In his essay Thinking Colours and/or Machines Kittler hints at a key point in the emergence of modern European culture: the point at which ‘letters and numbers no longer coincide’. In this essay - first published in 2003 as Zahl und Ziffer - Kittler traces the split between numerals and numbers in sweeping historical detail. This is part of a much larger project, the aim of which is to think about technology, history and culture anew by considering the ways in (...) which ‘letters, numbers, images and tones’ have been differentiated and re-integrated by developing notation systems and media technologies. In this present essay, Kittler is concerned specifically with the question of number. His argument is that numbers and numerals have not always stood apart. In Old Hebrew and even nursery rhymes, for example, numbers are in fact words. This might seem like a banal observation, but for Kittler it is crucial as historically, mathematics proper only developed ‘in cultures in which numbers are present as numerals’, a development which entailed the transformation of numbers from signifiers into signifieds and which rested on the emergence of storage and transmission media that Kittler calls ‘the media of mathematics’. This connection between media and mathematics is explored through a wide range of philosophical sources: Plato, Philolaus, Aristotle and Aquinas, to name but a few. Kittler is fascinated by the inscription technologies that make mathematics possible, and which at the same time structure cultural forms as well as our bodily experience of them. As he puts it in a programmatic aside, ‘media studies only make sense’ if they focus on how ‘media make senses.’ Hence his focus on the Greek phonetic alphabet: for Kittler, its superiority has less to do with its ability to reproduce the spoken words of any language, than with the fact that at one point it was used to handle language, music, and mathematics - that is, one and the same set of signs was used to encode letters, tones and numbers. This, however, was not an abstract undertaking but developed in constant feedback with specific instruments or media, especially the lyre and the bow. It was here that fundamental concepts such as logoi were first developed that were subsequently distorted, misunderstood and deprived of their musico-technical origins by philosophers such as Aristotle. Kittler’s essay is thus also part of a larger cultural project, indebted in particular to Martin Heidegger, whose aim it is to ferret out the different, as yet unrevealed beginning of occidental culture. Moreover, while it was necessary for the evolution of modern mathematics that numbers receive a notation system of their own that will allow for ratios and decimals, among others, it is obvious that Kittler sees the computer as a return of universal alphabet that operates in constant feedback with a medium that shapes our senses: ‘In the Greek alphabet our senses were present - and thanks to Turing they are so once again.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Medical MishapAngela MooreIn western society we live in an environment where image is valued and sought after. Acquiring Spastic Cerebral Palsy through no fault of one’s own directly challenges and contradicts this. We tend to base our judgments of other people on the way they “look” before we even speak to them or get to know them. For many centuries western society has valued and aspired to having (...) the “perfect” image and body shape. The children’s nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” illustrates that as far back as the 1600’s when something was broken people felt there was a “need” to correct the damage and fix the problem. Maybe “Humpty Dumpty” was an obese person who fell off the wall, maybe he was an intoxicated soldier, maybe it was a name of a large cannon that was sitting on the wall of Colchester (Wright, 2008) which was set up to protect the city. No matter what the situation, the reader is left with a feeling that whenever there was something wrong with Humpty Dumpty, there was a need to correct the error and fix what was broken. Because he was “different” or “not normal” in one way or another he was not valued for his role by members of his local community. The reader is left to form his or her own opinion. Society continues to hold those views to this very day.I am a secondary emergency teacher, have completed a Masters in Special Needs along with having a permanent acquired physical disability, Spastic Cerebral Palsy, affecting my four limbs. This was caused after an initial medical examination was “botched” by an unsupervised intern—the specialist left the theatre during the procedure when I was 14 weeks of age, over forty years ago. Further medical testing was arranged because there was a belief that I may have had hydrocephalus—swelling and excess fluid buildup around my brain causing it to be unnecessarily enlarge for my age. In my family’s case this seems to be an hereditary trait that has passed from my father who has a large head. It’s interesting to note that an obstetrician made a comment to my sister on the size of her toddler’s head. [End Page 213]Since 1970 I have had a range of both positive and negative medical experiences. As a child who wasn’t able to comprehend what and why things were happening I was very frightened and often very upset. As an adult I am able to understand what and why something is going on and I ask questions when needed.“Normal” has always been completing the same things but in a different way to other people while intending to reach the same outcome of “success.” There are many ways to skin a cat and “normal” is a term that has a very broad definition which is dependent upon the individual and the situation at hand. What is “normal” for me will be “different” for someone else. What is “normal” for another person will be “different” for me. It’s the differences between individuals that we come to value later on in life. That I cope in a different manner from others has clearly been aided by being able to make use of information technology—laptop, mobile phones, printers, etc.—along with a feeling that the acquired physical disability that I have is a small part of the overall person that I am. Before I became a person with an acquired disability I was a normal, happy, healthy baby and even now although I will always have a disability I have excellent health and choose not to be defined by having acquired a disability. Unlike some other people I consider myself to be a person who “acquired” a disability instead of being a “disabled” person. Having an acquired physical disability is a small part of the person I am. The manner in which I acquired a severe physical disability is what I have come to value along with the fact that I have done well in many areas of life while having such a severe condition.Unlike people who had disabilities in the 19... (shrink)

