Gheorghe Sferlea | : Cet article examine les premières tentatives d’interprétation théologique du titre marial Theotokos au IVe siècle. Au coeur de cette histoire on retrouve Apollinaire, évêque de Laodicée et figure importante du camp pro-nicéen, qui a élaboré une théorie controversée sur l’unité du Christ, notamment en excluant l’intellect humain de la constitution du Sauveur. C’est dans le cadre de cette préoccupation plus large qu’il vit l’opportunité de tenter une appropriation théologique du titre Theotokos et qu’il en (...) fit un outil polémique dans la stratégie d’ériger sa propre position en orthodoxie christologique. L’idée que je défends ici est que Diodore de Tarse, Grégoire de Nazianze, Grégoire de Nysse et Théodore de Mopsueste se sont tous confrontés à l’interprétation proposée par Apollinaire et ont cherché les meilleurs moyens d’y réagir. | : This article examines the first attempts of theological interpretation of Marian title Theotokos in the fourth Century. At the centre of this history stands Apollinarius, bishop of Laodiceea and a significant character of the pro-Nicene movement, who elaborated a controversial account on the unity of Christ that excluded human intellect from Saviour’s constitution. It was within this broader concern that he saw the opportunity of attempting a theological appropriation of title Theotokos and made it a polemical tool in the strategy of establishing his own Christological stance as authoritative. My contention is that Diodore of Tarsus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Theodore of Mopsuestia all found themselves confronted with Apollinarius’ interpretation and searched ways of reacting to it. (shrink)

Cette étude sur la conception henryenne du christianisme prend pour angle d’approche une étude attentive des enjeux philosophiques et anthropologiques de la christologie de M. Henry, singulièrement sur le plan des fondements de la subjectivité absolue. Tout son travail consiste à faire la différence entre un « christianisme transcendantal » et un « christianisme métaphysiquement moniste », pour mettre en évidence la part de l’histoire et celle du transcendantal, mais aussi celle de la culture et celle du point de vue (...) ontologiquement phénoménologique. Ovidiu-Sorin Podar montre aussi que cette portée de la phénoménologie est inaugurée très originairement dans le projet henryen, même si elle s’accomplit phénoménologiquement dans le triptyque final. Cette enquête autour du cogito chrétien, difficile par la technicité du langage utilisé, est utile sur le plan de la compréhension de la progression de l’œuvre henryenne. (shrink)

This paper argues for a different interpretation of Roberval’s scepticism in his Aristarchi Samii de mundi systemate. Roberval’s mild sceptical attitude, along with his fake attribution of hiscosmological treatise to the ancient Aristarchus of Samos, are explained by prudential reasons related to censure. I will instead provide a more internalist reading. There are deeper metaphysical and epistemological reasons for Roberval’s pessimism about the prospect of a perfect science of celestial motions, as well as for his (non-realistic) acceptance of heliocentrism as (...) just a more plausible system than Ptolemy’s or Tycho’s. I start by spelling out two distinct sceptical worries conflated in the Aristarchi. The first is a general agnosticism regarding certainty about the causes of the motions of the heavens—it is more of a worry that the true system of the world can never be known. The second is a particular pessimism regarding the prospects of improving astronomy. The same effect (the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies) can be produced by diverse causes. Judging by what seemed to be the most probable physical causes of the heavenly motions, Roberval saw no reason for the existence of a precisely predictable regularity in heavenly motions. Both sceptical attitudes have to do, aside from the cosmology of the Aristarchi, with the theory of science he expounds in his private Principes du debvoir et des cognoissances humaine, and in a fragment he wrote for Mersenne’s Curiouse perspective de Niceron. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to lay out the similarities between the philosophical projects of Patočka and Merleau-Ponty, with respect to the question of the “limits of phenomenology”. We suggest that both these authors propose two complementary strategies in their attempt of overcoming the Husserlian phenomenology. The first one consists in extending the field of phenomenology so as for it to be able to encompass phenomena either insufficiently explored or misinterpreted by the conceptuality that Husserl put forth; the second (...) strategy, more ambitious, aims to overpass the very standpoint of phenomenology in favour of an ontological approach. We try to show that what profoundly motivates these attempts is a radical – and hence, ontological – reinterpretation of the Lebenswelt. (shrink)

On the Beginnings of the Greek Doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls. In this article, I state that attendant on the acceptance of the idea of an immortalsoul is a legitimate question concerning the soul's status before the individual's birth and after its death. Whether the Greeks were the originators of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls or this was an influence from another culture is still open to debate.

