Physical Stuff Research Articles

Against causal arguments in metaphysics

Traditionally, causal arguments for physicalism have been taken to favour a ‘reductive’ brand of physicalism, according to which all the mental stuff is identical to some of the physical stuff. Many flaws have been found with these traditional causal arguments. Zhong (Asian Journal of Philosophy,2(2), 1–9, 2023) develops a new causal argument that avoids these flaws and favours a milder, non-reductive brand of physicalism instead. The conclusion is that all mental stuff is metaphysically necessitated by some of the physical stuff. I argue that neither the traditional nor the new causal argument holds much sway over non-physicalism. The problem is that causation just does not run that deep. It is a fairly superficial relationship and a poor guide to the metaphysically weighty facts of our world, such as what is identical to what, and what metaphysically necessitates what.

Spacing: Following negotiations in the process of exhibition dismantling

This paper is concerned with an Actor-Network Theory approach to museum space. It builds upon qualitative research at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a museum and educational building in Norwich, England. Following the people who work with the building in the process of dismantling an exhibition, I examine the negotiations that emerge when a problem occurs with the handling of a specific artwork. Drawing on the concept of spacing by Bruno Latour, this paper highlights the multiplicity and complexity inherent in museum practices. I argue that space is not contained inside the building but is done with the building, exhibition objects, handling instructions, surfaces, and people. Analyzing this process of spacing, then, the work towardsand negotiation of stability and flux, of homogeneity and heterogeneity inherent to museum spaces become visible which allows for a rich and nuanced understanding of the relationship between people and physical stuff.

Meeting the Challenges of Establishing Intensive Care Unit Follow-up Clinics.

Intensive care unit follow-up clinics are becoming an increasingly widespread intervention to facilitate the physical, cognitive, psychiatric, and social rehabilitation of survivors of critical illness who have post-intensive care syndrome. Developing and sustaining intensive care unit follow-up clinics can pose significant challenges, and clinics need to be tailored to the physical, personnel, and financial resources available at a given institution. Although no standard recipe guarantees a successful intensive care unit aftercare program, emerging clinics will need to address a common set of hurdles, including securing an adequate space; assembling an invested, multidisciplinary staff; procuring the necessary financial, information technology, and physical stuff; using the proper screening tools to identify patients most likely to benefit and to accurately identify disabilities during the visit; and selling it to colleagues, hospital administrators, and the community at large.

On Aqueducts and Anxiety: Water Infrastructure, Ruination, and a Region-Scaled Anthropocene Imaginary

This paper explores popular expectations for and meanings of the U.S. West’s environmental future, as articulated through recent artistic representations of the Los Angeles’s expansive water provision network. Weaving together material from participant observation and readings of creative works, I show how infrastructural imagery is used to index anxieties about a future of water scarcity. Presenting familiar, currently functional water infrastructures as ruins-in-the-making, these artists use the physical stuff of water provision networks to advance critiques of longstanding modes of development and the material basis of urban-rural relations in the U.S. West. Doing so, these imagined ruins draw the global-scale threat of climate change into a protracted regional story of landscape-making (and ruining). These works suggest the potential power of such a meso-scale approach to the Anthropocene concept for orienting empirical scholarship, enabling analysts to explore how global processes and local histories co-produce regional imaginaries and landscapes alike.

Maximum Space around the Typewriter: Yvonne Vera and the Craft of Writing

The late Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera puts material culture to use throughout her published fiction. Her engagement with the physical stuff that enters her writing reflects less the current wave of political craft scholarship and perhaps more an opportunity to work with the beauty of details provided both by the horrific and the everyday. This article argues that the descriptions Yvonne Vera offers us of her own writing process shed light on her work as a practitioner – a practitioner of the craft of writing – an emphasis often overlooked in studies more national or political in focus. Overall, the article is interested in acknowledging the less predictable nature of the creative process, which in Vera's case sought inspiration through attention to material culture, a process often described by Vera as an embodied, consuming search.

