Fresh Answers Research Articles

Testing the efficiency of Bronze Age axes: An interdisciplinary experiment

This paper discusses an interdisciplinary research project testing the efficiency of European Bronze Age axes through experiments with replica tools and the usewear analysis of prehistoric axe-heads from the collections of the Great North Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne (UK). The project explores whether changes in axe-head design and hafting arrangement from early to late Bronze Age might have been motivated by a desire to improve tool efficiency. The team, comprising researchers with backgrounds in archaeology, engineering, and statistical data modelling, carried out several field and laboratory tests to address the research problem. They subsequently validated the test results through the microscopic analysis of original Bronze Age axe-heads. The data suggest that hafting technology, and especially the resilience of the haft-blade assembly, is more important than axe-head design per se in determining the efficiency and working performance of Bronze Age axes. The research provides a fresh answer to a question rooted in 19th century archaeology and charts an innovative multidisciplinary pathway for studying human technology through the ages.

Capturing the Civic Lives of Cities: An Organizational, Place-Based Perspective on Civil Society in Global Cities

Introduction to Global Perspectives special collection: The Civic Life of Cities around the World In a wired world, how do social interactions among organizations and people continue to define civil society? Our co-produced approach to studying civil societies through a place-based, organizational lens provides fresh answers to perennial questions about voice, accountability, and embeddedness. The six articles in this collection on the civic life of cities draw on more than 1,400 interviews with organizational leaders in San Francisco, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, and Vienna. Moving beyond the “big theories” of civil society, the articles illustrate the value of our dual emphasis on place and organizations by showing how comparisons of the people, practices, and partnerships of civil society organizations enable new middle-range theories of civil society. This approach promises to offer rich comparative insights into similarities and differences among organizations around the globe.

(Electrodeposition Division Early Career Investigator Award Address) Regulating Electrochemical Deposition of Metals at Rechargeable Battery Electrodes

Scalable approaches for precisely manipulating the growth of crystals are of broad-based science and technological interest, and among the most extensively studied fields of research. New research interests have re-emerged in a subgroup of these phenomena—electrochemical deposition of metals in battery electrodes, such as zinc, an anode material that underpins several opportunities for developing cost-competitive technologies for large-scale electrical energy storage. Quantitative assessment shows that a high efficiency/reversibility of the electrochemical plating/stripping process (ie Coulombic efficiency > 99%), is necessary for the successful development practical rechargeable electrochemical energy storage systems that utilize a Zn metal anode. In practice, however, such efficiency values are usually below 80~90% in conventional metal plating/stripping systems.I will show that the inefficiency/irreversibility observed in metal plating/stripping is predominantly attributable to the metals’ susceptibility to parasitic chemical reactions and propensity for producing so-called “orphaned” fragments, which have lost electrical access to the electrode substrate termed the current collector. Both of these mechanisms are found to share the same origin— the non-uniform, rough electrodeposition morphology of metals. This finding motivates the overarching science question in this thesis: can the electrochemical growth of metals be strictly regulated in electrochemical cells? Despite the large volume of recent literature devoted to answering this question, the fundamental crystalline nature of the metal electrodeposits has been largely overlooked. Removing this artifice allows us to borrow knowledge from a rich body of literature on regulating the deposition process of crystalline materials to pursue fresh answers and approaches for achieving highly reversible electrodeposition of metals.Such approaches enable development of multiple strategies that are unprecedentedly effective in regulating metal deposition morphology and in achieving high-enough plating/stripping efficiency to meet the reversibility requirements as set forth. Specifically, I report that heteroepitaxy can be used to direct the shape and orientation of the metal crystallites formed on a rationally designed substrate. This strategy leverages crystals’ inclination for mimicking the atomic arrangement of the substrate surface, especially when the lattice misfit is below a critical value. Secondly, in I consider the fundamental limitation of heteroepitaxy—i.e. the correlation length is finite, meaning that the initial regulation of shape and crystallography of a metal deposit are only preserved for a finite electrodeposits thickness/electrode capacity. For as fundamental reasons, it is shown that this limitation can be overcome by imposing a convective flow normal to the electrode surface. The artificial convective flow serves as an additional solution-state mass transport mechanism and has a heretofore unexplored effect in suppressing chemotaxis-like reorientation of the metal crystallites at high areal capacities. I then demonstrate that solid-state metallurgy strategies for eliminating the built-in crystallographic heterogeneity of commercial foil-type metal electrodes, opens a fruitful path to powerful homoepitaxy regulation processes in which the metal itself is able to reversibly regulate its own electrodeposition morphology. In particular, subjecting a metal electrode to severe plastic deformation in the electrode foil-forming process is used to fabricate strongly-textured metal electrodes where such crystallographic heterogeneities are eliminated.In addition to these physical aspects, it is found that the chemical interaction at the heterointerface between the deposited metal crystallites and the substrate—which is actually a crystal of a different chemistry—also shows nontrivial influences on the electrodeposition process. I will assess consider these effects from two types of perspectives — oxygen- mediated bonding between the metal electrodeposit and substrate and alloying, respectively. The results suggest that the chemical affinity at the heterointerface is necessary to promote a uniform nucleation/growth landscape and to suppress the formation of “orphaned” metal deposits.

