The essays in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture contribute pioneering and revelatory insights into the phenomenon of invisibility, forging new and multi-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of aesthetics, technology, representation and politics. Importantly, they acknowledge the complex interaction between invisibility and its opposite, visibility, arguing that the one cannot be fully grasped without the other. Considering these entanglements across different media forms, the chapters reveal that the invisible affects many cultural domains, from digital communication and operative images to the (...) activism of social movements, as well as to identity, race, gender and class issues. Whether the subject is comic books, photographic provocations, biometric and brainwave sensing technologies, letters, or a cinematic diary, the analyses in this book engage critically and theoretically with the topic of invisibility and thus represent the first scholarly study to identify its importance for the field of visual culture. (shrink)

Arne Grøn’s reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s authorship revolves around existential challenges of human identity. The 35 essays that constitute this book are written over three decades and are characterized by combining careful attention to the augmentative detail of Kierkegaard’s text with a constant focus on issues in contemporary philosophy. Contrary to many approaches to Kierkegaard’s authorship, Grøn does not read Kierkegaard in opposition to Hegel. The work of the Danish thinker is read as a critical development of Hegelian phenomenology with (...) particular attention to existential aspects of human experience. Anxiety and despair are the primary existential phenomena that Kierkegaard examines throughout his authorship, and Grøn uses these negative phenomena to argue for the basically ethical aim of Kierkegaard’s work. In Grøn’s reading, Kierkegaard conceives human selfhood not merely as relational, but also a process of becoming the self that one is through the otherness of self-experience, that is, the body, the world, other people, and God. This book should be of interest to philosophers, theologians, literary studies scholars, and anyone with an interest not only in Kierkegaard, but also in human identity. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that one has yet to acknowledge the extent to which the notion of the aesthetic and its content is institutionally negotiated. A central question that we ought to bear in mind is: does the organization of “aesthetic knowledge” that the traditional disciplines facilitate promote or prevent insight into meta-aesthetic and transaesthetic concerns?

The aim of this article is two-folded. First, I wish to situate Baudelaire in the midst of 19th-century media, bring attention to the way he explored the new media of his day, and suggest that he developed his own media aesthetics. Second, I wish to examine Baudelaire’s relation to photography more specifically, emphasizing his love of commonplaces and clichés. I begin by contextualizing Baudelaire’s notorious attack on photography in the Salon de 1859 and then examine three poems in light of (...) the photographic culture of Baudelaire’s day. Central here is the experiment on the notion of identity that was carried out with the spread of portrait photography: the notation of a unique identity was undermined, processes of multiplication were explored, and the poetic discourse of the “soul” was radically changed. (shrink)

Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology, and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). Effective scientific theories magnify understanding, help supply legitimate explanations, and assist in formulating predictions. Moving from their (...) knowledge-producing representational functions to their interventional roles (Hacking 1983), theories are integral to building technologies used within consumer, industrial, and scientific milieus. -/- This entry explores the structure of scientific theories from the perspective of the Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Views. Each of these views answers questions such as the following in unique ways. What is the best characterization of the composition and function of scientific theory? How is theory linked with world? Which philosophical tools can and should be employed in describing and reconstructing scientific theory? Is an understanding of practice and application necessary for a comprehension of the core structure of a scientific theory? How are these three views ultimately related? (shrink)

The complex gestures of artwork remain an under-explored theoretical topos in contemporary visual culture studies. In our turbulent mediasphere where images are constantly mobilized to enact symbolic forms of warfare and where they get entangled in all kinds of cultural conflicts and controversies, a turn to the gestural life of images promises a particularly pertinent avenue of intellectual inquiry. As both a cultural phenomenon and a philosophical concept, the notion of gesture straddles several disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, performance, theater, (...) film and visual studies. In this volume, contributors ask: How may one speak not only of the gestures of the body but also of the gestures of the image? What constitutes gesturality in the image and, more broadly, what are the gestures of the aesthetic itself? By thinking about images within this conceptual framework, this volume seeks to renew our understanding of the image. (shrink)

The relation of the special and the general principle of relativity to the principle of covariance, the principle of equivalence and Mach's principle, is discussed. In particular, the connection between Lorentz covariance and the special principle of relativity is illustrated by giving Lorentz covariant formulations of laws that violate the special principle of relativity: Ohm's law and what we call “Aristotle's first and second laws.” An “Aristotelian” universe in which all motion is relative to “absolute space” is considered. The first (...) law: a free particle is at rest. The second law: force is proportional to velocity. Ohm's law: the current density is proportional to the electrical field strength. Neither of these laws fulfills the principle of relativity. The examples illustrate, in the context of Lorentz covariance and special relativity, Kretschmann's critique of founding Einstein's general principle of relativity on the principle of general covariance. A modification of the principle of covariance is suggested, which may serve as a restricted criterium for a physical law to satisfy Einstein's general principle of relativity. Other objections that have been raised to the validity of Einstein's general principle of relativity are based upon the preferred state of inertial frames in the general, as well as in the special theory, the existence of tidal effects in “true” gravitational fields, doubts as to the validity of Mach's principle, whether electromagnetic phenomena obey the principle, and, finally, the anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation. These objections are reviewed and discussed. (shrink)

