The construction of memory in colonial Eritrea: Eritreans, Mestizos and Italians. Focusing on some passages of life histories collected in Asmara and based on the ‘memory of Italy’, I study the representation of the past in order to reveal the shaping of the subjective experience by the colonial discourse in Eritrea. If the main aim of my essay is the understanding of the play of interactions between individuals and collectivity, one more important element I take into account is ‘memory’ seen (...) as a “social selection of remembering” (Halbwachs). I try to connect the social position and narrative role of single members (of the Eritrean society) to the meaning it takes the ‘going back to the past’ for them as individuals belonging to a group (an Eritrean, a Mestizo, an Italian) in relation to the past and the present. The consequence is that the logic dominant/dominated is inadequate to explain the internal articulations of the colonial context and that the focus must be shifted on individual and collective systems of expectations and on the negotiations of meaning resulting from a “past always to be recovered” and a “present always to be rebuilt”. (shrink)

Deductive inference is usually regarded as being “tautological” or “analytical”: the information conveyed by the conclusion is contained in the information conveyed by the premises. This idea, however, clashes with the undecidability of first-order logic and with the (likely) intractability of Boolean logic. In this article, we address the problem both from the semantic and the proof-theoretical point of view. We propose a hierarchy of propositional logics that are all tractable (i.e. decidable in polynomial time), although by means of growing (...) computational resources, and converge towards classical propositional logic. The underlying claim is that this hierarchy can be used to represent increasing levels of “depth” or “informativeness” of Boolean reasoning. Special attention is paid to the most basic logic in this hierarchy, the pure “intelim logic”, which satisfies all the requirements of a natural deduction system (allowing both introduction and elimination rules for each logical operator) while admitting of a feasible (quadratic) decision procedure. We argue that this logic is “analytic” in a particularly strict sense, in that it rules out any use of “virtual information”, which is chiefly responsible for the combinatorial explosion of standard classical systems. As a result, analyticity and tractability are reconciled and growing degrees of computational complexity are associated with the depth at which the use of virtual information is allowed. (shrink)

Through the seasons, you are attentive to God's inherent timing and intended purpose at every stage and episode in life. Obstacles give way to opportunities and hindrances to heights, as you surrender to a life of completion with a realization that it is the journey that matters at the finish.

In our information societies, tasks and decisions are increasingly outsourced to automated systems, machines, and artificial agents that mediate human relationships, by taking decisions and acting on the basis of algorithms. This raises a critical issue: how are algorithmic procedures and applications to be appraised and governed? This question needs to be investigated, if one wishes to avoid the traps of ICTs ending up in isolating humans behind their screens and digital delegates, or harnessing them in a passive role, by (...) curtailing their freedom and autonomy. (shrink)

Ian C. Jarvie developed the idea of situational logic in a subtle and effective way. He was also interested in, as well as a contributor to, the institution of academic publication. This chapter provides a situational analysis of an important recurrent pattern in academic publishing, namely, the concentration of work around particular topics, despite the fact that most such work will be unrewarded in the economy of esteem that is meant to be in play.

This book was published in 2003.This volume presents a detailed examination of incommensurability in the value-theoretical sense. Exploring how choosers deal with problems and constraints of choice, the author draws on work in cognitive psychology, in sociology, in jurisprudence, in economics, and in the theory of value to show how choosers learn to make trade-offs when there is potential incommensurability among the options they are considering. The analysis is also informed by recent work in the tradition of Michel Foucault. With (...) so many modern devices and ideals of government dependent on the comparability of options, this book is timely and can inform public debate about de-regulation, user-pays, accountability, and the substitution of market mechanisms for government regulation and supply. (shrink)

Quale rapporto c'è tra una noticina di appena 30 righe e un'opera filosofica di quasi 500 pagine? A questa domanda, appassionante per chi s'interessa alla genesi delle opere del pensiero, Simone D'Agostino risponde esaminando il rapporto tra il capolavoro blondeliano del 1893, L'Action, e quella che si suole chiamare la "Première notule" del 5 novembre 1882. Il presente lavoro non è uno studio genetico del pensiero blondeliano, bensì una sua interpretazione sistematica da due punti focali e rispecchiantisi l'uno nell'altro. Sotto (...) questo aspetto, la ricerca di D'Agostino può definirsi unica nel suo genere. (shrink)

Free Public Reason examines the idea of public justification, stressing its importance but also questioning the coherence of the concept itself. Although public justification is employed in the work of theorists such as John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Thomas Nagel, and others, it has received little attention on its own as a philosophical concept. In this book Fred D'Agostino shows that the concept is composed of various values, interests, and notions of the good, and that no ranking of these is possible. (...) The notion of public justification itself is thus shown to be contestable. In demonstrating this, D'Agostino undermines many current political theories that rely on this concept. Having broken down the foundations of public justification, D'Agostino then offers an alternative model of how a workable consensus on its meaning might be reached through the interactions of a community of interpreters or delegates at a constitutional convention. (shrink)

We have considered two strategies for using native utterances as evidence for assigning native beliefs. We have shown that each of these two strategies (literalism and symbolism) can avoid the logical difficulties mentioned in section 1 — so long, at least, as we employ an account of the logical form of belief sentences developed by Burdick. We have also considered the methodological principles which provide the basis for translational practice. Based on our consideration of these principles, we then argued that (...) we must prefer the literalist strategy for attributing beliefs. Only the literalist strategy enables us to provide a recursive account of the significance of native utterances, and only the literalist strategy enables us to maximize the truth of our claims about native beliefs. (shrink)

