In this paper, I intend to analyze Baumgarten’s position about the dietetic care of the body in its relation to nascent aesthetics, with special regard to the problem of physical exercise. On the one hand, I will show that physical exercise can acquire aesthetic value with the example of the somatic fine arts. On the other hand, I will demonstrate that dietetics is also seminal for the emergence of every act of beautiful thinking. Eventually, I will bring to the fore (...) the dietetic potential of beauty itself. In this way, it will be possible to better appraise the constitutive link between health and beauty in the founding of aesthetics as an independent branch of philosophy. (shrink)

Wittgenstein has often explored language games that have to do with musical objects of different sizes (phrases, themes, formal sections or entire works). These games can refer to a technical language or to common parlance and correspond to different targets. One of these coincides with the intention to suggest a way of conceiving musical understanding. His model takes the form of the invitation to "hear (something) as (something)": typically, to hear a musical passage as an introduction or as a conclusion (...) or in a certain tonality. However one may ask to what extent or in what terms (literal or metaphorical) these procedures, and usually the intervention of language games, is requested by our common ways of understanding music. This article shows through the use of some examples that aspectual perception inherent to musical understanding does not require language games as a necessary condition (although in many cases the link between them seems very strong), in contradiction with the thesis of an essential linguistic character of music. At a basic level, it seems more appropriate to insist on the notion of a game: to understand music means to enter into the orbit of "music games" which show an autonomous functioning. Language games have, however, an important function when we develop this comprehension in the light of the criteria of judgment that substantiate the manner in which music is incorporated in and operates within specific forms of life. (shrink)

L’articolo si propone di ricostruire criticamente il processo di crisi e trasformazione del concetto di impero a ridosso delle rivoluzioni settecentesche. A partire dalla Histoire des deux Indes di Raynal, e dalla critica illuminista ai differenti modelli imperiali, Pandolfi delinea il passaggio dal colonialismo classico – costruito attorno al rapporto tra coloni, selvaggi e schiavi – a una fase contraddistinta invece dallo sfruttamento indiretto della forza lavoro. La trattazione porta alla luce l’ambivalenza illuminista nei confronti della questione dell’impero, dimostrando come (...) l’opera di Raynal intersechi e restituisca al lettore le tensioni fondanti della seconda metà del Settecento. Così, ripercorrendo l’analisi di Diderot, l’autore dimostra come l’avanzamento morale dell’umanità sia il prodotto della costante interazione tra la retorica imperialista del commercio e le rivoluzioni che, in luoghi e momenti diversi, hanno attraversato lo spazio coloniale. (shrink)

In this paper, we take up an old issue that of pragmemes, broached by Mey and further explored by Capone. It is not easy to define pragmemes and distinguish them sufficiently from speech acts (units of language use broached by Austin and Searle) or from Wittgensteinian language games or from macro speech acts (see van Dijk on macrostructures) or from Goffman’s scripts. The best idea we could develop about pragmemes is that they instantiate the triple articulation of language, proposed by (...) Jock Wong; being essentially composed of phonological-syntactic units, that have a certain content relative to a social situation and to a certain culture, pragmemes express a certain function (or illocutionary force), like, e.g., modifying society or some aspect of it. They are part of a chapter that can be called either “societal pragmatics” or “emancipatory pragmatics,” to use the words by Mey. In fact, knowledge of how language is used to diminish the rights of people and to propagate the “status quo” may be instrumental to give rights and power to ordinary human beings who are oppressed by political and economical structures. -/- . (shrink)

Ted Sider has famously argued that existence, in the unrestricted sense of ontology, cannot be vague, as long as vagueness is modeled by means of precisifications. The first section of Chapter 9 exposes some controversial assumptions underlying Sider’s alleged reductio of vague existence. The upshot of the discussion is that, although existence cannot be vague, it can be super-vague, i.e. higher-order vague, for all orders. The second section develops and defends a novel framework, dubbed negative supervaluationary semantics, which makes room (...) for the possibility of super-vague existence. (shrink)

