Download or read book Readings on Color The philosophy of color written by Alex Byrne and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fashionable Nonsense written by Alan Sokal and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy. Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and his fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a delightfully witty and clear voice, the two thoughtfully and thoroughly dismantle the pseudo-scientific writings of some of the most fashionable French and American intellectuals. More generally, they challenge the widespread notion that scientific theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Umberto Eco written by Sara G. Beardsworth and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Philosophy of Umberto Eco stands out in the Library of Living Philosophers series as the volume on the most interdisciplinary scholar hitherto and probably the most widely translated. The Italian philosopher’s name and works are well known in the humanities, both his philosophical and literary works being translated into fifteen or more languages. Eco is a founder of modern semiotics and widely known for his work in the philosophy of language and aesthetics. He is also a leading figure in the emergence of postmodern literature, and is associated with cultural and mass communication studies. His writings cover topics such as advertising, television, and children’s literature as well as philosophical questions bearing on truth, reality, cognition, language, and literature. The critical essays in this volume cover the full range of this output. This book has wide appeal not only because of its interdisciplinary nature but also because of Eco’s famous “high and low” approach, which is deeply scholarly in conception and very accessible in outcome. The short essay “Why Philosophy?” included in the volume is exemplary in this regard: it will appeal to scholars for its wit and to high school students for its intelligibility.

Download or read book Elements of Neurogeometry written by Jean Petitot and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-08 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes several mathematical models of the primary visual cortex, referring them to a vast ensemble of experimental data and putting forward an original geometrical model for its functional architecture, that is, the highly specific organization of its neural connections. The book spells out the geometrical algorithms implemented by this functional architecture, or put another way, the “neurogeometry” immanent in visual perception. Focusing on the neural origins of our spatial representations, it demonstrates three things: firstly, the way the visual neurons filter the optical signal is closely related to a wavelet analysis; secondly, the contact structure of the 1-jets of the curves in the plane (the retinal plane here) is implemented by the cortical functional architecture; and lastly, the visual algorithms for integrating contours from what may be rather incomplete sensory data can be modelled by the sub-Riemannian geometry associated with this contact structure. As such, it provides readers with the first systematic interpretation of a number of important neurophysiological observations in a well-defined mathematical framework. The book’s neuromathematical exploration appeals to graduate students and researchers in integrative-functional-cognitive neuroscience with a good mathematical background, as well as those in applied mathematics with an interest in neurophysiology.

Download or read book Cognitive Morphodynamics written by Jean Petitot and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book - written in collaboration with René Doursat, director of the Complex Systems Institute, Paris - adds a new dimension to Cognitive Grammars. It provides a rigorous, operational mathematical foundation, which draws from topology, geometry and dynamical systems to model iconic «image-schemas» and «conceptual archetypes». It defends the thesis that René Thom's morphodynamics is especially well suited to the task and allows to transform the morphological structures of perception into Gestalt-like, abstract, proto-linguistic schemas that can act as inputs into higher-level specific linguistic routines. Cognitive Grammars have drawn upon the view that the deep syntactic and semantic structures of language, such as prepositions and case roles, are grounded in perception and action. This study raises difficult problems, which thus far have not been addressed as a mathematical challenge. Cognitive Morphodynamics shows how this gap can be filled.

Download or read book Catastrophe Theoretic Semantics written by Wolfgang Wildgen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1982-01-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Thom, the famous French mathematician and founder of catastrophe theory, considered linguistics an exemplary field for the application of his general morphology. It is surprising that physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists and sociologists are all engaged in the field of catastrophe theory, but that there has been almost no echo from linguistics. Meanwhile linguistics has evolved in the direction of René Thom’s intuitions about an integrated science of language and it has become a necessary task to review, update and elaborate the proposals made by Thom and to embed them in the framework of modern semantic theory.

Download or read book Watsuji Tetsuro s Rinrigaku written by Tetsur? Watsuji and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Watsuji Tetsuro's Rinrigaku (literally, the principles that allow us to live in friendly community) has been regarded as the definitive study of Japanese ethics for half a century. In Japan, ethics is the study of human being or ningen. As an ethical being, one negates individuality by abandoning one's independence from others. This selflessness is the true meaning of goodness.

