With the help of syncretiсs as a new philosophical logic, the philosophy of carriers, the theory of similarity and the theory of Infinite Hierarchical Nesting of Matter, the problems of modern physics are analyzed. We consider the classical and relativistic mechanics, the special and general theories of relativity, the theory of electromagnetic and gravitational fields, of weak and strong interactions. The goal is axiomatization of these theories, building models of elementary particles and of (...) their interactions with each other. The main obtained results are: the model of bead lightning; an explanation of redshift of the spectra of galaxies; the derivation of the Newton law in the concept of gravitons; the calculation of nuclear forces and the structure of simplest nuclei with the help of the theory of strong gravitation; building the model of weak interactions of elementary particles; presentation of quarks as a particular type of quasiparticles; explanation of the electron spin. The book should be useful for students and researchers, as well as for those interested in physical and philosophical problems. Tables 20. Fig. 30. Ref. 155 titles. (shrink)

With the help of syncretiсs as a new philosophical logic, the philosophy of carriers, the theory of similarity and the theory of Infinite Hierarchical Nesting of Matter, the problems of modern physics are analyzed. We consider the classical and relativistic mechanics, the special and general theories of relativity, the theory of electromagnetic and gravitational fields, of weak and strong interactions. The goal is axiomatization of these theories, building models of elementary particles and of (...) their interactions with each other. The main obtained results are: description of the electrokinetic theory of the origin of magnetic fields in cosmic bodies; calculation of metric in the uniformly accelerated reference frame; the axiomatic construction of electrodynamics, Lorentz invariant (LITG) and covariant theories of gravitation (CTG); comparing CTG with the general theory of relativity and with the results of gravitational experiments. Among other results – the analysis of the properties of ether as the medium responsible for transfer of electromagnetic and gravitational waves, and derivation of the formula for entropy in a tensor form. For students and researchers, as well as for those interested in physical and philosophical problems. (shrink)

The creation-of-matter hypothesis of the Bondi-Gold-Hoyle steady-state cosmology requires that in an infinite time to which the first transfinite number may be assigned the number of atoms of matter produced would be equal to the cardinal number of the set of mathematical points in the continuum. The existence of a set of finite atoms with that cardinal number is physically unacceptable. The argument for the production of a non-denumerable set of atoms, in infinite time, is given (...) in terms of a model which is shown to be isomorphic with the original Cantor "diagonal" proof for the existence of a non-denumerable infinity. An alternative model which meets the requirements of the steady-state theory is presented; in this model, the number of atoms is explicitly no greater than countably infinite, and remains countably infinite as long as the past time of the universe is restricted to the unlimited set of finite unit-time intervals. If the origin of the steady-state universe is taken as being within that infinite set, expressed by the negative natural numbers, the contradiction of an atom at every mathematical point does not arise. The contradiction does arise if the origin is not within the set of finite numbers, and accordingly there is a restriction as to which concept of infinite past may properly be maintained in the steady-state theory. (shrink)

Abstract.Growing interest in the origin of life, the physical foundations of biological theory, and the evolution of animal social systems has led to increasing efforts to understand the processes by which elements or living systems at one level of organizational complexity combine to form stable systems of higher order. J. Bronowski saw the need to extend or reformulate evolutionary theory to deal with the hierarchy problem and to account for the evolution of systems of “stratified stability.” The hierarchy (...) problem has become a matter of great interest also in nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory.An effort is made here to develop an abstract, phenomenological model, based on the laws of thermodynamics, to account for the origin and hierarchical evolution of living systems. It is argued that the principle of minimum entropy production, developed by I. Prigogine, applies generally to all thermodynamic systems and processes and is implicit in an extended and more complete formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. From this are derived a thermodynamic criterion and a principle of thermodynamic selection governing the formation of stable systems of “elements” of various levels of organization. Thermodynamic selection gives rise to the creation of “elements” having increasingly “open” characteristic structures which may combine spontaneously to form “social” or crystalline systems capable of growing and reproducing themselves through processes of fissioning or budding. Such simple, self‐reproducing systems are capable of evolving by natural selection, which is seen to be a special case of the more general process of thermodynamic selection. The principle of natural selection, thus formulated, has the character of a fundamental physical law. Self‐reproducing systems with suitably open hereditary programs may combine to form stable social systems, which may grow and reproduce as a unit. In this way self‐reproducing systems of increasing hierarchical order, size, and organizational complexity may evolve through processes of thermodynamic (natural) selection. Some implications of this open‐ended model and opportunities for testing its empirical and theoretical utility are explored. (shrink)

The earlier part of this paper yielded the result that the assertion ‘A portion of everything in everything’ has no place or function in the explanation of any sort of apparent ‘becoming’ or change. This conclusion is important because, ever since Aristotle, it has been assumed that the assertion was made in order to explain away becoming and change. But if , according to the best evidence, becoming and such sorts of change as Anaxagoras considered can be explained away without (...) using the assertion at all, it follows that the motive for it must be sought, not in the processes of apparent becoming and change, but in the permanent constitution of the ungenerated and unchanging things which figure as elements in the system. A visible mass of gold or of flesh is formed by the aggregation of smaller particles of gold or of flesh, and it is infinitely divisible into parts, every one of which is gold or flesh. But what is the constitution of a piece of gold of whatever size, and how does it differ from the constitution of a piece of flesh? The proposition we have so far successfully excluded comes in here as part of the answer to this question. (shrink)

Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value-bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only (...) a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman JacksonBernabé S. Mendoza (bio)Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World New York: By New York University Press, 2020, 320 pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-9004-0the radical work of black feminism is to upend Western dualistic ways of thinking that structure our understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Human: (...) Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson troubles the dominant dualistic distinction of the human and the animal. Jackson argues that antiblackness undergirds Enlightenment discourses on the human-animal divide such that blackness cannot be extricated from the very concept of the animal because both “are not only interdependent representations but also entangled concepts” (28). Central to Jackson’s argument on the animalization of blackness is the notion of “ontologized plasticity,” which posits the being of black(ened) people as infinitely malleable and mutable matter and further points to the fluidification of form and “fleshly existence.” Far from seeing the human as a category that has “ontological integrity,” as scholars in the fields of animal studies, new materialisms, and posthumanism presuppose, Jackson instead seeks to redefine the concept of the human through the theorization of blackness (16). She points out that such theorization has been, for such scholars, a lacuna and the “space of the unthought,” which thus marks her intervention in these fields. [End Page 211]The author offers a sustained engagement with the knowledge claims of science and philosophy, reading them through and against the intellectual contributions of black feminist writers and artists. She draws from such luminaries as Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the artist Wangechi Mutu to show the ways in which they reject an enclosed notion of the human that is defined only by keeping the racialized other at bay and in a degraded animalized and liquified state. As such, she showcases how black feminist visual and literary culture “theorizes and philosophizes” and reveals the faulty, antiblack premises upon which science and philosophy establish their claims of knowledge on the human.Offering a materialist theory of black ontology and temporality, Jackson poses three main arguments on the racialization of the human-animal distinction. The first is the aforementioned notion of ontologized and black(ened) plasticity that speaks to the constant modulation and manipulation of black matter as it relates to gender, sexuality, and sexual reproduction. Reading US slavery as an experimental playground for testing the limits of the human, Jackson argues that “black female f lesh... functions as the limit case of ‘the human’ and is its matrix-figure” (4). She defines plasticity as a “praxis that seeks to define the essence of a black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable in antiblack, often paradoxical sexuating terms as a means of hierarchically delineating sex/gender, reproduction, and states of being more generally” (11). There is, in other words, an inversion that takes place in that it is only through opposition and the imposed instability and illegibility of blackness—of black matter and the black mater(nal) situated as “chaos by design”—that such categories as “woman,” “mother,” and “female body” can themselves take hold and become intelligible forms (11). Jackson engages with the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter in order to argue that “Man,” as the object of analysis within liberal humanism, “produces an untenable dichotomy—‘the human’ versus ‘the animal,’ whereby the black(ened) female is posited as the abyss dividing organic life into ‘human’ or ‘animal’ based on wholly unsound metaphysical premises” (12). This claim on the centrality of the black female in the plasticization of blackness is given support in chapter 2, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative novel Brown Girl in the Ring, where plasticity gives way to opacity.In this chapter, Jackson explores the ways in which the black female body, as that which is opaque and nonrepresentable within the “dominant grammar of representation,” shatters what she argues is Heidegger’s metaphysical and hierarchical ordering of human, animal, and world. In exploring “how our received conceptions of being hinges on our im/perception of black mater... (shrink)

Despite hundreds of definitions, no consensus exists on a definition of life or on the closely related and problematic definitions of the organism and death. These problems retard practical and theoretical development in, for example, exobiology, artificial life, biology and evolution. This paper suggests improving this situation by basing definitions on a theory of a generalized particle hierarchy. This theory uses the common denominator of the “operator” for a unified ranking of both particles and organisms, from elementary particles (...) to animals with brains. Accordingly, this ranking is called “the operator hierarchy”. This hierarchy allows life to be defined as: matter with the configuration of an operator, and that possesses a complexity equal to, or even higher than the cellular operator. Living is then synonymous with the dynamics of such operators and the word organism refers to a select group of operators that fit the definition of life. The minimum condition defining an organism is its existence as an operator, construction thus being more essential than metabolism, growth or reproduction. In the operator hierarchy, every organism is associated with a specific closure, for example, the nucleus in eukaryotes. This allows death to be defined as: the state in which an organism has lost its closure following irreversible deterioration of its organization. The generality of the operator hierarchy also offers a context to discuss “life as we do not know it”. The paper ends with testing the definition’s practical value with a range of examples. (shrink)

