The physicist's conception of space-time underwent two major upheavals thanks to the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Both theories play a fundamental role in describing the same natural world, although at different scales. However, the inconsistency between them emerged clearly as the limitation of twentieth-century physics, so a more complete description of nature must encompass general relativity and quantum mechanics as well. The problem is a theorists' problem par excellence. Experiment provide little guide, and the inconsistency mentioned above (...) is an important problem which clearly illustrates the intermingling of philosophical, mathematical, and physical thought. In fact, in order to unify general relativity with quantum field theory, it seems necessary to invent a new mathematical framework which will generalise Riemannian geometry and therefore our present conception of space and space-time. Contemporary developments in theoretical physics suggest that another revolution may be in progress, through which a new kind of geometry may enter physics, and space-time itself can be reinterpreted as an approximate, derived concept. The main purpose of this article is to show the great significance of space-time geometry in predetermining the laws which are supposed to govern the behaviour of matter, and further to support the thesis that matter itself can be built from geometry, in the sense that particles of matter as well as the other forces of nature emerges in the same way that gravity emerges from geometry. Scientific research is not a process of steady accumulation of absolute truths, which has culminated in present theories, but rather a much more dynamic kind of process in which there are no final theoretical concepts valid in unlimited domains. (David Bohm). (shrink)

This paper highlights the results of a theoretical analysis aiming to prove that the key dimensions of Global Competence framework as proposed by OECD in 2016 are integrated in the so-called Pedagogy of Communion: the educational approach sprouted from the experience of Chiara Lubich and the Focolare Movement. The socio-ontological intelligence theoretical model may represent a valid support to all parties interested in developing the emerging OECD Education 2030 Framework aimed at establishing a common grammar and language, to (...) class='Hi'>support the design of curricula fostering the development of global competence. This theoretical reference framework used for the analysis proposed in this paper is an updated version of the Model of Social Intelligence, integrated with an ontological perspective. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s socialism has provoked debate for decades. His democratic theory and critique of political economy supports democratic socialism. In this article, I offer a philosophical reconstruction of the normative foundation of his democratic socialism in three steps. First, I argue that his philosophy of the modern democratic state supports the people’s advance of the principle of free and equal citizenship or civic equality. Next, I present his critique of the modern American welfare state, which asserts the fair (...) value of political liberty and democratic control over productive activities. Finally, I introduce the method of the excluded groups from Darkwater as an ideal procedure for guiding democratic deliberation in a profoundly nonideal public sphere. The method foregrounds the voices of excluded groups to correct asymmetrical relations of practical power and to infuse democratic reason with practical intelligence, namely, new content and values that can lead to the development of a democratic socialist state. (shrink)

This essay presents the normative foundation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s constructivist theory of justice in three steps. First, I show that for Du Bois the public sphere in Anglo-European modern states consists of a dialectical interplay between reasonable persons and illiberal rogues. Second, under these nonideal circumstances, the ideal of autonomy grounds reasonable persons’ deliberative openness, an attitude of public moral regard for others which is necessary for constructing the terms of political rule. Though deliberative openness is the (...) essential vehicle of construction, reasonable persons only have a pragmatic political obligation to forge ties of deliberative reciprocity with likeminded persons whom they trust will listen and not harm them. Finally, I present Du Bois’s defense of black suffragists’ support of the 19th Amendment to illustrate pragmatic political obligation in action. I sketch successful democratic engagement that reconstitutes a nonideal public sphere. (shrink)

The late 19th-century Ignorabimus controversy over the limits of scientific knowledge has often been characterized as proclaiming the end of intellectual progress, and by implication, as plunging Germany into a crisis of pessimism from which Liberalism never recovered. My research supports the opposite interpretation. The initiator of the Ignorabimus controversy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, was a physiologist who worked his whole life against the forces of obscurantism, whether they came from the Catholic and Conservative Right or the scientistic and millenarian (...) Left. Du Bois-Reymond’s doubt that scientists would ever elucidate consciousness must therefore be seen as an endorsement, and not a rejection, of his faith in reason. (shrink)

