What Is Called Thinking?: When Deleuze Walks Along Heideggerian Paths

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benoît Dillet

When on the last page of What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1995: 218) claim that philosophy needs a non-philosophy, this statement is the result of a long engagement with the problem of thinking in society. It is this engagement that we intend to reconstruct in this article. By developing an original definition of thinking after Heidegger, Deleuze is able to claim that philosophy is not the only ‘thinking’ discipline. Our point of departure is Deleuze's constant reference to a phrase from Heidegger's lecture course What Is Called Thinking?: ‘We are not yet thinking’ ( Deleuze 1988 : 116, 1989: 167, 1994: 144, 2002: 108; Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 56). This phrase points to the demand for a new distribution of the relation between philosophy and its outside. The purpose of this article is to trace Heidegger's influence on Deleuze's definition of thinking and to raise two points. First, Deleuze borrows some elements of Heidegger's definition of thinking to further his own understanding of politics as an involuntary practice. For both, the question of thinking is political. Second, by departing from Heidegger, Deleuze can democratise the definition of thinking, beyond its confinement to philosophy, by turning to cinema. Deleuze calls cinema the art of the masses because it brings the masses in contact with external signs. Finally, in the last part of this article, we will discuss how Deleuze raises stupidity (and not error) as a transcendental problem that should be constantly fought. In this way, we hope to shed light on how Deleuze moves from Heidegger's question ‘what is called thinking?’ to the problem of stupidity and shame.

Author(s):  
H. Burcu Önder Memiş

Fear is a human emotion that allows a person to survive. It has a function to ensure the continuity of life. The definition of fear has changed over time. Along with human development, transition to sedentary life, the industrial revolution, and modern life, fear and the things feared have changed. Fear has started to be marketed, especially in post-industrial societies. The governments have seen that fear and violence work to regulate, control, and passivate people. Political governments have had the unique opportunity to use fear as a mechanism for control and surveillance. The governments have aestheticized the fear and presented it indirectly with the support of media. The masses have been shaped as weak, scared, anxious, and helpless in the shadow of fear and violence. This study tries to shed light on the attempt to persuade the society about the legitimacy of the military government by presenting fear and violence to people in aestheticized forms in the 1980s in Turkey.


1996 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 121-128
Author(s):  
Jan Jansen

Stephan Bühnen has applied some of my ideas to a wider region than southwestern Mali, and shown that the principles of Mande status discourse make possible new interpretations on sources and political processes in the entire West African Sudan. Inspired by Bühnen's analysis, I am convinced that the principles of Mande status discourse may shed light on various processes, varying from political struggles between families to the construction of contemporary ethnic identities. I hope that this reply will not be the end of the discussion on West African genealogies, and that others will join us.Although Bühnen ideas are fruitful, there are also points to contest. Lack of space forces me to focus on three points of Bühnen's critique: the way I elaborate the term “segmentary;” his remarks that I overlook a “bulk of testimony recorded in medieval Arabic sources;” and his complaint of my “inadequate understanding of historical polities.”Since Bühnen accepts my analysis of the Mande genealogies and their relation to nineteenth-century society, I will take this as my point of departure. I will argue that we cannot deduce the “historical reality of polities” for the available material without being misled by our own prejudices and fallacies. The ‘old’ sources are not as one-dimensional as Bühnen thinks: a status claim does not necessarily represent an irreversible hierarchy in a relationship. Bühnen ignores the context, overlooks the dynamics of Mande status discourse, and presupposes his model of chiefdoms.I admit that I am vague about the way I operationalize the term “segmentary,” but a definition of “segmentary” is not necessary to my argument since I focus on a discourse which shows that any relation in Mande is hierarchical as well as based on a dichotomy—for instance, ‘older-younger’ or ‘founder-stranger.’


