Categories, Allegories, and Circuit Design

Languages based upon binary relations offer an appealing setting for constructing programs from specifications. For example, working with relations rather than functions allows specifications to be more abstract (for example, many programs have a natural specification using the converse operator on relations), and affords a natural treatment of non-determinism in specifications. In this paper we present a novel pictorial interpretation of relational terms as simple pictures of circuits, and a soundness/completeness result that allows relational equations to be proved by pictorial reasoning

The allegory of isomorphism

Isomorphism has become a key concept for the analysis of representation in many contexts: perceptual experience, mental imagery, scientific theories, and visual artwork may all be described as standing in isomorphisms to their targets. Yet isomorphism is a technical term from mathematics—how are we to evaluate its use in fields such as philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, or physics? I suggest that we should understand appeals to isomorphism as allegorical; the upshot of this suggestion is that isomorphism claims always operate on two distinct levels of significance, with different standards of precision and evaluation. Recognizing these levels as distinct changes the landscape of debate for isomorphism-based accounts of representation: it both dissolves the well-known triviality objection to these accounts and undermines strong forms of structural realism

Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days: The Allegorical Sequel of The Arabian Nights

This article examines the influence of The Arabian Nights on Najib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days. The Arabian Nights provides an archetypal narrative structure which Mahfouz utilizes in his Arabian Nights and Days. The purpose of this study scrutinizes the reformulation of four narrative elements pertinent to The Arabian Nights, namely, plot, narrator, characters, and setting. These elements exemplify the allegorical depiction of political corruption in the Egyptian society. The study’s narrative scrutiny follows a textual analysis of the cyclical plot as used in The Arabian Nights. The narrator’s name and identity is similar to The Arabian Nights’ traditional narrator, but he will be studied in the light of modern Egyptian citizenship. A close reading of the characters’ dialogic voice will extricate the author’s implicit voice in the novel’s magical real context. This voice critiques the dominating political corruption transpiring in an allegorical setting which resembles the contemporary Egyptian society. The conceptual framework used in this study draws up Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic novel; whereby the author expresses his/her monologic, or abstract ideology, through the novel’s dialogic voices

The Image Fallacy: Rethinking the Tragedy of the Commons

An image is what we have in our head and what we make up in an allegory, a name, a metaphor, a text, a map or in a drawing. None of these should be confused with the thing that is being imagined. They are not the real thing, just our imaginations of it. Still, we could not do without them, for instance when governing small-scale fisheries. They make us understand what we are up to and the track we are on. I argue, however, that we need a more playful attitude to them. We must avoid being locked in one image, like that of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. The image may lead us astray, ignoring the things that matter to the wellbeing of the millions of small-scale fisheries people around the world whose lives are dependent on a healthy resource base as well as functioning communities and a governance system that works for them. The paper draws heavily on philosophical thought from ancient to modern times as well as interactive governance research from 2000 onwards

Antropofagia and Constructive Universalism: A Diptych

This study proposes a rethinking of the word-image relation through an examination of Joaquin Torres-García’s Constructive Universalism (ca.1934-1949) and the Brazilian Modernist movement of Antropofagia (1928-ca.1934). By placing both in the close relation of a ‘diptych,’ I argue for a new reading of Torres-García’s visual work as well as a different understanding of Antropofagia. In the first part of this work, I argue, through a close reading and viewing of Torres-García’s work, that the constitutive instability between word/image has been overlooked in favour of, on the one hand, an appropriation in terms of a ‘deviation’ from the canon of Geometric Abstraction and on the other hand as a paradigm of Pre-Columbian, Inca abstraction. Both discursive gestures repress the matter of visual aesthesis. Against this strategy of legibility, I propose a counter-reading through the concepts of ‘graphism’ (Leroi-Gourhan), ‘manuscription’ (Sarabia), the ‘sensory field’ (Lyotard) and the hypericon. These concepts allow contingency to find its way back into Torres-García’s oeuvre in opposition to neo-Classicist misappropriations. Throughout my argument, it will become evident that Torres-García’s paintings bespeak an irrepressible mestizaje, an intertwining of the figural with the abstract. It is this tension animating Torres-García’s work that has been neglected by the disciplining of discourse’s ‘logic of illustration.’ In the second part of the study, I take Antropofagia not so much as a historically determinate period in the narrative of Brazilian Modernism, but as a heuristic for the thinking through of the ‘inconstancy’ of the relation between word and image in its New World Baroque vertigo. This vertigo is politically charged, and amounts to a ‘counter-Conquest’ (Lezama Lima) of the clear and distinct distribution of legibility and visibility inherited through coloniality. The metaphoric economy of cannibalism in Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) in conjunction with the visual work of Tarsila do Amaral and the ‘re-discovery’ of Barroco Mineiro by the Brazilian avant-garde deconstructs the narrative of rupture so as to engage in a complex ‘route to roots’ highlighting the artifice of origin. This same artifice marks Torres-García’s oeuvre, and by ‘closing’ the diptych, I show how abstraction folds back into a Baroque superimposition

