prompt stringlengths 205 775 |
|---|
Heisenberg, who at that time was my assistant, brought this period to a sudden end 5. He cut the Gordian knot by means of a philosophical principle and replaced guess-work by a mathematical rule. The principle states that concepts and representations that do not correspond to physically observable facts are not to be used in theoretical description. Einstein used the same principle when, in setting up his theory of relativity, he eliminated the concepts of absolute velocity of a body and of absolute simultaneity of two events at different places. Heisenberg banished the picture of electron orbits with definite radii and periods of rotation because these quantities |
The significance of the idea was at once clear to me and I sent the manuscript to the Zeitschrift für Physik. I could not take my mind off Heisenberg's multiplication rule, and after a week of intensive thought and trial I suddenly remembered an algebraic theory which I had learned from my teacher, Professor Rosanes, in Breslau. Such square arrays are well known to mathematicians and, in conjunction with a specific rule for multiplication, are called matrices. I applied this rule to Heisenberg's quantum condition and found that this agreed in the diagonal terms. It was easy to guess what the remaining quantities |
I was as excited by this result as a sailor would be who, after a long voyage, sees from afar, the longed-for land, and I felt regret that Heisenberg was not there. I was convinced from the start that we had stumbled on the right path. Even so, a great part was only guess-work, in particular, the disappearance of the non-diagonal elements in the above-mentioned expression. For help in this problem I obtained the assistance and collaboration of my pupil Pascual Jordan, and in a few days we were able to demonstrate that I had guessed correctly. The joint paper by Jordan and myself |
What this formalism really signified was, however, by no means clear. Mathematics, as often happens, was cleverer than interpretative thought. While we were still discussing this point there came the second dramatic surprise, the appearance of Schrödinger's famous papers 10. He took up quite a different line of thought which had originated from Louis de Broglie 11. A few years previously, the latter had made the bold assertion, supported by brilliant theoretical considerations, that wave-corpuscle duality, familiar to physicists in the case of light, must also be valid for electrons. To each electron moving free |
Wave mechanics enjoyed a very great deal more popularity than the Göttingen or Cambridge version of quantum mechanics. It operates with a wave function ψ, which in the case of one particle at least, can be pictured in space, and it uses the mathematical methods of partial differential equations which are in current use by physicists. Schrödinger thought that his wave theory made it possible to return to deterministic classical physics. He proposed (and he has recently emphasized his proposal anew's), to dispense with the particle representation entirely, and instead of speaking of electrons as particles, to consider them as a continuous density distribution jy,jz |
It appeared to me that it was not possible to obtain a clear interpretation of the ψ-function, by considering bound electrons. I had therefore, as early as the end of 1925, made an attempt to extend the matrix method, which obviously only covered oscillatory processes, in such a way as to be applicable to aperiodic processes. I was at that time a guest of the Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA, and I found there in Norbert Wiener an excellent collaborator. In our joint paper 16 we replaced the matrix by the general concept of an operator, and thus made it possible to describe |
The atomic collision processes suggested themselves at this point. A swarm of electrons coming from infinity, represented by an incident wave of known intensity (i.e., i@), impinges upon an obstacle, say a heavy atom. In the same way that a water wave produced by a steamer causes secondary circular waves in striking a pile, the incident electron wave is partially transformed into a secondary spherical wave whose amplitude of oscillation ψ differs for different directions. The square of the amplitude of this wave at a great distance from the scattering centre determines the relative probability of scattering as a function of direction. Moreover, if the scattering atom itself is capable of |
However, a paper by Heisenberg 19, containing his celebrated uncertainty relationship, contributed more than the above-mentioned successes to the swift acceptance of the statistical interpretation of the ψ-function. It was through this paper that the revolutionary character of the new conception became clear. It showed that not only the determinism of classical physics must be abandonded, but also the naive concept of reality which looked upon the particles of atomic physics as if they were very small grains of sand. At every instant a grain of sand has a definite position and velocity. This is not the case with an electron. If its position is determined with increasing |
The mathematical approximation methods which I used were quite primitive and soon improved upon. From the literature, which has grown to a point where I cannot cope with, I would like to mention only a few of the first authors to whom the theory owes great progress: Faxén in Sweden, Holtsmark in Norway 20, Bethe in Germany 21, Mott and Massey in England 22. Today, collision theory is a special science with its own big, solid textbooks which have grown completely over my head. Of course in the last resort all the modern branches of physics, quantum electrodynamics, the theory of mesons |
I should also like to mention that in 1926 and 1927 I tried another way of supporting the statistical concept of quantum mechanics, partly in collaboration with the Russian physicist Fock 23. In the above-mentioned threeauthor paper there is a chapter which anticipates the Schrödinger function, except that it is not thought of as a function y(x) in space, but as a function y,, of the discrete index n = 1, 2,... which enumerates the stationary states. If the system under consideration is subject to a force which is variable with time, y,, becomes also |
Much more difficult is the objection based on reality. The concept of a particle, e.g. a grain of sand, implicitly contains the idea that it is in a definite position and has definite motion. But according to quantum mechanics it is impossible to determine simultaneously with any desired accuracy both position and velocity (more precisely : momentum, i.e. mass times velocity). Thus two questions arise: what prevents us, in spite of the theoretical assertion, to measure both quantities to any desired degree of accuracy by refined experiments? Secondly, if it really transpires that this is not feasible, are we still justified in applying to the electron the concept |
Referring to the first question, it is clear that if the theory is correct -and we have ample grounds for believing this -the obstacle to simultaneous measurement of position and motion (and of other such pairs of so-called conjugate quantities) must lie in the laws of quantum mechanics themselves. In fact, this is so. But it is not a simple matter to clarify the situation. Niels Bohr himself has gone to great trouble and ingenuity 25 to develop a theory of measurements to clear the matter up and to meet the most refined and ingenious attacks of Einstein, who repeatedly tried to think out methods of measurement by means of |
