Il volume raccoglie saggi dedicati alla Fenomenologia dello spirito di G.W.F. Hegel e ad alcune sue principali interpretazioni. A scritti dal taglio più nettamente storiografico che ne ricostruiscono le influenze in autori quali Marx, Gentile, Heidegger, Kojève, Paci, Lacan e Brandom, si affiancano contributi volti a ricostruire alcuni nodi categoriali che, sollecitati dal testo hegeliano, hanno segnato le riflessioni etiche, teoretiche, filosofico-politiche e psicoanalitiche successive: dialettica, cultura, negazione, desiderio, corpo, fenomeno, riconoscimento. Questa raccolta non intende quindi né riproporre la lettera (...) del testo hegeliano, né avanzare una sua specifica interpretazione. Piuttosto, gli autori hanno condiviso lo sforzo di illustrare in actu exercito le possibilità di movimento tra questi due estremi – testo e interpretazione – tra cui la cultura filosofica si muove. Attraverso questo movimento la Fenomenologia dello spirito continua a produrre filosofia, ossia ad essere occasione e strumento per la comprensione del “proprio tempo col pensiero”. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the determinants underlying the internalization of proactive environmental management proposed by certifiable environmental management systems such as those set out in ISO 14001 and the European Management and Auditing Scheme. Using a study based on 232 usable questionnaires from EMAS-registered organizations, we explored the influence of institutional pressures from different stakeholders and the role of corporate strategy in the “substantial” versus “symbolic” integration of environmental practices. The results highlighted that although institutional pressures generally strengthen the internalization of (...) proactive environmental practices, the influence of stakeholders can either support the integration of these practices or encourage their superficial adoption. For example, while pressure from suppliers and shareholders contribute to corporate greening, pressure from customers and industrial associations tend to encourage greenwashing. Product quality-oriented strategies also positively influence EMS internalization. The paper sheds light on the institutional complexity underlying the substantial versus symbolic implementation of environmental practices, and questions the dominant isomorphic view of EMS adoption. The paper also bridges the gap between complementary approaches on corporate greening, notably neo-institutional and stakeholder theories. (shrink)

Cognitive frames help companies make sense of the intrinsic tensions of sustainability issues and influence how they respond to calls for sustainability over time. Yet, cognitive frames have been investigated as a static feature and previous studies have overlooked the evolutionary dynamics that can lead an organization to change its own frame. This study observes the evolution of life cycle management implementation through the theory of cognitive frames. We conducted a longitudinal multiple case study of 10 SMEs involved in a (...) European‐funded project. Over a three‐year period we examined how cognitive approaches to sustainability issues changed according to different learning mindsets. A total of three cognitive frames and two learning mindsets were revealed from the analysis, thus providing two important contributions. First, cognitive frames are not static in time, but can change to give more importance to the environmental sustainability of a life cycle. Second, the type of learning mindsets that managers in SMEs share can trigger changes in organizational cognitive frames. (shrink)

We outline a neo-Meinongian framework labeled as Modal Meinongian Metaphysics (MMM) to account for the ontology and semantics of fictional discourse. Several competing accounts of fictional objects are originated by the fact that our talking of them mirrors incoherent intuitions: mainstream theories of fiction privilege some such intuitions, but are forced to account for others via complicated paraphrases of the relevant sentences. An ideal theory should resort to as few paraphrases as possible. In Sect. 1, we make this explicit via (...) two methodological principles, called the Minimal Revision and the Acceptability Constraint. In Sect. 2, we introduce the standard distinction between internal and external fictional discourse. In Sects. 3–5, we discuss the approaches of (traditional) Meinongianism, Fictionalism, and Realism—and their main troubles. In Sect. 6 we propose our MMM approach. This is based upon (1) a modal semantics including impossible worlds (Subsect. 6.1); (2) a qualified Comprehension Principle for objects (Subsect. 6.2); (3) a notion of existence-entailment for properties (Subsect. 6.3). In Sect. 7 we present a formal semantics for MMM based upon a representation operator. And in Sect. 8 we have a look at how MMM solves the problems of the three aforementioned theories. (shrink)

