The conflict between globalism and nationalism is arguably one of the most important political issues of our time. In this article, I argue that Hegel’s mature political philosophy has convincing arguments for recognition-based, non-chauvinistic nationalism and against globalism. I lay out two reasons why Hegel is against dissolving national sovereignty and the establishment of a world state: First of all, he argues that the state provides the highest realization of human self-determination. Therefore, he believes that it is not rational for (...) a people who form a sovereign nation to want to give up their political independence. Second of all, Hegel argues that the state must be conceived of as having individuality, which means that it has the ontological structure of an exclusory being-for-itself: In order for it to be an individual, it must stand in exclusory relations to others of the same kind. In addition to reconstructing Hegel’s critique of globalism, I argue that his brand of nationalism is based on mutual recognition between states, which makes Hegel not a Hobbesian realist but someone who believes that the political sphere is inherently ethical. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to provide clarification of my view on ethical criticism of narrative art in order to respond to some of the concerns issued at it by Rafe McGregor. While McGregor and I share numerous assumptions regarding the cognitive and ethical value of art, we disagree with respect to certain practical concerns. To address his challenge, I argue for the necessity of joining philosophical research with research in other domains, primarily in cognitive sciences, in order to (...) determine the extent to which engagements with art can have positive or negative cognitive and moral impact on the spectators. I am particularly concerned with showing that philosophy needs support from other disciplines in order to ground its claims in scientifically supported theories and to avoid self-generating theoretical disagreements that are populating its debates. However, I also offer an array of reasons for the inclusion of philosophy into other disciplines, and I urge for the recognition of philosophy’s potential to respond to publically relevant issues. (shrink)

The article is based on Feuerbach's well-known ruling that "man is what he eats", to analyse its possible different meanings, even the most recondited ones. To do this the research winds through a long journey, which begins with a reflection on the role that food has in some Western religions, especially in Judaism and Christianity. Two processes which have deeply characterized the relationship of Western man with food are then examined: the process of industrialization and that of the medicalization of (...) food. Finally, coming to the contemporary, the article goes into the merits of the relationship that different cultures have with food in a multicultural society and offers some indications for alternative models compared to those currently dominant. The conclusion, with Feuerbach and beyond Feuerbach, is that man is yes what he eats, but also what he does not eat and, above all, man eats what he is. (shrink)

Technosciences such as biotechnologies aim to analyse, modify and reconstruct livings and complex biochemical components, using top-down or bottom-up approaches to simplify these complex systems. Because of the large number of involved parameters, these technosciences need more and more big data techniques (Artificial Intelligence with machine and deep learning) to find efficient correlations to predict the evolution of systems in their environments. This prediction is especially used to reconstruct livings or artificial pieces of livings in biotechnology and to give medical (...) diagnostics in medicine. Two examples corresponding to these two different cases are analysed in this paper. The aim is to highlight interests and limitations of such digital approach in terms of human free will and responsibility, in relation to provisional scientific truth. A difference is established between classical digital-assisted technoscience and digital-driven technoscience through an epistemological analysis of this new way to practice science. This allows to precise values which are favoured in a digital driven science, what we call an « ethics of knowledge ». Thus “capabilities to predict for making “, based on efficient correlations, look more important than “capabilities to know for making » and determine complex biological mechanisms or causes of evolutions. Consequences about technoscientific mentality are drawn and practical ethical questioning is consequently reassessed. (shrink)

In this article, I show how Bruschi’s Le matérialisme politique de Louis Althusser offers, against all attempts conjure up a self-generating general theory of history, a reconstruction of Althusser’s work that shows how its systematicity relies upon the unfinished, incomplete and provisional character of scientific research, always subject to constant rectification. I then claim that, from the conceptualisa-tion of the reproduction of the mode of production as dependent upon the singularity of the con-juncture, to the theorisation of the encounter as (...) the source of historical necessity, this constant re-working is crucial to Althusser’s ability to grasp the reality of class struggle. (shrink)

