Contemporary scholarship concerning science diplomacy is increasingly taking a historical approach. In our introduction to this special issue, we argue that this approach promises insight into science diplomacy because of the tools historians of science bring to their work. In particular, we observe that not only are historians of science currently poised to chart the diplomatic aspects involved in the transnational circulation of technoscientific knowledge, materials, and expertise. They are ready to bring critical global analysis to an important phenomenon that (...) has too often been treated as a benign diplomacy device deployed by the Global North without equal reference to the Global South. Through cases discussed in the articles of the special issue, however, we see that historically, in the Global South as well as the Global North, science diplomacy has often functioned to mediate the circulation of technoscientific knowledge and materials, and its historical study helps to better illuminate the resulting knowledge-power nexus. (shrink)

What is the relation between parts taken together and the whole that they compose? The recent literature appears to be dominated by two different answers to this question, which are normally thought of as being incompatible. According to the first, parts taken together are identical to the whole that they compose. According to the second, the whole is grounded in its parts. The aim of this paper is to make some theoretical room for the view according to which parts ground (...) the whole they compose while being, at the same time, identical to it. (shrink)

We discuss the distinction between the sensory modalities; the metaphysics of sounds; and the structure of sound space. We defend a physicalist conception of sounds, without accepting the identification of sounds with sound-waves in the medium. Sounds, we hold, are events in resonating objects. We evaluate the two main accounts of orientation in perceptual space: relationism and absolutism. We then address Strawson's problem of whether the logical space of sounds could be spatial in the full sense of the term. In (...) the Appendix, we discuss the logic of perceptual auditory reports, and show their compatibility with our theory of sounds. (shrink)

What is the relationship between persons and things? And how does the body transform this relationship? In this highly original new book, Roberto Esposito - one of Italy’s leading political philosophers - considers these questions and shows that starting from the body, rather than from the thing or the person, can help us to reconsider the status of both. Ever since its beginnings, our civilization has been based on a strict, unequivocal distinction between persons and things, founded on the (...) instrumental domination of persons over things. This opposition arose out of ancient Roman law and persisted throughout modernity, to take its place in our current global market, where it continues to generate growing contradictions. Although the distinction seems to appear clear and necessary to us, what we are continually witnessing in legal, economic, and technological practice is a reversal of perspectives: some categories of persons are becoming assimilated with things, while some types of things are taking on a personal profile. With his customary rigour, Roberto Esposito argues that there exists an escape route out of this paradox, constituted by a new point of view founded in the body. Neither a person nor a thing, the human body becomes the decisive element in rethinking the concepts and values that govern our philosophical, legal, and political lexicons. (shrink)

A magisterial study of the philosophy of physics that both introduces the subject to the non-specialist and contains many original and important contributions for professionals in the area. Modern physics was born as a part of philosophy and has retained to this day a properly philosophical concern for the clarity and coherence of ideas. Any introduction to the philosophy of physics must therefore focus on the conceptual development of physics itself. This book pursues that development from Galileo and Newton through (...) Maxwell and Boltzmann to Einstein and the founders of quantum mechanics. There is also discussion of important philosophers of physics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of twentieth-century debates. In the interest of appealing to the broadest possible readership the author avoids technicalities and explains both the physics and philosophical terms. (shrink)

El primer apartado del trabajo considera cómo el pensar es privado de su carácter primario cuando la lógica originaria y el lenguaje de las señas son sustituidos por la lógica del enunciado y el lenguaje de los signos. En segundo lugar, se muestra que la elucidación de las señas del Ser conduce a un examen del peligro que enfrenta el pensar en presencia de la filosofía. El tercer apartado se ocupa del ulterior peligro que surge cuando se intenta derivar el (...) pensar a partir del poetizar. El pensador aguarda señas porque ya no cuenta con sistemas de pensamiento, y en este proceso ha de estar dispuesto para la verdad del ser. Mientras que el poeta instituye de una manera originaria el Ser en una comunidad, el pensador concibe y ensambla, y de ese modo abre por primera vez lo que ha sido desvelado por el poeta. Finalmente, se ofrece un análisis de la relación de la lógica originaria con la hermenéutica y la fenomenología. (shrink)

From a hermeneutical position, the article examines why tension is created between «method» on one hand and circularity on the other. The latter, being unity as well, is the foundation of natural hermeneutics of which it has been said that to be human is to interpret. With this purpose in view, the author has sought to restore to essential Greek terms their archaic meaning which centuries of vernacular usage have rendered blurry, finding that, in accordance with the Greek symbolon, man's (...) conscience of «I am Here and Now» is symbolic unity, viz. a strained unity in search of The Superior Unity that makes him Methodos, Circle, His Own Future, and Metaphysics. (shrink)

