In Ricoeur’s last works, we can find what he calls a poetics of love. Choosing the “dialectic” path of a comparison between love and justice, Ricoeur claims that justice lies in the rule of equivalence (give to each his own); the disorientation of love, instead, suspends the return, the equivalence, the exchange. Love does not say: “do ut des”, but rather (if we can transform the expression) it says “do ut dem”, to offer without expecting anything in return: this is (...) what Ricoeur calls a “first gift”. However, it is an expectation that is always open to the possibility of a “surprise”: the surprise of a “second first gift” able to fulfill the gratuity of the original act of donation. This essay questions this possibility of “mutual gift”. (shrink)

Most scholars point out that Ricœur’s itinerary ends with a “phenomenology of the capable human being”. In this paper, I will try to propose a different hypothesis and explain why Ricœur’s last writings can be considered the starting point of a second Copernican revolution within phenomenology. A revolution of both method (from the analytic to the a-logical) and contents (from the theme of intersubjectivity to the theme of “giving” and loving), which, already in the Preface of Le volontaire et l’involontaire, (...) Ricœur wished could follow after the first revolution of the reflexive phenomenology: a hermeneutic poetic phenomenology that develops the project that the early Ricœur had drafted, but not completed in the 1950s. This is the project of a Poetics of the Gift, in which is hidden, in my opinion, the fecundity of Ricœurian philosophy and the possibility for it to become paradigmatic for the philosophy to come. (shrink)

This article is divided into two parts. In the first one, we will ask what place Ricœur reserves for art works within his philosophical path. We will try to show how this issue is only apparently minor and unimportant. In fact, the language of figurative art, totally other than the conceptual/argumentative language of the logos, is that which more than any other experience can allow philosophy to reflect on otherness, and to discover ‘itself as another.’ In the second part, starting (...) with this acquisition, we will ask ourselves what constitutes the singularity of artistic language and the particular communication specific to works of art. This will allow us to circle back to the initial question and ask ourselves, therefore, what figurative language can teach philosophical communication and what the arts can offer philosophy. (shrink)

Emotion-processing impairment represents a risk factor for the development of somatic illness, affecting negatively both health-related quality of life and disease management in several chronic diseases. The present pilot study aims at investigating the associations between alexithymia and depression, anxiety, and HRQoL in patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis ; examining the association between these three psychological conditions together with HRQoL, and thyroid autoantibodies status as well as thyroid echotexture in patients with HT; and comparing the intensity of all these clinical psychological (...) features in patients with HT versus controls. Twenty-one patients with serologically or ultrasonographically verified HT and 16 controls with non-toxic goiter or postsurgical hypothyroidism were recruited for this study. Serum thyrotropin and free thyroxine, as well as thyroid autoantibodies, were assayed. Alexithymia, depression, anxiety, and HRQoL were assessed with Toronto Alexithymia Scale; Beck Depression Inventory, second edition; Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale; and Health Survey Short-Form 36, respectively. A negative relationship between the difficulty to describe feelings and the cognitive component of depression was found. Besides, patients with seronegative HT had lower somatic anxiety than patients with HT who tested positive. Besides, no statistically significant difference was found between patients with HT and controls with regard to somatic anxiety. The present study suggests the relevance of alexithymia in patients suffering from HT, which may be intertwined with a possible state of underreported depression that is mainly expressed through physical complaints. Promoting the capability to describe and communicate feelings could contribute to psychological elaboration and coping with the disease and, consequently, to the improvement of self-management and perceived HRQoL. (shrink)

This landmark collection features selected writings by John D. Caputo, one of the most creative and influential thinkers working in the philosophy of religion today. B Keith Putt presents 21 of Caputo's most significant contributions from his distinguished 40-year career. Putt's thoughtful editing and arrangement highlights how Caputo's multidimensional thought has evolved from radical hermeneutics to radical theology. A guiding introduction situates Caputo's corpus within the context of debates in the Continental philosophy of religion and exclusive (...) interview with him adds valuable information about his own views of his work. (shrink)

This volume is a collective exploration of major themes in the work of Crispin Wright, one of today's leading philosophers. These newly commissioned papers are divided into four sections, preceded by a substantial Introduction, which places them in the context of the development of Wright's ideas. The distinguished contributors address issues such as the rule-following problem, knowledge of our meanings and minds, truth, realism, anti-realism and relativism, as well as the nature of perceptual justification, the cogency of arguments such as (...) G. E. Moore's celebrated proof of an external world, and skepticism about the material world. Some papers explore the relationship of Wright's ideas with those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose influence has always been a prominent aspect of Wright's philosophy. The essays collectively testify to the enormous interest and relevance of Wright's seminal contributions for present-day debates in areas as diverse as the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology, and significantly advance research in these areas. The volume also contains Wright's substantial responses to his critics, which offer the most up-to-date versions of his ideas and a vigorous defense of his philosophy. (shrink)

