This essay aims at inspecting the question of evil within Gilles Deleuze’s thought, focusing especially on his historical-philosophical works. I will attempt to show how, for Deleuze, the question of evil represented the most difficult issue to overcome in the construction of his vitalistic materialism, the latter established on the complete overlapping of ontology and ethics. By reconstructing the gradual composition of such «pure ontology» through Deleuze’s interpretations of Hume, Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, I will eventually define his vitalistic materialism (...) as a biodicy that makes the question of evil ethically irrelevant for the sake of individuals’ freedom to express their vitality. The main consequence of such a biodicy is the definition of a dichotomous relationship between suffering and freedom that risks justifying natural inequalities subsisting among living beings. (shrink)

Durante le celebrazioni per il centenario della nascita di Primo Levi del 2019 anche importanti riviste cattoliche, come "Civiltà Cattolica" e "Vita e Pensiero", sono tornate a riflettere sull'opera, il pensiero e la testimonianza dello scrittore torinese. Questo contributo cerca di ricostruire pertanto la ricezione di Primo Levi nel mondo cattolico . Dopo un breve inquadramento storico del complicato rapporto tra Chiesa e Shoah, si evidenzieranno le strutture interpretative che hanno caratterizzato la lettura delle opere di Levi in ambito cattolico (...) in un arco temporale che va dal 1963 al 2019. Letture che operano un'interessante movimento di appropriazione non privo tuttavia di importanti problematicità che meritano di essere evidenziate e meditate. La parte finale del saggio ricostruirà l'ateismo di Primo Levi, mettendo in luce come il rapporto tra Primo Levi e la cultura cattolica sia caratterizzato tanto da comunanze fondamentali, quanto da una distanza irriducibile. (shrink)

(Dall'introduzione del volume) Nel terzo capitolo Simone Ghelli si lancia nell’impresa di ipotizzare un percorso di lettura leviano di cui non è dato trovare riscontri filologici precisi, ma che è tuttavia percepibile “nell’aria” e nelle opere del torinese. Si tratta di una risonanza con il pensiero filosofico di Pierre Bayle e della sua riflessione sulla sofferenza nell’orizzonte speculativo di Levi, il quale tornò sovente a meditare sul problema del male e sulla spinosa questione dell’assenza di Dio e dell’impossibilità (...) di fornire una giustificazione della vita e del mondo. Ghelli arriva così a sostenere che «la posizione di Levi esprime una profonda consapevolezza filosofica, una concatenazione non casuale di concetti e argomenti riconducibile a una tradizione ben precisa: quella dell’ateismo moderno». (shrink)

The following article aims to reconstruct the philosophical-political content of Primo Levi's 1976 essays "About Obscure Writing", focusing especially on the anthropological question of inequality.

La questione antropologica è sicuramente uno dei temi più dibattuti all’interno degli studi filosofici attorno all’opera di Primo Levi. L’obbiettivo del presente contributo è quello di offrire una lettura darwiniana del modo in cui lo scrittore torinese ha definito il complesso rapporto tra umano e non-umano. A mio parere, analizzare il pensiero antropologico di Levi a partire dalle tesi psicologico-evoluzioniste esposte da Darwin in The Descent of Man permette infatti di risolvere le contraddizioni e le aporie in cui sembrano cadere (...) alcune interpretazioni post-umaniste e umaniste. L’ipotesi di un Primo Levi ‘lettore di The Descent of Man’ verrà qui indagata sia dal punto di vista filologico sia da quello argomentativo e concettuale. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the analysis of the passion of self-love. The first part aims to retrace some of the main landmark cases within the history of modern philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes and the Jansenists), highlighting how the distinction between self-preservation and pride becomes the main explanatory model of human agency. We find a meaningful case of such an anthropology in Mandeville’s categories of self-love and self-liking. We consider the theory of self-liking the attempt to establish a fully-fledged ‘philosophy of (...) vainness’. The second part deals with the contemporary use of self-love. We stress how it can be considered not only as the proper theoretical background for the current debate on recognition. It is also an anti-dualistic analytic tool which contests any Manichean understanding of power. We conclude with an interpretation of Primo Levi’s testimony which ideally stands for an extreme confirmation of modern theories on self-love. (shrink)

