Download or read book The Medium of Contingency written by Robin Mackay and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented meeting of philosophical thought, financial markets, and the art world. Why has the concept of contingency taken on a marked importance both in contemporary philosophy and in contemporary art practice? And if this simultaneity derives from parallel problems met within the two different fields, what are their common roots? Beyond acknowledging the contingent nature of tradition, institutions, and practices, recent speculative philosophies of “absolute contingency” demand a radical revision of the ways in which we conceive of our interaction with unknowable materialities, and pose a challenge to both probabilistic management and process-driven affirmation of contingency. In an unprecedented meeting of philosophical thought, financial markets, and the art world, The Medium of Contingency explores how works of art write contingency into the present, and are in turn written by the contingency of their materials, and how these exchanges interact with other markets. From the mathematical instruments used to value financial derivatives to the nature of literary creation, from the market-making role of the curator to the “chemistry of openness,” the contributors to this lively discussion draw out the startling consequences of a new figure of thought.
Download or read book The Medium of Contingency written by Elie Ayache and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Medium of Contingency Elie Ayache builds upon his ground-breaking book The Blank Swan, in exploring the intersection of philosophy and finance, introducing new notions of price and market. Inverting the received view, he now sees a creation of matter in both the market and its metaphysics, rather than pure speculation. Once recognized as the proper medium of contingency and disassociated from the probabilistic and statistical tools traditionally used to model it, the market can be thought as 'real', in a new sense of reality corresponding to the new sense of matter. To bring this new and original perspective, The Medium of Contingency builds on probability theory as first formalized by von Mises and Kolmogorov, and later revisited by Shafer and Vovk. It utilises the author's extensive experience in derivatives pricing technology and software, as well as his work in the philosophy of contingency and contingent claims, to propose a new philosophical interpretation of Brownian motion and of the Black-Scholes-Merton formula. Then it completes the overturning of the traditional view of the market by arguing that there should be no difference, ultimately, between an underlying asset and the derivative written on it. This book does not aim to change the market but the way we must think of it. It is the author's conviction that there can be no philosophy of the market, and consequently no thinking of it, without a philosophy of contingent claims and of derivative pricing. The book provides the missing piece, which the philosophy of probability cannot provide alone. Its scope, however, extends beyond the strict critique of financial mathematics, as it also, and perhaps most importantly, delivers the author's definitive treatment of the philosophically prominent and recently much discussed notion of contingency.
Download or read book The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art written by Martha Buskirk and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-02-18 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of transformations in the nature of the art object and artistic authorship in the last four decades. In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent. Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by minimalists' use of industrial materials and methods, including competing claims of ownership and artistic authorship evident in conflicts over the right to fabricate artists' works. Examining recent examples of appropriation, she finds precedents in pop art and the early twentieth-century readymade and explores the intersection of contemporary artistic copying and the system of copyrights, trademarks, and brand names characteristic of other forms of commodity production. She also investigates the ways that connections between work and context have transformed art and institutional conventions, the impact of new materials on definitions of medium, the role of the document as both primary and secondary object, and the significance of conceptually oriented performance work for the intersection of photography and the human body in contemporary art. Buskirk explores how artists active in the 1980s and 1990s have recombined strategies of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how the mechanisms through which art is presented shape not only readings of the work but the work itself. She uses her discussion of the readymade and conceptual art to explore broader issues of authorship, reproduction, context, and temporality.
Download or read book The Contingency Theory of Organizations written by Lex Donaldson and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2001-02-20 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the theories, evidence and methodological issues of contingency theory - one of the major theoretical lenses used to view organizations.
