The Burden of the Past, the Dialectics of the Present: Notes on Virginia Woolf's and Walter Benjamin's Philosophies of History

Writing in a Paris rife with war-anxieties, refugees and political plots, a stateless individual by the name of Walter Benjamin recorded on 11 January 1940: “Every line that we succeed in publishing today - given the uncertainty of the future to which we consign it - is a victory wrested from the power of darkness.” The fusion of desperation and mystical activism in the face of historical horror, expressed in Benjamin's last letter to Gershom Scholem, was echoed across the Channel. Only ten days later, Virginia Woolf - assailed by a mixture of historical, financial, creative and publishing worries - responded to a commission to write about peace by stating that the “views on peace […] spring from views on war.” </jats:p

Eduard Hanslick's Formalism and His Most Influential Contemporary Critics

The paper deals with the formalistic view on music presented in Eduard Hanslick’s treatise On the Musically Beautiful, which is taken to be the foundingwork of the aesthtetics of music. In the paper I propose an interpretation of Hanslick’s treatise which differs on many points from the interpretations displayed in the works of several most influential contemporary aestheticians of music. My main thesis is that Hanslick’s treatise is misunderstood and incorrectly presented by these authors. I try to demonstrate this thesis by referring to Hanslick’s original formulations in the German edition and by showing that my interpretation renders Hanslick’s view far more coherent and his arguments successful in showing his main conclusions. Accepting this alternative interpretation should have further implications on many contemporary theories in the aesthetics of music that reckon on the failure of Hanslick’s arguments as presented by usual interpretations

Reasoning of non- and pre-linguistic creatures: How much do the experiments tell us?

If a conclusion was reached that creatures without a language capability exhibit some form of a capability for logic, this would shed a new light on the relationship between logic, language, and thought. Recent experimental attempts to test whether some animals, as well as pre-linguistic human infants, are capable of exclusionary reasoning are taken to support exactly that conclusion. The paper discusses the analyses and conclusions of two such studies: Call’s (2004) two cups task, and Mody and Carey’s (2016) four cups task. My paper exposes hidden assumptions within these analyses, which enable the authors to settle on the explanation which assigns logical capabilities to the participants of the studies, as opposed to the explanations which do not. The paper then demonstrates that the competing explanations of the experimental results are theoretically underdeveloped, rendering them unclear in their predictions concerning the behavior of cognitive subjects, and thus difficult to distinguish by use of experiments. Additionally, it is questioned whether the explanations are rivals at all, i.e. whether they compete to explain the cognitive processes of the same level. The contribution of the paper is conceptual. Its aim is to clear up the concepts involved in these analyses, in order to avoid oversimplified or premature conclusions about the cognitive abilities of pre- and non-linguistic creatures. It is also meant to show that the theoretical space surrounding the issues involved might be much more diverse and unknown than many of these studies imply

Estimating Hedonic Prices for Stellenbosch wine

This paper estimates a hedonic price function for Stellenbosch wines to determine the association between market value and different characteristics of these wines. In such a hedonic price function, the price of a bottle of wine is ascribed to the implicit value of its attributes. Besides contributing to both South African and international wine pricing literature, the benefits of developing a hedonic wine pricing model extend to numerous players in the wine industry. Consumers are provided with guidelines on how to utilize their wine purchasing budget more efficiently, while producers are able to use estimates of the function to guide future investment decisions. The hedonic price function estimated in this paper includes numerous ‘objective’ characteristics, appearing on the label of the bottle, as well as subjective characteristics in the form of expert wine ratings. In an effort to address possible heterogeneity of wine as a product, separate regressions are run for red and white wines. The estimation of the hedonic price equation shows that, in general, wine quality (as modelled by blind and sighted wine ratings) and age of the wine are relevant in accounting for price deviations from average red wine prices. Further, it is found that only limited numbers of red wine varieties and sub-districts of production significantly influence the average price of Stellenbosch red wines. For white wines, only sighted wine ratings as well as age of the wine were found to significantly account for deviations from average white wine prices. While blind wine ratings and white wine varieties were not found to significantly influence average white wine prices, certain regions of production where found to be relevant in accounting for deviations from average white wine prices.Hedonic pricing, Wine, Stellenbosch, South Africa

Generalized Group Actions in a Global Setting

We study generalized group actions on differentiable manifolds in the Colombeau framework, extending previous work on flows of generalized vector fields and symmetry group analysis of generalized solutions. As an application, we analyze group invariant generalized functions in this setting

Climate Trading - The Clean Development Mechanism and Africa

Global warming is today, without a doubt, one of the biggest international issues. Whilst no country will go completely unscathed by future consequences of climate change, the impacts thereof – in terms of loss of life as well as the relative effects on economies – are expected to be felt most severely in developing countries, specifically Africa. Nevertheless, the development of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the global environmental treaty – the Kyoto Protocol – has brought with it the potential of socially and environmentally sustainable industrial and energy development in Africa. This paper examines the carbon trading system resulting from the Kyoto protocol, and investigates the implications of the associated Clean Development Mechanism for Africa. Although the carbon market is still in its formative stages, the benefits of this research are plentiful. Not only is such research critical for raising awareness, but also ensures that African countries get a foothold in this nascent market. It is found that while producing carbon credits, CDM projects also have the potential to bring numerous benefits – such as sustainable development, transfer of skills and technology, improved adaptive capabilities, as well as access to new markets – to African host countries. If changes are implemented as suggested, the CDM has the potential to bring billions of dollars to Africa – a feat invaluable to the social and environmental development of the continent.Clean Development Mechanism, CDM, Africa, Climate Change, Emissions Trading, Policy, Carbon Credits, Carbon Markets