Putting migrant remittances into house construction and rebuilding is generally seen as either conspicuous consumption or productive investment, but in both cases the perspective is economistic. This article argues that only when the cultural dimension of economic action is understood will it be possible to comprehend migrant spending on houses. Specifically, this article seeks to understand why, in the case of the rural Tagalog village in this study, located in upland Batangas Province in the Philippines, overseas labour migrants build houses (...) that they do not even live in, but are given to parents or simply left unoccupied. The explanation is framed in relation to the meanings of houses in a culture of bilateral kinship, which the Philippines shares with most parts of Southeast Asia, but inflected by distinct colonial influences. The article demonstrates the ways in which houses as memorials serve as idioms of ties of relatedness within kin groups and the broader community, ties that are being transformed by global migration and experienced differently yet maintained, renegotiated yet sustained transnationally. (shrink)

If the laws of nature are as the Humean believes, it is an unexplained cosmic coincidence that the actual Humean mosaic is as extremely regular as it is. This is a strong and well-known objection to the Humean account of laws. Yet, as reasonable as this objection may seem, it is nowadays sometimes dismissed. The reason: its unjustified implicit assignment of equiprobability to each possible Humean mosaic; that is, its assumption of the principle of indifference, which has been attacked on (...) many grounds ever since it was first proposed. In place of equiprobability, recent formal models represent the doxastic state of total ignorance as suspension of judgment. In this paper I revisit the cosmic coincidence objection to Humean laws by assessing which doxastic state we should endorse. By focusing on specific features of our scenario I conclude that suspending judgment results in an unnecessarily weak doxastic state. First, I point out that recent literature in epistemology has provided independent justifications of the principle of indifference. Second, given that the argument is framed within a Humean metaphysics, it turns out that we are warranted to appeal to these justifications and assign a uniform and additive credence distribution among Humean mosaics. This leads us to conclude that, contrary to widespread opinion, we should not dismiss the cosmic coincidence objection to the Humean account of laws. (shrink)

In recent years, online “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities have been linked to various deadly attacks targeting women. Why do these men react to romantic rejection with not just disappointment, but murderous rage? Feminists have claimed this is because incels desire women as objects or, alternatively, because they feel entitled to women’s attention. I argue that both of these explanatory models are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence toward women—for their oscillation between obsessive desire and violent hatred. (...) I propose instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian “Other.” For Beauvoir, when men conceive of women as Others, they represent them as simultaneously human subjects and embodiments of the natural world. Women function then as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. I go on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Rodger’s autobiographical manifesto, “My Twisted World.” I show how this Beauvoirian model sheds light on Rodger’s racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence toward women. It therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement. (shrink)

Can stable regularities be explained without appealing to governing laws or any other modal notion? In this paper, I consider what I will call a ‘Humean system’—a generic dynamical system without guiding laws—and assess whether it could display stable regularities. First, I present what can be interpreted as an account of the rise of stable regularities, following from Strevens [2003], which has been applied to explain the patterns of complex systems (such as those from meteorology and statistical mechanics). Second, since (...) this account presupposes that the underlying dynamics displays deterministic chaos, I assess whether it can be adapted to cases where the underlying dynamics is not chaotic but truly random—that is, cases where there is no dynamics guiding the time evolution of the system. If this is so, the resulting stable, apparently non-accidental regularities are the fruit of what can be called statistical necessity rather than of a primitive physical necessity. (shrink)

One of the key insights of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is the idea that gender-based subordination is not just something done to women, but also something women do to themselves. This raises a question about ethical responsibility: if women are complicit, or actively implicated in their own oppression, are they at fault? Recent Beauvoir scholarship remains divided on this point. Here, I argue that Beauvoir did, in fact, ethically criticize many women for their complicity, as a sign of (...) what she called “bad faith”. I challenge recent accounts by Nancy Bauer and Manon Garcia, who both read Beauvoir as exonerating complicit women. According to this reading, women emerge as human “freedoms” within a social world where a “destiny” of inferiority is already prepared for them. Their self-subordination is then an inevitable product of acting in a patriarchal world. I argue, however, that this interpretation generates a crucial tension, leading Bauer and Garcia to call on women to stop being complicit, while also claiming they cannot avoid complicity. I propose instead a different interpretation, on which feminine complicity is often fueled by criticizable ethical attitudes that are far from inevitable. By revisiting Beauvoir’s notion of “bad faith”, I show that this account is compatible with recognizing the limitations imposed on women’s agency and I show that this feminist ethical criticism is itself an important part of a collective project of social transformation. (shrink)

