Relational Passage of Time

This book defends a relational theory of the passage of time. The realist view of passage developed in this book differs from the robust, substantivalist position. According to relationism, passage is nothing over and above the succession of events, one thing coming after another. Causally related events are temporally arranged as they happen one after another along observers’ worldlines. There is no unique global passage but a multiplicity of local passages of time. After setting out this positive argument for relationism, the author deals with five common objections to it: (a) triviality of deflationary passage, (b) a-directionality of passage, (c) the impossibility of experiencing passage, (d) fictionalism about passage, and (e) the incompatibility of passage with perduring objects. Relational Passage of Time will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of time, metaphysics, and philosophy of physics

CSP as a Coordination Language. A CSP-based Approach to the Coordination of Concurrent Systems

Die Beherrschbarkeit komplexer nebenläufiger Systeme hängt in hohem Maße davon ab, mit welchen Methoden das System modelliert bzw. spezifiziert wird. Formale auf Nebenläufigkeit spezialisierte Methoden erlauben es, solche Systeme elegant auf einem hohen Abstraktionsniveau zu modellieren und zu analysieren. Ein Vertreter derartiger Methoden ist die in dieser Arbeit verwendete Prozess Algebra CSP. CSP ist ein weitverbreiteter, wohluntersuchter Formalismus, der es erlaubt, ein nebenläufiges System mathematisch präzise zu beschreiben und wichtige Eigenschaften, beispielsweise Verklemmungsfreiheit, zu verifizieren. Dennoch ist die Ableitung einer Systemimplementierung aus einem gegebenen CSP Modell immer noch ein aktueller Forschungsgegenstand. So ist zum Beispiel unklar, wie interne Aktionen eines Systems in einer Implementierung integriert werden können, da diese in CSP ununterscheidbar sind. Als Lösung wird in dieser Arbeit vorgeschlagen, CSP mit einer sequentiellen Zielsprache zu integrieren, so dass die Aktionen eines Systems in der sequentiellen Zielsprache implementiert werden und die Aktionen entsprechend eines CSP Prozesses koordiniert werden. Koordinationssprachen zielen ebenfalls darauf ab, Nebenläufigkeit von sequentiellen Aspekten eines Systems zu trennen, sie sind aber weniger auf automatisierte formale Verifikation ausgerichtet. In der Arbeit wird die Verwendung der Prozess Algebra CSP als formale Koordinationssprache für beliebige sequentielle Zielsprachen vorgeschlagen. Hierfür wird das formale Fundament einer Koordinationsumgebung entwickelt, die einen CSP Prozess zur Laufzeit simuliert und die Aktionen des Systems entsprechend ausführt. Besonderer Wert liegt auf der Koordination interner Aktionen und auf der Erkennung von Nebenläufigkeit zwischen extern synchronisierbaren und internen Aktionen. Durch Beweisverpflichtungen wird der Zusammenhang zwischen dem Koordinationsprozess und den Implementierungen der Aktionen hergestellt. Die Koordinationsumgebung wird konkret für die Zielsprache Java implementiert. Desweiteren wird eine Fallstudie vorgestellt, die sich mit der Entwicklung eines Workflow Servers beschäftigt, dessen interne Nebenläufigkeit einerseits selbst mittels CSP koordiniert wird und der andererseits CSP-basierte Workflows ausführen kann, die ebenfalls durch eine CSP Koordinationsumgebung gesteuert werden. Die Arbeit enthält wissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Theorie und der praktischen Verwendbarkeit von CSP, bezüglich der Konstruktion korrekter nebenläufiger Systeme, sowie zum Bereich der Modellierung und Verwaltung von Workflows.Complex concurrent systems are in general hard to understand, and equally hard to specify and to verify. The process algebra Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) offers a way of taming the complexity of concurrent systems by focusing on the interaction behavior of systems and abstracting from synchronization mechanisms and other implementation details. CSP provides a mature intermediate level formalism that allows us to specify and model such systems in a mathematically precise way and to verify important properties, e. g., deadlock-freedom. However, the derivation of a system’s implementation from its CSP-based model is still a problem and sub ject to ongoing research. It is, for example, not obvious how to integrate CSP with internal actions of a system, because CSP abstracts from internal actions to a great extent. To overcome this problem, we propose to integrate CSP with a sequential host language such that the concurrency aspects of systems are captured on the CSP level and its actions are implemented in the sequential host language. This idea of separating concurrent and sequential aspects of a system is also known from coordination languages, but those are in general less amenable to automated verification. In this thesis, we present the use of CSP as a formal coordination language for arbitrary sequential host languages, allowing us to use CSP for the design, implementation, and verification of concurrent systems. To this end, we develop the model of a coordination environment that simulates a CSP process at runtime and performs the system’s actions accordingly. The coordination environment controls the system’s interaction with its environment as well as its internal actions. We present proof obligations to ensure that the properties proved on the CSP level also hold on the implementation level of the system. We also present an implementation of the coordination environment for the target language Java and a case study of constructing a workflow server as a coordinated concurrent Java program. This thesis contributes to the theory and practice of CSP, to the engineering of correct concurrent systems, and to the modeling and management of workflows. The main contribution of this thesis is a target language independent CSP-based framework for the construction of provably correct concurrent systems

Relational Passage of Time

This book defends a relational theory of the passage of time. The realist view of passage developed in this book differs from the robust, substantivalist position. According to relationism, passage is nothing over and above the succession of events, one thing coming after another. Causally related events are temporally arranged as they happen one after another along observers’ worldlines. There is no unique global passage but a multiplicity of local passages of time. After setting out this positive argument for relationism, the author deals with five common objections to it: (a) triviality of deflationary passage, (b) a-directionality of passage, (c) the impossibility of experiencing passage, (d) fictionalism about passage, and (e) the incompatibility of passage with perduring objects

Animating Film Theory

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously. Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahash

Animating Film Theory

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously. Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahash

Space, spatiality, and epistemology in Hooke, Boyle, Newton, and Milton

In this thesis I trace the relations between thinking about space and the spatiality of thought as it relates to epistemology in the eponymous authors. I argue that the verbal,visual, and mental tools used to negotiate the ideas and objects under consideration are not merely representative or rhetorical, but are part of the process of knowledge-making itself. I contend that the spatialities of language, visual presentation, and mental image facilitate new ways of seeing and the exploring of previously invisible relationships. I show how the dynamic spatiality of the imagination is used for testing hypothesis, considering multiple points of view, accommodating uncertainties, and thinking about expansive ideas that push at (or exist beyond) the boundaries of the known or possible. In this way I offer new readings of key texts that foreground the inherent relativity of human experience, which I contend is at the heart of a scientific uncertainty found even in the new science that strove for objectivity. In four case studies I explore the elationship between external and internal space in the thinking and perceiving subject, building on Steven Connor’s assertion that ‘thinking about things is unavoidably a kind of thinking about the kind of thing that thinking is’ (‘Thinking Things’, 2010). In addition to this unidirectional relation between thinking and things, I demonstrate a complex dialogue between interior (thought) and exterior (thing) that occurs in the ways processes of thought and perception are externalized on the page and with instruments of viewing; in the way objects are brought into the mind; and in the way the mind creates infinities within by tracing expansive external spatialities