¿De qué hablamos cuando decimos Diseño Sustentable? El diseño sustentable podría definirse como el diseño que tiene en cuenta los aspectos ambientales en todos los niveles de producción. Así mismo, persigue el objetivo de fabricar productos que aporten el menor impacto posible en el ecosistema a lo largo de todo el ciclo de vida. Es muy difícil encontrar productos de consumo que cumplan puntualmente con los Preceptos del eco diseño y que sean exitosos en el mercado. Ante esta situación es (...) necesario revisar los aspectos involucrados en la concepción de un nuevo producto: ¿El rol del diseñador es el adecuado?, ¿Existe una seria y responsable conciencia por parte de los empresarios para llevar adelante un proyecto de eco diseño?, ¿Son los productos eco lo suficientemente atractivos para captar la atención de los consumidores? (shrink)

We study the origin of quantum probabilities as arising from non-Boolean propositional-operational structures. We apply the method developed by Cox to non distributive lattices and develop an alternative formulation of non-Kolmogorovian probability measures for quantum mechanics. By generalizing the method presented in previous works, we outline a general framework for the deduction of probabilities in general propositional structures represented by lattices (including the non-distributive case).

This paper addresses the problem of articulating ethics with justice, as it would seem impossible to think the practical application of one without denying the other at the same time. Indeed, as Levinas puts it, justice is violence within ethics when trying to compare the incomparable. On the contrary, ethics is an asymmetrical and irreversible relationship between two, where justice seems to have no room at all. This work seek to provide an articulation between both immeasurable dimensions by a renewed (...) attention to the issue of temporality of ethics and by including the concept of impure, taken from the work of Jean Guitton, from which it is understood that both dimensions are co-implicated from the very difference that constitute them. (shrink)

In previous works, an ontology of properties for quantum mechanics has been proposed, according to which quantum systems are bundles of properties with no principle of individuality. The aim of the present article is to show that, since quasi-set theory is particularly suited for dealing with aggregates of items that do not belong to the traditional category of individual, it supplies an adequate meta-language to speak of the proposed ontology of properties and its structure.

A restrictive view of self-control identifies exercises of self-control with synchronic intrapsychic processes, and pictures diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies not as proper instances of self-control, but as clever ways of avoiding the need to exercise that ability. In turn, defenders of an inclusive view of self-control typically argue that we should construe self-control as more than effortful inhibition, and that, on grounds of functional equivalence, all these diverse strategies might be properly described as instances of self-control. In this paper, I (...) take a fresh look at this debate by focusing on cases of addiction. I argue that addicted agents face a paradigmatic sort of self-control challenge, which makes addiction an important test case for theories of self-control. And I discuss evidence that highlights both the unreliability of synchronic intrapsychic strategies and the crucial role that is played by diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies in successful attempts at achieving abstinence by addicted individuals. Abstaining addicts are a paradigmatic case of agents who successfully exercise self-control, and they mostly do so by relying on diachronic and externally-scaffolded strategies. This, I argue, lends further support to an inclusive view of self-control. (shrink)

This paper argues that the crucial feature of the drug-related desires experienced by addicted agents is not that they ‘push’ the agent with a force she cannot oppose, but that they are not easily undermined by things that normally have the ability to undermine desires —in other words, that they are extraordinarily recalcitrant. As a result, the disposition to experience these desires is very persistent over the long-term, manifesting itself in particular episodes of wanting to use drugs that recur with (...) great frequency. Both the persistence and the recurrence of these desires, it is argued, contribute to a diminished ability to respond to relevant reasons that speak against drug use. (shrink)

This paper by Theodore de Laguna presents and argues for the deflationary theory of truth. The paper was first published in French in 1922. The version published here is the original, English version of the paper and has been edited by Joel Katzav.

We discuss a reconstruction of standard quantum mechanics assuming indistinguishability right from the start, by appealing to quasi-set theory. After recalling the fundamental aspects of theconstruction and introducing some improvements in the original formulation, we extract some conclusions for the interpretation of quantum theory -/- .

