Kant claims that we cannot cognize the mutual interaction of substances without their being in space; he also claims that we cannot cognize a ‘spatial community’ among substances without their being in mutual interaction. I situate these theses in their historical context and consider Kant’s reasons for accepting them. I argue that they rest on commitments regarding the metaphysical grounding of, first, the possibility of mutual interaction among substances-as-appearances and, second, the actuality of specific distance-relations among such substances. By illuminating (...) these commitments, I shed light on Kant’s metaphysics of space and its relation to Newton and Leibniz’s views. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from the contentThe reasons that drive individuals to develop new technologies and to disseminate them in new products and processes, and the capacity to develop original solutions to technological problems, can be analysed with the concepts typical of individual and social cognitive psychology. Various aspects of cognitive activity address innovation. In particular, the capacity to grasp the latent questions and needs of the market that lies behind the possibility to identify opportunities for new products or services; (...) the means of generating solutions that can respond effectively to the realisation of these new opportunities; problem solving processes in the identification of new procedures that underpin process inventions and new manufacturing techniques; the risk of innovative behaviour and the contexts that can favour a greater or lesser propensity to develop innovative solutions. The best historical example of the two stages of the identification of the problem/opportunity and the generation of. (shrink)

The widespread use of brain imaging techniques encourages conceiving of neuroscience as the forthcoming “mindscience.” Perhaps surprisingly for many, this conclusion is still largely unwarranted. The present paper surveys various shortcomings of neuroscience as a putative “mindscience.” The analysis shows that the scope of mind (both cognitive and phenomenal) falls outside that of neuroscience. Of course, such a conclusion does not endorse any metaphysical or antiscientific stance as to the nature of the mind. Rather, it challenges a series of assumptions (...) that the undeniable success of neuroscience has fostered. In fact, physicalism is here taken as the only viable ontological framework – an assumption that does not imply that the central nervous system exhausts the physical domain. (shrink)

INDICE -/- Note biografiche Introduzione, di Riccardo Faucci -/- Parte I - Da Verri a Toniolo 1. Jeremy Bentham: Contemporary Interpretations, di M.D.A. Freeman 2. Su Helvétius, Beccaria e Bentham, di Letizia Gianformaggio 3. L'etica utilitaristica di Pietro Veti, di Vincenzo Polignano 4. ll liberismo interventista di Vincenzo Emanuele Sergio, di Anna Li Donni 5. Il concetto di " felicità pubblica, nella << Genesi del diritto penale » di Romagnosi, e il rapporto Romagnosi-Bentham, di Robertino Ghiringhelli 6. « La (...) più grande felicità per il maggior numero » all'Accademia dei Georgofili ( 18)0-1850), di Gabriella Gioli 7. Una nota su Manzoni critico dell'utilitarismo, di Maurizio Mori 8. Sul concetto di utile in Francesco Ferrara e in Maffeo Pantaleoni, di Daniela Parisi Acquaviva 9. Sul pensiero sociale cristiano di fronte all'edonismo, di Luciano Avagliano 10. Giuseppe Toniolo e il recupero cattolico dell'utile e del valore, di Anna Camaiti -/- Parte II Aspetti di storia del pensiero economico nell’età classica -/- 1. La filosofia economica di Thomas Hobbes, di Marco Bertozzi 2. Ordinamento del sapere, modelli metodologici ed economia politica in Adam Smith, di Sergio Cremaschi 3. Elementi classici nel pensiero di Adam Smith: giurisprudenza romana e morale stoica, di Gloria Vivenza 4. Il “lusso” negli economisti italiani del Settecento, di Cosimo Perrotta 5. Prezzi naturali, prezzi di mercato e legge degli sbocchi nel dibattito fra Malthus e Ricardo, di Lilia Costabile 6. Marx e la moneta, di Roberto Petrini -/- . (shrink)

