Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as (...) a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language. (shrink)

Clarifying the nature of possibility is crucial for an evaluation of the phenomenological approach to ontology. From a phenomenological perspective, it is ontological possibility, and not spatiotemporal existence, that has pre-eminent ontological status. Since the sphere of phenomenological being and the sphere of experienceability turn out to be overlapping, this makes room for two perspectives. We can confer foundational priority to the acts of consciousness over possibilities, or to pre-set possibilities over the activity of consciousness. Husserl’s position on this issue (...) seems to change over time. Ultimately, the establishment of a phenomenological perspective must involve a rejection of any hypostatization of pre-set possibilities, but not all implications of this theoretical step seem to be drawn in Husserl’s texts. This paper is devoted to an illustration of how the phenomenological notion of possibility should change when we reject the hypostatization of possibility, that is, when we reject the idea that all acts of consciousness are to be conceived as realizations of pre-set “ideal forms”. We examine this question, first, by trying to clarify the conceptual constellation of “possibility” in Husserl’s texts. This leads to an overall classification of the features of constituted possibilities. Then we distinguish such constituted possibilities from their constituting conditions, which outlines a different sense of “possibility”. In the last instance two “possibilizing” dimensions are shown to lie at the root of all ontic possibilities. This leads to a final suggestion on the nature of the relation between experience and possibility. Actual experiences create the room for possibility: they are possibilizations. In this sense, experience is to be taken as a generative sphere which goes beyond the customary boundary between epistemic and ontological. From this point of view all experience is to be conceived as emergence. (shrink)

Human extinction is something generally deemed as undesirable, although some scholars view it as a potential solution to the problems of the Earth since it would reduce the moral evil and the suffering that are brought about by humans. We contend that humans collectively have absolute intrinsic value as sentient, conscious and rational entities, and we should preserve them from extinction. However, severe threats, such as climate change and incurable viruses, might push humanity to the brink of extinction. Should that (...) occur, it might be useful to envision a successor to humans able to preserve and hand down its value. One option would be to resort to humanoid robots that reproduce our salient characteristics by imitation, thanks to AI powered by machine learning. However, the question would arise of how to select the characteristics needed for our successors to thrive. This could prove to be particularly challenging. A way out might come from an algorithm entrusted with this choice. In fact, an algorithmic selection both at the social and at the individual level could be a preferred choice than other traditional ways of making decisions. In this sense, reflecting on human extinction helps us to identify solutions that are also suitable for the problems we face today. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that subliminally presented stimuli accelerate or delay responses afforded by supraliminally presented stimuli. Our experiments extend these findings by showing that unconscious stimuli even affect free choices between responses. Thus, actions that are phenomenally experienced as freely chosen are influenced without the actor becoming aware of the manipulation. However, the unconscious influence is limited to a response bias, as participants chose the primed response only in up to 60% of the trials. LRP data in free choice (...) trials indicate that the prime was not ineffective in trials in which participants chose the non-primed response as then it delayed performance of the incongruently primed response. (shrink)

By virtue of what do alarm calls and facial expressions carry natural information? The answer I defend in this paper is that they carry natural information by virtue of changing the probabilities of various states of affairs, relative to background data. The Probabilistic Difference Maker Theory of natural information that I introduce here is inspired by Dretske's [1981] seminal analysis of natural information, but parts ways with it by eschewing the requirements that information transmission must be nomically underwritten, mind-independent, and (...) knowledge-yielding. PDMT includes both a qualitative account of information transmission and a measure of natural information in keeping with the basic principles of Shannon's communication theory and Bayesian confirmation theory. It also includes a new account of the informational content of a signal, understood as the combination of the incremental and overall support that the signal provides for all states of affairs at the source. Finally, I compare and.. (shrink)

We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for them is evaluated. The framework we offer acknowledges the force of some (...) of the objections to basic emotion theory whilst demonstrating that the notion of a basic emotion, once properly reformulated, is still of scientific value. (shrink)

