We present a canonical form for definable subsets of algebraically closed valued fields by means of decompositions into sets of a simple form, and do the same for definable subsets of real closed valued fields. Both cases involve discs, forming "Swiss cheeses" in the algebraically closed case, and cuts in the real closed case. As a step in the development, we give a proof for the fact that in "most" valued fields F, if f(x),g(x) ∈ F[ x] (...) and v is the valuation map, then the set {x : v(f(x)) ≤ v(g(x))} is a Boolean combination of discs; in fact, it is a finite union of Swiss cheeses. The development also depends on the introduction of "valued trees", which we define formally. (shrink)

Assuming the existence of ω compact cardinals in a model on GCH, we prove the consistency of some new canonization properties on ω. Our aim is to get as dense patterns in the distribution of indiscernibles as possible. We prove Theorem 2.1. thm2.1Suppose the consistency of “ZFC+GCH + there are infinitely many compact cardinals”. Then the following is consistent: ZFC+GCH + and for every family 0 (...) such that for all 0shrink)

In this paper we investigate some families of decision problems associated with a restricted class of Post canonical forms, specifically, those defined over one-letter alphabets whose productions have single premises and contain only one variable. For brevity sake, we call any such form an RPCF (Restricted Post Canonical Form). Constructive proofs are given which show, for any prescribed nonrecursive r.e. many-one degree of unsolvability D, the existence of an RPCF whose word problem is of degree D (...) and an RPCF with axiom whose decision problem is also of degree D. Finally, we show that both of these results are best possible in that they do not hold for one-one degrees. (shrink)

Propositional canonical Gentzen-type systems, introduced in [2], are systems which in addition to the standard axioms and structural rules have only logical rules in which exactly one occurrence of a connective is introduced and no other connective is mentioned. [2] provides a constructive coherence criterion for the non-triviality of such systems and shows that a system of this kind admits cut-elimination iff it is coherent. The semantics of such systems is provided using two-valued non-deterministic matrices (2Nmatrices). [23] extends these (...) results to systems with unary quantifiers of a very restricted form. In this paper we substantially extend the characterization of canonical systems to (n, k)-ary quantifiers, which bind k distinct variables and connect n formulas, and show that the coherence criterion remains constructive for such systems. Then we focus on the case of k ∈ {0, 1} and show that the following statements concerning a canonical calculus G are equivalent: (i) G is coherent, (ii) G has a strongly characteristic 2Nmatrix, and (iii) G admits strong cut-elimination. We also show that coherence is not a necessary condition for standard cut-elimination, and then characterize a subclass of canonical systems for which this property does hold. (shrink)

The ‘messianic’ is one of philosophy’s most appropriated religious terms, yet one apparently now bereft of its historical religious particularity. This essay thus explores a genealogical approach to the ‘messianic’ which might prove helpful in uncovering the reasons for this transformation from the theological to the philosophical, and what role, if any, theology still has in determining the meaning and usage of this term. Accordingly, this essay traces the term through the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. (...) This development is made against the backdrop of another religious term which indirectly pervades the work of all three authors: the canon. The canonical is a term which lingers on the margins of these messianic discourses and needs to be explored further in the context of this work in order to provide a fitting foil to these otherwise ‘purely philosophical’ developments of the messianic. The necessity for invoking the canonical form will become clear as this analysis is extended to the work of Agamben in order to determine how canons remain an unstated factor in his attempt to eradicate all representation from a just ethical paradigm. In this attempt to articulate a model of understanding that goes beyond the universal/particular divide, he will in fact advance a movement from particularity to particularity which can be profoundly read as a genuine paradigm for articulating a theological principle of creation. Thus, this essay intends to point toward two related conclusions: first, that the triad of canon-creation-representation might be understood as a necessity for cultural intelligibility, yet one that must also be seen in relation to its messianic-redemptive-unrepresented elements; and, second, that even this epistemological framework can be undone through a bid to end all representations which nonetheless allows us to return to a more profound realization of creation. (shrink)

A canonical Gentzen-type system is a system in which every rule has the subformula property, it introduces exactly one occurrence of a connective, and it imposes no restrictions on the contexts of its applications. A larger class of Gentzen-type systems which is also extensively in use is that of quasi-canonical systems. In such systems a special role is given to a unary connective \ of the language. Accordingly, each application of a logical rule in such systems introduces either (...) a formula of the form \\), or of the form \\), and all the active formulas of its premises belong to the set \. In this paper we investigate the whole class of quasi-canonical systems. We provide a constructive coherence criterion for such systems, and show that a quasi-canonical system is coherent iff it is analytic iff it has a characteristic non-deterministic matrix which is based on some subset of the set of the four truth-values which are used in the famous Dunn–Belnap four-valued matrix for information processing. In addition, we determine when a quasi-canonical system admits cut-elimination. (shrink)

We examine a notion of an elementary particle in classical physics and suggest that its existence requires non-trivial homotopy of space-time. We show that non-trivial homotopy may naturally arise for space-times in which metric relations are generated by a canonical distance form factorized by a Weyl field. Some consequences of the presence of a Weyl field are discussed.

