We study the lattice of local operators in Hylandʼs Effective Topos. We show that this lattice is a free completion under internal sups indexed by the natural numbers object, generated by what we call basic local operators.We produce many new local operators and we employ a new concept, sight, in order to analyze these.We show that a local operator identified by A.M. Pitts in his thesis, gives a subtopos with classical arithmetic.

Following the book Algebraic Set Theory from André Joyal and leke Moerdijk [8], we give a characterization of the initial ZF-algebra, for Heyting pretoposes equipped with a class of small maps. Then, an application is considered (the effective topos) to show how to recover an already known model (McCarty [9]).

Here, we present a category ${\mathbf {pEff}}$ which can be considered a predicative variant of Hyland's Effective Topos ${{\mathbf {Eff} }}$ for the following reasons. First, its construction is carried in Feferman’s predicative theory of non-iterative fixpoints ${{\widehat {ID_1}}}$. Second, ${\mathbf {pEff}}$ is a list-arithmetic locally cartesian closed pretopos with a full subcategory ${{\mathbf {pEff}_{set}}}$ of small objects having the same categorical structure which is preserved by the embedding in ${\mathbf {pEff}}$ ; furthermore subobjects in ${{\mathbf {pEff}_{set}}}$ are (...) classified by a non-small object in ${\mathbf {pEff}}$. Third ${\mathbf {pEff}}$ happens to coincide with the exact completion of the lex category defined as a predicative rendering in ${{\widehat {ID_1}}}$ of the subcategory of ${{\mathbf {Eff} }}$ of recursive functions and it validates the Formal Church’s thesis. Hence pEff turns out to be itself a predicative rendering of a full subcategory of ${{\mathbf {Eff} }}$. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Effective communication relies on the use of rhetorical devices and strategies to make ideas present in the minds of an audience. By employing the concept of cognitive environments, we can use the visual analogy of making an idea “present” to its fullest effect, empowering our rhetorical skills and helping influence audience reception. In this article, the author argues that while cognitive environments do indeed provide a significant and important conceptual tool for understanding and anticipating an audience’s experiences, beliefs, (...) and knowledge, a more robust sense of agreement is necessary. The article proposes the concept of a topos that serves as a shared meeting place within cognitive environments within which both author and audience contribute their background assumptions to find common ground and commonalities in interpretations. It is in figuring the topos effectively that cognitive environments can be more accurately and effectively mapped onto each other, and breaches between such environments can be productively bridged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 343-346 [Access article in PDF] The Paradox Topos Lisa Gorton As William Egginton points out, 1 when Dante and Beatrice step outside the cosmos, they step into another set of concentric spheres. 2 These surround our (supposedly) geocentric cosmos, and yet they center upon God. The image affronts our logic of space. If these concentric spheres encompass us, how can (...) they center upon something somewhere else? The notion seems to turn space inside-out. But Dante's spatial paradox is not in truth a paradox of space. Instead, it is a spiritual paradox, set in terms of space. When Dante and Beatrice step outside the cosmos, they step outside space into an old philosophical topos, a spatial image of God. For that reason, Dante's image is not really akin to the spatial paradoxes of modern astrophysics, although Egginton's comparison of the two does provoke some fascinating comments upon medieval concepts of space. Egginton assesses Dante's paradox in light of medieval debates about space, place, and God. However, he overlooks the most important source for Dante's paradox--the symbolic geometry of Neoplatonic philosophy. 3Neoplatonic philosophers use spatial forms to imagine spiritual relationships. They develop a symbolic geometry, a spatial language of thought, which borrows nothing from physical space but its shapes: the center, the circle, and concentric spheres. Neoplatonists use this symbolic geometry because it offers a spatial way to imagine the relationship between a cause and its effect, without importing time differences into that relationship. In this way they seek to avoid the problems of time and causality, which the creation-myth in Timaeus introduced into Plato's philosophy: how and when could a timeless being make time? 4 [End Page 343]Plotinus, the first Neoplatonist, uses symbolic geometry to design an "Intellectual Cosmos," which he treats as quite distinct from our physical cosmos. 5 He imagines the source of life as a center: The Highest cannot be divided and allotted... thus a centre is an independent unity; everything within the circle has its own term in the centre, and to the centre the radii each bring their own. (Enneads, V. 1. 11). The "Highest" exists as the center of this "Intellectual Cosmos." Plotinus treats a center's geometric qualities as metaphysical attributes. Like an undimensioned central point, the "Highest" does not exist in space or time, and yet space and time radiate from it as a circumference radiates from its center.The bare symbolic space of Plotinus's "Intellectual Cosmos" has emotional connotations. Plotinus holds that "the center of a circle is distinctively a point of rest" (Enneads II. 2. 1). Lesser beings must turn sequentially through all the angles their center holds altogether at once: There is, we may put it, something that is centre; about it, a circle of light shed from it; round centre and first circle alike, another circle, light from light; outside that again, not another circle of light but one which, lacking light of its own, must borrow. (Enneads, IV. 3. 17) In Plotinus's "Intellectual Cosmos" life emanates from the center in concentric spheres. 6Dante and Beatrice step into such an "Intellectual Cosmos" when they step outside the physical world. They step into a spatial image that stands outside time and space, at the spiritual center of the poem, when they step into spheres that center upon a light too bright to look upon. Dante wonders where that center could be, and Beatrice responds to his silent question: "The nature of the universe, which holds the center still and moves all else around it, begins here as if from its turning point" (XXVII, 106-9). Egginton comments, "Dante's description of this absolute center as the origin of all movement and force in the universe" is "an 'eerie' likeness of what he [the modern astrophysicist, Robert Osserman] terms the retro-verse." More relevantly, it also refers to the "Intellectual Cosmos" of Neoplatonic philosophy, where the "Highest" is a center of rest, the starting point of light, movement, and life. [End Page 344]Plotinus... (shrink)

An error that medicine has long shared is to attribute to a desire or an effect of the mother’s imagination during gestation, the deformities, growths or spots that a child bears at birth. The imagination would be capable of imprinting external modifications on a matter and would have an impact on the perceptions and sensory development of the fetus. Returning briefly to the genealogy and posterity of the topos, this article focuses on the successes and refutations of the Malebranchist (...) paradigm in the 18th century, through a corpus of medical popularization texts where the debates oppose the supporters of the imagination for whom emotion alters the organs of the fetus and the detractors of this thesis who only see it as prejudice. Mechanistic systems had in common that they avoided the soul to explain life. Although each era has its hermeneutic system of representations, and that medicine—closely dependent on the philosophical and moral conceptions of its time—is also a cultural production, it is nevertheless not uninteresting to question on the fortune of a motive and the scientific topicality of the question. What does the baby perceive in utero? Does he feel his mother’s pain? If so, what is the biological impact? To what extent can the maternal imagination and experience mark the child’s body? Informed by functional imaging technologies, recent research returns to the symbiotic link of mother-fetus interactions. Convergences appear between this 18th century and our 21st century. In no case did we want to contrast today’s scientists who are firmly in touch with reality and their predecessors who are prey to imagination. Science, whatever the era, always feeds on imagination. (shrink)

This introductory chapter integrates two different steps: a global consideration of the problems which the “signifier” limits is able to include and a detailed mapping of the reflective path which the following thirteen chapters effectively pursue.

F. Richman raised the question of whether the following principle of second order arithmetic is valid in intuitionistic higher order arithmetic $\mathbf{HAH}$: $\forall X\lbrack\forall x(x \in X \vee \neg x \in X) \wedge \forall Y(\forall x(x \in Y \vee \neg x \in Y) \rightarrow \forall x(x \in X \rightarrow x \in Y) \vee \forall x \neg(x \in X \wedge x \in Y)) \rightarrow \exists n\forall x(x \in X \rightarrow x = n)\rbrack$, and if not, whether assuming Church's Thesis CT and (...) Markov's Principle MP would help. Blass and Scedrov gave models of $\mathbf{HAH}$ in which this principle, which we call RP, is not valid, but their models do not satisfy either CT or MP. In this paper a realizability topos Lif is constructed in which CT and MP hold, but RP is false. (It is shown, however, that $RP$ is derivable in $\mathbf{HAH} + \mathrm{CT} + \mathrm{MP} + \mathrm{ECT}_0$, so RP holds in the effective topos.) Lif is a generalization of a realizability notion invented by V. Lifschitz. Furthermore, Lif is a subtopos of the effective topos. (shrink)

