Review of Gerhard Richter's work on randomness in his recent abstract art paintings, compared with John Cage's work on randomness; the review asks about what randomness in representation qua art amounts to.

Existing definitions of relevance relations are essentially ambiguous outside the binary case. Hence definitions of probabilistic causality based on relevance relations, as well as probability values based on maximal specificity conditions and homogeneous reference classes are also not uniquely specified. A 'neutral state' account of explanations is provided to avoid the problem, based on an earlier account of aleatory explanations by the author. Further reasons in support of this model are given, focusing on the dynamics of explanation. It is (...) shown that truth in explanation need not entail maximal specificity and that probabilistic explanations should not contain a specification of probability values. (shrink)

This paper argues that the reading of Althusser which finds a pronounced continuity in his conception of the relations among science, philosophy, and politics is the correct one, this essay will begin with an examination of Althusser’s “scientism.” The meaning of this term (one that differs slightly from contemporary usages) will be specified before showing how and in what way Althusser’s political philosophy between 1960 and 1980 can be described as “scientistic.” The next section details the important political role Althusser (...) assigned to the sciences and particularly to the science of historical materialism during this period. This accomplished, the arguments of interpreters who emphasize the apparent difference in Althusser’s attitude towards science before and after 1980 will be considered. Here, possible reasons for such a reading will be rehearsed. Next, with the support of recently published and archival documents, this essay will engage in a close and comparative reading of Althusser’s texts from the 1970s and 1980s that have as their subject the relations among philosophy, science, and politics. This survey will show the continuity in Althusser’s position vis-à-vis the sciences: namely, that if we want good (i.e. desired) socio-politico-economic changes to result from our political actions, then it is necessary to engage in social scientific research or, at the very least, to consult such research and to use this knowledge in our political decision making. All this serves to support the conclusion that Althusser’s “new” political philosophy from the 1980s is not really so new. On the contrary, his writings on the materialism of the encounter and aleatory materialism represent prolongations and elaborations of positions and ideas already developed in the 1960s and 1970s and that include a mostly consistent understanding of the relations between scientific knowledge and political action. This is true even if the rhetorical and philosophical style in which these ideas are put forth in the 1980s differs from the ways in which these ideas were introduced during the prior two decades. (shrink)

The philosophy suggested by Jan Zwicky's expanded understanding of lyric and use of the fragment-as-method inspired this notebook of misunderstanding. Seeking to read Zwicky in the tradition of the aleatory genre and its basic form, the fragment, Roberts finds that her own sense of poetics and ethics accords generally with Zwicky's lyric philosophy and epistemology of imagination. Roberts's resonance with Zwicky's theory is conflicted by Zwicky's choice to isolate her fragment-method from the larger history of the aleatory genre (...) and its complex political evolution. Misunderstandings are compounded by Zwicky's disengagement from her contemporaries in the aleatory genre, the instability of her definitions by way of gestalt, and the impossible scale of her “ontological imperative.” In the end, Roberts is disappointed by this tempting but failed affinity. (shrink)

Ces dernières décennies, la relation entre Spinoza et Marx a été abordée par des auteurs comme Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri et Maximilien Rubel. Néanmoins, bien que l'on puisse établir un lien entre les deux au niveau des affinités théoriques, il manque une analyse du rapport entre ces affinités et les références effectives que Marx fait à Spinoza. Nous ne savons pas davantage, jusqu'à maintenant, comment ces références s'articulent avec les objectifs du militantisme philosophique et politique que Marx s'est fixé tout (...) au long de sa vie. La présente étude cherche donc à parcourir les premières oeuvres de Marx de manière à y étudier la présence de Spinoza, et à démontrer simultanément à quels buts cette présence était subordonnée. (shrink)

Beauvoir's Second Sex seems to be acknowledged as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. However, its relation to structuralism still has to be elaborated. The aim of this chapter is to analyze Beauvoir's reliance on Lévi‐Strauss, his elementary structures of kinship and the exchange of women (and not men). As the very asymmetry of sexual division became a target of Beauvoir's attack, she came close to asking Lévi‐Strauss the same question as Althusser, namely: Why is this (...) possible, and not something else? We conclude that the later Althusser's “repressed” aleatory materialism could account for Beauvoir's reasoning as to why the point of view of psychoanalysis and historical materialism are insufficient, and that Beauvoir's place could be identified with the repressed of the repressed. (shrink)

Analyzes Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics from a feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic perspective, showing that Aristotelian teleology relies on the disparagement of chance and the feminine simultaneously and finding resources therein for contemporary feminist thought.

