Reviving the somewhat forgotten notion of ‘secondary orality’, this paper conceptualizes online conspiracism as a creative, if monstrous, response to the attention economy of social media. Combining classic literature on oral cultures and current research on online subcultures, this paper takes conspiratorial folklore seriously and develops a program of research into its features and into its surprising adaptation to the attention regime of digital media.

It is increasingly common in natural and social sciences to rely on network visualizations to explore relational datasets and illustrate findings. Such practices have been around long enough to prove that scholars find it useful to project networks in a two-dimensional space and to use their visual qualities as proxies for their topological features. Yet these practices remain based on intuition, and the foundations and limits of this type of exploration are still implicit. To fill this lack of formalization, this (...) paper offers explicit documentation for the kind of visual network analysis encouraged by force-directed layouts. Using the example of a network of Jazz performers, band and record labels extracted from Wikipedia, the paper provides guidelines on how to make networks readable and how to interpret their visual features. It discusses how the inherent ambiguity of network visualizations can be exploited for exploratory data analysis. Acknowledging that vagueness is a feature of many relational datasets in the humanities and social sciences, the paper contends that visual ambiguity, if properly interpreted, can be an asset for the analysis. Finally, we propose two attempts to distinguish the ambiguity inherited from the represented phenomenon from the distortions coming from fitting a multidimensional object in a two-dimensional space. We discuss why these attempts are only partially successful, and we propose further steps towards a metric of spatialization quality. (shrink)

Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differs from mitigation and adaptation, and that includes diverse individual technologies, which can be classified as either solar radiation management or carbon dioxide removal. We analyse the representation of geoengineering on Wikipedia as a way of opening up this dominating, if contested, model for further debate. We achieve this by contrasting the dominating model as presented in the encyclopaedic article texts with the patterns of hyper-link associations between the (...) articles. Two datasets were created tracing the geoengineering construct on Wikipedia, shedding light on its boundary with its context, as well as on its internal structure. The analysis shows that the geoengineering category tends to be associated on Wikipedia primarily with atmospheric solar radiation management rather than land-based carbon dioxide removal type technologies. The results support the notion that the dominant model of defining and classifying geoengineering technology has been beneficial for solar radiation management type technologies more than for land-based carbon dioxide removal ones. The article also demonstrates that controversy mapping with Wikipedia data affords analysis that can open up dominating definitions and classifications of technologies, and offer resistance to their frequent naturalising and decontextualising tendencies. This work is in line with recent work on digital sociology, but the article contributes a new methodology and reports on the first empirical application of controversy mapping using Wikipedia data to a technology. (shrink)

In this article, we present a few lessons we learnt in the establishment of the Sciences Po médialab. As an interdisciplinary laboratory associating social scientists, code developers and information designers, the médialab is not one of a kind. In the last years, several of such initiatives have been established around the world to harness the potential of digital technologies for the study of collective life. If we narrate this particular story, it is because, having lived it from the inside, we (...) can provide an intimate account of the surprises and displacements of digital research. Founding the médialab in 2009, we knew that we were leaving the reassuring traditions of social sciences to venture in the unexplored territory of digital inscriptions. What we couldn't foresee was how much such encounter would change our research. Buying into gospel of Big Data, we imagined that the main novelty of digital research came from handling larger amounts of data. We soon realized that the interest of digital inscriptions comes instead from their proliferating diversity. Such diversity encouraged us to reshape our professional alliances, research practices and theoretical perspectives. It also led us to overcome several of the oppositions that used to characterize social sciences and to move in the direction of a more continuous sociology. (shrink)