On the parallel between the suplattice and preframe approaches to locale theory

AbstractThis paper uses the locale theory approach to topology. Two descriptions are given of all locale limits, the first description using suplattice constructions and the second preframe constructions. The symmetries between these two approaches to locale theory are explored. Given an informal assumption that open locale maps are parallel to proper maps (an assumption hinted at by the underlying finitary symmetry of the lattice theory but not formally proved) we argue that various pairs of locale theory results are ‘parallel’, that is, identical in structure but prove facts about proper maps on one side of the pair and about open maps on the other. The pairs of results are: pullback stability of proper/open maps, regularity of the category of compact Hausdorff/discrete locales, and theorems on information systems. Some remarks are included on a possible formalization of this parallel as a duality

War or Peace Discourse? Analysis of News Headlines on Pulwama Attack

Discourse analysis and the theories of war and peace journalism are used to investigate the newspaper coverage of the Pulwama attack of 2019, a recent development in the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan that brought the nuclear-armed Asian neighbours on the brink of a war. To identify the journalistic discourses of the Pulwama attack, 686 headlines of news articles published in six popular newspapers on the attack and its aftermath during February 15-25, 2019, are analysed. Three levels of discourse analysis are employed: Lexical, social and ideological stratifications. Under lexical stratification, the news headlines are analysed to identify their lexical choices, syntactics and utterance-type semantics, while under social stratification, the samples are analysed to identify their utterance-token semantics, prosodic structures and social language. In the final ideological stratification, the headlines are analysed to identify the figured worlds, embedded ideologies and intentions. Three distinct discourses—War, News and Peace—are thus identified and characterised. Finally, the study findings are used to theorise and comment on conflict and peace journalism

The Relevance of an Existential Conception of Nature

It is often assumed that science provides the most accurate knowledge about nature. This view not only collapses distinctions between different forms of knowing but also results in a paradox whereby understanding what it means to exist in the world is dictated by practioners of science. In this essay I argue for the relevance of an existential conception of nature via the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and how his notions of thrownness and phusis enable us to recognize a certain ethical bond to nature. I conclude with a critical analysis of liability insurance and actuarial science to demonstrate my points

Early Carthusian Script and Silence

At its founding and during its first three decades, the Carthusian order developed a distinctive and forceful concept of communication among the members and between the members and the extramural world.2 Saint Bruno’s life, contemporary twelfth-century exegesis, and the physical situation of La Grande Chartreuse established the necessary context in which this concept evolved. A review of historical background, the relevant documentary texts, and early development demonstrate the shaping of two steps in this concept. Close reading of the principal testimonies of Carthusians Bruno, Guigo I, Guigo II, and some other witnesses, as well as of some passages in Saint Augustine, argues that Carthusian scribal work was more preliminary practice for spiritual development than it was the sacralization of codices and texts. The two-step structure, composed of contrary movements of presentation and effacement, guarded what the Carthusians regarded as spiritual activity within a changing historical environment and became a fundamental part of Latin Christian mysticism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries