Academic Articles on Privacy by Andrea Togni
Journal of Libertarian Studies , 2024
Please visit the Journal of Libertarian Studies website: https://jls.mises.org/article/116327-pri... more Please visit the Journal of Libertarian Studies website: https://jls.mises.org/article/116327-privacy-as-a-kantian-misesian-a-priori-condition-for-the-preservation-of-property-rights
This article analyzes the relation between the philosophical notion of privacy, its practical implementation in the domain of cryptocurrencies, and the Western regulatory financial environment. A libertarian (anarchocapitalist, agorist) perspective is adopted. The main question concerns what kind of notion privacy is. Utilitarianism, privacy as a natural right, and privacy as a Kantian-Misesian a priori condition for the preservation of property rights are analyzed. First, it is shown that utilitarian approaches do not work because they let the government define privacy, thus corrupting its practical implementation. The cases of Tornado Cash and of Privacy Pools, two privacy-preserving cryptocurrency protocols, are discussed to prove the point. Second, the theory of privacy as a natural right is discarded because it is not compatible with libertarian reductionism. Third, the main proposal of this article is to define privacy as a Kantian-Misesian a priori condition for the preservation of property. This proposal is coherent with libertarian reductionism because privacy is not understood as a natural right; moreover, it is superior to utilitarianism because the a priori status of privacy protects it from the arbitrary wishes of politicians and bureaucrats. The origin of a priori notions is not empirical, but their use is: privacy cannot but impact how the acting man protects real-world property and interacts with fellow human beings.
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Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Politica --- Italian Journal of Political Philosophy, 2022
Please visit RIFP's website: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/rifp/article/view/2025
In ... more Please visit RIFP's website: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/rifp/article/view/2025
In the last chapter of "The Ethics of Liberty," Rothbard discusses his theory of strategy for liberty, and recommends tools such as education that libertarians can lean on to attain the highest political goal of freedom. Building on Rothbard's shoulders, the main thesis of this paper is that an effective theory of strategy for liberty cannot dispense with privacy, which needs to be understood as a condition for the enjoyment of liberty and not as a right per se. In the first section, the discussion is framed in the context of natural rights libertarianism. Then, a metaphysical taxonomy of property is provided, which articulates the functioning of property rights and privacy in the realm of the body and of the mind, in the realm of alienable goods and services, and in the realm of information. The third section deals with the war on privacy that is raging nowadays; not coincidentally, the ultimate enemy of this war is private property. The last part of the paper contends that Rothbard is correct in reducing privacy rights to property rights, but this doesn't mean that privacy has no place in libertarian thought; on the contrary, privacy is one of the main conditions for the defense and preservation of property rights, and, in the case of information, property cannot even exist without it. If these theses are true, libertarians need to find a proper place for privacy in their theory of strategy for liberty.
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Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 26, 2022
Please visit the Journal of Libertarian Philosophy's website:
https://jls.scholasticahq.com/artic... more Please visit the Journal of Libertarian Philosophy's website:
https://jls.scholasticahq.com/article/57657-privacy-as-invisibility-by-default-bridging-the-gap-between-anarcho-capitalists-and-cypherpunks
This article argues that privacy (here defined as invisibility by default) is one of the best weapons to defend property rights. Privacy cannot be owned, but it is necessary to preserve property. Physical and tangible objects behave differently from information, ideas, and data with regard to property and privacy: while ownership of the latter is lost as soon as adversaries see them, this is not the case for the former. In both cases, however, making property invisible is crucial to keeping it safe. Ultimately, privacy is the ability to make property invisible by default to enemies and visible by choice to trusted peers.
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Mises Wire Articles on Privacy by Andrea Togni
Mises Wire, 2024
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Mises Wire, 2024
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Mises Wire, 2023
Please visit the Mises Wire website: https://mises.org/wire/government-wants-turn-blockchain-firm... more Please visit the Mises Wire website: https://mises.org/wire/government-wants-turn-blockchain-firms-servants-state --- In recent years, blockchain surveillance (BS) companies have become increasingly important players in the cryptocurrency industry. Their business model consists in developing proprietary software that collects and interprets public data available on public blockchains and in selling their services to governments, banks, exchanges, and others that need access to this data. Usually, governments are interested in collecting information about financial crimes, while other institutional players use BS companies for compliance, especially with regard to customer due diligence. This article argues that BS companies can be understood as governmentalities. Michael Rectenwald deploys this term to "refer to corporations and other non-state actors who actively undertake state functions." The partnership between the state and BS companies threatens cryptocurrency users' privacy and their ability to transact freely, away from the prying eyes of unwanted third parties.