Author(s):  
Katarzyna Czeczot

The article deals with the love of Zygmunt Krasiński to Delfina Potocka. The point of departure is the poet's definition of love as looking and reads Krasiński's relationship with his beloved in the context of two phenomena that fascinated him at the time: daguerreotype and magnetism. The invention of the daguerreotype in which the history of photography and spiritism comes together becomes a pretext for the formulation of a new concept of love and the loving subject. In the era of painting the woman was treated as a passive object of the male gaze; photography reverses this scheme of power. Love ceases to be a static relationship of the subject in love and the passive object – the beloved. The philosophy of developing photographs (and invoking phantoms) allows Krasiński - the writing subject to become like a light-sensitive material that reveals the image of the beloved.


Author(s):  
Takis S. Pappas

Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key issues in the debate about populism and answers significant questions of great relevance for today’s liberal democracy, including: • What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy? • Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late? • Is Trump a populist and, if so, could he be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan? • Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil? • Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism? • Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds? • Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule? • What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy? Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways the reader understands populism and imagines the prospects of liberal democracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-158
Author(s):  
James A. Harris

AbstractMy point of departure in this essay is Smith’s definition of government. “Civil government,” he writes, “so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” First I unpack Smith’s definition of government as the protection of the rich against the poor. I argue that, on Smith’s view, this is always part of what government is for. I then turn to the question of what, according to Smith, our governors can do to protect the wealth of the rich from the resentment of the poor. I consider, and reject, the idea that Smith might conceive of education as a means of alleviating the resentment of the poor at their poverty. I then describe how, in his lectures on jurisprudence, Smith refines and develops Hume’s taxonomy of the opinions upon which all government rests. The sense of allegiance to government, according to Smith, is shaped by instinctive deference to natural forms of authority as well as by rational, Whiggish considerations of utility. I argue that it is the principle of authority that provides the feelings of loyalty upon which government chiefly rests. It follows, I suggest, that to the extent that Smith looked to government to protect the property of the rich against the poor, and thereby to maintain the peace and stability of society at large, he cannot have sought to lessen the hold on ordinary people of natural sentiments of deference. In addition, I consider the implications of Smith’s theory of government for the question of his general attitude toward poverty. I argue against the view that Smith has recognizably “liberal,” progressive views of how the poor should be treated. Instead, I locate Smith in the political culture of the Whiggism of his day.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Marin ◽  
Carla Piazza ◽  
Sabina Rossi

AbstractIn this paper, we deal with the lumpability approach to cope with the state space explosion problem inherent to the computation of the stationary performance indices of large stochastic models. The lumpability method is based on a state aggregation technique and applies to Markov chains exhibiting some structural regularity. Moreover, it allows one to efficiently compute the exact values of the stationary performance indices when the model is actually lumpable. The notion of quasi-lumpability is based on the idea that a Markov chain can be altered by relatively small perturbations of the transition rates in such a way that the new resulting Markov chain is lumpable. In this case, only upper and lower bounds on the performance indices can be derived. Here, we introduce a novel notion of quasi-lumpability, named proportional lumpability, which extends the original definition of lumpability but, differently from the general definition of quasi-lumpability, it allows one to derive exact stationary performance indices for the original process. We then introduce the notion of proportional bisimilarity for the terms of the performance process algebra PEPA. Proportional bisimilarity induces a proportional lumpability on the underlying continuous-time Markov chains. Finally, we prove some compositionality results and show the applicability of our theory through examples.


