Este livro poderia de facto definir-se também "Razão e Lógicas da Totalidade do Real na filosofia africana contemporânea". Quatro objectivos, por assim dizer, se vislumbram logo duma leitura atenta deste texto: antes de mais a preocupação dos autores de propor nos nossos dias, uma leitura transversal da filosofia africana moderna e contemporânea a partir, diríamos, do conceito da "razão". Trata-se, neste caso, de introduzir os leitores não na história da filosofia africana como tal, mas somente, como especifica Ezio (...) class='Hi'>Bono, de delinear "algumas questões principais que consideram ser mais significativas e recorrentes no actual debate" da filosofia africana moderna e contemporânea e a sua "traversée" (Bidima), por assim dizer, no âmbito moçambicano (José Castiano). Este texto, cuja vocação principal é transformar-se, "grosso modo", numa espécie de "Humanidades Clássicas Africanas" (Cheikh Anta Diop), se quer sintético e ao mesmo tempo panorâmico. Ele é sintético, pois os autores partem duma leitura temática (a razão). Ele é também panorâmico, já que partindo deste focus temático, eles oferecem uma visão global desta matéria, do ponto de vista histórico, teorético, epistemológico, cultural, panafricano (Procesi) e particular moçambicano (Bono e Castiano). (shrink)

Lorenzo Valla has often been considered to be a sceptic. Equipped with an extremely polemical and critical mind, his whole oeuvre seemed to aim at undermining received philosophical and theological dogmas. More specifically he has been associated with the burgeoning interests in ancient scepticism in the fifteenth century. In this article the arguments in support of this interpretation will be critically examined and evaluated. Based on a discussion of two of his major works, De vero bono and the (...) Dialectica, it will be shown that Valla was not a sceptic. Even though the first work betrays the techniques of the Academy as employed by Cicero, the appropriation of these strategies served an agenda which can hardly be called 'sceptical'. The second work contains his reform of Aristotelian dialectic, which seems to testify to a sceptical interest in arguments which rely on verisimilitude and dubious validity such as sorites and paradox. But rather than reflecting an endorsement of Academic scepticism, this work, on closer reading, shows Valla to be highly critical on such arguments. This raises the question of how scepticism is related to rhetoric. Their similarities and differences will be discussed in the final section: Valla the Christian orator was no proponent of doubt, uncertainty and a suspension of judgement, even though at times he used strategies derived from Academic scepticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionWilliam J. ConnellOne of the more unusual works in the corpus of the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla is the Oratio in principio sui studii, on the relation between Latin letters and the Christian faith. The speech was written and delivered in October 1455, toward the end of Valla’s life, as a lecture to inaugurate the academic year at the University of Rome where he had held the chair (...) in rhetoric since 1450. It was traditional at Rome to hold such an address each year not only to encourage the assembled students and faculty in their studies but also to thank the papacy for its support of the university, the Studium Urbis. For this reason Valla’s speech ends with customary words praising Pope Calixtus III for having increased the stipends of the lecturers in the university, even though, notwithstanding some remarkable kindnesses to Valla himself, Calixtus’s reputation was not that of a friend to scholarship. Valla’s Schoolyear Inaugural was not lengthy: it can only have lasted fifteen minutes. Nor is there indication that anyone was displeased with it. In fact, that is precisely what is oddest about the Inaugural, for throughout his career Valla had shown himself to be the sort of person who seized on such occasions to make polemical arguments. We read the speech—and it is possible that his audience also listened to it this way—expecting with each step that Valla will let fly a critical or unorthodox statement, but that never happens. 1Beginning with his earliest formal work, a comparison of Cicero and Quintilian written in 1428 and now lost, in which the humanist argued against Cicero on behalf of Quintilian, Valla seemed to delight in challenging established authorities. 2 His next important work, an attack on Bartolus of [End Page 1] Sassoferrato and the scholastic method of contemporary jurists, resulted in his forced departure from the University of Pavia. 3 A continuing combativeness is illustrated in subsequent writings, reaching an apogee in the work on the Donation. Even when Valla was developing another writer’s idea, he had a consistent way of pushing the argument to a daring extreme. This, as Riccardo Fubini argues below, is what Valla did in the De donatione, a work Fubini suggests relied more heavily on Nicholas of Cusa’s De concordantia catholica than hitherto realized, but written to promote an agenda far more radical than that of Cusanus. One of the surest indications of Valla’s brilliance as a polemicist is the fact that seventy years after his death humanists of the caliber of Agostino Steuco, the subject of Ronald K. Delph’s essay in this number, were still eager to take up cudgels against him.Valla paid a price for initiating so many disputes. In 1444, when he was called before the Inquisition in Naples after the attack on the Donation of Constantine, Valla was made to answer charges against not only that work, but also against the De vero bono for its Epicureanism, the De libero arbitrio for its determinism, the De professione religiosorum for its criticism of religious orders, and the Repastinatio totius dialectice et philosophie for various unorthodox statements, especially concerning the Trinity. This last work was the humanist’s most ambitious project, and he seems to have been aware of its explosive quality, since he alluded to a “peril to his life” should it be published. 4The 1455 Schoolyear Inaugural shows no trace of the risks that Valla took in his other writings, of his polemical temperament, or of his past disagreements with the Church. With style and vigor the speech argues that the Church deserves great thanks and praise for having ensured the survival [End Page 2] of Latin letters after the collapse of the Empire. This may seem a notable change of heart in the author who had written the oration On the Falsely Believed and Forged Donation of Constantin—a text which always seems to be lurking in the background of the Inaugural but which finds no explicit reference there. Given the proximity of Valla’s argument to the well-worn medieval theme of the translatio studii, his argument could hardly have been... (shrink)