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Mises Wire, 2023
Please visit the Mises Wire website: https://mises.org/wire/how-east-germanys-stasi-perfected-mas... more Please visit the Mises Wire website: https://mises.org/wire/how-east-germanys-stasi-perfected-mass-surveillance --- The state has a monopoly on violence. However, abusive repression harms government credibility and alienates public support in the long run. A more subtle and effective way to exercise power is to surveil the population and to prevent open manifestations of discontent. This article analyzes the case of the of the German Democratic Republic’s (DDR) Ministry for State Security (MfS), also known as the Stasi. The thesis is that an effective surveillance regime makes the use of open violence less urgent because the population is nudged to discipline itself.
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Mises Wire, 2023
Please visit the Mises Institute website: https://mises.org/wire/gdpr-paradox-empowering-governme... more Please visit the Mises Institute website: https://mises.org/wire/gdpr-paradox-empowering-government-name-data-protection
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became effective in 2016, is one of the most detailed legislative schemes in the field of data protection. This article discusses two libertarianminded objections to its approach. First, I argue that the notion of "right" adopted in the GDPR is flawed. Second, it shows that the GDPR doesn't protect individuals from data-hungry governments and corporations. In the end, data protection legislation makes people strong in theory but weak in practice, while making powerful private and public entities weak in theory but strong in practice.
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Books by Andrea Togni
https://www.amazon.it/criteri-individuare-sensi-unontologia-estetica/dp/8857553426/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_it_IT=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=andrea+togni&qid=1556887008&s=gateway&sr=8-1, 2019
Dai tempi di Aristotele fino alla filosofia analitica contemporanea è stata discussa una serie di... more Dai tempi di Aristotele fino alla filosofia analitica contemporanea è stata discussa una serie di criteri atti a rendere conto di cosa siano i sensi e a tassonomizzarli. Nel corso del libro, l'autore articola a livello concettuale il criterio esperienziale-ontologico e il criterio sottrattivo, e studia come essi aiutino a inquadrare i casi empirici del dolore, delle percezioni artificialmente assistite, delle sinestesie, dell'olfatto e dei sensi animali.
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Papers on the Philosophy of Perception by Andrea Togni
Estetica. Studi e Ricerche, 2021
--- Please visit https://www.rivisteweb.it/issn/2039-6635/issue/8450 or contact me to get the pap... more --- Please visit https://www.rivisteweb.it/issn/2039-6635/issue/8450 or contact me to get the paper --- The debate on the individuation of the senses aims at shaping criteria to answer two different but interrelated questions: what the sensory modalities are (metaphysical question), and how they should be categorized (classificatory question). In this essay, I analyze how the experiential-ontological criterion and the subtractive criterion deal with what I call the «intermodal gray area», where perceptions in one sensory modality are strictly associated with experiences normally related to a different sensory modality. Synaesthesias are paradigmatic cases of intermodal experiences. The experiential-ontological and the subtractive criterion are used to study the nature of synaesthetic experiences and their place in the catalog of the senses. My proposal is to grant synaesthetic experiences a phenomenological reality irreducible to the reality of the experiences associated with the inducing and the concurrent sensory modalities, and to classify each synaesthetic combination as an independent sense.
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Aisthesis, 2019
While shaping and defending a criterion to individuate the sensory modalities , philosophers have... more While shaping and defending a criterion to individuate the sensory modalities , philosophers have to deal with groups of perceptual states that don't fit into the catalogue of the senses comfortably. I call these groups «grey areas». In this paper, I present the «artificial grey area», which is about perceptions obtained through artificial devices that replace or augment one's sensory abilities. More precisely, the spotlight is on the results that the experiential criterion, the experiential-ontological criterion and the subtractive criterion provide when artificially-assisted perceptions fall under their scope. The main theses of the paper are that each sensory device allows users to access a peculiar sensory world, and that each of these worlds should be associated with a peculiar, independent sensory modality.