One of the remarkable features of recent interest in the work of Louis Althusser has been the prominence granted to Althusser’s cultural criticism. However, aside from one notable exception, Althusser’s cultural criticism has not figured prominently in discussions of his late work, and the absence of Althusser’s cultural criticism from those discussions has perhaps unwittingly obscured both the genealogy of Althusser’s late aesthetic ontology and the logic of his last texts, of ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ (...) and related writings on aleatory materialism. By tracing the genealogy of the aleatory impulse in Althusser’s cultural criticism, it is possible to show how that work resonates in Althusser’s late texts including the larger unpublished manuscript from which ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ has been drawn. This reading of the philosophy of the encounter also allows us to understand the importance of Nicolas Malebranche for Althusser’s aleatory materialism. (shrink)

Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and of Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza's text through Althusser and vice versa regarding the question of materialism.

This article aims at presenting the concept of “phantasmagorical interpellation”. This theoretical effort is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept of “phantasmagoria” and Louis Althusser’s concept of “ideological interpellation”. The proposal is to ally their respective philosophical work-in-progress in their “anthropological” and “aleatory” materialisms in order to provide a socio-political analysis of today’s capitalist aesthetics as displayed in postmodern architecture or the design of everyday life. The aim is also to open new perspectives of resistance to the normativity of the (...) consumer imaginary using a critical interpretation of cultural creations which, following the inspiration of both authors, could reveal a new subject history capable of burst onto the scene of history. (shrink)

How were reliable predictions made before Pascal and Fermat's discovery of the mathematics of probability in 1654? What methods in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic helped us to get at the truth in cases where certainty was not attainable? The book examines how judges, witch inquisitors, and juries evaluated evidence; how scientists weighed reasons for and against scientific theories; and how merchants counted shipwrecks to determine insurance rates. Also included are the problem of induction before Hume, design arguments for (...) the existence of God, and theories on how to evaluate scientific and historical hypotheses. It is explained how Pascal and Fermat's work on chance arose out of legal thought on aleatory contracts. The book interprets pre-Pascalian unquantified probability in a generally objective Bayesian or logical probabilist sense. (shrink)

“Aleatory materialism” does not merely constitute that which, in an overly linear perspective, one would call the “fourth Althusser”. Even if, in the last decade of his life, Althusser did indeed attempt to construct a “new philosophy”, seen as an alternative to “dialectical materialism”, one should rather perceive, behind the past arguments, so assertive and sharp, advanced by the previous Althusser, something like a discreet practical layer, self-conscious or not, wherein such arguments would have found their true point of (...) anchorage. What is at stake in this philosophy “starting from nothing” is what has always been the most necessary and the most unthinkable question, that of political subjectivation. (shrink)

How ought the historian to reconcile themselves philosophically with the fact of evental contingency and of its relationship to structural determination? Does the existence of contingent causation undermine the very concept of historical necessity, or do the two instead in dialectical entanglement? In this essay, I engage with the problem of historical contingency from a transcendental-materialist perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, tendering a philosophically serious response to the famous Pascalian conundrum of Cleopatra’s nose and its challenge to (...) structuralist accounts of historical causation. The position associated with Laplace – that is to say, that the course of history would be entirely predictable were one provided with a complete account of initial conditions – is firmly rejected. Instead, I revive Althusser’s attempt to craft a theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, in which the determinative power of structural forces nevertheless leave space for the radical and unpredictable transformation of a situation by the chance crystallisation of events and encounters. In this effort, I recruit conceptual architecture not only from the fields of historiography and philosophy, but also quantum physics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic defense of the single-case propensity account of probabilistic explanation from the criticisms advanced by Hanna and by Humphreys and to offer a critical appraisal of the aleatory conception advanced by Humphreys and of the deductive-nomological-probabilistic approach Railton has proposed. The principal conclusion supported by this analysis is that the Requirements of Maximal Specificity and of Strict Maximal Specificity afford the foundation for completely objective explanations of probabilistic explananda, so long (...) as they are employed on the basis of propensity criteria of explanatory relevance. (shrink)

