Using animals for scientific research is a highly contentious issue that Continental philosophers engaging with 'the animal question' have been rightly accused of shying away from. Now, Wahida Khandker asks whether Continental approaches to animality and organic life will make us reconsider our treatment of non-human animals. By following its historical and philosophical development, she argues that the concept of 'pathological life' as a means of understanding organic life as a whole plays a pivotal role in refiguring the human-animal (...) distinction. She explores the significance of this across philosophy and the life sciences through the work of a number of key thinkers of life and process, from Henri Bergson to Donna Haraway. (shrink)

This chapter proposes an extension of Georges Canguilhem's historical analysis toward contemporary concepts of milieu as flexible and dissipative territories, and as "adaptive landscapes" of living organisms such as the monarch butterfly and common swift. The chapter deploys and develops an understanding of certain vital processes in Canguilhem's account of milieu, by charting the experience to be found in various migration landscapes which cannot be understood independently of their taking place over time (and certainly not in abstraction). This is reflected (...) in the second section where an account of dissipative images is given as a way of thinking the ephemerality of structures whose ramifications occlude the ongoing radiance of their energy. This much can be seen, as the chapter concludes, in the work of Gemma Anderson whose drawings of mitosis and epigenetic landscapes contemplate, through a set of visual "notes," how we might begin to both think and render energy fluctuations. We can thus visualize migratory patterns not as a series of fixed points but in a way that might help us to see "sky" as a unique, dynamic milieu of lived time and space. (shrink)

The idea of the élan vital is crucial for an understanding of Bergson’s metaphysical method, underpinning the way in which philosophy stands with other forms of creative activity as an endeavour of “self-overcoming,” the self or subject no longer being at the centre of thought, but understood rather as a product of the process of thinking. In placing a special emphasis on Bergson’s 1907 work, Creative Evolution, the present essay is both an acknowledgement and challenge to the shift from early (...) interpretations of Bergson in which comparisons were made with thinkers such as Schelling and Schopenhauer, to more recent engagements centred on the theories of perception and memory. The aim of this essay is to formulate a response to the marginalized status of Creative Evolution in the “perception-based” strands of Bergson scholarship, by emphasising how Bergson’s theories of memory and consciousness are a means for understanding his definition of evolutionary “creativity.” Bergson suggests that the analysis of consciousness or “will” can provide us with a way of thinking about this creative movement of life, which is not a concept of a “cause” or “origin” in the sense of a “state of nature” (substance, essence, or “being”), but rather the operation of pure tendency. (shrink)

Whitehead calls for an extrication of the concept of nature from models of the body/subject, which is always engaged in a process of “extensive abstraction” or simplification, issuing forth our conceptions of serial time and divisible space. The incorporation of serial time into process (thereby unifying the sciences with philosophy) is commonly held to be a key distinction between Whitehead and the more “dualistic” thought of Henri Bergson. This essay examines the affinities between the two thinkers, with particular reference to (...) their common espousal of the primacy of process and a fragmentation of the Kantian unity of subjectivity. (shrink)

RESUMO A relevância do trabalho deve-se ao interesse pela investigação cognitiva e discursiva e pelos aspectos linguístico-sinergéticos implementados no discurso artístico contemporâneo, incluindo o literário, à importância da realização de investigação sobre a categoria de futuralidade, a modalidade e o conceito de temporalidade em obras literárias. O objetivo deste artigo é examinar em pormenor todos os aspectos que influenciam a formação da mentalidade dos países anglófonos e do Cazaquistão: sociais, culturais, psicológicos e linguísticos, através de um estudo da categoria de (...) futuralidade e modalidade no exemplo da prosa pós-modernista. A base metodológica foi teórica e comparativa, com elementos de análise conceitual, de enquadramento, funcional-semântico, estrutural e sinergética. Este artigo aborda as condições comunicativas de implementação, os mecanismos semânticos e cognitivos de formação de uma imagem conceitual do mundo no aspeto da futuralidade e a interação das categorias temporais com outros parâmetros do texto, recorrendo à linguosinergética. Fala-se da perceção pós-moderna da temporalidade e da visão do mundo dos povos inglês e cazaque. Foi efetuada uma análise comparativa das obras em termos de estado de espírito geral, temas, conceitos ideológicos e características estéticas. Foram compreendidos os métodos, os modos e as formas (léxico-gramaticais, estruturais e semânticas) de ativar a compreensão cognitiva e concetual de situações-chave do futuro e de significados modais. (shrink)

Based on the fact that Arabic words have roots from which they are derivated and their common meanings and there is a meaning relationship between words derivated from the same root Ibn Fāris tried to prove this theory in his dictionary. According to Ibn Fāris maqāyīs means the words that was derivated from a same root and have a common meaning. The purpose of writing this dictionary by Ibn Fāris is to determine the common meaning of words that was derivated (...) from a same root. This common meaning is called asl (origin) or miqyās (gauge). He tried to mention the most obvious expression of common meaning. Thus, the words with similar meanings can be gathered around the same expression. There are totally 4659 articles in al-Maqāyīs. Of these articles approximately 2175 articles have one common meaning, 355 articles have two common meanings, 68 articles have three common meanings and 15 articles have four common meanings. There are just 4 aricles they have five common meanings andonly one article has six common meanings. He characterized 222 articles with useyl. While explaning the articles he gaved a great importance to the testimony. He recorded in his dictionary approximately 5.000 poems and 858 rajazs. And there are 612 verses, 579 hadithes and nearly 390 proverbs in this work. While explaning these articles Ibn Fāris used some concepts. He generally recorded these concepts in the first line when he starts to explain an article. That’s why it’s not easy to understand the articles without understanding the recorded concepts in this work. This article was prepared to explain the concepts in al-Maqāyīs. In this way, it is aimed to understand this work better. In this article are explained 14 concepts and are given some articles in which these concepts are mentioned as examples. Ibn Fāris used the word of kalima wāhida (one word) in the meaning of meaning/content. The concept of binā is used in some articles in the meaning of root, in some articles in the meaning of meaning/content and somtimes is used in the meaning of common meaning. But the concept of harf (letter) is used for the roots which is given a little explanation. It is possible to say that this concept means word (kalima) and these articles are not suitable for common meaning. Also in some articles the author mentioned about the meaning inconsistency and the meaning distance between common meanings. He used terms like meaning dissimilarity (ademu inqiyās) and individual meaningful words for the roots which he could not find the common meanings. The author sometimes used the terms of difference (tafāwut), meaning similarity (taqārub) and interference (tadākhul) between origins and words. Although he accepts the existence of common words and auto-antonym (ezdād) in Arabic language, he states that there is a detail difference between the words which are considered to be synonym. The concept of muhmal means the neglected articles or the articles whose letters are incomatible. (shrink)

A book review of 'Diagrams of Sensation: Deleuze and Aesthetics Pli,' by Darren Ambrose and Wahida Khandker, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Volume 16 ISBN 1897646127.