Non-primary qualities are ubiquitous and humanly quite important. This paper briefly argues that they can be best understood on a dispositional model (or, that they are what is nowadays called in literature “responsedependent”), and offers a particular version of the model, the response-intentionalist one. It then discusses combinations of non-primary qualities and argues that there is a layered structure of iterated response-dependence, underlying aesthetic and other interesting properties such as meaningfulness.

For centuries most ontological systems have been based on the presupposition that the paradigmatic type of being is the kind of being things like stones and houses have. But if one looks at the beginning of Philosophy, at the emergence of philosophic thought, this choice was not an obvious one. For the pre-Socratics and even for Plato and Aristotle it was not obvious that reality is composed out of static and distinct elements.In this paper I want to investigate the relationship between the static and the dynamic description of reality historically and systematically. I argue for the thesis thatstatic ontologies are ultimately based on an analysis of predication and that dynamic ontologies are mainly based on an empirical or phenomenological investigation of singular and concrete reality.

This investigation discusses the relation between ontology and metaphysics. They are different, but how different? While metaphysics is transcendental and has as purpose the justification of being as existence, it establishes it, too. Metaphysics is speculation (as theoretical approach in the strong meaning of the term) on being. This relation can only emphasize the aporetic quality of metaphysics.

Among Singularists, it has been widely accepted that one can have singular thought by acquaintance, and that acquaintance encompasses the perceptual acquiring, memorizing and communicating of singular thoughts. I defend the possibility of having a singular thought via extending acquaintance to intermediaries other than just through written and spoken words. On my account, singular thought includes two types of representations, namely indexical-iconic representation and indexical-discursive representation. Also, it is determined by two constraints: (i) the acquaintance constraint: singular thought includes a causal-historicalrelation to the object; and (ii) the cognitive significance constraint: we have a cognitive capacity to deliberately encode an indexical-iconic representation into anindexical-discursive representation, which enables us to have a singular thought.

The function of rationality in A Theory of Justice (1971), which is of paramount importance for John Rawls’ (1921–2002) project, is often criticised as ambiguous.David Gauthier, for example, claims that Rawls develops principles for recipients who essentially share his intuitions of morality, without managing to prove theirvalidity. In Political Liberalism (1993), Justice as Fairness (2001) and other writings Rawls himself embarks upon the task to throw more light on this issue, making the Kantian distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’. I intend to demonstrate that in A Theory of Justice the formulation and the compliance with the principles of justice are based on the interaction between the rationality, represented in the idea of the good, and the sense of justice of individuals.

Sceptical theism is supposed, by a number of philosophers, to undercut the evidential basis for the evidential problem of evil. In this paper, I argue that even ifsceptical theism succeeds, its success comes with a hefty epistemic price: it threatens to undermine a good deal of what we supposedly know. Call this the problem of epistemic evil. Thus, sceptical theism has a costly philosophical price of admission. In light of this, it seems that the evidential problem of evil is harder to dislodge than it might have initially seemed; i.e. with sceptical theism, we trade the evidential problem of evil for the problem of epistemic evil.

The paper aims to indicate the complex genealogy of Spinoza's conception of the autonomy of philosophy and its political status. In essence, the study highlights the main directions of the history of thought – Western, Hebraic, Arabic and Greek – which inspired Spinoza in his approach to the great dramatic nature of the “separation” of philosophy from religion.

Chomsky and Foucault are closer to each other in their views than it is often assumed. This paper focuses on the “Chomsky-Foucault debate”, and in particular on the most philosophical topic discussed in the book, namely the question of whether there is a human nature. This paper argues that the contrast is more one of focus and stress than one of deep philosophical disagreement. This fact is of interest for the present day continental-analytic debate, given the importance of the two authors for the respective schools of thought. A constructive approach should look for bridges and enhance the dialogue of the two schools; Chomsky and Foucault are excellent authors in this regard, both as role models and as foci of inquiry.

This paper differentiates between science’s intentional theoretical objects and purely idealized theoretical objects. One identifies the former by inquiring into thefunctions they fulfill in a dynamic system (say, the system of chemical reactions in a metabolic pathway), whereas the latter get introduced by means of mathematical idealizations. Regardless of the epistemological differences, the existence of both types of theoretical objects is projected upon possibilities that are to be appropriated in a research process. The paper addresses the potentiality-for-being of the intentional theoretical objects. Though the functions which such an object fulfills are throughout experimentally recognizable, its being never becomes transformed into an actually accomplished presence.