Mereology deals with the study of the relations between wholes and parts. In this work we will discuss different developments and open problems related to the formulation of a quantum mereology. In particular, we will discuss different advances in the development of formal systems aimed to describe the whole-parts relationship in the context of quantum theory.

Temporal ontology is the philosophical debate on the existence of the past and the future. It features a three-way confrontation between supporters of presentism (the present exists, the past and the future do not), pastism (the past and the present exist, the future does not), and eternalism (the past, the present, and the future all exist). Most philosophers engaged in this debate believe that presentism is much more in agreement with common sense than the rival views; moreover, most of them (...) believe that being in agreement with common sense is epistemically valuable for a philosophical view. We studied experimentally non-experts’ ideas pertaining to the domain of temporal ontology, i.e., as we called it, common-sense temporal ontology, focusing on the Italian population. We found that a non-overwhelming majority of participants (~64%) favoured presentism, while two significant minorities favoured pastism (~19%) and eternalism (~17%). We think that our findings provide some support, albeit weaker than expected, for the view that presentism is more in agreement with common sense than the rival positions. (shrink)

We discuss the mathematical structures that underlie quantum probabilities. More specifically, we explore possible connections between logic, geometry and probability theory. We propose an interpretation that generalizes the method developed by R. T. Cox to the quantum logical approach to physical theories. We stress the relevance of developing a geometrical interpretation of quantum mechanics.

In this paper I try to show the relationship between the concept of freedom and the concept of technique as developed by Günther Anders. I will argue that in Anders’ writings there is a specific conception of freedom. The underlying idea is that freedom represents a sort of pathology. Humans live as strangers in the world, lacking in an a priori endowment that, for this very reason, they have to realize. Man acts as a producer of useful objects for his (...) own survival, and in this sense, there is a freedom to use technical capacity. Man is free to use technology to live in the world and without technology man couldn’t survive. Thus, with his own hands man manipulates the world, the production of which is led by a series of steps from a lack to technology, from abstraction to realization. The use of technology, however, according to Anders, is dramatic because there is no freedom, except to be free to use technology. (shrink)

In this chapter, Grace Andrus de Laguna and Theodore de Laguna critically examine the pragmatist theory of knowledge and offer their own alternative to it.

In this article, Grace Andrus de Laguna develops a view of human freedom, one according to which it is made possible by the uniqueness of human individuals and the cultural worlds in which they live.

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the (...) strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes. (shrink)

How are we to understand the intentionality of desire? According to the two classical views, desire is either a positive evaluation or a disposition to act. This essay examines these conceptions of desire and argues for a deontic alternative, namely the view that desiring is representing a state of affairs as what ought to be. Three lines of criticism of the classical pictures of desire are provided. The first concerns desire’s direction of fit, i.e. the intuition that the world should (...) conform to our desires. The second concerns the “death of desire” principle, i.e. the intuition that one cannot desire what one represents as actual. The last pertains to desire’s role in psychological explanations, i.e. the intuition that desires can explain motivations and be explained by evaluations. Following these criticisms, three positive arguments in favor of the deontic conception are sketched. (shrink)

Philosophy has always been concerned with mental health and mental disorder, and many prominent historical figures have held views that have drawn attention to these issues. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of interest in philosophical issues surrounding psychiatry. As a result, the philosophy of psychiatry has emerged as a distinct, well-established field of inquiry.

In a series of recent papers Francesco Orilia has presented an argument for the moral desirability of presentism. It goes, in brief, as follows: since the existence of painful events is morally undesirable, presentism, which denies that past painful events (tenselessly) exist, is morally more desirable than non-presentism, which instead affirms that past painful events (tenselessly) exist. An objection against this argument, which has already been taken into consideration by Orilia, is the ugly history objection or radical objection: what really (...) matters in the moral appraisal of a world is the history of it, and since the presentist and the non-presentist versions of our world share the same ugly history, they are morally on a par. This paper aims at corroborating this objection and defending it from Orilia’s criticisms. This will be done by bringing into play various thought experiments and a distinction between relevance (of an event or a fact about the occurrence of an event) to the moral evaluation of a world and moral (and psychological) involvement (in an event or in a fact about the occurrence of an event). (shrink)

