ABSTRACTThe presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality, and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is (...) driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level. (shrink)

The identification of a “new” handwriting of Manuel Chrysoloras allows to assign to him a number of hitherto unpublished witnesses, all preceding his teaching activity in Florence from 1397. This new dossier illustrates Chrysoloras’ youth in Constantinople, providing precious and so far unknown information on his family, his father John, his studies in the anti-Palamite milieux with Isaac Argyros and Demetrios Kydones, and, of course, his books, his graphic education, and his readings. Among these, a special place is occupied by (...) Aristotle’s logic: particular attention is therefore paid to a mock-up of a manuscript containing Aristotle’s Organon with a marginal commentary, here attributed to Chrysoloras and realized in a well-known manuscript by his master Argyros. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present and discuss the language of the «givens», a typical stylistic resource of Greek mathematics and one of the major features of the proof format of analysis and synthesis. I shall analyze its expressive function and its peculiarities, as well as its general role as a deductive tool, explaining at the same time its particular applications in subgenres of a geometrical proposition like the locus theorems and the so-called «porisms». The main interpretative theses (...) of this study are the following: the language of the «givens» (1) is the standard idiom in which “existence and uniqueness” of a mathematical object was proved, (2) was conceived as an unified framework reducing to a strictly deductive format disparate argumentative steps such as deductions, constructions, and calculations. (shrink)

Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...) attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

An analysis of personal self-determination with a special reference to Aquinas.

En el presente artículo se analizan las transformaciones que, a partir del siglo IV, experimentan los obispos cristianos por su estrecha vinculación con el poder imperial: si en un principio Constantino quiso ponerlos a su servicio como estrechos colaboradores en la administración del Imperio, pronto algunos de ellos, con gran personalidad, se sirvieron de los honores y privilegios adquiridos para reclamar una independencia allí donde — a diferencia de lo que sucederá en Constantinopla a partir de Teodosio I— su elección (...) no dependía del emperador. (shrink)

This article focusses on the generality of the entities involved in a geometric proof of the kind found in ancient Greek treatises: it shows that the standard modern translation of Greek mathematical propositions falsifies crucial syntactical elements, and employs an incorrect conception of the denotative letters in a Greek geometric proof; epigraphic evidence is adduced to show that these denotative letters are ‘letter-labels’. On this basis, the article explores the consequences of seeing that a Greek mathematical proposition is fully general, (...) and the ontological commitments underlying the stylistic practice. (shrink)

Philosophical reflections about the complex relationship between Jacobi and Fichte on realism and idealism.

ArgumentThis article is the sequel to an article published in the previous issue ofScience in Contextthat dealt with homeomeric lines (Acerbi 2010). The present article deals with foundational issues in Greek mathematics. It considers two key characters in the study of mathematical homeomery, namely, Apollonius and Geminus, and analyzes in detail their approaches to foundational themes as they are attested in ancient sources. The main historiographical result of this paper is to show thatthere wasa well-establishedmathematicalfield of discourse in “foundations of (...) mathematics,” a fact that is by no means obvious. The paper argues that the authors involved in this field of discourse set up a variety of philosophical, scholarly, and mathematical tools that they used in developing their investigations. (shrink)

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, wherein individuals need to understand, memorize, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing—only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (_N_ = 1,080 participants) (...) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain setup. The second experiment (_N_ = 1,200 participants) used the same material, but participants were asked whether or not they would share the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network or with their friends, in their favorite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorization and reproduction are involved in the transmission—as in oral transmission—than when they are not—as in online sharing. Negative content seems to be reliably favored in both modalities of transmission. (shrink)

