Resumen En la crítica del Cantar de los Cantares no hay acuerdo acerca del problema estructural del libro. Las teorías se dividen en aquellas que abogan por un carácter fragmentario contra otras que ven un carácter unitario de los poemas. El estudio intenta revisar esta problemática y proponer que el Cantar de los Cantares es una colección de poemas sueltos que un redactor/recopilador juntó e intentó poner en cierto orden, incorporando el conjuro de 2,7; 3,5; 5,8; 8,4 como estribillo con (...) función articuladora, de tal manera que el conjuro quedó puesto como hito divisorio entre grandes bloques poéticos que se relacionan entre sí por un tema común u otro recurso de mano redaccional, configurando así un ordenamiento estructural de todo el libro.In the criticism of the Song of Songs there is no agreement on the structural problem of the book. Theories are divided into those advocating a fragmentary against others who see a unitary character of poems. The study attempts to revise this problems and propose that the Song of Songs is a loose collection of poems that a compiler gathered and tried to give some order, incorporating the adjuration of 2, 7; 3,5; 5,8; 8,4 as refrain with articulate function, such that the adjuration was set as milestone dividing between large blocks poetic that interrelate by a common theme or other resource or literary technique thus configuring a structural arrangement of the whole book. (shrink)

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird die Behandlung ontologischer Fragen auf Grund analytischer Methoden untersucht und die zeitgenössische NominalismusDiskussion durchleuchtet. In einem ersten Teil erläutert der Verfasser Quines Kriterium für das, was er "ontic commitment" nennt, sowie dessen Ablehnung der sog. substitutionellen Quantifikationstheorie. Im zweiten Teil werden Hintikkas Interpretation des Kriteriums und sein Umdeutungsversuch dargelegt, der auf der Verwendung einer Quantifikationstheorie ohne existentielle Voraussetzungen beruht. Im letzten Teil wird die berühmte Kontroverse zwischen Carnap und Quine hinsichtlich ontologischer Aussagen und des Nominalismusstreites (...) erörtert. Es wird zu zeigen versucht, daß die Carnapsche Auffassung, wonach Fragen der Ontologie nur die praktische Wahl von Sprachsystemen betreffen und deshalb nicht sinnvollerweise in theoretischem Gewand auftreten können, den Vorzug verdient. Quines Betrachtungsweise scheitert letztlich an seinem Holismus und vor allem auch an den unerfüllbaren Forderungen, die er an die Definition von "analytisch" stellt. Wir bauen nicht, wie Neuraths Bild nahelegt, auf offener See an einem einzigen Schiff, dessen Planken wir einzeln ersetzen, sondern an einer bunten Flotte von Schiffen, die zu verschiedenen Zwecken gebraucht werden. Betrachtet man aber den faktischen wissenschaftlichen Betrieb aus dieser Perspektive, so scheint Hintikkas Kriterium, das den Handlungskontext der sog. Sprachspiele des Suchens und Findens mitberücksichtigt, bessere Dienste zu leisten als das Quinesche. (shrink)

Previous chapter The Recent Transformation of Rhythmanalysis into an Observation Technique As we can see, a significant number of elements of rhythmanalysis had already been outlined in the 1970s. This should be emphasized because it provides a better understanding of its strengths but also of its weaknesses. But before looking into Lefebvre's last book published posthumously in 1992, we need to consider its transformation into a sheer empirical method that has accompanied its recent - Sociologie – Nouvel article.

Previous chapter The Recent Transformation of Rhythmanalysis into an Observation Technique As we can see, a significant number of elements of rhythmanalysis had already been outlined in the 1970s. This should be emphasized because it provides a better understanding of its strengths but also of its weaknesses. But before looking into Lefebvre's last book published posthumously in 1992, we need to consider its transformation into a sheer empirical method that has accompanied its recent - Sociologie – Nouvel article.

A λ-theory T is a consistent set of equations between λ-terms closed under derivability. The degree of T is the degree of the set of Godel numbers of its elements. H is the $\lamda$ -theory axiomatized by the set {M = N ∣ M, N unsolvable. A $\lamda$ -theory is sensible $\operatorname{iff} T \supset \mathscr{H}$ , for a motivation see [6] and [4]. In § it is proved that the theory H is ∑ 0 2 -complete. We present Wadsworth's proof (...) that its unique maximal consistent extention $\mathscr{H}^\ast (= \mathrm{T}(D_\infty))$ is Π 0 2 -complete. In $\S2$ it is proved that $\mathscr{H}_\eta(= \lambda_\eta-\text{Calculus} + \mathscr{H})$ is not closed under the ω-rule (see [1]). In $\S3$ arguments are given to conjecture that $\mathscr{H}\omega (= \lambda + \mathscr{H} + omega-rule)$ is Π 1 1 -complete. This is done by representing recursive sets of sequence numbers as λ-terms and by connecting wellfoundedness of trees with provability in Hω. In $\S4$ an infinite set of equations independent over H η will be constructed. From this it follows that there are 2^{ℵ_0 sensible theories T such that $\mathscr{H} \subset T \subset \mathscr{H}^\ast$ and 2 ℵ 0 sensible hard models of arbitrarily high degrees. In $\S5$ some nonprovability results needed in $\S\S1$ and 2 are established. For this purpose one uses the theory H η extended with a reduction relation for which the Church-Rosser theorem holds. The concept of Gross reduction is used in order to show that certain terms have no common reduct. (shrink)

