Das Buch bietet eine neue Interpretation von Hegels Schlüsselwerk, der Wissenschaft der Logik, im Sinne einer Theorie der Freiheit als Selbstbestimmung. Die Untersuchung gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Im ersten werden Hegels logische Begriffe von Identität und Widerspruch diskutiert. Dabei können unterschiedliche Formen von Identität differenziert und Selbstbestimmung als deren höchste Form herausgestellt werden. Im zweiten Teil liefert der Autor einen ausführlichen Stellen-Kommentar des schwierigen Teleologie-Kapitels, in dem die spezifische Dynamik der Selbstbestimmung analysiert wird. Dabei ist zugleich die Einsicht in (...) die Grundstruktur gewonnen, aus der sich das Verhältnis von Hegels Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes zur Logik verstehen lässt. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how emojis are integrated into the text that they occur with. I use the typology of gestural iconic enrichments proposed by Schlenker (2018a, 2018b) to investigate the hypothesis that emojis denoting objects (e.g., ????) and activities (e.g., ????) project (i.e., interact with logical operators) when co-occurring with text in a similar way as gestures do with speech. In particular, I claim that [i.] emojis generate co-suppositions, i.e., assertion-dependent presuppositions, when immediately following text (e.g., the (...) sentence “John didn’t train today ????” gives rise to the inference that “if John had trained today, weightlifting would have been involved”); [ii.] emojis generate supplements (in the sense of Potts, 2005), just like appositive relative clauses, when they are separated from the accompanying text by a pause (e.g., the sentence “John trained today...????” gives rise to the inference that “John trained today, which involved weightlifting”); [iii.] when used as replacements for words (e.g., “Yesterday, John didn’t ???? ”), emojis have an at-issue semantics and can trigger standard presuppositions. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an analysis of the depictive properties of deepfakes. These are videos and pictures produced by deep learning algorithms that automatically modify existing videos and photographs or generate new ones. I argue that deepfakes have an intentional standard of correctness. That is, a deepfake depicts its subject only insofar as its creator intends it to. This is due to the way in which these images are produced, which involves a degree of intentional control similar to that (...) involved in the production of other intentional pictures such as drawings and paintings. This aspect distinguishes deepfakes from real videos and photographs, which instead have a non-intentional standard: their correct interpretation corresponds to the scenes that were recorded by the mechanisms that produced them, and not to what their producers intended them to represent. I show that these depictive properties make deepfakes fit for communicating information in the same way as language and other intentional pictures. That is, they do not provide direct access to the communicated information like non-intentional pictures (e.g., videos and photographs) do. Rather, they convey information indirectly, relying only on the viewer's assumptions about the communicative intentions of the creator of the deepfake. Indirect communication is indeed a prominent function of such media in our society, but it is often overlooked in the philosophical literature. This analysis also explains what is epistemically worrying about deepfakes. With the introduction of this technology, viewers interpreting photorealistic videos and pictures can no longer be sure of which standard to select (i.e., intentional or non-intentional), which makes misinterpretation likely (i.e., they can take an image to have a standard of correctness that it does not have). (shrink)

The broad aim of this paper is to question the ambiguous relationship between technology and intelligence. More specifically, it addresses the reasons why the ever-increasing reliance on smart technologies and wide repositories of data does not necessarily increase the display of “smart” or even “intelligent” behaviors, but rather increases new instances of “brutality” as a mix of ignorance and violence. We claim that the answer can be found in the cyborg theory, and more specifically in the possibility to blend different (...) kinds of intentionality. (shrink)

This essay reflects on Anglo-American literary representations of Italian culture from the perspective of postcolonial theory. Throughout history, many national and cultural entities have defined themselves in relation to foreign and “exotic” civilizations; this equally applies to “the exotic within Europe.” Through a discussion of the works of writers as various as E.M. Forster (The Story of a Panic, 1903), Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun, 1997), and Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love, 2006), the essay describes a tradition that celebrates (...) Italy as an authentic cultural experience and at the same time “orientalises” such a tradition by depicting it as a destabilizing threat and challenge to the “rational mind,” allegedly represented by Anglo-American culture. The essay attempts to disclose the degree of “imagined identity” that emerges from an on-going productive dialogue with the “other within oneself.”. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to assess the effects of visual aesthetic perception on event-related potentials . Eight subjects assigned an aesthetic judgment and a 10-step beauty estimation to the target stimuli, consisting of famous artistic pictures and geometric shapes. In a further task, the subjects performed a motor response to the previously judged pictures and geometric shapes. ERPs were recorded through 54 scalp electrodes during both tasks. The P3b amplitude was increased during the categorization of the geometric shapes (...) compared to the artistic figures and during the vision of the beautiful targets preceding the motor response. The categorization of the aesthetic qualities of geometrical shapes seems to induce a higher level of attention, while a higher arousal variation was elicited by the recognition of beauty, in any form that was presented. (shrink)

This study explores social enterprises’ strategies for addressing mission drift. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of two Italian social enterprises, we show how stakeholder engagement combined with social accounting can successfully support a social venture to re-balance its positioning between wealth generation and social value creation. Indeed, stakeholder engagement helps the internal actors of a social enterprise to rationalize and embody pro-social values previously abandoned, while social accounting reinforces this embodiment process by showing the reintroduced social commitment of (...) the social enterprise to external audiences. Conversely, strategies focused only on social accounting and without significant engagement of external stakeholders prove to be unsuccessful in counterbalancing mission drift because they fail to activate the necessary process of internal re-introduction and operationalization of pro-social values and objectives. (shrink)

Cognitive niche theories consist in a theoretical framework that is proving extremely profitable in bridging evolutionary biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and anthropology by offering an inter-disciplinary ground, laden with novel approaches and debates. At the same time, cognitive niche theories are multiple, and differently related to niche theories in theoretical and evolutionary biology. The aim of this paper is to clarify the theoretical and epistemological relationships between cognitive and ecological niche theories. Also, by adopting a constructionist approach we will try (...) to explain the shift from ecological to cognitive niches and their actual and theoretical overlaps. In order to do so, we will take two concepts expressing loose forms of causation in the interaction between organisms and their environment: the biological notion of “enablement” and the psycho-cognitive one of “affordance”. (shrink)

This paper sheds new light on the subtle relation between probability and logic by (i) providing a logical development of Bruno de Finetti's conception of events and (ii) suggesting that the subjective nature of de Finetti's interpretation of probability emerges in a clearer form against such a logical background. By making explicit the epistemic structure which underlies what we call Choice-based probability we show that whilst all rational degrees of belief must be probabilities, the converse doesn't hold: some probability values (...) don't represent decision-relevant quantifications of uncertainty. (shrink)

A quasivariety of algebras has the joint embedding property (JEP) if and only if it is generated by a single algebra A. It is structurally complete if and only if the free ℵ0‐generated algebra in can serve as A. A consequence of this demand, called ‘passive structural completeness’ (PSC), is that the nontrivial members of all satisfy the same existential positive sentences. We prove that if is PSC then it still has the JEP, and if it has the JEP and (...) its nontrivial members lack trivial subalgebras, then its relatively simple members all belong to the universal class generated by one of them. Under these conditions, if is relatively semisimple then it is generated by one ‐simple algebra. We also prove that a quasivariety of finite type, with a finite nontrivial member, is PSC if and only if its nontrivial members have a common retract. The theory is then applied to the variety of De Morgan monoids, where we isolate the sub(quasi)varieties that are PSC and those that have the JEP, while throwing fresh light on those that are structurally complete. The results illuminate the extension lattices of intuitionistic and relevance logics. (shrink)

This article builds on a recent paper coauthored by the present author, H. Hosni and F. Montagna. It is meant to contribute to the logical foundations of probability theory on many-valued events and, specifically, to a deeper understanding of the notion of strict coherence. In particular, we will make use of geometrical, measure-theoretical and logical methods to provide three characterizations of strict coherence on formulas of infinite-valued Łukasiewicz logic.

