A brief account of the work of Giorgio Agamben and its relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.

Abstract: Giorgio Agamben's recent works have been preoccupied with a certain obscure passage from St. Paul's 'Second Epistle to the Thessalonians,' which describes the portentous events that must occur before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can take place---specifically, the appearance of a 'man of lawlessness' (the Antichrist?) and the exposure of who or what is currently restraining the 'man of lawlessness' from being exposed as the Antichrist: a mysterious agency called the 'katechon.' In 'The Mystery of Evil: (...) Benedict XVI and the End of Days,' this obscure passage is connected with the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI through certain equally obscure references to the fourth century theologian, Tyconius, although the precise connection between these apocalyptic events and their mysterious agents remains obscure. This review attempts to shed some critical light upon this cryptic subject, both by considering the world-historical context of St. Paul's epistle, and by asking what role these apocalyptic figures play in Agamben's political theology. But, to begin with, the review also asks: Who, really, is the Antichrist? a scarcely rhetorical question that demands a sardonic answer. Although various candidates from contemporary politics are proposed, the review finally argues that the Antichrist and the katechon are not specific individuals or worldly institutions, but rather refer to world-historical trends within Western European Christian civilization itself that have resulted in what Friedrich Nietzsche called 'the devaluation of all higher values' and 'the desecration of the Christian moral world-view': an apocalyptic turn of events which Nietzsche equally sardonically referred to in 'The Antichrist.'. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between biological life and political life, placing it in the context of the ancient Greek distinction between the life of the home and the realm of politics. In contrast with the oikos, the life of the polis was characterized by attempts to exclude from its sphere both the constraints of necessity that oblige human action to conform to the exigencies of survival as well as the violence that accompanies this pursuit. Although this exclusion has never (...) been successful, the question of how to achieve it lies at the heart of the oldest philosophical reflections on politics and, in a more concealed fashion, remains central to our political concerns today. Invoking the work of Giorgio Agamben, this article explores the earliest discussions concerning the question “what is political life?” to show why so much depends upon how we answer this question. (shrink)

A review of Giorgio Agamben's The Mystery of Evil: Bendict XVI and the End of Days, which attempts to place Agamben's peculiar argument regarding Pope Benedict's abdication in the context of his reading of St. Paul's 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, and, more generally, in terms of his political-theology in the Homo Sacer series. The questions, 'Who is the Antichrist?' and 'Who (or what) is the katechon?' are also explored, in the attempt to translate Agamben's obscure theology into (...) contemporary political terms. (shrink)

A concise introduction (in Dutch) to the work of Giorgio Agamben, from the perspective of the central question in his philosophy under what conditions community or society today are possible, not based on in the end always artbitrary principles of exclusion — be they historical, biological, ...

A review of Giorgio Agamben's The Use of Bodies that considers Agamben's Homo Sacer series as a contribution to Post-Marxist political theory, and attempts to place Agamben's politial theology in the context of 1970s Italian radical politics. The review also poses the question whether Agamben's anarchist/aestheticist theory is a helpful contribution to political praxis in the contemporary period of the global hegemony of multinational military-industrial technocratic capitalism.

Seguramente lo más interesante de la suspensión de la cuenta de Twitter del ya expresidente Trump después del asalto al Capitolio no sea el debate tan manido sobre los límites de la libertad de expresión, sino el hecho mucho más significativo de que hoy es Twitter quien decide sobre el estado de excepción. Para desentrañar esta particular relación entre técnica y estado de excepción tan característica de nuestro predicamento contemporáneo, hay que leer a Giorgio Agamben. En este sentido, (...) el libro de Juan Evaristo Valls Boix, Política sin obra, ofrece una introducción tan divulgativa como profunda al trabajo del filósofo político italiano. Este ejemplar se enmarca dentro de la colección Pensamiento político posfundacional de la Editorial Gedisa, que lleva desempeñando, en los últimos años, una labor pedagógica admirable a la hora de dar a conocer al público, en lengua castellana y catalana, los principales filósofos y filósofas de lo político que han problematizado cualquier tipo de fundacionalismo –Lyotard, Foucault, Arendt, Derrida, Lefort, Laclau, Mouffe, Badiou, Rancière, Butler, Nancy, Abensour y Anzaldúa, entre otros y otras–. Cuando llega el turno de introducir a Agamben, la directora de la colección, Laura Llevadot, ya avisa que se trata de una auténtica “introducción a la vida no fascista”, haciendo un guiño al prólogo de Foucault sobre el Anti-Edipo de Deleuze y Guattari. (shrink)

