Singular Name Research Articles

THE DOUBLE EXCESS OF THE NAME

Etienne Gilson called “metaphysics of the Exodus” the thought which affirms the identity of God and Being, a fundamental thesis of “Christian philosophy” since Augustine. It is indeed authorized by the word – “I am He who is” – addressed to Moses on Sinai, as it was transmitted through its Greek and Latin translations. Which seems to inscribe the God of Biblical Revelation in Western metaphysics understood as onto-theology. Such a “god” then exposes himself to the same fate – and the same decline – as that which affects the ontology inherited from the Greeks. However, this ontological understanding of the Word of the Bush has been challenged in various ways. Several authors, from Eckhart to Lacan, have seen in it a negative statement – “I am who I am” … and do not ask for more – , that is to say an enigma. The dominant trend of Jewish tradition has understood it, on the contrary, as the affirmation of a being-with, the promise of a covenant: “I will be with you as He who will always be with you”. Should we discover here, as Ricoeur suggests, a “nonGreek understanding of Being” where biblical Revelation would exceed the onto-theological determination of metaphysics? Couldn’t this statement have a more directly political meaning, that of a subversion of the self-affirmation of the Pharaoh’s power? Perhaps the text of Exodus 3 attests there is another excess, more radical, when he superimposes to the promise of the Covenant the revelation of a singular Name: that of an Other I whose call would thwart the anonymous neutrality of Being.

Woest versus wonderbaarlijk

Both in Die Riddere metter Mouwen (‘The Knight with the Sleeve’), a Flemish Arthurian romance written in the second part of the thirteenth century, and in Lodewijk van Velthem’s Fifth Part of the Spiegel Historiael (‘Mirror of History’), an early fourteenth-century continuation of Jacob van Maerlant’s voluminous world history (1284-1289), a frightening forest appears which is called Woud(e) sonder Genade (‘Forest without Mercy’). This correspondence is remarkable, for these Middle Dutch texts offer the oldest known occurences of a toponym not found in adjacent languages. Following the reasoning of Marijke Carasso-Kok, Thea Summerfield believes that Velthem has borrowed the name ‘Forest without Mercy’ from the Arthurian romance, which the chronicler may have known at the time: an adaptation of the story is inserted in the Velthem-owned Lancelot Compilation (c. 1320-1330). As Summerfield argues, Velthem presents the English King Edward I as a second King Arthur, not only by stating this explicitly and having Edward enact the role of his predecessor in Round Table festivities, but also, when narrating Edward’s feats, by reminding listeners and readers of Arthurian events from the past as described in romances. One of these romances, according to Summerfield, is Die Riddere metter Mouwen. After drawing his audience’s attention to this romance by using the singular name ‘Forest without Mercy’ again, Velthem in his chronicle – so Summerfield asserts – alludes to frightening incidents in the Arthurian Woud sonder Genade as told in the Flemish story. This narrative strategy, Summerfield concludes, served Velthem’s purpose to prove the historicity of the adventures King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table once experienced. The current paper aims to prove that Summerfield’s argument is not supported by evidence present in Velthem’s text: apart from the shared toponym, the chronicle contains no intertextual references to Die Riddere metter Mouwen. Therefore, its date of composition (1315-1317) is not valid as terminus ante quem for the creation of the Flemish romance.

Devil Landforms as Resources for Geotourism Development: An Example from Southern Apulia (Italy)

The landscape of Murge Tarantine limestone ridge (southern Apulia, Italy) is marked by the presence of an isolated relief showing a singular shape and name, the Monte del Diavolo (i.e., the Devil’s Mount). The Monte del Diavolo is located in a very interesting area from a geological point of view since it shows an E–W trending high-fault scarp, the morphological effect of the right-lateral transtensive North Salento Fault Zone. The Monte del Diavolo is a small isolated conical relief reaching at its top 115 m above m.s.l.; it elevates about 20 m from the surrounding plain surface, stretching at about 95 m altitude. Its evolution has been influenced by the occurrence of strongly cemented breccia deposits, most likely due to cave roof collapse and calcite precipitation, which are more resistant to the karst denudation process than surrounding limestones. This paper would be the first step towards the cultural promotion of the Monte del Diavolo area, which is marked by geological and geomorphological peculiar features and by a relevant archaeological and natural heritage as well.

