This interdisciplinary collection of essays highlights the relevance of Buddhist doctrine and practice to issues of globalization. From philosophical, religious, historical, and political perspectives, the authors show that Buddhism—arguably the world’s first transnational religion—is a rich resource for navigating todays interconnected world.

After its remarkable affirmation overseas, creationism has landed in Europe and is also present in Italy. As in the USA, also in Italy the main terrain of the clash with Darwinism is the public school. The essay investigates the reasons why in Italy too has been possible to require to teach creationism alongside evolutionism. If in the US this is explained by the strong influence of the evangelical communities, in Italy creationism has found fertile ground in the traditional backwardness of (...) the country in terms of scientific culture. To this we must add a relativistic epistemological interpretation that allows to equalize scientific doctrines to ideologies. (shrink)

The Anthology of the Works of Ugo Spirito captures the trajectory of Ugo Spirito's complex body of thought that spanned more than fifty years, from 1921 to 1977.

The Cyrenaic school of philosophy (named after its founder Aristippus’ native city of Cyrene in North Africa) flourished in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Ugo Zilioli’s book provides the first book-length introduction to the school in English. The book begins by introducing the main figures of the Cyrenaic school beginning with Aristippus and by setting them into their historical context. Once the reader is familiar with those figures and with the genealogy of the school, the book offers an overview (...) of ancient and modern interpretations of the Cyrenaics, to provide readers with alternative accounts of the doctrines they endorsed and of the role they played in the context of ancient thought. Finally, the book offers a reconstruction of Cyrenaic philosophy and shows how the ethical side of their speculation connected with the epistemology and ontology they endorsed and that, as a result, the Cyrenaics were able to offer a quite sophisticated philosophy. Indeed, Zilioli demonstrates that they represented, in ancient philosophy, an important and original metaphysical position and alternative to the kind of realism endorsed by Plato and Aristotle. (shrink)

In order to present a hopefully comprehensive framework of what is the stake of the growing use of robot soldiers, the paper focuses on: the different impact of robots on legal systems, e.g., contractual obligations and tort liability; how robots affect crucial notions as causality, predictability and human culpability in criminal law and, finally, specific hypotheses of robots employed in “just wars.” By using the traditional distinction between causes that make wars just and conduct admissible on the battlefield, the aim (...) is to clarify how advancement of military robotics technology is transforming a 2,000-year-old legal debate on the concept of “just war.” For the first time, legal systems will hold political authorities and military commissioners responsible for what an artificial soldier autonomously decides to do. The paper examines how the new scenario affects both principles of military conduct and notions of justice in resorting to war. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe study examined the attributes of sexual violence against girls and young women with disabilities in the northern part of Ethiopia. In order to reach the proposed objective, six in-depth...

A comparative investigation in the metaphysics of material objects and persons in ancient philosophy, this book provides radically new insights into key themes and areas of ancient thought by drawing on Greek and Buddhist philosophies. Ugo Zilioli explicates the neglected tradition of philosophers who in different ways made material objects either redundant or ontologically dispensable in the ancient world. At the same time, while eliminating objects from the material apparatus of the world, some of those philosophers conceived of selves and (...) persons as the only truly existing items. Chapters cover concepts such as nihilism, elusive objects and the emergence of the self, demonstrating how the philosophy of major thinkers Protogoras, Vasubandhu, Gorgias, Nagarjuna, Democritus, Pyrrho, Epicurus and the Cyrenaics advance our understanding of eliminativism. Zilioli's historical and philosophical reconstruction challenges traditional readings of key moments and figures in the history of thought, both Eastern and Western, as well as providing conceptual tools that are of interest not only to historians of philosophy but also to contemporary metaphysicians. (shrink)

