ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Every day, everywhere, people make unethical choices ranging from minor selfish lies to massive frauds, with dramatic individual and societal costs. Embodied cognition theories posit that even seemingly abstract processes (like grammar) may be biased by the body-related signals used for building and maintaining self-consciousness, the fundamental experience of owning a body (ownership) and being the author of an action (agency), that is at the basis of self-other distinction. Applying this framework to morality, we hypothesize that strengthening or weakening participants’ bodily self-consciousness towards virtual avatars or real others will influence dishonesty in real, virtual, and web-based interactions. To test this hypothesis, we will measure: i) individual dishonesty after modifying body ownership (e.g., by changing the appearance of the virtual body) and agency (e.g., by changing the temporal synchrony between participant’s and avatar’s actions) over an avatar through which decisions are made; ii) intergroup dishonesty after inducing inter-individual sharing of body self-consciousness (e.g., blur self-other distinction via facial visuo-tactile stimulation); iii) individual and intergroup dishonesty by manipulating exteroceptive (e.g., the external features of a virtual body) or interoceptive (e.g., changing the degree of synchronicity between participant’s and avatar/real person’s breathing rhythm) bodily inputs. Dishonesty will be assessed through novel ecological tasks based on virtual reality and web-based interactions. Behavioural (e.g., subjective reports, kinematics), autonomic (e.g., heartbeat, thermal imaging) and brain (e.g., EEG, TMS, lesion analyses) measures of dishonesty will be recorded in healthy and clinical populations. Our person-based, embodied approach to dishonesty complements cross-cultural, large-scale, societal investigations and may inspire new strategies for contrasting dishonesty and other unethical behaviours.

2 497 188 €

Start date: 2018-11-01, End date: 2023-10-31

FLOS will focus on the metamorphoses of Greek Christian thought in Syriac (Aramaic) and Arabic in Late Antiquity, within the timeframe of the first millennium CE. Syriac Christianity was a pivotal mediator of culture in the Late Antique epistemic space, but is little-known today. FLOS aims to bring to light for the first time a body of highly relevant Syriac and Christian Arabic sources that have hardly ever been studied before. At the end of the millennium, in Islamic-ruled Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran, Syriac Christians strived to define their religious identity. One of their strategies was the production of florilegia, i.e. anthologies that they used to excerpt and reinvent the patristic canon, a corpus of Greek Christian works of the 2nd–6th centuries shared by European and Middle Eastern Christian cultures. A Greco-centric bias has prevented scholars from viewing these florilegia as laboratories of cultural creativity. FLOS will reverse the state of the art through two groundbreaking endeavours: 1) open-access digital editions of a set of Syriac florilegia of the 8th–10th centuries; 2) a study of many neglected writings of Syriac and Christian Arabic authors of the 8th–11th centuries. These tremendously important writings drew from Syriac patristic florilegia to pinpoint topics like incarnation and the Trinity against other Christians or Islam, showing how patristic sources were used to create new knowledge for the entangled environment of the Abbasid era. FLOS will thus dramatically improve our understanding of the cultural dynamics of Late Antiquity; patristic Christianity will emerge as a bridge between the intellectual history of Europe and of the Middle East. By studying how this shared patrimony was transformed in situations of interreligious interaction, especially with Islam, FLOS will facilitate the comprehension of Europe’s current religious discourses, and the preservation of the endangered cultural heritage of the Syriac Christians.

