In Boccacio's Decameron, Cervigni sees a parodic echo of the circles of Dante's Divine Comedy, and asks whether Bocaccio envisions the voyage of the brigata as similar to Dante the Pilgrim's journey toward the center, first the abysmal center of Lucifer, then towards the highest center, God.

_Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Athenian Democracy_ delivers a fresh and wide-ranging analysis of the uses and reinterpretations of ancient Greek democracy from the late Middle Ages to the XXI century, offering a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach to this important topic.

What contribution can visual art practice bring to interdisciplinary research? And how to give an account of practice-led research that acknowledges the need for interdisciplinary intelligibility? I consider these two questions by reflecting on the methodology--which I call "critical practical analogy" (CPA)--that I have developed while investigating the metaethical implications of French philosopher Simone Weil's notion of attention, during my practice-led PhD. In order to address the first question, I consider as a case study a research art project that employs (...) CPA, and I explain how CPA proved instrumental in overcoming the impasse that I reached by purely theoretical investigation of Weil's discourse on attention and how it opened a distinctly artistic way forward in my research. In order to address the second question, I consider a problem posed by the interdisciplinary nature of my research (covering art and philosophy). I show how, through the application of CPA to the case study, I articulated an exegesis of my research that was intelligible across these two heterogeneous fields of investigation. In conclusion, I give some reasons for my hope that CPA may possess some heuristic and exegetical applicability in practice-led interdisciplinary research beyond my own research. (shrink)

This book is intended as a historical and critical study on the origin of the equations of motion as established in Newton's Principia. The central question that it aims to answer is whether it is indeed correct to ascribe to Galileo the inertia principle and the law of falling bodies. In order to accomplish this task, the study begins by considering theories on the motion of bodies from classical antiquity, and especially those of Aristotle. The theories developed during the Middle (...) Ages and the Renaissance are then reviewed, with careful analysis of the contributions of, for example, the Merton and Parisian Schools and Galileo's immediate predecessors, Tartaglia and Benedetti. Finally, Galileo's work is examined in detail, starting from the early writings. Excerpts from individual works are presented, to allow the texts to speak for themselves, and then commented upon. The book provides historical evidence both for Galileo's dependence on his forerunners and for the major breakthroughs that he achieved. It will satisfy the curiosity of all who wish to know when and why certain laws have been credited to Galileo. (shrink)

This book describes in detail the various theories on the shape of the Earth from classical antiquity to the present day and examines how measurements of its form and dimensions have evolved throughout this period. The origins of the notion of the sphericity of the Earth are explained, dating back to Eratosthenes and beyond, and detailed attention is paid to the struggle to establish key discoveries as part of the cultural heritage of humanity. In this context, the roles played by (...) the Catholic Church and the philosophers of the Middle Ages are scrutinized. Later contributions by such luminaries as Richer, Newton, Clairaut, Maupertuis, and Delambre are thoroughly reviewed, with exploration of the importance of mathematics in their geodetic enterprises. The culmination of progress in scientific research is the recognition that the reference figure is not a sphere but rather a geoid and that the earth’s shape is oblate. Today, satellite geodesy permits the solution of geodetic problems by means of precise measurements. Narrating this fascinating story from the very beginning not only casts light on our emerging understanding of the figure of the Earth but also offers profound insights into the broader evolution of human thought. (shrink)

Text mining methods are examined and assessed in order to find exact sources of Pico's theses ascribed to Medieval authors in his "Conclusiones nongentae".

The paper is about the relationship between Scotus’s notion of ‘natura communis,’ for an examination of the main features that Scotus ascribes to ‘common natures’ can shed substantial light on the nature of metaphysics in itself. Some preliminary observations on historiography are also deemed to be in order.

