A long historiographical tradition has claimed that the famous Pietro Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae had been inspired by Tommaso de Vio’s Commentary on De anima – whose basic thesis was that, according to the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, the human soul was mortal – even though Pomponazzi in his entire work never mentioned Caietanus as a model. Firstly, this article frames the status quaestionis focusing on affinities and divergences between the two books and on the possible (...) relationship and exchange between the two authors, especially on the topic of the Aristotelian psychology. Secondly, the present study shows what emerges from a cross-reading of the sources which includes the collection of the Opuscula published in 1519 by the Dominican friar Bartolomeo Spina, who explicitly accused Caietanus of having paved the way for the scandalous and anti-Christian Pomponazzi’s position. The important gain of this collation of texts is the discovery of an unseen moment of debate with Caietanus inside Pomponazzi’s Tractatus. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to focus on the most unusual application of the Lateran bull Apostolici regiminis, the founding document of the inquisitorial legislation which regulated the teaching activity of philosophy professors by forcing them to refute any heterodox theory and to teach the doctrine of faith. In 1519, the inquisitor of Bologna Giovanni de’ Torfanni censored the book Defensorium, in which the secular Aristotelian philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi developed against his colleague Agostino Nifo a long series (...) of arguments in favor of the mortality of the human soul without match them with their respective Christian refutations, as prescribed by the papal bull. Nevertheless, as a result of a not well documented negotiation with the competent authorities, Pomponazzi was relieved of all obligations, provided that he submitted his book to the emendations of the Dominican theologian Crisostomo Javelli. Pomponazzi accepted the agreement and Javelli drew up a list of forty-two solutions to as many mortalistic arguments found in Defensorium. Javelli’s list – titled Solutiones rationum animi mortalitatem probantium quae in Defensorio contra Niphum excellentissimi Petri Pomponatii formantur – was then attached to Defensorium and in this way Pomponazzi gained permission to print and sell his book. After a short reconstruction of the key steps of this affair, the present work provides a critical edition of Javelli’s Solutiones, based upon both the sixteenth-century editions of the text, the first one contained in Defensorium, the other included in Pomponazzi’s Tractatus acutissimi, utillimi, et mere peripatetici. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two short dubitationes on animal’s technical abilities, which Pietro Pomponazzi discussed in 1514 and in 1519 while teaching at the University of Bologna and commenting on Aristotle’s Physica, II, t. 80. A comparative analysis between the respective positions, expressed at a distance of five years, allows to retrace the change in Pomponazzi’s thoughts from the period immediately preceding the composition of De immortalitate animae to the writing of the De incantationibus and De fato.

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Nicole Oresme raises a question that he is apparently the first to ask in these terms, in such a context: do all beings have the desire to persevere into being? Before him, this question is not found in any of the medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics. But after him it became canonical until at least the 16th century, since it can be found in Pietro Pomponazzi’s works for example. The novelty here consists (...) in questioning the validity of Averroes’ thesis, in his own commentary on the Physics, according to which all beings have the desire to persist into being, using the Augustinian analysis of voluntary death and suicide. How can we explain that one can freely put an end to his days if he is naturally inclined by a desire for life and even for eternity? Oresme’s solution consists in justifying not only the possibility, but also the moral obligation to accept death under certain conditions. In most cases, we do not really want to die. The desperate man wishes to cancel his misfortune and the heroic man who sacrifices himself for his country wishes to immortalize himself in the memory of other men. From a moral point of view, Nicole Oresme justifies only one case of voluntary death: that of individual sacrifice for the common good. The aim of this paper is to analyze precisely this important turning point in the long history of the notion of conatus in the West by comparing this quaestio from the commentary on the Physics with the glosses that accompany the French translation of the Nicomachean Ethics realised by Oresme at the court of Charles V. (shrink)

The two treatises Modus concionandi and Istructio pro concionatoribus were written by Gasparo Contarini for the preachers of Belluno between 1538 and 1541. With these works, Contarini explores three aspects of the predication. First, he focuses on a rhetorical issue: the language of the predication must be adequate for an inexpert audience. Second, he suggests to censure the most complex theological issues from the field of the predication since the audience could not understand such technical concepts like predestination and causal (...) bounds. Third, he reveals that the aim of the predication is to help a civil ethic and to avoid social disorders – like those triggered by Augustinian preachers. In the texts Contarini also shows his debt to Pietro Pomponazzi, who in his Tractatus and Apologia provided both a civic paradigm and an accusation of the bad preachers. (shrink)

