Psychiatric disorders share an excess of seasonal birth in winter and spring, suggesting an increase of neurodevelopmental risks. Evidence suggests season of birth can serve as a proxy of harmful environmental factors. Given that prenatal exposure of these factors may trigger pathologic processes in the neurodevelopment, they may consequently lead to brain volume alterations. Here we tested the effects of season of birth on gray matter volume in a transdiagnostic sample of patients with schizophrenia and depression compared to healthy controls. (...) We found a significant effect of season of birth on gray matter volume with reduced right hippocampal volume in summer-born compared to winter-born patients with depression. In addition, the volume of the right hippocampus was reduced independent from season of birth in schizophrenia. Our results support the potential impact of season of birth on hippocampal volume in depression. (shrink)

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as (...) a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language. (shrink)

.This paper discusses Aristotle’s thesis and Boethius’ thesis, the most distinctive theorems of connexive logic. Its aim is to show that, although there is something plausible in Aristotle’s thesis and Boethius’ thesis, the intuitions that may be invoked to motivate them are consistent with any account of indicative conditionals that validates a suitably restricted version of them. In particular, these intuitions are consistent with the view that indicative conditionals are adequately formalized as strict conditionals.

Several attempts have been made previously to provide a biological grounding for cognitive architectures by relating their components to the computations of specific brain circuits. Often, the architecture's action selection system is identified with the basal ganglia. However, this identification overlooks one of the most important features of the basal ganglia—the existence of a direct and an indirect pathway that compete against each other. This characteristic has important consequences in decision-making tasks, which are brought to light by Parkinson's disease as (...) well as genetic differences in dopamine receptors. This paper shows that a standard model of action selection in a cognitive architecture cannot replicate any of these findings, details an alternative solution that reconciles action selection in the architecture with the physiology of the basal ganglia, and extends the domain of application of cognitive architectures. The implication of this solution for other architectures and existing models are discussed. (shrink)

Currently much debate surrounds the significance of cross-cultural variation in mother-infant attachment. Is only one form of attachment “healthy,” or are different types of attachment adaptations to local socioecological conditions? Juvenile mortality rates have been promoted as important features of local environments that shape attachment, which in turn affects later reproductive strategies. To this we add fertility. Fertility changes the environment of a child by influencing the number of potential caregivers and competitors for care, and the cultural ethos regarding the (...) rights of children. Different combinations of fertility and mortality will likely give rise to different attachment forms, and only under one regime (low fertility and mortality) do we expect exclusivity in attachment. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the prospects of a Neo-Aristotelian position—according to which the difference between the human species and non-human animals is a difference in ‘form’—in the context of the question of how the human form of life is related to the idea of education. Two interpretations of this idea have been suggested by contemporary Neo-Aristotelian philosophy that offer contrasting accounts of the role played by education. According to the first, the idea of a formal difference goes with a (...) notion of potentiality, according to which the distinctiveness of the human is mainly a product of education, and hence a matter of second nature. According to the second, the idea of the human is the idea of a formally distinctive kind of first nature that explains the very possibility of education. I maintain that both interpretations do justice to an important aspect of human life yet fail fully to grasp the significance of the notion of ‘form’ that they employ. I argue that to embrace the insight that the difference of the human is a difference in ‘form’, we must think of the human as a form of life whose very concept contains the concept of education. The concept of education, I argue, is a logical concept, contained in the concept of life that it describes. (shrink)

In his interesting commentary, Joshua Shepherd raises two points—one related to epistemology, the other to ethics—about our article on human cerebral organoids.1 2 From the epistemological standpoint, he calls into question the need for a theory of consciousness. A theory of consciousness, for him, is not necessary because of the lack of consensus about the very nature of consciousness. Shepherd suggests that ‘given widespread disagreement, applying a theory of consciousness may not be helpful when attempting to diagnose the presence of (...) consciousness in cerebral organoids’. In Shepherd’s view, it would be better to transfer ‘concepts already under development in work on the presence and structure of consciousness in difficult marginal cases involving traumatic brain injury’.2 We could not agree more on this last point; detecting a minimal capacity for consciousness in the brain of comatose patients is a very similar challenge to inferring the presence of consciousness in cerebral organoids. Every day, as a by-product of saving many lives, intensive care medicine artificially produces thousands of brains that may remain isolated, split or fragmented; in the worst case, cortical islands, or an archipelago of islands, may survive while being disconnected from the outside world. Can these islands host some form of consciousness? That is, does it feel like anything to be a large piece of human cortex? Addressing this difficult question requires the development of general, objective brain-based indices of consciousness that are independent of sensory processing, executive functions and motor outputs.3 Consider, for example, a patient showing reflexive spontaneous behaviour, no response to command and no ability to communicate. In her brain, afferent pathways are damaged, thereby impairing the recruitment of cortical areas in response to sensory stimulation; basal ganglia, as well as other frontal structures supporting executive functions, are impaired. However, resting metabolism and significant electroencephalography …. (shrink)

Ontologies are created to describe and reason over the knowledge of a domain of interest. This requires deep understanding of the domain, and therefore, the input and collaboration of the domain’s...

Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la inducción analítica como método científico de investigación, es decir, como modo válido de hacer ciencia. En 1934, su creador, el filósofo y sociólogo Florian Znaniecki, afirmó que este era el método que debía ser adoptado en toda investigación sociológica. Su relevancia radica en que se propone encontrar explicaciones globales de los fenómenos sociales a partir de la utilización de técnicas cualitativas de investigación. Aquí adopto una perspectiva histórica que permite inscribir su (...) emergencia y evolución en un contexto mayor del desarrollo de metodologías cualitativas en sociología, para luego reflexionar sobre sus presupuestos epistemológicos y las críticas de las que fue objeto. Por último, realizo un balance de los aportes de esta metodología a la disciplina.: The aim of this article is to study analytic induction as a scientific research method, that is, as a valid way of making science. In 1934, the philosopher and sociologist Florian Znaniecki, its creator, referred to this methodology as the method that should be adopted by any sociological research. Its relevance lies on the fact that its goal is to find global explanations to social phenomena by using qualitative research techniques. I adopt a historical perspective to inscribe this method’s emergency and evolution in a larger context of the development of qualitative methods in sociology, and then reflect upon its epistemological basis and the criticisms made in relation to it. Finally, I evaluate this method’s contributions to the discipline. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

Recent replication crises in psychology and other fields have led to intense reflection about the validity of common research practices. Much of this reflection has focussed on reporting standards, and how they may be related to the questionable research practices that could underlie a high proportion of irreproducible findings in the published record. As a developing field, it is particularly important for Experimental Philosophy to avoid some of the pitfalls that have beset other disciplines. To this end, here we provide (...) a detailed, comprehensive assessment of current reporting practices in Experimental Philosophy. We focus on the quality of statistical reporting and the disclosure of information about study methodology. We assess all the articles using quantitative methods that were published over the years 2013–2016 in 29 leading philosophy journals. We find that null hypothesis significance testing is the prevalent statistical practice in Experimental Philosophy, although relying solely on this approach has been criticised in the psychological literature. To augment this approach, various additional measures have become commonplace in other fields, but we find that Experimental Philosophy has adopted these only partially: 53% of the papers report an effect size, 28% confidence intervals, 1% examined prospective statistical power and 5% report observed statistical power. Importantly, we find no direct relation between an article’s reporting quality and its impact. We conclude with recommendations for authors, reviewers and editors in Experimental Philosophy, to facilitate making research statistically-transparent and reproducible. (shrink)

In the present article, we aimed at describing the diagnostic process in Psychiatry through a phenomenological perspective. We have identified 4 core concepts which may represent the joints of a phenomenologically oriented diagnosis. The "tightrope walking" attitude refers to the psychiatrist's ability to swing between 2 different and sometimes contrasting tendencies (e.g., engagement and disengagement). The "holistic experience" includes all those intuitive, nonverbal, and pre-thematic elements that emerge in the early stages of the clinical encounter as an emanation of the (...) atmospheric quality of the intersubjective space. The "co-construction of symptoms" regards the hermeneutic process behind psychiatric symptoms, involving both the patient as a self-interpreting agent and the clinician as a translator of his/her experience. Finally, by the "evolving typification" we mean that the closer the relationship becomes with the patient, the more specific and nuanced becomes the typification behind psychiatric diagnosis. Each of these concepts will be accompanied by an extract from a clinical case deriving from one of the authors' most recent clinical experiences. (shrink)

In Plato's Gorgias Callicles argues for a life rooted in insatiable desire and the endless experience of pleasure, justifying this by appealing to nature, with examples of the lion, Xerxes, and Heracles. This essay shows that Callicles' examples undermine his own claims. Socrates examines the effects of Callicles' imperialistic hedonism on the soul. Socrates locates Callicles in Hades twice: first demonstrating that insatiable desire amounts to infinite neediness, then alerting Callicles to the consequences of the hedonistic life. This essay argues (...) that the move into Hades is occasioned by Callicles' own position and that the two myths do philosophical work. In contrast to Callicles, Socrates demonstrates that his life is consonant with nature. It does not depend on an after-life for its satisfaction, but it is not afraid of the possibility of an after-life. Socrates emerges victorious in the contest between the hedonistic and the philosophical life. (shrink)

