Paul Piccone’s Providential Moment: Phenomenology, Subjectivity, and 20th Century Marxism in Telos

This thesis explores the intellectual history of editor, writer, and philosopher, Paul Piccone and Telos, an independent journal of contemporary critical theory, which he founded in 1968. Born in Italy, Piccone lived most of his life in the United States, earning his Ph.D. in philosophy at SUNY-Buffalo in 1970. Piccone served as Telos’ editor and a major contributor from 1968 to 2004. This thesis follows the trajectory of his thought by contextualizing his writing within the broader world of Marxist, and eventually post-Marxist, political philosophy. Telos also concerned itself with modern interpretations of historical dialectics and early 20th-century Marxist philosophy. Piccone himself predicated much of his philosophy on Husserlian phenomenology, which stresses concrete experiences, and his writing therefore stands at a unique confluence of Husserl and Marx. Piccone ultimately became a leading exponent of anti-Liberal philosophy and the theory of artificial negativity, which examines capitalist hegemony in both material and socio-historical terms

Document collections, mobilized regulations, and the making of customary law at the end of the Middle Ages

Using late medieval examples from Switzerland, this paper argues that the emergence of formally organized archives around 1500 was part of an important shift in how documents could be deployed. However, this shift was not away from an oral and toward a literate culture, as argued in some earlier studies, but rather away from seeing documents as testimony that reminded a community about past authoritative actors, and toward relating the texts of documents to other texts, that is, to contexts. This shift took place largely through the appropriation of methods for using and organizing written material that had been developed in the realms of scholastic theology and liturgy, and applying them to secular lordship and administration. These methods provided new models for organizing collections of parchments and papers into connected archives and gave rise to new forms of text collection such as reorganized versions of law books (Spiegel, Coutumiers) containing new search tools such as tables of contents (capitulationes) and indices (abecedaria). Individual charters and scattered legal norms were also organized into textus–glossae structures in larger and smaller administrative units. In the Swiss case, the contextualization of legal texts was accompanied by an increased attribution of authority to ‘custom’ in general, because the community-oriented attribution of meaning found in earlier use was lost. Ultimately, recasting individual documents as part of larger textual contexts increased the power of rulers and ushered in an age of lawyers and of archives

Improved atomistic Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that poly-L-proline adopts heterogeneous ensembles of conformations of semi-rigid segments interrupted by kinks

Poly-L-proline (PLP) polymers are useful mimics of biologically relevant proline-rich sequences. Biophysical and computational studies of PLP polymers in aqueous solutions are challenging because of the diversity of length scales and the slow time scales for conformational conversions. We describe an atomistic simulation approach that combines an improved ABSINTH implicit solvation model, with conformational sampling based on standard and novel Metropolis Monte Carlo moves. Refinements to forcefield parameters were guided by published experimental data for proline-rich systems. We assessed the validity of our simulation results through quantitative comparisons to experimental data that were not used in refining the forcefield parameters. Our analysis shows that PLP polymers form heterogeneous ensembles of conformations characterized by semirigid, rod-like segments interrupted by kinks, which result from a combination of internal cis peptide bonds, flexible backbone ψ angles, and the coupling between ring puckering and backbone degrees of freedom