Reasonning in naive set theory (with unlimited comprehension), we derive a paradox (a formal contradiction) which can be seen as a variant of the Burali-Forti paradox.

We introduce a notion of syntactical truth predicate (s.t.p.) for the second order arithmetic PA 2 . An s.t.p. is a set T of closed formulas such that: (i) T(t = u) if and only if the closed first order terms t and u are convertible, i.e., have the same value in the standard interpretation (ii) T(A → B) if and only if (T(A) $\Longrightarrow$ T(B)) (iii) T(∀ x A) if and only if (T(A[x ← t]) for any closed first (...) order term t) (iv) T(∀ X A) if and only if (T(A[X ←▵]) for any closed set definition $\triangle = \{x \mid D(x)\}$ ). S.t.p.'s can be seen as a counterpart to Tarski's notion of (model-theoretical) validity and have main model properties. In particular, their existence is equivalent to the existence of an ω-model of PA 2 , this fact being provable in PA 2 with arithmetical comprehension only. (shrink)

Written in the form of a dialogue with Brussels sociologist Dieter Vandebroeck, this article retraces the social and intellectual trajectory of Loïc Wacquant as stepping stone to reviewing and discussing the major concepts coined and theoretical propositions elaborated in the course of his research on comparative urban marginality, racial domination, the ghetto, the penal state, neoliberalism, and carnality. This provides an opportunity to specify the relationships between ethnography, history and theory; the dialectic of domination and resistance; the role of (...) public (dis)honor in social life; the uses of Bourdieu's bureaucratic field; and the social and academic conditions of incubation, diffusion, and death of scholarly myths such as the “underclass.” The article closes on a call to clearly distinguish the rhetorical, metaphorical, and analytical usages of concepts and reaffirms the need for epistemic reflexivity as sine qua non for the articulation of robust scientific problematics. (shrink)

I use the collection of “carnal ethnographies” of martial arts and combat sports assembled by Raul Sanchez and Dale Spencer under the title Fighting Scholars to spotlight the fruitfulness of deploying habitus as both empirical object (explanandum) and method of inquiry (modus cognitionis). The incarnate study of incarnation supports five propositions that clear up tenacious misconceptions about habitus and bolster Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action: (1) far from being a “black box,” habitus is fully amenable to empirical inquiry; (2) the (...) distinction between primary (generic) and secondary (specific) habitus enables us to capture the malleability of dispositions; (3) habitus is composed of cognitive, conative and affective elements: categories, skills, and desires; (4) habitus allows us to turn carnality from problem to resource for the production of sociological knowledge; and (5) thus to realize that all social agents are, like martial artists, suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments. (shrink)

In this response to my critics, I amplify the conceptual clarification and methodological stipulation of habitus begun in ‘Homines in extremis’ to help us move from a sociology of the body as socially construc-ted object to a sociology from the body as socially construc-ting vector of knowledge, power, and practice. The specification of habitus by membership in collectives, attachment to institutions, and analytic purpose makes it a flexible multi-scalar notion with which to construct the epistemic individual and account for both (...) reproduction and change, conformity and creativity, as well as self-revision. For this, we must reject theological interpretations that rigidly lock habitus into Bourdieu’s framework; avoid conflating the formal properties of the notion with its concrete features in specific settings and cases; and distinguish between the rhetorical invocation of his concepts (‘speaking Bourdieuese’) and their effective deployment in the construction of the empirical object. As embodied and embedded capacity, habitus brings temporality, depth, and desire to the analytic epicenter. It reminds us that the social world is not transparent, open-ended, and instantaneous, but endowed with gravity, opacity, and asymmetry. Treating the sentient and skilled organism as fount of both social intelligence and sociological acumen can help historical social science connect with enactive psychology and recover the carnality of action that conventional accounts of social life routinely erase. (shrink)

In January, 1914, I published in the Classical Quarterly an article on t1he Five Grammatical Chapters of Quintilian, in which I endeavoured to set out the general scheme of the writer and his relation to the educational practice of his time. In the present paper I propose to deal with some of the numerous difficulties of detail—difficulties both of text and meaning—which crop up in chapters 4–7. The technicality of the subject and the abbreviated method of treatment produce much obscurity, (...) even when we have no reason to doubt the text. And as to the text, one can but echo the words of Varro with regard to philological and grammatical questions, ‘librarios haec spinosiora indiligentius elaturos putaui.’ The result is that these chapters provide perhaps more problems than are to be found in the same limits in any first class Latin writer—problems which, though not perhaps of much intrinsic importance, have that interest which must always attach to questions which have baffled generations of commentators. I have divided the questions which I have treated into two classes. The first consists of passages in which I feel some confidence in the text which I have adopted or the meaning which I have proposed. The second consists of those which I fear must be left unsolved, though I hope that I have been able to advance the discussion a few steps. (shrink)

The five chapters which Quintilian has devoted to ‘Grammatica’ are in many ways the most valuable discussion of the subject which we possess. They are older than any other surviving account, except the remains of Varro De lingua Latino, and the grammar of Dionysius Thrax, and this last, though far more complete than Quintilian in its examination of the parts of speech, has nothing that compares with the other chapters on analogy, etymology, etc., nor does it give so clear a (...) view of ‘grammatica’ as a whole. These chapters do not appear to have been treated by any scholar since Nettleship published his article on ‘Latin Grammar in the First Century’ in the Journal of Philology, vol. xv. If, in the course of this paper, I traverse on certain points the opinions of so distinguished a scholar, let it be understood that I do so with much diffidence, and only after much consideration of the facts as they appear to me. (shrink)

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and global (...) economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century's turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of `advanced marginality' — territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of `place', and the loss of a hinterland — and draws out their implications for the formation of the `precariat' in postindustrial societies. (shrink)

The passage here discussed, VIII. 6. 33, occurs in one of the lacunas, and we are thus deprived of the help of the great mutilated MSS., and have to fall back upon A. and G. (the scribe who in the eleventh century filled up the lacunas in the mutilated Bambergensis. In § 31 Quintilian, in the course of his treatment of tropes, has reached onomatopoeia, and in § 32 that subdivision of the last-named, or perhaps we should say the kindred (...) subject, which he calls πεποιημένα This was as follows: uix ilia quae πεποιημένα uocant quae ex uocibus in usum receptis quocumque modo declinantur, nobis permittimus, qualia sunt ‘sullaturit’ et ‘proscripturit,’ atque ‘laureati postes’ pro illo ‘lauru coronati’ ex eadem fictione sunt. Sed hoc feliciter eualuit. (shrink)

Using Biblical quotes and his own personal beliefs, the author presents analysis and a critique on some of the contemporary viewpoints presented to the public by the popular media, educational leaders, scientists, and politicians.

The controversy between the Anomalists and Analogists has not, I think, attracted as much of the attention of scholars as it deserves. It was perhaps not a very practical matter, though, as I shall point out presently, it probably had indirectly some important practical results. The interest of the controversy lies rather in the spirit in which it was conducted. Anyone who reads for instance Varro, De Ling. Lat. VIII. 31–32, where the anomalist argues that as in life variety of (...) furniture and the like is necessary for aesthetic enjoyment, so in language anomaly is desirable; or IX. 24, etc., where the analogist argues from the unchanging order that prevails in the heavenly bodies, in the tides, in the continuity of species, will feel that he is moving in a world of thought very different in one way from our own, though in another rather like it. By the analogist language is conceived as a world in itself, much as we conceive of the visible world. Its phenomena are being laid bare and constantly reveal fresh signs of law and order. The investigator sometimes finds facts which prima facie suggest anomaly, but he is as confident that behind them must lie some unifying principle as the scientific man of to-day is with regard to the phenomena of the visible world, as impatient of the suggestion of disorder as he is of any miraculous interference with the order of nature. Even the anomalist, sceptic as he is, approaches the question not in a spirit of mere denial, but of aesthetic consideration. We get a glimpse of a lost point of view. The world of words had a glamour and a wonder for them which it cannot have for us. (shrink)

The various attempts to make sense of ‘sequitur,’ e.g. Palmer ‘naturally follows,’ taking pudor as subject and amorem as object, seem to me most unsatisfactory. Sedlmayer reads ‘quitur’ which Palmer calls ‘mira coniectura.’ But it is obvious that as far as sense and transcriptional probability go the correction is excellent, and also that since a passive infinitive is understood, it is grammatically right or at least would be if we found it in Lucretius. The only, and it may be thought (...) fatal, objection is that this passive use of potestur, quitur, nequitur, etc., has not been found in any writ er later than Lucretius, with the possible and not very relevant exception of Apuleius. Birt, the original author of the conjecture, met this objection by adducing other archaisms in Ovid. My purpose here is not to discuss these, but to add to them the fact that Quintilian did not consider that quitur was obsolete. (shrink)

