Free speech and hate speech: language and rights

Book synopsis: Quasi ogni aspetto dell’esperienza umana sembra essere legato all’idea di normatività. Ma cosa sono le norme? Che cosa le giustifica? A chi, in quale misura e perché si applicano? Che rapporto hanno con i fatti e i valori? Questo volume (corredato di un’amplissima bibliografia) affronta tali questioni dal punto di vista della filosofia del linguaggio, della teoria della conoscenza, della morale, della filosofia del diritto e dell’azione

Somewhere over the... what?

In order to defend his controversial claim that observation is unaided perception, Bas van Fraassen, the originator of constructive empiricism, suggested that, for all we know, the images produced by a microscope could be in a situation analogous to that of the rainbows, which are ‘images of nothing’. He added that reflections in the water, rainbows, and the like are ‘public hallucinations’, but it is not clear whether this constitutes an ontological category apart or an empty set. In this paper an argument will be put forward to the effect that rainbows can be thought of as events, that is, as part of a subcategory of entities that van Fraassen has always considered legitimate phenomena. I argue that rainbows are actually not images in the relevant (representational) sense and that there is no need to ontologically inflate the category of entities in order to account for them, which would run counter to the empiricist principle of parsimony

Philosophy & Architecture

Philosophy & Architecture special number of philosophy@LISBON (International eJournal) 5 | 2016 edited by Tomás N. Castro with Maribel Mendes Sobreira Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa ISSN 2182-437

Non-Epicurean Desires

In this paper, it is argued that there can be necessary and non-natural desires. After a discussion about what seems wrong with such desires, Epicurus’ classification of desires is treated similarly to Kripke’s treatment of the Kantian table of judgments. A sample of three cases is suggested to make this point

Cultural syndromes: Socially learned but real

While some of mental disorders due to emotional distress occur cross-culturally, others seem to be much more bound to particular cultures. In this paper, I propose that many of these “cultural syndromes” are culturally sanctioned responses to overwhelming negative emotions. I show how tools from cultural evolution theory can be employed for understanding how the syndromes are relatively confined to and retained within particular cultures. Finally, I argue that such an account allows for some cultural syndromes to be or become mental disorders and also steers clear of some of the anti-realist trappings associated with a social constructivism of cultural syndromes

Els anys de formació de Miquel Carreras i Costajussà (1923-1930)

Miquel Carreras i Costajussà (1905-1938) és un polígraf sabadellenc, assassinat al front de l'Ebre, autor de diversos escrits importants que ja són clàssics en la història i la literatura catalanes (Elements d'història de Sabadell, Conceptes i dites deMartí Rialp, etcètera). La ciutat, la Caixa de Sabadell i la Fundació Bosch i Cardellach - lloc on es guarden i es cataloguen els manuscrits del seu llegat - celebren aquest setembre el centenari d'aquest intel ·lectual. L'estudi dels manuscrits i de nova documentació inèdita provinent d'altres arxius i estudis especialitzats permeten la reconstrucció del seu període de formació a la Universitat de Barcelona i aMadrid entre el 1924 i el 1930, incloent-hi els doctorats de filosofia i dret. La meva comunicació versa sobre aquest període crucial, en què es couen els gradients del seu pensament posterior

The truth functional hypothesis does not imply the liars paradox

The truth-functional hypothesis states that indicative conditional sentences and the material implication have the same truth conditions. Haze (2011) has rejected this hypothesis. He claims that a self-referential conditional, coupled with a plausible assumption about its truth-values and the assumption that the truth-functional hypothesis is true, lead to a liar’s paradox. Given that neither the self-referential conditional nor the assumption about its truth-values are problematic, the culprit of the paradox must be the truth-functional hypothesis. Therefore, we should reject it. In this paper I argue that, contrary to what Haze thinks, the truth-functional hypothesis is not to blame. In fact, no liar’s paradox emerges when the truth-functional hypothesis is true; it emerges only if it is false