Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

_Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze._.

Here, I offer a candid response to bell hooks's call for a testimony to the “movement beyond a mere ‘us and them’ discussion” that purportedly informs contemporary radical and feminist thought on difference. In alignment with a tradition that includes bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Aurora Levins Morales, I offer a personal testimony to the ways in which I—a middle-class, French, immigrant, continental-philosophy-bred incest survivor—envision both that movement and its limits. To establish these alliances means forming necessary communities. (...) I call on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to propose an account of the production of such communities that does not depend only on shared lived experience, but also on shared marginal spatiality, temporality, and “medicinal history”. I suggest that on the one hand, Deleuze's philosophy of immanence may indeed find apt expression in the politics of integrity that hooks, Lorde, and Morales call for. On the other hand, a genuine politics of integrity may benefit from drawing on the philosophy of immanence, which alone offers alternatives to the traditional, oppositional models of difference informed by transcendence. Finally, I propose the concept of “immanent forgiveness” to capture the movement at issue. (shrink)

In this paper I establish an alliance between the thought of Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference. In light of Fanon's critique of Sartre's characterization of the place of the Negritude movement in terms of dialectic, I point to the inherent limitations of modern humanism's dialectical accounts for enabling genuine historical change. Alternatively, I appeal to Deleuze's distinction between history and becoming, and his concomitant idea of intensive becoming-revolutionary. I conclude that such an alliance with Deleuzian metaphysics holds (...) far greater promises for effecting Fanon's revolutionary project of the creation of a new humanity (and therefore, of a new ethics and a new politics) than his traditional assimilation to Phenomenology and Existentialism. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the meaning of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism by means of the kind of experience that his project opens up for us – an experience that I want to call transcendental. Primarily on the basis of his works on cinema, famously dedicated to freely investigating Bergson's thought, I argue that Deleuze's notion of the time-image, together with his search for its real and necessary conditions, consists in the liberation of experience from its Kantian limitative conditioning. I then (...) examine both the new kind of subjectivity (the fissured ego) that emerges from this enlarged experience and the new conception of temporality (time out of joint) that subtends it. Finally, I try to bring out the concrete relations between (transcendental) experience, thought and the brain that Deleuze brings to light in his analysis of great cinema's reinvention of the relationship between time and movement. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that on the basis of their elaboration of and appeal to the Virtual, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze operate a profound transformation of the Kantian conception of the transcendental. This implies a novel account of experience and its conditions, resulting in what I call Transcendental Experience---whereby the primary condition of experience, that is, time, becomes immanent to what it conditions. Through this revaluation of the transcendental, Bergson and Deleuze are ultimately providing us with an alternative to both (...) Kant's and Phenomenology's theories of subjectivity. Rooted in real experience rather than abstract forms, this approach points to the primacy of the unconscious over consciousness as the ground of subjectivity. With Bergson and Deleuze, then, it is ultimately to the ontological unconscious that we must refer thought and experience, thereby accounting for a radically novel conception of subjectivity, in terms of inhuman and inorganic difference or alteration rather than some postulated transcendental ego. ;Hoping to provide a contribution to the current scholarship concerning Bergson and Deleuze, I examine closely both what they have in common and where they diverge. Accordingly, I dedicate the first part of the dissertation to a comprehensive examination of Bergsonian metaphysics. I conclude that through his observation of the immediate data of consciousness, perception and memory in terms of concrete duration, he is able to offer a new philosophical method based in an original notion of intuition---a method which, I claim, eventually allows him to solve the problem of dualism. The second part of this project then turns to an examination of Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism which, I argue, is directly inspired from Bergson's method of intuition. There, I focus on Deleuze's differential ontology, which leads me to an exploration of the role he ascribes to the Sensible, and consequently, to the artistic experience, as the primary ground---which, he shows, is also an ungrounding---of consciousness. Finally, I argue that over and above Bergson's ultimate privileging of continuity, Deleuze's prioritization of discontinuity allows him to address the great traditional philosophical problems while opening the future for thought and experience. (shrink)

