Quantification and the language of later Shakespeare

In this paper we consider the status of quantitative evidence in literary studies, with an example from our own work using the software package Docuscope to investigate chronological ‘periods’ in Shakespeare’s career. We argue that quantitative evidence has a function in literary studies, not as an end in itself, but as a starting point for traditional interpretative literary analysis. In our example, we show that linguistic analysis suggests three periods in Shakespeare’s career, defining a ‘period’ as a group of plays with similar linguistic features. We focus on the latest period, as this is the largest, and suggest that the ‘late style’ of Shakespeare may begin much earlier than traditionally thought. We analyse the features that the later plays share, and argue that from the late 1590s Shakespeare can be seen to be adopting features which are (a) closer to speech, and (b) indicate a shift from real-world denotation to a focus on communicating the subjectivity of the speaker

When can we do better than autarky?

This paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of nonautarkic contract in a risk sharing model with two-sided lack of commitment. Verifying the condition takes just one Guassian elimination of a matrix.

The Grey Zone

The ‘grey zone’ is a term coined by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1989; originally published in Italian in 1986), the last book he completed before his death. In ‘The Grey Zone’, the second chapter and the longest essay in the book, Levi acknowledges the human need to divide the social field into ‘us’ and ‘them’, two clearly distinct and identifiable groups, but points out that such binary thinking is inadequate in the face of the..

Hegel and the Ethics of Brandom’s Metaphysics

In order to develop his pragmatist and inferentialist framework, Robert Brandom appropriates, reconstructs and revises key themes in German Idealism such as the self-legislation of norms, the social institution of concepts and facts, a norm-oriented account of being and the critique of representationalist accounts of meaning and truth. However, these themes have an essential ethical dimension, one that Brandom has not explicitly acknowledged. For Hegel, the determination of norms and facts and the institution of normative statuses take place in the context of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’). By engaging with some of the more ontologically and ethically substantive points raised by Hegel, I argue that, from a Hegelian perspective, Brandom’s project regarding the social determination of truth and meaning cannot be divorced from ethics, specifically, the ethical dimension of social recognition. Furthermore, I argue that, in real situations (as opposed to ideal ones), claims to normative authority cannot be considered independently from the legitimacy of those claims, a legitimacy that Brandom is unable to reasonably explain. Finally, I argue that a Hegelian solution to the problems facing Brandom’s framework calls into question the unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics

Dewey, Second Nature, Social Criticism, and the Hegelian Heritage

Dewey’s notion of second nature is strictly connected with that of habit. I reconstruct the Hegelian heritage of this model and argue that habit qua second nature is understood by Dewey as a something which encompasses both the subjective and the objective dimension – individual dispositions and features of the objective natural and social environment.. Secondly, the notion of habit qua second nature is used by Dewey both in a descriptive and in a critical sense and is as such a dialectical concept which connects ‘impulse’ and ‘habit’, ‘original’ or ‘native’ and ‘acquired’ nature, ‘first’ and ‘second nature’. Thirdly, the ethical model of second nature as habituation and the aesthetic model of second nature as art are for Dewey not opposed to one another, since by distinguishing ‘routine’ and ‘art’ as two modes of habit, he makes space for an expressive and creative notion of second nature. Finally, I argue that the expressive dialectics of habit formation plays a crucial role in Dewey’s critical social philosophy and that first and second nature operate as benchmark concepts for his diagnosis of social pathologies

'Eastern' Elegy and 'Western' Epic:reading 'orientalism' in Propertius 4 and Virgil's Aeneid

