Unification was originally introduced in automated deduction and term rewriting, but has recently also found applications in other fields. In this article, we give a survey of the results on unification obtained in two closely related, yet different, application areas of unification: description logics and modal logics.

In this detailed study of the republican tradition in the development of the Enlightenment, the central problem of utopia and reform is crystallized in a discussion of the right to punish. Describing the political situation in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author shows how the old republics in Italy, Poland and Holland stagnated and were unable to survive in the age of absolutism. The Philosophes discussed the ideal of republicanism against this background. They were particularly influenced by (...) the political and religious radicalism of John Toland, which had survived the English Restoration and was then reaching Europe. Professor Venturi traces the debate on the penal laws and the attempt to relate utopian ideas of society to the practical problem of dealing with man in society, which culminated in the assertion by many Philosophes that an unjust social system necessitated harsh penal laws, thereby rejecting the possibility of reform. (shrink)

To put it in Peirce's words, philosophy is an act of semiosis. Interpretation, communication, and mediation are at the core of the philosophical enterprise. Mediation in a wide sense is indeed a constitutive character of human experience. If, at the core of our philosophical research, we focus on the so-called issue of cross-cultural and intercultural thought, in which the necessity of translation springs immediately up from the necessity to understand different languages and different systems of signs, the question of mediation (...) reveals itself to be a crucial one. Immediacy itself, whenever it is thought, reveals itself to be something mediated by our language: but what separates and requires mediation is also what connects, and binds together different elements in order to allow them communicate. (shrink)

Spingersi ai confini dell'esperienza del corpo - amore, sofferenza, vecchiaia, morte - attraverso la letteratura, la filosofia, le arti figurative, eventi etico-politici e personali, frammenti di racconto.

1. La filosofia antica-India, Cina, Grecia -- 2. La filosofia tardo-antica e medioevale: ebraismo, cristianesimo, islamismo -- 3.1. La filosofia moderna: umanesimo, Riforma, rivoluzione scientifica (1350-1715) -- 3.2. La filosofia moderna: illuminismo, criticismo, idealismo (1715-1815) -- 4.1. La filosofia contemporanea: scientismi, sroticismi, irrazionalismi -- 4.2. La filosofia contemporanea: filosofie analitiche e continentali.

Predicate extensions of the intermediate logic of the weak excluded middle and of the modal logic S4.2 are introduced and investigated. In particular it is shown that some of them are characterized by subclasses of the class of directed frames with either constant or nested domains.

Las Lecciones sobre teoría del significado (1908) constituyen un valioso documento a la hora de estudiar el pensamiento de Edmund Husserl a propósito del lenguaje. Sin embargo, este texto ha sido escasamente considerado por la crítica. En este trabajo, intentaré mostrar que el estudio de los planteos desarrollados en dichas lecciones resulta de gran interés para el análisis de las continuidades y cambios en el pensamiento de Husserl, así como también para la discusión filosófica sobre el lenguaje. Me concentraré en (...) dos temáticas que considero fundamentales y que servirán, a mi entender, para dar cuenta de su espíritu y relevancia: 1) la distinción entre dos conceptos de significado y sus repercusiones en la distinción entre significado y objeto; 2) la relación entre nuestras dinámicas de trato con las cosas y las formas gramaticales en que dicho trato se expresa lingüísticamente. (shrink)

This paper provides a historical reevaluation of the originality and implications of Avempace's critique of Aristotle's causal explanation of the motion of projectiles. It also offers a serious revision of the place which has usually been assigned to Avempace in the history of science. The views regarding projectiles defended in Avempace's Arabic commentary are in sharp opposition to the anti-Aristotelian Avempace that was known in the Medieval West through Averroes. Avempace's commentary reveals only a moderate critic of Aristotle, a critic (...) who did not, in any case, break with the master, and who, therefore, did not even go as far as Philoponus in creating a new and more profound theory of projectile motion. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the discourses produced on their websites by the two organisations that conducted the official ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ campaigns in the Brexit referendum. The analysis, whi...

Basically, the connection of two many-sorted theories is obtained by taking their disjoint union, and then connecting the two parts through connection functions that must behave like homomorphisms on the shared signature. We determine conditions under which decidability of the validity of universal formulae in the component theories transfers to their connection. In addition, we consider variants of the basic connection scheme. Our results can be seen as a generalization of the so-called E-connection approach for combining modal logics to an (...) algebraic setting. (shrink)

We show that the variety of Heyting algebras has finitary unification type. We also show that the subvariety obtained by adding it De Morgan law is the biggest variety of Heyting algebras having unitary unification type. Proofs make essential use of suitable characterizations (both from the semantic and the syntactic side) of finitely presented projective algebras.

This paper presents the Futurium platform used by Digital Futures, a foresight project launched by the European Commission's Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT). Futurium was initially developed with the primary purpose of hosting and curating visions and policy ideas generated by Digital Futures (Digital Futures was launched in July 2011 by DG CONNECT's Director General Robert Madelin following a prior DG CONNECT exercise called Digital Science.). However, it has turned into a platform on which to (...) experiment with new policymaking models based on scientific evidence and stakeholder participation, referred to in this paper as ‘Policy Making 3.0’. The platform hosts an online foresight toolkit to facilitate the joint creation of ideas to help design future policies. It leverages the potential of social networks, open data, semantic and knowledge mining technologies as well as participatory brainstorming techniques to engage stakeholders and harness their views and creativity to better inform policies that matter to them. The Futurium distinguishes between different variables, reflecting the emotional vs. rational mindsets of the participants, and offers the possibility to frame the engagement and co-creation process into multiple phases of a workflow. Futurium was developed to support Digital Futures, but its open architecture makes it easily adaptable to any policymaking/decision-making context where thinking ahead, participation, scientific evidence and agility are needed. Futurium is an early prototype implementation of the Policy Making 3.0 model, which is a long-term vision requiring further investigation and experimentation. The Futurium production website can be seen here: ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/futurium. (shrink)

The variety of Brouwerian semilattices is amalgamable and locally finite; hence, by well-known results [19], it has a model completion. In this article, we supply a finite and rather simple axiomatization of the model completion.

We show that some common varieties of modal K4-algebras have finitary unification type, thus providing effective best solutions for equations in free algebras. Applications to admissible inference rules are immediate.

Volume 16, Issue 4, September 2019, Page 381-388.

In this paper we want to analyze some philosophical and epistemological connections between a new kind of technology recently developed within robotics, and the previous mechanical approach. A new paradigm about machine-design in robotics, currently defined as ‘Embodied Intelligence’, has recently been developed. Here we consider the debate on the relationship between the hand and the intellect, from the perspective of the history of philosophy, aiming at providing a more suitable understanding of this paradigm. The new bottom-up approach to design (...) is deeply rooted in a new kind of empiricism, which tries to overcome issues connected with the previous approach strongly committed with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) debate and its origin. Since Turing’s time, the AI debate showed a rationalistic bias which remained undisputed until now. The paradigm shift we are witnessing nowadays is a reply to that bias in order to achieve not only a better way to design robots, but also to understand some underlying epistemological remarks. (shrink)

This paper investigates the status of the fragments of Peano Arithmetic obtained by restricting induction, collection and least number axiom schemes to formulas which are $${\Delta_1}$$ provably in an arithmetic theory T. In particular, we determine the provably total computable functions of this kind of theories. As an application, we obtain a reduction of the problem whether $${I\Delta_0 + \neg \mathit{exp}}$$ implies $${B\Sigma_1}$$ to a purely recursion-theoretic question.