Acerbo Stefano, « The εὐνοµώτατος ἔρανος in Pindar O. 1.25–27 and the Myth of Pelops: A Reassessment », Mnemosyne 75–2 (2022), p. 211–238 [revient sur les interprétations de l’épisode du chaudron de Pélops, avant de proposer une version différente, dans laquelle le chaudron évoquerait des représentations mythiques sur le rajeunissement et l’immortalité]. Alepidou Apostolia, « Thetis in Identity Crisis: Inversions of the Iliad in Statius’ Achilleid », Mnemosyne 74–5 (2021), p. 799–824 [compare...

Acerbo Stefano, « Mito e storia nella mitografia di età imperiale: Lico πολέμαρχος (Apollod., Bibl. III 41) », Emerita 87–2 (2019), p. 285–304 [la référence à la polémarchie dans le récit de la conquête du pouvoir à Thèbes contribue au plan de composition du Ps.-Apollodore. Cette allusion anachronique peut être vue comme un choix d’auteur, qui montre le rôle joué par les mythographes dans l’interaction entre le temps mythique et le passé historique]. Ameling Walter, « Zum Kult der (...) Arsinoe Phi... (shrink)

Antonio Signorini’s contribution to the constitutive theory of non-linear elasticity is reconstructed and analyzed. Some uninformed opinions suggesting he had a minor role, lacking of significant results, are discussed and refuted. It is shown that Signorini should be rightly credited for being among the first scholars aware of the central problem of non-linear elasticity: the determination of the general form of the elastic potential.

This paper establishes a Kantian duty against screen overexposure. After defining screen exposure, I adopt a Kantian approach to its morality on the ground that Kant’s notion of duties to oneself easily captures wrongdoing in absence of harm or wrong to others. Then, I draw specifically on Kant’s ‘duties to oneself as an animal being’ to introduce a duty of self-government. This duty is based on the negative causal impact of the activities it regulates on a human being’s mental and (...) physical powers, and, ultimately, on the moral employment of these powers. After doing so, I argue that the duty against screen overexposure is an instance of the duty of self-government. Finally, I consider some objections. (shrink)

yamato sharply distinguishes itself from other existing upper ontologies in the following respects. Most importantly, yamato is designed with both engineering and philosophical minds. yamato is based on a sophisticated theory of roles, given that the world is full of roles. yamato has a tenable theory of functions which helps to deal with artifacts effectively. Information is a ‘content-bearing’ entity and it differs significantly from the entities that philosophers have traditionally discussed. Taking into account the modern society in which a (...) flood of information occurs, yamato has a sophisticated theory of informational objects. Quality and quantity are carefully organized for the sake of greater interoperability of real-world data. The philosophical contribution of yamato includes a theory of objects, processes, and events. Those features are illustrated with several case studies. These features lead to the intensive application of yamato in some domains such as biomedicine and learning engineering. (shrink)

Presenting a critical history of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century, focusing on the transition from logical positivism in its first half to the ...

A widespread opinion holds that norms and codes of conduct as such can only be established via words, that is, in some lexical form. This perspective can be criticized: some norms produced by human acts are not word-based at all. For example, many norms are actually conveyed through graphics (e. g. road signs and land-use maps), sounds (e. g. the referee’s whistle), a silent gesture (the traffic warden’s signal to halt). In this article, we will focus on the norms that (...) are created by means of drawings and can be termed “drawn norms” or “graphical norms.” Specifically, we will inquire into the phenomenon of graphical norms with particular regard to traffic signs and land-use plans, and we will discuss the philosophical and legal problems to which these phenomena give rise. (shrink)

This paper makes the following claims: 1) early playwrights (especially Cratinus and Epicharmus, with a new reading of frr. 23B1-2 DK = 275-276 PCG) were keen on lampooning Eleatism; 2) through literary and linguistic devices that were obvious for Plato's original public, Plato revived this tradition in the Parmenides; 3) the Parmenides portrays the Eleats as catastrophically counterproductive philosophers. In sharp contrast with Socratic logoi, Eleatism, far from promoting philosophy (protreptic), eventually alienates all possible disciples ('apotreptic'), thus undermining the very (...) notion of Platonic philo-sophia. (shrink)

Despite his well‐known deductivism, in his early (unpublished) writings, Popper held an inductivist position. Up to 1929 epistemology entered Popper's reflections only as far as the problem was that of the justification of the scientific character of these fields of research. However, in that year, while surveying the history of non‐Euclidean geometries, Popper explicitly discussed the cognitive status of geometry without referring to psycho‐pedagogical aspects, thus turning from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science. As a consequence of (...) his reflections on the problematic relationship between geometrical‐mathematical constructions and physical reality Popper was able to get over a too direct notion of such a relationship, cast doubts on inductive inference and started conceiving in a new (strictly non‐inductivist) manner the relationship between theoretical and observational propositions. (shrink)

