A complex brain network, centered on the hippocampus, supports episodic memories throughout their lifetimes. Classically, upon memory encoding during active behavior, hippocampal activity is dominated by theta oscillations (6-10Hz). During inactivity, hippocampal neurons burst synchronously, constituting sharp waves, which can propagate to other structures, theoretically supporting memory consolidation. This 'two-stage' model has been updated by new data from high-density electrophysiological recordings in animals that shed light on how information is encoded and exchanged between hippocampus, neocortex and subcortical structures such as (...) the striatum. Cell assemblies (tightly related groups of cells) discharge together and synchronize across brain structures orchestrated by theta, sharp waves and slow oscillations, to encode information. This evolving dynamical schema is key to extending our understanding of memory processes. (shrink)

Nel Tesoro del Duomo di Monza si conservano tre celebri dittici eburnei relativi alla dotazione di suppellettili liturgiche di Berengario del Friuli (inizi X secolo): il dittico di Stilicone e quello del Poeta e della Musa, entrambi tardo antichi; il dittico di re Davide e san Gregorio Magno, di datazione e lettura più controverse (VI secolo ed età carolingia). Primo editore dei pezzi è Anton Francesco Gori nel secondo volume del Thesaurus veterum diptychorum consularium et ecclesiasticorum (1759), corredato (...) di tre tavole di Andrea Scacciati. Pur non avendo mai visionato i manufatti, l’erudito fiorentino dedica ad essi un’ampia disamina critica basandosi essenzialmente sugli acquerelli del pittore Girolamo Ferroni, reclutato dal marchese milanese e prezioso intermediario Alessandro Teodoro Trivulzio. Nel 1794 il padre della storiografia monzese, il canonico Anton Francesco Frisi, risolve di rieditare i dittici in apertura del terzo tomo delle sue Memorie storiche di Monza e sua corte. Consigliato da quel don Carlo Trivulzio erudito e proprietario di un ricco nucleo di avori antichi, supportato dalle modeste incisioni di Giulio Cesare Bianchi, offre una rilettura che puntualizza ed emenda in parte quanto scritto dal Gori, condita da una vena polemica contro «chi non ha esaminati personalmente i Monumenti, sui quali ragiona». Sullo sfondo del contesto culturale dell’epoca e delle personalità che vi presero parte, con l’ausilio della documentazione divisa tra la Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, l’Archivio della Fondazione Trivulzio e la Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze, il contributo intende proporre una ricostruzione degli avvenimenti con attenzione al rapporto tra originale (i dittici monzesi) e copia (disegni e incisioni che ne scaturirono). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Portrait of a Miniature Giant PAUL BAROLSKY There was a time when the art of the sixteenth -century Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino was reviled for its aesthetic excesses. Writing in his classic “The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy,” the great nineteenth -century scholar Jacob Burckhardt wrote that “as an historical painter,” Bronzino must “be placed among the Mannerists,” a judgement equivalent to placing him (...) in an art historical hell. But, Burckhardt added, “as a portrait painter, he is inferior to none of his contemporaries, not even the Venetians.” Given the fact that among the Venetians, Titian is one of the great portrait painters, this is astonishingly high praise. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for art historians, appreciating Mannerism, to celebrate the elegance and preciosity of Bronzino’s exquisite portraits. Of all Bronzino’s portraits, that of the dwarf Morgante is one of the most beguiling. It is distinctive in so many ways. This picture is the subject of a remarkable book by the Israeli art historian Sefy Hendler, Gracious and Beautiful Monster : The Literary Universe of Bronzino’s Nano Morgante, which is an exceptional piece of scholarship. Different aspects of his book have influenced various scholars who have written about the picture and who have fruitfully exploited its various details. What needs to be appreciated, however, is the way in which this book brings out the extraordinary synthetic character of Bronzino’s strange painting and the diarion 28.3 winter 2021 Sefy Hendler, Gracious and Beautiful Monster: The Literary Universe of Bronzino’s Nano Morgante, Maschietto Editore, 2016. 158 the portrait of a miniature giant versity of ways in which it belongs to the courtly culture in which it was painted. The beauty of Hendler’s seemingly all-encompassing book is that it tells a fascinating and highly entertaining story with admirable brevity in just over seventy pages. Hendler, who packs a great deal of deeply absorbing information and insight into his slim and learned volume, is sensitive to the sentiment of Peter Whiffle’s well-known dictum: “You cannot begin not to tell until you know more than you are willing to impart.” Hendler’s exquisitely concise story concerns a favorite dwarf of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, one Braccio di Bartolo in Poggio di Fornione, who flourished at the ducal court in the middle years of the sixteenth-century. Bronzino painted the dwarf for the Duke in 1552. His sometime rival, Giorgio Vasari, painter, architect, and biographer, described the picture as “beautiful and marvelous” in his Lives of the artists. The painting is double-sided, featuring a frontal view of the naked dwarf on the recto of the canvas (fig. 1) and a rear view of the dwarf, similarly exposed on the verso (fig. 2), where the dwarf’s backside dominates the composition. (We might well observe here that Bronzino specialized lasciviously in painting the culo (witness the coy Cupid in his famous Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time). It is therefore not surprising that the anatomical backside rendered over and over again in Italian Renaissance art, with all its connotations, sexual and otherwise, has recently been the subject of a considerable body of scholarship. Hendler, himself writing on various writers of the period, offers little hints into the psycho-sexual dimension of Bronzino’s picture. Its depiction of so many birds leads inevitably to a consideration of the word “bird” in its sexual dimension. Enough said. If Morgante’s posterior is manifest on the verso, the recto of the painting has its own special interest. A butterfly flies by the dwarf directly and conveniently in front of his genitals—a coy if not teasing gesture of decorum. The portrait once hung in the Palazzo Vecchio, which had become a ducal residence. In recent years it has moved around quite a bit, settling in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, once a ducal residence. Vasari’s description of the picture is not without a certain iro- Paul Barolsky 159 ny, since the beautiful form of the painting as painting stands in opposition to the less than beautiful dwarf. The writer Anton Francesco Grazzini captured this paradox in his poem on the occasion of the death... (shrink)

