Fundamental Contradiction Research Articles

THE IDEOLOGICAL LEGACY OF PYOTR KROPOTKIN IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN-DAY REGIONALISM

The article aims to find the constructive conceptual elements in the ideas of the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin which are suitable for resolving one of the fundamental contradictions of the modern world - the impossibility of an effective state-legal solution to many of the conflicts between states and their regions. This seemingly dead end conflict lies primarily in the internal contradiction of the original international legal document: the UN Charter. The article analyzes the views of Kropotkin on the problem of confrontation of communal and imperial beginnings throughout human history. Kropotkin's ideas are noted for their potential productivity in the theoretical analysis and practical resolution of modern territorial conflicts on the basis of reforming international law. The concept of “regional sovereignty” is introduced into the terminological context.

A Turning Point in Oxford Idealism

As a young Victoria Scholar from South Africa studying at Oxford from 1931–33, Errol Harris encountered most of the prominent representatives of “Oxford Idealism” there. He discovered that, predominantly under the influence of Bradley, they were uniformly convinced that Hegel’s Naturphilosophie was a superfluous “addition” to his system, accomplishing nothing not already provided by the Science of Logic, and that, moreover, to treat Nature as a reality (as opposed to an appearance) would introduce a fundamental contradiction into Hegel’s thought. In this general attitude they were strongly supported by the Italian “neo-Idealists” with whom they were closely engaged. In work accomplished during those two years, Harris laid the foundations for a thorough reversal of this attitude, arguing that in the absence of a philosophy of nature Hegel’s system could be neither coherent nor complete. On this basis Harris would eventually succeed in constructing the outlines of a complete cosmology grounded in twentieth-century physical theory.

Проблемы развития учебной самостоятельности младших школьников

The newly introduced state standard for primary education implies the formation of self-reliance in primary school children. However, this task is not an easy one to fulfill. Developing self-reliant learners can be challenging due to a number of fundamental contradictions such as the ones between the freedom offered to the child and the forced nature of some education methods; between the new educational tasks and the established school practices; between the invariant character of training standards and variability of individual learning features of schoolchildren. Overcoming these contradictions requires not only the formation of new teaching competencies in future teachers, but a fundamental change in the teacher’s professional position. It’s not enough to simply improve several means and methods of teaching, it’s important to develop and apply radically new education technologies: create an active and versatile educational environment, initiate mediated management of child learning and development, introduce individualization on the basis of personal activities of children, carry out pedagogical observations of every individual’s development. A lesson called “Self-taught learner”can be considered an example of such active and variable educational environment that promotes self-reliance in learning in children. In this lesson, every child masters some new learning content on their own and carries out basic learning actions step-by-step, moving along his/her individual learning route.

On the Non-trivial Origin of Atomic-Scale Patterns in Friction Force Microscopy

Friction between two surfaces is due to nano- and micro-asperities at the interface that establish true contact and are responsible for the energy dissipation. To understand the friction mechanism, often single-asperity model experiments are conducted in atomic-force microscopes. Here, we show that the conventional interpretation of the typical results of such experiments, based on a simple mass-spring model, hides a fundamental contradiction. Via an estimate of the order of magnitude of the dissipative forces required to produce atomic-scale patterns in the stick-slip motion of a frictional nano-contact, we find that the energy dissipation must be dominated by a very small, highly dynamic mass at the very end of the asperity. Our conclusion casts new light on the behavior of sliding surfaces and invites us to speculate about new ways to control friction by manipulation of the contact geometry.

ReichtumDemokratieArmut

Summary WealthDemocracyPoverty To live in a democracy seems natural to us. Maybe too natural to ask questions uncomfortable to ourselves. Actual studies show clearly, that there is a varying probability of realization for political projects depending on how which income group positions itself relating to the topic being on the agenda. Thus occurs a fundamental contradiction which doesn‘t refer to particular aspects like the participation at elections but at the democratic claim itself. From a systemic point of view especially the interaction microstructure of the given headwords is interesting.

O fundacionalismo filosófico em direitos humanos

A ideia de direitos humanos se transformou, gradualmente, no século XX, no discurso normativo primordial das relações internacionais. Nascido a partir de exigências práticas muito bem definidas, o vasto conjunto legal de normas de direitos humanos foi construído, contudo, por acordos complexos que escondiam contradições teóricas fundamentais. Neste trabalho vou analisar os termos da discussão contemporânea sobre a possibilidade de fundamentar filosoficamente, ou não, os direitos humanos. O artigo recupera parte do histórico debate filosófico de formação da Declaração Universal dos Direitos Humanos e reconstrói os argumentos de fundacionalistas normativistas e fundacionalistas substantivistas, com a finalidade de demonstrar a capacidade de cada conjunto teórico para lidar com os desafios de encontrar coerência entre a justificação racional e a aplicação prática dos direitos humanos.

