In the tenth book of the Republic, Socrates differentiates the maker of an object, such as a bed, made in accordance with the Idea of the thing (this is its eidos or form) , from the artist, proceeding in a quick and easy fashion, as if using a mirror. But "What should a painting be called," asked Alberti, "except the holding of a mirror up to the original as in art?"
Read MoreAt cell division, or mitosis, the nucleus of the cell divides. Each chromosome within the nucleus is first duplicated, and one copy passes to each daughter nucleus, and hence to each daughter cell.
Read MoreModernity can be thought of
1. as a category of historical periodization: a distinct period in time.
2. as a quality of social experience, ("our" modernity), and as the experience of a qualitative difference in historical time.
3. as a project, which is perhaps incomplete. (Habermas, Foucault, Deleuze (?) ) Perhaps also as a crisis.
For Deleuze and Guattari, molarity is the site of coded wholes. It is a productive process: a making-the-same. Its attractor state is that of stable equilibrium. It is the mode of being, rather than becoming.The principle revolutionary objective of their writing is to break down molar aggregates in favor of molecularity, and the "microphysics of desire." They call for becoming rather than being, for becoming-other rather than being the same. For them, becoming-other is thoroughly political.
Read More“Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.” (Milton Friedman)
Monopoly price refers to the price profitably above cost that a firm with monopoly power can charge. That power is often developed through restraints on trade. "I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad....” Thomas Babington Macaulay, speech to the British Parliament, 1841.
The history of Standard Oil is one of the great stories of monopoly power and its confrontations with antitrust regulation, lawsuits, and “muckraking” journalism. I
Read MoreA field is a region of physical influence. Fields are not a form of matter, rather, matter is energy bound within fields. In current physics, several kinds of fundamental fields are recognized: the gravitational and electro-magnetic fields and the matter fields of quantum physics.
The field concept in biology has its origin in the work of Hans Driesch, although the concept itself was elaborated by A. Gurwitsch and P. Weiss. (see account in Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin, Form and Transformation, pp 94-100) For Joseph Needham, fields are "wholes actively organizing themselves."
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the embryologist Wilhelm Roux proposed a "developmental mechanics" (Entwicklungsmechanik ) to account for origin and maintenance of organisms through a causal morphology that would reduce them to a "movement of parts," and would prove that biology and physics were completely one with each other. Roux sought to transform biology from a purely historical into a causal discipline through analytic thought and experiment. His "mosaic theory" described development as the self-differentiation of hereditary potentialities with the irreversible functional differentiation among cells. This hypothesis was supported in part by Roux's own experiments at the marine biological station in Naples. When he killed one of the first two cleavage cells in a frog's egg, the surviving cell, as he expected, gave rise to only half of a normal embryo.
in 1891, while working at the Naples station with a different organism, Hans Driesch obtained radically different results. Driesch demonstrated that, contrary to the Roux-Weismann hypothesis, each cell of a sea urchin embryo, when isolated at the two-cell stage, does not produce a half-embryo but a complete, miniature pluteus larva of normal form. (see mechanism / vitalism for philosophical interpretations of these experiments.)
Read MoreMorphogenesis is the process by which the phenotype develops in time under the direction of the genotype.
The explanation of morphogenesis requires a theory of the gene as well as theories for those properties of the organism revealed by experimental embryology and experimental morphology.
Morphology is an "account of form," an account that allows us a rational grasp of the morphe by making internal and external relations intelligible. It seeks to be a general theory of the formative powers of organic structure. 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)
Read MoreThe theory of what Stephen Jay Gould has called morphospace is that space of possible morphologies for species organized according to certain principles. Proponents of robust morphogentic processes, such as Stuart Kaufman or Richard Goodwin, see these processes as having large basins of attraction in morphospace.
Read MoreAccording to most accounts, in myth concepts are expressed in images, not in philosphical terms. Claude Levi-Strauss describes mythic thought as a well-articulated system, lying halfway between percepts and concepts. While percepts are impossible to separate from the concrete situations in which they appeared, concepts need be abstracted (in Husserl's sense that thought must put its projects "in brackets.") from the event and understood in their unlimited systematic substitutibility. For Levi-Strauss, signs are intermediaries between images and concepts, in the way that de Saussure described their double articulation of phonic material and undifferentiated thought.
Read MoreIn Civilization and its Discontents, Freud describes primary narcissism as that primal state where id, ego and external world are not differentiated. As he develops the concept of primary narcissism, libido theory and ego theory become inseparable. In his essay "On Narcissism," of 1914, Freud describes the origin of the ego in terms of the subject's ability to take itself or part of its own body as a love object.
Read MoreWhy is narration so universal? What psychological or social functions do stories serve? Why is our need for stories never satisfied? And why do we need the "same" story over and over again? (J. Hillis Miller, in Critical Terms for Literary Study.)