Book 1 of Euclid's Elements opens with a set of unproved assumptions: definitions, postulates, and ‘common notions’. The common notions are general rules validating deductions that involve the relations of equality and congruence. The attested postulates are five in number, even if a part of the manuscript tradition adds a sixth, almost surely spurious, that in some manuscripts features as the ninth, and last, common notion. The postulates are called αἰτήματα both in the manuscripts of the Elements and in the (...) ancient exegetic tradition. It is not said, however, that this denomination is original, as it coincides with the nomen rei actae associated with the verbal form introducing the postulates themselves. Since antiquity it has been recognized that the postulates naturally split into two groups of quite different character: the first three are rules licensing basic constructions, the fourth and the fifth are assertions stating properties of particular geometric objects. I transcribe postulates 1–3 in the text established by Heiberg : ᾐτήσθω ἀπὸ παντὸς σημείου ἐπὶ πᾶν σημεῖον εὐθεῖαν γραμμὴν ἀγαγεῖνκαὶ πεπερασμένην εὐθεῖαν κατὰ τὸ συνεχὲς ἐπ᾽ εὐθείας ἐκβαλεῖνκαὶ παντὶ κέντρῳ καὶ διαστήματι κύκλον γράϕεσθαι. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article presents ancient documents on the subject of homeomeric lines. On the basis of such documents, the article reconstructs a definition of the notion as well as a proof of the result, which is left unproved in extant sources, that there are only three homeomeric lines: the straight line, the circumference, and the cylindrical helix. A point of particular historiographic interest is that homeomeric lines were the only class of lines defined directly as the extension of a mathematical property, (...) a move that is unparalleled in Greek mathematics. The far-reaching connections between mathematical homeomery and key issues in the ancient cosmological debate are extensively discussed here. An analysis of its relevance as a foundational theme will be presented in a companion paper in a future issue of Science in Context. (shrink)

"Vocablo infaltable en todas las corrientes políticas occidentales, el republicanismo ha tendido a convertirse, en los últimos tiempos, es una suerte de significante vacío al que se apela sin más como sinónimo de justicia, de balance de poderes o de plena institucionalidad. En un libro que recupera el fundamental legado de Cicerón, Juan Acerbi presenta una serie de aspectos que se sumergen en las oscuras aguas de la tradición republicana para aclarar conceptos y aristas que, aún desde su latencia, determinan (...) muy de cerca el derrotero de las prácticas gubernamentales contemporáneas. Signado por el análisis de la performatividad del discurso político, de los usos de las justificaciones religiosas y de la íntima ligazón entre símbolos, formas de participación ciudadana, temporalidades y otros recursos para la conservación y ampliación del poder, este volumen recorre los meandros de la metapolítica para dejar al desnudo el cuerpo vivo del yo que sostiene a la república. Allí, el estudio sobre virtud del líder político, comprendido como un ser diferente del resto, demuestra que hace falta todavía sospechar de los vínculos entre un republicanismo cargado de razón pública y el capitalismo, que pretende que determinadas formas vacuas, exánimes, ocupen el lugar de los pensantes. A contrapelo de la desquiciada celebración de la inmediatez que se observa en nuestros días, Acerbi retoma un aspecto cardinal para cualquier pensamiento que pretenda ser político: la distinción entre lo necesario y lo contingente y la ubicación de toda acción política en el segundo de esos polos. De ese modo, apela a la palabra como forma fundamental de lo humano y logra ver, bajo un mismo cristal, eventos pasados, presentes y futuros que desenmascaran cualquier ilusión de una vida autoevidente." Hernán Borisonik. (shrink)

The article analyzes in detail the assumptions and the proofs typical of the research field of the geometry of burning mirrors. It emphasizes the role of two propositions of the Archimedean Quadratura parabolae, never brought to bear on this subject, and of a complex system of projections reducing a sumptōma of a parabola to some specific linear lemmas. On the grounds of this case-study, the much-debated problem of the heuristic role of analysis is also discussed.

The paper shows that, contrary to what has been held since the sixteenth-century mathematician Christoph Clavius, there is no application of consequentia mirabilis (CM) in Greek mathematical works. This is shown by means of a detailed discussion of the logical structure of the proofs where CM is allegedly employed. The point is further enlarged to a critical assessment of the unsound methodology applied by many interpreters in seeking for specific logical rules at work in ancient mathematical texts.

