NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
The normativity of epistemic rationality

This thesis argues that epistemic rationality is normative, or that agents ought to be epistemically rational. The property of rationality is here understood as a code. Specifically, the code of epistemic rationality requires various things, such as responding correctly to epistemic reasons one has, remaining coherent and avoiding akratic combinations of beliefs. Additionally, this thesis has secondary aims, such as: (i) arguing that apparent epistemic reasons to believe P (understood as apparently true propositions which, if they were true, would count in favour of the conclusion that P) are deontically significant; (ii) arguing against unsolvable normative dilemmas of epistemic rationality; (iii) arguing against a specific type of permissiveness which roughly states that, relative to a body of epistemic reasons, it can be epistemically rational for an ideal agent to believe P and to disbelieve P. While these secondary aims are interesting in their own right, they confirm the main claim of this thesis, namely, that epistemic rationality is normative.

Keyphrases: akrasie, Philosophy, Epistemology, epistemic rationality, epistemic norms, evidence, akrasia, epistemic permissiveness
L'être capable de son passé : l'herméneutique du temps de Paul Ricœur à la lumière de l'idée de reprise créatrice

Our study is about Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of time and it aims to analyze the capacity to reopen the past that Ricœur often praises, though without according to it a detailed philosophical treatment. The question we want to answer is the following: under which conditions and on which conceptual basis does this capacity enable creative repetitions, which attest, by virtue of the possibilities they reveal, the indetermination of the human past? To answer properly this question, we argue that Ricœur’s idea of repetition depends on the reciprocal mediation of a creative meaning and a way to be affected (by the past). This dialectic is analyzed on three different levels: tradition, history and personal memory. There are also three different issues resulting from this dialectic: existential, ontological and epistemological. The existential issue is about the suffering generated by the course of time, since it gives to any past event the form of something irremediable. The problem is then to understand how creative repetitions help us to face, from an hermeneutical standpoint, the irrevocability of the past that comes with the irresistible flux of time. The ontological issue revolves around the temporal qualities the repetition of the past is prompt to reveal. In this sense, our objective is to show that creative repetitions have not only a hermeneutical meaning (the fact that they imply a new interpretation of the past and present), but also a temporal function, because they create a re(con)figuration of our time experience. This kind of re(con)figuration is contained in the dialectic between creative meaning and being-affected. This dialectic thus comes with a temporal circle: this circle means that our past constantly determines the meaning of our present and our expectations towards the future, but in return these expectations are an opportunity to redefine and recover the possibilities hidden in our past and in so doing modify the way it affects us. Finally, the epistemological issue is about the truth value of the representation of the past that comes with creative repetitions. The question is the following: how can it be possible to change past meaning or recover its unaccomplished possibilities, while still trying to be faithful to what happened in the past? To face this difficulty, we assume that an interpretation of the past can be creative only to address an immanent need of its object. Our goal is then to show that Ricœur, by bringing to the fore the human capacity to reopen the past, does not sink into an unleashed antirealism nor does he argue in favour of relativism. On the contrary, by doing that, he only continues to defend, like elsewhere in his work, a proper form of critical realism.

Keyphrases: Paul Ricœur, Tradition, Time, Hermeneutics, Tradition, History, Memory
Aspects géométriques et topologiques du crochet de Poisson des variétés symplectiques

This thesis studies two problems of geometric and topological nature associated to the Poisson bracket on symplectic manifolds.  The first problem concerns the notion of "symplectic submersion" that we introduce here and which generalizes the concept of symplectomorphism. A symplectic submersion turns out to be a Poisson morphism, namely a map between symplectic manifolds which preserves the Poisson bracket. Our interest in those maps stems from the fact that Gromov's nonsqueezing theorem is a statement about the minimal area possible for the images of the symplectic submersions (going from a symplectic ball to a symplectic plane) which are compositions of a symplectic embedding into the Euclidean symplectic space and of the standard projection onto the plane of conjugated variables (p_1, q_1). We investigate the inverse "representability" problem: we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a symplectic submersionas above to factorize in the previous way either through a symplectic embedding or through a symplectic immersion into Euclidean space. We show moreover that there exists a symplectic submersion which does not factorize in this way through an immersion, and also that there exists a symplectic submersion which does factorize in this way through an immersion, but not through an embedding.    The second problem concerns Polterovich's Poisson bracket conjecture. Given a symplectic manifold (M, omega) and an open cover U of M, we can define the invariantpb(F) of a partition of unity F subordinated to U, which is a sort of norm on the pairwise Poisson brackets of the functions in F. Denoting e(U) the maximal Hofer displacement energy of a set in U, the conjecture asks whether there exists a positive constant C independent of U and F such that the product of pb(F) and e(U) is greater than C. This conjecture was proved recently by Buhovsky-Logunov-Tanny in the case of surfaces; based on earlier work of Buhovsky-Tanny , we also proved the conjecture for surfaces of genus one and above. We present our approach in the second chapter of this thesis. Using symplectic submersions, we generalize our methods in order to tackle the conjecture in higher dimensions; in particular, we obtain a new proof of a theorem of Polterovich and Buhovsky-Tanny about the pb invariant of covers made up of small open sets.    In order to make this thesis as accessible and self-contained as possible, we first give an introduction to symplectic topology. The appendices also collect the more specialized facts we use throughout this work.

