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From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
... Dick 1980, 1, 8-14, 22-27 ja passim; Dick 1982, 176-190; Henry 2002, 95-97, 126;Koyré 1979, ...
... 105 Kepler: Opera II, 501. 106Koyré 1979, 58, 61-64, 72-76, 86-87 ja 58-87 passim. 107 Holton 1988 ...
[Conceptions of Similarity of the Heavenly Bodies to the Earth and of Extraterrestrial Life in European Natural Philosophy during the First Half of the Seventeenth Century. Master's Thesis in General History. Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 2003.]
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/13055
The 17th century was a period of revolutionary development, as far as the natural sciences and scientific world view are concerned. This was especially the case in astronomy, where the Copernican, or heliocentric, theory gradually began to gain more supporters. Many of its proponents thought that, in contrast to the prevailing world view, there was no longer any reason to argue that the Earth differs from other celestial bodies. The majority of those who supported traditional cosmology felt the position of man at the top of creation to be threatened by the placement of the Earth among the planets, instead of the centre of the universe. Thus, this was not just a theoretical disagreement, but a fundamental contradiction in world view.
The idea of the Earth-likeness of the celestial bodies is usually followed by the question of extraterrestrial life. Indeed, several natural philosophers were intensively considering the matter, especially after the telescope had been introduced as an astronomical observation tool in 1609. This thesis explores mainly astronomical literature published in different European countries between 1596 and 1659, as well as some unpublished drawings of the Moon. The aim of the study is to examine the views of natural philosophers on the plurality of the worlds, namely the existence of many worlds similar to the Earth, and to refine the image of the scientific debate on the subject created by historical research to date. The approach followed in this thesis can be defined as the history of ideas and concepts in the cosmological world view.
From the sources studied it becomes clear that the question of Earth-likeness of the celestial bodies, and even the possibility of life on them, arose permanently on par with other scientific problems as early as the 1610s, even though the methods of the time did not provide satisfactory means to resolve the question. In the early stages, the subject was only discussed in passing, but gradually its weight seems to have increased. Those who welcomed the plurality of worlds also supported heliocentric cosmology, but not necessarily the other way around.
The writers' attention was chiefly directed to our nearest celestial body, the Moon. Texts describing the Moon's surface and its mapping, i.e. selenographical sources, tell a great deal about the perceptions of their authors. The sources of this study are divided into two groups: first, planetography, which emphasizes visual observation of the heavenly bodies; and second, speculative texts, where the question is approached mostly by means of reasoning. In addition to astronomical sightings, the most important arguments used in the works are Earth analogies, teleology, the tenets of Christianity, and appealing to previous writings. The preconceptions of natural philosophers played a decisive role in their interpretation of visual perceptions.
... Aus Sicht Lacans bedeutet dies offenbar, dass das mit Kopernikus assoziierte heliozentrische Weltbild nur scheinbar eine Revolution darstellt und auch nicht das ist, was Freud als eine der drei historischen Kränkungen der menschlichen Eigenliebe bezeichnet (Jacques Lacan 1988a, 23-24;2013, 23;Sigmund Freud 2000a, 283-284). Lacan be ruft sich hier auf den Philosophie-und Wissenschaftshistoriker Alexandre Koyré (1957), der davon ausgeht, dass das mathematische Verständnis der modernen Galilei'schen Wissenschaft die mittelalterliche Vorstellung eines wohlgeordneten, hierarchisch organisierten und geschlossenen Kosmos ablöste (vgl. Elisabeth Roudinesco 2011, 94;Jacques Lacan 2015g, 402). ...
... Dass Newton einen "Zipfel" entdeckt hat, scheint einerseits darauf hinzuweisen, dass er letztlich hinter dem zurückbleibt, was Lacan als revolutionär erachtet, und andererseits erinnert es daran, dass man vom Realen keine vollständige Kenntnis erlangen kann. 59 Lacan, der von den Überlegungen des Philosophie-und Wissenschaftshistorikers Alexandre Koyré (1957) beeinflusst ist, deutet an, dass die mathematische Physik ein Weltbild in Frage stellt, welches zu sehr an der Idee eines wohlgeordneten, bedeutungsvollen Kosmos festhält. Er beruft sich stattdessen auf einen mit der mathematischen Physik möglich gewordenen "Weg der kleinen Gleichungen" (Jacques Lacan 2006b, 83), auch mit dem Hinweis, dass es keine Formel für das Geschlechtsverhältnis geben kann. ...
Anthropocentrism and the fact that some animals are just considered a means to an end while others are loved are often subject to criticism in animal ethics. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, the author examines how the apparent ambivalence in human–animal relationships is based on different forms of enjoyment. Referring to the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, which according to Lacan define human reality, the author shows how enjoyment and its limits shape, for example, how we think about pets, farm animals or wild animals. This alternative perspective will contribute to a better understanding of the challenges in human–animal relationships.
... There are countless studies on the history of the concept of space (see, for instance, the following monographs on the general characteristics [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]). This notwithstanding, here, I attempt to offer a new contribution. ...