The answer to this is no longer physics, but philosophy, and to deal with it thoroughly would mean going far beyond the bounds of this lecture. I have given my views on it elsewhere 26. Here I will only say that I am emphatically in favour of the retention of the particle idea. Naturally, it is necessary to redefine what is meant. For this, well-developed concepts are available which appear in mathematics under the name of invariants in transformations. Every object that we perceive appears in innumerable aspects. The concept of the object is the invariant of all these aspects. From this point of view, the present universally |
I am pleased to report that, as Shawn Carlson has noted, "astrology failed to perform at a level better than chance" (Nature 318, 419-425; 1985). The results from my classes are: 8.0% (n = 163 students), 8.4% (n = 155), 7.0% (n = 143), 8.0% (n = 138) and 8.0% (n = 100). In other words, as John Maddox has commented "astrology is a pack of lies … There is no |
Scientists involved in creating the huge mutant-mouse population need to recognize this need and help find a solution. The governments funding the mice and their databases are failing to create the necessary human resources. One potential solution could be a partnership among academic institutions, industry and government to develop and support an 'electronic consortium' of existing mouse pathology specialists. Their collective wisdom could be shared with interested young pathologists, using distance-learning tools. However, unlike an artist's preparatory sketches or a novelist's drafts, scientific papers describing major discoveries have gone through the process of peer review. Reviewers often make significant contributions in shaping discoveries. They suggest new |
Certainly, many problems are likely to occur when translating old languages into English. This is especially true of those languages that are no longer currently in use and especially true of those that have been completely forgotten. Some aspects of translation, such as accuracy or the effort to preserve the originality of source language (SL) meaning when translating into target language (TL), be it either old or modern language, has always been difficult and problematic. This is so regardless of which language you are translating to or from accept that when old languages are in Arabic or Persian or written in Perso-Arabic script, the magnitude of difficulty in translating is significantly |
So, absence of vowel signs in Arabic, Persian and old Turkic languages, more precisely, writing them without vowel signs in the professional form of the language using just one vowel sign to suggest several vowel signs and make people guess which vowel sign belongs to which vowels amplify the problem. For example, the letter 'aleph' -' ﺃأ'with a sign above in Arabic, Persian and old Turkic is used for each 'a', 'e', 'u', 'ü' vowels, but the letter 'aleph' -' ﺇإ'with a sign below is used for ' |
When it comes to old languages which are completely in old or forgotten language, the difficulties and contradictions are increased exponentially for some reasons. Considering that both Dresden and Berlin manuscripts of the book of Dede Korkut were written in PersoArabic script, for that reason translators are not able to preserve all correct vocalizing of the words while reading the original. Fortunately, the third copy of the manuscript stored in the Vatican Museum was inserted with vowel signs and therefore it is much easier to understand. Accordingly, due to complexity of vowel system in the phonetic system of Arabic, Persian and as well as old Turkic languages, some translators |
Copies of the manuscripts or copies of the copies may leave some difficulties or ambiguity behind, and finally cause translation of such copies to be a waste of time. In the event the original is not discovered, translators who intend to translate the old language should try to get all available copies of the original. Their next step is to put them together and compare all differences and similarities. After this comparison of all existing forms of copy, the difficult decision should be made as to which words or expressions in the manuscript to select as likely to be most authentic. If this is not done, many different and possibly dissimilar translations of one work may appear |
'excellent','smooth' etc. For example: 'She is totally cool and easygoing', 'This is a really cool setup!', 'This stuff is so cool. I am just floating'(Spears, 1975: 87) etc. Similar changes or innovations exist for other languages too. For instance, once the word for 'uchmaq'in old Shikhbabayev, N. (2013). Sociolinguistic Approach to Translation Problems: In The Example of Dede Korkut and the Quran. Ulakbilge, 1 (2), s.71-83 |
Turkic languages was a noun meaning 'paradise', but now it is only used as a verb meaning 'to fly somewhere'. As for the words like 'aytmaq' -(narrate),'esen' -(healthy), 'tanuq' -(witness), 'yom' -(good tidings), they are no longer used in the modern Turkic languages now. (Dəәmirçizadəә, 1959: 143) In old Arabic language, unlike old Turkic languages, once the letters in Arabic included no dots in the past before Islam, |
Besides, 'knowledge of the old language', of course, includes familiarity with the idiomatic phrases. There are some mistranslated idioms that we would like to share. For example, this proverb which is mentioned in the book of Dede Korkut was lost from the text during its translation into English and was used instead as if it was a typical sentence rather than a proverb. The well known proverb 'They say the neighbor's due is God's due' was translated as 'Is this not a neighbor's duty?' (Shikhbabayev, 2009: 79) like a question but not a proverb |
Fortunately, in later translations (Lewis, 1974; Mirabile, 1991) Some translators behave as though some sentences or words in old manuscripts are unnecessary and that accordingly, there is no need or advantage to translating them. Besides, we consider that translators are required to give it in a note when a word or phrase is difficult to understand or translate and they should not leave them out neither partly nor completely, and they should not even abbreviate the text while it is repetitive or difficult to understand. As in the next example, the expression for 'drawn by scribes' (Shikhbabayev, 200 |
(Paul Mirabile) Shikhbabayev, N. (2013). Sociolinguistic Approach to Translation Problems: In The Example of Dede Korkut and the Quran. Ulakbilge, 1 (2), s. (Lewis, 1974) and Paul Mirabile (Mirabile, 1991) based on other three copies (Ergin, 1994; Cəәmşidov, 1999; İsaxanlı, 2002) To sum up the research, we advise a translator intended to translate old languages written in Arabic script to become |
This thematic issue of the Journal of Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy is dedicated to the Mediterranean bioethics or as the title says to the quest for it. Recently, I came across an article written by a Croatian moral theologian and bioethicist Tonči Matulić entitled ''Researching the Roots of Mediterranean Bioethics-the Ethics of Virtue and Happiness as a condition sine qua non'' (Matulić 2007). This article tried to answer the following questions: Is there such a thing as regional Mediterranean bioethics at all and what are its foundations? Who are proponents of this approach? What is |