The demand for social justice, especially in the context of the welfare state, is often framed as a demand of solidarity. But it is not clear why: in what sense, if any, is social justice best understood as a demand of solidarity? This article explores that question. There are two reasons to do so. First, very little has been written on the concept of solidarity, and almost nothing on why and how solidarity can both give rise to and be the (...) target of a moral obligation. The first aim of the article is to fill this gap. The second aim of the article is to explore the normative implications of this account of solidarity for the commitment to social justice at the heart of the welfare state, and in so doing, to put into question the idea that shared experience or shared identity are either necessary or sufficient bases for social justice qua solidarity. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the prospects of a Neo-Aristotelian position—according to which the difference between the human species and non-human animals is a difference in ‘form’—in the context of the question of how the human form of life is related to the idea of education. Two interpretations of this idea have been suggested by contemporary Neo-Aristotelian philosophy that offer contrasting accounts of the role played by education. According to the first, the idea of a formal difference goes with a (...) notion of potentiality, according to which the distinctiveness of the human is mainly a product of education, and hence a matter of second nature. According to the second, the idea of the human is the idea of a formally distinctive kind of first nature that explains the very possibility of education. I maintain that both interpretations do justice to an important aspect of human life yet fail fully to grasp the significance of the notion of ‘form’ that they employ. I argue that to embrace the insight that the difference of the human is a difference in ‘form’, we must think of the human as a form of life whose very concept contains the concept of education. The concept of education, I argue, is a logical concept, contained in the concept of life that it describes. (shrink)

This book addresses two related questions that have first arisen in Toulmin’s seminal book on the uses of argument. The first question is the one of the relationship between the semantic analysis of modality and the structure of arguments. The second question is the one of the distinctive place, or role, of modality in the fundamental structure of arguments. These two questions concern how modality, as a semantic category, relates to the fundamental structure of arguments. The book addresses modality and (...) argumentation also according to another perspective by looking at how different linguistic modal expressions may be taken as argumentative indicators. It explores the role of modal expressions as argumentative indicators by using the Italian modal system as a case study. At the same time, it uses predictions/forecasts in the business-financial daily press to investigate the relation between modality and the context of argumentation. (shrink)

Several experimental studies have reported that an otherwise robust regularity—the disparity between Willingness-To-Accept and Willingness-To-Pay—tends to be greatly reduced in repeated markets, posing a serious challenge to existing reference-dependent and reference-independent models alike. This article offers a new account of the evidence, based on the assumptions that individuals are affected by good and bad deals relative to the expected transaction price (price sensitivity), with bad deals having a larger impact on their utility (`bad-deal’ aversion). These features of preferences explain the (...) existing evidence better than alternative approaches, including the most recent developments of loss aversion models. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been defined by Husserl as “theory of the essences of pure phenomena,” yet the ontological status of essences in Husserlian phenomenology is far from a settled issue. The late Husserlian emphasis on genetic constitution and the historicity of the lifeworld is not immediately reconcilablewith the ‘unchangeable’ nature that is prima facie attributed to essences. However, the problem of the nature of ideality cannot be dropped from phenomenological accounts without jeopardizing the phenomenological enterprise as such. Through an immanent analysis (...) of Husserl’s meditation on essences a positive account of their ontological status is provided. Essences are interpreted as ontological thresholds, primordially rooted in our motivated confrontation with sensuous transcendence. Essences appear as emergent ontological features, which are not reducible to their particular realizations and which exhibit a fundamental continuity between consciousness and being. They manifest themselves as prospectively a priori (a precondition for further experiences), but retrospectively a posteriori (they are founded in experience). Finally, essences manifest the ‘co-essential’ nature of consciousness and sensuous transcendence: they are the way in which we are motivated and constitutively bound to articulate being, which in turn is apt to be thus articulated. (shrink)

This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate causation (of finite modes) do not always go together in Spinoza's thought. We show that there is good reason to doubt that this is the case in Spinoza's early Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well‐being. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza defends an account of God's immanent causation without fully endorsing the account of activity as adequate causation that he will later introduce in the Ethics (...) (E3def2). We turn to an examination of how God's immanent causation relates to the activity of finite things in the Ethics. We consider two ways to think about the link between God, seen as immanent cause, and the activity of finite things: namely, in terms of entailment and in terms of production. We argue that the productive model is most promising for understanding the way in which the activity of finite things and God's immanent causality are connected in Spinoza's (mature) philosophy. (shrink)