Kleene's realizability interpretation for first-order arithmetic was shown by Hyland to fit into the internal logic of an elementary topos, the “Effective topos” . In this paper it is shown, that there is an internal realizability definition in , i.e. a syntactical translation of the internal language of into itself of form “n realizes ” , which extends Kleene's definition, and such that for sentences , the equivalence [harr]n is true in . The internal realizability definition depends (...) on finding separated covers for non-separated objects of . However, for the objects arising in higher-order arithmetic, canonical covers are available, which are definable in higher-order arithmetic. These canonical covers yield “covering axioms”. It is shown that these covering axioms, together with uniformity principles and Extended Church's Thesis, axiomatize a formalized extension of Kleene realizability to a constructive system of higher-order arithmetic. The details are worked out for second and third-order arithmetic, but the method can be extended to any order. As an application, it is shown in the final section that a certain completeness property of the category of “modest sets” can be derived in third-order arithmetic from the realizability axioms. (shrink)

We show that Martin Hyland's effective topos can be exhibited as the homotopy category of a path category EFF. Path categories are categories of fibrant objects in the sense of Brown satisfying two additional properties and as such provide a context in which one can interpret many notions from homotopy theory and Homotopy Type Theory. Within the path category EFF one can identify a class of discrete fibrations which is closed under push forward along arbitrary fibrations (in other (...) words, this class is polymorphic or closed under impredicative quantification) and satisfies propositional resizing. This class does not have a univalent representation, but if one restricts to those discrete fibrations whose fibres are propositions in the sense of Homotopy Type Theory, then it does. This means that, modulo the usual coherence problems, it can be seen as a model of the Calculus of Constructions with a univalent type of propositions. We will also build a more complicated path category in which the class of discrete fibrations whose fibres are sets in the sense of Homotopy Type Theory has a univalent representation, which means that this will be a model of the Calculus of Constructions with a univalent type of sets. (shrink)

A topos version of Cantor’s back and forth theorem is established and used to prove that the ordered structure of the rational numbers (Q, <) is homogeneous in any topos with natural numbers object. The notion of effective homogeneity is introduced, and it is shown that (Q, <) is a minimal effectively homogeneous structure, that is, it can be embedded in every other effectively homogeneous ordered structure.

Two straightforward “extensionalisations” of Kleene's realizability are considered; denoted re and e. It is shown that these realizabilities are not equivalent. While the re-notion is a subset of Kleene's realizability, the e-notion is not. The problem of an axiomatization of e-realizability is attacked and one arrives at an axiomatization over a conservative extension of arithmetic, in a language with variables for finite sets. A derived rule for arithmetic is obtained by the use of a q-variant of e-realizability; this rule subsumes (...) the well-known Extended Church's Rule. The second part of the paper focuses on toposes for these realizabilities. By a relaxation of the notion of partial combinatory algebra, a new class of realizability toposes emerges. Relationships between the various realizability toposes are given, and results analogous to Robinson and Rosolini's characterization of the effective topos, are obtained for a topos generalizing e-realizability. (shrink)

An axiomatic treatment of synthetic domain theory is presented, in the framework of the internal logic of an arbitrary topos. We present new proofs of known facts, new equivalences between our axioms and known principles, and proofs of new facts, such as the theorem that the regular complete objects are closed under lifting . In Sections 2–4 we investigate models, and obtain independence results. In Section 2 we look at a model in de Modified realizability Topos, where the (...) Scott Principle fails, and the complete objects are not closed under lifting. Section 3 treats the standard model in the Effective Topos. Theorem 3.2 gives a new characterization of the initial lift-algebra relative to the dominance. We prove that in the standard case it is not the internal colimit of the chain 0 → L → L 2 → ⋯ . The models in Sections 2 and 3 compare via an adjunction. Section 4 discusses a model in a Grothendieck topos. A feature here is that N is not well-complete , whereas 2 is. (shrink)

We prove two embedding and extension theorems in the context of the constructive theory of metric spaces. The first states that Cantor space embeds in any inhabited complete separable metric space (CSM) without isolated points, X, in such a way that every sequentially continuous function from Cantor space to ℤ extends to a sequentially continuous function from X to ℝ. The second asserts an analogous property for Baire space relative to any inhabited locally non‐compact CSM. Both results rely on having (...) careful constructive formulations of the concepts involved.As a first application, we derive new relationships between “continuity principles” asserting that all functions between specified metric spaces are pointwise continuous. In particular, we give conditions that imply the failure of the continuity principle “all functions from X to ℝ are continuous”, when X is an inhabited CSM without isolated points, and when X is an inhabited locally non‐compact CSM. One situation in which the latter case applies is in models based on “domain realizability”, in which the failure of the continuity principle for any inhabited locally non‐compact CSM, X, generalizes a result previously obtained by Escardó and Streicher in the special case X = C[0, 1].As a second application, we show that, when the notion of inhabited complete separable metric space without isolated points is interpreted in a recursion‐theoretic setting, then, for any such space X, there exists a Banach‐Mazur computable function from X to the computable real numbers that is not Markov computable. This generalizes a result obtained by Hertling in the special case that X is the space of computable real numbers. (© 2004 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim). (shrink)

We prove two embedding and extension theorems in the context of the constructive theory of metric spaces. The first states that Cantor space embeds in any inhabited complete separable metric space (CSM) without isolated points, X, in such a way that every sequentially continuous function from Cantor space to ℤ extends to a sequentially continuous function from X to ℝ. The second asserts an analogous property for Baire space relative to any inhabited locally non‐compact CSM. Both results rely on having (...) careful constructive formulations of the concepts involved.As a first application, we derive new relationships between “continuity principles” asserting that all functions between specified metric spaces are pointwise continuous. In particular, we give conditions that imply the failure of the continuity principle “all functions from X to ℝ are continuous”, when X is an inhabited CSM without isolated points, and when X is an inhabited locally non‐compact CSM. One situation in which the latter case applies is in models based on “domain realizability”, in which the failure of the continuity principle for any inhabited locally non‐compact CSM, X, generalizes a result previously obtained by Escardó and Streicher in the special case X = C[0, 1].As a second application, we show that, when the notion of inhabited complete separable metric space without isolated points is interpreted in a recursion‐theoretic setting, then, for any such space X, there exists a Banach‐Mazur computable function from X to the computable real numbers that is not Markov computable. This generalizes a result obtained by Hertling in the special case that X is the space of computable real numbers. (© 2004 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim). (shrink)

The overwhelming majority of the attempts in exploring the problems related to quantum logical structures and their interpretation have been based on an underlying set-theoretic syntactic language. We propose a transition in the involved syntactic language to tackle these problems from the set-theoretic to the category-theoretic mode, together with a study of the consequent semantic transition in the logical interpretation of quantum event structures. In the present work, this is realized by representing categorically the global structure of a quantum algebra (...) of events (or propositions) in terms of sheaves of local Boolean frames forming Boolean localization functors. The category of sheaves is a topos providing the possibility of applying the powerful logical classification methodology of topos theory with reference to the quantum world. In particular, we show that the topos-theoretic representation scheme of quantum event algebras by means of Boolean localization functors incorporates an object of truth values, which constitutes the appropriate tool for the definition of quantum truth-value assignments to propositions describing the behavior of quantum systems. Effectively, this scheme induces a revised realist account of truth in the quantum domain of discourse. We also include an Appendix, where we compare our topos-theoretic representation scheme of quantum event algebras with other categorial and topos-theoretic approaches. (shrink)

The category-theoretic representation of quantum event structures provides a canonical setting for confronting the fundamental problem of truth valuation in quantum mechanics as exemplified, in particular, by Kochen-Specker’s theorem. In the present study, this is realized by representing categorically the global structure of a quantum algebra of events in terms of sheaves of local Boolean frames forming Boolean localization functors. The category of sheaves is a topos providing the possibility of applying the powerful logical classification methodology of topos (...) theory with reference to the quantum world. In particular, we show that the topos-theoretic representation scheme of quantum event algebras by means of Boolean localization functors incorporates an object of truth values, which constitutes the appropriate tool for the definition of quantum truth-value assignments to propositions describing the behavior of quantum systems. Effectively, this scheme induces a contextualist account of truth in the quantum domain of discourse. The philosophical implications of the resulting account are analyzed. Such an account essentially denies that there can be a universal context of reference or an Archimedean standpoint from which to state the totality of facts of nature. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza el ‘nacimiento’ como dispositivo político en la obra de Hesíodo. En primer lugar, nos referimos a una dimensión política en la medida en que algunos nacimientos se despliegan en el marco de las relaciones de poder, en el escenario de las tensiones habituales inherentes a la dramática divina en su relato arquetípico; en segundo lugar, nos referimos a los efectos que tales nacimientos producen en el topos de la economía general del mito como logos explicativo. Este (...) rastreo tiene como fin mostrar que el mito constituye lo real y ayuda a la configuración simbólica de identidades e imaginarios. This article analyze ‘birth’ as a political device in Hesiod’work. In the first place, we refer to a political dimension insofar as some births unfold in the framework of power relations, in the setting of the usual tensions inherent in the divine drama in its archetypal account; secondly, we refer to the effects of such births on the topos of the general economy of myth as explanatory logos. This tracing is intended to show that the myth constitutes the real and helps the symbolic configuration of identities and imaginaries. (shrink)

