We examine one of the well-known mathematical works of Abraham bar Ḥiyya: Ḥibbur ha-Meshiḥah ve-ha-Tishboret, written between 1116 and 1145, which is one of the first extant mathematical manuscripts in Hebrew. In the secondary literature about this work, two main theses have been presented: the first is that one Urtext exists; the second is that two recensions were written—a shorter, more practical one, and a longer, more scientific one. Critically comparing the eight known copies of the Ḥibbur, we show that (...) contrary to these two theses, one should adopt a fluid model of textual transmission for the various manuscripts of the Ḥibbur, because neither of these two theses can account fully for the changes among the various manuscripts. We hence offer to concentrate on the typology of the variations among the various manuscripts, dealing with macro-changes (such as omissions or additions of proofs, additional appendices or a reorganization of the text itself), and micro-changes (such as textual and pictorial variants). (shrink)

This analysis shows the common critique of representation suggested by the fluid metaphor in feminist theory and literature. The poetics of theory and the poetics of literature thus flow together into a metaphorical poetics of the fluid as a utopian form and space that subverts patriarchal language and textually undermines artificial divisions among the very genres of theory and literature that describe it.Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragmentary novel Der Fall Franza reconstructs the crisis and death of its eponymous young Austrian female protagonist, (...) who has been psychologically destroyed by her psychologist husband and who convinces her geologist brother to take her on a research trip to Egypt. One of the first events.. (shrink)

The Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated the fluidity of biblical and early Jewish texts in antiquity. How did early Jewish scribes understand the nature of their pluriform literature? How should modern textual critics deal with these fluid texts? Centered on the Serekh ha-Yaḥad - or Community Rule - from Qumran as a test case, this volume tracks the development of its textual tradition in multiple trajectories, and suggests that it was not understood as a single, unified composition (...) even in antiquity. Attending to material, textual, and literary factors, the book argues that ancient claims for textual identity ought to be given priority in discussions among textual critics about the ontology of biblical books. (shrink)

In this article I demonstrate the significance of a flexible approach to examining the autobiographical in early eighteenth-century womens writing. Using ‘old stories’, existing and developing narrative and literary forms, womens autobiographical writing can be discovered in places other than the more recognizable forms such as diaries and memoirs. Jane Barker and Delarivier Manley‘s works are important examples of the dynamic and creative use of cross-genre autobiographical writing. The integration of themselves in their fictional and poetic works demonstrates the potential (...) of generic fluidity for innovative ways to express and explore the self in textual forms. (shrink)

Inspired by Judith Butler's conceptualization of drag as ‘gender parody’, I develop the conceptual frame of ‘textual drag’ in order to define and examine the relationship between parody, satire and gender. I test this frame by reading two seminal feminist works, Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien. Both texts lend themselves particularly persuasively to analysis with this frame, as they each use parodic strategies to facilitate proto-queer satirical critiques of reductive gender norms. Orlando deploys an exaggerated (...) nineteenth-century biographical style, which foregrounds the protagonist's gender fluidity and her developing critique of the norms and systems that surround her, while Le Corps lesbien rewrites canonical romance narratives from a lesbian perspective, challenging the heterosexism inherent in these narratives and providing new modes of thinking about gender, desire and sexual interaction. (shrink)

This article presents the history of the medieval Latin translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It features the names of some key figures of the period like Burgundio of Pisa, Robert Grosseteste, and William of Moerbeke. The main focus lies on the question whether Robert Grosseteste had access to a complete copy of the earlier translation by Burgundio of Pisa, or only to the fragmentary version that has come down to us. To reach an answer, the Latin versions and their Greek (...) models are studied as “fluid texts”, which indicates that all individual witnesses of the text and of its translations contain readings and variants that differentiate them from each other and from the translator’s ultimate intentions. In their turn, the fluid elements cause changes to persist throughout the transmission process and continue to exert mutual influence. A detailed, though necessarily largely incomplete study of some of these aspects leads to unnoticed evidence and to an uncertain but optimistic conclusion. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