The paper defends that it is possible to offer a Kantian argument for justifying the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI). It first briefly presents Philippe van Parijs’ argument for UBI based on the concept of real freedom for all. In doing so, it will focus on its general structure and central insight, without entering too much into other issues like the economic feasibility of UBI. It second briefly presents Kant’s concept of external freedom and especially focuses on some of (...) its components to assess whether there is some closeness to van Parijs’ concept of real freedom. It further considers whether UBI is not only compatible with a Kantian position, but can be justified from such a position because it represents a tool for concretely realizing external freedom as presented in the _Doctrine of Right_ and for attaining the ethical ideal of virtuosity presented in the _Doctrine of Virtue_. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende fazer algumas considerações preliminares e programáticas sobre a questão da cooperação entre filosofia política e ciências sociais empíricas; oferecer uma estratégia para chegar a uma definição de pobreza que independa de dados quantitativos específicos, embora aponte para a importância deles ; apontar para a necessidade de ouvir a voz dos pobres; mostrar as razões da exclusão política dos pobres. Obviamente não se pretende discutir tudo isso de forma exaustiva, mas somente indicar possíveis caminhos a serem explorados.The present (...) paper aims at presenting some preliminary and programmatic considerations on the question of the cooperation between political philosophy and empirical social sciences; offering a strategy to reach a definition of poverty that does not depend on specific quantitative data, while it recognizes their importance ; pointing at the necessity to hear the voice of the poor; showing the reasons for the political exclusion of the poor. Of course all this shall not be discussed in an exhaustive form, but only with the intention of indicating possible paths to be explored. (shrink)

This introduction first justifies the approach of this focus on the political thought of Foucault. Therefore it highlights the conditions that determine the appearance and the operation of the political discourse, then it clarifies because, according to Foucault, political discourse should not be analyzed in a format which opposes science to ideology, but as an act of discourse located in a strategic field and fighting with other discursive formations. It concludes with a look at the difference and interweaving that for (...) Foucault stand and connect political discourse and philosophy. (shrink)

The paper aims at analyzing some Wagnerian figures in order to show that the influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on Wagner is not as strong as commonly held – at least not in his operas. The figures that shall be considered are: Wotan and Brünnhilde, Tristan and Isolde, and finally Parsifal, who appears to be the only Schopenhauerian character of all.

Ernst Tugendhat is one of the most important living German philosophers. He was born in Brno in 1930 to a Jewish family. In 1938 the Tugendhatshad to leave the country because of the threat represented by Nazi Germany. They emigrated first toSwitzerland, then to Caracas, Venezuela. After classical studies at Stanford University ,Ernst Tugendhat moved to Germany in order to study philosophy in Freiburg and Münster . He became an assistant professor in Tübingen before getting a professorship in Heidelberg. He (...) worked at the Max-Plack-Institut zurErforschung der Lebensbedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt , spend some years in Chile and was a professor at the FreieUniversität Berlin till his retirement. He was and still is visiting professor in universities in Europe aswell as in North and South America. Among his many books: Vorlesungen zur Einführung in diesprachanalytische Philosophie, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1976; Selbstbewusstsein undSelbstbestimmung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979; Probleme der Ethik, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984;Vorlesungen über Ethik, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993, and Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eineanthropologische Studie, München: Beck, 2003. (shrink)

The article Social epistemological conception of delusion, written by Kengo Miyazon and Alessandro Salice, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 17 September 2020 without open access.

Karl Marx theory of value/labour is primarily based on time. In his theory of value/labour, Marx displays how the economic mechanic of Capital reduces Labour to power and time. Power is the ability to produce, and represent a complex mixture of individual workforce and social cooperation. Time is the general measure of productivity and the partition of labour time gives the units of measure of the value produced. Capitalism is driven by one single linear and universal temporality, signed by the (...) time of production, and by the amount of time/value subtracted to the worker. Within an unorthodox Marxist tradition, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari openly criticised this approach to the production of value. By taking their distance from an image of history as a timeline, Deleuze and Guattari sketched history as a geography, and the capitalist society as an archipelago of temporalities. In this chapter, we will discuss their critique of an idea of linear time. Time is a nexus of lines, flows, segmentations and plateau: it is not merely a subjective experience, nor an objective/quantitative measurement of movement. It rather express a cartography of forms of life, of regimes and assemblages. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to examine the nature of technology in view of Georges Bataille’s notion of intimacy. After providing a summary of Bataille’s critique of technology, I offer my response and show that a technological device can reach such a degree of familiarity that it becomes indistinguishable from our psychophysical personality. In this sense, we experience technology not as instrumentation, but in intimacy. The old theory of technology as organ-projection is, therefore, reinterpreted to produce a theory of (...) technology that includes the technological process in its entirety, from the moment of invention and innovation, involving a movement of transcendence and objectification, to the moment of intimacy. (shrink)