Accounts of propositions as sets of possible worlds have been criticized for conflating distinct impossible propositions. In response to this problem, some have proposed to introduce impossible worlds to represent distinct impossibilities, endorsing the thesis that impossible worlds must be of the same kind; this has been called the parity thesis. I show that this thesis faces problems, and propose a hybrid account which rejects it: possible worlds are taken as concrete Lewisian worlds, and impossibilities are represented as set-theoretic constructions (...) out of them. This hybrid account (1) distinguishes many intuitively distinct impossible propositions; (2) identifies impossible propositions with extensional constructions; (3) avoids resorting to primitive modality, at least so far as Lewisian modal realism does. (shrink)

3.1 Experiments and causal analysis 3.2 The severity approach 3.3 Objectivist vs. Subjectivist approaches 3.4 “Low” vs. “high-level” hypothesis testing 3.5 Novelty and construct independence 4. External validity..

There is a principle in things, about which we cannot be deceived, but must always, on the contrary, recognize the truth – viz. that the same thing cannot at one and the same time be and not be": with these words of the Metaphysics, Aristotle introduced the Law of Non-Contradiction, which was to become the most authoritative principle in the history of Western thought. However, things have recently changed, and nowadays various philosophers, called dialetheists, claim that this Law does not (...) hold unrestrictedly – that in peculiar circumstances the same thing may at the same time be and not be, and contradictions may obtain in the world. This book opens with an examination of the famous logical paradoxes that appear to speak on behalf of contradictions (e.g., the Liar paradox, the set-theoretic paradoxes such as Cantor’s and Russell’s), and of the reasons for the failure of the standard attempts to solve them. It provides, then, an introduction to paraconsistent logics – non-classical logics in which the admission of contradictions does not lead to logical chaos –, and their astonishing applications, going from inconsistent data base management to contradictory arithmetics capable of circumventing Gödel’s celebrated Incompleteness Theorem. The final part of the book discusses the philosophical motivations and difficulties of dialetheism, and shows how to extract from Aristotle’s ancient words a possible reply to the dialetheic challenge. How to Sell a Contradiction will appeal to anyone interested in non-classical logics, analytic metaphysics, and philosophy of mathematics, and especially to those who consider challenging our most entrenched beliefs the main duty of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

This paper examines the role and power of the state in modernity and its transformation throughout it and into the present. First, it recognizes the centrality of the role of information control for the modern state constitution, which allows sovereign power to extend to the national level. Secondly, it discusses the shift of state power from a purely informational power to an informational and bargaining power, as well as the gradual transformation of sovereignty into governmentality. Finally, it analyzes the transformations (...) that have led to a critical loss of both powers by the state and have enabled their acquisition by tech corporations. It examines the implications of this shift in power and the consequent disempowerment of the state, defining the mode of operation of the power embodied by tech corporations as a regime of performativity, rephrasing the Foucauldian regime of truth, which presided over the ways in which governmental power was performed. Such a regime bases its power not on the ability to order discourse and knowledge, but on the ability to automate it, and to predict and manipulate human behaviors. In this way, it has disintermediated not only the state in its role as the primary informational agent, but also, to some extent, the ability of individuals to assert rights through their actions. (shrink)

A logic is called 'paraconsistent' if it rejects the rule called 'ex contradictione quodlibet', according to which any conclusion follows from inconsistent premises. While logicians have proposed many technically developed paraconsistent logical systems and contemporary philosophers like Graham Priest have advanced the view that some contradictions can be true, and advocated a paraconsistent logic to deal with them, until recent times these systems have been little understood by philosophers. This book presents a comprehensive overview on paraconsistent logical systems to change (...) this situation. The book includes almost every major author currently working in the field. The papers are on the cutting edge of the literature some of which discuss current debates and others present important new ideas. The editors have avoided papers about technical details of paraconsistent logic, but instead concentrated upon works that discuss more 'big picture' ideas. Different treatments of paradoxes takes centre stage in many of the papers, but also there are several papers on how to interpret paraconistent logic and some on how it can be applied to philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and metaphysics. (shrink)

The first full-scale commentary on the Cratylus, one of Plato's most difficult and intriguing dialogues.

Henri de Lubac is not a philosopher, but has some well -thought out philosophical beliefs, many of which derived from Blondel.

