This philosophical anthropology tries to explore the basic categories of man’s being in the worlds using a special quantum meta-ontology that is introduced in the book. Quantum understanding of space and time, consciousness, or empirical/nonempirical reality elicits new questions relating to philosophical concerns such as subjectivity, free will, mind, perception, experience, dialectic, or agency. The authors have developed an inspiring theoretical framework transcending the boundaries of particular disciplines, e.g. quantum philosophy, metaphysics of consciousness, philosophy of mind, phenomenology of space and (...) time, and ontological relativity. (shrink)

In his discussions of life as narrative, and identity as narrative identity, Paul Ricoeur has claimed that we learn to become narrators and heroes of our own stories, without actually becoming the authors of our own lives. This idea, that we cannot be the author of our own life-story in the same way that the author of fictional narrative is the author of that story, seems at first incontestable, given that we are caught up within the enactment of the narrative (...) that is our life, unlike the author of a fictional story who also has an independent existence outside that story. This asymmetry leads Ricoeur to pronounce that an ineradicable difference exists between fictional and life narratives. But is this difference in fact ineffaceable, or is there a sense in which we can be said to be the authors of our own lives? In this article I suggest that there are more points of similarity than Ricoeur explicitly recognizes between what authors do in writing fictional narratives and what we do in figuring, prospectively, our lives. These similarities are brought to light by a revision of the naïve, received concept of author and, once acknowledged, serve to bridge the purportedly ‘unbridgeable gap’ between fictional narratives and life narratives. I then consider how bridging this gap — establishing ourselves as authors as well as narrators — has ethical implications with regard to creating our own lives: a creation which authoring implies, but which is — given the revised notion of author — limited, both by the reciprocity of the other as co-author and by those events in life which the life-author is not fully able to plot. (shrink)

1. Phenomenology is first and foremost about intentionality. As Husserl puts it, “Intentionality is the name of the problem encompassed by the whole of phenomenology”.1 Broadly understood, the phen...

In the present paper, I shall argue that the book which Deleuze terms rhizomatic is a type of “open work”, namely a work that comprises its recipient's intervention as an encoder. It is distinguished, however, from Eco's and Ingarden's poetics – as well as from Gadamer's hermeneutics – in that the recipient actually inscribes. He inscribes in the sense that the book is “hybrid”, consisting of both semiotic text and the actual body and actions of an empirical – rather then (...) an implied – reader. I will introduce an example of a hybrid work in the form of Jewish scripture. Developing the book's unique mise en abyme and the interrelated trait of “transcoding” which Deleuze ascribes to it, I shall finally argue that rather than a “heterocosm”, the diegetic level of the hybrid work is empirical reality itself, although at a level which Deleuze terms “diagrammatical”. (shrink)

Today we come across new media art projects as post-industrial art services that occur at the intersection of contemporary art, new economy, post-political politics (activism, hacktivism), technosciences and techno lifestyles. The artwork is not a stable object anymore, it is a process, an artistic software, an experience, a service devoted to solving a particular (cultural and non-cultural) problem, a research, an interface which demands from its user also the ability for associative selection, algorithmic (logical) thinking and for procedures pertaining to (...) DJ and VJ culture, such as mixing, cutting, sampling and recombination. The art service is not so much the manufacturing of things as it is a process of reshaping the thing, moving it, repurposing it, connecting it and incorporating it into new contexts and relations. The service presupposes a problem, a challenge or an order to be solved or carried out. The performer of the service is always faced with a certain task, challenged to solve it in a sequence of steps, chosen as economically as possible. The service therefore ends with a solution of the problem (or its removal) and not with the manufacturing of a finished object. The service always implies an algorithmic procedure that has to be as rational as possible, economical, divided into phases, steps, instructions needed for it to be carried out. By defining the new media art in terms of post-industrial service activity, the traditional concepts of aesthetic and autonomous art are left behind and replaced with novel theoretical devices, e.g. software, repurposing, remixing, recombination, rewriting and hybridization. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis article compares the corresponding effects in science and art of a change in the intuition of time at the beginning of this century. McTaggart's distinction between linear time and tense time is applied to the question of whether linear perspective requires a notion of time as succession. It is argued that the problem of self-representation is a basic problem for this kind of uniform space-time because of the contradiction between this model's need for a privileged point of view (...) and its simultaneous denial of such a possibility. (shrink)