With the Ten Commandments as a case, the overall focus of this article is how a reader’s a priori concept of a text influences how he or she allows textual content and interpretive context to interact. The frame of the article is the claim by the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda that they will establish a society built on the Ten Commandments, a claim that raises questions about what they mean with this reference to ‘Ten Commandments’. The (...) article falls into two parts. The first part surveys some examples from the history of interpretation of the Ten Commandments, demonstrating contextual and terminological fluidity both in their biblical versions and in their postbiblical history of interpretation. With this insight, the second part discusses how LRA refers to the Ten Commandments in ways that demonstrate that the very concept ‘Ten Commandments’ is stronger than the details of their content. This enables the LRA to form ‘new commandments’ fitting with their ideology and struggle. (shrink)

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”.) needs to be read in the light of traditional Jewish sources. The question is, how does it stand up to modern hypotheses of gender construction? Yentl was originally published in Yiddish and was translated to English in the latter half of the twentieth century. We will see that the context within which to understand the story properly is encoded in the story itself, as Umberto Eco explains in his The Role of (...) the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation. We will see how the concept of a person’s gender, as a construction by social norms, is viewed within mainstream Jewish thought. Some textual issues and contemporary ideas of gender are applied to the story. Finally, the feature film Yentl. 1983. Yentl [film]. Los Angeles: United Artists Films.) is also compared the short story on which it was based as an example of translation and re-interpretation. (shrink)

This article seeks to enrich the social-theoretical and sociological approach to climate change by arguing in favour of a weak naturalistic ontology beyond the usually presupposed methodological sociologism or culturalism. Accordingly, attention is drawn to the elementary social forms that mediate between nature and the sociocultural form of life and thus figure as the central object of a critical sociological explanation of impediments retarding or preventing a transition to a sustainable global society. The argument is illustrated by a comparison of (...) the current situation of climate change to a similar situation some 10,000 years ago which conditioned the transition from hunting-gathering to farming. The crucial factor in the prehistoric transition had been the newly acquired cognitive fluidity, which not only became the defining feature of the modern human mind, but is also foundational of the corresponding social form of life. The cognitively fluid mind made possible new generative practices and the imagination of counterfactuals possessing an incursive force that is capable of transforming existing practices and social structures. The ultimate question, then, is twofold: whether there is enough potential left in the cognitively fluid mind for its societal significance to be activated to the benefit of a transformation of the current recalcitrant social formation; and whether we today are able and willing to recognize such potential and corresponding realizable possibilities upon which to act. (shrink)

The outer membrane (OM) is an essential barrier that guards Gram‐negative bacteria from diverse environmental insults. Besides functioning as a chemical gatekeeper, the OM also contributes towards the strength and stiffness of cells and allows them to sustain mechanical stress. Largely influenced by studies of Escherichia coli, the OM is viewed as a rigid barrier where OM proteins and lipopolysaccharides display restricted mobility. Here the discussion is extended to other bacterial species, with a focus on Myxococcus xanthus. In contrast to (...) the rigid OM paradigm, myxobacteria possess a relatively fluid OM. It is concluded that the fluidity of the OM varies across environmental species, which is likely linked to their evolution and adaptation to specific ecological niches. Importantly, a fluid OM can endow bacteria with distinct functions for cell‐cell and cell‐environment interactions. (shrink)

There is a question that has not been raised in the literature on Japan's regionalism: Why does it have a strong tendency toward making the boundary of the proposed East Asian community fluid? By looking back beyond the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s, a method hitherto untried, the paper shows that this Japanese propensity was also present in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, both then and now, Japan did (...) not and does not have a firm adherence to an ideology. These are two similarities between the pre-World War II period and the present (from the 1960s). On the other hand, Japan's present international situation is very different from its pre-World War II position. The paper uses the logic of the comparative method, which states that in two cases that are different in most aspects but the same in some, one or some of the similarities may explain the other similarity or similarities. It concludes that in both periods, the lack of a firm commitment to an ideology explains Japan's prejudice toward boundary fluidity. This explanation has the potential to contribute to a more comprehensive, if not yet a general theory of Japan's approach to regionalism because it applies not only to the present, but to the past as well. And it has to be stressed, the past refers not only to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s but also to the decades before. (shrink)

