The notion of Providence is born with the Greek word prόnoia which, however, originally meant "premeditation" (of a crime) or "design" of an artefact, and had nothing to do with religion. It was Plato in the Timaeus who adopted the word from the common language to indicate the rational and benevolent principle that inspired the anonymous God, which he defined as dēmiourgόs (also this word originally meant a professional technician, for example, a doctor or an architect) in his work of (...) shaping the cosmos. The doctrine of divine Providence was taken up by Middle Platonism, and with it the need to "justify" the divinity for the presence of evil in the world, what Leibniz will call "theodicy". Stoicism also supported Providence, but here there is no "theodicy" because in Stoic philosophy rationality and beneficial purpose are intrinsic to the cosmic process and therefore there is no external architect to be charged and absolved. Christian authors of the first centuries recycled the arguments of the Platonists in support of Providence, despite the fact that the word prόnoia never appears in the New Testament, nor is there any Hebrew equivalent in the Tanak. Perhaps there is some compatibility problem between the philosophical theory of Providence and the biblical-Christian view of God. (shrink)

Il concetto di relazione è colto come concetto antinomico e il valore è la coscienza di questa antinomia.

Riflessione sulla temporalità dell'evento a partire dalla pandemia di SARS-CoV2.

If the laws of nature are as the Humean believes, it is an unexplained cosmic coincidence that the actual Humean mosaic is as extremely regular as it is. This is a strong and well-known objection to the Humean account of laws. Yet, as reasonable as this objection may seem, it is nowadays sometimes dismissed. The reason: its unjustified implicit assignment of equiprobability to each possible Humean mosaic; that is, its assumption of the principle of indifference, which has been attacked on (...) many grounds ever since it was first proposed. In place of equiprobability, recent formal models represent the doxastic state of total ignorance as suspension of judgment. In this paper I revisit the cosmic coincidence objection to Humean laws by assessing which doxastic state we should endorse. By focusing on specific features of our scenario I conclude that suspending judgment results in an unnecessarily weak doxastic state. First, I point out that recent literature in epistemology has provided independent justifications of the principle of indifference. Second, given that the argument is framed within a Humean metaphysics, it turns out that we are warranted to appeal to these justifications and assign a uniform and additive credence distribution among Humean mosaics. This leads us to conclude that, contrary to widespread opinion, we should not dismiss the cosmic coincidence objection to the Humean account of laws. (shrink)

Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a 'typical' dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light --a different light-- on philosophical debates on the laws of (...) nature. In the explanation of such patterns, the specific form of the underlying dynamics is almost irrelevant. The conditions required, given a free state-space evolution, suffice to account for the coarse-grained lawful behaviour. An analysis of such conditions might thus provide a different account of how regular behaviour can occur. This paper focuses on drawing attention to this type of explanation, outlining it in the diverse areas of physics in which it appears, and discussing its limitations and significance in the tractable setting of classical statistical mechanics. (shrink)

Can stable regularities be explained without appealing to governing laws or any other modal notion? In this paper, I consider what I will call a ‘Humean system’—a generic dynamical system without guiding laws—and assess whether it could display stable regularities. First, I present what can be interpreted as an account of the rise of stable regularities, following from Strevens [2003], which has been applied to explain the patterns of complex systems (such as those from meteorology and statistical mechanics). Second, since (...) this account presupposes that the underlying dynamics displays deterministic chaos, I assess whether it can be adapted to cases where the underlying dynamics is not chaotic but truly random—that is, cases where there is no dynamics guiding the time evolution of the system. If this is so, the resulting stable, apparently non-accidental regularities are the fruit of what can be called statistical necessity rather than of a primitive physical necessity. (shrink)

