Sentences such as "The author started the book" are indeterminate because they do not make explicit what the subject (the author) started doing with the object (the book). In principle, indeterminate sentences allow for an infinite number of interpretations. One theory, however, assumes that these sentences are resolved by semantic coercion, a linguistic process that forces the noun "book" to be interpreted as an activity (e.g., writing the book) or by a process that interpolates this activity information in the resulting (...) enriched semantic composition. An alternative theory, pragmatic, assumes classical semantic composition, whereby meaning arises from the denotation of words and how they are combined syntactically, with enrichment obtained via pragmatic inferences beyond linguistic-semantic processes. Cognitive neuroscience studies investigating the neuroanatomical and functional correlates of indeterminate sentences have shown activations either at the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex or at the left inferior frontal gyrus. These studies have supported the semantic coercion theory assuming that one of these regions is where enriched semantic composition takes place. Employing fMRI, we found that indeterminate sentences activate bilaterally the superior temporal gyrus, the right inferior frontal gyrus, and the anterior cingulate cortex, more so than control sentences ("The author wrote the book"). Activation of indeterminate sentences exceeded that of anomalous sentences ("…drank the book") and engaged more left- and right-hemisphere areas than other sentence types. We suggest that the widespread activations for indeterminate sentences represent the deployment of pragmatic-inferential processes, which seek to enrich sentence content without necessarily resorting to semantic coercion. (shrink)

The task of my inquiry is to lay out the main lines of Eugen Fink’s reading of Kant, focusing on his interpretation of the Transcendental Dialectic. In the first part, I explain Fink’s claim that the Transcendental Dialectic represents the very heart of the Kantian project, in as much it is in this section of the first Critique that the question of totality (on Fink’s account, the driving impetus of this work) first comes to the forefront. Secondly, I undertake an (...) examination of Fink’s argument regarding the proper outcome of the “Antinomies of Pure Reason,” according to which the failure of the attempts to determine the world with “innerworldly models” is not a sufficient reason to contend that the world is merely a subjective idea. Finally, I discuss Fink’s thesis concerning the construction of the “Transcendental Ideal” according to which the transition from the omnitudo realitatis to the ens realissimum is not necessary (neither objectively, nor subjectively). In this regard, Fink’s project can be understood as an attempt to think the omnitudo realitatis for itself, prior to and independent from any realization in a being (be it a supreme one). (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.

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)

The encounters of the Romanian philosopher C. Noica with his youger disciples - Gabriel Liicean, Andrei Pleșu, Sorin Vieru et alii - in the transylvanian Carpathian mountains, in the Păltiniș resort were perceived by Noica’s followers as a real philosophical school and an idealistic alternative to the compulsory marxist ideology. In spite of that, the orthodox thinker and literary critic N. Steinhardt took it as a way of avoiding the tough reality of communism and a negation of the Christian religion. (...) Therefore, he criticised that option and the pretention of the “Păltiniș School” to create a viable alternative to the officially imposed marxist vision. Steinhardt’s article received critical answers not only from the members of the so-called School, but also from another thinker and literary critic, Adrian Marino, who thought that both Noica and Steinhardt are wrong and the younger thinkers should act against Nicolae Ceaușescu’s agressive dictatorship by meas of civic and democratic activity. The study tries to emphasize the existence of more than one alternative to the communist ideology in Romania’s 1980s, generally considered as a frozen epoch for free philosophical and politically relevant discussions. (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)

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)

The phenomenological tautology of life in Michel Henry’s works shows us that the radical concept of self-affection, in its own immanence, cannot be described in another way, either by metaphor or analogy for example, but only by that immediate relation like adequacy on itself: “life as life”. The reduplication of the fundamental concept in Henry’s last “theological” turn introduced a new Transcendence: the Self-Affection of the Absolute Life, the Christian God as Revelation. In this way, we can diversify the tautology (...) of life trying to read it using Saint Maximus the Confessor’s theology: “Life as Life” like the Absolute phenomenological Life of Trinity in Unity; “life as Life” for the creation of the human living by the Living God; “life as life” for the existence of the man, ek-sisting in a world affected by the original transgression; “Life as life” for the Incarnation of the Logos of God; “life as Life — 2” for the rebirth of the human living into Christ and His Mystical Body. (shrink)

Translation is a fundamental part of cultural dissemination. Based on an empirical qualitative research, the first part of this article presents the effects that thewave of translations after 2005, the first of utmost importance in the Romanian cultural environment, engaged in the local literary field, and in the second part there are brought into discussion some important intercultural barriers in translation and promotion of literature abroad, such as defining literature in a different way, new forms of censorship or problematic semiotic (...) codes of literature of revolt. (shrink)

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

Sandu Frunza, Iubirea si Transcendenta. O introducere la problema spatiului median al experientei religioase in Iudaism si Crestinismul Rasaritean Editura Dacia, Cluj, 1999.

