Like most Enlightenment philosophers, Priestley acknowledges his debt to Newton. However, despite his mentor’s prohibition against “making hypotheses”, in the 1770s, he embarked on a surprising metaphysical epic that led him, the theologian and scientist, to develop in his Disquisitions a bold system that articulated materialism, necessity and Socinianism. This synthesis constitutes the originality of a thinker who wanted to reapprehend science, metaphysics and theology together at the very moment when their dispersion seemed inevitable (and to give them an educational (...) and political extension). It is based on a monistic ontology to which Priestley did not hesitate to give the unexpected name of materialism, at the risk of a number of misunderstandings, while he claims, much to the dismay of Reid, to closely follow the method of Newton. This paper will focus on the relation between Priestley and Newton’s ambiguous inheritance. What is Priestley’s “science” made of? What is its relationship to Newton and his “rules”, to mathematics, to the theory of language, to the so-called “analysis and synthesis method”, to Boscovich? How important is his claim for hypotheses and metaphysics? If Priestley indeed was a Newtonian, he surely was an unorthodox one. (shrink)

A acusação de entusiasmo é um dos temas mais paradoxais da polêmica entabulada por Berkeley no Alciphron contra o livre-pensamento. Com efeito, o entusiasmo designa tradicionalmente uma forma de iluminação religiosa aparentemente incompatível com as pretensões do livre-pensamento à racionalidade crítica. Ora, essa acusação não se dirige aos principais deistas como Toland e Collins (antes qualificados como racionalistas obstinados) mas principalmente a Shaftesbury, cuja análise inovadora do entusiasmo como paixão universal, criativa ou destrutiva segundo o temperamento do indivíduo, é recusada (...) por Berkeley. Este artigo quer mostrar que a recusa de Berkeley traz subentendida uma concepção da razão como disciplina educativa heterônoma e que ela reenvia a uma imagem tradicional do homem, cuja natureza só é bestial antes ou sem a educação religiosa, contra a reavaliação do papel epistemológico e moral conferido pela análise shaftesburiana do entusiasmo ao desejo e ao sentimento individuais. Freethinking: an Enthusiasm of Reason?In the polemic raised by Berkeleys Alciphron against Freethinking, one of the most paradoxical topics is the accusation of enthusiasm. For enthusiasm traditionnally means a kind of religious illumination seemingly incompatible with the critical rationalism the freethinkers pretend to assume. Now this accusation is not raised against the foremost british deists like Toland and Collins (rather dismissed as rationalistic bigots), but against Shaftesbury, whose new analysis of enthusiasm as a universal passion, creative or destructive following only the temper of the individual, is strongly rejected by Berkeley. This papers aim is to show that Berkeleys rejection of this modern sense of enthusiasm involves a traditional and conservative conception of reason as an heteronomous, educational discipline of man, whose nature would only be bestial before -or withoutreligious education, against the new epistemological and moral role given to desire and sentiment by Shaftesburys analysis of enthusiasm. (shrink)

Despite the burgeoning literature on the governance and impact of cross-sector partnerships in the past two decades, the debate on how and when these collaborative arrangements address globally relevant problems and contribute to systemic change remains open. Building upon the notion of wicked problems and the literature on governing such wicked problems, this paper defines harnessing problems in multi-stakeholder partnerships as the approach of taking into account the nature of the problem and of organizing governance processes accordingly. The paper develops (...) an innovative analytical framework that conceptualizes MSPs in terms of three governance processes harnessing three key dimensions of wicked problems. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil provides an illustrative case study on how this analytical framework describes and explains organizational change in partnerships from a problem-based perspective. The framework can be used to better understand and predict the complex relationships between MSP governance processes, systemic change and societal problems, but also as a guiding tool in organizing governance processes to continuously re-assess the problems over time and address them accordingly. (shrink)

Une relecture de ce philosophe anglais (1676-1729), à la lumière de ce que disaient de et contre lui ses adversaires théologiens (Clarke, Berkeley), et surtout, de ce qu'il disait de lui-même. Pour ce libre-penseur, le concept de Dieu est vide de sens ou contradictoire, le dualisme créationniste une hypothèse intenable, et le christianisme un simple produit du besoin anthropologique de croire.