... Generally it is sustained, see for instance [15,16] (Introduction), that at the beginning mathematicians focused their attention on figures, rather than to the ambient space; thus, theirs was a geometry of figures; only later was space considered explicitly as an independent concept. Alexandre Koyré in his famous text From the closed world to the infinite universe of 1957 [7] attributes an important role to Euclidean geometry in forming the idea of infinite space, and he seems quite convincing. Edward Grant, on the other hand, argues that in no case did the discussions on the nature of space and its finiteness refer to Euclidean geometry, from Archytas of Tarentum to Pierre Gassendi [2] (p. ...
The concept of space, ubiquitous among all humans from birth, has changed profoundly in the course of the history of Western civilization, the only one to be considered here. An important contribution to this change was the theoretical elaborations of the philosophers of nature and mathematicians, started in Ancient Greece. Here, the process is considered up to Newton, when the concept of space for physicists, who then replaced the traditional philosophers of nature, took on a connotation that remained substantially undisputed for two centuries—that of absolute space.
... On the path that leads from this break in Hellenism caused by imperial logic to the universalization of compassion, four stages have been historically decisive: 1) the emergence of Christianity, and especially the intellectual influence of St. Paul; 2) the humanism of the Renaissance, where the value of "human dignity" is recognized; 3) the revolution in the physical sciences, which substitutes, according to the remarkable formula of Alexandre Koyré (Koyré 1968), the "infinite universe for the closed world"; 4) the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which finally enshrines the brotherhood of men through their presumed equality (Audi 2008: 185-202). ...
The Anthropocene refers to the geological era in which man - anthropos - has become a geophysical force transforming the biosphere. This period is marked by a lack of compassion and understanding of our environments - a total detachment from our biospheric reality. If care is everything we do to repair and maintain this world, what does this process entail in the Anthropocene? This paper addresses the importance of taking care seriously. We look at care in the Anthropocene and its interconnections with the notions of vulnerability and compassion from both a philosophical and anthropological perspective.
... The tradition of seven rulers of time, seven planetary metals, seven colors has its roots already in Babylonian times (Almarantis 2005) and come to the European tradition in the astronomy (Ptolemaic system of celestial spheres), in the Christianity (e.g. seven epoches in Revelation of St. John), or the hermetic tradition as a pre-stage to modern science (Yates 1964, Koyré 1968, Robert, McGuire Westman 1977. ...
The article focuses on a statistical analysis of the colour changes in European national flags over the years 1900-2020. The state flag has become the primary distinguishing symbol for all independent states in an international environment. Colours on European flags during the 20th century underwent several changes in the context of historical development. The author examines colours as an expression of collective emotion. The changes of colour occurrence are monitoring by using statistical methods as the linear regression and frequency analysis. The paper focuses on the dynamics of colour changes, according to the percentage of occurrence of all existing national flags, which were officially approved by the national parliaments. Research found, that only the primary seven colours accompany the modern European flag history (i.e. red, black, white, blue, green, orange and yellow). The colours on state flags refer to the long-term trends of the collective emotions (as universal emotions of P. Ekman, or moral emotions of J. Haidt). Methodo-logically, the author is inspired by current approaches of generative social sciences, cliodynamics or color psychology (especially theory of colors by Johann Wolfgang Goethe).
... His doctrine of ideas or eternal forms of reality was conceived with this very intention. In Timaeus, one of Plato's latest works, the Greek philosopher, who had previously apparently rejected the idea of investigating the physical world, much more imperfect than the ideal world of eternal forms, proposed a method of inquiry, involving mathematics, which is supposed to be one of the bases for modern physical science (Koyré, 1968). ...
Western philosophy has always stressed the importance of understanding the very nature of the universe and the relationship between humanity and the cosmos. Nowadays, astrobiology is used to shed light on that issue through a set of empirical data. Also, the Fermi paradox and the Rare Earth hypothesis could offer a suitable ground to properly interpret the proofs emerging from space exploration and direct and indirect observations from astronomers, that is, “we are likely the only intelligent species within the universe.” From this, we can say that maybe we are confronted with a cosmic bet. We should better wager on our cosmic importance as a species, otherwise the loss could be immense: the disappearance of the only species through which the universe enabled itself to understand its own secrets and cosmic treasures.
... Regarding the relationship between capitalism and the "infinite" nature of economy, Emanuel Wallerstein, an American sociologist, argues that modern capitalism can be defined as a system which presupposes an infinite increase in capital(Wallerstein, 2004).2 In the context of science, AlexandreKoyre (1968), a prominent historian of science in the 20th century, discussed that the fundamental transformation of worldviews from the closed and finite system of meanings and order to the infinite universe took place in the rise of modern science. ...
A wide range of research across academic disciplines including brain sciences, psychology and social sciences are paying attention to the cooperative or altruistic aspects of human behavior or human beings. This can be regarded as an essential departure from the basic paradigm of modern science or the modern model about human beings, which characterizes them as independent or atomistic individuals maximizing self-interests. While there may be a myriad of factors behind such a shift, attention can be focused on one socio-economic factor: the state of a society as determined by the “finite” versus “infinite” character of the total volume of resources and environment. This perspective is explored in this article through theoretical and historical viewpoints and future directions for the “reintegration of economy and ethics” in the post-growth society are presented.