This article aims to deepen the question of atheism within Primo Levi’s work from a philosophical point of view. Taking into account the current debate on the «sacred» in Levi’s moral reflection, instead I propose an opposite perspective, according to which atheism stands for both the conditio sine qua non and the landing place of his ethics. At first, I aim to reconstruct the way in which Levi articulates the disassociation between God and Evil, underling how, according to Levi, the (...) concept of Providence is not only illogical, but particularly immoral. Such a perspective evokes a certain affinity with the atheistic tradition which opposed to Christian theodicy over modern philosophy. The conclusion is devoted to an in-depth analysis of the meaning of «Luck» as the only plausible ethical reason for survival. (shrink)

This book provides a critical and innovative reassessment of contemporary debate on the human-animal relationship. Starting with a critique of the “official philosophical narration” of animal studies, and then a reassessment of Descartes' animal-machine paradigm, Simone Ghelli tracks down the conceptual coordinates of what he calls “the paradigm of the suffering animal.” The suffering animal is a materialist thesis on the condition of the living, which, while contesting the metaphysical and anthropocentric structure of western axiology, eventually redefines and (...) re-establishes ethics on the experience of suffering, that is on the mutual compassion sentient beings feel before the unjust sight of their finitude. The suffering animal paradigm shows how, within our philosophical tradition, the animal question has been always intertwined with the questions of atheism and of materialism. The ultimate aim of this research is to define the “ethical equilibrium” between aspects of the living, such as weakness and power, joy and suffering, life and death, which our philosophical tradition largely tends to consider as mutually excluding. To overcome such oppositions means avoiding opposing, in our ethical and political discourse, the defense of the vulnerability of the weak and the freedom of the powerful. (shrink)

A partire dall’incontro con l’opera di Darwin agli inizi degli anni Trenta, Primo Levi eleverà le scienze naturali a incrollabile a priori ontologico della sua riflessione etica e politica. Ciò che si intende mostrare è quanto una solida e consapevole conoscenza del darwinismo abbia costituito il “filtro di lettura” principale della riflessione su Auschwitz compiuta in Se questo è un uomo. È in quest’ottica che il binomio sommersi-salvati, vero e proprio nucleo del pensiero di Levi, rivela tutta la sua portata (...) concettuale. Quest’ultimo rappresenta infatti la risultante socio-antropologica delle leggi inegualitarie della vita, in opposizione alle quali Levi concepisce la disperata necessità della lotta umana contro i limiti dolorosi della materia vivente. Nelle opere della maturità, il naturalismo continuerà a fornire a Levi gli strumenti di base per l’elaborazione di originali soluzioni concettuali a problemi filosofici cruciali come l’origine della aggressività umana, la natura del male politico, il rapporto umano-animale e il nesso natura-civiltà. (shrink)

Recensione a C. Greppi, "Un uomo di poche parole. Storia di Lorenzo, che salvò Primo" (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2023).

Nota critica di Simone Ghelli a S. S. Wolin, "Democrazia Spa. Stati uniti: una vocazione totalitaria?", Roma, Fazi, 2011.

Nota critica di Simone Ghelli a R. Mordacci, "La condizione neomoderna", Einaudi, Torino, 2017).

The central claim of this article is that post-truth requires a political and socio-economical perspective, rather than a moral or epistemological one. The article consists of two parts. The first part offers a critical examination of the dominant analyses of post-truth in terms of shifting standards of the origin and the evaluation of facts. Moreover, the claim that postmodernism is the cause of post-truth is examined and refuted. In the second part an alternative perspective is developed, centring around the notion (...) of gatekeepers. Rather than linking post-truth to bullshit and postmodernism, it should be understood as a symptom of a contemporary shift in the gatekeepers of truth and knowledge. Knowledge and truth are always mediated in society through the hands of gatekeeping institutions such as journalism or science. Post-truth is a symptom of a broader transformation of the gatekeeping institutions of our current society. It therefore requires a political philosophy of these institutional shifts and the new risks they involve. (shrink)