Conoscere non riguarda solo l'intelligenza, ma anche l'affettività e un insieme di fattori extra-teoretici (=non meramente conoscitivi o intellettuali). In particolare una certezza esistenzialmente forte sui problemi filosofici decisivi non può essere raggiunta senza un coinvolgimento della libertà, in una “esperienza integrale”.

We propose a view of consciousness as a sort of metaphoric “funnel” transforming a fraction of the parallel processes taking place continually in our central nervous system into something intrinsically serial and sequential. A conscious state is the result of this temporary serialization of a set of parallel mental processes. Before this event, everything is parallel, but also after it, everything returns parallel. As a consequence, the simile we propose is that of a “clepsydra” or sandglass. A conscious state coincides (...) with its bottleneck. Here, we explore possible consequences of the adoption of this model. (shrink)

This paper clarifies why and how Wittgenstein’s animating idea of social practices should be considered as expressing a fundamental pragmatist commitment.To this end, I do not take the retrospective perspective, which traces “pragmatism” back to the criteria of use fixed by the inventor of the word, C. S. Peirce, but rather replace Wittgenstein in the context of contemporary debates. I focus in particular on R. Brandom’s attempt to understand Wittgenstein’s second philosophy as belonging to an intellectual tradition from which his (...) own rationalist pragmatism derives. A confrontation follows between Brandom and Wittgenstein, whose aim is to highlight the specific tactics of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism as a refusal of Brandom’s idealist rationalism. First, I present and defend R. Brandom’s reading of Wittgenstein’s argument on rule-following as a decisive clarification of the general idea of social practices. Second, I criticize Brandom’s narrow Kantian framework, explaining why it prevents us from understanding Wittgenstein’s conception of rules and concepts, and, therefore, of the very normativity of concepts. In light of the distinction between two kinds of conceptual norms, empirical and grammatical, I finally show, through a reading of On certainty, that the function assigned by Wittgenstein to social practices is to account for the conditions of possibility of conceptual contentfullness as expressed in rational activity. (shrink)

An interpretation of Wittgenstein’s much criticized remarks on Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem is provided in the light of paraconsistent arithmetic: in taking Gödel’s proof as a paradoxical derivation, Wittgenstein was drawing the consequences of his deliberate rejection of the standard distinction between theory and metatheory. The reasoning behind the proof of the truth of the Gödel sentence is then performed within the formal system itself, which turns out to be inconsistent. It is shown that the features of paraconsistent arithmetics match (...) with some intuitions underlying Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, such as its strict finitism and the insistence on the decidability of any mathematical question. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is twofold. First, we are interested in assessing the validity of one version of Kim’s argument against genuine higher level causation. Second, we discuss Wilson’s proposal to consider a weaker notion of emergence as genuinely metaphysical and compatible with Non-Reductive Physicalism. Our conclusion is that both proposals fail: the first in preempting genuine (strong) emergent causation, whereas the second in ensuring a genuinely metaphysical status to weak emergence. After all, Wilson’s proposal strongly depends on (...) the success of Kim’s, not only because it takes it as valid but, also, because in pursuing its own weaker model it shares the presuppositions that led Kim’s to failure. At the end of the day, Wilson’s conception of genuine weak emergence either breaks causal closure or is merely stipulative, namely confined at the descriptive level. (shrink)

Sometimes mereologists have problems with counting. We often don't want to count the parts of maximally connected objects as full-fledged objects themselves, and we don't want to count discontinuous objects as parts of further, full-fledged objects. But whatever one takes "full-fledged object" to mean, the axioms and theorems of classical, extensional mereology commit us to the existence both of parts and of wholes – all on a par, included in the domain of quantification – and this makes mereology look counterintuitive (...) to various philosophers. In recent years, a proposal has been advanced to solve the tension between mereology and familiar ways of counting objects, under the label of Minimalist View . The Minimalist View may be summarized in the slogan: "Count x as an object iff it does not overlap with any y you have already counted as an object". The motto seems prima facie very promising but, we shall argue, when one looks at it more closely, it is not. On the contrary, the Minimalist View involves an ambiguity that can be solved in quite different directions. We argue that one resolution of the ambiguity makes it incompatible with mereology. This way, the Minimalist View can lend no support to mereology at all. We suggest that the Minimalist View can become compatible with mereology once its ambiguity is solved by interpreting it in what we call an epistemic or conceptual fashion: whereas mereology has full metaphysical import, the Minimalist View may account for our ways of selecting "conceptually salient" entities. But even once it is so disambiguated, it is doubtful that the Minimalist View can help to make mereology more palatable, for it cannot make it any more compatible with commonsensical ways of counting objects. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between brain and language in terms of coevolution. Nowadays, the thesis of coevolution is defended by the exponents of the neoculturalist paradigm to claim that language is the product of cultural evolution. In our opinion, this claim is misleading. From our point of view, in fact, we can refer to the relationship between brain and language in terms of coevolution only if we are prepared to maintain that language is (...) the product of natural selection. In our opinion, in other words, the coevolution thesis involves the idea of language as biological adaptation. (shrink)

