Criado en un aluvión migratorio italiano y peronista seguí las transformaciones en el país de constantes pujas entre la religión, la educación y las intervenciones externas que me llevaron al exilio, resultado primero de los fanatismos franquistas de España que alimentaba las alucinaciones y el empe..

This major publication is a history of the semantic tradition in philosophy from the early nineteenth century through its incarnation in the work of the Vienna Circle, the group of logical positivists that emerged in the years 1925-1935 in Vienna who were characterised by a strong commitment to empiricism, a high regard for science, and a conviction that modern logic is the primary tool of analytic philosophy. In the first part of the book, Alberto Coffa traces the roots of (...) logical positivism in a semantic tradition that arose in opposition to Kant's theory that a priori knowledge is based on pure intuition and the constitutive powers of the mind. In Part II, Coffa chronicles the development of this tradition by members and associates of the Vienna Circle. Much of Coffa's analysis draws on the unpublished notes and correspondence of many philosophers. The book, however, is not merely a history of the semantic tradition from Kant 'to the Vienna Station'. Coffa also critically reassesses the role of semantic notions in understanding the ground of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge and questions the turn the tradition has taken since Vienna. (shrink)

This book provides both a historical analysis of the philosophical problem of individuation, and a new trajectory in its treatment. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as C.S. Peirce and the lesser-known Gilbert Simondon, Alberto Toscano takes the problem of individuation, as reconfigured by Kant and Nietzsche, into the realm of modernity, providing a unique and vibrant contribution to contemporary debates in European philosophy.

Recent attempts to turn Standard Quantum Theory into a coherent representational system have improved markedly over previous offerings. Important questions about the nature of material systems remain open, however, as current theorizing effectively resolves into a multiplicity of incompatible statements about the nature of physical systems. Specifically, the most cogent proposals to date land in effective empirical equivalence, reviving old anti-realist fears about quantum physics. In this paper such fears are discussed and found unsound. It is argued that nothing of (...) global skeptical or agnostic significance follows from the kind of underdetermination presently encountered in fundamental quantum theory. The case is instructive, however, for what it shows about the characteristics and prospects of scientific realism as a perspective in contemporary philosophy of science. (shrink)

The definition of love given by Descartes in the Passions of the Soul has never stopped puzzling commentators. If the first Cartesian textbooks discreetly evoke or even fail to discuss Descartes’s account of love, Spinoza harshly criticizes it, pointing out that it is ‘on all hands admitted to be very obscure’. More recently several scholars have noticed the puzzling character of the articles of the Passions of the Soul on love and hate. In this paper, I would like to propose (...) a reassessment of the definition of love provided by the Passions of the Soul and the Letters to Elisabeth and Chanut. By tracing back Descartes’s scholastic sources, I will demonstrate how Descartes builds up his definition of love by displacing or subverting the meaning of several major elements of the thomistic vulgata on love. Hence, a significant part of the obscurity of the definition given by the Passions of the Soul possibly finds its ultimate rationale in this attempt to recover some traditional questions of the scholastic debate on love, while advancing new answers to them. (shrink)

Insofar as the so-called new theory of reference has come to be acknowleged as the leading theoretical paradigm in semantic research, it has been widely accepted that proper names directly refer to their designation. In advancing some of the most convincing arguments in favour of this view of names, S. Kripke has however left somehow undecided what the role of context is in determining which is the direct referent for a name. According to one interpretation of his thought, context has (...) only an external task in allowing one to simultaneously select a name and a given referent for it. Although this interpretation is the most faithful to Kripke's own intentions, there is another possible interpretation of what he says, according to which context more significantly permits one to determine a given referent at a time for one and the same name1. This different interpretation of the role of context is not marginal for the purpose of semantics, since it generates two distinct theoretical conceptions of what a proper name is. According to the former, the 'idiosyncratic' conception, proper names are individuated (at least) by their form and bearer. According to the latter, the 'linguistic' conception, they are individuated by their morphology only: i.e., by their being (syntactically) unstructured strings of letters. The two conceptions prove to be substantially different when homonyms are called into play. Insofar as both the Greek philosopher and the famous shipowner are called "Aristotle", we have two distinct, albeit homonymous, names for the idiosyncratic conception but only one name (as applied to two distinct individuals) for the linguistic conception2. In what follows, I will first sketch one of the most recent attempts to support for the idiosyncratic view, namely the one which traces back to Kaplan [1990] theory of words, and recall its merits over its cognate idiosyncratic theories. I will then try to give an argument in favour of the linguistic conception, by pointing out how the latter.... (shrink)

