Res Cogitans

Legitimacy challenges are part of human societies. Whenever we recognise a person, law, ideal or institution as authoritative, questions can be raised about their legitimacy. Why follow this law? Why strive to honour this moral ideal? If such questions are repeatedly raised, they pose an undermining threat to the authorities in question. This is good if the challenged law or ideal is harmful, but problematic, if it is beneficial. Where the first kind of legitimacy challenges are raised by ethical pioneers and moral critics, the last kind are posed by cynics, who disregard the demands of law and morality when they conflict with their interests. The threat to human society caused by cynicism is part of the reason why philosophers since Plato have sought to address and rid society of it.This article discusses how philosophy can deal with cynicism. It does so by firstly looking at how Anthony Holiday defends a moral realist theory and disproves ‘the theory of cynicism’ as well as tries ...

There are two main currents of thought in Continental philosophy emerging today – the speculative realists (via: Graham Harman and Meillassoux) and the post-continental Marxists (via: Žižek and Badiou). The two camps have propped themselves against each other, with the speculative realists giving especially acerbic critiques of post-continentalism as being stuck in correlationist thought (while the latter just tend to ignore the former, considering them a philosophy not worthy of exposition). This paper argues that this confrontation is an illusion: the fundamental ontologies of both groups essentially rely on a single concept – that of the non-All – that structures the rest of their thought. Further, it is only by overcoming the illusory nature of this confrontation that we can unleash the full potential of both these fields.

This paper suggests that it is largely a want of notional distinctions which fosters the "explanatory gap" that has beset the study of consciousness since T. Nagel's revival of the topic. Modifying Ned Block's controversial claim that we should countenance a "phenomenal module" which exists in its own right, we argue that there is a way to recuperate the intuitions he appeals to without engaging in an onerous reification of the facet in question. By renewing with the full type/token/tone trichotomy developed by C. S. Peirce, we think the distinctness Block (rightly) calls attention to can be seen as stemming not from any separate module lurking within the mind, but rather from our ability to prescind qualities from occurrences.

Il mio intento non è né quello di descrivere la fisiologia umana, di delineare un modello di biologia descrittiva delle funzioni organiche, né quello di disegnare una sorta di mappa delle emozioni umane, nonostante che «sia sempre la nostra capacità di provare peculiari sentimenti morali che ispira la nostra vita etica»[3], bensì quello di estrarre una certa normatività (scaturente da principi e valori che, relativamente all’uomo, possono essere considerati assoluti) dalla ambigua ma unitaria costituzione antropologica umana.

Possible and narrative worlds are traditionally the most influential tools for explaining our understanding of fiction. One obvious implication of this is considering fiction as a matter of pretence. The theory I offer claims that it is a mistake to take truth as a substantial notion. This view rejects possible worlds and pretence as decisive features in dealing with fiction. Minimalist theory of fiction offers a solution that gives a way to combine a philosophical theory of meaning and views of literary theory. Narrative worlds approach saves its usefulness since its focus is more in the psychological process of reading. Minimalist theory of fiction is based on the minimal theory of truth and the use theory of meaning. The idea of language games as a practice of constructing contextual meanings is also decisive. A sentence is not true because it corresponds to a fact but because it is used in a right way in certain circumstances. The rejection of the possible worlds approach is thu...