In a first part, the contribution goes through different competing and/or complementary concepts of ontography as they appear in phenomenology, object-oriented ontology, science and technology studies, and semiotics. From this comparative examination, the text develops a notion of ontography in contrast to that of ontology. It highlights the ontography of temporal objects and adds a specific media-philosophical approach to it by concentrating on the operations and tools of ontographical writing, registering or drawing being in time. In a second part, ontography (...) is analysed as a techno-aesthetic operation on television, namely as the core of the slow motion replay. Four spectacular examples of instant replay are taken from the history of television that make the writing of an extended and malleable presence through television visible. From that, the contribution develops a hypothesis about the ontographical functioning of the medium of television and of its approach to the world. (shrink)

Resumen El artículo problematiza el concepto de instante en la obra temprana de M. Heidegger, particularmente Ser y tiempo. La problematización se propone, en primer lugar, mostrar en qué medida no es el instante como mirada quien abre la situación, sino la situación, como espacio de concernencia, quien posibilita el instante. En segundo, elucida el instante como un fenómeno responsivo y lo vincula a un acontecimiento repentino, decisivo y alterador que configura la situación a la que (...) responde. En tercero, muestra cómo el instante repercute en la eclosión de la situación. Finalmente, determina el carácter esencialmente espacio-temporal del fenómeno. (shrink)

Este artigo discute a experiência do Instante (Augenblick) à luz da ontologia da subjetividade desenvolvida por Kierkegaard, Nietzsche e Heidegger. O trabalho propõe que o Instante constitui uma experiência concreta de ruptura que tem como fundo e correlato a mediania pública niveladora. No Instante, instala-se a angústia que revela o domínio do público sobre a subjetividade (como publicidade, niilismo e domínio técnico). Ao mesmo tempo, revela-se a possibilidade de recuperação do ser si mesmo (Selbst) mais próprio na (...) singularidade. Conversão, superação, apropriação ou fuga para a impessoalidade constituem possibilidades abertas no Instante. Nesse horizonte, o artigo oferece elementos para a compreensão da experiência que se nomeia com a noção de Instante e sua pertinência para pensar uma ética da singularidade. (shrink)

When, in Plato’s Parmenides 155e4–157b5, Parmenides refers to the instant (ἐξαίφνης), he is alluding to a paradox of Zeno, and not to an argument of Plato. Thus, in the second part of the Parmenides, the speaker is a fair representation of the historical Parmenides, and not a figment of Plato’s imagination.

Since antiquity, philosophers have investigated how change works. If a thing moves from one state to another, when exactly does it start to be in its new state, and when does it cease to be in its former one? In the late Middle Ages, the "problem of the instant of change" was subject to considerable debate and gave rise to sophisticated theories; it became popular and controversial again in the second half of the twentieth century. The studies collected here constitute (...) the first attempt at tackling the different aspects of an issue that, until now have been the object of seminal but isolated forays. They do so in through a historical perspective, offering both the medieval and the contemporary viewpoints. (shrink)

Para la estética, la creatividad es la emergencia del instante que la vuelve irrepetible o un transitar pendular que la hace resurgir como reminiscencia cegada por un ocaso repetitivo. Haciendo coincidir proceso y teleología, Peirce aglutina estas dos dimensiones, sin atisbar realmente un atisbo de humanidad para disfrutar de lo ínfimo. De ahí que propongamos un momento oportuno que nos dirija hacia una temporalidad más humana.

Comme les peintres et poètes marquants de ce siècle, Debussy et Webern ont tourné l'un et l'autre la page de « l'âge de la représentation » inauguré au début du XVIe siècle, pour tracer le chemin des formes ouvertes. Libérée de toute soumission à quelque structure préétablie, l'œuvre vient au jour de la forme selon un processus d'engendrement qui marque tous ses paramètres au sceau de la mobilité. Cependant, loin de se laisser enfermer dans un univers auto-référentiel, les musiques de (...) Debussy et de Webern révèlent un rapport fondateur à la nature que l'on peut comprendre comme une quête de « l'origine ». Une interrogation sur l'instant fondateur du rythme met à jour des différences stylistiques notables – instant de l'effacement chez le premier, instant du rayonnement chez le second – et conduit à parler de leur musique comme d'une « voie négative » où l'on discerne les signes d'une authentique aventure spirituelle.Like the outstanding painters and poets of this century, Debussy and Webern both turned the page of the « age of representation » inaugurated at the beginning of the 16th century, in order to map out a path of open forms. Freed from all submission to any pre-established structure, the work was born of the form according to a process of creation that marks all its parameters with the seal of mobility. Far from falling into a self-referential world, Debussy's music and Webern’s reveal a basic relationship with nature that can be understood as a quest for « origin ». An examination of the founding moment of rhythm manifests notable stylistic differences – moment of effacement for the former, moment of rayonnement for the latter – and leads us to think of their music as a « negative way », where we discern the signs of an authentic spiritual adventure. (shrink)

