On raconte qu'après la désignation comme Premier consul, Napoléon montra à des invités La Science de la législation de Gaetano Filangieri, le "jeune homme qui est notre maître à tous". Presque au même moment, ces volumes se trouvaient aussi sur le bureau de Benjamin Constant. La fortune et la circulation de cette oeuvre au sein de l'Europe des Lumières et du XIXe siècle sont l'objet de cet ouvrage, qui décrit les débats qu'elle a alimentés afin de comprendre pourquoi les hommes (...) de lettres et les politiques continuèrent à s'intéresser à ce classique de la pensée républicaine du XVIIIe siècle pour se fondre dans la nouvelle Europe du XIXe siècle."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In _Time’s Causal Power_, Antonio Vargas explains how Proclus (412-485 C.E.) developed the unique theory that time is a cause and a god, the world’s first unmoved mover by addressing Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s claim that time is a change.

The dynamics of general relativity is encoded in a set of ten differential equations, the so-called Einstein field equations. It is usually believed that Einstein's equations represent a physical law describing the coupling of spacetime with material fields. However, just six of these equations actually describe the coupling mechanism: the remaining four represent a set of differential relations known as Bianchi identities. The paper discusses the physical role that the Bianchi identities play in general relativity, and investigates whether these identities (...) --qua part of a physical law-- highlight some kind of a posteriori necessity in a Kripkean sense. The inquiry shows that general relativistic physics has an interesting bearing on the debate about the metaphysics of the laws of nature. (shrink)

This article deals with a deep and theoretical thought on post-photography from the point of view of image’s genealogical approach. It is our aim to problematize the current image’s Statute throughout the cultural pattern’s context, mediated by digital technology. There will be three main axes in our research, namely the image’s symbolical power: it must be taken connected with mortality and the religious side of image, according to the Max Weber concept’s Disenchantment. Around these conceptual axes, our article will try (...) to link the ontology traditional subjects on image with the current photography practices, into the contemporary framework of the so-called post-photography. Therefore, it is needed to articulate a conceptual background around the new forms of gaze, conditioned by fragmentation, saturation, and acceleration. The critical apparatus will be based on a multidisciplinary focus. The works of authors like Joan Fontcuberta on post-photography and Régis Debray on life and death of image will vertebrate our article. We will take an essayistic point of view problematizing the subjects developed in the article as an invitation to deep thoughts. El artículo traza una reflexión teórica de la post-fotografía desde la conceptualización genealógica de la imagen, con el objetivo de problematizar el actual estatuto de la imagen en el marco de los patrones culturales contemporáneos, condicionados por la tecnología digital. Serán tres los ejes principales de reflexión: el poder simbólico de la imagen, su relación con la mortalidad y el carácter religioso de la imagen en el sentido weberiano de encantamiento. En torno a tales ejes de discusión, el artículo tratará de vincular las problemáticas tradicionales de la ontología de la imagen y la fotografía con las derivas actuales, en el marco de prácticas post-fotográficas. Será preciso, pues, una contextualización de las nuevas formas de mirada condicionadas por la fragmentación, la saturación y la aceleración. El aparato crítico del texto partirá de un enfoque multidisciplinar, donde los trabajos de Joan Fontcuberta acerca de la post-fotografía y la reflexión sobre la imagen de Régis Debray, servirán de núcleo vertebrador en la ilación de ideas. El punto de vista será ensayístico, por lo que el artículo se plantea como una invitación a cuestionar la problemática abordada. (shrink)

