The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. Humans have a need to communicate and the…[Read more]

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. Humans have a need to communicate, as they…[Read more]

In this essay, I examine two widely divergent instances of what I understand to be a compulsive and racialized-sexualized violence against women whose bodies have been figured as “foreign”/Eastern (and even, as animal and barbaric) threats within collective national bodies: the real case of a massacre in the modern state of Gujarat in southwestern…[Read more]

Presentation of a 15th century book-binding with a trick-lock from Munich.

Dini çoğulculuk, dini dışlayıcılık ve kapsayıcılıktan farklı olarak, her dinsel inanış taraftarlarının kendi dinleri içinde kalarak ilahi selamete erişeceğini söyler. Temelde, teolojik ve felsefi boyutları olan dini çoğulculuk tartışmasının siyasete bakan bir yönü de vardır. İslam tarihinde Meşşâî felsefenin kurucusu ve mutluluk filozofu ola…[Read more]

Einführung in die Gender Studies für Altgermanisten. Semesterprogramm und bibliographische Hinweise

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment, including fire and metals, to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of fire and metals enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. Fire and…[Read more]

This paper was written to investigate the order of discoveries made in chemistry leading up to the discovery of the periodic table. New experimental techniques, such as the pneumatic trough, voltaic pile, spectroscopy, and potassium analysis led to the discovery of many new elements and their properties which enabled the discovery of the periodic…[Read more]

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]

Presentation on Bibliomancy in Medieval Western Europe. With Bibliography.

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]

The change from the traditional Western and Chinese view of the elements involving materials such as water, air, earth, wood, metal and fire, to the chemical elements making up the periodic table, to atoms, to particles such as protons, neutrons and electrons, and then to quarks was inevitable. The order of discovery of these ideas of the ultimate…[Read more]

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. The human environment has a particular structure so that human knowledge of the environment is acquired in a particular order. The structure of the universe and the nature of the human sensory apparatus ensured that…[Read more]

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]

It is proposed that the ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be meet in a more efficient manner. Human needs…[Read more]

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]

This paper was written in order to examine the order of discovery of significant developments in the history of electricity. The history of electricity reveals a series of discoveries with the simplest discoveries being made first and more complex discoveries being made later. Some discoveries could not be made without certain prior discoveries…[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]