Speculative Concepts Research Articles

História e progresso em Emanuel Kant

Abstract: Kant's IaG is a reference for history studies because it gives us a speculative conception of this discipline. This work also points us to the moral background that this speculative conception of history intends to demonstrate. Therefore, we can analyze Kant's philosophy of history as a complement to his moral philosophy. The question that must be asked before such a position is exactly this: how can the philosopher demonstrate these results? The answer to this leads us to the thesis of progress in Kant's philosophy of history, but which is somewhat common in the eighteenth century: the History would only make sense if it could be understood from the notion of continuous progress. Kant seeks to defend the possibility, in the field of history, that Nature or Providence is executing a long-term plan that will bring benefits to humanity as a species, even though it requires the sacrifice of its welfare as an individual. Kant demonstrates that we can understand with reason, and its inventive capacity, that humanity is in full development throughout the course of history, even though we cannot see development in the individual but only in the species.

THE EPIMEDIAL LANDSCAPE

This article develops a media philosophical framework for addressing the intersection of epigenetics and complex dynamical systems in theoretical biology. In particular, it argues that the theoretical humanities (and especially media philosophy) need to think critically about the computability of epigenomic regulation (proposed by the complexity sciences), as well as speculatively about the possibility of an epigenomics beyond complexity. The fact that such a conceptual framework does not exist suggests not only a failure to engage with the mathematics of complexity, but also a failure to engage with its history. Both epigenetics and the application of complex dynamical systems to biology originate in the mid-twentieth-century work of Conrad Hal Waddington. The article demonstrates how this genealogy of epigenetic complexity (which passes through Waddington’s epigenetic landscape, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, molecular epigenetics, and the limitations of nonlinear differential equations for biological modeling) reveals the need for a speculative conception of epigenomic mediation beyond mathematical complexity. Using Whitehead’s philosophy as a conceptual anchor, the “epimedial landscape” serves as a first pass at a media philosophical revision of the complex dynamical systems view of the epigenetic landscape.

Dark pedagogy – speculative realism and environmental and sustainability education

This article draws on the emerging speculative realist philosophical movement in order to develop new understandings of the issues and content of education that needs framing and reframing within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research. We argue for the potential of using speculative realist concepts such as correlationism, hyperobjects, the strange stranger, undermining, overmining and duomining in order to develop a dark pedagogy that could draw on insights from speculative realism and object-oriented ontology in particular in order to develop further key concepts and discussions within ESE. Based on inspiration from speculative realism, our conception of a dark pedagogy could strive to: develop an understanding of the hyperobjects and the strangeness of objects of education at the center of ESE. Our conception of dark pedagogy insists on the inherent withdrawnness of the objects at play in ESE, and envisions to develop a sensibility towards eco-, geo-, infra- and chrono-factors in ESE and make explicit the potential educational implications of speculative realisms.

Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination

This introduction explores how to build a critical analysis of post-crisis capitalism by moving beyond Marx, Foucault and Callon's approaches. This is crucially important because powerful technocratic institutions and the discipline of economics are attempting to regain legitimacy by adopting theories that mirror performativity, discursive, narrative and network concepts within the social sciences. To combat this we need to forge a new approach that returns our attention to questions of accumulation and inequality. It is with this in view that the articles in the special issue use the concept of speculation and explore it in real estate markets, infrastructure financing, oil and gold trading, ethical finance and gambling. Overall speculation is understood to be future-oriented affective, physical and intellectual labour that aims to accumulate capital for various ends. Control of the means of speculation is governed by the distribution of contracts and credit in society. And crucially the amount of surplus value extracted depends on calculations of risk based on the imagination of social differences. Social evaluations are at the core of the technologies of imagination used in speculation. Speculation is akin to practices of divination or magic because it aims to reveal a hidden order of human and non-human ethical powers that explain the past, present and future and make it possible to act. Importantly this means that racial, gendered, national and other imaginings of the social permeate acts of speculation. From our perspective, we can write a critical and post-colonial account of capitalism that addresses inequalities of race and nation scandalously omitted from Marx, Foucault and Callon's accounts of ‘the economic’.