This article juxtaposes Anna Pawełczyńska’s writings with the works of Meir Dworzecki and Dov Levin. It will adopt a threefold analytical lens: first, using Pawełczyńska’s writings to reassess the conception of the early resistance that Dworzecki elaborated, second utilising Dworzecki’s viewpoint as a means to articulate Pawełczyńska’s perspective of Amidah, and then looking at Levin’s perspective on Pawełczyńska’s use of partisan testimony as a historical source. The main aims are to contribute to today’s debates on the Jewish resistance and the (...) relevance of partisanship in Holocaust historiography. The article also highlights some debates on the relationship between history and memory, as well as the necessity of rethinking Catholic-Jewish relations in Poland before and after the war. It presses for a new discussion of Dan Michman’s discourse of Jewish resistance, or Yehuda Bauer’s conceptualisation of it, and underscores the originality of Levin’s thought on memory as an essential tool for history. By way of a conclusion, the reader is invited to rethink the Polish World War II historiography and to read Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s contribution about the blessings of the Amidah. (shrink)

Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. In other historical periods, such concerns may have marked reactions to book bans and burnings. Often, they followed prosecutions and subsequent jailtime for things spoken or written. During the Red Scare, they were the hushed response to chilling state-sponsored watch-lists and employer-supported blacklists designed to ensure victory against communism. Against this history, complaints about the new censorship appear differently. With respect to the new censorship, there are (...) no books burnings, no prosecutions, no laws or committees. Indeed, there is no coercive state involvement at all. With a few notable exceptions, complaints about censorship in the 21st-century West are complaints about the behavior of private parties: social groups, employers, media conglomerates, social media platforms, and search engines. -/- To better understand the concerns surrounding nonstate interference with speech, Private Censorship offers an account of censorship, as well as an assessment of the ethical and political issues it raises across contexts. J.P. Messina asks and variously answers questions like: what should we think when employees get fired for things they say and how might patterns of such firings create a climate of fear inimical to free inquiry? When is it appropriate for social media firms to deplatform users, and what does it mean for our democracy that those in charge of such decisions are often wealthy Silicon Valley executives? Do search engines act as massive gatekeepers to information in troubling ways, and how might they be constrained, if they do? Along the way, Messina casts a critical eye on many popular proposals for responding to these complaints. Unlike these popular approaches, Private Censorship foregrounds the importance of rights to property, association, and free expression for thinking well about 21st-century censorship concerns. (shrink)

I begin by arguing that, for Kant, the pure category of substance has both a general content that is in play whenever we think of any entity as a substance as well as a more specific content that arises in conjunction with the thought of what Kant calls a positive noumenon. Drawing on this new “Dual Content” account of the pure category of substance, I offer new answers to two contested questions: What is the relation of the pure category to (...) phenomenal substance? What, if any, epistemic gains can we achieve when we apply the pure category to noumena? Regarding the first question, I argue that while phenomenal substance does not qualify as a substance according to the Inner-Simple Conception, it does qualify as one according to the Subsistence-Power Conception. Regarding the second question, I argue that, in the case of the substantiality of positive noumena, Kant’s account allows for justified conditional beliefs involving the Inner-Simple Conception. In the case of negative noumena, it allows for justified existential beliefs involving the Subsistence-Power Conception. (shrink)

This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, interactive alignment and interpersonal synergy, and assesses how they predict collective performance in a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy approach points to structural organization at the level of the interaction—such as complementary patterns straddling speech turns and interlocutors. We develop a general, quantitative method to assess lexical, prosodic, and speech/pause patterns related to the two approaches and their impact on collective (...) performance in a corpus of task-oriented conversations. The results show statistical presence of patterns relevant for both approaches. However, synergetic aspects of dialog provide the best statistical predictors of collective performance and adding aspects of the alignment approach does not improve the model. This suggests that structural organization at the level of the interaction plays a crucial role in task-oriented conversations, possibly constraining and integrating processes related to alignment. (shrink)

The author outlines one form of analytical legal realism as the junction of three main theses. According to its first main thesis, interpretive sentences in legal discourse are ascriptive sentences with no cognitive function. According to the second thesis, the law is the set of norms in force, i.e. the norms actually applied in the past and predictably applied in the future by law-applying agencies. The third thesis is that legal science as a cognitive activity must not be confused with (...) legal scholarship. Although legal scholars do engage in cognitive activities, their work mainly consists in non-cognitive activities such as interpretation and legal construction. | An earlier version of this statement was published in Revus 19 in Italian, French, and Croatian. (shrink)