1 343 175 €

Start date: 2018-03-01, End date: 2023-02-28

A seminal concept in modern neuroscience is the plasticity of the developing and adult brain that underpins the organismic ability to adapt to the ever-changing environment and internal states. Conversely, recent studies indicate that ongoing sensory input seems not crucial to modulate the overall level of brain activity, which instead it is strongly determined by its intrinsic fluctuations. These observations raise a fundamental question: what is coded in the intrinsic activity? This project tests the hypothesis that intrinsic activity represents and maintains an internal model of the environment built through the integration of information from visual and bodily inputs. The bodily inputs represent the physical and functional interaction that our body establishes with the external environment. In this framework, the hand has a special role, as it represents the primary means of interaction with the environment. Do behavior and mental activity change as a function of the effector we use to interact with the external environment? In virtual settings, I test the resilience of the internal model to extreme manipulations of the body by replacing the hand with everyday tools. The hypothesis is that prior representations constrain novel behaviors and plastic changes of both intrinsic and task-related brain activities. This prediction is also tested on samples of acquired amputees. These subjects represent an interesting model because the hand loss might reflect loss of sensory representations and less constrain on task-related brain activation. Throughout a combination of behavioral approaches, methods and techniques ranging from kinematics to functional neuroimaging (fMRI and MEG) and virtual reality, this project provides insights on how the synergic activity of body and environment shapes behavior and neural activity. This grant might open novel opportunities for future developments of robotic-assisted technology and neuroprostheses.

1 494 662 €

Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2023-01-31

Writing must rank among mankind’s highest achievements. Yet the factors that enabled its invention independently in different parts of the world have never been subject to an analysis from a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective that encompasses both deciphered and undeciphered scripts. INSCRIBE takes such an approach, combining a study of the world’s first instances of writing, including the earliest in Europe, through the lens of archaeology, anthropology, cultural evolution, cognitive studies and decipherment strategies. This methodology involves three strands of research. First, it will consider the original inventions, all of which are image-based, from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mesoamerica and China, and other debated cases. The objective is to characterize their conception in terms of visual cognition (why are signs shaped as they are?), archaeological setting (what are the contextual preconditions, why does writing emerge when it does, and only four times in history?), application of use (what are its initial purposes?), and language notation (what are the paths to registering sound?). Second, it will explore the earliest scripts in Europe from the second millennium BC Aegean, whose initial phase is highly iconic. The three undeciphered Aegean scripts (Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Cypro-Minoan) will be analyzed for the first time from a multistranded perspective that will shed unprecedented light on their creation and development. The objective is to analyze the relationship between these scripts and to apply a multi-stepped (and already successfully piloted) decipherment strategy. Third, INSCRIBE proposes to go beyond the traditional standards applied to the corpora of inscriptions by producing the first complete digital corpus of all three Aegean undeciphered scripts, with 3D interactive models accompanied by a multidimensional interface tagging inscriptions, types of inscribed objects, provenance, archaeological contexts and functions.

1 463 337 €

Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30

Although the research area dealing with building, sharing and exploiting linguistic resources and tools for automatic processing of Latin (and, more generally, of ancient languages) has seen a large growth across the last decade, linguistic resources for Latin are still not interoperable. This means that linguistic information is split up in many products that just do not talk to each other. Such a situation results in poor exploitation of the richness provided by all those digital objects for Latin that were produced across years of work. Since Latin is a dead language (thus missing native speakers), all we can and must do is to exploit to the best the information contained in those few and precious texts that survived from the past. This means: - to make the best possible organization and use of the available linguistic resources for Latin (enhanced with web-services for Natural Language Processing – NLP –) for a fruitful integration of the information they provide, i.e. to retrieve and combine information from different sources in the most efficient way; - to make it available linguistic resources whose quality is assessed (curated data sets). The objective of the LiLa project is to connect and, ultimately, to exploit the wealth of linguistic resources and NLP tools for Latin assembled so far, in order to bridge the gap between raw language data, NLP and knowledge descriptions, thus enabling scholars to exploit to the best the currently available resources and tools. To address such a challenge, LiLa intends to incorporate the linguistic resources for Latin into the Linked Data framework, making it possible for them to be published and interlinked on the web and to interact with each other. To this aim, the project will build an open-ended knowledge base for Latin by using the Linked Data paradigm to combine data from disparate linguistic resources, provide NLP web-services and include also Latin into the multilingual Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud.

