Adriano Ardovino, Raccogliere il mondo. Per una fenomenologia della rete [Angela Maiello] • Clive Bell, L’Arte [Filippo Focosi] • Alessandro Bertinetto, Il pensiero dei suoni. Temi di filosofia della musica [Domenica Lentini] • Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature. How Mind Emerged From Matter [Mariagrazia Portera] • Roger Scruton, La bellezza. Ragione ed esperienza estetica [Filippo Focosi] • Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience. Sigfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theoder W. Adorno [Domenico Spinosa] • Lawrence Barsalou, scritti sulla “Grounded Cognition” [Gialuca (...) Consoli] • Dis-forme , Università degli Studi di Palermo, 28-29 maggio 2012 [Michele Bertolini e Pietro Conte]. (shrink)

The Handbook of Formal Argumentation is a community effort aimed at providing a comprehensive and up-to-date view of the state of the art and current trends in the lively research field of formal argumentation. The first volume of the Handbook is organised into five parts, containing nineteen chapters in all, each written by leading experts in the field. The first part provides a general and historical perspective on the field. The second part gives a comprehensive coverage of the argumentation formalisms (...) available in the literature at various levels of abstraction. The third part is devoted to cover some of the many dialogical aspects of argumentation, while the fourth one deals with algorithmic, computational and implementation issues. Finally, the fifth part provides some deeper analyses on the previously introduced topics. The Handbook of Formal Argumentation is an open-ended initiative of which the present volume is the first outcome. Further volumes are planned to cover topics not included in the present one and the initiative is conceived to grow by the support and feeding it receives from the community members. (shrink)

The paper explores Nietzsche's observations on language in Human, All Too Human I, 11; reflects on the anti-realist position that Nietzsche defends in that aphorism; and focuses on the role she plays in his later investigation on Western culture and its anthropology. As will be argued, Nietzsche's criticism towards common sense realism is consistent with some pragmatist epistemologies developed during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. This treat of " timeliness " does not limit Nietzsche's originality on the topic. In fact, (...) the idea that philosophy can contrast the metaphysical commitment of common sense can be seen as the theoretical tool that allows Nietzsche to operate on the development of European culture and society. (shrink)

We discuss the role of perceptron (or threshold) connectives in the context of Description Logic, and in particular their possible use as a bridge between statistical learning of models from data and logical reasoning over knowledge bases. We prove that such connectives can be added to the language of most forms of Description Logic without increasing the complexity of the corresponding inference problem. We show, with a practical example over the Gene Ontology, how even simple instances of perceptron connectives are (...) expressive enough to represent learned, complex concepts derived from real use cases. This opens up the possibility to import concepts learnt from data into existing ontologies. (shrink)

Ernst Mach’s definition of the relationship between thoughts and facts is well known, but the question of how Mach conceived of their actual relationship has received much less attention. This paper aims to address this gap in light of Mary B. Hesse’s view of a postempiricist approach to natural science. As this paper will show, this view is characterized by a constructivist conception of the relationship between theory and facts that seems to be consistent with Mach’s observations on scientific knowledge. (...) The paper first explores Hesse’s account of postempiricism and her project of a new epistemology. It then considers Ernst Mach’s conception of facts as the middle term of a triad of concepts that includes thoughts and elements as extreme terms. Finally, the paper will offer concluding remarks on Mach’s contribution to the debate on scientific realism and his attempt to redefine the notions of correspondence and objectivity in science. (shrink)

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has sparked significant debate and influenced mental health legislation reforms in many countries worldwide (Gill and Sartorius 2...

The properties of the ${\forall^{1}}$ quantifier defined by Kontinen and Väänänen in [13] are studied, and its definition is generalized to that of a family of quantifiers ${\forall^{n}}$ . Furthermore, some epistemic operators δ n for Dependence Logic are also introduced, and the relationship between these ${\forall^{n}}$ quantifiers and the δ n operators are investigated.The Game Theoretic Semantics for Dependence Logic and the corresponding Ehrenfeucht- Fraissé game are then adapted to these new connectives.Finally, it is proved that the ${\forall^{1}}$ quantifier (...) is not uniformly definable in Dependence Logic, thus answering a question posed by Kontinen and Väänänen in the above mentioned paper. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to a comparison between Ernst Mach's and Friedrich Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical approach to scientific and philosophical concepts. By making reference to Mach’s early essay on the conservation of energy (Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit, 1872), I argue that Nietzsche shares with him the idea that the concepts we adopt are only useful fictions developed during the history of humankind and its culture. This idea is fundamental for the development of modern (...) science, since Mach’s epistemology contributed to give up the mechanistic (Newtonian) view of physics. (shrink)

In the last five years, the Italian political system registered its most important crisis. All parties, existing since the second world war, disappeared or were greatly transformed. The main purpose of this article is to analyse the deepest causes of the first Italian republic's collapse, following some specific interpretations of ltalian political observers.L. Ricolfi bases his theory on the emergence of "Lega" and the return of laïque culture in Italy. The old christian democratic and communist parties will suffer the most (...) from these changes.A. Sofri emphasizes the identity of northern regionalism between the "Lega" and the "Pool of Milan". A real opposition emerges between the judges of Milan and the politicians of Rome.S. Romano and M.L. Salvadori prefer the historical approach: for them, the events of1990-1994 are very similar to what happened in 1922-1926and in 1943-1945. The absence of a pacific alternative and the "ideological war" among political forces produce the effect that every change in Italian politics implies an end of regime.L. Ornaghi and V.B. Parsi deal with the "values" of citizens which, very often, do not correspond to the values of old politicians. For them, a democracy for the political parties -as structured in the last 45 years- must give priority to a democracy for the citizens. (shrink)

We develop a semantics for independence logic with respect to what we will call general models. We then introduce a simpler entailment semantics for the same logic, and we reduce the validity problem in the former to the validity problem in the latter. Then we build a proof system for independence logic and prove its soundness and completeness with respect to entailment semantics.

Hilary Putnam spent much of his career criticizing the fact/value dichotomy, and this became apparent already during the phase when he defended internal realism. He later changed his epistemological and metaphysical view by endorsing natural realism, with the consequence of embracing alethic pluralism, the idea that truth works differently in various discourse domains. Despite these changes of mind in epistemology and in theory of truth, Putnam went on criticizing the fact/value dichotomy. However, alethic pluralism entails drawing distinctions among discourse domains, (...) especially between factual and nonfactual domains, and these distinctions are in tension with the rejection of the fact/value dichotomy, as this would in principle hinder factual domains as genuine. This issue raises, prima facie, some doubts about the effective compatibility of these views. (shrink)

We examine the transitions between sets of possible worlds described by the compositional semantics of Modal Dependence Logic, and we use them as the basis for a dynamic version of this logic. We give a game theoretic semantics, a (compositional) transition semantics and a power game semantics for this new variant of modal Dependence Logic, and we prove their equivalence; and furthermore, we examine a few of the properties of this formalism and show that Modal Dependence Logic can be recovered (...) from it by reasoning in terms of reachability. Then we show how we can generalize this approach to a very general formalism for reasoning about transformations between pointed Kripke models. (shrink)

Biomarkers are widely used not only as prognostic or diagnostic indicators, or as surrogate markers of disease in clinical trials, but also to formulate theories of pathogenesis. We identify two problems in the use of biomarkers in mechanistic studies. The first problem arises in the case of multifactorial diseases, where different combinations of multiple causes result in patient heterogeneity. The second problem arises when a pathogenic mediator is difficult to measure. This is the case of the oxidative stress (OS) theory (...) of disease, where the causal components are reactive oxygen species (ROS) that have very short half-lives. In this case, it is usual to measure the traces left by the reaction of ROS with biological molecules, rather than the ROS themselves. Borrowing from the philosophical theories of signs, we look at the different facets of biomarkers and discuss their different value and meaning in multifactorial diseases and system medicine to inform their use in patient stratification in personalized medicine. (shrink)

An outdated geography supplies the bond among the thirty‐one articles in Sur les traces des Cassini. In the seventeenth century, when the Italians Gian Domenico Cassini and his nephew Giacomo Filippo Maraldi were born in Perinaldo, north of Genoa, their birthplace belonged to the County of Nice. Hence the rationale of building a set of papers on astronomy in the south of France around Cassini I and his family, which for four generations ran the Royal Observatory in Paris.Over half (...) the articles concern the Cassinis, mostly Cassini I and his great‐great‐grandson and namesake Cassini IV. There was also a Cassini V, Henri de Cassini, who countered the family genius and stamina by preferring botany and dying early, of the same outbreak of cholera that took the life of Sadi Carnot, without having created Cassini VI. He had already entered the Academy of Sciences with a push from his father. “I dare to beg of you [Cassini IV wrote to his fellow academician A. M. Ampère] to consider whether this unique situation in the history of letters, [a family's] devotion to the sciences for five successive generations and 170 years, ought not add some weight to the scientific credentials of my son.” It is hard to refuse the children of important alumni.The portion of Traces dealing more directly with astronomy in the south of France gets off to a distant start. Pytheas of Marseilles, who lived about 350 b.c., sailed to the Orkneys and the Baltic and earned himself the reputation of a liar back home for his stories of midnight suns and frozen lakes. He measured the latitude of Marseilles, the obliquity of the ecliptic, and the size of the earth. Ptolemy praised him. Strabo did not: “Pytheas lied about everything and covered it up with his knowledge of astronomy and numbers.”No traces worth following up were laid down for just under two thousand years. Then, in 1580, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc first saw the light of day. He lived in Italy for four years as a very young man, deepening his knowledge of astronomy and human nature and meeting the main future actors in the Galileo affair: Galileo himself, Bellarmine, and Matteo Barberini . At his center in Aix‐la‐Provence, Peiresc made many useful astronomical observations, some in collaboration with Pierre Gassendi. He died in harness, worrying about the change of the obliquity since the days of Pytheas.There follow articles on Provençal astronomers who determined longitude and latitude at sea, on neglected observers in Languedoc who assisted the cause of the Enlightenment, and on modern observatories in the south of France. The political circumstances after the defeat of 1870–1871 favored decentralization of astronomy away from the Paris Observatory. In Italy, too, recent political events—the unification of 1870—made a restructuring of astronomical institutions desirable and possible. But whereas France had too few observatories, Italy had too many. Georges Rayet and Pietro Tacchini, both astrophysicists, compared the circumstances in their countries and made mutually reinforcing proposals to their colleagues and governments. Their respective proposals, most of which were enacted, called for reassigning some Italian observatories to meteorological work, building new observatories in Besançon, Bordeaux, and Lyon, and refurbishing older ones at Marseilles and Toulouse. Once again, as in the days of Cassini I, Italy made a decisive contribution to the practice of astronomy in France.Sur les traces des Cassini mixes slight and weighty work, admits antiquarian and broader approaches, offers new documentation, displays pertinent illustrations, and does it all at a high level of scholarship. Since, because of its title, the book's primary audience probably will be people interested in the Cassinis, its fullest articles about them may usefully be mentioned here: Anna Cassini on Cassini's brief return to Italy, 1694–1696; Claude Teillet on the provincial life and poetry of Cassini IV; Christiane Demeulenaere‐Douyère on the Cassinis and the Académie des Sciences; Fabrizio Bonoli and Alessandro Braccesi on Cassini I's astronomical work in Bologna, with full bibliography; and Monique Pelletier on the Cassini map of France, on which she has written a book . Pytheas and Peiresc are the subjects of collaborative articles by Simone Arzano and Yvon Georgelin. (shrink)