Reflecting on ‘human development’ theorists face conceptual confusion, borne out experientially by contemporary ecological, social, and economic crises. Since concepts create realities (i.e. justify and motivate practices), and philosophers create concepts, it is important to consider how philosophers might respond to conceptual difficulties caused by the modern era’s still influential ‘binary’ paradigm, exemplified by the law of the excluded middle, which entails a discursive split between modernism’s ultimately predictable cosmos and postmodernism’s insistence on fundamental chaos. Supposedly obliged to choose between (...) opposites, theorists are caught between the necessity and iniquity of both. This impasse sets up conditions for what Lyotard calls ‘differends,’ and constrains our power to create responsible concepts. To show that Morin’s ‘generalised complexity’ takes us beyond the modernist/postmodernist impasse, I take up his injunction to promote ‘an epistemological reversal,’ starting from the notion of ‘open system’ and moving through ‘emergence’ and ‘organization’ to ‘logical complexity.’ Our epistemological task accordingly is to establish strategies for interpreting multiple dimensions of phenomenal reality, given the irreducibly complex relation of co-implication between mutually negating opposites. I agree with Cilliers that deconstruction is exemplary in this respect, but aim to broaden the adventure by suggesting ideas for a ‘pragmatics of complexity’ involving vocabulary, concepts, strategies, metaphors, and heuristics derived also from other philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists. The difficulty of complex thought is that it must face messes ... interconnectedness among phenomena, fogginess, uncertainty, contradiction. However, we can elaborate some conceptual tools, some principles for this adventure, and we can begin to perceive the face of the new paradigm of complexity that should emerge. (Edgar Morin, On Complexity, 2008: 6). (shrink)

The interdisciplinary Hannover Qualification Programme on ethics consultation has trained hospital staff to operate clinical ethics services in their respective hospitals since 2003. To evaluate Hannover Qualification Programme, all former participants were contacted using an online questionnaire including four domains: status quo before attending Hannover Qualification Programme, present status, impact of Hannover Qualification Programme, future challenges. Research objectives were the long-term satisfaction with Hannover Qualification Programme and its impact on clinical ethics services. The response rate was 45%. Hannover Qualification Programme (...) was evaluated as helpful and the responders were capable of applying their acquired skills. Most participants could contribute to the implementation of clinical ethics services. They were satisfied with Hannover Qualification Programme and with the degree of changes in their hospitals. In conclusion, clinical ethics education had long-term effects on trainees and on their respective hospitals. Problems were mentioned rather in the field of utilisation than with implementation or quality of clinical ethics services. (shrink)

The way people make career choices is often influenced by their idea of work. Alongside this concept, there is the idea of decent work, which takes the form of the opportunity, for men and women, to have productive, equal, safe, and rights-based work. We have conducted a study on these two concepts with a group of Italian adolescents, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We found that most of the participants consider work as a means to obtain economic benefits and (...) satisfy certain values, and decent work as characterized by the respect for rights and duties and economic benefits; a part of the participants fails in giving a definition of decent work or gives a negative definition of it. We deepened the study through quantitative analyses that revealed that those who have a more complex view of work and decent work also have higher levels of self-efficacy and career adaptability. These findings are discussed in the light of previous research and from a perspective that intends to give a contribution to career counseling practices. (shrink)

This paper depicts a case study of an organizational strategy for the promotion of ethical practice when introducing a new, high-risk, ethically-charged medical practice like Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). We describe the development of an interprofessional program that enables the delivery of high-quality, whole-person MAiD care that is values-based and sustainable. A “care ecology” strategy recognizes the interconnected web of relationships and structures necessary to support a quality experience of MAiD for patients, families, and clinicians. This program exemplifies a (...) care ecology approach that addresses common barriers to entry to MAiD practice, and also meets the needs of a variety of stakeholders through the creation of patient and family resources, team supports, standards of practice, professional development opportunities, organizational infrastructure, and community partnerships. We also describe how a thriving care ecology evolves to remain resilient, and to enable integration as the needs of the organization, team and program change over time. The design and development of this program may be adapted to other jurisdictions and organizations where MAiD is introduced, or where new patient populations become eligible for MAiD. This care ecology model may also be applicable to the creation of sustainable programs that provide other morally controversial or novel clinical services. (shrink)

