pt. I. Matter: 1. Philosophy as worldview ; 2. Classical matter: bodies and fields ; 3. Quantum matter: weird but real ; 4. General concept of matter: to be is to become ; 5. Emergence and levels ; 6. Naturalism ; 7. Materialism -- pt. II. Mind: 8. The mind-body problem ; 9. Minding matter: the plastic brain ; 10. Mind and society ; 11. Cognition, consciousness, and free will ; 12. Brain and computer: the hardware/software dualism ; 13. Knowledge: (...) genuine and bogus -- pt. III. Appendices: 14. Appendix A: Objects ; 15. Appendix B. Truths. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationships between prescription and description in legal rules. The analysis will focus on the culture-laden connotations of factual categories implied in all legal sentences and/or provisions. This investigation is spurred by the need to assess the impact of cultural difference in people’s understanding of legal imperatives and, symmetrically, how that impact is to be considered in the application of law. Differences in ways of categorizing the world could position the cultural pre-understanding required by law, and the (...) pluralism recognized and protected by constitutional principles and human/fundamental rights discourse, at a crossroads. Hence, even when we find an illegitimacy or an ignorance about what legal rules do not explicitly state but instead implicitly presuppose, this does not exclude that behind that ignorance there may be something worthy of legal protection. A question emerges: is it legitimate and reasonable to consider the ignorantia facti resulting from differing ways of categorizing the factual world as automatically and uncritically subject to the principle ignoratia legis non excusat? The essay continues with an assessment of the possible consequences of ignorantia facti in the administration of justice in multicultural societies and migration contexts. For this purpose, the opportunity for an intercultural use of law—including within national law—will be considered as a means of avoiding the discriminatory application of ignorantia facti. This topic will be addressed by leveraging both semiotic and cultural-anthropological analytical tools, including the well-known greimasien “contrat de véridiction”. (shrink)

Deployment Realism resists Laudan’s and Lyons’ objections to the “No Miracle Argument” by arguing that a hypothesis is most probably true when it is deployed essentially in a novel prediction. However, Lyons criticized Psillos’ criterion of essentiality, maintaining that Deployment Realism should be committed to all the actually deployed assumptions. But since many actually deployed assumptions proved false, he concludes that the No Miracle Argument and Deployment Realism fail. I reply that the essentiality condition is required by Occam’s razor. In (...) fact, there is a simpler formulation of essentiality which escapes Lyons’ criticisms and rescues the No Miracle Argument and Deployment Realism from their purported historical counterexamples: a hypothesis is essential when it has no proper parts (in Yablo’s sense) sufficient to derive the same prediction. Although essentiality so conceived cannot be detected prospectively, this is just natural, and it is not a problem but an advantage for Deployment Realism. (shrink)

We propose a method of learning indicative conditional information. An agent learns conditional information by Jeffrey imaging on the minimally informative proposition expressed by a Stalnaker conditional. We show that the predictions of the proposed method align with the intuitions in Douven, 239–263 2012)’s benchmark examples. Jeffrey imaging on Stalnaker conditionals can also capture the learning of uncertain conditional information, which we illustrate by generating predictions for the Judy Benjamin Problem.

We use a lab experiment to examine whether and how leaders influence workers’ (un)ethical behavior through financial reporting choices. We randomly assign the role of leaders or workers to subjects, who can choose to report an outcome via automatic or self-reporting. Self-reporting allows for profitable and undetectable earnings manipulation. We vary the leaders’ ability to choose the reporting method and to punish workers. We show that workers are more likely to choose automatic reporting when their leader voluntarily does so and (...) can assign punishment. Even workers who choose self-reporting tend to cheat less when their leader chooses automatic reporting. Nonetheless, most leaders do not opt for automatic reporting in the first place: they often choose self-reporting and punish workers who rather choose automatic reporting. Collectively, our results reveal a dual effect of leadership on ethical behaviors in organizations: workers behave more ethically if their leader makes ethical choices, but often leaders do not make ethical choices in the first place. Hence, leading by example can backfire. (shrink)