The article focuses on the relation established by Foucault in the two lecture courses Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics between life, nature and political economy. It explores the ways in which liberalism constructs a notion of economic nature as a phenomenon of circulation of aleatory series of events and poses the latter as an internal limit to sovereign power. It argues that the entwinement of vital and economic processes provides the means of internal redefinition of the (...) raison d’État and uses such an explanation to understand the emergence of the network topos as a technology of regulation of the unstable co-causality of milieus of circulation. The article also follows Foucault’s argument that the neoliberal market is significantly different from the liberal market inasmuch as, unlike the latter, it is not defined as an abstract logic of exchange among equals but as an ideal logic of competition between formal inequalities. Finally it asks whether new theories of social production and sympathetic cooperation, in the work of authors such as Yochai Benkler and Maurizio Lazzarato, can offer an alternative to the neoliberal logic of market-based competition as the basis for the production of new forms of life. (shrink)

The study of world politics in theoretical and empirical terms has recently witnessed an upsurge of interest in the question of complexity, drawing upon complexity theory; particularly, renewed interest in emergent properties and the aleatory nature of the political. This article seeks to demonstrate, primarily via an exploration of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, the possibilities for a type of thinking about the ‘international’ that utilises the notion of social complexity as its primary mode of enframing (...) the major dimensions to world politics. As such it argues for a theoretical reconceptualisation of the system of states, markets and societies as individual and overlapping scale-entities, each possessing causal agency, with overlapping and enmeshed boundaries, situated in their historical and concrete manifestations. The reified concepts of polity, economy and society are re-cast in the language of assemblage theory as ordering, exchanging and cohering, thus highlighting process in world politics and providing a theoretical base better equipped to cope with complex social processes and practices. And this I conclude clears the way to re-situate international space theoretically as a complex adaptive system. (shrink)

This article questions Balibar’s claim that Simondon’s concept of the transindividual does not fulfil all the requirements for a materialist ‘philosophical anthropology’. In fact, we demonstrate that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, and notably his concept of the transindividual, can be, as it were, included in a genealogy of aleatory materialism. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is indeed a philosophy of the transindividual insofar as it involves the constant revision of the different historical forms taken by social relations in the coevolution (...) of human beings and their techno-social and natural milieu. Simondon’s way of conceiving anthropogenesis as an open and ‘metastable’ field in which individuals and processes relate to each other maintaining their own knowledge in motion, marks, in our view, a materialist style of thinking. Against this background we analyse Simondon’s overcoming of the dichotomy between the individual and society through a ‘double rejection’, we sketch his theory of a ‘double source’ for social relations, and we explain in what sense, from his perspective, the transindividual ‘can be said in many ways’. (shrink)

While talking about sports (and games) we use such expressions as ?random victory?, ?winning by accident?, ?skill against luck?, ?chance (fortune) favours the better player?, etc. Unfortunately, chance-related notions that occur in these expressions are not well defined?their meaning is vague and it is not clear whether they refer to one or many different phenomena. Because such phenomena play an important role in sport, from the viewpoint of the philosophy of sport it is necessary to give a systematic account of (...) this topic. Although the works of De Wachter, Simon, Dixon, Breivik and Loland contain many important insights, there is still a room for further research in this field. The author tries to establish a typology of phenomena that could generally be called ?chance-phenomena?, which however, should be precisely distinguished. As such the primary task is to present an analysis of several different kinds of chance in sports. In constructing this typology the author uses both the distinction between different kinds of games (performative vs. kinetic) as well as analysis of structure of a game (four constitutive elements: players, constitutive rules, material substrate of the game and the world of the game). The most important method used is phenomenological analysis, especially Ingarden-style analysis. These kinds of ?chance-phenomena? are: aleatoriness, chaos, irregularity, imprecision and arbitrariness. The paradigm cases of each kind of chance are discussed. The genesis and functions of the respective phenomena in sports and games are also shown, as well as their position in the structure of the game. Such analytic work should precede any solutions of the chance vs. skill problem, or other problems concerning chance in sport. As a test of usefulness of the provided distinctions, the author considers the veracity of the judgements expressed in such sentences as ?Fortune favours the better player? (shrink)

