A blog about philosophical explorations supported by the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (BIAP)
This is a post by Gregory C. Keating (USC Gould School of Law).
In his excellent blog post Does Tort Law Really Care About You?, Diego Papayannis addresses a fundamental question of tort law and challenges my view of the matter as he understands it from my book Reasonableness and Risk (OUP 2022). The role of the law of torts is to secure us against harm at each other’s hands as we go about our lives in civil society. How then should the law of torts respond to unavoidable harm?
This is a post by Oscar Piedrahita (University of Barcelona).
You’re mowing your lawn when your neighbor strolls over and asks, “Do you know how many blades of grass you’ve just cut?” You’d naturally answer no. But if they then say “So you’re ignorant of that fact?”, this second question would feel stilted, perhaps even misplaced. Is this something you’re supposed to know? Of course you don’t know the count, but calling you ignorant of that trivial detail sounds like an unwarranted criticism.
This is a post by Diego M. Papayannis (University of Girona).
Imagine you live just 50 meters away from a massive cement plant. The plant operates lawfully and takes every reasonable precaution, yet its dust emissions still cause severe damage to your property and health. Because the economic activity carried out by the plant is of utmost importance to your town, the court refuses to issue an injunction to put an end to the nuisance. Instead, it awards you permanent damages to compensate for all the harm suffered. Problem solved?
This is a post by Riin Kõiv (University of Barcelona).
Imagine being told that personality, performance in math, substance addiction, or excess body weight has genetic causes. For many, this information plants a sense of inevitability — as if their personality, their math performance, or their body weight were in some sense “determined,” beyond their own control.
This is a post by Martina Rosola (University of Barcelona).
Referring to non-binary people in heavily gendered languages like Italian, German or Spanish is difficult because of structural features of the language itself. As a result, non-binary people are systematically misgendered: they are referred to either in the masculine or in the feminine despite non identifying as either men or women. This puts them at an unfair disadvantage and gives rise to a distinctive type of injustice, namely to an instance of what Miranda Fricker calls “hermeneutical injustice”.
This is a post by Andrés Soria-Ruiz (University of Barcelona).
Think of the following: for all you know, you could be living in a computer simulation. Your friends might be so-called “Non-Player Characters”; your home, your surroundings might all be part of a sophisticated illusion. All of that is possible, and more worryingly, you—we—have no way of telling whether that’s actually the case.
This is a post by Constant Bonard (University of Bern), Filippo Contesi (University of Cagliari) and Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona).
Propaganda is so ubiquitous a phenomenon in contemporary societies of all types that there would seem to be no problem in us understanding what it is. Still, we apparently continue to fall for it so often that perhaps we are not very good at recognizing it. It may be because we don’t really understand what propaganda is. Can the philosophical debate about how to define propaganda provide any help?
This is a post by Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona).
Francesc Pereña, a founding member of LOGOS and key contributor to its success, died on February 16 after a long and cruel illness.
Francesc got his PhD at the University of Barcelona in 1987 under the supervision of Emilio Lledó, with a dissertation on Schelling’s views on freedom that he had conceived during a four-year stay in Heidelberg, mentored by H. G. Gadamer. He worked mostly on the philosophy of the 19th-century German philosophers Fichte and Schelling, and on the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger.
This is a post by Margherita Grassi (University of Barcelona) and Eleonora Volta (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University).
Article 111 of the Italian Constitution establishes that every trial must be conducted before a third and impartial judge and under conditions of equality between the parties. That means the judge must sentence based on the law, considering the facts and evidence presented during the trial, and without letting any opinion or prejudice about the parties influence their judgment.
In cases of gender-based violence, however, this required impartiality sometimes fails to be put into practice.
This is a post by Markel Kortabarria (University of Barcelona).
It is a commonsense belief that reality is built from the ground up. At its base lie the fundamental building blocks that serve as a foundation for everything else. This belief is largely shaped by the dominant scientific view in physics, which suggest that every object is made up of fundamental particles. Philosophically, the view is reminiscent of the ancient atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, as well as Leibniz’s theory of monads—simple, indivisible substances that form the foundation of every other substance.
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