Richard Tuck traces the history of the distinction between sovereignty and government and its relevance to the development of democratic thought. Tuck shows that this was a central issue in the political debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and provides a new interpretation of the political thought of Bodin, Hobbes and Rousseau. Integrating legal theory and the history of political thought, he also provides one of the first modern histories of the constitutional referendum, and shows the importance of the (...) United States in the history of the referendum. The book derives from the John Robert Seeley Lectures delivered by Richard Tuck at the University of Cambridge in 2012, and will appeal to students and scholars of the history of ideas, political theory and political philosophy. (shrink)

Examines the nature of rhetorical theory and criticism, the rhetoric of science, and the impact of poststructuralism and postmodernism on contemporary accounts of rhetoric.

This article discusses the “aesthetics of existence” developed by Foucault in the late “ethical” stage of his work, aiming to clarify its complex significance through its relationships with ethics, critique, and, in particular, art as a model of self-invention. The main claims are that aesthetics of existence is a new type of self-formation molded by technologies inspired not only by the ancient ethical self-formation but also by modern art understood as creative self-production; thus, aesthetics of existence is an active (...) form of aesthetic education, in the particular sense of an ontological self-formation. To argue these claims, the author advances a line of analysis alternative to typical readings, which see it as related exclusively to the ancient “art of living” or its modern revival in the Nietzschean project of self-fashioning. The focus is instead on the Baudelairean and Kantian roots of Foucault’s work—modernity as a critical attitude and the transgressive art of the self of the dandy—as keys to understand the reframing by him of the art of living into a modern aesthetics of existence. This appears as a critical-transgressive invention of the self, which could contribute to constituting new subjectivities and alternative norms for the entire social body. (shrink)

This paper compares the features and methods of the two leading implemented systems that offer a tool for helping a user to find or invent arguments to support or attack a designated conclusion, the Carneades Argumentation System and the IBM Watson Debater tool. The central aim is to contribute to the understanding of scholars in informal logic, rhetoric and argumentation on how these two software systems can be useful for them. One contribution of the paper is to explain to these (...) potential users how the two tools are applicable to the task of inventing arguments by using some simple illustrative examples. Another is to redefine the structure of argument invention as a procedure. (shrink)

In teasing out the diverse origins of our “modern, ecological understanding of epidemic disease” Greater than the parts: holism in biomedicine, 1920–1950, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998), historians have downplayed the importance of parasitology in the development of a natural history perspective on disease. The present article reassesses the significance of parasitology for the “invention” of medical ecology in post-war France. Focussing on the works of microbiologist Charles Nicolle and on that of physician and zoologist Hervé Harant, I argue (...) that French “medical ecology” was not professionally insulated from some major trends in parasitology, especially in Tunis where disciplinary borders in the medical sciences collapsed. This argument supports the claim that ecological perspectives of disease developed in colonial context but I show that parasitologists such as Harant built on the works of medical geographers who had called attention to the dynamic and complex biological relations between health and environment in fashioning the field of medical ecology in the mid-1950s. As the network of scientists who contributed to the global emergence of “disease ecology” is widening, both medical geography and parasitology stand out as relevant sites of inquiries for a broader historical understanding of the multiple “ecological visions” in twentieth-century biomedical sciences. (shrink)

Fifty years ago when Jacques Hadamard set out to explore how mathematicians invent new ideas, he considered the creative experiences of some of the greatest thinkers of his generation, such as George Polya, Claude Le;vi-Strauss, and Albert Einstein. It appeared that inspiration could strike anytime, particularly after an individual had worked hard on a problem for days and then turned attention to another activity. In exploring this phenomenon, Hadamard produced one of the most famous and cogent cases for the existence (...) of unconscious mental processes in mathematical invention and other forms of creativity. Written before the explosion of research in computers and cognitive science, his book, originally titled The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field , remains an important tool for exploring the increasingly complex problem of mental life. The roots of creativity for Hadamard lie not in consciousness, but in the long unconscious work of incubation, and in the unconscious aesthetic selection of ideas that thereby pass into consciousness. His discussion of this process comprises a wide range of topics, including the use of mental images or symbols, visualized or auditory words, "meaningless" words, logic, and intuition. Among the important documents collected is a letter from Albert Einstein analyzing his own mechanism of thought. (shrink)

