In an effort to produce new and more sustainable technologies, designers have turned to nature in search of inspiration and innovation. Biomimetic design (from the Greek bios, life, mimesis, imitation) is the conscious imitation of biological models to solve today's technical and ecological challenges. Nowadays numerous different approaches exist that take inspiration from nature as a model for design, such as biomimicry, biomimetics, bionics, permaculture, ecological engineering, etc. This variety of practices comes in turn with a wide range of different (...) promises, including sustainability, increased resilience, multi-functionality, and a lower degree of risk. How are we to make sense of this heterogeneous amalgam of existing practices and technologies, and of the numerous promises attached to them? We suggest that a typology of biomimetic approaches would provide a useful hermeneutic framework to understand the different tensions that pull this variegated landscape in different directions. This is achieved through a critical analysis of the literature in different fields of biomimetic design and the philosophy of biomimicry, in order to derive conceptual and normative assumptions concerning the meaning and value of the imitation of nature. These two dimensions are then intersected to derive an analytical grid composed of six different biomimetic types, which enable the classification of existing and possible biomimetic approaches, practices, and technologies according to their specific conceptual assumptions and guiding norms. (shrink)

This paper represents a counterreply to “A rejoinder to Alessio Gava’s ‘Van Fraassen, a inferência da melhor explicação e a Matrix realista’”, by Minikoski and Rodrigues da Silva, released in Problemata (v. 12, n. 2, 2021). The authors originally published an essay in the same journal, “Van Fraassen and inference to the best explanation” (2016), the object of critic - ‘friendly and gentle’ - in a work of mine that also appeared in Problemata, in 2019. In this paper I (...) will show that, even when the subject matter is the inference to the best explanation, realists and antirealists end up debating about the same old topics, that represent the essence of the controversy between the two philosophical stances. (shrink)

Social research, from economics to demography and epidemiology, makes extensive use of statistical models in order to establish causal relations. The question arises as to what guarantees the causal interpretation of such models. In this paper we focus on econometrics and advance the view that causal models are ‘augmented’ statistical models that incorporate important causal information which contributes to their causal interpretation. The primary objective of this paper is to argue that causal claims are established on the basis of a (...) plurality of evidence. We discuss the consequences of ‘evidential pluralism’ in the context of econometric modelling. (shrink)

This paper addresses a fundamental line of research in neuroscience: the identification of a putative neural processing core of the cerebral cortex, often claimed to be “canonical”. This “canonical” core would be shared by the entire cortex, and would explain why it is so powerful and diversified in tasks and functions, yet so uniform in architecture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the search for canonical explanations over the past 40 years, discussing the theoretical frameworks informing this research. (...) It will highlight a bias that, in my opinion, has limited the success of this research project, that of overlooking the dimension of cortical development. The earliest explanation of the cerebral cortex as canonical was attempted by David Marr, deriving putative cortical circuits from general mathematical laws, loosely following a deductive-nomological account. Although Marr’s theory turned out to be incorrect, one of its merits was to have put the issue of cortical circuit development at the top of his agenda. This aspect has been largely neglected in much of the research on canonical models that has followed. Models proposed in the 1980s were conceived as mechanistic. They identified a small number of components that interacted as a basic circuit, with each component defined as a function. More recent models have been presented as idealized canonical computations, distinct from mechanistic explanations, due to the lack of identifiable cortical components. Currently, the entire enterprise of coming up with a single canonical explanation has been criticized as being misguided, and the premise of the uniformity of the cortex has been strongly challenged. This debate is analyzed here. The legacy of the canonical circuit concept is reflected in both positive and negative ways in recent large-scale brain projects, such as the Human Brain Project. One positive aspect is that these projects might achieve the aim of producing detailed simulations of cortical electrical activity, a negative one regards whether they will be able to find ways of simulating how circuits actually develop. (shrink)

We investigate an extension of the formalism of interpreted systems by Halpern and colleagues to model the correct behaviour of agents. The semantical model allows for the representation and reasoning about states of correct and incorrect functioning behaviour of the agents, and of the system as a whole. We axiomatise this semantic class by mapping it into a suitable class of Kripke models. The resulting logic, KD45n i-j, is a stronger version of KD, the system often referred to as Standard (...) Deontic Logic. We extend this formal framework to include the standard epistemic notions defined on interpreted systems, and introduce a new doubly-indexed operator representing the knowledge that an agent would have if it operates under the assumption that a group of agents is functioning correctly. We discuss these issues both theoretically and in terms of applications, and present further directions of work. (shrink)

