Hegel’s Kilogram: Taking the Measure of Metrical Units

2021 ◽  
pp. 125-140
Author(s):  
Nathan Brown

While Chapter 4 pursues the ontological consequences of a shift from speculative idealism to speculative materialism, Chapter 5 engages the ontic scope of scientific practice in detail. I consider the recent project in scientific metrology to redefine the kilogram unit in terms of Hegel’s theory of measure, as the unity of quantity and quality. The chapter offers a detailed description of experimental approaches to redefining the kilogram, situating this project with respect to the history of the metric system.

Author(s):  
Didier Debaise

Process and Reality ends with a warning: ‘[t]he chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence’ (PR, 337). Although this danger of narrowness might emerge from the ‘idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization’ (PR, 337), we should not be mistaken: it occurs within philosophy, in its activity, its method. And the fact that this issue arises at the end of Process and Reality reveals the ambition that has accompanied its composition: Whitehead has resisted this danger through the form and ambition of his speculative construction. The temptation of a narrowness in selection attempts to expel speculative philosophy at the same time as it haunts each part of its system.


This paper analyzes Foucault’s early thinking (from 1954 to 1957) as it bears on psychology, anthropology and psychiatry. The author maintains that Foucault’s texts from that period can be mined for the origins of the Foucault methodology, early indications of its scope, and its first applications. Although Foucault opposed a phenomenology of epistemology and allied himself with the latter, a close reading of his early work reveals a paradoxical synthesis of phenomenological and epistemological views. The influences of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Binswanger were decisive here.Foucault adopted the “practice-to-theory” vector from Canguilhem and grounded the history of psychology and psychiatry on the study of essential oppositions: normal - pathological, personality - environment, evolution - history. Merleau-Ponty’s theory allowed him to demonstrate that the ontological perspective of psychology and psychiatry does not match the subject of their research, which is the person and their experience. Foucault’s application of Binswanger and the idea of existence is to problematize the boundaries between psychology and psychiatry and their identity as sciences while formulating the problem of pathology and normality as crucial to their identification. He also considers mental illness as one of the forms of experience. Foucault thus goes beyond the boundaries of psychology and psychiatry to develop his archaeological method. In the Order of things and the Archaeology of Knowledge he makes two philosophical maneuvers: in the first, he rejects the subject; in the second he abandons the continuity of history. Foucault’s early psychological and psychiatric discourse is then the first harbinger of his trespassing the boundaries of disciplines and schools, combining perspectives, and scrutinizing the foundations of scientific practice. A critical dialogue with his own earlier thought is the source of Foucault’s birth as a philosopher.


Author(s):  
Karel Schrijver

This chapter describes how the first found exoplanets presented puzzles: they orbited where they should not have formed or where they could not have survived the death of their stars. The Solar System had its own puzzles to add: Mars is smaller than expected, while Venus, Earth, and Mars had more water—at least at one time—than could be understood. This chapter shows how astronomers worked through the combination of these puzzles: now we appreciate that planets can change their orbits, scatter water-bearing asteroids about, steal material from growing planets, or team up with other planets to stabilize their future. The special history of Jupiter and Saturn as a pair bringing both destruction and water to Earth emerged from the study of seventeenth-century resonant clocks, from the water contents of asteroids, and from experiments with supercomputers imposing the laws of physics on virtual worlds.


Author(s):  
Ann Werner

This chapter explores identity issues in commercial streaming services, which have grown steadily in the 2010s to become the dominant form of music consumption in the Nordic countries, with about 60% of all Internet users in 2015. The chapter offers an alternative to the dominant trend in music industry studies by focusing not on the industry’s interests but instead on broader cultural issues. The chapter presents case studies of two female Sámi artists and their representations on Spotify, YouTube, MySpace, and artists’ websites, taking various aspects of the services into account, including the interface and the algorithm-based recommendations. Informed by feminist cultural studies, the argument is that the industry continues a history of reinforcing stereotypes of ethnicity, indigeneity, and femininity. Thus, commercial streaming is not only making music available to global audiences, it is also selling images of Otherness within an unequal capitalist global media system.


