This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102: “Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication”. The research published in this book was discussed at the 3rd joint EUCOGII-COST 2102 International Training School entitled “Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues ” and held in Caserta, Italy, on March 15-19, 2010.

In this paper I propose a new interpretation of the British evolutionary synthesis. The synthetic work of J. B. S. Haldane, R. A. Fisher and J. S. Huxley was characterized by both an integration of Mendelism and Darwinism and the unification of different biological subdisciplines within a coherent framework. But it must also be seen as a bold and synthetic Darwinian program in which the biosciences served as a utopian blueprint for the progress of civilization. Describing the futuristic visions of (...) these three scientists in their synthetic heydays, I show that, despite a number of important divergences, their biopolitical ideals could be biased toward a controlled and regimented utopian society. Their common ideals entailed a social order where liberal and democratic principles were partially or totally suspended in favor of bioscientific control and planning for the future. Finally, I will argue that the original redefinition of Darwinism that modern synthesizers proposed is a significant historical example of how Darwinism has been used and adapted in different contexts. The lesson I draw from this account is a venerable one: that, whenever we wish to define Darwinism, we need to recognize not only its scientific content and achievements but expose the other traditions and ideologies it may have supported. (shrink)

Cet essai rappelle l’interprétation qu’ont donnée Carl Schmitt, Dolf Sternberger et Nicole Loraux du caractère essentiel de la politique. Celui-ci a un rapport intrinsèque avec ce que Joachim Ritter et Manfred Riedel ont essayé de penser à travers la catégorie de « métapolitique ». Mais c’est en se référant également aux grandes époques que décrit la philosophie de l’histoire de Hegel que l’auteur conclut que le noyau métapolitique de la politique est constitué par la relation antinomique entre inclusion et exclusion. (...) La machine de la théologie politique, autour de laquelle s’articule depuis longtemps la politique occidentale, fonctionne en attribuant constamment le rôle du tout à une partie par le biais de la soumission et de l’exclusion d’une autre partie. (shrink)

Se nella verità c’è il riferimento a qualcosa di “assoluto” e di “intemporale”, nel relativismo si esprime la mutevolezza del contingente, di modo che la realtà oggettiva e il senso soggettivo risultino separati sin dall’origine. L’aspetto più inquietante della cultura contemporanea stà nell’inimicizia concettuale tra l’io e la verità, con delle conseguenze nella concezione della libertà. Questa, concepita come autonomia dell’individuo, si capovolge nella sottomissione degli individui allo Stato – visto come verità – che offre loro legittimità, dando loro letteralmente (...) l’«essere». La verità dell’io si trasforma nella volontà generale e la libertà del singolo viene a coincidere con sua appartenenza al corpo dello Stato, di modo che il rapporto dell’io e della verità può e deve realizzarsi solo in forma politica. La permanenza di identità e comunità religiose all’interno di un’orizzonte culturale laico fa che il «discorso» religioso nel dibattito pubblico sia considerato una possibile proposta di razionalità. Più di una mera tolleranza dello Stato in ordine alla libertà religiosa, si tratta di un primo livello di integrazione cognitiva delle ragioni religiose nella razionalità laica, nell’ambito dell’etica. Quando si passa alla considerazione delle «verità» diverse, riguardo all’io e al mondo, c’è una asimmetria della verità metafisica e religiosa rispetto ad una semplice visione etica del mondo. Palavras-chave : Multiculturalismo, Stato, Libertà, relativismo, fondamentalismo Resumo Se na verdade existe algo de absoluto e de intemporal, no relativismo expressa-se a mutabilidade do contingente, de modo que a realidade objetiva e o sentido subjetivo se tornam separados desde a origem. O aspecto mais inquietante da cultura contemporânea se encontra na inimizade conceitual entre o eu e a verdade, com conseqüências na concepção da liberdade. Esta, concebida como autonomia do indivíduo, se inverte na submissão dos indivíduos ao Estado – visto como verdade – que lhes oferece legitimidade, dando-lhes literalmente o “ser”. A verdade do eu se transforma na vontade geral e a liberdade do singular passa a coincidir com seu pertencimento ao corpo do Estado, de modo que a relação entre o eu e a verdade pode e deve se realizar apenas na forma política. A permanência de identidades e comunidades religiosas no interior de um horizonte cultural laico faz com que o discurso religioso no debate público seja considerado uma proposta possível de racionalidade. Mais do que uma mera tolerância do Estado com relação à liberdade religiosa, trata-se de um primeiro nível de integração cognitiva das razões religiosas na racionalidade laica, no âmbito da ética. Quando se passa a considerações de verdade diferentes, com relação ao eu e ao mundo, existe uma assimetria da verdade metafísica e religiosa em relação a uma simples visão ética do mundo. Palavras-chave : Multiculturalismo, Estado, Liberdade, relativismo, fundamentalismo. ABSTRACT If indeed there is something timeless and absolute, the mutability of the contingent is expressed in relativism, in a way that objective reality and subjective sense become separated from their origin. The most disturbing aspect of contemporary culture lays is in the conceptual enmity between the self and the truth, with consequences in the conception of freedom. When such freedom is taken as individual autonomy, it becomes itself in the submission of individuals to the state which is always seen as the truth that gives them legitimacy. The truth of the self becomes in the general will and the freedom of the individual happens to belong to the body of the state, so that the relationship between the self and the truth can and should be performed only in political form. The permanence of identities and religious communities within a secular cultural horizon makes the religious discourse in public debate a possible proposal of rationality. More than mere tolerance of the state relating to religious freedom, this is a first level of cognitive integration of religious reasons within secular rationality under ethics. When it comes to considerations other than truth, about the self and the world, there is an asymmetry of the metaphysical and religious truth with regard to a simple ethical vision of the world. Key words : Multiculturalism, State, Freedom, relativism, fundamentalism. (shrink)