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Pain Nursing Magazine, 2018
Please visit Pain Nursing Magazine website: www.painnursing.it ---
The criteria to individuate... more Please visit Pain Nursing Magazine website: www.painnursing.it ---
The criteria to individuate the senses aim at answering two main questions: the metaphysical one investigates what is a sensory modality, while the classificatory one asks how a sensory modality can be distinguished from the others. In this paper, I discuss how the common sense criterion, the physical criterion, the physiological criterion, the experiential criterion, the experiential-ontological criterion and the subtractive criterion deal with pain. Pain can be used to exemplify what I call “extramodal grey area”. Each grey area gives the authors interested in the debate on the individuation of the senses a way to test the results obtained when the criteria above mentioned are applied to empirical cases. According to the extramodal grey area, the inclusion of some groups of perceptions in the catalogue of the senses may give rise to doubts: in the case of pain, it is not clear if it is a sensory modality in the first place, and, if so, if it is an autonomous sense.
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Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 2019
Riassunto --- In questo articolo, vengono difese due tesi. La prima è che esistono ragioni per sg... more Riassunto --- In questo articolo, vengono difese due tesi. La prima è che esistono ragioni per sganciare i di-battiti sull'individuazione delle modalità sensoriali e sul criterio esperienziale-ontologico dalle nozioni di "esperienza pura", "esclusività" ed "esaustività"; piuttosto, è preferibile collocare le esperienze percettive sotto il cappello dell'unità soggettiva. La seconda è che lo sviluppo del criterio esperienziale-ontologico (e dei criteri concorrenti) può essere portato avanti senza assumere che le modalità sensoriali costituiscono generi naturali. La prima tesi riguarda le esperienze percettive, la seconda riguarda le modalità sensoriali. Affermare, con il criterio esperienziale-ontologico, che le realtà (esperienze) percettive svolgono un ruolo ontologico non implica che lo stesso valga per le classificazioni teoriche dei sensi ottenute per suo mezzo. La proposta consiste nell'inquadrare le tassonomizzazioni dei sensi in una cornice strumentalista.
Parole chiave: Individuazione dei sensi; Modalità sensoriali; Esperienza percettiva; Criterio esperienziale-ontologico; Strumentalismo.
Abstract --- Towards an Instrumentalist Interpretation of the Senses --- Two main theses are defended in this paper. First, I submit that the notions of "pure experience", "exclusivity" and "exhaustivity" are far-fetched, and that a better proposal is to focus on the subjective unity of perceptual experiences. Second, I claim that the experiential-ontological criterion for the individuation of the sensory modalities doesn't require the senses to be understood as natural kinds. The first thesis is about perceptual experiences, while the second one concerns the senses. According to the experiential-ontological criterion, perceptual realities (experiences) have to be defined in ontological terms, but that doesn't imply that the same holds true for the senses, which are theoretical notions. The proposal is to put the task of taxonomizing the senses in an instrumentalist frame.
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Sistemi Intelligenti, 2019
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Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 2018
ABSTRACT – In this paper, I discuss some methodological issues relevant to the debate on the indi... more ABSTRACT – In this paper, I discuss some methodological issues relevant to the debate on the individuation of the sensory modalities. First, I make a distinction between a metaphysical question related to the nature of the senses, and a classificatory question related to their taxonomization. The criteria commonly used to individuate the senses should be able to address both questions. Second, I articulate five grey areas, namely, five groups of problematic cases that authors interested in defending a specific criterion should be able to tackle. The aim of this paper is not to discuss these criteria and grey areas per se, but to clarify some methodological premises that frame the debate under consideration.
KEY WORDS: Individuation of the senses; philosophy of perception; metaphysics of the senses; classification of the senses; grey areas.
ABSTRACT - In questo lavoro intendo discutere alcune questioni metodologiche relative al dibattito sull'individuazione delle modalità sensoriali. In primo luogo, cercherò di distinguere tra un problema me-tafisico, che riguarda la natura dei sensi, e un problema di classificazione, che riguarda la loro tassonomia. I criteri comunemente impiegati per individuare i sensi dovrebbero essere in grado di affrontare entrambi i problemi. In secondo luogo, delineerò cinque zone grigie, ossia cinque gruppi di casi problematici, che gli autori interessati nel difendere un criterio dovrebbero essere in grado di affrontare. Il fine di questo lavo-ro non è quello di discutere i criteri e le aree grigie per se, bensì quello di chiarire alcune premesse metodo-logiche sullo sfondo del dibattito che qui si sta considerando.
PAROLE CHIAVE: Individuazione dei sensi; Filosofia della percezione; Metafisica dei sensi; Classificazione dei sensi; Zone grigie.