Cognitive archaeologists attempt to infer the cognitive and cultural features of past hominins and their societies from the material record. This task faces the problem of _minimum necessary competence_: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from the cognitive sciences and then assessing some aspect of (...) the material record through that lens. We give examples to show that background theoretical commitments in cognitive science that inform those models lead to different minimum necessary competence results. This raises an important question: what principles should guide us in selecting a model from the cognitive sciences? We outline two complementary responses to this question. The first involves using _independent_ lines of evidence to converge on a particular capacity. This can then influence model choice. The second is a broader suggestion. Theoretical diversity is a good thing in science, but is only beneficial over a limited amount of time. According to recent modelling work, one way of limiting diversity is to introduce extreme priors. We argue that having a broad spectrum of views in the philosophy of cognitive science may actually help cognitive archaeologists address the problem of minimum necessary competence. (shrink)

Agency is a power, but what is it a power to do? The tradition presents us with three main answers: (1) that agency is a power to affect one’s own will, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of a part of one's body; (2) that agency is a power to affect one’s own body, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of an object that one touches; and (3) that agency is (...) a power to affect that material upon which one brings one's action to bear---e.g. the apple one is peeling (with a knife in one's hand). These three answers correspond to three increasingly expansive conceptions of the province of human agency. I refer to them, respectively, as volitionalism, corporealism and materialism. Only the first two are seriously considered in contemporary action theory. Favoring the third, and hoping to sharpen the conflict between the third and the first, I criticize the second. Corporealism has been a popular position—arguably, the default position in the philosophy of action—since Donald Davidson’s classic paper “Agency” (1971). Although it seems to occupy a sensible middle ground between volitionalism and materialism, corporealism is, I argue, indefensible: it shares the vulnerabilities of both its two rivals, without possessing the strengths of either. Nevertheless, reflection on corporealism lights the road to materialism, which, in the end, is the only possible alternative to volitionalism. (shrink)

