The purpose of this article is to examine two important issues concerning the agency theory of causality: the charge of anthropomorphism and the relation of simultaneous causation. After a brief outline of the agency theory, sections 2–4 contain the refutation of the three main forms in which the charge of anthropomorphism is to be found in the literature. It will appear that it is necessary to distinguish between the subjective and the objective aspect of the concept of causation. This will (...) lead, in section 5, to contrast two kinds of anthropomorphism, one which has been rightly rejected by modern science and one which is fully compatible with the objective reality of the causal processes. Finally, section 6 will apply the preceding considerations to simultaneous causation. On the one hand, in a basic sense, there can be no simultaneous causal relations. On the other hand, simultaneous causation arises when we consider the natural change by abstracting from the agent and from her/his projects of interven.. (shrink)

The paper offers a historical overview of Einstein's oscillating attitude towards a "phenomenological" and "dynamical" treatment of rods and clocks in relativity theory. Contrary to what it has been usually claimed in recent literature, it is argued that this distinction should not be understood in the framework of opposition between principle and constructive theories. In particular Einstein does not seem to have plead for a "dynamical" explanation for the phenomenon rods contraction and clock dilation which was initially described only "kinematically". (...) On the contrary textual evidence shows that, according to Einstein, a realistic microscopic model of rods and clocks was needed to account for the very existence of measuring devices of "identical construction" which always measure the same unit of time and the same unit of length. In fact, it will be shown that the empirical meaningfulness of both relativity theories depends on what, following Max Born, one might call the "principle of the physical identity of the units of measure". In the attempt to justify the validity of such principle, Einstein was forced by different interlocutors, in particular Hermann Weyl and Wolfgang Pauli, to deal with the genuine epistemological, rather then physical question whether a theory should be able or not to described the material devices that serve to its own verification. (shrink)

Teodicea e relazione. La teologia come garanzia di giustizia nella dialettica tra ordine e libero arbitrio. Teodicy and relationship. The theology as guarantee of justice in the dialectics between order and free will.

By the end of the 1820s, an innovative product was introduced in the northern Italian editorial market: technical and popular periodicals offering “useful knowledge” to a larger audience composed of members of the provincial middle-class, clergymen, and modestly educated craftsmen. By examining their medical content, this paper shows that popularisation did not merely entail disseminating a set of stable, unanimous, and trustworthy medical doctrines; rather, it represented a crucial step in the making of science during a period in which medical (...) theories were still various and contradictory. Moreover, it demonstrates that the environmental and preventative approach to disease, which these medical contributors often employed, did reflect recent developments in chemical or physical knowledge and responded to pedagogical and informative goals; but it mostly served to affirm the social usefulness of medicine and the legitimacy of health professionals' participation in determining how to regulate more general epidemiologic, social, and political issues. (shrink)

Inspired by the literature on extended/scaffolded mind, a debate concerning the contribution of extra-bodily resources to our (extended) emotions is recently gaining traction. Within this debate, inspired by the literature on cognitive artifacts introduces the notion of “affective artifacts”, indicating those objects that exert persistent effects on our feelings, possibly altering our self. However, by focusing on feelings, this notion neglects other facets of emotional episodes. Following Scarnatino’s tripartition between feeling, appraisal, and motivational theories of emotion, I present three varieties (...) of affective artifacts: Feeling, Evaluative and Motivational Artifacts. (shrink)

In Unfit for the Future, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu present a sophisticated argument in defense of the imperative of moral enhancement. They claim that without moral enhancement, the future of humanity is seriously compromised. The possibility of ultimate harm, caused by a dreadful terrorist attack or by a final unpreventable escalation of the present environmental crisis aggravated by the availability of cognitive enhancement, makes moral enhancement a top priority. It may be considered optimistic to think that our present moral (...) capabilities can be successfully improved by means of moral education, moral persuasion, and fear of punishment. So, without moral enhancement, drastic restrictions on human freedom would become the only alternative to prevent those dramatic potential outcomes. In this article, I will try to show that we still have reason to be less pessimistic and that Persson & Savulescu’s arguments are fortunately unconvincing. (shrink)

A historical and philosophical reassessment of the impact of Aristotle and early-modern Aristotelianism on the development of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant and Aristotle reassesses the prevailing understanding of Kant as an anti-Aristotelian philosopher. Taking epistemology, logic, and methodology to be the key disciplines through which Kant’s transcendental philosophy stood as an independent form of philosophy, Marco Sgarbi shows that Kant drew important elements of his logic and metaphysical doctrines from Aristotelian ideas that were absent in other philosophical traditions, such (...) as the distinction of matter and form of knowledge, the division of transcendental logic into analytic and dialectic, the theory of categories and schema, and the methodological issues of the architectonic. Drawing from unpublished documents including lectures, catalogues, academic programs, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic handbooks that were officially adopted at Königsberg University where Kant taught, Sgarbi further demonstrates the historical and philosophical importance of Aristotle and Aristotelianism to these disciplines from the late sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

We investigate the major mathematical theories of space from a modal standpoint: topology, affine geometry, metric geometry, and vector algebra. This allows us to see new fine-structure in spatial patterns which suggests analogies across these mathematical theories in terms of modal, temporal, and conditional logics. Throughout the modal walk through space, expressive power is analyzed in terms of language design, bisimulations, and correspondence phenomena. The result is both unification across the areas visited, and the uncovering of interesting new questions.

