Summary In the epistemic frame of the biocultural turn and of the neuroaesthetics, we have developed neurohermeneutics as an approach to literature that aims at contributing to the current debate about the linkage between literary, cognitive and neuroscientific studies, focusing on the relationship between mindbrain processes mirrored in the formal features of the text and the strategies activated by the author in a text in order to guide the reader in imagining, emotionally feeling and cognitively getting meanings out of the (...) literary experience. The aim of the neurohermeneutical approach is to grasp and describe phenomenologically the mirroring process between the two extremes of the literary experience, i.e. the writer’s creative process as it is mirrored in the formal features of the literary work and the reader’s imaginative reconfiguration of the text, and what they share in common. The reader revives the mental imaginative processes of the author by creating his/her unrepeatable individual experiences of the text and subjectively redesigning it in an endless loop of features that trigger the imagination and its creative potential both while writing and by reading literature. (shrink)

We present a generalisation of the type-theoretic interpretation of constructive set theory into Martin-Löf type theory. The original interpretation treated logic in Martin-Löf type theory via the propositions-as-types interpretation. The generalisation involves replacing Martin-Löf type theory with a new type theory in which logic is treated as primitive. The primitive treatment of logic in type theories allows us to study reinterpretations of logic, such as the double-negation translation.

We introduce type-theoretic algebraic weak factorisation systems and show how they give rise to homotopy-theoretic models of Martin-Löf type theory. This is done by showing that the comprehension category associated with a type-theoretic algebraic weak factorisation system satisfies the assumptions necessary to apply a right adjoint method for splitting comprehension categories. We then provide methods for constructing several examples of type-theoretic algebraic weak factorisation systems, encompassing the existing groupoid and cubical sets models, as well as new models based on normal (...) fibrations. (shrink)

Queer theorists have long staked their politics in an engagement with intersectionality. Yet intersectional scholars have been some of queer theory’s most vocal critics, decrying its failure to adequately engage persistent inequalities. I approach this seeming paradox in three parts. First, I situate intersectionality within the field of critical theory, arguing that it shares critical theory’s view of power. Both traditions, I argue, understand power to generate the very marginalized figures that it subordinates. Second, while intersectional and queer theories share (...) this critical insight, the two frameworks offer fundamentally different understandings of what constitutes a democratic politics of redress. Where intersectional theorists promote coalition-building between differently marginalized subjects, queer theorists tend to figure sexually marginalized subjects as exemplary democratic agents. Finally, I argue that this slippage in conceptions of democracy has had negative consequences for critical theory and highlights the difficult but essential role of coalition as a political resource. (shrink)

La traduction latine des Dialoghi della historia du philosophe néo-platonicien Francesco Patrizi da Cherso est publiée à Bâle en 1570. L’étude de la circulation de ce texte et des choix de traduction permet de mieux comprendre la réception des artes historicae italiennes dans le Nord de l’Europe et les fluctuations ou limites du latin face à la montée en puissance de l’italien vernaculaire comme langue philosophique.

We define and investigate Heyting-valued interpretations for Constructive Zermelo–Frankel set theory . These interpretations provide models for CZF that are analogous to Boolean-valued models for ZF and to Heyting-valued models for IZF. Heyting-valued interpretations are defined here using set-generated frames and formal topologies. As applications of Heyting-valued interpretations, we present a relative consistency result and an independence proof.

De l'antiquité à la Renaissance, la notion de certitude est au coeur de la structuration de la pensée. Cet ouvrage réunit les contributions de spécialistes, qui explorent tous la littérature latine en mettant cette notion à l'épreuve de différentes disciplines et époques.

A meta-analysis and an experiment show that the degree of compression of the in-depth dimension of visual space relative to the frontal dimension increases quickly as a function of the distance between the stimulus and the observer at first, but the rate of change slows beyond 7 m from the observer, reaching an apparent asymptote of about 50 %. In addition, the compression of visual space is greater for monocular and reduced cue conditions. The pattern of compression of the in-depth (...) dimension as a function of distance is similar to the ratio of in-depth to frontal visual angles of stimuli, but is not as extreme as this ratio would suggest, implying that observers are incapable of fully ignoring size information provided by cues to depth. Size and distance judgments may be described by an Affine transformation of physical space; however, the compression parameter in this model changes as a function of distance from the observer and other experimental conditions. (shrink)

