This article formulates a novel conception of constitutions based on John Finnis’s jurisprudential work. The ‘central case constitution’ transcends the formal or functionalist analyses currently dominant in constitutional theory by considering a constitution as having a ‘double life’. Constitutions are necessarily and intrinsically normative and factual. The article explores Finnis’s natural law philosophy, emphasizing the central case constitution’s alignment with the practical reasonableness viewpoint and its role in directing a political community towards its common good. Focusing on key elements such (...) as the rule of law and the context of a political community, the central case constitution emerges as a legal determination that structures society, frames political institutions and authoritatively directs communities towards justice. This ontological understanding has theoretical and practical implications, including identifying genuine constitutional purposes, safeguarding private associations from the overwhelming state presence, promoting community identity and accommodating diverse constitutional choices for self-determination. (shrink)

This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy (...) of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg. (shrink)

Several countries maintain universal health coverage, which implies responsibility to organize delivery formats of healthcare services and products for citizens. In Brazil, the health system has a principle of universal access for more than 30 years, but many deficiencies remain and the country observes a day practice for those seeking judicial decisions to determine provision of healthcare.

Se, por um lado, o pensamento filosófico não pode submeter-se a nenhum desígnio que lhe seja extrínseco, sob pena de se negar, por outro, não pode alhear-se do espaço-tempo onde emerge e se afirma como tal. Tornou-se entretanto urna evidência que Portugal está hoje num processo de viragem estratégica. Depois de, no rescaldo da descolonização, ter apostado tudo na integração europeia, voltando as costas ao espaço lusófono, importa agora que, Portugal, sem voltar as costas à Europa, aposte de novo na (...) convergência lusófona, ou seja, no reforço dos laços com os restantes países e regiões do espaço da lusofonia. A nosso ver, os estudos filosóficos a realizar em Portugal devem ter em conta essa viragem estratégica, promovendo-a na sua área. A Universidade Portuguesa tem, a esse respeito, uma acrescida responsabilidade. Ela deve liderar, no plano reflexivo, essa viragem estratégica. Se não o fizer, a Universidade Portuguesa condenar-se-á à irrelevância. Não há aqui meio termo – ou ela assume a responsabilidade de liderar, no plano reflexivo, essa viragem estratégica em prol da convergencia lusófona ou ela falha, por inteiro, a sua missão. Por isso lembramos aqui o pensamento de Agostinho da Silva. Philosophical thinking can not submit to any plan that is extrinsic to it, for it cannot distance itself from the space-time from which it emerges. It has now become quite evident that Portugal is now in the process of a strategic change. Once, in the aftermath of decolonization, having waged everything on European integration and turning its back to Lusophone countries, Portugal must now, without rejecting Europe, bet again on Lusophone convergence, i.e., the strengthening of ties with other countries and regions of the Lusophone space. In our view, the philosophical studies to take place in Portugal should take into account of this strategic change. A Portuguese university has, in this respect, an increased responsibility. It should lead in this strategic change in the domain of philosophical reflection. If not, the Portuguese university will condemn ourselves to irrelevance. There is no middle ground here – either it assumes the responsibility to lead in this area, or it will fail in its mission. It is in this context that we remember the thought of Agostinho da Silva. (shrink)

Diz o ditado que "quem não gosta de samba, bom sujeito não é: ou é ruim da cabeça ou doente do pé". Os filósofos tradicionalmente são doentes do pé e muitos deles certamente são ruins da cabeça. Isso parece tornar o tema desse livro pouco viável. Entretanto, tentamos mesmo assim. Afinal gente ruim da cabeça também é inconsequente. Na verdade, esse livro é a continuação do desejo compartilhado por seus diversos autores de aproximar a filosofia da cultura brasileira. E nada (...) melhor para tornar esse diálogo palpável do que o motivo fornecido pelo samba. Afinal, ele é uma de nossas manifestações nacionais mais típicas, difundidas e que tem sobrevivido a várias transformações ao longo do tempo. Através desse livro, esperamos ter nos tornado menos doentes do pé e menos ruins da cabeça -- apesar de quase todos gostarem de samba. (shrink)

Educazione o sublimazione estetica? : il "bello" in Schiller -- Dionisio contro Socrate : la "Nascita della tragedia" di Nietzsche.