Gossip has been the object of a number of different studies in the past 50 years, rehabilitating it not only as something worth being studied, but also as a pivotal informational and social structure of human cognition: Dunbar (Rev Gen Psychol 8(2):100–110, 2004) interestingly linked the emergence of language to nothing less than its ability to afford gossip. Different facets of gossip were analyzed by anthropologists, linguists, psychologists and philosophers, but few attempts were made to frame gossip within an epistemological (...) framework (for instance Ayim in (Good gossip, pp. 85–99, 1994)). Our intention in this paper is to provide a consistent epistemological (applied and social) account of gossip, understood as broadly evaluative talk between two or more people, comfortably acquainted between each other, about an absent third party they are both at least acquainted with. Hence, relying on the most recent multidisciplinary literature about the topic, the first part of this paper will concern the epistemic dynamics of gossip: whereas the sociobiological tradition individuates in gossip the clue for the (theoretically cumbersome) group mind and group-level adaptations Wilson et al. (The evolution of cognition, pp. 347–365, 2002), we will suggest the more parsimonious modeling of gossip as a soft-assembled epistemic synergy, understood as a function-dominant interaction able to project a higher organizational level—in our case, the group as group-of-gossips. We will argue that the aim of this synergy is indeed to update a Knowledge Base of social information between the group (as a projected whole) and its members. The second and third part will instead focus on the epistemological labeling of the inferences characterizing gossip: our contention is that the ever-present moral/evaluative dimension in gossip—be it tacit or explicit, concerning the objects or the partners of gossip—is best analyzed through the epistemological framework of abduction. Consequently, we will suggest that a significant role of gossip is to function as a group-based abductive appraisal of social matter, enacted at various levels. (shrink)

C’est sur la scène tragique - dans les oeuvres d’Euripide, particulièrement -, face au public masculin de la cité, que les femmes grecques viennent crier la douleur de la maternité. Caisse de résonance de douleurs et de malheurs. De la douleur la plus féminine, celle d’enfanter, bien sûr, mais aussi du malheur le plus féminin : celui d’être apais. Certes, l’homme sans descendance souffre de cette vacuité, mais cette tare d’être sans enfant, c’est seulement pour la femme qu’elle s’étend à (...) tout ce qui n’est pas le statut de félicité, celui de femme eupais. En effet, la femme apais, c’est aussi bien celle dont l’enfant est mort que celle à laquelle on a vite fait d’attribuer la stérilité du couple. C’est aussi celle que son âge, le délaissement dont elle est l’objet, font classer dans la catégorie des femmes vides. Coeur de la vraie vie des femmes, image fortement corporelle, la maternité constitue le pôle d’excellence, le seul vrai but de l’existence. La vierge s’y prépare à remplacer sa mère qui souffre d’abandonner ce en quoi elle s’est réalisée. (shrink)

Tommaso Campanella’s dignitas hominis acquires its own autonomous and innovative historiographical value in recognizing the connection between mens and religion as a distinctive element of human be...

RésuméIl y a, dans le Nafs d'Avicenne, deux enquêtes cheminant dès le début en parallèle : celle sur l’âme comme entité relationnelle, toujours considérée dans sa connexion avec le corps, et celle sur l’âme humaine en elle-même. Les deux enquêtes visent à établir l'existence et l'essence de l’âme, respectivement en relation au corps dont elle est l’âme et en soi-même. Le but de cette contribution est de reconstruire les étapes de ces enquêtes, afin de mettre en relief leur relation mutuelle, (...) et d'identifier ce qui fait office d'indicateur permettant de localiser la transition de la première enquête, plus générale, à la seconde, plus spécifique. Selon la reconstitution ici présentée, ce rôle peut être attribué à l'expérience de l’homme volant. Afin de corroborer cette interprétation, on prendra en considération trois autres ouvrages d'Avicenne, ceux-ci contenant les trois autres formulations attestées de l’homme volant, ainsi qu'un mouvement argumentatif similaire à celui que l'on peut reconstituer dans le Nafs. (shrink)

A logic is said to admit an equational completeness theorem when it can be interpreted into the equational consequence relative to some class of algebras. We characterize logics admitting an equational completeness theorem that are either locally tabular or have some tautology. In particular, it is shown that a protoalgebraic logic admits an equational completeness theorem precisely when it has two distinct logically equivalent formulas. While the problem of determining whether a logic admits an equational completeness theorem is shown to (...) be decidable both for logics presented by a finite set of finite matrices and for locally tabular logics presented by a finite Hilbert calculus, it becomes undecidable for arbitrary logics presented by finite Hilbert calculi. (shrink)

