In this paper, we report on an experiment with The Walking Dead (TWD), which is a narrative-driven adventure game with morally charged decisions set in a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies. This study aimed to identify physiological markers of moral decisions and non-moral decisions using infrared thermal imaging (ITI). ITI is a non-invasive tool used to capture thermal variations due to blood flow in specific body regions that might be caused by sympathetic activity. Results show that moral decisions seem to (...) elicit a significant decrease in temperature in the chin region 20 seconds after participants are presented with a moral decision. However, given the small sample involved, and the lack of significance in other regions, future studies might be needed to confirm the results obtained in this work. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the expressiveness of the variety of propositional interval neighborhood logics , we establish their decidability on linearly ordered domains and some important subclasses, and we prove the undecidability of a number of extensions of PNL with additional modalities over interval relations. All together, we show that PNL form a quite expressive and nearly maximal decidable fragment of Halpern–Shoham’s interval logic HS.

This study aimed to evaluate if eye blinks can be used to discriminate players with different performance in a session of Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Tetris. To that end, we developed a state-of-the-art method for blink extraction from EAR measures, which is robust enough to be used with data collected by a low-grade webcam such as the ones widely available on laptop computers. Our results show a significant decrease in blink rate per minute (blinks/m) during the first minute of playing (...) Tetris. After having defined 3 groups of proficiency based on in-game performance (Novices, Intermediates, and Experts) we found out that expert players display a significantly lower decrease in blinks/m compared to novices during the first minute of gameplay, which shows that Tetris players' proficiency can be detected by looking at eye blinks/m variations during the early phase of a game session. This difference in blinks/m is observed throughout the entire game session, which supports the general conclusion that proficient Tetris players have a lower decrease in blinks/m, even when playing more difficult levels. Finally, we offer some interpretations of this effect and the relationship that our results may have with the visual cognitive workload experienced during the gameplay. (shrink)

Uno dei principali problemi nello studio della mente e della sua "collocazione" consiste nell'identificazione del corretto Livello di Astrazione a cui le varie descrizioni fenomeniche e le corrispondenti ipotesi esplicative possono essere sviluppate e confrontate. L'articolo contribuisce all'attuale dibattito metodologico in filosofia della mente analizzando due nozioni fondative, quella di modello e quella di simulazione, sulla base del concetto di Livello di Astrazione. L'ambito è quello del Metodo delle Astrazioni, proposto in Floridi e Sanders [2003]. Il Metodo delle Astrazioni si (...) basa su una particolare branca dell'informatica teorica, quella dei Metodi Formali (Roever e Engelhardt [1998]; Woodcock e Davies [1996]), dove la matematica discreta è utilizzata per descrivere analiticamente le specifiche del comportamento di sistemi che elaborano informazioni. I sistemi sono descritti in termini di osservabili e regole di transizione, cioè come sistemi di transizione. Le descrizioni comportano l'utilizzo di variabili che rappresentano osservabili nella realtà, astraendo da altri eventuali osservabili. L'idea di fondo del Metodo delle Astrazioni è che tale processo di filtraggio sia ineliminabile in qualsiasi accesso alla realtà. Il tentativo di sondare un sistema in maggiore profondità produce una maggiore astrazione delle teorie e degli oggetti teorici che descrivono tale sistema. Il Metodo delle Astrazioni si presenta quindi come uno strumento per organizzare e chiarificare le varie teorie che intendono fornire una spiegazione della realtà o della conoscenza. La principale tesi dell'articolo è che "modello" e "simulazione" non possano essere pensati come nozioni a sé stanti, ma che la loro natura possa essere chiarita nei termini di tipi di relazioni tra sistemi di transizione. Nello specifico, si argomenta che la relazione di simulazione è una relazione tra gli osservabili di sistemi di transizione, mentre il modello è una relazione tra le regole di transizione di questi sistemi. Dati questi due nuovi tipi di relazioni, è possibile arricchire con ulteriori strutture di analisi il Metodo delle Astrazioni, estendendo la sua applicabilità. Queste strutture sono discusse nell'articolo come "Reti di Astrazione". (shrink)

