Cultured meat is a lab grown product that aims to tackle the cravings of omnivores who struggle to switch to a plant-based diet, while still being friendly to animals and the environment. Possibly, in time, the curiosity to apply this technology towards human meat production will emerge. However, when presented with the thought of eating cultured human meat potential consumers’ reaction greatly varies from pure disgust to indifference to excitement. This instinctive response indicates a lack of preformed judgements towards the (...) topic. Without a clear vision on the possibility of cultured human meat, scattered and uncertain regulations will fail to uphold paramount moral values. The risk is that we would either dig into this option out of excitement, or ban it without convincing motivations. The ethical theories of deontology and consequentialism can be followed to investigate this divisive issue. With an evaluation based on disgust I argue that the deontological perspective is mostly concerned with values of identity and humanness, while with a chain-reaction reasoning I argue that consequentialism would be concerned with health safety, privacy and equality. I conclude that cultured human meat is not acceptable. (shrink)

According to the extended cognition thesis, an agent’s cognitive system can sometimes include extracerebral components amongst its physical constituents. Here, we show that such a view of cognition has an unjustifiably anthropocentric focus, for it tends to depict cognitive extensions as a human-only affair. In contrast, we will argue that if human cognition extends, then the cognition of many non-human animals extends too, for many non-human animals rely on the same cognition-extending strategies humans rely on. To substantiate this claim, we (...) will proceed as follows. First (Sect. 1), we will introduce the extended cognition thesis, exposing its anthropocentric bias. Then, we will show that humans and many non-human animals rely on the same cognition-extending strategies. To do so, we will discuss a variety of case studies, including “intrabodily” cognitive extensions such as the spinal cord (Sect. 2), the widespread reliance on epistemic actions to solve cognitive tasks (Sect. 3) and cases of animal cognitive offloading (Sect. 4). We’ll then allay some worries our claim might raise (Sect. 5) to then conclude the paper (Sect. 6). (shrink)

With reference to an already existing and relatively widespread use of the expression in question, mathematical “thought experiments” (“TEs”) involve mathematical reasoning in which visualisation plays a relatively more important role. But to ensure an unambiguous and consistent use of the term, certain conditions have to be met: (1) Contrary to what has happened so far in the literature, the distinction between logical-formal thinking and experimental-operational thinking must not be ignored; (2) The separation between the context of discovery and the (...) context of justification is to be rejected, at least in one of the main senses in which it was defended by the logical empiricists and Popper (this excludes any position which, ascribing to mathematical TEs only a heuristic role, regards them an intermediate step to attain more traditional forms of rigour); (3) The distinction between mathematical TEs and formal proofs must be regarded as one of degree, and not as a qualitative one, although this distinction may be used in a de facto way for particular or local purposes. (shrink)

What is at the heart of political resistance? Whilst traditional accounts often conceptualise it as a reaction to power, this volume (prioritising remarks by Michel Foucault) invites us to think of resistance as primary. The author proposes a strategic analysis that highlights how our efforts need to be redirected towards a horizon of creation and change. This text combines a range of political and philosophical scholarship and provides an innovative rethinking of Foucault's model of power relations that leads towards a (...) new autonomism for the 21st century. (shrink)

Avec les consommations d’énergies fossiles et les émissions de gaz à effet de serre reparties à la hausse, le « monde d’après » ressemble terriblement à l’extractivisme d’avant. Et pourtant, des paramètres se sont déplacés à l’occasion de la pandémie et de son confinement planétaire. Une mutation s’est précipitée dans notre rapport aux énergies fossile.

Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2013.804645.

The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of the contributions made by Livio Rossetti to the methodologies of inquiry into ancient philosophical thought, with a specific focus on the hermeneutical tools he has developed over the course of his extensive research activity. This article will examine, in particular, the concept of “virtual philosophy” and of other “tools of the trade,” which the scholar has further refined within his latest book, Ripensare i presocratici.

We investigated motor resonance in children using a priming paradigm. Participants were asked to judge the weight of an object shortly primed by a hand in an action-related posture or a non action-related one . The hand prime could belong to a child or to an adult. We found faster response times when the object was preceded by a grasp hand posture . More crucially, participants were faster when the prime was a child’s hand, suggesting that it could belong to (...) their body schema, particularly when the child’s hand was followed by a light object . A control experiment helped us to clarify the role of the hand prime. To our knowledge this is the first behavioral evidence of motor simulation and motor resonance in children. Implications of the results for the development of the sense of body ownership and for conceptual development are discussed. (shrink)

In book 8 of his Naturalis historia, Pliny the Elder mentions the particularly savage character of some monkeys. Most editions and translations of Pliny’s text maintain that the reference to the fierce nature of these animals concerns both the cynocephali and the satyri. However, in the manuscript Riccardianus 488 (R in the transmission of Pliny), a second hand, contemporary to the period in which the text was copied, added supra lineam the obscure term *miarsima, which would refer to the nature (...) of the satyri in opposition to that of the cynocephali. By examining part of the ancient zoological and geographic traditions, in particular the De natura animalium by Aelian, this article defends editing the text of Pliny with the adjective mitissima, already present in the first printed editions of the Naturalis historia, as follows: Efferatior cynocephalis natura sicut mitissima satyris. (shrink)