It is not uncommon in the history of science and philosophy to encounter crucial experiments or crucial objections the truth-value of which we are ignorant, that is, about which we suspend judgment. Should we ignore such objections? Contrary to widespread practice, I show that in and only in some circumstances they should not be ignored, for the epistemically rational doxastic attitude is to suspend judgment also about the hypothesis that the objection targets. In other words, suspension of judgment “propagates” from (...) the crucial objection to the hypothesis. In this paper I study under which conditions this phenomenon occurs, and discuss its significance for the topics of skepticism, scientific realism, and peer disagreement. (shrink)

I summarize, in this informal interview, the main approaches to the ‘Past Hypothesis’, the postulation of a low-entropy initial state of the universe. I’ve chosen this as an open problem in the philosophical foundations of physics. I hope that this brief overview helps readers in gaining perspective and in appreciating the diverse range of approaches in this fascinating unresolved debate.

Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a ‘typical’ dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light—a different light—on philosophical debates on the laws of nature. In (...) the explanation of such patterns, the specific form of the underlying dynamics is almost irrelevant. The constraints required, given a free state-space evolution, suffice to account for the coarse-grained lawful behaviour. An analysis of such constraints might thus provide a different account of how regular behaviour can occur. This paper focuses on drawing attention to this type of explanation, outlining it in the diverse areas of physics in which it appears, and discussing its limitations and significance in the tractable setting of classical statistical mechanics. (shrink)

This doctoral dissertation investigates the notion of physical necessity. Specifically, it studies whether it is possible to account for non-accidental regularities without the standard assumption of a pre-existent set of governing laws. Thus, it takes side with the so called deflationist accounts of laws of nature, like the humean or the antirealist. The specific aim is to complement such accounts by providing a missing explanation of the appearance of physical necessity. In order to provide an explanation, I recur to fields (...) that have not been appealed to so far in discussions about the metaphysics of laws. Namely, I recur to complex systems’ theory, and to the foundations of statistical mechanics. The explanation proposed is inspired by how complex systems’ theory has elucidated the way patterns emerge, and by the probabilistic explanations of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. More specifically, this thesis studies how some constraints that make no direct reference to the dynamics can be a sufficient condition for obtaining in the long run, with high probability, stable regular behavior. I hope to show how certain metaphysical accounts of laws might benefit from the insights achieved in these other fields. According to the proposal studied in this thesis, some regularities are not accidental not in virtue of an underlying physical necessity. The non-accidental character of certain regular behavior is only due to its overwhelming stability. Thus, from this point of view the goal becomes to explain the stability of temporal patterns without assuming a set of pre-existent guiding laws. It is argued that the stability can be the result of a process of convergence to simpler and stable regularities from a more complex lower level. According to this project, if successful, there would be no need to postulate a (mysterious) intermediate category between logical necessity and pure contingency. Similarly, there would be no need to postulate a (mysterious) set of pre-existent governing laws. Part I of the thesis motivates part II, mostly by arguing why further explanation of the notions of physical necessity and governing laws should be welcomed (chapter 1), and by studying the plausibility of a lawless fundamental level (chapters 2 and 3). Given so, part II develops the explanation of formation of simpler and stable behavior from a more complex underlying level. (shrink)

En esta entrada se mencionan las principales cuestiones en los fundamentos de la mecánica estadı́stica y la termodinámica, y las cuestiones filosóficas en las que repercuten estas áreas de la fı́sica. Al final se añaden lecturas recomendadas, enfatizando las traducidas al español.

Como introducción al monográfico sobre reduccionismo y emergencia brindamos aquí un contexto teórico al debate contemporáneo. Hablaremos primero del acercamiento naturalista en filosofía (§2), así como de dos de las características más importantes de la emergencia: autonomía y universalidad (§3). Finalmente, basándonos en la literatura contemporánea (principalmente en Patricia Palacios y Jessica Wilson, además de Mario Bunge y Alicia Juarrero) presentamos algunas de las definiciones y distinciones más importantes para entender mejor el debate sobre la emergencia (§4).

