In Melanconia e società (1969), W. Lepenies si propone di individuare le cause storico-sociali e le conseguenze sociologicamente rilevanti degli atteggiamenti individuali e collettivi melanconici per la genesi, la conservazione e innovazione delle strutture sociali. Egli afferma che non intende definire a priori che cosa sia la melanconia, ma piuttosto ricostruirne il significato tramite le rappresentazioni dei vissuti interiori di coloro che si sono autodefiniti tali attingendo alla letteratura di corte, salottiera nobiliare e borghese, francese e tedesca. In realtà, (...) egli esamina le differenti rappresentazioni della malinconia, alla luce del quadro clinico elaborato dalla psicoanalisi di S. Freud e dalla psichiatria di E. Kraepelin, H. Tellenbach, ecc., e dello schema sociologico dei tipi di adattamento di R.K. Merton. Queste categorie concettuali consentono a Lepenies di ricostruire gli atteggiamenti malinconici che si diffusero presso due diversi ceti sociali in tempi e in luoghi differenti: 1) i ceti nobiliari francesi dopo la sconfitta della Fronda e 2) la borghesia tedesca del ‘700. (shrink)

My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have created her- (...) or himself---turns out to be the vastly more mundane and non controversial requirement that the responsible agent must, in a fairly standard sense, be sane. (shrink)

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the analysis of Joseph Raz on coercion, trust, and citizenship. The chapter starts with a number of brief comments on some of his observations regarding the doctrine of liberty and the preference for minimum government. The chapter also includes one of Raz's arguments that states that some people favour non-perfectionist forms of government out of a misunderstanding of the implications of perfectionism for liberty.

This analysis investigates whether solidarity is an appropriate concept for thinking about justifications for a just distribution of bioethical goods in the international arena. This will be explored by looking at the national origins of the idea of justifying solidarity in the form of the health care that welfare states offer. Following that, ‘life’ and ‘health’ will be placed within a philosophical context by focusing on the main arguments of John Rawls and Amartya Sen and the role of solidarity in (...) these two theories of justice will be analysed. It will be shown that these theories assume that solidarity is not a prerequisite for just international structures. Finally, the possibility will be discussed, that there is a degree of uncertainty surrounding justifications for fair distribution in the international context that can result when the concepts of solidarity and justice are handled imprecisely. (shrink)

Sport provides an arena for human flourishing. For some, this pursuit of a meaningful life through sport involves the use of non-human animals, not least of all through sport hunting. This paper will take seriously that sport – including sport hunting – can provide a meaningful arena for human flourishing. Additionally, it will accept for present purposes that animals are of less moral value than humans. This paper will show that, even accepting these premises, much use of animals for sport (...) – including sport hunting – is unacceptable. Nonetheless it will show that there can be acceptable ways of using animals as part of a human’s meaningful life pursuits through sport, albeit in a more limited fashion than many sportspersons currently accept. (shrink)

In this article we argue that a widespread adoption of nudging can alter legal and political institutions. Debates on nudges thus far have largely revolved around a set of philosophical theories that we call individualistic approaches. Our analysis concerns the ways in which adherents of nudging make use of the newest findings in the behavioral sciences for the purposes of policy-making. We emphasize the fact that most nudges proposed so far are not a part of the legal system and are (...) also non-normative. We propose two ideal types: “law-as-normative” and “law-as-instrumental”, that allow us to understand and evaluate the relation of nudges and the law. We stress the importance of law as a safeguard for the possible negative consequences of nudges and conclude with proposals that could complement nudging policies. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

Part of the draw of athletics is its straightforwardness. There are nuances to competitions to make them more sporting contests, but at the end of a long jump competition whomever records the longest jump should win. Unfortunately, a recent rule-change at the highest level of the sport – the “Final 3” format – undermined this simplicity for the horizontal jumps and the throws for some of the 2020 and much of the 2021 seasons. While fortunately this rule was largely reverted (...) within days of the initial submission of this paper, it’s still valuable to critically evaluate why such a rule is problematic so as to better understand of the value of sporting competitions and give guidance on future rule changes, be they in athletics or other sports. To that end, we will be drawing from the literature on the purpose and value of competitions and coupling that with simulations based on data from actual top-tier long jump competitions to show that the Final 3 format makes for significantly worse competitions than the standard format. (shrink)