People can represent temporal stimuli (e.g., pictures depicting past and future events) as spatially connoted dimensions arranged along the three main axes (horizontal, sagittal, and vertical). For example, past and future events are generally represented, from the perspective of the individuals, as being placed behind and in front of them, respectively. Here, we report that such a 3D representation can also emerge for facial stimuli of different ages. In three experiments, participants classified a central target face, representing an individual at (...) different age stages, as younger or older than the reference face of 40 years. Manual responses were provided with two keys placed along the horizontal axis (Experiment 1), the sagittal axis (Experiment 2), and the vertical axis (Experiment 3). The results indicated that the younger faces were represented on the left/back/top side of the space, whereas the older faces were represented on the right/forward/bottom side of the space. Furthermore, in all experiments, the latencies decreased with the absolute difference between the age of the target face and that of the reference face (i.e., a distance effect). Overall, this work suggests that the spatial representation of time includes social features of the human face. (shrink)

Herbert Simon’s work presents a curious anomaly to the historian and philosopher trying to understand the development of classic Artificial Intelligence (AI). Simon was one of most influential figures in AI since its birth, and yet it is always with some difficulties that his work can be made to fit within the received canon of AI’s development and goals. In fact, he differed from every other figure in early AI on most counts: in terms of the recognized intellectual heritage of (...) AI, of his own background and training, of the goals he set for his own AI work and the assessment criteria he accepted. I will argue that these differences provide important clues toward a reevaluation of the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Herbert Simon’s work that may change our current understanding of both. On the one hand, classic Artificial Intelligence (or Complex Information Processing, as Simon preferred to call it for a number of years), provided the tool he needed to pursue a much broader research agenda that strove to encompass human beings in their cognitive, emotional, social, and political dimensions. On the other hand, AI’s curious status as the discipline that straggles the boundaries between engineering, science, and philosophy can be recast as the tool that allowed researchers to pursue philosophy’s old goals with an alternative methodology. From this perspective, Simon’s version of Artificial Intelligence becomes a full-fledged form of ”anti-philosophy” as ambitious and broad-ranging as old-fashioned metaphysics and as revolutionary as the latter in the radical refashioning of its methodology. It follows that a philosophical assessment of AI, at in least in its Simonian incarnation, must be more farreaching than it is usually thought. At the methodological level, it must discuss whether AI’s invention of computer simulation as the tool that overcomes the a-priori/a-posteriori distinction by actually producing the behavior it wants to explain is really adequate to the job at hand.. (shrink)

In Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason Kant speaks of an ethical state of nature and of an ethico-civil condition, with explicit reference to the juridical state of nature and the juridico-civil condition he discusses at length in his legal-political writings. Given that the Religion is the only work where Kant introduces a parallel between these concepts, one might think that this is only a loose analogy, serving a merely illustrative function. The paper provides a first outline of the (...) similarities and the differences between the state of nature and the civil condition in Right and in ethics. The comparison points to a deeper, structural relation between the two pairs of concepts. By doing so, it makes room for developing a unitary conception of the state of nature and of the civil condition, which would underlie both the ethical and the juridical version. (shrink)

