In this article, I place management theory in conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s political theology with the dual scope of offering (a) a critical examination of the Agambenian interpretation of management, and (b) an application of such interpretation to illuminate and eventually explain the nature of some decisive and persistent limitations of the discipline. The main argument is that Agamben’s theological genealogy of economy transforms the discourse on management from a matter of value to one of control. In the first (...) section, I introduce Agamben’s political theological project and a couple of fundamental elements of Agamben’s interpretation of management. In the second, I discuss three fundamental shortcomings of management as a discipline that an Agambenian interpretation of management can make intelligible. (shrink)

Lo studio, la cui seconda parte sarà pubblicata nel secondo fascicolo di DSTradF 3, si può dividere in tre sezioni principali. Nella prima, dopo aver accennato alla questione storiografica sulla paternità tommasiana o egidiana della dottrina della differenza reale fra essere ed essenza, l'A. esamina datazione e struttura delle Quaestiones de esse et essentia egidiane, ed in particolare delle prime sette questioni di quest'opera, le Questiones de primo principio, sul tema della creazione, confrontandole poi con i Theoremata de esse et (...) essentia e con il commento di Egidio al II libro delle Sententiae. L'esame della dottrina egidiana della creazione è condotto sia per chiarire come Egidio abbia recepito il corpus degli scritti di Tommaso, sia per trarre nuova luce a proposito della dottrina della distinzione reale di essere ed essenza, la cui trattazione era intesa dal maestro agostiniano come continuazione di quella della creazione. Nella seconda parte l'A. esamina l'impiego egidiano degli scritti dell'Aquinate sulla creazione, mentre la parte finale del saggio verte sulle critiche mosse da Enrico di Gand alla dottrina della creazione elaborata da Egidio. (shrink)

The enormous increasing of connections between people and the noteworthy enlargement of domains and methods in sciences have augmented extraordinarily the cardinality of the set of meaningful human symbols. We know that complexity is always on the way to become complication, i.e. a non-tractable topic. For this reason scholars engage themselves more and more in attempting to tame plurality and chaos. In this book distinguished scientists, philosophers and historians of science reflect on the topic from a multidisciplinary point of view. (...) Is it possible to dominate complexity through reductionism? Are there other conceptual instruments useful to take account of complexity? What is complexity in biology, mathematics, physics and philosophy of mind? These are some of the questions which are faced in this volume. (shrink)

What is at stake in literature? Can we identify the fire that our stories have lost, but that they strive, at all costs, to rediscover? And what is the philosopher's stone that writers, with the passion of alchemists, struggle to forge in their word furnaces? For Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that the parable is the secret model of all narrative, every act of creation tenaciously resists creation, thereby giving each work its strength and grace. The ten essays brought together (...) here cover works by figures ranging from Aristotle to Paul Klee and illustrate what urgently drives Agamben's current research. As is often the case with his writings, their especial focus is the mystery of literature, of reading and writing, and of language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethico-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power. (shrink)

Homo sacer : sovereign power and bare life -- State of exception -- Stasis : civil war as a political paradigm -- The sacrament of language : an archaeology of the oath -- The kingdom and the glory : for a theological genealogy of economy and government -- Opus Dei : an archaeology of duty -- Remnants of Auschwitz : the witness and the archive -- The highest poverty : monastic rules and form-of-life -- The use of bodies.

The paper is devoted to an examination of the epistemic account of the notion of deductive inference recently provided by D. Prawitz, and based on the notion of ground. This is part of the general scenario constituted by the “Proof-theoretic semantics”, presented since the ’70s of the last century as an alternative to the standard model-theoretic explication of the notion of logical consequence.Our argument pivots on the so-called “Curry–Howard Correspondence”, which exploited the idea of considering proofs as proper mathematical objects (...) in a remarkable way. A sort of rational reconstruction of this idea is outlined, tracing it back to Hilbert and Husserl’s investigations. (shrink)

1. Epistemologia, logica e dialettica -- 2. Fisica, antropologia e metafisica -- 3. Filosofia pratica -- 4, pt. 1. L'influenza di Aristotele: antichità, Medioevo e Rinascimento -- v. 4, pt. 2. L'influenza di Aristotele: età moderna e contemporanea.

This is a book about food, philosophy, and intellectual property rights. Taken separately, these are three well-known subjects; but it is uncommon to consider them together. Delivering a rich field of disputes, the book is comprised of 50 case studies, organized around eight themes: images; genericity and descriptiveness; language traps; procedures; menus, recipes, and creativity; boundaries; biotech; and empowerment. The introductory chapter frames the selection of cases and encourages readers to look beyond them, envisaging new lenses to look at food (...) vis-à-vis intellectual property. The terrain encompassed is wide-ranging and reaches out to fine-grained aspects of food products, recipes, and cooking. Conceived for a wide scope of readers, the volume ultimately interrogates the links between food and cultural identity, bringing to the fore the ethical, political, aesthetic worth of culinary arts and gastronomic experiences. This accessible book will be of value to scholars, students, practitioners and others with interests in the areas of intellectual property, food law and food studies. (shrink)

Täglich verwenden wir Ausdrücke, mit denen wir etwas anderes meinen, als wir sagen. Wir ersetzen Unaussprechliches, wir bleiben höflich, und manche suchen unangenehme Wahrheiten oder ihre tatsächlichen Absichten zu verschleiern. Solche verhüllenden Ausdrücke wurden schon in der Antike als Euphemismen bezeichnet. Ihr Gegenteil, meist krasse Negativbezeichnungen, heißen Dysphemismen. Ob sie als Tabubruch, als Verstoß gegen Konventionen oder als unangemessenes Verhalten gelten, hängt von den Textsorten, den Situationen und Diskursen ab, in denen sie gebraucht werden. Oft geht es um Tod oder (...) Krankheiten, um den Mediendiskurs über Immigranten oder Minderheiten, aber auch um Arbeitszeugnisse oder die Werbung für Produkte und Dienstleistungen. Das alles sind Themen der Beiträge in diesem Buch. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Rawlsians have largely misunderstood the idea of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, thereby failing to delineate in an appropriate way the place of comprehensive doctrines in political liberalism. My argument rests on two core claims. The first claim is that (i) political liberalism is committed to three theses about the overlapping consensus. The first thesis concerns the subject of the overlapping consensus; the second thesis concerns the function of the overlapping consensus; the (...) third thesis explains how the overlapping consensus can serve its function in accordance with political liberalism’s commitment to epistemic neutrality. The second claim on which my argument relies is empirical: (ii) Rawlsians typically deny at least one of the three theses to which political liberalism is committed. Based on (i) and (ii), I conclude that Rawlsians have hitherto provided unconvincing accounts of the place of comprehensive doctrines in political liberalism. (shrink)

Our usual method" is an expression that Aristotle uses in a passage of the Politics (I.1, 1252a17-20) to describe the technique of subdividing a composite object of study into the elements that make it up, in order to study the possible combinations. What theory is the basis for this method? Is it really a usual method for Aristotle? Enrico Rini responds to these questions, starting with the analysis of some passages of the Aristotelian corpus that refer to concepts of (...) the part and the whole. From these passages, Rini attempts to extrapolate a theory that Aristotle states explicitly only on occasion. The mereology that emerges from this study is not a formal theory, unlike the logical mereology present today, and therefore takes into account different types of the whole and the part, with a scope that has applications for the field of biology. (shrink)

The stated aim of cryptocurrencies is to free the monetary system from the need to trust financial intermediaries, by relying on incentive design and technology. Many descriptive studies, however, have questioned cryptocurrencies’ delivery on the promise of trustlessness. This paper promotes a normative analysis of trust in cryptocurrencies by discussing (i) whether trust is in principle eliminable, and (ii) whether trustlessness is in itself a desirable goal. These issues are closely related, we argue, to the further issue of what kind (...) of institutions cryptocurrencies represent. We discuss the cognitive functions played by cryptocurrencies through the lens of the “extended mind” hypothesis in the philosophy of mind and hence conceive of cryptocurrencies as mind-extending institutions. As the models of institutional mind extension differ in the fiduciary bond they assume exists between individuals and institutional resources, we compare the reliance-based model of “scaffolding institutions” with the trust-based model of “cognitive institutions,” showing that the ineliminability and desirability of trust lead to seeing cryptocurrencies as instances of the latter. In the end, our discussion suggests that trust is a necessary component of cryptocurrencies’ cognitive functions and its promotion helps to perform such cognitive functions more effectively and sustainably. (shrink)

Enrico Müller legt hier die erste philosophische Gesamtdarstellung zur Bedeutung der Griechen für Nietzsches Denken vor. Er zeigt, wie sich in Auseinandersetzung mit dem Griechentum Nietzsches eigene Philosophie entwickelte, und problematisiert deren Abgrenzungen von der Logosphilosophie der griechischen Klassik. Müller kommt dabei zu dem Schluss, dass auch Nietzsches Philosophie letztlich auf die Vorgaben der sokratisch-platonischen Dialektik angewiesen bleibt.

Some arguments against the assumption that ordinary people may share common knowledge are sound. The apparent cost of such arguments is the rejection of scientific theories that appeal to common knowledge. My proposal is to accept the arguments without rejecting the theories. On my proposal, common knowledge is shared by ideally rational people, who are not just mathematically simple versions of ordinary people. They are qualitatively different from us, and theorizing about them does not lead to predictions about our behavior. (...) Nevertheless, models of action that assume common knowledge have a role to play in our understanding of collective rationality. (shrink)

The idea of an ?inversion principle?, and the name itself, originated in the work of Paul Lorenzen in the 1950s, as a method to generate new admissible rules within a certain syntactic context. Some fifteen years later, the idea was taken up by Dag Prawitz to devise a strategy of normalization for natural deduction calculi (this being an analogue of Gentzen's cut-elimination theorem for sequent calculi). Later, Prawitz used the inversion principle again, attributing it with a semantic role. Still working (...) in natural deduction calculi, he formulated a general type of schematic introduction rules to be matched ? thanks to the idea supporting the inversion principle ? by a corresponding general schematic Elimination rule. This was an attempt to provide a solution to the problem suggested by the often quoted note of Gentzen. According to Gentzen ?it should be possible to display the elimination rules as unique functions of the corresponding introduction rules on the basis of certain requirements?. Many people have since worked on this topic, which can be appropriately seen as the birthplace of what are now referred to as ?general elimination rules?, recently studied thoroughly by Sara Negri and Jan von Plato. In this study, we retrace the main threads of this chapter of proof-theoretical investigation, using Lorenzen's original framework as a general guide. (shrink)

La causa e la colpa -- Crimen e karman -- Le aporie della volontà -- Al di là dell'azione.