German-language culture and the Slav stranger within

The aim of this article is to delineate the symbolic position of the Slavonic, and in particular the Czech, in German-language Austrian culture of the period 1890–1940. My approach will be informed by psychoanalysis. A subsidiary aim is to try to demonstrate uses of psychoanalysis in the study of central European culture. What is at issue here is an historical set of social power relations that find their expression in culture, that is to say, in art and literature, and that can be interpreted by psychoanalysis. All too often psychoanalysis avoids the social and the political outside the framework of the individual and her or his predictable traumas emanating from domestic life.1 This article, however, constitutes an exercise in inter- and intra-cultural psychoanalysis: intra-cultural as an investigation of psychoanalytic dynamics within German-language culture; inter-cultural as an examination of the relationship between German-language and Slav cultures in psychoanalytic terms

Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge

Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This "imaginative resistance" is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability, or readers' normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical work that has been asked of it. Resistance to taking things to be fictional is often best explained by unfamiliarity with kinds of fictions than any representational, normative, or cognitive limits. With training and experience, any understandable proposition can be made fictional and be taken to be fictional by readers. This requires a new understanding both of imaginative resistance, and what it might be able to tell us about topics like conceivability or the bounds of possibility

The *subjectivity* of subjective experience - A representationalist analysis of the first-person perspective

This is a brief and accessible English summary of the "Self-model Theory of Subjectivity" (SMT), which is only available as German book in this archive. It introduces two new theoretical entities, the "phenomenal self-model" (PSM) and the "phenomenal model of the intentionality-relation" PMIR. A representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-person persepctive is offered. This is a revised version, including two pictures

A theory of Austria

The present essay seeks, by way of the Austrian example, to make a contribution to what might be called the philosophy of the supranational state. More specifically, we shall attempt to use certain ideas on the philosophy of Gestalten as a basis for understanding some aspects of that political and cultural phenomenon which was variously called the Austrian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Danube Monarchy or Kakanien

Effective resummation methods for an implicit resurgent function

Our main aim in this self-contained article is at the same time to detail the relationships between the resurgence and the hyperasymptotic theories, and to demonstrate how these theories can be used for an implicit resurgent function. For this purpose we consider after Stokes the question of the effective Borel-resummation of an exact Bohr-Sommerfeld-like implicit resurgent function whose values on an explicit semi-lattice provide the zeros of the Airy function. The resurgent structure encountered resembles what one usually gets in nonlinear problems, so that the method described here is quite general

A stochastic individual based model for the growth of a stand of Japanese knotweed including mowing as a management technique

Invasive alien species are a growing threat for environment and health. They also have a major economic impact, as they can damage many infrastructures. The Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica), present in North America, Northern and Central Europe as well as in Australia and New Zealand, is listed by the World Conservation Union as one of the world's worst invasive species. So far, most models have dealt with how the invasion spreads without management. This paper aims at providing a model able to study and predict the dynamics of a stand of Japanese knotweed taking into account mowing as a management technique. The model we propose is stochastic and individual-based, which allows us taking into account the behaviour of individuals depending on their size and location, as well as individual stochasticity. We set plant dynamics parameters thanks to a calibration with field data, and study the influence of the initial population size, the mean number of mowing events a year and the management project duration on mean area and mean number of crowns of stands. In particular, our results provide the sets of parameters for which it is possible to obtain the stand eradication, and the minimal duration of the management project necessary to achieve this latter

Asymptotics of the instantons of Painleve I

The 0-instanton solution of Painlev\'e I is a sequence $(u_{n,0})$ of complex numbers which appears universally in many enumerative problems in algebraic geometry, graph theory, matrix models and 2-dimensional quantum gravity. The asymptotics of the 0-instanton $(u_{n,0})$ for large $n$ were obtained by the third author using the Riemann-Hilbert approach. For $k=0,1,2,...$, the $k$-instanton solution of Painlev\'e I is a doubly-indexed sequence $(u_{n,k})$ of complex numbers that satisfies an explicit quadratic non-linear recursion relation. The goal of the paper is three-fold: (a) to compute the asymptotics of the 1-instanton sequence $(u_{n,1})$ to all orders in $1/n$ by using the Riemann-Hilbert method, (b) to present formulas for the asymptotics of $(u_{n,k})$ for fixed $k$ and to all orders in $1/n$ using resurgent analysis, and (c) to confirm numerically the predictions of resurgent analysis. We point out that the instanton solutions display a new type of Stokes behavior, induced from the tritronqu\'ee Painlev\'e transcendents, and which we call the induced Stokes phenomenon. The asymptotics of the 2-instanton and beyond exhibits new phenomena not seen in 0 and 1-instantons, and their enumerative context is at present unknown.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure

Introduction to 1-summability and resurgence

This text is about the mathematical use of certain divergent power series. The first part is an introduction to 1-summability. The definitions rely on the formal Borel transform and the Laplace transform along an arbitrary direction of the complex plane. Given an arc of directions, if a power series is 1-summable in that arc, then one can attach to it a Borel-Laplace sum, i.e. a holomorphic function defined in a large enough sector and asymptotic to that power series in Gevrey sense. The second part is an introduction to Ecalle's resurgence theory. A power series is said to be resurgent when its Borel transform is convergent and has good analytic continuation properties: there may be singularities but they must be isolated. The analysis of these singularities, through the so-called alien calculus, allows one to compare the various Borel-Laplace sums attached to the same resurgent 1-summable series.In the context of analytic difference-or-differential equations, this sheds light on the Stokes phenomenon. A few elementary or classical examples are given a thorough treatment (the Euler series, the Stirling series, a less known example by Poincar\'e). Special attention is devoted to non-linear operations: 1-summable series as well as resurgent series are shown to form algebras which are stable by composition. As an application, the resurgent approach to the classification of tangent-to-identity germs of holomorphic diffeomorphisms in the simplest case is included. An example of a class of non-linear differential equations giving rise to resurgent solutions is also presented. The exposition is as self-contained as can be, requiring only some familiarity with holomorphic functions of one complex variable.Comment: 127 page

You & Yours

An extended example illustrating various theories of personal identity and imagining how duplicates would confront the argument that neither of them is identical with the original