Naturae vero rerum vis atque majestas in omnibus momentis fide caret, si quis modo partes ejus ac non totam coplectatur animo.1In the De natura deorum, Cicero recalls that followers of Pythagoras often justified justified their acceptance of a statement by appealing to the authority of their teacher. For them, inasmuch as Pythagoras “himself said it,” his words should be accepted unreservedly and there was no reason to argue further.2 Since antiquity, “ipse dixit” has been considered the most straightforward summary of (...) the argument from authority. It also seems to condense all of the negative characteristics of an attitude that we nowadays regard as the contrary to modern scientific... (shrink)

Based on a symposium by the International Gesellschaft f'ur dialektische Philosophie, Societas Hegeliana with the theme "Abstrakt/Konkret," Sept. 21-12, 1998 in Braga, Portugal.

L’esthétique et la bonne table ont beaucoup de choses en commun. Le xviii e siècle hésite entre besoins physiques et raffinements du goût, entre la faim et l’appétit. Les théories de Dubos, de Voltaire et de Diderot sont ici examinées à la lumière des traités français de la « nouvelle cuisine » du siècle des Lumières, qui doivent beaucoup aux principes du bon goût. La cuisine bourgeoise qui s’est progressivement imposée est moins raffinée que que la cuisine aristocratique, mais le (...) cuisinier y est considéré à la fois comme un artiste qui joue avec les saveurs et comme un savant qui sait mélanger les éléments chimiques pour obtenir des mélanges nouveaux et surprenants. Un voyage de la philosophie à la table et retour. (shrink)

This commentary aims to discuss the article “Ordo-responsibility in the Sharing Economy: A Social Contracts Perspective” from a sympathetic viewpoint toward its implementation of a constitutional contractarian approach to business ethics and due consideration of digital platforms as institutions resulting from a social contract. Nevertheless, the commentary also wants to criticize the article’s interpretation of constitutional contractarian theory and institutional reconstruction of the phenomenon, and thus even the governance structure it is proposed for sharing platforms. The commentary presents another understanding (...) of constitutional contractarianism, referring to both the ex ante agreement and the ex post compliance problem. Moreover, it reframes the history of the evolutionary process of institutions’ selection within the domain of the sharing economy consistently with the idea that the Internet should be framed as a common pool resource. In this way, the commentary suggests an alternative governance structure for sharing platforms, that is, platform cooperatives. (shrink)

The regulatory mechanism which ensures that eukaryotic chromosomes replicate precisely once per cell cycle is a basic and essential cellular property of eukaryotes. This fundamental aspect of DNA replication is still poorly understood, but recent advances encourage the view that we may soon have a clearer picture of how this regulation is achieved. This review will discuss in particular the role of proteins in the minichromosome maintenance (MCM) family, which may hold the key to understanding how DNA is replicated once, (...) and only once, per cell cycle. (shrink)

The theory of numbers, the theory of computation and well-known biological and neurological studies on cognition and consciousness all indicate the concept of recursion as their common denominator. Mathematical recursion owes its meaning and properties to a dual relationship between its results, which always constitute a sequence, and the operator that generated them, which is instead invariant. This article proposes that this duality in recursion originates from the duality between the biological homeostatic equilibrium in living systems and the adaptive physico-chemical (...) changes required to sustain such equilibria. Such duality gives order and meaning to the experiences of a living system. One of the many implications of this innovative perspective is that this duality can decouple computational results from our intuitive order relations, and that this can cause a rarefaction of the capacity of digital systems to convey communication and favour adaptation to the environment. (shrink)