This volume sets out to give a philosophical "applied" account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in other disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, ...

There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model-based reasoning considered in this book. The term ‘model’ comprises both internal and external representations. The models are intended as interpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations and are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain. The book’s contributors are researchers active in the area of creative reasoning in science and technology.

What role does language play in the process of building worldviews? To address this question, in the first section of this paper we will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. In a nutshell, we define worldviews as the biological interpretations agents create of the world around them and cosmovision the more general cultural-based reflections on it. After presenting our definition for worldview, we will also present the multi-shaped viewpoint that frames our (...) analysis, adopting three concepts that can help us explain how agents construct and develop their worldviews: saliences, pregnances, and abduction. While the notions of saliences and pregnances will explain how agents recognize anomalies in their worldview, the concept of abduction will help us discuss how they can learn to approach, explain, and use these anomalies to get new skills and abilities. This other point will lead us to discuss the role of language in this process, which will be describe as an artifact that permits the agent to use abduction to “normalize” and exploit anomalies, being now the ultimate artifact to build, develop, and update their worldviews. (shrink)

We are glad to acknowledge the wide spectrum of topics posited by our commentators and at the same time the recognition of the thematic issue of our project: that the mentally ill is still a person, and that this humane dimension of his existence must be brought to the fore in psychopathological studies and kept always in the fore in the therapeutic process.We are also glad to have encountered appreciation for the fact that long gone is the time when the (...) clinician could have afforded to be the plenipotentiary in the therapeutic relationship, and that a more equal geometry of relations with the patient is not only useful but probably necessary for therapeutic success, intended as a "success [that] also involves... (shrink)

Locked and unlocked strategies are at the center of this article, as ways of shedding new light on the cognitive aspects of deep learning machines. The character and the role of these cognitive strategies, which are occurring both in humans and in computational machines, is indeed strictly related to the generation of cognitive outputs, which range from weak to strong level of knowledge creativity. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences when we analyze computational AI programs, such as (...) AlphaGo, which aim at performing various kinds of abductive hypothetical reasoning. In these cases, the programs are characterized by _locked_ abductive strategies: they deal with weak (even if sometimes amazing) kinds of hypothetical creative reasoning, because they are limited in what I call eco-cognitive openness, which instead qualifies human cognizers who are performing higher kinds of abductive creative reasoning, where cognitive strategies are instead _unlocked_. (shrink)