The political legacy of classical German philosophy can contribute in a crucial way to the most recent developments of contemporary political thought, thereby also making sense of the contradictions underlying the social practices and institutional values of our societies. What justifies this perspective is, in the first place, the complexity of contemporaneity, which holds within itself a doubleness that can be understood in the light of the conceptual tools of classical German philosophy. On the one hand, contemporary societies seem to (...) be facing relentless crises in the modern idea of democracy, the political subject of the nation-state, and capitalist economic structures. On the other hand, there is an ever-increasing demand for rights and new forms of recognition, not to mention the emergence of grassroots movements that strive for greater political participation and generate new collective subjectivities. By radically questioning traditional philosophical categories, Kant, Fichte and Hegel provide a new and insightful understanding of the crucial challenges of modernity. They outline a conception of practical rationality and its multiple manifestations that is irreplaceable for philosophically understanding our contemporary world. (shrink)

This special issue dedicated to Wlater Benjamin collects five essays in which a fundamental feature of his critical Theory is explored: his ability to inquire and interpret complex problems of a social, political, legal, and artistic order, through images made out of a Philosophy and a Theory of History that finds its most lucid expression in Poetry and in the Work of Art.

How and why does a being’s nature relate to what is good for it? Thomas Aquinas provides an account such that a being’s nature endows it with powers and natural inclinations – tendencies, strivings, directednesses – for the very goods that constitute a flourishing life for beings of that nature. In this essay, I aim to present, elucidate, and motivate Aquinas’s rich and nuanced thought on natural inclinations and how it illuminates some of his key views in metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, (...) and ethics. I first provide the background in Aquinas’s philosophical psychology and metaphysics, including his natural theology. Next, I take up the objection that evolutionary theory renders Aquinas’s thought on these matters obsolete. I then consider the natural inclinations of human beings, and specifically how these natural inclinations relate to practical cognition of basic goods and precepts. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how it is possible to allow for the existence of artifacts within a neo-Aristotelian conceptual framework. In order to do this, I show the main features of the mainstream Quinean approach to ontology, I then expose the main features of the neo-Aristotelian metaphysics and introduce some key notions such as sortal concepts and criteria of identity, and finally, I propose a criterion of identity for artifacts based on Evnine’s doctrine of amorphism. I also propose a (...) solution to a possible objection to amorphism. (shrink)

The work of both the philosophers of Western modernity and modern African(a) philosophers is premised on a fundamental reimagining of the foundations of the discipline. In both cases this has, and for African(a) philosophers continues to assume, the form of an appeal to First Philosophy. The shared interest in First Philosophy leaves the two canons irrevocably intertwined and invites the African(a) scholar to be creative when it comes to engaging Western theorists such as Hobbes whose reimagining of the social contract (...) has been foundational to the contemporary world order: its universalist assumptions must be negated but not at the cost of dispensing with what is valuable about the particular, Western insight into the human condition. In this article I argue that the reasoning deployed by African(a) philosophers can ironically be represented in terms of the very “constitutive causes” introduced by Hobbes. First, I discuss Hobbes’s appeal to First Philosophy and how this yielded the notion of “constitutive causes”. I then show how decolonial theorists radicalized the appeal to First Philosophy in order to expose the universalist assumptions at work in Western philosophy before I outline what I consider to be “constitutive causes” of both colonial and decolonial reasoning. (shrink)

The aim of this contribution is to offer an essay that investigates the different ways in which Maximus plays in his astrological poem with the origin of the words used by him or with their meaning. We will first see how our astrologer is able to put etymology at the service of the composition of his predictions; then how he exploits the semantic ambiguity of certain terms, not only to show off his erudition, but also to make his poem more (...) in keeping with the dictates of astrological literature; finally, how he implicitly succeeds in establishing what is for him the correct interpretation of a word susceptible to different and conflicting readings. (shrink)

Potential or potentiality is the central idea of Agamben’s philosophy and informed from the very beginning his work, though implicitly at first. If the term entered Agamben’s vocabulary only in the mid 1980s, it constitutes nevertheless already the logical structure of the experience of in-fancy, which is in fact not the actuality but the potentiality of speech. And it already marked, in Heideggerian fashion, human exceptionality: if only human beings have infancy, it is because only humans have the potentiality not (...) to speak, that is, to remain in in-fancy. This is, for Agam-ben, the very structure of potentiality – not only the potentiality of something, but that not to do or be something –, and it is what gives humans a freedom denied to nonhuman animals. The article analyses the concept of potential in Agamben’s philosophy, highlighting its fundamental anthropocentrism and logocentrism. However, with the ‘biopolitical turn’ of the 1990s and the publication of The Open in 2002, Agamben progressively seeks a way to overcome this still metaphysical structure, and will find it in the concept of ‘outside of being’ which precisely con-cludes The Open. (shrink)