According to an influential line of thought, from the assumption that indeterminism makes future contingents neither true nor false, one can conclude that assertions of future contingents are never permissible. This conclusion, however, fails to recognize that we ordinarily assert future contingents even when we take the future to be unsettled. Several attempts have been made to solve this puzzle, either by arguing that, albeit truth-valueless, future contingents can be correctly assertable, or by rejecting the claim that future contingents are (...) truth-valueless. The paper examines three of most representative accounts in line with the first attempt, and concludes that none of them succeed in providing a persuasive answer as to why we felicitously assert future contingents. (shrink)

The logical hexagon (or hexagon of opposition) is a strange, yet beautiful, highly symmetrical mathematical figure, mysteriously intertwining fundamental logical and geometrical features. It was discovered more or less at the same time (i.e. around 1950), independently, by a few scholars. It is the successor of an equally strange (but mathematically less impressive) structure, the “logical square” (or “square of opposition”), of which it is a much more general and powerful “relative”. The discovery of the former did not raise interest, (...) neither among logicians, nor among philosophers of logic, whereas the latter played a very important theoretical role (both for logic and philosophy) for nearly two thousand years, before falling in disgrace in the first half of the twentieth century: it was, so to say, “sentenced to death” by the so-called analytical philosophers and logicians. Contrary to this, since 2004 a new, unexpected promising branch of mathematics (dealing with “oppositions”) has appeared, “oppositional geometry” (also called “n-opposition theory”, “NOT”), inside which the logical hexagon (as well as its predecessor, the logical square) is only one term of an infinite series of “logical bi-simplexes of dimension m”, itself just one term of the more general infinite series (of series) of the “logical poly-simplexes of dimension m”. In this paper we recall the main historical and the main theoretical elements of these neglected recent discoveries. After proposing some new results, among which the notion of “hybrid logical hexagon”, we show which strong reasons, inside oppositional geometry, make understand that the logical hexagon is in fact a very important and profound mathematical structure, destined to many future fruitful developments and probably bearer of a major epistemological paradigm change. (shrink)

We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In _Nature as Event_, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following (...) William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human? (shrink)

This paper analyzes the rapid and unexpected rise of deep learning within Artificial Intelligence and its applications. It tackles the possible reasons for this remarkable success, providing candidate paths towards a satisfactory explanation of why it works so well, at least in some domains. A historical account is given for the ups and downs, which have characterized neural networks research and its evolution from “shallow” to “deep” learning architectures. A precise account of “success” is given, in order to sieve out (...) aspects pertaining to marketing or sociology of research, and the remaining aspects seem to certify a genuine value of deep learning, calling for explanation. The alleged two main propelling factors for deep learning, namely computing hardware performance and neuroscience findings, are scrutinized, and evaluated as relevant but insufficient for a comprehensive explanation. We review various attempts that have been made to provide mathematical foundations able to justify the efficiency of deep learning, and we deem this is the most promising road to follow, even if the current achievements are too scattered and relevant for very limited classes of deep neural models. The authors’ take is that most of what can explain the very nature of why deep learning works at all and even very well across so many domains of application is still to be understood and further research, which addresses the theoretical foundation of artificial learning, is still very much needed. (shrink)

Nature is a key theme of philosophical concerns today. This book examines Merleau-Ponty’s investigations on nature and provides a timely guide to his remarkable approach to scientific advances and their implications for our understanding of nature.

