The ERC-funded ModERN project is investigating 18th-century authorship practices using data-rich computational techniques to examine the digital archive of the Enlightenment period. This paper explores the use of new large-scale text reuse detection and network analysis to identify intertextual 'influencers' in a large heterogeneous collection of 18th-century French texts.

Socialist courts are supposed to apply the law, not make it, and socialist legality denies judicial decisions any precedential status. In 2011, the Chinese Supreme People’s Court designated selected decisions as Guiding Cases to be referred to by all judges when adjudicating similar disputes. One decade on, the paucity of citations to Guiding Cases has been taken as demonstrating the incongruity of case-based adjudication and the socialist legal tradition. Citations are, however, an imperfect measure of influence. Reproduction of language uniquely (...) traceable to Guiding Cases can also be evidence of their impact on judicial decision-making. We employ a local alignment tool to detect unattributed text reuse of Guiding Cases in local court decisions. Our findings suggest that Guiding Cases are more consequential than commonly assumed, thereby complicating prevailing narratives about the antagonism of socialist legality to case law. (shrink)

The study of textual reuse is of fundamental importance in reconstructing lost or partially lost texts, passages of which can be partly recovered through other texts in which they have been embedded. Furthermore, the study of textual reuse also provides one with a deeper understanding of the modalities of the production of texts out of previous textual materials. Finally, it constitutes a unique chance to reconsider the historicity of concepts such as “author”, “originality” and “plagiarism”, which do not (...) denote really existing universals, but have rather evolved—and still evolve—in different ways in different cultural milieus. After a general introduction and an analysis of the historical background of textual reuse in India and Europe, the essay attempts some general conclusions regarding the formulas introducing instances of textual reuse in Classical South Asian texts. (shrink)

We will examine three types of reuse represented in P?li legal literature: unacknowledged borrowings of authoritative opinions and definitions adapted and rearranged ; unacknowledged borrowings of largely unchanged selected text portions being rearranged ; and unconnected extracts of unchanged text portions lined up in the sequence of the source text century CE).

The Sārasaṅgaha is a Pāli text of XIIth–XIIIth century by the Sinhalese monk Siddhattha Thera. Its themes include the aspiration to become a Buddha, shrines, meditation, theories on rain, wind, gender and more. The main body consists of citations from the Nikāyas, the Jātakas, the Visuddhimagga and above all, from commentarial literature. By analysing the way the Sārasaṅgaha refers to and establishes a dialogue with the quoted works, this paper promotes a new assessment of the cultural and textual tendencies (...) that influenced the development of Buddhist literature especially in the Middle Ages. In particular, the analysis of this text and the quotations of which it is composed reveals the importance of commentarial literature, a literary genre that only recently has attracted the attention of Pāli scholars. (shrink)

Ve?ka?an?tha was the most important systematiser of the Vi?i???dvaita school of Ved?nta. This article describes his use of Buddhist sources and shows how Ve?ka?an?tha reused Buddhist texts to a much more significant extent than his predecessors Y?muna and R?m?nuja. The reused text-passages come mostly from the epistemological school of Buddhist philosophy but there are important exceptions, attesting that Ve?ka?an?tha was also aware of Buddhist schools such as the Vaibh??ikas, of whom only little is preserved today. Given that Buddhist philosophy (...) was no longer an active presence in South India at the time of Ve?ka?an?tha, his interest in it must be due to factors other than his polemical agenda. Perhaps, his project of enlarging Vi?i???dvaita Ved?nta made him confront outsiders such as Buddhist thinkers and his intellectual interest in philosophy made him engage in a genuine confrontation with them. (shrink)

Text recycling, often called “self-plagiarism”, is the practice of reusing textual material from one’s prior documents in a new work. The practice presents a complex set of ethical and practical challenges to the scientific community, many of which have not been addressed in prior discourse on the subject. This essay identifies and discusses these factors in a systematic fashion, concluding with a new definition of text recycling that takes these factors into account. Topics include terminology, what is not (...) text recycling, factors affecting judgements about the appropriateness of text recycling, and visual materials. (shrink)

The aim of the present study is to shed light on why the citation taken from Saraha’s Dohākośagīti and occurring in the Madhyamakaratnapradīpa, chapter 7, opens the door to some fundamental reflections concerning the authority and the “nature” of this latter text. On the basis of a historical and doctrinal analysis, here a new interpretation is put forward, according to which the Madhyamakaratnapradīpa should be considered a tenth century CE handbook, written by some unknown Buddhist teacher perhaps as a (...) manual for his lessons. The primary purpose of this teacher seems to have been the discussion—in the light of textual sources compiled up to this time—of the doctrinal and philosophical perspectives contained in the sixth century CE Bhāviveka’s Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā and Tarkajvālā. The Madhyamakaratnapradīpa could have been composed on the basis of notes written down for the benefit of this teacher’s students. Moreover, the analysis of the general style and quotes or references of the text, on the one hand, compared with the passage containing the quote from Saraha, on the other hand, lead us to take seriously into consideration the possibility that the citation borrowed from the Dohākośagīti could have been embedded into the text a little after its composition, by someone different from its original author. (shrink)

The study of Buddhist texts can inform us of the way scriptures were composed, as well as illuminate the reasons behind their production. This study examines the phenomenon of borrowing and reusing portions of texts without attributing them to their ‘legitimate authors’ within the Buddhist world of contemporary Tibet. It shows that not only is such a practice not at all infrequent and is often socially accepted, but that it is used in this case as a platform to advance specific (...) claims and promote an explicit agenda. Therefore, rather than considering these as instances of plagiarism, this essay looks at the practice of copying and borrowing as an exercise in intertextuality, intended as the faithful retransmission of ancient truths, and as an indication of the public domain of texts in Tibet. (shrink)

