In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 659-676 [Access article in PDF] Adam Smith's "Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review" Jeffrey Lomonaco One of Adam Smith's first publications was a letter addressed to the editors of the Edinburgh Review, printed anonymously in the second issue of the semiannual periodical in 1756. 1 The compact text entitled "A LETTER to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review," (...) which has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, offers valuable insight into Smith's work and career, and not merely because it confirms that Smith was an unusually widely-read man of letters long before he was the retrospectively anointed founder of the discipline of economics, though it does that. Indeed, the thirty-two-year-old writer presumes to pass judgment on the writing and learning of Europe as a whole and specifically assesses the only recently published work of Rousseau, the Encyclopédie project still in progress, and the work of Réaumur, Buffon and Daubenton, Descartes, Newton, and others. In this text (whose authorship was known well before Dugald Stewart noted it in his biographical account in the early 1790s) Smith delineates a space of learning that is at once Scottish, British, and European, mapping out a set of relations of complex rivalry between France, England, and Scotland in order to articulate and advocate a cosmopolitan patriotism. 2 He suggests that while England occupied the preeminent position in learning in the past, France does so in the present, and Scotland is in a position to do so in the near future, if it is properly incited. Smith's careful [End Page 659] rhetorical incitement of his Scottish contemporaries to fulfill this promise of future primacy in learning also reveals his own ambitions and how he proposed to realize them.My reading of the text will throw into relief Smith's strategy and show how, although Smith does not name his good friend David Hume, he subtly expresses his own allegiances to the Humean science of man as the way for Scotland to achieve primacy in the world of learning, and he indicates that the most important task facing the world of knowledge—the task he takes as his own—concerns the proper systematic organization and presentation of moral knowledge. That Smith's is a subtle writerly performance which calls for attention to the grain of the text is itself part of the point of my interpretation, especially since the rhetorical care Smith took in composition is generally underestimated, or at least not adequately attended to in detail. 3 Judging Rivals The Edinburgh Review was a project begun by a number of members of the Select Society, one of those social vehicles of improvement and enlightenment that flourished throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. 4 Smith was a founding member of the Select Society in 1754 and may have been one of the initiators of the periodical, to the inaugural 1755 issue of which he contributed a review of Johnson's Dictionary. 5 The preface of the opening issue of the Review, probably written by the editor Alexander Wedderburn, a close friend of Smith's, positioned the Review as Scotland's somewhat belated contribution to the widespread European print enterprise of bringing advances in knowledge to the attention of the public. 6 The purpose of the periodical, Wedderburn's preface declared, was to demonstrate "the progressive state of learning in this country" and thereby to incite Scots "to a more eager pursuit of learning, to [End Page 660] distinguish themselves, and to do honour to their country." 7 To these ends each issue of the Review was going "to give a full account of all books published in Scotland within the compass of half a year; and to take some notice of such books published elsewhere, as are most read in this country, or seem to have any title to draw the public attention." 8 The title page of the first issue, which appeared on 26 August 1755 and which covered books published between 1 January and... (shrink)

Partiendo de la definición crítica del “humanismo” en Said y de sus fuentes de crítica literaria (Auerbach) y de teoría política (Gramsci), este estudio intenta mostrar la originalidad de la aproximación de Said a Vico, en la medida en que los “textos” resultan reclamados para los contrastes y las luchas de donde emergen. El filósofo napolitano reconoce la centralidad de las “vulgares” circunstancias físicas de la propia biografía intelectual y de las fábulas antiguas, estropeadas y corrompidas, como las recibidas de (...) Homero. Para el estudioso americano de origen palestino recorrer la historia de la cultura en perspectiva filológica significa reconstruir los lazos entre tradiciones diversas y antagónicas como aquellos entre mundo árabe, hebreo y cristiano contra la distorsión de los documentos sagrados y profanos cotidianamente operado por los lenguajes del poder y de los medios. (shrink)

