A partire dalla tesi che nel neoliberalismo è all’opera una pratica di governo degli altri che si effettua tramite la sollecitazione di un modo particolare di governo di sé, nel presente contributo si tenterà di considerare lo specifico regime di verità che si profila in relazione a questa forma di esercizio del potere. Per comprendere questa particolare declinazione della veridizione come tecnica di sé atta ad assicurare il governo degli altri l’articolo si svilupperà in tre parti. In un primo momento (...) si tenterà di definire la nozione di regime di verità affinché sia possibile comprenderne la portata in relazione alla governamentalità neoliberale. Si avrà così modo, in un secondo momento, di analizzare il regime di verità neoliberale andando a definire il suo funzionamento e i suoi bersagli. Sarà possibile, infine, studiare gli effetti che tali pratiche veridizionali ingenerano nei processi di soggettivazione nella misura in cui producono un individuo imprenditore di sé, le cui scelte e comportamenti devono essere animati dalla logica del capitale umano. (shrink)

The economic and social thinking of Latin America was enriched by the Latin American Development School (LDS). That is the name given in this essay to the contributions from distinguished social scientists who, during fifty years (1950-2000), articulated their ideas around the, so called, Center-P..

Il presente volume raccoglie diversi articoli, relazioni e conferenze, fatti in circostanze diverse e in vari luoghi durante il decennio 1953-1962. I saggi qui presentati sono stati quindi gia pubblicati tutti, eccetto pochi. Tuttavia essi vengono qui non solo organicamente riuniti, ma anche in molti punti rimaneggiati, completati e in qualche caso fusi insieme. La grande attualita di argomenti di filosofia della scienza ci hanno spinto a curare la presente raccolta, come modesto contributo ad una delle piu urgenti problematiche della (...) cultura moderna. In essa, infatti, se occorre evitare il pericolo che la scienza nel senso stretto subordini a se ogni altro valore, bisogna pero anche riconoscere ad essa il suo reale valore teoretico e pratico ed evitare quindi che la filosofia si isoli in un piano puramente concettuale ed astratto, avulso dalla vera realta dei nostri tempi. (shrink)

The global spread of the novel coronavirus is affected by the spread of related misinformation—the so-called COVID-19 Infodemic—that makes populations more vulnerable to the disease through resistance to mitigation efforts. Here, we analyze the prevalence and diffusion of links to low-credibility content about the pandemic across two major social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook. We characterize cross-platform similarities and differences in popular sources, diffusion patterns, influencers, coordination, and automation. Comparing the two platforms, we find divergence among the prevalence of popular (...) low-credibility sources and suspicious videos. A minority of accounts and pages exert a strong influence on each platform. These misinformation “superspreaders” are often associated with the low-credibility sources and tend to be verified by the platforms. On both platforms, there is evidence of coordinated sharing of Infodemic content. The overt nature of this manipulation points to the need for societal-level solutions in addition to mitigation strategies within the platforms. However, we highlight limits imposed by inconsistent data-access policies on our capability to study harmful manipulations of information ecosystems. (shrink)

COVID-19 has brought to light the severity of economic inequalities by testing the capacity of the poorest families to make ends meet. Food insecurity has in fact soared all over the UK, with many people forced to rely on food support providers to not go hungry. This paper uses a unique dataset on 55 food support organizations active in Greater Manchester during the first COVID-19 wave, and 41 semi-structured interviews with food aid spokespersons and stakeholders, to shed light on what (...) they overcame, the complications and drawbacks of the food emergency response plan put in place. The results indicate that food aid organizations that remained open were surprisingly effective despite the growth in user demand and the decrease in volunteers. However, the necessity to maintain a timely supply food at all costs came with important drawbacks. The lockdown measures that followed COVID-19 not only affected the financial stability and management of the organizations, and the availability of food, but undermined the ways in which food support providers used to operate. Owing to physical distancing measures and to the increasing numbers of users, more or less intangible forms of support such as financial advice, empathic listening and human warmth were partially lost, probably when they were needed more than ever. (shrink)

Answering some of the main questions from [L. Motto Ros, The descriptive set-theoretical complexity of the embeddability relation on models of large size, Ann. Pure Appl. Logic164(12) (2013) 1454–1492], we show that whenever κ is a cardinal satisfying κ<κ=κ>ω, then the embeddability relation between κ-sized structures is strongly invariantly universal, and hence complete for (κ-)analytic quasi-orders. We also prove that in the above result we can further restrict our attention to various natural classes of structures, including (generalized) trees, graphs, or (...) groups. This fully generalizes to the uncountable case the main results of [A. Louveau and C. Rosendal, Complete analytic equivalence relations, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.357(12) (2005) 4839–4866; S.-D. Friedman and L. Motto Ros, Analytic equivalence relations and bi-embeddability, J. Symbolic Logic76(1) (2011) 243–266; J. Williams, Universal countable Borel quasi-orders, J. Symbolic Logic79(3) (2014) 928–954; F. Calderoni and L. Motto Ros, Universality of group embeddability, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.146 (2018) 1765–1780]. (shrink)