Prolegomena §38 is intended to elucidate the claim that the understanding legislates a priori laws to nature. Kant cites various laws of geometry as examples and discusses a derivation of the inverse-square law from such laws. I address 4 key interpretive questions about this cryptic text that have not yet received satisfying answers: How exactly are Kant's examples of laws supposed to elucidate the Legislation Thesis? What is Kant's view of the epistemic status of the inverse-square law and, relatedly, of (...) the legitimacy of the geometric derivation of that law? Whose account of laws, the understanding, and space is Kant critiquing in the passage? What positive account of the relationship between laws, the understanding, and space is Kant offering in the passage? My answer to depends crucially on my answers to –. As I interpret Kant, he holds that a wide range of a priori laws—including geometric laws, the inverse-square law, and the universal laws discussed in the Analytic of Principles—are ‘grounded’ in categorial syntheses rather than the intrinsic nature of the space given to us in pure intuition. (shrink)

En este artículo se analiza la famosa distinción entre las concepciones hilética y expresiva de las normas. Su objetivo principal es rechazar la tésis de Alchourrón y Bulygin según la cual dichas concepciones ofrecen dos soluciones incompatibles a un mismo problema. Según el autor, las dos concepciones responden a dos problemas distintos y parcialmente independientes: un «problema de la génesis» atinente al proceso de la producción de las normas y un «problema de la naturaleza» atinente al producto del dicho proceso. (...) Por ende, las dos concepciones de las normas no son necesariamente incompatibles, aunque la respuesta a uno de los dos problemas condiciona en alguna medida la respuesta al otro. | Una versión previa de este texto fue publicada en Riccardo Guastini, Otras distinciones. (shrink)

The thoughts of apocalypse can either be intense and demanding, or lead to the risk of abandoning the present to a state of inertia and impotence. The apocalypse can be, in fact, the moment of the Last Judgment. In this case, justice is related to the revelation of truth. But the apocalypse can also be the revelation of the end of any truth, i.e. the revelation that the history doesn’t have any meaning, that the end is as endless as it (...) is hopeless. This article takes up “the apocalypse of Blanchot.” It shows that by thinking that the apocalypse has always already occurred, history is not what leads to an end, but is rather the responsibility to an endless end. In that sense, for Blanchot, history is not the redemption of contingency as eternity; rather, what must be historicized is the eternity of the end. (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s mature political philosophy entails the provisionality thesis. The provisionality thesis asserts that in a world like ours, populated with beings sufficiently like us, acquired rights (rights to external objects of choice, including property, sovereignty and territory) are necessarily provisional. I motivate the standard view, which restricts the notion of provisional right to the state of nature and the transition from the state of nature to the civil condition. I then provide two textual arguments against it. I (...) conclude by reflecting on the normative implications of the provisionality thesis, arguing that they are more modest than has been formerly appreciated. (shrink)

What is the role of education in a world where we no longer have a clear vision of the future and where the idea of a single, universal model of humanity seems like the residue of a bygone age? What role should educators play in a world where young people find themselves faced with deep uncertainty about their future, where the prospects of securing a stable, long-term career seem increasingly remote and where intensified population movements have created more diverse communities (...) in which different cultures find themselves living side by side, no longer bound together by the belief that the other would eventually be assimilated into ‘our' culture? Faced with the bewildering features of our liquid modern world, many young people are inclined to withdraw - in some cases into the online world of games and virtual relationships, in other cases into anorexia, depression, alcohol or even drug abuse, hoping to find shelter from a world perceived as more and more dangerous. Others launch into more violent forms of behaviour, like street gangs and the looting carried out by young people who have been excluded from the temples of consumption but are eager to participate in the ceremony. And all this happens while our politicians look on, uncomprehending and indifferent. In this short book Zygmunt Bauman - the leading social theorist of our liquid modern world, here in conversation with Riccardo Mazzeo - reflects on the predicament of young people today and on the role of education and the educator in a world where the certainties of our predecessors can no longer be taken for granted. (shrink)