This article examines Paul Guyer’s claim that we should attempt to ground the principle of religious freedom on the basis of Kant’s arguments for religious liberty. I problematise Guyer’s suggestion by investigating a hypothetical ‘dogmatic conflict’ between a scientifically and a religiously grounded belief. I further suggest that considering Christian Wolff’s philosophy might provide us with an approach which shares the benefits that Guyer identifies in Kant, while at the same time avoiding the issues Kant might run into that result (...) from the occurrence of the dogmatic conflict. I start by providing a background to Wolff’s philosophy and explaining the notion of the dogmatic conflict. Then I present a potential contemporary case of the dogmatic conflict and try to see how it would be dealt with based on Guyer’s proposal. Finally, I consider what a Wolffian solution would look like, arguing that Guyer’s project might benefit from considering Wolff. (shrink)

This paper presents Christian Wolff’s claim that philosophy, undertaken on the basis of a proper method, cannot contradict revealed religion. The paper first provides a context of Wolff’s banishment from Halle for holding views in conflict with religious doctrines. Next, it proceeds, on the basis of Wolff’s Discursus præliminaris de philosophia in genere prefixed to his 1728 Latin Logic, to explain the principles of Wolff’s method, and to show how his conception of method enables him to disallow the possibility of (...) a genuine conflict between philosophical and religious dogmas. For Wolff, doctrinal conflicts between philosophy and revealed religion can only occur as a result of terminological disagreements, disagreements between dogmas and hypotheses, or disagreements between dogmas and theological misinterpretations. The actual conflict of dogmas, understood as religious or philosophical truths, Wolff holds to be impossible. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the development of ontology as a philosophical discipline in the German philosophical tradition. It starts from what can be considered the invention of ontology and proceeds to the way it was received in the philosophy of Hegel. It is separated into two parts. The first part argues that what can be called the ‘traditional’ form of ontology is developed by Christian Wolff in his 1730 monograph Philosophia prima sive Ontologia, and it traces both the history of the (...) name ‘ontology’, as well as the history of the conception which led to Wolff’s formulation of it. The history of the name tracks the use of the concept ‘ontology’ from its first occurrence in 1606 up to Wolff. The history of the conception tracks the conceptions of various philosophical disciplines, found in thinkers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza, that ultimately give rise to Wolff’s conception of ontology as a science of an entity qua entity. The second part traces the development of this Wolffian conception through the philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel. The aim of this thesis is to argue that Wolff’s philosophy should be seen as the original formulation of the philosophical discipline of ontology and that the Wolffian conception of ontology is the one shared by subsequent German thinkers up to, and including, Hegel. I refer to this shared understanding of what ontology is as ‘the German ontological tradition’. The title of the thesis, The Possibility of Ontology, refers to the way in which this traditional understanding of what ontology is, is treated throughout the German ontological tradition. Specifically, Kant argues that the traditional conception is effectively impossible, while in Hegel one can find arguments that are intended to show that some aspects of this traditional discipline are in fact possible. Besides focusing on a fairly under-researched topic of the early history of ontology as a philosophical discipline, this thesis attempts to utilise its historical findings in order to provide novel ways in which the systems of the thinkers such as Kant and Hegel can be understood. There is a serious disregard for, or underplaying of, the Wolffian influence on the philosophical thought of Kant and Hegel, and it is my aim to contribute to the rectification of this situation by demonstrating the frequently overlooked dialogue these thinkers had with Wolff’s conception of ontology. (shrink)

The origin of the genetic code has been attributed in part to an accidental assignment of codons to amino acids. Although several lines of evidence indicate the subsequent expansion and improvement of the genetic code, the hypothesis of Francis Crick concerning a frozen accident occurring at the early stage of genetic code evolution is still widely accepted. Considering Crick’s hypothesis, mathematical descriptions of hypothetical scenarios involving a huge number of possible coexisting random genetic codes could be very important to explain (...) the origin and evolution of a selected genetic code. This work aims to contribute in this regard, that is, it provides a theoretical framework in which statistical parameters of error functions are calculated. Given a genetic code and an amino acid property, the functional code robustness is estimated by means of a known error function. In this work, using analytical calculations, general expressions for the average and standard deviation of the error function distributions of completely random codes with standard stop codons were obtained. As a possible biological application of these results, any set of amino acids and any pure or mixed amino acid properties can be used in the calculations, such that, in case of having to select a set of amino acids to create a genetic code, possible advantages of natural selection of the genetic codes could be discussed. (shrink)