Strikes and Singing Classes: Chartist Culture, ‘Rational Recreation’ and the Politics of Music after 1842

Abstract Historians have often debated why so much energy was poured into efforts to reform working-class leisure and cultural pursuits in nineteenth-century Britain. This article uses a case-study of singing classes established in the early 1840s for industrial workers by local employers in the Manchester region to provide fresh answers to this question. It criticises a tendency to cast middle-class reformers as the primary agents of change in working-class leisure activities, arguing instead that many supposed innovations had been developed already by the Chartists, whose extensive transformation of working-class culture is increasingly recognised by scholars. The strike wave of 1842 permitted a dramatic manifestation of these cultural achievements, as the sounds of factory machinery were replaced by highly organised Chartist bands and choirs broadcasting radical messages. The establishment of a network of singing classes in the aftermath of the strikes was thus a belated attempt by the region’s middle classes to counter the dangerous eloquence of Chartist sonic culture. However, the subjective nature of musical experience meant working-class participants could derive quite different meanings from their massed singing than those their middle-class benefactors intended. In short, this article seeks to ascribe the central place to the Chartists, rather than middle-class reformers, in our explanations of why working-class leisure pursuits changed in the way they did, and to contend that the early Victorian singing-class mania, far from representing the reconciliation of middle and working classes in a shared liberal culture, might just as easily have furthered a radical cultural agenda.

Systemic Triangulation, a Tool for Complex Urban Diagnosis. The Case of Horsh Beirut

Perceived as a complex system, public space could be examined through the means of complexity thinking. Complexity thinking not only offers a new urban terminology delivering interesting insights on the city and its public space, it also offers new tools that could deepen our understanding of their major issues. In this paper, the complex case of Horsh Beirut is diagnosed with one of these tools: Systemic Triangulation. As a trans disciplinary tool for relational diagnosis, Systemic Triangulation acknowledges the inscription of urban problems in structural, functional and dynamic continuums, establishing the relationships between them, and projecting interactions between the system and its environment. This paper searches for the implication of this method, based on non-linear representations of urban reality, in public space design and management. And explores to what extent the systemic approach could give us fresh answers on classic urban problems such as dysfunctional green public spaces and spatial segregation.

The Ancient Quarrel Between Art and Philosophy in Contemporary Exhibitions of Visual Art