How do artists share, translate, reveal their imagination by using different semiotic systems; how can the audience partake in this imagination receiving only images, words, notation, sounds? Starting from artwork of the novelist Italo Calvino and the composers Helmut Lachenmann and Gyorgy Kurtag, this article addresses the relation among imagination, perception, remembrance and expression. The ‘images’ used, be they visual, verbal, auditory or haptic, are much more than images. They concentrate in themselves layers of subjective and intersubjective perceptual, cognitive and (...) emotive experiences. I will argue that imagination relies upon sensory fluidity. This allows us (1) to integrate sensorial experiences from different perceptual origins — synaesthesia, (2) to link past, present and future by way of sensorial and embodied patterns of remembrance — embodied sedimentation, and (3) to share intersubjective patterns of affect and effect, bridging idiosyncratic and universal human experiences. (shrink)

What can the philosophy of agency learn from Nguyen’s book on games? The most important lesson concerns, to use Nguyen’s terms, the ‘layered’ structure of our agency and the ‘fluidity’ requ...

Inspiration from Bauman’s analyses of„ liquid modernity” can be drawn to trace the transformations that love and hatred, as methods of solving the fundamental contradictions of human existence – stemming from the opposition between nature and culture, body and soul, death and immortality – undergo in these conditions. Those contradictions are manifested and reproduced in the relations between the subject and the other, relations of dividing and uniting, seeking transcendence. Analyzing these relations allows one to uncover the essence of death, (...) love, and hate between individuals and between communities of all sizes, including nations. Recognizing the essence of love and a subject‐object relationship, in which the truth of its subject and of onself is sought, a mutual surrender that transcendents the difference between egoism and altruism, and building a feeling of unity and dignity in a confrontation with inescapability of death – allows for the protection of those values against the destructive blows of hate. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a relatively undeveloped concept despite its increasing importance to corporations. One difficulty is the possible inexactness of CSR. Another is the apparent reluctance by regulatory authorities and policy makers to intervene in the area. This is largely a result of inhibitions created by traditional approaches to company law with emphasis on shareholder protection and financial disclosure. The consequence is the stultification of independent development of CSR by tying social issues to financial performance. This attitude might (...) not be unconnected to the theoretical and practical challenges in justifying CSR and defining its scope. The underlying impediment is a factual and theoretical failure to distinguish ‘instrumental’ and ‘pure’ (ethical) CSR. This article demonstrates that ethical CSR highlights the role of regulation, and a principal stance is that regulation is neither incompatible nor irreconcilable with ethical CSR. The article argues that cognizance of the intrinsic moral justification of ‘pure’ CSR is required for delineating the scope of CSR as well as for clarifying the desirability and extent of its regulation. It argues that the dynamic history and visage of multinational corporate corruption illuminates the fluidity of the regulation–CSR relationship. The current and widening backlash against transnational corporate corruption is, arguably, a demonstration of the position that regulation and CSR are not mutually exclusive and absolute concepts. This article submits that recognition and application of this ‘ethical’ and ‘instrumental’ CSR distinction is fundamental to the development of CSR and resolution of connected questions of regulation. (shrink)

I propose a neuroscience and animat research-inspired model and a thought experiment to test the hypothesis of a developmental relation between fluid and crystallized intelligence. I propose that crystallized intelligence is the result of well-defined activities and structures, whereas fluid intelligence is the physiological catalytic adaptation mechanism responsible for coordinating and regulating the crystallized structures. We can design experiments to reproduce exemplified normal and anomalous phenomena, especially disorders, and study possible cognitive treatments. (Published Online April 5 2006).

Non-Textual Marking Systems in Ancient Egypt. Edited by Julia Budka; Frank Kammerzell; and Sławomir Rzepka. Lingua Aegyptia, Studia Monographica, vol. 16. Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag, 2015. Pp. x + 322, illus. €59.

