In recent years, the social world is quickly gaining the focus of attention within the philosophical debates. The work of authors such as John Searle, Barry Smith, Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, to name just a few, is becoming increasingly important within the philosophical community. Hence, topics in social ontology dealing with the nature of institutions, collective actions, collective self/personhood, collective intentionality, shared goals and commitments, etc. are increasingly addressed by contemporary philosophical investigations. The discussion on these topics is today sprawling (...) of mainstream ambitious views, contributing to a complete understanding of the proper structures and dynamics of the social world. The present collection of essays aims at exploring side-issues in social ontology, trying somehow to go beyond mainstream topics. Another important aim of this book is connecting the typical discussions of social ontology to the philosophical tradition, and to debates in the social sciences and in anthropology. -/- The collection of essays does not offer a perspective on the social world which is shared among the authors, and it is rather pluralistic in nature: our shared belief is that pluralism and openness, especially in explorative attempts, are methodologically fit to promote dialogue and interaction between different ideas, strategies, and perspectives. According to this spirit, the book comprises a number of articles and critical notes that target different problems, traditions, and methodologies. (shrink)

Social facts require an ontological foundation because they are constitutive in human practices. Can a theory of the documentation supply us with a definitive foundation of the social practices disregarding the cognitive aspects of the cooperation? The article claims that social ontology cannot lie only on external aspects of the sociality like documents because it has also to investigate its mental and linguistic aspects.

This book strives to deal with Hegel's thought by means of a thorough, unitarian and logical approach and to enforce the idea that philosophy is rigorous as far as it is able to consistently tackle the question of self-consciousness. It results that the logic underlying every philosophical interest traces back to the self-referring investigation about life in the mode of self-consciousness, by which social practices and their history can be grasped. Once we assess that self-consciousness is life through the concept, (...) we would be able to realize the logical structure underlying its historical outcomes. (shrink)

This paper attends to treat the question about the “following a rule” in the philosophy of the second Wittgenstein and to connect it with the relation between pragmatics and semantic. In the philosophical Investigations this argument represents the culmination of the attempt to elucidate the concepts of use, meaning and understanding, which are introduced in the previous paragraphs. I mean to show that the rule, designed like a sign which indicates how take an action, is an inscrutable fact if we (...) don’t insert it in a precise context of human practices and behaviour. This inscrutability of the rule and of the sign raises an apparent contradiction: the rules make possible our lived but they have not sense if considered alone. Such dependence of the rules on the practices is mutual because it’s impossible thinking a practice without a rule. The connection rule-practice, that is treated similarly as the relation meaning-use, permit us to introduce the follow arguments my paper will consider: holism of the rule and of the meanings, the question about the understanding and the recognizing of rules and meanings, finally the question about the agreement in the actions. (shrink)