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts themselves present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions. Elizabeth Valentine has an international reputation as an eminent scholar and pioneer in the field of philosophy and history of psychology. This selection brings together some of her best work over the last thirty years. A specially written introduction gives an overview of (...) her career and contextualises the selection in relation to changes in the field during this time. The first section on 'Philosophy' covers work on different theoretical approaches to psychology, introspection and the study of consciousness, the mind-body problem, and different types of explanation in psychology including reductionism. The second section, 'From Philosophy to History', includes work on the philosophical psychologists G. F. Stout and James Sully, among others. The third section on 'History' covers Valentine's more recent historical work on the development of psychology in London – both institutional and biographical – and includes accounts of both Bedford College and University College, and the role of pioneer women psychologists. The book enables the reader to trace developments in the philosophy and history of psychology over the last thirty years. It will appeal to anyone with interests in these areas as well as being an invaluable resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in conceptual and historical issues. (shrink)

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.

In this article, I set out Suárez's conception of the demon's obstinacy. For Suárez, the demons’ obstinacy is a divine punishment. It is the result of the free and awful choice to turn away from God that the demons have decided to make, the main consequence of which is the loss of the freedom to will and to do the good. Taking up Aquinas’s conception, Suárez considers that the demonic nature is irredeemably corrupt and obstinate in evil. Demons are provided (...) only with a miserable freedom, consisting of the possibility to choose between different evils. Perpetually sinful and eternally constrained to remain so, they are condemned to wretchedness, to complacency in evil, and to the unremitting torments of hell. (shrink)

This study used a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to estimate curriculum management's direct and indirect effects on university graduate programmes' viability. The study also examined the role of institutional effectiveness in mediating the nexus between the predictor and response variables. This is a correlational study with a factorial research design. The study's participants comprised 149 higher education administrators (23 Faculty Deans and 126 HODs) from two public universities in Nigeria. A structured questionnaire designed by the researchers was (...) used for data collection. The questionnaire was duly validated with an acceptable scale and item content validity indices. The dimensionality of the instrument was determined using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Convergent validity was based on Average Variance Extracted (AVE), whereas discriminant validity was based on Fornell-Lacker criteria and the Hetero-Trait Mono-Trait (HTMT) ratio. Acceptable composite reliability estimates of internal consistency were reached for the three sub-scales. Following ethical practices, the questionnaire was physically administered to respondents and retrieved afterwards. Smart PLS (version 3.2.9) and SPSS (version 26.0) programs were used for all the statistical analyses. This study uncovered significant direct and indirect effects of curriculum management on the viability of graduate programmes. Institutional effectiveness significantly impacted graduate programmes’ viability while mediating the nexus between curriculum management and graduate programmes’ viability. Curriculum management and institutional effectiveness jointly explained a significant proportion of graduate programmes’ viability variance. The result of this study proved that graduate programmes’ viability depends, to a great extent, on how much curriculum is managed and how effective institutions are with their services. The result of this study can enable institutions seeking to run viable graduate programmes to re-evaluate their curriculum management practices and the effectiveness of their services. (shrink)

Understanding propositional logic -- Deductive reasoning in propositional logic -- Understanding first-order logic -- Deductive reasoning in first-order logic -- Applications : mathematical proofs and automated reasoning -- Answers and solutions to selected exercises.

This is an introduction to proofs book for the course offering a transition to more advanced mathematics. It contains logic, sets, functions, relations, the construction of rational, real and complex numbers and their properties. It also has a chapter on cardinality and a chapter on counting techniques. The book explains various proof techniques and has many examples which help with the transition to more advanced classes like real analysis, groups, rings and fields or topology.

In this paper, Leonard Waks investigates connections between listening and expertise or mastery, contrasting approaches from Eastern and Western philosophy. The first section accounts for listening in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, a work addressing themes in Chinese philosophy through metaphor and story narratives. In one story a character named “Confucius” advises a student to fast the mind and listen recklessly. The affinity between reckless and what has been called “apophatic” listening is demonstrated by the shared feature of mental emptiness (...) — listening without the imposition of conceptual categories. The second section demonstrates close affinities between the account of listening and expertise or mastery in the Zhuangzi and in the account of expert perception in contemporary Western philosophy and psychology, as exemplified by phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus. (shrink)