One Stoic response to the skeptical indistinguishability argument is that it fails to account for expertise: the Stoics allow that while two similar objects create indistinguishable appearances in the amateur, this is not true of the expert, whose appearances succeed in discriminating the pair. This paper re-examines the motivations for this Stoic response, and argues that it reveals the Stoic claim that, in generating a kataleptic appearance, the perceiver’s mind is active, insofar as it applies concepts matching the perceptual stimulus. (...) I argue that this claim is reflected in the Stoic definition of the kataleptic appearance, and that it respects their more general account of mental representation. I further suggest that, in attributing some activity to the mind in creating each kataleptic appearance, and in claiming that the expert’s mind allows her to form more kataleptic appearances than the amateur, the Stoics draw inspiration from the wax tablet model in Plato’s Theaetetus (190e–196d), where Socrates distinguishes the wise from the ignorant on the basis of how well they match sensory input with its appropriate mental ‘seal’ (σφραγίς). (shrink)

自史蒂芬·霍金(Stephen Hawking) 的暢銷科普著作《時間簡史》(以下簡稱《簡史》) 在上世紀八十年代末問世以來，至今天二十一世紀，華人基督教界就他宇宙無起點的論述仍有相當之評論，但可惜對評論未有綜合分析。評論者因寫作目的，也甚少交代霍金宇宙學的來龍去脈。故本文嘗試略述霍金宇宙學的歷史 背景及發展經過，繼而舉出華人基督教界的評論，帶出其獨特性，並提出商確的地方，以反省未來可行路向。.

Education as identity formation in Western-style liberal-democracies relies, in part, on neutrality as a justification for the reproduction of collective individual identity, including societal, cultural, institutional and political identities, many aspects of which are problematic in terms of the reproduction of environmentally harmful attitudes, beliefs and actions. Taking a position on an issue necessitates letting go of certain forms of neutrality, as does effectively teaching environmental education. We contend that to claim a stance of neutrality is to claim a position (...) beyond criticism. In the classroom this can also be an epistemically damaging position to hold. To further explore the problem of neutrality in the classroom, and to offer a potential solution, we will look to the philosophical community of inquiry pedagogy, and advocate for the addition of place-based education; a form of experiential education that promotes learning in local communities in which the school is situated, each with its own history, culture, economy and environment. However, how we understand ‘place’ is fundamental to understanding the potential of place-based education in giving students a ‘sense of place’—how they perceive a place, which includes place attachment and place meaning. To this end, we look to Indigenous understandings of Place and social reconstruction learning to inform place-based pedagogies. Doing so, we hold, opens a pathway to ethical education. (shrink)

I explore the process of changes in the observability of entities and objects in science and how such changes impact two key issues in the scientific realism debate: the claim that predictively successful elements of past science are retained in current scientific theories, and the inductive defense of a specific version of inference to the best explanation with respect to unobservables. I provide a case-study of the discovery of radium by Marie Curie in order to show that the observability of (...) some entities can change and that such changes are relevant for arguments seeking to establish the reliability of success-to-truth inferences with respect to unobservables. (shrink)

This essay considers how ancient Stoic cosmopolitanism – roughly, the claim all human beings are members of the same “cosmopolis”, or universal city, and so are entitled to moral concern in virtue of possessing reason – informs Stoic thinking about how we ought to treat non-human entities in the environment. First, I will present the Stoic justification for the thesis that there are only rational members of the cosmopolis – and so that moral concern does not extend to any non-human (...) part of the natural world – and explore the foundations of these views in Stoic physics. Next, I will show that, like other anthropocentric theories, Stoic cosmopolitanism allows for environmental preservation and protection of non-human entities, so long as these activities ultimately benefit human beings. However, because the Stoics include the appreciation of natural beauty as a component of the happy life, this justification is not as feeble as it might seem. Humans are naturally set up to contemplate the order and complexity of the universe, and so environmental degradation and species loss, in marring this harmonious system, frustrates the achievement of the human goal. After exploring these facets of Stoic philosophy, and assessing to what extent they might justify environmental conservation, I close with a critical appraisal of Stoic theory – specifically, of the claims that (i) only humans possess reason and (ii) only rational creatures are deserving of moral concern. (shrink)