We argue that legal argumentation, as the subject matter as well as a special subfield of Argumentation Studies (AS), has to be examined by making skilled use of the full panoply of tools such as argumentation and story schemes which are at the forefront of current work in AS. In reviewing the literature, we make explicit our own methodological choices (particularly regarding the place of normative deliberation in practical reasoning) and then illustrate the implications of such an approach through the (...) analysis of a case study in the English law of evidence. We argue that a clear distinction must be drawn between practical argumentation and stories. Because of the institutional separation between legal judgment and fact-finding in common-law jury trials, we argue for the combination of argument and story-based analysis. (shrink)

(English:) The article introduces conspiracy beliefs and considers the most relevant literature in the field. The main purpose of the article is phenomenological: it proposes to understand conspiracy beliefs within the broader genre of what I call general conceptual beliefs (or simply, general beliefs), whose central features are big issues, logical-conceptual fallacies, pseudorationality, bad faith, and monological bias. I claim that general beliefs are functional to a motivationally biased and inherently dishonest communication (the same one that conspiracy narratives share with (...) political extremism, religious fundamenta-lism and other eccentric belief systems), which is essentially conceived for practical and self-representational purposes (not for knowledge). The article argues against the mere stigmatization of this phenomenon and rather seeks to understand it by looking at a broader and murkier region of human experience, for which we are all responsible in some way. -/- (Castellano:) El artículo introduce al análisis de las creencias conspirativas y considera la literatura más relevante sobre el tema. El objetivo del escrito es fenomenológico: entender las creencias conspirativas colocándolas en un género más amplio, las creencias conceptuales generales (o, simple-mente, creencias generales), cuyas carac-terísticas esenciales son: grandes temas, falacias lógico-conceptuales, pseudoracionalidad, mala fe y tendencia monológi-ca. Las creencias generales son funcionales a una comunicación sesgada y tendencialmente deshonesta, la misma que las his-torias conspirativas comparten con ex-tremismos políticos, fundamentalismos religiosos y otros sistemas de creencias excéntricos, cuya finalidad es eminentemente práctica y autorepresentativa (no teorética). El artículo se opone a la mera estigmatización del fenómeno y trata más bien de comprenderlo, observando una región más amplia y turbia de la experiencia humana, de la que todos somos responsables de alguna manera. (shrink)

We survey main developments, results, and open problems on interval temporal logics and duration calculi. We present various formal systems studied in the literature and discuss their distinctive features, emphasizing on expressiveness, axiomatic systems, and (un)decidability results.

In the wake of high profile and recent events of blatant privacy violations, which also raise issues of democratic accountability as well as, at least potentially, undermining the legitimacy of current local and international governance arrangements, a rethinking of the justification of the right to privacy is proposed. In this paper, the case of the violation of the privacy of a bullied autistic youngster and the consequent prosecution of 3 Google executives will be discussed first. We will then analyse the (...) arguments made by both academic experts and pundits who agree with Google’s claim that if the first sentence had been left unchallenged, it would have opened the floodgates to several other jurisdictions that would as a consequence have used it as a pretext to increase control on the internet, jeopardising in such a way free speech, which has been seen so far as an inalienable right which should not be censored. Finally, by going beyond the sentences and their immediate contexts, we will propose a theoretical justification of our analysis. Our main claim is that the value of the right to privacy is based on the argument that its violation would undermine citizens’ capacity to participate effectively in democratic politics. (shrink)