We characterize the collapse of Buss' bounded arithmetic in terms of the provable collapse of the polynomial time hierarchy. We include also some general model-theoretical investigations on fragments of bounded arithmetic.

This paper explores the relationship between business experience in cross-sector partnerships and the co-creation of what we refer to as ‘dynamic capabilities for stakeholder orientation,’ consisting of the four dimensions of sensing, interacting with, learning from and changing based on stakeholders. We argue that the co-creation of dynamic capabilities for stakeholder orientation is crucial for CSPs to create societal impact, as stakeholder-oriented organizations are more suited to deal with “wicked problems,” i.e., problems that are large, messy, and complex. By means (...) of a grounded theory approach of inductive research, we collected and interpreted data on four global agri-food companies which have heterogeneous experience in participating in CSPs. The results of this paper highlight that only companies’ capability of interacting with stakeholders continually increases, while their capabilities of sensing, learning from, and changing based on stakeholders first increase and then decrease as companies gain more experience in CSP participation. To a large extent, this can be attributed to the development of corporate strategies on sustainability after a few years of CSP participation, which entails a shift from a reactive to a proactive attitude towards sustainability issues and which may decrease the need or motivation for stakeholder orientation. These findings open up important issues for discussion and for future research on the impact of CSPs in a context of wicked problems. (shrink)

Mirror neurons may play a role in representing not only signs but also their meaning. Because actions are the only aspect of behavior that are inter-individually accessible, interpreting meanings in terms of actions might explain how meanings can be shared. Behavioral evidence and artificial life simulations suggest that seeing objects or processing words referring to objects automatically activates motor actions.

The essay focuses on the dispute over the Kantian legacy that took place in Davos, in 1929, between Cassirer and Heidegger. The relationship between imagination, freedom and politics is at its core. Two different readings of Kant stand in a discrepancy that generates dismay. An opposition, not a hermeneutical leveling, stands between the two. It is a philosophical opposition that is intimately linked to the positivity of what is posed - and not necessarily opposed — next to the opposite position; (...) philosophical opposition as a productive figure of the negative, because it incorporates the potential for movement and transformation that the negative has, avoiding the exclusion of one interpretation from the other. One must therefore read the confrontation or dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos as a real opposition between opposing forces, both positive, because neither philosophy derives its meaning from the negation of the other, as Kant would have said. The opposites do not contradict each other, but rather face each other according to an ontological and symbolic plan which on the one hand makes them both necessary but on the other hand opposes them in a single space of knowledge. In the background stand the black shadows that stretch over Germany and Europe. Darkness that will soon throw the opposition into the darkness, imposing a night of the world in which one philosophy will save the symbolic through the exile, while the other philosophy will abandon itself to its destructive repetition leading to the annihilation of the being. (shrink)

The present contribution develops some key issues of the work of Luigi Stefanini, starting from his work on cinema dating back to 1954. The relationships between philosophical esthetics and film criticism have not been particularly fruitful in Italy (or elsewhere). However it can be surmised, following Formaggio 1961, that “cinema is a testbed for contemporary esthetics, insofar as the latter tries to provide a universal theorization of art”.

The present essay seeks to analyze the reflections on cinematographic art proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy, referring in particular to his L’Évidence du film. Abbas Kiarostami (2001) as well as to other studies where the author reconsiders the concepts of image and gaze. The specifity of films lies in “evidence”, which is a way to affirm the finite character of existence-presence. Cinema addresses the world without any form of realism. It is reality itself to open out to the image. What results (...) is a possible gaze which is no longer on representation and nor can it be a representative gaze. This gaze does not look at any object; the very act of seeing can be seen through it. (shrink)

