Unrepeatable Events Research Articles

The fates of human societies: caught between causality, chance and agency

In this critical note, I address two issues arising from the latest book by Simone Sarti “Il caso e la società”: the nexus between causality and chance, and the role of individual agency. I argue that the widely accepted notion of counterfactual causality cannot be applied to unique and unrepeatable events. Consequently, even the role of chance is not easily detectable in individual instances because an appropriate counterfactual is very difficult to identify. The role of individual agency is discussed with respect to two components of “merit”: talent and effort. While accepting the former as largely determined by chance is unproblematic, the latter cannot easily be considered as beyond individual control.

Biblijska teologija krštenja u Duhu Svetome

This article will discuss the issue of the baptisim of the Holy Spirit: what it is, how is it manifested, and what are its fruits. In the introduction, the problem and the questions pertaining to the Holy Spirit baptism are stated together with the thesis that will be tested. The thesis is that the baptism of the Holy Spirit biblically understood is a unique and unrepeatable event universal to all Christians, which happens instantaneously with salvation (when the believer is placed in Christ and joined to his body) and that this baptism is not marked by any immediate and special outward sign. First, this article will present different views on the doctrine of Holy Spirit baptism with historical developments of the views. Then it will deal with biblical data, focusing on all major passages. Special attention will be given to the Book of Acts, and “the second blessing” theology, which is the crux of the doctrine. Then the relation of hermeneutics and experience will also be discussed. Finally, the conclusion and the practical implications of the baptism of the Holy Spirit and biblical admonishments for the Christian life will be given.

Calculation and experimental verification of spatial resolution consistency on Petzval image plane of streak tube

With the expanded application of streak cameras in various fields, their imaging performance has become increasingly important, particularly in the detection and imaging processing of all types of extremely fast and unrepeatable events, and the consistency of detection in such cameras also determines their usage efficiency. In this study, to improve the detection efficiency of a streak camera, the resolution consistency of the streak tube on the Petzval image plane was verified for the first time based on both principle and testing, the results of which should provide ideas for future studies on ways to effectively reconstruct the original image from a single image.

Teatro com bebês: narrando vivências na Educação Infantil

Este artigo tem como objetivo refletir sobre os estudos contemporâneos no campo da infância, tendo como recorte central a pesquisa com bebês. Conceitualmente, assumimos por bebês o desenho estabelecido nas legislações e na área acadêmica que envolve a primeira infância, ou seja, do nascimento até 36 meses. O trabalho situou-se na interface das vivências dos bebês e suas enunciações, possibilitadas pelas atividades cênicas que assumimos e denominamos como teatro com bebês, que consistiu na oferta de um ambiente pensado para recebê-los, criando uma situação social em que se potencializaram suas atividades criadoras. Metodologicamente, a pesquisa com os bebês foi feita no espaço da educação infantil da Escola Nossa, em Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. Como principais conclusões mencionamos a potência que o teatro com bebês promove quando em interação com os adereços cênicos; suas enunciações enquanto, ao mesmo tempo, atores e plateia a partir da oferta cênica vinculada diretamente ao ato de brincar apresentam acontecimentos irrepetíveis e portadores de vivências que possibilitam seus protagonismos.

Narrative Explanations: The Case for Causality

Abstract In this paper I argue that historiography employs causal narrative explanations just as other historical sciences such as evolutionary biology or paleontology do. There is a logic of explanation common to all these sciences that centers on causal explanation of unique and unrepeatable events. The explanandum of historiography can further be understood as mechanism in the sense developed by Stuart Glennan and others in recent years. However, causal explanation is not the only way historiography relates to the past. Arthur Danto has given us the theoretical tools to differentiate between causal narratives and conceptual colligations, with both playing a pivotal role in historiography even though Danto himself has not expressed that thought clearly.

What to Do with the Leftovers of the Arts Industry?

From 2009 to 2010, Barcelona artists Marta Galán and Juan Navarro held three staged events using the remains and leftovers of stage sets, costumes and props from major public and private Catalan theatres and production companies. Among others, they recovered materials provided by the Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house, the Teatre Lliure and Focus Serveis de l'Espectacle S.A. (the leading private production company for a broad range of artistic and political events, owning several theatres in the provinces of Barcelona and Madrid).Each one of the three performances (all one-off, unrepeatable events) featured guest performers and a large number of non-professional actors. With the title "Post-dramatic, disposable, high-budget productions that will never be profitable," Galán and Navarro proposed an ironic reflection on the imbalance between the cultural production systems of leading companies in the arts and the vehicles of survival for independent artists.Galán's and Navarro's pieces provides a paradigmatic example within this article, which offers a succinct observation of the development and recycling of Catalan cultural policies in recent decades.While careers in the arts have become increasingly precarious, gradually changing since long before the outbreak of the economic crisis (2007-2008), cultural events have been trapped between a utilitarian conception, the image of Barcelona that is conveyed abroad (leading to a culture of tourism that opposes the culture of sustainability) and its use within nationalistic symbolism (with the burning conflict of the current push towards independence as a backdrop).

Conservation in an era of participation

Despite performance art’s originary stance against art commodification and institutionalisation, performance artworks are slowly being historicised and preserved for future generations. This art genre can be defined as consisting of unrepeatable events, specific in time and space, which may persist in some form in the memories of those who experienced them or in their documentation. The paradoxical relationship between performance art and its perpetuation in time has led to the development of many frameworks for its preservation. Artworks consisting of participatory practices present challenges that go beyond the work’s preservation, as traditional documentation methods do not usually encompass their social dimension. Equally relevant is the discussion about what changes this participatory trend will bring to the role of the conservator and to conservation practice in general. With this in mind, it is important to understand the future of conservation in an era of participation, in particular, in light of the burgeoning institutionalisation of performance-based artworks. This paper aims to discuss these issues while proposing the concept of body-archive of the conservator as an operative concept to re-evaluate the way documentation is currently executed. To illustrate this notion, the work Identificacíon (1975) by the Portuguese artist Manoel Barbosa and the participatory practices involved in its documentation process will be discussed.

Towards dialogic epistemology: the problem of the text

This article considers epistemological implications of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Bakhtin urged scholars in the human sciences to treat a text as having a voice of its own, to be attuned to its creativity and originality, and to resist conflating one’s image of the author with the actual person who has produced the text. Importing his ideas into the social sciences creates a site of tensions at the disciplines’ boundaries. Yet his characterisation of dialogue applies also to qualitative researchers’ interactions with nonfiction material. Bakhtin contended that a text as an utterance is a unique unrepeatable event; and that a voice is immanent in how the text itself operates: its placement in a dialogical sequence (answerability), its plan (purpose) and the realisation of the plan. Attention to these dynamics could constitute a formative step in the epistemic process of qualitative research, as concrete examples illustrate. A concept of a ‘dialogic triangle’ (utterance, response and their interrelation) is proposed.

Terror-Time in Network-Centric Battlespace: DeLillo’s Later Fiction

Variously addressing the war on terror now waged in the “full-spectrum dominance” of network-centric battlespace, DeLillo’s most recent four novels (published immediately before and since the 9/11 attacks) work to produce stillness as opposed to seductive, terroristic speed—to detach identities from everyday practices of time and elaborate transformative experiences for the reader. Each novel constitutes a complex hetero-chronograph, a textual apparatus that not only measures time but also produces altered temporal forms that slow down and multiply felt times and durations. Redeploying Bakhtin’s notion of the text as an unrepeatable event co-produced by the author and reader, this article explores how DeLillo’s texts enable the reader to become an actor, to produce and experience modes of resistance to the totalizing forces of terror by the realization of a network of virtual narrative associations among economic, political, aesthetic, and ethical vectors. Such relations are mapped on a Greimassian semiotic square of “terror-time.”

“Sad Experiment” in Paradise Lost: Epic Knowledge and Evental Poetics

Equating epic events in Paradise Lost with the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society, a commonplace in modern scholarship, misses the central concern of Milton’s poetry: making intelligible prelapsarian states of being. Eve’s irreparable transgression acutely stages the epistemology underlying the epic, what I call an evental poetics. Singular, unrepeatable events emerge as conceptual and narrative units of certainty that precipitate understanding of prelapsarian being, while repeatable experiences merely provide probable knowledge about the world one occupies. By showing how experiment, a postlapsarian epistemology, cannot take one back to Eden, Milton dismantles the redemptive promise of contemporary natural philosophy. Marking the disjunctions between poetic methods and natural philosophy, Miltonic events translate and make accessible to readers the unknowable prelapsarian world. Since what Paradise is remains inseparable from how one knows it, the epistemology of Paradise Lost reveals and theorizes the ontology of Miltonic poetics.

<b>Escritura, sujeto y saber: el caso de la enseñanza universitaria</b>

Writing, as an intimate and singular gesture, evidences a peculiar relationship between subject and knowing. In the teaching situations, it works as the remains of the unrepeatable event. In the dynamics of knowing-knowledge, what is wrote is situated on the side of re-signification, which is always provisional, and writing would be in the path from de-signification towards re-signification. In this movement, the function of writing is unique: there is something that can only be learnt by writing and not reading. At university, through the academic texts, it is built – or, better said, acquired – the position of the researcher, though the academic text drives to the functioning of science. Writing convokes certain knowing and leaves a testimony of that knowing; but knowing is always unknown, or lack of knowledge.Writing is an act of implication that always confronts with castration.

The point of death

David Pocock’s previously unpublished Inaugural Lecture on ‘The point of death’ marked his promotion to a Personal Chair at the University of Sussex and was delivered on 3rd May 1977. Pocock generously gave Parry a copy of his text while the latter was writing up material on death in Banares, and as far as we know, this is the only hard copy that has survived (though an audio recording of the lecture itself is listed in the Sussex University Library catalogue). It was written for verbal presentation and, at points, has a somewhat elliptical quality (though that is also true of much that Pocock published). The main text has been edited as lightly as possible and only with a view to occasionally clarifying its meaning. The comments and references in the footnotes have all been added by us. We are grateful to David Pocock’s executors, Paul and Susan Yates, for permission to include his lecture alongside our own appreciation of him. The justification for doing so is its enduring interest—both as a still highly suggestive contribution to the comparative study of mortuary practices and of ideas about death, and as an historical document that evokes a number of Pocock’s intellectual preoccupations and something of his intellectual style. As our own contribution to this issue of the journal has suggested, death was a topic on which he had long reflected; and here, he addresses it with characteristic erudition and an impressively catholic range of reference to literary and historical sources. But the resonances with his other writings go much further than that. These include: his continuing concern with the way in which uncontrollable biological occurrences and the effects of duration are subordinated to society (showing here that ‘the point of death is not the point of death’); and his related concern with the way in which unrepeatable historical events that unfold in linear time are accommodated to a theory of endlessly repeated cyclical time. Thus, the classical Hindu theory of the kaliyug is invoked to argue that the ‘good death’ of the householder is not really so ‘good’ after all. It is merely a kind of ersatz kaliyug version of the ideal, which supposes that by the time of his death, the householder will have taken sanyas. This fudge, Pocock intriguingly suggests, is associated with the fuzziness and contradictoriness of the eschatology. And that’s another of his recurring themes—the vague and tentative nature of religious belief. But perhaps, the most important message of his lecture has to do with the contrast it sets up between the ‘traditional complex’, with which the first part of the article is concerned and for which Hindu India stands, and the ‘modern complex’ exemplified by the contemporary and significantly secularised West, where the values of individualism are associated with ‘a maximal denial of death’—and indeed, of society itself. The contrast looks, on the face of it, highly Dumontian; but on closer reading, it is distinctly ambiguous. Though the ‘imperative insistence’ of Christian doctrine on the survival of the individual soul precludes the assimilation of the individual personality into a general category in a way that no other culture has done, and though the individual’s death is represented as being as unique as his birth and subsequent life, elements of the ‘traditional complex’ nevertheless persist. Rumours about mixing up bones and ashes in the crematorium recur, the standardised depersonalised coffin comes to stand for the deceased and Lily Pincus’s advocacy of a renewed intimacy with death and the dying is welcomed as a modern transformation of the older complex. It is the open-endedness and his sense of the complex ambiguity of social and intellectual life that makes Pocock both so frustratingly elusive and so attractive as a thinker. Editorial note by Jonathan Parry and Edward Simpson