In this paper we investigate a particular two-stage supply chain network design problem with fixed costs. In order to solve this complex optimization problem, we propose an efficient hybrid algorithm, which was obtained by incorporating a linear programming optimization problem within the framework of a genetic algorithm. In addition, we integrated within our proposed algorithm a powerful local search procedure able to perform a fine tuning of the global search. We evaluate our proposed solution approach on a set of large (...) size instances. The achieved computational results prove the efficiency of our hybrid genetic algorithm in providing high-quality solutions within reasonable running-times and its superiority against other existing methods from the literature. (shrink)

Si l’on s’en tient uniquement aux ouvrages publiés de son vivant, l’itinéraire philosophique de Fink semble marqué par une profonde césure. Après avoir été l’élève et l’assistant de Husserl, le collaborateur de ce dernier, dans les années 1930, au projet d’une refonte systématique de la phénoménologie – travail qui lui a valu la réputation d’être le porte-parole attitré de la phénoménologie husserlienne et dont le témoignage le plus éclatant est la 6e Méditation cartésienne –, Eugen Fink a dé...

Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument was received within the Pittsburgh School of Philosophy as raising new and interesting difficulties for the traditional empiricist model of knowledge justification. While McDowell’s attempt to solve the difficulties in question is still debated, I claim that a different solution to the same difficulties might have been suggested by Wittgenstein himself in On Certainty.

I analyze the possibility of free-will in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), arguing for their compatibility. I use as a starting point Nicolas Gisin’s “The Multiverse Pandemic” (preprint arXiv:2210.05377, 2022, after Gisin, N., “L’épidémie du multivers”, in “Le Plus Grand des Hasards”, Belin, Paris, 2010), in which he makes an interesting case that MWI is contradicted by our hard to deny free-will. The counts he raised are: (1) MWI is deterministic, forcing choices on us, (2) in MWI all our possible choices (...) happen, and (3) MWI limits creativity, because everything is entangled with everything else. I argue that each of these features of MWI is in fact compatible with more freedom than it may seem. In particular, MWI allows compatibilist free-will, but also free-will very much like the libertarian free-will defined by Chisholm. I argue that the position that alternative choices exist as possibilities does not make sense from a physical point of view, but MWI offers a physical ground for alternatives. (shrink)

The liberal democratic regimes rest on a well-developed public sphere accessible to all citizens that favors free discussions based on reason and critical debate and serves as a space where public opinion is formed through reasoned dialogue. The new digital technologies disrupted many parts of contemporary democratic societies and transformed their public sphere. Digital transformation alters industries and markets, changing the perceived subjective value, satisfaction, and usefulness of goods or services and displacing established companies and products. Within the political realm, (...) digital transformation creates a cleavage between the vulnerable populations who are ill-informed and lack digital fluency and politicians who tend to learn about peoples‟ problems not to deal with them but to weaponize new technologies to engineer elections and win power. The rise of misinformation and disinformation undermines public trust in democratic institutions and discourages or incapacitates citizens from engaging in debates within the public sphere. On the other hand, the digital transformation of the public sphere empowers ordinary people to aggregate in various publics and counteract the domination of the mainstream parties. Our paper aims to answer whether new technologies provide citizens with ways to counter the undemocratic tendencies caused by digital transformation and engage actively in the public sphere. (shrink)

La question de l’histoire représente une thématique transversale dans l’œuvre de Patočka, le point de convergence d’un ensemble d’interrogations qui irriguent sa recherche philosophique. Dans la matrice théorique articulée autour de ce concept se trouvent imbriquées plusieurs orientations théoriques qui se prêtent difficilement à une lecture unitaire. En se penchant sur la question de l’histoire, Patočka cherche, tour à tour, à tracer la physionomie du présent et à porter à la lumière les ten...