Which political principles should govern global politics? In his new book, Simon Caney engages with the work of philosophers, political theorists, and international relations scholars in order to examine some of the most pressing global issues of our time. Are there universal civil, political, and economic human rights? Should there be a system of supra- state institutions? Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

The main purpose of this paper is to refute the metaphysicians ‘methodological continuation’ argument supporting epistemic realism in metaphysics. This argument aims to show that scientific realists have to accept that metaphysics is as rationally justified as science given that they both employ inference to the best explanation, i.e. that metaphysics and science are methodologically continuous. I argue that the reasons given by scientific realists as to why inference to the best explanation is reliable in science do not constitute a (...) reason to believe that it is reliable in metaphysics. The justification of IBE in science and the justification of IBE in metaphysics are two distinct issues with only superficial similarities, and one cannot rely on one for the other. This becomes especially clear when one analyses the debate about the legitimacy of IBE that has taken place between realists and empiricists. The metaphysician seeking to piggyback on the realist defense of IBE in science by the methodological continuation argument presupposes that the defense is straightforwardly applicable to metaphysics. I will argue that it is, in fact, not. The favoured defenses of IBE in scientific realism make extensive use of empirical considerations, predictive power and inductive evidence, all of which are paradigmatically absent in the metaphysical context. Furthermore, I argue that the metaphysician, even if the realist would concede to the methodological continuation argument, fails to offer any agreed upon conclusions resulting from its application in metaphysics. As a result, the scientific realist is not committed to believing that there is metaphysical knowledge. (shrink)

Scientific realism driven by inference to the best explanation (IBE) takes empirically confirmed objects to exist, independent, pace empiricism, of whether those objects are observable or not. This kind of realism, it has been claimed, does not need probabilistic reasoning to justify the claim that these objects exist. But I show that there are scientific contexts in which a non-probabilistic IBE-driven realism leads to a puzzle. Since IBE can be applied in scientific contexts in which empirical confirmation has not yet (...) been reached, realists will in these contexts be committed to the existence of empirically unconfirmed objects. As a consequence of such commitments, because they lack probabilistic features, the possible empirical confirmation of those objects is epistemically redundant with respect to realism. (shrink)

This article argues that pseudoscience lacks an adequate philosophical analysis. Using conspiracy theories as a case study, it is claimed that such an analysis needs to go beyond a mere epistemological approach. In the first part, it is shown that the existing philosophical literature shares the assumption that conspiracy theories are primarily deficient scientific hypotheses. This claim is contested, because such an approach can only understand what conspiracy theories fail to be, but not what they are and why people tend (...) to endorse them. To develop an alternative, the second part starts from recent sociology of science, applied to conspiracy theories, that claims that both true and false theories are in need of a symmetrical social explanation. However, this opens the path to relativism because it does not allow for a significant distinction between scientific and conspiracy theories. In the third section an alternative analysis of conspiracy theories is offered, which does not abandon this distinction. Moreover, it is claimed that the most important element of conspiracy theories is not their truth value but rather their symbolic structures of meaning. The aim of conspiracy theories, and perhaps of pseudoscience in general, is then not to know facts about the world, but rather to offer a meaningful framework within which to live. (shrink)

This article takes the scientific study of conspiracy theories itself as an object of inquiry. It looks at the three main frameworks to look at conspiracy theories: a psychological, epistemological and a sociological approach. These different approaches exist somewhat separately and often do not get along. The central claim that follows from a genealogy of these research programs is that the conflicts between these different approaches should be understood not merely as disagreements about how the world works, but as a (...) fundamental disagreement about the underlying diagnosis of what is at stake in conspiracy theories. In other words, the conflicts stem in part from political differences, not merely empirical ones. The purpose of this article is to bring these different diagnoses back into dialogue with each other and to point out that despite their differences, they also have something in common: a concern about the state of contemporary democratic institutions. Depending on which project one subscribes to, conspiracy thinking will appear either as the cause or the solution of these democratic concerns. (shrink)