This article is a critical assessment of Harry Frankfurt's hierarchical theory of freedom. It spells out and distinguishes several different and irreconcilable conceptions of freedom present in Frankfurt's work. I argue that Frankfurt is ambiguous in his early formulation as to what conception of freedom of the will the hierarchical theory builds on, an avoidability or a satisfaction conception. This ambiguity causes problems in his later attempts to respond to the objections of wantonness of second-order desires (...) and of infinite regress. With his more recent idea of freedom as being satisfied with harmony in one's entire volitional system, Frankfurt may solve the infinite regress objection but he does so at the cost of ending up with a description of freedom, which comes very close to being identical to his own description of the wanton. Frankfurt's account leaves open the question of whether the satisfactory harmony is caused by the inability to do otherwise, or is independent of it. To answer this question, Frankfurt's hierarchical theory needs to be complemented with a number of “autonomy variables” (Double). Satisfaction may be a necessary condition of freedom, but it is not sufficient. We also need to know how the person came to be satisfied. If being satisfied is merely something that happens to one, it fails to be an adequate description of a free person – and it also contradicts some of Frankfurt's own earlier insights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 505-522 [Access article in PDF] Mary Astell's Ironic Assault on John Locke's Theory of Thinking Matter E. Derek Taylor Mary Astell (1666-1731), most famous today for her call for the establishment of Protestant nunneries in Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I (1694) and for her acute Reflections Upon Marriage (1700), has lurked for years at the edges of (...) that infinitely contentious category "feminism," but she is only now beginning to receive her rightful inheritance as a theological and philosophical thinker, probably the title she would most have preferred. 1 This is not to say that Astell's Christian-Platonism has been ignored. In her 1986 biography Ruth Perry gave cogent expression to the centrality of Astell's idealist Christianity to all aspects of her thought 2 and in the same year, Bridget Hill thoughtfully warned her readers against attempting to force Astell, a religious conservative, "into some preconceived idea of what late seventeenth and early eighteenth century feminism ought to have been." 3 More recently, Patricia Springborg has written two significant essays that rely in part on Astell's more neglected theological-philosophical works, Letters concerning the Love of God (1695), a collection of Astell's correspondence with John Norris of Bemerton (1657-1711), and The Christian Religion, As Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705; 3d edition 1730), far and away her most developed theological-philosophical [End Page 505] statement. 4 Despite these important forays, however, both Letters and Christian Religion continue to be largely ignored, as is suggested by the relative dearth of scholarly work on either text and the short shrift each receives in anthologies of Astell's works. 5 Despite the great popularity of Letters throughout the eighteenth century and despite the fact that, as Springborg points out, Astell considered Christian Religion "her magnum opus," neither text has found new life in a modern edition. 6This omission creates a rather vexing problem for would-be scholars of Astell's philosophical and theological ideas. The major primary texts themselves not being available, we have little choice but to rely on the limited accounts of other scholars for our information. Over a decade ago, for instance, The Journal of the History of Philosophy published a long note by Kathleen M. Squadrito on "Mary Astell's Critique of John Locke's View of Thinking Matter," and hers has since been the standard (if not quite only) account of this historically fascinating and important philosophical comment in Christian Religion.7 Squadrito wants, she writes, to "present a short account of [Astell's] work and her criticism of Locke's view of thinking matter." 8 Unfortunately, Squadrito's account of Astell's "work" is significantly flawed, which leads her to serious mischaracterizations of Astell's "criticism" of Locke's hypothesis. Briefly put, Astell's "own philosophy" in Christian Religion does not, as Squadrito claims, emerge "as an attempted reconciliation of the views of Norris and Locke" 9 ; because she supposes it does, however, Squadrito is able to present Astell's critique of Locke's theory [End Page 506] of thinking matter as a respectful, even-handed philosophical analysis, a theoretical bridge, as it were, between the Platonism of Norris and the Empiricism of Locke. As we shall see, Astell's critique of Locke's hypothesis actually amounts to a bitterly ironic assault, wherein Astell does not so much build bridges as burn them. Just why Astell in Christian Religion decided not to strike a middling position between Locke and Norris, and how this decision invigorated her attack on Locke's materialist hypothesis, are the primary questions this essay seeks to answer. In order to arrive at such answers, however, it is necessary first to examine the text in which Astell does attempt to carve out a position between Locke and Norris, namely Astell and Norris's Letters.The basic history of Letters is well enough understood. Mary Astell, a well-read young woman of significant perspicacity, first wrote in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bishop Berkeley Exorcises the Infinite: Fuzzy Consequences of Strict Finitism1 David M. Levy Introduction It all began simply enough when Molyneux asked the wonderful question whether a person born blind, now able to see, would recognize by sight what he knew by touch (Davis 1960). After George Berkeley elaborated an answer, that we learn to perceive by heuristics, the foundations ofcontemporarymathematics wereinruin. Contemporary mathematicians waved their hands and (...) changed the subject.2 Berkeley's answer received a much more positive response from economists. Adam Smith,in particular, seizedupon Berkeley's doctrine that welearn to perceive distance tobuild anelaborate system in which one learns to perceive one's self-interest.3 Perhaps because older histories of mathematics are a positive hindrance in helping us understand the importance of Berkeley's argument against infinitesimals,4 its consequences for economics have passed unnoticed. If infinitesimal numbers are ruled out, and we wish to maintain an algebra, then we rule out infinite numbers. This implication of Berkeley's argumenthas a dramatic implication for our understanding ofthe history ofideas about rule-directed action. Let me motivate this claim with a well-known historical problem. The social doctrine set forth by John Locke outside the Two Treatises depends critically upon individual belief about possible states of infinite pain or pleasure. The critical issue for the intolerance of atheism in Locke's system is his claim that without beUefin the infinite bliss of heaven forgone by a criminal, there is no reason to think a calculating individual will avoid crime.5 Locke's discussion is so different from the discussion of religion by David Hume and Smith. Here, questions of the substance of belief—the infinite worth of Heaven—have largely vanished.6 What happened between Locke and Hume-Smith? One answer is Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville. Berkeley's doctrine that only the finite is perceived is, I think, a better answer. Out of sight, out ofmind. In this paper I propose to give a close look at the content and consequences ofBishop Berkeley's once famous Towards a New Theory ofVision. While there are other aspects ofBerkeley's work that attract Volume XVIII Number 2 511 DAVID M. LEVY attention from historians ofeconomics,7 1 shall claim that Berkeley's insight into human perception in the Theory of Vision is central to Adam Smith's attempt to found economic behaviour on the self-awareness of systematic illusion. There is no doubt that Smith finds that much ofhuman behaviour is characterized by illusion.8 The difficulty arises, or so it seems to me, from modern unwilUngness to beheve that illusion can be systematic. There are four pieces to my argument. First, we consider Berkeley's statementofwhat we shall call his doctrine ofstrict finitism in perception.9 Berkeley puts forward two postulates: 1) there exists some minimum perceptible quantity, and 2) distance is not perceived directly but by experience. Second, we define strict finitism and demonstrate that it translates into the claim that perception is fuzzy in a technical sense. If Berkeleian perception is fuzzy, then some modern criticism of Berkeley's strict finitism is based upon a simple misunderstandingofthe propertiesoffuzzyrelations. Thisis quite easy to set right. (Getting right the doctrine of those who implicitly take perception to be fuzzy—Adam Smith is my prime candidate—will be muchharder.)Third, wereconsiderBerkeley's dispute withMandeville on the role ofinfinite gain in choice. Here, we find Mandeville putting forward the Berkeleian position that if infinite amounts mattered, people would not behave as they do. Berkeley's position against Mandeville, however, seems to depend upon the supposition that infinite distance is sensible.10 Earlier, however, the position that Mandeville argued for was defended by Berkeley. Fourth, we ask why all this isn't well known. The debate between Berkeley and Mandeville has been well studied, as has been the link between Berkeley and the Scots. In fact, our work focuses on one aspect of Berkeley's work that led to his challenge of the contemporary foundations of the calculus. If sense is a matter of perception, and infinitesimals cannot be perceived, then they are quite literally nonsense. Armed with this insight, Berkeley refuted contemporary mathematics. Nevertheless, the calculus was too... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bishop Berkeley Exorcises the Infinite: Fuzzy Consequences of Strict Finitism1 David M. Levy Introduction It all began simply enough when Molyneux asked the wonderful question whether a person born blind, now able to see, would recognize by sight what he knew by touch (Davis 1960). After George Berkeley elaborated an answer, that we learn to perceive by heuristics, the foundations ofcontemporarymathematics wereinruin. Contemporary mathematicians waved their hands and (...) changed the subject.2 Berkeley's answer received a much more positive response from economists. Adam Smith,in particular, seizedupon Berkeley's doctrine that welearn to perceive distance tobuild anelaborate system in which one learns to perceive one's self-interest.3 Perhaps because older histories of mathematics are a positive hindrance in helping us understand the importance of Berkeley's argument against infinitesimals,4 its consequences for economics have passed unnoticed. If infinitesimal numbers are ruled out, and we wish to maintain an algebra, then we rule out infinite numbers. This implication of Berkeley's argumenthas a dramatic implication for our understanding ofthe history ofideas about rule-directed action. Let me motivate this claim with a well-known historical problem. The social doctrine set forth by John Locke outside the Two Treatises depends critically upon individual belief about possible states of infinite pain or pleasure. The critical issue for the intolerance of atheism in Locke's system is his claim that without beUefin the infinite bliss of heaven forgone by a criminal, there is no reason to think a calculating individual will avoid crime.5 Locke's discussion is so different from the discussion of religion by David Hume and Smith. Here, questions of the substance of belief—the infinite worth of Heaven—have largely vanished.6 What happened between Locke and Hume-Smith? One answer is Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville. Berkeley's doctrine that only the finite is perceived is, I think, a better answer. Out of sight, out ofmind. In this paper I propose to give a close look at the content and consequences ofBishop Berkeley's once famous Towards a New Theory ofVision. While there are other aspects ofBerkeley's work that attract Volume XVIII Number 2 511 DAVID M. LEVY attention from historians ofeconomics,7 1 shall claim that Berkeley's insight into human perception in the Theory of Vision is central to Adam Smith's attempt to found economic behaviour on the self-awareness of systematic illusion. There is no doubt that Smith finds that much ofhuman behaviour is characterized by illusion.8 The difficulty arises, or so it seems to me, from modern unwilUngness to beheve that illusion can be systematic. There are four pieces to my argument. First, we consider Berkeley's statementofwhat we shall call his doctrine ofstrict finitism in perception.9 Berkeley puts forward two postulates: 1) there exists some minimum perceptible quantity, and 2) distance is not perceived directly but by experience. Second, we define strict finitism and demonstrate that it translates into the claim that perception is fuzzy in a technical sense. If Berkeleian perception is fuzzy, then some modern criticism of Berkeley's strict finitism is based upon a simple misunderstandingofthe propertiesoffuzzyrelations. Thisis quite easy to set right. (Getting right the doctrine of those who implicitly take perception to be fuzzy—Adam Smith is my prime candidate—will be muchharder.)Third, wereconsiderBerkeley's dispute withMandeville on the role ofinfinite gain in choice. Here, we find Mandeville putting forward the Berkeleian position that if infinite amounts mattered, people would not behave as they do. Berkeley's position against Mandeville, however, seems to depend upon the supposition that infinite distance is sensible.10 Earlier, however, the position that Mandeville argued for was defended by Berkeley. Fourth, we ask why all this isn't well known. The debate between Berkeley and Mandeville has been well studied, as has been the link between Berkeley and the Scots. In fact, our work focuses on one aspect of Berkeley's work that led to his challenge of the contemporary foundations of the calculus. If sense is a matter of perception, and infinitesimals cannot be perceived, then they are quite literally nonsense. Armed with this insight, Berkeley refuted contemporary mathematics. Nevertheless, the calculus was too... (shrink)

Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Questions such as these -- and the press of subtler (...) questions hidden in their amibiguities -- deeply unsettled philosophers of the early modern period. They seemed to expose serious paradoxes in the new world view pioneered by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The new science's account of a fundamentally geometrical Creation, mathematicizable and intelligible to the human inquirer, seemed to be under threat. This was a great scandal, and the philosophers of the period accordingly made various attempts to disarm the paradoxes. All the great figures address the issue: most famously Leibniz and Kant, but also Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, and Reid, in addition to a crowd of lesser figures. Thomas Holden offers a brilliant synthesis of these discussions and presents his own overarching interpretation of the controversy, locating the underlying problem in the tension between the early moderns' account of material parts on the one hand and the program of the geometrization of nature on the other. (shrink)

We establish a connection between measurement-based quantum computation and the field of mathematical logic. We show that the computational power of an important class of quantum states called graph states, representing resources for measurement-based quantum computation, is reflected in the expressive power of (classical) formal logic languages defined on the underlying mathematical graphs. In particular, we show that for all graph state resources which can yield a computational speed-up with respect to classical computation, the underlying graphs—describing the quantum correlations of (...) the states—are associated with undecidable logic theories. Here undecidability is to be interpreted in a sense similar to Gödel’s incompleteness results, meaning that there exist propositions, expressible in the above classical formal logic, which cannot be proven or disproven. (shrink)

This article is a comparative study between predictive processing (PP, or predictive coding) and cognitive dissonance (CD) theory. The theory of CD, one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology, is shown to be highly compatible with recent developments in PP. This is particularly evident in the notion that both theories deal with strategies to reduce perceived error signals. However, reasons exist to update the theory of CD to one of “predictive dissonance.” First, (...) the hierarchical PP framework can be helpful in understanding varying nested levels of CD. If dissonance arises from a cascade of downstream and lateral predictions and consequent prediction errors, dissonance can exist at a multitude of scales, all the way up from sensory perception to higher order cognitions. This helps understand the previously problematic dichotomy between “dissonant cognitive relations” and “dissonant psychological states,” which are part of the same perception-action process while still hierarchically distinct. Second, since PP is action-oriented, it can be read to support recent action-based models of CD. Third, PP can potentially help us understand the recently speculated evolutionary origins of CD. Here, the argument is that responses to CD can instill meta-learning which serves to prevent the overfitting of generative models to ephemeral local conditions. This can increase action-oriented ecological rationality and enhanced capabilities to interact with a rich landscape of affordances. The downside is that in today’s world where social institutions such as science a priori separate noise from signal, some reactions to predictive dissonance might propagate ecologically unsound (underfitted, confirmation-biased) mental models such as climate denialism. (shrink)

This book is an essay on the epistemology of classifications. Its main purpose is not to provide an exposition of an actual mathematical theory of classifications, that is, a general theory which would be available to any kind of them: hierarchical or non-hierarchical, ordinary or fuzzy, overlapping or non-overlapping, finite or infinite, and so on, establishing a basis for all possible divisions of the real world. For the moment, such a theory remains nothing but (...) a dream. Instead, the authors essentially put forward a number of key questions. Their aim is rather to reveal the “state of art” of this dynamic field and the philosophy one may eventually adopt to go further. To this end they present some advances made in the course of the last century, discuss a few tricky problems that remain to be solved, and show the avenues open to those who no longer wish to stay on the wrong track. Researchers and professionals interested in the epistemology and philosophy of science, library science, logic and set theory, order theory or cluster analysis will find this book a comprehensive, original and progressive introduction to the main questions in this field. (shrink)

One of the greatest challenges of consciousness research is to understand the relationship between consciousness and its implementing substrate. Current research into the neural correlates of consciousness regards the biological brain as being this substrate, but largely fails to clarify the nature of the brain-consciousness connection. A popular approach within this research is to construe brain-consciousness correlations in causal terms: the neural correlates of consciousness are the causes of states of consciousness. After introducing the notion of the neural correlate of (...) consciousness, we argue (in section 2) that this causal strategy is misguided. It implicitly involves an undesirable dualism of matter and mind and should thus be avoided. A non-causal account of the brain-mind correlations is to be preferred. We favor the theory of the identity of mind and brain, according to which states of phenomenal consciousness are identical with their neural correlates. Research into the neural correlates of consciousness and the theory of identity (in the philosophy of mind) are two major research paradigms that hitherto have had very little mutual contact. We aim to demonstrate that they can enrich each other. This is the task of the third part of the paper in which we show that the identity theory must work with a suitably defined concept of type. Surprisingly, neither philosophers nor neuroscientists have taken much care in defining this central concept; more often than not, the term is used only implicitly and vaguely. We attempt to open a debate on this subject and remedy this unhappy state of affairs, proposing a tentative hierarchical classification of phenomenal and neurophysiological types, spanning multiple levels of varying degrees of generality. The fourth part of the paper compares the theory of identity with other prominent conceptions of the mind-body connection. We conclude by stressing that scientists working on consciousness should engage more with metaphysical issues concerning the relation of brain processes and states of consciousness. Without this, the ultimate goals of consciousness research can hardly be fulfilled. (shrink)

This book offers a theory of how human conceptual life begins, and shows how perceptual information becomes transformed into concepts. Drawing on extensive research, Mandler describes the development of preverbal concept formation, inductive inference, and recall, and explains how these processes form the conceptual basis for language and adult thought.

