Includes a translator’s preface, note on the text, and suggestions for further reading.

Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments has had a profound impact on, and made significant contributions to, among others, the study of law, justice, crime, and punishment. Unsurprisingly, there is a voluminous literature on this text. This article subjects Beccaria’s treatise to an exegetical reading and focuses on the aesthetic inquiry at heart of the text. Beccaria professes to undertake a rigorous scientific inquiry into crime and punishment. He repeatedly invokes language from modernity and the enlightenment—e.g., (...) probability, correlation, and other mathematical tools (e.g., geometry)—to ground the scientific nature of his treatise. Yet, what Beccaria engages with is aesthetic and what is produced is not scientific knowledge but aesthetic knowledge. Rather than read this as a criticism, the article highlights how the concept of justice—like beauty or virtue—is, and can only or largely be, a matter of aesthetic inquiry, and explicates why Beccaria’s text ought to be read as an aesthetic inquiry into justice. (shrink)

Le texte de Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), publié pour la première fois en 1764, a joué un rôle primordial dans l’Europe des Lumières : véritable best-seller de l’époque, devenu aussitôt un classique non seulement en Italie mais dans une bonne partie de l’Europe et tout particulièrement en France, il est l’une des sources principales de notre doctrine pénale moderne. Si cet ouvrage reste d’actualité pour bonne partie du monde contemporain, c’est d’abord parce qu’il contient la toute première ar..

ABSTRACTAt the heart of the criminal reform proposed in Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 Dei delitti e delle pene are the principles of penal parsimony derived from a precise interpretation of the social contract. Punishment, being no more than a necessary evil devoid of any intrinsic virtue, must serve no more than a preventative function to the smallest possible extent; its application strictly bound by the principle of legality. Beccaria’s criminal philosophy, therefore, attempts to drastically reduce the power of (...) the penal institution. After recounting its principal aspects, this article seeks to propose a new interpretation of Beccaria’s theory from the perspective of its historical context. The Italian Enlightenment philosopher did not so much express indignation against the barbarism of the Milanese penal system, but rather instigate a rebellion against the political dominance of its patriciate, whose power had long been validated by its juridical functions. In this respect, Beccaria sought to combat the political hegemony of the jurists, concluding his treatise by excluding juridical thought from, and thus removing the intellectual foundations of, the practice of criminal law. (shrink)

In this paper I outline and criticize Judith Shklar’s and Richard Rorty’s ‘liberalism of fear’. Both political thinkers believe liberalism to be characterized by a fundamental opposition to cruelty , which they regard as the least liberal of the features that may distinguish any given human community. In order to demonstrate the limits of the Shklar–Rorty thesis, I make use, in the first place, of John Kekes’s critique of liberalism as to show that liberalism allows for cruelty in so far (...) as it grants wider margins of agency to the members of the community. In the second place, I make use of Cesare Beccaria’s reflections on the cruelty implied by liberalism assuch, in so far as this political doctrine endorses the institutions of penal justice and private property. Key Words: Cesare Beccaria • cruelty • ethics • fear • justice • John Kekes • liberalism • politics • property • punishment • Richard Rorty • Judith Shklar. (shrink)

El artículo hace un análisis del discurso de Beccaria contenido en su libro Dei delitti e delle pene y extrae las ideas relativas a la percepción como argumento considerable dentro de su propuesta político-criminal para fundar la utilización de ciertos instrumentos de la penalidad, con base en su pensamiento sobre la estética, entendida como un estudio sobre la percepción, realizado en algunas investigaciones personales. Igualmente, toma ciertas ideas de la epistemología gravitante de la época, para fundar su desiderátum político-criminal.

The impact of Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments on English discussions of punishment in the twenty-five years following its publication is assessed, with attention being paid to Beccaria's combination of contractarian and early utilitarian thinking. It is argued that Beccaria's influence was particularly striking in England in that he stimulated two disparate strands of reform thinking. The first being exemplified in the work of William Eden, and taking the form of a contractarian, humanitarian version, which owed something (...) to William Blackstone, but was ultimately quite distinct. The second represented in Jeremy Bentham's theory of punishment with its emphasis overwhelmingly on utilitarian calculation. (shrink)

C’est en territoire italien, à l’université de Naples, qu’est créée la toute première chaire d’économie, inaugurée en 1754 par Antonio Genovesi. La seconde chaire italienne est inaugurée en 1769 à Milan par Cesare Beccaria. Ces professeurs doivent répondre à une exigence de justification et de définition : pourquoi un nouveau savoir, et quelle est sa compétence ? Le savoir économique apparaît alors comme la première des « sciences humaines » qui n’ait pas vocation à interpréter des textes, puisqu’elle (...) se donne pour tâche d’analyser des choses. À l’ère de l’herméneutique succède celle de l’anthropologie. En ce sens, l’économie prolonge un geste déjà tenté par le droit naturel moderne, qui avait voulu soustraire la science du droit au règne des textes. Mais en prolongeant ce geste, elle veut aussi dépasser cette discipline, comme une jeune science qui non seulement pallie les imperfections de son aînée, mais prend définitivement sa relève. (shrink)

This book considers the way that Cesare Beccaria's slim 1764 volume On Crimes and Punishments influenced policy developments worldwide and over decades, if not centuries, after its publication. For those who turn to Beccaria's work today, the encounter is shaped by that knowledge. Appreciative of his book's dual nature as historical document and repository of ideas, the contributions in this collection address different aspects of the criminal justice theory Beccaria offered his readers and face up to (...) methodological questions raised by meeting a historical text of this kind - unsystematic and by modern standards often under-argued - with modern scholarly conventions in mind. Contributions in the first part of the book engage with Beccaria's 'political theory of criminal justice' through the lenses of political and penal philosophy. How do we get from Beccaria's blending of social-contractarian foundations and proto-utilitarian policy analysis to the concrete set of criminal justice practices Beccaria presents as justified? This leads across to the second part where contributors approach Beccaria's ideas with present-day reforms and developments in mind. Many of his policy proposals and arguments remain significant from our contemporary perspective, their limitations and omissions proving as instructive for the contemporary scholar as their more prescient elements. The third part offers those looking at Beccaria's work today a glimpse into the practical difficulties facing the firebrand author turned public servant during his long career in the Habsburg-Lombardian administration. It puts his work into the broader context of pathways to criminal justice reform in northern Italy, Habsburgian Lombardy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Beccaria's day. (shrink)

Optimization is about finding the best available object with respect to an objective function. Mathematics and quantitative sciences have been highly successful in formulating problems as optimization problems, and constructing clever processes that find optimal objects from sets of objects. As computers have become readily available to most people, optimization and optimized processes play a very broad role in societies. It is not obvious, however, that the optimization processes that work for mathematics and abstract objects should be readily applied to (...) complex and open social systems. In this paper we set forth a framework to understand when optimization is limited, particularly for complex and open social systems. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used (...) to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy. (shrink)

Comenzamos con una cuestión general: ¿puede el arte moderno ser entendido como una vía de salvación como lo señala Schopenhauer?Con el apoyo de varios textos, como los de Arthur C. Danto, Después del fin del arte: El arte contemporáneo y el linde de la historia, se contrastará lo que se considera como arte moderno contextualizándolo a la idea de Arthur Schopenhauer expresada en su libro El mundo como voluntad y representación. Arthur Danto explica y ejemplifica los conceptos moderno, contemporáneo y (...) posmoderno, que se vuelven bastante importantes pues son el apoyo para lograr contrastar el texto de Schopenhauer y saber si el arte moderno puede ser vía de salvación. (shrink)

In 1939, the influential psychophysicist S. S. Stevens proposed definitional distinctions between the terms ‘number,’ ‘numerosity,’ and ‘numerousness.’ Although the definitions he proposed were adopted by syeveral psychophysicists and experimental psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s, they were almost forgotten in the subsequent decades, making room for what has been described as a “terminological chaos” in the field of numerical cognition. In this paper, I review Stevens’s distinctions to help bring order to this alleged chaos and to shed light on (...) two closely related questions: whether it is adequate to speak of a number sense and how philosophers can make sense of the claim by cognitive scientists that numbers are perceptual entities. Moreover, I offer further support to Stevens’s distinction between numerosity and numerousness by showing that they are relational properties that emerge through different relationships between agents and their environments. The final conclusion is that, by adopting Stevens’s distinctions, numbers do not need to be seen as perceptual entities, since the so-called number sense is better described as a sense of numerousness. (shrink)

For risk and crisis communication in health emergencies and for the management of infodemics, now is the time to intervene. A time that precedes the arrival of the next health emergency and a time...

En los escritos esotéricos o privados de los años treinta y cuarenta, el concepto de un estilo del Da-sein puede resultar sorprendente. Sorprendente, en gran medida, porque en los escritos de ese período Heidegger desarrolla una crítica radical de la Modernidad, la cual acaba tomando la forma de una historia del ser. En esta historia, el estilo, figura moderna, artística y cultural por excelencia, difícilmente encuentra su sitio. El objetivo de este artículo es reconstruir este concepto, aparentemente secundario y menor, (...) para así desentrañar los sentidos filosóficos que contiene. Trataremos de mostrar cómo el estilo del Da-sein, al formar parte de la metafísica de la subjetividad moderna, tanto en la historia del arte como en la confrontación con Nietzsche, exhibe el proyecto filosófico de la Kehre. Sin embargo, si, en última instancia, el estilo del Da-sein concierne a nuestra relación con el ser, la de Heidegger podría no ser la única aproximación fenomenológica relevante al problema. (shrink)