This article focuses on the concrete and symbolic process of construction, self-identification and self-presentation of U.S.-America as a “material” nation, a self-identification elaborated, albeit seldom by using this term, through the emphasis on its “exceptional” system of production, distribution, and consumption between the turn of the century and the immediate aftermath of WWI. It weaves together three, so far separate, streams of research such as the one on the American system of manufacturing, that on the emergence of modern patterns of (...) distribution and consumption, and the literature on the sustained efforts at “exporting” abroad the “American dream”. It charts the evolution of the business practices and of the rhetoric used to forge the notion of “material nation,” the actors involved, the implications this had for the process of real and imagined nation-making and for the different social and cultural segments comprising the nation. (shrink)

Intergenerational justice represents a crucial theme in the on-going debate in ethics, politics and law. In what follows, I would like to show that a determined phenomenological perspective drawing from the motive of alterity can shed new light on such a topic. Importantly, my concern will be to display how this approach can provide a thorough justificatory underpinning for a responsibility towards future generations, while denouncing the main shortcomings that mainstream approaches reveal when dealing with this issue.

Nicholas Kaldor was one of this century's most original thinkers on economics, his influence on British economic policy second only to that of Keynes. This book traces the development of Kaldor's thought as it underwent a remarkable evolution from his membership of the Austrian neoclassical school to his embracing of radical Keynesianism. He was also extremely quick to grasp essential changes in economic reality and to forge analytical tools to explain them. Although he was innovative from 1938 onwards, much of (...) his seminal work belongs to a coherent project of research which made him, together with Joan Robinson and Micha/l Kalecki, a leading representative of the post-Keynesian school, an outstanding critic of the neoclassical theory of equilibrium, growth, and distribution, and a convinced opponent of the monetarist school. The book also seeks to show how economic policy and political economy were closely connected in Kaldor's work. It was this that made Kaldor one of the most lucid and radical champions of the economic policies which, by blending political freedom with social justice, have been the outstanding feature of the great European tradition of social democracy. (shrink)

This study intended to test whether attachment to one’s own residential place at neighborhood level could represent a coping response for the elderly (consistently with the “docility hypothesis;” Lawton, 1982), when dealing with the demands of unfamiliar environments, in order to balance their reduction of spatial abilities. Specifically, a sequential path was tested, in which neighborhood attachment was expected to play a buffer role between lowered spatial competence and neighborhood satisfaction. The participants (N = 264), senior citizens (over 65-year-old), responded (...) to a questionnaire including the measures of spatial self-efficacy, spatial anxiety, attitude toward wayfinding, residential attachment and residential satisfaction. Results from the mediation analysis showed that a lower perceived spatial self-efficacy is associated to a higher spatial anxiety, and both promote a more negative attitude toward wayfinding tasks in non-familiar places. This leads to a higher attachment to one’s own neighborhood, which in turn predicts a higher residential satisfaction. Thus, the “closure” response of becoming more attached to their residential place may be an adaptive strategy of the elderly for compensating the Person-Environment (P-E) mis-fit (Lawton and Nahemow, 1973) when they feel unable (or less able) to cope with the demands of unfamiliar environments. (shrink)

In this study, we explore the relation between scientific literacy and unwarranted beliefs. The results show heterogeneous interactions between six constructs: conspiracy theories poorly interact with scientific literacy; there are major differences between attitudinal and practical dimensions of critical thinking; paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs show similar associations ; and, only scientific knowledge interacts with other predictor of unwarranted beliefs, such as ontological confusions. These results reveal a limited impact: science educators must take into account the complex interactions between the dimensions (...) of scientific literacy and different types of unwarranted beliefs to improve pedagogical strategies. (shrink)

Interest in the demarcation problem is undergoing a boom after being shelved and even given up for dead. Nevertheless, despite current philosophical discussions, there are no substantial advances i...

The logic of discovering and that of justifying have been a permanent source of debate in mathematics, because of their different and apparently contradictory features within the processes of production of mathematical sentences. In fact, a fundamental unity appears as soon as one investigates deeply the phenomenology of conjecturing and proving using concrete examples. In this paper it is shown that abduction, in the sense of Peirce, is an essential unifying activity, ruling such phenomena. Abduction is the major ingredient in (...) a theoretical model suitable for describing the tran-sition from the conjecturing to the proving phase. In the paper such a model is introduced and worked out to test Lakatos' machinery of proofs and refutations from a new point of view. Abduction and its categorical counter-part, adjunction, allow to explain within a unifying framework most of the phenomenology of conjectures and proofs, encompassing also the method of Greek analysis-synthesis. (shrink)

