On a Dreyfusian account performers choke when they reflect upon and interfere with established routines of purely embodied expertise. This basic explanation of choking remains popular even today and apparently enjoys empirical support. Its driving insight can be understood through the lens of diverse philosophical visions of the embodied basis of expertise. These range from accounts of embodied cognition that are ultra conservative with respect to representational theories of cognition to those that are more radically embodied. This paper provides an (...) account of the acquisition of embodied expertise, and explanation of the choking effect, from the most radically enactive, embodied perspective, spelling out some of its practical implications and addressing some possible philosophical challenges. Specifically, we propose: an explanation of how skills can be acquired on the basis of ecological dynamics; and a non-linear pedagogy that takes into account how contentful representations might scaffold skill acquisition from a radically enactive perspective. (shrink)

To fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease, more than 3 billion people in the world have been confined indoors. Although lockdown is an efficient solution, it has had various psychological consequences that have not yet been fully measured. During the lockdown period in France, we conducted two surveys on two large panels of participants to examine how the lockdown disrupted their relationship with time and what this change in their experiences of time means. Numerous questions were asked about (...) the experience of time but also the nature of life during the lockdown: the emotions felt, boredom, the activities performed, sleep quality, and the daily rhythm. The participants also completed a series of self-reported scales used to assess depression, anxiety, and impulsivity. The results showed that time seemed to pass more slowly during the lockdown compared to before. This feeling of a slowing down of time has little to do with living conditions during the lockdown and individual psychological characteristics. The main predictor of this time experience was boredom and partly mediated by the lack of activity. The feeling of being less happy and the presence of sleep disturbance also explained this specific experience of time albeit to a lesser extent. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of the critical remarks raised by Kristian Bankov in a notion called Bankov’s razor, about some foundational elements of the biosemiotic paradigm. The elaborated form of the “razor” includes three main questions on biosemiotic ideas, namely: 1) the philosophical grounds of the biosemiotic discourse, 2) the scientific output of biosemiotics, and 3) the ethical consequences of some biosemiotic presumptions (this latter, given its scopes and extension, is left for a future occasion). Such questions are commented (...) and challenged by Dario Martinelli, from a point of view that is primarily that of the zoosemiotician, therefore an insider of biosemiotics. In order to set the readers’ expectations in the right direction, it shall perhaps be fair to inform them that the style of the article is rather sui generis, and can hardly be classified within the genre of academic essays. Tones and terminology are more reminiscent of a philosophical pamphlet written in dialogical form. Hopefully, this choice will not compromise the scientific content of the article. (shrink)

This article intends to summarise the content of my book Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity and expand the meaning of the term ‘universality’. Universality is not defined in abstract legal terms or by juxtaposition vis-à-vis a common enemy. Instead, I clarify the meaning of a more concrete and open practice of universality through historical examples and theories that I excavate from social practices.

In his 2018 essay Down to Earth, the French philosopher Bruno Latour proposes a hypothesis that connects a number of contemporary issues, ranging from climate denialism to deregulation and growing inequality. While his hypothesis, namely that the elites act as if they live in another world and are leaving the rest of the world behind, might seem like a conspiracy theory, I will argue that there is a way to make sense of it. To do so, I will turn to (...) two other authors, Timothy Mitchell and Shoshana Zuboff, to highlight the kind of logic that Latour seems to have in mind. In the final section, I will propose to capture the commonalities of these authors through the concept of shifting reciprocities and will return to Latour’s political plea to define one’s territories, reinterpreted as reciprocities. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss Hughes’ formulation of three‐dimensionalism. Firstly, I observe that the linguistic data do not clearly support his formulation. Secondly, the arguments he uses to state his formulation could be disputed either on the basis of a difference between ordinary language and regimented language, or on the basis of a different notion of temporal part.