A. M. Pitts in [Pi] proved that HA op fp is a bi-Heyting category satisfying the Lawrence condition. We show that the embedding $\Phi: HA^\mathrm{op}_\mathrm{fp} \longrightarrow Sh(\mathbf{P_0,J_0})$ into the topos of sheaves, (P 0 is the category of finite rooted posets and open maps, J 0 the canonical topology on P 0 ) given by $H \longmapsto HA(H,\mathscr{D}(-)): \mathbf{P_0} \longrightarrow \text{Set}$ preserves the structure mentioned above, finite coproducts, and subobject classifier, it is also conservative. This whole structure on HA (...) op fp can be derived from that of Sh(P 0 ,J 0 ) via the embedding Φ. We also show that the equivalence relations in HA op fp are not effective in general. On the way to these results we establish a new kind of duality between HA op fp and a category of sheaves equipped with certain structure defined in terms of Ehrenfeucht games. Our methods are model-theoretic and combinatorial as opposed to proof-theoretic as in [Pi]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the AmoresBetty Rose NagleBarbara Weiden Boyd. Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xii 1 252 pp. Cloth, $39.50.The “literary love affair” (130) in the Amores is as much (or more) an affair conducted with literature as it is one represented in literature. Although Barbara Boyd never puts it that way, this (...) is the essence of her argument. In her reading, this three-book collection of amatory elegies is the narrative of Ovid’s early career as a poet. This novel use of the genre—for literary autobiography—is one of the ways in which Ovid expands its boundaries. In Ovid’s Literary Loves Boyd intends to help readers appreciate the originality of the Amores, in part by showing in it the beginnings of that interest in redefining generic boundaries which in the past decade we have come to recognize, through the work of Stephen Hinds and others, as a hallmark of Ovid’s whole corpus.In her introduction, “The Isolation of Ovid’s Amores,” Boyd digests and assesses the current opinion about Ovid’s collection. Its “literary isolation” has resulted from the combined effects of the “generic fallacy” and what she calls the “progressive fallacy.” The latter (her own coinage) is the critical position which holds either that “what comes first is worst” or that “what comes last is worst” (5); accordingly, the Amores are early Ovid and hence inferior, and Ovid is the last of the elegists and hence inferior. As an antidote to the “generic fallacy” Boyd proposes James Zetzel’s “challenge of generic freedom,” itself the latest variation of Kroll’s “Kreuzung der Gattungen.” [End Page 468]Chapter 1, “Reused Language: Genre and Influence in the Interpretation of the Amores,” takes its point of departure from a comparison of the two propemptica Am. 2.11 and Propertius 1.8a. Boyd sets out “both to simplify and to clarify a method for reading imitation in the Amores” (19), and in doing so she makes a substantial contribution to the typology of imitation in Latin literature as a whole. She does this by bringing together two unlikely bedfellows, integrating G. P. Goold’s ideas about Ovid’s “formulae” and “instinctive” versification with G. B. Conte’s concepts of “poetic memory” and poetic language as “reused language.” She also employs Conte’s distinction between “exemplary model” (verbatim imitation) and “code model” (the system of generic rules familiar beforehand) and Richard Thomas’s preference for the term “reference” instead of “imitation.” For her purposes she distinguishes (30–31) between a “parallel,” which may “simply be a common topos” (30) rather than an actual imitation; a “formula,” which may be “a very precise mark of a poetic tradition” (30) without making a specific reference; and a “reference,” which is likely to engage with a whole tradition rather than simply allude to a single source. Finally, she distinguishes (47) “external allusion” (to another poet) from “self-imitation,” which in turn is differentiated into “’internal reference’ proper” (to an earlier poem in the same collection) and “self-imitation” (“reference across works”). These latter may well be, as she claims, “two different, though related, phenomena” (47), but “self-imitation” is not relevant to Boyd’s own discussion until her last chapter. In posing the question “How do we recognize ‘imitation’?” she distinguishes between imitation of “form and theme” (33) and imitation of “content” (34), using the latter term rather idiosyncratically to include “precise features, such as style, diction, and metrical character” (34).Chapter 2, “Literary Means and Ends: Ovid’s Ludus Poeticus,” continues the treatment of imitation in considering Ovid’s practice of “multiple allusion” (67, 89), according to Boyd “an aspect of his style that is far too little recognized and understood” (67). The goal is to clarify how Ovid views his literary past and what meaning his sources have for his use of them—in brief, as she neatly summarizes, “to move beyond equating Ovid’s inspiration and purpose with Propertius and parody, respectively” (50). She shows how in creating Sulmo as a literary landscape (Am. 2.16... (shrink)

Resumo: O ensaio parte da consideração de que a obra de Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) é uma intersecção entre diversas áreas do saber, como a filosofia, a educação, a psicologia, a antropologia e a etologia. Assim, busca formular um Deligny Contemporâneo, uma figura que se constitui a partir do debate público estabelecido em torno das pessoas diagnosticadas com o autismo na contemporaneidade. A partir de uma revisão bibliográfica narrativa, o texto propõe dois caminhos gerais de compreensão sobre a obra do autor, (...) que ainda é bastante desconhecida em território brasileiro: (1) o problema do poder pedagógico-psiquiátrico e de seu efeito sobre a maneira como o autismo passa a ser compreendido; e (2) o problema do topos, das formas de convívio possíveis entre modos de ser verbais e não verbais, que se desdobram em uma discussão sobre o lugar social do autismo. Palavras-chave: Autismo; Neurodiversidade; Educação; Poder Psiquiátrico; Fernand Deligny Contemporary Fernand Deligny: cartographing between education and psychiatric power Abstract: The essay starts from the consideration that the work of Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) is an intersection between different areas of knowledge, such as philosophy, education, psychology, anthropology, and ethology. Thus, it seeks to formulate a Contemporary Deligny, a figure that is constituted from the public debate established around people diagnosed with Autism in contemporary times. Based on a narrative bibliographic review, the text proposes two general ways of understanding the author's work, which is still largely unknown in Brazilian territory: (1) the problem of pedagogical-psychiatric power and its effect on the way in which autism becomes understood; and (2) the problem of topos, of the forms of possible coexistence between verbal and non-verbal ways of being, which unfold in a discussion about the social place of autism. Keywords: Autism; Neurodiversity; Education; Psychiatric Power; Fernand Deligny Contemporâneo Fernand Deligny: cartografía entre educación y poder psiquiátrico Resumen: El ensayo parte de la consideración de que la obra de Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) es una intersección entre diferentes áreas del conocimiento, como la filosofía, la educación, la psicología, la antropología y la etología. Se busca así formular un Deligny Contemporáneo, un personaje que se constituye a partir del debate público establecido en torno a las personas diagnosticadas con Autismo en la época contemporánea. A partir de una revisión bibliográfica narrativa, el texto propone dos caminos generales para comprender la obra del autor, aún en gran medida desconocida en el territorio brasileño: (1) el problema del poder pedagógico-psiquiátrico y su efecto en la forma en que se llega a entender el autismo; y (2) el problema del topos, de las formas de coexistencia posible entre modos de ser verbales y no verbales, que se despliegan en una discusión sobre el lugar social del autismo. Palabras-clave: Autismo; Neurodiversidad; Educación; Poder Psiquiátrico; Fernand Deligny Data de registro: 04/02/2024 Data de aceite: 25/09/2024. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hildegard: Medieval Holism and ‘Presentism’—Or, Did Sigewiza Have Health Insurance?Jerome L. Kroll (bio)Keywordsholistic healing, presentism, Hildegard of Bingen, medieval medicineSuzanne Phillips and Monique Boivin have published an article examining Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098–179) treatment and cure of Sigewiza, a possessed woman. The purpose of their article is to demonstrate Hildegard’s holistic, or biopsychosocial, approach to healing as a model that we in the twenty-first century have lost but would (...) do well to recover. Several questions come to mind:What is Hildegard’s model?Have we lost it?Is it something we wish to emulate?The basics of the case history is that a noblewoman, Sigewiza, is ill or possessed of an evil spirit. Attempts by her local abbot and community to send her on pilgrimages or otherwise to cure or exorcise her, even with Hildegard’s recommendation, have only short-lived success, after which Sigewiza’s illness or demon returns. Finally, the abbot asks Hildegard to take the noblewoman into her Benedictine monastery, and after a suitable time and various interventions, Sigewiza is permanently (presumably) cured. The arduous process of effecting this cure has left Hildegard weak and ill herself, a pattern of poor physical health from which Hildegard suffered all her life.Phillips and Boivin claim that this is an early example of conceptualizing and utilizing a bio-psychosocial model to treat a complex illness. Hildegard, well known for her medical and pharmaceutical knowledge, applies the proper dietary changes to correct Sigewiza’s humoral (biological) imbalance. She treats the psyche and its partner, the soul, by long hours of discussion with Sigewiza and verbal duels with her demon, as well as by exorcising the demon, and she includes the social aspects of treatment by bringing Sigewiza into the Benedictine community of sisters as a participating member. Which of these three modalities may be sufficient for a cure depends upon the medieval literary genre in which the case appears. If in a medical text, then the proper dietary treatment and application of compounds to neutralize and correct the offending humoral imbalances would be the therapeutic agents. In medieval hagiography, [End Page 369] the biological modality is never sufficient and often ridiculed, because the entire thrust of the text is to demonstrate the futility of medical (secular) ministrations and the effectiveness of saintly intervention in producing a cure, whether or not exorcism is technically part of the process. In Sigewiza’s case, perhaps because of the stubbornness of the possessing demon or because of other factors attached to Sigewiza’s condition, the three (biopsychosocial) modalities are utilized. It seems that Sigewiza has a treatment-resistant illness.The narrative follows a familiar topos in saint’s lives (Kroll and Bachrach 2005). Attempts to cure a demoniac by prayers, pilgrimages, intercessions of other local saints or reputedly holy persons, and sometimes by physicians (when available) are to no avail. The sufferer is brought, amidst great fanfare and public attention (a media event), to the holy woman who is the central figure of the particular Vita, and the sufferer is promptly, or protractedly, cured. In such an account, the holiness of the holy woman is further demonstrated and her reputation, shrine, and influence are duly extended and enhanced. The holy person, with humility, attributes the intercession and cure to the power of God, or Jesus or Mary or a particular patron saint, but the crowd of onlookers and the audience of the Vita understand that God (or Jesus or Mary) has in fact granted the miracle cure as a way of demonstrating the holiness of this holy person in contrast to those who previously tried to cure the ill person. The abbot who ‘referred’ Sigewiza to Hildegard, and the previous saints’ shrine to whom Sigewiza was brought, although generally acknowledged as being of fine character or respectability, had to suffer the ignominy of their petitions being rejected to dramatize the special regard in which Hildegard is held.Although we can say that the “purposes” for which Hildegard’s hagiographer includes such anecdotes is to demonstrate her holiness and her importance in God’s eyes, this does not stop us, nine centuries later, from using such... (shrink)