Keyphrases: Symplectic topology, Poisson bracket, Symplectic submersion, Poisson morphism, Representability problem, pb invariant, Hofer displacement energy, Partition of unity
Construction of graphene, nanotubes and polytopes using finite reflection groups

The goal of this thesis is to study structures obtained from finite reflection groups. The work is contained in four published papers, one submitted article and a research paper currently in preparation, with partial results presented as a chapter of this thesis. In the first article, we present a reduction of the orbits of finite Coxeter groups to their subgroups. We use projection matrices, that is, mappings that transform the simple roots of a reflection group to the simple roots of the appropriate subgroup. The results presented in this paper focus on non-crystallographic finite reflection groups. Moreover, we use polytopes generated by the non-crystallographic group H3 to illustrate the obtained branching rules, i.e., reductions of orbits of the finite Coxeter groups. In the second article, we study polytopes with 60 vertices, generated by the non-crystallographic group H3. We use a method of decoration of the Coxeter–Dynkin diagram to describe their structure in detail, and decompose their vertices into sums of orbits of lower-dimensional symmetries. The third article compares two notations used to describe polyhedra generated by reflection groups, namely the Schläfli symbol, and the dominant point notation. Here, we present the advantages of each method, we explain the two approaches, and we illustrate them through examples. In the fourth article, we focus on graphene, i.e., a hexagonal tiling of the plane that possesses remarkable properties when the vertices are modelled with carbon atoms. In this work, we present different methods to obtain graphene from lattices and three-dimensional orbits of finite reflection groups. Moreover, a technique to colour the hexagons by a finite number of colours is provided, along with a systematic method to refine the graphene. In the fifth article, we use special functions and Fourier transforms to process data sampled on a square lattice of the Lie group SU(2) × SU(2), related to the A1 × A1 symmetry group.

Keyphrases: Coxeter Group, Final Reflection Group, Non-crystallographic Root System, Graphene, Projection Matrix, Orbit Decomposition, Convex Polytope, Nanotube, Polytope convexe, Nanotubes
On challenges in training recurrent neural networks

In a multi-step prediction problem, the prediction at each time step can depend on the input at any of the previous time steps far in the past. Modelling such long-term dependencies is one of the fundamental problems in machine learning.  In theory, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) can model any long-term dependency. In practice, they can only model short-term dependencies due to the problem of vanishing and exploding gradients. This thesis explores the problem of vanishing gradient in recurrent neural networks and proposes novel solutions for the same.  Chapter 3 explores the idea of using external memory to store the hidden states of a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. By making the read and write operations of the external memory discrete, the proposed architecture reduces the rate of gradients vanishing in an LSTM. These discrete operations also enable the network to create dynamic skip connections across time. Chapter 4 attempts to characterize all the sources of vanishing gradients in a recurrent neural network and proposes a new recurrent architecture which has significantly better gradient flow than state-of-the-art recurrent architectures. The proposed Non-saturating Recurrent Units (NRUs) have no saturating activation functions and use additive cell updates instead of multiplicative cell updates.  Chapter 5 discusses the challenges of using recurrent neural networks in the context of lifelong learning. In the lifelong learning setting, the network is expected to learn a series of tasks over its lifetime. The dependencies in lifelong learning are not just within a task, but also across the tasks. This chapter discusses the two fundamental problems in lifelong learning: (i) catastrophic forgetting of old tasks, and (ii) network capacity saturation. Further, it proposes a solution to solve both these problems while training a recurrent neural network.

