This projecrt aims to present an online Reading Guide to help students, teachers and researchers navigate through Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics, or Institutions de physique (1740/42) and to make this important text visible to a broad audience.

If it is characteristic of obsessional neurosis that an object can be an object of desire only insofar as it is impossible object, this impossibility is also traced at the basis of any desire. The obsessional however specializes in setting things up "so that the object of his desire becomes the signifier of this impossibility". By aiming at or erasing the desire of the other, the obsessional depreciates his own desire. Žižek provides us with a rather classic version of this (...) when describing the place of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde in the history of modernity. This paper considers Žižek’s reading alongside a painting by Chilean artist Juan Davila, which I shall argue presents a quite different approach to the writing of modernity: one that is not based on an erasure of feminine jouissance. (shrink)

This essay contrasts Nietzsche’s remarks on elite education with W.E.B. Du Bois’ demand for democratized education. The essay takes their remarks as springboards for a twenty-first century philosophy of education rather than an historical account of their philosophies. Both thinkers cultivated Kant and Hegel’s dream that the spirit of freedom guided by reason would unite all the world’s peoples. Both held that education was key to realizing the dream. Their judgments about qualifying for education separated them. Nietzsche insisted that only (...) the elite should receive the fullest measure of education. Du Bois believed that in the future virtually every human being would receive a university-level education. The essay’s principal point is to show how contemporary technology can make Du Bois’ dream a reality. An African philosopher’s working model demonstrates a path to universal university education. (shrink)

Cherchant à refonder l’édifice euclidien, Leibniz a formulé une Caractéristique géométrique qui annonce les concepts géneraux de la théorie des ensembles. Dans ce cadre, il a pu en particulier formaliser sa conception du continu. L’intérêt du Pacidius Philalethi (1676) est de montrer qu’en choisissant la conception intensionnelle du continu -position qu’il ne dementira jamais- il sélectionne parmi les images duales celle dont se déduit le changement qualitatif, base d’une philosophie naturelle qui soutiendra encore la dynamique ultérieure. Une tâche se dessine (...) maintenant, soit déduire la nécessité d’un mouvement universei et infiniment varié à partir de ses conditions topologiques.We know that Leibniz intended to bring new foundations to the euclidean geometry and he has according to this view formulate a Characteristica geometrica which announces few general concepts of set theory. Parlicularly he tried to formalise his conception of continuity. Before the main interest of the Pacidius Philalethi (1676) is here: showing us that Leibniz when he chooses an intensional conception of continuity he chooses in the same time the dual image from which be can deduce the qualitative variation. We reckon again these conception at the grounds of his later philosophy of nature. But now we have to follow Leibniz demostrating how universal and infinite variations flow from its topological conditions. (shrink)

Housed in one volume for the first time are several of the seminal essays on Du Bois's contributions to sociology and critical social theory: from DuBois as inventor of the sociology of race to Du Bois as the first sociologist of American religion; from Du Bois as a pioneer of urban and rural sociology to Du Bois as innovator of the sociology of gender and culture; and finally from Du Bois as groundbreaking sociologist of education and cultural criminologist to Du (...) Bois as critic of the disciplinary decadence of the discipline of sociology. Unlike any other anthology or critical reader on Du Bois, this new volume offers an excellent overview of the critical commentary on arguably one of the most imaginative and innovative, perceptive and prolific founders of the discipline of sociology. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that a comprehensive understanding of addiction and its treatment should include an existential perspective. I provide a brief overview of an existential perspective of addiction and recovery, which will contextualize the remainder of the essay. I then present a case study of how the six-step philosophical practice method of Logic-Based Therapy can assist with issues that often arise in addiction treatment framed through an existential perspective.

Commentary on Tattvacintāmaṇi of Gaṅgeśa, 13th century, work on Hindu logic and epistemology of the Navya Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy.