It is somewhat of a mystery why one of Foucault's most important concepts—that of ‘dispositif’—is still quite vague in social and political theory; and while a small number of analyses have moved understanding forward, it remains stubbornly opaque. This paper argues that a strengthening of Foucault's concept can be achieved by integrating elements of Althusser’s formulation of a dispositif events), and a detailed examination of the shared conceptual history between dispositifs and discursive formations. Regarding, the paper contends that dispositifs restrict (...) three types of aleatory event: first, a ‘continuous present’ exerted upon objects and subjects; second, overdetermining repetitious occurrences; and third, negating the effects of unexpected aleatory events. The paper also argues that dispositifs are capable of producing certain forms of aleatory change. Regarding, four developmental thresholds of dispositifs are identified: strategic emergence, political elaboration, overdetermined a priori, and aleatory dominance. These two developments are argued to move Foucault's concept from being descriptive and largely passive to becoming a more theoretically active resource—what Deleuze terms changing the analytical to the diagnostic. (shrink)

I defend three claims regarding Foucault’s historical a priori and the intelligibility of history that counter commonly received accounts of Husserl’s approach to the same. First, Foucault is not a transcendental thinker in the Kantian sense of the term. His use of the HP is contingent, postdictive, regional and hypothetical. Second, the three “axes” of the dyads knowledge/truth, power/government, and subjectivation/ethics along with Foucault’s “history of the present” enclose a space called “experience” Erfahrung as nonreflective and “freed from inner life.” (...) At this point, “experience” and “multiplicity” coalesce to confirm Foucault’s anti-phenomenological bias and nominalist commitment. Finally, the relations of transformation and displacement that define archaeological change support a “fittingness” between the epistemes in question. Neither necessitating nor aleatory, their relation could be called “aesthetic” in a broad sense. I conclude by listing ways Husserl’s approach to historical intelligibility is the inverse of Foucault’s. (shrink)

While Logics of Worlds already emphasized that one’s participation in a process of truth is signalized by an affect and already pointed out some of the affects connected with these processes (enthusiasm, joy, pleasure, beatitude), the further elaboration of this topics remains the task of the third part of the Being and Event, which has yet to be written and is entitled The Immanence of Truths. The first part of the lecture discusses the very reasons for this work, its necessity, (...) and its place in my opus thus far. The task of The Immanence of Truths is to elaborate the question of how somebody is incorporated into a truth-process, how this relates to the question of the subject and the very role of philosophy itself. The latter is not the process of truth in a similar manner as its four conditions, it does presuppose them, but not the other way around. A short sketch of the inner structure of The Immanence of Truths follows and the argument in favour of the transformation of the formal category of negation. The role of the paraconsistent logics in The Immanence of Truths is to conceptualize the process of truth. The aleatory, the contingent character of any event namely means that we have to insist that there is a cut and that the truth is in the position of an exception, but which, however, is not something untransmittable. Concerning the question of the transmission and the ineffable, I distance myself in relation to Plato’s as well as to Bergson’s treatment of this question. For me, the category of an exception is a dialectical category. It has to be thought on one hand as a negation, which is not a miracle of some sort, and on the other as something inner, immanent (perhaps that was aimed at by Lacan with the term ‘extimacy’). The negation is namely an operator which simultaneously divides and includes, it is also part of the dialectical thought which includes the contingent and is therefore not deterministic. Everything that has been said so far has consequences for the functions of philosophy and concerns the question of the relationship between philosophy and life. Philosophy for me as a discipline departs from the conviction that there are truths. It is triple, being at the same time the diagnostics of an age, the construction of the concept of truth, and the existential experience of true life i.e. the immanent experiment of what is a true life, “what is it to live”. This is signalled by the affect of true life and by the formula “to live as an immortal”, which does not entail any kind of sacrifice or recompense. (shrink)

Study about previous topics in relation with the testaments as privileged sources 10 the knowledge of collectives attitudes befare death in Murcia and its municipality in the eigthteenth century. We deal with themes like social and geographic representativity of this document and its character of a source for the study of mentalities, c1asping all the century and applying an aleatory sounding of a homogeneous type of notariate record.

Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. Second, we are now discovering that the "late Althusser's" theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with (...) the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy "for Marx" were being worked out well before 1985 in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency. (shrink)

By digging through the stratigraphy of the history of ideas we can find within and beyond Marxism an 'aleatory current' that values the role of chance in history. Using this perspective, the book builds a case for a historical materialism that is stripped of all teleology. Starting in the ancient Mediterranean with Epicurus, it traces the history of conceiving history as plural up to Marxism and modern science. It shows that concrete historical 'worlds' such as ancient Mesoamerica and Eurasia (...) cannot be reduced to a single template. Affirming the potentiality of a future non-capitalist 'world', it invalidates any 'end of history' thesis. (shrink)

At Discorsi II.20, Machiavelli defines auxiliary arms as those, “whom a prince or a republic send captained and already paid for, for your aid.” My contention is that Machiavelli’s treatment of auxiliary arms is much more nuanced than it may seem at first glance. Throughout his works, Machiavelli articulates this type of force from the standpoint of the prince but also, surprisingly, from the standpoint of the people. In their princely employment, auxiliary arms act instrumentally as means for the projection (...) of power. However, analyzed from the standpoint of the people, auxiliary force exposes the projects of the state to the radically aleatory. Acknowledging the aspectival function played by the definition of auxiliaries in Machiavelli’s texts offers a new vantage point for re-reading Machiavelli on the nature of authority, power and the conflict of the umori. (shrink)

Through an empirical approach of several conspiracy theories, I have noticed they develop six main characteristics. First, the conspiratorial myth points out scapegoats in a non-aleatory way. They usually belong to ethnical or religious minorities. Secondly, those scapegoats try to acquire an overwhelming power in all fields. Thirdly, to achieve this goal, they corrupt the whole society, especially on mores and sexuality. Fourthly, to set up their domination the scapegoats use the art of simulation and dissimulation. They yield a (...) cult of secrecy. Fifthly, the scapegoats are consistently portrayed through symbolic morphological types, frequently as animals. Finally, conspiratorial myths undergo a process of hybridization and creolization. They go through transformations, alterations and medleys. Every conspiracy theories mix up into one another. (shrink)

Through an empirical approach of several conspiracy theories, I have noticed they develop six main characteristics. First, the conspiratorial myth points out scapegoats in a non-aleatory way. They usually belong to ethnical or religious minorities. Secondly, those scapegoats try to acquire an overwhelming power in all fields. Thirdly, to achieve this goal, they corrupt the whole society, especially on mores and sexuality. Fourthly, to set up their domination the scapegoats use the art of simulation and dissimulation. They yield a (...) cult of secrecy. Fifthly, the scapegoats are consistently portrayed through symbolic morphological types, frequently as animals. Finally, conspiratorial myths undergo a process of hybridization and creolization. They go through transformations, alterations and medleys. Every conspiracy theories mix up into one another. (shrink)

A review of recent French and Latin-American work on Althusser suggests that the received interpretations of the latter’s work may profitably be re-examined. The notion that there exists an early, middle and late Althusser, each distinct from the others in important ways, is called radically into question by this body of scholarship. Various authors show the presence of an aleatory dimension, usually associated with the late Althusser, in even his most ‘structuralist’ concepts. These works help us read Althusser in (...) a new way. (shrink)

In A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser Panagiotis Sotiris attempts a reading of the work of the French philosopher centered upon his deeply political conception of philosophy. Althusser's endeavour is presented as a quest for a new practice of philosophy that would enable a new practice of politics for communism, in opposition to idealism and teleology. The central point is that in his trajectory from the crucial interventions of the 1960s to the texts on aleatory materialism, Althusser remained a (...) communist in philosophy. This is based upon a reading of the tensions and dynamics running through Althusser's work and his dialogue with other thinkers. Particular attention is paid to crucial texts by Althusser that remained unpublished until relatively recently. (shrink)

