Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi

Recent popularity of the relationship of 'ethics' and 'economics' is at once revealing and misleading. It marks the withering away of a dogmatic confidence in a self-regulating and water-proof economic 'sphere'. It is also a muddled way of treating a number of interrelated but different issues: the interrelations between moralities (as historically given institutions) and markets (as partially self-regulating socially institutionalized mechanisms), the relationship between ethics and economic theory, and finally issues of distributive justice.

In the essays collected here, Apel addresses some of the points of the discourse ethics controversy by responding to critics and developing his original formulation in different directions: a) the distinction between two stages of discourse ethics, relating respectively to the ideal community of communication and the real community; in the second stage, while maintaining the principle of equal dignity of communication partners as a regulatory idea, deontological ethics should be integrated with an ethics of responsibility; b) placing a deontological ethics as a post-conventional ethics within an evolutionary reconstruction of individual development and the history of humankind in the light of Gehlen's anthropology and Kohlberg's psychological theory of moral development; c) a recognition of a certain validity in the neo-Hegelian claim of the ineliminable role of morality or Sittlichkeit in the face of all universalistic ethics, accompanied, however, by the characterization of ethics as a compromise between universalistic instances and concrete cultural and institutional data, without any concession, yet, to the thesis of incommensurability between different forms of life.

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.

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 discussion of 'Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation', a collection of 18 essays by Davidson already published since 1964. The first key idea of the book is the notion of 'radical interpretation', based on the semantic conception of truth, which contrasts with Frege's and the early Wittgenstein's conception of meaning, and is an extension of Quine's notion of radical translation. The second idea is the critique of the distinction between empirical content and the conceptual scheme that organizes it, a distinction that lies at the basis of relativism for which different languages organize the world in different ways; the distinction itself is but a third dogma of empiricism, which has survived the eradication therapy implemented by Quine against the two dogmas of analytical/synthetic distinction and reductionism. The third idea is the "principle of charity". The fourth is the critique of Max Black's theory of metaphor as interaction.

A New Italian translation of Principia Ethica coming almost 60 years after the 1964 translation by Gianni Vattimo with Nicola Abbagnano’s preface. The new edition makes room for the English text alongside the Italian translation; it includes the 1922 Preface, a bibliography of Moore’s ethical writings with critical literature, a chronology of Moore’s life and works, and an Index. The Introduction by Sergio Cremaschi reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions from which Moore’s Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of incompatible lines of argument than a consistent work. It compares PE with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different and more plausible way, which manages to answer decisive objections. It ends with the suggestion that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more multi-faceted phenomenon than the received view would make us believe and the analytic tradition's wheat, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, has to be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused, and besides mutually incompatible, legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism.

In this book the analysis of the relationship between Whewell and Mill is extended from the theme of induction, the topic the author starts with, to the comparison between the two projects of an overall reform of knowledge. These programmes announce themselves to the general public as proclamations of war for or against the academic, political and religious establishment; however, when viewed from the inside, they more or less consciously share very similar objectives. This applies both to the scientific method and to ethics and politics.

I discuss the main claims in a new book on the origins of morality . These are: i) our time, far from being the twilight of morality, is the first time in human history when a universalistic and autonomous morality has emerges as a social phenomenon, not just as a philosophical theory; ii) even if thousand years of rational philosophical discussion of morality has yielded valuable insights, yet a fresh start of critical reflexion on morality qua phenomenon is first possible now, starting with a sociological understanding of morality as spontaneous emergence of codes of norms; iii) sociology is intrinsically ethical theory, since at a certain point, no empirical and technocratic proc-essing of social data still makes sense and sociological discourse has to become reflexive, interpretive, and most of all, construed in terms of explicit valuations.

: The theory of objective value is the central feature in the paradigm of political economy. The Newtonian heritage plays a major role in giving political economy the status of a self-standing empirical science, and a reconstruction of this heritage casts fresh light on the idea of value and its role in the definition of the subject matter of political economy. Cognitive progress carried by classical political economy turns out to be related with the dilemmas of Newtonian epistemology and the alternative between essentialist realism and instrumental conventionalism.

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.

During a recent visit to Auschwitz, the Pope, with a mixture of seeming courage and calculated ambiguity, asked himself where God was during the Holocaust? A cartoonist answered with a drawing in which God, sandbagged behind the sinister Entry Tower of the extermination complex, could be heard saying, “Where was I to be but in the gas chambers?”, but without specifying if there he had to officiate as victim or executioner. As an innocent, yet weak, victim, or powerful, yet evil, executioner. A situation that recalls the two horns of Epicurus’s famous dilemma: “Either God wants to avoid evil, but cannot (which is to say, he is not omnipotent); or he can, but does not want to (which is to say, he is wicked)”. The text criticizes contemporary attempts at overcoming theology’s jogging down in the riddle by drawing upon new sophisticated versions of the old theodicy. Moreover, as against them, it proposes “a reflection on the problem of evil from the standpoint of unbelief”, together with an ethical response to the latter sustained by the sobriety of l’espoir – that hopefulness which Walter Benjamin liked to exemplify using Andrea Pisano’s sculpture for the Baptistery in Florence – as opposed to the ambitious, and so frequently frustrating, delusion of religious espérance.