Studies in originality, authorship, and intertextuality in the contexts of the South Asian and Tibetan Buddhist literature are indispensible for uncovering the direct and indirect referential connections and the diverse modes of their production in an extensive mosaic of Buddhist texts. They also highlight the multifarious functions of textual reuses and re-workings in cultural productions and religious and literary reinvigorations. Moreover, a reintegration of explicit and silent citations and creative paraphrases and a recirculation of narrative adaptations, which have been often (...) sidelined in the study of Buddhist literature, have been shown to be integral to the formation of a textual authority and to the restructuring of cultural and doctrinal meanings. (shrink)

The eleventh-century Indian Buddhist master Ratnākaraśānti presents a unique Yogācāra interpretation of tantric _maṇḍala_ visualisation in the _*Guhyasamājamaṇḍalavidhiṭīkā_. In this text, he employs the neither-one-nor-many argument to assert that the qualities of the mind represented by the deities in the _maṇḍala_ are neither the same nor different from the mind itself. He also provides five scenarios of meditation to explain the necessity of practising both the perfection method (_pāramitānaya_) and the mantra method (_mantranaya_) together in Mahāyāna. Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation exerts (...) a significant influence on the works of later Buddhist masters in India and Tibet, with parts of it being reused in the _*Śrīherukopadeśanāmasvādhiṣṭhānakrama_ by Śūnyasamādhivajra (c. the eleventh century), the eighteenth chapter of the _Āmnāyamañjarī_ by Abhayākaragupta (from the late eleventh to the twelfth century) and the tantric compendium _sNgags rim chen mo_ by the Tibetan master Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa (1357–1419). This paper explores how Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation has been reused and modified in these subsequent works. While Śūnyasamādhivajra faithfully reproduced Ratnākaraśānti’s Yogācāra explanation, Abhayākaragupta modified it to align with his Madhyamaka view. Abhayākaragupta in turn influenced Tsong kha pa, who accepted Abhayākaragupta’s Madhyamaka modification in his works. This paper also engages with current scholarly discussions on textual reuse and the underlying reasons behind it. While Śūnyasamādhivajra and Abhayākaragupta assimilated Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation without acknowledgement, Tsong kha pa quoted the text by name and acknowledged Abhayākaragupta’s reuse of Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation. This paper concludes by discussing the factors that determine whether the reused text is acknowledged or not, and the possible reasons behind textual reuse. (shrink)

The Kāśikāvṛtti, the oldest available complete commentary on Pāṇini’s grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, is found quoted often in the later Pāṇinian grammatical tradition. These quotations throw light on a number of aspects of the text of the Kāśikāvṛtti. This paper focuses on how this later Pāṇinian grammatical tradition views the modifications in the text of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and concludes that also the tradition ascribes these modifications to the Kāśikāvṛtti. Further, this paper also attempts to show that these quotations can (...) be shown to have interacted with the manuscript tradition of the Kāśikāvṛtti and indeed with the help of these quotations it becomes easier to better understand the manuscript transmission of the Kāśikāvṛtti. Thus, this article focuses on one of the applications of the study of quotations: through an analysis of the content of the quoted passages of the Kāśikāvṛtti in later Grammatical literature, it discusses the history of the transmission of the KV and of the text it comments upon, i.e., Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī. It also shows how a study of quotations is an unavoidable complement of the analysis of manuscripts for scholars aiming at the reconstruction of texts so remote in time. (shrink)

The paper offers a detailed investigation of select passages from the Vita II Sancti Remacli, a hagiographic text produced in the diocese of Liège in the last decades of the tenth century. The purpose of this investigation is threefold. First, to illustrate the point that the tenth-century Latin hagiographic texts produced in the diocese of Liège did not display quotations from classical and patristic authors only as petrified forms of frozen ancient wisdom with a merely decorative function, but rather (...) as raw gems which were polished and adjusted to fit seamlessly into a new framework. Thus, they could enhance both the form and contents of texts closely connected to their age’s political and intellectual realities. Second, to show that nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions of such texts can act as distorting mirrors to modern readers and researchers, since, due to an editorial strategy that privileged classical material over its medieval context, the editors sometimes completely neglected how quotations from ancient authors were re-worked by the tenth-century hagiographer following the stylistic requirements of rhymed prose. Third, to suggest as a necessary corrective to this distorting approach a new way of reading and consequently editing these types of texts, which places classical and patristic quotations in their proper context, by paying due attention to manuscript evidence, to the stylistic requirements of their new context, and to the complex functions they play in their new textual environment. (shrink)

As the capacity to generate, store, aggregate and combine ever greater volumes and types of data about individuals, behaviours and interactions continues to expand apace, so too does the challenge of ensuring suitable and appropriate governance of that data. In broad terms, the challenge is simple; how to ensure the (public) benefits of data, such as improvements in service delivery or individual and collective well-being, while avoiding harms such as discrimination, injustice or placing undue burdens on individuals and groups. The (...) difficulty, as ever, lies in the details. As Nicol et al 1 observe, informed consent is important but does not replace the need for an appropriate governance framework that covers the wider ecosystem of data generation, use and reuse. Moreover, there is no one universal oversight mechanism for data sharing, but what counts as ‘appropriate’ must take into account the context and purpose of data use. In this regard, the study by Ford et al is an important and valuable contribution to our understanding of the …. (shrink)