Along with a well-honoured tradition, we will accept that intentionality is at least a property a thought holds necessarily, i.e., in all possible worlds that contain it; more specifically, a necessary relation, namely the relation of existential dependence of the thought on its intentional object. Yet we will first of all try to show that intentionality is more than that. For we will claim that intentionality is an essential property of the thought, namely a property whose predication to the thought (...) is true in virtue of the identity, or nature, of such a thought. More particularly, for us intentionality will again be a relation, yet a relation of ontological dependence of the thought on its intentional object; specifically, the relation for the thought of being constituted by its object. Moreover, we will try to show that if intentionality is such a constitutive relation for the thought that has it, certain metaphysical consequences ensue. First, an objectual thought, a thought whose content basically consists in its intentional object, is nothing but that object in a certain cogitative modality, or, which is the same, as playing a certain motivational role for the subject entertaining the thought itself (at a certain time). Second, if an objectual thought is nothing but an intentional object in a cogitative modality, such a thought, not only as a type, but also as a token, is an abstract entity. More specifically, an objectual thought-type, an abstract object par excellence, is indeed instantiated by objectual thought-tokens which are again abstract particulars, yet of a specific kind: namely, tropes of a relational sort depending for their existence on their bearers (and possibly also on their temporal location). (shrink)

The author presents his views on the factors that led the Church to dialogue with Jews, after a history marked by Catholic rule and persecution of the Jewish people. Also exposes some biblical Jewish contribution to the topic such as technic of discussion / study called pilpul and the content of extensive discussions found in the Talmud, that demonstrate the central role that dialogue and philosophical inquiry have in Judaism. It also adds the contemporary Jewish contributions to the universal thought (...) made by the philosophy developed by the Jewish thinker Martin Buber, corroborating the central and uninterrupted place of dialogue in Judaism since its birth. Throughout the presentation connections are made with the Nostra Aetate Declaration, showing the Church key position in the theme of dialogue with the Jews and the 10 points of Seelisberg and the “12 points of Berlin”, result of the interaction between Christians and Jews after the Holocaust. (shrink)

pThere is much theoretical work already underway on the many facets of Badiou#39;s theory of political subjectivation. However, little attention has been directed hitherto to those figures of the subject which cannot be easily identifiable with a universalist or generic orientation. Beginning with Badiou#39;s struggles with the subjectivity of the bourgeois in the seminars that make up his Theorie du sujet , this article tries to track his thinking of the #39;other#39;, non- or anti-universalist subjects of politics, and to think (...) what effects their inclusion within a theory of the subject, and indeed a theory of political praxis, may have. Taking issue with some recent remarks of Badiou on the isomorphies between Islamism and fascism in Logiques des mondes , the article also seeks to develop Badiou#39;s notion of #39;reactive#39; and #39;obscure#39; subjects through a brief engagement with recent interpretations of political Islam./p. (shrink)