Resumen:En este artículo analizamos las relaciones entre ciencia, técnica y vida en el pensamiento del filósofo francés Michel Henry (1922-2002). Presentamos, primero, el rol que asigna Henry a la ciencia moderna que con su geometrización del mundo ha dejado de lado la vida y la subjetividad y con ello ha dado lugar a la técnica moderna o tecnología. En segundo lugar, siguiendo a Henry, caracterizamos esta técnica moderna como ciencia aplicada, basada en máquinas automáticas que se autonomizan del ser humano; (...) y que constituye la concreción práctica del conocimiento objetivo de la ciencia moderna. Por último, analizamos lo que Henry llama la Técnica original, definida como Cuerpo-apropiación y Praxis de la Subjetividad original y su expresión en los instrumentos y el trabajo humano. Estos análisis permiten vislumbrar una “filosofía de la técnica” en Henry, que consideramos podría inscribirse en la tradición de la “filosofía clásica de la técnica” (en la línea de autores como Heidegger y Ellul).Palabras clave: Michel Henry; ciencia; técnica; tecnología; vida; subjetividad. (shrink)

La comprensión y el análisis del problema de la intersubjetividad y la experiencia del otro ha sido un ámbito controvertido para la fenomenología en general, y no es excepción en la fenomenología de la vida de Michel Henry. La fenomenología henryana presenta como núcleo de su reflexión la subjetividad, que es concebida como realidad encarnada, una realidad afectiva y fundamentalmente viviente, cuya praxis se expresa en el trabajo subjetivo viviente. Desde este punto de partida filosófico, la alteridad, la intersubjetividad y (...) la comunidad sólo son posibles para Henry desde la afectividad, que es concebida como el único horizonte de la manifestación, ya no de la subjetividad solamente, sino de toda manifestación posible, es decir, como esencia de la manifestación. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo analiza el problema de la afectividad en la concepción de la Fenomenología de la vida del filósofo francés Michel Henry, quien la concibe como fundamento de la subjetividad y esencia de la manifestación. Henry realiza un análisis de la obra del pintor Vasily Kandinsky, y muestra cómo la pintura abstracta, no figurativa, logra expresar en los colores y formas aquello invisible que es la esencia de la pintura y que coincide a su vez con la Vida. (...) La concepción de abstracción elaborada por Kandinsky refiere al contenido invisible e interior, que se expresa a través de colores y formas, pero que es la vida misma en su pathos subjetivo fundamental. De este modo, según Henry, el arte se transformaría en único lenguaje para expresar la radicalidad de la vida afectiva, porque no representa nada exterior o extraño, su contenido es la vida misma.: The present article analyzes the problem of affectivity in French philosopher Michel Henry's conception of Phenomenology of life, conceived of as the foundation of the subjectivity and the essence of the manifestation. Henry analyzes the work of the painter Vasily Kandinsky, showing how abstract and non-figurative painting expresses in colors and forms something invisible, which is the essence of the painting and coincides with the Life. Kandinsky's conception of abstraction refers to the invisible and the inner content, which expresses itself through colors and forms, being the life itself in its fundamental subjective pathos. In this way, the art becomes the only language capable to express the radicality of the affective life, because it does not represent anything exterior or foreign, being its content the life itself. (shrink)

Resumen: A partir de sus análisis en torno a la realidad económica y social en el pensamiento de Marx, el filósofo francés Michel Henry propone que el fundamento de la economía es la subjetividad, o más bien la vida, pues es el trabajo, en cuanto “praxis viviente”, lo que define la realidad. El trabajo viviente produce y mantiene en el ser a los otros elementos de la economía, es el único que produce valor. El trabajo de cada sujeto, bajo esta (...) concepción de la fenomenología de la vida, ya no es un agregado más, un elemento contingente, sino que constituye al sujeto en tanto tal. Por último, el descubrimiento del trabajo viviente como fundamento de la posibilidad de la economía lleva a Henry a proponer que una tarea fundamental de la filosofía puede ser la elucidación de la génesis trascendental de los conceptos de la ciencia y de allí su importancia epistemológica.: From his analysis of Marx’s thinking on economic and social reality, the French philosopher Michel Henry establishes that subjectivity, or more precisely life, is the ground of economy because work as “living praxis” defines reality. Living work produces and keeps in being; it is the only one that produces value. This conception of phenomenology of life considers work as a constitutive and necessary element of the subject itself, and not only a contingent and expendable one. Finally, showing living work as grounding the possibility of economics permits Henry to propose as a fundamental aim of philosophy the elucidation of the transcendental genesis of science’s concepts, and from this, its epistemological relevance. (shrink)

