Killing the father, Parmenides: on Lacan’s anti-philosophy

This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. In part iii, focusing upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touching on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and (in a remarkable confirmation of Lacan’s “Parmenidean” conception of philosophy) the early Wittgenstein—we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas, nearly-contemporary with Galileo’s mathematization of physics and carried forwards by Kant’s critical philosophy and account of the substanceless subject of apperception. In different terms than Slavoj Žižek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit (as against mere illusion or falsity) that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried, at the same time as it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which thinking and being could be the same.

Conception of adaptive programming languages

Adaptive devices show the characteristic of dynamically change themselves in response to input stimuli with no interference of external agents. Occasional changes in behaviour are immediately detected by the devices, which right away react spontaneously to them. Chronologically such devices derived from researches in the field of formal languages and automata. However, formalism spurred applications in several other fields. Based on the operation of adaptive automata, the elementary ideas generanting programming adaptive languages are presented.

Conception of wheeled mobile robots with reconfigurable control using integrate prototyping

With the fast innovation of the hardware and software technologies using rapid prototyping devices, with application in the robotics and automation, more and more it becomes necessary the development of applications based on methodologies that facilitate future modifications, updates and enhancements in the original projected system. This paper presents a conception of mobile robots using rapid prototyping, distributing the several control actions in growing levels of complexity and using resources of reconfigurable computing proposal oriented to embed systems implementation. Software and the hardware are structuralized in independents blocks, with connection through common bus. The study and applications of new structures control that permits good performance in relation to the parameter variations. This kind of controller can be tested on different platform representing the wheeled mobile robots using reprogrammable logic components (FPGA). © 2006 IEEE.

On the conception of the centre-periphery system

Includes bibliography

NOTES ON THE FREUDIAN CONCEPTION OF ANXIETY

NOTES ON THE FREUDIAN CONCEPTION OF ANXIETY This article belongs to the field of history and epistemology of psychoanalysis, specifically to research on the conceptual genealogy pertaining to the construction of Freudian metapsychology of anguish. It aims to present the main arguments that allow us to discuss that theories contained in Freud's work on anxiety are not exclusive and may be considered, as a whole, a single explanatory model that would encompass the various stages of production on anxiety This paper intends to examine the barriers that can be seized in the Freudian formulations, under what is conceived, since Freud, as a "second theory of anxiety".

Connectionism as metaphor: Towards an integrated, unified conception of self-system and individual difference

Comments on an article by Kashima et al. (see record 2007-10111-001). In their target article Kashima and colleagues try to show how a connectionist model conceptualization of the self is best suited to capture the self's temporal and socio-culturally contextualized nature. They propose a new model and to support this model, the authors conduct computer simulations of psychological phenomena whose importance for the self has long been clear, even if not formally modeled, such as imitation, and learning of sequence and narrative. As explicated when we advocated connectionist models as a metaphor for self in Mischel and Morf (2003), we fully endorse the utility of such a metaphor, as these models have some of the processing characteristics necessary for capturing key aspects and functions of a dynamic cognitive-affective self-system. As elaborated in that chapter, we see as their principal strength that connectionist models can take account of multiple simultaneous processes without invoking a single central control. All outputs reflect a distributed pattern of activation across a large number of simple processing units, the nature of which depends on (and changes with) the connection weights between the links and the satisfaction of mutual constraints across these links (Rummelhart & McClelland, 1986). This allows a simple account for why certain input features will at times predominate, while others take over on other occasions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)