From Plato to Adam

The Journey of Truth: From Plato to Zola*

Western theater theory and criticism is generally considered to be set forth by the Greeks. Plato was “the first theater critic” with his negative comments about theater owing to his idealistic views about “the truth.” Then came Aristotle who used a different viewpoint from that of Plato, saying that there is “truth” in theater. However, hostile criticism on theater came back in the Middle Ages...

The Secularization of Revelation from Plato to Freud Angus

This paper will attempt to sketch a historical outline of ideas relating to revelation by tracing the development of a concept or topos which has preoccupied Western thinkers since antiquity and which became crucial during the Romantic period — the concept of the Daemon, and the general mode or sensibility referred to as the “Daemonic.” In Classical thought, the term “Daemonic” is associated wi...

Improving Generalization Performance by Switching from Adam to SGD

Despite superior training outcomes, adaptive optimization methods such as Adam, Adagrad or RMSprop have been found to generalize poorly compared to Stochastic gradient descent (SGD). These methods tend to perform well in the initial portion of training but are outperformed by SGD at later stages of training. We investigate a hybrid strategy that begins training with an adaptive method and switc...

Early Greek Science: Thales to Plato

arguments of this type, and the beautiful geometric arguments the Greeks constructed during this period and slightly later, seemed at the time to be merely mental games, valuable for developing the mind, as Plato emphasized. In fact, these arguments have turned out, rather surprisingly, to be on the right track to modern science, as we shall see. Change and Constancy in the Physical World Over ...

Commercial Relations: From Adam Smith to Field Experiments