We show that cast shadows can have a significant influence on the speed of visual search. In particular, we find that search based on the shape of a region is affected when the region is darker than the background and corresponds to a shadow formed by lighting from above. Results support the proposal that an early-level system rapidly identifies regions as shadows and then discounts them, making their shapes more difficult to access. Several constraints used by this system (...) are mapped out, including constraints on the luminance and texture of the shadow region, and on the nature of the item casting the shadow. Among other things, this system is found to distinguish between line elements (items containing only edges) and surface elements (items containing visible surfaces), with only the latter deemed capable of casting a shadow. (shrink)

Hegemonic practices of memorialization rely on narratives of heroic, morally untainted resistance, which cast traitors as the aberrant “other.” This paper draws on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and historical and sociological accounts of betrayal to trouble this binary and construct a framework for memorializing betrayal in its ambiguity—in relation to the everyday reality of tragic dilemmas that resisters face. I show how attentiveness to the ambiguity of betrayal can help rethink heroic resistance myths beyond the exclusionary logic (...) pitting moral purity against the depravity of treason—and warn against the reproduction of systematic practices of othering in the new political order. The paper develops the political relevance of this theoretical exploration via the example of a South African novel, The Texture of Shadows, examining how its insights into the ambiguity of betrayal challenge the myths of heroic resistance in South Africa. (shrink)

As debates rage over the place of faith in our national life, Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century crediting of religion for shaping America is largely overlooked today. Now, in _Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America,_ Ellis Sandoz reveals the major role that Protestant Christianity played in the formation and early period of the American republic. Sandoz traces the rise of republican government from key sources in Protestant civilization, paying particular attention to the influence of the Bible on the Founders and the blossoming (...) of the American mind in the eighteenth century. Sandoz analyzes the religious debt of the emergent American community and its elevation of the individual person as unique in the eyes of the Creator. He shows that the true distinction of American republicanism lies in its grounding of human dignity in spiritual individualism and an understanding of man’s capacity for self-government under providential guidance. Along the way, he addresses such topics as the neglected question of the education of the Founders for their unique endeavor, common law constitutionalism, the place of Latin and Greek classics in the Founders’ thought, and the texture of religious experience from the Great Awakening to the Declaration of Independence To establish a unifying theoretical perspective for his study, Sandoz considers the philosophical underpinnings of religion and the contribution that Eric Voegelin made to our understanding of religious experience. He contributes fresh studies of the character of Voegelin’s thought: its relationship to Christianity; his debate with Leo Strauss over reason, revelation, and the meaning of philosophy; and the theory of Gnosticism as basic to radical modernity. He also provides a powerful account of the spirit of Voegelin’s later writings, contrasting the political scientist with the meditative spiritualist and offering new insight into volume 5 of _Order and History_. _Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America_ concludes with timely reflections on the epoch now unfolding in the shadow of Islamic jihadism. Bringing a wide range of materials into a single volume, it confronts current academic concerns with religion while offering new insight into the construction of the American polity—and the heart of Americanism as we know it today. (shrink)

I discuss a solution to the Yale shadow puzzle, due to Roy Sorensen, based on the actual process theory of causation, and argue that it does not work in the case of a new version of the puzzle, which I call "the Bilkent shadow puzzle". I offer a picture of the ontology of shadows that constitute the basis for a new solution that uniformly applies to both puzzles.

Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in the debate over Martin Heidegger and Nazism from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's work. He reveals crucial aspects of Heidegger's thinking that betray an affinity with dimensions of Jewish thought.

