The Semantic Sphere 1: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy

PART 1

The Philosophy of Information

“Ah! very great tree of language, peopled with oracles and maxims, and murmuring the murmur of one born blind among the quincunxes of knowledge…”

Saint-John Perse, Winds, Pantheon, New York, 1953

“It was with pleasure that he saw himself in this eye looking at him. The pleasure in fact became very great. It became so great, so pitiless that he bore it with a sort of terror, and in the intolerable moment when he had stood forward without receiving from his interlocutor any sign of complicity, he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute.”

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, D. Lewis, New York, 1973

“It is evident, therefore, that the differentiating characteristic of humanity is a distinctive capacity or power of intellect. And since this capacity as a whole cannot be reduced to action at one time through one man, or through any one of the societies discriminated above, multiplicity is necessary in the human race in order to actualize its capacity in entirety. […] With this belief Averroës (Ibn Rushd) accords in his commentary on the treatise Concerning the Soul.”

Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia

Part 1 of this book explores the concept of open unity, i.e., a unity that ...