... One might, indeed, compare Leonardo's Vitruvian emblem with its near contemporary, Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia (1514), where the two images relate to the 'closed world' of both the European pre-Christian era and that of the medieval Church Fathers, distinct from the 'infinite universe' that was to come (Koyré 1957). The different pathos of experience evoked in these two European icons retain their fascination -even in a world of nuclear energy, of the Internet, of climate change, and of all that is now critically conceived of as 'the Anthropocene'because they are haunted by what is already broken (cosmically and temporally) in and for a European imaginary; at least, in so far as this imaginary still speaks Greek (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017: 112). ...
Adopting the term from the work of French-Algerian artist, Kader Attia, this essay reflects on what ‘repair’ offers for a reading of decolonising practices of knowledge, addressing the cosmological besides the historical. In contrast to the ‘modern Western’ expectation of the work of repair, in which a break or wound is rendered invisible, Attia advocates the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of kintsugi, in which repair is even highlighted with gold dust – an illumination of fracture that foregrounds an object’s transformation through the visible simultaneity of both the damage and its repair. Repair, here, is a thought-image of and for an anti-essentialism, challenging a cultural politics of ‘identity’ in which claims of and for an ‘original’ status that has been lost could be (ideally) redeemed or restored. The following discussion explores the resonances of this conception within an iconology of decolonialism, where the conceptual potential of repair connects with a cultural politics of what one might call ‘demodernism’ – addressing a correspondence, rather than simply a break, between pre- and post- in the historical self-definition of the ‘modern’.
... upšarrūtu represented and interpreted reality for the cuneiform scholars? Of course, that question makes no sense for a scientific realist, exactly the position the contextualists and 9 There are other formulations, and van Fraassen takes account of many of them in the book from which this definition was quoted (van Fraassen 1980 The restoration of scientific ideas to a place of significance in accordance with the contextualist method of Thomas Kuhn (1962), Quentin Skinner (1969), and Alexandre Koyré (1957) before them, was a crucial step in the critique of ahistorical claims to a universal representational goal of scientific epistemology. Scientific ideas in historical context often fly in the face of realist aspirations for science to reveal knowledge of the true way of nature. ...
Over the course of many centuries, cuneiform scribe-scholars produced a textual culture of learning that organized knowledge of the phenomenal world as defined by their particular interests. The ancient term for this culture was ṭupšarrūtu “the art of the scribe.” That we grant this culture the designation scientific is not without problems from the perspectives both of modern philosophy of science and of conventional historiography of science. This essay reflects on the anachronisms entailed in transposing such ideas about science to the premodern cuneiform world and the consequences these ideas have on a historiography of science inclusive of cuneiform scientific texts.
... Additive and linear models are now supplemented by non-additive, dynamic and non-linear ones. The ontological idea of a closed universe, an idea which came out of the Middle Ages, and which still characterized Hegel's thought, became replaced, as Koyré (1965Koyré ( , 1968 notes, by the conception of an open universe characterized by infinite possibilities, uncertainty, and chance. ...
This is the first collection focusing on knowledge socialism, a particularly apt term used to describe a Chinese socialist mode of production and socialist approach to development and modernity based around the rise of peer production, new forms of collaboration and collective intelligence. Making the case for knowledge socialism, the book is intended for students, teacher, scholars and policy theorists in the field of knowledge economy.
... It is worth mentioning, but not elaborating, that both Koyré and Kojève had Cosmist roots: the former, who is generally known for his explanation of the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution in terms of the shift 'from the closed world to the infinite universe' (Koyré 1957), published the first French book on so-called 'Slavophile' philosophy in 1950, while the latter did his PhD in Heidelberg under Karl Jaspers on Vladimir Solovyov, the Cosmist philosopher who introduced Hegel to Russia. We see already in the thought of the original Cosmist, Nikolai Federov (1829-1903, but then developed by his latter day follower, Vasily Kuprevich (generally known as the founder of Soviet gerontology), a much more explicit version of Dobzhansky's view about the collective benefit of individual deaths for humanity's cosmic advancement. ...
P> Nietzschean Meditations takes its inspiration from the version of Nietzsche that was popular before the Second World War, which stressed the ‘Zarathustrian’ elements of his thought as the harbinger of a new sort of being – the Übermensch . The book updates the image of this creature to present a version of ‘transhumanism’ that breaks with the more precautionary and pessimistic approaches of humanity’s future in contemporary ‘posthumanist’ thought. Fuller follows Nietzsche in discussing deeply and frankly the challenging issues that aspiring transhumanists face. They include their philosophical and especially theological roots, the implications of transhumanism for matters of life and death, and whether any traces of classical humanity will remain in the ‘transhuman’ being.</P
... The transition from a closed world to an infinite universe (Koyré 1957) was not easy for Medieval and Renaissance cosmologists, nor did it happen in a single leap, nor did it happen in a gradualistic evolutionary straight line. Rather, it advanced on many fronts as multiple working hypotheses (Chamberlain 1890) were offered competitively to escape the limits of earlier theories. ...