The conclusion of practical reasoning is commonly said to rest upon a diverse pair of representations—a “major” and a “minor” premise—the first of which concerns the end and the second, the means. Modern and contemporary philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning tend to portray the minor premise as a “means-end belief”—a belief about, as Michael Smith puts it, “the ways in which one thing leads to another,” or, as John McDowell puts it, “what can be relied on to bring (...) about what.” On this point there is little difference between followers of Davidson and followers of Anscombe, or between those who invoke Hume’s legacy and those who invoke Aristotle’s. But Aristotle himself held a very different position. According to him, the minor premise concerns particulars, a sphere controlled by perception. The perception of particulars—that is, of the really-existing people and things confronted in the field of action—plays no essential role in the modern account of rational agency. Because it does not, the modern account fails to explain how one could act for a reason, or how practical reasoning could deliver any conclusion. (shrink)

Anscombe holds that a proper account of intentional action must exhibit “a ‘form’ of description of events.” But what does that mean? To answer this question, I compare the method of Anscombe’s Intention with that of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic—another classic work of analytic philosophy that consciously opposes itself to psychological explanations. On the one hand, positively, I aim to identify and elucidate the kind of account of intentional action that Anscombe attempts to provide. On the other hand, negatively, I (...) hope to dispel the canard that Anscombe’s opposition to the causal theory of action is a product of “behaviorism.”. (shrink)

For as long as there has been anything called “the philosophy of action,” its practitioners have accounted for action in terms of an associated kind of explanation. The alternative to this approach was noticed, but not adopted, by G. E. M. Anscombe. Anscombe observed that a series of answers to the reason-requesting question “Why?” may be read in reverse order as a series of answers to the question “How?” Unlike answers to the question “Why?”, answers to the question “How?” are (...) not explanatory of what they are about: they reveal, not reasons for doing something, but ways of doing something, and they have the form of what Aristotle called a practical syllogism. The alternative to theorizing action in terms of explanation, is, thus, to theorize it in terms calculation. In exploring this alternative, I argue for three main theses: first, that (pace Anscombe) it is not a matter of indifference whether we theorize action in terms of the question “Why?” or in terms of the question “How?”; second, that the question “Why?” is a question for an observer of action (the agent already knows the answer and can learn nothing from the inquiry), whereas the question “How?” is a question for the agent—and moreover, one that the agent must answer in order to achieve any end whatsoever—so that part of what is at stake is the standpoint from which action is to be theorized; and finally, that the standpoint of the agent, revealed by the question “How?”, is prior to that of an observer. (shrink)

Irad Kimhi considers the conundrum, first addressed by Parmenides, of how negative facts can be the case and be thought, to be the puzzle that philosophy has been working to solve since Plato and Aristotle and wants to do his part by criticizing Frege's dissociation of sense and force and developing a more Aristotelian account of judgment. Michael Della Rocca considers the conundrum a hopeless aporia that we must avoid by embracing Parmenides' radical monism of being and in a recent (...) article (“Parmenides' insight and the possibility of logic”) aims to show that Kimhi is confronted with exactly the kind of insoluble difficulties that he that finds in Frege. The present article agrees with Kimhi that we can think about what is not the case, although thinking reaches all the way to what IS the case. But Della Rocca is right that Kimhi cannot explain by virtue of what we are able to do this. The counter‐proposal says: (1) Thinking reaches to being in that we have learned to read things in the intersubjective spatial field of consciousness as model tokens of singular propositions about them. (2) Negation can be thought of because thinking has its very origin in absolute, non‐well‐founded negation. (shrink)

