This paper examines the concept of the world elaborated by Heidegger in the early Freiburg lecture courses of the years 1919 to 1923, in which he proposes a renewed conception of phenomenology through a comparison with Husserlian phenomenology. First, I show that although the theme of the lifeworld became central only in late Husserlian works, especially in _The Crisis of European Sciences_, Husserl began to deal with this concept before 1920, anticipating some fundamental issues of the _Crisis_, as it results (...) from the lectures of 1919 on _Natur und Geist_. Husserl had addressed the concept of the world already in the lectures of 1910/11, _The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_, and, subsequently, in the second book of _Ideas_, which was published posthumously, but which was known to the young Heidegger. Then, I discuss the way in which Heidegger revisited the issue of the world in the early Freiburg lecture courses by means of a critique of Husserl’s analysis, focusing on perceptual experience as “environmental experience” and on the “world-character” of life. Particular emphasis is placed on the distinction between “environing-world,” “with-world,” and “self-world,” which Heidegger introduces in the lectures of 1919–1920. Finally, I point out that the Heideggerian rethinking of the concept of lifeworld is closely connected to the recognition of the immanent historicity of life, while Husserl only later takes into account the historicity of the lifeworld. (shrink)

The paper analyses the concept of sensibility from the philosophical perspective of Levinas, with particular reference to Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, wherein he develops a kind of “transcendental aesthetics”, namely a conception of sensibility quite different from that which is found in previous work. Through a comparison with Husserl’s analysis of temporality, Levinas proposes a notion of temporality as “diachrony”, placing the sensibility beyond time, in a past that was never present – only in this way the subject (...) is able to feel the responsibility for the “other”. Levinas also describes the self as a subjectivity “of flesh and blood”, which is affected by the other and therefore characterized by passivity – more passive than the “passive synthesis” mentioned by Husserl – and vulnerability. (shrink)

The article analyzes Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self and his concept of capable man, with particular reference to Oneself as Another and other late writings, where he develops a conception of the dialectic between self and other through a comparison with Husserl’s and Levinas’s perspectives. Ricoeur’s focus is on the acting subject, so that vulnerability is conceived with reference to the capabilities of the self. But since Ricoeur’s conception involves the recognition of the vulnerability of the other, which, however, occurs (...) through mediation, his hermeneutics of the self could be developed into a hermeneutics of otherness that also considers the immediacy of the ethical call of the other. (shrink)

In this essay I examine the concept of the “event” in Heideggerian thought, with particular reference to the first volume of the Black Notebooks, which is contemporaneous with Contributions to Philosophy and Notes III from the fourth volume. At issue are the concepts of “event”, “essential unfolding”, and “expropriation”, which assume considerable importance in the mid-1930s. Through his treatment of the event, Heidegger reinterprets being as an alterity with respect to beings and to Dasein, in that being withdraws and conceals (...) itself. Furthermore, I show a shift in Heidegger’s “disposition” that occurs in Notes III, from an “attunement” that stresses decision to a way of thinking in terms of “releasing” and “thanking.” In these writings, Heidegger already makes use of the concept of “releasement”, which is usually associated with a later stage of his thought. (shrink)

This book is about the relationship between different concepts of freedom and happiness. The book's authors distinguish three concepts for which an empirical measure exists: opportunity to choose, capability to choose, and autonomy to choose. They also provide a comprehensive account of the relationship between freedom and well-being by comparing channels through which freedoms affect quality of life. The book also explores whether the different conceptions of freedom complement or replace each other in the determination of the level of well-being. (...) In so doing, the authors make freedoms a tool for policy making and are able to say which conception is the most effective for well-being, as circumstances change. The results have implications for a justification of a free society: maximizing freedoms is good for its favorable consequences upon individual well-being, a fundamental value for the judgment of human advantage. (shrink)

What is freedom? Can we measure it? Does it affect policy? This book develops an original measure of freedom called 'Autonomy Freedom', consistent with J. S. Mill's view of autonomy, and applies it to issues in policy and political design. The work pursues three aims. First, it extends classical liberalism beyond exclusive reliance on negative freedom so as to take autonomous behavior explicitly into account. Second, it grounds on firm conceptual foundations a new standard in the measurement of freedom that (...) can be fruitfully coupled with existing gauges. Third, it shows empirically that individual preferences for redistribution and cross-country differences in welfare spending in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries are driven by the degree of 'autonomy freedom' that individuals enjoy. By means of an interdisciplinary approach and a sophisticated econometric methodology, the book takes an explicit stand in defense of freedom and sets the basis for a liberalism based upon people's actions and institutions. (shrink)

The book proposes an analysis of Rousseau's political philosophy, in the light of direct democracy proposals of our day. Is the model proposed in the "Social Contract" applicable in the age of virtual reality, the "network" and electronic devices within everyone's reach? It is a strictly technical investigation of the philosophical presuppositions of direct democracy... The volume contains an analytical summary of Rousseau's political works and a dictionary of political and philosophical terms--Translated from publisher's description.

This paper introduces considerations about constraints in the construction of measures of an agent's freedom. It starts with motivating the exercise from both the philosophical and the informational point of view. Then it presents two rankings of opportunity sets based on information about the extent of options and the constraints that a decision maker faces. The first ranking measures freedom as variety of choice; the second as non-restrictedness in choice.

This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philologist by training, an author of scholarly studies on the nineteenth-century poet Leopardi, and a Marxist by conviction. With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism. Whereas the (...) philosophical legacy of the later Engels has been decried by most prominent Marxists since the 1920s, Timpanaro eloquently defends its essential purpose and relevance, by unfashionably re-emphasising the permanent weight of nature within history. In doing so, he returns to the heritage of Lucretius and Leopardi, and argues for a more consistent materialism that is at once more pessimistic and more hedonistic than any other contemporary version of Marxism. Timpanaro emphasises the insuperable limits of frailty and mortality as unalterable conditions of society whose transformation is the goal of revolutionary socialism. Timpanaro vigorously attacks what he regards as the widespread entente between a diluted Marxism and a fashionable idealism in the west, whether in the form of an “existentialist” or a “structuralist” union of the two. The aversion of the former to the work of Darwin and Engels receives a spirited refutation, no less than the indulgence of the latter towards the work of Saussure or Levi-Strauss. A special introduction written for this English edition deals with the phenomenon of the recent revival of “vulgar materialism” in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the fields of psychology and anthropology, and its relationship to racism. On Materialism will be one of the central focuses of cultural and intellectual controversy within and beyond Marxism in the next decade. (shrink)

According to deontic justice theory, individuals often feel principled moral obligations to uphold norms of justice. That is, standards of justice can be valued for their own sake, even apart from serving self-interested goals. While a growing body of evidence in business ethics supports the notion of deontic justice, skepticism remains. This hesitation results, at least in part, from the absence of a coherent framework for explaining how individuals produce and experience deontic justice. To address this need, we argue that (...) a compelling, yet still missing, step is to gain further understanding into the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms of deontic justice. Here, we advance a theoretical model that disentangles three key processes of deontic justice: The use of justice rules to assess events, cognitive empathy, and affective empathy. Together with reviewing neural systems supporting these processes, broader implications of our model for business ethics scholarship are discussed. (shrink)

Questo utile ed interessante volume – frutto di una tesi in Filologia bizantina elaborata presso l'Università Cattolica di Milano sotto la guida di C. M. Mazzucchi – offre l'editio princeps della Parafrasi Ambrosiana allo Strategicon di Maurizio, un manuale di tattica militare fra i più significativi della letteratura greca, composto verisimilmente nell'ultima decade del VI secolo ovvero agli inizi del VI; la parafrasi, a sua volta, è testimoniata dal codice Ambrosianus B 119 sup. = gr. 139 (A), una importantissima raccolta (...) di tattici greci le cui caratteristiche paleografiche rinviano agli anni immediatamente successivi alla metà del X secolo; di più, l'esame interno del manoscritto permette di corroborare e precisare questa deduzione, riportandoci con tutta probabilità all'ambiente di corte ed ad una delle personalità più significative e potenti di quegli anni, Basilio παϱαϰοιμώμενος, figlio naturale di Romano Lecapeno e fratellastro dell'imperatrice Elena, la consorte di Costantino VII Porfirogenito: ne sono prova, fra l'altro, le eccezionali caratteristiche librarie e la presenza di un dizionario nautico – i cosiddetti Naumachica di Basilio – preceduto da esametri e da un proemio espressamente dedicati al Παϱαϰοιμώμενος, dati che sembrano riportarci ai preparativi per una spedizione navale per Creta che già negli anni 958–959 si andava allestendo. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore an important concept in the work of the later Rawls: the idea of the reasonable. While the concept has its roots in both Aristotle and Kant, Rawls develops a unique account of the reasonable in the light of his theory of political liberalism. The paper includes Rawlsian responses to the practical challenges of radical democrats on the one hand, and epistemological challenges to the reasonable on the other. It concludes that Rawls’s account of the reasonable (...) helps to bridge the gap between liberal theory and democratic practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a pluralistic framework for disagreement and I develop a strategy to account for the varieties of disagreement on the basis of the varieties of the truth across different domains of discourse. Truth-pluralism is thus sufficient for delivering pluralism about disagreement—that is, diaphonic pluralism.

