Frederick Denison Maurice.--Matthew Arnold.--Charles Bradlaugh.--Thomas Henry Huxley.--Leslie Stephen.--Harriet Martineau.--Charles Kingsley.

This article shows a clear sense in which general relativity allows for a type of ‘machine’ that can bring about a spacetime structure suitable for the implementation of ‘supertasks’. 1Introduction2Preliminaries3Malament–Hogarth Spacetimes4Machines5Malament–Hogarth Machines6Conclusion.

The film Nosferatu (1922) has graffiti created by the character of the madman Knock on the walls of his cell. This motif, which I call the ‘madman’s wall’, has accompanied depictions of lunatics since the beginning of the eighteenth century. This article examines the origin, transformations and functions of this motif. The popularisation of the motif originates with the longitude diagram in the last plate of A Rake’s Progress (1735) by William Hogarth, which subsequently found its way into the (...) works of Hogarth’s plagiarists and influenced illustrations of asylum interiors in the first half of the nineteenth century. The madman’s wall also appears in literature, such as the popular novel The Father and Daughter (1801) by Amelia Opie, which was plagiarised and dramatised, and the legend of the poet Charles Smart, who allegedly wrote his poem on the walls of his cell. The main prerequisite for the madman’s wall is the dungeon-like image of the asylum—presenting it as a prison. It is usually the author of the graffiti who displays the signs of madness, not the wall itself. As society distanced itself from the image of the asylum as a dungeon, the madman’s wall disappeared after the 1850s. Paradoxically, many reports about the authentic wall art of asylum patients emerged in the press after the 1850s. The madman’s wall in Nosferatu is the first example after an approximately seventy-year absence and could be a product of the period interest of avant-garde artists in the art of the mentally ill. (shrink)

It is well established that discursive innovations in literature and philosophy encouraged pro-animal sentiments in 18th-century England. Far less well known in this regard is the "animal turn" in the graphic arts. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by documenting the extensive representation of animals in the paintings, drawings, and printed engravings of the English artist William Hogarth. It outlines the four chief ways in which Hogarth pictured animals-namely, as hybrids, as edibles, as "pets," and as signs (...) of satire. In so doing the article asks, how did Hogarth see animals? How should we see Hogarth’s animals? (shrink)

In these compositions, the subjects that will both entertain and improve the mind, bid fair to be of the greatest public utility.From toddlers to teenagers, children are everywhere in Hogarth’s pictures. There are children of the drawing room and children of the streets; “little angels” shown putting on a play, “little devils” shown torturing animals; portraits of the sons and daughters of minor aristocrats and the upwardly mobile professional classes and gangs of youngsters gambling at cards on the pavements (...) of St. James’s Street. Biblical images may lend gravitas or satirical point to the messages of the pictures: for example, in the theme of abandonment that lies behind the painting of the infant Moses Brought... (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Tait’s axiomatic conception of mathematics implies that it is in principle impossible to be justified in believing a mathematical statement without being justified in believing that statement to be provable. I will then show that there are possible courses of experience which would justify acceptance of a mathematical statement without justifying belief that this statement is provable.

The standard theory of computation excludes computations whose completion requires an infinite number of steps. Malament-Hogarth spacetimes admit observers whose pasts contain entire future-directed, timelike half-curves of infinite proper length. We investigate the physical properties of these spacetimes and ask whether they and other spacetimes allow the observer to know the outcome of a computation with infinitely many steps.

We analyse the extent of possible computations following Hogarth ([2004]) conducted in Malament–Hogarth (MH) spacetimes, and Etesi and Németi ([2002]) in the special subclass containing rotating Kerr black holes. Hogarth ([1994]) had shown that any arithmetic statement could be resolved in a suitable MH spacetime. Etesi and Németi ([2002]) had shown that some relations on natural numbers that are neither universal nor co-universal, can be decided in Kerr spacetimes, and had asked specifically as to the extent of (...) computational limits there. The purpose of this note is to address this question, and further show that MH spacetimes can compute far beyond the arithmetic: effectively Borel statements (so hyperarithmetic in second-order number theory, or the structure of analysis) can likewise be resolved: Theorem A. If H is any hyperarithmetic predicate on integers, then there is an MH spacetime in which any query ? n H ? can be computed. In one sense this is best possible, as there is an upper bound to computational ability in any spacetime, which is thus a universal constant of that spacetime. Theorem C. Assuming the (modest and standard) requirement that spacetime manifolds be paracompact and Hausdorff, for any spacetime there will be a countable ordinal upper bound, , on the complexity of questions in the Borel hierarchy computable in it. Introduction 1.1 History and preliminaries Hyperarithmetic Computations in MH Spacetimes 2.1 Generalising SADn regions 2.2 The complexity of questions decidable in Kerr spacetimes An Upper Bound on Computational Complexity for Each Spacetime CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This book reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. Standard accounts of the aesthetic theories of this era hold that the idea of mimesis was supplanted by the far more robust and compelling doctrines of taste and aesthetic judgment. Since the idea of mimesis was taken to apply only in the relation of art to nature, it was judged to be too limited when the focus of aesthetics changed to questions about the constitution of individual (...) subjects in regard to taste. Tom Huhn argues that mimesis, rather than disappearing, instead became a far more pervasive idea in the eighteenth century by becoming submerged within the dynamics of the emerging accounts of judgment and taste. Mimesis also thereby became enmeshed in the ideas of sociality contained, often only implicitly, within the new accounts of aesthetic judgment. The book proceeds by reading three of the foundational treatises in aesthetics—Burke’s _Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_, Hogarth’s _Analysis of Beauty_, and Kant’s _Critique of Judgment_—with an eye for discerning where arguments and analyses betray mimetic structures. Huhn attempts to explicate these books anew by arguing that they are pervaded by a mimetic dynamic. Overall, he seeks to provoke a reconsideration of eighteenth-century aesthetics that centers on its continuity with traditional notions of mimesis. (shrink)

This book reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. Standard accounts of the aesthetic theories of this era hold that the idea of mimesis was supplanted by the far more robust and compelling doctrines of taste and aesthetic judgment. Since the idea of mimesis was taken to apply only in the relation of art to nature, it was judged to be too limited when the focus of aesthetics changed to questions about the constitution of individual (...) subjects in regard to taste. Tom Huhn argues that mimesis, rather than disappearing, instead became a far more pervasive idea in the eighteenth century by becoming submerged within the dynamics of the emerging accounts of judgment and taste. Mimesis also thereby became enmeshed in the ideas of sociality contained, often only implicitly, within the new accounts of aesthetic judgment. The book proceeds by reading three of the foundational treatises in aesthetics—Burke’s _Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_, Hogarth’s _Analysis of Beauty_, and Kant’s _Critique of Judgment_—with an eye for discerning where arguments and analyses betray mimetic structures. Huhn attempts to explicate these books anew by arguing that they are pervaded by a mimetic dynamic. Overall, he seeks to provoke a reconsideration of eighteenth-century aesthetics that centers on its continuity with traditional notions of mimesis. (shrink)

Posthumanism reformulates the idea of human agency and its relationship with the natural world. By shunning dualisms, it blurs the man-made boundaries between the human and the animal in the natural and technological world. As a rejection of universality, posthumanist studies aim to rearrange the way we view societal values through a more intersectional approach, without completely divorcing itself from the tradition of humanism. Instead, it seeks to expand the way the human interacts with the wider world, and in the (...) case of The Vegetarian, the title character Yeong-hye’s actions may be part of a moral imperative. (shrink)