This paper responds to five critics (Eva Buddeberg, Scott Marratto, Michael Naas, Janna Thompson, and Jason Wirth) and their commentaries on my Taking Turns with the Earth. Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice (Stanford University Press, 2018). In relation to the book’s argument, my response seeks to clarify and elaborate the role of indigenous philosophies; the meaning and value of the concept of earth; the ontology-ethics interface and the emergence of normativity with birth and death; the practical feasibility and motivational force (...) of the book’s proposals for conceptualizing justice for future generations, namely asymmetrical reciprocity and taking turns; and the role of democratic institutions for justice between generations in view of the global capitalist economy. (shrink)

This is an appreciative examination of Matthias Fritsch’s significant new book, Taking Turns with the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice (Stanford, 2018). After analyzing the temporal axis of Fritsch’s intervention into the question of intergenerational justice in the context of the ecological crisis, I extend it to a complementary spatial analysis by following some of the book’s important cues. I develop this in terms of some recent North American Indigenous philosophy, including Winona LaDuke, Glen Sean Coulthard, and Leanne Simpson.

This paper purports to identify the nature of Hegel’s theory of race. Especially, the author will examine whether Hegel’s theory of race in particular, his philosophy of spirit in general, provides the justification of a colonial racism or a cultural racism. While Hegel’s theory undoubtedly contained racist elements, still unanswered is whether racism is inherently at odds with the basic principles of his philosophy of spirit. To be examined critically is the suggestion that racism is fundamentally incompatible with the basic (...) principles of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, notwithstanding its undeniably racist elements. The paper aims to provide clarification in this question by showing that Hegel’s racism is not an accidental or ancillary byproduct of his speculative philosophy of spirit and world history. (shrink)

This paper aims at showing how Gadamer understood the impossibility of any properly unpolitical stance for philosophy by examining the relation of philosophy and politics in his interpretation of Plato’s Republic. I argue that Gadamer’s rejection of the possibility of the ἄπολις (as presented by Aristotle) was prompted by the thoughts of his friend and interlocutor Leo Strauss on the question of the relation of the theoretical life and political life in Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. I then turn to Gadamer’s reading of (...) the Republic and focus on three aspects of his interpretation: philosophical education in the context of utopian thinking, the Forms and the Idea of the Good, and philosophical knowledge. Tied together, these three elements convene a picture of philosophy that is by no means above or against politics, but rather exists in a harmonious and mutually influencing relation with the political community. I finally suggest that the interpretive conditions of this harmony are not without consequence on how we conceive of philosophy itself, its nature and its task. (shrink)

This essay compares how Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss interpret the allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic. Such a comparison helps resolve two ambiguities in the scholarship on Arendt and Strauss. First, Arendt is ambiguous about the origins of the tradition of political philosophy that, she argues, distorts the authentic experience of philosophy and politics. I contend that a theme typically associated with Strauss, esotericism, appears in Arendt and helps resolve this ambiguity. In an esoteric reading of Plato's allegory (...) of the cave, Arendt argues that Plato constructs the allegory of the cave to teach a lesson that would make the political situation of the philosopher less precarious. This initiates the formidable tradition of political philosophy. The tradition's prejudice in favour of the vita contemplativa over the vita activa originates with Plato's politics. Arendt exposes Plato's esotericism in order to retrieve a purer understanding of philosophy and politics from Platonism's distortions. Second, Strauss is ambiguous toward metaphysics. Strauss expresses this ambiguity in his interpretation of the allegory of the cave, as well as in his treatment of Plato's doctrine of the ideas. Yet a tendency in Strauss scholarship, as well as in Straussian studies of Plato, is to conclude that Strauss aims for a non-metaphysical recovery of Platonic philosophy, where the priority is to resolve the precarious political situation of the philosopher vis-à-vis the city. This interpretation holds that for Strauss, the allegory of the cave and the doctrine of ideas are primarily about political themes. I argue that Arendt's interpretation diverges from Strauss precisely on the emphasis of political themes. It is Arendt, not Strauss, who emphasises political themes. It is Arendt, not Strauss, who primarily interprets the doctrine of the ideas as Plato's solution to the precarious political situation of the philosopher vis-àvis the city. Showing where Arendt and Strauss diverge on these points deepens our understanding of Strauss. Strauss's interpretation stresses the presuppositions behind the form of questioning that the doctrine of ideas takes. Strauss cannot be characterised as a simply non-metaphysical thinker concerned with the precarious political situation of the philosopher, because his own interpretation of Plato's doctrine of the ideas and the allegory of the cave ultimately raise the question of what nature is. (shrink)

