Stefania Achella

This chapter aims to clarify the transformative effects on the concept of personal autonomy resulting from extending the notion to Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly in the defense domain. The complexity of this task is increased by the fact that philosophers have offered a wide range of competing accounts of the autonomous agent’s special relation to their own desires and values. I will draw on the concept of autonomy implied in John Martin Fisher and Mark Ravizza’s control theory, which, while explaining the theory and practice of autonomy, also identifies two conditions that cannot be appropriately satisfied by autonomous systems, but only by persons who interact and communicate with one another. Despite the superficial sameness between personal autonomy and autonomous systems, control theory allows us to pinpoint an important distance in their underlying features. The seeming similarity masks indeed a profound conceptual divergence between autonomy as a condition of moral agency and autonomy understood as the characterization of a system’s operational capacities. This supports, at least in principle, the moral argument that entrusting machines with authority over human life and death is ethically wrong, regardless of how advanced the technology might be.

This book explores one of the most pressing questions of our time: what becomes of human autonomy when algorithms and artificial intelligence systems are no longer just tools but rather actors in medicine, care, education, mobility, and even warfare? By confronting the philosophical, ethical, and practical implications of so-called “autonomous” machines, it opens a critical space to rethink what autonomy means for humans today. Rather than framing the encounter with artificial agents in oppositional terms, humans versus machines, the volume advances a dialogical and co-evolutionary approach. Contributors from moral philosophy, gender studies, phenomenology, philosophy of technology, and medical humanities investigate how AI refracts our understanding of freedom, self-determination, and responsibility. Covering a variety of AI applications, including recommender systems, autonomous vehicles, avatars, predictive medicine, and algorithmic decision-making, the essays address the risks of manipulation and dependency as well as the transformative opportunities for reshaping autonomy as a relational, situated, and dynamic process. With special attention to relational autonomy and feminist theory, the volume challenges the reductionist view of autonomy as an individual possession, emphasizing instead its negotiation within networks of care, technology, and power. Aimed at scholars, researchers, and advanced students in philosophy, ethics, AI studies, and the medical humanities, as well as policymakers, engineers, and healthcare professionals concerned with the ethical design and governance of intelligent systems, this book provides the conceptual tools to navigate the ethical challenges of intelligent systems. It is an essential resource for anyone concerned with the future of human freedom in an age increasingly defined by algorithms.

This article argues that enactivism, integrated with feminist and posthumanist perspectives, provides a unified framework for addressing both the ecological crisis and the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Current debates—from the Anthropocene to human-centered AI—call for a critical redefinition of the human, yet they often evolve in parallel, producing a “split gaze” that neglects the profound hybridization of humans, environments, and technologies. With its relational understanding of cognition, sense-making, and agency, enactivism offers conceptual tools for overcoming the human versus Nature dualism as well as the human versus machine dualism. By reassessing intelligence as embodied, emergent, and environmentally embedded, it enables a shift toward relational ecological ethics grounded in interdependence and care. Applied to AI, this perspective treats digital technologies as components of an evolving human niche rather than external tools, thereby reframing responsibility in terms of socio-material practices rather than abstract principles. The article concludes by proposing a “networked humanity” and an “ecologically expansive community” as guiding concepts for multispecies and technological coexistence.

