Arkady Plotnitsky
Biographic Data
| ID | 446848 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Arkady Plotnitsky |
| GIVEN NAMES | Arkady |
| FAMILY NAME | Plotnitsky |
| SIGNATURE | PLOTNITSKY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Purdue University West Lafayette |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6462-2181 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Logos and Alogon: Thinkable and the Unthinkable in Mathematics, from the Pythagoreans to the Moderns
The book offers a new understanding of the relationships between algebra and geometry, from the Pythagorean to modernist mathematics, to our own time.
Logos and Alogon: Thinkable and the Unthinkable in Mathematics, from the Pythagoreans to the Moderns
Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle
Demons of Chance, Angels of Probability: Thomas Pynchon’s Novels and the Philosophy of Chance and Probability
This article discusses the relationships between Thomas Pynchon’s novels and the philosophy of chance and probability, especially in connection with quantum theory, which radically redefined our thinking concerning both concepts, and to begin with, the nature of physical reality. The article considers how different scientific theories dealing with chance and probability figure in Pynchon’s major novels, which, the article argues, helps us to thin…
Structure, Sign, and Play and the Discourse of the Natural Sciences: After the Hyppolite-Derrida Exchange
Structure, Sign, and Play and the Discourse of the Natural Sciences:After the Hyppolite-Derrida Exchange Arkady Plotnitsky Introduction Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" offered a radical rethinking of structuralism and of structure itself. According to Derrida: Structure—or rather the structurality of structure—although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, by a pro…
Thinking without Being and Acts of Poetry in Shelley
William Wordsworth's modification of 'sound' to the 'ghost of sound' captures the elusive, yet somehow palpable, effects of twilit music. His phrase might seem commonplace enough, but its ghostly manifestation of a sound that is barely perceptible as sound at all speaks tellingly to Romanticism's spectral presences in the past, present, and future. Romanticism as a haunted and haunting presence becomes, as Paul de Man comments on the poetry of Ch…
From Resonance to Interference: The Architecture of Concepts and the Relationships among Philosophy, Art and Science in Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari
Experimenting with Ontologies: Sets, Spaces, and Topoi with Badiou and Grothendieck
The paper explores the ontology and logic of the irreducibly multiple in set theory and in topos theory by considering the differences between Badiou's logical and Grothendieck's ontological approach to topos theory. It argues that Grothendieck's ontological program for topos theory leads to a more radical concept of the multiple than does the set-theoretical ontology, which defines Badiou's view of ontology even in his later, more topos theoreti…
The Multiple and the Unthinkable in Postmodern Thought: From Physics to Justice
Taking as its point of departure Jean-François Lyotard's inaugural argument concerning postmodernity in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , this article considers the character of postmodern thought, especially postmodern theoretical thought, and resistance to it, which has been and remains formidable. The article also offers an assessment of our theoretical thought now, thought after postmodern thought, as it moves from physics to …
Bernhard Riemann's Conceptual Mathematics and the Idea of Space
This essay explores the power and fertility of mathematical imagination, as they are manifest in the thought of a nineteenth-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), one of the greatest and most imaginative mathematicians who ever lived. Riemann introduced radically new ideas in every main field of modern mathematics: algebra, analysis, geometry, and topology. These ideas transformed each of these fields and played major roles i…
Badiou's Equations--and Inequalities: "A Response to Robert Hughes's "Riven
Badiou’s Equations--and Inequalities: A Response to Robert Hughes’s “Riven” Arkady Plotnitsky Robert Hughes’s article offers an unexpected perspective on Alain Badiou’s work and its impact on the current intellectual and academic scene, a cliché-metaphor that (along with its avatars, such as performance or performative, also a pertinent theoretical term) may be especially fitting in this case, given that Badiou is not only a philosopher but also …
Différantial Atopologies, Mathematical and Ethico-Political: Light, Space, and Alterity in Derrida
Taking as its point of departure the question of light vis-à-vis the question of being in Derrida's work, this article discusses Derrida's radical conceptions of khoral (a)spatiality and alterity, by linking his first book on Edmund Husserl's “The Origin of Geometry” and his early critique of Emmanuel Levinas to his exploration of the ethico-political problematics, in part, again, via Levinas, in his latest works. The article also considers Derri…
Chaosmologies: Quantum Field Theory, Chaos and Thought in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy
This article explores the relationships between the philosophical foundations of quantum field theory, the currently dominant form of quantum physics, and Deleuze's concept of the virtual, most especially in relation to the idea of chaos found in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?. Deleuze and Guattari appear to derive this idea partly from the philosophical conceptuality of quantum field theory, in particular the concept of virtual parti…
Jacques Derrida
The Differance of the World: Homage to Jacques Derrida
The Différance of the World: Homage to Jacques Derrida Arkady Plotnitsky With the death of Jacques Derrida, the world has lost one of its greatest philosophers, as well as one of the most controversial and misunderstood. But then, controversy and misunderstanding are part and parcel of philosophical greatness. Plato is still controversial and misunderstood, and is still our contemporary. So are René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Fri…
Evolution and Contingency
Evolution and Contingency Arkady Plotnitsky Review of: Gould, Stephen J. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. We often complain about long books, and, at nearly 1500 pages, Stephen Jay Gould’s magnum opus is about as long as one could find in the sciences. But then, the actual genre of the book, which is a mixture of science, history of science, and biography, sets it apart from most science books as well, althou…
