In this paper, we investigate how the life and work of Louis Rougier relate to the broader political dimension of logical empiricist philosophy. We focus on three practical projects of Rougier in the 1930s and 1940s: first, his attempts to integrate French-speaking philosophers into an international network of scientific philosophers by organizing two Unity of Science conferences in Paris; second, his role in the renewal of liberalism through the organization of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium; and third, his attempts at political (...) negotiations between Great Britain and the Vichy regime during the Second World War. These activities of Rougier in the 1930s and 1940s have so far never been discussed as part of a unified project on his part. Based on our investigations of these practical projects of Rougier, we argue that his relation to logical empiricist philosophers should primarily be understood on the level of action. His projects aimed to proliferate the concrete improvement of society and the lives of its citizens by expunging all metaphysical questions and speculations from the sphere of social discourse. Rougier conceived logical empiricist philosophers as allies to achieve such practical effects in society. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize the thesis that value-laden approaches in American philosophy of science were marginalized in the 1960s through the editorial policy at Philosophy of Science and funding practices at the National Science Foundation. I argue that there is no available evidence of any normative restriction on philosophy of science as a domain of inquiry which excluded research on the relation between science and society. Instead, I claim that the absence of any exemplary, professional philosopher who discussed the (...) relation between science and society sufficed to narrow the focus of philosophers of science, given the institutional stabilization of the domain within professional philosophy from 1959 onwards. (shrink)

Standard citation-based bibliometric tools have severe limitations when they are applied to periods in the history of science and the humanities before the advent of now-current citation practices. This paper presents an alternative method involving the extracting and analysis of mentions to map and analyze links between scholars and texts in periods that fall outside the scope of citation-based studies. Focusing on one specific discipline in one particular period and language area—Anglophone philosophy between 1890 and 1979—we describe a procedure to (...) create a mention index by identifying, extracting, and disambiguating mentions in academic publications. Our mention index includes 1,095,765 mention links, extracted from 22,977 articles published in 12 journals. We successfully link 93% of these mentions to specific philosophers, with an estimated precision of 82% to 91%. Moreover, we integrate the mention index into a database named EDHIPHY, which includes data and metadata from multiple sources and enables multidimensional mention analyses. In the final part of the paper, we present four case studies conducted by domain experts, demonstrating the use and the potential of both EDHIPHY and mention analyses more generally. (shrink)

We investigate epistemic independence for choice functions in a multivariate setting. This work is a continuation of earlier work of one of the authors [23], and our results build on the characterization of choice functions in terms of sets of binary preferences recently established by De Bock and De Cooman [7]. We obtain the independent natural extension in this framework. Given the generality of choice functions, our expression for the independent natural extension is the most general one we are aware (...) of, and we show how it implies the independent natural extension for sets of desirable gambles, and therefore also for less informative imprecise-probabilistic models. Once this is in place, we compare this concept of epistemic independence to another independence concept for choice functions proposed by Seidenfeld [22], which De Bock and De Cooman [1] have called S-independence. We show that neither is more general than the other. (shrink)

Nel presente articolo sono illustrati i concetti che distinguono la sociologia di Pierre Bourdieu – campo, capitale, habitus, interesse, azione – indicando il nesso tra la costruzione di definizioni astratte, più frequenti negli scritti degli anni ’70, e la pratica di ricerca da cui quei concetti derivano e in cui trovano applicazione. Il sociologo francese ha costruito, infatti, un sistema di concetti interconnessi con cui descrive le componenti e i processi di riproduzione fon-damentali del mondo sociale e indirizza le ricerche (...) empiriche su ambiti d’analisi particolari. D’altra parte, egli ha mostrato una resistenza a presentarlo criticando le operazioni “scolastiche” di sistematizzazione che, secondo il sociologo, “normalizzano” l’opera ai fini accademici dell’insegnamento e intellettuali della divulgazione facendo perdere la complessità del lavoro in cui i concetti sono impiegati. Egli ritiene, infatti, che non si possa comprendere l’opera – l’opus operatum – se non si restituisce al “fare” della ricerca sugli oggetti – modus operandi. (shrink)

U izdanju Instituta za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju Univerziteta u Beogradu i Akademske knjige Novi Sad, biblioteka MINIMA je 2020. godine objavila knjigu naziva Od obrazovanja do neobrazovanja: tri teorije Vilhelma Fon Humbolta, Teodor V. Adorna i Konrada Paula Lismana. Teorije su preveli, priredili i uvodnu studiju napisali Igor Cvejić i Predrag Krstić, a recenzije su uradili Milica Sekulić, Olga Nikolić i Đurđa Trajković. Knjiga ima 150 stranica i sastavljena je od predgovora, tri prevoda, a na kraju knjige, pobrojana su (...) izdanja biblioteke MINIMA. Predgovor naslovljen Deklinacija obrazovanja: priča o sumraku jednog idola? nas uvodi u ove prije svega njemačke priče, te objašnjava težinu prevoda i nosioca ovih priča, riječi Bildung. Na početku saznajemo da se prvobitno značenje Bilda (tj. slike duha koju treba unijeti u sebe po uzoru na Isusov lik), koje potiče iz trinaestog vijeka, despiritualizovalo krajem …. (shrink)

When it comes to the discussions of ancient economic thought, the Stoics rarely come to the forefront. By and large, the lack of focus on this Hellenistic philosophical school is understandable: there is no evidence of the Stoics writing treatises entitled oikonomikos or similar or, in fact, showing any substantial interest in the matters pertaining to wealth management or money acquisition. There is an extant fragment, however, depicting a debate between Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus in which the (...) latter advocates for the moral permissibility of the behaviour that comes very close to exhibiting economic rationality. In this paper, I analyse this passage and, noting its complex transmission history, I argue that it reveals an engagement with various ideas pertaining to the oikonomia genre. Although some of them resemble the contemporary notion of economic rationality, ultimately, the Stoic argument is embedded in ethical debates with the Peripatetics and it concerns moral value rather than the homo economicus style of reasoning about maximizing gains. (shrink)

The paper disproves the widely held interpretation of Aristotle’s statement that the concept of the citizen varies with the constitution. I claim that it gives no evidence for any positivism or constitutional relativism. What Aristotle truly intends here is to put emphasis on his idea of the good life in a city that consists of a variety of forms and ways. This variety is generally desirable and thus prescriptive. It is only under these conditions that the constitution is „the Form (...) of the city“ which determines the citizenship. The concept of the citizen is thus conceived as rather broad and the argument reveals to be a plea for the rule of majority (polity). But on the other hand, the definition of citizen enables to distinguish the virtue of the good man from that of the good citizen und thus to differentiate among the good constitutions. (shrink)

One usually considers that pre-Aristotelian thought had little interest in economic problems. In reality, various authors from the end of the 5th or beginning of the 4th century BC (Ps.-Xenophon, Plato, Xenophon, Phaleas of Chalcedon) paid particular attention to these questions when they developed their political thought. Although their ideas differ in detail, they all share the same distrust of trade and monetary economy. These thinkers develop, from a certain number of (aristocratic) political presuppositions, a strong and detailed critique of (...) the economic transformations of which they are contemporary. The importance that Plato, in particular, attaches to economic realities appears in his harsh criticism of Athenian democracy, as well as in his political constructions of the Republic, the Critias and the Timaeus, or the Laws. By alternating a general approach and a detailed one (because the importance of the economy, in Plato, is also revealed in apparently minor details), we propose to show the fundamental importance of economic reflections in classical Greek thought, even before the Stagirite. (shrink)