Three problems in book I of Diophantus’ Arithmetica contain the adjective plasmatikon, that appears to qualify an implicit reference to some theorems in Elements, book II. The translation and meaning of the adjective sparked a long-lasting controversy that has become a nonnegligible aspect of the debate about the possibility of interpreting Diophantus’ approach and, more generally, Greek mathematics in algebraic terms. The correct interpretation of the word, a technical term in the Greek rhetorical tradition that perfectly fits the context in (...) which it is inserted in the Arithmetica, entails that Diophantus’ text contained no (implicit) reference to Euclid’s Elements. The clause containing the adjective turns out to be a later interpolation, that cannot be used to support any algebraic interpretation of the Arithmetica. (shrink)

The question of the trait that would distinguish human beings from the rest of the animals has kept humanity awake for centuries. Their ability to express themselves through words, their use of reason, their self-awareness of their finiteness or their capacity to produce and appreciate the art have been some of the faculties that, over the centuries, have come to give humanity a justification for its position in the world. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, many of these attributes came (...) to be questioned thanks to the ability of non-biological entities to produce, among other performances, artistic and literary works. In this article we will revisit some of the topics that have allowed us to delineate the limits of what is human and, in the light of the latest technological advances, to question the link that humanity, technology and artistic creation have with each other today. (shrink)

An introduction to the first edition of a brief text written by Cornelio Fabro on Freedom.

The passage has been an object of scholarly debate: the lack of independent sources on the mathematical construction described by Aristotle, the terseness of the formulation and the resulting syntactical ambiguities make the exact interpretation of the text quite difficult, as already noted by Philoponus. What does it mean that the gnomons are ‘placed round the one and without’ (περὶ τὸ ἓν καὶ χωρίς)? And in what sense is this an indication of the even being ‘cut off, enclosed (ἐναπολαμβανόμενον), and (...) limited (περαινόμενον) by the odd’? The aim of the present paper is to discuss the available interpretations of the passage and to propose a new one. (shrink)

Aristotle claims that the necessity of the syllogisms in the first figure is evident, and calls them ‘perfect’ on this basis. The perfection of such syllogisms, most notably barbara, appears to be correlated with the actual disposition of the middle term. G. Patzig strengthened the correlation to an explanation, claiming that in virtue of that disposition the transitivity of the relation ‘belongs to all’ between the terms becomes manifest. The present article shows that the modern scheme of transitivity, namely, with (...) contiguous middle term, is not the same as the one employed with remarkable consistency in the ancient mathematical texts. On these grounds, I argue that Patzig’s calling into play the notion of transitivity cannot count as an explanation of first figure syllogisms being perfect, not even of those in barbara. Keywords: Aristotle; logic; syllogism; perfect syllogism; first figure; barbara; proportion; transitivity. (shrink)

Objective: To investigate the differences between patients returning to work and those who did not after brain tumor surgery.Methods: Patients were evaluated before surgery and after 3 months. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, Trail-Making Test, 15-word Rey–Osterrieth Word List, F-A-S tests, and Karnosfky Performance Status were used to assess cognitive status, attention, executive functions, memory, word fluency, and functional status. Patient-reported outcome measures used to evaluate emotional distress and disability were the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and World Health Organization (...) Disability Assessment Schedule. Clinical and work-related variables, PROMs, and cognitive tests were compared using chi-squared, t-test or Mann–Whitney U test.Results: Sixty patients were included. Patients returning to work were 61.3 and 31.0% among people with meningioma and glioma, respectively. They reported lower postoperative disability and lesser home-to-work travel time. Patients with meningioma also showed better preoperative and postoperative attention and executive functions, better postoperative functional and cognitive status, and lower frequency of treatments.Conclusions: These variables should be considered in a clinical context to plan interventions for people who need support during return to work and in future research to investigate preoperative and postoperative predictive factors of going back to work. (shrink)

Summary and reflections about a recent philosophical congress on Consciousness.