This anthology collects the texts that defined the concept of biopolitics, which has become so significant throughout the humanities and social sciences today. The far-reaching influence of the biopolitical—the relation of politics to life, or the state to the body—is not surprising given its centrality to matters such as healthcare, abortion, immigration, and the global distribution of essential medicines and medical technologies. Michel Foucault gave new and unprecedented meaning to the term "biopolitics" in his 1976 essay "Right of Death and (...) Power over Life." In this anthology, that touchstone piece is followed by essays in which biopolitics is implicitly anticipated as a problem by Hannah Arendt and later altered, critiqued, deconstructed, and refined by major political and social theorists who explicitly engaged with Foucault's ideas. By focusing on the concept of biopolitics, rather than applying it to specific events and phenomena, this Reader provides an enduring framework for assessing the central problematics of modern political thought. _Contributors_. Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Timothy Campbell, Gilles Deleuze, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Achille Mbembe, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Adam Sitze, Peter Sloterdijk, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek. (shrink)

This article explores the category of biopolitics through the use Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben make of two Greek words, bios and ōē. In particular, I argue that the separation of bios and ōē as introduced in Homo Sacer has no "natural" nor "lingual" relevance. The exposition of such a fabulous antinomy simply ruins the historical matter of Agamben's discourse on biopolitics. Here, Esposito's research could be read as an attempt to found the category of biopolitics anew without (...) repeating the fiction of a bifurcation between ōē and bios. However, Esposito, in his own celebration of biopower, undermines the very power of language and, thus, ignores the variation of the invariant that is history. Esposito's and Agamben's difficulties lead us back to the possible ambition of all politics to absorb all life, as it was already expressed by Aristotle. In this sense, "modern biopolitics" becomes a case study for the totalitarian temptation of political order. (shrink)

The Latin word lupus ‘wolf’ uniquely shares with Greek λύκος a metathesized form of Proto-Indo-European *u̯l̥kʷos, and it is unlikely that they could have arisen independently. But an early borrowing from Greek into the Italic languages can be justified, after metathesis took place, but before the changes to labiovelar consonants in each language that would exclude the possibility.

This biography sheds new light on the life and work of physicist Ettore Majorana (including unpublished contributions), as well as on his mysterious disappearance in March 1938. Majorana is held by many, including Nobel Laureate, Enrico Fermi, to have been a genius of the rank of Galilei and Newton. In this intriguing story, the author, himself a leading expert on the work of Majorana, supplements the existing literature with new insights, anecdotes and personal accounts of contemporaries of Majorana.

Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. (...) Game-playing, then, illuminates a distinctive human capacity. We can take on ends temporarily for the sake of the experience of pursuing them. Game play shows that our agency is significantly more modular and more fluid than we might have thought. It also demonstrates our capacity to take on an inverted motivational structure. Sometimes we can take on an end for the sake of the activity of pursuing that end. (shrink)

The bibliographical history offers an interesting point of view for a better understanding of the rise and development of ontology, as an autonomous discipline, in early modern thought. After Luther’s interdict, the metaphysics was neglected in many protestant academies and excluded from the disciplinary classifications (§§ 1-2). The return of metaphysics, at the end of the 16thcentury, coincided, in many cases, with the affirmation of the new scholastic paradigm of ontology (§ 3). An illustrious precedent of this paradigm was constituted (...) by the Jesuit Francisco Suárez and his Disputationes metaphysicae (§ 5). The Jesuit models - not only that by Suárez, but also those by Benet Perera and Pedro da Fonseca - represented the standard on which Calvinists and Lutherans built their own metaphysics in an ontological way. This paper provides a conspicuous number of case studies in which the passage from metaphysics to ontology becomes definitively clear: this debate takes place throughout the first handbooks, treatises, magisterial and doctoral disputations (§ 6) proposed by the Calvinist and Lutheran authors. (shrink)

The communicative affordances of the participatory web have opened up new and multifarious channels for the proliferation of hate. In particular, women navigating the cybersphere seem to be the target of a disproportionate amount of hostility. This paper explores the contexts, approaches and conceptual synergies around research on online misogyny within the new communicative paradigm of social media communication. The paper builds on the core principle that online misogyny is demonstrably and inherently a discourse; therefore, the field is envisaged at (...) the intersection of digital media scholarship, discourse theorization and critical feminist explications. As an ever-burgeoning phenomenon, online hate has been approached from a range of disciplinary perspectives but has only been partially mapped at the interface of meaning making contents/processes and new mediation technologies. The paper aims to advance the state of the art by investigating online hate in general, and misogyny in particular, from the vantage point of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies ; an emerging model of theorization and operationalization of research combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in digital media and technology research. Our SM-CDS approach to online misogyny demarcates itself from insinuation whereby the phenomenon is reduced to digital communicative affordances per se and argues in favor of a double critical contextualization of research findings at both digital participatory as well as social and cultural levels. (shrink)

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. The best explanation, I suggest, is (...) that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. Deferring to aesthetic testimony, then, makes the same mistake as looking up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments. -/- *There is an audio version available: look for the Soundcloud link, below.*. (shrink)

I propose to study one problem for epistemic dependence on experts: how to locate experts on what I will call cognitive islands. Cognitive islands are those domains for knowledge in which expertise is required to evaluate other experts. They exist under two conditions: first, that there is no test for expertise available to the inexpert; and second, that the domain is not linked to another domain with such a test. Cognitive islands are the places where we have the fewest resources (...) for evaluating experts, which makes our expert dependences particularly risky. -/- Some have argued that cognitive islands lead to the complete unusability of expert testimony: that anybody who needs expert advice on a cognitive island will be entirely unable to find it. I argue against this radical form of pessimism, but propose a more moderate alternative. I demonstrate that we have some resources for finding experts on cognitive islands, but that cognitive islands leave us vulnerable to an epistemic trap which I will call runaway echo chambers. In a runaway echo chamber, our inexpertise may lead us to pick out bad experts, which will simply reinforce our mistaken beliefs and sensibilities. (shrink)

An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible with recognizing the (...) inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

We offer an account of the generic use of the term “porn”, as seen in recent usages such as “food porn” and “real estate porn”. We offer a definition adapted from earlier accounts of sexual pornography. On our account, a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with primarily for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content. We demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of generic (...) porn by using it to isolate a new type of such porn: moral outrage porn. Moral outrage porn is representations of moral outrage, engaged with primarily for the sake of the resulting gratification, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with morally outrageous content. Moral outrage porn is dangerous because it encourages the instrumentalization of one’s empirical and moral beliefs, manipulating their content for the sake of gratification. Finally, we suggest that when using porn is wrong, it is often wrong because it instrumentalizes what ought not to be instrumentalized. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the classical—linear and bottom-up directed—models of causation in biology, and the ‘‘proximate/ultimate’’ dichotomy, are inappropriate to capture the complexity inherent to biological processes. We introduce a new notion of ‘‘multilevel causation’’ where old dichotomies such as proximate/ultimate and bottom-up/ top-down are reinterpreted within a multilevel, web-like, approach. In briefly reviewing some recent work on complexity, EvoDevo, carcinogenesis, autocatalysis, comparative genomics, animal regeneration, phenotypic plasticity, and niche construction, we will argue that such reinterpretation is a (...) necessary step for the advancement of the ‘‘Extended Synthesis.’’. (shrink)