Investigation of the evolution of the DNA sequences that comprise a small gene cluster in five closely related species of Drosophila shows that it evolves as a mosaic, with adjacent subregions displaying very different rates and types of evolution. It appears that local differences in the influence of selectional and mutational forces result in the formation of these distinct subregions.

Leon Roth’s famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics of historiography. Within (...) this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was . With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” . The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel’s account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the One. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “Mosaic distinction” , the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity. (shrink)

A survey of models in immunology is conducted and distinct kinds of models are characterized based on whether models are material or conceptual, the distinctiveness of their epistemic purpose, and the criteria for evaluating the goodness of a model relative to its intended purpose. I argue that the diversity of models in interdisciplinary fields such as immunology reflects the fact that information about the phenomena of interest is gathered from different sources using multiple methods of investigation. To each model is (...) attached a description specifying how information about a phenomenon of interest has been acquired, highlighting points of commonality and difference between the methodological and epistemic histories of the information encapsulated in different models. These points of commonality and difference allow investigators to integrate findings from different models into more comprehensive explanatory accounts, as well as to troubleshoot anomalies and faulty accounts by going back to the original building blocks. (shrink)

College of Medicine, University of South Alabama Mobile, AL 36688-0002, USA wbp501{at}jaguar1.usouthal.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Recent work in viral genomics has shown that bacteriophages exhibit a high degree of mosaicism, which is most likely due to a long history of prolific horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Given these findings, we argue that each of the most plausible attempts to properly classify bacteriophages into distinct species fail. Mayr's biological species concept fails because there is (...) no useful viral analog to sexual reproduction. Phenetic species concepts fail because they obscure the mosaicism and the rich reticulated viral histories. Phylogenetic species concepts, even when extended to take into account reticulation, fail because there is no non-arbitrary distinction between recombination events that create a new viral species and those that do not. There is good reason to think that bacteriophages, arguably the Earth's most abundant biological agent, evolve without forming species. Introduction The Biology of Viruses 2.1 Bacteriophage life cycles 2.2 Mechanisms of HGT The Species Problem and Species Concepts 3.1 Phenetic species concepts 3.2 The biological species concept 3.3 Phylogenetic species concepts 3.4 The ecological species concept 3.5 Homeostatic property cluster species Viruses and Species Taxonomy Reticular Phylogenies Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) is rarely referred to as a philosopher. He is known as the author of Glasarchitektur (1914), and of numerous books, essays, and stories of “fantasy” and anti-militarism. As a follower of Berkeley’s skepticism, he proposed an aesthetic of the fantastic, an art program in contrast to current realism and impressionism. Studying technical and scientific progress, he developed alternative ideas, in a unique blend of fiction and science. His “astro-” or “cosmopsychology” is a variant of ancient panpsychism or, (...) as Jan Assmann calls it, cosmotheism, which was suppressed by the “Mosaic distinction,” the introduction of true and false in things religious. Exponents of this dualism are the supporters of the “Great chain of being” (Lovejoy): Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, and Kant in his refutation of hylozoism. The late Kant, however, comes close to Scheerbart in calling planet Earth an “organic,” though not “living” body. Fechner and, after him, Scheerbart overcome such hesitation. In Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, scrutinized by Bruno Latour, the old intuition of a non-dualistic eco-holism takes on its actual form. (shrink)

The present contribution deals with excess in medieval and early modern monastic asceticism. It claims that excess, in this context, is not an individual option, but a general problem inherent to Christian asceticism. By giving priority to self-denial, this type of asceticism promotes a self-regulated, autonomous subjectivity which is clearly an unintentional by-product of the asceticism. Therefore individual asceticism oscillates between prohibited self-fashioning and, as a response, intensified self-denial. The problem is outlined in an introductory chapter about ‘De exterioris et (...) interioris hominis compositione’ by David of Augsburg. Following this, two early modern Spanish books are used to illustrate how spiritual texts deal with the ambivalences of asceticism. The ‘Exercitatorio de la vida spiritual’ by García Jiménez de Cisneros regulates asceticism in detail, while the ‘Subida del monte Sión’ by Bernardino de Laredo allows the subject more room for interpretation; this however comes at the price of a fictionalisation of asceticism. (shrink)

프로이트의 모세 및 유일신교의 성립 배경에 대한 연구는 정치신학의 논의 확산과 최근 이집트학의 재발견이라는 새로운 분위기 속에서 주목의 대상이 되고 있다. 이 논문은 프로이트의 마지막 저서 『인간 모세와 유일신교』의 출판 배경과 의도를 살펴보면서, 그의 모세-이집트인설과 유일신교 비판이 독일 나치주의의 반유대주의의 확산을 저지하려는 정치신학적 의도를 숨기고 있다는 사실을 부각시키고자 한다. 이집트학자 얀 아스만에 의하면, 모세의 유대교는 유일신교이나 아케나텐의 아톤교는 우주신교라는 점에서 차이가 있으며, 프로이트가 ‘역사적 인물’ 모세를 중시하는 반면, 문화적 기억이론에서는 ‘기억의 인물’ 모세를 대상으로 한다.BR 프로이트가 유대인 증오의 근원이 유일신교를 수립한 (...) 모세 그 자신에 있다고 말한 것처럼, 아스만 역시 유일신교는 참된 종교와 거짓 종교를 구별하는 이른바 ‘모세구별’에서 시작되었고, 따라서 모세구별의 폐지를 통해서만 억압과 폭력의 해체가 가능하다고 주장한다. 아스만은 프로이트가 “모세구별의 가장 노골적인 반대자”로서 반유대주의의 확산을 저지하려는 분명한 입장을 가졌다고 평가한다. 반유대주의적 증오가 나치주의 시대의 기독교인들에게 전이되는 가운데, 프로이트는 기독교의 실질적인 창시자 유대인 바울을 ‘유대교의 파괴자’인 동시에 ‘유대교의 계승자’라고 평가한다. 바로 이 지점에서 타우베스는 바울을 정치신학적으로 해석하기 시작하였으며, 아스만이 그것을 계승하였다. 프로이트가 기술하는 ‘역사적 모세’는 ‘예언자 모세’가 아니라 ‘법제정자와 정치적 개조로서 모세’이고, 그가 단행한 ‘구별’에서 유대인 혐오가 발생한 것이다. 따라서 ‘역사적 환원에 의한 해체’(니체)로서 프로이트의 유일신교 비판은 정치신학적 권능을 가지고 있다. 타우베스가 바울을 정치신학자로 해석한 것처럼, 아스만은 프로이트의 유일신교 비판에서 정치신학적 요소를 발굴한 것이다. (shrink)