Neuromoral theorists are those who claim that a scientific understanding of moral judgment through the methods of psychology, neuroscience and related disciplines can have normative implications and can be used to improve the human ability to make moral judgments. We consider three neuromoral theories: one suggested by Gazzaniga, one put forward by Gigerenzer, and one developed by Greene. By contrasting these theories we reveal some of the fundamental issues that neuromoral theories in general have to address. One important issue concerns (...) whether the normative claims that neuromoral theorists would like to make are to be understood in moral terms or in non-moral terms. We argue that, on either a moral or a non-moral interpretation of these claims, neuromoral theories face serious problems. Therefore, neither the moral nor the non-moral reading of the normative claims makes them philosophically viable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this study, we investigate how different internal and external stakeholders influence the innovation strategy of a social enterprise to adopt product, process, and partnership innovations that impact either social or commercial performance. Relying on survey data from a sample of work integration social enterprises, we find that in situations of turbulence, administrative leaders do not significantly influence the innovation strategy of a social enterprise. Instead, board members and external stakeholders seem to play a role. Our study contributes to strategic (...) and business ethics research on social enterprises and, more broadly, to the literature that explores how business organizations combine social value creation and wealth generation. (shrink)

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these pasts. Approaching collective remembering as a Lieu de Dispute allows us, in turn, to foreground three consequential dimensions of remembrance, which the (...) articles in the issue examine in different ways: that collective remembering is an interpersonal, political and affective practice. This introduction discusses these three dimensions to collective remembering in greater detail, before outlining the remaining contents of the Special Issue. (shrink)

Abstract.This paper is devoted to a logical and algebraic treatment of conditional probability. The main ideas are the use of non-standard probabilities and of some kind of standard part function in order to deal with the case where the conditioning event has probability zero, and the use of a many-valued modal logic in order to deal probability of an event φ as the truth value of the sentence φ is probable, along the lines of Hájek’s book [H98] and of [EGH96]. (...) To this purpose, we introduce a probabilistic many-valued logic, called FP(SŁΠ), which is sound and complete with respect a class of structures having a non-standard extension [0,1]⋆ of [0,1] as set of truth values. We also prove that the coherence of an assessment of conditional probabilities is equivalent to the coherence of a suitably defined theory over FP(SŁΠ) whose proper axioms reflect the assessment itself. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the consequences of the bibliometrics-based evaluation system of scientific production on the contents and methods of sciences. The research has been conducted by means of in-depth interviews to a multi-disciplinary panel of Italian researchers. We discuss the implications of bibliometrics-based evaluation on the choice of the research topic, on the experimental practices, on the dissemination habits. We observe that the validation of the bibliometrics-based evaluation practices relies on the acceptance and diffusion within (...) the scientific community, and that these practices are self-sustained through their wide application. We discuss possible evolving scenarios, also considering the recent development of digital archives. (shrink)

Positive modal algebras are the$$\left\langle { \wedge, \vee,\diamondsuit,\square,0,1} \right\rangle $$-subreducts of modal algebras. We prove that the variety of positive S4-algebras is not locally finite. On the other hand, the free one-generated positive S4-algebra is shown to be finite. Moreover, we describe the bottom part of the lattice of varieties of positive S4-algebras. Building on this, we characterize structurally complete varieties of positive K4-algebras.

This work presents a model-theoretic approach to the study of first-order theories of classes of BL-chains. Among other facts, we present several classes of BL-algebras, generating the whole variety of BL-algebras, whose first-order theory has quantifier elimination. Model-completeness and decision problems are also investigated. Then we investigate classes of BL-algebras having (or not having) the amalgamation property or the joint embedding property and we relate the above properties to the existence of ultrahomogeneous models.

ABSTRACTAlbert Camus has rarely been considered as a theoretician of democracy. Nonetheless, from the end of the Thirties it is possible to find in his different writings several observations relating to politics and the life of democracy and democracies. The second half of the Forties saw this interest, intertwined with the new post-WWII context, being explicitly dedicated to such subjects in the form of several articles and observations. Through the latter, Camus developed a radical – literally ‘that goes to roots’ (...) – analysis of twentieth century politics, defining an identity between democracy and modesty and using them to face the nihilistic attitude spread by totalitarian regimes and ‘conquering spirits’ within the same western society. Such attention to ‘modesty’ was also defined in direct connection with the idea that Camus developed during the same period on the concept of Art and the role of the artist. According to Camus, the artist – or the ‘eternal girondin’ – is like a democrat who tries to defend pluralism and unity against homologation and totality. Through tracing the historical growth of such a reflection and its relevance in defining some critical issues, this study leads us to a better understanding of contemporary politics and its crisis. (shrink)