What Philosophical Aesthetics Can Learn from Applied Anthropology

Through a detailed case study of investigations on beauty, I demonstrate that a thoughtful consideration of empirical evidence can lead to the disclosure of the fundamental assumptions entrenched in a philosophical discipline. I present a contrastive examination of two empirically oriented approaches to art and beauty, namely, the anthropology of art and the anthropology of aesthetics. To capture these two different ways of interpreting the available evidence, I draw upon a debate between Alfred Gell and Jeremy Coote on the understanding of beauty and art in the Dinka community. Following Gell, I reveal that the Western-centric predilection of Coote, who uses traditional aesthetic categories, leads to his failure to grasp the functional and causal roles of beauty in the social relations of the Dinka. In more general terms, my study reveals the inherent limitations of aesthetics as developed in the Western tradition and its Kantian legacy. Being steadily driven towards purely abstract and speculative concepts, such as ‘work of art,’ Western aesthetics has lost the ability to account for the causal role of beauty in social relations. By contrasting this approach with Gell’s anthropological approach to art, I indicate those fundamental assumptions of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline that apparently confine it to a particular cultural context, compromising its ability to account for the universal human condition. As my study illustrates, this limitation could be overcome by a thoughtful and unprejudiced examination of empirical evidence.

Mutual Determination, Concrescence and Transition. Whitehead’s Speculative Conception of Temporal Subjectivity Interpreted from a Merleau-Pontyan Standpoint

The interpretive approach adopted in this paper is influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and in particular by his understanding of Nature, which in turn takes into consideration Whitehead’s work. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is seen by its author as the metaphysical generalization of problems found in his investigation of natural knowledge. Whitehead admits that a speculative approach is necessitated by the very questions arising from the mathematical concepts of the material world and the revolutions undergone in logic, mathematics and physics at the turn of the century.Whitehead’s understanding of nature is framed from the beginning in terms of a processual approach. However, this notion of process is not fully worked out in the epistemological works and requires a metaphysical deepening. This is due to the fact that the notion of duration adopted in the epistemological works is not sufficient to convey the notion of process. This lack of adequacy is coupled by Whitehead with the need to interpret process in terms of experience. In turn, this notion of experience is wider than the usual one, for it implies that there is experience from the lowest levels onwards. Matter itself experiences. Seen in this perspective, reality is thus conceived in terms of a whole in constant change, whose parts are in mutual connection. This conception derives from Whitehead’s criticism of Aristotle’s substantialism and from his preference for a relationist ontology. The outcome of this approach is a speculative conception of reality in terms of a twofold notion of process: concrescence and transition, which Whitehead sees as the two faces of the creative advance of nature. This dual notion of process is interpreted in this essay in a merleau-pontyan perspective.

ACERCA DEL DISEÑO ESPECULATIVO DEL ESPACIO ARQUITECTONICO: EXPERIENCIAS, METAFORAS Y ABSTRACCION

Los actos de imaginar, crear y proyectar son conceptos de especulación pura, ya que, al inicio del proceso, arquitectos con conciencia, no saben con certeza lo que se va a lograr, pero con el objetivo siempre de mejorar lo existente. Arquitectos como Peter Eisenmann, Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe y Peter Zumthor tienen como meta proponer especulativamente en sus proyectos soluciones formales basados en conceptos abstractos, metafóricos y experienciales.

Muscular Vein Thrombosis Prior to Immobilization in Tendo Achilles Rupture: A Previously Unrecognized Association

Category:DTV prophylaxisIntroduction/Purpose:Thromboembolic complications during lower-limb immobilization after Achilles tendon ruptures are common. Both operative and nonoperative treatments of Achilles tendon rupture include a period of immobilization which is a well-documented risk factor for distal vein thrombosis (DVT). The term DVT refers to the anterior/posterior tibial or the peroneal veins, and comprise the deep venous system. More recently, the role of muscular vein thrombosis (MVT) or isolated gastrocnemius or soleus vein thrombosis has been reported. However, there is no report of MVT associated with Achilles tendon rupture either before or after the initiation of treatment. We present a prospective series of patients treated for a rupture of the Achilles tendon and who were all evaluated with ultrasound for diagnosis of venous compromise prior to initiation of treatment.Methods:21 patients who consecutively presented for treatment for an Achilles tendon rupture at the emergency department were included.All patients sustained the injurie while playing some kind of sport. 20 of 21 patients were male, and their average age was 48.8 years (range 34 to 62 years). Our prospective protocol included a routine ultrasound prior to the initiation of treatment to identify the location of the Achilles tendon rupture and simultaneously, a color Doppler ultrasound. Upon diagnosis, all patients were immobilized in an equinus cast while waiting for definitive treatment.Patients were treated either non operatively if a diagnosis of DVT was made, or with percutaneous surgical treatment in the absence of DVT. Upon DVT diagnosis patients were enrolled in a four week LWMH at curative doses therapy supervised by our team hematologist, in order to obtain an international normalized ratio (INR) of between 2 and 3.Results:Nine in the group of twenty one patients (42%) were diagnosed with a DVT in the Doppler ultrasound prior to the initial immobilization. In six of the nine patients diagnosed with a distal vein thrombosis thrombi was allocated in the muscular veins, two of the nine in the gastrocnemius veins and the remaining one in one of the posterior tibial vein. All of the patients had some kind of comorbidity, however only three of them had risk factors previously associated with the occurrence of distal vein thrombosis. In our evaluated cohort there were no cases of progression to pulmonary embolism (PE).Conclusion:To the authors knowledge this is the first publication that links the MVT diagnosis to the moment previous to the immobilization in Achilles tendon rupture. It is our perspective that although not well stablished there is at least a theoretical risk of further propagation to the profound venous system and subsequently to the pulmonary system, and this fact not only conditions the treatment of MVT itself, but also the treatment of the Achilles rupture. Clearly this is just a speculative concept and further evidence needs to be gathered in order to have a better understanding.