Going critical: Toward a modified nuclear one worldism

Nuclear weapons posed a profound conceptual problem for classical realism, forcing into collision two of its long-standing core dictums: oppose world government as a source of insecurity and un-freedom, and exit anarchy into authoritative government when levels of violence interdependence in particular spaces become very high. Initially, leading realists (Burnham, Morgenthau, and Herz) chose world government, hoping internal restraints (analogous to the role played by the balance of power in anarchies with lesser levels of violence interdependence) could overcome its threat to freedom and its political impracticality. But this option reached a conceptual and practical dead end. Building on Herz’s suggestion of a generalized historical materialist base-superstructural model to theorize security practices and orders, the actual materiality of the nuclear situation (previously dimly understood) points toward the obsolescence of the statist mode of protection, and toward arms control, as the practices of an alternative, republican-federal, mode of protection whose operation gradually moves world order from anarchy, but not toward a world state. Until this shift is complete, world order remains in fundamental contradiction with the nuclear forces of destruction.

Entre a Ilusão e a Teatralidade: Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried e o Minimalismo

Resumo: O artigo investiga a questão da teatralidade do Minimalismo a partir das leituras críticas elaboradas por Michael Fried e Rosalind Krauss. Enquanto Krauss, desde o primeiro momento em que reflete sobre obras de Donald Judd e Dan Flavin, evidencia sua contradição fundamental - a presença da ilusão, a despeito de sua rejeição pelos artistas -, Fried atém-se ao pretenso literalismo dessas propostas, denominando-o de teatralidade. No texto, as duas abordagens serão confrontadas, extraindo-se delas os pontos de vista dos autores para a noção de teatralidade.

Neoliberalism and the Corporation: Mutually Contradictory and Corrupting

Neoliberalism and the corporate economy stand in fundamental contradiction. First, corporations are created and sustained through government intervention in the economy, contradicting neoliberal strictures. Second, the neoliberal attempt, in the face of this contradiction, to better square the corporation with free market principles, by treating it as a private partnership of stockholders as opposed to a state franchise, renders the corporation dysfunctional. Particularly damaging has been the application of a distorted version of agency theory that, as I show, is indebted to game theory, in which stockholders are modeled as the “principal” and management (and workers) as their opportunistic agent. This exaggerated “agency problem” has been addressed through a massive reallocation of firm revenues, from reinvestment and workers, to executives and stockholders. Far from supercharging capital accumulation, as widely assumed, neoliberalism has the opposite effect, decapitalizing the corporation, the state, and the worker in order to enrich the stockholder and stock-compensated executive. In contradiction to its ideals, neoliberalism applied to a corporate economy lowers investment, slows growth, heightens irresponsibility, intensifies worker coercion, and sharply raises economic inequality. And for all this, it fails to reduce the corporation’s dependence on government intervention.

Automatic Acquisition and Sustainable Use of Political-Ecological Data

The sustainable management of anthropogenically-impacted ecosystems will require ongoing monitoring and advocacy by people across the globe. To this end, automatic methods are developed herein for acquiring several types of such political-ecological data. On the political side, a method is developed for gathering news articles about human actions that affect the ecosystem along with a method for identifying themes in social media that concern the consumption of an ecosystem’s products. On the ecosystem side, a method is derived for estimating wildlife abundance from purchasable high-resolution satellite images. A simple website architecture is described for holding this data and enabling its use in developing sustainable conservation policies. A rhino conservation website illustrates this architecture. A fundamental contradiction between the desire for open data on the locations of endangered flora and fauna versus the need to hide these locations from poachers is addressed through a new security protocol that enables the secure distribution of sensitive ecosystem data to trusted data consumers.

Forest owners’ views on storing carbon in their forests

ABSTRACTGiven the high percentage of private forest ownership in Finland, family forest owners have an important role in mitigating climate change. The study aims to explore Finnish family forest owners’ perceptions on climate change and their opinions on increasing carbon storage in their forests through new kinds of management activities and policy instruments. The data consists of thematic face-to-face interviews among Helsinki metropolitan area forest owners (n = 15). These city-dwellers were expected to be more aware of and more interested in climate change mitigation than forest owners at large. Forests as carbon fluxes appear to be a familiar concept to most of the forest owners, but carbon storage in their own forests was a new idea. Four types concerning forest owners’ view on storing carbon in their forests could be identified. The Pioneer utilizes forestland versatilely and has already adopted practices to mitigate climate change. The Potential is concerned about climate change, but this is not seen in forest practices applied. The Resistant is generally aware of climate change but sees a fundamental contradiction between carbon storing and wood production. The Indifferent Owner believes that climate change is taking place but does not acknowledge a relation between climate change and the owner’s forests.

