The concept of irreducible complexity of a biological system was introduced by Behe [1] in 1996. His point of view is that an organism consisting of a finite, possibly very large, number of independent components, coupled together in some way, exhibits irreducible complexity if, by removing any of its components, the reduced system no longer functions meaningfully. Using the language of nonline...

Scholarship on early Chinese theories of " language " regularly treats the term ming 名 (name) as the equivalent of " word. " But there is a significant difference between a " word " and a " name. " 1 Moreover, while a " word " is often understood to mean a unit of language that is identifiable in its sameness across speech and writing, there is reason to believe that a ming was mainly used to m...

The case of Kant's Critique of Judgment offers a powerful example of the radical disruption of the metaphysical text, enacted by Bataille's major сoncepts. The analysis of the metaphor of economy in Kant, Bataille and Derrida suggests the crucial importance of Bataille's general economy—as the economy of loss—for deconstructing the Kantian conception of genius and the whole scheme of taste—as a...

This paper considers the relevance of the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida to geography’s engagements with both mainstream moral philosophy and poststructuralist theory. This relevance lies in the way in which their work unsettles the ascription of normative value to relations of proximity and distance. Distance is usually understood to be a medium of moral harm or indifference. In ...

According to the historical de"nition of philosophy among Western philosophers from Hegel to his anti-historical critics Levinas, Derrida, and Rorty, non-Western peoples have many intellectual practices but in a crucial sense they lack “philosophy.” !is absence meant for Hegel the want of a non-pictorial and abstract, cognitive, conceptual thinking; for later thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida, ...