The soul is an elusive thing, and anyone who wants to describe it must do so with metaphors, painting it in a picture of words. The metaphors one chooses for this task will reflect the aspects one is most eager to promote of what it is to be a person, a living, breathing, thinking presence in the world. Popularly, the soul is often pictured as a little fellow inside one's head, a homunculus with whom one is in constant communication. Such (...) a picture lends color to the idea that to be a sentient being is to be in a condition of inner dialogue with oneself, reasoning things out, talking things over, and perhaps also being guided by one's conscience, an inner voice heard only by oneself. Notice that the soul so. (shrink)

The respectably legitimate offspring of an age-old affair between writing and picture-making, the calligramme — that is, “a poem in which the typographical layout creates a picture, generally related to the ‘subject’ of the text” (Dictionnaire des littératures, Larousse) — is often seen as an esoteric minority art of dubious reputation. Starting from an exclusively Western approach to the history of the calligramme, my aim is to demonstrate that this artform may in fact represent something more than simply (here I (...) deliberately use a metaphor from the far east, as a counterargument to my theme) the “Kyogen of the No theatre” — i.e., more than a lightweight interlude between more literary, aesthetic, even metaphysical preoccupations — more elevated, more serious, or, in general terms, more extended. Apart from the play and the pleasure of an approach that is creative in terms of letters and language, it contains serious elements related to the actual exercise of writing in our media civilization. (shrink)

The eclipse riddle -- Seeing surfaces -- The disappearing act -- Spinning shadows -- Berkeley's shadow -- Para-reflections -- Para-refractions : shadowgrams and the black drop -- Goethe's colored shadows -- Filtows -- Holes in the light -- Black and blue -- Seeing in black and white -- We see in the dark -- Hearing silence.

Typically, Aristotle’s notion of an accidental unity is explained using our concept of identity, but doing so is fraught and liable to mislead. I argue that we should explain accidental unities in terms of sameness: doing so not only shows a coherence among texts thought to be in tension with one another, it reconciles the two competing conceptions of accidental unities in a satisfying way. I conclude by answering several Boolean questions that naturally arise in response to the inclusion of (...) accidental unities in Aristotle’s ontology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Barthes and the Lesson of SaenredamHoward Caygill (bio)In his late dialogue Parmenides, Plato seems to be on the point of overturning the main achievement of his philosophy, the doctrine of ideas. The aged Parmenides disquiets the young Socrates by asking if ideas apply not only to abstractions such as the just, the beautiful, and the good, but also to "hair, mud, dirt, or anything else particularly vile and worthless" (...) [131A]. Socrates thinks not, but admits being troubled by a doubt that forces him to retreat "for fear of falling into some abyss of nonsense and perishing." This hint of an obverse Platonism that haunts the doctrine of ideas shares much with the later work of Barthes, which, qualifying a life's work in semiotics, seems to turn away from signs and the inquiry into their conditions of meaning to seek meaning in the smudge and the blemish. In his late essay on Cy Twombly, "The Wisdom of Art" (1979), he explicitly adopts the obverse Platonism that so troubled Socrates as a principle of method: "Ideas (in the Platonic sense) are not shiny, metallic Figures in conceptual corsets, but somewhat shaky maculations, tenuous blemishes on a vague background" [180]. The clear allusion to the parable of the cave in Plato's Republic—with its contrast between the shadows on the wall and the bright light of the ideas—allows Barthes's work to be situated within an obverse, dirty Platonism. He does not abandon the Platonic search for ideas but reorients its direction of inquiry from the realm of light to that of shadow, from the heavens to the cave.The position adopted by Barthes before his death should not be understood as a turn away from a preoccupation with light and the conditions of intelligibility to a sensitivity to the shadows in the nuances of voice, tone, timbre, and texture. Such a development might seem to be confirmed by the shift in Barthes's interests from the immaculate, harshly lit geometrical architectural interiors of the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Saenredam in one of his first essays, "The World as Object" (1953), to the informal works of Cy Twombly during the final years of his life. The church interiors of the former would seem to exemplify the idea as "shiny, metallic figure," while the paintings of the latter are closer to maculation and blemish. Yet the sensitivity to the vague and the indefinable that eludes meaning while remaining one of its conditions of possibility was always present, even and especially in Barthes's response to the mysterious works of Saenredam, which for all their immaculate surface are themselves profoundly marked and blemished.The essay of 1953, contemporary with Writing Degree Zero, inaugurates a number of trajectories that range between a concern with the visual to the conditions of artistic practice under capitalism, even to a reorientation of Platonism. Itself an astonishingly wide-ranging yet focused response to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the essay begins with a discussion of Saenredam as an exceptional moment in Dutch painting. Yet this moment is itself quickly identified as an inaugural moment of a certain obverse [End Page 38] artistic practice—the evocation of the idea of truth through reduction and negation—that continued through the contemporary avant-garde. Saenredam's art is inaugural in its refusal to participate in the mythology of what would later be identified as a capitalist society and culture. The essay, ostensibly concerned with Dutch painting, is also a reflection on the possibilities of an aesthetics of resistance in a capitalist society and the limits within which avant-garde practice is confined. Barthes's reading of Saenredam and through him Dutch painting is thus programmatic of his readings of the contemporary avant-garde, and beyond this to the Platonic structures which still silently inhabit its aesthetic theory and practice.An Aesthetic of SilenceIn the opening paragraph of "The World as Object," Barthes introduces the work of Saenredam as anticipating "a 'modern' aesthetic of silence," an anticipation that is said to exceed even "the dislocations of our contemporaries" [62]. This chronological dislocation of Saenredam's work—placing it in advance of the contemporary avant-garde—is but one of... (shrink)