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from his Through the Looking Glass, “The time has come to talk of many things.” Not as the Walrus did in the nursery rhyme, “of sho...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Hannah Baker Saltmarsh This Girl I Lost Touch With This girl, who was afraid to enter a room— a girl born in the woods, on moss, whose family dreamt under quilts, who wore dresses that matched anything fabric in the house, even the dresses without loneliness— I held her hand in the corridor-dark until the speaking-in-tongues at (...) the community college dispersed into prayers with too many gerunds and too much fervor that wouldn’t adjust if you got a thousand dollars in the mail or jury duty, faith subtle as a crucifix the size of God on the highway. I waited with her until it was over, although the prayer group was never really over. Over rooms of crowded, faith-based humidity, she loved corridors of woods, the rushes of running away. This girl and I, we were cult-lured, but then the leader stepped down—was it porn, alcohol? He drove us around in a red jeep without doors— the first time I drove in a man’s car, I was eighteen so I fell in love: looking straight ahead together, arm hair touching, the cathedral of autumn anticipating a shape to hold you, the wind that you sometimes hollered over. What happened I can’t see, but when he left the group, I left: the death of visions. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh 95 This girl could long for a man in her fingernails, and, without talking, take a man from his pregnant wife’s side, have his even newer children, this girl who wouldn’t go in a room all alone, walked right in, somewhere we’ve not been, and never left. Monostich in Praise of Four Missed Foul Shots in a Row, Ending with a Line by Shaquille O’Neal —Orlando Magic vs. Houston Rockets, Game 1, NBA Final, 1995 Each mistake at the foul line longs to be its own distinct trip-up, divorced from the tragic-comic failure automatic-reflex of a protagonist on a shame-rampage; each delicate flaw of glass, net, rim wants to be denied once at the charity line, once and only once of red-lipsticked points, the naive purity of one aberrant error in calculation—not bring bleacher-crowds to their feet, posterless hands in the vaulted air before tallying Nick Anderson up as Brick Anderson, most hated NBA player of all time, and by his own fans not believing their own eyes as a series of empty arcs toward scoring dovetails into quadruple humiliations and a goofy smile of gutted hopes and boyish fear-tangled awe that any brain so practiced (for this and what else?) could fail so many times in a row, each fail better and Beckett-harder until the last exit out of obliterating loss is part of the abyss too, unless you are quick on your feet for sports broadcasting... but there is no end to swindled championships if you are a man who’s never had to face the extinction of his early twenties or suck the aftertaste of multi-millionaire juice cocktails poured with a legend’s touch, but in the soapy-sweet glass of your Dixie cup liquor, however close to the sound of Shaq’s name spoken in every language, stares your same lovesick reflection in the welt of that shot-glass mirror, mouthing the bitters of paranoid distraction, unripe manhood, aged ingratitude, and a starless Orlando Magic blue diamond broomed over by nursery-rhyme witches brushing out the cobweb-haze because the crowd is always the same crowd calling you swept... each fumbling error of pressure you let get to you, if only it could be a plotless, lyric monostich without arc, not driven to the plot that is your grave, where the unfaithful, the murderers, liars, and cheaters are defined by threads, no, snapped pieces, of seconds and, as Dante would have it, sorted in hell by a singular thought or deed so 96 Hannah Baker Saltmarsh transformative as to name you; the blue and white jersey on the floor, fists and feet, knees and elbows vacuumed in tantrum, hyped up in the court glare and... (shrink)

Name does matter. During exploration of knowledge, name provides dignity of existence. Isolating a quid from a whole, name gives that quid a status (i.e., helps it to gain a space, time, and fact). Biohistory had its own name in August 1992, when finally my mind isolated the historical quantum as the promotor of life. Shape follows name; Biohistory began to take shape in 1993, when it ran into Edgar Morin's ideas. For about a year, Biohistory had been a game (...) I toyed with, using it to show my pupils the explosion of events in spaces. I even gave it a poetic dress, in the form of nursery-rhymes (Spazioliberina; Colamonico, 1993). In 1993 I also read Morin's Introduction to Complex Thought (1993), in which it is assumed that a new science and a new doctrine would manage to read the one-whole. It was then that I understood that this theory would have been the body-mind-eye of my joyful child. So I adopted Morin as the father of my Biohistory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard J. Arneson BENTHAMITE UTILITARIANISM AND HARD TIMES IT is commonly understood that Dickens's vaguely specified criticisms of the "Hard Facts" philosophy in Hard Times are intended as criticisms of Benthamite Utilitarianism. It is also commonly held that, on the level of theory at any rate, Dickens's criticisms are in the form of caricature so crudely painted as almost entirely to misrepresent its object. ' It would be foolish (...) to deny the presence of bathos, flat caricature, and stereotyped sentiment in this novel, or for that matter in any of Dickens's novels. But alongside the flamboyantly bad there is much stronger and subtler material. In this paper I examine the criticisms of Utilitarianism in Hard Times, and argue that Dickens's arguments possess more cogency than he is usually given credit for. It will turn out that much of the intellectual interest of the novel derives from the tension between what Dickens says to us in authorial sermons and what he shows us in the structure of his plot. One complaint Dickens offers is that Utilitarians like Thomas Gradgrind oppose fact to fancy and, in their gross worship of fact and downcrying of fancy, stifle much in human beings that is essential to their flourishing. The fact-versus-fancy theme is traceable in the novel's handling of education in the Gradgrind school, of the upbringing of the Gradgrind children, and of working-class life in industrial towns such as Coketown. Here as elsewhere Dickens means to present in tandem a criticism of the "Hard Facts" philosophy and of the society which he believed increasingly to be operating on the principles of that philosophy; hence a response to Hard Times must deal with social criticism as well as philosophical critique. What exactly is it that Gradgrind thinking aims to excise from Victorian culture by its campaign against "fancy"? Critics have objected that 60 Richard J. Arneson61 Dickens's notion of fancy comprehends only playful imagination and light-minded amusement and as such cannot bear the heavy burden of argument he rests upon it.2 In many passages of the novel fancy is indeed tantamount to play. But Dickens insists on the significance of fancy for moral education and on the continuity between light fancy and the poetical imagination that heightens moral sensibility. Fancy, nurtured in a child even in the humble pursuits of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, turns into moral imagination in an adult, who is thereby enabled to place himself in thought in the position of another, intuit his way of thinking, sense his feelings, and so acquire the knowledge and the inclination to treat the other with intelligent sympathy. That Gradgrind education frustrates this natural process is Dickens's complaint against it. It is worth calling attention to the similarity between Dickens's complaint against a vaguely discerned spirit of the times and the much more focused criticism urged by J. S. Mill against Bentham in his 1838 essay in London and Westminster Review. Bentham, says Mill, lacked himself, and failed to appreciate, a certain sort of imagination— that which enables us, by a voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings which, if it were indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another. This power constitutes the poet, insofar as he does anything but melodiously utter his own actual feelings.... Mill concludes that Bentham, lacking imagination and an historical sense, "saw accordingly in man little but what the vulgarest eye can see."3 And in his Autobiography, Mill acknowledges that in the Benthamite Radical circles he frequented in the 1820's, "From this neglect both in theory and in practise of the cultivation of feeling, naturally resulted, among other things, an undervaluing of poetry, and of Imagination generally, as an element of human nature."4 A sympathetic internal critic of Utilitarianism, Mill tries to retain the essentials of Bentham's secular and empiricist moral doctrine while softening its cruder aspects. Like Bentham, Mill identifies morality with furthering the greatest happiness... (shrink)

What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like _Baa Baa Black Sheep_ be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression? In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. _How to Read Literature _is the book of choice for students new to the study of literature and for all other readers interested in deepening their understanding and enriching their (...) reading experience. In a series of brilliant analyses, Eagleton shows how to read with due attention to tone, rhythm, texture, syntax, allusion, ambiguity, and other formal aspects of literary works. He also examines broader questions of character, plot, narrative, the creative imagination, the meaning of fictionality, and the tension between what works of literature say and what they show. Unfailingly authoritative and cheerfully opinionated, the author provides useful commentaries on classicism, Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism along with spellbinding insights into a huge range of authors, from Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling to Jane Austen and Samuel Beckett. (shrink)

_A literary master’s entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasure_ What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like _Baa Baa Black Sheep_ be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression? In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. _How to Read Literature _is the book of choice for students new to the study (...) of literature and for all other readers interested in deepening their understanding and enriching their reading experience. In a series of brilliant analyses, Eagleton shows how to read with due attention to tone, rhythm, texture, syntax, allusion, ambiguity, and other formal aspects of literary works. He also examines broader questions of character, plot, narrative, the creative imagination, the meaning of fictionality, and the tension between what works of literature say and what they show. Unfailingly authoritative and cheerfully opinionated, the author provides useful commentaries on classicism, Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism along with spellbinding insights into a huge range of authors, from Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling to Jane Austen and Samuel Beckett. (shrink)

This book on the topic of ethics and poetry consists of contributions from different continents on the subject of applied ethics related to poetry. It should gather a favourable reception from philosophers, ethicists, theologians and anthropologists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America and allows for a comparison of the healing power of words from various religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions. The first part of this book presents original poems that express ethical emotions and aphorism related to a philosophical questioning (...) of the grounding of our values for life. The poems are written by twelve authors coming from four continents, for whom poetic emotions are sources of artistic inspiration and that can be used for conflict resolution. In the second part, which features short essays, nine authors tackle how poems, symbolic representations, metaphorical narratives and lies impact the space of possibilities, in which we are moved to action, knowledge formation, and how we imagine the world together. (shrink)

This unusual book takes the form of a dialogue between a linguist and another scientist. This unusual book takes the form of a dialogue between a linguist and another scientist. The dialogue takes place over six days, with each day devoted to a particular topic--and the ensuing digressions. The role of the linguist is to present the fundamentals of the minimalist program of contemporary generative grammar. Although the linguist serves essentially as a voice for Noam Chomsky's ideas, he is not (...) intended to be a portrait of Chomsky himself. The other scientist functions as a kind of devil's advocate, making the arguments that linguists tend to face from those in the "harder" sciences. The author does far more than simply present the minimalist program. He conducts a running argument over the status of theoretical linguistics as a natural science. He raises the general issues of how we conceive words, phrases, and transformations, and what these processes tell us about the human mind. He also attempts to reconcile generative grammar with the punctuated equilibrium version of evolutionary theory. In his foreword, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini says, "The vast number of readers who have been enthralled by Goedel, Escher, Bach may well like also this syntactic companion, a sort of 'Chomsky, Fibonacci, Bach.'". (shrink)

Poetry turns everything into life. It is that form of life that turns everything into language. It does not come to us unless language itself has become a form of life. That is why it is so unquiet. For it does not cease to work on us. To be the dream of which we are the sleep. A listening, awakening that passes through us, the rhythm that knows us and that we do not know. It is the organization in language (...) of what has always been said to escape language: life, the movement no word is supposed to be able to say. And in effect words do not say it. That is why poetry is a meaning of time more than the meaning of words. Even when its course is ample, it is contained in what passes from us through words. It does not have the time of glaciers and ferns. It tells about a time of life. Through everything that it names. Even its haste transforms. Since it is a listening that compels a listening.But traditionally poetry suffers from the effect of the separation between the order of language and the order or disorder of life. It is that the order in which the thought of language is found is an order against chaos. The fabulous is not found in chaos. It is found in order. A mythic thought about language is charged with the maintaining of order. Thus there is an impassable barrier between poetry in terms of life and language in terms of the forms of poetry. Its meters and its rhymes. That is what we have to think about. Through and for poetry, language, life. Against sentimental poetizations of poetry and of life. As much as against formalizations. Henri Meschonnic is professor of linguistics at the University of Paris—VIII at Vincennes. His penultimate book of poems, Voyageurs de la voix , was awarded the Prix Mallarmé. His other books include Critique du rythme, anthropologie historique du langage and Modernité, modernité . Gabriella Bedetti, associate professor of English at Eastern Kentucy University, is completing A Meschonnic Reader. (shrink)

From an observation by the poet Paul Valéry, I argue that rhyme schemes, while constraining, also enable the poet to achieve autonomy from various surrounding influences, such as the domestic and the political. The demand to keep to the rhyme scheme takes priority, reducing the likelihood of these dominating.