Gilbert Simondon has recently attracted the interest of political philosophers and theorists, despite the fact that he is renowned as a philosopher of technics – author of Of the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects – who also elaborated a general theory of complex systems in Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information. A group of scholars has developed Gilles Deleuze’s early suggestion that Simondon’s social ontology might offer the basis for a re-theorisation of radical democracy. (...) Others, following Herbert Marcuse, have instead focused on Simondon’s analysis of the relationship between technology and society. However, only a joint study of Simondon’s two major works can reveal their implicit political stakes. As I will argue, Simondon’s anti-Aristotelianism and his anti-Heideggerian understanding of the Greek origins of philosophy, allow us to conceive philosophical thought as a ‘tradition of invention’, that is, a pedagogical technē endowed with the political task of maintaining the openness of the social system and allowing normative invention to emerge from within. (shrink)

Mathematics has been the most successful and is the most mature of the sciences. Its first great master work – Euclid's ‘Elements’ – which helped to establish the field and demonstrate the power of its methods, was written about 2400 years ago; and it served as a standard text in the mathematics curriculum well into the twentieth century. By contrast, the first comparable master work of physics – Newton's Principia – was written 300 odd years ago. And the juvenile science (...) of biology only got its first master work – Darwin's ‘On the Origin of Species’ – a mere 150 years ago. The development of the subject has also been extraordinarily fertile, particularly in the last three centuries, and it is perhaps only in the last century that the other sciences have begun to approach mathematics in the steady accumulation of knowledge that it has been able to offer. There has, moreover, been almost universal agreement on its methods and how they are to be applied. What we require is proof; and, in practice, there is very little disagreement over whether or not we have it. The other sciences, by contrast, tend to get mired in controversy over the significance of this or that experimental finding or over whether one theory is to be preferred to another. (shrink)

This article proposes three states in an actor-network and a global/local distinction among actants. This theoretical framework is applied to two invention networks: one created by an inventor of solar heating systems and another created by a designer who wanted to create an environmentally sustainable furniture fabric. Both solar inventor and fabric designer wanted to develop technologies that would improve the environment and also make money. The article concludes by considering whether invention networks that intend to turn “good (...) into gold” have to evolve a shared representation or whether it is sufficient for a new design to serve as a boundary object for actants. (shrink)

Even a decade after the end of the 1914–1918 war, economic theory assumed that the world was tranquil and orderly. By 1939 an economic slump without parallel, allied to the re-emergence of military ambition in Europe, had brought economic theorists face to face with reality. In this classic book, first published in 1967, Professor Shackle provides a study, in exact and professional language, of the precise nature, structure, presuppositions, language and inter-relations of the theories which were formulated in these fourteen (...) years - unparalleled in the whole history of economics except perhaps by the years of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. These theories are not prototypes on the way to something better but are of essential and permanent importance. (shrink)

This paper is a preliminary exploration of the connections between the statistical style of reasoning and the research practices of statistical mechanics in the early period of the long quantum revolution. It suggests that before 1925 the instantiations of the statistical style in physics went through two phases. The first phase consisted of the formulation of the Maxwell‐Boltzmann statistics on the basis of the population‐gas analogy. The second phase was characterized by the generalization of the Maxwell‐Boltzmann statistics through analogies between (...) ideal gas molecules and other microphysical entities, analogies that shaped and were shaped by the rise of quantum theory. Einstein's invention of the Bose‐Einstein statistics started a third phase and created the conditions of possibility for a new classification of microphysical entities according to their different statistics. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century the microscope opened up a new world of observation, and, according to Catherine Wilson, profoundly revised the thinking of scientists and philosophers alike. The interior of nature, once closed off to both sympathetic intuition and direct perception, was now accessible with the help of optical instruments. The microscope led to a conception of science as an objective, procedure-driven mode of inquiry and renewed interest in atomism and mechanism. Focusing on the earliest forays into microscopical research, from (...) 1620 to 1720, this book provides us with both a compelling technological history and a lively assessment of the new knowledge that helped launch philosophy into the modern era. Wilson argues that the discovery of the microworld--and the apparent role of living animalcula in generation, contagion, and disease--presented metaphysicians with the task of reconciling the ubiquity of life with human-centered theological systems. It was also a source of problems for philosophers concerned with essences, qualities, and the limits of human knowledge, whose positions are echoed in current debates about realism and instrument-mediated knowledge. Covering the contributions of pioneering microscopists (Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Malpighi, Grew, and Hooke) and the work of philosophers interested in the microworld (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley), she challenges historians who view the abstract sciences as the sole catalyst of the Scientific Revolution as she stresses the importance of observational and experimental science to the modern intellect. (shrink)

This article presents Simondon’s psycho-biological thinking as a type of heterodox naturalism centring on the self-organizing activity of vital forms. Despite his critique of classic notions of form, notably Aristotelian hylomorphism, Simondon revises this concept through a critical expansion and synthesis of information theory and Gestalt psychology. In his lecture series Imagination and Invention (1965–6) in particular, he develops an account of psycho-biological activity as governed by what he calls ‘images’: relatively autonomous informational sub-systems that serve to regulate the (...) relationship between organism and environment and that constitute the condition for creative action or invention. Focusing on his analysis of the individualization of perceptual objects, the article goes on to show that ‘forms’ for Simondon feature as emergent properties of quantum thresholds of ‘information’ within these systems. It also argues that such a conception offers a more promising alternative to both idealist philosophies of perception and materialist interpretations of deconstruction. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler’s concept of individuation suggests that the human being is co-constituted with technology. Technology precedes the individual in the respect that the latter is thrown in a technological world that always already contains externally inscribed memories—what he calls tertiary memories—that selectively form the individual and the collective space of the community. Revisiting Husserlian phenomenology, Stiegler renews the critique of culture industries asserting that imagination and differance have always been technologically mediated, and echoing the Heideggerian anxiety concerning thinking’s over-determination, Stiegler (...) offers an intriguing analysis of the specificity of our age’s technologies while exploring the possibility for political responsibility and educational intervention. (shrink)

This paper deals with what has been called "ars inveniendi" (’art of finding‘) in antiquity, medieval and early modern times. A survey of different techniques of finding tenable and relevant arguments is presented (among them, the Topical tradition, Status theory, Debate theory, Encyclopedic systems, Creativity techniques). Their advantages and disadvantages are critically compared. It is suggested that a mixture of strategies of finding arguments should be used. Finally, a few remarks showing the relationship beween the strategies of finding arguments and (...) creativity in general are given. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom and many published histories of “Green Chemistry” describe its start as being a result of governmental and/or regulatory actions at the US Environmental Protection Agency during the early 1990’s. But there were many Real World industrial examples of environmentally friendly commercial processes in the oil and commodity chemicals industries for decades prior to the 1990s. Some early examples of commercial “Green Chemistry” are briefly described in this article. The Boots/Hoechst Celanese Ibuprofen process was one of the earliest multiple-award-winning (...) examples of industrial “Green Chemistry” in the fine chemical/pharmaceutical industry. The author, who conceived the BHC Ibuprofen synthetic strategy in 1984, reveals and documents that the BHC Ibuprofen process was not primarily a result of governmental or regulatory mandates, or environmentalist or political motivations. The BHC ibuprofen process, and probably many other early industrial “green” inventions, evolved from, and their development and commercialization motivated and guided by, a long prior industrial culture of both scientific and technical evolution. The invention and commercialization of these early industrial commercialized processes, and the BHC Ibuprofen process were also guided by both competitive and economic market needs, personal human motivations, and a low waste culture of “Quality” and “Continuous Improvement” that the commodity chemical industry internally promoted in the 1980’s. The author comments on some perceptions of the status of Green Chemistry now, and directions it should consider going in the future. The author recommends that young Green Chemists and/or Green Engineers reconsider “Quality” approaches in order to genuinely lead Society toward a Greener future. (shrink)

Summary We offer a novel historical-philosophical framework for discussing experimental practice which we call ‘Generating Experimental Knowledge’. It combines three different perspectives: experimental systems, concept formation, and the pivotal role of error. We then present an historical account of the invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM), or Raster-Tunnelmikroskop, and interpret it within the proposed framework. We show that at the outset of the STM project, Binnig and Rohrer—the inventors of the machine—filed two patent disclosures; the first is dated (...) 22 December 1978 (Switzerland), and the second, two years later, 12 September 1980 (US). By studying closely these patent disclosures, the attempts to realize them, and the subsequent development of the machine, we present, within the framework of generating experimental knowledge, a new account of the invention of the STM. While the realization of the STM was still a long way off, the patent disclosures served as blueprints, marking the changes that had to be introduced on the way from the initial idea to its realization. (shrink)

An important artistic topic of Italian Renaissance painting was the rendering of the human figure. As leading actors in a painted narrative, figures had to convince beholders of the reality of the matter depicted with appropriated attitudes and gestures. This article is about two ways of drawing or rather constructing the human figure artists developed to achieve this goal. The first was only an adaptation to an old method: because of the rather simple and coarse elements used, constructions often resulted (...) in faulty pictures and were for that matter often criticized. As this article will show, the second method involved a new and very successful drawing skill, which not just required a different kind of knowledge of visual forms but of procedures of moving the hand, too. (shrink)

The ArgumentI propose a revisionist account of the production and reception of Galileo's telescopic observations of 1609–10, an account that focuses on the relationship between credit and disclosure. Galileo, I argue, acted as though the corroboration of his observations were easy, not difficult. His primary worry was not that some people might reject his claims, but rather that those able to replicate them could too easily proceed to make further discoveries on their own and deprive him of credit. Consequently, he (...) tried to slow down potential replicators to prevent them from becoming competitors. He did so by not providing other practitioners access to high-power telescopes and by withholding information about how to build them. This essay looks at the development of Galileo's monopoly on early telescopic astronomy to understand how the relationship between disclosure and credit changed as he moved from being an instrument-maker to becoming a discoverer and, eventually, a court philosopher. (shrink)

Résumé Au point de départ, l’acte théologique se constitue par la lecture des Écritures. Mais cette lecture, par laquelle se produit un sujet théologien, ne peut elle-même se résoudre que dans une écriture par laquelle ce sujet fait trace, à son tour, de son expérience. Le présent article investigue ces rapports complexes de la théologie aux Écritures et à l’écriture pour tenter d’en définir l’acte théologique comme traversée des textes et production d’un sens. La théologie, argumente-t-il, suppose que le lecteur-écrivain (...) se situe dans l’axe de l’Autre, c’est-à-dire dans un rapport au texte et à l’ordre symbolique du monde qui consiste à ne pas se laisser arrêter par leurs valeurs acquises, à continuer sans relâche à interroger ce qu’ils laissent à désirer. Cet acte, dès lors, ne peut se réaliser que dans le lieu de son impossibilité même : donner figure à l’Autre en sachant que cet Autre lui échappe.The theological work starts by reading Scriptures. This reading, which produces the theological subject, yet needs a writing by which this subject traces his own experience. The present paper investigates the complex relations that the theologian must keep up with reading and writing in order to define the specific locus of his work. Theology, it argues, supposes that the reader-writer places himself in the axis of the Other, that means, in such a relation with texts and symbolic order of the word as he will not be stopped by actual value systems and he will keep inquiring what is left open to desire by them. This act, therefore, can take place only in the context of its own impossibility : it gives a representation of the Other while knowing that the Other cannot be represented. (shrink)

Certaines ont affirmé que le concept de gender était une invention américaine, intraduisible par le mot français « genre ». Pourtant, au-delà des distinctions grammaticales, il existe depuis longtemps - bien avant Beauvoir, Oakley, et l'usage postmoderniste construit par Joan Scott et Judith Butler - un usage français du terme « genre », qui spécifie dans le vocabulaire sociopolitique - notamment féministe - la construction sociale et culturelle des sexes. L’objet de cet article est d’en rétablir les trajectoires historiques (...) et de contribuer peut-être à balayer les dernières réticences manifestées en France à son égard. (shrink)

What role does genius play in scientific invention and discovery? This was a question at the fore of many discussions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially as the Romantic movement came to a head. It also serves as a frame for Idit Chikurel's focused and fascinating account of Salomon Maimon's views about mathematical invention and discovery. As with many of his positions, Maimon adopted a rather iconoclastic theory of genius and invention, and Chikurel does an excellent (...) job of charting the ways in which Maimon sought to categorize the means by which we can make inventions and discoveries in mathematics. The project is fairly narrow and assumes a good deal of familiarity with Maimon, so it is... (shrink)