By questions of “canon,” we mean questions of what is fictionally true of some character, story, or world. What is canon is treated as authoritative or official, usually by creators and fans alike. But disputes about canon have arisen as storytellers and publishers have sought to capitalize on the popularity of their characters, churning out more and more stories to meet public demand, and at the same time engaging with growing fan bases. As audiences have become more involved, and as (...) fictional worlds have become messier, the authoritative nature of canon—and who authorizes it—has begun to erode. In this paper, we characterize canon as an article in the evolving relation between authors and audiences. More specifically, we characterize canon as an intangible good, subject to a form of cultural negotiation, resting on a power relation between producers and consumers of fictions. In Part I, we consider the author’s evolving role, and the rights of the creator to a story, character, or world. In Part II, we discuss the emerging activities of fans, particularly as they weigh on issues of canon. In Part III, we discuss canon as being subject to cultural negotiation, highlighting the importance of power dynamics in this negotiation. (shrink)

Hedgehog (Hh) signaling is a widely studied signaling pathway because of its critical roles during development and in cell homeostasis. Vertebrate canonical and non‐canonical Hh signaling are typically assumed to be distinct and occur in different cellular compartments. While research has primarily focused on the canonical form of Hh signaling and its dependency on primary cilia – microtubule‐based signaling hubs – an extensive list of crucial functions mediated by non‐canonical Hh signaling has emerged. Moreover, amounting (...) evidence indicates that canonical and non‐canonical modes of Hh signaling are interlinked, and that they can overlap spatially, and in many cases interact functionally. Here, we discuss some of the many cellular effects of non‐canonical signaling and discuss new evidence indicating inter‐relationships with canonical signaling. We discuss how Smoothened (Smo), a key component of the Hh pathway, might coordinate such diverse downstream effects. Collectively, pursuit of questions such as those proposed here will aid in elucidating the full extent of Smo function in development and advance its use as a target for cancer therapeutics. (shrink)

The article scrutinises the semantics of canonical property designators of the forms ‘the property of being F’ and ‘F-ness’. First it is argued that, as their form suggests, the former are definite definitions, albeit of a special sort. Secondly, the prima facie plausible classification of the latter as proper names (which is often met in philosophical writings) is rejected. The semantics of such terms is developed and it is shown how its proper understanding yields important consequences about the (...) concepts expressed by these terms. (shrink)

We define the notions of a canonical inference rule and a canonical system in the framework of single-conclusion Gentzen-type systems (or, equivalently, natural deduction systems), and prove that such a canonical system is non-trivial iff it is coherent (where coherence is a constructive condition). Next we develop a general non-deterministic Kripke-style semantics for such systems, and show that every constructive canonical system (i.e. coherent canonical single-conclusion system) induces a class of non-deterministic Kripke-style frames for which (...) it is strongly sound and complete. We use this non-deterministic semantics to show that all constructive canonical systems admit a strong form of the cut-elimination theorem. We also use it for providing a decision procedure for every such system. These results identify a large family of basic constructive connectives, each having both a proof-theoretical characterization in terms of a coherent set of canonical rules, as well as a semantic characterization using non-deterministic frames. The family includes the standard intuitionistic connectives, together with many other independent connectives. (shrink)

The legacy of an antinomian messianism within a Jewish historical context -- Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben on the processes of messianicity and canonicity -- Conclusions formulated on the basis of part I: recognizing the challenges of a "political theology of immanence" -- The radical hermeneutics of theology -- The "violence" of the canon: a contemporary context for the canonical form -- The necessity of hermeneutics.

We take canonical theology, in its most minimal form, to be the normative thesis that the final shape of a canon ought to guide how one interprets the texts contained within the canon. Within the Christian tradition, a standard objection to canonical theology goes something like this: Given the diversity of canon lists, whose canon should we endorse? Should we prefer the Masoretic ordering or the LXX? If the Greek tradition, which Greek tradition? Call this the Problem (...) of Canon List Diversity (PCLD). Appealing to scholastic hermeneutics, especially St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and recent developments in the theology of inspiration, we develop a successful response to PCLD. (shrink)

We prove frame determination results for the family of many-valued modal logics introduced by M. Fitting in the early '90s. Each modal language of this family is based on a Heyting algebra, which serves as the space of truth values, and is interpreted on an interesting version of possible-worlds semantics: the modal frames are directed graphs whose edges are labelled with an element of the underlying Heyting algebra. We introduce interesting generalized forms of the classical axioms D, T, B, 4, (...) and 5 and prove that they are canonical for certain algebraic frame properties, which generalize seriality, reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity and euclideanness. Our results are quite general as they hold for any modal language built on a complete Heyting algebra. (shrink)

In the traditional form of canonical quantization, certain field components (not having “conjugate” momenta) must be regarded as noncanonical. This long-known distinction enters modern gauge theories, when they are canonically quantized as by Kugo and Ojima. We avoid that peculiarity by not using any conjugate “momenta” at all. In our formulation, canonical quantization can be related to Feynman's path integral.

Following Dirac's generalized canonical formalism, we develop a quantization scheme for theN-dimensional system described by the Lagrangian $L_0 (\dot y,y) = \frac{1}{2}h_{ij} (y)\dot y^i \dot y^j + b_i (y)\dot y^i - w(y)$ which is supposed to be invariant under the gauge transformation $y^i \to y\prime ^i = y^i + (\rho ^i _\alpha + \sigma ^i _{\alpha j} \dot y^j )\delta \Lambda ^\alpha + \tau ^i _\alpha \delta \dot \Lambda ^\alpha$ . The gauge invariance necessarily implies that the Lagrangian is (...) singular. The identities imposed by the gauge invariance are enumerated and reduced to simpler forms. There are primary and secondary constraints, both of which are of first class. The reduced identities are solved explicitly for the case where the secondary constraints constitute the generators of the groupSO(M), and thus an explicit expression for the manifestly gauge-invariant Lagrangian is obtained. By fixing the gauge appropriately, the unphysical variables are eliminated and a quantization is achieved using only physical variables. Our formulation is covariant under an arbitrary point transformation of physical variables. The problem of formulating a quantum action principle is also commented on briefly. (shrink)

This paper looks at the concept of neighborhood canonicity introduced by BRIAN CHELLAS [2]. We follow the lead of the author's paper [9] where it was shown that every non-iterative logic is neighborhood canonical and here we will show that all logics whose axioms have a simple syntactic form-no intensional operator is in boolean combination with a propositional letter-and which have the finite model property are neighborhood canonical. One consequence of this is that KMcK, the McKinsey logic, (...) is neighborhood canonical, an interesting counterpoint to the results of ROBERT GOLDBLATT and XIAOPING WANG who showed, respectively, that KMcK is not relational canonical [5] and that KMcK is not relationally strongly complete [11]. (shrink)

A major literary and theological force was at work in shaping the present form of the Hebrew Bible by which prophetic oracles directed to one generation were fashioned in Sacred Scripture by a canonical process to be used by another generation.

Among the processes of canon-formation is the habit of coupling writers; and among the most powerful of couples in the traditional English literary canon is Spenser-and-Milton. Much of my own professional life has probably been determined by my first teaching assignment of 1963, which included “Spenser-and-Milton,” in those days at Toronto a famous cornerstone course carrying the tamp of the stamp of the formidable Renaissance scholar A. S. P. Woodhouse, known affectionately if disrespectfully to his students as Professor Nature-and-Grace. For (...) several years I labored mightily, though neither naturally nor, I suspect, gracefully, on Spenser-and-Milton, sensing all the time that the connections I made, the doctrines I was conveying, lacked persuasion; and no doubt the seed of this essay was sown in those days, although its angle of sight was not then available, obscured on all sides by institutional pillars.When we couple writers we usually imply a criterion of fit or at least explicable mating. While there is nothing to prohibit a merely comparativist curiosity, or coupling in the service of some other agenda, we presumably give greater authority to relationships that imply causality, even, or especially, if causality is defined as the influence of the one writer on the other. Most of such relationships are unidirectional, from the earlier to the later dead, and a plausible coupling requires either the successor’s own testimony that the influence-relation existed, or other evidence that the influence-relation was strong enough to be formative; or, preferably, both. Annabel Patterson, professor of literature and English at Duke University, is the author of Hermogenes and the Renaissance , Marvell and the Civic Crown , Censorship and Interpretation , Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry , and Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of the application of canon law to the administration of Catholic heahh care in the United States. It is divided into four sections. The first section provides a context for the role of canon law in the life of the Church. The second section considers the fundamental question of juridic personality in the Church. The third section delineates the predominant forms of organization that have hitherto been the main Church related institutions providing health care. The (...) fourth section considers the validity of the McGrath "independence" thesis conceming the continuing applicability of canon law to incorporated health care structures under U.S. civil law. The paper concludes with some practical considerations conceming the relationship between canon law and corporate structures. (shrink)

We show that any (atomic) excellent class K can be expanded with hyperimaginaries to form an (atomic) excellent class Keq which has canonical bases. When K is, in addition, of finite U-rank, then Keq is also simple and has a full canonical bases theorem. This positive situation contrasts starkly with homogeneous model theory for example, where the eq-expansion may fail to be homogeneous. However, this paper shows that expanding an ω-stable, homogeneous class K gives rise to an (...) excellent class, which is simple if K is of finite U-rank. (shrink)

We start by studying the relationship between two invariants isolated by Shelah, the sets of good and approachable points. As part of our study of these invariants, we prove a form of “singular cardinal compactness” for Jensen's square principle. We then study the relationship between internally approachable and tight structures, which parallels to a certain extent the relationship between good and approachable points. In particular we characterise the tight structures in terms of PCF theory and use our characterisation to (...) prove some covering results for tight structures, along with some results on tightness and stationary reflection. Finally, we prove some absoluteness theorems in PCF theory, deduce a covering theorem, and apply that theorem to the study of precipitous ideals. (shrink)

This text is focused on the question of what we should teach in high school philosophy and the relationship of this teaching to recognizing oneself as a good philosophy teacher. We hold that these points are connected to the idea of “canon” and “history of philosophy” that we gained with and despite Ricœur himself. This paper advances a critical view of contemporary practices in philosophy teaching in Colombia through Ricœur’s thought. In the first part, we follow Ricœur’s considerations about the (...) history of philosophy and its connections to the very practice of thinking. In the second part, we concentrate on the question of the canon. At the end of each section, we will give some pedagogical stitches to interweave Ricœur’s philosophical legacy with the didactics and theory of the curriculum, thus forming a tripod that should be part of the didactics of philosophy as an independent discipline. (shrink)

[E.H. Gombrich wrote on May 13, 1975:] . . . I recently was invited to talk about "Art" at the Institution for Education of our University. There was a well-intentioned teacher there who put forward the view that we had no right whatever to influence the likes and dislikes of our pupils because every generation had a different outlook and we could not possibly tell what theirs would be. It is the same extreme relativism, which has invaded our art schools (...) and resulted in the doctrine that art could not possibly be taught because only what has been done already can be taught, and since art is creativity it is not possible to teach it. Q.E.D.—I recently asked my history finalists what "Quod erat demonstrandum" means and they did not know. . . . [Quentin Bell responded on May 15, 1975:] . . . Your teacher at the Institute, is he really a relativist? Isn't he a kind of religious zealot? I used to teach school children. With me there was a much better teacher . One day she came into the room where I had been teaching and found a series of the most surprising and beautiful water colours. "What are these?" said she. I explained that they were copies of Raphael made by eleven and twelve year old children. I would have gone on to explain how interested I was by their resemblance, not to Raphael but rather to Simone Martini, for they had all the shapes beautifully right but none of the internal drawing or the sentiment, but I was checked by her look of horror. "You've made them copy from Raphael?" she said. Her expression was exactly that of someone who had been casually informed that that I had committed a series of indecent assaults upon the brats. And in fact in subsequent conversation it appeared that this was very nearly what she did feel. For her, what she called "self expression" was as precious as virginity. E.H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His books include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic Images, The Heritage of Apelles, and In Search of Cultural History. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Notes and Exchanges" ,"Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" , and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" . Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" , "Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