Le présent article montre que s’il est totalement réducteur de considérer Descartes comme un mécaniste radical (le corps humain n’est pas un corps comme un autre puisqu’il est uni à une âme) et Kant comme un finaliste radical (l’explication scientifique en biologie sera, en dernier ressort, mécaniste) dans leur tentative respective d’explication du vivant, il est tout aussi réducteur de voir en Bergson unsimple critique du mécanisme. En effet, Bergson fait le «rêve», dans L’évolution créatrice , d’un «mécanisme de la (...) transformation» qui représente une réforme du mécanisme dont la condition de possibilité repose non seulement sur le progrès de la chimie, mais également et surtout sur celui des mathématiques modernes, plus précisément du calcul infinitésimal, seule méthode capable de saisir bjectivement le mouvement.When it comes to explaining life and living organisms, it is as insufficient to see in Descartes a proponent of radical mechanicism (the human body is not any sort of body since it is united with a soul) and in Kant a proponent of radical finalism (in biology, scientific explanations are in the last resort mechanicist), as it is to see in Bergson nothing other than an opponent of mechanicism. In fact in Creative Evolution Bergson “dreams” of a “mechanism of transformation” that should consist of a reform of mechanicism, the conditions of possibility of which are based not only on the progress of chemistry, but first of all on the progress of mathematics, and more precisely of infinitesimal calculus, the only method able to objectively grasp movement. (shrink)

In the last 2500 years, since the beginnings in ancient Greece of the literary genre we call “history,” the relationship between history and law has been very close. True, the Greek word historia is derived from medical language, but the argumentative ability it implied was related to the judicial sphere. History, as Arnaldo Momigliano emphasized some years ago, emerged as an independent intellectual activity at the intersection of medicine and rhetoric. Following the example of the former, the historian analyzed specific (...) cases and situations looking for their natural causes; following the prescriptions of the latter—a technique, or an art, born in tribunals—he communicated the results of his inquiry.2Within the classical tradition, historical writing had to display a feature the Greeks called enargeia, and the Romans, evidential in narrtatione: the ability to convey a vivid representation of characters and situations. The historian, like the lawyer, was expected to make a convincing argument by communicating the illusion of reality, not by exhibiting proofs collected either by himself or by others.3 Collecting proofs was, until the mid-eighteenth century, an activity practiced by antiquarians and erudite, not by historians.4 When, in his Traité des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité he l’histoire , the erudite Jesuit Henri Griffet compared the historian to a judge who carefully evaluates proofs and witnesses, he was expressing a still-unaddressed intellectual need. Only a few years later Edward Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first work that effectively combined historical narrative with an antiquarian approach.5 2. See Arnaldo Momigliano, ”History between Medicine and Rhetoric,” Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, trans. Riccardo Di Donato , pp. 14-25.3. See Ginzburg, “Montrer et citer.”4. See Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Contributo alla storia degli studi classici , pp. 67-106.5. See Henri Griffet, Traité des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité de l’histoire, 2d ed. . Allen Johnson, in his Historian and Historical Evidence , speaks of the Traité as “the most significant book on method after Mabillon’s De re diplomatic” . See also Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” p. 81, and Ginzburg, “Just One Witness.” On Gibbon, see Momilgiano, Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico , pp. 231-84. Carlo Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His two most recent books are Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath and Il giudice e lo storico. (shrink)

When Augustine condemns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because the Jews reject reading “in the spirit,” they are therefore condemned to remain “Israel in the flesh.” Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one that is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language (...) and discover its immaterial spirit.1 This way of thinking about language has been initially stimulated in the Fathers by Paul’s usage of “in the flesh” and “in the spirit” respectively to mean literal and figurative. Romans 7:5-6 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure: “For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions, stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the Spirit and not the old one of the letter.” In fact, the exact same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, who writes that his interest is in “the hidden and inward meaning which appeals to the few who study soul characteristics rather than bodily forms.”2 For both, hermeneutics becomes anthropology. 1. See Henri Crouzel, Origen, trans. A. S. Worrall , pp. 107-12.2. Philo, On Abraham, sec. 147, in vol. 6 of Philo, trans. and ed. F. H. Colson , p. 75. It is very important to note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of an entire school of people who understood the Bible, and indeed the philosophy of language, as he did. On this see David Winston, “Philo and the Contemplative Life,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Green , pp. 198-231, esp. p. 211. Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the department of Near-Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash , as well as the forthcoming Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, from which the present essay is drawn. He is currently engaged in a project entitled The Politics of the Spirit: Paul as a Jewish Cultural Critic. (shrink)

Henri Poincaré’s views on the foundations of mechanics and the nature of mechanical explanation were influenced by the work of two of the most renowned nineteenth century scientists, James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz. In order then to unravel Poincaré’s views and own contribution to the subject it is important to see the connection between Maxwell ’s and Hertz’s researches on the one hand and Poincaré’s on the other. Consequently, I start this paper with a brief account of Poincaré’s (...) encounter with Maxwell ’s work in electromagnetism. Then, in section 2, I move on to show how Hertz’s work on the foundations of mechanics shaped Poincaré own views. In sections 3 and 4, I formulate Poincaré’s own conventionalist philosophy of mechanics and show how several methodological considerations, especially the search for unity, mitigated his conventionalism. Having thus examined Poincaré’s views on the foundations of mechanics, in section 5 I turn my attention to his notion of mechanical explanation and his proof that a mechanical explanation of a set of phenomena is possible if the principle of conservation of energy is satisfied. I then go on to show how Poincaré secured the possibility of a mechanical explanation of electromagnetic phenomena, and also how, having done so, he ended up with an unlimited number of configurations of matter in motion that could underpin electromagnetic phenomena. The upshot of this paper will be that Poincaré departed from the traditional conceptions on mechanical explanation and defended a purely structural conception, the strong point of which was that it promoted — as the motto of this paper says — the true and only aim of science, namely unity. (shrink)

Henri Bergson and William James were great admirers of each other, and James seemed to think he got valuable ideas from Bergson. But early critics were right to see in Bergson the antithesis of pragmatism. Unfolding this antithesis is a convenient way to study important concepts and innovations in Bergson's philosophy. I concentrate on his ideas of duration and intuition, and show how they prove the necessity of going beyond pragmatism. The reason is because knowledge itself goes beyond the (...) utilitarian limitations in which pragmatism confines it. Knowledge is more than utility, more than adaptation, more than pragmatism, because our cognitive powers prove capable of more than any naturally selected service to survival. (shrink)

