This paper defends an interpretation of Descartes according to which he sees us as having normative (and not merely psychological) certainty of all clear and distinct ideas during the period in which they are apprehended clearly and distinctly. However, on this view, a retrospective doubt about clear and distinct ideas is possible. This interpretation allows Descartes to avoid the Cartesian Circle in an effective way and also shows that Descartes is surprisingly, in some respects, an epistemological externalist. The paper goes (...) on to defend this interpretation against some powerful philosophical objections by Margaret Wilson and others by showing how Descartes' doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths can be brought in to support his epistemology. This doctrine and other analogous positions in Descartes can also reveal that Descartes, again surprisingly, takes important steps toward doing epistemology without direct appeal to God and God's veracity. (shrink)

An ardent treatise for the Dignity of Man, which elevates Humanism to a truly Christian level, making this writing as pertinent today as it was in the Fifteenth Century.

Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, he was also a man with solid roots in his own time. He taught in Naples and Rome, then for the ten years 1939-1948 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the few university teachers who, when the oath of loyalty to the Italian fascist regime was introduced in October 1931, opted not to accept that act of submission. His memoirs, Fantasmi ritrovati, were published in 1966; (...) the book, now out of print, conjures up a tableau vivant of half a century of intellectual encounters in Italy and Europe between the wars. Among the portraits he paints there is the astounding story of those crucial days in June 1924 when the fascist government became a full-blown regime. This article presents extended extracts from that story. (shrink)

Estratto da Jean-Paul Sartre, "Critica della ragione dialettica, Tomo II: L’intelligibilità della storia", trad. it. di F. Cambria, Christian Marinotti Edizioni, Milano 2006, pp. 409-426.Testo nella traduzione italianaTesto originale francese.

The Parmenidean Ascent is a full-throated and wide-ranging defense of an extreme form of monism or the denial of all distinctions, a form of monism rarely seen since the time of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. At once historically sensitive and deeply engaged with trends in recent and contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of action, epistemology, and philosophy of language, The Parmenidean Ascent aims, on rationalist grounds and in a skeptical spirit, to challenge the content of-and to overturn the methods of much of (...) contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice has undergone a steady growth in the medical ethics literature throughout the last decade as many ethicists have found it to be a powerful tool for describing and assessing morally problematic situations in healthcare. However, surprisingly scarce attention has been devoted to how epistemic injustice relates to physicians’ professional duties on a conceptual level. I argue that epistemic injustice, specifically testimonial, collides with physicians’ duty of nonmaleficence and should thus be actively fought against in healthcare encounters on the (...) ground of professional conduct. I do so by fleshing out how Fricker’s conception of testimonial injustice conflicts with the duty of nonmaleficence as defined in Beauchamp and Childress on theoretical grounds. From there, I argue that testimonial injustice produces two distinct types of harm, epistemic and non-epistemic. Epistemic harms are harms inflicted by the physician to the patient qua knower, whereas non-epistemic harms are inflicted to the patient qua patient. This latter case holds serious clinical implications and represent a failure of the process of due care on the part of the physician. I illustrate this through examples taken from the literature on fibromyalgia syndrome and show how testimonial injustice causes wrongful harm to patients, making it maleficent practice. Finally, I conclude on why nonmaleficence as a principle will not be normatively enough to fully address the problem of epistemic injustice in healthcare but nevertheless may serve as a good starting point in attempting to do so. (shrink)

I argue that the key motivation for the essentialist is that modal intuitions, such as "Humphrey might have won", are not to be explicated in terms of persons in other possible situations who are similar to the actual Humphrey. However, because of a need to preserve the necessity of identity, the essentialist must claim that certain other intuitions (such as "Hesperus might not have been Phosphorus") have to be understood in terms of similarity (as in Kripke) or have to be (...) rejected (as in Yablo). This move leads to ineliminable doubts about the essentialist's rejection of similarity, and so it leads to an undermining of the motivation for essentialism itself. (shrink)