: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos provides a new defense of the thesis that, unlike early vision, late vision is cognitively penetrable, in accordance with a new definition of cognitive penetrability that is centered on the ideas of direct influence of cognition upon perception and of the epistemic role of perception. This new definition allows him to maintain that late vision is a genuinely perceptive stage of the perceptual process. In this paper, I try (...) to discuss not only whether this new definition has plausible consequences that allow only late vision to be cognitively penetrable but also whether the claim that late vision is genuinely perceptual allows it to have the kind of hybrid content, half nonconceptual and half conceptual, that Raftopoulos now wants to ascribe to it. Keywords: Cognitive Penetrability, weak, strong, and superstrong; Early and Late Vision; Nonconceptual Content Penetralibità cognitiva e visione secondaria Riassunto: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos dà una nuova difesa della tesi secondo cui, a differenza della visione primaria, la visione secondaria è penetrabile cognitivamente, secondo una nuova definizione della nozione di penetrabilità cognitiva centrata sulle idee di influenza diretta della cognizione sulla percezione e di ruolo epistemico della percezione. Questa nuova definizione gli consente di sostenere che la visione secondaria è una fase genuinamente percettiva del processo percettivo. Nell’articolo, provo a discutere non solo se la nuova definizione ha conseguenze plausibili che consentono solo alla visione secondaria di essere penetrabile cognitivamente, ma anche se l’idea che la visione secondaria sia genuinamente percettiva consente ad essa di avere il contenuto ibrido, in parte nonconcettuale e in parte concettuale, che Raftopoulos vuole ora ascriverle. Parole chiave: Penetrabilità cognitiva debole, forte e superforte; Visione primaria e secondaria; Contenuto nonconcettuale. (shrink)

A brief theoretical review of the current state of the art of embodiment research in clinical psychology has been expounded in order to highlight the key role that embodied conceptualization has on the understanding and explanation of several mental disorders, such as eating disorders, schizophrenia and depression. Evidence has suggested that mental disorders may be explained as disturbances of embodiment, from the disembodiment to the hyperembodiment. In order to understand how some clinical conditions are affected by cultural models, we propose (...) and define a new framework called Exbodiment, complementary to the Embodiment approach to cognition. Mental disorder is strictly related to the subject-culture interaction that may be explained as a two way process in which embodiment and exbodiment are complementary points of view. In this perspective, embodiment may be seen as the “top-down” process, while exbodiment the “bottom-up” one. The introduction of exbodiment conceptualization highlights how subject is both receiver and interpreter of social influence. Subject is the target of a cultural pressure and, at the same time, enacts its own embodied culture in world. Exbodiment conceptualization may help clinicians to better understand and explain the role of culture in the onset and maintenance of mental disorders. (shrink)

Although both belong to the domain of the nonexistent, there is an ontological distinction between ficta and possibilia. Ficta are a particular kind of abstract objects, namely constructed abstract objects which generically depend on authors for their subsistence. Moreover, they are essentially incomplete entities, in that they are correlates of finite sets of properties. - On the other hand, possibilia are concrete objects. Being a possible object is indeed being an entity that might have existed, that is, that might have (...) been involved in the causal order. Besides, as an object existent in this sense may legitimately be qualified as complete, the incompleteness which pertains to possible objects is contingent, in that it regards them only with respect to the possible worlds in which they do not exist. This ontological distinction has a semantic correlate: whereas names for possibilia are full-fledged directly referential terms, names for ficta are synonymous with de facto rigid descriptions of a complex sort. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the relation between Kant’s views on the foundations of syllogistic inference in ‘The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures’, the views of eighteenth-century German authors who wrote on syllogism, and the conception of metaphysics that Kant developed in 1762-1764. Kant’s positions are, on the whole, rather original, even though they are not as independent from the intellectual context as Kant’s later, Critical philosophy. Despite Kant’s polemical tone, his views on syllogism are not primarily motivated by polemical (...) purposes. They are strongly influenced by his views on the method of metaphysics. (shrink)

La Alquería de Tablate constituye un núcleo inhabitado único por tratarse de un vestigio arquitectónico con enorme valor patrimonial. El objetivo principal de la investigación e intervención sobre este enclave es la definición de una propuesta que suponga una innovación en el modo de habitar rural. El sistema resultante pues, constituye un ejemplo de cómo acercar la industrialización a la tradición a través de la abstracción de las bases de la arquitectura popular andaluza. Una reflexión sobre la forma de incorporar (...) conceptos como lo reversible, la virtualidad o la actividad agrícola a la arquitectura contemporánea. (shrink)

