Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2025) XXVII/3

This paper examines the « empirization » of Hegel’s philosophy through the lens of William James and Jean Wahl, two key figures in 20th-century philosophical empiricism. While both thinkers were overtly critical of Hegel’s systematic approach, their interpretations integrate elements of his thought into alternative structures. James’s radical empiricism and Wahl’s second-order empiricism prioritize lived experience over conceptual abstractions, offering a critique of Hegel’s dialectics while reimagining his insights on the unity of thought and reality. However, their reinterpretations do not merely dissolve Hegel into experience; rather, they reconstruct his philosophy within a strong, albeit non-systematic, metaphysical framework. By opening Hegel’s system to the flux of lived reality, they propose a model where individuality and universality coexist without hierarchical subordination, paving the way for ethical and philosophical pluralism. The paper situates these reinterpretations within broader debates on metaphysics, pragmatism, and the limits of systematic thought.

The article investigates the central socio-political function played by the gaze in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. The relevant role of the sense of sight in the Inspection House already emerges clearly in the light of the cultural temperament and historical context in which it was designed, as both are imbued with a renewed taste for theatricality, not only in aesthetic terms but also with distinctly political reflections. However, the contextualisation of the panoptic project within Jeremy Bentham's Political Theory and Theory of Punishment - both indebted to his ethical-anthropological perspective - will allow for a clearer understanding of the social and political significance of the gaze as its essential profile: as operating in the Panopticon, in fact, the sense of sight would have guaranteed not only a (reflexive) monitoring of society but also a control over the rulers (represented by the inspector) by society. Through his articulate reflection, Bentham corroborates a link between visibility and surveillance that is destined to persist in the present time.

The issue of how philosophers should evaluate colonialism has acquired a new importance due to two recent conflicting views on European colonialism: ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘revisionism’. Especially revisionism challenges philosophical evaluation, because it purports to roughly rehabilitate European colonialism on moral grounds and suggests a critique of the prevailing view that European colonialism was an injustice. This article defends the thesis that to philosophically assess European colonialism is to insist primarily on its substantive injustice and thus its illegitimacy, even on a generous reading of the revisionist account. Four arguments are developed. First, accepting the anti-colonialist equation of (European) colonialism with slavery would be a non-starter philosophically: colonialism, as such and specifically European, is no obvious evil but requires further inquiry. Second, philosophers’ argument of colonialism’s procedural injustice, which suggests that a moral inquiry of evidence on European colonialism would be basically unnecessary, is inconclusive due to inherent instability and relevant-substantive emptiness. Third, Charles Beitz’s substantive justice theory of colonialism offers an appropriate philosophical perspective on empirical, European and other, forms of colonialism. Fourth, applying Beitz’s theory to revisionist evidence strongly suggests that European colonialism, even if presented in a most favorable light, remains a serious violation of substantive justice.

This paper aims to analyse Labriola’s 1873 writing, Della libertà morale , focusing on two issues that, although the critical literature has already investigated in a rigorous manner, nevertheless require some clarification. In more detail, the first part of the discussion aims to clarify Labriola’s position on liberum arbitrium indifferentiae , showing how it bases its origin on the fundamental assumption of Spinozism: the negation of the contingency and transcendence of the possible with respect to the real. The second part, on the other hand, aims to clarify the semantic characterisation of the concepts of determinism, mechanical determinism and predeterminism (the latter also associated by Labriola with finalism). In the light of the philosopher’s reflections, it is possible to note how the last two terms - predeterminism and finalism respectively - although they may appear incompatible on superficial analysis, in reality they lead to the same theoretical outcome: the denial of freedom and the complexity of states of consciousness in the name of a superior and transcendent order.

The aim of this article is to identify a dimension related to animality in bodily experience. The thesis is that animality is a dimension of the body on the borderline between identity and foreignness. The main question is: can a description of the relationship between body and animality shed light on the way we experience corporeality? To answer this question, I will use Bernhard Waldenfels’concept of the experience of the alien and Helmuth Plessner’s biophilosophy. Waldenfels speaks of moments of strangeness in the corporeal self. These are moments in which the subject experiences its own body as identical with itself and at the same time as other than itself. Plessner suggests the idea of an animal form remaining embedded in the human body through his description of the various levels of the organic. The experience of the alien will therefore be related to the animal dimension in the living body to suggest that animality can be considered among the experiences of the alien.