Construction Site for Possible Worlds

Author: Amanda Beech
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029662
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Perspectives from philosophy, aesthetics, and art on how to envisage the construction site of possible worlds. Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, when the tremendous pressures exerted by capital on contemporary life produces an aggressively normative “official reality,” the question of the construction of other possible worlds is crucial and perhaps more urgent than ever. This collection brings together different perspectives from the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and art to discuss the mechanisms through which possible worlds are thought, constructed, and instantiated, forcefully seeking to overcome the contemporary moment's deficit of conceptualizing alternate realities—its apparent fear of imagining possible new and compelling futures—to begin the arduous task of producing the political dynamics necessary for actual construction. Implicit in this dynamic between the imaginary and the possible is the question of how thinking intertwines with both rationality and the inherited contingencies and structures of the world. With no ascertainable ground on which to build, with no confidence in any given that could guarantee our labors, how do we even envisage the construction site(s) of possible worlds, and with what kind of diagrams, tools, and languages can we bring them into being?

Sonic Possible Worlds

Author: Salomé Voegelin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623566959
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Inspired by its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of game design, Salomé Voegelin adapts and develops “possible world theory” in relation to sound. David K Lewis' Possible World is juxtaposed with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's life-world, to produce a meeting of the semantic and the phenomenological at the place of listening. The central tenet of Sonic Possible Worlds is that at present traditional musical compositions and contemporary sonic outputs are approached and investigated through separate and distinct critical languages and histories. As a consequence, no continuous and comparative study of the field is possible. In Sonic Possible Worlds, Voegelin proposes a new analytical framework that can access and investigate works across genres and times, enabling a comparative engagement where composers such as Henry Purcell and Nadia Boulanger encounter sound art works by Shilpa Gupta and Christina Kubisch and where the soundscape compositions of Chris Watson and Francisco López resound in the visual worlds of Louise Bourgeois.

Sonic Possible Worlds, Revised Edition

Author: Salomé Voegelin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501367633
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands 'possible world theory' to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelin's exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Áine O'Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds' radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies; between humans, humanoid aliens, monsters, vampires, plants, things and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call.

Possible Worlds

Author: Rod Girle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317489411
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Ever since Saul Kripke and others developed a semantic interpretation for modal logic, 'possible worlds' has been a much debated issue in contemporary metaphysics. To propose the idea of a possible world that differs in some way from our actual world - for example a world where the grass is red or where no people exist - can help us to analyse and understand a wide range of philosophical concepts, such as counterfactuals, properties, modality, and of course, the notions of possibility and necessity. This book examines the ways in which possible worlds have been used as a framework for considering problems in logic and argument analysis. The book begins with a non-technical introduction to the basic ideas of modal logic in terms of Kripke's possible worlds and then moves on to a discussion of 'possible for' and 'possible that'. The central chapters examine questions of meaning, epistemic possibility, temporal logic, metaphysics, and impossibility. Girle also investigates how the idea of a possible world can be put to use in different areas of philosophy, the problems it may raise, and the benefits that can be gained.

Goethe Yearbook 24

Author: Adrian Daub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113977X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and his age, featuring in this volume a special section on the poetics of space in the Goethezeit. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 24 features a special section titled "The Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit," co-edited by John Lyon and Elliott Schreiber, with contributions on blind spots in Goethe's Elective Affinities; on the topography and topoi of Goethe's autobiographical childhood; on disorientation and the subterranean in Novalis; on selfhood, sovereignty, and public space in Die italienische Reise and Dichtung und Wahrheit; on Goethe's theater of anamnesis in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; and on spatial mobilization in Kleist's Berliner Abendblätter. There are also articles on the horror of coming home in Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's "Der Abtrünnige" and on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Eduard Allwills Papiere. Contributors: Colin Benert, Stephanie Galasso, Tove Holmes, Edgar Landgraf, Sara Luly, John B. Lyon, Anthony Mahler, Monika Nenon, Joseph O'Neil, Elliott Schreiber, Inge Stephan, Gabriel Trop, Christian P. Weber. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis. Book review editor Birgit Tautz is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College.