The jargon of delinquents and the study of conversational dynamics

The analysis of three recordings in which jargon speakers interact, either among themselves or with speakers from other social spheres, seems to support the view of conversation as a dynamic process which is the result of the interaction of three different factors: power relationships, social distance and social space, and speakers' attitudes. This analysis may increase our knowledge of verbal interaction. First, we should approach each conversation as a unique and unrepeatable event. Furthermore, different conversational resources and maneuvers participate in the realization of various conversational processes involved in this interaction, such as the construction and interpretation of meaning, the presentation of a public self image, the management of information, the expression of relationships of power and solidarity, and the management of conversational space. Regarding each one of these processes, and the components of the speech event, the speakers adopt strategies of negotiation, imposition and cooperation. Delinquent jargon, which defines the peer group and permits the expression of alternative values, but which also protects information vital for subsistence, reveals, as if observed through a magnifying glass, the dynamic character of conversation and shows the role played by speakers' attitudes.

Models in the history of physics

Research into the history of physics is undergoing a difficult period of transition. It began life as a part of the history of science and the history of culture, and owes a great deal to epistemology and sociology, but would now appear to be acquiring its own methodology and developing outside the grey area traditionally separating natural and human sciences. Given this situation, the aim of this paper is to identify and classify into sets the principal models associated with research into the history of physics. In doing this we applied a rule which states that research into the history of physics is an analysis of the manifest inferential behaviour of scholars of the past. The expression ,manifest inferential behaviour~ refers to linguistic behaviour which is observable, since it has an empirical basis. This basis is not formed, as is generally believed, by single unrepeatable events, but by documents concerning the use of inferences and artifacts during theoretical and experimental research into physics. Acceptance of this rule implies acceptance of the view that the history of physics can assume the status of research within the framework of the natural

On the individuation of events

As Donald Davidson has pointed out,1 there are many good reasons for taking events seriously as concrete individuals, i.e., as numerically unique entities which have location in space and time. In the first place, both action theory and explanation seem to call for events qua unrepeatable, spatially located particulars. In excusing an action (a species of event) we frequently describe the action in a number of different ways. My daughter's eating all the brownies in the refrigerator this afternoon is the very same action as my daughter's eating the dessert for tonight's dinner. But she is blameless in that she didn't know that the brownies were the dessert. Similarly in explaining the expansion of a piece of metal, scientists may redescribe it in a number of different ways: in terms of the kind of material it is, in terms of the heat capacity of metal, in terms of molecular bonding and the motion of molecules. All this talk of redescription makes little sense if there are no individuals to be described in the first place. Moreover, as Davidson has shown, an ontology of unrepeatable events has great utility for the purposes of accommodating adverbs in predicate logic, allowing us to validate the intuitive inference from, say, 'Elspeth ate the brownies quickly under the deck at noon' to 'Elspeth ate the brown ies'. In brief, action theory, causation, explanation, and logical theory all seem to call for events which are concrete individuals, as opposed to abstract (timeless) and general (property-like).2 Nevertheless the claim that events are concrete individuals faces a major hurdle. If events are concrete individuals, then it should be possible to provide identity conditions for them;3 for as Quine has cautioned us, "No entity without identity".4 Unfortunately, however, the most widely discussed proposals for such conditions, by Donald Davidson, John Lemmon and Jaegwon Kim, are beset with serious problems. In order to better understand the difficulties involved in formulating identity conditions for events, let us briefly review these three proposals, paying particular attention to the problems commonly associated with them.