Thus it would not be the content or meaning of a written Torah that Jeremiah would attack; rather it would be the Deuteronomic “claim to final and exclusive authority by means of writing” . Jeremiah’s problem is political rather than theological. He knows that writing is more powerful than prophecy and that he will not be able to withstand it—and he knows that the Deuteronomists know no less. As Blenkinsopp says, “Deuteronomy produced a situation in which prophecy could not continue (...) to exist without undergoing profound transformations” —that is, without ceasing to be “free prophecy,” or prophecy unbound by any text, including its own. “It might be considered misleading or flippant to say that for [Deuteronomy], as for rabbinic orthodoxy, the only good prophet is a dead prophet. But in point of fact the Deuteronomic scribes, despite their evident debt to and respect for the prophets, contributed decisively to the eclipse of the kind of historically oriented prophecy represented by Jeremiah and the emergence in due course of quite different forms of scribal prophecy” .It is at this point that we reach a sort of outer limit of biblical criticism—a threshold that scholars, with their foundations in literary criticism, their analytical attitude toward texts, and their theological concerns, are not inclined to cross. In any case, it is no accident that the political meaning of the conflict of prophecy and canon has received its most serious attention not from a biblical scholar but from a radical historian, Ellis Rivkin. In The Shaping of Jewish History, a brilliant and tendentious book, Rivkin proposes to treat the question of canon-formation and the promulgation of canonical texts of the Scriptures, not according to literary criteria but according to power criteria. For Rivkin, the production of the Hebrew Scriptures “was not primarily the work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling to gain power.”23 23. Ellis Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New Interpretation , p. 30; further references to this work will be included in the text. Gerald R. Bruns is professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History . The present essay is from a work in progress, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern. (shrink)

In the Medieval period, Roman law and canon law formed ius commune or the common European law. The similarity between Roman and canon law was that they used the same methods and the difference was that they relied on different authoritative texts. In their works canonists and civilists combined the ancient Greek achievements in philosophy with the Roman achievements in the field of law. Canonists were the first who carried out research on the distinctions between various legal sources and systematized (...) them according to a hierarchical order. The Medieval civilists sought solutions in canon law for a large number of problems that Justinian’s Codification did not hinge on or did it only superficially. Solutions offered by canon law were accepted not only in the civil law of Continental Europe, but also in the English law. (shrink)

The analysis of interacting relativistic many-particle systems provides a theoretical basis for further work in many diverse fields of physics. After a discussion of the nonrelativisticN-particle systems we describe two approaches for obtaining the canonical equations of the corresponding relativistic forms. A further aspect of our approach is the consideration of the constants of the motion.

This paper obtains the weak completeness and decidability results for standard systems of modal logic using models built from formulas themselves. This line of work began with Fine (Notre Dame J. Form. Log. 16:229-237, 1975). There are two ways in which our work advances on that paper: First, the definition of our models is mainly based on the relation Kozen and Parikh used in their proof of the completeness of PDL, see (Theor. Comp. Sci. 113-118, 1981). The point is (...) to develop a general model-construction method based on this definition. We do this and thereby obtain the completeness of most of the standard modal systems, and in addition apply the method to some other systems of interest. None of the results use filtration, but in our final section we explore the connection. (shrink)

Generalizing model companions from model theory we define companions of pieces of canonical partitions of Polish G-spaces. This unifies several constructions from logic. The central problem of the paper is the existence of companions which form a G-orbit which is a Gδ-set. We describe companions of some typical G-spaces.

In forming the canon, the church acknowledged and established the Bible as the measure or standard of inspiration in the church, not as the totality of it. What concurs with canon is of like inspiration ; what does not is not of God.

The famous ethological maxim known as “Morgan’s Canon” continues to be the subject of interpretive controversy. I reconsider Morgan’s canon in light of two questions: First, what did Morgan intend? Second, is this, or perhaps some re-interpretation of the canon, useful within cognitive ethology? As for the first issue, Morgan’s distinction between higher and lower faculties is suggestive of an early supervenience concept. As for the second, both the canon in its original form, and various recent re-readings, offer nothing (...) useful to cognitive ethology. (shrink)

In Abrahamic theism scripture is essential to belief-forming, yet scripture as an epistemic evidence source is plagued with difficulties. In the following article, I argue for a specific reductionist model of scriptural proposition justification utilising an account of scripture as testimony. I contend that for an individual to be justified in a belief sourced from a scriptural proposition, she must appeal to external evidence to “prop up her epistemic bar.” Accordingly, I consider some potential “epistemic bar-proppers.”.

