Scuola di Dottorato in Filosofia e Scienze Umane

Teaching Activities 2018/2019

November 2018

- Science, Technology and Gender (Reading Group)
This reading group on Science, Technology and Gender will explore the many complex relationships between gender, science, and technology. We will look at gender in science (i.e. the many ways in which gender has been conceptualised in the sciences) and at historical examples of gendered science (i.e. the influence of the gender politics of the broader society into the organisation of science). The articles discussed will be drawn from the history of science and technology, the sociology of science, feminist science studies; in the final two meetings we will consider some of the contemporary developments in the field of Sscience and Technology Studies.
Convener: Valentina Marcheselli
10 hours, 2 CFU
To register, contact giampietro.gobo@unimi.it

- Philosophy and/as/of literature
The course will provide a solid, useful grounding in the central topics, trying to keep the two terminal points, philosophy and literature, always in contact with each other, and in such a way that they engage each other clearly, concretely, precisely, and humanely. Here questions arise concerning whether philosophy can be reduced to a kind or special genre of literature, what philosophical content may resist any such attempted reduction, what literature might show that philosophy can only say, and the distinctive self-transformative philosophical role that literature might play; furthermore, our emotional engagement with, and responses to, narrative fiction; the nature of literary language, narrative, point of view, truth in literature generally and poetry in particular; and last but not least, the “future of writing” (V. Flusser) in a world saturated by a culture highly dependent on media.
Lecturer: Paola Letizia Ester Bozzi
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: paola.bozzi@unimi.it

December 2018

- Time and Experience (Course)
A short class for PhD. Students.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest amongst philosophers and psychologists both in how temporally extended experience should be understood. There are good reasons for such a focus. If the nature of conscious perception is to be understood, temporality certainly cannot be ignored: we not only experience the world in time–what is perceived differs from moment to moment– but also, at least apparently, have experiences oftime, in that we see leaves fall or traffic lights change, and feel the present as constantly slipping into the past.
The objective of this course is to provide students with a thorough grounding in contemporary debates on time and experience. Areas of focus will include: how the experience of time as passing should be characterised, what it is to perceive change and movement, whether such properties can be depicted, and the temporal structure of non–visual perceptual modalities.
Lecturer: Nick Young (nickyoung1@gmail.com)
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: giuliano.torrengo@unimi.it
Dates: 3rd – 7th December
Times: 14.00 – 16.00
Location: University of Milan, Via Festa del Perdono, 7, I-20122 Milano, Italy

- Inclusi ed esclusi. La cittadinanza dall'età antica all'età contemporanea (Reading Group)
Il reading group offrirà una riflessione sui criteri di cittadinanza dall’antichità alla contemporaneità. In particolare si prenderà in analisi il mutare dei criteri di inclusione ed esclusione degli individui nella società civile come risposta ai problemi politici emergenti in ciascuna delle epoche storiche considerate e come conseguenza della trasformazione storicamente determinata del modo di concepire l’ordine sociale. In una prospettiva più ampia ci si propone di indagare in che misura l’analisi di un concetto politico-sociale – quale quello di “cittadinanza” – centrale per la riflessione politica dell’antichità e della modernità possa fornire elementi utili per indagare la sua trasformazione e crisi nell’epoca della globalizzazione e della svolta neoliberale-sovranista.
Conveners: Marco Geuna and Mauro Simonazzi
12 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: mauro.simonazzi@unimi.it

- Social Implications of Digital Technology. Philosophical perspectives (Reading Group)
The aim of this reading group is to enquire the social implications of digital technology. We will connect various philosophical approaches to try to understand, in the first section, the relation between information, logic and philosophy of mind and, in the second section, what are the social and political concerns raised by the new digital age.
Conveners: Marcello D’Agostino, Giuseppe Primiero
16 hours, 3 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: giuseppe.primiero@unimi.it

- Seminario di Filosofia dell’immagine (Seminar)
Lo scopo del seminario è Introdurre i dottorandi alle questioni relative alle immagini immersive e alle protesi digitali del sé (AVATAR) attraverso una serie di incontri seminariali con studiosi che, in diversi settori e modalità, hanno affrontato il problema dell'avatarizzazione negli ambienti di Realtà Virtuale.
Lecturers: Simone Arcagni, Luca Farulli, Katrin Helmann, Elisabetta Modena, Lily Hibberd, Martine Beugnet, Alain Berthoz
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: Italian, English
To register, contact: andrea.pinotti@unimi.it