Against certain positivistic and neopositivistic strictures still rooted in our society, Agazzi argues that knowing the invisible is possible, not just in science, but also in metaphysics, in morals, in aesthetics, and in other areas, including, in a sense, religion. The book also examines many examples of such knowledge, surveying not only the great classics of philosophy, but various immortal masterpieces of art, music and literature. It is not just a treatise in epistemology, but a book of philosophy in the (...) most complete and traditional sense, for it discusses knowledge not only for its own sake, but also as a guide to culture, morality, happiness and to the sense of life. Thus, it also provides some important suggestions on how to face our time of crisis and an uncertain future. Despite Agazzi’s proverbial rigor and clarity, his project is so momentous and demanding that I discuss certain points which might deserve further explication and argumentation. (shrink)

This essay, between serious and facetious, addresses an apparently secondary implication of the planetary tragedy produced by Covid-19. It coincides with the ‘problem of the veil,’ a bone of contention in Islam/West relationships. More specifically, it will address the question of why the pandemic has changed the proxemics of public spaces and the grammar of ‘living together.’ For some time—and it is not possible to foresee how much—in many countries people cannot go out, or enter any public places, without wearing (...) a sanitary mask. In short, almost all of us, by obligation or by urgent advice from the public authorities of the various countries, will not live the public sphere with our faces uncovered. The alteration of the social context affecting many Western countries will inevitably involve also the ‘local’ perception of the Islamic veil and—as a matter of equality—the consistency of the prohibition of wearing it. What will thus become of the ban on wearing it in public places established by some countries such as France and asseverated by the ECHR? If everyone can and will have to go around with their faces covered, why should only Islamic women be discriminated against? Will not the change in boundary conditions produced by Covid-19 also induce Western people to re-categorize the meaning of the veil? And will this re-categorization not directly affect the ‘fact’ of wearing the veil, that is, its empirical perception? And still, will this psycho-semantic change not show how empirical perceptions are cultural constructs rather than ‘objective facts,’ as such allegedly independent from the observer’s point of view? Consequentially, will the plurality of perceptions and cultural meanings related to the gesture of covering one’s own face not gain renewed relevance in determining the legitimacy of wearing the veil? The socio-semantic earthquake produced by Covid-19 compels us to rethink this and other issues orbiting around the translation of ‘facts’ into legal language; furthermore, it highlights the instrumentality of many ideological/partisan and ethnocentric assumptions passed off as objectivity regarding those alleged ‘facts.’ The essay will attempt to provide an answer to the above questions by proposing a semiotic-legal approach to intercultural conflicts and, indirectly, the pluralism in law. (shrink)

The Bible recounts that in Eden, Adam gives names to all the animals. But those names are not only representations of the animals’ nature, rather they shape and constitute it. The naming by Adam contains in itself the divide between the human and non-human. Then, there is the Fall: Adam falls and forgets Being. Though he may still remember the names he gave to the animals in Eden, he is no longer sure about their meaning. Adam will have to try (...) to remember his own intentions. Through this effort he can also become aware of how he thinks, who he is, and what was the natural order he knew before the Fall. Medieval bestiaries tell us this story. Bestiaries are works of word play populated by animal figures. They depend on back-and-forth anthropomorphization, or circular metaphor. Animal figures are portrayed as both a mirror of human nature and a window on it. Bestiaries served as means for the moral education of human beings and, at the same time, a way to criticize the current state of humanity, including political and ethical habits. Within the moral irony of medieval bestiaries we can find the origin of the invented nature that modernity will try, subsequently, to insert into natural rights discourse through the teleological oxymoron of their naturalized and naturalizing counter-factuality. I will propose a historical-semiotic journey through the ironic representations of the human-beasts from the ancient world to contemporaneity. The proposal resulting from this cultural excursion is that the words included in the many national and international Rights declarations operate much like the names Adam gave to the animals and still more as they were re-read in medieval bestiaries, both textual and musical. So, can the words of Rights still serve as musical scores, open to an infinite play of re-signification? If we were able to overcome the modern culture/nature and human being/animal dualisms, we could cast, today as in the past, a zoological gaze on human rights by means of contemporary bestiaries and, in this way, perhaps find the gist of rights’ names and our ever regained and ever lost again humanity. (shrink)