This article suggests that Buber's idea of the community may hint at an alternative to the more common foundations of political thought, usually grounded on notions of power or rationality. Showing how Buber's idea of the community developed from a neo-romantic form (in his early writings) to a principle informed by the dialogical dimension of human life (from I and Thou onwards), I will point out the vertical dimension of political life ensuing from Buber's discourse. A discussion of the theopolitical (...) principle as expressed in Buber's Kingship of God will lead to the conclusion that, both descriptively and normatively, politics needs an openness to transcendence. (shrink)

While some form of loss of control is often assumed to be a common feature of the diverse manifestations of addiction, it is far from clear how loss of control should be understood. In this paper, I put forward a concept of decrease in control in addiction that aims to fill this gap and thus provide a general framework for thinking about addictive behavior. The development of this account involves two main steps. First, I present a view of degrees of (...) control as the degree to which an agent would be responsive to potential or counterfactual sufficient reasons to do otherwise. Second, I sketch an account of the relevant control-undermining factors in addiction that is consonant with my proposed view of degrees of control. Being a high-level functional property, reasons-responsiveness is particularly well suited to frame an account of control-undermining factors that is doubly pluralistic: it encompasses the contribution of factors both internal and external to the agent, and it is consistent with various proposals as to the precise nature of the anomaly taking place in the psychology of addiction. (shrink)

Can addiction be credibly invoked as an excuse for moral harms secondary to particular decisions to use drugs? This question raises two distinct sets of issues. First, there is the question of whether addiction is the sort of consideration that could, given suitable assumptions about the details of the case, excuse or mitigate moral blameworthiness. Most discussions of addiction and moral responsibility have focused on this question, and many have argued that addiction excuses. Here I articulate what I take to (...) be the best argument for this view, based on the substantial difficulty that people with severe addiction experience in controlling drug-related behavior. This, I argue, may in some cases be sufficient to ground a mitigating excuse, given the way in which addiction undermines agents’ responsiveness to relevant moral reasons to do otherwise. Much less attention has been devoted to a second set of issues that critically affect the possibility of applying this mitigating excuse in particular cases, derived from the ambivalent nature of agential control in addiction. In order to find a fitting response to moral harm, the person with the right standing to blame must make a judgment about the extent to which the agent possessed certain morally relevant capacities at the time of the act. In practice, this will often prove tremendously difficult to assess. The ethical challenge for the person with the right standing to blame is fundamentally one of making a judgment about matters that seem underdetermined by the available evidence. (shrink)

The Dead Past Growing Block theory of time—DPGB-theory—is the metaphysical view that the past and the present tenselessly exist, whereas the future does not, and that only the present hosts mentality, whereas the past lacks it and is, in this sense, dead. One main reason in favour of this view is that it is immune to the now-now objection or epistemic objection (which aims at undermining the certainty, within an A-theoretical universe, of being currently experiencing the objective present time). In (...) this paper, I examine the additional arguments offered by P. Forrest and G. A. Forbes to back the DPGB-theory and show that they do not work. I also examine a proposal to rescue the DPGB-theory suggested by an anonymous reviewer for this journal and argue that it does not work either. Moreover, in line with D. Braddon-Mitchell and against Forbes, I argue that the DPGB-theory is indeed committed to the existence of zombies in the past. Being ad hoc and burdened by a very odd and counterintuitive ontological commitment, the DPGB-theory turns out to be rather unpalatable. (shrink)

The informal logic movement began as an attempt to develop – and teach – an alternative logic which can account for the real life arguing that surrounds us in our daily lives – in newspapers and the popular media, political and social commentary, advertising, and interpersonal exchange. The movement was rooted in research and discussion in Canada and especially at the University of Windsor, and has become a branch of argumentation theory which intersects with related traditions and approaches (notably formal (...) logic, rhetoric and dialectics in the form of pragma-dialectics). In this volume, some of the best known contributors to the movement discuss their views and the reasoning and argument which is informal logic’s subject matter. Many themes and issues are explored in a way that will fuel the continued evolution of the field. Federico Puppo adds an insightful essay which considers the origins and development of informal logic and whether informal logicians are properly described as a “school” of thought. In considering that proposition, Puppo introduces readers to a diverse range of essays, some of them previously published, others written specifically for this volume. (shrink)