January 2019

- Conditionals and modals (Reading Group)
The aim of this reading group is to familiarize students with the current literature concerning conditionals (both subjunctive and indicative) and modals (especially deontic and epistemic). Special attention will be devoted to the issue of the validity of familiar argument forms involving these constructions (e.g. modus ponens and modus tollens).
Conveners: Andrea Guardo, Elisa Paganini, Sandro Zucchi.
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: andrea.guardo@unimi.it

- A Primer on Formal Argumentation (Course)
This course will introduce students to the recent developments of "Formal Argumentation Theory" a new paradigm in logic that has been a very active area of reasearch in artificial intelligence over the last two decades, but is still virtually unknown in philosophical circles. In its most abstract (purely graph-theoretical) form, the theory started with Dung’s PhD thesis and provides foundations for dialectical argumentation involving individual agents (“monological models”), as well as a plurality of agents resolving conflicts or making decisions about alternative actions (“dialogical models”). Owing to its dialectical nature, this paradigm is a radical alternative to the mainstream approach to logic developed in the XX Century under the name of "mathematical logic".
Lecturers: Sanjay Modgil, Christian Fermueller, Davide Grossi, Marcello D’Agostino, Giuseppe Primiero, Hykel Hosni (to be confirmed).
10 hours, 2 CFU, 29th January-1st February.
Language: English
To register, contact: marcello.dagostino@unimi.it

February 2019

- Human rights, lawfare and the juridification of politics (Course)
The course will familiarize PhD students with the key issues, concepts, and methods of the anthropology of law as it relates to collective rights, particularly indigenous peoples’ rights. It will introduce the common challenges faced by indigenous peoples and discuss how indigenous peoples are using the institutions and mechanisms of law in their attempts to achieve recognition and redistribution. The course will introduce empirical cases to reflect on contemporary cultural contests, activism, “lawfare,” group representation, and identity formation. These topics will serve as the foundation for a broader understanding of human rights in terms of their conceptual origins and effects.
The course includes five classes of 2 hours each, divided into the followings modules:
1. Global govervance and human rights 2. Recognition, Redistribution, and Representation; 3. Indigeneity and the question of autochthony; 4. Legal Activism and the social life of court judgements 5. New legal personhood and the juridification of Politics.
Each unit will include key questions appropriate for reflection, discussion, and debate based on key readings assigned by the instructor.
Lecturer: Maria Sapignoli
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: stefano.allovio@unimi.it

- Performing Identities Seminar (Seminar)
PIS uses an interdisciplinary perspective to focus on the metamorphic dynamics implied by the construction of identities. It stresses the importance of performing apparatuses and processes capable of eliciting both individual and communal oneness, so as to address the establishment of species and gender identities as well as socio-political and affective ones. PhD candidates are offered the possibility to address issues globally discussed and widely mentioned by scholars in humanities, however not yet sufficiently taken into account by Italian scholarship.
Lecturers: to be confirmed
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: Italian and English
To register, contact: chiara.cappelletto@unimi.it

- Perché leggere i classici della filosofia politica? (Seminar)
Lecturers: Gabriella Silvestrini, Elena Pulcini, Salvatore Veca, Alfredo Ferrarin, Lucio Cortella, Italo Testa, Stefano Petrucciani, Fabio Raimondi, Eugenio Lecaldano, Pier Giorgio Donatelli, Andrea Borsari, Barbara Carnevali, Remo Bodei.
15 hours, 3 CFU
To register, contact: marco.geuna@unimi.it

- Philosophy and Depiction (Reading Group)
The world is filled with images of different types. Walking through a city street you will see billboards with cartoon characters advertising breakfast cereal, a train carriage is filled with diagrams showing what to do in an emergency, there are likely hundreds of photos on your mobile phone. All of these items can be said to depict their subject matter, but what is depiction, and how is it achieved? Such questions have occupied philosophers interested in perception or aesthetics for decades, and there are still lively debates as to the nature of depiction amongst contemporary philosophers. The objective of this course is to provide students with a thorough grounding in contemporary philosophy of depiction, as well as an understanding of its relevance to other areas of philosophy.
Convener: Nick Young
14 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: giuliano.torrengo@unimi.it