There is a contradiction between the fact that societal endogamy characterizes
most models of Australian Aboriginal systems of descent, marriage and kinship, while
societal exogamy, which is freely acknowledged by most observers, widely reported in the
ethnographic literature and necessary for Aboriginal survival, is commonly missing from
those models. In a field characterized by the modeling of formal relational systems of
enormous complexity within societies, surely it is remarkable that representations and
analyses of comparable complexity rarely address relations between and among Aboriginal Nations and their constituent societies. The tradition of building endogamous, generationally closed cognitive models of exogamous, behaviorally open societies is valuable for some purposes but is lacking in realism. Drawing on research in demography, genetics, kinship, historical linguistics, ecology and archaeology, I advocate moving beyond cognition and dealing with the facts of life as well.
O objetivo deste trabalho é fazer um esboço de alguns dos aspectos da sociologia do direito de Max Weber, relacionando-os com os seus textos metodológicos, pressupostos epistemológicos e compromissos éticos substantivos. Busca-se verificar se há no pensamento de Weber evidências contra ou a favor da descrição que Jeremy Waldron fez do papel “desmoralizante” que a modernidade e o desencantamento de mundo realizam no sistema
jurídico e na vida cultural das pessoas e das sociedades. Também se pretende indagar se este papel nos autoriza a interpretar Max Weber como um pessimista cultural e o que pode significar
comprometer-se com uma tal perspectiva.
Este livro consiste em um estudo da ideia de líder forte no pensamento político de Max Weber, que foi influente no desenho constitucional do Presidente Plebiscitário da República de Weimar (1918-1933) e, indiretamente, nos seus desdobramentos ditatoriais. O estudo investiga a hipótese de Wolfgang Mommsen em Max Weber and German Politics 1890-1920 – de que o conceito de legitimidade carismáticoplebiscitária elaborado por Weber informou o argumento de Carl Schmitt em defesa do Golpe contra a Prússia. A recepção de Schmitt, segundo Mommsen, seria consistente com o programa weberiano em razão do agnosticismo moral, pessimismo histórico e nacionalismo de Max Weber. A dissertação indaga quanto à legitimidade dessa recepção, buscando nas manifestações políticas, sociológicas e metodológicas de Weber elementos para descrever uma possível filosofia política. O objetivo do trabalho é questionar se esta filosofia política é ou não compatível com o uso antiliberal que dela foi feito.
From a historical perspective, it is worth focusing on the context in which CopernicusCopernicus, N. lived and worked as well as on his scientific points of reference.
In the context of an interdisciplinary approach aimed at pointing out the interconnections between science and philosophy in the early modern centuries, no author is probably more interesting than Leibniz.
With regard to cosmology, Galileo was not an original thinker. He adhered to the Copernican system of the world and did not elaborate it further: he did not investigate the details of the form of the planetary orbits, he remained faithful to the traditional idea of their circular form and always rejected Kepler’s theory of elliptical orbits.
DescartesDescartes, R.’ philosophy is one of the most studied and debated subject in the whole history of philosophy because of the innovative character of his metaphysics and theory of knowledge.
After the Copernican revolution, it was clear that the experience of vision could no longer be considered a completely reliable source of knowledge due to the optical relativity of motion. Furthermore, new optical instruments (telescope, microscope) pointed out the epistemological problem of the limits of human vision. However, the spatial-visual representation of physical phenomena by geometry remained a stalwart scientific practice and the source of certain conclusions. But, as is known, the algebraization of geometry by Descartes’s analytic geometry broke the correspondence between arithmetic or algebra and its intuitive geometric meaning. In mathematical semiotics, we passed from iconic symbols to arbitrary signs. The change led to a reduction of geometry to algebraic calculus and the abandonment of visual geometric thought. The analytical geometry of Descartes, on the other hand, involved a new geometric visualization of physico-mathematical relations. The birth of non-Euclidean geometries, the special and general relativity theories, and the four-dimensional representation of space–time inspired a new chrono-geometric graphic representation. Quantum physics and quantization of space–time required a completely new mathematical creative imagination to understand Nature.KeywordsVisual thinkingAncient geometryModern scienceDescartes’s analytic geometryRelativityQuantum physics
I argue that Henry More contributed to a climate of receptivity towards Descartes in Cambridge at the time when Newton first encountered Cartesianinism as a student there. I emphasise More’s interest in Cartesian natural philosophy rather than in Cartesian metaphysics by highlighting his neglected, ‘Epistola H. Mori ad V.C.’, which was in fact his most re-published work. I show that this defends Cartesian a natural philosophy as an improvement on existing theories, despite what More saw as its shortcomings. Furthermore, this is a position which More continued to maintain despite his reservations about Cartesian mechanism. While we cannot be certain what impact More’s views may have had on Newton, this more positive assessment of More’s engagement with Cartesian natural philosophy requires us reconsider the prevailing view that More rejected Cartesianism in his later years.
This paper provides epistemological support for one of Hume's numerous critiques of the teleological arguments for God's existence. Hume explores the following question: can we explain the observed harmony of the universe without appealing to the work of an intelligent creator? The answer, presented through the character of Philo, appears to be positive. I will try to defend this position. Following Hume's theory of space, and exploring the relation between ideas of the whole and relation, I will show the universe can be seen as finite space with definite numbers of parts which are spatially and causally interconnected. Because all changes occur on the basis of Hume's principle of causation, we can say the harmony of the universe is established and maintained precisely because of the changes happening on the basis of causation. If this is the case, the role of the intelligent creator appears to be redundant.
