This paper gives two complete and elementary proofs that if the speed of light over closed paths has a universal value c, then it is possible to synchronize clocks in such a way that the one-way speed of light is c. The first proof is an elementary version of a recent proof. The second provides high precision experimental evidence that it is possible to synchronize clocks in such a way that the one-way speed of (...) light has a universal value. We also discuss an old incomplete proof by Weyl which is important from an historical perspective. (shrink)

This paper gives two complete and elementary proofs that if the speed of light over closed paths has a universal value c, then it is possible to synchronize clocks in such a way that the one-way speed of light is c. The first proof is an elementary version of a recent proof. The second provides high precision experimental evidence that it is possible to synchronize clocks in such a way that the one-way speed of (...) light has a universal value. We also discuss an old incomplete proof by Weyl which is important from an historical perspective. (shrink)

This paper (i) gives necessary and sufficient conditions that clocks in an inertial lattice can be synchronized, (ii) shows that these conditions do not imply a universal light speed, and (iii) shows that the terrestrial redshift experiment provides evidence that clocks in a small inertial lattice in a gravitational field can be synchronized.

The convention that the one-way velocity of light is isotropic is shown to be independent of the postulates of relativity in a globally Minkowskian continuum, but not in a continuum which is only locally Minkowskian.

In a previous work, we have shown that the null result of the Michelson–Morley experiment in vacuum is deeply connected with the notion of time. The same is true for the postulate of constancy of the two-way speed of light in vacuum in all frames independently of the state of motion of the emitting body. The argumentation formerly given is very general and has to be true not only within Special Relativity and its “equivalence” of all inertial frames, (...) but as well as in Lorentz-Poincaré scenario of a preferred reference frame. This paper is the second of a trilogy intending to revisit the foundations of Special Relativity, and addresses the question of the constancy of the one-way speed of light and of the differences and similarities between both scenarios. Although they manifestly differ in philosophy, it is debated why and how the assumption of a “special system of reference experimentally inaccessible” is indeed compatible with Einstein’s Special Relativity, as beautifully outlined and discussed by Bell [Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988)]. This rather trivial statement is still astonishing nowadays to a big majority of scientists. The purpose of this work is to bring such assertion into perspective, widening the somewhat narrow view of Special Relativity often presented in textbooks and scientific papers. (shrink)

The Reichenbach-Grunbaum thesis of the conventionality of simultaneity is clarified and defended by developing the consequences of the Special Theory when assumptions are not made concerning the one-way speed of light. It is first shown that the conventionality of simultaneity leads immediately to the conventionality of all relative speeds. From this result, the general-length-contraction and time-dilation relations are then derived. Next, the place of time-dilation and length-contraction effects within the Special Theory is examined in the light of (...) the conventionality thesis. The slow-transport method of synchrony is then examined in the light of these results and is shown not to provide an adequate method of uniquely determining the one-way speed of light. Finally, the general ε -Lorentz transformations for events along the x-axis are derived from three principles: the round-trip light principle, the principle of equal passage times, and the linearity principle. These principles are shown to be independent of one-way velocity assumptions, and thus may form the basis of a Special Theory of Relativity without distant simultaneity assumptions. (shrink)

The Reichenbach-Grunbaum thesis of the conventionality of simultaneity is clarified and defended by developing the consequences of the Special Theory when assumptions are not made concerning the one-way speed of light. It is first shown that the conventionality of simultaneity leads immediately to the conventionality of all relative speeds. From this result, the general-length-contraction and time-dilation relations are then derived. Next, the place of time-dilation and length-contraction effects within the Special Theory is examined in the light of (...) the conventionality thesis. The slow-transport method of synchrony is then examined in the light of these results and is shown not to provide an adequate method of uniquely determining the one-way speed of light. Finally, the general ε -Lorentz transformations for events along the x-axis are derived from three principles: the round-trip light principle, the principle of equal passage times, and the linearity principle. These principles are shown to be independent of one-way velocity assumptions, and thus may form the basis of a Special Theory of Relativity without simultaneity assumptions. (shrink)

The claim that distant simultaneity with respect to an inertial observer is conventional arose in the context of a space-and-time rather than a spacetime ontology. Reformulating this problem in terms of a spacetime ontology merely trivializes it. In the context of flat space, flat time, and a linear inertial structure (a purely space-and-time formalism), we prove that the hyperplanes of space for a given inertial observer are determined by a purely spatial criterion that depends for its validity only on the (...) two-way light principle, which is universally regarded as empirically verified. All (empirically determined) “spacetime” entities, such as the conformal structure or light surface equation, are used in a purely mathematical manner that is independent of and hence isneutral with respect to the ontological status that is ascribed to them. In this regard, our criterion is significantly stronger than thespacetime criterion recently advanced by D. Malament, which appeals explicitly to the conformal orthogonality of spacetime vectors and to the invariance of the conformal-orthogonal structure of spacetime under the causal automorphisms of spacetime. Once the hyperplanes of space for a given inertial observer have been determined by our empirical and purely spatial criterion, the following holds: there exists one and only one $\vec \varepsilon $ -synchronization procedure, namely the standard procedure proposed by Einstein, such that the planes of common time are thesame as the nonconventional hyperplanes of space for the inertial observer. It follows that our criterion provides an empirical even if indirect method for determining that the one-way speed of light is the same as the average two-way speed of light. In addition, two inertial observers that are not at rest with respect to each other necessarily havedifferent hyperplanes of space, and consequently their respective spatial views cannot be encompassed in a single three-dimensional space. Hence, our purely spatial criterion provides an empirical motivation for adopting the more comprehensive spacetime ontology. (shrink)

Time is analyzed by considering the actual setup of clock system within the four-dimensional framework. We find that both relativistic time and universal time can be embedded in such a symmetry framework. Although Poincaré and Einstein both understood the meaning of Lorentz's local time in terms of sending light signals to calibrate clocks, they differed on a basic point: Einstein believed local time to be the necessary and unique time, while Poincaré admitted flexibility in the definitions of time (...) and regarded local time as only a convention. The results of our analysis shed light on Poincaré's original idea concerning conventions of time and provide the conceptual basis for the formulation of a new four-dimensional symmetry with a universal time. We demonstrate that the one-way speeds of light measured by stable atomic clocks in rockets may not be isotropic, in contrast to the two-way speeds of light. Furthermore, atomic clocks can be used to set up a clock system which reads a universal (but not absolute) time. (shrink)

The Robertson–Walker (RW) metric allows us to apply general relativity to model the behavior of the Universe as a whole (i.e., cosmology). We can properly interpret various cosmological observations, like the cosmological redshift, the Hubble parameter, geometrical distances, and so on, if we identify fundamental observers with individual galaxies. That is to say that the interpretation of observations of modern cosmology relies on the RW metric. The RW model satisfies the cosmological principle in which the 3-space always remains isotropic and (...) homogeneous. One can derive the cosmological redshift relation from this condition. We show that it is still possible for us to obtain consistent results in a specific time-varying speed-of-light model without spoiling the success of the standard model. The validity of this model needs to be determined by observations. (shrink)

The most recent attempt at factually establishing a "true" value for the one-way velocity of light is shown to be faulty. The proposal consists of two round-trip photons travelling first in vacuo and then through a medium of refractive index n before returning to their common point of origin. It is shown that this proposal, as well as a similar one considered by Salmon (1977), presupposes that the one-way velocities of light are equal to the round-trip value. Furthermore, (...) experiments of this type, involving regions of space with varying refractive indices, cannot "single out" any factual value for the Reichenbach-Grünbaum ε factor thus posing no threat to the conventionalist thesis. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to illuminate the texture of moral experience. I pursue that aim through a close reading of David Lean's film, Brief Encounter, produced in 1946. The chief protagonist in the film undergoes a moral odyssey that reveals and tests all that she has understood about how to conduct a life. Her experience sheds light on the constituents of an individual moral sensibility as well as how its enactment appears in practice when one confronts a heartfelt (...) difficulty. I argue that moral experience is best understood through the idiom of narrative and character, rather than through ethical language that places formal or universal principle at the center of the moral life. In the workshop of the moral self, as Lean's protagonist reveals, the task is not to fashion or take on universal principles but rather to cultivate virtuous relations with other people in the here-and-now. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christ as the Truth, the Light, the Life, but a Way?Bokin KimA conservative Korean Presbyterian pastor asks me what I know about Christ. He asks again what a Buddhist can know about Christ. He claims that Christ cannot be understood from the other aspects of view, but only from the Christian view. Then do I know at all about Christ?My Buddhist understanding of Christ does not start with (...) how Christ has been understood in the Christian context. My understanding is based on the reading of the Christian scripture. My reading of the scripture is guided by Sot’aesan’s understanding of Christianity. 1According to my reading, the Bible presents two meanings of Christ: Christ in the transhistorical sense and Christ in the historical sense. The meaning of Christ as the Truth, the Light, and the Life represents a Christ in the transhistorical sense. The meaning of Christ as a way represents a Christ in the historical sense. Because Jesus did not make any distinction or clarification between these two meanings, it is obvious that even the Christian tradition has confusion on the meaning of Christ. As a result, most Christians hold to an exclusive view of Christ that claims his uniqueness.My attribution of two meanings of Christ is derived from a similar distinction in Buddhism. Buddha in the transhistorical sense represents the universal nature of Buddha, which is identical with Truth. Truth can be replaced by other terms, such as Light or Life. Buddha in the historical sense means the historical nature of Buddha. In this sense, Buddha is unique and should not be depicted as absolute nor as universal. Likewise, Christ can be construed in these two ways.Christ as the Truth, Light, and LifeWhen I read the description of Christ as the Truth, Light, and Life in the Gospel according to John, I feel a strong urge to replace Christ with the term Buddha—not Gautama Buddha but Dharmakaya Buddha. Here Christ refers to the source of the historical Christ just as Dharmakaya Buddha is the source of historical Buddha. In this sense, Christ cannot be compared with any beings in the world and thus is being described absolutely. Christ only is the Truth, Light, and Life. Similarly, there is a Zen koan saying, “Buddha alone exists.”Here the terms Christ and Buddha do not point to historical figures such as Jesus of Nazareth and Siddhartha Gautama. According to a story related to the compilation of Buddha’s teaching, Ananda, who heard Buddha talk the most, was excluded from the committee of compilation. The reason was that Ananda saw the corporal aspect of the Buddha only, but he could not meet the spiritual aspect of the Buddha. [End Page 76] The term awakening in the Buddhist tradition refers to understanding the absolute or universal nature within each transient being.It seems wrong if one claims that only Christ, not Buddha, is the Truth, Light, or Life. By the same token it is wrong to say that Buddha alone, not Christ, exists in eternity. It is wrong to identify historical figures such as Jesus or Gautama with the Truth, Light, or Life. It is more erroneous to exclusively describe only one historical figure as the Truth, Light, or Life. According to my understanding, the terms Christ and Buddha are not the starting point for arguing the uniqueness of the historical Jesus or Gautama but for awakening our absolute or universal nature. That is, Christ as Truth, Light, and Life is our true nature or true self. In this nature there is no distinction between Christ and Buddha, between Christ and me, or between Buddha and me.Regardless of how our foundation is named—Christ (or God), Buddha (Dharmakaya Buddha), Tao, or Wu-chi—our foundation is the basis from which religions are originated.Christ as a WayChrist is a way to our foundation—in other words, the Truth, Light, and Life. Christ’s way is faith/grace. Jesus taught that the faith in God and grace from God would bring forth salvation to the believers. Similarly, Buddha is a way to the Truth, Light, and Life. Buddha’s way is practice/enlightenment... (shrink)

