Ce livre est né de la donation en 1994 aux Archives nationales italiennes (section de la ville d'Orvieto) du fonds photographique d'Elisa Lombardi, « commandante » de l'« Académie féminine nationale d'éducation physique » fondée en 1932 à Orvieto par le régime fasciste. L'Académie formait en trois ans au métier d'enseignante en éducation physique des jeunes filles ayant terminé leurs études secondaires, munies d'un certificat de bonne santé (les lunettes étaient interdites, les trop ma...

On multiple occasions, Theodor W. Adorno turned to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a resource for the critical anatomy of a capitalist society in which laissez-faire liberalism was being overtaken by an authoritarian coordination of the political and the economic. This article revisits Spengler’s reactionary prophecies about late capitalist civilization in light of Adorno’s arguments. It explores a dimension of Spengler’s thought insufficiently addressed in Adorno’s writings and resonant with our present moment, namely the claim that an (...) emergent “Caesarism” would be helmed by figures like Cecil Rhodes, entrepreneurial Übermenschen spawned by racial imperialism. (shrink)

This book provides both a historical analysis of the philosophical problem of individuation, and a new trajectory in its treatment. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as C.S. Peirce and the lesser-known Gilbert Simondon, Alberto Toscano takes the problem of individuation, as reconfigured by Kant and Nietzsche, into the realm of modernity, providing a unique and vibrant contribution to contemporary debates in European philosophy.

Most theorisations of fascism, Marxist and otherwise, have taken for granted its idolatry of the state and phobia of freedom. This analytical common sense has also inhibited the identification of continuities with contemporary movements of the far Right, with their libertarian and anti-statist affectations, not to mention their embeddedness in neoliberal policies and subjectivities. Drawing on a range of diverse sources – from Johann Chapoutot’s histories of Nazi intellectuals to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theorisation of the anti-state state, and from Marcuse’s (...) explorations of fascist competitive individualism to debates on neoliberal authoritarianism – this essay sketches the counter-intuitive but disturbingly timely image of a fascism enamoured of freedom and at odds with the state. (shrink)

Though we agree with their argument that language is shaped by domain-general learning processes, Christiansen & Chater (C&C) neglect to detail how the development of these processes shapes language change. We discuss a number of examples that show how developmental processes at multiple levels and timescales are critical to understanding the origin of domain-general mechanisms that shape language evolution.

On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany calling for an end to class rule by the bourgeoisie. Massive demonstrations followed and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January—only to be crushed by police and anticommunist paramilitary troops. Several leaders of the League were killed and the revolt was quashed. Through a detailed reconstruction of the events of that bloody winter, historian and critic Furio Jesi recasts our understanding of a (...) foundational political difference—revolt or revolution? Drawing on a deep reserve of literary sources like Brecht, Eliade, Dostoyevsky, and Mann, Jesi outlines a uniquely incisive phenomenology of revolt that distinguishes between the purposeful historical temporality of revolution and the suspension of time that marks a revolt. And with the addition of an essay on the politics of time and revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, a founding leader of the Spartakus League, this volume becomes a crucial text at the intersection of history and philosophy. (shrink)

Columbia University Press's multivolume _Prison Notebooks_ is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, _Quaderni del Carcere_, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters. This set includes notebooks 1 through (...) 8 with all attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 125-136, September 2011.

Automating Humanity is the shocking and eye-opening new manifesto from international award-winning designer Joe Toscano that unravels and lays bare the power agendas of the world's greatest tech titans in plain language, and delivers a fair warning to policymakers, civilians, and industry professionals alike: we need a strategy for the future, and we need it now. Automating Humanity is an insider's perspective on everything Big Tech doesn't want the public to know--or think about--from the addictions installed on a global (...) scale to the profits being driven by fake news and disinformation, to the way they're manipulating the world for profit and using our data to train systems that will automate jobs at an explosive, unprecedented scale. Toscano provides a critique of modern regulation, including parts of the new European Union's General Data Proctection Regulation (GDPR) suggesting how we can create proactive, adaptable regulation that satisfies both the needs of consumer safety and commercial success in the international economy. The content touches on everything from technology, economics, and public policy to psychology, history, and ethics, and is written in a way that is accessible to everyone from the average reader to the technical expert. (shrink)

Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce.

This article takes inspiration from Allan Sekula’s remarks on New Topographics photography, as well as his own ‘geography lessons’, to interrogate how photographs of ‘man-altered landscapes’ give visual form to the problems of temporality, natural history and historical agency that mark life in the Capitalocene. It proposes that combining Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the way that capital congeals ‘quantities of the past’ into dead labour with Andreas Malm’s diagnosis of our ‘warming condition’ allows us both to diagnose and counter the (...) temptation to a sublime inhumanity that so often haunts contemporary panoramas of ecological devastation. (shrink)

This essay takes issue with Critchley's diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejorative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Infinitely Demanding on an anarchic metapolitics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than infinite demands that is happy to embrace the accusation of "Prometheanism".

This article traces the link between Deleuze’s philosophy of individuation, developed in such works as Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, and the notion of structure, that articulated a good part of the epistemological and ontological discussions in French philosophy and science in the 1960s. Besides pointing out the originality of Deleuze’s take on the term ‘structure’—as it ceases to correspond to a formal constant that is opposed or indifferent to the genesis of singular individuals, and becomes a virtual (...) field of pre-individual determinations—, the author presents the possible limits of its use in a philosophy of difference in itself. The reconstruction of this philosophical bet that wanted to turn “structuralism” into a new transcendental philosophy allows to assess how much of this idea of structure remains alive in Deleuze and Guattari’s later works, and to what extent their philosophy transforms or displaces the project that had been formulated in those early books. (shrink)

Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure (...) and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education. Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art. Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett. (shrink)

Este pequeño ensayo pretende ir más allá de las celebraciones hagiográficas que hacen del Manifiesto Comunista un monumento para reflexionar sobre las lecciones que se pueden extraer de las formas específicas de su fallida realización. Contra el cliché de que el Manifiesto es un texto profético, deberíamos explorar la disyunción entre el pronóstico incisivo de la “prosa” del capitalismo y la anticipación frustrada de la “poesía” de la revolución. Este ensayo argumenta que las limitaciones analíticas y políticas del Manifiesto deben (...) ser localizadas en la excesiva linealidad y homogeneidad con que enmarca los poderes de abstracción del capital. En la medida en que el capital procede mediante una dialéctica de la homogeneización y la diferenciación, de la expansión y la división espacial, la erosión de la tradición y su refuncionamiento cínico con el objeto de apuntalar la dominación, las tareas de la unidad de la clase obrera y la internacionalización planteadas por el Manifiesto devienen aún más apremiantes políticamente, y cualquier cosa excepto inevitables. (shrink)

Among the non-monotonic reasoning processes, abduction is one of the most important. Usually described as the process of looking for explanations, it has been recognized as one of the most commonly used in our daily activities. Still, the traditional definitions of an abductive problem and an abductive solution mention only theories and formulas, leaving agency out of the picture. Our work proposes a study of abductive reasoning from an epistemic and dynamic perspective. In the first part we explore syntactic definitions (...) of both an abductive problem in terms of an agent’s information and an abductive solution in terms of the actions that modify the agent’s information. We look at diverse kinds of agents, including not only omniscient ones but also those whose information is not closed under logical consequence and those whose reasoning abilities are not complete. In the second part, we look at an existing logical framework whose semantic model allows us to interpret the previously stated formulas, and we define two actions that represent forms of abductive reasoning. (shrink)

This article focuses on a resonant debate initiated by the publication of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s groundbreaking article “On Defense of Abortion” in 1971. It is my contention that philosophers who argued against Thomson based on what has come to be called the “Responsibility Objection” did not fully examine the gender assumptions embedded in their logic. Rather than attempt to prove the flaw in the Responsibility Objection directly, I demonstrate it by applying the same logic used to discuss women’s responsibilities to (...) men to prove that it also supports forcing men to get a vasectomy. What I show is that the Responsibility Objection, when no longer clothed in a set of gendered assumptions, is not logically convincing. Further, given that the Responsibility Objection supports the logic the U.S. Supreme Court recently relied on in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health in overruling Roe vs. Wade, the examination of the flaws in this logic is timely and important. (shrink)

Focusing especially on Science and the Modern World, this article explores Whitehead's understanding of the social contexts and repercussions of mathematical and scientific abstraction. It investigates his remarks on the need to offset pernicious practices of abstraction in the context of a renewed concern with the link between conceptuality and materiality in social theory. Whitehead's inquiry into the problematic legacy of Galileo and scientific materialism is then contrasted with a different diagnosis of the abstractive maladies of modern society, the one (...) put forward under the Marxist rubric of `real abstraction'. While both stances allow us to explore the social repercussions of abstractive practices, it is argued that an understanding of the practically abstract character of capitalism permits us to identify the limits of Whitehead's pedagogical wish to reform our culture of abstraction. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the idea of human dignity has a precise and philosophically relevant sense. Following recent works,we can find some important clues in the long history of the term.Traditionally, dignity conveys the idea of a high and honourable position in a hierarchical order, either in society or in nature. At first glance, nothing may seem more contrary to the contemporary conception of human dignity, especially in regard to human rights.However,an account of dignity as high rank provides (...) an illuminating perspective on the role it plays in the egalitarian discourse of human rights. In order to preserve that relational sense regarding human dignity, we can use the notion of moral status, towhich somemoral philosophers have paid attention in recent years.I explore the possibilities of the idea of moral status to better understand the idea of human dignity and its close relationship with human rights. (shrink)

