Philosophy

È ormai da circa un decennio che il dibattito culturale registra un ritorno del materialismo; un ritorno che si delinea innanzitutto come un suo aggiornamento ai temi contemporanei (post-umanesimo, ecologia, femminismi), svolto attraverso la riattivazione di quella materia che il materialismo si porta sempre in qualche misura dietro, nella sua declinazione filosofica come nei suoi usi politici. Pur inserendosi in questo movimento diffuso, il volume prova a riconfigurare i termini del dibattito attraverso uno spostamento prospettico: da un centro unico – la materia, che nella sua pervasività rischia di descrivere un determinismo in grado di trasmettersi dalla dimensione fisica a quella sociale, politica, estetica – a due fuochi, la materia e la forma. La scommessa è che dalla lunga vicenda filosofica di questi due concetti affiorino dei momenti in cui la loro dialettica lasci intravedere percorsi differenti rispetto a quelli che si sono dati storicamente, e configurazioni inedite di senso, capaci di concepire un materialismo che non cerchi solo la legittimazione materiale di lotte e pratiche, ma che trovi le parole e gli strumenti per immaginarne di nuove.

This article revisits Marx’s theory of subsumption and elaborates its centrality for comprehending contemporary capitalism from a global perspective. It explores the forms of capitalist subsumption, first in terms of Marx’s classic notions of ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subsumption, in which social and technological mechanisms of domination unfold within capitalist production. It then seeks to broaden the scope of analysis towards the sphere of commodity cir- culation and mercantile exchange, with its monetary and credit mechanisms of subsumption. Finally, it sketches a global conceptualization of subsumption at the level of the process of social reproduction.

Unique hue settings of 185 observers under three room-lighting conditions were used to evaluate the accuracy of full and mixed chromatic adaptation transform models of CIECAM02 in terms of unique hue reproduction. Perceptual hue shifts in CIECAM02 were evaluated for both models with no clear difference using the current Commission Internationale de l'Éclairage (CIE) recommendation for mixed chromatic adaptation ratio. Using our large dataset of unique hue data as a benchmark, an optimised parameter is proposed for chromatic adaptation under mixed illumination conditions that produces more accurate results in unique hue reproduction

Observers are faster to detect a target among a set of distracters if the targets and distracters come from different color categories. This cross-boundary advantage seems to be limited to the right visual field, which is consistent with the dominance of the left hemisphere for language processing [Gilbert et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 489 (2006)]. Here we study whether a similar visual field advantage is found in the color identification task in speakers of Mandarin, a language that uses a logographic system. Forty late Mandarin–English bilinguals performed a blue–green color categorization task, in a blocked design, in their first language (L1: Mandarin) or second language (L2: English). Eleven color singletons ranging from blue to green were presented for 160 ms, randomly in the left visual field (LVF) or right visual field (RVF). Color boundary and reaction times (RTs) at the color boundary were estimated in L1 and L2, for both visual fields. We found that the color boundary did not differ between the languages; RTs at the color boundary, however, were on average more than 100 ms shorter in the English compared to the Mandarin sessions, but only when the stimuli were presented in the RVF. The finding may be explained by the script nature of the two languages: Mandarin logographic characters are analyzed visuospatially in the right hemisphere, which conceivably facilitates identification of color presented to the LVF.

An online colour-naming experiment was designed and developed to determine a broad set of colour words in wide cultural use with their corresponding colour ranges in sRGB and Munsell specifications. The quality of the English dataset was analysed in terms of colour centroids, frequency of names, consistency and response time. The importance of basic colour terms was confirmed while it was also revealed that in free colour naming tasks, the majority of the observers preferred to use non-basic colour terms. The validation of the web-based experimental methodology with previous studies conducted in controlled viewing conditions produced satisfactory results, while a comparison of the 27 most frequent chromatic colour words with a previous web-based experiment showed a remarkable agreement.

Extensive research in color naming and color categorization has been more focused on a small number of consensual color categories than towards the development of more subtle color identifications. The work we present in this paper describes an online color-naming model. In this context we evaluated the performance of two probabilistic estimation algorithms for automatic assignment of CIELAB coordinates into an arbitrary number of color names. The algorithms were tested on data gathered in a sophisticated online color naming experiment detailed elsewhere and summarized here. Our methodology resulted in practical color naming models that can support natural language image segmentation, with a computational simplicity that makes them suitable for online applications.