Le mot ouvrier apparaît pour la première fois au milieu du xiie siècle pour désigner celui qui travaille de ses mains moyennant salaire. C’est dans un roman de chevalerie, écrit par Chrétien de Troyes entre 1176 et 1181, Yvain, le chevalier au lion, qu’est offerte l’une des premières descriptions d’ouvrières salariées du Moyen Âge. La brutale confrontation entre le preux chevalier et la réalité du travail féminin y donne naissance à l’une des pages les plus fortes de la littérature (...) médiévale. Elle témoigne d’une nouvelle réalité, celle du travail, de l’argent et de la condition ouvrière au cœur de la féérie arthurienne. (shrink)

We investigate differences in perceived danger and recklessness judgements by experts (experienced skiers, N=362) and laypeople (N=2080) about participation in adventure sports across the same judgemental task using a third person perspective. We investigate the relationship between danger and recklessness and the extent to which fatality frequency, as well as other contextual factors such as gender, dependants, competence, and motivations of the sports participant affect expert and laypeople judgements respectively. Experienced skiers gave lower overall danger and recklessness ratings than (...) non-skiers. Experienced skiers’ judgements were also more sensitive than non-skiers’ to variations in the fatality rate of the activity and the competence level of the participant, yet were less sensitive to whether the event was done for external benefit such as a charity. Recklessness judgements were overall more sensitive to changes in activity descriptions than danger judgements. Our findings support the emerging picture of adventure sports participants as rational and sensitive to risk-relevant features rather than somehow pathological in their risk perception. (shrink)

The set of minimal indices of a Gödel numbering $\varphi$ is defined as ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi} = \{e: (\forall i < e)[\varphi_i \neq \varphi_e]\}$ . It has been known since 1972 that ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi} \equiv_{\mathrm{T}} \emptyset^{\prime \prime }$ , but beyond this ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi}$ has remained mostly uninvestigated. This paper collects the scarce results on ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi}$ from the literature and adds some new observations including that ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi}$ is autoreducible, but neither regressive nor (1,2)-computable. We also study several variants of (...) ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi}$ that have been defined in the literature like size-minimal indices, shortest descriptions, and minimal indices of decision tables. Some challenging open problems are left for the adventurous reader. (shrink)

We combine state-of-the-art techniques from computational linguisticsand theorem proving to build an engine for playing text adventures,computer games with which the player interacts purely through naturallanguage. The system employs a parser for dependency grammar and ageneration system based on TAG, and has components for resolving andgenerating referring expressions. Most of these modules make heavy useof inferences offered by a modern theorem prover for descriptionlogic. Our game engine solves some problems inherent in classical textadventures, and is an interesting test case for (...) the interactionbetween natural language processing and inference. (shrink)

In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of ways of being (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities (...) of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.--Description from an alternate version. (shrink)

The article is devoted to understanding the specific features of the reflection of computer technologies and social networks in the works of science fiction writers and in films made as part of development of the fantasy genre. In their work, the authors give a brief description of the essential aspects of the functioning of computer technologies and social networks. The article examines the degree of significance of the above phenomena for the effective development and existence of human civilization as a (...) whole, and also analyzes the essence of social networks as a cultural phenomenon that has a significant impact on the development of social relations. This study indicates the inconsistency of the statement according to which the fantasy genre is not an essential segment of world art and demonstrates the need to take into account such works when understanding the technological development of human civilization and the evolution of relations in society towards the online mode. In this paper, the features of displaying the development of technology in science fiction literature and adventure fiction are analyzed with a comparative analysis of the difference in approaches in these two components of the fantasy genre. The study also comprehends the reasons for the lack of serious interest in displaying the analogue of social networks in fiction literature and cinema, and provides a justification for changes in this issue in the early 1980-s. This article examines the characteristic features of the dynamics of the reflection of the development of social networks in fiction literature at the end of the XX – first decades of the XXI century, taking into account changes in public relations in this period. (shrink)

The sensorimotor approach to perception addresses various aspects of perceptual experience, but not the subjectivity of intentional action. Conversely, the problem that current accounts of the sense of agency deal with is primarily one of subjectivity. But the proposed models, based on internal signal comparisons, arguably fail to make the transition from subpersonal computations to personal experience. In this paper we suggest an alternative direction towards explaining the sense of agency by braiding three theoretical strands: a world-involving, dynamical interpretation of (...) the sensorimotor approach, an enactive description of sensorimotor agency as contrasted with organic agency in general, and a dynamical theory of equilibration within and between sensorimotor schemes. On this new account, the sense of oneself as the author of one’s own actions corresponds to what we experience during the ongoing adventure of establishing, losing, and re-establishing meaningful interactions with the world. The meaningful relation between agent and world is given by the precarious constitution of sensorimotor agency as a self-asserting network of schemes and dispositions. Acts are owned as they adaptively assert the constitution of the agent. Thus, awareness for different aspects of agency experience, such as the initiation of action, the effort exerted in controlling it, or the achievement of the desired effect, can be accounted for by processes involved in maintaining the sensorimotor organization that enables these interactions with the world. We discuss these processes in detail from a non-representational, dynamical perspective and show how they cohere with the personal experience of agency. (shrink)