_Locked_ and _unlocked_ strategies are illustrated in this article as concepts that deal with important cognitive aspects of deep learning systems. They indicate different inference routines that refer to poor (locked) to rich (unlocked) cases of creative production of creative cognition. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences when we analyze computational deep learning programs, such as AlphaGo/AlphaZero, which are able to realize various types of abductive hypothetical reasoning. These programs embed what I call locked abductive strategies, so, (...) even if they present spectacular performances for example in games, they are characterized by poor types of hypothetical creative cognition insofar as they are constrained in what I call _eco-cognitive openness_. This openness instead characterizes unlocked human cognition that pertains to higher kinds of abductive reasoning, in both the creative and diagnostic cases, in which cognitive strategies are instead unlocked. This special kind of “openness” is physically rooted in the fundamental character of the human brain as an open system constantly coupled with the environment (that is, an “open” or “dissipative” system): its activity is the uninterrupted attempt to achieve the equilibrium with the environment in which it is embedded, and this interplay can never be switched off without producing severe damage to the brain. The brain cannot be conceived as deprived of its physical quintessence that is its openness. In the brain, contrary to the computational case, ordering is not derived from the outside thanks to what I have called in a recent book “computational domestication of ignorant entities”, but it is the direct product of an “internal” open dynamical process of the system. (shrink)

The “origins” of (geometric) space is examined from the perspective of the so-called “conceptual space” or “semantic space”. Semantic space is characterized by its fundamental “locality” that generates an “implicit” mode of geometrizing. This view is examined from within three perspectives. First, the role that various diagrammatic entities play in the everyday life and pragmatic activities of selected ethnic groups is illustrated. Secondly, it is shown how conceptual spaces are fundamentally linked to the meaning effects of particular natural languages and (...) these are very different from the global and universal aspects of Euclidean spaces. Thirdly, it is contended that these modes of creating body and culture-based spatial frameworks and related cosmogonies and cosmologies can be described as forms of “latent geometry” that initially appear unexplainable in any rational way. Nonetheless, and thanks to the deep mathematical reflections provided by René Thom, it is illustrated how the various ways of generating space can be further analyzed as distortions of mainstream spatialization furnished by Euclidean geometry that established the dominant universality of the ideas of space (and time). (shrink)

This article analyzes Italian research and experimentation on the economic potential of certain plant species in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, also providing insight into beekeeping and honey production. It focuses on continuity of method and progress across regimes and on the invisibility of many of the actors involved in the development of agricultural science and food research. Specifically, “continuity” refers to the continuation of certain threads of Old-Regime experimentation by the scientific apparatus put in place during the (...) Napoleonic era. These threads were reworked and strengthened with the new means available to Frenchified Europe. The concept of “invisibility” derives from an expression by Steven Shapin and refers to actors who contributed to the development of agricultural science while remaining in the shadows. These include various types of technicians and members of rural society who supported the scientific work of scholars without receiving overt recognition. Continuity and invisibility were therefore two fundamental components both in the epistemological development of agricultural science and in the improvement of food research. The article analyzes case studies mainly from northern Italy – or rather, the various geopolitical entities existing in this geographical region – during the late Old Regime and the Napoleonic era, comparing them with examples from all over Europe. (shrink)

The debate between speculative realism and phenomenology has become quite heated over the past years. The matter of contention is the possibility of a metaphysics that can provide knowledge of reality as it is in itself. The speculative realists accuse phenomenology of denying this possibility, confining knowledge to the sphere of subjectivity. What has been overlooked in this debate is the similarity between the speculative project of Quentin Meillassoux and a Husserlian metaphysics. This article looks at these positions from a (...) reconciliatory point of view. After outlining the debate, conceding the problematic nature of realism for phenomenology to the speculative realists, it will be shown that there is a place for a realist metaphysics within phenomenology. After showing the similarities between Meillassoux’s philosophy and a phenomenological metaphysics, and the legitimacy of qualifying the latter as a speculative realism, the conclusion will reflect on the modal notions at play in them. (shrink)