Roy Sorensen’s adventure in Shadowland started with his prize-winning article, "Seeing Intersecting Eclipses" (published in The Journal of Philosophy, and chosen by the board of the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy articles of 1999), which is the basis for the first two chapters in this book. The recipe adopted in that article is followed in most of the following thirteen chapters, five of them being based on Sorensen’s previous articles on the topic: start with an open (...) mind regarding the existence and causal efficacy of absences, shadows, i.e. absences of light, in our case, devise a riddle involving perception of such absences, and draw the consequences for the philosophy of perception and/or ontology. (shrink)

In a 1978 lecture in Tokyo, Foucault drew a comparison between his own philosophical methodology and that of ‘Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy’, claiming the label ‘analytic philosophy of politics’ for his own approach. This may seem like a somewhat surprising comparison given the gulf between contemporary analytic and continental philosophy, but I argue that it is a very productive one which indeed might help us reconsider this gulf. I proceed through a comparison between Foucault and the speech act theory of J. (...) L. Austin, one of the analytic philosophers Foucault had in mind in his Tokyo lecture. By focusing on the methodological commonalities between Foucault and Austin, this article identifies the core of a philosophical methodology that cuts across the analytic/continental divide in philosophy in general while constituting a powerful alternative to the methods applied by analytic political philosophers specifically. This approach, which I term ‘analytic critique’, is one that starts from a critical analysis of what happens in ordinary lived experience and theorizes ‘bottom-up’ in an avowedly politically engaged way – thereby challenging the conceptual and political aloofness of contemporary political philosophy in the liberal-Rawlsian tradition. Foucault’s appropriation of the label ‘analytic philosophy’, it is argued, ought to function as a call to more imaginative methodological-theoretical engagement across the traditional division between continental and analytic approaches. (shrink)

I gave remarks at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing in London, UK on the first day for the section titled, “Sickle Cell Disease: A Case Study Affecting Millions.” It did not es...

In this paper I examine important texts by Jacques Derrida in which, either implicitly or explicitly, the Shoah, the catastrophe of the Holocaust is signified, interrupting, disrupting, even disfiguring the texture of the text. The question is how appropriately to remember and mourn the dead within philosophical discourse, how to remember what happened and how to understand it as a question not only of ethical and political responsibility but also as an evil deeply and pervasively reflected in the ontology (...) and epistemology of the philosophical tradition—an evil circulating within the very substance of philosophical thought, and in such a way that Derrida will make this philosophical complicity in the violence and evil of the Holocaust register its painfully oppressive guilt in textual configurations haunted by the presence of the victims, remembered in traces of their absence. Thus we see how Derrida lets the question of an appropriate form of historical memory, a fitting way to remember the Shoah, invade his texts—how he lets the texts of his thought be exposed to its radical evil and exposed to the pain of an impossible mourning. We also see how the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence implies a contestation of historicism, a writing of history that betrays the past in the very process of making it present. (shrink)