Tackling material constraints on the exponential growth of the energy transition

Tackling material constraints on the exponential growth of the energy transition

About Consciousness, Subtle Energies and Unification

In this paper we analyze the consciousness through a new structural model of energy we could call "General Gaussian Energy Group" (GGEG). By the infinite number of symmetry groups we recognize a series of new energy sources. We consider these ones as effective causes for fundamental consciousness. They would play an important role for consciousness (physical stuff with spirit stuff), explaining an individual material body system within a broader global system. The involved energy sources are SU(6), SU(12), SU(24), etc. This new structural model can be explained mathematically as follows: SU(11) ⊃ SU(6) × SU(5) × U(1); SU(23) ⊃ SU(12) × SU(11) × U(1); SU(47) ⊃ SU(24) × SU(23) × U(1), etc, bringing to the creation of various new unknown particle-like entities in wave status, directly and indirectly linked to the creation of life, consciousness and other biological phenomena. The model, called B-DS model, is giving new answers to unsolved questions of reality. It is a new set of primary elements linked to the theory of quantum entanglement. These new structure is also particularly important for clarifications about subtle energies and about the deep vacuum structure.

On the Making of African Literatures

Manuscripts and songs. Letters and archival scraps. Inscriptions and book collections. Maps, machines, and crude oil. Each of the essays in this special issue looks to get a handle on an author, text, or set of texts by taking hold of something solid, tangible, sensuous. In his essay on Christopher Okigbo, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma attends to the poet’s compositional practice with an ear to his passion for music. Rachel Bower combs through editorial archives and correspondence to examine the ways in which Nigerian poetry has been made by anthologies. Asha Rogers re-reads Richard Rive’s short story ‘The Bench’ after looking into the author’s personal library and opening its books to closer inspection. And in her account of Kojo Laing’s bewildering fiction Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars, Christine Okoth assesses the impact of industry on mapping – real and metaphorical – and on how we imagine Africa’s futures. Does this interest in sensuous objects and tangible things explain our use of the phrase ‘materials of literature’? Not entirely, though it is certainly striking that the essays elicited by our call for papers are all concerned with the ‘stuff’ of verbal arts – with voice, paper, ink, body, machine – when, in the initial call, we glossed the term simply as ‘matter to hand’: as that which is put to work in acts of literary making. Similarly, though we gave no special weight to archival research, this is central to three of the four essays, while the fourth, Okoth’s, reflects on the means by which books are transported and stored. Perhaps this unanticipated congruence has to do with the fact that, for many literary critics, knowledge about the making of stories, poems, plays, and novels emerges most readily from archives, whether these consist of small book collections at prestigious institutions (the case with Richard Rive), curated editorial records (such as the Howard Sergeant archive explored by Bower), or personal papers held by relatives (the case with Christopher Okigbo – at least at the time of Suhr-Sytsma’s research). This is not because such archives are deemed repositories of foundational truth, but because contact with physical stuff, which can be handled, photographed, watched, and heard (and which often parches the throat, dries the hands, leaves eyes and neck aching) produces a particular sense of the materiality of the verbal arts.

Low Leakage Current by Solution Processed PTAA-ZnO Transparent Hybrid Hetero-Junction Device

In this work solution processed novel poly-triarylamine (PTAA) organic p-type active layer on inorganic n-ZnO device transparency and electrical properties are investigated under illumination. Low cost organic–inorganic transparent hybrid hetero-junction (HHJ) is a promising candidate for next-generation photovoltaic applications. Greater band gap organic material window layer while inorganic material’s higher thermal stability as HHJ is suitable for detection and photovoltaic applications. However, hetero-interface defects associated leakage current is the key issue of undermining large-area device electrical performance. Hetero-interface defect associated carriers optical absorption limits transparency whereas leakage current density is reliant on physical property and band barrier effect. It is demanded to investigate hetero-device physical stuff and band barrier effect on electrical properties. Novel PTAA is deposited on RF-sputtered inorganic n-ZnO/ITO/glass substrate by spin-coating method. 100 and 60 nm PTAA thin films are deposited with 1000 and 2000 revolution per minute (rpm) growth sequence, respectively. PTAA as a transparent p-emitter is shown to absorb incident light beyond visible band, thereby it has promoted excitonic effect. Device I–V characterization carried out at different annealing temperatures and applied voltage. Suitable annealing condition leakage current is shown to reduce nearly 10−4 A/cm2 and at higher applied field the greater rectifying I(+)/I(−) ratio is realized. Grain size is shown to increase with annealing effect however; leakage current is remained almost independent of grain size.

