Wittgenstein on Knowledge (1949-1951)

In this paper, I want to characterize Wittgenstein"s epistemology, namely his contextualism, presented in his notes published under the title On Certainty. This characterization will be made in terms of a comparison with four control points in order to put into light the peculiarities of Wittgenstein"s epistemological position. The markers I will use for that purpose will give an indication of the level of conceptual commitment toward four important epistemological theses: holism, internalism, fallibilism, and egalitarianism. These markers have been chosen in function of the power of discrimination they provide regarding the two main trends in the past 40 years (or so) of debate in contemporary epistemology, i.e., foundationalism and coherentism. Using these conceptual markers, one can easily distinguish between strict foundationalism, which shows a low level of each markers, and strict coherentism, which shows a high level of each markers

The Use and Abuse of Archaeology to Promote Nazi Nationalist Goals

By appealing to the people, and restoring a sense of pride through nationalism, Hitler and his Nazi party gained immense popularity. In this article, I explore one of the Nazi party\u27s most influential, yet not well known or studied in depth, methods for inspiring nationalistic pride in Germany, archaeological research

Two types of epistemic instrumentalism

Epistemic instrumentalism views epistemic norms and epistemic normativity as essentially involving the instrumental relation between means and ends. It construes notions like epistemic normativity, norms, and rationality, as forms of instrumental or means-end normativity, norms, and rationality. I do two main things in this paper. In part 1, I argue that there is an under-appreciated distinction between two independent types of epistemic instrumentalism. These are instrumentalism about epistemic norms and instrumentalism about epistemic normativity. In part 2, I argue that this under-appreciated distinction matters for the debate surrounding the plausibility of EI. Specifically, whether we interpret EI as norm-EI or as source-EI matters for the widely discussed universality or categoricity objection to EI, and for two important motivations for adopting EI, namely naturalism and the practical utility of epistemic norms. I will then conclude by drawing some lessons for epistemic instrumentalism going forward

Topological recursion and mirror curves

We study the constant contributions to the free energies obtained through the topological recursion applied to the complex curves mirror to toric Calabi-Yau threefolds. We show that the recursion reproduces precisely the corresponding Gromov-Witten invariants, which can be encoded in powers of the MacMahon function. As a result, we extend the scope of the "remodeling conjecture" to the full free energies, including the constant contributions. In the process we study how the pair of pants decomposition of the mirror curves plays an important role in the topological recursion. We also show that the free energies are not, strictly speaking, symplectic invariants, and that the recursive construction of the free energies does not commute with certain limits of mirror curves.Comment: 37 pages, 4 figure

Strong Approximations of BSDEs in a domain

We study the strong approximation of a Backward SDE with finite stopping time horizon, namely the first exit time of a forward SDE from a cylindrical domain. We use the Euler scheme approach of Bouchard and Touzi, Zhang 04}. When the domain is piecewise smooth and under a non-characteristic boundary condition, we show that the associated strong error is at most of order h^{\frac14-\eps} where $h$ denotes the time step and \eps is any positive parameter. This rate corresponds to the strong exit time approximation. It is improved to h^{\frac12-\eps} when the exit time can be exactly simulated or for a weaker form of the approximation error. Importantly, these results are obtained without uniform ellipticity condition.Comment: 35 page

Supereigenvalue Models and Topological Recursion

We show that the Eynard-Orantin topological recursion, in conjunction with simple auxiliary equations, can be used to calculate all correlation functions of supereigenvalue models.Comment: 46 pages. v2: published version (minor changes to the presentation