Background. Since the nineties, policymakers and theorists working across several disciplines started to entertain the notion of directly engaging the public in matters of public concern. Accompanying this was the attempt to resort to deliberative democracy in order to make such an involvement effective. Seizing on its intrinsic dialogic nature, some scholars proposed the application of public deliberation to the realm of public bioethics. Drawing upon the theory and practice of deliberative public bioethics, the purpose of this paper is to (...) shed light onto the figure of the bioethical expert and its role in public bioethics, and relatedly, to investigate how deliberation may be implemented in a public bioethics context. Methods. We set up a large-scale experiment to investigate whether, and to what extent, different moderation styles impact on participants’ moral preferences. The study combines a survey of a representative sample of the general population with a laboratory experiment based on a random sample of students that ex-ante has identical attitudes to the general population.Results. Findings show that: i) different moderation styles can significantly influence deliberative outcomes; iii) the effects of deliberation are not necessarily immediate, but may be revealed after the end of deliberative session; iii) participants tend to better appreciate a bioethical expert acting as “passive moderator”, namely as someone who acts in order to ensure non-domination and non-interference, thus allowing the creation of basic conditions for equality within the deliberative setting.Conclusions. Our experiment represents an example of how deliberation can be employed in public bioethics. (shrink)

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of viability. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than those given (...) so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored. (shrink)

Recently discovered correspondence from Oskar Becker to Hermann Weyl sheds new light on Weyl's engagement with Husserlian transcendental phenomenology in 1918-1927. Here the last two of these letters, dated July and August, 1926, dealing with issues in the philosophy of mathematics are presented, together with background and a detailed commentary. The letters provide an instructive context for re-assessing the connection between intuitionism and phenomenology in Weyl's foundational thought, and for understanding Weyl's term ‘symbolic construction’ as marking his own considered position (...) in the foundational controversy of the 1920s. In addition, they reveal Weyl's hitherto unknown objections to Becker's detailed attempt (Mathematische Existenz, 1927) to ground the transfinite phenomenologically. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the status of argumentative discourse. We argue that argumentation can contribute to instances of different discourse genres, regardless of whether it is functional to their purposes. By analyzing examples from the daily press in the light of an approach to discourse analysis inspired by pragmatics, we show that also texts that are not expected to be argumentative have underlying argumentative structures and that a text’s being argumentative is a matter of degree: the (...) understanding of underlying argumentative structures contributes to a varying extent to the understanding of what a text as a whole means and of its point in the speech situation. This role of argumentative structures in text understanding suggests considering argumentation as a cognitively-based dimension of discourse, connected to human rationality. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether, and if so, in what way, argumentation can be profitably described in speech-act theoretical terms. I suggest that the two theories of argumentation that are supposed to provide the most elaborate analysis of it in speech-act theoretical terms (namely van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst’s Pragma-Dialectics and Lilian Bermejo-Luque’s linguistic normative model of argumentation) both suffer from the same two flaws: firstly, their “illocutionary act pluralism” assumption and secondly, a lack of interest in where arguing belongs in (...) the classification of illocutionary acts. I argue that these flaws derive from the authors’ reliance on an intention-based speech-theoretical framework. Finally, I adopt a deontic framework for speech acts in order to propose an alternative way of accounting for argumentation which seems to overcome the two limitations outlined above. According to this framework, argumentation may be conceived as a speech act sequence, characterized by the conventional effects brought about by the communicative moves (as illocutionary acts) of which it is composed. (shrink)

After giving a brief overview of the renewal of interest in logic and the foundations of mathematics in Göttingen in the period 1914-1921, I give a detailed presentation of the approach to the foundations of mathematics found in Behmann's doctoral dissertation of 1918, Die Antinomie der transfiniten Zahl und ihre Auflösung durch die Theorie von Russell und Whitehead. The dissertation was written under the guidance of David Hilbert and was primarily intended to give a clear exposition of the solution to (...) the antinomies as found in Principia Mathematica. In the process of explaining the theory of Principia, Behmann also presented an original approach to the foundations of mathematics which saw in sense perception of concrete individuals the Archimedean point for a secure foundation of mathematical knowledge. The last part of the paper points out an important numbers of connections between Behmann's work and Hilbert's foundational thought. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of philosophical interpretations of Dostoevsky, focusing on readings that pay particular attention to his representation of the battle between good and evil, and postulating that said representation constitutes the essence of his works. The analysis maps this history of interpretations as developing within a specific framework: the dispute between interpreters who argue that good triumphs in Dostoevsky’s works and those who maintain that nihilism prevails in the end. In this context, the article submits its own (...) thesis: that a fundamental contradiction haunts the offer, in Dostoevsky’s works, of Christian salvation, and condemns Dostoevsky to defeat at the hands of his nihilists. (shrink)

