Introduction to " Gnosticism ": Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds is the first textbook on Gnosticism, guiding students through the most significant of the Nag Hammadi texts, grouping them by theme and genre, and revealing to the uninitiated their most inscrutable mysteries.

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

The study of anarchism as a philosophical, political, and social movement has burgeoned both in the academy and in the global activist community in recent years. Taking advantage of this boom in anarchist scholarship, Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl have compiled twenty-six cutting-edge essays on this timely topic in New Perspectives on Anarchism.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

This paper examines the perceptual and reasoning processes that underpin regularities in behaviour. A distinction is made between situations as they are, or as described by an omniscient external observer, and situations as agents see or frame them. Different frames can stem from differences in culture, experience and personality, as well as from other context-specific factors. Drawing upon David Lewis’sConvention(1969), I show that consistency between reasoning and experience does not preclude individuals from understanding the same state of affairs differently, (...) and that agents’ beliefs about others’ beliefs may well be wrong. As a result, cases may occur in which conventions are sustained by false but mutually consistent and self-confirming beliefs. (shrink)

The phenomenon of performativity has recently sparked debates about the status of the economic discourse. This paper aims to discuss the subjectivist idea that if economics ‘performs’ social reality, rather than merely reflects it, then every theory can be considered ‘true.’ My main goal is to point out three limits of performativity. First, not all theories can be performative since some do not produce empirical landmarks for agents. Second, social institutions restrict performativity. Third, I emphasize the necessity that a theory (...) to be self-fulfilling. This article is a prelude to a new kind of performative studies based on an original definition: a theory performs the world if it implies a behavioral regularity which leads to a general coordination between agents. That is to say, if it becomes a convention à la David Lewis. (shrink)

This paper addresses a specific issue inherent to David Lewis’s conception of possible worlds, namely whether or not they are liable to being limited in size. The paper purports to show that, if a certain argument against unlimited worlds’ size is valid, then the way of countering it by means of positing an upper limit to size (as Lewis himself and John Divers have suggested) leads to a troublesome distortion of some modal phenomena, such as de re ascriptions (...) of properties. Even if somewhat disagreeing with Lewis’s favoured solution of the topic at issue, it must be remarked that what follows should not be intended either as a defence or as an attack on Lewis’s overall modal ontology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Seven Poems NICOLAS CALAS (Translated by Avi Sharon) hellenizing surrealism: a greek door to europe Nicolas calas (Kalamares) may be considered merely a minor Greek poet, but he had a major global persona and influence. In the middle of the last century he played a catalyzing role in the international avant garde: He was a Zelig-like polemicist in three languages (Greek, French, and English) and across three cultural (...) capitals (Athens, Paris, and New York). But he always fought on a singular front: surrealism. Born in Lausanne in 1907, he grew up in Athens and by the later 1920s began to stand out in literary circles (he was over 6' 4") for his modernist if not revolutionary views. Starting from an interest in Freud and Marx, the subconscious and the revolutionary, Calas soon arrived at their natural synthesis—surrealism. Around the time when a distinctly Greek form of surrealist poetry emerged, with the 1935 publication of “Blast Furnace” by Andreas Embiricos, Calas was on his way to becoming its unofficial spokesman. He moved to the epicenter of the movement in Paris and with the 1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie became the “most lucid and audacious” of founder André Breton’s acolytes, both prophet and demagogue of the group. Carried along in the current of European artists and thinkers leaving Europe for New York, he would continue the fight on the western wing of the faction (literally, coming to blows at a cocktail party with Clement Greenberg, representing the opposing Abstract Expressionist side). In 1942 he published another clarion pamphlet, Confound the Wise, giving the movement voice in English and befriending its most visible local supporters and practitioners, from Peggy Guggenheim to Marcel Duchamp. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 The Wyndham Lewis of the operation, Calas was a cross-border catalyst, evangelizing the role of surrealism as a liberating and generative force in modern literature and art. For him and other writers and poets, the weapon that would most effectively derange the reader’s habitual conformism into revelatory and revolutionary perception was the surrealist image, poetry’s lingua franca. For Greek practitioners it was completely natural for that magical representation to arise out of their god-infested, sun-filled landscape. Here they had a force that was both blinding and enlightening, penetrating and transformative, local and universal. For Calas, the primary echo or reflection of that essential image was the island of Santorini, referenced in several of the translations here (and reminiscent of his fellow national Nikos Gatsos’s use of the island of Amorgos in a similar context). It stood as the very symbol of fiery transformation, an image monstrous enough to shock the reader into a super-rational embrace of its own form of logic. This Hellenization of surrealism, like the Hellenization of modernism itself, was to become an important, transformative power in its own right. For many, the origin (and likewise, for many, the enclosing border ) of surrealism was France. “But it is French. It is their invention,” was how William Carlos Williams saw it, to his chagrin. Williams was convinced that the objective concentration on the image itself (“no ideas but in things”) could offer a salutary corrective to American poetry of his time. “It is the surrealists who have invented the living defense of literature,” he wrote in a 1929 essay. But for a poet so at one with the American Grain to be reconciled with surrealism’s ‘Francite’ he needed some way to cross the divide. His admiration for Calas’s work in clarifying and promoting the group’s ideas enabled the Greek poet to serve as a mediator, to allow the creative transference of its rebellious wisdom into Williams’s poetry. To borrow the title of one of his early American essays, Calas provided Williams a “Greek door to Europe.” In translating four of Calas’s French poems into English, published in 1941 with a frontispiece by the surrealist painter and magician Kurt Seligman, Williams leveraged Calas as the vehicle through which the “enabling foreignness” of surrealism could be grafted into the grain of his American modernist work, just as he set out on his magnum opus, Paterson. In a similar way... (shrink)