Movements, in the last fifty years, have been bringing knowledge closer to the new knowledge coming from the neurosciences. In this brief essay, we intend to analyze neuropsychoanalysis and neuroaesthetics, as promising areas in these terms. Such an analysis will be based on critical theory, conceptualized mainly by Adorno and Horkheimer, especially considering that “On the path to modern science, men renounced meaning and replaced the concept with the formula, the cause with the rule and probability”. Therefore, in relation to (...) neuropsychoanalysis, its historical and scientific foundations, the international movement that gave rise to the area, its purposes and objections attributed to it will be analyzed. Regarding neuroaesthetics, its emergence, its relations with conceptual art and the neurohistory of art will be presented, as well as possible intrinsic parallels to sensation and experience. Finally, following the objective of the essay, the epistemological critique of these areas will be done through the concepts of Gestell (Heidegger) and Ecosofia (Guattari), as well as supported by Valéry and Teresa D’Ávila. (shrink)

A. W. F. Edwards is one of the most influential mathematical geneticists in the history of the discipline. One of the last students of R. A. Fisher, Edwards pioneered the statistical analysis of phylogeny in collaboration with L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and helped establish Fisher's concept of likelihood as a standard of statistical and scientific inference. In this book, edited by philosopher of science Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Edwards's key papers are assembled alongside commentaries by leading scientists, discussing Edwards's influence on their (...) own research and on thinking in their field overall. In an extensive interview with Winther, Edwards offers his thoughts on his contributions, their legacy, and the context in which they emerged. This book is a resource both for anyone interested in the history and philosophy of genetics, statistics, and science, and for scientists seeking to develop new algorithmic and statistical methods for understanding the genetic relationships between and among species both extant and extinct. (shrink)

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort: Introduction: A Negativistic Approach to Existential Hermeneutics Stefano Micali: Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology René Rosfort: Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics Mads Peter Karlsen: The Past >Has Us Before We Have.

It is shown how a consistent kinematic resolution of Ehrenfest's paradox may be given in accordance with the special theory of relativity. Some statements by T. E. Phipps, Jr., connected with these matters, are commented upon. Problems connected with the relation between stress and strain are solved by a manifestly covariant formulation of Hooke's law.

In a recent article in this journal, Kingsley has tried to show that the postulates of special relativity contradict each other. Here we show that the arguments of Kingsley are invalid because of an erroneous appeal to symmetry in a non-symmetric situation. The consistency of the postulates of special relativity and the relativistic kinematics deduced from them is restated.

Observation of online forums is a relevant methodological approach for researchers in several disciplines. However, ethical guidelines on such observations challenge the ethically concerned researcher. In this paper, I reflect on how I carried out my observation of an online weight-loss forum, and how I could have conducted it differently to meet ethical standards and the demands of high-quality research. After receiving approval from the forum administrators to observe the forum, information about my project on obesity was posted online. Some (...) of the participants reacted negatively to my presence in the forum. This paper draws on the evolving discussion between researcher and participants on the complex issue of research ethics, particularly informed consent, in studying closed forums on the Internet. It is suggested that evaluating whether participants are harmed is more important than the public/private divide when considering whether informed consent is necessary. (shrink)

This chapter examines Soren Kierkegaard's views about the concept of time and history. It suggests that while time and history do not figure prominently in the works of Kierkegaard, the implications of his key concepts can only be understood through the questions of time and history, particularly his ideas about selfhood, existence, and the ethical. The chapter also discusses the different notions of time and history, and considers how time and history come into play in the works of Kierkegaard.

The question is discussed whether the description of the gravitational Doppler effect as a simple energy effect is consistent with its general-relativistic description as a metric-time effect. The difference between a local description and a global one is stressed. In the local description one is permitted to ignore metric effects. The global description yields a position-dependent rate of proper time in a gravitational field, and the energy, or the frequency, of a “freely falling” photon is described as a constant of (...) motion. An experiment of nonlocal character measuring, simultaneously, the gravitational Doppler effect and the position-dependent rate of proper time may be performed by the use of a geostationary satellite. A simple general-relativistic treatment of the satellite experiment is obtained by transforming the Schwarzschild metric to a rotating frame, and describing the motion of free particles and the rates of standard clocks in the resulting metric. (shrink)