Most see having their individuality stifled as equivalent to the terrible forced conformity found within speculative fiction like George Orwell's 1984. However, the oppression of others by those in power has often been justified through ideologies of individualism. If we look to animistic traditions, could we bridge the gap between these extremes? What effect would such a reevaluation of identity have on the modern understanding of selfhood? The term ' in-dividual' suggests an irreducible unit of identity carried underneath all of (...) our titles and experiences—the real self. By linking Marilyn Strathern's elaboration of dividualism and Nurit Bird-David's relational epistemology , a clear contrast forms between the animistic sense of self and that of the West. This system of selfhood more readily encourages a life lived in Henri Bergson's sense of duration and sets up a state of dialogical discourse , as seen in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. These concepts challenge the traditional praise for individuality and exposes how individualism can be used as a tool of marginalization as seen in Michel Foucault's critique of authorship. I argue that pursuing a sense of self rooted in these concepts instead of individualism mitigates this marginalization via a more socially aware cultural environment that the traditional Western sense of self fails to create. (shrink)

This paper examines the meaning of space and its relationship to value. In this paper, I draw on Henri Lefebvre to suggest that our ethics produce and are produced by spaces. Space is not simply a passive material container or neutral geographic location. Space includes the ideas on which buildings are modeled, the ordering of objects and movement patterns within the space, and the symbolic meaning of the space and its objects. Although often unrecognized, space itself is value-laden, and (...) its values are suggested as people interact within that space. By reflecting on the spaces of health care, we will see that we not only must attend to the quandaries caused by the delivery of health care in non-acute places, but also to the values that produce and are produced by spaces. These values influence our moral imagination and shape us as people. (shrink)

From Bishop Wilberforce in the 1860s to the advocates of "creation science" today, defenders of traditional mores have condemned Darwin's theory of evolution as a threat to society's values. Darwin's defenders, like Stephen Jay Gould, have usually replied that there is no conflict between science and religion--that values and biological facts occupy separate realms. But as James Rachels points out in this thought-provoking study, Darwin himself would disagree with Gould. Darwin, who had once planned on being a clergyman, was convinced (...) that natural selection overthrew our age-old religious beliefs. Created from Animals offers a provocative look at how Darwinian evolution undermines many tenets of traditional philosophy and religion. James Rachels begins by examining Darwin's own life and work, presenting an astonishingly vivid and compressed biography. We see Darwin's studies of the psychological links in evolution (such as emotions in dogs, and the "mental powers" of worms), and how he addressed the moral implications of his work, especially in his concern for the welfare of animals. Rachels goes on to present a lively and accessible survey of the controversies that followed in Darwin's wake, ranging from Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism to Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology, and discusses how the work of such influential intellects as Descartes, Hume, Kant, T.H. Huxley, Henri Bergson, B.F. Skinner, and Stephen Jay Gould has contributed to--or been overthrown by--evolutionary science. Western philosophy and religion, Rachels argues, have been shaken by the implications of Darwin's work, most notably the controversial idea that humans are simply a more complex kind of animal. Rachels assesses a number of studies that suggest how closely humans are linked to other primates in behavior, and then goes on to show how this idea undercuts the work of many prominent philosophers. Kant's famous argument that suicide reduces one to the level of an animal, for instance, is meaningless if humans are, in fact, animals. Indeed, humanity's membership in the animal kingdom calls into question the classic notions of human dignity and the sacredness of human life. What we need now, Rachels contends, is a philosophy that does not discriminate between different species, one that addresses each being on an individual basis. With this sweeping survey of the arguments, the philosophers, and the deep implications surrounding Darwinism, Rachels lays the foundations for a new view of morality. Vibrantly written and provocatively argued, Created from Animals offers a new perspective on issues ranging from suicide to euthanasia to animal rights. (shrink)

Henri Lefebvre speaks of space as a social product. Spatially, law operates as a social product when considering sites of imprisonment. Call them prisons, jails, or correctional facilities, people who violate the law go to these places for purposes of confinement, punishment, rehabilitation. However, with decades of increasing rates of incarceration, we can see that these places fail both the jailed and the external society to which they will return. Through overcrowding, exploitative private companies, and defunded social services, these (...) places continue to cause injustice as spaces in which the social product of rehabilitation is often lacking. However, on the Island of Hawai‘i, there is an alternative. In Hilo, the community-based organization ‘Ohana Ho‘opakele’ seeks to provide a Hawaiian holistic approach that will serve as an alternative to incarceration. Through wellness centers and the practice of traditional ho’oponopono, this group advocates for a spatially-oriented rehabilitative approach to restorative justice. A central feature is the land upon which the program will be situated and its organization as a self-supported ahupua‘a. This indigenous land division contains diverse and sustainable resources where the participants will be connected to Hawaiian culture and practices central to the concept of wellness for the person and the community. The group’s vision for this program is far-reaching as it will serve as a model for justice in the Restored Hawaiian Kingdom. In this paper, we will explore the vision of ‘Ohana Ho‘opakele against the backdrop of a politically westernized legislative-based response to the diasporic urgency of Hawaii’s incarcerated. (shrink)

Technologies not only change “external reality” but also change our internal consciousness, shaping the way we experience the world. As the reality of intelligent environments is upon us—ushered along with the age of ubiquitous computing—we must be careful that the ideology these technologies embody is not blindly incorporated into the environment. As disciplines, engineering and computer science make implicit assumptions about the world that conflict with traditional modes of cultural production. For example, space is commonly understood to be the void (...) left behind when no objects are present. Unfortunately, once we see space in this way, we are unable to understand the role it plays in our everyday experience. In order to make computationally enhanced spaces that are meaningful at the level of the everyday, we must exorcise the notion of intelligence from their design and replace it with life. Henri Lefebvre’s discussions of the space of everyday life provide a framework to help conceive this transition. (shrink)

Article published in Progress in Human Geography, Aug 2017. This is a pre-publication version of the article ; please see early online version at publisher website for final version.: This article examines rhythmanalysis within the context of Henri Lefebvre's critique of everyday life and identifies gaps in his framework from the vantage point of intersectional feminist scholarship. Intersectional rhythmanalysis, I argue, provides a framework - Géographie – Nouvel article.