The paper provides both a description of conspiracy beliefs and an insight into their cultural significance. On one side, it highlights their specific formal features, on the other, and this constitutes its peculiarity in the recent literature on the topic, it considers them within the broader genre of general conceptual beliefs, whose main characteristics are weak methodology and logical structure, strong affective and dispositional constraints, epistemic closure and mauvaise foi, and whose main function is practical and self-representative (not epistemic). The (...) paper also claims that political theory and social sciences had some influence in legitimizing certain ideas and stereotypes that are exacerbated in conspiracy beliefs, while other te(le)ological conceptions, such as finalism and providence, may be an important source of ideas that turn out to be widely spread in contemporary criticism towards those same beliefs. (shrink)

The knowledge of truth, in Plato, is an experience that calls for conversion of the soul (μεταστροφή, περιστροφή). The basic feature of this experience consists in some sort of connection, which is constantly at work, between rational arguments and their non-rational conditions, briefly, lógos and páthos. How does this connection show up in Plato? Its crucial importance emerges many times at both narrative (récit) and theoretical level. In the three parts of my contribution, I show how logos-pathos intertwines with Plato's (...) notion of conversion considered as a double-sided phenomenon, as both "process" of moral education and "noetic event". (shrink)

In this paper we focus our attention on tableau methods for propositional interval temporal logics. These logics provide a natural framework for representing and reasoning about temporal properties in several areas of computer science. However, while various tableau methods have been developed for linear and branching time point-based temporal logics, not much work has been done on tableau methods for interval-based ones. We develop a general tableau method for Venema's \cdt\ logic interpreted over partial orders (\nsbcdt\ for short). It combines (...) features of the classical tableau method for first-order logic with those of explicit tableau methods for modal logics with constraint label management, and it can be easily tailored to most propositional interval temporal logics proposed in the literature. We prove its soundness and completeness, and we show how it has been implemented. (shrink)

La convinzione che la corretta comprensione della filosofia di Giordano Bruno sia imprescindibile dal tempo e dal luogo in cui il testo venne scritto è il principio ispiratore dell’originale metodo di ricerca di Guido del Giudice. Questa antologia, che raccoglie per la prima volta tutte le epistole dedicatorie delle opere latine, giunge a coronamento di un lavoro decennale dell’autore.

In this study, we predict the different levels of performance in a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Tetris session based on the score and the number of matches played by the players. Using the first 45 seconds of gameplay, a Random Forest Classifier was trained on the five keys used in the game obtaining a ROC_AUC score of 0.80. Further analysis revealed that the number of down keys (forced drop) and the number of left keys (left translation) are the most relevant (...) keys in this task, showing that by merely including the data from these two keys our Random Forest Classifier reached a ROC_AUC score of 0.83.We conclude that the keylogger data during the early phases of a game session can be successfully used to predict performance in longer sessions of Tetris. (shrink)

This article aims to evaluate the contribution of Bentham’s ideas to the jurisprudential debate in view of their relevance vis a vis their contemporary reception. The focus is on Bentham’s revolutionary idea of publicity with its spill-over effects on contemporary debates on the rule of law and accountable and transparent governance. As far as the method is concerned, after having examined Bentham’s ideas on the rule of law and the debate they raised, the focus in the second section of this (...) article is specifically on his conception of publicity. Some critical remarks then show that Bentham’s focus on publicity and transparency has been rightly interpreted in the contemporary debate as an important contribution. However, it is their justification that it is judged to be problematic. In fact, the assessment of the fundamental importance of publicity for the rule of law and transparent and accountable governance leads to a critical engagement with contemporary readings of Bentham’s scholarship, in primis that of Gerald Postema, with a development of the latter’s republican interpretation. The direction of travel that is proposed is towards a more liberal republicanism. The article not only shows how Bentham’s contribution should be revaluated in view of contemporary interpretations, but also proposes directions for further research developments according to which contemporary conceptions of regulation need to take a reflexive turn while aiming at legitimate legality at the same time. (shrink)