Perhaps no philosopher is more of a conundrum than Nietzsche, the solitary rebel, poet, wayfarer, anti-revolutionary Aufklärer and theorist of aristocratic radicalism. His accusers identify in his 'superman' the origins of Nazism, and thus issue an irrevocable condemnation; his defenders pursue a hermeneutics of innocence founded ultimately in allegory. In a work that constitutes the most important contribution to Nietzschean studies in recent decades, Domenico Losurdo instead pursues a less reductive strategy. Taking literally the ruthless implications of Nietzsche's anti-democratic (...) thinking - his celebration of slavery, of war and colonial expansion, and eugenics - he nevertheless refuses to treat these from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, he restores Nietzsche's works to their complex nineteenth-century context, and presents a more compelling account of the importance of Nietzsche as philosopher than can be expected from his many contemporary apologists. (shrink)

DIVTranslated into English for the first time, this work portrays a different side of Hegel -- not just as a philosopher preoccupied with abstract ideas but a man deeply enmeshed and active in the pressing, concrete political issues of his time./div.

In this paper we argue that data science is a coherent and novel approach to empirical problems that, in its most general form, does not build understanding about phenomena. Within the new type of mathematization at work in data science, mathematical methods are not selected because of any relevance for a problem at hand; mathematical methods are applied to a specific problem only by `forcing’, i.e. on the basis of their ability to reorganize the data for further analysis and the (...) intrinsic richness of their mathematical structure. In particular, we argue that deep learning neural networks are best understood within the context of forcing optimization methods. We finally explore the broader question of the appropriateness of data science methods in solving problems. We argue that this question should not be interpreted as a search for a correspondence between phenomena and specific solutions found by data science methods; rather, it is the internal structure of data science methods that is open to precise forms of understanding. (shrink)

Let be a saturated model of inaccessible cardinality, and let be arbitrary. Let denote the expansion of with a new predicate for. Write for the collection of subsets such that ≡. We prove that if the VC-dimension of is finite then is externally definable.

The war against Iraq unleashed in March 2003 spawned an attempt to silence the protest movement by accusing it of anti‐Americanism. This essay argues that the theory according to which right‐wing anti‐Americanism and left‐wing anti‐Americanism coincide is a myth. A new issue appears now, a paradox that characterizes the United States, where democracy developed within the white community concomitantly with the enslavement of blacks and the deportation of American Indians. In the American “Herrenvolk democracy,” a line of demarcation between whites (...) and people of color fosters the development of relations based on equality within the white community. Furthermore, U.S. history is marked by the fundamentalist tendency to transform the Judeo‐Christian tradition into a sort of national religion that consecrates the exceptionalism of the American people and the sacred mission with which they are entrusted (“Manifest Destiny”). Europe is unable thoroughly to comprehend the American mixture of religious and moral fervor, on the one hand, and overt pursuit of political, economic, and military world domination, on the other. But it is this mixture, or rather this explosive combination, this peculiar fundamentalism, that constitutes the greatest threat to world peace today. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é refletir sobre o mecanismo da negação como uma estratégia psicopolítica que articula o movimento bolsonarista. Como método de trabalho, realizamos uma discussão teórica sobre alguns aspectos do movimento bolsonarista que são estruturados pelo negacionismo. Empregamos os conceitos da psicologia política, da esquizoanálise e da psicanálise de grupo para analisar este fenômeno. Para discutir os mecanismos de negação, constatamos quatro características principais: (i) a negação como estratégia discursiva, (ii) a lógica cognitiva da negatividade, (iii) a produção (...) do antagonismo coletivo e (iv) a micropolítica do ódio, que é anterior à necessidade de um líder. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Psicologia Política. Extremismo político. Esquizoanálise. Grupo. (shrink)

On his way to General Relativity (GR) Einstein gave several arguments as to why a special relativistic theory of gravity based on a massless scalar field could be ruled out merely on grounds of theoretical considerations. We re-investigate his two main arguments, which relate to energy conservation and some form of the principle of the universality of free fall. We find that such a theory-based a priori abandonment not to be justified. Rather, the theory seems formally perfectly viable, though in (...) clear contradiction with (later) experiments. (shrink)

This paper discusses the merits and faults of a Note by Vittorino Grossi, published in this journal , concerning a new Italian translation of Augustine’s bestseller, City of God, with an introduction by Domenico Marafioti . The Author discusses the divergence of interpretations of Augustine’s works.