Trois courts textes qui se présentent comme trois petits traités sur le bonheur, sur ces trois "complexités" énigmatiques qui enchantent et illuminent nos vies : l'amour, la poésie et la sagesse, et les liens qui les unissent. Issus de conférences prononcées en 1990 et 1995.

Alan Turing is often portrayed as a materialist in secondary literature. In the present article, I suggest that Turing was instead an idealist, inspired by Cambridge scholars, Arthur Eddington, Ernest Hobson, James Jeans and John McTaggart. I outline Turing’s developing thoughts and his legacy in the USA to date. Specifically, I contrast Turing’s two notions of computability (both from 1936) and distinguish between Turing’s “machine intelligence” in the UK and the more well-known “artificial intelligence” in the USA. According to (...) my proposed historical interpretation, Turing did not view computations in the real world to be exhaustively and deterministically characterized by his automatic machines from 1936. (shrink)

"Qui augmente sa connaissance augmente son ignorance" disait Friedrich Schlegel. "Je vis de plus en plus avec la conscience et le sentiment de la présence de l'inconnu dans le connu, de l'énigme dans le banal, du mystère en toute chose et, notamment, des avancées d'une nouvelle ignorance dans chaque avancée de la connaissance" nous dit Edgar Morin. Ainsi a-t-il entrepris ici de patrouiller dans les territoires nouveaux de la connaissance, où se révèle un trio inséparable : connaissance, ignorance, mystère. (...) À ses yeux, le mystère ne dévalue nullement la connaissance qui y conduit. Il nous rend conscient des puissances occultes qui nous commandent et nous possèdent, tels des Daimon intérieurs et extérieurs à nous. Mais, surtout, il stimule et fortifie le sentiment poétique de l'existence."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

L'esthétique, avant d'être le caractère propre de l'art, est une donnée fondamentale de la sensibilité humaine. Le sentiment esthétique est un sentiment de plaisir, qui peut s'intensifier en émerveillement et bonheur. Il peut être suscité par un spectacle naturel, une oeuvre d'art, mais aussi par des objets ou des oeuvres que nous esthétisons. D'où vient la créativité artistique? Qu'appelle-t-on inspiration ou génie? De la transe du chaman à celle du poète, de la mimesis de l'écrivain à celle du comédien, quelle (...) est l'expérience in vivo de l'artiste? De Lascaux à Beethoven, de Dostoïevski à Orson Welles, Edgar Morin convoque les oeuvres et les artistes qui l'ont marqué et accompagné pour démontrer la profondeur de l'expérience esthétique. Les grandes oeuvres ne sont pas que "divertissements" : elles nous donnent compréhension de la condition humaine, dans ses comédies et ses tragédies."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a structured (...) exercuse in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse. (shrink)

This highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. It features eleven essays on scientific objectivity from a variety of perspectives, including philosophy of science, history of science, and feminist philosophy. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities. Taken individually, the essays supply new methodological tools for theorizing what is valuable in the pursuit (...) of objective knowledge and for investigating its history. The essays offer many starting points, while suggesting new avenues of research. Taken collectively, the essays exemplify the very virtues of objectivity that they theorize—in reading them together, the reader can sense various anxieties about the dangerously subjective in our age and locate commonalities of concern as well as differences of approach. As a result, the volume offers an expansive vision of a research community seeking a communal understanding of its own methods and its own epistemic anxieties, struggling to enunciate the key problems of knowledge of our time and offer insight into how to overcome them. -/- (Contributors: Alex Csiszar, Scott Edgar, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, Sandra Harding, Moira Howes, Paolo Savoia, Judy Segal, Joan Steigerwald, and Alison Wylie). (shrink)

Explores the science and creative process behind Poe’s cosmological treatise. Silver Winner for Philosophy, 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards In 1848, almost a year and a half before Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of forty, his book Eureka was published. In it, he weaved together his scientific speculations about the universe with his own literary theory, theology, and philosophy of science. Although Poe himself considered it to be his magnum opus, Eureka has mostly been (...) overlooked or underappreciated, sometimes even to the point of being thought an elaborate hoax. Remarkably, however, in Eureka Poe anticipated at least nine major theories and developments in twentieth-century science, including the Big Bang theory, multiverse theory, and the solution to Olbers’ paradox. In this book—the first devoted specifically to Poe’s science side—David N. Stamos, a philosopher of science, combines scientific background with analysis of Poe’s life and work to highlight the creative and scientific achievements of this text. He examines Poe’s literary theory, theology, and intellectual development, and then compares Poe’s understanding of science with that of scientists and philosophers from his own time to the present. Next, Stamos pieces together and clarifies Poe’s theory of scientific imagination, which he then attempts to update and defend by providing numerous case studies of eureka moments in modern science and by seeking insights from comparative biography and psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolution. David N. Stamos teaches philosophy at York University in Toronto. He is the author of several books, including Darwin and the Nature of Species, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

