This book presents the first detailed treatment of Gadamer’s account of the nature of meaning. It argues both that this account is philosophically valuable in its own right and that understanding it sheds new light on his wider hermeneutical project. -/- Whereas philosophers have typically thought of meanings as belonging to a special class of objects, the central claim of Gadamer’s view is that meanings are events. Instead of a pre-existing content that we must unearth through our interpretive efforts, for (...) Gadamer the meaning of a text is what happens when we encounter it in the appropriate way. In events of meaning the world makes itself intelligibly present to us in a manner that is uniquely and irreducibly bound up with the concrete situation in which we find ourselves. When we recognize that Gadamer thinks of meaning in this way, we are better positioned to appreciate what his wider views amount to and how they hang together. Gadamer’s accounts of interpretive normativity, the aspectival character of understanding, and the nature of essences, for example, snap into more vivid relief when we see them as outgrowths of his underlying conception of meanings as events. (shrink)

This paper challenges the ‘Standard Account’ of the so-called endoxic method that Aristotle articulates in a well-known passage from book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics. That account is problematic because it misreads what Aristotle says and thereby attributes to him an unusually rigid and conservative method that he himself does not seem to employ. This paper carefully analyzes the semantics and syntax of the book VII passage in order to present a novel and improved understanding of the endoxic method. This (...) improved account helps adjudicate scholarly debates about the method’s purpose and scope. (shrink)

There is a recent scholarly trend drawing similarities between Aristotle’s conceptions of ethics and demonstrative science. One such similarity has become widely and rightly recognized: for Aristotle both ethics and demonstrative science seek essential definitions of phenomena. The task of the paper is to show that German philosopher and classicist Hans-Georg Gadamer not only prefigured this interpretative trend, he also identified a problematic feature of Aristotle’s method so construed. The problematic feature is semantic. For Aristotle essential definitions must consist of (...) univocal terms, but such univocity cannot be maintained if the definienda and definientes are concepts to be usefully employed in everyday ethical judgements. Gadamer therefore points out a problematic tension in Aristotle’s ethics. On the one hand, ethical inquiry should have practical application, but, on the other hand, the semantic assumptions underlying inquiry imply that it cannot. (shrink)

Translator's Introduction: Hans-Georg Gadamer first published this essay in 1991 in his Gesammelte Werke, but it appeared shortly before in a Gedenkschrift for Karl-Heinz Ilting, a scholar of German Idealism and ancient philosophy who studied under Gadamer’s colleague, Erich Rothacker. The essay is the product of a lifetime of studies in Plato and Aristotle, reflecting in particular Gadamer’s ongoing preoccupation with the “Socratic question” and the development of his views on it since his Habilitationsschrift, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics . The Socratic (...) question consists of two intertwined questions: what is the good thing to do in a particular situation; and what is the human good. The latter question is the subject of philosophical ethics and motivates the thought of both Plato and Aristotle. As Gadamer argues here, but more extensively in The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy , both thinkers see this question of the good as grounded in the relat .. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, I defend the view that for Aristotle ethical inquiry, like all philosophical inquiry, is in the business of seeking scientific explanations. This defense will require (in section II) first describing the basic structure of such explanations and then showing how those explanations can either be found in or endorsed by Aristotle’s ethics. My description of scientific explanation should be relatively uncontroversial, and my subsequent discussion of scientific explanations in Aristotle’s ethics is intended (...) to help us see more clearly just what sorts of things are to count as “the thats” and “the whys” in ethical inquiry. The second aim of my paper is (in section III) to interpret anew the two thorny passages in which Aristotle discusses the role of scientific explanation in ethics. My interpretations further support the view that scientific explanations play a central role in Aristotle’s ethics, but they do so in a way that corrects textual misunderstandings made by scholars who share that view. Lastly (in section IV), I explain how Aristotle thinks scientific explanations in ethics can help us live better lives. Aristotle insists that the ultimate goal of ethics is to become good (EN I.3, 1095a5-6; II.2, 1103b26-29; X.9, 1179a35-b4), and so if scientific explanations are, indeed, necessary for ethics, then they must somehow help achieve that goal. (shrink)

According to many scholars, Aristotle holds that judgments in ethics can hold true only “for the most part”. Such judgments state general claims about ethical life, not specific claims about how to act in a particular situation. These judgments can be either descriptive or prescriptive. When they are descriptive, they hold true “for the most part” insofar as they express observed regularities that occur neither always and necessarily, nor by mere chance. For example, courage is good “for the most part,” (...) except when it causes injury or death ; brave men are fearless “for the most part,” except when in grave danger. When.. (shrink)

This chapter reassesses the role of Aristotle in Gadamer’s work. Gadamer is sometimes read as preferential to Plato over Aristotle. Such a reading, however, displaces the centrality of Aristotle to Gadamer’s thought. Gadamer saw Aristotle, and not Plato, as the first phenomenologist. Gadamer consequently expressed a great debt to Aristotle, not only for modeling a phenomenological approach to philosophy, but also for the illuminating phenomenological descriptions that Aristotle gave. Both his philosophical approach and the insights it yielded serve as compelling (...) evidence for Aristotle’s continued relevance for us today. (shrink)

Instrumentalism as a theory of practical reasoning has been both widely held and difficult to dethrone. The theory holds that good practical reasoning need only involve determining suitable means to pre-determined ends. The theory is difficult to dethrone because critiques of it tend to specify aspects of reasoning that either do not seem practical, strictly speaking, or can be re-described as a series of episodes of means-end reasoning. Either way, instrumentalism dodges these criticisms raised against it. This paper presents a (...) phenomenological argument that cannot be so dodged. The argument is this: practical reasoning is not merely instrumental because our considering an exemplary means to some end sometimes modifies our concept of that end within one and the same episode of practical deliberation. Such modification is possible because in any exercise of reason in which we apply a concept to a particular, the exemplarity of the particular can imbue our concept with new meaning. If exemplary means can modify our practical ends in this way, then instrumentalism is false. (shrink)

One of the fundamental theses of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is that all knowledge is historically conditioned. This thesis appears to be self-refuting. That is, it appears to contradict itself insofar as its assertion that every knowledge claim is historically conditioned seems to assert an absolute, unconditionally true knowledge claim. If the historicity thesis does, in fact, refute itself in this way, then that spells trouble for philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer was well aware of this, and so he attempts in several passages (...) to respond to this charge of self-contradiction. Those passages, however, are brief and difficult to understand. They consequently have been either neglected or inadequately understood. This paper makes better sense of those passages in order to defend Gadamer’s historicity thesis as coherent. (shrink)

This article argues that the meaning of σύνεσις in the classical period has been inadequately understood, and consequently its historical significance has likely been misplaced. The traditional view is that the word possessed two basic meanings. First and foremost, σύνεσις meant a general ability to understand. Second and less frequently, it meant moral conscience or some such ability to judge the morality of human choice and action. However, by considering anew the attestations of σύνεσις and its grammatically related forms, it (...) will be shown that σύνεσις never meant moral conscience, but instead often denoted a hermeneutic virtue by which we interpret the deeper significance of things said and done. (shrink)

This paper provides a commentary on Truth and Method III.1.

Should college teachers still teach works with immoral content? What if the works are by deeply immoral thinkers? This guide is intended to help us answer these sorts of pedagogical questions by articulating the pertinent moral issues and then suggesting strategies for navigating them.

This paper provides a commentary on Truth and Method III.1.

Hans-Georg Gadamer held that the chief task of philosophy today is to defend practical reason against the encroachments of techno-scientific rationality and thereby to ground the possibility for a philosophical ethics. Although this is well-known and much discussed in the secondary literature, there is curiously sparse discussion of just what Gadamer took ethical inquiry to be. The little discussion that exists tends either to neglect Gadamer's distinction between practical reasoning and philosophical ethics, or it accuses Gadamer himself of conflating the (...) two. This paper provides a sketch of Gadamer's understanding of ethics in a way that makes clear how it differs from practical reasoning. (shrink)

Is reality three-dimensional and becoming real (Presentism), or is reality four-dimensional and becoming illusory (Eternalism)? Both options raise difficulties. I argue that we do not need to be trapped by this dilemma. There is a third possibility: reality has a more complex temporal structure than either of these two naive options. Fundamental becoming is real, but local and unoriented. A notion of present is well defined, but only locally and in the context of approximations.

As a response to the semantic and logical paradoxes, theorists often reject some principles of classical logic. However, classical logic is entangled with mathematics, and giving up mathematics is too high a price to pay, even for nonclassical theorists. The so-called recapture theorems come to the rescue. When reasoning with concepts such as truth/class membership/property instantiation, (These are examples of concepts that are taken to satisfy naive rules such as the naive truth schema and naive comprehension, and that therefore are (...) compatible with a solution to paradox cast in the logics considered below. Other notions of similar kind can be added to the list.) if one is interested in consequences of the theory that only contain mathematical vocabulary, nothing is lost by reasoning in the nonclassical framework. This article shows that this claim is highly misleading, if not simply false. Under natural assumptions, some well-established approaches to recapture are incorrect. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 5, Page 869-885, September 2022.

The aim of this article is to show in what sense the institutions of the welfare state are key to the struggles that are developing around the debt crisis and against the austerity policies carried out in its name. The first part is dedicated to isolating some elements which contribute to explaining the nature of the current crisis of capitalism and the strategic issues at stake in the policies of expropriation of welfare institutions. The second part emphasizes how, around the (...) question of welfare institutions, the crisis articulates two alternative models of society and regulation of a knowledge-based economy. Within this framework, we will put forward a few lines of analysis in order to think of a different model of development, one which is founded on the ‘Welfare of the Common’ as a new mode of production. (shrink)

In attempting to explain or deal with negative workplace behaviours such as workplace bullying, the notion of ‘workplace psychopaths’ has recently received much attention. Focusing on individual aspects of negative workplace behaviour is at odds with more systemic approaches that recognise the contribution of individual, organisational and societal influences, without seeking to blame a person(s) for their behaviour or personality disorder. Regarding a coworker as a psychopath is highly stigmatising, and given the relatively low prevalence of psychopathy in the community, (...) is likely to be incorrect. Sources promoting the notion of workplace psychopathy provide lists of diagnostic criteria and appear to encourage the perception that it is common. This research examines how lay persons use behavioural criteria consistent with psychopathy and the label ‘psychopath’ in relation to a coworker. 307 Australian workers completed an online survey concerning their experience of workplace bullying, which also asked them to rate a coworker’s behaviour on a range of scales to assess perceptions of psychopathy. Rates of psychopathy, when using labels and behavioural criteria, were found to be much higher than scientific estimates of prevalence, for both participants who had been bullied and those who had not. A higher proportion of non-bullied participants classified a coworker as a psychopath when using the label ‘psychopath’, compared to when using behavioural criteria. The notion that there are psychopaths in every workplace should be treated with caution to ensure that the potential for ‘misdiagnosis’ and stigmatisation do not cause further harm in situations of unacceptable workplace behaviours. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between contextual work-related factors on the one hand, in terms of job demands (i.e., risk factors) and job resources (i.e., protective factors), and work-family conflict in teachers on the other. Building on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, we hypothesized that job demands, namely qualitative and quantitative workload, are positively associated with work-family conflict in teachers. Moreover, in line with the buffer hypothesis of the JD-R, we expected job resources, in terms (...) of support from supervisor, job autonomy, and participation in decision making, to affect this association, which is expected to be stronger when job resources are low. The study was conducted in an Italian secondary school. Overall, 122 teachers completed a self-report questionnaire aimed at determining work-family conflict, as well as job demands and resources. The hypothesized relationships were tested using moderated multiple regression. The results of this study largely support our predictions. First, both aspects of workload were positively associated with work-family conflict. Secondly, job resources, including support from supervisor and participation in decision making, buffered this association, which was stronger when resources were low. On the contrary, job autonomy did not buffer the association between workload and work-family conflict. Overall, the results of this study are consistent with the Job Demands-Resources model and contribute to to the understanding of work–family conflict among teachers. More specifically, our study suggests that teachers with high levels of job resources, namely support from supervisor and participation in decision making, can effectively cope with job demands, in terms of both qualitative and quantitative workload, thus preventing negative consequences such as conflict between work and family domains. Interventions aimed at preventing work-family conflict among teachers should encourage organizations to optimize the balance between job demands and resources, as well as the identification and training of the workers at risk of work-family conflict. (shrink)

Human beings are getting fatter and sicker. As we question what we eat and why we eat it, this book argues that living well involves consuming a raw vegan diet. With eating healthfully and eating ethically being simpler said than done, this book argues that the best solution to health, environmental, and ethical problems concerning animals is raw veganism―the human diet. The human diet is what humans are naturally designed to eat, and that is, a raw vegan diet of fruit, (...) tender leafy greens, and occasionally nuts and seeds. While veganism raises challenging questions over the ethics of consuming animal products, while also considering the environmental impact of the agriculture industry, raw veganism goes a step further and argues that consuming cooked food is also detrimental to our health and the environment. Cooking foods allows us to eat food that is not otherwise fit for human consumption and in an age that promotes eating foods in ‘moderation’ and having ‘balanced’ diets, this raises the question of why we are eating foods that should only be consumed in moderation at all, as moderation clearly implies they aren’t good for us. In addition, from an environmental perspective, the use of stoves, ovens and microwaves for cooking contributes significantly to energy consumption and cooking in general generates excessive waste of food and resources. Thus, this book maintains that living well and living a noble life, that is, good physical and moral health, requires consuming a raw vegan diet. Exploring the scientific and philosophical aspects of raw veganism, this novel book is essential reading for all interested in promoting ethical, healthful, and sustainable diets. (shrink)

Quantum gravity is expected to require modifications of the notions of space and time. I discuss and clarify how this happens in Loop Quantum Gravity.

In this wide-ranging volume of papers on Greek and Roman philosophy, a group of distinguished scholars has come together to honor Phillip Mitsis as a teacher, scholar, and colleague. Apart from examining a range of topics and philosophers that covers most areas of Classical philosophy and even beyond, the volume is particularly noteworthy for the variety of critical and philosophical methodologies it embraces. This reflects the honorand's belief that our understanding of philosophy and its relation to its own history must (...) be continually re-examined and that such examinations inevitably benefit from the mutual engagement of different traditions and styles of philosophical argument, even when they seem to conflict. While not explicitly setting up methodological debates, the volume manages to intimate the benefits of more polyphonic discussions by showing eminent practitioners of various approaches going about their craft and presenting their arguments in the spirit of a friendly gift, or philodorema. Edited by David Konstan and David Sider, the volume collects essays in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy by Pietro Pucci, Gerasimos Santas, David Sider, Darren Gardner, Nathaniel Nicol, Heather L. Reid, Carlo DaVia, Theodore Scaltsas, David O. Brink, Fred D. Miller, Jr., Paul Schollmeier, Enrico Piergiacomi, David Konstan, Jean-Philippe Ranger, Paul A. Vander Waerdt, Joseph G. DeFilippo, Jon Miller, Brad Inwood, Paul T. Keyser, Christos C. Evangeliou, David Robertson, Michael Erler, and Alain Gigandet. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss some of Maximilian de Gaynesford’s arguments regarding indexicals. Although I agree with his treatment of the first singular personal pronoun as a prototype of demonstrative expressions, I challenge his refusal to treat indexicals as complex demonstratives. To offer an alternative to this refusal I try to develop a common ground from different theories that consider indexicals as linguistic constructions that embed a nonlinguistic element, following an original idea in Frege’s latest writings. These views form the (...) backdrop on which we can put forward the claim of treating all indexicals as complex demonstratives. In the central part of the paper, I criticize each of de Gaynesford’s arguments against the reduction of indexicals to complex demonstratives. Besides, I propose a new definition of the concept of “demonstration” as a nonlinguistic feature of all indexicals in their referential uses, to contrast de Gaynesford’s rejection of the idea that demonstrations are an essential feature of indexicals. Eventually, I strengthen my claim by distinguishing indexicals from proper names and definite descriptions on the ground that only perceptual indexicals necessarily require an accompanying demonstration. However, the main point of the paper is a negative one, that is the rejection of de Gaynesford’s arguments against the reduction of indexicals to complex demonstratives. More work is needed to reach a positive conclusion on this topic. (shrink)

In his 1956 book ‘The Direction of Time’, Hans Reichenbach offered a comprehensive analysis of the physical ground of the direction of time, the notion of physical cause, and the relation between the two. I review its conclusions and argue that at the light of recent advances in physics Reichenbach analysis provides the best account for the physical underpinning of these notions. I integrate results in cosmology, and on the physical underpinning of records and agency into Reichenbach’s account, and discuss (...) which questions it leaves open. (shrink)

In twentieth-century continental philosophy, German philosophical anthropology can be seen as a sort of conceptual laboratory devoted to human/animal research, and, in particular, to the discontinuity between human and non-human animals. Its main notion—the idea of the special position of humans in nature—is one of the first philosophical attempts to think of the specificity of humans as a natural and qualitative difference from non-human animals. This school of thought correctly rejects both the metaphysical and/or religious characterisations of humans, and the (...) positivistic gradualism, that sees the human being as an animal endowed with a greater degree of certain faculties. At the same time, German philosophical anthropology still takes it for granted that such natural-qualitative novelty is unique in the realm of the living, that in correspondence with humans there is the hiatus, the discontinuity par excellence. The semiotic side of this view is the distinction between signs and symbols developed by Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer: animal signs would be mere proxies for perceptive elements or stimuli, whereas only human symbols could convey complex representation of objects and situations. The goal of this contribution is to criticise the alleged uniqueness of the hiatus and its semiotic implications through the opposite approach of the diffuse discontinuities. This approach that focuses on the semiotic traits of different species-specific environments can be traced back to Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotical phenomenology, which thinks of discontinuities as a normal phenomenon of animal life. (shrink)

Diano's Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy, anticipating the work of Deleuze, Badiou, Esposito, and Agamben. It now appears in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy.

La investigación presente analizará las semejanzas y relaciones encontradas entre los planteamientos de Edmund Husserl y Simone Weil respecto al fenómeno religioso de la idolatría. Para ello, señalaremos en primer lugar el tratamiento que la religión podría tener dentro del marco fenomenológico husserliano; posteriormente, nos enfocaremos en el análisis de una de las publicaciones póstumas de autoría weiliana. Respecto al filósofo austríaco, se recurrirá a textos de distintos períodos de su obra, por lo que implícitamente se contemplará una continuación entre (...) sus denominados análisis estáticos y los genéticos. (shrink)

La presente investigación busca generar un diálogo entre la filosofía de las ciencias de Susan Haack y la teoría queer de Judith Butler. Para ello, recorreremos primero los hitos más importantes del feminismo y, en un segundo momento, veremos cómo estos desembocaron en la teoría queer. Luego, tomaremos como hilo conductor el problema del cuerpo y de la evidencia objetiva para analizar, en un tercer momento, la postura butleriana y, en un cuarto momento, la haackiana. Como sección conclusiva, pondremos ambas (...) posturas en diálogo considerando sus planteamientos en un caso concreto: la intersexualidad. (shrink)

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-021-00451-y.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the recurring concepts emerging in a transnational social-media arena focusing on Brexit in the period immediately after the June 2016 referendum. It mainly focuse...

With his talk of the ”death of God“, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche presented a diagnosis of the future that is both problematic and highly topical. Although this had been the subject of exhaustive discussion in connection with the resulting practical problem of the loss of values, its relevance for the status and selfunderstanding of the theoretical sciences has not been broached. 17 contributions from well-known scholars approach the subject by highlighting the connection between the specific nature of modern science and (...) the non-involvement of theology. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity theory: the topics of time dilation, the search for invariants, and (...) the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will help to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of his philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

One way to study and understand the notion of truth is to examine principles that we are willing to associate with truth, often because they conform to a pre-theoretical or to a semi-formal characterization of this concept. In comparing different collections of such principles, one requires formally precise notions of inter-theoretic reduction that are also adequate to compare these conceptual aspects. In this work I study possible ways to make precise the relation of conceptual equivalence between notions of truth associated (...) with collections of principles of truth. In doing so, I will consider refinements and strengthenings of the notion of relative truth-definability proposed by Fujimoto (2010): in particular I employ suitable variants of notions of equivalence of theories considered in Visser (2006) and Friedman & Visser (2014) to show that there are better candidates than mutual truth-definability for the role of sufficient condition for conceptual equivalence between the semantic notions associated with the theories. In the concluding part of the paper, I extend the techniques introduced in the first and show that there is a precise sense in which ramified truth (either disquotational or compositional) does not correspond to iterations of comprehension. (shrink)

In this article we will address the issue whether and in how far Anton Marty had a significant influence on the development of the phenomenological movement. As “the phenomenological movement” is not a clearly defined and circumscribed notion, we need to provide an appropriate context for any comparison. The phenomenological movement grew out of the School of Brentano and we take this larger whole as our starting point. Since Marty did not found his own school or movement, but remained a (...) Brentanist, it is quite difficult to identify a clear influence of Marty on the phenomenological movement that would not be intermingled with a general Brentanist background. A specifically Martian influence could perhaps mainly be found in the philosophy of language. We will look at Marty’s and Husserl’s shared background, mutual criticisms and common legacy in order to evaluate the significance of any influence there might have been. (shrink)

Through the elaboration of his political philosophy, Hobbes wishes to present himself as a representative of the new mechanistic and deterministic science of the seventeenth century, by applying Galilei’s method in politics and by refusing the Aristotelian metaphysics and natural philosophy as well. The aim of the present article is to challenge this claim. As a matter of fact, Hobbes’s thought seems to be characterised by an original co-existence of decisionism and mechanism and his view of the natural law does (...) not appear to be based on deterministic principles, but on a voluntarist and moral character condensed in his theory of passions. (shrink)

The philosophy of mathematics of the last few decades is commonly distinguished into mainstream and maverick, to which a ‘third way’ has been recently added, the philosophy of mathematical practice. In this paper the limitations of these trends in the philosophy of mathematics are pointed out, and it is argued that they are due to the fact that all of them are based on a top-down approach, that is, an approach which explains the nature of mathematics in terms of some (...) general unproven assumption. As an alternative, a bottom-up approach is proposed, which explains the nature of mathematics in terms of the activity of real individuals and interactions between them. This involves distinguishing between mathematics as a discipline and the mathematics embodied in organisms as a result of biological evolution, which however, while being distinguished, are not opposed. Moreover, it requires a view of mathematical proof, mathematical definition and mathematical objects which is alternative to the top-down approach. (shrink)