The very existence of society depends on the ability of its members to influence formatively the beliefs, desires, and actions of their fellows. In every sphere of social life, powerful human agents (whether individuals or institutions) tend to use coercion as a favorite shortcut to achieving their aims without taking into consideration the non-violent alternatives or the negative (unintended) consequences of their actions. This propensity for coercion is manifested in the doxastic sphere by attempts to shape people’s beliefs (and doubts) (...) while ignoring the essential characteristics of these doxastic states. I argue that evidential persuasion is a better route to influence people’s beliefs than doxastic coercion. Doxastic coercion perverts the belief-forming mechanism and undermines the epistemic and moral faculties both of coercers and coercees. It succeeds sporadically and on short-term. Moreover, its pseudo doxastic effects tend to disappear once the use of force ceases. In contrast to doxastic coercion, evidential persuasion produces lasting correct beliefs in accordance with proper standards of evidence. It helps people to reach the highest possible standards of rationality and morality. Evidential persuasion is based on the principles of symmetry and reciprocity in that it asks all persuaders to use for changing the beliefs of others only those means they used in forming their own beliefs respecting the freedom of will and assuming the standard of rationality. The arguments in favor of evidential persuasion have a firm theoretical basis that includes a conceptual clarification of the essential traits of beliefs. Belief is treated as a hypercomplex system governed by Leibniz’s law of continuity and the principle of self-organization. It appears to be a mixture consisting of a personal propositional attitude and physical objects and processes. The conceptual framework also includes a typology of believers according to the standards of evidence they assume. In this context, I present a weak version of Clifford’ ethical imperative. In the section dedicated to the prerequisites for changing beliefs, I show how doxastic agents can infuse premeditated or planned changes in the flow of endogenous changes in order to shape certain beliefs in certain desired forms. The possibility of changing some beliefs in a planned manner is correlated with a feedback doxastic (macro-mechanism) that produces a reaction when it is triggered by a stimulus. In relation with the two routes to influence beliefs, a response mechanism is worth taking into consideration – a mechanism governed to a significant extent by human conscience and human will, that appears to be complex, acquired, relatively detached from visceral or autonomic information processing, and highly variable in reactions. Knowing increasingly better this doxastic mechanism, we increase our chances to use evidential persuasion as an effective (although not time-efficient) method to mold people’s beliefs. (shrink)

This paper investigates the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP), which is an extension of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), and it searches for an optimal tour in a clustered graph, such that every cluster is visited exactly once. In this paper, we describe a novel Memetic Algorithm (MA) for solving efficiently the GTSP. Our proposed MA has at its core a genetic algorithm (GA), completed by a Chromosome Enhancement Procedure (CEP), which is based on a TSP solver and the (...) Shortest Path (SP) algorithm and for improving the convergence characteristics of the GA, a Local Search (LS) operation is applied for the best chromosomes in each generation. We tested our algorithm on a set of well-known instances from the literature and the achieved results prove that our novel memetic algorithm is highly competitive against the existing solution approaches from the specialized literature. (shrink)

This paper deals with Descartes’s and Roberval’s attempts to devise and describe the center of agitation of a composite pendulum. This episode has received some attention in the recent literature. It is usually depicted as the first step in the development of a general procedure for establishing the center of oscillation of a pendulum. My aim is to explore the different physical concepts and assumptions which informed the two mathematical accounts of the composite pendulum. I will argue that force, agitation, (...) heaviness, or resis­tance of air essentially meant different things for Descartes and Roberval. As a result, the physical phenomena covered by the two geometrical procedures were quite distinct, and both mathematicians envisaged different roles of these phenomena within their agenda of studying nature. (shrink)

In order to decide whether a discursive product of human reason corresponds or not to the logical order, one must analyze it in terms of syntactic correctness, consistency, and validity. The first step in logical analysis is formalization, that is, the process by which logical forms of thoughts are represented in different formal languages or logical systems. Although each thought can be properly formalized in different ways, the formalization variants are not equally adequate. The adequacy of formalization seems to depend (...) on several essential features: parsimony, accuracy, transparency, fertility and reliability. Because there is a partial antinomy between these traits, it is impossible to find a perfectly adequate variant of formalization. However, it is possible and preferable to reach a reasonable compromise by choosing the variant of formalization which satisfies all of these fundamental characteristics. (shrink)

The main thesis of my article is that the viability of the European Union does not depend so much on its political structure as on its being anchored in a culture-based public sphere and on the establishment of a cultural European citizenship. The public sphere could be defined as an unique world, characterized by consensus and cooperation, in which only public goods can be sought and acquired, or as an unique world, characterized by rivalry and competition, in which everyone could (...) pursue their private interests, but only if there is a consensus regarding an objective and fair procedure. In any way, we cannot speak of a pluralism of public spheres - like the black public sphere, the LGBT public sphere, etc. - but (at the most) a plurality of interests represented in the public sphere, under the reserve of respecting a fair procedure, which allows the expression of axiological judgments. The EU needs a progressive citizenship, from civil citizenship to cultural citizenship, depending on the acquired skills, behavior and virtues. One deserves cultural citizenship and have the right (or, perhaps the privilege) to manifest - in the public sphere - a way of life and a cultural identity only if promote authentic values: virtues, rationality, free will etc. The problematic aspects of the European media sphere are obstacles on the way to establishing an authentic European cultural citizenship. They can be kept under control by assuming a healthy reactionary attitude and associating every element of change and contingent progress (speed, reductive simplicity, user's solitude, pictoriality, lateralness, data overload, immediacy, segmentation, social amnesia, etc.) with an element of moderation and equilibrium. Only thus can the media contribute in the making of a viable union of the European peoples, grounded on a well articulated European cultural citizenship. (shrink)

