This essay situates the file-sharing website AAARG (primarily used to share academic texts in the humanities) in the context of the economics of the contemporary academy. Contingent employment prevents access to research libraries, while reduced library budgets and the exploitative practices of publishing conglomerates such as Elsevier limit…[Read more]

Published 5/4/2016: A deconstruction of distant reading and a close reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Rigor in Science.” The undecidability of the political and conceptual borders of the story challenges the possibility of any absolutist and orientalist cartographic project (such as Moretti’s literary mapmaking). Implications for the digital…[Read more]

As per its title

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet reli…[Read more]

This article treats late ancient rabbinic texts (ca. 1st-early 3rd cents. CE), reading them as biology, and following their ideas about the limits and possibilities of reproductive and species variation. I read sources from the tractates of Niddah, Kil’ayim, and Bekhorot, in the Mishnah and Toseta, as expressions of a science of generation, or a b…[Read more]

This thesis follows my earlier work on Aurignacian rock art by drawing a clear line between cave painting in the south of France and the holiest Hebrew script Ktav Ivrit or STA”M. This is an in depth study detailing relationships between Language, Mysticism and Kabbalah, as well as Religious Dogma that answers the question, “Why do all religions…[Read more]

This is a series of brief paradigms that suggest ways of manipulating abstraction, such as Art Language Religion and Politics, for use with a Carlos Ginzburg Evidentiary Paradigm, or other multivariate analysis. The tables in this appendix accompany the Index of Deities and Demons and How the Aleph-Bet Got Its Shape.

Introduction to the book Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society

One of Anton Pannekoek’s main scientific projects was to provide a representation of the appearance of the Milky Way – an object he believed to be an optical illusion. This paper elucidates how Pannekoek thought the Milky Way appearance was formed by a combination of human psychology and physiology, and why he attributed such significance to it.…[Read more]

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), prominent astronomer and world-renowned socialist theorist, stood at the nexus of the revolutions in politics, science and the arts of the early twentieth century. His astronomy was uniquely visual and highly innovative, while his politics were radical. Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society collects…[Read more]

Article for the exhibition catalogue “Hagenbund. A European network of modernism 1900 to 1938” (2014)

Completed in early 1944, Robert Desnos’s militant series of 25 poems in Contrée evokes memories of a lost peace and calls for the defeat of the German occupiers. Suggesting the desecration of the human body by the occupiers, Picasso cut his cubist–surrealist frontispiece etching of Dora Marr to produce severed heads and dismembered body part…[Read more]

Though John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) is remembered principally for his work as a theorist, art critic, and historian of visual culture, he wrote exhaustively about his health in his correspondence and diaries. Ruskin was prone to recurring depressive and hypochondriacal feelings in his youth and adulthood. In 1871, at the age of 52, he developed an i…[Read more]

This study of Leibniz’s philosophical views on mathematics starts from the rank he assigned to them in the encyclopedia of knowledge. Mathematics, in many Leibnitian writings, is proposed to other disciplines as an example to follow: they are an essential component of the new, at the same time encyclopaedic and demonstrative knowledge he is…[Read more]

Leibniz was undoubtedly a many-sided man, and a polymathic mind, if ever there was one. The concept of analysis is notoriously, for its part, a polycephalous monster, and nearly all its meanings are spread through Leibniz’s works, in juridical, scientific, mathematical, or philosophical contexts, under different conditions and with different p…[Read more]

The article processing charge (APC) is the specter haunting the open access movement. Advocates for open access (OA) face plenty of other obstacles, including tolled journal prestige, researcher inertia, and the life-draining embrace of the publishing oligopolists. But the APC—the fee many publishers charge authors to publish—is a homegrown pro…[Read more]

Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s 1983 Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science is used here as a vehicle for exploring the behavior of disciplinary boundaries in the context of crisis both historically and theoretically. Responding to his contemporaneous architectural crisis of the 1970s instigated by the rise of positivism, Pérez-Gómez uses Ale…[Read more]

This review explores usage of the term public in debates about science and society. Since the 1980s, there has been a broad shift from public understanding and science communication towards engagement, dialogue and participation. I explore the multiple meanings of public in these debates, including the transition from singular the public to plural…[Read more]

Мало тога је познато о месопотамском образовању до краја 3. миленијума пре Христа. Из доступних података може се извести закључак да је у време Треће династије Ура (21. век пре Христа) писање учено “на послу”, у једном шегртском односу према искуснијем писару, истим начином којим су се учили и остали занати. Много већим бројем података распо…[Read more]

Дело које се налази пред читаоцима представља својеврсну новину на овим просторима. Приручник ове врсте, колико је мени познато, није до сада постојао на српском језику. Ова чињеница је, пре свега, последица недовољне заинтересованости, самим тим и неупућености у проблеме једног тако значајног цивилизацијског феномена као што је клинасто писмо.…[Read more]