Attention and the Free Play of the Faculties

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception.

The Essences of Objects: Explicating a Theory of Essence in Object-Oriented Ontology

In this paper, I will discuss the need for a theory of essences within Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and then formulate one. I will do so by drawing on Graham Harman’s work on OOO and Martin Heidegger’s thought on the essence of being, presented in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Harman touches on essences, describing them as the tension between a withdrawn object and its withdrawn qualities, but fails to distinguish between essential and inessential qualities within this framework. To fill in the gaps, I will turn to Heidegger’s explication of phusis in order to show that an essential aspect of being is how one enters into causal relations and continually reveals oneself to other beings. In bringing OOO and Heidegger together, I will find that each object has a unique way of exerting itself in the world and that the domestic relations that make up this unique profile are essential to it, while other domestic relations, those that do not influence its particular way of exerting itself, are inessential. Thus, the essence will be found to be the set of domestic relations that make up the determinate form, or unique causal profile, of the object.

The voice of an ancient spring

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, an old beggar woman is heard singing outside Regent’s Park underground station. The song itself cannot be fixed: it is given to us, first, as a string of meaningless syllables, then ‘translated’ by the narrator of the book into an ancient, primordial song of sexual love, and then heard in the form of a modern German lied—a melancholy fin-de-siècle art-song which is inconceivable as a song sung by a beggar on a London street in 1925. The solid foundation of realism dissolves in Woolf’s playful handling, but she has good reasons for refusing to pin the song down to a single determinate form. The characters who see and hear the old woman—Peter Walsh, Rezia and Septimus Smith—do not really ‘see’ her for what she is, and do not understand that she is not begging, but offering; and they pass her by.

The “Place” of Language

This chapter sets out a general Heideggerian framework for conceiving language by extracting an overall picture of language’s role in world disclosure from Being and Time. Having introduced Heidegger’s account of how human understanding takes on determinate form, it identifies two problems in understanding where language fits into this account, problems linked with the interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of Articulacy (Rede) and its relation to intelligent nonlinguistic behaviors. Based on Heidegger’s discussion of predicative judgments (‘statements’ or ‘assertions’), particularly the relation between language and content this implies, it then argues that these two problems can be solved by interpreting Articulacy as having distinct purposive and predicative modes. This has the important consequence that a Heideggerian framework allows for ‘prepredicative’ language use that underlies and is irreducible to predication or propositional content.

Fremtiden i skraldespanden: Temporær perspektivisme blandt danske venstreradikale aktivister

Artiklen belyser venstreradikale aktivisters indsamling af mad fra supermarkeders affaldscontainere, såkaldt skraldning, som politisk og tidsligt fænomen. Analysen peger på kroppen som både politikkens form og objekt og på, hvordan formgivning af kroppen frembringer tid. Artiklen omhandler aktivisters erfaringer af forskel- lige midlertidige perspektiver (død og aktiv tid). Frem for at anskue politiske handlinger som orienterede imod eller et resultat af et fremtidigt punkt eller mål bruges begrebet figuration til at beskrive, hvordan en ellers ubestemmelig fremtid midlertidigt opnår en bestemt form. Gennem analysen udsættes modstillingen mellem nutid og fremtid således for en etnografisk informeret kritik. Stine Krøijer: The Future in a Garbage Container: Temporary Perspectivism among Danish Leftwing Activists The present article describes the practice of dumpster diving, that is, the recollection of discarded food from supermarket containers, as a political and temporal phenomenon. The analysis points to the body as both the form and object of political action, and on how this figuration of the body engenders time. The article illuminates left radical activists’ experiences of different temporal perspectives (dead and active time). Rather than looking upon political actions as oriented towards, or as a result of, a future goal or point in time, the concept figuration is employed to describe how an otherwise indeterminate future temporarily gains a determinate form. Through the analysis the antinomy between present and future is subjected to an ethnographically informed critique. Keywords: Dumpster diving, activism, body , time, future, Denmark

Sentencing as Art

Thomas Aquinas, in his famous argument on human law, classified the process of sentencing as an art, as opposed to a science. Human law, he argued, or at least good human law, “has the force of law in that it flows from natural law”. And yet, Aquinas further maintained that “commands can be traced to natural law in two ways; one, drawn deductively like conclusions from premises; two, grounded on it like constructional implementations of general directives. The first process is like that of the sciences. … The second process is like that of the arts where a special shape is given to a general idea, as when an architect determines that a house should be in this or that style”. Hence while a proposition such as “you must not commit murder” can be deduced from “you must not commit harm”, no similar deduction can determine the appropriate punishment for the crime: “Natural law pronounces that crime has to be punished without deciding whether this or that should be the penalty; the punishment selected is like a determinate form given to natural law”, concludes Aquinas.