This article has two purposes. The first speaks to the compatibilist quality of Charles Mills’ Black Radical Kantianism (BRK), its strengths and weaknesses and the pertinence of W. E. B Du Bois to it. BRK turns from Mills’ previous critique of Kantianism as representative of arassenstaatlichpolitical liberalism, underwritten and tainted by the racial/domination contract, to his current defence of a compatibilist Kantianism as representative of arechtsstaatlichpolitical liberalism supported by a non-ideal racially corrective critique of both that contract and the (...) kind of political liberalism affiliated with it. The second focuses on what I introduce as the ‘Radicalization of Kant in Black’ (RKB). RKB isnota compatibilist project. Rather it re-examines issues first posed by ‘slave- and black-encoded’ blacks coming to act and struggle with the primacy of practical reason under the historically normative authority of freedom and the abolition of enslavement. What are the ramifications of each for Kant-/Kantian-radicalization? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 120-137 [Access article in PDF] Discursive Mobility and Double Consciousness in S. Weir Mitchell and W.E.B. Du Bois 1 Susan Wells Here are two stories about double consciousness: they will become, eventually, stories about the public sphere: W. E. B. Du Bois formulating the theory of double consciousness, and S. Weir Mitchell presenting Mary Reynolds's case history, an instance of a mental (...) disorder known in the nineteenth century as double consciousness. I will begin with Du Bois's story, by far the most familiar to us: few texts are more central to contemporary rhetoric or cultural studies than the discussion of double consciousness in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk. 2 In the theory of double consciousness, Du Bois concentrated his contradictory experiences of scholarship, activism, social isolation, and active cosmopolitanism. Double consciousness was a methodological constraint that enabled Du Bois to build into the structure of The Souls of Black Folk a recognition that the complexity of African American life requires more than one perspective. And double consciousness was also a technique of writing, shaping the ironic and urgent voice of the book, by turns indignant and tender, eloquent and colloquial, a form of double address to both African American and Caucasian readers that allowed Du Bois to be two places at once. Double consciousness therefore controlled both the development and the presentation of The Souls of Black Folk, from the arc of its argument to its formal elements, includingDu Bois's famous use of chapter epigraphs to link canonic poetry with the melodies of the sorrow songs. Like the most relentlessly formal high modernist poem, the book continually enacts in its form not only its informing idea, but the circumstances of its composition and the constraints that shape its reading.The book's initial essay, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," offers an analysis of double consciousness as it is shaped by three central categories of modernity: temporality, embodiment, and expertise. Double consciousness is located in time, in history; it is placed in a story of the epochal succession [End Page 120] of races, and in the specific history of slavery. Double consciousness emerges as strategically shaping African American responses to the problems of disenfranchisement, poverty, and the denial of civil rights after the suppression of Reconstruction. The historical sections of The Souls of Black Folk, therefore, do not simply rectify the facts, setting the record straight on Reconstruction or Afrocentric scholar and theorist Alexander Crumell. These local arguments all motivate an understanding of consciousness as temporally constituted, so that the work of previous generations can be effective only when it is appropriated in the present. Such appropriation is supported and mediated by the form of the book: Du Bois ends with an invocation to "God the Reader," who alone can ensure that "these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed THE END" (19).Double consciousness is also connected with embodiment, specifically the embodiment of African Americans, externalized and displaced in two images: blood, which I will discuss later in the essay, and the veil or caul that grants second sight. Like skin color, the caul is an inconsequential physical object invested with enormous symbolic power (8); it is a mark of origins that foretells the future. The "second sight" offered to the Negro is a vision of "two warring ideals," a vision that can barely be supported by "one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"(9). At moments in The Souls of Black Folk, the veil is generalized, and becomes a physical barrier between the white world and the world of African American culture; the work of separating these worlds, of rendering them invisible to one another, is staged on the bodies of African Americans. The veil is usually seen as a separation between the races, something that has happened ("Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil... (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Le présent ouvrage qui regroupe dix-sept articles inédits de philosophes, physiciens et mathématiciens renoue avec la tradition «scientifique» de la Naturphilosophie et réhabilite certaines idées des premiers Naturphilosophen et fondateurs de la psychophysique. Il reprend également les intuitions et les analyses de certains phénoménologues ainsi que des théoriciens de la Gestalt et développe la pensée des pionniers de la morphologie et de la biologie théorique. Les auteurs mettent en évidence l'actualité de nombreux concepts introduits par les philosophes naturels dans les (...) sciences fondamentales. Ils proposent ainsi d'élaborer une véritable «philosophie géométrique» des formes naturelles et de renouveler les débats scientifiques et philosophiques sur les concepts d'espace et de temps ainsi que sur leur rôle dans la compréhension des rapports entre les structures mathématiques et les phénomènes physiques. Les idées proposées, bien que diverses de par leur approche méthodologique et épistémologique, convergent vers un même objectif: la recherche d'une vision intrinsèque des choses et d'une vocation authentiquement globale et qualitative de la connaissance. Ce sont là d'ailleurs deux piliers d'une vision qui prétend dégager des liens profonds existant entre les soi-disant «sciences de la Nature» et les «sciences de l'Homme». (shrink)