ABSTRACTWe can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and passages out of their historical contexts. Yet the methodological literature stresses the latter and says little about the former. This paper thus theorises the idea of textual context, distinguishes three types of textual context, and asks how we uncover the right textual contexts. I distinguish (...) four kinds of textual-context error, and offer practical tips for avoiding these errors. However, the beating heart of this paper is the history–philosophy debate: in contrast to the prevailing assumption that historical and philosophical analysis are fundamentally different, I show that a commitment to textual context, which should be entirely uncontroversial, also commits one to think philosophically. (shrink)

In the thesis literature review, an engineering graduate student is expected to place original research in the context of previous work by other researchers. However, for some students, particularly those for whom English is a second language, the literature review may be a mixture of original writing and verbatim source text appropriated without quotations. Such problematic use of source material leaves students vulnerable to an accusation of plagiarism, which carries severe consequences. Is such textual appropriation common in engineering master’s (...) writing? Furthermore, what, if anything, can be concluded when two texts have been found to have textual material in common? Do existing definitions of plagiarism provide a sufficient framework for determining if an instance of copying is transgressive or not? In a preliminary attempt to answer these questions, text strings from a random sample of 100 engineering master’s theses from the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database were searched for appropriated verbatim source text using the Google search engine. The results suggest that textual borrowing may indeed be a common feature of the master’s engineering literature review, raising questions about the ability of graduate students to synthesize the literature. The study also illustrates the difficulties of making a determination of plagiarism based on simple textual similarity. A context-specific approach is recommended when dealing with any instance of apparent copying. (shrink)

Textual representation of graphene in Sweden’s most circulated newspapers is analyzed in 229 articles from 2004 to 2018. What is and is not said about graphene is explored through systematically identifying the lexical and grammatical patterns of sentences using the word “graphene.” Graphene is said to be a super material with certain properties, to be an object of research, commercialization, and application, and to have societal significance. Given frequent classifications of graphene as a nanomaterial in scientific discourse, there is (...) notably limited reference to graphene as “nano” in the newspapers and only marginal reference to risk. This paper discusses the findings regarding this Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene in relation to its intertextuality, i.e., how texts draw upon and recontextualize other texts: the Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene echoes discourses of promise formulated elsewhere in society; it is not very diversified in terms of themes; it is dominated by positive and neutral representations rather than by risk; and it makes limited reference to the nano-discourse, even though, according to most definitions, graphene is a nanomaterial. (shrink)

The article provides textual evidence for the partial, subtle dependence of Theodore Daphnopates' sermon On the Birth of John the Baptist on Homily 42 on the same subject by Emperor Leo VI . This finding is then brought into correlation with Theodore's homiletic oeuvre and its production environment. Through its exploitation of the given source the sermon in question emerges as being directly related to Emperor Constantine VII and his literary preferences, as is the case with other works of (...) Theodore's as well. (shrink)

This book addresses the question of deconstruction by asking what it is and discussing its alternatives. To what extent does deconstruction derive from a philosophical stance, and to what extent does it depend upon a set of strategies, moves, and rhetorical practices that result in criticism? Special attention is given to the formulations offered by Jacques Derrida and by Paul de Man . And what, in deconstructive terms, does it mean to translate from one textual corpus into another? Is (...) it a matter of different theories of translation or of different practices? And what of difference itself? Does not difference already invoke the possibility of deconstruction’s “others”? Althusser, Adorno, and Deleuze are offered as exemplary cases. The essays in this volume examine in detail these differences and alternatives. The Textual Sublime is particularly concerned with how a text sets its own limits, borders, and margins, how it delimits what constitutes the text per se and how it invokes at the same time what is not determinately in the text. The textual sublime is that aspect of a text that deconstruction shows to be both an element of the text and what surpasses the text, what takes it outside itself and what ties it to differing philosophical, rhetorical, historical, and critical practices. (shrink)

The interest in textuality from a hermeneutic perspective has its historical origins in Martin Luther's doctrine of Sola Scriptura, “Only Scripture”. Schleiermacher, who to liberated hermeneutics from the Bible, presented a scientific account of textuality that consists in establishing a dialectic between the grammatical and the psychological. The modern hermeneutic theory of textuality was first developed by Hans‐Georg Gadamer. To be a work, says Ricoeur, textual discourse must satisfy three criteria: it must be a sequence longer than a sentence; (...) it must be codified into a genre (a story, poem, essay, etc.); and it must be uniquely configured into a style. Ricoeur's analysis of work in this sense is an attempt to synthesize the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher with what he sees as being its antithesis. The hermeneutics of both Ricoeur and Gadamer are returned to their Lutheran origins through this faith in textuality, or textual goodwill. (shrink)

Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment. The automation of textual entailment recognition supports a wide variety of text-based tasks, including information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Much ingenuity has been devoted to developing algorithms for identifying textual entailments, but relatively little to saying what textual entailment actually is. This article is a review of the logical and (...) philosophical issues involved in providing an adequate definition of textual entailment. We show that many natural definitions of textual entailment are refuted by counterexamples, including the most widely cited definition of Dagan et al. We then articulate and defend the following revised definition: T textually entails H = df typically, a human reading T would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by H from the proposition expressed by T. We also show that textual entailment is context-sensitive, nontransitive, and nonmonotonic. (shrink)

Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and (...) Woolf; and from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and "real" life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and (...) Woolf; and from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and real life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

Utilizing the metaphor of the palimpsest, this paper looks at layering processes at work in the natural world and human perceptions of it, paying particular attention to the manifestations of the past visible in constructions in and of the landscape. History is made of constant reformations, in which pieces of the past make up the present. The palimpsest offers a useful tool for discussing a trans-temporal landscape. The layers of landscape construction go beyond the literal geological construction, encompassing human pasts (...) and presents as well. Engaging the palimpsestuous layers at work in physical and textual landscape construction allows us to place human endeavours into more expansive notions of temporality. (shrink)

Self-plagiarism requires clear definition within an environment that places integrity at the heart of the research enterprise. This paper explores the whole notion of self-plagiarism by academics and distinguishes between appropriate and inappropriate textual re-use in academic publications, while considering research on other forms of plagiarism such as student plagiarism. Based on the practical experience of the authors in identifying academics’ self-plagiarism using both electronic detection and manual analysis, a simple model is proposed for identifying self-plagiarism by academics.

RNAs can do many things. They can store information, act in the world, and respond to the world. Because of these capabilities biologists have proposed a primordial ‘RNA world’ in which RNA, rather than DNA, performed the central role of replicator and repository of adaptive information. Deacon dismisses this hypothesis because replication is not about anything and because the structure of replicating molecules cannot contain information about the environment. I dispute both claims. An RNA and its opposite-sense complement represent each (...) other and, by two rounds of complementation, represent themselves. Although nucleic acid sequences do not change in response to their present environment, these sequences embody information about ancestral environments via the selective filtering of alternative sequences in those environments. Nucleic acid sequences are the textual record of what has worked in the past. (shrink)

RESUMO Este estudo tem por objetivo compreender o processo criativo durante a gênese textual de títulos em histórias inventadas por alunos recém-alfabetizados. A partir da perspectiva teórico-metodológica oferecida pela Genética Textual, dentro de uma abordagem linguístico-enunciativa, analisamos as relações associativas constituídas na recuperação de informações advindas das memórias semântica e episódica desses alunos. Tomamos como unidade de análise o diálogo face a face, estabelecido durante um processo de produção textual colaborativa, no contexto ecológico da sala de aula. (...) Nossa análise, qualitativa e microgenética, permitiu mapear o modo como ideias e elementos linguísticos são articulados de forma imprevisível e inusitada, formando redes associativas, tanto por semelhanças semânticas, quanto por semelhanças sonoras. As redes associativas indicam que a criatividade se dá entre o reconhecimento do jogo de linguagem e, ao mesmo tempo, preservação das propriedades do gênero textual e da unidade de sentido do manuscrito escolar em construção. ABSTRACT This study aims to understand the creative process during the textual genesis of titles in stories invented by newly literate students. Based on the theoretical-methodological perspective offered by Textual Genetics, within a linguistic-enunciative approach, we analyze the associative relations constituted in the retrieval of information from the semantic and episodic memories of these students. We take as a unit of analysis the face to face dialogue, established during a collaborative textual production process, in the ecological context of the classroom. Our qualitative and microgenetic analysis allowed us to map the way ideas and linguistic elements are articulated in an unpredictable and unusual way, forming associative networks, both by semantic and sound similarities. The associative networks indicate that creativity occurs between the recognition of the language set while preserving the properties of the textual genre and the unity of meaning of the school manuscript under construction. (shrink)

IN PHYSICS 2, Aristotle defines nature as the source and cause of being moved and of being at rest. Yet some recent translations have moved Aristotle's "being moved" into an active form. I shall argue that an active translation of this definition is potentially misleading, and that the implications of such a reading have had their place in the history of Aristotelian debate.

This book offers a stimulating new approach to studying social and political theory. It combines specially selected extracts from the political classics with original and insightful essays offering a commentary upon them. The reader is drawn into a dialogue with the Western political tradition’s principal thinkers, whose ideas provide a common currency in which to debate the problems facing modern societies. Each of the twelve chapters combines extracts from two (or in one case three) political philosophers on a key political (...) concept with a commentary essay. Each chapter does more than just introduce the reader to the classics; it also explains, via the commentary essay, the key concepts of political debate, and the historical contexts which led the thinkers to their different understandings of the nature of society. (shrink)

The following notes concern textual problems in the prologue and parodos of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. The text and apparatus criticus are based on those of M.L. West, Aeschylus: Tragoediae.

This article examines the textual afterlives of Utopia in China and Taiwan by surveying titles published between 2016 and the first half of 2017. We are dealing with a massive array of titles pertinent to Utopia related to multiple disciplines. Indeed, not only has the sixteenth-century neologism Utopia become "a term of common parlance" that has taken on its own life,1 but the concept of Utopia representing the ideal has also been extensively adapted and appropriated.2 Since any articulation expressing (...) a particular ideal can be considered "utopian" in its own right, it is not my intention to take into account all the titles that border on the articulation of or the desire for an... (shrink)

Thi Nguyen has given us a cracker of a book in Games: Agency as Art, one that sports philosophers amongst others will learn from for many years. One fascinating (but I will argue, pro...

Dōgen: Textual and Historical Studies is an impressive volume that marks a significant leap forward in the study of Zen Master Eihei Dōgen, founder of the Japanese Sōtō School. Dōgen’s life and thought are closely examined in light of the wider historical and religious contexts of Song dynasty China and the Kamakura era in Japan. This collection offers a careful consideration of Dōgen’s rich literary legacy by examining his significance situated as he was at the historical crossroads between the (...) Chinese Chan tradition and the birth of Japanese Zen. In particular, the volume contemplates the manner in which Dōgen’s historical — perhaps mythological — figure has been endorsed and cultivated by the Sōtō.. (shrink)

Via a hermeneutics focused on Chinese numerology and concentric arrangements, the book offers a novel construal of the textual universe proper to early China writings. The author lays bare distinguishable patterns of textual composition while relating them to corresponding patterns of thinking. He differentiates rhetorical variants through detailed studies of the Zhuangzi's Inner chapters, the Laozi, the Analects, and the Huainanzi. The philosophical depth and relevance of the Chinese ancient worldview appear in a fresh light when one unearths (...) the patterns into which its content is embedded. The focus on textual patterns and rhetorical arrangements also facilitates the reading of Chinese classics alongside other traditions. The book will be a valuable reference for scholars and graduate students studying Chinese literary criticism, Chinese philosophy, and comparative philosophy. (shrink)

This paper considers the use of textual analysis of oral histories as a method for historians of nursing. Fifty‐three oral histories of retired nurses in midwestern USA were analyzed for the purpose of historical reconstruction of past education experiences in nursing. Textual analysis was used to determine how nurses made sense of their educational experiences, and it involved gathering data, analyzing the information, and using a different method of interpreting the data. Although the participants responded to specific questions, (...) the oral histories in this study are more than mere answers to the researchers’ queries. The participants’ memories are narratives that are the joint product of both the historian and the participant. As such, the oral history becomes a text to be stored along with other primary sources for future historians’ use. The research also suggests decentering oral histories from an exclusively academic agenda and focusing more on what the participants choose to remember and why they make those choices. (shrink)

In order to establish patterns of materialization of the beliefs we are going to consider that these have defined mathematical structures. It will allow us to understand better processes of the textual, architectonic, normative, educative, etc., materialization of an ideology. The materialization is the conversion by means of certain mathematical correspondences, of an abstract set whose elements are beliefs or ideas, in an impure set whose elements are material or energetic. Text is a materialization of ideology and it is (...) any representation of the Reality represented by symbolic means. In all text T we can observe diverse topological structures: Metric Textual Space, Textual Topology and a Textual Lattice. (shrink)

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The (...) book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory. (shrink)

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer’s recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in the sense of Pollack [18]. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation (...) and reasoning used in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator’s simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization. (shrink)