In this paper, we give a constructive nonstandard model of intuitionistic arithmetic (Heyting arithmetic). We present two axiomatisations of the model: one finitary and one infinitary variant. Using the model these axiomatisations are proven to be conservative over ordinary intuitionistic arithmetic. The definition of the model along with the proofs of its properties may be carried out within a constructive and predicative metatheory (such as Martin-Löf's type theory). This paper gives an illustration of the use of sheaf semantics to obtain (...) effective proof-theoretic results.The axiomatisations of nonstandard intuitionistic arithmetic (to be calledHAIandHAIωrespectively) as well as their model are based on the construction in [5] of a sheaf model for arithmetic using a site of filters. In this paper we present a “minimal” version of this model, built instead on a suitable site of provable filter bases. The construction of this site can be viewed as an extension of the well-known construction of the classifying topos for a geometric theory which uses “syntactic sites”. (Such sites can in fact be used to prove semantical completeness of first order logic in a strictly constructive framework, see [6].)We should mention that for classical nonstandard arithmetics there are several nonconstructive methods of proving conservativity over arithmetic, e.g. the compactness theorem, Mac Dowell–Specker's theorem [3]. (shrink)

The category-theoretic representation of quantum event structures provides a canonical setting for confronting the fundamental problem of truth valuation in quantum mechanics as exemplified, in particular, by Kochen–Specker’s theorem. In the present study, this is realized on the basis of the existence of a categorical adjunction between the category of sheaves of variable local Boolean frames, constituting a topos, and the category of quantum event algebras. We show explicitly that the latter category is equipped with an object of truth (...) values, or classifying object, which constitutes the appropriate tool for assigning truth values to propositions describing the behavior of quantum systems. Effectively, this category-theoretic representation scheme circumvents consistently the semantic ambiguity with respect to truth valuation that is inherent in conventional quantum mechanics by inducing an objective contextual account of truth in the quantum domain of discourse. The philosophical implications of the resulting account are analyzed. We argue that it subscribes neither to a pragmatic instrumental nor to a relative notion of truth. Such an account essentially denies that there can be a universal context of reference or an Archimedean standpoint from which to evaluate logically the totality of facts of nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:That St(r)ain Again:Blood, Water, and Generic Allusion in Horace's Bandusia OdeGottfried MaderAbstractHorace's vivid picture of the blood sacrifice to the spring of Bandusia has left many readers feeling somewhat uneasy, for while animal sacrifices appear elsewhere in the Odes,1 none matches this for its pathos or detail:O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro,dulci digne mero non sine floribus, cras donaberis haedo, cui frons turgida cornibusprimis et venerem et proelia destinat.frustra: nam (...) gelidos inficiet tibi rubro sanguine rivos lascivi suboles gregis.(Carm. 3.13.1-8)O spring of Bandusia, brighter than glass, worthy of sweet wine and flowers: tomorrow you will be presented with a kid whose forehead, swelling with first horns, destines him for both love and battles—but in vain, for to honour you the offspring of the wanton herd will dye your icy waters with his crimson blood.Hence the protest or surprise expressed at this allegedly offensive intrusion of blood into an otherwise idyllic scene: "Who wants a drink out of the fountain of Bandusia after that?" (Campbell 1924, 2); "[Horace] visualizes with aesthetic relish the mingling of the cool water and the red blood.... [His] behaviour was strange even by ancient criteria" (Nisbet 1962, 198); "somewhat macabre" (Williams 1969, 89); "the scandal of the sacrificial kid, whose death is dwelt upon... with a cruel brilliance quite out of proportion to any decorative needs" (Wilson 1968, 289).2 Others [End Page 51] have attempted to domesticate the sacrifice, urging that the ancients were less sentimental in these matters and justifying the description as rustic realism.3 But neither view accounts adequately for the densely suggestive detail or the perceptible emphasis on the blood offering—in a word, for the poetic intensity of these lines.The sacrifice begins to make sense when we explore its metaphorical possibilities and integrate it into the ode's thematic and intellectual design.4 Recent criticism has emphasized the metapoetic dimension of 3.13, interpreting Horace's homage to the spring as a tribute to the poetry which secures it a place among the celebrated fountains of Greek and Roman literature: "fies nobilium tu quoque fontium / me dicente cavis inpositam ilicem / saxis, unde loquaces / lymphae desiliunt tuae " (13-16; "you too will take your place among the famous springs when I celebrate the ilex set upon the hollow rocks, from which your clear-voiced waters come cascading down"). Further, since springs and water have a long metaphorical association with poetry (cf. below, note 12), the literal shades off easily into the literary, and the fons reflects the ideals and aspirations of Horace's own lyric art.5 From this perspective, the blood sacrifice too acquires a metaphorical nuance. Here is Steele Commager: "Readers have often been repelled by the details of the kid's sacrifice (6-8). Perhaps the description is not there for its realistic effect alone. Destined for love and battle, the 'offspring of the wanton flock' epitomizes life's comprehensive vitality, and as his warm blood mingles with the lucid water it is easy to sense a suggestion of the transformation of life into art" (Commager 1962, 323-24). Ralph Hexter continues on this trajectory: "The image of the red blood of the goat staining the cold spring water reflects the transmutation of life into poetry.... I believe a close reading of the poem supports a further insight: that Horace means to show us how life is transferred to the water of poetry, and by showing us how it is, he shows us that it is."6 Most recently, Gregson Davis has suggested a further association: "Unmixed wine, flowers, and young animal constitute the sine quibus non of the banqueting apparatus.... Horace's fons is to be honored with the irreducible tokens of convivial [End Page 52] poetry. This ensemble of tokens, and not the presumed reference to an obscure festival, is what principally determines the speaker's choice of offerings." And once the choice of offerings has established the lyric orientation, the goat's death suggests to Davis also the mortality topos or the "dark background," typically a foil to the convivial motifs in the context of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Iconicity, Romance and History in the Crónica SarracinaMarina S. Brownlee (bio)Though seemingly alien discourses, romance and historiography are perennially linked. Far from offering an atemporal imaginary universe that bears no resemblance to historical specificity, romance is constructed as a response to it. Rather than simply projecting for the reader the naïve appeal of a prelapsarian escapism from the harsh realities of history, romance involves a continuous and sophisticated reinvention (...) of itself as a response to an ever-changing historico-political configuration. It is, in fact, a reciprocal relationship. We frequently see history appropriating romance paradigms explicitly, as, for example, when Bernal Díaz chooses to present Spain’s New World conquest and colonization as a continuation of the exploits of Amadís [see Gilman].Whatever form it takes, romance is committed to the celebration of a coherent system of socio-political values. This extra-textual frame of reference can take a variety of forms—from political propaganda that offers a self-aggrandizing depiction of the nobility or patron for whom the text is produced, to escapist fantasy—futuristic or archaizing. It is nostalgia for the lost world of chivalric romance which Cervantes embodies in the figure of Don Quijote, a foolish old man driven mad by his obsession with this perennial literary form. Cervantes is rightly credited with a brilliant and programmatic use of romance constructs to communicate the ongoing historical crisis of the Spanish empire. A byproduct of this romance scrutiny of history was his invention of the modern novel.Testimony to the long-standing interaction between romance and history in Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, is evident in the fact that its first romances were based on history, the so-called “romances of antiquity.” In those texts historical figures and events are evoked for the purpose of legitimating the present, vernacular poets as they celebrate the empowering myths projected by their society, as well as their own literary endeavors by invoking venerable Latin models. The well known translatio studii et imperii topos offers such allegory of empire.At the same time, the confrontation of romance and historical representation can also have a destabilizing effect, and this is programmatically explored in Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina (c. 1430). His text ponders the possibilities of romance and historiography in an obsessive manner and he accomplishes his task by examining representation of the most iconic figures associated with the fall of Spain in 711, namely, La Cava and her father, Count Julián, King Rodrigo, and Pelayo, the messianic hope of the Reconquest effort which would last nearly 800 years.Of related and perhaps even broader importance, Corral’s text merits careful reading because its exploration of iconicity related to Spain’s fall offers meditations on the workings of ideology, which inevitably proposes “imaginary or formal solutions to unresolvable contradictions” [Jameson 79]. Ideology—its unmasking—is intriguingly posited by Corral in powerful ways.If we turn to Corral’s text, we find a work offering an extraordinary consideration of history and romance—their profound interaction—whose full title reads, La crónica [End Page 119] del rey don Rodrigo con la destrucción de España (The Chronicle of King Rodrigo with the Destruction of Spain). My interest in the Crónica here is primarily to consider the mechanisms by which it gestures boldly toward what Žižek has described as the project of the postmodern critique of ideology—though it is clearly a recurring cultural constant—namely to “designate the elements which point towards the system’s antagonistic character, and thus ‘estrange’ us to the self-evidence of its established identity” [Žižek 7]. A reading of the Crónica provides an extended paradigm of such estrangement.Iberia is the area of the Mediterranean which underwent the most protracted encounter between Christianity and Islam, and the events of the Moorish invasion of 711 constitute Spain’s unique foundational subject-matter—on a par with the Troy legend and with King Arthur [see Deyermond 355]. Like them, the retelling of 711 is all about forging mythic connections in order to legitimize empire in a temporally remote time-frame. What interests me in this essay is... (shrink)