This essay attempts to describe the neo-Lamarckian atmosphere that was dominant in French biology for more than a century. Firstly, we demonstrate that there were not one but at least two French neo-Lamarckian traditions. This implies, therefore, that it is possible to propose a clear definition of a (neo) Lamarckian conception, and by using it, to distinguish these two traditions. We will see that these two conceptions were not dominant at the same time. The first French neo-Lamarckism (1879-1931) was structured (...) by a very mechanic view of natural processes. The main representatives of this first period were scientists such as Alfred Giard (1846-1908), Gaston Bonnier (1853-1922) and Félix Le Dantec (1869-1917). The second Lamarckism - much more vitalist in its inspiration - started to develop under the supervision of people such as Albert Vandel (1894-1980) and Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895-1985). Secondly, this essay suggests that the philosophical inclinations of these neo-Lamarckisms reactivated a very ancient and strong dichotomy of French thought. One part of this dichotomy is a material, physicalist tradition, which started with René Descartes but developed extensively during the 18th and 19th centuries. The other is a spiritual and vitalist reaction to the first one, which also had a very long history, though it is most closely associated with the work of Henri Bergson. Through Claude Bernard, the first neo-Lamarckians tried to construct a mechanical and determinist form of evolutionary theory which was, in effect, a Cartesian theory. The second wave of neo-Lamarckians wanted to reconsider the autonomy and reactivity of life forms, in contrast to purely physical systems. (shrink)

This essay attempts to describe the neo-Lamarckian atmosphere that was dominant in French biology for more than a century. Firstly, we demonstrate that there were not one but at least two French neo-Lamarckian traditions. This implies, therefore, that it is possible to propose a clear definition of a (neo)Lamarckian conception, and by using it, to distinguish these two traditions. We will see that these two conceptions were not dominant at the same time. The first French neo-Lamarckism (1879–1931) was structured by (...) a very mechanic view of natural processes. The main representatives of this first period were scientists such as Alfred Giard (1846–1908), Gaston Bonnier (1853–1922) and Félix Le Dantec (1869–1917). The second Lamarckism – much more vitalist in its inspiration – started to develop under the supervision of people such as Albert Vandel (1894–1980) and Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985). Secondly, this essay suggests that the philosophical inclinations of these neo-Lamarckisms reactivated a very ancient and strong dichotomy of French thought. One part of this dichotomy is a material, physicalist tradition, which started with René Descartes but developed extensively during the 18th and 19th centuries. The other is a spiritual and vitalist reaction to the first one, which also had a very long history, though it is most closely associated with the work of Henri Bergson. Through Claude Bernard, the first neo-Lamarckians tried to construct a mechanical and determinist form of evolutionary theory which was, in effect, a Cartesian theory. The second wave of neo-Lamarckians wanted to reconsider the autonomy and reactivity of life forms, in contrast to purely physical systems. (shrink)

This is a book about evolution from a post-Darwinian perspective. It recounts the core ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson and his rediscovery and legacy in the poststructuralist critical philosophies of the 1960s, and explores the confluences of these ideas with those of complexity theory in environmental biology. The failings in the development of systems theory, many of which complex systems theory overcomes, are retold; with Bergson, this book proposes, some of the rest may be overcome too. It asserts (...) that Bergson’s ideas can further our understanding of evolution, and of complex systems, and aid the work of scientists working in the field of ecological complexity. See http://www.creativeemergence.info/ for more detail and sample chapter. "The claim is that Bergson's notions of duration and élan vital resonate with and provide interesting metaphysical speculations complementing a process structuralist biology of the Goodwin and Kauffman stripe. This is certainly provocative and worth further thought. The key claim is that the openness and unpredictability of systems "at the edge of chaos" (where a system can be said to "choose" at bifurcation points in its state space) meets the Bergsonian desideratum of an open universe that takes irreversible time and evolutionary difference seriously. In particular, Kreps stresses the way Bergson's insistence on the differentiating force of élan vital (which Kreps successfully defends from the charge of a substantialist vitalism along the lines of Hans Dreisch) puts him in line with those who see natural selection as a secondary pruning of a primary differentiation." -John Protevi, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2016.01.20 'This is no ordinary introduction to Henri Bergson. What David Kreps' excellent study gives us is Bergson, complexe: first, because there is no simple way to take (or leave) Bergson's ideas - his thought of durée, élan, and 'multiplicity' demands the most subtle and nuanced reading to give them their full justice; and second, because only by intertwining his ideas with the most up-to-date research in systems thinking, complexity theory, and poststructuralism can we begin to understand their absolute contemporaneity. Kreps' work does all this and more: it gives us the Bergson we need for today.' -John Mullarkey, author of Bergson and Philosophy 'Kreps' book is a thoroughly researched and well-written work that shows how Bergson's philosophy of evolution and time can also reinvigorate our ideas about complexity and organization in the natural and physical sciences.' -Stephen Crocker, author of Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media. (shrink)

Sewall Wright first encountered the complex systems characteristic of gene combinations while a graduate student at Harvard's Bussey Institute from 1912 to 1915. In Mendelian breeding experiments, Wright observed a hierarchical dependence of the organism's phenotype on dynamic networks of genetic interaction and organization. An animal's physical traits, and thus its autonomy from surrounding environmental constraints, depended greatly on how genes behaved in certain combinations. Wright recognized that while genes are the material determinants of the animal phenotype, operating with great (...) regularity, the special nature of genetic systems contributes to the animal phenotype a degree of spontaneity and novelty, creating unpredictable trait variations by virtue of gene interactions. As a result of his experimentation, as well as his keen interest in the philosophical literature of his day, Wright was inspired to see genetic systems as conscious, living organisms in their own right. Moreover, he decided that since genetic systems maintain ordered stability and cause unpredictable novelty in their organic wholes (the animal phenotype), it would be necessary for biologists to integrate techniques for studying causally ordered phenomena (experimental method) and chance phenomena (correlation method). From 1914 to 1921 Wright developed his "method of path coefficient" (or "path analysis"), a new procedure drawing from both laboratory experimentation and statistical correlation in order to analyze the relative influence of specific genetic interactions on phenotype variation. In this paper I aim to show how Wright's philosophy for understanding complex genetic systems (panpsychic organicism) logically motivated his 1914-1921 design of path analysis. (shrink)

Nearly all the extracts presented here are new translations and most have never appeared in English before.

