The Zolt-Gilburne Faculty Seminar https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination at Macaulay Honors College Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:10:36 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/var/www/webroot/ROOT/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2016/01/15140022/mhc_logo_NEW-favicon.png The Zolt-Gilburne Faculty Seminar https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination 32 32 The Nature and Dynamics of Entrepreneurship and Its Interplay with Imagination https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2010/04/10/the-nature-and-dynamics-of-entrepreneurship-and-its-interplay-with-imagination/ Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:10:36 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/?p=76 Ramona Kay Zachary

Entrepreneurs, their networks and entrepreneurial imagination come in a myriad of forms, types and sizes as well as exhibits many dimensions.  As a field of study, entrepreneurial research, education and practice have reached a nearly fifty-year pinnacle. Leading research suggests that a comprehensive perspective of entrepreneurial activities and players is emerging anew.  No longer is entrepreneurship seen as one individual pursuing a unique and promising idea, perhaps sprung from his or her imagination, for profits and wealth maximization.

Today, family and community networks supportive of entrepreneurial ideas and activities are seen as vital to nascent, startups, storefronts, and web-based enterprises as well as fundamental to business strategies, growth, performance and exits.  Entrepreneurship theories now suggest that imagination is a vital resource input into the process of creating, growing or exiting a business.  Imagination is a human and social resource as well as an expansive dimension of the processes fundamental to businesses, their owners, and their communities.

Surely imagination is one of the drivers of entrepreneurial phenomenon; however, little mention occurs in the literature and communication within the field.  In fact, many entrepreneurial startups can be one of three ideas/strategies: new market, new technology, or new benefit. Most entrepreneurial ventures, almost half, are developed and operationalized from existing ideas within an industry.  In other words, people learn about a skill or trade or industry and then see what new markets, new technology or new benefits might be created and they seek to implement their imaginations within their entrepreneurial network.  Entrepreneurship is not a singular domain of individual wealth creation but also includes lifestyle, artistry, not-for-profit, social responsibility as well as the general notion of sustainability for all parties involved, from families to our environmental infrastructure.

Indeed, entrepreneurial imagination is an engine of our economy, society and nation as well as a resource for all worldwide.

Selected References

Aldrich, H.E., and J. E. Cliff (2003), ‘The pervasive effects of family on entrepreneurship: Toward a family embeddedness perspective’, Journal of Business Venturing, 18, 573-596.

Bosma, N., and J. Levis (2009),  The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor: 2009 Global Report. MA: Babson College, The Authur M. Blank Center.

Danes, S. M., J. Lee, K. Stafford and R. K. Z. Heck (2008), ‘The effects of ethnicity, families and culture on entrepreneurial experience: An extension of Sustainable Family Business Theory’, Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship, 13(3), 229-268.

Heck, R. K. Z., Hoy, F., Poutziouris, P. Z., & Steier, L. P. (2008). Emerging paths of family entrepreneurship research. Journal of Small Business Management, 46(3), 317-330.

Ibrahim, A. B. and W. H. Ellis (2006), Family business management: Concepts and practice (2nd ed), Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.

Kets de Vries, M. “The Entrepreneurial Personality: A Person at the Cross Roads,” Journal of Management Studies XIV, 1977, pp. 34-57.

Longenecker, J. G., C. W. Moore, J. W. Petty, and L. E. Palich (2008), Small Business Management: Launching and Growing Entrepreneurial Ventures. U.S.: Thomson, South-Western.

Schumpeter, J. A. “Creative Destruction,” From Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975) [orig. pub. 1942], pp. 82-85.

Zachary, R. K., S. M. Danes, K. Stafford (Invited ERJ Review Article in preparation). “A Review of Models and Theories of the Family Firm: The Nature and Importance of the Business and the Family Dimensions,” Entrepreneurship Research Journal, forthcoming in 2011.

