The ways in which other animal species can be informative about human biology are not exhausted by the traditional picture of the animal model. In this paper, I propose to distinguish two roles which laboratory organisms can have in biomedical research. In the more traditional case, organisms act as surrogates for human beings, and as such are expected to be more manageable replicas of humans. However, animal models can inform us about human biology in a much less straightforward way, (...) by being used as measuring devices—what I call their instrumental role. I first characterize this role and provide criteria for it, before illustrating it with some examples from biomedical research, especially cancer research. In such an instrumental role, phenotypes are not expected to phenocopy human phenomena, but instead have the purely instrumental value of detecting or measuring differences. I argue that the instrumental role is more prevalent than might first be suspected, and that some characteristics of contemporary biomedical research are increasingly shifting the use of laboratory organisms to the instrumental role. Finally, in light of the distinction proposed, I discuss the meaning of the expression “animal model”. (shrink)

Authentic Replicas: Buddhist Art in Medieval China by Hsueh-man Shen. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press 2019. 352 pp.; 132 illustrations, 113 in colour. Hb $72 ISBN-13: 9780824867058.

Creating a legacy is often seen as a way to circumvent mortality. At the very least, it is a way to ensure that someone’s ideas live on and their influence on others extends beyond their own lifetime. Common examples of such legacies are cultural products, such as books, music, or art, that one creates and leaves behind. In light of rapid advances in artificial intelligence research, it is conceivable that it will soon become possible – and, to some extent, it (...) already is – to create a new type of legacy in the form of a virtual entity, such as a chatbot or an avatar, that acts as a digital replica of someone. In this paper, we investigate in what sense, if any, one could say that the original person continues to exist in their digital replica. Taking Derek Parfit’s work on the nature of personal identity as our inspiration and starting point, we suggest under what circumstances one could (and should) perceive such replicas as genuine extensions of one's personhood. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy depends on carefully designed institutional frameworks—such as participant selection, facilitation methods, and decision-making mechanisms—that shape how deliberation performs. However, identifying optimal institutional designs for specific contexts remains challenging when relying solely on real-world observations or laboratory experiments: they can be expensive, ethically and methodologically tricky, or too limited in scale to give us clear answers. Computational experiments offer a complementary approach, enabling researchers to conduct large-scale investigations while systematically analyzing complex dynamics, emergent and unexpected collective behavior, and risks (...) or opportunities associated with novel democratic designs. Therefore, this paper explores Digital Twin (DT) technology as a computational testing ground for deliberative systems (with potential applicability to broader institutional analysis). By constructing dynamic models that simulate real-world deliberation, DTs allow researchers and policymakers to rigorously test “what-if” scenarios across diverse institutional configurations in a controlled virtual environment. This approach facilitates evidence-based assessment of novel designs using synthetically generated data, bypassing the constraints of real-world or lab-based experimentation, and without societal disruption. The paper also discusses the limitations of this new methodological approach and suggests where future research should focus. (shrink)

Can we build machines with which we can have interesting conversations? Observing the new optimism of AI regarding deep learning and new language models, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: We want to find out how far we can get in creating a digital replica of a philosopher. This project has two aims; one more technical, investigating of how the best model can be built. The other one, more philosophical, explores the limits and risks which are accompanied by the creation (...) of digital replicas. In cooperation with Daniel Dennett, we took his complete works to fine-tune a GPT-3. In this paper, we share our first results with some piloting models and discuss legal and ethical questions about creating and interacting with digital replicas. (shrink)

The task of this brief presentation is to “establish a dialogue” with Streeck’s text, attempting to fill the hiatus between the answer and the original question that Habermas’ interpretation intended to pose to those wishing to simply dispose of economic and monetary union, ending up by dismantling the political and cultural integration project that inspired the founding fathers. Streeck complains about the “levity” with which many reviewers accepted “as a slogan” the “killer-argument” [Totschlagargument] of the “nostalgic option” provided by the (...) interpretation of his most recent publication and the excuse for his removal from the assembly of “guardians of the Holy Grail”. Now, while acknowledging that in the thesis of the author of Gekaufte Zeit [4] there is no trace of nationalist seeds, which – as Altiero Spinelli observed – “had caused the catastrophe of the two World Wars” [5], Habermas’ critique seizes the unrealistic thoughtlessness of an idea that ends up evoking the system of “European cooperation” between the now impotent national states. We can do without the “specialisation in Europeanism” that according to Streeck, would be required as a preliminary to discuss European policy in the German public arena, but not criticism that is constructive and not defeatist. (shrink)

