Cet ouvrage analyse le rôle des moeurs et des coutumes dans les discours philosophiques modernes et dans l'interrogation des classiques sur la subjectivité, le statut de la morale, la constitution et les limites de la souveraineté.

Why has power in the West assumed the form of an "economy," that is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it? In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile monotheism with God's threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if the Trinity amounted (...) to nothing more than a problem of managing and governing the heavenly house and the world. Agamben shows that, when combined with the idea of providence, this theological-economic paradigm unexpectedly lies at the origin of many of the most important categories of modern politics, from the democratic theory of the division of powers to the strategic doctrine of collateral damage, from the invisible hand of Smith's liberalism to ideas of order and security. But the greatest novelty to emerge from _The Kingdom and the Glory _ is that modern power is not only government but also glory, and that the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis of Western power. Through a fascinating analysis of liturgical acclamations and ceremonial symbols of power—the throne, the crown, purple cloth, the Fasces, and more—Agamben develops an original genealogy that illuminates the startling function of consent and of the media in modern democracies. With this book, the work begun with _Homo Sacer_ reaches a decisive point, profoundly challenging and renewing our vision of politics. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the rapid and unexpected rise of deep learning within Artificial Intelligence and its applications. It tackles the possible reasons for this remarkable success, providing candidate paths towards a satisfactory explanation of why it works so well, at least in some domains. A historical account is given for the ups and downs, which have characterized neural networks research and its evolution from “shallow” to “deep” learning architectures. A precise account of “success” is given, in order to sieve out (...) aspects pertaining to marketing or sociology of research, and the remaining aspects seem to certify a genuine value of deep learning, calling for explanation. The alleged two main propelling factors for deep learning, namely computing hardware performance and neuroscience findings, are scrutinized, and evaluated as relevant but insufficient for a comprehensive explanation. We review various attempts that have been made to provide mathematical foundations able to justify the efficiency of deep learning, and we deem this is the most promising road to follow, even if the current achievements are too scattered and relevant for very limited classes of deep neural models. The authors’ take is that most of what can explain the very nature of why deep learning works at all and even very well across so many domains of application is still to be understood and further research, which addresses the theoretical foundation of artificial learning, is still very much needed. (shrink)

In this paper I will address some theories of Roman Ingarden and Walter Benjamin in the light of the new reproductive technologies for streaming music. As to Ingarden's theory I argue that, in the case I am bringing into investigation, streaming music experience can bring new light on the problem of the identity of the musical work by creating a continuum in a sequence of performances, and such continuum may account for a sort of ‘fluid’ cross-identity of the music piece (...) variously performed. I also argue that the lack of ‘aura’, in this case, does not devalue the music piece and nevertheless allows for a notable aesthetic fruition. (shrink)

The experience of owning a body is built upon the integration of exteroceptive, interoceptive, and proprioceptive signals. Recently, it has been suggested that motor signals could be particularly important in producing the feeling of body part ownership. One thus may hypothesize that the strength of this feeling may not be spatially uniform; rather, it could vary as a function of the degree by which different body parts are involved in motor behavior. Given that our dominant hand plays a leading role (...) in our motor behavior, we hypothesized that it could be more strongly associated with one’s self compared to its non-dominant counterpart. To explore whether this possible asymmetry manifests as a stronger implicit association of the right hand with the self, we administered the Implicit Association Test to a group of 70 healthy individuals. To control whether this asymmetric association is human-body specific, we further tested whether a similar asymmetry characterizes the association between a right animal body part with the concept of self, in an independent sample of subjects. Our results revealed a linear relationship between the magnitude of the implicit association between the right hand with the self and the subject’s handedness. In detail, the strength of this association increased as a function of hand preference. Critically, the handedness score did not predict the association of the right-animal body part with the self. These findings suggest that, in healthy individuals, the dominant and non-dominant hands are differently perceived at an implicit level as belonging to the self. We argue that such asymmetry may stem from the different roles that the two hands play in our adaptive motor behavior. (shrink)

Individuals who deviate from social norms by committing crimes may have reduced facial emotion recognition abilities. Nevertheless, a specific category of offenders – i.e. organised crime (OC) members – is characterised by hierarchically organised social networks and a tendency to manipulate others to reach their illicit goals. Since recognising emotions is crucial to building social networks, OC members may be more skilled in recognising the facial emotion expressions of others to use this information for their criminal purposes. Evidence of a (...) difference between OC and non-organised crime (NOC) offenders in terms of facial emotion recognition is still lacking. To fill this gap in the literature, we tested 50 OC, 50 NOC offenders, and 50 non-offender controls for their ability to identify six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise). All participants underwent a cognitive and psychological evaluation to avoid alternative explanations. Results show that OC members were more able to detect the expression of fear in others as compared to NOC. We interpreted this finding in light of the social context and the behavioural criminal attitude of OC members. (shrink)

This article describes key paradigms employed to assess deception and reviews the main neuroscience-based technologies that have been employed to investigate the neural correlates of deception: electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and transcranial direct current stimulation. Any potential use of neuroscience-based methods to detect deception in real-life situations requires successful classification in single subjects. It describes findings on the single subject performance of these methods and addresses the effects of two factors that are problematic for all deception detection methods, the (...) potential use of countermeasures, strategies used by subjects to defeat the deception detection tests, and the potential role of false memories and of incidental encoding. It briefly outlines some of the ethical issues associated with these technologies to detect deceptive behavior. (shrink)

Global development, diffusion and implementation of the human-centredness paradigm can be performed at best when supported by a study of our mental activity. By analysing our mental operations, we can understand how human needs, interests, values and creativity take form, what each consists of, how it is possible to expand, modify and generate them. The proposed model of mental activity is based on attentional movement. The new opportunities, both ethical and social, offered by such a study are presented.

As prototypical incentive with biological meaning, food illustrates the distinction between money as tool and money as drug. However, consistent neuroscience results challenge this view of food as intrinsic value and opposite to drugs of abuse. The scarce availability over evolutionary time of both food and money may explain their similar drug-like non-satiability, suggesting an integrated mechanism for generalized reinforcers. (Published Online April 5 2006).

My goal is to emphasize the way we generally use the word ‘logic’ and the sort of problems related to the definition of logic and the sort of problems related to the definition of logic. I also wish to underline the differences between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.