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Studia Philosophica Estonica, 2017
According to Hermann von Helmholtz, sensations are signs (symbols) that external
causes impress ... more According to Hermann von Helmholtz, sensations are signs (symbols) that external
causes impress on our sense organs; those signs are then used by the mind to acquire
knowledge of the reality.
Helmholtz’s work points out the difficulty of defining a notion of causality suitable
to explain the relation between sensations on the one hand and the physical world on the other. In fact, he states that: 1) Physical stimuli, understood as the causal origins of
sensations, are unknowable in themselves; 2) There is no empirical evidence for the
kind of causality from which sensations originate; 3) A transcendental causality is
nothing but the urge of the intellect to know everything.
It is necessary to keep in mind that Helmholtz is a committed empiricist: therefore,
he believes that all knowledge originates from sensations. Then, he tries avoiding
commitments with any kind of pre-established harmony between the two sides of the
causal relation. That is to say, sensible perceptions give us information about the
peculiarities of the external world, but the relation between sensations and the reality
should be explained and should not be taken for granted.
In this paper, I study Helmholtz’s struggles with providing a suitable explanation of
that relation; in doing so, I also make use of Emile Du Bois-Reymond’s work
concerning the limits of human understanding, and in particular the transcendent
difficulty of grasping the origins of sensations.
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Dialeghestai, 2017
Uno tra i bersagli polemici preferiti da Berkeley è ciò che egli chiama “materialismo”, ovvero la... more Uno tra i bersagli polemici preferiti da Berkeley è ciò che egli chiama “materialismo”, ovvero la tesi secondo la quale gli oggetti materiali esterni esistono che vi siano o meno degli esseri senzienti che la percepiscono. Nel corso delle sue opere filosofiche, Berkeley non sostiene solamente che gli oggetti materiali non sono gli unici a esistere; piuttosto, egli rifiuta di accordare l’esistenza a qualsiasi realtà mind-independent. Dunque, l’avversario principale del vescovo irlandese è ciò che in questo articolo viene chiamata Tesi Realista Generale:
TRG — La realtà esterna esiste in modo indipendente da qualsivoglia entità pensante o percipiente (la realtà esterna esisterebbe anche se non venisse pensata o percepita da nessuna entità pensante o percipiente).
L’accusa più insistente che Berkeley muove alle diverse versioni di realismo è che esse implicano lo scetticismo. Dopo aver analizzato le critiche mosse dal vesovo irlandese contro diverse versioni delle TRG, e dopo aver analizzato il rapporto intercorrente tra TRG e scetticismo, cercherò di far emergere la via che il vescovo irlandese propone per uscire dal pantano scettico.
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Dianoia, 2017
In this paper, I propose a heterodox reading of Locke’s "Essay concerning Human Understanding". S... more In this paper, I propose a heterodox reading of Locke’s "Essay concerning Human Understanding". Specifically, the focus is on the following tripartite thesis: 1. The substance of external sensible things, understood as something different from their nominal essence, is not knowable in general, not even by sensation; 2. Even if substances were identifiable with the primary qualities of the corpuscles that compose them, those primary qualities would be knowable only by analogical inference, and would be unperceivable anyway; 3. Even if the primary qualities were perceivable, there would not be a conceivable relation between them on the one hand and the secondary qualities and the ideas of secondary qualities on the other.
In the main body of the paper, I analyse how Locke lets each horn of the tripartite thesis emerge. In the last section, I suggest that Locke’s troubles depend on his theory about the relation between knowledge and sensation. Moreover, I sketch a personal reform of this relation that could be useful to avoid the difficulties implied by the tripartite thesis.
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RIFAJ, 2018
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RIFAJ, 2018
In the first Snapshot in the philosophy of perception, we tackle the question of whether there ar... more In the first Snapshot in the philosophy of perception, we tackle the question of whether there are sounds in a vacuum. The answer depends heavily on the metaphysics one is willing to accept. On the one hand, Berkeley points out that there are no empirical, perceptual grounds to settle the issue. On the other hand, realists try to provide reasons to address the question. Mechanistic philosophers believe that there are no sounds in a vacuum, because no sound waves can be found there. Casati and Dokic claim that there are sounds in a vacuum, because they are to be identified with the vibrations of the sound source. O’Callaghan denies the existence of sounds in a vacuum: he submits that the presence of a medium is a necessary condition for the existence of sounds even though he doesn’t identify sounds with sound waves. In what follows, we briefly examine these approaches.