In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that WEIRD populations are generally representative of the (...) species. Yet neither of these assumptions is justified. In many psychological and behavioural domains, cultural variation begets cognitive variation, and WEIRD samples are recurrently shown to be outliers. In the years since the article was published, attention has focused on the implications this has for research on extant human populations. Here we extend those implications to the study of ancient _H. sapiens_, their hominin forebears, and cousin lineages. We assess a range of characteristic arguments and key studies in the cognitive archaeology literature, identifying issues stemming from the problem of sample diversity. We then look at how worrying the problem is, and consider some conditions under which inferences to ancient populations via cognitive models might be provisionally justified. (shrink)

Explores the notion of selfhood in the wake of the post-structuralist debates.

Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both when the quantifier occurs in unembedded and embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task (...) from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game-theoretic design, thereby including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles that describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient than a strategy based on literal descriptions. (shrink)

Evolution and life phenomena can be understood as results of history, i.e., as outcomes of cohabitation and collective memory of populations of autonomous entities across many generations and vast extent of time. Hence, evolution of distinct lineages of life can be considered as isomorphic with that of cultures. I argue here that cultures and culture-like systems – human culture, natural languages, and life forms – always draw from history, memory, experience, internal dynamics, etc., transforming themselves creatively into new patterns, never (...) foreseen before. This is possible thanks to the fact that all forms of life are descendants of life. Ontogeny and speciation in various lineages draw from continuous re-interpretation of conservative genetic/generic “texts”, as well as from changes of the interpretative process itself. The result is continuous appearances of new lineages-cultures and/or communities-cultures, in a semiotic process of re-interpretation and inventing new ways of living. The topic is developed here on the backgrounds of ideas presented by R. A. Rappaport in “Ritual and religion in the making of humanity” and J. Flegr in “Frozen evolution”. (shrink)

Recently theorists have developed competing accounts of the origins and nature of protolanguage and the subsequent evolution of language. Debate over these accounts is lively. Participants ask: Is music a direct precursor of language? Were the first languages gestural? Or is language continuous with primate vocalizations, such as the alarm calls of vervets? In this article I survey the leading hypotheses and lines of evidence, favouring a largely gestural conception of protolanguage. However, the “sticking point” of gestural accounts, to use (...) Robbins Burling’s phrase, is the need to explain how language shifted to a largely vocal medium. So with a critical eye I consider Michael Corballis’s most recent expression of his ideas about this transition. Corballis’s view is an excellent foil to mine and I present it as such. Contrary to Corballis’s account, and developing Burling’s conjecture that musicality played some role, I argue that the foundations of an evolving musicality provided the means and medium for the shift from gestural to vocal dominance in language. In other words, I suggest that an independently evolving musicality prepared ancient hominins, morphologically and cognitively, for intentional articulate vocal production, enabling the evolution of speech. (shrink)

We define a type theory MLM, which has proof theoretical strength slightly greater then Rathjen's theory KPM. This is achieved by replacing the universe in Martin-Löf's Type Theory by a new universe V having the property that for every function f, mapping families of sets in V to families of sets in V, there exists a universe inside V closed under f. We show that the proof theoretical strength of MLM is $\geq \psi_{\Omega_1}\Omega_{{\rm M}+\omega}$ . This is slightly greater than (...) $|{\rm KPM}|$ , and shows that V can be considered to be a Mahlo-universe. Together with [Se96a] it follows $|{\rm MLM}|=\psi_{\Omega_1}(\Omega_{{\rm M}+\omega})$. (shrink)

Meaning is a central concept of (bio)semiotics. At the same time, it is also a word of everyday language. Here, on the example of the world information, we discuss the “reduction-inflation model” of evolution of a common word into a scientific concept, to return subsequently into everyday circulation with new connotations. Such may be, in the near future, also the fate of the word meaning if, flexed through objectified semantics, will become considered an objective concept usable in semiotics. We argue (...) that reducing meaning to a technical term essentially synonymous to code and stripped of most of the original semantic field is not a necessary prerequisite for a meaningful application of the concept in semiotics and in biology. (shrink)

