We investigate several fluctuation effects in high-energy hadronic and nuclear collisions through the analysis of different observables. To introduce fluctuations in the initial stage of collisions, we use the interacting gluon model (IGM) modified by the inclusion of the impact parameter. The inelasticity and leading-particle distributions follow directly from this model. The fluctuation effects on rapidity distributions are then studied using Landau's hydrodynamic model in one dimension. To investigage further the effects of the multiplicity fluctuation, we use the (...) longitudinal phase-space model, with the multiplicity distribution calculated within the hydrodynamic model, and the initial conditions given by the IGM. Forward-backward correlation is obtained in this way. (shrink)

Work on the central problems of the philosophy of science has led the author to attempt to create an intelligible version of quantum theory. The basic idea is that probabilistic transitions occur when new stationary or particle states arise as a result of inelastic collisions.

Aberrations -- Absorption -- Accuracy and precision -- Alpha radiation -- Amplitude -- Angular forces -- Angular momentum -- Antenna -- Arago dot -- Aperture -- Archimedes's principle -- Band theory of solids -- Bernoulli's principle -- Beta radiation -- Blackbody radiation -- Bohr atom -- Bose condensation -- Bra-ket notation -- British thermal unit (BTU) -- Calculating system efficiency -- Circular motion -- Closed systems and isolated systems -- Concave and convex -- Conservation of charge -- Conservation of energy (...) -- Convection and conduction -- Cosmic radiation -- Crest and trough -- Density and specific gravity -- Diode -- Distance and area -- Distortion -- Doppler effect -- Dynamic systems theory -- Edison effect -- Eigenvectors -- Elastic and inelastic collisions -- Electric circuits: Parallel vs series, diagrams and components -- Electric potential -- Energy and power -- Enthalpy -- Entropy -- Euler's laws of motion -- Falling bodies and physics -- Faraday's law -- Feynman diagrams -- Flywheel -- Focal point -- Free body diagram -- Frequency -- Gamma radiation -- Gauss's law -- Gluon -- Gravitational potential energy -- Harmonic oscillator -- Harmonics -- Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- Higgs boson -- Horsepower -- Ideal gas law -- Joule --. (shrink)

A new version of quantum theory is proposed, according to which probabilistic events occur whenever new statioinary or bound states are created as a result of inelastic collisions. The new theory recovers the experimental success of orthodox quantum theory, but differs form the orthodox theory for as yet unperformed experiments.

In this paper, I will examine John Smeaton’s contribution to the vis viva controversy in Britain, focusing on how the hybridization of science, technology, and industry helped to establish vis viva, or mechanic power, as a measure of motive force. Smeaton, embodying the ‘hybrid expert’ who combined theoretical knowledge and practical knowhow, demonstrated that the notion of vis viva possessed a greater explanatory power than momentum, because it could be used to explain the difference in efficiency between overshot and undershot (...) waterwheels. Smeaton’s conclusions were correct since waterwheel efficiency was already measured in terms that were proportional to vis viva, not momentum, as a result of the industrial applications of waterwheel technology, which favored measuring efficiency by the product of mass and vertical displacement. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the loss of motive force in the inelastic collision driving the undershot wheel began to be seen as equivalent to the expenditure of labor in the manufacture of commodities, further underlining how strictly scientific conclusions about motive force could have their origin in industrial practices. (shrink)

Sadi Carnot’s 1824 Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire created the new science of thermodynamics. It succeeded in its audacious goal of finding a very general theory of the efficiency of heat engines, by introducing and exploiting the strange and unexpected notion of a thermodynamically reversible process. The notion is internally contradictory. It requires the states of these processes to be both in unchanging equilibrium, with a perfect balance of driving forces, while also changing. The work of Sadi’s father, (...) Lazare Carnot, on the efficiency of ordinary machines provided Sadi with a template of a very general theory of the efficiency of ordinary machines; and a characterization of the most efficient processes in them as those that minimize differences of driving forces and can be run in reverse. Lazare’s work could provide these resources because of its choice of a dissipative ontology of inelastic collisions among hard bodies. This historically ill-fated choice meant that Lazare’s machines were analogous to Sadi’s heat engines in their key aspects: they are built from essentially dissipative processes. Lazare’s strategies for controlling dissipation and optimizing his machines were transferrable to the analogous problems Sadi found in heat engines. The unanswerable historical question is whether Sadi would have sought a general theory of heat engines at all or found these general theoretical devices without the template provided in analogy by the prior work of Lazare. (shrink)