In this paper I argue that Hegel’s dialectical critique as method for instituting truth and freedom is the articulation of three interconnected moments or actions: first, transformative appropriation; second, refutation as self-refutation; and the final act of letting go. I discuss these moments by looking at three crucial passages of the Science of Logic: the Absolute in which the Logic of Essence appropriates Spinoza’s substance; the Widerlegung of Spinozism as the “genesis” of the Begriff and the beginning of freedom; the act of frei Entlassen by which the “absolute idea” brings the logic as a whole to the end leading logical thinking beyond itself to its radical other. The paper frames the idea of “dialectical critique” present in Hegel’s philosophy in terms of the movement of “refutation” (Widerlegung). Critique as refutation requires, for Hegel, the fundamental recognition of the position and independent value of the other (the other theory, the other culture, voice, agency which is being refuted). But it also implies the two apparently contradictory acts of making oneself other (hence refutation always and necessarily implies a self-critical stance), and of appropriating the other - that which is criticized is that which is appropriated (not discarded as untrue). Refutation is the beginning of freedom but not the highest act of freedom. The final act of freedom is the gesture of “letting go” and “letting be” - the frei Entlassen that is the act of relinquishing whatever has been appropriated thereby letting it be free from the subject, free for itself or in its own right, free for new possibilities.

This book presents a unique rethinking of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy from unusual and controversial perspectives in order to liberate new energies from his philosophy. The role Hegel ascribes to women in the shaping of society and family, the reconstruction of his anthropological and psychological perspective, his approach to human nature, the relationship between mental illness and social disease, the role of the unconscious, and the relevance of intercultural and interreligious pathways: All these themes reveal new and inspiring aspects of Hegel’s thought for our time.

One of the first modern discussions on untranslatability in philosophy, in particular in relation to Asian philosophy, is the controversy between Georg Wilhelm Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt. This controversy began in 1823, with the publication of August Schlegel’s translation from Sanskrit into Latin of the Bhagavad-Gītā, one of the most important poems of Indian culture. This translation generated a strong debate among German intellectuals between 1770 and 1830, not only about the difficulty of philosophical translation, but also about how to develop a trans-cultural hermeneutics. The paper reconstructs the outlines of this debate, by bringing out its inner complexity and showing how many of those problems still remain in the current intercultural debate.

Is there a dark side to Hegelian philosophy? And if there is one, what is it exactly? This contribution aims to investigate those elements of Hegel’s speculative contributions that cannot be traced back to the clarity of a narrow rationality, but that refer to another principle of reason, which includes the role of corporeity and the concepts of powerlessness and pain. As a result, the complexity of the Hegelian model of knowledge will be outlined. These aspects emphasize indeed the key role of elements of fragility and openness in the Hegelian system. A new reading of this latter, catering to contemporary needs as well, is therefore attempted.

TheMiller Eleine, P. pandemic has demonstrated, in an amplified way, that vulnerability is common to all human beings. Nevertheless, the paradigm shift proposed by the ethics and discourses built around vulnerability did not take hold. The call for a more just and less competitive society, which became widespread during the pandemic, did not immediately seem to be as urgent afterwards. In fact, since the pandemic, attitudes seem to reflect a desire to erase this experience and restore the status quo ante. Can this operational limit of the concept of vulnerability be a sufficient reason to abandon this interpretive paradigm and return to the old Promethean idea of man which shaped modern society? In the light of the pandemic, is it not worthwhile instead to question vulnerability more deeply? Is it not important to continue reflecting on the anthropological approach underlying vulnerability in order to understand how it can provide an ethical and political perspective for building a better future? Starting from these questions, this essay explores vulnerability from a philosophical perspective, analysing its strengths and weaknesses.

Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume offers new insights for critically engaging with the problem of vulnerability. The essays here contained take the move from the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to explore the inherent vulnerability of individuals, but also of social, economic and political systems, and probe the descriptive and prescriptive import of the concept.Each chapter provides a self-contained perspective on vulnerability, as well as a specific methodological framework for questioning its meaning. Taken together, the chapters combine into a multi-disciplinary toolkit for approaching the various forms and structures of vulnerability, with a special attention to the intersectional factors shaping the individual experience of it: from gender to age, from disability to mental illness, from hospitalisation to incarceration. The book explores the theoretical richness and complexity of the concept and proposes new analytical approaches to it, before illustrating its multifariousness through empirically grounded case studies. The closing section engages with “the future of vulnerability”, as a hermeneutic, epistemological, and critical-normative perspective to be deployed beyond the domain of global crises and emergencies.The volume is primarily intended as a reference for scholars in the human, social and health sciences. The accessible structure and plain language of the chapters make it also a valuable didactic resource for graduate courses in philosophy, the social sciences and public health.

