Since its beginnings in the 1970s, modern rhetorical genre studies has used classical Darwinian adaptation as a key analogy, if not a model, in the study of genre evolution. While the adaptation analogy has obvious strengths, it also produces blind spots. As the studies of rapidly evolving social media genres presented in this article suggest, not all of a genre's formal features are the result of a purposeful adaptation to an existing rhetorical exigence. Some features repeat and intensify because they are part of the genre's aesthetic landscape, becoming available to be coopted for a rhetorical purpose later on. This suggests that along with adaptation, exaptation should also be considered as a crucial force in genre evolution. Moreover, the inclusion of exaptation in our model of genre evolution also means that rhetorical genre scholars will need to rediscover the language of aesthetics and form even as genre continues to be studied as social action.

The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analyticcontinental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical 'sound' from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Noah Roderick The Being of AnalogyLondon 2016 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESSOpen Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2016Freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/the-being-of-analogy AcknowledgementsThe more you understand your debts to others, the harder it is to articulate them. With that terrible paradox in mind, I want to thank Charish. Above all. All of my love. And finally, this book would not have been possible had GrahamHarman not taken a chance on me. I thank him for the revolutionary ideas he brought to the world, for the comma he brought to page 137 of my manuscript, and for everything in between. List of Figures Introduction The Midday StarsEinstein's great mystique lies in his intellectually humble beginnings and in his unorthodox thinking. Every eighth grade science student has heard about his inability to speak until the age of four (though this is almost certainly untrue). They know about how his most important ideas were developed while he was a frustrated patent office worker, and about how he dreamt up his theory of relativity while watching trains pass each other.Einstein's exuberance, his funky hair, and his ability to translate startling visuals into beautiful mathematics made him a counter-culture hero. All of it seemed to come naturally to Einstein, a quirk of personality. Not so for Hideki Yukawa. He titled his memoir Tabibito, "The Traveler." Yet, it is full of mentions of his distaste for leaving the sanctuary of his home and routine.The book's subtitle might well have been An Unexpected Journey. Yukawa had to work hard to become an unorthodox thinker. Since it was not part of his personality, it had to become his philosophy.In the years following the Russo-Japanese War, in the spirit of Meiji curiosity about the nation's rivals, Russian literature was all the rage in Japan. Because of his crippling shyness and his lack of interest in all of the things boys at the time w...

This essay calls for an independent theory of features in object-oriented philosophy. Theories of features are in general motivated by at least two interconnected demands: 1) to explain why objects have the characteristics they have, 2) to explain how regular divisions in those characteristics can be intuited. While a theory of universal properties may be the most internally consistent means of addressing these demands, an object-oriented metaphysics needs to address them without a concept of shared features. This means that regular divisions of invariant features and our intuitions of them cannot be explained by the repetition of self-same characteristics or natural laws. They can instead be explained by the immanent repetition of similar features. However, this requires a new, radically aesthetic understanding of what it means to be similar in the first place, one in which similarity is an emergent process rather than a state of affairs existing between resembling particulars.

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Of all the human sciences, linguistics has had perhaps the most success in pivoting itself towards the physical sciences, particularly in the past fifty years with the dominance of Universal Grammar, which is most closely associated with the work of Noam Chomsky. One of the most important implications of Universal Grammar has been that language production in its most natural and optimal state is organized analytically, and thus shares the same organizational logic of other knowledge systems in Western science, such as the binomial taxonomization of nature and analytic geometry. This essay argues that recent challenges to Universal Grammar represent more than just a theoretical dispute within a single discipline; they threaten to undermine the hegemony of analytical knowledge systems in general. While analytical logic has served Western science well, analogical knowledge systems may be able to address problems that analytical logic cannot, such as ecological crises, the limitations of artificial intelligence, and the problems of complex systems. Instead of studying languages as a means of modeling human thought in general, languages should also be studied and preserved as heteronomous knowledge systems which themselves exist as embodied objects within particular ecologies. Rethinking language as existing on a univocal plane with other ecological objects will provide us with new insight on the ethics and epistemology of analogical knowledge production.