In situations where we ignore everything but the space of possibilities, we ought to suspend judgment—that is, remain agnostic—about which of these possibilities is the case. This means that we cannot sum our degrees of belief in different possibilities, something that has been formalized as an axiom of non-additivity. Consistent with this way of representing our ignorance, I defend a doxastic norm that recommends that we should nevertheless follow a certain additivity of possibilities: even if we cannot sum degrees of (...) belief in different possibilities, we should be more confident in larger groups of possibilities. It is thus shown that, in the type of situation considered (in so-called ‘classical ignorance’, i.e. “behind a thin veil of ignorance”), it is epistemically rational for advocates of suspending judgment to endorse this comparative confidence; while on the other hand it is shown that, even in classical ignorance, no stronger belief—such as a precise uniform probability distribution—is warranted. (shrink)

This doctoral dissertation investigates the notion of physical necessity. Specifically, it studies whether it is possible to account for non-accidental regularities without the standard assumption of a pre-existent set of governing laws. Thus, it takes side with the so called deflationist accounts of laws of nature, like the humean or the antirealist. The specific aim is to complement such accounts by providing a missing explanation of the appearance of physical necessity. In order to provide an explanation, I recur to fields (...) that have not been appealed to so far in discussions about the metaphysics of laws. Namely, I recur to complex systems’ theory, and to the foundations of statistical mechanics. The explanation proposed is inspired by how complex systems’ theory has elucidated the way patterns emerge, and by the probabilistic explanations of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. More specifically, this thesis studies how some constraints that make no direct reference to the dynamics can be a sufficient condition for obtaining in the long run, with high probability, stable regular behavior. I hope to show how certain metaphysical accounts of laws might benefit from the insights achieved in these other fields. According to the proposal studied in this thesis, some regularities are not accidental not in virtue of an underlying physical necessity. The non-accidental character of certain regular behavior is only due to its overwhelming stability. Thus, from this point of view the goal becomes to explain the stability of temporal patterns without assuming a set of pre-existent guiding laws. It is argued that the stability can be the result of a process of convergence to simpler and stable regularities from a more complex lower level. According to this project, if successful, there would be no need to postulate a (mysterious) intermediate category between logical necessity and pure contingency. Similarly, there would be no need to postulate a (mysterious) set of pre-existent governing laws. Part I of the thesis motivates part II, mostly by arguing why further explanation of the notions of physical necessity and governing laws should be welcomed (chapter 1), and by studying the plausibility of a lawless fundamental level (chapters 2 and 3). Given so, part II develops the explanation of formation of simpler and stable behavior from a more complex underlying level. (shrink)

Como introducción al monográfico sobre reduccionismo y emergencia brindamos aquí un contexto teórico al debate contemporáneo. Hablaremos primero del acercamiento naturalista en filosofía (§2), así como de dos de las características más importantes de la emergencia: autonomía y universalidad (§3). Finalmente, basándonos en la literatura contemporánea (principalmente en Patricia Palacios y Jessica Wilson, además de Mario Bunge y Alicia Juarrero) presentamos algunas de las definiciones y distinciones más importantes para entender mejor el debate sobre la emergencia (§4).

It is not uncommon in the history of science and philosophy to encounter crucial experiments or crucial objections the truth-value of which we are ignorant, that is, about which we suspend judgment. Should we ignore such objections? Contrary to widespread practice, I show that in and only in some circumstances they should not be ignored, for the epistemically rational doxastic attitude is to suspend judgment also about the hypothesis that the objection targets. In other words, suspension of judgment “propagates” from (...) the crucial objection to the hypothesis. In this paper I study under which conditions this phenomenon occurs, and discuss its significance for the topics of skepticism, scientific realism, and peer disagreement. (shrink)

At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation through the lens of Simone de (...) Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism: a form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today – well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance. (shrink)

Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a ‘typical’ dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light—a different light—on philosophical debates on the laws of nature. In (...) the explanation of such patterns, the specific form of the underlying dynamics is almost irrelevant. The constraints required, given a free state-space evolution, suffice to account for the coarse-grained lawful behaviour. An analysis of such constraints might thus provide a different account of how regular behaviour can occur. This paper focuses on drawing attention to this type of explanation, outlining it in the diverse areas of physics in which it appears, and discussing its limitations and significance in the tractable setting of classical statistical mechanics. (shrink)

I summarize, in this informal interview, the main approaches to the ‘Past Hypothesis’, the postulation of a low-entropy initial state of the universe. I’ve chosen this as an open problem in the philosophical foundations of physics. I hope that this brief overview helps readers in gaining perspective and in appreciating the diverse range of approaches in this fascinating unresolved debate.

How can a metaphysics of abstract entities be built upon a metaphysics of time? In this paper, I address the question of how to accommodate abstract entities in a presentist world. I consider both the traditional metaontological approach of unrestricted fundamental quantification and then ontological pluralism. I argue that under the former we need to impose two constraints in the characterization of presentism in order to avoid undesired commitments to abstract entities: we have to characterize presentism as a thesis only (...) about the concrete, and we also need to avoid the widely held distinction between tensed and tenseless senses of existence. Under ontological pluralism, instead, I argue that we can naturally accommodate any view of abstract objects in a presentist world. (shrink)

Much recent philosophy of physics has investigated the process of symmetry breaking. Here, I critically assess the alleged symmetry restoration at the fundamental scale. I draw attention to the contingency that gauge symmetries exhibit, that is, the fact that they have been chosen from an infinite space of possibilities. I appeal to this feature of group theory to argue that any metaphysical account of fundamental laws that expects symmetry restoration up to the fundamental level is not fully satisfactory. This is (...) a symmetry argument in line with Curie’s first principle. Further, I argue that this same feature of group theory helps to explain the ‘unreasonable’ effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and that it reduces the philosophical significance that has been attributed to the objectivity of gauge symmetries. (shrink)

This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding the constraints that truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply to Briggs and Forbes (2017), whoargue that certain truthmaking commitments are incurred by a Humean metaphysics and by the Growing-Block theory. First, I argue that Humean Supervenience does not need to endorse a standard version of truthmaker maximalism. This undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion that Humean Supervenience and the Growing-Block theory are (...) incompatible. Second, I argue that the Growing-Block theory does not commit us to any weaker version of truthmaker maximalism, which also undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion. Finally, I point out other reasons to think that any version of truthmaker maximalism is disputable, undermining a fortiori Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion and supporting the moral that metaphysical theories—or at least Humean Supervenience, the Growing-Block theory, and presentism—are little constrained by truthmaking commitments. (shrink)

Jewish Law as Rebellion is unconventional and controversial in its approach to the world of Jewish Law and its response to religious crises. The book delves into the contemporary application and development of halacha and pointedly protests many accepted methods and ideals, offering new solutions to existing halachic dilemmas. Rabbi Cardozo discusses hot topics such as same-sex marriage, conversion, and religion in the State of Israel and presents a critical analysis and explanation of the application of halacha.

En esta entrada se mencionan las principales cuestiones en los fundamentos de la mecánica estadı́stica y la termodinámica, y las cuestiones filosóficas en las que repercuten estas áreas de la fı́sica. Al final se añaden lecturas recomendadas, enfatizando las traducidas al español.

The representation of color by pictures raises worthwhile questions for philosophers and psychologists. Moreover, philosophers and psychologists interested in answering these questions will benefit by paying attention to each other's work. Failure to recognize the potential for interdisciplinary cooperation can be attributed to tacit acceptance of the resemblance theory of pictorial color. I argue that this theory is inadequate, so philosophers of art have work to do devising an alternative. At the same time, if the resemblance theory is false, then (...) color depiction has interesting implications for color science. Empirical researchers must rethink the widespread assumption that color recognition requires color constancy. I suggest that a neuropsychological account of color recognition will be instrumental to completing the philosophical task, but by the same token scientists might do well not to proceed without casting an eye to the work of philosophers of art. (shrink)