According to pluralism about some concept, there are multiple non-equivalent, legitimate concepts pertaining to the ontological category in question. It is an open question whether conceptual pluralism implies anti-realism about that category. In this article, I argue that at least for the case of music, it does not. To undermine the application of an influential move from pluralism to anti-realism, then, I provide an argument in support of indifference realism about music, by appeal to music archaeological research, via an analogy (...) with Adrian Currie’s indifference realism about species licensed by paleobiological research. (shrink)

We present well-ordering proofs for Martin-Löf's type theory with W-type and one universe. These proofs, together with an embedding of the type theory in a set theoretical system as carried out in Setzer show that the proof theoretical strength of the type theory is precisely ψΩ1Ω1 + ω, which is slightly more than the strength of Feferman's theory T0, classical set theory KPI and the subsystem of analysis + . The strength of intensional and extensional version, of the version à (...) la Tarski and à la Russell are shown to be the same. (shrink)

Theorists have recently defended rival analyses of sound. The leading analyses reduce sound to sensations or mental representations, longitudinal compression waves, or sounding objects or events. Participants in the debate presuppose that because the features of the world targeted by these reductive strategies are distinct, at most one of the analyses is correct. In this article I argue that this presupposition is mistaken, endorsing a polysemy analysis of ‘sound’. Thus the ‘What is sound?’ debate is largely merely verbal, or so (...) I argue. All participants in this debate agree that there are the various reductions, they simply differ over which of them ‘is sound’. Yet there is no reason to think that, say, psychologists studying auditory sensations/representations, audio physicists studying sound waves, and anthropologists/ethnomusicologists studying sounding objects/events aren’t just studying different reductions of ‘sound’ despite the different explananda of their research. According to the polysemy theory of sound, we do not need to uniquely identify sound with one of these various explananda, outside of some context. (shrink)

We present a developmental perspective regarding the difference in perceptions toward privacy between young and old. Here, we introduce the notion of privacy conceptions, that is, the specific ideas that individuals have regarding what privacy actually is. The differences in privacy concerns often found between young and old are postulated as the result of the differences found in their privacy conceptions, which are subsequently linked to their developmental life stages. The data presented have been obtained through a questionnaire distributed among (...) adolescents, young adults, and adults and provide support for this developmental perspective. This study is one of the first to include adolescents when investigating the privacy concerns among young and old. The results show that the privacy conceptions held by adolescents indeed differ from those held by young adults and adults in keeping with the expectations as seen from a developmental perspective. In addition, the areas in which the differences in privacy conceptions are found also reflect the strongest relationship with concerns. As such, these findings present an alternative perspective to the commonly held notion that young people are less concerned about privacy. (shrink)

This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster (...) of philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, from a variety of career stages, of whom many are leading experts in their fields. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)

This essay explores the theoretical implications of Freud's notion of `the narcissism of minor differences' - the idea that it is precisely the minor differences between people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them. A comparative survey shows that minor differences underlie a wide range of conflicts: from relatively benign forms of campanilismo to bloody civil wars. Freud's tentative statements link up with the insights of Simmel, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Elias, and (...) Girard. Especially helpful is what Bourdieu writes in Distinction: social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat. An outline of a general theory of power and violence should include consideration of the narcissism of minor differences, also because its counterpart - hierarchy and great differences - makes for relative stability and peace. (shrink)

Merker suggests that the thalamocortical system is not an essential system for consciousness, but, instead, that the midbrain reticular system is responsible for consciousness. Indeed, the latter is a crucial system for consciousness, when consciousness is regarded as the waking state. However, when consciousness is regarded as phenomenal consciousness, for which experience and perception are essential elements, the thalamocortical system seems to be indispensable. (Published Online May 1 2007).