In Latin Europe, the controversy over spontaneous generation of perfect animals – namely those whose breeding occurs through sexual reproduction – is received in different ways, varying from positions very close to Avicenna’s, as in the case of Pietro Pomponazzi, to interpretations that rather refer to Averroes’ perspective. To this ‘Averroist front’ undoubtedly belongs the figure of Urbano da Bologna, author of the Expositio commenti Averrois in VIII libros Physicorum – a work that can be defined a supercommentary (...) to Averroes’ Physica – composed in Bologna around 1334. The present study aims to provide the complete transcription of a quaestio that is present in the work – but which was disputed according to its author also in public – as an example of the elaboration of the theme of spontaneous generation in the early 14th century. The text deals with many aspects of the problem, especially elaborating on the correspondence between each specific form and its appropriate matter, in the light of the lively debates of the time, and reveals a mature understanding of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and its Averroist interpretation. (shrink)

Il contenuto dei paragrafi conclusivi della "Genealogia della morale" può essere considerato il nucleo di una rete di concetti che costituisce l’intelaiatura della tarda filosofia di Nietzsche. In questo saggio si mostrerà in particolare come la problematizzazione della verità annunciata in GM III, 24 e 27 rappresenti per Nietzsche un passaggio fondamentale per portare a maturazione le istanze critiche del proprio pensiero e permettere la realizzazione della «filosofia dell’avvenire» di cui "Al di là del bene e del male" doveva costituire (...) il preludio. (shrink)

During the second decade of the 20th century Hans Kleinpeter, an Austrian scholar devoted to the development of the modern science, published some brief papers on Nietzsche’s thought. Kleinpeter has been one of the main upholders of Mach’s epistemology and probably the first who connected his ideas with the philosophy of Nietzsche. In his book on Der Phänomenalismus (1913) he described a new world view that arose in the 19th century, a perspective that ‒ according to him ‒ completely contrasted (...) the mechanistic and metaphysical world view of the old school of scientific inquiry. The main outcome of the scientists whose name was related with this perspective (e.g. Clifford, Maxwell, Kirchoff and, obviously, Mach himself) has been the refusal of the absolute value of any “truth”. Kleinpeter’s statements on this topic are a good example of the rising of a Scientific Philosophy, whose development involved many scientists and thinkers that later set up the Verein Ernst Mach and the Wiener Kreis. On the other hand, his interest on Nietzsche is a relevant case of reception of the latter’s thought, that Kleinpeter puts into the context of the contemporary epistemology. In fact, he considers Nietzsche as one of the main upholders of the phenomenalistic world view, and states that he «took part at the same renewal of philosophical investigation that arose from the latest results of scientific inquiry» during the 19th century. A renewal whose main outcomes has been presented by John Stallo in his book on The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1881), which Kleinpeter translated in German and published in 1901. According to Kleinpeter, in Nietzsche’s writings (mostly unpublished) one can find a theory of knowledge quite close to the one presented by both Mach and the new born Pragmatism, i.e. the complete refusal of an absolute truth and, therefore, the development of an antimetaphysical world view. In my paper I’ll discuss the main statements presented by Kleinpeter on this topic and show which of Nietzsche’s ideas has actually been in compliance with the main outcomes of late 19th century science. Thus, I’ll carry out a reconstruction of an unfamiliar side of the first period of reception of the philosophy of Nietzsche and its relevance to the development of a new (scientific) world view. (shrink)

In this paper I deal with Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in the context of 19th century epistemology. In particular, I argue that, even though Nietzsche shows the ontological lack of content of truths (both on the theoretic and on the moral plane), he nevertheless leaves the space for a practical use of them, in a way that can be compared with William James' pragmatism. I thus deal with Nietzsche's and James' concept of "truth", and show their relationship with some outcomes (...) of Ernst Mach's epistemology. (shrink)

Hans Kleinpeter provided a popularization of both Ernst Mach's thought and the scientific philosophy that forerun the foundation of the Vienna Circle. Between 1912 and 1913 Kleinpeter published the articles that one finds here in their first Italian translation; they concern a comparison between Mach's epistemology and Nietzsche's thought, and are thus an original contribution to the reception of the latter's philosophy. In these texts Kleinpeter anticipates some of the ideas he later presented in his work devoted to the 'Phenomenalistic' (...) worldview, whose - according to him - Nietzsche has been one of the main upholders, as much as Mach. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content as an (...) ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

This paper is a detailed and critical report of the debate between Rorty and Habermas (published in R.Brandom(ed.),"Rorty and His Critics", Blackwell, Oxford 2000) about the importance of truth and epistemic justification in communicative practices. They here present two different versions of the idea of communicative reason. I try to compare them and to evaluate their vices and virtues.

The paper provides both a description of conspiracy beliefs and an insight into their cultural significance. On one side, it highlights their specific formal features, on the other, and this constitutes its peculiarity in the recent literature on the topic, it considers them within the broader genre of general conceptual beliefs, whose main characteristics are weak methodology and logical structure, strong affective and dispositional constraints, epistemic closure and mauvaise foi, and whose main function is practical and self-representative (not epistemic). The (...) paper also claims that political theory and social sciences had some influence in legitimizing certain ideas and stereotypes that are exacerbated in conspiracy beliefs, while other te(le)ological conceptions, such as finalism and providence, may be an important source of ideas that turn out to be widely spread in contemporary criticism towards those same beliefs. (shrink)

This paper studies the relationship between promoting people's welfare and respecting their autonomy of choice under risk. I highlight a conflict between these two aims. Given compelling assumptions, welfarists end up disregarding people's unanimous preference, even when everyone involved is entirely rational and only concerned with maximizing their own welfare. Non-welfarist theories of social choice are then considered. They are shown to face difficulties, too: either they fail to respect the value of welfare in at least one important sense, or (...) they end up prioritizing different people's welfare differently in non-risky choices, on the basis of their attitudes to risk, which are intuitively irrelevant in this context. (shrink)

The knowledge of truth, in Plato, is an experience that calls for conversion of the soul (μεταστροφή, περιστροφή). The basic feature of this experience consists in some sort of connection, which is constantly at work, between rational arguments and their non-rational conditions, briefly, lógos and páthos. How does this connection show up in Plato? Its crucial importance emerges many times at both narrative (récit) and theoretical level. In the three parts of my contribution, I show how logos-pathos intertwines with Plato's (...) notion of conversion considered as a double-sided phenomenon, as both "process" of moral education and "noetic event". (shrink)

This paper explores Thomas Kuhn’s mature conception of incommensurable theories as collective structured lexicons that are not mutually translatable. As will be argued, his view on this issue can profitably be approached in the light of the broad pragmatist attitude that one finds at the core of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy of language, which can also consistently be ascribed to Kuhn.

The chapter explores comparatively the attention to the practical dimension that—each in his own way—Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the classic pragmatist thinker William James pay when confronted with the challenge of providing a non-skeptical response to the relativist stance on truth that arose in the post-Kantian age. Particular focus will be given to the extent to which these three authors conceived of the practical framework as the only one that allows us to meaningfully address and determine truth.

This paper is devoted to a comparison between Ernst Mach's and Friedrich Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical approach to scientific and philosophical concepts. By making reference to Mach’s early essay on the conservation of energy (Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit, 1872), I argue that Nietzsche shares with him the idea that the concepts we adopt are only useful fictions developed during the history of humankind and its culture. This idea is fundamental for the development of modern (...) science, since Mach’s epistemology contributed to give up the mechanistic (Newtonian) view of physics. (shrink)

The fact that Internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This has also led to the development of search engines that promise no tracking and privacy. Search engines also have a major role in spreading low-quality health information such as that of anti-vaccine websites. This study investigates the relationship between search engines’ approach to privacy and the scientific quality of the information they return. (...) We analyzed the first 30 webpages returned searching “vaccines autism” in English, Spanish, Italian, and French. The results show that not only “alternative” search engines but also other commercial engines often return more anti-vaccine pages (10–53%) than Google (0%). Some localized versions of Google, however, returned more anti-vaccine webpages (up to 10%) than Google. Health information returned by search engines has an impact on public health and, specifically, in the acceptance of vaccines. The issue of information quality when seeking information for making health-related decisions also impact the ethical aspect represented by the right to an informed consent. Our study suggests that designing a search engine that is privacy savvy and avoids issues with filter bubbles that can result from user-tracking is necessary but insufficient; instead, mechanisms should be developed to test search engines from the perspective of information quality (particularly for health-related webpages) before they can be deemed trustworthy providers of public health information. (shrink)

During his late period, Nietzsche is particularly concerned with the value that mankind attributes to truth. In dealing with that topic, Nietzsche is not primarly interested in the metaphysical disputes on truth, but rather in the effects that the "will to truth" has on the human being. In fact, he argues that the "faith in a value as such of truth" influenced Western culture and started the anthropological degeneration of the human type that characterizes European morality. To call into question (...) the value of truth is therefore necessary, if one wants to help mankind to find her way in the labyrinth of nihilism. -/- In this new addition to Nietzsche scholarship, Gori explores the origin and aim of the philosopher's late perspectival thought by merging the theoretical with the historical approach, with a special focus on the epistemological debate that influenced Nietzsche. As a result, the book provides a contextual reading of the issue that supports the idea that Nietzsche’s attitude in addressing the problem of truth is, in a broad sense, pragmatic. (shrink)

Hans Kleinpeter’s letters to Ernst Mach held in the Deutsches Museum Archive in Munich are of the greatest importance in order to learn some details of the relationship between these scholars. In the three letters here entirely published for the first time, Kleinpeter shows his interest for Nietzsche’s thought, and states that some of the latter’s ideas are in compliance with Mach’s epistemology.

Tra i numerosi autori attivi nel campo delle scienze naturali che Friedrich Nietzsche ebbe modo di conoscere nel corso della propria vita, Ernst Mach rappresenta certamente un caso significativo. La sua presenza all'interno degli scritti del filosofo è pressoché nulla, ma la comunanza dei temi trattati e la particolare affinità delle prospettive adottate in materia di teoria della conoscenza invitano ad avvicinare questi due autori e a ipotizzare un qualche tipo di influsso diretto tra loro. Ciononostante, fino ad oggi non (...) era mai stato svolto uno studio critico e completo che esaminasse e discutesse tale relazione. Muovendo dai contenuti di una delle principali opere di Mach, i "Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen" (1886) questo volume delinea un quadro esegetico che fa di Mach non tanto un referente diretto, quanto piuttosto il segnale di una prospettiva di ricerca che in qualche modo stimolò l'interesse di Nietzsche e che per molti aspetti egli mostra di condividere. (shrink)

Ineffability in Plato is a conundrum. There are at least four dimensions of ineffability in Platonic texts: epistemic (divine), strategic (religious), unspeakability and incommunicability. In this paper, I deal only with the first dimension, which is strictly epistemic in kind, and defend that Plato rejects divine ineffability, namely, the belief that the knowledge of the divine in general is inaccessible to the human mind. Several crucial passages attest to this rejection unequivocally. They show that Plato attached a great philosophical relevance (...) to what I call the equivalenceprinciple, namely, the interdependence or specularity between human and divine intelligence. The assertion of this principle represents the Platonic path to absolute knowledge, which I try to locate in the broader context of the history of philosophy, from early philosophers to Hegel. (shrink)

The arguments I examine in this chapter are not necessarily from Anaximander. Anaximander is generally known for having put the ἄπειρον as a principle (ἀρχή), probably due to the greater radicality with which he affirmed the physical – perhaps also epistemic – indeterminacy (and the consequent ineffability) of the principle of the φύσις. However, it is well known that, according to Aristotle, a large part of archaic physics or physiology had placed the ἄπειρον as the origin and foundation of the (...) becoming, to the point of deifying it as a living, surrounding, ruling and probably animated body (σῶμα), whose nature was separate or at any rate different from visible reality and its major components. I will call it Arkhé Apeiros Theory (TAA). A TAA then exists for archaic philosophy in general, and not only for Anaximander, and is based on a fairly clear common feature, namely the idea that the principle of nature is an indeterminate body (σῶμα ἄπειρον) and is, therefore, although to a variable extent, unknowable-ineffable. (shrink)

In this article I propose a unitary interpretation of Kant’s reflection on evil in Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1792–1794). This part of Immanuel Kant’s work often presents knotty interpretative problems because the author, while reaffirming the principle of the subject’s moral freedom as set forth in Critique of Practical Reason, seems actually to be showing this freedom as conditioned by a tendency toward evil that is so compelling that it blocks and undermines the subject’s autonomy. I give (...) an account of the coherence acquired by the Kantian notion of radical evil, defined as an axiological inversion of the order of the motives, once one grasps the defective character of the notion of freedom that the philosopher employs in the work and the metaphysical orientation that backs it up. (shrink)

The environment can elicit biological responses such as oxidative stress (OS) and inflammation as a consequence of chemical, physical, or psychological changes. As population studies are essential for establishing these environment-organism interactions, biomarkers of OS or inflammation are critical in formulating mechanistic hypotheses. By using examples of stress induced by various mechanisms, we focus on the biomarkers that have been used to assess OS and inflammation in these conditions. We discuss the difference between biomarkers that are the result of a (...) chemical reaction (such as lipid peroxides or oxidized proteins that are a result of the reaction of molecules with reactive oxygen species) and those that represent the biological response to stress, such as the transcription factor NRF2 or inflammation and inflammatory cytokines. The high-throughput and holistic approaches to biomarker discovery used extensively in large-scale molecular epidemiological exposome are also discussed in the context of human exposure to environmental stressors. We propose to consider the role of biomarkers as signs and to distinguish between signs that are just indicators of biological processes and proxies that one can interact with and modify the disease process. (shrink)

The paper provides a thorough account of the relationship between Ernst Mach’s thought and that of an apparently more intellectually distant near-contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche. The consistency of their views is in fact substantial, as I try to show within the paper. Despite their interests being different, both Mach and Nietzsche were concerned with the same issues about our intellectual relationship with the external world, dealing with the same questions and pursuing a common aim of eliminating worn-out philosophical conceptions. Moreover, it (...) can be argued that both Mach and Nietzsche converged on what we now know as the problem of realism versus anti-realism in the philosophy of science, and that they both rejected ‘representational’ (realist) conceptions of science in favour of a certain sort of pragmatic anti-realism, whose focus was on the role science plays as a means of orientation. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the role played by Ernst Mach on Nietzsche’s thought. Starting from the contents of his Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, I’ll show the close similarities between their view on both human knowledge and the scientific world description. In his writing on science Nietzsche shares Mach’s critique to the 19th century mechanism and its metaphysical ground, as much as his way of defining the substantial notions such as matter, ego and free will. Moreover, my investigation will (...) make it clear that Mach cannot be seen as a direct source of Nietzsche’s thought, since the latter wrote many times on the same subjects long before his first reading one of his works. Rather, it is possible to consider the writings of Lange, Spir and Spencer as the first sources of Nietzsche’s views on the main themes Mach dealt with in his work from 1886. (shrink)

The pre-theoretic, intuitive notion of Logical Consequence is at the heart of logic, and many authors have attempted to make it into a mathematically tractable object. The received view is Tarski (1956)’s model-theoretic explication, which however found a fierce critic in Etchemendy (1983, 1990, 2008). In turn, Sagi (2014) argues that the strongest attack on Etchemendy has been advanced by Shapiro (1998). In this essay, I first outline the views of Tarski, Etchemendy, and Shapiro in three respective sections. I then (...) argue that most of Etchemendy’s criticism of Tarski can also be raised against Shapiro’s criticism of Etchemendy, thus invaliding Shapiro’s attack. This means the model-theoretic explication of Logical Consequence is still in danger—a concern of the uttermost seriousness, given how widely the explication has been leveraged. (shrink)

"Twilight of the Idols" plays an important role in Nietzsche’s work, since it represents the opening writing of the philosophical project called "Transvaluation of all values". In that text, Nietzsche aims to sound out the "eternal idols", which means to disclose the inconsistency of the principles of traditional metaphysics. The way Nietzsche addresses the "old truths" in Twilight of the Idols leads back to his early writings, when his theory of knowledge is first outlined, inspired by Schopenhauer as much as (...) neo- and post-Kantian thinkers such as F. Lange and A. Spir. As I shall show, these observations can be compared with Ernst Mach's anti-metaphisical attitude to the ordinary world-conception, insofar as Mach as much as Nietzsche stressed the importance of a historical approach as instrument to enlighten the "prejudices" of traditional scientists or philosophers. (shrink)

The content of Boscovich’s Theoria philosophiae naturalis was well-known to his contemporaries, but both scientists and philosophers chiefly discussed it during the 19th century. The observations that Boscovich presented in this text, and that he himself defined as “philosophicas metitationes”, soon showed their being a good programme for the forthcoming atomic physics, and contributed to get rid of the mechanistic paradigm in science. In this paper I’ll go back to some meaningful moments of the history of Boscovich’s reception in the (...) era of contemporary philosophy, by referring to what authors such as Popper, Cassirer, Nietzsche and Fechner wrote about him. These thinkers, indeed, particularly stressed the importance of the Theoria in the history of Western thought, and showed that it can easily be evaluated beyond the plane of a pure scientific investigation. (shrink)

The essay focuses, firstly, on the notion of evil in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE). James identified evil with a pathological mental fact, “depression”, and analyzed it according to different thresholds and degrees of symptomatic severity: from the more conscious, intellectualized and, apparently, superficial cases to the more painful and obscure, which, according to his view, were also the deepest ones. The second aim of this essay is to cast light on James’ theory of religious conversion. According to (...) James, once the believer has reached a new mental balance and experienced a lasting happiness thanks to his change of mind, evil comes again to him under the form of a persistent and warning memory of the past troubling experience, a memory that is functional to preserve his new belief-system. We define this memory and its role as “functional atheism” and propose to transpose this notion from the uncertain realm of inner experience, where James originally put it, to the narrative and neurocognitive grounds, where it may lead to more original and wider developments. (shrink)

ITA: Quello del “buon europeo” è in Nietzsche un tema significativo, che si presenta originariamente connesso alle riflessioni di Nietzsche sulla cultura europea, arricchendosi col tempo di una portata filosofica che si lega agli obiettivi del suo pensiero maturo. Scopo del presente articolo è di mostrare la genesi e l’evoluzione di tale concetto, a partire dalle sue prime occorrenze in Umano, troppo umano I fino al suo compiuto sviluppo negli scritti del 1885-87. Tale studio permetterà di evidenziare il particolare valore (...) che Nietzsche attribuisce ai “buoni europei”, in quanto promotori dello sviluppo spirituale conseguente alla compiuta liberazione della morale cristiana. ENG: The “good European” is a rich and important topic in Nietzsche. It is first related to Nietzsche’s early reflections on European culture, and during the 1880’s it gains philosophical value, being strictly connected with the purposes of Nietzsche’s mature thought. The aim of this paper is to track the genesis and development of the notion of “good European”, from Human, all too Human I to Nietzsche’s writings from the years 1885-1887. That investigation shall particularly show the meaning and value that Nietzsche attributes to the good Europeans; as for him, they are in fact the leaders of the spiritual development that follows the overcoming of Christian morality. (shrink)

We discuss the role of perceptron (or threshold) connectives in the context of Description Logic, and in particular their possible use as a bridge between statistical learning of models from data and logical reasoning over knowledge bases. We prove that such connectives can be added to the language of most forms of Description Logic without increasing the complexity of the corresponding inference problem. We show, with a practical example over the Gene Ontology, how even simple instances of perceptron connectives are (...) expressive enough to represent learned, complex concepts derived from real use cases. This opens up the possibility to import concepts learnt from data into existing ontologies. (shrink)

Inferentialism, especially Brandom’s theory, is the project aimed at understanding meaning as determined by inferences, and language as a social practice governed by rational discursive norms. Discursive practice is thus understood as the basic rational practice, where commitments undertaken by participants are evaluated in terms of their being correct/incorrect. This model of explanation is also intended to rescue, by means of reasons, the commitments we undertake ourselves and assess the commitments we attribute to others, in an objective sense: starting from (...) our subjective normative and doxastic attitudes we should be able to use the normative discursive resources apt to assess our commitments, not only referring to what we take to be correct, but also referring to how things actually are.My hypothesis is that this objectivity is not achieved only on the basis of the rational structure of discursive practice. The main worry concerns the fact that material inferences, those responsible for the content of our concepts (and commitments), are in general non-monotonic. These inferences put experts in an advantageous position,namely as those capable of defeasible reasoning. I propose a view by which this asymmetry among language users is the crucial factor in assessing the objectivity of claims within discursive practice. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticism towards the substance-concept „I“ plays an important role in his late thought, and can be properly understood by making reference to the 19th century debate on the scientific psychology. Friedrich Lange and Ernst Mach gave an important contribution to that debate. Both of them developed the ideas of Gustav Fechner, and thought about a „psychology without soul“, i.e. an investigation that gives up with the old metaphysics of substance in dealing with the mind-body problem. In this paper (...) I shall deal with both Lange and Mach (whose writings has been read by Nietzsche), in order to shed some light on Nietzsche’s rejection of the „I“ in philosophy. (shrink)

Ernst Mach’s definition of the relationship between thoughts and facts is well known, but the question of how Mach conceived of their actual relationship has received much less attention. This paper aims to address this gap in light of Mary B. Hesse’s view of a postempiricist approach to natural science. As this paper will show, this view is characterized by a constructivist conception of the relationship between theory and facts that seems to be consistent with Mach’s observations on scientific knowledge. (...) The paper first explores Hesse’s account of postempiricism and her project of a new epistemology. It then considers Ernst Mach’s conception of facts as the middle term of a triad of concepts that includes thoughts and elements as extreme terms. Finally, the paper will offer concluding remarks on Mach’s contribution to the debate on scientific realism and his attempt to redefine the notions of correspondence and objectivity in science. (shrink)

Aim of this paper is to reflect on the anthropological ideal Nietzsche outlines in his late period. The way Nietzsche deals with concepts such as “German”, “(good) European”, and “free spirit” in the sections of Twilight of the Idols which deal with Goethe will be especially considered. Furthermore, I shall argue that Renaissance plays an important role in Nietzsche’s anthropological project, for it helps to define the spiritual strength which characterizes the health type of man to which Nietzsche destined his (...) late philosophical wisdom and gay science. (shrink)

Nei paragrafi conclusivi della terza dissertazione della "Genealogia della morale" Nietzsche espone l'obiettivo della propria filosofia matura e circoscrive il compito al quale intende dedicarsi negli anni a venire. Quest'ultimo consiste principalmente nel porre in questione ciò che la filosofia non ha mai affrontato problematicamente e operare in particolare una critica del «valore della verità», che è per Nietzsche anche una critica della morale e della cultura europee.

