Fabio Fossa

Qual è il valore pratico della filosofia? La tradizione tramanda un verdetto duplice. Da una parte, il sapiente è colui che sa vivere, poiché conosce cosa è bene e come realizzarlo; dall’altra, il filosofo è inesperto del mondo ed esibisce in prima persona l’inutilità del suo sapere. Ma come si misura l’utilità del sapere filosofico? In questi scritti inediti risalenti agli anni canadesi (1949-1956), tradotti per la prima volta, Hans Jonas si interroga sul significato vitale e umano dell’esperienza filosofica, intrecciando un vivace dialogo con gli autori antichi e lasciando emergere, nel confronto con essi, i lineamenti della sua filosofia dell’organico.

The increase in the spread of conversational agents urgently requires to tackle the ethical issues linked to their design. In fact, developers frequently include in their products cues that trigger social biases in order to maximize the performance and the quality of human-machine interactions. The present paper discusses whether and to what extent it is ethically sound to intentionally trigger gender biases through the design of virtually embodied conversational agents. After outlining the complex dynamics involving social biases, social robots, and design, we evaluate the ethics of integrating gender cues in conversational agents, analysing four different approaches to the problem. Finally, we suggest which approach in our opinion might have the best chances to reduce the negative effects of biases and discriminatory visions of gender dynamics.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more and more pervasive in our everyday life, new questions arise about its ethical and social impacts. Such issues concern all stakeholders involved in or committed to the design, implementation, deployment, and use of the technology. The present document addresses these preoccupations by introducing and discussing a set of practical obligations and recommendations for the development of applications and systems based on AI techniques. With this work we hope to contribute to spreading awareness on the many social challenges posed by AI and encouraging the establishment of good practices throughout the relevant social areas. As points of novelty, the paper elaborates on an integrated view that combines both human rights and ethical concepts to reap the benefits of the two approaches. Moreover, it proposes innovative recommendations, such as those on redress and governance, which add further insight to the debate. Finally, it incorporates a specific focus on the Italian Constitution, thus offering an example of how core legislations of Member States might contribute to further specify and enrich the EU normative framework on AI.

Wie aus Jonas’ zahlreichen biographischen Erinnerungen hervorgeht, war die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Analogie zwischen Gnosis, Existentialismus und Nihilismus eine entscheidende Etappe seiner intellektuellen Reise. Jonas hat eine solche Einschätzung ausdrücklich in »Gnosis, Existentialismus und Nihilismus « vorgenommen, einem Aufsatz, den der Philosoph mehrmals in englischer und deutscher Sprache überarbeitet und neu aufgelegt hat. Dort schlug Jonas eine Kritik des Existentialismus vor, indem er diesen mit der Gnosis in Bezug setzte.

The purpose of this essay is to attempt an interpretation of Hans Jonas’s philosophical approach to tradition in terms of an exercise in critical thinking. Although several modern authors have seen in tradition a normalizing and conservative force that either constrains the powers of human reason or prevents new disruptive ideas from thriving, other philosophers have contested this accusation and concurred to sketch the general guidelines of a theory of the critical value of tradition. Commenting on both published and unpublished material, I claim that Jonas’s meditation on the history of western culture belongs to this latter stance. Moving from this thesis, I then analyse some passages of Jonas’s oeuvre where his position concerning the critical potential of tradition is theorised or directly put into practice. In particular, I focus on the essay The Practical Uses of Theoryand on an unedited transcription of the 1967 conference Contemporary Problems in Science and Ethics. A Jewish Comment.

In Italien erlangte Hans Jonas, ähnlich wie in andersen Ländern, öffentliche Anerkennung dank seines Werks Das Prinzip Verantwortung, das 1990 ins Italienische übersetzt wurde. Die Übersetzung weckte das Interesse einer breiten Öffentlichkeit sowohl an seinem bioethischen Ansatz als auch an seinen früheren philosophisch-biologischen Schriften. Die Besonderheit des italienischen Kontexts besteht jedoch darin, dass der Philosoph in der akademischen Welt bereits lange vor seiner eingangs erwähnten allgemeinen Anerkennung und ›Entdeckung‹ in der Öffentlichkeit durch seine Arbeiten über die spätantike Gnosis gut bekannt war.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how the image of the artist has formed in Western culture and how digital art may shed light on some of its internal contradictions, if not perhaps even help us overcome them. Firstly, I take into consideration the Jewish and Christian tradition according to which the image of God as Creator may play the role of the archetypal artist, of whom the human artist is a sort of copy and imitator – an idea that fully established itself during the Renaissance and even now widely influences the image of the creative artist, whom is commonly endowed with an almost absolute subjectivity able to derive from her boundless spontaneity everything is needed for the making of the work of art. Next to the image of God as Creator I focus on the influence exerted by the Platonic myth of the Demiurge, the divine craftsman who, trusting its own ability and insight, shapes a given matter according to a preexisting model it contemplates. It will then be shown how the image of the Demiurge might temper the absoluteness proper to the notion of the artist deriving from the image of God as Creator and, therefore, how it might help rediscover the dimension of historicity and conditionedness that is inseparable from human artistic creativity, even though it has been strongly downplayed and despised. Finally, I argue that the philosophical study of digital art – particularly of computational creativity and remix – may offer a precious occasion for shedding new light on the objective and conditioned elements of artistic creativity and, as such, may lead the way towards a reconfiguration of the image of the artist (and of the many concepts connected to it) not under the absolute sign of God as Creator, but rather under the historical aegis of the Demiurge.

The concept of autonomy is crucial for the theoretical characterization of robots and, more in general, complex technological artifacts. The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual and logical framework in which it is possible to define two concepts of autonomy: autonomy of performance and autonomy of process. The analysis is carried out exploiting the logical resources of the counterfactual semantics-developed by Lewis' and Stalnaker's seminal works-and branching structures of the possible courses of actions. It allows to differentiate the autonomy of a robotic arm from the autonomy of a highly complex machine-like rovers for the explorations of the planets. The clarification of the concept of autonomy is, moreover, an essential precondition for the investigation concerning the ethics of artificial agents.