Protagoras was an important Greek thinker of the fifth century BC, the most famous of the so called Sophists, though most of what we know of him and his thought comes to us mainly through the dialogues of his strenuous opponent Plato. In this book, Ugo Zilioli offers a sustained and philosophically sophisticated examination of what is, in philosophical terms, the most interesting feature of Protagoras' thought for modern readers: his role as the first Western thinker to argue for relativism. (...) Zilioli relates Protagoras' relativism with modern forms of relativism, in particular the 'robust relativism' of Joseph Margolis, gives an integrated account both of the perceptual relativism examined in Plato's Theaetetus and the ethical or social relativism presented in the first part of Plato's Protagoras and offers an integrated and positive analysis of Protagoras' thought, rather than focusing on ancient criticisms and responses to his thought. This is a deeply scholarly work which brings much argument to bear to the claim that Protagoras was and remains Plato's subtlest philosophical enemy. (shrink)

This book explores how the design, construction, and use of robotics technology may affect today's legal systems and, more particularly, matters of responsibility and agency in criminal law, contractual obligations, and torts. By distinguishing between the behaviour of robots as tools of human interaction, and robots as proper agents in the legal arena, jurists will have to address a new generation of "hard cases." General disagreement may concern immunity in criminal law (e.g., the employment of robot soldiers in battle), personal (...) accountability for certain robots in contracts (e.g., robo-traders), much as clauses of strict liability and negligence-based responsibility in extra-contractual obligations (e.g., service robots in tort law). Since robots are here to stay, the aim of the law should be to wisely govern our mutual relationships. (shrink)

The paper aims to move beyond the mere logic of the Aristocles passage, to find external evidence for supporting a metaphysical reading of it. To do so, it looks at close analogies between one early Buddhist Sutra (Three Marks), the Aristocles passage and some of its other features (such as its possible oral origin and Pyrrho’s hieratic style) that often go unnoticed in current scholarship and that, if taken in due consideration, help us gain a more balanced assessment of one (...) of the most original and troublesome texts of ancient philosophy. (shrink)

French Jesuit missionaries in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9530-8 Authors Ugo Baldini, Department of Historical and Political Studies, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Padova, Via del Santo 28, 35123 Padova, Italy Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This paper starts with an examination of the terms use d to designate the face in different languages, in particular in Italian, comparing these with the definitions provided by some authoritative dictionaries as well as with their etymology. This exploration yields some remarkable results: firstly, it appears that the face is indeed a term that has a material meaning, but at the same time it is a social object; secondly, the importance of the communicative function emerges, which makes the face (...) similar to the mask and in some ways to the arbitrariness of language. All this suggests that the philosophical status of the face is that of ‘transcendence’ which is a condition of that state of freedom that we attribute to ourselves and that can be defined as ‘human exception’. (shrink)

This article discusses the references to Kant made by Hintikka in his recent writings on epistemology and philosophy of science. Hintikka holds that Kant's argument concerning the justification of mathematical methods can be understood as a question concerning the legitimacy of the rule of "existential instantiation." He also holds that the difference between "surface information" and "depth information" in first-order languages throws light on the Kantian concept of "Ding an sich". It is argued that Hintikka's attitude reflects instead a specific (...) philosophical standpoint, rather than a reformulation of Kantian concepts. (shrink)

Different disciplines have analyzed binary choices to model collective behavior in human systems. Several situations in which social dilemma arise can be modeled as N-person prisoner’s dilemma games including homeland security, public goods, international political economy among others. The purpose of this study is to develop an analytical solution to the N-person prisoner’s dilemma game when boundedly rational agents interact in a population. Previous studies in the literature consider the case in which cooperators and defectors have the same learning factors. (...) We obtain an analytical equation to find equilibria in the N-person prisoner’s dilemma game in the general case when agents have different learning factors. We also introduce a more realistic approach where probability values are bounded between zero and one and therefore eliminates the possibility of infeasible probability values. Since no analytic solution can be derived in this case, agent based simulation is used to analyze the asymptotic behavior of the resulted dynamical system. (shrink)

The paper examines twelve legal regimes related to the governance and regulation of both the environmental risks and opportunities brought forth by the use of AI systems and AI models in the Artificial Intelligence Act (‘AIA’) of EU law. The assessment of risks and opportunities of AI related to the environment includes the high-risk management procedures under Art. 9 of the AIA, the “fundamental rights impact assessment” of Art. 27, and the codes of conduct of Art. 95. These provisions are (...) supplemented by further regulatory regimes, such as the proposal of EU directive on sustainable consumption and green claims, and Reg. (EU) 2023/588 on environmental and space sustainability, among others. The aim of the analysis is to specify which are the less or the more environmentally friendly regulatory regimes set up with the AIA. The claim is that Art. 9, 27 and 95 are among the less green pieces of the whole legislation. (shrink)