Quantum electrodynamics presents intrinsic limitations in the description of physical processes that make it impossible to recover from it the type of description we have in classical electrodynamics. Hence one cannot consider classical electrodynamics as reducing to quantum electrodynamics and being recovered from it by some sort of limiting procedure. Quantum electrodynamics has to be seen not as a more fundamental theory, but as an upgrade of classical electrodynamics, which permits an extension of classical theory to the description of phenomena (...) that, while being related to the conceptual framework of the classical theory, cannot be addressed from the classical theory. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature of bureaucratization within public research bodies and its relationship to scientific performance, focusing on an Italian case-study. The main finding is that the bureaucratization of the research sector has two dimensions: public research labs have academic bureaucratization since researchers spend an increasing part of their time in administrative matters (i.e., preparing grant applications, managing grants/projects, and so on); whereas universities mainly have administrative bureaucratization generated by the increase over time of (...) administrative staff in comparison with researchers and faculty. In addition, I show that research units with higher bureaucratization have lower scientific performance. (shrink)

El merito mayor de esta obra reside en su amplio espectro de contenidos relevantes y en su estructura inteligente, confiable y clara. De este volumen se aprende muchisimo, puede ser utilizado como columna vertebral de un curso o por una persona inteligente que desee iniciarse en cualquiera de las disciplinas que trata. Reitero: calidad y erudicion son sus principales meritos.

This paper assesses the novelty of NSMs - or better, of any social and political movement in contemporary Western societies - in the light of their capacity to develop systems of relationships which cut across established social and political cleavages. It illustrates first the relational bases of Rokkan's concept of cleavage, and its contribution to the understanding of social movements; it then shows how Simmel's concept of the intersection of social circles and his distinction between concentric and crosscutting circles may (...) be fruitfully applied to the analysis of political cleavages and their changing forms. In the conclusions, the elements of an approach to the study of the newness of social movements, based on the integration of Rokkan's and Simmel's principles, are introduced. (shrink)

Es ist schwierig, Kant in der Frage der Willensfreiheit eine der heute üblichen philosophischen Sichtweisen zuzuordnen. Mithilfe des »transzendentalen Idealismus« meint Kant im Ergebnis die Vereinbarkeit von Freiheit und Naturnotwendigkeit begründen zu können. Zugleich hält er an einem Verständnis von Freiheit fest, demzufolge Freiheit »absolute Spontaneität« verlangt und deshalb nicht im Naturnotwendigen aufgehen kann. Seine Antwort verweist mit der Unterscheidung von »Ding an sich« und »Erscheinung« auf zwei verschiedene »Welten« oder »Standpunkte«, von denen aus unser Handeln beschrieben werden kann – (...) einerseits als absolut frei, andererseits als naturnotwendig. Wie wichtig Kant gerade dieses Ergebnis seiner Kritik war, wurde von ihm wiederholt unterstrichen und in der Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage der Kritik der reinen Vernunft sogar zum eigentlichen Ziel des kritischen Projekts erhoben. Doch obwohl die kantische Philosophie sich einer verbreiteten Anerkennung erfreut, sind heutzutage die wenigsten bereit, Freiheit in einer Welt der »Dinge an sich« zu verorten. Die Gründe dafür liegen zum Teil in einer Neigung zum philosophischen Naturalismus, zum Teil in einem veränderten Verständnis von Freiheit, vor allem aber in einer grundsätzlichen Skepsis im Hinblick auf ehrgeizige metaphysische Theorien. Der vorliegende Band diskutiert Kants Freiheitstheorie in exegetischer und systematischer Hinsicht. Die Autoren stellen unter anderem folgende Fragen: Was genau hat Kant mit der Unterscheidung von »Ding an sich« und »Erscheinung« im Sinn? Wie soll sie die Möglichkeit transzendentaler Freiheit sichern? Gelingt das, wenn man die Unterscheidung akzeptiert? Ist der transzendentale Idealismus überhaupt eine kohärente Theorie? Was bleibt von Kants Freiheitstheorie und seiner Metaphysik des transzendentalen Idealismus? Inhaltsübersicht: Mario Brandhorst, Andree Hahmann, Bernd Ludwig: Einleitung - Dietmar H. Heidemann: Über Kants These: »Denn, sind Erscheinungen Dinge an sich selbst, so ist Freiheit nicht zu retten« - Tobias Rosefeldt: Kants Kompatibilismus –Jochen Bojanowski: Ist Kant ein Kompatibilist? - Andree Hahmann: Ist Freiheit die »Wahrheit der Notwendigkeit«? Das Ding an sich als Grund der Erscheinung bei Kant – Geert Keil: Kann man nichtzeitliche Verursachung verstehen? Kausalitätstheoretische Anmerkungen zu Kants Freiheitsantinomie – Mario Brandhorst: Woran scheitert Kants Freiheitstheorie? – Kenneth Westphal: Kants positive Verteidigung der Urteils- und Handlungsfreiheit, und zwar ohne transzendentalen Idealismus - Heiner Klemme: Spontaneität und Selbsterkenntnis. Kant über die ursprüngliche Einheit von Natur und Freiheit im Aktus des Denkens – Bernd Ludwig: Was weiß ich vom Ich? Kants Lehre vom Faktum der reinen praktischen Vernunft, seine Neufassung der Paralogismen und die verborgenen Fortschritte der Kritischen Metaphysik im Jahre 1786 – Reinhard Brandt: »Sei ein rechtlicher Mensch « – wie das? - Dieter Schönecker: Kants Grundlegung über den bösen Willen. Eine kommentarische Interpretation von GMS III 457,25-458,5 – Susanne Brauer: Alternative zu Kant? Freiheit nach Hegel in den Grundlinien zur Philosophie des Rechts. (shrink)

