El propósito de este trabajo es el esclarecimiento de algunas de las principales tesis nihilistas, algunas de las cuales son sometidas a una breve crítica, y se centra en el nihilismo especulativo, por lo que hace solo unas pocas referencias al nihilismo práctico. Las tesis nihilistas que se analizan son las siguientes: “no hay nada”; “no hay Dios”; “no hay nada que no cambie, no hay sustancia, todo fluye”; “el ser no tiene sentido-orden, ni dirección, ni propósito”; “el ser de (...) las cosas no tiene ningún valor intrínseco”; “el ser (en su totalidad o en parte) no es bueno: es nocivo y/o malo y debe (en su totalidad o en parte) suicidarse o morir”; “el ser no es cognoscible, no hay verdad”. Por último, este trabajo menciona dos vías para dialogar con los nihilistas. (shrink)

A partire dalla metà del Novecento, dopo una modernità dominata da prospettive di stampo deontologistico o utilitaristico, la filosofia pratica contemporanea ha visto il sorgere di una ripresa di interesse per un’etica “in prima persona”, in grado di offrire una prospettiva integrale sul soggetto e centrata sullo sviluppo del suo carattere e della sua personalità; in breve, si è assistito a un nuovo potente ingresso in scena dell’idea del bene, e, con essa, della virtù quale via maestra per conseguire il (...) fine adeguato della vita umana. Il volume si propone di rendere conto – anche in correlazione al ruolo delle emozioni, ma non solo – del percorso filosofico della virtù: dall’indagine delle sue fonti “classiche”, all’inizio del suo declino nella modernità, al risorgere della sua vitalità negli ultimi decenni nelle diverse aree linguistico-culturali, tenendo anche conto delle differenti discipline con cui si è interfacciata. Esso non pretende di esaurire i percorsi e le suggestioni che una tematica così vasta presenta, né di coprirne tutta la storia; piuttosto, vuole rappresentare uno stimolo alla ricerca, ponendo in connessione tagli disciplinari e metodologici differenti per offrire una riflessione a tutto campo, che metta in dialogo studiosi provenienti da ambiti diversi ed apra nuove prospettive.Saggi di: Francesco Camera, Angelo Campodonico, Elisabetta Cattanei, Michel Croce, Elisa Cuttini, Marco Damonte, Elisa Grimi, Simona Langella, Alberto Masala, Alma Massaro, Letterio Mauro, Giacomo Samek Lodovici, Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, Paolo Vignola, Lodovica Maria Zanet, Matteo Zoppi. (shrink)

We investigate two formalizations of Optimality Theory, a successful paradigm in linguistics.We first give an order-theoretic counterpart for the data and processinvolved in candidate evaluation.Basically, we represent each constraint as a function that assigns every candidate a degree of violation.As for the second formalization, we define (after Samek-Lodovici and Prince) constraints as operations that select the best candidates out of a set of candidates.We prove that these two formalizations are equivalent (accordingly, there is no loss of generality with (...) using violation marks and dispensing with them is only apparent).Importantly, we show that the second formalization is equivalent with a class of operations over sets of formulas in a given logical language.As a result, we prove that Optimality Theory can be characterized by certain cumulative logics.So, applying Optimality Theory is shown to be reasoning by the rules of cumulative logics. (shrink)

In Optimality Theory, recent work has been exploring the idea that the order of constituents in syntax is determined by alignment constraints, developed within the theory of Generalized Alignment ). Costa and Samek-Lodovici present general overviews, and both have specifically argued that OT analyses are superior to proposals expressed in terms of the parameterized “directionality” of movement or ordering. In Korean, the ordering options for major clausal constituents have been explored in Choi and Lee, who discussed the ordering (...) of a verb’s arguments as an interaction between constraints on canonical ordering and constraints on information structure. In this paper, I will discuss extending the ideas of ordering as alignment into the core clausal syntax, concentrating on the non-phrasal clausal elements.. (shrink)

One important distinction in the debate over the nature of epistemic justification is the one between propositional and doxastic justification. Roughly, while doxastic justification is a property of beliefs, propositional justification is a property of propositions. On a rather common view, which accounts for doxastic justification in terms of propositional justification plus the so-called ‘basing relation’, propositional justification is seen as the prior notion, and doxastic justification is explained in terms of it. According to the opposing view, the direction of (...) explanation needs to be reversed, and doxastic justification should be seen as primary. I distinguish between two notions of priority, and I argue that they give different verdicts with respect to the issue of which notion of justification comes first. The lesson may be taken to be that propositional and doxastic justification are in a relation of intertwinement. (shrink)

When we witness a great actor, musician, or sportsperson performing, we share something of their experience. Only recently has it become clear just how this sharing of experience is realised within the human brain. 'Mirrors in the brain' provides an accessible overview of mirror neurons, written by the man who first discovered them.