Fin dalle origini la filosofia occidentale ha cercato di liberare il pensiero dall'enorme scandalo rappresentato dal nulla assoluto, proibendo persino di nominarlo (Parmenide), oppure volgendo lo sguardo da un'altra parte (ad esempio Platone e Heidegger, verso la differenza rispettivamente ontica e ontologica), o mostrandone la auto-negazione (Severino). Questo libro propone un modo nuovo di avvicinarsi al "non-essere" e alla sua aporia: un modo che, invece di eliminarlo dal pensiero, afferma la libertà del nulla da ogni forma di negazione. Si tratta, (...) certo, di raddoppiare lo scandalo, tanto da mettere in questione anche il linguaggio stesso, dove già solo la parola nulla si costituisce "via negationis (nec-ulla)". Ma il presente saggio indica un ripensamento radicale del legame tra il nulla e la negazione proprio per tentare di risolvere l'aporia, articolandola attraverso una struttura diversa da quella tradizionale, sebbene la forma dell'argomentazione resti fondata sulla logica della non contraddizione -/- [dalla prefazione di Emanuele Severino] «Nei miei scritti l’assolutamente innegabile è chiamato “struttura originaria” […] Appartengono alla struttura originaria anche le aporie che sorgono al suo interno […] Anche queste aporie non possono che essere apparenti, ma, anche qui, la loro presenza e la loro risoluzione accresce la concretezza - non l’innegabilità! - dell’assolutamente innegabile. Il libro di Marco Simionato, che sono lieto di presentare, appartiene a questa forma di discorso aporetico, che viene da lui sviluppato con lucidità e grande perizia, capace com’è di muoversi in mezzo a tematiche di complessità e difficoltà quanto mai rilevanti». (shrink)

Pochi pensatori – o forse nessuno – occupano nella storiografia filosofica di Karl Löwith una posizione strategica tanto rilevante quanto Friedrich Nietzsche e Jacob Burckhardt. Le ricerche löwithiane sono dunque importanti in un doppio senso: tanto come letteratura critica sull’uno e sull’altro autore (e sul loro celebre rapporto), quanto nell’economia complessiva dello stesso pensiero di Löwith. L’articolo proverà a evidenziare tale doppia pregnanza attraverso la ricostruzione di due livelli interpretativi, che non si escludono ma anzi si compenetrano a vicenda. Un (...) primo e più evidente piano, spesso considerato dagli interpreti, illustrerà la lettura löwithiana come un passaggio esistenziale dall’estremismo di Nietzsche alla disincantata moderazione di Burckhardt. A un secondo e meno ovvio livello, la posizione löwithiana sembra in grado di accogliere, almeno potenzialmente, Nietzsche e Burckhardt quali riferimenti complementari, ai fini di una convincente postura nei confronti della storia e del mondo storico. (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)

En este estudio se presentan las líneas directrices de una investigación que se propone analizar el sentido y el significado que se otorga a los conceptos de “bien común” e “interés general” en la retórica de los poderes públicos de nuestro tiempo. A continuación, trata de dar respuesta al interrogante de si ambos conceptos son perfectamente intercambiables en el debate público o, por el contrario, estamos ante conceptos que proceden de presupuestos antagónicos.

Terms of service of on-line platforms too often contain clauses that are potentially unfair to the consumer. We present an experimental study where machine learning is employed to automatically detect such potentially unfair clauses. Results show that the proposed system could provide a valuable tool for lawyers and consumers alike.

According to a widely shared interpretation, research employing spontaneous-response false belief tasks demonstrates that infants as young as 15 months attribute (false) beliefs. In contrast with this conclusion, I advance an alternative reading of the empirical data. I argue that infants constantly form and update their expectations about others’ behaviour and that this ability extends in the course of development to reflect an appreciation of what others can and cannot see. These basic capacities account for infants’ performance in spontaneous-response false (...) belief tasks without the need to assume the existence of a cognitive module specific for mental state attribution. My proposal suggests a plausible explanatory strategy for the problem of the representational format of the information processed in spontaneous-response false belief tasks. (shrink)

O presente artigo propõe uma interpretação deflacionista para a doutrina da essência absolutamente considerada , apresentada por Tomás de Aquino no opúsculo "De ente et essentia". O norte do trabalho é a análise das expressões reduplicativas que são constantemente utilizadas pelo Doutor Angélico para designar as EAC's. Portanto, pretendo mostrar que a EAC é a consideração dos predicados essenciais, que se predicam das expressões reduplicadas, diferentemente da noção acidental de existência. Por isso, a EAC não existe nem no intelecto nem (...) na realidade, o que, dito em outras palavras, significa apenas que "existir no intelecto" e "existir na realidade" são predicados acidentais em relação às essências apreendidas abstrativamente pela mente. This paper proposes a deflationist interpretation of the doctrine of the Nature as such, which Thomas Aquinas exposes in his work "De ente et essentia". The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of reduplicative expressions used by Aquinas to refer nature as such. Hence, I will show that the nature as such is the consideration of the essential properties predicated by the reduplicative expressions, diverse from the accidental notion of 'existence'. Consequently, nature as such does not exist in the intellect and do not exist in reality, for in other words 'existing in the intellect' and 'existing in the reality' are accidental predicates when attributed to essences grasped by the mind. (shrink)

