scholarly journals Urgent Matter

Konturen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Jonathan Monroe

Opening questions about “things” onto the bureaucratically-maintained, compartmentalized discursive, disciplinary claims of “philosophy,” “theory,” and “poetry,” “Urgent Matter” explores these three terms in relation to one another through attention to recent work by Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, the German-American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, and the German poet Ulf Stolterfoht, whose fachsprachen. Gedichte. I-IX (Lingos I-IX. Poems) Waldrop rendered into English in an award-winning translation. The difference between the "things" called "poetry" and "philosophy," as now institutionalized within the academy, is not epistemological, ontological, ahistorical, but a matter of linguistic domains, of so-called concrete "images" as the policed domain of the former and of "abstraction" as the policed domain of the latter. Challenging the binary logics that dominate language use in diverse discursive/disciplinary cultures, Waldrop’s linguistically self-referential, appositional procedures develop ways to use language that are neither linear, nor so much without direction, as multi-directional, offering complexes of adjacency, of asides, of digression, of errancy, of being “alongside,” in lieu of being “opposed to,” that constitute at once a poetics, an aesthetics, an ethics, and a politics. Elaborating a complementary understanding of poetry as “the most philosophic of all writing,” a medium of being “contemporary,” Waldrop and Stolterfoht question poetry’s purposes as one kind of language apparatus among others in the general economy. Whatever poetry might be, it aspires to be in their hands not a thing in itself but a form of self-questioning, of all discourses, all disciplines, that “thing” that binds “poetry” and “philosophy” together, as urgent matter, in continuing.

Author(s):  
Lexi Eikelboom

This book argues that, as a pervasive dimension of human existence with theological implications, rhythm ought to be considered a category of theological significance. Philosophers and theologians have drawn on rhythm—patterned movements of repetition and variation—to describe reality, however, the ways in which rhythm is used and understood differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological implications. This book brings those implications into the open, using resources from phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences to analyse and evaluate uses of rhythm in metaphysical and theological accounts of reality. The analysis relies on a distinction from prosody between a synchronic approach to rhythm—observing the whole at once and considering how various dimensions of a rhythm hold together harmoniously—and a diachronic approach—focusing on the ways in which time unfolds as the subject experiences it. The text engages with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara alongside thinkers as diverse as Augustine and the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and proposes an approach to rhythm that serves the concerns of theological conversation. It demonstrates the difference that including rhythm in theological conversation makes to how we think about questions such as “what is creation?” and “what is the nature of the God–creature relationship?” from the perspective of rhythm. As a theoretical category, capable of expressing metaphysical commitments, yet shaped by the cultural rhythms in which those expressing such commitments are embedded, rhythm is particularly significant for theology as a phenomenon through which culture and embodied experience influence doctrine.


Author(s):  
Oskari Kuusela

This chapter elucidates Wittgenstein’s later non-empiricist naturalism. This novel kind of naturalism makes it possible to recognize the relevance of natural historical considerations concerning humans and language use for logic, while retaining the traditional conception of logic as a non-empirical discipline. The justification and generality of the employment of natural history based logical models is explained, and distinguished from the justification and generality of empirical statements. The different ways in which Wittgenstein makes use of natural historical considerations in logical or grammatical clarification are discussed, and the difference of Wittgenstein’s approach from broadly Kantian philosophical anthropology clarified. The correctness or truth of logical accounts is explained and a method of multidimensional logical descriptions introduced.


2019 ◽  
Vol 119 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas K Jones

Abstract There are two broad approaches to theorizing about ontological categories. Quineans use first-order quantifiers to generalize over entities of each category, whereas type theorists use quantification on variables of different semantic types to generalize over different categories. Does anything of import turn on the difference between these approaches? If so, are there good reasons to go type-theoretic? I argue for positive answers to both questions concerning the category of propositions. I also discuss two prominent arguments for a Quinean conception of propositions, concerning their role in natural language semantics and apparent quantification over propositions within natural language. It will emerge that even if these arguments are sound, there need be no deep question about Quinean propositions’ true nature, contrary to much recent work on the metaphysics of propositions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 1515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Thompson Klein

The title of this article signals increasing collaboration across boundaries aimed at understanding and solving complex scientific and societal problems. The article is a reflective analysis of five intersecting keywords in discussions of sustainability and boundary crossing. This genre of discourse studies interprets language use, drawing in this case on a representative sample of authoritative definitions, case studies, and state-of-the-art accounts. The Introduction situates the discussion around the increasing number and size of teams as well as research across both academic disciplines and other sectors, followed by the five keywords that structure the overall argument. Section 2 examines the first of the five keywords, defining interdisciplinarity by marking its alignment with integration, confluence, interdependence, interaction, and balance. Section 3 considers the second keyword—transdisciplinarity—by tracing evolution of a problem-focused connotation, links to sustainability, inclusion of stakeholders, the imperative of critique, and transdisciplinary action research. Section 4 brings together insights on inter- and trans-disciplinarity in a composite “crossdisciplinary” alignment with collaboration, factoring in the nature of teamwork, public engagement, and translation. Section 5 then turns to learning, noting the difference between education and training then emphasizing transformative capacity, double- and triple-loop learning, reflexivity, and a transdisciplinary orientation. Section 6 takes up the final keyword—knowledge—by calling attention to inclusion, indigenous and local perspectives, nomothetic versus idiographic perspectives, the question of fit, and the nature of crossdisciplinary knowledge. The article concludes by identifying future research needs.