Hinge epistemology has to dispel the worry that disagreeing over hinges is rationally inert. Building on a companion piece (Coliva and Palmira 2020), this paper offers a constitutivist solution to the problem of rational inertia by maintaining that a Humean sceptic and a hinge epistemologist disagree over the correct explication of the concept of epistemic rationality. The paper explores the implications of such a solution. First, it clarifies in what sense a disagreement over hinges would be a conceptual disagreement. Secondly, (...) it uses considerations about the (alleged) rational inertia of hinge disagreement to offer a test whereby to demarcate genuine hinges from merely entrenched beliefs. Thirdly, it offers a response to the challenge of explaining why we have reason to engage in the epistemic practices that hinges are constitutive of in the first place. Fourthly, it argues that the constitutivist approach to hinge disagreement does not result in a relativist view. (shrink)

Skepticism is one of the perennial problems of philosophy: from antiquity, to the early modern period of Descartes and Hume, and right through to the present day. It remains a fundamental and widely studied topic and, as Annalisa Coliva and Duncan Pritchard show in this book, it presents us with a paradox with important ramifications not only for epistemology but also for many other core areas of philosophy. In this book they provide a thorough grounding in contemporary debates about (...) skepticism, exploring the following key topics: the core skeptical arguments, with a particular focus on Cartesian and Humean radical skepticism. the epistemic principles that are held to underlie skeptical arguments, such as the closure and underdetermination principles. the content externalism of Putnam, Davidson and Chalmers, and how it might help us respond to radical skepticism. the epistemic externalism/internalism distinction and how it relates to the skeptical problematic. contextualism in epistemology and its anti-skeptical import. the various interpretations of a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology. the viability of epistemological disjunctivism, including whether it can be combined with hinge epistemology as part of a dual response to radical skepticism. liberal and conservative responses to the Humean skeptical paradox. Both authors are themselves prominent figures who work on skepticism, and so one novelty of the book is that it provides an insight into their own contrasting responses to this philosophical difficulty. With the addition of annotated further reading and a glossary this is an ideal starting point for anyone studying the philosophy of skepticism, along with students of epistemology, metaphysics and contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This book offers a cutting-edge perspective of design for space to increase astronauts’ wellbeing and performance creating a more sustainable and inclusive environment, but without to forget beauty. The relevant aspect is that these design principles are now also supported and promoted by the European Community with the New European Bauhaus project. It is legitimate to affirm that Space Design is a precursor and inspiring these principles. Space exploration has shown us how results of space research inspire management policies addressing (...) important earth issues such as the responsible use of resources as well as ethical behavior leading to sustainable and inclusive choices. The International Space Station (ISS) is the most successful virtuous example of circular economy and sustainability by almost totally recycling the waste produced. Recently the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the first call for “parastronauts” opening the fly possibilities to people with physical disabilities and thus affirming the principle of inclusion in space. Thanks to design—a bridge between science, technology, and beauty—space opens up to new creative experiments, placing the human being at the center of the interplanetary exploration programs to ensure extra-terrestrial habitats safer, more comfortable, and efficient, where crew will feel “like at home”. (shrink)

This paper discusses the thought of the medieval Maghrebin thinker Ibn Khaldun through the prism of the philosophy and sociology of law and politics. I will first try to illustrate how, even if Ibn Khaldun wrote in the fourteenth century, he anticipated many core concepts that are characteristic of modern Western sociological and philosophical thought. The argument is thus made that his thought can, and indeed must, be rescued from the wide neglect that, outside the specialized field of Khaldunian studies, (...) it has so far suffered in our treatment and teaching of the history of politico-legal sociological thought. I will then claim that the scheme he devised to explain the rise and fall of civilizations can also, with due care, be used to frame and understand the political and cultural landscape in which the West and the Islamic world are presently engaged in a difficult dialogue. The discussion is in this sense offered in the hope of making a contribution to the current politico-legal philosophical and sociological debate on multiculturalism, and on the limits of its scope. (shrink)