The concept of fitness, central to population genetics and to the synthetic theory of evolution, is discussed. After a historical introduction on the origin of this concept, the current meaning of it in population genetics is examined: a cause of the selective process and its quantification. Several difficulties arise for its exact definition. Three adequacy criteria for such a definition are formulated. It is shown that it is impossible to formulate an adequate definition of fitness respecting these criteria. The propensity (...) definition of fitness is presented and rejected. Finally it is argued that fitness is a conceptual device, a useful tool, only for descriptive purposes of selective processes, changing from case to case, and thus devoid of any substantial physical counterpart. Any attempt to its reification is an apport to the metaphysical load evolutionary theory has inherited from Natural Theology. (shrink)

What are human rights? What makes a particular human rights claim ‘genuine’ or ‘valid’? These are difficult questions with which current philosophical literature on human rights is concerned. They are also the same kind of questions that legal philosophers asked about Law throughout the 20th century. Drawing from the similarities between the two fields, I attempt to do with the concept of human rights something similar to what Ronald Dworkin accomplished with that of Law in Law’s Empire. First, I offer (...) a critique of the two dominant perspectives on human rights—the Orthodox and Political views—that is similar in character to Dworkin’s Semantic Sting objection to Legal Positivism. Second, I sketch an alternative, Dworkinian-inspired framework that seeks to develop the notion of human rights as an interpretive concept. According to this framework, different accounts of human rights are to be understood as expressing different interpretations of the point (or purpose) of human rights practice. (shrink)

Human rights have become an important ideal in current times, yet our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous less enlightened one. This book explores the historical and theoretical dimensions of this paradox. Divided into two parts, the first section offers an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights are represented as the eternal human struggle to resist opression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At (...) the time of their birth in the 18th Century and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of law and society. The radical rhetoric of rights and its apparently endless expansive potential has led to its adoption by governments and individuals alike seeking to justify their actions on moral grounds and has undermined its radical edge. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. The classical critiques of Kant, Burke, Hegel and Marx illuminate traditional aproaches to the concept of human rights. The work of Heidegger, Sartre and psychoanalysis is used to deconstruct the metaphisical essentialism of bothe universalists and cultural relativists. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a moral stand point which both transcends the present and is historically relevant. (shrink)

Annotated logics were introduced by V.S. Subrahmanian as logical foundations for computer programming. One of the difficulties of these systems from the logical point of view is that they are not structural, i.e., their consequence relations are not closed under substitutions. In this paper we give systems of annotated logics that are equivalent to those of Subrahmanian in the sense that everything provable in one type of system has a translation that is provable in the other. Moreover these new systems (...) are structural. We prove that these systems are weakly congruential, namely, they have an infinite system of congruence 1-formulas. Moreover, we prove that an annotated logic is algebraizable (i.e., it has a finite system of congruence formulas,) if and only if the lattice of annotation constants is finite. (shrink)

There is a debate in philosophy and cognitive science over whether concepts – the building blocks of thought—are couched in a perceptual modality or are amodally represented. The empirical evidence so far collected seems not to have adjudicated this question yet, as reinterpretation of the same set of evidence by both supporters of modalism and amodalism have been provided. I offer a critique of such reinterpretations, arguing that they ultimately derive from theoretical problems in the definition of a modal representation. (...) In particular, I will review three criteria which have been offered to distinguish amodal concepts from modal ones: the isomorphism criterion, the neural location criterion, and the input specificity criterion. I will explain how these criteria often lack theoretical clarity, making it possible in most cases to propose a parsimonious explanation of the same set of data from both an amodalist and a modalist perspective. As a result, it becomes impossible to empirically discriminate between the two interpretations. My conclusion is that the main problem with the discussed criteria is that they frame the question on the format of concept as an either/or debate, by overlooking more interesting empirical questions. (shrink)

The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial (...) services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. (shrink)

Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics.