This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding the constraints that truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply to Briggs and Forbes (2017), whoargue that certain truthmaking commitments are incurred by a Humean metaphysics and by the Growing-Block theory. First, I argue that Humean Supervenience does not need to endorse a standard version of truthmaker maximalism. This undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion that Humean Supervenience and the Growing-Block theory are (...) incompatible. Second, I argue that the Growing-Block theory does not commit us to any weaker version of truthmaker maximalism, which also undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion. Finally, I point out other reasons to think that any version of truthmaker maximalism is disputable, undermining a fortiori Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion and supporting the moral that metaphysical theories—or at least Humean Supervenience, the Growing-Block theory, and presentism—are little constrained by truthmaking commitments. (shrink)

The common account of the analog vs digital distinction is based on features of physical systems, being related to the usage of continuous vs discrete supports respectively. It is proposed here to alternatively characterize the concepts of analog and digital as related to coding systems, of which a formal definition is given, by suggesting that the distinction refers to the strategy adopted to define the coding function: extensional in digital systems, isomorphic intensional in analog systems. This thesis is supported by (...) examples, in particular of analog systems exploiting discrete supports, and is discussed to explain why digital coding is currently so widespread in technological and social practice. (shrink)

In situations where we ignore everything but the space of possibilities, we ought to suspend judgment—that is, remain agnostic—about which of these possibilities is the case. This means that we cannot sum our degrees of belief in different possibilities, something that has been formalized as an axiom of non-additivity. Consistent with this way of representing our ignorance, I defend a doxastic norm that recommends that we should nevertheless follow a certain additivity of possibilities: even if we cannot sum degrees of (...) belief in different possibilities, we should be more confident in larger groups of possibilities. It is thus shown that, in the type of situation considered (in so-called ‘classical ignorance’, i.e. “behind a thin veil of ignorance”), it is epistemically rational for advocates of suspending judgment to endorse this comparative confidence; while on the other hand it is shown that, even in classical ignorance, no stronger belief—such as a precise uniform probability distribution—is warranted. (shrink)

How can a metaphysics of abstract entities be built upon a metaphysics of time? In this paper, I address the question of how to accommodate abstract entities in a presentist world. I consider both the traditional metaontological approach of unrestricted fundamental quantification and then ontological pluralism. I argue that under the former we need to impose two constraints in the characterization of presentism in order to avoid undesired commitments to abstract entities: we have to characterize presentism as a thesis only (...) about the concrete, and we also need to avoid the widely held distinction between tensed and tenseless senses of existence. Under ontological pluralism, instead, I argue that we can naturally accommodate any view of abstract objects in a presentist world. (shrink)

Much recent philosophy of physics has investigated the process of symmetry breaking. Here, I critically assess the alleged symmetry restoration at the fundamental scale. I draw attention to the contingency that gauge symmetries exhibit, that is, the fact that they have been chosen from an infinite space of possibilities. I appeal to this feature of group theory to argue that any metaphysical account of fundamental laws that expects symmetry restoration up to the fundamental level is not fully satisfactory. This is (...) a symmetry argument in line with Curie’s first principle. Further, I argue that this same feature of group theory helps to explain the ‘unreasonable’ effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and that it reduces the philosophical significance that has been attributed to the objectivity of gauge symmetries. (shrink)

In juxtaposition with the myth and tragedy of Ovid’s Medea, this paper investigates the possibility within the Kantian conception of agency of understanding moral evil as acting against one’s better judgment. It defends the thesis that in Kant self-deception, i. e. the intentional untruthfulness to oneself, provides the fundamental structure for choosing against the moral law. I argue that, as Kant’s thought progresses, self-deception slowly proceeds to become the paradigmatic case of moral evil. This is discussed with regard to two (...) important topics in his later moral philosophy: the doctrine of radical evil and the crucial role of the duty of truthfulness in ethics. The inquiry into Kant’s theory of conscience unfolds both against this theoretical background and in light of its historical roots in the polemic against casuistry and probabilism. This contribution closes with a brief look at the tools Kant implements to counter this tendency to self-deception in moral judgment and particularly at the role casuistry plays within his conception of moral education. (shrink)