The currently most plausible version of scientific realism is probably “deployment” realism, based on various contributions in the recent literature, and worked out as a unitary account in Psillos. According to it we can believe in the at least partial truth of theories, because that is the best explanation of their predictive success, and discarded theories which had novel predictive success had nonetheless some true parts, those necessary to derive their novel predictions. According to Doppelt this account cannot withstand the (...) antirealist objections based on the “pessimistic meta-induction” and Laudan’s historical counterexamples. Moreover it is incomplete, as it purports to explain the predictive success of theories, but overlooks the necessity to explain also their explanatory success. Accordingly, he proposes a new version of realism, presented as the best explanation of both predictive and explanatory success, and committed only to the truth of best current theories, not of the discarded ones. Here I argue that Doppelt has not shown that deployment realism as it stands cannot solve the problems raised by the history of science, explaining explanatory success does not add much to explaining novel predictive success, and a realism confined to current theories is implausible, and actually the easiest prey to the pessimistic meta-induction argument. (shrink)

Dans l’histoire et le débat autour de l’anthropologie philosophique allemande du XXe siècle, l’œuvre et le destin du médecin juif-allemand Paul Alsberg (1883-1965) constituent un véritable cas qui permit d’interroger la genèse et la validité de l’anthropologie philosophique même. En suivant Joachim Fischer, on entend ici par « Philosophische Anthropologie » une orientation de la pensée du XXe siècle, dont le fil rouge offre une réponse originale à la « destruction de l’idéalisme pendant le XI...

Decoding the human genome in the past decades has brought into focus a computationally intensive operation through DNA profiling. The typical search space for these kinds of problems is extremely large and requires specialized hardware and algorithms to perform the necessary sequence analysis. In this paper, we propose an innovative and scalable approach to exact multi-pattern matching of nucleotide sequences by harnessing the massively parallel computing power found in commodity graphical processing units. Our approach places careful consideration on preprocessing of (...) DNA datasets and runtime performance, while exploiting the full capabilities of the heterogeneous platform it runs on. Finally, we evaluate our models against real-world DNA sequences. (shrink)

The present paper provides a comparative analysis of imperial and canonical legislation concerning the abduction of lay or consecrated women in the 4th century, when both legislations delineated the distinctive features of the abovementioned crimen. The imperial law showed both an extreme severity towards abductors and a leniency towards lay and consecrated women, who were considered innocent; however, women were not allowed to live together with their abductors. The canonical legislation also severely punished abductors and considered lay women innocent; however, (...) contrary to the provisions in the civil laws, the ecclesiastical legislation condemned consecrated women who consented to abduction. The paper aims to reconstruct the basic outline of both legislative systems and to identify a set of key features that might describe female submission to both the will of male members of the family and to the provisions in the canonical laws: indeed, the consent to abduction often represented an extreme attempt on the part of women to determine their own lives. (shrink)