The purpose of the present article is not an excursion into the history of philosophy. It is not a story of the adventures of Immanuel Kant on Russian soil, and even less does it pretend to expound systematically the perception of Kantian philosophy by Russian metaphysics. The author's interest is strictly philosophical. Russian religious thought, insofar as it has an appetite for philosophizing, consciously enters into the life of classical European philosophy, into that living communication of minds by which truth (...) is sustained, moved, and nourished among people and nations.2 A clarification of its personal relations with the central figures of this philosophical drama will help us to understand the strictly philosophical significance of Russian metaphysics more accurately than even sometimes the most dedicated description of it in itself succeeds in doing. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Kevin Krein argues that the notion of self-competition is misplaced in adventure sports and of only limited application altogether, for two main reasons: (i) the need for a consistent and repeatable measure of performance; and (ii) the requirement of multiple competitors. Moreover, where an individual is engaged in a sport in which the primary feature with which they are engaged is a natural one, Krein argues that the more accurate description of their activity is not (...) 'competition', but an attempt at harmonious interaction. I raise a number of problems against both criteria and argue that traditional and adventure sports do both involve self-competition on at least two levels: bettering one's previous performance and resisting the desire to quit. I argue that self-reflexive competition is not so much with one's self (which is philosophically absurd), but within one's self, between conflicting motivations and desires. I explore what is involved in self-reflexive competition, particularly at a phenomenological, self-constituting level, and raise the question of whether it is appropriate for activity in wilder natural environments. (shrink)

Geography and Empire re-examines the role of geography in imperialism and reinterprets the geography of empire. It brings together new work by eighteen geographers from ten countries. The book is divided into five parts. Part I considers the early engagement of geographers with the imperial adventures of England and France. Part II focuses on the links between nineteenth-century European imperial expansion and the establishment of the first geographical institutions. Part III examines the rhetoric of geographical description and theory - the (...) climatic determinism that reduced the population of half the world to idle degenerates, and the geopolitics that elevated a small part of the rest to be their rulers. Part IV is concerned with the active role of geographers in imperial administration and planning, and with the beginnings of a critical perspective on imperial ambition. Part V describes the experience of decolonization and of post-colonialism - the ambiguous role of the USA in the former, the difficulties of finding a true voice for the latter. Geography and Empire provides new insights and vivid perspectives not only on the development of the profession and discipline of geography, but on the interactions between individuals, ideas, events and movements - and, most notably, on what happens when one culture invades and attempts to dominate another. It concludes with notes for further reading, a comprehensive bibliography and a full index. (shrink)

This is not a very strong contribution to the Monograph Series. Given the present state of the debate in the philosophy of mind, I think most readers will find this essay anachronistic in its metaphilosophy, incomplete and confused in its presentation of the issues, sloppy in its argumentation, and unimposing in its conclusions. And I think most readers will be right. Ostensibly, it is an essay in descriptive metaphysics, an essay in “conceptual geography”. In the author's words, “… this essay (...) constitutes an attempt to map one particular area of the conceptual countryside… that surrounding the concept person.” The vintage of the metaphors aside, this does remain a worthy undertaking, for certainly the full story on our common-sense conception of persons has yet to be told. Curiously, however, Professor Englebretsen's contributions on this particular score are surprisingly slim, and we find him instead discussing and criticizing at length a variety of substantive theories as to what the things we conceive of as persons really are. This is adventurous behaviour for one whose concerns pretend a limit at the inspection, description, and explication of the current state of common-sense, and one wonders how the author supposes that mere conceptual cartography can serve to settle these apparently substantive issues. (shrink)

In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel. A Trip to Cuba appeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana's story of his ???vacation voyage,??? To Cuba and Back . These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military ???filibusters.??? Howe's (...) narrative demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. ???I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,??? she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 ???sprightly??? pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of ???foreign??? institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish may not have described her prose narrative The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World as a utopia, let alone assigned it a single genre or form. It contains aspects of romance, adventure, and fantasy and many of the elements that would come to be associated with utopian literature, such as world building and a detailed accounting of that world by a traveler who happens upon it. Yet The Blazing World also contains philosophy, scientific debates, (...) political discussions, and a detailed narrative of a successful military campaign. Folded into this rich hybrid text are also numerous autobiographical events, characters, and details. This rich plurality of elements offered Cavendish a... (shrink)

As a critic, Virginia Woolf has been called a number of disparaging names: "impressionist," "belletrist," "raconteur," "amateur." Here is one academic talking on the subject: "She will survive, not as a critic, but as a literary essayist recording the adventures of a soul among congenial masterpieces. . . . The writers who are most downright, and masculine, and central in their approach to life - Fielding or Balzac - she for the most part left untouched....Her own approach was at once (...) more subterranean and aerial, and invincibly, almost defiantly, feminine." In other words, Virginia Woolf is not a critic; how could she be? She is a woman. From its beginning, criticism has been a man's world. This is to say not only that males have earned their living as critics but, more importantly, that the conventionally accepted ideals of critical method are linked with qualities stereotypically allotted to males: analysis, judgment, objectivity. Virginia Woolf has had a poor reputation as a critic not merely because her sex is female but because her method is "feminine." She writes in a way that is said to be creative, appreciative, and subjective. We will accept this descriptive for the moment but will later enlarge on it, and even our provisional acceptance we mean to turn to a compliment. Barbara Currier Bell has written articles on critical theory and modern poetry and has served as a consultant on women's education at both Vassar and Hampshire Colleges. She is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. Carol Ohmann is the author of Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman and several articles on English and American fiction. She coedited Female Studies IV: Teaching about Women with Elaine Showalter and is chairman of the Department of English at Wesleyan University. She has contributed, with Richard Ohmann, "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye , and "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Universals and the Historically Particular" .See also: "The Masculine Mode" by Peter Schwenger in Vol. 5, No. 4; "The Robber in the Bedroom: or, The Thief of Love: A Woolfian Grieving in Six Novels and Two Memoirs" by Mark Spilka in Vol. 5, No. 4. (shrink)