According to a widely shared view, experience plays only a limited role in children's acquisition of the capacity to pass the false belief test: at most, it facilitates or attunes the development of mindreading abilities from infancy to early childhood. Against the facilitation—and also the maturation—hypothesis, I report empirical data attesting that children and even adults never come to understand false beliefs when deprived of proper social and linguistic interaction. In contrast to the attunement hypothesis, I argue that alleged mindreading (...) abilities in infancy differ significantly from those required to pass the false belief test at age four. I conclude that children's success in the false belief test reflects the acquisition of a novel psychological competence, and argue that social experience in the form of conversation about mental states teaches children to exploit belief reports to predict intelligent behaviour, and induces their acquisition of a capacity to recognize and track others' beliefs across contexts. (shrink)

In the framework of contemporary cosmology, the age-old aspiration to inquire the outer limits of the universe translates into our effort to observe the initial stages of cosmic history. Thanks to a fortunate combination of astronomical circumstances, and pushing mm-wave technology to its limits, today we are able to image the early universe in great detail, back at a time when cosmic age was only 0.0027% of its present value. The state of the art in the field has been set (...) by the ESA Planck mission, launched in 2009, dedicated to precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background. Planck observed the full sky for 4 years in a wide frequency range, reaching μK sensitivity both in temperature and polarization. The latest results, published by the Planck Collaboration in 2018, are in exquisite agreement with the simplest 6-parameter ΛCDM model and constrain the main cosmological parameters with percent-level accuracy. Furthermore, the Planck data yield insight on the very early universe, opening the way to a new generation of experiments searching for the possible signatures of primordial gravitational waves in the CMB polarization pattern. (shrink)

This paper replies to objections that have been raised against my operational-Kantian account of thought experiments by Fehige 2012 and 2013. Fehige also sketches an alternative Neo-Kantian account that utilizes Michael Friedman’s concept of a contingent and changeable a priori. To this I shall reply, first, that Fehige’s objections not only neglect some fundamental points I had made as regards the realizability of TEs, but also underestimate the principle of empiricism, which was rightly defended by Kant. Secondly, in opposition to (...) what he states, my account does not differ in a very essential way from the empiricist solutions either as regards the power of TEs to predict something new about empirical reality, or as regards the criteria for telling apart good from bad TEs. Thirdly, in the light of the Kantian definition of the a priori, Friedman’s corresponding notion is contrary both to the spirit and to the letter of Kant’s philosophy; moreover, from a theoretical point of view, a material a priori is theoretically untenable since, counter to Friedman’s own intentions, it leads to relativism. -/- . (shrink)

Embodiment and embeddedness define an attractive framework to the study of cognition. I discuss whether theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute mental states to others to predict and explain their behaviour, fits these two principles. In agreement with available evidence, embodied cognitive processes may underlie the earliest manifestations of social cognitive abilities such as infants’ selective behaviour in spontaneous-response false belief tasks. Instead, late theory-of-mind abilities, such as the capacity to pass the (elicited-response) false belief test at age (...) four, depend on children’s ability to explain people’s reasons to act in conversation with adults. Accordingly, rather than embodied, late theory-of-mind abilities are embedded in an external linguistic practice. (shrink)

Why, for such a long time, has there been no Kantian point of view among the most influential theories about thought experiments? The primary historical reason – the main trends in the philosophy of science have always rejected the existence of a priori knowledge – fits a theoretical reason. Kant oscillated between two very different views about the a priori: on the one hand, he attributed to it a particular content, whereas on the other hand he insisted on its purely (...) formal character. The first interpretation of the a priori was one-sidedly developed by Ørsted and led to his untenable notion of thought experiment. The other interpretation, however, can be further developed into new Kantian theories of thought experiments in the natural sciences and in philosophy. (shrink)

The operational perspective here defended permits a reflexive-transcendental point of view that sharply distinguishes the two concepts, while, at the same time, maintaining the connection between them. On the one hand, simply imagining that the experimental apparatus, counterfactually anticipated in a thought experiment, has really been constructed is sufficient to erase any difference between thought and real experiments. On the other hand, this very ‘imagining’, this capacity of the mind to assume every real entity as a possible entity, underpins the (...) difference in principle – a properly transcendental difference – between thought and real experiments. This difference, however, implies the intimate association between experiment and thought experiment: All thought experiments must be thought of as translatable into real ones, and all real experiments as realisations of thought ones. What thought experiments have over and above real experiments is the mere fact that they exist in a purely hypothetical sphere; what real have over and above thought experiments is the mere fact that they overstep the sphere of the possible, in the experiment’s real execution. (shrink)