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, prophet-saviour-apostles,” in (...) which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

Poincaré and Prawitz have both developed an account of how one can acquire knowledge through reasoning by mathematical induction. Surprisingly, their two accounts are very close to each other: both consider that what underlies reasoning by mathematical induction is a certain chain of inferences by modus ponens ‘moving along’, so to speak, the well-ordered structure of the natural numbers. Yet, Poincaré’s central point is that such a chain of inferences is not sufficient to account for the knowledge acquisition of the (...) universal propositions that constitute the conclusions of inferences by mathematical induction, as this process would require to draw an infinite number of inferences. In this paper, we propose to examine Poincaré’s point—that we will call the closure issue—in the context of Prawitz’s framework where inferences are represented as operations on grounds. We shall see that the closure issue is a challenge that also faces Prawitz’s own account of mathematical induction and which points out to an epistemic gap that the chain of modus ponens cannot bridge. One way to address the challenge is to introduce suitable additional inferential operations that would allow to fill the gap. We will end the paper by sketching such a possible solution. (shrink)

Several years ago, in a brilliant contribution to the Collection Archives Series, Michel de Certeau wove together a large number of seventeenth-century documents pertaining to the famous episode of demonic possession among the Ursuline nuns of Loudun.1 One of the principal ways in which de Certeau organized his disparate complex materials into a compelling narrative was by viewing the extraordinary events as a kind of theater. There are good grounds for doing so. After all, as clerical authorities came to acknowledge (...) the incidents of possession and treat them accordingly, they ceased to be isolated, private events occurring inside the convent walls and were transformed instead into public spectacles performed for a populace deeply divided between Catholics and Huguenots. Once or twice a day the nuns were taken from their needlework or tranquil meditations and led in small groups through the streets of the town to a church or chapel, where spectators had already gathered. At first these spectators were local townspeople, many of whom must have been acquainted with or even related to the nuns, but, as word of the possession spread, crowds of the curious arrived not only from the region but from all over France and from as far away as England and Scotland. The inns of the town were filled with these visitors who traveled to Loudun expecting to witness events there that were at once beyond nature and yet performed on schedule: repeatable, predictable, and—in their bizarre way—decorous.At the appointed times, beneath the expectant gaze of the crowd, the possessed women would ascend a scaffold, be loosely tied to low chairs, and begin to manifest their symptoms. From within each of the tormented bodies, a particular devil would arise and be constrained by the exorcist to identify himself. If a nun were possessed by more than one demon, the exorcist could dismiss one supernatural voice and demand that another come forth and occupy the tongue of the writhing woman. If the demon refused to cooperate in the interrogation, the presiding priest would solemnly remove the Holy Sacrament from the pyx and hold it up to the mouth of the possessed while the priests and spectators would assist by chanting the Salve Regina. This would provoke screams and violent contortions. Submitting to irresistible spiritual pressure, the devil would then be compelled to speak, confirming the Christian mysteries and the power of the Catholic church. “On stage,” writes de Certeau, “there are no longer human beings; in this sense, there is no longer anyone—only roles” . And these “roles” in turn are revealed to be the hidden truths that underlie the masks of ordinary life; more accurately, the ceremony has the power to convert ordinary life into mere masks, precisely so that these masks may be stripped away to reveal the inward drama of spiritual warfare. The demons appear at first to dominate that drama, forcing their wretched and unwilling hosts to manifest the power of darkness, but a spectacular ecclesiastical counterforce transforms the tragedy into a comedy in which the devil confesses that he has been vanquished by Jesus Christ. 1. See Michel de Certeau, La Possession de Loudun, Collection Archives Series, no. 37 ; all further references to this work, abbreviated PL, will be included in the text . On the relationship between exorcism and theater in this period, see also Henri Weber, “L’Exorcisme à la fin du seizième siècle, instrument de la Contre Réforme et spectacle baroque, » Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 1 : 79-101. Stephen Greenblatt, the Class of 1932 Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a founder and editor of Representations. His most recent book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, received the British Council Prize in the Humanities. He is presently completing a study of Shakespeare and the poetics of culture. “Marlow, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1978 issue. (shrink)

A monumental work by an important modern philosopher, Matter and Memory (1896) represents one of the great inquiries into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Nobel Prize-winner Henri Bergson surveys these independent but related spheres, exploring the connection of mind and body to individual freedom of choice. Bergson’s efforts to reconcile the facts of biology to a theory of consciousness offered a challenge to the mechanistic view of nature, and his original and innovative views exercised a (...) profound influence on other philosophers--including James, Whitehead, and Santayana--as well as novelists such as Dos Passos and Proust. Matter and Memory is essential to an understanding of Bergson’s philosophy and its legacy. (shrink)

Topology uses simple geometric and algebraic ideas, but its huge success and vast ramifications make it a tough nut for historians of twentieth‐century mathematics. Two books have addressed it well: Dieudonné chronicles about one thousand key definitions and theorems, and essays in James focus on forty central themes. Both assume considerable mathematics, but neither offers a historical synthesis of the simplest core ideas. Now, Alain Herreman uses semiotics to watch these leading ideas develop through the founding works of Henri (...) Poincaré, Oswald Veblen, James Alexander, and Solomon Lefschetz. Herreman states outright that semiotics will not exhaust these meanings, but he makes it a revealing tool.The method is especially suited to Poincaré, who will define one technical term repeatedly in a single work, each time differently, as if it was the first, and perhaps no definition will match any use of the term in proofs. For Poincaré no term gets meaning from a definition. Each functions in relation to the others—that is, specifically in relation to other terms in Poincaré's work. It is no use invoking standards of rigor current in Poincaré's time and place or then‐current definitions. Poincaré was well known at the time for using neither: Poincaré's meanings must be derived from his writing, as Herreman does.Herreman bases his semiotics on Hjelmslev yet refutes Hjelmslev's concern that mathematics may be “monoplanar,” with no content beyond the signs themselves . The book depicts four levels of content at work in these authors: algebraic, geometric, arithmetic, and set theoretic. Herreman says a sign has algebraic content if its use depends on its written expression, the way polynomials are formal expressions added and multiplied by formal rules. Early topologists—here especially Alexander—sought purely combinatorial methods. Thus a “cube” is a set of six “faces,” twelve “edges,” and eight “vertices,” each taken as primitive and described only by a short table showing which ones meet which. Combinatorics typifies arithmetic content for Herreman. Yet a cube is also an infinite set of points. Herreman speaks of geometric content when a sign indicates both a set of parts and a set of points. Today we might use different notations for the set of points and the set of parts—Poincaré et al. did not. Herreman will not reconstruct their works or restate them in other words; rather, he uses these levels of content to organize extensive quotations and analyze the relations in each text as they move toward deeper union of the algebraic and geometric.The chapter on Lefschetz makes a great finale. Lefschetz is arguably Poincaré's closest and greatest student, though the two never met. Like Poincaré's, his work is at once compelling and baffling, decisive for the future of mathematics yet brutally difficult to absorb. Semiotics serves well in presenting this mathematician who “never stated a false theorem or gave a correct proof,” as his friends joked.The book does not go far into theorems. Yet it requires some background. A beginner might enjoy it with Alexandroff , a gem itself, written with unusually strong historic sense. Specialists will enjoy reading it with the original works for its fresh viewpoints and novel connections. It is a fine way to analyze the works, to see how they create their own meanings. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