Fabio Acerbi - « I codici stilistici della matematica greca : dimostrazioni, procedure, algoritmi », Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, n. s., 101(2), 2012, p. 167-214. - « Commentari, scolii e annotazioni marginali ai trattati matematici greci », Segno e Testo 10, 2012, p. 139-222. -« The Number of Endings of the Adjective συναμφότερος », Glotta 88, 2012, p. 1-8. Dany Amiot [avec K. Van Goethem], « A constructional account of French -clé 'key' and Dutch sleutel- 'key' in mot-clé / (...) sleute.. (shrink)

ACERBI Fabio“A Reference to Perfect Numbers in Plato's Theaetetus”, Archive for History of Exact Science, 59/2005, p. 319-348. Comptes-rendus - Cleomedes Lectures on Astronomy : a Translation of The Heavens with an Introduction and Commentary by Alan C. Bowen and Robert B. Todd, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2004, dans Nunciu, 20/2005, p. 232-233. - D. Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy: A New Reconstruction, Second Edition, Oxford, Clarendon Press (Oxford..

ACERBI Fabio« Archimedes and the Angel: Phantom Paths from Problems to Equations » Aestimatio 2 (2005), paru en 2006, p. 169-226. Compte-rendu J. Schönbeck, Euklid, Basel/Boston/Berlin, Birkhaüser 2003, dans Nuncius 21 (2006), p. 157-159. BABAULT SophieLangues, école et société à Madagascar. Normes scolaires, pratiques langagières, enjeux sociaux, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2006, 320 p. BENDJABALLAH SabrinaAvec Patricia Cabredo Hofherr, « Modification of the Noun in Somali: Comparative Evidence from..

Acerbi Fabio- Euclide, Tutte le Opere. A cura di F. Acerbi. Milano, Bompiani 2007, 2713 p. - « Una scuola matematica alessandrina ? »,, in C. Bartocci, P. Odifreddi (éds.), La Matematica, Vol. 1. I luoghi e i tempi. Torino, Einaudi 2007, pp. 65-89. Comptes-rendus - H.L.L. Busard, Campanus of Novara and Euclid's Elements, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag 2005, in : Nuncius 22 (2007), pp. 139-140. - J. Evans, J.L. Berggren (éds.), Geminos’s Introduction to the Phenomena: A Translation and Study (...) .. (shrink)

Fabio Acerbi - Il silenzio delle sirene. La matematica greca antica, Roma, Carocci 2010, 448 p. - « Homeomeric Lines in Greek Mathematics », Science in Context 23 (2010), p. 1-37. - « Two Approaches to Foundations in Greek Mathematics: Apollonius and Geminus », Science in Context 23 (2010), p. 151-186. - [avec N. Vinel, B. Vitral], « Les Prolégomènes à l’Almageste. Une édition à partir des manuscrits les plus anciens : Introduction générale, Parties I-III », SCIAMVS 11 (2010), p. (...) 53-210. - « .. (shrink)

Fabio Acerbi Diofanto, “De polygonis numeris”. Introduzione, testo critico, traduzione italiana e commento di F. Acerbi», Pisa, Roma, Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2011. 252 p. Dany Amiot - [avec Dejan Stosic], « Sautiller, voleter, dansoter : évaluation, pluriactionnalité, aspect », Temps, aspect et classes de mots : études théoriques et didactiques. Actes du septième colloque international de linguistique française et roumaine, E. Arjoca-Ieremia, C. Avezard-Roger, J. Goes, E. Moline & A. Tih..

