Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories contains the most extended testimony about the Stoic conception of acting (ποιεῖν) and undergoing (πάσχειν). Simplicius ascribed to the Stoics the idea that acting and undergoing are to be reduced to the movement. To this opinion Simplicius opposed the Aristotelian view according to which acting and undergoing are two different categories. In this paper I intend to outline the original Stoic position comparing the reportage of Simplicius with other Stoic sources. Later, I will deal with (...) Boethus’ defense of the distinction between the categories of acting and undergoing. I will argue that Boethus directly reacted against the Stoic opinion reformulating it in Aristotelian language. (shrink)

O presente texto visa a problematização do ensino de Filosofia na Educação Básica em um contexto de maior enquadramento do trabalho docente nas escolas públicas do estado de São Paulo. Argumenta-se que o poder educacional vem transformando as escolas em máquinas de fazer índices, em detrimento das experiências mínimas ou dos disparadores de pensamentos e afetos no cotidiano dos encontros aprendentes. Para tanto, mobilizam-se conceitos de Gilles Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari e Georges Didi-Huberman a fim de pensar as (...) possibilidades da Filosofia na escola. (shrink)

The Stoic theory of movement has never been the object of a deep investigation despite the considerable number of sources in Neoplatonist commentators. This paper explores for the first time the Stoic notion of ἐνέργεια, which plays a fundamental role in the Stoic conception of movement and generally in the characterization of interaction between bodies. I will show that the Stoics identified movement and activity, so that everything that is active is necessarily moved. This implies that the Stoics merely characterized (...) ἐνέργεια in a dynamic or kinetic sense, namely by connecting it with movement. In order to prove the coherence of this philosophical position to the Stoic doctrine, I will display the compatibility of Neoplatonists’ reports with other sources. Accordingly, I will claim that the Stoics conceived this peculiar sense of ἐνέργεια in reaction to Aristotle, who clearly distinguished between ἐνέργεια and κίνησις in his physical theory. (shrink)

This paper aims at comparing and relating belief revision and argumentation as approaches to model reasoning processes. Referring to some prominent literature references in both fields, we will discuss their (implicit or explicit) assumptions on the modeled processes and hence commonalities and differences in the forms of reasoning they are suitable to deal with. The intended contribution is on one hand assessing the (not fully explored yet) relationships between two lively research fields in the broad area of defeasible reasoning and (...) on the other hand pointing out open issues and potential directions for future research. (shrink)

Dans l’étude des relations entre la philosophie et la sociologie naissante en France, un chapitre demeure inexploré : l’interprétation des sciences sociales par Léon Brunschvicg. S’il apprécie la valeur de la recherche ethnologique de Lévy-Bruhl, sa critique de Durkheim est sévère. Il identifie deux problèmes dans le projet durkheimien, étroitement liés : avoir cherché l’origine de la connaissance dans des formes « primitives » de savoir ; avoir soumis l’autonomie du jugement au primat du social. L’idéalisme critique de Brunschvicg cherche (...) alors à opposer aux représentations collectives de Durkheim un autre modèle d’esprit collectif, incarné dans les avancées de la science et dans le progrès de la philosophie scientifique. (shrink)

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in (...) philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

The essay focuses, firstly, on the notion of evil in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE). James identified evil with a pathological mental fact, “depression”, and analyzed it according to different thresholds and degrees of symptomatic severity: from the more conscious, intellectualized and, apparently, superficial cases to the more painful and obscure, which, according to his view, were also the deepest ones. The second aim of this essay is to cast light on James’ theory of religious conversion. According to (...) James, once the believer has reached a new mental balance and experienced a lasting happiness thanks to his change of mind, evil comes again to him under the form of a persistent and warning memory of the past troubling experience, a memory that is functional to preserve his new belief-system. We define this memory and its role as “functional atheism” and propose to transpose this notion from the uncertain realm of inner experience, where James originally put it, to the narrative and neurocognitive grounds, where it may lead to more original and wider developments. (shrink)

How should we choose on behalf of people with different attitudes to risk? Simon Blessenohl has recently argued that this question poses a dilemma: it seems that sometimes we must choose either acts that everyone disprefers or else acts that are sure to turn out worse than some other act. In this article, I offer a complaints-centered account of how to take people’s attitudes to risk into consideration in our decision-making, and then I show that it provides a way out (...) of Blessenohl’s dilemma. (shrink)