Download or read book The Blank Swan written by Elie Ayache and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: October 19th 1987 was a day of huge change for the global finance industry. On this day the stock market crashed, the Nobel Prize winning Black-Scholes formula failed and volatility smiles were born, and on this day Elie Ayache began his career, on the trading floor of the French Futures and Options Exchange. Experts everywhere sought to find a model for this event, and ways to simulate it in order to avoid a recurrence in the future, but the one thing that struck Elie that day was the belief that what actually happened on 19th October 1987 is simply non reproducible outside 19th October 1987 - you cannot reduce it to a chain of causes and effects, or even to a random generator, that can then be reproduced or represented in a theoretical framework. The Blank Swan is Elie's highly original treatise on the financial markets presenting a totally revolutionary rethinking of derivative pricing and technology. It is not a diatribe against Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, but criticises the whole background or framework of predictable and unpredictable events white and black swans alike , i.e. the very category of prediction. In this revolutionary book, Elie redefines the components of the technology needed to price and trade derivatives. Most importantly, and drawing on a long tradition of philosophy of the event from Henri Bergson to Gilles Deleuze, to Alain Badiou, and on a recent brand of philosophy of contingency, embodied by the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux, Elie redefines the market itself against the common perceptions of orthodox financial theory, general equilibrium theory and the sociology of finance. This book will change the way that we think about derivatives and approach the market. If anything, derivatives should be renamed contingent claims, where contingency is now absolute and no longer derivative, and the market is just its medium. The book also establishes the missing link between quantitative modelling (no longer dependent on probability theory but on a novel brand of mathematics which Elie calls the mathematics of price) and the reality of the market.
Download or read book Fortune s Faces written by Daniel Heller-Roazen and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2004-12-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably the single most influential literary work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun has traditionally posed a number of difficulties to modern critics, who have viewed its many interruptions and philosophical discussions as signs of a lack of formal organization and a characteristically medieval predilection for encyclopedic summation. In Fortune's Faces, Daniel Heller-Roazen calls into question these assessments, offering a new and compelling interpretation of the romance as a carefully constructed and far-reaching exploration of the place of fortune, chance, and contingency in literary writing. Situating the Romance of the Rose at the intersection of medieval literature and philosophy, Heller-Roazen shows how the thirteenth-century work invokes and radicalizes two classical and medieval traditions of reflection on language and contingency: that of the Provençal, French, and Italian love poets, who sought to compose their "verses of pure nothing"in a language Dante defined as "without grammar," and that of Aristotle's discussion of "future contingents" as it was received and refined in the logic, physics, theology, and epistemology of Boethius, Abelard, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.Through a close analysis of the poetic text and a detailed reconstruction of the logical and metaphysical concept of contingency, Fortune's Faces charts the transformations that literary structures (such as subjectivity, autobiography, prosopopoeia, allegory, and self-reference) undergo in a work that defines itself as radically contingent. Considered in its full poetic and philosophical dimensions, the Romance of the Rose thus acquires an altogether new significance in the history of literature: it appears as a work that incessantly explores its own capacity to be other than it is.
Download or read book The Emergence of Cinematic Time written by Mary Ann Doane and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002-12-27 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as the permanent record of fleeting moments, the cinema emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century as an unprecedented means of capturing time--and this at a moment when disciplines from physics to philosophy, and historical trends from industrialization to the expansion of capitalism, were transforming the very idea of time. In a work that itself captures and reconfigures the passing moments of art, history, and philosophy, Mary Ann Doane shows how the cinema, representing the singular instant of chance and ephemerality in the face of the increasing rationalization and standardization of the day, participated in the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity. At this book's heart is the cinema's essential paradox: temporal continuity conveyed through "stopped time," the rapid succession of still frames or frozen images. Doane explores the role of this paradox, and of notions of the temporal indeterminacy and instability of an image, in shaping not just cinematic time but also modern ideas about continuity and discontinuity, archivability, contingency and determinism, and temporal irreversibility. A compelling meditation on the status of cinematic knowledge, her book is also an inquiry into the very heart and soul of modernity.
Download or read book The Concept of Non Photography written by Francois Laruelle and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy, and art, so as to discover an essence of photography that precedes its historical, technological, and aesthetic conditions. If philosophy has always understood its relation to the world according to the model of the instantaneous flash of a photographic shot, how can there be a “philosophy of photography” that is not viciously self-reflexive? Challenging the assumptions made by any theory of photography that leaves its own “onto-photo-logical” conditions uninterrogated, Laruelle thinks the photograph non-philosophically, so as to discover an essence of photography that precedes its historical, technological and aesthetic conditions. The Concept of Non-Photography develops a rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy, and art, and introduces the reader to all of the key concepts of Laruelle's “non-philosophy.”
