The semantic web aims to make the meaning of data on the web explicit and machine processable. Harking back to Leibniz in its vision, it imagines a world of interlinked information that computers `understand' and `know' how to process based on its meaning. Spearheaded by the World Wide Web Consortium, ontology languages OWL and RDF form the core of the current technical offerings. RDF has successfully enabled the construction of virtually unlimited webs of data, whilst OWL gives the ability to (...) express complex relationships between RDF data triples. However, the formal semantics of these languages limit themselves to that aspect of meaning that can be captured by mechanical inference rules, leaving many open questions as to other aspects of meaning and how they might be made machine processable. The Semantic Web has faced a number of problems that are addressed by the included publications. Its germination within academia, and logical semantics has seen it struggle to become familiar, accessible and implementable for the general IT population, so an overview of semantic technologies is provided. Faced with competing `semantic' languages, such as the ISO's Topic Map standards, a method for building ISO-compliant Topic Maps in the OWL DL language has been provided, enabling them to take advantage of the more mature OWL language and tools. Supplementation with rules is needed to deal with many real-world scenarios and this is explored as a practical exercise. The available syntaxes for OWL have hindered domain experts in ontology building, so a natural language syntax for OWL designed for use by non-logicians is offered and compared with similar offerings. In recent years, proliferation of ontologies has resulted in far more than are needed in any given domain space, so a mechanism is proposed to facilitate the reuse of existing ontologies by giving contextual information and leveraging social factors to encourage wider adoption of common ontologies and achieve interoperability. Lastly, the question of meaning is addressed in relation to the need to define one's terms and to ground one's symbols by anchoring them effectively, ultimately providing the foundation for evolving a `Pragmatic Web' of action. (shrink)

What is data? That question is the fundamental investigation of this dissertation. I have developed a methodology from social-scientific processes to explore how different people understand the concept of data, rather than to rely on my own philosophical intuitions or thought experiments about the “nature” of data. The evidence I have gathered as to different individuals' constructions of data can be used to inform further inquiry of data and the design of information systems. My research demonstrates that people have different (...) constructions of data. The methodology of the SDFN, created for this dissertation, has proven able to probe those understandings. The SDFN, loosely based on a DFD and combined with ideas from SNA, provides a way of discovering practical definitions of hard-to-operationalize terms like data. The process of repeatedly categorizing various items as data allows the methodology to explore how participants actually use the term, rather than relying on theoretical dictionary-based definitions. Analysis of the interviews found three different constructions of data: data as communications, a container for meaning; data as subjective observations, sense-impressions filtered by knowledge; and data as objective facts, measurements revealing the relationships of reality. (shrink)

The proposed ineffability of subjective experience has meant that it is frequently absent in educational discourse, where the emphasis is on objective and rational acquisition of knowledge. This prevailing conception of knowledge leaves the pre-predicative foundations of learning neglected, which this thesis challenges by foregrounding the subjective contemplative experience of its ‘co-researchers’ (i.e. ‘participants’). In doing this, it reveals a subjective interrelational realm, intersecting and being intersected by the objective that grounds learning through contemplation. This project, sited in the holistic (...) approach of contemplative education, critically examines the co-researchers’ experience of this realm. Its interdisciplinary phenomenological approach and methods provided access to the co-researchers’ contemplative interior experience. The rich data resulting from these methods revealed their development of feeling languages and maps, which they used to navigate their inner landscapes. Recognising the importance of these metaphorical languages led to the central findings of this thesis. Despite the co-researchers’ struggle at times to define their contemplative experience, what they reported is suggestive of a contemplative synaesthesia, or their experience of gestalts of affective, somatic, cognitive and transcendent modes of being. I have termed the process that I believe underpins these gestalts, the feeling nexus. Further I suggest that the feeling nexus resides in an elemental ground-of-being, and that contemplative engagement with both provides a sense of integration that founds the positive outcomes of contemplative education. This project’s exploration of the feeling nexus starts with a phenomenological and Yogic examination of an interrelational or ecological body, made permeable by the interspersion of its contexts. Its interrelational nature provides access to the feeling nexus, while contemplative experience of it frequently initiates a trajectory through contemplation where new meaning arises through pre-predictive, somatic and cognitive phases of meaning making. This study’s translation of the co-researchers’ experience in each of these stages is a unique approach that traces their creation of new meaning through contemplation. It offers a schema of learning through feelings for contemplative pedagogy, and a conception of subjective contemplative experience that contributes to an ontology of consciousness, which is currently missing from contemplative education theory. (shrink)

In different countries, the music curricula for primary/ elementary school children has been influenced by many diverse factors including a number of progressive educational practices and a variety of psychological theories. This research gives a detailed analysis of a number of primary/ elementary school programs for general music in Australia (New South Wales, i.e. NSW), in the UK (England), in the Russian Federation and in the United States of America. The research aims to find out to what extent music education (...) in different countries is based on or follows psychological theories of child development and progressive educational practices. Firstly, to acquire an adequate understanding of child education this research examines the philosophical roots of primary/ elementary education and a set of psychological ideas of Piaget and Vigotsky about the nature of children and the nature of knowledge. This provides insight of how children learn (the nature of learning) and the role of the teacher in learning music. Secondly, the research examines the musical content of the syllabae (the nature of subject). It critically compares the following components of curricula and syllabae: philosophy, objectives and contents including musical concepts, activities and music repertoire. This is then subjected to further analysis examining these contents in relation to theories of child development (Piaget and Vigotsky) and traditional and progressive educational practices (where it is applicable). Finally, a questionnaire is aimed at primary school teachers in NSW. These teachers are generalist teachers, there are no specialist music teachers employed as such in public primary schools in NSW. Music is taught in the NSW primary schools by class teachers. The problem is that NSW university faculties of education do not train music teachers as specialists at primary level. They only train generalist teachers. In other countries the situation is different. There are music specialists in the USA, UK and Russia teaching in primary schools. There are also such teachers in primary schools in Queensland, SA, Victoria, and WA and there are some in NSW. The questionnaire was, therefore, designed to enquire into the specific situation in NSW. Finally, issues of further investigation and research of curricula and syllabae in the primary/ elementary school are outlined. (shrink)