This paper develops the idea that valid arguments are equivalent to true conditionals by combining Kripke’s theory of truth with the evidential account of conditionals offered by Crupi and Iacona. As will be shown, in a first-order language that contains a naïve truth predicate and a suitable conditional, one can define a validity predicate in accordance with the thesis that the inference from a conjunction of premises to a conclusion is valid when the corresponding conditional is true. The validity predicate (...) so defined significantly increases our expressive resources and provides a coherent formal treatment of paradoxical arguments. (shrink)

Research on autonomy exhibits a constellation of variegated perspectives, from the problem of the crude deprivation of it to the study of the distinction between personal and moral autonomy, and from the problem of the role of a “self as narrator”, who classifies its own actions as autonomous or not, to the importance of the political side and, finally, to the need of defending and enhancing human autonomy. My precise concern in this article will be the examination of the role (...) of the human cognitive processes that give rise to the most important ways of tracking the external world and human behavior in their relationship to some central aspects of human autonomy, also to the aim of clarifying the link between autonomy and the ownership of our own destinies. I will also focus on the preservation of human autonomy as an important component of human dignity, seeing it as strictly associated with knowledge and, even more significantly, with the constant production of new and pertinent knowledge of various kinds. I will also describe the important _paradox of autonomy_, which resorts to the fact that, on one side, cognitions (from science to morality, from common knowledge to philosophy, etc.) are necessary to be able to perform autonomous actions and decisions because we need believe in rules that justify and identify our choices, but, on the other side, these same rules can become (for example, as a result of contrasting with other internalized and approved moral rules or knowledge contents) oppressive norms that diminish autonomy and can thus, paradoxically, defeat agents’ autonomous capacity “to take ownership”. (shrink)

More than a hundred years ago, the American philosopher C. S. Peirce suggested the idea of pragmatism as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practical meaning. Many words have been spent on creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. In fact, philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but all aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, illusory or obscure, and thus (...) not analyzable. The “computational turn” gave us a new way to understand creative processes in a strictly pragmatic sense. Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science tools allow us to test concepts and ideas previously conceived in abstract terms. It is in the perspective of these actual models that we find the central role of abduction in the explanation of creative reasoning in science. What I call theoretical abduction certainly illustrates much of what is important in abductive reasoning, especially the objective of selecting and creating a set of hypotheses that are able to dispense good explanations of data, but fails to account for many cases of explanation occurring in science or in everyday reasoning when the exploitation of the environment is crucial. The concept of manipulative abduction is devoted to capture the role of action in many interesting situations: action provides otherwise unavailable information that enables the agent to solve problems by starting and performing a suitable abductive process of generation or selection of hypotheses. Many external things, usually inert from the epistemological point of view, can be transformed into what I call epistemic mediators, which are illustrated in the last part of the paper. (shrink)

Complementarity tells us we cannot know precisely the values of all the properties of a quantum object at the same time: the precise determination of one property implies that the value of some other (complementary) property is undefined. E.g. the precise knowledge of the position of a particle implies that its momentum is undefined. Here we show that a Schrödinger cat has a well defined value of a property that is complementary to its “being dead or alive” property. Then, thanks (...) to complementarity, it has an undefined value of the property “being dead or alive”. In other words, the cat paradox is explained through quantum complementarity: of its many complementary properties, any quantum system, such as a cat, can have a well defined value only of one at a time. Schrödinger’s cat has a definite value of a property which is complementary to “being dead or alive”, so it is neither dead nor alive. Figuratively one can say it is both dead and alive. While this interpretation only uses textbook concepts (the Copenhagen interpretation), apparently it has never explicitly appeared in the literature. We detail how to build an Arduino based simulation of Schrödinger’s experiment based on these concepts for science outreach events. (shrink)