The book is an epistemological monograph written from a multidisciplinary perspective. It provides a complex and realistic picture of cognition and rationality, as endowments aimed at making sense and reacting smartly to one's environment, be it epistemic, social or simply ecological. The first part of the book analyzes scientific modeling as products of the biological necessity to cope with the environment and be able to draw as many inferences as possible about it. Moreover, it develops an epistemological framework which will (...) be exploited in both the second part of the book, focusing on social cognition and cognitive niche construction, and the third part, dealing with the apparent irrationality of magical and religious belief. The book also discusses how both social networking and online religion influence cognition, rationality and irrational belief. (shrink)

Cognitive niche construction theory provides a new comprehensive account for the development of human cultural and social organization with respect to the management of their environment. Cognitive niche construction can be seen as a way of lessening complexity and unpredictability of a given environment. In this paper, we are going to analyze economic systems as highly technological cognitive niches, and individuate a link between cognitive niche construction, unpredictability and a particular kind of economic crises.

Many stored beliefs, like beliefs in one’s personal data or beliefs in one’s area of expertise, intuitively amount to knowledge, and so are justified. This uncontroversial datum arguably tells against evidentialism, the position according to which a belief is justified if it fits the available evidence: stored beliefs are normally not sustained by one’s available evidence. Conee and Feldman have tried to meet this potential objection by relaxing the notion of available evidence. According to their proposal, stored beliefs are dispositionally (...) justified, because they are justified by the evidence one has the disposition to retrieve; such evidence, as a consequence, is to be characterize as available, though in a derivative sense. Goldman has criticized this proposal, by offering a counterexample to the claim that a disposition to generate a piece of evidence may qualify as a justifier. In this paper I critically examine two possible replies to Goldman’s example stemming from Conee and Feldman, and finally propose my own, based on a distinction, inspired by Audi, between dispositional evidence and the disposition to have evidence. Though this proposal differs from Conee and Feldman’s one, I will conclude that it fits pretty well their intuitions. (shrink)

The article offers an overview and a critical assessment of the work of Zeev Sternhell, focussing on the questions of fascism and of the anti-Enlightenment tradition. It claims that the career of the Israeli historian revolves around the intuition of a history of European modernity marked by a central opposition: that between the Enlightenment and the anti-Enlightenment. I show how the idea is already present in his initial works, and argue that it produces a specific kind of intellectual history, concerned (...) with the unity of traditions over large temporal horizons. I claim that it has the advantage of offering an historically grounded reading of fascism which nonetheless is capable to account for its emergence in apparently very dissimilar contexts. After having examined some of the shortcomings of this approach, I offer an historical explanation for the type of intellectual history practiced by Sternhell, arguing that it must be tied to his political activism in Israel. (shrink)

Functional MRI shows promise as a candidate prognostication method in acutely comatose patients following severe brain injury. However, further research is needed before this technique becomes appropriate for clinical practice. Drawing on a clinical case, we investigate the process of obtaining informed consent for this kind of research and identify four ethical issues. After describing each issue, we propose potential solutions which would make a patient’s participation in research compatible with her rights and interests. First, we defend the need for (...) traditional proxy consent against two alternative approaches. Second, we examine the impact of the intensive care unit environment on the informed consent process. Third, we discuss the therapeutic misconception and its potential influence on informed consent. Finally, we deal with issues of timing in recruiting participants and related factors which may affect the risks of participation. (shrink)

Effective methods for evaluating the reliability of statements issued by witnesses and defendants in hearings would be an extremely valuable support to decision-making in court and other legal settings. In recent years, methods relying on stylometric techniques have proven most successful for this task; but few such methods have been tested with language collected in real-life situations of high-stakes deception, and therefore their usefulness outside lab conditions still has to be properly assessed. In this study we report the results obtained (...) by using stylometric techniques to identify deceptive statements in a corpus of hearings collected in Italian courts. The defendants at these hearings were condemned for calumny or false testimony, so the falsity of (some of) their statements is fairly certain. In our experiments we replicated the methods used in previous studies but never before applied to high-stakes data, and tested new methods. We also considered the effect of a number of variables including in particular the homogeneity of the dataset. Our results suggest that accuracy at deception detection clearly above chance level can be obtained with real-life data as well. (shrink)