The strange journey of Latawalujwa in Java, from two pre-Islamic goddesses to an elastic term for God

In the early history of Islam, pre-Islamic female goddesses named Al-Lat and al-‘Uzza were regarded as particular threats to the new faith. They appeared in one of the oldest surviving Modern Javanese manuscripts, a Caritanira Amir written no later than 1629, as Lata wa-l-‘Uzza, their names being joined by the Arabic conjunction wa. This appears to be the key to later Javanese misunderstanding of these two names as a single one: Latawalujwa (or close variants thereof). This misunderstanding is even to be found in a Javanese translation of the Qur’an in Javanese (rather than Arabic) script, which refers to a singular “idol named Latawalnguza.” From the 18th to the early 20th centuries we find several Javanese examples of this singular name being used for a divinity, sometimes for God himself, sometimes for other sorts of divinities. The origin of this name in the two pre-Islamic idols seems to have been entirely forgotten.

Distribution Laws in Weak Positional Logics

A formal language is positional if it involves a positional connecitve, i.e. a connective of realization to relate formulas to points of a kind, like points of realization or points of relativization. The connective in focus in this paper is the connective “R” , first introduced by Jerzy Łoś. Formulas “Raphi” involve a singular name a and a formula phi to the effect that phi is satisfied (true) relative to the position designated by a In weak positional calculi no nested occurences of the connective “R” are allowed. The distribution problem in weak positional logics is actually the problem of distributivity of the connective “R” over classical connectives, viz. the problem of relation between the occurences of classical connectives inside and outside the scope of the positional connective “R”.

The Myth of Útgarðr - A Toponym as a Basis for an Old Norse System of Values?

The toponym Utgarðr, used as a singular place name in Snorra Edda, is often applied to an outer region or peripheral realm inhabited by giants and other monstrous entities. This leads to a concepti...

A problem for predicativism solved by predicativism

John Hawthorne and David Manley say that the difference between these two sentences raises a problem for Predicativism about names. According to the currently more standard version of Predicativism, a bare singular name in argument position, like ‘John’ in (2), is embedded in a definite description with an unpronounced definite article. The problem is supposed to be that (1) permits a covarying reading that allows for different races to have been won by different colts, while (2) does not permit a covarying reading—it can be true only if there is a single John that won every race. But, the objection runs, if the name ‘John’ is really embedded in a definite description with an unpronounced definite article, then the two sentences are structurally parallel and should not differ with respect to covariation. Appealing to Jason Stanley's ‘Nominal Restriction’ (the 2005 version), I show that the difference between the two sentences above not only does not raise a problem for Predicativism but also is actually predicted by it.

Names Are Predicates

One reason to think that names have a predicate-type semantic value is that they naturally occur in count-noun positions: ‘The Michaels in my building both lost their keys’; ‘I know one incredibly sharp Cecil and one that's incredibly dull’. Predicativism is the view that names uniformly occur as predicates. Predicativism flies in the face of the widely accepted view that names in argument position are referential, whether that be Millian Referentialism, direct-reference theories, or even Fregean Descriptivism. But names are predicates in all of their occurrences; they are predicates that are true of their bearers. When a name appears as a bare singular in argument position, it really occupies the predicate position of what in this essay is called a denuded definite description: a definite description with an unpronounced definite article. Sloat provided good evidence for this. The definite article is sometimes pronounced with names in the singular: ‘The Ivan we all love doesn't feel well’. Sloat proposed a disjunctive generalization of when the definite article must be pronounced with a singular name. This essay shows that by slightly revising Sloat's generalization, we arrive at a simple, nondisjunctive, syntactic rule that governs the overt appearance of the definite article with singular names. But Ivan does not necessarily bear the name ‘Ivan’, so one might worry that the sentence “Ivan might not have had ‘Ivan’ as a name” would incorrectly be predicted false. This essay shows that Predicativism does not have this consequence by showing that incomplete definite descriptions in general and incomplete denuded descriptions, such as ‘Øthe Ivan’, in particular are rigid designators.

