Originally published in English in 1950 this is one of the most revealing works by one of Italy's foremost philosophers of the 20th century, who was also a courageous and effective opponent of Fascism. Following the Allied landing at Salerno, Croce was called upon by kings, princes, generals and politicians and asked to decide question of vital importance to Italy. This book records the notes Croce made on political matters in 1943 and 1944 and includes some of the many documents (...) Croce possessed which referred to the attempt in Naples to form a Corps of Italian volunteers. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in the method of explication as a procedure for conceptual engineering in philosophy and in science. In the philosophical literature, there has been a lively debate about the different desiderata that a good explicatum has to satisfy. In comparison, the goal of explicating the concept of explication itself has not been central to the philosophical debate. The main aim of this work is to suggest a way of filling this gap by explicating (...) ‘explication’ by means of conceptual spaces theory. Specifically, I show how different, strictly-conceptual readings of explication desiderata can be made precise as geometrical or topological constraints over the conceptual spaces related to the explicandum and the explicatum. Moreover, I show also how the richness of the geometrical representation of concepts in conceptual spaces theory allows us to achieve more fine-grained readings of explication desiderata, thereby overcoming some alleged limitations of explication as a procedure of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF BENEDETTO CROCE BY DOUGLAS AINSLIE B.A. (OXON.).

We focus on a neglected aspect of scientific theory choice: how the selection of theories affects epistemic values. Building on Kuhn, we provide a general characterization of the feedback-loop dynamic between theories and values in theory choice as analogous to the relationship between organisms and the environment in niche construction. We argue that understanding theory choice as niche construction can explain how certain values acquire more weight and a specific application over time, and how resistance to scientific change can, therefore, (...) arise. We illustrate our picture by looking at the Mendelian–biometrician controversy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 305-326 [Access article in PDF] Logos and Kratos: Gramsci and the Ancients on Hegemony Benedetto Fontana * The purpose of this paper is to locate Gramsci's concept of hegemony, and its related ideas of civil society, the national-popular and the people-nation, within the political thought of classical antiquity. 1 In so doing, the paper seeks to identify strands or elements (...) within aspects of ancient political thought which may usefully be seen as conceptual prefigurations or as political anticipations of Gramsci's hegemony. It will show that Gramsci shares with the ancients specific theoretical, linguistic, and intellectual topoi. Hegemony has hitherto been located within the context, both theoretical and historical, of debates and controversies arising out of the Marxist and later Leninist revolutionary tradition. It is rightly seen as a notion developed by Gramsci to explain revolutionary failure in Italy and in the West generally, and consequently its antecedents are traced to the problems attendant upon the collapse of the Second International and the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. 2 While such an approach has been useful in revealing the immediate (both political and tactical) constraints acting upon Gramsci's thinking, it has overlooked passages in his writings which reveal an interest in, and [End Page 305] familiarity with, philosophical and theoretical themes originally formulated and elaborated by classical political thought.I. In a note entitled "Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing" Gramsci establishes a distinction between intellectuals who "know" and the "people-nation" that "feels." The former may know but do not always understand or feel, while the latter may feel but does not always know. The intellectual, in order to know something politically and socially, not merely abstractly or philosophically, must understand it with feeling and passion. As Gramsci writes: The intellectual's error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned (not only for knowledge in itself but also for the object of knowledge); in other words that the intellectual can be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated--i.e. knowledge. One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. 3The merely abstract knowledge of the intellectual becomes life and politics when linked to the experiential and passionate feelings of the people. At the same time, the feeling-passion of the people acquires the character of knowledge. Of course such a formulation is reminiscent of Marx's comments in the Theses on Feuerbach. 4 The dyadic relation between intellectual and people-nation, and between knowledge and feeling-passion, both parallels and informs the relation between common sense and good sense. Common sense is opinion which is incoherent and ambiguous 5 but which may nevertheless contain elements of truth to the extent that they are proliferated throughout a people. Good sense, on the other hand, is the common sense of the people as their passion and experience are imbued with knowledge and reason--that is, as the people begin to "think" coherently by producing their own intellectuals, the organic intellectual, or the democratic philosopher. 6 [End Page 306]Gramsci recalls the problem originally posed by Plato and Aristotle and running through the entire history of Western political thought up to thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, and Croce: namely, the relation between knowledge and politics, philosophy and rhetoric, ruler and people, reason and desire/appetite. 7 This relation poses the question regarding the role and status of reason. It is the way reason (the logos as transcendent reason or as speech and language) is perceived that moves the theory in either an ossified (absolutist... (shrink)