Infinity and the Brain proposes a logical and scientific way to resolve the paradox of mind and matter -- by explaining how the perception of a finite image is dependent upon the contrasting infinitude of God. The theory holds that awareness is equal to a tension between existence and nonexistence, such that the self is illuminated to itself (becomes conscious) to the exact measure that it anticipates the infinitude of its own nonexistence. This "anticipation" is actually a "tendency (...) toward" a loss of structure in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, a process that is restrained by effort and the consequent wholesness of an image. An understanding of how effort is linked to an image and how both are dependent upon neural systems inseparable from "infinity anticipation" sets the stage for a new worldview -- in which mind is seen as dependent upon the immanence of an infinite God. And because "mind" can be defined by the presence of an image which intrinsically restrains disorder, we see by extrapolation that the entire universe must be fundamentally personal, not objective as currently viewed by modern science. Book jacket. (shrink)

Review by A. Kanamori, Boston University (author of The Higher Infinite), review in The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic: “Notwithstanding and braving the daunting complexities of this labyrinth, José Ferreirós has written a magisterial account of the history of set theory which is panoramic, balanced and engaging. Not only does this book synthesize much previous work and provide fresh insights and points of view, but it also features a major innovation, a full-fledged treatment of the emergence of the set-theoretic (...) approach in mathematics from the early nineteenth century. Much of history is in the details, and much of good history is in tone, emphasis, and the drawing together of different strands. Without being Whiggish, Ferreirós is never far from major synthetic themes, themes that in the main work toward balance and pull back from excesses of emphasis of some recent histories. The main criticism of the book would have to be on matters of broad interpretation. Yet, Ferreirós brings a considerable mathematical acuity and expertise to his enterprise, and this makes his viewpoints the more compelling.” . (shrink)