Hobbesian anthropology makes use of the wolf motif, a Roman and Republican one, by which Hobbes defines a state of nature as a state of war where men live in diffidence each other and where fear is law; the wolf is there a timid or unsociable animal, not a sanguinary or savage creature. But against ancient philosophers and moral writers - Aristotle, Cicero - who regard man as a rational being and who believe in a right reason, the modern philosopher (...) reuses this motif to set before men eyes that monarchy is the only way to protect citizens from gatherings of wolves in the city; reflections on civil wars conduct him to side with the sovereign power of one. Against upholders of regicide who compare the king to a tyrant, Hobbes inscribes the political motif of the wolf in his text by which beast - 'arrant wolf ' - is distinguishable from animal; he mainly rewrites it on Seneca's text, the Stoic who expounded a desperate vision of humankind. By focusing on a Graeco-Roman heritage, this study shows in three parts that the philosopher of De Cive and Leviathan is not really - not only - the man of a pessimistic view on mankind; it is a portrait of a Renaissance philosopher who never, exactly, wrote that 'man is a wolf to man'. (shrink)

si quis patriae meae pecuniam credat, non dicam me illius debitorem nec hoc aes alienum profitebor aut candidatus aut reus: ad exsoluendum tamen hoc dabo portionem meam.If anyone were to lend money to my country, I will not call myself his debtor nor will I declare this as money owed either when a candidate or when prosecuted: nevertheless, I will contribute my share to paying off the debt. Miriam Griffin drew attention to the comment of Justus Lipsius: ‘a defendant might (...) have to make such a declaration in cases involving financial penalties, such as extortion and peculation, for when the litis aestimatio [‘assessment of damages’] was made, it would be important to know who the other claimants to the convicted man's assets were, and how encumbered his property was.’ No further elucidation, however, has been made since Lipsius. Mommsen failed to record this passage in his Staatsrecht and Strafrecht, and, as far as we know, no monograph on Roman criminal law mentions the passage of Seneca. (shrink)

Old and Middle Assyrian sources dealing with moths Terminology Moth damage Conditions for moth proliferation Prevention Losses and reuse of infested textiles.

The bulk of the present volume focuses on the reuse of Buddhist texts. The Introduction gives some background to the topic of textual reuse in general and discusses the reasons for undertaking the analysis of textual reuse within Buddhist texts. It then elaborates on the extent of its pervasiveness within Buddhist literature through the example of Tibetan ritual texts. Lastly, it takes stock of the articles on text-reuse and discusses some general lines of interpretation of (...) the phenomenon of textual reuse in Buddhism, highlighting the importance of the genre over that of the time and language of composition. Thus, philosophical or technical texts tend to quote explicitly, whereas ritual texts see the predominance of the conveyed message over the transparency of the transmission so that reuse is mostly silent. Religious texts of various forms come in between these two extremes. (shrink)

Documents the history and rationale as well as the technology for the creation of an open online corpus of Ancient Greek texts, the Free First Thousand Years of Greek. Reveals the energy on a worldwide basis for building open data along with the boundless creativity around developing software tools for teaching, research, and publishing that exploit open data in ways that were impossible before.

The study, design and development of a low-cost digital braille printer is boarded with a transdisciplinary approach. The main challenge was focused on reducing significantly the high cost of this type of printers and their printing services. This context is aggravated with the low commercialization of these products in the country, a factor that makes the access of these tools -that are essential to much of the low and middle sectors of the Argentine social structure- even more difficult. An interdisciplinary (...) group of teachers, graduates and students of the careers of industrial design and informatics degree from the National University of La Plata, developed the design and prototype of a braille printer. The work was carried out according to the principles of Gandhian Engineering, based on the reuse of ink-jet printers. The project consists of the design, development and generation of a low-cost Braille printer, produced locally, which prioritizes the use of nationally manufactured components for assembly. To achieve this, an electronic and electromechanical system was designed and manufactured to adapt any Inkjet printer to the objectives of the project, enabling the recycling of obsolete printers. This means, it is proposed to resolve through the use of text printers, applying technical knowledge of computer science and industrial design, to adapt the technological components to the Braille lexicon printer. They also developed, on the one hand, software that controls the printer and allows its use in a simple and accessible way. On the other hand, the hardware and external components were adapted with 3D printing technology and thermoforming, producing a housing that contains the entire printer. Finally, a systematization of the assembly process of the printer prototype was carried out, making it possible to replicate it. Using methodologies of Gandhian Design, a prototype and two alternative proposals of carcasses were obtained. The main objective, which guided this work, was that blind people can access low-cost braille printers promoting by this a favorable impact on the cultural development of their daily lives. (shrink)

Rāmānujācārya’s Tantrarahasya, a philosophical treatise mainly dedicated to the hermeneutics and epistemology of the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā School, might be considered hardly more than a jigsaw of reused passages, since one third of it has a direct source, and a further third has its roots in interlanguage usage. It is thus a perfect case study for investigating the compositional habits of philosophical authors in pre-modern śāstra literature. The article analyses the formal aspects of textual reuse by Rāmānujācārya and draws some (...) general conclusions regarding the author’s intellectual affiliation to Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā on the basis of the way he reuses his school’s texts as compared to the reuse of other schools’ texts. A final section discusses the possibility of generalising these results to the approach to textual reuse of the whole Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. (shrink)

This artists’ text examines the relationship between photographic images and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environments. We note that such scripted image worlds necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of the capacities of image, its formation, reproduction, storage and circulation. As an archaeologist would document an excavation, extending conventional methods through 3D visualization technology to work in new ways with the archaeological record, we chose to document a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the (...) Yung Cum Bois (YCBs). We turn to some definitions of griefer as a subcultural phenomenon within online culture to attempt to contextualize our involvement some more, thinking through the forms of image-gathering that grief play has generated, such as scripted object attacks where image-objects spawn and self-replicate, continually spurting out copies of themselves, lagging the region, slowing down frame rates, consuming land resources. Here we witness images blockading network logistics. This was active fieldwork. We got involved. We applied visualization technology learnt from archaeological computing research to the avatars, temporary structures and abandoned ruins of an online world, Second Life (SL). We patched together a kind of virtual photogrammetry, enabling the monumentalization of avatars, objects and scenarios, recompiling these into new configurations and uploading them freely to be reused, detourned and weaponized by our virtual friends. We situate this endeavour within a cobbled history of imaging technology, the networked self and its pathologies, riffling through our own image dump. Here. (shrink)