The essay takes its point of departure from Monod's reading of dialectical materialism in Chance and Necessity. A passage of Engels's Dialectics of Nature, which identifies Spinoza's concept of causa sui with the Hegelian concept of interaction [Wechselwirkung], provides the opportunity to examine the consequences of Monod's claims more closely. Using Spinoza's philosophy as a litmus test, the essay attempts to demonstrate the debt of Engels's materialism to Hegel's Science of Logic by tracing the development of the concept of Wechselwirkung (...) in classical German philosophy. A profound difference between the Spinozan and Hegelian concepts becomes apparent: while the concept of Wechselwirkung implies a totality present to itself as simultaneity, permitting the flow of a linear, homogenous and empty time upon which stages of development can be inscribed, the concept of causa sui implies a totality without closure, a totality whose eternity is identified with the necessary and infinite network of modal durations. The essay concludes by suggesting that Spinoza's concept of causa sui allows us to rethink the relation between freedom and necessity in the Marxist tradition in conjunctural and aleatory terms. (shrink)

In his book On the Nature of Marx’s Things Jacques Lezra inherits another Marx and another materialism. It is an aleatory materialism: a materialism of the dynamic contingency of Marx and his “things”. This “subterranean current” of aleatory materialism is excavated by Lezra in his swerve through the letters, notebooks, and “private notes” of a young Marx working on his doctorate thesis. Following Lezra’s necrophilological thread –which encounters Lucretius and his “things”– we find that, in a parallel fashion, (...) Marx is also searching for a concept of science in his dissertation. This is what here is tentatively called a science of contingency. This science – though not in the usual disciplinary sense– opens the possibility of an alliance with Karen Barad’s performative materialism that displaces the humanism of the “new materialisms” by thinking alongside another science of contingency, also of a certain Lucretian inheritance, and which Marx did not get to think: quantum mechanics. -/- -- -/- En su libro On the Nature of Marx’s Things Jacques Lezra hereda otro Marx, y otro materialismo. Un materialismo aleatorio, un materialismo de la contingencia dinámica de Marx y sus “cosas”. Tal “corriente subterránea” del materialismo aleatorio es excavada por Lezra en su desvío por las cartas, cuadernos y notas “privadas” de un joven Marx que trabajaba en su tesis de doctorado. Siguiendo el hilo necrofilológico de Lezra, que se topa con Lucrecio y sus “cosas,” encontramos que, paralelamente, Marx también busca un concepto de ciencia en su tesis: lo que tentativamente nombramos ciencia de la contingencia. Ciencia, no ya disciplinaria, que abre la posibilidad de una alianza con el materialismo performativo de Karen Barad que desplaza el humanismo de los “nuevos materialismos” desde una reflexión critica que piensa a la par de otra ciencia de la contingencia, también de cierta herencia lucreciana, con la cual Marx no llegó a pensar: la mecánica cuántica. (shrink)

This work on the philosophy of science shows how it cuts across the core areas of philosophy. Topics covered include the nature of natural laws; aleatory explanations; epistemology (The Dogma that Didn't Bark by Fodor); logic versus historical theories of confirmation; and much more.

Aristotle divided arguments that persuade into the rhetorical (which happen to persuade), the dialectical (which are strong so ought to persuade to some degree) and the demonstrative (which must persuade if rightly understood). Dialectical arguments were long neglected, partly because Aristotle did not write a book about them. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth century late scholastic authors such as Medina, Cano and Soto developed a sound theory of probable arguments, those that have logical and not merely psychological force but (...) fall short of demonstration. Informed by late medieval treatments of the law of evidence and problems in moral theology and aleatory contracts, they considered the reasons that could render legal, moral, theological, commercial and historical arguments strong though not demonstrative. At the same time, demonstrative arguments became better understood as Galileo and other figures of the Scientific Revolution used mathematical proof in arguments in physics. Galileo moved both dialectical and demonstrative arguments into mathematical territory. (shrink)

It is a happy circumstance that this important aspect of method should be brought to our attention by a distinguished scientist in the field of biology. In the past any reference to the “psychical” by the scientific methodologist has been regarded as a dubious departure from his strict routine. But the recognition, finally, by a man of science, of the aleatory, autonomous character of a spontaneous universe, disclosed in biological directives as well as in the dynamics of the atom, (...) is a stimulating enhancement of that philosophy which, as Dewey says, is “the critical theory of methods of criticism.”. (shrink)