Sleep and dreaming are important daily phenomena that are receiving growing attention from both the scientific and the philosophical communities. The increasingly popular predictive brain framework within cognitive science aims to give a full account of all aspects of cognition. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the theoretical advantages of Predictive Processing (PP, as proposed by Clark 2013, Clark 2016; and Hohwy 2013) in defining sleep and dreaming. After a brief introduction, we overview the state of the (...) art at the intersection between dream research and PP (with particular reference to Hobson and Friston 2012; Hobson et al. 2014). In the following sections we focus on two theoretically promising aspects of the research program. First, we consider the explanations of phenomenal consciousness during sleep (i.e. dreaming) and how it arises from the neural work of the brain. PP provides a good picture of the peculiarity of dreaming but it can’t fully address the problem of how consciousness comes to be in the first place. We propose that Integrated Information Theory (IIT) (Oizumi et al. 2014; Tononi et al. 2016) is a good candidate for this role and we will show its advantages and points of contact with PP. After introducing IIT, we deal with the evolutionary function of sleeping and dreaming. We illustrate that PP fits with contemporary researches on the important adaptive function of sleep and we discuss why IIT can account for sleep mentation (i.e. dreaming) in evolutionary terms (Albantakis et al. 2014). In the final section, we discuss two future avenues for dream research that can fruitfully adopt the perspective offered by PP: (a) the role of bodily predictions in the constitution of the sleeping brain activity and the dreaming experience, and (b) the precise role of the difference stages of sleep (REM (Rapid eye movement), NREM (Non-rapid eye movement) in the constitution and refinement of the predictive machinery. (shrink)

In this paper we defend structural representations, more specifically neural structural representation. We are not alone in this, many are currently engaged in this endeavor. The direction we take, however, diverges from the main road, a road paved by the mathematical theory of measure that, in the 1970s, established homomorphism as the way to map empirical domains of things in the world to the codomain of numbers. By adopting the mind as codomain, this mapping became a boon for all those (...) convinced that a representation system should bear similarities with what was being represented, but struggled to find a precise account of what such similarities mean. The euforia was brief, however, and soon homomorphism revealed itself to be affected by serious weaknesses, the primary one being that it included systems embarrassingly alien to representations. We find that the defense attempts that have followed, adopt strategies that share a common format: valid structural representations come as “homomorphism plus X”, with various “X”, provided in descriptive format only. Our alternative direction stems from the observation of the overlooked departure from homomorphism as used in the theory of measure and its later use in mental representations. In the former case, the codomain or the realm of numbers, is the most suited for developing theorems detailing the existence and uniqueness of homomorphism for a wide range of empirical domains. In the latter case, the codomain is the realm of the mind, possibly more vague and more ill-defined than the empirical domain itself. The time is ripe for articulating the mapping between represented domains and the mind in formal terms, by exploiting what is currently known about coding mechanisms in the brain. We provide a sketch of a possible development in this direction, one that adopts the theory of neural population coding as codomain. We will show that our framework is not only not in disagreement with the “plus X” proposals, but can lead to natural derivation of several of the “X”. (shrink)

Whereas geometrical oppositions (logical squares and hexagons) have been so far investigated in many fields of modal logic (both abstract and applied), the oppositional geometrical side of “deontic logic” (the logic of “obligatory”, “forbidden”, “permitted”, . . .) has rather been neglected. Besides the classical “deontic square” (the deontic counterpart of Aristotle’s “logical square”), some interesting attempts have nevertheless been made to deepen the geometrical investigation of the deontic oppositions: Kalinowski (La logique des normes, PUF, Paris, 1972) has proposed a (...) “deontic hexagon” as being the geometrical representation of standard deontic logic, whereas Joerden (jointly with Hruschka, in Archiv für Rechtsund Sozialphilosophie 73:1, 1987), McNamara (Mind 105:419, 1996) and Wessels (Die gute Samariterin. Zur Struktur der Supererogation, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2002) have proposed some new “deontic polygons” for dealing with conservative extensions of standard deontic logic internalising the concept of “supererogation”. Since 2004 a new formal science of the geometrical oppositions inside logic has appeared, that is “ n -opposition theory”, or “NOT”, which relies on the notion of “logical bi-simplex of dimension m ” ( m = n − 1). This theory has received a complete mathematical foundation in 2008, and since then several extensions. In this paper, by using it, we show that in standard deontic logic there are in fact many more oppositional deontic figures than Kalinowski’s unique “hexagon of norms” (more ones, and more complex ones, geometrically speaking: “deontic squares”, “deontic hexagons”, “deontic cubes”, . . ., “deontic tetraicosahedra”, . . .): the real geometry of the oppositions between deontic modalities is composed by the aforementioned structures (squares, hexagons, cubes, . . ., tetraicosahedra and hyper-tetraicosahedra), whose complete mathematical closure happens in fact to be a “deontic 5-dimensional hyper-tetraicosahedron” (an oppositional very regular solid). (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to explore what role persuasion plays in the early education of children. Advocating Wittgenstein, I claim that persuasion involves imparting to a pupil about a particular world-picture (Weltbild) by showing rather than explaining. This because we cannot introduce a child to the hinges of a world-picture through a discursive argument. I will employ the remarks of Wittgenstein in On Certainty (1969) (OC) to define what persuasion (Überredung) is. I will make use of the notes regarding (...) seeing-an-aspect from the Philosophical Investigations (2009) to clarify such a notion. Afterwards, I will contextualise this in early-childhood education and conclude providing some examples of how persuasion solidifies hinges. (shrink)