This contribution explores Gilles Personne de Roberval’s 1644 Aristarchi Samii de mundi systemate, partibus, & motibus eiusdem, libellus. I focus on the complex circumstances of publication, the intellectual context of the polemics of Copernicanism within the scientific community, as well as the natural philosophy of the treatise. Roberval’s strategy of publication provides a very sophisticated example of authorship in early modern natural philosophy. The strategy lies at the conflux of certain specific motivations. I contextualize these motivations by accounting for the (...) delicate debates around the motion of the Earth in mid-seventeenth century Europe, the institutional communities of the Collège Royal and Mersenne’s circle, and the disciplinary bounds of Roberval’s professional authority. Weighing in all the elements, I argue that Roberval’s publication is an interesting intellectual game, playing with the notion of ancient authority and humanistic recovery. By this somewhat libertine attitude, Roberval takes a stance in a complicated debate around heliocentrism and the status of hypothetical cosmology. Roberval’s position is supported by his natural philosophical speculations, which I situate in the contemporary debates of the community. Roberval borrows from many philosophers, but he aims at achieving a highly systematic speculative cosmology. One of the functions of this system is to confirm Copernicanism, while maintaining a very pessimistic attitude on the prospects of precise astronomical knowledge and, among others, prognostication issues. (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)

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.

This paper sought to develop a literature review-based framework for fitting research projects into philosophies of research. The philosophical underpinning of the study to optimize the financial performance of pension funds through asset allocation and portfolio management decisions was used as a case in point. The paper argues that all knowledge generation processes should be deeply rooted in philosophy if they are to produce reliable solutions to research problems. The study established that the research approaches and the science of doing (...) research need to be informed by the philosophical positions of reality, knowledge, logic and ethical stance of the researcher. It is also noted that the philosophical positions of the researcher should be derived from the objective or subjective nature of the variables in the research problem. In relation to optimizing the financial performance of pension funds, the study concluded that pragmatism is the most appropriate guiding philosophy for determining the ontological, epistemological, axiological and methodological positions of the researcher. It is also concluded that the mixed method research paradigm, implemented through the explanatory sequential design is a better approach to comprehensively understand the subject matter since pension fund financial performance is a function of both subjective and objective factors. (shrink)

The research on stem cell-based therapies has greatly expanded in recent years. Our text attempts to seek those religious and ethical challenges that stem cell therapy and research bring into debate. Our thesis is that bioethics can defend its principle without a religious background. We will develop our argumentation on three major points: firstly, a comparison between secular ethics and religious views will clarify why stem cell therapy and research are important from a scientific point of view, addressing the very (...) center of the human being; in our view, being based on secular society, bioethics can answer the challenges of stem cell therapy and research; secondly, following Hans Jonas' perspective on experimenting on humans, we seek to understand the philosophical guidance that sciences dealing with stem cell need; thirdly, we will map the ethical guidelines for clinical translational research that have been adopted by the International Society for Stem Cell Research. . (shrink)

This paper addresses the topic of bioethics in reproductive medicine from the perspective of the religious implications for the field. The assumption underlying the approach is that religion remains a factor that influences the field of bioethics even in a secularized postmodern society. The first part of the paper analyses the main bioethical issues which mark obstetrics and gynecology, uttering that the four basic principles of bioethics are available both in obstetrics and gynecology and must be applied in association with (...) the practitioner’s virtues. The second part of the paper focuses on the main directions that guide the debate on the presence of religion in the field of bioethics, with a special interest in their relevance for reproductive medicine. Despite the difficulties implied by the task of advocating for the place of religion at the secular table of deliberation in medical ethics, the relevance of religion for bioethics cannot be ignored. (shrink)

Dans ses Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire, Jan Patočka donne de la première guerre mondiale une interprétation située dans le sillage de l’interrogation historiale de Heidegger, dont il marque les limites et propose une radicalisation qui fait surgir la solidarité entre la technique et la guerre. Pour Patočka, qui s’appuie sur les récits de guerre de Jünger et de Teilhard de Chardin, la pensée historiale et les témoignages du front s’éclairent mutuellement : la saisie de la première guerre (...) comme « culmination du règne de la force » permet de rendre visibles un certain nombre d’expériences, dont celle du sacrifice. L’expérience du front contient le ferment d’un renversement, d’un « metanoein colossal et inouï », seul capable de miner les bases du système qui a conduit à la guerre et d’ouvrir ainsi une « paix véritable ». (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...

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)

On the basis of an experimental investigation of the construals of present under past in child French, we argue that French children, just like Japanese adult speakers, but unlike French adult speakers, allow pure simultaneous construals of present under past, where the present denotes an interval that lies completely in the past, be it in relative or complement clauses. We conclude that French children have two presents: an indexical present and a zero present (just like Japanese adults, cf. Ogihara 1999, (...) 2008), suggesting that French children have both the Japanese and the French setting for the Sequence of Tense parameter since they allow simultaneous construals of both present and past under past. This multiple grammar approach to tense interpretation in child French extends to child Japanese in so far as Japanese children have been argued to allow simultaneous readings of past under past, although this reading is unavailable in the target grammar (Matsuo & Hollebrandse 1999). (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)

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 continue encore largement, en France, à rapporter la pensée d’Eugen Fink aux textes et concepts qu’il élabore dans le cadre de son étroite collaboration avec Husserl, limitant ainsi son originalité à une radicalisation de la pensée du dernier Husserl (à travers des thèmes comme celui du spectateur désintéressé, du méontique ou de l’Entmenschung). Des études récentes, en Italie et surtout en Allemagne, se penchent quant à elles avec une attention soutenue sur les écrits du second Fink, écri...