What are quantum entities? Is the quantum domain deterministic or probabilistic? Orthodox quantum theory (OQT) fails to answer these two fundamental questions. As a result of failing to answer the first question, OQT is very seriously defective: it is imprecise, ambiguous, ad hoc, non-explanatory, inapplicable to the early universe, inapplicable to the cosmos as a whole, and such that it is inherently incapable of being unified with general relativity. It is argued that probabilism provides a very natural solution to the (...) quantum wave/particle dilemma and promises to lead to a fully micro-realistic, testable version of quantum theory that is free of the defects of OQT. It is suggested that inelastic interactions may induce quantum probabilistic transitions. (shrink)

Phase-shift analysis is a commonly used technique to extract the scattering amplitudes of a two-body strong-interaction scattering process from the experimentally measured quantities | total cross-section, di erential cross-section, polarization and spin-correlation parameters. However, at a xed energy, all the scattering amplitudes can be multiplied by an arbitrary angle-dep phase-factor without a ecting the measurables. It would seem then that the phase of the..

_The Collision of Science with the Question of Be-ing in Heidegger’s Thinking_ Science does not lead to the full, final, truly in-depth exploration of beings; it leaves unresolved (unclarified) the understanding of being; it does not think through the question of being, of the “to be”, of the “is”; it does not think being as such; it adopts a metaphysical idea of being as being of beings (as one, the highest of beings). As this study shows, being is not within (...) the range of merely scientific investigation. Many philosophical questions (e. g., the foundation of the sciences; the understanding of the ontological difference) go beyond and transcend the reach of scientific inquiry. The collision of science with the question of being, with the question of the “to be”, comes from science attempting to move beyond its intrinsic limitations and boundary. According to Heidegger’s be-ing-historical thinking, scientific inquiry cannot resolve the question of the “to be” and that of the truth of the “to be”; it cannot eliminate (suppress) these distinctly philosophical concerns. Science cannot become a substitute for philosophy. As this study indicates, the understanding of the danger of the “collision” identified contributes to its prevention and to a creative interaction between science and philosophy. (shrink)

This Collision explores the relationship between Object-Oriented Ontology theory, the “aesthetic experience” of a contemporary artwork (Iris Haussler’s He dreamed overtime from 2012) and the creeping hand of fiction. OOO is a useful theory to apply to contemporary art, as it charts a philosophical return to all things as objects, rather than their relations or networks. It is also timely for understanding the changing nature of multi-media art, wherein experience, interactivity, spectatorial agency and contingent narratives are key.

This collision explores ecological aesthetics through two encounters with dead whales: one literary and one osseous . The literary animal is the taxidermied whale that drives the narrative of László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, and the osseous encounter involves a bench made of one jawbone and one rib from a baleen whale. Considered together, the immense totality of the taxidermied whale and the metonymic bones provide unsettling aesthetic insights into ecological matters of interconnectedness – of the relationships (...) between parts and wholes and amongst parts within a whole or wholes. Through analyses of the visual, literary, and haptic aspects of these encounters, this paper raises questions about what it means to perceive and think about ecology through aesthetic encounters with non-human animal bones and taxidermied bodies. (shrink)

Algebraic equations in the tradition of Descartes and Frans Van Schooten accompany Christiaan Huygens’s early work on collision, which later would be reorganized and presented as De motu corporum ex percussione. Huygens produced the equations at the same time as his announcement of his rejection of Descartes’s rules of collision. Never intended for publication, the equations appear to have been used as preliminary scaffolding on which to build his critiques of Descartes’s physics. Additionally, Huygens used algebraic equations of this form (...) to accurately predict the speeds of bodies after collision in experiments carried out at the Royal Society. Despite their deceptive simplicity, Huygens’s algebraic equations pose significant conceptual problems both mathematically and for their physical interpretation especially for negative speeds; they may very well have been the source of a new principle, the conservation of quantity of motion with direction. (shrink)

For this collision, the role of nonhuman animals as woodland theater and naturalizing agents is questioned. In remediated sites, animals are actors that legitimize everyday pollution, oppression and violence. How can the lived realities of nonhuman animals be embraced without naturalizing the discourse that externalizes those lives? As life and industrial-nature cohere, how might aesthetics engender agency in recovery?