Lors d’un cours du semestre d’hiver 1929/30, Heidegger affirme de « l’instant », tel que le pense Kierkegaard, et tout en en assumant à son tour le concept, qu’il ouvre « la possibilité d’une époque complètement nouvelle de la philosophie ». Quelques années plus tard, les Contributions à la philosophie accomplissent toutefois elles-mêmes l’entrée de la pensée heideggérienne dans une dimension impensée de toute l’histoire de l’ontologie, celle de l’ Ereignis, de l’événement d’appropriation depuis lequel l’unité de l’être et du (...) temps se laisse atteindre. Or, ce manuscrit fait justement de l’instant, der Augenblick, un trait libérant un regard pour et dans l’ Ereignis. Faut-il en conclure que la nouveauté de l’instant kierkegaardien mène jusqu’à cette extrémité? Et s’il est vrai que Kierkegaard est un auteur chrétien, quel rapport la pensée de l’ Ereignis entretient-elle alors avec le christianisme? Pour répondre à ces questions, les pages qui suivent prennent le concept d’instant pour fil directeur d’une lecture croisée des œuvres de Heidegger et de Kierkegaard. (shrink)

En el marco del juego hipotético del diálogo El Parménides, donde se examinan las posibilidades de lo Uno y lo Múltiple en relación con su participación en el ser, surge, como condición de dicha participación en tiempos diferentes, la existencia del instante. Este elemento irrumpe fraccionando la continuidad de la magnitud del movimiento, introduciendo así el "cambio" como el concepto que permite eludir la contradicción en que podría caer el Uno al participar y no participar simultáneamente. Se exponen, de (...) este modo, las circunstancias de la aparición tematizada del instante en el diálogo, y su rasgo intemporal como característica sobresaliente. (shrink)

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns. The book consists of _The Instant of My Death,_ a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and (...) an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness. Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II. (shrink)

Plato's view on time, a key aspect of his doctrine of forms, is influenced by his reception of Parmenides, but the way in which Plato takes up and modifies Parmenides' view is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. In this article, the author analyzes Plato's revision of Parmenidean time by exploring four temporalities: the eternal present, timeless eternity, the enduring present, and the instant between time and eternity. Through this examination, she uncovers the common origin of both the eternal present (...) of Parmenides' fragment B8 and the flowing present of the phenomenal realm in the instant (ἐξαίφνης) in Plato's Parmenides. This perspective on time offers a promising solution to Plato's problem of participation, bridging the gap between the eternal being of the form and the being in time of the particulars. (shrink)

This anthology concerns limit-decision problems, chiefly as treated in the fourteenth-century Latin West. A central problem taken up concerns the instant of change: in a change from ø to not-ø such that before instant t there is ø and after t not-ø, at t is there ø, or not-ø, or neither, or both? For medieval thinkers, the answer often depended on what kind of item was at issue. They standardly distinguished permanent items, the whole of which exists simultaneously, from successive (...) items, whose parts are non-simultaneous, and gave different type or type answers in the two cases.The papers in... (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that ‘one-instant worlds’—worlds that contain a single instant—fail to contain time. We experimentally investigate whether these worlds satisfy the folk concept of time. We found that ~50% of participants hold that there is time in such worlds. We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities. First, the population disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, with there being a substantial sub-population for whom the presence of neither an (...) A-, B-, nor C-series, is necessary for time, and hence those folk have a radically more minimal concept of time than has been attributed to them by philosophers. Or, second, the population do not disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, but disagree about what it takes for a world to fail to contain even a C-series. (shrink)

Se, para Gaston Bachelard, a realidade do tempo se reduz ao instante presente, circundado por dois nadas, para Henri Bergson, que se encontra em uma posição diametralmente oposta à de Bachelard, o tempo é um contínuo, uma duração ininterrupta. Mais do que isso, para Bergson, a única dimensão real do tempo é o passado, que se prolonga no presente e abre as portas para o futuro, ou seja, para o novo, para a novidade. Pois bem, tomando por base a (...) querela que se estabeleceu entre esses dois pensadores acerca do tempo, o presente artigo pretende mostrar como é possível dissolver o paradoxo do tempo a partir do aprofundamento de sua relação com a matéria. Relação essa que sempre foi feita na história da filosofia, e mesmo na ciência, mas nunca por se levar em conta que o enigma do tempo depende também da decifração do que é a própria matéria, sempre considerada algo de menor valor por uma metafísica dualista que ainda domina subterraneamente o pensamento. (shrink)

This paper will argue that the puzzles about instantaneous velocity, and rates of change more generally, are the result of a failure to recognize an ambiguity in the concept of an instant, and therefore of an instantaneous state. We will conclude that there are two distinct conceptions of a temporal instant: (i) instants conceived as fundamentally distinct zero-duration temporal atoms and (ii) instants conceived as the boundary of, or between,temporally extended durations. Since the concept of classical instantaneous velocity is well- (...) defined only on the second conception of instants, we will conclude that this distinction allows us to avoid the above dilemma. If instantaneous velocity is well-defined then the states of a system at various instants are not logically distinct and thus we cannot generate Zeno’s paradox. However, if we assume that the instants are metaphysically distinct, then instantaneous velocity is not well-defined and thus the second horn of the dilemma about the causal-explanatory role of instantaneous velocity cannot be generated. (shrink)

In this article we study the work and communication practices of two highly connected organizations, the members of which have all access to instant messaging on a professional basis. We document the development of a communicational genre, that of ‘quick questions’, and analyze the sequence organization of such IM conversation threads. We show how ‘quick questions’ enable the collaborative accomplishment of complex, knowledge-intensive tasks by recruiting colleagues constituted as experts capable of quickly answering information requests related to ongoing tasks. ‘Quick (...) questions’ articulate communicative practices, ‘strong’ distribution of tasks and ‘organizing’ in highly connected organizations. We argue that they enact a distinctive cognitive and moral economy based on minimal forms of interaction and exchanges, constituting a more general phenomenon. (shrink)

There is a growing need to identify what really can converge classroom learning to the real-life practising of ethical principles. We examine if the effectiveness of ethics education can be improved through meditation-based mindfulness intervention. Our baseline experiment is a procedurally modified version of the anagram exercise (Ruedy and Schweitzer 2010) for measuring unethical behaviour. We introduce a brief meditation intervention to induce instant mindfulness. Our findings indicate substantive evidence confirming the positive effect of the state of mindfulness on ethical (...) behaviour. Subjects in the meditation group engage in more low-level cheating compared to the control group who cheated more severely. Gender and academic grade do not influence ethical behaviour. Mindfulness fosters composure, mental poise, and a conducive environment for upholding ethical values, as indicated by a lower incidence of cheating in our study. We propose to promote a learning environment with mindfulness intervention in educational programmes. (shrink)

NOTE Special Title: PAPERBACK OUT OF PRINT 1/22/99 This book is about the relationship between blackness, ethnicity, and speed. It is an in-depth ethnographic and anthropological study of a population of collegiate sprinters, constructed upon a formal model of ethnic and cultural identity which sees social interaction, expressed in the order and arrangement of social identities, as a means of establishing social networks through universal or cognitive rules.