Syphilis occupies a unique position in the history of U.S. medicine and medical ethics. Given its widespread prevalence and variable presentation, syphilis was a major professional concern among late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century physicians. Syphilis was also at the center of perhaps the most famous example of medical racism in our history, the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee, in which officials followed the natural history of the disease in a cohort of black men for forty years without (...) offering treatment, even once penicillin became available. In this essay, I call attention to a less well‐known aspect of syphilis and its history. I examine one of the disease's most dreaded manifestations, neurosyphilis (also known as general paresis or general paralysis of the insane), and its treatment via malarial inoculation from the 1920s into the 1950s. The goal of this treatment, dramatic even to observers at the time, was to produce spiking fevers that would kill the syphilitic spirochete and arrest the disease process. My focus will be on developments at St. Elizabeths Hospital, a large‐scale federal psychiatric facility in the District of Columbia that served the city's residents and members of the U.S. military. Physicians at St. Elizabeths were the first in the United States to experiment with malarial fever therapy, treating their initial cohort of patients in December of 1922.Malarial fever therapy raised a host of ethical questions, rendered all the more complex from today's vantage point by efforts to understand them within the context of the time. What sorts of risks, both from malaria and via indirect exposure, might be deemed acceptable in the treatment of a devastating and almost invariably fatal disease? How ought researchers and clinicians to have approached the question of consent, itself an evolving concept in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the disease they were targeting impaired a patient's ability to reason effectively? Finally, at a time when segregated and inferior care for black Americans was the norm and when the black community bore a disproportionate burden of disease, who would have had access to malarial fever therapy, and at what cost? (shrink)

Dance is regarded as visual art form by common arts and science perspectives. Definitions of dance as means of communication agree that its message is conveyed by the dancer/choreographer via the human body for the observer, leaving no doubt that dance is performed to be watched. Brain activation elicited by the visual perception of dance has also become a topic of interest in cognitive neuroscience, with regards to action observation in the context of learning, expertise and aesthetics. The view that (...) the aesthetic experience of dance is primarily a visual one is still shared by many artists and cultural institutions, yet there is growing interest in making dance performances accessible for individuals with visual impairment / blindness. Means of supporting the non-visual experience of dance include verbal (audio description), auditive (choreographed body sounds, movement sonification), and haptic (touch tour) techniques, applied for different purposes by artists and researchers, with three main objectives: to strengthen the cultural participation of a non-sighted audience in the cultural and aesthetic experience of dance; to expand the scope of dance as an artistic research laboratory toward novel ways of perceiving what dance can convey; and to inspire new lines of (neuro-cognitive) research beyond watching dance. Reviewing literature from different disciplines and drawing on the personal experience of an inclusive performance of Simon Mayer's “Sons of Sissy,” we argue that a non-exclusively visual approach can be enriching and promising for all three perspectives and conclude by proposing hypotheses for multidisciplinary lines of research. (shrink)

A response to “Fever of the Tuskegee Study,” by Robert White.

Spatial region concepts such as “front,” “back,” “left,” and “right” reflect our typical interaction with space, and the corresponding surrounding regions have different statuses in memory. We examined the representation of spatial directions in the auditory space, specifically in how far natural response actions, such as orientation movements toward a sound source, would affect the categorization of egocentric auditory space. While standing in the middle of a circle with 16 loudspeakers, participants were presented acoustic stimuli coming from the loudspeakers in (...) randomized order, and verbally described their directions by using the concept labels “front,” “back,” “left,” “right,” “front-right,” “front-left,” “back-right,” and “back-left.” Response actions varied in three blocked conditions: (1) facing front, (2) turning the head and upper body to face the stimulus, and (3) turning the head and upper body plus pointing with the hand and outstretched arm toward the stimulus. In addition to a protocol of the verbal utterances, motion capture and video recording generated a detailed corpus for subsequent analysis of the participants’ behavior. Chi-square tests revealed an effect of response condition for directions within the left and right sides. We conclude that movement-based response actions influence the representation of auditory space, especially within the sides’ regions. Moreover, the representation of auditory space favors the front and the back regions in terms of resolution, which is possibly related to the physiological characteristics of the human auditory system, as well as to the ecological requirements of action control in the different regions. (shrink)

We prove a version of the associated sheaf functor theorem in Algebraic Set Theory. The proof is established working within a Heyting pretopos equipped with a system of small maps satisfying the axioms originally introduced by Joyal and Moerdijk. This result improves on the existing developments by avoiding the assumption of additional axioms for small maps and the use of collection sites.

We present a solution to the problem of defining a counterpart in Algebraic Set Theory of the construction of internal sheaves in Topos Theory. Our approach is general in that we consider sheaves as determined by Lawvere-Tierney coverages, rather than by Grothendieck coverages, and assume only a weakening of the axioms for small maps originally introduced by Joyal and Moerdijk, thus subsuming the existing topos-theoretic results.