Some of the manuscripts once part of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s collection transmit autograph notes, which have been useful to reconstruct his library. A peculiar case is represented by the notes transmitted in a codex containing the Latin translation of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. These notes are actual corrections to the translation made mostly on the basis of a comparison with the Hebrew text, while in some other cases they derive from a specific interpretation. The aim of this (...) paper is to present some characteristics of the textual revisions, in particular with reference to the Hebrew source. The palaeographic data demonstrate Pico’s direct involvement, which leads to the question of the authorship of these notes, namely if they were the result of an autonomous work or of a collaboration with some other scholar. (shrink)

The species concept is one of the central concepts in biological science. Although modern systematics speculates about the existence of a complex hierarchy of nested taxa, biological species are considered particularly important for the active role they play in evolution. However, neither theoretical biologists nor philosophers of biology have come to an agreement about what a species is. In this chapter, we address two questions pertaining to biological species: (1) are they individuals or universals? and (2) are they bona fide (...) or fiat entities? In section The Species-as-Individuals View, we illustrate the reasons that have led many scholars to support the view that species are individuals. In the next two sections, we show that the relational concepts of species – on which the species-as-individuals view is based – provide neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for species membership. This seriously undermines the species-as-individuals view. In the section A Conceptualist Model for the Metaphysics of Species, we advance the proposal that species are fiat concepts (and thus, universal entities partially dependent on the human mind) carved in a multi-dimensional space representing the properties that the biological organisms possess. The final section concludes. (shrink)

In epoca medievale si è molto discusso su alcuni concetti chiave come prova o giustificazione. La teoria della prova contenuta nei trattati di logica medievale prende il nome tecnico di consequentia, che è un tipo di ragionamento fondato sul passaggio dalla concessione (o negazione) di uno o più enunciati denominati antecedenti alla concessione (o negazione) di uno o più enunciati denominati conseguenti. Questo tipo di teoria ha avuto un correlato a livello dei singoli termini che compongono l’enunciato all'interno della teoria (...) nota come suppositio terminorum. Prende, infatti, il nome di descensus, la regola che permette la verifica del passaggio da un termine maggiore (un termine comune) ad un termine minore (che denota individui). La stessa definizione di alcune ramificazioni della teoria della suppositio è col-legata alla possibilità di ammettere o meno il descensus cioè questa "discesa" da un termine comune ad una congiunzione o disgiunzione di termini singolari. Il presente lavoro intende descrivere la teoria del descensus come un tipo particolare di consequentia mostrandone le connessioni con le moderne tecniche logiche. I trattati che si affronteranno appartengono al XIV e al XV secolo, cioè ad un periodo caratterizzato da una sistemazione della materia che li rende confrontabili con un quadro teorico unitario. (shrink)

The literature on algorithmic fairness has examined exogenous sources of biases such as shortcomings in the data and structural injustices in society. It has also examined internal sources of bias as evidenced by a number of impossibility theorems showing that no algorithm can concurrently satisfy multiple criteria of fairness. This paper contributes to the literature stemming from the impossibility theorems by examining how informational richness affects the accuracy and fairness of predictive algorithms. With the aid of a computer simulation, we (...) show that informational richness is the engine that drives improvements in the performance of a predictive algorithm, in terms of both accuracy and fairness. The centrality of informational richness suggests that classification parity, a popular criterion of algorithmic fairness, should be given relatively little weight. But we caution that the centrality of informational richness should be taken with a grain of salt in light of practical limitations, in particular, the so-called bias-variance trade off. (shrink)