The reconstruction of Leibniz’s metaphysics that Deleuze undertakes in The Fold provides a systematic account of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics in terms of its mathematical foundations. However, in doing so, Deleuze draws not only upon the mathematics developed by Leibniz—including the law of continuity as reflected in the calculus of infinite series and the infinitesimal calculus—but also upon developments in mathematics made by a number of Leibniz’s contemporaries—including Newton’s method of fluxions. He also draws upon a number of subsequent (...) developments in mathematics, the rudiments of which can be more or less located in Leibniz’s own work—including the theory of functions and singularities, the Weierstrassian theory of analytic continuity, and Poincaré’s theory of automorphic functions. Deleuze then retrospectively maps these developments back onto the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics. While the Weierstrassian theory of analytic continuity serves to clarify Leibniz’s work, Poincaré’s theory of automorphic functions offers a solution to overcome and extend the limits that Deleuze identifies in Leibniz’s metaphysics. Deleuze brings this elaborate conjunction of material together in order to set up a mathematical idealization of the system that he considers to be implicit in Leibniz’s work. The result is a thoroughly mathematical explication of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics. This essay is an exposition of the very mathematical underpinnings of this Deleuzian account of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics, which, I maintain, subtends the entire text of The Fold. (shrink)

I here defend microphysical manyism. According to microphysical manyism, each composite or higher-level object is a mere plurality of microphysical particles. After clarifying the commitments of the view, I offer two physicalist-friendly arguments in its favour. The first argument appeals to the Canberra Plan. Here I argue that microphysical particles acting in unison play the theoretical roles associated with composite objects - that they do everything that we think of composite objects as doing - and thus that composite objects are (...) to be identified with pluralities of microphysical particles. Along the way I rebut the objections that pluralities of particles don’t display the right emergent, ‘lingering’, or modal properties to be good candidates for identification with higher-level objects. In the second argument I claim that microphysical manyism is uniquely able to capture a compelling and widespread physicalist intuition concerning the intimate nature of the relationship between higher-level, composite objects and the microphysical world. (shrink)

Does Seneca entirely reject the utility of dialectical study for moral improvement? No, I argue here. Focusing on Letter 87, I propose that Seneca raises and disarms objections to formal Stoic arguments in order to help moral progressors avoid backsliding and advance towards ethical knowledge. I trace this method back to Chrysippus and show that reading Letter 87 in this Chrysippean framework yields a satisfying explanation of its otherwise puzzling features.

The badness of having conflicting emotions is a familiar theme in academic ethics, clinical psychology, and commercial self-help, where emotional harmony is often put forward as an ideal. Many philosophers give emotional harmony pride of place in their theories of practical reason.1 Here we offer a defense of a particular species of emotional conflict, namely, ambivalence. We articulate an conception of ambivalence, on which ambivalence is unresolved inconsistent desire (§1) and present a case of appropriate ambivalence (§2), before considering two (...) alternative defenses of emotional conflict (§3). We then argue that inconsistent desires can be fitting (§4) and that it can be reasonable not to resolve inconsistent desires (§5), before considering an objection (§6) and concluding the discussion (§7). (shrink)

Why Plantinga's updated (2009) version of the Free Will Defense does not work, and consequently the Logical Argument From Evil against the God of Theism is undefeated.

According to hedonistic act utilitarianism, an act is morally right if and only if, and because, it produces at least as much pleasure minus pain as any alternative act available to the agent. This dissertation gives a partial defense of utilitarianism against two types of objections: action guidance objections and intuitive objections. In Chapter 1, the main themes of the dissertation are introduced. The chapter also examines questions of how to understand utilitarianism, including (a) how to best formulate the moral (...) explanatory claim of the theory, (b) how to best interpret the phrase "pleasure minus pain," and (c) how the theory is related to act consequentialism. The first part (Chapters 2 and 3) deals with action guidance objections to utilitarianism. Chapter 2 defines two kinds of action guidance: doxastic and evidential guidance. It is argued that utilitarianism is evidentially but not doxastically guiding for us. Chapter 3 evaluates various action guidance objections to utilitarianism. These are the objections that utilitarianism, because it is not doxastically guiding, is a bad moral theory, fails to be a moral theory, is an uninteresting and unimportant moral theory, and is a false moral theory. The second part (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) deals with intuitive objections to utilitarianism. Chapter 4 presents three intuitive objections: Experience Machine, Transplant, and Utility Monster. Three defenses of utilitarianism are subsequently evaluated. Chapter 5 and 6 introduces two alternative defenses of utilitarianism against intuitive objections, both of which concern the role that imagination plays in thought experimentation. In Chapter 5, it is argued that we sometimes unknowingly carry out the wrong thought experiment when we direct intuitive objections against utilitarianism. In many such cases, we elicit moral intuitions that we believe give us reason to reject utilitarianism, but that in fact do not. In Chapter 6, it is argued that using the right kind of sensory imagination when we perform thought experiments will positively affect the epistemic trustworthiness of our moral intuitions. Moreover, it is suggested that doing so renders utilitarianism more plausible. In Chapter 7, the contents of the dissertation are summarized. (shrink)