The use of human biological materials involves a number of issues from both an ethical and a legal point of view. In recent decades, the purposes for which this material has been used have i...

La traduction latine des Dialoghi della historia du philosophe néo-platonicien Francesco Patrizi da Cherso est publiée à Bâle en 1570. L’étude de la circulation de ce texte et des choix de traduction permet de mieux comprendre la réception des artes historicae italiennes dans le Nord de l’Europe et les fluctuations ou limites du latin face à la montée en puissance de l’italien vernaculaire comme langue philosophique.

This article takes up the commonplace antagonism between ‘second wave’ lesbian feminism and ‘third wave’ queer theory and politics, and argues that the antagonism itself is both historically and politically reductive. First, I make the case that ‘third wave’ queer theory actually shares its central concern – namely, accountability for intra-group inequalities – with lesbian feminism. However, I argue that ‘third wave’ queer theories ultimately founder in their bid for a more reflexive political praxis by tending to hold others – (...) lesbian feminists – accountable for ongoing inequalities rather than grappling with them directly. By contrast, I show that lesbian feminists from the late 1970s to the late 1980s developed a reparative politics that succeeds where ‘third wave’ theories stumble by developing relationships of mutual accountability around issues of race and racism, and by establishing processes by which to repair these relationships when they founder. I conclude by arguing that a fuller attention to the history of lesbian feminism, in fact, offers important resources for feminists and queers dealing with issues of intra-group marginalization, such as transphobia, in the present. (shrink)

The paper aims to explore the phenomenon of the spread in democracy of new powers – produced by inexhaustible technological developments – from the perspective of the philosophy of Institutions. It traces the original idea of democracy, in which the «government of the people» arises from the conversion of natural liberty into social and political liberty, dwells on the political and juridical meaning of authority, analyses the traditional instruments used to condition human opinions and behaviours, and reconstructs – in light (...) of this itinerary – the functioning and new grammar of the digital order. What opens before us is a fluid and disorganized scenario, dominated by digital systems, algorithms and artificial intelligence, that draws the attention of philosophers and sociologists, jurists and scholars of language and of anthropology. The old single order, outlined by the political and juridical machine of the modern State – which, through an aloof and solemn language, aimed to impart regularity to human behaviour and to give society direction – is replaced by multifarious models of order, each of which is generated by its own logic, practices, and autonomous control techniques. Under the omnipotence of technology, concepts such as authority, liberty, truth and power undergo a vortex of semantic transformations that penetrate a new symbolic space into human reasoning and actions. (shrink)

This article argues that the early Christian ?order of widows? provides a fruitful model for Christian ethicists struggling to address the medical and social problems of elderly women today. After outlining the precarious state of the ?almanah? - or widow - in biblical times, it describes the emergence of the order of widows in the early Church. Turning to the contemporary situation, it argues that demographics both in the United States and around the globe suggest that meeting the needs of (...) elderly women will become an enormous challenge in the years to come. The order of widows illustrates a three-fold conception of solidarity that has immediate implications today. That conception of solidarity encourages us: 1) to identify the unique medical needs of elderly women (e.g., osteoporosis); 2) to find ways of overcoming their societal isolation, which can increase their risk of medical and psychological problems; and 3) to develop strategies for enabling them to remain contributing members of the community for as long as possible. This essay is a slightly revised version of a keynote address given by the author at a conference on ?Women?s Health and Human Rights? held in Rome, Italy in February 1998 and sponsored by the Vatican, Georgetown University, and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. The proceedings of that conference were published in Italy by the Società Editrice Universo-Roma in a volume entitled Women?s Health Issues, edited by Spagnolo and Gambino (2003). (shrink)

There is a growing sense among translational hermeneuticists that their assumptions pertaining to the act of translation as seen from the hermeneutical perspective should align them more with a cognitive field. Taking the above view into account, the aim of this paper is to introduce the idea of translational (neuro)hermeneutics into the field of translation studies. The first part of the paper is dedicated to the concept of (neuro)hermeneutics as based on Gambino and Pulvirenti (2019) approach to literary studies, (...) which is then followed by the theoretical and methodological issues associated with philosophy of landscape taken from the perspective of new cultural geography and of embodiment. The second part of this paper presents the theoretical and methodological considerations as regards translations of landscape descriptions and their analysis, with emphasis on the concept of the (neuro)hermeneutic circle. The paper concludes with suggestions as to further advancement within the field of translational (neuro)hermeneutics. (shrink)