Writing, the exigency of writing: no longer the writing that has always (through a necessity in no way avoidable) been in the service of the speech or thought that is called idealist (that is to say, moralizing), but rather the writing that through its own slowly liberated force (the aleatory force of absence) seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that remains without identity, and little by little brings forth possibilities that are entirely other: an anonymous, distracted, deferred, (...) and dispersed way of being in relation, by which everything is brought into question – and first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally the idea of the Book and the Work so that this writing (understood in its enigmatic rigor), far from having the Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that could be said to be outside discourse, outside language. – Maurice Blanchot ( The Infinite Conversation , xi) The Compendium * Beginning with the idea and practice of writing, and moving to the subject or self, then to truth and the One, and arriving at the Book and the Work, Blanchot’s words reflect the trajectory of the following work of writing. True to the embeddedness of the subject in the work of writing, the term “Compendium” has been a metonym for me over the past few years as I have thought about the concept of totality alongside its expression in figures such as the One, the Whole, or the All. In the following I aim to share some of the content of this metonym, and to enrich it by making some distinctions. 1 Here the term “Compendium” will refer to a concept of totality that is ontological (pertaining to being, and the copula) and also textual (pertaining to the symbolic, and the signifier-signified relationship). The Compendium is a figure for thinking the world as a Book, in the broadest sense—an approach to reality that is by no means new, but one that is due for renewal. 2 In partial answer to the question of the Compendium we will say that the word ‘Compendium’ stands in for expressions which seek to totalize, or concepts which seek to approach the concept of ‘everything,’ particularly when these expressions are bound up in the question of the Book (both the book as a physical object and the Book as a metaphysical figure: a way of thinking about the work in and of writing). The question of the Compendium is strongly associated with the physical and metaphysical form of the Book, like the mysterious and symbolic books which are opened in the Biblical book of Revelation, the book of life and the book of death, which together constitute an important couplet. 3 Parataxis & Hypotaxis There are two helpful distinctions that will bring us closer to an answer to the question “What is a Compendium?” The first distinction is between two figures in and for writing: parataxis and hypotaxis . Typically paired in contrast to one another as literary techniques, with parataxis indicating a side-by-side placement of textual elements and hypotaxis referring to subordinate arrangements of textual elements, the two figures can be understood as having a philosophical significance in addition to their practical function as devices for writers. For us these two terms will remain between philosophical theory and writing practice, and serve as a perspective for our writing and creation of texts. Here I take texts to refer to anything from the concrete written words in a book, to the ontological text of the world that we experience. Parataxis , as a figural way of thinking about the ontological structure of texts, refers to texts which are tightly woven and interdependent – texts within which each sentence bears the weight of the entire work. Parataxis often involves repetition, great density, and fragility. One of the best examples of this sort of text is Theodor Adorno’s posthumous magnum opus , Aesthetic Theory . In addition to the text itself, the translation history of the book may also help us to better understand parataxis and its relation to hypotaxis . The final published version of Aesthetic Theory , in German, was a text that Adorno intended to revise and rewrite, but this intention was never realized because of his untimely death. Where the German text of Aesthetic Theory certainly exemplifies the concept of parataxis , the first English edition took this densely woven text and carved Adorno’s lengthy paragraphs and lengthy sentences into manageable ‘bite-sized’ pieces of English text. The first translator took further liberty and inserted headings and new paragraph breaks where there were none in the original. Aesthetic Theory was eventually retranslated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and is now available in a form that is much more faithful to the original work. 4 The pertinent idea that this translation history points to is the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis . Where parataxis describes texts which are repetitive, densely woven, and often fragile, hypotaxis describes texts which are hierarchical and in which the primary relation is linear – the latter of which is very similar to the first English translation of Aesthetic Theory . On the other hand, the original German text that Adorno wrote was very dense, often repetitive, and contained long sections of text unbroken by paragraphs or headings. This example of parataxis was then turned towards hypotaxis through the initial translation which took a text that was, in many ways, nonhierarchical and nonlinear, and artificially subjected it to a hierarchy that was not its own (and here I take the word of Fredric Jameson who comments on the two translations in a note at the beginning of his book Late Marxism ). 5 The point here is not about translation, but rather the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis precisely as they are figures for discourse, written or otherwise. The concept of parataxis looks far more postmodern and rhizomic than the concept of hypotaxis which remains very modern and arborescent. This is a more figural way of talking about the distinction. However, if we wanted to take a more precise and analytical approach we could say that on the level of form parataxis involves a relationship between sentences and paragraphs in which each part bears an equally crushing responsibility to present the whole content of the text. As well, on the level of content, parataxis requires that each concept in a work take on the full conceptual weight of the total work. Continuing the analysis, we could say that parataxis describes texts in which there is no (or very little) linear or causal move from antecedent to consequent, whether in content or form. Instead, parataxis describes texts which weave together concepts via conjugations or associations. The concept of hypotaxis , on the other hand, requires that texts submit themselves to hierarchy, one example of which is logical argumentation. The contingency of the conclusion upon premises in hypotaxis is certainly distinct from the repetition, re-presentation, and conjugation of concepts in parataxis , and I think that this is evident in the difference between the writing styles prevalent in contemporary Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. It is not the case that the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis absolutely corresponds with the writing styles of Continental and Analytic philosophy (respectively). There are thinkers who take exception to this pattern, such as Badiou’s more formal approach in the discourse of Continental philosophy to give one example. However, when Analytic philosophy takes its writing lessons from the sciences, and seeks to do philosophy via the clean linear move from antecedent to consequent, then I think that Analytic philosophy writes with hypotaxis in mind. On the other hand, when Continental (particularly German and French) philosophy takes its writing lessons from narrative or poetry then Continental philosophy writes with parataxis in mind. It is not fair to say that all those writing Continental philosophy are looking to narrative and poetry for stylistic direction, just as it is not the case that all those writing Analytic philosophy have mathematics and science as their writing format, however there are some striking ways in which the differing epistemologies of Continental and Analytic philosophy encourage writing with parataxis and hypotaxis in mind (respectively). For some, writing with parataxis or hypotaxis in mind is a conscious decision and a product of stylistic self-consciousness, and for others it is an unconscious discursive and epistemic requirement that must be met in order to be involved in a particular discourse. Before moving on to our second distinction, and then an examination of the question of the Book, it is important to point out that both totality and figurations like the One, the Whole, and the All, come out of very human desires to totalize or to actualize our being-towards-totality. The relationship between identity and totality then can be construed, with Heidegger in mind, as striving toward wholeness, completion, or fulfillment, each of which is a quality of compendia. 6 Compilation & Selection The first distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis pertains to both form and content, and to both the mechanics of writing and the ideas to which writing refers. The second distinction pertains to both as well. In the process of writing and in the process of perception as well, there is a tension between compilation and selection . To begin with, in the work of theory-writing there is compilation, and this is because writing theory requires a broad perspective and certain measure of totalization. On the other hand, writing theory requires that the writer select an idea or a combination of ideas to individuate out of a radical and infinite multiplicity of identities and combinations. The concern here is not primarily for the writing of a theory about a specific idea, like a secondary work or a reference text. But rather the concern is with the writing of grand theories: Marx and Marxism, Derrida and Deconstruction, Husserl and Phenomenology, Sartre and Existentialism, Saussure and Structuralism —each of which strives along a trajectory towards being all-encompassing, whether it intends to or not. Today, we could even say that Speculative Realism has embarked on this journey, and perhaps now we could say that the discourse of Speculative Realism has reached the inevitable point after which a grand theory leaves the hands of its writer or writers and becomes a possession of the collective consciousness of the academy, or (perhaps now) the mass consciousness of the blogosphere—and this is a true pharmakon , a poison and a cure, a blessing and a curse. 7 When we write theory, whether the scope is that of a grand theory or a particular theory, we write in the tension between compilation (making good on the desire to be all encompassing) and selection (being required to decide and discern and to judge what is included in the work and what is deleted or appended or abridged or given over to ellipses). Generally speaking, the work of theory-writing often comes out of a desire to totalize, that is, to develop a theory of everything that is able to apprehend new experiences and ideas while still remaining whole. I grant that this is not a universal desire, and that not everyone who sits down to write a work (or book) of theory does so because of their will-to-totality, but it remains that this drive to totalize does condition a great many writers of theory (especially those who seek to develop grand theories like those mentioned previously). At the beginning of his book of interviews, Between Existentialism and Marxism , Sartre is quoted as saying, after completing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason : “I no longer feel the need to make long digressions in my books, as if I were forever chasing after my own philosophy. It will now be deposited in little coffins, and I will feel completely emptied and at peace—as I felt after Being and Nothingness . A feeling of emptiness: a writer is fortunate if he can attain such a state. For when one has nothing to say, one can say everything .” 8 This is where our two initial distinctions come to bear on the being-towards-totality as it is expressed in the concrete practice of writing: the first being between parataxis and hypotaxis , and the second being between compilation and selection. Where this second distinction is concerned there is a certain paradox at play given that selection is inescapable, and compilation is unachievable. Selection is inescapable (with the figure of the Compendium in mind) because, even when the imperative to compile is followed to excruciating lengths, selection still has the last word. This is why the Compendium is a figure rather than some material thing that can actually be accomplished or actualized. No matter how far one goes along with the will-to-archive and the will-to-compile, it is only ever a question of minimizing selection and never eliminating it. This leads to the second point, which is that total compilation is unachievable. The closest thing to total compilation that we have before us is the ontological and textual fabric of the world. Even in the case of the world, compilation cannot be enacted in a total fashion because of the need to include both the sphere of the actual and the sphere of the possible or potential. This as another way in which compilation is always-already selection, and further evidence that total compilation is practically impossible. Discursive Figuration and Total Writing Rather than figuration referring to a figure of speech or an image, here the term points to a way in which to think about the work of writing, both the work put into writing, and the work that is the result of writing: the finished yet incomplete final piece. As figures or figurations, the Book and the Compendium are ways of thinking about the work of writing and the human desire for the wholeness, completion, and fulfillment that are made manifest in the completed form of the book (whether a published or printed or saved document put to rest by the author). These two figures bear more strongly upon works that seek to be all-encompassing, and works that strive towards expressions of totality such as the One, the Whole, or the All. Moving on to the topic of the subtitle, and on a more prescriptive note, I would say that there is more hope for theory-writing to be found in parataxis than hypotaxis . Part of the reason for this claim is the poststructuralist critique of hierarchies, and yet another part is the compelling line of thinking called “weak thought” (in theology by John D. Caputo, and in philosophy by Gianni Vattimo, among others). 9 The consequences of these two convictions are such that if one is to strongly assert the truth of a grand theory without leaving the realm of hierarchy-critique and weak thought, then one must write paradoxically with parataxis in mind, and in so doing write weakly and non-hierarchically. This does not mean avoiding a sort of topography or topology when writing theory, rather it means avoiding both subjugation and oppression in thought by pursuing a nonviolent sort of ontology. In order to do this, theory writing does not present itself as an exercise in logical analysis where one mechanically moves from a set of premises (via contingency) to the inevitable conclusion (via necessity). Instead, theory approaches the idea of a Compendium. Given that the figural Compendium places parataxis and compilation above hypotaxis and selection, then the question becomes: is placing one part of a binary term before another not just another way of selecting, or another expression of hypotaxis ? Counter to the urge to resign oneself to the reign of selection, with some qualification one can nonetheless write without deciding whether selection and hypotaxis should be subservient to compilation and parataxis (which is to say that writing-without-decision is somewhere between and beyond possibility and impossibility). This dilemma can be disarmed by stating that theory writing is not about primacy, and not about having-decided-beforehand, both stylistically and also where content is concerned. This is the paradox of writing: always striving along a trajectory ( telos ) towards totality via parataxis and compilation, but always being drawn back to finitude and making selections, and placing one idea before another with hypotaxis in mind. In light of this paradox, the question of the Compendium as a figure for discourse and a figural Book has resonance with Jacques Derrida’s essay on Edmund Jabès’ Book of Questions , found in his Writing and Difference . The Question of the Book “Little by little the book will finish me.” 10 Derrida quotes Jabès, and proceeds to outline the reflexive relationship between the author of the book and the book itself, each of which are subjected to the other through a sort of chiasmus, both ontological and textual (not that the two are entirely separable). The Book, for Derrida like Blanchot in the introductory quotation, “infinitely reflects itself” and “develops as a painful questioning of its own possibility”, and in light of this we can draw an association with the painful tension between the practical reality of selection and the ideal trajectory of compilation. 11 This tension in writing, between the will to total compilation and the necessity of abridgment, is an ontological tension between part and whole just as it is a textual tension between signifier and signified. The ontological tension in writing that Derrida expresses in his essay on Jabès is between everything and nothing – a contradiction which Derrida finds in Jabès’ Book of Questions and also in the divine, in God. When one writes between compilation and selection one writes towards totality, and here we can follow Derrida who states that the lapse in signification, presumably in the signifier-signified discrepancy, is a “ rupture with totality itself” and furthermore that this lapse cannot be rectified through deductive reason or even philosophical discourse. 12 This rupture with totality, found in the troubled relation between signifier and signified, can also tell us a lot about the Book and about writing. Given an understanding of writing as an ontological act that strives towards (but never accomplishes) totality, we can see the written book as the manifested and given body of that striving. Perhaps in other disciplines or even other schools of philosophy there is a cultural climate within which the article is prized above the book, but I am fairly confident, especially when referring to the grand theories of Continental thought, that there is a respect for the book as a uniquely meaningful object capable of apprehending totality. Derrida writes, Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book. Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. 13 Here the vitality of the literal event is compromised by the deadening weight of the concept, and the figure of the Book assists in this lapse of meaning. The Book is a totalizing object, much like the figure of the Compendium, and yet this totalization lacks its final object of completed totality both because the figural Book is necessarily incomplete, and because the physical book is always-already a product of selection. Instead of achieving its end of being a place where everything takes place, it suffers from the lapse of writing, the discrepancy between event and concept. Derrida continues his exposition on Jabès by bringing to light yet another reflexive relation, a reversal of the relationship between the Book and the world. Derrida writes that, for Jabès, “the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book.” 14 In addition to what was stated before, I take figuration to mean that the concepts employed, such as the Book or the Compendium, are not subject to the supposed rigor of analysis that is so prized by Enlightenment or Capitalist realisms. The figure of the Book and the figure of the Compendium cannot be held accountable to standards imported from scientific method, given an understanding that these standards require a concept to be replicable, consistent, falsifiable, measurable, and so on… This is an important point to make, especially in the present atmosphere within which theory must justify itself under conditions that are not its own. Instead of being held to these standards, figuration serves as a way in which to think about writing that leaves thought open to idealistic speculation, imperfect analogies, and most importantly the ever-present gain and loss that occur in the relationship between thought and being. By extension the figural way of addressing writing indulges in enough generalization to accommodate the excess/lack relationship between the ideal form of the Book or the Compendium, and the manifested and given body of a text (as it is practically completed and closed). Here we speak against the hostile atmosphere which would have theory submit itself to hierarchical rigor, rather than Blanchot’s “enigmatic rigor”, by being explicit about the discursive conditions and epistemic conditions under which theory operates. To write with parataxis in mind is, to a certain degree, to write with weakness as one’s methodology (with weak thought being in opposition to hypotaxis and hierarchy as much as weak thought can be in opposition to anything). Rather than asserting the strength of hierarchical theory, and rather than employing antagonistic argumentation with the goal of refutation different discursive and epistemic conditions for theory writing must be cultivated (and these are by no means new). First the critical and theoretical spirit reveals itself as being concerned with the task of complication—especially the complication and critique of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, polarities, paradoxes, parallaxes, hybridities, and especially antinomies. Second, theory positions itself as a sort of showing or revealing, rather than being ultimately focused on coming to full agreement or disagreement. This is where figuration can help theory-writing, both by placing emphasis on teleologies and trajectories (like parataxis and compilation), and by shifting focus away from pure primacy, power, or absolute origin. Figuration then, assists theory writing by placing the concern of theory outside of the concerns of the hard or soft sciences, and into the realm of thought or the idea. To speak of ‘the’ Compendium or ‘the’ Book, here, is to generalize not regarding the perfect form of the Compendium or Book, but to engage speculatively with an abstract idea which remains singular and yet complicated by multiplicity. The question of the Book that Derrida asks through Jabès is a question of everything and nothing, totality and nonbeing, and this question is a concern for writing and a concern for the figure of the Compendium so defined by the tension between compilation and selection, and parataxis and hypotaxis . On the note of nonbeing, we can look to the final page of Derrida’s first essay on Jabès in Writing and Difference and notice the introduction of his neologism, différance (with an ‘a’). Derrida writes: Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance . Books are always books of life (the archetype would be the Book of Life kept by the God of the Jews) or of afterlife (the archetype would be the Books of the Dead kept by the Egyptians). 15 This introduction of différance into the equation of the Book, alongside ontological affirmation and negation, hearkens back to the discussion of the symbolic lapse earlier in his essay. Differing and deferring, the Book is always a Book of Life and a figure for the intersection of the vital (life) and the total in writing. In a way, the writer of the Book may be someone who lives life, and in another way the writer of the book-as-object may be someone who engages in the act of writing, both practically (by inscribing words on paper, or typing script on a computer) and ontologically or symbolically (by investing their existence and inexistence into a work worthy of the figural Book). In addition to the writer as writer, the writer also serves as an editor, and the editorial role alongside the idea of the Compendium shows the editor to be one who collects and compiles, while being restrained by eventual selection and decision. Beyond this the editor of works and texts, in both the Book and the world, is engaged in a process of inscribing notation—of annotating (on) the Compendium. Eternal commentary is a feature of the textual Compendium, just as open-ended totality describes the ontological Compendium. The writer as writer does not simply write texts, but rather engages in a profoundly ontological act of inscribing their existence into the world, and the writer as editor does not merely annotate or alter texts as they are, but rather comments upon the text of the world. In/Conclusion So as we create texts, and as we write and create theory, let us be and remain attentive to the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book. These two concurrent metonymies are essential for total writing (grand theories, etc.), and may be forgettable for those concerned with fragmentary or hierarchical writing (which are valid in their own right). From the ontological and symbolic text of the world and phenomenological experience, to concrete texts such as books or mixed media, the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book are important for the actualization of the human will to be all-encompassing. The figure of the Compendium teaches writers of theory that the repetition, density, and fragility of parataxis offers a strong sort of weakness which does not become yet another variety of oppressive and hegemonic thought. Rather than write with hypotaxis in mind, subjugating one thought to another via cause and effect or antecedent and consequent, I would hope that theory-writing could guiltlessly indulge in the dialectical and contradictory conjugation of ideas, and take this as a legitimate methodology. Rather than being ashamed of showing resonances or giving way to abridgment or ellipses, it is my own authorial (but not authoritative) conviction that one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the fact that complete totalization is impossible, and one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the worry of violence, for the Book and the Compendium lack their completed object and are ever incomplete trajectories. NOTES * UPDATED 7/19/13: we've updated the HTML version to reflect the (correct) PDF version. Our apologies to the author—eds. 1. I would like extend thanks to Dr. Peter Schwenger of the University of Western Ontario for his comments on this paper and his hospitality as it was presented as a Theory Session at the Centre for Theory and Criticism on October 26th 2012. I would also like to thank Andrew Weiss for conversation and critique. 2. I should clarify my use of the term ‘figure’ at the outset. Given the use of the term by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Discourse, Figure (and also Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon ), I should state clearly that my use of the term will not correspond to the term ‘figure’ understood as the representation of an object. Instead, my use of the term ‘figure’ and its variations (‘figural’, ‘figurative’, ‘figuration’) will refer to the illustrative or metaphorical use of the Compendium or the Book as models or ways of thinking about writing and discourse. 3. Cf. Revelations 20:12-15. 4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London & New York: Continuum Press, 1997). 5. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London & New York: Verso, 1990), ix-x. 6. I have written about this concept of being-towards-totality elsewhere in two pieces of writing: the first is called Notes on the Compendium (an unfinished draft) which addresses some very wide theoretical concerns, being structured as a sort of itinerary or archive, and the second is Dialectics Unbound (Punctum Books, 2013) which outlines a concept of totality without the violence of totalization. While these works are more concerned with ontological totality, here I would like to focus on the idea of the Compendium as a textual totality. 7. Cf. Louis Morelle, “Speculative Realism: After Finitude and Beyond, A vade mecum” in Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism . Issue 3 (Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, 2012), 241-272. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism . Trans. John Matthews (London & New York: Verso, 1974), 9. 9. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). 10. Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65. 11. Ibid, 65. 12. Ibid, 71. 13. Ibid, 75. 14. Ibid, 76. 15. Ibid, 78. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.2 (2006) 321-322 [Access article in PDF] Thomas Holden, The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Pp. x + 305. Cloth $74.00. Most scholars believe that the problem of infinite divisibility that plagued early modern natural philosophy was an entirely mathematical issue and, therefore, resulted from the short-comings of early modern mathematics. Accordingly, advances in geometry, topology (...) and the logic of infinity are often thought to lay this debate to rest, thereby reducing it to some quaint footnote in the history of natural philosophy. Thomas Holden, however, through thorough textual and philosophical analysis, convincingly argues that this debate was more metaphysical in nature than previously supposed. He shows how the various paradoxes concerning the structure of matter stem from two widely-accepted theses central to the new science. The first resulted from the early modern method of applying the principles of geometry to physics. This geometrical method dictated that bodies are metaphysically divisible (m-divisible) in infinitum, because they occupy regions of space that can, at least by the power of God, be subdivided into those parts occupying corresponding sub-regions of space, and those sub-parts into those sub-sub-parts occupying their respective corresponding sub-sub-regions of space in infinitum. The other thesis is that "the parts of material bodies are each concrete existents in their own right" (3). Such actual parts exist prior to any act of division, whereas parts that are only potential would not exist prior to division but only after a divisive act has occurred. Holden argues that the actual parts doctrine was a metaphysical thesis just as fundamental to Enlightenment natural philosophers as the geometrization of matter. Indeed, it is these two theses that came into conflict and gave rise to a plethora of antimonies at the heart of the new science.Holden should be applauded for the skill he employs in challenging the received scholarship. In chapter 1, after some historical and terminological preliminaries, Holden reconstructs several of the more popular paradoxes of material structure found throughout the period's vast literature and successfully shows how these paradoxes would not arise if the problems of material structure were merely mathematical. He shows how the metaphysical doctrine of actual parts gave rise to these difficulties because of its conflict with the assumed geometrical doctrine that extension is infinitely m-divisible. For example, some thought it followed from the actual parts doctrine that there must be an actual infinity of parts, because actual parts exist prior to any process of division and, therefore, in order for both actual parts and infinite m-divisibility to be true, there must be an actual infinity of parts. This raised issues about the intelligibility and piety of an actual infinite as well as issues about equal and unequal infinities, e.g., half an infinite number of parts would still be infinite but half as much as the whole collection of parts. Hence, this and other paradoxes would not arise in the absence of the actual parts doctrine, and so the debate is more metaphysical in nature than previously supposed. [End Page 321]Chapter 2 examines in more detail the actual parts metaphysic and how it leads to tension with infinite m-divisibility. Chapter 3 examines various "short-circuit" arguments designed to undermine the actual parts doctrine. And chapter 4 examines the actual parts doctrine via the argument from composition found in Kant's pre-critical work, Physical Monadology. In chapter 5, Holden briefly examines the potential parts doctrine and how some actual-parts partisans tried to undermine it. It is eventually concluded that actual-parts and potential-parts advocates are at an impasse due to the question-begging nature of their respective arguments. Finally, chapter 6 is "something of an addendum" (74), since it examines a fascinating synthesis of the two conflicting positions, viz. the Kant-Boscovich force-shell atom theory.Given that the book is about material structure, it is a propos that my critical comment is about the structure of the book. It seems... (shrink)