From epileptic seizures to depressive symptoms, predictive neurotechnologies are used for a large range of applications. In this article we focus on advisory devices; namely, predictive neurotechnology programmed to detect specific neural events (e.g., epileptic seizure) and advise users to take necessary steps to reduce or avoid the impact of the forecasted neuroevent. Receiving advise from a predictive device is not without ethical concerns. The problem with predictive neural devices, in particular advisory ones, is the risk of seeing one’s autonomous (...) choice supplanted by the predictions instead of being supplemented by it. For users, there is a potential shift from being assisted by the system to being over-dependent on the technology. In other terms, it introduces ethical issues associated with epistemic dependency. In this article, we examine the notion of epistemic authority in relation to predictive neurotechnologies. Section 1 of our article explores and defines the concept of epistemic authority. In section 2, we illustrate how predictive devices are best conceived of as epistemic authorities and we explore the subject-device epistemic relationship. In section 3, we spell out the risk of harms interconnected with epistemic deferral. We conclude by stressing a set of preliminary measures to prepare users for the authoritative nature of predictive devices. (shrink)

This paper portrays the later Wittgenstein’s conception of contradictions and his therapeutic approach to them. I will focus on and give relevance to the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, plus the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. First, I will explain why Wittgenstein’s attitude towards contradictions is rooted in: a rejection of the debate about realism and anti-realism in mathematics; and Wittgenstein’s endorsement of logical pluralism. Then, I will explain Wittgenstein’s therapeutic approach towards contradictions, and why it means that (...) a contradiction is not a problem for logic and mathematics. Rather, contradictions are problematic when we do not know what to infer from them. Once a meaning is established through a new rule of inference, the contradiction becomes a usable expression like many others in our inferential apparatus. Thus, the apparent problem is dissolved. Finally, I will take three examples of dissolved contradictions from Wittgenstein to clarify further his notion. I will conclude considering why his position on contradictions led him to clash with Alan Turing, and whether the latter was convinced by the Wittgensteinian proposal. (shrink)

When he died in 1984, Michel Foucault was widely regarded as one of the most powerful minds of this century. Hailed by historians and lionized in America, he continues to provoke lively debate. This meticulously documented narrative debunks the many myths and rumors surrounding the brilliant philosopher to consider that all Foucault's books are "fragments of an autobiography".

Some Carrollian posthumous manuscripts reveal, in addition to his famous ‘logical diagrams’, two mysterious ‘logical charts’. The first chart, a strange network making out of fourteen logical sentences a large 2D ‘triangle’ containing three smaller ones, has been shown equivalent—modulo the rediscovery of a fourth smaller triangle implicit in Carroll's global picture—to a 3D tetrahedron, the four triangular faces of which are the 3+1 Carrollian complex triangles. As it happens, such an until now very mysterious 3D logical shape—slightly deformed—has been (...) rediscovered, independently from Carroll and much later, by a logician , a mathematician and a linguist studying the geometry of the ‘opposition relations’, that is, the mathematical generalisations of the ‘logical square’. We show that inside what is called equivalently ‘n-opposition theory’, ‘oppositional geometry’ or ‘logical geometry’, Carroll's first chart corresponds exactly, duly reshap.. (shrink)

In his tightly argued, thought-provoking volume Interpretation without Truth, Pierluigi Chiassoni offers a groundbreaking, reductionist account of judicial fictions.1 Under Chiassoni’s view, judici...

Review of: "Biology as a postmodern science: Universals, historicity, and context".

