We live in a world confronted by mounting environmental problems; increasing global deforestation and desertification, loss of species diversity, pollution and global warming. In everyday life people mourn the loss of valued landscapes and urban spaces. Underlying these problems are conflicting priorities and values. Yet dominant approaches to policy-making seem ill-equipped to capture the various ways in which the environment matters to us. Environmental Values introduces readers to these issues by presenting, and then challenging, two dominant approaches to environmental decision-making, (...) one from environmental economics, the other from environmental philosophy. The authors present a sustained case for questioning the underlying ethical theories of both of these traditions. They defend a pluralistic alternative rooted in the rich everyday relations of humans to the environments they inhabit, providing a path for integrating human needs with environmental protection through an understanding of the narrative and history of particular places. The book examines the implications of this approach for policy issues such as biodiversity conservation and sustainability. Written in a clear and accessible style for an interdisciplinary audience, this volume will be ideal for student use in environmental courses in geography, economics, philosophy, politics and sociology. (shrink)

In this Very Short Introduction, John H. Holland, one of the leading figures in the field, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of complexity. From complex physical systems such as fluid flow and the difficulties of predicting weather, to complex adaptive systems such as the diverse and interdependent ecosystems of rainforests, he uses simple examples to illustrate the approach and insights provided by complexity theory.

In this Very Short Introduction, John H. Holland, one of the leading figures in the field, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of complexity. From complex physical systems such as fluid flow and the difficulties of predicting weather, to complex adaptive systems such as the diverse and interdependent ecosystems of rainforests, he uses simple examples to illustrate the approach and insights provided by complexity theory.

We provide a general framework for studying the expansion of strongly minimal sets by adding additional relations in the style of Hrushovski. We introduce a notion of separation of quantifiers which is a condition on the class of expansions of finitely generated models for the expanded theory to have a countable ω-saturated model. We apply these results to construct for each sufficiently fast growing finite-to-one function μ from 'primitive extensions' to the natural numbers a theory T μ of an expansion (...) of an algebraically closed field which has Morley rank 2. Finally, we show that if μ is not finite-to-one the theory may not be ω-stable. (shrink)

The projective plane of Baldwin 695) is model complete in a language with additional constant symbols. The infinite rank bicolored field of Poizat 1339) is not model complete. The finite rank bicolored fields of Baldwin and Holland 371; Notre Dame J. Formal Logic , to appear) are model complete. More generally, the finite rank expansions of a strongly minimal set obtained by adding a ‘random’ unary predicate are almost strongly minimal and model complete provided the strongly minimal set is ‘well-behaved’ (...) and admits ‘exactly rank k formulas’. The last notion is a geometric condition on strongly minimal sets formalized in this paper. (shrink)

Reading the signs of the times against a background of cultural-civilization and global financial-ecological conflicts, the book explores a "new cosmology" influenced by Teilhard de Chardin. It upholds evolution as a co-creative artistic-mystical process in contrast to modern secularist-determinist perspectives. It links a global spirituality to a global ethics.

The fifteen essays in this volume, rooted in the work of the Hellenistic Moral Philosophy and Early Christianity Section of the SBL, examine the works of Philodemus and how they illuminate the cultural context of early Christianity. Born in Gadara in Syria, Philodemus (ca. 110-40 BCE) was active in Italy as an Epicurean philosopher and poet. This volume comprises three parts; the first deals with Philodemus' works in their own terms, the second situates his thought within its larger Greco-Roman context, (...) and the third explores the implications of his work for understanding the earliest Christians, especially Paul. It will be useful to all readers interested in Hellenistic philosophy and rhetoric as well as Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. (shrink)

Theorem: For every k, there is an expansion of the theory of algebraically closed fields (of any fixed characteristic) which is almost strongly minimal with Morley rank k.

We provide a general framework for studying the expansion of strongly minimal sets by adding additional relations in the style of Hrushovski. We introduce a notion ofseparation of quantifierswhich is a condition on the class of expansions of finitely generated models for the expanded theory to have a countable ω-saturated model. We apply these results to construct for each sufficiently fast growing finite-to-one functionμfrom ‘primitive extensions’ to the natural numbers a theoryTμof an expansion of an algebraically closed field which has (...) Morley rank 2. Finally, we show that ifμis not finite-to-one the theory may not beω-stable. (shrink)

Even as the philosopher can show us how to treat an object conceptually as a work of art, by regarding it in some context, so Cavell constantly implies that there are parables to be drawn about the way we treat the objects of our consciousness and the subjects of parts of it. But this special sort of treatment—like projective imagination itself—is not fancy or wit but more like a kind of epistemological fabling that is close to what Shelley called, in (...) A Defense of Poetry, "moral imagination." What is so powerful—and yet elusive of the nets of ordinary intellectual expectation—in The Claim of Reason is the way in which the activities of philosophizing become synecdochic, metonymic, and generally parabolic for the activities of the rest of life itself. It is the way in which the large , unphilosophical, "poetic," or "religious" questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms that makes so much of this book poetical, but not "literary," philosophy. When he writes of how tragedy "is the story and study of a failure of acknowledgment, of what goes before it and after it—i.e., that the form of tragedy is the public form of skepticism with respect to other minds"; or when, after brilliantly adducing The Winter's Tale in his consideration of Othello, he confronts the magic of Hermione's statue coming to life, he observes that "Leontes recognizes the fate of stone to be the consequence of his particular skepticism," the reader can perceive the kind of vast fiction in which minds, bodies, the privacy of insides, dolls, statues, and other representations figure as agents and elements. It will take longer to understand, I think, the imaginative significance of the earlier portions of the book. The philosophers who find its terrain familiar tend to have little patience with poetry; the reader whose sensibility is "literary" may be unable to distinguish between the arguments and examples, and the meta-arguments and examples, of the discussions of Wittgensteinian and Austinian method. Both kinds of readers should keep at it. John Hollander, a distinguished poet and critic, is professor of English at Yale. The author of The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, and The Figure of Echo, his books of poetry include Spectral Emanations and Blue Wine and Other Poems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Summary Of The Spoken Responses By The Poets To Their CriticsJohn HollanderMark Strand responded to Charles Berger’s comments by mak-ing appreciative remarks about the kind of attention his work had received, adding that he did occasionally in writing perceive “glimmers, in the kind of attention I pay, to what Charles Berger has spoken of.” With regard to certain aspects of prior intention, he said that “vague formal imperatives got (...) fulfilled in the writing” and that knowing at the time “the rightness of what I’ve said,” I was nonetheless able to “know the meaning of what I’d said only weeks afterward.” He also acknowledged the kinds of allusiveness which Berger had adduced in his writing, speaking of how and when in the course of writing the resources of his particular sort of echo and allusion seemed to make themselves available.He then turned to the specific question of one of the sequences of poems that Berger had discussed, the “Great Dog Poem No. 2.” He averred that in choosing a dog as speaker he had “not just meant to be funny” [he avowed later on in his remarks that his poems frequently began with “dark humor”] but had also sought for a mode of introspection more original than the fashionably solemn ones of so much contemporary poetry: “I could look within and bark.” With respect to the final line, he observed “I like to finish with a flourish, to pretend I’m Laforgue or Rimbaud,” manifesting “a desire to be a symbolist poet.” With respect to that concluding verse, “I feel like the end of a gorgeous line,” he added that if a dog said that—particularly “a [End Page 189] platinum retriever”—it could not be self-pitying. He spoke in general of the relation of high and low in the poem (a dog named “Rex,” and so forth) and of the relation of this sequence to a much earlier poem of his called “Eating Poetry” in which the speaker is likewise a dog.With regard to formal design, he concluded by saying that in general he tended to start poems “with rough drafts in blank verse” which he then “roughened up” in various ways, preferring as he said “cadences” rather than “measure” in the framing of lines. But he added that in the De Chirico poems he had read, he felt that if one wrote a villanelle, one should keep strictly to the form, without changing words in the refrain lines, and keeping to the iambic meter, saying that “I don’t think you should cheat” under those circumstances.Strand concluded by thanking Berger for the precise nature of his critical attentiveness.John Hollander started out by acknowledging with pleasure that Eleanor Cook’s analysis of his “Owl” had certainly helped him to understand it better; he observed that he felt he had only started to write what he called “real poetry” in his third book, when he had first written a poem he could not understand at the time, and only came to understand years later. He remarked that “The relation of poet and critic as framed by this panel is this: good criticism is a poem’s best friend. We all depend on our friends to point out to us things about ourselves we may not know or acknowledge; although their cousins and other familial relations are other poems, our poems’ best friends are pieces of critical writing.”He was particularly grateful to Cook for pointing out things he hadn’t himself seen—such as the question of the terminal words in the first stanza—but which as a result of the critical insight he had to acknowledge. And this brought up the crucial question of intentionality at the practical rather than theoretical level: in the case of such observations by critics and acknowledgments by poets, it would seem that the writing of a poem could have an intention of which the writer would be unaware. Hollander adduced the analogy of dreaming to poetic composition, paralleling the question “Did you mean to write that?” with (to anyone reporting a dream) “Did you mean to dream that?”He then observed about the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OwlJohn HollanderOwlNow that the owl-light—in the time between Dog and wolf, as some call it—ends, we wait As you alight on an unseen Branch to interrogateThe listener and the rememberer; Lost outlines heighten—as last colors fade— The sounder darkness you confer Upon the spruce’s shade.Deluded by the noonlight’s wide display Of everything, our vision floats through thin Spaces of ill-illumined day: How we are taken inBy what we take (...) in with our roving eyes! Your constant ones, if moved to track or trace, Take their head with them, lantern-wise Taking heed, keeping faceIn the society of night, and keeping Faith with the spirit of pure fixity That sets the mind’s great heart to leaping At what you more than see. [End Page 163]Medusa’s visage gazed our bodies to Literal stone unshaded: your face, caught In our glance widely eyes us through, Astonishing our thought. You who debated with the nightingale The rectitude of northern wisdom, cold Against the love-stuff of the tale The laid-back south had told; And yet who stood amid the lovely, thick Leaves of the ivy, while in all their folly The larks and thrushes sought the prick And berries of the holly; You who confounded the rapacious crow Thus to be favored by the great sky-eyed Queen of the air and all who know, Now ever by her side; With silent wing and interrogative Cry in lieu of a merely charming song, You sound the dark in which you live Perched above right and wrong. Resonance is not vacancy: although He could hear nothing in your hollow howls But woe and his own guilt, Thoreau Rejoiced that there were owls. Scattered and occasional questionings With here and there too late a warning shout, Wisdom arises on the wings Of darkness and of doubt. Where in day’s vastnesses does truth reside? In noon’s uncompromising light and heat When even our own shadows hide Under our very feet? Or in the hidden center of the quick Resilient dark on which your narrowed sight So pointedly alights to pick Not the day, but the night, [End Page 164] Its fruitful flower, petaled a hundredfold? Oh it is there, truth, with the poor blind prey Trembling with prescience or cold Waiting for how your way Of well-tuned suddenness and certitude Tight-strung and execution highly wrought Leads to the pounced-on object, food For something beyond thought, By overlooking nothing, overseeing In all the stillness hidden, tiny motions Squirming with the life of being Inferences and notions. With patient agency the beak and claws Of fierce sublime awareness pluck it clean Deriving what for us are laws Governing the unseen. Under torn canvas we put out to sea Trusting, though puzzled by what glows above, To something like philosophy To be the helmsman of Life (but whose life?). Your lessons of the land, Down-to-tree, then, if not -to-earth, indict Our helplessness to understand Just what we are at night. Immensities of starlight told us lies Of what and where we are; but, we allow, Drunk with the Milky Way, our eyes Are on the Wagon now, Fugitive slaves, leaving despair for dread As if in search of the cold, freeing North, Keep gazing steadily ahead Keep on Keep knowing forth You urge us, as your silences address The power that Minerva chose you for: Great-winged, far-ranging consciousness Now come to rest in your [End Page 165] Olympian attentiveness that finds The affrighted heartbeat on the ground, perceives The flutter of substances, the mind’s Life in the fallen leaves.John HollanderYale UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of algorithms designed to optimize highly interactive systems (multi-diminsional, multi-peak, nonlinear functions). Two applications are discussed: one concerns cognitive systems capable of learning and generalization, and one concerns calculations dealing with the "origin of life" from "organic soups". The algorithms are intrinsically parallel--each function argument processed serves as a carrier for information about a tremendous number of regions (hyperplanes) in the function's domain. Each region is automatically ranked according to the estimated average value of the (...) function over that region, and the rankings are compactly stored in the algorithm's data base (M l-tuples store approximately M-2 l/2 rankings). Thus, the algorithm implicitly processes hyperplanes by manipulating function arguments. (shrink)