In this paper, I interview Francesca De Vecchi (Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in Vita-Salute San Raffaele University) about her qualitative ontology and its social and normative implications. If at the foundation of our lifeworld there are significantly qualitative experiences, phenomenology can investigate the most important contemporary issues, such as gender disparity, socio-virtuality depersonalizations and political urgencies.

La première préface à l’Histoire de la folie est un texte riche qui propose une conception originale de la culture : celle-ci se définirait non par ce qu’elle affirme, mais par ce qu’elle rejette. Or, s’il existe une littérature secondaire qui en fait mention, la préface n’est presque jamais traitée pour elle-même. Nous pensons pourtant qu’en plus d’offrir une conception de la culture, elle permet de penser l’œuvre et la folie à travers une certaine confrontation, à savoir celle entre la (...) dialectique et le tragique. C’est en suivant cette confrontation, voulue par Foucault, que nous dégagerons les points forts de la préface. On se demandera, enfin, si Foucault, dans ce texte, dispose des moyens pour mener la véritable confrontation des « dialectiques de l’histoire » ou si, comme le pensait Derrida, il ne s’agit que d’une contestation de l’ordre rationnel. (shrink)

Imagine that you are a farmer living in Kenya. Though you work hard to sell your produce to foreign markets you find yourself unable to do so because affluent countries subsidize their own farmers and erect barriers to trade, like tariffs, thereby undercutting you in the marketplace. As a consequence of their actions you languish in poverty despite your very best efforts. Or, imagine that you are a peasant whose livelihood depends on working in the fields in Indonesia and you (...) are forcibly displaced from your land by a biofuels company because corrupt government officials have stolen the land and sold it to the company. Or, suppose that you work on the coast of Bangladesh but find that increasingly you are unable to cope with salination resulting from sealevel rise – a product of anthropogenic climate change. These, I believe, are cases of global injustice. My question is: What are those who bear the brunt of global injustice entitled to do to secure their, and other people’s, entitlements? Often people focus on the duties of the affluent to respect and uphold the rights of the disadvantaged. This is understandable. But there is a striking omission. Rarely do people analyze, or even mention, what those who lack their entitlements are entitled to do to secure their own rights. This is my focus in this paper. More specifically, I examine what agents are entitled to do to change the underlying social, economic and political practices and structures in a more just direction. (shrink)

My interest in this chapter is to investigate this crossroad as applied to mental properties, considered powers. In particular, I scrutinize the possibility of taking the phenomenal property of feeling pain as a complex power or disposition. This possibility comes in handy in discussing panpsychism, the view that the ultimate elements of reality are phenomenal properties, which would ground physical properties as well.

Despite well-established results in survey methodology, many experimental philosophers have not asked whether and in what way conclusions about folk intuitions follow from people’s responses to their surveys. Rather, they appear to have proceeded on the assumption that intuitions can be simply read off from survey responses. Survey research, however, is fraught with difficulties. I review some of the relevant literature—particularly focusing on the conversational pragmatic aspects of survey research—and consider its application to common experimental philosophy surveys. I argue for (...) two claims. First, that experimental philosophers’ survey methodology leaves the facts about folk intuitions massively underdetermined; and second, that what has been regarded as evidence for the instability of philosophical intuitions is, at least in some cases, better accounted for in terms of subjects’ reactions to subtle pragmatic cues contained in the surveys. (shrink)

One of the oldest traditions in the Eastern Orthodox church is Forgiveness Sunday. It’s a festive occasion: the last day to eat dairy before the onset of the fa.