Einstein's early thoughts about superconductivity are discussed as a case study of how theoretical physics reacts to experimental findings that are incompatible with established theoretical notions. One such notion that is discussed is the model of electric conductivity implied by Drude's electron theory of metals, and the derivation of the Wiedemann-Franz law within this framework. After summarizing the experimental knowledge on superconductivity around 1920, the topic is then discussed both on a phenomenological level in terms of implications of Maxwell's (...) equations for the case of infinite conductivity, and on a microscopic level in terms of suggested models for superconductive charge transport. Analyzing Einstein's manuscripts and correspondence as well as his own 1922 paper on the subject, it is shown that Einstein had a sustained interest in superconductivity and was well informed about the phenomenon. It is argued that his appointment as special professor in Leiden in 1920 was motivated to a considerable extent by his perception as a leading theoretician of quantum theory and condensed matter physics and the hope that he would contribute to the theoretical direction of the experiments done at Kamerlingh Onnes' cryogenic laboratory. Einstein tried to live up to these expectations by proposing at least three experiments on the phenomenon, one of which was carried out twice in Leiden. Compared to other theoretical proposals at the time, the prominent role of quantum concepts was characteristic of Einstein's understanding of the phenomenon. The paper concludes with comments on Einstein's epistemological reflections on the problem. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

There is a fundamental tension in business ethics between the apparent need to ensure ethical conduct through hierarchical control, and the encouragement of individuals' potential for autonomous moral judgement. In philosophical terms, these positions are consequentialist and Kantian, respectively. This paper assumes the former to be the dominant position in practice, and probably in theory also, but regards it as a misplaced extension of the more general managerial tendency to seek and maintain control over employees. While the functions (...) of such control are recognized, the arguments in favour of individuals' moral autonomy are pursued from both a Kantian and a social–theoretic perspective. Reference is made to Kohlberg's research on moral development that provides an insight into how individuals, through participation in debate with colleagues, might become more effective moral agents within organizational settings. This is contrasted with a managerial perspective, which pays lip service to individuals' right to such genuine involvement. The paper considers psychological manipulation and the legitimacy of managerial authority on matters of ethics, as opposed to in the purely technical context. The wider societal significance of such hierarchical power in organizations constitutes an important background to the paper. It is concluded that genuine, non‐manipulative, participation by employees is the way forward for the ethical management of business ethics. (shrink)