Agamben is hard to pin down both theologically and philosophically. He attempts to construct miraculous minutiae out of un-miraculous things. Hence this work is the act of profaning the unprofanable. What ontological stature, what imaginative configuration and what spatio-temporal coordinates this move articulates are less than forthcoming. Indeed it is possible that Agamben disavows these entirely in favour of a Benjaminian eternal 'as if' structure, one which sees in the most mundane the traces of an eternal and secular (...) redemption. But this remains problematic; this idiosyncratic moment seems devoid of any real comprehension or description of themes concerning the rest of us mortals, such as temporality, finitude or the spatial and imaginative presentation of that which promises to redeem us. (shrink)

This review shows Agamben as reading Dante and misunderstanding the Jesus event.

O projeto de crítica das categorias éticas e políticas ¿ estéticas e jurídicas ¿ fundamentais do Ocidente tendo em vista a sua operatividade, o modo como estruturam a composição do tempo presente, segundo o tem perseguido Giorgio Agamben, desde antes, porém, de Homo sacer (1995-2015), seu mais vasto projeto filosófico, articula-se a partir do lugar de uma crítica à fundamentação da linguagem (e do ser) na negatividade. Tal é a proposta analítica que conduz as investigações deste trabalho. Se (...) o diagnóstico acerca do destino niilista da cultura ocidental sustém-se, na ótica agambeniana, o vir à luz do vazio e do nada não mais seria do que a exposição do próprio fundamento negativo das experiências de pensamento que se conceberam como metafísica. No tocante à experiência que ela realiza, como filosofia, com a linguagem, evidencia-se, no plano do lugar do seu fundamento, a negatividade do silêncio, o qual seria operacionalizado a partir de um comutador articulatório denominado Voz, comissura da dúplice estrutura da experiência com a palavra entre mostrar e dizer. A partir, portanto, de uma topologia da negatividade, o plano da própria fundamentação metafísica pode ser investigado com relação ao seu indizível fundamento, ao inefável como o seu limite. Nesse sentido, entendemos que uma tentativa de elucidação do pensamento filosófico de Giorgio Agamben passa pelo questionamento da experiência que toma a linguagem a partir de bases negativas, compondo a metafísica como a entende Agamben, e pela compreensão do seu efetivo fundamento ¿ o problema do experimentum linguae como tal, a existência e a maravilha da linguagem, ao qual se confronta o exílio representativo da postulada necessidade humana de falar (o lógos como condição do humano). O que significa, por conseguinte, que o homem, por ser aquele capaz de linguagem, seja também aquele capaz de política, de vida em comum? Se a linguagem aparece como insígnia da nossa antropogênese - portanto, do humano e da ética , qual o fundamento da linguagem, com base no qual se a concebe como lugar dessa operação, bem como da experiência a partir da negatividade - da subtração, da falta, da finitude - que travamos com ela? Essas questões permitem-nos sintetizar o caminho do pensamento agambeniano diante da experiência metafísica com a palavra como aprisionamento à representação e ao lógos, além de vislumbrar possíveis resultados dessa crítica para o seu próprio pensamento sobre a linguagem e a ética, momento fundamental da construção de sua filosofia. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz , Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme (...) and Maurice Blanchot – I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity , and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare ; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende analizar la particular relación de imbricación que Michel Foucault y Giorgio Agamben han venido a establecer entre la vida humana y el poder. A tal fin, se propone un recorrido por los dos momentos centrales de su producción que permiten dar cuenta de dicha imbricación: en el caso de Agamben, el referido a la investigación “homo sacer” y, en el de Foucault, el de su investigación en torno de la biopolítica como acontecimiento decisivo de (...) la modernidad. Ambas investigaciones han redundado, entre otros aspectos, pero de manera central, en la configuración de la vida humana en su relación con el poder. En cada uno de los momentos elegidos en las producciones de los filósofos, se analizan las nociones centrales que componen cada investigación: nuda vida, “homo sacer”, estado de excepción y “oikonomía”, en el primer caso; y biopolítica y gubernamentalidad, en el segundo. Finalmente, se contrastan ambas formulaciones filosóficas a fin de sopesar los alcances y las potencialidades que implican frente al análisis que proponen. Este breve ejercicio de análisis sobre la relación entre la vida y el poder en los dos filósofos, pretende poner en evidencia los riesgos a los que nos exponen ciertos presupuestos frecuentes que fundamentan y dan sentido a las ideas y a las prácticas políticas contemporáneas. (shrink)