This Collision uses an encounter with Cathy Choi’s B1206 , coupled with theories of aesthetic empathy, to articulate how hijacking as an aesthetic concept might work. The aesthetic faculty of empathy conceives of the aesthetic experience as “feeling into” a given work. This concept furnishes a useful framework for thinking about aesthetic hijacking, as “feeling into” something implies the displacement of the work or its viewer. Hijacking, then, could foreground that displacement by emphasizing spatial uncertainty. Furthermore, hijacking could be an (...) inversion of the process of “feeling into” a given work, indicating a process whereby the work forces its way into the viewer and the space s/he inhabits. (shrink)

Collision-free autonomous path planning under a dynamic and uncertainty vineyard environment is the most important issue which needs to be resolved firstly in the process of improving robotic harvesting manipulator intelligence. We present and apply energy optimal and artificial potential field to develop a path planning method for six degree of freedom serial harvesting robot under dynamic uncertain environment. Firstly, the kinematical model of Six-DOF serial manipulator was constructed by using the Denavit-Hartenberg method. The model of obstacles was defined by (...) axis-aligned bounding box, and then the configuration space of harvesting robot was described by combining the obstacles and arm space of robot. Secondly, the harvesting sequence in path planning was computed by energy optimal method, and the anticollision path points were automatically generated based on the artificial potential field and sampling searching method. Finally, to verify and test the proposed path planning algorithm, a virtual test system based on virtual reality was developed. After obtaining the space coordinates of grape picking point and anticollision bounding volume, the path points were drew out by the proposed method. 10 times picking tests for grape anticollision path planning were implemented on the developed simulation system, and the success rate was up to 90%. The results showed that the proposed path planning method can be used to the harvesting robot. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:129 Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race BY GENEVIEVE CARPIO Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019 REVIEWED BY JARED FRIESEN In Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race, Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies Genevieve Carpio systematically uncovers several of the insidious forms that power takes in order to construct racial inequality. Settlement, mobility, and immobility have served to (...) draw distinctions between Latino/a, Indigenous, Asian, African Americans and white populations in the inland Southern California region. Carpio produced abundant evidence to bolster these statements through interdisciplinary methodological practices, such as “reinterpreting and recovering history” through archival research, analysis of oral history projects, and the examination of both photographic records and the built environment (14). Collisions at the Crossroads begins with a recent example of how mobility and the social construction of place, or “place making” were used to exclude Latino/a residents from participating in the celebration of the Route 66 heritage of the area. In an effort to protect the authenticity of the event, organizers of the Rendezvous festival implemented a ban on lowriders, thus sanitizing the event of Mexican cruising culture that has been a part of the complex multiracial history of the region. This moment is only one of the latest in the history of inland Southern California reaching back to the arrival of white migrants in the form of the Riverside colony to a region composed of Indigenous and Mexican Book Reviews ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 13 / ISSUE 2 / 2021 130 American communities. The book lays bare how “the concept of mobility particularly applies to the everyday channels of movement in a community, especially for Indigenous people and people of color” (3–­4). Mobility is conceptualized as physical movement, the shared meaning of the physical movement, and the policies that enable or constrict movement.Throughthisanalyticlens,Carpio tracesthe “Anglo Fantasy Past” to illuminate how white populations created history that places them at the center and either erases non-­white populations or reduces themtoperpetualoutsiders.Thishistoryincludeswhitesettlement,the rise of the citrus industry, and the role of religion. For example, Indigenous people were immobilized in off-­ reservation boarding schools for AmericanIndianchildren,andcapitalist-­orientedpolicieswereenacted such as the Geary Act (1892) in order to control the mobility of Chinese immigrants. The latter is an excellent example of how race continually shaped the experiences of nonwhite migrants. Mobility is encouraged when a source of low cost labor is needed, but then controlled or even criminalized in order to maintain a racialized hierarchy. Throughout the book, Carpio reinforces the precarious situation of mobilityforpeopleofcolor.“Workersweresupposedtomoveinparticu­ lar ways, at specific times, in and to predetermined spaces” (66). This was deftly accomplished in a way that expresses the subtle processes through which power is used, indeed in ways that appear normative and even natural. Without globalized labor migration, the rise of industries such as large-­ scale citrus agriculture would not have been possible. Alternatively, deterring regional labor migration and desegregated housing were critical to maintaining the white supremacist status quo. Collisions at the Crossroads connects readers to the current turmoil and fear around immigration and racism by looking back at the exploita­ tive incentivizing and coercion of Mexican migrant workers. Mexican immigrants are attracted to work in agricultural communities, then their mobility is pathologized to limit movement through public policy. Ultimately, Mexican immigrants are constructed as “birds of passage” who prefer not to be rooted to a place. Geographer Doreen Massey refers to these processes as “differentiated mobility”: “some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-­end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.”1 Book Reviews 131 This racialization of labor created a low-­ cost workforce that was immobilized by the threat of arrest but later seen as preferable to Puerto Rican or Filipino migrants who had rights to permanent settlement. The claim was that because Mexicans preferred to migrate to worksites, they should therefore return to Mexico in the ebbs of citrus production in the inland Southern California region. Mexican migrants were considered a natural option for filling the workforce needs of the local citrus industry while... (shrink)

