When Form Becomes Substance


Book Description

This interdisciplinary volume collects contributions from experts in their respective fields with as common theme diagrams. Diagrams play a fundamental role in the mathematical visualization and philosophical analysis of forms in space. Some of the most interesting and profound recent developments in contemporary sciences, whether in topology, geometry, dynamic systems theory, quantum field theory or string theory, have been made possible by the introduction of new types of diagrams, which, in addition to their essential role in the discovery of new classes of spaces and phenomena, have contributed to enriching and clarifying the meaning of the operations, structures and properties that are at the heart of these spaces and phenomena. The volume gives a closer look at the scope and the nature of diagrams as constituents of mathematical and physical thought, their function in contemporary artistic work, and appraise, in particular, the actual importance of the diagrams of knots, of braids, of fields, of interaction, of strings in topology and geometry, in quantum physics and in cosmology, but also in theory of perception, in plastic arts and in philosophy. The editors carefully curated this volume to be an inspiration to students and researchers in philosophy, phenomenology, mathematics and the sciences, as well as artists, musicians and the general interested audience.




The Guide for the Perplexed


Book Description

Moses Maimonides was a medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher. His famous work The Guide for the Perplexed combines Aristotelian philosophy with Hebrew Bible theology.




A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets


Book Description

This Companion represents the myriad ways of thinking about the remarkable achievement of Shakespeare’s sonnets. An authoritative reference guide and extended introduction to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Contains more than 20 newly-commissioned essays by both established and younger scholars. Considers the form, sequence, content, literary context, editing and printing of the sonnets. Shows how the sonnets provide a mirror in which cultures can read their own critical biases. Informed by the latest theoretical, cultural and archival work.




Differential Heterogenesis


Book Description

This book describes about unlike usual differential dynamics common in mathematical physics, heterogenesis is based on the assemblage of differential constraints that are different from point to point. The construction of differential assemblages will be introduced in the present study from the mathematical point of view, outlining the heterogeneity of the differential constraints and of the associated phase spaces, that are continuously changing in space and time. If homogeneous constraints well describe a form of swarm intelligence or crowd behaviour, it reduces dynamics to automatisms, by excluding any form of imaginative and creative aspect. With this study we aim to problematize the procedure of homogeneization that is dominant in life and social science and to outline the dynamical heterogeneity of life and its affective, semiotic, social, historical aspects. Particularly, the use of sub-Riemannian geometry instead of Riemannian one allows to introduce disjointed and autonomous areas in the virtual plane. Our purpose is to free up the dynamic becoming from any form of unitary and totalizing symmetry and to develop forms, action, thought by means of proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction devices. After stating the concept of differential heterogenesis with the language of contemporary mathematics, we will face the problem of the emergence of the semiotic function, recalling the limitation of classical approaches (Hjelmslev, Saussure, Husserl) and proposing a possible genesis of it from the heterogenetic flow previously defined. We consider the conditions under which this process can be polarized to constitute different planes of Content (C) and Expression (E), each one equipped with its own formed substances. A possible (but not unique) process of polarization is constructed by means of spectral analysis, that is introduced to individuate E/C planes and their evolution. The heterogenetic flow, solution of differential assemblages, gives rise to forms that are projected onto the planes, offering a first referring system for the flow, that constitutes a first degree of semiosis.




Health, Rights and Dignity


Book Description

The idea that there is such a thing as a human right to health has become pervasive. It has not only been acknowledged by a variety of international law documents and thus entered the political realm but is also defended in academic circles. Yet, despite its prominence the human right to health remains something of a mystery - especially with respect to its philosophical underpinnings. Addressing this unfortunate and intellectually dangerous insufficiency, this book critically assesses the stipulation that health is a human right which - as international law holds - derives from the inherent dignity of the human person. Scrutinising the concepts underlying this stipulation (health, rights, dignity), it shall conclude that such right cannot be upheld from a philosophical perspective.




Causation and the Principle of Sufficient Reason


Book Description

The cleverest people in the world are those most capable of making the least expected connections between apparently disparate things. This book explains how light, life, mind, souls, causation, motion, energy, ontological mathematics and ontological reason are all synonymous. Are you one of the rare few capable of seeing the light? Can you see the hidden mathematical order beneath the Grand Illusion presented to our senses? Only those on the verge of Enlightenment have any hope of understanding ontological mathematics, the science of the soul, the science of the unseen light of the Universal Mind. It's all in the math. "If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like." - Hermes Trismegistus




Medieval Jewish Philosophical Writings


Book Description

Medieval Jewish intellectuals living in Muslim and Christian lands were strongly concerned to recover what they regarded as a 'lost' Jewish philosophical tradition. As part of this project they transmitted and produced many philosophical and scientific works and commentaries, as well as philosophical commentary on scripture, in Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew, the principal literary languages of medieval Jewry. This volume presents translations of seven prominent medieval Jewish rationalists: Saadia Gaon, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Moses Maimonides, Isaac Albalag, Moses of Narbonne, Levi Gersonides, Hasdai Crescas and Joseph Albo - including, for the first time in English, the complete Falaquera abridgement of Gabirol's Source of Life. These works range over topics that are both theological (e.g. the creation of the world) and philosophical (e.g. determinism and free choice), but they are characterized by two overarching principles: the unity of truth, and its accessibility to human reason.




Hegel's Grand Synthesis


Book Description

This book offers the first genuinely systematic treatment of Hegel's eschatology in the literature. It is an investigation into Hegel's project to demonstrate the ultimate unity of thought and being (consciousness and reality, self and world). The author traces the project through Hegel's epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of history. The grand synthesis creates a basic tension, an ambivalence, that reaches its most acute formulation in Hegel's eschatological language of a final completion or fulfillment of history. This conflicts with his dialectic and Heracletian metaphysics of becoming. Berthold-Bond concludes that a substantially new approach to Hegel's eschatology is needed.




Marx's 'Grundrisse' and Hegel's 'Logic' (RLE Marxism)


Book Description

Marx’s Grundrisse is acknowledged as the vital link between Marx’s early and late work. It is also a crucial text in elucidating Marx’s debt to the idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. This book, first published in 1988, is the first full-length study of that relationship, in a thorough textual analysis which makes the connections explicit and also the Grundrisse’s relations to the works of Adam Smith and Aristotle. This book argues that Marx’s critique of political economy, and his critique of Hegel, are double interrelated. Not only did Marx adapt Hegelian logic in order to analyse the economic categories crucial to modern society but it is argued that those logical categories were themselves seen as reflections of the productive processes of contemporary commercial society. Uchida reveals a conceptual structure common to the apparently rarefied world of Hegelian conceptual logic and to the supposedly common-sensical world of economic science. Demonstrating this is a considerable achievement, and it allows us to consider precisely what is valuable today in Marx’s critical commentary on this conceptual structure and on the type of society in which it is manifested. Uchida’s subject, like Marx’s, is ‘the force of capital on modern life’.




George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels


Book Description

This is the first study to argue that Jewish Mysticism influenced all Eliot's novels and not just her Jewish novel, Daniel Deronda , and leaves the reader with a very different George Eliot from that assumed by most previous criticism. Though previous studies have attempted to qualify the still-dominant view that George Eliot is firmly as part of the realistic tradition, this study goes further by demonstrating that a cohesive mythic structure with its basis in Jewish mysticism is identifiable in her fiction. Providing helpful background and factual information about the Golem and other aspects of Kabbalah, this work will appeal to anyone interested in the myth of the Golem, the re-writing of Victorian culture from a Judaic perspective, and George Eliot studies in general.