We develop and apply a multi-dimensional conception of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that establishes initial condition fine-tuning as a dimension of explanatory depth relevant to debates in contemporary cosmology. We propose dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy as two further dimensions of depth in the context of problems with instability and trans-Planckian modes that afflict bouncing and inflationary approaches respectively. In (...) the context of the latter issue, we argue that the recently formulated trans-Planckian censorship conjecture leads to a trade-off for inflationary models between dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy. We conclude with the suggestion that explanatory preference with regard to the different dimensions of depth is best understood in terms of differing attitudes towards heuristics for future model building. (shrink)

Ce livre étudie, à travers une série d'épisodes allant de la philosophie des Lumières à notre époque, le problème du matérialisme dans l'histoire de la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences. Comment comprendre les spécificités de l’histoire du matérialisme, des Lumières à nos jours, au sein de la grande histoire de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences ? Quelle est l’actualité de l’opposition classique entre le corps et l’esprit ? Qu’est-ce que le rire ou le rêve peuvent nous apprendre du (...) matérialisme ? En traversant l’histoire de ce concept jusqu’à l’émergence d’un « nouveau matérialisme » contemporain, l’ouvrage vise à revitaliser le matérialisme et sa lecture. -/- . (shrink)

While the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis has attracted many adherents and undergone a number of variations, in general it suffers from an authority problem with two dimensions. First, it is unclear why the analysis of a concept should have objective authority: why explicating what we mean should express how things are. Second, conceptual analysis seems to lack intersubjective authority: why philosophical analysis should apply to more than a parochial group of individuals. I argue that Hegel’s conception of social (...) ontology, focused on his concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), helps to explain how concepts (and their explication) have both objective and intersubjective authority in the social domain. Hegel claims that modern institutions are the product of self-conscious purposes, so that they are conceptually constituted. Concepts do not just represent these objects and so depend on a contingent relation to them. As many contemporary social ontologists agree, this means that our concepts of these institutions are uniquely epistemically “transparent.” They have objective authority. Concepts have intersubjective authority in the modern world as well, according to Hegel. However, I show that this feature of Hegel’s account does not rely on the solution to a philosophical problem. Rather, since the concepts of modern ethical life are “essentially contested,” their content depends on the practical and political agreement of modern subjects. This means that concepts can only have objective authority if some prior intersubjective agreement has been reached. The role of philosophy as conceptual analysis is thus importantly dependent on political developments. (shrink)

Christliche Ethik in der technischen Welt.--Kybernetik und christliches Ethos.--Christliche Anthropologie und biologische Zukunft des Menschen.--Die Stadt als Ort der Utopie.--Christliche Zukunftshoffnung und rationale Zukunftsplanung.--Verantwortung für die Folgen der Freiheit, theologische Überlegungen zum Thema Umweltschutz.

Für Aristoteles ist das Kontinuum ein potentiell Unendliches. Dieser Unendlichkeitsbegriff, den er neben dem prozessualen und aktualen einführte, wurde im Laufe der Philosophiegeschichte nicht mehr berücksichtigt. So verwenden ihn u.a. weder Kant noch Weyl in ihren Kontinuumsbetrachtungen, obwohl ihr Kontinuumsverständnis ihn geradezu nahelegt. - In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen die ontologischen Kontinuumslehren des Aristoteles und späterer Philosophen und Mathematiker behandelt, zum anderen erfährt die von Aristoteles im 6. Buch der «Physik» vorgelegte strukturelle Kontinuumsuntersuchung eine eingehende Würdigung.

Abstract (German version follows): -/- This paper develops a new proposal for a coherentist business ethic in which ethically justified and empirically supported proposed solutions to economic problems are developed through a coherentist process of adjustments between the three levels of (1) conception of problem and its solution, (2) positive economic theory, and (3) ethical theories. Using an example, it illustrates how in this framework, Homann's business ethics gains in validity and relevance but loses its claim to universality. // -/- (...) Diese Arbeit entwickelt eine kohärentistische Wirtschaftsethik, in der ethisch begründete und empirisch gestützte Lösungsvorschläge für ökonomische Probleme durch einen kohärentistischen Anpassungsprozess zwischen den drei Ebenen (1) Auffassung von Problem und Lösungsansatz, (2) positive ökonomische Theorie, sowie (3) ethischen Theorien erarbeitet werden. Anhand eines Beispiels wird illustriert, wie Homanns Wirtschaftsethik in diesem Rahmen an Validität und Relevanz gewinnt, jedoch ihren Universalitätsanspruch verliert. (shrink)