Only one volume has reached us to mark the centenary of Bergson's birth. Is this significant? If a writer lives to an advanced age his centenary usually falls at a time when fashion has turned against him, and the consequent attitudes are perhaps more interestingly gleaned from comparitively informal assessments than from carefully timed publications. In the Nouvelles Littéraires of October 22,1959, there appeared, almost a hundred years to the day after Bergson's birth, a reported discussion on his philosophy between (...) Gaston Berger, Gabriel Marcel, Henri Gouhier, Jean Brun and a young “normalien” Dominique Janicaud.The talk, presumably more or less spontaneous, was naturally desultory. The older participants could always compensate for implicit misgivings by falling back on affectionate personal recollections, and the youngest would perhaps have preferred not to have to say anything at all. The most cogent general estimate was probably M. Jean Brun's, when he described Bergson as in effect making a stand against the danger of specialist appropriation of the dismembered fragments of philosophy by the various branches of science. We have seen this very nearly come about in England, where a fairly narrow linguistic and logical sector alone has been held with any feeling of conviction. What is here exemplified is the difference of outlook on any question that the English Channel makes. I once heard an English professor of English literature say that when reading Emile Legouis' History of English Literature he had some difficulty in persuading himself that his own professional speciality was being dealt with. It is not difficult to see how this comes about. What one nation takes for granted appears to another as excitingly significant. (shrink)

We shall revisit a debate which has been going on at least since pioneering British Indologists like William Jones first encountered the ‘Brahmanic theology’ we now know as Vedānta, namely, the nature of the relationship—if any—between certain forms of ‘western’ and ‘Indian’ idealisms, and how these metaphysical systems have influenced Christian theology. Specifically, we look at the question of possible thematic and conceptual convergences between Neoplatonism and Advaita Vedānta, and argue that significant parallels can be found in their common conception (...) of the Absolute as Being. Rather than attempt a comprehensive overview of the two systems, we take the divine ‘I AM’ revealed to Moses in Exodus 3.14 as the locus classicus of Christian philosophical interpretations of God as Being itself, and explore how four seminal figures read this passage in light of Neoplatonic and Vedāntic influences. We shall see that similarities and divergences in the readings of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and Henri Le Saux can be understood in terms of how they negotiate the relation between the One and the many, or between ‘being’ and ‘knowing’. The more these figures allow themselves to be influenced by Neoplatonism and Advaita Vedānta, the more we see any clear ontological distinction between creature and Creator start to break down. This verse, therefore, proves to be an unusually fruitful test case for exploring the relation between the underlying Neoplatonic and Vedāntic metaphysics which structure varying Christian interpretations of it. (shrink)

This article compares the colonial and contemporary canvas of the hegemonic discourse of White Western writers and their portrayal of Malaysia and her people. The first half of the discussion will focus on the figurative elements of classical colonialist discourse through an exploration of The Soul of Malaya (1931) a text written by Henri Fauconnier, a French planter of Colonial Malaya. Here, cultural hegemony is revealed mostly through the employment of the Manichean allegory, of what we see as “ideological (...) allegory”. The second half of the discussion adopts a more linguistic oriented framework, as it reveals patterns in linguistic selection in the novel , Borneo Fire (1995)by contemporary white writer, William Riviere. This latter is what we term “ideological stylistics”. The main objective of the article is to compare the underlying ideological constructs of the discursive landscape of the two texts and to determine whether white western superiority manifested in the discourse of the contemporary text has evolved from that seen in its colonial predecessor. The paper concludes that time changes little in terms of the location of the other, for despite its being published in 1995, the discourse of Borneo Fire has not moved away from the approach and conventions of the colonial text, The Soul of Malaya. (shrink)

Cities around the globe are immersed in transnational projects of place reconfiguration and attraction. Urban places, intent on competing in the globalized experience-based economy, undertake identity projects—on-going, dynamic processes through which places are produced and reproduced by conscious strategies of place making and identity building (see, for example, Nyseth and Viken 2009). In this article, I employ Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of a “right to the city” in order to explore the right to full participation in imagining and shaping urban (...) futures. Spatial practices, such as those I term civic tinkering, may offer one way to help enable such imagining.My discussion draws from scholarship on imaginaries and place identity, as well as on my own qualitative field studies conducted in Roanoke, Virginia, in the United States, and Belfast, Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. While my precise research questions differed in these two sites, I explored, in each instance, the processes of place identification and development centered on arts and culture, and the extent to which marginal groups and their concerns were engaged or considered in such processes. I also explore “tinkering” as a set of activities that hold potential for residents to more fully participate in the urban project byconstructing, altering, and disrupting spatial meanings. Tinkering may be any impermanent, unsanctioned, and informal activity endeavoring to positively alter a city’s identity. Henri Lefebvre described the relevance of such practices in his vision of the city as oeuvre, or ongoing project. (shrink)