This paper examines a passage of the eleventh chapter of the Rigs gter of Sa skya Paṇḍita on the division of arguments by consequence of the form “Because S is P, it follows that it is Q” with respect to the type of relation between P and Q. This passage appears in quite different versions in several available recensions of the Rigs gter, all of which are problematic to some extent. The different interpretations of the commentators can be shown to (...) derive from their reliance on different versions of the text, which they strove to make sense of through two distinct strategies. Following up on the examination of a division of arguments by consequence along the same line in the works of Sa skya Paṇḍita’s Tibetan predecessors, in particular Phya pa Chos kyi seng ge and mTshur ston gZhon nu seng ge :883–938, 2016b), I evaluate the diverging versions of the Rigs gter against a coherent logical scenario founded on Sa skya Paṇḍita’s discussion pertaining to the types of logical reasons in inference in the tenth chapter of his work and comparison with the classification by Phya pa. I offer a hypothesis regarding the genesis of the problematic versions of the passage on the classification of consequences in the Rigs gter based on the comparison with the classification found in mTshur ston’s epistemological work. I propose that the composition of this portion of the Rigs gter might have involved a textual reuse of mTshur ston’s classification, even though mTshur ston and Sa skya Paṇḍita disagree on background issues. This very disagreement imposed changes to the reused text that led to problematic readings. (shrink)

The ARXMLIV corpus is a remarkable collection of text containing scientific mathematical discourse. With more than half a million documents, it is an ambitious target for large scale linguistic and semantic analysis, requiring a generalized and distributed approach. In this paper we implement an architecture which solves and automates the issues of knowledge representation and knowledge management, providing an abstraction layer for distributed development of semantic analysis tools. Furthermore, we enable document interaction and visualization and present current implementations of (...) semantic tools and follow-up applications using this architecture. We identify five different stages, or purposes, which such architecture needs to address, encapsulating each in an independent module. These stages are determined by the different properties of the document formats used, as well as the state of processing and linguistic enrichment introduced so far. We discuss the need of migration between XML representations and the challenges it would pose on our system, revealing the benefits and trade-off of each format we employ. In the heart of the architecture lies the Semantic Blackboard module. The Semantic Blackboard comprises a system based on a centralized RDF database which can facilitate distributed corpus analysis of arbitrary applications, or analysis modules. This is achieved by providing a document abstraction layer and a mechanism for storing, reusing and communicating results via RDF stand-off annotations deposited in the central database. Achieving a properly encapsulated and automated pipeline from the input corpus document to a semantically enriched output in a state-of-the-art representation is the task of the Preprocessing, Semantic Result and Output Generation modules. Each of them addresses the task of format migration and enhances the document for further semantic enrichment or aggregation. The fifth module, targeting Visualization and Feedback, enables user interaction and display of different stages of processing.. (shrink)

Driven by the use cases of PubChemRDF and SCAIView, we have developed a first community-based clinical trial ontology (CTO) by following the OBO Foundry principles. CTO uses the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top level ontology and reuses many terms from existing ontologies. CTO has also defined many clinical trial-specific terms. The general CTO design pattern is based on the PICO framework together with two applications. First, the PubChemRDF use case demonstrates how a drug Gleevec is linked to multiple (...) clinical trials investigating Gleevec’s related chemical compounds. Second, the SCAIView text mining engine shows how the use of CTO terms in its search algorithm can identify publications referring to COVID-19-related clinical trials. Future opportunities and challenges are discussed. (shrink)

The article presents a preliminary survey of textual reuse in Nepalese collections of j?takas and avad?nas, focusing in particular on three works: the Avad?na?ataka, the Divy?vad?na, and the Dv?vi??atyavad?nakath?. The reassessment of the manuscript tradition of these three Sanskrit collections, based on Nepalese manuscripts and Tibetan translations, sheds more light on the role of scribes in the creation of these collections and of the Nepalese avad?nam?l? literature. In particular, the great role played in the 17th century by the Nepalese (...) scribe and scholar Jayamuni in shaping the text of the Avad?na?ataka, the Divy?vad?na, and many other Buddhist narrative works is brought to light. The result of this preliminary survey shows that a study of this type of collections based on the available critical editions should be rethought in the light of the specific character of their manuscript and textual transmission in medieval and early modern Nepal. (shrink)

Augustine was a convinced proponent of the multiplicity of meanings. He had both theoretical and theological reasons for affirming the phenomenon of polysemy. This article deduces seven themes from Augustine’s exegetical practice and from his discussions of the principles of his exegesis, and employs these as Augustine’s arguments for the multiplicity of meanings. Augustine acknowledges the legitimacy of the many senses of the Word of God. Because scripture is an ambiguous linguistic reality, it constitutes a system of signs and it (...) reuses earlier texts to convey new meanings. Augustine’s theological reasons for the multiplicity of meanings include the beliefs that human authorial intention is complemented by the primary divine intention, that scripture has to be interpreted Christologically, that scripture’s interpretations have to be spiritually useful, and that the texts of scripture are part of the new theological/literary context of the canon. (shrink)

Commentaries in late antiquity were the predominant form of scholarly engagement with ancient, authoritative texts. Not only in Greek, but in Latin no less, ancient commentaries were an integral part of reading and understanding literature and philosophy (and theology, as part and parcel of philosophy at that time). I shall deal with commentaries (as self-standing works, different from glosses) on poetic, rhetorical, philosophical, and religious texts in Latin late antiquity, both ‘pagan’ and Christian. Grammatical and rhetorical education played a remarkable (...) role in their preparation, and questions of adaptation and of the reuse of earlier material, especially Greek models, will also come into play. (shrink)