From the beginning of the XIV century, many leading works by Latin scholars were translated into Hebrew only a few years after being written. This practice reveals the extraordinary process of philosophical re-acculturation that has its roots in precise ideological and social reasons: implementing contemporary Latin culture rapidly and systematically meant, for late Medieval Hebrew translators, renewing Hebrew wisdom in the light of their Christian neighbours’ thought. This was certainly the purpose of one of the protagonists of Hebrew Scholasticism, Yehudah (...) ben Moses Romano: openly hostile to the philosophical inertia of his Jewish contemporaries, who were still convinced of being the sole holders of the truth bestowed on them from on high, he translated for his co-religionists new knowledge from his Christian colleagues. Particularly intense and sustained were the translations he made of Giles of Rome, which display transversal interests in all aspects of his work. The history of the reception and success of Giles of Rome’s thought on the Jewish world goes far beyond Yehudah Romano’s intellectual project: the reference here is to Yoseph Taitazak, who from his home in Salonica wrote the Porat Yosef, a bizarre Commentary on Ecclesiastes, in which Koholet’s words are used as an occasion for Taitazak to reinterpret the Aristotelian system through a Thomist and Aegidian lens. The inclusion of the Scholastic doctrine in Taitazak’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes, however, responds to a need symmetrically specular to the work of Yehudah Romano: not to proceed with a project of updating Hebrew culture, but to show instead how the Torah is the repository of all knowledge, indeed that the Torah is the knowledge. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) spent most of his life as a private scholar in Naples. His Estetica, which first appeared in 1902, has remained a seminal work not only for aesthetics but also for general linguistics. As the full title indicates, this is not a narrow work dealing with the theory of art and criticism. For Croce intended this to be the first part of his "philosophy of the spirit" and he thus presents a systematic general theory (...) intended to solve all philosophical problems. The work presents an account of the structure of the human mind and shows how art arises naturally from that structure, as well as introducing the influential notion of the organic unity of a work of art. As a result, art is shown to be integral to any life and an essential aspect of what it is to be human. This new translation of the first and most important part of the work (Theory) supersedes the defective translation by D. Ainslie, first published in 1909. It is based on the most recent Italian edition (1990). In his foreword the translator addresses the difficulties in translating certain key words in the Italian original, "scienza", "fantasia", and of course, "estetica" itself. He also furnishes the reader with helpful explanatory annotation. This publication will be of cardinal importance for all those interested in the philosophy of art, the history of criticism, and the history of linguistics. (shrink)

According to Kuhn's speciation analogy, scientific specialisation is fundamentally analogous to biological speciation. In this paper, we extend Kuhn's original language-centred formulation of the speciation analogy, to account for episodes of scientific specialisation centred around methodological differences. Building upon recent views in evolutionary biology about the process of speciation by genetic divergence, we will show how these methodology-centred episodes of scientific specialisation can be understood as cases of specialisation driven by value divergence. We will apply our model of specialisation by (...) value divergence to an episode of methodology-centred scientific specialisation: the emergence of molecular biology. (shrink)