Sophists’ apologia. -/- Sophists were the first paid teachers ever. These ancient Greek enlighteners taught wisdom. Protagoras, Antiphon, Prodicus, Hippias, Lykophron are most famous ones. Sophists views and concerns made a unified encyclopedic system aimed at teaching common wisdom, virtue, management and public speaking. Of the contemporary “enlighters”, Deil Carnegy’s educational work seems to be the most similar to sophism. Sophists were the first intellectuals – their trade was to sell knowledge. They introduced a new type of teacher-student relationship – (...) the mutually beneficial communication on equal terms. They taught pupils how to think independently and how to persuade others, which was inseparably connected with the rise of democracy in the most advanced Greek polices. Sophists were the first to proclaim that all people are naturally equal. They put forward the idea of natural rights and social contract, working out the fundamentals of the present-day law. In addition, they developed the basics of philology, psychology, logic, and gave a scientific explanation to the origins of religions. They embodied definite positive ideals of their epoch. Sophistry flourished in the second half of the Vth through he first third of the IVth centuries B. C. The period coincides with the heyday of the entire Greek history – the so called Greek Miracle epoch. Sophists expressed some present-day concepts of Ancient Greek ideology and mentality, characteristic of its Golden Age times. The Ancient Athens of the times of Periclus were similar to the Florence of Renaissance as to the type of social structure. That is why (?) the art of eloquence (public speaking) was highly respected in Florence. The two cities had a lot of features of the present-day capitalist society, which was due to their role as the main centres of industry of their “worlds-economies”. During the subsequent Hellenic period, the Old Order was restored, based on the feudal rent recipients’ rule. The degradation of society resulted in the decline of sophistry. Sophistry represents the highest point in the evolution of Greek philosophy. It is also the most prominent school as to the novelty of its ideas. That was owing to the common propensity for innovation typical of Periclus’ Golden Age, which in its turn resulted from the establishment of the individualistic and rationalistic thinking similar to present-day mentality. Among other aspects, close attention was paid to ethnic issues; some humanistic ideas such as Master and Servant ethics and Enlightment as the primary condition of man’s freedom, received scientific grounding. The genre of philosophical dialogue was developed, as well as the rationalistic scientific gnoceology, aimed at consistently opposing any religion. Dialectics, the most outstanding achievement of the Antiquity, was also worked out by the sophists. Zeno of Helleas was one of the sophists. Democrites’ ideas were, too, quite close to dialectics. Socrates’ contemporaries regarded him ironically, as shown, for example, in the Aristophanes’ comedy “Clouds”. Nevertheless, this scholar can still be referred to as a sophist, although of somewhat weird personality. Socrates’ popularity, which came later, should be attributed to the fact that he was the first philosopher ever to have been sentenced and executed by law, rather than to any valuable scientific contributions. Sophistry as such, rather than Socrates, marks the line between pre-Socratic and post- Socratic schools. Plato, with the exception of his latest works, is considered to belong to the same philosophical school. Specifically, there are valid reasons to believe that he was paid fees by his disciples. In Plato’s Dialogues, all points of view will be proven and then disproved, so that an integral philosophical system is hard to observe. Plato’s “Idealism” is but one of the many possible theories. His ideal philosophy is a high-minded argument of wise men. As late as towards the end of his life, Plato betrayed the ideals of sophistry, turning into the world’s first proponent of totalitarianism. Sophistry is Greek classical literature. Later on, philosophy, as well as the entire Greek civilization, started to fall into decline. Over 500 subsequent years, Hellenistic-Roman scholars never came up with anything novel. The entire process of antique philosophical evolution can be subdivided into the following six stages: Phoenician (IX–VIIth centuries B. C.), archaic (VIth – the first half of IVth century B. C., classic (the epoch of sophistry: the second half of the Vth through the first decades of the IIIrd centuries B. C.), late antique (middle of the IIIrd – first decades of the VI th centuries B.C.) The fact that early in the VIth century B. C. sophistry was rejected in Athens, has a lot to do with the consequences of their defeat in Peloponnesian war, a social catastrophe. Ever since, the prevalent part of the criticism of sophistry is a criticism of sophists’ immoral ways of life and personalities, rather than the essentials of their philosophy. For instance, Aristotle’s criticism primarily concerns their pragmatism and tendency to make a profit out of teaching. However, Aristotle himself taught his disciples along similar lines, showing them how to “be able to prove both opposites”. It was Aristotle who summed up sophists’ century-long elaborations. The traditional modern interpretation of sophists as shown in Plato’s dialogues appears to be groundless. The truth of the matter is that Plato regards sophists as more serious philosophers than Socrates was. It becomes especially clear in the dialogue titled “Protagoras”, which shows the latter as gaining an undoubted victory over Socrates. Generally speaking, Plato’s works never regard sophists as weak or worthless opponents. A common opinion as to the essence of sophists’, in particular, Protagoras’s philosophy, has hitherto not been worked out. Many researchers renounce the very existence of any specific philosophical position in sophistry. The term “relativism” itself now has a bad name. However, it should be borne in mind that Protagoras doctrine emerged as a result of an attempt to get out of the ontological dead-end to which the entire Greek natural philosophy had come. To this purpose, he employed Anaxagoras’s idea about everything comprising everything, whereupon he built his physical-ontological theory, and Zeno of Helleas’s concept that all objects are such and different at the same time in the same respect. According to Protagoras’s philosophy, every object does not only seem, but is different from every other object, including human beings. Therefore, every person is his or her own measure of all other entities. The objective reality is the Ego’s relations with the outer world. Every object’s essence is defined through its interaction with ourselves. Nothing remains stagnant – every existence already contains non-existence, and vice-versa. However, the relativity of being is not to be regarded as absolute. That means, that relatively stable and therefore relatively cognizable entities do exist, among them the words we say. Doubt is not considered absolute by relativists either, which differentiates them from skeptics and agnostics. They dare to believe. Uncertainty is Godly – here, Protagoras becomes very close to the concept of apathetic theology. Gorgius shared Protagoras’s views and tried to prove them applying the same method as Zeno applied when upholding Parmenidis’s philosophy. He argued that if one accepts the opposite point of view and agrees that nothing can exist and not exist at the same time, one is bound to come to an the absurd conclusion that nothing is cognizable and nothing exists. To prove that there is a universal contradiction within the Existence itself, Protagoras and his followers in their turn put forward a number of special logical arguments, called rules of contraries, or sophisms. The most well-known of them is the Euathle’s sophism, which proves that an object can be such and different at the same time in the same respect. Generally speaking, all relationships of any entity are extraneous. The idea that all entities, including concepts, exist and do not exist at the same time, was also accepted by Plato. It should be stressed, that Plato’s philosophy as a whole is relativists’ greatest achievement. In his dispute against relativism, Aristotle put forward the main concepts of his ontology: the existence falls into the existence in possibility and the existence in reality, or substance and accidence – the ever changing “sublunary” world and the stable world of divine heavenly bodies. This division made his system self-contradictory to the point of absurd. Aristotle quite realized, that the direct disproof of relativism is hardly possible, which fact makes his criticism a mere tautology. It is very indicative in this respect that materialists, idealists and even skeptical agnostics applied the same arguments do disprove relativism. That demonstrates that the inner contradiction between any forms of “absolutism” and relativism is the most fundamental philosophical problem. Relativist ideas were repeatedly renewed throughout history, provided the social conditions were favourable. In variations, the concepts were advanced by Tzuan Tsi and ancient Chinese sophists, apostle Paul, Nicolas of Cusa, Galileo, Rene Descartes, G. Berkley, D. Hume, Ch. S. Pierce, E. Mach, A. Bogdanov, F. de Saussure, N. Bore, P. Feuerabend, U. Quain and others. However, no consistent relativist ontological system was developed after Protagoras. Meanwhile, a valid relativist theory could provide a clue to a fuller and more adequate general physical concept of the world, and to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. -/- Relativism as an ontological system of beliefs. -/- The relativist principle of relativity of all that exists is fundamental for the entire system of philosophy. Absolutely everything exists, but, at the same time, no existence is absolute. Anything is possible, but those entities only exist for us with which we interact this way or another, i. e., reality is interaction, “I interact – hence, I exist”. However, an overly close relationship between entities leads to non-existence – in other words, there is a certain existential optimum. For all of us, information, or perceptible heterogeneities, is real. Each of us is the center of a definite system of interactions with the world. If God is an endless Possibility, then the World is but the man’s dialogue with God. However, the ties that bind us with the world are of some definite kind, which predetermines our reality. The principle of relativity constrains itself, as any relativity is relative. On the one hand, that calls forth the Evil – caused by our own weakness. On the other hand, it makes our world relatively stable and cognizable. Generally speaking, the world is what we are. Everybody has an own Universe, but since people are fairly similar, our universes can be regarded as one Universe with common laws and regulations. It is possible for us to change the degree of objects’ existence in relation to ourselves and one another. It is equally important, though, to remain ourselves (keep following our “warrior’s path”). Since everything exists and no existence is absolute, the process of cognition should involve a criticism of everything but never a complete rebuttal of anything. The criterion of verity for any theory then is in its capacity to build itself upon a bigger number of diverse statements than in any other theory. Theoretically, all philosophies should ideally be complementary. The question of what in fact happened is meaningless unless we specify the “we”, the “where” and the “when”. The past can only exist as part of the present. When we change, our past undergoes corresponding qualitative objective changes, all of which are irreversible. The contemporary physics regards all objects of the Universe as existing for one another, which results in absurd conclusions. In fact, only what we interact with, exists. The so called “speed of light in vacuum” c is the maximum speed of direct interaction and direct exchange of signals. Specifically, at the oncoming speed c with a significant blue parallax the gamma-quantum is unable to interact with the matter. When this speed is reached, the gravitational mass of objects in relation to one another becomes equal to zero (imaginary), whereas their inertial mass equals infinity. Further acceleration will bring us into an entirely different Universe. That means that the Universe is an open system, which fact destroys all present-day cosmological models. Anything is possible in this world. Our reality is magic. Every bit of space contains a potentially limitless number of bits of other, however virtual, universes, as well as an infinite number of particles, which are still virtual for us (as postulated by quantum mechanics). In other words, there exists an infinity of different realities. With all the above in mind, the different levels of entities’ existence, in particular, of Life and Reason, should be taken into consideration. For example, to which extent a live system exists in relation to the inanimate forms of being is very indefinite, as what life is has to be determined by living creatures. An even greater compass of levels of existence can be brought about through interaction – that is the core idea of Godel’s theorem. As a result, the range of forms of existence tends towards infinity – the evolution of matter through super-intelligence will bring us up to God’s heights. A more generalized mathematical model of the physical world, including a universal operator of the co-existence of objects, can be developed based on the above considerations. The bonds between objects become weaker owing to 1) a high speed, 2) acceleration, 3) rotation, 4) strong gravity, 5) strong fields of other kinds, 6) the difference of levels of existence , 7) phase shifts. Yet, there always is an existential optimum. Such mathematical model is to operate certain non-transitive algebras. Relativist ontology assumes that the notion of “temperature” is relative, thus making it possible to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In its turn, that will allow for phase shifts. A perpetual motion machine of the second type will become a reality. Rotation could presumably be used to increase inertial and decrease gravitational mass, slowing down the time. An experimental research could shed light on the mentioned effects. (shrink)