How is freedom valuable? And how should we go about defining freedom? In this essay, I discuss a distinction between two general ways of valuing freedom: one appeals to the good (e.g., to freedom's contribution to well-being); the other appeals to how persons have reason to treat one another in virtue of their status as purposive beings (to the right). The analysis of these two values has many relevant implications and it is preliminary to a better understanding of the relationships (...) between freedom and justice. First, it contributes to shed light on the relationship between trust and the value of freedom, and on two attitudes towards freedom – promoting and respecting freedom. Second, it disambiguates between two versions of the claim that freedom has non-specific/content-independent value: one appeals to the good, the other to the right. And third, I show that certain implications concerning the definition of freedom follow from assuming an account of the value of freedom that exclusively appeals to the right, illustrating how the value of freedom can shape what freedom is. (shrink)

The paper investigates the epistemological and communicative competences the experts need to use and communicate evidence in the reasoning process leading to diagnosis. The diagnosis and diagnosis communication are presented as intertwined processes that should be jointly addressed in medical consultations, to empower patients’ compliance in illness management. The paper presents defeasible reasoning as specific to the diagnostic praxis, showing how this type of reasoning threatens effective diagnosis communication and entails that we should understand diagnostic evidence as defeasible as well. (...) It argues that metaphors might be effective communicative devices to let the patients understand the relevant defeasors in the diagnostic reasoning process, helping to improve effective diagnosis communication, and also encouraging a change in patients’ beliefs and attitudes on their own experience of illness and illness’ management. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on strategic ineffability in Plato. Strategic ineffability serves different purposes. In Plato, it is mainly used to express a religious feeling of dependence and to emphasize the remoteness of the divine. However, its meaning is not only religious. It is also part of a complex narrative device that often resorts to irony in order to de-emphasize the most arduous and controversial metaphysical speculations. Whereas topoi of affected modesty and unspeakability may only play an aesthetic role, strategic ineffability (...) has to do with relevant communication: it is a way to share with (and induce in) other people feelings, goals and morally relevant beliefs, without entailing any accurate conceptual content. Knowledge is not the primary goal here. The paper argues that Plato, Plotinus and other ancient philosophers used the notion of divine ineffability strategically to share beliefs with their selected audiences and lead their disciples to spiritual change. (shrink)

This paper focuses on sections of Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols that deal with Goethe, with the aim of reflecting on the anthropological ideal that Nietzsche outlines in his late period. I give particular attention to the way in which Nietzsche deals with concepts such as "German", "(good) European", and "free spirit", connecting them in a coherent picture. Finally, I argue that the Renaissance plays an important role in Nietzsche's anthropological project, for it helps to define the spiritual strength that (...) characterizes the healthy type of man whom Nietzsche thought destined to realize his late philosophy. (shrink)

We normally suppose that any artwork “is about” something. The aim of this paper is to show that, even if we can often successfully treat artworks like (historical, sociological, biographical, economical, psychological…) documents, such a circumstance isn’t essential in order to make of an object (a building, a photo…) an artwork (nor it is, parenthetically, the fact that the object in question can be judged as a “beautiful” object, in any sense of this word). The only important circumstance is that (...) an object is adequately documented to be an artwork. (shrink)

This paper explores Thomas Kuhn’s mature conception of incommensurable theories as collective structured lexicons that are not mutually translatable. As will be argued, his view on this issue can profitably be approached in the light of the broad pragmatist attitude that one finds at the core of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy of language, which can also consistently be ascribed to Kuhn.

In this article I rethink Rawls' conception of international economic justice, with a particular focus on international trade. I ground my normative argument on a different interpretation of the concepts of basic structure and of basic institution. I use the contemporary international trading system to illustrate my normative interpretation. I use the Law of Peoples to discuss the Rawlsian concept of basic structure. I contest Samuel Freeman's interpretation of this concept as one that pertains exclusively to the domestic realm. As (...) a reply, I work out an interpretation of basic institutions valid for both the national and international context. I base my understanding on the impact and the form of membership that characterize basic institutions. Both properties are compatible with an extension of the concept of a basic institution to the international domain. I then show how the World Trade Organization (WTO) system can be compared to a domestic basic institution. I analyse the decisional setting that surrounds the choice of joining the WTO. I conclude that no real alternative exists. Hence, WTO membership is not to be considered a completely free policy choice. I also state that the new system is witnessing a strong expansion of the areas subject to trade governance. Such expansion is responsible for the growing impact that international trade has on domestic institutions and hence on people. Finally, I use my analysis of contemporary international trading relations to test Rawls' position in the Law of Peoples. I conclude that although Rawls' principles for fair trade and international cooperation can regulate GATT-style international trade, they are not proficient in assessing the new characteristics of international trade. (shrink)

