237,367 research outputs found
Against purity : identity, western feminisms and Indian complications
This thesis argues that Western feminist theoretical models of identity can be
productively complicated by the insights of postcolonial feminisms. In particular,
it explores ways that Western feminist theory might more adequately sustain a
focus on 'women' while keeping open a space for differences such as race and
nation. Part One identifies a number of themes that emerge from recent Indian
feminist scholarship on the intersections of sex, gender, race, nation and
community identities. Part Two uses these insights to look critically at the work
of four Western theorists, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Luce
Irigaray. I argue that strategies which privilege sexual difference as primary
cannot deal adequately with differences such as race and nation. But I also argue
that strategies which privilege destabilizing identity can be equally constrained
by the logic of dualisms which has made it so difficult for feminists to sustain a
focus on women and their differences. Part Three discusses how the insights to
be drawn from Indian ferninisms might be taken on board by Western ferninisms
in order to develop more complex models of power, identity and the self.
Throughout the thesis I draw on a Foucauldian understanding of power as
productive, and on Foucault's insight that subjects and identities emerge, not
through the imperatives of a single symbolic system, but through the intersection
of multiple networks of discourses, material practices and institutions. I argue
that, by attending to women's complex location within intersecting landscapes of
gender, nation, race and other community identities, feminist models of identity
can dispense with a logic of dualisms in order to redefine, and not only
destabilize 'women' as the subject of/for feminism. This requires working against
purity on three levels. First, it requires a model of power that gives up on the
search for pure, power-free zones and works instead with the instabilities power
produces as it both enables and constrains women. Second, it requires seeing
'women' as a complex, impure category that bleeds across the apparently coherent
borders of identity categories such as gender, race and nation, and contesting
discursive constructs of 'Woman' as the pure space of origin upon which these
apparently discrete categories stand. Third, it requires the development of
alternative models of the self that take these complex, impure spaces as a valid
and valorised position from which to act and to speak
The Logic of Opacity
We explore the view that Frege's puzzle is a source of straightforward counterexamples to Leibniz's law. Taking this seriously requires us to revise the classical logic of quantifiers and identity; we work out the options, in the context of higher-order logic. The logics we arrive at provide the resources for a straightforward semantics of attitude reports that is consistent with the Millian thesis that the meaning of a name is just the thing it stands for. We provide models to show that some of these logics are non-degenerate
But in the End, Why is Deleuze “Anti-Hegelian”? At the Root of the Hegel–Deleuze Affair
Deleuze said that he detested Hegelianism and dialectics: this paper claims that Deleuze is contra Hegel because he has and proposes a different philosophical system. Thus, I suggest that if we want to understand the reason of such a “disgust,” we need to focus the philosophical question that moves the entire Deleuzian system (§ 1). Then, I explain that if the ground-question of Hegel’s philosophy is “how is it possible that things are surpassed, that they go on?”, the Deleuzian one is “how is it that there is always something new, that things come out?” (§ 2). Finally, I discuss how desire can be considered as a key-example for seeing how the perspectives of the two thinkers diverge (§ 3)
Life, Logic, and the Pursuit of Purity
In the *Science of Logic*, Hegel states unequivocally that the category of “life” is a strictly logical, or pure, form of thinking. His treatment of actual life – i.e., that which empirically constitutes nature – arises first in his *Philosophy of Nature* when the logic is applied under the conditions of space and time. Nevertheless, many commentators find Hegel’s development of this category as a purely logical one especially difficult to accept. Indeed, they find this development only comprehensible as long as one simultaneously assumes that Hegel breaks his promise to let the logic do the leading. However, if Hegel were to in fact allow the logical development to be led by biological analogies at this point, problems would ensue. Not only would it contradict his own speculative method, which should secure the necessity of the categories, but it would also endanger the ontological generality of the category of life itself. Beyond undermining his method and the logical integrity of the category, however, I will argue that such a reading makes the transition to the next category of “cognition” unintelligible and problematic. My aim in the first part of this paper is to argue how logical life can be read as a pure category. I then argue in the second part how my reconstruction makes the transition to cognition intelligible without resorting to profane or supernatural interpretations
Perspectives for proof unwinding by programming languages techniques
In this chapter, we propose some future directions of work, potentially
beneficial to Mathematics and its foundations, based on the recent import of
methodology from the theory of programming languages into proof theory. This
scientific essay, written for the audience of proof theorists as well as the
working mathematician, is not a survey of the field, but rather a personal view
of the author who hopes that it may inspire future and fellow researchers
Quantum teleportation and Grover's algorithm without the wavefunction
In the same way as the quantum no-cloning theorem and quantum key
distribution in two preceding papers, entanglement-assisted quantum
teleportation and Grover's search algorithm are generalized by transferring
them to an abstract setting, including usual quantum mechanics as a special
case. This again shows that a much more general and abstract access to these
quantum mechanical features is possible than commonly thought. A non-classical
extension of conditional probability and, particularly, a very special type of
state-independent conditional probability are used instead of Hilbert spaces
and wavefunctions.Comment: 21 pages, including annex, important typo in annex corrected in v2,
Found Phys (2017
First-order modal logic in the necessary framework of objects
I consider the first-order modal logic which counts as valid those sentences which are true on every interpretation of the non-logical constants. Based on the assumptions that it is necessary what individuals there are and that it is necessary which propositions are necessary, Timothy Williamson has tentatively suggested an argument for the claim that this logic is determined by a possible world structure consisting of an infinite set of individuals and an infinite set of worlds. He notes that only the cardinalities of these sets matters, and that not all pairs of infinite sets determine the same logic. I use so-called two-cardinal theorems from model theory to investigate the space of logics and consequence relations determined by pairs of infinite sets, and show how to eliminate the assumption that worlds are individuals from Williamson’s argument
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