Chomskyan linguistics recently seems to let its goals become wider, from a pure formal field to biology and cognitive sciences, aiming to a foretold convergence between the Universal Grammar Theory and neurosciences. In this paper I try to make the point on how far this linguistics biological trend is going today. First I’m going to talk about the foundations of biolinguistics. Then I’ll shortly face some critics against Chomsky about rationalism, innateness and modularity of mind; two theories alternative to UG (...) will be shown. Fifth and sixth paragraphs just talk about recent acquisitions on the biological foundations of language and about how the UG theory can be tested with new neuroscientific surveying techniques. The last paragraph contains some remarks on the future of biolinguistics. (shrink)

This article sheds light on the relation between care for the soul and the political thought of Jan Patočka. Patočka often sketches a connection between care for the soul and a theory of the state, but he rarely elaborates this. The biographical fact of Patočka’s own political dissidence and his interpretation of care for the soul as a distancing from traditional structures of society have caused many to look at Patočka’s political thought mainly through the lens of political resistance. Such (...) interpretations are definitely warranted, but can overlook the moments in his work that point towards a theory of the state. While these are only indications, this article presents a way to develop these moments. It will do so on the basis of the idea that the theory of the state should not be based directly on care for the soul itself, but on its founding principle of problematicity. The stronger, perhaps more metaphysical, interpretation of problematicity that is argued for here both opens the space of the political and sets strict boundaries to it and as such should be the founding principle of any state that wishes to uphold this space. (shrink)

In my opinion, it is only in the framework of a research dealing with abductive cognition that we can analyze important cognitive aspects of human and machine capacities. From the point of view of human capacities the phenomenological concept of anticipation, which is related to the problem of the spontaneous generation of spatiality and its three-dimensionality, will be central. I will describe that anticipations can be seen as types of visual and manipulative abduction and also fruitful to illustrate, in the (...) case of human and machine capacities, the respective role of two kinds of strategic reasoning: locked and unlocked abductive strategies, which characterize the basic cognitive pro- cedure of “reading ahead”. The specificity of these contrasting inferential strategies is also related to their potentiality in producing different kinds of hypothetical outcomes, which in turn represent dissimilar levels of knowledge creativity. This diversity is also fundamental to depict the special character, the kind of creativity, and the limits of current computational deep learning AI systems, such as AlphaGo, which realize abductive cognitive processes. (shrink)

This book contains contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR'012), held on June 21-23 in Sestri Levante, Italy. Interdisciplinary researchers discuss in this volume how scientific cognition and other kinds of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. Some of the contributions analyzed the problem of model-based reasoning in technology and stressed the issues of scientific and technological innovation. The book is divided in (...) three main parts: models, mental models, representations; abduction, problem solving and practical reasoning; historical, epistemological and technological issues.. (shrink)

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. It includes revised contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR’015), held on June 25-27 in Sestri Levante, Italy. The book is divided into three main parts, the first of which focuses on models, reasoning and representation. It highlights key theoretical concepts from an applied perspective, addressing issues concerning (...) information visualization, experimental methods and design. The second part goes a step further, examining abduction, problem solving and reasoning. The respective contributions analyze different types of reasoning, discussing various concepts of inference and creativity and their relationship with experimental data. In turn, the third part reports on a number of historical, epistemological and technological issues. By analyzing possible contradictions in modern research and describing representative case studies in experimental research, this part aims at fostering new discussions and stimulating new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the field of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of current theories and applications of model-based reasoning. (shrink)

