88 research outputs found
Ego-Splitting and the Transcendental Subject. Kant’s Original Insight and Husserl’s Reappraisal
In this paper, I contend that there are at least two essential traits that commonly define being an I: self-identity and self-consciousness. I argue that they bear quite an odd relation to each other in the sense that self-consciousness seems to jeopardize self-identity. My main concern is to elucidate this issue within the range of the transcendental philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the first section, I shall briefly consider Kant’s own rendition of the problem of the Egosplitting. My reading of the Kantian texts reveals that Kant himself was aware of this phenomenon but eventually deems it an unexplainable fact. The second part of the paper tackles the same problematic from the standpoint of Husserlian phenomenology. What Husserl’s extensive analyses on this topic bring to light is that the phenomenon of the Ego-splitting constitutes the bedrock not only of his thought but also of every philosophy that works within the framework of transcendental thinking
China and the changing economic geography of coffee value chains
For the past three centuries, the economic geography of the global coffee sector has been characterized by the supply of beans from tropical countries for consumption in North America and Europe, with various modes of value chain coordination enacted by lead firms to ensure reliable and affordable supply. This pattern is now fundamentally changing, with growth in coffee consumption in emerging markets, including China, exceeding that in established markets. But China is not only a growing consumer market, it is less well known that rapidly increasing agricultural production in Yunnan province of southwest China has also inserted the country as an important source region for coffee, and this has been pivotal in facilitating the emergence of Chinese lead firms in the sector. This article presents the emergence of China, and Chinese firms, at a critical juncture for the structure and governance of the global value chain for coffee. The processes through which this is occurring are outlined, and the implications for regional development prospects across Southeast Asia are discussed. We argue that the changing economic geography of coffee value chains, and their increasing driven-ness by Chinese actors, is starting to reshape the regional coffee industry in profoundly new ways
Pointer states for primordial fluctuations in inflationary cosmology
Primordial fluctuations in inflationary cosmology acquire classical
properties through decoherence when their wavelengths become larger than the
Hubble scale. Although decoherence is effective, it is not complete, so a
significant part of primordial correlations remains up to the present moment.
We address the issue of the pointer states which provide a classical basis for
the fluctuations with respect to the influence by an environment (other
fields). Applying methods from the quantum theory of open systems (the Lindblad
equation), we show that this basis is given by narrow Gaussians that
approximate eigenstates of field amplitudes. We calculate both the von Neumann
and linear entropy of the fluctuations. Their ratio to the maximal entropy per
field mode defines a degree of partial decoherence in the entropy sense. We
also determine the time of partial decoherence making the Wigner function
positive everywhere which, for super-Hubble modes during inflation, is
virtually independent of coupling to the environment and is only slightly
larger than the Hubble time. On the other hand, assuming a representative
environment (a photon bath), the decoherence time for sub-Hubble modes is
finite only if some real dissipation exists.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figures, matches published version: discussion expanded,
references added, conclusions unchange
Mismatch: Land Reallocations, Recovery Land Rental and Land Rental Market Development in Rural China
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