Tomos II. Koinōnikes epistēmes kai epistēmes tou anthrōpou: ho gallikos dromos tēs ennoias.

In this article, I try to present some effects of the acceptance of nonconceptual content of perception in the realism problem. After having enhancement as main the problem of discrimination observable - unobservable into the conflict of realism with the constructive empiricism, I criticize a particular aspect, that nonconceptual content of perception strengthens the realistic position. Arguing that, while the starting point of the realist position is the existence of entities of common sense, there is nothing that assures us that (...) the world of our daily life consists of objective, specific, unambiguous entities, that is made up the deep structure of the world - as realists believes - and entities are not just "relevant" objects, which are meant only for our own biological species. These “subjective for species” entities we are obliged, as a particular species, to percept with particular perceptual organs in order to satisfy specific needs, and manage to survive ourselves in a particular environment. (shrink)

The notion of affordance has been introduced by Gibson (1977, 1979) as the feature of an object or the environment that allows the observer to perform an action, a set of “environmental supports for an organism’s intentional activities” (Reybrouck 2005). Studied under very different perspectives, this concept has become a crucial issue not only for the ecological psychology, but also for cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence studies, and philosophy of mind. This variety of approaches has widened the already ambiguous definition originally (...) provided by Gibson, contributing to the development of different standpoints in open contrast with each other (see Zipoli Caiani 2011). During the last two decades, moreover, many researchers tried to extend the notion also to musical experience, aiming to draw a coherent theory of musical affordances (e.g. Clarke 2005; Nussbaum 2007; Krueger 2011a; 2011b). In this paper, we will argue for a particular concept of musical affordances, that is, as we see it, one narrower and less ambiguous in scope and more closely related to its original. Taking the discovery of canonical neurons as our starting point, we will (i) introduce the general notion of affordance, (ii) discuss some significant contributions in this area of research, mostly focusing on musical affordances and (iii) propose a motor-based interpretation of musical affordances. (shrink)

Persistence in Time No person ever steps into the same river twice—or so goes the Heraclitean maxim. Obscure as it is, the maxim is often taken to express two ideas. The first is that everything always changes, and nothing remains perfectly similar to how it was just one instant before. The second is that nothing … Continue reading Persistence in Time →.

This collection offers a set of new readings on the history, meanings, and cultural innovations of the grotesque as defined by various current critical theories and practices. Since the grotesque frequently manifests itself as striking incongruities, ingenious hybrids, and creative deformities of nature and culture, it is profoundly implicated in early modern debates on the theological, philosophical, and ethical role of images. This consideration serves as the central focus from which the articles in the collection then move outward along different (...) lines of conceptualization, chronology, cultural relevance, place, and site. They cover a wide spectrum of artistic media, from prints to drawings, from sculptures to gardens, from paintings to stuccos. As they do this, they engage with, and bring together, theoretical perspectives from writers as diverse as Plato and Paleotti, Vitruvius and Vasari, Molanus to Montaigne. Whether travelling a short distance from Nero's Domus Aurea to Raphael's Vatican logge, or across the ocean from Italy to New Spain, this volume goes further than any previous study in defining the historic understanding of grotesque and, in so doing, providing us with a more nuanced resource for our understanding of an art form once viewed as peripheral. (shrink)

The world in which we live for millennia is a breakthrough, entering into a lane of profound changes, in which the whole of our life is rebuilt and rebuilt. Untwisted to the maximum turns the flywheel of transformations has touched and is ready to deform various spheres of existence of man and humanity: the relation between humanity and the planet in which it lives; the interaction between the states, each of which is looking for its own ways to the future (...) and, at the same time, can not but reckon with the interests of other nations and states; the struggle of social groups and the confrontation of religions, in the interrelationships of which they are struggling to realize that humanity has a common destiny and that universal values ​​and ideals must come first, become the main ones in the interaction between people; high pace of scientific and technological progress, which far from unequivocally affect both the knowledge of our lives, and on ourselves. In other words: we are faced with a new world - both in the latest technologies, in new forms of life, in new ways of worldview and world outlook, and most importantly in those global threats, in which the contradiction between the new realities of our existence and the established forms and methods unfolds. an attitude to this world. It is no coincidence that society and the church face an acute problem of adaptation to global change, the formation of a new worldview that corresponds to a new era. (shrink)