The Chemical Composition of Archaic Greek Bronze

This paper sets forth the chemical analysis of a number of copper objects from Greece of the Late Bronze and Early Iron ages. The majority of these objects were picked up by me during my wanderings, and so are not exactly stratified or datable, but nevertheless may be assigned with tolerable certainty within the limits described. The collection from the Argive Heraeum was found in the temple rubbish-heaps; the pieces of determinate form are paralleled from Geometric times, so it is highly probable that the whole of this deposit is of the same date.

On the corpuscles of the blood. Part II

The observations recorded in this memoir are founded on an examination of the blood in every class of vertebrated animals, in some of the Invertebrata, and in the embryo of Mammalia and Birds. The nucleus of the blood-corpuscle, usually considered as a single object, is here represented as composed, in some instances, of two, three, or even many parts; these parts having a constant and determinate form. In the substance surrounding the nucleus, the author has frequently been able to discern, not merely “red colouring matter,” but cell-like objects; and he points out an orifice as existing at certain periods in the delicate membrane by which this substance is surrounded. In a former memoir he had differed no less from previous observers regarding “cells.” He had shown, for instance, that the nucleus of the cell, instead of being “cast off as useless, and absorbed,” is a centre for the origin, not only of the transitory contents of its own cell, but also of the two or three principal and last-formed cells, destined to succeed that cell; and that a separation of the nucleus into two or three parts, is not, as Dr. Henle had supposed in the case of the Pus and Mucus-globule (the only instances in which the separation in question had been observed), the effect of acetic acid, used in the examination,—but that such separation is natural, apparently common to nuclei in general, and forming part of the process by which cells are reproduced. The author had farther shown the so-called nucleolus to be not a distinct object existing before the nucleus, but merely one of a series of appearances arising in succession, the one within the other, at a certain part of the nucleus, and continuing to arise even after the formation of the cell. These views he now confirms; and in the present paper shows that they admit of being extended to the corpuscles of the blood.

On the equilibrium of a mass of homogeneous fluid at liberty

The author shows that Clairaut’s theory of the equilibrium of fluids, however seductive by its conciseness and neatness, and by the skill displayed in its analytical construction, is yet insufficient to solve the problem in all its generality. The equations of the upper surface of the fluid, and of all the level surfaces underneath it, are derived, in that theory, from the single expression of the hydrostatic pressure, and are entirely dependent on the differential equation of the surface. They require, therefore, that this latter equation be determinate and explicitly given ; and accordingly they are sufficient to solve the problem when the forces are known algebraical expressions of the co-ordinates of the point of action; but they are not sufficient when the forces are not explicitly given, but depend, as they do in the case of a homogeneous planet, on the assumed figure of the fluid. In this latter case, the solution of the problem requires, farther, that the equations be brought to a determinate form by eliminating all that varies with the unknown figure of the fluid; and the means of doing his are not provided for in the theory of Clairaut, which tacitly assumes that the forces urging the interior particles are derived from the forces at the upper surface, merely by changing the co-ordinates at the point of action. In the case of a homogeneous planet, the forces acting on the interior particles are not deducible, in the manner supposed, from the forces at the surface. After showing that the equilibrium of a fluid, entirely at liberty, will not be disturbed by a pressure of the same intensity applied to all the parts of the exterior surface, the author considers the action of the forces upon the particles in the interior parts of the body of the fluid; and shows that although the forces at the surface are universally deducible from the general expressions of the forces of the interior parts, yet the converse of this proposition is not universally true, the former not being always deducible from the latter; a distinction which is not attended to in Clairaut’s theory. He then investigates the manner in which these two classes of forces are connected together; establishes a general theorem on the subject; and proceeds to its application to some of the principal problems, relating to the equilibrium of a homogeneous fluid at liberty, and of which the particles attract one another with forces, first in the inverse duplicate ratio, and secondly in the direct ratio of the distance, at the same time that they are urged by a centrifugal force arising from their revolution round an axis. The author concludes with some remarks on Maclaurin’s demonstration of the equilibrium of the oblate elliptical spheroid; and on the method of investigation followed in the paper published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1824. In an Appendix the author subjoins some remarks on the manner in which this subject has been treated by M. Poisson.