Translations
Twenty lectures by the Hungarian philosopher Melchior Palágyi (1859–1924), arguing against psychologism and for the intermittency of consciousness—a pulsed, rhythmic theory set against the Bergsonian stream—while developing a vitalist account of perception and imagination as active encounters with resistance. A neglected polymath later read closely by Ludwig Klages, Palágyi treats consciousness and life as a single problem.
From the German, Naturphilosophische Vorlesungen über die Grundprobleme des Bewußtseins und des Lebens (1908).
Ervin Bauer’s 1935 treatise grounds a thermodynamic theory of life in a single principle—“stable non-equilibrium”: living systems alone continually perform work against the equilibrium that physics would otherwise impose on them. The Hungarian biologist was executed in Stalin’s Great Terror in 1938 and the book suppressed; it anticipates the non-equilibrium thermodynamics later associated with Schrödinger and Prigogine, and appears here in a complete, independent translation from the Russian.
From the Russian, Теоретическая биология (1935).
English translation of Chapter III of Paul Kraus’s Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, volume II (1942), pp. 97–134. The chapter examines artificial generation, homunculi and animated statues across Greek, Hermetic, Neoplatonic and Arabic traditions. The edition includes Kraus’s 272 notes, additions and errata, translator’s notes, and English translations of the Greek and Latin quotations.
From the French, “La génération artificielle” (Jābir ibn Ḥayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, vol. II: Jābir et la science grecque, 1942).
Goethe reflects on Heinroth’s description of his thinking as “object-directed” (gegenständlich): thinking and perceiving remain bound to the objects themselves. The essay connects this method to poetry, plant metamorphosis, anatomy and geology, and considers how knowledge of the world and recognition by others contribute to self-knowledge.
From the German, “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort” (Zur Morphologie, Band II, Heft 1 (1823); Berliner Ausgabe, Band 16, 1823).
Kolmogorov’s preface and the popular exposition of his report prepared by N. G. Rychkova, followed by his fifteen report theses. The two texts explore automata, living systems, and the possibilities of cybernetics.
From the Russian, “Автоматы и жизнь” (Tekhnika–Molodezhi, nos. 10–11 (1961); report theses, 1 March 1961; texts reproduced in Vivos Voco (2000), 1961).
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