Nowadays, students are experiencing difficult and stressful situations due to the Global Pandemic Alert. This changing world can evoke negative emotions that have been traditionally linked to higher anxiety. Researches have been focused on the positive outcomes of trait emotional intelligence preventing psychological disorders. However, the possibility that TEI might have a dark side has been neglected. Hence, this study aimed to explore the mediating effect of the three dimensions of TEI in the relationship between negative affect and anxiety symptoms (...) among college students. Participants of this research were 467 undergraduates who completed an online self-reported questionnaire including the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and Trait Meta-Mood Scale. The global serial mediation model showed that the total amount of variance explained by the global model was 30.8%. Negative affectivity and age accounted for the 15.1% of state anxiety variance while 15.7% of the variance of state anxiety was attributed to the direct or indirect effect of the three dimensions of TEI. Five indirect effects presented statistical significance. The contrast analyses between mediators showed that three indirect effects had higher statistical weigh; the ability of negative affect to increase state anxiety through emotional attention; emotional clarity, and serially through emotional clarity and mood repair. Our results indicated that students’ negative emotions lead to higher emotional attention which in turn may enhance state anxiety in two ways: by a direct effect of emotional attention on state anxiety and by a serial effect through emotional clarity. Moreover, when negative affect is associated with lower emotional clarity, anxiety symptoms may also arise. However, when attention and clarity are connected, the negative effect is reversed into a positive one, decreasing state anxiety. (shrink)

Poreskoro, with three cat and four dog heads and a snake with a forked tongue as his tail, is responsible for epidemics of contagious diseases in Romany folklore. The Pishachas of Vedic mythology lurk in charnel houses and graveyards, waiting for humans to infect with madness. In Christian demonology, Pythius is known as the ruler of the eighth circle of the Inferno, bestowing heinous and unspeakable tortures on those who have committed fraud. Demons are the stuff of legends, and they (...) are everywhere in mythology and theology. These are just three of the more than thirty I counted that start with the letter P.How lucky we are for the advent of science. A rational tonic, it scatters our demons, demystifying the world for us—or so, at least, we think. As Canales brilliantly shows in this book, our assumption has been far off the mark. In physics, computer science, genetics, neuroscience, and economics, not to mention in the very foundations of rationality itself, an underworld of imaginary creatures has sustained and continues to inhabit modern science. Scientific demons appear in many guises: as atomic and subatomic particle manipulators, as feedback and parallel-processing experts, as messengers who can travel faster than the speed of light, as computer-code spies, gene and bit selectors in evolution and in informatics, as triggers of cascades from the nano level to the level of full-blown ecological and astrophysical theaters. By inventing them, we have learned that causality does not always hold at the level of atoms, that the speed of message transmission is limited, that living systems spend energy, that perpetual-motion machines are impossible, and that there are corners of the universe we have not imagined.We have all heard of Laplace's Demon, and Maxwell's, but who knew that, borrowing from physics, the historian Henry Adams considered the action of demons in geopolitics or that the economist Paul Samuelson analyzed their role in producing more efficient markets? Who knew that the generation that gave us the Internet and artificial intelligence were tasked by their teachers in graduate school to insert as many demons as possible into their programs? Who among us has heard of Darwin's Demon, or Maxwell-Szilárd-Brillouin's, or Monod's, or Loschmidt's? Who is aware of Norbert Weiner's use of demons in conceptualizing cybernetics, or of the great scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem's comparison between Israel's superfast computers and the Golem?As Canales shows convincingly, it has been difficult for both historians and scientists to countenance demons in science, and so they have been written out, in many ways and many instances, of the histories of which they are part and parcel. Thomas Kuhn and even the more radical philosopher Paul Feyerabend both failed to acknowledge in their social critiques of science the extent to which an imaginary underworld of beings has been constitutive of the modern scientific imagination. Ironically, it was the man who provided a hard-and-fast criterion by which to distinguish scientific and nonscientific pursuits, Karl Popper, who ultimately saw the light. Revisiting his classic book The Logic of Scientific Discovery from 1934, he clarified in Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1982 the extent to which every historical era has been characterized by a particular demon. We moderns believe that science is about facts and numbers, but we are mistaken. As Canales beautifully summarizes the stakes of her project, “What first sets science on its path of discovery—then as now—is the continued use of the imagination.”Tracking the fate of demons in modern thought from Descartes to Lord Kelvin to H. G. Wells to David Bohm, and from Conrad Hal Waddington to Henry Compton to Stephen Hawking and Steven Pinker, Bedeviled assumes that the demons of the church or of paganism and the demons of science differ and resemble each other in ways that can be usefully elaborated. What is more crucial, however, is how such demons become real, how they morph from fears to hopes, and from thought experiments into real experiments, and ultimately to things in this world like computer programs, transistors, and nanorobots. From weather systems to messenger RNAs to black holes, demons emerge everywhere. The hard question is: How does the imagination actually drive discovery and understanding? How does it change our world?Perhaps it has been a sidetrack to consider whether we have or have never been modern. Clearly, what reason will not allow, it perennially recruits for a shadowland that helps us to better see our world. Rather than aiming to exorcise science, one day, of all of its methodological and epistemological ghosts, perhaps we might make peace with the notion that every culture struggles with distinguishing truth from falsehood in its own unique way. Such struggles are sensitive to their times and are accomplished through leaps of imagination. But fear not: the debunking of “Western rationality” casts no wet blanket on the project of Enlightenment. If anything, as Canales writes, “an account of science that considers how scientists themselves do science only risks adding new insights into our repertoire of knowledge.” Perhaps, therefore, there is solace to be gained from the dictum, Always choose the Devil you know. Ultimately, there may be no other way forward. (shrink)

In late August 2012, artist Paul Thomas and philosopher Timothy Morton took a stroll up and down King Street in Newtown, Sydney. They took photographs. If you walk too slowly down the street, you find yourself caught in the honey of aesthetic zones emitted by thousands and thousands of beings. If you want to get from A to B, you had better hurry up. Is there any space between anything? Do we not, when we look for such a space, encounter (...) a plenitude of other things —a slice of plaster, an old vinyl record, a flattened piece of aluminum, painted metal surfaces, nameless interstitial powder, the reflection of sky, some letters of the alphabet, roughened concrete. Between what we take to be things there exist other things, as if the universe were jammed with entities like clowns in a crowded Expressionist painting. An abyss of things that emanates from them, not a yawning void that threatens to engulf them, but a sunlit nothingness filled with dust that seems to spray out of them like dry mist sparkling with firefly swarms. In these so-called spaces, we encounter the work of causality. Look: someone painted over this crack, some sunlight rippled in a mirage, a hole appeared. When we look for causes and effects, we don't encounter a basement of efficiently whirring machinery. Rather, we encounter these in-between spaces, where we had not thought to look. What we see are stage hands moving the scenery about—they are doing it in plain sight, the best place to hide, right in front of you, in the place we call the aesthetic dimension . In Tibetan Buddhism these spaces are called bardo , which just means the between. There is no such thing as a moment of your life that is not a between, according to this view. There is the between of living. There is the between of dying. There is the between of the transition between lives. There is the between of dreaming. There is the between of meditation. There is the between of two humans holding cameras walking down a street in Sydney. The between of two buildings, a space bursting with objects as if a billion jack in the boxes had exploded at once. Some of the lids are stuck, sometimes a nose bursts out and the hinge won't open any further; at other times, the jack in the box flies right out and pulps against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Time opens up. Each surface is a poem about the past. A myriad stories begin to proliferate, as if a thing were a crisscrossing of books, a whole library of them, each page whispering parts of paragraphs and broken pieces of word. The stories tell us things—they are quite literal, look, this guy painted part of this wall, then they came and stripped off the panel and touched up the holes. Form is the past. When you look at appearance, you are looking at the past. Where is the present? And essence is the future. The hints of unknown, unseen things, the absolute impossibility of grasping everything about this plastic pipe, the way photons entering the camera lens obey a speed limit and splash onto receptors, going into and out of coherence. At the electronic level, it's quite clear that causality is aesthetic. I can't see an electron without deflecting it. Everything is a refrigerator with a light on—or off—inside. For me, for you, for this arrangement of tiles sandwiched between a door and a slab of marble. To a photon, an electron is a refrigerator with a closed door, and a light that might be on—or off—inside. How can you know whether the light is on inside? Why, you open the door of course. But then you are looking at the past. You never see the light in the refrigerator before you open the door. This future is not a predictable future that is a specific number of now-points away. You will never reach it. You will never be able to sneak up from the side and see through the refrigerator. Nor can a photon see through the refrigerator of an electron. Nor can paint see through the refrigerator of this plastic pipe. You take a photo—click—the past appears, another open refrigerator. But the thing you have just made, the photograph, the graphing of the photons—it is another thing, another story. You can read the words, but the meaning always eludes you. It always lurks just off the edge of the sentence, just at the very edge of this ragged slice of paint, just at the edge of this building, between this one and that one. Thousands of secrets, everywhere. Masks that lie and tell the truth at the same time: this pink paint is not blue paint, that's true. But the thing, the thing in itself, that paint sliding off a brush onto that pipe—it is nowhere to be seen, like a light behind a closed door. When you walk too slowly down the street, you start walking into millions of levels of pastness, levels emitted not just by the humans or the dogs and cats, but also by this garbage can, this mottled pink surface pockmarked with nail holes. You walk surrounded by as many futures as there are things. You walk, or rather you occupy a peculiar shifting ground of nowness, created by the relative motion of the past sliding against the future, not touching. You begin to realize that the present does not exist. A thing is a train station where one train is always arriving and one train is always leaving. Hundreds of train stations everywhere, hundreds of relative motions. The idea of a universal, regular, atomic sequence of instants that contains everything is absolutely ludicrous, the philosophers have known this for thousands of years, and to hide the absurdity, to get from A to B, Houston to Sydney, crossing the International Date Line without too much laughter, you have embedded piezoelectric devices in as many pieces of hardware as possible, devices in which quartz talks to electrons, making train stations where the trains seem to run on time. When you walk too slowly down the street, you begin to realize that Zeno had a point. You can seemingly divide each moment, each step, infinitesimally. So perhaps there are no moments, no steps. Or perhaps time is not a box that everything goes in. Perhaps time is, as Einstein argued after all, a way that things send out ripples. Where one house touches another house, there arise hundreds of things, hundreds of meeting places (Old English thing , meeting place). Hundreds of times. I have a thing for you. Come over here, let's do a thing. Stay in the sunlight and shadow between worlds, in the sunlit canyon between this building and that building. See how paint touches this pipe, caressing then leaving, no one will notice if a surface is left exposed, not quite filled in. See how shadows are reflected in pale cream glass—see the luminous abyss of causality spreading out before your very eyes, right in front of security. All kinds of beautiful crimes are committed right here, and as American cars keep telling you, and you never notice, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. They are here, or rather, here is them, and now is them. Kissing in the shadow. Tim Morton Rice University. (shrink)