Duncan Purves and Nicolas Delon have argued that one’s life will be meaningful to the extent that one contributes to valuable states of affairs and this contribution is a result of one’s intentional actions. They then argue, contrary to some theorists’ intuitions, that non-human animals are capable of fulfilling these requirements, and that this finding might entail important things for the animal ethics movement. In this paper, I also argue that things besides human beings can have meaningful existences, but I (...) disagree with Purves and Delon’s theory of meaning, and some of the practical implications they suggest arise from their conclusion. Specifically, I argue that Purves and Delon are wrong to suggest that intentional agency is necessary for one’s life to be meaningful; contributing to valuable states of affairs can be sufficient by itself. Purves and Delon’s objection to such a claim is that it would allow even inanimate objects’ existences to count as meaningful. However, while I accept this... (shrink)

In this paper I explore whether three different approaches to connexivity – namely, Lewis and Langford’s, Wansing’s and Egré and Politzer’s – can be non-trivially related. Lewis and Langford’s approach consists of the definition of the conditional in terms of consistency via the definition of possibility in terms of consistency and Lewis’ definition of the (strict) conditional in terms of possibility; Wansing’s approach is based on his definition of the falsity condition for the conditional as “if A (...) is true then B is false”; Egré and Politzer’s approach relies on the modalization of the falsity condition for the conditional in its conditional form (A→◇~B). With this background in mind, I build upon Estrada-González’s work relating connexivism and possibilism, the thesis according to which everything is possible. Estrada-González’s work relates Lewis and Langford’s connexive approach with Nelson’s idea that every proposition is self-consistent. He does so using a fragment of LP augmented with a special conditional. This relation has resulted in the study and postulation of several truth-functional modalities, some of which have already been discussed elsewhere. I employ several truth-functional modalities to evaluate Egré and Politzer’s falsity conditions for the conditional. I show that in using Béziau’s truth-functional modality ◇B, definable in Estrada-González’s framework, one can retain in a single framework the three different approaches. More specifically, distinguishing the notion of logical equivalence from the notion of interderivability and these two from the notion of coimplication, it is possible to relate ~(A→B) and (A→◇~B) as interderivable schemas and in a valid biconditional. I also show some consequences of this for Béziau’s negative appraisal of three-valued truthfunctional modalities. (shrink)

Il problema di fondo da cui la discussione sui mondi possibili scaturisce è quello di fornire una teoria circa l’interpretazione delle espressioni modali. È quindi da un’analisi di queste espressioni che partiremo per la nostra discussione sui mondi possibili. Nel linguaggio naturale il discorso modale è segnalato da una molteplicità di espressioni come avverbi, modi verbali ed operatori enunciativi: 'potere', 'dovere', 'avere la capacità', 'avere l’opportunità', 'possibilmente', 'doverosamente', et coetera. In seguito ad una semplificazione non priva di conseguenze, si è (...) generalmente ritenuto che le espressioni paradigmatiche del discorso modale (a cui tutte le altre potessero essere in qualche modo ridotte) fossero. (shrink)

The logic of Conditional Beliefs has been introduced by Board, Baltag, and Smets to reason about knowledge and revisable beliefs in a multi-agent setting. In this article both the semantics and the proof theory for this logic are studied. First, a natural semantics forCDLis defined in terms of neighbourhood models, a multi-agent generalisation of Lewis’ spheres models, and it is shown that the axiomatization ofCDLis sound and complete with respect to this semantics. Second, it is shown that the neighbourhood (...) semantics is equivalent to the original one defined in terms of plausibility models, by means of a direct correspondence between the two types of models. On the basis of neighbourhood semantics, a labelled sequent calculus forCDLis obtained. The calculus has strong proof-theoretic properties, in particular admissibility of contraction and cut, and it provides a decision procedure for the logic. Furthermore, its semantic completeness is used to obtain a constructive proof of the finite model property of the logic. Finally, it is shown that other doxastic operators can be easily captured within neighbourhood semantics. This fact provides further evidence of the naturalness of neighbourhood semantics for the analysis of epistemic/doxastic notions. (shrink)