Zachary, R. K., Rogoff, E. G., & Phinisee, I. (2010). “Defining and Identifying Family Entrepreneurship Worldwide: A New View of Entrepreneurs,” Forthcoming in Minniti, M. (Ed.), Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Book, Part 2: Entrepreneurial Activity in Alternative Contexts. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

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A Social Basis for the Imagination? https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2010/04/10/a-social-basis-for-the-imagination/ Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:06:42 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/?p=74 Phil Kasinitz

We usually conceive of imagination and creativity in individualistic  terms.  Of course, we all know that the people who make imaginative breakthroughs are, like everyone else, parts social networks and rooted in traditions and histories—hence  the cliché about seeing further than others by “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Yet The question of why one person sees further or why someone is  able to put together established facts and ideas in new and different ways seems inherently individualistic. Indeed we imagine imagination to be almost magical: “the  spark,” “the ‘aha’ moment, ” “scales falling from our eyes” etc. We still, I think, don’t have a clear idea of what happens in that moment– which is why we resort to such metaphors to describe it–but  I do think we usually conceive of it as happening alone. The imaginative moment separates the imaginer from the ways things are usually done or usually thought about  by most people most of the time.

As a sociologist, which is to say, someone who studies what most people do most of the time, I have been struggling with what I might have to add to this discussion. I know that “imagination,” “creativity” and “genius” exist. I do not know where they come from. But I also know that certain social settings, certain historical moments and certain positions in social networks appear to be more conducive to imagination. There are times and places that seem to promote creativity and that  receive it and  reward it better than others.

In remainder of my short  talk I will draw on some of my own work to point to an example of one social group whose situation seems to promote creativity:  the  children of immigrants. This is a situation that as New Yorkers and as CUNY Professors I suspect we are all familiar with. Since the late 19th century reformers, social workers and immigrant  parents have  worried that young people “torn between two worlds” or caught “betwixt and between” two cultures will grow up unable to function well in either. Yet even a casual look at the history of  our City shows the  hugely disproportionate role that immigrants and particularly that their children have played  in making New York a center for innovation in the arts, science, scholarship and business. There are many reasons for this, of course. But one, I will argue, may be the spur to the imagination provided by being able to use more than one cultural system. Drawing on a large study of contemporary young adult New Yorkers I will suggest some ways in which this “second generation advantage” promotes creativity in everyday life.

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Imagining Musical Scales https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2010/03/09/imagining-musical-scales/ Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:14:25 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/?p=71 Norman Carey

Musical cultures adopt particular arrangements of tones as the alphabet in which musical works are written. Upon a second look, musical scales are not as obvious as they may seem. For example, naive listeners will hear the familiar do-re-mi “major” scale as comprising equally-spaced steps, like the rungs of a ladder (scala = staircase, ladder). The steps are, in fact, not all the same size. Until very recently, the origin of the major scale and other musical scales has been explained upon the basis of the overtone series. In particular, the overtone series offers a reasonable basis for the choice of our fundamental musical intervals, the octave and the fifth. Although overtone series can account for the material of the scale, it does not explain the arrangement of that material. A delicate balance of symmetry and asymmetry lies at the heart of the major scale and others. When generating scales with octaves and fifths, the balance is found in scales with 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, or 12 notes. The 5-note scale corresponds to the black keys on the piano, the 7-note scale with the white keys, and the 12 note scale with black and white keys consecutively. The series (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12…) can be infinitely extended. Puzzler for the talk: how many notes would be in the next scale, the one that follows the 12-note chromatic scale? (Hint: No, this isn’t the Fibonacci series, but you’re close.) Recently, these developments in musical scale theory have been found to have a strong connection with the mathematics of “word theory,” where a word is a string, either finite or infinite, of symbols based on a (normally) finite alphabet.