This paper attempts to explain the emergence of the logical empiricist philosophy of space and time as a collision of mathematical traditions. The historical development of the ``Riemannian'' and ``Helmholtzian'' traditions in 19th century mathematics is investigated. Whereas Helmholtz's insistence on rigid bodies in geometry was developed group theoretically by Lie and philosophically by Poincaré, Riemann's Habilitationsvotrag triggered Christoffel's and Lipschitz's work on quadratic differential forms, paving the way to Ricci's absolute differential calculus. The transition from special to general relativity (...) is briefly sketched as a process of escaping from the Helmholtzian tradition and entering the Riemannian one. Early logical empiricist conventionalism, it is argued, emerges as the failed attempt to interpret Einstein's reflections on rods and clocks in general relativity through the conceptual resources of the Helmholtzian tradition. Einstein's epistemology of geometry should, in spite of his rhetorical appeal to Helmholtz and Poincaré, be understood in the wake the Riemannian tradition and of its aftermath in the work of Levi-Civita, Weyl, Eddington, and others. (shrink)

Iranian national cinema is showing the scars of artistic persecution. The aesthetic landscape of this national cinema has become one of stark confines – both in its thematic allowances and its aesthetic possibilities. However, these confinements, both physical and technological, have not merely been passively affected by ideological constraints but have also been active in affecting ideological discourse, answering back as it does within imposed limitations. What we are seeing in contemporary Iranian cinema, I believe, is a complex movement of (...) aesthetic novelty, provoking some important questions regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics. The relatively high-profile instance of which I am concerned here is Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film (2011): a work that denies its ontological category and, in turn, furthers its medial possibilities. Panahi’s confinement is an example of enforced asceticism: an asceticism of necessity, groundbreaking in its approach. So much potential arises from this “non-film” – too much to find any answers here. However, this Collision presents the perfect space for briefly outlining some of the questions emanating from a film that is “not a film”. I raise some striking similarities between what occurs with Panahi and the politico-aesthetic ideas of Jacques Rancière in order to contemplate Panahi’s use of asceticism to political effect. (shrink)

What is unpresentable in art? This paper considers VALIE EXPORT’s feminist exhibitionism in her 1968 performance artwork Genital Panic, which took place in a Munich cinema. EXPORT’s transgressive display of her genitals, which finds art-historical precedents in medieval sheela na gigs and Courbet’s Origin of the World, established a paradigm for a kind of feminist art collision that continues today, – for instance in Deborah de Robertis’ 2014 unauthorized performance at the Musée d’Orsay. EXPORT’s staged presentation and representation of blatant (...) power and sexuality contradicts the lack postulated in Freud’s castration complex. At the same time, it raises the question of the unpresentable, a notion taken up by Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman, which explores concepts of representation and the unpresentable. The latter he defines as an expression of an “Idea of reason,”, an absolute. I reflect on how this concept applies to EXPORT’s marker for the use of the body in feminist art. (shrink)