This paper critically examines a prominent and perennial strategy—found in thinkers as diverse as Kant and Shamik Dasgupta—of simultaneously embracing the Principle of Sufficient Reason and also limiting it so as to avoid certain apparently negative consequences of an unrestricted PSR. I will argue that this strategy of taming the PSR faces significant challenges and may even be incoherent. And for my purposes, I will enlist a generally derided argument by Leibniz for the PSR which will help us to see (...) the connections between the PSR and a radical form of monism. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense of a much-maligned Leibnizian argument for the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the principle according to which whatever is has a sufficient reason or explanation. While Leibniz’s argument is widely thought to rely on a question-begging premise, the paper offers a wholly original and non-question-begging defense of that premise, a defense that Leibniz did not anticipate. The paper does not present this defense of Leibniz's argument as an interpretation of Leibniz; rather, the paper—more modestly in one (...) way, less modestly in another—simply claims that this argument succeeds. (shrink)

This volume contains Gianfrancesco Pico's Life of his uncle Giovanni Pico and also Giovanni's Oration. Gianfrancesco's Life opens a collection that omits Giovanni's Conclusions but includes the speech that we - unlike Pico - know as an Oration on the Dignity of Man. He wrote the Oration to introduce the Conclusions, but his nephew's editorial decision cut the theses off from the speech that their author had connected with them. Several times in the Oration, the orator mentioned "theorems" to be (...) proposed in the Conclusions: he clearly saw the book and the speech as tools for the same task. Either Gianfrancesco missed his uncle's intentions, which seems unlikely, or he meant to seal off his other writings - including the Oration - from a book that he found embarrassing for himself and his relative and too risky to make public. This is the fact of the matter: Gianfrancesco left the Conclusions unpublished while publishing the Oration in a collection introduced by his Life. Both the speech and the biography are presented here, in this edition, in the same way - apart from the Conclusions: this reflects the situation in 1496 and respects Gianfrancesco's choice, even though his decision blocked understanding of the speech for many years. Today, with access to all the relevant texts in many versions, readers can move from one work to another as needed. (shrink)

This first extensive study of Spinoza's philosophy of mind concentrates on two problems crucial to the philosopher's thoughts on the matter: the requirements for having a thought about a particular object, and the problem of the mind's relation to the body. Della Rocca contends that Spinoza's positions are systematically connected with each other and with a principle at the heart of his metaphysical system: his denial of causal or explanatory relations between the mental and the physical. In this way, (...) Della Rocca's exploration of these two problems provides a new and illuminating perspective on Spinoza's philosophy as a system. (shrink)

Questo contributo teorico propone una prospettiva innovativa nel dibattito sul concetto di “bullshit”. L’ipotesi principale è che la vaghezza sia un elemento fondamentale delle bullshit, che si focalizza sull’attività. In questo modo si supera il dibattito in letteratura che mette al centro o l’intenzionalità dell’enunciatore o la struttura e il contenuto degli enunciati. Si sostiene inoltre che la vaghezza non debba essere considerata come un limite, ma come un’opportunità per comprendere situazioni comunicative complesse. Questo differente approccio, basato sulla tradizione pragmatista, (...) supera alcuni limiti evidenziati in letteratura, aprendo la strada a una comprensione più approfondita del fenomeno delle bullshit. Offre inoltre una risposta esaustiva ad alcuni quesiti di Frankfurt e riconosce il lato “produttivo” delle bullshit, adattandosi meglio a molteplici circostanze quotidiane. Un approccio pragmatista al fenomeno-bullshit basato sulla vaghezza offre una maggiore comprensione di fenomeni complessi di comunicazione senza cadere nel “paradigma della sincerità” evidenziato da Frankfurt. (shrink)

What enables individuals to act together? Recent discoveries suggest that a variety of mechanisms are involved. But something fundamental is yet to be investigated. In joint action, agents represent a collective goal, or so it is often assumed. But how, if at all, are collective goals represented in joint action and how do such representations impact performance? To investigate this question we adapted a bimanual paradigm, the circle-line drawing paradigm, to contrast two agents acting in parallel with two agents performing (...) a joint action. Participants were required to draw lines or circles while observing circles or lines being drawn. The findings indicate that interpersonal motor coupling may occur in joint but not parallel action. This suggests that participants in joint actions can represent collective goals motorically. (shrink)

The introduction of Linear Logic extends the Curry-Howard Isomorphism to intensional aspects of the typed functional programming. In particular, every formula of Linear Logic tells whether the term it is a type for, can be either erased/duplicated or not, during a computation. So, Linear Logic can be seen as a model of a computational environment with an explicit control about the management of resources.

This paper presents an argument for the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the PSR, the principle according to which each thing that exists has an explanation. I begin with several widespread and extremely plausible arguments that I call explicability arguments in which a certain situation is rejected precisely because it would be arbitrary. Building on these plausible cases, I construct a series of explicability arguments that culminates in an explicability argument concerning existence itself. This argument amounts to the claim that the (...) PSR is true. The plausibility of the initial cases in the series provides the basis of an argument for the PSR, an argument that can be rebutted only by drawing a line between the plausible early cases in the series and the apparently unacceptable later cases. I argue that no principled reason for drawing this line has been found and that one cannot draw an unprincipled or arbitrary line without begging the question. The paper concludes that, therefore, this defense of the PSR remains unrebutted and that we have a powerful, new reason to embrace the PSR. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

To początkowy fragment mowy O godności człowieka Pico della Mirandoli." Wstępem poprzedział Danilo Facca, przełożyli Zbigniew Nerczuk i Mikołaj Olszewski. -/- This is an excerpt from the Polish translation of Pico della Mirandola's De dignitate hominis. The preface to the translation by Danilo Facca. Translation by Zbigniew Nerczuk and Mikołaj Olszewski.

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 42-44.

I argue that the standard counterexamples to the identity of indiscernibles fail because they involve a commitment to a certain kind of primitive or brute identity that has certain very unpalatable consequences involving the possibility of objects of the same kind completely overlapping and sharing all the same proper parts. The only way to avoid these consequences is to reject brute identity and thus to accept the identity of indiscernibles. I also show how the rejection of the identity of indiscernibles (...) derives some of its support from its affinity with a Kripkean account of trans-world identity and theories of direct reference. (shrink)

By invoking surprising rationalist considerations that Bernard Williams does not anticipate, this paper defends Williams’s claim that that moral criticism on the basis of purported external reasons amounts to ‘bluff’. After strengthening this rejection of external reasons by drawing parallels to compelling rationalist arguments in other domains, the paper mounts a similarly rationalist critique of internal reasons invoked by Kantian moral philosophers. The paper closes with an apocalyptic line of thought that develops the preceding rationalist arguments into a challenge to (...) the notion of acting for reasons in general. (shrink)

In their address of structural racism in healthcare, Sabatello and colleagues provide both a remarkable review of the empirical literature regarding the disproportionate impacts of the COVID...

This is a translation of three works by Mirandola: "On the Dignity of Man," a document of early Renaissance humanism; "One Being and the One," a treatise on the relationship between unity and being; and "Heptaplus," an interpretation of the first verses of "Genesis.".

In a now classic paper, Karen Carr argues that Kierkegaard is a religious “anti-rationalist”: He holds that reason and religious truth exist in necessary tension with one another. Carr maintains that this antagonism is not a matter of the logical incoherence of Christianity, but rather the fact that genuine submission to Christ precludes approaching him through demonstration. In this essay, we argue that while Kierkegaard is in fact an anti-rationalist, the literature has failed to appreciate the full strength of his (...) position. It is not just that reason and obedience are in tension; rather, Kierkegaard holds the stronger view that reason is actively offended by Christianity’s primary claims. Not only is reason incapable of generating any positive evidence for the truth of Christianity, more radically, it provides evidence against it. In order to make this case, we offer a close reading of Practice in Christianity, developing a typology of Kierkegaard’s account of Christ’s “offense.” Finally, having motivated Kierkegaard’s strong anti-rationalism, we consider why, on his account, anyone would want to be a Christian. (shrink)

While the normative debate on European integration has addressed the importance of the construction of truly democratic institutions as well as the establishment of social rights at EU level, the role of progressive social movements has not been much debated. Building upon theorization and research in social movement studies, I argue that progressive social movements are indeed already contributing to the construction of European public spheres. Not one liberal (or bourgeois), public sphere but the proliferation of subaltern counterpublics could allow (...) for the participation of the excluded, giving them the possibility to make their political voice heard. Through different paths of Europeanization (in particular, domestication, externalization and transnationalization), progressive social movements have played an important role in the creation of a critical public sphere as, by contesting European institutions, they have contributed to make them (more) accountable, but have also developed collective identities at EU level and, with them, European public spheres. A main challenge is now to connect an emancipatory critical public to public institutions. (shrink)