Extensionalism is, roughly, the view that perception occurs in episodes that are temporally extended (and thus capable of accomodating in their entirety phenomena taking a nonzero lapse of time to occur). This view is widely acknowledged to be incompatible with thin presentism, the second most popular position in temporal ontology. In this paper, I argue that extensionalism is also incompatible with several other positions in temporal ontology, namely those positing the existence of non-present times that host sentience—positions I collectively refer (...) to as the sentient non-present view. Most notably, extensionalism proves to be incompatible with B-theoretical eternalism, which is the most popular position in temporal ontology. (shrink)

Desire has not been at the center of recent preoccupations in the philosophy of mind. Consequently, the literature settled into several dogmas. The first part of this introduction presents these dogmas and invites readers to scrutinize them. The main dogma is that desires are motivational states. This approach contrasts with the other dominant conception: desires are positive evaluations. But there are at least four other dogmas: the world should conform to our desires (world-to-mind direction of fit), desires involve a positive (...) evaluation (the “guise of the good”), we cannot desire what we think is actual (the “death of desire” principle), and, in neuroscience, the idea that the reward system is the key to understanding desire. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contributions to this volume. The hope is to contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on this neglected, albeit crucial, aspect of the mind. (shrink)

In this work, we focus on the philosophical aspects and technical challenges that underlie the axiomatization of the non-Kolmogorovian probability framework, in connection with the problem of quantum contextuality. This fundamental feature of quantum theory has received a lot of attention recently, given that it might be connected to the speed-up of quantum computers—a phenomenon that is not fully understood. Although this problem has been extensively studied in the physics community, there are still many philosophical questions that should be properly (...) formulated. We analyzed different problems from a conceptual standpoint using the non-Kolmogorovian probability approach as a technical tool. (shrink)

In this work, we discuss the failure of the principle of truth functionality in the quantum formalism. By exploiting this failure, we import the formalism of N-matrix theory and non-deterministic semantics to the foundations of quantum mechanics. This is done by describing quantum states as particular valuations associated with infinite non-deterministic truth tables. This allows us to introduce a natural interpretation of quantum states in terms of a non-deterministic semantics. We also provide a similar construction for arbitrary probabilistic theories based (...) in orthomodular lattices, allowing to study post-quantum models using logical techniques. (shrink)

Kant’s metaphilosophy has three main parts: (1) an essentialist project (“What is philosophy?”); (2) a methodological project (“How do we do philosophy?”); and (3) a taxonomic project (“What are the different parts of philosophy, and how are they related?”). This paper focuses on the third project. In particular, it explores one of the most intriguing yet puzzling aspects of Kant’s philosophy, viz. the relationship between what Kant calls ‘pure’ philosophy vs. ‘applied’, ‘empirical’ or what we can broadly refer to as (...) ‘impure’ philosophy. (As we shall see, in order to be able to address this third project, we shall also need to examine the other two projects in detail.) My plan is as follows. First, I discuss four main areas of pure vs. impure philosophy: (i) ‘pure logic’ vs. ‘applied logic’; (ii) ‘rational psychology’ vs. ‘empirical psychology’; (iii) ‘pure metaphysics of nature’ vs. ‘physics’ and (iv) ‘pure morality’ or a ‘metaphysics of morals’ vs. ‘moral anthropology’, ‘practical anthropology’ or ‘applied moral philosophy’. Based on this, I identify four key differences between pure and impure philosophy. Second, I critically examine four different readings of Kant’s views about the status of ‘impure’ philosophy: (a) that it is not genuine philosophy; (b) that it is bad or inferior philosophy; (c) that it is instrumentally valuable; and (d) that it constitutes an indispensable part of Kant’s philosophy, both in a theoretical and practical sense. I argue that Kant is best interpreted as endorsing readings (c) and (d). Third, I offer some concluding remarks. (shrink)

Different notions of the consistency of obligations collapse in standard deontic logic. In justification logics, which feature explicit reasons for obligations, the situation is different. Their strength depends on a constant specification and on the available set of operations for combining different reasons. We present different consistency principles in justification logic and compare their logical strength. We propose a novel semantics for which justification logics with the explicit version of axiom D, jd⁠, are complete for arbitrary constant specifications. Consistency is (...) sometimes formulated in terms of permission. We therefore study permission in the context of justification logic, introducing a notion of free-choice permission for the first time. We then discuss the philosophical implications with regard to some deontic paradoxes. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of the bust of Galileo that Vincenzo Vela created for his house and studio at Ligornetto. The work carries symbolic significance in that it was conceived by the Ticinese artist for the pilaster on the right hand side of the principal entrance to the villa, as a counterpart to the bust of Christopher Columbus on the left. It thus served to perpetuate a long-standing literary topos which started at the beginning of the 17th century and (...) which was made use of during the Risorgimento to celebrate Italian ascendency within a European context. Through this work Vela reveals his adherence to patriotic ideals that he had previously expressed through his active participation in the first Italian War of Independence, fighting in the anti-Austrian ranks. (shrink)

Is there any interesting sense in which we can speak of an act as 'evil', in contrast to simply "morally bad' or "immoral"? In ordinary language, we typically judge actions as evil that somehow differ significantly, in terms of degree or intensity, from commonplace wrongdoing. If taken to an extreme, however, this view simply reduces the difference between evil and immoral acts to a mere quantitative analysis. At worst, it leads to a wholly trivial account of evil as just those (...) actions we tend to regard as "really bad". In this paper, I outline a distinctively Kantian theory of evil that instead defends a fundamental qualitative difference between evil and more ordinary immoral actions, locating the main distinction in terms of the structure of the agent's will itself Broadly understood, this strategy endorses a Kantian account of "evil as dehumanization" in which a "material" -- as opposed to purely "formal" -- difference exists between the respective maxims of the immoral and the evil agent. In such instances, unlike typical cases of Kantian immoral actions, direct violation of another person's humanity qua human somehow comprises a necessary part of the "material object" of an evil agent's will. (shrink)

Following the proposal of a new kind of selective structural realism that uses as a basis the distinction between framework and interaction theories, this work discusses relevant applications in fundamental physics. An ontology for the different entities and properties of well-known theories is thus consistently built. The case of classical field theories—including general relativity as a classical theory of gravitation—is examined in detail, as well as the implications of the classification scheme for issues of realism in quantum mechanics. These applications (...) also shed light on the different range of applicability of the ontic and epistemic versions of structural realism. (shrink)

We discuss the relationship between logic, geometry and probability theory under the light of a novel approach to quantum probabilities which generalizes the method developed by R. T. Cox to the quantum logical approach to physical theories.

Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise (...) of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? -/- Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? -/- This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind. (shrink)

In the Indian philosophical debate, the relationship between the structure of knowledge and external reality has been a persistent issue. This debate has been particularly prominent in Buddhism, as evidenced by the earliest Buddhist attestations in the Pāli canon, where reality is described as a perceptual defection. The world (loka) is perceived through cognition (citta), and the theme of designation (paññatti) is central to the analysis of the Abhidhamma. Buddhism can be viewed as navigating between nominalism and cognitive normativism, as (...) it deconstructs language, which is seen as an obfuscating element that separates the subject from the world. In this article, we explore these issues through a philosophical dialogue between Early Buddhism, Abhidhamma, and Madhyamaka, utilizing methodological tools from Western philosophical traditions, both ancient and modern. We engage in a clash between nihilism and absolutism, in search of the substantiality of entities, which, behind the emptiness of conventional designations, conceals a complex fractal network of pansematism. (shrink)