This article examines the nature of the child´s right to be loved. In particular, it argues that besides reasons for ensuring that children are affectively cared for by their parents, we have strong reasons for why children should be loved unconditionally -that is, loved independently of their morally irrelevant features. The article defends this claim by engaging closely with an argument recently formulated by Samantha Brennan and Colin Macleod, according to which the child´s right to be loved would be violated (...) by strongly homophobic parents. I argue that Brennan’s and Macleod’s argument needs to be revised because, while it generates a convincing conclusion in the case of homophobic parents, it fails to do so in other cases. This problem calls for a reconsideration of the nature of the right to be loved. Drawing on Philip Pettit’s analysis of robust goods, I argue that this right is a right to be loved unconditionally and an appeal to unconditional love allows us to accommodate the conviction that strongly racist as well as homophobic parents wrong their children by failing to love them (unconditionally). (shrink)

John goes out for a walk. If John endures and his walk perdures, they are different entities. However, what if both John and his walk perdure? Is John’s walk identical to his relevant temporal part? Some philosophers answer in the affirmative. Their motivations rest on ontological parsimony and the quest for clear-cut identity criteria for existing things. By contrast, one of the most widely accepted theories of events – the theory of events as property-exemplifications – allows us to formulate an (...) argument to the effect that objects’ temporal parts are distinct from the events they participate in: the AID argument, as I shall call it. In this paper, I argue that accepting austere nominalism is the best strategy a supporter of the identification between events and temporal parts of objects can take in order to resist the AID argument. (shrink)

Richard Löwenthal’s response to the challenges of ‘1968’ was more complex than that of most of his liberal colleagues. He did not simply remain beholden to the interpretative patterns of a German ‘special path’ (Sonderweg). He also, and increasingly so, drew on the conceptual framework of ‘Western civilization’ to make sense of and cope with the socio-cultural transformations of his times. What many like-minded intellectuals perceived solely as a ‘deviation from the West’, he also viewed as a ‘crisis of the (...) West’. This article argues that this transnationally ‘Western’ stance was part and parcel of Löwenthal’s intellectual profile as ‘cold war liberal’. This was a relatively rare species in Cold War Germany, and Löwenthal was rather exceptional in his sustained engagement with the topic of ‘Western civilization’. Compared with luminaries such as Carl Joachim Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel or Karl Loewenstein, Richard Löwenthal may be lesser known in English-speaking scholarship, but he makes for a particularly instructive case when discussing ‘cold war liberalism’ in West Germany. With its focus on the spatialization of political thought, and ‘the West’ as a spatial imaginary, this article also seeks to contribute to the growing discussion of how to ‘spatialize’ intellectual history. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to analyze the problem of violence, as tackled by Derrida in his dialogue with Levinas. It is asked in particular how it is possible to think critically about violence if we assume that violence constitutes us. In order to do this, it dwells on the diference that Derrida establishes between criticism and deconstruction and on his analysis of the relationship between violence and silence. One of the main theses of this article is that what allows a (...) critique of violence refers to what Derrida calls “trace”, that is, a silence that inhabits language and that does not refer to a previous meaning. In addition, this article focuses on the critic Derrida addresses to Levinas in “Violence and metaphysic”. It shows that far from fitting this critique, Levinas’s analysis of the relation between language and silence implies a radicalization of Derrida’s thesis on what he calls the “worst violence”. (shrink)

Après les guerres du siècle dernier qui ont remis en cause l'idée de progrès, devant les formes multiples des guerres actuelles, peut-on encore penser la paix aujourd'hui? A l'encontre des idées conservatrices de la paix où cette dernière, conçue comme ordre et stabilité, a souvent été le corrélat des Etats policiers, la pensée de la paix, telle que l'élabore Levinas, relève d'une critique de l'autoritarisme politique et permet d'élaborer un nouveau concept de liberté affranchi de la tutelle des Etats. La (...) paix n'est pas ici une idée abstraite mais porte le sujet hors de toutes les formes de confort moral ou de conformisme politique. C'est à un Levinas neuf que nous avons ici à faire : tout en dialoguant avec la tradition moderne et contemporaine de la philosophie politique, il nous montre que la paix est une forme d'insubordination qui aspire à "désembourgeoiser la révolution". Une lecture intranquille de Levinas. (shrink)

