Custom is a complex phenomenon, and one that is hardly given a satisfying account, especially if it is assumed, as many legal positivists do, that law is only produced through acts of will. After examining five main reasons for the complexity of custom, I will consider Uberto Scarpelli’s thesis that customary law can be given an account within legal positivism through a reinterpretation of norm-generating facts as the manifestations of a will. But what kind of will is implied here, and (...) how can the underlying norm be inferred? I will first briefly examine Gaetano Carcaterra’s analysis of abduction as a method to infer norms from behaviors, and then distinguish six different forms of will possibly implied in a behavior which is relevant for the formation of a customary norm. I will finally focus on norm-oriented, or nomotropic will, and especially on nomotrophic will, that is, the will –implied and expressed in the reaction to the violation of a norm– that the infringed norm be valid. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce qu’une norme? Y a-t-il des relations logiques entre les normes? Sur quoi repose la validité d’un système normatif? Qu’est-ce que la validité déontique? Les verbes performatifs peuvent-ils agir sur le monde? Quelles sont les différentes façons d’agir en fonction d’une règle? Que sont les règles constitutives? Et qu’est-ce que la vérité? Ce sont là quelques-unes des questions que posent les essais d’Amedeo Giovanni Conte rassemblés dans cette anthologie. Ces essais offrent quelques-unes des contributions les plus originales et les plus (...) significatives de la philosophie du langage normatif. Amedeo Giovanni Conte (Pavie, 1934-Cava Manara, 2019), professeur émérite de l’Université de Pavie, membre de l’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, fut l’un des philosophes les plus originaux du droit italien. Parmi ses œuvres : Saggio sulla completezza degli ordinamenti giuridici (1962), les trois volumes de Filosofia del linguaggio normativo (1989-2001), Filosofia dell’ordinamento normativo (1997), Sociologia filosofica del diritto (2011) et Adelaster : Il nome del vero (2016). (shrink)

A widespread thesis in the analytical theory of law is that norms exist as linguistic entities. Rodolfo Sacco is one of the authors who have most fruitfully insisted, on the contrary, that there is no necessary correlation between norms and language, not even in the specific context of law. He thus extended the conceptualisation of legal normativity well beyond the boundaries of language through the notions of cryptotype and mute law. This paper takes into account two alternative hypotheses to the (...) hypothesis that norms exist as linguistic entities, which are respectively based on the concepts of deontic state-of-affairs and deontic noema. Both hypotheses are tested for their applicability to the phenomena investigated by Sacco under the notion of mute law, notably with reference to cryptotypes. The question is raised then of how the existence of cryptotypes can be inferred from behaviour. The paper emphasizes the role that can be played in this context by nomotrophic behaviour, that is, the behaviour that consists in a reaction to the violation of a norm. (shrink)

We almost every day direct our actions with reference to social, moral or legal norms and oughts. However, oughts and norms cannot be perceived through the senses: how can we “grasp” them, then? Adolf Reinach distinguishes enacted norms and oughts created through a social act of enactment, from moral norms and oughts existing in themselves independently of any act, knowledge or experience. I argue that this distinction is not a distinction between two species of oughts within a common genus: it (...) is rather a deeper ontological distinction between two modes of existence that are quite different, even though both are objective, according to Reinach. This ontological distinction is reflected in the way in which enacted oughts and moral oughts can be grasped, respectively: in the former case, the enacted ought is grasped by going back to the underlying social act from which it springs; in the latter, a “grasping through feeling” of the moral values is implied. (shrink)

We present a revenge argument for non-reflexive theories of semantic notions – theories which restrict the rule of assumption, or initial sequents of the form φ ⊩ φ. Our strategy follows the general template articulated in Murzi and Rossi [21]: we proceed via the definition of a notion of paradoxicality for non-reflexive theories which in turn breeds paradoxes that standard non-reflexive theories are unable to block.

This paper develops a trivalent semantics for indicative conditionals and extends it to a probabilistic theory of valid inference and inductive learning with conditionals. On this account, (i) all complex conditionals can be rephrased as simple conditionals, connecting our account to Adams's theory of p-valid inference; (ii) we obtain Stalnaker's Thesis as a theorem while avoiding the well-known triviality results; (iii) we generalize Bayesian conditionalization to an updating principle for conditional sentences. The final result is a unified semantic and probabilistic (...) theory of conditionals with attractive results and predictions. (shrink)

Contextualist approaches to the Liar Paradox postulate the occurrence of a context shift in the course of the Liar reasoning. In particular, according to the contextualist proposal advanced by Charles Parsons and Michael Glanzberg, the Liar sentence L doesn’t express a true proposition in the initial context of reasoning c, but expresses a true one in a new, richer context c', where more propositions are available for expression. On the further assumption that Liar sentences involve propositional quantifiers whose domains may (...) vary with context, the Liar reasoning is blocked. But why should context shift? We argue that the paradox involves principles of contextualist reflection that explain, by analogy with well-known reflection principles for arithmetic, why context must shift from c to c' in the course of the Liar reasoning. This provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox—one that equally applies to two revenge arguments against contextualist approaches, one recently advanced by Andrew Bacon, the other mentioned by Charles Parsons and more recently revived by Cory Juhl. (shrink)

Beall and Murzi :143–165, 2013) introduce an object-linguistic predicate for naïve validity, governed by intuitive principles that are inconsistent with the classical structural rules. As a consequence, they suggest that revisionary approaches to semantic paradox must be substructural. In response to Beall and Murzi, Field :1–19, 2017) has argued that naïve validity principles do not admit of a coherent reading and that, for this reason, a non-classical solution to the semantic paradoxes need not be substructural. The aim of this paper (...) is to respond to Field’s objections and to point to a coherent notion of validity which underwrites a coherent reading of Beall and Murzi’s principles: grounded validity. The notion, first introduced by Nicolai and Rossi, is a generalisation of Kripke’s notion of grounded truth, and yields an irreflexive logic. While we do not advocate the adoption of a substructural logic, we take the notion of naïve validity to be a legitimate semantic notion that points to genuine expressive limitations of fully structural revisionary approaches. (shrink)

Deflationists argue that ‘true’ is merely a logico-linguistic device for expressing blind ascriptions and infinite generalisations. For this reason, some authors have argued that deflationary truth must be conservative, i.e. that a deflationary theory of truth for a theory S must not entail sentences in S’s language that are not already entailed by S. However, it has been forcefully argued that any adequate theory of truth for S must be non-conservative and that, for this reason, truth cannot be deflationary :493–521, (...) 1998; Ketland in Mind 108:69–94, 1999). We consider two defences of conservative deflationism, respectively proposed by Waxman :429–463, 2017) and Tennant :551–582, 2002), and argue that they are both unsuccessful. In Waxman’s hands, deflationists are committed either to a non-purely expressive notion of truth, or to a conception of mathematics that does not allow them to justifiably exclude non-conservative theories of truth. Tennant’s conservative deflationism fares no better: if deflationist truth must be conservative over arithmetic, it can be shown to collapse into a non-conservative variety of deflationism. (shrink)

According to Woodward’s influential account of explanation, explanations have a counterfactual structure, and explanatory counterfactuals are analysed in terms of causal relations and interventions. In this paper, we provide a formal semantics of explanatory counterfactuals based on a Ramsey Test semantics of conditionals. Like Woodward’s account, our account is guided by causal considerations. Unlike Woodward’s account, it makes no reference to causal graphs and it also covers cases of explanation where interventions are impossible.

It is often argued that fully structural theories of truth and related notions are incapable of expressing a nonstratified notion of defectiveness. We argue that recently much-discussed non-contractive theories suffer from the same expressive limitation, provided they identify the defective sentences with the sentences that yield triviality if they are assumed to satisfy structural contraction.

ABSTRACT This paper uses abduction to propose a theory of addictive desire that is based on a dual dysfunction in learning and motivation. The theory is termed the Coherent Dual Theory of Addictive Desire (CDT) because it proposes that a dual dysfunction lies at the heart of addictive desire. This paper first lays out CDT in psychological terms. It then focuses on how CDT coheres with both the neurobiology and phenomenology of addictive desire, granting the theory empirical support and more (...) explanatory power. The paper concludes by addressing an objection from opponent process theory. The result is a theory of addictive desire that contains multiple abductive virtues: It is simple, general, testable, and coherent on the levels of neurobiology, psychology, and phenomenology. (shrink)

The present collection of essays honours John Woods on the occasion of his eightieth birthday from contributors who wish to pay homage to this remarkable researcher whom they see not only as a scholar of prodigious energy and insight, but as a friend, colleague, collaborator, or former teacher. All of the essays touch upon topics Woods has taken a direct or indirect interest in, ranging from technical problems of mathematical logic and applications of formal methods through philosophical logic, philosophy of (...) language, epistemology and history of ancient and modern logic. The sections themselves of the book cover relevance, paradoxes, inconsistency, fallacies, abduction, fictions, logic naturalized, law, argumentation and narratives, and many other topics: and represent the main research areas which have profited from Woods' reflections. (shrink)

Since the late Eighties, technological change and transition from analog to digital, led to a challenging of the classical categories of modernist design. With the development of Human Computer Interaction and its impact on theories of Functionalist Design, it has begun a process of interrogation – initially in a cognitive sense and then in the more properly aesthetic sense – which, through theories and practices increasingly dependent on computerization , brings modernist theories about functionality to shift their interest on Usability (...) and, then, from Usability to User Experience. (shrink)

The present contribution proposes a reflection on the meanings of the actions of educational professionals when trying to prevent mental distress in their students and promote their well-being. This focus derives from the suggestion — indicated by Basaglia’s work in linking mental health to the existential, educational, social and cultural elements of everyone’s life conditions — that education can offer an important contribution to the development of, and support for, mental wellbeing. It would thus follow that educational professionals play a (...) potentially pivotal role in promoting mental health and in preventing possible disease, if they are aware of the possibilities and are appropriately trained. This paper, based on a phenomenological approach, refers to the words of schoolteachers and other educators collected in a qualitative educational research project and presents and explores possible ways of giving meaning to educational work in these areas. (shrink)

'Memory and Utopia' looks at the connection between memory and forgetfulness in Europe during the twentieth century. Drawing on oral history and feminist theory and practice, the book highlights how women struggled to be recognized as full subjects. The themes of utopia and desire in the 1968 movements of students, women and workers are explored. 'Memory and Utopia' examines the sense of belonging to Europe that has emerged in the last twenty years. The book analyses European identity as expressed through (...) identities based on gender, age and culture to explore an inclusive and non-hierarchical subjectivity. (shrink)

This book aims to develop the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, the theoretical account of interpretive (as opposed to explanatory) understanding--the account of meanings and contexts rather than causes and predictions--usually restricted to the domain of literary and textual analysis, in new directions by exploiting its potential as an instrument of critique. It refutes commonly held claims that hermeneutic analyses are necessarily relativistic, Eurocentric, or critically impotent and demonstrates how hermeneutic procedures can inform analyses of urgent current and cross-cultural issues such (...) as the biology of race, female genital excision, and the so-called "culture of poverty" thesis. Lorenzo Simpson demonstrates that a robust methodology of philosophical hermeneutics is well positioned to intervene in critical political and social issues in global ethics and justice in concert with critical theory's emancipatory aims. (shrink)

This article explores the change in meaning of the term `utopia' between 1968 and today. It proposes an interpretation of 1968 based on the connection between utopia and desire; the emergence of subjectivity in history meant a new way of becoming subjects of one's own history, and a new understanding of socio-political change, as including daily life and personal emotions.

This is the first dedicated commentary to Sextus Empiricus’ treatise _Against the Arithmeticians_, dealing with crucial issues in the history of the sceptical, Platonic and Pythagorean traditions and in the ancient philosophy of mathematics.

The present article argues for the non-authenticity of l. 38 in the first Horatian Epistle. Together with the allusions to avarice and pride at ll. 33 and 36, it contains a reference to the cardinal sins, a concept that did not yet exist at the time of Horace. In particular, the sins listed in the line at issue appear to coincide with those discussed by Gregory the Great in his Moralia in Iob (31.45) and eventually adopted by medieval thought. The (...) metrical pattern and a check of the main medieval commentaries support the suspected spuriousness of the line. (shrink)

Despite recent essentialist approaches to Kant’s laws of nature, it is unclear whether Kant’s critical philosophy is compatible with core tenets of essentialism. In this paper, I first reconstruct Kant’s position by identifying the key metaphysical and epistemological features of his notion of ‘nature’ or ‘essence’. Two theses about natures can be found in the literature, namely that they are noumenal in character (noumenal thesis) and that they guide scientific investigation as regulative ideas of reason (regulative thesis). I argue that (...) Kant’s notion of nature does not entail the noumenal thesis and, based on his model of causal explanation, I propose a novel, phenomenal thesis, that allows for a better understanding of the function of natures as regulative ideas. In the last part of the paper, I show that Kant’s ‘essentialism’ is a genuine form of essentialism committed to de re modality, although it differs in several respects from major contemporary essentialist accounts. I conclude by suggesting that Kant’s essentialism (if appropriately updated) can be relevant to the contemporary debate, which has so far been dominated by Humean and Aristotelian proposals. (shrink)