Wittgenstein will seinen "Standpunkt weit draußen einnehmen" und philosophische Probleme mit ethnologischem Blick sehen. Ist seine scharfe Auseinandersetzung mit James Frazers Hauptwerk, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion, eine Einübung in diese "ethnologische Betrachtungsweise"? Brusotti zeigt in seinem Werk,dass Wittgensteins Denken sprach- und kulturphilosophisch neue Horizonte eröffnet.

The distinction between nature and artifice has been definitive for Western conceptions of the role of humans within their natural environment. But the human must already be separated from nature in order to distinguish between nature and artifice. This separation, in turn, facilitates a classification of knowledge in general, typically cast in terms of a hierarchy of sciences that ascends from the natural sciences to the social (or human) sciences. However, this hierarchy considers nature as a substantial foundation upon which (...) artifice operates and to which it responds. Here I examine three inter-related concepts that, by focusing on events rather than substances, operate beyond the nature–artifice distinction and thereby resist the hierarchical classification of the sciences: Foucault’s concept of technology, the concept of milieu as it crosses over historically from physics to biology and anthropology, and Deleuze and Guattari’s reconfiguration of the concept of milieu in terms of their concept of machine. (shrink)

Experimental balance is usually understood as the control for the value of the conditions, other than the one under study, which are liable to affect the result of a test. We discuss three different approaches to balance. ‘Millean balance’ requires identifying and equalizing ex ante the value of these conditions in order to conduct solid causal inferences. ‘Fisherian balance’ measures ex post the influence of uncontrolled conditions through the analysis of variance. In ‘efficiency balance’ the value of the antecedent conditions (...) is decided ex ante according to the efficiency they yield in the estimation of the treatment outcome. Against some old arguments by Worrall, we show that in both Fisherian and efficiency balance there are good reasons to randomize the allocation of treatments, in particular when there is no agreement among experimenters as to the antecedent conditions to be controlled for. (shrink)

Cuando hablamos de iconos nos referimos a representaciones que producen un cierto impacto en nosotros aunque no sean perfectas; del icono se esperan armonía, belleza, simplicidad. Cuando el icono no es una imagen sino una persona humana, se convierte en referente: observamos aspectos de su personalidad con los que nos identificamos aunque nos coincidan exactamente con los nuestros. A lo largo de la historia de la ciencia, las mujeres han sido iconos referenciales fundamentalmente por dos cosas, su calidad humana y (...) su excelencia científica. (shrink)

Munch-Jurisic’s book thoroughly describes several cases of severe distresses reported and expressed by perpetrators of tremendous acts such as mass murders. Arguing against a simplistic reading according to which these signs of distress are straightforward manifestations of some innate moral nature, and against the optimistic reading according to which they will lead to prosocial behaviors, Munch-Jursic offers compelling reasons to adopt a more complex theory of emotion. In this commentary, I aim to stress the implications of her book for the (...) debate on moral enhancement and for emotion theory in general. However, while I concur with Munch-Jurisic that emotion theory must make room for complexity and indeterminacy, I challenge her claim that motivational theories of emotion are ill-equipped to face the challenges she poses. (shrink)

Are concepts stable entities, unchanged from context to context? Or rather are they context-dependent structures, created on the fly? We argue that this does not constitute a genuine dilemma. Our main thesis is that the more a pattern of features is general and shared, the more it qualifies as a concept. Contextualists have not shown that conceptual structures lack a stable, general core, acting as an attractor on idiosyncratic information. What they have done instead is to give a contribution to (...) the comprehension of how conceptual structure organized around such a stable core can produce contextually appropriate representations on demand. (shrink)

Meditation comprises a series of practices mainly developed in eastern cultures aiming at controlling emotions and enhancing attentional processes. Several authors proposed to divide meditation techniques in focused attention and open monitoring techniques. Previous studies have reported differences in brain networks underlying FA and OM. On the other hand common activations across different meditative practices have been reported. Despite differences between forms of meditation and their underlying cognitive processes, we propose that all meditative techniques could share a central process that (...) would be supported by a core network for meditation since their general common goal is to induce relaxation, regulating attention and developing an attitude of detachment from one’s own thoughts. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on activation likelihood estimation of 10 neuroimaging studies on different meditative techniques to evidence the core cortical network subserving meditation. We showed activation of basal ganglia , limbic system and medial prefrontal cortex . We discuss the functional role of these structures in meditation and we tentatively propose a neurocognitive model of meditation that could guide future research. (shrink)

