In public communication contexts, such as when a company announces the proposal for an important organizational change, argumentation typically involves multiple audiences, rather than a single and homogenous group, let alone an individual interlocutor. In such cases, an exhaustive and precise characterization of the audience structure is crucial both for the arguer, who needs to design an effective argumentative strategy, and for the external analyst, who aims at reconstructing such a strategic discourse. While the peculiar relevance of multiple audience is (...) often emphasized in the argumentation literature and in rhetorical studies, proposals for modelling multi-audience argumentative situations remain scarce and unsystematic. To address this gap, we propose an analytical framework which integrates three conceptual constructs: Rigotti and Rocci’s notion of communicative activity type, understood as the implementation of an interaction scheme into a piece of institutional reality, named interaction field; the stakeholder concept, originally developed in strategic management and public relations studies to refer to any actor who affects and/or is affected by the organizational actions and who, accordingly, carries an interest in them; the concept of participant role as it emerges from Goffman’s theory of conversation analysis and related linguistic and media studies. From this integration, we derive the notion of text stakeholder for referring to any organizational actor whose interest becomes an argumentative issue which the organizational text must account for in order to effectively achieve its communicative aim. The text stakeholder notion enables a more comprehensive reconstruction and characterization of multiple audience by eliciting the relevant participants staged in a text and identifying, for each of them, the interactional role they have, the peculiar interest they bear and the related argumentative issue they create. Considering as an illustrative case the defense document issued by a corporation against a hostile takeover attempt made by another corporation, we show how this framework can support the analysis of strategic maneuvering by better defining the audience demand and, so, better explaining how real arguers design and adapt their topical and presentational choices. (shrink)

Still today it remains unclear whether Galileo ever climbed the leaning tower of Pisa in order to drop bodies from its top. Some believe that he established the principle of equal speeds for falling bodies by means of an ingenious thought experiment. However, the reconstruction of that thought experiment circulating in the philosophical literature is no more than a cartoon. In this paper I will tell the story of the thought processes behind the cartoon.Keywords: Galileo Galilei; Thought experiment; Falling bodies.

About a century ago, Ernst Mach argued that Archimedes’s deduction of the principle of the lever is invalid, since its premises contain the conclusion to be demonstrated. Subsequently, many scholars defended Archimedes, mostly on historical grounds, by raising objections to Mach’s reconstruction of Archimedes’s deduction. In the debate, the Italian philosopher and historian of science Giovanni Vailati stood out. Vailati responded to Mach with an analysis of Archimedes’s deduction which was later quoted and praised by Mach himself. In this paper, (...) my objective is to show that the debate can be further advanced, as Mach indicated, by reframing it in terms of the empirical vs. the logical dimensions of mechanics. In this way, I will suggest, the debate about Archimedes’s deduction can be resolved in Mach’s favour.Keywords: Equilibrium; Experience; Thought experiment; Archimedes; Ernst Mach; Giovanni Vailati. (shrink)

A comienzos de los años 60 el marxismo althusseriano y el psicoanálisis lacaniano coincidían en un punto: su voluntad de intervenir críticamente en una coyuntura teórica caracterizada por el avance de las ciencias humanas. Ambas corrientes señalaban, con grandes convergencias, que las “ciencias humanas” (de manera evidente en sus versiones “tecnocráticas”: ego psychology, pisicología social, sociología en sus distintos avatares, etc.) cumplían funciones de adaptación de los individuos al sistema social, considerado como un invariante. Dichas ciencias humanas se presentaban como (...) obstáculos epistemológicos para lo que entonces se pensaba como el re-comienzo del materialismo histórico y del psicoanálisis. El hallazgo de obstáculos semejantes no es una mera coincidencia. Ambas líneas de pensamiento convergen en puntos importantes, afirmando, en lo que podría pensarse como una común tendencia materialista, la subordinación de la esfera biológica a la de lo simbólico o a la práctica social, la primacía del significante sobre el sentido, la necesidad de conceptualizar formas originales de la causalidad, cuyo leit-motiv es la sobredeterminación. El presente trabajo busca explorar algunas de las tensiones contenidas en esta coincidencia. El punto de mayor tensión lo suscitan los desarrollos de Althusser y algunos de sus seguidores (en particular Pêcheux y Lecourt) acerca de la relación entre la categoría de sujeto, la de ideología y el conocimiento científico en tanto que “proceso sin sujeto”, al sostener la imposibilidad de un “sujeto de la ciencia”, tesis que sin embargo juega un rol importante en el pensamiento de Lacan. Esta tensión remite a diferentes factores: la diferente herencia epistemológica (Bachelard en un caso, Koyré en el otro), la diferente recepción de la historia de la filosofía (el caso de Descartes), como así también diferencias de registro de los conceptos clave: inconsciente por un lado, ideología y lucha de clases, por el otro. En este trabajo haremos algunas observaciones sobre los efectos que acarrea la diferente recepción de la filosofía de Descartes. (shrink)