My aim in this article is threefold: First, I wish to challenge the view put forward by A. Flew and H. L. A. Hart which has won widespread recognition, namely, that the concept of punishment entails a legal or quasi-legal system of punishment. In my view all that is necessary for a case of punishment to occur is that a person inflicts deliberately and not primarily for the sake of any beneficial consequences which may flow from his action, anything likely (...) to cause discomfort to a victim who is capable of experiencing it, provided that the person inflicting the discomfort would claim, if asked to give a reason for his action, that he is inflicting it because of something for which he holds the victim accountable. If I am right it follows that punishment is not necessarily retributive, and that utilitarian ‘punishment’ like reformative and compensatory ‘punishment’ is not true punishment, since the discomfort inflicted in these cases is merely ancillary to another end. Secondly, I hope to show that Hart does not succeed in discrediting the retributive theory, and that his treatment of punishment, though functional in aim, perpetuates the confusion between the meaning of punishment and its justification. Thirdly, I shall contend that retribution is not a proper aim of a legal system, whatever place it may actually have or ought to have in our moral code. Looking to the future, I shall venture to predict that the legal institution of punishment will sooner or later give way to a system designed to reduce crime and to rehabilitate offenders. Such a system will be adjusted to the needs of the community and of individual offenders, and will not involve the infliction of discomfort as an end. Hence, it would be wrong to call it a system of punishment. (shrink)

While growing empirical evidence suggests a continuity between human and non-human psychology, many philosophers still think that only humans can act and form beliefs rationally. In this paper, we challenge this claim. We first clarify the notion of rationality. We then focus on the rationality of beliefs and argue that, in the relevant sense, humans are not the only rational animals. We do so by first distinguishing between unreflective and reflective responsiveness to epistemic reasons in belief formation and revision. We (...) argue that unreflective responsiveness is clearly within the reach of many animals. We then defend that a key demonstration of reflective responsiveness would be the ability to respond to undermining defeaters. We end by presenting some empirical evidence that suggests that some animal species are capable of processing these defeaters, which would entail that even by the strictest standards, humans are not the only rational animals. (shrink)

Ernst Cassirer’s epistemological trilogy – Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910), Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie (1921) and Determinismus und Indeterminismus (1937) – is well known to Western scholars, some of whom recently devoted a number of in-depth and interesting studies to Cassirer’s epistemology. Nonetheless, they overlooked aspects of Cassirer’s concept of idealisation and his model of science as found in his last epistemological work: Determinismus und Indeterminismus. In this essay I will consider these two almost disregarded aspects of Cassirer’s epistemology in order to (...) provide a better understanding of his idea of science. (shrink)

We establish a correspondence between the rationalizability of choice studied in the revealed preference literature and the notion of minimal belief revision captured by the AGM postulates. A choice frame consists of a set of alternatives , a collection E of subsets of (representing possible choice sets) and a function f : E ! 2 (representing choices made). A choice frame is rationalizable if there exists a total pre-order R on..

Famously, Kripke has argued that the central portion of the Philosophical Investigations describes both a skeptical paradox and its skeptical solution. Solving the paradox involves the element of the community, which determines correctness conditions for rule-following behavior. What do such conditions precisely consist of? Is it accurate to say that there is no fact to the matter of rule following? How are the correctness conditions sustained in the community? My answers to these questions revolve around the idea that a rule (...) is followed insofar as a convention is in place. In particular, I consider the game-theoretic definition of convention offered by David Lewis and I show that it illuminates essential aspects of the communitarian understanding of rule-following. Make the following experiment: say “It’s cold here” and mean “It’s warm here”. Can you do it?Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953, §510.I can’t say “it’s cold here” and mean “it’s warm here”—at least, not without a little help from my friends.David Lewis, Convention. (shrink)

The present study investigates shared representations of syntactic knowledge in music and action. We examined whether expectancy violations in musical harmonic sequences are also perceived as violations of the movement sequences necessary to produce them. Pianists imitated silent videos showing one hand playing chord sequences on a muted keyboard. Results indicate that, despite the absence of auditory feedback, imitation of a chord is fastest when it is congruent with the preceding harmonic context. This suggests that the harmonic rules implied by (...) observed actions induce expectations that influence action execution. As evidence that these predictions are derived at a high representational level, imitation was more accurate for harmonically incongruent chords than for congruent chords executed with unconventional fingering. The magnitude of the effects of context and goal prioritization increased with musical training. Thus, musical training may lead to a domain-general representation of musical grammar, i.e., to a grammar of action. (shrink)