Mikhail Psel i vizantiĭskii︠a︡t khumanizŭm na XI vek -- Palamitskite sporove.

The history and philosophy of science are destined to play a fundamental role in an epoch marked by a major scientific revolution. This ongoing revolution, principally affecting mathematics and physics, entails a profound upheaval of our conception of space, space–time, and, consequently, of natural laws themselves. Briefly, this revolution can be summarized by the following two trends: by the search for a unified theory of the four fundamental forces of nature, which are known, as of now, as gravity, electromagnetism, and (...) strong and weak nuclear forces; by the search for new mathematical concepts capable of elucidating and therefore explaining such a relationship. In fact, the first search is essentially dependent on the second; that is to say, that in order for a new theory of physics to come to light, the development of a deeper geometric theory capable of explaining the structure of space–time on a quantum scale appears to be necessary. On careful consideration, we notice that both of these developments converge in the direction of a unitary and fundamental tendency of modern science—which is the geometrization of theoretical physics and of natural sciences. This new emergent situation carries within it a profound conceptual change, affecting the way in which relations are conceived of, first and foremost, between mathematics and physics. This new paradigm can be summed up by the intimately interdependent points: the immense variety of physical phenomena and of natural forms follows from the equally infinite variety of geometric and topological objects that can be made out in space and from which space is made up; the second point, which ensues from the former one and which is of great historical and epistemological significance, is that mathematics is involved in rather than applied to phenomena. In other words, phenomena are effects that emerge from the geometrical structure of space–time. There is no doubt that this new conception of the relationship between the universe of mathematical ideas and objects and the world of natural phenomena is the true scientific revolution of our century, of great conceptual importance, and consequently, capable of changing our view of science and of nature at one and the same time. It is all at once of a scientific, philosophical and aesthetic order. (shrink)

According to Kant, the axioms of intuition, i.e. space and time, must provide an organization of the sensory experience. However, this first orderliness of empirical sensations seems to depend on a kind of faculty pertaining to subjectivity, rather than to the encounter of these same intuitions with the real properties of phenomena. Starting from an analysis of some very significant developments in mathematical and theoretical physics in the last decades, in which intuition played an important role, we argue that nevertheless (...) intuition comes into play in a fundamentally different way to that which Kant had foreseen: in the form of a formal or “categorical” yet not sensible intuition. We show further that the statement that our space is mathematically three-dimensional and locally Euclidean by no means follows from a supposed a priori nature of the sensible or subjective space as Kant claimed. In fact, the three-dimensional space can bear many different geometrical and topological structures, as particularly the mathematical results of Milnor, Smale, Thurston and Donaldson demonstrated. On the other hand, it has been stressed that even the phenomenological or perceptual space, and especially the visual system, carries a very rich geometrical organization whose structure is essentially non-Euclidean. Finally, we argue that in order to grasp the meaning of abstract geometric objects, as n-dimensional spaces, connections on a manifold, fiber spaces, module spaces, knotted spaces and so forth, where sensible intuition is essentially lacking and where therefore another type of mathematical idealization intervenes, we need to develop a new form of intuition. (shrink)