This book explores the life of Galileo Galilei through a philosophical and scientific lens, utilizing an innovative hermeneutic perspective that places his work in the wider context of early modern hermeticism, religious heresy, and libertinism. As the first comprehensive study of Galileo’s life and work from a phenomenological and existentialist viewpoint, Paolo Palmieri calls into question the positivist myth of Galileo, the founder of modern science, and interrogates the positivist historiography that has shaped the myth since the historic publication (...) of the monumental edition of Galileo’s works at the turn of the twentieth century. The book highlights the entanglement of Galileo’s natural philosophy with his private unorthodox convictions about Christian theology, Biblical hermeneutic, sexuality, and the hidden traditions of Italian heretics and libertines. The text demonstrates the philosophical, pedagogical, and political implications of this new reading of one of the founding fathers of modernity for both the sciences and the humanities. Addressing hotly debated questions of ethnicity, racism, subjectivity, the self, and pedagogy, this study will be of particular interest to scholars who teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in history of science, philosophy of science, phenomenology and existential philosophy, cultural studies, Italian studies, humanism, and the European Renaissance. (shrink)

In response to Maarten Van Dyck’s commentary, I present a translation of Vailati’s original paper with a short introductory note.Keywords: Giovanni Vailati; Ernst Mach; Archimedes; Balance.

The word akoumena succinctly refers to the main focus of the book, which is the natural philosophy of human hearing from the perspective of intellectual history of science and of philosophy, with a theoretical emphasis on phenomenology. The word akoumena suggests a move away from the language of vision which has been predominant throughout Western thought, both in the modern natural sciences and in Western metaphysics.

This article proposes a reconstruction of the Sextan critique against the Pythagorean conception of number as principle of all existing things. Taking into consideration all the parallel passages concerning the presentation and the polemic about the Pythagorean doctrine, the present article proposes a division of the sceptical critique into two sections, the first one presenting the Pythagorean reasons to consider the numbers as principle existing apart from numbered things, and the second one presenting the arguments that Sextus himself built against (...) them. This paper will show that this structure is consistent with the sceptical method, which consists in pointing out the ἰσοσθένεια among different positions which leads to suspension of judgment. Regarding the Pythagorean doctrine that emerges from these passages, the present article discusses the way in which Sextus testified a juxtaposition between Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines, probably due to a Middle-Platonic or Neopythagorean elaboration, against which Sextus used Platonic concepts, adopting in original way arguments taken from the Parmenides and the Phaedo. Despite the ἐποχή about the nature of the number, this article will argue that Sextus did not avoid to use the number in practical daily life, in a way that is consistent with the sceptical practical criterion. (shrink)

In the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time, Edmund Husserl has frequent recourse to sound and melody as illustrations of the processes that give rise to immanent temporal objects. In Husserl’s analysis, there is a philosophically pregnant tension between the geometrical diagrams representing multiple dimensions of immanent time and his intuition that time-points might be no more than fictions leading to absurdities. In this paper, I will address this tension in order to motivate a complementarity approach to temporal objects (...) such as sound and melody that might illuminate the phenomenology of sound-consciousness. (shrink)

Pursuing a line of progression articulated by Prof. Quine, Dr. Pasch (Experience and the Analytic) argues that the analytic-synthetic distinction rests on mere convention. Further, that the use of this distinction by present day empiricists--especially the rational reconstructionists--has caused empiricism to take a departure from traditional empiricism. I observe, in opposition, 1) the natural language firmament is itself an amorphous construct, 2) the natural language might be the language of experience but not of empiricism, 3) the ideal language is tied (...) to experience by primitives for what perceptually appears, and 4) if one claims the primitives must be tested in scientific inquiry, a case should be made for this philosophical position. (shrink)

Evangelista Torricelli is perhaps best known for being the most gifted of Galileo’s pupils, and for his works based on indivisibles, especially his stunning cubature of an infinite hyperboloid. Scattered among Torricelli’s writings, we find numerous traces of the philosophy of mathematics underlying his mathematical practice. Though virtually neglected by historians and philosophers alike, these traces reveal that Torricelli’s mathematical practice was informed by an original philosophy of mathematics. The latter was dashed with strains of Thomistic metaphysics and theology. Torricelli’s (...) philosophy of mathematics emphasized mathematical constructs as human-made beings of reason, yet mathematical truths as divine decrees, which upon being discovered by the mathematician ‘appropriate eternity’. In this paper, I reconstruct Torricelli’s philosophy of mathematics—which I label radical mathematical Thomism—placing it in the context of Thomistic patterns of thought.Keywords: Evangelista Torricelli; Thomism; Eternity; Indivisibles; Proportions. (shrink)