The contradictions and insecurities generated by the pandemic have put the "reasons" of science, the criteria of its objectivity and its relationship with politics back at the center of public discussion. The present contribution starts from Foucaultian reflection on epidemics in which the deep link between science and social space is very evident and leads to a reflection on the relationship between science and politics. In the first part, the essay dwells on the interweaving of medicine in the modern age; in the second part it analyses the debate that developed in the second half of the twentieth century about the social dimension of scientific knowledge; in the concluding part it analyses the link between science and politics, and more extensively between science and powers.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the concept of “world” in Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews, to show how the tension between the theoretical-contemplative and existential approaches finds evident expression in the different roles that the “world” plays in the first and second parts of this work. In the first part, the world is still the object of a subject, although this relationship is neither evaluative nor only gnoseological, but is also the result of an Erlebnis, thus presenting itself as a lived world. In the second part, beginning with the section on spiritual spheres, the world is characterised not only as a place of man’s action, but also as a shock, a resistance that acts upon man. The essay goes on to question whether it is possible to find a different approach to mental illness.

Che cosa vuol dire “ragione”? Fino a che punto siamo liberi di agire e di scegliere? Dove risiedono le emozioni? Qual è il significato originario del termine “contagio”? Non sempre siamo consapevoli del bagaglio culturale e teorico che alcuni termini comunemente usati portano con sé. Il libro affronta con un linguaggio comprensibile anche ai non specialisti alcune parole chiave della filosofia, richiamandone sinteticamente la storia e i principali interpreti. Un piccolo e agevole lessico filosofico, dunque, che offre uno sguardo sul dibattito contemporaneo toccando vari ambiti: dalla politica alla morale e alla storia, dall’estetica alle neuroscienze e alla robotica. Completa il volume un quadro statistico dello stato degli studi filosofici nell’università italiana e dei possibili sbocchi lavorativi dei laureati in Filosofia.

Im vierten Kapitel des ersten Teils der Allgemeinen Psychopathologie stellt Jaspers seine Analyse der sinnhaften objektiven Tatbestände vor. In diesem Abschnitt des Buches, der für die Ausgabe von 1946 stark erweitert wurde, konzentriert sich Jaspers auf die Analyse der Physiognomie, Mimik, Schreibanalyse und die Aspekte von Werken von psychisch Kranken. Er zeigt in diesem Zusammenhang, wie diese objektiven Ausdrucksformen hilfreich für das „Verstehen“ der subjektiven psychischen Phänomene sein können, unterstreicht aber auch die Grenzen dieser Methodik. In diesem Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, welche Bedeutung Jaspers in seinen methodischen Reflexionen über die körperlichen Ausdruckformen und deren Sinnhaftigkeit für das „Verstehen“ von psychischen Krankheiten zuspricht. Die sinnhaften, objektiven Tatbestände weisen für Jaspers auf die Komplexität der Konstitution der verschiedenen Beziehungen zur Welt hin, mit denen psychisch Kranke der Außenwelt begegnen.

The essay aims to analyze the relationship between mind and body in the Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit. Through a rapid reconstruction of the influences of emerging empirical sciences, such as biology with his vitalist positions, physiognomy and phrenology, the essay aims to highlight not only the role that in the structure of Hegel’s view assumes the teleological vision derived from Aristotle, mediated by third Kantian critique, but also the epistemological significance of the Hegelian methodological attitude. Hegel rejects the attempts to bring back the relationship mind-body to a dualistic view, and proposes a dialectic solution that goes beyond the rigidity of an attitude which is crushed both from a naturalist perspective as well as from an anti-naturalist one. This methodological approach may still offer an interesting contribution to the contemporary debate.