In Principle Observable’: Werner Heisenberg's Discovery of Quantum Mechanics and Romantic Imagination
Demonstration and Democracy
Postmodern Culture - Volume 12, Number 3, May 2002
The Knowable and the Unknowable: "Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the "Two Cultures
Effects of the Unknowable: Materialism, Epistemology, and the General Economy of the Body in Bataille
(2001). Effects of the Unknowable: Materialism, Epistemology, and the General Economy of the Body in Bataille. Parallax: Vol. 7, Economies of Excess, pp. 16-28
Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration, and Science in Galileo's Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences
Galileo's Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences is, indisputably, one of the founding documents of the modern, mathematical sciences of nature. 1 As such, it is not surprising that it is more discussed (or, more accurately, referred to) than read. Galileo is accepted as the founder of a mathematized physics--one in which time, space, and motion are treated as physically measurable and, theoretically, mathematical quantities, and in which laws of…
The Cosmic Internet
Postmodern Culture - Volume 8, Number 3, May 1998
An Exchange: Richard Crew and Arkady Plotnitsky
Postmodern Culture - Volume 8, Number 2, January 1998
Zarathustra's Ladders: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Practical Philosophy in Nietzsche
Arkady Plotnitsky, Zarathustra's Ladders: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Practical Philosophy in Nietzsche, Poetics Today, Vol. 19, No. 2, Hellenism and Hebraism Reconsidered: The Poetics of Cultural Influence and Exchange II (Summer, 1998), pp. 199-219
Penrose's triangles: The large, the small, and the human mind
Postmodern Culture - Volume 7, Number 3, May 1997
The Knowable and the Unknowable: "Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the "Two Cultures
Experimenting with Ontologies: Sets, Spaces, and Topoi with Badiou and Grothendieck
The paper explores the ontology and logic of the irreducibly multiple in set theory and in topos theory by considering the differences between Badiou's logical and Grothendieck's ontological approach to topos theory. It argues that Grothendieck's ontological program for topos theory leads to a more radical concept of the multiple than does the set-theoretical ontology, which defines Badiou's view of ontology even in his later, more topos theoreti…
Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable
Research Article| April 01 1995 Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Barbara Herrnstein Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arkady Plotnitsky Arkady Plotnitsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (2): 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-2-371 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn…
From Resonance to Interference: The Architecture of Concepts and the Relationships among Philosophy, Art and Science in Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari
Bernhard Riemann's Conceptual Mathematics and the Idea of Space
This essay explores the power and fertility of mathematical imagination, as they are manifest in the thought of a nineteenth-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), one of the greatest and most imaginative mathematicians who ever lived. Riemann introduced radically new ideas in every main field of modern mathematics: algebra, analysis, geometry, and topology. These ideas transformed each of these fields and played major roles i…
Complementarity, Idealization, and the Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality
Research Article| April 01 1995 Complementarity, Idealization, and the Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality Arkady Plotnitsky Arkady Plotnitsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (2): 527–570. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-2-527 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Arkady Plotnitsky; Complementarity, Idealization, an…
In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious
A study examining Hegel's significance for Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille and Derrida, and exposing facets of the relationship between the Hegelian and post-structuralist understanding of history. It also looks at mathematics and science and the possibilities of traffic between disciplines
Re: Re-flecting, Re-membering, Re-collecting, Re-selecting, Re-warding, Re-wording, Re-iterating, Re-et-cetra-ing,…(in) Hegel
Postmodern Culture - Volume 5, Number 2, January 1995
The vertigo of history and geopolitics of criticism: Hegelianism, Ivan Kireyevsky, and Russian critical tradition
1995). The vertigo of history and geopolitics of criticism: Hegelianism, Ivan Kireyevsky, and Russian critical tradition. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 19-39
Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable
Research Article| April 01 1995 Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Barbara Herrnstein Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arkady Plotnitsky Arkady Plotnitsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (2): 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-2-371 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn…
Complementarity, Idealization, and the Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality
Research Article| April 01 1995 Complementarity, Idealization, and the Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality Arkady Plotnitsky Arkady Plotnitsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (2): 527–570. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-2-527 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Arkady Plotnitsky; Complementarity, Idealization, an…
Penrose's triangles: The large, the small, and the human mind
Postmodern Culture - Volume 7, Number 3, May 1997
"But It Is Above All Not True": "Derrida, Relativity, and the "Science Wars
“But It Is Above All Not True”: Derrida, Relativity, and the “Science Wars” Arkady Plotnitsky Und darum: Hoch die Physik! Und höher noch das, was uns zu ihr zwingt,—unsre Redlichkeit! —Nietzsche The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability—it is, finally, the concept of the game [jeu]. In other words, it is not the concept of some thing —of a center starting from which an observer could master…
