Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in (...) philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

The chapter explores comparatively the attention to the practical dimension that—each in his own way—Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the classic pragmatist thinker William James pay when confronted with the challenge of providing a non-skeptical response to the relativist stance on truth that arose in the post-Kantian age. Particular focus will be given to the extent to which these three authors conceived of the practical framework as the only one that allows us to meaningfully address and determine truth.

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in (...) philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

The absence of an English translation of Gonzaga's writings, both as a whole and separately, , inspired me to undertake it with the aim of making it more accessible to the public. If I were to talk briefly about the outline, the first original French version of the text appears as an anonymous author's work. In that first version signed by Sir Thomas Witth whom nothing is known about, Gonzaga doesn’t appear. His name hadn’t been appearing in the first booklet (...) for seven years until it appeared as translator in the 1807 version. Researchers concur that this was actually a trick which Gonzaga has been hiding behind because he probably never had the courage to introduce himself as the author. It is claimed that it has been conducted a lot of research in order to recover the text of Sir Thomas Witth or other possible authors with a similar name but any satisfactory solution to the riddle has not yet been given. Regarding historical data carried out during my research, I would like to offer my opinion that there is the Scottish philosophy of Common Sense hidden behind this pseudonym which deserves attention. (shrink)

The Handbook of Formal Argumentation is a community effort aimed at providing a comprehensive and up-to-date view of the state of the art and current trends in the lively research field of formal argumentation. The first volume of the Handbook is organised into five parts, containing nineteen chapters in all, each written by leading experts in the field. The first part provides a general and historical perspective on the field. The second part gives a comprehensive coverage of the argumentation formalisms (...) available in the literature at various levels of abstraction. The third part is devoted to cover some of the many dialogical aspects of argumentation, while the fourth one deals with algorithmic, computational and implementation issues. Finally, the fifth part provides some deeper analyses on the previously introduced topics. The Handbook of Formal Argumentation is an open-ended initiative of which the present volume is the first outcome. Further volumes are planned to cover topics not included in the present one and the initiative is conceived to grow by the support and feeding it receives from the community members. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to question the nature of the socio-anthropological approach in Lefort’s thought. The author explores the complex relationship between Lefort and the Durkheimian French school of sociology in four stages: in the first, he shows Lefort as a sociologist ‘worthy of its name’ or, in other words, a sociologist interested in questioning the ‘institution of the social’. In the second, he focuses on the disturbing elements that Lefort introduces: the political and the division into the (...) French sociological approach. In the third stage, he focuses his attention on the sociological approach in Lefort’s way of thinking about democratic society. Finally, he concludes by referring to Lefort’s apparent opposition between philosophy and social sciences – and the errors that this may have engendered – in order to demonstrate the continuity of Lefort’s sociological approach. (shrink)

Orthodox decision theory is fanatical in the way it treats small probabilities of enormous value, if unbounded utility functions are allowed. Some have suggested a fix, Nicolausian discounting, according to which outcomes with small enough probabilities should be ignored when making decisions. However, there are lotteries involving only small-probability outcomes, none of which should intuitively be ignored. So the Nicolausian discounter needs a procedure for distinguishing the problematic cases of small-probability outcomes from the unproblematic ones. In this paper, I present (...) a dilemma for Nicolausian discounting: the view must be coupled either with a procedure that delivers fanatical verdicts of its own, as bad as those of orthodox decision theory, or with one that entails intransitive cyclic preferences. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issue of scientific realism in Mach, and his pragmatist approach to epistemology. Firstly, Eric Banks’s interpretation of Mach as a direct realist about particulars will be explored and discussed. Secondly, Sami Pihlström’s pragmatic realism will be considered, and it will be suggested that this view can be more viably attributed to Mach. Finally, in the light of Mach’s 1910 paper on Sensory Elements and Scientific Concepts, it will be argued that Mach’s agnosticism was probably stronger than (...) any moderate form of realism he could have been committed to, and that he was a radical pragmatist in refusing to be concerned with any kind of metaphysical issue. (shrink)