This paper develops an approach to analysing the importance of anticipations of the future on present actions in the lives of mental health service users, for whom sensing stability in the future is important as part of the recovery process. The work of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead is drawn upon to argue that temporality is understood spatially, and that past and future experience only exist in relation to their shaping of present activity. This process is produced spatially (...) rather than chronologically. Drawing on empirical work with community mental health service users the paper focuses on the home space as a key site for organising space in anticipation of future life. This involves analysing accounts of home making in which we see the role of anticipatory futures in the ordering of domestic space. The paper concludes by arguing that home spaces are a key site related to ongoing psychological well being, and that analysis of such spaces is important in terms of highlighting practices through which service users attempt to ‘make the future’. . (shrink)

In recent years, social workers have raised a new concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. Even employed, there are people so overburdened by the cost of living and so under compensated that they cannot afford a place to sleep. Contrary to popular opinion, according to the website for the Coalition for the Homeless, forty-four percent of the homeless in first world countries actually have jobs. In _No Fixed Abode_, Marc Augé’s pathbreaking ethnofiction—a fictional ethnography—a (...) man named Henri narrates his strange existence in the margins of Paris. By day he walks the streets, lingers in conversation with the local shopkeepers, and sits writing in cafés, but at night he takes shelter in an abandoned house. From here, we see a progressive erosion of Henri’s identity, a loss of bearings, and a slow degeneration of his ability to relate to others. But then he meets the artist Dominique, whose willingness to share her life with him raises questions about who he has become and about what a person needs in order to be a part of society. This is a book about how we live in geographical space and how work and patterns of domicile affect our status and our inner being. Despite the apparent simplicity of the fictional premise, Augé’s book asks serious questions about the nature of our culture. (shrink)

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space and real space. In the course of his (...) exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures. (shrink)

In a paper presented at a symposium on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University in 1968, the historian Charles Morazé analyzed the issue of invention largely with reference to mathematics and the theory of Henri Poincare.1 Poincare, along with the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, was the first to put forward a theory of scientific discovery as occurring in discrete phases. In 1926, Joseph Wallas generalized this theory to apply to all creativity, positing phrases which closely resemble those of Morazé. (...) While both Poincare and Wallas use a four-phrase model of invention, Morazé reduces his to three phrases: information, cogitation, and intellection. In information, the inventor becomes familiar with the sign systems and knowledge, the "collective contributions of society," relevant to his field of problems. Cogitation assembles these materials and concentrates them until "a certain moment" when "a light breaks through." This "sudden illumination...forces us to insist upon the neurological character" of the inventive moment. Finally, in intellection, the inventor rationally evaluates the utility of his invention and thus, in a sense, steps outside of himself and rejoins society. The distinction which organizes Morazé 's entire account, as well as most of the discussion that followed his presentation, is between the "collective" support and control of the inventor and his own individual, or "neurological," act of synthesis or creation. · 1. See Charles Morazé 's "Literary Invention," in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, pp. 22-55. Loy D. Martin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. He has written The Language of Invention, a study of Robert Browning and the genesis of the dramatic monologue. "A Reply to Carl Pletsch and Richard Schiff" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is one of the truly great philosophers of the modernist period, and there is currently a major renaissance of interest in his unduly neglected texts and ideas amongst philosophers, literary theorists, and social theorists. Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous in his own lifetime; in it Bergson responds to the challenge presented to our habits of thought by modern evolutionary theory, and attempts to show that the theory of knowledge must have its (...) basis in a theory of life. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is one of the truly great philosophers of the modernist period, and there is currently a major renaissance of interest in his unduly neglected texts and ideas amongst philosophers, literary theorists, and social theorists. Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous in his own lifetime; in it Bergson responds to the challenge presented to our habits of thought by modern evolutionary theory, and attempts to show that the theory of knowledge must have its (...) basis in a theory of life. (shrink)

" Vivid . . . immense clarity . . . the product of a brilliant and extremely forceful intellect." — Journal of the Royal Naval Scientific Service "Still a sheer joy to read." — Mathematical Gazette "Should be read by any student, teacher or researcher in mathematics." — Mathematics Teacher The originator of algebraic topology and of the theory of analytic functions of several complex variables, Henri Poincare (1854–1912) excelled at explaining the complexities of scientific and mathematical ideas to (...) lay readers. Science and Method, written in 1908, has been appreciated by a wide audience of nonprofessionals and translated into many languages. It defines the basic methodology and psychology of scientific discovery, particularly in regard to mathematics and mathematical physics. Drawing on examples from many fields, it explains how scientists analyze and choose their working facts, and it explores the nature of experimentation, theory, and the mind. 1914 edition. Translated by Francis Maitland. (shrink)

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his _3 Standard Stoppages_, a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or (...) negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The _3 Standard Stoppages_ is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance. (shrink)