The final fifth contribution of this issue comes from Marseille, France from Espace éthique méditerrenéen. The authors are starting from the presumption that there are distinct ethical features between Anglo-Saxon liberal and Latin (Southern Europe) paternalist ethical traditions. They have decided to measure predominance of bioethical paradigm (principalism) by comparative analysis of regional moral opinion reflected in nation-health state laws. They attempt to ascertain the extent and nature of variation between the countries with respect to understanding the application of the principle of the autonomy. Their conclusion is that there are less regional differences thus it seems that even in the Mediterranean area we |
As you can see from the contributions all the authors are coming from the European Mediterranean countries. I also wanted to include in this issue the authors from the Middle Eastern and African part of the Mediterranean. However, these attempts were hampered by language barriers and recent events in the region. I would also like to thank Henk ten Have, Renzo Pegoraro and Marie-Jo Thiel who helped me a lot with their suggestions for some of the contributions in this issue. I think this issue will create a lot of questions and debate among its readers because of the content and approaches proposed by some of the authors. I leave it to |
The older Aldrovandi did not recall this speleological episode to celebrate Rome's visual wealth, however, but to refute the opinion of his close friend Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti that painting was more ancient than script. This was doubtful in Aldrovandi's view. Grotesques after all were no older than the Romans themselves, "otherwise Vitruvius would make reference to this." 3 They could not be compared to Assyrian letters which, Pliny testified, "have always existed," nor to the astronomical observations inscribed on "fired bricks" by the eighteen volumes containing 4,000 images of plants |
To my delight, during my last visit to the Aldrovandi archive in Bologna I stumbled upon an unpublished manuscript of his, a Trattato dei colori, which despite its title is written in Latin and is elsewhere referred to as De coloribus (MS 72) (Fig. 2). This treatise fills one of those long and narrow volumes bound in calfskin in which the naturalist regularly used to jot down his drafts. Belying its title, it is not a commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian De coloribus, as contemporaries of Aldrovandi were writing. 9 Its |
Further digging among Aldrovandi's papers uncovered two related sets of notes in separate volumes. MS 95 contains four pages enumerating ninety-four colors, each listed by its Latin name, or the Latinized version of its Greek appellation, and explained with a phrase in the vernacular, from the white Albus to Ater, the deepest black (Fig. 3). MS 40 contains a set of diagrams in Latin which expand on the previous glossary and reorganize its nomenclature around the seven-color scale attributed to Aristotle (Fig. 4). 11 While dating these writings or establishing their order |
This article provides a first introduction to these works, investigating the reasons behind their composition and their probable uses. Little of a comparable nature has survived among the papers of contemporary naturalists. Yet their value is not limited to this status of textual relic. My contention is that they should be taken as a window on the lay color practices of Renaissance virtuosi, individuals like Aldrovandi who did not belong to the art trades or produce visual artifacts (they often did not even sketch), 13 but who increasingly felt the need for a mode of analysis in their studies different from script, and became consumers and patrons of art. Overall the content |
These texts confirm that color had a central place in the identification and classification of naturalia, one it would only lose, according to David Freedberg, when a more streamlined taxonomic system based on morphological characteristics gained ground in the eighteenth century. 15 However, while considered one of the essential notae or characteristics of a specimen, color was notoriously difficult to pin down. Not only did individuals perceive hues differently, but how best to articulate this perception verbally remained an open question. 16 So did the issue of communicating the variety of colors to others, particularly when this communication occurred without the specimen, via letter or a black-and |
14 On ancient color theories, see Maria Michela Sassi, "Entre corps et lumière: Réflexions antiques sur la nature pages of schematic notes that highlighted the links in a field of knowledge, usually via branching diagrams that worked by metodo divisivo (dividing larger categories into smaller units), and were meant to be used to draw up an account of the subject in question. 46 The color table in MS 40 is a typical example of the genre (Fig. 4). Aldrovandi produced almost ninety of them with a variety of functions: from a basic outline for future works, such as the " |
Aldrovandi. To understand these, we need to recall the latter's thoughts on 'art and science', Though historians have pointed out that these pictorial conventions were often breached, the accuracy and accountability they advocated underscored the point that images had to demonstrate and instruct before they delighted the beholder. This confronted naturalists with two immediate problems: whom to entrust with their illustrations, and how best to ensure that the end product answered their needs. Naturalists were bound, often to a disadvantage, to the existing art market and its modes of representation. The flora and fauna that traditionally supplied decorative elements in paintings had to be brought |
. That artists, however, were more often casual hands is showcased by the apology presented to Aldrovandi by a correspondent, the apothecary Ippolito Geniforti, for his inability to send a drawing: his artist was busy applying a fresh coat of paint to the façade of his home. Aldrovandi's insistence on the need to capture colors correctly must be understood in relation to a specific weakness of the medium of illustration, where most of the senses on which the naturalist usually relied to know nature found themselves muted. Taste, smell and touch, which in the field and the apothecary |
If of dubious effectiveness in practice, this semantic multiplication displayed an intriguing synergy with the sustained attempts of contemporary painters at replicating luster, shine and tonal variation on canvas by experimenting with new materials. Driven by similar concerns with mimesis, sixteenth-century artists strove to reproduce the effects that light had on the appearance of objects with new smalts and glassy pigments obtained by crushing luminous glass, marble and metals. 97 For Aldrovandi the problem with the 'old materials', namely the color nomenclature inherited from Graeco-Latin literature, was the gap between the uses envisaged for it |
