Year: 2018
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The Value of Integrity
True human integrity is not a given, it is a conquest. We are not born one, but multiple. And most people, throughout their lives, continue to manifest various traits of character, often contradictory or in any case disparate, mal-unified. Integrity is the virtue of the one who has made and continues to make the…
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Bergson, Esprit de Corps and Fabulation
The paragraphs below are excerpted from the manuscript of my forthcoming book, The Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps (Edinburgh University Press). This is a draft, especially the English translation of Bergson’s quotations, which I am working on at the moment. Henri Bergson was a world-famous philosopher in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was…
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Anticipation and Causality (part 1)
There is a relationship between physicalism and anticipation, according to Burgers (1975). Physicalist descriptions usually follow the causality principle. Causality is a certain discourse according to which “objective facts” from the past affect an objective present state of affairs. “It is in this way that the ‘past’—that is, those aspects of past phenomena which are…
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Smooth Operator: Artificial Intelligence and the Agony of Personal Initiative
Human existence, as possibility and ongoing project (Sartre, 1956), is the anticipation, the expectation, the sentiment of what will be. The future is our fundamental existential dimension (Heidegger, 1962). Existence is always stretched out towards the possible of a horizon that death renders elastic. To attempt to escape the anguish felt before the power of…
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BIFURCATIONS, CHAOS, AND FRACTAL OBJECTS IN BORGES’ “GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS”
Gabriel Schreiber & Roberto Umansky The mathematical theory of bifurcation originated in the seminal work of Henri Poincaré on systems of non-linear differential equations. The term bifurcation was coined by Poincaré to designate the emergence of several solutions from a given solution. Whenever the solution to an equation, or system of equations, changes qualitatively at…
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Causality and anticipation
Analysis of the concept of anticipation can contribute to the philosophy of biology. J. M. Burgers “The purpose of this article is to renew discussion of the problem whether the phe- nomena of life can be satisfactorily ana- lyzed and explained on the basis of the laws discovered in the physical sciences, or whether more…
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The Three Stages of Understanding: Analytics, Dialectics, Crealectics
Reality might force us to live in an analytic world of objectality. It is a horizontal world in which the subject suffers more or less, because a subject can never be reduced to objectal evidence. No decent person will ever strive in a world of parts, even if [because] these parts are articulated into a functional…