The structures of discourse used by legal and ordinary languages share differences that foster technical issues when applying or fine-tuning general-purpose language models for open-domain question answering on legal resources. For example, longer sentences may be preferred in European laws (i.e., Brussels I bis Regulation EU 1215/2012) to reduce potential ambiguities and improve comprehensibility, distracting a language model trained on ordinary English. In this article, we investigate some mechanisms to isolate and capture the discursive patterns of legalese in order to (...) perform zero-shot question answering, i.e., without training on legal documents. Specifically, we use pre-trained open-domain answer retrieval systems and study what happens when changing the type of information to consider for retrieval. Indeed, by selecting only the important parts of discourse (e.g., elementary units of discourse, EDU for short, or abstract representations of meaning, AMR for short), we should be able to help the answer retriever identify the elements of interest. Hence, with this paper, we publish Q4EU, a new evaluation dataset that includes more than 70 questions and 200 answers on 6 different European norms, and study what happens to a baseline system when only EDUs or AMRs are used during information retrieval. Our results show that the versions using EDUs are overall the best, leading to state-of-the-art F1, precision, NDCG and MRR scores. (shrink)

Ist Geschichtsdarstellung ein transparentes Fenster zu einer faktischen Vergangenheit? Oder verlieren Fakten ihre Verbindlichkeit zugunsten der Repräsentation? Der vorliegende Band weist einen vermittelnden Weg zwischen diesen Extremen. Jenseits der positivistisch verstandenen historischen Fakten sowie der infolge des linguistic turn häufig behaupteten Unzugänglichkeit und Unentscheidbarkeit der faktischen Vergangenheit wird die Geschichtsdarstellung selbst als das eigentlich Greifbare zur Geltung gebracht. Geschichte ist demnach in ihrer Darstellung zu suchen – unabhängig davon, ob es sich um historiographische Quellen, literarische Texte, Gemälde oder um Museen (...) als mediale Darstellungsräume handelt. Die Beiträge gehen einem breiten Spektrum unterschiedlicher Dimensionen von Geschichtsdarstellung nach. Medien, Methoden und Strategien bilden dabei die zentralen Koordinaten, anhand derer Geschichtsdarstellung mit ihren narrativen und bildlichen Ausdrucksformen exemplarisch erörtert wird. Mit Beiträgen von Wolfgang Frühwald, Werner Goez, Thomas Kirchner, Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Otto Gerhard Oexle, Antonios Rengakos, Hermann Schäfer, Jörg Schönert, Howard Weinbrot, Horst Wenzel und Gernot R. Wieland. (shrink)

In order to develop efficient tools for automated reasoning with inconsistency (theorem provers), eventually making Logics of Formal inconsistency (_LFI_) a more appealing formalism for reasoning under uncertainty, it is important to develop the proof theory of the first-order versions of such _LFI_s. Here, we intend to make a first step in this direction. On the other hand, the logic _Ciore_ was developed to provide new logical systems in the study of inconsistent databases from the point of view of _LFI_s. (...) An interesting fact about _Ciore_ is that it has a _strong_ consistency operator, that is, a consistency operator which (forward/backward) propagates inconsistency. Also, it turns out to be an algebraizable logic (in the sense of Blok and Pigozzi) that can be characterized by means of a 3-valued logical matrix. Recently, a first-order version of _Ciore_, namely _QCiore_, was defined preserving the spirit of _Ciore_, that is, without introducing unexpected relationships between the quantifiers. Besides, some important model-theoretic results were obtained for this logic. In this paper we study some proof–theoretic aspects of both _Ciore_ and _QCiore_ respectively. In first place, we introduce a two-sided sequent system for _Ciore_. Later, we prove that this system enjoys the cut-elimination property and apply it to derive some interesting properties. Later, we extend the above-mentioned system to first-order languages and prove completeness and cut-elimination property using the well-known Shütte’s technique. (shrink)

This essay aims to reappraise Agnes Arber's contribution to the history of science with reference to her work in the history of botany and biology. Both her first and her last books are classics: the former in the history of botany, the latter in that of biology. As such, they are still cited today, albeit with increasing criticism. Her very last book was rejected by Cambridge University Press because it did not meet the publisher's academic standards – we shall return (...) to it in due course. Despite Kathryn Packer's two essays about Arber's life in context, much remains to be done toward a just appreciation of her research. We need such a reappraisal in order to avoid anachronistic criticisms of her contributions to the historiography of botany, or, on the other hand, uncritical applause for her studies in plant morphology. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno’s interest in magic was not a marginal aspect of his philosophy. In the magical works written in 1589 and 1591, Bruno carried out his project of a cultural reform, which he also conceived as a pratical renovatio. In De magia naturali Bruno undertook a careful theoretical reexamination of Renaissance magic in order to ground its "experimental data" on physical foundation. Some traditional notions , which Bruno found in his sources and made use of, are analyzed in his paper (...) to show the deep change they underwent in the light of Bruno’s new ontology and cosmology. (shrink)

