The idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. On the one hand, so many linguistic phenomena appear to be explained if (and, according to some authors, only if) we make room for logical forms in which reference to or quantification over events is explicitly featured. Examples include nominalization, adverbial modification, tense and aspect, plurals, and singular causal statements. On the other hand, a number of deep (...) philosophical questions arise as soon as we take events into consideration. Are events entities of a kind? What are their identity and individuation criteria? How does semantic theorizing depend on such metaphysical issues? The aim of this book is to address such issues in some depth, with emphasis precisely on the interplay between linguistic applications and philosophical implications. Contributors: N. Asher, P. M. Bertinetto, J. Brandl, D. Delfitto, R. Eckardt, J. Higginbotham, A. Lenci, T. Parsons, A. ter Meulen, H. Verkuyl. A comprehensive introductory essay (pp. 3-47) is included. (shrink)

In this sixth issue of Speculations, a serial imprint created to explore post-continental philosophy and speculative realism, a wide range of contemporary philosophical issues pertaining to the contemporary philosophical scene is touched upon, from the continental realism of Tristan Garcia, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux to the 'new realism' of Maurizio Ferraris, from Lacanian and Laurellian speculations to the synthetic philosophy of Fernando Zalamea's mathematics.

This article explores the ways in which suspects attempt to make putative victims/complainants at least partially responsible for the incidents for which they are investigated, transforming themselves into the victim and the other into the perpetrator. Drawing upon conversation analysis, I examine audio-recorded police interviews for low-level crimes in England and in which suspects have constructed what I refer as counter-denunciations. I argue that suspects accomplish these counter-denunciations through discursive practices that involve, for example (a) contrasting the complainant’s actions with (...) their own innocent conduct; (b) historicizing the event being investigated; and (c) discrediting the complainant’s character—stigmatizing. These practices have in common the suspects’ reliance on the relational and contextual character of the categories ‘offender’ and ‘victim’. (shrink)

In language learning, learners engage with their environment, incorporating cues from different sources. However, in lab‐based experiments, using artificial languages, many of the cues and features that are part of real‐world language learning are stripped away. In three experiments, we investigated the role of positive, negative, and mixed feedback on the gradual learning of language‐like statistical regularities within an active guessing game paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants received deterministic feedback (100%), whereas probabilistic feedback (i.e., 75% or 50%) was introduced in (...) Experiment 2. Finally, Experiment 3 explored the impact of mixed probabilistic feedback (33% positive, 33% negative, 33% no feedback). The results showed that cross‐situational learning of words was observed without feedback, but participants were able to learn structural regularities of the miniature language only when feedback was provided. Interestingly, the presence of positive feedback was particularly helpful for the learner, promoting more in‐depth learning of the artificial language. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I present a new model of the self-regulation of virtue that integrates perspectives on emotion, cognition, and motivation. Across three vignette-based studies in US/uk (N = 1,540), I developed through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis a multi-item measure of broadening and defensive responses, the Self-Regulation of Virtue Inventory (SRVI). I applied that measurement model to two new scenarios portraying prototypical moral exemplars (selected from a set of 12) and fitted structural models that identify key antecedents: motivational dispositions (regulatory focus (...) and hedonic orientation) and moral comparisons (opinion- and ability-based). The findings were consistent with network analysis, providing initial evidence of their robustness. By integrating literatures on motivation, emotion, social cognition and comparison within a self-regulation framework, I provide initial evidence to advance theory on moral self-regulation and moral education, with practical implications on how to maximise the upsides of virtue while mitigating or channelling its possible drawbacks. (shrink)

Philosophers, theologians, physicists, and psychologists join their efforts to reflect on the crucial issues of limit and infinity, time and eternity, empty space and material space. The volume offers an invaluable contribution to some of the most important issues of our times: questions on God and consciousness are discussed in parallel with quantum theory, black holes, the inflationary universe, the Big Bang, and string theory, from different perspectives and angles, ranging from neuroscience to AI.