Historically, dialectics is the general method of (early) philosophy. The philosophy rhetoric controversy of modern dialectics (or argumentation theory) is reducible to a persuasion-knowledge gap. It's addressed in five parts. First, disputes in discourse (dialectics). Critical discussion or debate involves disagreement and contention. An agent's position on an issue includes an opinion (or claim) and ground. A ground is strategically developed in a contest of strengths using psycho-social influence and persuasion. This depends on the conveyance of meaning. Dispute resolution occurs (...) where there is preponderance and a dominant position. The remaining parts selectively elaborate this framework. Second, persuasion (rhetoric). Persuasion involves the use of appeals e.g. rhetorical devices, arguments etc. to influence the propositional attitudes of agents. A hormic-hedonic infrastructure of mind suggests that psycho-social influence occurs through interest-satisfaction and results in an attitude (acceptance-withholding or rejection) toward a proposition. An agents internally operate according to an opinion-persuasion relation with thresholds, which most likely belong to the class of sigmoid functions. Benchmarks (thresholds) are set by a standard of establishment or proof. Satisfying a good standard is a preferred condition for action. Third, reason (dianoetics). Reason is impassioned rationally-principled semi -- autonomous intellect. The hormic-hedonic infrastructure of mind suggests it's a source (ideas) and an influence (pro-rational passions). Rationality rests on concepts and principles that regulate conduct (thought, feeling and action). Rational discourse isn't fully understood game-theoretically. A jurisprudential metaphor offers proof-based decision-making as an approach. Fourth, conduct (strategics). The aim of dispute involves both persuasion and dominance in a contest of strength. Arguments are an important class of appeals; they have cogency as their strength attribute. Strategically, conduct involves argumentative strategic criticism. A universal argumentation scheme describes conduct generally and is the basis for strength aggregates. Ideally, dispute resolution occurs when one position satisfies the standard of establishment or proof. Game-theoretically, establishment- or proof-based decision-making involves scores, voting and Arrow's theorem. Fifth, the dialectics of alethic inquiry (epistemics). This is the application of dialectics to claims. Internally, they are beliefs or knowledge. Difficulties (e.g. the Gettier challenge) with the standard justified true belief (JTB) model leads to alternatives like cognitivism, gradualism and thresholdism. What is proposed is an open contested certified true belief model that makes use of a claim-persuasion relation with thresholds. It is underwritten by a progressive rational regimentation of influences that is naturally based on a common ground of pragmatic reliabilism. This requires a preference for persuasive over non-persuasive influences. Thus, knowledge is belief with proof where proof-based decision-making rests on the cogency of arguments and case. Finally, by bridging the persuasion-knowledge gap, the philosophy-rhetoric controversy is settled and a reconciliation of philosophy (representing dialectics) and rhetoric is achieved. Rhetoric is a sub-discipline of dialectics. An implication is a denial of the incommensurability of theories associated with critical discussion and debate in discourse. (shrink)

Since the postpositivist critique of the policy sciences, policy theory has come into question. More particularly, the ‘problem orientation’ upon which Lasswell defined the policy sciences has come into question because policy making does not conform to his problem solving logic. That logic is inadequate. I argue that we must reconsider the problem orientation at a philosophical level to reconstruct it upon a more appropriate foundation. This thesis does not depict how we should conduct policy making but deals with foundational (...) concepts and issues. I draw on Michel Meyer's new philosophy of questioning, problematology, to consider policy theory in terms of questioning and to reconstruct the problem orientation on problematological grounds. The thesis is in two parts. Part I reviews and critiques past policy theory in terms of questioning, commencing from the problem solving basis of Dewey's philosophy and Lasswell’s ‘policy sciences’. I criticise this basis and outline how it made politics and argumentation residual aspects of reason. I discuss how the postpositivist critique problematised the policy sciences and how this permits us to pose policy theory itself as a question. Part II answers this question by reconstructing policy theory upon the problematological foundation of knowledge. Meyer’s logic of questioning incorporates problematicity in answering, allowing us to account for the politics of policy. I outline the dynamic nature of the logic of questioning and how it incorporates key concepts of interpretative epistemology; hermeneutics, dialectic, and rhetoric. I conclude by describing policy making as a synthesis of two questions: the policy question and the question of legitimacy. (shrink)

Biographical sketch of Peter Kropotkin . History and theory of mutualism and Kropotkin's mutual aid theories. Gene, individual, group and species selectionism/natural and sexual selection/economic, genetic and reproductive explanations of cooperative behaviour/sociality and intelligence/functional and non-functional sociality/social hierarchies/mutualism and morality/speciation and environment/geographic and reproductive isolation/sympatric and allopatric speciation/habitat tracking, environmentally induced or acquired characters and their inheritance in plants and animals/symbiosis and symbiogenesis/evolution of multicellularity. ;Kropotkin's social anarchism and environmentalism. History of communal revolution/social resolution of conflict in non-governmental societies and (...) medieval city/diffuse sanctions/causes of crime/prisons/Kropotkin's environmental vision. ;Kropotkin's biophysics of nature. Self-organisation and natural process/biogenesis/complexity and chaos theory/bio-physics and mathematics/eleectro-bio-dynamics/non-equilibrium thermodynamics/biospheric self-regulation/internal and external organisation/fluidity and natural process/decentralisation and natural order. ;Evolution, revolution and the idea of biological and social progress . ;Comprehensive bibliography of Kropotkin's works in English. (shrink)

The notion of 'Care' has occupied a central place as foundation in nursing theory, ethics and practice. An examination of critical and authoritative documents reveals that the term is vague and ill defined. The literature on care does not theorise the concept as fully as expected in a profession where the concept is considered central. Moreover, even the best theories of care neglect justice. Applying Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance allows the debate to move on from definitional issues to assess (...) the applicability of 'care' to the practice of the profession. An examination of a range of assessments of nursing practice shows that although 'care' is frequently used in connection with nursing, it does not appear to be a major consideration in key areas of appraisal. This thesis explores the relationship between care and justice in nursing and proposes that they be integrated within nursing theory. A theory for nursing that does not exclude care, but that has justice as its basis is proposed. Care, when used in the context of justice provides nursing with a theory that is appropriate not only for nursing theory and ethics but also assists the profession meet the demands of modern practice. (shrink)

This thesis develops a new, mid-range theory of the recognition of prior learning (RPL) with non-traditional learners. It incorporates a practice framework accompanied by good practice principles, to support the implementation of socially just RPL. Formal skills recognition processes, such as RPL, have been used as tools for enhancing social inclusion and social justice within educational institutions across the world. RPL seeks to affirm and accredit skills and knowledges that have evolved from diverse, informal learning experiences and cultural locations and (...) is thought by some to be ‘a powerful tool for bringing people into the learning system’ (Hargreaves 2006, 2). However, in Australia and elsewhere, RPL is largely accessed by those who are already familiar with systems and discourses of formal learning. This excludes the very people who could most benefit from RPL and misses an opportunity to integrate alternative knowledges into professional education curricula. This qualitative, empirical study, explores non-traditional learners’ experiences of RPL for the formal award of Community Services qualifications within the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector. Data are gathered at three points during the RPL process through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nine RPL candidates, their workplace supervisors and the assessors. A total of 22 participants provide data via 54 individual interviews and one assessor focus group. Data analysis was undertaken using constructivist grounded theory methods revealing three key aspects of RPL that operate as ‘vectors’ to guide and stabilise the RPL experience for individual candidates. A strong ‘meta’ theme emerges, indicating ontological purposes of RPL and intersubjective qualities and effects of the assessment. Philosophical and political theories of Recognition (Honneth 1995, Oliver 2001) are used to demonstrate how RPL is an interpersonal exchange that engages both the candidate’s and assessor’s sense of ‘who’ they are and how socially valued and agentive they feel. The thesis concludes that in order to provide a suitably tailored response to non-traditional learners in the context of striving for socially just and inclusive RPL, the assessor must embrace this avowedly ontological conceptual base and hone specific skills for the conduct of an ethically responsible assessment relationship. (shrink)

This work investigates some of the issues and consequences for the field of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, which are related to the perceived limits of computation with current digital equipment. The Church -Turing thesis and the specific properties of Turing machines are examined and some of the philosophical 'in principle' objections, such as the application of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, are discussed. It is argued that the misinterpretation of the Church-Turing thesis has led to unfounded assumptions about the limitations of (...) computing machines in general. Modern digital computers, which are based on the von Neuman architecture, can typically be programmed so that they interact effectively with the real word. It is argued that digital computing machines are supersets of Turing machines, if they are, for example, programmed to interact with the real world. Moreover, computing is not restricted to the domain of discrete state machines. Analog computers and real or simulated neural nets exhibit properties that may not be accommodated in a definition of computing, which is based on Turing machines. Consequently, some of the philosophical 'in principle' objections to artificial intelligence may not apply in reference to engineering efforts in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This thesis is an enquiry into the Marquis de Sade, his writing and the perversion known as sadism. The narrower focus of this thesis investigates the problem of the meeting of violence and language in Sade's novels and the implications for cinema. The procedure has been to adopt the Critical and Clinical approach to philosophy that brings together both the literary style of Sade and the clinical symptoms of sadism. This method canvasses a number of Sades novels to consider the (...) psychoanalytical definition of sadism before moving on to discuss the expression of sadism through language. Finally, the model of sadism and language is then applied to a number of films to discuss how violence within the context of sadism functions through language within cinema. The general results show how speech and action can be defined as equivalent forms of sadian violence when expressed through language in both literature and cinema. This occurs, furthermore, through the transcendent model of violence where both speech and action refer to a higher order of violence and this is put at the service of the senses through language. The major conclusions reached suggest that language in literature and cinema can be a demonstrative form of the higher order of violence. Sadism draws out the violence and excess of the world by reflecting it within language. In doing so, violence is designated with a quality of the erotic through this excess. Finally, each act of violence within literature and cinema is an attempt to overcome taboos through transgression. The breaking of a taboo creates an amount of excess but also reinstates the taboo in what becomes an empty act of transgression. The excess is expressed through violence within language and deed according to a transcendent function of language in literature and cinema. (shrink)

A consistent feature of Saul Bellow’s fiction is the protagonist’s encounter with one or more teaching figures. Dialogue with such individuals prompts the Bellovian protagonist to reject his current state of selfhood as inadequate and provokes him to re-form as a new person. The teacher figure offers a better self to which the protagonist is attracted; or, more frequently in Bellow, the protagonist is repelled by both his teacher and his own current state to form a new, previously unrepresented self. (...) This thesis argues that Bellow’s self inherits and modifies the perfectionist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in a literary reinterpretation that parallels Stanley Cavell’s philosophical revaluation of the American Transcendentalists. In Emerson and Thoreau, and in Cavell’s reading of perfectionism, the self is attracted onward only by a better representation of selfhood in another, while Bellow’s self may also be, and often is, provoked by a repellent other to inhabit a new form of selfhood. This thesis takes the evolution of selfhood in Bellow to be structured by travel. In The Adventures of Augie March, Augie’s movement between selves is impelled by conversation with teacher figures and paralleled by his unending journeys. In Herzog, Herzog’s self-transformations and travels are provoked by reading and writing, and by the ecstasy of loss revealed to him through apostrophic conversations with the dead and absent in a series of unsent and mental letters. Letter-writing, the provocation for Herzog’s self-perfection, becomes a form of travel in Herzog. This thesis further argues that Bellow’s travelling self is a critical response to two poles of modern subjectivity, structured by European mythologies of travel: Bellow’s fiction is critical, first, of a Hegelian, egoist mode of selfhood structured after the Odyssey; but equally critical of examples of Levinasian openness to the Other, patterned on Abraham’s exile. Bellow does not accept either the Odyssean or the Abrahamic mode of selfhood on its own, recognizing oppressive possibilities in both. Travelling selfhood in Bellow, initiated by conversation with others, both fuses and rereads Odyssean and Abrahamic constructs within a new, but perpetually unfinished American mode of self perfection. (shrink)

It is argued that physical (and not inherently psychical) properties are insufficient to constitute all else. Specifically they cannot constitute an instance (K1) of our knowledge that the number of existing things is at least one. This employs a new version of entry by entailment: Every fact as to the presence of a constituted trope is entailed by facts about the presence of the ontologically basic, where a property is ontologically basic if and only if the fact of its presence (...) is not entailed (even allowing exhaustive definitions of all tropes in terms of their ultimate constituents) by facts about the presence of things non-identical to it. Existence is a mind-independent presence. Things can be present (to mind) as opposed to existing but must be accompanied by the presence of all of their parts and of anything else that their presence might entail. This includes some existing thing in the case that knowledge that something exists is present, since it is analytic that knowledge cannot be of what is not the case. Purely dynamical properties cannot exist apart from instances of some other property kind (on pain of regress as to what moves). Material properties can make a difference to cognitive states only in virtue of differences they can make to dynamical properties. Thus, any cognitive state present in some dynamical and material scenario must be present in an equivalent purely dynamical scenario, which cannot exist. Hence: 1) There can be no knowledge of existence, or thus trope K1, in a purely dynamical scenario. 2) There can thus neither be a trope K1 if only dynamical and material properties (and what they constitute) are present. So because there is a trope K1, there are one or more ontologically basic properties which are not dynamical or material. It is further argued that nothing ontologically basic is per se (directly and non-obscurely) conceivable except as psychicality or a categorical basis of a disposition to change or constancy (respectively, dynamism and materiality). Thus at least one ontologically basic property is either psychical or not per se conceivable. The latter proposition has less merit. (shrink)

This thesis engages with epistemology’s value problem. That is, is knowledge epistemically preferable to true belief? If so, how is that the case? The issue under discussion is whether epistemic justification can account for a value discrepancy between true belief and knowledge. First of all, the contours of the justificatory landscape are presented—in particular, the division between externalist and internalist styles. The thesis then considers whether solely truth-directed justification (which includes externalism) can possibly account for a value unique to knowledge. (...) The preliminary conclusion is that solely truth-directed justification cannot solve the value problem. A discussion of internalism then ensues. The discussion does not focus explicitly on which benefits internalism may offer in terms of value; instead, the focus is on whether internalism qua internalism can solve the value problem. It is concluded that, if internalism is the sole provider of the value of knowledge (above that of true belief), then epistemology must forgo the belief that knowledge is preferable to a Gettiered belief. I do not accept such a concession; therefore, I reject the thesis that internalism exclusively solves the value problem. Throughout the thesis, the importance of externalism to epistemology becomes apparent. This feature invites a reconsideration of the value of externalism (in particular, of reliabilism). The thesis closes by reconsidering the value of reliabilism and concludes that the value problem can be solved, but only by an appeal to externalist justification. (shrink)

Social relations are commonly seen as exchanges between entities, a view implicitly indebted to Hegel?s account of the development of independent subjectivity. It is an analysis that explains many social interactions but that cannot explain key moments in social life. These moments occur in the non-Euclidean space and time of the in-between. This concept will be elucidated in this thesis through analysis of fieldwork examples and in relation to the work of Martin Buber and Donald Winnicott. The in-between arises when (...) adults and children play together in the way described by Winnicott as playing in the third zone. A phenomenological, interpretive analysis of forms of relations between parents and their two year old children revealed playing in the in-between during everyday family life. While the fieldwork focuses on families at home, the arguments are not restricted to this arena. It has implications for those working with young children, challenging the current emphasis on a task-oriented focus on teaching and learning. A focus on social exchange creates early childhood programs that lack opportunities for being in the present moment in an unforced, un-knowing way. Such programs achieve set goals but may lack moments of infinite mutuality and tenderness such as those observed in the research. Relations cannot form when there is a continual focus on what is understood and known, on past accomplishments and future objectives. The in-between has three aspects; being fully present, un-knowing and mutuality through love. This analysis provides new views that will encourage opportunities for children and staff to be with one another in simple but profound moments of the in-between. (shrink)

This thesis, The Arab as Spectacle, is about representation. It is about the limits and the contradictions of representation. It is about the burden and the violence of representation. It is about the persistence of Orientalism and how the hierarchies of race and gender intersect with discourses on sexuality to inform and inflect the representation of Arabs in contemporary literary and media spheres of Australian popular culture. This thesis comprises two sections. Part One is a research dissertation that explores the (...) strategies, devices and parameters of the representation of Arabic culture and identities through close readings of specific texts. This theoretical project inaugurates the second part of my study which takes up the question of the contradictions of representation through a collection of ficto-critical writings. Through these satirical narratives, I seek to expose and disrupt the hegemony of Orientalist representations that proliferate in English language literature and news media by bringing into focus the inherent paradox of representation, working within and against Orientalist representational traditions. In so doing, it is not my aim to 'correct' the Orientalist logic and imagery that I theorise in the first part of this thesis, but rather to undermine the spurious truth-value of Orientalist representations by deploying the literary weapons of satire, parody and irony. In this way, my fiction works to engage creatively and critically with the very tropes that I theorise in my research dissertation. (shrink)

In this thesis I investigate the nature of noir subjectivity, and the degree to which it can be described as heroic. To investigate these issues, I have chosen to illustrate my argument by analysing my novel, Viper, and two films that renew the noir cycle at different socio-political crossroads in America: in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock’s late noir, Vertigo, and in 1974, Frances Ford Coppola’s neo-noir, The Conversation. Because these texts present an extreme theorisation of deception in terms of the assembling (...) and erasure of subjective identity, they will serve as a basis to explore the question of noir subjectivity. In proceeding thus, I argue in the dissertation that film noir’s most innovative borrowing can be described as a monstrous stitching together of incompatible parts—the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, the living and the dead—which accounts for a cut both between, and within, the image. It is this prosthetic approach to representation that takes the noir mode beyond its existential, individualist limits, and accounts for the subjective wound in noir: the heroic conflict between the singular and the multiple. In my analytic procedure then, I extend the idea of monstrosity beyond its current boundaries in contemporary theory. I do this by fusing Marie Hélène Huet’s conception of the monstrous imagination, which is a theory of art, with Gilles Deleuze’s powers of the false, which belongs to a philosophy of time. I posit a dialogic exchange across these analyses and my novel to suggest that the cinematic cut not only accounts for what Deleuze has termed the time-image but also is symptomatic of the chronic wounding of the riven noir hero. These analyses suggest that, while sustaining the aura of authorship through technical innovation and stylistic mastery, film noir serves paradoxically to challenge the mastery of the model designated as masculine. In my novel I continue to deal with the issues raised in the dissertation, through a rearticulation of a subjectivity that irrevocably alters its relation to representation in its affinity with the image, its serial movement through interstitial space, and its novel powers of falsification. (shrink)

When it comes to the notion of creativity, both R. Dawkins and D. Dennett argue that creativity is a matter of random mutation, in the same way that genes randomly mutate. Neither Dennett nor Dawkins see anything else in the mimetic theory of creativity than a process of Darwinian evolution. However, this complete reliance upon the extension of evolution for understanding creativity needs to be supplemented by combining it with other ideas such as those of "schema theory," because creativity always (...) occurs within a structured context and is not simply a matter of random mutation of ideas. Schema theory comes largely from the works of E.H Gombrich, who argued that "schemas" play a crucial role in how it is that we are able to be creative. He defines schemas as structure and traditions in society that help to convey the meaning of our creative efforts. Just as semantics needs syntax within language in order to formulate and convey meaning, so by analogy memes need schemas for the creation and expression of new ideas. Rather than being the antithesis of creativity, existing forms of expression and traditions are important for the creation of new ideas. This needs to be factored into any theory of creativity in order to account for the effect of the social context on creative endeavours in addition to a Darwinian account of memes. The unconscious processes at work within the brain that are involved in the generation of ideas and other creative products can be understood using the notion of a "generator", as originally conceived by D. Dennett. This notion goes beyond mere concrete Skinnerian behavioural trial and error. Within this generator, there appear to be at work processes such as those of bisociation and association, as discussed by A. Koestler, as well as processes such as the role of language, memory, generate-and-test and intentionality that must be acknowledged in addition to the syntactic operations of schemas and the replicating contents of memes. The operation of all of these ingredients within the generator, when understood together, can be seen as responsible for our ability to be creative. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with popular music's working of time. It takes the experience of time as crucial to the negotiation of social, political or, more simply, existential, conditions. The key example analysed is the funk style invented by legendary musician James Brown. I argue that James Brown's funk might be understood as an apprehension of a minor temporality or the musical expression of a particular form of negotiation of time by a minor culture. Precursors to this idea are found (...) in the literature of the stream of consciousness style and, more significantly for this thesis, in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the cinema in his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. These examples are all concerned with the indeterminate unfolding of lived time and where the reality of temporal indeterminacy will take precedence over the more linear conventions of traditional narrative. Deleuze’s Cinema books account for such a shift in emphasis from the narrative depiction of movement through time the movement-image to a more direct experience of the temporal the time-image, and I will trace a similar shift in the history of popular music. For Deleuze, the change in the relation of images to time is catalysed by the intolerable events of World War II. In this thesis, the evolution of funk will be seen to reflect the existential change experienced by a generation of African-Americans in the wake of the civil-rights movement. The funk groove associated with the music of James Brown is discussed as an aesthetic strategy that responds to the existential conditions that grew out of the often perceived failure of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Funk provided an aesthetic strategy that allowed for the constitution of a minor temporality, involving a series of temporal negotiations that eschew more hegemonic, common sense, compositions of time and space. This has implications for the understanding of much of the popular music that has followed funk. I argue that the understanding of the emergence of funk, and of the contemporary electronic dance music styles which followed, would be enhanced by taking this ontological consideration of the experiential time of minorities into account. I will argue that funk and the electronic dance musics that followed might be seen as articulations of minority expression, where the time-image style of their musical compositions reflect the post-soul eschewing of a narratively driven, common sense view of historical time. (shrink)

For Badiou, love must be regarded in terms of an exceptional logic that simultaneously confirms the philosophical counting operation, while generating another number that is not a product of ordination.

This thesis is the first dedicated sociological attempt to offer a critical response to cultural studies and allied discourses that concern themselves with the relationship between technology and violence. A critical reconstruction is necessary because these cultural theorists have failed to adequately contextualize their arguments in relation to both the globally ascendant neoliberal policy outlook and its associated social Darwinian technoculture: the combined pernicious effects of which could be described as the logic of “social constructionism as social psychosis”. The most (...) prominent manifestation of this theoretical psychosis has to do with an interest in biotechnology in particular. The problem I identify in the treatment of this theme is how easily it can be used to support a technologically determinist position. One undesirable side effect is that these determinists are able to project from present trends a dystopian exhaustion of all critique through their focus on violence. In the thesis of “bioglobalism” this state of affairs is also deployed to take sociologists to task for insufficient recognition of processual “network” forms of distributed agency in technological processes. At stake therefore is the recovery of sociological critique. It follows that the core of my thesis is the radical reworking of two related heuristic devices: seriality and contingency. Seriality is taken to refer to social practices as diverse as the possible relationships between the social problem of rationality, case studies of individuals who have run amok, and the functioning of network characteristics. I use contingency to eschew seriality’s deterministic accounting of the social. Here I propose a new conceptual relationship between creativity and action. Emphasis is accordingly placed upon two related normative projects: Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism, and three of the “problematiques” Peter Wagner has identified as inescapable for theorizing modernity: the continuity of the acting person, the certainty of knowledge, and the viability of the political order. I conclude with a renewed conception of the role of normative critique as a form of conceptual therapy for bioglobal projections of seriality. (shrink)

In this dissertation an attempt was made to uncover the source of verbal associations. The investigation focused on establishing the locus of representation for associative relationships in the cognitive system and whether this locus is different from that for semantic relationships. A picture naming task and an object decision task were used within the standard priming paradigm, in which the target is preceded by a prime. A dual-level model was proposed in which associative relatedness is represented at a lemma level (...) that connects the lexical form representation of a word to its semantic information. According to this model an interaction between associative and categorical relatedness should occur in picture naming, but not in object decision, when primes and targets share both relationships, and this is what was observed. To investigate the mechanisms of associative priming, asymmetrically associated prime-target pairs were used to create two situations. In the forward priming condition the target was an associate of the prime (e.g., brick-house), and in the backward priming condition the prime was an associate of the target (e.g., babyrattle). Unexpectedly, facilitation was observed for backward priming at the short SOA in picture naming. Because no effect was observed for this condition in the object decision task, and given that forward priming produced facilitation in both tasks spreading activation was upheld as the mechanism for associative priming. In order to investigate whether the source of the relationship between associates might be in their latent semantic content, the impact of instrument relationships (e.g., grinder-coffee), script relationships (e.g., zoo-tiger), and proximity in multidimensional semantic space were also investigated in the picture naming task. Items that were close in semantic space, but did not share any semantic relationships, produced the same priming pattern as category co-ordinates in picture naming (i.e., interference), while instrumental and script relationships did not produce a priming pattern that matched either that observed for associative or categorical relatedness. These results were taken to indicate that the source of associative relationships is in the co-occurrence of words in the language, which further supported the main claim of a dual-level model where information about verbal associations is stored outside semantic memory. (shrink)

This work examines the representations of the Perennial Philosophy in the literature of the Deep Ecology movement, and the negative response of critics to the Self-realisation approach. It then goes on to suggest that a deeper engagement with the nondualistic doctrines Naess embraced could lift environmental philosophy out of the Cartesian framework in which it appears to be bogged down. Deep Ecology has been accused of being politically ineffective, and letting down the environmental movement, because it remains insufficiently engaged with (...) debates concerning power, class, sex, and other hegemonies that occupy the minds of social ecologists, ecofeminists, and cultural studies theorists. I argue that Deep Ecology is not as ineffective as detractors claim, but that it remains philosophically undeveloped, and has not provided sound foundations for environmental ethics. The qualified nondualism I advance, based on Vedânta, the work of David Bohm, and (to a lesser extent) Platonic thought, treats cosmos, society and the individual as intelligent creative systems in which the interrelated parts are expressions of a vital generative order to which each is actively related. The Self is a mirror of the cosmos, engaged in the process of becoming a more complete reflection of the totality. In all of this the nature of consciousness as vast creative intelligence is paramount, and freedom dominates the entire process from beginning to end. This thesis offers an opportunity to rethink ideas of value, moral considerability, and the nature of the empirical self, from a nondualistic perspective. It proposes that "intrinsic unity" might replace the community as the foundational moral concept for environmental ethics. In the process, emphasis shifts away from the objective sphere and settles firmly on the thinker and thought. Following Bohm and Krishnamurti, I argue that conditioned thought is the only barrier to (inner) freedom and creativity. Most important, the metaphysics of nondualism privileges processes of universal Self-realisation, and reveals the limitations of the empirical self. Understanding thought as a process then becomes something of a moral imperative. (shrink)

This thesis examines the relations among emotions and musical features and their changes with time, based on the assertion that there exist underlying, culturally specific, quantifiable rules which govern these relations. I designed, programmed and tested a computer controlled Two-Dimensional Emotion Space (2DES) which administered and controlled all aspects of the experimental work. The 2DES instrument consisted of two bipolar emotional response (ER) dimensions: valence (happiness-sadness) and arousal (activeness-sleepiness). The instrument had a test-retest reliability exceeding 0.83 (p > 0.01, N (...) = 28) when words and pictures of facial expressions were used as the test stimuli. Construct validity was quantified (r < 0.84, p > 0.01). The 2DES was developed to collect continuous responses to recordings of four movements of music (N = 67) chosen to elicit responses in all quadrants of the 2DES: "Morning" from Peer Gynt, Adagio from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (Aranjuez), Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance Op 42, No. 1 and Pizzicato Polka by Strauss. Test-retest reliability was 0.74 (p > 0.001, N = 14). Five salient and objectively quantifiable features of the musical signal (MFs) were scaled and used for time series analysis of the stimuli: melodic pitch, tempo, loudness, frequency spectrum centroid (timbral sharpness) and texture (number of different instruments playing). A quantitative analysis consisted of: (1) first order differencing to remove trends, (2) determination of suitable, lagged MFs to keep as regressors via stepwise regression, and (3) regression of each ER onto selected MFs with first order autoregressive adjustment for serial correlation. Regression coefficients indicated that first order differenced (∆) loudness and ∆tempo had the largest correlations with ∆arousal across all pieces, and ∆melodic pitch correlated with ∆valence for Aranjuez (p > 0.01 for all coefficients). The models were able to explain up to 73% of mean response variance. Additional variation was explained qualitatively as being due to interruptions, interactions and collinearity: The minor key and dissonances in a tonal context moved valence toward the negative direction; Short duration and perfect cadences moved valence in the positive direction. The 2DES measure and serial correlation adjusted regression models were, together, shown to be powerful tools for understanding relations among musical features and emotional response. (shrink)

There are currently considerable confusion and disarray about just how we should view computationalism, connectionism and dynamicism as explanatory frameworks in cognitive science. A key source of this ongoing conflict among the central paradigms in cognitive science is an equivocation on the notion of computation simpliciter. ‘Computation’ is construed differently by computationalism, connectionism, dynamicism and computational neuroscience. I claim that these central paradigms, properly understood, can contribute to an integrated cognitive science. Yet, before this claim can be defended, a better (...) understanding of ‘computation’ is required. ‘Digital computation’ is an ambiguous concept. It is not just the classical dichotomy between analogue and digital computation that is the basis for the equivocation on ‘computation’ simpliciter in cognitive science, but also the diversity of extant accounts of digital computation. There are many answers on what it takes for a system to perform digital computation. Answers to this problem range from Turing machine computation, through the formal manipulation of symbols, the execution of algorithms and others, to the strong-pancomputational thesis, according to which every physical system computes every Turing-computable function. Despite some overlap among them, extant accounts of concrete digital computation are non-equivalent, thus, rendering ‘digital computation’ ambiguous. The objective of this dissertation is twofold. First, it is to promote a clearer understanding of concrete digital computation. Accordingly, my main thesis is that not only are extant accounts of concrete digital computation non-equivalent, but most of them are inadequate. I show that these accounts are not just intensionally different (this is quite trivially the case), but also extensionally distinct. In the course of examining several key accounts of concrete digital computation, I propose the instructional information processing account, according to which digital computation is the processing of discrete data in accordance with finite instructional information. The second objective is to establish the foundational role of computation in cognitive science whilst rejecting the purported representational nature of computation. (shrink)

The relationship with nature through art has been explored as a two fold bond. The first considers a relationship with nature via art and science, where the history and contemporary application of scientific illustration in art is explored; while the second explores past and present connections with nature via art and the landscape, particularly the panoramic tradition. Historically these relationships have predominately been about dominating nature, mans dominion over the land. Science was seen as the only authority, while our relationships (...) with the land in art, positioned the viewer at a commanding distance above and over the land, as seen in the post colonial panoramic tradition. In contrast, -The Coorong Series- explores a lived history with nature rather than the historical role of dominance. -The Coorong Series" explores a relationship of knowledge, understanding, and the experience of nature; through two parts. The first combines art and science in -The Coorong Specimen Series', to explore the facts and knowledge that science has provided about certain plants, birds and marine life from the Coorong. Inspiration has been derived from 19thC scientific illustrations and the lyrical prints of the Coorong by Australian Artist John Olsen. Part two explores the immersive experience of the iconic landscape in –The Coorong Landscape Series" providing a relationship that seeks to understand the functionality of the location and to celebrate the unique beauty of this diverse region. Inspiration has been gained from the landscapes by l8th and 19th C artists John Constable and Claude Monet, along with landscapes by contemporary artists, John Walker and Mandy Martin. Through aesthetic notions such as scientific illustration, panoramic landscape, immersive scale, the collection of work, an expressionistic use of paint, and labeling of each piece like a museum display. -The Coorong landscape series" provides an exploration of a region that immerses the viewer in an experience of the location. The series portrays a relationship with nature through art that educates the viewer about The Coorong region. Connections are made between the land, birds, plants, fish, and human interaction; which results in an ecological consideration of the Coorong. Ultimately it is the educational experience that art provides allowing the viewer to explore a plethora of relationships within nature, and to explore how these relationships have changed or continue to exist within this era. (shrink)

