Although Hegel is increasingly recognized as an important figure in the history of political economy, his economic views are never strictly economic. In contrast to other modern thinkers, his primary concern is not the economic efficacy of different practices or institutions but the extent to which they enable and promote the development of human freedom. In this article, I argue that Hegel's pioneering critique of modern liberal economy plays out simultaneously at a more empirical level, corresponding to the properly economic (...) dimension of his analysis, and at a deeper, logical level, which grounds and guides his position. Moreover, I argue that the tendency to favour the first of these levels, found in most of the literature on Hegel's economic thought, reduces the Philosophy of Right's main argument to a more or less vigorous plea for economic interventionism. Against this kind of reading, I show that a renewed focus on the text's logical structure reveals a different and more radical philosophical proposition, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. In particular, I argue that Hegel's dialectical logic leads him beyond the liberalism‐interventionism debate, towards a qualitatively different conception of social and economic relations. (shrink)

The Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx's work results from a failure to understand his mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx's oeuvre, Silva isolates the central elements of his style: the search for an architectonic unity at the level of the text, his capacity to express himself dialectically at the level of the sentence, and, above all, his great gift for metaphor.

The paper aims at connecting the concepts of beauty and possession, traditionally coupled with the male gaze, with eros as felt by women, by homosexuals, and by those who do not identify with a defined gender. First, I will outline the concepts of beauty and possession according to “male thinking”, well formulated by Freud, Plato, Levinas, and Sartre. I will show that, in Western tradition, beauty is seen from a masculine perspective, as a set of charms arousing the subject and (...) stimulating his will to possess. The erotic relationship is consequently considered in a dualistic way: the subject is masculine and active, and desires his “object”, who can be either a man or a woman. However, the mentioned authors also highlight a crucial point: desire is doomed to be unfulfilled, because the transcendence of the other person is ungraspable. I will argue that, despite the latter point, such authors bring forward a reductionist view of eros and relationships between genders. I will suggest a solution to this reductionism, taking inspiration from the concepts of gender performativity, theorized by Butler, and queer orientation, developed by Ahmed. I will also propose to rely on Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the flesh, especially as it concerns its features of reversibility and divergence, in order to give account of every gender identity, including non-binary ones. The concepts of beauty and possession, together with the impossibility to grasp the transcendence of the other person, will not be rejected, but reconfigured through a different way of conceiving subjectivity. (shrink)

Il volume comprende i saggi dei seguenti autori: Corrado Mangione, Enrico Bellone, Giulio Giorello, Marco Mondadori, Gabriele Lolli, Silvano Tagliagambe, Francesco Barone, Umberto Bottazzini, Vincenzo Cappelletti, Domenico Costantini, Piero Mangani, Carlos Minguez, Alberto Pasquinelli, Rossano Pancaldi, Mario Servi.

The recent proliferation of AI scandals led private and public organisations to implement new ethics guidelines, introduce AI ethics boards, and list ethical principles. Nevertheless, some of these efforts remained a façade not backed by any substantive action. Such behaviour made the public question the legitimacy of the AI industry and prompted scholars to accuse the sector of ethicswashing, machinewashing, and ethics trivialisation—criticisms that spilt over to institutional AI ethics boards. To counter this widespread issue, contributions in the literature have (...) proposed fixes that do not consider its systemic character and are based on a top-down, expert-centric governance. To fill this gap, we propose to make use of qualified informed lotteries: a two-step model that transposes the documented benefits of the ancient practice of sortition into the selection of AI ethics boards’ members and combines them with the advantages of a stakeholder-driven, participative, and deliberative bottom-up process typical of Citizens’ Assemblies. The model permits increasing the public’s legitimacy and participation in the decision-making process and its deliverables, curbing the industry’s over-influence and lobbying, and diminishing the instrumentalisation of ethics boards. We suggest that this sortition-based approach may provide a sound base for both public and private organisations in smart societies for constructing a decentralised, bottom-up, participative digital democracy. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the possibility of a dialogue between Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and phenomenology, a dialogue concerning the problem of objects and relations. In the first part, the author shows what is interesting in OOO from a phenomenological perspective and why it should be considered as a challenge for contemporary philosophy. The second part develops the phenomenological perspective of the author, a perspective based on Merleau-Ponty’s “carnal” phenomenology, as well as some suggestions coming from the Italian school of (...) Gaetano Kanizsa. The third part is dedicated to the objections of the author to the OOO view regarding the separation between objects and relations: a separation which leads to Harman’s quadruple object. In the concluding portion, the author shows that, despite evident differences between phenomenological and OOO’s views of relations, OOO offers new starting points for phenomenological reflections, thanks to its specific focus on objects and its pluralistic view of reality. (shrink)

Dedicata a interrogare le categorie di metafora, mito e modernità, la riflessione di Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) è senz'altro una delle più inquiete, profonde e decisive del secondo Novecento. Il presente volume ne offre una serrata ricostruzione evolutiva, partendo da un'analisi della prima, inedita fase del suo pensiero, e descrivendone la trasformazione nel corso del primo ventennio (1946-1966). Mostrando come la sua indagine si sia sistematicamente nutrita di un confronto "corpo a corpo" con la storia del pensiero cristiano - Agostino, Pascal, (...) Kierkegaard -, vengono allora esplorate le radici teoriche profonde della tesi della legittimità dell'età moderna, quale contraccolpo conseguente all'entrata in crisi dell'assolutismo teologico di matrice agostiniana. Ne emerge così un'immagine nuova della proposta filosofica e antropologica di Blumenberg, in costante debito critico nei confronti della memoria cristiana della cultura occidentale, seppure ritrattata in prospettiva nietzschiana. (shrink)