Is there an intimate connection between nationalism and war? Does the right to national self-determination invariably lead to bellicose relations with others? These have been central concerns in the literature on nationalism and war. They have also been concerns of political thinkers/activists who have worried about these connections and have sought to fashion a conception of national identity free of its warlike proclivities. This essay explores the link of war, nationalism, and national self-determination with reference to the founding of the (...) state of Israel. And it reflects on the views of Martin Buber whose writings on Zionism constantly engaged these questions in searching for a peace-oriented nationalism. (shrink)

"Quite otherwise than the scientist, and far more than the historian," writes R. G. Collingwood, "the philosopher must go to school with the poets in order to learn the use of language, and must use it in their way: as a means of exploring one's own mind, and bringing to light what is obscure and doubtful in it." Whereas the poet "yields himself to every suggestion that his language makes," however, the philosopher's words are assembled "only to reveal the thought (...) which they express, and are valuable not in themselves but as a means to that end." On this view, notes Collingwood, philosopher is to poet as lensgrinder is to jeweler: his art must conceal itself.1 And yet, the urge to emulate goes both ways, since... (shrink)

This article is first within the Russian and Western art history to examine the concept of visual poetics as a separate subject of research. Based on the analysis of iconographic and theoretical searches of the masters of symbolism, which found reflection within the boundaries of expressive means of visual art, the author comes concludes on the poetic principles of symbolist artists as the fundamental sources of the formation of the style of Art Nouveau – a new sculptural language of the (...) XIX – early XX centuries. Detail characteristic of the philosophical-aesthetic content that underlies optical forms of the visual symbolist image, in its scientific origins leans on the capabilities of the art comparative-formal analysis, as well as iconological method adapted to the period under review. The innovative conceptual approach towards studying the art of symbolism lies in the fact that poetry as the concept is depicted beyond the literary sphere, as a specific type of artistic worldview that influenced the development of the visual language of art in the era of Art Nouveau. At the same time, visual poetics is compared to the complex system of internal images, which shape in with the works of the master throughout the entire path of his self-expression, and are directly related to profoundness of the poetic principle of the soul, lyrical and metaphorical intuition of the artist. This approach allows us broadening the representation on the aesthetic benchmarks of the symbolist artists, as well as designating the new methodological coordinates in the field of studying the art of symbolism in both national and international contexts. (shrink)

Having a confirmation bias sometimes leads us to hold inaccurate beliefs. So, the puzzle goes: why do we have it? According to the influential argumentative theory of reasoning, confirmation bias emerges because the primary function of reason is not to form accurate beliefs, but to convince others that we’re right. A crucial prediction of the theory, then, is that confirmation bias should be found only in the reasoning domain. In this article, we argue that there is evidence that confirmation bias (...) does exist outside the reasoning domain. This undermines the main evidential basis for the argumentative theory of reasoning. In presenting the relevant evidence, we explore why having such confirmation bias may not be maladaptive. (shrink)

The controversies unleashed by psychoanalysis never seem to stop repeating themselves. If what psychoanalysis has to say is true, then, by its own lights, it has to be controversial. Controversies are thus a privileged place to see this truth and this resistance in violent and lurid action. Take infant experience and bastardry. Every kid is a bit of a bastard, and the establishment of this infantile bastardry conditions subsequent repetitions of the organism: that breast is persecuting me, these are not (...) my real parents, I did not borrow your kettle. Just how much of a bastard is this baby? The answers psychoanalysis comes up with depend on how it formulates the vicissitudes of differential repetitions, formations of the unconscious. Yet there remains something puzzling about repetition: if eros is constantly getting itself into nasty situations as a matter of course, are there still other factors (perhaps even more sinister) at work? Because of his refusal to dismiss his own puzzlement, Jacques Lacan persistently returned to the relation between desire and drive, reformulating his own theory as he went. At one moment, as we shall see, he comes to discriminate between a surprising number of (at least 3!) kinds of death. (shrink)

In this essay, I elaborate a reading of the Buddhist allusions throughout T.S. Eliot's poetry as being not confessions of Buddhist faith or merely syncretic experiments, but rather ‘conceptual rhymes’ with the crisis of personal connection that preoccupies Eliot across multiple texts. In the Buddhist concepts of pratītya-samutpāda, śūnyatā, saṃsāra, and the pretas, Eliot finds thematic resonances with his own emotional and psychological concerns and so alludes to these concepts in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land and (...) ‘Burnt Norton’ of Four Quartets as part of his characteristic poetic collage. By examining the connection between Eliot's personal poetic practice and the cross-cultural traditions upon which he drew, my argument intervenes in a long-standing debate regarding the meaning of Asian religio-philosophical influences in the poet's key texts. Moreover, by close reading the third movement of ‘Burnt Norton’ for Buddhist allusions, I attempt to refocus scrutiny of Buddhism in Eliot from the oft-discussed ‘Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land to Eliot's later Four Quartets, which remains under-examined for its Buddhist influences by scholars who instead attend to the latter text's more pronounced Vedic references. (shrink)