This article focuses on the significance of space in the display of hegemonic power in the La Scala opera house in the years 1776–1850s. More specifically, it traces the changes in the use of space from Napoleon’s attempt to “democratise” La Scala by attacking the display of hegemonic hierarchy and subverting the status quo, to the Habsburgs’ attempt to “restore” a display of hegemonic rule. The analysis of primary findings demonstrates that the space of the opera house was reshaped not (...) only physically through renovation but also by imposing rules and structuring attendance during performances. The social significance of La Scala’s theatrical space is also explored by identifying the means the Habsburg authorities used to control it as part of their response to the rise of the Risorgimento. The article thus traces the historical shifts in the political functions of space in La Scala from its early role of displaying aristocratic authority through the period of Napoleonic democratisation and finally the Hapsburgs’ restoration politics of surveillance. (shrink)

Martin Gustafsson and Richard Sørli. The Philosophy of J. L. Austin. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780199219759 Reviewed by Claudia Bianchi.

This contribution claims that the two fundamental notions of causation at work in the health sciences are manipulative and mechanistic, and investigates what kinds of evidence matter for the assessment of causal relations. This article is a development of our 2007 article, ‘Plurality of Causality’, where we argue for a pluralistic account of causation with an eye to econometrics and a single medical example. The present contribution has a wider focus, and considers the notion of evidence within a whole range (...) of disciplines belonging to the health sciences. Section 1 addresses the relations between kinds of evidence and causal accounts, and it is shown how different notions of causation can be employed in various medical cases. Section 2 calls attention to issues crucial for any adequate epistemological theory of causation, such as the distinctions between types and tokens, observational and experimental regimes, explanation and prediction. Lastly, the notion of context is articulated, highlighted in its role in the assessment of causal links. All these issues are tackled in the framework of what we label a ‘bottom–up’ epistemology. (shrink)

Analyzes Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics from a feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic perspective, showing that Aristotelian teleology relies on the disparagement of chance and the feminine simultaneously and finding resources therein for contemporary feminist thought.

Eating disorders are mental illnesses that can have a significant and persistent physical impact, especially for those who are not treated early in their disease trajectory. Although many persons w...

In the remediation of business-related human rights abuses, meaningful stakeholder engagement which culminates in effective access to remedy begins with forms of communication that enable the voice and agency of marginalized stakeholders, and value their lived experiences. Here, we consider how the development of a _dialogical_ theorization of stakeholder engagement is aligned with the practical and ethical goals of an effective access to human rights remedy. Drawing on dialogical theory, we discern four ethical criteria —_power cognizance, polyphonic pluralism, generative agonism (...) and discursive unfinalizability_— that reveal three general approaches to stakeholder engagement —_essentially monologic, seemingly dialogic and authentically dialogic_— based on the extent to which they exhibit the criteria above. We propose and discuss an 'authentically dialogic' approach for organizations adopting morally expansive, victim-centric approaches to engagement in the design and implementation of company-led remedial mechanisms. (shrink)

This article focuses on the assessment of mechanistic relations with specific attention to medicine, where mechanistic models are widely employed. I first survey recent contributions in the philosophical literature on mechanistic causation, and then take issue with Federica Russo and Jon Williamson’s thesis that two types of evidence, probabilistic and mechanistic, are at stake in the health sciences. I argue instead that a distinction should be drawn between previously acquired knowledge of mechanisms and yet-to-be-discovered knowledge of mechanisms and that both (...) probabilistic evidence and manipulation are essential with respect to newly discovered mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper takes Plato's metaphor of poetic transmission as magnetic charge in the Ion as a central trope for thinking through the various relationships between philosophy and literature; between poetry, interpretation, and truth; and between erotic affects and the material, corporeal, queer dimensions of reception. The affective dimensions of the Platonic text in the Ion, Republic, Symposium, and Phaedrus are examined at length, and the explicit accounts of ascent to philosophical truth are shown to be complicated by the persistence of (...) tropes of corporeal and affective downgoing, with particular attention afforded to the figures of Eros, Hermes, and shame. The paper argues for an unbroken connection between these scenes of classical philosophy and the emergence of homosexuality in relation to the study of the classics in Victorian England. (shrink)

Putting into question the usefulness and the adequacy of the Wave metaphor as a key to understand the complexity of the feminist movement and its history, the author critically recounts the salient nodes around which the feminist movement has discussed on the transnational level the issue of wage for housework and the nexus production/reproduction in the long 1968, critically rethinking the differences between women and the different experiences of oppression in capitalist society. In particular, the essay analyzes the way in (...) which the dichotomy redistribution/recognition has constituted an inseparable nexus in feminist reflections and has redefined the relationship between gender, class and ethnicity/race, showing the centrality of the intersections between them for the movement and feminist theory. (shrink)

a relação entre razão e natureza envolve um dos principais aspectos da crítica da teleologia de Kant. Visando destacar esta relação, investigarei o conceito de técnica da natureza, tal como introduzida na Crítica da faculdade de julgar. De acordo com Kant, a técnica da natureza permite as leis da razão a representarem o acordo dos princípios transcendentais da razão com a natureza. Deste modo, o conceito da técnica da natureza assume um papel prolífico ao expor, através de uma analogia com (...) as faculdades humanas, a atividade produtiva da natureza, como se sua atividade fosse orientada a fins.The relationship between reason and nature embodies one of the main aspects of Kant‟s critique of teleology. In order to highlight this relation, I shall investigate the concept of the technique of nature, as it has been introduced in Critique of the Power of Judgment. According to Kant, the technique of nature allows the laws of reason to represent the agreement of the transcendental principles of reason with nature. Thus, the concept of the technique of nature assumes a fruitful role by exposing, through an analogy with human faculties, the productive activity of nature, as if its activity were oriented towards ends. (shrink)

The meaning of matter is determined by our interpretations. Even food has its own frequencies, which can be aligned with the specific notes of a musical scale. When presented with a dish we might ask not only “how does it taste?” but also “how does it sound?.” Gastrofonia is defined not as the musical accompaniment to a cooking demonstration, but the actual sound of it: music is made by food. Built upon an experiment initiated by John Cage to try to (...) make music with objects, gastrofonia examines sound as a possible connection among the visual and material arts. Combining music with taste, musician Roy Paci identified a biosonic perception of food. This chapter aims to analyze the case of gastrofonia in light of the increased scientific and artistic interest in food characterizing our contemporary society, that is, an orthorexic society where food has become a specific form of language, a communicative vehicle through which we express our identity, interests, social-ethical choices, and new concepts of art. From a sociosemiotic perspective, the gastrofonic dish is an example of a textual polyphonic discourse combining different languages, related to the five senses in a performance that becomes a form of shared communication. (shrink)

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order to (...) criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like “pencil” functions very differently from a natural kind term like “tiger.” This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on (...) Kripke’s and Putnam’s considerations, and I use it to rebut Schwartz’s arguments, showing that if it works for natural kind terms, it can work for artifactual kind terms too, or at least that Schwartz did not provide good enough reasons to the contrary. (shrink)

This is a personal recollection of Lyman Tower Sargent that stresses his enormous contribution—personal and academic—to the community of utopian studies. After a brief recollection of our academic interactions, the short contribution pays homage to a “social dreamer” who is aware that utopia can be dangerous but is equally sure that it is absolutely essential if we are to survive.

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Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir a relação entre a construção de uma postura individualista como estratégia de cuidado de si dentro do contexto atual em que vivemos. Para tanto é realizado uma reflexão a partir da idéia de “sociedade de consumidores” trazida por Zygmunt Bauman, buscando construir uma relação desta com diferentes campos de atuação do sujeito humano. O que encontramos é uma postura que busca defender o indivíduo de possíveis riscos, sendo o outro, seu principal alvo de controle. (...) Dessa forma, constrói-se um individualismo que não pode ser confundido com a postura ascética do cuidado de si grego que possuía em seu conceito a dimensão trágica como suporte a política da existência. Ao final, concebe-se a resistência às políticas de controle de desejos como saída aos dispositivos presentes na sociedade de consumo. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 39-51, September 2011.

This book examines the role of note-taking in ancient education as a pedagogical method, by taking readers on a stimulating analysis of lectures by ancient philosophers that were recorded by their students.

It is generally assumed, and usually taken for granted, that reality is fully contained in space. However, when taking a closer look at the strange behavior of the entities of the micro-world, we are forced to abandon such a prejudice and recognize that space is just a temporary crystallization of a small theatre for reality, where the material entities can take a place and meet with each other. More precisely, phenomena like quantum entanglement, quantum interference effects and quantum indistinguishability, when (...) analyzed attentively, tell us that there is much more in our physical reality than what meets our three-dimensional human eyes. But if the building blocks of our physical reality are non-spatial, what does it mean? Can we understand what the nature of a non-spatial entity is? And if so, what are the consequences for our view of the world in which we live and evolve as a species? This article was written having in mind one of the objectives of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies, that of a broad dissemination of scientific knowledge. Hence, it addresses a transversal audience of readers, both academic and nonacademic, hoping to stimulate in this way the interdisciplinary dialogue about foundational issues in science. (shrink)

The essay analyses utopia as a key concept to investigate modern politics. It argues that looking at the works of Machiavelli and More in order to retrace the utopia-realism nexus permits to develop a valuable analytical tool to interpret the outset of political modernity.