Palle Yourgrau: A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of mathematics, mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, physics, science, special relativity, theory of relativity, time, vienna circle
In 1942, the logician Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein became close friends; they walked to and from their offices every day, exchanging ideas about science, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German science. By 1949, Gödel had produced a remarkable proof: In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist. Einstein endorsed this result reluctantly but he could find no way to refute it, since then, neither has anyone else. Yet cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded as if this discovery was never made. In A World Without Time, Palle Yourgrau sets out to restore Gödel to his rightful place in history, telling the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue the brilliant work they did together.
Publisher Basic Books, New York, 2005
ISBN 0465092934
210 pages
review (Kelley L. Ross)
PDF (83 MB)
Comment (0)Ruth Hagengruber (ed.): Emilie Du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, enlightenment, history of science, mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, physics, science
Emilie du Châtelet was one of the most influential woman philosophers of the Enlightenment. Her writings on natural philosophy, physics, and mechanics had a decisive impact on important scientific debates of the 18th century. Particularly, she took an innovative and outstanding position in the controversy between Newton and Leibniz, one of the fundamental scientific discourses of that time.
The contributions in this volume focus on this “Leibnitian turn”. They analyze the nature and motivation of Emilie du Châtelet’s synthesis of Newtonian and Leibnitian philosophy. Apart from the Institutions Physiques they deal with Emilie du Châtelet’s annotated translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia.
The chapters presented here collectively demonstrate that her work was an essential contribution to the mediation between empiricist and rationalist positions in the history of science.
This is the first publication on this particular aspect of Châtelet studies: Founding Physics in Metaphysics – against Newton und Maupertuis’s empiricism, as well as the first publication on a woman philosopher, physicist and mathematician of the 18th century.
Publisher Springer, 2012
Volume 205 of International Archives of the History of Ideas
ISBN 9400720939, 9789400720930
253 pages
Tiqqun: Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999–) [EN, DE]
Filed under book | Tags: · biopolitics, biopower, body, capitalism, consumerism, desire, feminism, labour, love, metaphysics, philosophy, reification, seduction, sexuality, theory
“First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society’s total product and model citizen: whatever “type” of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women’s magazines, rooted in Proust’s figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski’s notion of “living currency” and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses — and makes visible — a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.
In the years since the book’s first publication in French, the worlds of fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and social media exchanges of “personalities” within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumer society’s colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl’s “freedom” (in magazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.” (from Semiotexte, the publisher of the 2012 edition)
Announcement and discussion about the translation
Commentary (Rob Horning, 2012)
More commentaries (compiled by 1000 Little Hammers, 2013)
Originally published in French as Premiers matériaux pour une Théorie de la Jeune-Fille in Tiqqun 1, 1999
Revised, republished by Éditions Mille et une nuits, 2001.
Translator unknown
Published on younggirl.jottit.com, Jan 2010
PDF (2010)
HTML (2010)
HTML (2012 edition, trans. Ariana Reines, Preliminaries + Chapters 6 & 7)
German edition (2009)