Educating the Designer of 2025

I am not inclined, for several reasons, to believe there are straightforward goals for educators seeking to shape the designer of 2025. The embedded assumption that there are broad similarities among designers is my first worry. I don’t just believe that differences are inevitable—I believe in the value of diversity in individual experience and individual points of view. I see thinking through making as vital in my little corner of design, and as valuable resource for educators in general. Thinking through making—once a common way of approaching the world—has largely disappeared, but art and design programs would do well to preserve this important approach. (Note that I am not talking about past designers; much of society dealt with the world as physical stuff to be manipulate.) To some extent, the popularity of design thinking has demonstrated the value of a variety of thinking through making. Much of the conversation around design thinking assumes that the future of design is in the tackling of larger, more complex, and often immaterial tasks. While I embrace that, I wonder whether moves toward larger, more complex, often immaterial projects as the center of undergraduate training undermines the learning of the sort of skills we hope designers have.

Intuitions about personal identity are rooted in essentialist thinking across development

What aspects of a person determine whether they are the same person they were in the past? This is one of the fundamental questions of research on personal identity. To date, this literature has focused on identifying the psychological states (e.g., moral beliefs, memories) that people rely on when making identity judgments. But the notion of personal identity depends on more than just psychological states. Most people also believe that the physical matter that makes up an individual is an important criterion for judging identity; changes to the physical stuff in a person’s body, even if they are not accompanied by any psychological changes, are judged to change who the person is at some level. Here, we investigate the sources of these beliefs and propose that they stem from the broader cognitive tendency to assume that unseen physical essences make things what they are—psychological essentialism. Four studies provided support for this claim. In Studies 1 and 2, exposing participants to essentialist reasoning led to stronger endorsement of physical continuity as a criterion for personal identity. Similarly, individual differences in participants’ essentialist thinking predicted the extent of their reliance on physical continuity (Study 3), and this relationship was observed even among 6- to 9-year-old children (Study 4). These studies advance theory on the psychology of personal identity by identifying a reason why people assign a central role to physical composition when judging identity.

The recalcitrant invention of X-ray images

ABSTRACTThis article extends new materialist theorizing on the constructive role played by the physical stuff of the world. Specifically, it draws on Kenneth Burke’s writings on recalcitrance to theorize the materialities of rhetorical invention. It takes X-rays as a case study in recalcitrance-driven invention, focusing on two particular applications, traditional medical X-rays, a pervasive category of contemporary technical communication, and backscatter X-ray airport security scans, a controversial and short-lived one. Its analysis shows how recalcitrance (1) is harnessed as means of technical invention and (2) is key to invention’s bidirectionality, by which our material interventions, in turn, work upon us.

What Should Atomic and BITonic Learn from Each Other?

We are in the midst of a journey. We are moving from an atomic world, where physical stuff is critical to a bitonic world where things made of bits are critical. The atomic world is not going away. It is here to stay. The atomic world is augmented by a bit-like, digital, often called virtual artifacts. As researchers our goal is to connect the two. Facilitate learning from one setting to another. At the forefront of this learning we find the legal and governance perspectives.As you examine the issue, you can get a good sense of a field that uses past discussion to advancenew issues.

The Terminal: Eric Walrond, the City of Colon, and the Caribbean of the Panama Canal

All my readers must know—a glance at the map will show it to those who do not—that between North America and the envied shores of California stretches a little neck of land, insignificant-looking enough on the map, dividing the Atlantic from the Pacific. Matter in the wrong place: five words waiting for the largest public works project in US history. Single syllables are best for being matter-of-fact, and the four in this phrase pronounce with a self-assurance that doesn't budge. Not so the physical stuff in question; the generically identified matter identifies a material referent already neither here nor there. The phrase was put to use in 1908 by geographer Vaughan Cornish, who adds a particularly memorable superlative to the many used to describe the American Panama Canal. Reflecting on the mammoth labor of removing a width of that little neck of land separating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, he writes, “nowhere is the classical definition of dirt as ‘matter in the wrong place’ so appropriate as on the Isthmus” (167). Maps confirm this characterization; whatever the scale and however detailed, the canal is first and foremost the stretch where the continent isn't. With the completion of the canal in 1914, the transit route evolved into a perfect watery nothingness.