In the 17th century not all manuscripts were clandestine because there also existed manuscripts written for public circulation (first and foremost the correspondences that were semi-public, or certain collections of poems that circulated first in manuscript and then in printed form), but it is undeniable that most of the resolutely “heterodox” authors found it useful to entrust their ideas to manuscripts both to protect themselves against the retaliation of the authorities and to circumvent the censorship to which printed books were (...) subject. These philosophical manuscripts were messengers of “full heterodoxy” which we could call “global” and not “local”. The exclusion did not regard one or another context but all (or almost) of the contexts of the Ancien Régime, as they expressed a radical dissent in contrast with all of the orthodoxies of modern Europe. Bodin’s Colloquium, like Theophrastus redivivus and Meslier’s Mémoire, could not have been published either in a Catholic country or in a Protestant one, either in an absolute monarchy or in a republic. The clandestine authors were aware that it would be impossible to spread their ideas outside a circle protected by the manuscript form and most often by anonymity. (shrink)

In this paper the author discusses the impact of information access, in combination with network structures and communications technologies, in the formation of social perceptions. This phenomenon is known as social computing. However, global access to emerging technology and easy user access to information sources are leading to new philosophical tendencies. Group behaviour and individual perceptions suggest that virtual influences and individual cognitive processes such as creativity and event perception are potentially determinants of new adoptions, as constructor elements of a (...) new type of thinking. Finally, the author examines the impact of sharing personal experiences in the change of social values and norms from an individual to a global level. (shrink)

In the absence of concepts that correspond to those of chance, luck, or fortune, how do people account for why seemingly random desirable or undesirable events occur? Based on long-term fieldwork with the Chewong, a small hunting-gathering and shifting-cultivating group of people who live in the Malaysian rain-forest, I study their theory of causality. It is argued that cause is a universal category of the human mind, but that an understanding of cause cannot be separated from an examination of the (...) ontology and epistemology in each case. (shrink)

In this essay I begin with remarks made by Bernard Williams that there are two main motives for philosophy, curiosity and salvation, and that he is not ‘into salvation’. I seek to make the case for the claim that philosophy, at its best, should aim at a kind of ‘salvation’. In the first section, I discuss the problematic character of the world that philosophy should aim to address as a matter of seeking a kind of salvation. I identify this as (...) the problem of ‘cosmodicy’, i.e., the problem of how to justify life in the world as meaningful and worthwhile in the face of extensive evil, suffering, disorder, and the like. In the second section, I discuss how Williams’s claim not to be ‘into salvation’ is not entirely accurate. Although he rejects a certain ‘grand’ traditional picture of salvation, he still seeks a more minimal kind insofar as he addresses the problem of cosmodicy. This comes through in his advocacy of ‘humane’ philosophy and in his attempt to support the values that arise for us from within our historically contingent forms of life. I argue here that Williams is wrong to reject the human concern for a larger cosmic significance. In the final section, I discuss two secular attempts to address the issue of cosmic significance: viz., those of Thomas Nagel and Paolo Costa. I also briefly consider here what a theistic perspective has to offer. I conclude by suggesting that if I am right that philosophy, at is best, should aim at a kind of salvation, then this means that the philosophy of religion should have a central place in any philosophy curriculum. (shrink)

