Treating mathematical science as a distinct cultural entity subject to environmental factors which influence its evolution, the author examines the creation and development of its major concepts since early times.

This book investigates the Ancient Stoic thinkers’ views on gender and sexuality. A detailed scrutiny of metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy reveals that the Stoic philosophers held an exceptionally equal view of men and women’s rational capacities. In its own time, Stoicism was frequently called ‘ the manly school’ of philosophy, but this volume shows that the Stoics would have also transformed many traditional notions of masculinity. Malin Grahn-Wilder compares the earlier philosophies of Plato and Aristotle to show that the (...) Stoic position often stands out within Ancient philosophy as an exceptionally bold defense of women’s possibilities to achieve the highest form of wisdom and happiness. The work argues that the Stoic metaphysical notion of human being is based on strikingly egalitarian premises, and opens new perspectives to Stoic philosophy on the whole. (shrink)

Three public lectures delivered in the Chemistry Lecture Hall of the Rice Institute, April 9, 10, and 11, 1928, by Wilder D. Bancroft, Ph.D., D.Sc., World War Memorial Professor of Physical Chemistry at Cornell University.

Treating mathematical science as a distinct cultural entity subject to environmental factors which influence its evolution, the author examines the creation and development of its major concepts since early times.

This article proposes a locative function as a defining feature of situated art. All artworks orient their beholders, but situated art is characterized by this context-sensitive orientation entering the work’s content. In so doing, it facilitates ‘here’- and ‘now’-thoughts, not only towards the “real” situation encountered (the work’s outer orientation) but to the work’s “virtual” or “bracketed” realm (its inner orientation). These orientations overlap, but do not necessarily align; indeed, situated works often construct a tension through a deliberate miscalibration of (...) these orientations. But what is the mechanism by which such works afford indexical thought towards their worlds? Drawing upon Gareth Evans’s account of demonstrative content, I contend that sensory imagination—conceived in Evans’s terms as an additional conceptual component—plays a necessary role in negotiating demonstrative thought towards two (or more) separate spaces conceived as “here.” This is something the beholder brings to the work. (shrink)

Research ethics education has taken many forms since federal funding agencies issued regulatory guidance directing those supported by these agencies to complete required training. In the absence of a standard training approach among institutions such as universities, the design and content of courses, workshops, and seminars varies widely. Here we describe a southwestern United States research university program that employed six teaching strategies to assist students in deep learning of ethical principles and behavior. Our purpose was to determine how these (...) strategies impact understanding and empowerment among an interdisciplinary group of graduate students. Results suggested that deep learning design can result in learning that requires students not only to remember and understand key ethics concepts but also to analyze and apply them in a broader ethical domain. Key findings inform design and delivery of future research ethics courses for instructional designers and instructors in higher education. (shrink)

Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s, constituted a threat not only to the medium specificity of modernism, but to the artwork as self-contained autonomous object. Both supporters and critics of intermedia drew a contrast between, on the one hand, modernism’s aesthetic engagement with a medium-specific ‘object’, and on the other new non-aesthetic ‘practices’ engaging the ‘literal spectator’ within her own space, such that the space of the gallery is drawn into the situational encounter. In her 2003/12 (...) book Aesthetics of Installation Art Juliana Rebentisch challenges this binary characterization of autonomous/non-autonomous art. She argues that aesthetic autonomy is not something that can be guaranteed by production, but rather is explicable only with reference to the structure of the aesthetic experience. And for Rebentisch, while installation art has not led to fundamentally different conditions of reception, it has led to an ideological rejection of the notion of context-independent art. Aesthetic autonomy is here not abandoned, but rather reconfigured as a dynamic operational with respect to the ethical and political situation where we encounter the artwork. Sympathetic to the broad remit of Rebentisch’s argument, this article investigates the role of the beholder’s share within the context of such situated art. I draw specifically on Wolfgang Iser’s transformation of a negative aesthetics from binaries of negation/affirmation into an enabling structure where the organization of signifiers serve not the designation of a signified object, but rather designate instructions for the production of the signified. This requires work of the situated beholder, who must negotiate access to the work’s content by bringing her orientation into play. Installation art, thus conceived, constitutes a space that while virtualized – removed from functional imperatives – compels acts of imagination/ideation by problematizing our habitual dispositions. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider Michael Fried’s recent contribution to the debate around the experience of video art, made in relation to the work of Douglas Gordon. Fried speculates that issues of antitheatricality may in fact be key to specifying the medium of video installation. While Fried’s position offers a useful way of framing the relation with the beholder in video art, in a way that pointedly moves beyond tautological notions of activating spectatorship, I question how theatricality is to be (...) thus defined. Referencing the beholding of painting, I distinguish the implicit beholder from the literal spectator, and claim that the distinction has relevance for video art. However, I welcome what seems to be an explicit acknowledgment from Fried that the position of the spectator is a contributory factor in what he terms empathic projection. I argue that video art as a spatial practice offers a distinct mode of reception by positioning the spectator in relation to two-dimensional figurative space to which she is excluded. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to evaluate Quine's arguments for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. After formulation of the thesis, Quine's four main arguments are described and evaluated. The arguments are: (1) the argument from the underdeterminacy of physical theory, (2) the argument from the inscrutability of terms, (3) the argument from the conjunction of the Peircean notion of meaning and the Duhemian thesis about the interanimation of sentences, and (4-) the argument from the linguist's reliance on (...) sets of analytical hypothesis. It is contended that none of these arguments is successful in supporting the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, and that Quine has offered no reason to believe that the degree of determinacy of translation is different from that of physical theory. (shrink)

“What happened?”“Tell us a story.”“That's only a story.”“Is that story true?”“Is that the whole story?”.