<em>Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora</em>, ed. Joel Tishkin, Toyin Falola, and Akintunde Akinyemi

Reviewed by: Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora K. Noel Amherd Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora ED. Joel Tishkin, Toyin Falola, and Akintunde AkinyemiBloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. ix + 365 pp. $75.00 cloth, ISBN 978-0-253-35336-8; $27.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-253-22094-3. This volume is the third anthology of an emerging type addressing a single Yoruba orisa (divinity), following predecessors addressing Ogun, Osun, and even a forthcoming volume from Mississippi University Press on Ayan, the god of drumming. There has been a marked shift in Yoruba studies in which discourse has left the hands of outsider anthropologists, sociologists, and historians and been taken over by those who see themselves as insiders, either as participants and representatives of said culture or those making claims to a legitimating ancestry. This volume seeks to enter the tension between the poles of emic and etic. Asserting that the Yoruba orisa of thunder and lightning, Sango, is truly international in scope and that "Yoruba people have left an undeniable and permanent imprint on many parts of the world" (1), the editors of this volume seek to address "the nature of Sango worship within Africa and from various perspectives within the African Diaspora" (2). Emphasizing the omnipresent ambivalence, syncretic, mythic, historical, and globalized polysemy of the god wherever he manifests, the editors wish also to bring attention to what is at stake, namely "the quest for authenticity and legitimacy as peoples grapple with the legacy of slavery, colonialism, changes in identity, and the spread of Islam and Christianity" (19). The editors organize the fifteen contributions following their own introduction into four categories: "Defining Sango in West Africa," "Representations of Sango in Oral and Written Popular Cultures," "Sango in the African Diaspora," and "The Voices of Sango Devotees." The contributions demonstrate the breadth of variation and difference residing within this singular name, Sango, while elucidating the struggles and stakes faced by communities and individuals interacting and identifying with this deity. What stands out is the intricate ties and overlaps at play among their shared ironies, humor, sorrow, polemics, and triumph; there is a cacophony of devotees' voices that resound in every contribution that is not included in the section of that title. Who counts as in or out becomes as elusive yet illuminating as Sango's own lightning celts. Through discourses on divination, bata drums, oriki, shrine carvings, the Internet, Catholic saints, wives, gender, and empire, the reader traverses realms in a vertiginous movement among attempts to grasp a concept that refuses to sit still and become singularly comprehended. The collection offers ideas and research well worth the price of the book and runs into its own thematic dilemma. How is it realistic to create a sense of sturdy singularity as does a physical book with a title that is simultaneously the name of a god who refuses this very sclerosis of identity? And by continuing the trend of books of this type, what about the orisa who do not get books, the communities overlooked by the unintended and ironic creation of an academic pantheon while speaking of multiplicity and difference? This ambivalence rises in the plaintive voice of a Beninois worshipper of the thunder god Ara, "cousin" to Sango, stating, "I know that Ara no longer dwells on the sacred hill near our town. . . . [The Ara [End Page 189] priest said that] civilization had spoiled everything. . . . Who is Ara? Where did he come from? Where is he now? No one can answer these questions" (105). K. Noel Amherd noelamherd@sbcglobal.net Copyright © 2010 Indiana University Press

Is the God of the Philosophers That Which Nothing Greater Can be Conceived?