This article is a belated contribution to a Common Knowledge symposium on the “unanticipated conceptual practice” of “anthropological philosophy.” The basic argument is that the groundwork for this emerging approach, associated foremost with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's book Métaphysiques cannibales of 2009, was laid in the 1970s by the controversial French anthropologists Pierre and Hélène Clastres. It is argued that the Clastres took the intellectual practices of Guarani shamans and prophets as analogous to the those of ancient Greek philosophers but (...) also as sharply critical of the principles that underlay early Western metaphysics. (shrink)

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

One important discussion raised in this special issue on the ethical spectrum of consciousness involves the possibility of providing machines with human mind-like capabilities to the point of allow...

We introduce a family of matrices that define logics in which paraconsistency and/or paracompleteness occurs only at the level of literals, that is, formulas that are propositional letters or their iterated negations. We give a sound and complete axiomatization for the logic defined by the class of all these matrices, we give conditions for the maximality of these logics and we study in detail several relevant examples.

The purpose of the present paper is to consider the traditional interpretive problems of quantum mechanics from the viewpoint of a modal ontology of properties. In particular, we will try to delineate a quantum ontology that (i) is modal, because describes the structure of the realm of possibility, and (ii) lacks the ontological category of individual. The final goal is to supply an adequate account of quantum non-individuality on the basis of this ontology.

In this paper we provide frame definability results for weak versions of classical modal axioms that can be expressed in Fitting's many-valued modal languages. These languages were introduced by M. Fitting in the early '90s and are built on Heyting algebras which serve as the space of truth values. The possible-worlds frames interpreting these languages are directed graphs whose edges are labelled with an element of the underlying Heyting algebra, providing us a form of many-valued accessibility relation. Weak axioms of (...) the form we treat here have been examined from the completeness perspective and further explored for applications in non-monotonic reasoning. Here, we introduce more weak many-valued modal axioms and prove a frame correspondence result for all of them. The classes of corresponding labelled frames possess algebraic properties which are strongly reminiscent of many classical ones, such as the Church-Rosser property, reflexivity, transitivity, partial functionality, etc. (shrink)

Jurisprudence is the prudence of jus, law's consciousness and conscience. Throughout history, when thinkers wanted to contemplate the organisation of society or the relationship between authority and the subject, they turned to law. All great philosophers, from Plato to Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber had either studied the law or had a deep understanding of legal operations. But jurisprudence is also the conscience of law, the exploration of law's justice and of an ideal law or equity at the bar (...) of which state law is always judged. Jurisprudence brings together 'is' and 'ought', the positive and the normative, law and justice. But after a long process of decay, legal theory is today characterised by cognitive and moral poverty. Jurisprudence has become restricted and academically peripheral, a guidebook to technocratic legalism and a legitimation of the existent. Critical jurisprudence returns to the classical tradition of a general philosophy of law and adopts a much wider concept of legality. It is concerned both with posited law and with the law of the law. All legal aspects of the economic, political, emotional and physical modes of production and reproduction of society are part of critical jurisprudence. This widening of scope allows a radical rethinking of the nature of rights, justice, sovereignty and judgement. A political philosophy of justice today must examine the political economy of law; transitions from Empire to nation; ideological and imaginary constructions through which we understand ourselves and relate to others; ways in which gender, race or sexuality create forms of identity that both discipline bodies and offer sites of resistance. Law's complicity with political oppression, violence and racism has to be faced before it is possible to speak of a new beginning for legal thought, which in turn is the necessary precondition for a theory of justice. Critical Jurisprudence offers an ethics of law against the nihilism of power and an aesthetics of existence for the melancholic lawyer. (shrink)

The article examines Kant's notion of conceptual extension in order to determine a conception of predication that could integrate, in a coherent fashion, basic theoretical commitments of general logic as he conceived it and the central tenets of his transcendental logic. After a brief overview of the several characterizations of thatnotion in the Kantian corpus, I distinguish three interpretative models concerning it in the literature. Such models are criticized and their prospects of integrating Kant's commitments in a fully satisfactory way (...) are rejected. Finally, I sketch an alternative account of Kant's notion of conceptual extension, which respects the criteria of adequacy that guided the examination of the former models. It points, on its turn, to a revaluation of Kant's notion of conceptual content. (shrink)

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.