2,391 research outputs found
AlĘilbÄŤrÄŤâs Book of the rational conclusions. Introduction, Critical Edition of the Arabic Text and Materials for the History of the ḪawÄᚣᚣic Genre in Early Andalus
[eng] The Book of the rational conclusions, written perhaps somewhen in the 10th c. by a physician from IlbÄŤrah (Andalus), is a multi-section medical pandect. The author brings together, from a diversity of sources, materials dealing with matters related to drug-handling, natural philosophy, therapeutics, medical applications of the specific properties of things, a regimen, and a dispensatory. This dissertation includes three different parts. First the transmission of the text, its contents, and its possible context are discussed. Then a critical edition of the Arabic text is offered. Last, but certainly not least, the subject of the specific properties is approached from several points of view. The analysis of Section III of the original book leads to an exploration of the early AndalusÄŤ assimilation of this epistemic tradition and to the establishment of a well-defined textual family in which our text must be inscribed. On the other hand, the concept itself of âspecific propertyâ is often misconstrued and it is usually made synonymous to magic and superstition. Upon closer inspection, however, the alleged irrationality of the knowledge of these properties appears to be largely the result of anachronistic interpretation. As a complement of this particular research and as an illustration of the genre, a sample from an ongoing integral commentary on this section of the book is presented.[cat] El Llibre de les conclusions racionals dâun desconegut metge dâIlbÄŤrah (lâĂndalus) va ser compilat probablement durant la segona meitat del s. X. Es tracta dâun rudimentari però notablement complet kunnaix (un gènere epistèmic que ĂŠs definit sovint com a âenciclopèdia mèdicaâ) en què lâautor aplega materials manllevats (sovint de manera literal i no-explĂcita) de diversos gèneres. El llibre obre amb una secciĂł sobre apoteconomia (una mena de manual dâapotecaris) però se centra desprĂŠs en les diferents branques de la medicina. A continuaciĂł dâuns prolegòmens filosòfics lâautor copia, amb mĂnima adaptaciĂł lingĂźĂstica, un tractat sencer de terapèutica, desprĂŠs un altre sobre les aplicacions mèdiques de les propietats especĂfiques de les coses, una sèrie de fragments relacionats amb la dietètica (un règim en termes tradicionals) i, finalment, una col¡lecciĂł de receptes mèdiques. Cadascuna dâaquestes seccions mostren evidents lligams dâintertextualitat que apunten cap a una intensa activitat sintetitzadora de diverses tradicions aliades a la medicina a lâĂndalus califal. El text ĂŠs, de fet, un magnĂfic objecte sobre el qual aplicar la metodologia de la crĂtica textual i de fonts. LâediciĂł crĂtica del text incorpora la dimensiĂł cronològica dins lâaparat, que esdevĂŠ aixĂ un element contextualitzador. Quant lâestudi de les fonts, si tot al llarg de la primera part dâaquesta tesi ĂŠs nomĂŠs secundari, aquesta disciplina pren un protagonisme gairebĂŠ absolut en la tercera part, especialment en el capĂtol dedicat a lâanĂ lisi individual de cada passatge recollit en la secciĂł sobre les propietats especĂfiques de les coses
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Strategies for defending the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles: a critical survey and a new approach
The Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) is the focus of much controversy in the history of Metaphysics and in contemporary Physics. Many questions rover the debate about its truth or falsehood, for example, to which objects the principle applies? Which properties can be counted as discerning properties? Is the principle necessary? In other words, which version of the principle is the correct and is this version true? This thesis aims to answer this questions in order to show that PII is a necessarily true principle of metaphysics. To accomplish this task, the reader will find, in this thesis, an encyclopaedical introduction to the history of PII and to the reasons it matters so much, followed by a presentation of the most famous arguments against it and the defences used against these arguments. Then, the reader finds in-depth discussion of the minutiae involved in postulating the principle as to make clear what is in fact being attacked and defended. With these preliminaries solved, a deeper analysis of these defences is presented aiming to discover which is the most appropriate example to use against the attacks to the principle. This analysis allowed a classification of these defences in four families with different strategies within them. Finally, with these defensive strategies at hand we are able to confront alleged counterexamples to PII in Mathematics with the intention to test these defences
A Theistic Critique of Secular Moral Nonnaturalism
This dissertation is an exercise in Theistic moral apologetics. It will be developing both a critique of secular nonnaturalist moral theory (moral Platonism) at the level of metaethics, as well as a positive form of the moral argument for the existence of God that follows from this critique. The critique will focus on the work of five prominent metaethical theorists of secular moral non-naturalism: David Enoch, Eric Wielenberg, Russ Shafer-Landau, Michael Huemer, and Christopher Kulp. Each of these thinkers will be critically examined. Following this critique, the positive moral argument for the existence of God will be developed, combining a cumulative, abductive argument that follows from filling in the content of a succinct apagogic argument. The cumulative abductive argument and the apagogic argument together, with a transcendental and modal component, will be presented to make the case that Theism is the best explanation for the kind of moral, rational beings we are and the kind of universe in which we live, a rational intelligible universe
Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction
In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material formsâroads, rails, pipes, and wiresâinfrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading âinfrastructurallyâ: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this projectâJames Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamidâtake up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible
Subgroup discovery for structured target concepts
The main object of study in this thesis is subgroup discovery, a theoretical framework for finding subgroups in dataâi.e., named sub-populationsâ whose behaviour with respect to a specified target concept is exceptional when compared to the rest of the dataset. This is a powerful tool that conveys crucial information to a human audience, but despite past advances has been limited to simple target concepts. In this work we propose algorithms that bring this framework to novel application domains. We introduce the concept of representative subgroups, which we use not only to ensure the fairness of a sub-population with regard to a sensitive trait, such as race or gender, but also to go beyond known trends in the data. For entities with additional relational information that can be encoded as a graph, we introduce a novel measure of robust connectedness which improves on established alternative measures of density; we then provide a method that uses this measure to discover which named sub-populations are more well-connected. Our contributions within subgroup discovery crescent with the introduction of kernelised subgroup discovery: a novel framework that enables the discovery of subgroups on i.i.d. target concepts with virtually any kind of structure. Importantly, our framework additionally provides a concrete and efficient tool that works out-of-the-box without any modification, apart from specifying the Gramian of a positive definite kernel. To use within kernelised subgroup discovery, but also on any other kind of kernel method, we additionally introduce a novel random walk graph kernel. Our kernel allows the fine tuning of the alignment between the vertices of the two compared graphs, during the count of the random walks, while we also propose meaningful structure-aware vertex labels to utilise this new capability. With these contributions we thoroughly extend the applicability of subgroup discovery and ultimately re-define it as a kernel method.Der Hauptgegenstand dieser Arbeit ist die Subgruppenentdeckung (Subgroup Discovery), ein theoretischer Rahmen fĂźr das Auffinden von Subgruppen in Datenâd. h. benannte Teilpopulationenâderen Verhalten in Bezug auf ein bestimmtes Targetkonzept im Vergleich zum Rest des Datensatzes auĂergewĂśhnlich ist. Es handelt sich hierbei um ein leistungsfähiges Instrument, das einem menschlichen Publikum wichtige Informationen vermittelt. Allerdings ist es trotz bisherigen Fortschritte auf einfache Targetkonzepte beschränkt. In dieser Arbeit schlagen wir Algorithmen vor, die diesen Rahmen auf neuartige Anwendungsbereiche Ăźbertragen. Wir fĂźhren das Konzept der repräsentativen Untergruppen ein, mit dem wir nicht nur die Fairness einer Teilpopulation in Bezug auf ein sensibles Merkmal wie Rasse oder Geschlecht sicherstellen, sondern auch Ăźber bekannte Trends in den Daten hinausgehen kĂśnnen. FĂźr Entitäten mit zusätzlicher relationalen Information, die als Graph kodiert werden kann, fĂźhren wir ein neuartiges MaĂ fĂźr robuste Verbundenheit ein, das die etablierten alternativen DichtemaĂe verbessert; anschlieĂend stellen wir eine Methode bereit, die dieses MaĂ verwendet, um herauszufinden, welche benannte Teilpopulationen besser verbunden sind. Unsere Beiträge in diesem Rahmen gipfeln in der EinfĂźhrung der kernelisierten Subgruppenentdeckung: ein neuartiger Rahmen, der die Entdeckung von Subgruppen fĂźr u.i.v. Targetkonzepten mit praktisch jeder Art von Struktur ermĂśglicht. Wichtigerweise, unser Rahmen bereitstellt zusätzlich ein konkretes und effizientes Werkzeug, das ohne jegliche Modifikation funktioniert, abgesehen von der Angabe des Gramian eines positiv definitiven Kernels. FĂźr den Einsatz innerhalb der kernelisierten Subgruppentdeckung, aber auch fĂźr jede andere Art von Kernel-Methode, fĂźhren wir zusätzlich einen neuartigen Random-Walk-Graph-Kernel ein. Unser Kernel ermĂśglicht die Feinabstimmung der Ausrichtung zwischen den Eckpunkten der beiden unter-Vergleich-gestelltenen Graphen während der Zählung der Random Walks, während wir auch sinnvolle strukturbewusste Vertex-Labels vorschlagen, um diese neue Fähigkeit zu nutzen. Mit diesen Beiträgen erweitern wir die Anwendbarkeit der Subgruppentdeckung grĂźndlich und definieren wir sie im Endeffekt als Kernel-Methode neu
Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5
This ďŹfth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different ďŹelds of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered.