This paper examines the significance of Epicureanism for Nietzsche’s critique of Christian monotheism and his subsequent attempt to reanimate a kind of this-worldly, affirmative religiosity of immanence. After a brief overview of the pivotal role that Epicurus’ thought plays in the death of God, I focus on Epicurus’ own residual conception of the gods and the ways in which Nietzsche strategically retrieves it and puts it use in his writing. Nietzsche juxtaposes the distant, serene, indifferent Epicurean gods with the omniscient, (...) intrusive, jealous and needy God of middle-Eastern monotheisms. One might say that they constitute a ‘halfway house’ of sorts between Christianity and Nietzsche’s new Dionysian religion of the earth. But they also figure prominently in his own conflicted desire to intervene in the aleatory course of natural history and legislate the the future of humanity: Nietzsche finds he cannot simply look down with “the mocking and aloof eyes” of an Epicurean god upon the degeneration and diminution of the human being under Christian ascetic regimes of cultivation. Ultimately, Nietzsche fails to achieve the divine temperament of the Epicurean gods (looking down from afar on human ignorance, desire and suffering with a noble pathos of distance). Forthcoming 2022. (shrink)

The processes of constructing meaning in digital database environments entail a paradigm shift from previous models of audio-visual communication. Media emerging from the Electro-mechanical era (film/TV/video) present fixed spatio-temporal linearity and material conditions which objectify and render passive viewer and process. The problematic aspects of cinematic communication were addressed by Latin American filmmakers of the “Third Cinema” movement. Their concerns and approach presaged and assisted an understanding of the radical redefinition of audio-visual communication possible with digital databases. The conceptual and (...) aesthetic aspirations of “Third Cinema” artists such as Julio Garcia Espinosa and Fernando Solanas were ultimately contradictory to linear media and find their fitting medium in digital modular construction. The materiality of database expression lacks an intrinsic temporal or spatial state and permits a more dynamic and multidirectional set of power relationships between author/s, piece, viewer/s. Other important referents for contextualising database art are modern art practitioners that rejected linear representational space and fractured the centrality of authorship. The author's own work, “...two, three, many Guevaras,” an exploratory database environment, embraces the redefinition of process as artistic expression, the empowerment of interacting generative forces, and serves to illustrate the revolutionary potential of the new media. (shrink)

Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics are related facets of cutting edge therapeutic research in a field that relates pharmacological properties to the genetic characteristics of human beings. An optimistic interpretation suggests that “One-Size-Fits-All” therapeutics, whose effects can only be predicted in probabilistic terms, will give way eventually to individual tailor-made therapies with entirely predictable properties in each patient. Yet the concept of anticipating individual pharmacotherapeutic response appears to disregard some of the fundamental limitations of causal understanding in the biological world of structure–action (...) relationships. It is not simply a problem of confronting complexity – which might be overcome in time with advances in biotechnology and computing power – but the inescapable paradox of the genetic characteristics of individuals within the human species. The aleatory process of evolution ensures that with the exception of monozygotic twins, every human being is genetically unique. At the same time there appears to be more in common than divides. Pharmacogenomics provides a climate in which to explore and better understand the variable causal relationships between genetic element, protein and therapeutic or toxic actions, but can only do so in abstraction. Thus␣predictive power may be enhanced but is ultimately constrained by insuperable probabilistic considerations. (shrink)

A nation is not a creation of the brain but a collective experience. It does not equal the sum of the individuals that compose it but transcends that sum like a global personality that is not only juridical (although there once was a “League of Nations”) but also moral in the highest sense of the word.We may ask ourselves if liberty is indetermination, nonalienation and autonomy in its accomplishment; if it is congenial in the genetic code of the nation for (...) its entire existence or, on the contrary, if there is not a sort of dialectic, that is, historic, aleatory and problematic relationship between these two realities. In fact, there is danger in the desire to find a similarity, even by analogy, between the life of nations and a biological process. The nation is a historical phenomenon appearing through a chain of circumstances in 19th-century Europe, theorized by Europe and often born elsewhere as a reaction to European imperialism. The Nation is largely a bourgeois idea and reality. (shrink)