Beginning 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn has had a significant impact across the academy and on culture more widely. And he had a great impact on science education research, theorising, and pedagogy. For the majority of educators, the second edition (1970) of his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1970a) articulated the very nature of the science, the discipline they were teaching. More particularly, Kuhn’s book directly influenced four burgeoning research fields in science education: Children’s Conceptual Change, Constructivism, Science-Technology-Society studies, and Cultural Studies of Science Education. This paper looks back to the Kuhnian years in science education and to the long shadow they cast. The discipline of science education needs to learn from its past so that comparable mistakes might be averted in the future. Kuhn’s influence was good and bad. Good, that he brought HPS to so many; bad, that, on key points, his account of science was flawed. This paper will document the book’s two fundamental errors: namely, its Kantian-influenced ontological idealism and its claims of incommensurability between competing paradigms. Both had significant flow-on effects. Although the book had many positive features, this paper will document how most of these ideas and insights were well established in HPS literature at the time of its 1962 publication. Kuhn was not trained in philosophy, he was not part of the HPS tradition, and to the detriment of all, he did not engage with it. This matters, because before publication he could have abandoned, modified, or refined much of his ‘revolutionary’ text. Something that he subsequently did, but this amounted to closing the gate after the horse had bolted. In particular, the education horse had well and truly bolted. While educators were rushing to adopt Kuhn, many philosophers, historians, and sociologists were rejecting him. Kuhn did modify and ‘walk back’ many of the head-turning, but erroneous, claims of Structure. But his retreat went largely unnoticed in education, and so the original, deeply flawed Structure affected the four above-mentioned central research fields. The most important lesson to be learnt from science education’s uncritical embrace of Kuhn and Kuhnianism is that the problems arose not from personal inadequacies; individuals are not to blame. There was a systematic, disciplinary deficiency. This needs to be addressed by raising the level of philosophical competence in the discipline, beginning with the inclusion of HPS in teacher education and graduate programmes.
The Triumph of Uncertainty offers a unique autobiographical overview of how science as a discipline of thought has been characterized by philosophers and historians over the past century. Tauber frames his account through science’s – and his own personal – quest for explanatory certainty. During the 20th century, that goal was displaced by the probabilistic epistemologies required to characterize complex systems, whether in physics, biology, economics, or the social sciences. This “triumph of uncertainty” is the inevitable outcome of irreducible chance and indeterminate causality. And beyond these epistemological limits, the interpretative faculties of the individual scientist (what Michael Polanyi called the “personal” and the “tacit”) invariably affects how data are understood. Whereas positivism had claimed radical objectivity, post-positivists have identified how a web of non-epistemic values and social forces profoundly influence the production of knowledge. Tauber presents a case study of these claims by showing how immunology has incorporated extra-curricular social elements in its theoretical development and how these in turn have influenced interpretive problems swirling around biological identity, individuality, and cognition. The correspondence between contemporary immunology and cultural notions of selfhood are strong and striking. Just as uncertainty haunts science, so too does it hover over current constructions of personal identity, self knowledge, and moral agency. Across the chasm of uncertainty, science and selfhood speak.
Did science, as we know it, have to be? The article explores a possible response in the negative, organized around a specific contingency: that of Greek mathematics or, even more specifically, that of the mathematics of the generation of Archimedes. The argument is that (1) Greek mathematics, seen against a cross-cultural comparison, is an anomaly, (2) the scientific revolution, as it in fact unfolded, was directly shaped by the anomaly of Greek mathematics, and (3) it is not clear that, absent Greek mathematics, an equivalent scientific revolution would have taken place. The argument is developed in some detail concerning the history of ancient Greek science, but more is said on the inevitably philosophical questions of counterfactuals in history and on the specific question of the contingency of science.
According to the Copernican myth, geocentrism was a form of anthropocentrism because it showcased humankind as being both the centre and the purpose of the Cosmos, whereas heliocentrism, in dethroning humankind from this privileged position, luckily provided a means to quash this point of view, which was illusory and vain, and that even went against scientific progress. According to the anthropocentric myth, which is a part of it, geocentrism is a form of anthropocentrism, while heliocentrism is really an anti-anthropocentrism and not simply a non-anthropocentrism. This article, in the form of a dialogue, questions these two myths, looking in particular for the causes of their appearance, among which is a guilty anachronism.
While “life” does not seem to constitute a problem per se in the seventeenth century, especially regarding the question of an ontological distinction between the living and the non-living (see Wolfe 2011), the recognition of specific vital mechanisms in the early eighteenth century underlying the formation, growth and organization of living entities, such as “intusscusception”, can be seen as a condition under which “life” gradually emerged as an ontological problem. In this paper I investigate the role played by the conceptualization of metabolic processes, especially nutrition, in the emergence of a specific ontological category, i.e. how living entities were gradually separated from inert entities. In this nutrition-centered approach (rather than reproduction-centered), the contribution of nutrition to the emergence of the ontological problem of life and to the elucidation of the material (especially chemical) processes that support it implied the identification and differentiation of mechanisms proper to organic beings. This chapter focuses on early attempts made to characterize such mechanisms under the concept of “intussusception” and, against the received view (see Roger 1979, 1993; Duchesneau 2003; Cheung 2006; Mensch 2015; Schmitt 2014), proposes a revised genealogy of its formation.