What is a building? Documents for the contractual diagramming of design

The common lawyer's understanding of land still hovers between a purely material conception of the physical stuff of land and a more cerebral image of land as comprising a co-ordinated set of abstract entitlements. This underlying tension between the physical and the conceptual has imparted a multi-dimensional complexity to the term […]. Kevin Gray and Susan GrayWhat is a building? To begin to extrapolate our reasons for posing this question, consider the context of ‘Further Reading’, and the supplementary documents this supposes. To those whose profession is dedicated to the design of buildings, and whose professional life is, all too often, beleaguered by impediments threatening the actualisation, the construction, of their design, supplementary documents are not simply footnotes to design but evidence of struggles over design control. Within this trajectory, law is, most frequently, figured as yet another problematic. But consider a rather different trope – one which uses aspects of legal thinking, or rather thinking through law, to re-engage with the idea of ‘a building’ and of ‘design’. Supplementary documents, in this sense, become a ‘supplement’ which we could characterise as an ‘excess’. Documents which before might have been marginalised now become reconstituted as artefacts, evidencing other accounts of the processes of architecture. Legal artefacts related to design and building, which evidence a series of techniques and strategies for diagramming rights and responsibilities, may be deployed to open new perspectives on the question of ‘What is a building?’

Foundations of a General Ethics: Selves, Sentient Beings, and Other Responsively Cohesive Structures

Everything we can refer to – physical, biological, psychological, or a human-created entity, institution, activity, or expression of some kind, and whether constituted of brute physical stuff or less tangible complexes of social arrangements, ideas, images, movements, and so on – can be considered in terms of its form of organization or structure. This applies even if what we want to say about these things is that they represent a disorganized or unstructured example of their kind or else that they simply lack any discernible form of internal organization or structure in the sense that their internal structure is undifferentiated or homogenous as opposed to being ‘all over the place’. We therefore live in a world in which everything can be characterized, either positively or negatively, in terms of its form of organization or structure. (The terms ‘form of organization’ and ‘structure’ can be used interchangeably in the context of this paper, although I will tend to use the term ‘structure’ in what follows.)

Aesthetics and Judaism, Art and Revelation

Aesthetic sensation (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) and aesthetic creation (architecture, music, poetry, painting) are at the base of religious thought and culture. In rabbinic memory, the Temple in Jerusalem was once the adornment (noyo) of the world (Zebahim 54b), its altar compared to a wolf (53b), its sanctuary to a lion, narrow behind and broad in front (Middot 4:7). Religious environments build upon a mass of physical stuff: objects and texts, stories and sound, organized and reorganized by acts of custom and law. Empirically, the co-relation between aesthetics and religion is the self-evident subject of art history and the history of religions, its existence, if not its significance, a matter of fact. At a second order of analysis, the relationship proves cryptic. The religious culture of Judaism depends upon the presupposition that the presence of God, the glory of God, is made manifest to human consciousness through visual, aural, and tactile media. Such a theoretically fraught claim and the counterclaims against it are of unique concern to theological speculation and philosophical analysis. They relay human consciousness past the limits of reason into the dim vagaries of aesthetic judgment and religious intuition, into Plato's cave, the holy of holies.

Matter and Aristotle's Material Cause

If by the term ‘matter’ is meant the extended, movable, and corporeal stuff out of which perceptible objects are made, then, according to one interpretative tradition, there is nothing in Aristotle's account of the world that corresponds to matter in the above sense of physical stuff. Aristotle does indeed describe certain things as extended, movable, and corporeal: for example, the five elements, earth, water, air, fire, and ether, as well as everything made out of them. He also has the concept of a material cause, that is, the raw materials out of which something can be made or generated, and he makes frequent use of this concept in his analysis of perceptible substances. Still, the fact that Aristotle thought about what perceptible substances are made of is insufficient evidence for attributing to him the concept of matter as physical stuff. In addition, we would want to know whether he thought that all perceptible substances are extended, movable, and corporeal precisely because they are made out of matter, and whether any aspect of their behavior is to be explained simply by virtue of their nature as material objects.

Establishing the Chinese archaeological school: Su Bingqi and contemporary Chinese archaeology

Most of what is heard in the West of Chinese archaeology is about the physical stuff — the astonishing string of major finds; some, like soldiers from the Terracotta Army of the First Emperor's tumulus, have been exhibited outside China. All archaeological material is excavated, described and explained by reference to some frame of ideas. This essay on the thinking of a leading Chinese archaeologist of our day, Su Bingqi, is accompanied by an article of his in translation.