The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely (...) argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments. (shrink)

The founding motto of philosophy in science is “tracking down big philosophical problems in contemporary science.” Knowing the basic history of philosophy and the history of science, we more or less know what “big philosophical topics” mean. The most representative topics of this kind include: time, space, causality, matter, life, consciousness, thinking... The tables of contents of philosophy textbooks could be copied to continue this list. These topics are big not only when they remain at a high level of generality, (...) but also when they get down to special cases and particular sub-problems. Sometimes it is only then that they fully reveal their big format. (shrink)

Recenzja książki: Bogdan Dembiński, _Stara Akademia Platona. W początkach epoki hellenistycznej _, Wydawnictwo Marek Derewiecki, Kęty 2018, s. 183.

Our present knowledge in the field of dynamical systems, information theory, probability theory and other similar domains indicates that the human brain is a complex dynamical system working in a strong chaotic regime in which random processes play important roles. In this environment our mental life develops. To choose a logically ordered sequence from a random or almost random stream of thoughts is a difficult and energy consuming task. The only domain in which we are able to do this with (...) a full success is mathematics. Leibniz’s life ambition was to extend this success, with the help of what he called _characteristica universalis_, to other areas of human activity. The belief that this is possible lies at the basis of Leibniz’s rationalist system. Reasoning within his system, Leibniz claimed that also fundamental laws of physics can be deduced from the “first principles”. Just as linguistic or conceptual units are at the basis of the _charactersistica universalis_, his monads are responsible for physical activity of material bodies. When this rationalistic strategy is applied to the philosophy of space and time, it leads to their radically relational conception. Leibniz’s rationalistic approach to philosophy and science arouses out sympathy but it was Newton’s mathematical-empirical method that turned out to be effective in human endeavour to understand the functioning of the physical world. Successes of the Newtonian method compel us to revise our concept of rationality. (shrink)

The article discusses the political meaning of refusal. Against the dominating philosophical perspective, praising participation and sense of community, it argues that the acts of refusal may play an important role in resistance against power. Some elements of a possible theory of refusal are to be found in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, especially in his famous essay on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, but also in Dialogues and Mille Plateaux, where he coins the crucial concept of becoming-imperceptible.