Keyphrases: Recurrent Neural Networks, Long-term Dependencies, Non-saturating Recurrent Units, Memory Augmented Neural Networks, Neural Turing Machines, LSTMs, Skip connections, lifelong learning, catastrophic forgetting, capacity saturation
Advances in deep learning with limited supervision and computational resources

Deep neural networks are the cornerstone of state-of-the-art systems for a wide range of tasks, including object recognition, language modelling and machine translation. In the last decade, research in the field of deep learning has led to numerous key advances in designing novel architectures and training algorithms for neural networks. However, most success stories in deep learning heavily relied on two main factors: the availability of large amounts of labelled data and massive computational resources.  This thesis by articles makes several contributions to advancing deep learning, specifically in problems with limited or no labelled data, or with constrained computational resources.   The first article addresses sparsity of labelled data that emerges in the application field of recommender systems. We propose a multi-task learning framework that leverages natural language reviews in improving recommendation. Specifically, we apply neural-network-based methods for learning representations of products from review  text, while learning from rating data. We demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance  on the Amazon Reviews dataset.  The second article tackles computational challenges in training large-scale deep neural networks. We propose a conditional computation network architecture which can adaptively assign its capacity, and hence computations,  across different regions of the input. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on visual recognition tasks where objects are spatially localized within the input, while maintaining much lower computational overhead than standard network architectures.  The third article contributes to the domain of unsupervised learning with the generative adversarial networks paradigm. We introduce a flexible adversarial training framework, in which not only the generator converges to the true data distribution, but also the discriminator recovers the relative density of the data at the optimum. We validate our framework empirically by showing that the discriminator is able to accurately estimate the true energy of data while obtaining state-of-the-art quality of samples.  Finally, in the fourth article, we address the problem of unsupervised  domain translation. We propose a model which can learn flexible, many-to-many mappings across domains from unpaired data. We validate our approach on several image datasets, and we show that it can be effectively applied in semi-supervised learning settings.

Keyphrases: Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Probabilistic Generative Models, Generative Adversarial Networks
La cité de Séleucie-sur-le-Tigre aux époques séleucide et arsacide

The city of Seleucia on the Tigris was founded in the 4th century BCE by Seleucos I, one of Alexander’s empire’s Successors. According to the size of it’s original dwelling-blocks, it was designed from the start to be a large and important city. It flourished for some time and became an administrative center and royal residence. In 129 BCE, it was conquered by the Arsacids, a rival dynasty. Seleucia’s development continued unbroken, but the city eventually declined and disappeared around 200 CE.   To explain this change, historians underlined the importance of the perceived culture of its old and new sovereigns. Ruled by the Macedonian Seleucids, the city prospered. Under the Iranian Arsacids’ hostile administration, it was ill-treated until it got abandoned. Such analyses have been based on some passages of ancient texts insisting on the Greek character of Seleucia and its inhabitants. Those also influenced the interpretation of the results of the first archaeological digs conducted on the site.   This thesis comes back on the relations between the city and both its Seleucid and Arsacid kings in order to evaluate the importance of this supposed cultural rivalry in the development of Seleucia. It compares the written tradition, essential but biased by political imperatives, and the buildings, coins, seals and figurines discovered by American, German and Italian archaeologists between 1927 and 1989. Our results suggest that the city and its population were of a mixed cultural backround and that its supposed Greek character did not play much of a role in its decline. We therefore suggest that other factors explain the disappearance of Seleucia, such as the Tigris changing bed and an evolution in the geopolitical situation of the Near East around 200.

Keyphrases: Seleucia on the Tigris, Seleucid Kingdom, Arsacid Kingdom, Hellenistic Mesopotamia, Hellenism, Hellenization
Mille après mille : mobilité, célébrité et mémoire des artistes populaires après «l'exode»

Art history and cultural history in Quebec present many examples of “retours d’Europe” and of “French triumphs,” from the formative overseas stays of the “exotiques” in the 1910s to the stage success of Quebec “chansonniers” in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. However, between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s, some of the most famous French-speaking artists based in Montréal preferred to go on tour in the United States. Many of them traveled New England year after year, sometimes going as far as New York City, to cheer the French-speaking public present along the way in the industrial cities of the region. Yet this episode of high mobility is almost absent from history, memory and cultural heritage in Quebec—and even more so in the United States. Beyond the impact of the Great Depression on Montréal’s cultural scene and of the Second World War on the possibility of visiting Europe, these artists have turned their eyes towards America because they participated in a transnational space, both geographical and symbolic, inherited from an era of great intracontinental migrations, then reactivated and reconfigured by the advent of sound and audiovisual media—discs, radio and cinema. By studying the history of the celebrity of Mary “La Bolduc” Travers, Rudy Vallée and Jean Grimaldi, this thesis attempts to access to the various layers of this phenomenon at the crossroads of cultural history, media history and migration history. Their intricate narratives therefore reveal the modality of mobility involved inside—and often times outside—of the French Canadian “imagined community.” By analyzing the heritagization process of these artists, it is possible to isolate some of the causes the oblivion of this transnational episode of francophone culture in North America, such as the rejection of mobility in the formation of national and ethnic identity narratives; the historical marginalization of popular arts; and the mistrust of the United States among cultural and political elites around the world at the time.