Jouissance commands as it induces differentiated subjective effects, and its characteristics on the man's and woman's sides have repercussions, especially at the level of the differential clinic of love.

The author recounts her experiences in the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne's (ECF) cartel of the pass. She describes the two crises of 1990 and 1996 with respect to the discourse of the pass that involved analysts' interpretation of Lacan's views on transference.

Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom provides an incisive commentary on Lacan's reading of Marx, mapping the relations between these two vastly influential thinkers. Unlike previous books, Bruno provides a detailed history of Lacan's reading of Marx and surveys his references to Marx in both his writings and seminars. Examining Lacan's key argument that Marx "invented the symptom", Bruno shows how Lacan went on to criticize Marx and contrasts Marx's concept of surplus-value with Lacan's surplus-enjoyment. Exploring the division (...) between Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives on social and psychological need and Lacan's formalisation of the capitalist discourse, the book compares the positions of Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari, and Zizek on the relations between Lacan, Marx and capitalism, using a wide range of cultural examples, from Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Brecht's Joan Dark and Pierpont Mauler. Through these readings, Bruno also elaborates an extended commentary on Lacan's central idea of the division of the subject. His focus is not only on showing how we can exit from capitalism but also, and just as importantly, on showing how we can make capitalism exit from us. This book will be of great interest to scholars and readers of Lacan and Marx from across the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy and political economy, and will also appeal to Lacanian psychoanalysts in clinical practice. (shrink)