A guest edited volume of the Journal of Applied Philosophy devoted to topics regarding the ethics of nudges, particularly those that have received little or no treatment up to now. Since the publication of Nudge in 2008, nudges have become widely used tools in policymakers' toolbox. Concurrently, ethicists have discussed which conditions, if any, ensure the fair and ethically legitimate implementation of such untraditional policy techniques. The debates have focused primarily on the alleged intrusiveness of nudges and their lack of (...) factual transparency. The special issue is intended to enrich the debate in the conviction that the clarity of the terms adopted within the debate could be improved and that some relevant ethical perspectives have been left out in assessing the morality of nudges. Specifically, the aims of this special issue are twofold, normative and conceptual. On the one side, we delve into the concepts on which the evaluation of nudging hinges, such as "preferences", "resistibility", and "libertarianism". Since the meanings assigned to such concepts drive our evaluation of nudging, their comprehension is critical. On the other side, the acceptability of nudges has been extensively assessed in the light of ethical theories developed within Western philosophy, and not with alternative but promising ethical frameworks from the Global South. Relatedly, some values implicated in nudging, such as the ethics of nudging vulnerable populations, have been overshadowed by scholars' attention to decisional autonomy. The special issue gives these themes the attention they deserve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hunters, Cooks, and Nooks:Two Interpretations of the Tangled Relationship Between Philosophy and ScienceStefano Franchi (bio)Knowledge is the measure of all things.—Plato, Prot. 361b1Preliminaries: Double QuestioningWhen philosophers ask questions about science, they usually do so in the context of one specific discipline whose latest results or whose historical development seem to pose genuinely philosophical problems: for instance, the nature of space/time, the nature of intelligence, the nature/nurture debate. It is (...) rarer to hear a philosopher asking questions about the general relationship between philosophy and science, even when, as in the cases above, the answer to this question provides the necessary ground for any specific investigation of the allegedly genuine philosophical problems arising in physics, biology, or cognitive science.The main difficulty lies in the intrinsic ambiguity of the term "science." On the one hand, "science" can be considered as a descriptive term: it is the genus of the empirically given, scientific disciplines (the "sciences," in the plural). On the other hand, "science" (episteme, scientia, Wissenschaft) (always in the singular) is a theoretical term that denotes a form of knowledge. More precisely, it refers, as philosophers say, to a "conceptually unified body of objective knowledge." Traditionally, the latter meaning includes philosophy itself within its denotation. Thus, when both meanings of the term "science" are considered, to interrogate the relationship between philosophy and science is always, and preliminarily, to question the nature of philosophy itself, even when the question as such is not explicitly raised. In all these cases, a characterization of the nature of philosophy is presupposed by a philosophical analysis of scientific results.However, unless the specificity of concrete scientific investigations is denied from the outset, the questioning, even when conducted from a circumscribed philosophical standpoint, cannot be reduced to a single gesture that interrogates the scientificity of philosophy. On the contrary, it must also concurrently question the possibility of a specific relation between a determinate philosophical endeavor and specific scientific pursuits. Any questioning of the relationship between philosophy and science will always imply a double gesture: on the one hand, a question about what makes or does not make philosophy a science; on the other, what brings philosophy closer, or moves [End Page 98] it farther apart, from the sciences. Most often, philosophers focus their attention on just one aspect of this double question. In this paper, I would like to address both sides of the issue. In particular, I would like to examine the two very different answers to this general problem given by Plato and by Michel Foucault. Although their answers address fundamentally the same issue, they are so diametrically opposed, as I will show, that they may be considered as the external boundaries of a very broad range of possible responses.2SignpostsLet me begin with Plato. In a well-known passage from the Euthydemus, the main characters are discussing which kind of knowledge is required by wisdom. In this context, to the delighted although belated surprise of Crito, the young Cleinias introduces a crucial distinction between hunters and cooks: the former know how to find the prey, but only the latter know how to use it:No art of actual hunting, [Cleinias] said, extends any further than pursuing and capturing; whenever the hunters catch what they are pursuing they are incapable of using it, but they and the fishermen hand over their prey to the cooks. And again, geometers and astronomers and calculators (who are hunters too, in a way, for none of these make their diagrams; they simply discover those which already exist), since they themselves have no idea of how to use their prey but only how to hunt it, hand over the task of using their discoveries to the dialecticians—at least, those of them who are not completely useless [anoetoi].[290b–c]1Cleinias's account acknowledges the reality and value of the knowledge gained by the sciences, but denies that scientists have full awareness of what they are doing and of the implications of their own work. Scientific knowledge lacks both self-reflexivity and transparency: it does not have the ability to bring to full evidence the principles it rests upon... (shrink)

Believing that the enterprise of constructing "artificial intelligence" transcends the bounds of any one discipline, the editors of Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds have brought together researchers in AI and scholars in the humanities to reexamine the fundamental assumptions of both areas. The AI community, for example, could benefit from explorations of human intelligence and creativity by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, literary critics, and others, while analysis of AI's theoretical struggles and technical advances could yield insights into such traditional humanist concerns as (...) the nature of rationality and the mind-body dichotomy.The contributions include a continuation of the famous Hubert Dreyfus-Daniel Dennett debate over Kasparov's defeat by IBM's Deep Blue; Philip Agre's tracing of difficulties in AI research to the inherited tensions of Cartesian dualism; Evelyn Fox Keller's examination of the development of computer technology in relation to biology; Douglas Hofstadter's argument that thinking is more than the theorem-solving activities of AI; and Alison Adam's discussion of the implicitly male universal subject used in AI. (shrink)

This special issue of Social Epistemology is devoted to critical comments on Fuller's study of the philosophy of Thomas S. Kuhn and its context.

This paper discusses a passage from the Second Day of Galileo’s Dialogue in which explicit reference is made to the game of tennis and, more specifically, to spinning balls. This often overlooked passage forms part and parcel of the tightly-knit argumentative structure of the work, and provides key arguments against Aristotelian physics. Furthermore, Galileo’s choice of terms shows how careful he was in his use of analogies as effective tools to reconcile the new physics that he was struggling to introduce, (...) with common sense. Finally, and most interestingly, by comparing this passage with a similar one from Galileo’s unpublished writings, this paper shows the extent to which Galileo was interested in the physics of spinning balls and how he planned to include a discussion of it in a work that he began shortly after the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, but never managed to finish. (shrink)