Describing an algorithm can provide a formalization of a specific process. However, different ways of conceptualizing algorithms foreground certain issues while obscuring others. This article attempts to define an algorithm in a broad sense as a cultural activity of key importance to make sense of socio-cognitive structures. It also attempts to develop a sharper account on the interaction between humans and tools, symbols and technologies. Rather than human or machine-centered analyses, I draw upon sociological and anthropological theories that underline social (...) practices to propose expanding our understanding of an algorithm through the notion of ‘collective intentionalities’. To make this term clear, a brief historical review is presented, followed by an argumentation on how to incorporate it in an integral perspective. The article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term. It develops a discussion along the lines of cognitive anthropology and the cognitive sciences, therefore advancing a definition that is grounded in observed practices as well as in modeled descriptions. The benefit of this approach is that it encourages scholars to explore cognitive structures via archaeologies of technological assemblages, where intentionalities play a defining role in understanding socio-structured practices and cognitive ecologies. (shrink)

El derecho a la privacidad está en el centro de muchos de los debates públicos actuales. Sin embargo, a pesar de la extensa literatura filosófica y jurídica sobre el tema, no contamos con una explicación adecuada del sentido y del valor de la privacidad. Esta falta de acuerdo sobre cuestiones conceptuales y normativas ha llevado a algún autor a hablar del ‘caos de la privacidad’. Este artículo se centra en la exploración conceptual de la privacidad. Para ello, en primer lugar, (...) consideraré cómo el derecho a la privacidad fue formulado por primera vez en el célebre artículo de Warren y Brandeis. Segundo, en la medida en que el derecho a la privacidad es sistemáticamente traducido en español como ‘derecho a la intimidad’, resulta crucial analizar con cuidado la confusa relación entre intimidad y privacidad. Con este fin, en las dos últimas secciones del trabajo discutiré algunas explicaciones de cómo trazar la distinción entre ambas nociones y cómo entender su intrincada relación. (shrink)

The decisive inquiry into the volatile link between philosophy, revolution, and the 'radical' is arguably Marx's 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Introduction', written in 1843. We can still find all these themes introduced by Marx at work 80 years later in an emblematic and instructive confrontation between Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch. Where Lukács presents the proletariat as the practical and epistemological 'Archimedean point' capable of unhinging the capitalist totality, Bloch reveals in a subjective (...) metahistory of a utopian kernel whose drive and directionality – despite all of the changes in instruments, organisations, and motivating ideologies – remains invariant from the Taborites to the Bolsheviks. To borrow Lukács's formulation, we are thus confronted with two potent, and alternative ways, to politically and conceptually grasp the statement that man 'both is and at the same time is not', or, in Blochian terms, both is and is not-yet. This antinomy signified by the names and texts of Lukács and Bloch is visible in the insistence of contemporary radical thought on the enigmas of philosophical anthropology, the political repercussions of messianism, and the possibility of a rational and partisan subjectivity. (shrink)

This essay explores Jameson’s reading of Goethe’s Faust II in Allegory and Ideology, putting it into dialogue with enquiries into Goethian allegory by other Marxist critics, namely Georg Lukács, Cesare Cases and Franco Fortini. Allegories of monetisation and dispossession in Faust II are explored, along with the limits of Lukács’s partial devaluation of the allegorical. The essay focuses in particular on how Jameson’s reading of Faust II can be interpreted as an allegory of theory itself, and in particular of the (...) dialectic, thereby returning us to Lukács’s own parallel reading of Faust and Hegel’s Phenomenology, albeit in a different key. (shrink)

Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, Translated, Edited and withan Introduction by Norman Madarasz ISBN - 9780791442197Alain Badiou, Deleuze. The Clamor of Being, Translated and with aPreface by Louise Burchill ISBN - 9780816631391.

We present a framework for understanding abduction within modal logic and Kripke semantics; worlds of a Kripke frame will represent possible theories, and a change in theory will be understood as a passage from one world to an adjacent possible world. Further, these steps may agree with the accessibility relation or may ‘backtrack’, accordingly as new information refutes or reinforces our present theory. Our formalism can be used to model not only abduction, but also to talk about the inner structure (...) of theories as well as relations between them, allowing us to interpret many ideas from philosophy of science within the well-understood framework of modal logic. (shrink)

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Beginning with his engagement with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s seminal treatment of ‘real abstraction’, Intellectual and Manual Labour, Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly thematised and excavated the proposition that capitalism is innervated by a kind of actually-existing metaphysics, the scandal of an abstract form external to human cognition. This essay investigates Žižek’s use and criticism of Sohn-Rethel and outlines some of the developments and contradictions in his effort to confront capital’s challenge to philosophy’s self-sufficiency. It problematizes Žižek’s tendency to elide a model of (...) abstraction as a hollowing-out or evacuation of social content with a much more promising conception of real abstraction as its re-articulation or re-functioning, while querying Žižek’s recent efforts to transcend the purported limitations of Marx’s conceptualisation of capital in the direction of a Hegel. (shrink)

We explore the possibilities that dynamic epistemic logic offers to model abductive reasoning. We show that many of the problems with formal approaches to abduction based on classical logic can be solved when considering an epistemic agent that reasons and acts.Exploramos las posibilidades que ofrece la lógica epistémica dinámica para modelar el razonamiento abductivo. Mostramos que muchos de los problemas que encuentran los tratamientos formales de la abducción basados en lógica clásica pueden ser resueltos al considerar un agente epistémico que (...) razona y actúa. (shrink)