A groundbreaking classic of contemporary philosophy for the first time in English translation Between 1961 and 1970, Emanuele Severino was subjected to a thorough investigation by the Vatican Inquisition. The “fundamental incompatibility” identified between his thought and Christian doctrine ejected him from his position as Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University in Milan. The Essence of Nihilism, published in 1972, was the first book to follow his expulsion, and it established Severino’s preeminent position within the the constellation (...) of contemporary philosophy. In this groundbreaking and classic book—now for the first time available in English—Severino reinterprets the history of Western philosophy as the unfolding of “the greatest folly,” that is, of the belief that “things come out of nothing and fall back into nothing.” According to Severino, such a typically Western understanding of reality has resulted in a conviction that there is a radical “nothingness” to existence. In turn, this justifies the treatment of the world as an object of exploitation, degradation and destruction. To move beyond Western nihilism, suggests Severino, we must first of all “return to Parmenides.” Joining forces with the most venerable of Greek philosophers, Severino confutes nihilism’s “path of night”, and develops a new philosophy grounded on the principle of the eternity of reality and of every single existent thing. (shrink)

Il percorso spirituale, culturale e politico di Ernesto Balducci difficilmente puň essere colto nel suo significato di fondo senza considerare il tema delle sue ‘radici' da un punto di vista biografico ed esistenziale. Nella ‘montagna incantata' dell'Amiata, terra di minatori sospesa tra miseria e povertÀ, si ritrovano infatti le fonti sorgive della sua ispirazione. Quello di Balducci č un ‘pensiero di confine' costruito all'insegna della fedeltÀ all'‘asse evangelico' e, contemporaneamente, di una radicale istanza di laicitÀ. Nel tempo della mondializzazione e (...) dell'interdipendenza dei destini umani il suo principio-speranza, tributario del pensiero utopico di Ernst Bloch e con forti assonanze con impostazioni come quelle di Dietrich Bonhoeffer e Simone Weil, assume una connotazione globale in cui le memorie dell'antico sogno di giustizia e libertÀ del villaggio delle origini si fondono con le inedite aspirazioni della civiltÀ planetaria. (shrink)

Annotated logics were introduced by V.S. Subrahmanian as logical foundations for computer programming. One of the difficulties of these systems from the logical point of view is that they are not structural, i.e., their consequence relations are not closed under substitutions. In this paper we give systems of annotated logics that are equivalent to those of Subrahmanian in the sense that everything provable in one type of system has a translation that is provable in the other. Moreover these new systems (...) are structural. We prove that these systems are weakly congruential, namely, they have an infinite system of congruence 1-formulas. Moreover, we prove that an annotated logic is algebraizable (i.e., it has a finite system of congruence formulas,) if and only if the lattice of annotation constants is finite. (shrink)

Within Germany, Carl Schmitt's status as a political thinker is on a par with Machiavelli and Hobbes. With the rise in neo-conservatism and authoritarian liberalism in less developed countries such as Chile and Singapore, Renato Christi believes Schmitt's theories will become of considerable importance. Nazi Third Reich. His political theories provide an insight into the nature of Conservatism. well as extrapolate possibilities for the future.

A filosofia é privativa da cultura ocidental ou é uma criação do pensamento humano em geral? As culturas africanas e afrodiaspóricas são relevantes para o entendimento da filosofia? Existe filosofia africana e/ou filosofia afro-brasileira? Em caso afirmativo, como elas podem contribuir para o entendimento das relações étnico-raciais? Como o(a) professor(a) pode incluir a filosofia africana e a afrodiaspórica no currículo de Filosofia do ensino médio? Como formar um(a) professor(a) de Filosofia capaz de fazer essa conexão? Estas são algumas das questões (...) que o professor Renato Noguera discute nesta obra, que contém roteiros de reflexão, referências a autores fundamentais e propostas curriculares práticas. (shrink)

Uma concepção de cosmopolitismo, de base eurocêntrica, é questionada por pensadores como K. A. Appiah, Walter Mignolo, Silviano Santiago entre outros, para buscar possíveis ressemantizações do termo no contexto contemporâneo, marcado pela globalização, pelo multiculturalismo e pela expansão das novas tecnologias de comunicação. Considerando esse confronto de noções de cosmopolitismo, indaga-se como se deu a interpretação do Brasil no início do século XX, quando recrudesceram as tensões entre cosmopolitismo e nacionalismo. Busca-se, por outro lado, confrontar tais interpretações com as que (...) surgem no início do século XXI, quando a nação vai deixando de ser o centro de um sistema de significação, em tempo heterogêneo e de globalização, em que se pode falar em “cosmopolitismo do pobre” (cosmopolitismo do subalterno), como formulou Silviano Santiago. (shrink)

I present in this note an alternative answer to the princesses' earring problem, found in the first chapter of Cezar Augusto Mortari's book "Introdução à Lógica”.

Neste artigo, examino a duplicidade de sentidos que a tese pluralista “os seres são múltiplos” ou “se há múltiplos seres” comporta: pode significar uma multiplicade numérica, isto é: a tese de que há mais de uma coisa no mundo, assim como pode significar que uma mesma coisa possui mais de um atributo. Incialmente, argumento que Sócrates estava consciente desta ambiguidade, pois as duas compreensões de pluralismo representam perspectivas complementares de uma mesma posição filosófica. Segundo minha interpretação, o reconhecimento dessa ambiguidade (...) permite melhor entender a crítica de Sócrates ao monismo eleático, sua defesa da Teoria das Ideias e sua distinção entre Formas transcendentes e propriedades imanentes. Estes dois sentidos de multiplicidade farão ainda parte da estratégia utilizada por Parmênides na sua contra-argumentação à solução socrática ao paradoxo de Zenão. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend that the historiographical category of eclecticism is a correct way to describe the epistemology and the exegetical activity of the Anonymous commentator on Plato’s Theaetetus. In addition, I show that the interpretation of the platonic philosophy presented in this text not only presupposes an eclectic philosophical attitude, but also offers a conscious defense of a positive and philosophically relevant form of eclecticism. By eclecticism, I understand a method of inquiry based on the deliberate use of (...) hypotheses and arguments from different philosophical traditions. My claim is that Anon. intends to lay ground of his way of doing philosophy by attributing it to Plato and the platonic tradition. In doing so, Anon. provides us with a positive understanding of eclecticism as a legitimate methodology of philosophical investigation. (shrink)

Philosophical problems about the part-whole relation have been discussed throughout the history of philosophy, at least since Plato and Aristotle. In contemporary philosophy, the understanding of these issues has benefited from the formal tools of Classical Extensional Mereology. This paper aims is to defend mereological restrictivism against some constraints imposed by the vagueness argument. To achieve this, the paper is divided into three parts. In the first, I introduce the special composition question (hereafter SCQ) as formulated by [Van Inwagen, 1990] (...) and briefly present the three sets of theories that proffer answers to it. In the second part, I focus on the vagueness argument, that was presented by [Lewis, 1986, ] and [Sider, 2007, ] to defend mereological universalism. In the third section, I introduce the theory of natural properties by David Lewis. From this theory, I propose a new mereological operation labeled as natural fusion. The purpose of this operation is to falsify one of the premises of the vagueness argument. Then, I discuss some examples and counter-examples to natural fusion. (shrink)

Partindo da ideia de Orfmilá, a filosofia é autoconhecimento, o propósito é a impressão de dois sentidos: ciência da cabeça e cartografia dos caminhos. O que podemos fazer é uma incursão em arranjos matemáticos sobre o Odu, analisando os elementos que constituem a cabeça e como encruzilhados dos caminhos. A base teórica está situada nos escritos de filósofas nigerianas, principalmente Sophie Oluwole. Palavras-chave: Orunmilá; filosofia; autoconhecimento; ori; caminhos.

Abstract. This paper examines two views of free will. It looks first at the fourteenth-century religious insights of John Duns Scotus, one of history's seminal thinkers about free will. It then examines what current neuroscience tells us about free will. Finally, it summarizes the past and present views and concludes by answering two questions: Does free will refer to an absence of external constraint, or does it refer to a human ability to decide in an acausal manner?

This article is a belated contribution to a Common Knowledge symposium on the “unanticipated conceptual practice” of “anthropological philosophy.” The basic argument is that the groundwork for this emerging approach, associated foremost with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's book Métaphysiques cannibales of 2009, was laid in the 1970s by the controversial French anthropologists Pierre and Hélène Clastres. It is argued that the Clastres took the intellectual practices of Guarani shamans and prophets as analogous to the those of ancient Greek philosophers but (...) also as sharply critical of the principles that underlay early Western metaphysics. (shrink)

"A Course on Aesthetics" offers a broad perspective of current scholarship in aesthetics without favouring any one particular school, discipline, or ideology. Written in an elegant and clear style, Barilli's text explores the basic inherent structures of human thought about the classification and evaluation of the arts. Barilli avoids any binding or dogmatic conclusions about artistic assessment in his consideration of both historical and more current art forms such as video and performance art. In doing so, he presents a contemporary (...) account of a scholarly concern. In "A Course on Aesthetics", Barilli examines the aesthetic experience in general, the passage from aesthetics to art, the "user" of art, and the critic. In his brilliant analyses of the phenomenology of various forms of art - from literature to music, from painting to art, from theatre to television - he discusses the relationship between representation and expression, touching on many of the major questions debated in contemporary criticism. A bibliography provides direction for further study of the history of aesthetics as a discipline. Renato Barilli has published numerous books in Italian on poetics, cultural theory, and contemporary art, including "Culturologia e Fenomenologia Degli Stili", L'Arte Contemporanea", and "Il Ciclo Del Postmoderno". The University of Minnesota Press has also published a translation of his "Rhetoric". Karen Pinkus is translator of Giorgio Agamben's "Language and Death". (shrink)