Nota do tradutor: O texto apresentado a seguir é uma tradução do ensaio “Heidegger and theology”. Para uma indicação de outras versões posteriores do texto e comentários a seu respeito, ver nota de rodapé 2, do autor, abaixo. No texto da tradução, a paginação original é indicada entre [ ] e em negrito.Nota preliminar do autor [235]: Este ensaio foi apresentado, de forma um pouco mais abreviada, para uma conferência de teólogos concernente ao tema sobre “o Pensamento e o Discurso (...) Não-objetivante na Teologia Contemporânea”1. Para os conferentes esse título tinha um significado atual e concreto: o uso do pensamento tardio de Martin Heidegger pelaa teologia protestante. Tendo em vista as circunstâncias de sua concepção e pronunciamento, e o eco que ele então provocou naquela ocasião e posteriormente2, achei melhor [236] deixar o ensaio com seu caráter original enquanto um discurso que se dirige a um público. (shrink)

_Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts_ is the first comprehensive collection of papers by philosophers examining the nature of imagination and its role in understanding and making art. Imagination is a central concept in aesthetics with close ties to issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, yet it has not received the kind of sustained, critical attention it deserves. This collection of seventeen brand new essays critically examines just how and in what form the notion of imagination (...) illuminates fundamental problems in the philosophy of art. (shrink)

Brief overview of the debates held in the workshop on scientific representation, in Prague, May 2018.

Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades (...) the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism. (shrink)

Antes de tecer qualquer tipo de homenagem ou traçar elogios, é necessário alertar ao leitor do risco e, talvez, da insuficiência das palavras. O alerta se deve ao fato das palavras não exprimirem com precisão o olhar que acolhe, a voz que direciona sem cercear a liberdade de escolher por si só qual caminho seguir. É assim que brevemente podemos aproximar o conceito de “cuidado” ao professor Dr. Luizir Oliveira, ou simplesmente Luizir.

This volume collects 12 essays by various contributors on the subject of the importance and influence of Schopenhauer’s doctoral dissertation for both Schopenhauer’s more well-known philosophy and the ongoing discussion of the subject of the principle of sufficient reason. The contributions deal with the historical context of Schopenhauer’s reflections, their relationship to idealism, the insights they hold for Schopenhauer’s views of consciousness and sensation, and how they illuminate Schopenhauer’s theory of action. This is the first full-length, English volume on Schopenhauer’s (...) Fourfold Root and its relevance for Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The thought-provoking essays collected in this volume will undoubtedly enrich the burgeoning field of Schopenhauer-studies. (shrink)

Gender seems to be everywhere in the norms governing our social world: from how to be a good friend and how to walk, to children’s clothes. It is not surprising then that a difficulty in identifying someone’s gender is often a source of discomfort and even anxiety. Numerous theorists, including Judith Butler and Charlotte Witt, have noted that gender is unlike other important social differences, such as professional occupation or religious affiliation. It has a special centrality, ubiquity and importance in (...) social practices. This observation moves us away from the classic philosophical question ‘what is gender?’ towards a more underappreciated one: ‘what is the role of gender’? To answer this question, I introduce the notion of social standing, which refers to our ability to enter into social relations. Social standing distinctions are an important feature of human societies. However, our existing philosophical tools do not adequately capture this notion: it is neither a moral distinction, nor is it reducible to hierarchy. I offer a conception of our entry into social relations as always conditioned by various shared representational assumptions about social subjects. When individuals are anomalous with respect to those assumptions, their social standing is in doubt. This explains important forms of uncommon and peculiar treatment across societies. I argue that forms of social devaluation on the basis of severe and visible disability in our society are central examples of diminished social standing. In our social context, being hard to recognize through the matrix of gender makes one representationally anomalous and imperils one’s social standing. Gender plays a fundamental role because gender legibility is a precondition for full social standing. Gender norms parallel ‘ability norms’ in this respect, linking notions of normalcy in scholarship on gender and in scholarship on disability. Social standing also explains two key phenomena about gender. Firstly, it tells us why our social practices and norms are pervasively gendered. Given the performative and relational nature of gendered positions, this is necessary for constant gender legibility. Secondly, social standing recognition accounts for social anxiety phenomena around gender ambiguity. These phenomena are reactions to anomaly as a threat to our social systems of meaning. In the final part of my dissertation, I consider some political consequences of my view. Understanding this special role of gender allows us to identify a distinct type of backlash to feminist social change that is particularly insidious. It is not driven by the hierarchical investments of the most gender-privileged, but rather by our collective investment in gender as a system of social coordination. I explore 2000s ‘raunch feminism’ to argue for this hypothesis. Gender’s role as a conditioning parameter of social standing puts systematic pressure on all would-be social subjects to be gender legible. This requires that individuals position themselves in recognizably gendered ways within social practices. But when gender differentiation is eroded, this positioning becomes tricky. This gives rise to a disorientation I call ‘meaning vertigo’. Meaning vertigo prompts attempts at reinstating a clear gendered system. In the process, gender equality suffers a serious set-back. To make substantial feminist progress, we must unseat gender from its central position in social domains like sexuality. I suggest that the best way to do this may be by foregrounding other aspects of social identity as systems of social coordination, instead of working on gender directly. (shrink)

