The Worldhood of the Cinematic Image

A close analysis of the specifically cinematographic procedure in Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Dream’ Crows reveals it as an articulated and insightful philosophical statement, endowed with general relevance concerning ‘natural’ perception, phenomenological Erlebnis, mechanical image and aesthetic rapture. The antagonism between the Benjaminian lineage of a mechanical irreducibility of the cinematic image to anthropocentric categories, and the Cartesian tradition of a film-philosophy still relying on the equally irreducible structure of the intentional act, be it the one of a deeply embodied and enworlded counsciousness, in accounting for the essential structure of film and spectator (and their relation), i.e., the antagonism between the decentering primacy of the image and the self-centered primacy of perception, cannot be settled through a simple Phenomenological shift from occularcentric, intentional counsciousness to its embodyment ‘in-the-world’ as yet another carrier of intentionality. Still it remains to be explained what is it in the mechanical image that is able to so deeply affect the human flesh, and conversely, to what features in the human bodily experience is its mechanical other, the fascinating image, so successfuly adressing? It should be expected from the anti-Cartesianism of both the early and the late Merleau-Ponty the textual support for an approach to the essential condition of passivity in movie watching, that would be convergent with Benjamin. The Chapter ‘Le sentir’, in Phénoménologie de la perception, will offer us the proper guide to elucidate what we are already perceiving and conceiving in Kurosawa’s film, where the ex-static phenomenological body of the aesthetical contemplator ‘enters the frame’ like the Benjaminian surgeon enters the body and like the painter - and always already like our deepest level of ‘sensing’, previously to any act of cousciousness - ‘just looses himself in the scene before him’. The Polichinello secret of cinema watching is nonetheless too evident to be seen, and that is where Phenomenological description and reduction are still required.

Weak reasoning argumentative theory. A dialogical approach for the discovery of philosophy in high schools

In the literature on philosophical practices, despite the crucial role that argumentation plays in these activities, no specific argumentative theories have ever been proposed to assist the figure of the facilitator in conducting philosophical dialogue and to enhance student’s critical thinking skills. The dissertation starts from a cognitive perspective that challenges the classic Cartesian notion of rationality by focusing on limits and biases of human reasoning. An argumentative model (WRAT – Weak Reasoning Argumentative Theory) is then outlined in order to respond to the needs of philosophical dialogue. After justifying the claim that this learning activity, among other inductive methodologies, is the most suitable for critical thinking education, I inquired into the specific goal of ‘arguing’ within this context by means of the tools provided by Speech Act Theory: the speaker’s intention is to construct new knowledge by questioning her own and other’s beliefs. The model proposed has been theorized on this assumption, starting from which the goals, and, in turn, the related norms, have been pinpointed. In order to include all the epistemic attitudes required to accomplish the complex task of arguing in philosophical dialogue, I needed to integrate two opposed cognitive accounts, Dual Process Theory and Evolutionary Approach, that, although they provide incompatible descriptions of reasoning, can be integrated to provide a normative account of argumentation. The model, apart from offering a theoretical contribution to argumentation studies, is designed to be applied to the Italian educational system, in particular to classes in technical and professional high schools belonging to the newly created network Inventio. This initiative is one of the outcomes of the research project by the same name, which also includes an original Syllabus, research seminars, a monitoring action and publications focused on introducing philosophy, in the form of workshop activities, into technical and professional schools.

Anisotropic seismic tomography with the reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo

The established isotropic tomographic models show the features of subduction zones in terms of seismic velocity anomalies, but they are generally subjected to the generation of artifacts due to the lack of anisotropy in forward modelling. There is evidence for the significant influence of seismic anisotropy in the mid-upper mantle, especially for boundary layers like subducting slabs. As consequence, in isotropic models artifacts may be misinterpreted as compositional or thermal heterogeneities. In this thesis project the application of a trans-dimensional Metropolis-Hastings method is investigated in the context of anisotropic seismic tomography. This choice arises as a response to the important limitations introduced by traditional inversion methods which use iterative procedures of optimization of a function object of the inversion. On the basis of a first implementation of the Bayesian sampling algorithm, the code is tested with some cartesian two-dimensional models, and then extended to polar coordinates and dimensions typical of subduction zones, the main focus proposed for this method. Synthetic experiments with increasing complexity are realized to test the performance of the method and the precautions for multiple contexts, taking into account also the possibility to apply seismic ray-tracing iteratively. The code developed is tested mainly for 2D inversions, future extensions will allow the anisotropic inversion of seismological data to provide more realistic imaging of real subduction zones, less subjected to generation of artifacts.