Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi

The evolution of Habermas follows that of Rawls in Political Liberalism, where the principles of justice are traced back to a historical background and no longer derived from an original position as in A Theory of Justice; and even Rawls, curiously enough, while he made his own the criticism in a broad sense Hegelian, of opponents such as Walzer,continued not to recognize the debt he now owed them. Appropriations of the opponents' objections, withdrawals disguised as victories, ad hoc distinctions and so on, are common staple in disputes between thinkers, phenomena that it would be too easy to dismiss with accusations of tendentiousness or lack of rigour.

Hampshire addresses the problem of pluralism, i.e. conflicts, characteristic of modern societies, which arise from the presence of conflicting moral interests and duties. The solution is a procedural notion of justice, seen as the precondition for respect for the different positive conceptions of the good. A salient feature of the book is the combination of a form of a 'weak' Aristotelianism, similar to that of Bernard Williams and far away from that of MacIntyre, with the theme of the relationship between universalism and particularism. Another is the idea that deliberation is the primary procedure in ethics. This theme was the centre of American ethical and political thought since the confrontation between Rawls and his communitarian critics.

The theses in this book are: 1) the tension between the Leibnizian theory of the tropes and their use is resolved in a "pragmatic of discourse" that gives the metaphor a richer dimension than the theorized one, that is, that of "a mechanism capable of combining elements coming from different conceptual spaces into a new metaphorical conceptual space, 'shapeless' to which the metaphor itself provides an adequate language to describe and structure it"; 2) the role of metaphors is placed for Leibniz in the context of a 'multi-method' idea that combines the inventive and the formalizing moment and allows for a multiplicity of directions; 3) the Leibniz system is organized according to a 'logic' that is not deductive but analogical; 4) the valid relations in the system are not only connections of a logical nature; on the contrary, the organization is 'reticular', and the primacy of a relation depends from time to time on the prevalence assigned to a metaphor according to the problem being faced; 5) Leibniz's central metaphors are "emerging parts of a wider submerged translation", i.e. they are both expression and conceptualizing vehicle of a cognitive strategy that wants to govern the complexity of knowledge by organizing it around themes; this strategy is alternative to the Cartesian formulation of "Method" based on the disjunction of objects and notions and instead gives philosophical expression to the Baroque sense of the constant mutability that rules the world.

Alongside the aspects of interest in the history of ideas in general, this text is of great interest to the economist and the philosopher of economics. The parts on Smith and Marx are a demonstration of how it is possible to make a history of scientific thought that explains the incongruities of the history of thought in front of which Schumpeter stops: these incongruities cease to be mysterious, and indeed they acquire full meaning if we accept the idea of considering in scientific texts not only what is said explicitly, i.e. the analytical instruments, but also the unsaid, i.e. the unspoken assumptions, traditions and ideology.

The malaise of modernity, in particular the malaise diagnosed by Nietzsche in the face of the absurdity of suffering, stems from an unfinished, dogmatic and contradictory revival of elements that medieval synthesis had marginalised: hope and earthliness. The ideologies of modernity - revolutionary-progressive or technical - were condemned to be ideologies, and therefore dogmatic, because they were based on faiths smuggled as reasons. Today we live a moment of awareness of the unfinished character of scientific discourses and the partial and provisional character of political discourses. It is precisely the awareness of these limits that opens the space for the paradox that is what the Jewish tradition has remained attached to, a tradition that today, to some of us, sounds as pertinent as ever.

The definition of "philosophical analysis" is far from obvious and the definition adopted by the editors should be mentioned. The editors wish to designate with this term, as is often done in the English-speaking world, a much broader tradition than that of "analytical philosophy", one initiated by the disciples of the second Wittgenstein and including Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, neo-empiricism and the "philosophy of ordinary language". From the editors' introductions it is clear that there was a number of reasons that at first delayed and hindered the reception of the analytic tradition in Latin America, and later forced this tradition into a position of open confrontation with the pre-existing philosophical schools of continental derivation. In this clash, cultural factors played a role, as did the dramatic socio-political events of these countries, events that also influenced the personal destinies of many of the authors who appear in the anthology who emigrated or were removed from teaching by military dictatorships.

A review of a collection of essays one meta-philosophy by fifteen philosophers, including Rorty, Castañeda and Putnam. It is a stimulating collection, useful reading for those who want to go beyond the caricatures of today's philosophy in America, for those interested in the discussion on the origins of the split between continental philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy and for the philosopher who does not disdain a moment of "self-consciousness". The editors, both teaching at Tel-Aviv University, have proved able to manage this small transoceanic enterprise with originality; it is a symptom, like those represented by many other books of Israeli philosophers published in recent years in German and much more in English, of the vitality and openness to the outside world of this small philosophical community.

