Language has a rich typology of inferential types. It was recently shown that subjects are able to divide the informational content of new visual stimuli among the various slots of the inferential typology: when gestures or visual animations are used in lieu of specific words in a sentence, they can trigger the very same inferential types as language alone (Tieu et al., 2019 ). How general are the relevant triggering algorithms? We show that they extend to the auditory modality and (...) to music cognition. We tested whether pro-speech musical gestures, i.e. musical excerpts that replace words in sentences, can give rise to the same inferences. We show that it is possible to replicate the same typology of inferences using pro-speech music. Minimal and complex musical excerpts can behave just like language, gestures, and visual animations with respect to the logical behavior of their content when embedded in sentences. Specifically, we found that pro-speech music can generate scalar implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, and homogeneity inferences. (shrink)

This article discusses Lysias’ Against Eratosthenes as an ancient Athenian instance of the superior orders plea, a line of defence made notorious during the Nuremberg trials, which in turn became the cornerstone of modern war crime legislation. Whereas the pre-Nuremberg jurisdiction largely embraced the principle of superior responsibility, whereby a subordinate executing criminal orders was not to be held liable for them, the trials of the Nazi war criminals brought about a complete reversal of this doctrine. While remaining faithful to (...) the spirit of the Nuremberg jurisdiction, the subsequent legislative acts sought to further elaborate its underlying principle of absolute liability, in order to precisely determine the question of guilt and innocence. I argue that despite the close relationship between modern legal systems and Roman law, which fully embraced the doctrine of superior responsibility, it is in the juridical thought of ancient Athens that one finds the archetype of contemporary war crime legislation. (shrink)

Taking its cue from modern debates on the expressive function of punishment, this paper discusses the stigmatizing effect of penalties in classical Athens. It focuses on corporal punishment, which was discursively associated in the Athenian public discourse with slaves and other fringe groups of the citizen community, despite the fact that in reality, with only certain restrictions, it was meted out to all social tiers making up the polis-community. Unlike other penalties, those affecting the body were not only public, but (...) not infrequently spectacular. This turned them into versatile devices of stigmatization whereby the punishment itself was no longer considered a one-off event, but a permanent mark branding the person who suffered it as a social outcast. (shrink)

What are the underlying processes that enable human beings to recognize a happy face? Clearly, featural and configural cues will help to identify the distinctive smile. In addition, the motivational state of the observer will influence the interpretation of emotional expressions. Therefore, a model accounting for emotion recognition is only complete if bottom-up and top-down aspects are integrated.

In this paper I make two arguments: first, that the Western Cape has always functioned as the epistemological heading of the 'coloured' category. This is because it is in the Western Cape where the category first emerged as a descriptor for the 'mixing of blood', and where knowledge around the category was first produced through the appointment of commissions of inquiry. In addition, intellectuals in the Western Cape based primarily at Stellenbosch University also produced knowledge by drawing on the concept (...) of heredity, and attaching inherited racial traits or characteristics to the 'coloured' category. The second argument is that by the late 1930s, a new epistemological heading emerged in the Transvaal, where intellectuals from the University of Pretoria would engage with the category through the emerging discourse on bloedvermening or miscegenation. To these Pretoria-based intellectuals, 'coloured' was no longer just a marker for the 'mixing' of blood that originated in the Western Cape, but represented a threat to the heredity of the Afrikaner volk in the Union as a whole. Intellectuals in the Transvaal were less concerned with ascribing hereditary traits to the 'coloured' category, and more preoccupied with how those characteristics would affect the white racial imprint through miscegenation. By arguing that the Transvaal emerged as a new heading on the 'coloured' category, I am suggesting that another epistemological direction is on offer one that departs from the form, the sign, or the logic of the heading of the Western Cape. (shrink)

Summary This essay explores the place of natural philosophy among the patronage projects of Louis XIV, focusing on the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (or Histoire des animaux) of the 1670s, one of a number of works of natural philosophy to issue from Louis XIV's printing house. Questions particular to the Histoire des animaux include the interaction between text and image, the credibility and authority of images of exotic animals, and the relationship between comparative anatomy and natural (...) history, and between human and animal anatomy. At the same time that the Histoire des animaux contributed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert's management of patronage and of Louis's image, it was a work of natural philosophy, representing the collaborative efforts of the new Paris Academy of Sciences. It examined natural history and comparative anatomy in new ways, and its illustrations broke new ground in their depiction of animals in a natural setting. However, the lavishly formatted books were presentation volumes and did not gain wide circulation until their republication in 1733. Sources consulted include Colbert's manuscript memoires on the royal printers and engravers. (shrink)