In his “Common knowledge” (2016) and _The Transmission of Knowledge_ (2021), John Greco proposes a novel account of hinge propositions. Central to it is the idea that they are items of common knowledge – that is, of knowledge that is already present in the system, freely available to anyone, without having to figure it out by oneself or having to be taught it by others. As such, they are not subject to any quality control at all. Furthermore, they figure in (...) a subject’s cognitive economy as items of procedural, mostly tacit knowledge, which is operative in the execution of actions and various cognitive tasks. After introducing the basics of Greco’s account, I consider it from a systematic and historical perspective and argue that, while instructive, it is wanting in several respects. Whereas some, among the myriad hinges Wittgenstein considers in _On Certainty_ (1969), may be known, there is no need to make them the content of a different kind of knowledge. Furthermore, we cannot have (evidential) justification and, _a fortiori_, knowledge of at least some other propositions that Wittgenstein considered as hinges. In passing, I also show that Greco’s account aligns much more with G. E. Moore’s ideas about the epistemic status of his truisms in “A defence of common sense” (1925) and the premises of his celebrated “Proof of an external world” (1939), than with Wittgenstein’s account of hinges and their epistemic significance in _On Certainty_. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree. A lot. Pervasive disagreement is part of the territory; consensus is hard to find. Some think this should lead us to embrace philosophical skepticism: skepticism about the extent to which we can know, or justifiably believe, the philosophical views we defend and advance. Most philosophers in the literature fall into one camp or the other: philosophical skepticism or philosophical anti-skepticism. Drawing on the insights of hinge epistemology, this paper proposes another way forward, an intermediate position that appeals both (...) to skeptical and anti-skeptical intuitions concerning the possibility and scope of philosophical knowledge. The main advantage of our account is that it’s able to recover some philosophical knowledge while also being compatible with philosophical skepticism. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing is often portrayed as indebted to G. E. Moore for her ideas concerning the relationship between common sense and philosophy and about analysis. By focusing mostly on her article “The...

This book explores the idea that self-knowledge comes in many varieties. We “know ourselves” through many different methods, depending on whether we attend to our propositional attitudes, our perceptions, sensations or emotions. Furthermore, sometimes what we call “self-knowledge” is not the result of any substantial cognitive achievement and the characteristic authority we grant to our psychological self-ascription is a conceptual necessity, redeemed by unravelling the structure of several interlocking concepts. This book critically assesses the main contemporary positions held on the (...) epistemology of self-knowledge. These include robust epistemic accounts such as inner sense views and theory-theories; weak epistemic accounts such as transparency theories and rational internalism and externalism; as well as expressivist and constitutivist approaches. The author offers an innovative “pluralist” position on self-knowledge, emphasizing the complexity of the phenomenon and its resistance to any “monistic” treatment, to pose new and intriguing philosophical challenges. (shrink)

This paper looks at the genealogical challenge encapsulated in the schema “You just believe that because...” through the lens of hinge epistemology. It is claimed that hinges are typically held just because one has been brought up to believe them. It is further claimed that, while fitting into the YJBTB schema, hinges are rationally held when different de facto hinges are taken for granted merely because of one’s position in history. Moreover, they are rationally held if they are de jure (...) hinges, constitutive of epistemic rationality. By contrast, holding different de facto hinges, while aware that one’s reasons for them are either question-begging or no stronger than the ones in favor of incompatible ones, is not rational. The latter would be cases of “deep disagreement”—that is, disagreement that is in principle insoluble. Hence, the nature and epistemic significance of the genealogical challenge are clarified. (shrink)

This chapter serves as an opinionated introduction to the problem of convergence (that there is no clear convergence to the truth in philosophy) and the problem of peer disagreement (that disagreement with a peer rationally demands suspending one’s beliefs), and some of the issues they give rise to, namely, philosophical skepticism and progress in philosophy. After introducing both topics and surveying the various positions in the literature we explore the prospects of an alternative, hinge-theoretic account.

Summary This paper argues that Lampito, the Spartan character who takes part in the pacifist plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BC), has been inspired by both parents of Agis II, the king of Sparta who led the war against Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian War and fortified Deceleia in 413 BC. Agis’ mother bore the quite rare name of Lampito as well; his father, the ‘pacifist’ King Archidamos II, voted against the war at the Spartan Assembly in 432. (...) Aristophanes knew of Archidamos’ speech from oral tradition, possibly from the report of the Athenian ambassadors at Sparta or, alternatively and more probably, from public readings of Thucydides’ account of the pre-war debate that took place in the Spartan Assembly. (shrink)