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Academic Articles on Privacy by Andrea Togni
This article analyzes the relation between the philosophical notion of privacy, its practical implementation in the domain of cryptocurrencies, and the Western regulatory financial environment. A libertarian (anarchocapitalist, agorist) perspective is adopted. The main question concerns what kind of notion privacy is. Utilitarianism, privacy as a natural right, and privacy as a Kantian-Misesian a priori condition for the preservation of property rights are analyzed. First, it is shown that utilitarian approaches do not work because they let the government define privacy, thus corrupting its practical implementation. The cases of Tornado Cash and of Privacy Pools, two privacy-preserving cryptocurrency protocols, are discussed to prove the point. Second, the theory of privacy as a natural right is discarded because it is not compatible with libertarian reductionism. Third, the main proposal of this article is to define privacy as a Kantian-Misesian a priori condition for the preservation of property. This proposal is coherent with libertarian reductionism because privacy is not understood as a natural right; moreover, it is superior to utilitarianism because the a priori status of privacy protects it from the arbitrary wishes of politicians and bureaucrats. The origin of a priori notions is not empirical, but their use is: privacy cannot but impact how the acting man protects real-world property and interacts with fellow human beings.
In the last chapter of "The Ethics of Liberty," Rothbard discusses his theory of strategy for liberty, and recommends tools such as education that libertarians can lean on to attain the highest political goal of freedom. Building on Rothbard's shoulders, the main thesis of this paper is that an effective theory of strategy for liberty cannot dispense with privacy, which needs to be understood as a condition for the enjoyment of liberty and not as a right per se. In the first section, the discussion is framed in the context of natural rights libertarianism. Then, a metaphysical taxonomy of property is provided, which articulates the functioning of property rights and privacy in the realm of the body and of the mind, in the realm of alienable goods and services, and in the realm of information. The third section deals with the war on privacy that is raging nowadays; not coincidentally, the ultimate enemy of this war is private property. The last part of the paper contends that Rothbard is correct in reducing privacy rights to property rights, but this doesn't mean that privacy has no place in libertarian thought; on the contrary, privacy is one of the main conditions for the defense and preservation of property rights, and, in the case of information, property cannot even exist without it. If these theses are true, libertarians need to find a proper place for privacy in their theory of strategy for liberty.
https://jls.scholasticahq.com/article/57657-privacy-as-invisibility-by-default-bridging-the-gap-between-anarcho-capitalists-and-cypherpunks
This article argues that privacy (here defined as invisibility by default) is one of the best weapons to defend property rights. Privacy cannot be owned, but it is necessary to preserve property. Physical and tangible objects behave differently from information, ideas, and data with regard to property and privacy: while ownership of the latter is lost as soon as adversaries see them, this is not the case for the former. In both cases, however, making property invisible is crucial to keeping it safe. Ultimately, privacy is the ability to make property invisible by default to enemies and visible by choice to trusted peers.
Mises Wire Articles on Privacy by Andrea Togni
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became effective in 2016, is one of the most detailed legislative schemes in the field of data protection. This article discusses two libertarianminded objections to its approach. First, I argue that the notion of "right" adopted in the GDPR is flawed. Second, it shows that the GDPR doesn't protect individuals from data-hungry governments and corporations. In the end, data protection legislation makes people strong in theory but weak in practice, while making powerful private and public entities weak in theory but strong in practice.
Books by Andrea Togni
Papers on the Philosophy of Perception by Andrea Togni
The criteria to individuate the senses aim at answering two main questions: the metaphysical one investigates what is a sensory modality, while the classificatory one asks how a sensory modality can be distinguished from the others. In this paper, I discuss how the common sense criterion, the physical criterion, the physiological criterion, the experiential criterion, the experiential-ontological criterion and the subtractive criterion deal with pain. Pain can be used to exemplify what I call “extramodal grey area”. Each grey area gives the authors interested in the debate on the individuation of the senses a way to test the results obtained when the criteria above mentioned are applied to empirical cases. According to the extramodal grey area, the inclusion of some groups of perceptions in the catalogue of the senses may give rise to doubts: in the case of pain, it is not clear if it is a sensory modality in the first place, and, if so, if it is an autonomous sense.
Parole chiave: Individuazione dei sensi; Modalità sensoriali; Esperienza percettiva; Criterio esperienziale-ontologico; Strumentalismo.
