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)

Este artigo apresenta resultados de uma pesquisa sobre o Colégio Sagrado Coração de Jesus, localizado no Município de Bento Gonçalves/ RS, uma instituição educativa particular e católica. Como recorte temporal, contempla o período de 1956, data da criação do colégio, até 1972, ano em que a instituição apresentou interessantes mudanças em seu processo educativo, em virtude dos reflexos da Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação 5.692/1971. Esta investigação apresenta uma análise sobre a prática do ensino misto presente na cultura (...) escolar, a qual foi vivenciada pelos sujeitos no interior da escola e representada pelos seus modos de ser, de estar, de agir e de se relacionar em determinados tempo e espaço. Como metodologia, utilizamos fotografias e a História Oral, tendo como sujeitos da investigação os seguintes entrevistados: dois ex-alunos, uma ex-professora e dois moradores do Bairro Cidade Alta, região em que o colégio se constituiu dentro do município. Pelas análises produzidas a partir das fontes investigadas, concluímos que, embora o discurso para a comunidade estivesse voltado para uma educação compartilhada entre meninos e meninas, essa prática apresentou algumas divergências no interior da escola, como a própria separação dos gêneros em atividades do cotidiano escolar. As estratégias identificadas no espaço escolar, para unir ou separar meninos e meninas, apontam para uma reflexão em torno da prática do ensino misto no colégio e promovem diferentes interpretações para os sujeitos que participaram do processo de constituição dessa instituição educativa, bem como vivenciaram esses primeiros anos do ensino misto nesse colégio. Palavras-chave: Instituição educativa. Prática escolar. Cultura escolar. (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)

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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

A lot of attention has recently been devoted to the notion of Trustworthy AI (TAI). However, the very applicability of the notions of trust and trustworthiness to AI systems has been called into question. A purely epistemic account of trust can hardly ground the distinction between trustworthy and merely reliable AI, while it has been argued that insisting on the importance of the trustee’s motivations and goodwill makes the notion of TAI a categorical error. After providing an overview of the (...) debate, we contend that the prevailing views on trust and AI fail to account for the ethically relevant and value-laden aspects of the design and use of AI systems, and we propose an understanding of the notion of TAI that explicitly aims at capturing these aspects. The problems involved in applying trust and trustworthiness to AI systems are overcome by keeping apart trust in AI systems and interpersonal trust. These notions share a conceptual core but should be treated as distinct ones. (shrink)

This paper explores mutable futurism, the view according to which the future can literally change—that is, it can happen that a future time t changes from containing an event E to lacking it. Mutable futurism has received little attention so far, and the details and implications of the view are underexplored in the literature. For instance, it currently lacks a precise metaphysical model and a formal semantics. Although we do not endorse mutable futurism, our goal here is to strengthen the (...) case for mutable futurism and help establish it as a worthy contender in the debate on the philosophy of time. To attain this goal, we try to make mutable futurism, along with its metaphysical and inferential commitments, as clear as possible, by providing it with a coherent metaphysical model and a plausible semantics, and we show that it can be backed by theoretical reasons. (shrink)

We propose here a new symplectic quantization scheme, where quantum fluctuations of a scalar field theory stem from two main assumptions: relativistic invariance and equiprobability of the field configurations with identical value of the action. In this approach the fictitious time of stochastic quantization becomes a genuine additional time variable, with respect to the coordinate time of relativity. Thisintrinsic timeis associated to a symplectic evolution in the action space, which allows one to investigate not only asymptotic, i.e. equilibrium, properties of (...) the theory, but also its non-equilibrium transient evolution. In this paper, which is the first one in a series of two, we introduce a formalism which will be applied to general relativity in its companion work (Gradenigo, Symplectic quantization II: dynamics of space-time quantum fluctuations and the cosmological constant, 2021). (shrink)

We focus on Timothy Williamson’s recent attack on the epistemological significance of the a priori–a posteriori distinction, and offer an explanation of why, fundamentally, it does not succeed. We begin by setting out Williamson’s core argument, and some of the background to it and move to consider two lines of conciliatory response to it—conciliatory in that neither questions the central analogy on which Williamson's argument depends. We claim, setting aside a methodological challenge to which Williamson owes an answer, that no (...) satisfactory such reconciliation is in prospect. Rather, as we then argue, —and it is on this that we base our overall negative assessment of his argument—Williamson’s core analogy is flawed by an oversight. We conclude with some brief reflections on Williamson’s ideas about the imagination as a source of knowledge. Our principal conclusion is only that Williamson’s argument fails to perform as advertised. A constructive case for confidence, to the contrary, that the intuitive contrast between a priori and a posteriori reflects something of fundamental epistemological significance is prefigured in our final section, but will not be elaborated here. (shrink)