‘The last stanza of Horace's poem’, writes Denis Feeney of Hor.Carm.3.3, ‘declares virtually outright that he has just been “quoting” epic matter: “desine peruicax | referre sermones deorum et | magna modis tenuare paruis” (70–2)’. A poem that recounts the doings of gods automatically demands comparison with epic, but if thespeechesof gods are presented, all the more so. Horace's poem in fact evokes an episode within a specific epic poem, the Council of the Gods that occurred during the first book (...) of Ennius’Annales. But such divine councils are a ‘stock epic scene’, and rather more than that: they are moments when epic is at its most quintessentially epic. In simple terms, an epic poet ‘may underline the significance and increase the dramatic effect’ of a critical point in the narrative ‘by showing us that it exercised the gods’, and that analysis applies to any divine presence in a poem: if a key impulse of epic is to amplify the significance of human activity, those occasions when higher forces overtly assert their control of human destiny satisfy a number of fundamental preoccupations of the genre. But in the Council of the Gods we have the most developed and impressive realization of this divine concern for mortal existence, as well as a topos that in Rome at least achieved special status within the broader field of divine machinery in epic. That status is perhaps reflected in a tendency discernible in the Roman section of the tradition for such councils to fall early in the epic narrative, as if initiating the epic plot. If so, however, Virgil's Council atAen.10.1–117 defies expectation by failing to be convened until the plot of the epic is very far advanced indeed, and even then, as this article will consider, achieving strikingly less than one might expect of a plenary gathering of supernatural powers at an advanced stage in an epic narrative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chariton's Erotic HistoryJean AlvaresIt is clear that numerous personages and events of Chaireas and Callirhoe are either taken directly from history or are in some way based on historiographical materials.1 The work has been considered a historical romance,2 yet its mixture of genuine historical fact, gross inaccuracies, anachronisms of Chariton's period,3 and reflections of drama, oratory, and epic4 suggests to some that Chariton merely aims to provide a "general (...) colouring of Greek history, to titillate the readers" (Reardon 1996, 327). I believe Chariton had larger aims. Building upon the insights of Edwards (1987, 29–51) into how Chariton depicts Aphrodite's influence upon politics and society, I consider here how Chariton adapts familiar elements from history in order to provide a contrast to [End Page 613] history, as those elements' usual political and social significances are attenuated or ignored and as they in turn become evidence for the operations of Aphrodite. Thus a Greek assembly pleads for the marriage of teenagers, an eros–obsessed satrap contemplates revolt, and the hero, seeking vengeance against his erotic rival, mimics the deeds of Alexander. I use these elements to produce an outline (not a full–fledged narrative) of an "alternative" history of Syracuse, one that suggests a more satisfying history wherein Aphrodisian values are pursued with the same vigor as those of conventional history.5 I do not assert that Chariton intended his work to be read as a type of history or even as a historical novel;6 I merely wish to reveal the historical narrative that is contained (with much else) within the text and its significance.To provide context for this reading I begin with Müller's observation that Chariton offers his work as a successor to epic inasmuch as Chaireas and Callirhoe concerns a heroic period of Greek history that had by Chariton's time become legendary.7 For such "epic" and "mythologized" history, traditional accounts, such as those of Thucydides, become simply raw material, such as Homer became for later poets, dramatists and rhetoricians—material to be altered according to the author's purposes.8 Further, as Bowersock notes, starting at roughly the [End Page 614] time of Nero, various literary works appeared that challenged conventional history or myth by presenting an alternative version of famous events: for example, the account of the Trojan War offered under the name of Dictys of Crete.9 I suggest that, for Chariton, the glorious period of Syracuse's victory over Athens is sufficiently remote and mythologized to be the legitimate object of a similar rewriting, an "alternative" history which demonstrates that pursuit of the values of Aphrodite and Eros can bring the sort of success achieved by the heroes of conventional histories. The outlines of such an alternative history can be extracted from Chaireas and Callirhoe.The starting point for Chariton's alternative erotic history is an idealized Syracuse, a state whose unique excellence makes it a fitting birthplace for the exceptional Chaireas and Callirhoe. A long–standing literary tradition idealized Syracuse and Hermocrates for their wealth and unexpected defeat of Athens.10 The Syracuse of Chaireas and Callirhoe is a city with recognizably Hellenic political and social institutions that work in surprising harmony.11 Hellenistic and Roman historiography often connect the rise and fall of states and individuals to their character and actions; similarly, the social harmony and success of these fictive Syracusans are linked to their willingness to follow the influence of Aphrodite, whose politically beneficent effects are observed early on.Initially a fierce political rivalry exists between Hermocrates and Ariston (1.1.3–4). Such rivalries were a common historiographical topos as well as a present reality of the Greek East.12 They often brought civic [End Page 615] disaster, but here Eros, "who is a lover of victory and rejoices in paradoxes set straight," decides that the rivals' two children should be married and arranges their meeting. Chaireas and Callirhoe fall in love, and, forbidden to marry, begin to waste away (1.1.4–10). At the next scheduled assembly the Syracusans, dominated by Eros the demagogue, ignore all other public business and instead beg Hermocrates to marry... (shrink)

We analyse the proposition that the spacetime structure is modified at short distances or at high energies due to weakening of classical logic. The logic assigned to the regions of spacetime is intuitionistic logic of some topoi. Several cases of special topoi are considered. The quantum mechanical effects can be generated by such semi-classical spacetimes. The issues of: background independence and general relativity covariance, field theoretic renormalization of divergent expressions, the existence and definition of path integral measures, are briefly discussed (...) in the proposal. The connection with some problems in foundations of mathematics and differential topology are also discussed. (shrink)