In this essay, I show how the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard, reacted to the idea of phenomenology at different stages of his philosophical development. During the early years, Kantianism (through a Schopenhauerian reading of Kant) had the greatest influence on his understanding of phenomenology. Even if he always considered phenomenology a valuable method, Bachelard believed that the term noumenon is necessary, not for a full description of reality, but for probing possible sources of reality. For him, phenomena are (...) not only static objects or things observed in nature, but dynamic objects that can be produced or even created (hence phenomenotechnique). The noumenal realm lies beyond the structure of the phenomenal world. In his later “poetical” years, Bachelard did not make a strict distinction between noumena and phenomena, but instead situated the poetical (literary) image, a phenomenon of literary consciousness, in specific zones between subjectivity and objectivity; the term phenomenotechnique no longer plays any role in his study of imagination or daydreams. For the later Bachelard, phenomenology became the method or attitude that can best lead us into the unexplored regions of our consciousness (reverie) which remain largely forgotten by Western philosophy, or drowned out by its exclusive concern with other aspects of consciousness, such as rational thought. (shrink)

Mehr et al. seek to explain music's evolution in terms of a unitary proper function – signalling cooperative intent – which they cash out in two guises, coalition signalling and parental attention signalling. Although we recognize the role signalling almost certainly played in the evolution of music, we reject “ultimate” causal explanations which focus on a unidirectional, narrow range of causal factors.

Musical flutes constructed from bird bone and mammoth ivory begin to appear in the archaeological record from around 40,000 years ago. Due to the different physical demands of acquiring and working with these source materials in order to produce a flute, researchers have speculated about the significance—aesthetic or otherwise—of the use of mammoth ivory as a raw material for flutes. I argue that biological signaling theory provides a theoretical basis for the proposition that mammoth ivory flute production is a signal (...) of increasing social differentiation in Upper Palaeolithic human life. (shrink)

In this contribution, we identify and clarifysome distinctions we believe are useful inestablishing the reliability of information onthe Internet. We begin by examining some of thesalient features of information that go intothe determination of reliability. In so doing,we argue that we need to distinguish contentand pedigree criteria of reliability and thatwe need to separate issues of reliability ofinformation from the issues of theaccessibility and the usability of information.We then turn to an analysis of some commonfailures to recognize reliability orunreliability.

Empirical research on counterfactual thinking has found a closeness effect: people report higher negative affect if an actual outcome is close to a better counterfactual outcome. However, it remains unclear what actually is a ?close? miss. In three experiments that manipulate close counterfactuals, closeness effects were found only when closeness was unambiguously defined either with respect to a contrasted alternative, or with respect to a categorical boundary. In a real task people failed to report greater negative affect when encountering a (...) close numerical miss, while they predicted greater negative affect hypothetically. These results show that counterfactual closeness effects on affect depend on closeness being accessible and unambiguously defined. (shrink)

On Despair. An Ontological Study (in Polish).

The rapid development of programs based on the principles of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) signals significant changes in the components of education, namely in the provider, the tool of transmission, and the recipient of knowledge. Historical data analysis regarding the key functions of education serves as the basis for identifying fundamental innovations introduced through AI and ML. The impact of writing, printing, and the Internet has significantly altered the tool for knowledge transmission, influencing the volume of information (...) and the number of knowledge recipients. The implementation of AI and ML transforms not only the tool but also the provider of knowledge itself, which can become impersonal thanks to the corresponding computer programs. With the historically justified increase in the volume of knowledge possessed by humanity, there is a transformation observed in education systems. This is especially true for democratic societies, where the emphasis is increasingly shifting from providing a large amount of knowledge to developing critical thinking. It has been researched that programs based on AI and ML, applying linguistic models, are capable of effectively systematizing knowledge. This lays the foundation for personalizing the entire education process for a specific knowledge recipient, without burdening the provider. However, there have been cases when such imitation misleads scientists, who perceive it as attempts at communication between programs that have an equivalence to the human level. The conclusions drawn indicate a significant transformation of the education system caused by AI and ML-based programs. However, intelligent programs are unable to evolve into independent knowledge recipients due to their inability to consciously attribute meaning to information, transforming it into knowledge. (shrink)