Many commentators have suggested that the metaphysical portions of Emilie du Châtelet's Institutions de physique are a mere retelling of Leibniz's views. I argue that a close reading of the text shows that du Châtelet's cosmological argument and discussion of God's nature contains both Lockean and Leibnizian elements. I discuss where she follows Locke in her arguments, what Leibnizian elements she brings in, and how this enables her to avoid some of the mistakes commonly attributed to Locke's formulation of the (...) cosmological argument. I show that while du Châtelet accepts the causal principle ex nihilo nihil fit, she does not utilize Locke's stronger causal principle. I also discuss her use of the principle of sufficient reason in both improving the Lockean cosmological argument and in proving the attributes of God. (shrink)

Extant research on design thinking is subjective and limited. This manuscript combines protocol analysis and electroencephalogram to read design thoughts in the core design activities of concept generation phase. The results suggest that alpha band power had event related synchronization in the scenario task and divergent thinking occupies a dominant position. However, it had event related desynchronization in analogy and inference activities, etc., and it is stronger for mental pressure and exercised cognitive processing. In addition, the parietooccipital area differs significantly (...) from other brain areas in most design activities. This study explores the relationship of different design thinking and EEG data, which is innovative and professional in the field of design, providing a more objective data basis and evaluation method for future applied research and diverse educational practices. (shrink)

In experimental cognitive psychology, objects of inquiry are typically operationalized with psychological tasks. When interpreting results from such tasks, we focus primarily on behavioral measures such as reaction times and accuracy rather than experiences – i.e., phenomenology – associated with the task, and posit that the tasks elicit the desired cognitive phenomenon. Evaluating whether the tasks indeed elicit the desired phenomenon can be facilitated by understanding the experience during task performance. In this paper we explore the breadth of experiences that (...) are elicited by and accompany task performance using in-depth phenomenological and qualitative methodology to gather subjective reports during the performance of a visuo-spatial change detection task. Thirty-one participants were asked to remember either colors, orientations or positions of the presented stimuli and recall them after a short delay. Qualitative reports revealed rich experiential landscapes associated with the task-performance, suggesting a distinction between two broad classes of experience: phenomena at the front of consciousness and background feelings. The former includes cognitive strategies and aspects of metacognition, whereas the latter include more difficult-to-detect aspects of experience that comprise the overall sense of experience. We focus primarily on the background feelings, since strategies of task-performance to a large extent map onto previously identified cognitive processes and discuss the methodological implications of our findings. (shrink)

China was the first to produce tea and consumed the largest quantities and its craftsmanship was the finest. During the development of Chinese history, Chinese Tea culture came into being. In ancient China, drinking tea is not only a very common phenomenon but also an elegant taste for men of letters and officials. Chinese tea culture is extensive and profound and it is necessary for foreigners to understand Chinese tea culture for the purpose of smooth and deepen the communication with (...) the Chinese people. (shrink)

Jannie Pretorius and Michael Von Maltitz have identified some of the most pressing problems in South African education.1 They have argued that the education system is still suffering from the fragmented effects of apartheid and that the postapartheid government is struggling to set schools in motion to provide learners with authentic perspectives on the realities of their existence in a postapartheid South Africa. Naledi Pandor, the country's previous minister of education, painted a rather somber picture of the situation in the (...) Eastern Cape, one of South Africa's nine provinces:In a context in which there is ineffective system response on core obligations, it is very important to isolate those attributes that are .. (shrink)

Arlie Russell Hochschild is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include: The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind and The Commercialization of Intimate Life. In her work, Hochschild explores the many ways we manage our emotions in personal life and perform emotional labor in the workplace. Her most recent work explores the growing political divide in America, and the need for each side to climb an ‘empathy wall’ to begin dialogue with those (...) on the other side. She reports on five years of field-work among Tea Party enthusiasts in Louisiana in her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. In this interview, she reflects on the phenomenon of critique within the framework of emotional labor, which leads to discussions on neoliberalism and the ideal worker in contemporary working life. (shrink)

Economic dispatch plays an important role in power system operation, since it can decrease the operating cost, save energy resources, and reduce environmental load. This paper presents an improved particle swarm optimization called biogeography-based learning particle swarm optimization for solving the ED problems involving different equality and inequality constraints, such as power balance, prohibited operating zones, and ramp-rate limits. In the proposed BLPSO, a biogeography-based learning strategy is employed in which particles learn from each other based on the quality of (...) their personal best positions, and thus it can provide a more efficient balance between exploration and exploitation. The proposed BLPSO is applied to solve five ED problems and compared with other optimization techniques in the literature. Experimental results demonstrate that the BLPSO is a promising approach for solving the ED problems. (shrink)