We find the complete Euler characteristics for the categories of definable sets and functions in strongly minimal groups. Their images, which represent the Grothendieck semirings of those categories, are all isomorphic to the semiring of polynomials over the integers with nonnegative leading coefficient. As a consequence, injective definable endofunctions in those groups are surjective. For infinite vector spaces over arbitrary division rings, the same results hold, and more: We also establish the Fubini property for all Euler characteristics, and extend the (...) complete one to the eq-expansion of those spaces while preserving the Fubini property but not completeness. Then, surjective interpretable endofunctions in those spaces are injective, and conversely. Our presentation is made in the general setting of multi-sorted structures. (shrink)

A empatia, em Edith Stein, é uma vivência que permite o conhecimento do outro, mastambém do “sujeito empatizante”. Pela teoria “do vivenciar completo”, alcança-se nãoapenas um conhecimento da vivência do outro, mas também dos valores subjacentesà sua ação. Através desta teoria, pretende-se responder à proposta levinasiana deuma responsabilidade total, por um lado, e, por outro, de P. Ricoeur, que apresenta anecessidade de uma relação que pense ao mesmo tempo a reflexividade do si mesmo.A empatia permite um modo de constituição personalizadora (...) para os dois sujeitosque mantém, de modo simultâneo, a unicidade e a alteridade de cada um. (shrink)

RESUMO A empatia, em Edith Stein, é uma vivência que permite o conhecimento do outro, mas também do "sujeito empatizante". Pela teoria "do vivenciar completo", alcança-se não apenas um conhecimento da vivência do outro, mas também dos valores subjacentes à sua ação. Através desta teoria, pretende-se responder à proposta levinasiana de uma responsabilidade total, por um lado, e, por outro, de P. Ricœur, que apresenta a necessidade de uma relação que pense ao mesmo tempo a reflexividade do si mesmo. A (...) empatia permite um modo de constituição personalizadora para os dois sujeitos que mantém, de modo simultâneo, a unicidade e a alteridade de cada um. ABSTRACT According to Edith Stein, empathy is an experience that allows for knowledge of the other and of the "empathizing subject". The notion of "full experience" makes it possible to know the experience of the other, as well as the values underlying his/her actions. On the basis of this theory, the article seeks to respond to Levinas' proposal of total responsibility, on the one hand and to P. Ricœur, who argues in favor of a relation that, at the same time, takes into account the reflexivity of the self, on the other. Empathy allows for a personalized mode of constitution of the two subjects, which, simultaneously preserves the singularity and alterity of each. (shrink)

Cet article ne cherche pas tant à réhabiliter la sculpture décorative (la talha, en portugais), habituellement considérée comme un art mineur, qu’à apporter les différents témoignages de sa domination dans un lieu particulier, le Minho (le nord-ouest portugais), au moment notamment de l’adoption du rococo, domination a priori impensable dans le contexte occidental autrement qu’en termes de périphérie. Il s’agit ensuite de comprendre les nuances qu’une telle domination introduit corollairement dans les concepts artistiques (notamment dans celui de paternité) et, enfin, (...) d’examiner en quoi cette situation permet de remettre en question de l’intérieur quelques modèles théoriques passés et contemporains. (shrink)

