Philosophers of Nothingness. An Essay on the Kyoto School. James W. Heisig., The University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 2001. xi, 380 pp. ISBN 0-8248-2480-6; 0-8248-2481-4.

Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta para pensar nas práticas educativas como humanização e diferença. Diante disso, põe em questão que muitos dos conhecimentos sobre educação advêm de processos de elaboração que têm pouca ou quase nenhuma relação com práticas educativas. Por isso, posiciona-se pela crítica à postura que submete a educação aos diversos discursos que circulam nas ciências da educação, superando os fundamentos humanistas modernos e o entendimento de educação como lugar de produção de determinadas subjetividades e/ou identidades. Ao contrário (...) disso, assumindo uma atitude propositiva, as práticas educativas serão abordadas como lugar de formação humana, entendendo a humanização como um conceito aberto, cuja definição não pode ser descrita antes e fora das práticas educativas. Além disso, esta proposta argumenta em favor da diferença e/ou da pluralidade do ser humano, ou seja, deve ser aceito que a educação ainda é um processo pelo qual os indivíduos são formados de acordo com suas potencialidades, e que essas são construídas durante o processo educativo. Palavras-chave: Práticas educativas. Humanização. Singularidades. Diferenças. (shrink)

The conjunction fallacy has been a key topic in debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. Despite extensive inquiry, however, the attempt of providing a satisfactory account of the phenomenon has proven challenging. Here, we elaborate the suggestion (first discussed by Sides et al., 2001) that in standard conjunction problems the fallacious probability judgments experimentally observed are typically guided by sound assessments of confirmation relations, meant in terms of contemporary Bayesian confirmation theory. Our main formal result is (...) a confirmation-theoretic account of the conjuntion fallacy which is proven robust (i.e., not depending on various alternative ways of measuring degrees of confirmation). The proposed analysis is shown distinct from contentions that the conjunction effect is in fact not a fallacy and is compared with major competing explanations of the phenomenon, including earlier references to a confirmation-theoretic account. (shrink)

To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their engagement in this collective activity. Our (...) classification offers, on the one hand, a model of how the ethical aspects of science are taken into consideration by scientists and, on the other, some indications on how to institutionalize ethics in science. (shrink)

Both in the bibliography and in the citation in the text, Michelle Gibbons’ article below has been mistakenly attributed to “Gibson.” The proper reference to the article should be: Gibbons, M.. Reassessing discovery: Rosalind Franklin, scientific visualization, and the structure of DNA. _Philosophy of Science, 79_, 63–80.

Beyond Personal Identity. Dogen, Nishida and a Phenomenology of No-Self. Gereon Kopf. Curzon Press, Richmond 2001. xx, 298 pp. 40.00. ISBN 0-7007-1217-8.

In his mature writings, Kuhn describes the process of specialisation as driven by a form of incommensurability, defined as a conceptual/linguistic barrier which promotes and guarantees the insularity of specialties. In this paper, we reject the idea that the incommensurability among scientific specialties is a linguistic barrier. We argue that the problem with Kuhn’s characterisation of the incommensurability among specialties is that he presupposes a rather abstract theory of semantic incommensurability, which he then tries to apply to his description of (...) the process of specialisation. By contrast, this paper follows a different strategy: after criticising Kuhn’s view, it takes a further look at how new scientific specialties emerge. As a result, a different way of understanding incommensurability among specialties will be proposed. (shrink)