The two center time dependent Dirac equation, for an electron in the external field of two colliding ultrarelativistic heavy ions is considered. In the ultrarelativistic limit, the ions are practically moving at the speed of light and the electromagnetic fields of the ions are confined to the light fronts by the extreme Lorentz contraction and by the choice of gauge, designed to remove the long-range Coulomb effects. An exact solution to the ultrarelativistic limit of the two-center Dirac (...) equation is found by using light-front variables and a light-fronts representation. Previously unexplained experimental results obtained at CERN's SPS are explained in this way and predictions are made as to where one should look, in momentum space, and in space-time, if one wants to study and observe non-perturbative electromagnetic pair-production effects in extremely relativistic heavy-ion collisions. (shrink)

A number of physical processes and experimental procedures are listed which appear to be inexplicable in the context of the conventionality thesis of Reichenbach and Grünbaum. Distant synchrony can be produced by procedures based on the free displacement or rotation of elastic solids. Results are expected to agree with Einstein's definition of distant synchrony (by means of light signals, assuming isotropy). The one-way velocity of light can be measured using a rotating shaft, slotted disks, and one stationary clock.

The purpose of the present paper is to develop kinematics of the special relativity with an anisotropy of the one-way speed of light. As distinct from a common approach, when the issue of anisotropy of the light propagation is placed into the context of conventionality of distant simultaneity, it is supposed that an anisotropy of the one-way speed of light is due to a real space anisotropy. In that situation, some assumptions used in developing the (...) standard special relativity kinematics are not valid so that the “anisotropic special relativity” kinematics should be developed based on the first principles, without refereeing to the relations of the standard relativity theory. In particular, using condition of invariance of the interval between two events becomes unfounded in the presence of anisotropy of space since the standard proofs drawing the interval invariance from the invariance of equation of light propagation are not valid in that situation. Instead, the invariance of the equation of light propagation, which is a physical law, should be taken as a first principle. A number of other physical requirements, associativity, reciprocity and so on are satisfied by the requirement that the transformations between the frames form a group. Finally, the correspondence principle is to be satisfied which implies that the coordinate transformations should turn into the Galilean transformations in the limit of small velocities. The above formulation based on the invariance and group property suggests applying the Lie group theory apparatus which includes the following steps: constructing determining equations for the infinitesimal group generators using the invariance condition; solving the determining equations; specifying the solutions using the correspondence principle; defining the finite transformations by solving the Lie equations; relating the group parameter to physical parameters. The transformations derived in such a way, as distinct from the transformations derived in the context of conventionality of distant simultaneity, cannot be converted into the standard Lorentz transformations by a coordinate change. The anisotropic nature of the presented transformations manifests itself in that they do not leave the interval invariant but only provide the conformal invariance of the interval. The relations that represent measurable effects include the conformal factor which depends on the relative velocity of the frames and the anisotropy degree. It is important to note the use of the correspondence principle as a heuristic principle which allows to relate the conformal factor to the anisotropy degree and thus completely specify the transformations and observable quantities. (shrink)

We study the possible interpretation of the "universal constants" by the classification of J.-M. Lévy-Leblond. The Planck constant and the speed of light in vacuum are the most common examples of constants of this type. Using Fock’s principle of the relativity w.r.t. observation means, we show that these two constants can be viewed as manifestations of certain relativity. We also show that there is a possibility to interpret the Boltzmann constant in a similar way, and make some (...) comments about the relativistic interpretation of the constant spacetime curvature and gravitational constant G. (shrink)

This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual (...) framework, repurposes it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (2004) 603-625 [Access article in PDF] Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain Lucia Dacome University College London Ae for "Adversariorum methodus." Be for "Beauty, Beneficience, Bread, Bleeding, Blemishes."1 By associating the first letter with the initial vowel of a word, generations of eighteenth-century readers, students, and observers diligently regulated access to information they reputed (...) worth retaining. Following this rule, they organized the notes they took on a certain subject, the thoughts and observations they believed were worth remembering, and the exemplary words of their favorite authors. The rule was devised by John Locke for his "new method of making commonplace-books," a method characterized by a particular system for indexing the entries of a notebook that became popular in the eighteenth century. Before Locke developed his new method readers had already familiarized themselves with the practice of keeping an account of their readings, excerpting passages of texts, and copying them in their notebooks under a relevant heading. Throughout the early modern period commonplace books provided repositories for arranging notes, excerpts, drawings, and objects.2 Regarded as aids to memory and storehouses of knowledge, they were part of a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that dated back to the classical period. Reducing vast amounts of knowledge to a [End Page 603] manageable form, they instantiated a special relationship between the accumulation of knowledge and the organization of space. At the turn of the eighteenth century Locke's new method promised to facilitate compilers' task by providing a new way of accumulating multum in parvo at a time of increasing concern for the uncontrollable growth of the "Stock of Knowledge."3 It did so by seeking to increase the amount of information one could annotate in the notebook, while also speeding up its retrieval. Many eighteenth-century compilers relied on it in order to reduce the volume of their notebooks and save time. Some were lured by the promise that this technique could also help them to order their minds and thus turn them into better people.Although commonplace books have dropped out of usage today, they were still mentioned in nineteenth-century educational manuals. As tools that lay at the intersection between practices of collecting, reading, classifying, learning, and the arts of rhetoric, they have come to the fore of historical discussion.4 In some cases, commonplace books have been regarded as capable of providing insights into compilers' reading patterns and as biographical sources casting light on compilers' personal idiosyncrasies and cataloguing manias.5 The intellectual and cultural significance of Locke's own new method of compiling has [End Page 604] accordingly been discussed in relation to Locke's own intellectual biography (and in particular his medical interests), in the context of shifting patterns of systematization of knowledge and in light of the dissemination of eighteenth-century encyclopedic projects.6 However, still little is known about the uses and the popularity of the Lockean method in the eighteenth century.What follows considers the spreading of Lockean commonplacing in the context of eighteenth-century discussions on the nature of the self. Locke himself contributed to these discussions when, in the second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), he famously suggested that self-identity lay in the mind and resided in the continuity of memory and consciousness.7 Now a widely shared assumption of Western modernity, the view that self lies in the mind has long been dated back to the Age of Enlightenment. Yet early in this period Locke's proposal to make self-identity coextensive with memory and self-knowledge proved controversial. The debate that followed is now part of the canon of the history of philosophy and of the philosophical literature as a whole.8 In the course of the debate some of Locke's critics doubted that it was possible to found the self in conscious memory: they wondered about the destiny of the self during intervals... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

After discussing in the first five sections the meaning and the difficulties of the principle of relativity we present a new sel of spacetime transformations between inertial systems (“inertial” transformations), based on three assumptions: (1) The two-way velocity of light is c in all inertial systems and in all directions; (2) Time dilation effects take place with the usual relativistic factor; (3) Clocks are synchronized in the way chosen by nature itself, e.g., in the Sagnac effect. We show that (...) our new transformation laws can explain the available experimental evidence in spite of the implied noninvariance of the one-way velocity of light. (shrink)

The selections contained in this volume were made by Richard Kik. The original edition Vom Licht in uns was published by Verlag J.F. Steinkopf, Stuhgart. It contains sayings of things highly spiritual nature as well as a description of the life of Richard Kik. One such selection is The beginning of all spiritual life is fearless belief in truth and its open confession. Albert Schweitzer (14 January 1875 4 September 1965) was a German-French theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. He was (...) born in Kaysersberg in the province of Elsass-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine), at the time in the German Empire. Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by historical-critical methodology current at his time in certain academic circles, as well the traditional Christian view, depicting a Jesus Christ who expected and predicted the imminent end of the world. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life" expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambarene, now in Gabon, west central Africa (then French Equatorial Africa). As a music scholar and organist, he studied the music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and influenced the Organ reform movement (Orgelbewegung). Schweitzer's passionate quest was to discover a universal ethical philosophy, anchored in a universal reality, and make it directly available to all of humanity. This is reflected in some of his sayings, such as: "Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace." "I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.". (shrink)

It is still perhaps not widely appreciated that in 1905 Einstein used his postulate concerning the ‘constancy’ of the light-speed in the ‘resting’ frame, in conjunction with the principle of relativity, to derive numerical light-speed invariance. Now a ‘weak’ version of the relativity principle (or, alternatively, appeal to the Michelson—Morley experiment) leads from Einstein's light postulate to a condition that we call universal light-speed constancy. which is weaker than light-speed invariance. (...) It follows from earlier independent investigations (Robertson [1949]; Steigler [1952]; Tzanakis and Kyritsis [1984]) that this condition is none the less sufficient to derive the Lorentz transformations up to a scale factor, given the well-known kinematic principle of ‘reciprocity’. In this paper, we follow Robertson and explore the kinematics consistent with universal light-speed constancy without imposing reciprocity, and we recover the Lorentz transformations by further appeal only to the weak relativity principle and spatial isotropy. (shrink)

Starting from the current trend to digitise the university, this thesis aims to clarify the specific relation between university thinking and its use of media. This thesis is an investigation concerning the sensorial and medial conditions which enable the event of thinking to emerge at the university, i.e. conditions which do not make thinking necessary, but possible. Thinking is approached as an event which can happen while studying at the university, not as an outcome, nor a disposition or skill. The (...) ambition of this thesis is theory development and of making a contribution in the field of philosophy of education. The theoretical framework discussed in chapters one and two will allow first, an analysis of the university sensorium inspired by the work of Ivan Illich who, through a history of the senses, pioneered this kind of research applied to medieval reading practices. Secondly, the work of media philosopher Vilém Flusser is used to operationalize the analysis of media at the university; this thesis will use the Flusserian concepts of code, modes of consciousness, transcoding, gestures, intellectual field, dialogue and apparatus. The methodology consists of a novel approach inspired by Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures: in order to find traces of thinking, this investigation looks for gestures (with media) occurring in university practices, gestures which seem to imply some form of coding or transcoding. The first chapter critically discusses Ivan Illich’s historical hypothesis of the mediatic specificity of the university thinking. Illich works with a particular conception of the history of the senses through which he shows how the invention of the optical text and its way of reading gave rise to a new way of thinking which was later fostered by the university. The text emerges as an instrumental way of using the book for studying and thinking, a profanation and suspension of the book. This move is taken to be the signature move of the university which enables a particular way of thinking: abstract and non-visual thinking, which is made present through the event of reading. The second chapter introduces the media-theoretical framework of Flusser by discussing his particular take on codes and the modes of consciousness enabled by the dominant codes. Provisionally, transcoding is taken to be an indication of the event of thinking. The threshold introduces the approach of a phenomenology of gestures which will be used in the following two chapters. The third chapter examines the practice of university lecturing from a sensorial and gestural perspective by using several direct observations of lectures and historical reports of lectures. It was found that the lecture does not promote any particular sense, hence no particular mode of consciousness, and that the media in the lecture suffers a continuous transcoding. Thinking in the lecture was described as a thinking which suddenly makes itself present for all those attending the lecture. The fourth chapter examines MOOCs which are taken to be the digital counterpart of the university course. The specific media usage enabled by MOOCs is described starting from two case studies: an xMOOC and the bMOOC (designed by KU Leuven and LUCA researchers). Using interviews and an autoethnographic account, this chapter finds indications of what could be digital gestures in the MOOC and concludes that thinking in the MOOC occurs as a collective construction of a techno-image. The fifth and final chapter outlines the theoretical contributions of this thesis. The kind of thinking made possible by university practices is described as a form of collective thinking, non-productive and anti-apparatus. The ways in which this thinking is made possible are theorised by introducing the notion of mediatic displacement, a specific event in which the particular logic of media is suspended in such a way as to make room for a thinking which is not determined by any mediality. The notion of intellectual askesis is proposed for the collective enactment of attention, as the sensorial condition which makes possible the mediatic displacement. In light of these findings, the thesis proposes to understand the promise of the digital university as still a utopian project to come, because it cannot yet enable the sensorial and collective attention techniques which the classical university managed to enact through its study practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Musician's Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and WellnessSusanna P. GarciaGerald Klickstein, The Musician's Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness (Oxford University Press: New York, 2009)Directed towards college music majors studying the Western classical tradition, The Musician's Way articulates both an artistic approach to attaining mastery of an instrument/voice and a practical approach to achieving professional goals. Its treatment of these topics is comprehensive, addressing, (...) in addition to practical needs, the physical and psychological demands of functioning as a professional musician. Gerald Klickstein, a classical guitarist and teacher at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, says that he intends the book to be "a beacon on your journey towards limitless artistic growth" (p. vi).The Musician's Way is organized into three sections: "Artful Practice," "Fearless Performance," and "Lifelong Creativity." Klickstein treats these subjects, not as separate and unrelated topics, but as interdependent elements necessary for long-term musical success. The Musician's Way is uniquely holistic. It encourages aspiring musicians to approach their study as a process that will take place over the course of a lifetime. The Musician's Way is not a research-based text. It is rather a practical self-help manual, filled with the wisdom gained in Klickstein's thirty years in the performing and teaching professions.At the outset, I should state that I am writing this review from two perspectives: [End Page 100] as a professor of piano at a mid-size public university, and as an experienced performer with a touring piano-duo. These experiences inform my critique of Klickstein's book.In "Artful Practice," Klickstein takes on the heroic task of defining both the 'what' and the 'how' of practicing. Mastery of the art of practicing is a precondition for musical success, yet it is not uncommon for students to enter college poorly schooled in the habits they will need for success in school and the professional world. In my undergraduate piano studio, for example, much of a student's first semester or even a full year may be spent acquiring proper practice and repertoire management techniques. Many students are unaware that artistic performance requires more than correct notes and rhythms. The habit of empty repetitions—playing something over and over again without setting specific goals or applying any critique—is common. Some students do not possess the listening skills necessary to enable critical assessments about their performance. For others, memorization requirements pose a serious challenge. This is often exacerbated by a lack of knowledge of theory or poor general musicianship skills. Managing a large body of repertoire in preparation for juries and recitals is a new frontier. Many students are unaccustomed to a more demanding practice and rehearsal schedule. A sudden increase in time spent on their instrument may result in temporary injury or chronic pain. There are, of course, many other psychological and social issues that arise when students transition to university life.Klickstein understands this and he attempts to quantify every facet of practicing in painstaking detail. No element is too small to warrant inclusion in one of his many lists and subsequent discussions. Initially, I found this penchant tedious. However, there were always items on his list that I would not have thought to mention to a student. For example, Klickstein's advice on outfitting a practice room lists the obvious necessities: a suitable chair, music stand, metronome, and pencil. However, he also discusses equally essential yet sometimes overlooked items, such as a bottle of water, adequate lighting and climate control, and hearing protection. This mundane example is illustrative of the meticulousness of his approach throughout the book.One of the most useful proposals in The Musician's Way involves the organization of practice sessions. Many students habitually prepare for very short term goals: lessons, studio class performances—whatever is just around the next corner. Juries, in which students are expected to prepare a short program of compositions, are intended to be a step along the way to longer, more significant performances such as upper division barriers and junior and senior recitals. Students have difficulty managing their practice time to continuously cycle... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NARRATIVE AND EXPLANATION: EXPLAINING ANNA KARENINA IN THE LIGHT OF ITS EPIGRAPH Marina Ludwigs University ofCalifornia, Irvine In this paper, I will be examining the relation of explanation to narrative, looking briefly at the theoretical side ofthe problematic and in more detail at specific explanatory issues that arise in Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina. Although the use itselfofthe term "explanation" is not as visible in the humanities as it (...) is in the sciences, the explanatory enterprise by other names is just as prominent. For indeed, an animating impetus behind textual interpretation is an explanation ofhowatextcan be brought into a correspondence with another text, while contemporary critical-theoretical activities of demystifying aesthetic and cultural assumptions, contextualizing historical knowledge, or laying bare ideological presuppositions are, in one way or another, engagements in the explanation ofthe workings of language. I approach humanistic explanation via a brief detour of scientific explanation, which constitutes an already established discourse with a set of defined issues and standard arguments, limiting myself to touching upon issues relevant to the narrativization of explanation. In scientific debates, explanation is defined as an answer to the question of "why?," in contradistinction to the question of "what?," which prompts a description of a phenomenon in question. Descriptive and explanatory conceptual frameworks, however, are interdependent. A physical description involves an "in-depth" understanding of underlying regularities. An explanatory answer to a question is, in its turn, an argument that logically deduces the explanandum (the description ofa phenomenon to be explained) from the explanans (well-understood regularities). This Marina Ludwigs125 formal definition of an explanation necessitates a symmetry between explanation and prediction, because the reconstructed logical sequence can also be read in the other direction, demonstrating the inevitability of what has occurred. Thus the sight of shattered glass and a baseball lying about allows me to explain the accident by invoking the law ofthe conservation ofmomentum and the low shock-resistance ofglass. But the knowledge of these regularities would have also allowed me to predict the same outcome had I seen the baseball flying in its direction ofthe window. The ontological status of "regularities" has elicited a lively debate in the scientific community pertaining to the problem ofthe "real." The standard view of regularities defines them as general laws (the kind we learn about in physics classes) that could be deductive or inductive, deterministic or statistical. A general law may be subsumed under another, even more general law, thus forming a unifying hierarchy of laws. A rival conception appeals to causal mechanisms and defines regularities as established chains oftemporal succession. Both models, the covering-law and the causal one, have been criticized: the former—for its failure to distinguish a law from an accidental generalization; the latter—for its resurrection ofthe metaphysical notion ofcausal influence and its inability to deal with probabilistic events. One of the later contenders is Nancy Cartwright's model, that proposes to conceive of regularities as so-called "nomological machines"—"fixed (enough) arrangements] ofcomponents, or factors, with stable (enough) capacities that in the right sort of stable (enough) environment will, with repeated operation, give rise to the kind of regular behavior that we represent in our scientific laws" (Cartwright 50). Cartwright claims that scientific models work on the ceteris paribus (everything else being equal) basis. That is to say they "hold only in circumscribed conditions or so long as no factors relevant to the effect besides those specified occur" (Cartwright 28), such as inside a battery, refrigerator, or a rocket—insofar as special shielding conditions are in effect (as a counterexample, imagine usingNewton's laws ofmechanics for describing the motion of a dropped crumpled dollar). Cartwright's explanatory framework is thus pragmatic and local, avoiding the twin pitfalls of the metaphysical assumptions underlying the two older models—the totalizing and unifying idea of a covering law, on the one hand, and the influence of causal "force," on the other. What is instead emphasized by her is a procedural aspect of scientific knowledge that has been historically prevalent and reflects the practical exigencies of human existence—the experience of dangers and natural obstacles to human 126Explaining 'Anna Karenina ' desires. When ill-defined impediments are analyzed and reduced to concrete difficulties, specific... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:140 BOOK REVIEWS The Church: The Universal Sacrament of Salvation. By JoHANN AUER. Translated from the German by Michael Waldstein. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993. Pp. 541. $24.95 (paper). The Church, Community of Salvation: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology. By GEORGE H. TAVARD. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1992. Pp. 264. $18.95 (paper). These two works represent two recent and very different attempts by contemporary Catholic (...) ecclesiologists to present a comprehensive or systematic theology of the church. I shall deal with the specifics of each work separately. Johann Auer (1910-1989) was professor of dogmatics and the history of dogma at the University of Bonn when in 1983 he first published his Die Kirche: Das allgemeine Heilssakrament. This present work is an English translation of that German text which was Volume VIII in a comprehensive, nine-part, dogmatic survey, with volumes addressing the traditional dogmatic themes: God, Creation, Christ, Grace, Eucharist, Sacraments, Church and Eschatology. Joseph Ratzinger was co-editor with Auer of the original series. And while Auer authored the first eight volumes, Ratzinger authored the final volume on eschatology. We have seen this kind of dogmatic survey in English before in the comparable six-volume work of Michael Schmaus called Dogma (1968). As with Schmaus's work, this dogmatic survey is intended as a series of textbooks for theology students and thus its method is to survey each dogmatic theme focusing upon three elements, the biblical foundation for the theme, the historical development of this theme, and finally its systematic inner coherence or integral rational development. In this volume, Auer accomplishes all three tasks in exemplary fashion and with a depth of treatment Schmaus never aimed at approaching. Auer's The Church is divided into eighteen chapters organized into four thematic sections bearing the titles, " Pathways towards the Proper Understanding of the Church," " Pathways towards a Theological Concept of the Church taken from Biblical Images," "Manifestations of the Church's Being, Life and Activity in the Light of its Sacramental Structure," and "The Church's Tasks and Its Ways to Self-Realization in the World." Under these titles are treated all the traditional themes expected of a comprehensive ecclesiology: the origin and authority of the church, its mission and ministries, biblical images, organizational BOOK REVIEWS 141 models and dogmatic marks of the church, ecumenism, the place of the Blessed Virgin Mary among the People of God, relations between church and state. Auer's consideration of each of these themes is marked by his thorough knowledge of the sources and his skillful handling of these materials. Even so, Auer's work is hardly beyond criticism. For example, arguably the heart of the book is the author's 213-page treatment of the history and theology of the ministries which comprises Part III, "Manifestations of the Church's Being, Life and Activity...." I want to call this section masterful because of the vastness of the enterprise (the development of the ministries over almost two thousand years) and the wealth of careful distinctions Auer brings to his treatment of so much material. To choose among the riches here one might single out Auer's treatment of the two principles of democracy and hierarchy and the numerous collegial forms for participative governance and administration that have been created or once existed in the church and have been revived since Vatican II (pp. 157-173). This is a stimulating but balanced discussion, blending historical material with more immediate and urgent concerns. But there are also some serious weaknesses in the larger section. For example, while extended attention is given to the offices of bishop and pope (almost a hundred pages on the papal office alone), comparatively little attention is given to the role of presbyters (four pages) and the laity. As for the latter, though Auer considers "The Question of the Secular Office of the Laity," he never addresses the question of the religious office of the laity, that is, their ministry in the church and not just to the world. He broaches this theme in his section on " Vocations or Charisms, Ministries and Offices or Commissionings " (pp. 179-194), but all too quickly he concludes this section... (shrink)

Ibn al-Qāṣṣ (d. 335/946), one of the representatives of the Shāfiʿī school of law in the 4th/10th century, compiled a short treatise of extraordinary nature: Fawāʾid Ḥadīth Abī ʿUmeyr. In this work, he deduces sixty different wajhs (verdicts, comments) from a ḥadīth reporting the Prophet’s interest and affection to a child known as Abū ʿUmayr and his family during a visit he paid after Abū ʿUmayr’s birdie died by jokingly telling him in rhyme, “yā Abā ʿUmayr, mā faʿala al-nughayr” (O (...) Abū ʿUmayr, what happened to the nughayr?) This study deals with the primary goal of the composition of the Fawāʾid, its content, and structural qualities as well as the author’s approach in deducing verdicts. As one of the aṣḥāb al-wujūh, the author’s legal/madhhab notion and the literalist and external perspective he developed regarding the interpretation of texts, seems to have directly affected his deductive reasoning and determined his approach. This concise work not only sheds light over certain aspects of the relationship between ḥadīth and fiqh at the time of Ibn al-Qāṣṣ, but also exemplifies to what extent methodological tendencies and personal factors might affect the process of deriving verdicts from ḥadīth and could push the limits in that regard. Summary: Ibn al-Qāṣṣ (d. 335/946), one of the representatives of the Shāfiʿī school of law in the 4th/10th century, compiled a short treatise of extraordinary nature: Fawāʾid Ḥadīth Abī ʿUmeyr. In this work, he deduces sixty different wajhs (verdicts, comments) from a ḥadīth reporting the Prophet’s interest and affection to a child known as Abū ʿUmayr and his family during a visit he paid after Abū ʿUmayr’s birdie died by jokingly telling him in rhyme, “yā Abā ʿUmayr, mā faʿala al-nughayr” (O Abū ʿUmayr, what happened to the nughayr?) The report of Abū ʿUmayr, which is in the focus of the work, is, in essence, reflects a singular and special aspect of the close relationship between the Prophet and Anas b. Malik’s family. Nevertheless, it is surprising that many ḥadīth scholars from the early times, not only Ibn al-Qāṣṣ, have chosen this ḥadīth as an example in which they can demonstrate their skill in the field of fiqh al- ḥadīth. Fawāʾid seems to be a work in which the juridical point of view centered and resembles the classical fiqh commentaries in a sense. In the work, different variants of the Abū ʿUmayr report were brought together and evaluated within the framework of the text and textual possibilities as possible. The author also analyzed some words in the narrative text for being a base for a verdict, referred to Qurʾānic verses, prophetic ḥadīths, reports, and legal opinions, tried to solve the disputes and the conflicts among legal evidences in various ways, and stated occasionally his personal opinions. Fawāʾid reflects the author’s rich accumulation of legal knowledge, while at the same time gives an idea about his knowledge of ḥadīth and his approach to the ḥadīth. Considering what the author did and wanted to do, it is understood that he deals with ḥadīth as well as fiqh, and he has a certain level of relationship not only with fuqahāʾ (muslim jurisprudents), but also with ḥadīth scholars. Ibn al-Qāṣṣ’s interest in fiqh and ḥadīth must have lead him to take initiative to eliminate the tension between the ahl al-ḥadīth of Shāfiʿī school of law who focused on transmitting ḥadīths and the fuqahāʾ of Shāfiʿī school of law who care about the fiqh perspective, in that period of time. It can also be said that he tried to establish a reconciliation between the ahl al-ḥadīth (the traditionists) and the ahl al-raʾy (the rationalists) and bring the parties together in the middle way. The work seems to have been written as a result of such considerations. As Ibn al-Qāṣṣ was considered as one of the aṣḥāb al-wujūh, that is, as a jurist who was bound of a madhhab Imām for legal reasoning, he seems to have followed the methodology of Shāfiʿī school of law for deriving legal solutions from the sources. Legal notion of the author and his literalist and textualist perspective with regards to the interpretation of texts, seems to have directly affected his way of reasoning from the ḥadīth and determined his approach. This approach, as mentioned in many contemporary studies, is not sufficient and appropriate for the evaluation of ḥadīth texts, which were transmitted by meaning, not word-by-word, and shaped by the transmitter’s dispositions. It is also difficult to say that Ibn al-Qāṣṣ sufficiently considered the physical, historical, social, and cultural context surrounding the text as well as other extra-textual elements, which complete the meaning. This situation implies that some of the wajhs recorded in the work are the author’s attempt to find a base and evidence for his ideas, which he already had, rather than deductions drawn from the ḥadīth. It makes the scientific quality and accuracy of his efforts controversial. The verdicts presented in the work, as wajh and fāʾida are predominantly jurisprudential and compatible with the opinions of the Shāfiʿī School of law, however, there are also controversial ones, and the author pointed to them without revealing his own tendency. It does not seem that these wajhs in the work are systematically ranked. In this vein, similar wajhs are sometimes in succession, sometimes scattered, and some wajhs are repetitive. The degree of accuracy, clarity and quality of some wajhs also seem arguable. Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī (d. 806/1404), who made a general evaluation of these wajhs, said that: “Some of the (meanings of the) wajhs in the work are apparent, some of them are hidden and some are strained.” The work’s editor drew attention in the footnotes to the wajhs, which might be subject to objection. The early ḥadīth scholars, who reported this ḥadīth in their compilations, deduced six or seven judgments from the ḥadīth under the headings (bāb) specified for this ḥadīth. This appears quite modest in comparison to the treatise of Ibn al-Qāṣṣ. The given ḥadīth has also taken its place in the fiqh literature, and it has been questioned in the context of the issue of Madīna’s being of ḥarām region (holy land) and hunting ban in this region. In conclusion, Ibn al-Qāṣṣ’s treatise of Fawāʾid Ḥadīth Abī ʿUmayr, is a short but worthy example of the ḥadīth literature in terms of its purpose and interesting content. This work can be considered as a study that exemplifies how the purpose of writing can be determinative on the structure of a work, and in particular to what extent methodological tendencies and personal factors might affect the process of deriving verdicts from ḥadīth and could push the limits in that regard. The author’s universe of meaning, which focused on the apparent meaning and to draw as many judgments as possible from the text, should be related to his personal intention and purpose as well as to the fiqh perspective of his time. Due to the textual approach and the method for drawing inferences, which are observed in the work, the tool-purpose relationship between the text and the judgment sometimes remains obscure and sometimes becomes unimportant. In some respects, this work is a striking example of the consequences of ignoring the context and historical reality surrounding texts for specific purposes. (shrink)

A Michelson interferometer with a phase-conjugate mirror (PCM) is described and discussed. The behavior of phase conjugate mirrors is discussed and the result of an experiment with a Michelson interferometer with a phase-conjugate mirror is described and commented. This interferometer has been proposed to be used to test the intrinsic non-locality of quantum mechanics. In this paper a new experimental setup to study the one-way velocity of light is proposed, which uses this new interesting device.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Green Light Ethics: A Theory of Permissive Consent and its Moral Metaphysics by Hallie LibertoJonathan Ichikawa (bio)Review of Hallie Liberto, Green Light Ethics: A Theory of Permissive Consent and its Moral Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022)Hallie Liberto's Green Light Ethics offers a framework for conceptualizing permissive consent. The book is a philosopher's work of philosophy. Although it touches on non-ideal social realities, especially sexism, it (...) is most centrally a contribution to a quite abstract literature in normative ethics, following in the tradition of scholars like David Owens, Heidi Hurd, Alan Wertheimer, and Tom Dougherty—it may have a few too many Φs and abstractions to be accessible to and comfortable for many people outside the analytic philosophical tradition. The central approach to permission and consent is general—not specific to sexual consent—although some discussions are specific to sex.I have always appreciated and learned from Liberto's work on this topic, and I was excited to read her new book. As I'd hoped, it exhibits fresh and interesting moral and philosophical instincts, and advances plausible and interesting ideas. I did feel, however, that it was sometimes more difficult than one might hope to identify exactly what those ideas are. At key points, I found myself wanting more precision or explanation. I am not the kind of philosopher who shuns abstraction—I value both the concrete/non-ideal and the theoretical/abstract. And I'm not afraid of all those Φs. But as I see it, the point of writing in that mode—the reason it can be worth the cost in accessibility and style—is the ability to express and examine complex ideas with a high degree of precision. As I was reading this book, I found that much of my own intellectual contribution centered around attempts to interpret Liberto's ideas and technicalities before I was in a good position to learn from them. This was a bit of a shame, because there are intriguing ideas in this book, well worthy of consideration. I'll give my own reconstruction of a few of them below, along with some critical engagement.1. domain authorityLiberto posits that there are certain domains over which people hold a special kind of moral authority, which she calls "domain authority" (38). Someone would wrong you if they acted in your domains outside of your normative control. For example, you have domain authority over sexual contact with your body; any actions by others within that domain must [End Page 429] be in accordance with your moral control, or they are violative. Liberto typically uses the following abbreviations to discuss domain authority: S is a person who may or may not be giving P permission to Φ, which is a potential action that P might perform. Φ here is always an action within D, a particular domain of S's moral authority. Since Φ is within D, Φ would wrong S if P Φ'd without S's appropriate authorization.In the case of sexual domain rights, D is S's bodily sexual domain; P would wrong S by performing some act Φ within that domain outside of S's authority. (Φ might be sexually penetrating S, for example.) The framework generalizes. D might be my home, and Φ could stand for potential actions within my home for which any S would need my permission: entering it, say, or drilling a hole in the wall. I'll follow Liberto's use for these abbreviations. Note that Φ will always refer to an act within S's domain D.One of the more distinctive contributions of Liberto's framework is her insistence that subjects retain their domain authority, even as they exercise it to permit action within their domains (42). When S consents to Φ, Liberto says, S does not waive any rights against Φ. If they did, Φ would no longer be part of S's domain of authority D. It is possible to waive rights in this way—this is what happens with property transfers. But Liberto argues that things are quite different for permissive consent (61). If I invite P into my home, or permit P to touch me sexually, they may do so without violating... (shrink)

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens skills (...) in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The nature versus nurture debate continues, as various poverty of stimulus arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Making the "One" ImpossibleJane Gallop (bio)The last paragraph of the first chapter of Mother Tongues presents the book's argument. "What I hope to argue in this book," writes Johnson, "is that the plurality of languages and the plurality of sexes are alike in that they both make the 'one' impossible" [25]. While I am not convinced that Mother Tongues actually demonstrates the similarity between the plurality of languages and (...) the plurality of sexes, my reading nonetheless does find its thesis in this sentence. I would say that Johnson's project in this book is to "make the 'one' impossible," that throughout this book, Johnson continually and consistently argues against the "appeal" of "the 'one'"—repeatedly locates herself in, and exhorts us to join her in, resistance to the powerful seductions of "the 'one.'"In the sentence I just quoted, the word "one" is in quotation marks because the word is not quite the proper name for what Johnson is talking about. When I use the phrase "the 'one'" here, as I do in my title ("Making the 'One' Impossible"), and as I will do throughout this paper, the word "one" will always be in quotation marks, scare quotes.In Mother Tongues, "the 'one'" goes by a number of different names. In the last paragraph of the first chapter, for example, where we found our thesis, it is called "universality." Under that guise, we might recognize the politics of this resistance to "the 'one'" (a politics we are, at this point in critical history, all more than ready to climb on board for). Johnson's resistance to "the 'one'" in Mother Tongues, however, usually appears—I'm happy to say—in other, less politic, more perverse guises.The most widespread elaboration of Mother Tongues's resistance to "the 'one'" is through its active interest in the practice of translation. The theory and practice of translation elaborated in this book is one I'd like to call insubordinate translation. At a number of places, Johnson looks at multiple translations of a text along with the original, not in order to determine which is closer to the original, but in order to enlarge the network of meaning. At times, Johnson productively follows meanings which appear in a translation but are not in the original.The first time this occurs is in the first chapter, in a section entitled "Translation." Johnson is looking at two different English translations of Kafka's The Trial: an "old translation" she "happened to have on hand" and "a more recent edition" in which the old translation "had been revised." Studying the first sentence of the novel in the original and the two translations, Johnson seizes on the word traduce, which she finds in the old translation but not the revision and proclaims: "The translation... is thus even better than the original" [16, emphasis added].The next chapter of Mother Tongues gives us a sense of where, theoretically, this insubordination comes from: "the theory that transformed literary studies utterly transformed the practice of translation. Translating Derrida or Lacan became an art in itself" [32]. "An art in itself" suggests a primary creation, not secondary. (We would certainly want to recall here that Johnson herself translated Derrida's Dissemination). [End Page 77]In the third chapter, "The Task of the Translator," we find Johnson comparing an English translation of Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" to the German original. At one point she ponders the associations of "light" in the word lightly, which is translating the German fluchtig, associations that are not in the original. She concludes: "We have no way of talking about these creations ex nihilo of translation" [57]. Like the earlier "an art in itself," the phrase "creations ex nihilo" again makes translation a primary rather than secondary art. We may have "no way of talking about" these creations, but Mother Tongues does talk about them, regularly, throughout the book.The fifth chapter opens with an epigraph from a letter Benjamin wrote to Horkheimer, or rather an English translation of that letter. The conclusion to the first section of the chapter returns to the word apprehend, which appears in this epigraph: "the psychological... (shrink)

The United States has long been a model for accessible, affordable education, as exemplified by the country's public universities. And yet less than 60 percent of the students entering American universities today are graduating. Why is this happening, and what can be done? Crossing the Finish Line provides the most detailed exploration ever of college completion at America's public universities. This groundbreaking book sheds light on such serious issues as dropout rates linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Probing (...) graduation rates at twenty-one flagship public universities and four statewide systems of public higher education, the authors focus on the progress of students in the entering class of 1999--from entry to graduation, transfer, or withdrawal. They examine the effects of parental education, family income, race and gender, high school grades, test scores, financial aid, and characteristics of universities attended. The conclusions are compelling: minority students and students from poor families have markedly lower graduation rates--and take longer to earn degrees--even when other variables are taken into account. Noting the strong performance of transfer students and the effects of financial constraints on student retention, the authors call for improved transfer and financial aid policies, and suggest ways of improving the sorting processes that match students to institutions. An outstanding combination of evidence and analysis, Crossing the Finish Line should be read by everyone who cares about the nation's higher education system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese Gleams of Sufī Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a New Translation of Jāmī's Lawā'iḥ from the Persian by William C. ChittickE. N. AndersonChinese Gleams of Sufī Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a New (...) Translation of Jāmī's Lawā'iḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick. By Sachiko Murata, with a foreword by Tu Weiming. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 264.Contacts between China and the Near East are at least as old as civilization but have been relatively little studied. This has led to a lack of attention to Chinese Islam. Yet, Islam has been a profoundly influential force in China for centuries. In Chinese Gleams of Sufī Light, Sachiko Murata has stepped forward to bring a wider awareness to the interactions between Chinese Islam and native Chinese philosophic traditions. (Murata is also the author of The Tao of Islam [1992] and, with Islamicist William Chittick, The Vision of Islam [1994]). [End Page 257]The present book adds greatly to our understanding. It includes a translation of The Great Learning of the Pure and Real, by Wang Tai-yü (ca. 1590-ca. 1658) and facing-page versions of William Chittick's English translation of the fifteenth-century Gleams (Lawā'iḥ) by 'Abd al-Rahman Jāmī and Murata's English translation of Liu Chih's (ca. 1662-ca. 1730) Chinese version of the same work. (Here, incidentally, I follow the book in using the Wade-Giles system.) One can see, comparing the translations, howLiu recast Jāmī's work in Chinese philosophic language, paraphrased some difficult passages, summarized others, and added his own commentaries.Interestingly, Liu eliminated Jāmī's Persian poetry. Murata thinks this is because Liu wanted to focus on the hard ideas; I suspect that it was because Liu realized that Persian prosody and imagery were too far from Chinese poetry to please his audience.Both Wang and Liu belonged to what must have been a rather loose but some-how connected circle of Chinese Islamic scholars. Both, also, almost necessarily used language fairly widespread in Chinese philosophy. Terms such as "emptiness" and "transformation" had many Chinese resonances, some most un-Islamic (Neo Confucian and Buddhist, for instance).Neither Chittick nor Murata give any glosses for key philosophical terms in either source language. Their philosophical and religious provenance, Chinese or Muslim, is correspondingly unclear.What is clear is that Neo-Confucianism had a strong influence on these scholars. Haqiqa "reality" is often translated as li "principle." Pen-jan "root nature" is used for the Arabic compound "essence and attributes." These examples are discussed in the introduction (p. 19). "Annihilation" becomes "conquering" (pp. 148-149). This is strange, because "Annihilation" (fana') is a technical term in Sufism for the disappearance of the self in God; it is an Arabic term, and literally means something like. "passing away." It signifies the forgetting or loss of self, such that only contemplation of the Divine remains. It is as close to the Divine as humans can get since, in Islam, humans cannot be absorbed into Allah (as, in Buddhism, they can be absorbed into Nirvāṇa or the Buddha-nature). "Conquering" seems a rather strange way to express this in Chinese. Perhaps Chinese Muslim readers of the time had developed this specialized sense for it.There are, of course, debatable translations here to contend with (both from Persian and Arabic to Chinese and from Persian and Chinese into English), but it appears that real incommensurability is involved. It was very difficult to use the language of Chinese philosophy in the seventeenth century, influenced as it was by centuries of Neo-Confucian thought, to talk about a radically different religion characterized by an infinitely powerful and wise God, aware of all futures, close to the believer and yet cut off.The inevitable result is to wedge the Arabic and Persian philosophy, so heavily informed by Neoplatonic essentialism and other... (shrink)

The objective of this article is to provide a formalism to deal with the special theory of relativity (STR, in short) as riewed by Reichenbach, according to which STR involves an ineradicableconventionality of simultaneity. One of the two postulates of STR asserts that, in empty space, the one-way speed of light relative to inertial frames is constant. Experimental evidence, however, is related to the constancy of the round-trip speed of light and has no bearing on one-way (...) speeds. Following Reichenbach's viewpoint, we relax the second postulate of STR, abandoning the constancy of the one-way speed of light to the more realistic one asserting the constancy of the round-trip speed of light. This, in turn, results in a formalism to deal with Reichenbach's special theory of relativity (RSTR, in short) in which the two one-way speeds of light in empty space, C±, in the two senses of a round-trip are arbitrarily selected in such a way that their harmonic mean is the measurable round-trip speed of light, c. Experimentally, RSTR and STR are indistinguishable and, hence, represent the same physical theory. It is only the formalism that we use to deal with STR which is extended in RSTR to accommodate the immeasurability of one-way velocities. The usefulness of the proposed formalism to study special relativity is demonstrated. (shrink)

