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)

The printed images in the frontispiece of modern philosophical books were not simply meant as decorations, but offered in remarkable cases a pictorial synthesis of the ideas expounded in the book. This is true not only of Bacon’s Instauratio magna, on the background of an explicit theoretical reflection on the use of fables and metaphors in the exposition of scientific truth, but also of Hobbes’ Leviathan, notwithstanding Hobbes’ own criticism of metaphorical language. One third impressive example is the “dipintura” of (...) Vico’s La Scienza Nuova, which is the object of a lengthy hermeneutical analysis by the author himself. The paper argues that the prominent importance of the image in these modern classics reflects the search for a more immediate connection between words and things, whose actuality is still debated in XXthcentury philosophy. (shrink)

Post-Gibson attempts to set out a definition of affordance generally agree that this notion can be understood as a property of the environment with salience for an organism’s behavior. According to this view, some scholars advocate the idea that affordances are dispositional properties of physical objects that, given suitable circumstances, necessarily actualize related actions. This paper aims at assessing this statement in light of a theory of affordance perception. After years of discontinuity between strands of empirical and theoretical research, the (...) time is ripe for addressing the question of whether the dispositional interpretation of affordance is in accordance with some recent evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. Following this line, I clarify that there are some cases of affordance-related effects that neither require the actualization of an action, nor the presence of an action-related property bearer in the environment, and that the identification of affordance with physical properties provides only a partial explanation of the wide range of affordance-related effects. Accordingly, I argue in favor of a more general account of affordance perception based on the ability to directly detect perceptual patterns in the environment. (shrink)

Principi e ordinamento romano : una riflessione sulle orme di Fritz Schulz -- Homo liber e homo sacer : due archetipi dell'appartenenza -- L'humanitas tra diritto romano e totalitarismo hitleriano -- Sull'eccezione di dolo generale -- L'arbitraggio sul prezzo -- Diritto romano e scienza del diritto -- Roma e i suoi giuristi nel pensiero di Nicolás Gómez Dávila -- Tradizione e misura umana del diritto: considerazioni sulla figura del giurista a partire da Giuseppe Grosso.

Devices of direct democracy are an important structural element in Switzerland's political system. In this article, institutions and functions of Switzerland's direct democracy will be presented. Then the author will pursue whether the direct democracy can be used as a device to prevent a dysfunctional parliamentary system of government. He comes to the conclusion that Switzerland's direct democracy is not an exportable good. We know from the Swiss experience that there is no single model that describes how initiatives and referendums (...) function in every state. (shrink)

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant provides two different propositions of freedom. According to the first, in the “Analytic of Pure Practical Reason,” freedom establishes the possibility of moral agency—i.e., it is the ratio essendi of the moral law. According to the second, in the “Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason,” freedom is the object of one of the practical postulates (CPrR 246–54; AA 5:132–41). Why should Kant postulate something that has been allegedly established as the ground of moral (...) agency? Does Kant appeal to two different conceptions of freedom? In this paper, I argue that Kant (1) in both cases conceives of freedom as an unconditioned form of causality, and (2) pursues two different aims according to two different but complementary arguments. On the one hand (the practical standpoint), he wants to argue that the causality of freedom is actual, through moral agency, in the domain where the laws of nature also apply. On the other hand (the theoretical standpoint), he is aware that the possibility of achieving the highest good would be compromised if we did not assume, along with the other two postulates, a world in which only the causality of freedom applies. While freedom as the ratio essendi of the moral law is actual, freedom as a postulate is a mere object of belief. (shrink)

Radical Enactivism holds that the best explanation of basic forms of cognition is provided without involving information of any sort. According to this view, the ability to perceive visual affordances should be accounted for in terms of extensional covariations between variables spanning the agent’s body and the environment. Contrary to Radical Enactivism, I argue that the intensional properties of cognition cannot be ignored, and that the way in which an agent represents the world has consequences on the explanation of basic (...) sensorimotor abilities. To support this claim, I show that the perception of visual affordances is not segregated from higher forms of cognition; rather, it is modulated by the agent’s ability to recognize the semantic identity of the visual target. Accordingly, since the semantic recognition of an object involves a way of representing it under a certain description, it can be inferred that the perception of visual affordances cannot be accounted for without considering the intensional properties of cognition. This poses an explanatory issue for Radical Enactivism. (shrink)