The essay has two main purposes.The first consists of discussing some literary and philosophical thoughts on the epistemological value of science by one of the most famous and celebrated poets in Italian literature,Gi...The essay has two main purposes.The first consists of discussing some literary and philosophical thoughts on the epistemological value of science by one of the most famous and celebrated poets in Italian literature,Giacomo Leopardi.The poet firmly believes in the cognitive power of science,capable of revealing false beliefs with the light of reason.However,in his mature reflections,what will radically change will not be the value of scientific activity itself,always admirably accepted,but rather its true salvific force.Leopardi was not a scientist,but he used the scientific culture of his time to critically address the great existential themes of man concerning nature and the universe.He had amply demonstrated a scientific culture since his youthful'History of Astronomy',which would reappear in many of his other literary works.His deep and meditative reflections on the nature of finite and infinite space and time are a clear and fruitful testimony to this.However,Giacomo writes icastically,reason alone is not enough;it needs imagination.The second concerns a first reconstruction of the influence that the philosophy of Enlightenment had on Leopardi’s thought especially in relation to these topics:atheism,rejection of providentialism and anthropocentrism,the conception of nature,the question of the relationship between human and animal intelligence,the rejection of metaphysics,the importance of scientific knowledge.展开更多
With this work, we introduce a novel method for the unsupervised learning of conceptual hierarchies, or concept maps as they are sometimes called, which is aimed specifically for use with literary texts, as such disti...With this work, we introduce a novel method for the unsupervised learning of conceptual hierarchies, or concept maps as they are sometimes called, which is aimed specifically for use with literary texts, as such distinguishing itself from the majority of research literature on the topic which is primarily focused on building ontologies from a vast array of different types of data sources, both structured and unstructured, to support various forms of AI, in particular, the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee. We first elaborate on mutually informing disciplines of philosophy and computer science, or more specifically the relationship between metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, computing and AI, followed by a technically in-depth discussion of DEBRA, our dependency tree based concept hierarchy constructor, which as its name alludes to, constructs a conceptual map in the form of a directed graph which illustrates the concepts, their respective relations, and the implied ontological structure of the concepts as encoded in the text, decoded with standard Python NLP libraries such as spaCy and NLTK. With this work we hope to both augment the Knowledge Representation literature with opportunities for intellectual advancement in AI with more intuitive, less analytical, and well-known forms of knowledge representation from the cognitive science community, as well as open up new areas of research between Computer Science and the Humanities with respect to the application of the latest in NLP tools and techniques upon literature of cultural significance, shedding light on existing methods of computation with respect to documents in semantic space that effectively allows for, at the very least, the comparison and evolution of texts through time, using vector space math.展开更多
The transcendental approach initiated by Immanuel Kant and Peter Strawson has been the most representative contemporary exponent of this line of thinking. Barry Stroud understands this form of transcendental argument ...The transcendental approach initiated by Immanuel Kant and Peter Strawson has been the most representative contemporary exponent of this line of thinking. Barry Stroud understands this form of transcendental argument as relying on an empirical ＂verification principle＂ and hence he rejects it as unnecessary. Nevertheless, Stroud＇s view is only warranted to a certain extent. In some non-empirical objective spheres, including concepts and propositions as regards general metaphysics, moral metaphysics and philosophy of religion, the transcendental approach is still necessary. In terms of quality, transcendental approach belongs to ＂conceptual argumentation,＂ which differs from experience and logic with the fundamental characteristic of setting up a theoretical antecedent before further inquiry at the level of doctrine, i.e., concepts.展开更多
文摘The essay has two main purposes.The first consists of discussing some literary and philosophical thoughts on the epistemological value of science by one of the most famous and celebrated poets in Italian literature,Giacomo Leopardi.The poet firmly believes in the cognitive power of science,capable of revealing false beliefs with the light of reason.However,in his mature reflections,what will radically change will not be the value of scientific activity itself,always admirably accepted,but rather its true salvific force.Leopardi was not a scientist,but he used the scientific culture of his time to critically address the great existential themes of man concerning nature and the universe.He had amply demonstrated a scientific culture since his youthful'History of Astronomy',which would reappear in many of his other literary works.His deep and meditative reflections on the nature of finite and infinite space and time are a clear and fruitful testimony to this.However,Giacomo writes icastically,reason alone is not enough;it needs imagination.The second concerns a first reconstruction of the influence that the philosophy of Enlightenment had on Leopardi’s thought especially in relation to these topics:atheism,rejection of providentialism and anthropocentrism,the conception of nature,the question of the relationship between human and animal intelligence,the rejection of metaphysics,the importance of scientific knowledge.
文摘With this work, we introduce a novel method for the unsupervised learning of conceptual hierarchies, or concept maps as they are sometimes called, which is aimed specifically for use with literary texts, as such distinguishing itself from the majority of research literature on the topic which is primarily focused on building ontologies from a vast array of different types of data sources, both structured and unstructured, to support various forms of AI, in particular, the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee. We first elaborate on mutually informing disciplines of philosophy and computer science, or more specifically the relationship between metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, computing and AI, followed by a technically in-depth discussion of DEBRA, our dependency tree based concept hierarchy constructor, which as its name alludes to, constructs a conceptual map in the form of a directed graph which illustrates the concepts, their respective relations, and the implied ontological structure of the concepts as encoded in the text, decoded with standard Python NLP libraries such as spaCy and NLTK. With this work we hope to both augment the Knowledge Representation literature with opportunities for intellectual advancement in AI with more intuitive, less analytical, and well-known forms of knowledge representation from the cognitive science community, as well as open up new areas of research between Computer Science and the Humanities with respect to the application of the latest in NLP tools and techniques upon literature of cultural significance, shedding light on existing methods of computation with respect to documents in semantic space that effectively allows for, at the very least, the comparison and evolution of texts through time, using vector space math.
文摘The transcendental approach initiated by Immanuel Kant and Peter Strawson has been the most representative contemporary exponent of this line of thinking. Barry Stroud understands this form of transcendental argument as relying on an empirical ＂verification principle＂ and hence he rejects it as unnecessary. Nevertheless, Stroud＇s view is only warranted to a certain extent. In some non-empirical objective spheres, including concepts and propositions as regards general metaphysics, moral metaphysics and philosophy of religion, the transcendental approach is still necessary. In terms of quality, transcendental approach belongs to ＂conceptual argumentation,＂ which differs from experience and logic with the fundamental characteristic of setting up a theoretical antecedent before further inquiry at the level of doctrine, i.e., concepts.