Curso de Geografia de Jean-Jacques Rousseau integra o X volume da edição de OEuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Édition thématique du Tricentenaire, Slatkine/Honoré Champion (2012), subintitulado Escritos Científicos. Para esta tradução, além do texto consagrado na edição do tricentenário, também utilizamos a edição norte-americana dos textos de Rousseau organizada por Christopher Kelly, intitulada Autobiographical, scientific, religious, moral, and literary writings (2007). Preservamos, integralmente, as indispensáveis notas ao texto em língua francesa, que são de autoria de Christophe Van Staen.

O advento da sociedade em rede promoveu mudanças significativas na experiência-com-o-mundo. Observa-se nos últimos anos a crescente toxidade no ambiente informacional, marcado tanto pela vivência tóxica da informação que circula legalmente nas redes sociais como por informações que intoxicam os indivíduos e grupos. O objetivo é discutir, em tempos de pós-verdade e da sociedade non-stop, o aspecto tóxico da informação, que ao tornar o ambiente informacional tóxico, adoece indivíduos e também as sociedades democráticas, ao esmaecer a empatia para com os (...) demais e de pôr em risco a própria ideia de democracia e de vida partilhada de modo democrático. A proposta é discutir a intoxicação pela informação não pelo excesso (infoxicação), mas pelo que nomeio informação tóxica, i.e., o aspecto tóxico da informação e de ambiente informacional tóxico tendo como referência os discursos de ódio. Para tanto serão consideradas a desconstrução de experiências de estados democráticos mediante o crescimento da circulação de discursos de ódio e de discursos de ódio fascistas; o crescimento da desinformação; o crescimento da circulação de notícias fraudulentas (Fake news) e de notícias falsas (por exemplo, as não endossadas pelos saberes científicos, como o terraplanismo, a ideia da supremacia branca); os robots e os algoritmos. (shrink)

Available corpora for Argument Mining differ along several axes, and one of the key differences is the presence (or absence) of discourse markers to signal argumentative content. Exploring effective ways to use discourse markers has received wide attention in various discourse parsing tasks, from which it is well-known that discourse markers are strong indicators of discourse relations. To improve the robustness of Argument Mining systems across different genres, we propose to automatically augment a given text with discourse markers such that (...) all relations are explicitly signaled. Our analysis unveils that popular language models taken out-of-the-box fail on this task; however, when fine-tuned on a new heterogeneous dataset that we construct (including synthetic and real examples), they perform considerably better. We demonstrate the impact of our approach on an Argument Mining downstream task, evaluated on different corpora, showing that language models can be trained to automatically fill in discourse markers across different corpora, improving the performance of a downstream model in some, but not all, cases. Our proposed approach can further be employed as an assistant tool for better discourse understanding. (shrink)

In this paper I intend to identify the kind of Amoralism Nietzsche is arguing for in his writings of the middle period. In the first part of the paper, I focus on the presuppositions as well as on the motivation underlying this version of the amoralist position. Nietzsche diagnoses a normative conflict between intellectual integrity and the metaphysical presuppositions of our moral vocabulary and practices. This diagnosis leads him to the conclusion that we should reform a substantive part of our (...) moral intuitions. However, this first critique of morality, one that we could label an internal critique, is not all that Nietzsche has to say about normativity, even if we consider only the works of the middle period. According to my interpretation, Nietzsche is committed to a position that could be described as normative Minimalism. By developing this position, Nietzsche was clearly influenced by Montaigne´s reception of both Epicureanism and Pyrrhonism. The kind of human life Nietzsche associated with this position is identified by him with the life of the free spirits, conceived as both a genuine heir and an emulator of the ascetic types made possible by the Christian culture, paradigmatically exemplified by Pascal and the French Jansenists. In the second part of this paper, I contrast this kind of normative Minimalism with Nietzsche´s defence of Perfectionism in his later works. I conclude my paper by calling attention to some argumentative advantages of normative Minimalism and to some argumentative difficulties that Perfectionism cannot preclude (from a genuine Nietzschean perspective). (shrink)