Author(s):  
Harry Bunt

This chapter presents a characterisation of the field of computational pragmatics, discusses some of the fundamental issues in the field, and provides a survey of recent developments. Central to computational pragmatics is the development and use of computational tools and models for studying the relations between utterances and their context of use. Essential for understanding these relations are the use of inference and the description of language use as actions inspired by the context, and intended to influence the context. The chapter therefore focuses on recent work in the use of inference for utterance interpretation and in dialogue modeling in terms of dialogue acts, viewed as context-changing actions. The chapter concludes with a survey of recent activities concerning the construction and use of resources in computational pragmatics, in particular annotation schemes, annotated corpora, and tools for corpus construction and use.


Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.


Recent work on the osmotic pressure of the hen’s egg has introduced a sense of uncertainty as to the value of the many comparisons which have been made between osmotic pressures of the blood, body fluids, and surrounding media. The uncertainty pertains not to theory but to a simple matter of fact and, as this involves that most fundamental datum for biological theory—viz., the state of the water in the living cell—there is urgent need to have it cleared up. The fact in dispute is the freezing point of the yolk and white of the bird’s egg. Atkins in 1909 by measurements, obviously made with the greatest care, found “no difference between the freezing point of white and yolk of the same egg and a mixture of white and yolk gave the same depression.” Atkins (1909) used the ordinary Beckmann technique and so, too, did Straub (1929) twenty years later, but with a surprisingly different result for he found a constant difference between white and yolk of the hen’s egg amounting on the average to —0·15° C. A. V. Hill (1930) confirmed Straub’s (1929) finding by a different method. He compared the fall in temperature caused by evaporation with that of water and from the difference calculated the osmotic pressure. Howard (1932) using the Beckmann method again found no difference in the freezing point of white and yolk. In these measurements the yolk was puddled by stirring so that at sometime or another the structure was broken down. Yolk is not only a chemical complex but it is alive, gross mechanical disturbance might, therefore, have the effect it usually has on living cells and cause chemical breakdown with consequent fall of the freezing point. Hale’s experiments were designed to explore this possibility by observing directly the freezing point of intact yolk and white.


2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael Salkie

Some recent work on French tenses has proposed a new analysis of the difference between the imperfect and the passé simple/passé composé. The imperfect is said to be a relative or anaphoric tense, while the PS/PC are absolute or deictic tenses. A number of studies have argued against the more widely accepted analysis which sees the difference between these tenses in terms of aspect. This paper argues that the new analysis is fundamentally incorrect as an account of the meaning of the French past tenses, although it has brought to light a range of phenomena which need to be included in a full account of the behaviour of the tenses in discourse. I argue that an enriched version of the traditional analysis can account for all the relevant data.


1881 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-283
Author(s):  
Cargill G. Knott

At the surface of separation of any two different substances in contact, there exists in general an electromotive force tending to maintain a certain difference of potential between them. This principle, established for metals by Volta in 1796, has been extended by later investigators to other substances, including liquids and gases. From these early researches of Volta, and the later more elaborate inquiries of Kohlrausch, Hankel, and Gerland, there have been deduced certain fundamental laws, which have been fully corroborated by the recent work of Clifton, and Ayrton and Perry. If, of a number of conductors set serially in contact, the difference of potential between each successive pair is quantitatively estimated and reckoned positive or negative, according as the first member of the pair is at a higher or lower potential than its successor, then the difference of potential between the first and last members of the chain is equal to the algebraic sum of the potential differences between the successive contiguous pairs.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arab World English Journal ◽  
Sabria Salama Jawhar

This paper is an investigation of language use inside a content language integrated learning (CLIL) classroom at Saudi tertiary level. It examines the difference in language use between teachers and students in four subject-specific classrooms in which English is used as a medium of instruction. The study is informed by corpus linguistics (CL) and uses the principles and theoretical underpinning of conversation analysis (CA). It identifies the most frequent linguistic features of CLIL and examines their diverse interactional functions in this context. Amongst the most frequent linguistic features in CLIL are short response tokens such as “yes” and “no”. Using a micro-analytic approach to conversation analysis, a closer look at the data shows the students’ ability to use small and limited linguistic resources to accomplish multiple interactional functions such as taking the floor, taking turns and, most importantly, displaying orientation to knowledge. The data reflected the relationship between frequency and meaning construction. With regard to the difference in language use between teachers and students with regard to comes to short response tokens, the study shows some common interactional uses of response tokens between teachers and students, such as agreement, acknowledgement, response to confirmation checks and yes/no questions. On the other hand, it shows some exclusive interactional use of the same token by teachers and students. Finally, the paper emphasises the relationship of language, interaction and orientation to content knowledge in CLIL classrooms. Pedagogically, the findings have implications for teachers’ language use and for increased classroom interaction.


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