The paper considers the "GR-desideratum", that is, the way general relativity implements general covariance, diffeomorphism invariance, and background independence. Two cases are discussed where 5-dimensional generalizations of general relativity run into interpretational troubles when the GR-desideratum is forced upon them. It is shown how the conceptual problems dissolve when such a desideratum is relaxed. In the end, it is suggested that a similar strategy might mitigate some major issues such as the problem of time or the embedding of quantum non-locality (...) into relativistic spacetimes. (shrink)

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents:IntroductionAntónio ZILHÃO: Folk-Psychology, Rationality and Human ActionJoão BRANQUINHO: The Problem of Cognitive DynamicsJ.P. MONTEIRO: Hume, Induction and Single ExperimentsMarco RUFFINO: The Primacy of Concepts and the Priority of Judgments in Frege's LogicJoão Vergílio Gallerani CUTER: Die unanwendbare Arithmetik des TractatusSílvio PINTO: Wittgenstein's Anti-PlatonismFernando FERREIRA: A Substitutional Framework for Arithmetical ValidityJ.R. CROCA & R.N. MOREIRA: Indeterminism Versus CausalismLuíz MONIZ PEREIRA: The Logical Impingement of Artifical Intelligence.

INCONTINENCE, HONOURING SUNK COSTS AND RATIONALITY According to a basic principle of rationality, the decision to engage in a course of action should be determined solely by the analysis of its consequences. Thus, considerations associated with previous use of resources should have no bearing on an agent’s decision-making process. Frequently, however, agents persist carrying on an activity they themselves judge to be nonoptimal under the circumstances because they have already allocated resources to that activity. When this is the case, agents (...) are said to be honouring sunk costs. Honouring sunk costs is thus typically viewed as irrational economic behaviour. Two striking findings of the psychological literature on the sunk cost effect are that it is, in general, not lessened by having taken previously courses in economics, and that agents who did take such courses and that do honour sunk costs seem to be frequently aware of a cognitive dissonance in their behaviour. Davidson’s account of the possibility conditions of incontinent action renders continent action materially unfeasible. The very idea of incontinent action becomes thus a hollow one. I’ll present an alternative description of these possibility conditions that renders continent action materially feasible, and both, continent and incontinent action, cognitively plausible. In a nutshell, my proposal rests upon the drawing of an essential cognitive contrast between explicit processes of deliberative reasoning and lower level heuristic procedures. I conclude the paper arguing that my redescription of incontinent action accounts for the above mentioned cognitive dissonance effect better than the alternatives and that viewing at least an important subset of behaviours of honouring sunk costs as incontinent actions will enable us to consider them as peculiar manifestations of a more general and meaningful pattern in human behaviour. (shrink)

Emerging technologies such as cloud computing, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and robotics, among others, are transforming the field of manufacturing and industry as a whole in unprecedent ways. This fourth industrial revolution is consequentially changing how operators that have been crucial to industry success go about their practices in industrial environments. This short paper briefly introduces the notion of the Operator 4.0 as well as how this novel way of conceptualizing the human operator necessarily implicates human values in (...) the technologies that constitute it. Similarly, the design methodology known as value sensitive design (VSD) is drawn upon to discuss how these Operator 4.0 technologies can be design for human values and, conversely, how a potential value-sensitive Operator 4.0 can be used to strengthen the VSD methodology in developing novel technologies. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación de corte cualitativo realizada los años 2007 y 2008 en Santiago de Chile, la que tuvo como uno de sus objetivos el describir y comprender las condiciones y la experiencia de trabajo de un grupo de hombres y mujeres de bajo nivel ocupacional empleados en la sala de venta de una gran cadena nacional de supermercados. A partir de la presentación y discusión de estos hallazgos se busca contribuir a una mejor comprensión (...) de los profundos procesos de flexibilización y modernización experimentados por el sector del retail en Chile en las últimas décadas, especialmente en lo que respecta al impacto de los mismos en la experiencia de trabajo de los sujetos empleados en dicho sector. Se espera de este modo arrojar luces desde una perspectiva psicosocial sobre los aspectos laborales de los cambios en el mundo del retail, los que han tendido a quedar invisibilizados ante los enfoques que han enfatizado las dimensiones económicas, o culturales y de consumo, de dichas transformaciones. (shrink)

