Potentialities

This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays spanning more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher and author of State of Exception. Giorgio Agamben is one of contemporary philosophy’s most influential thinkers on the subjects of language, power, society. This collection of essays opens with an enlightening introduction by the translator Daniel Heller-Roazen, who situates Agamben’s work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts organize the collection as a whole: the existence of language; the nature of history; and the problem of potentiality in metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben offers an extensive reading of Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility and reality, in a new light.

Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the design process entails three main shifts in the way we approach architecture: its movement from an abstracted mode of codification to the formation of its image, the emergence of the informed object as a statistical model rather than a fixed entity and the increasing porosity of the architectural discipline to other fields of knowledge. Instabilities and Potentialities aims to bridge theoretical and practical approaches in digital architecture.

Membrane Contactors: Fundamentals, Applications and Potentialities, Volume 11 covers new operations that could be efficiently used to improve the performance of a variety of industrial production cycles in applications ranging from biotechnology to agrofood. This book focuses on the basic "principles of work": required membrane materials and properties; major operating parameters; the importance of module configuration and design and; the performance of membrane contactors in specific processes. The authors’ dynamic approach to this subject makes Membrane Contactors: Fundamentals, Applications and Potentialities, Volume 11 the most comprehensive book currently available on all aspects related to the 'membrane contactor world. * Describes new unit operations in process engineering * Covers a wide variety of industrial applications, from biotechnology to agrofood * Applicable to process intensification and sustainable growth strategies

This book emphasises the systemic character of Aristotle's philosophy by examining questions on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy and mind and ethics. His reliance on dialectic as the method of philosophy appears to conflict with the metaphysical realist view of his conclusions.

This book discusses the reality of human being by pointing out some of the very fundamental issues that remain hidden from the eyes of the modern and post-modern western thought. By elaborating Mulla Sadra’s concept of Soul’s origination from the body and its survival through the Spirit, this book explains how the human soul develops stage by stage in a gradual manner from a vegetative body in the womb. By using Mulla Sadra’s principles of causality, this book shows how God and his Angels create man and other species on the Earth without denying Darwin’s evolutionary theory. In this reference, the role of metaphysical worlds in actualizing human knowledge is also discussed. This book also shows how the human life is a journey back towards its origin i.e. towards God and how this journey would continue even after death. In this reference, this book also explains the principles on the basis of which human soul would continue its life in the post-humus world. This book also clarifies the benefits of focusing onto the self and how this focus may lead to the realization of the Eternal Self of God. In this way, it shows how it is not impossible to experience the post-humus conditions even before death. It also specifies what kind of lifestyle may possibly ensure the occurrence of such mystic experiences.

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her starting point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: (1) Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; (2) formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and (3) semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects (and, crucially, not of possible worlds). This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years, it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean, powers-based metaphysics. The aim of Potentiality and Possibility is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics.