Carolina Sartorio argues that only the actual causes of our behaviour matter to our freedom. The key, she claims, lies in a correct understanding of the role played by causation in a view of that kind. Causation has some important features that make it a responsibility-grounding relation, and this contributes to the success of the view. Also, when agents act freely, the actual causes are richer than they appear to be at first sight; in particular, they reflect the agents' (...) sensitivity to reasons, where this includes both the existence of actual reasons and the absence of other reasons. So acting freely requires more causes and quite complex causes, as opposed to fewer causes and simpler causes, and is compatible with those causes being deterministic. The book connects two different debates, the one on causation and the one on the problem of free will, in new and illuminating ways. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering and consider consequences for how to understand epistemic normativity. Though the view that there are such norms seems intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that (...) there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry. (shrink)

Long known solely as fascism s precursor, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) re-emerges in this volume as a versatile thinker with a colossally diverse posterity whose continuing relevance in Europe is ensured by his theorization of the ...

Joseph de Maistre's reputation as a writer is legendary. His style, unique and alive, moulded the French language anew. It sabotaged his attempts at anonymous publication and earned him, through the centuries, the praises of enemies and admirers. Yet the relationship between Maistre's thought and writing remains ill-known. This collection is the first to examine how Maistre's ideas - including his denunciation of the written word - intersected with his writing practices and personas. The essays disclose an author formed by (...) duty and affectionate relationships, by the conventions of public combat, by an intense sense of history, and by the imperatives of Revolution."--Series page. (shrink)

I argue that, according to ordinary morality, there is moral inertia, that is, moral pressure to fail to intervene in certain circumstances. Moral inertia is manifested in scenarios with a particular causal structure: deflection scenarios, where a threatening or benefiting process is diverted from a group of people to another. I explain why the deflection structure is essential for moral inertia to be manifested. I argue that there are two different manifestations of moral inertia: strict prohibitions on interventions, and constraints (...) on interventions. Finally, I discuss the connection between moral inertia and the distinction between killing and letting die (or doing and allowing harm). (shrink)

En este artículo se analiza un conjunto de obras sobre ríos y represas que pertenece a la serie titulada Represa /Represión (2012-) de la artista colombiana Carolina Caycedo. La pregunta de la que se ocupa esta investigación es ¿cómo las estrategias estéticas de estas obras identifican los problemas socio-ecológicos generados por las represas y contribuyen a articular imaginarios políticos de sostenibilidad? El argumento principal es que las obras de Caycedo sobre el río Yuma o Magdalena contribuyen con la construcción (...) de una memoria histórica ambiental, a partir de saberes populares, campesinos y cosmovisiones indígenas. Con este fin, este texto caracteriza el problema de las represas a partir de los conceptos de ‘extractivismo’, de Macarena Gómez-Barris, y ‘desterritorialización’, de Rob Nixon, para luego realizar un recorrido por las obras de la artista, de cuyo análisis se va construyendo una caracterización de la memoria histórica ambiental de un segmento del río Yuma. El marco conceptual del trabajo incluye las nociones de ‘seres-tierra’, de Marisol de la Cadena y ‘territorio’, de Arturo Escobar, así como ‘memoria de los ríos’, de Kristina Lyons. La metodología se basa en el análisis conceptual y técnico de las piezas de Caycedo en el marco interdisciplinar de las humanidades ambientales. El análisis concluye que las obras de Caycedo generan espacios de memoria histórica ambiental desde perspectivas trasnacionales y, en estos espacios de encuentro que constituyen las obras, se relacionan y rearticulan los extremos de falsos antagonismos como naturaleza/cultura, humano/no humano y ciencia/arte. (shrink)

Using data from 88 countries, we test hypotheses linking a country’s economic freedom and cultural values with the propensity and timing of decisions to impose stringent policies to combat the spread of Covid-19, as well as society’s compliance with those restrictive measures. Our analysis supports hypotheses that a country’s economic freedom and cultural dimensions of individualism and masculinity predict early implementation of stringent policies. After accounting for endogeneity, we find that individualism also helps explain residents’ compliance with stringent measures. These (...) findings illustrate how institutions and cultural values influence government policies and societal compliance. (shrink)

Epistemic agents interact with evidence in different ways. This can cause trouble for mutual understanding and for our ability to rationally engage with others. Indeed, it can compromise democratic practices of deliberation. This paper explains these differences by appeal to a new notion: epistemic styles. Epistemic styles are ways of interacting with evidence that express unified sets of epistemic values, preferences, goals, and interests. The paper introduces the notion of epistemic styles and develops a systematic account of their nature. It (...) then discusses the implications of epistemic styles for central questions in epistemology, in particular, for issues surrounding rational engagement and for the debate between virtue epistemologists and epistemic situationists. (shrink)

[Esotericism. One-day Workshop about the Annale n. 25 of the Storia d'Italia Einaudi]. This section contains the proceedings of the one-day workshop on the book Esoterismo, published as the Annale n. 25 in the collection "History of Italy" by Einaudi. The workshop was organized by ISPF on the October 26, 2011 to promote the discussion on the significance of Western esotericist traditions in Italian history. S. Caianiello’s introduction highlights some major concepts and goals of the recent field of studies about (...) Western Esotericism, and some open problems about its definition. M. Cambi comments on the substantial transformation of esotericist themes in Giordano Bruno’s natural philosophy, whereby the sources of the magician’s power are completely enclosed in the realm of nature, thus rejecting any transcendent foundation. M. Conforti focuses on "the function and opportunities" offered by the Western Esotericism approach "to the genesis and development of early modern science" and comments from this perspective on different contributions in the volume, emphasizing however the importance of largely pre-existing traditions in the history of science and medicine which have long challenged the wiggish separation between science and magic, rational and irrational thought. L. Simonutti provides new material to the general theme, with a historical-philosophical analysis of the esotericist elements in Picart’s iconography of the 18th Century edition of "Cymbalum mundi". F. Sofia discusses the effective role of esotericist traditions in the attempts to establish a "civil religion" in Italy from Risorgimento to Fascism, a history in which, she argues, it is difficult to establish "how much esotericism was an intentional choice or the product of an unavoidable nicodemism". C. Castellano reviews the contributions dedicated to the "political teology" of Italian Risorgimento, dealing in depth with the complex relationship between Freemasonry and Carbonari in Italy – in her view, more of a cultural than of a strictly political connection – and highlights the relevance of the anticurial component in their esotericist inspiration. G.M. Cazzaniga, author and editor of the Annale, beyond reacting to the different stimuli offered by the discussion, provides a brief history of Western Esotericism studies in Europe and of the reasons of their difficult reception in Italy. (shrink)

This article points out that the great theses formulated by the analytic philosophy of the XX century, were anticipated in the XVII century by Thomas Hobbes. In The Leviathan, the author states the existing relationship between science and language. He had in mind the need of discerning between the sensible propositions and the absurd ones. Language is what provides the conditions for the construction of scientific thought and discovery of the truth. It also can be a source of error, absurdity (...) and nonsense. To avoid this danger, the philosopher must employ a method of analytic character that allows him to distill clearly the meaning of the expressions he uses, always appealing to an attitude of rigor, precision and exactitude. (shrink)

A billionaire tells you: “That chair is in my way; I don’t feel like moving it myself, but if you push it out of my way I’ll give you a hundred dollars.” You decide you don’t want the billionaire’s money and you’d actually prefer that the chair stay in the billionaire’s way, so you graciously turn down the offer and go home. As it turns out, the billionaire is also a stingy old miser; he was never willing to let go (...) of a hundred dollars. Knowing full well that the chair couldn’t be moved due to the existence of several tons of weight tying it to the ground, he simply wanted to have a laugh at your expense. (shrink)

This is a case study of the birth of conservative historicism out of the Jacobin Terror. The historical rupture represented by the French Revolution provoked reflections on the course and meaning of history among those who, opposed to the Revolution, would become heralds of conservatism. Highly significant -- and heretofore neglected -- among these reflections were those that the Savoyard thinker Joseph de Maistre developed in De la Souverainete du peuple, the precipitate critique of Rousseau's Du Contrat social that he (...) composed during the years 1794 to 1796. This paper contends that De la Souveraineté introduced an influential and original form of historicism founded on a combinatorial theory of political constitutions. It likewise demonstrates that, in devising a model for the history of nations, Maistre also defined concepts that would become integral to nineteenth-century positivism, to the then- nascent science of moral statistics, and to French sociology. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to analyze the role that Agnes Heller gives to utopia in the frame work of the the ory of history. To accomplish this, there lation she establishes between future-utopia, change-utopia and progress-utopia will be analyzed. After the analysis and explanation of these conce..

Escasos trabajos han examinado las conductas específicas de ciberagresión por género y el papel de la adicción a Internet y el déficit en inteligencia emocional en la ciberagresión. Ser adicto a Internet y ciertos déficits emocionales explican la ciberagresión por género. Se subraya la importancia de programas sobre ciberagresión que incluyan el control parental y el fomento de habilidades emocionales.

The standard notion of formal theory, in logic, is in general biased exclusively towards assertion: it commonly refers only to collections of assertions that any agent who accepts the generating axioms of the theory should also be committed to accept. In reviewing the main abstract approaches to the study of logical consequence, we point out why this notion of theory is unsatisfactory at multiple levels, and introduce a novel notion of theory that attacks the shortcomings of the received notion by (...) allowing one to take both assertions and denials on a par. This novel notion of theory is based on a bilateralist approach to consequence operators, which we hereby introduce, and whose main properties we investigate in the present paper. (shrink)

Some classical studies in social psychology suggest that we are more sensitive to situational factors, and less responsive to reasons, than we normally recognize we are. In recent years, moral responsibility theorists have examined the question whether those studies represent a serious threat to our moral responsibility. A common response to the “situationist threat” has been to defend the reasons-responsiveness of ordinary human agents by appeal to a theory of reasons-responsiveness that appeals to patterns of counterfactual scenarios or possible worlds. (...) In this paper I identify a problem with that response and I offer a better solution. (shrink)

This theoretical paper proposes a new perspective to understand the moral distress of nurses more fully, using virtue ethics. Moral distress is a widely studied subject, especially with respect to the determination of its causes and manifestations. Increasing the theoretical depth of previous work using ethical theory, however, can create new possibilities for moral distress to be explored and analyzed. Drawing on more recent work in this field, we explicate the conceptual framework of the process of moral distress in nurses, (...) proposed by Ramos et al., using MacIntyrean virtue ethics. Our analysis considers the experience of moral distress in the context of a practice, enabling the adaptation of this framework using virtue ethics. The adoption of virtue ethics as an ethical perspective broadens the understanding of the complexity of nurses’ experiences of moral distress, since it is impossible to create a ready model that can cover all possibilities. Specifically, we describe how identity, social context, beliefs, and tradition shape moral discomfort, uncertainty, and sensitivity and how virtues inform moral judgments. Individuals, such as nurses, who are involved in a practice have a narrative history and a purpose ( telos) that guide them in every step of the process, especially in moral judgment. It is worth emphasizing that the process described is supported by the formation of moral competence that, if blocked, can lead to moral distress and deprofessionalization. It is expected that nurses seek to achieve the internal good of their practice, which legitimizes their professional practice and supports them in moral decision-making, preventing moral distress. (shrink)

Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capacities and masking to show that the cognitive science of evidence-resistance supports rather than undermines the orthodox view. In doing so, I argue for the claim that belief requires the capacity for evidence-responsiveness. More precisely, if a subject believes that p, then they have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence bearing on p. Because (...) capacities for evidence-responsiveness are fallible and may be masked, beliefs can be held in the face of counter-evidence. Indeed, I will argue that our best science of belief supports the claim that evidence-resistant beliefs result from masks on evidence-responsiveness capacities. This account of belief not only allows for resistance to evidence, but provides us with a framework for describing and explaining actual cases of evidence-resistance. (shrink)

Does a person's liability to attack during a war depend on the nature of their individual causal contribution to the (unjust) threat posed? If so, how? The recent literature on the ethics of war has become increasingly focused on questions of this kind. According to some views on these matters, your liability hinges on the extent of your causal contribution: the larger your contribution to an unjust threat, the larger the amount of harm that we can impose on you in (...) order to avert the threat. Some philosophers have suggested that we can ground a quite general principle of civilian immunity on this basis. But, do causal contributions really come in degrees? Can we make sense of a graded notion of causal contribution that can be relevant to debates about liability in war? I argue there is good reason to be sceptical. The appearance that causal contributions come in degrees is just an illusion that can be explained away. (shrink)

Este trabajo intenta dilucidar el significado de la afirmación polémica de Platón relativa a la índole peculiar de los relatos literarios que, aunque falsos, encierran también algunas verdades, pues resulta problemático que Platón, al mismo tiempo, critique esos relatos y, sin embargo, proponga también hacer uso de otros igualmente falsos. Examino tres posibilidades de desambiguar el sentido de pseûdos en estos contextos -"falso" designaría ficción o mentira verbal o el carácter de uno de los dos niveles que constituiría un relato (...) literario- y defiendo que la falsedad rechazable para Platón es sólo la atinente al núcleo tipológico contenido en esos relatos. This paper attempts to elucidate the meaning of the controversial Platonic statement in relation to the peculiarity in the literary accounts which, in spite of being false, contain at the same time certain truths. Furthermore, there seems to be contradiction in the fact that Plato critiques those writings and still proposes using others equally false. I analyze three possibilities to disambiguate the meaning of pseûdos in these contexts -"false" would point to fiction or to a verbal lie or the character of one of the two levels which would comprise a literary account; and I support the fact that, for Plato, the undesirable falsity is only the one related to the typological core comprised in those accounts. (shrink)

Este trabajo examina el tópico de la poesía imitativa en Platón. Su objetivo es averiguar si, para Platón, puede haber una mimesis de valor y, consiguientemente, una poesía mimética aceptable. Para ello se analizan dos secciones de República concernientes a una imitación válida. Esta se basaría en el conocimiento dialéctico de las realidades inteligibles; condición que no puede ser cubierta por el poeta. Mi hipótesis es que la solución a este problema reside en la idea platónica de 'diseño', que -derivado (...) del paradigma ideal- sería la herramienta de trabajo para el imitador. Filón ha conceptualizado esa herramienta en su idea de arquetipo. This paper examines the topic of imitative poetry in Plato. Its aim is to determine whether, for Plato, may be a mimesis of value and consequently an acceptable mimetic poetry. For this, two sections concerning a valid Republic imitation will be analyzed. This would be based on the dialectical understanding of intelligible realities; condition that the poet can not be covered. My hypothesis is that the solution to this problem is the Platonic idea of 'design', which -derived the ideal paradigm- would be the tool for the imitator. Philo has conceptualized this tool in his idea of archetype. (shrink)