Keyphrases: migration, identification collective, mobility, tour, migration, media, celebrity, popular art, public memory, heritagization, collective identification, 20th century, Quebec, New England
La violence masculine à l’égard des femmes dans les Églises en Haïti : analyse praxéologique des récits de vie des personnes immigrantes haïtiennes qui vivent à Montréal

Our thesis focuses on male violence against women in churches in Haiti. It is part of the disciplinary field of theology in interdisciplinary dialogue with human sciences, particularly at the intersection of sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, history, psychology, Men’s Studies and feminist theology. The problem revolves around four main issues: the prevalence of violence against women in Haiti; Church violence, the resistance and solidarity of Haitian women; the importance of the commitment of men in the fight against this violence. These questions are posed in a Haitian context and, more specifically, in the Christian churches in Haiti.  The research has as methodological support the praxeology. This allows us to observe and articulate, from a field study, the stories of people who have been involved in episodes of church violence in Haiti. Such research seeks to stimulate social and religious change among clerics and lay people from an awareness that propels them to become involved in private spheres, but above all to engage in the political struggle against masculine violence towards women.  Our thesis helps to promote: 1) the transformation of men's behavior towards women in Christian churches in Haiti; 2) the awareness of members of the clergy and secular men regarding respect for the rights of women, their emancipation and liberation; 3) masculine solidarity as a strategy to promote the integration of women in the positions of responsibility; 4) the involvement of men in the fight against male violence against women. Finally, the specificity of this research is not only limited to exploring the violence of men towards women in Christian churches, but also extends to other institutions of Haitian society.

Keyphrases: Violence, Kyriarcat, Genre, Church, Masculinity, Feminist theology, Kyriarchy, Gender, Clericalism
Écosystème relationnel pour une paix intérieure et extérieure : modèle issu d’une méthode mixte en recherche sur l’approche de l’écoute compassionnelle selon The Compassionate Listening Project.

The research consists of an exploratory mixed-method research (Cresswell & Plano Clark, 2011) using a constructive Grounded Theory methodology (Charmaz, 2014, 2006). The object of study is experiences and transformations related to the practice of compassionate listening, as well as the process and type of spirituality at the heart of this approach for conflict transformation developed by The Compassionate Listening Project (TCLP) based in the United States. People get to sit with Israeli or Palestinian guest speakers and they listen to them share their story and experience with the conflict, wherever they can locate themselves in the political Spectrum. Trained with the compassionate listening approach, it becomes possible for them to affirm their deepest humanity and learn to hold the complexities related to the conflict (Cohen, 2011). 14 semi-structured interviews with delegates from the 2010 TCLP delegation, participant observation and document analysis, took place in the qualitative stage of the research. Followed by the administration of an online questionnaire to past participants of TCLP delegations between 1998 and 2015 (n=60). The study led to the emergence of a theoretical and practical Model named: Well-being Ecosystem for Inner and Outer peace, based on a social process theory (Glaser, 2005) informing on conditions and factors involved in the passage between three stages: from a feeling or state of separation with the other, to more communication and towards deep connection and communion. The integration chapter of the mixed methods presents four key pillars supporting this Model to help integrate an agenda of the heart to peace efforts, in the form of specific types of “responses of the heart” (affiliated to the notion of compassionate love, Fehr et al., 2009) inspired by the compassionate listening approach and series of variables, factors, and conditions to help cultivate a culture of peace in any environment. The quality of presence and environment at the relational level is exposed in the nexus of the notions of spirituality and practice for peacebuilding and conflict transformation. The research combines scientific and experiential knowledge in Social Sciences, Applied Religious Studies, Health and Contemplative Studies.

Keyphrases: Compassion, Compassionate listening, Conflict transformation, Culture of peace, Compassion, Listening, Applied religious studies, Israel-Palestine conflict, Compassionate love, Agenda of the heart, Response of the heart