This paper examines the legal frameworks governing digital replicas in the United States and Japan, with a focus on recent legislative developments and case law. It analyzes New York’s 2020 and California’s 2024 amendments restricting the use of digital replicas, as well as proposed federal legislation such as the NO FAKES Act. While U.S. jurisdictions have enacted explicit statutory protections, Japan relies on judicial interpretation of personality rights, including portrait and publicity rights established by Supreme Court decisions in (...) 2005 and 2012.The study highlights key differences: U.S. laws explicitly address post-mortem rights, whereas Japanese personality rights are generally considered non-transferable and non-inheritable. Japan’s potential legislative response, particularly through unfair competition law reform, aligns with scholarly perspectives linking the right of publicity to trademark law.The paper concludes that Japan would requires legislative intervention to regulate digital replicas, particularly regarding post-mortem rights and licensee standing. Any comprehensive framework must balance protection with free speech considerations by incorporating explicit exemptions for news, criticism, parody, and biographical works, as well as case-specific defenses. (shrink)

In this chapter, I outline three prominent themes that have emerged in my provenance research in the collections of the Canada Science and Technology Museum (CSTM). First, I explore the role collectors have had on the kinds of histories we collect, preserve, research and display, and the means through which their activities build historical value for a body of preserved materials. Through the history of collectors (many are scientists), we depart from traditional narratives and learn more about their own time, (...) culture, preoccupations and conceptions of science. Second, I look at the historical function of display in the history of museum objects, and their surprisingly long history of being on display, in many cases much longer than their technical use. These display histories tell us much about the nature of scientific communication, culture and identity. Third, I look at the history of scientific replicas and recreations, and their function in making and shaping the history and culture of science. I treat replicas as artifacts from their time of construction, and not just as representations of a previous historical moment. (shrink)

Resurrection has been used as the conceptual basis for attempted solutions to two problems that occur in the context of western theism, the problem of cognitive meaning and the problem of theodicy. Because John Hick has proposed resurrection as a solution to both problems so extensively, and because Antony Flew and Terence Penelhum have examined those solutions so strenuously, I will use their writings to lay out the problem. My aim is to improve upon Hick by overcoming a weakness in (...) his defence of resurrection. My narrower focus will be on resurrection and the ‘replica objection’, rather than the wider use of resurrection to solve problems of evil or the meaningfulness of theistic discourse, but some brief remarks on the wider problems will be necessary to set the stage. (shrink)

Replicas of Marian images, especially the Salus Populi Romani, played an important role in the conversion of Chinese literati and commoners to Christianity. This article examines the diffusion of replicas of the Salus Populi Romani in the Ming Empire during the late sixteenth century, including both copies produced in situ and those coming from Europe. It focuses particularly on the role of miraculous and conversion tales related to the vision of Salus Populi Romani reproductions. This paper also focuses (...) on the renowned conversion of the Chinese literatus (Paul) Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562-1633) as it has been narrated by the Jesuit missionaries and the controversial role in his conversion played by a Marian devotional image. Conversely, this piece takes into consideration the role played by the production and reproduction of Marian devotional images in the Ming dynasty cultural context, including a new change in the enthusiasm in China for “Western” artworks and the wide diffusion of Roman Catholicism through “European” and “European-like” devotional images. (shrink)

This essay brings together questions from aesthetic theory and museum management. In particular, I relate a contextualist account of the value of copies to a pluralistic understanding of the purpose of museums. I begin by offering a new defence of the no longer fashionable view that the aesthetic (as opposed to the ethical, personal, monetary, historical, or other) value of artworks may be detached from questions regarding their provenance. My argument is partly based on a distinction between the process of (...) creating a work of art and the artwork in question.Next, I defend a pluralism about the purpose of museums and their exhibitions. I combine this with a pluralist account of the value of replicas which falls out of the above argument, exposing our preference for originality as being frequently fetishistic. I maintain that the importance of the provenance of artworks is relative to the specific purposes of any given exhibition or museum. Those that are primarily educational (such as encyclopaedic ones) are in many cases best served with high-quality replicas. This view may be extended to artefacts that are not artworks, such as fossils and dinosaur skeletons. Finally, I expound the variety of roles that replicas may play in museums and relate these to notions of authenticity. (shrink)