Any logical analysis – and therefore philosophy itself – begins with the question: is there an indubitable knowledge? To answer this question Bertrand Russellappeals to tradition – both mathematical and philosophical – in which he recognizes himself. The process used by Russell, in order to build mathematics on a new foundation, was to build concepts logically, starting from atomic elements and known relationships. For example, a logical construction as that of the “class” is that a sentence, which includes a fixed concept, is turned into a logically equivalent statement (example analyzed by Russell is “Scott” and “the author of Waverley”) which unlike the first, entails relations that include concepts. Thus, the primitive concept can be replaced and removed. The new method was named the “theory of types” and became the intellectual program of Russell and his successors. Among the method’s performances is solving logical and mathematical paradoxes. The importance of Russell’s logical investigations exceeded the reductionist program, stimulating the formalist program of philosophy andmethodology and the logical analysis of the language of science with a logical-mathematical apparatus. This program was definitively concluded, it seems, by Kurt Gödel’s results on the decidability problem in the formal axiomatic systems of P type, a problem closely linked to the question of “truth” and the two other meta-theoretical properties of P formal systems, namely “consistency” and “completeness”. Gödel’s Theorems do not affect the now established legitimacy of a meta-theoretical system concerning the formalizing processes, but prove that the hilbertian original program to reduce mathematics to logic is old and the very meaning of the whole process of realizing it must be analyzed again. Considering that in a formal P system, the decision process is demonstrability of true statements, Gödel’s research findings prove the consubstantial relationship of the four meta-theoretical properties Truth-Consistency-Completeness-Demonstrability.

We consider that the epistemological recourse to semiotic dimensions could lead to peace: those in favour of an epistemology without a knowing subject are right (if they keep themselves within the syntactic and semantic frames of theoretical construction) and those who add a knowing subject are also right (if they want to express the concrete process of building up scientific convictions).

In this article I discuss and evaluate the selectivity problem as a problem put forward by Bermúdez (1997, 2000) against anti-intentionalist accounts of self-deception. I argue that the selectivity problem can be raised even against intentionalist accounts, which reveals the too demanding constraint that the problem puts on the adequacy of a psychological explanation of action. Finally I try to accommodate the intuitions that support the cogency of the selectivity problem using the resources from the framework provided by an anti-intentionalist account of self-deception.

On the assumption that, among forms of human communication, artistic communication is one of the most rich and complex, this paper mainly analyses two major aspects. The first refers to the phenomenon of contemporary art characterized by its reflective, but also commercial, nature, by its questioning of the essence, the forms of expression and the purpose of art, which seeks its identity with respect to the requirements of our time. The second brings into focus another major issue: the current strained relations between contemporary artistic creation and the public, each with its own development and justifications that are not easy to reconcile. Finally, this study advocates the idea that, beyond any indulgence to "anti-aesthetic", post-historical artistic creation, the public claims that art should offer aesthetic satisfaction, for she seeks beauty in artistic creation, to the delight of contemplation and spiritual perfection.

After presenting four basic ontological frameworks for social being, the paper adopts the two-layered approach defended by Bhaskar and Poli. Within this framework, the relation between emergents and latents is briefly described. Since most emergents are ephemeral (weak signals), the problem arises of what may eventually stabilize emergents, and values are seen as promising stabilizers for emerging new behaviors. By exploiting the case of technological innovation, the paper raises the broader issue of social innovation and the problem of its stabilization.

Throughout the history of philosophical thinking, ethics has almost never been associated with ontology because the moral approach is about the action while the ontological approach is about the being. The prospective approach confers to moral philosophy a genuine ontological direction, an ontology of the human, since it aims at identifying the problems of (human) existence, which no longer describes “what should be” but mostly “what can be”, thus anticipating the ways of human existence in a future world.The challenges raised by disruptive innovations and the environmental issue require the critical eye of moral philosophy regarding the impact of technological progress is having in redefining the human condition of tomorrow’s society; all the more so as we are facing a regrettable backwardness of moral progress, which does not seem to keep pace with the spectacular changes in science and technology. The wisdom of ethical reflection refers to a feeling of concern for both present and future humanity as a whole,relating not only to immediate reality but, especially, anticipating what might happen.