Optional Reading: Aspects of well-formed scales. Norman Carey and David Clampitt. Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 187-206

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Imaginative Play https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2010/03/09/imaginative-play-2/ Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:10:11 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/?p=69 Roger A. Hart

It is hard to imagine a discussion of the imagination without addressing early childhood, the period of life when it is revealed so explicitly through play. The importance of imaginative play has long been broadly claimed by a wide range of psychologists to have great importance for children’s intellectual, social and emotional development. Furthermore, many writers strongly believe that imaginative play in childhood is a key to later creativity in life. But there are so many questions that have not been resolved through research. It has been observed that the degree of imaginative play varies greatly between individual children and in this brief session we will consider two contextual issues that concern many parents and educators at this moment in time: what should be the roles of adults in children’s play and what environments, toys and tools should be made available to children. These issues have become of great concern to parents as there have been dramatic changes in just one generation in how much time children spend in settings that are directed, or at least supervised, by adults and how many commercial materials are now aimed at children. As we attempt to reflect critically on these ideas, romantic notions of childhood and our own nostalgia will probably be deeply implicated in the exchange.

References:

Bruner, J.S.Jolly, A. and Sylva, K. (Eds.). (1976). Play: Its role in development and evolution. New York: Penguin.

Chudacoff, H. P. (2007). Children at play: an American history. New York, New York University Press.

Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Boston, Beacon Press.

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Imagination in 19th Century American Landscape Art:Poetry, Science, Aestheticism https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2010/01/30/imagination-in-19th-century-american-landscape-artpoetry-science-aestheticism/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:53:30 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2010/01/30/imagination-in-19th-century-american-landscape-artpoetry-science-aestheticism/ Kathy Manthorne

How could we possibly get a handle on “imagination” as it pertains to the visual arts? It is so vast a topic that it boggles the imagination! For the purposes of this 10-minute presentation I focus on a particular moment in the history of American art, from 1840 through the 1870s, which marks a high point in landscape art. It was also, not coincidentally, a time when imagination was recognized and championed as essential equipment of the artist, complicated by the fact that the definition of “imagination” metamorphosed over those four decades. Juxtaposing text and image, we explore a sequence of positions articulated by three major artists. Thomas Cole (1801-1848) represents the poetic; his pupil Frederic Church (1826-1900), that of science; and the expatriate James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) displayed affinities with Aestheticism. All three were linked by the Hudson River: Cole lived in Catskill, Church in Hudson, and Whistler attended nearby West Point, where he studied drawing with Robert Weir. Throughout this period artworks continued to be measured by the yardstick of accurate representation, articulated as “truth to nature” by John Ruskin: the most influential critic of the 19th century and Whistler’s nemesis. Even as critics denied artists the freedom to experiment with nature, however, they persisted in discussing the role of imagination in the creation of a work of art. Examining the pictures and reading the writings of the artists and their contemporary critics, we begin to penetrate this dialectic of the real and the imaginary so central to 19th c. landscape imagery.

Preliminary Bibliography

Katherine Emma Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879. Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989, esp. Ch. 3, pp. 67-89. “Cataclysm and Creation: Church and the Question of Terrestrial Origins”

Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century. Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. NY: Harper & Row, 1979. (2nd ed.), esp. Ch. 3, pp. 61-79, “Thomas Cole: The Dilemma of the Real and the Ideal”

James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. NY: Dover, 1967 (rpt; 1st ed. 1890), esp. Ten O’ Clock Lecture, pp. 131-159.

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Evolution of Song Culture: How Social Interactions Shape Song Development https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2010/01/30/evolution-of-song-culture-how-social-interactions-shape-song-development/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:50:09 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2010/01/30/evolution-of-song-culture-how-social-interactions-shape-song-development/ Ofer Tchernichovski

Would culture resembling existing ones evolve in an island colony of naïve founders? This cannot be studied experimentally in humans; we performed the analogous experiment using socially learned birdsong. Zebra finch isolates unexposed to singing tutors during development, produce song with characteristics that differ from the wild-type song found in laboratory or natural colonies. In tutoring lineages starting from isolate founders, we quantified alterations in song across tutoring generations in two social environments: sound isolated chambers with tutor-pupil pairs, and an isolated semi-natural colony. For both tutor-pupil only and isolated colony settings, songs evolved toward the wild type in 3-4 generations. Therefore, species-typical song culture can evolve de novo. Although the progression toward wild type song culture takes place even in an impoverished environment, no innovation and invention of new syllable type were observed in a one-to-one song tutoring setting. In contrast, in a colony environment, in the presence of females, we observed invention of new syllable types across generations. To explore the role of female zebra finches (who do not sing) in the development of song culture, we compared auditory responses to songs across males and females using functional MRI. We found that isolate males show no song specific BOLD responses in auditory brain areas. In male zebra finches, the development of song-specific auditory responses required social or song learning experience during development. In contrast, isolate females showed song-specific BOLD responses similar to those observed in experienced colony raised males. Therefore, females might have an important role in the development of song culture, since they show song-specific responses prior to experience. I will present ongoing experiments in controlled social environments to test how social interactions with males and with females might affect the development of song culture across generations.

