This chapter highlights how the encouragement of citizens' participation may in fact masquerade their rulers' attempt to create consensus for their ‘superior’ political project. It illustrates in ethnographic detail how rulers have symbolically used the public space, along with policies of urban regeneration, to win popular consensus and, thus, legitimise their position. The analysis addresses a central problem in the dynamics of democratic government, as it shows that lack of responsibility and superimposition of a political rhetoric on good governance eventually (...) leads to people's distrust of those in power. The case of Naples significantly points to the fact that, while people may be granted formal membership of society, rulers' pedagogic approaches and self-legitimisation do in fact deny fundamental citizenship rights, such as social and economic rights. (shrink)

Western élite groups’ moralities and actions can and should be studied empirically. Contrary to belief held in the 1980s in mainstream social anthropology that fieldwork in the classic anthropological fashion could not be done among the western élite, the findings of long-term research in this field have yielded key ethnographic insights leading to academic and public debate. In this article I draw on ethnographic research on legitimacy, power, and governance among key Neapolitan élite groups to offer reflections on a style (...) of governance that has at once engendered and thrived on the blurring of the dividing line between what is legitimate and what is not legitimate in public life. The discussion focuses on powerful, tightly networked groups that, inspired by an elitist philosophy of power, have been hard at work to gain and maintain power, while losing trust and authority. The analysis builds towards an understanding of their implosion and of the corresponding erosion of the relationship between citizenship and governance. (shrink)

We investigate certain Brouwer-Zadeh lattices that serve as abstract counterparts of lattices of effects in Hilbert spaces under the spectral ordering. These algebras, called PBZ*-lattices, can also be seen as generalisations of orthomodular lattices and are remarkable for the collapse of three notions of “sharpness” that are distinct in general Brouwer-Zadeh lattices. We investigate the structure theory of PBZ*-lattices and their reducts; in particular, we prove some embedding results for PBZ*-lattices and provide an initial description of the lattice of PBZ*-varieties.

El consentimiento informado en investigación se inscribe en la relación médico-paciente, que ha sufrido, y sigue sufriendo, importantes cambios: desde el planteamiento clásico, como relación de amistad, al planteamiento contemporáneo, como relación entre extraños, que es regulada por normas éticas y legales. El principal objetivo de estas últimas es conseguir, mediante requisitos formales, que dicha relación no perjudique al paciente. Bajo esta luz, se examina y compara el consentimiento informado en las principales normativas internacionales y en la ley española. Especialmente, (...) nos centramos en la hoja de información al paciente, la comprensión, la voluntariedad, la certificación y la comunicación de los resultados de la investigación. Se concluye con la observación de la seria limitación intrínseca de la que adolecen estas normativas, que impiden, más que favorecen, el trato adecuado al paciente. doi: 10.5294/pebi.2015.19.2.3. (shrink)

A brief introduction to the main philosophical problems and theories about the nature of holes and such-like nothingnesses.

In the recent literature across philosophy, medicine and public health policy, many influential arguments have been put forward to support the use of randomization procedures to allocate scarce life-saving resources. In this paper, I provide a systematic categorization and a critical evaluation of these arguments. I shall argue that those arguments justify using RAND to allocate SLSR in fewer cases than their proponents maintain and that the relevant decision-makers should typically allocate SLSR directly to the individuals with the strongest claims (...) to these resources rather than use RAND to allocate such resources. (shrink)

Introduction -- Inquiry as the logic of practical reasoning -- From reasoning to judgment -- Expressive inquiry -- The public sphere -- Pragmatism, pluralism, and the fact of relativism -- A pragmatic theory of objectivity -- Why justification matters? -- Pragmatism as an epistemology of practice.

Over the last few decades, there have been intense debates concerning the effects of markets on the morality of individuals’ behaviour. On the one hand, several authors argue that markets’ ongoing expansion tends to undermine individuals’ intentions for mutual benefit and virtuous character traits and actions. On the other hand, leading economists and philosophers characterize markets as a domain of intentional cooperation for mutual benefit that promotes many of the character traits and actions that traditional virtue ethics accounts classify as (...) virtuous. In this paper, I join this debate and argue for three claims of general interest to philosophers, economists and policy makers. First, market transactions do not reliably promote individuals’ intentions for mutual benefit, and often select against such intentions. Second, the set of so-called market virtues lacks a substantial overlap with the set of character traits that traditional virtue ethics accounts classify as virtuous. And third, many seemingly virtuous actions observed in market contexts are merely actions in accordance with virtue rather than genuine actions from virtue. These three claims do not license opposition to markets, but challenge the main empirical and theoretical presuppositions of leading virtue ethics defences of markets. (shrink)