Several classicists, moreover, have recently argued that color terms in antiquity were more qualitative and less connected to a specific hue than we are accustomed to today: for instance caeruleus, usually associated with the sea, was not meant to suggest a 'blue' surface so much as one possessing a quality akin to the sea itself, deep and agitated. Similarly, viridis did not simply stand for greenness and for the metaphorical connotation of 'yet to grow' and hence immature that it carries to this day, but also for the state itself of 'vigor' and 'growing'. 100 In this language |
It is difficult to measure the extent to which such a layered approach to color was 'thinned out' across the centuries; and whether early modern naturalists sought to discard or simply failed to capture these inherent associations, thus 'flattening' the experience of color terminology into that of univocal visual-linguistic correspondences. When, for example, did caeruleus lose its nature of 'color of the sea' and become turquoise? Aldrovandi seems to be after such univocity, as his glossary strives to link each term with a specific hue that may be 98 found in qualitatively different |
Aldrovandi was experimenting with a language to talk across domains. According to Olmi, he supervised his artists' manufacture of pigments. 113 He certainly could consult his list before instructing his painter on a color choice-particularly when the sketching was not from life but, as was common, from third-party drawings or dry specimens, and thus the naturalist's expertise would have been a necessary corrective. As such the words and similes of his glossaries should be considered not just descriptive, but also performative. Whether he could go one step further and ask his artist to 'paint in the shade that resembles straw |
another physician, Giulio Mancini, would publish his influential Considerazioni sulla pittura, among the first painters," Aldrovandi advised the gentleman to have the drawings assessed by a "persona dell'arte" (an art dealer), so "that he may judge the value of these pictures, given that so much money is being asked." 124 Conversely, the potential conflict that seems to be at issue here, between the judgment of an expert and that of a lay connoisseur-consumer, was simply not applicable to the case of scientific illustrations. There, the rights to connoisseurship can be claimed because there |
This had a composite grammar that took its rules of composition on one side from the language of close examination and description of naturalia, and on the other from the language of philology and the activation of the textual heritage of ancients and moderns. It was a composite language which most of Aldrovandi's peers, for whom a university education intersected with an interest in nature, would have had no trouble becoming literate in. This should be taken with the caveat that this was an operative language that made sense to a humanist and was nurtured by a tradition invested in the power of the word and writing. 124 Ibid |
tion, that is, it would be the negation of all material exristence. And yet it would Dot be absolute nlegation. It might be described as the absence of position. Every past stage of evolution is nega- tive to that which immediately succeeds it, and yet it is positive to that w hich has gone before; so that if we go back to the beginni-ng of evolution, the earliest nega'tion is the most real of all existences, because it is that from which all otber existence has been derived. Tbus formed matter in ceasing to exist as such, and in |
Our experience with residency programs and our professional practice and teaching in higher education in healthcare led us to raise some concerns about the role of the preceptor in the professional training for Brazil's Unified Health System (SUS). If the preceptor participates in the health education process, by relating the work environment to the teaching environment, as one of the main players in the teaching-learning process of the residency program, he needs to have broader knowledge than the usual knowledge of the healthcare practice. In the exercise of preceptorship, the professional must master not only the clinical knowledge, but also be able to transform work experiences into learning experiences. Thus, |
Therefore, the preceptor is a mediator in the learning process and, thus, needs to mobilize knowledge and strategies that make it possible for them to perform this process, for The mastery of specialized knowledge of a given practice is not sufficient. Preceptors should be able to teach and make sure the students understand what is taught. (1). Besides, it is necessary to understand how such knowledge is transformed to originate new knowledge to be used in theory and practice (2). Because "those who know are capable of doing. Those who understand can teach" (3:14). Thus, this article was aimed to reflect on |
Over the past three decades, there has been much debate on the training of healthcare professionals regarding the consolidation of the SUS as a model of healthcare and social practice in Brazil. The discussions concern the training model, the pedagogical proposals and the challenges in the educational process, seeking to disrupt the fragmented and doctor-centered model, aiming to promote greater comprehensiveness and a stronger link between workplace and education (4). Therefore, the residency programs under the National Policy on Continuing Education (PNEP) are a strategy for training human resources for the SUS. Preceptors are part of this scenario. But what is their role? What are |
Being a professor is "exercising, in a perspective of personal wholeness, the possible mediations of the relationship of the students with the world, in order to facilitate their perception, apprehen-sion, mastery and, thus, their power to transform reality [...] requires more than mastering specific knowledge" (7:7). It requires awareness, sensitivity and, under an emancipatory vision, transforming information contents into knowledge and critical thinking about professional training (8). Teaching is more than transmitting knowledge, and it requires interaction with students in the construction of learning. It requires safety, professional competence, generosity, commitment, |
In this regard, preceptors should develop what Shulman (1) calls Knowledge Base for teaching, which is composed of seven categories of knowledge, namely: content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, curriculum knowledge; pedagogical content knowledge;, knowledge about the students and their characteristics, of educational contexts, of objective, goals and educational Of these, it is worth stressing the pedagogical content knowledge (CPC), combination of the knowledge of the subject with general pedagogical knowledge (2). According to the referred author, education should be an act of understanding, reasoning, transformation, action/thinking (1). |
Naturally, Haltof's survey method has its shortcomings: some films are granted only a few lines of discussion, while others, notably Ostatni etap/The Last Stage (Wanda Jakubowska, Poland, 1948), Ulica Graniczna/Border Street (Aleksander Ford, Poland, 1948), Korczak (Andrzej Wajda, Poland/Germany/UK, 1990) and Wielki tydzien/Holy Week (Andrzej Wajda, Poland/Germany/France, 1995) are accorded greater |
Given that the debates around Jedwabne have generated the'most prolonged and far-reaching of any discussion of the Jewish issue in Poland since the Second World War' (Polonsky and Michlic 2004: xiii), it is somewhat surprising that Haltof himself plays down the recent shifts in Polish memory around the Holocaust. Jedwabne is only mentioned a handful of times, and little attention is paid to the documentary films centering on the Jedwabne events (Haltof's book was, it should be noted, published before the release of the first fiction film that takes up many issues present |
