This book explores the nature of meaning, primarily through readings of the work of Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Alexander Stern offers a critical analysis of Benjamin's philosophy of language, finding in it a common root with Wittgenstein's thought on language, and traces the historical foundation of both accounts of meaning to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy. Benjamin's theory of language is notoriously dense and obscure. In elucidating it, Stern emphasizes Benjamin's attempt to reorient the Kantian project around language-the medium (...) in which knowledge is expressed-and his concern with the logical understanding of language gaining credence in the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. The result is a radical model of the relationship between language, experience, and the world that sees "absolutely everything" as linguistic in a broadened sense and which sees the logical or designative capacities of language as grounded in an aesthetic foundation. Wittgenstein and Benjamin are read in the book as complementary to one another, sharing comparable critiques of empiricism and comparable accounts of concept use, linguistic understanding, and the relation between experience and language. Although this similarity breaks down over Wittgenstein's account of the "experience of meaning," which is subordinated to his account of meaning as use, Stern argues that Benjamin's theory of language can productively address some unresolved issues in Wittgenstein's understanding of meaning. (shrink)

In this revolutionary work, the author sets the stage for the science of the 21st Century, pursuing an unprecedented synthesis of fields previously considered unrelated. Beginning with simple classical concepts, he ends with a complex multidisciplinary theory requiring a high level of abstraction. The work progresses across the sciences in several multidisciplinary directions: Mathematical logic, fundamental physics, computer science and the theory of intelligence. Extraordinarily enough, the author breaks new ground in all these fields. In the field of fundamental physics (...) the author reaches the revolutionary conclusion that physics can be viewed and studied as logic in a fundamental sense, as compared with Einstein's view of physics as space-time geometry. This opens new, exciting prospects for the study of fundamental interactions. A formulation of logic in terms of matrix operators and logic vector spaces allows the author to tackle for the first time the intractable problem of cognition in a scientific manner. In the same way as the findings of Heisenberg and Dirac in the 1930s provided a conceptual and mathematical foundation for quantum physics, matrix operator logic supports an important breakthrough in the study of the physics of the mind, which is interpreted as a fractal of quantum mechanics. Introducing a concept of logic quantum numbers, the author concludes that the problem of logic and the intelligence code in general can be effectively formulated as eigenvalue problems similar to those of theoretical physics. With this important leap forward in the study of the mechanism of mind, the author concludes that the latter cannot be fully understood either within classical or quantum notions. A higher-order covariant theory is required to accommodate the fundamental effect of high-level intelligence. The landmark results obtained by the author will have implications and repercussions for the very foundations of science as a whole. Moreover, Stern's Matrix Logic is suitable for a broad spectrum of practical applications in contemporary technologies. (shrink)

This paper is a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, especially as it expressed in 1916's “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. I read Benjamin's theory as a contribution to what Charles Taylor has called the “expressivist” tradition that includes eighteenth century thinkers like J.G. Herder and J.G. Hamann. Hamann's work and his interpretation of the theological concept of condescension are of particular importance. Although Benjamin's views are often regarded as impenetrable or mystical, they are relevant (...) to and, in part, motivated by concerns of more mainstream twentieth century philosophy of language, in particular Russell's paradox. His “metaphysics of language” understands reference or designation, central to analytic theories of meaning, as derived from a more fundamental, aesthetic meaning. (shrink)

We introduce a notion of complexity for interpretations, which is used to prove some new results about interpretations of sequential theories. In particular, we give a new, elementary proof of Pudlák's theorem that sequential theories are connected. We also demonstrate a counterexample to the infinitary distributive law $a \vee \bigwedge_{i \in I} b_i = \bigwedge_{i \in I} (a \vee b_i)$ in the lattice of chapters, in which the chapters a and b i are compact. (Counterexamples in which a is not (...) compact have been found previously.). (shrink)

Walter Benjamin's influence on Theodor Adorno centers on the former's early philosophy of language, which drew on manifold sources, including importantly the theological writings of Johann Georg Hamann. Adorno adapts this “expressivist” philosophy of language as part of a critique of Hegel's dialectic that forms the basis for Adorno's understanding of epistemology and social criticism. The result of this tempered influence is that Benjamin's and Adorno's projects share a great deal of common ground and vocabulary, but diverge in fundamental ways. (...) These tensions come to the fore in Adorno's 1930s criticisms of Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project. Of particular import are their respective understandings of Benjamin's notion of a constellation. For Adorno the constellation is a response to the dialectical tension in the relation between subject and object, while for Benjamin it transcends that relation. (shrink)

In this pioneering work, the author develops a fundamental formulation of logic in terms of theory of matrices and vector spaces. The discovery of matrix logic represents a landmark in the further formalization of logic. For the first time the power of direct mathematical computation is applied to the whole set of logic operations, allowing the derivation of both the classical and modal logics from the same formal base. The new formalism allows the author to enlarge the alphabet of the (...) truth-values with negative logic antivalues and to link matrix logic descriptions with the Dirac formulation of quantum theory - a result having fundamental implications and repercussions for science as a whole. As a unified language which permits a logical examination of the underlying phenomena of quantum field theory and vice versa, matrix logic opens new avenues for the study of fundamental interactions and gives rise to a revolutionary conclusion that physics as such can be viewed and studied as a logic in the fundamental sense. Finally, modelling itself on exact sciences, matrix logic does not refute the classical logic but instead incorporates it as a special deterministic limit. The book requires multidisciplinary knowledge and will be of interest to physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers. (shrink)