Framing effects have a significant influence on the finitely repeated matching pennies game. The combination of being labelled "a guesser", and having the objective of matching the opponent’s action, appears to be advantageous. We find that being a player who aims to match the opponent’s action is advantageous irrespective of whether the player moves first or second. We examine alternative explanations for our results and relate them to Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter". We propose a behavioral model which (...) generates the observed asymmetry in the players’ performance. (shrink)

Edgar Allan Poe’s standing as a literary figure, who drew on (and sometimes dabbled in) the scientific debates of his time, makes him an intriguing character for any exploration of the historical interrelationship between science, literature and philosophy. His sprawling ‘prose-poem’ Eureka (1848), in particular, has sometimes been scrutinized for anticipations of later scientific developments. By contrast, the present paper argues that it should be understood as a contribution to the raging debates about scientific methodology at the time. This (...) methodological interest, which is echoed in Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’, gives rise to a proposed new mode of—broadly abductive—inference, which Poe attributes to the hybrid figure of the ‘poet-mathematician’. Without creative imagination and intuition, Science would necessarily remain incomplete, evenby its own standards. This concern with imaginative (abductive) inference ties in nicely with his coherentism, which grants pride of place to the twin virtues of Simplicity and Consistency, which must constrain imagination lest it degenerate into mere fancy. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza tres cuentos de Edgar Allan Poe (El demonio de la perversidad, El gato negro y El corazón delator). Estos cuentos tienen en común el tema de la perversidad hacia cuya elucidación pretendemos avanzar desde la premisa deleuziana según la cual es preciso volver al espacio literario donde fueron nombradas las perversidades, con el fin de obtener algunas claves de comprensión sobre las causas y consecuencias de la perversidad, así como sobre la naturaleza de estos personajes literarios (...) que, en los tres cuentos citados, se autodefinen como víctimas de esta condición que se encarna en los seres humanos bajo la forma de un demonio. Nos acompañarán en este recorrido los aportes teóricos de Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, François Delaporte y Claude-Olivier Doron. (shrink)

En su faceta de ensayista Edgar Allan Poe desarrolló interesantes ideas que corresponden al campo de la estética. Sin embargo, estas no han sido muy difundidas, y menos en América Latina, al contrario de su labor poética –mejor conocida–, y de su narrativa en prosa –que suele hacer parte de los programas de enseñanza de la literatura universal–. El presente escrito se propone recuperar algunos de sus planteamientos analizando su ensayo teórico “El propósito de la poesía”, siguiendo el rastro (...) de su crítica a una estética burguesa de masas y a una estética aristocrática tradicionalista. Con su lectura atenta rendimos un homenaje al autor, ahondando en su complejo perfil y siguiendo su exploración de temas tan variados como la crítica, el público, la recepción, la creación poética, la función del arte y la importancia social del poeta. Por último, su opinión sobre algunas figuras destacadas de la poesía mundial de su tiempo nos brinda un panorama muy rico del contexto cultural de la primera mitad del siglo XIX. (shrink)

The anthropological and religious interest for the raven is present in Buddhism, in biblical stories, in North and Greek mythologies, in Arthurian legend and in Spanish epic. The occultism attributed to the raven the mission of guidance of dead human souls after death. This article tracks how the raven transfers its occult connotations to the poetic symbol analyzing the poem«The Raven» by EdgarAlan Poe in its cultural and aesthetic context. Charles Baudelaire and the French symbolists dignified the intertextual evolution of (...) Poe’s symbol and transferred it to LatinAmerican and Spanish modernists. These poets used the raven not only as a symbol but mainly as a recurrent motif or poetic topos. Even though the occultist influence appears ‘scattered’ in the process of the creative experience of this symbol, it does not take away its existence. The occultist influence of the raven explains the ultimatemeaning of some verses and clarifies the exceptions and contradictions that appear in many poems. (shrink)