Zeami on Performance

Since the survival of Noh theatre at the time of Zeami (1363–1443) and Kanami depended entirely upon the support of its audience, which consisted mainly of laymen, warriors and nobles, it was essential that each presentation had its own unique beauty and power enabling each performance to become an unrepeatable idiosyncratic event. In particular, Zeami demands that each performance will attain the goals of hana (the flower, i.e. a strangeness and novelty in beauty that will attract the audience) and yūgen (a mystic quality of beauty and elegance) on stage. In order to achieve these goals, he provides us with a great deal of suggestive and analytical ideas from various points of view, ranging from precise technical comments to pure metaphysical concepts.

The New Model Autobiographer

SHERE ARE SMALL but crucial grammatical differences between biographer and autobiographer: the two words do not work in quite the way. Biographer can be used predicatively of someone to say what it is that does; autobiographer cannot. The distinction holds good in life and even more sharply in death. Biographers, when they die and get an obituary, will hope to be commemorated at the very least as a (or better, provided they have worked hard and successfully, as the) biographer. Autobiographers are only incidentally the authors of an autobiography, and no rational necrology will describe them as an, let alone as the, autobiographer; instead, they will be classified by whatever else it is they have done or written-their prime ministership, it may be, or their poetry-which was their cue for writing an autobiography in the first place. Biography, in short, is a trade, autobiography a subsidiary and unrepeatable event; not even Rousseau made autobiography his profession. It is the regulars, the biographers, who have established the conventions not only of their own practice, of biography, but of autobiography too. The usual objective of the autobiographer is to be his own biographer, the narrator of his life story in the first person. The near totality of autobiographies can fairly be called pseudobiographies, formally distinct from their model only by having I where it has he or she. This is not to say that, as readers, our anticipations are the for autobiography as for biography. We expect autobiography to be less cluttered with data, more intimate, more speculative, perhaps less single-mindedly retrospective than the same life story (meaning the life story of the person) told from outside. But the outside and inside stories have something in common: they are both stories. The shift from one perspective to the other is a surface one; it has no effect at all on the deep structure common to biography and autobiography. The relation that ordinarily exists between the two forms stands out clearly and rather comically in the account of how the Autobiography of T. H. Huxley came to be written. This is, to put it mildly, a short work, occupying only nine pages of the recent reprint which it shares with the Autobiography of Charles Darwin.I It is short because Huxley wrote it with reluctance, in order to forestall a biography of himself: it is a

Eternal vs. Ephemeral Events

Roderick Chisholm's States of Affairs Again removes some of the obstacles that separated us in an earlier exchange, and helps to sharpen the differences that remain.' Both of us think that there are events, but it is not clear that we agree about what events are; so joining the issue turns out to be tricky. Chisholm holds that timeless states of affairs (which may occur once, often, or never) are the ineluctable brand of event, but he has not denied that particular, unrepeatable events exist. I have not tried to show that states of affairs are supernumerary, only that particular events are not. What is directly in dispute, then, is not what sorts of entities exist. Where we disagree is on how entities are related to terms and sentences, on what kind of event must exist if certain typical sentences of ordinary language are to be true. If I am not mistaken, what emerges is a difference of opinion over how to do semantics, the study that relates language and ontology. The dispute seems to me potentially instructive because Chisholm and I share a number of assumptions. He writes: