Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of troops have been deployed in peacekeeping missions all around the world. The mixed success and high-profile failures of several missions have provided peacekeepers and scholars with a wealth of experience from which to generate knowledge and understand key lessons. In this article I use the Rwandan case to explore the issue of the use of force to protect unarmed civilians that have become the target of violence. In particular, I focus on the (...) moral responsibilities implied in such operations. I contend that in order for peacekeepers to be effective, they need to subscribe to, and be motivated by a peacekeeper ethos. The core element of this ethos is the protection of human life. Those peacekeepers who, through experience and education, internalize this ethos will be the best prepared for the difficult task they face. This article emphasizes the importance of sharpening moral autonomy among peacekeepers, in order to provide them with the skills they need to be more effective in saving lives. To illustrate this point, I analyze the slaughter of more than 2000 refugees at the ETO school in Kigali, Rwanda; a UN site protected by Belgian peacekeepers in 1994. (shrink)

Bringing together contributors from philosophy, international relations, security studies, and strategic studies, New Wars and New Soldiers offers a truly interdisciplinary analysis reflective of the nature of modern warfare. This comprehensive approach allows the reader to see the broad scope of modern military ethics, and to understand the numerous questions about modern conflict that require critical scrutiny. Aimed at both military and academic audiences, this paperback will be of significant interest to researchers and students in philosophy, sociology, military and strategic (...) studies, international relations, politics, and security studies, acting as an ideal course text or as supplementary reading. (shrink)

Using quantitative methods, we investigate the role of logic in analytic philosophy from 1941 to 2010. In particular, a corpus of five journals publishing analytic philosophy is assessed and evaluated against three main criteria: the presence of logic, its role and level of technical sophistication. The analysis reveals that logic is not present at all in nearly three-quarters of the corpus, the instrumental role of logic prevails over the non-instrumental ones, and the level of technical sophistication increases in time, although (...) it remains relatively low. These results are used to challenge the view, widespread among analytic philosophers and labeled here “prevailing view”, that logic is a widely used and highly sophisticated method to analyze philosophical problems. (shrink)

According to McDowell, in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind the myth of Jones has the purpose of completing the account of experience that Sellars needs to argue against traditional empiricism. In particular, on McDowell's view the myth of Jones should explain how to conceive of non-inferentially knowable experiences as containing propositional claims. This article argues that the myth of Jones does not succeed in providing such an account, especially on McDowell's own terms: assuming McDowell's epistemological distinction between inferential and (...) non-inferential knowledge, it turns out that in Sellars' thought experiment perceptual experiences can contain propositional claims only at the price of being known inferentially rather than non-inferentially. Therefore McDowell's Sellars' attack fails against traditional empiricism. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with Wittgenstein’s attitudes towards various forms of naturalism. On the one hand, Wittgenstein’s antinaturalism is based on the idea that there is a deep divide between science and philosophy. The paper argues that such a methodological claim cannot be criticized by resorting to Quine’s attack to analyticity, for the Wittgensteinian notion of a grammatical rule is different from the Carnapian notion of an analytical proposition. Though, at the same time, the paper underlines that Wittgenstein’s conception of (...) grammar is the core of the so-called “linguistic doctrine of necessity”, which has been strongly criticized by Kripke. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s naturalism is based on notions such as “form of life” and “general facts of nature”. The paper shows that such a view is motivated by antifoundationalist and non intellectualistic biases, and is mainly characterized by a peculiar attention to the normative dimension of human behaviour and activities. (shrink)