Cumulative Prospect Theory is the modern version of Prospect Theory and it is nowadays considered a valid alternative to the classical Expected Utility Theory. Cumulative Prospect theory implies Gain-Loss Separability, i.e., the separate evaluation of losses and gains within a mixed gamble. Recently, some authors have questioned this assumption of the theory, proposing new paradoxes where the Gain-Loss Separability is violated. We present a generalization of Cumulative Prospect Theory which does not imply Gain-Loss Separability and is able to explain the (...) cited paradoxes. On the other hand, the new model, which we call the bipolar Cumulative Prospect Theory, genuinely generalizes the original Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky, preserving the main features of the theory. We present also a characterization of the bipolar Choquet Integral with respect to a bi-capacity in a discrete setting. (shrink)

Extensive training with a musical instrument results in the automatisation of the bodily operations needed to manipulate the instrument: the performer no longer has to consciously think about the instrument while playing. The ability of the performer to automate operations on the instrument is due to sensorimotor mechanisms that can predict changes in the state of the body and the instrument in response to motor commands. But how strong are these mechanisms? To what extent can we alter the structure of (...) the instrument before they disappear? We performed an exploratory study to understand whether and how sensorimotor predictions survive instrument modification. We asked seven professional violinists to perform repertoire pieces and sight-reading exercises on four different violins: their own, a cheap violin, a small violin, and a violin whose strings had been put on in reverse order. We performed a series of quantitative investigations on performance intonation and duration, and on bowing gestures and errors. The analysis revealed that participants struggled adapting to the altered instruments, suggesting that prediction mechanisms are a function of instrument configuration. In particular, the analysis of bowing errors, intonation, and of performance duration suggested that the performance with the reverse violin was much less fluent and precise than the performer's own instrument; the performance with the small violin was also sub-standard though to a lesser extent. We also observed that violinists were differently affected by instrument modifications, suggesting that the capability to adapt to a new instrument is highly personal. (shrink)

BackgroundDefinition and concept of the ‘beginning of human life’ are weakened by co-existing contrasting hypotheses based on humanistic or religious beliefs rather than scientific foundations. This plethora of conceptually distant views have important common concerns in different fields of science and shape, in turn, several societal aspects including laws related, for instance, to inheritance eligibility or abortion, end-of-life care and euthanasia, and reproductive technology. Also, they are fundamental to evaluate opportunity for resuscitation vs. palliative care in extremely preterm infants. In (...) this article, we address one of the most common tenets in medicine: the acceptance that human life starts with first breath, even though several events are well-documented to take place before its occurrence.Main textSeveral studies show how pivotal physiological events take place before first breath. Evidence of a number of neurological events occurring before first breath opens the way to the primacy of the Central Nervous System, given its immediate extra-uterine activation at birth. This activation eventually sets specific physiological conditions that allow the complex sequence of events determining the muscle activity associated with the influx of air in the lung and the settling of a continuous and successful extra-uterine respiration. We would like to invite the scientific community to endorse a clear-cut position against the paradigm of ‘first breath’ as the beginning of life. Herein, we also assume how, a still undefined, yet possibly specific quid in the external environment triggers further physiological response in newborns. Better understanding of the critical events that occur at the beginning of human life is likely to cause great concern and expectations in scientists, researchers and physicians working in the domain of brain, and its physiology, and mental health.ConclusionsThe comparison between beliefs and evidence-based observations generates confusion, misperceptions and false expectations in society, hence, in the scientific and medical community. Different and more solid alternatives about the carachterization of the ‘beginning of human life’ are indeed available and require to be explored and defined. (shrink)

In the present work is addressed three defining aspects of the question hermeneutics as didactic and condition to generate a shared horizon of meaning. In the first place the dialog between the text, author and reader. Second, the opening of the horizon of meaning through the question and its radical ontological. Third, the role of tradition in the construction of rational discourse and breaking through a language polysemic. Finally, we conclude that the dialog that opens horizon and shared sense is (...) the only capable of building long-term consensus and, specifically, solutions. (shrink)

La teneur d'un ouvrage philosophique dépend à la fois des thèses qui y sont déployées par son auteur et des références dont celui-ci se nourrit. Dans l'oeuvre de Gaston Bachelard, le système référentiel est tout particulièrement abondant : comme si le philosophe redoutait secrètement la vaticination, préférant étayer ses affirmations par des matériaux qu'il puise dans l'univers, pour ainsi dire illimité, de ses lectures. De fait, il n'a jamais caché avoir été un lecteur boulimique, insatiable. Ce faisant, il oublie de (...) dire que toute sa vie est aussi bien un acte d'écriture, dont la table d'existence, c'est-à-dire la table de travail, est le support fondamental. Écriture et lectures s'avèrent pour lui intimement liées. C'est bien pourquoi l'Index que nous proposons ici présente un intérêt majeur. Il dévoile de façon ordonnée l'abondance impressionnante d'une culture qui se met sans arrêt au service d'une pensée. En même temps il agit à la manière d'un spectrographe, qui révèle des zones privilégiées de références et de préoccupations. Dans le cas de Gaston Bachelard, le champ des affinités philosophiques est particulièrement révélateur : il s'y noue un réseau globalement cohérent de références récurrentes, qui apparaît en même temps sur un fond de désaffections implicites : c'est dire qu'il y a de grands absents dans le répertoire bachelardien. De fait, et globalement, il cite beaucoup plus largement les savants et les poètes que les grands philosophes de la tradition classique. D'une utilisation particulièrement aisée, cet Index permettra aux chercheurs, aux étudiants et à tous les lecteurs passionnés de repérer les sources explicites de Gaston Bachelard disséminées à l'intérieur de son oeuvre. (shrink)

