Binary synthesis: Goethe's aesthetic intuition in literature and science

Argument This essay seeks to identify the cultural significance of Goethe's scientific writings. He reformulates, in the light of his own concrete experience, “crucial turning-points” (Hauptmomente) in the history of science – key ideas, the historical understanding of which is vital to present understanding – thus situating his own scientific work at the bi-polar center of the Western scientific tradition, conceived as the dramatic interplay over centuries of two opposing modes of thought. For in his experimentation he recaptures the glimpse of living form gained in aesthetic perception (Anschauung), from which such inherited theoretical positions are ultimately derived. At each stage of this process, imagination, in its aesthetic modality, is essential, for it alone reveals the world as it truly is. The literary quality of his writings on nature, as on culture, reveals Goethe's stylistic achievement in devising a medium in which the insights gained in contemplation may be so transmitted as to make a similar, imaginative, appeal to his reader – re-enacting the abstract-concrete equilibrium characterizing all aesthetic experience. Matching his style to the subtle, delicate, connectedness of Nature, Goethe recreates the delights of participating in natural creativity. His Janus-faced, scientific-literary, style illustrates “binary synthesis,” the principle that unites Goethe's science with his art

Spartan Daily, January 10, 1961

Volume 48, Issue 58https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4112/thumbnail.jp

Emily Dickinson\u27s Approach to Poetry

One of the most fascinating aspects of any poet is his conception of his art. Many poets have written extensively on the theory of art around which they orient their poetry. Others have clearly revealed their theories by writing criticism of other authors. Emily Dickinson, however, left no critical essays, no elucidation of her artistic principles. It is quite probable, indeed, that she did not consciously concern herself to any extent with poetic theory. She may have written, and written in her unique way, through an instinctive need which would admit of no plodding deliberation or stylistic experimentation. Still, such a need would resolve itself in certain characteristic ways. Implicit in these ways would be an intellectual and emotional approach to poetry. I believe the main elements of that approach are discoverable. A major difficulty confronting the student of Emily Dickinson is the unsettled state of her published material. It is remarkable that the poems were published at all considering their chaotic condition in manuscript and the strange career of these manuscripts after Emily Dickinson\u27s death. The editorial quagmire from which the published poems emerged, however, does not make the errors and shortcomings more palatable. So many errors have been detected in Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, that one hesitates to accept the authenticity of the wording of any poem in the volume. Both this volume and Bolts of Melody, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, suffer from poor organization. The poems are neither arranged chronologically nor categorized into well-defined classifications but are lumped under such inadequate headings as Time and Eternity and That Campaign Inscrutable. Despite the difficulties involved, there is ample justification for giving critical attention to Emily Dickinson\u27s poems. In the first place, no matter who determined the final wording of the poems, many emerge as great works of genius. It is, after all, the poems, not the personalities involved, with which a student is primarily concerned. Also, by finding and compiling from Emily Dickinson\u27s poems and letters selections which are relevant to a particular subject, the student can infer the poet\u27s own attitudes concerning that subject. Her statements speak for themselves when systematically presented in their proper relationships and contexts, whereas the individual thoughts and attitudes are obscured in a haphazard and confusing multiplicity of themes in the present editions of her work. After sketching the background of Emily Dickinson\u27s poetry, I shall show her attitude toward the individual word in regard to its power for communication. Next I shall discuss the mystical tendency which her poems exhibit and compare her position with traditional mysticism as treated by Evelyn Underhill in her two authoritative books, Mysticism and The Mystic Way. In the fourth chapter I shall indicate how Emily Dickinson\u27s attitude toward communication and her mystical tendency result in a rather definite aesthetic position which affected her attitude toward the creation of poetry. I shall conclude by examining an example of her best work, There\u27s a certain slant of light, which exhibits many of the essential characteristics of Emily Dickinson\u27s approach to poetry

Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets

Focusing on the work of A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder, author Leonard Scigaj shows that just as a sustainable society does not depreciate its resource base, so a sustainable poetry does not restrict interest to language. Over the past thirty years many poets have shown an increasing sensitivity to ecological thinking. But critics trained in poststructuralist language theory often fail to explore the substance of ecopoetry. Scigaj is the first to define ecopoetry as separate and distinct from nature or environmental poetry, marked by its concern with balancing the interests of human beings with the needs of nature. Just as science learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, ecopoetry insists on the recognition that humans are not at the center of the natural world. The first book to treat the US’s four foremost ecopoets as ecopoets. -- Choice Scigaj uses his examination of contemporary ecological poetry to mount a direct assault on the way literary theory has been conducted over the past twenty years. -- Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Will join John Elder\u27s Imagining the Earth as the most important contribution to date to the study of contemporary ecopoetry. -- Lawrence Buell A rich context for our understading the work and persons of A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder, four outstanding American poets. -- Psychological Reports Anyone who things that nature poetry is a leftover mode from a bygone era, or that all nature poets are alike, needs to read this book before we have no nature left. -- Virginia Quarterly Review Urges readers to distinguish between two kinds of poetry in order to set the stage for an epic intellectual and aesthetic battle. -- Western American Literaturehttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1001/thumbnail.jp

The rhetoric of advocacy in American nature writing

In this study, I examine how nature writers invest the non-human world with language in an effort to empower nature, and how, in the process. they subvert the prevailing views of humanism and scientific rationalism. I am most interested in the role of those I call "nature advocates," a group of writers who purport to represent nature's interests within the human political sphere. Some of the authors under consideration here include James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Ursula Le Guin, Rachel Carson, and Annie Dillard, just to name a few. Most of this study is devoted towards examining how language affects the dynamics of power within the relationship between the advocate, nature, and the public. The advocate plays an intermediary role between nature (which is non-linguistic) and humanity (which defines itself as quintessential linguistic), interpreting a variety of non-linguistic "meanings" in natural phenomenon which he or she then translates into language, often with didactic overtones. This intuitive and experiential perspective of the material world is markedly different than the "objective" approach privileged within the dominant culture. The advocate rejects the strict dichotomy between objective and subjective ways of knowing, suggesting instead that knowledge is transactional

The structure and perception of budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus) warble songs

The warble song of male budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) is an extraordinarily complex, multi-syllabic, learned vocalization that is produced continuously in streams lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes without obvious repetition of particular patterns. As a follow-up of the warble analysis of Farabaugh et al. (1992), an automatic categorization program based on neural networks was developed and used to efficiently and reliably classify more than 25,000 warble elements from 4 budgerigars. The relative proportion of the resultant seven basic acoustic groups and one compound group is similar across individuals. Budgerigars showed higher discriminability of warble elements drawn from different acoustic categories and lower discriminability of warble elements drawn from the same category psychophysically, suggesting that they form seven perceptual categories corresponding to those established acoustically. Budgerigars also perceive individual voice characteristics in addition to the acoustic measures delineating categories. Acoustic analyses of long sequences of natural warble revealed that the elements were not randomly arranged and that warble has at least a 5th-order Markovian structure. Perceptual experiments provided convergent evidence that budgerigars are able to master a novel sequence between 4 and 7 elements in length. Through gradual training with chunking (about 5 elements), birds are able to master sequences up to 50 elements. The ability of budgerigars to detect inserted targets taken in a long, running background of natural warble sequences appears to be species-specific and related to the acoustic structure of warble sounds

RoboFinch: A versatile audio-visual synchronised robotic bird model for laboratory and field research on songbirds

1. Singing in birds is accompanied by beak, head and throat movements. The role of these visual cues has long been hypothesised to be an important facilitator in vocal communication, including social interactions and song acquisition, but has seen little experimental study. 2. To address whether audio-visual cues are relevant for birdsong we used high-speed video recording, 3D scanning, 3D printing technology and colour-realistic painting to create RoboFinch, an open source adult-mimicking robot which matches temporal and chromatic properties of songbird vision. We exposed several groups of juvenile zebra finches during their song developmental phase to one of six singing robots that moved their beaks synchronised to their song and compared them with birds in a non-synchronised and two control treatments. 3. Juveniles in the synchronised treatment approached the robot setup from the start of the experiment and progressively increased the time they spent singing, contra to the other treatment groups. Interestingly, birds in the synchronised group seemed to actively listen during tutor song playback, as they sung less during the actual song playback compared to the birds in the asynchronous and audio-only control treatments. 4. Our open source RoboFinch setup thus provides an unprecedented tool for systematic study of the functionality and integration of audio-visual cues associated with song behaviour. Realistic head and beak movements aligned to specific song elements may allow future studies to assess the importance of multisensory cues during song development, sexual signalling and social behaviour. All software and assembly instructions are open source, and the robot can be easily adapted to other species. Experimental manipulations of stimulus combinations and synchronisation can further elucidate how audio-visual cues are integrated by receivers and how they may enhance signal detection, recognition, learning and memory

