User:KYPark/1949

The Aleph (short story collection)

revised in 1974

• The Aleph (short story)

``In Borges's story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion. The story continues the theme of infinity found in several of Borges's other works, such as The Book of Sand.``

``Borges writes in the collection's afterword that the story owes something to H. G. Wells' The Crystal Egg``

``The science fiction novel Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson contains a device called "an aleph" that is described as an approximation of the entirety of cyberspace.``

The God that Failed

• An edition of six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous ex-Communists. The common theme of the essays is the authors' disillusionment with and abandonment of Communism. "Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about Communism," including Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright.

Courts on Trial

• stressed the uncertainties and fallibility of the judicial process.
• Law and the Modern Mind (1930)
  argues for 'legal realism' and emphasizes the psychological forces at work in legal matters.
• ``Jerome Frank is famously credited with the idea that a judicial decision might be determined by what the judge had for breakfast.``
• behaviorism

Language in Thought and Action

• Cf. wikiquote: S. I. Hayakawa

Nineteen Eighty-Four

• ``Specific literary influences include Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar by Arthur Koestler, The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London; Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley; We (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which Orwell read in French and reviewed in 1946; and The Managerial Revolution (1940) by James Burnham, predicting permanent war among three totalitarian superstates, broadly equivalent to those in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell told Jacintha Buddicom that he would write a novel stylistically like A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells.``

The Concept of Mind

• ``The "reduction" of the material world to mental states and processes, as well as the "reduction" of the mental states and processes to physical states and processes, presuppose the legitimacy of the disjunction "either there exist minds or there exist bodies (but not both)". It would be like saying, "either she bought a left-hand and a right-hand glove or she bought a pair of gloves (but not both)".``
• Influenced by Schopenhauer
• Cf. Ghost in the machine, The Ghost in the Machine (1967), Janus: A Summing Up (1978)

The Mathematical Theory of Communication

(with Warren Weaver)

Theory of Literature

with Austin Warren