Various kinds of observations show that the ability of human beings to both consciously relive past events – episodic memory – and conceive future events, entails an active process of construction. This construction process also underpins many other important aspects of conscious human life, such as perceptions, language and conscious thinking. This article provides an explanation of what makes the constructive process possible and how it works. The process mainly relies on attentional activity, which has a discrete and periodic nature, (...) and working memory, which allows for the combination of discrete attentional operations. An explanation is also provided of how past and future events are constructed. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the rapid and unexpected rise of deep learning within Artificial Intelligence and its applications. It tackles the possible reasons for this remarkable success, providing candidate paths towards a satisfactory explanation of why it works so well, at least in some domains. A historical account is given for the ups and downs, which have characterized neural networks research and its evolution from “shallow” to “deep” learning architectures. A precise account of “success” is given, in order to sieve out (...) aspects pertaining to marketing or sociology of research, and the remaining aspects seem to certify a genuine value of deep learning, calling for explanation. The alleged two main propelling factors for deep learning, namely computing hardware performance and neuroscience findings, are scrutinized, and evaluated as relevant but insufficient for a comprehensive explanation. We review various attempts that have been made to provide mathematical foundations able to justify the efficiency of deep learning, and we deem this is the most promising road to follow, even if the current achievements are too scattered and relevant for very limited classes of deep neural models. The authors’ take is that most of what can explain the very nature of why deep learning works at all and even very well across so many domains of application is still to be understood and further research, which addresses the theoretical foundation of artificial learning, is still very much needed. (shrink)

The essay discusses the import of the separability thesis both for legal positivism and for contemporary legal practice. First, the place of the separability thesis in legal positivism will be explored, distinguishing between “standard positivism” and “post‐Hartian positivism.” Then I will consider various kinds of relations between law and morality that are worthy of jurisprudential interest, and explore, from a positivist point of view, what kind of relations between law and morality must be rejected, what kind of such relations should (...) be taken into account, and what kind of such relations are indeed of no import at all. The upshot of this analysis consists in highlighting the distinction between two different dimensions of legal validity (formal validity and material validity respectively), and in pointing out that the positivist separability thesis can apply to formal validity only. On the other hand, when the ascertainment of material validity is at stake, some form of moral reasoning may well be involved (here and now, it isnecessarilyinvolved). The essay concludes with some brief remarks on the persisting importance of the positivist jurisprudential project. (shrink)

Consistency with the formal Church’s thesis, for short CT, and the axiom of choice, for short AC, was one of the requirements asked to be satisfied by the intensional level of a two-level foundation for constructive mathematics as proposed by Maietti and Sambin From sets and types to topology and analysis: practicable foundations for constructive mathematics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005). Here we show that this is the case for the intensional level of the two-level Minimalist Foundation, for short MF, (...) completed in 2009 by the second author. The intensional level of MF consists of an intensional type theory à la Martin-Löf, called mTT. The consistency of mTT with CT and AC is obtained by showing the consistency with the formal Church’s thesis of a fragment of intensional Martin-Löf’s type theory, called \, where mTT can be easily interpreted. Then to show the consistency of \ with CT we interpret it within Feferman’s predicative theory of non-iterative fixpoints \ by extending the well known Kleene’s realizability semantics of intuitionistic arithmetics so that CT is trivially validated. More in detail the fragment \ we interpret consists of first order intensional Martin-Löf’s type theory with one universe and with explicit substitution rules in place of usual equality rules preserving type constructors -rule which is not valid in our realizability semantics). A key difficulty encountered in our interpretation was to use the right interpretation of lambda abstraction in the applicative structure of natural numbers in order to model all the equality rules of \ correctly. In particular the universe of \ is modelled by means of \-fixpoints following a technique due first to Aczel and used by Feferman and Beeson. (shrink)

It is not unusual to think of Rorty’s work as a success in rhetoric and a failure in political philosophy. In this article we re-evaluate this assessment by analyzing a typical feature of Rorty’s writing: his frequent use of “we so-and-so.” Taking stock of the existing literature on the subject we discuss how Rorty’s use of the “we” was received by peers and how he himself made sense of it. We then analyze Rorty’s oeuvre in order to show that a (...) better understanding of his rhetorical “we” could make his politico-philosophical “we” more appealing. We suggest that Rorty’s pragmatist take on “ethnos” is preferable to other notions that are currently championed in political theory and philosophy. (shrink)

Fifty years ago, the U.S. ethicist Philip Paul Hallie set himself the task of investigating in fine detail “the self-deception and often the hypocrisy that seek to hide harm-doing under justificati...

Gaetano Roberto Buccola’s new book is a psychoanalytic study of evil and, specifically, a Jungian inquiry into a form of evil that affects contemporary human societies on a global scale: terrorism....

The present book addresses the background, rationale, general structure, and particular aims and arguments characterizing our third and last volume about "humor" and "cruelty". A guiding foray is provided into the vast expert literature that can be retrieved in the Western humanities and social sciences on these two terms. Pivotal thinkers and crucial notions are duly identified, highlighted, and examined. Apposite subsidiary references are also included, especially with regard to psychodynamics and clinical psychology, existentialism, feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and representative recent (...) studies in the philosophy of humor and its cognates. The stage is thus set for the exploration and assessment of the conflicts between humor and cruelty unfolding in Part 2 of Volume 3. Being the philosophical terminus of our entire research project, Volume 3 counterbalances, complements, and, occasionally, complexifies the numerous forms of mutual cooperation between humor and cruelty that the preceding Volume 2 had unearthed and discussed. (shrink)

Part 2 of Volume 3 addresses in detail the conflicts between humor and cruelty, i.e., how cruelty can be unleashed against humor and, conversely, humor can be utilized against cruelty. Potent enmities to mirth and jollity are retrieved from a variety of socio-historical contexts, ranging from Europe’s medieval monasteries to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. Special attention is paid to the cruel humor and humorous cruelty arising thereof, insofar as such phenomena can reveal critical aspects of today’s neoliberal socio-economic order. (...) In parallel, settings where humor has been used as an instrument to cope with suffered cruelty, whether natural or human in origin, are also retrieved and discussed. These also vary greatly and encompass domains such as hospital wards, 20th-century Jewish ghettoes, and contemporary funeral homes. A set of concluding reflections is then offered on the psychological, theological, ethical, and metaphysical roots of humor—and its cruel rejection. (shrink)

This large volume comprises thirty-two essays on globalisation authored in English by chiefly Spanish-speaking scholars from Europe and Latin America, who specialise primarily in the humanities and...

In the aftermath of the dramatic collapse of the Icelandic bubble economy in 2008, the Centre for Ethics of the University of Iceland felt all the more compelled to find ways to promote ethical ref...

In his 1990s studies of visual humor, Noël Carroll left to “future researchers” the laborious task of developing a “comprehensive and rigorous classification of the phenomena” pertaining to “the sight gag.” Carroll contributed five possible items belonging to such a taxonomy, i. e., “the mutual interference gag”, “mimed metaphors”, “the object analog”, “the switch image” and “the solution gag”. Following the implicit reference to rhetoric built in the very names of some of these items, this article shows how the well-established (...) tropes of classical rhetoric, indeed three hundred of them, can be employed, with a modicum of analogical creativity, in order to address the visual component of comedic sketches, as exemplified by Monty Python’s famous Flying Circus. (shrink)