The Passions and Disinterest: From Kantian Free Play to Creative Determination by Power, via Schiller and Nietzsche

I argue that Nietzsche’s criticism of the Kantian theory of disinterested pleasure in beauty reflects his own commitment to claims that closely resemble certain Kantian aesthetic principles, specifically as reinterpreted by Schiller. I show that Schiller takes the experience of beauty to be disinterested both (1) insofar as it involves impassioned ‘play’ rather than desire-driven ‘work’, and (2) insofar as it involves rational-sensuous (‘aesthetic’) play rather than mere physical play. In figures like Nietzsche, Schiller’s generic notion of play—which is itself influenced by Kant’s claim that aesthetic pleasure is orthogonal to desire-satisfaction—becomes decoupled from his (further) Kantian view that aesthetic play essentially involves a harmony of sensuous receptivity and rational spontaneity. The result, I suggest, is a self-standing opposition between desires and passions. This motivates a recognizably Romantic vision of aesthetic disinterestedness, as freedom from desire realized in a state of creative determination by passion

Non-local Coulomb interactions and metal-insulator transition in Ti2_2O3_3: a cluster LDA+DMFT approach

We present an ab initio quantum theory of the metal-insulator transition in Ti$_2$O$_3$. The recently developed cluster LDA+DMFT scheme is applied to describe the many-body features of this compound. The conventional single site DMFT cannot reproduce a low temperature insulating phase for any reasonable values of the Coulomb interaction. We show that the non-local Coulomb interactions and the strong chemical bonding within Ti-Ti pair is the origin of the small gap insulating ground state of Ti$_2$O$_3$

First-principles studies of water adsorption on graphene: The role of the substrate

We investigate the electronic properties of graphene upon water adsorption and study the influence of the SiO2 substrate in this context using density functional calculations. Perfect suspended graphene is rather insensitive to H2O adsorbates, as doping requires highly oriented H2O clusters. For graphene on a defective SiO2 substrate, we find a strongly different behavior: H2O adsorbates can shift the substrate's impurity bands and change their hybridization with the graphene bands. In this way, H2O can lead to doping of graphene for much lower adsorbate concentrations than for free hanged graphene. The effect depends strongly on the microscopic substrate properties.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Correlation effects in electronic structure of PuCoGa5

We report on results of the first realistic electronic structure calculations of the Pu-based PuCoGa5 superconductor based on the dynamical mean field theory. We find that dynamical correlations due to the local Coulomb interaction between Pu f-electrons lead to substantial modification of the electronic structure with a narrow peak being formed in vicinity of the Fermi energy, in agreement with the experimental photoemission spectra, and in contrast with the recent calculations within the LDA+U method, where only static electronic correlations have been included. Both Pu and Co contribute in equal footing to the narrow peak on the density of states at the Fermi level, the Co partial density of states being prominently affected by electronic correlations on the Pu sites. The k-resolved spectral density is calculated and the theoretical spectral function resolved extended Van Hove singularity near the Fermi energy. This singularity may lead to enchancement of the magnetic susceptebility and favour d-wave superconductivity