The debate on the argumentative turn in Public Policy and Administration (PPA), as reflective of the influence of politico-legal theory on the discipline, is reviewed with a thorough and indepth engagement with the Argumentation Theory (AT) literature. The focus in this article is in fact of a methodological nature since we argue that critical scholars - who have contributed to the general and specialized (i.e. political discourse analysis and critical contextualism) literature of AT as well as politico-legal theory - pave (...) the way to a novel methodology which will be exemplified through the analysis of the transparency concept. (shrink)

Ineffability in Plato is a conundrum. There are at least four dimensions of ineffability in Platonic texts: epistemic (divine), strategic (religious), unspeakability and incommunicability. In this paper, I deal only with the first dimension, which is strictly epistemic in kind, and defend that Plato rejects divine ineffability, namely, the belief that the knowledge of the divine in general is inaccessible to the human mind. Several crucial passages attest to this rejection unequivocally. They show that Plato attached a great philosophical relevance (...) to what I call the equivalenceprinciple, namely, the interdependence or specularity between human and divine intelligence. The assertion of this principle represents the Platonic path to absolute knowledge, which I try to locate in the broader context of the history of philosophy, from early philosophers to Hegel. (shrink)

(English:) This contribution attempts a first non-normative approach to the problem of the classic, its definition and its meaning in an age of globalization. It reviews a series of common representations of the classic (and other analogous or contrary terms), stressing the programmatic-ideological aspect that generally characterizes them. Classic, actually, tends to be a foundational category, and therefore rests on delimitations that determine its exclusiveness as opposed to something else. This paper, in particular, criticizes the last boundary of the exclusivity (...) of the classic, that is, its normative opposition to fashion and actuality. On the contrary, it is argued that there is a substantial link between classic, actuality and fashion. On the basis of this connection, two deflationary definitions of the classic are proposed: the first regards it as part of the broader process of construction of historical identity by concrete individuals. The second, on the other hand, conceives it as a product of art, and, therefore, of a formative process of abilities, skills, taste, by which the classic becomes the object of technical, aesthetic and teleological judgments. -/- (Spanish:) En esta contribución se intenta una primera aproximación no normativa al problema del clásico, su definición y su significado en una era de globalización. Se revisa una serie de representaciones comunes sobre lo clásico (y otros términos análogos o contrarios), se destaca el aspecto programático-ideológico que por lo general las caracteriza. Clásico, en efecto, tiende a ser una categoría fundacional, por lo cual se apoya en delimitaciones que determinan su exclusividad por oposición a otra cosa. En este trabajo, en particular, se critica la última frontera de la exclusividad de lo clásico, es decir, su oposición normativa a la moda y la actualidad. Por el contrario, se argumenta que existe un vínculo sustancial entre el clásico, la actualidad y la moda. A partir de esta conexión, se proponen dos definiciones deflacionarias del clásico: la primera lo considera parte del proceso más amplio de construcción de la identidad histórica por parte de individuos concretos. El segundo, en cambio, lo concibe como un producto del arte, y, por tanto, de un proceso de formación de competencias, habilidades, gusto, por el cual el clásico se convierte en objeto de juicios técnicos, estéticos y teleológicos. (shrink)

In this study, we extracted facial action units (AUs) data during a Hearthstone tournament to investigate behavioural differences between expert, intermediate, and novice players. Our aim was to obtain insights into the nature of expertise and how it may be tracked using non-invasive methods such as AUs. These insights may shed light on the endogenous responses in the player and at the same time may provide information to the opponents during a competition. Our results show that player expertise may be (...) characterised by specific patterns in facial expressions. More specifically, AU17 (chin raiser), AU25 (lips apart), and AU26 (jaws drop) intensity responses during gameplay may vary according to players' expertise. Such results were obtained by training a random forest classifier to test whether we can use these three AUs alone to accurately detect players' expertise. The classifier reached 0.75 accuracy on 5-fold cross-validation, after balancing the class weights, and 0.85 after having applied the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) function. These results suggest that AUs can be effectively used to discriminate different levels of expertise in competitive video game players. (shrink)