In the 1881 note 11 [156], Nietzsche mentions the “infinitely small moment” as “the highest reality and truth” for the individual who tries to contrast the “uniformity of sensations” and to affirm his “idiosyncratic taste”. The fragment explores some ideas on the herd instinct that will be developed in "The Gay Science"; observations on the cultural and anthropological value of science; critical refections on metaphysical realism. Most important, these considerations focus on the relationship between man and society, which is the (...) plane of the standardized “normal taste” selected throughout the evolution of mankind. The paper explores these issues and especially deals with the dialectic relationship between the individual and the community viewpoint that Nietzsche seems to take into account. (shrink)

Platonic religiosity is the first of two volumes devoted to the analysis of religiosity or religious feeling (pathos) in Plato. -/- (Back cover) Platonic Religiosity is a hermeneutical attempt to read Platonic works from the perspective of their religiosity. The aspects examined in the book are limited for the moment to the most basic, perhaps even the simplest, dimensions of religious feeling, those involving the representation of a relationship between man and divinity, Earth and Heaven, "low" and "high". Low and (...) high are spatial metaphors constitutive of our thinking. Although, in this case, they indicate the link between man and the super-sensible world, they also presuppose, at all times, the devout feeling (and the risk) of an insurmountable distance and remoteness that divides men from the numen. The need to affirm the relationship partly overcomes the presence of this feeling of distance, but never manages to neutralise it completely. -/- Religious feeling as such always oscillates between two terms: the need to establish a relationship with the divinity, and thus to guarantee its proximity to man, and the affirmation of its transcendence, namely the distance that divides us from the numen, up to the point, eventually, where the danger becomes the greatest: the denial of the god by man (atheism) or the human feeling of being abandoned by the god. The presence of these oscillations in the Platonic texts is analysed in several chapters of the book, devoted to different themes, such as the representations of reciprocity (do ut des), the images of the friendly god and the hostile god, the feeling of the threshold, prayers and invocations, verecundia and nostalgia, the feeling of dependence, the notion of prescience, assimilation to the god, the different types of ineffability, the role of atheism and incredulity, and lastly the notion of conversion, which substantiates Platonic religiosity by characterising it in the sense of a redemption-belief. (shrink)

In The Analysis of Mind (1921), Bertrand Russell stresses the importance of William James’ late neutral monist view of consciousness for the studies in psychology. In so doing, he focuses on a topic whose roots can be traced back to the nineteenth-century European debate on physiology and scientific psychology. In this introductory paper I shall briefly outline the path that, starting from the revival of Kant in the German scientific debate, leads to both Ernst Mach’s and William James’ questioning the (...) value of the I or consciousness as a substance concept. (shrink)

Il presente contributo muove dalle osservazioni sul linguaggio che Nietzsche svolge in Umano, troppo umano, I, § 11, con lo scopo di riflettere sulla posizione anti-realista che Nietzsche sostiene in quell’aforisma e di evidenziare il ruolo che essa svolge nelle sue più tarde considerazioni relative alla cultura occidentale e alla sua antropologia. Come si avrà modo di mostrare, la critica nietzscheana al realismo del senso comune è in linea con alcune epistemologie pragmatiste sorte tra Otto- e Novecento. Questo elemento di (...) “attualità” non mina però l’originalità della riflessione di Nietzsche su quell’argomento. Piuttosto, è possibile sostenere che l’idea che il pensiero filosofico intervenga in una correzione dell’impegno metafisico proprio del senso comune sia lo strumento teoretico che permette a Nietzsche di operare sullo sviluppo della cultura e società europee. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s timeliness is patent in the renewed enthusiasm with which scholars in both the continental and analytic traditions have approached his works in recent years. Along with other topics, attention has been particularly directed towards two important issues: Nietzsche’s analysis, critique, and genealogy of culture, and his stance on subjectivity. In this introductory study we shall provide a brief outline of both these topics. As will be shown, they play a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s thought, and the link that connects (...) them is stronger than one would imagine. (shrink)

