Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe

Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe
Author: Paul North
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1942130465

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"This book affirms the experience of likeness at the heart of many, if not all, disciplines of knowledge and seeks to formalize that basic experience into a science of its own, "homeotics.""--

Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe

Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe
Author: Paul North
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 194213049X

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An imaginative new theory of likeness that ranges widely across history and subjects, from physics and evolution to psychology, language, and art A butterfly is like another butterfly. A butterfly is also like a leaf and at the same time like a paper airplane, an owl’s face, a scholar flying from book to book. The most disparate things approach one another in a butterfly, the sort of dense nodule of likeness that Roger Caillois once proposed calling a “bizarre-privileged item.” In response, critical theorist Paul North proposes a spiritual exercise: imagine a universe made up solely of likenesses. There are no things, only traits acting according to the law of series, here and there a thick overlap that appears “bizarre.” Centuries of thought have fixated on the concept of difference. This book offers a theory that begins from likeness, where, at any instant, a vast array of series proliferates and remote regions come into contact. Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe follows likenesses as they traverse physics and the physical universe; evolution and evolutionary theory; psychology and the psyche; sociality, language, and art. Divergent sources from an eccentric history help give shape to a new trans-science, “homeotics.”

Rare Earth

Rare Earth
Author: Peter D. Ward
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2007-05-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0387218483

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What determines whether complex life will arise on a planet, or even any life at all? Questions such as these are investigated in this groundbreaking book. In doing so, the authors synthesize information from astronomy, biology, and paleontology, and apply it to what we know about the rise of life on Earth and to what could possibly happen elsewhere in the universe. Everyone who has been thrilled by the recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and the indications of life on Mars and the Jovian moon Europa will be fascinated by Rare Earth, and its implications for those who look to the heavens for companionship.

Monumental Names

Monumental Names
Author: Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000815994

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What stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the book examines a version of archival activism that is centred on various practices of documentation and commemoration of many dead victims of historical violence in Russia to understand what kind of historicity is produced when a single name is added to an endless list. What do acts of accumulation of names of the dead affirm when they are concretised in monuments and performance events? The key premise is that multimodal inscriptions of names of the dead entail a political, aesthetic and conceptual movement between singularity and multitude that honours each dead name yet conveys the scale of a mass atrocity without reducing it to a number. Drawing on anthropology, history, philosophy, and aesthetic theory, the book yields a new perspective on the politics of archival and historical justice while it critically engages with the debates on relations and distinctions between names and numbers of the dead, monumental art and its political effects, law and history, image and text, the specific one and the infinite many.

"Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present "

Author: Tricia Cusack
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351566733

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Before the eighteenth century, the ocean was regarded as a repulsive and chaotic deep. Despite reinvention as a zone of wonder and pleasure, it continued to be viewed in the West and elsewhere as ?uninhabited?, empty space. This collection, spanning the eighteenth century to the present, recasts the ocean as ?social space?, with particular reference to visual representations. Part I focuses on mappings and crossings, showing how the ocean may function as a liminal space between places and cultures but also connects and imbricates them. Part II considers ships as microcosmic societies, shaped for example by the purpose of the voyage, the mores of shipboard life, and cross-cultural encounters. Part III analyses narratives accreted to wrecks and rafts, what has sunk or floats perilously, and discusses attempts to recuperate plastic flotsam. Part IV plumbs ocean depths to consider how underwater creatures have been depicted in relation to emergent disciplines of natural history and museology, how mermaids have been reimagined as a metaphor of feminist transformation, and how the symbolism of coral is deployed by contemporary artists. This engaging and erudite volume will interest a range of scholars in humanities and social sciences, including art and cultural historians, cultural geographers, and historians of empire, travel, and tourism.

The Privileged Planet

The Privileged Planet
Author: Guillermo Gonzalez
Publisher: Regnery Gateway
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1684510775

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Earth. The Final Frontier Contrary to popular belief, Earth is not an insignificant blip on the universe’s radar. Our world proves anything but average in Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards’ The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery. But what exactly does Earth bring to the table? How does it prove its worth among numerous planets and constellations in the vastness of the Milky Way? In The Privileged Planet, you’ll learn about the world’s life-sustaining capabilities, water and its miraculous makeup, protection by the planetary giants, and how our planet came into existence in the first place.

What's Eating the Universe?

What's Eating the Universe?
Author: Paul Davies
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2021-09-22
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022681632X

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Combining the latest scientific advances with storytelling skills unmatched in the cosmos, an award-winning astrophysicist and popular writer leads us on a tour of some of the greatest mysteries of our universe. In the constellation of Eridanus, there lurks a cosmic mystery: It’s as if something has taken a huge bite out of the universe. But what is the culprit? The hole in the universe is just one of many puzzles keeping cosmologists busy. Supermassive black holes, bubbles of nothingness gobbling up space, monster universes swallowing others—these and many other bizarre ideas are being pursued by scientists. Due to breathtaking progress in astronomy, the history of our universe is now better understood than the history of our own planet. But these advances have uncovered some startling riddles. In this electrifying new book, renowned cosmologist and author Paul Davies lucidly explains what we know about the cosmos and its enigmas, exploring the tantalizing—and sometimes terrifying—possibilities that lie before us. As Davies guides us through the audacious research offering mind-bending solutions to these and other mysteries, he leads us up to the greatest outstanding conundrum of all: Why does the universe even exist in the first place? And how did a system of mindless, purposeless particles manage to bring forth conscious, thinking beings? Filled with wit and wonder, What’s Eating the Universe? is a dazzling tour of cosmic questions, sure to entertain, enchant, and inspire us all.

The Edge of Surrealism

The Edge of Surrealism
Author: Roger Caillois
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2003
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822330684

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A collection of newly translated writings by the French sociologist and surrealist.

The Philosophy of Mannerism

The Philosophy of Mannerism
Author: Sjoerd van Tuinen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-11-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350322482

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Sjoerd van Tuinen argues for the inseparability of matter and manner in the form of a group portrait of Leibniz, Bergson, Whitehead, Souriau, Simondon, Deleuze, Stengers, and Agamben. Examining afresh the 16th-century style of mannerism, this book synthesizes philosophy and aesthetics to demonstrate not only the contemporary relevance of artists such as Michelangelo or Arcimboldo but their broader significance as incorporating a form of modal thinking and perceiving. While looking at mannerism as a style that spurned the balance and proportion of earlier Renaissance models in favour of compositional instability and tension, this book also conceives of mannerism a-historically to investigate what it can tell us about continental modal metaphysics. Whereas analytical metaphysics privileges logical essence and asks whether something is possible, real, contingent, or necessary, continental philosophy privileges existence and counts as many modes as there are ways of coming-into-being. In three main parts, van Tuinen first explores the ontological, aesthetic, and ethical ramifications of this distinction. He then develops this through an extended study of Leibniz as a modal and indeed mannerist philosopher, before outlining in the final part a (neo)-mannerist aesthetics that incorporates diagrammatics, alchemy, and contemporary technologies of speculative design.

Predictive Minds: Old Problems and New Challenges

Predictive Minds: Old Problems and New Challenges
Author: Manuel Curado
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-10-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1648897851

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The Predictive Processing Theory of Mind is a recent theory developed by philosophers, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists about the nature and function of the brain and its role in creating the conscious mind that we humans, and perhaps some non-human animals, have. The authors that advanced those lines of research believe that there is a fundamental idea that has been overlooked in the research done about the brain until the present: that the brain is a prediction machine with the function of creating hypotheses about the causes of our sensory signals and predictions of possible future sensory signals. Moreover, the internal models of the world created this way are constantly challenged by incorporating the errors of the previous models into new models. From this point of view, the brain's work could be described as a process of making predictions about the upcoming sensory data based on its best current models of the causes of those data. This book intends to critically analyze this theory and its subsequent theoretical and empirical consequences. To achieve that, the volume brings together some of the best experts on Predictive Processing – such as Thomas Metzinger, Wanja Wiese, or Mark Miller – with the goal of presenting some of the advantages of this approach but also some of its caveats.