There is a growing concern for the proper role of science within democratic societies, which has led to the development of new science policies for the implementation of social responsibility in research. Although the very expression ‘social responsibility of science’ may be interpreted in different ways, many of these emerging policy frameworks define it, at least in part, as a form of anticipative reflection about the potential impacts of research in society. What remains a rather under-discussed issue is the definition (...) of the bearer of the social responsibility of science. In other words, it is not clear who is supposed to engage in such an anticipative reflection, whether individual researchers or research groups. In the past few years, philosophers of science have begun to use qualitative research methods to fill the gaps between normative models of the organisation of ideal scientific communities and the reality of actual scientific practices. In this article, I follow this approach to discuss the issue of the collective dimension of the social responsibility of science. I rely on a qualitative study conducted on an interdisciplinary research group and I describe how group dynamics position individuals and distribute duties and roles, including social responsibility. Qualitative descriptions of the distribution of duties within actual research groups should inform the formulation of general prescriptive theories on the collective responsibility of science. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to trace a pathway connecting contemplative knowledge and practices with the social sciences. Contemplative knowledge and practices offer material for reflection in social science even concerning their very foundation. I'll found an opportunity for meshing our disciplinary tools with this knowledge as I introduced it in a health promotion program. The result will be a transdisciplinary confluence of different lines of inquiry contributing to a new perspective of self and social action. First of all (...) I will give a definition of contemplative knowledge and practices. Then, I will make a bridge between the contemplative approach and the social sciences, showing the contribution that symbolic interactionism can play. I will illustrate the perspective drawing on an action research program called Auriga aimed at smoking cessation and reduction among health professionals. The aim of this paper is focused on the specification of the conceptual background in which such kind of program has been developed. Finally, I outline some implications it could represent for what might be called transformative sociology. I believe that contemplative knowledge could contribute to disentangle some of the unanswered questions and concerns in the social sciences, once they dismiss for a while their scientistic perspective. The secular redefinition of tools mainly belonging to the wisdom traditions represents an innovation that can reshape what we intend by the self and experience, contributing to what is called the “social transformation from within,” a pragmatic and wise approach to change at any level. (shrink)

Questo articolo si sofferma su alcuni aspetti della relazione tra performance musicali e registrazioni sonore. Dopo una breve introduzione sul tema dell'improvvisazione in musica, cerco di integrare due dei contributi teorici più rilevanti della filosofia di Maurizio Ferraris – la ridefinizione dell’estetica intesa come “scienza della percezione sensibile” e la teoria della documentalità – per far luce su alcuni dei temi più discussi in filosofia della musica: l'ontologia della performance, la registrazione su supporti sia fisici che (apparentemente) immateriali, e infine (...) il ruolo cruciale giocato dalla tecnologia, e in particolare da Internet, nel rendere disponibile contemporaneamente a milioni di utenti sterminate quantità di musica archiviata in memorie dalla capienza praticamente infinita. (shrink)

Le polbusting est une pratique de recreation et récréation esthétique à travers laquelle les protagonistes de la culture électronique détournent et ridiculisent les messages et les corps de la politique contemporaine. Ces performances incarnent emblématiquement la vocation et la sensibilité transpolitiques de la culture postmoderne, indiquant la fête et le jeu comme les matrices sur lesquelles elle se fonde. Ainsi, il apparaît indispensable, pour comprendre la relation contemporaine entre imaginaire, médias et politique, de prendre sérieusement en considération ce qui se (...) produit dans les nouveaux paysages médiatiques, dans la mise en scène de la vie quotidienne, dans la culture de l’éphémère et dans tout ce qui a, jusqu'à présent, constitué la marge et l’ombre de la vie sociale. (shrink)

Contemporary interdisciplinary research is often described as bringing some important changes in the structure and aims of the scientific enterprise. Sometimes, it is even characterized as a sort of Kuhnian scientific revolution. In this paper, the analogy between interdisciplinarity and scientific revolutions will be analysed. It will be suggested that the way in which interdisciplinarity is promoted looks similar to how new paradigms were described and defended in some episodes of revolutionary scientific change. However, contrary to what happens during some (...) scientific revolutions, the rhetoric with which interdisciplinarity is promoted does not seem to be accompanied by a strong agreement about what interdisciplinarity actually is. In the end, contemporary interdisciplinarity could be defined as being in a ‘pre-paradigmatic’ phase, with the very talk promoting interdisciplinarity being a possible obstacle to its maturity. (shrink)

Harrigan and Spekkens, introduced the influential notion of an ontological model of operational quantum theory. Ontological models can be either “epistemic” or “ontic.” According to the two scholars, Einstein would have been one of the first to propose an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Pusey et al. showed that an epistemic interpretation of quantum theory is impossible, so implying that Einstein had been refuted. We discuss in detail Einstein’s arguments against the standard interpretation of QM, proving that there is a (...) misunderstanding in Harrigan and Spekkens’ attribution of an epistemic perspective to Einstein, whose point of view was actually statistical, but in a quasi-classical sense. (shrink)

The paper lists several editions of Euclid’s Elements in the Early Modern Age, giving for each of them the axioms and postulates employed to ground elementary mathematics.