This book explores a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to rediscover a first nature right at the heart of the subject. Alessio Rotundo traces and documents the presence of a double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty's analyses across foundational aspects of human experience: sense perception, organic development and behavior, cognition, language, and history. Physical, biological, and (...) psychological processes in nature are not merely scientific data; they provide the evidence for another, more primordial sense of nature. (shrink)

A radically new philosophy of experience and speculation, based on a reading of Whitehead's Process and Reality. Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise's reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake. He focuses in on (...) Whitehead's attempt to construct a metaphysical system of everything in the universe that exists whilst simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of our experience: everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought. (shrink)

In 1995 Slater argued both against Priest’s paraconsistent system LP (1979) and against paraconsistency in general, invoking the fundamental opposition relations ruling the classical logical square. Around 2002 Béziau constructed a double defence of paraconsistency (logical and philosophical), relying, in its philosophical part, on Sesmat’s (1951) and Blanche’s (1953) “logical hexagon”, a geometrical, conservative extension of the logical square, and proposing a new (tridimensional) “solid of opposition”, meant to shed new light on the point raised by Slater. By using n-opposition (...) theory (NOT) we analyse Beziau’s anti-Slater move and show both its right intuitions and its technical limits. Moreover, we suggest that Slater’s criticism is much akin to a well-known one by Suszko (1975) against the conceivability of many-valued logics. This last criticism has been addressed by Malinowski (1990) and Shramko and Wansing (2005), who developed a family of tenable logical counter-examples to it: trans-Suszkian systems are radically many-valued. This family of new logics has some strange logical features, essentially: each system has more than one consequence operator. We show that a new, deeper part of the aforementioned geometry of logical oppositions (NOT), the “logical poly-simplexes of dimension m”, generates new logical-geometrical structures, essentially many-valued, which could be a very natural (and intuitive) geometrical counterpart to the “strange”, new, non-Suszkian logics of Malinowski, Shramko and Wansing. By a similar move, the geometry of opposition therefore sheds light both on the foundations of paraconsistent logics and on those of many-valued logics. (shrink)

In a recent work published in this journal, “Van Fraassen e a inferência da melhor explicação” (2016), Minikoski and Rodrigues da Silva identify four critical lines proposed by Bas van Fraassen against the form of abductive reasoning known as ‘inference to the best explanation’ (IBE). The first one, put forward by the Dutch philosopher in his seminal book The Scientific Image (1980), concerns the distinction between observable and unobservable entities. Minikoski and Rodrigues da Silva consider that the distinction is of (...) no relevance to the scientific practice. For this reason, they address van Fraassen’s allegations against IBE qua justification of the existence of unobservable entities in a couple of pages and prefer focusing on the other lines they identified. The aim of this work is to pour over the analysis that the two authors perform about van Fraassen’s mentioned argument and some realists’ replies, particularly in the section that Minikoski and Rodrigues da Silva devote to this topic. This will allow us to clarify van Fraassen’s vision on scientific practice and on the ‘immersion in the theoretical world-picture’. The importance and the relevance of the distinction between observables and unobservables will also be reaffirmed. (shrink)

The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the reconfiguration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accumulation of data. Data politics asks questions about the ways in which data has (...) become such an object of power and explores how to critically intervene in its deployment as an object of knowledge. It is concerned with the conditions of possibility of data that involve things, language, and people that together create new worlds. We define ‘data politics’ as both the articulation of political questions about these worlds and the ways in which they provoke subjects to govern themselves and others by making rights claims. We contend that without understanding these conditions of possibility – of worlds, subjects and rights – it would be difficult to intervene in or shape data politics if by that it is meant the transformation of data subjects into data citizens. (shrink)

This perspective paper critically examines value-laden challenges that emerge when using standards to support regulation in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly within the context of the AI Act. It presents a dilemma arising from the inherent vagueness and contestable nature of the AI Act’s requirements. The effective implementation of these requirements necessitates addressing hard normative questions that involve complex value judgments. These questions, such as determining the acceptability of risks or the appropriateness of accuracy levels, need to be addressed (...) in order to achieve compliance with the AI Act. However, this creates a dilemma: either the hard normative questions left open by the AI Act are addressed by the standards or they are addressed by the actors involved in the conformity assessment. This paper argues that the latter approach is more likely. Consequently, regulatory intermediaries such as notified bodies will be responsible for making critical value judgments while evaluating compliance with the AI Act’s value-laden requirements. This shift raises a series of concerns and implications that warrant further exploration. (shrink)