The essayistic nature of Fredric Jameson's short new book on G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit should not blind us to the fact that the book offers a systematic interpretation of the entire inner structure of Hegel's first masterpiece. Although The Hegel Variations comes from someone for whom reading Hegel is like eating daily bread, the book is readable as an introduction to Hegel while simultaneously providing precise interpretive hints worthy of the greatest Hegel specialists. In this review, I limit myself to four variations of my own, to four interventions into the book's key topics: Hegel and the |
Jameson is right to draw attention to the fact that, "despite his familiarity with Adam Smith and emergent economic doctrine, Hegel's conception of work and labor-I have specifically characterized it as a handicraft ideology-betrays no anticipation of the originalities of industrial production or the factory system"-in short, Hegel's analyses of work and production cannot be "transferred to the new industrial situation" (68). There is a series of interconnected reasons for this limitation, all grounded in the constraints of historical experience at Hegel's disposal. First, Hegel's notion of industrial revolution was the Adam Smith-type manufacture where |
Second, Hegel could not yet imagine the way abstraction rules in developed capitalism: when Karl Marx describes the mad self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today's metareflexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like |
Is then capital the true Subject/ Substance? Yes and no. For Marx, this self-engendering circular movement is-to put it in Freudian terms-precisely the capitalist unconscious fantasy that parasitizes the proletariat as pure substanceless subjectivity; for this reason, capital's of real abstraction at its purest and much more radical than in Marx's time? In short, the highest form of ideology does not reside in getting caught up in ideological spectrality, ignoring its foundation in real people and their relations, but precisely in overlooking this Real of spectrality and in pretending to address directly real people with their real |
Capital is money that is no longer merely wealth, its universal embodiment, but value that, through its circulation, generates more value-value that mediates or posits itself, retroactively speculative self-generating dance has a limit and brings about the conditions of its own collapse. Our everyday experience tells us that the ultimate goal of capital's circulation is the satisfaction of human needs, that capital is just a means to attain this satisfaction more efficiently. Then there is the notion of capital as a self-engendering monster. In actuality, however, capital does not engender itself but exploits the worker's surplus value. There is thus a necessary |
What all this means is that the urgent task of the economic analysis today is, again, to repeat Marx's critique of political economy without succumbing to the temptation of the multitude of the ideologies of postindustrial societies. The key change concerns the status of private property: the ultimate element of power and control is no longer the last link in the chain of investments, the firm or individual who really owns the means of production. The ideal capitalist today functions in a wholly different way: investing borrowed money, "actually owning" nothing, even indebted, but nonetheless controlling things. A corporation is owned by another corporation, which is again borrowing money |
The irony is not difficult to miss here: the fact that Marx needed Hegel to formulate the logic of capital (the crucial breakthrough in Marx's work occurred in the mid1850s, when, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, he started to read Hegel's Logic again) means that what Hegel wasn't able to see was not some post-Hegelian or postidealist reality of the properly Hegelian aspect of capitalist economy. Here, paradoxically, Hegel was not idealist enough; that is, what he did not see was the properly speculative content of the capitalist speculative economy, the way the |
Jameson characterizes Understanding (Verstand), the "common-sense empirical thinking of externality, formed in the experience of solid objects and obedient to the law of non-contradiction" (119), as a kind of spontaneous ideology of our daily lives, of our immediate experience of reality. As such, it is not merely a historical phenomenon to be dissolved through dialectical critique and the practical change of relations that engender it, but a permanent, transhistorical, fixture of our everyday reality. True, Reason (Vernunft) "has the task of transforming the necessary errors of Verstand into new and dialectical |
Closely linked to this notion of ideology is Jameson's (rarely noticed, but all the more persistent) motif of the unsayable, of things better left unsaid. For example, in his review of my Parallax View (2006) in the London Review of Books, his argument against the notion of parallax is that, as the name for the most elementary split/diffraction, it endeavors to name something that is better left unnamed. In a similar way, Jameson subscribes to the Kantian tendency of (some of) today's brain scientists about the a priori structural unknowability of |
Jameson develops this impossibility to break out in his perspicuous reading of the concept of positing as the key to what Hegel means by idealism. His first move is to dialectically mediate the very opposition of positing and presupposing: The core of positing is not the direct production of objects, since such a production remains abstractly opposed to what is simply given. (I as a finite subject finds in front of me material objects and then proceeds to positing by working on them.) The core of positing concerns these presuppositions themselves-that is, what is primordially posited are presuppositions themselves |
Kant's theory-phenomenon and noumenon-looks somewhat different if it is grasped as a specific way of positing the world.... [I]t is no longer a question of belief: of taking the existence of objective reality, of the noumenon, of a world independent of human perceptions, on faith. But it is also not a question of following in Fichte's footsteps and affirming that objective reality-the noumenon, which has now become the not-Iis summoned into being by the primal act of the I, which "posits" it (now using the term in |
Rather, that beyond as which the noumenon is characterized now becomes something like a category of thinking.... It is the mind that posits noumena in the sense in which its experience of each phenomenon includes a beyond along with it.... The noumenon is not something separate from the phenomenon, but part and parcel of its essence; and it is within the mind that realities outside or beyond the mind are "posited." (29) We should introduce here a precise distinction between the presupposed/shadowy part of what appear as ontic objects and the ontological horizon of their appearing. On |