Questions concerning the epistemological status of computer science are, in this paper, answered from the point of view of the formal verification framework. State space reduction techniques adopted to simplify computational models in model checking are analysed in terms of Aristotelian abstractions and Galilean idealizations characterizing the inquiry of empirical systems. Methodological considerations drawn here are employed to argue in favour of the scientific understanding of computer science as a discipline. Specifically, reduced models gained by Dataion are acknowledged as Aristotelian (...) abstractions that include only data which are sufficient to examine the interested executions. The present study highlights how the need to maximize incompatible properties is at the basis of both Abstraction Refinement, the process of generating a cascade of computational models to achieve a balance between simplicity and informativeness, and the Multiple Model Idealization approach in biology. Finally, fairness constraints, imposed to computational models to allow fair behaviours only, are defined as ceteris paribus conditions under which temporal formulas, formalizing software requirements, acquire the status of law-like statements about the software systems executions. (shrink)

In the last two decades an increasing number of musicians, musicologists and philosophers in the United States of America have dealt with questions of philosophy of music on a phenomenological basis. F. Joseph Smith certainly deserves mention as one of the first and most innovative of these authors. Sections 1 and 2 of the paper sketch a portrait of Smith against the background of the current situation in America, where there is a strong awareness of the need to overcome the (...) present limits imposed by historical musicology in order to develop a new phenomenological approach. Section 3 expounds Smith 's critique against traditional theory of musical form and his attempt to redefine musical form on the basis of Husserl's treatise on passive synthesis. This, in the author's opinion, is Smith 's most important contribution to a phenomenologically oriented philosophy of music. Finally, section 4 tries to draw some critical conclusions concerning Smith 's work, with special regard to the merits and demerits of his idea of phenomenology as applied to music. (shrink)

This research aims to examine access to medical treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic for people living with disabilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the practical and ethical problems of allocating limited medical resources such as intensive care unit beds and ventilators became critical. Although different countries have proposed different guidelines to manage this emergency, these proposed criteria do not sufficiently consider people living with disabilities. People living with disabilities are therefore at a higher risk of exclusion from medical treatments as physicians (...) tend to assume they have poor quality of life, whereas access to medical treatment should be based on several parameters, including clinical data and prognosis. However, the COVID-19 pandemic shifts the medical paradigm from person-centred medicine to community-centred medicine, challenging the main ethical theories. We reviewed the main guidelines and recommendations for resources allocation and examined their position toward persons with disabilities. Based on our findings, we propose criteria for not discriminating against people with disabilities in allocating resources. The shift from person-centred to community-centred medicine offers opportunities but also risks sacrificing the most vulnerable people. The principle of reasonable accommodation must always be considered to guarantee the rights of persons with disabilities. (shrink)

This paper attempts to investigate Kierkegaard’s thought through the category of mimesis. First, two meanings of the word are distinguished and analyzed: the archaic meaning that links it to the concept of re-enactment, and the traditional meaning that links it to the aesthetic field of art. These two meanings are then considered in relation to Kierkegaard’s opus, showing the oscillation of mimesis as corresponding to that between the aesthetic, which lives in fantasy and in the unfulfilled possibility, and the religious, (...) which finds its identity in the imitation of Christ and in the transparent relationship to God. (shrink)

In the present article, I discuss Husserl’s analysis of the genesis of action in the Husserliana edition Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. My aim is to clarify how a “voluntary action” has its...

In its formlessness and potentiality, prime matter is a problematic entity of medieval metaphysics and its ontological limitations drastically affect human possibility of conceiving it. In this article, I analyse three influential strategies elaborated to justify an epistemic access to prime matter. They are incidental perception, negative abstraction, and analogy. Through a systematic and historical analysis of these procedures, the article shows the richness of interpretations and theoretical stakes implied by the conundrum of how prime matter can be known by (...) human beings. In particular, the reasons behind the later medieval acceptance of analogy as the main way to unveil prime matter become clearer by pointing out the correlation between the ontological and epistemological levels of the medieval examination of prime matter. (shrink)

L’article propose une relecture du texte Die Sitte publié par Ferdinand Tönnies en 1909. Ce texte nous donne une perspective stratégique pour améliorer notre compréhension de la longue réflexion que Tönnies consacre, pendant toute sa vie, au concept de communauté. Il nous montre que cette entreprise théorique contribue à réévaluer la notion d’obligation dont la pensée politique moderne a fait une notion clé depuis Hobbes. En ce sens, la sociologie de Tönnies participe d’une intention théorique qui est au cœur du (...) projet de la sociologie classique. Cette intention consiste à voir dans la sociologie une intervention épistémique dans la pensée politique des modernes capable de produire une critique de ses concepts fondamentaux. (shrink)

The essay addresses Heidegger’s language in two distinct yet interrelated ways: in terms of his understanding of language as well his own jargon. The analysis is based on a close reading of the preamble to ›Being and Time‹ (›Sein und Zeit‹), which serves as an exemplar and is representative of the suggestive language-games that are characteristic of Heidegger’s philosophy. Therefore, the analysis focuses on the use of a single word, the adverb ›eigentlich‹. In a second step, the article examines the (...) nominalized form of inauthenticity and questions its source and shows to which extent Husserl’s understanding of language serves as a contrast to Heidegger’s own understanding of language. In conclusion, it is demonstrated how Heidegger employed two distinct exoteric languages and why ›Being and Time‹ can be regarded as a critique of language. (shrink)