At the Le Thor Seminar in 1969, Heidegger characterises his thinking as taking the form of what he calls a ‘topology of being’ (Topologie des Seins) and as thereby giving a key role to place (topos, Ort/Ortschaft). Much of my work over the last 25 years has been devoted to exploring how such a topology is indeed present in Heidegger’s thinking, both early and late, and so to showing how place figures in that thinking – to showing, in effect, (...) how the questioning of being is also the thinking of place. The aim here is to provide a summary introduction to the topology that this exploration has aimed at uncovering, but to do so in a way that is focussed on the early work, especially Being and Time. To this end, the discussion proceeds through an explication of the topological elements that are present in the form of key terms and ideas such as facticity, questionability, being-in, existential spatiality, and there-being or Dasein. There is also a brief exploration of the way the term Dasein figures in German philosophical discourse prior to Heidegger in ways that are not only reflected in Heidegger’s early work, but also draw directly upon that term’s topological connotations. (shrink)

Undergirding China’s Belt and Road Initiative’s lofty promise of global connectivity are existing connections between the PRC’s implementation of planetary-scale observation systems for environmental sustainability and the recognizably nefarious policies of localized, colonial surveillance of Turkic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). My article examines how the recently alleged genocide in XUAR becomes the afflicted topos where both the rhetoric and practices of monitoring differently complex systems come together. Such complex connections require a recursive analysis, one which (...) further distinguishes between recursion as an actual technique used in remote sensing and algorithmic processes and recursion as a heuristic in discourses about these computational processes and their effects on controlled populations and territories. This article, following recent interest in the intersections of geopolitics, computational design, digital capitalism and colonialism, argues that the Chinese government’s multipronged investments in environmental sciences-related sensing and imaging technologies do not simply help track its own citizens and foreign populations but also how these groups are increasingly monitored by them. I examine how the Digital Belt and Road’s Science Plan frames the environment, including sovereign territories, peoples, and natural resources as data assets. The rest of my discussion turns away from state-sponsored Earth sciences to examine Anglophone media and human rights groups’ use of satellite imageries and databases to evidence the state’s construction of internment facilities and other surveillance mechanisms in XUAR. Alleged algorithms of oppression enclose the XUAR as a black box of the police state, but digital infographic interfaces like the Xinjiang Data Project, which attempts to expose the PRC’s relegation of Uyghurs to biometric and surveillance data, only furthers a recursive datafication of XUAR. (shrink)

In this paper we treat humorous situations as a series of events underpinned by topoi, principles of reasoning recognised within a socio-cultural community. We claim that humorous effect in jokes and other discourse is often created by the juxtaposition of topoi evoked. A prerequisite for this is that there is a shift where the interpreter of the discourse updates their information state with regard to a second topos being evoked. This view of humour is consistent with an incremental analysis (...) of dialogue, and we therefore argue that interaction is central both for humour creation and interpretation. We point out some different ways in which topoi are juxtaposed in humorous dialogues as well as in jokes published in social media or in joke books, and take jokes from the coronavirus pandemic as an example because this makes lots of new topoi available and therefore offers the opportunity of creating novel jokes based on the juxtaposition of the new and existing topoi. We explore how the mechanisms of inference in dialogue can be applied to humour through the four elements from our title: old, new, borrowed and taboo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 223-248 [Access article in PDF] Probabilities, Signs, Necessary Signs, Idia, and Topoi:The Confusing Discussion of Materials for Enthymemes in the Rhetoric Brad McAdon This essay examines three groups of "sources" or "materials" of enthymemes in Aristotle's Rhetoric. According to the text of the Rhetoric, enthymemes are derived from, among other things, probabilities, signs, and necessary signs, and/or from the topics, and/or from idia as (...) the following table indicates.1The Rhetoric does not explain any relationships that may exist between these different sources (or materials) from which enthymemes are said. This problem, as I am framing it, is two-fold: First, these different conceptions of materials from which enthymemes are said are never reconciled into a coherent account (or theory) in the Rhetoric. Rather, each conception of materials for the enthymeme is presented in a way that obscures, rather than facilitates, our understanding of the materials of enthymemes in the Rhetoric. Moreover, when Rhetoric 2.22-23 and its textual contexts are compared to 1.2 and its textual contexts, several differences will emerge [End Page 223] in respect to the nature of the materials of enthymemes and the distinctions in enthymemes that further cloud our understanding of the text. Second, many contemporary commentators place more emphasis on the dialectical aspects of rhetoric than the demonstrative. For while rhetoric is said to be closely related to dialectic in important ways in the early portions of the Rhetoric (especially 1.1-2), there are, arguably, more similarities between the materials of enthymemes in the Prior and Posterior Analytics (and thus demonstrative argument) than in the Topics (and dialectical argument). This suggests that the discussion of the materials of enthymemes in the Rhetoric is more demonstrative in nature (or at least in emphasis) than dialectical, and I hope to demonstrate that this is the case.As far as I can tell, Grimaldi's discussions of the "Eikota and semeia" (1972, 104-15) and "The topoi" (115-35) are the only contemporary attempts to explicitly address the relationship between probabilities and signs and the topoi in the Rhetoric. 2 Grimaldi's account is confusing in many respects. For example, in addition to understanding the idia as topoi, he claims that "[w]hen Aristotle has presented us with the sources of the enthymeme, eikota and semeia, and told us that they are the premises of enthymematic reasoning (A3, 59a7-10) the question which immediately arises is where does the rhetor turn for the material which will provide him with such eikota and semeia. The answer is: the topics" (115). Yet, a little further down the same page, he claims that "the topics are sources, or loci, both particular and general, to which one must have recourse in constructing probable argumentation by enthymeme in an effort to effect pistis" (115). So, in effect, Grimaldi claims that probabilities and signs are the sources of enthymemes and then that the topics are the sources of probabilities and signs, 3 but, as demonstrated above, the text of the Rhetoric clearly claims that the topoi are the sources of enthymemes just as probabilities, signs, and necessary signs are sources of enthymemes. Grimaldi fails to address or even acknowledge this. Rather, in his attempt to maintain the unity of the text of the Rhetoric, he has advanced this working relationship between eikota and se-meiaand the topoi in what he claims is a consistent theory in the Rhetoric concerning the relationship of eikota and se-meia (and tekme-ria)to the topoi that, I will argue, is not supported by the text as Grimaldi suggests. More recently, Robin Smith (1989 and 1997) provides carefully informed commentary on some of these terms—topos, idia, eikos, se-meia, and tekme-ria—but, and this is not his purpose, he does not provide a discussion that explicitly examines how (or if) these different terms relate to one another as sources of enthymemes. Thus, this essay is an attempt to explore and succinctly articulate the problems with the... (shrink)

The paper aims at critical reconsideration of a motif popular in Indian literary, ritual, and pictorial traditions – a tree goddess (yakṣī, vṛkṣakā) or a woman embracing a tree (śālabhañjīkā, dohada), which points to a close and intimate bond between women and trees. At the outset, I present the most important phases of the evolution of this popular motif from the ancient times to present days. Then two essential characteristics of nature recognized in Indian visual arts, literature, religions and philosophy (...) will be distinguished: (1) a dynamic, creative, self-sufficient and inexhaustible power, and (2) a passive, merely reproductive or vegetative, and dependent field of potentiality. The paper is to demonstrate the interdependence of the popular concepts of nature identified with femininity, and their iconic representations circulating for centuries in Indian culture, with a specific line of argument repeatedly used in social practices and public debates. While doing so, I consider the semiotic function of a cultural topos which proves to be an effective instrument for construing and supporting the gender roles and gender identities. As a modern example illustrating vitality and persuasive power of the motif of yakṣī and śālabhañjīkā, I refer to the Chipko Movement, a group of rural women based in the Garhwal Himalayas (state Uttarakhand), who fought against the mass cut of trees in the 1970s. They were involved in the wide-spread environmental campaign which significantly affected the ecological policy of the local and state authorities. Thus, a traditional motif of the visual arts has been revived and re-elaborated by the activists of this ecofeminist movement through converting the symbolic potential of yakṣī/śālabhañjīkā into social and political power. (shrink)

In spacetime physics any set C of events—a causal set—is taken to be partially ordered by the relation ≤ of possible causation: for p, q ∈ C, p ≤ q means that q is in p’s future light cone. In her groundbreaking paper The internal description of a causal set: What the universe looks like from the inside, Fotini Markopoulou proposes that the causal structure of spacetime itself be represented by “sets evolving over C” —that is, in essence, by the (...) topos SetC of presheaves on Cop. To enable what she has done to be the more easily expressed within the framework presented here, I will reverse the causal ordering, that is, C will be replaced by Cop, and the latter written as P—which will, moreover, be required to be no more than a preordered set. Specifically, then: P is a set of events preordered by the relation ≤, where p ≤ q is intended to mean that p is in q’s future light cone—that q could be the cause of p, or, equally, that p could be an effect of q. In that case, for each event p, the set p↓ = {q: q ≤ p} may be identified as the causal future of p, or the set of potential effects of p. In requiring that ≤ be no more than a preordering—in dropping, that is, the antisymmetry of ≤—I am, in physical terms, allowing for the possibility that the universe is of Gödelian type, containing closed timelike lines. (shrink)