L'idée essentielle de ce travail est que la perception est, d'abord etavant tout, perception d'un monde phénoménal pourvu d'une certaine organisationgéométrique, de sorte qu'il nous paraît impossible de comprendre comment lesstructures perceptives se constituent sans que l'on précise le rôle que jouentcertaines propriétés géométriques fondamentales du monde physique et de sesobjets. En fait, ces propriétés géométriques, au lieu d'être un élément certesimportant mais somme tout accidentel du monde phénoménal, comme encore lecroient les théoriciens de la Gestalt, jouent un rôle essentiel (...) dansle processus de constitution de ce monde. Nous cherchons à montrer qu'il doitexister un petit nombre de modèles géométriques qui très vraisemblablementrégissent les mécanismes perceptifs assurant la reconnaissance de la forme desobjets dans l'espace ambiant. Par ailleurs, nous soulignons que toute théoriede la perception spatiale doit viser à expliquer les rapports entre les espacessensible, physique et géométrique. Husserl y a contribué de façon essentielle,en mettant notamment en évidence le type de proto-géométrie qui intervient dansla structuration du monde phénoménal, ou dans la constitution de la « chosespatiale ». Il a par là anticipé un certain nombre d’idées importantes, entreautres, l’idée selon laquelle l’espace de la perception serait un « espacequotient global » produit de plusieurs sous-espaces sensibles. (shrink)

This fellowship project addressed the need to increase diversity in public health law. Non-traditional delivery methods of education, such as synchronous online classes and offering courses during an intersession between regular semesters and in the evenings, expanded the opportunities for diverse students to learn about the field and have meaningful internship experiences in public health law. Synchronous distance education is the wave of the future for law teaching and has particular significance in the teaching of public health law.

The association between New York City’s all-over structure and the play that unfolds within it relative to difference and identity is very pertinent but is not specific enough, in my opinion. On the one hand, all of Mondrian’s neoplastic works are constituted by an opposition between the variable and the invariable . On the other hand, the type of identity produced in New York City relies on repetition, a principle which, we know, explicitly governs a whole range of paintings predating (...) neoplasticism. New York City differs from the “classic” neoplastic works, as well as from the 1918-19 modular paintings with which it seems to have a good deal in common. It is, in part, because he never discusses this last point that Masheck doesn’t entirely grasp the amplitude of the reversal that Mondrian effected in his New York works.In fact, as James Johnson Sweeney realized quite early, one must go back o the 1917 works, which gave rise to modular grids for the two years that followed, in order to understand what happens not only in New York City but also in the two Boogie-Woogie paintings.3Everyone is aware of the extraordinarily rapid evolution of Mondrian’s work during the years immediately preceding the foundation of neoplasticism: under the influence of Bart van der Leck, he dopted the colored plane and the black dash on a white background as elements of his composition for the two Compositions in Color, A and B . Mondrian, who had not yet found a means of perspicuously relating these diverse elements , tied both plane and dashes together by way of an optical dynamism, based largely on their superimposition. The immediate consequence was to make the background recede optically. The next step was the five Compositions , all entitled “With Colored Planes” . Here all superimposition was eliminated, as well as all “line.” In the last two of these canvases, the background itself is divided without remainder in to planes of different shades of white. The colored rectangles are on the way to alignment. In spite of this, the rectangles fluctuate and, consequently, the background is hollowed out behind them. 3. See James Johnson Sweeney, “Mondrian, the Dutch and De Stijl,” Art News 50 : 63. Meyer Schapiro made a similar remark, at about the same time, in his courses. 4. When I refer to a number accompanied by “Seuphor,” it refers to the “catalog by group” included in Michel Seuphor’s book on the artist. See Seuphor [Ferdinand Louis Berckelaers], Piet Mondrian; sa vie, son oeuvre, 2d ed. . Yve-Alain Bois is associate professor of art history at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published a number of essays on twentieth-century art, architecture, and criticism and is currently working on Mondrian’s neoplastic years and on a history of axonometric perspective. Amy Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was a translation of Ernesto Laclau’s “Psychanalyse et marxisme”. (shrink)