This article proposes an original analysis of the international debate on climate change through the use of digital methods. Its originality is twofold. First, it examines a corpus of reports covering 18 years of international climate negotiations, a dataset never explored before through digital techniques. This corpus is particularly interesting because it provides the most consistent and detailed reporting of the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Second, in this paper we test an original approach to (...) text analysis that combines automatic extractions and manual selection of the key issue-terms. Through this mixed approach, we tried to obtain relevant findings without imposing them on our corpus. The originality of our corpus and of our approach encouraged us to question some of the habits of digital research and confront three common misunderstandings about digital methods that we discuss in the first part of the article. In addition to reflecting on methodology, however, we also wanted to offer some substantial contribution to the understanding of UN-framed climate diplomacy. In the second part of the article we will therefore introduce some of the preliminary results of our analysis. By discussing three visualizations, we will analyze the thematic articulation of the climatic negotiations, the rise and fall of these themes over time and the visibility of different countries in the debate. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe financial crisis of 2008 was unforeseen partly because the academic theories that underpin policy making do not sufficiently account for uncertainty and complexity or learned and evolved human capabilities for managing them. Mainstream theories of decision making tend to be strongly normative and based on wishfully unrealistic “idealized” modeling. In order to develop theories of actual decision making under uncertainty, we need new methodologies that account for how human actors often manage uncertain situations “well enough.” Some possibly helpful methodologies, (...) drawing on digital science, focus on the role of emotions in determining people's choices; others examine how people construct narratives that enable them to act; still others combine qualitative with quantitative data. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a Kierkegaardian critique of Roy A. Rappaport’s classic treatment of religious rituals. It discusses Rappaport’s claim that public and outward acceptance of a religious ritual is sufficient for successfully enacting it – even where such acceptance is devoid of any personal commitment on the participants’ part. To interrogate Rappaport, the paper develops Jonathan Lear’s reading of Kierkegaard and builds on the Danish theologian’s remarks on the Christian sacraments to argue that, pace Rappaport, personal engagement is necessary to (...) the successful enactment of religious rituals. In this sense, I will show with Kierkegaard how inner belief is a necessary pre-requisite for the performance of any religious ritual whereas in Rappaport’s view it is ritual action itself which creates a posteriori the possibility for personal religious faith. (shrink)

Modern knowledge of the grammarian Consentius’ De barbarismis et metaplasmis, a work valuable for the study of the Latin language, dates back to a relatively recent past: it was only in 1817 that its editio princeps was published by Ph.C. Buttmann, just a few years after the legal scholar A.W. Cramer came across a mention of the then unknown treatise in a ninth-century MS in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich, numbered Clm 14666. Based on this solitary manuscript, H. Keil published (...) the short treatise in the fifth volume of his Grammatici Latini. With no little enthusiasm did W.M. Lindsay announce his unearthing of what, in his own words, had ‘long been a “desideratum”, a second authority’ for this text, in the MS F 15 III d at the Universitätsbibliothek Basel; this was followed by E.O. Winstedt's complete collation and M. Niedermann's critical edition. After about a century now there comes to light a third authority, surprisingly enough in a codex which has enjoyed such fame in the past decades that one might wonder how Consentius could have gone unnoticed in it for so long: this is the eleventh-century MS of Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Lat. Z. 497, in which the De barbarismis et metaplasmis is contained on fols. 84vb 39 - 90va 39; moreover, a so-far-unnoticed quotation from it, together with one from Consentius’ De nomine et uerbo, is found on fol. 41vb 16–21 of the same manuscript in a famous grammatical florilegium. The codex, written in Romanesque minuscule and probably originating in Rome, is regarded as a handbook of liberal arts designed by Lawrence Archbishop of Amalfi, formerly a monk at Montecassino, thereafter a teacher in Florence and Rome, where he died in about 1049. Based on palaeographical evidence, F.L. Newton rightfully assumed as an exemplar for this codex a MS in Beneventan script, as some features can be detected that betray the scribal imitation of that typical South Italian script, namely the use of the distinctive abbreviation for eius as ‘ei in ligature with stroke through the descender of the i’, the Beneventan ti ligature for the assibilated sound, and the 2-shaped Beneventan interrogation sign, to which I would add the typical abbreviation for in as a long i cut by a horizontal stroke and the confusion of a and t. Interestingly enough, none of these features is found on fols. 66–95, those containing the new Consentius: from a codicological point of view, this is an autonomous section, written by a different scribe from the rest of the MS and preserving some grammatical texts generally attributed to insular authors, such as Smaragdus’ Liber in partibus Donati and part of the compilation entitled Pauca de barbarismo, which precedes the De barbarismis et metaplasmis; not surprisingly, the new text of Consentius displays numerous features of the Insular script, such as the symbols for enim, autem, eius, est, nihil and et. On this basis it is most likely that this whole section was never included in the Beneventan exemplar, but was added at the time and place of copying of our MS in order to enrich the grammatical content. (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...