A culture in crisis -- The rise of the living will -- Empirical and ethical problems with living wills -- Living wills don't make decisions : human beings do -- The barbaric life of the ICU -- Life after the ICU -- Reform : the current state of the art -- Healing the intensive care unit.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Layers of Seeing and Seeing through Layers: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital ImageryLouisa Wood Ruby (bio)Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the (...) time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.—Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936In consulting on or creating a Web site designed to use works of art for teaching purposes, it is extremely important to be aware of the differences between seeing an artwork “in the flesh” and in reproduction. Museum educators are highly aware of this disparity and are therefore eager to have students visit museums to experience authentic works of art instead of seeing them only in books, slides, or on Web sites. Already in 1936, Walter Benjamin called attention to the drawbacks of reproductions; his words resonate all the more in our age of digital image overload. Easy access to images is, of course, desirable, and the advanced technologies we now have can even aid our understanding of a work of art. Nonetheless, the physical experience of standing in front of a work of art can never be replicated by seeing it on a flat screen or a piece of paper. In this article I will examine the advantages, disadvantages, differences, and similarities between looking at a Web-based image of a Rembrandt painting, a photograph of a Rembrandt painting, and actually standing in front of one of his original works. I will also discuss the more advanced technologies for examining paintings and how they can help us “see” further into a work of art and increase our understanding of it. [End Page 51]When standing in front of a painting, you are seeing a three-dimensional object with a history of its own. Its nicks, the dings in its frame, its true colors and texture, its exact size, the quality of the brushstrokes, and the amount of paint are all visible to the careful observer, who stands in a long line of viewers over the centuries who have appreciated the artist’s achievement. When approached from different angles, a painting in real space can even seem to vary in the mood it conveys or the impression it gives. A striking demonstration of this phenomenon occurred during a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when Rika Burnham, a museum educator, divided our Rembrandt Project group in half and asked us to look at Rembrandt’s 1660 Self-Portrait from different angles and describe the sitter’s mood. When we compared notes, our impressions of the painting were so different that an outside listener would have thought we were looking at two completely different paintings. We then switched angles, and our respective impressions changed dramatically. Effects of light (shadows, highlights, color) and interpretations of elements in the painting, such as the hand or the hat, had been affected by the angle from which we had approached the work, and these minor adjustments had significantly altered the way we “read” the painting.This kind of experience is of course not possible when looking at a photograph of a work of art. A photograph can be very useful and can usually tell you much about a painting, but, unfortunately, the photograph itself is an object that was taken at a specific time and place, under specific circumstances that might or might not be ideal for capturing the essence of what it is trying to reproduce. Because the angle from which a photograph is taken remains static, it only allows us to experience the painting from one direction, under the given set of lighting conditions. Other problems abound. Two color reproductions of a given painting will more than likely offer wildly different color tonalities because photographs and reproductions in many publications imperfectly correct for color. Lighting of the painting may... (shrink)

I wish to thank Prof. Houlgate for his thoughtful article, especially in view of his agreement with so much of the argument of Recognition. I welcome his concurrence with many of my theses: that there is an account of intersubjectivity in German idealism, that reason is social, that love is the most important form of reciprocal recognition, and that Hegel does not reduce the other to the same. His analysis of both Fichte and Hegel is sophisticated and perceptive. Before responding (...) directly to his criticisms, which focus chiefly on the topic of absolute knowledge, I should like to indicate briefly my objectives in writing Recognition, how and at what levels the question of the other comes to be posed, and its significance for basic issues in Hegel interpretation. (shrink)

Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence (...) within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. The book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives. (shrink)

