no es desmenuzar cada una de las determinaciones que el filósofo ofrece, toda vez que describe tanto el quehacer de la tradición como el suyo propio, sino revisar en qué consiste la posibilidad de esa diferencia —y unidad— entre la metafísica tradicional y la kantiana. El énfasis yace, por tanto, en la historicidad de la filo- sofía kantiana de acuerdo con algunos conceptos fundamentales.