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions—among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi— Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and British Deism, or religious reformation. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization.

One of the points of interest of A Theory of Justice was that it tied so tightly together efficiency and equity; however, this link was entrusted to the "principle of difference" and the related maximin rule, the very point that is dropped in this book. Now society as a cooperative enterprise becomes part of the shared concept of the just society and it is no longer the reason for its justification; on this basis, however, Rawls lucidly asks the question about the justification for solidarity with those suffering from such severe handicaps to prevent then from making a contribution to this cooperative enterprise. His answer is that for the problems to which justice such as equity does not give an answer there are several possibilities: one is that the idea of political justice cannot cover everything and that we should not expect it to; or the problem may be a problem of political justice, but justice as fairness does not would be the correct conception in this case, though it may be in other cases.

In order to understand the Gricean "logic of conversation" that underlies the Nicomachean Ethics, Burger believes it necessary to identify the audience to which the work is addressed: this is the audience of men and citizens who have received a good education, that is, have learned the virtues through habit, but have doubts about the content of the education received, that is, about the beautiful and the just. Aristotle proposes on the one hand to give them reasons to defend and justify the moral virtues they have learned and they practice, but on the other hand also to lead them to understand a dimension that goes beyond the horizon of traditional ethos.

Amerini declares that by this book he did not want to make any contribution to the contemporary bioethical debate, or in another way, he wanted to give a preliminary contribution of great importance. His opinion on the implications of Aquinas's embryological theory for today's bioethical debate is in fact that it "certainly has some bioethical consequences, but it does not give rise to one particular bioethical theory rather than another. It is, as said, a philosophical explanation, traced in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, and as such can only be of support for the elaboration of a bioethical theory".

My objections are: first, we may ask whether the achievement of The Wealth of Nations has been that of creating a new and more encompassing conceptual framework where already existing theoretical elements could be integrated and whether the growth of knowledge could have originated from a growth in the consistency of a theoretical framework which synthesized already existing individual elements; secondly, we may ask whether Smith's "tendentious" presentation of the positions of both predecessors and opponents might be some kind of unavoidable sin and he might have been guilty of that sin because this was a price to be paid to his rhetorical strategy; thirdly, whether the fact that a text has been canonized at a certain moment in history for quite contingent reasons is no decisive proof of the intrinsic worth or lack of worth of the text in itself.

I discuss this collection of published and unpublished essays on religion and ethics by GEM Anscombe edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally. My main doubt concerns the criteria on which papers have been included in this volume. I argue that, while part of the material included typically belongs to a discussion between believers, some of these are good examples of applied ethics with no direct link with the Christian faith and addressed to a universal audience of reasonable partners of conversation.

A critical discussion of DAVID WILSON and WILLIAM DIXON, A History of Homo Economicus. The nature of the moral in economic theory, London and New York, Routledge, pp. xviii+123 ISBN 978-0-415-59568-1. I declare agreement with one basic idea in this book, that economic discourse is performative, or economic theory is not pure theorìa. I add several objections to the historical reconstruction carried out os such authors as Malthus and Ricardo and I object to the definition adopted of homo economicus

I discuss Mary Hess’s interaction-view of scientific metaphor, outline an alternative view and show how it may prove fruitful when applied to chapters of the history of science. I start with a reconstruction of the discussion on the nature of scientific models and on their relationship to metaphors that has taken place in the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of Science starting from the Fifties; the discovery started with Stephen Pepper and Kenneth Burke, reaching Thomas Kuhn, Marx Wartofsky, and George Lakoff via Max Black's and Mary Hesse's interaction view. I argue that Hesse's view has a number of weak points: uncritically accepting Black's idea of "interaction", for keeping too much of a logical empiricist view of observation language, and for keeping too much of a Scholastic distinction between formal and material analogy. I argue that a few insights from Kuhn and Wartofsky seem to go in the same direction as Granger's view of metaphor as opposed to metonymy, thus severing the link between metaphor and the "qualitative". I argue that the Cartesian legacy and its implicit ideal of a "mirroring" relationship between the world and the mind is the main obstacle to be eventually overcome if we are to work out a satisfactory account of the language of science and that suggestions from pragmatism as well as from French epistemology may be used in order to work out a post-Cartesian view of science.