Cuando E. Lévinas afirma que la paz es "el acontecimiento inicial del encuentro" y que es un "primer lenguaje", se podría creer que suspende su actitud crítica en beneficio de una ingenua confianza en el ser humano, olvidando así la violencia sin límites de las relaciones humanas. Todo cambia, sin embargo, cuando se comprende que ese "acontecimiento primero" proviene de lo anárquico, que no se fija y no permite entonces ninguna especie de conciliación. Se analiza cómo Lévinas renueva, después de (...) la La Paz perpetua de Kant, el sentido de la palabra paz. Se pregunta qué actitud crítica permite pensar la paz sin remitirse a las ilusiones de la moral, y qué peso tiene una paz que no se encarna en instituciones. It could be possible to think that when E. Lévinas states that peace is "the first event of the encounter" and that it is a "first language", he gives up his critical attitude in favor of a naive faith in human beings, thus forgetting the unlimited violence that characterizes human relations. Everything changes, however, when one understands that the "first event" arises from anarchy, that it is not fixed, and that it allows for no conciliation. The article analyzes how, after Kant's Perpetual Peace, Lévinas provides a renovated meaning of peace. Likewise, it inquires into the critical attitude that makes it possible to think peace without falling into the illusions of morality, and what significance would a peace not actualized in institutions might have. (shrink)

L'articolo si propone di esaminare le ricerche di Michael Tomasello nel campo della psicologia evoluzionistica dal punto di vista di una filosofia neocriticista. L'analisi metterà in luce, in una prospettiva generale ma anche a partire da un caso specifico tratto da Tomasello, la possibilità di interpretare la psicologia evoluzionistica, grazie all'apporto di un'analisi trascendentale dei suoi concetti, come una disciplina composita e dotata di differenti piani di sviluppo.

Whereas several commentators have held that Kant’s argument for the postulate of private right fails insofar as it begs the question, I argue here that this criticism misses the mark. Critics have...

In criminal proceedings, offenders are sentenced based on doctrines of culpability and punishment that theorize why they are guilty and why they should be punished. Throughout human history, these doctrines have largely been grounded in legal-policy constructions around retribution, safety, deterrence, and closure, mostly derived from folk psychology, natural philosophy, sociocultural expectations, public-order narratives, and common sense. On these premises, justice systems have long been designed to account for crimes and their underlying intent, with experience and probabilistic assumptions shaping theoretical (...) discourses on the nature of crimes and offenders’ punishability. As scientific discoveries, inventions, and methodologies progressively developed to refine such doctrines and displace long-held assumptions, criminal courtrooms have increasingly witnessed counsels and judges relying on scientific evidence to submit, dispute, or validate claims. For instance, over the last century, criminal courtrooms have selectively admitted neuroscientific models, exams, and insights claiming to revolutionize our understanding of who is culpable and deserving of punishment. Most recently, advancements in epigenetics have promised even more profound challenges to long-standing criminal law doctrines. This article examines the reasons reversibility and inheritability of epigenetic markers might warrant revising culpability and punishment and concludes that epigenetic findings are not yet robust enough to justify such revisions. (shrink)

Resumen El artículo se propone mostrar cómo, en El can de Kant, la filosofía llega a ser cuestionada por la literatura, y qué tipo de operación crítica o deconstructiva esta última posibilita. Muestra en particular que los problemas de la imaginación y del tiempo en Kant están enfocados a partir de la experiencia de la memoria y de la traducción en Borges. Finalmente, se sugiere que, mientras la imaginación posibilita la conformación de objetos, y por ende la posibilidad de tener (...) a un perro, la literatura abre a otras formas de territorialidad, de relaciones y de asunción del cuerpo.This article aims to show how in Kant’s Dog philosophy can be questioned by literature, and what kind of critical or deconstructive operation the later enables. In particular, it shows that the problem of imagination and time in Kant are focused on the experience of memory and translation in Borges. Finally, the article suggests that while imagination enables the conformation of objects, and therefore the possibility of having a dog, the literature opens to other forms of territorialities, of relationships, and of assumption of the body. (shrink)