This paper addresses a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, i.e. superdeterminism. In short, superdeterminism i) takes the world to be fundamentally deterministic, ii) postulates hidden variables, and iii) contra Bell, saves locality at the cost of violating the principle of statistical independence. Superdeterminism currently enjoys little support in the physics and philosophy communities. Many take it to posit the ubiquitous occurrence of hard-to-digest conspiratorial and coincidental events; others object that violating the principle of statistical independence implies the death of the (...) scientific methodology. In this paper, we offer a defense to these and other objections. To counter the conspiracy objection, we draw upon the philosophical literature on time travel, and conclude that the picture of the world offered by the superdeterminist does not need to be particularly surprising or conspiratorial. We then move on to other recent objections, in particular those that focus on the methodology of science and the nature of the physical laws compatible with superdeterminism. A key ingredient of our arguments is that the principle of statistical independence may be violated in theory, but valid for practical purposes. Our overarching goal is to offer a defense of superdeterminism with respect to its main objections, so that it can earn its keep as a legitimate contender among the possible interpretations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Taking the inspiration from some points made by Scott Sturgeon and Albert Casullo, I articulate a view according to which an important difference between undermining and overriding defeaters is that the former require the subject to engage in some higher-order epistemic thinking, while the latter don’t. With the help of some examples, I argue that underminers push the cognizer to reflect on the way she formed a belief by challenging the epistemic worthiness of either the source of justification or the (...) specific justificatory process. By contrast, overriders needn’t pose any such challenge. I also consider some problems for the proposed view, and I put forward some possible solutions. Finally, I provide some details on how undermining defeat works in different cases. (shrink)

Making a prediction is essentially expressing a belief about the future. It is therefore natural to interpret later predictions as revisions of earlier ones and to investigate the notion of belief revision in this context. We study, both semantically and syntactically, the following principle of minimum revision of prediction: “as long as there are no surprises, that is, as long as what actually occurs had been predicted to occur, then everything which was predicted in the past, if still possible, should (...) continue to be predicted, and no new predictions should be added.”. (shrink)

The main purpose of this exploratory analysis is to understand whether, based on evidence gathered from international best practices selected among corporations which adopt the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines in sustainability reporting (SR), stakeholders are significantly consulted and involved—as international literature would indicate—by assurance providers, during assurance processes of SR. We aim at verifying if this practice—known as stakeholder assurance—is in fact widespread in SR assurance by carrying out empirical research, through content analysis, into a sample of 161 assurance statements (...) of international corporations, in order to test characteristics of any stakeholder assurance implemented. (shrink)

This paper brings the analysis of epistemic injustices and the perspective of media philosophy into dialogue by proposing the new concept of medial epistemic injustice. After introducing the topic, the contribution confronts some metaphilosophical stances in light of the recent medial turn in order to suggest that, despite all their controversies, philosophers seem to agree that doing philosophy uniquely involves writing texts. This discussion sets the stage for the claim that institutionally sanctioned philosophy manifests a mono-genreism that only admits one (...) particular kind of written text and a mono-medialism that excludes all media other than writing. Next, the relationship between non-verbal media and philosophy is examined more closely on two levels. First, it is emphasized how academic philosophy leaves no room for corporeal thinking and visual thinking; second, it is illustrated how this may harm some individuals, using the example of deaf people and visually oriented autistic people. The conclusion proposes a provocative Gestalt-switch: What if current “angelic” philosophical knowledge were itself atypical, exhibiting the traits of an aphantasic mind? (shrink)

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".

The philosophy of language of Robert Brandom is based on a theoretical structure composed of three main elements: the normative analysis of linguistic practices, the inferential characterization of conceptual contents and the expressive articulation of the relations between the former two. Normative pragmatics aims to explain how linguistic practices are sufficient to confer contentful states in those who engage in them. Inferential semantics provides a theory of such pragmatic significances in terms of the inferential relations that articulate conceptual contents. Rational (...) expressivism is the thesis that concept application is essentially a process of turning something that can only be done into something that can also be said. Such a threefold structure is the core of normative inferentialism. This book is a concise, selfcontained and comprehensive presentation of this philosophical enterprise. It guides the reader through the analysis of Brandom’s imposing theoretical apparatus, the discovery of the roots of his approach in American pragmatism and German idealism, till the exploration of some of its most interesting and recent outcomes in pragmatics and semantics. It is a valuable resource for both those who approach Brandom’s work for the first time and those who are interested in the potential of normative inferentialism. (shrink)

This essay gives an account of epistemic deference for agents with imprecise credences. I look at the two main imprecise deference principles in the literature, known as Identity Reflection and Pointwise Reflection (Moss, 2021). I show that Pointwise Reflection is strictly weaker than Identity Reflection, and argue that, if you are certain you will update by conditionalisation, you should defer to your future self according to Identity Reflection. Then I give a more general justification for Pointwise and Identity Reflection from (...) the assumption that you defer to someone whenever you consider their doxastic state to be better than yours, in the sense of leading to better decision-making. (shrink)

