philosophy

immanence / transcendence

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Socrates first discovered the concept, or eidos as the relation between the particular and the general and as a germ of a new meaning of the general question concerning being. This meaning emerged in its full purity when the Socratic eidos went on to unfold into the (transcendental) Platonic "Idea." (see also essence) The eidos is absolutely and eternally real, but in respect to each single realization, it is the possible, its potentiality.

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Singularity

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A singularity is a kind of discontinuity. It might or might not be interesting. A vaguer use of the term is simply "a point where something happens" (although this equally describes an event.) Deleuze and Guattari are fascinated by singularities because they are points of unpredictability, even when deterministic. They are thus the sites of revolutionary potential.

As used by mathematical physicists, a singularity means a place where slopes become infinite, where the rate of change of one variable with another exceeds all bounds, and where a big change in an observable is caused by an arbitrarily small change in something else. (cf sensitivity to initial conditions). It is an actual point of infinite density and energy that's kind of a rupture in the fabric of space-time.


Astrophysics describe the centers of black holes as singularities.The Big Bang is considered to be a singularity.
A phase singularity is a point at which phase is ambiguous and near which phase takes on all values. Time at the poles of the earth is an example.

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analytic/synthetic

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For Logical Positivists, such as A.J.Ayer, the only statements that can be verified are those that are analytic. According to Ayer, they cannot be confirmed or refuted by facts of experience, and "do not make any assertion about the empirical world, but simply record our determination to use symbols in a certain way."

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continuity/discontinuity

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continuity/discontinuity

For Georges Bataille, (sexual)"Reproduction implies the existence of discontinuous beings." (Erotism, p.12) Each being is distinct from all others, including its parents, who are distinct from each other. For Bataille death means the continuity of being and is brought into play by reproduction. Death is the end of discontinuous being, of the being formed at the moment when the discontinuous entities of sperm and egg unite to form a new continuity, when two become one, and a new entity is formed from the fatal fusion. The fascination with both reproduction and death is the dominant element in Eroticism. 

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durée

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For Henri Bergson, duration is not an objective mathematical unit, but the subjective perception of space-time. Bergson believed that the conventions of scientific practice were incompatible with lived experience. In his "Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" (1889), Bergson argued that experience viewed as a succession of separate, thinglike states is no less an abstraction from lived consciousness than time as measured by the hands of a clock. Both are fundamentally spatial. Lived consciousness, on the other hand, is a spatiotemporal continuum, "like a mutual penetration, a solidarity, an intimate organization of elements, each of which is representative of the others and neither distinguished from nor isolated by abstracting thought." (see also memory)

For Bergson, we can describe the movement of an object in space, for example, by postulating an infinite number of reference points, through which the object may be said to move. But "they are not parts of the movement; they are so many views taken to it; they are, we say, only supposed stopping points. Never is the mobile reality in any of these points; they most we can say is that it passes through them." Bergson proposed a division of labor between the analytical methods of scientists and the intuitions of the metaphysicians, who would strive for a "true empiricism" that would seek to keep "as close to the original itself as possible."

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emergence

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Emergence refers to the appearance of patterns of organization and is one of the key concepts of complexity and a-life.It is sometimes referred to as a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, because it cannot be analyzed by taking the parts apart and examining them separately. One reason for this is that in a complex phenomenon showing emergent properties, the parts become a determining context for each other, and these patterns of feedback contribute to the appearance of the emergent phenomenon. For Michael Polanyi, " Evolution can be understood only as a feat of emergence." 

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empathy

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In the late nineteenth century, the concept of Einfühlung , as "feeling into," was proposed by Rudolph Lotz and Wilhelm Wundt. E. G. Tichener, a student of Wundt, coined the English translation "empathy" in 1910, using the Greek root pathos for feeling and the prefix em for in. Empathy was developed as an aesthetic theory in the work of Theodore Lipps and others. 

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fold

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"In the late work of the painter is the fold / of that which comes to presence and of presence itself / become simple, 'realized.' healed, / transfigured in an identity full of mystery. / Does a path open up here, that leads to the co- / belonging of poetry and thought?" From Martin Heidegger, "Cezanne." in Gedaches, quoted in Agamben, Stanzas, p 158, n.)

"A structure is a regularized infolding of an aleatory outside." (Brian Massumi, p. 58) (see inside / outside ) For Gilles Deleuze, the Baroque is an operative function endlessly producing folds. These operations occur on two levels: the pleats of matter and the folds of the soul. What is the connection between the two? Correspondence, communication, or a fold between two folds?

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form

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Is there an independent problem of form, for which biology must develop its own concepts and methods of thought? The Pre-Darwinian project of rational morphology was to discover the "laws of form," some inherent necessity in the laws which governed morphological process. It sought to construct what was typical in the varieties of form into a system which should not be merely historically determined, but which should be intelligible from a higher and more rational standpoint. (Hans Driesch, 1914, p. 149) 

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genius

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Kant's aesthetic is based on a distinction between reason's requirements for determinate concepts, and the indeterminate, yet universal quality of aesthetic judgement. For Kant, natural beauty is the prime paradigm, because it is not a product guided by concept (a design). Yet when we judge nature aesthetically, we impute the "mere" form of cognisibility to it. In Kant's terminology, the aesthetic judgement of nature requires that we think of nature as "purposive without purpose."

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heimlich / unheimlich

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"With Freud indeed, foreignness, an uncanny one, creeps into the tranquility of reason itself...Henceforth, we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others." (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 170)

In an article published in 1906, the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch published "Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen ", an essay on the uncanny as an affective excitement -- a sensation of unease, of disorientation, of not being quite "at home" -- which a "fortunate formation" of the German language conveys quite clearly, since Heim specifically refers to the home. Thus, for Jentsch the experience of the new, the foreign, and the unusual can provoke mistrust, unease, and even hostility, as opposed to the familiar forms of the traditional, the usual, the hereditary which are a source of comfort and reassurance. While the familiar may even appear self-evident, the unfamiliar can create uncertainty and disorientation, and threats to the everyday sense of intellectual mastery. While the intensity of feeling associated with this disorientation can vary considerably, the sense of the uncanny is most particularly aroused in conditions of "doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate." (The point is taken up by Freud in Das Unheimliche ) Fear, terror, and horror can result. The impression of the uncanny is often provoked by wax figures, automata, panopticons, and panoramas, and in recent years the "uncanny valley" has been proposed to explain the unease that lifelike robots can provoke -- almost but not quite animate.

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hermeneutics

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Hermeneutically oriented philosophy aims at deciphering the meaning of Being, the meaning of Being-in-the-world, and its central concept if that of interpretation.

In it broadest sense hermeneutics means "interpretation", but in a more specialized sense, it usually refers to textual interpretation and to reading. Reflection on the practice of interpretation arose in modern European culture as the result of the attempt to understand what had been handed down within that culture from the past.

Interpretation (Auslegung ) is now seen as the explicit, conscious understanding of meanings under conditions where an understanding of those meanings can no longer be presumed to be a self-evident process but is viewed as intrinsically problematic; it is here assumed that misunderstandings about what we seek to interpret will arise not simply occasionally, but systematically. (Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, p 95)

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