Esercizi Filosofici 17 (2022)

Voting procedures are fundamental in contemporary liberal-democracies, which are mostly defined in a procedural sense. However, I will point out that the achievements of social choice theory and the various possibilities of vote manipulation should lead political philosophers to be at least cautious, if not skeptical, about whether democratic theory can actually deliver what it promises, namely that it can achieve democratic ends using democratic means. I will examine William Riker’s attempt to maintain a liberal conception of democracy, but I will argue that this proposal does not prove decisive. Procedural democracy thus turns out to be untenable, although the possibility of its justification at the non-procedural level remains open.

According to the Italian philosopher Paolo D’Angelo, aesthetics must be understood primarily as a branch of philosophy that investigates the nature of that particular form of experience which we obtain mainly, although not exclusively, from works of art, and which is labelled aesthetic experience. By dealing with a vast tradition of philosophical thought, he defines aesthetic experience as both a duplication and a reshaping of the forms and meanings that characterize ordinary experience. In this essay I will try to see to what extent a notion of this kind can account for our appreciation of nature, and what is, among the functional definitions of art that have been offered over the last few decades, the most suited to express the central role that aesthetic experience plays in the activities of art creation, interpretation, enjoyment, and enhancement.

With one eye on his sources and another on his production, in this contribution we would like to present Henrich Steffens' philosophy as an “enhanced” naturalism. After explaining the meaning of this definition, we will examine some topical places in Steffens' philosophical, political, and psychological-anthropological production. There the naturalistic perspective will prominently emerge, so as to demonstrate how it is central to the author's understanding and unusual with respect to its context. Finally, we will propose some general considerations on the heuristic fruitfulness of Steffens' original point of view.

Natural theology was one of the most important teaching in the academic curricula during the whole Scottish Enlightenment. One of the core topics was the demonstration of the existence of an intelligent ‘design’ or project of divine origin in the arrangement of the different parts of the natural world and of the sentient beings. This article aims at exploring how two of the most prominent figures of the Scottish common sense tradition, Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, dealt with this topic. While Reid was more interested in giving solid metaphysical foundation to the ‘argument from final causes’, Stewart pointed out the importance of final causes and the design argument for the advancement both of natural philosophy and the philosophy of the human mind. However, even with different goals, both authors maintained that the topic at stance was fundamental for the development and the attainment of moral virtues.