This article examines the ethics of ambiguity formulated by existentialist authors in the 1940s, linking it to turn-of-the-century debates on ethics between philosophy and the social sciences. The underlying thesis is that, rather than representing a radical conceptual novelty, the ethical thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, strained between freedom and situation, constitutes a revisiting and updating of philosophical positions from the landscape of the Third Republic. To demonstrate this, the thought of Frédéric Rauh is examined. Indeed, anticipating (...) what de Beauvoir would later call “ambiguity”, Rauh sought to develop an ethics of action that would constitute a third way between sociological objectivism and the empty abstractions of idealism and rationalism. By reconstructing the transitions from one generation and historical context to the next, the article shows how, and through which mediators, the existentialists were well aware of this debate and, in their own way, developed a philosophy of action, of ethical experience, similar to Rauh’s. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content as an (...) ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

This paper aims at comparing and relating belief revision and argumentation as approaches to model reasoning processes. Referring to some prominent literature references in both fields, we will discuss their (implicit or explicit) assumptions on the modeled processes and hence commonalities and differences in the forms of reasoning they are suitable to deal with. The intended contribution is on one hand assessing the (not fully explored yet) relationships between two lively research fields in the broad area of defeasible reasoning and (...) on the other hand pointing out open issues and potential directions for future research. (shrink)

During the second decade of the 20th century Hans Kleinpeter, an Austrian scholar devoted to the development of the modern science, published some brief papers on Nietzsche’s thought. Kleinpeter has been one of the main upholders of Mach’s epistemology and probably the first who connected his ideas with the philosophy of Nietzsche. In his book on Der Phänomenalismus (1913) he described a new world view that arose in the 19th century, a perspective that ‒ according to him ‒ completely contrasted (...) the mechanistic and metaphysical world view of the old school of scientific inquiry. The main outcome of the scientists whose name was related with this perspective (e.g. Clifford, Maxwell, Kirchoff and, obviously, Mach himself) has been the refusal of the absolute value of any “truth”. Kleinpeter’s statements on this topic are a good example of the rising of a Scientific Philosophy, whose development involved many scientists and thinkers that later set up the Verein Ernst Mach and the Wiener Kreis. On the other hand, his interest on Nietzsche is a relevant case of reception of the latter’s thought, that Kleinpeter puts into the context of the contemporary epistemology. In fact, he considers Nietzsche as one of the main upholders of the phenomenalistic world view, and states that he «took part at the same renewal of philosophical investigation that arose from the latest results of scientific inquiry» during the 19th century. A renewal whose main outcomes has been presented by John Stallo in his book on The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1881), which Kleinpeter translated in German and published in 1901. According to Kleinpeter, in Nietzsche’s writings (mostly unpublished) one can find a theory of knowledge quite close to the one presented by both Mach and the new born Pragmatism, i.e. the complete refusal of an absolute truth and, therefore, the development of an antimetaphysical world view. In my paper I’ll discuss the main statements presented by Kleinpeter on this topic and show which of Nietzsche’s ideas has actually been in compliance with the main outcomes of late 19th century science. Thus, I’ll carry out a reconstruction of an unfamiliar side of the first period of reception of the philosophy of Nietzsche and its relevance to the development of a new (scientific) world view. (shrink)

In recent years, the family of algorithms collected under the term ``deep learning'' has revolutionized artificial intelligence, enabling machines to reach human-like performances in many complex cognitive tasks. Although deep learning models are grounded in the connectionist paradigm, their recent advances were basically developed with engineering goals in mind. Despite of their applied focus, deep learning models eventually seem fruitful for cognitive purposes. This can be thought as a kind of biological exaptation, where a physiological structure becomes applicable for a (...) function different from that for which it was selected. In this paper, it will be argued that it is time for cognitive science to seriously come to terms with deep learning, and we try to spell out the reasons why this is the case. First, the path of the evolution of deep learning from the connectionist project is traced, demonstrating the remarkable continuity, and the differences as well. Then, it will be considered how deep learning models can be useful for many cognitive topics, especially those where it has achieved performance comparable to humans, from perception to language. It will be maintained that deep learning poses questions that cognitive sciences should try to answer. One of such questions is the reasons why deep convolutional models that are disembodied, inactive, unaware of context, and static, are by far the closest to the patterns of activation in the brain visual system. (shrink)

In this paper I deal with Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in the context of 19th century epistemology. In particular, I argue that, even though Nietzsche shows the ontological lack of content of truths (both on the theoretic and on the moral plane), he nevertheless leaves the space for a practical use of them, in a way that can be compared with William James' pragmatism. I thus deal with Nietzsche's and James' concept of "truth", and show their relationship with some outcomes (...) of Ernst Mach's epistemology. (shrink)

Paralelamente a su poesía, Bernard Noël desarrolla una obra en prosa que plantea interrogantes de orden cognitivo, en particular en torno a la percepción visual. La exploración de dispositivos tecnológicos (la cámara fotográfica) y de escenificaciones del acto de creación (la escena del pintor trabajando) es ocasión para contrastar la pertinencia de las intuiciones y reflexiones del poeta puestas bajo el foco de las actuales ciencias cognitivas. El trayecto de lo óptico a lo mental queda inscrito en una comprensión encarnada (...) y gestual de la cognición que apunta también hacia el surgimiento del lenguaje. Su poesía ha de ser pues entendida como el tramo final del proceso. (shrink)

The “Natural Problem of Consciousness” is the problem of understanding why there are presently conscious beings at all. Given a non-reductive naturalist framework taking consciousness as an ontologically subjective biological phenomenon, how can we rationally explain the fact that the actual world has turned out to be one where there are presently living beings that can feel, rather than having developed as a zombie-world in which there would be no conscious experiences of any kind? -/- This book introduces the Natural (...) Problem by relating it to central problems in the philosophy of mind (metaphysical mind-body problem, Hard Problem of consciousness) and emphasizing the distinctive interest of its diachronic dimension. Ranging from philosophy to biology and neuroscience, it offers a thorough analysis aimed at better understanding what could explain why phenomenal consciousness has been preserved throughout evolution by natural selection. This is an original, engaging, and thought provoking philosophical study of a neglected but fundamental question regarding the nature and origin of consciousness. (shrink)

In the 20th century the occurrence of revolutions, violent collective behaviours and dictatorships have shown the power of masses, raising many theoretical issues in sociology, philosophy and psychology. In this paper we will focus on four accounts in order to clarify the relation between a mass of human individuals and the role of a leader. These explanations are developed respectively by Weber, Le Bon, Freud and Girard. Even if our work is theoretical, we will briefly mention the French Revolution as (...) solid example for a better understanding of mass-leader relation. (shrink)

This critical essay evaluates the potential integration of distinct kinds of expertise in policymaking, especially during situations of critical emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This article relies on two case studies: herd immunity and restricted access to ventilators for disabled people. These case studies are discussed as examples of experts’ recommendations that have not been widely accepted, though they were made within the boundaries of expert epistemic authority. While the fundamental contribution of biomedical experts in devising public health policies (...) during the COVID-19 pandemic is fully recognized, this paper intends to discuss potential issues and limitations that may arise when adopting a strict expert-based approach. By drawing attention to the interests of minorities, the paper also claims a broader notion of “relevant expertise.” This critical essay thus calls for the necessity of wider inclusiveness and representativeness in the process underlying public health policymaking. (shrink)

During his late period, Nietzsche is particularly concerned with the value that mankind attributes to truth. In dealing with that topic, Nietzsche is not primarly interested in the metaphysical disputes on truth, but rather in the effects that the "will to truth" has on the human being. In fact, he argues that the "faith in a value as such of truth" influenced Western culture and started the anthropological degeneration of the human type that characterizes European morality. To call into question (...) the value of truth is therefore necessary, if one wants to help mankind to find her way in the labyrinth of nihilism. -/- In this new addition to Nietzsche scholarship, Gori explores the origin and aim of the philosopher's late perspectival thought by merging the theoretical with the historical approach, with a special focus on the epistemological debate that influenced Nietzsche. As a result, the book provides a contextual reading of the issue that supports the idea that Nietzsche’s attitude in addressing the problem of truth is, in a broad sense, pragmatic. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel argumentation framework to support Issue-Based Information System style debates on design alternatives, by providing an automatic quantitative evaluation of the positions put forward. It also identifies several formal properties of the proposed quantitative argumentation framework and compares it with existing non-numerical abstract argumentation formalisms. Finally, the paper describes the integration of the proposed approach within the design Visual Understanding Environment software tool along with three case studies in engineering design. The case studies show the potential (...) for a competitive advantage of the proposed approach with respect to state-of-the-art engineering design methods. (shrink)

The paper provides both a description of conspiracy beliefs and an insight into their cultural significance. On one side, it highlights their specific formal features, on the other, and this constitutes its peculiarity in the recent literature on the topic, it considers them within the broader genre of general conceptual beliefs, whose main characteristics are weak methodology and logical structure, strong affective and dispositional constraints, epistemic closure and mauvaise foi, and whose main function is practical and self-representative (not epistemic). The (...) paper also claims that political theory and social sciences had some influence in legitimizing certain ideas and stereotypes that are exacerbated in conspiracy beliefs, while other te(le)ological conceptions, such as finalism and providence, may be an important source of ideas that turn out to be widely spread in contemporary criticism towards those same beliefs. (shrink)

The knowledge of truth, in Plato, is an experience that calls for conversion of the soul (μεταστροφή, περιστροφή). The basic feature of this experience consists in some sort of connection, which is constantly at work, between rational arguments and their non-rational conditions, briefly, lógos and páthos. How does this connection show up in Plato? Its crucial importance emerges many times at both narrative (récit) and theoretical level. In the three parts of my contribution, I show how logos-pathos intertwines with Plato's (...) notion of conversion considered as a double-sided phenomenon, as both "process" of moral education and "noetic event". (shrink)

The environment can elicit biological responses such as oxidative stress (OS) and inflammation as a consequence of chemical, physical, or psychological changes. As population studies are essential for establishing these environment-organism interactions, biomarkers of OS or inflammation are critical in formulating mechanistic hypotheses. By using examples of stress induced by various mechanisms, we focus on the biomarkers that have been used to assess OS and inflammation in these conditions. We discuss the difference between biomarkers that are the result of a (...) chemical reaction (such as lipid peroxides or oxidized proteins that are a result of the reaction of molecules with reactive oxygen species) and those that represent the biological response to stress, such as the transcription factor NRF2 or inflammation and inflammatory cytokines. The high-throughput and holistic approaches to biomarker discovery used extensively in large-scale molecular epidemiological exposome are also discussed in the context of human exposure to environmental stressors. We propose to consider the role of biomarkers as signs and to distinguish between signs that are just indicators of biological processes and proxies that one can interact with and modify the disease process. (shrink)

The paper investigates the epistemological and communicative competences the experts need to use and communicate evidence in the reasoning process leading to diagnosis. The diagnosis and diagnosis communication are presented as intertwined processes that should be jointly addressed in medical consultations, to empower patients’ compliance in illness management. The paper presents defeasible reasoning as specific to the diagnostic praxis, showing how this type of reasoning threatens effective diagnosis communication and entails that we should understand diagnostic evidence as defeasible as well. (...) It argues that metaphors might be effective communicative devices to let the patients understand the relevant defeasors in the diagnostic reasoning process, helping to improve effective diagnosis communication, and also encouraging a change in patients’ beliefs and attitudes on their own experience of illness and illness’ management. (shrink)

We present a logic of evidence that reduces agents’ epistemic idealisations by combining classical propositional logic with substructural modal logic for formulas in the scope of epistemic modalities. To this aim, we provide a neighborhood semantics of evidence, which provides a modal extension of Fine’s semantics for relevant propositional logic. Possible worlds semantics for classical propositional logic is then obtained by defining the set of possible worlds as a special subset of information states in Fine’s semantics. Finally, we prove that (...) evidence is a hyperintensional and non-prime notion in our logic, and provide a sound and complete axiomatisation of our evidence logic. (shrink)

This book presents the author’s personal historical perspective and conceptual analysis on symmetry and geometry. The author enlightens with modern views the historical process which led to the contemporary vision of space and symmetry that are used in theoretical physics and in particular in such abstract and advanced descriptions of the physical world as those provided by supergravity. The book is written intertwining storytelling and philosophical argumentation with some essential technical material. The author argues that symmetry and geometry are inextricably (...) entangled and their current meaning is the result of a long process of abstraction which was determined through history and can be understood within the analytic system of thought of western civilization that started with the Ancient Greeks. The evolution of geometry and symmetry theory in the last forty years has been deeply and constructively influenced by supersymmetry/supergravity and the allied constructions of strings and branes. Further advances in theoretical physics cannot be based simply on the Galilean method of interrogating nature and then formulating a testable theory to explain the observed phenomena. One ought to interrogate human thought, meaning frontier-line mathematics concerned with geometry and symmetry in order to find there the threads of so far unobserved correspondences, reinterpretations and renewed conceptions. (shrink)

Drawing upon multiple research fields, this volume explores the affinities between the work of Marx and Wittgenstein, arguing that although they belong to two different philosophical traditions, their thinking can offer benefits across both political philosophy and philosophy of language.

