There is too much talk today about “turns”, “paradigm change”, “revolution”. Using these terms, it always remains unclear how this *where* is characterized where these operations are supposed to be happening – stories of linear progress and transformation? cyclical cleansing and purification? decadence and apocalyptics? Arrival at the End of Time or History? Keeping this in mind, I would like to merely index events of major impacts by speaking of them as “little dramas staged”. To keep them at a healthy distance from any agitation, if possible.
»[…] so frage dich, ob unsere Sprache vollständig ist; – ob sie es war, ehe ihr der chemische Symbolismus und die Infintesimalnotation einverleibt wurden; denn dies sind, sozusagen, Vorstädte unserer Sprache. […] Unsere Sprache kann man ansehen als eine alte Stadt: Ein Gewinkel von Gässchen und Plätzen, alten und neuen Häusern, und Häusern mit Zubauten … Continue reading
The manuscript for my lecture at the QUANTITY AND QUALITY, THE PROBLEM OF MEASUREMENT IN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY conference at UC Davis, CA, April 5/6 2014, organized by Prof. Nathan Brown. ************************************************************** CONTENTS The first cycle: Homothesis as the Locus in Quo of the Universal’s Presence 1st Iteration (acquiring a space of possibility) 2nd Iteration … Continue reading
Symbolic corporeality, or: what Zahlenkörper (in English unfortunately called number fields) are capable of. watch a series of clips on youtube giving a more elaborate explanation here. Continue reading
Unter der Bezeichnung Open Design beginnt sich gegenwärtig das Label für eine Aufmerksamkeit herauszubilden, welches eine bestimmte Wiedererkennbarkeit, Einschätzbarkeit und Entwicklungstendenz in den aufkommenden Infrastrukturen zu indexieren sucht, in denen heutige „Produkte“ – so allgemein gesprochen wie es die Anwendbarkeit des Begriffs Design heute eben verlangt – ausgedacht, entwickelt, hergestellt, verteilt und erworben werden. Dabei … Continue reading
Abstract How can we consider the situation of thought leaving the interiority of the thinking subject ? With this theme as an underlying motive throughout many of his writings, Peter Sloterdijk considers the question of hominization in terms of anthropotechnics. The primary importance of technological developments, he holds, concerns thinking. More specifically, we are challenged … Continue reading
abstract The paper presents an architectonic notion of computation in the philosophical sense, which depart from the genuinely algebraic ideas in number theory that have been articulated a.o. by Richard Dedekind. Such a perspective interprets the idea of singularity (Ray Kurzweil) as a hubris in the Fregean positivist tradition relying on some „third empire of … Continue reading
Abstract In this post I will investigate the Leibnizian idea of a Characteristica Universalis from a comparative point of view on two diverging paradigms on computation that can be distinguished, as I will argue, to have emerged since the end of the 19th century. While algebraists like Augustus de Morgan, George Boole, Charles Sanders Peirce … Continue reading
This post ist stimulated by a recent lecture given by Gilles Retsin at the CAAD Chair at ETH in Zurich entitled “Object Oriented Design”. It raised an interesting thought regarding this new and highly popular theory wave called Object Oriented Philosophy or Object Oriented Ontology (associated with Graham Harman, Levi Byrant, Timothy Morton a.o.), which is emphatically welcomed by … Continue reading
“All algebraic inquiries, sooner or later, end at the Capitol of modern algebra over whose shining portal is inscribed the Theory of Invariants.” This writes Arthur Cayley in a letter, around 1850, to his friend James Joseph Sylvester [1]. It strangely resonates, as a statement, with another very famous saying, namely every road leads to Rome. … Continue reading
“I have not yet any clear view as to the extent to which we are at liberty arbitrarily to create imaginaries, and to endow them with supernatural properties” declared John Graves in reaction to his mathematician friend’s invention of the quaternions (Hamilton 1843). Henri Poincaré held it as: “a revolution in arithmetic which is entirely … Continue reading
How can it be, that a Wittgenstein scholar like Wilfrid Sellars, in his recent book Within the Space of Reasons (Harvard UP 2007),when he discusses Wittgenstein’s view in the Tractatus on predication, doesn’t hesitate to leave the entire debate in the philosophy of mathematics which was culminating in Wittgenstein’s time, completely without mention. Undoubtedly, the problem of predication in philosophical … Continue reading
(translated by Aoife Rosenmeyer) In prep school classes there always came a day which we called ‘the day of inversion’. On that day….the elders [the teachers] had to kowtow to the wind of retribution. But this only lasted for a day. And whatever happened in this reversal, it was never the case that the weakest in … Continue reading
In the Quantum City, it is mainly existentialists who gather. Existentialists of the symbolic. People who know they could do virtually anything, if they wanted to, and if they got organized properly. Yet they feel largely undecided. There is a sense of brute potency all around them, which at one and the same time attracts … Continue reading
»Oh Newton, if you have managed, with the light and the sublimity of your genius, to determine the figure of the earth, so it is my own project to envelop you with your own discovery. This is, in a certain manner, to have you being enveloped with yourself […].« (Etienne Louis Boullée (1728-1799) Originally in French: … Continue reading
monas oikos nomos 