Table of Contents I. WHO ARE THE SCIENTISTS? Historically. Women in the Origins of Modern Science, Londa Schiebinger. Women of Third World Descent in the Sciences, Sandra Harding. Recently. Women in Science: Half In Half Out, Vivian Gornick.”How Can a Little Girl Like You Teach a Great Big Class of Men?’ the Chairman Said, and Other Adventures of a Woman in Science, Naomi Weisstein. The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics, Evelyn Fox Keller. Currently. Women Join the Ranks of Science (...) but Remain Invisible at the Top, Natalie Angier. Creeping Toward Inclusivity in Science, Phyllis Goldberg. II. WHAT KIND OF ENTERPRISE IS SCIENCE? Science’s Aims, Methods, and Norms of Behavior. Patriarchy, Scientists, and Nuclear Warriors, Brian Easlea. Culturally Inclusive Chemistry, Catherine Hurt Middlecamp. A World of Difference, Evelyn Fox Keller. Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms, Ann Oakley. Science’s Subject Matter. Have Only Men Evolved?, Ruth Hubbard. Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology, The Biology and Gender Study Group. The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies, Alison Wylie. Still Seeking Transformation: Feminist Challenges to Psychology, Sue Wilkinson. Science’s Social Effects. Androcentric Bias in Clinical Research, Sue Rosser. Man-Made Medicine and Women’s Health, Nancy Krieger and Elizabeth Fee. The New Procreative Technologies, Ruth Hubbard. A Question of Genius: Are Men Really Smarter Than Women?, Anne Fausto-Sterling. III. WHAT KIND OF ENTERPRISE OUGHT SCIENCE TO BE? Feminist Empiricism. Subjects, Power, and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science, Helen Longino. Epistemological Communities, Lynn Hankinson Nelson. Feminist Standpoint Theory. ”Strong Objectivity’: A Response to the New Objectivity Question, Sandra Harding. Introduction to Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman, Joyce Ladner. Feminist Postmodernism. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Donna Haraway. Though This Be Method, Yet There Is Madness in It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology, Naomi Scheman. (shrink)