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The Sociological Imagination https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2009/11/02/sociological-imagination/ Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:12:15 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/?p=48 David Savran

My seminar will be in three parts.  The first will focus on what the leftist sociologist C. Wright Mills’s describes as the sociological imagination.  I am circulating the first few pages of his 1959 book of the same name.  The remainder of the seminar will provide examples of the use of that methodology.  The second part will explain how I came to collaborate with eleven of my students from my Sociology of Theatre class last semester on a jointly written article on Shrek The Musical entitled “‘Let Our Freak Flags Fly’: DreamWorks Theatricals and the Branding of Diversity.”  The third part will explicate the thesis of the essay, that DreamWorks is using Shrek the Musical to exploit a generic theme of diversity to extend the reach of the Shrek franchise and challenge Disney in its own backyard.  By bringing a sociological analysis to bear on the study of commercial theatre, we aim to show that DreamWorks is using its marketing strategy—diversification—to provide the theme—diversity—for the product it is employing to implement that strategy.

Beginning of C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination (pdf format–click to read)

“Freak Flag” (excerpt) from Shrek the Musical (click the arrow button to listen).

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Varieties of Imaginative Experience https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2009/11/02/varieties-of-imaginative-experience/ Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:53:01 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/?p=45 Joan Richardson

  • “God and the imagination are one.” Wallace Stevens, Adagia
  • “Imagination” as we have come to think of it, has/needs to be reconceived, as for Ralph Waldo Emerson who had at the heart of his project, to “reconceive reason.” This desire, on his part, had all to do with what we have come to recognize as the “Darwinian event.”
  • “…so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend to a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature.
    […]”“This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent.” (Emerson, “The Poet,” 456, 459)
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes was the first to realize that Emerson had anticipated what we have come to understand, after Charles Darwin’s monumental contribution, as “evolution,” in his moment known simply as “developmental theory.” (Dov Ospovat; Gillian Beer et al).
  • William James, perhaps Emerson’s and Darwin’s most significant heir, was at pains to indicate in the grounding “Stream of Thought” chapter of his The Principles of Psychology (1890)—a text that was ten years in the making—that it is accidental that we come to think of words like “imagination,” “truth,” or almost any other word ending in “-ion” as having substantive purchase because, simply, of features of the language we happened to have inherited/acquired in which nouns and verbs occupy prominence as substantives and essential categories. He goes on to note that this feature of these languages occludes the actuality of accident and process that in fact is the more accurate decriptor of human experience. [Quote passage from James.]
  • Given this access, an anticipation of what contemporary researchers like Gerald Edelman and Jean-Pierre Changeux have been articulating about thinking/mind processes being themselves subject to the same natural/evolutionary pressures as a life form like any other life forms—a naturalized extension of a Kantian insight—it is rather urgent that this information be integrated into both conceptual frameworks and methodologies of research and teaching.
  • There is not yet a theorized basis for such a program, though there are individuals and texts mapping paths into this (new) territory.
  • Along the way of one of these paths, I would offer, that it is crucial to separate the idea of “imagination” from “image”—something that on the surface seems, of course, to some, a given. Yet, only by the suggestion/connotation of the word itself, it is quite difficult for us to entertain the reality that, in fact, “imagination” is not at all limited to an “image-ing” function but, rather, encompasses/point to/draws on all residual remnants of lived experience as they are called up by “present” prompts—elicitors.
  • Consider for example this passage from linguist Roman Jakobson’s second lecture on Sound and Meaning given in New York City in 1942 as part of the inaugural event  of L’Ecole Libre des hautes etudes (Free School for Advanced Studies) founded by French and Belgian scientists in exile:
  • We speak to ourselves without emitting and without hearing any sounds. Instead of pronouncing or hearing we imagine ourselves to be pronouncing or hearing. The words of our interior speech are not composed of emitted sounds but of their acoustic and motor images. And if a Russian, in his interior speech, pronounces in imagination… (SM 37; my emphases).