Even though famous designation of as id quo mains non cogitari potest (that which nothing greater can be conceived) by 11th century Catholic theologian, Anselm of Canterbury does not, to my knowledge, appear in any of writings of those whom we might well call classical Jewish rationalists, cannot imagine that any of them would disagree with it in principle. This designation would seem to fit what could be called the of viz., Absolute. Yet, it also means that we cannot see this in all the i. e., all those philosophers who still speak of God. Thus we can see this in of Aristotle or in of Plotinus or in of Spinoza, but not in god of Plato or in god of Whitehead; in of Hegel and in of Hermann Cohen, but not in god of Kant. So, even though this is not of all philosophers, it is still useful for contemporary Jewish rationalists to consider this formula in our attempts to engage in serious philosophical Godtalk, i. e., theo-logy. As modern philosophers, however, we must focus our discussion in context of linguistic orientation of modern philosophy, be it analytic or phenomenological. Accordingly, question Is of Philosophers That Which Nothing Greater Can be Conceived! requires a close look at how name is used in our discourse, i.e., when it is still used at all. It would seem that we first have to distinguish how name is used as a universal name from how it is used as a singular name, and then how universal name of and singular name of are interrelated in Jewish Godtalk. Universal naming designates minimal criteria that any singular or specific name must fulfill in order to be cogently assigned to one so named. And so, when proclaims to Israel I am Lord your God (Exodus 20:2), Israel must have some idea of what word

Equating categorially names and quantifiers within first-order logic

Grammarians traditionally consider quantifier expressions such as something, everything, somebody, everybody, some dog, every dog together with names (singular name expression) as belonging to the noun phrases category. The reason is simple: both quantifier expressions and names can be used as subjects in sentences. Logicians on the other hand, usually treat quantifier expression (in short: quantifiers) as operators, i.e. as expressions of a different category from the name category. The source of this distinction seems clear: names are categorametic, whereas operators are syncategorsmetic expressions. However, when we are trying to explain the opposition categorametic-syncategorametic we usually give names and quantifiers as paradigmatic examples respectively.

Rethinking the History of Settler Agriculture in Nineteenth-Century Liberia

In 1870 five Americo-Liberians, as descendants of the free American slaves who founded Liberia in 1822 later called themselves, sat down to lunch. Their host, another Americo-Liberian, served the midday meal, and an account of that occasion was subsequently published in a local paper.1 An excerpt from the story follows: had scarcely finished friendly greetings ... when another little stir arrested our attention, and lo, a fine Liberian the name of which is associated with so many reminiscences.... The Dumboy, not withstanding its singular name, is a very excellent dish.... we Liberians would not exchange for any foreign dishes that could be offered. It is healthy, harmless, and very nutritious.2 Anecdotes like this narrative about the dumboy3 and recently uncovered archival evidence suggests that scholars must reconsider a fundamental assumption about the history of Liberian agriculture in the nineteenth century. According to the existing literature, for the most part of the nineteenth century Americo-Liberians failed to produce staple crops for exports because they strongly disdained agricultural labor. This contempt was manifested in the social attitudes of the immigrants.4 For instance, it is alleged that the Americo-Liberians preferred imported American foods like pork and bacon to indigenous African cuisine such as dumboy.5 Scholars contend that the importation of foodstuffs hindered agriculture; in the words of historian M. B. Akpan, it was hardly compatible with enthusiasm for agriculture.6 But the evidence shows that in addition to the dumboy, American immigrants did adopt many local foods. Consider the contents of the following letters that immigrants in Liberia sent back to the United States. William Burke, emancipated by his owner (would-be Confederate General Robert E. Lee), emigrated to Liberia with his family in 1853. The following year, Burke sent a letter to the Lees in which he commented that or five months after we arrived in Africa, my children looked better than think ever saw them; they were so fond of palm oil and rice, and eat so much of it, that they fattened very fast.7 In another piece of Burke's correspondence to Mrs. Lee about four years later, he provided more details about African foodstuffs: We have a vegetable known by the name eddoe, Or tania, very much like our Irish potato, a very excellent breadstuff. raised a quantity of them, which my family live upon, they being very wholesome.8 Another immigrant, Henry Hannon, traveled to Liberia after being manumitted in 1837 or early 1838. In a letter to his erstwhile family in 1846, Hannon explained: You desire of me to mension something about meat and Bread stuffs that we have in Africa. When we want Bread we take the Rice, beat it in a morter, siften it until it become a beautifull white flour, knead it & Break it as other Bread. Meats, we have a great meny: wild Deer, hogs, goats, and meny other animals. Very good meats when we can get them; we cannot get Every time we want them.9 Finally, a dozen new immigrants arrived in Liberia in December 1869 and informed acquaintances in the United States less than six months later: We have under cultivation, rice, peas, potatoes, corn, eddoes, cassadas [cassava] ginger, figs, and arrow root. Every family is well satisfied' [emphasis added].10 Some scholars have alleged that the large number of former slaves among the immigrant population shunned agriculture because it evoked unpleasant memories of slavery. Others charged that the former slaves misconstrued their new-found freedom in Liberia to mean that they did not have to work.12 Here again, the evidence leads us to a different conclusion. Excerpts from a set of letters ex-slaves in Liberia wrote to their former masters demonstrate perseverance and determination, not antipathy to agriculture. In 1859, James P. Skipwith, for example, explained to John H. Cocke: I am trying to Farm But cannot see But little Progress as yet. …