This study seeks to critically explore the link between sovereignty, violence and war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. From a brief rereading of Leviathan’s main arguments that explicitly revolves around the Aristotelian distinction between actuality/ potentiality, it will conclude that Hobbesian pre-contractual violence is primarily based on what Hobbes terms “anticipatory reason” and the problem of future contingency. Relying on Foucauldian insights, it will be emphasized that the assumption of certain potentialities suffices in (...) leading to Hobbes’s well-known conclusion that the state of nature is a “condition of Warre.” In a second step, this study considers some of Agamben’s arguments to account for how pre-contractual violence as envisioned by Hobbes cannot be rendered impotent through the integration of a sovereign. In specific, Agamben’s claims shed light on an irreducible, inextricable entwining between the state of nature and the state of law as “Siamese twins” (Virno). On a meta-level, Agamben thus implicitly shows how the “Hobbesian problem” cannot be merely reduced to a “problem of order” (Parsons). With regard to the current functioning of the stratagems of financial markets and the mechanisms of future-colonization underpinning global politics, this study finally argues that Hobbes ought to be reevaluated in particular regarding the problem of the future in his account. Partly responding to Agamben’s critical investigations, I suggest that a careful exploration of what will be coined “the prospects of an actualization of the potentiality not-to-be” might serve as a first theoretical step towards a productive form of criticism. (shrink)

This is the first draft of a paper presented in an international conference in West Bengal.

Nach Sarasin ist Agambens Analyse im Vergleich zu derjenigen von Foucault ein "todesfixierter Mystizismus der Souveränität"1. Geulen schreibt, Agamben verwandle Foucaults Biopolitik in eine "Thanatopolitik"2, und sogar Agamben selbst unterstellt Foucault, "er habe sich einer einheitlichen Theorie der Macht konsequent verweigert."3. Folglich meint Agamben, er müsse die foucaultsche These berichtigen oder wenigstens ergänzen.4 Ich möchte deshalb im Folgenden in einem ersten, ausführlichen Schritt auf diejenigen Stellen von Agambens "Homo Sacer" eingehen, in denen Agamben aus Foucaults Perspektive (...) argumentiert oder gar Kritik an ihm übt. (shrink)

The idea of the political, reconfiguring sovereignty and exception: Analysing theoretical perspectives of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben -/- Author / Authors : Meenakshi Gogoi Page no. 69-78 Discipline : Political Science/Polity/ Democratic studies Script/language : Roman/English Category : Research paper Keywords: Political, Sovereignty, Exception, Democracy, Rule of Law.

In his early works, Giorgio Agamben argues that some Auschwitz inmates practised a ‘silent form of resistance’ by shutting themselves off from the world until nothing could harm them. I argue that this conception of ‘bare life’ is both too abstract and too individualistic. Agamben’s idea of bare life’s resistance first neglects the socio-historical context that has produced particular instances of it, effectively barring the investigation into how to avoid future occurrences of sovereign violence. Agamben, second, (...) emphasizes the potential for resistance present in individual bodies shut off from the world without providing guidelines for how these bodies should form a substantive community. I consequently employ Vasily Grossman’s writings on the Shoah to provide an alternative conception of bare life’s resistance in the camps. According to Grossman, resistance lies not in closing oneself off from the world, but in cultivating ineradicable nodes of ‘senseless kindness’ in concrete human interactions. (shrink)