In his renowned collection Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot suggests that the original trait of philosophy as a method by which one exercises themselves to achieve a new way of living and seeing the world fails with the rise of modernity. In that time, philosophy increasingly takes on a merely theoretical aspect, tending toward a system. However, Hadot himself glimpses at the dawn of modernity some instances of the original trait of philosophy still very much present, and (...) in his wake, Michel Foucault warns that between the late 16th and early 17th centuries the philosophical question of the reform of the mind attests to a still very close link between asceticism and truth. This book aims to develop just such an idea by thoroughly analyzing the most representative works of the reform of the mind in the early modern period: Francis Bacon's New Organon (1620), René Descartes' Discourse on the Method (1637), and Baruch Spinoza's Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677). From this analysis it will emerge that these modern works fully deserve to be counted among the tradition of philosophy as way of life. On closer inspection, the inquiries about method elaborated in these works are fully understandable only when read in the light of a broader and more complex philosophical need: to establish the spiritual conditions for accessing truth and aspiring to full self-realization. (shrink)

We present an informational view of classical propositional logic that stems from a kind of informational semantics whereby the meaning of a logical operator is specified solely in terms of the information that is actually possessed by an agent. In this view the inferential power of logical agents is naturally bounded by their limited capability of manipulating “virtual information”, namely information that is not implicitly contained in the data. Although this informational semantics cannot be expressed by any finitely-valued matrix, it (...) can be expressed by a non-deterministic 3-valued matrix that was first introduced by W.V.O. Quine, but ignored by the logical community. Within the general framework presented in [21] we provide an in-depth discussion of this informational semantics and a detailed analysis of a specific infinite hierarchy of tractable approximations to classical propositional logic that is based on it. This hierarchy can be used to model the inferential power of resource-bounded agents and admits of a uniform proof-theoretical characterization that is half-way between a classical version of Natural Deduction and the method of semantic tableaux. (shrink)

This book supports the idea that the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life does not disappear in early modernity, but is transformed into a search for how to cure, guide, and free the human mind.

We consider the relation between the uniform interpolation property and the elimination of non-standard quantifiers (the bisimulation quantifiers) in the context of the ?-calculus. In particular, we isolate classes of frames where the correspondence between these two properties is nicely smooth.

Decision-making assisted by algorithms developed by machine learning is increasingly determining our lives. Unfortunately, full opacity about the process is the norm. Would transparency contribute to restoring accountability for such systems as is often maintained? Several objections to full transparency are examined: the loss of privacy when datasets become public, the perverse effects of disclosure of the very algorithms themselves, the potential loss of companies’ competitive edge, and the limited gains in answerability to be expected since sophisticated algorithms usually are (...) inherently opaque. It is concluded that, at least presently, full transparency for oversight bodies alone is the only feasible option; extending it to the public at large is normally not advisable. Moreover, it is argued that algorithmic decisions preferably should become more understandable; to that effect, the models of machine learning to be employed should either be interpreted ex post or be interpretable by design ex ante. (shrink)

The young French philosopher, Maurice Blondel, was fascinated by the vinculum substantiale hypothesis proposed by the late Leibniz in his correspondence with Bartolomeo Des Bosses, a Jesuit from Collegio Romano. What did young Blondel see in this intricate hypothesis? An answer to the question can be found by making a thorough critical analysis of two manuscripts of Blondel: «Première notule» and «Nota complementare». The focal point of these texts is the substantiality of the concrete individual. Blondel compares this with some (...) passages from Aristotle's book Lambda in Metaphysics in his search for the «first substance» in its real and ontological sense. In fact, had Blondel known the twentieth century studies of book Zeta Metaphysics he could have found what he was seeking. (shrink)

Using only propositional connectives and the provability predicate of a Σ1-sound theory T containing Peano Arithmetic we define recursively enumerable relations that are complete for specific natural classes of relations, as the class of all r. e. relations, and the class of all strict partial orders. We apply these results to give representations of these classes in T by means of formulas.

It has frequently been suggested that Rawls’s characteristic method of justification, a method crucially involving the notion of reflective equilibrium, is in some sense relativistic in its implications. No sustained development of this suggestion has been undertaken by those who advance it; likewise, no sustained attempt to refute this suggestion has been made by those who are otherwise sympathetic to Rawls’s account of justification. I here attempt to fill these gaps in the already extensive literature associated with the method of (...) reflective equilibrium. At below, I review claims that Rawls’s method has relativistic implications. I also attempt, for purposes of argument, to buttress these claims by citing remarks of Rawls which could be interpreted as relativistic in character. At below, I consider problems of political reasoning as these arise in societies which are ill- and well-ordered in Rawls’s sense. At below, I consider problems of political reasoning as these arise between the members of two or more well-ordered societies, each of which is regulated by a different conception of justice. I also there adapt Williams’s distinction between notional and real confrontations between incompatible systems of beliefs in order to distinguish two kinds of conflict with respect to fundamental political principles. Finally, I show how a notion of broad reflective equilibrium can be deployed in order to solve those problems of political adjudication which may arise between the members of societies which have distinct conceptions of justice. At this point it should be clear that Rawls’s method of justification is not, in intention at least, relativistic in its implications. (shrink)