The Douglas Summerland Collection is a fictional "monographically based history"1. In essence this research is concerned with the current debates about history recording, authenticity of the photograph, methods of history construction and how the audience digests new 'knowledge'. The narrative for this body of work is drawn from a small album of maritime photographs discovered in 2004 within the archives of the Port Chalmers Regional Maritime Museum in New Zealand. The album contains vernacular images of life onboard several sailing ships (...) from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the DH Sterling and the William Mitchell. Through investigating the'truth' systems promoted by the photograph within the presentations of histories this research draws a link between the development of colonialism and the perception of photography. It also deliberates on how 'truth' perception is still a major part of an audience's knowledge base. 1. Anne-Marie Willis Picturing Australia: A History of Photography, Angus & Robertson Publishers, London. 1988:253. (shrink)

The notion of doubledeath, as an idea to generate work, can be seen as both an ironic reflection on the medium of photography and a critical attempt to comment on contemporary culture. In short, the inherent characteristics of the photographic medium and its function within society are combined. Photography embodies both death and the beginning of something autonomous and new in the very moment of the picture-taking process. A photograph is a mere simulation of what was once there, in front (...) of the lens, transformed onto photographic paper. It then opens up a whole range of new possibilities to the viewer. The photograph's almost life-like appearance informs the photographic myth that is the idea that a photograph provides evidence of absolute truth. This characteristic together with the possibility of manipulating and altering a photograph has been continuously exploited by mass media to influence, make and guide our perceptions towards reality. These characteristics of image-making have left the borders between fiction and fact blurred. Living in a world of over-mediation it is hard to escape and find one's way around in this melting pot of the various realities suggested. Reality today is informed by the present trace of an absent original. When this is recorded photographically, it could be described as a doubledeath. Both this research documentation and the studio work are social comments on contemporary life and artmaking. Where photographs record scenes from life informed by visual simulation (the presence of the absent) the notion of doubledeath becomes most obvious. Moreover, they reflect contemporary culture, addressing and investigating concerns fueled by today's omnipresent commodity and life-style culture, and provoking thoughts about illusion and the crises of the real. In the 21st century we interact with, acknowledge, accept or even prefer the surface over the essence of things, and real experience becomes more diluted. (shrink)

This exegesis aims to assess the communicative power of assemblage-based installation art. The body of research underlying this assessment provides tools for understanding experimental assemblage-based installation practices and their affective nature. The exegesis tracks discourses between contemporary assemblage-based practices and recent philosophy on aesthetics. It reviews mechanisms used by contemporary artists to engage the spectator that resist existing aesthetic structures and assert new communicative visual forms. Definitions of ‘the contemporary’ are employed to help situate the dialectic of forms. By way (...) of applying some key concepts of philosopher Gilles Deleuze to methods of production, the assessment proposes a symbiotic relationship between Deleuzian philosophy and assemblage-based practices. Deleuze’s ‘affect’, ‘de-stratification’, ‘repetition’ and ‘assemblage’ are the main theories applied to this a posteriori relationship. This exegesis investigates artists’ methods of sign manipulation such as compositions of repetitions, rhythms and durations. The experience of the spectator is investigated from the key positions of three disciplines of thought. How the brain processes information when viewing art is examined by way of readings from commentator Jacques Ranciere, philosopher David Hume and neurologist Vilayanaur Ramachandran. This establishes a speculative foundation for the relationship between the spectator and ‘the sign’. In terms of linguistics and visual forms, a critical analysis is applied to ‘signs’ to analyse the practices of artists who challenge established form and narrative structures. Readings of Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and Giorgio Agamben’s analogous ‘apparatus’ are used to articulate systems of communication and their compositions of elements. It is put forward that an artist’s assemblage of signs is the dispositif of their practice. This analysis posits that, asserting new and non-linear forms rather than following pre-existing models can be a powerful means for affective and lucid communication. Chapter IV of this exegesis presents a discussion of examples of my work completed as part of the research. This chapter is a more reflective expression of my motivations for creating assemblage-based installation focused on form and meaning. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the links between how the ocean has been imaged historically and how this imaging has impacted on environmental conservation values surrounding the sea in western culture. Pictorial images of the sea have been dominated by the seascape that, whilst showing the effects of light and wind on water, have not uncovered what lies beneath the surface, leaving the ocean to become a repository for waste. In contrast, Romantic landscape artists of the eighteenth century were influential in changing (...) attitudes towards place that led to preservation. I argue that as the sea has been depicted as empty, vast and dangerous by artists, or illustrated as scientific curiosity, protection of the ocean has only been a recent development. Critical change for ocean habitat occurred through the documentary films and television series of Jacques Cousteau, who invented SCUBA gear and also revealed to the world the wonder of life under the oceans. I also contend that documentary artists, like Jacques Cousteau, play a crucial role in conservation efforts as they add to a continuous environmental story that influences how we culturally perceive our environment. Although conservation efforts have increased, ocean habitats still remain under enormous pressure and threat, and therefore I see my work as part of a story that can influence perceptions. In my work, the conduit to changing these perceptions is wonder, which at its core has an ethical dimension. I have utilized my own wonder to examine the effects of the desalination plant at Kurnell in Sydney. (shrink)

This studio-based research investigates the diverse manifestations of language in contemporary art, with a focus on contemporary practice where language, materiality and mimetic function are interdependent aspects of the creative work. At the heart of this is the question of metaphysical transformation in art – an apparently subjective phenomenon which appears to exceed causative principles, operating within a fluctuating cultural and conceptual matrix of ascribed meanings, and delivering ‘transcendental’ affect. At the outset I outline my knowledge base with reference to (...) art theory, cultural studies, linguistics, philosophy, metaphysics, comparative religion and mythology, referencing a number of writers who deal with diverse cultural manifestations of ritual, metaphor and mimesis in the visual arts. Following this, I discuss the cross-currents of global contemporary practice that have been influential to my work as an artist, thinker and writer. A line is traced from early twentieth century conceptual art movements through aspects of metaphysical art and contemporary shamanic practice in mediated and unmediated societies, considering the work of artists whose practice interrogates notions of equivalence, materiality, metaphor, cultural identity and alterity. My own studio work and iconography is outlined through tropes of phenomenology, emotionality and materiality, with key strands of practice identified, including technological investigations such as photosequencing and video compositing. In conclusion I explore the possibility that all significant human facture has an ontological rather than a causative genesis, deriving from our shared genetic code, and suggest that it is ‘innate’ code recognition that, experientially, distinguishes powerful works of art. Such approaches are resistant to taxonomical analysis, and tend to undermine the basis of much traditional scholarship in the plastic arts. The outcome of this research is presented through a catalogue raisonée of component works, and an immersive, ‘artist at work’ final installation, where the work is progressed for the duration of the exhibition. In this way, new meanings and ‘language particles’ emerge from the juxtaposition and aggregation of a series of series – a conversation with multiple vocabularies, where liminality thrives, and mysterious forces are at play. (shrink)