ObjectiveTo investigate the instant impact of hemodialysis on the cerebral morphological measurements of patients with end-stage renal disease.Materials and methodsTwenty-five patients undergoing maintenance HD and twenty-eight age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy control were included. The HD group and HC group had 3D high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging scans twice and once, respectively. Both groups underwent neuropsychologic tests. The morphological measurements of structural MRI were measured using CAT12 and these measures were compared among three groups. The relationship between morphological measures and (...) clinical parameters and neuropsychological tests were investigated through multiple regression analysis.ResultsCompared to the HC group, the cortical thickness before HD significantly decreased in the bilateral temporal lobe and significantly decreased in the left superior temporal gyrus after HD. The cortical thickness significantly increased in the bilateral temporal lobe, frontal lobe and occipital lobe after HD compared to before HD. The sulcus depth in the bilateral insula, frontal lobe, and parietal lobe after HD significantly increased compared to before HD. No significant differences in sulcus depth between HD and HC were detected. After HD, the cortical thickness of the right parsopercularis was positively correlated with the number connection test-A. Cortical thickness in multiple regions were positively correlated with blood flow velocity and cortical thickness in the left parahippocampal gyrus was negatively correlated with ultrafiltration volume. Patients showed better performance in the digit symbol test and line tracing test after HD compared to before HD, but there were no significant differences in the comparison of neuropsychologic tests between patients and HC.ConclusionThe instant morphological changes were captured during a single hemodialysis in HD patients. There was an association between these instant changes in the brain and clinical parameters and neuropsychologic tests. This work implied the instant impact of a single hemodialysis impact on the brain in HD patients. (shrink)

In Kierkegaard’s Instant, David J. Kangas reads Kierkegaard to reveal his radical thinking about temporality. For Kierkegaard, the instant of becoming, in which everything changes in the blink of an eye, eludes recollection and anticipation. It constitutes a beginning always already at work. As Kangas shows, Kierkegaard’s retrieval of the sudden quality of temporality allows him to stage a deep critique of the idealist projects of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. By linking Kierkegaard’s thought to the tradition of Meister Eckhart, Kangas (...) formulates the central problem of these early texts and puts them into contemporary light—can thinking hold itself open to the challenges of temporality? (shrink)

There is a mystery, present from conception, namely, how the human person, who transcends the individual elements of sperm and ovum, can nevertheless come to exist at the first instant of the sperm’s interaction with the ovum, an event marked by the formation of an “embryonic skin,” or wall. In this essay, the author holds that the full complexity of the human person implies such a profound unity-in-diversity of human being that we must, in the end, let the dialogue between (...) reason and revelation lead us to conclude that the first instant of embryonic life is the first instant that the person comes to exist: that the first sign of embryonic life is a “natural sacrament” of the internal act of God which brings the person to exist, one in soul and body. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.3 (Autumn 2012): 421–430. (shrink)

Ceci n’a rien d’un texte référencé, documenté par de multiples citations et connaissances littéraires ou mythologiques accumulées : ce n’est que l’expression de relations humaines, pathétiques ou tragiques dérivant au gré du besoin de l’enfant... à tout prix.Fabriquer une vie, transmettre un peu de soi – en duplication de deux unités – dépasse toutes les..

El artículo analiza desde una perspectiva fenomenológica preconfesional las nociones de instante, salvación y comunidad en el pensamiento de Bernhard Welte. Primero explicita la relación intrínseca existente entre instante como consumación de la temporalidad existencial y salvación como plenitud significativa de la existencia, por un lado, y el surgimiento y configuración de una comunidad auténtica, por otro. En segundo lugar, distingue la comunidad-asociación como forma histórica defectible de comunidad de la comunidad-hogar como la forma auténtica de comunidad, fundada (...) en la salvación vislumbrada en el instante. Finalmente, describe los rasgos esenciales de la comunidad-hogar y su significación religiosa pre-confesional. (shrink)

Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling presents a reductio ad absurdum regarding the time-spans subject to moral evaluation. The text's classic dilemma depends on assuming that we only evaluate discrete, contextless instants. The pseudonymous author constantly seeks the single instant or moral “photograph” that indicates Abraham's status. Doing so, however, extracts scripture's moral legislation out from narrative, resulting in theological paralysis and thereby requiring an alternative temporal vocabulary for evaluating Abraham. Fear and Trembling contains an under-explored alternative that sets Abraham within (...) the covenantal narrative's temporality. The paper explores the consequences of shifting from evaluating instants to evaluating narrative durations, showing that while Genesis 22 remains a challenging episode, it also offers a model of imaginative faith, fidelity to promises, and hope in the face of trauma that focusing on moral instants overlooks. (shrink)