In this paper we will give a critical account of Plantinga’s well-known argument to the effect that the existence of an omnipotent and morally perfect God is consistent with the actual presence of evil. After presenting Plantinga’s view, we critically discuss both the idea of divine knowledge of conditionals of freedom and the concept of transworld depravity. Then, we will sketch our own version of the Free-Will Defence, which maintains that moral evil depends on the misuse of human freedom. However, (...) our argument does not hinge on problematic metaphysical assumptions, but depends only on a certain definition of a free act and a particular interpretation of divine omniscience. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw the fundamental structures of the phenomenology of the person, on the basis of a precise theoretical assumption: to introduce to phenomenology of the person is to introduce to the eidetic phenomenology. So, my paper explores the fundamental questions of the Husserlian phenomenology, and traces a path towards the contemporary questions of the phenomenology of the person: what is a person in the era of social networks and liquid society?

Many philosophers have pointed out that statistical evidence, or at least some forms of it, lack desirable epistemic or non-epistemic properties, and that this should make us wary of litigations in which the case against the defendant rests in whole or in part on statistical evidence. Others have responded that such broad reservations about statistical evidence are overly restrictive since appellate courts have expressed nuanced views about statistical evidence. In an effort to clarify and reconcile, I put forward an interpretive (...) analysis of why statistical evidence should raise concerns in some cases but not others. I argue that when there is a mismatch between the specificity of the evidence and the expected specificity of the accusation, statistical evidence—as any other kind of evidence—should be considered insufficient to sustain a conviction. I rely on different stylized court cases to illustrate the explanatory power of this analysis. (shrink)

Can epistemology be shaped by the Christian faith? Is there anything specific to this faith that can give rise to an equally specific epistemology without compromising the autonomy that the latter requires from faith? In the footsteps of Aquinas's religious epistemology, I first focus on the fact that Christian faith seems to characterize intellectual activity in a way that appears to be irreconcilable with epistemological perspectives that are not shaped by faith. Second, I argue that it is possible to do (...) justice to the irreconcilability in question by making reference to what radically distinguishes the Christian faith from the epistemological reflection. Finally, I focus on two ways in which the specific nature of Christian faith can shape and promote rationality, and give rise to a Christian epistemology. (shrink)

Faust is one of the most famous literary character: reshaped in different ways throughout the centuries, my goal here is to reformulate its figure with the tools of Kantian transcendentalism. This reinterpretation brings home the possibility to investigate in a new way the transhumanist logic: if Faust is a character that desperately wants to overcome in a trascendental way its condition for a more complete perspective of things, transhumanists can be seen as Fausts and, therefore, logical transcendentalists.

In 1931, Evgeny Pashukanis, the distinguished Soviet jurist, author of “The General Theory of Law and Marxism”, following an invitation to celebrate the centenary of Hegel’s death, published an assay entitled “Hegel, the State and Law” (Гегель. Государство и право) aimed to demistify, through a brief retrospective of Hegelian’s philosophy, its specific use, something achieved through the bourgeois ideology which, at some point in history, abandoned Kantism and its followers to embrace Neo-Hegelianism as a philosophy of domination and social control. (...) In this unpublished text, Pashukanis reflects, from a Marxist and Leninist point of view, on the ability to use Hegel as a bourgeois defense tool, when a particular society, specifically the one from the 1920s to the 1930s, began to be affected by the fear of communism and by the crises that endanger its very survival. From this angle, the capitalist interest - following Pashukanisian interpretation of Hegel - will only develop in the terms of a scientific elimination of all those subversive potentials that the economic crisis is destined to produce, thus reformulating the notions of State and Law which, in between obedience, discipline and defense of the homeland, come to assert the official recognition of the inexorably crushed proletariat in a condition in which all relations of production and social reproduction are transferred to the realm of exploitation, as its definitive subsumption to capital. (shrink)