The paper explores the anti-skeptical bearing of the kind of hinge epistemology I have developed in Extended Rationality. A Hinge Epistemology. It focuses, in particular, on the moderate account of perceptual justification, the constitutive response put forward against Humean skepticism, and the denial of the unconditional validity of the Closure Principle, which is key in rebutting Cartesian skepticism. Along the way, a comparison with Wittgenstein's own views in on Certainty and with the positions held by other prominent hinge epistemologists, particularly (...) Moyal-Sharrock, Pritchard and Wright, is provided. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 79 - 96 The paper explores the idea of a “hinge epistemology,” considered as a theory about justification which gives center-stage to Wittgenstein’s notion of _hinges_. First, some basic methodological considerations regarding the relationship between merely exegetical work on Wittgenstein’s texts and more theoretically committed work are put forward. Then, the main problems raised in _On Certainty_ and the most influential interpretative lines it has given rise to so far are presented and discussed. (...) In light of the initial methodological considerations, some contemporary attempts at developing Wittgenstein’s ideas in an anti-skeptical direction, such as Crispin Wright’s and Michael Williams’s, are considered. Their intrinsic merits notwithstanding, it is argued that they fail to take proper measure of Wittgenstein’s own position. In closing, an alternative version of hinge epistemology is put forward and points of contact and disagreement with Wittgenstein’s own views are highlighted. (shrink)

In 1665 Athanasius Kircher published the treatise Mundus Subterraneus, to ex-plore the complex relationships between the visible forms of the landscape and the reasons that produce them. Kircher was peer of Claude Lorrain, who gave a critical contribution in founding landscape as an artistic genre, making indistinguishable its existence as a real place and its representation as a picture. Compared to Kircher, Lorrain had the greatest influence on Western landscape culture. Yet today, thanks to scholars and landscape architecture practitioners, Kircher’s (...) intuition seems effective to describe the contemporary idea of landscape as a performative field, encompassing all living forms, soils and waters, and intangible substances working together, impossible to understand just by the investigation of their visible forms. Today landscape exists because it is perceived and because it works: Lorrain and Kircher have finally met. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic invites a question about how long-standing narratives of alterity and current narratives of disease are entwined and re-enacted in the diagnosis of COVID-19. In this commentary, we discuss two related phenomena that, we argue, should be taken into account in answering this question. First, we address the diffusion of pseudoscientific accounts of minorities’ immunity to COVID-19. While apparently praising minorities’ biological resistance, such accounts rhetorically introduce a distinction between “Us” and “Them,” and in so doing produce new (...) and re-enact old narratives of alterity. Second, these unsubstantiated narratives thrive on fake news and scarcity of data. The second part of this commentary thus surveys the methods through which the COVID-19 test is administered in various countries. We argue that techniques used for data collection have a major role in producing COVID-19 data that render contagion rates among migrants and other minorities invisible. In the conclusion, we provide two recommendations about how COVID-19 data can instead potentially work towards inclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 41-46 [Access article in PDF] On What There Really Is to Our Notion of Ownership of a Thought Annalisa Coliva JOHN CAMPBELL'S REPLY to my paper aims at reestablishing the point that there are two strands to our notion of ownership of a thought. There are two ways of cashing out this idea. 1 First, one could say that A is the (...) owner of a thought if and only if both the following two independent conditions apply 2 : (1) X is introspectively aware of a token thought and (2) X is the person who formed that token thought. Second, one may hold that there are twodifferent and independent notions of ownership of a thought, call it O1 and O2, corresponding to (1) and (2), respectively. For brevity, I will refer only to the first interpretation. But what I will be saying will apply, mutatis mutandis, to both.On this view, thought insertion would be a case in which someone thinks that (1) is satisfied, while (2) is not and, therefore, denies that the thought she is introspectively aware of is her own. 3 Campbell's explanation of thought insertion is quite clear: the subject has prima facie reasons to think that she is not the person who formed that token thought—maybe because she does not experience that thought as formed by herself—and, therefore, has prima facie reasons to deny that she is its owner, but she is mistaken in identifying the producer of the thought and what she says is false, yet reasonable. 4 Notice, however, an important consequence of Campbell's model. If (1) and (2) are independent conditions, then one could obtain without the other. Hence, it must be conceivable that one is introspectively aware of a thought that one has not produced. Indeed, cases of multiple personality, if taken literally, might be taken as examples of this kind of situation: person A and person B inhabit the same body, A can have access to B's thoughts, yet B remains their producer. So A could actually say something like "I'm thinking (i.e. I am immediately aware) that p, but this is not my thought (it is not the thought I produced), it's B's (the thought that B produced)" and what she would be saying would in fact be true.Yet, a simple-minded reaction one may have toward this line of explanation is this: If the subject is either saying something false, but reasonable, or, indeed, something altogether true, when she says "I'm thinking 'Kill God,' but this isn't my thought, it's Chris'," why should we consider her report as an expression of some kind of cognitive illusion, 5 which we take as a symptom of mental illness, as opposed to, at most, a possible mistake in identifying the producer of the thought? And, connectedly, why should we try to cure her, rather than just, at most, correct her? [End Page 41]Hence, the whole dispute between Campbell and me hinges on whether it is logically possible for one to be introspectively aware of a thought and yet not be its producer. Campbell claims that it is, whereas I deny that this is a genuine possibility. He holds that these are two independent conditions and that the one can obtain without the other, whereas I hold that they are not independent and that they stand or fall together. Campbell is fully aware of being making a surprising claim because, as he points out, "[The two strands in the ordinary notion of ownership of a thought] do not ordinarily even seem to come apart" (Campbell 2002, italics mine). Yet he offers in its support no more than an analogy between being the person who produced a certain signature and being the person who produced a given token thought. Let us look at it closer.Consider the following situation: a person NN looks at a piece of paper with NN written on it and wonders whether she is the... (shrink)