  • [Explore Stevens’s “Imagination as Value”]
  • Think of imago, final stage in the metamorphosis from larva to pupa to imago: adult, sexually mature, winged stage.
  • Along the way to “reconceiving reason,” following William James, following Emerson, we find in Jamesian pragmatism a project dependent on “the use of…imagination”:
  • […] Pent in, as the pragmatist more than any one else sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations? If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandments one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the uses of imagination in science. [John Tyndall] It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. (“Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking in William James: Writings 1902-1910 [New York: Library of America, 1987], pp. 588-89)

  • Overlapping domains (as opposed to Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria”): adapting information from one area and using it in another: fine example, Emile Galle’s using what he learned from Darwin and Haeckel and from Japanese botanist Hokkai Takashina as well as Japanese art displayed in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century to shape his exquisite glass objects. See Nature review, “Evolution’s influence on art nouveau” (Vol. 460 [2 July 2009] 37). Connect as well with overlapping in William James, as observed by Jean Wahl in Vers le Concret.Similarly, Darwin’s taking from Paradise Lost a “moving picture” of evolution’s process—then still called “development theory” (Dov Ospovat volume; Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots and Open Fields). And my sense/use of manner of DNA/RNA activity, imperfect replication, providing a current vehicle for understanding the nature and behavior of imagination (A Natural History of Pragmatism).
  • Another thought: given recent finding that dreaming is continuous—Gregory Bateson’s “primary process”—it seems to me that whatever it is we call “imagination” is what William James describes as the “hook” that we drop from “consciousness” into the “darker, blinder strata…where we find real fact in the making” (passage in Principles). These “hooks” Whitehead calls “lures for feeling.” In the “darker, blinder strata” is the undifferentiated matter/experience/information that we share with all being/matter/process.
  • Prehension: Charles Lyell’s adding to scientific “fact,” to the empirical, the imagination’s grasping of invisible and completely untestable experience, the passage of aeons of time that it had to have taken for the stria of the planet to be laid down (Burgess Shale).
  • From Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants comes the aptest description of imagination’s working. It is Goethe’s description of what he called “exact sensory imagination”:
  • The second part of the genetic method requires what Goethe calls “exact sensory imagination.” We initially see the different leaves as discrete steps in a process, but since “nature leaves no gaps,” we need to consolidate these steps in order to apprehend nature’s continuous inner workings. Reviewing the sequence of leaves, we then attentively internalize these visual forms as memory images. With these forms firmly in mind, we move in imagination through the sequence, transforming the first into the second, the second into the third, and so on, following the process forward and backward, forward backward, as nature has also done. We thus implicate each explicit form—each momentary pause in the process—with those before and after, like the flow of notes in a musical performance [and has bearing for James’s “specious present”]. By focusing on the relationship between the leaf forms, exact sensory imagination involves setting one’s mind in corresponding motion, so that the selfsame living idea that has expressed itself in the metamorphosis of the plant comes to life and visibility in the mind as well. What was successinve in one’s empirical experience then becomes simultaneous in the intuitively perceived idea—Proteus in potentia. Insteaad of an onlooking subject knowing an alien object, this is knowledge through participation, or even identification, of observer and observed—knowing things from the inside. As Goethe said, “our spirit stands in harmony with those simpler powers that lie deep within nature; and it is able to represent them to itself just as purely as the objects of the visible world are formed in a clear eye.”* (Italics mine; bold italics, the editors: MIT edition, 2009, pp. 109-11)

Additional Reading

Beer, Gilian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London and Boston: Ark/Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).