There is a fundamental tension in business ethics between the apparent need to ensure ethical conduct through hierarchical control, and the encouragement of individuals' potential for autonomous moral judgement. In philosophical terms, these positions are consequentialist and Kantian, respectively. This paper assumes the former to be the dominant position in practice, and probably in theory also, but regards it as a misplaced extension of the more general managerial tendency to seek and maintain control over employees. While the functions (...) of such control are recognized, the arguments in favour of individuals' moral autonomy are pursued from both a Kantian and a social–theoretic perspective. Reference is made to Kohlberg's research on moral development that provides an insight into how individuals, through participation in debate with colleagues, might become more effective moral agents within organizational settings. This is contrasted with a managerial perspective, which pays lip service to individuals' right to such genuine involvement. The paper considers psychological manipulation and the legitimacy of managerial authority on matters of ethics, as opposed to in the purely technical context. The wider societal significance of such hierarchical power in organizations constitutes an important background to the paper. It is concluded that genuine, non‐manipulative, participation by employees (and others) is the way forward for the ethical management of business ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Heidegger and OntologyEmmanuel Levinas (bio)The prestige of Martin Heidegger 1 and the influence of his thought on German philosophy marks both a new phase and one of the high points of the phenomenological movement. Caught unawares, the traditional establishment is obliged to clarify its position on this new teaching which casts a spell over youth and which, overstepping the bounds of permissibility, is already in vogue. For once, (...) Fame has picked one who deserves it and, for that matter, one who is still living. Anyone who has studied philosophy cannot, when confronted by Heidegger’s work, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievements, stemming from genius, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument—with that craftsmanship of the patient artisan in which phenomenologists take such pride. In this study, it is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him.To get to the heart of Heidegger’s system, it seems fitting to begin with a problem that is generally familiar. We choose the problem of knowledge, a deeper understanding of which takes us to the very threshold of Heidegger’s thought. For this problem, central to modern philosophy, is one of the main obstacles of modern philosophy that Heidegger wishes to surmount. Neo-Kantianism, which takes knowledge as the philosophical problem of the first rank, is the movement against which Heidegger rebels with all his strength. We have, thus, every chance of gaining access to his thought by the main door, so to speak. Once inside the system we will try to trace its outlines, 2 reserving, for a second part of our work, the determination of Heidegger’s place in the history of ideas, especially in the phenomenological movement, as well as of his relations with the philosopher to whom he owes so much—Edmund Husserl. 31In its most general form, the problem of the theory of knowledge has a critical significance. It consists in delineating a domain where knowledge can be certain and in determining the criteria for the legitimate scope of knowledge. But this problem, as normal and as simple as it may appear, has deeper roots. That knowledge should need a criterion at all presupposes that truth is not identical to all that is known and that the course [End Page 11] of things can fail to correspond with the course of thought. “How does knowledge correspond to being?” is a more profound formulation of the problem of knowledge.But we are not going to touch anymore on the primordial phenomenon that generates the problem. The problem of correspondence between thing and thought presupposes a free activity of thought and its isolation in relation to the object. It is precisely this presupposition which renders their harmony and even their contact problematic. “How does the subject take leave of itself to attain the object?” is what the problem of knowledge, in the last analysis, boils down to. Its true source is thus the concept of “subject” as elaborated by modern philosophy. The cogito presided over the subject’s birth. The cogito was the affirmation of the privileged nature of the subject’s immanent sphere, of its unique place in existence; hence, the cogito was the specificity of the subject’s connection to the rest of reality, the sui generis nature which opens up the passage from immanence to transcendence, the passage from ideas contained in the thinking substance to 4 their “formal existence.”The concept of the subject, understood as a substance having a specific position in the entire domain of being, presents us with difficulties of two kinds. First, how do we understand this leave-taking from the self which the thinking substance brings about and which displays an entirely original aspect? Indeed, we could say that thought, in reaching out toward objects, does not actually take leave of itself, since its objects—considered as ideas and contents of thought—are, in a certain sense, already within it. In order to make sense of this paradox, Descartes... (shrink)

The representational content or subject matter of a picture is normally distinguished from various non-representational components of meaning involved in artworks, such as expressive, stylistic or intentional factors. However, I show how such non subject matter components may themselves be analyzed in content terms, if two different categories of representation are recognized--aspect indication for stylistic etc. factors, and normal representation for subject matter content. On the account given, the relevant kinds of content are hierarchically structured, with relatively (...) unconceptualized lower level aspectual contents encoding or symbolizing higher level conceptualized representational subject matter. Such an account is strongly supported by the latest findings of cognitive science regarding levels of conceptualization. The paper also demonstrates how the account given is compatible with the actual pictorial competence of normal viewers of visual artworks. (shrink)

This essay examines the contemporary approaches to systems theory, the strengths and limitations of these approaches, and how communication researchers can apply them creatively. It points out that using system approaches requires communication scholars to study the mutual interaction of both information inputs and matter/energy inputs. Overloads of these inputs coupled with storage problems could engender positive feedback loops and move the system away from the linear region of stability toward the edge of chaos. It could then self-organize (...) as a more complex system in a new phase space of its trajectory. This complexity approach could be used to trace the trajectory of the global mass communication system or to conduct empirical research on all or any of the information-processing subsystems within the eight hierarchical levels of nested systems ranging from cell to supranational systems. Although systems thinking is writ large in the onto-cosmology of Eastern philosophies, its epistemological and methodological refinements did not occur until quantum physics challenged the ‘atomism’ of the dominant Newtonian-Cartesian model. (shrink)

The article contributes to the debate on new materialism commenced by Sara Ahmed (2008). Taking up Lena Gunnarsson’s (2013) argument that erasing distinctions is no effective antidote to dualistic theorising, the article argues that Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) theory is problematic on this count. Whereas Barad dilutes the theoretical distinction between mind and matter as well as that between the animate and the inanimate, the contention here is that it is ethically and politically vital to hold on to (...) a notion of subjectivity understood in terms of the capacity for experience, on account of which sentient being is exposed to suffering. This requires accentuating the passive dimension of subjectivity rather than merely the active dimension of matter. This article contests Barad’s reinscription of a masculinist devaluation of passivity on the grounds that only by moving beyond it can we overcome the hierarchical opposition of subject versus object and, in consequence, of mind versus matter. (shrink)

Human knowledge is a phenomenon whose roots extend from the cultural, through the neural and the biological and finally all the way down into the Precambrian “primordial soup.” The present paper reports an attempt at understanding this Greater System of Knowledge (GSK) as a hierarchical nested set of selection processes acting concurrently on several different scales of time and space. To this end, a general selection theory extending mainly from the work of Hull and Campbell is introduced. The (...) perhaps most drastic change from previous similar theories is that replication is revealed as a composite function consisting of what is referred to as memory and synthesis. This move is argued to drastically improve the fit between theory and human-related knowledge systems. The introduced theory is then used to interpret the subsystems of the GSK and their interrelations. This is done to the end of demonstrating some of the new perspectives offered by this view. (shrink)

Leibniz coined the word “dynamics,” but his own dynamics has never been completed. However, there are many illuminating ideas scattered in his writings on dynamics and metaphysics. In this paper, I will present my own interpretation of Leibniz’s dynamics and metaphysics. To my own surprise, Leibniz’s dynamics and metaphysics are incredibly flexible and modern. In particular, the metaphysical part, namely Monadology, can be interpreted as a theory of information in terms of monads, which generate both physical phenomena and mental (...) phenomena. The phenomena, i.e., how the world of monads appears to each monad must be distinguished from its internal states, which Leibniz calls perceptions, and the phenomena must be understood as the results of these states and God’s coding. My distinctive claim is that most interpreters ignored this coding. His dynamics and metaphysics can provide a framework good enough for enabling Einstein’s special relativity. And finally, his dynamics and metaphysics can provide a very interesting theory of space and time. In Part 1, we will focus on the relationship between metaphysics and dynamics. Leibniz often says that dynamics is subordinated to metaphysics. We have to take this statement seriously, and we have to investigate how dynamics and metaphysics are related. To this question, I will give my own answer, based on my informational interpretation. On my view, Leibniz’s metaphysics tries, among others, to clarify the following three: How each monad is programmed. How monads are organized into many groups, each of which is governed by a dominant monad ; this can be regarded as a precursor of von Neumann’s idea of cellular automata. And how the same structure is repeated in sub-layers of the organization. This structure is best understood in terms of the hierarchy of programs, a nested structure going down from the single dominant program to subprograms, which again controls respective subprograms, and ad infinitum. If we may use a modern term, this is a sort of recursion, although Leibniz himself did not know this word. And one of my major discoveries is that the same recursive structure is repeated in the phenomenal world, the domain of dynamical investigations. Recursion of what, you may ask. I will argue that it is elastic collision. For Leibniz, aside from inertial motions, dynamical changes of motion are brought about by elastic collisions, at any level of the infinite divisibility of matter. This nicely corresponds to the recursive structure of the program of a monad, or of the program of an organized group of monads. This is the crux of his claim that dynamics is subordinated to metaphysics. Moreover, the program of any monad is teleological, whereas the phenomenal world is governed by efficient cause of dynamics. And it is natural that the pre-established harmony is there, since God is the ultimate programmer, as well as the creator. (shrink)

