[T]here is a way that those cultural influences flow through all the people who do any kind of serious work anyway. So you can’t really tell: When I get it from J.G. Ballard, does that mean I got it from de Chirico, because Ballard couldn’t have done it without him? If you’ve got it going on, it all flows together.
31 December 2010
If you've got it going on, it all flows together.
20 December 2010
We live among Palimpsests
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| Archimedes' Palimpsest |
Finally, we can't even conceive of a continuum of time. Every fragment exists by itself, and that's why we live among palimpsests, because finally all the work should fit into one whole, and express an entire perfect action, as Aristotle says, and it's impossible now, it's impossible, because of the breakage, there are pieces everywhere . . .
Seeing is like painting
Andy Clark, Being there: putting brain, body, and world together again:
Seeing, according to Noë (2004), is like painting. Painting is an ongoing process in which the eye probes the scene, then flicks back to the canvass, then back to the scene, and so on in a dense cycle of active exploration and partial, iterated cognitive uptake. It is this cycle of situated, world-engaging activity that constitutes the act of painting. Seeing (and more generally, perceiving) is likewise constituted, Noë claims, by a process of active exploration in which the sense organs repeatedly probe the world, delivering partial and restricted information on a need-to-know basis. This cycle of situated, world-engaging, whole animal activity is the locus, on Noë’s account, of genuine cognitive interest, at least for perceptual experience. According to such a view, “Perception is not something that happens to us or in us, it is something we do” (Noë 2004, 1). Let’s call this the Strong Sensorimotor Model (SSM) of perceptual experience.
Velasquez, Las Meninas
The SSM does not merely claim that you need an active body as a platform for perceiving. Rather, the interesting claim is that skillful bodily action and perception are in some sense intimately entangled or intermingled. The starting point here is the correct and important observation that perception is active:
Think of a blind person tap-tapping his or her way around a cluttered space, perceiving that space by touch, not all at once, but through time, by skilful probing and movement. This is, or at least ought to be, our paradigm of what perceiving is. (Noë 2004, 1)
Expanding on this, Noë adds that
all perception is touch-like in this way: perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession of bodily skills. What we perceive is determined by what we do (or what we know how to do); it is determined by what we are ready to do . . . we enact our perceptual experience: we act it out. (2004, 1, emphasis in original)
An important implication of this, according to Noë, is that appeals to internal representations (if such there be) cannot tell the whole story either for painting or for seeing:
The causally sufficient substrate of the production of the picture is surely not the internal states of the painter, but rather the dynamic pattern of engagement among the painter, the scene and the canvass. Why not say the same thing about seeing? Seeing, on this approach, would depend on brain, body and world. (2004, 223)
Recovering Lost Knowledge
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| Fragment of a previously unknown epic poem by Simonides about the Greeks’ victory against the Persians at Plataea |
The aim of this site is to experiment tools and devise methods for representing fragments of lost works, i.e. ancient texts that have survived only through quotations preserved by other authors.
Print collections of fragmentary texts are collections of textual excerpts drawn from many different sources and arranged according to various criteria, such as chronological order or thematic disposition. The length of these excerpts can be significantly different from one edition to another and depends on the editor’s choice. The aim of a digital collection of fragmentary texts is to go beyond the limits of print collections and express fragmentary sources in a more dynamic and interconnected way.
10 December 2010
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