This chapter is an overview of Giorgio Agamben's engagement, in the Homo Sacer series (1995–2014), with Aristotelian philosophy. It specifically studies Agamben's attempt to deconstruct two Aristotelian conceptual oppositions fundamental for the Western tradition of political thought: (1) that between the bare fact of being alive and "qualified" living (associated by Agamben with an alleged distinction between zōē and bios) and (2) that between potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia). Agamben's concept of form-of-life (forma-di-vita), a life (...) that is never "bare" but always in the process of qualifying itself, is designed to deactivate and overcome these distinctions. In the final volume of the series, The Use of Bodies (2014), this is done with the help of the Aristotelian concepts of use (chrēsis) and habit (hexis). (shrink)

This paper revisits Giorgio Agamben’s text The Time That Remains and through a comparative analysis contrasts the author’s reading of St Paul’s Romans to relevant Derridean thematics prevalent in the text. Specific themes include language, the law, and the subject. I illustrate how Agamben attempts to revitalise the idea of philosophical anthropology by breaking away from the deconstructive approach. Agamben argues that language is an experience but is currently in a state of nihilism. Consequently, the subject (...) has become lost; or, more specifically, the subject and its object have not disappeared in language but through language. The resuscitation of experience is thus required to defeat this condition: only in language does the subject have its site and origin. Unlike deconstruction, which highlights an inherent paradox within a situation unearthing a questionable foundation, Agamben argues that, by investigating the “exception,” one finds neither a norm nor an inherent truth of the situation, but the confusion which surrounds them both. (shrink)

El concepto de dispositivo en el pensamiento de Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze y Giorgio Agamben.

Cultural studies of recent memory tend to cling to love and find a certain answer from its musings. This critical move proceeds from various interrogations of cultural or cross-cultural practices towards adapting a linear progress so that love is tasked to provide an antidote to contemporary social maladies. This critical paper, however, attempts to appraise the idea that love is not a panacea, especially in a setting where theory is fragmented and assumes almost definitively a dead state. Instead, love functions (...) as a specter that haunts a post-theoretical culture. The paper hinges this take from contemporary thinkers whom Nicholas Birns points to as “theorists without ‘theory’.” As such, the spectral concept of love is explored and critiqued in the lens of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben – both thinkers taken as separate and together – as a subversion to its affirmative theoretical standing and as a proposal on how its spectrality can inform the possibilities of its function. (shrink)

In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, the narrator finds himself involved in a moral relation with the title character whose sense he finds difficult to articulate. I argue that we can make sense of this relation, up to a certain point, in terms of the influential account of obligation that Stephen Darwall advances in The Second-Person Standpoint. But I also argue that there is a dimension of moral sense in the relation that is not captured by Darwall’s account, or indeed (...) by any of the accounts of obligation that have been most prominent in the history of western philosophy from the early modern period up to the present. More specifically, I argue that what is brought out in the relation between Bartleby and the narrator is the separation of the experience of moral necessitation from the rule that would give its content. I attempt to show that this obligation without rule is a genuine moral phenomenon and that we can begin to understand it in terms of the ideas of love, singularity, and potentiality as these are developed in the work of Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben in different ways. I start with explaining the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness however resembles neoliberal theories of innovation, because both share the conceptual persona of a subject (...) whose potentialities exceed the current status quo. Potentiality is thus not an unambiguous antagonist of capitalism, as Lazzarato suggests. In order to adequately oppose neoliberalism, Lazzarato should question the role of potentiality in capitalism. Agamben has undertaken such a project. In the second part of the essay I consequently argue that Agamben’s philosophy of inactivity as impotentiality is able to circumvent neoliberalism and the society of the spectacle. (shrink)

Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in (...) how each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one’s share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in community with one another. This book traces this problem through a wide array of fields ranging from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, and social theory. (shrink)

