This volume is the proceedings of a workshop to discuss the recent work on complex systems in physics and biology, its epistemological and cultural implications, and its effect for the development of these two sciences. The workshop is geared towards physicists, biologists, and science historians.

In Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, the year of 2020 marked a dramatic escalation of military activities of the Islamist insurgent group locally known as Al-Shabab or mashababe. This intensification was accompanied by a more immaterial phenomenon: the rise in prominence of social media, both as battleground and as public forum. While the insurgents sacked and occupied major towns and district headquarters, the Web 2.0 networks - Facebook and WhatsApp especially - became the central arena in which the war was apprehended and (...) discussed. This essay is an exploration of the entwining of social media with the 'new war' in Cabo Delgado, focussing on the events that surround the conquest of the Makonde plateau, mythical cradle of the Mozambican liberation struggle. Building on a budding literature on digital militarism, the essay dwells especially on orality and the use of the voice note as a medium to convey information deemed to be more trustworthy and stable than images. Tracking these media and their interrelations, the essay establishes a narrative, however fragmentary, of the downfall of the Makonde plateau; highlights recurring features of violence in the Cabo Delgado conflict; and provides fresh insight into the formation of the Local Force (Força Local), a State-sponsored militia largely constituted by war veterans. (shrink)

D. Touam Bona, Fugitive, Where are you Running?, L. Hengehold (trans) (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2023), 230 pp., ISBN: 978-1509551842 Fugitive, Where are you Running? is a collection of essays, most of which were previously published in French, by writer, philosopher and curator Dénètem Touam Bona. The author's inclination to straddle geographic and conceptual lines is reflected in the scope, exuberance and poetic verve of the volume. The first three chapters ('Return of the Maroni', 'The Art of the Fugue', 'Manhunt') (...) lay the conceptual foundation by foregrounding categories of marronage, fugitivity and fugue. The fugitive slave is presented as the figure that haunts the establishment of capitalist modernity and the only possible 'line of flight' from it. The fugue is the art of subtle evasion from the prisons of racialised capitalism and an alternative to the triumphalist politics of armed liberation struggles. Touam Bona proposes an impressionistic, rhapsodic and allegorical travel through the various incarnations of the maroon community - with its spontaneous and horizontal modes of organisation and accretion - and capitalism's death drive to surveil and suppress them. The following two chapters track the iterations and repression of fugitivity in the present, by engaging with technologies of migrant surveillance at the border ('Heroic Land', which mixes critique and fiction) and the space of Mayotte, a French department in the heart of the Indian Ocean, increasingly securitised and excised from the histories of flux that characterise this region ('The Impossibility of an Island'). The sixth chapter ('Cosmo-poetics of the Refuge') returns to the book's central theme of the maroon rebellion, connecting it to Afro-diasporic spirituality and performance. The final extended chapter ('Liana Dreaming') turns to environmental concerns, by foregrounding the figure of the liana as the point of resistance to colonial penetration and weapon of maroon resistance. In Caribbean cultures, the liana and the vine bring together collective bodies and communities. Against colonial tropes of taming, erasure and penetration, the power of the forest itself generates plant-induced visions of unsubmission. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event entailing long-term consequences on population health and welfare. Those who contracted the coronavirus may have suffered from both physical and mental health issues that unfold the need for tailored intervention strategies. Hence, our study aims to investigate the psychological and social consequences of COVID-19 on a sample of 86 participants, encompassing 43 patients recruited from Bari University Hospital, 19 of whom were hospitalized due to the disease. The remaining 43 were individuals not fallen (...) ill with COVID-19 to date. The investigation yielded significant gender differences in post-traumatic stress symptoms, depression, and representation of interpersonal distance, evaluated through the IES-R, the BDI-II, and the IVAS task, respectively. This pattern of results was not replicated in the control group. In general, participants who reported having experienced the most intense post-traumatic symptoms also presented a greater mood deflection and, more specifically, within the clinical group women obtained the highest scores on both scales. Women reported higher IES-R and BDI-II scores compared to men, that could indicate that women who have contracted COVID-19 are more exposed to post-traumatic and depressive symptoms. Our results also showed a significant effect of COVID-19 on IPD with a tendency of disease-experienced individuals to increase their preferred IPD from adults, children, and elderly people. Regarding gender differences in mood and proxemic behavior, a correlation between depressive symptoms and probable PTSD and a further correlation between probable PTSD and greater IPD were found in women from both clinical and control group. Overall, these findings might contribute to a better understanding of gender-based implications of the current pandemic on mental health, also leading to the development of integrated yet personalized intervention strategies. (shrink)

We show how mereotopological notions can be expressed by extending intuitionistic propositional logic with propositional quantification and a strong modal operator. We first prove completeness for the logics wrt Kripke models; then we trace the correspondence between Kripke models and topological spaces that have been enhanced with an explicit notion of expressible region. We show how some qualitative spatial notions can be expressed in topological terms. We use the semantical and topological results in order to show how in some extensions (...) of the logics it is possible to express connectedness, non-emptiness and a set of jointly exhaustive, pairwise disjoint, binary relations that play a significant role in qualitative spatial reasoning. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 937-947, December 2021.

In this paper we extend to various classes of subreducts of hoops some results about splitting algebras. In particular we prove that every finite chain in the purely implicational fragment of basic hoops is splitting and that every finite chain in the \ fragment of hoops is splitting. We also produce explicitly the splitting equations in most cases.

