The duality between general frames and modal algebras allows to transfer a problem about the relational (Kripke) semantics into algebraic terms, and conversely. We here deal with the conjecture: the modal algebra A is subdirectly irreducible (s.i.) if and only if the dual frame A* is generated. We show that it is false in general, and that it becomes true under some mild assumptions, which include the finite case and the case of K4. We also prove that a Kripke frame (...) F is generated if and only if the dual algebra F* is s.i. The technical result is that A is s.i. when the set of points which generate the dual frame A* is not of zero measure. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of attention in the phenomenological analysis of intentional experience in light of the problem of the relation between consciousness, intentionality, and transcendental subjectivity. Are these concepts equivalent? Or should we rather say that there is more to intentionality (and subjectivity) than consciousness? Does subjectivity embrace an unconscious domain? And, if so, how does this unconscious, yet intentional, life of subjectivity operate and how is it related to consciousness? In order to answer these questions, the paper (...) tracks the development of Husserl’s conception of attention from the Logical Investigations to genetic phenomenology, by focusing on his analyses of temporality in the Bernau Manuscripts, on the relation between activity and passivity in the Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis, and on the issue of the self-constitution of subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper investigates the little-known reception of Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke in the Scottish universities in the period 1660–1700. The fortune of the English philosophers in the Scottish universities rested on whether their philosophies were consonant with the Scots’ own philosophical agenda. Within the established Cartesian curriculum, the Scottish regents eagerly taught what they thought best in English philosophy and criticised what they thought wrong. The paper also suggests new sources and (...) perspectives for the broader discussion of the ‘origins’ of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

Ethical concerns in e-social science are often raised with respect to privacy, confidentiality, anonymity and the ethical and legal requirements that govern research. In this article, the authors focus on ethical aspects of e-research that are not directly related to ethical regulatory framework or requirements. These frameworks are often couched in terms of benefits or harms that can be incurred by participants in the research. The authors shift the focus to the sources of value in terms of which benefits or (...) harms are understood in real social situations. A central claim of this paper is that the technologies that are used for research are not value neutral, but serve to reinforce some values at the expense of others. The authors discuss databases, modelling and simulation, network analysis as examples of technologies which affect the articulation of values. A view of e-social science as a techno-scientific constellation of researchers, technologies and society, in which values are always already embedded, is put forward as a basis for a view of ethics as reflexive and active engagement, conducted with awareness. Methodological pluralism and proactive openness are also proposed as responses to this view of the ethical dimensions of e-social science. (shrink)

Based on Pritchard’s distinction (2012, 2016) between favoring and discriminating epistemic grounds, and on how those grounds bear on the elimination of skeptical possibilities, I present the dream argument as a moderate skeptical possibility that can be reasonably motivated. In order to block the dream argument skeptical conclusion, I present a version of phenomenological disjunctivism based on Noë’s actionist account of perceptual consciousness (2012). This suggests that perceptual knowledge is rationally grounded because it is a form of embodied achievement – (...) what I call embodied rationality –, which offers a way of dissolving the pseudo-problem of epistemic immodesty, namely, the seemingly counterintuitive thesis that one can acquire rationally grounded knowledge that one is not in a radical skeptical scenario. (shrink)

L’étude des troubles de la voix et de la parole est sortie du cadre de la recherche clinique. Par l’observation des dysfonctionnements, les chercheurs non cliniciens confrontent les résultats de leur recherche établis sur des corpus de parole « normale » à des situations de dysfonctionnement. Le défi est immense car le cadre « pathologique » induit une variation considérable dans ses manifestations de surface. Toute généralisation à une population clinique particulière nécessite l’observation d’un grand nombre de patients du fait (...) de la très forte variation interindividuelle. Il est donc important de capitaliser et mutualiser les enregistrements existants. Or pour être utilisables, ces enregistrements doivent répondre à de fortes exigences. Le maillon faible reste la normalisation et la structuration des données sur les locuteurs et leurs productions langagières. Concrètement, si les données sonores sont souvent accessibles, elles ne présentent au final aucun intérêt si les liens entre les enregistrements et les caractéristiques cliniques du locuteur sont rompus ou erronés. L’objectif de ce travail est de présenter différentes actions de terrain et de proposer des recommandations pour la structuration des données sonores, physiologiques et cliniques dans le cas de corpus de parole issue de patients atteints de troubles de la voix et de la parole. (shrink)

It is a curious feature of Hegelian studies in English that its practitioners seem incapable of tackling their subject without first disclaiming any adherence to the more metaphysical side of Hegel's thought, be it called “speculative metaphysics,” “dialectical logic” or whatever. I say “curious” because I doubt that the same scholars would feel obliged to enter an equivalent disclaimer at the head of a study on, say, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza or even Newton—even though all of these classics have a metaphysical (...) side at least as abstruse as any of Hegel's worse romantic excesses. Hegel himself, if he could witness the practice, would be flattered by it. He would not see it as an indication that “the problems of [his] logic remain alien and artificial to us in ways that the problems of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy do not” but, on the contrary, as a hidden acknowledgement that, whether for good or bad, his philosophy is still alive, still so close to our culture that we instinctively feel the need of exorcizing it ritually, like a demon capable of frightening us. (shrink)

Against the background of Gestalt psychology, the author argues that the phenomenological method is not a generic plea for philosophical innocence or the appeal to a conscious dismantling of every kind of unconscious prejudices, but rather the uncovering of a set of well-determined opinions, with precise theoretical consequences, mostly inspired by psychological associationism. The theoretical core of phenomenology as a philosophical method and Husserl’s attempt to use it for responding to the appeals and tensions of his historical moment have therefore (...) to be sharply distinguished. For Husserl, the problem of method became entangled with ethical tasks, while phenomenology took more and more the shape of a philosophy of subjectivity, until the idea of phenomenology was presented as the only answer to the concept of crisis. While the rhetoric of the crisis gets poorer the more it is iterated outside of its historical horizon, the theoretical core of phenomenology as a method can be grasped in its validity only beyond it as the analytic task driven by a theory of the intentionality of conscious acts. In the line of this analytic interpretation of phenomenology, the first goal of philosophy is bringing order into thinking: phenomenology is a – rather complex and sophisticated – intuitionistic method. In this respect, intuition consists in a method to trace modes of being by describing structural modes of manifestation. The goal is not to describe phenomenological givens, but phenomenological rules or structures: it is to sketch a phenomenologically grounded ontology. Accordingly, philosophical analysis deals with the process of “concept formation” from the inner structures of experience up to more independent idealities, from general regularities that are directly graspable in the configuration of what is given to more abstract concepts. (shrink)

This article aims to compare the heuristic potentials of two different theories of desire, with reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The first theory is that of mimetic desire, proposed by René Girard; the second theory is the one elaborated by Freud and Lacan, a theory of which we emphasize the conception of identity in terms of identification and the distinction between the Imaginary and Symbolic registers. The crisis of the Degree together with the unleashing of rivalry represent a war between (...) “doubles”, whose only solution would be the killing of Caesar, accomplished with purity of hearts ; the failure of the sacrificial rite would be due to the prevalence of envious violence. In line with a Lacanian perspective, and by way of a less scholastic conception of the Symbolic – understood here in term of dimension of intellectual complexity, and therefore of political art – this article intends to suggest a different interpretation: the main nucleus of the work falls on the duel between Brutus and Anthony, where the triumph of Anthony expresses the primacy of intelligence. (shrink)