The patient’s autonomy and well-being are sometimes seen as central to the ethical justification of voluntary euthanasia (VE) and physician-assisted suicide (PAS). While respecting the patient’s wish to die plausibly promotes the patient’s autonomy, it is less obvious how alleviating the patient’s suffering through death benefits the patient. Death eliminates the subject, so how can we intelligibly maintain that the patient’s well-being is promoted when she/he no longer exists? This article interrogates two typical answers given by philosophers: (a) that death (...) confers a well-being benefit in the sense that it actualises a comparatively better life course for the patient (ie, a shorter life with less net suffering), and (b) that death is beneficial because non-existence which entails no suffering is superior to an existence filled with suffering. A close examination of the two senses in which the patient might incur a well-being benefit reveals problems that preclude physicians delivering VE/PAS in the name of beneficence. (shrink)

L’esame di un passo della Vita di Platone laerziana (III 2) – e di luoghi paralleli riferibili alla medesima tradizione – permette di mettere a fuoco un motivo mitico cruciale nei racconti sulla concorrenza tra essere umano e divinità nel gamos con una mortale: il divieto, che il nume impone al ‘rivale’ di inferiore natura, di congiungersi con la donna che reca in grembo il suo seme, finché l’eroina non abbia portato a termine la gravidanza. Le storie di personaggi femminili (...) colpevoli di duplice gamos – prima con il dio e poi, a breve distanza di tempo, con il mortale – si focalizzano sulle conseguenze nefaste del secondo contaminante connubio: uno per tutti il caso di Coronide madre di Asclepio (e forse il motivo era associato anche ad altre note madri mitiche, come Arianna, Semele e Alcmena). In questi esempi, tuttavia, in genere non è esplicitato il tema della proibizione divina, come invece accade nel bios di Diogene Laerzio. Qui infatti Apollo, dopo aver concepito Platone con Perictione, appare ad Aristone per vietargli il rapporto sessuale con la parthenos. (shrink)

Sahlqvist theory is extended to the fragments of the intuitionistic propositional calculus that include the conjunction connective. This allows us to introduce a Sahlqvist theory of intuitionistic character amenable to arbitrary protoalgebraic deductive systems. As an application, we obtain a Sahlqvist theorem for the fragments of the intuitionistic propositional calculus that include the implication connective and for the extensions of the intuitionistic linear logic.

Current theories propose that our sense of curiosity is determined by the learning progress or information gain that our cognitive system expects to make. However, few studies have explicitly tried to quantify subjective information gain and link it to measures of curiosity. Here, we asked people to report their curiosity about the intrinsically engaging perceptual ‘puzzles’ known as Mooney images, and to report on the strength of their aha experience upon revealing the solution image (curiosity relief). We also asked our (...) participants (279) to make a guess concerning the solution of the image, and used the distribution of these guesses to compute the crowdsourced semantic entropy (or ambiguity) of the images, as a measure of the potential for information gain. Our results confirm that curiosity and, even more so, aha experience is substantially associated with this semantic information gain measure. These findings support the expected information gain theory of curiosity and suggest that the aha experience or intrinsic reward is driven by the actual information gain. In an unannounced memory part, we also established that the often reported influence of curiosity on memory is fully mediated by the aha experience or curiosity relief. We discuss the implications of our results for the burgeoning fields of curiosity and psychoaesthetics. (shrink)

The possibility of multi-location—of one entity having more than one exact location—is required by several metaphysical theories such as the immanentist theory of universals and three-dimensionalism about persistence. One of the most pressing challenges for multi-location theorists is that of making sense of exact location—in that extant definitions of exact location entail a principle called ‘functionality’, according to which nothing can have more than one exact location. Recently in a number of promising papers, Antony Eagle has proposed and defended a (...) definition of exact location in terms of weak location that does not entail functionality. This paper provides the first thorough assessment of Eagle’s proposal. In particular, we argue that it cannot account for the location of immanent universals, the multi-location of mereologically changing three-dimensional objects, the multi-location of mereologically complex objects, and that it makes extended simples impossible. (shrink)

I provide an argument against the Aristotelian view of universals, according to which universals depend for their existence on their exemplifiers. The argument consists in a set of five jointly inconsistent assumptions. As such, the argument can be used to argue in favour of other conclusions, such as that exemplification is no relation or that plausible principles concerning ontological dependence or grounding do not hold.