Multialgebras have been much studied in mathematics and in computer science. In 2016 Carnielli and Coniglio introduced a class of multialgebras called swap structures, as a semantic framework for dealing with several Logics of Formal Inconsistency that cannot be semantically characterized by a single finite matrix. In particular, these LFIs are not algebraizable by the standard tools of abstract algebraic logic. In this paper, the first steps towards a theory of non-deterministic algebraization of logics by swap structures are given. Specifically, (...) a formal study of swap structures for LFIs is developed, by adapting concepts of universal algebra to multialgebras in a suitable way. A decomposition theorem similar to Birkhoff’s representation theorem is obtained for each class of swap structures. Moreover, when applied to the 3-valued algebraizable logics J3 and Ciore, their classes of algebraic models are retrieved, and the swap structures semantics become twist structures semantics. This fact, together with the existence of a functor from the category of Boolean algebras to the category of swap structures for each LFI, suggests that swap structures can be seen as non-deterministic twist structures. This opens new avenues for dealing with non-algebraizable logics by the more general methodology of multialgebraic semantics. (shrink)

dolce, the first top-level ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. dolce is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. dolce clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and (...) is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources. Being a foundational ontology, dolce is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains. In these 20 years dolce has shown that applied ontologies can be stable and that interoperability across reference and domain ontologies is a reality. This paper briefly introduces the ontology and shows how to use it on a few modeling cases. (shrink)

Aristóteles comparte con Platón la concepción de la forma como causa del ser y del conocimiento de las cosas. Sin embargo, un análisis de sus críticas a las Ideas muestra que encuentra en la separación de las Ideas y las cosas sensibles la aporía fundamental de la teoría platónica. Con el propósito de circunscribir el significado de “separación” aplicable a las Ideas, concentraremos nuestro estudio en dos objeciones: 1) el argumento que conduce al tercer hombre y 2) la inutilidad de (...) las Ideas como causas. En el primer caso, creemos que la separación entraña homonimia, por lo que la solución aristotélica implicará la comunidad de naturaleza entre el individuo y su esencia. En el segundo, la separación implica trascendencia o falta de contacto entre generante y generado, por lo que la solución aristotélica apuntará a concebir la forma de las entidades naturales como un principio inmanente, inseparable de la materia y del movimiento, pero a la vez eterno a través de su reproducción en otros individuos de la misma especie. Creemos que en ambas soluciones opera un principio de sinonimia, que constituye su propia contribución al problema de la separación. (shrink)

In §21 of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik asks us to consider the forms: a a2 = 4 and a a > 0 and notices that they can be obtained from a φ(a) by replacing the function-name placeholder φ(ξ) by names for the functions ξ2 = 4 and ξ > 0 (and the placeholder cannot be replaced by names of objects or of functions of 2 arguments).

Fragmentalism allows incompatible facts to constitute reality in an absolute manner, provided that they fail to obtain together. In recent years, the view has been extensively discussed, with a focus on its formalisation in model-theoretic terms. This paper focuses on three formalisations: Lipman’s approach, the subvaluationist interpretation, and a novel view that has been so far overlooked. The aim of the paper is to explore the application of these formalisations to the alethic modal case. This logical exploration will allow us (...) to study (i) cases of metaphysical incompatibility between modal facts and (ii) cases of modal dialetheias. In turn, this will enrich our understanding of the role of impossibility in the fragmentalist framework. (shrink)

Smith argues that, unlike other forms of evidence, naked statistical evidence fails to satisfy normic support. This is his solution to the puzzles of statistical evidence in legal proof. This paper focuses on Smith’s claim that DNA evidence in cold-hit cases does not satisfy normic support. I argue that if this claim is correct, virtually no other form of evidence used at trial can satisfy normic support. This is troublesome. I discuss a few ways in which Smith can respond.

Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why admitting other (...) forms of evidence, such as eyewitness, trace, and motive evidence, does not violate equal protection. (shrink)

Il 2021 segna gli ottant’anni dalla nascita di Mario Perniola, uno dei massimi filosofi italiani del secondo dopoguerra. Questo volume raccoglie interventi che esplorano la sua opera mostrandone la fertilità e sottolineando al tempo stesso la prossimità delle sue idee con le principali sfide del nostro tempo. Dall’Italia al Brasile, passando per gli Stati Uniti, l’Irlanda, la Francia, il Belgio, il Messico e la Cina, gli autori si soffermano su temi che comprendono l’estetica, la politica, la teoria della comunicazione, i (...) queer studies, il pensiero rituale e religioso, la sessualità e la letteratura, restituendo la plurivocità e l’originalità di un filosofo di respiro internazionale e più che mai attuale. (shrink)

‘No-fault unbelief’ can be named the view that there are those who do not believe in God through no moral or intellectual fault of their own. This view opposes a more traditional one, which can be named ‘flawed unbelief’ view, according to which religious unbelief signals a cognitive or moral flaw in the non-believer. Since this charge of mental or moral flaw causes a certain uneasiness, I oppose the former view, i.e. ‘no-fault unbelief’, with a strategy that has nothing to (...) do with the latter. I assume that ‘no-fault unbelief’ is correct and show what consequences follow for both unbelievers and believers. I conclude that the assumption in question is superficially beneficial but deeply detrimental to unbelievers, and by contrast, it is superficially detrimental and deeply beneficial to believers. (shrink)

In recent decades, Richard Swinburne has offered an influential view of the relationship between faith and reason. In doing so, he focused to a considerable extent on Aquinas’s view of faith. For Swinburne, Aquinas’ view of faith is that to have faith in God is simply to have a belief-that. In contrast, it is another view of faith, which Swinburne calls ‘Lutheran,’ that involves both theoretical beliefs-that and a trust in the Living God. In this article, I argue that Swinburne’s (...) view is not faithful to Aquinas’s doctrine of faith. In the first section, I will explain Swinburne’s view of belief in detail and its application to Aquinas’s doctrine of faith. In the second section, I will bolster my argument by showing that Swinburne’s reading is inconsistent with Aquinas’ statements regarding three relationships, which are essential to Aquinas’s faith. I am referring to the relationships between faith and will, between faith and merit and between faith and doubt. (shrink)

Both Husserl and Sartre speak of quasi-presence in their descriptions of the lived experience of imagination, and for both philosophers, accounting for quasi-presence means developing an account of the hyle proper to imagination. Guided by the perspective of fulfillment, Husserl’s theory of imaginary quasi-presence goes through three stages. Having experimented first with a depiction-model and then a perception-model, Husserl’s mature theory appeals to his innovative conception of inner consciousness. This elegant account nevertheless fails to do justice to the facticity and (...) bodily involvement of our imaginary experience. Sartre’s theory of analogon, based on his conception of imaginary quasi-presence as ‘magical’ self-affection, embodies important insights on these issues. Kinesthetic sensations and feelings are the modes in which we make use of own body to possess and be possessed by the imaginary object, thus lending it a semblance of bodily presence. (shrink)

Advances in neuroscience implicate reentrant signaling as the predominant form of communication between brain areas. This principle was used in a series of masking experiments that defy explanation by feed-forward theories. The masking occurs when a brief display of target plus mask is continued with the mask alone. Two masking processes were found: an early process affected by physical factors such as adapting luminance and a later process affected by attentional factors such as set size. This later process is called (...) masking by object substitution, because it occurs whenever there is a mismatch between the reentrant visual representation and the ongoing lower level activity. Iterative reentrant processing was formalized in a computational model that provides an excellent fit to the data. The model provides a more comprehensive account of all forms of visual masking than do the long-held feed-forward views based on inhibitory contour interactions. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Sartre’s theory of selfhood against the background of the contemporary debate between minimal-self theories and narrative-self theories. I argue that Sartre’s theory incorporates both an emphasis on the singular first-person perspective, which is characteristic of minimal-self theories, and an emphasis on the practical intelligibility of experience, which is characteristic of narrative-self theories. The distinctiveness of the Sartrean combination of these motifs consists in its idea of the necessary ideal-relatedness of consciousness. According to Sartre, the logical structure of (...) the pre-reflective cogito requires the haunting presence of an ideal of self-coincidence, which determines for consciousness the meaning of its lived experiences. Consciousness exists as a question to itself due to this ideal-relatedness, and it answers this question by projecting its possibilities as creative and symbolic realizations of this ideal. Establishing the connection between Sartre’s theory of imagination and his theory of selfhood, I suggest that both the ideal and the possibility of consciousness are lived in the manner of the imaginary. (shrink)