Background Biobanking and genomic research requires collection and storage of human tissue from study participants. From participants’ perspectives within the African context, this can be associated with fears and misgivings due to a myriad of factors including myths and mistrust of researchers. From the researchers angle ethical dilemmas may arise especially with consenting and sample reuse during storage. The aim of this paper was to explore these ethical considerations in the establishment and conduct of biobanking and genomic studies in (...) Africa. Methods We conducted a narrative synthesis following a comprehensive search of nine (9) databases and grey literature. All primary research study designs were eligible for inclusion as well as both quantitative and qualitative evidence from peer reviewed journals, spanning a maximum of 20 years (2000–2020). It focused on research work conducted in Africa, even if data was stored or analysed outside the region. Results Of 2,663 title and abstracts screened, 94 full texts were retrieved and reviewed for eligibility. We included 12 studies (7 qualitative; 4 quantitative and one mixed methods). Ethical issues described in these papers related to community knowledge and understanding of biobanking and genomic research, regulation, and governance of same by research ethics committees, enrolment of participants, types of informed consents, data collection, storage, usage and sharing as well as material transfer, returning results and benefit sharing. ca. Biospecimen collection and storage is given in trust and participants expect confidentially of data and results generated. Most participants are comfortable with broad consent due to trust in researchers, though a few would like to be contacted for reconsenting in future studies, and this would depend on whether the new research is for good cause. Sharing data with external partners is welcome in some contexts but some research participants did not trust foreign researchers. Conclusion Biobanking and genomic studies are a real need in Africa. Linked to this are ethical considerations related to setting up and participation in biobanks as well as data storage, export, use and sharing. There is emerging or pre-existing consensus around the acceptability of broad consent as a suitable model of consent, the need for Africans to take the lead in international collaborative studies, with deliberate efforts to build capacity in local storage and analysis of samples and employ processes of sample collection and use that build trust of communities and potential study participants. Research ethics committees, researchers and communities need to work together to work together to adapt and use clearly defined ethical frameworks, guidelines, and policy documents to harmonize the establishment and running of biobanking and genomic research in Africa. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs the tension between the then emerging approach of emphasising authorial innovation and the traditional learned practice of adapting and reusing existing texts, which was cultivated in the early modern ars excerpendi. In 1717, a case of plagiarism occurred in the midst of a new historiographical genre (Reichshistorie) and attracted much attention. Complementing existing scholarship on early modern theories of plagiarism, the examination focuses on how learned communicative practice treated plagiarism. Contrary to the norm established in the discourse (...) on plagiarism, the plagiariser and his work were not excluded from the respublica literaria. Instead, the case became part of academic memory, and was itself frequently reported in a plagiaristic manner. In closing, a comparative glance at the juridically‐based treatment of a current case of plagiarism (a politician's dissertation of 2009) is taken. The paper argues that the contradiction between the theoretical norm and the actual eighteenth‐century management of plagiarism resulted from the familiarity of unmarked „copying“ in pre‐modern scholarly practice. The paper shows that early modern learned culture, although characterised by Steven Shapin as a „moral economy,“ neither felt compelled to impose its crucial ethical norm in a case of open non‐conformance, nor did it consistently observe this norm for routine processes. (shrink)

Contemporary art based on new media is situated at the intersection of art-as-we-know-it, smart technologies, digital and algorithmic culture, networked economy, politics, as well as bio and techno sciences. Contemporary art enters into intense relations with these fields, including interactions, adoption of methodological devices and approaches, changes of the areas of activity, hybridization and amalgamation. This text explores those features of contemporary life and culture which are affected by digital art and the recombination, appropriation, remediation, reusing, repurposing, and transfer (...) of artistic procedures/tools from one context or field to another. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at AthensWilliam C. WestA. Geoffrey Woodhead. The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Vol. XVI, Inscriptions: The Decrees. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1997. xx 1 531 pp. 1 plan. 32 pls. Cloth, $100.A. G. Woodhead characterizes his work as “a still (...) photograph, extracted from a process of discovery, discussion, and reevaluation constantly in motion... a representation of the status rerum... at the end of 1991” (viii). Nonetheless, this is a remarkable book. It reprints and discusses up-to-date texts of Athenian decrees from the Agora and classifies them in five sections: (1) to the fall of Athens in 404 B.C.; (2) from one restoration of democracy to another, 403/2-307/6 B.C.; (3) the “Macedonian Century,” 307/6-201/200 B.C.; (4) Athens and the Roman Republic, 200–86 B.C.; and (5) Athens in the Roman Empire, 86 B.C.-A.D. 203 (xi). The reader is thereby helped to an appreciation of Athenian diplomacy and bureaucracy within the framework of recognized historical periods. [End Page 458]A total of 342 inscriptions are presented: 28 in section 1; 78 in section 2; 149 in section 3; 76 in section 4; and 10 in section 5. Two phases of Agora excavation are represented: 1931–45 and 1946–67. After each section an appendix on material discovered after 1967 lists new discoveries with appropriate references. New studies and new texts are assimilated in the presentation of each item up to the end of 1991. Decrees of the Athenian state form the bulk of the collection, but decrees of other bodies, such as demes, gene, orgeones, etc., are also included. Excluded by intention (vii) are the decrees on councilors and their officers (Agora XV) and the decrees honoring ephebes.For each item Woodhead gives an extensive lemma, with brief description of the stone, dimensions of the letters, and bibliography of previous texts and works contributing to their understanding. Each text is followed by a commentary. He frequently comments on the lettering and style of engraving before entering upon discussion of individual lines.For section 1, the fifth century, the texts of IG I3 (1981) are printed, but for the others, in sections 2–5, the best available text is chosen. Where a new fragment of an old text has been discovered in the Agora, the full text of the entire inscription is given. As many decrees were set up on the Acropolis, it is clear that some material was “thrown or brought down from the citadel for reuse” (3). In the case of the Brea decree (no. 7), the contribution of the Agora fragment is slight, but in that of the treaty between Athens and Argos of 417/6 (no. 19) it is significant, providing the length of the line, 76 letters.When an archon is cited in the prescript of an Agora decree, Woodhead supplies a full discussion of the archonship, seeking to show how opinion was formed concerning the date of the office and the calendar. The earliest to be discussed is Polyzelos, 367/6 B.C. (section 2); the latest, Flavius Macrinus, A.D. 116/17 (section 5).In section 2, the fourth century to 307/6, Woodhead calls attention (41) to the spread of Athenian bureaucracy in the increased detail in the prescripts of decrees, the appearance of new formulae, such as that indicating hortatory intent (cf. A. S. Henry, ZPE 112 [1996] 105–19), and stock phrases enumerating the merits of laudandi in honorary decrees. The inevitable restoration of in the prescript of no. 101 brings in this formula for the first time in Agora decrees, although it is known from elsewhere “as early as 334/3” (154). The Agora contributes very significant decrees on the nomothesia (nos. 73, 75, 106C) and Athens’ regulation of the Eleusinian Mysteries (nos. 56, 57).The next section, 307/6 to 201/200, represents for Athens “the high-water mark of its bureaucracy” (167). The texts classified here attest the variety of documents... (shrink)