The ethical criticism of art has received increasing attention in contemporary aesthetics, especially with respect to the evaluation of narratives. The most prominent philosophical defenses of this art-critical practice concentrate on the notion of response , specifically on the emotional responses a narrative requires for it to be correctly apprehended and appreciated. I first investigate the mechanisms of emotional participation in narratives ; then, I address the question of the legitimacy of the ethical criticism of narratives and advance an argument (...) in support of such a practice . ;Chapter 1 analyzes different modes of emotional participation in narratives, distinguishing between: emotional inference, affective mimicry, empathy, sympathy, and concern. Chapter 2 first critically discusses Noel Carroll's objections to identificationism and to an empathy-based account of character participation, and then analyzes the sorts of imaginative activities involved in narrative engagement, by investigating the distinctions introduced by Richard Wollheim between central and acentral imagining, and iconic and non-iconic imagination. ;Chapter 3 offers a taxonomy of the possible views on the relationship between the ethical and the artistic values of a narrative, distinguishing between reductionist and non-reductionist views, and sorting the latter ones into autonomism and moralism, radical and moderate. Chapter 4 analyzes the ethical assessment of narratives for their consequences on their perceivers and the means of their production, and indicates the evaluation in terms of the ethical perspective a narrative embodies as the kind of ethical evaluation on which an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives ought to concentrate. Chapter 5 critically assesses the accounts of "imaginative resistance" to fiction offered by Kendall Walton, Richard Moran, and Tamar Gendler, and concludes that none of them is adequate to ground an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives. Chapter 6 looks at Carroll's argument for moderate moralism and Berys Gaut's "merited-response" argument for "ethicism," and finds both arguments wanting. Chapter 7 proposes a version of moralism grounded in the notion of a narrative's ethical perspective, and defended on the grounds of narratives' commitments to provide a realistic representation of reality. (shrink)

This paper aims at explaining Kant’s concept of sovereignty as defined in the Doctrine of Right as well at showing its relation to the idea of republicanization and of political progress. Since Kant emphatically claims that sovereignty belongs solely to the united will of the people but, at the same time, does not want the people to intervene directly in the process of decision making, we shall distinguish between the real and the actual sovereign , as well between a synchronic (...) and a diachronic concept both of the “united will” and of “the people”. By doing this, it will become clear in what sense Kant claims that every republic is necessarily a representative political system. (shrink)

Ce livre se veut une lecture d'ensemble des reflexions que Wittgenstein a consacrees aux questions esthetiques concernant la musique. Il s'attache notamment a explorer les fonctions de l' entendre comme un outil conceptuel susceptible de nous aider a analyser nos manieres de comprendre cet art et a mieux definir ses proprietes expressives et son pouvoir emotionnel. Plus generalement, l'approfondissement de ces thematiques a pour objectif la definition d'une strategie pour re-penser l'acte performatif et l'experience auditive.

This edited volume on contextualism and pragmatics is interdisciplinary in character and contains contributions from linguistics, cognitive science and socio-pragmatics. Going beyond conventional contextual matters of truth-conditions and pragmatic intrusion, this text deals with a variety of issues including hyperbole, synonymy, reference, argumentation, schizophrenia, rationality, morality, silence and clinical pragmatics. Contributions also address the semantics/pragmatics debate and show to what extent the theory of contextualism can be applied. This volume is based on a unitary research project financed by the University (...) of Messina and appeals to students and researchers working in linguistics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo esclarecer la relación del constructivismo y la filosofía moral kantiana. En tal sentido comienza mostrando qué es el constructivismo moral y cómo es una posición en metaética que busca esclarecer la cuestión de la objetividad de los juicios morales de una mejor manera que las posiciones tradicionales en el campo: el realismo y el antirrealismo morales. Seguidamente aborda el constructivismo moral kantiano por ser una de las versiones más desarrolladas y estudiadas. De esta manera (...) se aclarará la relación que guarda el constructivismo con la crítica de la razón, la razón práctica y la autonomía moral de la persona. Finalmente, se presentan las conclusiones más relevantes del estudio. (shrink)

La ontología trinitaria indica el pasaje de un ser in se, que se auto-construye y se auto-realiza, a uno que es desde el momento en que se desplaza el propio baricentro existencial del in se al “para” y “en” el otro. Esta dinámica, reveladora del ser Dios de Dios, se manifiesta de un modo fundamental en el evento pascual e imprime una novedad decisiva, mediante la introducción de lo negativo, en las estructuras mismas de pensamiento.