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half-century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will (...) the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.1 (2002) 119-122 [Access article in PDF] Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink, eds. Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society. Center for Hellenic Studies Colloquia 4. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. vi + 346 pp. Cloth, $50. The present collection of essays, which originated as a colloquium at the Center for Hellenic Studies, starts, in the words of editor and organizer Dirk Obbink, from (...) the premise that "genre is a conceptual orienting device that suggests to the hearer the sort of receptorial conditions in which a fictive discourse might have been delivered." Obbink goes on to note that, as the discussion at the colloquium developed, "a more text-based conception of authorial performance" began to emerge (6). This evolution in turn parallels the movement in the volume from an initial discussion of archaic and classical Greek genres to those of Hellenistic poetry and its Roman imitators. One can only applaud this attempt to provide a more sophisticated framework for the reading and reception of ancient literature. As befits the stature of the sponsoring institution and of the many distinguished participants, all the contributions are of an unquestionable competence. In the end, however, it is unclear that we have achieved a more complex, refined, or problematized concept of genre than that with which we began. Indeed, with a few exceptions, most of the modern debates about the concept of genre are either ignored or cited in passing rather than directly engaged. Nonetheless, there are a number of interesting and important individual papers in this volume and only a few that disappoint.Among the most praiseworthy is Eric Csapo's "From Aristophanes to Menander? Genre Transformation in Greek Comedy." Csapo takes dead aim at the traditional narrative of the evolution from a politically engaged Old Comedy of ribald invective to an apolitical plot-centered New Comedy typified by Menander and his Roman epigones. Csapo's argument is that this narrative was manufactured, not through the accidents of preservation, but through a deliberate selection and canonization of texts by early Peripatetic critics and scholars. When we characterize Old Comedy as being typified by Aristophanes' carnivalesque assaults on the Athenian political establishment and then point to his plays as proof, we are not only engaging in circular reasoning, we are also treading a path that has been deliberately and tendentiously drawn for us. Thus, while the traditional narrative depicts a linear evolution from iambic to Old Comedy to New Comedy, which is portrayed as a movement from the personal and the topical to the universal and the apolitical, Aristotle himself, as Csapo notes (117), admits that Crates, Aristophanes' predecessor, abandoned the iambic and began to compose generalizing plots (Po. 1449b7-8). In short, plots of the kind deemed [End Page 119] typical of New Comedy are to be found at the very beginning of the comic form. By the same token, we have evidence of political comedy surviving well past Aristophanes' supposed invention of the Middle Comic style in the Plutus. Indeed, the last example of an Athenian comedy of political invective is Demetrius' Areopagite, dating from circa 294 B.C.E.Csapo's argument, of course, is not a simpleminded refusal to acknowledge change but rather an attempt to rethink the historical evolution of the comic genre outside the bounds of a narrow, teleological narrative. Genres are always complex negotiations between competing conceptions of the same form by different producers and consumers. At various times, for various intrinsic and extrinsic reasons, different versions of the same form will be ascendant or fading into eclipse. But it is never a question of an essence that either unfolds its fullness over time or declines from a single ideal instantiation.Less revolutionary but equally persuasive is Joseph W. Day's "Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual." Day examines the relation between dedicatory epigrams on cult statues and their ritual contexts by arguing that the dedicatory genre is essentially performative rather than constative. These epigrams do their social work by activating a performative context in the mind of the reader... (shrink)

The Introductory chapter explains the purpose of the book. To this aim, the chapter contains four subsections: (1)Bring the Past Into the Present, (2)Multiculturalism and Liberal Feminism: Is the Rift Between Them Necessary?, (3)Development of Gender Discourse in Chinese Culture and Thought, (4)Purpose of This Volume and Its Four Main Parts, and (5) What's Next? A Way Forward. Excerpt: "Chinese philosophy, broadly construed, in its varied roots and forms has approximately three thousand years of history, and it continues to exert (...) immense influence on the lives of Chinese people as well as on the world community. Nonetheless, if traditions are not simply to remain as antiquated ideas, they must be able to converse with contemporary readers and address their deepest concerns and longings (Pang-White, 2009b, 2009c, 2011). Premised on the undeniable facts that (1) all persons are embodied and cultural beings and that (2) traditions constitute an essential element of individual identity, it would be a mistake to attempt to eradicate traditions altogether, as certain types of liberal feminists have recommended. Instead, it would be more meaningful to ask: Can we, and how do we, re-read, re-imagine, and reconstruct canonical texts so as to find their new significance in the contemporary world? It is generally agreed that Chinese traditions have had a troubled history in dealing with gender relations—well-known examples include concubinage, foot binding,female infanticide, and so on. For various reasons, Chinese traditions and societies have generally been less enthusiastic in confronting, dialoguing about, and resolving problems of gender disparity. Even though gender studies and feminist theories have populated academic discourse in the West since the 1960s, these topics remain relatively marginalized, often as an afterthought, in Chinese philosophical and cultural discourse. Furthermore, as the growing body of research and our deepened knowledge informs and expands our conception of gender, informed persons must ask themselves how Chinese philosophical traditions would and should engage the LGBT community and their concerns. Gender studies is not and should not be perceived simply as a subject in vogue. Rather, for humanity to flourish in this incredibly interdependent network of reality, it is imperative that we have a better understanding of all members of the human community so as to relate to one another in more inclusive, caring, and just ways. Surely, many of our contemporary concerns and vocabularies are anachronistic in the historical settings of classical texts. However, even within the framework of Western traditions, phrases such as “feminism,” “gender,” and “homosexual” were not part of the existing apparatus of vocabulary until the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Jenainati and Groves, 2010). Moreover, with the advancement of . . . ". (shrink)

In [E. Hrushovski, D. Palacín and A. Pillay, On the canonical base property, Selecta Math. (N.S.) 19(4) (2013) 865–877], Hrushovski and the authors proved, in a certain finite rank environment, that rigidity of definable Galois groups implies that [Formula: see text] has the canonical base property in a strong form; “internality to” being replaced by “algebraicity in”. In the current paper, we give a reasonably robust definition of the “strong canonical base property” in a rather more (...) general finite rank context than [E. Hrushovski, D. Palacín and A. Pillay, On the canonical base property, Selecta Math. (N.S.) 19(4) (2013) 865–877], and prove its equivalence with rigidity of the relevant definable Galois groups. The new direction is an elaboration on the old result that [Formula: see text]-based groups are rigid. (shrink)

An (n, k)-ary quantifier is a generalized logical connective, binding k variables and connecting n formulas. Canonical systems with (n, k)-ary quantifiers form a natural class of Gentzen-type systems which in addition to the standard axioms and structural rules have only logical rules in which exactly one occurrence of a quantifier is introduced. The semantics for these systems is provided using two-valued non-deterministic matrices, a generalization of the classical matrix. In this paper we use a constructive syntactic criterion (...) of coherence to characterize strong cutelimination in such systems. We show that the following properties of a canonical system G with arbitrary (n, k)-ary quantifiers are equivalent: (i) G is coherent, (ii) G admits strong cut-elimination, and (iii) G has a strongly characteristic two-valued generalized non-deterministic matrix. (shrink)

In a recent publication, Wikramanayake and colleagues have implicated the canonical Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway as a mediator of axial polarity and germ-layer specification in embryos of the cnidarian Nematostella.1 In this anthozoan, β-catenin is localized in nuclei of blastomeres in one region of the 16- to 32-cell embryo whose descendants subsequently form the entoderm of the embryo. They claim that the pattern of nuclear localization is significant for two reasons: (1) when nuclear localization of β-catenin was inhibited, gastrulation (...) does not occur, and (2) when localization of β-catenin took place in all cells of the pregastrula embryo, the number of entodermal cells increases. Since the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway also plays a role in establishing axial polarity and specifying endoderm and mesoderm in a number of bilaterians,2-6 Wikramanayake et al. imply that this developmental mechanism is an evolutionary inheritance from a radially symmetrical ancestor. Some of the gaps in the current evidence, which must be filled to evaluate their interpretation, are discussed. BioEssays 26:474–478, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The procedures of canonical quantization of the gravitational field apparently lead to entities for which any interpretation in terms of spatio-temporal localization or spatio-temporal extension seems difficult. This fact is the main ground for the suggestion that can often be found in the physics literature on canonical quantum gravity according to which spacetime may not be fundamental in some sense. This paper aims to investigate this radical suggestion from an ontologically serious point of view in the cases of (...) two standard forms of canonical quantum gravity, quantum geometrodynamics and loop quantum gravity. We start by discussing the physical features of the quantum wave functional of quantum geometrodynamics and of the spin networks of loop quantum gravity that motivate the view according to which spacetime is not fundamental. We then point out that, by contrast, for any known ontologically serious understanding of quantum entanglement, the commitment to spacetime seems indispensable. Against this background, we then critically discuss the idea that spacetime may emerge from more fundamental entities. As a consequence, we finally suggest that the emergence of classical spacetime in canonical quantum gravity faces a dilemma: either spacetime ontologically emerges from more fundamental non-spatio-temporal entities or it already belongs to the fundamental quantum gravitational level and the emergence of the classical picture is merely a matter of levels of description. On the first horn of the dilemma, it is unclear how to make sense of concrete physical entities that are not in spacetime and of the notion of ontological emergence that is involved. The second horn runs into the difficulties raised by the physics of canonical quantum gravity. (shrink)

