The Cultural Significance of k-NN

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-130
Author(s):  
James E. Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Nearest Neighbor ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Big Data Applications ◽  
Actual Use ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formalized Description

This chapter turns to a lower level of computation to produce a cultural critique and historicization of one of the most important algorithms used in digital humanities and other big-data applications in the present moment, the k-nearest neighbor or k-NN algorithm. The chapter reconstructs the partial genealogy, the intellectual history, of this important algorithm that was key to sense making in the midtwentieth century and has found continued life in the twenty-first century. In both its formalized description, its exposition in the papers introducing and refining the rule and its implementation in algorithmic form, and its actual use, the k-nearest neighbor algorithm draws on dominant midtwentieth-century ideologies and tropes, including partitioning, segregation, suburbanization, and democratization. In the process of situating the k-NN algorithm within the larger field containing other residual and emergent statistical methods, the author seeks to produce an intervention within the developing critical theory of algorithmic governmentality.

Taking Herod to Task: Source Critical and New Historical Methods of Reading Herod’s Trial

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-422
Author(s):  
Ari Finkelstein
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
First Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Historian ◽  
Historical Methods

AbstractFor nearly three decades scholars of the first-century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, have debated this author’s methodologies and goals in writing his Jewish Antiquities. While source-critics view Josephus as a compiler, new historians have chosen to read Antiquities as primarily a literary work which reveals social, political, and intellectual history. A series of recent publications place these methodologies side by side but rarely coordinate them, which leaves out important insights of each group. At stake is how we moderns read Jewish history of the first century CE. I explore how parallel accounts of Herod’s trial while he was Tetrarch of the Galilee in Jewish War and in Antiquities can be justified by employing source-critical analysis as a first step to explain the changes made to the text of Antiquities before turning to new historians’ methodologies. We can better understand the function of Herod’s trial in Antiquities through this process.

The Mathematical Imagination

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Handelman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Second World ◽  
Critical Project

The Mathematical Imagination is an archaeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of the Second World War. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative and argues that it has obscured how mathematics provided three lesser-known German-Jewish thinkers—Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer—with metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Their theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique borrowed ideas from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. This vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing in the intellectual history of critical theory—from the work of second-generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas to contemporary critiques of technology. Building on the work of Martin Jay and Susan Buck-Morss, The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us confront and intervene in our digital, and increasingly mathematical, present.

The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Public Law ◽  
First Century ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Legal Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

This book provides an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel’s classic The Dual State (1941), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel’s was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National Socialism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler’s Germany. His sophisticated––not to mention courageous––analysis amounted to an ethnography of Nazi law. Because of its clandestine origins, The Dual State has been hailed as the ultimate piece of intellectual resistance to the racial regime. This book brings Fraenkel’s innovative concept of “the dual state” back in, restoring it to its rightful place in the annals of public law scholarship. Uniquely blending insights from legal theory and legal history, it tells in an accessible manner the truly suspenseful gestation of Fraenkel’s ethnography of law inside the belly of the behemoth. But this is also a book about the ordering presence of institutions more generally. In addition to upending conventional wisdom about the law of the “Third Reich,” it explores the legal origins of dictatorship elsewhere, then and now. It theorizes the idea of an authoritarian rule of law, a cutting edge topic in law-and-society scholarship, and thus also speaks to the topic of democratic backsliding in the twenty-first century.

Philosophy before the Greeks

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Many ◽  
Eastern Traditions

There is a growing recognition that philosophy isn’t unique to the West, that it didn’t begin only with the classical Greeks, and that Greek philosophy was influenced by Near Eastern traditions. Yet even today there is a widespread assumption that what came before the Greeks was “before philosophy.” This book presents a groundbreaking argument that, for three millennia before the Greeks, one Near Eastern people had a rich and sophisticated tradition of philosophy fully worthy of the name. In the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily praised the Babylonians for their devotion to philosophy. Showing the justice of Diodorus’s comment, this is the first book to argue that there were Babylonian philosophers and that they studied knowledge systematically using a coherent system of logic rooted in the practices of cuneiform script. The book uncovers Babylonian approaches to knowledge in three areas: the study of language, which in its analysis of the written word formed the basis of all logic; the art of divination, which interpreted communications between gods and humans; and the rules of law, which confirmed that royal justice was founded on truth. The result is an innovative intellectual history of the ancient Near Eastern world during the many centuries in which Babylonian philosophers inspired scholars throughout the region—until the first millennium BC, when the breakdown of this cosmopolitan system enabled others, including the Greeks, to develop alternative methods of philosophical reasoning.

