Upon visiting the splendid mosaics in Villa Romana del Casale (Piazza Armerina), one is reminded very clearly of the intelligent remark made by Karl Marx according to which work had no social relevance in the ancient world. Because of oversupply due to slave… Read More ›
Otium, in ancient Roman time, was the time productively spent pursuing the agenda of your personal growth – be it the cultivation of your garden or the virtuous studium of arts & science. This concept was clearly coming from the… Read More ›
Let’s start again with late Tony Judt’s comment about Eric Hobsbawm autobiography, where one can read the following: Eric Hobsbawm is decidedly a man of order, a “Tory communist,” as he puts it. Communist intellectuals were never “cultural dissidents”; and… Read More ›
There used to be an old concept in classical philosophy, the concept of the full and meaningful life, creative and inquisitive. German classical philosophy recovered that from the ancient Greek civilization, in particular from Ⅴ century Athens. Unfortunately, that was… Read More ›
Watching the stunning documentary “The Look of Silence” by Joshua Oppenheimer is a moving experience. Of almost enlightening nature. The titles at the end, full of “Anonymous” references, are a powerful reminder that the grim events of Indonesian genocide of… Read More ›
One of my all time favorite sentences by legendary MIT linguist (whose opus is now preserved here) is the following (from Introduction to D. Guerin. “Anarchism”). It describes what our ‘practical reason’ target should be in life. “At every stage… Read More ›
In the introduction to “Anarchism” by D. Guerin, Chomsky stresses the existence of a cultural tradition going back to Rousseau (“Discourse on Inequality, 1754), Von Humboldt, “The Limits of State Action” and chiefly Immanuel Kant on the French Revolution remarking that freedom… Read More ›
In a perceptive book, Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer at Google, and responsible for the Hidden Markov Model that stays behind much of today speech and text recognition software (like Siri), restates the position of the Logical Neopositivism as the following:… Read More ›
There was a point in which the AI community adopted Chomsky grammars. Grammars are Cartesian universals. The other approach (N. Wiener) would have been to use feedback control system (later: stochastic control) to interpret learning. It did not happen. It… Read More ›
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