This Collision examines photographs of Santiago Sierra’s “Line” installations, discovering in these works a unique formulation of the tension between the social and formal aspects of contemporary art. Developing the philosophical implications of this formulation, this essay connects divergent trajectories embodied by the work (i.e. trajectories initiated by the material elements of the works, the body and the line) to divergent trajectories in contemporary aesthetic theory (i.e. the trajectory that emphasises the socio-political possibilities of artistic representation versus the trajectory that (...) emphasises a distinction between the formal aspects of art and the political effects of art). Developing the socio-political approach, I draw on recent work by Claire Bishop who, emphasizing the distinction between consensus and antagonism, argues that Sierra’s work enacts a democratic politics more rigorous than that of “relational art.” Developing a specifically aesthetic understanding of Sierra’s installations, I understand the works in relation to the constructivist interrogation of the nature of the line. Drawing in part on the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, I suggest that, whereas a social aesthetic tends to limit art to a didactic function, a geometric aesthetic enables a more rigorously materialist experience of the work without reducing the potential political force of the work. (shrink)

Using Bakhtin's notion of polyphony, this study explored the discussion of the end-of-life issues in the Course on Life and Death Education in one Chinese university. Ethnographic methods were adopted to investigate the collision between the classroom voices and the voices of the mainstream culture on end-of-life in the process of developing students' attitudes toward death. The findings revealed that “to understand death” involved challenging the voice of “strangeness and fear of death”; “honestly facing up to and accepting the feelings (...) of the fear, pain, and helplessness” was the response to “be brave”; and the goal “to die peacefully” resisted the notion of “extending life at any cost.” Through the collision between these voices, students developed their attitudes toward death in facing, understanding, accepting, and choosing how to die. The analysis further revealed that providing only one “answer” to death by the teacher is not sufficient or effective to foster students' attitudes toward death because the students are a diverse group holding different views on the end-of-life issues, which demonstrated the importance of creating dialogues in the life and death education. (shrink)

We discuss the total collision singularities of the gravitational N-body problem on shape space. Shape space is the relational configuration space of the system obtained by quotienting ordinary configuration space with respect to the similarity group of total translations, rotations, and scalings. For the zero-energy gravitating N-body system, the dynamics on shape space can be constructed explicitly and the points of total collision, which are the points of central configuration and zero shape momenta, can be analyzed in detail. It turns (...) out that, even on shape space where scale is not part of the description, the equations of motion diverge at (and only at) the points of total collision. We construct and study the stratified total-collision manifold and show that, at the points of total collision on shape space, the singularity is essential. There is, thus, no way to evolve the solutions through these points. This mirrors closely the big bang singularity of general relativity, where the homogeneous-but-not-isotropic cosmological model of Bianchi IX shows an essential singularity at the big bang. A simple modification of the general-relativistic model (the addition of a stiff matter field) changes the system into one whose shape-dynamical description allows for a deterministic evolution through the singularity. We suspect that, similarly, some modification of the dynamics would be required in order to regularize the total collision singularity of the N-body model. (shrink)

We discuss the total collision singularities of the gravitational N-body problem on shape space. Shape space is the relational configuration space of the system obtained by quotienting ordinary configuration space with respect to the similarity group of total translations, rotations, and scalings. For the zero-energy gravitating N-body system, the dynamics on shape space can be constructed explicitly and the points of total collision, which are the points of central configuration and zero shape momenta, can be analyzed in detail. It turns (...) out that, even on shape space where scale is not part of the description, the equations of motion diverge at (and only at) the points of total collision. We construct and study the stratified total-collision manifold and show that, at the points of total collision on shape space, the singularity is essential. There is, thus, no way to evolve the solutions through these points. This mirrors closely the big bang singularity of general relativity, where the homogeneous-but-not-isotropic cosmological model of Bianchi IX shows an essential singularity at the big bang. A simple modification of the general-relativistic model (the addition of a stiff matter field) changes the system into one whose shape-dynamical description allows for a deterministic evolution through the singularity. We suspect that, similarly, some modification of the dynamics would be required in order to regularize the total collision singularity of the N-body model. (shrink)