Author(s):  
Alexander MacDonald

Mankind will not remain forever confined to the Earth. In pursuit of light and space it will, timidly at first, probe the limits of the atmosphere and later extend its control to the entire solar system. —Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Letter to B. N. Vorobyev, 1911 What do we learn from this long-run perspective on American space exploration? How does it change our understanding of the history of spaceflight? How does it change our understanding of the present? This book has provided an economic perspective on two centuries of history, with examinations of early American observatories, the rocket development program of Robert Goddard, and the political history of the space race. Although the subjects covered have been wide-ranging, together they present a new view of American space history, one that challenges the dominant narrative of space exploration as an inherently governmental activity. From them a new narrative emerges, that of the Long Space Age, a narrative that in the ...


Author(s):  
L. V. Batiev

The predominant interest of S.A. Muromtsev in Roman law and jurisprudence (legal thinking) in the 1870-1880s is due to their special role in the history of law and in the legal system of modern Europe, as well as the science of civil law. His research in this area was not so much historical as theoretical. It was works on Roman law that formed the S.A. Muromtsev’s scientific concept. Based on the analysis of the problem of the conservatism of Roman jurisprudence, S.A. Muromtsev, following R. Iering and contrary to the historical school, comes to the conclusion that the content of law is causally dependent on the needs of civil life and the activity of legal thinking (jurisprudence in the broad sense), formulating new standards in the struggle of ideas and goals. With this approach, along with economic and other factors of the development of society and its needs, to understand the development of law, it is important to study the properties of legal thinking in its historical development. The combination of historical and theoretical approaches to the study of law and legal thinking seems fruitful, but little realized in scientific practice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-59
Author(s):  
A.N. Plaksina ◽  
◽  
O.P. Kovtun ◽  
S.L. Sinotova ◽  
O.V. Limanovskaya ◽  
...  

Objective of the research: identification of risk factors that potentially affect the outcomes of pregnancies achieved by assisted reproductive technologies (ART), with an assessment of the health status of children born to women with genitourinary system (GUS) diseases. Materials and methods: a retrospective uncontrolled non-randomized multicenter study of 821 women and 836 children under the age of 3 years. Results: gynecological history of women has little effect on pregnancy outcomes achieved by ART (Matthews coefficient <0,2). Children born to mothers with GUS diseases are statistically significantly more likely to have some infectious and parasitic diseases (p=0,0002), mental and behavioral disorders (p=0,009), diseases of the nervous system (p=0,031), respiratory system (p=0,009), oral cavity, salivary glands and digestion (p=0,002), musculoskeletal system and connective tissue (p=0,001), genitourinary system (p=0,009), certain conditions arising in the perinatal period (p=0,009), as well as trauma, poisoning, and some other consequences of external causes (p=0,009) than children from mothers without GUS diseases. Conclusion: children born by ART from women with GUS pathology are a risk group for the development of diseases in early age.


Author(s):  
Anastasia Marinopoulou

In his systems’ theory, Luhmann attempts to redefine communication, and associates it with information. For Luhmann, communication is distinct from action (Handeln), and the rationality of the scientific system resides in the notion of Zweck, or in the ends of the sciences towards action. For the first time in the epistemological history of modernity, rationality is understood as a certain scientific purpose of action and not as the critique of scientific truth and validity of reason. The schism that Luhmann brought about between ‘traditional’ epistemology (reconsidered now as novel) and the ‘critical’ theory of science (seen by Luhmann as ‘traditional’) was irredeemable. In the following pages, I maintain that all evidence to the contrary such a divergence was inherent to modernity.Drawing on the Schützean model of multiple realities, Luhmann manages to blur the distinction between instrumentality and rationality by relativizing both within systemic complexity. According to Luhmann, complexity characterizes a multifaceted social system, such as science itself. However, I argue that where complexity, in Luhmann, interprets the systemic, it also employs presentism and partial situationalism to explain the essence and methodology of science as a system.


Author(s):  
Martin Maiden ◽  
Adina Dragomirescu ◽  
Gabriela Pană Dindelegan ◽  
Oana Uță Bărbulescu ◽  
Rodica Zafiu

How did the definite article evolve morphologically from Latin ILLE? What is the determiner al and how did it evolve? What is the history of the indefinite article? How does locative and adverbial deixis work? What is the function of the formatives -a, -le, and -și?


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