In this study, we analyzed the blinking behavior of players in a video game tournament. Our aim was to test whether spontaneous blink patterns differ across levels of expertise. We used blink rate, blink duration, blink frequency, and eyelid movements represented by the Eye Aspect Ratio (EAR) to train a machine learning classifier to discriminate between different levels of expertise. Classifier performance was highly influenced by features such as the mean, standard deviation and median EAR. Moreover, further analysis suggests that (...) blinking rate and blink duration are likely to increase along with the level of expertise. We speculate this may be indicative of a reduction in cognitive load and lowered stress of expert players. In general, our results suggest that EAR and blink patterns can be used to identify different levels of expertise of video game players. (shrink)

The essay focuses, firstly, on the notion of evil in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE). James identified evil with a pathological mental fact, “depression”, and analyzed it according to different thresholds and degrees of symptomatic severity: from the more conscious, intellectualized and, apparently, superficial cases to the more painful and obscure, which, according to his view, were also the deepest ones. The second aim of this essay is to cast light on James’ theory of religious conversion. According to (...) James, once the believer has reached a new mental balance and experienced a lasting happiness thanks to his change of mind, evil comes again to him under the form of a persistent and warning memory of the past troubling experience, a memory that is functional to preserve his new belief-system. We define this memory and its role as “functional atheism” and propose to transpose this notion from the uncertain realm of inner experience, where James originally put it, to the narrative and neurocognitive grounds, where it may lead to more original and wider developments. (shrink)

Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences should (...) not be confused tout court with a broader and more complex phenomenon, such as extremism and politico-religious radicalism, but are a specific typology of that broader and multifaceted fact that is self-deception. We hypothesize that the self-deception implicit in experiences of intellectual distortion produces a cognitive dissonance of which the subject is normally, though with varying intensity, aware (or may become aware through honest introspection). The phenomenon occurs in two extreme forms: one is normal (sporadic), the other is exceptional (systematic). The passage from one to the other is a complex process of escalation and de-escalation, on which multiple external and internal variables act. In its ascending path, it essentially coincides with a process of psychological polarization and cognitive "de-pluralization", while its descending phase marks a return to reality and a "re-pluralization", where the subject returns to being what he basically is, namely, an active and tireless meaning seeker. In the central part of the chapter, similarities and differences between processes of deradicalization and phenomena of religious deconversion are analyzed, with reference, among others, to the case of the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. -/- An abridged version of this text has been delivered for the Workshop "Explaining Extreme Belief and Extreme Behavior", September 15-16, 2022, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am grateful to David Konstan (NYU) for reading and commenting on a first version of this chapter and to Rik Peels (VUA) for his comments and questions during the Workshop. I would also like to thank my bachelor's and master's students at UDG, who discussed these topics at length with during semester 2022-B. (shrink)

Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences should (...) not be confused tout court with a broader and more complex phenomenon, such as extremism and politico-religious radicalism, but are a specific typology of that broader and multifaceted fact that is self-deception. We hypothesize that the self-deception implicit in experiences of intellectual distortion produces a cognitive dissonance of which the subject is normally, though with varying intensity, aware (or may become aware through honest introspection). The phenomenon occurs in two forms: one is normal (sporadic), the other is exceptional (systematic). The passage from one to the other is a complex process of escalation and de-escalation, on which multiple external and internal variables act. In its ascending path, it essentially coincides with a process of psychological polarization and cognitive "de-pluralization", while its descending phase marks a return to reality and a "re-pluralization", where the subject returns to being what he basically is, namely, an active and tireless meaning seeker. In the central part of the chapter, similarities and differences between processes of deradicalization and phenomena of religious deconversion are analyzed, with reference, among others, to the case of the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. -/- An abridged version of this text has been delivered for the Workshop "Explaining Extreme Belief and Extreme Behavior", September 15-16, 2022, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am grateful to David Konstan (NYU) for reading and commenting on a first version of this chapter and to Rik Peels (VUA) for his comments and questions during the Workshop. I would also like to thank my bachelor's and master's students at UDG, who discussed these topics at length with during semester 2022-B. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the analysis of conspiracy beliefs and conspiracy theories by taking into consideration some of the major contributions about the topic presently provided by several disciplines. A definition is given that helps illustrate the most prominent features of these beliefs, namely monological bias, logical and conceptual fallacies, dispositional influence and pseudorationality. Other important psychological preconditions are also provided (such as, among others, credulity, hypersensitive agency detection devices and proneness to self-deception), but, as the paper argues, they are (...) features shared to a greater or lesser extent with other belief systems, like radical political ideologies and religious fundamentalisms. As a result, it is suggested that a more proper understanding of the phenomenon is attainable by approaches combining psychological data with the analysis of groups and sociopolitical dynamics. Exceptional contingencies and shifts in power distribution among group/social actors seem to be the most influential factors that explain formation, spread and salience of this kind of beliefs. (shrink)