No single moral theory can instruct us as to whether and to what extent we are confronted with legal loopholes, e.g. whether or not new legal rules should be added to the system in the criminal law field. This question on the primary rules of the law appears crucial for today’s debate on roboethics and still, goes beyond the expertise of robo-ethicists. On the other hand, attention should be drawn to the secondary rules of the law: The unpredictability of robotic (...) behaviour and the lack of data on the probability of events, their consequences and costs, make hard to determine the levels of risk and hence, the amount of insurance premiums and other mechanisms on which new forms of accountability for the behaviour of robots may hinge. By following Japanese thinking, the aim is to show why legally de-regulated, or special, zones for robotics, i.e. the secondary rules of the system, pave the way to understand what kind of primary rules we may want for our robots. (shrink)

Ugo Spirito's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is the intellectual autobiography of one of the most original and anticonformist contemporary Italian philosophers. In it, Spirito makes an evaluation of his long career (spanning from the decade of the 20's to that of the 70's of the twentieth century) as a thinker who was never satisfied with any theoretical or philosophical system, while constantly aiming at finding a definitive truth: the "incontrovertible" or absolute. The various stages of his search deal with (...) different philosophical and scientific systems - from positivism to actual idealism, from problematicism to omnicentrism, from scientism to neoproblematicism - revealing at the same time an inherent antinomic procedure that does not permit him to take any truth for granted. At the end of his life, Spirito realized that he could only be sure of his present state of "unawareness," thus challenging the validity of his lifelong investigative activity. "Man cannot know himself," Spirito wrote. Confronted with the manifestations of life and universe, he could not help but feel a sense of "surprise and astonishment." Throughout his life, he was only a spectator of his destiny, not the conscious creator of it, as he believed in the early stage of his career. Consequently, he reached a position of negating any value system, bordering on skepticism and nihilism. Within this context, he offered a post-modern interpretation of life. This interpretation was also Spirito's conclusion, and as such, implied a rethinking about other faiths, both political and ideological, that for more than fifty years would develop parallel to philosophical faith. Consequently, he revisited some of the most important philosophical and political personalities who interpreted or materialized those faiths, from Benedetto Croce to Gentile, from Benito Mussolini to Giovanni Bottai, from Togliatti to Pope Paul VI. Spirito was not a thinker who remained secluded within the ivory tower of pure investigation, but in an effort to modify society according to principle of the identification of philosophy with life, he tried to act upon it by following thoughts with action. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is divided in two parts: one purely autobiographical and theoretical, and the other more historical, where Spirito narrates his relationship with the above-mentioned personalities, as a way of testing the validity of his beliefs. Indeed, one can perceive his moment of adherence to each of the different approaches expounded, only to subsequently detach himself from them. For the English-speaking reader, the second part will appear more interesting and poignant, since Spirito's involvement with history foretells the intellectual fate of a nation. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is a reflection on life, in which personal history serves as a vehicle for judgment upon an entire century. (shrink)

In the two golden centuries that followed the death of Socrates, ancient philosophy underwent a tremendous transformation that culminated in the philosophical systematizations of Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools. Fundamental figures other than Plato were active after the death of Socrates; his immediate pupils, the Socratics, took over his legacy and developed it in a variety of ways. This rich philosophical territory has however been left largely underexplored in the scholarship. This collection of eleven previously unpublished essays by leading (...) scholars fills a gap in the literature, providing new insight into the ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology as developed by key figures of the Socratic schools. Analyzing the important contributions that the Socratics and their heirs have offered ancient philosophical thought, as well as the impact these contributions had on philosophy as a discipline, this book will appeal to researchers and scholars of Classical Studies, as well as Philosophy and Ancient History. (shrink)