Steven M. Rosen

This essay offers a broad historical exploration of the apeiron, the ancient principle of boundlessness and indeterminacy first brought to light by Anaximander in the 6th century BCE. Early Greek philosophy’s struggle with the apeiron and apeiron’s subsequent repression during the Renaissance and Enlightenment are noted. In the nineteenth century, apeiron is resurgent in science, art, and other fields—only to be repressed again with the early twentieth century rise of modernism. But with modernism's collapse into postmodernism, once again the apeiron comes to the fore. The conclusion reached is that the apeiron can be effectively contained only by consciously acknowledging and accepting it as part of the process of individuation.

Processes and Boundaries of the Mind is a wide-ranging, free-wheeling investigation that probes the foundations of contemporary thought. In the course of his exploration, Yair Neuman examines a number of fascinating dimensions on the frontiers of the human intellect: semiotics and the origin of language, ontology and epistemology, animal intelligence, phenomenology and hermeneutics, recursion and self-reference, complex systems and chaos theory, and many others. Neuman's diverse reflections come together around a centering insight into the dynamic nature of the mind. In reading this book, we discover that the mind is neither an object, nor a free-standing subject, but a fundamental process, a dynamically oscillating boundary event constituting the primary distinction from which all other distinctions arise. Distinctions do tend to harden, with the world taking on the appearance of coming ready-made, already parceled out into pre-existent, rigidly bounded categories. But Neuman demonstrates the deceptiveness of these reified appearances, and brings us back time and again to the embodied processual substrate that underlies the fixed abstractions currently dominant in our culture.