Richard Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which (almost) no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. This semantic universal is part of an asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. Whilst factives are abundant, contrafactives are scarce. We propose that this asymmetry is partly due to a difference in learnability. The meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. We tested our hypothesis by conducting a computational experiment using an artificial neural (...) network. The results of this experiment support our hypothesis. (shrink)

The early Stoics diagnose vicious agents with various psychological diseases, e.g. love of money and love of wine. Such diseases are characterized as false evaluative opinions that lead the agent to form emotional impulses for certain objects, e.g. money and wine. Scholars have therefore analyzed psychological diseases simply as dispositions for assent. This interpretation is incomplete, I argue, and should be augmented with the claim that psychological disease also affects what kind of action-guiding impressions are created prior to giving assent. (...) This proposal respects the Stoic insistence that impression-formation, no less than assent, is an activity of reason. In so far as the wine-lover’s reason is corrupted in a different way from the money-lover’s, the two vicious agents will form different action-guiding impressions when faced with similar stimuli. Here I juxtapose the Stoic account of expertise, according to which experts form more precise action-guiding impressions compared to the amateur, in virtue of possessing a system of grasps (katalēpseis). So expertise enhances, whereas psychological disease degrades, the representational fidelity of the impressions that prefigure action. With these commitments, the Stoics can be seen to offer a nuanced and principled theory of cognitive penetration and to anticipate some recent proposals in epistemology and cognitive science. (shrink)

Within continental philosophy of biology the work of Michel Serres has not received a lot of attention. Nonetheless, this chapter wants to argue that Serres was part of a group of thinkers – together with Jacques Monod and Henri Atlan – that started to think about biology in terms of second-order cybernetics and information theory. Therefore, this chapter aims to do four things. First of all, it maps the relation between Serres and Canguilhem, one that was mediated by authors such (...) as Louis Althusser or Jacques Monod. Secondly, it fleshes out Serres’s own ‘biophilosophy’. I label this alternative tradition as a ‘biophilosophy without a subject’. Finally, this chapter explores the consequences of this alternative biophilosophy through a brief examination of two authors whose work lies in the line of this tradition: René Girard and Bruno Latour. Though at first sight different, they both draw inspiration from this biophilosophy to develop a framework that, paradoxically, ‘jumps over’ the subject. Hence, the reason why biology is neither a prominent theme in Girard’s nor in Latour’s work. This is not because of a lack of biophilosophy, but because of an implicit one: a biophilosophy without a subject. (shrink)

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body (...) of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, I will make use of epistemic permissivism to provide a general recipe for generating so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge. I will call this class of cases permissive divergence cases. While other divergence cases have been discussed in the literature, permissive divergence cases prove themselves to be less susceptible to many of the worries raised against their competitors, while being directly built on an often-defended epistemological thesis. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Richard Lauer’s “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” (2019) and an attempt to contribute to the meta-social ontological discourse more broadly. In the first part, I will give a rough sketch of Lauer’s general project and confront his pragmatist approach with a fundamental problem. The second part of my reply will provide a solution for this problem rooted in a philosophy of the social sciences in practice.

This article argues that historical epistemology offers the history of philosophy and science more than a mere tool to write the history of concepts. It does this, first of all, by rereading historical epistemology through Michel Foucault's “techniques of the self.” Second, it turns to the work of Léon Brunschvicg and Gaston Bachelard. In their work we see a proposal for what the subjectivity of scientists and philosophers should be. The article thus argues that their work is driven by a (...) normative psychology: a set of prescriptions for which mental constitution a scholarly self has to have. In the Conclusion, it returns to existing analyses of “open‐mindedness” as a virtue and explores in what way these cases challenge these analyses, as well as to what extent Foucault's “techniques of the self” can be applied to other cases in the history of French philosophy. (shrink)

