For a history of effects: Hume and German anti-rationalism

L'articolo analizza la ricezione del pensiero di Hume da parte di quello che I. Berlin ha definito l'anti-razionalismo tedesco, in pensatori come Hamann e, in particolare, H.F. Jacobi. E' anche attraverso tale ricezione infatti che si è annunciato lo spirito del grande movimento romantico. Di qui l'importanza di questi autori che sono stati protagonisti di una vera svolta d'epoca

Umanesimo, scetticismo, società borghese: Horkheimer lettore di Montaigne

In some of his works, Horkheimer investigates the connections between modern philosophy and the historical development of bourgeois society, exposing the contradictions that smoulder at the heart of the bourgeois order. One of the most interesting of these texts is the 1938 essay on Montaigne. This article explores Horkheimer‟s interpretation of Montaigne and of scepticism of the modern age, throwing light upon its precision and fecundity within the sphere of Montaignian studies and underlining, in particular, the convergences and divergences between various ideas of Montaigne and the Protestant reform, points of contact between scepticism and humanism, and the fundamental Horkheimerian distinction between the scepticism of the 16th century and that of his contemporaries

Scetticismo e ricerca della verità. Nota sul termine ζήτησις in Sesto Empirico

This paper argues that Sceptic philosophers’ search for the truth is different from the Dogmatic one: the Sceptics indeed investigate the truth of Dogmatic philosophers’ theories. That is not inconsistent with a genuine search for truth, since the Sceptics do not maintain that the Dogmatic philosophical theories are necessarily false

A Propòsit de Leo Strauss, Xenofont i Plató

A propòsit del llibre d'Alessandra Fussi La città nell'anima es presenta en l'article una discussió sobre la interpretació que Leo Strauss va fer de les obres de Plató i de Xenofont. Es posen en qüestió la ironia, l'escepticisme i la naturalesa dels diàlegs com a obra filosòfica.Regarding Alessandra Fussi’s book La città nell’anima the article offers a discussion on Leo Strauss’ interpretation of Plato’s and Xenophon’s works. Irony, skepticism and the nature of the dialogs as a philosophical work are all questioned

Teoria dell’errore e ‘stranezza’ ontologica: Mackie e l’attualità dell’antirealismo in etica

The paper critically examines the metaethical position of J.L. Mackie as regards its influences on the recent debate, starting from the so–called error theory, through his treatment of scepticism and queerness. The aim is to clarify how we can assume an antirealistic position in ethics, believ-ing that there are no objective values and that ‘morality has to be invented’, and to evaluate the force of the arguments of Mackie, by focusing the attention on the important – and often ne-glected – influences on his thought of J. Locke, D. Hume and, particularly, E. Westermarck, with his epistemological and anthropological attitude to ethical enquiry

Legge di natura e scienza economica

I argue that the difference between the 17th century new moral science and Scholastic Natural Law Theory derived primarily from the skeptical challenge the former had to face. Pufendorf's project of a 'scientia practica universalis' was the paramount expression of an anti-skeptical moral science, a «science» both explanatory and normative, but also anti-dogmatic in so far as it tried to base its laws on those basic phenomena of human life that supposedly were outside the scope of skeptical doubt. Of the Scholastic legacy to the new moral science, a dichotomy between an «intellettualistic» and a «voluntaristic» view of natural law (or between lex immanens and lex imposita). Voluntarism lays at the root both of theological views such as those of Calvinism and of political views such as those of Hobbes and Locke. A need to counterbalance undesirable implications of estreme voluntarism may account for much of 17th and 18th centuries developments in ethics and politics. Scottish natural jurisprudence, an expression of such quest for a third way between scepticism and extreme voluntarism, is less secular and more empirical than received wisdom admits of. One of its side-effects, namely a systematic, self-contained, and empirical economic theory, results from the search for a normative theory of social life on an empirical basis. The main tool for building such a theory, namely a view of societal laws as embedded in trans-individual mechanisms, derives from the voluntarist view of natural law as «imposed» law. Subsequent discussions of social issues based on the opposition of economic and ethical reasons originated partly from gross misreading of the Scottish natural jurisprudential framework for economic theory

Epistemologia morale

This paper offers a critical introduction to moral epistemology, that is, one of the emerging disciplines within metaethics and epistemology. The main sections of this contribution are devoted to addressing the three following issues: first, whether it is possible to acquire moral knowledge; second, how – viz., through which sources – we can acquire moral knowledge; and third, which implications moral epistemology draws from empirical sciences

Il personalismo laico di Engelhardt tra ermeneutica e scetticismo

L’articolo ravvisa uno dei principali motivi di interesse dell’elaborazione di Engelhardt nell’innestare il suo scetticismo etico-epitemologico sul terreno della Sittlichkeit hegeliana e dell’ermeneutica. Questo gli consente un approccio duttile, non acriticamente positivistico alla tecnologia, che va valutata entro la prospettiva fondamentale dell’accordo intersoggettivo tra stranieri morali, su cui si impernia il suo personalismo laico: un accordo che può essere solo di tipo procedurale, non sostanziale. Nell’articolo si avanzano invece delle riserve sulla considerazione troppo ottimistica del mercato economico e sull’unilaterale giudizio storico sulla Riforma protestante e sulle sue implicazioni nell’ambito della bioetica

Il linguaggio dei diritti tra inflazione e scetticismo

Following the XVIII century Declarations, rights have progressively occupied the whole space of legal, political and moral debate; with the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, the language of rights has been established as a universal ground for expressing human needs and claims, despite allegations of Western ethnocentrism. Rights are an indispensable tool for expressing the value of human dignity, because they allow right-holders to claim certain actions as due to them: they endow the individuals with a moral authority, the absence of which would dramatically impoverish moral (political, legal) discourse. However, 1) the abuse and uncontrolled proliferation of rights talk threatens such language with inflation. Moreover, 2) not all plausible moral concerns can be expressed in terms of rights, since rights presuppose an individualist anthropology and are particularly well-suited to situations in which individuals can be seen as both independent and equal: in situations where individuals depend on others and have little or no power of negotiation, values like respect and dignity cannot be adequately expressed by rights language. Finally, 3) if we reduce all moral discourse to rights talk, we are unable to ascribe the due importance to values like autonomy, which presuppose collective goods. A reasonable use of rights language would avoid such shortcomings, although this seems to conflict with the basic tenets of some so-called “right-based” ethical theories