scholarly journals Introduction: Communicating Science: National Approaches in Twentieth-Century Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne Schirrmacher
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Public Science ◽  
Technological Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

In a recent book on The Publics of Science; Experts and Laymen Through History, Agustí Nieto-Galan introduced his subject of a (mostly Western) history of public science, covering the times from the Scientific Revolution to the twenty-first century, with reference to Sigmund Freud. In one of his essays of cultural critique, Freud had, so to speak, put culture itself on his couch, and this session also featured talk about science and technological application. Civilization and Its Discontents identified a factor of disillusionment in the progress of science and technology, which gave rise to “The Uneasiness in Culture” (the literal translation of the title of Freud's German essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), and this uneasiness tainted a great deal of the happiness science and technology were intended to cultivate (Nieto-Galán 2011; Freud 1930). New technology and inventions like telephones, ocean liners, or drugs, Freud argued, were mostly remedies for negative developments technology had just created; for instance, without modern transportation people would stay close to each other and not need any telephone. (However, he did not address the issue of whether scientific knowledge itself may have provided some satisfaction.) The modern individual, as analyzed by Freud, was therefore constantly ill at ease with modern scientific and technological culture.

Hausaland’s Islamic Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Eltantawi
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
History Of ◽  
Islamic Society

This chapter provides a history of the rise of Islam in west Africa, in particular to Hausaland, which is today’s Northern Nigeria. The chapter then concentrates on the Sokoto Jihad and subsequent caliphate led by Uthman Dan Fodio. The chapter traces his intellectual history, highlighting his engagement with the Arabian peninsula and championing of unifying the Hausaland region under the textual regimen of the Maliki school of Islamic law. The second layer of the sunnaic paradigm, the role the Sokoto jihad plays in contemporary northern Nigerian idealizations of an ideal Islamic society, is explained. Idealization of scholars and hudud punishments are shown to be reinscribed into Nigeria’s present moment as a source of authentication of the 1999 sharia experiment.

An Intellectual History of African Literary Studies?

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-306
Author(s):  
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
African Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Global Condition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractTwenty-first-century African literary production has generated a number of conundrums for scholars invested in African literary studies as one recognizable field of study. Some of these conundrums drive Tejumola Olaniyan’s declaration of a post-global condition in African literary studies in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age.” Understanding that essay demands a detour through an intellectual history of African literary studies from about 1990 to 2010.

Against Harmony

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Mark Shields
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Young Men ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
Western Model ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
History Of

Against Harmony traces the history of progressive and radical experiments in Japanese Buddhist thought and practice from the mid-Meiji period through the early Shōwa period (1885–1935), when historical events coalesced to eliminate all such experiments. It is a work of both intellectual history and of critical, comparative thought. Perhaps the two best representations of progressive Buddhism during this period were the New Buddhist Fellowship (1899–1915) and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (1931–1936). Both were nonsectarian, lay movements comprising young men with education in classical Buddhist texts as well as Western literature, philosophy, and religion. Their work effectively collapses commonly held distinctions between religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and economics. Unlike many others of their day, these “New Buddhists” did not regard the novel forces of modernization as problematic and disruptive, but rather, as an opportunity to explore and expand the possibilities of the dharma. Moreover, these and similar Buddhist and Buddhist-inspired movements experimented with novel, alternative forms of modernity, rooted in variations on what might be called “dharmic materialism.” In short, they did not simply inherit or mimic the dominant Western model(s). For this reason, their work remains of relevance in the early twenty-first century.

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