Mathematical game theory – developed starting from the publication of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior , by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern – aims to outline an ideal model of behaviour of rational agents involved in some interaction with other rational agents. For this reason, game theory has immediately attracted the attention of philosophers dealing with practical rationality and, since the fifties, has been applied to the analysis of several issues concerning ethics and philosophy of politics. Here (...) we will focus on one of the most interesting applications of game theory to ethical-political inquiry, i.e., with the game theoretic analysis of some problems related to the evolution of moral norms. Firstly, we will provide a short outline of the development of game theory, which has lead to the formulation of a plurality of different game theories. It will be shown that such theories can be classified in two main groups: rationalistic game theories –in two different versions: classical and epistemic – and evolutionary game theories. Moreover, some basic elements of classical game theory will be introduced and the key ideas of epistemic and evolutionary game theories will be illustrated. Afterwards, the main approaches developed within the ethical-political applications of game theory will be shortly described. Finally, some results obtained in the last twenty years by the researchers who have analysed the evolution of moral norms by the conceptual tools of evolutionary and epistemic game theories, will be examined. (shrink)

Desde una perspectiva que parte de las ideas de Iván Illich sobre la noción de proporcionalidad, el presente artículo hace referencia a la idea de límites o umbrales como un elemento necesario para la reconstrucción de un mundo multicultural. Pero, igualmente bajo la inspiración de Illich, se desmarca de las prácticas científico-profesionales que producen enunciados ajenos a las prácticas populares. Desde afuera y desde arriba no se puede reconstruir “un mundo en el que quepan muchos mundos”. Esto no implica que (...) la búsqueda de nuevos paradigmas sociales sea algo simple. Por el contrario, la profundidad de la búsqueda nos lleva incluso a retomar la vivencia de lo sagrado, como lo describe Mircea Eliade en las sociedades tradicionales, como principio epistémico para ese “otro” mundo posible. (shrink)

La sexualidad humana es uno de los grandes temas en consideración en nuestra sociedad actual. Tanto en el campo de las neurociencias como en el de la filosofía y las ciencias sociales se han realizado diversos estudios que intentan esclarecer el significado de la especificidad sexual humana (femenina o masculina). Sin embargo, estos enfrentan múltiples obstáculos al tratar acerca de las últimas causas del fenómeno de la sexualidad. Atendiendo a las contribuciones del filósofo argentino Juan José Sanguineti, se ofrece una (...) aproximación filosófica que busca ser holística a partir de una perspectiva realista y en diálogo con los aportes neurocientíficos. De este modo, se brinda un tratamiento filosófico de las dimensiones de la persona humana, desde su base biológica hasta su vida espiritual. (shrink)

This paper makes first steps toward a systematic investigation of how pertinence to topic contributes to determine deductively valid reasoning along with preservation of designated values. I start from the interpretation of Weak Kleene Logic WKL as a reasoning tool that preserves truth and topic pertinence, which is offered by Jc Beall. I keep Beall’s motivations and I argue that WKL cannot meet them in a satisfying way. In light of this, I propose an informal definition of a topic-sensitive logic (...) and I proceed to turn it into a formal one by deploying the topic-algebraic framework from the Topic-Sensitive Intentional Modalities project by Francesco Berto. I apply the framework in order to define semantically a ‘classical topic-sensitive logic’ CTSL that meets Beall’s motivations and proves topic-sensitive. Then, I prove results that connect CTSL and any possible topic-sensitive logic to the tradition of containment logics and provide a unification tool for a wide range of recent proposals in philosophical logic. A topic-theoretical interpretation of WKL is then offered without prejudice to the fact that the logic is not topic-sensitive. Finally, the paper discusses some conceptual issues and research perspectives. (shrink)