In this paper we consider the emerging position in metaphysics that artifact functions characterize real kinds of artifacts. We analyze how it can circumvent an objection by David Wiggins (Sameness and substance renewed, 2001, 87) and then argue that this position, in comparison to expert judgments, amounts to an interesting fine-grained metaphysics: taking artifact functions as (part of the) essences of artifacts leads to distinctions between principles of activity of artifacts that experts in technology have not yet made. We show, (...) moreover, that our argument holds not only in the artifactual realm but also in biology: taking biological functions as (part of the) essences of organs leads to distinctions between principles of activity of organs that biological experts have not yet made. We run our argument on the basis of analyses of artifact and biological functions as developed in philosophy of technology and of biology, thus importing results obtained outside of metaphysics into the debate on ontological realism. In return, our argument shows that a position in metaphysics provides experts reason for trying to detect differences between principles of activities of artifacts and organs that have not been detected so far. (shrink)

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into a promising (...) philosophy of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

Relativists maintain that identity is always relative to a general term. According to them, the notion of absolute identity has to be abandoned and replaced by a multiplicity of relative identity relations for which Leibniz’s Law does not hold. For relativists RI is at least as good as the Fregean cardinality thesis, which contends that an ascription of cardinality is always relative to a concept specifying what, in any specific case, counts as a unit. The same train of thought on (...) cardinality and identity is apparent among those – Artifactualists – who take relative identity sentences for artifacts as the norm. The aim of this paper is to criticize the thesis thatfrom FC it is possible to derive RI, and to explain why Artifactualists mistakenly believe that RI can be derived from FC. The misunderstanding derives from their assumption that the concept of artifact – like the concept of object – is not a sortal concept. (shrink)

The goal of the paper is to analyse some specific features of a very central concept for top-level ontologies for information systems: i.e. the concept of artefact. Specifically, we analyse the relation to be a copy of that is strongly linked to the notion of artefact and—as we will demonstrate—could be useful to distinguish artefacts from objects of other kinds. Firstly, we outline some intuitive and commonsensical reasons for the need of a clarification of the notion of artefact in ontologies (...) for information systems, and we analyse some characterisations of the notion given by two top-level ontologies (Cyc and Wordnet). Secondly, we introduce and critically analyse Tzouvaras’ notion of copy. Thirdly, we try to complete an analysis of copy by distinguishing three kinds of copies: replicas (Tzouvaras’ notion of copy), rigid copies, and functional copies. With the help of these three notions we outline a first and preliminary distinction between artefacts, objects of art and natural objects. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta una revisión del trabajo de María Luisa Bemberg con un enfoque en Yo, la peor de todas ya que es la película donde la directora lleva la sexualidad al punto más alto. Casi treinta años después de su lanzamiento, lo que se mostró en la película, se puede ver hoy de una manera muy diferente, ya que hubo muchos cineastas que volvieron a explorar directamente esas intensificaciones sexuales que Bemberg planteó como un germen. A partir de un (...) análisis de los elementos visuales, sonoros y simbólicos de la película, se busca mostrar las tensiones que su trabajo produjo en sus aspectos sexuales y de género, pero también las formas de reflexionar sobre el poder y los procesos históricos de su presente y nuestra contemporaneidad. (shrink)

L’opera filosofica di Novalis, inedita e frammentaria per ragioni biografiche, è stata a lungo trascurata. Gli studi fichtiani e l’interesse per la scienza sono alla base della sua «Enciclopedistica», nella quale la filosofia della musica ha un posto rilevante. Novalis conosce la scienza acustica del suo tempo e riconduce i rapporti tra suoni e figure a una forza formatrice presente nella natura fin dal livello inorganico. La medesima forza si presenta poi nell’uomo tramite la voce, espressione più autentica della libertà (...) assoluta dell’Io. Lungi da ogni «sentimentalismo» l’identità di uomo e natura si manifesta in una rarefatta estetica simbolica condensata da Novalis nell’immagine dell’«arpa eolia». (shrink)

Il volume analizza il problema del suono nella filosofia tedesca, dalla Critica del Giudizio di Kant alla psicologia della Gestalt. Vengono prese in esame la filosofia della natura del romanticismo e dell’idealismo, la psicologia filosofica della seconda metà del secolo e infine la scuola descrittivo-fenomenologica del primo Novecento. Il quadro che ne risulta è quello di un dibattito molto vivace che tocca fondamentali questioni di fisica acustica, psicologia della percezione ed estetica musicale, mettendo a confronto molti dei massimi autori del (...) secolo. Tra i temi affrontati, il senso dei rapporti numerici insiti nelle relazioni tonali, l’indagine sui processi percettivi e cognitivi legati alle figure armoniche e melodiche, il significato estetico e metafisico del sentimento musicale. Sullo sfondo, le grandi trasformazioni nella prassi musicale del tempo e le notevoli conquiste della scienza acustica, delle quali i filosofi, in diversa misura, furono generalmente consapevoli. (shrink)