How can liberal democracy best be realized in a world fraught with conflicting new forms of identity politics and intensifying conflicts over culture? This book brings unparalleled clarity to the contemporary debate over this question. Maintaining that cultures are themselves torn by conflicts about their own boundaries, Seyla Benhabib challenges the assumption shared by many theorists and activists that cultures are clearly defined wholes. She argues that much debate--including that of "strong" multiculturalism, which sees cultures as distinct pieces of a (...) mosaic--is dominated by this faulty belief, one with grave consequences for how we think injustices among groups should be redressed and human diversity achieved. Benhabib masterfully presents an alternative approach, developing an understanding of cultures as continually creating, re-creating, and renegotiating the imagined boundaries between "us" and "them." Drawing on contemporary cultural politics from Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, Benhabib develops a double-track model of deliberative democracy that permits maximum cultural contestation within the official public sphere as well as in and through social movements and the institutions of civil society. Agreeing with political liberals that constitutional and legal universalism should be preserved at the level of polity, she nonetheless contends that such a model is necessary to resolve multicultural conflicts. Analyzing in detail the transformation of citizenship practices in European Union countries, Benhabib concludes that flexible citizenship, certain kinds of legal pluralism and models of institutional powersharing are quite compatible with deliberative democracy, as long as they are in accord with egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription, and freedom of exit and association. The Claims of Culture offers invaluable insight to all those, whether students or scholars, lawyers or policymakers, who strive to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of cultural politics in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Both clinical research and basic science rely on the epistemic practice of extrapolation from surrogate models, to the point that explanatory accounts presented in review papers and biology textbooks are in fact composite pictures reconstituted from data gathered in a variety of distinct experimental setups. This raises two new challenges to previously proposed mechanistic-similarity solutions to the problem of extrapolation: one pertaining to the absence of mechanistic knowledge in the early stages of research and the second to the large number (...) of extrapolations underpinning explanatory accounts. An analysis of the strategies deployed in experimental research supports the conclusion that while results from validated surrogate models are treated as a legitimate line of evidence supporting claims about target systems, the overall structure of research projects also demonstrates that extrapolative inferences are not considered definitive or sufficient evidence, but only partially justified hypotheses subjected to further testing. 1 Introduction2 Surrogate Models2.1 What exactly is a surrogate model?2.2 Why use surrogate models?3 Prior Validation of Surrogate Models3.1 The validation and ranking of surrogate models in the early stages of basic research3.2 The validation of surrogate models in later stages of basic research and in clinical research4 ‘Big Picture’ Accounts and the Extrapolations Underpinning Them4.1 The mosaic nature of mechanistic descriptions in basic science4.2 Challenges for mechanistic-similarity-based validation protocols5 Retrospective Testing of Extrapolated Knowledge5.1 Holistic confirmation5.2 Fallback strategies6 Conclusions. (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

In this article I enquire into the notion of ‘political art’, by drawing on ideas from R. G. Collingwood’s often neglected Principles of Art. I show that his characterisation of ‘expression’ reveals what I call the ‘Narrow Aretaic Structure’ (NAS), distinguishable from a ‘Wide Aretaic Structure’ (WAS). Whatever satisfies NAS satisfies WAS, but not vice-versa. Though we have reasons to call ‘art’ anything satisfying WAS, Collingwoodian ‘art proper’ must also satisfy NAS. I then suggest that the distinction between WAS (...) and NAS is more interesting than the distinction between art and non-art and even as a criterion for ‘aesthetic’ (though this is not my main issue). The main issue is articulating a view of when the ‘politicalness’ of ‘political art’ is relevant in light of its being art, or, in Collingwoodian terms, ‘expression’ (under the NAS model). Collingwood allows us to give an alternative answer to these questions; one that does not appeal to ‘messages’ in art and their hypothesised effects on the audience. In other words, an answer that avoids the consequentialist ‘template’, which is restricted to the WAS model. As case studies, I use some of Aleksander Deineka’s ‘Socialist-Realist’ mosaics, as well as other examples of political artworks, and the recording of a work song. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Barry Loewer attempts to defend Humeanism about laws of nature from a charge that Humean laws are not adequately explanatory. Central to his defense is a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations: even if Humeans cannot offer further metaphysical explanations of particular features of their “mosaic,” that does not preclude them from offering scientific explanations of these features. According to Marc Lange, however, Loewer’s distinction is of no avail. Defending a transitivity principle linking (...) scientific explanantia to their metaphysical grounds, Lange argues that a charge of explanatory inadequacy resurfaces once this intuitive principle is in place. This paper surveys, on behalf of the Humean, three strategies for responding to Lange’s criticism. The ready availability of these strategies suggests that Lange’s argument may not bolster anti-Humean convictions, since the argument rests on premises that those not antecedently sharing these convictions may well reject. The three strategies also correspond to three interesting ways of thinking about relations of grounding linking Humean laws and their instances, all of which are consistent with theses of Humean supervenience, and some of which have been heretofore overlooked. (shrink)

This paper is a reflection on the emergent directions of Australian culture and values in the context of the process of globalization. It views Australian society as a multi-cultural mosaic where aboriginal cultures coexist with the derived cultures of migrants from Europe, America and Asia. Adding that globalization has meant both greater confusion and conformity to intrusive American culture and practices, the author asks: Will we be able to find and clarify a changing set of shared values in this (...) emergent society? Although Australia still finds itself in the mould of the acquisitive Western society, a transition to the stronger communitarian value system of the East is a distinct possibility. Drawing inspiration from an experiential workshop in India, the author concludes with the hope that ultimately the survival and enrichment of an edifying Australian culture and set of human values will depend on and flow from the hearts, minds and human creativeness of Australians in a continually changing world. (shrink)

Wrestling with the Angel is a meditation on contemporary political, legal, and social theory from a psychoanalytic perspective. It argues for the enabling function of formal and symbolic constraints in sustaining desire as a source of creativity, innovation, and social change. The book begins by calling for a richer understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of the symbolic and the resources it might offer for an examination of the social link and the political sphere. The symbolic is a crucial dimension of (...) social coexistence but cannot be reduced to the social norms, rules, and practices with which it is so often collapsed. As a dimension of human life that is introduced by language--and thus inescapably "other" with respect to the laws of nature--the symbolic is an undeniable fact of human existence. Yet the same cannot be said of the forms and practices that represent and sustain it. In designating these laws, structures, and practices as "fictions," Jacques Lacan makes clear that the symbolic is a dimension of social life that has to be created and maintained and that can also be displaced, eradicated, or rendered dysfunctional. The symbolic fictions that structure and support the social tie are therefore historicizable, emerging at specific times and in particular contexts and losing their efficacy when circumstances change. They are also fragile and ephemeral, needing to be renewed and reinvented if they are not to become outmoded or ridiculous. Therefore the aim of this study is not to call for a return to traditional symbolic laws but to reflect on the relationship between the symbolic in its most elementary or structural form and the function of constraints and limits. McNulty analyzes examples of "experimental" (as opposed to "normative") articulations of the symbolic and their creative use of formal limits and constraints not as mere prohibitions or rules but as "enabling constraints" that favor the exercise of freedom. The first part examines practices that conceive of subjective freedom as enabled by the struggle with constraints or limits, from the transference that structures the "minimal social link" of psychoanalysis to constrained relationships between two or more people in the context of political and social movements. Examples discussed range from the spiritual practices and social legacies of Moses, Jesus, and Teresa of Avila to the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. The second part is devoted to legal and political debates surrounding the function of the written law. It isolates the law's function as a symbolic limit or constraint as distinct from its content and representational character. The analysis draws on Mosaic law traditions, the political theology of Paul, and twentieth-century treatments of written law in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Pierre Legendre, and Alain Badiou. In conclusion, the study considers the relationship between will and constraint in Kant's aesthetic philosophy and in the experimental literary works of the collective Oulipo. (shrink)

