PATH INTEGRALS IN QUANTUM MECHANICS-Oxford Scholarship (original) (raw)

Doubt as an Integral Part of Calling: The Qur'anic Story of Joseph

Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy, 2019

This chapter seeks to address the misleading assumption that vocational discernment should lead a person toward a clear and definitive goal. In practice, the process of finding one’s callings will necessarily be accompanied by doubt and uncertainty; in fact, the ambiguous and shadowy nature of vocation can be a positive feature. Many stories from various religious traditions remind us that even the most deeply committed and vocationally focused individuals have experienced doubt about their own callings and uncertainty about their lives. The chapter cites a range of scholarly literature on vocation to emphasize this point, then illustrates it through various elements in the Qur’an—including a detailed retelling the story of Joseph. Like Joseph, many people may retrospectively come to see how the various elements of their lives have been woven together, even if they faced a great deal of doubt and uncertainty along the way. Keywords: vocation,

The Elements of Right-Sizing and Right-Peopling the State

Right-sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders , 2001

Brendan O'Leary outlines a broad theory of right-sizing the state. He addresses the distinctiveness of modern state borders, the centrality of nationality and ethnicity that makes public officials concerned with 'right-peopling' their states, and territorial expansion, maintenance and contraction, which oblige public officials to consider 'right-sizing.' His account builds on Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism and Ian Lustick's theory of state expansion and contraction. The author also classifies different strategies of eliminating and managing ethnic differences and existing borders.

Novel Machines: Introduction

New Historicist critics approached the novel as if it were a ‘technology of power’ whose main effect was to discipline readers. Recent scholarship, by contrast, has provided a richer understanding of the narrative machinery of eighteenth-century fiction by emphasizing the variety of different technologies available to authors as models for the form of their narratives and the different effects they were thought to have on readers. The introduction reconciles these two approaches by drawing on the work of ‘constructivist’ sociologists and philosophers of technology to argue that although eighteenth-century authors thought in different ways about the mechanics of narrative, they shared a common preoccupation with the problem of how the novel mediates human subjectivity. In contrast to New Formalist work on Romantic organicism, Novel Machines offers a genealogy of modern structuralist approaches to the mechanics and dynamics of narrative and recovers the complexity of the eighteenth-century idea of ‘mechanical form’. Keywords: Panopticon, constructivism, science studies, mechanical form, dynamics, mediation, innovation, Bruno Latour, structuralism, formalism

Gatas y Vatas: Female Empowerment and Community-Oriented Experimentalism

Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, 2018

This chapter centers on the activities of Gatas y Vatas, an annual experimental music festival in New Mexico that features solo performances by local practitioners. Initiated by young female Hispanic musicians as an attempt to counteract the white male dominance of local music scenes, Gatas y Vatas has become a catalyst of female empowerment where participants experience liberation while defying gender norms in an all-inclusive environment. Alonso- Minutti examines how the practices fostered in the festival are tied to a locally perceived freedom granted by Albuquerque’s complex cultural makeup. To the “Gatas,” the city is a place where “everything is possible.” She argues that this sentiment of endless potential drives performers to experiment with sound, noise, technology, and the environment and to engage in activities that foster a feminist ideal rooted in a Hispanic connection. The result is a community-oriented experimental atmosphere that has reached levels of inclusion and female equality rarely seen in experimental music scenes.

The Nature of Desire. New York: Oxford University Press

2017

Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind.

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