Working memory (WM) is a fundamental cognitive ability to support complex thought, but it is limited in capacity. WM training has shown the potential to make benefit for those in need. Many studies have shown the potential of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to transiently enhance WM performance by delivering low current to the brain cortex of interest via electrodes on the scalp. TDCS has also been revealed as a promising intervention to augment WM training in a few studies. However, (...) those few tDCS-paired WM training studies focused more on the effect of tDCS on WM enhancement and its transferability after training but paid less attention to the variation of cognitive performance during the training procedure. The current study attempted to explore the effect of tDCS on the variation of performance during WM training in healthy young adults. All the participant received WM training with the load-adaptive verbal N-back task for five days. During the training procedure, active/sham anodal high-definition tDCS (HD-tDCS) was used to stimulate the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). To examine the training effect, pre- and post-test were performed respectively one-day before and after the training sessions respectively. At the beginning of each training session, stable-load WM tasks were performed to examine the performance variation during training. Compared to the sham stimulation, higher learning rates of performance metrics during the training procedure were found when WM training was combined with active anodal HD-tDCS. The performance improvements (post-pre) of the active group were also found to be higher than those of sham group and were transferred to a similar untrained WM task. Further analysis revealed that the negative relation between the training improvements and baseline performance. These findings show the potential that tDCS may be leveraged as an intervention to facilitate WM training for those in need of higher WM ability. (shrink)

What does being money consist in? We argue that something is money if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange. What kinds of things can be money? We argue against the common view that a variety of things (notes, coins, gold, cigarettes, etc.) can be money. All monetary systems are (...) best interpreted as implementing the same basic protocol. Money, i.e. the thing that we coordinate on acquiring in order to lower our transaction costs, is, in all cases, a set of positions on an abstract mathematical object, namely a relative ratio scale. The things that we ordinarily call ‘money’ are merely records of positions on such a scale. (shrink)

La transcription de corpus de langage oral est un art difficile car c’est une activité langagière. En particulier, elle inclut le processus d’interprétation des propos d’autrui que l’on trouve dans toute interaction langagière. Or ce qu’attend le scientifique est une description des données de langage qui s’affranchirait de cette interprétation, ce qui est impossible. On doit donc chercher à générer un processus d’interprétation simple, consensuel, qui puisse être compris par tout utilisateur d’un corpus. Pour cela, on utilise des normes de (...) codage précises, claires, aussi peu ambiguës que possible, ainsi qu’un alignement sur du matériel sonore ou audiovisuel. On peut aussi accompagner les transcriptions d’un contexte très riche, soit langagier (phonologique, syntaxique, sémantique, pragmatique), soit extra-langagier (situation, actions, description de scène). Ces difficultés techniques sont présentées dans le cas de corpus de jeunes enfants (projet Léonard) qui exemplifie les problèmes de transcription de langage oral. Les outils et formats utilisés sont ceux du projet CHILDES avec des évolutions spécifiques qui reflètent les difficultés que nous avons relevées dans notre travail de corpus et les solutions adoptées. (shrink)

We prove that if an ultrafilter ${\mathcal{L}}$ is not coherent to a Q-point, then each analytic non-σ-bounded topological group G admits an increasing chain ${\langle G_\alpha:\alpha < \mathfrak b(\mathcal L)\rangle}$ of its proper subgroups such that: (i) ${\bigcup_{\alpha}G_\alpha=G}$ ; and (ii) For every σ-bounded subgroup H of G there exists α such that ${H\subset G_\alpha}$ . In case of the group Sym(ω) of all permutations of ω with the topology inherited from ω ω this improves upon earlier results of S. (...) Thomas. (shrink)

Two recent texts join the field of research on the Oulipo writing group. The End of Oulipo?: An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement is a slim volume, mostly comprising two essays and a preface. Authors Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito contribute one essay each, in which they address some of the issues that have arisen with the present-day Oulipo. Cécile De Bary’s Une nouvelle pratique littéraire en France: Histoire du groupe Oulipo de 1960 à nos jours is almost as brief, (...) and assesses the Oulipo in terms of its evolution from experimental workshop to literary group.The Oulipo, or “Ouvoir de littérature potentielle” is now over fifty years old. It was founded in November 1960 by novelist... (shrink)

This article (in German) explores divine activity, human passivity, and the role played by grace in the medieval image-and-verse program "Christ and the Loving Soul". After discussing the historical context and target readers and laying out the story of CMS, I show how this popular piece of late medieval devotional literature expresses complex theological and philosophical ideas that central to understanding the narrative. I argue for a new way of reading CMS that places emphasis on movement and the notion of (...) volitional "turning points" ("Ke(h)rmomente") - a reading that sheds new light on medieval understandings of divine acts of grace and human autonomy. (shrink)

La transcription de corpus de langage oral est un art difficile car c’est une activité langagière. En particulier, elle inclut le processus d’interprétation des propos d’autrui que l’on trouve dans toute interaction langagière. Or ce qu’attend le scientifique est une description des données de langage qui s’affranchirait de cette interprétation, ce qui est impossible. On doit donc chercher à générer un processus d’interprétation simple, consensuel, qui puisse être compris par tout utilisateur d’un corpus. Pour cela, on utilise des normes de (...) codage précises, claires, aussi peu ambiguës que possible, ainsi qu’un alignement sur du matériel sonore ou audiovisuel. On peut aussi accompagner les transcriptions d’un contexte très riche, soit langagier (phonologique, syntaxique, sémantique, pragmatique), soit extra-langagier (situation, actions, description de scène). Ces difficultés techniques sont présentées dans le cas de corpus de jeunes enfants (projet Léonard) qui exemplifie les problèmes de transcription de langage oral. Les outils et formats utilisés sont ceux du projet CHILDES avec des évolutions spécifiques qui reflètent les difficultés que nous avons relevées dans notre travail de corpus et les solutions adoptées. (shrink)

In the Chinese stock market, special treatment (ST) firms are the firms listed as facing imminent danger of delisting, unless they return to profitability after reporting two consecutive annual losses. Some ST firms voluntarily pay substantial fees to their external auditors to conduct interim audits, which are not required by regulations. In this study, we investigate and find that ST firms that pay for voluntary interim audits report greater discretionary accrued earnings, higher non-operating earnings, and higher returns on assets in (...) ensuing annual reports. As a result, these firms are more likely to return to profitability and reduce their delisting risk. Our results, which contribute to the current debate on auditor independence, appear to be consistent with the possibility that ST firms “buy” external auditors’ cooperation to manipulate earnings when faced with the threat of delisting. (shrink)

Philosophy of technology was not initially considered a consolidated field of inquiry. However, under the influence of sociology and pragmatist philosophy, something resembling a consensus has emerged in a field previously marked by a lack of agreement amongst its practitioners. This has given the field a greater sense of structure and yielded interesting research. However, the loss of the earlier “messy” state has resulted in a limitation of the field’s scope and methodology that precludes an encompassing view of the problematic (...) issues inherent in the question of technology. It is argued that the heterodox disunity and diversity of earlier philosophy of technology was not a mark of theoretical immaturity but was necessitated by the field’s complex subject matter. It is further argued that philosophy of technology should return to its pluralistic role as a meta-analytical structure linking insights from different fields of research. (shrink)

There is a tension in Emilie Du Châtelet’s thought on mathematics. The objects of mathematics are ideal or fictional entities; nevertheless, mathematics is presented as indispensable for an account of the physical world. After outlining Du Châtelet’s position, and showing how she departs from Christian Wolff’s pessimism about Newtonian mathematical physics, I show that the tension in her position is only apparent. Du Châtelet has a worked-out defense of the explanatory and epistemic need for mathematical objects, consistent with their metaphysical (...) nonfundamentality. I conclude by sketching how Du Châtelet’s conception of mathematical indispensability differs interestingly from many contemporary approaches. (shrink)

Pink and blue colors have been found to associate with gender stereotypes in previous Western studies. The purpose of the present study was to explore the neuropsychological processing basis of this effect in contemporary Chinese society. We presented stereotypically masculine or feminine occupation words in either pink or blue colors to Chinese college students in a modified Stroop paradigm, in which participants were asked to classify each occupation word by gender as quickly and accurately as possible. Event-related potential signals were (...) concurrently recorded in order to identify the temporal dynamics of gender stereotypical interference effect. The behavioral results showed that pink–masculine stimuli elicited a longer response time and lower accuracy than blue–masculine stimuli in the participants, while no such differences were observed between pink–feminine and blue–feminine conditions. The ERP results further revealed distinctive neural processing stages for pink–masculine stimuli in P200, N300, N400, and P600. Overall, our results suggested that pink but not blue was a “gendered” color in Chinese culture. Moreover, our ERP findings contributed to the understanding of the neural mechanism underlying the processing of gender–color stereotypes. (shrink)