Building on dissatisfaction with current approaches that entail a superficial conception of the firm’s moral agency, this article has two broad theoretical underpinnings. First, it refers to the Catholic Social Thought’s view of the enterprise as a community of work, which leads to place stress on the possibility of creating ‘organizational humanizing cultures’ that revolve around the principles of human dignity and the common good and allow organizational members to flourish. Second, the article draws on the perspective of the sociologist (...) Philip Selznick to emphasize the key role of ‘institutional leadership’ in the formation and maintenance of a moral organizational character, also suggesting that these processes involve an influence on the development of employees’ moral identity conceived as a driver of moral agency. On these theoretical grounds, the article’s central argument is articulated by claiming that human resource management can provide essential support for the development of organizational humanizing cultures. In particular, it is highlighted how human resource management professionals may operate as institutional leaders who contribute to the embedding of moral identities in the organizational context. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print. What is the practice and the role of the historian? What does it mean to dig into marginalized and silenced histories? What does it mean to reactivate the contents of past insurgent moments? And who has the power to do it? These are some of the important questions that my generous interlocutors raise in their comments regarding the methodology, and the historiographical and political approach of my book. Indeed, Insurgent Universality outlines an (...) alternative historiography capable of reactivating the histories of the struggling oppressed by putting their past attempts of liberation at the service of political and social alternatives to the present. The task of my historiography is to present the past as a battlefield, which begins from the very political assumptions that often operate behind the historian's back, and to provide a new viewpoint from which other political trajectories of modernity can be disclosed. (shrink)

Kant is not typically considered a major figure in the just war tradition's canon, although his work has informed recent discussions about international justice and just war theory. More specifically, philosophers have suggested that Kant's work may provide a coherent, normatively practical just war theory, basing this claim, in the main, on his views on the goal of peace and its purpose of establishing a cosmopolitan civil society.1 Such discussions are mostly concerned with jus ad bellum and jus in bello (...) constraints on nations and how Kant's writings can guide deliberation and, perhaps, the considered policy and practices of governments. Yet, the fact remains that it is embodied men and women and not the metaphysical ?nation? who actually conduct war. Hence, this paper seeks to determine the extent to which Kant's thought might contribute to the moral deliberation of those individuals who a fortiori will be bound to jus in bello constraints. To this end, the idea of moral learning will be explored, emphasizing the Kantian idea of autonomy. The ultimate goal of this paper is to demonstrate how some aspects of Kant's thought would contribute to ethics education in a military academy. (shrink)

It is often claimed that epistemic bubbles and echo chambers foster post-truth by filtering our access to information and manipulating our epistemic attitude. In this paper, I try to add a further level of analysis by adding the issue of belief formation. Building on cognitive psychology work, I argue for a dual-system theory according to which beliefs derive from a default system and a critical system. One produces beliefs in a quasi-automatic, effortless way, the other in a slow, effortful way. (...) I also argue that digital socio-epistemic environments tend to inculcate disvalues in their agent's epistemic identity, a process that causes the cognitive shortcircuits typical of conspiracy theories. (shrink)

According to the so-called strong variant of Composition as Identity (CAI), the Principle of Indiscernibility of Identicals can be extended to composition, by resorting to broadly Fregean relativizations of cardinality ascriptions. In this paper we analyze various ways in which this relativization could be achieved. According to one broad variety of relativization, cardinality ascriptions are about objects, while concepts occupy an additional argument place. It should be possible to paraphrase the cardinality ascriptions in plural logic and, as a consequence, relative (...) counting requires the relativization either of quantifiers, or of identity, or of the is one of relation. However, some of these relativizations do not deliver the expected results, and others rely on problematic assumptions. In another broad variety of relativization, cardinality ascriptions are about concepts or sets. The most promising development of this approach is prima facie connected with a violation of the so-called Coreferentiality Constraint, according to which an identity statement is true only if its terms have the same referent. Moreover - even provided that the problem with coreferentiality can be fixed - the resulting analysis of cardinality ascriptions meets several difficulties. (shrink)