There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possibility of transformation and, because of the connection they establish between politics (...) and animality, link this possibility to a change in the relationship between humans and their being alive. Yet both philosophers end up with an entirely different understanding of the nature of this change, and of its potential scope. This paper is an attempt at clarifying this disagreement between Nietzsche and Agamben, and with using it to come to a better understanding of the latter’s political ontology. It presents a reading of Kafka’s “The Burrow” in an attempt to show how Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine challenges the Nietzschean program of the affirmation of life as will to power. (shrink)

Some arguments against the assumption that ordinary people may share common knowledge are sound. The apparent cost of such arguments is the rejection of scientific theories that appeal to common knowledge. My proposal is to accept the arguments without rejecting the theories. On my proposal, common knowledge is shared by ideally rational people, who are not just mathematically simple versions of ordinary people. They are qualitatively different from us, and theorizing about them does not lead to predictions about our behavior. (...) Nevertheless, models of action that assume common knowledge have a role to play in our understanding of collective rationality. (shrink)

David Kaplan famously argued that mainstream semantics for modal logic, which identifies propositions with sets of possible worlds, is affected by a cardinality paradox. Takashi Yagisawa showed that a variant of the same paradox arises when standard possible worlds semantics is extended with impossible worlds to deliver a hyperintensional account of propositions. After introducing the problem, we discuss two general approaches to a possible solution: giving up on sets and giving up on worlds, either in the background semantic framework or (...) in the corresponding conception of propositions. As a result, we conclude that abandoning worlds by embracing a truthmaker-based approach offers a promising way to account for hyperintensional propositions without facing the paradoxical outcome. (shrink)

Mereological universalists, according to whom every plurality of entities has a fusion, usually claim that most quantifications are restricted to ordinary entities. However, there is no evidence that our usual quantifications over ordinary objects are restricted. In this article I explore an alternative way of reconciling Mereological Universalism with our usual quantifications. I resort to a modest form of ontological expansionism and to the so-called interpretational modalities. Quantifications over ordinary objects are the initial stages of the expansion. From these initial (...) stages, expansions can proceed upwards (fusions of entities in the domain of quantification are added), downwards (parts of entities in the domain are added), and sidewards (entities which are mereologically disjoint from the entities in the domain are added). These expansions are driven by a variety of epistemic and pragmatic reasons and raise different kinds of problems. At each stage, a modalized version of Mereological Universalism is true. By contrast, only at some especially rich stages, standard, non-modalized Mereological Universalism is true as well. Among these especially rich stages, there is a final, metaphysically pre-eminent stage of mereological plenitude. In the last part of the article I discuss some problems and limitations of expansionism. (shrink)

A wide variety of concepts are nowadays considered to be hyperintensional, and some of them do not seem to involve our representational attitudes. This led some philosophers to identify and defend a notion of worldly hyperintensionality: the idea that some hyperintensional phenomena derive from features of objective reality, independently of how we represent it. Against this view, Darragh Byrne and Naomi Thompson argue that the correct understanding of such phenomena must be conceptualist in nature, and claim that hyperintensionality always derives (...) from features of representations. In the present work I defend the genuine distinction between worldly and representational hyperintensionality through a new framing of the issue: the comparison with worldly intensionality. I argue that locating the sources of hyperintensionality should not be affected by preferences towards any specific semantic framework, and reject Byrne and Thompson's argument against worldly hyperintensionality. (shrink)

According to the Maxim of Quality, rational agents tend to speak honestly. Due to the influence of Grice, a connection between linguistic rationality and honesty is often taken for granted. However, the connection is not obvious: structural rationality in language use does not require honesty, any more than it requires dishonesty. In particular, Quality does not follow from the Cooperative Principle and structural rationality. But then what is honest rational speech? I propose to move the discussion in the context of (...) Stalnaker's theory of assertion. From this perspective, although there is no most rational way to behave, Quality follows from the structure of Stalnakerian conversations if interlocutors are sensitive to credibility. In this case, honesty is built on the expectation of reciprocity, and cooperativity is an outcome and not a precondition of rational communication. A benefit of my discussion is that the account of linguistic rationality falls under the more general view of interactive rationality familiar from theoretical economics. (shrink)