1 984 500 €

Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31

MISFIRES opens up new theoretical and empirical horizons for analysing and innovating ‘concerned markets’, where multiple actors’ interests, values and concerns clash. It asks how actors can engage with a market’s failures to challenge its organisation and make it more collaborative, more open to civic values and to social or political concerns. Concerned markets are contested by diverse actors with equally diverse perspectives and value measures. Evaluating such a market’s efficiency is as much of an illusion as redesigning its inner workings on a blackboard. We need new conceptual frameworks to understand how to innovate concerned markets from the inside to make them ‘better’ (as defined by concerned actors), and we urgently need empirical insights into how collaborative action in markets with such social and political stakes may translate into market change. MISFIRES relies on science and technology studies, pragmatic sociology and critical market studies to shift thinking around market organisation from failure and design to collaboration and experimentation. I devise an ethnographic and participatory inquiry to explore how a market’s failures can lead us to markets that are more attentive to and accommodating of the concerns they create. I choose three exemplary contested markets in healthcare (licensing of antiretroviral drugs, Hepatitis C pricing, and the sale of DNA information) and two emergent controversies to investigate the activities concerned actors undertake, and the instruments and devices they experiment with, to re-organise that market. MISFIRES will comprehensively map, engage in, and conceptualise this collaborative turn in organising markets. With this, MISFIRES will guide new academic and policy thinking by establishing how: 1) concerned actors voice and mobilise around the notion that a market has ‘failed’ them; 2) concerned actors seek to negotiate and address market failures; 3) this process may lead to ‘better’ markets.

1 923 780 €

Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2023-07-31

NeoplAT offers a fresh and thoroughly documented account of the impact of Pagan Neoplatonism on the Abrahamic traditions. It focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the Elements of Theology of Proclus (fifth century) which occupies a unique place in the history of thought. Together with its ninth-century Arabic adaptation, the Book of Causes, it has been translated, adapted, refuted and commented upon by Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across centuries, up to the dawn of modernity. Despite a renewed interest in Proclus’ legacy in recent years, one still observes a tendency to repeat conventional hypotheses focused on a limited range of well-studied authors. This project radically challenges these conservative narratives both by analysing invaluable, previously ignored resources and by developing an innovative comparative approach that embraces a variety of research methods and disciplines. Specialists in Arabic, Greek and Latin history of ideas, philology, palaeography and lexicography develop an intense interdisciplinary research laboratory investigating the influence of Proclus on the mutual exchanges between the scriptural monotheisms from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. Based on fundamental archival examinations in underused library collections, NeoplAT aims (1) to identify new Arabic and Latin manuscripts and to continue to explore a corpus of texts recently discovered by the PI, representing a largely unknown intellectual heritage; (2) to retrace the scholarly networks by which Neoplatonism was transmitted between the Middle East, Byzantium and the Latin West, with particular attention to the dynamics of exchange within each cultural milieu; (3) to analyse the impact of Proclus on the history of metaphysics and on the relations between philosophy and theology within the Abrahamic traditions. NeoplAT achieves these goals through a collaborative, adapted methodology; its specific outputs will provide research tools for the broader academic community.

1 992 590 €

Start date: 2018-05-01, End date: 2023-04-30

The aim of the PALaC project is to provide a systematic and complete study of language-contact in pre-classical Anatolia, from the XVIII century BCE up the Anatolian and Syro-Anatolian cultures of the Iron ages. Language contact is a specific phenomenon present in all phases of modern and historical languages, and requires to be investigated using the language-internal methodologies of contact-linguistics. The project will provide a rigorous and complete description of the linguistic interactions in ancient Anatolia, a unique historical and geographical gateway where Indo-European, Semitic and isolated languages interacted with each other, on the ideal boundary between the East and the West. PALaC will deal with the analysis of the textual data from the different Ancient Anatolian corpora, that will be assessed both from a linguistic and from philological perspective. The final results will also be integrated in the general framework of historical and cultural contact in the Ancient Mediterranean world by a dedicated work-package. The project will take advantage of the methodological expertise of a team of researchers who are well trained both in the philological study of the Ancient Near Eastern texts and in the linguistic study of languages in contact.

1 233 750 €

Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2023-01-31