According to most interpreters, Aristotle explains death as the result of material processes of the body going against the nature of the living being. Yet, this description is incomplete, for it does not clarify the relationship between the process of decay and the teleological system in which it occurs: this makes it impossible to distinguish between natural and violent death. In this paper, I try to fill this gap by looking at his so-called ‘biological works’ and mainly at the De (...) Juventute. I first introduce the specific concept of life at play in this treatise and prove its complementarity with the framework of the De Anima. Then, I illustrate in detail the process of dying and the reasons why a merely material description is insufficient to account for the distinction between natural and violent death. Finally, I show that for Aristotle natural death is a by-product of teleologically directed life activities: only against the background of this teleological structure is natural death fully explained in terms of essence and causes. To support this claim, I compare death to two analogous cases in Aristotle’s biology, namely dreams and the features of GA V. (shrink)

Philosophers have debated at length the epistemological status of scientific thought experiments. I contend that the literature on this topic still lacks a common conceptual framework, a lacuna that produces radical disagreement among the participants in this debate. To remedy this problem, I suggest focusing on the distinction between the internal and the external validity of an experiment, which is also crucial for thought experiments. I then develop an account of both kinds of validity in the context of thought experiments. (...) I show that we can naturally conceptualise internal validity in terms of games of make-believe. Then, I argue that external validity is best defined as accurate representation of a target system. Finally, I turn back to the current debate on thought experiments and show that my diarchic account provides a general framework that can be shared by the competing philosophical views, as well as a fruitful guide for their reconciliation. (shrink)

In this paper, we embark on the complicated discussion about the nature of vice in Virtue Ethics through a twofold approach: first, by taking seriously the claim that virtues (and certain flavours of vices) are genuinely dispositional features possessed by agents, and secondly, by employing a pluralistic attitude borrowed from Battaly’s pluralism (2008). Through these lenses, we identify three varieties of viciousness: incontinence, indifference, and malevolence. The upshot is that the notion of vice is not as categorically homogeneous as that (...) of virtue: some states of viciousness consist in interference of present virtuous dispositions, or mimicking of absent vicious ones, whereas others can be considered genuine dispositions themselves. Furthermore, this set-up can provide an interesting, albeit highly idealized story as to how, through the interference in one’s environment, one gets acquainted with vice in various degrees. Finally, this approach can be illuminating vis-à-vis Virtue Ethics in general; e.g. we can employ it to discuss more productively Johnston’s (2003) objection to Hursthouse’s (1999) account of moral conduct. Finally, this approach can be illuminating vis-a-vis Virtue Ethics in general; e.g. we can employ it to discuss more productively Johnston’s (2003) objection to Hursthouse’s (1999) account of moral conduct. (shrink)

This paper attempts a reconstruction of reason’s contribution to empirical truth in connection with Kant’s definition of truth as the agreement of cognition with its object. I argue that Kant’s treatment of truth in the Transcendental Analytic gets completed in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic with an often neglected but compelling argument (what I shall call the Variety Argument). This argument postulates such a variety in the appearances as to undermine any attempt at formulating empirical truths. Crucially, I argue (...) that this variety does not depict an extreme-case scenario, but our own epistemic situation without reason. Reason completes Kant’s theory of truth by allowing the understanding (i.) to form empirical concepts and (ii.) approximate to empirical truth. (shrink)

The sentences employed in semantic paradoxes display a wide range of semantic behaviours. However, the main theories of truth currently available either fail to provide a theory of paradox altogether, or can only account for some paradoxical phenomena by resorting to multiple interpretations of the language. In this paper, I explore the wide range of semantic behaviours displayed by paradoxical sentences, and I develop a unified theory of truth and paradox, that is a theory of truth that also provides a (...) unified account of paradoxical sentences. The theory I propose here yields a threefold classification of paradoxical sentences – liar-like sentences, truth-teller-like sentences, and revenge sentences. Unlike existing treatments of semantic paradox, the theory put forward in this paper yields a way of interpreting all three kinds of paradoxical sentences, as well as unparadoxical sentences, within a single model. (shrink)

Legislation usually lacks a systematic organization which makes the management and the access to norms a hard problem to face. A more analytic semantic unit of reference (provision) for legislative texts was identified. A model of provisions (provisions types and their arguments) allows to describe the semantics of rules in legislative texts. It can be used to develop advanced semantic-based applications and services on legislation. In this paper an automatic bottom-up strategy to qualify existing legislative texts in terms of provision (...) types is described. (shrink)

Scientific models typically contain idealizations, or assumptions that are known not to be true. Philosophers have long questioned the nature of idealizations: Are they heuristic tools that will be abandoned? Or rather fictional representations of reality? And how can we reconcile them with realism about knowledge of nature? Immanuel Kant developed an account of scientific investigation that can inspire a new approach to the contemporary debate. Kant argued that scientific investigation is possible only if guided by ideal assumptions—what he calls (...) “regulative ideas”. These ideas are not true of objects of nature, and yet they are not heuristic tools or fictional represen- tations. They are necessary rules governing the construction and assessment of scientific explanations. In this paper, I suggest that some idealizations can be interpreted as having necessary regulative value and as being compatible with scientific realism. I first analyze the puzzle of the nature of idealization and present the main approaches to this topic in the literature. Second, I reconsider the puzzle vis-a-vis a restricted, Kantian definition of idealization and a novel characterization of the relation between idealization and truth. Finally, I discuss in detail an example of idealization (the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium) along the suggested Kantian lines. (shrink)

This article aims to justify the positive role in the empirical investigation of nature that Kant attributes to the idea of God in the Critique of Pure Reason. In particular, I propose to read the Transcendental Ideal section and the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic together to see whether they can reciprocally illuminate each other. I argue that it is only by looking at the transcendental deduction of the ideas of reason and the resulting analogical conception of God that a (...) fully legitimate positive use of the idea of God can be vindicated. (shrink)

'Memory and Utopia' looks at the connection between memory and forgetfulness in Europe during the twentieth century. Drawing on oral history and feminist theory and practice, the book highlights how women struggled to be recognized as full subjects. The themes of utopia and desire in the 1968 movements of students, women and workers are explored. 'Memory and Utopia' examines the sense of belonging to Europe that has emerged in the last twenty years. The book analyses European identity as expressed through (...) identities based on gender, age and culture to explore an inclusive and non-hierarchical subjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a systematic account of Kant’s view on ‘phenomenal substance’. Several studies have recently analyzed Kant’s notion of substance. However, I submit that more needs to be said about how this notion is reconceptualized within the critical framework to vindicate a genuine and legitimate sense of substance in the phenomenal realm. More specifically, I show that Kant’s transcendental idealism does not commit him to a rejection of substantiality in phenomena. Rather, Kant isolates a general notion of (...) substance (as ultimate subject) and argues that (i) the relationality of phenomena is compatible with this notion; and that (ii) matter and all its parts are the ultimate subjects of everything existing in space (as what is independently movable in space). I suggest that vindicating a genuine and legitimate notion of phenomenal substance has far-ranging consequences for the interpretation of Kant’s empirical realism. (shrink)

According to the most common interpretation of the simulation argument, we are very likely to live in an ancestor simulation. It is interesting to ask if some families of simulations are more likely than others inside the space of all simulations. We argue that a natural probability measure is given by computational complexity: easier simulations are more likely to be run. Remarkably this allows us to extract experimental predictions from the fact that we live in a simulation. For instance we (...) show that it is very likely that humanity will not achieve interstellar travel and that humanity will not meet other intelligent species in the universe, in turn explaining the Fermi's Paradox. On the opposite side, experimental falsification of any of these predictions would constitute evidence against our reality being a simulation. (shrink)

A genealogical account of state sovereignty explores the ways in which the concept has emerged, evolved, and is in decline today. Sovereignty has a theological foundation, and is deeply bound up with the idea of God, in particular a voluntarist God, presented as being capable of intervening directly in the world. Religious conflicts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forced the separation between religion and politics, and opened the space for the emergence of a national state endowed with sovereignty which (...) has dominated the world until now. Today’s rise of international and transnational obligations challenges the conventional understanding of state sovereignty, which cannot account for the normative density of the global order and the corresponding decline of state-based political authority. In order to explain that, I contrast two competing understandings of state sovereignty: a static one and a dynamic one. The static understanding regards sovereignty as absolute within the state territory. The dynamic understanding regards sovereignty as evolutionary: according to this account, the state is just one possible form that sovereignty can take. I conclude by suggesting that the dynamic understanding of state sovereignty is better suited to explaining the decline of state sovereignty. (shrink)