Walt Disney’s movie, The Pagemaster (1994) begins on a dark and stormy night, with a young boy stumbling into an immense, gothic-styled library for refuge from the rain. Once inside, he is soon carried away by a tumultuous river of coloured paints, transformed into an animated characterization of himself, and thrust into an animated world of literature, where he battles Captain Hook, flees Moby Dick, and participates in other classic tales of adventure, horror, and fantasy. -/- Adults might understand (...) the film as a fanciful description of how they feel when reading a lively book. Although they would probably not imagine themselves tagging along with the animated characters like a 4th musketeer, they might very well claim that they enter a fiction through the viewpoint of one or more of the characters, experiencing, imaginatively, mental images of the sights, sounds, smells, and movements that the character would experience. Under this description, the reader would be forming multi- modal images that would correspond directly to what the literary characters are doing, thinking, and experiencing. When a fictional hero whips out his sword and slashes a rope in half, the reader might form a visual image of the hero’s determined face, an auditory image of the sound of the whizzing sword, and a motor image of an extended arm movement. I call such an imitative participation, by use of mental images in any modality, a simulation. -/- I suggest that this imitative experiencing of a fiction through the production of multi-modal imagery - a simulation - is not the only way in which readers might engage a literary text. In this paper I explore the hypothesis that readers might use their own bodily processes - those of the somato-viscero-motor system (SVM) for a non-imitative activity that I call a reinterpretation and that the reinterpretation might make a distinctive contribution to the reading process. As an example of a simulation and a reinterpretation, take the SVM experience of the reader’s breathing. A simulation would occur if the text describes a character who is taking deep breaths of air and the reader creates a mental image representing the experience of breathing. In this case, the reader’s mental image of breathing would stand for a property of the literary work - the fictional experience of breathing. -/- By contrast to the simulation, a reinterpretation would occur if the text describes a character who is gazing at long, wispy clouds that extend outward from a horizon and the reader uses his own experience of breathing to stand for the visual sense of looking at a long, continuous expanse of filmy white: the reader’s actual breathing would stand for a property of the literary work - the fictional experience of seeing. Breathing is not the same as seeing. This should help clarify the following definition. -/- I hypothesize that a reinterpretation occurs when the reader becomes aware of some component of the SVM system and reinterprets it as a property of the literary work that is not the same as that particular SVM process. The SVM experience is projected into the literary work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cynthia Willett HEGEL, ANTIGONE, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF ECSTATIC DIALOGUE In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel argues that drama is the highest form of art. Only drama can resolve, or sublate (auflieben), an opposition between objective and subjective poles ofaesthetic experience.1 This opposition takes its penultimate form in the difference between epic and lyric poetry. Subjective feelings expressed in lyric and the objective representation ofevents in epic are sublated (...) in classical drama as ethical character and action. In this article I will examine both what Hegel does and does not say about the structure and function ofclassical drama in order to determine its role in the education of humanity, or what Hegel calls the "phenomenology of spirit." As it turns out, drama is not only a climactic moment in the development of spirit. The structure ofdrama also traces a paradigm and an historical origin for Hegel's dialectic. The ironic reversals and discoveries that emplot tragic drama also constitute dialectic. An immediate consequence of this parallel is mat, in accordance with Aristode's definition of tragic drama, dialectic demands the catharsis, or purging, of emotion from educated spirit.2 After establishing the analogy between dialectic and cathartic drama, I turn to the exemplary role that is played by Sophocles' Antigone in the Phenomenology ofSpirit. A reinterpretation of the play suggests that Hegel fails to see that emotional engagement, or the unsublated subjective feeling relegated to die lower art of lyric, in fact orients the dramatic action of Antigone. The resemblance between drama and dialectic suggests that desire can no more be purged from dialectic than from classical tragedy. As a consequence, Hegelian dialectic should be reconceived in terms of a notion of tragedy that is not cathartic but ecstatic. Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 268-283 Cynthia Willett269 In the AesUietks, Hegel places drama after epic and lyric as the third and final moment of the highest stage of art. Drama presents actions that are ethical and thus differs from the lyrical expression of feelings as well as the adventures narrated in epic (A, pp. 1158; 474). Hegel's definition of epic in terms of narration and description suggests that the language of epic functions as representation. Representational language externalizes, or objectifies, spirit's movement in a series ofevents which are related by the epic poet. This narration functions without the mediation ofa subject, which is to say without an "agent's inner will and character" (A, pp. 1160; 476). Lyric poetry, on the other hand, concerns feelings or "the inner life alone" (A, pp. 984; 254). In accordance with its subject matter, the language oflyric is not representational but expressive. Drama presents actions before an audience, such actions occurring primarily in the mode of speech (A, pp. 1159; 475). What we can characterize as the "speech-acts" performed in drama carry out intentions of, or ends soughtby, the main character. Drama advances dialectic because, as Hegel writes, "drama does not fall apart into a lyric inner life and an external sphere as its opposite, but displays an inner life and its external realization" (A, pp. 1 160; 476). First, events which occur episodically in epic attain the unity of a single action that comprises dramatic plot. Secondly, a "cleaned-up" version ofthe "chaotic" feelings expressed in lyric poetry develops into the intention of a character to adher to a universal ethical principle. It is important to emphasize that, according to Hegel, drama should not draw any of its effect from subjective emotions. Drama sublates lyrical feeling into ethical law. Only thus does drama bring together the epic-making events and lyrical subjectivity, notby wayofa mechanical synthesis, but in a metamorphosis enabling elements initially opposed to give rise to an original whole. The proximity ofdrama to dialectical thought appears in the contrast Hegel draws between dramatic action and action which is prosaic, or philosophically insignificant (A, pp. 1159; 475). Dramatic action, Hegel explains, "is notconfined to the simple and undisturbed accomplishment ofa specific aim; on the contrary, it rests entirely on collisions ofcircumstances, passions, and characters... which in turn necessitate a resolution of the conflict and discord" (A, pp. 1159; 475). On the other hand, a prosaic, or ordinary... (shrink)

The creative imagination changes itself and the world in ways we cannot anticipate. This restless creativity gathers not just refutable facts; it hunts self-transforming revelations, semiotic prizes acclaimed and defended in the realms of inner awareness and political power. So doing, it eludes final description in any one set of signs. This means, I argue here, that sign systems must themselves give chase. Texts of this kind will not be the fixed embalmed arrays of signs and symbols that have sustained (...) our civilizations to date. These texts will be a new kind of artificial life, creative agents that rewrite and re-express themselves on-the-fly, in ways unpredictable by their founding authors. The deconstructive turn in postmodern theory sought interpretive vistas and strange loops to be teased, once upon a time, from each embalmed text. Beyond postmodernity is an aesthetics and a critical theory of empowered texts — sign arrays never quite the same and that, like time itself, sit still for no one. After an initial push by us, they self-evolve. Human sociobiology, asking how culture rewrites the agenda of replicating genes, provides a first glimpse of this new adventure in semiotics and human self-discovery. (shrink)

In the first half of 2009 I organized a series of talks at University of California, San Francisco. The series was dedicated to observing science from a wider perspective and figuring out where its trains and we as scientists in it are heading to. The final presentation in the series I envisaged as the one drawing threads between love and science. However, my aim was neither for that particular talk to be the one of explaining sensations of love using scientific (...) language nor to be based on pastoral and pathetic eruptions of love about science. What I had in mind was a description of an adventurous quest to find love at the core of our scientific endeavors. As my attempts to find an appropriate lecturer failed, I decided to engage myself in such an adventure. This is how this article sprang into life. In it, I slowly tread the way towards realizing that the heart of love beats at the core of the scientific enterprise of humanity. To reach this centre, I have travelled through the intricate forests of discoursing on the concept of experiential co-creation, the uncertainty principle, the dichotomy between Empiricist and Renaissance scientific methods, the tautological character of logical inferences and scientific descriptions as pragmatic sets of metaphors or pointers used in the mutual coordination of experiences at the social level, having ocean waves, seashore pebbles, corals, fish, atoms, gramophones, pine trees and stars passing me by, and yet managed to emerge back to light with the treasure in my hands. (shrink)