An explicit feature of the World Health Organisation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been to ensure that naming conventions, both for the disease itself and for the variants of its underlying virus, should not have a stigmatising effect on any one population or region. An implicit feature of this undertaking is the recognition that the relation between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is heard’ involves an ongoing and even generative tension that cannot be mapped following a defined set of (...) coordinates. The reason for this, the following paper claims, employing the work of Barbara Cassin, is that there is a uniquely performative (epideictic) aspect to language – one that takes place in a uniquely non-globalised space whose extension remains unscripted or extemporised, a space that is often distended and sometimes localisable but ultimately indivisible. Such a space, this paper shows, is one oriented by an understanding of rhetoric whereby utterances obtain according to the actual use [chreia] or decisive moment [kairos] – as opposed to any definitive place [topos] – of what is said. (shrink)

This paper explores how Heidegger’s discussion of experience as topos can illuminate some elements of Maximus’ writings. In Heidegger’s later work, the experiencing subject emerges from, and experiences only within, place. Experience is only ever constituted when the conditions of its emergence come together concretely, which is to say, somewhere. Topos, a place, such as a city or my home, is a unity of the elements that make it up. The essay first examines how Heidegger sees philosophical inquiry (...) as a drawing out of the different elements that constitute the unity of experience as place. Many works of Maximus the Confessor, including his ascetic writings, examine how the subject experiences within the world. Using the topological account of experience described by Heidegger, the paper examines several distinctions that emerge from Maximus’ ascetic thought. Using examples, the essay suggests it is possible to see Maximus’ analyses as being engagements with an understanding to the effect that experience emerges with a unity, in topos. The essay suggests that reading Maximus through topos helps explain why it is that so many structures can arise interdependently through his engagement with experience. (shrink)

As our scientific conscience about nature has been deeply changed by the development of so-called ‘quantum theory’ during the 20th century, theology has been confronted with a new horizon of questions about ‘God’ and about how a human being has to be imagined in our cosmos. This article is a tiny comparison between the renaissance of thinking in line with the rediscoveries of Aristotelian thought in the West during 12th century and the renaissance of science we are witnessing in our (...) age.Contribution: In this series of contributions about theology and nature, this article contributes to a way of questioning theology and nature in a new, dazzling perspective about rerouting humanity in recent research about the smallest measurable values in nature, being perhaps a new topos of theological reflection that is characterised by God and contingency. (shrink)

Evidence and CausalityCausality is a vibrant and thriving topic in philosophy of science. It is closely related to many other challenging scientific concepts, such as probability and mechanisms, which arise in many different scientific contexts, in different fields. For example, probability and mechanisms are relevant to both causal inference (finding out what causes what) and causal explanation (explaining how a cause produces its effect). They are also of interest to fields as diverse as astrophysics, biochemistry, biomedical and social sciences. At (...) the same time, there has been an explosion of interest in evidence, most obviously in biomedical contexts with the rise of ‘evidence-based medicine’, but also elsewhere, such as in social science. What is evidence? How do we decide what our best sources of evidence are?This topos examines the relation between causality and evidence in different scientific areas. This involves questions about the foundations of the sciences, e.g. what is e .. (shrink)

This article examines Russian realist landscape paintings of the Peredvižniki. It demonstrates how in the course of the formation of a national identity during the late nineteenth century, an originally ideology-free space was politically charged and in the course of decades has been incorporated through various measures and media into the collective memory. In this way, the topos of the ‘Russian Landscape’ became lieu de mémoire for Russianness that transcends social order. Through identification with supposedly Russian scenery, which knows (...) no regional or national borders, love of the motherland can be created and strengthened. In their various reproductions, these landscape images developed into a kind of world parallel to the world of everyday experience in the Stalin era. The ideology of Russian landscape painting is now experiencing a new level of appreciation in the West, the effect of which is a shift in focus in their evaluation, from national to universal criteria. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going to our Happy Place: Idealism, Realism, and Nishida's Eutopia: A Response to Christian UhlChristopher S. Goto-JonesWords can be tricky things; their significance is often found in unexpected places. The word 'utopia,' for example, is usually considered to have originated in the early sixteenth century in Louvain when Thomas More fused two Greek words (ou, 'not,' and topos, 'place'). The result was a new, Greek-sounding compound, utopia, translatable (...) as 'Noplace.' Apparently, it was a small, newly discovered island where people did things differently from Europeans. By a happy coincidence, utopia was almost homophonous with another Greek compound, eutopia, which might be translated as 'Happyplace.' The word has come to be used to describe models of nonexistent societies that are imagined to be better than the ones in which we live.In his stimulating, thorough, and carefully crafted review of my recent book, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity, Christian [End Page 482] Uhl makes a great deal of my claim that Nishida's political project was utopian. He also takes issue with my characterization of Nishida as a political idealist. In the interests of clarification and in the spirit of engaged debate, I think that it is important to consider what these important (and often complicated) terms mean. In particular, the idea that 'idealist' and 'utopian' are coterminous should not be allowed to stand unchallenged. In a related way, it may be helpful to clarify what is meant by 'realist' in political thought, since Uhl claims that, far from being an idealist, Nishida was actually a realist "in a very fundamental sense of the word."Uhl is quite right to observe that I identify Nishida's political scheme as utopian in the sense that he provides a model of an ideal society as a means of demonstrating the problems in the society in which he lived.1 However, when it comes to the effectiveness of Nishida's utopian vision qua dissent in wartime Japan (or simply qua practice), the key problem slides from being utopianism itself to idealism. A utopia is an ideal society; the method required to realize that society is not necessarily part of the vision itself, although it may be implied in the structure. Consider a socialist utopia: for Marx, the road to this perfect society was paved by historical materialism; for a number of other socialists (including many Japanese socialists), the route to a broadly similar society was defined in humanist or even idealist terms. In a rather casual sense we might label the later Marx a realist and, say, Kawakami Hajime as an idealist. Nishida's utopia is no simpler,2 although it does, in fact, contain a sense of process: it is defined as a type of self-realization and it is premised upon an underlying faith in the power of the mind to transform both the self and the everyday world.I would contend that Nishida was an idealist (a thinker who works on the principle that the reality in which we live is somehow mind-correlative), although not a simple idealist, and also a political utopian. A number of his students, for example Nishitani and Kōyama, broadly shared their mentor's goals but differed in their construction of the paths to them. The quotation from Nishitani that Uhl selects reveals this clearly: he argues that if we do not "have both feet firmly grounded in the consciousness of the past as well as in the practice of the present, any idea will remain a mere concept, a utopian ideal."3 Nishitani is not taking issue with the utopia; he is challenging the process appropriate to its realization. He argues (in common with many of the other second-generation members of the Kyoto School) that an idealist philosophy that pays no attention to the significance of history can offer no blueprints for the achievement of its ideals in reality. The implied challenge to Nishida's thought here is to his understanding of the forces of historical change: idealist self-power (jiriki) is laid bare as ahistorical and inadequate as an engine for social change. Having said that, however, Nishitani does not make... (shrink)

Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the evidence (...) offered to support these claims is sorely deficient. He also shows that there is strong empirical support for the thesis that some conscious decisions and intentions have a genuine place in causal explanations of corresponding actions. In short, there is weighty evidence of the existence of effective conscious intentions or the power of conscious will. Mele examines the accuracy of subjects' reports about when they first became aware of decisions or intentions in laboratory settings and develops some implications of warranted skepticism about the accuracy of these reports. In addition, he explores such questions as whether we must be conscious of all of our intentions and why scientists disagree about this. Mele's final chapter closes with a discussion of imaginary scientific findings that would warrant bold claims about free will and consciousness of the sort he examines in this book. (shrink)

Recent studies have shown that self‐explanation is an effective metacognitive strategy, but how can it be leveraged to improve students' learning in actual classrooms? How do instructional treatments that emphasizes self‐explanation affect students' learning, as compared to other instructional treatments? We investigated whether self‐explanation can be scaffolded effectively in a classroom environment using a Cognitive Tutor, which is intelligent instructional software that supports guided learning by doing. In two classroom experiments, we found that students who explained their steps during (...) problem‐solving practice with a Cognitive Tutor learned with greater understanding compared to students who did not explain steps. The explainers better explained their solutions steps and were more successful on transfer problems. We interpret these results as follows: By engaging in explanation, students acquired better‐integrated visual and verbal declarative knowledge and acquired less shallow procedural knowledge. The research demonstrates that the benefits of self‐explanation can be achieved in a relatively simple computer‐based approach that scales well for classroom use. (shrink)

