This paper addresses the transformation of subjectivity in trauma by considering recent psychopathological research, especially in relation to the works of Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk. It...

If the ancient Stoics conceived passion as a judgment or the consequence of a judgment referring to external reality, it is correct to define their conception of the psyche as ‘monistic’; it is very different if we consider that passion is due to another faculty independent of reason. In this second case, a scenario opens up in which a realistic and ‘reified’ conception of passion emerges. With reference to this, in theLetter113 Seneca discusses the paradoxical thesis of the ancient Stoic (...) scholars according to whom “the soul is an animal”, just as virtues and passions are. Through a series of close logical arguments, he shows the absurdities that can be reached in this way. By comparing this letter with theDe irawe can define the position of Seneca as a type of practical/operational imaginary dualism: the development of an original coherent form of monism. Not to give in to passion (for example to anger or libido) will not be just or not so much a psychological exercise of reason and will, but certainly a physical experience of resistance. (shrink)

‘Philosophical dialogue’ indicates both a form of philosophical inquiry and its corresponding literary genre. In its written form, it typically features two or more characters who engage in a discussion concerning morals, knowledge, as well as a variety of topics that can be widely labelled as ‘philosophical’. Our philosophical dialogue takes place in Krakow, Poland. It is a rainy morning and two strangers are waiting at a tram stop. One of them is dressed neatly, and cannot stop fidgeting with his (...) closed umbrella. The other was caught unprepared by the morning downpour and water is dripping from his worn, soaked jacket. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 1 Seiten: 67-88.

Feminist scholars have been remaking the landscape in political theory, and in this important book some of the most important feminist political theorists provide reconstructions of those concepts most central to the tradition of political philosophy. The goal is nothing less than the construction of a blueprint for a positive feminist theory.Many of these papers are completely new; others are extensions of important earlier work; two are reprints of classic papers. The result is a progress report on the continuing feminist (...) project to re-envision traditional political theory. As such, it constitutes essential reading not only for feminist thinkers but also for traditional philosophers and political theorists, who will need to come to terms with these contemporary critiques and re-readings. (shrink)

This paper analyses the déjà-vu experience in order to deepen the understanding of the complex nature of time-consciousness from a phenomenological point of view. The paper is divided into two sections: the first section focuses on Bergson’s research on déjà vu in order to assess the validity of his position; the second section describes a specific form of déjà-vu experience from a phenomenological perspective. This investigation will question the widespread assumption according to which déjà vu should be conceived as a (...) disturbance of the memory of the past. On the contrary, the author shows that the disturbance primarily pertains to the dimension of the future. In order to understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to focus on the coherent deformation of the immediate expectation of the imminent future. (shrink)

Taking inspiration from Searle’s ‘The Logic of Fictional Discourse’, this essay presents an argument against different versions of the so-called ‘speech act theory of fiction’. In particular, it argues that a Uniformity Argument may be constructed, which is additional to the Determination Argument commonly attributed to Searle, and which does not rely on his presumably controversial Determination Principle. This Uniformity Argument is equally powerful against the ‘Dedicated Speech Act’ theories that Searle originally targeted, and the more recent, Grice-inspired versions of (...) speech-act approaches to fictional discourse. (shrink)

In this article the author seeks to highlight a specific disorder related to bodily experience in melancholia conceived as a severe form of clinical depression. The article is divided into three parts. In the first section, the author investigates the intersubjective dimension of bodily experience in light of the categories of Außen- and Innenleiblichkeit. In the second section, I explore a specific disturbance of the dimension of intercorporeality. The excessive feeling of the bodily (außenleibliche) visibility of his/her own sufferance is (...) a fundamental aspect of depression. At a pre-reflexive level, we constantly assume the noncoincidence between one's own bodily expression and the Other's experience/reading of these expressions. An alteration of this (pre-reflexive) awareness occurs in melancholia. The patient feels as if the melancholic condition would be transparent to the other. In the third section, the author intends to show the alteration of the embodied communication between the melancholic person and the other investigating two particular phenomena: the exchange of gaze in a face to face encounter, and the disturbance of the oral sense, revealing a specific form of irresponsiveness and the experience of void. (shrink)