In the Poetics, Aristotle claims that plot is the most important feature of a narrative. A good story has a beginning, middle, and end, making a shapely whole with no extraneous elements. Aristotle also addressed the social and psychological role of narration. He described tragic drama as the purging or catharsis of the undesirable emotions of pity and fear by first arousing them and then clearing them away.
A large contemporary literature has explored diverse theories of narrative, including Russian formalist theories (Propp, Sklovskij, Eichenbaum); Bakhtinian, or dialogical theories (Mikhail Bakhtin); New Critical theories (R.P. Blackmur); Chicago school, or neo-Aristotelian , theories (R.S. Crane, Wayne Booth); psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham); hermeneutic and phenomenological theories (R. Ingarden, P. Ricoeur, Georges Poulet); structuralist, semiotic, and tropological theories (C. Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gérard Genette, Hayden White); Marxist and sociological theories (Georg Lukacs, Frederic Jameson); reader-response theories (Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss); and poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man) .
"Organic forms have a general character which distinguishes them from artificial ones.... We come then to conceive of organic form as something which is produced by the interaction of numerous forces which are balanced against one another in a near-equilibrium that has the character not of a precisely definable pattern but rather of a slightly fluid one, a rhythm...There is, in a human work of sculpture, no actual multitude of internal growth-forces which are balanced so as to issue in a near-equilibrium of a rhythmic character. We should therefore not expect that works of art will often arrive at the same type of form as we commonly find in the structures of living matter. Much more can we anticipate an influence of man's intellectualizing, pattern-making habit of simplification, diluted perhaps by an intrusion of unresolved detail." (Waddington (1951) in L.L. Whyte, ed. Aspects of Form)
Read MoreIn his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) Darwin argued because "variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle for life" do occur sometimes in thousands of generations in the wild, and because "many more individuals are born than can possible survive," then we cannot doubt that "individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind," while "any variations in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed." It is, then, the "preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations" that "I call Natural Selection." (from: M.J.S. Hodge, "Natural Selection: Historical Perspectives" in Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, p.212)
Read MoreNineteenth century liberals sought to limit state involvement in economic activity under the banner of “Laissez-faire”, although the expression is a simplification of Adam Smith’s identification of private interest with public interest,
But support for unfettered Capitalism waned among economists and the public in the face of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the outbreak of the Second World War. Capitalism, in the form of free markets, did not seem able to avert sharp cycles of “boom or bust”, and seemed to require some forms of state planning
Read MoreFor Kant, nature is the existence of things insofar as they are determined in accordance with universal laws. For Kant, the categorial principle of unity is a requirement for the very concept of nature. As he puts it in the Prolegomena to the Critique of Pure Reason, "nature is the existence of things, considered as existence determined according to universal laws." For Kant, the idea of God serves to symbolize or "schematize" the highest form of systematic unity to which empirical knowledge can be brought, the purposive unity of things. (B714) "God has put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system."
Read MoreNeoteny: the neural development that certain species, notably humans, continue to experience after birth. Man is born immature and helpless. He is not capable of locomotion or of any of the directed, volitional behavior indispensable for self-preservation. The survival of the neonate is predicated on devoted parental care.
Read MoreNeurons are rather different from most cells. Mature neurons do not move about, nor do they divide. If a mature neuron dies, it is rarely replaced by a new one. Neurons have a more spikey shape than most cells, and the axon of a neuron can be very long -- as much as several feet. Neuroscientists today believe that the brain records an event by strengthening the connections between groups of neurons that participate in encoding the experience. (see engram)
Read Morea child's definition of a net: "a lot of holes tied together with string"
Stuart Kaufman has described the formation of networks as a phase transition that occurs as the number of connections is increased between a random graph of points. As a general feature, when the number of connections reaches half of the number of points, the majority of the points become linked in a giant cluster. Kauffman believes that we should think of the genetic program not as a serial algorithm but as a parallel distributed regulatory network .
As a general model, the network applies not only to the "intertwingled" pieces of text in a hypertext but also to the linked computers in a connected system such as Internet, to pattern-recognition systems such as the immune system, or to organisms such as the slime mold, that are made up of individual cells responding to gradients and forming larger and more differentiated entities. The ability of the brain to synchronize and coordinate activities in different parts, called reentry, is another networked process. Theorists of complexity describe the behaviour of such systems as emergent.
Problems are assumed to become intractable when they become tangled, yet models of rhizomes and networks that value links are a kind of countermodel.
Read MoreFor Deleuze and Guattari, nomads are characterized above all by the fact that their mode of existence is antithetical to the system of the State, of cultivation, and of striation, which they describe as sedentary. Because the nomads were so decisively defeated, history has always dismissed them, and indeed "history is one with the triumph of States." (p.394) Nomadism becomes, for D+G, a revolutionnary alternative to the State, although they are always careful to distinguish between their "de jure" or conceptual distinctions and all the "de facto" mixes and transitions that actually occur.
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