The painter Francis Bacon and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze agree with Heraclitus: any phenomenon is constituted of movement or becoming and no appearance endures. I read Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation from the perspective of the Heraclitean flux. This allows me to show the eminent role of forces in the work of Deleuze, which he inherits from the Greek philosopher. I point at sensation as Deleuze's re-thinking of the notion of becoming. ‘How can an artist make an object endure?’ (...) The artistic product, for Deleuze, embodies the force to recreate itself, and thus to endure in the universe. This phenomenon is a bloc of sensation. (shrink)

Il volume e un omaggio del P. Selvaggi al pensiero filosofico del Prof. Annibale Pastore, eminente studioso vissuto tra la seconda meta del XIX secolo fino alla prima meta del XX secolo. Il volume parte dalla iniziale riflessione sulla filosofia della scienza, sui suoi metodi e sul suo valore alle considerazioni sulla logica e in particolare sulla logica aristotelica, alle relazioni tra la logica e la matematica fino alla elaborazione della sua teoria: la logica del potenziamento basata sulla relativita. Con (...) la sua teoria il Pastore vuole superare sia l'idealismo kantiano sia il materialismo. Egli parte da un dualismo: soggetto e oggetto, natura e spirito, ma lo supera, non con la negazione degli opposti come fanno i materialisti e gli idealisti, bensi mediante l'identificazione dei termini con la relazione che li unisce. Il lavoro del P. Selvaggi e innanzitutto una descrizione dello sviluppo del pensiero di Pastore e un commento critico alle sue elaborazioni e conseguenze. (shrink)

The last quarter of a century has featured a surge in interest and studies on the commons, spearheaded, of course, by the efforts of Elinor Ostrom. These efforts have problematized the once well-established paradigm of the tragedy of the commons most clearly described by Garrett Hardin in 1968. One could say that the commons, thus, have become a fundamental field of study in most social sciences. This is not the case in the field of legal scholarship, which leads me to (...) the overarching issue of this essay, namely the difficult relationship between jurists and the commons. The phrase?difficult relationship? does not refer to an explicit antagonism, but to something even worse: complete indifference and a scandalous lack of knowledge. While my main purpose is to try to explain this sorry state of affairs, I also hope to make a more general point on the nature of law and legal change. In this sense, the commons can be considered a case-study in legal theory. The main issue of this paper is to tackle following sub-questions. What is the status of commons in the Western European legal discourse? Why do most legal scholars pay such a poor attention to the growing literature on the commons in other disciplines? What factors contribute to this peculiar case of cultural deafness? What promise of improvement does the future hold? nema. (shrink)

We show in rather informal terms how witness sets can be useful in both explicating some basic intuitions about scope and understanding how particular denotational semantic differences between noun phrases affect their abilities to bear out certain scopal patterns. More generally we suggest that the usual notion of scope needs to be factored into variation distributivity and maximality. This part lays some groundwork for several of the subsequent chapters and is thus of interest to all readers. The second part shows (...) that already in this initial raw form the above insights can be applied to make a novel claim concerning the availability of so-called branching readings. In logical terms a branching reading can be defined for any sentence with a subject and a direct object. However speakers of English accept only a fraction of these readings, so the question arises how the data can be predicted from the meanings of the participating quantifiers and the syntactic structure of the sentence. We propose that thinking about the behavior of quantifiers along the lines introduced in the first part leads to a simple answer to this question. (shrink)

The study of the arts in philosophy has often concentrated on the role that emotions (and affective responses more generally) play in art’s creation and value. Philosophical theories of art have sometimes even defined art in terms of its capacity to elicit or express emotions. Philosophers have debated such questions as what it is to express an emotion in art; whether emotions form part of the value of an artwork; whether the emotions involved in art appreciation are of the same (...) kind as those that we experience in real life, or of a different, even sui generis kind (i.e., aesthetic emotions); whether it is rational or appropriate to experience emotions in response to art; and what value, if any, there is in art that evokes unpleasant emotions. Although the focus here will be on what, to a first approximation, can be characterized as the “Western mainstream philosophical tradition,” discussion of the role of emotions in art can also be found in different approaches and traditions of thought: from Indian philosophy to cognitive science, to so-called Continental philosophy. (shrink)

