In this essay I reflect on Knox Peden's Spinoza contra Phenomenology, a history of French rationalist Spinozism in the mid-twentieth century. The book marks an important intervention in modern French ...and European intellectual history, depicting the importance of Baruch Spinoza's thought in the negotiation of and resistance to the phenomenology that captivated much of twentieth-century French intellectual life. With philosophical and historical sophistication, Peden tells the story of several relatively overlooked thinkers while also providing substantially new contexts and interpretations of the well-known Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze. While accounting for Peden's major accomplishment, my aim is also to situate his work among a number of recent works in the history of Spinozism in order to reflect on the specific methodological questions that pertain to the widely varying appropriations of Spinoza's thought since the seventeenth century. In particular, I reflect on Peden's claim that Spinoza's thought cannot provide an actionable politics, a claim that runs counter to nearly two centuries of leftist forms of Spinozism. I offer a short account of some of the ways that theorists have mobilized Spinoza's thought for political purposes, redefining "action" itself in Spinozist terms. I then conclude by reflecting on the dimensions of Spinoza's thought (and recent interpretations of it) that make it possible for such significantly different claims about its political potential to be credible.
This paper addresses the question as to whether the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is compatible with the phenomenological notion of consciousness defined as self-awareness. This problem ...is approached by explicating various concepts that Merleau-Ponty used in his attempts at a reinterpretation of the psychoanalytic unconscious. At first, the paper focuses on MerleauPonty’s position in the Phenomenology of Perception, which is specified by the concepts of bad faith, institution and body schema. After that, it is explained what are the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s late conceptions of primordial symbolism and embodied intersubjectivity for the problem of the unconscious and its manifestation in the consciousness.
The “life phenomenology” theme of the 35th International Human Science Research Conference challenged participants to consider pressing questions of life and of living with others of our own and ...other-than-human kinds. The theme was addressed by keynote speakers Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Ralph Acampora and David Abram who invoked a motile, affective and linguistic awareness of how we might dwell actively and ethically amongst human communities and with the many life forms we encounter in the wider, wilder world we have in common. Conference participants were provoked to consider the following questions: “How might phenomenology have us recognize a primacy of movement and bring us in touch with the motions and gestures of the multiple lifeworlds of daily living? What worlds from ecology to technology privilege certain animations? What are the affects and effects of an enhanced phenomenological sensitivity? What senses, feelings, emotions and moods of self-affirmation and responsiveness to others sustain us in our daily lives? And to what extent might the descriptive, invocative, provocative language of phenomenology infuse the human sciences and engender a language for speaking directly of life?”
Particles beyond the Standard Model (SM) can generically have lifetimes that are long compared to SM particles at the weak scale. When produced at experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ...at CERN, these long-lived particles (LLPs) can decay far from the interaction vertex of the primary proton-proton collision. Such LLP signatures are distinct from those of promptly decaying particles that are targeted by the majority of searches for new physics at the LHC, often requiring customized techniques to identify, for example, significantly displaced decay vertices, tracks with atypical properties, and short track segments. Given their non-standard nature, a comprehensive overview of LLP signatures at the LHC is beneficial to ensure that possible avenues of the discovery of new physics are not overlooked. Here we report on the joint work of a community of theorists and experimentalists with the ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments-as well as those working on dedicated experiments such as MoEDAL, milliQan, MATHUSLA, CODEX-b, and FASER-to survey the current state of LLP searches at the LHC, and to chart a path for the development of LLP searches into the future, both in the upcoming Run 3 and at the high-luminosity LHC. The work is organized around the current and future potential capabilities of LHC experiments to generally discover new LLPs, and takes a signature-based approach to surveying classes of models that give rise to LLPs rather than emphasizing any particular theory motivation. We develop a set of simplified models; assess the coverage of current searches; document known, often unexpected backgrounds; explore the capabilities of proposed detector upgrades; provide recommendations for the presentation of search results; and look towards the newest frontiers, namely high-multiplicity 'dark showers', highlighting opportunities for expanding the LHC reach for these signals.
Exploring viable vacua of the Z 3-symmetric NMSSM Beuria, Jyotiranjan; Chattopadhyay, Utpal; Datta, AseshKrishna ...
The journal of high energy physics,
4/2017, Volume:
2017, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract We explore the vacua of the Z 3-symmetric Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) and their stability by going beyond the simplistic paradigm that works with a tree-level ...neutral scalar potential and adheres to some specific flat directions in the field space. We work in the so-called phenomenological NMSSM (pNMSSM) scenario. Also, for our purpose, we adhere to a reasonably ‘natural’ setup by requiring |μ eff| not too large. Key effects are demonstrated by first studying the profiles of this potential under various circumstances of physical interest via a semi-analytical approach. The results thereof are compared to the ones obtained from a dedicated package like Vevacious which further incorporates the thermal effects to the potential. Regions of the pNMSSM parameter space that render the desired symmetry breaking (DSB) vacuum absolutely stable, long- or short-lived (in relation to the age of the Universe) under quantum/thermal tunneling are delineated. Regions that result in the appearance of color and charge breaking (CCB) minima are also presented. It is demonstrated that light singlet scalars along with a light LSP (lightest supersymmetric particle) having an appreciable singlino admixture are compatible with a viable DSB vacuum. Their implications for collider experiments are commented upon.
The non-first-order-factorizable contributions1 to the unpolarized and polarized massive operator matrix elements to three-loop order, AQg(3) and ΔAQg(3), are calculated in the single-mass case. For ...the F12-related master integrals of the problem, we use a semi-analytic method based on series expansions and utilize the first-order differential equations for the master integrals which does not need a special basis of the master integrals. Due to the singularity structure of this basis a part of the integrals has to be computed to O(ε5) in the dimensional parameter. The solutions have to be matched at a series of thresholds and pseudo-thresholds in the region of the Bjorken variable x∈0,∞ using highly precise series expansions to obtain the imaginary part of the physical amplitude for x∈0,1 at a high relative accuracy. We compare the present results both with previous analytic results, the results for fixed Mellin moments, and a prediction in the small-x region. We also derive expansions in the region of small and large values of x. With this paper, all three-loop single-mass unpolarized and polarized operator matrix elements are calculated.
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