The arguments I examine in this chapter are not necessarily from Anaximander. Anaximander is generally known for having put the ἄπειρον as a principle (ἀρχή), probably due to the greater radicality with which he affirmed the physical – perhaps also epistemic – indeterminacy (and the consequent ineffability) of the principle of the φύσις. However, it is well known that, according to Aristotle, a large part of archaic physics or physiology had placed the ἄπειρον as the origin and foundation of the (...) becoming, to the point of deifying it as a living, surrounding, ruling and probably animated body (σῶμα), whose nature was separate or at any rate different from visible reality and its major components. I will call it Arkhé Apeiros Theory (TAA). A TAA then exists for archaic philosophy in general, and not only for Anaximander, and is based on a fairly clear common feature, namely the idea that the principle of nature is an indeterminate body (σῶμα ἄπειρον) and is, therefore, although to a variable extent, unknowable-ineffable. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on strategic ineffability in Plato. Strategic ineffability serves different purposes. In Plato, it is mainly used to express a religious feeling of dependence and to emphasize the remoteness of the divine. However, its meaning is not only religious. It is also part of a complex narrative device that often resorts to irony in order to de-emphasize the most arduous and controversial metaphysical speculations. Whereas topoi of affected modesty and unspeakability may only play an aesthetic role, strategic ineffability (...) has to do with relevant communication: it is a way to share with (and induce in) other people feelings, goals and morally relevant beliefs, without entailing any accurate conceptual content. Knowledge is not the primary goal here. The paper argues that Plato, Plotinus and other ancient philosophers used the notion of divine ineffability strategically to share beliefs with their selected audiences and lead their disciples to spiritual change. (shrink)

In this article I propose a unitary interpretation of Kant’s reflection on evil in Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1792–1794). This part of Immanuel Kant’s work often presents knotty interpretative problems because the author, while reaffirming the principle of the subject’s moral freedom as set forth in Critique of Practical Reason, seems actually to be showing this freedom as conditioned by a tendency toward evil that is so compelling that it blocks and undermines the subject’s autonomy. I give (...) an account of the coherence acquired by the Kantian notion of radical evil, defined as an axiological inversion of the order of the motives, once one grasps the defective character of the notion of freedom that the philosopher employs in the work and the metaphysical orientation that backs it up. (shrink)

