Experience and Transcendence; or, An Ontological Journey

Author(s):  
Jean Wahl
Keyword(s):  
Van Gogh ◽  

In this mature writing, Wahl looks back on his career and offers a succinct account of his philosophical and poetic journey. It not only touches on many of his philosophical, poetic, and artistic influences—Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, James, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, Whitehead, Claudel, Novalis, and Valéry, Cézanne and Van Gogh—but also but brings them together in such a way as to present his own unique concerns with a radical empiricism, with relativity, negativity, and facticity, with the concrete, with surpassing dichotomies, with “the silences of the dialectic,” with transcending transcendence, and especially with the preeminence of poetry. Along the way, Wahl demonstrates how poetry is crucial to his personal philosophical quest by interspersing his wide-ranging discussions with several poems of his own.

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Clayton

Owen Clayton, "London Eyes: William Dean Howells and the Shift to Instant Photography"(pp. 374––394) Toward the end of the nineteenth century, one of William Dean Howells's many avid readers, finally meeting him in the flesh, expressed surprise that the famed writer was not dead. Although he had not actually departed from the world, it was true that by this time the venerable "Dean"was at a low ebb. While younger authors were taking the novel in directions about which he was, at the least, ambivalent, Howells was aware that his own best work was behind him. Yet, throughout his career, he maintained a desire to test different literary approaches. In England in 1904, Howells tested a conceit that would allow him to keep pace with the literary movements of the day. This consisted of an extended photographic metaphor: an association of himself with the Kodak camera. He used this figuration to move beyond the philosophical foundations of his previous work. Criticism has largely overlooked this endeavor, which Howells buried away in the somewhat obscure travelogue London Films (1905). This essay shows how London Films used its photographic metaphor to question positivistic observational assumptions, the way in which this was a response to William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), and, finally, why Howells ultimately went back on his attempt to create a Kodak school in fiction.


Hypatia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Yap

Feminist epistemologies consider ways in which gender (among other social factors) influences knowledge. In this article, I want to consider a particular kind of feminist empiricism that has been called feminist radical empiricism (where the empiricism, not the feminism, is radical). I am particularly interested in this view's treatment of values as empirical, and consequently up for revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Proponents of this view cite the fact that it allows us to talk about certain things such as racial and gender equality as objective facts: not just whether we have achieved said equality in our society, but whether we are, in fact, all equal. I will raise the concern that the way in which they model the role of values in epistemology may be a problematic idealization of the open‐mindedness of human agents. In some cases, resistance to value‐change cannot be diagnosed as a failure to respond adequately to evidence. If so, the strategy of empirically testing our values that some feminist radical empiricists suggest may not be as useful a tool for social change as they think.


1983 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-200
Author(s):  
Martha Op De Coul

AbstractA recently discovered pencil drawing by Van Gogh (Fig. I), which has always been in private possession, shows a man standing with arms folded. It bears the signature Vincent at bottom right (Fig. 2). The drawing, in poor condition when discovered and clearlycut down at the top, has been thoroughly restored and laid down (Fig. 3). Details of the costume of the fiure can be paralleled in drawings of Van Gogh's Hague period (December 1881-September 1883) and a figure in precisely the same pose turns up in a highly detailed drawing of a Schevenitigen fish-drying shed dated May, 1882 (Fig. 4, Note 3). Our drawing may perhaps have served as a model for this. In style it is close to the topographical drawings in pencil that Van Gogh was working on in March and April 1882 to a commission from his art-dealer uncle (Note 5), particularly in the way the composition is built up by means of hatching. This dating is further supported by the similarity of our figure to those in two such topographical works dated March 1882 (Figs. 5 and 6, Notes 6 and 7). Only a few drawings of single figures are known from this period, which makes this discovery particularly welcome.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Babińska ◽  
Michal Bilewicz

AbstractThe problem of extended fusion and identification can be approached from a diachronic perspective. Based on our own research, as well as findings from the fields of social, political, and clinical psychology, we argue that the way contemporary emotional events shape local fusion is similar to the way in which historical experiences shape extended fusion. We propose a reciprocal process in which historical events shape contemporary identities, whereas contemporary identities shape interpretations of past traumas.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aba Szollosi ◽  
Ben R. Newell

Abstract The purpose of human cognition depends on the problem people try to solve. Defining the purpose is difficult, because people seem capable of representing problems in an infinite number of ways. The way in which the function of cognition develops needs to be central to our theories.


1976 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
H. M. Maitzen

Ap stars are peculiar in many aspects. During this century astronomers have been trying to collect data about these and have found a confusing variety of peculiar behaviour even from star to star that Struve stated in 1942 that at least we know that these phenomena are not supernatural. A real push to start deeper theoretical work on Ap stars was given by an additional observational evidence, namely the discovery of magnetic fields on these stars by Babcock (1947). This originated the concept that magnetic fields are the cause for spectroscopic and photometric peculiarities. Great leaps for the astronomical mankind were the Oblique Rotator model by Stibbs (1950) and Deutsch (1954), which by the way provided mathematical tools for the later handling pulsar geometries, anti the discovery of phase coincidence of the extrema of magnetic field, spectrum and photometric variations (e.g. Jarzebowski, 1960).


Author(s):  
W.M. Stobbs

I do not have access to the abstracts of the first meeting of EMSA but at this, the 50th Anniversary meeting of the Electron Microscopy Society of America, I have an excuse to consider the historical origins of the approaches we take to the use of electron microscopy for the characterisation of materials. I have myself been actively involved in the use of TEM for the characterisation of heterogeneities for little more than half of that period. My own view is that it was between the 3rd International Meeting at London, and the 1956 Stockholm meeting, the first of the European series , that the foundations of the approaches we now take to the characterisation of a material using the TEM were laid down. (This was 10 years before I took dynamical theory to be etched in stone.) It was at the 1956 meeting that Menter showed lattice resolution images of sodium faujasite and Hirsch, Home and Whelan showed images of dislocations in the XlVth session on “metallography and other industrial applications”. I have always incidentally been delighted by the way the latter authors misinterpreted astonishingly clear thickness fringes in a beaten (”) foil of Al as being contrast due to “large strains”, an error which they corrected with admirable rapidity as the theory developed. At the London meeting the research described covered a broad range of approaches, including many that are only now being rediscovered as worth further effort: however such is the power of “the image” to persuade that the above two papers set trends which influence, perhaps too strongly, the approaches we take now. Menter was clear that the way the planes in his image tended to be curved was associated with the imaging conditions rather than with lattice strains, and yet it now seems to be common practice to assume that the dots in an “atomic resolution image” can faithfully represent the variations in atomic spacing at a localised defect. Even when the more reasonable approach is taken of matching the image details with a computed simulation for an assumed model, the non-uniqueness of the interpreted fit seems to be rather rarely appreciated. Hirsch et al., on the other hand, made a point of using their images to get numerical data on characteristics of the specimen they examined, such as its dislocation density, which would not be expected to be influenced by uncertainties in the contrast. Nonetheless the trends were set with microscope manufacturers producing higher and higher resolution microscopes, while the blind faith of the users in the image produced as being a near directly interpretable representation of reality seems to have increased rather than been generally questioned. But if we want to test structural models we need numbers and it is the analogue to digital conversion of the information in the image which is required.


1979 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol A. Pruning

A rationale for the application of a stage process model for the language-disordered child is presented. The major behaviors of the communicative system (pragmatic-semantic-syntactic-phonological) are summarized and organized in stages from pre-linguistic to the adult level. The article provides clinicians with guidelines, based on complexity, for the content and sequencing of communicative behaviors to be used in planning remedial programs.


ASHA Leader ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patty Prelock

Children with disabilities benefit most when professionals let families lead the way.


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