This special issue on Forms of Life was conceived on the top floor of a café overlooking one of Rome's wonderful Piazzas, after a conference, hosted by Piergiorgio Donatelli, on Forms of Life and Ways of Living. Piergiorgio, Sandra Laugier and I thought the subject cried out for a small collection of essays in which several voices would elucidate the genesis, use and potential of Wittgenstein's concept of form of life -- and we committed to producing it. (...) This is the fruit of our Roman resolution. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. (shrink)

J. S. Mill lays great emphasis on the importance of the notion of the individual as a progressive being. The idea that we need to conceive the self as an object of cultivation and perfection runs through Mill’s writings on various topics, and has played a certain role in recent interpretations. In this paper I propose a specific interpretation of Mill’s understanding of the self, along the lines of what Stanley Cavell identifies as a “perfectionist” concern for the self. Various (...) texts by Mill, ranging from the Logic to On Liberty, show an understanding of the self in which both the theoretical and the practical domain are presented as being internally connected to the transformation of the self. Mill elaborates a criticism of a notion of truth articulated by doctrines having a life independent of the self, as well as a notion of choice which is not the expression of one’s inner self. This internal relation of truth and choice to the self generates a special dialectic within the self, which Mill explores in On Liberty’s second and third chapters by means of several contrasts, such as passive vs. active knowledge, living vs. dead beliefs, or being oneself vs. liking and choosing in crowds. (shrink)

This article suggests a reading of the significance of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for ethics, in the light of Cora Diamond’s resolute reading. The contrasts between sense and nonsense and between ethics and science are commented on and are connected to a further contrast between a specialized response to language and the world and an unspecialized response characteristic of the humanistic disciplines. The Tractatus is seen as a work which diagnoses the loss of such a fully human unspecialized sense of things and (...) which wishes to recover this possibility for its reader. On the basis of such reading, the article also suggests how to connect the significance of the later Wittgenstein for ethics with the Tractatus. A connection can be established by following Iris Murdoch’s notion of conceptual clarification. (shrink)

The article explores aspects of the notion of forms of life in the Wittgensteinian tradition especially following Iris Murdoch’s lead. On the one hand, the notion signals the hardness and inexhaustible character of reality, as the background needed in order to make sense of our lives in various ways. On the other, the hardness of reality is the object of a moral work of apprehension and deepening to the point at which its distinctive character dissolves into the family of connections (...) we have gained for ourselves. The two movements of thought are connected and necessary. (shrink)

Je vais évoquer ici la pertinence des concepts d’éthique au moyen de quelques réflexions sur le concept d’être humain. C’est là une notion cruciale parce que nous comprenons ce que signifie s’engager dans certaines activités dans la mesure où elles sont perçues comme humaines. La pensée morale est l’une de ces activités ; et par « moralité »..

The relation between Pragmatism, Transcendentalism, and Perfectionism is both obvious and difficult, and this is what prompted us to edit the present issue of the Journal. The relation is obvious, because the history of American Philosophy is deeply textured by this relation, and the transition from Transcendentalism to Pragmatism has been historically attested. Difficult, because these traditions seem to deny one another. Pragmatist philosophers have often presented themselves as the founder...

Introduction to the symposia on Pragmatism and Perfectionism appered on the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 2 issue 2, 2010.

Il campo di esperienza che Galvano della Volpe ha aperto nella filosofia italiana del Novecento non si chiude con la fine di una stagione culturale.

Volume II of Classical Recursion Theory describes the universe from a local (bottom-up or synthetical) point of view, and covers the whole spectrum, from the recursive to the arithmetical sets. The first half of the book provides a detailed picture of the computable sets from the perspective of Theoretical Computer Science. Besides giving a detailed description of the theories of abstract Complexity Theory and of Inductive Inference, it contributes a uniform picture of the most basic complexity classes, ranging from small (...) time and space bounds to the elementary functions, with a particular attention to polynomial time and space computability. It also deals with primitive recursive functions and larger classes, which are of interest to the proof theorist. The second half of the book starts with the classical theory of recursively enumerable sets and degrees, which constitutes the core of Recursion or Computability Theory. Unlike other texts, usually confined to the Turing degrees, the book covers a variety of other strong reducibilities, studying both their individual structures and their mutual relationships. The last chapters extend the theory to limit sets and arithmetical sets. The volume ends with the first textbook treatment of the enumeration degrees, which admit a number of applications from algebra to the Lambda Calculus. The book is a valuable source of information for anyone interested in Complexity and Computability Theory. The student will appreciate the detailed but informal account of a wide variety of basic topics, while the specialist will find a wealth of material sketched in exercises and asides. A massive bibliography of more than a thousand titles completes the treatment on the historical side. (shrink)

With Piergiorgio Paterlini, a noted Italian writer and journalist, Gianni Vattimo, a leading philosopher of the continental school, reflects on a lifetime of politics, sexual radicalism, and philosophical exuberance in postwar Italy.