Crosslinguistically, the same modal words can be used to express a wide range of interpretations. This crosslinguistic trend supports a Kratzerian analysis, where each modal has a core lexical entry and where the difference between an epistemic and a root interpretation is contextually determined. A long-standing problem for such a unified account is the equally robust crosslinguistic correlation between a modal’s interpretation and its syntactic behavior: epistemics scope high (in particular higher than tense and aspect) and roots low, a fact (...) which has led to proposals that hardwire different syntactic positions for epistemics and roots (cf. Cinque’s hierarchy). This paper argues that the range of interpretations a modal receives is even more restricted: a modal must be keyed to certain time-individual pairs, but not others. I show that this can be captured straightforwardly by minimally modifying the Kratzerian account: modals are relative to an event—rather than a world—of evaluation, which readily provides a time (the event’s running time) and (an) individual(s) (the event’s participants). I propose that this event relativity of modals can in turn explain the correlation between type of interpretation and syntactic position, without stipulation of an interpretation-specific height for modals. (shrink)

Facultés, concepts, théories et modules innés... Le débat philosophique contemporain sur la structure naturelle de l'esprit multiplie les références aux idées innées. Noam Chomsky lui-même, défenseur d'une faculté innée de langage, s'inscrit dans la lignée de la philosophie moderne. Mais les idées innées contemporaines ont-elles le même sens que celles posées par Descartes et Leibniz? Les progrès des sciences biologiques et cognitives permettent-ils d'attester ou d'infirmer l'existence des idées innées? L'étude analyse les théories modernes et contemporaines des idées innées puis (...) propose une définition de l'innéisme qui démontre l'actualité du débat amorcé à l'âge classique entre innéisme et empirisme."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Many researchers and intellectuals warn about extreme risks from artificial intelligence. However, these warnings typically came without systematic arguments in support. This paper provides an argument that AI will lead to the permanent disempowerment of humanity, e.g. human extinction, by 2100. It rests on four substantive premises which it motivates and defends: first, the speed of advances in AI capability, as well as the capability level current systems have already reached, suggest that it is practically possible to build AI systems (...) capable of disempowering humanity by 2100. Second, due to incentives and coordination problems, if it is possible to build such AI, it will be built. Third, since it appears to be a hard technical problem to build AI which is aligned with the goals of its designers, and many actors might build powerful AI, misaligned powerful AI will be built. Fourth, because disempowering humanity is useful for a large range of misaligned goals, such AI will try to disempower humanity. If AI is capable of disempowering humanity and tries to disempower humanity by 2100, then humanity will be disempowered by 2100. This conclusion has immense moral and prudential significance. (shrink)

This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on certain modals: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement of the modal to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. I show that this puzzling behavior, originally discussed in Bhatt (1999, Covert modality in non-finite contexts) for the ability modal, extends to all modal auxiliaries with a circumstantial modal (...) base (i.e., root modals ), while epistemic interpretations of the same modals are immune to the effect. I propose that implicative readings are contingent on the relative position of the modal w.r.t. aspect: when aspect scopes over the modal (as I argue is the case for root modals), it forces an actual event, thereby yielding an implicative reading. When a modal element scopes over aspect, no actual event is forced. This happens (i) with epistemics, which structurally appear above tense and aspect; (ii) with imperfective on a root modal: imperfective brings in an additional layer of modality, itself responsible for removing the necessity for an actual event. This proposal enables us to solve the puzzle while maintaining a standardized semantics for aspects and modals. (shrink)

How do children learn the meanings of propositional attitude verbs? We argue that children use information contained in both syntactic distribution and pragmatic function to zero in on the appropriate meanings. Specifically, we identify a potentially universal link between semantic subclasses of attitude verbs, their syntactic distribution and the kinds of indirect speech acts they can be used to perform. As a result, children can use the syntax as evidence about the meaning, which in turn constrains the kinds of pragmatic (...) enrichments they do and do not make in understanding these verbs in conversation. (shrink)

The annual cost of healthcare in the United States reached $2.5 trillion in 2009 (about 17.6% of GDP) with projections to 2019 of about $4.5 trillion (about 20% of likely GDP).