Possible Worlds in Literary Theory

Author: Ruth Ronen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521456487
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
The concept of possible worlds, originally introduced in philosophical logic, has recently gained interdisciplinary influence; it proves to be a productive tool when borrowed by literary theory to explain the notion of fictional worlds. In this book Ruth Ronen develops a comparative reading of the use of possible worlds in philosophy and in literary theory, and offers an analysis of the way the concept contributes to our understanding of fictionality and the structure and ontology of fictional worlds. Dr Ronen suggests a new set of criteria for the definition of fictionality, making rigorous distinctions between fictional and possible worlds; and through specific studies of domains within fictional worlds - events, objects, time, and point of view - she proposes a radical rethinking of the problem of fictionality in general and fictional narrativity in particular.

Possible Worlds

Author: John Divers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134731604
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
Possible Worlds presents the first up-to-date and comprehensive examination of one of the most important topics in metaphysics. John Divers considers the prevalent philosophical positions, including realism, antirealism and the work of important writers on possible worlds such as David Lewis, evaluating them in detail.

Constructing the World

Author: David J. Chalmers
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191654949
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Book Description
David Chalmers develops a picture of reality on which all truths can be derived from a limited class of basic truths. The picture is inspired by Rudolf Carnap's construction of the world in Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt. Carnap's Aufbau is often seen as a noble failure, but Chalmers argues that a version of the project can succeed. With the right basic elements and the right derivation relation, we can indeed construct the world. The focal point of Chalmers' project is scrutability: the thesis that ideal reasoning from a limited class of basic truths yields all truths about the world. Chalmers first argues for the scrutability thesis and then considers how small the base can be. The result is a framework in "metaphysical epistemology": epistemology in service of a global picture of the world. The scrutability framework has ramifications throughout philosophy. Using it, Chalmers defends a broadly Fregean approach to meaning, argues for an internalist approach to the contents of thought, and rebuts W.V. Quine's arguments against the analytic and the a priori. He also uses scrutability to analyze the unity of science, to defend a sort of conceptual metaphysics, and to mount a structuralist response to skepticism. Based on Chalmers's 2010 John Locke lectures, Constructing the World opens up debate on central philosophical issues concerning knowledge, language, mind, and reality.

Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences

Author: Allén Sture
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110866854
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
Possible worlds in humanities, arts, and sciences : proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65.

Epistemic Complexity and Knowledge Construction

Author: A. Carsetti
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400760132
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
The volume as its first target aims at clarifying that peculiar entanglement of complexity, causality, meaning, emergence and intentionality that characterises the unfolding of the "natural forms" of human cognition As is well known, cognition is not only a self-organising process. It is also a co-operative and coupled process. If we consider the external environment as a complex, multiple and stratified Source which interacts with the nervous system, we can easily realise that the cognitive activities devoted to the "intelligent" search for the depth information living in the Source, may determine the very change of the complexity conditions according to which the Source progressively expresses its "wild" action. In this sense, simulation models are not neutral or purely speculative: the true cognition actually appears to be necessarily connected with successful forms of reading, those forms, in particular, that permit a specific coherent unfolding of the deep information content of the Source. Therefore, the simulation models, if valid, materialise as "creative" channels, i.e., as autonomous functional systems, as the very roots of a new possible development of the entire system represented by mind and its Reality. From a general point of view, the objectivity of Reality is also proportionate to the autonomy reached by cognitive processes. In this sense, at the level of cultural evolution, reference procedures act as guide, mirror and canalisation with respect to primary information flows and involved selective forces: they offer themselves as the actual instruments for the constant renewal of the code, for the invention and the actual articulation of an ever-new incompressibility. From an effective point of view, they appear as indissolubly linked to the successive definition of specific (and innovative) measures of the epistemic complexity. These measures cannot concern only statistical rarity (Shannon) or computational incompressibility (Kolmogorov-Chaitin), on the contrary they should also be able to take into account the coupled connection between the Source and the cognitive agent, the evolution of this connection as well as the successive constitution of meaning as symbolic form. Hence the possible (and necessary) definition of new axiomatic systems, new measure spaces, the real displaying of processes of continuous reorganisation at the semantic level. Indeed, it is only through a complete, first-order "reduction" and a correlated non-standard second-order analysis that new incompressibility will actually manifest itself. Therefore, the reference procedures appear to be related to a process of multiplication of minds, as well as to a process of "clarification" of meanings which finally emerges as vision via principles.