The paper first introduces a cube of opposition that associates the traditional square of opposition with the dual square obtained by Piaget’s reciprocation. It is then pointed out that Blanché’s extension of the square-of-opposition structure into an conceptual hexagonal structure always relies on an abstract tripartition. Considering quadripartitions leads to organize the 16 binary connectives into a regular tetrahedron. Lastly, the cube of opposition, once interpreted in modal terms, is shown to account for a recent generalization of formal concept analysis, (...) where noticeable hexagons are also laid bare. This generalization of formal concept analysis is motivated by a parallel with bipolar possibility theory. The latter, albeit graded, is indeed based on four graded set functions that can be organized in a similar structure. (shrink)

According to the ancient commentaries, Iliad 21.195 was omitted by some sources, thereby making Acheloios, instead of Ocean, the origin of all waters, including the sea: the reasons for and the date of such a version of the text have been debated. In this paper 1 argue that the version without line 195 actually represents the earlier textual stage. This role of Acheloios is paralleled in the poem interpreted in the Derveni papyrus, and some features of Acheloios' cosmological function, as (...) well as his iconography, find interesting parallels in the Near East. As a 'cosmic' figure, Acheloios was in competition with Ocean, and is only rarely so represented in later preserved texts. His function as the origin of all fresh water and the source of all springs was more persistent, probably due also to his cultic role in Dodona: this, too, is probably reflected in another ancient variant for the text of Il. 16.234. (shrink)

Vera Zasulich’s shooting of Trepov, a governor of St Petersburg who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner, in January 1878, catapulted her to international fame as a revolutionary heroine, a reputation that she put to good use by becoming one of the five ‘founding parents’ of Russian Marxism that created the ‘Group for the Emancipation of Labour’ in 1883. But her act of self-sacrifice also triggered, to her dismay, the institutionalisation of individual terrorist tactics in the Russian Populist (...) movement with the creation of the ‘People’s Will’ (Narodnaya Volya) Party in 1879. The organisation went into decline after the killing of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and Populism itself was increasingly superseded by Marxism as the hegemonic force on the left with the rise of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). But individual terrorist tactics reappeared with the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1902, prompting Zasulich to write an article for Die neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of German Social Democracy, in which she both condemned the Neo-Populist tendency as deleterious to the rising labour movement and supported the organisational plans for the RSDLP sponsored by the Iskra group, developed at length by Lenin in his book What Is to Be Done?, published in March 1902. This article provides the background to Vera Zasulich’s article ‘The Terrorist Tendency in Russia’ (December 1902), setting it against the history of the Russian revolutionary movement from 1878 to 1902. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the issue of the processes potentially underlying the emergence of emotional consciousness in the light of theoretical considerations and empirical evidence. First, we argue that componential emotion models, and specifically the Component Process Model , may be better able to account for the emergence of feelings than basic emotion or dimensional models. Second, we advance the hypothesis that consciousness of emotional reactions emerges when lower levels of processing are not sufficient to cope with the event (...) and regulate the emotional process, particularly when the degree of synchronization between the components reaches a critical level and duration. Third, we review recent neuroscience evidence that bolsters our claim of the central importance of the synchronization of neuronal assemblies at different levels of processing. (shrink)

In order to defend his controversial claim that observation is unaided perception, Bas van Fraassen, the originator of constructive empiricism, suggested that, for all we know, the images produced by a microscope could be in a situation analogous to that of the rainbows, which are ‘images of nothing’. He added that reflections in the water, rainbows, and the like are ‘public hallucinations’, but it is not clear whether this constitutes an ontological category apart or an empty set. In this paper (...) an argument will be put forward to the effect that rainbows can be thought of as events, that is, as part of a subcategory of entities that van Fraassen has always considered legitimate phenomena. I argue that rainbows are actually not images in the relevant (representational) sense and that there is no need to ontologically inflate the category of entities in order to account for them, which would run counter to the empiricist principle of parsimony. (shrink)