_________, Open Fields: Studies in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1996).

Bunn, James H., Wave Forms: A Natural Syntax for Rhythmic Languages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Clark, Andy, “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” in Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, ed. Peter Carruthers and Jill Boucher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 162-83.

Crick, Francis, and Christof Koch, “A Framework for Consciousness,” Nature Neuroscience, 6:2 (February 2003), 119-26.

Edelman, Gerald M., Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

James, William, The Principles of Psychology (rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1890]).

Le Doux, Joseph, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Ospovat, Dov, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Sciences, 1838-1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Richardson, Joan, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Sacks, Oliver, “In the River of Consciousness,” New York Review of Books (January 15, 2004), 41-44.

“Seeing Science,” special issue, Representations 40 (Fall 1992).

Stafford, Barbara Maria, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

Stevens, Wallace, “Imagination as Value,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1997), pp. 724-39.

Tyndall, John, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” in Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews, 2 vols. (rpt. London: Gregg International Publishers Ltd., 1970 [Longman’s, Green, 1892]).

Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, ed.

David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1985).

___________________, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967).

Zeki, Semir, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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Knowledge and Games https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2009/09/21/knowledge-and-games/ Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:21:43 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/?p=40 Sergei Artemov

I would like to share some personal experiences of contributing to well-established research areas outside pure Math.

The first story concerns Epistemology, or more precisely, the characterization of Knowledge. Since Plato, Justification, along with other features, has been considered a principal element of Knowledge. However, the mathematical theory of Knowledge used the existing machinery of modal logic, which lacked the very notion of Justification and hence had certain notorious defects. I undertook some foundational mathematical studies which extended the format of the logic of knowledge and ultimately led to a coherent model of Justification in general.

The second story’s subject is Game Theory, a flourishing field with applications in Economics, Politics, the Social Sciences, etc. At the center of Game Theory lies a doctrine of probabilistic rational decision making under uncertainty, developed by von Neumann & Morgenstern in the 1940s. However, some important classes of games (e.g., so-called games of perfect information) do not rely on probabilistic assumptions. There was no corresponding theory and only a very few extreme, special cases were studied. I noticed that a complete theory of rational non-probabilistic decision making, which far exceeds what had been commonly perceived, can be derived from standard game theoretical postulates.

I will conclude with some reflections about imagination, vision, and discovery.

Click here to download (pdf format) the slides from the presentation.

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Sylvia Tomasch, English https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/2009/09/21/sylvia-tomasch-english/ Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:16:29 +0000 http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/imagination/?p=39 Associate University Dean of Academic Affairs, Macaulay Honors College
sylvia.tomasch@mhc.cuny.edu
212-729-2918

At the Honors College since 2005, Associate University Dean of Academic Affairs Sylvia Tomasch is also Professor of English at Hunter College, where she chaired the department in 2002-05. A past president of the Medieval Club of New York, Dr. Tomasch served five years on the Executive Committee of the Chaucer Division of the Modern Language Association (Chair, 2005-06), and is in the midst of a five-year term on the Executive Committee of the Comparative Medieval Division (2007-11).

Her scholarly interests include surveillance studies, medieval literature, especially Middle English and Chaucer, historical cartography, medieval antisemitism, and the history of the discipline of Medieval Studies. Recent publications include the articles “Professionalizing Chaucer: John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert, and the Canterbury Tales as Cultural Capital”” and “Editing as Palinode: The Invention of Love and The Text of The Canterbury Tales”; two reprinted articles, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew” and “Mappae Mundi and ‘The Knight’s Tale’: The Cartography of Power, The Technology of Control”; and two co-edited volumes of essays, Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (which also contains two articles by her, “Introduction: Geographical Desire” and “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew”) and The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens.

When she’s not spending her summer hiking in Ireland or excavating million-year-old fossils in Spain, Dr. Tomasch is working on a cultural biography of John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert and has begun a new project on Surveillance Studies and Medieval Practice.

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