Lam and Esfeld have argued that, within Bohmian mechanics, the wave function can be interpreted as a physical structure instantiated by the fundamental particles posited by the theory. Further, to characterize the nature of this structure, they appeal to the framework of Ontic Structural Realism, thereby proposing a structuralist interpretation of Bohmian mechanics. However, I shall point out that OSR denotes a family of distinct views, each of which maintains a different account about the relation between structures and objects, and (...) entails a different kind of ontology. Thus, in this paper I will show how to articulate the structuralist approach to Bohmian Mechanics accordingly to the different standard versions of OSR, and I will evaluate these alternatives. Moreover, I will propose a novel and _sui generis_ kind of structuralist interpretation of Bohmian Mechanics, based on the framework of metaphysical coherentism. (shrink)

Philosophers of science today by and large reject the cataclysmic and irrational interpretation of the scientific enterprise claimed by Kuhn. Many computational models have been implemented to rationally study the conceptual change in science. In this recent tradition a key role is played by the concept of abduction as a mechanism by which new explanatory hypotheses are introduced. Nevertheless some problems in describing the most interesting abductive issues rise from the classical computational approach. It describes a cognitive process (and so (...) abduction) by the manipulation of internal symbolic representations of external world. This view assumes a discrete set of representations fixed in discrete time jumps, and cannot adequately account for the issue of anticipation and causation of a new hypothesis. An integration of the traditional computational view with some ideas developed inside the so-called dynamical approach can suggest some important insights. The concept of attractor is very significant. It permits a description of the abductive generation of new hypotheses in terms of a catastrophic rearrangement of the parameters responsible for the behavior of the system. (shrink)

Through the many reinterpretations of Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche (1919) within French Postmodernism, in recent decades, the uncanny has become a vague synonym for the methodology of deconstruction. The article aims to disambiguate the uncanny by reestablishing its characterizing nucleus and relocating it within the aesthetics through the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. The American philosopher claims that this feeling can be generated by drawing attention to the ordinary, which is so close and familiar to fade out of focus. Cavell and (...) the German Philosopher Juliane Rebentisch following him show that artistic practices can reinforce this experience, as through displacements and dislocations, they deprive objects of daily use and ordinary matters of their familiarity and force us to look more closely at their material, sensorial, and phenomenological dimensions. In this way, Cavell and Rebentisch offer a path to reconstitute a stable conceptual framework for defining the uncanny, linking it to Freud’s definition of something familiar appearing in an unfamiliar light. At the same time, they also propose a novelty by interpreting the uncanny not as inherently frightening and disturbing but as a compelling affective state that encourages a willingness to reappropriate and rediscover the ordinary. (shrink)

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art). Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated images. Furthermore, this (...) contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning. Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images. (shrink)