There is a tension between Dispositionalism––the view that all metaphysical modality is grounded in actual irreducible dispositional properties––and the possibility of time travel. This is due to the fact that Dispositionalism makes it much harder to solve a potentiality-based version of the grandfather paradox. We first present a potentiality-based version of the grandfather paradox, stating that the following theses are inconsistent: 1) time travel is possible, 2) powers fully ground modality, 3) self-defeating actions are impossible, 4) time-travellers retain their intrinsic (...) powers upon time-travelling, and 5) time-travellers are ordinary agents with basic intrinsic potentialities. We then consider a number of potential solutions, and find them wanting. We argue that the metaphysical impossibility of performing a self-defeating action acts as a necessary perfect mask––while time-travel lets us “slip” the potentiality under the mask, thus generating the contradiction. We conclude considering what are the options for the dispositionalist. (shrink)

In introducing his argument - which resumes and develops the philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of globalisation advanced in his book Westward Passage (forthcoming from Verso, London-New York) - Giacomo Marramao takes the film Babel, by the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, as the point of departure for his discussion: the film depicts the globalised world as a complex space at once interdependent and differentiated in character, constituted like a mosaic, composed of a multiplicity of "asynchronic" ways and forms (...) of life which are brought together by the manifold flux of events that traverse them. This cinematographic depiction perfectly captures the disconcerting bi-logic of globalisation: the logic through which the mix of the global market and of digital technologies operating in "real time" generates an increasing diaspora of identities. The Babel of our contemporary world thereby reveals itself as a kind of planetary extension of the world of Kakania described by Robert Musil: a cacophonous compendium of proliferating and mutually untranslatable languages. In order to conceptualise, and produce a suitably fluid and dynamic account, of this new "world picture," we must not only dissolve the spurious dilemma between universalism and relativism, but move beyond the current impasse encouraged by a normative political philosophy which tends to reify "cultural identities" and "struggles for recognition" by treating these as givens rather than as problems. The philosophical approach pursued in the following discussion attempts to liberate the concept of "the universal" - despite the etymology of the word - from the logic of the reductio ad unum, and apply it instead to the realm of multiplicity and difference. Developing a double phenomenology of the increasingly homogenising phenomenon of the market on the one hand and of the internally conflicted pandemic of identitarian and communitarian approaches on the other, the author indicates a variety of universalising tendencies whose potential can only fully be evaluated in the context of a new theory and practice of translation. Marramao's proposal for a universalism of difference is predicated on the failure of the two principal models of "democratic" inclusion that have previously been attempted in the West: the republican or assimilationist model (that of a Republique founded upon what could be called a universalism of indifference) and the "strong" multiculturalism model (the so-called Londonistan model that derives from a mosaic of differences that also provides fertile ground for the growth of fundamentalist ideas). But to advance beyond the antagonistic complicity generated by this dilemma calls for a re-enchantment of the political: the only way in which we may be able to read the prognostic signs of our present. (shrink)

Among the many possible approaches to dealing with logical omniscience, I consider here awareness and impossible worlds structures. The former approach, pioneered by Fagin and Halpern, distinguishes between implicit and explicit knowledge, and avoids logical omniscience with respect to explicit knowledge. The latter, developed by Rantala and by Hintikka, allows for the existence of logically impossible worlds to which the agents are taken to have access; since such worlds need not behave consistently, the agents’ knowledge is fallible relative to logical (...) omniscience. The two approaches are known to be equally expressive in propositional systems interpreted over Kripke semantics. In this paper I show that the two approaches are equally expressive in propositional systems interpreted over Montague-Scott (neighborhood) semantics. Furthermore, I provide predicate systems of both awareness and impossible worlds structures interpreted on neighborhood semantics and prove the two systems to be equally expressive. (shrink)

This is a direct challenge to the notion of library neutrality, especially in the present context of war, revolution, and social change. This book locates library and information workers as participants and interventionists in social conflicts. The strategies for social action worldwide were chosen because of their connection to elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that relate particularly to core library values, information ethics, and global information justice. This book also encourages readers to pay attention to links (...) between library and information work and the following solidarity rights not currently incorporated into any legally-binding human rights framework. The aim is primarily at librarians, archivists, educators and students. Content consists of essential concepts presented in accessible terms (e.g., critical librarianship, information ethics, global information justice, human rights), along with a practical orientation to action on contemporary issues (e.g., intellectual freedom, intellectual property, preservation, cultural destruction, censorship, public access to government information, commercialization, academic freedom, workplace speech, international relations, anonymity, privacy, confidentiality, human security, national security policies, transborder data flow, and information poverty). (shrink)