The frequency of cyberattacks has been rapidly increasing in recent times, which is a significant concern. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities present in the software components that constitute the targeted system. Consequently, the number of vulnerabilities within these software components serves as an indicator of the system’s level of security and trustworthiness. This paper compares the accuracy, trainability and stability to configuration parameters of several neural network architectures, namely Long Short-Term Memory, Multilayer Perceptron and Convolutional Neural Network. These architectures are utilized (...) for forecasting the number of software vulnerabilities within a specified timeframe for a specific software product. By evaluating these neural network models, our aim is to provide insights into their performance and effectiveness in vulnerability forecasting. (shrink)

This paper aims to lay out the main tenets of Bernhard Waldenfels’s analyses of the experience of the alien and to confront the philosophical thesis underwriting them with a central insight stemming from Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy. In the first section, I reconstruct the outlines of the experience of the alien, as described by Waldenfels, and show that, on his account, this experience can function as a powerful impetus enabling us to call into question some of the most deeply held commitments (...) of Western philosophical tradition: the sovereignty of the ego, the supremacy of order, the priority of the whole. In the second section, I show how a patient analysis of this experience compels us to undertake an inquiry concerning the “inter-world,” understood as the place of the encounter and the threshold of separation between the own and the alien. Finally, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s alternative description of the “inter-world,” I maintain that Waldenfels’s account is insufficiently radical and show that the in-between realm cannot be assimilated to an interstice lodged between two insulated spheres. Rather, the “inter-world” should be conceived of as a shared dimension, subtending the partition between the spheres of ownness and alienness, as the one inclusive world. (shrink)

My paper aims to lay out the main tenets of the philosophical project Eugen Fink unfolded in his post-war writings and argues that his enterprise is situated at the crossroads between two compatible yet distinct lines of inquiry: a phenomenology of mediality and a philosophical cosmology. The twofold orientation followed byFink’s radicalization of classical phenomenology can best be grasped if we pay heed to the double critical strategy he put in place in order to overcome what he deemed to be (...) the shortcomings of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the first place, Fink undertakes a “phenomenological” critique of Husserl, showing that the paradigmatic models underlying Husserl’s analysis and, most notably, the preeminence granted to the “individuated thing”, drastically limit the field available for a phenomenological description. On this account, Fink’s critique aims at expanding the domain phenomenology can explore. However, in the second place, Fink points to the limits inherent to phenomenology as such, and advocates for the necessity of supplementing phenomenology’s descriptive analysis with a speculative approach. In this sense, his project of radicalizing phenomenology is tantamount to unveiling the speculative presuppositions undergirding and orienting any descriptive inquiry. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to bring out the core commitments underlying Kojève’s ontological position. My main claim is that he designs an original ontological framework, which integrates (but also regionalizes) Hegel’s and Heidegger’s analysis, and which can be properly characterized as a “double dualism”. In order to assess this thesis, I discuss Kojève’s relationship to Heidegger and show that: a) on Kojève’s view, Heidegger’s phenomenology is marked by an attenuation of the scope of negativity which gives rise to (...) a tendentially monistic phenomenology; b) for Kojève, Heidegger’s main philosophical innovation is the idea of a dualist ontology. This thesis relies on Kojève’s hermeneutical conjecture that in the unpublished part of Being and Time Heidegger accomplishes a doubling (or a duplication) of ontology. (shrink)

Review of Ioan-Aurel Pop, Biserică, societate şi cultură în Transilvania secolului al XVI-lea. Între acceptare şi excludere (Church, society and culture in 16 th Century Transylvania. Between acceptance and exclusion) , București: Editura Academiei, 2012.

Ioan Chirila, Cartea profetului Osea – Breviarum al gnoseologiei Vechiului Testament Editura Limes, 1999.