The paper explores Nietzsche's observations on language in Human, All Too Human I, 11; reflects on the anti-realist position that Nietzsche defends in that aphorism; and focuses on the role she plays in his later investigation on Western culture and its anthropology. As will be argued, Nietzsche's criticism towards common sense realism is consistent with some pragmatist epistemologies developed during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. This treat of " timeliness " does not limit Nietzsche's originality on the topic. In fact, (...) the idea that philosophy can contrast the metaphysical commitment of common sense can be seen as the theoretical tool that allows Nietzsche to operate on the development of European culture and society. (shrink)

(English:) This contribution attempts a first non-normative approach to the problem of the classic, its definition and its meaning in an age of globalization. It reviews a series of common representations of the classic (and other analogous or contrary terms), stressing the programmatic-ideological aspect that generally characterizes them. Classic, actually, tends to be a foundational category, and therefore rests on delimitations that determine its exclusiveness as opposed to something else. This paper, in particular, criticizes the last boundary of the exclusivity (...) of the classic, that is, its normative opposition to fashion and actuality. On the contrary, it is argued that there is a substantial link between classic, actuality and fashion. On the basis of this connection, two deflationary definitions of the classic are proposed: the first regards it as part of the broader process of construction of historical identity by concrete individuals. The second, on the other hand, conceives it as a product of art, and, therefore, of a formative process of abilities, skills, taste, by which the classic becomes the object of technical, aesthetic and teleological judgments. -/- (Spanish:) En esta contribución se intenta una primera aproximación no normativa al problema del clásico, su definición y su significado en una era de globalización. Se revisa una serie de representaciones comunes sobre lo clásico (y otros términos análogos o contrarios), se destaca el aspecto programático-ideológico que por lo general las caracteriza. Clásico, en efecto, tiende a ser una categoría fundacional, por lo cual se apoya en delimitaciones que determinan su exclusividad por oposición a otra cosa. En este trabajo, en particular, se critica la última frontera de la exclusividad de lo clásico, es decir, su oposición normativa a la moda y la actualidad. Por el contrario, se argumenta que existe un vínculo sustancial entre el clásico, la actualidad y la moda. A partir de esta conexión, se proponen dos definiciones deflacionarias del clásico: la primera lo considera parte del proceso más amplio de construcción de la identidad histórica por parte de individuos concretos. El segundo, en cambio, lo concibe como un producto del arte, y, por tanto, de un proceso de formación de competencias, habilidades, gusto, por el cual el clásico se convierte en objeto de juicios técnicos, estéticos y teleológicos. (shrink)

Peirce’s pragmatist theory of truth holds that truth will be the outcome of an indefinitely adequate amount of scientific research. According to the minima trivialia objection, Peirce’s theory of truth is refuted by such common sense truths as that about what I ate for breakfast, which is hardly the outcome of a prolonged collective scientific endeavour. The argument does not work, however, if we endorse Sellars’s distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of mankind in the world and (...) the connected scientific realism: in this Sellarsian context, minima trivialia can be seen as false views from the perspective of the manifest image, like the existence and persistence of material objects, and not as proper truths, which are appreciated as such only from the point of view of the scientific image. Therefore, the endorsement of this distinction, which is quite compatible with Peirce’s framework, bypasses the minima trivialia objection. (shrink)

Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences should (...) not be confused tout court with a broader and more complex phenomenon, such as extremism and politico-religious radicalism, but are a specific typology of that broader and multifaceted fact that is self-deception. We hypothesize that the self-deception implicit in experiences of intellectual distortion produces a cognitive dissonance of which the subject is normally, though with varying intensity, aware (or may become aware through honest introspection). The phenomenon occurs in two extreme forms: one is normal (sporadic), the other is exceptional (systematic). The passage from one to the other is a complex process of escalation and de-escalation, on which multiple external and internal variables act. In its ascending path, it essentially coincides with a process of psychological polarization and cognitive "de-pluralization", while its descending phase marks a return to reality and a "re-pluralization", where the subject returns to being what he basically is, namely, an active and tireless meaning seeker. In the central part of the chapter, similarities and differences between processes of deradicalization and phenomena of religious deconversion are analyzed, with reference, among others, to the case of the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. -/- An abridged version of this text has been delivered for the Workshop "Explaining Extreme Belief and Extreme Behavior", September 15-16, 2022, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am grateful to David Konstan (NYU) for reading and commenting on a first version of this chapter and to Rik Peels (VUA) for his comments and questions during the Workshop. I would also like to thank my bachelor's and master's students at UDG, who discussed these topics at length with during semester 2022-B. (shrink)