I argue that the two criteria traditionally identified as jointly sufficient for voluntary behavior according to Aristotle require qualification. Without such qualification, they admit troubling exceptions. Through minding these difficult examples, I conclude that a third condition mentioned by Aristotle – the eph' hēmin – is key to qualifying the original two criteria. What is eph' hēmin is that which is efficiently caused by appetite and teleologically caused by reason such that the agent could have, in theory, acted differently. I (...) propose that praise and blame are justified only when 1: the behavior is voluntary and 2: the agent is susceptible to the positive influences of appropriate praise and blame to help form, improve, or strengthen a good character. Through concentrating on the agent's affectability in morally salient situations, we may better understand the qualified criteria's role in voluntary human behavior in general. (shrink)

In the present essay my aim is first to review and extend Frank’s thinking on ‘the sociology of development,’ and second, I will attempt to apply his insights to some of the new or present-day directions in sociological theory and research with a view to showing how they might be seen as contributing to ‘the underdevelopment of sociology.’ Beginning with the vision of the founding fathers of sociology broadly understood, I will argue that that vision and the promise of sociology (...) are being lessened by the aforementioned new directions in the discipline. (shrink)

This critical review concentrates on four important parts of Raimo Tuomela’s analytical theory of social action. It examines the book’s reconstructions of social action, of practical reasoning in this context, of social norms and it investigates its claim to a conceptual individualism. The result is critical in several aspects. Tuomela’s most original idea in the analysis of joint action, that of we-intentions, is not broad enough to cover more than a part of social action in the commonly understood sense. His (...) ‘social’ practical reasoning incorporates an implausible premiss. The game-theoretical reconstruction of social norms strikes one as unlikely to be fulfilled in social reality. Hardly any of these analyses back up the individualist claims of Tuomela’s project. (shrink)

The enactive view states that mental processes are embodied in the sensorimotor activity of the organism. This paper seeks to show how it is possible to be conscious of intentions in an embodied way, by adding detail about muscle spindle action to a theory put forward by Damasio. Consciousness is here understood as the awareness of our intentionality. This is a motor plan to interact with the environment, and is expressed in the body. As the body prepares the muscles to (...) act, there is propioceptive feedback from the spindles. The muscle spindle system needs to be added to Damasio's body loop to clarify how intentionality is embodied. He feels that core consciousness is based on the proto-self. I believe that the muscle spindle feedback is part of the proto-self, and enables the proto-self to sense the body's motor preparation. (shrink)

This paper introduces a Special Issue of Topoi entitled "Archaeology and philosophy".

In 'How to create a cultural species: Evaluating three proposals', Nichols, Mackey, and Moll deliver a thoughtful and detailed assessment of three recent publications on human cultural evolution [from Cecilia Heyes, Kevin Laland, and Michael Tomasello]. Of these, NMM are most critical of Heyes. In this commentary, we interrogate four of those critcisms.

The architectonic principle, as stated in Aristotle's Politics, is related to the arrangement of the arts, the technai, whereby it is argued that the leading art is the politike techne. Plato, in the Gorgias, has argued for an architectonic of crafts. Four technai provide the best, aei pros to beltiston therapeuousai, and they differ from the pseudo-crafts that offer pleasure while indifferent to the beltiston. The principle for arranging the architectonic is the pursuit of the best, whereby each practitioner of (...) a craft is expected to give logos concerning the "how" as well as the end of the craft. Extending the Platonic principle, Aristotle brings together under a unified theory the intelligibility of nature and human nature in line with the ends of episteme and techne, especially the politike techne. (shrink)