SummaryIn the 1780s the anatomist Vincenzo Malacarne discussed the possibility of testing experimentally whether experience can induce significant changes in the brain. Malacarne imagined taking two littermate animals and giving intensive training to one while the other received none, then dissecting their brains to see whether the trained animal had more folds in the cerebellum than the untrained one. This experimental design somewhat anticipated one used 180 years later by Mark R. Rosenzweig at the University of California, Berkeley. This paper (...) explores some methodological aspects of the case study just outlined by pointing out that our grounds for being interested in it are neither merely neuroscientific (for, strictly speaking, Malacarne's proposal was false) nor narrowly historical (for there is no causal chain linking Malacarne's ideas to Rosenzweig's experiment). Rather, the really interesting point here is to what extent Malacarne's ideas are similar to Rosenzweig's, a point that we can better investigate by employing certain conceptual tools borrowed typically (but not exclusively) from (a certain kind of) philosophy. If we do not handle the analogy with care, we run the risk of ‘discovering’ nothing but void platitudes or anachronistically misleading common features. (shrink)

The study of evil and the different forms in which it manifests itself has long been the interest of a significant number of scholars, mainly philosophers and theologians. Yet, following the libera...

There is a rather widespread consensus, among historians of philosophy, concerning the decline of Wittgenstein amid recent analytic philosophy. However, the exact import of such a decline,...

The paper is concerned with Wittgenstein’s attitudes towards various forms of naturalism. On the one hand, Wittgenstein’s anti-naturalism is based on the idea that there is a deep divide between science and philosophy. The paper argues that such a methodological claim cannot be criticized by resorting to Quine’s attack to analyticity, for the Wittgensteinian notion of a grammatical rule is different from the Carnapian notion of an analytical proposition. Though, at the same time, the paper underlines that Wittgenstein’s conception of (...) grammar is the core of the so-called “linguistic doctrine of necessity”, which has been strongly criticized by Kripke. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s naturalism is based on notions such as “form of life” and “general facts of nature”. The paper shows that such a view is motivated by anti-foundationalist and non intellectualistic biases, and is mainly characterized by a peculiar attention to the normative dimension of human behaviour and activities. (shrink)

The essays in this book are intended to inform leaders, and the general public, about the challenges of ethical decision making, the application of the law of war, and the important role of spirituality. Aspects of Leadership will educate readers and generate important questions that leaders should ask themselves, encouraging them to reflect upon their pivotal roles in these three areas"--Back cover.

The article investigates what happens when philosophy meets and begins to establish connections with two formal research methods such as game theory and network science. We use citation analysis to identify, among the articles published in Synthese and Philosophy of Science between 1985 and 2021, those that cite the specialistic literature in game theory and network science. Then, we investigate the structure of the two corpora thus identified by bibliographic coupling and divide them into clusters of related papers by automatic (...) community detection. Lastly, we construct by the same bibliometric techniques a reference map of philosophy, on which we overlay our corpora to map the diffusion of game theory and network science in the various sub-areas of recent philosophy. Three main results derive from this study. Philosophers are interested not only in using and investigating game theory as a formal method belonging to applied mathematics and sharing many relevant features with social choice theory, but also in considering its applications in more empirically oriented disciplines such as social psychology, cognitive science, or biology. Philosophers focus on networks in two research contexts and in two different ways: in the debate on causality and scientific explanation, they consider the results of network science; in social epistemology, they employ network science as a formal tool. In the reference map, logic—whose use in philosophy dates back to a much earlier period—is distributed in a more uniform way than recently encountered disciplines such as game theory and network science. We conclude by discussing some methodological limitations of our bibliometric approach, especially with reference to the problem of field delineation. (shrink)

Review of the book "Analytic Philosophy and the Later Wittgensteinian Tradition" by Paolo Tripodi.

In this paper, I investigate the relations between the notion of the I and the conception of World history in Hegel’s philosophy. First, I address Hegel’s account of the I by reconstructing its phenomenological and logical development from consciousness to self-consciousness through recognition with the other and arguing that the project of the Philosophy of Right is normative, as it provides an account of the logical process of affirmation of the I as the normative source of the realm of objective (...) spirit. I then argue for an account of World history as the self-conscious development and liberation of the I in time and objectivity, and I consider Hegel’s philosophy of history in light of the Philosophy of Right as the historical emergence of the I through the forms of objective spirit in history. Finally, I focus on two of the allegedly most problematic issues related to Hegel’s conception of World history: the nature and very possibility of an ‘intersubjective consciousness’ and the notion of ‘World spirit’. I conclude by outlining how the conception of World history, if reconstructed in light of Hegel’s conception of the I, can have previously unnoticed political implications. (shrink)

Kant elaborated his dynamical theory of matter in two quite different systematic accounts, the first in the Monadologia physica, the second in the Dynamics chapter of the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft. In this paper I investigate the transition from the monadological to the “continuum” dynamical theory of matter, whose exact timing and motives are not explicitly clarified in Kant’s writings. I locate Kant’s turn around the middle 1760s, presenting Kant’s abandonment of his own physical monadology as a way out of (...) controversies about monads and materialism which characterized the German intellectual world of his time. Among the results of this crucial modification in matter theory stands out the new interpretation of Newtonian forces in the critical writings, which is not only relevant for Kant’s account of physics, but also plays a major exemplary role for his critical theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Pierre de Fermat is known as the inventor of modern number theory. He invented–improved many methods useful in this discipline. Fermat often claimed to have proved his most difficult theorems thanks to a method of his own invention: the infinite descent. He wrote of numerous applications of this procedure. Unfortunately, he left only one almost complete demonstration and an outline of another demonstration. The outline concerns the theorem that every prime number of the form 4n + 1 is the sum (...) of two squares. In this paper, we analyse a recent proof of this theorem. It is interesting because: it follows all the elements of which Fermat wrote in his outline; it represents a good introduction to all logical nuances and mathematical variants concerning this method of which Fermat spoke. The assertions by Fermat will also be framed inside their historical context. Therefore, the aims of this paper are related to the history of mathematics and to the logic of proof-methods. (shrink)

Aristotle created logic and developed it to a level of great sophistication. There was nothing there before; and it took more than two millennia for something better to come around. The astonishment experienced by readers of the Prior Analytics, the most important of Aristotle's works that present the discipline, is comparable to that of an explorer discovering a cathedral in a desert. This article explains and evaluates some of Aristotle's views about propositions and syllogisms. The most important omission is the (...) difficult subject of syllogisms involving modalities. Aristotle distinguishes two relations of opposition that can obtain between propositions with the same subject- and predicate-expressions: contrariety and contradiction. In every canonical syllogism, one term is common to the two premises: it is called “middle term,” or simply “middle.” The remaining two terms of the premises are the only ones occurring in the conclusion: they are called “extreme terms,” or simply “extremes.”. (shrink)

In the present paper we discuss a recent suggestion of Schroeder-Heister concerning the possibility of defining an intensional notion of harmony using isomorphism in second-order propositional logic. The latter is not an absolute notion, but its definition is relative to the choice of criteria for identity of proofs. In the paper, it is argued that in order to attain a satisfactory account of harmony, one has to consider a notion of identity stronger than the usual one (based on β- and (...) η-conversions) that the authors have investigated in recent work. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to understand an important passage in the history of the sciences of the psyche: starting from the psychiatric problematization — and the consequent emergence — of the concept and the object called ‘sexuality’ in the second half of the 19th century, it attempts to show a series of continuities and discontinuities between this kind of reasoning and the birth of psychoanalysis in the first years of the 20th century. The particular focus is therefore directed (...) on two texts: Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The argument runs along three intertwined axes: (1) an historico-epistemological analysis of the concepts and their transformations in the field of the science of sexuality; (2) an analysis of the power relationships between patients and physicians; and (3) an account of the psychiatric technologies of the self that have as an effect the emergence of new forms of ‘objective’ knowledge of the subject. The broader goal is to trace a map of the simultaneous and correlate coming into being and transformations both of new forms of objects and of new forms of subjects through the mediation of scientific concepts and techniques. (shrink)

_An examination of the philosophical notion of sacrifice from Kant to Nietzsche._.

Christ as symbol in Kant¿s religion -- Hegel's conception of God -- The reality of religion in Hegel's idealist metaphysics -- Hegel's version of the ontological argument for the existence of God -- The trinity and the I -- The death of God and recognition of the self -- Beyond subjectivism -- The relevance of Hegel's philosophy of religion today.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to shed some light on the early Stoics' practice of managing platonic suggestions to construct their epistemology. Instances of such a practice, which scholars have recently focussed on, are the Stoic reassessment of the account of phantasia Plato offers in the Sophist and the image of the wax block as discussed in the Theaetetus. In this work I put forward a comparison between the simile of the soul-book, as presented by Socrates in (...) the Philebus (39a1-c2), and the Stoic image of the soul as a sheet in which conceptions are inscribed. I try to show that a far-reaching investigation of the relationship between Plato and early Stoic epistemology should take such a comparison into due account. In section one, I go into the details of the comparison and argue that Plato's perceptual judgment (this is how I translate the term doxa as it is used in the relevant section of the Philebus) is compatible with Stoic phantasia. In section two, I try to show that the theorisation of assent enable the Stoics to reply to an objection Aristotle made to Plato's definition of phantasia as a mixture of perception and judgment. (shrink)

The version of the paradox of false judgement examined at Tht. 188c10–189b9 relies on the assumption that to judge falsehoods is to judge the things which are not. The presentation of the argument displays several syntactic ambiguities: at several points it allows the reader to adopt different syntactic connections between the components of sentences. For instance, when Socrates says that in a false judgement the cognizer is “he who judges the things which are not about anything whatsoever” (188d3–4), how should (...) the clause “about anything whatsoever” be construed? In common with “he who judges” and “the things which are not” (in which case the cognizer would be “he who judges about anything whatsoever the things which are not about it”), or exclusively with “he who judges” (in which case the cognizer would be “he who judges about anything whatsoever the things which are not”)? The most plausible answer is that both construals are envisaged. Accordingly, the argument has two branches corresponding to these two alternative construals. In particular, it attempts to show that in both cases the cognizer will address what does not exist – an impossibility. The idea that a false judgement is concerned with what is not about its reference has a clear echo in the Sophist. The way in which the problem is handled in the Theaetetus provides a hint that can help to find a solution for the hotly debated issue of the interpretation of the Sophist’s account of false statement. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct a hypothetical genealogy of the U.S. national motto “in God we Trust” by comparing the juridical and theological concept of “depositum”. According to Philo of Alexandria, the deposit was the most sacred institutional act of ancient social life, because it had both a religious and a sociological function. According to the Epistulae to Timothy the term ‘deposit’ defined the legacy of the Christian faith of which the disciple of St. Paul was entrusted. (...) His task was to manage this legacy and to spread it among the others. Hence the deposit defined at the same time a contract based upon good faith and a symbolic space of “security”, namely a container that protected an unchangeable content: the oral knowledge transmitted by Christ to the Apostoles and, indirectly, to St. Paul. The depositum was also the procedure through which the word of Christ would acquire all its potential. On the other hand, the contract defined as “depositum” by Roman law was characterized by a centrality of the so-called bona fides and by the distinction between regular and irregular deposit. This means that the principle of good faith should lead the conducts of the manager whose task is exactly to look after an object called Christian faith. How can we interpret the word ‘trust’ according to the juridico-political remarks? The purpose of this chapter is to explain all these related issues. (shrink)

The article aims at describing an alternative way to the Foucaldian escape of sovereignty. According to Foucault the only chance to reach this goal is to “go beyond” this concept as well as of linked concepts such as “law” and “institution”. On the one hand this vision is affected by the erroneous identification of law with the order of the sovereign, while the original private dimension of law is totally neglected. On the other hand, Foucault cannot assume that it is (...) also possible to delegitimize sovereignty with the very tools of law, namely in a trial. The article deals with the case of the «mutilated sovereignty» of the Italian State which has been acknowledged by a court in 2006. The government has been compensated for the damages suffered by the State because of the illegal activity in a region. The sovereignty has been “estimated”. But estimating something unquantifiable like sovereignty is destroying its symbolic force. (shrink)