ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

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Ontologies of the Future in Contemporary Philosophy: Stiegler and Meillassoux

With the concept of the future understood as uncertainty at their core, both Meillassoux and Stiegler\u2019s projects ought to be read as two different solutions to the problem of correlationism: a purely speculative one, providing human mind access to the radical uncertainty (Meillassoux) and a technologically mediated, putting in question the very ontological distinction between human and reality (Stiegler). Claims of the thesis: 1) The concept of the future constitutes the heart of Meillassoux and Stiegler\u2019s ontological projects. 2) The concept of the future in Meillassoux and Stiegler ought to be understood in terms of ontological uncertainty which enriches and empowers the concept of a-venir extracted from the thought of Deleuze and Derrida. 3) Both speculative (Meillassoux) and media-oriented (Stiegler) approaches to the uncertain real require reshaping the concept and the function of imagination. 4) The projects of Stiegler and Meillassoux ought to be read as shifting from the ontology of being to what we call the ontology of may-be which is characterized by the radical openness to change of not only future but also being as such. The research is pursued as a comparative analysis of Stiegler and Meillassoux which also re-actualizes their thought in the obvious relation to Kantian legacy and in less obvious and rarely discussed relation to such representatives of 20th century continental philosophy as Deleuze, Derrida, and others, as well as contemporary thinkers of future and ontology. By re-contextualizing Meillassoux and Stiegler\u2019s ideas, the research is aimed at inquiring into Meillassoux and Stiegler\u2019s projects as a whole and, therefore, revolves around their main opuses as well as publications and talks of a smaller scale. Therefore, the research is conducted by performing four methodical steps within the hermeneutic circle of interpretation: 1. Comparative analysis of Stiegler and Meillassoux\u2019s ontological projects; 2. Re-contextualization of Stiegler and Meillassoux within the horizon of postmodern French thought, majorly represented by Deleuze and Derrida; 3. Re-evaluation of Stiegler and Meillassoux\u2019s conceptual debt to Kantian transcendentalism; 4. Contextualization of Stiegler and Meillassoux\u2019s stances on mediation by applying them to the realm of artistic practices

Volume VII, No. 3

Allen, Terry L. “Doing Philosophy With Children.” 23­-28. Calandra, A. “Seeking Out Alternatives.” 41. Daniel, Marie­France. “Thinking, mind, the existence of God...Transcript of a classroom dialogue with first and second graders in Montreal.” 21-­22. Gazzard, Ann. “Thinking Skills in Science and Philosophy for Children.” 32­-40. Hetzler, Florence M. “The Person and the Little Price of St. Exupery.” 2-­7. Matthews, Gareth. “Review of Frank R. Stockton, The Bee­man of Orn. 1. Nussbaum, Martha. “Can Philosophical Literature Deal With Individuals?” from Review of Scruton, Sexual Desire. 31. Roszak, Theodore. “The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking.” 8-­12. Sheffer, Susannah. “Philosophy Outside of Schools.” 19­-20. Thompson, A. Gray. “Philosophy Students in Guatemala.” 29-­30 (photographs). Tinder, Glenn. “Community as Inquiry.” 13-­17. Uvarov, Count Sergei. “On the Relationship of the Schools to the University.” 31. Weinstein, Mark. “Critical Thinking and Moral Education.” 42-­49

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Satirizing habits in Victorian fiction: novelistic satire, 1830s-1890s