Incommensurability may be regarded as driving specialisation, on the one hand, and as posing some problems to interdisciplinarity, on the other hand. It may be argued, however, that incommensurability plays no role in either specialisation or interdisciplinarity. Scientific specialties could be defined as simply 'different' (that is, about different things), rather than 'incommensurable' (that is, competing for the explanation of the same phenomena). Interdisciplinarity could be viewed as the co- ordinated effort of scientists possessing complemetary and interlocking skills, and not (...) as the overcoming of some sort of incommensurable divide. This article provides a comprehensive evaluative examination of the relations between specialisation, interdisciplinarity, and incommensurability. Its aim is to defend the relevance of incommensurability to both specialisation and interdisciplinarity. At the same time, it aims at correcting the tendency, common among many philosophers, to regard incommensurability in a restrictive manner - such as, for example, as an almost purely semantic issue. (shrink)

We prove that the unification type of Łukasiewicz logic and of its equivalent algebraic semantics, the variety of MV-algebras, is nullary. The proof rests upon Ghilardiʼs algebraic characterisation of unification types in terms of projective objects, recent progress by Cabrer and Mundici in the investigation of projective MV-algebras, the categorical duality between finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra, and, finally, a homotopy-theoretic argument that exploits lifts of continuous maps to the universal covering space of the circle. We discuss the background (...) to such diverse tools. In particular, we offer a detailed proof of the duality theorem for finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra—a fundamental result that, albeit known to specialists, seems to appear in print here for the first time. (shrink)

We offer a proof of the duality theorem for finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra, a folklore and yet fundamental result. Our approach develops first a general dual adjunction between MV-algebras and subspaces of Tychonoff cubes, endowed with the transformations that are definable in the language of MV-algebras. We then show that this dual adjunction restricts to a duality between semisimple MV-algebras and closed subspaces of Tychonoff cubes. The duality theorem for finitely presented objects is obtained by a further specialisation. (...) Our treatment is aimed at showing exactly which parts of the basic theory of MV-algebras are needed in order to establish these results, with an eye towards future generalisations. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is widely considered as one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, while his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is regarded as one of the most influential works in the philosophy ofscience. At the same time, however, his place within philosophy of science remains ambiguous. On the one hand, despite the popularity of SSR, there is no proper ‘Kuhnian school of thought’ in HPS. On the other hand, the interest towards Kuhn does (...) not seem to fade away and the number of publications about his work does not seem to decrease. We suggest that there are at least three different ways to go ‘beyond SSR’: (i) by scrutinising the development of Kuhn’s thought, from his pre- to his post-SSR writings; (ii) by contextualising Kuhn in the philosophical milieu of his time, thus interpreting his view as emerging from the intellectual exchanges he had with contemporary philosophers; (iii) by reinterpreting and developing some of his most known ideas, in ways that perhaps Kuhn himself was not able to contemplate. (shrink)

Avicenna’s ground-breaking view of logic as both a tool for other sciences and a science in its own right has already attracted scholars’ attention and has been studied in several different respects. The present paper aims to address a specific issue entailed by considering logic as a science in its own right: that is, assessing the relation in which logic as a science stands to the other sciences, and particularly to metaphysics and psychology. The inquiry will focus on a fundamental, (...) yet tricky, passage of chapter I.4 of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Madḫal, the opening work of his most comprehensive philosophical summa, the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ (Book of Healing). Due to the obscurity of some of Avicenna’s references, chapter I.4 “on the subject-matter of logic” has stimulated numerous attempts at interpretation from the Middle Ages to today. In this paper, I will attempt to provide a new reading of the chapter in light of Avicenna’s definition of the epistemological status of science in Burhān II.7. (shrink)

In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual networks and lexicons. This article distinguishes these three concepts (...) and shows that adopting each one of them has different impacts on Kuhn’s model of science. After distinguishing and assessing the concepts of taxonomy, network, and lexicon, it will be argued that the latter not only fits the Kuhnian model of science better, but it also helps capture the wide sense of Kuhn’s early concept of a paradigm. (shrink)

This article begins by surveying the names of the Father and their occurrences in the Cassiciacum Dialogues, then moves from language to ideas. It explores the meaning, sources and content of notions associated with each named Father. It concludes with a philosophical synthesis focused on the theoretical features of the figure of “the Father”, which conforms with Christian faith as interpreted through careful use of neoplatonic thought.