We discuss the fate of the correspondence principle beyond quantum mechanics, specifically in quantum field theory and quantum gravity, in connection with the intrinsic limitations of the human ability to observe the external world. We conclude that the best correspondence principle is made of unitarity, locality, proper renormalizability (a refinement of strict renormalizability), combined with fundamental local symmetries and the requirement of having a finite number of fields. Quantum gravity is identified in an essentially unique way. The gauge interactions are (...) uniquely identified in form. Instead, the matter sector remains basically unrestricted. The major prediction is the violation of causality at small distances. (shrink)

Relativity theory is often said to support something called ‘the four-dimensional view of reality’. But there are at least three different views that sometimes go by this name. One is ‘spacetime unitism’, according to which there is a spacetime manifold, and if there are such things as points of space or instants of time, these are just spacetime regions of different sorts: thus space and time are not separate manifolds. A second is the B-theory of time, according to which the (...) past, present, and future are all equally real and there is nothing metaphysically special about the present. A third is perdurantism, according to which persisting material objects are made up of different temporal parts located at different times. We sketch routes from relativity to unitism and to the B-theory. We then discuss some routes to perdurantism, via the B-theory and via unitism. (shrink)

The correspondence principle made of unitarity, locality and renormalizability has been very successful in quantum field theory. Among the other things, it helped us build the standard model. However, it also showed important limitations. For example, it failed to restrict the gauge group and the matter sector in a powerful way. After discussing its effectiveness, we upgrade it to make room for quantum gravity. The unitarity assumption is better understood, since it allows for the presence of physical particles as well (...) as fake particles (fakeons). The locality assumption is applied to an interim classical action, since the true classical action is nonlocal and emerges from the quantization and a later process of classicization. The renormalizability assumption is refined to single out the special role of the gauge couplings. We show that the upgraded principle leads to an essentially unique theory of quantum gravity. In particular, in four dimensions, a fakeon of spin 2, together with a scalar field, is able to make the theory renormalizable while preserving unitarity. We offer an overview of quantum field theories of particles and fakeons in various dimensions, with and without gravity. (shrink)

We define life as the amplification of quantum uncertainty up to macroscopic scales. A living being is any amplifier that achieves this goal. We argue that everything we know about life can be explained from this idea. We study a ladder mechanism to estimate the probability that the amplification occurs spontaneously in nature. The amplification mechanism is so sensitive to small variations of its own parameters that it acts as a bifurcation itself, i.e. it implies that the universe is either (...) everywhere dead or alive wherever possible. Since the first option is excluded by the existence of life on earth, we infer that the universe hosts a huge number of inhabited planets (possibly one per star on average). We also investigate models of conscious and unconscious learning processes, as well as the structure of the brain and evolution. Finally, we address the problem of creating artificial life. (shrink)

Several particles are not observed directly, but only through their decay products. We consider the possibility that they might be fakeons, i.e. fake particles, which mediate interactions but are not asymptotic states. A crucial role to determine the true nature of a particle is played by the imaginary parts of the one-loop radiative corrections, which are affected in nontrivial ways by the presence of fakeons in the loop. The knowledge we have today is sufficient to prove that most non directly (...) observed particles are true physical particles. However, in the case of the Higgs boson the possibility that it might be a fakeon remains open. The issue can be resolved by means of precision measurements in existing and future accelerators. (shrink)

The Monster Objection has often been considered one of the main reasons to explore non-standard mereological views, such as hylomorphism. Still, it has been rarely discussed and then only in a cursory fashion. This paper fills this gap by offering the first thorough assessment of the objection. It argues that different metaphysical stances, such as presentism and three- and four-dimensionalism, provide different ways of undermining the objection.

In November of 1997, a letter from my professor AM came to my name. Hoodies from Ternopil Medical Academy named after. V.Ya. Gorbachevsky The letter mentioned that Arsen Richinsky was born in Kremenets'kyi, therefore the Department of Religious Studies at the Institute of Philosophy named after GS Pots of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine want to hold a scientific conference, whose participants should be taken immediately. [Mazur P., The immortalism of Arsen Rychinsky's memory on his native land // (...) Arsen Rychinsky - prominent Ukrainian public figure and scholar and religious scholar. Science collection. - Kyiv-Kremenets, 2007. - P. 27-32]. Motivating that the conference should be carefully prepared, we agreed with scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine to hold the first Rychinsky readings on the basis of the school in the spring of 1998. (shrink)