[J]ust as we always posit the anteriority of a nameless object along with the name or idea we have just articulated, so also in the matter of historical temporality we always posit the preexistence of a formless object which is the raw material of our emergent social or historical articulation. (85-86) of these prehistorical societies, with detailed descriptions of their rituals, systems of kinship, myths, etc.? The classic ethnology and anthropology were precisely studies of "prehistoric" societies, studies that systematically overlooked the specificity of these societies, interpreting them as a contrast to "civilized" societies |
This Jamesonian account nonetheless raises a number of critical points. Yes, presuppositions are (retroactively) posited, but the conclusion to be drawn from this is not This formlessness should also be understood as a violent erasure of (previous) forms: whenever a certain act is posited as a founding one, as a historical cut, the beginning of a new era, the previous social reality is as a rule reduced to a chaotic ahistorical conundrum-say, when the Western colonialists "discovered" Black Africa, this discovery was read as the contact of "prehistorical" primitives with civilized history proper, |
One should add a further qualification here: what escapes our grasp is not the way things were before the arrival of the New, but the very birth of the New, the New as it was "in itself," from the perspective of the Old, before the New managed to posit its presuppositions. This is why fantasy, the phantasmatic narrative, always involves an impossible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence-the illusion is here the same as that of alternate reality whose otherness is also posited by the actual totality, which is why it remains within the coordinates |
The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome (the rise of utilitarian market capitalism). The point of Marx is not primarily to make fun of the wild hopes of the Jacobins' revolutionary enthusiasm, to point out how their high emancipatory rhetoric was just a means used by the historical cunning of reason to establish the vulgar |
The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination. If somebody says that the world would now be better if Napoleon had never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have to adjust their minds with a jerk. The very notion is new to them. Yet it would have prevented the Prussian reaction; saved equality and enlightenment without a mortal quarrel with religion; unified Europeans and perhaps advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages |
However, a much more important critical point concerns the way Jameson formulates the dichotomy between Understanding and Reason: Understanding is understood as the elementary form of analyzing, of drawing the lines of fixed differences and identities; that is, of reducing the wealth of reality to an abstract set of features. This spontaneous tendency toward identitarian reification has to be then corrected by dialectical Reason, which faithfully reproduces the dynamic complexity of reality by way of outlining the fluid network of relations within which every identity is located. This network generates each identity and, simultaneously, causes its ultimate downfall.... This, however, is emphatically not |
We thereby search the whole world, and outer space, and end up only touching ourselves, only seeing our own face persist through multitudinous differences and forms of otherness. Never truly to encounter the not-I, to come face to face with radical otherness (or, even worse, to find ourselves in an historical dynamic in which it is precisely difference and otherness which is relentlessly being stamped out): such is the dilemma of the Hegelian dialectic, which contemporary Hegel appears, a more materialist Hegel for whom reconciliation between Subject and Substance does not mean that the subject swallows its substance, internalizing it into its |
What this also means is that Communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)appropriation of the alienated substantial content-all versions of reconciliation as "subject swallows the substance" should be rejected. So, again, reconciliation is the full acceptance of the abyss of the desubstantialized process as the only actuality there is: the subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it only emerges through the process of separation, of overcoming of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are also just a retroactive effect of the same process of their overcoming. The result is thus that there is, at both |
Such advances helped meteorologists to forecast the start of the current stratospheric warming about a week in advance. The events typically start towards the end of winter, when mountains or the contrast between warm ocean temperatures and cold land masses generate continental-scale atmospheric disturbances known as Rossby waves. If these are large enough, they can reach into the stratosphere and break like a wave over a beach, compressing and warming the air in the stratosphere above the pole. This pressure can force the strong stratospheric winds encircling the pole -the polar-night jet stream -to abruptly slow and reverse, changing from being wester |
Laureates' discovery underpins understanding of diseases such as anaemia and cancer. In 1995, Mayor, at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and his then-student Queloz made the first discovery of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star (M. Mayor and D. Queloz Nature 378, 355-359; 1995). Their work launched a field that has become one of astronomy's hottest. They detected the exoplanet through its tiny gravitational pull on its star, 51 Pegasi, a technique that is now used to study some of the more than 4, |
Peebles, who is at Princeton University in New Jersey, developed a theoretical framework that underpins modern understanding of the Universe's history (P. J. E. Peebles and J. T. Yu Astrophys. J. 162, 815; 1970). In particular, he helped to lay the theoretical foundations for the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the 'afterglow' of the Big Bang, and to establish the current'standard model' of the Universe's evolution. In this model, the mysterious substance known as dark matter plays a central part in assembling large-scale structures of the cosmos, |
The work has led researchers to develop drugs that target oxygen-sensing processes, including those in cancer. Drugs, called prolyl hydroxylase inhibitors, that prevent VHL from binding to HIF and causing its degradation are also being investigated as treatments for anaemia and renal failure. Chinese regulators approved the first of these drugs in 2018. "You could argue that some aspect of this is going to be germane to all diseases you can think of, " says Simon. Colleagues hailed the trio as role models for other scientists. "They are extremely humble people, " says Dewhirst. "All three |
The frozen embryo truly is a tiny baby. Even though this baby should not have been brought into being as he or she was, 1 now that this new person exists, he or she-like a baby conceived as a result of The Linacre Quarterly 79(3) (August 2012): 304-315. © 2012 by the Catholic Medical Association. All rights reserved. 0024-3639/2012/7903-0005 $.30/page. * I would like to thank Brandon Brown, Patrick Lee, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on a draft of this paper. A version |