Abstract --- Towards an Instrumentalist Interpretation of the Senses --- Two main theses are defended in this paper. First, I submit that the notions of "pure experience", "exclusivity" and "exhaustivity" are far-fetched, and that a better proposal is to focus on the subjective unity of perceptual experiences. Second, I claim that the experiential-ontological criterion for the individuation of the sensory modalities doesn't require the senses to be understood as natural kinds. The first thesis is about perceptual experiences, while the second one concerns the senses. According to the experiential-ontological criterion, perceptual realities (experiences) have to be defined in ontological terms, but that doesn't imply that the same holds true for the senses, which are theoretical notions. The proposal is to put the task of taxonomizing the senses in an instrumentalist frame.
KEY WORDS: Individuation of the senses; philosophy of perception; metaphysics of the senses; classification of the senses; grey areas.
ABSTRACT - In questo lavoro intendo discutere alcune questioni metodologiche relative al dibattito sull'individuazione delle modalità sensoriali. In primo luogo, cercherò di distinguere tra un problema me-tafisico, che riguarda la natura dei sensi, e un problema di classificazione, che riguarda la loro tassonomia. I criteri comunemente impiegati per individuare i sensi dovrebbero essere in grado di affrontare entrambi i problemi. In secondo luogo, delineerò cinque zone grigie, ossia cinque gruppi di casi problematici, che gli autori interessati nel difendere un criterio dovrebbero essere in grado di affrontare. Il fine di questo lavo-ro non è quello di discutere i criteri e le aree grigie per se, bensì quello di chiarire alcune premesse metodo-logiche sullo sfondo del dibattito che qui si sta considerando.
PAROLE CHIAVE: Individuazione dei sensi; Filosofia della percezione; Metafisica dei sensi; Classificazione dei sensi; Zone grigie.
causes impress on our sense organs; those signs are then used by the mind to acquire
knowledge of the reality.
Helmholtz’s work points out the difficulty of defining a notion of causality suitable
to explain the relation between sensations on the one hand and the physical world on the other. In fact, he states that: 1) Physical stimuli, understood as the causal origins of
sensations, are unknowable in themselves; 2) There is no empirical evidence for the
kind of causality from which sensations originate; 3) A transcendental causality is
nothing but the urge of the intellect to know everything.
It is necessary to keep in mind that Helmholtz is a committed empiricist: therefore,
he believes that all knowledge originates from sensations. Then, he tries avoiding
commitments with any kind of pre-established harmony between the two sides of the
causal relation. That is to say, sensible perceptions give us information about the
peculiarities of the external world, but the relation between sensations and the reality
should be explained and should not be taken for granted.
In this paper, I study Helmholtz’s struggles with providing a suitable explanation of
that relation; in doing so, I also make use of Emile Du Bois-Reymond’s work
concerning the limits of human understanding, and in particular the transcendent
difficulty of grasping the origins of sensations.
TRG — La realtà esterna esiste in modo indipendente da qualsivoglia entità pensante o percipiente (la realtà esterna esisterebbe anche se non venisse pensata o percepita da nessuna entità pensante o percipiente).
L’accusa più insistente che Berkeley muove alle diverse versioni di realismo è che esse implicano lo scetticismo. Dopo aver analizzato le critiche mosse dal vesovo irlandese contro diverse versioni delle TRG, e dopo aver analizzato il rapporto intercorrente tra TRG e scetticismo, cercherò di far emergere la via che il vescovo irlandese propone per uscire dal pantano scettico.
In the main body of the paper, I analyse how Locke lets each horn of the tripartite thesis emerge. In the last section, I suggest that Locke’s troubles depend on his theory about the relation between knowledge and sensation. Moreover, I sketch a personal reform of this relation that could be useful to avoid the difficulties implied by the tripartite thesis.
This article analyzes the relation between the philosophical notion of privacy, its practical implementation in the domain of cryptocurrencies, and the Western regulatory financial environment. A libertarian (anarchocapitalist, agorist) perspective is adopted. The main question concerns what kind of notion privacy is. Utilitarianism, privacy as a natural right, and privacy as a Kantian-Misesian a priori condition for the preservation of property rights are analyzed. First, it is shown that utilitarian approaches do not work because they let the government define privacy, thus corrupting its practical implementation. The cases of Tornado Cash and of Privacy Pools, two privacy-preserving cryptocurrency protocols, are discussed to prove the point. Second, the theory of privacy as a natural right is discarded because it is not compatible with libertarian reductionism. Third, the main proposal of this article is to define privacy as a Kantian-Misesian a priori condition for the preservation of property. This proposal is coherent with libertarian reductionism because privacy is not understood as a natural right; moreover, it is superior to utilitarianism because the a priori status of privacy protects it from the arbitrary wishes of politicians and bureaucrats. The origin of a priori notions is not empirical, but their use is: privacy cannot but impact how the acting man protects real-world property and interacts with fellow human beings.