Consciousness and the Physical World

The main file in this deposition is a pdf file containing the scanned pages of the Proceedings. Additional files OCR.txt and OCR.pdf (the latter having the same pagination as the book) are included to simplify search, etc. Because of their automated creation using software, the accuracy of the OCR files cannot be guaranteed, though some checking has been carried out. In the scanned version, entering 'go to page n' in a pdf reader will access the pair of pages 2n and 2n+1. Alternatively, go to the contents pages (accessible via 'go to page', entering 'contents' at the prompt) for the numbers to use with 'go to' for specific chapters. © By arrangement with the publishers, the editors (Brian D Josephson and Vilayanur S Ramachandran) are the present copyright holders. They grant permission for the use of the material in this book in accord with the terms of the CC licence below.Edited proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on consciousness held at the University of Cambridge in January 1978. The purpose of the Cambridge conference was to encourage distinguished scientists to express their views on the relationship of conscious experience to the physical world.The conference was supported by a grant from Research Corporation of New York

WASIS - Identificação bioacústica de espécies baseada em múltiplos algoritmos de extração de descritores e de classificação

Orientador: Claudia Maria Bauzer MedeirosDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: A identificação automática de animais por meio de seus sons é um dos meios para realizar pesquisa em bioacústica. Este domínio de pesquisa fornece, por exemplo, métodos para o monitoramento de espécies raras e ameaçadas, análises de mudanças em comunidades ecológicas, ou meios para o estudo da função social de vocalizações no contexto comportamental. Mecanismos de identificação são tipicamente executados em dois estágios: extração de descritores e classificação. Ambos estágios apresentam desafios, tanto em ciência da computação quanto na bioacústica. A escolha de algoritmos de extração de descritores e técnicas de classificação eficientes é um desafio em qualquer sistema de reconhecimento de áudio, especialmente no domínio da bioacústica. Dada a grande variedade de grupos de animais estudados, algoritmos são adaptados a grupos específicos. Técnicas de classificação de áudio também são sensíveis aos descritores extraídos e condições associadas às gravações. Como resultado, muitos sistemas computacionais para bioacústica não são expansíveis, limitando os tipos de experimentos de reconhecimento que possam ser conduzidos. Baseado neste cenário, esta dissertação propõe uma arquitetura de software que acomode múltiplos algoritmos de extração de descritores, fusão entre descritores e algoritmos de classificação para auxiliar cientistas e o grande público na identificação de animais através de seus sons. Esta arquitetura foi implementada no software WASIS, gratuitamente disponível na Internet. Diversos algoritmos foram implementados, servindo como base para um estudo comparativo que recomenda conjuntos de algoritmos de extração de descritores e de classificação para três grupos de animaisAbstract: Automatic identification of animal species based on their sounds is one of the means to conduct research in bioacoustics. This research domain provides, for instance, ways to monitor rare and endangered species, to analyze changes in ecological communities, or ways to study the social meaning of the animal calls in the behavior context. Identification mechanisms are typically executed in two stages: feature extraction and classification. Both stages present challenges, in computer science and in bioacoustics. The choice of effective feature extraction and classification algorithms is a challenge on any audio recognition system, especially in bioacoustics. Considering the wide variety of animal groups studied, algorithms are tailored to specific groups. Classification techniques are also sensitive to the extracted features, and conditions surrounding the recordings. As a results, most bioacoustic softwares are not extensible, therefore limiting the kinds of recognition experiments that can be conducted. Given this scenario, this dissertation proposes a software architecture that allows multiple feature extraction, feature fusion and classification algorithms to support scientists and the general public on the identification of animal species through their recorded sounds. This architecture was implemented by the WASIS software, freely available on the Web. A number of algorithms were implemented, serving as the basis for a comparative study that recommends sets of feature extraction and classification algorithms for three animal groupsMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computação132849/2015-12013/02219-0CNPQFAPES