The author of this paper discusses some major points vital for two classical Indian schools of philosophy: (1) a significant feature of linguistic analysis in the Yoga tradition; (2) the role of the religious practice (iśvara-pranidhana) in the search for true self-identity in Samkhya and Yoga darśanas with special reference to their gnoseological purposes; and (3) some possible readings of ‘ahamkara’ and ‘asmita’ displayed in the context of Samkhya-Yoga phenomenology and metaphysics. The collision of language and metaphysics refers to the (...) risk of paralogism caused by the common linguistic procedures making the subject define its identity within the semantic order (i.e. verbal conventions and grammatical rules) which does not reflect the actual metaphysical situation of the self, though it determines one’s self-understanding in the empirical sense. Whereas, Samkhya-Yoga aims at recognizing, reorganizing and, finally, going beyond these procedures regarded as the obstacles on the path towards self-knowledge and liberation form metaphysical ignorance. (shrink)

In 1997, the United States incarcerated over 1.7 million persons in local jails and in state and federal prisons. These inmates are disproportionately poor and persons of color. Many lack adequate access to health care before incarceration and present to correctional services with major unaddressed medical problems.Convictions for drug possession and use have increased the number of injection drug users with HIV and AIDS in prisons. Determinate sentencing and “three strikes and you’re out” laws have increased the number of inmates (...) who are aging and dying during their sentences. Their feelings reflect those of Larry Rideau, sentenced to life without parole and founder of The Angolite—an award-winning prison newspaper at Louisiana's Angola Prison—“The dream of getting out, you equate with heaven. Dying in prison you equate with hell.”. (shrink)

In 1997, the United States incarcerated over 1.7 million persons in local jails and in state and federal prisons. These inmates are disproportionately poor and persons of color. Many lack adequate access to health care before incarceration and present to correctional services with major unaddressed medical problems.Convictions for drug possession and use have increased the number of injection drug users with HIV and AIDS in prisons. Determinate sentencing and “three strikes and you’re out” laws have increased the number of inmates (...) who are aging and dying during their sentences. Their feelings reflect those of Larry Rideau, sentenced to life without parole and founder of The Angolite—an award-winning prison newspaper at Louisiana's Angola Prison—“The dream of getting out, you equate with heaven. Dying in prison you equate with hell.”. (shrink)

FEATURED IN EVENTAL AESTHETICS RETROSPECTIVE 1. LOOKING BACK AT 10 ISSUES OF EVENTAL AESTHETICS. This Collision examines photographs of Santiago Sierra’s “Line” installations, discovering in these works a unique formulation of the tension between the social and formal aspects of contemporary art. Developing the philosophical implications of this formulation, this essay connects divergent trajectories embodied by the work (i.e. trajectories initiated by the material elements of the works, the body and the line) to divergent trajectories in contemporary aesthetic theory (i.e. (...) the trajectory that emphasises the socio-political possibilities of artistic representation versus the trajectory that emphasises a distinction between the formal aspects of art and the political effects of art). Developing the socio-political approach, I draw on recent work by Claire Bishop who, emphasizing the distinction between consensus and antagonism, argues that Sierra’s work enacts a democratic politics more rigorous than that of “relational art.” Developing a specifically aesthetic understanding of Sierra’s installations, I understand the works in relation to the constructivist interrogation of the nature of the line. Drawing in part on the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, I suggest that, whereas a social aesthetic tends to limit art to a didactic function, a geometric aesthetic enables a more rigorously materialist experience of the work without reducing the potential political force of the work. (shrink)

This paper addresses problems in the interpretation of Chardin’s still life paintings, which are disconcerting because they are so out of step with those of his contemporaries. It is suggested that, with the application of Kantian aesthetics, Chardin can be best understood as representing things in themselves as well as the limits of language and understanding.

FEATURED IN EVENTAL AESTHETICS RETROSPECTIVE 1. LOOKING BACK AT 10 ISSUES OF EVENTAL AESTHETICS. This paper addresses problems in the interpretation of Chardin’s still life paintings, which are disconcerting because they are so out of step with those of his contemporaries. It is suggested that, with the application of Kantian aesthetics, Chardin can be best understood as representing things in themselves as well as the limits of language and understanding.

In his neglected treatise on education, the great eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, mentions that Benjamin Franklin “wondered why everyone didn’t learn to swim, since swimming is so pleasant and so useful.” Franklin..