A powerful and influential view to visual perception has been that visual information is processed hierarchically: it proceeds in a series of cascaded stages, which can be associated with distinct brain areas, from a mosaic of simple, local features to an integrated representation of a visual object. Here I will argue that lateral and recurrent connectivity within and between brain areas motivate a range of alternative views, for which I consider the evidence from neural activity. I conclude that perceptual (...) integration proceeds in parallel at different levels, encompassing ever-widening circles of contextual information. At all these levels, visual representations are dynamically dependent on their context; from contour patterns in early visual perception, to episodic events in later stages. The view proposed here implies intrinsic holism, which means that already in the early visual areas, information is integrated across populations of neurons. (shrink)

Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical (...) picture suggested by Humeanism. -/- I suggest that the Humean can respond to these objections not by rejecting this divergence, but by arguing that is appropriate. In particular the Humean can, in the spirit of Loewer (2012), distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanation — this is motivated by differing aims of explanation in science and metaphysics. And they can further leverage this into distinctions between scientific and metaphysical fundamentality and scientific and metaphysical possibility. We can use these distinctions to respond to the objections that the Humean faces. (shrink)

This article explores the cultural form of the obituary as a contribution to ‘collective memory’. In order to assess the value of viewing the obituary through this lens, it is necessary to look at how memory and collective memory have been conceptualized in various authors, especially in the classic works of Bergson, Halbwachs and Benjamin. Tension emerges between those who think that such social forms of memorizing, like tradition, are declining across the board and those who think that they are (...) still alive but contained in new media such as the newspaper. For the latter, including the present author, these mosaics of tiny testimonies can shape collective memory. The cultural form of the obituary is undergoing an internal transformation. Although there is still considerable evidence of the material and social privilege of these subjects, the contemporary obituary is not restricted to the memory of the ‘dominants’. Obituary editors in national newspapers aspire to include all those who have significantly shaped the modern world, including figures hallowed in popular memory and even counter-memory. Moreover, obituaries have now branched out, beyond the arena of heroes and villains, into depictions of a more nuanced or contradictory world of tragedy and paradox. A key element of such memory is the public realm of producers. However here ‘heroes of production’ (workers or industrialists) figure much less frequently than those who have left distinguished cultural and scientific works for the collective inheritance. The article finally asks how the democratization of the form might be further advanced while also recognizing its inescapable foundation in the scarcity of distinction. (shrink)

It is widely assumed by scholars that Christ was in error on such matters as an expectation that the final judgement and its accompanying events would occur within the timeframe of a generation. While accepting that Christ did indeed prophesy his return within this timeframe, a recent co-authored work When the Son of Man Didn't Come aims to defend the veracity of his prophecy by drawing on the same historical-critical method that has given rise to doubts about it. The authors (...) propose a distinction between Mosaic and Jeremianic prophecy, arguing that Christ's was of the latter kind, which was present in the Ancient Near East, the Old and New Testaments, and other Jewish and Christian authors. Their argument, however, is at risk of reducing the truthfulness of a prophecy to its success. Hence this article explores a further distinction between two kinds of prophecy made in Thomas Aquinas's account of the truthfulness of prophecy, mapping it onto the Mosaic-Jeremianic distinction, and arguing that, in view of this linking of Aquinas's understanding of prophecy to the argument of the book, the book certainly adds to the set of proposed theological explanations of how Christ's prophecy of his return was true. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 139-140 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Dimensionen Der Leere: Gottals Nichts Und Nichts Als Gott Im Christlich-Buddistischen Dialog Dimensionen Der Leere: Gottals Nichts Und Nichts Als Gott Im Christlich-Buddistischen Dialog. By Armin Münch. Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT-Verlag, 1998. 337 pp. This is a most unusual study, pieced together out of hidden facets and neglected aspects of Buddhist and Christian studies and containing an unrivaled (...) overview of the literature. If modernWestern theology, taking its cue from Heidegger, has emphasized the temporality of existence, Münch draws our attention to its "spatiality" in what he calls "dimensional thinking." He is able to point to an astonishing number of thinkers from a variety of disciplines who have taken as their starting point our need to orient ourselves in space. In this light, the kenôsis.assage Philippians 2:5-11 is seen to be patterned on a U-shaped movement linking the dimensions "above" and "below" as distinct from S- and O-shaped movements found elsewhere in the mystical tradition.Münch goesonto establish left/right, behind/before, inside/outside, coming to be/passing away as what he calls "immanentals" (12-13) analogous to the "transcendentals" of scholastic theology. In particular, he seeks out thinkers who have tried to formulate the "fourth dimension," which would take us beyond conventional space-time. Plotinus, Eckhart, and the Kabbala are all examined for their attempts to conceptualize the transcendent in this way.What is the purpose of this exercise? Münch's leading question, to which he eventually returns, is clear: "What is lacking in our idea of God if we are ignorant of Buddhist experience?" (5). His purpose is to evaluate the relative significance of kenôsis ("he emptied himself") and tapeinosis."he humbled himself") in Philippians 2. This becomes apparent when he comes to the leading thinkers of the Kyoto School--Nishida, Nishitani, and Abe--and the debate between Takizawa and Yagi. Here Münch finds evidence of a "backwards-directed," or "dorsal," theology that corresponds to a rearwards movement in Buddhist thinking (264). This interesting hypothesis would need further verification by consulting the textual and extratextual traditions that shaped Japanese Buddhism in the context of their Indian and Chinese origins. In criticizing the work of Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Münch suggests that for Buddhists the balance between the experiences of relationship and transitoriness is not so much a matter of different directions or perspectives of transcendence as a leaving behind of all perspectivity (130-133). The search for salvation is orientated rearward in the Buddhist case, forward in the Christian, but these can be seen as complementary directions on the one road.Münch is able to agree with Ueda that Buddhist "nothingness" is best understood as a "desubstantializing dynamic" (283-284). Shûnyatâ.s the "fullness of nothingness" corresponds to the Christian concept of God. Christ is said to have "gone outside himself" rather than to have "emptied himself out" ["Christus entäusserte sich, aber er entleerte sich nicht!"(287)], to have undergone a metamorphosis. In Münch's view, only trinitarian language can encompass all the dimensions, from zero to the [End Page 139] elusive fourth, which are necessary to express what we mean by God in Buddhist terms (305-306).One of the most original things Münch does is to draw a parallel between the Zen ox-herding pictures and the Christian story. This serves to draw together pictorially, if not conceptually, the sometimes arcane researches that go to make up Münch's mosaic. It is perhaps because spatially dimensional thinking has been so rare in Western science, philosophy, and theology that he must search in such dark corners for evidence of it. The result is an at times bewildering patchwork of apparently unrelated contributions that do not blend smoothly into a unity. This sometimes puzzling heterogeneity is justified, in my view, in that it presents us with a highly diversified tool kit for getting to work on the potential offered... (shrink)

