Conceptual Structures

http://iccs2014.info.uaic.ro/committees.php

Sap and sawdust

Still, she couldn't feel nervous with it, after they had been talking together so long.

` -- then you don't like all insects?' the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened. 

• `I like them when they can talk,' Alice said. `None of them ever talk, where I come from.'

`What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?' the Gnat inquired.

• `I don't rejoice in insects at all,' Alice explained, `because I'm rather afraid of them -- at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some of them."

`Of course they answer to their names?' the Gnat remarked carelessly.

• `I never knew them do it.'

`What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, `if they won't answer to them?'

• `No use to them,' said Alice; `but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?'

`I can't say,' the Gnat replied. `Further on, in the wood down there, they've got no names -- however, go on with your list of insects: you're wasting time.'

Compte-pas

Un matin, cependant que dans la triste rue
Les maisons, dont la brume allongeait la hauteur,
Simulaient les deux quais d’une rivière accrue,
Et que, décor semblable à l’âme de l’acteur,

Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l’espace,
Je suivais, roidissant mes nerfs comme un héros
Et discutant avec mon âme déjà lasse,
Le faubourg secoué par les lourds tombereaux.

charge d'âme

La solitude est l’aphrodisiaque de l’esprit, comme la conversation celui de l’intelligence. (Le crépuscule des pensées)

ℇ- en effigie

'We found first that the law of causality, as usually stated by philosophers, is false, and is not employed in science.  We then considered the nature of scientific laws, and found that, instead of stating that one event A is always followed by another event B, they stated functional relations between certain events at certain times, which we called determinants, and other events at earlier or later times or at the same time.  We were unable to find any a priori category involved:  the existence of scientific laws appeared as a purely empirical fact, not necessarily universal, except in a trivial and scientifically useless form.  We found that a system with one set of determinants may very likely have other sets of a quite different kind, that, for example, a mechanically determined system may also be teleologically or volitionally determined. '

knowingness

'...when it comes to risk, you have to think for yourself. That’s the only way to cut through the noise. Society, in fact, needs to make a shift toward prioritizing understanding risk so that we don’t let the experts drive us crazy. “In the good old times people learned how to read and to write.  That’s no longer sufficient in the high tech twenty-first century,”'

superficies

 
..'une page, dans son système, doit, s'adressant au coup d'oeil qui précède et enveloppe la lecture, "intimer" le mouvement de la composition; faire pressentir, par une sorte d'intuition matérielle, par une harmonie préétablie entre nos divers modes de perception, ou entre les différences de marche de nos sens,- ce qui va se produire à l'intelligence.'

• 'The paper intervenes each time as an image, of itself, ends or begins once more, accepting a succession of others, and, since, as ever, it does nothing, of regular sonorous lines or verse – rather prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, the instant they appear, and as long as they last, in some precise intellectual performance, that is in variable positions, nearer to or further from the implicit guiding thread, because of the verisimilitude the text imposes.' 

 'Il introduit une lecture superficielle, qu'il enchaîne à la lecture linéaire; c'était enrichir le domaine littéraire d'une deuxième dimension.(Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard)' 

réalisme magique

'...Poètes et mendiants, musiciens et prophètes, guerriers et racaille, tous créatures de cette réalité effrénée, n’avons eu que peu de choses à demander de notre imagination, car le défi principal pour nous a été de rendre notre vie crédible sans avoir assez de ressources conventionnelles pour y arriver ..'. 

•  The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England.  These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales.

Transcendence

'...but even now we barely begin to understand the most rudimentary facts about human personality. Is the self unitary, or is it a shifting collection of fragments, turning inward upon themselves in a recursive illusion? Do our personalities persist through time, or are we a sandpile of our own unreliable memories? It is trite to say that one is not the same person now as twenty years ago. How about five minutes ago?'

des éclairs

Les époques travaillées par l’interrogation métaphysique demeurent les moments culminants, les vrais sommets du passé. (Écartèlement)

understandingly

 

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

Bertrand Russell, "Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?", 1947

bronze, iron, and digital

'..Great city-destroying quarrels begin with what turn out, to be, in retrospect, absurdly flimsy reasons. Modern historians will doubtless try to attach deeper causes to the quarrels—just as Hammurabi may have returned his shoes in a symbolic gesture of refusal, perhaps the braying hippo was a conventional cultural code for some other, economic quarrel. But our own experience suggests the reverse: people with money and power are annoyed when their shoes don’t quite fit; great powers come to grief over the noise a hippo makes, or is thought to make, even when the moat is nowhere near the palace.'

persuasion

'...Orwell and Kafka may be cliches, argues Hitchens, because the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states are cliches. It's as though they used 1984 as an instruction manual.'