In light of the recent revival of the debate on radical democracy, this paper seeks to show how a critical reappropriation of Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic politics can explain the structure of a conflict-based understanding of democratic orders. In explicit convergence with Mouffe, I argue that a radical democratic project by no means needs to abandon—as many absolute democracy and multitude theorists claim—the modern political paradigm. I also show, diverging from her account, that Mouffe’s defence of a radical democratic (...) project based on pluralism and agonism would have been better served by a critical reception of Arendt’s thinking rather than that of Schmitt. The relevance of this alternative strategy—so I will argue—lies in the fact that it delivers an apt design for a politico-legal order which permits true and proper conflicts, on the one hand, while simultaneously allowing that they be dealt with democratically, on the other. (shrink)

This work, in continuity with the article published by Ferdinando Casolaro and Giovanna Della Vecchia in Vol 5, 2017 of this series, in which we noted that in the centuries since the eight century B.C. at the 13th century A.D. the evolution of Astronomy and historical events have influenced the development of Mathematics, intends to demonstrate how the Architecture and Literature of the following centuries have further conditioned the development of the sciences in Italy and, in particular, of Mathematics, (...) identifying the affinities and, in some cases, the coincidences between the different forms of thought that invite us to make a serious reflection on the uniqueness of culture. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the publication of the Black Notebooks, the debate on "Heidegger and Politics" seems, more than ever, to be colonized by the sole question regarding the connection between his thought and his involvement with Nazism and its anti-Semitic ideology. Far from relativizing the importance of such a debate, the book opens up a different approach to the political implications of Heidegger's philosophy: his early work devoted to a phenomenology of life in all its facticity. This early work (...) has a genuine, although implicit, political character, which - as Ferdinando Menga argues - can be made explicit and developed in a way that yields inspiring material for a true and proper theory of democracy. Lässt sich mit Heidegger noch politische Philosophie betreiben? Seit der Veröffentlichung der Schwarzen Hefte scheint dies unmöglich oder zumindest sehr kontrovers. Ohne die Relevanz der um die Hefte entstandenen Debatte in Frage zu stellen, wird hier ein anderer Weg eingeschlagen, um, diese politische Dimension zu erkunden. Dieser alternative Zugang thematisiert die frühen phänomenologischen Schriften (1919-1923) des Autors, die um die fundamentale Frage nach einem Denken des Ursprungs kreisen. Es handelt sich um ein Denken, das für sich in Anspruch nimmt, einen genuinen und adäquaten Zugang zur ursprünglichen Struktur der faktischen Lebenserfahrung gefunden zu haben. Die zentrale These Mengas lautet nun, dass die Vorrangigkeit des Politischen gerade in dieser phänomenologischen Dimension entdeckt, weiter entfaltet und kritisch erörtert werden kann - bis hin zu Spuren einer Demokratietheorie in Heideggers früher Philosophie. (shrink)

El marco teórico desde el cual se llevan a cabo investigaciones acerca de la pseudociencia es deficiente, dado que suele incluir otros tipos de creencias carentes de garantía epistémica. En este artículo, se repasarán los mecanismos de explotación de la autoridad científica por parte de la pseudociencia, desarrollando así un marco psicocognitivo más refinado para caracterizar el fenómeno. Se analizará la psicología del engaño pseudocientífico, las raíces cognitivas que posibilitan la epidemiología de este tipo de ideas y sus mecanismos de (...) autolegitimación, como la superioridad dialéctica, el falso apoyo externo o la falsa superioridad ética y/o epistemológica. (shrink)

While in the realm of scholarly debate on intergenerational justice the mechanism of a transgenerational intertwinement has been often adopted as a chief conceptual device in view of overcoming ethical short-termism and legitimizing duties towards future generations, this paper aims at showing that there are good reasons for considering the opposite outcome. Drawing on three paradigmatic examples taken from three mainstream approaches in the debate—Rawls’s contractualism, Gauthier’s contractarianism, and indirect reciprocity—I will show how the grammar of presentism is still largely (...) operative under the surface of theories explicitly recurring to such a device and thereby advocating a chain of duties capable to reach the remote future. A short closing section will be devoted to endorsing a radical reorientation in ethics, such that a direct link to future invocations will be considered as a promising strategy for genuinely justifying intergenerational obligations. (shrink)

The landscape of seventeenth-century chemistry is complex, and it is impossible to find in it either a clear-cut distinction between alchemy and chemistry or a sort of simple identification of the two. The seventeenth-century cultural context contained a rich variety of "chemical" discourses with arguments ranging from specific experiments to the justification of the validity of chemistry and its novelty in terms of its extraordinary antiquity. On the basis of an analysis of the works by O. Borch, J.J. Glauber, and (...) J. J. Becher, this paper tries to demonstrate that a historical reconstruction of "chemistry" must consider these different levels of the chemical debate. Only then will it be possible to appreciate the outstanding role played by G.E. Stahl in founding modern chemistry. The paper argues in favor of a contextualization of the historical research on seventeenth-century chemistry. (shrink)