Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Polychronique"

Abstract This article examines the work of the fifth-century bishop and brother of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Polychronius of Apamea (d. ca. 430), in light of extant writings from the second-century Greek grammarian, Aelius Herodianus. It studies a fragment from Polychronius’ prologue to his commentary on Job titled Causes for the Obscurity in the Divine Scriptures, identifies a philological analogue in the work of Herodian, and in so doing, highlights their grammatical training and shared concern with τόνοι (accents) in the interpretation of a text. The analysis shows that Polychronius’ employment of grammatical technique in understanding Christian scripture is of no less value to the Christian bishop than it is to the Greek grammarian, Herodian, in his understanding of Greek classics. For Polychronius, the “obscurity in the divine scriptures” can be resolved with the tools of Greek grammatical theory.

We present a minimal spiking network that can polychronize, that is, exhibit reproducible time-locked but not synchronous firing patterns with millisecond precision, as in synfire braids. The network consists of cortical spiking neurons with axonal conduction delays and spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP); a ready-to-use MATLAB code is included. It exhibits sleeplike oscillations, gamma (40 Hz) rhythms, conversion of firing rates to spike timings, and other interesting regimes. Due to the interplay between the delays and STDP, the spiking neurons spontaneously self-organize into groups and generate patterns of stereotypical polychronous activity. To our surprise, the number of coexisting polychronous groups far exceeds the number of neurons in the network, resulting in an unprecedented memory capacity of the system. We speculate on the significance of polychrony to the theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS, neural Darwinism), cognitive neural computations, binding and gamma rhythm, mechanisms of attention, and consciousness as “attention to memories.”

En donnant à cette étude le titre d’« anachronirisme », on se propose d’explorer sous plusieurs angles les rapports du rêve et du temps. Seront envisagés successivement l’ubiquité temporelle du rêve, message prophétique ou archaïque ; la polychronie , mettant en présence des époques incompatibles ; la désynchronisation de la durée onirique et du temps physique du sommeil, objet des tentatives de chronométrage ; l’ana-chronisme lié au caractère non chronologique du rêve quand on le suppose monté à rebours , voire en parallèle ; enfin l’anachronisme défini comme trompe-l’œil temporel dans les conceptions qui soustraient franchement le rêve à l’ordre du temps. Loin de prétendre à une histoire des traités du rêve au temps, l’article esquisse un simple florilège de questions à travers les siècles qui valent encore. Le geste lui-même anachronique du florilège n’est peut-être pas sans rapport avec le projet de faire de la réflexion sur le rêve un des paradigmes de la notion d’anachronisme.

The article attempts to prove that, besides the numerous studies about the South Slavic history of culture and literature, Polychronie Sârcu paid a special attention towards the spiritual legacy of the Romanian Bessarabians and particularly towards the history of the Căpriana Monastery, where he received his primary schooling. His works on the history of Russian-Romanian cultural relations, the role of Romanians as a link between the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans and the Eastern Slavic world were highly appreciated. He presented this role of Romanian culture in a special course at the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. Simultaneously with the study of the old Bulgarian literature, he also paid attention to the Romanian medieval manuscript heritage. Some of these codices and documents were published by P. Sârcu or included in his collection of manuscripts. The materials he accumulated in the Romanian lands are described in the present article. Such scientific interests fully justify the opinion of the authors, who equally appreciate Polihronie Sârcu not only as a Slavist, but also as a Romanian scholar.