This article examines a complex passage of Aristotle's Physics in which a Pythagorean doctrine is explained by means of a mathematical example involving gnomons. The traditional interpretation of this passage (proposed by Milhaud and Burnet) has recently been challenged by Ugaglia and Acerbi, who have proposed a new one. The aim of this article is to analyse difficulties in their account and to advance a new interpretation. All attempts at interpreting the passage so far have assumed that ‘gnomons’ should indicate (...) ‘odd numbers’. In this article it is argued that the usage of ‘gnomon’ related to polygonal numbers, which is normally considered late, could be backdated to at least the fifth/fourth centuries b.c.; in particular, it explains the link between the philosophical explanandum and the mathematical explanans in Aristotle's passage. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The 3rd BCE Stoic logician "Chrysippus says that the number of conjunctions constructible from ten propositions exceeds one million. Hipparchus refuted this, demonstrating that the affirmative encompasses 103,049 conjunctions and the negative 310,952." After laying dormant for over 2000 years, the numbers in this Plutarch passage were recently identified as the 10th (and a derivative of the 11th) Schröder number, and F. Acerbi showed how the 2nd BCE astronomer Hipparchus could have calculated them. What remained unexplained is why Hipparchus’ (...) logic differed from Stoic logic, and consequently, whether Hipparchus actually refuted Chrysippus. This paper closes these explanatory gaps. (1) I reconstruct Hipparchus’ notions of conjunction and negation, and show how they differ from Stoic logic. (2) Based on evidence from Stoic logic, I reconstruct Chrysippus’ calculations, thereby (a) showing that Chrysippus’ claim of over a million conjunctions was correct; and (b) shedding new light on Stoic logic and – possibly – on 3rd century BCE combinatorics. (3) Using evidence about the developments in logic from the 3rd to the 2nd centuries, including the amalgamation of Peripatetic and Stoic theories, I explain why Hipparchus, in his calculations, used the logical notions he did, and why he may have thought they were Stoic. OPEN ACCESS LINK. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly being used not only to classify and analyze but also to generate images and text. As recent work on the content produced by text and image Generative AIs has shown (e.g., Cheong et al., 2024, Acerbi & Stubbersfield, 2023), there is a risk that harms of representation and bias, already documented in prior AI and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms may also be present in generative models. These harms relate to protected categories such as (...) gender, race, age, and religion. There are several kinds of harms of representation to consider in this context, including stereotyping, lack of recognition, denigration, under-representation, and many others (Crawford in Soundings 41:45–55, 2009; in: Barocas et al., SIGCIS Conference, 2017). Whereas the bulk of researchers’ attention thus far has been given to stereotyping and denigration, in this study we examine ‘exnomination’, as conceived by Roland Barthes (1972), of religious groups. Our case study is DALL-E, a tool that generates images from natural language prompts. Using DALL-E mini, we generate images from generic prompts such as “religious person.” We then examine whether the generated images are recognizably members of a nominated group. Thus, we assess whether the generated images normalize some religions while neglecting others. We hypothesize that Christianity will be recognizably represented more frequently than other religious groups. Our results partially support this hypothesis but introduce further complexities, which we then explore. (shrink)

A revision of George Kennedy's translation of, introdution to, and commentary on Aristotle's On Rhetoric. His translation is most accurate, his general introduction is the most thorough and insightful, and his brief introductions to sections of the work, along with his explanatory footnotes, are the most useful available.

Recent research on algebraic models of _quasi-Nelson logic_ has brought new attention to a number of classes of algebras which result from enriching (subreducts of) Heyting algebras with a special modal operator, known in the literature as a _nucleus_. Among these various algebraic structures, for which we employ the umbrella term _intuitionistic modal algebras_, some have been studied since at least the 1970s, usually within the framework of topology and sheaf theory. Others may seem more exotic, for their primitive operations (...) arise from algebraic terms of the intuitionistic modal language which have not been previously considered. We shall for instance investigate the variety of _weak implicative semilattices_, whose members are (non-necessarily distributive) meet semilattices endowed with a nucleus and an implication operation which is not a relative pseudo-complement but satisfies the postulates of Celani and Jansana’s strict implication. For each of these new classes of algebras we establish a representation and a topological duality which generalize the known ones for Heyting algebras enriched with a nucleus. (shrink)

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

Classical text on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy; with Āloka Sanskrit commentary.