There is no rigorous philosophy which does not depend on history of philosophy, and which does not acknowledge this dependence; there is no cogent research on history of philosophy which does not take also a philosophical position. This is the credo informing the contributions to this Thesis Eleven special issue on Ágnes Heller. Yet each contribution embodies this afflatus in its specific way, each one discusses Ágnes Heller and with Ágnes Heller according to its own standpoint, whether ethics or epistemology, (...) aesthetics or philosophy of history, (meta)philosophy or history and its vicissitudes. The fundamental tonality being the same, all contributions colour it with their rhythms and styles: a sort of philosophical “suite” inviting us to dance the philosophy of Ágnes Heller. (shrink)

In this article I present a new perspective on the theological concept of justification, by focusing not on the content but on the form of this concept. I start with the semantic overabundance related to justification, with specific reference three meanings: the forensic, the effective, and the ontological-theotic. Then, I confront these meanings with Luther's idea of justification as in his De servo arbitrio. Thanks to this, I stress that the theological concept of justification plays a meta-conceptual function: it affirms (...) the priority of divine justification over any standard condition of conceptualization and thinkability of justification – in specific, the structure of imputative justice. This leads to a reconsideration of the role of this concept as "articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiæ". (shrink)

Kritik: Peter Remmers, Film als Wissensform. Eine Philosophische Untersuchung der Wahrnehmung filmischer Bewegungsbilder, Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter 2018.

Since their first appearance in the late 18th century (Herder, Novalis), and particularly during the golden age between the late 19th and the early 20th century (Vischer, Lipps), the theories of empathy (Einfühlung) have frequently interpreted the ancient issue of the animation of the inanimate on the basis of a hydraulic model of communicating vases: the human subject fills the void object with her/his feelings. The unsustainable psychologistic subjectivism underpinned by such model was radically criticized both by Gestalt theorists and (...) phenomenologists, who rejected the idea of emotional projection and claimed the expressivity peculiar to any entity, both human and non-human. Nevertheless, the notion of empathy is not completely confuted by such criticism, for it does not completely coincide with the hydraulic model. In my paper I will try to show the possibility of a non-subjectivistic version of the Einfühlung referring to the analogical characterology developed in the circle of Lipps’ school (Pfänder, Geiger, Klages). (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence of (...) conceptually necessary connections. Hence, Clarke can harmonize God's freedom of choosing with the existence of eternal and necessary relations among things. Moreover, in Clarke's account, only intelligent entities can be properly understood as efficacious causes. Beings deprived of intelligence are not agents or efficacious causes at all and their effects are thus the result of the immediate action of some intelligent being operating upon them. (shrink)

Nel dibattito sui fondamenti filosofici della fisica, la teoria dell'organismo di Whitehead svolge un ruolo essenziale. Nonostante gli sforzi compiuti da molti studiosi, la posizione realista di Whitehead invalida qualsiasi tentativo di mettere in relazione la sua filosofia con l'interpretazione ortodossa della meccanica quantistica. Sia nelle sue opere matematiche che nelle filosofiche il suo «compito costruttivo» è stato «una protesta contro l'esenzione del cambiamento da qualsiasi parte dell'universo». Whitehead mirava a fondere la sua conoscenza nella logica matematica e nella fisica (...) matematica al fine di ottenere uno modello assiomatico e cosmologico diverso dal sistema newtoniano: la nozione di campo, introdotta per la prima volta dall'elettromagnetismo, non è riconciliabile con l'immagine meccanicista del mondo; inoltre, sia nella teoria della relatività che nella teoria quantistica, i fenomeni non lineari hanno mostrato i limiti di applicabilità dei postulati classici. La formalizzazione simbolica portata avanti da Whitehead ha come suo referente la nozione ontologica di periodicitá e ritmo, comuni in tutte le scale della complessitá: un quantum di energia, una molecola di ferro, una nota musicale, un organismo biologico, una marea oceanica, un pianeta e una stella sono sistemi periodici che hanno bisogno di un «lasso di tempo» per funzionare, per manifestarsi come entità e per esprimere la loro individualità. Ognuno di questi sistemi deve «essere concepito come una modifica delle condizioni nello spazio-tempo, estendendosi in tutta la suo campo». Inoltre, questi sistemi periodicamente, ritmicamente pulsanti, questi «stati di agitazione», sono analizzabili in una «regione focale» e in un flusso esterno, ma non separato, dal momento che «per la fisica, la cosa stessa è ciò che fa e ciò che fa è questo flusso di influenza divergente». (shrink)