A contemporary of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Tommaso Campanella was a controversial philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet who was persecuted during the Inquisition and spent much of his adult life imprisoned because of his heterodox views. He is best known today for two works: _The City of the Sun_, a dialogue inspired by Plato’s _Republic_, in which he prophesies a vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy; and his well-meaning _Defense of Galileo_, which may have (...) done Galileo more harm than good because of Campanella’s previous conviction for heresy. But Campanella’s philosophical poems are where his most forceful and undiluted ideas reside. His poetry is where his faith in observable and experimental sciences, his astrological and occult wisdom, his ideas about deism, his anti-Aristotelianism, and his calls for religious and secular reform most put him at odds with both civil and church authorities. For this volume, Sherry Roush has selected Campanella’s best and most idiosyncratic poems, which are masterpieces of sixteenth-century Italian lyrics, displaying a questing mind of great, if unorthodox, brilliance, and showing Campanella’s passionate belief in the intrinsic harmony between the sacred and secular. (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)

Questo articolo prende in esame il fenomeno della proliferazione di fake news da un punto di vista filosofico—anzi, per meglio dire, prettamente epistemologico—con particolare attenzione a tre questioni fondamentali: cosa sono le fake news e come debbano essere definite; quali meccanismi ne favoriscono la proliferazione sui social media; chi debba essere ritenuto responsabile e degno di biasimo nel processo sotteso alla generazione, pubblicazione e diffusione di fake news. A partire dall'analisi dei principali lavori nella letteratura filosofica sul tema, ci proponiamo (...) di: offrire una definizione di fake news che eviti le obiezioni sollevate contro altre definizioni discusse dalla letteratura (§1); mettere in luce le principali cause della propagazione di fake news, con particolare riferimento ai bias cognitivi e alle strutture comunitarie in cui si organizzano gli utenti dei social media (§2); infine, presentare una analisi originale della responsabilità epistemica dei consumatori di fake news (§3). (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)

You reach for the bowl with ‘sugar’ written on it only to discover, from the bad taste of your coffee, that it contained salt. Mundane experiences like these show that epistemic justification does not necessarily hold stable across possible changes of information. One can be justified in believing a proposition at a certain time (that the bowl contains sugar) and cease to be justified at a later time, as one enlarges one’s epistemic perspective (as one drinks a salty coffee). When (...) this happens, one’s justification has been defeated. An epistemic defeater, broadly speaking, is that in terms of which the defeat of justification proceeds. The notion of an epistemic defeater is mostly associated with J. Pollock’s work on reasoning and inference. Pollock has provided the canonical definition of an epistemic defeater and proposed an influential taxonomy in terms of the way different types of defeaters induce their characteristic effects. The notion of an epistemic defeater has acquired a broader meaning in current epistemology, and several distinctions have been introduced that have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of defeat as well as to complement Pollock’s original taxonomy. The correlated notion of a propositional defeater, defined in terms of would-be defeat of justification, is appealed to by the proponents of the defeasibility theory in the parallel debate about knowledge to explain what prevents a justified true belief from constituting knowledge in Gettier cases. (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)

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.

First aim of this paper is to show that Evidentialism, when paired with a Psychologistic ontology of evidence, is unable to account for ordinary cases of inferential justification. As many epistemologists have maintained, however, when it is paired with a Propositionalist ontology of evidence, Evidentialism is unable to explain in a satisfactory way ordinary cases of perceptual justification. So, the Evidentialist is faced with a dilemma. Second aim of this paper is to give an argument in favour of Propositionalism about (...) evidence, and so to motivate the conclusion that perceptual justification must be accounted for in non-evidentialist terms. By this I do not mean to defend a strongly Non-Evidentialist epistemology, according to which there are doxastic attitudes which are unsupported by any justifier. More modestly, I aim to motivate the weakly Non-Evidentialist epistemology according to which a subject’s perceptual beliefs may be justified by non-evidential justifiers. I conclude the paper by explaining why I believe that Pryor's dogmatism supplies a model for the way in which an internalist who is persuaded by my argument might want to detail her weakly Non-Evidentialist account of perceptual justification. (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)