Determinants of Speculative Demand of Wheat and Its Impact on Consumer Welfare Loss

A much-neglected concept of price speculation from the side of consumers plays an important role in the determination of prices and quantity traded in the market. Almost all the consumers speculate about future prices of commodities and at the first stage, whenever prices increase, most of the consumers believe and speculate that the prices will increase more in the future. The current study underhand is conducted to find the factors of speculative demand for wheat and its relationship with consumer’s welfare. The need for this study was to find the factors of speculative demand and its and its relationship with the welfare loss. For this purpose data were collected from one hundred wheat consumers who buy wheat monthly from rural and urban areas of District Mandi Baha ud Din, Pakistan at random by direct interviewing to analyze which factors compel them not to buy wheat at annual bases and how it is related to their income, family size, and monthly income. Results show a negative relationship between the speculative demand for wheat and income. There is also a positive relationship between speculation and family as well as between speculation and actual quantity demanded. The lower-income consumers do speculation about the prices of the wheat from September to March and cause prices to increase about 8.92% more than the normal prices which cost them to lose consumer welfare and surplus. It is concluded that if consumers avoid speculation, they can buy wheat at 8.92% lesser price and can enjoy more consumer welfare and surplus. An increase in speculative demand increases prices more than a normal increase. The addition of some portion of price increment merely is due to consumer’s psychological phenomenon of speculation.

Learning anthropology in transitory spaces

This paper seeks to explore the pedagogical nuances of student self-reflective feedback,1 as it highlights the importance of acknowledging 1st year students’ uncertainty when approaching anthropological terminology for the first time. I attempt to explore the conceptual impact of the broad discipline of anthropology's conceptual terminology on 1st year students. In later sections of this paper, the notions of “experimental knowledge” and “knowledge appropriation” will be developed further and illustrated with examples extracted from focus groups and observations conducted as part of this research. The outcomes of this research suggest that current unproblematised uses of speculative concepts, such as “culture” and “indigenous” negatively impact the discipline’s image inside and outside the class. However, these concepts pose numerous opportunities for highlighting their frictions and uncertain natures as thresholds where knowledge is produced and re-produced. Unfortunately, curricula are often designed with standardised assessments in mind; this predisposes students towards a certain body of knowledge required to meet the demands of these assessments. Yet, how do students conceptualise such disconnections between curricula and daily experiences? This paper seeks to combine the fields of education theory, critical pedagogy and linguistic anthropological analysis to approach Higher Education learning from a student-based perspective, where students reflectively navigate their own learning processes and voice their uncertain experiences and knowledge. This will help situate the disconnections between curricula, student experience and outcomes in the context of the very transitory spaces that students occupy. Students’ semantic adventures, including all its frictions, can contribute to contemporary ways of understanding student agency and liminal knowledges as conceptual devices that challenge the assumedly immutable aspects of anthropological curricula.

Implementing Adaptive Voltage Over-Scaling: Algorithmic Noise Tolerance vs. Approximate Error Detection

Adaptive Voltage Over-Scaling can be applied at run-time to reach the best tradeoff between quality of results and energy consumption. This strategy encompasses the concept of timing speculation through some level of approximation. How and on which part of the circuit to implement such approximation is an open issue. This work introduces a quantitative comparison between two complementary strategies: Algorithmic Noise Tolerance and Approximate Error Detection. The first implements a timing speculation by means approximate computing, while the latter exploits a more sophisticated approach that is based on the approximation of the error detection mechanism. The aim of this study was to provide both a qualitative and quantitative analysis on two real-life digital circuits mapped onto a state-of-the-art 28-nm CMOS technology.

Typology of Minimalism in the 1950–1960s. The Conceptual, Technological, and Material

«Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Искусствоведение» — научно-теоретический рецензируемый журнал, обобщающий результаты исследований ученых всего мира в различных областях искусства, включая музыковедение, культурологию и художественное образование.