This article reassesses the notion of personal identity over time from a Heideggerian perspective, aiming to bridge the conceptual gap between concerns for personhood and continuity. Traditional approaches, including the psychological and moral approaches to the self, often inadequately address the relationship between personhood and temporal continuity. This article establishes an understanding of personhood as social agency, contending that this perspective encompasses both conceptual dimensions central to the question of personal identity over time. Following an initial exploration of the problem (...) (§ 2), a concept of social agency rooted in Heidegger’s notion of Dasein is developed in comparison with alternative conceptions of personhood (§ 3). Subsequently, drawing on Arthur Danto’s philosophy of history, Heidegger’s perspective on personal identity over time is examined with a focus on historicity (§ 4). Lastly, this account is compared with contemporary views on personhood and identity over time (§ 5). (shrink)

Since belief revision deals with the interaction of belief and information over time, branching-time temporal logic seems a natural setting for a theory of belief change. We propose two extensions of a modal logic that, besides the next-time temporal operator, contains a belief operator and an information operator. The first logic is shown to provide an axiomatic characterization of the first six postulates of the AGM theory of belief revision, while the second, stronger, logic provides an axiomatic characterization of the (...) full set of AGM postulates. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The article _Anthropological crisis or crisis in moral __status: a philosophy of technology approach to the moral consideration of artificial intelligence_ questions the anthropology of properties commonly assumed in philosophical discussions about the relationship between humans and technologies and the attribution of moral status. By beginning to develop the possible link between the ontology of properties and the anthropological question aptly outlined by that contribution, this short commentary suggests that the adoption of a truly relational or non-proprietary approach in the (...) philosophy of technology seems at once necessary and challenging. For, on the one hand, it represents a response to the demands posed by information technologies; on the other it seems to call into question some of our deeply ingrained habits of thought. (shrink)

This paper investigates the epistemic assumptions that David Lewis makes in his account of social conventions. In particular, I focus on the assumption that the agents have common knowledge of the convention to which they are parties. While evolutionary analyses show that the common knowledge assumption is unnecessary in certain classes of games, Lewis’ original account (and, more recently, Cubitt and Sugden’s reconstruction) stresses the importance of including it in the definition of convention. I discuss arguments pro et contra to (...) argue that, although the assumption might be relevant to a descriptively adequate account of social convention, it is not required for its rational reconstruction. I then point out that Lewis’ account, properly speaking, is of common reason to believe, rather than of common knowledge, and argue that, in order to formalize aptly the distinction between reason to believe and belief, standard formal epistemic models need to be supplemented with so-called awareness structures. Finally, I stress that the notion of knowledge implicit in Lewis’ text involves interesting elements that cannot be captured in the standard propositional formalizations, but need the full expressive force of quantified epistemic logic. (shrink)

The fictional worlds of science fiction can stimulate philosophical speculation towards socio-technical scenarios and trends that are extrapolated from our physical reality. This widely accepted observation highlights but one of the ways to pursue philosophy with the aid of fiction and science fiction in particular. In this paper, we argue that fiction can in itself constitute a philosophical, academic work and need not merely represent the subject about which such work speculates. This idea questions the currently predominant, institutional paradigm which (...) identifies philosophical works with written texts and specifically with a single kind of text: the paper-format (§1). To suggest an alternative way of doing philosophy, we analyse the structure and content of the recent, experimental science fiction book, The Clouds, and propose that its hybrid textuality – which leverages at once fiction, theory, and meta-commentary – offers a possible corrective to the cognitive closure and rigidity of expression encouraged by the institutionally accepted approach to philosophical work (§ 2). (shrink)

Il seguente contributo presenta una ricognizione sulla teoria della postegemonia e di quella parte al suo interno che può essere raggruppata nella definizione di fondazionale. Questa area di studi si definisce a partire dal rifiuto della relazione tra subalternità ed egemonia, dichiarando la fine della seconda. La particolarità della postegemonia si trova nella radice di questa idea, derivata dall’intreccio tra l’idea di subalternità dei Subaltern Studies e la teoria dell’egemonia sviluppata da Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe. Dal punto di vista (...) degli studi gramsciani verranno analizzate le due concezioni chiave di subalternità ed egemonia, in particolare come sono state elaborate nelle due correnti menzionate formando le basi della postegemonia. Successivamente sarà analizzata la stessa postegemonia nelle sue due principali ramificazioni, una legata all’infrapolitica e l’altra alla moltitudine. (shrink)

We propose a modal logic based on three operators, representing intial beliefs, information and revised beliefs. Three simple axioms are used to provide a sound and complete axiomatization of the qualitative part of Bayes’ rule. Some theorems of this logic are derived concerning the interaction between current beliefs and future beliefs. Information flows and iterated revision are also discussed.

In this book Giacomo Marramao focuses on the work of two great Central European writers, Elias Canetti and Herta Müller, each of whom, in different periods and contexts, offered a philosophical genealogy of forms of domination and a radical diagnosis of power, command and law. This book explores the issue of power from a philosophical literary perspective. It tackles the linguistic and literary relations between the notions of "power" and "potential".