Open Physics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Prunotto ◽  
Wanda Maria Alberico ◽  
Piotr Czerski

Abstract The rooted maps theory, a branch of the theory of homology, is shown to be a powerful tool for investigating the topological properties of Feynman diagrams, related to the single particle propagator in the quantum many-body systems. The numerical correspondence between the number of this class of Feynman diagrams as a function of perturbative order and the number of rooted maps as a function of the number of edges is studied. A graphical procedure to associate Feynman diagrams and rooted maps is then stated. Finally, starting from rooted maps principles, an original definition of the genus of a Feynman diagram, which totally differs from the usual one, is given.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (11) ◽  
pp. 2395-2399 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZAHI TOUMA ◽  
DAFNA D. GLADMAN ◽  
DOMINIQUE IBAÑEZ ◽  
SHAHRZAD TAGHAVI-ZADEH ◽  
MURRAY B. UROWITZ

Objective.To evaluate the performance of the Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) Responder Index (SRI) when the SLE Disease Activity Index 2000 (SLEDAI-2K) is substituted with SLEDAI-2K Responder Index-50 (SRI-50), a valid and reliable index of disease activity improvement. Also, to determine whether the SRI-50 will enhance the ability of SRI in detecting responders.Methods.Our study was conducted on patients who attended the Lupus Clinic from September 2009 to September 2010. SLEDAI-2K, SRI-50, the British Isles Lupus Assessment Group measure, and the Physician’s Global Assessment were determined initially and at followup. SRI was determined at the followup visit according to its original definition using the SLEDAI-2K score and by substituting SLEDAI-2K with SRI-50.Results.A total of 117 patients with SLEDAI-2K ≥ 4 at baseline were studied. Patients had 1 followup visit over a 3-month period. Twenty-nine percent of patients met the original definition of SRI and 35% of patients met the definition of SRI when SLEDAI-2K was substituted with SRI-50. The use of SRI-50 allowed determination of significant improvement in 7 additional patients. This improvement could not be discerned with the use of SLEDAI-2K as a component of SRI. At followup visits that showed improvement, SRI-50 scores decreased to a greater extent than SLEDAI-2K scores (p < 0.0001).Conclusion.SRI-50 enhances the ability of SRI to identify patients with clinically important improvement in disease activity. SRI-50 was superior to SLEDAI-2K in detecting partial clinical improvement, ≥ 50%, between visits. These properties of the SRI-50 enable it to be used as an independent outcome measure of improvement or as a component of SRI in clinical trials.


2001 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 105-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan

‘According to informational semantics, if it's necessary that a creature can't distinguish Xs from Ys, it follows that the creature can't have a concept that applies to Xs but not Ys.’ (Fodor, 1994, p. 32)There is, indeed, a form of informational semantics that has this verificationist implication. The original definition of information given in Dretske'sKnowledge and the Flow of Information(1981, hereafter KFI), when employed as a base for a theory of intentional representation or ‘content,’ has this implication. I will argue that, in fact, most of what an animal needs to know about its environment is not available as natural information of this kind. It is true, I believe, that there is one fundamental kind of perception that depends on this kind of natural information, but more sophisticated forms of inner representation do not. It is unclear, however, exactly what ‘natural information’ is supposed to mean, certainly in Fodor's, and even in Dretske's writing. In many places, Dretske seems to employ a softer notion than the one he originally defines. I will propose a softer view of natural information that is, I believe, at least hinted at by Dretske, and show that it does not have verificationist consequences. According to this soft informational semantics, a creature can perfectly well have a representation of Xs without being able to discriminate Xs from Ys.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Venini

An innovative approach to topology optimization of dynamic system is introduced that is based on the system transfer-function H∞-norm. As for the structure, the proposed strategy allows to determine the optimal material distribution that ensures the minimization of a suitable goal function, such as (an original definition of) the dynamic compliance. Load uncertainty is accounted for by means of a nonprobabilistic convex-set approach (Ben-Haim and Elishakoff, 1990, Convex Models of Uncertainty in Applied Mechanics, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam). At each iteration, the worst load is determined as the one that maximizes the current dynamic compliance so that the proposed strategy fits the so-called worst case scenario (WCS) approach. The overall approach consists of the repeated solution of the two steps (minimization of the dynamic compliance with respect to structural parameters and maximization of the dynamic compliance with respect to the acting load) until convergence is achieved. Results from representative numerical studies are eventually presented along with extensions to the proposed approach that are currently under development.


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