The starting point of this lecture is Hegel’s analysis of the human being as embodied spirit, located in a here that is now, which points to a philosophy of the human environmental spaces that provides the geographical basis of his Philosophy of world history. The paper retraces how the position that natural location occupies in the imaginary of a particular period in European history figures in some fictions relating to the Caribbean and the related literary studies or re-writings. In particular, (...) against the background of the transfer of power over nature in The Tempest, D’haen focusses on the 1847 novel Jane Eyre, where Bertha Mason is the literal embodiment of temptation, and as such also an impersonation of the lure of the tropics in the guise of its lush nature, and Wuthering Heights, where the role Heathcliff plays is close to that of Bertha for the hint at the possibility of his not being of European stock. (shrink)

This paper recounts a dramatic paradigm shift in the debate on the value and significance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, from the harsh criticism it faced over the past two centuries to its reappraisal, in the last three decades, through both the vindication of Hegel’s competence in the empirical sciences and the appreciation of his assessment of organic life and habitat, at the intersection with anthropology. The paper concludes with the most recent trends in scholarship, which focus on the problem (...) of the naturality of man in respect to culture and to democratic societies and on the systematic transition from Hegel’s philosophy of nature to the philosophy of spirit. (shrink)

As guest editor of this special issue of Esercizi Filosofici, the author introduces Kenneth R. Westphal’s and Paolo Parrini’s position papers on pragmatism, idealism and realism by elucidating the background and rationale of the workshop she organized on 29 April, 2015 at the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste, within the framework of her undergraduate course in «History of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy». The Appendix lists questions posed by students and by the audience, to which the invited speakers (...) replied in discussion following the presentations; their respective replies follow their main papers. -/- published (open access) in: Esercizi Filosofici, vol.10, n.1(2015), pp.1-15 . (shrink)

Answering to the questions posed by students, I clarify my position on four main topics: the pragmatic maxim; the relation between my conception of truth on one hand, and epistemic conceptions of truth and the idea of the convergence of our cognitive efforts on the other; the skeptical challenge; the relationship between science and philosophy.

The first part of the paper offers an historical reconstruction of the relationship between philosophy and neuroscience. The goal of this part is to show that such relationship has been generated on the basis of a theoretical common ground; that this common story was essentially tied to the American philosophical naturalism; that naturalism entails a metaphilosophical constraint, such that between philosophy and the natural sciences subsists a strong cognitive asymmetry. In the second part of the paper, it has been taken (...) into consideration the proposal of a “naturalized epistemology”. On the one hand, it has been examined the historical and theoretical consequences of it. But on the other hand, it is possible to show that in the very same quinean text there are conceptual resources that exceed the cages of reductionisms by restoring a broader and less hierarchical idea of philosophy. The fundamental claim of the work is that only assuming an idea of philosophy not already-naturalized it is possible to match the challenge for a new semantics of concepts brought forward by neurosciences. (shrink)

This paper discusses critically what simulation models of the evolution of cooperation can possibly prove by examining Axelrod’s “Evolution of Cooperation” and the modeling tradition it has inspired. Hardly any of the many simulation models of the evolution of cooperation in this tradition have been applicable empirically. Axelrod’s role model suggested a research design that seemingly allowed to draw general conclusions from simulation models even if the mechanisms that drive the simulation could not be identified empirically. But this research design (...) was fundamentally flawed, because it is not possible to draw general empirical conclusions from theoretical simulations. At best such simulations can claim to prove logical possibilities, i.e. they prove that certain phenomena are possible as the consequence of the modeling assumptions built into the simulation, but not that they are possible or can be expected to occur in reality I suggest several requirements under which proofs of logical possibilities can nevertheless be considered useful. Sadly, most Axelrod-style simulations do not meet these requirements. I contrast this with Schelling’s neighborhood segregation model, the core mechanism of which can be retraced empirically. (shrink)

Using the approach known as ‘Economics of Scientific Knowledge’, this paper defends the view of scientific norms as the result of a ‘social contract’, i.e., as an equilibrium in the game of selecting the norms under which to proceed to play the game of scientific research and publication. A categorisation of the relevant types of scientific norms is offered, as well as a discussion about the incentives of the researchers in choosing some or other alternative rules.