Na educação popular brasileira o termo �conscientização� é de uso muito freqüente. Muito citado nos diálogos cotidianos e nas elaborações escritas, não é sempre problematizado e historiado. Muitas vezes, especialmente nos âmbitos da educação formal, a circulação deste termo perdeu o seu sentido mais profundo e suas implicações políticas de transformação da sociedade. Neste artigo se problematiza o termo �conscientização� a partir da reflexão sobre outra palavra que pertence a filosofia política: a �práxis�. A práxis e seu vínculo com a (...) ação prático-reflexiva provoca o sentido político da conscientização e sua ligação com a experiência transformadora da educação. (shrink)

Developing a suggestion by Russell, Prawitz showed how the usual natural deduction inference rules for disjunction, conjunction and absurdity can be derived using those for implication and the second order quantifier in propositional intuitionistic second order logic NI\. It is however well known that the translation does not preserve the relations of identity among derivations induced by the permutative conversions and immediate expansions for the definable connectives, at least when the equational theory of NI\ is assumed to consist only of (...) \- and \-equations. On the basis of the categorial interpretation of NI\, we introduce a new class of equations expressing what in categorial terms is a naturality condition satisfied by the transformations interpreting NI\-derivations. We show that the Russell–Prawitz translation does preserve identity of proof with respect to the enriched system by highlighting the fact that naturality corresponds to a generalized permutation principle. Finally we sketch how these results could be used to investigate the properties of connectives definable in the framework of higher-level rules. (shrink)

Italian Constitutional Justice in Global Context is the first book ever published in English to provide an international examination of the Italian Constitutional Court, offering a comprehensive analysis of its principal lines of jurisprudence, historical origins, organization, procedures, and its current engagement with transnational European law. The ItCC represents one of the strongest and most successful examples of constitutional judicial review, and is distinctive in its structure, institutional dimensions, and well-developed jurisprudence. Moreover, the ItCC has developed a distinctive voice among (...) global constitutional actors in its adjudication of a broad range of topics from fundamental rights and liberties to the allocations of governmental power and regionalism. Nevertheless, in global constitutional dialog, the voice of the ItCC has been almost entirely absent due to a relative lack of both English translations of its decisions and of focused scholarly commentary in English.This book describes the "Italian Style" in global constitutional adjudication, and aims to elevate Italian constitutional jurisprudence to an active participant role in global constitutional discourse. The authors have carefully structured the work to allow the ItCC's own voice to emerge. It presents broad syntheses of major areas of the Court's case law, provides excerpts from notable decisions in a narrative and analytical context, addresses the tension between the ItCC and the Court of Cassation, and positions the development, character, and importance of the ItCC's jurisprudence in the larger arc of global judicial dialog. (shrink)

In the present paper we discuss a recent suggestion of Schroeder-Heister concerning the possibility of defining an intensional notion of harmony using isomorphism in second-order propositional logic. The latter is not an absolute notion, but its definition is relative to the choice of criteria for identity of proofs. In the paper, it is argued that in order to attain a satisfactory account of harmony, one has to consider a notion of identity stronger than the usual one (based on β- and (...) η-conversions) that the authors have investigated in recent work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ECHIC—The European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres 2023 Annual ConferenceIlenia Vittoria CasmiriEcological Mindedness and Sustainable Wellbeing, ECHIC—The European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres 2023 Annual Conference, May 25–27, 2023, University of Ferrara, ItalyThis year’s annual conference of the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres (ECHIC) invited international scholars with diverse backgrounds to explore visions of a desirable future world that is both environmentally sustainable and (...) socially just. In stressing the social and political relevance of the humanities in Europe today, the main goal of the Consortium, as it is articulated on the conference website, is the pursuit of the highest international standards of excellence with a spirit of innovation and exploration of new research areas:Since the World Commission on Environment and Development published Our Common Future (1987) [commonly known as the Brundtland Report], the notion of... sustainability has been expanded to incorporate environmental, cultural, legal, and economic features of a low-carbon future and to encompass the wellbeing of all living species, which involves material aspects such as the social acceptance of resource-efficient transitions and immaterial ones such as flourishing human capabilities. [End Page 625]The participants of the 2023 ECHIC conference on Ecological Mindedness and Sustainable Wellbeing presented original, multidisciplinary perspectives, and offered valuable opportunities to develop holistic approaches to the prismatic issue of environmental sustainability. Bringing together cultural diversity as well as local and global perspectives, keynoters and panelists addressed the vast array of challenges imposed by the perpetuation of anthropocentric worldviews. Their challenge to traditional demarcations between the humanities, the social sciences, economy, law, architecture, engineering, and the life and medical sciences, generated synergies for exploring interconnections between life forms, resources, and heritage. While the theoretical frameworks varied considerably, they all advocated for the need to overcome ideological, cultural, and spatial barriers in favor of broader, more inclusive approaches to other disciplines, other cultures, other humans, other species. Overall, the conference not only exposed the cultural and economic roots of social inequality and of uneven distribution of resources, thanks to unsustainable modes of capitalist production and consumption, but also highlighted the media’s positive effect in eliciting pro-environmental behaviors.Toward More Sustainable FuturesThe prismatic nature of the concept of sustainability inspired keynote speakers Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Klagenfurt), Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont), Tim Waterman (University College London), and Antonio López (John Cabot University) to address climate apocalypse impacts on the human physical and psychological well-being from diverse personal and academic backgrounds.In the opening keynote lecture, “Growing Hope: Narratives of Food Justice and Sustainability,” Weik von Mossner explores the psychological implications of affect and emotion in the communication of environmental issues. Her diachronic account illustrates the rise and fall of the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, a sanctuary for locals by providing fresh produce, stimulating a sense of community, and representing a symbol of resilience against systemic inequalities. Weik Von Mossner elucidates the psychological benefits accruing from exposure to such a sustainably inhabited space. Her analysis of Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s documentary, The Garden (2008), affirms that climate change narratives across media may prompt food justice activism (Retzinger 2011, 337) by eliciting the emotional engagement of its audience. [End Page 626]However, observes von Mossner, the greater the popularity of the Farm, the greater the threat posed to its existence. Through documentaries, news articles, and online campaigns, the South Central Farm has received national and international attention. At the same time, media have shed light on the struggles faced by marginalized communities and provided a solid basis for discussions on social justice, environmental activism, and the value of communal spaces. She explains that activists used social media to voice their concerns about the potential eviction and the loss of a vital resource for the local community, leading to an outpouring of support from environmentalists and celebrities who had realized to what extent the predominantly low-income, minority community was affected by limited access to fresh food and green spaces.Adrian Ivakhiv, delivering his keynote “How to Face the Angel of History: A Call to Anthropocenic Conscience” the following day, suggests that a pervasive lack of an emotional... (shrink)