Plato tries to explain the becoming of the cosmos by referring to the concepts of order and disorder. Scholars have usually focused on the relationship between the cosmos and the demiurge that Plato puts forward to explain the reasonable development. Along these lines, scholarship has examined the providential role played by both the demiurge and the soul of the world. Yet, an interesting prob­lem still remains open: what exactly is the function of disorder? What is the sense of the concept (...) of a perfectly established order if we do not know the manner in which it is achieved, since we have no understand­ing of the conditions that make it possible? Pursuing this line of thought, one may point to a providential role of the disorder given the balance of forces that operates in Plato’s cosmic becoming. (shrink)

The Adventures of the Man in Gold / Les aventures de l’Homme en Or is an interesting, original and, to some extent, also “strange” or “bizarre” book by the American philosopher Richard Shusterman. The book appears in bilingual edition, with Shusterman’s text published both in the original English version and in French translation, and is structured in a very clear way: Preface, three chapters, biographies of the author and all contributors, and acknowledgments. The book is also enriched by ma...

The concept of nature plays a decisive role in Adorno’s philosophy, and must be understood as part of a conceptual constellation that also includes the notions of myth, enlightenment, dialectics, fate, reason, conceptuality, knowledge, freedom, society, and history. In the first section we provide a general analysis of the role played by the concept of nature in Adorno’s philosophy. In doing so, we mostly concentrate on his works The Idea of Natural History, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and (...) also his 1964-65 lectures on History and Freedom. In the second section, then, we turn to Adorno’s aesthetics, which must not be merely understood as a philosophy of art but rather as a general theory of the aesthetic that also includes nature among its objects. On this basis, and by referring not only to Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory but also to his 1958-59 lecture course on Aesthetics, we explain why, in our view, the question concerning natural beauty holds a special place in the whole of his aesthetics, and why this question is essential indeed in order to properly understand the general meaning, philosophical range and ultimate goals of his philosophical project. (shrink)

In this paper I start with Adorno’s famous and provocative statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, aimed at asking whether art was still possible in the age of genocides. Then, I take into examination Adorno’s concept of commitment in art – which is closely related to these questions - and the meaning itself of the notion of “Auschwitz” in Adorno’s philosophy. Analyzing what Adorno called “true” art (i.e. art provided with a relevant “truth content”) leads to take into (...) consideration what he understood vice-versa as false or untrue art, in particular mass culture and popular music. Adorno would have probably considered as a sort of blasphemy or heresy the idea itself to write and perform pop-rock songs about such subjects as genocide, but I argue that his views rely on some prejudices that negatively condition his philosophy of art and especially of music. The songs on the Armenian genocide written and performed by the heavy metal band System of a Down serve here as a profitable example that may be of help to foster a critical rethinking of some aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics. (shrink)

An increasing number of Italian scholars are beginning to share the idea that the conceptual basis of legal positivism (LP) is wrong, particularly in the field of Public Law. According to a group of theories called “neoconstitutionalism,” constitutionalism is to be understood not only as a principle based on the need to impose legal limits to political power, but also as an aggregation of values capable of continually remodelling legal relationships, positioning itself as a “pervasive” point of reference for legal (...) experience. A recent essay by Professor Antonio Baldassarre, President Emeritus of the Constitutional Italian Court, about the “misery of legal positivism” is a good expression of this view. In this article, the ideas outlined by Baldassarre are examined and criticized. The paper also tries to defend a version of legal positivism, which has both a conceptual and prescriptive meaning, relating to decisions made on the basis of rules. This view is based on the two correlated concepts of primary formalism and secondary formalism of “competence and procedure.”. (shrink)

The set, the closure of F, is the closure with respect to substitution and concatenation recursion on notation of a set of basic functions comprehending the set F. By improving earlier work, we show that is the substitution closure of a simple function set and characterize well‐known function complexity classes as the substitution closure of finite sets of simple functions.

A basis for a set C of functions on natural numbers is a set F of functions such that C is the closure with respect to substitution of the projection functions and the functions in F. This paper introduces three new bases, comprehending only common functions, for the Grzegorczyk classes ℰ_n with n ≥ 3. Such results are then applied in order to show that ℰ_{n+1} = K_n for n ≥ 2, where {K_n}n∈ℕ is the Axt hierarchy.

