In this detailed study of the republican tradition in the development of the Enlightenment, the central problem of utopia and reform is crystallized in a discussion of the right to punish. Describing the political situation in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author shows how the old republics in Italy, Poland and Holland stagnated and were unable to survive in the age of absolutism. The Philosophes discussed the ideal of republicanism against this background. They were particularly influenced by (...) the political and religious radicalism of John Toland, which had survived the English Restoration and was then reaching Europe. Professor Venturi traces the debate on the penal laws and the attempt to relate utopian ideas of society to the practical problem of dealing with man in society, which culminated in the assertion by many Philosophes that an unjust social system necessitated harsh penal laws, thereby rejecting the possibility of reform. (shrink)

O artigo discute o método de esquiva de John Rawls em A ideia de um consenso por justaposição, de 1987. O centro da leitura que oferecemos sobre o argumento do consenso informa a recusa injustificada do ceticismo, a segunda objeção. Sugere-se que ele pode integrar o consenso por sobreposição. Deseja-se apontar para um fato conhecido entre os céticos: o método de oposições para a discussão configura uma ética do público para o público. Descreve-se como a linguagem fenomênica pode atravessar (...) toda tese e produção de consenso público para regimes democráticos. Conclui-se pela convergência dos métodos estudados. (shrink)

La relación entre experiencia y objetividad ofreció a Mariano Álvarez-Gómez, en 1978, ocasión para destacar la influencia del planteamiento kantiano en el pensamiento de Hegel y asegurar el carácter sistemático de la experiencia entendiéndola como “forma de la objetividad”. La estructura, contexto teórico e implicaciones epistemológicas de este concepto parecen ofrecer cierta base metafísica a la noción de “pretensión de objetividad” de la experiencia defendida en la actualidad por John McDowell.

: The technologies at the intersection of assisted reproduction and genetics call for a new regulatory approach, say Franco Furger and Francis Fukuyama, authors of the recent report Beyond Bioethics. In the essay below they map out their recommendation. In the following essays, James Fossett argues that regulation is likelier—and would be better—at the state level, Leonard Fleck calls for more robust public involvement, and John Robertson recommends sticking with the status quo. Turning from procedural to substantive issues, (...) Josephine Johnston takes up Furger and Fukuyama’s suggestion that children have a right to a traditional genetic parentage. (shrink)

This article casts light on the moral implications of the possibility of human extinction, with a specific focus on extinction caused by an interruption in human reproduction. In the first two paragraphs, I show that moral philosophy has not yet given promising explanations for the wrongness of this kind of extinction. Specifically, the second paragraph contains a detailed rejection of John Leslie’s main claims on the morality of extinction. In the third paragraph, I offer a demonstration of the fact (...) that a moral view which stresses the permissibility of some types of human extinction can be effectively constructed, while in the following paragraph I propose a prima facie defense of a new approach to the topic which is likely to provide us with reasons in favor of the wrongness of a premature departure of humankind. (shrink)

John W. Burgess was one of the indisputable founders of the discipline of political science in the United States. Two crucial influences on the development of Burgess's political thought were the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. His interest in these historical events, which he saw as central to understanding the importance of the nation-state, deeply influenced the Foundations of Political Science, his most compact exposition of what he believed to be the core principles of political science.

The volume contains a collection of papers presented at the International Symposium, which took place in Hvar, Croatia, in 2006. In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in the study of Plato, Platonism and Neoplatonism. Taking the position that it is of vital importance to establish an ongoing dialogue among scientists, artists, academics, theologians and philosophers concerning pressing issues of common interest to humankind, this collection of papers endeavours to bridge the gap between contemporary research in Platonist (...) philosophy and other fields where insights gained from the study of Plato and Platonist philosophy can be of consequence and benefit. Authors: Werner Beierwaltes, Luc Brisson, Amber Carpenter, John Dillon, Jonathan Doner, Franco Ferrari, Francesco Fronterotta, F.A.J. de Haas, Aaron Hughes, Byron Kaldis, Daniel Kolak, Thomas Leinkauf, Dionysis Mentzeniotis, Jean-Marc Narbonne, Giannis Stamatellos, Vladimir Stoupel, Patrick Quinn, Jure Zovko and Marie-Élize Zovko. (shrink)

‘Disastrologies’ explores Derrida's fascination with dates and how that fascination reveals a secret correspondence, in every sense of the word, with Walter Benjamin – a man who has the same birth-date as Derrida. It is, though, the date of Benjamin's death and indeed its infamous mise-en-scène, the cheap hotel on the Franco-Spanish border, that dominates this text which takes the form of a dramatic monologue delivered by the hotel manager, Juan Suñer, a man known to be both a manipulator (...) of dates and, indeed, close to the Gestapo. As the monologue unfolds, Suñer advances an elaborate calendrical re-reading of a host of Derrida texts which probes at the mystery not only of Benjamin's last night but also of living with both Jewish and Christian calendars. Finally, we see how this last of nights puts under unbearable pressure the infinite promise of both the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. (shrink)

Critics of literary Darwinism like to point out the weaknesses of its scientific scaffolding, but the real flaw in this research program is its neglect of literary history and stylistic evolution. A full-fledged scientific approach to literary criticism should incorporate the kind of work being done by Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab—a quantitative analysis of the history of literary form. While Moretti and the literary Darwinists are almost never mentioned together, I contend that their work is not (...) only compatible but also necessarily so for a more consilient literary criticism. The Darwinian aesthetics promoted by Denis Dutton can help to unite these two approaches. (shrink)

Based on the new and much acclaimed two-volume Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes by Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch, this anthology of essential texts contains the most important and widely studied of those writings, including the Discourse and Meditations and substantial extracts from the Regulae, Optics, Principles, Objectives and Replies, Comments on a Broadsheet, and Passions of the Soul. In clear, readable, modern English, with a full text and running references to the standard Franco-Latin edition of Descartes, (...) this book is planned as the definitive one-volume reader for all English-speaking students of Descartes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.2 (2003) 306-309 [Access article in PDF] Philippe Rouet. Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases: Beazley and Pottier. Trans. Liz Nash. Oxford Monographs on Classical Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xiii + 167 pp. 21 black and white plates. Cloth, $74. This monograph examines the development of two major approaches in the study of Greek vase painting by focusing on a comparison of (...) the work of Sir John D. Beazley with that of Edmond Pottier. Beazley, an English scholar, spent his scholarly life attributing vases to various formerly unnamed artists based on [End Page 306] their style of drawing, thereby ascertaining for the first time the artistic history and stylistic development of Attic black-figure and red-figure vase painting. Pottier, a French scholar, founded the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, an international series whose original goal was to publish all ancient clay vases. Each scholar's interests contrasted with the other's in many ways. Beazley's work focused more on the object and Athens, while Pottier was opposed to the study of individual artists and was particularly interested in the relationship of the origins of Greek civilization to the East and the broader context of the vessels.The book's introduction sets the historical and intellectual background of Beazley and Pottier. Areas covered include the early history of collecting, initial attempts at defining the works of individual Greek vase painters, some influential early catalogues of Greek vases (e.g., those of Hamilton's collection), and the role that the copying of motifs from ancient pottery had in spreading the interest in Greek vase painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly the part played by the Wedgwood workshop. I miss here any reference to the fine work of Brian A. Sparkes on these subjects (The Red and the Black: Studies in Greek Pottery[London and New York, 1996] 34-63).The first chapter considers the most influential, immediate predecessors of Beazley and shows how their work formed the intellectual framework for his accomplishment. They are Wilhelm Klein, whose important study of and signatures on Attic vases still serves as the basis for our interpretation of them; Paul Hartwig, who was the first to attribute vases to an anonymous master; and Adolph Furtwängler, who in collaboration with Karl Reichhold initiated the monumental three-volume work, Griechische Vasenmalerei, which featured exceptionally accurate drawings of vase paintings. The author astutely notes that Furtwängler's work on attributing Roman copies of Greek sculpture to artists was likewise influential in augmenting the interest in style and artistic personalities. The intertwined relationship between connoisseurship, collectors, and the art market is touched on briefly in the discussions of Hartwig and Edward Warren. It might also have been noted here that the wording and style of Beazley's earliest work on the Kleophrades Painter clearly owes its inspiration to Hartwig.Pottier's early life and career are the focus of the next chapter. This was the time when museum catalogues and encyclopedic dictionaries were for many the signs of significant national scholarship. Indeed, after France's loss in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War, Pottier and many of his contemporary compatriots sought to affirm the intellectual vitality of their nation by initiating and completing such projects. Pottier's contribution was to publish Vases antiques du Louvre, in which photography was used for the first time on a large scale to illustrate the vases, and to serve as one of the editors of the Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, in which he was also responsible for many of the entries on vases.Chapter 3 returns to the subject of connoisseurship and the two non-classical archaeologists whose methodology bear clear resemblances to Beazley's. The first of them, Giovanni Morelli, was the first to attempt a scientific methodology for attributing paintings to unknown artists by examining the minor details [End Page 307] of drawings in order to discover the artistic language of the painters. Rouet concludes that Morelli paved the way for Beazley's work, for... (shrink)

Volume XVIII Special Issue: Gian-Carlo Rota and The End of Objectivity, 2019 Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Contributors: Gabriele Baratelli, Stefania Centrone, Giovanna C. Cifoletti, Jean-Marie Coquard, Steven Crowell, Deborah De Rosa, Daniele De Santis, Nicolas de Warren, Agnese Di Riccio, Aurélien Djian, (...) Yuval Dolev, Mirja Hartimo, Burt C. Hopkins, Talia Leven, Ah Hyun Moon, Luis Niel, Fabrizio Palombi, Mario Ariel González Porta, Gian-Carlo Rota, Michael Roubach, Franco Trabattoni and Michele Vagnetti. Submissions: Manuscripts, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to the Editors electronically via e-mail attachments. (shrink)

Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. By Carol Meyers.Wives, Harlots and Concubines. By Alice L. Laffey.Jonah. A Psycho‐Religious Approach to the Prophet. By Andre LaCocque and Pierre‐Emmanuel Lacocque.The Temptation and the Passion: The Markan Soteriology, Second Edition. By Ernest Best.Theios Aner and the Markan Miracle Traditions: A Critique of the ‘Theios Aner’Concept as an Interpretative Background of the Miracle Traditions used by Mark. By Barry Blackburn.The Shepherd Discourse of John 10 and its Context: Studies by Members of the (...) Johannine Writings Seminar. Edited with introduction by Johannes Beutler, S.J., and Robert T. Fortna.The Epistle to the Hebrews: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. By Harold W. Attridge, edited by Helmut Koester.Structure and Message of the Epistle to the Hebrews. By Albert Vanhoye, translated by James Swetnam.Religious Pluralism and Unbelief: Studies Critical and Comparative. Edited by Ian Hamnett.7he Uniqueness of Christ in the 7heocentric Model of the Christian Theology of World Religions: An Elaboration and Evaluation of the Position ofJohn Hick. By Gregory H. Carruthers.The Jewish Roots of Christian Liturgy. Edited by Eugene J. Fisher.Women, Religion and Sexuuliry: Studies on the Impact of Religious Teachings on Women. Edited by Jeanne Becher.In Whose Image? God and Gender. By Jann Aldredge Clanton.Women Towards Priesthood: Ministerial Politics and Feminist Praxis. By Jacqueline Field‐Bibb.Afrer Eve: Women, Theology and the Christian Tradition. Edited by J. Martin Soskice.Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian. By Thomas F. Torrance.Theology und Dialogue: Essay in Conversation with George Lindbeck. Edited by Bruce D. Marshall.From Theology to Social Theory: Juan Luis Segundo and the Theology of Liberation. By Marsha Aileen Hewitt.Liberation Theology at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution. By Paul E. Sigmund.Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic. By Hans Kung.Marxism, Moralig and Social Justice. By R. G. Peffer.The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists. By Peter P. Nicholson.The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. By Paul Franco.Divine Action. By Keith Ward.Free Willand the Christian Faith. By W. S. Anglin.Tracrurian Semantics: Finding Sense in Wirrgetisrein's ‘Tractatus’. By Peter Carruthers.The Metaphyics of the ‘Tracratus’. By Peter Carruthers.Realism with a Human Face. By Hilary Putnam.Explanation and its Limits. Edited by Dudley Knowles.Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage. By Lee H. Yearly.Hobbes. By Richard Tuck.Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant's Critical Philosophy. By Richard L. Velkley.Reason in Religion: The Foundarions of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. By Walter Jaeschke.International Kierkegaard Commentary, VoL 13: The Corsair Affair. Edited by Robert L. Perkins.Ssren Kierkegaard: ‘Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses’. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.Lonergan Workshop, Volume 6. Edited by Fred Lawrence.Holy City, Holy Places: Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century. By P. W. L. Walker.Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton s Prose. Edited by David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner.Beauty and Holiness: The Dialogue between Aesthetics and Religion. By James Alfred Martin.Science Deified & Science Defied: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture. Volume 2: From the Earl? Modern Age through the Romantic Era ca. 1640 to ca. 1820. By Richard Olson.The Vatican and Zionism: Conflict in the Holy Land, 1895‐1925. By Sergio I. Minerbi.The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious Movements Contemporary Society. By Bryan Wilson.Confessor between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. By Jaroslav Pelikan. (shrink)

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a (...) providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794. (shrink)

Nella sua straordinaria opera scientifica, Franco Selleri si è sempre opposto alla rinuncia alla comprensione della struttura della realtà e della natura degli oggetti fisici, che egli considera come l’elemento caratterizzante delle principali teorie della fisica del Novecento e che è stata stigmatizzata da Karl Popper come tesi della “fine della strada in fisica”. Sin dalla fine degli anni ’60, egli ha sviluppato quella riflessione critica nei confronti delle teorie fondamentali della fisica moderna, in particolar modo della teoria delle (...) particelle elementari e della meccanica quantistica, e in un secondo tempo delle teorie relativistiche, che contraddistingue il suo programma di ricerca. Nel corso della sua intensa e infaticabile attività scientifica, Selleri è entrato in proficuo contatto con molti grandi fisici e filosofi della scienza, instaurando un intenso dialogo critico con Louis de Broglie, John Bell e Karl Popper. Le sue originali e non convenzionali ricerche lo hanno portato a risultati significativi non solo nell’ambito dei fondamenti della fisica, ma anche della storia e della filosofia della fisica. Per questo abbiamo voluto dedicare un numero speciale di Isonomia al nostro impareggiabile amico e collega, sia per la sua passione instancabile e la sua profonda conoscenza dei fondamenti formali, concettuali e filosofici delle teorie della fisica contemporanea, sia e forse ancor più come maestro di una prospettiva perennemente critica che egli ha sempre seguito e proposto con particolare rigore ed estrema determinazione. (shrink)

With contributions by John J. Cleary, Gregor Damschen, Rainer Enskat, Francisco J. Gonzalez, Jürgen Mittelstraß and Carlo Natali (all on Plato) as well as by Enrico Berti, Nicolas Braun, Graciela M. Chichi, Wolfgang Kullmann, Helmut Mai, Alejandro G. Vigo, Franco Volpi and Hermann Weidemann (all on Aristotle).

Receptor oligomerization plays a key role in maintaining genome stability and restricting protein mutagenesis. When properly folded, protein monomers assemble as oligomeric receptors and interact with environmental ligands. In a gene-centered view, the ligand specificity expressed by these receptors is assumed to be causally predetermined by the cell genome. However, this mechanism does not fully explain how differentiated cells have come to express specific receptor repertoires and which combinatorial codes have been explored to activate their associated signaling pathways. It is (...) our contention that the plasma membrane acts as the locus where several contextual cues may be integrated. As such it allows the semiotic selection of those receptor configurations that provide cells with the minimum essential requirements for agency. The occurrence of protein misfolding makes it impossible for receptor monomers to assemble along the membrane and to sustain meaningful relationships with environmental ligands. How could a cell lineage deal with these loss-of-function mutations during evolution and restrain gene redundancy accordingly? In this paper, we will be arguing that the easiest way for bacteria clones to accomplish this goal is by getting rid of cells expressing mutated receptor proteins. The mechanism sustaining this cell selection is also occurring in many somatic tissues and its function is currently believed to counteract in vivo protein mutagenesis. Our discussion will be mainly focused on the significance and semiotic nature of the interplay between membrane receptors and the epigenetic control of gene expression, as mediated by the control of mismatched repairing and protein folding mechanisms. (shrink)

Thoughts on poetry and its vbarieties.--Bentham.--Coleridge.--On liberty.--Utilitarianism.--Inaugural address at Saint Andrews.

Abstract:I defend that the distinctive object of our aesthetic evaluation of films is the full emotional experience, taken as a unified whole, that we go through as we watch a film and that I call the viewer's film emotional life. The aesthetic value itself—the positive quality we perceive in the experience of having had a certain film emotional life—is in the significance we experience in that film emotional life insofar as it contributes to the discovery and the exploration of the (...) viewer's human and individual emotional nature. I finally suggest that the explanation of the positive felt quality of such experience is in the progress it represents regarding our resourcefulness as emotional subjects toward the realization of our individual ideal of life. (shrink)

Most of us believe that theory-change in science has been a rationally analysable process. We believe, that is, that when one theory, Newton’s for example, is replaced as the accepted theory in science by a rival, Einstein’s in the same example, it is because the newer theory turns out to be better than the old in some objective sense and a sense, moreover, crucially related to the experimental evidence. Even those who have abjectly surrendered (at any rate on Mondays, Wednesdays (...) and Fridays) to an overly subjectivist form of Bayesianism, believe this really – hence their desperate pointing in the direction of (in my view, unavailing) results concerning the ‘washing out of priors’. The problem has always been to construct a set of agreed criteria of theory-appraisal that would convincingly yield this generally agreed result. (Of course by ‘most of us’ here I mean ‘most philosophers of science’; nothing I say will cut much ice with some of our benighted sociologist colleagues.). (shrink)

We prove that the sets of standard tautologies of predicate Product Logic and of predicate Basic Logic, as well as the set of standard-satisfiable formulas of predicate Basic Logic are not arithmetical, thus finding a rather satisfactory solution to three problems proposed by Hájek in [H01].

In this paper we give a rather detailed algebraic investigation of interpolation and Beth’s property in propositional many-valued logics extending Hájek’s Basic Logic [P. Hájek, Metamathematics of Fuzzy Logic, Kluwer, 1998], and we connect such properties with amalgamation and strong amalgamation in the corresponding varieties of algebras. It turns out that, while the most interesting extensions of in the language of have deductive interpolation, very few of them have Beth’s property or Craig interpolation. Thus in the last part of the (...) paper we look for conservative extensions of having such properties. (shrink)

Established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies on July 3rd 2014, in conjunction with Springer Publishing, publishers of the Society’s official journal, Biosemiotics, the Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award seeks to recognize those papers published in the journal that present novel and potentially important contributions to the ongoing project of biosemiotic research, its scientific impact, and its future prospects. Here the winner of the Biosemiotics Achievement Award for 2019 is announced: the award goes to Y.H. Hendlin (...) for the article ‘I Am a Fake Loop: the Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial Selection’. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the algebraization of an arithmetical predicate introduced by S. Feferman. To this purpose we investigate the equational class of Boolean algebras enriched with an operation (g=rtail), which translates such predicate, and an operation τ, which translates the usual predicate Theor. We deduce from the identities of this equational class some properties of (g=rtail) and some ties between (g=rtail) and τ; among these properties, let us point out a fixed-point theorem for a sufficiently large class of (...) (g=rtail)-τ polynomials. The last part of this paper concerns the duality theory for (g=rtail)-τ algebras. (shrink)