Oxygenic photosynthesis: history, status and perspective.

Cyanobacteria and plants carry out oxygenic photosynthesis. They use water to generate the atmospheric oxygen we breathe and carbon dioxide to produce the biomass serving as food, feed, fibre and fuel. This paper scans the emergence of structural and mechanistic understanding of oxygen evolution over the past 50 years. It reviews speculative concepts and the stepped insight provided by novel experimental and theoretical techniques. Driven by sunlight photosystem II oxidizes the catalyst of water oxidation, a hetero-metallic Mn4CaO5(H2O)4 cluster. Mn3Ca are arranged in cubanoid and one Mn dangles out. By accumulation of four oxidizing equivalents before initiating dioxygen formation it matches the four-electron chemistry from water to dioxygen to the one-electron chemistry of the photo-sensitizer. Potentially harmful intermediates are thereby occluded in space and time. Kinetic signatures of the catalytic cluster and its partners in the photo-reaction centre have been resolved, in the frequency domain ranging from acoustic waves via infra-red to X-ray radiation, and in the time domain from nano- to milli-seconds. X-ray structures to a resolution of 1.9Å are available. Even time resolved X-ray structures have been obtained by clocking the reaction cycle by flashes of light and diffraction with femtosecond X-ray pulses. The terminal reaction cascade from two molecules of water to dioxygen involves the transfer of four electrons, two protons, one dioxygen and one water. A rigorous mechanistic analysis is challenging because of the kinetic enslaving at millisecond duration of six partial reactions (4e-, 1H+, 1O2). For the time being a peroxide-intermediate in the reaction cascade to dioxygen has been in focus, both experimentally and by quantum chemistry. Homo sapiens has relied on burning the products of oxygenic photosynthesis, recent and fossil. Mankind's total energy consumption amounts to almost one-fourth of the global photosynthetic productivity. If the average power consumption equalled one of those nations with the highest consumption per capita it was four times greater and matched the total productivity. It is obvious that biomass should be harvested for food, feed, fibre and platform chemicals rather than for fuel.

THE PRINCIPLE OF NON-INTERFERENCE OF POWER AND ITS ETHICAL JUSTIFICATION IN THE WORK OF HANS-HERMANN HOPPE

In the article the contents aspects and methodological meaning of non-interference of power are opened and its ethical justification in the works of the famous representative of «a new Austrian school» Hans-Hermann Hoppe is analyzed. Methodological basis of the research is the use of both general scientific and sociological methods. The theoretical and methodological basis of work is the system of general scientific and special methods, namely: historical-logical method, theoretical generalization and systematization. It defends the universalism of private property ethics, which transforms into the creation of a speculative concept of «natural order» implemented within the bounds of anarcho-capitalism Mises-Rothbard direction of «a new Austrian school». It is proved that the scientist, building on his a priori, praxeology, and the principles of self-belonging and homestead, creates his own theory of the economy of power, where the main object of criticism is the state as an institutionalized form of coercion and exploitation. For him power – is a coercion which becomes horribly devastating, turning into a state institution. It kills the creative potential of a person by reducing or even completely destroying the level of «domination over nature», and also threatening the normal work of the market, while having the «right» of legitimate violence, receives a clear preference. That is why the scientist places great emphasis on the ethical substantiation of the principle of non-interference of government in economic processes.

The manipulability of what? The history of G-protein coupled receptors

This paper tells the story of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), one of the most important scientific objects in contemporary biochemistry and molecular biology. By looking at how cell membrane receptors turned from a speculative concept into a central element in modern biochemistry over the past 40 years, we revisit the role of manipulability as a criterion for entity realism in wet-lab research. The central argument is that manipulability as a condition for reality becomes meaningful only once scientists have decided how to conceptually coordinate measurable effects distinctly to a specific object. We show that a scientific entity, such as GPCRs, is assigned varying degrees of reality throughout different stages of its discovery. The criteria of its reality, we further claim, cannot be made independently of the question about how this object becomes a standard by which the reality of neighbouring elements of enquiry is evaluated.

A SPECULATIVE STUDY ON NEGATIVE-DIMENSIONAL POTENTIAL AND WAVE PROBLEMS BY IMPLICIT CALCULUS MODELING APPROACH

Based on the implicit calculus equation modeling approach, this paper proposes a speculative concept of the potential and wave operators on negative dimensionality. Unlike the standard partial differential equation (PDE) modeling, the implicit calculus modeling approach does not require the explicit expression of the PDE governing equation. Instead the fundamental solution of physical problem is used to implicitly define the differential operator and to implement simulation in conjunction with the appropriate boundary conditions. In this study, we conjecture an extension of the fundamental solution of the standard Laplace and Helmholtz equations to negative dimensionality. And then by using the singular boundary method, a recent boundary discretization technique, we investigate the potential and wave problems using the fundamental solution on negative dimensionality. Numerical experiments reveal that the physics behaviors on negative dimensionality may differ on positive dimensionality. This speculative study might open an unexplored territory in research.