In the last chapter of "The Ethics of Liberty," Rothbard discusses his theory of strategy for liberty, and recommends tools such as education that libertarians can lean on to attain the highest political goal of freedom. Building on Rothbard's shoulders, the main thesis of this paper is that an effective theory of strategy for liberty cannot dispense with privacy, which needs to be understood as a condition for the enjoyment of liberty and not as a right per se. In the first section, the discussion is framed in the context of natural rights libertarianism. Then, a metaphysical taxonomy of property is provided, which articulates the functioning of property rights and privacy in the realm of the body and of the mind, in the realm of alienable goods and services, and in the realm of information. The third section deals with the war on privacy that is raging nowadays; not coincidentally, the ultimate enemy of this war is private property. The last part of the paper contends that Rothbard is correct in reducing privacy rights to property rights, but this doesn't mean that privacy has no place in libertarian thought; on the contrary, privacy is one of the main conditions for the defense and preservation of property rights, and, in the case of information, property cannot even exist without it. If these theses are true, libertarians need to find a proper place for privacy in their theory of strategy for liberty.
https://jls.scholasticahq.com/article/57657-privacy-as-invisibility-by-default-bridging-the-gap-between-anarcho-capitalists-and-cypherpunks
This article argues that privacy (here defined as invisibility by default) is one of the best weapons to defend property rights. Privacy cannot be owned, but it is necessary to preserve property. Physical and tangible objects behave differently from information, ideas, and data with regard to property and privacy: while ownership of the latter is lost as soon as adversaries see them, this is not the case for the former. In both cases, however, making property invisible is crucial to keeping it safe. Ultimately, privacy is the ability to make property invisible by default to enemies and visible by choice to trusted peers.
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became effective in 2016, is one of the most detailed legislative schemes in the field of data protection. This article discusses two libertarianminded objections to its approach. First, I argue that the notion of "right" adopted in the GDPR is flawed. Second, it shows that the GDPR doesn't protect individuals from data-hungry governments and corporations. In the end, data protection legislation makes people strong in theory but weak in practice, while making powerful private and public entities weak in theory but strong in practice.
The criteria to individuate the senses aim at answering two main questions: the metaphysical one investigates what is a sensory modality, while the classificatory one asks how a sensory modality can be distinguished from the others. In this paper, I discuss how the common sense criterion, the physical criterion, the physiological criterion, the experiential criterion, the experiential-ontological criterion and the subtractive criterion deal with pain. Pain can be used to exemplify what I call “extramodal grey area”. Each grey area gives the authors interested in the debate on the individuation of the senses a way to test the results obtained when the criteria above mentioned are applied to empirical cases. According to the extramodal grey area, the inclusion of some groups of perceptions in the catalogue of the senses may give rise to doubts: in the case of pain, it is not clear if it is a sensory modality in the first place, and, if so, if it is an autonomous sense.
Parole chiave: Individuazione dei sensi; Modalità sensoriali; Esperienza percettiva; Criterio esperienziale-ontologico; Strumentalismo.
Abstract --- Towards an Instrumentalist Interpretation of the Senses --- Two main theses are defended in this paper. First, I submit that the notions of "pure experience", "exclusivity" and "exhaustivity" are far-fetched, and that a better proposal is to focus on the subjective unity of perceptual experiences. Second, I claim that the experiential-ontological criterion for the individuation of the sensory modalities doesn't require the senses to be understood as natural kinds. The first thesis is about perceptual experiences, while the second one concerns the senses. According to the experiential-ontological criterion, perceptual realities (experiences) have to be defined in ontological terms, but that doesn't imply that the same holds true for the senses, which are theoretical notions. The proposal is to put the task of taxonomizing the senses in an instrumentalist frame.
KEY WORDS: Individuation of the senses; philosophy of perception; metaphysics of the senses; classification of the senses; grey areas.
