Search

The evidence-based turn in education reveals renewed consensus on empiricism and shared trust in science as if it were the allegedly value-free basis for decision-making: good, justifiable governance should be a non-discretional corollary of scientific knowledge. The article focuses on some risks implied in pursuing the de-moralization of educational decision-making, namely the realistic, the reductionist, and the perspective fallacies, as well as the minimization of individual responsibility in favor of the third-person perspective implied in following protocols and guidelines. In the discussion I address some possible reasons for the appeal of the evidence-based turn despite these risks: the contemporary pressure for “accountability” and the need to justify social policies and practices with consensual criteria. In the conclusion, I claim that educational decision-making should deploy rather than conceal its moral bases despite their being potentially highly divisive. Consequently, I make a case for “moral accountability”: making publicly inspectable what evidence-based education tries to conceal, i.e. the unavoidable value-ladeness of educational policies and practices.

This contribution aims to present the different philosophical interpretations of Descartes and Cartesian philosophies in the 17th century within the Revue Internationale de Philosophie. Studies on Descartes and Cartesian philosophies profoundly influenced the scientific orientations of the Revue by promoting the encounter between historical-philosophical and epistemological research. By reconstructing a century of Cartesian interpretations in the Revue, from the 1930s to the present day, the contribution examines the link between the universality of philosophical ideas and the analysis of texts, between the history of ideas and the history of philosophical systems.

The present essay provides an overview of the images of seventeenth-century philosophy in the Rivista di storia della filosofia (then retitled Rivista critica di storia della filosofia) in the years 1946–1983. Founded in 1946 by Mario Dal Pra, the journal promoted a new anti-idealistic approach to the history of philosophy. Based on philological accuracy, this approach enhanced the complexity of history and the interdependence of different fields of knowledge. In particular, the unprecedented emphasis on the connections between science and philosophy entailed a preeminent place for empiricism in the Rivista. This explains why this essay focuses on empiricist currents in seventeenth-century philosophy and especially on three of their representatives, namely Galileo Galilei, Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon.

In this paper I will argue that Deleuze, Whitehead and Bergson share a similar approach to abstraction, an approach that is fundamentally ‘pragmatist’ (broadly construed, close to James Williams’ ‘fantastic’ pragmatism). Leaning on William James one name for this shared approach methodologically is radical empiricism and is best understood in my view in the context of process philosophy. Although, they share a similar approach I will point out some differences between the radical empiricists in the way they think about some of their own key abstractions engaging the themes of relation, becoming and space-time. All three thinkers give us abstractions for thinking life as the creation of the new.

This article is an attempt to present the views of the Polish philosopher on the phenomenon of religion. L. Kołakowski devoted almost all his professional life to the issue of religion. He places the area of religious experiences and beliefs within the framework of transcendentalism, one of the basic and mutually exclusive options: “transcendentalism – empiricism”. Empiricism is the sphere of naturalistic views and contents, and their most radical representatives are empirical sciences and philosophies related to them. Kołakowski points out that there is no reason for the naturalistic option to exhaust the cognitive content. However, a philosophical attempt to go beyond naturalism in grasping the Absolute and the self, ends in metaphysical horror. Hence L. Kołakowski points to religious perception as an area that remains non-scientific but this fact does not contradict its value. A special place in L. Kołakowski’s analyses is occupied by the anthropological argument under which the biologisation of human existence is unjustified.

The article surveys the interpretation of Dewey in Italian new-enlightenment and in particular the contributions of Aldo Visalberghi and Antonio Santucci. Visalberghi develops a number of Deweyan insights on the connexions between the methodology of the sciences and the process for the justifications of evaluations. Santucci shows the analogies between Dewey's pragmatism and Hume's sceptical empiricism. Both thinkers enrich the attempt by 20th century Italian philosophy of a recover of the Enlightenment's heritage with the help of Dewey's ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new framework for examining the empirical research of early modern architects. It explores the rise of nature study in sixteenth-century architectural theory and practice through the works of physician and architecture expert Walther Hermann Ryff (c. 1500–1548). The article argues that Ryff’s 1548 Vitruvius Teutsch, the first German translation of Vitruvius’s De architectura, gave architects pathbreaking advice about performing design research in nature. Ryff’s book supported the botanical investigations of architects by aping empirically derived botanical imagery from the De historia stirpium of Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) and by comparing architectural nature study to the period craze for examining ancient ruins firsthand. In proposing a new mode of architectural empiricism, Vitruvius Teutsch reconciled tensions between abstract theory and hands-on practice in the formation of architectural knowledge.