Lebeau examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science, and technology that brought pychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. She explores the subsequent encounters between the two: the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converging, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock, and sexuality. Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-siècle Paris, this study offers a detailed reading of (...) the texts and concepts which generated the field of psychoanalytic film theory. (shrink)

From surrealism’s beginnings around a Parisian séance table, it oscillated between the occult and the political. One of its key methods, automatism, provided access to both the esoteric and the exoteric: it took form in the mid-19th century as a spiritualist technique for communicating with the other side while, simultanously, this other side could address political issues as equal rights, de-colonisation and a utopian future with an authority coming from beyond the individual. By tracing the development of automatism, the article (...) shows how automatism in surrealism became a call for both a re-orientation of life and an institutional re-organisation by becoming a divination tool for a future community looking back to hermeticism to find a way forward. The article argues that not only can surrealism fruitfully be understood in the light of an occult revival in reaction to crises but, additionally, that it marks the return of and a reaction to a kind of magical thinking in the modern – due to waning religious and socio-economic orthodoxies – that echoes eerily into our own big data contemporary of social medias where we tend to substitute equations with associations. (shrink)

There is a puzzle about how to understand the conclusion of a successful instance of practical reasoning. Do the considerations adduced in reasoning rationalize the particular doing of an action, as Aristotle is sometimes interpreted as claiming? Or does reasoning conclude in the formation of an attitude – an intention, say – that has an action-type as its content? This paper attempts to clarify what is at stake in that debate and defends the latter view against some of its critics.

Enactive and ecological approaches to cognitive science both claim a “mutuality” between agents and their environments – that they have a complementary nature and should be addressed as a single whole system. Despite this apparent agreement, each offers criticisms of the other on precisely this point – enactivists claiming that ecological psychologists over-emphasise the environment, while the complementary criticism, of agent-centred constructivism, is levelled by ecological psychologists at enactivists. In this paper I suggest that underlying the confusion between the two (...) approaches is the complexity of agency, which comes in different forms, at different scales or levels of analysis. Cognitive science has not theorised the relationship between these different forms in a sufficiently disciplined manner, and a task therefore remains of finding a way to map the complex territory of agency. (shrink)

In this chapter, we offer an account of fear and risk in anticipation of catastrophe. We draw on the narrative response to the Mount Enta volcano in medieval Sicily to frame an evaluation of how fear can be seen to impact the understanding of risk when the event of that risk is the catastrophic suffering of an entire community. We aim to demonstrate how an exploration of the philosophical questions surrounding the emotion of fear and the understanding of risk can (...) contribute to broader, interdisciplinary dialogue on the experience of the disastrous and deadly. (shrink)

In this chapter, we offer an account of fear and risk in anticipation of catastrophe. We draw on the narrative response to the Mount Enta volcano in medieval Sicily to frame an evaluation of how fear can be seen to impact the understanding of risk when the event of that risk is the catastrophic suffering of an entire community. We aim to demonstrate how an exploration of the philosophical questions surrounding the emotion of fear and the understanding of risk can (...) contribute to broader, interdisciplinary dialogue on the experience of the disastrous and deadly. (shrink)

An important challenge when creating automatically processable laws concerns open-textured terms. The ability to measure open-texture can assist in determining the feasibility of encoding regulation and where additional legal information is required to properly assess a legal issue or dispute. In this article, we propose a novel conceptualisation of open-texture with the aim of determining the extent of open-textured terms in legal documents. We conceptualise open-texture as a lever whose state is impacted by three types of forces: (...) internal forces (the words within the text themselves), external forces (the resources brought to challenge the definition of words), and lateral forces (the merit of such challenges). We tested part of this conceptualisation with 26 participants by investigating agreement in paired annotators. Five key findings emerged. First, agreement on which words are open-texture within a legal text is possible and statistically significant. Second, agreement is even high at an average inter-rater reliability of 0.7 (Cohen’s kappa). Third, when there is agreement on the words, agreement on the Open-Texture Value is high. Fourth, there is a dependence between the Open-Texture Value and reasons invoked behind open-texture. Fifth, involving only four annotators can yield similar results compared to involving twenty more when it comes to only flagging clauses containing open-texture. We conclude the article by discussing limitations of our experiment and which remaining questions in real life cases are still outstanding. (shrink)

