Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by (...) Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice-which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion-Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago. (shrink)

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the subject is something else--the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin's philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the (...) constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays--though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal. Benjamin's investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón's Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the "constellation" as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century's greatest literary critics.--. (shrink)

Rent control is an economic abomination. It diverts investments away from residential rent units, it leads to their deterioration, it is responsible for urban decay such as in the South Bronx, it does not help poor tenants, it is a horrendous means of income redistribution. Yet this economic regulation is beloved of intellectuals (hot beds of pro rent control sentiment are Berkeley, Ann Arbor and Cambridge) particularly in the legal and philosophical communities. The present article is dedicated to an exploration (...) and rejection of the arguments in behalf of rent control which emanate from this source. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an argument showing why the general properties of a self-organizing system (e.g. being far from equilibrium) may be too weak to characterize biological and proto-biological systems. The special character of biological systems, tell us that its distinctive capacities could have been developed in pre-biotic times. In other words, the basic properties of life would be better comprehended if we think that they were much more likely early in time. We developed a conceptual proposal on the (...) origins of pre-biotic world, a kind of protocellular system which is made up of simple molecular compounds interconnecting three different types of processes. The interrelation of these processes characterizes the “Informational Dynamical System” (our conceptualprotocell proposal) as an autonomous dynamical system that can maintain by itself in far from equilibrium state, as opposed to those that depend on external causes. Consequently it follows that, in the dawn of pre-biotic world, there was no DNA or RNA or proteins to begin with. As well, our proposal implies the separation of biological evolution from the kind of open-ended evolution that gave rise to first breed of animate matter. (shrink)

Aims to show graduate students and researchers the vital benefits of integrating mathematics into their study and experience of the physical world. This book details numerous topics from the frontiers of modern physics and mathematics such as convergence, Green functions, complex analysis, Fourier series and Fourier transform, tensors, and others.

Often, new technology brings in its train unprecedented problems. As far as computers, e-mail and the internet are concerned, this certainly holds true in many arenas. But there is one aspect of this new technology which does not present additional difficulties: cyber-slacking. The managerial challenges posed by employees using these amenities for job search, shopping sprees, personal relationships, in a word, general goofing off, have long ago already been overcome by employers. There is 'nothing new under the sun' in at (...) least this one dimension of the computer age. (shrink)

Revision of the author's thesis (Bonn, 1924).

This paper discusses logical accounts of the notions of consistency and negation, and in particular explores some potential means of defining consistency and negation when expressed in modal terms. Although this can be done with interesting consequences when starting from classical normal modal logics, some intriguing cases arise when starting from paraconsistent modalities and negations, as in the hierarchy of the so-called cathodic modal paraconsistent systems (cf. Bueno-Soler, Log Univers 4(1):137–160, 2010). The paper also takes some first steps in exploring (...) the philosophical significance of such logical tools, comparing the notions of consistency and negation modally defined with the primitive notions of consistency and negation in the family of Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs), suggesting some experiments on their expressive power. (shrink)

Reflections on the Conference on First-Person Methodologies in the Study of Consciousness, Ratna Ling Retreat Center, Cazadero, California, March 29-April 2, 2007.