Burnout is a well-documented entity in Care Workers population, affecting up to 50% of physicians, just as it is equally well established that managing an infectious disease outbreaks, such as confirmed in the COVID-19 pandemic, increases Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the psychological burden. Mental health support, in the form of formal or remote sessions, has been shown to be helpful to health care staff, despite the organizational difficulties in an emergency. During the first emergence of COVID-19 in Italy, the Scientific (...) Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Health Care Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Policlinico San Matteo Foundation, the Italian hospital that treated “patient 1,” has activated an agreement with the Soleterre Foundation, an international Non-Governmental Organization that manages health emergency projects, to provide psychological support. A task force of psychologists was created with the aim of designing and administering a Therapeutic Mental Health Assessment for COVID-19 Care Workers to evaluate and support health care workers’ mental health. The assessment battery was developed to evaluate symptoms and behaviors associated with trauma and the corresponding maladaptive behaviors. Once the TMHA COVID-19 CWs had been developed, the team of psychologists regularly visited healthcare staff in the ward to administer it. One hundred seven care workers across Intensive Care Units, the emergency room and medical ward were administered the TMHA COVID-19 CWs. PTSD symptoms were reported as severe by 13% of the population. Depressive symptoms as severe for 7% and Anxiety symptoms as severe for 14%. Severe psychotic symptoms were experienced by 2% and severe suicidal thoughts by 1% of the population. The possibility of acting upon the results of the TMHA COVID-19 CWs allowed an early intervention through individual session beyond the cut-off level for PTSD in NSESSS. In fact, 280 individual support sessions were offered. Therefore, we considered our project a protective and support factor for healthcare workers’ mental well-being and we recommend implementing a mental health screening program in ward involved in COVID-19 patients’ care. (shrink)

This paper develops an endurantist theory of persistence. The theory is built around one basic tenet, which concerns existence at a time – the relation between an object and the times at which that object is present. According to this tenet, which I call transcendentism, for an object to exist at a time is for it to participate in events that are located at that time. I argue that transcendentism is a semantically grounded and metaphysically fruitful. It is semantically grounded, (...) insofar as a semantic analysis of our temporal talk favors it over rivals. It is metaphysically fruitful, insofar as the theory of persistence that can be built around it – the transcendentist theory of persistence, to give it a name – requires neither temporal parts nor the problematic commitments to which all extant forms of endurantism are committed, such as the possibility of extended simples or multilocation. (shrink)

"Cover " -- "Title Page " -- "Copyright " -- "Contents " -- "Preface to the English Edition" -- "Introduction" -- "1. The Substitute" -- "2. Animals, Machines, Cyborgs, and the Taxi " -- "3. Mind, Emotions, and Artificial Empathy " -- "4. The Other Otherwise " -- "5. From Moral and Lethal Machines to Synthetic Ethics " -- "Notes" -- "Works Cited" -- "Acknowledgments" -- "Credits.

The essay explores the possibilities afforded by Heidegger’s thought for addressing the question of the reality of the phenomenon within the framework of the theory of quantum mechanics. Heidegger’s conception of the task of phenomenology is seen to provide a crucial axis along which the phenomenon of quantum physics can be connected both to its appearance in language and to the historical unfolding of the horizon that grounds the possibility of an encounter with the phenomenon itself. The determinations of this (...) horizon, i.e. of the order of “phenomenality” that makes the appearance of the phenomenon possible, are analyzed in the instance of quantum mechanics, and compared to the ones presented by Heidegger in his considerations concerning the appearing of the phenomenon in Aristotelian and classical physics. The three main directives that structure the analysis of this order of phenomenality are the determinations of the conditions of experience of the phenomenon, of the function of language that makes this appearance possible, and of the subject function that constitutes, and is in turn constituted by, this experience. (shrink)

Aim of this paper is to support the view that all human practical identities are contingent by arguing against the view that there is at least one necessary practical identity shared by all human beings, namely Humanity. The view that Humanity is a necessary practical identity is explicitly defended by Christine M. Korsgaard (Korsgaard, C. M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity, edited by O. O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Korsgaard, C. M. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. New York: Oxford (...) University Press) and indirectly by Marya Schechtman (Schechtman, M. 2014. Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life. New York: Oxford University Press). Korsgaard understands Humanity both in terms of pure self-legislation, and as deep sociality. In the first case, Humanity as self-legislation faces what I call ‘Existential dilemma’: either Humanity has specific content, typical of contingent practical identities, but stops being necessary for all human beings; or Humanity is emptied of its content and is conceived of as necessary self-legislation, but stops being a practical identity. In the second case, i.e., Humanity as deep sociality, Korsgaard confuses the necessary natural fact that human beings are social creatures, with contingent contexts of human socialization, which are the true sources of specifically human practical identities. I articulate this confusion in the guise of what I call ‘Nature/nurture dilemma’, which also applies to the morally neutral account of human personhood advocated by Schechtman (Schechtman, M. 2014. Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life. Oxford University Press). In conclusion, I address the worry that without the necessary practical identity of Humanity we might not be able to extend our practical and moral concerns to distant fellow human beings by sketching an alternative path to extend such concerns. (shrink)