Download or read book Morphogenesis of Meaning written by Jean Petitot and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The original French version of «Morphogenesis of Meaning» was one of the important breakthroughs in cognitive semiolinguistics during the eighties. It provided a deep philosophical elaboration of René Thom's Catastrophe Theory and exerted great influence on the main semiolinguistic schools in the world. Translated by Franson Manjali and revised with his help, the present English version focuses on dynamical modeling perspectives, the mathematical content of the models, and epistemologically foundational issues. The central problem dealt with is that of structure. Topological and dynamical models of morphogenesis are applied to structuralist theories such as phonology and categorical perception (Roman Jakobson), structural syntax and geometrical interpretation of case grammars (Lucien Tesnière, Louis Hjelmslev), narrative structures (Vladimir Propp, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Algirdas J. Greimas) as well as semiogenesis. It can be seen that there exists a theoretical convergence between many trends in American cognitive linguistics (Charles Fillmore, Len Talmy, Ron Langacker, George Lakoff) and the dynamical modeling perspectives which were developped in the context of European structuralism.

Download or read book Fiction Refracts Science written by Allen Thiher and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines the relationship between science and the fiction developed by modernists, including Musil, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce. Looks at Pascalian and Newtonian cosmology, Darwinism, epistemology, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, the development of modernist and postmodern fiction, positivism, and finally works by Woolf, Faulkner, and Borges"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book L Univers romanesque de Marguerite Duras written by Marguerite Duras and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Chairs written by Charlotte Fiell and published by Welbeck. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition features designs from 1800 up to present day, and features the biggest names in furniture design, art, architecture and craft.

Download or read book The History of Sexuality written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-04-14 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Download or read book Modernism and the Ordinary written by Liesl Olson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism and the Ordinary overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. Liesl Olson shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. With attentive and sensitive readings, Modernism and the Ordinary examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. In doing so, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism's most compelling attributes.

Download or read book Lost Intimacies written by William J. Spurlin and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism uses queer theory as a hermeneutic tool with which to read against the grain of heterotextual narratives of the Holocaust and as a way of locating alternative pathways of meaning in dominant Holocaust research. Specifically addressing the racialization of sexuality, the book asks how the politics of sexuality can be more explicitly and systematically theorized, along with state-sanctioned homophobia under Nazism, with a clear recognition that homophobia seldom operated alone, but worked in conjunction with other axes of power, including race, gender, eugenics, and population politics. In theorizing gender and sexuality as entangled axes of analysis, the book allows the specificity of lesbian difference to emerge and challenges the received wisdom that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted under National Socialism. William J. Spurlin questions the wisdom of received scholarship that reduces Nazi fascism to latent homosexuality, and examines the possible implications of Nazi homophobia, and its imbrication with other deployments of power, for the study of contemporary culture where the homophobic impulse continues to reverberate, thereby challenging understandings of history steeped in notions of progressive modernity.

Download or read book Axiomatics written by Robert Blanché and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Borrowed Plumage written by Eugene Chen Eoyang and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eclectic collection of essays focuses on a number of intriguing issues in translation: some of these "polemic" essays challenge certain widespread beliefs and practices: for example, the belief that humor is untranslatable; the assumption that translations are always inferior to the originals; the spread of translations that are more impenetrable to the target audience than the originals ever were to the source language audience; above all, the notion that translation is a marginal rather than a major area of study: indeed, as one essay suggests, translation may represent a model of thought, and translating a mode of thinking. These essays also consider the international trade in translations, the ratio of translations out of the language and of translations into the language, as a possible index to historical development; analyze the humor that can be translated as well as the humor that cannot be translated; uncover the implicit indicators of time and place in traditional Chinese poetry (offering thereby a study in comparative deictics); examine the hermeneutics of Old Testament exegeses, which -- unlike the modern world -- privileged the oral over the written word; discuss the subtle but definable differences between translations that appropriate previous versions by way of allusion and quotation, and translations that merely plagiarize. In the final section, entitled "Divertissements", Eugene Eoyang provides an exposition of his translation of a poem, first published in the People's Daily (and since banned), that contained a hidden -- and decidedly hostile -- acrostic, in which the challenge was not only to convey the original meaning but also to preserve the disguise of the original meaning in the Chinese text. (The translation appeared in The New York Times.) He also offers a wry typology of translators, comparing them -- metaphorically and paronomastically -- to different species of birds; in a concluding coda, he excavates the place-names in bicultural and multilingual Hong Kong, uncovering not only translations and transliterations, but also "heteronyms" (different names for the same place) as well as, remarkably, "phononyms" (names where the pronunciation of a word in one language happens to coincide with a word in another language with the same meaning). The result is a provocative potpourri of fascinating insights into the cultural and semiotic complexities of translation that will surely interest students of translation, literature, linguistics, and history, as well as the informed general reader.

Download or read book Ulysses and Us written by Declan Kiberd and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an audacious new take on Joyce's classic modern novel "Ulysses," Kiberd argues the novel is not an esoteric tome for the scholarly few but rather a work written both about and for the common person, and explains how it can teach readers to live better lives.