This article aims to analyze the role of intellectuals in times of a global pandemic, whereby their discourse is assumed as a counterbalance to the hegemony of experts. It takes as a case study several exemplar speeches by Noam Chomsky, linguist and political activist, which were produced since the beginning of March 2020 regarding Covid-19. We will try to show that what marks Chomsky’s discourse is related to the ethos (Maingueneau 2020) of an “intellectual engagement” (Bourdieu 2003). Within the universe of possibilities for choosing intellectuals’ speeches, who are not necessarily convergent on topics affecting the world, and who, in general, don’t talk about the same things, we chose to circumscribe our research on a specific intellectual: Noam Chomsky. In our view, he is an actual example of “intellectual action”, representing properly “the relations between intellectuals and power” (Bobbio 1997). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the statements of intellectuals like Chomsky in moments of global uncertainty, and as a discourse of a different nature that stands against the experts’ power in major media corporations or in government technocracy. Thus, far from wanting to exhaust the possibilities of interpreting the role of the wider category of intellectuals during the pandemic, our proposal is to outline the main points of how an intellectual like Chomsky has been developing and taking the same political positions since the beginning of his activism, in the 1960s, which refers to a type of intellectual engagement similar to that taken since the Dreyfus Affair. In the Dreyfus Affair we have an “inaugural archetype” of the concept of an “engaged intellectual” (Bourdieu 2003, p. 73–74), from which the one who has social capital as an erudite, a scientist or a writer, comes out publicly criticizing the established powers and denounces crimes committed by “the reasons of State” (Chomsky 1973). Therefore, we understand that Chomsky comes from a lineage whose representatives are inserted into a form of intellectual activism; a lineage that became known as “the century of intellectuals” (Winock 2000), the intellectual conceived as the one who “tells the truth”, as Chomsky (1996, p. 55) himself define the “intellectual's responsibility”: “At one level, the answer is too easy: the intellectual responsibility of the writer, or any decent person, is to tell the truth.” On the one hand, there is a patent argument of authority behind the experts, based on a “scientific discourse”, but, on the other hand, there is a kind of “moral commitment to the truth” behind the intellectuals' discourse that becomes a “deeper criticism”. That is, a holistic view to ponder, in the case of Covid-19, the humanitarian problems created due to the pandemic, but also to think about relating this crisis to previous and further geopolitical reasons, from a freer position, not committed to companies and States. This position of the intellectual engagement is idealized in opposition to the “normal science discourse”: the genre of the scientific discourse is produced under official means; it is plastered, blunted, does not allow the spokespeople of science to speak beyond what their research allows. In other words, the scientific experts are inscribed in discursive structures of “scenes of enunciation” (Maingueneau, 2006) that don’t permit them to surpass the barriers of “objectiveness” and enter the field of moral judgment. Seeking to understand how Chomsky acts as an engaged intellectual during the pandemic, we searched his political network and the media in which he is involved. From that, we chose our corpus of analysis, selected from Noam Chomsky’s innumerous speeches to a left-wing or clearly progressive press during the first months of Covid-19 pandemic in the form of interviews from March to June: an interview to Michael Brooks (2020), at the Jacobin Magazine (Brooks, M. 2020); an interview with his longtime interviewer, David Barsamian (2020), an Armenian-American journalist and political activist, published on the website Literary Hub; an interview with the British socialist newspaper Morning Star (2020); two interviews he gave to Amy Goodman (2020a, 2020b) for the American journal Democracy Now; an interview with the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat (2020), from which we will use only the parts of the transcript that we found published by Al Jazeera and not the video; an interview to the writer Chris Brooks to the magazine Labor Notes, channel for the proletarian movement; an interview to Cristina Magdaleno (2020) for the Euroactiv, a non-profit organization for democracy in European Union, as well as an interview Chomsky and Robert Pollin gave to C. J. Polychroniou (2020). We believe that through this corpus it is possible to cover the vast majority of Chomsky's speeches on the Covid-19 pandemic, centered on media where Chomsky usually features and that name themselves as having a more progressive bias. We assume that what gives Chomsky’s speech authority to talk about the pandemic, to be invited multiple times to do so, is not his expertise in the subject; it is not his background in epidemiology studies, which he lacks, neither his linguistics theories, that do not relate to the topic, but his image as a great surviving intellectual. It’s to say, what authorizes Chomsky to speak and, therefore, to make his contribution to the studies of this pandemic situation, is not what interests the State, or what would lead the actions of government officials, as they are in general centered on the discourse of experts. Instead, it is his trajectory as a critic without corporate scruples, engaged in telling another kind of “truth”, as one that can discuss and propose a different future for humanity. So, with this article we intended to produce a discussion about the following problem: the type of discourse raised by Chomsky is not that of government experts, men of science who must anchor themselves in statistical studies on disease proliferation curves, researchers who need to give prevention guidelines or economists who provide “get out of the crisis” scenarios. In other words, differently from a biologist, a disease proliferation specialist or a market administrator, Chomsky conceives the pandemic beyond Covid-19, as a long-term crisis, which will cover economic, social and environmental aspects of much greater proportions. In short, with this article we seek to understand how Chomsky assumes himself as a spokesman for all of humanity and how he constructs this position discursively. He is concerned with “bigger problems”, not diminishing the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, but insisting on the fact that global warming and the economic crisis created by the debacle of neoliberalism, as well as nuclear war menaces, are much greater threats to human species survival and the maintenance of the planet. We also bring an overview of three important intellectuals who also acted and contributed their reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic during its inception. They are Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Byung-Chul Han. The purpose of incorporating these distinct views is, in the first instance, to compare to what extent they may resemble the Chomskyan discourse, but also to show how intellectual discourse is constructed in times of a global pandemic in the face of the discourses of health experts or specialists who occupy the spaces of intellectual speech authority.