The role of conscious attention in language processing has been scarcely considered, despite the wide-spread assumption that verbal utterances manage to attract and manipulate the addressee’s attention. Here I claim that this assumption is to be understood not as a figure of speech but instead in terms of attentional processes proper. This hypothesis can explain a fact that has been noticed by supporters of Relevance Theory in pragmatics: the special role played by speaker-related information in utterance interpretation. I argue that (...) representation of the speaker in working memory reliably enhances the activation of speaker-related information and, consequently, the role it plays in determining the content of interpretations. (shrink)

My main purpose here is to provide an account of context selection in utterance understanding in terms of the role played by schemata and goals in top-down processing. The general idea is that information is organized hierarchically, with items iteratively organized in chunks—here called “schemata”—at multiple levels, so that the activation of any items spreads to schemata that are the most accessible due to previous experience. The activation of a schema, in turn, activates its other components, so as to predict (...) a likely context for the original item. Since each input activates its own schemata, conflicting schemata compete with (and inhibit) each other, while multiple activations of a schema raise its likelihood to win the competition. There is therefore a double movement—with bottom-up activation of schemata enabling top-down prediction of other contextual components—triggered by multiple sources. Another claim of the paper is that goals are represented by schemata placed at the highest-levels of the executive hierarchy, in accordance with Fuster’s model of the brain as a hierarchically organized perception action cycle. This account can be considered, in part at least, a development of ideas contained in Relevance Theory, though it may imply that some other claims of the theory are in need of revision. Therefore, a secondary purpose of the paper is a contribution to the analysis of that theory. (shrink)

In their attempt to connect the workings of the human mind with their neural realizers, cognitive neuroscientists often bracket out individual differences to build a single, abstract model that purportedly represents (almost) every human being’s brain. In this paper I first examine the rationale behind this model, which I call ‘Platonic Brain Model’. Then I argue that it is to be surpassed in favor of multiple models allowing for patterned inter-individual differences. I introduce the debate on legitimate (and illegitimate) ways (...) of mapping neural structures and cognitive functions, endorsing a view according to which function-structure mapping is context-sensitive. Building on the discussion of the ongoing debate on the function(s) of the so-called Fusiform “Face” Area, I show the necessity of indexing function-structure mappings to some populations of subjects, clustered on the basis of factors such as their expertise in a given domain. (shrink)

In considering what it means to lead organizations effectively and ethically, the literature comprising spirituality at work and spiritual leadership theory has become highly influential, especially in the USA. It has also attracted significant criticism. While in this paper, we endorse this critique, we argue that the strand of literature which purportedly takes a Christian standpoint within the wider SAW school of thought, largely misconstrues and misapplies the teaching of its founder, Jesus. As a result, in dismissing the claims and (...) application of SAW and SLT, there is a real risk that we lose the vital contribution of Christian thought, not least some of the timeless counter-cultural wisdom of Jesus which, we contend, offers a vital foundation to the practice of ethical leadership and business ethics in organizations. In proposing a way forward, two thorny issues which face all leaders are addressed: dealing with ego and closing the gap between what we say and what we do. The more we understand about the dynamics of human nature, the more we learn about the profundity of Jesus’ teachings. We then propose a number of ways in which Jesus-centred ethical leadership can be practised. Each is radical and each implies risk: both the personal risk of inner renewal arising from repentance as a doorway to personal integrity, as well as the risk of opposing unethical practices and promoting the excellence of core practices in the workplace. (shrink)

In his article, ‘Social constructionism and climate science denial’, Hansson claims to present empirical evidence that the cultural theory developed by Dame Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky and ourselves leads to science denial. In this reply, we show that there is no validity to these claims. First, we show that Hansson’s empirical evidence that cultural theory has led to climate science denial falls apart under closer inspection. Contrary to Hansson’s claims, cultural theory has made significant contributions to understanding and addressing climate (...) change. Second, we discuss various features of Douglas’ cultural theory that differentiate it from other constructivist approaches and make it compatible with the scientific method. Thus, we also demonstrate that cultural theory cannot be accused of epistemic relativism. (shrink)