Although incidents of online sexual assault are becoming increasingly common, the concept of virtual rape still needs critical examination. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I first argue that virtual rape should not be seen as a metaphorical term, let alone an oxymoron. Focusing on the embodied conditions that define presence in immersive environments, I then draw a phenomenologically inspired distinction between physical and bodily to challenge the idea that virtual rape is nothing more than psychological violence. Lastly, I introduce the notion (...) of somatechnical body to clarify the specific nature of virtual rape. (shrink)

I. Del regno terreno.--II. Del regno celeste.--III. Del regno papale.

Orthodox decision theory is fanatical in the way it treats small probabilities of enormous value, if unbounded utility functions are allowed. Some have suggested a fix, Nicolausian discounting, according to which outcomes with small enough probabilities should be ignored when making decisions. However, there are lotteries involving only small-probability outcomes, none of which should intuitively be ignored. So the Nicolausian discounter needs a procedure for distinguishing the problematic cases of small-probability outcomes from the unproblematic ones. In this paper, I present (...) a dilemma for Nicolausian discounting: the view must be coupled either with a procedure that delivers fanatical verdicts of its own, as bad as those of orthodox decision theory, or with one that entails intransitive cyclic preferences. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issue of scientific realism in Mach, and his pragmatist approach to epistemology. Firstly, Eric Banks’s interpretation of Mach as a direct realist about particulars will be explored and discussed. Secondly, Sami Pihlström’s pragmatic realism will be considered, and it will be suggested that this view can be more viably attributed to Mach. Finally, in the light of Mach’s 1910 paper on Sensory Elements and Scientific Concepts, it will be argued that Mach’s agnosticism was probably stronger than (...) any moderate form of realism he could have been committed to, and that he was a radical pragmatist in refusing to be concerned with any kind of metaphysical issue. (shrink)

The paper provides a thorough account of the relationship between Ernst Mach’s thought and that of an apparently more intellectually distant near-contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche. The consistency of their views is in fact substantial, as I try to show within the paper. Despite their interests being different, both Mach and Nietzsche were concerned with the same issues about our intellectual relationship with the external world, dealing with the same questions and pursuing a common aim of eliminating worn-out philosophical conceptions. Moreover, it (...) can be argued that both Mach and Nietzsche converged on what we now know as the problem of realism versus anti-realism in the philosophy of science, and that they both rejected ‘representational’ (realist) conceptions of science in favour of a certain sort of pragmatic anti-realism, whose focus was on the role science plays as a means of orientation. (shrink)

In recent years, the family of algorithms collected under the term ``deep learning'' has revolutionized artificial intelligence, enabling machines to reach human-like performances in many complex cognitive tasks. Although deep learning models are grounded in the connectionist paradigm, their recent advances were basically developed with engineering goals in mind. Despite of their applied focus, deep learning models eventually seem fruitful for cognitive purposes. This can be thought as a kind of biological exaptation, where a physiological structure becomes applicable for a (...) function different from that for which it was selected. In this paper, it will be argued that it is time for cognitive science to seriously come to terms with deep learning, and we try to spell out the reasons why this is the case. First, the path of the evolution of deep learning from the connectionist project is traced, demonstrating the remarkable continuity, and the differences as well. Then, it will be considered how deep learning models can be useful for many cognitive topics, especially those where it has achieved performance comparable to humans, from perception to language. It will be maintained that deep learning poses questions that cognitive sciences should try to answer. One of such questions is the reasons why deep convolutional models that are disembodied, inactive, unaware of context, and static, are by far the closest to the patterns of activation in the brain visual system. (shrink)

Nel corso della sua lunga attività di insegnamento presso le Università di Padova e di Bologna, Pietro Pomponazzi si confrontò ripetutamente con il De anima di Aristotele e con il relativo commento di Averroè. Il suo primo corso svolto in qualità di professore ordinario a Padova risale al 1499, il frutto più maturo delle sue riflessioni è sicuramente il celebre Tractatus de immortalitate animae, pubblicato a Bologna nel 1516, che lo proiettò al centro di polemiche, discussioni e condanne. Gli (...) studenti del Pomponazzi ci hanno tramandato gli appunti di numerosi suoi commenti al Corpus aristotelicum. Fra questi, di particolare interesse è l'esposizione sul primo libro del De anima, che il professore svolse a Padova sul cadere dell'anno 1503, e che fu riportata e messa in bella copia da un nobile veneziano, Antonio Surian, che frequentava le sue lezioni. Il volume presenta l'Expositio super I De anima secondo l'unico manoscritto che ci è pervenuto, conservato nella Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli (VIII D 81), e reca un fondamentale contributo alla ricostruzione della formazione e dello sviluppo della dottrina psicologica pomponazziana. (shrink)