The lack of water, which has arisen due to reasons such as climate change, excessive and misuse, has become a global problem. The reuse of wastewater is considered as an important solution to overcome this problem. With the technology developed for this purpose, wastewater is treated and used in many fields, especially in irrigation of agricultural products and parks and fire extinguishing. There is no information directly related to the methods of treating polluted water in the religious texts. In (...) the past, when today's technological possibilities were not available, fuqaha determined some treatment techniques, but these are about waters exposed to najāsat (filthy things), not about wastewater that contains a large amount of najis elements. As a matter of fact, it seems impossible to clean wastewater with these methods. With the systems developed today, wastewater can be treated at different levels according to their usage areas. Accordingly, the analysis information regarding the output at each treatment level should be evaluated separately when determining the fiqh provision of treated wastewater. In this study, it is aimed to examine the purification methods discussed in fiqh books together with the relevant texts and to determine the criteria taken as basis in purification and to try to determine the fiqh provision regarding the treated wastewater outputs within these criteria. (shrink)

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language is concerned with the years 1865 through Winter/Spring 1870-71. Four texts of Nietzsche's, "Vom Ursprung der Sprache", "Zur Teleologie", "Zu Schopenhauer", and "Anschauung Notes", are translated into English and interpreted from the perspective of Nietzsche's developing theory of language. An examination of the major influences of Schopenhauer, Kant, Eduard von Hartmann, and Frederick A. Lange are pursued. ;Theory, in this work, does not assume that it is possible to take a position of authority (...) or truth in the interpretation of texts, rather that interpretation of texts constitutes an attempt to uncover a discursive practice, to describe a discourse-object. The method used is Nietzsche's method of genealogy, which follows the formation of discourse, at once scattered, discontinuous, and regular and analyzes the process of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in that discourse. Genealogy is exegesis in Nietzsche's sense of it as rumination, as the slow, repetitive, gray activity of deciphering what is documented. Major genealogical nodes or elements of Nietzsche's beginning theory of language are used and reused in different contexts throughout the work, resulting in a cumulative effect which explores specific elements in Nietzsche's thinking about language. ;This work offers five major contributions to Nietzsche studies: a detailed introduction of the significant influence of Eduard von Hartmann upon Nietzsche's thinking; a comprehensive look at the influence of Lange's History of Materialism upon Nietzsche's beginning theory of language; a thorough analysis of "Zur Teleologie" and "Zu Schopenhauer" in the overall contexts of Nietzsche's thinking with regard to metaphysics and teleology; the gathering together and interpretation into a world view of the "Anschauung Notes"; and a close examination of Nietzsche's breaking away from Schopenhauer as it takes place before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. ;Nietzsche's primary contributions to a theory of language in these beginning years are three: the adoption of the role of the unconscious instincts in the origins and ongoing production of language; the assertion that unconscious thought processes are a precondition for conscious thought; an examination of the relationships of language to epistemology, which results in the recognition of the limits of language as an instrument of truth, but a realization of the inestimable value and force of its symbolic and figurative aspects, aspects necessitated by the very nature of language itself. (shrink)

The abrupt beginning of the Philebus refers to the abrupt interruption of the dialogue with Callicles in the Gorgias. The reuse of the phrase αὐτὸς γνώσῃ (Phlb. 12a9 = Gorg. 505c9), unique in Plato, is an evident sign of the will to connect the two texts and contexts. Both of them deal with the problem of the interruption of the philosophical dialogue. The absolute lack of contextualization and the ‘open’ conclusion in the Philebus are consistent with this framework. The (...) continuity with the Gorgias is also a fundamental reason why Socrates returns as protagonist in a late dialogue. It also allows us to put forward a hypothesis on the identity of Philebus, an emblematic character like Callicles. (shrink)

Most research on student plagiarism defines the concept very narrowly or with much ambiguity. Many studies focus on plagiarism involving large swaths of text copied and pasted from unattributed sources, a type of plagiarism that the overwhelming majority of students seem to have little trouble identifying. Other studies rely on ambiguous definitions, assuming students understand what the term means and requesting that they self-report how well they understand the concept. This study attempts to avoid these problems by examining student (...) perceptions of more complex citation issues. We presented 240 students with a series of examples, asked them to indicate whether or not each should be considered plagiarism, and followed up with a series of demographic and attitudinal questions. The examples fell within the spectrum of inadequate citation, patchwriting, and the reuse of other people’s ideas. Half were excerpted from publicized cases of academic plagiarism, and half were modified from other sources. Our findings indicated that students shared a very strong agreement that near verbatim copy and paste and patchwriting should be considered plagiarism, but that they were much more conflicted regarding the reuse of ideas. Additionally, this study found significant correlation between self-reported confidence in their understanding and the identification of more complex cases as plagiarism, but this study found little correlation between academic class status or exposure to plagiarism detection software and perceptions of plagiarism. The latter finding goes against a prevailing sentiment in the academic literature that the ability to recognize plagiarism is inherently linked to academic literacy. Overall, our findings indicate that more pedagogical emphasis may need to be placed on complex forms of plagiarism. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the ritual context of the 200,000-line Chinese Great Perfection of Wisdom at Dunhuang. Beside the fact that the purpose of the mass production of sūtras was to generate merit and then present a “merit gift” for the sponsor, the copies were reused as ritual instruments in the large-scale chanting liturgy called “sūtra-rotation”. This paper examines the relevant administrative documents and liturgical texts to reconstruct the three modules of the liturgy, i.e., the preparation stage, the pronouncement of (...) a “liturgical script,” and the “long-playing” chanting. By analyzing key passages in the Prajñāpāramitā literature, the paper argues that the Great Perfection of Wisdom was taken as an apotropaic device with unmediated protective power. (shrink)