Nostalgia is only the beginning of a recognizably ideological discourse. The way through to the ideological sense of Tennyson’s “failure,” beneath the phenomenal glow of Eliot’s nostalgia, lies in the entanglement of minority in this complex of meanings, the determination that Tennyson is properly placed when seen as a “minor Virgil.” The diffusion of a major talent in minor works suggests that what Tennyson or Eliot might have been was another Virgil, and for Eliot that means simply a “classic.” In (...) “What Is a Classic?,” we are told that English literature has no classic poet who would exalt, as Virgil or Dante did, the truths of his age.14 The absence of a modern classic reflects not an individual failure but rather the absence of a universal truth, which has been hidden in the minor works. Here is the reason both for the ambivalence Eliot expresses about the fact of minority and for the peculiar, and certainly not necessary, association of poetic minority with a marginal elite.15It is the latter point to which I now want to turn. If it has been shown that the canon Eliot legislated in his early career was not merely an arbitrary set of aesthetic preferences, we have not yet fully evinced the ideological sense of Eliot’s canonical principle. We have only determined that one way to reconstruct Eliot’s canon would be to list those “minor” poets. But the essential quality of their minority, what drives them away from the “mainstream” of English literature, is what Eliot approved as their fidelity to “tradition.” Such a concept of tradition must be exclusive as well as revisionary, because it implies that the major poets of English literary history cannot also be “traditional.” Eliot finally understood that his canonical principle was the literary reflection of a more fundamental evaluative norm, extrinsic to literature, which he identified as “orthodoxy.” So he tells us in After Strange Gods that he is rewriting “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by substituting “orthodoxy” for “tradition,” and this is unquestionably an ideological correction.16 In the same way, the canon of minor writers is established retrospectively as determined by the rule of orthodoxy. Neither they nor the young Eliot need be orthodox Christians for this rule to have enabled their productions. It is precisely Eliot’s meaning that these elite, like the “elect” before them, may come at some point to a conviction of their election, yet they were always the elect. In this sense, Eliot’s conversion to Christianity was the recognition that he already belonged to a marginal elite, whose membership had been polemically foreshadowed by the construction of an alternative canon. 14. The whole argument of “What Is a Classic?” is interesting in this respect. Eliot’s standard of classical value is “universality,” which is opposed to the “provincial.” The closest English literature comes to a classical age is in the eighteenth century, and this too fails because its “restriction of religious sensibility itself produces a kind of provinciality: the provinciality which indicates the disintegration of Christendom, the decay of a common belief and a common culture”.15. But at least a hint about how to make this connection is given in Eliot’s “The Classics and the Man of Letters,” To Criticize the Critic : “The continuity of literature is essential to its greatness; it is very largely the function of secondary writers to preserve this continuity, and to provide a body of writings which is not necessarily read by posterity, which plays a great part in forming the link between those writers who continue to be read”.16. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, p. 22. John Guillory, assistant professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History. He is currently working on a study of canon-formation. (shrink)

This paper argues that the existence of a canon of established and privileged texts in the primary literacy curriculum in England can be traced historically and has informed current national policy and practice. This canonisation of a particular set of literature has served to marginalise popular cultural and media texts, often the preferred texts of children in contemporary society. The paper examines the historical development of an established, hegemonic body of texts and critically analyses current national curricula frameworks for primary (...) literacy in order to determine the way in which reading material is framed. It is argued that current national policy enshrines particular textual traditions at the expense of more popular forms of material and that this has major implications for the relevance of the future primary literacy curriculum. (shrink)

Problems related to the operator form of the generalized canonical momenta in quantum mechanics are resolved by use of the general quantum mechanical canonical point transformation method. This method can be applied to any general canonical point transformation irrespective of the relationship between the domains of the original and transformed variables. The differential representation of the original canonical momenta pi in the original coordinate space is −i $\begin{array}{*{20}c} / \\ h \\ \end{array}$ ∂/∂x i and (...) of the transformed canonical momentap i ′ in the transformed coordinate space is −i $\begin{array}{*{20}c} / \\ h \\ \end{array}$ ∂/∂x i ′. Relationships are derived between the eigenvalues of the original and transformed momenta in either space. The ordering problem for general point transformations is discussed and is shown to be solved. As an example of the generality of the method, it is demonstrated on the point transformation in three dimensions from Cartesian rectilinear to spherical rectilinear coordinates. (shrink)