This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account, which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will show, the evidential account exhibits some distinctive logical features that deserve careful consideration. On the one hand, it departs from the material reading of ‘if then’ exactly in the way we would like it to depart from that reading. On the other, it significantly differs from the non-material accounts which (...) hinge on the Ramsey Test, advocated by Adams, Stalnaker, Lewis, and others. (shrink)

According to the view of conditionals named 'inferentialism', a conditional holds when its consequent can be inferred from its antecedent. This paper identifies some major challenges that inferentialism has to face, and uses them to assess three accounts of conditionals: one is the classical strict account, the other two have recently been proposed by Douven and Rott. As will be shown, none of the three proposals meets all challenges in a fully satisfactory way. We argue through novel formal results that (...) a variation of the evidential account of conditionals suggested by Crupi and Iacona is the most promising candidate to develop inferentialism in a coherent formal framework. (shrink)

This paper develops a probabilistic analysis of conditionals which hinges on a quantitative measure of evidential support. In order to spell out the interpreta- tion of ‘if’ suggested, we will compare it with two more familiar interpretations, the suppositional interpretation and the strict interpretation, within a formal framework which rests on fairly uncontroversial assumptions. As it will emerge, each of the three interpretations considered exhibits specific logical features that deserve separate consideration.

The aim of this paper is to trace a pathway connecting contemplative knowledge and practices with the social sciences. Contemplative knowledge and practices offer material for reflection in social science even concerning their very foundation. I'll found an opportunity for meshing our disciplinary tools with this knowledge as I introduced it in a health promotion program. The result will be a transdisciplinary confluence of different lines of inquiry contributing to a new perspective of self and social action. First of all (...) I will give a definition of contemplative knowledge and practices. Then, I will make a bridge between the contemplative approach and the social sciences, showing the contribution that symbolic interactionism can play. I will illustrate the perspective drawing on an action research program called Auriga aimed at smoking cessation and reduction among health professionals. The aim of this paper is focused on the specification of the conceptual background in which such kind of program has been developed. Finally, I outline some implications it could represent for what might be called transformative sociology. I believe that contemplative knowledge could contribute to disentangle some of the unanswered questions and concerns in the social sciences, once they dismiss for a while their scientistic perspective. The secular redefinition of tools mainly belonging to the wisdom traditions represents an innovation that can reshape what we intend by the self and experience, contributing to what is called the “social transformation from within,” a pragmatic and wise approach to change at any level. (shrink)

Estudio histórico-crítico bibliográfico del anuario Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani desde 1971 hasta 2000.PALABRAS CLAVE: Vico, Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, historia, filología, filosofía.This is a historical and critical bibliographic study of the yearbook Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, from 1971 to 2000.KEYWORDS: Vico, Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, history, philology, philosophy.

Science and Humanism in UNESCO's Approach to Globalization studies the influence of scientific humanism on the emergence and development of UNESCO's original approach to globalization. It also studies the role that UNESCO tried to play in the international system through the promotion of its own specific account of globalization.

Epistemologists and philosophers of science have often attempted to express formally the impact of a piece of evidence on the credibility of a hypothesis. In this paper we will focus on the Bayesian approach to evidential support. We will propose a new formal treatment of the notion of degree of confirmation and we will argue that it overcomes some limitations of the currently available approaches on two grounds: (i) a theoretical analysis of the confirmation relation seen as an extension of (...) logical deduction and (ii) an empirical comparison of competing measures in an experimental inquiry concerning inductive reasoning in a probabilistic setting. (shrink)

The paper lists several editions of Euclid’s Elements in the Early Modern Age, giving for each of them the axioms and postulates employed to ground elementary mathematics.

This paper develops a formal theory of non-monotonic consequence which differs from most extant theories in that it assumes Contraposition as a basic principle of defeasible reasoning. We define a minimal logic that combines Contraposition with three uncontroversial inference rules, and we prove some key results that characterize this logic and its possible extensions.