The possibility of autonomous artificially intelligent systems (AAIs) has awaken a well-known worry in the scientific community as well as in popular imaginary: the possibility that beings which have gained autonomous intelligence either turn against their creators or at least make the moral and ethical superiority of creators with respect to the created questionable. The present paper argues that such worries are wrong-headed. Specifically, if AAIs raise a worry about what human ways of life it a worry for a certain human way of thinking about what it is to be human. What is threatened is a way of thinking about what it is to be human, not human ways of life or human value.

Jean-Henri Fabre made numerous discoveries observing meticulously the lifestyle and behaviour of insects which lived around his traditional house in Provence. Those discoveries are still valid, even though the heterodox entomologist became the standard bearer for opponents of transformism, which perpetually progressed and is about to triumph. Fabre is first known to have been an outstanding observer, but also to have gathered together in a colossal collection his entomologist’s memoirs, whose literary – and even poetic – value is celebrated as far away as Japan. This article proposes to question the validity of the preconceived idea that Les Souvenirs entomologiques adds to the accurate eye of the observer the fertile imagination of the poet. Refusing to just make note of this a posteriori superposition, it hypothesizes that there is a reunification of the inflexible empiricism of the biological approach with a creative imagination which reveals to be omnipresent in every phase of Fabre’s enterprise: the hypothesis, the validation by observation, and the literary transcription.

The aim of this paper is to compare Phenomenological Empiricism with two different kinds of Empiricism: Classical Empiricism (represented by Hume) and Logical Empiricism (represented by Schlick). Phenomenological Empiricism is at the same time a radical and sophisticated theory of experience, in which intentionality, ideation, material a priori, a complex notion of data and of intuition play a crucial role.

An analysis of Anton Marty's usage of nativism and empiricism as opposed terms in the controversy on the genetic theory of language (the so-called Nativismusstreit). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vittario Alfieri was one of the greatest poets and autobiographers, and also one of the greatest travellers of the 18th century, during what we consider to be the period of great voyages (and the era of philosophical empiricism). The many long journeys of Alfieri through Europe, reported in his autobiographical work Vita, are a series of mad flights (using the terminology of Dante, "folli voli"), reflecting a restless soul in search of himself. These journeys never brought the satisfaction of going, there was also the suffering of remaining next to the possibilities of gathering experiences of the world. Landscapes prepared him for his protoromantic poetic works, while the political ones matured him for his strong revolt against tyranny. His consciousness showed a mission of a judge writer ("scrittore tribuno"), a bard of freedom, and his categorical refusal of any type of absolute power, and an admiration for the parliamentary government of a "happy England". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Système de philosophie (1691) by Pierre Sylvain Régis can be considered as the achievement both of the scientific liveliness of the Académie des Sciences in the 17th century and of its fruitful relationship with the Royal Society. Since it aims to shape the new conception of the universe in terms of a system, the Système represents one of the most mature achievements of Cartesian philosophy and it is characterized by an empirical interpretation of Descartes’ thought. The Système therefore reflects two important phenomena occurring in the Europe of the 17th century: the scientific revolution and the proliferation of Academies. In fact, this ambitious work could be undertaken with the support of the Académie des Sciences and the Journal des Sçavants. My paper will analyse the French context by focusing to outline the role which the Académie de France had both in France, as the medium of dissemination of the new philosophy despite censorship, and abroad, in particular through the relationship with the Royal Society in England. I aim to analyse the role of the Journal des Sçavants as a means to share ideas other than by correspondence and as a trait d’union between “rationalist France” and “empiricist England”. I intend to question whether it is possible to establish a connection between the empirical interpretation of French Cartesianism, the consolidation of the Académie de France and the employment of new means of academic communication. The paper will show that the second half of 17th century France represents a remarkable exception to the conventional picture, which states that in 17th century Europe, following the success of a mechanistic interpretation of reality, two philosophical school clashed: rationalism, predominating on the continent, and empiricism, in England.