AbstractAt a time when professional art criticism is on the wane, the ancient quarrel between art and philosophy demands fresh answers. Professional art criticism provided a basis upon which to distinguish apt experiences of art from the idiosyncratic. However, currently the kind of narratives from which critics once drew are underplayed or discarded in contemporary exhibition design where the visual arts are concerned. This leaves open the possibility that art operates either as mere stimulant to private reverie or, in the more contentful cases, as propaganda. The ancient quarrel between art and philosophy is that art influences surreptitiously while philosophy presents reasons that invite rational scrutiny. As such, in contrast to philosophy, art would undermine our agency. In July 2017, a group of philosophers gathered at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW), in Sydney, Australia, in the presence of two AGNSW curators to explore the basis of their own experiences of selected artworks. Here, those commentaries are reproduced. Each reveal that objective grounds for an experience of art can be based in the community from which one draws one's terms of reference. In our commentaries we see the expertise of the respective philosophical communities but other communities of culture or expertise might serve the same purpose and hence resolve the ancient quarrel. Before hearing these commentaries, I explain what is at stake when the ancient quarrel between art and philosophy is understood in contemporary terms. This Issue of the Curator also includes an article on the community‐based art criticism that emerges from these commentaries followed by an exhibition review which reveals the incorrigible impulse (also demonstrated in the commentaries) to find the basis for the most apt experience of an artwork.

EL VALOR DEL ESTUDIO DE LA FILOSOFÍA ANTIGUA (A MODO DE PRESENTACIÓN)

<p>En estas páginas ofrezco, en primer lugar, algunas con­sideraciones respecto del valor filo­sófico del estudio de la filosofía antigua, tanto en vista de los aspectos metodológicos y argu­mentati­vos desplegados por los textos de los filósofos antiguos, como en atención al contenido de estos tex­tos. En este último sentido, recojo algunas de las mu­chas instancias de rehabilitación de filósofos y doctri­nas antiguas que han tenido lugar a lo largo de los últimos decenios para poner de relieve cómo y hasta qué punto la reflexión filosófica sustantiva no se de­sentiende de hecho del estudio de los antiguos, sino que más bien encuentra en ellos, una y otra vez, fuente de inspiración filosófica. Por último, realizo un breve recorrido por los artículos que componen este número monográfico.</p>

The Paradox of Ineffability: Matilal and Early Wittgenstein

Bimal Krishna Matilal was interested in the paradoxes of the ineffability of mystical experiences throughout his career. He was all eager to prove that the concept of mysticism in Indian tradition had its own strong logic, which had helped its proponents overcome the charges of being ‘self-refuting’. In various articles, Matilal had analysed various formulations of the logic of ineffability in various systems of Indian philosophy and examined various ways to get out of the logical paradoxes. While discussing the paradox of ineffability, he often refers to the ineffability of the mystical in the Tractatus and maintains that the Tractatus paragraphs T4.003 and 6.522 and Wittgenstein’s letter to Russell, quoted in Anscombe, ‘strike a very familiar note in the heart of the mystics’. His own view in this regard was that ‘ineffability in the sense that something is beyond the reach of all words, is impossible. For in the last analysis it is possible to speak of that which is (supposedly) ineffable, by the word “ineffable” itself’ (Matilal 2002, 12). He discusses also the ways how one can finally avoid the paradoxes of ultimate ineffability. His position is that ‘the so-called ineffable is not really or ultimately ineffable.’ In this paper, there will be an attempt to apply Matilal’s viewpoint on the paradox of ineffability in the Tractatus. This exploration unfolds in three main sections. Matilal’s perspective on the concept of ineffability along with the paradoxes and its solutions in various systems of Indian tradition will be highlighted in the first section and the paradox of ineffability in the Tractatus along with the controversy regarding its interpretation in the second, and finally, in the concluding section, attempts will be made to find a way out of this impasse by applying Matilal’s stance on this matter and see how it allows us to give ‘fresh answers to the questions raised in Western Philosophy’ (Mohanty 1992,401).

Marxist Criticism and Hegel

The interesting question is in fact a two-way street. Familiar enough, with its accusatory hint of idealism and intellectualizing elitism, is the query, In what sense was Marx a Hegelian? But more tantalizing, more science fictional and counterfactual, is its echoing alternative: In what sense was Hegel a Marxist? The sharing of the dialectic is of course the easy way out, in a speculative dilemma calculated to open up fresh answers and unexpected new problems. I will only take on one of them here—namely, what Hegel might have to tell us about the possibilities, and also the limits, of Marxist literary criticism, an issue that may seem as remote today as literature itself (and the theorizing criticism of it).