Tunneling Spectra of a Quasifreestanding Graphene Monolayer

With considering the great success of scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) studies of graphene in the past few years, it is quite surprising to notice that there is still a fundamental contradiction about the reported tunnelling spectra of quasi-free-standing graphene monolayer. Many groups observed V-shape spectra with linearly vanishing density-of-state (DOS) at the Dirac point, whereas, the others reported spectra with a gap of 60 meV pinned to the Fermi level in the quasi-free-standing graphene monolayer. Here we systematically studied the two contradicted tunnelling spectra of the quasi-free-standing graphene monolayer on several different substrates and provided a consistent interpretation about the result. The gap in the spectra arises from the out-of-plane phonons in graphene, which mix the Dirac electrons at the Brillouin zone corners with the nearly free-electron states at the zone center. Our experiment indicated that interactions with substrates could effectively suppress effects of the out-of-plane phonons in graphene and enable us to detect only the DOS of the Dirac electrons in the spectra. We also show that it is possible to switch on and off the out-of-plane phonons of graphene at the nanoscale, i.e., the tunnelling spectra show switching between the two distinct features, through voltage pulses applied to the STM tip.

Germline V repertoires: Origin, maintenance, diversification.

In our view, Melvin Cohn (Scand J Immunol. 2018;87:e12640) has set out the logical guidelines towards a resolution of the very real enigma of the selectability of vertebrate germline Ig V repertoires under the current evolutionary paradigm…" A somatically derived repertoire scrambles this (germline VL+VH) substrate so that its specificities are lost, making it un-selectable in the germline. Consequently, evolution faced an incompatibility." It is argued here in Reply that a reverse transcriptase-based soma-to-germline process (S->G) targeting germline V segment arrays goes some considerable way to resolving fundamental contradictions on the origin, maintenance and then real-time adaptive diversification of these limited sets of V segments encoded within various V repertoire arrays.

El ecoturismo como base para el desarrollo territorial sostenible en la Reserva de la Biosfera Sierra La Laguna (REBIOSLA), Baja California Sur, México

Este artículo pretende constituirse en una herramienta metodológica que desde el análisis de la importancia y pertinencia de impulsar un sistema territorial basado en la colaboración entre los actores sociales, propone estudiar las posibilidades y potencialidades que pudieran contribuir a conformar y fortalecer un sistema productivo de base ecoturística en la Reserva de la Biosfera Sierra La Laguna, localizada al noroeste de la República Mexicana, en el extremo Sur del estado de Baja California Sur y decretada como Reserva de la Biosfera el 6 de junio de 1994. El territorio cuenta con una población de 431 personas distribuida en 83 ranchos y dedicada a actividades primarias de escaso valor agregado. En el contexto territorial, el producto ecoturístico en desarrollo debe ser valorado como el núcleo en torno al cual se constituye la cadena productiva del sistema y las estrategias para su desarrollo deben obedecer al manejo responsable de los recursos naturales y culturales, mediante el establecimiento de lineamientos de ordenamiento que orienten la toma de decisiones hacia el diseño de productos coherentes, desde lo ambiental, lo social y lo económico. Como aportes de la investigación se señalan la apropiada actualización y adaptación sobre bases científicas del desarrollo de la actividad turística a las condiciones específicas de la REBIOSLA; revelar los elementos que deben conformar las relaciones de actores en el desarrollo de un sistema productivo de base ecoturística como alternativa de desarrollo territorial sostenible, y privilegiar una opción para resolver la contradicción fundamental que se establece entre las relaciones de los diferentes actores del territorio en el desarrollo de un producto turístico sostenible.

From theBulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix Rougeto theInternational Review of the Red Cross: The Great War as a revelator

AbstractDuring the Great War, theBulletin International des Sociétés de la Croix Rougecovered the immense work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (National Societies). This article focuses on one particular angle of that work: the tensions and even contradictions between the ICRC's duty of neutrality and impartiality, on the one hand, and the national and sometimes nationalistic commitments of National Societies, which were naturally opposed to each other in wartime, on the other. While some of theBulletin’s articles revealed real advances in thought on war and the protection of victims, others reflected the inertia caused by this fundamental contradiction.