The article aims to demonstrate that the nudge theory suffers from three main weaknesses stemming from its theoretical dependence on behavioural economics. The first two weaknesses endanger the paternalistic goal, whereas the third does not justify the libertarian attribute. The first weakness lies in the incomplete realistic characterisation of behavioural economics theory that is the central theoretical pillar of Nudge theory. The second weakness is even more relevant. The normative model of behavioural economics is neoclassical rationality. It can be applied (...) to choices in conditions of risk, when it is possible to forecast the probability of the outcomes of one’s choices. On the contrary the real life problems are inside a complex and uncertain environment. In an uncertain environment the neoclassical algorithms are no longer valid, in that they postulate the knowledge of the probability of the outputs. Thus errors and bias, as observed in behavioural economics, are not such in many instances, but they are instead adaptive and therefore rational responses to the context of decision-making. Therefore nudge theory that pursues the normative paternalistic objective of neutralising the bias and judgement errors discovered by behavioural economics and putting paternalistically the citizen on the right track, is in fact proceeding in the wrong direction. The last weakness concerns an assumption of Nudge theory about the duality of mind. System 1 represents the intuitive mind, while System 2 corresponds to the analytical one. System 1 tends to make decisions quickly and unconsciously, while System 2 follows a slow and conscious process. Biases and judgement errors are mainly generated by System 1. However, System 2 may later intervene to correct them. From this premise, the Nudge theory affirms its libertarian character. In this paper I will argue that the dualism of the mind would not entail the reversibility of some nudges, particularly of default states. In this way the fundamental pillar is weakened to justify the libertarian character of the nudge theory. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 4 Seiten: 416-457.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Worldview: How Judgment Shapes Human Comprehension by Rudolf A. MakkreelRiccardo PozzoRudolf A. Makkreel. Kant’s Worldview: How Judgment Shapes Human Comprehension. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Pp. 284. Hardback, $99.95. Paperback, $34.95.This is the last book Rudolf Makkreel published before passing away in October 2021. No wonder, then, that it makes some strong points, one of which is truly fundamental: the time has come to recognize the (...) expediency of reading Kant along with Dilthey for a better understanding of the workings of human comprehension. Makkreel maintains that Kant endorsed “a more inclusive idea of philosophizing according to a world-concept (Weltbegriff ),” for Kant had realized that, because reason cannot simply extrapolate from the ways in which the understanding proceeds to a determinate lawful order, it is necessary to tame the speculative projections of reason by our own powers of orientation and judgment. Hence, Makreel concludes that “the overall worldview we can actually arrive at will need [End Page 511] to include supplementary modes of organizational order that are not determinant but reflective” (3).Throughout the book, Makkreel is pleading for Kant scholars to acknowledge the heuristic value of a set of concepts whose philosophical effectiveness has been to date underestimated. Readers will find many convincing analyses of the lexical cloud around judgment: determining judgment (bestimmende Urteilskraft) against reflecting judgment (reflektierende Urteilskraft) in its connection with the Weberian distinction between explaining (Erklären), understanding (Verstehen), and comprehending (Begreifen). What is at stake in contrasting the last two, understanding and comprehension, insists Makkreel, is the scope of what humans can claim to know, for while it is important to base knowledge claims on the empirical understanding, we must remain open to what could lie beyond the horizon of sense. Hence, critical philosophy is there to supplement “the limits of actual geographical” surveys of the earth with the “boundaries of all possible descriptions of the earth” (KrV A 759/B 787), whereby limits (Schranken) are negative empirical markers that do not take into account what could be beyond them, while boundaries (Grenzen) are positive markers that “presuppose a space existing outside a certain definite space and enclosing it” (Prolegomena, AA 4:352). Makkreel suggests we can infer that whereas earthly limits are imposed from without, worldly boundaries are in some sense self-imposed. Earthly limits would act as external negative restraints on the understanding, while worldly bounds work as internal positive constraints on reason as it attempts to comprehend both what we can and cannot know. Comprehension, argues Makkreel, can be “shown to be a mode of reason whose bounds must be judgmentally self-binding” (14).Let me take a step back. Makkreel intends to show that the task of understanding in its relation with comprehension is what we need to provide an overall characterization of Kant’s philosophical project. This is a bold stance, given Kant’s argument that the faculty of understanding (Verstand) proceeds discursively, namely one step at a time, which makes the project of a more holistic comprehension (Begreifen) highly problematic. However, Makkreel notes that if it is true that “concepts of reason serve for comprehension” (KrV A 311/B 367), it is also true they are purely inferential and at times sophistical (13). To help define what Kant ends up meaning by ‘comprehension,’ Makkreel provides exhaustive references to important discussions about this notion in Kant’s Lectures on Logic and the Critique of Judgment (40–46).Here comes to the foreground the notion of worldview (Weltanschauung) that stands alone in the title of his book. It is in the context of his discussion of the mathematical sublime that Kant broached the idea of an overall “worldview [Weltanschauung]” (KU AA 5:255), which nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers (e.g. Hegel, Dilthey, and Jaspers) took to denote a common or generic outlook on life. For Makkreel, though, ‘worldview’ designates a comprehensive way of characterizing Kant’s distinctive philosophical project (13).As I said above, this is a bold stance. While the first part of the book focuses on philosophizing according to a world-concept, the second part turns to our practical concerns as we act in the world. In... (shrink)