Some forms of analytic reconstructivism take natural language (and common sense at large) to be ontologically opaque: ordinary sentences must be suitably rewritten or paraphrased before questions of ontological commitment may be raised. Other forms of reconstructivism take the commitment of ordinary language at face value, but regard it as metaphysically misleading: common-sense objects exist, but they are not what we normally think they are. This paper is an attempt to clarify and critically assess some common limits of these two (...) reconstructivist strategies. (shrink)

Although implementation is ubiquitous in computer science, there is no systematic philosophical analysis of its metaphysical structure. In this article, I argue that the conceptual resources of analytical metaphysics can be very helpful in laying the foundations for a metaphysics of implementation and, by extension, of computer science. More specifically, I hold that implementation is a form of metaphysical grounding, and I show that, by combining the properties of grounding with the specific constraints of computer science, one can clarify what (...) a metaphysics of computer science could look like. In sections 2 and 3 of the article, I discuss various meanings of implementation, while in section 4, I submit my central claim that implementation is a form of metaphysical grounding. I substantiate this claim by showing that implementation and grounding share the same formal properties. If this is correct, then issues of ontological dependence, metaphysical explanation, hyperintensionality, and foundedness, typically associated with grounding, can be re-formulated in computer science using the concept of implementation. This is what I do in sections 5.1-5.4. I conclude with some general remarks about the future development of computer science's metaphysics. (shrink)

This essay illustrates the main aspects of the discussion between Brentano and Stumpf about «tonal fusion». In his Tonpsychologie, Stumpf essentially moved from a Brentanian standpoint. Yet, he did not adopt Brentano’s subsequently developed new theory of «sensible qualities», so that a polemic eventually arouse between them. Far from representing a marginal issue, the episode is relevant to our understanding of their relationship. The discussion as to the mechanism of tonal fusion reveals a general divergence between Brentano and Stumpf concerning (...) the idea of human sensibility as a whole and of the method of psychology. (shrink)

An intricate, long, and occasionally heated debate surrounds Boltzmann’s H-theorem (1872) and his combinatorial interpretation of the second law (1877). After almost a century of devoted and knowledgeable scholarship, there is still no agreement as to whether Boltzmann changed his view of the second law after Loschmidt’s 1876 reversibility argument or whether he had already been holding a probabilistic conception for some years at that point. In this paper, I argue that there was no abrupt statistical turn. In the first (...) part, I discuss the development of Boltzmann’s research from 1868 to the formulation of the H-theorem. This reconstruction shows that Boltzmann adopted a pluralistic strategy based on the interplay between a kinetic and a combinatorial approach. Moreover, it shows that the extensive use of asymptotic conditions allowed Boltzmann to bracket the problem of exceptions. In the second part I suggest that both Loschmidt’s challenge and Boltzmann’s response to it did not concern the H-theorem. The close relation between the theorem and the reversibility argument is a consequence of later investigations on the subject. (shrink)

Hegel’s treatment of character in §395 of Encyclopedia is considered together with the commentaries given in his lectures. In these texts Hegel addresses some philosophical problems concerning character. In Hegel’s view, in fact, human character has a “natural basis” and yet depends on a free individual choice. Attention is drawn at Kant’s treatment of the same subject matter in Anthropology form a pragmatic point of view, which is the source of Hegel’s tripartite arrangement of Naturell, temperament and character. Diverging from (...) Kant, however, Hegel introduces a dialectic development within the development of character. (shrink)

This study examines the implications of practical reason for entrepreneurial activities. Our study is based on Thomas Aquinas’ interpretation of such virtue, with a particular focus on the partition of practical reason in potential parts such as synesis, or common sense, and gnome, or perspicacity. Since entrepreneurial acts and actions deal with extremely uncertain situations, we argue that only this perspicacity, as the ability of correctly judging in exceptional cases, has the power to find wisdom under such blurred conditions. Perspicacity (...) frees entrepreneurs from their cognitive schemata rendering them able to be truly entrepreneurial. Based on this vision and thanks to a semantic analysis of the meaning of the Greek word gnome, we construct an interpretative model for entrepreneurial judgment composed of three dimensions, specifically, knowledge-cognitive, external-affective and personal-reflective. The model highlights how a ‘successful’ entrepreneurial judgment is also such from a holistic point of view. (shrink)