There are two currently popular but quite different ways of answering the question of what constitutes personal identity: the one is usually called the psychological continuity theory (or Psychological View) and the other the narrative theory.1 Despite their differences, they do both claim to be providing an account—the correct account—of what makes someone the same person over time. Marya Schechtman has presented an important argument in this journal (Schechtman 2005) for a version of the narrative view (the ‘Self-Understanding View’) over (...) the psychological one, an argument which has received an overwhelmingly positive response from commentators (Gillett 2005; Heinemaa 2005; Phillips 2006). I wish to argue that .. (shrink)

Many agents have failed to comply with their responsibilities to take the action needed to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change. This pervasive noncompliance raises two questions of nonideal political theory. First, it raises the question of what agents should do when others do not discharge their climate responsibilities. (the Responsibility Question) In this paper I put forward four principles that we need to employ to answer the Responsibility Question (Sections II-V). I then illustrate my account, by outlining four kinds of (...) action that should be undertaken (Section VI). Pervasive noncompliance also raises a second question: Given the lack of progress in combating climate change, should existing governance structures be maintained or changed (and if they should be changed, in what ways)? (the Governance Question). The paper briefly outlines a methodology for addressing this question and outlines what a nonideal response to the existing institutional structures would be (Section VII). It does so with reference to the Paris Agreement, and in particular the creation of a "global stocktake" (Article 14, Paris Agreement) and the "facilitative dialogue" (paragraph 20 of the ‘Adoption of the Paris Agreement’). The aim, then, is to set out an account of a nonideal theory of climate justice. (shrink)

According to the B-theory, the passage of time is an illusion. The B-theory therefore requires an explanation of this illusion before it can be regarded as fullysatisfactory; yet very few B-theorists have taken up the challenge of trying to provide one. In this paper I take some first steps toward such an explanation by first making a methodological proposal, then a hypothesis about a key element in the phenomenology of temporal passage. The methodological proposal focuses onthe representational content of the (...) element of experience by virtue of which time seems to pass. The hypothesis involves the claim that the experience of changeinvolves the representation of something enduring, rather than perduring, through any change. (shrink)

The work of Thomas Kuhn has been very influential in Anglo-American philosophy of science and it is claimed that it has initiated the historical turn. Although this might be the case for English speaking countries, in France an historical approach has always been the rule. This article aims to investigate the similarities and differences between Kuhn and French philosophy of science or ‘French epistemology’. The first part will argue that he is influenced by French epistemologists, but by lesser known authors (...) than often thought. The second part focuses on the reactions of French epistemologists on Kuhn’s work, which were often very critical. It is argued that behind some superficial similarities there are deep disagreements between Kuhn and French epistemology. This is finally shown by a brief comparison with the reaction of more recent French philosophers of science, who distance themselves from French epistemology and are more positive about Kuhn. Based on these diverse appreciations of Kuhn, a typology of the different positions within the philosophy of science is suggested. (shrink)

What is it for two people to think of an object, natural kind or other entity under the same mode of presentation (MOP)? This has seemed a particularly difficult question for advocates of the Mental Files approach, the Language of Thought, or other ‘atomistic’ theories. In this paper I propose a simple answer. I first argue that, by parallel with the synchronic intrapersonal case, the sharing of a MOP should involve a certain kind of epistemic transparency between the token thoughts (...) of the two thinkers. I then explain how shared words help bring about this transparency. Finally, I show how this account can be extended for thoughts expressed using demonstratives or indexicals. (shrink)

Software application ontologies have the potential to become the keystone in state-of-the-art information management techniques. It is expected that these ontologies will support the sort of reasoning power required to navigate large and complex terminologies correctly and efficiently. Yet, there is one problem in particular that continues to stand in our way. As these terminological structures increase in size and complexity, and the drive to integrate them inevitably swells, it is clear that the level of consistency required for such navigation (...) will become correspondingly difficult to maintain. While descriptive semantic representations are certainly a necessary component to any adequate ontology-based system, so long as ontology engineers rely solely on semantic information, without a sound ontological theory informing their modeling decisions, this goal will surely remain out of reach. In this paper we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), along with The Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Sciences (IFOMIS), are working towards developing and implementing just such a theory, combining the open software architecture of L&C’s LinkSuiteTM with the philosophical rigor of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology. In this way we aim to move beyond the more or less simple controlled vocabularies that have dominated the industry to date. (shrink)