Defining experiment was particularly vexed in the realm of anatomical dissection and vivisection. Was dissection merely descriptive, or something more? Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood and Aselli's discovery of the so-called lacteal veins shaped much anatomical research between the late 1620s and the 1650s. While the techniques of dissection and vivisection gained wide use, there was much debate on the validity of the circulation in particular, and its relationship to the lacteal veins. Critics, particularly the French anatomist (...) Jean Riolan, but also the natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi, focused on the lack of causation in Harvey's method and the lack of medical use and not on his use of vivisection. Jean Pecquet's discovery of the thoracic duct in 1651 changed the terms of the debate by definitively connecting the circulation with the lacteals. Riolan's critiques of Pecquet in the 1650s show profoundly differing notions of the purpose of dissection. While Gassendi eventually accepted Harvey's concept of the circulation, Riolan never did. (shrink)

This essay examines the efforts by Austro-Marxists to identify, define, and incorporate (geistige Arbeiter) into their movement. In this struggle, socialists faced a hegemonic conservative establishment that controlled the largest scholarly societies and intellectual publications and held most positions in the universities and educational bureaucracy. Despite notable successes in a closer examination of the discourse on intellectuals reveals that conservative ideas remained entrenched in interwar Austria. Austro-Marxists could not overcome the class biases and status anxieties of the educated middle class (...) (BildungsbBlack Viennese” cultural field have largely escaped critical scrutiny despite, and likely because of, their pervasiveness during the First Republic and after World War II. In looking at Austrian and European debates on the role of intellectuals in modern society, this article places conservatives back at the center of interwar Austrian intellectual and cultural history, while contending that they must bear greater responsibility for the authoritarian and fascist turns of Austria during the 1930s. (shrink)

I primi decenni del Seicento costituiscono un difficile e problematico periodo della storia della cultura europea. Filosofia e scienza si rinnovano profondamente grazie alle opere di autori come Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi, Renè Descartes, Francis Bacon, William Gilbert, Tommaso Campanella, Federico Cesi. I contenuti delle loro teorie mettono in crisi l'Aristotelismo e la Scolastica e il primato delle antiche istituzioni e dei secolari poteri che su di essi avevano fondato la loro legittimità. Il conflitto tra nuovi saperi e antichi primati (...) diviene uno dei tratti più caratteristici della vita culturale del tempo. Il libro ricostruisce alcuni dei più significativi momenti di questa lotta, attingendo sempre a fonti originali e portando alla luce documenti inediti e sconosciuti. (shrink)

The data science era is characterized by data-driven automated decision systems (ADS) enabling, through data analytics and machine learning, automated decisions in many contexts, deeply impacting our lives. As such, their downsides and potential risks are becoming more and more evident: technical solutions, alone, are not sufficient and an interdisciplinary approach is needed. Consequently, ADS should evolve into data-informed ADS, which take humans in the loop in all the data processing steps. Data-informed ADS should deal with data responsibly, guaranteeing nondiscrimination (...) with respect to protected groups of individuals. Nondiscrimination can be characterized in terms of different types of properties, like fairness and diversity. While fairness, i.e., absence of bias against minorities, has been widely investigated in machine learning, only more recently this issue has been tackled by considering all the steps of data processing pipelines at the basis of ADS, from data acquisition to analysis. Additionally, fairness is just one point of view of nondiscrimination to be considered for guaranteeing equity: other issues, like diversity, are raising interest from the scientific community due to their relevance in society. This paper aims at critically surveying how nondiscrimination has been investigated in the context of complex data science pipelines at the basis of data-informed ADS, by focusing on the specific data processing tasks for which nondiscrimination solutions have been proposed. (shrink)

(2010). The representation of animals in the early modern period. Annals of Science: Vol. 67, The Representation of Animals in the Early Modern Period, pp. 299-301. doi: 10.1080/00033790.2010.488139.

The speed and scale of the COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted the limits of current health systems and the potential promise of non‐establishment research such as “DIY” research. We consider one example of how DIY research is responding to the pandemic, discuss the challenges faced by DIY research more generally, and suggest that a “trust architecture” should be developed now to contribute to successful future DIY efforts.