Independientemente de qué considere cada persona como saludable, lo más seguro es que cualquiera de nosotros quiera vivir una vida sin molestias ni dolores. De alguna manera todos queremos bienestar. Pues bien, el libro _Holistic Healing _editado por Peter A. Dunn nos presenta diferentes teorías, prácticas y el cambio social que estas traen consigo. Para algunos sectores y personas del ámbito de la salud, el término “holístico” puede causar desconfianza, recelo o simplemente indiferencia, ya que el término “holístico” ha sido (...) usado para referirse a prácticas de sanación que no hacen parte de la biomedicina o de la llamada medicina occidental. Lo interesante de este libro es que los autores de cada capítulo evidencian de distintas maneras que una aproximación más completa al ser humano permite abordar la salud desde una perspectiva que va más allá de curar las enfermedades físicas. Como veremos a continuación, una mirada holística considera las dimensión física, psicológica, emocional y espiritual del ser humano, cómo interactúan entre ellas y cómo se ven influenciadas por la realidad social, económica y ambiental. (shrink)

Translated from the Italian by Dorothy Bonchino-Demmler.

This article seeks to trace the origins of contemporary ‘post-workerism’ in the formulation of concepts of political subjectivity, antagonism and insurrection in Tronti and Negri. In particular, it tries to excavate the seemingly paradoxical position which postulates the increasing immanence of struggles, as based on the Marxian thesis of real subsumption, together with the intensification of the political autonomy or separation of the working class. In order to grasp the political and theoretical proposals of Italian workerism and autonomism, Toscano concentrates (...) on the thesis of a historical transformation of capitalism into an increasingly parasitical and politically violent social relation, a thesis which is grounded in an interpretation of Marx’s notion of ‘tendency’ and which serves as the background to the exploration, especially in Negri, of increasingly uncompromising forms of antagonism. The article focuses especially on Tronti’s so-called ‘Copernican revolution’—giving workers’ struggles primacy in the understanding of capitalism—and critically inquires into the effect of this workerist axiom on Negri’s writings on proletarian sabotage and insurrection in the 1970s. By way of a conclusion, it notes the difficulties in prolonging the workerist gambit in light of capital’s continued effort, as Tronti would put it, to emancipate itself from the working class. (shrink)

A slow study of the letters written by Nietzsche in the last five years of his conscious life shows a suffering man who trans-values the sorrow of his body recognizing it as both a face and a mask. The subject fades within history, art, science, within the time that becomes eternal through the death and beyond it, through the speech that becomes the seal of the world. Despite every insufficient reading which underlines the pathological feature in Nietzsche’s last writings madness (...) has been a real fiction: it became the Great Health in which “it’s finished” and the ego multiplies and vanishes in “all the names of History”. (shrink)

Shortly before and during World War II many European psychoanalysts found refuge in South America, concentrated in Buenos Aires. Here, together with local professionals, they created a strong, creative and productive psychoanalytic movement that in turn gave birth to theoretical and clinical contributions that transformed psychoanalysis, psychology, medicine and culture in South America. _The Pioneers of Psychoanalysis in South America_ is a collection of those pioneers’ papers, and introduces the reader to a body of ideas and advancements, many of which (...) have had limited and piecemeal exposure within the psychoanalytic community in the rest of the world until now. The editors Nydia Lisman-Pieczanski and Alberto Pieczanski present original papers and essays, many of which have never before been published in English; those that have been translated were rarely presented in context. Each one of the chapters is accompanied by a scholarly introduction written by psychoanalysts, many of whom personally knew the pioneers and their oeuvres in depth, tracing the roots of their ideas in the European analytic schools. _The Pioneers of Psychoanalysis in South America _is divided into six main sections: Psychoanalytic process Psychoanalytic technique Metapsychology Psychoanalysis of children Culture and society Psychosomatic medicine. Nydia Lisman-Pieczanski and Alberto Pieczanski provide a coherent guide to the seminal ideas and practices of the South American psychoanalysts who have made major theoretical and clinical contributions to the advancement of the psychoanalytic discipline. The chapters present the material in a way that is accessible to psychoanalysts from across the globe and will enable them to incorporate the ideas and practices outlined here into their everyday psychoanalytic work. It will also be of interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists, academics interested in the history and development of psychoanalytic ideas and psychoanalysis, and advanced students. The following link leads to an video interview featuring Nydia Lisman-Pieczanski and Alberto Pieczanski by the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis for the History Project, where they open up about their stories, their marriage, and their new book: https://www.routledge.com/posts/8996. (shrink)

