There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

/pdf/situated-knowledges-the-science-question-in-feminism-and-the-50s6kk2g1e.pdf

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

Recent social studies of science and technology, for example, have made available a very strong social constructionist argument for all forms of knowledge claims, most certainly and especially scientific ones. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. “Passionate detachment” requires more than acknowledged and self-critical partiality. Positioning is, therefore, the key practice in grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision, and much Western scientific and philosophic discourse is organized in this way. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.

/pdf/situated-knowledges-the-science-question-in-feminism-and-the-ttb7c49cb5.pdf

Situated Knowledges : The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

Since critics first allegedthat feminism claimed tospeak universally for all
women, feminist researchers havebeen acutely aware ofthe limitations of 
genderas a single analyticalcategory. In fact, feministsare perhaps alone in
the academy in theextent to which theyhave embraced intersectionality – the 
relationshipsamong multiple dimensions andmodalities of social relations
and subject formations – as itselfa central category ofanalysis. One could 
evensay that intersectionality isthe most important theoreticalcontribution 
that women’s studies,in conjunction with relatedfields, has made sofar.1

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426800

The Complexity of Intersectionality

1980 Preface * 1999 Preface * 1999 Acknowledgements * Introduction * 1 Circular Logic * 2 Phase Singularities (Screwy Results of Circular Logic) * 3 The Rules of the Ring * 4 Ring Populations * 5 Getting Off the Ring * 6 Attracting Cycles and Isochrons * 7 Measuring the Trajectories of a Circadian Clock * 8 Populations of Attractor Cycle Oscillators * 9 Excitable Kinetics and Excitable Media * 10 The Varieties of Phaseless Experience: In Which the Geometrical Orderliness of Rhythmic Organization Breaks Down in Diverse Ways * 11 The Firefly Machine 12 Energy Metabolism in Cells * 13 The Malonic Acid Reagent ('Sodium Geometrate') * 14 Electrical Rhythmicity and Excitability in Cell Membranes * 15 The Aggregation of Slime Mold Amoebae * 16 Numerical Organizing Centers * 17 Electrical Singular Filaments in the Heart Wall * 18 Pattern Formation in the Fungi * 19 Circadian Rhythms in General * 20 The Circadian Clocks of Insect Eclosion * 21 The Flower of Kalanchoe * 22 The Cell Mitotic Cycle * 23 The Female Cycle * References * Index of Names * Index of Subjects

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/596B270197FE27DE5FABB598B6210622/S0025557200150892a.pdf/div-class-title-span-class-italic-the-geometry-of-biological-time-span-by-a-t-winfree-pp-544-dm68-corrected-second-printing-1990-isbn-3-540-52528-9-springer-div.pdf

The geometry of biological time , by A. T. Winfree. Pp 544. DM68. Corrected Second Printing 1990. ISBN 3-540-52528-9 (Springer)

Self-Organization, Self-Assembly, and the Inherent Activity of Matter

Science and Its Critics.

My theme is the concept, and the term, 'self-organisation'. Originally introduced by Immanuel Kant to characterise the unique properties of living organisms, the term's history is inseparable from the history of biology. Only in the second half of the twentieth century, however, does it begin to acquire the promise of a physicalist understanding. This it does with two critical transformations in its meaning: first, with the advent of cybernetics and its dissolution of the boundary between organisms and machines, and second, with the mathematical triumphs of non-linear dynamical systems theory and accompanying claims to have dissolved the boundary between organisms and complex physical systems. This paper focuses primarily on the second transformation.

Contenders for life at the dawn of the twenty-first century: approaches from physics, biology and engineering

Today’s genome looks very different from the one with which the science of genetics began. Rather than a set of genes initiating causal chains leading to the formation of traits, it looks far more like an exquisitely sensitive reactive system – a device for regulating the production of specific proteins in response to the constantly changing signals it receives from its environment. True, the signals it detects come most immediately from its intra-cellular environment, but these, in turn, reflect input from the external environments of the cell and of the organism. Humans are especially reactive systems, and they are so on every level at which they are capable of interacting: cultural, interpersonal, cellular, and even genetic. The reconceptualization of the genome that I propose allows us – indeed obliges us – to abandon the dichotomies between genetics and environment, and between nature and culture, that have driven so much fruitless debate, for so many decades. If much of what the genome ‘does’ is to respond to signals from its environment, then the bifurcation of developmental influences into the categories of genetic and environmental makes no sense. Similarly, if we understand the term environment as including cultural dynamics, neither does the division of biological from cultural factors. We have long understood that organisms interact with their environments, that interactions between genetics and environment, between biology and culture, are crucial to making us what we are. What research in genomics seems to show is that, at every level, biology itself is constituted by those interactions – even at the level of genetics.

/pdf/cognitive-functions-of-metaphor-in-the-natural-sciences-pr539392ep.pdf

Evelyn Fox Keller

Papers

Self-Organization, Self-Assembly, and the Inherent Activity of Matter

Science and Its Critics.

Contenders for life at the dawn of the twenty-first century: approaches from physics, biology and engineering

Cognitive functions of metaphor in the natural sciences

Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death : Essays on Science and Culture