Aristotle

This chapter is an overview of Giorgio Agamben's engagement, in the Homo Sacer series (1995–2014), with Aristotelian philosophy. It specifically studies Agamben's attempt to deconstruct two Aristotelian conceptual oppositions fundamental for the Western tradition of political thought: (1) that between the bare fact of being alive and "qualified" living (associated by Agamben with an alleged distinction between zōē and bios) and (2) that between potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia). Agamben's concept of form-of-life (forma-di-vita), a life that is never "bare" but always in the process of qualifying itself, is designed to deactivate and overcome these distinctions. In the final volume of the series, The Use of Bodies (2014), this is done with the help of the Aristotelian concepts of use (chrēsis) and habit (hexis)

A Bijection Between the Recurrent Configurations of a Hereditary Chip-Firing Model and Spanning Trees

Hereditary chip-firing models generalize the Abelian sandpile model and the cluster firing model to an exponential family of games induced by covers of the vertex set. This generalization retains some desirable properties, e.g. stabilization is independent of firings chosen and each chip-firing equivalence class contains a unique recurrent configuration. In this paper we present an explicit bijection between the recurrent configurations of a hereditary chip-firing model on a graph and its spanning trees.Comment: 13 page

The End of the World after the End of Finitude: On a Recently Prominent Speculative Tone in Philosophy

The chapter studies the speculative realist critique of the notion of finitude and its implications for the theme of the "end of the world" as a teleological and eschatological idea. It is first explained how Quentin Meillassoux proposes to overcome both Kantian and Heideggerian "correlationist" approaches with his speculative thesis of absolute contingency. It is then shown that Meillassoux's speculative materialism also dismantles the close link forged by Kant between the teleological ends of human existence and a teleological notion of the "end of the world." Speculative materialism no longer sees the end of thought, or the end of the thinking human being, as an insurmountable limit of conceivability, but rather as one contingent and possible event among others. This allows us to conceive an "end of all things" in a positive sense with regard to which the old eschatological hope for the end of the present world of injustice and for the emergence of a new world of perfect, "divine" justice becomes meaningful and legitimate in an entirely new sense

Encountering Finitude: On the Hermeneutic Radicalization of Experience

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of scientific knowledge that is itself increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us

Indigenous Rights and Intellectual Property Law: A Comparison of the United States and Australia

Quantum Physics has many concepts that are hard to conceive. The main goal with this project is to explain and demonstrate some of these. To achieve this, a setup has been built where a beam is split into two paths, which then subsequently coincide on a mutual screen. If we choose to deny ourselves the possibility of determining which path the wave takes, the paths are said to be indistinguishable. In this case the waves from the two dierent paths will interfere, which will be seen as a periodic interference pattern on the screen. If we instead choose to do a measurement in such a way that we know which path the wave took, the paths are distinguishable. As this occurs, the interference pattern will disappear. There is also a third possibility. The third possibility is to leave the opportunity of measuring, but not actually doing it. This alternative gives the same result as if the path was actually determined, the interference pattern will disappear. In this setup the wavefront is split into two by a thin metal wire. On each side is a polarisation lter with perpendicular polarisation with respect to one another. These lters help us to distinguish the two possible paths. By placing a third polariser between the wire and the screen, parallel to one of the earlier polarisers, it can be seen which path the light has taken, making the paths distinguishable. If the third polariser is instead rotated at a 45o-angle letting through equal parts of both paths, the passing light will have a mutual direction of polarisation. This will once again make the light indistinguishable and the interference pattern will reappear.Kvantfysiken har många svårbegripliga koncept. Målet med detta projekt är att förklara och demonstrera vissa av dessa. För att uppnå detta har en uppställning byggts där en ljusstråle delas upp och får utbredas längs två olika vägar. Vägen kan kodas på de respektive vägarna med hjälp av polarisationslter. Därefter låter man ljuset som tog de två vägarna sammanfalla på en gemensam skärm. Om vi väljer att avsäga oss möjligheten att avgöra vilken väg ljuset tar, sägs ljuset som tog respektive väg icke-särskiljbart. I detta fall kommer vågorna från de två olika banorna interferera, vilket syns som ett mönster på skärmen. Däremot om vi väljer att mäta vilken bana vågen tar är banorna särskiljbara. När vi gör detta val försvinner interferensm önstret. Det nns även ett tredje alternativ. Det alternativet är att skapa en möjlighet att mäta, men inte utnyttja den. Detta fall ger samma resultat som att faktiskt mäta, det vill säga interferens- 3 mönstret försvinner. I vår uppställning delas vågfronten upp i två delar med hjälp av en metalltr åd. På vardera sida om tråden sitter polariseringslter med vinkelr äta polarisationsriktningar i förhållande till varandra. Med hjälp av dessa kan vägarna särskiljas. Genom att sätta ett tredje polarisations- lter mellan metalltråden och skärmen parallellt med ett av ltren kan man bestämma vilken väg ljuset tagit, vilket gör banorna särskiljbara. Om vi däremot sätter det tredje ltret i 45o-vinkel mot de vinkelräta polarisatorerna så att ljuset från de båda vägarna återigen får samma polarisationsrikting, går det inte längre att avgöra vilken väg ljuset tagit. Alltså är vägarna nu icke-särskiljbara och interferensmönstret på skärmen återuppstår.

Infrared photometry of the 1982-4 eclipse of Epsilon Aurigae

The infrared photometry of epsilon Aur performed prior to and during the ingress phase of the recent eclipse allowed the first solid determination of the temperature of the secondary object. The eclipse depth was significantly less at lambda 5 micrometers than in the near-infrared. This is explained by a model of the secondary as an opaque and very cool object with a temperature of approx. 500 K. During eclipse, the secondary blocks approximately 45% of the near infrared radiation from the primary star. At the same time, the radiation from the secondary remains completely unobscured, resulting in a shallower light curve at longer wavelengths. This phenomenon is well known in the study of eclipsing binary stars; if the two stars have different colors, then the net color of the system changes during eclipse. In the case of epsilon Aur, the eclipsing object has a color deep in the infrared, so the effect is only noticeable there