The question of rationality and of its role in human agency has been at the core of pragmatist concerns since the beginning of this movement. While Peirce framed the horizon of a new understanding of human reason through the idea of inquiry as aiming at belief-fixation and James stressed the individualistic drives that move individuals to action, it is in Dewey’s writing that we find the deepest understanding of the naturalistic and normative traits of rationality considered as the qualifying attribute (...) of human agency. Recent developments in moral and political philosophy as well as in general pragmatist scholarship have shown a renewal of interest in the role of human reason in agency, both with respect to control of conduct (decisions about how to act) and with respect to normative attitudes (considerations of what is good and right). In this article I will examine some features of Dewey’s epistemology which are particularly promising for the elaboration of a theory of practical rationality based on pragmatist sources. In particular, I will focus on Dewey’s notion of “judgment of practice” in order to frame a distinctively Deweyan approach to practical rationality. In order to point out the specificity of Dewey’s epistemological framework, I will refer to it as an “epistemology of practice”i. The aim of this article is to clarify the epistemological meaning of the concepts of articulation and transformation, that Dewey places at the heart of his theory of inquiry. Part of my argument consists in showing that through these notions Dewey aimed at broadening the conception of rationality, bringing it beyond the reach of the standard notions of analysis and synthesis and of induction, deduction, and abduction. Once the specificity of Dewey’s conception of rationality will have been demonstrated, I will proceed to show some of its implications in the explanation of the rationality of human agency with reference to practical reasoning and value assessment. I will then conclude the article by drawing some implications of Dewey’s theory of judgment for a broader epistemology based upon the acknowledgment of the primacy of practice. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a description of the free algebras in some varieties of Glivenko MTL-algebras having the Boolean retraction property. This description is given (generalizing the results of [9]) in terms of weak Boolean products over Cantor spaces. We prove that in some cases the stalks can be obtained in a constructive way from free kernel DL-algebras, which are the maximal radical of directly indecomposable Glivenko MTL-algebras satisfying the equation in the title. We include examples (...) to show how we can apply the results to describe free algebras in some well known varieties of involutive MTL-algebras and of pseudocomplemented MTL-algebras. (shrink)

The present article focuses on certain points in the semantics/pragmatics debate. Among these, one of the most interesting is the possibility of reconciling, independent of the context, certain aspects of meaning which have always been the subject of discussion in formal semantics, with the view that meaning is socially and situationally conditioned. Recent new insights concerning the importance of pragmatics for enriching the propositional content of the utterance should not lead to a radical contextualism that denies the assignment of any (...) role at all to semantics. Instead, it is possible to argue that both dimensions, semantics and pragmatics, along with their constituent parts, offer fundamental contributions to the transmission and understanding of the overall meaning of a (spoken or written) text. (shrink)

I defend a cognitive theory of pictures, according to which the central paradigm of our concept of a picture is the representational picture, i.e., the one which induces recognitional abilities in the perceiver. I show how to classify different pictorial styles in terms of their distance from the paradigm, and I criticize alternative accounts.

Nonhuman animals are the most prominent alterity with which humans have engaged in interaction and in comparative self-definition. The reference point of nonhuman alterity is central both to the development of humanism and of posthumanism. In the complex and nonlinear interfaces with nonhumans, humans are extensively hybridized in a process that defines their very humanity. Understanding humans as open and interactive animals rather than as closed and autarchic entities is indispensable to the dismantling of humanism and the development of posthuman (...) thought. Nonhuman and human animals host and are hosted by one another in dynamic and emergent relations. (shrink)

Il saggio focalizza quattro significati fondamentali del concetto di seconda natura in Hegel e ne ricostruisce i legami, i nessi interni, le implicazioni per la comprensione dell’intera Geistesphilosophie. Attraverso il concetto di seconda natura, infatti, è possibile evidenziare la connessione tra spirito soggettivo e spirito oggettivo e mostrare che le sfere dello spirito non sono prive di unificazione e provengono da una radice comune. Al termine del saggio emerge che il concetto di seconda natura ha inoltre uno statuto ambivalente: da (...) un lato, esso rende possibile l’idealizzazione della natura e l’innalzamento alla dimensione dello spirito, dall’altro implica una naturalizzazione dello spirito ossia la sua autonegazione. (shrink)

Neste estudo, busca-se uma exposição e uma análise da teoria tomasiana da “restituição” (restitutio). Isso implica apresentar a restitutio como parte da teoria da justiça comutativa e expor os vários aspectos de consideração que servem como pressupostos e condições para a sua realização virtuosa. Em particular, procura-se analisar a confluência de motivos normativos e penitenciais que a abordagem de Tomás de Aquino contém e que, ao final, é decisiva para a devida compreensão da dimensão de obrigação que a restituição importa.

Sir John Hicks was a leading economic theorist of the twentieth century, and along with Kenneth Arrow was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972. His work addressed central topics in economic theory, such as value, money, capital and growth. An important unifying theme was the attention for economic rationality 'in time' and his acknowledgement that apparent rigidities and frictions might exert a positive role as a buffer against excessive fluctuations in output, prices and employment. This emphasis on the virtue of (...) imperfection significantly distances Hicksian economics from both the Keynesian and Monetarist approaches. Containing contributions from distinguished theorists in their own right, this volume examines Hicks's intellectual heritage and discusses how his ideas suggest a distinct approach to economic theory and policy making. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of economic theory and the history of economic thought. (shrink)