In his contribution to the Journal of Medical Ethics, Joseph Mazor1 makes a logical case, based on the premises underlying his reasoning, for his article's primary thesis: he concludes that parents have the prerogative to determine the ‘best interests’ of their infant son in a circumcision decision. If the facts of the matter were ultimately no different from what he adduces, one could admit the soundness of his argument. But the paper is flawed by some questionable assumptions and grievous incompleteness.First, (...) the author insufficiently explores the profound implications of a serious equivocation in the term ‘circumcision’ that is common throughout the literature. He does superficially reference the article on ‘Circumcision’ in The Jewish Encyclopedia, which describes in detail the actual steps involved in brit milah versus brit periah.2 Despite this general allusion, though, he hardly discusses the matter further, as though the distinction were practically irrelevant. It does have fundamental import, however. Milah is merely a token clip of the very tip of the prepuce, which leaves most of the organ system intact. This was evidently the version practiced in biblical times under the old Abrahamic–Mosaic covenant, before the Talmudic guardians of Judaic ethnic and religious identity proposed a means to prevent Hellinising Jewish men from attempting foreskin restoration by stretching their remaining preputial tissue forward. The rabbis mandated the replacement of milah with the more drastic procedure of periah, a radical surgery that cuts and tears from the penis its entire covering, leaving the glans irreversibly denuded. Unlike traditional milah, the innovation of periah necessarily has significant adverse consequences .Second, Mazor concedes that circumcision might cause a ‘moderate’ reduction of sexual pleasure in the lad's …. (shrink)

Maimonides (1135/1138–1204) and Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) are unparalleled in the transformation and revitalization of Jewish and Confucian traditions, respectively. This article offers a comparative analysis of the two philosophers’ conceptions of nature and their view on the end of knowledge. It examines, on one hand, Maimonides’s distinctive interpretation of the rabbinic concept of maʿaseh bereshith (the Account of the Beginning) in the light of his statement that maʿaseh bereshith is identical with natural science; and on the other hand, Zhu (...) Xi’s elucidation of key concepts such as xing 性 (nature), shu 數 (number), tian 天 (heaven), and cheng 誠 (genuineness) in the framework of his doctrine of li 理 (pattern or principle) and qi 氣 (material force). The article points out that Maimonides not only connects the maʿaseh bereshith to the beginning of the world, as traditionally held; he also associates it with the beginning of the revelation of the Mosaic Law, which renders profound implications. While both emphasize the inherent nature of all things, they diverge on the ultimate goal of knowledge in terms of the hierarchy of virtues. Along with Aristotle, Maimonides prioritizes rational virtue over moral virtue, thereby placing intellectual perfection as the ultimate human perfection. In contrast, Zhu Xi esteems knowledge of nature as facilitating the pursuit of the highest goal of sagehood, and leaves no room for the higher status of theoretical pursuit to moral cultivation. (shrink)

While border surveillance produces geopolitical realities and distinctions between types of human life, Richard Mosse’s video installation INCOMING (2017) uses a military high-grade thermal camera to challenge this onto-political project. Recording refugee camps and crossings via the Mediterranean into Europe, his techno-images’ specific mosaic structure, tactility, and luminous flatness evoke the visual mode of Byzantine icons, thus switching from a paranoid, invasive world/view to an economy of mediation and contact with the Other.

Quantum gravity’s suggestion that spacetime may be emergent and so only exist contingently would force a radical reconception of extant analyses of laws of nature. Humeanism presupposes a spatiotemporal mosaic of particular matters of fact on which laws supervene; primitivism and dispositionalism conceive of the action of primitive laws or of dispositions as a process of ‘nomic production’ unfolding over time. We show how the Humean supervenience basis of non-modal facts and primitivist or dispositionalist accounts of nomic production can (...) be reconceived, avoiding a reliance on fundamental spacetime. However, it is unclear that naturalistic forms of Humeanism can maintain their commitment to there being no necessary connections among distinct entities. Furthermore, non-temporal conceptions of production render this central concept more elusive than before. In fact, the challenges run so deep that the survival of the investigated analyses into the era of quantum gravity is questionable. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

Memmert tried to foster the development of attentional research by discussing four differences between attentional misdirection and inattentional blindness . Considering this goal, the comment was received in the intended way by the comments of 18 and 14 who make a number of highly valuable suggestions for further progress. As initially suggested by Memmert this dialog should help unravel the underlying attentional mechanisms of different paradigms. Therefore, we first discuss the suggested distinction between central and spatial IB by Most (...) . Second, we argue that working memory and perceptual load research seem particularly interesting in this regard and should be taken into consideration when conducting future research along the lines of IB and AM. Third, representative task designs can be an important mosaic piece in across-the-board attention theories and highly useful for deriving further testable hypothesis in naturalistic settings. The most important claim of all commentaries in this issue is that the proposed ideas can all be empirically tested and thereby contribute to the advancement of an unified theoretical framework incorporating IB, AM in consideration of overt and covert attention mechanisms. (shrink)

Good Thinking is a collection of papers about abilities, skills, and know-how and the distinctive but often overlooked—or explained away—role that these phenomena play in various foundational issues in epistemology and action theory. Each chapter, taken on its own, represents a fairly specific intervention into debates in (i) epistemic responsibility, (ii) the nature of inferential justification, and (iii) connections between inference and action. But taken collectively, these chapters constitute fragments of a larger mosaic of commitments about the explanatory priority (...) of abilities in normative theories. One distinctive argumentative strategy employed throughout Good Thinking is its placing special emphasis on what might be called “bad thinking”: defective judgments borne out of cognitive short-circuiting, incoherence or self-doubt, depression, or anxiety. The underlying motivation for this is that much of what we can learn about good thinking is only revealed at the margins, where thinking has in some respects gone bad without being entirely spoiled. (shrink)

While border surveillance produces geopolitical realities and distinctions between types of human life, Richard Mosse’s video installation INCOMING (2017) uses a military high-grade thermal camera to challenge this onto-political project. Recording refugee camps and crossings via the Mediterranean into Europe, his techno-images’ specific mosaic structure, tactility, and luminous flatness evoke the visual mode of Byzantine icons, thus switching from a paranoid, invasive world/view to an economy of mediation and contact with the Other.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ego CredoMichel Serres (bio)Saint Paul combines in one singular person the three ancient formats, Jewish, Greek, and Latin, from which the Western World sprang. A devout Pharisee, he was born in Tarsus into a family of the Diaspora, and educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel; he observed Mosaic Law and constantly cited the Torah, both Psalms and Prophets, with erudition. It also seems likely that he knew Greek philosophy, (...) at least by way of Philo the Jew, since he wrote and spoke the Greek language and cited some of its authors, saying that he admired its wisdom, practiced its elegance, and dreaded its reason. As a Roman citizen, like his father, he took pride in this status; he must have known Roman Law, since after being sentenced by the imperial courts, he addressed an appeal to them.Saint Paul not only symbolizes the cultural melting pot among Mediterranean sailors, port-merchants, and occasional scholars during the Pax romana; he above all embodies the integral man built by the Law, the Logos, and the Administration, three formats forged in the fires of Hebraic monotheism, Hellenistic rational Wisdom, and Roman Law, themselves respectively shaped by ritual in the Temple, harmony in the Cosmos, and the City-State in the Empire. This triple belonging to an organized society, a systematic world, and an all-powerful god promotes excellent modes of conduct.Triply formatted in this way, Saint Paul, newly named, rose up out of the trinity of his belonging; he traveled the world over, and he invented the coming era. In so doing, he braved three disasters: the persecution of his fellows, the mockery of Greek philosophers on the Areopagus, and his trial and probable execution by Rome. In and through Paul, all the superior and lasting achievements of the Indo-European and Semitic traditions stem from this original bifurcation; the good news he proclaims is incarnated and grafted on him and through him; from him, the branch of a new creature springs forth.Although his ancient formats imply a belonging to three different communities, the new man identifies with none of them in order to create something entirely new. But what? [End Page 1]Belonging and IdentityIn a previous book, I wrote that my identity cannot be reduced to my belonging to certain groups. So do not call me "old man," a male, or a writer, but put me, if you must, in whichever subcategory designates the corresponding age, sex, or profession. Apart from these characteristics, who am I? Me. All the rest, including what the government bureaucracy obliges me to write on my so-called "identity" card, merely indicates some of the subcategories to which I belong.If you confuse belonging and identity, you make a logical error that is certainly serious, but, in the end, relatively benign. Moreover, you set yourself up to make a deadly mistake, that of racism, which consists precisely in reducing a person to one of his groups. We owe this distinction (which is so important that I like to repeat it) to Saint Paul. We owe it to him both in theory, because he elaborates it, and in terms of his life, because the Good News that he brings breaks with the three ancient formats, all three of which were associated with groups."There is neither Jew nor Greek," says Paul, "there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female" (Gal. 3:28). All he mentions here are classes, sexes, languages, or nations—in short, all categories or groups. What he means is that there is no longer any belonging in the earlier sense, leaving only the identity I = I: "But by the grace of God I am what I am" (1 Cor. 15:10).For Paul, the only thing left is this "new creature": I, the adoptive Son of God, through faith in Jesus Christ; I, full of faith and without works, without pride; I, empty, poor, and nothing: universal.Who am I? I am I, and that is all. If we put aside the subcategorical definition of belonging (x å A), the principle of identity becomes evident, not in a formal way, as in the Aristotelian sense of a... (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between simple, monadic, divine words and the words of men linked to corporeity, devoid of clarity and univocity. For the divine word to be grasped by men a kind of transformation is necessary. One can hypothesize the existence of an archetypal, primordial language, in imitation of the essence of things. It is the language of Adam: given the perfection of a still pure soul, not affected by infirmity, illness or passion, the progenitor seized immediate (...) impressions, grasped the meaning of things whose natures could be enunciated and thought at the same time. It is the original perfect language and is perhaps common to humans and animals if in the Garden of Eden the words of the serpent were understood by Eve. A distinction is drawn between the language of Adam, mimetic of the language of God and the mosaic language in which we have the translation of the divine word in human language. This, despite that, for Moses too it is said that the names correspond to the description of things. A further passage takes place with the passing from one language into another. God addresses different kinds of communication to different people according to their capacities. It is a “translation” of a noetic language that can speak monadically – and it is the case of communication to Moses – or assume the form of names and verbs proper to human language –and it is what happens with the Septuagint, translators like Aron. (shrink)

Even today entering Neapolis, modern day Kavala, in Greece it is possible to imagine Paul stepping off a ship onto the landing. This is the craft of the author of Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostle to engage the hearer in the narrative he constructs: in Acts, the birth and mission of the church is a story in which the audience have a role. According to Acts, Paul followed a vision, a call from a certain Macedonian to 'Come (...) over to Macedonia and help us'. What would he have expected to find as he set out on a sea voyage from Asia to Macedonia, the home of Alexander the Great? Paul's landing is commemorated on a wall mosaic with ancient stone bollards and pillars slightly inland from the current promenade where the fishing boats line up around the bay. Paul's embarkation on this journey has all the hallmarks of mission. His journey will take him to Philippi and beyond. The focus here is particularly on his encounter with Lydia and the flourishing of this mission in a distinct and different place with new opportunities for the development and growth of leadership and community. In particular I will concentrate on the insights of this narrative for the engagement with new frontiers in our present day. (shrink)

An important part of the influential Humean doctrine in philosophy is the supervenience principle (sometimes referred to as the principle of separability). This principle asserts that the complete state of the world supervenes on the intrinsic properties of its most fundamental components and their spatiotemporal relations (the so-called Humean mosaic). There are well-known arguments in the literature purporting to show that in quantum mechanics the Humean supervenience principle is violated, due to the existence of entangled states. Recently, however, arguments (...) have been presented to the effect that the supervenience principle can be defended in Bohmian mechanics. The key element of this strategy lies in the observation that according to Bohmian mechanics the fundamental facts about particles are facts about their spatial locations, and moreover, for any proper subsystem of the world its state may non-trivially depend on the spatial configuration of the rest of the universe. Thus quantum-mechanical states of subsystems do not represent their intrinsic properties but rather characterize their relations with the environment. In this paper we point out the worry that this Bohmian strategy --known as Bohumianism-- saves the letter but not the spirit of the Humean doctrine of supervenience, since it prima facie violates another seemingly important Humean principle, which we call Strong Supervenience and whose denial implies the existence of necessary connections among distinct individuals. We argue that the best defense for Bohumians is to question the fundamental existence of complex physical systems and their states by treating any reference to them as a convenient description of the underlying collection of Bohmian particles. We consider several pros and cons of this strategy. (shrink)