Should retirees be allowed to work? Should working imply forfeiting one’s retiree status? Are retirement and work incompatible? Manuel Valente has recently shown that distinguishing between leisure and free time has significant implications for thinking about retirement. Valente argues that, whilst it may be intuitive to think of retirement in terms of leisure (work-freeness), liberals would better think of retirement as free time (control over one’s time). Hence, working retirees is not an oxymoron. In this comment to Valente’s article I (...) question whether perfectionism grounds a reason to protect free time, as Valente understands the concept. I also suggest that Valente’s claim that liberals should care about free time finds further support in a hybrid view of wellbeing that appeals to endorsement. (shrink)

All’intersezione di Realtà Aumentata e Wearable Technologies, un nuovo paradigma estetico sta emergendo ai nostri giorni. Questo mette in atto un nuovo trattamento tecnico della nostra sensibilità, in qualche modo antagonista rispetto alla Realtà Virtuale. Nel presente studio, mi propongo di affrontare questo nuovo paradigma in riferimento al dispositivo di Google Glass, e distinguere così due diverse tendenze del suo sviluppo. La prima tendenza, che chiamerò “cartesiana”, è caratterizzata da un processo di selezione e ottimizzazione della sensibilità; la seconda tendenza, (...) che riferirò al pensiero di Merleau-Ponty, fa sì che la partecipazione estetica sia in grado di realizzare un dialogo intermediale tra parola e immagine. È interessante notare che, dal punto di vista di una tendenza “cartesiana”, il “prisma” di Google Glass è interpretato come uno schermo, mentre dal punto di vista “merleau-pontiano” è compreso piuttosto come un occhio protesico. (shrink)

This article addresses the ideological context of twentieth-century history of science as it emerged and was discussed at the threshold of the Cold War. It is claimed that the bifurcation of the discipline into a socio-economic strand and a technical-intellectual one (the divide between ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’) should be traced back to the 1930s. In fact, the proposal of a Marxist-oriented historiography by the Soviet delegates at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology (London, 1931) led by Nikolai (...) Bukharin, set off the ideological and methodological opposition that characterised the later years. Bukharin’s views on science are closely considered, as well as those of his Marxist critics, György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. It is argued that, despite the fluidity of the positions of the 1920s and 1930s, these theories soon crystallized as demonstrated by the leftist reception of Bukharin’s and his associates’ perspective in the history of science, especially in Great Britain, as well as by the anti-communist reactions. Intellectualist approaches renouncing socio-economic factors, typically those by Alexandre Koyré and Thomas Kuhn, are reconsidered in the light of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War era. Reflection on the political-cultural embedding of the history of science has often been overshadowed by claims about the objectivity and neutrality of science and its historiography. Thus, the seminal discussion of the 1930s remains one of the most lucid moments of reflection about the role of science and history of science as cultural phenomena shaped by political struggles. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content as an (...) ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

This essay looks at early‐modern Venice hydroculture as a case of episteme from below. The forms of water knowledge it developed were multilayered and collective in their essence and solidly rested on a social experiential basis that was rooted in labour (especially fishing) and practices (especially water surveying and engineering). In accordance with the city's republican esprit (and correspondent political values), its episteme emerged as the encounter and negotiation between various institutions and groups: the fishermen of San Niccolò in Venice, (...) the practitioners of the water magistrature and political authorities. This essay explores the institutional settings of this water culture, seen as an instance of bottom‐up epistemic construction. It especially addresses three historical instances: firstly, a seventeenth century program to map public waters in order to block their alienation for private fish farming; secondly, water officers’ interviews with fishermen aimed to assess the state of the lagoon hydromorphology and, thirdly, fishing regulations. Venice communitarian and circular forms of knowledge production are here contrasted to an opposite paradigm, which was embodied by the Galileian mathematician and Rome courtier, Benedetto Castelli. His interactions with the Republic of Venice on water management and his approach to hydraulic problems are revealing of an elitist and abstract understanding of scientific knowledge that guided political decisions from above without taking in any consideration the opinions of the ‘vulgar’. While his science was the expression of a top‐down political epistemology, Venetian water knowledge was more egalitarian. It left room for exchange, inclusiveness and bottom‐up codification; it valued the gathering of different experiences (including the fishermen's practical knowledge of their waters) and rested on a concrete and systemic (organicist) understanding of natural‐anthropic processes. (shrink)

