Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2018) XX/2

In the present article we define death as "the loss of the duality", for a human being is composed of two heterogeneous elements: the mental one and the bodily one, which are equally important according to life and death. Death, indeed, occurs when the two elements are separated. We investigate bioethical and philosophical scenarios ("brain death survivors" documented by D.A. Shewmon, and the thought experiment called "brain in a vat"). Our approach outlines the role played by the body regarding life of human being: the Cartesian perspective is indeed no longer valid.

A brief critical reflection on the reception of my books The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton, 2017) and Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe (Cambridge, 2004). The clarifications and rejoinders offered are, I believe, important for understanding how these works reflect both a sympathetic, complex reconstruction of the classical utilitarian legacy and an approach to the history of philosophy prioritizing diversity and inclusion.

This article demonstrates that the genesis of the concept of Civil Society, explained by social sciences as part of the Greek democracy and the consolidation of liberal democracy, in fact, it has been linked to the ideas of freedom and individual trade by the Scottish Enlightenment. We will analyze how this eighteenth-century school defines the Civil Society as the convergence of private interests of individuals who participate in productive activities in order to get material comfort, in a kind of market of the recognition, and achieve some kind of social scale reference. This approach will be presented by exploring the reflections of Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and David Hume on the thinking of the Austrian economists Karl Menguer, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek.

In this article I examine the position of R. Mordacci in his book 'The neomodern condition'. While I am in substantial agreement with many of the analyzes expressed about postmodernism, I think that the target is sometime overrated. However, Mordacci's volume remains an example of a civil intervention of philosophy and an attempt to introduce it into public debate.

Although there seems to be a consensus among Croatian and international education theorists alike when it comes to the issue of values being an integral part of upbringing almost to the same extent as upbringing is considered a part of education, discord ensues as soon as implementation of specific values is attempted through official curricula. There is discord when it comes to specific values, but also when teaching methods are concerned. In this paper, we will argue that this issue could be resolved by applying Rawls's theory of justice to the prevalent practices in upbringing and education, with some minor adjustments. We argue that, since the political and familial domains share three crucial characteristics, it is legitimate to expand the application of the public reason as the main principle of political domain, so as to govern both parental and educational conduct, which could in turn result in considerable changes in the ways upbringing is traditionally viewed. By analysing the main principles of Rawls's liberal theory of justice, and applying these to parental practices at home, as well as to institutionalized educational conduct by the teachers at schools, we will try to offer an outlook on the proper educational and parental conduct from the liberal perspective. In the final chapter, we will defend the idea of cosmopolitanism as the right way to go at the crossroads of deciding on the appropriate educational policies in the liberal, democratic, constitutional regimes, the kind that most of the contemporary (Western) societies, declaratively, strive to be, but often seem to fail in this endeavour. This is confirmed in the light of numerous crises we are faced with lately.