Canada is caught between two empires and between two constitutional systems. However, neither the British model of a "single sovereign" nor the American people's "sacred fire of liberty" matched the pluralistic identity of Canada, so Canadians engaged in constitutional experimentation. In Canada and the Ethics of Constitutionalism Samuel LaSelva argues that, in order to understand the old Canada of Confederation and the new one that followed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it is necessary to see how distinctive Canadian constitutionalism (...) is and how that distinctiveness does not depend on borrowings from the British or American constitutional models. LaSelva supports his argument by exploring different aspects of Canada's contribution to the ethics of constitutionalism including the limits of free expression, the Charter's notwithstanding clause, the origins and functions of judicial review, the Quebec secession debate, Aboriginal self-government, and the conception of Canada as a multicultural and multinational mosaic. Through a careful consideration of how Canadian constitutional pluralism with its focus on the rights of others differs from American and British ideas, Canada and the Ethics of Constitutionalism provides engaging answers to contested questions about how Canada was founded and what it has become. (shrink)

In applied problems mathematics is used as language or as a metalanguage on which metatheories are built, E.G., Mathematical theory of experiment. The structure of pure mathematics is grammar of the language. As opposed to pure mathematics, In applied problems we must keep in mind what underlies the sign system. Optimality criteria-Axioms of applied mathematics-Prove mutually incompatible, They form a mosaic and not mathematical structures which, According to bourbaki, Make mathematics a unified science. One of the peculiarities of applied (...) mathematical language is a variety of dialects: a problem can be presented in terms of various mathematical notions. Another peculiarity is polysemy: a problem can be presented in the framework of one dialect by a set of various models with equal right to exist. The pragmatic sense of distinction between applied and pure mathematics must lead to specific training in each case. (shrink)

Will Kymlicka’s theory of minority rights has been most influential. Kymlicka distinguishes two types of ethnocultural minorities: national groups in a multinational state and ethnic groups in an immigrant society. This article focuses on the ‘multinational’ aspect of this paradigm. It investigates the extent to which Kymlicka’s justification of self-government rights for nations can offer a just guideline for the way in which we should accommodate cultural diversity generated by a plurality of national groups within one state. Should we regulate (...) the cultural and linguistic market-place, and, if so, should we justify a right for all nations to a distinct societal culture with its own political and territorial boundaries?The answer the article develops is a moderate ‘yes, but’. We should recognize and protect cultural identities, since, as Kymlicka rightly argues, cultures provide us with constitutive contexts of choice.But there seems to be an inability in Kymlicka’s theory to deal with strongly multinational and multilingual situations. Kymlicka explicitly recognizes the fact that national cultures can be pluralistic , but he neglects diversity within the cultural structure itself. Nevertheless, our cultural world is full of such instances of vague boundaries, gray zones, minorities within minorities, bi-and multilingualism, etc.Consequently, the article attempts to supplement Kymlicka’s mosaic form of multiculturalism with a hybrid extension. It is highly commendable to recognize and protect cultures, provided we incorporate cultural hybridity into our multicultural theory. (shrink)

This paper critically analyses three main neurobiological hypotheses on trans* identities: the neurobiological theory about the origin of gender dysphoria, the neurodevelopmental cortical hypothesis, and the alternative hypothesis of self-referential thinking and body perception. In this study I focus then the attention on three elements: the issue of (de)pathologisation, the idea of the trans brain, and the aetiology of trans* identities. While the neurobiological theory about the origin of gender dysphoria and the neurodevelopmental cortical hypothesis claim the existence of the (...) trans brain, each offering its own neurobiological depiction, the hypothesis of self-referential thinking and body perception doesn’t postulate a distinctive neurobiological trait for all trans* people. I problematize both portrayals of the trans brain departing from the findings and conceptualizations of the paradigm shifting brain mosaicism. Unlike the hypothesis of self-referential thinking and body perception that keeps the question of causation open, both the neurobiological theory about the origin of gender dysphoria and the neurodevelopmental cortical hypothesis situate the origin of trans* identities in the neurobiological domain. I challenge the biological deterministic framework in which this aetiology is inscribed from a dynamic processual entanglement perspective. Finally, concerning the issue of (de)pathologisation of trans* identities, an evolution can be seen in each of the hypothesis and among them, from the least to the most depathologising. However, I question their complete departure from a pathologising framework. (shrink)