In The Fold (1988), Gilles Deleuze argues that if the Baroque period establishes the concept of total art or the unity of the arts, then it does so in extension. Each art form extends to another art form. To this “extensive unity” – this “universal theatre” – he adds the Elements; we can say the epigene. The philosopher writes: “[t]his extensive unity of the arts forms a universal theatre that includes air and earth, and even fire and water.” According to Giovanni Careri, writing in Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion (1995), the interiors of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's are the most complete realisation of the bel composto. In these chapels, the interiors function as complete autonomous organisms in and of themselves. A theatrical dimension is associated with this autonomous operation. Careri adds another insight. He argues that the proliferations of composition components inherent in Bernini's chapels result in a cinematographic montage. Proceeding from Bernini’s bel composto and Deleuze’s thought, this paper proposes a new reading of the Baroque that is relevant to the present-day for architecture, taking the idea of theatrical scene as an organism supported by architecture and advancing to an idea of montage (beyond Careri’s) in which the spectator, the one who observes the small world, and the small world itself turning into an autonomous organism, makes the assemblage of the whole. A living-montage – an idea of architecture that is constantly interpreted, reinterpreted and recreated by the beholder.
This paper traces the evolution of Philippa Foot’s way of thinking about moral issues, going beyond her particular opinions and philosophical positions to examine her methodology. Guided by a continuous struggle against the limits of what moral philosophy sees as a legitimate statement, her work is much more coherent than the author herself seems to have thought.Philippa Foot looked for a natural raison d’être to morality – one that would ensure its reality – without always being sure what “natural” means. Her work evolved around this theme across three distinct periods. To begin, she was simply a realist. Then, she drew close to David Hume and his refusal to give a definitive and universal foundation for morality. Finally, she ended her philosophical work by adopting Neo-Aristotelianism. Her contribution to moral philosophy was twofold. Her first philosophical stances were made in dialogue with expressivism to advance a metaethics. She later moved on to practical ethics, or rather a general reflection on the variety of normativities engaged in difficult life decisions. While sympathetic to this struggle, the present text will not simply follow all the choices made by Foot. It may indeed be the case that contemporary moral philosophy cannot, and should not, propose such wide-ranging conceptions. Working on the grammar of morality means working on its conceptual errors, its flawed definitions, and its unacknowledged presuppositions rather than providing a general anthropology, which requires a different methodology. Moral philosophy as grammar should probably concentrate the critical work. The practical consequence of this effort leads to elucidating the decisions made on a case-by-case basis as much as possible.
Este artigo apresenta uma contextualização histórico-filosófica sobre alguns conteúdos científicos fundamentais para a compreensão docente e estudantil da relação Terra-Universo. Suas justificativas encontram-se nos benefícios que a visão epistemológica de Larry Laudan tem proporcionado para o ensino de ciências/física, especialmente, na fundamentação das investigações acadêmico-científicas de questões relativas ao processo de ensino-aprendizagem, em todos os níveis de ensino. Fundamentando-se nesse referencial, particularmente, nos seus conceitos de problemas empíricos, problemas conceituais e de tradição de pesquisa, este trabalho propicia uma ressignificação histórico-filosófica de alguns conteúdos científicos da astronomia, da cosmologia e da física, considerados essenciais à compreensão docente e estudantil da relação Terra-Universo. Esses conteúdos são: a confecção de calendários, as distâncias orbitais dos planetas, as fases da Lua, as estações do ano, o fenômeno do dia e da noite, o movimento de rotação da Terra, os modelos cosmológicos, o movimento de translação dos planetas e a gravidade. Como resultado, essa contextualização histórico-filosófica pode contribuir para a superação dos problemas relativos: às concepções de senso comum; à correção dos erros conceituais encontrados nos livros didáticos da educação básica; bem como na construção do saber docente do conteúdo disciplinar da história conceitual da ciência, mediante uma viagem prazerosa pela história da ciência. Portanto, defende-se que somente um diálogo contínuo com os resultados de pesquisas, integrado com uma atenta vigilância epistemológica, educacional, didática e pedagógica, sobre o processo de ensino-aprendizagem; com a mediação da construção do conhecimento disciplinar, dentre outros; e uma apropriada transposição didática dos conteúdos científicos para os livros didáticos da educação básica; torna possível o trabalho efetivo em prol de uma substantiva melhoria da educação e do progresso do ensino de ciências.
The phenomenological origins of the historian and epistemologist Alexandre Koyré are not entirely evident or sufficiently recognized by scholars interested in his thinking. The main aim of this paper is therefore to highlight the belonging of Koyré to the phenomenological movement and to establish lines of continuity between the investigations of Husserl and Koyré, namely mathematics and philosophy. The proposal is divided into two parts. First, on a biographical level, we reconstruct the formation of the young Koyré at the phenomenological school of Göttingen. Secondly, at the thematic level, we present some notions of continuity between Phenomenology and Koyré’s historical studies.