Al nominalista non manca proprio nulla? La dispensabilità dell’insieme vuoto in mereologia - Quine’s commitment to nominalism has always required set theory to be replaced by an ontologically less dubious tool for the analysis of predication, one that is usually ABSTRACT Rivista di storia della filosofia, n. 1, 2009 mereological in nature, akin to the Calculus of Individuals he and Goodman developed in a seminal paper on nominalism. The problem Quine himself always acknowledged as central in any such replacement arises (...) with the mereological "translation" of numbers. I show here that Quine’s proposed translation strategy, even when successful, raises even more serious issues since it requires mereology to supply a substitute for the empty set. After proving the indispensability, given Quine’s translation, of such an entity, I demonstrate that an exact mereological replica of the empty set cannot be admitted without engendering contradictions. I conclude by discussing some paraphrases of the usual mereological axioms that prima facie might seem to be compatible with the null object and assessing their implausibility. (shrink)

Epistemologists and philosophers of science have often attempted to express formally the impact of a piece of evidence on the credibility of a hypothesis. In this paper we will focus on the Bayesian approach to evidential support. We will propose a new formal treatment of the notion of degree of confirmation and we will argue that it overcomes some limitations of the currently available approaches on two grounds: (i) a theoretical analysis of the confirmation relation seen as an extension of (...) logical deduction and (ii) an empirical comparison of competing measures in an experimental inquiry concerning inductive reasoning in a probabilistic setting. (shrink)

En este libro, que aparece en Italia en 1987, publicado muchas veces y muy comentado también en el extranjero, Vincenzo Ferrari analiza las funciones sociales del derecho en una perspectiva relativista, subjetivista y conflictualista, opuesta a la del funcionalismo sociológico. De tal manera, el derecho se revela como un medio de acción social dirigido a lograr los proyectos de seres humanos empeñados en relaciones variables de cooperación y de lucha. Así, se muestra cómo las normas jurídicas pueden orientar las (...) actitudes y desorientarlas; solucionar los conflictos y agravarlos o fomentarlos; legitimar cualquier forma de poder con argumentos tan válidos como ficticios. Solo al nivel de los ideales se redescubre el valor del derecho, su potencialidad libertadora y su naturaleza igualitaria. (shrink)

Splicing is an efficient and precise mechanism that removes noncoding regions from a single primary RNA transcript. Cutting and rejoining of the segments occurs on nascent RNA. Trans-splicing between small specialized RNAs and a primary transcript has been known in some organisms but recent papers show that trans-splicing between two RNA molecules containing different coding regions is the normal mode in a Drosophila gene.1-3 The mod(mdg4) gene produces 26 different mRNAs encoding as many protein isoforms. The differences lie in alternative (...) 3′ exons encoded by different transcriptional units and spliced to the 5′ common region by a surprising trans-splicing mechanism. BioEssays 24:988–991, 2002. © 2002 Wiley-Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved in such a (...) transition. I will clarify the role of the scientific community in revolutionary changes and characterize the incommensurability across specialties as possessing both semantic and methodological aspects. The discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA will serve both as an illustration of my main argument and as reply to one criticism raised against Kuhn—namely, that his model cannot capture cases of revolutionary yet non-disruptive episodes of scientific progress. Revisiting Kuhn’s ideas on specialization will shed new light on some often overlooked features of scientific change. (shrink)

In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed several formal models of the social organisation of science. While their robustness and representational adequacy has been analysed at length, the function of these models has begun to be discussed in more general terms only recently. In this article, I will interpret many of the current formal models of the scientific community as representing the latest development of what I will call the ‘Kuhnian project’. These models share with Kuhn a number (...) of questions about the relation between individuals and communities. At the same time, they also inherit some of Kuhn’s problematic characterisations of the scientific community. In particular, current models of the social organisation of science represent the scientific community as essentially value-free. This may put into question both their representational adequacy and their normative ambitions. In the end, it will be shown that the discussion on the formal models of the scientific community may contribute in fruitful ways to the ongoing debates on value judgements in science. (shrink)