A great deal of "epistemological" thought is dedicated to the question of the origin of the ideas that form our ordinary conception of reality.1 How do we obtain our view of the world as a whole composed of discrete substances, endowed with space-time extension, which are the substrata of specific qualities, linked to each other by different kinds of relation?This is a question that is certainly less problematic in contexts of thought that defend "pluralist" ontologies—where being is thought to amount (...) to a plurality of discrete and self-subsistent entities. There... (shrink)

This short paper is meant to be an introduction to the ‘Letter to Alan Turing’ that follows it. It summarizes some basic ideas in information theory and very informally hints at their mathematical properties. In order to introduce Turing’s two main theoretical contributions, in Theory of Computation and in Morphogenesis, the fundamental divide between discrete vs. continuous structures in mathematics is presented, as it is also a divide in his scientific life. The reader who is familiar with these notions, and (...) is convinced that they are relevant in the mathematical understanding of phenomena, may skip this introduction and go directly to the Letter. (shrink)

Central figures in the phenomenological tradition, such as Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, drew extensively on gestalt psychology in their writings. The dialogue between phenomenology and psychology they began continues today in the field of embodied cognitive science. We take up this conversation starting from Aron Gurwitsch’s rich phenomenological analysis of the perception of the cultural world. Gurwitsch’s phenomenological descriptions of the perception of the cultural world bear a striking resemblance to work in embodied cognitive science that takes (...) its inspiration from Gibson’s ecological psychology. Gibson coined the term “affordance” to refer to the possibilities for action that can be directly perceived by persons [Gibson 1979]. However, Gibson from his earliest writings made a distinction between a universal, strictly individual and nonsocial form of perception and a perception of the world that was subject to social and cultural influences. We use Gurwitsch to argue against Gibson’s individualist understanding of direct perception. Each affordance that can be selected as an object of perception refers to a wider sociocultural context, which Gurwitsch called an “order of existence”. We end our paper by taking up the question of the relation of phenomenological description of the perceptual world and explanations of perceptual experience provided by embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

Alexandra Pârvan's appropriation of Augustine's metaphysical distinction between self and action is both creative and laudable. It surely has the potential to add an important element to the treatment of both victims and perpetrators of violence by helping them to change negative self-models that puts them at risk "for both receipt and perpetration of relationship violence". What I would like to do is suggest ways that this potential might be increased i) through a more refined understanding of Augustine's distinction between (...) self and action, and ii) through the appropriation of later medieval developments in philosophical psychology, developments that find their classic formulation in the... (shrink)

Automation and information technology have transformed the organization of labor to such an extent that the processes of exploitation have moved beyond the labor class and now work upon society as a whole. If this displacement has destroyed the political primacy of the labor class, it has not, however, eliminated exploitation; rather, it has broadened it, implanting it within the given conditions of the most diverse spheres of society. -- from The Winter Is Over In late 1995, in opposition to (...) the conservative agenda of Jacques Chirac and his prime minister Alain Juppé and their proposed widespread welfare cuts, French students rose up against their government; public sector workers, together with all the major trade unions, went on strike. When railway workers and Paris Metro personnel joined in the protests, France's public transportation system came to a halt. These extensive social upheavals, the likes of which had not been seen in France since 1968, found widespread public support and fuelled the creation of many political organizations. Chirac backed down from restructuring the public retirement system. Antonio Negri's _T_he Winter is Over comes out of the glimmer of optimism created by the events of 1995, when the long, cold season of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, reaction, and counterrevolution appeared to have run its course. Published in Italian in 1996, _The Winter is Over_ brings together a series of articles, speeches, and other documents written by Negri between 1989 and 1995 at the threshold of this thaw. It offers a revealing and wide-reaching account of those years of change and brink-of-change, focusing on such topics as the networks of social production, the decline of "limp thought," the end of applied socialism, the Gulf War, and, finally, Italy's transition to its so-called "Second Republic," as seen by an exile. (shrink)

What is 'rebirth' in Buddhism? The contribution of hypnotic regression.

Dieses Handbuch bietet einen verlässlichen, systematischen und umfassenden Zugang einerseits zu Leben und Werk Karl Poppers, andererseits zur breiten Wirkung des Philosophen in Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft.

Contextual type theories are largely explored in their applications to programming languages, but less investigated for knowledge representation purposes. The combination of a constructive language with a modal extension of contexts appears crucial to explore the attractive idea of a type-theoretical calculus of provability from refutable assumptions for non-monotonic reasoning. This paper introduces such a language: the modal operators are meant to internalize two different modes of correctness, respectively with necessity as the standard notion of constructive verification and possibility as (...) provability up to refutation of contextual conditions. (shrink)

RESUMO Entre os vários pontos da obra de Nāgārjuna que deram origem a análises e discussões, o tema das 'duas verdades' é um dos mais controversos. Com efeito, dentro da ampla bibliografia dedicada a essa temática, são muitas, e amiúde divergentes, as tentativas de explicar o que Nāgārjuna entendesse - no verso 24.8 das suas Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā - com as expressões 'verdade convencional' e 'verdade suprema'. Esses pontos de vista interpretativos, entretanto, frequentemente, parecem prescindir daquele que talvez seja o critério mais (...) confiável para dirimir as controvérsias relativas às MMK: i. e., a leitura dos comentários indianos às mesmas MMK. Em contraste com essa tendência, este escrito objetiva investigar as passagens do Prajñāpradīpa e das Prasannapadā onde encontramos explicações, respectivamente de Bhāviveka e de Candrakīrti, que dizem respeito às duas verdades. O resultado dessa pesquisa se apresentará como nitidamente favorável à interpretação da doutrina das duas verdades que, em outros escritos, chamei de 'pedagógica'.ABSTRACT Among the many passages of Nāgārjuna's work that have generated analysis investigation and discussion, the issue of the 'two truths' is one of the most controversial ones. In fact, within the vast bibliography dedicated to this topic, attempts to explain what Nāgārjuna meant - in verse 24.8 of his Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā - by 'conventional' and 'supreme truth' are many and frequently divergent. However, it often seems that these interpretative views neglect what probably is the most reliable criterion for solving controversies in the MMK: i. e., the reading of Indian commentaries to the MMK. Going against this trend, this paper aims to investigate passages of Bhāviveka's Prajñāpradīpa and of Candrakīrti's Prasannapadā where we find explanations that concern the two truths. The result of this research will look quite favorably on the interpretation of the two truths doctrine that I called, in other works of mine, "pedagogical". (shrink)

Synchronic intertheoretic reductions are an important field of research in science. Arguably, the best model able to represent the main relations occurring in this kind of scientific reduction is the Nagelian account of reduction, a model further developed by Schaffner and nowadays known as the generalized version of the Nagel–Schaffner model. In their article, Dizadji-Bahmani, Frigg, and Hartmann specified the two main desiderata of a reduction á la GNS: confirmation and coherence. DFH first and, more rigorously, Tešic later analyse the (...) confirmatory relation between the reducing and the reduced theory in terms of Bayesian confirmation theory. The purpose of this article is to analyse and compare the degree of coherence between the two theories involved in the GNS before and after the reduction. For this reason, in the first section, I will be looking at the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics and use it as an example to describe the GNS. In the second section, I will introduce three coherence measures which will then be employed in the comparison. Finally, in the last two sections, I will compare the degrees of coherence between the reducing and the reduced theory before and after the reduction and use a few numerical examples to understand the relation between coherence and confirmation measures. (shrink)