Although it is usually assumed that in Michel Foucault’s work biopolitics is a politics which has life for its object, a closer analysis of the courses he gave at the Collège de France on this topic, as well as of the other seminars and papers of this period, shows that he took a quite different direction, restricting it to the regulation of population. The aim of this article is to return to the origins of the concept and to confront the (...) issue of life as such. This implies four shifts with respect to Foucault’s theory: (1) Politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing, but also about its stakes. (2) More than the power over life, contemporary societies are characterized by the legitimacy they attach to life. (3) Rather than a normalizing process, the intervention in lives is a production of inequalities. (4) The politics of life, then, is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values. The discussion is grounded on a series of empirical investigations conducted in France and South Africa on how life and lives are treated in our world. (shrink)

The critique of pure sense data is a characteristic feature of contemporary philosophy, from Wittgenstein and Heidegger to Martha Nussbaum and Ernst Tugendhat. These authors variously call into question that the data of sensation should be taken as primordial. Other contemporary authors have responded to this general critique starting from considerations about the role of sensory states, often referred to as “qualia,” in our experiential awareness. In this paper, I suggest that the philosophy of science of Ernst Mach is especially (...) paradigmatic in that it displays in one same intellectual effort the presence of these two polarizing views in the philosophical discussion of the twentieth century. In Mach a radical biological and epistemic pragmatism coexists with the most extreme sensual elementism. I show that Mach is at the same time the proponent of a phenomenological lineage that Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, is aware to take up and continue. What I propose is that Husserl’s phenomenology emerges as true juncture between the extremes of sensualism and pragmatism by way of a recasting of the modern intentionalist conceptions of experience beyond any mentalist and realist paradigm. (shrink)

Discutindo acerca das centenas de detecções de planetas extrassolares, que supostamente aconteceram desde 1989 e que ele considera (incorretamente) como instâncias de observações, Peter Kosso disse, justamente, que segundo os parâmetros de Bas van Fraassen esses objetos celestes seriam observáveis. Ora, tais astros poderiam sem dúvida ser observados diretamente (sem a necessidade de instrumentos), nas condições apropriadas. Mas, acrescenta Kosso, “esse tipo de epistemologia externalista, que permite que a justificação se baseie em informação que não temos a disposição (nós não (...) estamos em condição de ver planetas extrassolares a olho nu [atualmente]), não ajuda a decidir quais particulares afirmações científicas garantem a crença” (Kosso 2006, 225, nota 1). Van Fraassen provavelmente incorre em uma petição de princípio não muito diferente daquelas que ele muitas vezes desmascarou em textos de autores realistas, quando apela para o fato de o objeto detectado ser observável, para atribuir o estatuto de ‘observação’ a uma certa detecção. O ponto é, mais uma vez, entender o que vale como observação, particularmente quando isso envolve o uso de algum instrumento. Endossar aquilo que Otávio Bueno chama de ‘padrão internalista’ parece garantir solidez à qualificação de determinadas ações como observações. Uma das principais consequências dessa adoção é que tal critério, não operando nenhuma distinção relevante entre detecções ‘diretas’ e detecções mediadas por instrumentos, permite que a linha que separa observáveis e inobserváveis seja traçada de maneira diferente de como van Fraassen acredita que deveria ser, abarcando, entre os observáveis, mais (tipos de) entidades do que esse parece estar disposto a admitir. (shrink)

Based on a gambling formulation of quantum mechanics, we derive a Gleason-type theorem that holds for any dimension n of a quantum system, and in particular for \. The theorem states that the only logically consistent probability assignments are exactly the ones that are definable as the trace of the product of a projector and a density matrix operator. In addition, we detail the reason why dispersion-free probabilities are actually not valid, or rational, probabilities for quantum mechanics, and hence should (...) be excluded from consideration. (shrink)

Aspetti filosofico-matematici dei celebri paradossi di Zenone di Elea.

In this response, I express sympathy for Buhr's proposal to expand our typology into an ethical framework of eco-normative profiling of (sustainable) technologies. I reflect on crucial issues that this framework should include, offering some words of caution against taking concepts such as Anthropocene and sustainability too lightly. I end with an invitation to include multiple and diverse perspectives about what sustainable futures could look like.