If conduct must be wrongful in order to be justifiably criminalised, how should its wrongfulness be established? I examine a conception of wrongfulness put forward by A. P. Simester, which makes wrongfulness turn on whether the reasons favouring the performance of an action are, all things considered, defeated by the reasons against its performance. I argue that such a view can only generate appropriate substantive constraints in the context of criminalisation if it can distinguish between the sorts of reasons that (...) a verdict of wrongfulness, as a concept distinct from stupidity or selfishness, should attend to, and the sorts of reasons it should leave out. Assuming that this conception of wrongfulness should operate as a constraint on criminalisation in a liberal-democratic state, the only reasons it should include are other-regarding reasons. What matters is whether the agent commits an other-regarding wrong. This conception of wrongfulness helps us further to resolve fundamental questions concerning mala prohibita and the legitimate reach of any duty to obey the law. (shrink)

On May 11th a round table discussion was held on the subject "The Interactions of Science and Art under the Conditions of the Revolution in Science and Technology ," organized by the editorial boards of the journals Voprosy filosofii and Voprosy literatury.

The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) first coined the united-front policy in 1921, representing a promising effort to bolster Communist influence in the workers’ movement of that country. As the first part of the article shows, the KPD recruited large numbers of new members and significantly improved its electoral returns as a result. Despite this success, however, the party only pursued the united-front policy in two phases (1921–3 and 1926). As illustrated in the second part of the article, the KPD (...) bid farewell to the united front as ‘Stalinisation’ began to set in during the Weimar Republic’s final years – with lethal consequences, as its abandonment decisively abetted the victory of German fascism. (shrink)

Dans les situations les plus radicales de fragilisation de l’identité personnelle, la question « Qui suis-je? » est laissée sans réponse. Selon Paul Ricoeur, ces situations ne représentent pas pour autant de véritables pertes d’identité. Persiste une forme épurée, mise à nu de l’ipséité, qui finit par résoudre son errance identitaire en s’engageant envers autrui. Cet article vise à analyser la nature de cette ipséité résiduelle et à s’interroger sur la conception proposée par Ricoeur. Nous chercherons d’abord à montrer que (...) ni l’ipséité comme telle ni la promesse, qui est l’un de ses modes, ne constituent des modèles d’identité personnelle. Conservant l’idée que quelque chose reste de nous dans les crises identitaires, le concept ricoeurien d’ipséité fera ensuite l’objet d’une réappropriation phénoménologique venant lui donner, par le détour du concept d’identité narrative proposé par László Tengelyi, une base et une consistance identitaire. (shrink)