Nowadays, physicalism is arguably the received view on the nature of mental states. Among the arguments that have been provided in its favour, the inductive one seems to play a pivotal role in the debate. Leveraging the past success of materialistic science, the physicalist argues that a materialistic account of consciousness will eventually be provided, hence that physicalism is true. This article aims at evaluating whether this strategy can provide support for physicalism. According to the standard objection raised against the (...) inductive line of reasoning, the argument would beg the question by assuming some sort of metaphysical uniformity between consciousness and the rest of the natural domain. Here, I concede that there is a way to avoid this criticism. However, I argue that the argument still fails to support physicalism due to a structural problem of justification transmission. (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)

The essay proposes a notion of “icon” understood, according to the paradigm born of the Second Council of Nicaea, as a visible image of the invisible qua invisible. In this light, the distinctive feature of the icon-image is its ability to manifest the paradoxical identity-difference relationship that links visible and invisible, and, consequently, representable and unrepresentable, immanence and transcendence, eternity and time. By offering itself as the privileged place for the presentation of an absence and of a “withdrawal”, the icon (...) is distinguished in the first place by its apophatic and kenotic character. In this sense, the salient trait of the icon is its constitutive disquiet: it is founded on the “relational economy” of the image, which implies the need of an incessant articulation of the relation between visible and invisible. We can thus see in the icon the paradigm itself of “great art”: indeed, like the icon, great art is always primarily characterised by its disquiet, that is its ability to make transcendence appear in immanence, the Other of the visible appear in the visible. (shrink)

The anti-Catullan and anti-elegiac perspective characterizing Horace's erotic Odes builds on elements of the biography of his persona found in his juvenile collections, the Satires and the Epodes, where the construction of Horace's poetic autobiography as a lover brings together matters of didactics, ethics and literary criticism.

This article argues that Plotinus wrote Ennead VI 8 (39) to direct his students to see that our freedom is founded on the One, a goal pursued by means of a polemic against Alexander of Aphrodisias’ De fato and De anima. The first part aims to establish that the “rash discourse” introduced in chapter 7 is an interpretation of De fato’s position on the freedom of the gods. Plotinus reads his opponent’s thesis by transferring to the level of the One (...) a tripartite structure made up of nature, reason, and chance, a structure that Alexander used to explain events on the level of Becoming. The second part proposes to see the treatise as a dialectical process. Plotinus starts his inquiry at the levels of soul and Intellect. He later arrives at the discourse about the One, in which he tries to progressively overcome the limits of language by analyzing alternative positions from the viewpoint of discourse, words, and finally thought. In doing this, he insists on his reversal of Alexander’s theses: the One is simple and therefore not constrained by its nature; it is free thanks to a will incapable of choosing between the contraries and directed metaphorically toward itself. (shrink)

It is almost unanimously acknowledged that the formation of Hegel’s philosophy was largely determined by the appropriation and further development of some fundamental achievements of Kant’s transcendental idealism - first of all his polemic against the “old metaphysics” or, as Hegel also said, the “empty metaphysics of the understanding”. The most decisive assumption of this metaphysics consisted, indeed, in the belief that the totality of our universe could be exhaustively resolved into a plurality of isolated entities, devoid of any “internal,” (...) essential, mutual relations. Each entity was, as a consequence, considered to be only abstractly self-identical and so different from any other. In such a perspective, the absolute, the infinite, the divine, could not but be conceived as being substantially alien to the human mind’s innermost life and essence, as a merely motionless object, absolutely transcendent to the self-creative process in which our rational subjectivity essentially consists. Kant’s critique - especially by virtue of his conception of knowledge as an “a priori synthesis” of intuition and category, of experience and concept, which finds the ultimate condition of its possibility not in its conformity to a presupposed objectivity, but precisely in the original unity of self-consciousness, the “I-think-in general” - has certainly by now rendered unsustainable the strict dualism typical of such a metaphysics, and in particular its pretension of rationally “demonstrating” the existence and the most general properties of the alleged merely transcendent absolute. Whereas Kant’s idealism seems nevertheless to limit itself to the statement and foundation of this simply critical and negative outcome of the transcendental analysis of our knowledge, the ultimate aim of Hegel’s whole philosophy consists rather in the attempt explicitly and systematically to develop a conception of the universe, according to which the universe, far from dividing into a plurality of absolutely different and exclusive entities, instead constitutes itself as a unique, absolute, organic totality, in which any immediate difference and opposition tends to merge, to “reconcile” itself in a superior and deeper “dialectical” unity, which is both divine and human, infinite and finite, identical and different, ideal and real, eternal and in a process of becoming, transcendent and immanent. Every one of its determinate aspects and grades of development, every element into which it differentiates itself, thus turns out to be intimately immanent in, and connected with, every other, and finally in and with the absolute totality itself. Totum in toto et in qualibet parte. “Outside” of such unique, concrete totality, there appear to be but empty, irrational, unreal abstractions: first of all the A = A of formal logic and the absolutely transcendent God of the “old metaphysics.”. (shrink)