Infinite time register machines (ITRMs) are register machines which act on natural numbers and which are allowed to run for arbitrarily many ordinal steps. Successor steps are determined by standard register machine commands. At limit times register contents are defined by appropriate limit operations. In this paper, we examine the ITRMs introduced by the third and fourth author (Koepke and Miller in Logic and Theory of Algorithms LNCS, pp. 306–315, 2008), where a register content at a limit time (...) is set to the lim inf of previous register contents if that limit is finite; otherwise the register is reset to 0. The theory of these machines has several similarities to the infinite time Turing machines (ITTMs) of Hamkins and Lewis. The machines can decide all ${\Pi^1_1}$ sets, yet are strictly weaker than ITTMs. As in the ITTM situation, we introduce a notion of ITRM-clockable ordinals corresponding to the running times of computations. These form a transitive initial segment of the ordinals. Furthermore we prove a Lost Melody theorem: there is a real r such that there is a program P that halts on the empty input for all oracle contents and outputs 1 iff the oracle number is r, but no program can decide for every natural number n whether or not ${n \in r}$ with the empty oracle. In an earlier paper, the third author considered another type of machines where registers were not reset at infinite lim inf’s and he called them infinite time register machines. Because the resetting machines correspond much better to ITTMs we hold that in future the resetting register machines should be called ITRMs. (shrink)

Some classical authors ascribe to Anaximander of Miletus a belief in the existence of infinite worlds. Their testimonies have provoked an extensive discussion on the question of whether Anaximander spoke of successive or coexistent worlds, or perhaps only one world that undergoes changes. Of course, this subject is related to important aspects of archaic cosmologies. First, we need to investigate whether one can even speak of a notion of coexistent worlds prior to atomist theories. Second, the issue of (...) class='Hi'>infinite worlds is closely linked to the nature of Anaximander's scheme of the universe and Ionian cosmologies in general. Finally, this matter has a bearing on the subject of the duration or perishing of the world. (shrink)

Within anthropology, as elsewhere in the human sciences, there is a tendency to divide knowledge making into two separate poles: conceptual (theory) vs. empirical (ethnography). In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus argue that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory—a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value, (...) of professional ideology—operates in anthropology and related fields today. They have assembled a distinguished group of scholars to diagnose the state of the theory-ethnography divide in anthropology today and to explore alternative modes of analytical and pedagogical practice. Continuing the methodological insights provided in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be, the contributors to this volume find that now is an optimal time to reflect on the status of theory in relation to ethnographic research in anthropology and kindred disciplines. Together they engage with questions such as, What passes for theory in anthropology and the human sciences today and why? What is theory's relation to ethnography? How are students trained to identify and respect anthropological theorization and how do they practice theoretical work in their later career stages? What theoretical experiments, languages, and institutions are available to the human sciences? Throughout, the editors and authors consider theory in practical terms, rather than as an amorphous set of ideas, an esoteric discourse of power, a norm of intellectual life, or an infinitely contestable canon of texts. A short editorial afterword explores alternative ethics and institutions of pedagogy and training in theory. Contributors: Andrea Ballestero, Rice University; Dominic Boyer, Rice University; Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jessica Marie Falcone, Kansas State University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago; Cymene Howe, Rice University; Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School for Design and the Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Townsend Middleton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston–Clear Lake; Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago. (shrink)

This collection of original work, within the sociology of education, draws on the 'spatial turn' in contemporary social theory. The premise of this book is that drawing on theories of space allows for a more sophisticated understanding of the competing rationalities underlying educational policy change, social inequality and cultural practices. The contributors work a spatial dimension into the consideration of educational phenomena and illustrate its explanatory potential in a range of domains: urban renewal, globalisation, race, markets and school choice, (...) suburbanisation, regional and rural settings, and youth and student culture. (shrink)

No artigo "Einstein y el efecto Compton", publicado neste número de SCIENTIÆ UDIA: , os autores estranham o fato de Einstein não ter declarado mais claramente o quanto esse efeito comprovava definitivamente o carácter corpuscular da radiação. A presente nota crítica pretende fornecer elementos adicionais de apreciação que permitam acompanhar o método de exploração do domínio dos quanta elaborado por Einstein, na ausência de uma teoria adequada, e praticado por ele de 1905 à 1925, evidenciando por esse meio propriedades inéditas (...) e inusuais dos fenômenos quânticos; e também explicitar o alvo que ele queria almejar com sua investigação e entender melhor seu pensamento acerca dos quanta. Três argumentos principais são delineados. (1) O problema dos quanta de luz está estreitamente ligado com aquele das propriedades quânticas da matéria atômica em geral, do qual não pode ser separado. (2) Outro experimento, realizado pouco depois do experimento de Compton, trouxe um elemento adicional, necessário para que se possa atribuir sem nenhuma reticiência uma quantidade de movimento à radiação, isto é, o caráter individual da interação da qual a radiação toma parte. (3) Enfim, os trabalhos de Einstein sobre a estatística quântica, realizados no mesmo período, apontavam na direção da generalização do duplo caráter onda-corpúsculo à radiação, como também à matéria, evidenciando a indiscernibilidade dos estados idênticos e revelando, assim, propriedades fundamentais radicalmente novas que toda teoria quântica futura haveria de incluir. In the article "Einstein y el efecto Compton", published in this issue of SCIENTIÆ UDIA: , the authors wonder why Einstein did not claim unambiguously that this phenomenon was a clear and definitive proof of the corpuscular character of radiation. The aims of the present critical note are to provide additional comments that serve to clarify the method that Einstein used for exploring the quantum domain, in the absence of a satisfactory theory - a method he practiced from 1905 to 1925, and from which he obtained evidence of new and unusual properties of quantum phenomena; and to try to formulate what he wanted to get at in his investigations, so as to understand better his thinking about quanta. Three main arguments are sketched. (1) The problem of light quanta cannot be separated from that of the quantum properties of atomic matter in general. (2) Another experiment, performed shortly after Compton's yielded a further element that was necessary to obtain a definitive answer to the question of whether a quantity of motion can be attributed to radiation. (3) Finally, Einstein's works on quantum statistics during that period pointed towards a generalization of the double wave-corpuscle behavior of radiation, and also of matter, providing evidence for the indistinguishability of identical states, thus revealing radically new fundamental properties that should be accounted for by any further quantum theory. (shrink)

Daniel Sennert , a prominent physician and a prolific and influential writer, was both an atomist and an Aristotelian. He was influenced by a distinctive and now little known Aristotelian approach to matter and form, and this promoted his development over time of a hierarchical account of atoms, with elementary atoms and grades of molecules. The first section provides a study of Sennert's Aristotelian foundation. The final two sections consider, in turn, Sennert's development over time of an atomistic (...) theory, and the nature and significance for him of substantial forms. (shrink)

Este artículo da cuenta de la aparición histórica de lo infinito en la teoría de conjuntos, y de cómo lo tratamos dentro y fuera de las matemáticas. La primera sección analiza el surgimiento de lo infinito como una cuestión de método en la teoría de conjuntos. La segunda sección analiza el infinito dentro y fuera de las matemáticas, y cómo deben adoptarse. This article address the historical emergence of the infinite in set theory, and how we are to (...) take the infinite in and out of mathematics.The first section discusses the emergence of the infinite as a matter of method in set theory. The second section discusses the infinite in and out of mathematics, and how it is to be taken. (shrink)

If a classical system has infinitely many degrees of freedom, its Hamiltonian quantization need not be unique up to unitary equivalence. I sketch different approaches (Hilbert space and algebraic) to understanding the content of quantum theories in light of this non‐uniqueness, and suggest that neither approach suffices to support explanatory aspirations encountered in the thermodynamic limit of quantum statistical mechanics.

Spoken language consists of a linear sequence of units, from which the existence of particular underlying hierarchical processing mechanisms is inferred. Uddén et al. use graph theory to provide a framework for describing the possible structural relationships that may underlie a linear output sequence. Being more explicit in defining different structures can help identifying and testing for such structures in AGL experiments, as well as help showing how behavioral and neuroimaging data reveals signatures of hierarchical processing in (...) humans. (shrink)

Spoken language consists of a linear sequence of units, from which the existence of particular underlying hierarchical processing mechanisms is inferred. Uddén et al. use graph theory to provide a framework for describing the possible structural relationships that may underlie a linear output sequence. Being more explicit in defining different structures can help identifying and testing for such structures in AGL experiments, as well as help showing how behavioral and neuroimaging data reveals signatures of hierarchical processing in (...) humans. (shrink)

The problem of the finite and the infinite.--Pragmatism and a theory of knowledge.