Se discuten dos argumentos del diálogo Protágoras sobre la relación entre las virtudes individuales. En primer lugar se defiende -frente a Terry Penner- la tesis de Vlastos de que cuando Sócrates dice que "la justicia es justa", "la justicia es piadosa", etc., está destacando la mutua implicación entre las virtudes, y no su identidad; y se formula una hipótesis para explicar la razón de tal reciprocidad. En segundo lugar, se examina el argumento de que, puesto que la insensatez se opone (...) tanto a la moderación como a la sabiduría, y un término contrario no puede tener más de un contrario, moderación y sabiduría serían "una sola cosa". Se asevera que Platón quiere que rechacemos esta última conclusión, basada en el fondo en la idea de que las distintas virtudes se relacionan entre sí como las partes de un mismo rostro. Se concluye que los argumentos analizados no implican realmente la idea contraintuitiva de la identifi cación mutua de las virtudes.Two arguments from the Protagoras on the unity of the virtues are here dwelt with. First, it is claimed - with G. Vlastos and contra T. Penner - that when Socrates says that “justice is just”, “justice is pious”, etc. he wants to highlight the reciprocity of the individual virtues, not their mutual identity . Second, it is argued that Plato does not really want us to infer from folly’s opposition to both temperance and wisdom the need to identify these two virtues . He is only drawing our attention to their close relationship. This is enough to reject the hypothesis initially defended by Protagoras, i.e. that the different virtues relate to each other as the parts of a face. I conclude that the two aforesaid arguments do not really support the mutual identity of the virtues. (shrink)

This book shows how the current reform in investment regulation is part of a broader attempt to transform the international economic order. Countries in the North and South are currently rethinking how economic order should be constituted in order to advance their national interests and preferred economic orientation. While some countries in the North seek to create alternative institutional spaces in order to promote neoliberal policies more effectively, some countries in the South are increasingly skeptical of this version of economic (...) order and are experimenting with alternative versions of legal ordering that do not always sit well with mainstream versions promoted by the North. While we recognize that there are differences in approaches to the investment regimes proposed by countries in the South, we identify commonalities that could function as the founding pillars of an alternative economic order. (shrink)

Contemporary Darwinian medicine is a still-expanding new discipline whose principal aim is to arrive at an evolutionary understanding of aspects of the body that leave it vulnerable to disease. Historically, there was a precedent; between 1880 and 1940 several scientists tried to develop a general evolutionary theory of disease as arising from deleterious traits that escape elimination by natural selection. In contrast, contemporary Darwinian medicine uses evolutionary theory to consider all the possible reasons why selection has left human vulnerable to (...) a disease. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop...

Volume I. Aborto-azione popolare -- Volume II. Banche dati-Buoni costumi -- Volume III. Cadavere-Cyborg -- Volume IV. Danno alla salute-Duplice effetto -- Volume V. Ebraismo-Evoluzionismo -- Volume VI. Fallacia naturalistica-Guerra -- Volume VII. Handicap-Living will -- Volume VIII. Madre - mutilazioni genitali -- Volume IX. Nanoscienza e nanotecnologia - ortodossia -- Volume X. Pace-robotica -- Volume XI. Sacralità della vita : sviluppo sostenibile -- Volume XII. Tecniche di fecondazione artificiale : zigote.

Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this respect, and go on to suggest a complementary account that stresses the central role (...) of internally democratic and participatory political parties in actualising popular sovereignty, drawing on the democratic theory of Hans Kelsen. (shrink)