In this essay, I first show that, from the view that God is the ultimate cause of the human ability to perform ethically laudable acts, does not follow that no continuity between biological and intentional altruism is possible. In line with recent theological research concerning the non-human world, I argue that there is a partial continuity between these two forms of altruism. I also show that, from a naturalistic viewpoint, no continuity at all seems demonstrable between the two forms of (...) altruism at stake. I therefore contribute to strengthen a more general conviction, according to which evolution in itself is more persuasive than its combination with naturalism. (shrink)

Thinking is overrated: golfers perform best when distracted and under pressure; firefighters make the right calls without a clue as to why; and you are yourself ill advised to look at your steps as you go down the stairs, or to try and remember your pin number before typing it in. Just do it, mindlessly. Both empirical psychologists and the common man have long worked out that thinking is often a bad idea, but philosophers still hang on to an intellectualist (...) picture of human action. This book challenges that picture and calls on philosophers to wake up to the power of mindlessness: it is our habits, skills and conventions that help us cope with a world way too diverse for us to hope to always reinterpret it. The book presents the empirical evidence that has been accumulating over the last few decades and offers a philosophical analysis of mindless phenomena such as habits, skilled activity, automatic actions, emotional and spontaneous reactions and social conventions, arguing that traditional philosophical theories of action should be revised to do justice to this forgotten but important part of our lives: when we act mindlessly, we are free and fully rational even though we neither deliberate nor are aware of what we are doing. (shrink)

The logics of formal inconsistency (LFIs, for short) are paraconsistent logics (that is, logics containing contradictory but non-trivial theories) having a consistency connective which allows to recover the ex falso quodlibet principle in a controlled way. The aim of this paper is considering a novel semantical approach to first-order LFIs based on Tarskian structures defined over swap structures, a special class of multialgebras. The proposed semantical framework generalizes previous aproaches to quantified LFIs presented in the literature. The case of QmbC, (...) the simpler quantified LFI expanding classical logic, will be analyzed in detail. An axiomatic extension of QmbC called QLFI1o is also studied, which is equivalent to the quantified version of da Costa and D'Ottaviano 3-valued logic J3. The semantical structures for this logic turn out to be Tarkian structures based on twist structures. The expansion of QmbC and QLFI1o with a standard equality predicate is also considered. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson has recently proposed a new argument for the thesis that killing the one in the Trolley Problem is not permissible. Her argument relies on the introduction of a new scenario, in which the bystander may also sacrifice herself to save the five. Thomson argues that those not willing to sacrifice themselves if they could may not kill the one to save the five. Bryce Huebner and Marc Hauser have recently put Thomson's argument to empirical test by asking (...) people what they should do in the new trilemma case, in which they may also sacrifice themselves. They found that the majority judge that they should either kill the one or sacrifice themselves; Huebner and Hauser argue that those numbers speak against Thomson's argument. But Thomson's argument was about the dialectical effect of the new trilemma on the traditional dilemma, rather than about the trilemma itself. Here I present the results of a study in which I asked subjects first what they should do in the trilemma and then what they should do in the traditional Trolley Problem. I found that, if asked first about the trilemma, subjects then have the intuition that killing the one in the traditional Bystander at the Switch is not permissible?exactly what Thomson's argument had predicted. (shrink)