Aristotle\u27s Theory of Genius Examined through Reid\u27s Theory of Natural Signs

This paper explains how we might comprehend Aristotle’s paradoxical theory of metaphor via Thomas Reid’s theory of natural signs. A realist, Aristotle believes that metaphor, as a stretching of the structure of language, relies on a fundamental relationship between things in the world. Metaphors are better or worse depending on the selection of fitting terms, and good metaphors are said to be the sign of genius. Metaphor mastery cannot be taught, but rather is an “intuitive perception”. Since what cannot be learned cannot be predicated on concepts, Reid’s account of the second type of natural signs helps clarify how Aristotle’s “similarity in dissimilars” is discoverable. Furthermore, that such natural signs do not depend on experience but rather are known to all given the “constitution of human nature,” explains away the problem of how a non-genius would be able to comprehend a metaphor without being able to create one

SUNDANESE INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IN SINDANG BARANG CULTURAL VILLAGE – BOGOR

The Sindang Barang Cultural Village was formed by the descendants of customary holders who live in Bogor to revitalize Sundanese culture. This is useful for preserving customs so that people can continue to live the Sundanese way (using indigenous knowledge and sticking to local wisdom) even though they live in the modern era. This study aims to identify the Sundanese indigenous knowledge possessed by them. This study uses a qualitative thematic analysis approach to identify it. The results of this study indicate that the themes of indigenous knowledge owned by the society are village landscape, agriculture, natural signs, health, and batik. The village landscape has sub-themes landscape of land and building position. The sub-themes of agriculture are the type of paddy, fertilizer, planting time, magic guard, and granary. Natural signs have the sub-themes of changing days and signs of calamity and disaster. The sub-theme of health is herbs. Batik has a sub-theme of motifs and natural dyes. This study found that some of the indigenous knowledge about herbs and batik had been lost from the people's memory

A view on the iconic turn from a semiotic perspective

Media are not only a means of communication. From a cognitive perspective, they may be viewed as components of an external, auxiliary memory system (Schönpflug 1997), and contemporary cognitive science “construes cognition as a complex system in which cognitive processes are ‘embodied, situated’ in environments, and ‘distributed’ across people and artifacts” (Nersessian 2007: 2). In man-machine communication, man-man-communication via digital machinery and especially in the World Wide Web (Heintz 2006, Steels 2006) the “external” components of this system have taken on more and more of the characteristics of our individual, “internal”, living and active memory with its richness of sensual and symbolic formats. The intellectual challenge in the drafts of the “masterminds” of hypertext (Eisenstein) and multimedia (Lintsbakh) was the detection of temporal/spatial, mathematical and linguistic correspondences between such different sensual and symbolic representations (Bulgakova 2007, Tsivian 2007). The so called “iconic” or “pictorial turn” was pulled along by the digital turn, and it may in turn have stimulated and accelerated the digital turn

The Enlightenment revival of the Epicurean history of language and civilisation

The Epicurean account of the origin of language appealed to eighteenth-century thinkers who tried to reconcile a natural history of language with\u3cbr\u3e\u3cbr\u3ethe biblical account of Adamic name-giving. As a third way between Aristotelian linguistic conventionality and what was perceived as a Platonic supernatural congruence between words and things, Epicurus’\u3cbr\u3e\u3cbr\u3etheory allowed for a measure of contingency to emerge in the evolution of initially natural signs. This hypothesis was taken up by authors as different from one another as Leibniz, Vico, Condillac and Mendelssohn. By integrating the Epicurean account of language into their own theories, however, these authors also revived the tensions inherent in the ancient thesis and had to confront the ensuing difficulties in innovative way

An Informational Study of the Evolution of Codes in Different Population Structures

Best Student Paper Award. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesWe consider the problem of the evolution of a code within a structured population of agents. The agents try to maximise their information about their environment by acquiring information from the outputs of other agents in the population. A naive use of information-theoretic methods would assume that every agent knows how to “interpret” the information offered by other agents. However, this assumes that one “knows” which other agents one observes, and thus which code they use. In our model, however, we wish to preclude that: it is not clear which other agents an agent is observing, and the resulting usable information is therefore influenced by the universality of the code used and by which agents an agent is “listening” to

Efficacy of a New Postpartum Transition Protocol for Avoiding Pregnancy

Introduction: The postpartum period is a challenging time for family planning, especially for women who breastfeed. Breastfeeding delays the return of menses (lactational amenorrhea), but ovulation often occurs before first menses. For this reason, a protocol was developed to assist women in identifying their return of fertility postpartum to avoid pregnancy. Methods: In this prospective, 12-month, longitudinal cohort study, 198 postpartum women aged 20 to 45 years (mean age, 30.2 years) were taught a protocol for avoiding pregnancy with either online or in-person instruction. A hand-held fertility monitor was used to identify the fertile period by testing for urinary changes in estrogen and luteinizing hormone, and the results were tracked on a web site. During lactational amenorrhea, urine testing was done in 20-day intervals. When menses returned, the monitor was reset at the onset of each new menstrual cycle. Participants were instructed to avoid intercourse during the identified fertile period. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was used to calculate unintentional pregnancy rates through the first 12 months postpartum. Results: There were 8 unintended pregnancies per 100 women at 12 months postpartum. With correct use, there were 2 unintended pregnancies per 100 women at 12 months. Conclusion: The online postpartum protocol may effectively assist a select group of women in avoiding pregnancy during the transition to regular menstrual cycles