Eberl fornication, adultery, rape, or incest-has the same immeasurable worth and deserves the same respect and loving care as every other human being. 2 The question is worth exploring, however, of whether the metaphysical and moral status of a "frozen" embryo is indeed the same as one living in utero. One phrase used to describe the status of a cryopreserved embryo is "suspended animation." The use of this phrase has metaphysical import insofar as "animation" is derived from the Latin word for "soul"-anima-as used by Thomas Aquinas and other Christian medieval |
According to Aquinas, all human beings are persons. 3 He adopts the definition of personhood developed by Boethius: "An individual substance of a rational nature." 4 The disposition of a human body is determined by its having a rational soul as its "substantial form." 5 As a substantial form, a rational soul is responsible for the existence of a human being, the actualization of the matter that composes a human being, and the unity of existence and activity in a human being. 6 One way to understand the notion of a rational soul as a substantial form, in contemporary terms, is to think |
A human being is not identical to either her rational soul or the matter it informs. Rather, a human being is composed of her informed material body. Aquinas concludes, "A human being is said to be from soul and body just as from two things a third is constituted that is neither of the two, hence a human being is neither soul nor body." 7 This general metaphysical account of human nature raises the specific question of when a human being first comes into existence. 8 Aquinas's explicit account of human embryogenesis has been generally rejected by contemporary scholars due to its dependence upon medieval biological information, which has been far |
My argument goes to the nature of chemically anhydrating embryos, replacing water with a cryoprotectant such as glycol, and super freezing at temperatures at which no life has been known to survive. This is a state in which the parts of the embryo are no longer in an integrated relationship: all biological activity is interrupted, and the parts are separated by the chemical solution.... Frozen and anhydrous storage is a state of suspended animation, of life, as it were, arrested. 17 But in a frozen-anhydrous state all activity ceases. The parts of the embryo are separated by the chemical |
Nevertheless, a cryopreserved embryo is "alive in the sense that it could be thawed so that life development could continue": 19 [A cyropreserved embryo] can be re-integrated through the removal of the cryopreservative, rehydration, and thawing. Dynamism can be restored by that process. He or she is therefore not dead; there is a possible future. Death, by contrast, is a permanent state. These embryos can be restored to an integrated state and to activity and development. 20 Tonti-Filippini refers to such an embryo as having a "quasi-living |
A frozen embryo will not become an adult human being without significant external interference. It is not actively developing towards any future state.... In its frozen state, the embryo will not grow, develop, or change at all over time. It is not dynamic. Its lack of active potential is not merely a matter of its chances of being selected and successfully implanted; its developmental process has been "switched off" by the freezing process, and cannot recommence without a significant change in the embryo's status. 23 Aquinas distinguishes between two types of potentiality: active and passive. If a substance, such as a typical human embryo, |
Admittedly, the claim that a cryopreserved embryo's nature is "restored" when it is thawed, rather than it being "altered" by the freezing process and then changed back, appears question-begging prima facie. However, there are at least two reasons supporting this conclusion. First, the fact that the cryopreservation process does not permanently destroy an embryo's capacity to develop into a fully actualized human person is evidence that something essentially "human" remains in the cryopreserved embryo such that it is not able to become a different type of being once it is thawed-it will either become |
Of course, sperm and ova share a similar fate of either becoming a fully actualized human person-if conception occurs-or dying after ejaculation or menstruation. As argued previously, however, we have good reason to regard a human embryo, prior to cryopreservation, as having an intrinsic active potentiality-as opposed to the passive potentiality possessed by sperm and ova-to develop into a more fully actualized human person. While it is arguable that cryopreservation reverts the embryo's active potentiality into a passive form, such an occurrence would involve a substantial change in which a nascent human person dies, her organic parts are |
We can differentiate the relevant potentialities of the different types of entities under discussion thus: 1) A sperm cell or ovum has merely a passive potentiality to develop into a person because a) each must be changed by an external agent-the other gamete-in order for such development to occur, and b) such change is not identity-preserving-each gamete ceases to exist in the process of fertilization; 2) an intact embryo, existing either in vitro or in utero, has an active potentiality to develop itself-within a supportive environment 34 -into a more fully actualized self-conscious and rational |
Second, the age-old principle of Ockham's razor applies equally well in metaphysics as it does in empirical science. In this case, on the Thomistic understanding of human nature, an extraordinarily more ontologically complex alternative awaits the denial of the claim in question. This alternative would involve the claim that a human embryo dies through the cryopreservation process-presumably once the essential water medium is removed-and then is "reanimated" when the embryo is rehydrated and thawed. Given the Thomistic conclusion that a human embryo is rationally ensouled from conception onward, regardless of whether conception occurred naturally in utero or |
It may be objected that such discontinuous existence is not metaphysically problematic at all, and I agree that there is nothing inherently problematic about an embryo ceasing to exist, her parts being preserved, and then those parts coming to compose a numerically distinct embryo. It is, nonetheless, an inelegant picture that should not be preferredabsent prior ontological presuppositions-to a competing explanation that satisfactorily accounts for an embryo's persistent numerical identity throughout this procedure. And while it is true that the embryo's life functions have (temporarily) ceased, it does not necessarily follow that the embryo itself has ceased to exist, so |
A human embryo's moral status, from the Thomistic perspective, whether it is developing in utero or is frozen, follows from its metaphysical status as a person. A human person has a fundamentally intrinsic value due to being a living, sentient, and rational substance. Rationality, on Aquinas's view, is the highest capacity found among natural substances because it enables a person to come to know universal conceptual truths and to determine their own actions. 38 Hence, he says, the term "person" is attributed to rational beings insofar as they have a special dignity-i.e., a particularly high degree of intrinsic value among natural |