Some aspects of insect development were reconsidered in relation toWolpert's concept of “positional information”, which was briefly summarized. His distinction between positional information and “polarity potential” was shown to be unnecessary. The question was discussed whether transdetermination inDrosophila imaginai discs is a re-specification or a re-interpretation of positional information. In the first case transdetermination would depend on spatial relationships in the blastema, whereas in the second case it would not. As to the so-called “prepattern mutants”, it was emphasized that (...) in all cases published so far the supposed prepattern alterations are accompanied by growth disturbances which may account for changes in the specification of positional information. “Regulation” in imaginai discs is of a particular kind in that it depends on a proliferation phase. It takes place according to rules which were newly formulated in terms of positional information; the salient point of these rules is a tendency to maintain the slope of the positional information “gradients” and to produce symmetrically reduplicated, often defective organs. A short description of the postulated determinative processes occurring in imaginai discs from the early embryo up to the pupal stage was given. Intermingling of cells from various discs has shown that the cells may restore the original patterns in so far as their positional information has been stably specified,i.e. up to the level of the organ districts; within the districts mosaics are formed, which shows that positional information is specified with respect to new reference points. Transplantation experiments involving the abdominal epidermis of some other insects point to the possibility of limited local shifts in the positional information, and of both increase and reduction of the slope of the positional information curve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Material Life of Roman Slaves by Sandra R. Joshel, Lauren Hackworth PetersenJuan P. LewisSandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen. The Material Life of Roman Slaves. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xv + 286 pp. 16 color plates. Hardback, £65.00.This is an original book, even though it is does not contain new research or new findings. The title may be somewhat misleading. Rather than (...) a general study of Roman slaves’ material culture, the reader will find here an anthropology of the architecture of the spaces and built environments in which slaves dwelt and toiled (5). Thus, the focus is not so much on the material conditions in which slaves lived or the artifacts they worked with, but on the layout of a small set of first century c.e. houses, streets and economic units, mostly found in the Bay of Naples, Ostia, and the ager Cosanus. The study of space serves Joshel and Hackworth Petersen as an attempt to reconstruct slaves’ responses, through adaptation and challenge, to the choreography of movements imposed on them by their masters.Methodologically, this investigation operates on the distinction developed by Michel De Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life [1988]) between the strategies of the powerful to delimit a space in which power relations can be managed to their own advantage and the tactics of the weak to seize the opportunities to use an imposed spatial order for their own ends (8). The authors see their work as “an act of remembrance” (222). Their aim is to make invisible slaves visible again. Slaves, they contend, have not only been silenced in classical texts written by and from the point of view of slave owners. In the process of collecting and analyzing ancient material, and in the crafting of their historic narratives, modern archaeologists, art historians, and even tourism authorities have “actively, if unwittingly made [slaves] disappear” (3). To redress the imbalance, Joshel and Hackworth Petersen walk away from mere static descriptions of archaeological sites and concentrate on the dynamic of slaves’ movements within those spaces.Although the authors rely on other archaeologists and historians’ fieldwork and interpretation of the material remains, they themselves visited most of the sites and buildings they describe. The book is profusely illustrated with sixteen plates and 170 figures, among which we find the authors’ own photographs of some of the structures they discuss, such as doorways, storage rooms, stairs, porticos, kitchens, street benches, and fountains. Other illustrations consist of maps of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Ostia (19–21), street plans of Pompeii (plates VI, VII, and XI), and building plans of the houses, workshops and villae dealt with in the body of the text. Constant cross-reference to these images and drawings helps the reader to see and understand space in three dimensions, something [End Page 709] that it is not always easy to elicit from illustrations and archaeological reports in which findings are presented in a two-dimensional plane.The book is divided into six chapters. The Introduction (chap. 1) lays out the aims of the book and the methodological approach chosen by the authors. In the next four chapters, the discussion of built environments moves from the inside to the outside and from an urban set-up to the rural world. Chapter 2 focuses on the architectural layout of houses from Campania and Rome’s port-town, Ostia: namely, the houses of the Menander, Julius Polybius, Sutoria Primigenia, the Smith, Lucretius Fronto, the Ceii, the Vetii, and the Gilded Cupids in Pompeii; the houses of the Corinthian Atrium, the Mosaic Atrium, the Alcove, the Beautiful Courtyard, the Samnite, and the Grand Portal in Herculaneum; and the Ostian house of the Muses.The analysis of the Roman domestic landscape uses Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s two axes of differentiation between the grand and the humble and the public and the private (Houses and Societies in Pompeii and Herculaneum [1994]:38), but the emphasis is on the slaves’ perspective within this framework, rather than the owners’—even though the latter is not absent. Particular attention is given to doorways and how they helped to choreograph movements through their diverse heights and hierarchical positions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacramental Wisdom:Humilitatio, Eruditio, Exercitatio in the Scholastics and TodaySr. Albert Marie Surmanski O.P.IntroductionThe relationship between human nature and the sacraments is often characterized in a way that takes away from the beauty and power of the sacraments. Sacraments are sometimes viewed today as something basically irrelevant to human life, an interesting spiritual "option" for those who find comfort in ritual. This view leads to a sacramental practice that is (...) occasional, irregular, or nonexistent. Many young people who fail to grasp religion as important to their reality implicitly embrace this perspective. The difficulty parishes have had in the past few years in convincing parishioners to return to liturgical prayer after each wave of the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates this viewpoint.In another perspective, the sacraments might be viewed precisely as expressions of what it means to be human, or one might say, to be human in a world in which God reveals himself at all times.1 In this view, the sacraments [End Page 1391] are our own graced self-expression as a community. They merely make thematic what already happens each moment. Alternatively, they celebrate who we are, and perhaps can be radically updated to reflect changing categories of social identity. 2Both of these viewpoints overlook the fallen state of human nature that cries out for healing from God. The first view does not preclude knowledge of human violence and fragility, but fails to recognize the sacraments as a medicine needed for the remedy of human ills. The second viewpoint, while professing a need for Christ, looks to the human person or community for healing rituals. This approach risks being enmeshed with human nature in a disordered state in such a way that it celebrates human disorder instead of healing it. Alternatively, the viewpoint may lead to the abandonment eschatological hope and wither into inanity.There are profound metaphysical and anthropological issues that play out in these two opposite but strangely united viewpoints. Rather than directly analyze these errors, this paper would like to propose the recovery of a medieval viewpoint that offers another perspective. This is Hugh of St. Victor's explanation that the sacraments fit and heal human nature through offering humanity humility, instruction, and exercise. 3 This paper will briefly survey Hugh's contribution, analyze its reception by several of the thirteenth-century Scholastics, shows its deep rootedness in biblical wisdom, and then show how it fruitfully opposes current-day challenges.Hugh of St. VictorHugh of St. Victor was a twelfth-century canon of the Parisian Abbey of St. Victor. The most influential writer of the Victorine school, his work is characterized by an Augustinian concern for the re-formation of the image of God in man, a sense of the wise ordering of salvation history, and an emphasis on both virtue and liturgical practice. In his masterwork, De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei, Hugh of St. Victor divides the works of God into two main periods: the work of creation and the work of restoration. Within the [End Page 1392] work of restoration, there are three periods: the period of the natural law, that of the Mosaic or written law, and that of grace, inaugurated by Christ.4 His book's division into two parts cuts across these distinctions: Part 1 of Hugh's text covers creation, the restoration in general, faith, sacraments in general, as well as particulars of the sacraments of the periods of the natural and written law. Part 2 includes the Incarnation, the Church, various Christian rituals, and the final restoration of Christ's return.Hugh is writing around the time when theologians began to list the number of the sacraments of the Church as seven. Emerging from the wider use of the term, Hugh uses the word "sacrament" in a wide sense, but distinguishes several categories of sacraments. Following Dominique Poirel, scholars recognize that Hugh uses the word sacramentum in five main ways.5 The first is a general definition: (1) any sign of anything sacred. The second through fourth are more specific usages, to which we do not commonly give the term "sacrament" today: (2) Scripture, which signifies sacred realities both through its text and the... (shrink)

This monograph focuses on two major themes of current interest---those of complexity and emergence. Neither of the two concepts is, in the very nature of things, precisely defined or easily comprehended. Complexity is all around us while the sciences often analyze entities and events by making simplifications. But the fault lines in the latter get exposed over larger spans of space and time. Complexity entails emergence that involves discontinuity and novelty in the evolution of complex systems, based on the appearance (...) of distinctive spatial and temporal structures. Underlying an occurrence of emergence is an instability involving the transition from one stable regime to another, where distinct space-time scales acquire relevance across the transition. The structures on the two sides of the transition are characterized by distinct sets of state variables where, on one side of the transition, collective variables make their appearance. -/- Complexity and emergence are viewed in this book in the context of the Kantian noumenal-phenomenal divide. The noumenal reality is the repository of all the complexity that there is, while the phenomenal reality emerges from the noumenal in the process of our perception, interpretation, and inference. The noumenal exists in itself as a self-determined whole, and reveals itself to us in fragmentary patches as skewed projections that we assemble to form our phenomenal world that keeps on emerging ceaselessly. Our own biological evolution and the evolution of our phenomenal world occurs in a mutually consistent process, that can be referred to as co-evolution. -/- We seek regularities in the phenomenal world by means of our scientific theories which are often successful, but that success is fragile as, over larger spans of space and time, anomalies make their appearance, giving a lie to the simplicity and regularity previously presumed to have been unearthed. Simplicity, regularity, and harmony are only fleetingly located in the phenomenal world by means of our theories as these keep on being revised endlessly and often radically, thereby generating a mosaic of theories that becomes ever more complex, indicating a pervasive complexity of the noumenal world from which the phenomenal emerges by way of strictly limited projections. The foundational metaphysics on which this book is based tells us that reality is fundamentally complex, while tiny islands of simplicity, regularity, and harmony are embedded in it in isolated space-time domains. (shrink)