With the current changes driven by the expansion of the World Wide Web, this book uses a different approach from other books on the market: it applies ontologies to electronically available information to improve the quality of knowledge management in large and distributed organizations. Ontologies are formal theories supporting knowledge sharing and reuse. They can be used to explicitly represent semantics of semi-structured information. These enable sophisticated automatic support for acquiring, maintaining and accessing information. Methodology and tools are developed (...) for intelligent access to large volumes of semi-structured and textual information sources in intra- and extra-, and internet-based environments to employ the full power of ontologies in supporting knowledge management from the information client perspective and the information provider. The aim of the book is to support efficient and effective knowledge management and focuses on weakly-structured online information sources. It is aimed primarily at researchers in the area of knowledge management and information retrieval and will also be a useful reference for students in computer science at the postgraduate level and for business managers who are aiming to increase the corporations' information infrastructure. The Semantic Web is a very important initiative affecting the future of the WWW that is currently generating huge interest. The book covers several highly significant contributions to the semantic web research effort, including a new language for defining ontologies, several novel software tools and a coherent methodology for the application of the tools for business advantage. It also provides 3 case studies which give examples of the real benefits to be derived from the adoption of semantic-web based ontologies in "real world" situations. As such, the book is an excellent mixture of theory, tools and applications in an important area of WWW research. * Provides guidelines for introducing knowledge management concepts and tools into enterprises, to help knowledge providers present their knowledge efficiently and effectively. * Introduces an intelligent search tool that supports users in accessing information and a tool environment for maintenance, conversion and acquisition of information sources. * Discusses three large case studies which will help to develop the technology according to the actual needs of large and or virtual organisations and will provide a testbed for evaluating tools and methods. The book is aimed at people with at least a good understanding of existing WWW technology and some level of technical understanding of the underpinning technologies (XML/RDF). It will be of interest to graduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field, and the many industrial personnel who are tracking WWW technology developments in order to understand the business implications. It could also be used to support undergraduate courses in the area but is not itself an introductory text. (shrink)

The unique compendium re-assesses the value of future and emergent computing technologies via artistic and philosophical means. The book encourages scientists to adopt inspiring thinking of artists and philosophers to reuse scientific concepts in their works.The useful reference text consists of non-typical topics, where artistic and philosophical concepts encourage readers to adopt unconventional approaches towards computing and immerse themselves into discoveries of future emerging landscape.

This article discusses a peculiar Sā$$\dot {\text{n}}$$n˙khya-Yoga theory of transformation (pariṇāma) that the author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra created by drawing upon Sarvāstivāda Buddhist theories of temporality. In developing his theory, Patañjali adaptively reused the wording in which the Sarvāstivāda theories were formulated, the specific objections against these theories, and their refutations to win the philosophical debate about temporality against Sarvāstivāda Buddhism. Patañjali’s approach towards the Sarvāstivāda Buddhist theories was possible, even though his system of Yoga is based on an (...) ontology that differs considerably from that of Sarvāstivāda Buddhism because both systems share the philosophical view that time is not a separate ontological entity in itself. Time is a concept deduced from change in the empirical world. This agreement results from the common philosophical orientation of Sarvāstivāda Buddhism and Yoga, which takes the phenomenon of experience as the basis of philosophical enquiry into the structure of the world. The intention that guided Patañjali’s adaptive reuse was twofold. On the one hand, he aimed at winning the debate with Sarvāstivāda Buddhism about how the problem of temporality can be solved. He thus integrated four mutually exclusive theories on temporality into a single theory of transformation of properties (dharma) involving a second-level and a third-level theory on the transformation of the temporal characteristic mark (lakṣaṇa) and on the transformation of states (avasthā), respectively. On the other hand, Patañjali intended to achieve philosophical clarification regarding the question of how exactly properties relate to their underlying substrate in the process of transformation of the three constituents or forces (guṇa) sattva, rajas and tamas of matter (pradhāna) that account for all phenomena of the world except pure consciousness (puruṣa). Patañjali’s theory of transformation is thus of central importance for his Sā$$\dot {\text{n}}$$n˙khya ontology, according to which the world consists of 25 categories or constituents (tattva), i.e., of primal matter (prakṛti) and its transformations and pure consciousness. (shrink)

The paper aims at reconstructing the influence of Simonides on a contiguous series of Horatian poems . The starting point is provided by the discovery of new Simonidean fragments published by Peter Parsons and by Martin West in 1992. But the research casts a wider net, including the influence of Theocritus on Horace-and of Simonides on Theoocritus-and the simultaneous and competing presence of Pindar and Simonides in late Horatian lyric. The influence of Simonides is seen in specific textual pointers-e.g., a (...) simile on the death of Achilles in 4.6, the idea of caducity in 4.7-as well as in the composite role-model of Simonides, the immortalizing poet, the flexible praise-singer. Some wider questions are put in perspective: As for Horace's approach to the poetic tradition, the Roman poet is able to glance across whole genealogies of models, without necessarily making a choice, but making the invocation of several predecessors, already linked in a tradition, relevant to his new text. "Odes" 4.7, for instance, features a dialogue of Horace, Homer, Mimnermus and Simonides. The oscillation in modern criticism between an "Alexandrian" and a "classicizing" Horace could be better explained by constructing a complex model of intertextuality: "Pindar" plus "the Pindar in Callimachus"; "Simonides" plus "the Simonides in Theocritus." The dominating influence of Pindar in Book IV could be a part of a richer picture of influence, now difficult to reconstruct since all we have is the four Pindaric books of epinicia, not necessarily the only widely read choral lyric in antiquity. The reuse of early-classical praise poetry includes references to social constructs and cultural models of patronage, gift exchange, and poetic addressee: they are important in Augustan lyric precisely because they are felt as distant and impossible to recreate, and become a part of Horace's deft and often ironical negotiations with the problem of being a lyric poet in Augustan Rome. (shrink)

The subject matter of research is contradictions and moral-legal antinomies arising in the philosophy of science, in relation to a set of technologies called “Anti-Plagiarism”. The formal-logical and formal-axiological aspects of the notions “property”, “common property”, “private property”, “theft”, “plundering” and others are considered. The paper argues for the urgent necessity to allow authors unlimited reuse of any fragments of their previously published texts in their new publications actually containing novel scientific results. The condition is that such duplication is (...) indispensable for understanding and rechecking the novel discovers. The scientific novelty: theoretic arguments are exemplified by a hitherto never published new scientific result made within a discrete mathematical model of natural law of private and common ownership. (shrink)

This article examines some of the strategies adopted by the authors of Sanskrit law digests in dealing with quotations. Given the peculiar nature of the Nibandhas, which in the majority of cases are almost exclusively made of quotations from authoritative texts, citations are here not only a method to support a viewpoint, but constitute the very core of the text. In order to narrow the topic, the analysis has been restricted to a sub-category of the Dharmanibandha genre, i.e. the (...) so called dānanibandhas, the digests specialized on the rules for gifting. Given their chronological distribution, these texts can be considered representative of the tendencies emerging in this branch of literature. The focus will lie both on the general rules and conventions accepted by the various Nibandha authors, and on concrete examples of the different methods applied while quoting from the same texts. Particular attention will be given to the methodological statements detected in these works, like the incipit of Lakṣmīdhara’s Kṛtyakalpataru and that of Ballālasena’s Dānasāgara. (shrink)

Digital cultural archives and databases are promising an era of heritage democratization and an enhancement of the role of arts in everyday cultures. It is hoped that mass digitization initiatives in many corners of the world can facilitate the secure preservation of human cultural heritage, with easy access and diverse ways for creative reuse. Understanding the dialogic processes within these increasingly vast databases necessitates a dynamic conceptualization of data they contain. The paper argues that this can be found in (...) Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotic notion of text and text’s functions in culture. It elaborates on the three key characteristics of text – expression, boundary, and structure – as manifested within the digital semiosphere. At the same time, the textual dialogues within digital archives are increasingly conditioned by metadata, which is hereby conceptualized as metalanguage inducing a modeling effect on archived texts and defining their possible sphere of dynamics. To balance the explanations of creative operations of digital archives, the paper also demonstrates their auto-communicative mechanisms for facilitating cultural continuities and stability. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the scholastic technique of the Theravāda scholar-monk Chapaṭa Saddhammajotipāla. Chapaṭa is the author of several scholastic treatises in Pāli, the most voluminous of which is the Suttaniddesa, a commentary on the Pāli grammar of Kaccāyana. I offer a general introduction to the Pāli grammatical tradition and especially to the Pāli grammatical tradition of Burma, together with an introduction to the life and works of Chapaṭa. I also offer the first annotated translation of a passage from the (...) Suttaniddesa and in this way I show how the scholastic technique of Chapaṭa is based on a precise use of quotations, mainly from other Pāli or Sanskrit grammatical texts, but also from Buddhist literature. I finally give a preliminary assessment of typology and purpose of every different type of quotation. Although this paper consists mainly of preliminary work, it is the first essay entirely devoted to the Suttaniddesa, which is one of the most important grammatical works in the Theravāda tradition. (shrink)

The phyi dar or ‛later dissemination’ of Buddhism in Tibet is known to be a crucial formative period of Tibetan Buddhism; yet, many questions still wait to be answered: How did Tibetan Buddhist teachers of this time approach the Buddhist scriptures? Did they quote from books or from memory? Did they study Buddhism through original Sūtras or exegetical literature? To what degree was the text of the scriptures fixed and standardised before the Bka’ ’gyur and the Bstan ’gyur were (...) compiled? In search for some answers to questions such as these, the present article focuses on the gzhung pa or ‛scriptural tradition” of the Bka’-gdams-pa school of Tibetan Buddhism. Their works contain quotations from the Indian Buddhist scriptures that sometimes differ markedly from the mainstream editions of the Bka’ ’gyur and Bstan ’gyur. There are several possible explanations for such discrepancies: The Tibetan authors might be quoting a different Tibetan translation that was later discarded by the redactors of the Tibetan canon; they might be quoting from a secondary source such as a commentary or Buddhist anthology; or they might be quoting from memory, changing the text either deliberately or by accident. Giving examples from works of the early Bka’-gdams-pa masters this article discusses how textual deviations from the canonical versions can be explained. It will thereby provide insights into the way the Indian Buddhist scriptures were studied and transmitted in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition around the 11th–13th centuries. (shrink)

This book seeks to explain why different systems of sovereign states have built different types of fundamental institutions to govern interstate relations. Why, for example, did the ancient Greeks operate a successful system of third-party arbitration, while international society today rests on a combination of international law and multilateral diplomacy? Why did the city-states of Renaissance Italy develop a system of oratorical diplomacy, while the states of absolutist Europe relied on naturalist international law and "old diplomacy"? Conventional explanations of basic (...) institutional practices have difficulty accounting for such variation. Christian Reus-Smit addresses this problem by presenting an alternative, "constructivist" theory of international institutional development, one that emphasizes the relationship between the social identity of the state and the nature and origin of basic institutional practices. Reus-Smit argues that international societies are shaped by deep constitutional structures that are based on prevailing beliefs about the moral purpose of the state, the organizing principle of sovereignty, and the norm of procedural justice. These structures inform the imaginations of institutional architects as they develop and adjust institutional arrangements between states. As he shows with detailed reference to ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, absolutist Europe, and the modern world, different cultural and historical contexts lead to profoundly different constitutional structures and institutional practices. The first major study of its kind, this book is a significant addition to our theoretical and empirical understanding of international relations, past and present. (shrink)