The great French Marxist philosopher weighs up the contributions of the three major critics of modernity With the translation of Lefebvre's philosophical writings, his stature in the English-speaking world continues to grow. Though certainly within the Marxist tradition, he consistently saw Marx as an 'unavoidable, necessary, but insufficient starting point'. Unsurprisingly, Lefebvre always insisted on the importance of Hegel to understanding Marx. But the imposing Metaphilosophy also suggested the significance he ascribed to Nietzsche, in the 'realm of shadows' through (...) which philosophy seeks to think the world. Lefebvre proposes here that the modern world is at the same time Hegelian in terms of the state; Marxist in terms of the social and society; and Nietzschean in terms of civilization and its values. As early as 1939, Lefebvre pioneered a French reading of Nietzsche that rejected the philosopher's appropriation by fascism, bringing out the tragic implications of Nietzsche's proclamation that 'God is dead' long before this approach was followed by such later writers as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Forty years later, in the last of his philosophical writings, Lefebvre juxtaposes the contributions of the three great thinkers, in a text whose themes remain surprisingly relevant today. (shrink)

In the traditional sense, a work of art creates an illustration of the outside world, or of a certain text or doctrine. Sometimes it is considered that such an illustration is not literal, but is an interpretation of what is visible, or an interpretation of a certain literary or ideological message. It can also be assumed that a work of art creates its own visual world, a separate story or a separate philosophical statement. The Parc de La Villette represents the (...) last of these possibilities: it is a philosophical statement that develops the premises derived from poststructuralist philosophies and the philosophy of deconstruction. The uniqueness of its being status, however, is that it does so not only at the level of the theoretical assumptions, but also through its functioning as an active philosophical work. This means that a park is a happening philosophy. Its activity, however, does not refer only to the present tense, but is also an attempt to penetrate the future, all otherness and impossibility. This kind of activity assumes that the work, in a sense, does not yet fully exist, but is also still produced in the processes of its interpretation. The theoretical foundations of the park included texts by Bernard Tschumi, in which he questioned traditional ways of creating a work of architecture, postulating in return the use of a long series of negations, which were comparable to the crisis of metaphysics characteristic of contemporary philosophy. It is therefore no coincidence that the publication containing Tschumi’s theoretical text on Parc de La Villette was accompanied by an essay by Jacques Derrida developing some of the architect’s concepts. The next step in integrating philosophy into the process of park design was a series of discussions between Peter Eisenman and Derrida, who completely moved the creation of the park into the world of thoughts, without accentuating the need for their realization in the material reality. The main topic of these discussions was the problem of the chôra, which was taken up by later commentators and used to interpret the park as a work in which the philosophy of the beginning is manifested relating to issues of politics, morality and religion. The park was therefore interpreted as a space of invention within the scope of creating new rules of functioning of the community and democracy. Thinking about the political future may, however, exceed the horizon of ordinary expectations. Although philosophical thought is always connected with contemporary problems and metaphysics sometimes intertwines with current politics, yet at the same time the customs of philosophy also include crossing horizons and thinking about absolute otherness and impossibility. Initially, the chôra, différance, Absolute Otherness (tout autre) and the Impossibile were concepts of pure philosophy of atheistic character, but with the further development of the discussion, more and more theological motifs began to emerge. One of the reasons for this phenomenon was the fact that radical negations of all being, which were contemplated in contemporary philosophy (by Heidegger and Derrida, among others), had previously been manifested in negative and apophatic theologies (by Master Eckhart, among others). Also the category of the “Other”, taken from Emmanuel Levinas, was clearly connected with the thought about God. A further reason for connecting the chôra with the theological thought was the interest in the philosophy of deconstruction expressed by some theologians. Caputo in particular managed to persuade Derrida to participate in discussions on the current status of religion. In the late period of Derrida’s writing, further statements on religious topics appeared. All these reasons led to posing a question about the identity of the chôra and God. Although there were no satisfactory conclusions on this issue, the discussion was also important to create an interpretation of the park as a place of worship. The chôra, representing, according to Plato, the preoriginal emptiness is the place of every beginning, but it turns out that it is not neutral to the being created in it. The chôra deposits itself in every being as an irremovable beginning that interferes with its stability. The chôra, therefore, forces us into a palintropical movement, but it also turns out to be a pure compulsion, an erring necessity and a fundamental force from which, in the human perception, motifs useful to the individual and to the community are extracted. All definitions of this force, including its anthropomorphisation, are formulated in such a way that they allow for building private and collective morality upon them. Such definitions are changed depending on variable political situations. It is difficult to determine whether in the processes of changes in the formulation of “God’s names” any essential value is retained, which is not subject to change. The current definitions of the chôra (God?), which can be found, for example, in the philosophy of Caputo, stress that she is a combination of various and contradictory forces. This characteristic inherits much of Plato’s concept, reminds us of Master Eckhart’s views on Gottheit and, at the same time, is not unfamiliar to Tschumi, whose essays were an apologia of contradictions. The current concept of chôra, transferred into the sphere of politics, is the praise of social diversity and the protection of the difference from the forces of order. In the Parc de La Villette, the future community and democracy were elevated as a system of safe existence of individuals in all their singularity. The park is a temple of a future community in which individual beings have nothing in common. (shrink)