I have never read the two great stanzas of Odes III. 3 without a feeling that the above phrase was rather inadequate, according to what I suppose to be the accepted translation. I base the word ‘accepted’ on Forcellini, and Lewis and Short, who give the reference under the head of propositum, ‘purpose,’ ‘intention,’ ‘resolution,’ ‘design.’ But the capacity of sticking to some particular purpose is not a very noble quality, and if we take the phrase in the wider sense (...) of general tenacity of purpose, I do not feel that we get the ‘iustus’ of the ode, though we may perhaps get a person who is likely to succeed in life. Taken in this way, ‘tenax propositi’ suggests the portrait of Henry VIII., with his gross face and striding legs, dominating the English Church and the High Table of Trinity. I shall perhaps be told that the context shows the meaning. It may no doubt prevent the phrase from being misleading, but it does not make it worthy of its setting. I may add that in the other two places, where I know of its occurring, it has no very lofty meaning. In Ovid Met. X. 415, ‘propositi tenax’ is used to describe the persistent efforts of Myrrha's nurse to find out what is the matter. In Quintilian XI. 1, 90, in a discourse on mild equivalents, we are told that the ‘pertinax’ may be spoken of as ‘ultra modum propositi tenax.’. (shrink)

This article draws on 35 months of ethnographic fieldwork and apprenticeship in a boxing gym located in Chicago's black ghetto to explicate how prizefighters apperceive and express the fact of being live commodities of flesh and blood, and how they practically reconcile themselves to ruthless exploitation in ways that enable them to maintain a sense of personal integrity and moral purpose. The boxer's experience of corporeal exploitation is expressed in three kindred idioms, those of prostitution, slavery and animal husbandry. The (...) first likens the fighter-manager combo to the prostitute-pimp duo; the second depicts the ring as a plantation and promoters as latter-day slave masters; the third intimates that boxers are used in the manner of livestock. All three tropes simultaneously enounce and denounce the immoral marketing of disquiescent bodies. But this acute consciousness is neutralized by the doxic belief in the normalcy of exploitation, in the `agency' of corporeal entrepreneurship, and in the possibility of individual exceptionalism. This practical belief, inscribed in the bodily dispositions of the fighter, helps produce the collective misrecognition whereby boxers collude in their own commercialization. (shrink)

Both the physiological and the pathological morphogenetic processes that we can meet in embryogenesis, neogenesis and degenerative dysgenesis present common features: they are ruled by three different kinds of mechanisms, one related to cell migration, the second to cell differentiation and the third to cell proliferation. We deal here with an application to the cambial growth which essentially involves the third type of mechanism.Woody plants produce secondary tissue (secondary xylem and phloem) from a meristematic tissue called vascular cambium, responsible for (...) the radial growth of a tree. This paper focuses on the formation of secondary xylem, considered in two dimensions in a cross-section framework. A new discrete modelling approach is used, based on the cellular scale, in order to attain a more accurate understanding of how the elementary microscopic behaviour of each cell takes part in the macroscopic morphogenesis. The mathematical model essentially uses an occurrence method simulating the main features of radial growth with simple geometric rules, such as Thom's division rule (Thom,1972)to account for the cell proliferation. The study applies to concrete instances in which the changes made in the geometrical cellular patterns of the vascular cambium clearly affect the shape of the tree, as in Pinus radiata (D. Don.). (shrink)

In the field of NLP, “noise” is a notion with many different meanings. This is also true in fields of linguistics in which the analysis of ecological data is central.In studies involving corpus linguistic methods, noise management is an essential process for data collection, data structuration and data analysis. Paradoxically, this step is almost never developed, or completely ignored.In this paper, we propose to focus on the management of noise during the various stages classically defined in the processing of an (...) oral corpus: data structuration (including transcription), data enrichment (including annotation) and data analysis.We show that noise management is a cross-cutting issue: it needs to be taken into account during the phases of structuration, data enrichment and analysis of linguistic corpora. More specifically, the creation of corpora of children’s productions leads us to manage a particular type of noise: the variation regarding the so-called “standard” forms. For noise management, we show that there is no ideal methodology: noise management is specific to each project. Moreover, decisions taken at one stage necessarily influence the others: a noise generated during data structuration may cause a silence during automatic processing; a noise “cleaned up” during the processing phase may generate a silence during analysis. (shrink)