Open peer commentary on the article “Loving the Earth by Loving a Place: A Situated Approach to the Love of Nature” by Laura Candiotto. Abstract: Candiotto elaborates a down-to-earth enactive epistemology and applies it to environmental ethics. I comment on the timeliness of her intervention and the challenges for an enactive account of place. I concur with her exhortation to a participatory loving of place by becoming native, but notice that the conditions for enacting it are inaccessible for most. Some (...) healing is needed first. (shrink)

Learning to perceive is faced with a classical paradox: if understanding is required for perception, how can we learn to perceive something new, something we do not yet understand? According to the sensorimotor approach, perception involves mastery of regular sensorimotor co-variations that depend on the agent and the environment, also known as the “laws” of sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs). In this sense, perception involves enacting relevant sensorimotor skills in each situation. It is important for this proposal that such skills can be (...) learned and refined with experience and yet up to this date, the sensorimotor approach has had no explicit theory of perceptual learning. The situation is made more complex if we acknowledge the open-ended nature of human learning. In this paper we propose Piaget’s theory of equilibration as a potential candidate to fulfill this role. This theory highlights the importance of intrinsic sensorimotor norms, in terms of the closure of sensorimotor schemes. It also explains how the equilibration of a sensorimotor organization faced with novelty or breakdowns proceeds by re-shaping pre-existing structures in coupling with dynamical regularities of the world. This way learning to perceive is guided by the equilibration of emerging forms of skillful coping with the world. We demonstrate the compatibility between Piaget’s theory and the sensorimotor approach by providing a dynamical formalization of equilibration to give an explicit micro-genetic account of sensorimotor learning and, by extension, of how we learn to perceive. This allows us to draw important lessons in the form of general principles for open-ended sensorimotor learning, including the need for an intrinsic normative evaluation by the agent itself. We also explore implications of our micro-genetic account at the personal level. (shrink)

This paper investigates the concept of étendue intelligible, as used by Malebranche to frame a metaphysical theory on top of the concept of space, a new perspective on ideas and a solution to Cartesian issues about the nature of thought and its relationships with extension. In particular, attention is paid to the reasons why the étendue intelligible is, for Malebrance, the joining link between the human mind and God. Such a connection is emphasized not only for its metaphysical meaning but (...) also for the intrinsic relevance of a topological view of ideas. (shrink)

Reconociendo la insoslayable ambigüedad que afecta a la relación entre retórica y filosofía en la obra viquiana, este trabajo se preocupa por resaltar la continuidad entre el Vico retórico y el Vico filósofo, antes que por indagar las diferencias entre ambos. Semejante continuidad se percibe en la imaginación y en la persuasión. Ambos tópicos son tratados en profundidad en la Scienza Nuova, pero ponen de manifiesto consideraciones teóricas sobre la retórica que arrancan especialmente de las Institutiones Oratoriae.

In this paper are studied the properties of the proofs in PRA of provability logic sentences, i.e. of formulas which are Boolean combinations of formulas of the form PIPRA, where h is the Gödel-number of a sentence in PRA. The main result is a Normal Form Theorem on the proof-trees of provability logic sequents, which states that it is possible to split the proof into an arithmetical part, which contains only atomic formulas and has an essentially intuitionistic character, and into (...) a logical part, which is merely instrumental. Moreover, the induction rules which occur in the arithmetical part are implicit. Some applications of the Normal Form Theorem are shown in order to obtain some syntactical results on the PRA-completeness of modal logic. In particular a completeness theorem for Boolean combinations of modalities is given. (shrink)

Variations sur le survolRuyer, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze et le statut de la formeLa question principale que j’aborde dans cet article concerne la manière dont Merleau-Ponty et Deleuze assument l’héritage du finalisme du vingtième siècle.En analysant certains textes fondamentaux de ces deux auteurs, on aperçoit en effet clairement leur dette à l’égard, notamment, du néo-finalisme de Raymond Ruyer. Autant Merleau-Ponty que Deleuze lisent l’oeuvre de Ruyer en la séparant de son contexte d’origine et de ses intentions explicites, à savoir hors de toute (...) exigence de nature épistémologique. Entre ces deux auteurs subsiste toutefois une différence substantielle dans la manière d’employer les concepts ruyériens. Merleau-Ponty réfute l’hypothèse d’une forme qui survole les matériaux constituant l’organisation idéale, mais valorise l’idée d’un thématisme immanent, d’une essence qui subsiste seulement à l’intérieur de ses variations. Deleuze, lui, semble reprendre sans réserve à son compte ces mêmes notions de forme et de survol parce qu’il les interprète comme des concepts plutôt que comme des causes formelles ou finales. Le concept deleuzien n’est pas pris dans la « pâte » du vécu, mais survole toute expérience vécue et tout état de choses. C’est pourquoi il ne peut être que créé, et c’est pourquoi la philosophie ne peut pas être uneactivité descriptive, à la manière de la phénoménologie, mais doit être nécessairement constructive.Variations on the SurveyRuyer, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and the Status of the FormThe main question that I confront in this article concerns the way in which Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze take up the heritage of 20th century finalism. By analyzing some of both of these authors’ basic texts, we clearly perceive their debt to, particularly, the neofinalism of Raymond Ruyer. Merleau-Ponty as much as Deleuze read Ruyer’s work separately from its original context and its explicit intentions, that is, they read it outside of any sort of epistemological demand. Nevertheless, we still find between the two a substantial difference in the manner of using Ruyer’s concepts. Merleau-Ponty refutes the hypothesis of a form that surveys the materials that constitute the ideal organization, but valorizes the idea of an immanent thematism, of an essence that only subsists within its variations. Deleuze, for his part, appears by contrast to take unreservedly into his own account these same notions of form and survey because he interprets them as concepts rather than formal and final causes. The Deleuzian concept is not “infested” with the lived, but surveys all lived experience and every state of things. That is why itcan only be created and that is why philosophy cannot be a descriptive activity, in the manner of phenomenology, but will necessarily be constructive. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 2 Seiten: 755-784.