Abstract‘[T]he “mainstream” of global governance has changed course’ and in so doing, might well have ‘outrun the standard tools of critical, progressive, and reform-minded international lawyers’, Fleur Johns wrote in 2019. It is especially the critical tools of ‘appeals to history, context, language [and] the grassroots’ in response to universalist planning that Johns sees absorbed in the turn to prototyping as a new ‘style’ of governance. In this article, we take on this observation and explore how the ‘lean start-up mentality’ (...) that Johns described has taken hold of tech-based climate governance. We base our reflections on the ‘Tech for Our Planet’ challenge that took place over 2021 and was showcased at the UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow. While a turn ‘from planning to prototypes’ is observable, we question how exactly this ‘change of course’ affects the high modernist style of global governance and its critique by international lawyers. The ‘digital solutions for climate challenges’ that were showcased in Glasgow are indeed based on localized experiments with data science, thereby seemingly overcoming high modernist impulses towards universalist ideals. Yet, these experimental prototypes are developed with the ambition of being replicable and scaled up, to become a stack of tools deployable in any given scenario. This form of scaling up neither breaks with modernist aspirations based on technologically-mediated replicability—of moving the same logic inscribed in code to different sites and contexts—nor with a modernist understanding of knowledge as universal in its application. In our analysis, the determining feature is then not so much a matter of planning or prototyping in ideal type forms, but of replicability of knowledge production and scalability of technological know-how that underpin both planning and prototyping. Prototyping in the start-up space does not depart from, but rather reinscribes, a modernist representation of the human subject that forces its epistemological lens onto a world of nonhuman objects amenable to governance. Critical international lawyers’ toolkits must therefore be reconfigured with a focus on a governance style of disembodied knowledge production that runs through both planning and prototyping. (shrink)

German universities come under fire: in contemporary political discourse they are considered to be antiquated, inefficient and unfit for international competition. Accordingly, the German government implemented an extensive program of reforms. Following the so‐called ‘Sorbonne Declaration’, the universities shall become part of an European higher education system with comparable and compatible structures. With the focus on the field of academic teaching and learning, this essay discusses the way of defining these activities in a new, entrepreneurial way, and the implications of (...) this process within the university. The reflections lead to the thesis that the actual reforms ask for new forms of critique, because the neoliberal offer of marketable ways to teach and to learn makes the enduring asymmetry of power relations within the educational field invisible, endangers the democratic character of the university and trivializes education. (shrink)

Mangarevan traditionally contained two numeration systems: a general one, which was highly regular, decimal, and extraordinarily extensive; and a specific one, which was restricted to specific objects, based on diverging counting units, and interspersed with binary steps. While most of these characteristics are shared by numeration systems in related languages in Oceania, the binary steps are unique. To account for these characteristics, this article draws on—and tries to integrate—insights from anthropology, archeology, linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science more generally. The analysis (...) of mental arithmetic with these systems reveals that both types of systems entailed cognitive advantages and served important functions in the cultural context of their application. How these findings speak to more general questions revolving around the theoretical models and evolutionary trajectory of numerical cognition will be discussed in the. (shrink)

The domain of numbers provides a paradigmatic case for investigating interactions of culture, language, and cognition: Numerical competencies are considered a core domain of knowledge, and yet the development of specifically human abilities presupposes cultural and linguistic input by way of counting sequences. These sequences constitute systems with distinct structural properties, the cross-linguistic variability of which has implications for number representation and processing. Such representational effects are scrutinized for two types of verbal numeration systems—general and object-specific ones—that were in parallel (...) use in several Oceanic languages. The analysis indicates that the object-specific systems outperform the general systems with respect to counting and mental arithmetic, largely due to their regular and more compact representation. What these findings reveal on cognitive diversity, how the conjectures involved speak to more general issues in cognitive science, and how the approach taken here might help to bridge the gap between anthropology and other cognitive sciences is discussed in the conclusion. (shrink)