Processes are occurrents that were, are, or will be happening. They endure or they perdure, i.e. they are either “fully” present at every time they happen, or they rather have temporal parts. According to Stout (2016), they endure. His argument assumes that processes may change. Then, Stout argues that, if something changes, it endures. As I show, Stout’s Argument misses its target. In particular, it makes use of a notion of change that is either intuitive but illegitimate or technical but (...) question-begging. (shrink)

The manuscript UCLA 170/624 contains Galileo’s proof of the center of gravity of the frustum of a cone, which was ultimately published as Theoremata circa centrum gravitatis solidorum in Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze. The UCLA copy opens the possibility of giving a fuller account of Theoremata dating and development, and it can shed light on the origins of this research by the young Galileo. A comparison of the UCLA manuscript with the other extant copies is (...) carried out to propose a new dating for the composition of the Theoremata. This dating will then be reconsidered in light of the mathematical content. The paper ends with a complete description of the content of the UCLA manuscript and the edition of Galileo’s text there contained. (shrink)

This paper presents a transcription of a handwritten Latin text, along with its translation into English, that was identified only very recently in the Kongelige Bibliothek in Copenhagen while preparing the new critical edition of Kant’s Nova dilucidatio (PND). The text consists of remarks by Johann Reinhold Grube, composed in his role as opponent at Kant’s disputation for the venia legendi on 27 September 1755. Grube’s interleaved opposing remarks on Kant’s dissertatio metaphysica pro receptione contain precious starting points for new (...) lines of research, since they vividly exemplify the point of view of one of the participants in the debate, a perspective that is rarely documented. In addition to informing us about how the disputation itself was carried out and which traditional rhetorical techniques were used, these remarks offer a compelling glimpse into the immediate reception of Kant’s first thoughts on logic and metaphysics, giving scholars access to an ingenious reaction to Kant’s stance on the theory of judgment. (shrink)

The importance of Gottlob Ernst Schulze's Aenesidemus 1 for the history of German Idealism has been widely recognized. Much as Hume had awoken Kant, Aenesidemus jolted the young Fichte out of his slumbering adherence to Reinhold's formulation of Kant's philosophy, leading him to re-evaluate the claims, methods, and foundations of the Critical philosophy. In his "Review of the Aenesidemus" 2 Fichte set out the results of this re-evaluation, which included his doctrine of intellectual intuition with remarkable and uncharacteristic clarity. 3 (...) According to a widely accepted story about the genesis of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre, the early Fichte was largely sympathetic to .. (shrink)