I temi della libertà e del male nelle considerazioni di Luigi Pareyson rivelano una profondità non comune e costituiscono, specie per la teologia, una riflessione "provocante" che dà a pensare. Se la fenomenologia del male moltiplica le domande senza risposta, nell'ordine del pensiero, esso rappresenta l'aporia delle aporie. Eppure, di fronte alla lacerante domanda sul male, l'uomo da sempre ha tentato di rispondervi. Ma il male, nella sua multiforme e tentacolare realtà, non solo sembra sfuggire ad ogni risposta, ma nello (...) stesso tempo sembra rivelare "un fondo tenebroso", uno stato di irrazionalità radicale, le cui radici penetrano nel più profondo della natura umana e gettano la loro ombra nei segreti recessi dei rapporti tra uomo e trascendenza. Così la radicalità del male nel suo non-senso si vede rinviata all'origine del senso, cioè a Dio. Questo è il punto più difficile, temerario e tuttavia penetrante, dove Pareyson cerca di mostrare come proprio individuando in Dio la possibilità, da Dio stesso scartata da sempre e per sempre, del male, si possa comprendere l'irrevocabile, eterna, originaria positività che è il Dio cristiano. (shrink)

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned to ethics to theorize politics in what seems to be an increasingly depoliticized age. Yet the move toward ethics has obscured the ongoing value of political responsibility and the vibrant life it represents as an effective response to power. Sounding the alarm for those who care about robust forms of civic engagement, this book fights for a new conception of political responsibility that meets the challenges of today's democratic practice. Antonio (...) Y. Vázquez-Arroyo forcefully argues against the notion that modern predicaments of power can only be addressed ethically or philosophically through pristine concepts that operate outside of the political realm. By returning to the political, the individual is reintroduced to the binding principles of participatory democracy and the burdens of acting and thinking as a member of a collective. Vázquez-Arroyo historicizes the ethical turn to better understand its ascendence and reworks Adorno's dialectic of responsibility to reassert the political in contemporary thought and theory. (shrink)

Columbia University Press's multivolume _Prison Notebooks_ is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, _Quaderni del Carcere_, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters. This set includes notebooks 1 through 8 with (...) all attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Book Description (Blurb): Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds explains the crucial role that human cognition research plays in the design and realization of artificial intelligence systems, illustrating the steps necessary for the design of artificial models of cognition. It bridges the gap between the theoretical, experimental and technological issues addressed in the context of AI of cognitive inspiration and computational cognitive science. -/- Beginning with an overview of the historical, methodological and technical issues in the field of Cognitively-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, (...) Lieto illustrates how the cognitive design approach has an important role to play in the development of intelligent AI technologies and plausible computational models of cognition. Introducing a unique perspective that draws upon Cybernetics and early AI principles, Lieto emphasizes the need for an equivalence between cognitive processes and implemented AI procedures, in order to realise biologically and cognitively inspired artificial minds. He also introduces the Minimal Cognitive Grid, a pragmatic method to rank the different degrees of biologically and cognitive accuracy of artificial systems in order project and predict their explanatory power with respect to the natural systems taken as source of inspiration. -/- Providing a comprehensive overview of cognitive design principles in constructing artificial minds, this text will be essential reading for students and researchers of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper we identify and characterize an analysis of two problematic aspects affecting the representational level of cognitive architectures (CAs), namely: the limited size and the homogeneous typology of the encoded and processed knowledge. We argue that such aspects may constitute not only a technological problem that, in our opinion, should be addressed in order to build arti cial agents able to exhibit intelligent behaviours in general scenarios, but also an epistemological one, since they limit the plausibility of the (...) comparison of the CAs' knowledge representation and processing mechanisms with those executed by humans in their everyday activities. In the fi nal part of the paper further directions of research will be explored, trying to address current limitations and future challenges. (shrink)