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)

Après avoir passé en revue la diversité des politiques nationales en matière de transition énergétique, cet entretien fait le point sur ce que l’Union européenne a déjà pu et pourra apporter aux multiples redimensionnements en cours. Alors que les politiques nationales restent obnubilées par une conception centralisatrice de la production énergétique, le nouveau monde de la parité-réseau et des consommateurs-producteurs redistribue les cartes selon des échelles sensiblement différentes. Une coordination européenne entre initiatives locales peut devenir un atout, pour autant que (...) des mesures de redistribution sachent prévenir une nouvelle « lutte des classes énergétiques » qu’exaspèrent nos inégalités actuelles. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to deal with the links between Schutz and Wittgenstein on the centrality of language and intersubjectivity in the structure of meanings. I believe there are similarities between Schutz’s proto-trust in the natural attitude and Wittgenstein’s animal faith in the basic life form of language games. To this end, Cicourel’s analysis of the relationship between language, Verstehen and empirical research methods will be used. Cicourel renders Schutz and Wittgenstein contiguous, by interpreting the different techniques of (...) empirical research as languages that structure the understanding of meanings on the basis of the order of different realities and different language games. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the way that the concepts of thought and interest have been described in the three main documents that currently guide Brazilian Child Education – National Education Guidelines and Bases/1996, National Curriculum Guidelines for Child Education/2010, and National Curriculum Basis/2018 for Child Education – and their implications for relations between childhood and thinking. In order to do that, we have relied on studies in the philosophy of difference, considering authors such as Kohan, Larrosa, López and Ribeiro, (...) among others, to problematize thought as linked to individual interest. We notice how much thought has been regarded as a problem-resolution tool in these documents, following a neoliberal logic that has been increasingly displaced from collective to individualized interest. Furthermore, the whole functioning of a disciplinary society is evident in the documents, as the latter moves towards a performance society, with greater emphasis on assessment practices and records of children’s “production.” We consider, both in the concept of childhood and the concept of experience, the possibility of experiencing other relationships with childhoods and temporalities in schools, and the power of both free time and play as open breathing spaces among routines that are both full of compulsory activities and empty of meaning. (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.

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)

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)

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)

Two conjectures are proposed on Sophocles’ Thyestes (fr. 260a Radt) which restore Sophoclean language and metre.

In this work, I investigate the implications of reversing the common assumption of rationality on behalf of human agents typically underlying philosophical research. Instead, I assume that human agents can become rational only if they learn to edge against their dumbness. Specifically, I show that intelligence cannot be considered the opposite of dumbness. To this end, I embrace the difference among System 1, System 2, and System 1.5. On these grounds, I argue that System 2 can be considered the system (...) of intelligence, whereas Systems 1 and 1.5 can be viewed as the systems of rationality. More precisely, I argue that System 2 concerns theoretical reasoning, whereas System 1 and 1.5 concern practical reasoning. Accordingly, I show that people are dumber whenever they fail to have rational control over System 1 via System 1.5, whereas people become more rational whenever they manage to have rational control over System 1 via System 1.5. Interestingly, both cases can be considered the causes of two distinct social processes. On one side, when dumbness increases among individuals, social groups achieve coordination that detriments general welfare. On the other, when dumbness decreases among individuals, social groups achieve coordination that maximizes general welfare. (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)

Although excluded from the standard account of the history of philosophy, Catharine Trotter Cockburn avoided the 17th-century bias against female intellectual skills and was an active contributor to the early modern philosophical discourse. In her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay, she defended Locke from several criticisms by Thomas Burnet. By analysing three of Burnet’s main arguments, such as the theory of natural conscience, his anti-voluntarism, and his belief in the immateriality of the soul, Trotter showed that he often misinterpreted John (...) Locke’s principles, especially those concerning his moral epistemology. Moreover, beyond her apologetic aim, she also presented her own moral philosophy, arguing that the true ground of morality is the rational and social nature of human beings. Although Trotter was clearly inspired by John Locke, her Defence was not simply a vindication, and she was not his mere handmaiden, for her thought was original and independent in many respects. (shrink)