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Subjects A–Z

These are subjects of importance to SPLectrum, referenced within the site.

A

• Aesthetics in philosophy · philosophy, history of ideashow aesthetics came to rank last among philosophy’s branches, and the counter-current from Schiller through Rancière that kept arguing it should rank first
• Assembly theory · complexity science, origin of lifecomplexity through construction history: Cronin, Walker, assembly index, biosignatures, time as object
• Autopoiesis · biology, systems theoryself-making systems, operational closure, structural coupling: Maturana, Varela, Luhmann
• Avro · data serialization, software engineeringschema-based serialization with the schema carried alongside the data: JSON schemas, binary encoding, schema resolution, Cutting, Hadoop, Kafka

B

• Behaviourism · psychologypsychology as the objective science of behaviour: Watson’s manifesto, Pavlov’s conditioning, Skinner’s operant conditioning and radical behaviourism, the applied analysis of behaviour, and the cognitive revolution that displaced it
• Biosemiotics · biology, semioticssign processes in living systems, semiosis and life coextensive: Peirce and Uexküll’s foundations, Sebeok, the Copenhagen–Tartu school (Hoffmeyer, Kull), code-duality, the Barbieri code-biology split

C

• Category theory · mathematicsstructure through relationships rather than internal composition — objects known entirely by their arrows
• Complex adaptive systems · cross-disciplinarylocally interacting agents producing global order: Holland, Kauffman, Gell-Mann, Santa Fe Institute
• Constructivism · epistemology, psychology of learningknowledge built by the knower to fit experience, not to mirror reality — Piaget’s genetic epistemology, von Glasersfeld’s radical version, viability not truth, the trivial and social variants, the solipsism charge
• Cosmopolitics · philosophy of science, political ecologyStengers: ecology of practices, reciprocal capture, the idiot, cosmos as constructed not given

D

• Darwinism · biology, history of scienceevolution by natural selection — Darwin’s theory, its integration with genetics, its extensions and disputes, and the traditions that bear its name
• Deconstruction · philosophyDerrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence — différance, the trace, the speech/writing hierarchy, the Searle and de Man disputes, the turn to justice and hospitality
• Dialogism · philosophy, literary theoryBakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle — the dialogic utterance, heteroglossia, polyphony, the chronotope and carnival, the authorship dispute, the literary-theory afterlife
• Domain-specific languages (DSL) · software engineering, notationpurpose-built vocabularies for specific problem areas — from SQL and regular expressions to musical notation and chemical nomenclature

E

• Enactivism · philosophy of mind, cognitive sciencecognition as the enactment of a world through embodied action, not representation of a pre-given one — The Embodied Mind, sense-making, the three strands (autopoietic, sensorimotor, radical), the scaling-up problem
• Epistemology — the naturalistic turn · philosophy, history of ideasthe one move the metaphysics map has no slot for — epistemology renegotiating its border with empirical inquiry: the analysis of knowledge and its collapse after Gettier, Quine’s naturalizing handover, the externalist turn hinged on reliabilism, the social turn, and Williamson’s knowledge-first counter-move
• Ethics · philosophyhow moral philosophy is structured — the normative theories of what to do, and beneath them the metaethical question of what a moral claim is: realism, error theory, expressivism, constructivism, relativism, and the form-of-life line that rejects the frame

G

• German idealism · philosophyFichte, Schelling, Hegel: overcoming Kant’s limits, the productivity of negation
• Git · version control, software engineeringdistributed version control: content-addressed snapshots, the commit DAG, integrity by hashing, Torvalds, the Linux kernel

H

• Hermeneutics · philosophythe theory of interpretation and understanding — the hermeneutic circle, method versus truth, the ontological turn: Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur

K

• Kafka · event streaming, software engineeringdistributed event-streaming platform built on a durable append-only log: topics, partitions, offsets, replay, Kreps, Confluent

M

• Metaphysics · philosophy, history of ideashow metaphysics has been approached — five recurring stances toward the enterprise itself: construction, critique, disclosure, deflation, genealogy, with the Western tree set beside Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka as another inheritance
• Mineral evolution · geology, astrobiologyEarth’s mineral diversity as coupled physical, chemical, and biological history: Hazen, the ten stages, co-evolution with life
• Music and meaning · philosophy of music, aestheticsthe long argument over what music means — Hanslick’s formalism, expression and emotion (Cooke, Meyer, Levinson), Langer’s symbol, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, absolute versus programme music
• Mutualism · biology, social and economic thoughtrelationships of mutual benefit across two parallel traditions — ecological and socio-political — from their shared nineteenth century origins to the present

N

• Nativism · linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of mindthe mind brings more than experience could have given it — the rationalist lineage from Plato and Leibniz, and its modern form: poverty of the stimulus, the emergence cases (creoles, Nicaraguan Sign Language, homesign), universal grammar and the retreat to Merge, the disputes over concepts (Fodor’s Mentalese, Spelke’s core knowledge) and evolution (saltation versus adaptation), and the typological, usage-based and empiricist challenges

P

• Phenomenology · philosophythe study of experience from the inside: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Jonas
• Philosophy of organism · philosophyWhitehead’s speculative metaphysics: actual entities, prehension, creativity, God — the cure for the bifurcation of nature
• Philosophy of science · philosophyfrom logical positivism through falsification, paradigms, and methodological pluralism
• Pluralism · philosophythe many are real and none privileged — the conclusion recurring across metaphysics, knowing, language, value and power (James, Whitehead, Berlin, Goodman, Arendt); its dimensions, and the disputes it lives in: relativism, self-refutation, anything-goes, realism
• Political philosophy · philosophyhow people ought to live together — the recurring questions of authority, justice, liberty and the collective; the traditions that answer them differently; and the standing disputes (liberal–communitarian, the justice debates, legitimacy, value-pluralism) the field actually lives in
• Pragmatism · philosophymeaning as consequence, truth as convergence: Peirce, Dewey, Rorty
• Process philosophy · philosophybecoming over being, events over substances: Bergson, Whitehead, Hegel
• Psychoanalysis · psychologyFreud’s theory of the unconscious and the schools that followed: ego psychology, object relations, self psychology, Lacan, attachment, the relational turn; its contested science and its humanities afterlife

R

• Rasa · philosophy, aestheticsthe Indian theory of aesthetic experience — Bharata’s Natya Shastra and the rasa-sutra, the commentators’ debate, dhvani, Abhinavagupta’s account of relish, the nine rasas
• Relational quantum mechanics · theoretical physicsproperties through interaction, no absolute state: Rovelli, van Fraassen, decoherence

S

• Semiotics · philosophy, linguisticsthe theory of signs — Peirce’s triadic sign and Saussure’s dyadic sign, the semiology of culture (Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Barthes, Eco, Lotman), and the biosemiotic extension into the living world
• Structuralism · linguistics, philosophymeaning as difference, systems of relations: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and beyond
• Symbolic forms · philosophyCassirer’s account of mind constituting its worlds through language, myth, art, religion, and science — the neo-Kantian background, the Davos debate, and the afterlife in Langer and Goodman

U

• Ubuntu · philosophy, ethicsthe southern African philosophy of personhood through relation — “a person is a person through other persons”, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, Ramose, Tutu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the communitarian critique
• URI · web architecture, software engineeringuniform resource identification — the addressing layer of the Web: URL and URN, RFC 3986, Berners-Lee, Fielding

X

• XPath · query language, software engineeringnavigating and selecting in tree-structured documents: location paths, axes, node tests, predicates, James Clark, XSLT, XQuery