Humankind is concerned with scientific enquiry because humans want to understand the milieu in which they find themselves. They want to engineer and reliably control or cooperatively modulate as much of the environment as possible to sustain, enrich, and propagate their lives. Following this path, the goal of science is to gain a reliable description of all natural phenomena so as to allow accurate prediction (within appropriate limits) of nature’s behavior as a function of an ever-changing environment. As such, science (...) is incapable of providing us with absolute truth. Rather, it provides relative knowledge, internally self-consistent knowledge, about the relationships between different phenomena and between different things. The goal of engineering, on the other hand, is to build on this fundamental understanding to generate new materials, devices, structures, attitudes, moralities, philosophies, and so on, for producing tangible order, harnessing the latent potential in nature’s phenomena and expanding human capabilities in an ever-changing environment. In this context, medicine is to human biology as engineering is to physical science. As each of us rides the “river of life,” the great consciousness adventure, we perceive events occurring around us, but more often than not, we do not perceive the total information content inherent in those events nor the true reality of those events. The latter point is so because what we take as the reality of an observation is actually a convolution between (1) what our sensory system actually senses and (2) our mindset or belief structure that filters and/or selectively amplifies segments of the basic gathered data stream. Further, only what we call the five physical senses are well-developed and integrated in our overall sensory system, so only a portion of the total available data becomes our basic internal data stream. We are thus always making personal observations through the distorting and spectrally-limited lens of our mindsets, and we have no way at present to perform a deconvolution and perceive the pure information inherent in our basic input data stream. By using designed instruments to access information patterns in nature, we gain a more objective perspective of these events. However, we must always remember that these instruments were designed on the basis of the logic of our average cognitive development and therefore probably also have only a limited access to the total information spectrum for these events occurring in nature. In particular, these instruments only respond to positive energies. Over the course of the past four to five centuries, we have learned how to conduct true scientific investigations, first under the rubric of classical mechanics and, more recently, quantum mechanics. Let us now look a little more deeply to see what this means. (shrink)

For Jung, the beautiful and brilliantly creative 28-year old Christiana Morgan was an inspired force whose path in self-analysis paralleled his own quest for personal knowledge. By teaching Morgan the trance-like technique of active imagination, Jung helped her embark on a series of archetypal adventures which she depicted in paintings of great virtuosity and he candidly recounted at a seminar given to some of his closest followers. Through his eloquent description of the fiery, mythic visions of a woman discovering her (...) repressed sexuality and feminine power, Jung reveals how deeply this encounter challenged his understanding of feminine psychology. These two volumes bring together for the first time colour reproductions of Morgan's paintings with a complete transcript of the seminar. (shrink)