L’individu dont le nom, Pasiôn fils de Dikaiarchos, est gravé sur une tablette de plomb publiée par D. Jordan en 2003 (SEG LIII 256) est bien le célèbre banquier Pasiôn, comme l’éditeur l’a soutenu, mais l’interprétation du texte proposée par celui‑ci ne semble pas convaincante. Il ne s’agit pas d’une lettre, mais d’un texte destiné à servir dans une opération magique, un katadesmos dirigé contre des personnes dont trois sont connues grâce au plaidoyer pseudo-démosthénien Contre Nikostratos. Les circonstances dans lesquelles (...) Pasiôn décida d’agir contre ces personnes par le biais de la magie ne se laissent pas établir ; il est cependant permis de supposer qu’il était mécontent des rapports entre elles et son fils aîné, Apollodôros. Il ne semble pas que cette opération magique ait été liée à un procès judiciaire. Il est intéressant, bien que non surprenant, de constater qu’il pouvait arriver à un homme très riche et influent comme le banquier Pasiôn d’avoir recours à la magie. (shrink)

Lakatos’ (Lakatos, 1976) model of mathematical conceptual change has been criticized for neglecting the diversity of dynamics exhibited by mathematical concepts. In this work, I will propose a pluralist approach to mathematical change that re-conceptualizes Lakatos’ model of proofs and refutations as an ideal dynamic that mathematical concepts can exhibit to different degrees with respect to multiple dimensions. Drawing inspiration from Godfrey-Smith’s (Godfrey-Smith, 2009) population-based Darwinism, my proposal will be structured around the notion of a conceptual population, the opposition between (...) Lakatosian and Euclidean populations, and the spatial tools of the Lakatosian space. I will show how my approach is able to account for the variety of dynamics exhibited by mathematical concepts with the help of three case studies. (shrink)

First published in 2005, Economics and Social Interaction is a fresh attempt to overcome the traditional inability of economics to deal with interpersonal phenomena that occur within the sphere of markets and productive organizations. It makes use of traditional economic concepts for understanding interpersonal events, while venturing beyond those concepts to give a better account of personalised interactions. In contrast to other books, Economics and Social Interaction offers the reader a rigorous effort at extending economic analysis to a difficult field (...) in a consistent manner, sensitive to insights from other behavioural and social sciences. This collection represents an important contribution to a growing research agenda in the social sciences. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel approach to the question of the normativity of logic, which we reinterpret as a clash between two intuitions: the direct normativity intuition and the unfeasibility intuition. The standard response has been to dismiss the direct normativity intuition, bridging logic and reasoning via principles that relativize the normative import of logic to pragmatic and feasibility considerations. We argue that the standard response is misguided. Building upon theories of bounded rationality, our approach conceptualizes reasoning as constrained by (...) multiple, independent normative factors, logical and non-logical ones. These different factors can conflict with one another, to the effect that logically sound inferences might not coincide with what is feasible for an agent to infer. From this perspective, we will argue that logic gives us only prima facie, i.e. contributive and defeasible, obligations on what to believe, but that such obligations do not always coincide with what an agent ought to believe all things considered. These distinctions will dissolve the alleged clash between the direct normativity and the unfeasibility intuition. (shrink)

Originally published in 1946, this book reveals Croce's dynamic conception of liberty, liberalism and the relation of individual morality to the State. The State which he discusses is more than a national government; it is a historical conception which takes in all 'states' - local and international. The volume provides an inspired analysis of the relation of politics and morals, individual liberty, free enterprise and pragmatic social judgement.