Die Korrespondenz zwischen körperlichen Merkmalen und dem Charakter eines Menschen, die im 19. Jahrhundert die Matrix für die Naturwissenschaften fungierte, stellt heute die Basis von Lifestyle-Normen oder auch von psychologischer und medizinischer Diagnostik dar. Infolge strukturalistisch-semiotischer Methoden gilt die Physiognomik immer noch als Deutungsdispositiv bei Formen literarischer Personendarstellungen oder philosophischer Deutung menschlichen Antlitzes. In den durch umfangreiche mediale und technische Umwälzungen hervorgebrachten Modellierungen der Sinnlichkeit erweist sich die Physiognomik auch als Paradigma des Enhancements. Der Band untersucht historisch und systematisch die (...) biopolitische Performativität physiognomischer Praktiken der Selbst- und Fremddeutung, ihre Gestaltung sowie ihre Transformationen durch neue Technologien. Er diskutiert ihre materiell-mediale Dynamik, das in der Ästhetik von Texten und Medien implizierte Lebenswissen, Formen der Affektforschung sowie die anthropozentrischen Implikationen der Physiognomik. (shrink)

In a previous paper we investigated the extraction of proof-theoretic properties of natural deduction derivations from their impredicative translation into System F. Our key idea was to introduce an extended equational theory for System F codifying at a syntactic level some properties found in parametric models of polymorphic type theory. A different approach to extract proof-theoretic properties of natural deduction derivations was proposed in a recent series of papers on the basis of an embedding of intuitionistic propositional logic into a (...) predicative fragment of System F, called atomic System F. In this paper we show that this approach finds a general explanation within our equational study of second-order natural deduction, and a clear semantic justification in terms of parametricity. (shrink)

The investigations on higher-order type theories and on the related notion of parametric polymorphism constitute the technical counterpart of the old foundational problem of the circularity of second and higher-order logic. However, the epistemological significance of such investigations has not received much attention in the contemporary foundational debate.We discuss Girard’s normalization proof for second order type theory or System F and compare it with two faulty consistency arguments: the one given by Frege for the logical system of the Grundgesetze and (...) the one given by Martin-Löf for the intuitionistic type theory with a type of all types.The comparison suggests that the question of the circularity of second order logic cannot be reduced to Russell’s and Poincaré’s 1906 “vicious circle” diagnosis. Rather, it reveals a bunch of mathematical and logical ideas hidden behind the hazardous idea of impredicative quantification, constituting a vast domain for foundational research. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Elias Ashmole’s collections and views about John Dee. I consider Dee as an object of collection against the broader background of Ashmole’s collecting practices. I also look at the uses to which Ashmole put some of his collections relating to Dee, as well as those which he envisaged for posterity. I argue that Ashmole’s interest in Dee stemmed from his ideas about the uses of antiquity in the reconstruction and transmission of knowledge. They partly reflected (...) Ashmole’s interpretation of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of learning as well as the influence of William Backhouse and William Oughtred’s ideas about publishing natural philosophy in English. (shrink)