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 2, pp 209 - 232 In _Specters of Marx_, Derrida suggests that the most fundamental condition of phenomenality lies in the ambiguous status of the noema, defined as an intentional and non-real component of _Erlebnis_, neither “in” the world nor “in” consciousness. This “irreality” of the noematic correlate is conceived by Derrida as the origin of sense and experience. Already in his _Of Grammatology_, Derrida maintained that the difference between the appearing and the appearance, between (...) the world and the lived experience, is the condition of all other differences. Unfortunately, Derrida limits himself to a few self-evident remarks, without further elaborating.The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, to contextualize Derrida’s interpretation of the noema from a theoretical and historical perspective; on the other hand, to show its effects on the early moments of Derrida’s philosophy. The result will shed light on a neglected issue in the relationship between deconstruction and phenomenology. (shrink)

Reciprocal libertarianism is a version of left-wing libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian distribution of resources according to reciprocity. In this paper, I show that reciprocal libertarianism is a coherent and appealing view. I discuss how reciprocal libertarians can handle conflicts between self-ownership and reciprocity, and I show that reciprocal libertarianism can be realised in a framework of individual ownership of external resources or in a socialist scheme of common ownership (libertarian socialism). I also compare reciprocal libertarianism with left-libertarian (...) approaches: I argue that a reciprocity-sensitive version of left-libertarianism (reciprocal left-libertarianism) is coherent and morally superior to traditional left-libertarianism, on grounds of incorporating a distinctively solidaristic and recognition-oriented aspect of equality. The policy implications of reciprocal libertarianism will differ depending on which rights people can have over external resources, but all reciprocal libertarian views acknowledge the existence of social rights that people have as co-operators. (shrink)

This paper addresses the existence of Hopf bifurcations in a directed acyclic network of neurons, each of them being modeled by a Hindmarsh–Rose neuronal model. The bifurcation parameter is the small parameter corresponding to the ratio of time scales between the fast and the slow dynamics. We first prove that, under certain hypotheses, the single uncoupled neuron can undergo a Hopf bifurcation. Hopf bifurcation occurrences in a directed acyclic network of HR neurons are then discussed. Numerical simulations are carried out (...) to observe these bifurcations and to illustrate the theoretical results. (shrink)

This volume is devoted to Vermigli's philosophical writings, consisting of topics from commentaries with sections on: reason and revelation; body and soul; ...

The main aim of this paper is to act as a corrective to the comparatively deafening silence of egalitarian political philosophy’s response to the Great Recession. The paper thus provides an accessible analysis of a new strand of empirical research into the causes of the crisis. This new literature, which has largely gone unnoticed by the broader philosophical community, maintains that the main driver of financial instability is income and wealth inequality coupled with income stagnation at the bottom of the (...) income distribution. Building on this empirical research, the paper puts forward six connections between egalitarian political philosophy broadly construed, and the findings of the new literature it surveys. These connections are understood as operating in two directions: that is, they both provide reasons for egalitarians to play a larger role in debates concerning the moral aspects of financial instability, and also offer valuable insights to egalitarians to reorient their position concerning central facets of their arguments. (shrink)

In this article I rethink Rawls' conception of international economic justice, with a particular focus on international trade. I ground my normative argument on a different interpretation of the concepts of basic structure and of basic institution. I use the contemporary international trading system to illustrate my normative interpretation. I use the Law of Peoples to discuss the Rawlsian concept of basic structure. I contest Samuel Freeman's interpretation of this concept as one that pertains exclusively to the domestic realm. As (...) a reply, I work out an interpretation of basic institutions valid for both the national and international context. I base my understanding on the impact and the form of membership that characterize basic institutions. Both properties are compatible with an extension of the concept of a basic institution to the international domain. I then show how the World Trade Organization (WTO) system can be compared to a domestic basic institution. I analyse the decisional setting that surrounds the choice of joining the WTO. I conclude that no real alternative exists. Hence, WTO membership is not to be considered a completely free policy choice. I also state that the new system is witnessing a strong expansion of the areas subject to trade governance. Such expansion is responsible for the growing impact that international trade has on domestic institutions and hence on people. Finally, I use my analysis of contemporary international trading relations to test Rawls' position in the Law of Peoples. I conclude that although Rawls' principles for fair trade and international cooperation can regulate GATT-style international trade, they are not proficient in assessing the new characteristics of international trade. (shrink)