The present work outlines a logical and philosophical conception of propositions in relation to a group of puzzles that arise by quantifying over them: the Russell-Myhill paradox, the Prior-Kaplan paradox, and Prior's Theorem. I begin by motivating an interpretation of Russell-Myhill as depending on aboutness, which constrains the notion of propositional identity. I discuss two formalizations of of the paradox, showing that it does not depend on the syntax of propositional variables. I then extend to propositions a modal predicative response (...) to the paradoxes articulated by an abstraction principle for propositions. On this conception, propositions are “shadows” of the sentences that express them. Modal operators are used to uncover the implicit relation of dependence that characterizes propositions that are about propositions. The benefits of this approach are shown by application to other intensional puzzles. The resulting view is an alternative to the plenitudinous metaphysics of impredicative comprehension principles. (shrink)

Natural language contains simple lexical items for some but not all Boolean operators. English, for example, contains conjunction and, disjunction or, negated disjunction nor, but no word to express negated conjunction *nand nor any other Boolean connective. Natural language grammar can be described by a logic that expresses what the lexicon can express by its primitives, and the rest compositionally. Such logic for propositional connectives is described here as a bilateral extension of update semantics. The basic intuition is that a (...) context can be updated by assertion or by rejection, and by one or multiple propositions at once. These distinctions suffice to characterize the logic of the lexicon. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that explains both human consciousness and meanings through the working of attention. By arguing for a first-person approach to consciousness, this book offers a critical overview of the major theories and empirical findings on consciousness and attention, and exemplifies how one of the most difficult and fundamental conscious experiences to account for, that is, time, can be analyzed by adopting the kind of semantics developed within the presented theoretical framework: Attentional Semantics.

I argue that it is not acceptable to restrict the claim that linguistic types are concrete entities (type-concretism) to some categories of linguistic types (such as words or proper names), while at the same time conceding that other categories of linguistic types (such as sentence types) are abstract entities. Moreover, I suggest a way in which type-concretism can be extended to every linguistic type, thereby responding to the so-called productivity objection to type-concretism, according to which, whenever tokens of a type (...) t are produced in different, causally isolated circumstances, then t needs to be identified by a certain form or structure. This extension of type-concretism detaches type-concretism from so-called originalism and gives rules a prominent role in type-concretism. (shrink)

Some tools introduced by Linnebo to show that mathematical entities are thin objects can also be applied to non-mathematical entities, which have been thought to be thin as well for a variety of reasons. In this paper, I discuss some difficulties and opportunities concerning the application of abstraction and interpretational modalities to mereological sums. In particular, I show that on one hand some prima facie attractive candidates for the role of an explanatory plural abstraction principle for mereological sums (in terms (...) of pluralities of summed entities) are not really explanatory; on the other hand, singular abstraction principles (in terms of single summed entities) are materially inadequate. Nonetheless, explanatory criteria of identity and conditions of existence for mereological sums are provided by classical extensional mereology independent of abstraction principles. Thus, given classical extensional mereology, the reasons why, according to Linnebo, mathematical abstracted entities are thin also hold for mereological sums. Finally, I contend that interpretational modalities can be used to characterise the process by which a subject adds sums of previously admitted entities to the domain of quantification. (shrink)

Los conceptos de evolución y cambio evolutivo son a la vez laxos y polisémicos: se aplican a fenómenos muy diferentes y no siempre se definen con precisión. La aplicación extendida del paradigma neo-darwinista clásico, además, suele imponer un esquema adaptacionista al análisis de los hechos evolutivos, en el cual las funciones juegan un papel lógicamente anterior a los rasgos y sus formas. En este artículo proponemos, como etapa previa a la formulación de hipótesis sobre las causas del cambio, un modelo (...) de espacio forma-función que pueda responder a preguntas como cuándo se da un cambio en los rasgos de una arquitectura biológica y de qué tipo son estos cambios. Un modelo de este tipo nos permite ver claramente cuándo se da un cambio en la forma o en la función y qué alcance evolutivo tiene. (shrink)