This article explores the extent to which the genres of epic and elegy can be considered ‘occidental’ and ‘oriental’ respectively. Such a polarity is apparently constructed in the ‘epic’ and ‘elegiac’ movements of Propertius 4.1, but it is also progressively deconstructed in Propertius’ reception of Virgil’s Aeneid in elegies 4.1, 4.6 and 4.9. On the one hand, Propertius reads the Aeneid for its oriental components (e.g. the Phrygian immigration as viewed by native Italy ; its oriental ‘heroines’ : Dido, Cleopatra and, if the episode to which she lends her name is not an interpolation, Helen). On the other hand, Propertian elegy has for its part become more occidental (Propertius sings of maxima Roma and the Roman victory at Actium ; Cynthia is dead). In this way, Propertius shows that the narrative of elegy is no less bound up with occidental hegemony than that of Virgilian epic, and that elegy’s literary exoticism is, like Virgil’s intertextual appropriation of Greek literature, itself contingent on Roman imperialism

Variable types for meaning assembly: a logical syntax for generic noun phrases introduced by most

This paper proposes a way to compute the meanings associated with sentences with generic noun phrases corresponding to the generalized quantifier most. We call these generics specimens and they resemble stereotypes or prototypes in lexical semantics. The meanings are viewed as logical formulae that can thereafter be interpreted in your favourite models. To do so, we depart significantly from the dominant Fregean view with a single untyped universe. Indeed, our proposal adopts type theory with some hints from Hilbert \epsilon-calculus (Hilbert, 1922; Avigad and Zach, 2008) and from medieval philosophy, see e.g. de Libera (1993, 1996). Our type theoretic analysis bears some resemblance with ongoing work in lexical semantics (Asher 2011; Bassac et al. 2010; Moot, Pr\'evot and Retor\'e 2011). Our model also applies to classical examples involving a class, or a generic element of this class, which is not uttered but provided by the context. An outcome of this study is that, in the minimalism-contextualism debate, see Conrad (2011), if one adopts a type theoretical view, terms encode the purely semantic meaning component while their typing is pragmatically determined

Letter from the Editor

In the act of pondering the majesty of God’s Creation, I never tire of observing the slide of Autumn as it nestles into Winter and the beauty of the snow that follows. It is good to reflect on the comforting flow of God’s grace, beauty and consistency. The ICCTE journal, in its rhythm of bi-annual publication, has seasons as well. As I end this year and prepare to enter the next one, I have the task not only of introducing what is in this issue, but what you can look forward to in the coming months

A reproducible approach with R markdown to automatic classification of medical certificates in French

In this paper, we report the ongoing developments of our first participation to the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) eHealth Task 1: “Multilingual Information Extraction - ICD10 coding” (Névéol et al., 2017). The task consists in labelling death certificates, in French with international standard codes. In particular, we wanted to accomplish the goal of the ‘Replication track’ of this Task which promotes the sharing of tools and the dissemination of solid, reproducible results.In questo articolo presentiamo gli sviluppi del lavoro iniziato con la partecipazione al Laboratorio CrossLanguage Evaluation Forum (CLEF) eHealth denominato: “Multilingual Information Extraction - ICD10 coding” (Névéol et al., 2017) che ha come obiettivo quello di classificare certificati di morte in lingua francese con dei codici standard internazionali. In particolare, abbiamo come obiettivo quello proposto dalla ‘Replication track’ di questo Task, che promuove la condivisione di strumenti e la diffusione di risultati riproducibili

The "Double Sense" of Fichte's Philosophical Language - Some Critical Reflections on the Cambridge Companion to Fichte

The principal thesis in this review-essay is that the key linguistic terms in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre especially have two main meanings that appear at first sight to be almost in contradiction or opposed to each other. The reader of Fichte therefore has to work hard to overcome any apparent conflicts in the “double sense” of his philosophical terminology. Accordingly, I argue that Fichte’s linguistic method and use of language should be seen as part of his chief philosophical method of synthesis, where we have to carry out a similar procedure and attempt to reconcile opposites using the power of the imagination. This thesis is put forward by means of a number of practical examples and in the context of some critical reflections on the recently published Cambridge Companion to Fichte, eds. David James and Günter Zöller. Review essay published in Volume 15 (December, 2017) of the journal Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte (ed. Emiliano Acosta)