Until May, 1924, patient felt better generally-except for frequency of micturition, especially at night (five to seven times). Vision much improved, -can now read newspaper. Slight weakness of right side of tongue and left side of face. Pupils react sluggishly to light and weakly to accommodation. Double extensor responses. Knee-jerks exaggerated. In Mav, 1924, passing 70 to 110 oz. of pale urine of low specific gravity (1005). 1 c.c. of pituitrin did not raise the specific gravity. Much thirst. Sugar tolerance |
Is passing 60 to 90 oz. (incomplete) of pale urine, specific gravity 1001 to 1002. No albumin, no sugar, no blood. White deposit of phosphates. Blood-sugar curve shows hyperglyc8emia. X-ray shows some thickening of floor of pituitary fossa and of bone below this, around sella turcica. The alteration in the blood-sugar curve and in the X-ray appearance of the pituitary fossa in the last eight months, pointing to a prolonged hyperglycamia of the type associated with hyper-pituitarism, |
One puzzle, or paradox (Reiss, 2012), concerning highly idealized models is whether and under what conditions they explain. The paradox is that models * I would like to thank audiences at the EIPE 20th Anniversary, INEM 2017, and EPSA 2017 conferences for helpful questions and comments. Special thanks also to James Grayot and the two anonymous referees of this journal for extensive and valuable suggestions on earlier versions of this article. The published version of this article will appear in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa |
seem to misrepresent reality, and yet appear to be explanatory despite the fact that our best theories of scientific explanation (Woodward, 2003; Strevens, 2008) require faithful representation for successful explanation. For some commentators, one way out of this conundrum is to view these models as providing 'how-possibly explanations' (HPEs hereafter) (Craver, 2006; Forber, 2010; Reydon, 2012; Grüne-Yanoff, 2013a; Bokulich, 2014; Ylikoski and Aydı |
This response, however, raises two sets of issues. First, existing views attribute different features to HPEs. There are two important families of accounts, which I call the Dray-type and the Hempel-type. While the Dray-type (Dray, 1968; Forber, 2010) considers HPEs and HAEs to be a different species of explanation, the Hempel-type (Hempel, 1965; Brandon, 1990; Bokulich, 2014) The second issue concerns the relationship between highly idealized models and HPEs. Many models appear |
I aim to provide an account of HPEs that clarifies their nature in the context of solving the puzzle of model-based explanation. More precisely, to address the first issue I argue that the modal notions of 'actuality' and 'possibility' provide the relevant dividing lines between HPEs and HAEs. The crucial feature that distinguishes HAEs from HPEs is neither the type of questions they answer nor the empirical truth of the former and the falsehood of the latter, but instead the sort of knowledge they provide. Whereas HAEs provide knowledge of actual explanations, HPEs provide knowledge of possible explanations |
To address the second issue, I emphasize the need to make a distinction between model and world propositions. According to my account, HPEs are world propositions of the form '♦(p because q)'. What model propositions (e.g., unrealistic assumptions) do is to give reasons to believe in the truth of the possibility claim. In other words, they provide evidence for HPEs (cf. Claveau and Vergara Fernández, 2015). The prima facie issue of viewing models as HPEs dissolves when one properly takes into account the distinction between model and world propositions as well as the |
true (Hempel, 1965) potential (Hempel, 1965) pseudo-explanation (Resnik, 1991) how-actually (Dray, 1968) possible explanations how-possibly (Dray, 1968) how-plausibly (Machamer et al., 2000) potential how-actually (Reydon, 2012) global how-possibly (Forber, 2010) genuine explanations in need of explananda (Reydon, 2012) possible explanation why-necessarily (Dray, 1968) local how- |
Hempel rejected the assertion that HPEs were a distinct species of explanation and therefore did not believe it was necessary to characterize them further. Even though some accounts (Salmon, 1989; Brandon, 1990; Craver, 2006 ; see also Bokulich, 2014) Craver maintains that how-possibly models "are purported to explain, but they are only loosely constrained conjectures about the mechanism that produces the explanandum phenomenon" (2006, 361). In these two cases, the use of HPEs is closer to the Hempel-type than to Dray |
But is it not only a language problem? What is really at stake if scholars misidentify 'potential' explanations as 'how-possibly' explanations? The problem is that the confusion occurs not only at the semantic level. In many debates on theoretical models, the concept of HPE is mobilized to account for their epistemic contribution (Brandon, 1990; Cooper, 1996; Craver, 2006; Aydınonat, 2007; Grüne-Yanoff, 2013b,a; Rohwer and Rice, 2013; Bokulich, 2014; Y |
It is explanatory and provides understanding, they say, because "the model is still able to answer certain key how-possibly questions (Resnik, 1991; Forber, 2010; Reydon, 2012) " (Rohwer and Rice, 2013, 349). In all fairness, Rohwer and However, what I want to show is that neither the Dray-type nor the Hempel-type are fully adequate. To do so, it suffices to briefly consider the case of Schelling's (1971; 1978) checkerboard model of residential segregation. The most popular |
The model is not strictly speaking a Hempel-type potential explanation because it goes beyond meeting the internal conditions. The model does not only tell us how certain consequences can be derived. When considering the model, "we see it is possible that preferences for not living in a minority status bring about segregation. But that it is possible does not imply that it actually happens in this way. This is therefore different from offering a merely internally correct explanation and from providing a HAE. Furthermore, there is a prima facie puzzle on the standard reading of the Hempel-type since it was not developed to deal with the idealizations models typically contain. Laws |
All the preceding quotes suggest that HPEs have something to do with the modality of the explanation. The use of words like'might', 'could', and 'possibility' are all modal terms. It is interesting to see that regardless of one's specific position in the debate over HPEs, a common idea is that HPEs provide modal information. What I take to be the defining feature of HPEs is therefore not the type of question they answer nor their degree of empirical confirmation, but rather that they contribute to our knowledge of the possibility of certain states of affairs. HAEs, on the contrary, |
The first question we may then ask is whether HPEs and HAEs have the same internal conditions, viz., do they have the same structure or form? In its general form, an explanation "is a set of propositions with a certain structure" (Strevens, 2013, 510 In this formulation, how the modality of the possibility operator should be interpreted is deliberately left open. This is an essential feature of the characterization I propose. Modality comes in various sorts, e.g., epistemic, metaphysical, causal, logical, nomic, etc. (see Kment, 2017 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.