I have two objectives in this paper. The first is to investigate whether, and to what extent, truth is valuable. I do this by first isolating the value question from other normative questions. Second, I import into the debate about the nature of truth some key distinctions hailing from value theory. This will help us to clarify the sense in which truth is valuable. I then argue that there is significant variability in the value of truth in different areas of (...) discourse. I shall call this the axiological variability conjecture. I illustrate and substantiate AVC by contrasting the occurrence of disagreement in two paradigmatically evaluative areas of discourse, viz. matters of taste, on the one hand, and morality, on the other. I claim that there is a reasonable tendency to care much more about settling moral disagreements than taste disagreements and that this difference has to do, at least partly but significantly, with the different value that truth exhibits in these two areas of discourse. I then turn to the second objective of the paper—namely, to discuss how pluralistic accounts of the nature of truth may deal with the value of truth in light of AVC. I will argue that AVC is a problem for all versions of truth pluralism that are committed to the following two theses: that truth is a value concept; and that this characteristic of the concept has to be reflected in the metaphysical nature of any admissible truth properties—i.e., all the various properties that are admissible in the pluralist account are value-conferring properties and thus intrinsically valuable. In so doing, I will focus primarily on Michael Lynch’s functionalist incarnation of truth pluralism. Lynch terms this “Manifestation Alethic Pluralism”. My reason for this is twofold: first and foremost, MAP is a paradigmatic exemplification of a model of truth pluralism that is committed to both and ; second, MAP has, to date, enjoyed the most discussion, and currently provides the most developed account of truth pluralism. However, I argue that MAP lacks the resources to account for AVC. Owing to this, I suggest two ways out for an advocate of MAP, which force various structural changes in her view. (shrink)

Some time ago, the philosopher Luciano Floridi suggested that Western philosophy, and the mainstream contemporary approach to it traditionally called ‘analytic philosophy’, is in dire need of a reboot. The concern was that the discipline might be in a period of decadence. Analytic philosophy would be benefited by greater internationalization, wider and more transparent decision-making, and the reduction (as much as possible) of conflicts of interest as well as of its current habit of hiring and providing publication opportunities on the (...) basis of contacts, networking, and academic pedigree. If we are right, then we need a reconditioning of the institutional framework of analytic philosophy that adjusts it to the current global and interconnected world. (shrink)

Shutter Island is a much-criticized and highly debated film. Scorsese, in fact, has been accused of distorting the facts and altering his historical sources. The depictions we see of the Holocaust are false, not based on visual documents, a mix of incompatible evidences and iconographies, an amalgam of irreconcilable informations and representations. The director has created a visual style and a sound design that vacillate between thriller and horror, drama and fantasy, while betraying the medial transparency of the reconstruction and (...) the ethical responsibility of interpretation. The viewer sees and believes in the images of the concentration camp of Dachau which are, in reality, dialectical imaginings of another scene: in these images, constructed according to the clinical and critical vision of Scorsese as cinephile, the past and the repressed return in the present. In our present too. On the one hand, in fact, the viewer participates empathically in the mental images relived and suffered by the protagonist in his post-traumatic hallucinations; on the other hand, the viewer is prompted to recall the pictures quoted or paraphrased from the archives of the imagery of cinema and of the photojournalism of war–in which Pontecorvo, Resnais, Fuller, George Stevens and John Huston live side by side with the RKO horror films of Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson. For Scorsese, the images of the violence of war and of the horror of extermination cannot be linked to an origin or past that have definitively been concluded. They are more than recorded pictures or concrete evidences: they are clues and symptoms. They come from a conflictual and endless descent of which cinema is the living and ambiguous memory; they are the open wounds of an original struggle between human and inhuman and of man–they still survive, here and now. (shrink)

The controversy over teleology raged in the early modern period with particular intensity. In this paper, I will show that Guillaume Lamy represents a current of antifinalism, devoid of weakness, and far from compromise with his adversaries. This antifinalism makes of Lamy not so much a sincere supporter of the unknowability of God in other words, a proto but rather a radical Lucretian materialist, whose aim is to openly distance himself equally from the partial Cartesian rejection of final causes and (...) from the sugar–coated Epicureanism of the Gassendists. (shrink)