Using the example of Newton's Opticks, the author develops the concept of 'classic' as applied to landmark works in the history of the sciences. A discussion of themes drawn from H.-G. Gadamer and T. Kuhn is followed by an introduction of the notions of the texture and contexture of scientific works, conceived as the result of an author's weaving together foreground and background concerns. These notions assist in understanding how certain works can exercise a continuing appeal to both specialists (...) and nonspecialists. The essay concludes with reflections on the pedagogical purpose of using classic scientific texts in university education. (shrink)

Size-from-shadow arguments requires tinkering in many a case as the geometry of the situation is often not determinate. I then make a remark about the availability of indications about size in perceptual content.

Texts and textures: approaching an age of human-made nature through the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. We have entered the Anthropocene era—a geological age of our own making, in which what we have understood to be nature is made by man. We need a new way to understand the dynamics of a new epoch. These volumes offer writings that approach the Anthropocene through the perspectives of grain, vapor, and ray—the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. The first three volumes—each (...) devoted to one of the three textures—offer a series of paired texts, with contemporary writers responding to historic writings. A fourth volume offers a guide to the project as a whole. Grain: Granular materials add up to concrete forms; insignificant specks accumulate into complex entities. The texts in this volume narrate some of the fundamental qualities of the granular. In one pairing of texts, Robert Smithson compares the accumulation of thoughts to the aggregation of sediment, and an environmental historian writes about the stakes for earthly knowledge today. Other authors include Alfred Russel Wallace, Denis Diderot, and Georges Bataille. Vapor: The vaporous represents matter's transformations. In this volume, a political scientist compares Kafka's haunting “Odradek” to “vibrant matter”; a media theorist responds to poems and diagrams by Buckminster Fuller; and more, including texts by Hippocrates, Italo Calvino, and James Clerk Maxwell. Ray: A ray is an act of propagation and diffusion, encompassing a chain of interdependencies between energy and matter. This volume includes texts by Spinoza (with a reconceptualization by a contemporary philosopher), Jacques Lacan (followed by an anthropologist's reflections on temporality), Thomas Pynchon (accompanied by an interpretation of Pynchon's “electro-mysticism”), and others. These volumes constitute a unique experiment in design and composition as well as content. The mingling of texts and the juxtaposition of different areas of knowledge represented in a variety of forms express the dynamics of a world in change. (shrink)