Take open-future Humeanism to comprise the following four tenets: (T1) that truth supervenes on a mosaic of local particular matters of fact; (T2) that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences; (T3) that there is a dynamic present moment; and (T4) that there are no future facts; that is, contingent propositions about the future obtain truth values only when their referents are actualised. Prima facie this is a deeply problematic metaphysic for the Humean, since given that the widely (...) accepted Humean conception takes all truths (inclusive of nomological truths) to supervene on an omnitemporal mosaic of local particular matters of fact, if there are no future facts, then the Humean can neither provide laws of nature, nor justify many everyday inductive inferences. However, I argue that this eternalist metaphysic is in tension with at least one of Hume’s central metaphysical claims concerning causation, e.g. that causal regularities may cease to hold at any time. In this paper I propose and defend one possible open-future Humean metaphysic which admits of “true-to-Hume” causal and nomological facts. Furthermore, although I am happy to concede that induction is problematic for the open-future Humean, I demonstrate that it poses no greater threat to the open-future conception than it does to the popular Lewisian conception of natural law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 361-379 [Access article in PDF] The Idea and the Reality of the City in the Thought of Philo of Alexandria * David T. Runia The theme of my paper is the conception of the city as a social and cultural phenomenon held by the Jewish exegete and philosopher Philo of Alexandria (15 bc to 50 ad). There can be no doubt (...) that the city occupied a central position in his own life. As an inhabitant of Alexandria he was thoroughly immersed in a highly urbanized form of life. From a more theoretical angle the city has an important place in his thought because of what it represents: of all physical products of human activity the city is the largest and most complex (here there is in fact little difference between Philo and us, although there is an obvious difference in scale). It is not my aim to examine Philo's political philosophy, i.e., his views on how the city should be governed, nor his views on the actual political administration of the Roman Empire in his time. These subjects have already been treated with sufficient competence by others. 1 I will argue that, though as an Alexandrian Philo was very much a homo urbanus, he nevertheless reveals a significant ambivalence towards the city. This attitude is related to his dual ideological background (Jewish and Greek), and anticipates developments in later antiquity.As always in the case of Philo, it is necessary to reflect on the methodology that should be used to reach our aim. True to his usual method, Philo nowhere examines the nature of the city in a sustained way. It is necessary to cull statements from many different places in his various works. For his views on living in the city of Alexandria we can examine his historical treatises. A more theoretical perspective is gained from his exegetical and philosophical works; but these, too, are not wholly devoid of topical remarks, such as the famous text in [End Page 361] which he complains that he has had to exchange the contemplative life for immersion in the maelstrom of Alexandrian political life (De specialibus legibus 3.1-6).In the analysis of the numerous texts in which Philo speaks of the city, it would be a mistake to try to compartmentalize his thought too much, i.e., to make a sharp distinction between historical-apologetic and exegetical-philosophical modes of thinking. It is true that Philo devotes the greatest part of his oeuvre to giving exegesis of the Law of Moses. But for him this is far from a merely antiquarian exercise. Philo is convinced of the universal relevance of the Pentateuch for both Jew and Gentile, including those who live in a complex urban environment utterly different from the circumstances of tent-dwelling Patriarchs or itinerant Israelites. The Law, it is assumed, represents the constitution of a Mosaic politeia deserving of universal admiration. So when Philo speaks of the city in his exegesis of Mosaic texts, his remarks may well be relevant to our theme. This applies also to allegorical forms of interpretation. The method of allegory enables him to bring forward the more theoretical and "philosophical" aspects of the theme.It remains a problem that our material consists of a large number of scattered and episodic remarks. These can be assembled together into the shape of a plausible and informative picture, but the aspect of a scholarly construct cannot be entirely avoided. There are compensations in Philo's case through the sheer volume of the material he has left behind. This lessens the chance that we should attribute too much significance to what may be no more than casual remarks. We should, however, have no illusions about the extent to which we can pene-trate behind the facade of his works. These were not written with the motive of disclosing his personal views on a wide scale of issues. The personality of Philo the Alexandrian Jew remains largely hidden from view... (shrink)

The millennial interest in the fable told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass has produced periods of intense preoccupation. Of these uses of the legend none is more interesting, varied, and profound—none possesses greater implications for contemporary life and manners—than the obsessive concern of pre-Romantic and Romantic writers and artists. Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian culture had produced at least twenty surviving statues of Psyche alone, some seven Christian sarcophagi that used the legend, and a set of mosaics on a (...) Christian ceiling in Rome from the early fourth century;1 and of course to late antiquity belongs the distinction of having produced the seminal telling of the tale by Apuleius in about A. D. 125. But what we possess from that remote time is thin and lacks the power to engage the modern spirit. The allegorizing and erotic responses made in the Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque culture produced monuments of painting that the later period cannot rival; but the impregnation of literature by the legend was slight, and the intellectual or moral content was often only a perfunctory and dutiful addendum. The revival of the story in the aesthetic movement of the late Victorians and early moderns has its examples of beauty, particularly in Rodin and in the lush harmonies and occasionally piercing melodies of César Franck's Psyché, a tone poem for chorus and orchestra; but the long retellings by Morris, Bridges, and John Jay Chapman oppress with luxuriant sweetness and remain of interest only as period pieces. · 1. See Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Apuleius and His Influence , p. 164, and Maxime Collignon, "Essai sur les monuments grecs et romains . . . ," in Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d'Athène et de Rome , fasc. 2, pp. 285-446, esp. pp. 364, 436-38. Jean H. Hagstrum, John C. Shaffer Professor of English and Humanities at Northwestern University, is currently preparing a book on the theme of love in European literature and art from the mid-seventeenth century through the Romantic period. He is the author of books and articles on Blake and Samuel Johnson, and of The Sister Arts, a study of the relations of poetry and painting from antiquity through the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Using an intersectionalist analysis, Hinther recounts efforts by Canada’s Ukrainian minority to build an ethnically distinct leftist movement. Opposed from without by both left-wing internationalists and right-wing nationalists, and hobbled from within by stubborn gender and generational inequalities, the movement finally lost its radical political momentum and so took up its allotted place in Canada’s polite multicultural mosaic. (Published in the series “Studies in Gender and History,” University of Toronto Press, 2018.).

In this paper, I defend the agent/patient distinction against critics who argue that causal interactions are symmetrical. Specifically, I argue that there is a widespread type of causal interaction between distinct entities, resulting in a type of ontological asymmetry that provides principled grounds for distinguishing agents from patients. The type of interaction where the asymmetry is found is when one of the entities undergoes a change in kind, structure, powers, or intrinsic properties as a result of the interaction while (...) the other does not. Interactions of this type are widespread in molecular biology and chemistry. I focus specifically on (i) the actions of enzymes on substrates and (ii) water molecules breaking the bonds of polarized molecules. Finally, I respond to objections by laying out and to a limited extent defending three commitments of my account: emergent entities and powers, realism about chemical kinds or structures, and the assumption of the agent/patient distinction in functional attributions in biology. (shrink)