Pas de Deux: “The Simulacrum of a Duel”

The very fact that Derrida has begun to write an autobiographical mode is a slippery affair about which both he and we need to be vigilant, lest we and he be the victims of a ruse which he more than anyone has done the most to expose. (PT, 279)1 Derrida,2 one supposes, presumes to expose the and of The book simulates an apparently decisive cut between Geoffrey Bennington's Derridabase (1993)' above the line, and Derrida's Circumfession4 below. This cut, it would seem, separates opposing modes of exposition, explication and confession, that both, nevertheless, claim rights to the singularity marked by the name Jacques Derrida. In the preface, then, it is announced that the book's condition of possibility is a contract, a challenge, outbidding, or raising the stakes. According to this contract, Bennington was to attempt a clear, argued exposition of the thought of By extracting the thought from the life, and laying bare the bones of its general system, he proposes an explication without residue (and principle incapable of being surprised), which would, moreover, make it in principle . .. accessible to any user. turn, was to undertake to meet the challenge posed by Bennington's text by writing something that indeed surprises (escapes) his proposed general system, thereby demonstrating the ineluctable necessity of Bennington's failure. It is, then, as if the book simulates a between reader and author, for rights to the singular name Jacques Derrida, for power over its exposition. Bennington's aim is to show that this singularity is fabricated within a general textuality as an ideality of sorts (as the repeatability, or better, iterability, of quasi-transcendental logic). Guided by the form of a contest, one might expect to find that contrast, demanding respect for the thought that will not be drawn (like blood) from the life that sustains it, proposes to confess his thinking its unrepeatable, living, breathing, historical singularity. In this duel, it would seem, an iterable signature is opposed to a living singularity, such that the condition of the possibility of the one is the rejection of, or escape from, the other. Yet, this interpretation, admittedly facilitated by the preface which the challenge is announced (but countersigned by whom`?), belongs to a credulous reading of the juxtaposed texts terms of the very oppositional logic that Derrida has famously worked to unsettle. What choreographer, one might then ask, has been authorized to counter-position the texts signed by jailer and escapee (above, below; outer, inner; system, singular; closed, open), who both remain incredulous toward this very kind of counter-positioning? Why the complicity of the incredulous dance-partners a simulacrum of a duel between opposites (DB, 318)? Perhaps it is significant that the text announcing this contract remains unsigned, detached from what is signed, and left without guarantee the equivocal counter-signatures of self-effacement and silence. This is reason enough at least not to take the challenge set up the preface too readily at face value. Indeed, I would argue that readers are obliged to remain suspicious of which only strategically, but by no means substantively, sets itself up as a between Geoffrey Bennington and Thus, one should not, through credulous reading, miss the irony of this play, and thereby obscure a subtly wrought performance of the double bind of the text (this particular one, to be sure, but more generally any text that claims, or is claimed by, a proper name); namely the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of saying something singular. What I shall attempt to set out more detail, then, is a suspicious reading that detects complications both texts, and shows how the performance of a at one level is simultaneously the undermining of this oppositional posture. …