In 1688, the Irish scientist William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke in which he asked whether a man who had been born blind and whose experience of the world was based on senses other than vision, would be able to distinguish and name a globe and a cube by sight alone, once he had been enabled to see. This issue immediately raised considerable interest amongst philosophers, who, for centuries, have continued to speculate about how this issue might be resolved. More recently, the possibility of corrective surgery for people born with congenital cataracts, has offered a valuable opportunity to explore this topic experimentally. A discussion of how Molyneux’s question has been addressed over the centuries, allows us to investigate a number of intellectual challenges, involving a variety of fields, ranging from philosophy, psychology and the cognitive sciences, to neuroscience. For instance, Molyenux’s question raises the question of whether sensory experience is specific to each sensory modality, or rather supramodal, and if a transfer of knowledge across modalities can be established. Molyneux’s question is also relevant to the discussion of whether, how and to what extent a concept of space can be developed by blind people. More generally, it concerns the idea of how conceptual knowledge is acquired and processed when vision is lacking. The present paper aims to provide an overview of all the issues raised by Molyenux’s question.

One of the most mature achievements of the Cartesian philosophy is the aim to diffuse Descartes’ thought among a wider audience by presenting his philosophy in an encyclopedic way. A relevant contribution in this field is Pierre Sylvain Régis’s Système. Régis’s contribution consists both in reconciling the new scientific discoveries with les principes de Monsieur Descartes by combining them into a scholarly manual whose aim is to stimulate the ars inveniendi and in recognizing the relevance of Arnauld’s and Nicole’s L’art de penser as manual of Cartesian logic. In an article published on the «Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa» (4/2 (2012), pp. 517-55: L’«Art de penser» nella logica del «Système» di Régis) I analysed Régis’s logic in order to point out that, even if L’art de penser represents its only source, La logique of the Système has not to be considered as a mere compendium of the Port-Royal Logique, but as a revision of the latter according to a specific philosophical system, characterized by the empirical interpretation of Descartes’s philosophy. In this paper I provide a synopsis of the comparison between the logic of the Système and the Logique of Port-Royal, in order to resume in a schematic way the results of my research.

Although the Grand Tour is often implicitly circumscribed to the (long) eighteenth century, its origins actually date back to the sixteenth, as previously argued by Edward Chaney and Michael Brennan. The present article aims to reassess the complex role travel played in the education of the early modern elite, notably the contrasting responses this new social phenomenon elicited. While the crown actively fostered transnational experiences, regarding them as conducive to political and diplomatic wisdom, scholars and playwrights presented this form of transculturation as the fall from a condition of purity. Preoccupations concerning the newly acquired national and religious identity of England and Britain mingle in these texts with reflections on language, manners and morals. This anti-cosmopolitan campaign takes on different nuances, alternatively stigmatising the travellers’ affectation and portraying them as devilish. In the first half of the seventeenth century, however, a new paradigm of knowledge as pragmatically based on experience asserted itself, as shown by Francis Bacon’s works. This lead to a reassessment of travelling as a useful social practice and ultimately to the systematisation of the traveller’s gaze, as shown – among others – by the proceedings of the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge. Moreover, the pressure the Ottoman Empire exerted on the Eastern borders of Europe contributed to alert Britons to a new religious and cultural faultline, prompting them to reassess their perception of intra-European differences.

This paper aims to clarify the program of Deleuze’s work on Hume’s philosophy. Also, I plan to make clear the operational meaning of Deleuze’s own hallmark regarding his approaches to philosophy. I start to follow Deleuze’s plot by engendering three functions of his interpretation of Hume’s Treatise that will be the area of three thematic chapters. The first tries to sort the polemical function of empiricism that is launched through Deleuze’s Hume; the second attempts to figure the domain of subjectivity as the inventive function of the book; the third searches the creative function by describing the role of the institutional theory.

The research is related to David Hume. This philosopher is described as being an empiricist, but it should be noted that the empiricism promoted by Hume represents the development up to the final consequences of this philosophical doctrine that should be subjected to the observability requirement. The core problem for Hume’s philosophy is the difficulty of causality thinking. The Scottish philosopher promotes a moderate and inconsistent skepticism because he does not doubt the permanency of facts. The Humean epistemology is mixed with elements belonging to some naïve ontology of a materialistic nature and with elements of a sensualistic psychology of an associationist type. The causality or the causal connection between events is based on a psychological belief, which has a pragmatic end for people, in that it offers us the psychological comfort of habitual events and the familiar existential. Causality refers to certain events that have already happened in a certain way, but it cannot constitute a necessary and sufficient basis for similar future events.