Citizen sensing, air pollution and fracking: From ‘caring about your air’ to speculative practices of evidencing harm

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is an emerging and growing industry that is having considerable effects on environments and health. Yet fracking often lacks environmental regulations that might be understood as governmental forms of care. In some locations in the US, citizens have taken up environmental monitoring as a way to address this perceived absence of care, and to evidence harm in order to argue for new infrastructures of care. This article documents the practices of residents engaged in monitoring air pollution near fracking sites in the US, as well as the participatory and practice-based research undertaken by the Citizen Sense research project to develop monitoring kits for residents to use and test over a period of seven months. Citizen sensing practices for monitoring air pollution can constitute ways of expressing care about environments, communities and individual and public health. Yet practices for documenting and evidencing harm through the ongoing collection of air pollution data are also speculative attempts to make relevant these unrecognised and overlooked considerations of the need for care. Working with the concept of speculation, this article advances alternative notions of evidence, care and policy that attend to citizens’ experiences of living in the gas fields. How do citizen sensing practices work towards alternative ways of evidencing harm? In what ways does monitoring with environmental sensors facilitate this process? And what new speculative practices emerge to challenge the uses of environmental sensors, as well as to expand the types of data gathered, along with their political impact?

Autoconsciência e conceito no pensamento tardio de Fichte e na Lógica de Hegel

In summer term 1812 Fichte lectured on “the relation of logic with real philosophy” in order to introduce the point of view of the Science of Knowledge. A few months before the beginning of Fichte’s lectures, the first book of Hegel’s Science of Logic had been published. Independently of the controversial question if Fichte’s ‘Transcendental Logic’ from 1812 was intended to be a critical reply to the Hegelian project of a speculative logic, no doubt the lecture from summer 1812 is an important source for understanding the systematical relation between the late Fichte’s conception of transcendental logic and the Hegelian project of a speculative logic. The principal thesis of this paper is that both the convergences and differences between the two philosophical projects can be identified by considering the conceptions of the concept and of self-consciousness that are contained in Fichte’s lecture and in the third part of Hegel’s Lógic, the Doctrine of Concept. The comparison between these conceptions shows that the late Fichte and Hegel converge insofar as they criticize the logical conception of concepts and the idea that self-consciousness is a fundamental principle of philosophy. However, whereas Fichte defends a genetic theory of conceptual content and of self-consciousness that is based on the conception of an absolutely spontaneous and ‘image’-producing thinking, Hegel searches for a structural explanation that is based on the speculative conception of the concept as the fundamental structure of reality, understanding concepts in the logical sense as a result of the ‘separation’ of the original unity of the concept and self-consciousness as its conscious concretization.

Metateoria historii woli. Rozważania o powstaniu i wczesnym rozwoju pojęcia woli od V wieku przed Chr. do Maksyma Wyznawcy

In the text, I discuss the metatheoretical aspects of a history of the origins and development of the notion of free will. I begin with the notion of a speculative concept. Since the will is a speculative concept there is no unequivocal definition of this notion. For this reason the study of the history of this notion is particularly difficult, since ancient authors have operated on different theories of willing and freedom, which were not always mutually compatible. Next, I discuss the theories of willing and action of select authors, that had a significant influence on the later development of the theory of the will. I discuss the notion of choice in Plato, the notions of wish and choice in Aristotle, the notion of assent in the Stoics, the theory of freedom of Epicurus, the theory of choice of Alexander of Aphrodisias, the concept of will in Augustine of Hippo, and the theory of will in Maximus the Confessor.

Study on the Theory of the Smart City

Along with the development of city, problems and challenges of city environment, city resources and city management and other aspects are increasingly prominent and severe. Low carbon transformation of wisdom city has become a strategic mode of city development in china. In some places there are still the concepts of speculation and blindly push phenomenon in management and economy are faced with uncertainty and risk. At present our country city in the running process has exist "system failure" phenomenon. The reason is that the interactive relationship between the complexity of the operational mechanism of urban system, internal evolution and functioning mechanism as well as the groups lack of scientific analysis and certification. Therefore, it is particularly important on a thorough study of city system complexity, impact factor and interaction and symbiosis mechanism, constructing a theoretical framework.