In the paper we argue that truth-relativism is potentially hostage to a problem of exhibiting witnesses of its own truth. The problem for the relativist stems from acceptance of a trumping principle according to which there is a dependency between ascriptions of truth of an utterance and ascriptions of truth to other ascriptions of truth of that utterance. We argue that such a dependency indeed holds in the case of future contingents and the case of epistemic modals and that, consequently, (...) the relativist about these domains cannot exhibit witnesses to his relativism. In the appendix we provide some results on the relation between trumping and multi-order relativism. (shrink)

_Rawls: An Introduction_ is a uniquely comprehensive introduction to the work of the American philosopher John Rawls, who transformed contemporary political philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s, political philosophy seemed to have reached a dead end characterized by a loose predominance of utilitarian theses. Rawls’s conception of liberalism placed civil liberties and social justice at its core, and his extraordinary influence has only been confirmed by the extent of the criticism he has provoked. The book is divided into three parts (...) which correspond to Rawls’s three major books. The first concentrates on _A Theory of Justice_ and examines the way in which Rawls’s general vision of social justice is presented. Maffettone also includes here a discussion of some of the most important critiques of Rawls. The second part of the book highlights _Political Liberalism_, with a chapter dedicated to the “passage” from _Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism_. Finally, the third part provides a discussion of _The Law of Peoples_. This work is acomprehensive examination of these three major texts by a renowned Rawls scholar and will appeal to all philosophers and social scientists for whom it is essential to understand the key theories of this most influential of political philosophers. (shrink)

Archibald Pitcairne’s medical writings are inspired by Newton’s Principia mathematica, as the Scottish physician assumed Newtonian physics as a model for scientific inquiry that should be applied to other branches of natural philosophy, including physiology and pathology. The ideal of a comprehensive mathematical science was very appealing to late seventeenth-century intellectuals, including physicians. This essay focuses on how Pitcairne tried to implement these ideas. In particular, I argue that Pitcairne’s medical thinking is based on three philosophical assumptions: first, a methodological (...) assumption, for which medical knowledge should be sought in the form of a deductive system; second, an epistemological assumption, that is, that our knowledge of physiological processes is sound only when we reduce them to a set of mathematical laws; and, third, an ontological assumption that identifies blood as the substance on which animal life most directly depends. I also suggest that such ideas should be studied against the backdrop of Pitcairne’s general mindset, including his personal sympathy for political conservativism. I further argue that his insistence on the reduction of natural processes to mathematical relations and his search for the universal order of nature also connect to his religious and political ideals. (shrink)

The hydrodynamical formalism for the quantum theory of a nonrelativistic particle is considered, together with a reformulation of it which makes use of the methods of kinetic theory and is based on the existence of the Wigner phase-space distribution. It is argued that this reformulation provides strong evidence in favor of the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it is suggested that this latter could be better understood as an almost classical statistical theory. Moreover, it is shown how, within this (...) context, the Wigner and the Margenau-Hill functions are not equivalent, and that the latter is essentially unsatisfactory, as well as the associated symmetrization rule. Arguments in favor of a stochastic picture of the phenomena at the microscopic level are also presented. (shrink)

The full significance of phenomenological experience was one of Pasolini's favourite subjects, declined in terms of 'Reality as Language'. Another semiotic theme of Pasolini as a cinema theorist, was the idea of individual existence as a sequence shot, to which the editing operation constituted by death gives order and sense. The article, based onFabbri, Peirce and Ricœur, suggests an interpretation of that idea, in the direction of the narrative constitution of personal identity – as an effect of final subjectivity.

Describing the will and the extent of its causal power over human actions, Joseph Priestley famously compared the mind to a stone, as both are subject to deterministic laws: “Though an inclination...

In Plat. Prot. 349d2-351b2, first Socrates leads Protagoras to acknowledge that wisdom and courage are the same thing, then Protagoras accuses him of having put in his mouth words that he never said. Starting from a new reconstruction of the logic of Socrates’ demonstration, I will show how this is more complex, sophistic, and corresponding to Protagoras’ accusation than what is usually believed.