Our article seeks to demonstrate that Husserl’s approach to intersubjectivity in his First Investigation of 1901/1913 was rigorous rather than rash. To do so, it applies a combination of intentionality and whole-part logic that has been overlooked in Husserl study. It therefore starts from Husserl’s Prolegomena of 1901 to follow his normative phenomenology until it excludes knowledge of another’s consciousness, then unpacks how he does so by his “proofs” in his 1913 Third Investigation, to apply those results to his First (...) Investigation. The outcomes might demonstrate an unexpected rigour in Husserl’s early address to intersubjectivity, and even support a novel logic that considers alterity. (shrink)

Derrida became increasingly overt in later years in suggesting that his work displays a rigour, and even a “logic.” Further, it is becoming accepted that deconstruction arose in dialogue with Husserl. In support of these views, this article points out that in 1990 Derrida told us that his first work of 1954 revealsa “law” which guides his career, and that some responses had already arisen there. The work of 1954 is examined, and an interrelated “system” developed by which the responses (...) relate to the law, to help find a common, early and systematic base to apply to Derrida’s oeuvre as it develops. Brief examples will be pointed to in closing to show that this basis subsists, at least in part, in later work. (shrink)

This article aims to restore a way to approach Derrida by revisiting the essentialist ‘logic’ that Leonard Lawlor put forward in 2002. Lawlor argues that the early Derrida developed a ‘logic of totality’ from Hyppolite's reading of Hegel, which formed the basis for a ‘logic of contamination’ and différance; moreover, Lawlor demonstrated such progress. We will situate his implicit premises before following his sequential argument, and thus isolate how Lawlor is aware that Derrida disputes Hyppolite's basic premises and outcomes, so (...) as to suggest the difficulty is methodological. By that we will support Lawlor's discovery that Derrida's earliest work can be approached ‘logically’, so as to help re-orientate both an approach and strands of thought that Derrida helped to inspire. (shrink)

The new wave of ‘foundation models’—general-purpose generative AI models, for production of text (e.g., ChatGPT) or images (e.g., MidJourney)—represent a dramatic advance in the state of the art for AI. But their use also introduces a range of new risks, which has prompted an ongoing conversation about possible regulatory mechanisms. Here we propose a specific principle that should be incorporated into legislation: that any organization developing a foundation model intended for public use must demonstrate a reliable detection mechanism for the (...) content it generates, as a condition of its public release. The detection mechanism should be made publicly available in a tool that allows users to query, for an arbitrary item of content, whether the item was generated (wholly or partly) by the model. In this paper, we argue that this requirement is technically feasible and would play an important role in reducing certain risks from new AI models in many domains. We also outline a number of options for the tool’s design, and summarize a number of points where further input from policymakers and researchers would be required. (shrink)

Sir William Hamilton's theory of the quantification of the predicate is presented and discussed with reference to the contemporary debate on logic.

Is some form of epoché possible on theological concepts? In which way? Is it possible consider their importance leaving their religious scope aside? Can the theological concepts tell us something unless we consider their essential reference to our relationship with a divine being? The answer to these questions let us to understand what means to be a secular scholar of medieval philosophy. It's impossible conversely to discuss this problem without dealing with medieval theology. And this concerns not only the nature (...) of theology, but also and deeply the same idea of secularism . Therefore a fully aware historiography of medieval thought has to understand the theological speech and to encounter the depth of this theoretical question. So we can conclude that for a secular reading of the medieval theology is paradoxically essential to catch the intimate sense of religious thought and the historically defined forms of its actual conceptualizations. (shrink)

Since its inception in the late 2000s, supporters of Quentin Meillassoux tended to oppose the movement he founded, speculative materialism, to Derrida and the Derridean community. The arc of Meillassoux's later publications, however, did not support that opposition, especially when it became clear that he neither dismissed correlationism nor set aside literary concerns. These approaches might not be as incompatible as has been supposed. Still, if any affinity is to be established, a first need is to reassess the core of (...) Meillassoux's argument in After Finitude, which has continued to influence his publications. In this article, I attempt not merely to comment upon Meillassoux's argument, but to justify it from within, and so to demonstrate its logic. Then, using a method of re-reading that will be familiar to many, I will attempt to show how that logic reveals speculative materialism and Derridean concerns to be better treated as logical affiliates. Doing so will not presuppose agreement, but will set the stage for more thorough comparisons in future. (shrink)

It has long been accepted that one of Levinas’ major concerns is to establish an ethics of responsibility for the ‘other.’ Yet it has been deemed for decades, even by Levinasians, that his approach to that concern is ‘unsystematic’ and ‘not consistent.’ That situation arose because Levinas’ four terms for ‘other’ are difficult to translate, so his terms were first addressed by adopting English conventions. Such conventions have furthered Levinas scholarship, but our aim is to consider Levinas’ consistency: Hence we (...) undertake the first English-language assessment of the rigour of Levinas’ approach in 1961 to the ‘other’ by means of all four terms. To do so, we follow a ‘formal structure’ that Levinas develops from the tradition of phenomenological logic—mostly Husserl’s. We hope the result will palliate worries about Levinas’ rigor, and allow new ways to engage with his work. (shrink)

Although many still see Derrida as a thinker opposed to a unified systematic meaning, there has recently been growing recognition that Derrida, in his later years, suggested that his work is not averse to formalisation. In support of this view, this paper points out that, in 1990, Derrida himself told us that his first work of 1954 reveals a “law” which impels his career, and that some responses had arisen even there. Some benefits of adopting such a common pole are (...) set out, and an interrelated “system” developed to relate the law of 1954 to the later responses, in order to help find a common, systematic base for Derrida’s oeuvre. The need to accommodate approaches which are wary of a systematic approach is nevertheless acknowledged, and possible ways of reconciling the diverse readings of Derrida’s intent and collaboratively furthering the formalisation of Derrida’s oeuvre for posterity are outlined in closing. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 2, October 2010: 43-60. (shrink)

Allowing pupils to choose the content of their learning is an important step towards individualized development. Despite the need proclaimed by society for the development of competences in STEM area, educational cycles in this field are the least represented in the Croatian general education curriculum. This research was conducted in order to gain insight into pupils’ interests in the contents of technical culture and for school activities. The research was conducted on a stratified sample of primary school pupils in Croatia (...) aged 11 to 15 years. The analysis of the research results showed that the activities from ICT, robotics, programming and woodworking are the most attractive. When it comes to school activities, pupils most prefer sports activities, computer activities, experiments in science subjects and then technical activities. This result suggests that the school curricula needs to be redesigned so that pupils can develop according to their interests. Učenikova mogućnost izbora sadržaja učenja tijekom općeg obveznog obrazovanja važan je korak ka individualiziranom razvoju. Unatoč proklamiranim potrebama društva za razvojem kompetencija u tzv. STEM području, u hrvatskom su obrazovnom sustavu aktivnosti iz ovog područja najmanje zastupljene u kurikulumu općeg obrazovanja. Stoga je provedeno istraživanje interesa učenika za izbornu nastavu tehničke kulture te za aktivnosti koje bi odabrali kad bi mogli birati što će u školi učiti i raditi. Istraživanje je provedeno na stratificiranom uzorku učenika osnovnih škola u Hrvatskoj u dobi od 11. do 15. godine života. Analizom rezultata istraživanja ustanovljeno je da su aktivnosti iz IKT-a, robotike, programiranja i modelarstva najatraktivnija područja za izbornu nastave tehničke kulture. Kad je riječ o aktivnostima u školi, učenici bi najradije odabrali sportske aktivnosti, a potom slijede informatičke, prirodoznanstvene i tehničke aktivnosti. Ovakav nalaz ukazuje na nužnu preobrazbu školskog kurikuluma koji će učenicima omogućiti razvoj u skladu s njihovim interesima. (shrink)

Učenikova mogućnost izbora sadržaja učenja tijekom općeg obveznog obrazovanja važan je korak ka individualiziranom razvoju. Unatoč proklamiranim potrebama društva za razvojem kompetencija u tzv. STEM području, u hrvatskom su obrazovnom sustavu aktivnosti iz ovog područja najmanje zastupljene u kurikulumu općeg obrazovanja. Stoga je provedeno istraživanje interesa učenika za izbornu nastavu tehničke kulture te za aktivnosti koje bi odabrali kad bi mogli birati što će u školi učiti i raditi. Istraživanje je provedeno na stratificiranom uzorku učenika osnovnih škola u Hrvatskoj u (...) dobi od 11. do 15. godine života. Analizom rezultata istraživanja ustanovljeno je da su aktivnosti iz IKT-a, robotike, programiranja i modelarstva najatraktivnija područja za izbornu nastave tehničke kulture. Kad je riječ o aktivnostima u školi, učenici bi najradije odabrali sportske aktivnosti, a potom slijede informatičke, prirodoznanstvene i tehničke aktivnosti. Ovakav nalaz ukazuje na nužnu preobrazbu školskog kurikuluma koji će učenicima omogućiti razvoj u skladu s njihovim interesima. (shrink)

The arising of smart cities has shown the limitations of the traditional attempts to understand and characterize cities. The smart city marks a relevant step in the evolution of urban systems which is expected to have disruptive impacts in the near future. Indeed, the ‘smartness’ qualification of cities points to relevant changes in the possibilities these complex systems offer mainly due to changes in the information which is made available. This chapter studies the notion of city from an ontological viewpoint, (...) and provides the first elements of a general framework aimed to characterize and unify how to understand the city and its evolution. It starts from historical considerations to isolate the factors that drove the changes from ancient to modern cities, and the complexity that characterizes the nature of cities. Our analysis departs from the traditional views and leads to distinguish three ontological components in the city: the modified physical place, the distributed agentivity, and the knowledge present in the system. The analysis of these components and their interactions, we argue, provides a coherent reading of the city across its evolution steps, and may be used to establish the maturity of today’s smart cities. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

Results of a comprehensive simulation study are reported investigating the effects of sample size, test length, number of attributes and base rate of mastery on item parameter recovery and classification accuracy of four DCMs. Effects were evaluated using bias and RMSE computed between true parameters and estimated parameters. Effects of simulated factors on attribute assignment were also evaluated using the percentage of classification accuracy. More precise estimates of item parameters were obtained with larger sample size and longer test length. Recovery (...) of item parameters decreased as the number of attributes increased from three to five but base rate of mastery had a varying effect on the item recovery. Item parameter and classification accuracy were higher for DINA and DINO models. (shrink)

Early twentieth-century Italian poetry experiences a crisis in confidence concerning the expressibility of rhythm. Dino Campana's writings exemplify the processes the poet goes through in order to write rhythm. Rhythm is difficult to deal with because it is both sacred and tired. These two incarnations of rhythm lead Campana to different modes of expression; from more traditional definitions through to more fluid definitions. Two strands of analysis reveal themselves as central to understanding Campana's theoretical stance, namely fluidity and movement. (...) These point to a careful veiling of rhythm which opens up new spaces for the articulation of something that, whilst difficult, remains the essence of poetry. (shrink)

Dino del Garbo, médecin actif dans les premières décennies du xiv e siècle, est surtout connu pour son commentaire au poème de Guido Cavalcanti Donna me prega. La présente étude propose l’édition d’une question quodlibétique sur la capacité de l’imagination à altérer le corps, disputée à Bologne ou Sienne dans les années 1320. Nous examinons le contexte médical et philosophique dans lequel s’inscrit cette question, en montrant notamment comment le débat s’est progressivement cristallisé autour de l’opposition entre un modèle (...) avicennien et un modèle aristotélicien des rapports entre l’âme et le corps. L’analyse de ce débat permet d’éclairer d’un jour nouveau la glose de Dino del Garbo à Donna me prega et aussi, de manière incidente, le poème lui-même. (shrink)

Il termineha cominciato a essere impiegato nel nostro paese con riferimento all'integrazione sociale di gruppi minoritari solo a partire dagli anni sessanta, per sostituire il concetto ormai logoro di. Prendendo in esame le piů recenti normative italiane ed europee l'articolo mostra come le nuove politiche disegnino un ritorno, al di sotto di una terminologia rimasta immutata, alla concettualitÀ assimilazionista. Questo ritorno, in controtendenza rispetto alla progressiva giuridificazione e proceduralizzazione dell'appartenenza messa in moto dall'emergere nel secondo dopoguerra della politica dei diritti (...) umani, sembra spingere le nostre societÀ politiche indietro verso una pericolosa ri-sostanzializzazione del concetto di cittadinanza in un processo che, lungi dall'aprire spazi di convivenza culturalmente plurali, sembra condurre concretamente verso una sempre piů spregiudicata e discriminante selezione migratoria funzionale a perpetuare quella sistematica inferiorizzazione economica e simbolica degli immigrati in cui consiste e di cui si nutre il razzismo istituzionale europeo. (shrink)

At its beginnings Humanities Computing was characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Subsequently, Humanities Computing practice has been prevailingly driven by technological developments and the main concern has shifted from content processing to the representation in digital form of documentary sources. The Digital Humanities turn has brought more to the fore artistic and literary practice in direct digital form, as opposed to a supposedly commonplace application of computational methods to scholarly research. As an example (...) of a way back to the original motivations of applied computation in the humanities, a formal model of the interpretive process is here proposed, whose implementation may be contrived through the application of data processing procedures typical of the so called artificial adaptive systems. (shrink)

This essay considers the tradition of criticism against Athenian democracy, in both ancient and modern times. Often this critical tradition has been seen to adduce greater interest than the very democratic experience from which it arose; in this it has been aided, in part, by the asserted absence of an ancient theory of democracy. Yet there are significant traces of a democratic theory in the ancient sources, which ought to serve both as a theoretical and ideological riposte to the critics. (...) Some of the modern objections to classical Athenian democracy take up the argument of the ancient critics and display an anti-democratic orientation. Others, however, are motivated by a certain sensibility, grown out of liberalism and the legal state, as well as the emancipation of women and the abolition of slavery. Nevertheless, these objections are sometimes lacking in historical perspective. If we reassess Athenian democracy, it may yet be seen to constitute a useful point of reference, at a time when the current model of democracy finds its legitimacy questioned.2. (shrink)

We study the bi-embeddability and elementary bi-embeddability relation on graphs under Borel reducibility and investigate the degree spectra realized by these relations. We first give a Borel reduction from embeddability on graphs to elementary embeddability on graphs. As a consequence we obtain that elementary bi-embeddability on graphs is a $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }^1_1$ complete equivalence relation. We then investigate the algorithmic properties of this reduction. We obtain that elementary bi-embeddability on the class of computable graphs is $\Sigma ^1_1$ complete with respect (...) to computable reducibility and show that the elementary bi-embeddability and bi-embeddability spectra realized by graphs are related. (shrink)

Transculturality. When Anthropology meets Psychology.

We calculate the complexity of Scott sentences of scattered linear orders. Given a countable scattered linear order L of Hausdorff rank $\alpha $ we show that it has a ${d\text {-}\Sigma _{2\alpha +1}}$ Scott sentence. It follows from results of Ash [2] that for every countable $\alpha $ there is a linear order whose optimal Scott sentence has this complexity. Therefore, our bounds are tight. We furthermore show that every Hausdorff rank 1 linear order has an optimal ${\Pi ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ (...) or ${d\text {-}\Sigma ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ Scott sentence and give a characterization of those linear orders of rank $1$ with ${\Pi ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ optimal Scott sentences. At last we show that for all countable $\alpha $ the class of Hausdorff rank $\alpha $ linear orders is $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }_{2\alpha +2}$ complete and obtain analogous results for index sets of computable linear orders. (shrink)