Shadworth Hollway Hodgson and William Kingdon Clifford

2020 ◽  
pp. 152-177
Author(s):  
W. J. Mander

Following on from a brief consideration of the Metaphysical Society, this chapter considers two highly original empiricist thinkers who used their membership as an opportunity to develop bold new metaphysical schemes. The chapter begins by outlining Hodgson’s unique methodology of descriptive empiricism, whose consequences are then explored via his theory of causality (or ‘real conditions’), his construction of external material reality, and his position about things-in-themselves. Lastly it is considered how his strict empiricism nonetheless leads him to embrace the curious notion of a ‘unseen universe’ of significance for both immortality and religion. The discussion of Clifford examines his empiricism, his phenomenalism, and his views about causation and religion, before examining in detail his paper ‘On the Nature of Things-in-themselves’, which (it is argued) brings him to another form of unseen reality.

Author(s):  
М. В. Дзисюк

Definitions of concept and sphere of the concept are widely used in different aspects of modern linguistics. There is no single understanding of these notions and universal methodology of research has not been invented by linguists yet. This predetermines topicality of the article. The aim of our research is analysis, generalization, and systematization of different approaches to the interpretation of the notion ‘concept’ that exist in modern linguistics. It results in the following tasks: analysis of existing definitions of concept and its division into certain ranges and defining classification features. Modern linguists raise the questions of the conceptual and linguistic image of the world, the role of a human factor in its formation and interaction as in a linguistic process more frequently and it is defined as a fact in today’s linguistic scientific literature. The problem of individual language formation, poetic one in particular gains important meaning in this context. Ukrainian linguists use the notion of ‘concept’ for a long time now although they adhere to different views on its definition. Researches of the question define two major approaches in the analysis of the notion ‘concept’ that is linguistic-cognitive and linguistic-cultural. We can claim that words-concepts are agents between material reality and the ideal world that is synthesized in poetry, carriers of sense since with their help the versatility of the real world correlates with eternal spiritual values. Therefore, main features of the notion ‘concept’ in which objectively-cognitive and subjectively-creative features are combines are as follow sensual authenticity, time-spatial features, mediation between material and spiritual, semantic filling, ability to polysemy. A word with a generally symbolic meaning that is implemented in a language process through literary techniques typical for poet’s idiotype is the main core of the concept. The concept in poetic language formation by modern Uman poets is semantically integral, fulfilled, able to penetrate into other concepts and absorb semantically narrower images saving unity and semantic independence, varying numerous interpretations that project it in a certain semantic space, saving potential of real reflection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christos Lynteris

A pressing question during the first half-decade of the third plague pandemic (1894–9) was what was a ‘suitable soil’ for the disease. The question related to plague’s perceived ability to disappear from a given city only to reappear at some future point; a phenomenon that became central to scientific investigations of the disease. However, rather than this simply having a metaphorical meaning, the debate around plague’s ‘suitable soil’ actually concerned the material reality of the soil itself. The prevalence of plague in the working-class neighbourhood of Taipingshan during the first major outbreak of the pandemic, in 1894 in Hong Kong, led to an extensive debate regarding the ability of the soil to harbour and even spread the disease. Involving experiments, which were seen as able to procure evidence for or against the demolition or even torching of the area, scientific and administrative concerns over the soil rendered it an unstable yet highly productive epistemic thing. The spread of plague to India further fuelled concerns over the ability of the soil to act as the medium of the disease’s so-called true recrudescence. Besides high-profile scientific debates, hands-on experiments on purifying the soil of infected houses by means of highly intrusive methods allowed scientists and administrators to act upon and further solidify plague’s supposed invisibility in the urban terrain. Rather than being a short-lived, moribund object of epidemiological concern, this paper will demonstrate that the soil played a crucial role in the development of plague as a scientifically knowable and actionable category for modern medicine.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
Mikhail V. DUTSEV

The article is devoted to the reality of the modern historical city in the totality of the actual values of the valuable heritage, traces of the past, mental codes, archetypal images and the memory of civilization. The place of history in today’s socio-cultural fi eld and in the professional context is not clearly defi ned. Together with the understanding of the need to preserve the heritage, traces and memory of the past, there are global trends that mediate the features of the glocal in architecture. However, even this compromise cannot fully demonstrate the complexity of the historical city viability. According to the author, it is necessary to search for reasons that sometimes appear outside the material reality, but address directly to the spiritual world and mental space of a person, which is the main purpose of the article. The emphasis is placed on the artistic dimension of environmental realities, which allows us to determine the living connections of history and modernity on the basis of the author’s concept of artc integration. The article is illustrated by some results of cooperation between the Nizhny Novgorod State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering and the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) in the fi eld of reconstruction and renovation of historically valuable territories and author’s photographs.


