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The Process That Is the World grapples with John Cage not just as a composer, but as a philosopher advocating for an ontology of difference in keeping with the kind posited by Gilles Deleuze. Cage's philosophy is not simply a novel method for composition, but an extensive argument about the nature of reality itself, the construction of subjects within that reality, and the manner in which subjectivity and a self-creative world exist in productive tension with one another. Over the course of the study, these themes are developed in the realms of the ontology of a musical work, performance practices, ethics, and eventually a study of Cagean politics and the connection between aesthetic experience and the generation of new forms of collective becoming-together. The vision of Cage that emerges through this study is not simply that of the maverick composer or the “inventor of genius,” but of a thinker and artist responding to insights about the world-as-process as it extends through the philosophical, artistic, and ethical registers: the world as potential for variance, reinvention, and permanent revolution.

In 1932, world-renowned physicist Wolfgang Pauli had already done the work that would win him the 1945 Nobel Prize. He was also suffering after a series of troubling personal events. He was drinking heavily, quarrelling frequently, and experiencing powerful, disturbing dreams. Pauli turned to C. G. Jung for help, forging an extraordinary intellectual conjunction not just between a physicist and a psychologist but between physics and psychology. As their acquaintance developed, Jung and Pauli discussed the nature of dreams and their relation to reality, finding surprising common ground between depth psychology and quantum physics and profoundly influencing each other's work.

Text pochází z Kacířských esejí. Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin jsou Patočkovo vrcholné dílo. Ústí sem všechno dosavadní filosofovo myšlení o dějinách. Shrnuje se tu i Patočkovo myšlení fenomenologické: jde o to učinit zjevným fenomén dějina zároveň - v závěrečné syntéze obou Patočkových učitelů, Husserla i Heideggera - zasadit do něj lidskou existenci v porozumění konkrétnímu životu ve společenství, ve světě, v dějinách.

One of the most fundamental developments in the history of our species—and one having among the most profound impacts on landscapes and the people occupying them—was the domestication of plants and animals. In addition to altering landscapes around the globe from the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene, the shift from foraging to farming resulted in negative and multiple consequences for human health. Study of human skeletal remains from archaeological contexts shows that the introduction of grains and other cultigens and the increase in their dietary focus resulted in a decline in health and alterations in activity and lifestyle. Although agriculture provided the economic basis for the rise of states and development of civilizations, the change in diet and acquisition of food resulted in a decline in quality of life for most human populations in the last 10,000 years.

James C. Scott investigates a major question in human history: ‘‘How did urban civilization arise?’’ [...] As Scott notes, ‘‘the sequence of progress from hunting and gathering to nomadism to agriculture (and from band to village to town to city) was settled doctrine’’ (9). It was held by philosophers and thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Locke to Vico to Spengler and the social Darwinists (9). Scott casts doubt on the received view, mobilizing recent discoveries and new methods that have provided striking evidence against this long-standing narrative: The narrative of this process has typically been told as one of progress, of civilization and public order, and of increasing health and leisure. Given what we now know, much of this narrative is wrong or seriously misleading. The purpose of this book is to call that narrative into question on the basis of my reading of the advances in archaeological and historical research of the past two decades.

The essay translated here, “Die Stadt als Wellental in der Bilderflut,” appeared in Die Revolutionen der Bilder: Der Flusser-Reader zu Kommuni-kation, Medien, und Design. Written in 1988, it illustrates some of Flusser’s most advanced thinking on the topic of human subjectivity in relation to tech-nology and media. It also locates him in relation to an intellectual current in German social theory, seen most notably in Luhmann’s work, that draws heavily upon cybernetics and systems theory. Flusser’s concept of the subject as a “knot ”of relations, as the intersection of various “channels ”of information, out of which the “net ” of a city is formed, parallels similar concepts developed by...

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is a 1998 book by the biologist E. O. Wilson, in which the author discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might in the future unite them with the humanities. Wilson uses the term consilience to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor.

The book is a collection of dreams for how we [publishers] want text to evolve as well as how we understand our current textual infrastructures, how we view the history of writing, and much more. The aim is to make it inspire a powerfully rich future of text in a multitude of ways today and to still have value in a thousand years and beyond. It should serve as a record for how we saw the medium of text and how it relates to our world, our problems and each other in the early twenty first century. We know so precious little about the potential of text. Our great ancestors adapted when faced with new landscapes. For them it was adapt or die. We have entered cyberspace–an entirely new information landscape. It is no different for us. The cost of investing in the future of high, but the cost of not investing is higher, in terms of opportunities for understanding lost and fake news spread.