In actuarial parlance, the price of an insurance policy is considered fair if customers bearing the same risk are charged the same price. The estimate of this fair amount hinges on the expected value obtained by weighting the different claims by their probability. We argue that, historically, this concept of actuarial fairness originates in an Aristotelian principle of justice in exchange (equality in risk). We will examine how this principle was formalized in the 16th century and shaped in life insurance (...) during the following two hundred years, in two different interpretations. The Domatian account of actuarial fairness relied on subjective uncertainty: An agreement on risk was fair if both parties were equally ignorant about the chances of an uncertain event. The objectivist version grounded any agreement on an objective risk estimate drawn from a mortality table. We will show how the objectivist approach collapsed in the market for life annuities during the 18th century, leaving open the question of why we still speak of actuarial fairness as if it were an objective expected value. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

According to the Green Paper presented by the European Commission in July 2001, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis (Commission of the European Communities, 2001b, p. 6). On this basis, in 2002, the Italian Government, and especially the Italian Ministry of Welfare, launched an initiative called CSR-SC (social commitment) in order to foster the proactive social role of (...) Italian enterprises, with great attention on SME involvement. The technical partner of the Italian Ministry of Welfare for this initiative is Bocconi University. The goal of this contribution is to present the main results of CSR–SC research project developed by Bocconi University. The paper provides a detailed picture of the general scheme designed to carry out the research project and a review of the different methodologies used to support the solutions proposed. (shrink)

In this article we present an advanced version of Dual-PECCS, a cognitively-inspired knowledge representation and reasoning system aimed at extending the capabilities of artificial systems in conceptual categorization tasks. It combines different sorts of common-sense categorization (prototypical and exemplars-based categorization) with standard monotonic categorization procedures. These different types of inferential procedures are reconciled according to the tenets coming from the dual process theory of reasoning. On the other hand, from a representational perspective, the system relies on the hypothesis of conceptual (...) structures represented as heterogeneous proxytypes. Dual-PECCS has been experimentally assessed in a task of conceptual categorization where a target concept illustrated by a simple common-sense linguistic description had to be identified by resorting to a mix of categorization strategies, and its output has been compared to human responses. The obtained results suggest that our approach can be beneficial to improve the representational and reasoning conceptual capabilities of standard cognitive artificial systems, and –in addition– that it may be plausibly applied to different general computational models of cognition. The current version of the system, in fact, extends our previous work, in that Dual-PECCS is now integrated and tested into two cognitive architectures, ACT-R and CLARION, implementing different assumptions on the underlying invariant structures governing human cognition. Such integration allowed us to extend our previous evaluation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSome firms are initiating pro-stakeholder activities and policies that transcend conventional corporate social responsibility conceptions and seem inconsistent with their business interests or economic responsibilities. These initiatives, which are neither legally nor morally obligatory, are responding to calls for a more active role of business in society and for a broader interpretation of CSR. In fact, they benefit stakeholders in a superior and an innovative way and are difficult to reconcile with commonly used rationales in the extant CSR literature, such (...) as win-win opportunities, creating shared value, or corporate philanthropy. For better insight, we develop a qualified account of the concept of supererogation from ethical theory. This account, which examines voluntary responses to moral obligations from which a business is normally excused, is applied to identify the unique features of the initiatives that are not readily understood within conventional reasoning, which is generally focused on a business case. (shrink)

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of the combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC + TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC + TR by typicality inclusions of the (...) form p :: T(C) v D, whose intuitive meaning is that “we believe with degree p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds”. As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying standard Description Logic ALC. (shrink)