The debate around the notions of a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge has proven crucial for the development of many fields in philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, metametaphysics etc. We advocate that the recent debate on the two notions is also fruitful for man-made distributed computing systems and for the epistemic analysis thereof. Following a recently proposed modal and fallibilistic account of a priori knowledge, we elaborate the corresponding concept of a priori belief: We propose a rich taxonomy of (...) types of a priori beliefs and their role for the different agents that participate in the system engineering process, which match the existing view exceedingly well and are particularly promising for explaining and dealing with unexpected behaviors in fault-tolerant distributed systems. Developing such a philosophical foundation will provide a sound basis for eventually implementing our ideas in a suitable epistemic reasoning and analysis framework and, hence, constitutes a mandatory first step for developing methods and tools to cope with the various challenges that emerge in such systems. (shrink)

We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction _and_, disjunction _or_, and negated disjunction _nor_; the lexical quantifiers are _all, some_ and _no_. The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, (...) the lexicalized operators are all upward or downward monotone, an observation known as the Monotonicity Universal. We propose a logical explanation of lexical gaps and of the Monotonicity Universal, based on the dynamic behaviour of connectives and quantifiers. We define update potentials for logical operators as procedures to modify the context, under the assumption that an update by \( \phi \) depends on the logical form of \( \phi \) and on the speech act performed: assertion or rejection. We conjecture that the adequacy of update potentials determines the limits of lexicalizability for logical operators in natural language. Finally, we show that on this framework the Monotonicity Universal follows from the logical properties of the updates that correspond to each operator. (shrink)

Communication facilitates coordination, but coordination might fail if there's too much uncertainty. I discuss a scenario in which vagueness-driven uncertainty undermines the possibility of publicly sharing a belief. I then show that asserting an epistemic modal sentence, 'Might p', can reveal the speaker's uncertainty, and that this may improve the chances of coordination despite the lack of a common epistemic ground. This provides a game-theoretic rationale for epistemic modality. The account draws on a standard relational semantics for epistemic modality, Stalnaker's (...) theory of assertion as informative update, and a Bayesian framework for reasoning under uncertainty. (shrink)

Why do we use epistemic modals like 'might'? According to Factualism, the function of 'might' is to exchange information about state-of-affairs in the modal universe. As an alternative to Factualism, this paper offers a game-theoretic rationale for epistemic possibility operators in a Bayesian setting. The background picture is one whereby communication facilitates coordination, but coordination could fail if there's too much uncertainty, since the players' ability to share a belief is undermined. However, 'might' and related expressions can be used to (...) reveal one's uncertainty, and exploit this to coordinate despite the lack of a common epistemic ground. The final result is a way to articulate a non-Factualist view of epistemic possibility modals that builds on their standard semantics. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that consciousness is a unique way of processing information, in that: it produces information, rather than purely transmitting it; the information it produces is meaningful for us; the meaning it has is always individuated. This uniqueness allows us to process information on the basis of our personal needs and ever-changing interactions with the environment, and consequently to act autonomously. Three main basic cognitive processes contribute to realize this unique way of information processing: the self, attention (...) and working memory. The self, which is primarily expressed via the central and peripheral nervous systems, maps our body, the environment, and our relations with the environment. It is the primary means by which the complexity inherent to our composite structure is reduced into the “single voice” of a unique individual. It provides a reference system that (albeit evolving) is sufficiently stable to define the variations that will be used as the raw material for the construction of conscious information. Attention allows for the selection of those variations in the state of the self that are most relevant in the given situation. Attention originates and is deployed from a single locus inside our body, which represents the center of the self, around which all our conscious experiences are organized. Whatever is focused by attention appears in our consciousness as possessing a spatial quality defined by this center and the direction toward which attention is focused. In addition, attention determines two other features of conscious experience: periodicity and phenomenal quality. Self and attention are necessary but not sufficient for conscious information to be produced. Complex forms of conscious experiences, such as the various modes of givenness of conscious experience and the stream of consciousness, need a working memory mechanism to assemble the basic pieces of information selected by attention. (shrink)