« Les sciences s’éloignent de plus en plus de leur motivation première, d’une part parce qu’elles s’enferment dans leurs spécialisations respectives, de l’autre, parce qu’elles se réduisent à une pratique utilitariste ou purement calculatoire. Il faudrait s’employer à réhabiliter une pensée exigeante et transversale capable de repérer les similitudes à l’œuvre dans les disciplines et les phénomènes les plus différents. La compréhension spatiale et temporelle des phénomènes est le dénominateur commun capable de les unifier, tout en en reconnaissant les différences (...) significatives. Dans cette perspective, les mathématiques, et plus particulièrement la géométrie et la topologie qui expriment une pensée qualitative riche et complexe, doivent acquérir à nouveau un rôle fondamental qui, abandonnant toute prétention d’exclusivité ou de supériorité par rapport aux autres formes de connaissance, renoue sur les plans heuristique et imaginatif avec la philosophie, les sciences de la nature et les études sur la société. Le principal propos d’une philosophie de la nature me semble être de clarifier les interactions entre espace et temps, matière et forme, corps et esprit. De nombreux phénomènes physiques et naturels, y compris plusieurs processus biologiques, peuvent être compris en termes de déploiement d’un noyau géométrique initial qui crée en quelque sorte un espace-temps spécifique aux propriétés caractéristiques. Sans épuiser la signification de ces phénomènes et processus, ce noyau constitue plutôt une vision spectrale incluant leurs divers modes d’organisation et de manifestation. ». (shrink)

In this article we criticize the way in which the concept of information is used in the biological sciences. First, we start by giving a revised and larger definition of genetic information, by underlining the fact that the linear sequence map of the human genome is an incomplete description of our genetic information. This is because information on genome function and gene regulation is also encoded in the way DNA molecule is folded up with proteins to form chromatin structures. Secondly, (...) we point forward the need of constructing a theory in which the informational language (code, program, computation) so characteristic of molecular biology be completed by (and somehow translated into) the language of dynamical systems (phase space, bifurcations, trajectories) and the language of topology (deformations, plasticity, forms). Our traditional modes of system representation, involving fixed sets of sequential states together with imposed mechanical laws, strictly pertain to an extremely limited class of systems that can be called simple (static) systems or mechanisms. Biological systems are not in this class, and they must be called complex or dynamic. Complex systems can only be in some sense approximated, locally and temporally, by simple ones. Such a fundamental change of viewpoint leads to a number of theoretical and experimental consequences. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

Les femmes betsimisaraka de la côte est de Madagascar jouent depuis le XVIIe siècle un rôle déterminant dans le contact entre les autochtones et les étrangers. Elles en tirèrent prestige et fortune même si, après la conquête du littoral par les Merina, les alliances avec l'étranger ne sont plus au cœur des enjeux du pouvoir local. Dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, les femmes continuent de bénéficier d'un statut particulier, qu'elles soient « ménagères » (concubines) ou prostituées. Auxiliaires indispensables (...) des traitants et incontournable soutien des missionnaires, elles sont des intermédiaires culturels de premier plan, surtout lorsqu'elles ont reçu une éducation européenne aux Mascareignes, ce qui est souvent le cas des femmes métisses. Novatrices en matière de religion, revendicatrices parfois et sources de conflit pour les diplomates et les gouverneurs merina, elles sont néanmoins indispensables à ces derniers en ce qui concerne la gestion des rapports avec l'étranger. (shrink)

Les femmes betsimisaraka de la côte est de Madagascar jouent depuis le XVIIe siècle un rôle déterminant dans le contact entre les autochtones et les étrangers. Elles en tirèrent prestige et fortune même si, après la conquête du littoral par les Merina, les alliances avec l'étranger ne sont plus au cœur des enjeux du pouvoir local. Dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, les femmes continuent de bénéficier d'un statut particulier, qu'elles soient « ménagères » (concubines) ou prostituées. Auxiliaires indispensables (...) des traitants et incontournable soutien des missionnaires, elles sont des intermédiaires culturels de premier plan, surtout lorsqu'elles ont reçu une éducation européenne aux Mascareignes, ce qui est souvent le cas des femmes métisses. Novatrices en matière de religion, revendicatrices parfois et sources de conflit pour les diplomates et les gouverneurs merina, elles sont néanmoins indispensables à ces derniers en ce qui concerne la gestion des rapports avec l'étranger. (shrink)