Platonic religiosity is the first of two volumes devoted to the analysis of religiosity or religious feeling (pathos) in Plato. -/- (Back cover) Platonic Religiosity is a hermeneutical attempt to read Platonic works from the perspective of their religiosity. The aspects examined in the book are limited for the moment to the most basic, perhaps even the simplest, dimensions of religious feeling, those involving the representation of a relationship between man and divinity, Earth and Heaven, "low" and "high". Low and (...) high are spatial metaphors constitutive of our thinking. Although, in this case, they indicate the link between man and the super-sensible world, they also presuppose, at all times, the devout feeling (and the risk) of an insurmountable distance and remoteness that divides men from the numen. The need to affirm the relationship partly overcomes the presence of this feeling of distance, but never manages to neutralise it completely. -/- Religious feeling as such always oscillates between two terms: the need to establish a relationship with the divinity, and thus to guarantee its proximity to man, and the affirmation of its transcendence, namely the distance that divides us from the numen, up to the point, eventually, where the danger becomes the greatest: the denial of the god by man (atheism) or the human feeling of being abandoned by the god. The presence of these oscillations in the Platonic texts is analysed in several chapters of the book, devoted to different themes, such as the representations of reciprocity (do ut des), the images of the friendly god and the hostile god, the feeling of the threshold, prayers and invocations, verecundia and nostalgia, the feeling of dependence, the notion of prescience, assimilation to the god, the different types of ineffability, the role of atheism and incredulity, and lastly the notion of conversion, which substantiates Platonic religiosity by characterising it in the sense of a redemption-belief. (shrink)

In this article we analyse the problem of emergence in its diachronic dimension. In other words, we intend to deal with the generation of novelties in natural processes. Our approach aims at integrating some insights coming from Whitehead’s Philosophy of the Process with the epistemological framework developed by the “autopoietic” tradition. Our thesis is that the emergence of new entities and rules of interaction (new “fields of relatedness”) requires the development of discontinuous models of change. From this standpoint natural evolution (...) can be conceived as a succession of emergences — each one realizing a novel “extended” present, described by distinct models — rather than as a single and continuous dynamics. This theoretical and epistemological framework is particularly suitable to the investigation of the origin of life, an emblematic example of this kind of processes. (shrink)

On the basis of the conception of aesthetic imagination derived from evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, and social cognitive neuroscience, today it is possible - and more appropriate - to invert the traditional view of anthropologists and archeologists that conceives the arts (from the early pre-historic arts) as mere instruments supporting religious beliefs, practices, and rituals.

In this paper we introduce three methods to approach philosophical problems informationally: Minimalism, the Method of Abstraction and Constructionism. Minimalism considers the specifications of the starting problems and systems that are tractable for a philosophical analysis. The Method of Abstraction describes the process of making explicit the level of abstraction at which a system is observed and investigated. Constructionism provides a series of principles that the investigation of the problem must fulfil once it has been fully characterised by the previous (...) two methods. For each method, we also provide an application: the problem of visual perception, functionalism, and the Turing Test, respectively. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the natural philosophical method of Geminiano Montanari, one of the most prominent Italian natural philosophers of the late seventeenth century. Montanari’s views are used as a case study to assess recent claims concerning early modern experimental philosophy. Having presented the distinctive tenets of seventeenth-century experimental philosophers, I argue that Montanari adheres to them explicitly, thoroughly, and consistently. The study of Montanari’s views supports three claims. First, experimental philosophy was not an exclusively British phenomenon. (...) Second, in spite of some portrayals of experimental philosophy as an ‘atheoretical’ or ‘purely descriptive’ enterprise, experimental philosophers could consistently endorse a variety of natural philosophical explanations and postulate theoretical entities. Third, experimental philosophy and mechanical philosophy were not, as such, antagonistic. They could be consistently combined in a single philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

During the century following the Council of Trent, two trends within Catholic religious orders matured: the first consisted in unifying and strengthening the Order’s culture by focussing on one author of reference; the other in elaborating a new way of presenting that author’s doctrines. In the case of the Friars Minor Conventuals, these trends were fostered in the second decade of the seventeenth century by the minister general of the Order, Giacomo Montanari, who promoted the idea that providing the (...) Order with new works featuring innovative didactic characteristics and a renewed defence of the doctrines of John Duns Scotus was a prime way to lead an authentic religious life. Bartolomeo Mastri and Bonaventura Belluto’s “philosophiae cursus ad mentem Scoti” was probably the major result of this impulse. This essay examines the ways in which this process occurred and the outcomes to which it led. (shrink)