Does scepticism threaten our common sense picture of the world? Does it really undermine our deep-rooted certainties? Answers to these questions are offered through a comparative study of the epistemological work of two key figures in the history of analytic philosophy, G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

There is nowadays a tendency, to be dated back to Gordon Baker’s reading, to interpret the later Wittgenstein as proposing a thoroughly therapeutic view of philosophy. Accordingly, he was not dealing with philosophical problems to show how they originated in a misunderstanding of our language. For that would have presupposed his advancing theses about how language works. Rather, his therapeutic method was in the service of liberating philosophers from the kind of intellectual prejudices that would prompt them to ask philosophical (...) questions. The article examines the complex interconnections between Wittgenstein and Waismann to show how the thorough-going therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein proposed by Baker is in fact a projection of Waismann’s ideas onto Wittgenstein. Moreover, by looking at Wittgenstein’s complex anti-skeptical strategies in On Certainty, it shows that his aim was not to provide therapy against philosophers’ inclinations, but to show that skeptical doubts are misguided and nonsensical. (shrink)

The article introduces the Vygotskian tradition in the realist theoretical discussion of the structure-agency problem. Archer's concept of internal conversation is discussed in terms of internalization and externalization of conversational dynamics. The article addresses in particular the methodological issue of observing how external events trigger internal use of language, and how these internal dynamics are externalized. The experience of talk is proposed as a conceptual key to the understanding of internal conversations and of the relation between structured activity and agency. (...) The experience of talk is defined with the help of the notions of emotional experience, personal sense and inner speech, as they are conceptualized in activity theory and in particular in the works of L.S. Vygotsky and A.N. Leont’ev. Students’ experiences of critical conversational events with teachers are analyzed on the basis of written autobiographical accounts. The experience of talk emerges from the analysis as a form of emotional experience in which the horizon of the individual's subjective view relates to specific circumstances external to the individual. Autobiographical accounts of critical conversations are suggested as a type of data which allows access to the experience of talk. (shrink)

Integrating information systems has become a key goal for governments worldwide. Systems of “authentic registers,” for instance, provide government agencies with information from databases acknowledged as the only legitimate sources of data. Concerns are thus arising about the risks for democratic accountability constituted by more and more integrated governmental IS. Studies call for a new research agenda that investigates the redistribution of authority and accountability entailed by interoperable IS. This article contributes to this endeavor by suggesting the “vectorial glance” as (...) a research framework that works along two lines. First, by recovering the science and technology studies notion of “infrastructural inversion,” it looks at the technical minutiae of interoperability projects as strategic sites where institutional shifts—and eventually state transformation—can become visible. Second, by defining interoperability as a performative process of boundary reordering, it opens research to the possibility that institutional identities be reconstituted along different lines. Just as vector graphics are based on paths that lead through control points without being bound to underlying pixels, so the vectorial glance runs across boundaries without implicitly assuming that they are immutable and/or a priori relevant for the analysis. This article draws on a case study observed while working at a major project of civil registers integration in Italy. (shrink)

Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology provides a novel account of the structure of epistemic justification. Its central claim builds upon Wittgenstein's idea in On Certainty that epistemic justifications hinge on some basic assumptions and that epistemic rationality extends to these very hinges. It exploits these ideas to address major problems in epistemology, such as the nature of perceptual justifications, external world skepticism, epistemic relativism, the epistemic status of basic logical laws, of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, of our (...) belief in the existence of the past and of other minds, and the nature of testimonial justification. Along the way, further technical issues, such as the scope of the Principle of Closure of epistemic operators under known entailment, the notion of transmission failure, and the existence of entitlements are addressed in new and illuminating ways. (shrink)