Effective field theories have been a very popular tool in quantum physics for almost two decades. And there are good reasons for this. I will argue that effective field theories share many of the advantages of both fundamental theories and phenomenological models, while avoiding their respective shortcomings. They are, for example, flexible enough to cover a wide range of phenomena, and concrete enough to provide a detailed story of the specific mechanisms at work at a given energy scale. (...) So will all of physics eventually converge on effective field theories? This paper argues that good scientific research can be characterised by a fruitful interaction between fundamental theories, phenomenological models and effective field theories. All of them have their appropriate functions in the research process, and all of them are indispensable. They complement each other and hang together in a coherent way which I shall characterise in some detail. To illustrate all this I will present a case study from nuclear and particle physics. The resulting view about scientific theorising is inherently pluralistic, and has implications for the debates about reductionism and scientific explanation. (shrink)

Prior to this intervention the site used to be a degraded fiscal property, that functioned as a bus yard, a police legal deposit, and a restaurant parking lot. Underneath it runs the Maldonado stream culvert, covered by a concrete slab at a depth of only -20cm. Next to the site is a 5m high railroad embankment. The plot is strategically located at the end of Juan B. Justo avenue and works as a gateway to the Tres de Febrero park (also (...) known as Bosques de Palermo, the Buenos Aires’s biggest green space designed by Charles Thays in 1875). It is situated in the neighborhood of Palermo, an area that underwent a vertiginous residential and commercial expansion since the late 90´s. -/- The design approach is influenced by the adjacent urban fragments: the grounds of the Sociedad Rural Argentina, the surrounding Avenues Santa Fe-Sarmiento; the opening of Darregueyra street expected for the near future, the implementation of historic preservation guidelines for the Tres de Febrero Park, and the proposal for the development of nearby railroad yards. -/- Specifically, the project seeks to minimize the impact of the fast traffic that runs along Bullrich avenue, improving pedestrian and cycle access to the park. At the same time it defines new landscape features, utilizing the earth made available by the tunneling works of a new subway line. -/- The project comprises the structuring of an existing 800 meter long embankment and the transformation of the sidewalk into a public promenade. This is achieved through a wider sidewalk of 12m on average, which is part of a series of longitudinal stripes ranging from high speed to quiet spaces. The first band of grass and aged tipas (tipuana tipu) buffer pedestrian and cyclist from automotive traffic. Cycle traffic is organized on its own lane. The sidewalk itself contains several bays that act as urban lounges. Next, a continuous concrete bench delimits the beginning of the slope, backed by a stripe of grass that works as a soft extension. Finally, plants for contemplation are arranged as undulating traces. Rhythmic use of retaining gabions defines longitudinal segments of varying slope, unifying the spacial criterion. This series is punctuated by an amphitheater and framed by triangular plazas at the corners. -/- Material choices for hard surfaces are constrained by concerns of durability, low cost, and consistency with other ongoing public works. -/- Hard materials, as well as the plant selection needed to be low-maintenance. The palette was kept to reinforced concrete, granitic slabs, and granite stone in large size –forming retaining gabions- and as loose finishing for pavements. Likewise, the lack of a protective enclosure and of continuous surveillance dictated that urban furniture and fixtures be anti-vandalic. The stealing of these components –from inspection lids, to benches, to plants- is a common problem in urban spaces in many Latin American cities. To prevent this, fixtures must be designed according to precise specifications regarding their weight, fixing and anchoring systems, and mechanical parts. -/- Sidewalks are organized through a 6 meter grid made of granitic white slab, infilled with textured combed nonslip concrete modules. Extended bays and corner squares are finished with white and black slabs respectively. These materials are similar to another used in public spaces under construction, in the believe that it creates a collective identification of themselves along the city. -/- The continuous reinforced concrete bench is 1.10 m wide, in order to allow people to use it in non-conventional ways. Further up on the slope, undulating paths separate plant species and provide access for gardening, but are also open to use by the public. They are paved with 2 meter-long precast concrete slabs (smaller and lighter pieces were avoided to deter robbery). As they reach the gabions they connect with sloping paths covered with loose granitic stones. The gabions themselves allow the creation of varying slopes while contributing to retaining the soil, which is reinforced with geosynthetic fabric in the perimeter to avoid landslides originated by strong rains typical of the region. -/- Urban furniture is featured on the wider bays of the sidewalk and at corner plazas. It includes seats, water fountains, bicycle racks, wastepaper baskets. As a counterpoint to the linear concrete bench, groups of concrete seats are arranged informally. These seats are a reinterpretation of the dynamic BKF chair (also known as Butterfly chair), the classic Argentinean design of the 1930’ by Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy. A few low concrete tables complete these spaces as authentic urban lounges. Lighting design accompanies the general features of the project and creates a new scenography emphasizing night-time usage. -/- Landscape gardening criteria is set up by a selection of various species of high-resistant pasture (grass). The higher the slope, the higher the grass, increasing the final volumetric result. Based on considering the original tipas line (tipuana tipu, a species from the north of Argentina, yellow flowering) as a vertical wall that frames the view, the horizontal stripes contain a single species each, differing in size, shade and flowering periods –adding, in the middle band, a changing color on the big green plane slope in the same chromatic range. The final configuration of the stripe sequence from bottom to top: bermuda grass, bulbine frutescens, euryops pectinatus. The upper band existing native species is reinforced with new samples: paspalum exaltatum + cortadera selloana and ipomea + thumbergia climbing the railway fence. Each sector between gabions has an automated system of drip irrigation. Near the corner plazas, several palms are planted to provide shade and identity to the street-crossing. -/- The intervention proposes an ambivalent effect on the landscape, trascending the merely ornamental by accompanying the motorist in speed, while conforting the pedestrian with spaces for contemplation and urban relax. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the internal structure of Gandhi's ethics as a way to determine opportunities for improving that system's ability to influence behavior. In this paper, the author aims to work under the idea that a system of ethics is a guide for social responsibility. -/- Design/methodology/approach – The data source is Gandhi's set of ethics as described by Naess. These simple (primarily quantitative) studies compare the concepts within the code of ethics, and (...) their relationships to one another. -/- Findings – Gandhi's ethics are robust at the 0.25 level (the scale is zero to one – zero is lowest). This is consistent with theories of the social sciences (that do not work well in practice). Gandhi's success might be ascribed to his leadership ability. -/- Research limitations/implications – Some suggest this approach is reductionist because of its superficial similarity to approaches of physical science. The implications for research are profound. First, this approach provides an objective method for comparing (and so, advancing) systems of ethics. Second, this paper suggests the opportunity to compare the internal structure of ethics with “external” aspects – the implementation of ethical systems. -/- Practical implications – By itself, Gandhi's system of ethics cannot be reliably applied in practice - it cannot be expected to change behavior more than any other system of ethics. This raises concerns about other ethical codes as well. The practical implications of the form of analysis presented in this paper are immense because it provides a way for practitioners to objectively compare two codes of ethics and determine which one will be more effective. -/- Originality/value – The approach documented in the paper has never been applied to the field of ethics. It is unique in that it addresses the “internal” structure of a system of ethics (compared to the “external”, or application, of ethical systems). (shrink)

Three accounts of effective realism (ER) have been advanced to solve three problems for scientific realism: Fraser and Vickers (forthcoming) develop a version of ER about non-relativistic quantum mechanics that they argue is compatible with all the main realist versions (‘interpretations’) of quantum mechanics avoiding the problem of underdetermination among them; Williams (2019) and Fraser (2020b) propose ER about quantum field theory as a response to the problems facing realist interpretations; Robertson and Wilson (forthcoming) propose ER to deal with (...) the dubious ontological status of the entities belonging to superseded theories. This paper argues for the unification of these proposals based on realism about modal structure and the idea of scale relativity of ontology developed by ontic structural realists. This solves problems some or all the accounts of ER face, especially that of making explicit in what way they are realist. Furthermore, we respond to a recent critique that has been raised against the ontic structural realist account of quantum mechanics that we employ. (shrink)

Horsten and Roelants have raised a number of important questions about my analysis of effective procedures and my evaluation of the Church-Turing thesis. They suggest that, on my account, effective procedures cannot enter the mathematical world because they have a built-in component of causality, and, hence, that my arguments against the Church-Turing thesis miss the mark. Unfortunately, however, their reasoning is based upon a number of misunderstandings. Effective mundane procedures do not, on my view, provide an analysis (...) of ourgeneral concept of an effective procedure; mundane procedures and Turing machine procedures are different kinds of procedure. Moreover, the same sequence ofparticular physical action can realize both a mundane procedure and a Turing machine procedure; it is sequences of particular physical actions, not mundane procedures, which enter the world of mathematics. I conclude by discussing whether genuinely continuous physical processes can enter the world of real numbers and compute real-valued functions. I argue that the same kind of correspondence assumptions that are made between non-numerical structures and the natural numbers, in the case of Turing machines and personal computers, can be made in the case of genuinely continuous, physical processes and the real numbers. (shrink)