*Runner-up for the 2021 Royal Institute for Philosophy Essay Prize*: What should we think about ‘acts of conscience’, viz., cases where our personal judgments and public authority come into conflict such that principled resistance to the latter seems necessary? Philosophers mainly debate two issues: the Accommodation Question, i.e., ‘When, if ever, should public authority accommodate claims of conscience?’ and the Justification Question, i.e., ‘When, if ever, are we justified in engaging in acts of conscience – and why?’. By contrast, a (...) third important topic – the Conduct Question, i.e., ‘How should we act, morally speaking, when engaging in acts of conscience?’ – has been mostly neglected. This paper aims to offer concrete guidance for persons wishing to engage in acts of conscience in morally virtuous ways. I argue that such agents are subject to two basic prima facie duties: duties to oneself related to demands of integrity and duties to others related to demands of civility. I explain both duties in detail, arguing with regard to, that in light of what I call ‘the paradox of conscience’, we need to rethink our views about both ‘conscience’ and ‘integrity’; and with regard to, that, building upon Rawls’ ‘duty of civility’, we should embrace at least seven general principles for undertaking acts of conscience in a morally conscientious manner. (shrink)

This paper argues that the crucial feature of the drug-related desires experienced by addicted agents is not that they ‘push’ the agent with a force she cannot oppose, but that they are not easily undermined by things that normally have the ability to undermine desires —in other words, that they are extraordinarily recalcitrant. As a result, the disposition to experience these desires is very persistent over the long-term, manifesting itself in particular episodes of wanting to use drugs that recur with (...) great frequency. Both the persistence and the recurrence of these desires, it is argued, contribute to a diminished ability to respond to relevant reasons that speak against drug use. (shrink)

Intuitively, we can conceive of the existence of a conscious state as a pure activity that does not necessarily require a body (or even a brain). This idea has found new support in certain recent theories that present the possibility of a totally disconnected and disembodied consciousness. Against this hypothesis, I argue that human experience is intrinsically embodied and embedded, though in a specific way. Using Sartre’s phenomenology of the body, I first analyze the concept of consciousness as intentionality and (...) a world-disclosing activity, thus explaining how conscious activity can only be expressed through a body that is spatiotemporally related to the world. Then, I argue that bodily consciousness does not necessarily imply the actual presence of an anatomical body but, rather, a process of spatialization and temporalization (hodological space and temporal synthesis) through the “spatiotemporal body”. Finally, I test my thesis by critiquing some cases of apparent disembodied/disconnected consciousness, i.e., dreams, out-of-body experiences, and the brain-in-a-vat scenario. (shrink)

Presentism is, roughly, the ontological view that only the present exists. Among the philosophers engaged in the metaphysics of time there is wide agreement that presentism is intuitive (or commonsensical) and that its intuitiveness counts as evidence in its favour. My contribution has two purposes: first, defending the view that presentism is intuitive from some recent criticisms; second, putting forth a genealogical (or debunking) argument aimed at depriving presentism’s intuitiveness of the evidential value commonly granted to it.

En este trabajo analizo el entramado conceptual de la concepción causal de la metáfora (Davidson 1978). Para ello me enfocaré en primer lugar en su discusión con las concepciones semánticas, lo que nos llevará a discutir el tratamiento davidsoniano de la noción de significado y su distinción entre significado de la oración y significado del hablante. Luego plantearé un problema interno a este enfoque, en términos de cómo entender esta última distinción dentro del marco nominalista del pragmatismo davidsoniano. Finalmente, analizaré (...) las consecuencias de adoptar este enfoque a la hora de pensar a las metáforas como vehículos para la transmisión de contenido cognitivo. (shrink)

This brief note explores Sorainen's (1939) contribution to the birth of deontic logic. He maintained that imperatives can be true or, respectively, false.

The main thesis of this work is as follows: there are versions of Yablo’s paradox that, if Cook is right about the non-circular character of his version of it, are truly paradoxical and genuinely non-circular, and Cook’s version of Yablo’s paradox is one of them. Here I will not evaluate the"circular" or"non-circular" side to Cook’s proposal. In fact, I think that he is right about it, and that his version of Yablo’s list is non-circular. But is it paradoxical? In order (...) to be so, the principles that lead to (i) the derivation of a contradiction, or (ii) the impossibility to give a stable assignment of truth values to the relevant set of sentences, must be acceptable. I will explore two ways to argue that they are not. I will conclude that these attempts lead to a very narrow conception of a theory of truth, or to deny that a paradigmatic case of paradox, such as the"Old-Fashioned Liar," is truly paradoxical. La tesis principal de este trabajo es la siguiente: hay versiones de la paradoja de Yablo tales que, si Cook está en lo cierto acerca del carácter no-circular de su propia versión de ella, son genuinamente paradójicas y auténticamente no-circulares, y la versión de Cook en cuestión es una de ellas. Aquí no voy a evaluar su carácter circular o no-circular. Creo, de hecho, que Cook está en lo correcto sobre el punto. Pero, ¿es su versión auténticamente paradójica? Para que lo fuera, los principios que llevan a (i) derivar una contradicción, o (ii) la imposibilidad de dar una asignación de valores de verdad estables al conjunto relevante de oraciones, deben ser aceptables. Voy a explorar dos modos de argumentar que no lo son. voy a concluir que estos intentos llevan a una concepción de la teoría de la verdad muy estrecha, o a negar que un caso paradigmático de paradoja, como el"mentiroso Tradicional", sea auténticamente paradójica. (shrink)