Author(s):  
Laura Schaefli

The colonization of Aboriginal peoples in North America involved systematic efforts to control and eradicate Indigenous knowledges and cultures. However, Aboriginal peoples have resisted colonization through creative expression; creating space for the exploration and critique of the myriad identities informed by this relationship. This study focuses on work by prominent American and Canadian authors Louise Erdrich, Tomson Highway, and Daniel David Moses. Erdrich, who self‐identifies as Chippewa with mixed European ancestry, is best known for the interconnections of short narratives between and within her novels. Tomson Highway, a Cree novelist and playwright, is most famous for his cycles of“rez” playsdetailing life on a fictional Ontario reserve. Daniel David Moses, member of the Delaware First Nation in Brantford, Ontario and acclaimed Canadian playwright, is best known for his parody of non‐Aboriginal constructions of the “authentic Indian” in his work. These authors use political destruction of normative categories, particularly gender transgression, but also past and present, here and there, material reality and the spirit realm to create space for the playful exploration of Indigenous identities. I explore the ways in which gender transgression is nested in larger themes of playful category destruction and creative reconstruction to open up issues of political importance to these authors. By exploring these themes in conjunction with author biographies and interviews, I identify the political motives and implications of category transgression.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Eros Rosilah Rosilah

Learning Social Studies (IPS) is a compulsory subject taught. Learning IPS has a very wide range of material. Reality on the ground results of test scores of fourth grade students of SDN Babakan Tarogong 5 in social studies subject of natural resources, economic activity and technological advances in the district / city and province is still very low. This is due to social studies learning not meet minimum completeness, because the strategy used so far have not matched the learning process. The purpose of this study to determine the activities of students in participating in learning by using learning strategies of problem solving. The results of this research has reached the average value of the class.Keyword : Natural resources, economic activities, technological progress.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-31
Author(s):  
Kevin Rogan

Critical data studies have made great strides in bringing together data analysts and urban design, providing an extensible concept which is useful in visualizing the role of local and planetary data networks. But in the light of the experience of Sidewalk Labs, critical data studies need a further push. As smart cities, algorithmic urbanisms, and sensorial regimes inch closer and closer to reality, critical data studies remain woefully blind to economic and political issues. Data remains undertheorized for its economic content as a commodity, and the political ramifications of the data assemblages remain locked in a proto-political schema of good and bad uses of this vast network of data collection, analysis, research, and organization. This paper attempts to subject critical data studies to a rigorous critique by deepening its relationship to the history thus far of Sidewalk Labs’ project in Quayside, Toronto. It is broken into sections. The first section discusses the material reality of Kitchin and Lauriault’s (2014) data assemblages and data landscapes. The second section investigates data itself and what its ‘inherent’ value means in an economic sense. The third section looks at the way the understanding of data promoted by the data assemblage effects smart city design. The fourth section examines the role of the designer in shepherding this vision, and moreover the data assemblage, into existence.


Author(s):  
Melike Demirbag-Kaplan ◽  
Begum Kaplan-Oz

This article explores how individuals reflect on their digital experiences of actualizing fantasies to make sense of their everyday actions, particularly in the context of video gaming. Our study takes a qualitative approach to understanding the context of materializing consumer fantasies, as initially experienced and actualized in video games, and how these fantasies are transformed into material reality, through an investigation of an illustrative case of mass street protests, the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey. The findings suggest that digital virtual experiences in video games have obvious manifestations in the material world, as consumers travel on the borders of reality, moving back and forth into the liminoid terrain of the digital virtual, and provide a deeper understanding of how the blurred boundaries between the virtual and material are established in practice.


Author(s):  
Gerrit Krueper

Based on early Marx’s concept of the species-being, this paper provides a (historical) materialist definition of an ontology of being human and argues that it enables a theorization of a human post humanism. Such theory is based on the fact that cognitive capitalism’s rise of technology translates the human body into literal instruments of labor. However, the link of technology with the laborer enables a transfer of skills and powers that extend the body’s capabilities: creating thus, what this paper terms, the cyber-body. The material reality of this cyber-body is ambivalent: It is a reality of exploitation and abstraction, designed to eventually create infinite capital accumulation, as well as a reality of liberation from the social divisions of class, gender, race, and sexuality by use of its network connecting capabilities. Put together, this ambivalence recovers the real species-being.


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