A ROAD TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM
EDITORIAL
A pivot of philosophical epistemology from Kant onwards, the concept of synthesis in all its practical, theoretical, and methodological meanings does not yet seem to have found a satisfactory description and definition. It is Kant’s merit to have identified in the idea of synthesis – understood as something different from that of mere reversal of the analysis – one of the central questions of philosophy. Leggi tutto »
Kant’s definition of the distinction between analysis and synthesis and his attempts to find an a priori synthetic type of judgment have been criticized several times during the past two centuries. However, successive amendments and critiques failed at both giving an account of the Kantian distinction that would fit with the development of knowledge and science or to finding a serious alternative to the explicative power of the distinction. Leggi tutto »
We study the concept of border/frontier under non-analytical perspectives (reverse, continuity, mediation), and we situate Riemann’s surfaces (1850), Peirce’s continuum (1890) and Grothendieck’s categorical archetypes (1960) under those three perspectives. We further present sheaf logic as a mediation between logical (analytical) and topological (synthetical) polarities, which helps to better understand some border/frontier problems, and to expand reason beyond purely linguistic constraints.
This article aims to analyze the concept of integration, introduced by the American philosopher and sociologist Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) in her writings composed in the early decades of the twentieth century. The concept of integration will be discussed in four steps. Leggi tutto »
This article suggests the idea of a “creative synthesis” to describe the complex relationship between literature and knowledge. The first part of the article summarizes and discusses some paradigmatic positions on this problem, emphasizing literature’s capacity to articulate non-propositional experiences. Leggi tutto »
In this paper, I argue that complex time (with real plus imaginary components) could be a key to some of the most virulent problems in the artistic reality of music, namely the nature of artistic consciousness and creativity, especially in the performing perspective of music. The performing musician faces a complex combination of memory, technique, gestures, and the balance in the famous temporal καιρός between past and future moments. Successful musical performance is a highly creative and complex activity. Leggi tutto »
In this paper I propose to consider synthesis as the starting point of knowledge, instead of the common perception that consider synthesis as the arrival compromise between a series of data. In doing this, I took the poetical experience – specially T.S. Eliot’s experience and his former studies of philosophy – as a paradigm of this process, Leggi tutto »