In the western tradition utopia is often associated with Sir Thomas More’s description of an ideal city. This association has resulted in a number of consequences. For instance, until recently, the pre-More utopian texts have been to a large extent neglected. Also, overshadowed by modern European adventure fictions, non-western utopian writings have received relatively little attention. This article briefly reviews various Persian utopian traditions,1 followed by a more detailed examination of one of them, the Alexandrian genre. It will show (...) that some of the accounts presented by More were anticipated by Persian utopian authors. The article also shows that the Alexandrian utopia, like many of its European .. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead's (1861-1947) 'Philosophy of Organism' offers an important, indeed fundamental, metaphysical doctrine. It is the product of a long adventure of ideas and has many complementary aspects. The present book does not claim to achieve a complete description of all the aspects of the late Whitehead's worldview. Its aim is rather to stress some specific features of his teachings, such as his views concerning rationality, dynamic holism, things and objects, events, anticipation, creativity, nature, organism, and life. This (...) book should be useful not only for process philosophers, but also for all scholars who are interested in the development of process philosophical ideas"--Introduction, page 7. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DIKTAT OR DIALOGUE? ON GADAMER'S CONCEPT OF THE ART WORK'S CLAIM by John Pizer How do we experience a work of art? Put another way, how does die work of art engage and address us? Hans-Georg Gadamer devoted much of his magnum opus, Truth and Method, to answering these questions, and he takes up the task again in a brief essay entided "Aesthetics and Hermeneutics" (1964). Earlier positions on (...) the nature of hermeneutical reflection, the historical context of aesthetic interpretation and the linguistic character underlying the apprehension of all modes of art are reformulated here. At first glance, the essay appears to be more the summary of a previous epistemology than a venture into new terrain. There is, in fact, almost nothing in this work which seems to contradict Gadamer's previous view. Nevertheless, the closing lines of the essay give his concept of art a dimension not directly perceptible in Truth and Method. This is the notion that the work of art challenges us, on a personal level, to change the course of our existence: "The intimacy with which the work of art touches us is at the same time, in enigmatic fashion, a shattering and a demolition of the familiar. It is not only the 'This art thou!' disclosed in ajoyous and frightening shock; it also says to us: 'Thou must alter thy life'!" {PH, p. 104).1 Whereas Truth and Method focuses on the heightened reflexivity gained in a dialogue with an aesthetic object, Gadamer's citation of Rilke's admonition would appear to turn the dialogue into a command, or at least an unmediated personal challenge, issued by the work of art. 272 John Pizer273 This is not to say that Truth andMethod is free ofpowerful, even violent language in its description of aesthetic experience. In discussing the concept of "Erlebnis" as it came to be the dominant term in phenomenological investigations ofconsciousness, Gadamer represents aesthetic experience as paradigmatic of all experience. Like the hermeneutic circle, consciousness is grounded in the interplay of discrete, individual experience and the experience oflife as a whole. Life as a whole consists of unique, episodic experiences, and yet these experiences only acquire meaning in the context of life in its totality. As Joel Weinsheimer puts it: "An experience is something the meaning ofwhich accompanies one through life, determining that life and being determined by it."2 An exceptional experience is an adventure, which gives a disruptivejolt to the even flow of life. But it allows one to experience life in its richness, fullness, and totality even as it tears one from life's quotidian context. In this, the aesthetic experience has the character ofan adventure: "The work of art seems destined to become an aesthetic experience. This means the person experiencing it is wrenched at one blow from the context of his life while at the same time he is related back to the whole of his existence" {WM, p. 66).3 But while Gadamer's terminology here in describing the experience of art is as violent as that of "Aesthetics and Hermeneutics," he does not suggest in Truth and Method that the work of art issues a command or injunction. Rather, by reflecting on the essence of experience as the dialectic of "exile and reunion," 4 our dialogue with the art work enriches our ability to understand and find truth in life as a whole. Of course, even in Truth and Method Gadamer distinguishes clearly between the silent dialogue between art work and spectator, particularly between reader and text, and the colloquy of individuals engaged in conversation. Nevertheless, he makes it clear that in both cases an openended dialectic ofquestion and answer motivates the engagement. Does the notion that a work of art "shatters" the familiar and admonishes us to change our lives contradict the earlier, seemingly more democratic parameters established by Gadamer as defining the search for ontological truth, and, more narrowly, the attempt at legitimate interpretation? The purpose of this paper will be to demonstrate that it does not. First ofall, we must note Gadamer's concept ofexperience {Erfahrung) in relationship to the text implies an openness to it rather than a detached, objective... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Holy Trinity in Ippolito Desideri's Ke ri se ste aṇ kyi chos lugs kyi snying poTrent PomplunOn April 10, 1716, Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit who had but recently arrived in Tibet, wrote a long letter to another Jesuit missionary, Ildebrando Grassi, who was stationed in Mysuru, India. Desideri recounted his adventures since the two men had last been together, three and a half years earlier, at the Jesuit (...) residence in Goa. He told of his travels to Surat, Delhi, Lahore, Leh, and Lhasa, and recalled his first impressions of Tibetan religion and culture. Tibetans, he told Grassi, were gentle and docile, but coarse and uncultivated. In Desideri's opinion, they had neither arts nor sciences, but they did reject the doctrine of transmigration and appeared to have some knowledge of the Christian faith.1 "Here is what I learned about the Tibetans' religion," he wrote,They call God könchok (dkon mchog), and they appear to have some notion of the adorable Trinity, for at times they call Him könchok chik (dkon mchog gcig), that is, the One God, and at other times they call Him könchok sum (dkon mchog gsum), that is, the Triune God. They also use a kind of chaplet, over which they repeat the words Oṁ ah hūṁ, and they say that the word Oṁ signifies knowledge or an arm, that is, power; ah is the word, and hūṁ is the heart, or love, and that these three words mean God. They also worship a being named Padmasaṃbhava, who was born some seven hundred years ago. When asked if he were God or man, some people replied that he was both God and man, having neither father nor mother, but having been born from a flower. Even so, they have statues representing a woman with a flower in her hand, whom they call Padmasaṃbhava's mother, and they venerate several others whom they treat as saints. In their churches, one finds an altar covered with cloth and ornaments, and a sort of tabernacle sits in the middle of the altar, where they say Padmasaṃbhava dwells, though they also assert that he is in heaven.2This letter, which survives only in a French translation, is noteworthy if only because Ippolito Desideri would later repudiate almost everything he affirmed in it. In a matter of months, the Jesuit missionary would change his mind about Tibetans' capacities for art, for science, and for culture. He would also change his mind considerably about their religion. [End Page 117]Perhaps the most significant change—and one that would later play a large role in his legal battle with the Capuchins for control of the Tibetan mission—concerned the knowledge that Tibetans had of the Holy Trinity, the central Christian mystery that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In what follows, I would like to explore Ippolito Desideri's explanation of the Holy Trinity, especially in the Ke ri se ste aṇ kyi chos lugs kyi snying po (The Essence of Christian Doctrine). I will briefly situate Desideri's account of Tibetans' knowledge of the Trinity in the general historical and theological context of the early modern missions, outline his various attempts to explain this central Christian mystery in Tibetan, and offer some tentative speculations on the Jesuit's motives for choosing certain Tibetan terms. I hope this discussion of Desideri's treatment of the Holy Trinity might contribute to Christian theologians and Buddhist philosophers who are engaged in interreligious dialogue and assist them in their reflections about how best to translate their respective faiths in such dialogue. Desideri's translations are not always perspicacious—as we shall see—but they are instructive, especially to the extent that they show us the issues that must be considered when anyone wishes to translate the basic terms of his own religion into an alien language. With this difficulty in mind, we might also consider the inadequacy of all language, human or angelic, when confronted with the mystery of God's infinite transcendence.Ippolito Desideri in ContextBefore addressing Desideri's translations, I would like to point out that the description of Tibetan religion... (shrink)

Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood pursues three main questions: What role does literature play in the constitution of a human being? What is the connection between the language we see at work in imaginative fiction and the language we develop to describe ourselves? And is something more powerful than just description at work -- that is, does self-descriptive or autobiographical language itself play an active role in shaping and solidifying our identities? This adventurous book (...) suggests that interdisciplinary work interweaving philosophy and literature can answer these questions. Main sections investigate the relational model of the self derived from American pragmatism, the sense of rightness that can attach to descriptions of ourselves and our actions, the analogy between interpreting works of art and the interpretation of persons, the special power of literature as a self-compositional tool and the "architecture" of self-narratives and the corresponding growth of self-understanding, what we can learn from cautionary tales concerning the tragic lack of self-knowledge, the possibility of "rewriting" and "rereading" the self, and overall, the assembly of real-life structures of self-definition through our reflective engagement with literature. Throughout, the book develops a model of active, self-constitutive literary reading that provides language for, and sharpens, self-individuation and sensibility. Conjoining a relational conception of selfhood to a narrative conception of self-understanding, Living in Words makes a powerful claim that aesthetic experience and our engagement with the arts is a far more serious matter in human life and society than it in some quarters is taken to be. (shrink)

Mentalization-based family therapy and family rehabilitation represent a rich variety of approaches for assisting families with difficult interaction patterns. On the other hand, adventure therapy methods have been successfully used with families to offer them empowering experiences of succeeding together against difficult odds and to improve communication between family members. Further, the health promoting qualities of spending time outdoors are now well established and recognized. The Nordic approach to mentalization-based family rehabilitation combines adventure, outdoor, and systemic therapy. We (...) provide three examples of nature-based family rehabilitation practices that are delivered as brief, multi-family psychological interventions taking place in nearby nature and aiming to support sustainable, systemic change. The current contribution is a description of clinical practice, not a systematic review or a formal evaluation. We propose that recontextualizing mentalization-based family rehabilitation to the outdoors can not only provide added health benefits, but also strengthen intra-familial attuned interaction and emotional connectedness. The outdoor adventure provides the families with embodied, multisensory experiences of verbal and, especially, non-verbal interaction that can be usefully examined through the lens of theory of mentalization. The concreteness of adventure experiences is particularly beneficial for families that have difficulties in verbal communication and/or utilizing executive functions, perhaps due to neuropsychiatric traits, intellectual disabilities, or learning difficulties. Furthermore, outdoor adventure can support the participants’ connectedness to nature. (shrink)

Cultural historian Iain McCalman tells the stories of Charles Darwin and his most vocal supporters and colleagues: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Beginning with the somber morning of April 26, 1882--the day of Darwin's funeral--Darwin's Armada steps back in time and recounts the lives and scientific discoveries of each of these explorers. The four amateur naturalists voyaged separately from Britain to the southern hemisphere in search of adventure and scientific fame. From Darwin's inaugural trip on the Beagle (...) in 1835 through Wallace's exploits in the Amazon and Malaysia in the 1840s and 1850s, each man independently made discoveries that led him to embrace Darwin's groundbreaking theory of evolution. This book reveals the untold story of Darwin's greatest supporters who, during his life, campaigned passionately in the war of ideas over evolution and who lived on to extend and advance the scope of his work.--From publisher description. (shrink)

In refreshing challenge to the common presumption that knowing involves amassing information, this book offers an eight-step approach that begins with love and pledge and ends with communion and shalom. Everyday adventures of knowing turn on a moment of insight that transforms and connects knower and known. No matter the field--science or art, business or theology, counseling or athletics--this little manual offers a how-to for knowing ventures. It offers concrete guidance to individuals or teams, students or professionals, along with plenty (...) of exercises to spark the process of discovery, design, artistry, or mission."--Publisher description. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

The epic, page-turning history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth century. Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein didn't only revolutionise physics; they redefined our world and the reality we live in. In The Age of Uncertainty, Tobias Hürter brings to life the golden age of physics and its dazzling, flawed, and unforgettable heroes and heroines. He immerses us in a half century of (...) global turmoil against which some of humankind's greatest and strangest scientific discoveries unfolded, expertly guiding us through the brilliant and mind-bending ideas that turned the world on its head. The work of the twentieth century's most important physicists produced scientific breakthroughs that led to an entirely new view of physics -- and a view of the universe that is still not fully understood today, even as evidence for its accuracy is all around us. The men and women who made these discoveries were intellectual adventurers, renegades, dandies, and nerds, some bound together by deep friendship; others, by bitter enmity. But the age of relativity theory and quantum mechanics was also the age of wars and revolutions. The discovery of radioactivity transformed science, but also led to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout The Age of Uncertainty, Hürter reminds us about the entanglement of science and world events, for we cannot observe the world without changing it"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