L'œuvre de l'architecte Alberto Ponis s'inscrit à un moment charnière (1960 - 1980) durant lequel l'architecture dite vernaculaire devient une source d'inspiration pour de nombreux architectes. Son œuvre est riche d'un ensemble de 300 maisons. Ponis invente ainsi une nouvelle culture architecturale en développant une démarche ethnographique, les données qu'il récolte deviennent la source d'inspiration pour ses projets. Il semble ainsi engager une décélération contraire à la pratique qu'il menait jusque-là en confirmant le constat que la modernité engendre une crise de notre expérience du temps : La temporalité linéaire, vectorielle, homogène et continue se découvre parfois cyclique, répétitive, hétérogène et discontinue.Les projets de Ponis sont constitués d'idées héritées, chacun étant un montage de références. Son modus operandi révèle des influences venant de contextes et époques variés. Les maisons qu'il conçoit sont des agencements de temporalités multiples (temps cosmologique, géologique, biologique, historique, social, vécu, etc…) produisant un tout signifiant. Nous proposons de faire le récit de cet agencement avec quelques maisons que nous interprétons comme diverses figures de temporalités multiples : figure évolutionniste, figure des survivances ou figure géologique. L'objectif de cette thèse est de mieux comprendre et faire le récit de l'agencement des temporalités multiples à l'œuvre dans certaines réalisations de l'architecte Alberto Ponis.Nous retenons pour notre étude quatre maisons que nous avons sélectionnées suivant des critères spécifiques : position charnière dans la chronologie de son œuvre, réception par la critique architecturale, diffusions récentes, disponibilité des matériaux d'étude, etc… Pour opérer ces études, nous employons différents instruments d'analyse critique que nous empruntons à d'autres disciplines telles que l'histoire de l'art ou l'histoire littéraire. Enfin, le travail de terrain fait partie intégrante de notre démarche d'enquête. Plusieurs séjours en Sardaigne à la rencontre d'Alberto Ponis, de ses archives et de ces maisons sont nécessaires.Concevant une architecture toujours plus fusionnelle avec le site, son imaginaire s'inscrit dans le temps long et devient « géologique » (Ponis 2023). Par ce décentrement vers la géologie (Gaillardet 2023), vers cette attention aux choses (Verbeek 2005), il propose une nouvelle manière d'habiter le pays et le temps sarde. Ponis composerait ainsi des « temps-paysages » (Bensaude-Vincent 2021), c'est-à-dire qu'il replongerait les actions humaines dans les cycles multiples qui régissent l'histoire de la Terre. Aussi, cette étude témoigne que la manipulation des temporalités par les architectes passe par une mise en récit du monde dans lequel ils construisent, permettant par la médiation de la temporalité narrative la figuration du développement de l'expérience qui semble disparaitre (Ricoeur 1983 ; Hamel 2006).Cette attention « au paysage construit sans précédent culturel » (Smith 1966) semble être l'une des préoccupations majeures de Ponis depuis les années 1970. Il procède à un examen sensible des précédents géologiques pour concevoir ses projets. La narration qu'il produit avec ses constructions et qu'il dispense depuis dans différents entretiens, répond à la nécessité de la mise en récit de l'activité humaine pour vivre l'expérience du temps.Une analyse critique de la réception récente des travaux de Ponis et de son discours complète notre recherche. L'intérêt pour son œuvre éclaire a fortiori nos préoccupations face aux temps de crises (Serres 2009) et les nouvelles limites de la pratique architecturale
The work of architect Alberto Ponis dates back to a period (1960-1980) when vernacular architecture became a source of inspiration for many architects. His work includes a collection of 300 houses. Ponis pioneered a new architectural culture by developing an ethnographic approach, and the data he collected became the source of inspiration for his projects. In this way, he seems to be undertaking a deceleration that runs counter to his previous practice, confirming the observation that modernity is generating a crisis in our experience of time: the linear, vectorial, homogeneous and continuous temporality is sometimes found to be cyclical, repetitive, heterogeneous and discontinuous.Ponis's projects are made up of inherited ideas, each one a montage of references. His modus operandi reveals influences from a variety of contexts and periods. The houses he designs are arrangements of multiple temporalities (cosmological, geological, biological, historical, social, lived experience, etc.) producing a meaningful whole. We propose to narrate the story of this arrangement with a few houses that we interpret as various figures of multiple temporalities: the evolutionism figure, the survival figure or the geological figure. The aim of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of the multiple temporalities at work in some of the buildings designed by the architect Alberto Ponis.We have selected four houses for study based on to specific criteria: their pivotal position in the chronology of his work, their reception by architectural critics, their recent distribution, the availability of study materials, etc. To carry out these studies, we are employing various instruments of critical analysis borrowed from other disciplines such as art history or literary history. Finally, fieldwork is an integral part of our investigative approach. Several trips to Sardinia to meet Alberto Ponis, to explore his archives and these houses were necessary.By designing an architecture that is increasingly fused with the site, his imagination takes a long-term view and becomes “geological” (Ponis 2023). Through this decentring towards geology (Gaillardet 2023), towards this attention to things (Verbeek 2005), he proposes a new way of inhabiting the country and Sardinian time. Ponis thus composes “landscape-time” (Bensaude-Vincent 2021), in other words, he immerses human actions in the multiple cycles that govern the history of the Earth. This study also shows that the manipulation of temporalities by architects involves putting the world in which they are building into a narrative, making it possible, through the mediation of narrative temporality, to depict the development of experience that seems to be disappearing (Ricoeur 1983; Hamel 2006).This attention to “the built landscape without cultural precedent” (Smith 1966) seems to have been one of Ponis's major preoccupations since the 1970s. He makes a sensitive examination of geological precedents when designing his projects. The narrative that he produces with his constructions, and which he has since shared in various interviews, responds to the need to put human activity into a narrative in order to experience time.A critical analysis of the recent reception of Ponis's work and his discourse concludes our research. Our interest in his work sheds light on our concerns in times of crisis (Serres 2009) and the new limits of architectural practice