The author tries to prove that Plato’s theory of thecreation of kosmos by Demiourgos as conforming to a pre-existing model – namely “ho LÍgos” – by way of thepossession of a peculiar art, i.e. “to-know-how”, has a contemporary correspondent in the image built by science of the universe. Even the emergence of evil in such a rational and ordered universe has a replication in the religious myth of Lucifer’s rebellion.The paper is intended to show that, in the history of post-modern culture, three periods of global life are known as characterized through the connection betweenscience, philosophy and religion.The first is described in the dialogue Timaeus, where Plato imagined the creation of the world by Demiourgos, according to the Logos: “Cosmos was forged by a model – Logos – which can be designed with reason – Nous”; “Once he saw that the universe is moving and living, born as holy habitation of the immortal gods, begotten of the Father who was seized by delight and rejoicing. He had thought about how to make it even more like the model – Logos. And how this model – Logos – is an eternal creature, Demiourgos tried to perfect the universe, in this regard also”; “He has made a smooth body, uniform and equal everywhere from centre, whole and absolutely right-down, composed of perfect bodies”. Ptolemy, drawing on an Aristotelian conception of time and eternity, developed, in his Almagest, a vision of the cosmos founded on the ideas of Aristotle’s Physics describing a geocentric universe full of symbols. But this universe could not be brought to the eye as improved, as a universal astronomical system limited by the firmament of the fixed stars beyond which Christian theology has placed Paradise and Hell.The second period can be described through what Max Weber says about modernity, a process of “Entzauberung der Welt”, dramatically accelerated sincethe scientific revolution of Galileo, accomplished by the globalization of the mechanistic empire, by replacing Aristotelian and Thomist space, which is closed, limited and heterogeneous, by a homogeneous infinite space. Meta-science that favoured the emergence of modern scientific revolution is related to the logos problem of evolution and its solutions, where the core terminology means equally reason, rationality, science, and at the same time speech, word, verb, having religious or transcendent connotations but secularised in an historical horizon.The contemporary period – the third, the end of the second and the beginning of the third millennium – is placed under the heresy of the solidarity between science and technology, characterized by the technefication of science designating a process whereby techniques are predominant in traditional research methods, opening an age of cybernetic heresy.

This article presents theories of group belief with a problem. It is conceptually and psychologically impossible for there to be a believer with just one belief. Forconceptual reasons, a single belief could not have any content without the background of other beliefs. Or even if it could, it would for psychological reasons be impossible for the believer to know or understand the content of its sole belief. With certain plausible assumptions, however, groups would at some point of time have to have only one belief. (The assumption of discontinuity between the group’s and its members’ commitments leads to this.) If it is conceptually or psychologically impossible for the group to acquire its first belief, it can never come to acquire any beliefs at all. The article ends by discussingvarious ways out of this dilemma.

This paper outlines a relational variety of the theory of emergence and claims that it can be applied more fruitfully to sociology than the functional variety advocated by Keith Sawyer. Sawyer argues that the wildly disjunctive multiple realizability of social properties justifies a nonreductive approach to causal explanation in the social sciences (but also ontological individualism). In response, this paper argues, first, that the social properties he discusses are not wildly disjunctive, and secondly, that we can explain their causal significance more effectively with a relational emergence theory linked to the critical realist account of causal powers. Although these properties are multiply realizable, they are not emergent because they are multiply realizable, but despite being so.

This article comparatively explores Searle’s conception of society, which prioritizes language and intentionality in producing social things and Max Weber’s conception of social action as human behavior, in which the acting individual attributes subjective meaning to his or her behavior by orientation to the behavior of others. My aim is to show that the “nonlinguistic institutional facts” which in Searle’s terms seem to emerge in the absence of any constitutive rule linguistically expressed can be described in Weber’s terms of attaching a subjective meaning to individual behavior. In this way, we may add a minimal sociology to Searle’s conceptual apparatus in order to grasp contingent and historical dimensions of the functioning of institutions.