This article examines the cultural dimensions of synthetic ‘body fat replicas’, anatomically modelled objects used in educational and medical settings to train subjects in particular affective responses to fat/ness. Specifically, I focus on theorizing the phenomenological experience of embodied engagements with such models, and exploring the manner in which the replicas are designed to participate in the shaping of emotional orientations toward one’s own body and those of others. Appealing to the work of contemporary social and cultural theorists, (...) I consider how the capacity of objects to act as nexuses for the commingling of abstract and concrete, psychological and material, inner space and outer life, and meaning and affect situates these lumps of polyvinyl chloride as valuable aids to elucidating the cultural polyvalence of ‘fat’. This article is oriented around the application of a selection of insightful theoretical work, drawn from the multidisciplinary field of science and technology studies, as well as from sociological research on medicine and the body. I argue that, by moving toward an understanding of fat/ness as a phenomenon comprised, in Annemarie Mol’s terminology, of ‘multiple enactments’, we can better understand how ‘fat’ has come to embody particular sets of meanings and emotions in the context of a contemporary medicalized transnational culture. (shrink)

The demand for integrating and sharing heterogeneous data online has attracted the interest of cultural institutions in making information access and retrieval more effective via Semantic Web technologies. The present study proposes a digital repository for 3D scans of modernist sculptures in public spaces in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with a view to ensuring access, use, reuse and preservation of this information. This is a qualitative exploratory experimental study based on the scientific literature and specific empirical material. (...) It presents the analysis results of vocabularies for physical artifact documents and their digital counterparts on the Semantic Web and a discussion on how these align with the nature of the metadata determined here, as well as a metadata modeling prototype implemented on the Tainacan platform and aimed at cataloging digital 3D replicas. We claim that the proposed model for documenting cultural heritage assets on Tainacan is easy to implement, in that it uses accessible technology with a wide internet user base, highly expressive in its descriptions of 3D and multimedia content and based on well-established metadata and ontology standards recommended by regulatory bodies and communities such as the World Wide Web Consortium and International Organization for Standardization. Keywords: networked heritage documents, digital repositories, 3D digitization, semantic annotation. (shrink)

Quantum walks exhibit different properties compared with classical random walks, most notably by linear spreading and localization. In the meantime, random walks that replicate quantum walks, which we refer to as quantum-walk-replicating random walks, have been studied in the literature where the eventual properties of QWRW coincide with those of QWs. However, we consider that the unique attributes of QWRWs have not been fully utilized in the former studies to obtain deeper or new insights into QWs. In this paper, we (...) highlight the directivity of one-dimensional discrete quantum walks via QWRWs. By exploiting the fact that QWRW allows trajectories of individual walkers to be considered, we first discuss the determination of future directions of QWRWs, through which the effect of linear spreading and localization is manifested in another way. Furthermore, the transition probabilities of QWRWs can also be visualized and show a highly complex shape, representing QWs in a novel way. Moreover, we discuss the first return time to the origin between RWs and QWs, which is made possible via the notion of QWRWs. We observe that the first return time statistics of QWs are quite different from RWs, caused by both the linear spreading and localization properties of QWs. (shrink)

Some people wrongly believe that A. Turing’s works that underlie all modern computer science never discussed “physical” robots. This is not so, since Turing did speak about such machines, though making a reservation that this discussion was still premature. In particular, in his 1948 report [8], he suggested that a physical intelligent machine equipped with motors, cameras and loudspeakers, when wandering through the fields of England, would present “the danger to the ordinary citizen would be serious.” [8, ]. Due to (...) this imperfection of technology in the field of knowledge that we now call robotics, the methodology that he proposed was based on human speech, or rather on text. Other natural human skills were too difficult to implement, while the exchange of cues via written messages was much more accessible for engineering implementation in Turing’s time. Nevertheless, since then, the progress of computer technology has taken forms that the founder of artificial intelligence could not have foreseen. (shrink)

In a recent book Cattaneo argued without hesitation for the authenticity of that Basilian work. Prof. Manlio Simonetti in his review of this book – Augustinianum 54, 561-567 – expressed an opinion totally opposed, believing inconclusive the arguments presented by the Author. With this reply, the Author tries to answer the objections of Simonetti, and concludes by confirming his original position.

This paper illustrates what can bе termed the "joumey of а name," one of the many kinds of cultural and material transmission that occured between early Byzantine Constantinople and the major centers of the province of Italy, which had been taken back from their captors bу Justinian's armies in the fourth and fifth decades of the sixth century. In fact, the monastery of Cosmas Damian in Constantinople offers а particularly apt case study, as its name was given to three newly (...) founded ecclesiastical establishments in Italy. The latter seem to have had no specific connection with what was claimed as their motherhouse. The name could simply bе among the most distinct reflections of a sort of traveling memory. (shrink)