Caricature undeniably excels at mocking people and their foibles. But is this mode of depiction limited to human beings? Can animals, objects, or even abstract concepts be caricatured? The first goal of this paper is to trace the limits of the caricaturable and see how far they extend beyond the human figure. The second goal is to understand how the wondrous modification enacted by caricature works. To do so, I analyze the features that caricature selects, and argue that such features (...) have a relational nature—they are instantiated by the depicted subject but their sense hinges on implicit norms. I then outline the deep structure of reference exploited by caricature for depicting. Finally, I use this account to unravel the paradox of caricature: how can a picture both misrepresent its subject and prompt an accurate recognition? I defend the controversial claim that caricature per se does not amount to misrepresentation. (shrink)

In this article I try to prove that the crisis of the West is necessarily linked to the crisis of a monotheism, which has lost its primordial sense. Indeed, because God was conceived of in Western civilization on the basis of the Plotinian unus—that is, on the basis of identity—and every other relationship to alterity was conceived of following this very same criterion, sociality was defined as plurality of the individual, as a mere numerical multiplicity. Against this conception I sketch (...) a new schema for thinking of God and thinking of the relation to otherness based on a differentiality irreducible to any identity. I depict this differentiality as based on the Husserlian conception of time consciousness, defining it not only as a mere lack of identity but as a non-indifference for the other. Hence, I conclude that it is possible to think of a true monotheism that fosters a multiplicity of religions that are not indifferent but responsible to each other. (shrink)

Paraconsistent logics are logical systems that reject the classical principle, usually dubbed Explosion, that a contradiction implies everything. However, the received view about paraconsistency focuses only the inferential version of Explosion, which is concerned with formulae, thereby overlooking other possible accounts. In this paper, we propose to focus, additionally, on a meta-inferential version of Explosion, i.e. which is concerned with inferences or sequents. In doing so, we will offer a new characterization of paraconsistency by means of which a logic is (...) paraconsistent if it invalidates either the inferential or the meta-inferential notion of Explosion. We show the non-triviality of this criterion by discussing a number of logics. On the one hand, logics which validate and invalidate both versions of Explosion, such as classical logic and Asenjo–Priest’s 3-valued logic LP. On the other hand, logics which validate one version of Explosion but not the other, such as the substructural logics TS and ST, introduced by Malinowski and Cobreros, Egré, Ripley and van Rooij, which are obtained via Malinowski’s and Frankowski’s q- and p-matrices, respectively. (shrink)

In filosofia spesso si segue un metodo stando al quale una tesi o teoria che sia più in sintonia con il senso comune deve essere preferita alle posizioni meno in sintonia con esso, per lo meno fino a quando non si mostri che quella tesi o teoria è inadeguata e che una delle posizioni avverse costituisce un adeguato sostituto. Nel presente contributo si vuole offrire una caratterizzazione della nozione di senso comune generalmente in uso nei dibattiti filosofici contemporanei; illustrare criticamente (...) i principali metodi impiegabili per determinare contenuti filosoficamente rilevanti del senso comune; chiarire e giustificare il metodo filosofico dell'appello al senso comune; presentare, d'altro canto, alcune delle strategie argomentative attuabili da chi si trovi a sostenere una tesi o teoria contrastante con il senso comune. (shrink)