Boring Holes: The Crystalline Body of Beckett'sThe Lost Ones

In a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett describes the mark of modern literary ambition as an inexhaustible drive to ‘drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.’ Much is made of this little line by readers of Beckett from Gilles Deleuze and Mladen Dolar to, more recently, Alenka Zupançiç. As its title teases, this essay takes up Beckett's directive to read for, with, and through the holes bored into language alongside the bodies—narrated and narrating—captured by it as so many boring, banal holes into which meaning, form, and other bodies can be pushed. In The Lost Ones, Beckett's short prose piece from 1971, bodies abound: lost, scurrying, shivering, defeated, sweaty, aroused, pained, aging, nauseated, desiring bodies. Beckett's ‘most anthropological work,’ as C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski have dubbed it, The Lost Ones proposes a series of fundamental contradictions or antagonisms between the narrating ‘anthropological’ voice concerned with quantitatively capturing a neutralized (and neutered, disembodied) totality—and the titular ‘lost’ bodies that inhabit the world of the text, for whom embodiment wholly determines both the potentialities and limitations of life, movement, and feeling.The ‘bore’ of a cylinder—the shape of the contained world of The Lost Ones—incidentally also names the diameter of empty space, the hole, around which its form wraps. This essay explores the antagonistic relationship between the circumscribing forces that envelop and contain life in the cylindrical space of narration, and its bore: the ‘something or nothing,’ as Beckett might put it, into which a substance can drill, enter, flood, leak, or fall. The objectifying impulses of the affectively eviscerating, abstracted narrator of The Lost Ones short-circuit throughout the text in special moments, when the bodies the voice describes erupt into what this essay will call a ‘crystal image.’ Taken from Deleuze's Cinema books, the crystal image and its transmission through ‘crystalline description’ name a set of aesthetic operations through which antagonisms can coexist. In other words: where otherwise mutually exclusive contradictions appear simultaneously as imbricated conditions of possibility for a single image. While the voice gazes, god-like, from above the cylinder, the bodies it describes explode its forms of containment with a kind of qualitative surplus that over and again impedes the narrator's attempts to totalize, circumscribe, and define the limits of embodied and affective life. I argue that the eruption of affect within the scientistic descriptive mode not only forms a crystal image out of an otherwise contained realm of quantifications, but that by pinning oppositional forms of aesthetic capture and representation against one another, the text reveals fundamental contradictions at play within narration and description more broadly. These contradictions and equivocations are not to be resolved or reconciled, I argue, but animated, sparked, and put into play through the process of reading.

Russian Federation Scientific Adaptation Programs to the Market Economy and the Results of Their Implementation

Various conceptual approaches to Russian Federation scientific sphere reforming and its adaptation to market conditions are analyzed on the basis of previously unpublished archival documents, statistical data and other materials; they assess the reaction of the academic community and the heads of large enterprises to the activities carried out by the government in the framework of developed program implementation. The conclusion is drawn that the results of the policy carried out during 1990s in Russian science are catastrophic ones in general. The country developed a fundamental contradiction between the purpose of science and the practical use of its achievements to overcome the crisis. The projects and recommendations of leading scientists were ignored. The programs were declarative ones, funding was reduced sharply, which led to the intensification of the brain drain process, the disintegration of scientific schools, and the degradation of production.

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTION OF CAPITALISM REVISITED

ABSTRACTWe build an overlapping generations model to analyse the evolution of inequality as an economy develops. Our model economy resembles a ‘very capitalist society’. Initially, wealth is exclusively concentrated in a rich dynasty. We ask whether or not this type of capitalist economy contains a fundamental contradiction, as claimed by Piketty in his recent book. We derive a condition under which the economy is driven to a state of perpetual inequality. However, we also show that an economy where capital deepening triggers the development process is very unlikely to be absorbed in that state.

Employed family carers in Austria

In this contribution, we investigate the relationships between paid and unpaid work in the lifeworlds of employed informal carers against the background of the Austrian long-term care regime. We pursue a twofold argument: On the one hand, we emphasize that combining paid and unpaid work currently poses serious difficulties for employed family carers in their everyday lives and impacts their current and future financial and social security. On the other hand, we argue that the relationships between employment and informal care are in fact not well understood by the common concepts of “reconciliation” or “work-life balance”. These concepts are not able to explain the complexities of employed carers’ lived realities and fail to adequately address the fundamental contradiction in the idea of a “reconciliation” of paid and unpaid work.

Imagine All the People? Mobilising Islamic Populism for Right-Wing Politics in Indonesia

ABSTRACTRight-wing politics in Indonesia is frequently associated with Islamic populist ideas. In part this is because Islamic organisations played a major role in the army-led destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party in the 1960s. Since then Islamic populism has evolved greatly and in post-authoritarian Indonesia it includes manifestations that see no fundamental contradiction between Islam and neo-liberal market economies as well as those that do. Significantly, like their counterparts in other countries, Indonesian Islamic populists maintain vigilance against the purveyors of class-based politics who may exert a divisive influence on the ummah. Thus, Indonesian Islamic populism shares with many of its counterparts a disdain for Leftist challenges to private property and capital accumulation besides political liberalism’s affinity to the secular national state. Yet strands of Islamic populism have relegated the project of establishing a state based on sharia to the background and embraced the democratic process. But this has not translated necessarily into social pluralist positions on a range of issues because the reinforcement of cultural idioms associated with Islam is required for the mobilisation of public support in contests over power and resources based on an ummah-based political identity.