ALL OR NOTHING? NATURE IN CHINESE THOUGHT AND THE APOPHATIC OCCIDENT

This paper develops an interpretation of nature in classical Chinese culture through dialogue with the work of François Jullien. I understand nature negatively as precisely what never appears as such nor ever can be exactly apprehended and defined. For perception and expression entail inevitably human mediation and cultural transmission by semiotic and hermeneutic means that distort and occult the natural in the full depth of its alterity. My claim is that the largely negative approach to nature that Jullien finds in sources of Chinese tradition can also be found in the West, particularly in its apophatic currents or countercurrents that contest all along the more powerful positive conceptions and systems for construing and mastering the natural world. These insights grow especially from the critique of idolatry, in which worship of nature, in concrete, objective forms taken as gods, is negated. Bringing out this negative-theological matrix can give us a perspective on Jullien’s treatment and expose some of his own biases notably in favor of immanence to the exclusion of metaphysical transcendence. Comparative philosophy serves in this negative-theological key self-critically to identify blind spots in one’s own culture

Self-Reflection and Reduction in the Language of Lyric

Lyric is the language of self-reflection – and is self-reflexive language – par excellence. The question will be: Is self-reflection necessarily a reduction to the self? or, How can self-reflection effect a dissolution of the self and a breaking open to the Other? Lyric, above all in its modern, I-centered form, has often been viewed as a reduction to the self in its self-enclosure or even to the prison house of language about language that is obsessed only with itself. In this paper, William Franke considers how in lyric language the filtering of reality through the experience of the ‘I‘ or of highly self-reflective language can actually turn into a powerful way of opening the world into a dimension of infinite self-revelation and of revelation of the Other – which might be the other person, or the other of language, or the Other to thinking itself, or even some kind of divine or absolute otherness. He explores how precisely reduction, especially in the form of self-reflection, leads to discovery of something that is irreducible. He aims to demonstrate this in the case of lyrical language. The dialectic of reduction leading to and revealing the irreducible emerges exemplarily in the case of lyric language. But this is only an example of a dialectic that can be charted more generally as determining the entire course of modern secular culture. William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University and was concomitantly Professor of Philosophy at University of Macao (2013-16). He is a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and has been Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at the University of Salzburg. His apophatic philosophy is directly expressed in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society ranging from identity politics to cognitive science in On The Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). As a philosopher of the humanities with a negative theological vision, he elaborates a theological poetics in books including Dante’s Interpretive Journey (1996), Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (2009), Dante and the Sense of Transgression: ’The Transgression of the Sign‘ (2012). He traces the ramifications of Dante’s theological poetics forwards in modern poetry (Secular Scriptures: Theological Poetics and the Challenge of Modernity, 2016) and backwards towards Dante’s own sources (The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante, 2015). In 2021 he published three speculative monographs revolving around Dante: The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso: The Metaphysics of Representation (2021); Dante’s Vita Nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation (2021): Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection (2021).William Franke, Self-Reflection and Reduction in the Language of Lyric, lecture, ICI Berlin, 16 May 2022, video recording, mp4, 56:28 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220516

A Model for Information Industries Systems Management Success: Lessons from the Past

An important issue in the area of the rapidly developing information industries is the still unresolved problem of determining “best practices” by which to successfully manage systems for these newly emerging business types. Indeed, recent practitioner literature suggests that the information industries have such seemingly unusual economic characteristics that it is tempting to abandon all prior research in MIS theory about effective information systems management. This paper discusses three key points: 1) the paper will first define the boundaries of the information industries; 2) the paper will briefly explore the unique systems management challenges which arise from the unusual dynamics found in the information industries; and 3) the paper will conclude by describing a conceptual model based in traditional MIS theory that may contribute to successful management of the MIS function for information industry firms in the future. The underlying premise of the model is the proposition that, although the information industries have unique economic drivers which cause these firms to appear to have different systems business practices needs on the surface, the bedrock MIS management theories are still quite applicable and relevant to successful information industry firm performance

Information Technology and Information Goods as Predictors of Organizational Expansion Activity

This research presents a model that separates the effects of the use of information technology (IT) in the production and distribution of goods from the degree of information in the product on changes in vertical and horizontal firm boundaries. The research tests and confirms the hypothesis that firms that produce higher levels of information goods tend to have different vertical and horizontal organizational boundaries when compared to non-information goods firms. Information goods producing firms may be subject to unusual economies of scale, scope, network externalities, and increasing returns effects. These effects are drivers for horizontal firm boundary expansion. Further, the research partially tests the electronic markets hypothesis, which argues that information technology influences the dismantling of extensive vertical firm boundaries by lowering firm transactions costs, finding some supportive results. The research also tests for the hypothesized effect of information technology use in enabling expanding horizontal firm boundaries. Chi square and MANOV A analyses, using two years of merger, acquisition and alliance event data on a sample of 317 very large firms were conducted, while controlling for firm revenues. The results suggest that information goods producing firms have structures that are driven by the unique economics of manufacturing and marketing information products, as well as the transactional and agency effects of information technology used in production

Perspective Chapter: Liberal Arts Education Worldwide Unlimited Inc. - The Unspeakable Basis of Comparative Humanities

This essay, originally a keynote speech for celebratory occasions in East Asian universities, works from the personal experience of the author as a professor teaching and researching in Macao and visiting other universities of the region. The essay espouses a philosophy that moves from what cannot be said, the ineffable, as the basis for thinking both in the East, with its mystical philosophies focused on what escapes formulation in language, and the West, beginning from the Socratic wisdom of knowing nothing. This negative moment of encountering the other and the unknown, which entails a moment of relinquishing of language, is shown to be crucial to knowledge in the humanities and to resist the pressures toward specialization at the university. These considerations articulate an alternative vision of what liberal arts education can be today that is informed by both Eastern and Western cultural traditions. Their insights can be applied to pragmatic fields and be plied to place even present and future business relations in the perspective of their historical background and universally human grounding