Download or read book Contingency Irony and Solidarity written by Richard Rorty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-24 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.
Download or read book There s No Such Thing As Free Speech written by Stanley Fish and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-12-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.
Download or read book Contingent Encounters written by Dan DiPiero and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.
Download or read book Hydroplutonic Kernow written by Robin Mackay and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A geophilosophical odyssey through the remains of Cornwall's industrial past offers a historical portrait of geotrauma in action. This unique document provides a pioneering case study in post-“site-specific” geophilosophy. Based on a weird field trip into Cornwall's mining heartlands with geologists, philosophers, and ecologists as guides, Hydroplutonic Kernow drills down through nature, industry, and cultural capital to site the local within the global, unfolding the telluric plots that manipulated populations and devastated the landscape during the industrial age. In doing so, it provides a historical portrait of geotrauma in action. This geophilosophical odyssey takes us through the remains of the region's industrial past, reading them through the twisted prism of the geocosmic theory of trauma espoused by legendary “cryptographer” Dr. Daniel Barker and further developed by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, and uncovering the deep plot of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, the collusion between water and the depths of the earth. Along with full documentation of the trip, the book also contains exegetical materials including an essay by Reza Negarestani, a poem by Jake Chapman, a preface by Caitlin DeSilvey, and an in-depth interview with Mining Engineer Steve Tarrant.
Download or read book The Price We Pay written by Marty Makary and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestseller Business Book of the Year--Association of Business Journalists From the New York Times bestselling author comes an eye-opening, urgent look at America's broken health care system--and the people who are saving it--now with a new Afterword by the author. "A must-read for every American." --Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief, FORBES One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research, and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of the business of medicine and its elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up. Dr. Makary shows how so much of health care spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr. Makary challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine's noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable. The Price We Pay offers a road map for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care, and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well--a mission that can rebuild the public trust and save our country from the crushing cost of health care.
Download or read book Recursivity and Contingency written by Yuk Hui and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an investigation of algorithmic contingency and an elucidation of the contemporary situation that we are living in: the regular arrival of algorithmic catastrophes on a global scale. Through a historical analysis of philosophy, computation and media, this book proposes a renewed relation between nature and technics.
Download or read book Bank Contingency Financing written by Andrew J. Zamora and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1991-01-16 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, banks have greatly increased their reliance on contingency financing. Shows bankers how to minimize their risk and maximize their profits when dealing in these new markets. Contingency items (also called off-balance-sheet items) are agreements made by banks in which, for a fee, the bank undertakes to act as an intermediary, guaranteeing a transaction between other parties. Zamora explains the various types of contingency financing, including swap transactions, forward rate agreements, bankers' acceptances, and standby letters of credit. Each topic is illustrated with a case study. covers all aspects of contingency financing and places them in the context of the bank's overall financial structure.
Download or read book The Best Writing on Mathematics 2013 written by Mircea Pitici and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year's finest writing on mathematics from around the world, with a foreword by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roger Penrose This annual anthology brings together the year's finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2013 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don't need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These writings offer surprising insights into the nature, meaning, and practice of mathematics today. They delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday occurrences of math, and take readers behind the scenes of today's hottest mathematical debates. Here Philip Davis offers a panoramic view of mathematics in contemporary society; Terence Tao discusses aspects of universal mathematical laws in complex systems; Ian Stewart explains how in mathematics everything arises out of nothing; Erin Maloney and Sian Beilock consider the mathematical anxiety experienced by many students and suggest effective remedies; Elie Ayache argues that exchange prices reached in open market transactions transcend the common notion of probability; and much, much more. In addition to presenting the year's most memorable writings on mathematics, this must-have anthology includes a foreword by esteemed mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and an introduction by the editor, Mircea Pitici. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.
Download or read book Critical Theories Of Mass Media Then And Now written by Taylor, Paul and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract:
