Vers une phénoménologie de l’a-légalité

This paper analyzes Lindahl’s phenomenological coordinates and thereby his understanding of the delimitation of legal orders as normative orders. In particular, by drawing on the legal and political-philosophical mainstay of important authors such as Hart, Arendt and Waldenfels, it inspects the extent to which Fault Lines of Globalization accurately frames and discloses the con-stitutive relation between legal and social normativity

Antigone e i dilemmi del Nomos

Rilettura filosofico-giuridica dei problemi posti dall'Antigone di Sofocle, in particolare il rapporto tra il nomos di Creonte e i nomima cui si richiama l'eroin

Sessione “Comprendere la Storia per progettare il futuro dei giovani”

L'uguaglianza dei diritti come conquista storica e progetto di futuro più giusto

Does death make us all equal? Conformism and status-seeking under mortality salience

The thought of one’s own death induces anxiety and threatens self-esteem. According to Terror Management Theory, to reduce this existential threat individuals typically embrace their cultural worldview, and seek for an increase in self-esteem and status by improving their productivity. Within an experimental economy setting, this paper investigates the effect of Mortality Salience (MS) on individual productivity, using for the first time a real-effort task where the economic incentive is to not perform. We investigated whether the improvement in productivity was significantly driven by self-esteem or status seeking, providing either private feedback alone or, additionally, public feedback. Always controlling for participants’ individual susceptibility to the MS induction, our results indicate that subjects generally tend to be more sensitive to in-group conformity under MS compared to a control (Music) induction condition. That is, they initially improve their performance to enhance self-esteem, but then homologate to average performance levels, consistent with the incentive not to perform. However, for a subset of less materialistic participants, with strong susceptibility to MS, performance levels constantly improved along the task

Beyond the Primacy of Representation

The primacy of representation, to which – at least according to Paul Ricoeur – Edmund Husserl would have remained faithful, is radically questioned in Emmanuel Levinas’ famous essay on the "ruin of representation" (1959). The phenomenological structure of intentionality, in which “something appears as something”, confirms the need to “break out of the magic circle of representation”. Indeed, it is precisely by means of a detailed analysis of “intentionality”, insofar as the latter appears as characterized by an essential Mehrmeinun. Levinas brings out the overcoming of representation, that is, the abandonment of the latter's claim to subordinate thought to the objective necessity of presence. Within the horizon of presence, the necessity of being-thus-and-not-otherwise overwhelms the sense of the possible, and the actual evidence annihilates the being-able-to-be-otherwise of human experience. Through the analysis of intentionality and its potentiality, it is possible to bring out the transition from a philosophy of the necessary constraints of evidence, linked to the primacy of representation, to a philosophy of the power-able-to-be-otherwise. After all, the ruin of representation is the ruin of the instant or eternity of evidence, relegated into the actuality of consciousness. By subtracting itself from the self-referential necessity of evidence, the ethical Sinngebung evocated by Levinas at the end of his 1959 article connects intentionality to the sense of the possible, making explicit its openness to the future in radical form.The primacy of representation, to which – at least according to Paul Ricoeur – Edmund Husserl would have remained faithful, is radically questioned in Emmanuel Levinas’ famous essay on the "ruin of representation" (1959). The phenomenological structure of intentionality, in which “something appears as something”, confirms the need to “break out of the magic circle of representation”. Indeed, it is precisely by means of a detailed analysis of “intentionality”, insofar as the latter appears as characterized by an essential Mehrmeinun. Levinas brings out the overcoming of representation, that is, the abandonment of the latter's claim to subordinate thought to the objective necessity of presence. Within the horizon of presence, the necessity of being-thus-and-not-otherwise overwhelms the sense of the possible, and the actual evidence annihilates the being-able-to-be-otherwise of human experience. Through the analysis of intentionality and its potentiality, it is possible to bring out the transition from a philosophy of the necessary constraints of evidence, linked to the primacy of representation, to a philosophy of the power-able-to-be-otherwise. After all, the ruin of representation is the ruin of the instant or eternity of evidence, relegated into the actuality of consciousness. By subtracting itself from the self-referential necessity of evidence, the ethical Sinngebung evocated by Levinas at the end of his 1959 article connects intentionality to the sense of the possible, making explicit its openness to the future in radical form

Present and future self in memory: the role of vmPFC in the self-reference effect

Self-related information is remembered better than other-related information (self-reference effect; SRE), a phenomenon that has been convincingly linked to the medial prefrontal cortex. It is not clear whether information related to our future self would also have a privileged status in memory, as medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) regions respond less to the future than to the present self, as if it were an 'other'. Here we ask whether the integrity of the ventral mPFC (vmPFC) is necessary for the emergence of the present and future SRE, if any. vmPFC patients and brain-damaged and healthy controls judged whether each of a series of trait adjectives was descriptive of their present self, future self, another person and that person in the future and later recognized studied traits among distractors. Information relevant to the present (vs future) was generally recognized better, across groups. However, whereas healthy and brain-damaged controls exhibited strong present and future SREs, these were absent in vmPFC patients, who concomitantly showed reduced certainty about their own present and anticipated traits compared to the control groups. These findings indicate that vmPFC is necessary to impart a special mnemonic status to self-related information, including our envisioned future self, possibly by instantiating the self-schema

Appunti sulla genesi filosofico-politica della prospettiva convivialista.

Abstract not availabl

Sophocles "Antigone" and the lack of legal mediation

La Antígona de Sόfocles sirve de pretexto para reflexionar sobre la falta –en el mundo griego– de mediaciόn entre la generalidad de la legislaciόn, comprendida como un conjunto de órdenes políticas, y la particularidad del caso concreto. La insolubilidad del conflicto trágico muestra el límite insuperable del pensamiento social de la polis griega, que finalmente resulta como encarcelado en la perspectiva del nomos. El carácter general y abstracto de este último no conoce y no admite ningún procedimiento que pueda controlar su ejecución en lo concreto de la vida cotidiana. En este sentido, la tragedia de la hija y hermana de Edipo consiste en la falta de una transición que no sea simplemente deductiva, y por lo tanto de una posible mediaciόn, desde el nivel de la producción de la ley hacia el nivel de su aplicación al caso particular. En este tipo de mediaciόn se puede ver expresada la diferenciación fundamental entre la ley y el Derecho.Sophocles’ Antigone can be taken as a good starting point in order to investigate, within the Greek classical world, on the absence of mediation between the generality of legislation, on the one side, and the concrete case in its particularity, on the other. The lack of a solution in the tragic conflict shows, as it is, the very limit characteristic of the social thought underlying the Greek polis. This one is in fact as entrapped in the sole perspective of the nomos. The general and abstract character of the latter does not admit in effect any procedure able to control its execution in the concrete realm of daily life. And this is exactly true of the tragedy regarding Oedipus’ daughter and sister, such that there is no transition other than a deductive one enabling a connection –and a possible mediation– between the law-making and its application to the particular case. This kind of mediation expresses the fundamental difference between nomos and ius