Phenomenology aims at analyzing the constitutive moments of the different experiences by doing justice to their specific ways of appearing. By doing so, it can make visible (and therefore correct) the problematic assumptions taken as valid from the outset. These assumptions coherently distort and manipulate the phenomena in such a way that the phenomena are transformed into something radically different. The phenomenon of déjà vu is very interesting in this regard for two different reasons. Déjà vu is transformed into a (...) different phenomenon in the field of cognitive sciences: déjà-vu is commonly understood as a simple memory error. Secondly, déjà vu implies a repetition of a unique, contingent experience. This logic of repetition is not easily compatible with the logos of empirical sciences that focus on the identification of invariant relations between general terms through experimental research and therefore requires a different approach. (shrink)

This essay presents an argument against the token-reflexive approach to the semantics for indexical languages. After some preliminary remarks in section one, sections two and three explain why some traditional arguments against token-reflexivity are ultimately ineffective. Section four puts forth a more persuasive argument, to the effect that token-reflexive views overgenerate with respect to results of analyticity. However, as section five explains, defenders of the alternative, type-oriented view have all too often wasted the advantage offered by their approach: the unmotivated, (...) independent restriction of semantic evaluation to so-called ‘proper’ indexes is responsible for undesirable conclusions, similar to those to which token- reflexive theorists are committed. (shrink)

Antonio Signorini’s contribution to the constitutive theory of non-linear elasticity is reconstructed and analyzed. Some uninformed opinions suggesting he had a minor role, lacking of significant results, are discussed and refuted. It is shown that Signorini should be rightly credited for being among the first scholars aware of the central problem of non-linear elasticity: the determination of the general form of the elastic potential.

The focus of this monograph lies in the construction of a theory of legal obligation, understanding it as a discrete notion with its own defining traits. In this work, Bertea specifically addresses the question: how should legal obligation be distinctively conceptualized? The conceptualization of legal obligation he defends in this work gradually emerges from a critical assessment of the theories of legal obligation that have been most influential in the contemporary legal-theoretical debate. Building on such critical analysis, Bertea's study purports (...) to offer a novel and unconventional conceptualization of legal obligation, which is characterized as a law-engendered intersubjective reason for carrying out certain courses of conduct. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose an analysis of Quine’s example ’Giorgione was so-called because of his size’, grounded on the idea of an obstinate demonstrative. In the first sections, I discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the demonstrative and logophoric treatments of ‘so called’, I highlight certain parallelisms with Davidson’s paratactic view of quotation, and I introduce independent considerations in favor of the idea of an obstinate demonstrative. In the second half of my essay, I apply this notion to Quine’s (...) example, and I discuss its consequences with respect to the principle of substitutivity of coreferential singular terms. (shrink)

The purpose is to study the strength of Ramsey’s Theorem for pairs restricted to recursive assignments ofk-many colors, with respect to Intuitionistic Heyting Arithmetic. We prove that for every natural number$k \ge 2$, Ramsey’s Theorem for pairs and recursive assignments ofkcolors is equivalent to the Limited Lesser Principle of Omniscience for${\rm{\Sigma }}_3^0$formulas over Heyting Arithmetic. Alternatively, the same theorem over intuitionistic arithmetic is equivalent to: for every recursively enumerable infinitek-ary tree there is some$i < k$and some branch with infinitely many (...) children of indexi. (shrink)

This article discusses three textual problems in Servius’ commentary on Virgil (Serv. on Aen. 11.741; Ecl. 2.58; Ecl. 4.4). In two notes a new conjecture is proposed; in one passage a transmitted reading, so far neglected by earlier editors, is supported.

Against the traditional theory of indexicals, I suggest that some utterances of sentences containing occurrences of indexical expressions must be evaluated with respect to a context distinct from the context of utterance. This proposal yields an intuitively correct treatment of a variety of linguistic phenomena. I discuss the interpretation of recorded messages, certain peculiar examples involving 'here', 'now', and 'I', the generic uses of indexicals, and some problems related to discourse about fiction. I also consider the logical consequences of my (...) view, and I argue that certain examples which are commonly taken as logically valid are not recognized as logical truths in my system. (shrink)

This essay presents an analysis of the conversational role of disambiguation, with special attention to disambiguating parentheticals such as 'bats, the furry animals, are not easy to find'. The essay proposes an enriched representation of conversational states as pairs of an interpretation function and standard common belief, it represents disambiguations within the ensuing framework, and, on the basis of these conceptual tools, it proposes a systematic picture of the updates achieved by disambiguating parentheticas.