We enter the room of Poe’s midnight reader and witness the uncanny visit of the raven. We begin to notice that the repetition of the word ‘nevermore’ is strange in that it seems to carry within it despair, as well as a promise. And so we listen carefully and begin to read a dissemination of this single word, a word that takes us on an unforgettable journey. But to do so we must disseminate ourselves so that we can remain with (...) our reader while flying with the raven toward the disseminating sounds within the word: ‘evermore’, ‘more’, ‘or’. Our raven guide leads us toward wonders beyond imagination: toward other ravens flying with coded messages, toward an apocalyptic sunrise where we think that we perhaps saw the lost Lenore. But we return to the midnight study, knowing that we will see her ‘nevermore ’.Nous pénétrons le cabinet du lecteur de minuit imaginé par Poe et sommes témoins de I’inquiétante visite du corbeau. Nous sommes frappés par I’étrangeté du mot «nevermore», «plus jamais», qui traîne avec lui désespoir et promesse. Nous prêtons alors une oreille attentive et entreprenons la dissémination de ce mot qui nous conduira à une dissémination de nous-mêmes. Portés par le jeu des sonorités, nous nous envolons vers des mondes fantastiques dans lesquels se retrouvent d’autres corbeaux portant des messages codés, où point une aube apocalyptique où nous croyons avoir perçu Lenore. Mais nous devons retourner au cabinet, sachant que nous ne la reverrons «plus jamais». (shrink)

We enter the room of Poe’s midnight reader and witness the uncanny visit of the raven. We begin to notice that the repetition of the word ‘nevermore’ is strange in that it seems to carry within it despair, as well as a promise. And so we listen carefully and begin to read a dissemination of this single word, a word that takes us on an unforgettable journey. But to do so we must disseminate ourselves so that we can remain with (...) our reader while flying with the raven toward the disseminating sounds within the word: ‘evermore’, ‘more’, ‘or’. Our raven guide leads us toward wonders beyond imagination: toward other ravens flying with coded messages, toward an apocalyptic sunrise where we think that we perhaps saw the lost Lenore. But we return to the midnight study, knowing that we will see her ‘nevermore ’.Nous pénétrons le cabinet du lecteur de minuit imaginé par Poe et sommes témoins de I’inquiétante visite du corbeau. Nous sommes frappés par I’étrangeté du mot «nevermore», «plus jamais», qui traîne avec lui désespoir et promesse. Nous prêtons alors une oreille attentive et entreprenons la dissémination de ce mot qui nous conduira à une dissémination de nous-mêmes. Portés par le jeu des sonorités, nous nous envolons vers des mondes fantastiques dans lesquels se retrouvent d’autres corbeaux portant des messages codés, où point une aube apocalyptique où nous croyons avoir perçu Lenore. Mais nous devons retourner au cabinet, sachant que nous ne la reverrons «plus jamais». (shrink)

Résumé Le présent article analyse d’un point de vue sémiotique les rapports entre la /lumière/ et l’/obscurité/ et les catégories discursives au sein d’un corpus de quatre textes de la littérature du dix-neuvième et vingtième siècle. Il s’agit de montrer que les propriétés physiques et sensibles fondent les structures sémio-narratives et orientent les catégories axiologiques, thymiques, spatiales et temporelles. Autrement dit, on observe une primauté de la lumière et de l’obscurité en tant que catégories organisées en structure élémentaire qui génère, (...) par un système de conversion, les unités abstraites et concrètes aux niveaux successifs du parcours génératif. (shrink)

To me a painted paroquet Hath been – a most familiar bird– Taught me my alphabet to say– To lisp my very earliest word. Edgar Allan Poe, “Romance,” Poetry and Tales 53 Logographical necessity (ana...

In Between Literature and Science Peter Swirski examines the true intellectual scope of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem.

Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a particularly noteworthy example of the sublime, a psychological state in which one is overwhelmed by the magnitude of that which is perceived by the mind. Valdemar exemplifies the sublime in that his death has somehow been suspended in time because he was under hypnosis as part of a medical experiment at the moment of his passing. However, the story also draws particular attention to (...) the means by which insight into the nature of death is acquired by the hypnotist who narrates the story. For a more comprehensive understanding of the sublime experience, one may turn to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the postmodernist work of Slavoj Žižek, which lead to the conclusion that the dramatic chain of events in “Valdemar” is an example of the sliding signifier, and, moreover, that the instability of the signifier may explain the sublime effect. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Popular Culture in the Houses of Poe and CortázarDaniel Bautista (bio)"[…]at the age of nine I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. That book I stole to read because my mother didn't want me to read it, she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it."…—Julio Cortázar1In interviews and (...) essays, Julio Cortázar, the famous Argentine author, often expressed a lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe (Berg 227–32). Moreover, as a young man Cortázar spent two years translating the American author's prose into Spanish, making irresistible the search for traces of Poe in his own work. His description of Poe as a youthful and guilty pleasure reflects a common reaction to the American author that has led some critics to rue Poe's influence. Jonathan Elmer points out that "Poe's connection with juvenile tastes, and hence with a time when reading and acquiring 'culture' were actually enjoyable […] has been insistently and disapprovingly stressed by the Anglo-American literary-historical tradition" (3). Although Poe himself often liked to "advertise [his work] as ethereal and otherworldly, or avowedly timeless," critics who found elements of the vulgarly popular in his writing regarded the author as a true "stumbling block" in the American literary landscape (Rosenheim and Rachman xii; Eliot 205). In a similar vein, Elmer observes,It has puzzled many critics, sometimes to the point of vituperation, that Poe stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres: detective fiction and science fiction, as well as certain modes of sensational or gothic horror, which are today, to use one of Poe's coinages, "omniprevalent."(2)In the past, such critics tended to dismiss Poe to the fringes of the American canon for what they saw as his highbrow pretensions and lowbrow taste. More recently, critics like Elmer and others have argued that Poe's ability to straddle the high/low cultural divide is precisely what makes him such a perennially fascinating writer and one of the most revealing about American culture in general.Considering Poe's high standing in Latin America, one might assume that the question of his low or popular status was not as much of a stumbling block there.2 Cortázar himself blamed American discomfort with Poe on his use of "baroque" language, an issue that Cortázar's own background as a native Spanish speaker allowed him to ignore: [End Page 1] "since I'm neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn't the slightest importance next to his genius" (Weiss 73). The idea that an author's "genius" could rise above the demands of his countrymen was important to Cortázar. Questions about his own cultural status also significantly affected the reception of Cortázar's work, though in many ways he suffered from just the opposite charges made against Poe. The style and themes of his work, and the political context in Argentina during the early part of his career (characterized most conspicuously by the rise of Perónism), led some in the literary establishment of his own country to accuse Cortázar of being too European or elitist.3 Looking at Poe and Cortázar together, this essay compares how both authors negotiated such cultural issues in their writing and the way that Cortázar reworks some of Poe's particular strategies in a modern Argentine setting. Focusing on two of these authors' most well-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (published in 1839) and "Casa tomada" ("House Taken Over") (published in 1946), I argue that they both reflect some of the ways that Poe and Cortázar grappled with the rise and attraction of a popular culture that threatened to reconfigure their particular literary landscapes.In Keywords, Raymond Williams traces the... (shrink)

In this new edition of his acclaimed autobiography — long out of print and rare until now — Alan Watts tracks his spiritual and philosophical evolution from a child of religious conservatives in rural England to a freewheeling spiritual teacher who challenged Westerners to defy convention and think for themselves. From early in this intellectual life, Watts shows himself to be a philosophical renegade and wide-ranging autodidact who came to Buddhism through the teachings of Christmas Humphreys and D. T. (...) Suzuki. Told in a nonlinear style, In My Own Way wonderfully combines Watts’ own brand of unconventional philosophy and often hilarious accounts of gurus, celebrities, psychedelic drug experiences, and wry observations of Western culture. A charming foreword written by Watts’ father sets the tone of this warm, funny, and beautifully written story of a compelling figure who encouraged readers to “follow your own weird” — something he always did himself, as his remarkable account of his life shows. (shrink)

Co-published with the University of Queensland Press. HPC holds rights in North America and U. S. Dependencies. Since its first publication in 1976, Alan Chalmers's highly regarded and widely read work--translated into eighteen languages--has become a classic introduction to the scientific method, known for its accessibility to beginners and its value as a resource for advanced students and scholars. In addition to overall improvements and updates inspired by Chalmers's experience as a teacher, comments from his readers, and recent developments (...) in the field, this fourth edition features an extensive chapter-long postscript that draws on his research into the history of atomism to illustrate important themes in the philosophy of science. Identifying the qualitative difference between knowledge of atoms as it figures in contemporary science and metaphysical speculations about atoms common in philosophy since the time of Democritus offers a revealing and instructive way to address the question at the heart of this groundbreaking work: What is this thing called science? (shrink)

White searches for the subtler side of Nietzsche beyond his ambiguous support for violence and oppression. He looks at the `yes saying teachings' articulated with the `voice of beauty'.

Since its first publication in 1976, Alan Chalmers's highly regarded and widely read work--translated into eighteen languages--has become a classic introduction to the scientific method, known for its accessibility to beginners and its value as a resource for advanced students and scholars. -- Amazon.com.

Discusses the nature and functions and philosophical foundations of law as well as the central problems of legal method.

In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology tend to regard Luhmann as the (...) sole representative of systems theory, the latter has been characterized by its diversity, and the writings of such systems theorists as Mario Bunge deserve more (critical) attention from social researchers than they receive at present. Finally, this article suggests that the perennial debate over methodological individualism and holism in social science may make real progress if such ambiguous terms as reduction and reductionism are elucidated before they are employed. (shrink)

This compilation offers a unique synthesis of the traditional branches of Eastern thought by drawing upon their historical connections and common foundations in mystical experience.