Bu çalışma, gerek farklı dinler arasında gerekse de büyük dinlerin kendi içerisinde siyasal, sosyal, kültürel ve dini çatışmaların çokça yaşandığı bir dönem olan Orta Çağ’da, ötekine yönelik farklı bir anlama çabasını incelemek üzere yapılmıştır. Bu çaba, erken dönem Rönesans’ının önemli isimlerinden olan Nicholas of Cusa tarafından ortaya konulmuştur. Yaşadığı dönemde papalık bünyesinde aldığı önemli vazifelerin yanında akademik çalışmalarıyla da etkili olan Cusa, hümanist, reformist ve uzlaşı taraftarı bir figür olarak öne çıkmıştır. Cusa’nın tarihi, teolojik bağlamları içerisinde farklı çalışmalara konu olan bu yönü, bu çalışmada, felsefi arka planı açısından değerlendirilecektir. Bu çalışmanın temel tezi, Cusa’nın dünya görüşünde belirgin bir şekilde ortaya çıkan birleştirici tutumun arkasında düşünsel bir birikimin bulunduğudur. Bu birikim, felsefi temelini Platon felsefesi ve onun diyalektik yönteminden almaktadır.
Este estudio presenta las profecías posthumanistas de Arendt y establece la relación con su análisis de la tecnociencia moderna. Se destaca el papel ambivalente que la tecnología ocupa en su pensamiento. Arendt afirma, por un lado, la neutralidad política de la tecnología, pero, prevé, por otro, que la futura modificación de la condición humana, gracias a la tecnología, podría dar lugar a una etapa de tal pasividad, que la humanidad se abandone a un indefinido proceso vital en el que ya no sea posible un mundo propiamente humano.
This chapter deals specifically with the trilingual perspective of treatment and on how diseases present a hierarchical spectrum, spanning from the disorder of cellular systems to the subjective experience of being ill; and how “top-down” (psychotherapeutic approaches) and “bottom-up” (neurobiological approaches) complement each other by operating at different levels of the hierarchies.KeywordsTreatment: trilingual perspectiveMultiple sclerosis: hierarchical spectrumDisease-illness spectrum: multiple sclerosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder
Ceci est la réactualisation de mon livre déposé le 13 Juillet 2015 sur Researchgate. Il ne contient que la Table des matières, l'Introduction, le premier et le dernier chapitre ainsi que la Conclusion (trois études) et l'index des auteur(e)s ainsi que la Bibliographie.
Le texte complet est disponible sur KDP, à côté de mon autre livre d'Arithmétique infinie de 2019. Ces extraits sont presque self-contained, ils donnent une idée assez complète de mes résultats et de ma démarche scientifique.
A common misperception, both within academia and without, is that the premodern, Judeo-Christian picture of the universe was of a small, cramped one. This allowed people to believe that the Earth and its inhabitants were the most important thing in it. But this misfires in several ways: First, the premodern cosmos is only small in comparison to what contemporary science has discovered, not absolutely. Second, the premoderns felt just as insignificant as we do in light of the universe’s size, but we cannot translate this into a scientific or philosophical argument. Third, it assumes that the Judeo-Christian view is that humanity is the most important thing (rather than God) and that God created the universe for us (rather than himself). Fourth, whatever value human beings have in the Judeo-Christian tradition is derivative, based on being created in God’s image, and the size of the universe has no bearing on it.
“The world” as a concept necessarily involves many difficulties and contradictions. The text presents some of them in a rather circular way, underlining the fact that we are always confronted with the dilemma of what to do with the world, or rather, what, which, and whose world we are dealing with. Beginning with some arguments about the claim that “the world is (out there),” and then moving on to certain dilemmas related to some views on the two-world theory, one inevitably comes across Marx’s thesis that the ultimate goal in relation to the world should be to “change it”. The text also presents some contemporary views thereon of Badiou, Nancy, and Ruda. Taking into account all these arguments and adding insights from Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, and Adorno as to the world and one’s worldview, we can only agree with Badiou’s statement about the only true goal of philosophy: “Philosophy has no other legitimate aim except to help find the new names that will bring into existence the unknown world that is only waiting for us because we are waiting for it.”
The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual foundations of modernity. This rich and comprehensive volume surveys and illuminates the numerous and complicated interconnections between philosophical and scientific thought as both were radically transformed from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The chapters explore reciprocal influences between philosophy and physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other disciplines, and show how thinkers responded to an immense range of intellectual, material, and institutional influences. The volume offers a unique perspicuity, viewing the entire landscape of early modern philosophy and science, and also marks an epoch in contemporary scholarship, surveying recent contributions and suggesting future investigations for the next generation of scholars and students.
This article is a presentation of key aspects of Jung’s psychology as well as a response to Daniel Anderson’s article on Wolfgang Giegerich’s theory of soul, “The Soul’s Logical Life and Jungian Schisms,” published separately in the present issue. I address the question of Jungian institutional schisms in light of the tension between the professionalization of analytical psychology and Jung’s concept of soul. In a second step, I consider the relatedness of alchemy to modern quantum mechanics, in the process analogizing Jung’s archetypes to the concept of radical uncertainty.
The paper is devoted to an overview of Cassirer’s work both as historian of philosophy and historian of science. Indeed, the “intelletcual cooperation” between history of philosophy and history of science represents an essential feature of Cassirer’s style of philosophizing: while the roots of a wide exploration stretching from Renaissance thought to modern physics go back to the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, the results of a similar cross-fertilization of research fields have deeply contributed to shaping new standards of inquiry. Cassirer’s relationship with the Warburg milieu in Hamburg and late in his life with the American intellectual scenario (for instance, with the “Journal of History of Ideas”) are surely worthy of closer investigation. Distinguished scholars such as Meyerson, Brunschvicg, Burtt, Koyré, Metzger, Lovejoy, Kristeller, have disussed, appreciated, critizised Cassirer’s still today fascinating studies devoted to Pico della Mirandola, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, to mention but a few. To explore some of these aspects focusing both on affinities and differences within a cosmpolitian intellectual community can provide a better understanding of philosophy and history of science in the first half of 20th century. Cassirer’s legacy requires, therefore, a new assessment.
In this article, I consider Descartes’ enigmatic claim that we must assert that the material world is indefinite rather than infinite. The focus here is on the discussion of this claim in Descartes’ late correspondence with More. One puzzle that emerges from this correspondence is that Descartes insists to More that we are not in a position to deny the indefinite universe has limits, while at the same time indicating that we conceive a contradiction in the notion that the universe has a limit. I reject one attempt to resolve this apparent conflict which appeals to Descartes’ admission to More that divine omnipotence requires that God can create a vacuum in nature, and focus instead on his response to More’s claim that this omnipotence requires the possibility of a completion of the division of matter that results in atoms. Finally, I distinguish Descartes’ indefinite from two other kinds of infinity with which it might well be confused. The first is an essentially incomplete ‘potential infinity’ that Descartes discusses in the Third Meditation, and the second is the sort of quantitative infinity that Leibniz – contrary to Descartes – denies can constitute a completed whole.
Against the usual interpretation, which states that Afrofuturism is unreservedly technophilic, I argue that Afrofuturism is a radical critique of white technology. White technology (be it imperial, colonial or capitalist) is an acosmic technology that rejects its belonging to the cosmos. The Space Age and what is now called New Space (both of which have neo-colonial aims) are perfect illustrations of white technology and its anthropocentric enthusiasm. Rejecting this colonial and exploitative technology, Afrofuturism – from the music and poems of Sun Ra to the paintings of Wangechi Mutu to the poems and activism of Alexis Pauline Gumbs – is first and foremost an attempt to use outer space not as a space open to conquest, but as a mediation, a stellar detour thanks to which our terrestrial condition could be politically and anthropologically rethought. At odds with any geoengineering project, Afrofuturism conjures up an “epoch of being” (Heidegger) in which technology would be constantly inhabited by a form of uncanny that would definitively prevent human beings from considering technology as a way of mastering the Earth.
This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene – the ecological nomos of the earth – and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos seemingly ‘natural’ spaces like the biosphere and the atmosphere became politically charged. This challenges the modernist separation between natural facts and political norms. It then underlines the imperial origins of this nomos by introducing the concept of air-appropriation understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by CO 2 emissions. Instead of assuming that the ecological nomos represents a transition from a colonial to an ecological and cosmopolitan world order, focusing on air-appropriation highlights forms of ecological imperialism that go along with the new nomos. Accordingly, the article calls for a just redistribution of ecospace that takes into account the imperial legacies and ongoing effects of air-appropriation.
The first edition of Newton's Principia contains only two additional comments on the methodology: the notification that the purpose of the paper is to explain "how to determine the true motions from their causes, effects, and apparent differences, and, conversely, how to determine from motions, whether true or apparent, their causes and effects"; and, in the Scholium at the end of Book 1, Section 11, Newton asserts that his distinctive approach makes possible a safer argumentation in natural philosophy.
Kant’s absolute, the Categorical Imperative, commands acting only on universalizable reasons, reasons everyone can act on without entailing self-contradiction or collective self-destruction. He argues it is reason that demands universalizability and makes us free-willed, but only somewhere beyond space and time. For to solve the big problem of his age, how knowledge is possible, he argued we can know nature only if we apply to it the category of causality. If we don’t act on universalizable reasons we are causally determined, hence not responsible for immoral actions. Kant bit this bullet to save a system that provided meaning in life. His interest in finding meaning appears in his naturalistic interest in teleology. The Categorical Imperative proves to be metaphysical rather than moral and might be backed by a naturalistic teleology of history and nature.
Sometimes the normal course of events is disrupted by a particularly swift and profound change. Historians have often referred to such changes as “revolutions”, and, though they have identified many of them, they have rarely supported their claims with statistical evidence. Here, we present a method to identify revolutions based on a measure of multivariate rate of change called Foote novelty. We define revolutions as those periods of time when the value of this measure is, by a non-parametric test, shown to significantly exceed the background rate. Our method also identifies conservative periods when the rate of change is unusually low. We apply it to several quantitative data sets that capture long-term political, social and cultural changes and, in some of them, identify revolutions — both well known and not. Our method is general and can be applied to any phenomenon captured by multivariate time series data of sufficient quality.
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