Curvatures of the Negative: Ars Nova and Doktor Faustus from 1900 to 2001
Research Article| October 01 1997 Curvatures of the Negative: Ars Nova and Doktor Faustus from 1900 to 2001 Arkady Plotnitsky Arkady Plotnitsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1997) 96 (4): 821–852. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-96-4-821 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Arkady Plotnitsky; Curvatures of the Negative: Ars Nova an…
Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory
Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory is a unique collection of essays dealing with the intersections between science and mathematics and the radical reconceptions of knowledge, language, proof, truth, and reality currently emerging from poststructuralist literary theory, constructivist history and sociology of science, and related work in contemporary philosophy. Featuring a distinguished group of international contributors, this volume…
The Cosmic Internet
Postmodern Culture - Volume 8, Number 3, May 1998
An Exchange: Richard Crew and Arkady Plotnitsky
Postmodern Culture - Volume 8, Number 2, January 1998
Zarathustra's Ladders: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Practical Philosophy in Nietzsche
Arkady Plotnitsky, Zarathustra's Ladders: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Practical Philosophy in Nietzsche, Poetics Today, Vol. 19, No. 2, Hellenism and Hebraism Reconsidered: The Poetics of Cultural Influence and Exchange II (Summer, 1998), pp. 199-219
Effects of the Unknowable: Materialism, Epistemology, and the General Economy of the Body in Bataille
(2001). Effects of the Unknowable: Materialism, Epistemology, and the General Economy of the Body in Bataille. Parallax: Vol. 7, Economies of Excess, pp. 16-28
Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration, and Science in Galileo's Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences
Galileo's Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences is, indisputably, one of the founding documents of the modern, mathematical sciences of nature. 1 As such, it is not surprising that it is more discussed (or, more accurately, referred to) than read. Galileo is accepted as the founder of a mathematized physics--one in which time, space, and motion are treated as physically measurable and, theoretically, mathematical quantities, and in which laws of…
Demonstration and Democracy
Postmodern Culture - Volume 12, Number 3, May 2002
The Knowable and the Unknowable: "Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the "Two Cultures
The Differance of the World: Homage to Jacques Derrida
The Différance of the World: Homage to Jacques Derrida Arkady Plotnitsky With the death of Jacques Derrida, the world has lost one of its greatest philosophers, as well as one of the most controversial and misunderstood. But then, controversy and misunderstanding are part and parcel of philosophical greatness. Plato is still controversial and misunderstood, and is still our contemporary. So are René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Fri…
Evolution and Contingency
Evolution and Contingency Arkady Plotnitsky Review of: Gould, Stephen J. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. We often complain about long books, and, at nearly 1500 pages, Stephen Jay Gould’s magnum opus is about as long as one could find in the sciences. But then, the actual genre of the book, which is a mixture of science, history of science, and biography, sets it apart from most science books as well, althou…
In Principle Observable’: Werner Heisenberg's Discovery of Quantum Mechanics and Romantic Imagination
Jacques Derrida
Chaosmologies: Quantum Field Theory, Chaos and Thought in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy
This article explores the relationships between the philosophical foundations of quantum field theory, the currently dominant form of quantum physics, and Deleuze's concept of the virtual, most especially in relation to the idea of chaos found in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?. Deleuze and Guattari appear to derive this idea partly from the philosophical conceptuality of quantum field theory, in particular the concept of virtual parti…
Badiou's Equations--and Inequalities: "A Response to Robert Hughes's "Riven
Badiou’s Equations--and Inequalities: A Response to Robert Hughes’s “Riven” Arkady Plotnitsky Robert Hughes’s article offers an unexpected perspective on Alain Badiou’s work and its impact on the current intellectual and academic scene, a cliché-metaphor that (along with its avatars, such as performance or performative, also a pertinent theoretical term) may be especially fitting in this case, given that Badiou is not only a philosopher but also …
Différantial Atopologies, Mathematical and Ethico-Political: Light, Space, and Alterity in Derrida
Taking as its point of departure the question of light vis-à-vis the question of being in Derrida's work, this article discusses Derrida's radical conceptions of khoral (a)spatiality and alterity, by linking his first book on Edmund Husserl's “The Origin of Geometry” and his early critique of Emmanuel Levinas to his exploration of the ethico-political problematics, in part, again, via Levinas, in his latest works. The article also considers Derri…
Bernhard Riemann's Conceptual Mathematics and the Idea of Space
This essay explores the power and fertility of mathematical imagination, as they are manifest in the thought of a nineteenth-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), one of the greatest and most imaginative mathematicians who ever lived. Riemann introduced radically new ideas in every main field of modern mathematics: algebra, analysis, geometry, and topology. These ideas transformed each of these fields and played major roles i…
The Multiple and the Unthinkable in Postmodern Thought: From Physics to Justice
Taking as its point of departure Jean-François Lyotard's inaugural argument concerning postmodernity in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , this article considers the character of postmodern thought, especially postmodern theoretical thought, and resistance to it, which has been and remains formidable. The article also offers an assessment of our theoretical thought now, thought after postmodern thought, as it moves from physics to …
Philosophy (26 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Art (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Literature (7 works) · Mathematics (7 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (7 works) · Political science (7 works)