Fábio Alves dos Santos (1954-2013) cursou Pedagogia, Ciências Sociais e Teologia, era Especialista em Filosofia da Religião (PUC Minas), Advogado (PUC Minas) e Mestre em Direito Constitucional (UFMG). Lecionou na PUC Minas como professor de Cultura Religiosa e depois como professor no Curso de Direito, atuando principalmente no Serviço de Assistência Judiciária – SAJ, especialmente cuidado de causas populares como as da ASMARE (Associação dos Catadores de Papel, Papelão e Material Reaproveitável de Belo Horizonte), da Pastoral de Rua, da Pastoral (...) Carcerária, de movimentos de “Sem Casa”, de ocupações e tantos outros grupos. Fábio sofria de grave problema de visão há mais de 15 anos. Quase ficou cego depois de diversas cirurgias de miopia. Isso, porém, não o impedia de seguir seu constante compromisso com as lutas populares. Na última entrevista que concedeu, menos de um mês antes de sua morte (19 de outubro de 2013), depois de duro sofrimento de quase dois anos, no tratamento de um câncer no pâncreas, conta um pouco de sua vida, sua luta e sua percepção de várias realidades, especialmente da Igreja e da pastoral. Militante formado na Teologia da Libertação, de profunda espiritualidade, marcada por traços da religiosidade popular nordestina e comprometida com a libertação, Fábio Alves também buscou em sua vida abrir-se à teologia do pluralismo religioso, especialmente com o Santo Daime, em cuja tradição religiosa chegou a ser “fardado”, mantendo uma profunda atitude espiritual aberta ao diálogo inter-religioso. Sua primeira publicação foi “Começo de mundo novo: sofrimento, luta e vitória dos posseiros de Santana dos Frades”, Sergipe, numa versão popular em 1981 e outra pela Editora Vozes (1990). Fruto de sua dissertação de mestrado, publicou o livro “Direito Agrário: política fundiária no Brasil (1995). Em 2001 saiu seu último livro, uma coletânea de artigos publicados em diversos jornais: “Em defesa da vida”. Num artigo em Horizonte (2004), juntamente com o advogado, amigo e colega Prof. Cristiano de Melo Bastos, discutiu “A prática jurídica na missão da PUC Minas”. Palavras-chave : Teologia da Libertação. Militância. Igreja Católica. Pastoral. Lutas populares. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a “promises and perils” framework for understanding the “soft” impacts of emerging technology, and argue for a eudaimonic conception of well-being. This eudaimonic conception of well-being, however, presupposes that we have something like stable character traits. I therefore defend this view from the “situationist challenge” and show that instead of viewing this challenge as a threat to well-being, we can incorporate it into how we think about living well with technology. Human beings are susceptible to (...) situational influences and are often unaware of the ways that their social and technological environment influence not only their ability to do well, but even their ability to know whether they are doing well. Any theory that attempts to describe what it means for us to be doing well, then, needs to take these contextual features into account and bake them into a theory of human flourishing. By paying careful attention to these contextual factors, we can design systems that promote human flourishing. (shrink)

Focused on city-scale automation, and using self-driving cars (SDCs) as a case study, this article reflects on the role of AI—and in particular, computer vision systems used for mapping and navigation—as a catalyst for urban transformation. Urban research commonly presents AI and cities as having a one-way cause-and-effect relationship, giving undue weight to AI’s impact on cities and overlooking the role of cities in shaping AI. Working at the intersection of data science and social research, this paper aims to counter (...) this trend by exploring the reverse perspective: how do cities affect the development, and expose the present limits, of SDCs? The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, by comparing urban and nonurban environments and thoroughly examining the relationship between computer vision and city-specific sociality and form, it defines machine autonomy/automation as a function of the sociotechnical milieu in which an AI system operates. Second, and related, the paper problematizes the notion of SDCs as autonomous technologies and the role it plays in envisioning contending policy arrangements and technical solutions for achieving full driving automation. Finally, the article offers insight into a materialist and spatialized understanding of AI—namely, not as an abstract quality susceptible to replication within discrete machines, but rather as a distributed property emerging through embodied interactions among a multiplicity of agents (human, non-human, and technological) within/with their environments. (shrink)