"This dissertation argues for a significant presence of satire within Victorian novels from the 1830s to the 1890s - the very decades in which many influential critics, from the early twentieth century to the present day, discern a marked, general decline in the practice of satire. As early as the eighteenth century, writers valued amiable humour over wit and satire; continuing this trend, countless Victorian writers and critics attempted (in David Worcester's words) to ""pus[h] satire into the dunce's comer"" (32). Nevertheless, regardless of their theoretic disavowal of satire, many novelists embraced, in their narrative practice, its mild Horatian, philosophical Menippean, and even stringent Juvenalian possibilities. Charlotte Bronte's words to Elizabeth Gaskell may be applied to many Victorian writers: ""'Satirical you are - however; I believe a little more so than you think""' (Letters 3: 4 7). Current studies of satire in the Victorian novel tend to restrict themselves to individual analyses of substantially satiric novels such as Martin Chuzzlewit or The Way of All Flesh; more generic assessments are deferred. In terms of broader engagements, Frank Palmeri' s view that satire is a form of writing that disappears ""underground or into eclipse"" (""Thackeray"" 770) in the mid-Victorian period, only to emerge in the late decades of the period, is representative. In this dissertation, however, I demonstrate a distinctly Victorian satiric focus on society as the source of moral ills by identifying habit as a dominant, encyclopaedic subject of novelistic satire. The belief that human character is substantially a social creation is exemplified by George Henry Lewes's observation: ""To understand the Human Mind we must study it under its normal conditions, and these are social conditions"" (PLMJ 128). As well, inspired by Athena Vrettos's enterprising work on the prevalence of Victorian debates concerning habit and its relevance to psychological realism in terms of Dickens's Dombey and Son, I trace the relations of culturally embedded discourses on habit to the period's novelistic satire. Satirists' preoccupation with habit is strikingly illuminated by Mikhail Bakhtin's social-formalist assessment of the novel's steadfast roots in ancient serio-comical literature and Menippean satire - a dialogic form that defamiliarizes habit. Cultural systems - ""all the habitual matrices [sosedstva] of things and ideas"" - are exposed in ""the menippea"" through voracious parody of literary and non-literary genres, and through the ""creation of ... unexpected connections"" (Dialogic 169). Victorian novelists, I argue, continued the traditions of satire (as an evolving mode or genre) through an engagement with omnipresent theories of habit. Although authoritative nineteenth-century discourses (both of natural science and of moral/social science) implicate habit in the forces of determinism, contradictory theories inveterately identify habit as a locus of moral hope (through habits of sympathy, self-control, free will, and free thought). I examine in detail the confluence of satire and this dual discourse of habit through close readings of canonical Victorian novels. The novels I discuss, from Cranford (1851-53) and Silas Marner (1861) to The Way of All Flesh (written between 1873 and 1884, published 1903) and New Grub Street (1891), demonstrate either Horatian optimism or Juvenalian cynicism with regard to habit as a source for good or ill. It is a trajectory encapsulated by Edward Bulwer-Lytton's transition from optimism and faith in habits of sympathy in Pelham ( 1828) to his cynicism concerning the assimi1ating powers of habit in The Coming Race (1871). Importantly, Dickens's novels of the 1850s and 60s, which target habit in ""lines of blood and fire"" (30) (to borrow James Hannay' s epithet for Juvena1ian satire), foreground the theoretical issues be1eaguering satire's relations with the novel. The satura of Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) is characterized by unrestrained metaphor that targets all forms of institutional (social) and individual (psychological) bad habits. Finally, I investigate misogynist theorizations of both satire and habit, by analyzing the satiric machinery of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (1849) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). With satiric irreverence, both novels pose a question that is crucial to historic and Victorian theories concerning female mental inferiority: ""'[D]o you seriously think all wisdom in the world is lodged in male skulls?''' (Bronte, S 328). Despite the era's ambivalence to satire, which I explore at length, Victorian novelists were profoundly engaged with its literary and social possibilities. Dissociating and dissenting from the ""habitual matrices"" of their culture, and engaging with complex moral discourses affirming the ""familiar fact, the power of habit"" (Mill, Utilitarianism 10: 238), novelists wrote philosophically probing and culturally critical Menippean, Horatian, and Juvenalian satire.

Architecture & Spirtuality; an Architecture-Centered Aesthetic Experience

This research was executed in three stages; data collection and analysis, internship, and interviews. First, by assessing two case study communities through site visits and conducting a comparative analysis of the two predominant cultural groups; second, a semester of research and internship at an architecture firm resulting in the production of an architectural checklist for culturally appropriate design; and third, conducting interviews with members of case study communities, including experts from the UH Department of Anthropology as well as the Center for Pacific Island Studies

AN INTIMATE INSIGHT ON PSYCHOPATHY AND A NOVEL HERMENEUTIC PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Abstract This paper is rather a profound hermeneutic enunciation putting into question our present understanding of psychopathy. It further articulates, in complement, a novel theoretical and methodological conceptualisation for a hermeneutic psychological science. Methodology-wise, it puts into question a traditional more or less categorical and mechanical approach to the social and behavioural sciences as it strives to introduce a creative and insightful approach for the articulation of ideas. It rather seeks to construe the scientific method as being more about falsifiability and validation but driven by a sense of creative understanding and insight of notions laid out as open-ended conceptualisations. Theory-wise, it sees continuity between anthropology and psychology as anthropopsychology behind an entropic construct of human psychology based on a recurrent re-institutionalisation mechanism for intemporal-preservation-entropy-or-contiguity–or–ontological-preservation

Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel in its relations with contemporary French thought

This brief sketch of the currents and, cross-currents of contemporary French thought will, we hope, serve to illuminate many of the themes in Gabriel Marcel's doctrine which we are about to discuss, and also place this doctrine as a whole in the nexus of intellectual relationshipb from which no philosopher, least, of all an Existentialist, should be' sundered. It may also make clear that'the Existentialist movement in France is not only much more complex than would appear. to the uninitiated, but that its roots are, to a greater extent than is realised, and without discounting the obvious external, influences, in traditional French thought