This paper has two related goals. Firstly, after briefly clarifying the theoretical core of Solger's thought, it will analyse his metaphysics from Hegel's point of view, emphasizing that sacrifice is, for Solger, the fundamental structure of the relationship between the finite and the Infinite. Secondly, it will investigate the main reasons behind Hegel's criticism of Solger, showing that they have different conceptions of privation and negation and concluding that Solger and Hegel have different aims. Hegel's aim consists in recomposing the (...) unity of finite and infinite, whereas Solger's thought is structured on the rupture between these two. (shrink)

Présentation En novembre 1958, le poète surréaliste égyptien Georges Henein publiait dans la revue de Boris Souvarine, Le Contrat social, une étude intitulée, « Bruno R. et la “nouvelle classe” ». Ainsi, presque vingt ans après la publication à compte d’auteur de La Bureaucratisation du monde, un périodique aussi bien informé que celui-là continuait à ignorer le nom de l’auteur de cette étude. Elle avait pourtant résolu, dès 1939, un des principaux problèmes que ce siècle a rencontré : « la (...) nature de la nouvelle société russe », selon les mots de Guy Debord. Mais elle avait aussi posé des jalons essentiels pour comprendre la place de la bureaucratie dans ce pays ainsi que dans les autres grandes formations sociales capitalistes sous le nom de « collectivisme bureaucratique », bien que son auteur demeurât dans une obscurité propice à toutes les récupérations et sans qu’aucune revue française prît le soin de le traduire. Po... (shrink)

Italian Abstract: Per giustificare l’autorità e la validità della scienza economica, gli economisti sono spesso ricorsi all’argomento che le leggi e i postulati di questo sapere sono verità scientifiche, nel senso di verità empiriche, logiche o autoevidenti. Tuttavia, questo discorso, in quanto discorso legittimante o discorso sull 'importanza' della scienza economica, sembra contraddire una siffatta argomentazione giacché non statuisce né verità empiriche né verità logiche, e tanto meno verità autoevidenti. A quale tipo di verità, allora, fa riferimento la predica della (...) scienza economica? Perché la scienza economica, in quanto sapere, viene predicata come una ‘legge’ a cui bisognerebbe obbedire? Esiste un legame storico e teoretico tra la struttura giuridico-politica della legittimità e la predica, la retorica e/o il discorso della scienza economia nella sfera pubblica? In che senso un sapere è un 'istituzione'? -/- In questo articolo esamino il ‘caso Einaudi’ come exemplum dei discorsi sulla scienza economica fatti dagli economisti nella sfera pubblica. Analizzando la predicazione e la riflessione epistemologica di Einaudi e confrontandola con quella di Pareto, Robbins, Weber e Schumpeter, vedremo come sullo sfondo di note dicotomie quali positivo/normativo, fatti/valori, essere/dover essere, analisi/visione, si stagli la contrapposizione epistemologico-antropologica tra Ragione e passioni, spesso assimilata a un’altra perdurante antitesi: Ragione e fede. Muovendo dalla prospettiva dell’«antropologia dogmatica» di Pierre Legendre, e attraverso un rovesciamento solo apparentemente paradossale delle categorie giuridiche e teologiche presenti nel discorso einaudiano, cercherò di formulare una nozione di normatività della scienza economica, estendibile anche ad altri saperi, in vista di un superamento della (falsa) contrapposizione tra Ragione e passioni. -/- English Abstract: To legitimate the authority and the validity of the economic science, economists have often claimed that the laws and the postulates of this savoir are scientific truths, in the sense of empirical, logical or self-evident truths. However, this discourse, as a legitimating discourse, or as a discourse on the ‘significance’ of the economic science, seems to contradict such a claim since it does not assert either empirical, logical or self-evident truths. To what type of truth, then, does the preaching of the economic science refer? Why is the economic science, as a savoir, preached as a ‘law’ to which one should obey? Is there an historical and theoretical nexus between the legal-political structure of the legitimacy and the preaching, rhetoric or discourse of the economic science? What does it mean that a savoir is an ‘institution’? -/- In this article I examine the ‘Einaudi case’ as an exemplum of the discourses on the economic science done by economists in the public sphere. Analysing Einaudi’s preaching and epistemological speculation and comparing it with that of Pareto, Robbins, Weber and Schumpeter, I will show how from the background of well known dichotomies – such as positive/normative, fact/values, to be/ought to be, analysis/vision – the epistemological-anthropological opposition between Reason and passions emerges. This opposition is often assimilated to another long-lasting antithesis: that between Reason and faith. Moving from the perspective of Pierre Legendre’s «dogmatic anthropology», and by an apparently paradoxical reversal of the juridical and theological concepts of Einaudi’s discourse, I will try to formulate a notion of normativity of economic science, which is also applicable to other sciences, in view of an overcoming of the (false) opposition between Reason and passions. (shrink)

This article responds to the arguments put forth by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994). It argues that the said work is representative of the widespread tendency in literary theory today to discard the possibility of literary truth, and it provides counterarguments to the work’s main theses. Consequently, it criticizes the philosophy of pragmatism and its implications, and it offers a theory that defines fictional objects as existing and solves contradictions that (...) commonly affect our debates on the ontology of fiction. The article does not provide a positive theory of literary truth, but it undermines its denials, which have become popular in recent decades. (shrink)

The late Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) was an Italian philosopher whose work on Aeschylus has not yet been made available in English. In Il giogo: alle origini della ragione: Eschilo (The Yoke: At the Origins of Reason: Aeschylus, 1989), Severino seeks to demonstrate that Aeschylus belongs amongst the founders of philosophy, i.e., that Aeschylus was the first to set down some of philosophy’s most fundamental principles, including that ontological becoming produces unbearable suffering and that the only remedy to suffering is knowledge (...) of the truth. Thus, by introducing readers to Severino’s interpretation, and by translating various passages of his work, this article aims to enlarge Severino’s readership and spread his argument for the philosophical stature of Aeschylus. (shrink)

That words express a conceptual content is uncontroversial. This does not entail that their content should break down neatly into a grammatical part, relevant for language and to be analyzed in linguistic terms, and a conceptual part, relevant for cognition and to be analyzed in psychological terms. Various types of empirical evidence are reviewed, showing that the conceptual content of words cannot be isolated from their linguistic properties, because it is affected and shaped by them. The view of words as (...) labels or containers for a non-linguistic conceptual content stems from a naive disregard of the complex and structured nature of lexical knowledge. On the contrary, knowledge of language is shown not just to organize and categorize conceptual content in a way not reducible to non-linguistic cognition, but also to affect its scope, as the range of verbalized concepts is both limited by abstract templates and expanded by productive word formation. This suggests that lexical knowledge is a distinctively linguistic dimension of conceptualization, and that words do not so much label or package concepts, as provide an inner form for conceptual knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate splitting algebras in varieties of logics, with special consideration for varieties of BL-algebras and similar structures. In the case of the variety of all BL-algebras a complete characterization of the splitting algebras is obtained.

In this paper we extend to various classes of subreducts of hoops some results about splitting algebras. In particular we prove that every finite chain in the purely implicational fragment of basic hoops is splitting and that every finite chain in the \ fragment of hoops is splitting. We also produce explicitly the splitting equations in most cases.

Martin Heidegger and Emanuele Severino reflected on the meaning of technology more than anyone else in the twentieth century. Their philosophies are irreconcilable. They converge on this simple recognition and its implications: techno‐science dominates our time. But they disagree even on the interpretation of this domination. Exploring this disagreement will help us understand the leading dynamics of our civilization. Therefore, the intention in this paper is to unveil, for English speakers, the value of Severino’s philosophy in relation to Heidegger and (...) the meaning technology. We will see that, ultimately, their disagreement concerns the originary truth of Being and has repercussions on how they conceptualize technology and the possibility of redemption from it. Heidegger indicated the letting‐be of beings in their freedom as the possible path beyond technology. Severino saw Heidegger’s indication as destined to remain trapped in technology itself. If we understand why this was so – from Severino’s point of view – this may open a new path for us: the path of day, the path that may truly lead beyond technology. The aim of this paper is, finally, to indicate one reason why delving into Severino’s works is truly worthwhile: if it is possible for the truth to unveil itself beyond willing – where Heidegger couldn’t see – then Severino’s works may the place where this possibility appears in coherent conceptual form. (shrink)