In Truth and Objectivity, Crispin Wright argues that because truth is a distinctively normative property, it cannot be as metaphysically insubstantive as deflationists claim. We offer a reconstruction of Wright’s Inflationary Argument that highlights the steps required to establish its inflationary conclusion. We argue that if a certain metaphysical and epistemological view of a given subject matter is accepted, a local counterexample to the Inflationary Argument can be constructed. As a case study we focus on the domain of basic taste. (...) We develop two variants of a subjectivist and relativist metaphysics and epistemology that seem palatable in that domain and we show that the Inflationary Argument doesn’t go through in the domain of basic taste thus construed. We conclude by briefly discussing the significance of this result for the debate on alethic pluralism. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy is beginning to pay to problems of linguistic justice the attention that they deserve in today’s heavily interconnected world. However, contemporary philosophy, as a part of today’s world, has problems of linguistic justice of its own which deserve meta-philosophical attention. At least in the philosophical tradition that is mainstream in much of the world today, viz. analytic philosophy, methodological and sociological mechanisms make it the case that the voices of non-native-speaking philosophers are substantially less heard. In this essay, (...) I briefly outline the problems non-native speakers face in contemporary analytic philosophy. I then move on to analysing the possible causes of the current problems. Among these reasons, I argue, is the emphasis given to linguistic style and appearances as signs of clarity, precision and rigour in the treatment of philosophical problems. I argue that the current emphasis on linguistic style in analytic philosophy is not justifiable, in part because it deprives contemporary analytic philosophy of a wider variety of philosophical perspectives. I argue that an important remedy for the emphasis on linguistic appearances within philosophy is to foster greater linguistic diversity. I conclude by presenting and motivating a recent initiative that aims to achieve such a goal. (shrink)

This paper considers Niccolò Machiavelli’s contribution to a theory of constituent power. Modern authors who have analysed the concept of constituent power generally agree on its ambiguous, paradoxical and apparently contradictory essence. With few exceptions, Machiavelli is absent from both the historical reconstructions of and the theoretical debates on the origin of constituent power. My argument is built around two main theses: reintroducing Machiavelli to the debate on constituent power offers an original response to the theoretical fallacies and inconsistencies identified (...) by modern scholars. In particular, Machiavelli’s philosophy contributes to the comprehension of constituent power as a living force within social order. My second thesis is that by tracing the source of constituent power back to Machiavelli, we can overcome the main theoretical problem implied by this concept, namely the problem of the priority of the factual or the juridical, by providing a vision that emphasises their immanent coexistence. (shrink)

Control is typically accepted as a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Thus, humans are morally responsible for their actions only if we can realise the right kind of control. Are there good reasons to think that humans can psychologically realise control? This paper is an attempt to address this question by establishing choice and agenthood as separate but interconnected aspects of control. I consider two challenges to the claim that humans can realise the kind of control required for moral responsibility. (...) First, an empirical challenge from cognitive neuroscience provides a familiar way to argue against the realisation of the choice aspect by human psychology. Second, a more formidable conceptual challenge to the aspect of agenthood presents us with scepticism about the kind of explanations that psychology can provide. The second challenge suggests that, in psychological accounts of choice, the agent disappears. Drawing on recent empirical models of cognitive control and philosophical accounts of agency, I conclude that the psychological explanation of choice is consistent with the aspect of agenthood being realised by human psychology. (shrink)

We hypothesize that heritable epigenetic changes can affect rates of fitness increase as well as patterns of genotypic and phenotypic change during adaptation. In particular, we suggest that when natural selection acts on pure epigenetic variation in addition to genetic variation, populations adapt faster, and adaptive phenotypes can arise before any genetic changes. This may make it difficult to reconcile the timing of adaptive events detected using conventional population genetics tools based on DNA sequence data with environmental drivers of adaptation, (...) such as changes in climate. Epigenetic modifications are frequently associated with somatic cell differentiation, but recently epigenetic changes have been found that can be transmitted over many generations. Here, we show how the interplay of these heritable epigenetic changes with genetic changes can affect adaptive evolution, and how epigenetic changes affect the signature of selection in the genetic record. (shrink)

Does adherence to the principles of logic commit us to a particular way of viewing the world? Or are there ways of being – ways of behaving in the world, including ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking – that ground the normative constraints that logic imposes? Does the fact that assertions, the traditional elements of logic, are typically made about beings present a problem for metaphysical prospects of making assertions meaningfully about being? Does thinking about being accordingly require revising or (...) restricting logic's reach – and, if so, how is this possible? Or is there something precious about the very idea of thinking the limits of thinking? Contemporary scholars have become increasing sensitive to how Heidegger, much like Wittgenstein, instructively poses such questions. Heidegger on Logic is a collection of new essays by leading scholars who critically ponder the efficacy of his responses to them. (shrink)