Vṛṣabhadeva’s Sphuṭākṣarā, a commentary on the first chapter of Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya and its Vṛtti, offers a peculiar interpretation of the monistic ideas exposed at the beginning of the mūla text. The reflection on the status of ordinary reality and its relation with the unitary metaphysical principle is particularly interesting. Although according to Bhartṛhari’s perspective the entities of the world are real, the Sphuṭākṣarā offers a more intricate picture in which different degrees of reality seem involved. Furthermore, the author adopts hermeneutical (...) tools that are unusual in Bhartṛhari’s texts, and comparable to those of Advaita Vedānta. In particular, the article will deal with Vṛṣabhadeva’s use of the notion of ‘inexpressibility’, as well as with other concepts which are typical of the scholastic phase of Advaita. In discussing these affinities the paper will also touch upon the problem of Vṛṣabhadeva’s historical collocation. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper explores the possibility of developing a new understanding of the traditional notion of human death as the separation of soul and body by relying on the resources of St Thomas’s hylomorphism. It therefore develops the concept of material kenosis, showing in what way the Thomistic understanding of death should be broadened beyond the mere understanding of it as substantial change. The paper concludes by suggesting that this view of human death supplements St Thomas’s interpretation of the notion of (...) Divine kenosis in Philippians 2:7. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim at identifying a concept of man that can represent a reference point for those who work or supervise social processes characterized by commercial or economic purposes. Economic, management, and organizational theories and ideas have a large impact on the way we think of ourselves, and we act accordingly. By making a radical departure from the ontological assumptions, this paper proposes a shifting of the current paradigm in terms of how we theorize about man. In order (...) to do this, we analyze the ontological level of the relationship between the idea of happiness and the concept of man from medieval scholastics, and the relationship between the idea of happiness and functionalism in social science. We first prove the formal equivalence between the structures of human choice as described in the qq. 6–21 Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the model of problem-solving behavior as conceptualized in popular management models. Then we show that the Aquinas theory of action could provide a more adequate view of economy and business in the sociocultural and environmental context in which they operate. Finally, we present the implications of this study for management theory, practice, and education. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz möchte den Beitrag der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls zur Debatte über die Fundierung der Geisteswissenschaft in groben Zügen enthüllen. Zunächst wird eine schematische Zusammenfassung der aus der deutschen Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts stammenden Debatte über die Fundierung der Geisteswissenschaften dargeboten. Dies soll dazu dienen, den philosophisch-historischen Hintergrund, in den Husserls Denkmotiv über die Beziehung zwischen Phänomenologie und Geisteswissenschaften eingebunden ist, zu begreifen. Danach wird Husserls Beitrag in dieser Debatte abgewägt, wobei im Besonderen die neuen Begriffe und Denkmotive, die von (...) ihm in die Diskussion eingefügt wurden, nämlich der der regionalen Ontologie und der der personalistischen Einstellung, betrachtet werden. Dieser zweite und letzte Teil schließt mit einer Erörterung des von Husserl angegebenen Vorrangs der Geisteswissenschaften und des Geistes als ihr Korrelat, vor den Naturwissenschaften ab. (shrink)

The paper presents a critique of Marcuse’s theory of “false needs”. It aims to clear the theoretical ground necessary to sketch out an immanent critique of the socio-economical dynamics that dictate the exhausting, and oft endless postponement of the satisfaction of a multiplicity of mass needs and desires. The paper focuses its attention on some paradoxes produced by Marcuse’s theory, correlated in particular with the critique of the wellbeing of the masses, and with the manipulative superpower ascribed to ideology. These (...) paradoxes are interpreted as expressions of a radical distance between critic and the social reality and of a paternalistic drift, which can both be overcome by the introduction of a immanent critique. -/- Il contributo presenta una critica della teoria dei “falsi bisogni” di Marcuse. Tale critica è volta a liberare lo spazio teorico necessario per impostare una critica immanente delle dinamiche socio-economiche che impongono un estenuante e spesso infinito differimento della soddisfazione di una molteplicità di desideri e bisogni di massa. Ci si sofferma su alcuni paradossi generati dalla teoria di Marcuse, correlati in particolare alla critica rivolta al benessere raggiunto dalle masse, ed allo strapotere manipolatorio attribuito all’ideologia. Tali paradossi vengono interpretati come espressione di un radicale distacco tra il critico e la realtà sociale, e di una sua deriva paternalistica, che possono essere superati attraverso l’adozione di una critica di tipo immanente. (shrink)

(2013). Distributed intentionality: A model of intentional behavior in humans. Philosophical Psychology: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 267-290. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2011.641743.

The opposition between behaviour- and mind-reading accounts of data on infants and non-human primates could be less dramatic than has been thought up to now. In this paper, I argue for this thesis by analysing a possible neuro-computational explanation of early mind-reading, based on a mechanism of associative generalization which is apt to implement the notion of mental states as intervening variables proposed by Andrew Whiten. This account allows capturing important continuities between behaviour-reading and mind-reading, insofar as both are supposed (...) to be just different kinds of generalization from perceptual experience. Specifically, I will argue that the projection of inner experiences to others which is involved in early mind-reading does not imply a computational leap beyond associative generalization from perceptual experience. (shrink)