In the space of four years, from 1826 to 1829, the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal published three anonymous articles seemingly advocating doctrines inspired by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Decades of scholarship have initially attributed the most outspoken of the three articles, the 1826 “Observations on the Nature and Importance of Geology,” to Robert Grant, and subsequently to Robert Jameson, thanks to a critical reassessment by James Secord. More recently, scholars have also ascribed to Jameson an article published in 1829, “Of the Continuity (...) of the Animal Kingdom by Means of Generation from the First Ages of the World to the Present Times.” A third short contribution, the 1827 “Of the Changes which Life has Experienced on the Globe” has been credited to the Franco-German Ami Boué. Research undertaken over several years has led to the identification of the three authors hiding behind the veil of anonymity. They were not the ones scholars have agreed upon, nor were they really “Lamarckians.” The discussion of the ways in which the three texts reached Edinburgh broadens our understanding of the daily working practices of contemporary periodicals and of the networks of circulation of texts at the Continental level. Finally, when considered within their proper conceptual and social context, the three articles throw light on the many ways in which, during the 1820s, European amateurs, naturalists, and journalists debated the succession of life forms throughout the history of the Earth. (shrink)

In field computing a topologic organization of CFs is necessary to support sensorimotor planning. A simple model of cortical dynamics can exploit such topologic organization.

This essay deals with Girolamo Fracastoro’s ensouled cosmology. His Homocentrica sive de stellis (1538), an astronomy of concentric spheres, was discussed by the Padua School of Aristotelians. Since the polemics over the immortality of the human soul, which had famously opposed Pomponazzi to Nifo, psychological discussions—including those about heavenly spheres’ souls—raised heated controversies. Fracastoro discussed the foundations of his homocentric planetary theory in a dialogue titled Fracastorius, sive de anima (1555). In a 1531 exchange with Gasparo Contarini, Fracastoro discussed celestial (...) physics, including problems linked to mathematical analysis of physical causation. Contarini expressed his doubts over Fracastoro’s lack of consideration of Aristotelian viewpoints on heavenly souls and intelligences. Fracastoro offered an account of cosmic animation in his later dialogue “On the Soul,” taking a different path than his Paduan teachers. He picked up the Platonic idea of the “world soul,” freely connecting it with Aristotelian views about the ensouled cosmos of concentric spheres, resulting in an eclectic composition of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Averroistic elements. Fracastoro grounded his renewed mathematical astronomy on an understanding of the cosmos as a living whole. His animated homocentric cosmos represented a development of Aristotelian premises and a step beyond this legacy. (shrink)

Commentary on Romans The thirtenth Chapiter "Let every soule be subject to the higher powers : for ther is no power but of God : and the powers that be, ...

This paper studies the relationship between promoting people's welfare and respecting their autonomy of choice under risk. I highlight a conflict between these two aims. Given compelling assumptions, welfarists end up disregarding people's unanimous preference, even when everyone involved is entirely rational and only concerned with maximizing their own welfare. Non-welfarist theories of social choice are then considered. They are shown to face difficulties, too: either they fail to respect the value of welfare in at least one important sense, or (...) they end up prioritizing different people's welfare differently in non-risky choices, on the basis of their attitudes to risk, which are intuitively irrelevant in this context. (shrink)

This critical essay evaluates the potential integration of distinct kinds of expertise in policymaking, especially during situations of critical emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This article relies on two case studies: herd immunity and restricted access to ventilators for disabled people. These case studies are discussed as examples of experts’ recommendations that have not been widely accepted, though they were made within the boundaries of expert epistemic authority. While the fundamental contribution of biomedical experts in devising public health policies (...) during the COVID-19 pandemic is fully recognized, this paper intends to discuss potential issues and limitations that may arise when adopting a strict expert-based approach. By drawing attention to the interests of minorities, the paper also claims a broader notion of “relevant expertise.” This critical essay thus calls for the necessity of wider inclusiveness and representativeness in the process underlying public health policymaking. (shrink)