This article argues that the discovery of Pythagorean volumes in Numa's tomb in 181 b.c. may have played a significant role in the conception of the meeting between Numa and Pythagoras in the last book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, since several features of this event integrate very well into the discourse at the heart of Book 15 on the Greek origins of Roman culture and literature, on the immortality of poetry, and on the relationship between poetry and power. The article further (...) argues that Ennius’ Annals Book 15 may have covered the events up to 179, if that really was the year of Nobilior's dedication of the Aedes Herculis Musarum, and included the discovery of Numa's books in 181; and hence that Ovid may have used the Ennian account of this discovery as a model for the Numa–Pythagoras episode, appropriating the poetic and political meaning that it already had in Annals Book 15. (shrink)

Es, quiza, la coleccion mas abierta que existe en cuestiones de etica, aunque se ha ocupado tambien de antropologia, estetica, ontologia, teoria del conocimiento e historia de la filosofia. El primer titulo que se publico en la coleccion fue la gran Historia de la filosofia y de la ciencia en tres volumenes de Ludovico Geymonat. A este le han seguido obras de A. J. Ayer, A. MacIntyre, Ernst Tugendhat, Antoni Domenech, Anna Estany, Agnes Heller, F. Fernandez Buey, Carlos Paris, (...) Emilio Lledo, Manuel Sacristan, John Rawls o Ludwig Wittgenstein. Victoria Camps ha dirigido, ademas, una gran Historia de la etica, en tres volumenes, en la que han colaborado los mejores especialistas espanoles. (shrink)

The SARS‐CoV‐2 virus is responsible for the COVID‐19 pandemic the world experience since 2019. The protein responsible for the first steps of cell invasion, the spike protein, has probably received the most attention in light of its central role during infection. Computational approaches are among the tools employed by the scientific community in the enormous effort to study this new affliction. One of these methods, namely molecular dynamics (MD), has been used to characterize the function of the spike protein at (...) the atomic level and unveil its structural features from a dynamic perspective. In this review, we focus on these main findings, including spike protein flexibility, rare S protein conformational changes, cryptic epitopes, the role of glycans, drug repurposing, and the effect of spike protein variants. (shrink)

Adorno’s conception of ideology was denounced by Habermas as incompatible with a viable form of social critique. By conflating ideology and the ‘identity principle’ inherent to modern Western reason, he argues, Adorno offered an overly negative characterisation of modernity and failed to recognise its rational potential. This paper questions this line of criticism by revisiting Adorno’s position. While he does sometimes associate ideology with identity-thinking, this association does not exhaust his views on the subject. For Adorno, ideology is just as (...) much a matter of Identität as a matter of Schein, or illusion, and its practical effects. Moreover, he views ideology as an intrinsically dynamic concept, whose definition has changed throughout human history. Drawing on his late sociological writings, I distinguish three major stages in the development of the concept of ideology, namely (a) ideology as simple illusion, a definition associated with the Enlightenment and expanded by the so-called sociology of knowledge; (b) ideology as necessary illusion, invoked by Marx to capture the structural logic of capitalism; and (c) ideology as disillusionment, related to the positivism of late capitalist society. Finally, I reflect on what this survey reveals about the relationship between illusion and identity in Adorno’s theory of ideology. (shrink)

Although Hegel is very critical of representative democracy, his views on political participation are in many ways richer and more sophisticated than the ones favoured today by most Western societies. The present paper aims to shed light on this apparent paradox by dispelling some of the misunderstandings still associated with Hegel’s ethical and political thought. I argue, on the one hand, that Hegel’s emphasis on the notion of freedom does not amount to an endorsement of political liberalism, but to a (...) critique of its underlying principles. On the other hand, I show that the Hegelian theory of the modern state, albeit falling short of a fully democratic constitutional solution, is by no means opposed to social justice or political pluralism. Hegel views political freedom as the result of a global web of mutual recognition, embodied by social institutions destined to bridge the gap between private and communal interests. Despite the ambiguous and outdated elements of Hegel’s description, I believe his overall solution remains uniquely relevant, and an important source for the ongoing debate about the merits and limitations of contemporary democracies. (shrink)

This article provides a critical reexamination of Blaise Pascal’s fragment on the “eternal silence of infinite spaces”, challenging the conventional objections, notably those by Paul Valéry. It presents an analytical journey through the philosophical and existential dimensions of Pascal’s text, exploring the unique interplay between human solitude and cosmic silence. The discussion navigates the intricate relationship between individual perception and the overarching sense of existential dread evoked by the universe’s vastness. This exploration is enriched by contrasting Pascal’s insights with broader (...) philosophical contexts, including references to Kierkegaard and the concept of the ‘music of the spheres’. Ultimately, the paper offers a nuanced interpretation of Pascal’s work, emphasizing its enduring relevance in understanding the human condition within the unfathomable expanse of the universe. (shrink)