The Philosopher and the Moviemaker.Merleau-Ponty and the Thinking of CinemaAs its subtitle indicates, the present article is devoted to the relations between Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and the thinking of cinema. The first section focuses on two topics, each underlying the lecture on cinema given by Merleau-Ponty in 1945. On the one hand, we find the reflection about the peculiarities of expression in film and cinematic image; on the other, we see the convergence between the inspiration of cinema and that of (...) philosophy, which Merleau-Ponty sees as a significant characteristic of his time. This is a convergence in which the nouvelle vague’s cinema will recognise itself and which Christian Metz will retrospectively confirm. Moreover, by developing both of these topics, the author finds a way to interpret Merleau-Ponty’s lecture as an undeclared polemical response to Henri Bergson’s famous negative judgement on cinema. The second section focuses on the question of movement in cinema, putting together further references to cinema made by Merleau-Ponty in posthumous or unpublished writings such as the notes for the 1952-53 course on “The Sensible World and the World of Expression.” The third section focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s later reflection about vision and images. This section shows how the peculiar noveltyof cinema is more and more understood by Merleau-Ponty not only as historically convergent with a new way of conceiving philosophy, but as a symptom of the new ontology he was trying to formulate philosophically.Il filosofo e il cineasta.Merleau-Ponty e il pensiero del cinemaCome sottolinea il suo sottotitolo, il presente articolo è dedicato alle relazioni fra la filosofi a di Maurice Merleau-Ponty e il pensiero del cinema. La prima sezione si concentra su due argomenti, ognuno ravvisabile nella conferenza sul cinema tenuta da Merleau-Ponty nel 1945. Da una parte, troviamo la riflessione sulle peculiarità dell’espressione filmica e dell’immagine cinematografica; dall’altra, la convergenza fra l’ispirazione del cinema e quella della filosofia, che Merleau-Ponty vede come una significativa caratteristica del proprio tempo: una convergenza in cui il cinema della nouvelle vague riconoscerà se stesso e che Christian Metz retrospettivamente confermerà. Inoltre, sviluppando entrambi gli argomenti, l’autore trova modo di interpretare la conferenza di Merleau-Ponty come una non dichiarata risposta polemica al celebre giudizio negativo sul cinema formulato da Henri Bergson. La seconda sezione si concentra sulla questione del movimento nel cinema, riunendo ulteriori riferimenti di Merleau-Ponty al cinema in scritti postumi o inediti, come le note per il corso del 1952-1953 su “Il mondo sensibile e il mondo dell’espressione”. La terza sezione si concentra sulla riflessione dell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty sulla visione e le immagini. Ciò mostra come la peculiare novità del cinema sia sempre più compresa da Merleau-Ponty non solo come storicamente convergente con un nuovo modo di concepire la filosofia, ma come un sintomo della nuova ontologia che egli stava cercando di formulare filosoficamente. (shrink)

The author of these two complementary essays, neither of which he lived to see in final published form, was one of the most distinguished Jesuit scholars of his generation. Alexander Kojève, whose seminar on Hegel he attended from 1934 to 1939, once remarked that he could have been "easily and by far" France's best Marxist theorist if he had so desired. Partly because of the topical nature of his works, but perhaps even more because of his philosophic depth, he was (...) never read as widely outside of France as are his illustrious confrères, Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou. Of the one hundred and twenty-odd items listed in his bibliography only three articles have thus far been translated into English. Yet this impressive literary production could well become one of the landmarks of contemporary French Catholicism. (shrink)

At the background of this article lies the question of how social sciences can internalize spatial and cultural phenomena and, in the most general sense, the ‘principle of difference’. Therefore, it has more than one problem and tries to see many seemingly contradictory phenomena as parts of a whole by employing a complex dialectical method. It looks at the relationships between the following phenomena: social and cultural; natural and cultural; universal and particular; similar and different. The article proceeds according to (...) this method: it relates the opposites to each other through space and thus tries to show the following dialectical transitions: the social is produced as culture through the social space and the production of the social space itself. The article suggests that the transition between universal and particular constitutes the problematic of space, that space realizes the social as culture, and that this is the only realization of the social. The articles argues that the social is universalizing, and the cultural is particularizing, and that the social/universal can fulfill itself as necessarily cultural/particular. It also defends the principle of universality by stating that differences occur in relation to a whole. The article critically exploits classical social theory, specifically Marxist social theory and spatial Marxists such as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, some recent historical sociology, some postcolonial ideas, planetary urbanization theory, and tries to support the development of the theory of historical-geographical materialism. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse tout d’abord à la logique de la foi chez Bouillard, à partir de deux sources, Logique de la foi et Comprendre ce que l’on croit . Ensuite, à la lumière du dernier article de Bouillard, « Transcendance et Dieu de la foi » , il cherche à voir si la sagesse mystique peut en constituer son accomplissement et celle de l’essence humaine. En s’appuyant sur la conception de la vie mystique telle que la conceptualise saint Jean de (...) la Croix et en y apportant une interprétation tout à fait personnelle, Bouillard développe une approche qui prend l'homme sous l'angle de la destination. Il cherche à introduire son lecteur au plan méta-philosophique et méta-théologique, là où la ratio fidei est inconditionnée, mais conditionne tout, sans aliéner, libère tout en dispensant les grâces de la divine Providence. This article concentrates, firstly, on the logic of faith as understood by Henri Bouillard, on the basis of two sources: Logique de la foi [English translation: The Logic of Faith ] and Comprendre ce que l’on croit . Then, in the light of Bouillard’s last article, “Transcendance et Dieu de la foi” , we will try to see if the mystic wisdom could represent its accomplishment and that of human nature as such. By relying on the understanding of mystical life such as John of the Cross conceptualizes it, and by adding a very personal interpretation of it, Bouillard develops an approach envisioning man under the angle of destination. He endeavours to lead us to the meta-philosophical and meta-theological level where the ratio fidei is unconditioned while conditioning everything and, without alienating, sets free while dispensing the graces of Divine Providence. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to excavate and analyse Henri Bergson’s “problematic” thinking. This task will be prosecuted through a close reading of his two-part introduction to The Creative Mind – the text in which Bergson most concisely and conclusively articulates the “problematic” character of his work. As I will attempt to show in this paper, Bergson’s work is “problematic” in two respects, one to do with methodology and the other metaphysics. These two, furthermore, are intimately entwined: on (...) the one hand, Bergson’s method of problematisation emerges from the findings of his metaphysical inquiries, while on the other, it is through the application of his problematising method that the findings of his metaphysical inquiries can be deemed as reliably accurate. In exploring this “problematic” intersection of Bergson’s methodology and metaphysics, I will first discuss what Bergson takes to be one of the biggest problems for philosophy: the lack of adequate “precision.” As we will see, many of the major themes and concepts of Bergson’s work, such as duration and intuition, both spring from and converge on his efforts to address this problem. The pursuit of precision also calls for a “problematic approach” that is appropriate for the metaphysical reality it seeks to handle – an approach I will outline in the second part of this paper. This will be followed by a discussion of how Bergson’s problematic method/metaphysics involves a critique of what he refers to as “fictitious,” “phantom” or “pseudo-problems.” This “negative” aspect of Bergsonian problematisation will then be reconsidered in the final part of the paper alongside its “positive” dimension – posing problems in terms of time. (shrink)