Chapter 4 relates Hegel, the great spokesman and philosophical champion of the Weltbild of his literary contemporaries, to the two major themes of the book. On the one hand, it shows how he picked up the idea of the divinity of man, a prominent feature of the romantic Weltbild, and interpreted it in such a way as to keep contact with the Similarity Thesis. In Hegel’s philosophy, it is reason that constitutes the link between God, nature, and man. On the (...) other hand, the chapter shows how Hegel added impetus and theoretical weight to a style of thought that, by stressing human autonomy and creativity, turns the view away from the divine mind, and on to the works of man. At the textual level, a close reading of the famous chapter on Sense-Certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit reveals the centrality of the concept of activity: the reason why purely passive sense-certainty collapses is that its content turns out to be always universal, and so cannot be the product of mere passivity. (shrink)

There are hints that the connectivity of space-time in quantum gravity could emerge from entanglement, and it has further been proposed that any two entangled particles may be connected by a quantum wormhole. One way to test this proposal is by probing the electric field of an entangled charged particle to determine whether its electric field leaks through the putative wormhole. In addition, if such a wormhole is traversable, then it could be possible for the collapse of the wave function (...) to occur in a causal manner, with information about the collapse travelling through the wormhole at the speed of light, rather than the wave function collapse being a global and instantaneous event. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religion a Threat to Morality: An Attempt to Throw Some New Light on Hume's Philosophy of Religion* Gerhard Streminger At the beginning ofhis Natural History ofReligion Hume writes that two questions in particular... challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature. The first challenge is taken up by Hume in the Dialogues ConcerningNatural Religion, and the second (...) in hisNatural History ofReligion. In this paper I will try to show that there is a third fundamental problem discussed by Hume with regard to religion, namely its relationship to and influence on morality. Although he never wrote on this topic in as systematic a way as on the above-mentioned two questions inparticular, I am convinced that his thoughts about it were not just casual. The passages in Hume relevant to this third central question about religion are to be found in "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm," in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary; in section 11 ofAn Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; in Appendix 4 and "A Dialogue," in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles ofMorals; in the History ofEngland; in Part XII of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion ; and, in particular, in the Natural History ofReligion. Why Hume never wrote about the relationship between religion and morality in a more systematic way is not entirely clear. He may have decided not to provoke the orthodox any further than he already had. That Hume changed the title ofsection 11 ofhis first Enquiry from the original "Of the Practical Consequences of Natural Religion" to the rather non-committal "Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State" may support this conjecture. Before going into more detail as to Hume's view on the relationship between religion and morality, I want to make a few remarks about Hume's opinion of religion in general. Hume made a distinction between one 'true' and two forms of 'false' religion. His most explicit description of true religion is to be found in a preface to the second volume of his History ofEngland: Volume XV Number 2 277 GERHARD STREMINGER Theproper Office ofReligion, Hume wrote in terms which have a Quakerish flavour, is to reform Men's Lives, to purify their Hearts, to inforce all moralDuties, & to secure Obedience to the Laws & civil Magistrate. While it pursues these useful Purposes, its Operations, tho' infinitely valuable, are secret & silent; andseldom come under the Cognizance ofHistory... The Idea ofan Infinite Mind, the Author ofthe Universe seems... to require a Worship absolutely pure, simple, unadorned; without Rites, Institutions, Ceremonies; even without Temples, Priests, or verbal Prayer & Supplication. This preface, however, was not printed in the words quoted above. Instead it was reduced by Hume to a footnote at the end of the second volume of his History of England in a shortened and toned-down version. Even this footnote was removed in later editions ofthe History ofEngland. But in the Dialogues Hume repeated his idea of the effect of true religion on morality almost verbatim: The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit oftemperance, order, and obedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of mortality and justice, it is in danger of being overlooked, and confounded with these other motives. This form ofreligion, however, although without anypernicious consequences with regard to society (D 223), is extremely rare. Religion, as it has commonly been found in the world (D 223), is a threat to morality. The corruptions of true religion, namely superstition and enthusiasm, are the popular forms of religious worship. Whenever Hume talks about religion without qualifications, he has this false religion in mind. Coming back to my original thesis, Hume, I think, sees three main negative influences of false religion: (1) The clergy has an interest in setting bounds to human knowledge; (2) The God offalse religion is no moral authority; (3) False religion corrupts the natural moral sentiments and promotes an 'artificial, affected' life. I. False Religion and Human Knowledge To see the force of Hume's argument concerning the threat of false religion to morality, one has to take into account some general assumptions of Hume... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Universal "One"Toward a Common Conceptual Basis for Chinese and Western StudiesMing Dong GuIn the world today, rapid globalization has drastically shrunk the geographical distance between the East and the West and greatly facilitated exchanges between different cultures and traditions. In the comparative studies of Eastern and Western literatures and cultures, however, an opposite trend characterized by the anxiety of cultural relativism prevails. It has been aptly reduced (...) to this claim: "[T]he East and the West are so distinctly different that ways of thinking and expression cannot be made intelligible from one to the other, and therefore the knowledge of one must be kept apart from that of the other" [Longxi Zhang xvii]. The viability of comparative studies, as is recognized, rests on the fundamental notion that two cultural objects juxtaposed for comparison should share some common ground, or that a valid frame of reference be applicable to both of them. In the comparative studies of Chinese and Western traditions, because these traditions are recognized as founded on different and often unique ontological premises and epistemological assumptions, it is difficult to locate a common conceptual entry point for a two-way dialogue, let alone a common conceptual basis undergirded by Chinese and Western philosophical thought, to establish a viable paradigm of comparison. The current absence of such a conceptual basis in the international context of globalization, which calls for dialogues between different cultures and traditions, cannot but force us to ask: is there a Chinese philosophical concept that signifies, as another Western philosophical concept does, the ontological and epistemological conditions of human existence, one that can be used as a conceptual premise upon which to build a bridge across the divide between the Chinese and Western traditions?Undaunted by the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Chinese and Western traditions, some scholars have made valiant efforts to locate a common conceptual ground. Following the lead of Qian Zhongshu, a Chinese erudite of the twentieth century, some scholars have also noted that the Dao (Tao) in Chinese philosophical thought and Logos in Western philosophical thought are remarkably comparable [Qian 408]. The compatibility of the Dao and Logos, however, has been problematized by other scholars, who argue that the differences between the Dao and Logos are more profound than their apparent similarities. James J. Y. Liu, for example, questions the universality of logocentrism as claimed by Longxi Zhang in both the Dao and Logos: "Zhang's comparison of dao to logos fails to take into account an important difference: in the West, logos is identified with God, but Lao Zi took great pains to say that dao is not the true name of the ultimate" [Liu 25]. Moreover, while in Lao Zi's conception, the Dao is a [End Page 86] feminine concept, the Western Logos, through its emphasis on presence, is obviously masculine in nature. More significantly, the pairing of the Chinese concept of Dao with the Western concept of Logos as a conceptual common ground has a fundamentally incommensurable point: namely, while the former is predicated on a fundamentally monistic view of the universe as a spontaneously self-generating entity, the latter, like Plato's Idea, is founded on a dualistic view of the universe as constituted by one world of essence and another of appearances, created by a powerful personal god.To establish a model for cross cultural studies, it is of little value to simply juxtapose a Chinese concept and a Western concept and find their similarities. In comparative studies, we need to find a conceptual model based on the pairing of similar concepts from different traditions that may yield promises of paradigms and methodologies. For this reason, my exploration is not concerned with the question of whether it is viable to pair the Dao and Logos together. I am more concerned with another question: Is it possible to build a conceptual and methodological model based on the near commensurability between the Dao and Logos? Some scholars suggest that the striking similarity invites and encourages further exploration. But in which direction or directions should we pursue the subject further? In my view, previous scholars' preliminary explorations have been promising, but too narrowly focused on the local... (shrink)

Hua-Ching Ni encourages each person to go beyond religion and theology in order to rediscover his or her own spiritual nature. He provides the tools with which one can unlock the spiritual treasures of the universe, lighting the way to internal and external harmony and fulfilment.

According to the Special Theory of Relativity, there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity, contrary to the view defended in the book. However, this chapter demonstrates that the Special Theory of Relativity can be modified so as to allow absolute simultaneity. This modification involves reference to absolute space and the causal relations between space‐time points, and drops the assumption that the one‐way speed of light is constant through all frames of reference. Contrary to the orthodox theory, the (...) modified version has the additional advantage of avoiding a clash with quantum mechanics, such as brought out by the Einstein‐Podolsky‐Rosen thought experiment and Bell's Theorem. (shrink)

The present article attempts at combining Big History potential with the potential of Evolutionary Studies in order to achieve the following goals: 1) to apply the historical narrative principle to the description of the star-galaxy era of the cosmic phase of Big History; 2) to analyze both the cosmic history and similarities and differences between evolutionary laws, principles, and mechanisms at various levels and phases of Big History. As far as I know, nobody has approached this task in a systemic (...) way yet. It appears especially important to demonstrate that many evolutionary principles, patterns, regularities, and rules, which we tend to find relevant only for higher levels and main lines of evolution, can be also applied to cosmic evolution. Moreover, almost everything that we know about evolution may be detected in the cosmic history, whereas many of the evolutionary characteristics are already manifested here in a rather clear and salient way. Of course, many of the characteristics are manifested in initial or nonsystematic forms but some features, on the contrary, appear to be more distinct just in the cosmic phase. And at the same time when many characteristics and features which are typical of biological and social evolution unexpectedly reveal their roots or protoforms at earlier phases, one becomes aware that the universal character of evolution is real and it can be detected in a number of manifestations. One should also bear in mind that the origin of galaxies, stars, and other celestial objects is the lengthiest evolutionary process among all evolutionary processes in the Universe. Such an approach opens new perspectives for our understanding of evolution and Big History, of their driving forces, vectors, and trends, it also creates a consolidated field for the multidisciplinary re-search. (shrink)

Contemporary debate over laws of nature centers around Humean supervenience, the thesis that everything supervenes on the distribution of non-nomic facts. The key ingredient of this thesis is the idea that nomic-like concepts—law, chance, causation, etc.—are expressible in terms of the regularities of non-nomic facts. Inherent to this idea is the tacit conviction that regularities, “constant conjunctions” of non-nomic facts do supervene on the distribution of non-nomic facts. This paper raises a challenge for this conviction. It will be pointed out (...) that the notion of regularity, understood as statistical correlation, has a necessary conceptual component not clearly identified before—I shall call this the “conjunctive relation” of the correlated events. On the other hand, it will be argued that there exists no unambiguous, non-circular way in which this relation could be determined. In this regard, the notion of correlation is similar to that of distant simultaneity where the necessary conceptual component is the one-way speed of light, whose value doesn’t seem to be determined by matters of facts. (shrink)