The article’s intellectual core resides in the examination of social phenomena through the lenses of ambivalence and ambitemptiness. Democracy is conceived through the cultivation of the ideal of national solidarity within the framework of the “indivisible and unified nation” and revolution — values which, according to B. Anderson, individuals do not choose of their own volition. Nevertheless, it functions by virtue of structures that are freely chosen by individuals, specifically political parties and civil society organisations, among which trade unions assume (...) a paramount role in ensuring social solidarity. The author posits that a functioning political democracy, viewed as a historically ambi temptuous phenomenon, necessitates the reanimation of sustained equilibrium between the for ces of social hegemony and counter-hegemony. This revival hinges on transformative shifts in the structure of civil society, particularly reinstatement of pivotal social functions to trade unions. The article underscores the phenomenon of unprecedented demonstrative solidarity exhibited by the Democratic Party of the USA towards the strike movement. The author emphasises that a fully-fledged European liberal democracy was established during its golden age, preceding financial globalisation, as a social democracy. Within its framework, competitive and pluralist elections were complemented by the possibility of nationwide strikes facilitated by trade unions capable of social mobilisation. Proposing the term “political society” to denote the phenomenon encompassing political parties and movements, the article argues that their viability depends on their connection with civil society structures. It is asserted that neither right-wing nor left-wing populism possesses the capacity to fully neutralise “democratic fatigue”. (shrink)

Based on key texts of Derrida as well as his interviews and recently published seminars the article presents a “micrological” analysis of deconstructivist thought in the context of its appeal to phenomenology of Husserl and fundamental ontology of Heidegger. Derrida begins his intellectual path with a reflection on the most important topics of Husserlian phenomenology and discovers in the descriptions of temporalization a paradoxical movement of the immanent self-deconstruction of phenomenology. It from within undermines its own basic principle of the (...) primordial givenness of the living present to itself in its whole presence. From the point of view of Derrida’s deconstruction, the living present of self-presence of the transcendental ego, like itself, is no longer the original source of sense, meaning, knowledge and experience but rather the effect of difference. Derrida discovers the radical constitutive dependence of the present on the trace of the inevitably lost past, thus, his thought resolutely destroys the primordial nature of the present and roots it in the true “origin” as a game of delays and differences. Similarly, Derrida criticizes the project of fundamental ontology. While Heidegger conceives of the ontological difference between being and Being as the last hidden basis of any question in the discourse of metaphysics, Derrida insists that this differentiation is derived from différance as an even more primordial movement of difference. And although Derrida claims to have a more essential comprehension of the core of metaphysics compared to Husserl and Heidegger and even confidently classifies their philosophical work ones to the field of metaphysics, he continues to use the resources of phenomenological and transcendental discourse again and again, leaving them without any criticism. The most telling example here is the use of the phrase “always already” (toujours déjà, immer schon), incredibly common in the works of Heidegger and Husserl (as well as most other most famous modern phenomenologists) and accompanying most of Derrida’s texts. In this article we seek to draw attention to the mystery power of this phrase, which hides the secret of the origins of phenomenological, fundamental-ontological, transcendental, and deconstructivist discourses as such, and also to demonstrate the possibilities of self-deconstruction of deconstruction, which with new urgency returns us to the problem of defining the limits of metaphysics and the “margins of philosophy”. (shrink)

Modern philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning rarely discuss perception. This is remarkable, not only because acting on the particular objects in one’s environment obviously requires a perceptual awareness of them, but also because perception is central to the account of action and practical reasoning offered by Aristotle, from whom many contemporary philosophers take their inspiration. The pivotal role that Aristotle assigned to perception is now uniformly given to belief, an act of mind or propositional attitude that might concern (...) particulars, but that might equally well concern general laws of nature, probabilities, or rules of logic. This paper aims to recover and demystify the idea of a practical perception. On the one hand, it argues that in order to mediate between a general end and an action performed in pursuit of that end, the minor premise of practical reasoning must concern particulars and must therefore be perceptual. On the other hand, it argues that this same minor premise must be practical, in the sense that it must represent the particular objects about which the agent is reasoning as constituting a field of obstacles and opportunities, or of things to be avoided and pursued. (shrink)