In recent discussions, it has been argued that a theory of animal rights is at odds with a liberal abortion policy. In response, Francione (1995) argues that the principles used in the animal rights discourse do not have implications for the abortion debate. I challenge Francione’s conclusion by illustrating that his own framework of animal rights, supplemented by a relational account of moral obligation, can address the moral issue of abortion. I first demonstrate that Francione’s animal rights position, which grounds (...) moral consideration in sentience, is committed to the claim that a sentient fetus has a right to life. I then illustrate that a fully developed account of animal rights that recognizes the special obligations humans have to assist animals when we cause them to be dependent and vulnerable through our voluntary actions or omissions is committed to the following: a woman also has a special obligation to assist a sentient fetus when she causes it to be dependent and vulnerable through her voluntary actions or omissions. From these considerations, it will become evident that a fully developed and consistent animal rights ethic does in fact have implications for the abortion discussion. (shrink)

The title of this book, Adventures of Ideas, bears two meanings, both applicable to the subject-matter.

Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, (...) which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism. The post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, uncannily echoing the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. Hegel and Marx denounced the Romantics for their otherworldly and nebulous posture, yet post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, Breckman traces a fascinating reflection of Romantic themes and resonances, and he explores in depth the effort to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that does not privilege materialist understandings of the social. Engaging with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek, Breckman uniquely situates these important theorists within two hundred years of European thought and extends their profound relevance to today's political activism. (shrink)

Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, (...) which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism. The post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, uncannily echoing the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. Hegel and Marx denounced the Romantics for their otherworldly and nebulous posture, yet post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, Breckman traces a fascinating reflection of Romantic themes and resonances, and he explores in depth the effort to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that does not privilege materialist understandings of the social. Engaging with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek, Breckman uniquely situates these important theorists within two hundred years of European thought and extends their profound relevance to today's political activism. (shrink)

At the same time, the book is a contribution to recent philosophical debates, in particular on the prospects for a successful nominalist reconstruction of .

Since the early seventeenth century of Bacon, Gallileo and Descartes, the relations between science and religion as well as mind and body have remained volatile fault lines of conflict. The controversies surrounding these relations are as alive and pressing now as at any point over the course of the past four centuries. Adrian Johnston's transcendental materialism offers a new theoretical approach to these issues. Arming himself with resources provided by German idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, the life sciences and contemporary philosophical developments, (...) Johnston formulates an account of subjectivity that, although being both materialist and naturalist, does full justice to human beings as irreducible to natural matter alone. At the same time he argues against relapses into idealisms, dualisms and spiritualisms. Adventures in Transcendental Materialism elaborates Johnston's position through critical engagements with some of today's most important thinkers including Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Claude Milner, Martin Hägglund, William Connolly, and Jane Bennett"--Back cover. (shrink)

Badiou explores the exponentially rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published her for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althussers's canonical works For Marks and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of 'potato fascism' in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari's A Thousand Plateus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara (...) Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought.Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, the argues for the persistence of Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea. (shrink)

History of the human race from the point of view of mankind's changing ideas--sociological, cosmological, philosophica.

ABSTRACTThe question concerning the relation between thinking and the university is the starting point of this paper. After a very brief outline of some reflections on this topic, the case of Campus in Camps, a Palestinian experimental university, is presented to shed light on this issue. Inspired by Isabelle Stengers’ ecology of practices, it is possible to discern four requirements on thinking in the work of Campus in Camps, namely storytelling, comparing, mapping, and using. It will be argued that the (...) particularity of thinking at the university, is that it is done via artifices that initiate processes of composition, problematization, and attention. In the concluding section, the paper proposes to understand the study practice of Campus in Camps as an adventure that activates a sense of the possible, and hence opens up futures that are different from the ones that present themselves as obvious or unavoidable. (shrink)

This paper examines changing conceptions of honour and masculinity during the Colombian Wars of Independence in the early 19th century. It explores the position of the foreign women who accompanied British and Irish expeditions to join the war against Spanish rule, and shows how colonial, imperial and republican conceptions of masculinity were affected by the role that women played in these volunteer expeditions and in the wars in general. The paper considers women's experiences during war and peace, and examines their (...) experiences in the light of changing conceptions of masculinity at home, in the British empire and in Hispanic America in the early nineteenth century. The social mobility of the Wars of Independence shifted the ground on which these concepts rested for all groups involved. The participation of foreign women alongside male adventurers was a further ingredient in this disorientating period. (shrink)

The Adventure of the Human Intellect presents the latest scholarship on the beginnings of intellectual history on a broad scope, encompassing ten eminent ancient or early civilizations from both the Old and New Worlds. Borrows themes from The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946), updating an old topic with a new approach and up-to-date theoretical underpinning, evidence, and scholarship Provides a broad scope of studies, including discussion of highly developed ancient or early civilizations in China, India, West Asia, (...) the Mediterranean, and the Americas Examines the world view of ten ancient or early societies, reconstructed from their own texts, concerning the place of human beings in society and state, in nature and cosmos, in space and time, in life and death, and in relation to those in power and the world of the divine Considers a diversity of sources representing a wide array of particular responses to differing environments, circumstances, and intellectual challenges Reflects a more inclusive and nuanced historiographical attitude with respect to non-elites, gender, and local variations Brings together leading specialists in the field, and is edited by an internationally renowned scholar. (shrink)