Definitions I NNJOYY

A good definition: something that is broad yet specific

Nature - The realization of the possible - Simondon

State - That entity which has a monopoly on the exercise of violence - Weber

Politics - Dealing with your situation. Political leadership - defining the situation; giving a definition of the situation that a majority find acceptable. - Rajaratnam

Anthropology - Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. - Unknown

Substance - That which depends on nothing else for its existence. - Descartes

Observation - The channel by which theory makes contact with reality - Peter Godfrey-Smith

Logical coherence - For every logically coherent system, there must be at least one theorem that the system cannot prove, in order for that system to be true in its own terms - Godel's incompleteness theorem

Sensing - The promise of sentience. So we have to imagine that any thing which has the capacity to sense its environment - say a cell - is also sentient. There are aliens within us and among us - Merleau-Ponty

Freedom - A matter of how willingly people do what society requires of them anyway - Durkheim

Dependence - 3 kinds: causal: a sprout depends on water, sunshine, soil etc. to grow; mereological: a thing depends on its parts for its existence eg a book and the pages of the book; notional or conceptual dependence eg. long and short, thick and thin - what is long maybe short in another context or instance - Various

Rationality versus reason: increasingly defined by cybernetics as a series of optimal solutions to problems arising from the inherent fallibility of the latter - Francisco Nunes

Propositions: Not statements about the world made by conscious humans but mutual relations between any 2 things in which the 2 things articulate each other more fully - Whitehead

Religion: Moral Poetry - George Santayana

Poetry: What is most real, completely true, only in another world - Baudelaire

Representation: To represent is to practice division: to divide representer from the represented; subject and object; signifier and signified - John Law

Limit: The first thing outside which nothing is to be found and the first thing inside which everything is to be found - Ranajit Guha

Reality: That which we cannot afford to ignore is real. So it can be something you hold in your hand or your head, it doesn't matter. - Michael Levin

Communism: Contrary to mythical belief the earliest forms of money were not invented to deal with the inefficiencies of barter but was invented to track debts owed to the King, temples etc. Thus communism can be thought of as a society that is organized around sharing resources rather than one organized around settling debts. - David Graeber

Language completes thought - Merleau-Ponty: So language is neither a container/ vehicle for thought nor a representation of thought but something which completes it (since thoughts must have existed prior to language).