It is reported that in reply to John Wisdom’s request in 1944 to provide a dictionary entry describing his philosophy, Wittgenstein wrote only one sentence: “He has concerned himself principally with questions about the foundations of mathematics”. However, an understanding of his philosophy of mathematics has long been a desideratum. This was the case, in particular, for the period stretching from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the so-called transitional phase. Marion’s book represents a giant leap forward in this direction. In the (...) preface, Marion provides a diagnosis for why it has taken such a long time to obtain an accurate picture of Wittgenstein’s ideas in the foundations of mathematics. When the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics came out in 1956 the reception by specialists, such as Kreisel, was negative. This led many Wittgenstein scholars to set aside the issues in the foundations of mathematics and go on with the business of the day, focusing on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and psychology. However, these early negative appraisals were severely limited by two facts. First of all, the nature of the Remarks was a hindrance to an understanding of what Wittgenstein was up to. The book was edited by Wittgenstein’s literary executors by collating together passages from several manuscripts dating from 1937 to 1944, cutting, however, many passages in between remarks. Second, many of the original manuscripts and typescripts of the transitional phase were not available and thus it was virtually impossible to obtain a balanced picture of Wittgenstein’s development. Finally, a stark contraposition between the early and late Wittgenstein did not encourage people to work seriously on the development of Wittgenstein’s position from the Tractatus through the transitional period to the later writings. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 63-76, September 2011.

René Girard’s mimetic theory has significantly influenced the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies, as well as sociological anthropology and philosophy. Nevertheless, I argue that a somewhat different line of interpretation, an interdisciplinary one, has not been sufficiently investigated. This involves an interpretation which focuses on the vicissitudes of the mimetic and “victimage” circle not (or not only) in sociological terms, but by analysing their articulation on the level of knowledge. The sociological and epistemological perspectives do not exclude each (...) other, but can be integrated. The main aim of this paper is to clarify this articulation, and to show that integration between these two perspectives is possible only by bringing into play a real ‘literary aesthetics’. The notion of literary aesthetics needs to be considered in both the common and the etymological sense, as a theory of feeling and of experiencing. In doing so, I firstly cover in brief the main stages of Girard’s thought in the light of this perspective, to then focus on the relationship between literary aesthetics and knowledge. Finally I argue that this picture, if seriously considered, could lead to a mystical outcome, and will discuss the possible alternatives to that outcome. (shrink)

In this paper the PA-completeness of modal logic is studied by syntactical and constructive methods. The main results are theorems on the structure of the PA-proofs of suitable arithmetical interpretationsS of a modal sequentS, which allow the transformation of PA-proofs ofS into proof-trees similar to modal proof-trees. As an application of such theorems, a proof of Solovay's theorem on arithmetical completeness of the modal system G is presented for the class of modal sequents of Boolean combinations of formulas of the (...) form p i,m i=0, 1, 2, ... The paper is the preliminary step for a forthcoming global syntactical resolution of the PA-completeness problem for modal logic. (shrink)

An Authoritarian Scenario. The long-term war against « terrorism » embarked upon by the Bush administration in the aftermath of September 11th 2001 goes far beyond its strictly military dimension. It also involves a fundamental onslaught on democratic and social rights, both in the USA and in European countries. The result of this combination between the military and a political dimension is the establishment of an architecture of control operating in the service of the most brutal sectors of the imperialist (...) bourgeoisie and of the accumulation of capital. (shrink)

This paper is the second part of the syntactic demonstration of the Arithmetical Completeness of the modal system G, the first part of which is presented in [9]. Given a sequent S so that ⊢GL-LIN S, ⊬G S, and given its characteristic formula H = char(S), which expresses the non G-provability of S, we construct a canonical proof-tree T of ~ H in GL-LIN, the height of which is the distance d(S, G) of S from G. T is the syntactic (...) countermodel of S with respect to Gand is a tool of general interest in Provability Logic, that allows some classification in the set of the arithmetical interpretations. (shrink)