This thesis focuses on models of conceptual change in science and philosophy. In particular, I developed a new bootstrapping methodology for studying conceptual change, centered around the formalization of several popular models of conceptual change and the collective assessment of their improved formal versions via nine evaluative dimensions. Among the models of conceptual change treated in the thesis are Carnap’s explication, Lakatos’ concept-stretching, Toulmin’s conceptual populations, Waismann’s open texture, Mark Wilson’s patches and facades, Sneed’s structuralism, and Paul Thagard’s conceptual revolutions. (...) -/- In order to analyze and compare the conception of conceptual change provided by these different models, I rely on several historical reconstructions of episodes of scientific conceptual change. The historical episodes of scientific change that figure in this work include the emergence of the morphological concept of fish in biological taxonomies, the development of scientific conceptions of temperature, the Church-Turing thesis and related axiomatizations of effective calculability, the history of the concept of polyhedron in 17th and 18th century mathematics, Hamilton’s invention of the quaternions, the history of the pre-abstract group concepts in 18th and 19th century mathematics, the expansion of Newtonian mechanics to viscous fluids forces phenomena, and the chemical revolution. I will also present five different formal and informal improvements of four specific models of conceptual change. I will first present two different improvements of Carnapian explication, a formal and an informal one. My informal improvement of Carnapian explication will consist of a more fine-grained version of the procedure that adds an intermediate, third step to the two steps of Carnapian explication. I will show how this novel three-step version of explication is more suitable than its traditional two-step relative to handle complex cases of explications. My second, formal improvement of Carnapian explication will be a full explication of the concept of explication itself within the theory of conceptual spaces. By virtue of this formal improvement, the whole procedure of explication together with its application procedures and its pragmatic desiderata will be reconceptualized as a precise procedure involving topological and geometrical constraints inside the theory of conceptual spaces. My third improved model of conceptual change will consist of a formal explication of Darwinian models of conceptual change that will make vast use of Godfrey-Smith’s population-based Darwinism for targeting explicitly mathematical conceptual change. My fourth improvement will be dedicated instead to Wilson’s indeterminate model of conceptual change. I will show how Wilson’s very informal framework can be explicated within a modified version of the structuralist model-theoretic reconstructions of scientific theories. Finally, the fifth improved model of conceptual change will be a belief-revision-like logical framework that reconstructs Thagard’s model of conceptual revolution as specific revision and contraction operations that work on conceptual structures. -/- At the end of this work, a general conception of conceptual change in science and philosophy emerges, thanks to the combined action of the three layers of my methodology. This conception takes conceptual change to be a multi-faceted phenomenon centered around the dynamics of groups of concepts. According to this conception, concepts are best reconstructed as plastic and inter-subjective entities equipped with a non-trivial internal structure and subject to a certain degree of localized holism. Furthermore, conceptual dynamics can be judged from a weakly normative perspective, bound to be dependent on shared values and goals. Conceptual change is then best understood, according to this conception, as a ubiquitous phenomenon underlying all of our intellectual activities, from science to ordinary linguistic practices. As such, conceptual change does not pose any particular problem to value-laden notions of scientific progress, objectivity, and realism. At the same time, this conception prompts all our concept-driven intellectual activities, including philosophical and metaphilosophical reflections, to take into serious consideration the phenomenon of conceptual change. An important consequence of this conception, and of the analysis that generated it, is in fact that an adequate understanding of the dynamics of philosophical concepts is a prerequisite for analytic philosophy to develop a realistic and non-idealized depiction of itself and its activities. (shrink)

In their efforts to uncover the principles of a robust conception of democracy, theorists of deliberative democracy place a premium on the role of political expression—public speech and reasoned debate—as the key to democratic processes. They also frequently hark back to historical antecedents in their quest to establish that deliberative procedures are more than “merely theoretical” and instead have a practical application. But for all this emphasis on the discursive and historical dimensions of democracy, these theorists have generally neglected the (...) rich resources available in the history of rhetorical theory and practice. It is the purpose of _Talking Democracy_ to resurrect this history and show how attention to rhetoric can help lead to a better understanding of both the strengths and limitations of current theories of deliberative democracy. Contributors, besides the editors, are Russell Bentley, Tsae Lan Lee Dow, Tom Murphy, Arlene Saxonhouse, Gary Shiffman, John Uhr, Nadia Urbinati, John von Heyking, and Douglas Walton. (shrink)