March 2019

- At the origin of Symbolic Language (Course)
The aim of this course is to foster and develop a satisfactory theoretical framework; discuss the core and unresolved problems linked with the question of the origins of symbolic language from a philosophical, anthropological and psychological-evolutive perspective, with reference to the most important scholarship on the topic.
Lecturer: Carmine Di Martino
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: carmine.dimartino@unimi.it

- Imagination, belief and cognitive architeture (Course)
This course will introduce some key themes in the philosophy of imagination, with a focus on questions concerning the functional relations between imagination and belief within human cognitive architecture.
All these themes will be approached from an empirically informed perspective, combining traditional methods of philosophical inquiry with relevant findings from psychology and other cognitive sciences.
Lecturer: Anna Ichino
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: paolo.spinicci@unimi.it

April 2019

- Il dibattito sul diritto naturale nella prima età moderna: momenti e figure (Course)
Conoscere e discutere, attraverso il confronto con dei testi chiave, alcuni momenti e figure emblematiche nel grande dibattito della prima modernità sul diritto naturale, considerato nei suoi presupposti filosofico-teologici e nelle sue implicazioni etico-politiche, e tenendo presente il rapporto di continutà/discontinuità con la tradizione premoderna su tali temi.
Lecturers: Marco Geuna, Stefano Di Bella, Mauro Simonazzi, Stefano Bacin, Alberto Frigo,
15 hours, 3 CFU
Language: Italian
To register, contact: stefano.dibella@unimi.it

May 2019

- Plato vs. Aristotle: the comparatio as a Genre in Early Modern Europe (Course)
In one of the most evocative frescoes of the Renaissance, Raphael juxtaposes Plato and Aristotle. The pairing would seem obvious, since the two thinkers had been for centuries symbols of philosophy and wisdom. But only the recent revival of Plato, begun in the mid-fifteenth century, had allowed Latin West to gain a better understanding of Platonic philosophy and therefore to compare Plato’s doctrines directly to those of Aristotle. Were master and disciple in harmony? And if not, which of the two should be favored? Such questions were less innocent than one might think, and the answers to them had implications for scholastic philosophy, theology, and speculation on the natural world, among a wide range of topics. A preferred vehicle for confronting these issues were works expressly conceived as comparisons between the two philosophers: the comparationes. The comparatio between Plato and Aristotle – a legacy from late antiquity – was initially recovered as a genre by Greek authors such as Pletho, George of Trebizond and Bessarion, and eventually appropriated by Latin authors, from Pico to Fox Morcillo, from Champier to Camutius. Driven by philosophical, apologetic and even political concerns, comparationes between Plato and Aristotle were still being composed even at the end of the seventeenth century, as the genre served as a flexible tool for different intellectual agendas. This course will outline, on the basis of new archival and bibliographic research, some significant episodes in the history of this genre.
Lecturer: Eva Del Soldato
10 hours, 2 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: luca.bianchi@unimi.it

- Knowledge and Action (Course)
This course will be an advanced introduction to knowledge-first epistemology, focusing on the relation between knowledge and action. According to knowledge-first epistemology, the concept of knowledge plays a foundational explanatory role with respect to a variety of other philosophically interesting concepts. Traditionally, knowledge-first epistemologists insist on the conceptual priority of knowledge with respect to other epistemological concepts, such as justification and evidence. In this course, we will focus instead on the explanatory role played by knowledge with respect to practical concepts, such as the concepts of intentional and coordinated action and that of intelligent performance.
Lecturer: Carlotta Pavese
15 hours, 3 CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: andrea.borghini@unimi.it

June 2019

- What are fictional objects? (Course)
The contemporary debate on fictional objects will be presented. The students will be stimulated to react critically to each theory considered.
Lecturer: Elisa Paganini
10 hours, 2CFU
Language: English
To register, contact: elisa.paganini@unimi.it