Paul Grice’s theory of meaning has been widely adopted as a starting point for investigating the evolutionary and developmental emergence of linguistic communication. In this picture, reasoning about complexes of intentions is a prerequisite for communicating effectively at the prelinguistic level, as well as for acquiring a natural language. We argue that this broadly ‘Gricean’ picture rests on an equivocation between theories of communication and theories of cognition, and that it leads to paradoxical or implausible claims about human psychology. We (...) defend an alternative conception of prelinguistic communication, inspired by Bart Geurts and based on the notion of commitment. Adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to avoid the pernicious equivocation, and it provides a better systematization of the key empirical findings. We develop our argument with respect to infants’ sensitivity to ‘ostensive signals’; infants’ pointing; and infants’ endorsement of normative attitudes in joint activities. Finally, adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to argue that sophisticated forms of psychological reasoning are enabled by the mastery of a rich natural language, rather than being a prerequisite for acquiring one. (shrink)

The synthesis between death and vocation that has in the structure ‘being toward vocation’ its conclusion is the key to human finitude according to Ortega y Gasset. This means, against Heidegger’s ‘being toward death’, that in Ortega death, far from being understood as a priori horizon of meaning of existence and sign of human finitude, is an essential ingredient -and a posteriori- of human life which, together with the human vocation, essentially defines existence. The development of that synthesis obliges us (...) to explain two fundamental problems that form part of the essence of death. The first is the mystery of death, which is basically due to two questions: the enigmatic ceasing to be that describes death, and the particular fact that death is simultaneously exterior and interior to life, strange and familiar. The second problem is the question of why human beings do not want to die and want to live, a question substantially linked to the question of the meaning of human life. (shrink)

On raconte qu'après la désignation comme Premier consul, Napoléon montra à des invités La Science de la législation de Gaetano Filangieri, le "jeune homme qui est notre maître à tous". Presque au même moment, ces volumes se trouvaient aussi sur le bureau de Benjamin Constant. La fortune et la circulation de cette oeuvre au sein de l'Europe des Lumières et du XIXe siècle sont l'objet de cet ouvrage, qui décrit les débats qu'elle a alimentés afin de comprendre pourquoi les hommes (...) de lettres et les politiques continuèrent à s'intéresser à ce classique de la pensée républicaine du XVIIIe siècle pour se fondre dans la nouvelle Europe du XIXe siècle."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The paper considers the "GR-desideratum", that is, the way general relativity implements general covariance, diffeomorphism invariance, and background independence. Two cases are discussed where 5-dimensional generalizations of general relativity run into interpretational troubles when the GR-desideratum is forced upon them. It is shown how the conceptual problems dissolve when such a desideratum is relaxed. In the end, it is suggested that a similar strategy might mitigate some major issues such as the problem of time or the embedding of quantum non-locality (...) into relativistic spacetimes. (shrink)

In this work we present an explainable system for emotion attribution and recommendation (called DEGARI (Dynamic Emotion Generator And ReclassIfier) relying on a recently introduced probabilistic commonsense reasoning framework (i.e. the TCL logic, see Lieto & Pozzato 2020) which is based on a human-like procedure for the automatic generation of novel concepts in a Description Logics knowledge base (see also Lieto et al. 2019, Chiodino et al. 2020 for other applications). In particular, in order to model human-like forms of concept (...) combinations, the TCL logic combines a probabilistic description logics of typicality with the HEAD-MODIFIER heuristics coming from cognitive semantics. In the context of our application of such framework, our system exploits the logic TCL to automatically generate novel commonsense semantic representations of compound emotions (e.g. Love as derived from the combination of Joy and Trust according to Plutchik’s theory of emotions, see Plutchik 2001). The generated emotions corresponds to prototypes, i.e. commonsense representations of given concepts, and have been used to reclassify emotion-related contents in a variety of artistic domains. We have tested our system in the context of the H2020 EU project SPICE for providing artistic recommendations of museum items in the Galleria di Arte Moderna (GAM) of Turin. The obtained results (reported in Lieto et al, 2021 and Lieto at al., to appear) show promising results for what concerns both the acceptance of the provided affective recommendation and the explainability associated to each suggestion made by the users. Here we discuss, the open problems and the lessons learned. -/- . (shrink)

In this essential rereading of Spinoza's (1632-1677) philosophical and political writings, Negri positions this thinker within the historical context of the development of the modern state and its attendant political economy.

In this short introduction, the guest editors present the main themes of the special issue.

Es altamente probable que este siglo que está recién comenzando supere al siglo XX descrito por Hobsbawm como el más sanguinario del que la Historia tenga registro; juicio éste compartido por personajes tan dispares como René Dumont, William Golding e Isaiah Berlin.Vivimos en tiempos violentos. Hemos hasta llegado a perder la capacidad de asombro frente a las diversas manifestaciones de violencia que nos hacen conocer los programas cotidianos de noticias: de una parte aquellas provenientes de..

This article serves as an introduction to the collection of papers in this monographic issue on "What the European tradition can teach about Corporate Social Responsibility" and presents the rationale and the main hypotheses of the project. We maintain that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an ethical concept, that the demands for socially responsible actions have been around since before the Industrial Revolution and that companies have responded to them, especially in Europe, and that the content of CSR has evolved (...) over time, depending on historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic drivers and particular conditions in different countries and also at different points in time. Therefore, there is not — and probably cannot be — a unique, precise definition of CSR: one global standard for CSR is unlikely. (shrink)

Una larga tradición en la enseñanza, que se remonta al periodo dictatorial, pero que sustantivamente en sus formas no ha cambiado con las administraciones democráticas, es que todo debe estar regulado, produciéndose lo que Habermas ha llamado una "juridificación" de ámbitos que pertenecen al ejercicio de la misma profesionalidad o al "mundo de la vida". De este modo, la complejidad de problemas educativos que requeriría el necesario juicio profesional, se reduce a aplicar lo que indica la Administración o sus supervisores (...) en cada momento, por lo demás cambiante. (shrink)