Recent logic and linguistic literature suggest that certain forms of denial cannot be reduced to a simple assertion of negation. In particular, the existence of mathematical and empirical conjectures offers a basis for refuting Frege’s thesis of equivalence between denial and assertion of negation. Following this line of thought we develop a formal framework with two primitive illocutionary operators for assertion and denial, where denial is not a simple negation of assertion. We introduce a semantics for the operators mentioned above. (...) Finally, we discuss the relations between asserted and denied contents. (shrink)

According to Frege a proposition—or, in his terms, a thought—is an abstract structured entity constituted by senses which satisfies, at least, the three following properties: it can be semantically assessed as true or as false, it is the object of so called propositional attitudes and it can be grasped. What Frege meant by 'grasping' is the peculiar way in which we can have epistemic access to propositions. The possibility for propositions to be grasped is put by Frege as a warrant (...) for their existence: to challenge their graspability would amount to jeopardise their ontological reality. But is it true, as Frege uncritically maintained, that the "graspability requirement" is satisfied as far as propositions are concerned? This is the topic of the present work. A negative answer to the above mentioned question has been given in recent time by the representatives of what has come to be labelled the "cognitive turn" in analytical philosophy. People such as Fodor and Johnson-Laird patently denied the possibility for propositions, conceived Frege, to be accessed by the grasping relation. What grounds their position is, to put it roughly, the following train of thought: in order for something to be the target of the grasping relation it must enter the mind. Nothing which is different from a mental entity can enter the mind. Therefore, what can be grasped must be mental. The upshot of this move implies, among other things, the rejection of that radical anti-psychologism which was characteristic of the forefathers of the analytical tradition. In our work we shall try to resist their conclusion by showing that it is not necessary to zero the distinction between propositions and mental entities in order to provide an adequate account of the grasping relation. What one has to give up, instead, is only Frege's late Platonism of the "third realm" which, in our view, is a wholly unnecessary and dispensable accretion of his picture. For, as we shall show, if Platonism is in place it is difficult to provide an account of the grasping relation which makes no use of the "representationalist hypothesis" — i.e. of the hypothesis that mediate our access to whatever can be given to us. But representationalism, once in place, makes the theoretical role of the notion of sense dispensable or purely additional. (shrink)

Boltzmann’s equilibrium theory has not received by the scholars the attention it deserves. It was always interpreted as a mere generalization of Maxwell’s work or, in the most favorable case, a sketch of some ideas more consistently developed in the 1872 memoir. In this paper, I try to prove that this view is ungenerous. My claim is that in the theory developed during the period 1866-1871 the generalization of Maxwell’s distribution was mainly a mean to get a more general scope: (...) a theory of the equilibrium of a system of mechanical points from a general point of view. To face this issue Boltzmann analyzed and discussed probabilistic assumptions so that his equilibrium theory cannot be considered a purely mechanical theory. I claim also that the special perspective adopted by Boltzmann and his view about probabilistic requirements played a role in the transition to the non equilibrium theory of 1872. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the epistemological significance of the problem of induction. In the first section, the foundation of this problem is identified in the thesis of gnoseological dualism: we only know our representations as separate from ‘the world itself’. This thesis will be countered by the thesis of gnoseological monism. In the second section, the implications of Hume’s skeptical thesis will be highlighted and it will be demonstrated how the point of view of gnoseological monism can offer a way out (...) that I call the hermeneutic theory of induction. In the third section, a formal approach is proposed in agreement with this theory. Using tools of the theory of information, this defines the conditions of acceptance or refusal of a hypothesis starting with an experiment. In the fourth section, the epistemological consequences of this approach are analyzed. (shrink)

The Collectio Avellana, a collection of late antique documents which has been thoroughly investigated, above all by ancient historians and historians of Roman law, provides a wealth of historical, political-religious and legal information for the period between the middle of the 4th and the middle of the 6th century AD. This contribution, limited to the years of the pontificate of Pope Damasus, seeks to understand whether these texts can also represent a source of topographical information for the city of Rome.