In their article ‘Who is afraid of black box algorithms? On the epistemological and ethical basis of trust in medical AI’, Durán and Jongsma discuss the epistemic and ethical challenges raised by black box algorithms in medical practice. The opacity of black box algorithms is an obstacle to the trustworthiness of their outcomes. Moreover, the use of opaque algorithms is not normatively justified in medical practice. The authors introduce a formalism, called computational reliabilism, which allows generating justified beliefs on the (...) algorithm reliability and trustworthy outcomes of artificial intelligence systems by means of epistemic warrants, called reliability indicators. However, they remark the need for reliability indicators specific to black box algorithms and that justified knowledge is not sufficient to justify normatively the actions of the physicians using medical AI systems. Therefore, Durán and Jongsma advocate for a more transparent design and implementation of black box algorithms, providing a series of recommendations to mitigate the epistemic and ethical challenges behind their use in medical practice. In this response, I argue that a peculiar form of black box algorithm transparency, called design publicity, may efficiently implement these recommendations. Design publicity encodes epistemic, that is, reliability indicators, and ethical recommendations for black box algorithms by means of four subtypes of transparency. These target the values and goals, their translation into design requirements, the performance and consistency of the algorithm altogether. I discuss design publicity applying it to a use case focused on the automated classification of skin lesions from medical images. (shrink)

The current Covid-19 pandemic is illustrative of both the need of more experts and of the difficulties that can arise in the face of their decisions. This happens, we argue, because experts usually interact with society through a strongly naturalistic framework, which often places experts’ epistemic authority (understood as neutrality and objectivity) at the centre, sometimes at the expenses of other pluralistic values (such as axiological ones) that people (often non-experts) cherish. In this paper, we argue that we need to (...) supplement such a strong naturalistic framework used to promote epistemic authority with a number of virtues -both intellectual and ethical- which include i. intellectual humility, ii. courage, iii. wisdom and cares, as well as iv. relational autonomy. To illustrate this claim, we discuss these ideas in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and analyse a set of real-life examples where important decisions have been delegated to experts merely based on their epistemic authority. We use the illustrative failures described in the case studies above-mentioned to call for a revision of current understandings of expertise (merely based on epistemic soundness). Specifically, we argue that in social contexts we increasingly need “experts in action”; that is, people with certified specialist knowledge, who can however translate it into practical suggestions, decisions, and/or public policies that are ethically more balanced and that ultimately lead to fairer, more inclusive, and more representative decisions. (shrink)

Free will is usually defined by three conditions: the ability to do otherwise; control of one’s own choices; responsiveness to reasons. The compatibility of free will with determinism lies at the heart of the philosophical debate at the metaphysical level. This debate, while being increasingly refined, has not yet reached a conclusion. Recently, neuroscience and empirical psychology have tried to settle the problem of free will with a series of experiments that go in the direction of so-called illusionism: free will (...) as the conscious control of our behavior cannot exist, being a mere illusion. But even in this case, the experimental results are challenged at various levels. Considering that in most moral and legal systems, the subject’s liability derives from their freedom, the usefulness of preserving the concept of freedom – which incidentally responds to a very strong commonsensical intuition – suggests the need for an operational solution. This could be done by resorting to the concepts of capacity and cognitive control, which are measured by a set of well-established neuropsychological tests. Our preliminary proposal is to create an index, the first step towards a specific quantification and measurement of free will, to be used especially in ethical and legal contexts. Theoretical premises, practical difficulties and objections to this approach are also discussed and addressed. (shrink)

Individuals with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulties in the recollection of past experiences (Episodic Memory). Accumulating evidence suggests that they might have also difficulties in the ability to imagine potential future scenarios (Episodic Future Thinking, EFT) and in narrative generation skills. This investigation aimed to determine 1) whether impairments of EFT can be identified in a large cohort of children with high functioning ASD using a task with minimal narrative demands; and 2) if such impairments are related to the (...) ability to generate a narrative's scenario. 77 children with high-functioning ASD and 77 children with typical development were recruited for the study. The two groups were balanced for age, level of formal education, and IQ. EFT was assessed by administering a task with minimal narrative demands, whereas narrative generation skills were assessed with three tasks requiring children to generate past, middle or future episodes in a narrative discourse. With respect to control participants, a subgroup of children with ASD had impaired EFT skills and also showed significant impairments in the ability to generate adequate narratives. On the contrary, participants with spared EFT had normal performance on the narrative generation task. Interestingly, EFT skills predicted narrative generation abilities in both groups. The results of this study support the hypothesis that EFT may be impaired in some but not all children with ASD and of a relation between difficulties with EFT and impairments in the process of narrative generation. The assessment of EFT should employ tasks that do not require narrative production, as children with impaired EFT may also have reduced narrative skills. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the primacy of the present in Husserl’s philosophy is not an unquestioned ballast inherited from the tradition of metaphysics but rather a genuinely phenomenological discovery. First, I explore the present of things and argue that the phenomenological primacy of the present in this domain should be understood in terms of what Husserl calls “affection.” Strictly speaking originary affection and associative syntheses (as the most basic phenomena for the givenness of things) can only take place (...) in the present or starting from the present. Second, I consider the present in the egological sphere and analyze its primacy for both the transcendental and the personal ego. Finally, I move to the experience of the other and argue that only the perception of the other’s body in the present gives rise to an authentic empathic experience as the experience of the other’s governing in his own body. (shrink)

For addressing the problem of negotiating social orders in a way that protects one’s humanity, I have considered Deleuze and Guattari’s intriguing claim in Anti-Oedipus that “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch‘. I outlined the associated principles of schizoid living developed in Anti-Oedipus via a critique that reverses the value of two Freudian concepts, namely, ”neurosis’ and ”psychosis’. I then cited some of the book’s eulogising ”praise poetry’, which (...) describes the ”schizo’ and connected it to a contemporaneous text, J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, that addresses the same ethical problem of negotiating social orders. Through the activities and reflections of the novel’s protagonist, Michael K, who might be thought of as “a schizophrenic out for a walk‘, I showed that Coetzee explores various forms of resistance. He investigates the impotence of resistance as the active construction of an alternative story from the alienated position of the ”other’. I pointed out that this strategy fails because it remains within the neurotic desire to construct a coherent narrative. Similarly, I indicated that resistance fails as a gesture of pure refusal akin to schizophrenic antiproduction, because the neurotic response re-appropriates this extremity through self-serving gestures of externalisation. Finally, I pointed out how Coetzee alludes to a kind of resistance that might be called schizoid and that changes the rules of the game. In the novel, K experiments with the first and second options, but cannot make life possible, either as a servant to a social order, on his own terms, or on the absolute outside. Echoing the question posed by Deleuze and Guattari of whether the schizoid ”men of desire’ they praise exist yet, K only dreams of the third option in the novel’s final lines, which detail the thoughts of a man dying of starvation. (shrink)

Even though the relevance of business actors in peace processes is increasingly acknowledged, analysis of their particular roles and contributions remain sparse in peace mediation literature. This is despite the fact that such knowledge would be highly relevant for supporting mediation processes such as those ongoing in Colombia or the Philippines. This article looks at the involvement of business actors in mediation processes by tracing analysis along the entry points for involvement, the different roles that business actors can play and (...) the limitations they face. The empirical data shows that business actors mainly play a role during the pre‐ and mediation phase and therein often as a support‐giver to the mediation process. Furthermore, most of the involvement does not take place at track‐1 level but rather at track‐2 mediation processes, where mainly local business play an important role. In contrary to what is postulated by some of the literature, the relevance of utilitaristic motives is not problematic; rather a monetary motivation can also foster the credibility in a political process where a lot is at stake. (shrink)

German universities come under fire: in contemporary political discourse they are considered to be antiquated, inefficient and unfit for international competition. Accordingly, the German government implemented an extensive program of reforms. Following the so‐called ‘Sorbonne Declaration’, the universities shall become part of an European higher education system with comparable and compatible structures. With the focus on the field of academic teaching and learning, this essay discusses the way of defining these activities in a new, entrepreneurial way, and the implications of (...) this process within the university. The reflections lead to the thesis that the actual reforms ask for new forms of critique, because the neoliberal offer of marketable ways to teach and to learn makes the enduring asymmetry of power relations within the educational field invisible, endangers the democratic character of the university and trivializes education. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that doxastic responsibility, i.e., responsibility for holding a certain doxastic attitude, is not based on direct doxastic control. There are two different kinds of direct doxastic control to be found in the literature, intentional doxastic control and evaluative doxastic control. Although many epistemologists agree that we do not have intentional doxastic control over our doxastic attitudes, it has been argued that we have evaluative doxastic control over the majority of our doxastic attitudes. (...) This has led to the assumption that doxastic responsibility is based on evaluative doxastic control. In the first part of this paper I will introduce the notion of doxastic responsibility and the framework of doxastic guidance control as well as the approaches to direct and indirect doxastic control. I will then argue that doxastic responsibility is not based on direct doxastic control by showing that doxastic responsibility is neither based on intentional nor on evaluative doxastic control. (shrink)

Intellectual knowledge is omnipresent in human lives and decisions. We are constantly trying to make good and correct decisions. However, responsible decision-making is characterised by rather difficult epistemic conditions. It applies all the more during the pandemic when decisions require not only specialised knowledge in a number of disciplines, scientific consensus, and participants from different fields, but also responsibility and respect for moral principles in order to ensure that the human rights of all groups are observed. Pandemic measures are created (...) by politicians, healthcare policy-makers, and epidemiologists. However, what is the role of ethics as a moral philosophy and experts in ethics? Experts in ethics and philosophy are carefully scrutinising political decisions. Levy and Savulescu have claimed that Ethicists and philosophers are not epistemically arrogant if they question policy responses. They played an important role in the creation of a reliable consensus. This study analyses epistemic and moral responsibility, their similarities, analogies, and differences. Are they interconnected? What is their relationship and how can they be filled with actual content during the pandemic? (shrink)

In his treatment of subjective mind, Hegel argues that the development that characterizes the vital process of a human individual is logically unique in that it dissolves the contradiction between two logical determinations that characterize any vital activity: the contradiction between the ‘immediate singularity’ of the subject of this process and its ‘abstract generality’. Hegel employs the term Bildung to characterize any vital activity that has this form. The idea that the distinction between human life and non-human life is a (...) logical distinction is one of the main lessons that Hegel thinks we should learn from Aristotle's treatment of the idea of life. In this article I distinguish between two contemporary varieties of this Aristotelian idea: a sophisticated variety that emphasizes the idea of second nature in order to characterize the distinctiveness of the human, and a naive variety that thinks of the human's uniqueness in terms of characterizations that already belong to its first nature. I argue that Hegel is neither sophisticated nor naive but offers a third variety of Neo-Aristotelianism that solves the difficulties of the other two. This has decisive consequences for his understanding of Bildung. Although the notion of Bildung describes an empirical process, Hegel argues, it is not an empirical concept. Rather, it is the concrete concept of the process of actualization that characterizes a self-conscious form of life that reflects the inner temporality of this form's actuality. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that in order to make sense of the ascription of truth and falsity to the things we say it is essential to acknowledge a divergence between two basic intuitions. According to one of them it is plausible to talk of what is said as what the speaker has in mind. According to the other it is plausible to talk of what is said as the bearer of truth or falsity. The paper presents (...) three cases in which these two intuitions seem not to coincide, and shows how this lack of coincidence can be accounted for in terms of underspecification. (shrink)

Philosophers have been quarrelling for ages over the correct understanding of the identity relation and its applications, but seldom have they discussed the identity of foods, including beverages under this herd. Taking wine as a working example, the present study shows that foods call attention over unnoticed metaphysical difficulties, most importantly the role of authenticity in ascertaining the identity of an individual and the possibility of identity being determined by a collectivity of people. More in details, the paper examines the (...) relationship between a rank of wines and its specific instances, that is, on what grounds some wine is of a certain rank. A “rank of wines” here stands for wines that are identical under some respect, be it the area of production, the style, the color, the variety, and so forth. Extant wine labels are taken as the best candidates to carve out a class of wine ranks that is metaphysically prior to any other; the analysis focuses on geographic indications because of the extensive discussion they have generated, but the morals here drawn extend also to other classes of wine ranks, such as those utilized by wine experts. After some introductory remarks (§1), the case is made that the identity of wines is established through judgments of authenticity (§2). Issues of authenticity are then discussed through the special case of geographic indications (§3). Two different views on how to justify the attribution of a geographic indication are presented and criticized; those rest respectively on terroir (§3.1) and chemical composition (§3.2). The last section (§4) argues for a conventionalist view on wine identity. Distancing itself from conventionalist proposals advanced to favor industrial wine production, the view defended here ties the identity of a wine to collective expert judgments of authenticity that are based on the extensive pleasure of the product. (shrink)