What is Restorative Justice? Fresh Answers to a Vexed Question

It has become commonplace to say that restorative justice cannot be defined. I argue that restorative justice can and must be defined concretely as a justice mechanism. I develop this argument with four points: (1) restorative justice is not a type of justice, it is a justice mechanism; (2) retributive justice is not a type of justice or a justice mechanism; (3) restorative justice is one of many justice mechanisms under an innovative justice umbrella; and (4) restorative justice can be defined. The way forward is to assess and compare a variety of justice mechanisms, which reside on a continuum from conventional to innovative. In time, the justice mechanisms studied may come to matter more than the concept of restorative justice.

Tourism in Bela Crkva: Fresh answers to the old questions

This paper discusses several tourists’ attraction/manifestations in Bela Crkva, Banat, and the relationship between the events, local community and wider social influences. The paper focuses especially on the three events: Hunting Besi - a traditional fishing of the mythological catfish in the city’s lake, that has started in the 19080’s; Flower carnival- a renewed tourist manifestation, started in the 1990’s, originated from the religious ceremonies in the 19th century; and Bela Crkva in apples, a tourist and industrial manifestation, started in the first decade of the 21st century. These manifestations have started successively, covering the periods of pre-transition, “war-transition” during the fall of the former Yugoslavia and the contemporary transitional processes in Serbia. The organizational design of these events indicate that the participants of various backgrounds have tried to discontinue the socialist heritage in the domain of sustainable economy, and in this way, to post new measures for a different kind of distribution of the social authority. Hence, the tourism in Bela Crkva, at least in the past decades, has become one of the instruments for the community sustainable development in various social and economic environments, but also one of the pillars for reconstruction and new ways of defining of the layered identity. An analysis of societal change is thus possible, through researching tourist models: these changes are reflected in symbolic communicative exchange, included in these manifestations.

The Meaning of the Phrase τα στοιχεια του κοσμου in Galatians

This article seeks a fresh answer to the difficult question of the meaning of the phrase τα στοιχεια του κοσμου in Gal 4.3. The answer is sought by paying close attention to (1) the argumentative context of Paul's use of the phrase in the letter (he posits some sort of equivalence between the veneration of τα στοιχεια του κοσμου and the observance of the Law; he does so for contextually relevant theological and rhetorical reasons), and (2) the cultural-historical context of the addressees, the Gentile believers in Galatia (τα στοιχεια are ‘the gods’ they once venerated; this veneration involved calendrical observances).

Field-ground reversal in Islamic art as a model for confronting indeterminancy in theology

Field-ground reversal underlies Islamic art's use of repeating geometric patterns or tessellations. Encounter with field-ground reversal suggests the notion of ‘oscillationism’ to mean willingness to oscillate between two equally plausible opposites rather than to affirm one or the other of them. This article explores oscillationism as a move for confronting theories of evil and for assessing the merits of foundationalism without succumbing to cognitive dissonance. The article goes on to examine F.D.E. Schleiermacher's suggestion of 1799 that the infinitude of God calls for more, not fewer religions. His reversal of Christian and Muslim assumptions puts contemporary debate in the theology of religions into a postmodernist perspective. Without supplying fresh answers, the spiritual practice of oscillationism provides a fresh way to frame some of the weightiest questions.

A history of American architecture: buildings in their cultural and technological context

Why did the Victorians drape their buildings in elaborately ornate decoration? Why was the Arts and Crafts movement so popular with the American middle class at the end of the 19th century? Why did Modernism replace traditional architectural styles after World War II? Mark Gelernter provides fresh answers to questions like these, convincingly showing how buildings express powerful cultural forces. Embodying deeply felt attitudes about fundamental issues, buildings express our relationship with nature, our social relations with others, the importance of the individual, the value of science and technology, and our political role in the world. He explains how designers sometimes expressed these ideas with available building technologies, while at other times they invented new technologies in order to realize new ideas. Each of the ten chronological chapters, accompanied by almost 300 photographs, drawings, and maps, begins with a broad survey of the dominant cultural forces and technologies, and then discusses how designers of the day responded with particular architectural forms.