Since Rawl’s A theory of justice, political philosophy has been haunted by the moral and epistemic problem of justification. The growing awareness of the irreducibility of human disagreement has increased a sense of uneasiness towards the ambivalence of pluralism that, in turn, has fostered the hope that rationality, in its public use, could help us in grounding the social order on more stable basis. Although Stanley Cavell is not usually considered a significant participant in this debate, through his work he (...) has developed an original and strong interpretation of the nature of justification and rationality. Cavell’s search for a new conception of rationality starts from an analysis of the rationality immanent to the use of ordinary language. This model of explanation, whose origins are to be found in the teaching of Wittgenstein and Austin, is then extended and articulated through an analysis of aesthetic judgment. This vantage point is successively used by Cavell in order to redefine the epistemological categories of political and moral philosophy. Cavell’s moral and political philosophy is based on an original account of practical rationality and justification built over the concepts of claim, articulation and expression. As Cavell himself has never offered a complete account of his theory of rationality, in this paper I provide a wide reconstruction of the linguistic, aesthetic and moral steps through which this theory has been developed. (shrink)

v. 1. A alma é o corpo -- v. 2. A arma é o corpo.

Se intentan poner de manifiesto isomorfismos estructurales en las teorías de Heidegger y Husserl sobre tiempo e historia. En relación con Ser y tiempo, la atención está puesta en la tesis compartida de que la historiografía está arraigada en la historicidad y esta en la temporeidad. Con referencia al curso de 1934 se pone de relieve la convergencia heideggeriana de misión, encargo y trabajo, que remiten al futuro, al pasado y al presente. Se muestran nociones equivalentes en los niveles que (...) Husserl distingue en la historia: protohistoria, historia efectiva e historia racional. Finalmente, en lo que atañe al viraje, se trazan paralelos entre el Ereignis y el presente viviente como instancias últimas de una indagación restrospectiva, entre la temporeidad del Dasein y al tiempo inmanente como resonancias de una dimensión profunda, y en torno de una conexión mutua en el análisis de la historia en términos de desviación, reposición, incorporación y superación, esto es, los momentos que componen la noción de Gewind. (shrink)

Some concepts, such as colour concepts or value concepts, seem to bear traces of the mind's own make-up. For instance, an extreme position would be that colours and values are not in the world at all, they instead are mere projections that tell us more about the users of response-dependent concepts than about the world they inhabit. But even setting aside such extreme views, a number of important philosophical and psychological questions remain open. What exactly is response-dependence, and does any (...) concept have this feature? What is the appropriate metaphysics for properties represented by response-dependent concepts, and for these concepts themselves? What determines the extension of such properties? How are we to account for knowledge expressed in terms of response-dependent concepts? What mechanisms correctly explain the origins of response-dependent concepts, and their role in representation? (shrink)

This paper aims to identify several interpretive problems posed by the final part ofDAII.11 (423b27–424 a10), where Aristotle intertwines the thesis that a sense is like a ‘mean’ and an explanation for the existence of a ‘blind spot’ related to the sense of touch, adding the further contention that we are capable of discriminating because the mean ‘becomes the other opposite’ in relation to the perceptible property being perceived. To solve those problems, the paper explores a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s (...) claims, arguing that they describe a homeostatic physiological reaction by which the sensory apparatus responds to perceptible stimuli. According to the proposed interpretation, such homeostatic reaction constitutes a necessary condition for perceiving what Aristotle refers to as ‘proper’ perceptible features, which include properties like ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ as well as colors and sounds. (shrink)

The Diuisio Aristotelea 67M/32DL draws a distinction between two categories of beings, per se and relatives. I defend three main theses. First, that the relation of dependence characterizing the members of the latter category is modal and symmetrical in nature and, accordingly, the per se-relatives contrast cannot be equivalent to the substance-accidents contrast. Second, that the type of relativity relevant to this diuisio is both ontological and semantic in nature (but with different emphases depending on the version of the diuisio (...) considered). Third, I argue, against a widespread opinion, that the last line of the DL version of the diuisio does not concern metaphysical principles. Here I also compare the diuisio to other Early Academic bicategorial schemes and show that they differ from one another significantly, especially as far as the alleged connection between categories and metaphysical principles is concerned. (shrink)