This thesis is about Zhuangzi’s scepticism. The argument is that Zhuangzi’s scepticism about proposing solutions to the unrest of the Warring States period (481-221 BCE) is a manifestation of a Yangist concern about being involved in official life. The aim is to offer a new perspective of Zhuangzi’s scepticism as scepticism about the solutions of the thinkers of the period.

Modernity began in Leibniz’s lifetime, arguably, and due to the efforts of a group of philosopher-scientists of which Leibniz was one of the most significant active contributors. Leibniz invented machines and developed the calculus. He was a force for peace, and industrial and cultural development through his work as a diplomat and correspondence with leaders across Europe, and in Russia and China. With Leibniz, science became a means for improving human living conditions. For Leibniz, science must begin with the “God’s (...) eye view” and begin with an understanding of how the Creator would have designed the universe. Accordingly, Leibniz advocated the a priori method of scientific discovery, including the use of intellectual constructions or artifices. He defended the usefulness and success of these methods against detractors. While cognizant of Baconian empiricism, Leibniz found that an unbalanced emphasis on experiment left the investigator short of conclusions on efficient causes. Leibniz worked outside, but complemented, the current of formal reasoning and empiricism which was developing in scientific circles during his lifetime. He supported the development of methods for calculation and demanded precise reasoning, while arguing that it was folly to omit the Neoplatonic orientation from science. Indeed, without Neoplatonism there would be no modernity. Leibniz’s Neoplatonic course complemented his work with machines. Leibniz crystallised the Neoplatonic orientation as a pragmatic humanist agenda, and merged it with national imperatives for developing science. Leibniz’s policy orientation is aligned with the Hermetic conception of Man as magus, who ultimately can control even the stars. The industrial-scientific age which followed Leibniz is a testament to the success of his life’s work. (shrink)

Literary critics have rarely paired Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and William Carlos Williams, despite their common involvement in the imagist movement and, subsequently, their long friendship. This neglect is partly due to the poets’ own idiosyncrasies. The contrast between H.D.'s intensely subjective, mythological poetics and Williams' apparently objective focus on every-day objects tends to locate the two poets in very different critical spheres and poetic traditions. In essays written and published in 1919, however, not too long after imagism’s flourishing, both writers (...) attempted to theorize poetry in explicitly epistemological terms. This thesis examines that neglected confluence, showing how shared philosophical questions motivate the poets’ critical writings and poetic practice. In her 1919 essay 'Notes on Thought and Vision', H.D. proposes an epistemological theory wherein a heightened mode of vision offers knowledge of ideals immanent to material reality. In 'Notes From a Talk on Poetry', Williams advocates continual epistemological renewal through the ‘fastening’ of affect to the 'world of the senses', the visual sense in particular. This study reveals the centrality of affect — the mechanism by which vision becomes knowledge — to H.D.’s and Williams’ poetic theory. The thesis then analyses H.D.'s 1916 collection Sea Garden and Williams' 1921 collection Sour Grapes within the framework of these epistemological theories. Contrary to prevailing critical orthodoxies, which tend to emphasize H.D.’s hermeticism or Williams’ ontology, this thesis shows that the early poetry of both poets is best understood as a working through of the relations between vision, affect, and knowledge. Finally, the thesis argues that Sea Garden and Sour Grapes go beyond the essays of 1919, as the genre of poetry allows H.D. and Williams to engage with fundamental epistemological problems in more complex, problematic, and productive ways. (shrink)

My thesis positions the contested category of the American Romance within Jacques Rancière'’s account of the relationship between literary and political modernity. I will suggest that for many American writers the evocation of romance offered a means of tuning their writing towards an abstract encounter with the political as it is defined in the philosophy of Jacques Rancière. The political, for Rancière, is constituted by a moment in which the boundaries and internal demarcations of the sensible world are reconfigured. This (...) could be a moment when a subject thought to be incapable of deliberative utterance, but only of the ‘noise’ of complaint, assumes the right to speak on behalf of the collective, or when the so called natural behavior of a specific class of persons becomes ‘denaturized’. Rancière defines politics as the paradoxical appearance of ‘the part that has no part’, thus framing the moment of politics as an unsettling of reality, as some have put it, a ‘wringing’ of ontology. In aligning the uncanniness of Rancière’s political ontology with the anachronisms of the modern romance and the supernatural devices of the Gothic genre, I am working somewhat against the grain of his own literary categories. Rancière positions the realist novel as the primary form of an aesthetic modernity where, for the first time, the literary and the aesthetic are seen as autonomous practices capable of intervening in the configuration of the community, thus demonstrating their alignment with the practice of politics as such. He aligns older forms like the romance with what he calls the ‘representative’ rather than the aesthetic regime. However, I want to suggest that hybrid forms like the modern romance or the gothic novel, can often derive their energy from the deregulation of hieratic relations of form and content, with the disincorporation of genre acting as a process internal to the genre. This is especially apparent in Pierre, and to a lesser extent, in Wieland, where a certain generic instability is put at the center of the representation of the democratic national space. (shrink)

This comprehensive introductory textbook to early Chinese philosophy covers a range of philosophical traditions which arose during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods in China, including Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, and Legalism. It considers concepts, themes and argumentative methods of early Chinese philosophy and follows the development of some ideas in subsequent periods, including the introduction of Buddhism into China. The book examines key issues and debates in early Chinese philosophy, cross-influences between its traditions and interpretations by scholars up (...) to the present day. The discussion draws upon both primary texts and secondary sources, and there are suggestions for further reading. This will be an invaluable guide for all who are interested in the foundations of Chinese philosophy and its richness and continuing relevance. (shrink)