Roll Out the Barrels: Emptiness, Fullness, and the Picaresque-Idyllic Dynamic in Vasilii Aksenov’s “Zatovarennaia bochkotara”

Barrels roll. In a mythological, folk, or literary text, they set off a reciprocal dynamic of emptying out and filling in. Where Diogenes filled his barrel with his own cynical self, Francois Rabelais removed him, then poured back in the wine drained off to accommodate his asceticism. On the basis of this example, Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates the need to re-embody the disembodied; in connection with the folk laughter that replenishes the hollow chill of mortality, he notes that Rabelais celebrated the “cheerful death” of the Duke of Clarence in a barrel full of malmsey. In Vladimir Propp’s analysis of myth, folktales, and initiation rites, barrels stand in for the bellies of great fish; these swallow and then regurgitate the hero, supplying in the interim “temporary death,” mystic instruction, and the makings of a leader or a savior of the people. It is in an ocean-going barrel that Aleksandr Pushkin’s Prince Gvidon, condemned to an infant death, grows “not by days, but by hours” (“Skazka o tsare Saltane” [Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1831]), repeating the pattern of reversals in birth dreams, through exposure on the water and entombment in womb-like receptacles, studied by Otto Rank. Il'ia Erenburg’s apostle of absolute and universal negation had planned to start his mission by crossing the Atlantic in a beer barrel (Julio Jurenito, 1922). The dual or schizophrenic narrator of Sasha Sokolov’s Shkola dlia durakov (School for fools, 1976), though otherwise anonymous, is moved to fill his mentor’s barrel with his own singular name.

Studies in the History of Probability and Statistics. XXXIII Cauchy and the witch of Agnesi: An historical note on the Cauchy distribution

The curve we commonly call the Cauchy density, or rather curves proportional to y = (a2 + x2)-1, have been appearing in mathematical works for over three hundred years. The curve seems to have first appeared in the works of Fermat in the middle of the seventeenth century, and was subsequently studied by such men and women as Newton, Leibniz, Huygens, Guido Grandi, and Maria Agnesi; by the nineteenth century it had acquired the singular name 'the witch of Agnesi', a name that is still commonly found in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. With its simple, symmetric form, it is surprising that the Cauchy density did not appear as a possible error distribution before 1824. When it finally did appear, it was in the role it plays most often today, as a counterexample to otherwise general theorems. The Cauchy distribution appeared naturally as a part of the move to greater rigour in mathematics during the nineteenth century, and was in fact discovered twice. It is interesting that the two discoverers had different motives in looking for it and interpreted its importance in two different ways. In the case of the second discovery, by Cauchy, the distribution appeared as part of an argument which persists today. Howimportant are regularity conditions in practical applications, and how much weight should be placed on large sample theory?

Primitive Traditions as to the Pleiades

MY conclusions as to the Pleiades having been believed to be in early ages the centre of the universe, were not in any way based upon the singular name Alcyone for the principal star in that group. I can hardly account for my having so long forgotten the meaning of that name, and its connection with the belief I had found vestiges of, as to the Pleiades being the centre of all things. It is probable that at first I regarded its significance as a mere accident, as Dr. Tylor evidently does, and dismissed it from my mind. The best proof of the widespread traces of the belief in question is to be found in the fact that even since this correspondence took place I have met among the Berbers of Morocco a name for Alcyone, which has precisely the same meaning, and which, they tell me, was given to that star because Paradise is in them, and they are the centre of all things. I have also found that the idea, which, as I stated in my last letter, I have for many years entertained, that those stars were observed by means of openings or passages in temples in early ages, is manifestly well founded.