First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modiďŹed Proportional ConďŹict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classiďŹers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes.
Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identiďŹcation of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classiďŹcation.
Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classiďŹcation, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well
To have done with theory? Baudrillard, or the literal confrontation with reality
Baudrillard, Eluding the temptation to reinterpret Jean Baudrillard once more, this work started from the ambition to consider his thought in its irreducibility, that is, in a radically literal way. Literalness is a recurring though overlooked term in Baudrillardâs oeuvre, and it is drawn from the direct concatenation of words in poetry or puns and other language games. It does not indicate a realist positivism but a principle that considers the metamorphoses and mutual alteration of things in their singularity without reducing them to a general equivalent (i.e. the meaning of words in a poem, which destroys its appearances).
Reapplying the idea to Baudrillard and finding other singular routes through his âpasswordsâ is a way to short-circuit its reductio ad realitatem and reaffirm its challenge to the hegemony of global integration. Even in the literature dedicated to it, this exercise has been rarer than the âhermeneuticalâ one, where Baudrillardâs oeuvre was taken as a discourse to be interpreted and explained (finding an equivalent for its singularity).
In plain polemic with any ideal of conformity between theory and reality (from which our present conformisms arguably derive, too), Baudrillard conceived thought not as something to be verified but as a series of hypotheses to be repeatedly radicalised â he often described it as a âspiralâ, a form which challenges the codification of things, including its own. Coherent with this, the thesis does not consider Baudrillardâs work either a reflection or a prediction of reality but, instead, an out-and-out act, a precious singular object which, interrogated, âthinksâ us and our current events âbackâ.
In the second part, Baudrillardâs hypotheses are taken further and measured in their capacity to challenge the reality of current events and phenomena. The thesis confronts the âhypocriticalâ position of critical thinking, which accepts the present principle of reality. It questions the interminability of our condition, where death seems thinkable only as a senseless interruption of the apparatus. It also confronts the solidarity between orthodox and alternative realities of the COVID pandemic and the Ukrainian invasion, searching for what is irreducible to the perfect osmosis of âvirtual and factualâ.
Drawing equally from the convulsions of globalisation and the psychopathologies of academics, from DeLilloâs fiction and Baudrillardâs lesser-studied influences, this study evaluates the irreversibility of our system against the increasingly silent challenges of radical thought. It looks for what an increasingly pessimistic late Baudrillard called ârogue singularitiesâ: forms which, often outside the conventional realms one would expect to find them, constitute potential sources of the fragility of global power.
âTo have done with theoryâ does not mean abandoning radical thought and, together with it, the singularity of humanity. It means, as the thesis concludes, the courage to leave conventional ideas of theory and listen to less audible voices which, at the heart of this âenormous conspiracyâ, whisper â as a mysterious lady in Mariupol did to Putin â âItâs all not true! Itâs all for show!â
The Epistemic Value of Resonance: Intuitive Thinking in Theoretical Understanding
We commonly say that an explanation for something we do not quite understand âresonatesâ. And we seem to take the resonance of the explanation to count epistemically in its favor. What is resonance and what is its epistemic value? I propose that resonance is a psychological state in which a consciously considered explanation coheres with the unconscious representational content in the mind of an individual, and that this psychological state is metacognitively signaled by a feeling which we also call âresonanceâ. This account of resonance implies that theoretical understanding, rather than knowledge, is the epistemic domain of its functioning. That is, when an explanation resonates, the usual case is that a consciously considered explanatory framework coheres with a rich, unconscious representational nexus associated with the object purportedly explained.
I pursue the question of the value of resonance by developing the features of theoretical understanding. Theoretical understanding of an object, I take it, is when an individual grasps an accurate explanatory framework for that object. Hence, understanding is normed by both accuracy and grasping. Accuracy, however, is secured through warrant. Resonance, I argue, can increase oneâs warrant, but not very much. Grasping, on the other hand, is a stop-and-go process of integrating explanations and representational content in long-term memory. Resonance, I argue, improves grasping by ensuring coherence and motivating persistence. Further, resonance seems to be practically necessary to theoretical understanding, insofar as understanding aims toward an aspirational mastery. Resonance enables us to invest cognitive resources in explanatory frameworks we do not yet understand and it prevents us from becoming rigidly attached to a familiar but failing explanatory framework.
I conclude by addressing three worries about the epistemic value of resonance: (1) that the feeling of resonance cannot be distinguished from similar, non-epistemic feelings, (2) that the pleasantness of this feeling conflicts with the accuracy norm for understanding, and (3) that an explanatory framework might resonate with false unconscious beliefs, thus inhibiting accuracy in oneâs understanding. Of these, the last is the most worrisome and suggests that attuning to resonance is only one part of a virtuous epistemic life
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Shaping and expressing politics: a comparative study of national parliament buildings within the European Union
Book chapter. No abstract available
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