In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law’s experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational (...) and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that ‘law makes its facts.’ Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what ‘law is’ but also on ‘how’ it unwinds through, and _in spite of_, environmental and semantic transformations. (shrink)

The framework for this contribution is the transformation of the textual community, namely, modern society, into a digital community, in other words, a network society. This paper analyzes two theses. The first holds that the text, due to its genetic and historic nature, is always IMMUTABLE, STABLE, and never mobile. For this reason, the text represents the foundational element of a specific society, modern society. The second thesis is based on the assertion that within information and hypertext technologies two diverse (...) views confront and contrast each other. I locate these tendencies in the following key words: “dream” (Nelson) and “intellect” (Engelbart). Hypertext technology and culture represent the most transformative location and agency, they are the actors of the paradigm shift in which we are implicated. The hypertext revolution is based on the criticism of and attack against the material supports of writing and reading, as well as typographic technologies. Hypertext fights and wins this battle. However, hypertext technology is not able to reach the deep structure of alphabetic culture that is made not only of material support but also mental and bodily experience, consolidated and evolving, and of social relationships that are implied in the materiality of the support. La cornice di riferimento di questo contributo è la trasformazione della società testuale, cioè della società moderna, in società digitale, ovvero nella società dei network. Nell’intervento vengono analizzate due tesi: la prima afferma che il testo, per sua natura genetica e storica, è sempre IMMUTABILE, STABILE e non è mai mobile e per questo è fondativo di una società specifica, quella che noi chiamiamo la società moderna. La seconda tesi si basa sull’assunto che all’interno della cultura informatica e tecnologica che genera gli ipertesti si confrontano e si scontrano due idee diverse. Identifico queste due tendenze nelle parole chiave: dream (Nelson) e intellect (Engelbart). La tecnologia e la cultura ipertestuale sono il luogo e l’agente più fortemente trasformativi, gli attori del cambio di paradigma che ci coinvolge. La rivoluzione ipertestuale ha le sue basi nell’attacco e nella critica dei supporti materiali della scrittura e della lettura e sulle tecnologie tipografiche. L’ipertesto combatte e vince questa battaglia. La tecnologia ipertestuale non riesce però a raggiungere la struttura profonda della cultura alfabetica che è composta non solo da supporti ma da esperienze sia della mente sia del corpo, da relazioni sociali consolidate e mutanti che sono sottese e operanti con la materialità del supporto. (shrink)

1. Chiarificazione e valutazione. H.L.A. Hart è stato uno dei più influenti filosofi del diritto del ventesimo secolo. In particolare nei paesi di lingua inglese, i suoi scritti sono stati a lungo il punto di riferimento per gli studiosi della disciplina. Tale opinione è largamente diffusa, anche tra coloro – e non sono pochi – che ne hanno criticato, talvolta in modo severo, i lavori. Di recente questo primato è stato messo in discussione per via della crescente attenzione suscitata dal (...) pens... (shrink)

The article has three parts. The first is devoted to the analysis of some features of Italian philosophy that might be used to explain why analytic philosophy of politics, and analytic philosophy in general, has few practitioners. The second part gives an explanation of the relatively small audience Rawls has among liberals in Italy. Some features of the Italian liberal tradition might be helpful in explaining this fact; hence a short presentation of these features (as exemplified by Croce) is outlined. (...) The third part deals with the reception of Rawls's ideas among the small group of analytic political philosophers in Italy. (shrink)

Zhu Guangqian's Life and Philosophy: An Introduction is Mario Sabattini's last uncompleted work dedicated to the work of Zhu Guangqian, one of the most representative figures of contemporary Chinese aesthetics. Since the '30s, Zhu Guangqian had an active role in China both on the literary and philosophical scenes, and, through his writings, he exerted an important influence in the moulding of numerous generations of intellectuals. Some of his works have been widely read, and they still provoke considerable interest in (...) China, on the mainland as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong. (shrink)