Hume defende na Investigação sobre o Entendimento Humano a parcimônia no uso de princípios explicativos. Tenta-se mostrar, neste artigo, como ele procurou seguir essa diretriz em seus trabalhos sobre os sentimentos morais, a história, a política e a economia. Explora-se, ao mesmo tempo, o caráter sistemático do projeto enunciado no começo do Tratado da Natureza Humana.In his Enquiry on Human Understanding Hume proposes a rule of parcimony in the use of explanatory principles. This essay is an attempt to show how the philosopher managed to follow that rule in his writings on moral sentiments, history, politics and economics. At the same time, it explores the systematic character of the project described in the presentation of the Treatise on Human Nature.

Na filosofia de Hume há uma nítida distinção entre a obra da juventude e a obra da maturidade. Mas seu Tratado da Natureza Humana não está no mesmo caso que essas outras obras de juventude que justificam falar de um jovem Hegel ou de um jovem Marx, ou de um Kant pré-crítico em contraste com o Kant da filosofia transcendental. Trata-se de um caso intermédio: a filosofia do autor é sempre a mesma, mas o Tratado apresentava, segundo o próprio autor, tais imprecisões e negligências que o levaram, na década seguinte, a publicar novas versões de suas principais teorias (do entendimento, das paixões, da moral) onde a filosofia, repito, ainda era a mesma, mas com vastas correções, notadamente na teoria do entendimento, sua epistemologia, que é o objeto do presente estudo. É preciso examinar cuidadosamente cada texto, sem pretender que haja um modelo único de leitura, de modo a fazer justiça tanto às geniais imperfeições do Tratado quando à argumentação mais sólida da Investigação sobre o Entendimento Humano. O resultado de tais leituras poderá indicar, por exemplo, não haver na primeira Investigação qualquer argumentação em favor de alguma forma de associacionismo a respeito da causação. Também não aparece ali compatibilidade da epistemologia de Hume com o empirismo comum, ou mesmo com qualquer espécie de pirronismo. Tais conclusões apóiam a interpretação de que Hume, em sua obra de maturidade, operou modificações relevantes de conteúdo, que deveriam ser reconhecidas como revisões definitivas das posições do autor.Hume's philosophy present relevant differences between the work of his young years and the one produced in his maturity. However, the Treatise of Human Nature does not justify referring to a young Hume the same way Hegel, Marx or Kant have sometimes been considered. Hume's work is rather an intermediate case. The author allegedly develops his philosophical thought publishing new versions of its mains subjects, while criticizing the Treatise for its negligence and imprecision. The changes require an attentive examination of each text essaying different reading procedures in order to do justice to the genial imperfections of the Treatise as well as to the more consistent arguments presented in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The result of a careful reading of the first Enquiry may shed light upon the absence of any involvement of association of ideas in causal reasoning. One can also find no compatibility of Hume's epistemology either with common empiricism or any kind of pyrrhonism. Such findings may offer strong support to the conclusion that Hume's mature epistemology operated relevant changes not only in the manner but also in the matter of his earlier work that should be acknowledged as final versions of the author's theoretical positions.

Este texto se ocupa de um exame, em caráter introdutório, das relações entre a reflexão de Bacon acerca das limitações de nossas faculdades e o ceticismo filosófico - um tema pouco considerado pela literatura mais recente, a despeito das muitas referências a tal filosofia. Ainda que, à primeira vista, tais referências possam parecer vagas e imprecisas, pensamos que um exame adequado de algumas delas pode revelar, não apenas a importância do tema para a compreensão de aspectos do seu próprio empreendimento, mas o interesse de Bacon pela literatura cética contemporânea. As peculiaridades de sua própria interpretação, por sua vez, parecem antecipar traços do modo como essa filosofia foi compreendida por filósofos posteriores, como Hume.This text focuses, in a preliminary way, on the relations between Francis Bacon's reflections on the limits of our cognitive faculties and philosophical skepticism, a theme not much considered by most of recent commentaries, in spite of Bacon's own explicit and numerous allusions to this philosophy. Even if these allusions seem at first sight somewhat loose and not very sharp, some of them reveal, we think, not only its relevance for understanding of some aspects of his own enterprise, but also Bacon's attention to the skeptical literature produced on the period. Moreover, the particularities of his own interpretation of skepticism seem to anticipate important features of the way this philosophy was understood by later philosophers as Hume.