ABSTRACT - In questo lavoro intendo discutere alcune questioni metodologiche relative al dibattito sull'individuazione delle modalità sensoriali. In primo luogo, cercherò di distinguere tra un problema me-tafisico, che riguarda la natura dei sensi, e un problema di classificazione, che riguarda la loro tassonomia. I criteri comunemente impiegati per individuare i sensi dovrebbero essere in grado di affrontare entrambi i problemi. In secondo luogo, delineerò cinque zone grigie, ossia cinque gruppi di casi problematici, che gli autori interessati nel difendere un criterio dovrebbero essere in grado di affrontare. Il fine di questo lavo-ro non è quello di discutere i criteri e le aree grigie per se, bensì quello di chiarire alcune premesse metodo-logiche sullo sfondo del dibattito che qui si sta considerando.
PAROLE CHIAVE: Individuazione dei sensi; Filosofia della percezione; Metafisica dei sensi; Classificazione dei sensi; Zone grigie.
causes impress on our sense organs; those signs are then used by the mind to acquire
knowledge of the reality.
Helmholtz’s work points out the difficulty of defining a notion of causality suitable
to explain the relation between sensations on the one hand and the physical world on the other. In fact, he states that: 1) Physical stimuli, understood as the causal origins of
sensations, are unknowable in themselves; 2) There is no empirical evidence for the
kind of causality from which sensations originate; 3) A transcendental causality is
nothing but the urge of the intellect to know everything.
It is necessary to keep in mind that Helmholtz is a committed empiricist: therefore,
he believes that all knowledge originates from sensations. Then, he tries avoiding
commitments with any kind of pre-established harmony between the two sides of the
causal relation. That is to say, sensible perceptions give us information about the
peculiarities of the external world, but the relation between sensations and the reality
should be explained and should not be taken for granted.
In this paper, I study Helmholtz’s struggles with providing a suitable explanation of
that relation; in doing so, I also make use of Emile Du Bois-Reymond’s work
concerning the limits of human understanding, and in particular the transcendent
difficulty of grasping the origins of sensations.
TRG — La realtà esterna esiste in modo indipendente da qualsivoglia entità pensante o percipiente (la realtà esterna esisterebbe anche se non venisse pensata o percepita da nessuna entità pensante o percipiente).
L’accusa più insistente che Berkeley muove alle diverse versioni di realismo è che esse implicano lo scetticismo. Dopo aver analizzato le critiche mosse dal vesovo irlandese contro diverse versioni delle TRG, e dopo aver analizzato il rapporto intercorrente tra TRG e scetticismo, cercherò di far emergere la via che il vescovo irlandese propone per uscire dal pantano scettico.
In the main body of the paper, I analyse how Locke lets each horn of the tripartite thesis emerge. In the last section, I suggest that Locke’s troubles depend on his theory about the relation between knowledge and sensation. Moreover, I sketch a personal reform of this relation that could be useful to avoid the difficulties implied by the tripartite thesis.
Full paper: https://jls.mises.org/article/116327-privacy-as-a-kantian-misesian-a-priori-condition-for-the-preservation-of-property-rights
Since Grice’s paper Some remarks about the senses (1962), many philosophers have dealt with the debate about the criteria to distinguish the senses. As I understand the debate, a criterion should help to answer to two questions: 1) By what principle do we distinguish the senses from one another? (Matthen); 2) Does a criterion provide a better understanding of what the sensory modalities are?
Many criteria have been proposed to tackle those problems. Today, I will focus on two of them: 1) Proper object criterion — The senses allow us to perceive external objects and properties. Each sensory modality is individuated by the set of properties perceived through that sensory modality; 2) Experiential criterion — The sensory modalities are to be defined in phenomenological or experiential terms. Each of them has a peculiar qualitative character that distinguishes it from the others.
In particular, I will test the proper object criterion and the experiential criterion with regard to synesthetic perceptions. According to the most common definition, synesthesia is a condition in which stimulation in one sensory modality (inducer) triggers an experience not only in that sensory modality, but also in a second sensory modality (concurrent). For example, a can of paint may smell blue, an orgasm may feel orange, a sound may taste salty, and so on.
The aim of this talk is to discuss two points: 1) The notion of ”veridicality" is not the most appropriate notion to understand synesthesias; 2) The defenders of the experiential criterion could classify synesthesias or as sums of distinct experiences, or as new kinds of unitary experiences. In order to gain a clue to solve the dispute, I’ll propose to reflect on (hypothetical?) cases of bidirectional synesthesias, that is, synesthesias that run not only from the inducer to the concurrent, but also in the opposite direction.