Absolut-realistisch und als solche idealistisch ist die Marxsche Geschichtsphilosophie a) insofern, als derer «Kategorien... nicht mehr oder minder reflexive Aussagen über etwas Seiendes oder Werdendes, sondern bewegende Formen der Materie selbst», ja sogar vielmehr, logisch-historische dialektische Realstrukturen des als real vorkonzipierten weltgeschichtlichen dialektischen Gesamtprozesses selbst sind; und b) insofern, als sie ihren Erkenntnisstandpunkt nicht kritisch hinterfragt, sondern die Sinnerkenntnis des weltgeschicht- lichen Prozesses auf definitive und damit dogmatisch-metaphysische Weise sich erschlossen zu haben vorgibt.

Events that preceded the Brest Union in 1596 followed by her has long been the subject of numerical research. Little is a historical event like The Berne Union has found such a wide coverage in history.

This essay centres on two contributions—Giorgio Agamben’s What is Real? and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway —that deal with what they see as the import the quantum turn has...

The Aristotelian view of universals, according to which each universal generically depends for its existence on its instantiations, has recently come under attack by a series of ground-theoretic arguments. The last such arguments, presented by Raven, promises to offer several significant improvements over its predecessors, such as avoiding commitment to the transitivity of ground and offering new reasons for the metaphysical priority of universals over their instantiations. In this paper, we argue that Raven's argument does not effectively avoid said commitment (...) and that Raven's new reasons fail. Moreover, we present a novel ground-theoretic interpretation of the Aristotelian view, referred to as strong immanence, and introduce a new argument against the Aristotelian view, intended to sidestep any commitment to the transitivity of ground. (shrink)

This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry that has important implications across a range of domains. - Contains twelve essays that bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology. - Tackles questions such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as (...) a genuine cognitive extension. - Brings together insightful new scholarship from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, as well as rising scholars in “digital native” philosophy and engineering. - Includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. (shrink)

The ontology of Bohmian mechanics includes both the universal wave function and particles. Proposals for understanding the physical significance of the wave function in this theory have included the idea of regarding it as a physically-real field in its 3N-dimensional space, as well as the idea of regarding it as a law of nature. Here we introduce and explore a third possibility in which the configuration space wave function is simply eliminated—replaced by a set of single-particle pilot-wave fields living in (...) ordinary physical space. Such a re-formulation of the Bohmian pilot-wave theory can exactly reproduce the statistical predictions of ordinary quantum theory. But this comes at the rather high ontological price of introducing an infinite network of interacting potential fields which influence the particles’ motion through the pilot-wave fields. We thus introduce an alternative approach which aims at achieving empirical adequacy with a more modest ontological complexity, and provide some preliminary evidence for optimism regarding the program of trying to replace the configuration space wave function with a set of fields in ordinary physical space. (shrink)

Social robotics entertains a particular relationship with anthropomorphism, which it neither sees as a cognitive error, nor as a sign of immaturity. Rather it considers that this common human tendency, which is hypothesized to have evolved because it favored cooperation among early humans, can be used today to facilitate social interactions between humans and a new type of cooperative and interactive agents - social robots. This approach leads social robotics to focus research on the engineering of robots that activate anthropomorphic (...) projections in users. The objective is to give robots "social presence" and "social behaviors" that are sufficiently credible for human users to engage in comfortable and potentially long-lasting relations with these machines. This choice of ’applied anthropomorphism’ as a research methodology exposes the artifacts produced by social robotics to ethical condemnation: social robots are judged to be a "cheating" technology, as they generate in users the illusion of reciprocal social and affective relations. This article takes position in this debate, not only developing a series of arguments relevant to philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, and robotic AI, but also asking what social robotics can teach us about anthropomorphism. On this basis, we propose a theoretical perspective that characterizes anthropomorphism as a basic mechanism of interaction, and rebuts the ethical reflections that a priori condemns "anthropomorphism-based" social robots. To address the relevant ethical issues, we promote a critical experimentally based ethical approach to social robotics, "synthetic ethics," which aims at allowing humans to use social robots for two main goals: self-knowledge and moral growth. (shrink)