There are, apparently, many differences between the ethical theory of Locke and the next utilitarianism of Bentham, so much so that the explicit appreciations, that the same Bentham expressed about Locke in many occasions, seem surprising.This paper examines some of the most striking differences between the two philosophies, and it does not find in the moral philosophy of Locke elements that are incompatible with utilitarianism widely understood, so that one can see in Locke's hedonistic empiricism a crucial precedent of utilitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo faz a análise de alguns aspectos do sistema de constituição do Logische Aufbau der Welt (A construção lógica do mundo) de Rudolf Carnap, tendo em vista duas possíveis interpretações da base autopsicológica escolhida pelo autor, ou seja, das vivências. Alguns autores, como Michael Friedman e Moulines, vêem o Aufbau como sendo um sistema estrutural cujas formas não são determinadas pelas experiências básicas - pelas vivências. Outros, como, por exemplo, Stegmüller, afirmam que as estruturas, as definições do Aufbau, resultam de relações que podem ser estabelecidas entre estas. Acompanhando os argumentos desses intérpretes e a proposta epistemológica do próprio Carnap, sustento a necessidade de pensar a base autopsicológica, as vivências, como determinantes das relações estruturais do Aufbau.This paper is an analysis of some aspects of the constitutional system of Carnap's Logische Aufbau der Welt. It considers two possible interpretations of the autopsychological basis - the elementary experiences - as this concept is used in Carnap's book. Some authors, like Michael Friedman and Moulines, see the Aufbau as a structural system whose forms are not determined by basic experiences - elementary experiences. Others, as for instance Stegmüller, say that the structures, the definitions, within the Aufbau are the result of relations which can be established among those experiences. Following the arguments of these interpreters as well as Carnap's epistemological proposal, I sustain in this paper that it is necessary to think about the autopsychological basis - the elementary experiences - as determining Aufbau's structural relations.

This essay holds that the imaginative capability of the mind and its outputs occupy an important place in Shaftesbury's moral and aesthetic theory. Furthermore, it shows how reading Shaftesbury's work as centred on the relationship between imagination and moral sense can point out, apart from its obvious debt to Platonism, what Shaftesbury's ideas owe to Empiricism.

The «Standard Model» as a Starting Point for a New Reflection. The problem of rationality of scientific knowledge and its development is often found in the diverse contributions of the contemporary epistemological scene. The formulation of the methodological question - intended as theory of empirical research procedure - tends to be crushed within obsolete argumentation. This contribution seeks a «step-by-step» redefinition of a boundary line that is still unsmoothed, and therefore goes through the main stages of Lakatosian reflection on falsificationist methodology of research programs, and embraces the contribution that Amsterdamskian epistemology offers in this regard. The background of this well-formulated reconstruction is made up by the reference to the «Standard Model» of contemporary sub-atomic physics and the diverse theories that gravitate around it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patrick Suppes' views on probability are discussed focusing particularly on the issues of invariance and pluralism. The claim argued in this paper is twofold: (1) this dualism allows us to understand Suppes' theory of probability and (2) Suppes' strategy intended to solve this dualism contains the key to shed light upon other parts of his thought. In the first section the dualism is discussed. The second, third and fourth sections deal with the formal theory of probability and with Suppes' analysis of the classic philosophical views on probability. In the fifth section I present the probabilistic empiricism as Suppes' peculiar philosophical position on indeterminacy and randomness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text aims at examining the relations between Bacon's reflections on the limits of our faculties and philosophical skepticism - a theme not so dominant in the most recent literature, despite the many references to that philosophy. Even though these references seem at first sight somewhat vague and imprecise, we came to the conclusion that not only a close exam can reveal the relevance of the theme in regard to the comprehension of Bacon's own philosophy, but also show his interest in contemporary skeptical literature. The distinctive features of his own interpretation seem to anticipate how skepticism is to be understood by future philosophers as Hume, for instance.