Following the standard view, scientific theories are formal systems, which receive empirical content by way of certain correspondence rules. The task of philosophy of science is then to make explicit the structure of such systems. In contrast to this view, one can point to the French tradition in philosophy of science. What characterizes this tradition is recourse to historical study, which has evolved from an attempt to bridge the fields of philosophy of science and history of science by a closer (...) integration of conceptual and historical methods. My aim in this paper is to explore the emergence of historical epistemology in France and its later revival at an international level. Attention is directed at the presuppositions and motivations underlying such an approach. (shrink)

Robert Brenner's contribution to the history of post-war capitalism provides a stimulating basis for the opening of a debate on this subject. I will begin with some critical remarks before putting forward a number of alternative propositions on the functioning of contemporary capitalism.

By noting the end of the dualism between public and private law, between state and international law and between goods and services, the article comments and interprets Ugo Mattei’s doctrine about new forms of property. Cognitive transformations, both technological and social, do not prelude to a new and different juridical intermediation as guarantee of the communal regime of goods. These new forms of property, when confronted with the domain that private economic property continues to exercise, do not announce neither the (...) dissolution of the monopoly of state coercion, nor the advent of a merely administrative management. (shrink)

At the heart of Youth Justice Conferencing, a form of restorative justice aimed at addressing youth crime, is the notion that young persons who have committed an offence should be ‘reintegrated’ into their communities (Braithwaite in Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989). This paper focuses on the role of parents as support persons, in particular the ‘crying mum’, an identity often leveraged by the Convenor when prompting the young person to express remorse to the circle. We explore (...) an Avouchment genre that we have observed whereby support persons vouch for the character of the young person. Our analysis considers the ways in which values are composed (as ideational categories are coupled with evaluative interpersonal ones) and unfold in discourse as invitations for participants to align. In Knight’s (2010) terms, when shared, couplings of ideation and evaluation engender bonds through which participants may commune. (shrink)

L'oeuvre de Claude Tresmontant est un formidable appel à un développement théologique digne des défis actuels du XXIe siècle, fondé sur les bases solides théologiques reconnues par l'Eglise, en particulier les conciles. Tresmontant qui connaît parfaitement l'hébreu s'est livré à une recherche approfondie sur le véritable contenu du christianisme. Sa pensée est celle d'une métaphysique qui nous réconcilie avec le réel : il donne toute sa place dans la réflexion à ce que les sciences de la nature nous enseignent.

La interpretación monista de la ontología de Parménides aquí propuesta parece confirmada por la lógica ineludible que impregna enteramente su pensamiento. A pesar del carácter fragmentario de su poema, es posible reconstruir la férrea racionalidad de la ontología parmenídea. Esta lógica intrínsecamente coherente pone de manifiesto la absoluta necesidad de la naturaleza monística del ser. En esta perspectiva parece evidente la absoluta incompatibilidad de la perfecta racionalidad y coherencia de la verdad con la dimensión engañosa e inconsistente de la doxa.

In technologically grounded organizations, culture is bound tightly to the material characteristics of the technology that the organization manufactures, distributes, or services. Technological grounding helps explain why high-technology organizations often experience cultural integration problems following a merger. Examining the recent merger of US West and Qwest, this article analyzes how powerful actors strategically used the process of technological grounding to enroll a core technology to situate postmerger integration in technological terms, creating a discourse of inevitability that then justified publicly Qwest's (...) cultural domination of US West. (shrink)

This paper extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by Mariotti and Veneziani (2009a) to infinitely-lived societies. First, some novel characterisations of inegalitarian leximax social welfare relations are derived based on the Individual Benefit Principle (IBP), which incorporates a liberal, non-interfering view of society. This is surprising because the IBP does not explicitly incorporate any preference for inequality, nor does it assign priority to well-off members of society. Second, some impossibility results are derived that highlight a (...) general tension between standard fairness and efficiency axioms in social choice, and a liberal Principle of Non-Interference that generalises IBP. (shrink)

This essay examines the educational opportunities of people in poverty who receive social welfare assistance. The dominant political theory underlying social policy (including education policy) in the United States has evolved from 1960s and 1970s welfare liberalism into 1980s and 1990s style neo-conservatism—a theory that embraces principles of the market and individual liberty as paramount social values. Against this backdrop, I review two recent books that provide compelling evidence for this turn and I call for increased understanding of the relationship (...) between social welfare policies and higher education opportunities for those in poverty. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to deal seriously with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. Instead of charting its emergence and its uses in Foucault’s disperse texts, the essay contends with governmentality as a concept able to refresh our very understanding of politics. Governmentality is described as the best concept through which to interrupt the “natural” relationship linking modern western States to sovereignty. This is why governmentality is coupled with apparently distant legal and political historically oriented lines of thought. The essay (...) thus proposes a new approach to the history of modern State informed by an enriched concept of governmentality. (shrink)

This essay presents a personal remembering of Rudolf Haller and deals with his interpretation and evaluation of Meinong’s theory of impossible and incomplete objects in order to better understand the objects of fiction and imagination.

La logica di Croce -- Croce oggi -- Lo storicismo assoluto e l'ideologia sociale -- Il negativo e l'ombra del male -- Il concetto della natura e la storia -- Universalismo e mondo tedesco nella Kulturphilosophie di Ernst Cassirer -- Storicismo e marxismo di Gramsci.

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl argues that “sign” is an ambiguous word because it refers to two essentially different signitive functions: indication and expression. Indications work in an evidential way, providing information through a direct association of the sign and the presence of an object or state of affairs. Expressions work in a non-evidential way, pointing to possible experiences and displaying that the speaker or someone else has had such experience. In this paper I show that Husserl went back to (...) the distinction between indications and expressions in a much later text, a manuscript from 1931, in order to distinguish between two kinds of communication with different essential features. I call these indicative and expressive communication. My claim is that Husserl’s distinction between these two types of communication is a crucial contribution to the phenomenology of knowledge sharing. In knowledge sharing, we appropriate someone else’s knowledge as someone else’s knowledge. Husserl shows that only expressive communication, and not indicative communication, makes this appropriation possible. Since Husserl argues that only humans use expressive communication, his analysis of indicative and expressive communication is also a contribution to understanding the uniquely human capacity for accumulating knowledge. (shrink)

Sometimes, a metaphysical theory has revisionary ethical consequences: for example, some have thought that modal realism entails that there are no moral obligations. In these cases, one may be tempted to reject the metaphysical theory on the grounds that it conflicts with commonsensical ethics. This is an ethics-to-metaphysics inference. My claim is that this inference is in general irrational, and that the fact that a metaphysical theory has highly revisionary ethical consequences is no reason at all to reject the theory. (...) I argue for this claim on the basis of general epistemic principles about the transmission of justification, and what makes for a good argument. Furthermore, I argue that my account can explain why a certain narrow class of ethics-to-metaphysics inferences are rational. (shrink)

This book explains why anti-realism is so popular with philosophers of science by showing that many contemporary philosophers of science and language, who define themselves as empiricists, in fact have evolved into linguistic idealists.

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating (...) in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user. (shrink)

We argue about a conceptual approach to quantum formalism. Starting from philosophical conjectures (Platonism, Idealism and Realism) as basic ontic elements (namely: math world, data world, and state of matter), we will analyze the quantum superposition principle. This analysis bring us to demonstrate that the basic assumptions affect in different ways:(a) the general problem of the information and computability about a system, (b) the nature of the math tool utilized and (c) the correspondent physical reality.