ABSTRACTIn the past millennium, there have been thousands of polities in Europe and millions of laws. This article contributes to efforts by historians and sociologists to make some sense of this sprawl by constructing common types of law and legal change. Such types constitute distinctive patterns by which historical actors change names, ideas, and applications of rules of law under various circumstances. Three classic forms of change, namely legislation, mutation of custom, and judge‐made law, were described by Max Weber. To (...) Weber's model I add four new types or motifs of change, which I dub legal deeds, voice‐supersession, legal fictions, and anthropological expansion. The major advance of the four motifs is that they each combine what could be called a semantic and a social view of legal change. That is, they take seriously the fact that law is often bound in a self‐conscious tradition of thought and practice. But each motif of change is also characterized by a typified social configuration of legal operators and legal subjects, who apply competing ideas to one another in distinctive ways. The paradigm of law in which the four motifs are embedded is evolutionary, pluralist, and liberal in that it posits creative social organization by multiple, independent, interacting individuals in society, weaving cumulative, complex orders.This theory makes several significant scholarly interventions. First, it attempts to reconcile outstanding semantic and social theories of legal change. Second, it historicizes legal pluralism while giving evolutionary theory a healthy dose of contingency. Third, the four motifs should also be serviceable to intellectual historians as tools for describing how historical actors interact with traditions generally. Tradition need not be viewed as conservative or even overwhelmingly static. This paradigm may help historians and social scientists assess how the force of the status quo balances against the power of individuals to innovate. (shrink)

How do we know what an amoeba looks like? How can doctors see the details of our skeletons and internal organs? All of these things are made possible through the innovations of photography. The author provides a primer on the applications of photography to science as she explores the multiple facets of this complex relationship.

Wild Ideas is a collection of essays that brings a fresh and refreshing perspective to the wilderness paradoxically at the center of our civilization.

In this paper, I consider Michael Fried’s recent contribution to the debate around the experience of video art, made in relation to the work of Douglas Gordon. Fried speculates that issues of antitheatricality may in fact be key to specifying the medium of video installation. While Fried’s position offers a useful way of framing the relation with the beholder in video art, in a way that pointedly moves beyond tautological notions of activating spectatorship, I question how theatricality is to be (...) thus defined. Referencing the beholding of painting, I distinguish the implicit beholder from the literal spectator, and claim that the distinction has relevance for video art. However, I welcome what seems to be an explicit acknowledgment from Fried that the position of the spectator is a contributory factor in what he terms empathic projection. I argue that video art as a spatial practice offers a distinct mode of reception by positioning the spectator in relation to two-dimensional figurative space to which she is excluded. (shrink)

This_classic undergraduate text_elegantly acquaints students with the_fundamental concepts and methods of mathematics. In addition to introducing_many noteworthy historical figures_from the 18th through the mid-20th centuries, it examines_the axiomatic method, set theory, infinite sets, the linear continuum and the real number system, groups, intuitionism,_formal systems, mathematical logic, and other topics.

Este repertorio registra los artículos sobre Platón que se encuentran en la Hemeroteca de la Biblioteca Central de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. El listado abarca las publicaciones existentes hasta el primer semestre del año 2000.

I question the assumption that painting always presents a self-contained world. I use Masaccio’s Trinity to claim that in certain works, integrated into their architectural settings, the internal onlooker is fused with the external spectator. Here the imaginative engagement is situated. I highlight differences afforded internal and external spectators: with the former, the viewer identifies with a spectator who already occupies an unrepresented extension of the ‘virtual’ space; with the latter, the beholder enters that part of the fictive world depicted (...) as being in front of the picture surface, the work thus drawing the ‘real’ space of the spectator into its domain. I claim that this distinction mirrors two distinct types of visualization: where a scene is presented as elsewhere, and where it is juxtaposed with an existing reality. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies’s performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works ‘mean’ to the role of the architectural ‘score’, recast not as a mere ‘constraint’ but as integral to the creative processes by (...) which architecture establishes an ‘artistic statement’ and a distinctive ‘virtual’ realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was in his eighties, and examine the extraordinary lengths necessitated by his idiosyncratic imperative not to cut any bricks, thereby articulating an artwork every bit as radical as contemporaneous works by conceptual artists. (shrink)

How might the supernatural be represented in those religious paintings that imply a continuity between the virtual space of painting and the real space of the beholder? Such an implied continuity, dependent upon an engagement where the beholder imaginatively realigns her frame of reference to that of the picture, might be thought to threaten a necessary distance demanded of religious works. This paper examines how a number of painters exploited innovative displacement devices, utilizing inherent ambiguities as to where a painting (...) is relative to its beholder through the withholding of perspectival distance and positional cues for a discrete section of the work. (shrink)

In the early chapters of Mind and the World Order, Lewis develops a theory of meaning which has interesting points of similarity with that mentalistic or propositional theory of meaning which has been rejected by Quine, in Word and Object and elsewhere. There are also interesting similarities, however, between Lewis’ theory and Quine's own naturalistic theory. In this paper, I shall concentrate on one such similarity: namely, the analogy, noticed by Quine, between the predicament formulated in his own thesis of (...) the indeterminacy of translation, and the “predicament of private worlds” in which Lewis’ theory of meaning is involved.These analogous predicaments have a bearing on the problems of the commensurability of scientific theories and of objectivity in science in general; in fact, my primary motivation in attempting to explicate the analogy between Quine's theory of meaning and Lewis’ theory is to clear the way for an assessment of Quine's position on the problem of the objectivity of theories in science. (shrink)