This paper investigates the logic of reasons. Its aim is to provide an analysis of the sentences of the form ‘p is a reason for q’ that yields a coherent account of their logical properties. The idea that we will develop is that ‘p is a reason for q’ is acceptable just in case a suitably defined relation of incompatibility obtains between p and ¬q. As we will suggest, a theory of reasons based on this idea can solve three challenging (...) puzzles that concern, respectively, contraposing reasons, conflicting reasons, and supererogatory reasons, and opens a new perspective on some classical issues concerning non-deductive inferences. (shrink)

The so‐called problem of irrelevant conjunction has been seen as a serious challenge for theories of confirmation. It involves the consequences of conjoining irrelevant statements to a hypothesis that is confirmed by some piece of evidence. Following Hawthorne and Fitelson, we reconstruct the problem with reference to Bayesian confirmation theory. Then we extend it to the case of conjoining irrelevant statements to a hypothesis that is dis confirmed by some piece of evidence. As a consequence, we obtain and formally present (...) a novel and more troublesome problem of irrelevant conjunction. We conclude by indicating a possible solution based on a measure‐sensitive approach and by critically discussing a major alternative way to address the problem. *Received December 2008; revised August 2009. †To contact the authors, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Turin, via Sant'Ottavio 20, 10124 Turin, Italy; e‐mail: vincenzo[email protected] ; [email protected] or [email protected]. (shrink)

There is a growing concern for the proper role of science within democratic societies, which has led to the development of new science policies for the implementation of social responsibility in research. Although the very expression ‘social responsibility of science’ may be interpreted in different ways, many of these emerging policy frameworks define it, at least in part, as a form of anticipative reflection about the potential impacts of research in society. What remains a rather under-discussed issue is the definition (...) of the bearer of the social responsibility of science. In other words, it is not clear who is supposed to engage in such an anticipative reflection, whether individual researchers or research groups. In the past few years, philosophers of science have begun to use qualitative research methods to fill the gaps between normative models of the organisation of ideal scientific communities and the reality of actual scientific practices. In this article, I follow this approach to discuss the issue of the collective dimension of the social responsibility of science. I rely on a qualitative study conducted on an interdisciplinary research group and I describe how group dynamics position individuals and distribute duties and roles, including social responsibility. Qualitative descriptions of the distribution of duties within actual research groups should inform the formulation of general prescriptive theories on the collective responsibility of science. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate about the differences and, if any, the similarities among the modern State and the mafia criminal organizations. In particular, starting from their definitions, I will try to find the differences between State and mafia, to then focus on the operational aspects of the functioning of these two organizations, with specific reference to the effect/impact that both these human constructs have on citizens’ existences, and especially on citizen’s economic lives. All this in order (...) to understand whether it is possible to identify an objective difference – beside morals – between taxation by the modern State and extortion by criminal organizations. With this of course I do not want to argue that the mafia is in any way justifiable or absolvable, nor that it is better than the State. However, I want to investigate whether there is a real, logical reason why the State should be considered by the citizens more desirable than the criminal organizations oppressing Southern Italy, from a strictly logical point of view and not from the point of view of ethics and morality. (shrink)