L’objectiu d’aquesta comunicació és posar de manifest el contingut de l’obra Les fonts de la ciència de l’educació [The Sources of a Science of Education (1929)], on Dewey defensa la possibilitat de dotar de caràcter científic la disciplina de l’educació i respon a alguns dels principals interrogants que aquesta possibilitat suscita. -/- [Referència: OYA, A. “John Dewey: el caràcter científic de l’educació” [“John Dewey: The Scientific Character of Education”]. In Monserrat i Molas, Josep; Roviró, Ignasi, eds. 2019. Col·loquis de Vic (...) (XXIII). L’educació. Barcelona (Spain): Institut d’Estudis Catalans, pp. 45–48 (ISBN: 978–84–9965–495–9).]. (shrink)

In his Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta, Recanati maintains two main theses regarding meta-representational sentences embedding allegedly empty proper names. The first thesis concerns both belief sentences embedding allegedly empty names and (internal) meta-fictional sentences (i.e., sentences of the form “in the story S, p”) embedding fictional, hence again allegedly empty, names. It says that such sentences primarily have fictive truth-conditions: that is, conditions for their fictional truth. The second thesis is that a fictive ascription of a singular belief, assigning to (...) a certain metarepresentational sentence fictive truth-conditions, amounts to the factive ascription of a pseudo-singular belief, assigning to that very sentence factual truth-conditions as well. In what follows, I will first try to show that the first thesis is definitely correct only for a rather limited range of cases, i.e. cases of meta-representational sentences embedding absolutely empty proper names. Second, I will claim not only that that the notion of a pseudo-singular belief is not so clear as it may seem, but also that, for those cases for which the first thesis is correct, we do not really need the sentences involved to also have factive truth-conditions. (shrink)

El presente trabajo busca exponer las premisas y la fundamentación teológica que subyace a la moral de Pedro Abelardo, con el fin de mostrar cómo en el sistema filosófico de dicho autor, conocido por su racionalismo, hay una justificación que extralimita dicho sistema. Para ello, se expondrá la terminología clave de su moral, la aplicación práctica de dichos conceptos, y una serie de objeciones tanto teológicas como filosóficas.

Este texto ofrece una lectura eco-fisiológica de la relación entre la inmunidad y el metabolismo capitalista, ofreciendo a los debates de la inmunología política contemporánea un lecho biofísico en el que aterrizar. El argumento central del texto es que ambos procesos, metabólico e inmunológico, son esenciales para la conservación de la homeodinámica del capital: su tendencia adaptativa al crecimiento permanente. Desde este enfoque, el texto analiza las dependencias anatómicas y circulatorias del metabolismo capitalista tras la Gran Aceleración, y dialoga con (...) Byung-Chul Han, Inge Mutsaers y Laura Quintana para esclarecer la naturaleza de los procesos que sirven a la inmunización del crecimiento ilimitado. (shrink)

Este trabajo defenderá la universalidad de la metáfora en arte (Arthur Danto), contra quienes piensan (Davidson, Carrol, Vilar) que en él la atribución de propiedades expresivas es literal y no metafórica. Se defiende la tesis de que la metáfora artística es como un símbolo tensivo que apunta a significados (epífora) y al mismo tiempo crea presencia (diáfora). Gracias a ambos elementos el arte crea presencia, crea realidad o transfigura lo usual y le otorga súbitas y asombrosas posibilidades de presencia, a (...) las cuales se corresponde no sólo con los sentidos, sino también con el afecto, el entendimiento y la imaginación. (shrink)