Functional reductionism characterises inter-theoretic reduction as the recovery of the upper-level behaviour described by the reduced theory in terms of the lower-level reducing theory. For instance, finding a statistical mechanical realiser that plays the functional role of thermodynamic entropy allows for establishing a reductive link between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. This view constitutes a unique approach to reduction that enjoys a number of positive features, but has received limited attention in the philosophy of science. -/- This paper aims to clarify (...) the meaning of functional reductionism in science, with a focus on physics, to define both its place with respect to other approaches to reduction and its connection to ontology. To do so, we develop and explore two alternative frameworks for functional reduction, called Syntactic Functional Reductionism and Semantic Functional Reductionism. They represent two different possible stances on the view that expand and improve the basic functional reductionist approach along different lines, and make clear how the approach works in practice. The former elaborates on David Lewis’ account, is connected with the syntactic view of theories, is committed to a logical characterisation of functional roles, and is embedded within Nagelian reductionism. The latter adopts a semantic view of theories, spells out functional roles mainly in terms of mathematical roles within the models of theories, and is expressed in terms of the related structuralist approach to reduction. The development of these frameworks has the final goal of advancing functional reductionism, to make it a fully-fledged alternative account for reduction in science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper explores philosophically the experiences of laughter and irony, focusing on Japanese sources but with a cross-cultural outlook. I ask whether globally unfavorable attitudes towards the comic in the European canon might have left unexplored or misunderstood several insights offered by the bodily and spiritual dimension revealed by laughter, and examine them through Japanese sources. Following a short but poignant triad of examples in Kuki Shūzō’s work, the paper analyses three instances of Japanese laughter and irony: the orgiastic (...) laughter of the gods luring Amaterasu out of the Heavenly Cave in Kojiki; the anthropomorphic animal scrolls of Chōjūgiga, and the “Tiger Cubs Crossing” stone garden in Ryōanji, Kyoto, concluding how each one of them offers an important insight on the bodily and conceptual phenomenological cluster of laughter and irony. I conclude with a further exploration of laughter in Zen, a religious tradition with a unique stress on the spiritual potential of humor, following Nishitani’s reading of Mumonkan and his connection to the experience of “emptiness”. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyse Timaeus’ prescription at 37e3–38b3 on how to use some tensed and tenseless phrases, with particular regard to the verb “be”. I provide an interpretation of (i) what the meaning of the εἴδη (forms or aspects) of time is, and (ii) some epistemological and semantical implications of the tenseless use of “is”. Then, I connect this passage to two famous sections of Timaeus’ proemium, namely the distinction between being and becoming (28a1–4), and the statement that λόγοι (...) are interpreters (ἐξηγῆται) and kin of (συγγενεῖς) what they speak about (29b2–c3). I show that the connection between the two parts of the dialogue is actually quite close and that they illuminate each other. My main interpretive proposal is that the relation between λόγοι and the temporal or atemporal status of their objects is so strict that not only does it affect their epistemic status but also their form. (shrink)

There has been little research into the weak kindsof negating hypotheses. Hypotheses may be unfalsifiable. In this case it is impossible tofind a contradiction in some area of the conceptualsystems in which they are incorporated.Notwithstanding this fact, it is sometimes necessaryto construct ways of rejecting the unfalsifiablehypothesis at hand by resorting to some external forms of negation, external because wewant to avoid any arbitrary and subjectiveelimination, which would be rationally orepistemologically unjustified. I will consider akind of ``weak'''' (unfalsifiable) hypotheses that (...) arehard to negate and the ways for making it easy. Inthese cases the subject can ``rationally'''' decide towithdraw his hypotheses even in contexts where it is``impossible'''' to find ``explicit'''' contradictions: theuse of negation as failure (an interestingtechnique for negating hypotheses and accessing newones suggested by artificial intelligence) isilluminating. I plan to explore whether this kind ofnegation can be employed to model hypothesiswithdrawal in Poincaré''s conventionalism of theprinciples of physics and in Freudian analyticreasoning. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an interpretation of the symploke ton eidon at Soph. 259e. My goal is to show that the specific metaphysical view expressed by the interweaving of forms best accounts for Plato’s explanation of truth and falsehood. In the first section, I introduce the fundamentals of the interpretation of the greatest kinds and their functions. After that, I propose an interpretation of the assertion at 259e, the upshot of which is that the interweaving of forms only deals (...) with extra-linguistic items, that it is related to both truth and meaning of linguistic items, in a very complex way which I aim to explain throughout the paper, and that it never involves sensible particulars. In the second section, I put forward my reading of the Stranger’s description of how logoi are structured and how they work. I pay particular attention to the view that words reveal being when they intertwine to form a statement. In the third section, I interpret the statements concerning Theaetetus. My goal is to advance a new reading of the specific role that kinds and their interweaving play with regard to the truth and falsehood of the statements concerning Theaetetus. The result is the very specific view that the kinds, which are the separated ontological cause of what happens in space and time, are the grounds of both the truth and the meaning of statements. (shrink)

I analyse Theaet. 200e-201c. I hold that this passage provides specific insights into: first, the nature of sensible things and events; second, the nature of knowledge. I show that the text should be taken as an analogy, which means that Plato does not consider eye-witnessing to be a case of knowledge. Finally, I consider the relation between the trial analogy and the dialogue as a whole.