Recent research put forward the hypothesis that eye movements are integrated in memory representations and are reactivated when later recalled. However, “looking back to nothing” during recall might be a consequence of spatial memory retrieval. Here, we aimed at distinguishing between the effect of spatial and oculomotor information on perceptual memory. Participants’ task was to judge whether a morph looked rather like the first or second previously presented face. Crucially, faces and morphs were presented in a way that the morph (...) reactivated oculomotor and/or spatial information associated with one of the previously encoded faces. Perceptual face memory was largely influenced by these manipulations. We considered a simple computational model with an excellent match that expresses these biases as a linear combination of recency, saccade, and location. Surprisingly, saccades did not play a role. The results suggest that spatial and temporal rather than oculomotor information biases perceptual face memory. (shrink)

A key feature of unregulated mHealth research is the diversity of participants in this space. Applying an approach drawn from user experience design, we describe a set of archetypal unregulated mHealth researcher “personas,” which range from individuals who seek empowerment or have philanthropic objectives to those who are primarily motivated by financial gain or have misanthropic objectives. These descriptions are useful for evaluating policies applicable to mHealth to understand how they will impact various stakeholders.

The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, said the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. In the seventeenth century, the kitchen, and particularly the scullery, was the site of the slaughter, butchery, and dismemberment by carving of a variety of animals. The tools and techniques employed in these activities overlapped considerably with those of animal and human dissection. Dissection often took place in residences and the (...) kitchen was the most likely place for this activity. This challenges historians’ identification of the kitchen as an exclusively female realm. The preparation of food and medicines occurred in tandem with experimental natural philosophy, sharing tools as well as the sensory apparatus of cooking, including tasting and smelling. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to separately analyze the role of featural and configural face representations. Stimuli containing only featural information were created by cutting the faces into their parts and scrambling them. Stimuli only containing configural information were created by blurring the faces. Employing an old‐new recognition task, the aim of Experiments 1 and 2 was to investigate whether unfamiliar faces (Exp. 1) or familiar faces (Exp. 2) can be recognized if only featural or configural information is provided. (...) Both scrambled and blurred faces could be recognized above chance level. A further aim of Experiments 1 and 2 was to investigate whether our method of creating configural and featural stimuli is valid. Pre‐activation of one form of representation did not facilitate recognition of the other, neither for unfamiliar faces (Exp. 1) nor for familiar faces (Exp. 2). This indicates a high internal validity of our method for creating configural and featural face stimuli. Experiment 3 examined whether features placed in their correct categorical relational position but with distorted metrical distances facilitated recognition of unfamiliar faces. These faces were recognized no better than the scrambled faces in Experiment 1, providing further evidence that facial features are stored independently of configural information. From these results we conclude that both featural and configural information are important to recognize a face and argue for a dual‐mode hypothesis of face processing. Using the psychophysical results as motivation, we propose a computational framework that implements featural and configural processing routes using an appearance‐based representation based on local features and their spatial relations. In three computational experiments (Experiments 4–6) using the same sets of stimuli, we show how this framework is able to model the psychophysical data. (shrink)

Questo articolo cerca di chiarire i termini che costituiscono i fondamenti della concezione della vita vegetale elaborata da Gassendi nel Syntagma philosophicum. Nei primi capitoli del quarto libro, intitolato De plantis, della seconda parte di quest’opera, sono contenute alcune considerazioni sulla natura dell’anima vegetale, della sensibilità, delle funzioni organiche e delle qualità delle piante che rappresentano un densissimo capitolo di filosofia naturale passato finora praticamente inosservato fra le pur fitte maglie delle ricerche sull’opera e il pensiero di Gassendi. Il presente (...) articolo dà rilievo ai contenuti di questa parte del Syntagma, connettendoli coerentemente gli uni con gli altri. The present paper focuses on Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophicum botanical life concepts. In particular here will be analyzed the first chapters of the forth book titled De plantis. The latter contains a considerable amount of observation regarding the nature of the so called vegetable soul, the sensibility, the organic function and quality of plants. Despite the large literature on Gassendi such observations have still been not examined accurately. Here has been done the attempt both of bringing into light such concepts and give them a coherent skeleton. (shrink)