Two Decades of Maude

This paper is a tribute to José Meseguer, from the rest of us in the Maude team, reviewing the past, the present, and the future of the language and system with which we have been working for around two decades under his leadership. After reviewing the origins and the language's main features, we present the latest additions to the language and some features currently under development. This paper is not an introduction to Maude, and some familiarity with it and with rewriting logic are indeed assumed.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Voicing embodiment, relating difference: towards a relational legal subjectivity

Focusing on the writings of Adriana Cavarero and Lia Cigarini, this piece examines the possible counterpractices and counterspaces of a politics of relational subjectivity outside the time of the masculine legal order which are to be found in Italian sexual difference theory. Both Cavarero and Cigarini share a desire to create a practice of sexual difference based on relational subjectivity. In their writings and in their praxis they have attempted to bring into being spaces where the unique embodied existent can interact with other unique existents in a space of relational politics. This is a politics based on the unique existent who acts, speaks, and thinks for herself rather than one based on the ideal abstract individual of liberal rights ideology. In effect, it amounts to a politics of relational plurivocality

Fewer epistemological challenges for connectionism

Seventeen years ago, John McCarthy wrote the note Epistemological challenges for connectionism as a response to Paul Smolensky’s paper 'On the proper treatment of connectionism'. I will discuss the extent to which the four key challenges put forward by McCarthy have been solved, and what are the new challenges ahead. I argue that there are fewer epistemological challenges for connectionism, but progress has been slow. Nevertheless, there is now strong indication that neural-symbolic integration can provide effective systems of expressive reasoning and robust learning due to the recent developments in the field