The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain

This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

The symbolic species: the co-evolution of language and the brain

This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

Total propaganda: from mass culture to popular culture

Total propaganda: from mass culture to popular culture

Medieval Jewish Aesthetics: Maimonides, Body, and Scripture in Profiat Duran

Reconnaissance of sixteenth-century French literature convinced Lucien Febvre that like their acute hearing and sharp sense of smell, the men of that time doubtless had keen sight. But that was just it. They had not yet set it apart from the other senses. As he wittily concluded, ... there was no Hotel Fairview in the sixteenth century, nor any Prospect Hotel.... The Renaissance continued to up [a' descendre] at the Rose, the Wild Man, or the Golden Lion, refugees from heraldry that had stumbled into the hotel business. Taking a cue from Febvre's search for the sensory underpinnings of thought in different periods,' historians of Judaism might ask: what are the aesthetic doctrines of Jewish thought? Where, for example, did medieval Jewish philosophers put up? Was their hearing acute, their sense of smell sharp, and their sense of sight keen? Did they set vision apart from the other senses? Before proceeding to the combined textual and artifactual evidence on which fresh answers to these questions must be based, I want briefly to describe the conventional answers and to explain why they have gone stale. When the conventional answers were first formulated, historical scholarship was conceptually dominated by Cartesian dualism, neo-Kantian moralism, and Hegelian enthusiasm for poetry and Volksgeister Idealism. This scholarship was simultaneously embroiled in socio-political warfare over the questions of Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and cultic reform.2 In the middle

From philosophy to religion

Abstract When we examine the theory of the social order set forth by the successive documents of the canonical writings of Judaism, we find an account of the way of life, world view, and definition of the social entity. But by ‘way of life’ or ‘world view’ one system need not mean exactly the same category of data that another system adopts for itself, and, it goes without saying, we cannot claim functional equivalency, for obvious reasons as irrelevant as the judgment of relativism. A system selects its data to expose its systemic categories; defines its categories in accord with the systemic statement that it wishes to set forth; identifies the urgent question to which the systemic message compellingly responds. In the study of the three stages in the history of the formation of Judaism—philosophical, religious and, finally, theological—we find that the successor-system held up a mirror to the received categories and so redefined matters that everything was reversed, left becoming right, down becoming up, power turned into weakness, things of real value transformed into intangibles. What the successor-thinkers did was not continue and expand the categorical repertoire but set forth a categorically-fresh vision of the social order—a way of life, world view and definition of the social entity—within appropriate counterpart-categories. The formation of Judaism that took place through the transformation of Judaism from an account of the social order that was essentially philosophical to one that was fundamentally religious was accomplished by reversing the flow of language, specifically taking the predicate of a sentence and moving it to the position of the subject, that is, commencing not from subject but from predicate. This transvaluation of values, through not merely the re-formation but the utter transformation of categories, set forth an essentially fresh answer to a fundamentally new urgent question.

QUELLE PHILOSOPHIE POUR LE JUDAISME ET LE CHRISTIANISME?

Summary Is it an offense to human reason or a sin against the Holy Spirit to question the most fundamental postulate in philosophy, the one which is common to most famous classical syntheses, that is: the idea of perfect being is linked with that of “undivided unity” and every distinction in being or between beings, which implies a plurality of beings, is supposedly linked with their imperfect aspects or must be caused by a principle of imperfection? However such a postulate reduces the essential assertions of Judaism and Christianity to a mysterious turn of mind, and discards the great human questions of love and death as irrational concerns. Therefore, would it not be possible to construct a new form of philosophy on the following contradictory principle in every being: there is at least one distinctive relationship which expresses the perfection of the Real? This being would unveil its essence in “relationality”. To be is “to make be” and to be absolutely is to let be absolutely. The thesis of the essential relationality of being allows us to start afresh with all the classical questions and to give a fresh answer to them. It also provides us with a new understanding of Judaism and Christianity which shows their outstanding complementarity and leads us to indestructible hope.