The thesis deals with a section of the major philosophical summa by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), namely the Book of the Healing (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ). The summa is structured into four parts, devoted to Logic, Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and Metaphysics; the section at stake is Avicenna’s reworking of Porphyry’s Isagoge (Kitāb al-Madḫal, i.e. “Book of the Introduction”) opening the section of Logic of the Šifāʾ. The thesis is articulated into three main parts, namely (i) an edition of the Arabic text (...) of Avicenna’s Madḫal, (ii) an English translation and (iii) a systematic commentary; these three main parts are preceded by an Introduction (0) divided into two halves: (0a) a General Introduction focused on the doctrinal major innovations of the work and (0b) an Introduction to the Edition of the text, which offers a first comprehensive study of its direct and early indirect tradition and explains the criteria of the edition. (i) The only previous edition of Avicenna’s Madḫal was the one printed in Cairo in 1952 (then reprinted in Tehran in 1983 and in Beirut in 1993), based on ten manuscripts. The huge manuscript tradition of Avicenna’s Madḫal – and, more in general, of Avicenna’s Book of the Healing – is still a matter of investigation. According to the provisional results of the bibliographical research conducted in the present work, it can be estimated that the manuscript tradition of the Madḫal amounts to at least 119 certain witnesses and 14 possible additional witnesses (as explained in the Introduction to the edition, 0b). The text of the Cairo edition, far from being representative of the whole textual tradition, was reconstructed on the basis of ten manuscripts that were not selected on the basis of philological criteria and whose reciprocal stemmatic relations were not clear. Although a critical edition based on all the 119 certain witnesses of the work exceeds the scope of the present work, the edition provided in the thesis takes into account a larger number of manuscripts than the Cairo edition did and, most importantly, selects them by means of a preliminary collation made on portions of the text. The purpose of this preliminary collation is making the selection of the manuscripts employed less arbitrary and providing a reconstruction of their stemmatic relations (in the Introduction, 0b). Overall, 32 manuscripts among the 68 inspected were employed in the edition here proposed, 21 of which were systematically collated and 11 were eliminated as codices descripti. The present edition also assumes as a witness the twelfth-century Latin translation of the work, which is, at the present moment, among the earliest extant witnesses of the text. Hopefully, this editorial work allowed us to improve the text of the Cairo edition in a number of points that are crucial to the correct understanding of Avicenna’s argumentation. (ii) As this project started, complete translations of Avicenna’s Madḫal in modern languages were only available in Turkish and Russian. Chapters of the work had also been translated in other languages, but an English translation of the whole work was still a desideratum. A complete English translation is provided in the thesis, based on the newly-established Arabic text of the work and aiming at preserving the major possible consistency in rendering the relevant philosophical terms. As a complement to the translation, an apparatus of notes is offered to facilitate the immediate understanding of the text. (iii) The third section of the thesis consists in a systematic commentary on Avicenna’s Madḫal, which is meant to support a deeper understanding of the text in its entirety. The commentary deals with both historical and philosophical aspects; more in detail, it includes an analysis and an identification, when possible, of Avicenna’s sources, and underlines the points of major philosophical interest of the work, which are dealt in a more comprehensive manner in the General Introduction (0a). (shrink)

The Pietro Piovani Foundation for Vico Studies has launched a new series of the Collectio Viciana “Texts” with the anastatic reprint of the 1730 New Science. A discussion of the Foundation’s choice to reproduce the work and of many features of the text of the Second New Science is offered to accompany the publication of the text.

Reason and law before New Sciences -- Dominion, liberty, tutelage : law, ethics and history in De uno -- The "constancy" of the divine and human things -- From Grotius to Vico : the "Natural right of the gentes.".

In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved in such a (...) transition. I will clarify the role of the scientific community in revolutionary changes and characterize the incommensurability across specialties as possessing both semantic and methodological aspects. The discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA will serve both as an illustration of my main argument and as reply to one criticism raised against Kuhn—namely, that his model cannot capture cases of revolutionary yet non-disruptive episodes of scientific progress. Revisiting Kuhn’s ideas on specialization will shed new light on some often overlooked features of scientific change. (shrink)

To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their engagement in this collective activity. Our (...) classification offers, on the one hand, a model of how the ethical aspects of science are taken into consideration by scientists and, on the other, some indications on how to institutionalize ethics in science. (shrink)

We discuss the probabilistic analysis of explanatory power and prove a representation theorem for posterior ratio measures recently advocated by Schupbach and Sprenger. We then prove a representation theorem for an alternative class of measures that rely on the notion of relative probability distance. We end up endorsing the latter, as relative distance measures share the properties of posterior ratio measures that are genuinely appealing, while overcoming a feature that we consider undesirable. They also yield a telling result concerning formal (...) accounts of explanatory power versus inductive confirmation, thereby bridging our discussion to a so-called no-miracle argument. (shrink)