The article proposes a re-examination of the role and position of the so-called “Disney villains” within the narrative framework of animated films and popular culture as a whole. In the first part, the historical evolution in the representation of these villains will be explored according to the practice of “queer coding,” which involves attributing stereotypically queer traits to them without explicitly stating their gender and sexual identity. It will be observed how their non-conforming gender and sexuality, used to mark their (...) moral deviance, challenge and defy dominant gender and narrative norms. It is precisely through their queer performance and camp aesthetic that “evil stepmothers,” “sissy-villains,” and “drag-queen-like” sea witches can emancipate themselves from their traditional roles as antagonists (narrative level) and as social outcasts (discursive level) to seize the spotlight through the screen (manifest surface). This study combines tools of Greimasian text analysis, including the canonical narrative schema and the generative trajectory of meaning, with Lotman’s theory and notion of “semiosphere,” to investigate the centrality and criticality of these “quillains” within the heteronormative narrative framework and the broader cultural context. To capture (or being captured by) the queer aspect of these characters and their stories, the invitation is to look at their visage not as a coded symbol of an underlying identity and truth, but as an image that exceeds any defined meaning thanks to its iconic power. (shrink)

The present paper argues that substantialist metaphysics are in tension with the physicalist idea that the universe is causally closed. The argument is a rather specific one and proceeds through three steps. The first step consists in arguing that monistic substance metaphysics allow for the existence of entities that cannot belong to the intended first order domain. This result sensitively depends on the nature of substances as invariant entities. The second step concludes that, if further domains are to be admitted, (...) then they are inhabited by “higher” or (systematically) “non-standard” entities and that, in both cases if not made somehow innocuous, such entities may take part on the metaphysical construction of the world through their own distinctive properties and causal powers. However, this latter claim is in contradiction with causal closure. But closure is the principle that mainly characterizes physicalist approaches in metaphysics and as such physicalist metaphysics cannot get rid of it. Who attempted making exotic properties and causal powers innocuous usually appealed to the Supervenience Argument. Unfortunately, as the third step proves, this argument is invalid. Finally, the paper looks forward and toward alternative models for physicalist metaphysics, like process-based models. (shrink)

v. 1. La posizione gnoseologica della scienza.

In this paper we propose a narrative hypothesis on the nature of language and a proto-discursive hypothesis on the origin of our communicative abilities. Our proposal is based on two assumptions. The first assumption, concerning the properties of language, is tied to the idea that global discourse coherence governs the origin of our communicative abilities as well the functioning of these abilities. The second assumption, concerning processing devices, is connected to the idea that the systems of spatial and temporal navigation (...) are implicated in discourse coherence processing. Analysis of the relationship between these two assumptions allows us to integrate the model of language based on clues proposed by Sperber and Wilson with Relevance Theory with the discursive foundation of human communication. In this respect, our proposal can be considered as a tentative extension of Relevance Theory. (shrink)

We investigate some properties of two varieties of algebras arising from quantum computation - quasi-MV algebras and $\sqrt{^{\prime }}$ quasi-MV algebras - first introduced in \cite{Ledda et al. 2006}, \cite{Giuntini et al. 200+} and tightly connected with fuzzy logic. We establish the finite model property and the congruence extension property for both varieties; we characterize the quasi-MV reducts and subreducts of $\sqrt{^{\prime }}$ quasi-MV algebras; we give a representation of semisimple $\sqrt{^{\prime }}$ quasi-MV algebras in terms of algebras of functions; (...) finally, we describe the structure of free algebras with one generator in both varieties. (shrink)