The Normative and the Evaluative. The Buck-Passing Account of Value. By Rowland Richard.

This book represents a unique attempt to restore a 'new-classical' aspiration towards a philosophical system able to provide some certainties. Using the distinctive feature of presenting an original and complete philosophical system, author Francesco Belfiore diverges from the philosophical literature of the last decades, which has been ever more focused upon specific fields.

Naturalism is still facing a strong opposition in the philosophy of social science from influential scholars who argue that philosophical analysis must be autonomous from scientific investigation. The opposition exploits philosophers’ traditional diffidence toward social science and fuels the ambition to provide new foundations for social research. A classic anti-naturalist strategy is to identify a feature of social reality that prevents scientific explanation and prediction. An all-time favorite is the dependence of social phenomena on human representation. This article examines two (...) prominent versions of the dependence thesis and concludes that they both fail. Contemporary social science is capable of accounting for the causal dependence of social reality on representation, and there is no reason to believe that social entities are ontologically dependent on the collective acceptance of a constitutive rule. (shrink)

According to Chomsky, creativity is a critical property of human language, particularly the aspect of ?the creative use of language? concerning the appropriateness to a situation. How language can be creative but appropriate to a situation is an unsolvable mystery from the Chomskyan point of view. We propose that language appropriateness can be explained by considering the role of the human capacity for Mental Time Travel at its foundation, together with social and ecological intelligences within a triadic language-grounding system. Our (...) proposal is based on the change of perspective from the analysis of individual sentences to the flux of speech in which the temporal dimension of language is much more relevant. (shrink)

[ita] Blondel offre una prospettiva gnoseologica complementare al tomismo: se quest'ultimo sottolinea troppo la forza del concetto, Blondel da parte sua la relativizza un po' troppo. Tra le due prospettive occorre quindi cercare una sintesi. -/- [eng] Blondel offers a gnoseological perspective complementary to tomism: if the latter excessively underlines the strength of the concept, Blondel instead underestimates it. Between the two perspectives it is therefore necessary to seek a synthesis.

1. Da Leibniz a Kant.--2. L'algebra della logica.

This paper is about a discussion between two Italian philosophers: Gustavo Bontadini and Alessandro Emiliani. The first object of human knowledge is or not immediate (/intuitive)?

Medieval philosophy is a very rich thought and deserves to be studied with more attention and more time than they do in schools.

The fallen state of man is characterized by the disappearance of wisdom and the lack of freedom, according to Ugo and the anonymous author of Summa Sententiarum. Ugo assimilates this person to the insipid and stupid in the book of Job. Such a person should blend infused wisdom with the triple cognition of God, himself and the good to be done. This task follows a precise historical development, which is initiated by the weak in faith and which can be schematized (...) in five steps: 1) fear; 2) education; 3) wisdom; 4) history; 5) study of the Bible. Studying, man assimilates himself to God as the supreme exemplary form of wisdom and individualizes the works of condition and reparation. But whereas the anonymous author subdues the moral value of divine action to a social criterion, Ugo distinguishes three degrees of good and connects moral value to the activity or passivity of the divine will. (shrink)

The connection between economics and ethics is as old as economics itself, and central to both disciplines. It is an issue that has recently attracted much interest from economists and philosophers. The connection is, in part, a result of the desire of economists to make policy prescriptions, which clearly require some normative criteria. More deeply, much economic theory is founded on the assumption of utility maximization, thereby creating an immediate connection between the foundations of economics and the philosophical literature on (...) utilitarianism and reasons for action. In fact, some influential contemporary approaches to ethics advocate decision-theoretic or game-theoretic foundations of some sort for moral principles, while several economic theorists are now prepared to take into account the ethical dimensions of rational decisions. As a result, it appears that economics and ethics are somehow inextricably linked through theories of rational decision-making. Most of us would probably find it disturbing to concede that there are contradictions between the prescriptions of rationality and the requirements of moral `rightness'. The essays included in the present volume provide a detailed analysis of the connections between ethics and economics as viewed from several different - sometimes conflicting - perspectives. This book, the outcome of a joint meeting of philosophers and economists, has three main themes: the validity of utilitarianism much used by economists, the notion of fairness and equity, and the coherence of the rationality postulate of economics. The book does not reach any final conclusions, but it greatly illuminates the exact areas of possible disagreement and indeed the open-ended nature of ethical reasoning. There is much that economists, and especially welfare economists, can learn from these papers - not least circumspection. (shrink)

Analogue Gravity Phenomenology is a collection of contributions that cover a vast range of areas in physics, ranging from surface wave propagation in fluids to nonlinear optics. The underlying common aspect of all these topics, and hence the main focus and perspective from which they are explained here, is the attempt to develop analogue models for gravitational systems. The original and main motivation of the field is the verification and study of Hawking radiation from a horizon: the enabling feature is (...) the possibility to generate horizons in the laboratory with a wide range of physical systems that involve a flow of one kind or another. The years around 2010 and onwards witnessed a sudden surge of experimental activity in this expanding field of research. However, building an expertise in analogue gravity requires the researcher to be equipped with a rather broad range of knowledge and interests. The aim of this book is to bring the reader up to date with the latest developments and provide the basic background required in order to appreciate the goals, difficulties and success stories in the field of analogue gravity. Each chapter of the book treats a different topic explained in detail by the major experts for each specific discipline. The first chapters give an overview of black hole spacetimes and Hawking radiation before moving on to describe the large variety of analogue spacetimes that have been proposed and are currently under investigation. This introductory part is then followed by an in-depth description of what are currently the three most promising analogue spacetime settings, namely surface waves in flowing fluids, acoustic oscillations in Bose-Einstein condensates and electromagnetic waves in nonlinear optics. Both theory and experimental endeavours are explained in detail. The final chapters refer to other aspects of analogue gravity beyond the study of Hawking radiation, such as Lorentz invariance violations and Brownian motion in curved spacetimes, before concluding with a return to the origins of the field and a description of the available observational evidence for horizons in astrophysical black holes. (shrink)