Riassunto: Al centro di questo articolo è l’analisi dei fondamenti neurocognitivi dei deficit macrolinguistici, discorsivo-narrativi nello specifico, osservabili nei pazienti affetti da schizofrenia. Tale analisi è condotta in riferimento alle ricerche svolte negli ultimi decenni nell’ambito della psicolinguistica e delle neuroscienze. I risultati di queste ricerche hanno mostrato che alcuni aspetti dei disturbi macroelaborativi che caratterizzano il profilo linguistico dei pazienti schizofrenici possono essere spiegati chiamando in causa i deficit di tre sistemi cognitivi: teoria della mente, funzioni esecutive, memoria semantica. (...) In questo articolo si sostiene che un tale quadro esplicativo vada integrato attraverso il riferimento a un ulteriore processo cognitivo cruciale per l’elaborazione macrolinguistica: la costruzione di scenari. Tale processo è fondamentale per la comprensione e produzione discorsiva in quanto responsabile della costruzione della rappresentazione globale degli eventi del discorso narrativo. Alla luce di queste considerazioni, in questo lavoro si propone che un ruolo cruciale nella spiegazione di alcuni aspetti dei disturbi macrolinguistici nella schizofrenia sia svolto da una compromissione nel processo di costruzione di scenari mentali e si avanza l’ipotesi che tale compromissione sia determinata, a sua volta, da problematiche che agiscono sul piano del funzionamento delle aree cerebrali preposte alla percezione e all’assemblaggio multimodale delle rappresentazioni sensomotorie. Parole chiave: Abilità macrolinguistiche; Costruzione di scenari; Elaborazione discorsiva: Embodied Cognition; Narrazione; Schizofrenia; Percezione; Modelli mentali The role scenario building in the explanation of macrolinguistic disorders in schizophrenia: This article analyzes the neurocognitive foundations of macrolinguistic deficits, specifically narrative, observable in patients with schizophrenia. This analysis is conducted with reference to the investigations carried out in recent decades in the field of psycholinguistics and neuroscience. The results of these investigations showed that some aspects of macrolinguistic deficits of schizophrenics can be explained in terms of impairments of three cognitive systems: theory of mind, executive functions, and semantic memory. In this article, it is suggested that this explanatory framework has to be integrated with the reference to a further cognitive process: scenarios construction. Such process turns out to be critical for discourse comprehension and production as it is responsible for the building of the global representation of events of a narrative. In the light of these considerations, it is claimed that a crucial role in the explanation of some aspects of macrolinguistic disorders in schizophrenia is played by an impairment in the process of constructing mental scenarios. The hypothesis is that this impairment is, in turn, determined by problems affecting the brain areas responsible for the perception and multimodal assembly of sensorimotor representations. Keywords: Discourse Processing; Embodied Cognition; Macrolinguistic Skills; Scenario Building; Narrative; Schizophrenia; Perception; Mental Models. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can accommodate populism provided that the latter conforms to (...) particular discursive norms. What the article calls a ‘liberal ethics of populism’ turns out to be closely bound up with a broader ethics of peoplehood, understood as a way of articulating who ‘the people’ are in a way that is compatible with liberal–democratic principles of political justification. Such an ethics, concludes the article, inevitably has a much wider audience than populist political actors: its addressees are all those who seek legitimately to exercise power in the name of the people. (shrink)

Building on early work by Girard ( 1987 ) and using closely related techniques from the proof theory of many-valued logics, we propose a sequent calculus capturing a hierarchy of notions of satisfaction based on the Strong Kleene matrices introduced by Barrio et al. (Journal of Philosophical Logic 49:93–120, 2020 ) and others. The calculus allows one to establish and generalize in a very natural manner several recent results, such as the coincidence of some of these notions with their classical (...) counterparts, and the possibility of expressing some notions of satisfaction for higher-level inferences using notions of satisfaction for inferences of lower level. We also show that at each level all notions of satisfaction considered are pairwise distinct and we address some remarks on the possible significance of this (huge) number of notions of consequence. (shrink)

Plutarch’s account of Lucullus unsuccessfully begging his soldiers to follow him further, shortly before being forced to leave his command, is commonly read as the apex of his failure as a military leader. A close reading, however, reveals two hitherto overlooked aspects. Firstly, the story offers valuable information on late Republican military history, regarding the duration of military service before Augustus’ reform and the existence of clearly defined subgroups within the army. Secondly, the conflict between Lucullus and his soldiers allows (...) us to get a glimpse of the political debate of the time, characterised by the competing claims to Sulla’s heritage, the shift of military loyalty towards specific individuals, and above all the question of who really represented the interests of the res publica. (shrink)

Unworkable discusses the ongoing implosion of our globalized world from three distinct angles: the capitalist elimination of labor through technological automation, the dissolution of our shared social narratives, and the subtle imposition of an increasingly pervasive ideological order. Aiming to root out the lost cause of this implosion, Fabio Vighi returns to Marx by way of Hegel, Lacan, Gorz, Baudrillard, and other thinkers who, in different ways, have reflected on the complex dialectical structure of modernity and its hidden conditions (...) of possibility. Capitalism, Vighi argues, fundamentally redefined the meaning of work and prevented the emergence of alternative forms of life. In our own time, the delusions of work and the values that propel life under capitalism have become, in Vighi's analysis, unworkable. And yet, even as we become an increasingly "workless" society, we continue to abide by the same laws of productivity and profit. (shrink)