Pub Date : 2009-12-15DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009488
Mindy Tan
{"title":"The Biography of a Philosopher","authors":"Mindy Tan","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009488","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130721492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-12-15DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094917
Zijiang Ding
{"title":"Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher","authors":"Zijiang Ding","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094917","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134527799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-12-15DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094912
Amrita Ghosh
The latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his notorious anti-emancipationist perspective in "The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," followed by John Stuart Mill's divergent response to him in 1850 titled, "The Negro Question." In 1878, The Westminster Review also published a woman's perspective, "The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question" by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. This paper first compares the three essays to show the underlying hegemonic racial discourse and then presents the imperialist subtext that underlies Mill's views. In this, I argue that it is crucial to read these three essays within the scientific discourse of the era, to see how 19th century science, especially phrenology and contemporary researches of evolution became "hegemonic systems (1)" which seeped into the normative racial ideologies of the period as seen through these writers. Brian Regal in Race and the Search for Origins of Man mentions that even before the advent of Darwin's theories about evolution there were comparisons between human beings and apes. Regal points out: "European systematizers ranked groups as superior and inferior using their own faces as the measure." (2) As Regal states 'Savage' races were equated with savage beasts in the growing tide of racial stereotypes. Ape imagery dealt with race, class, the spread of empire and even gender issues, as well as evolution and human origins. The ape became a metaphor of everything dark and troubling in European minds.... (3) In the same vein, Patrick Brantlinger also notes: "The theory that man evolved through distinct social stages--from savagery to barbarism to civilization-led to a self-congratulatory anthropology that actively promoted belief in the inferiority, indeed the bestiality, of the African." (4) Researches into the question of human evolution and racial hierarchies were a large part of the discourse of Carlyle's epoch and he shares certain assumptions from such scientific discourses. Although Carlyle doesn't directly depict Africans as apes, he does relegate them to a bestial, animal status, since he views them as "two-legged cattle (5)" with "excellent horse-jaws." (6) In addition, Carlyle leaves no hope that Africans would have been capable of making any improvements to the putrefied lands of West Indies; he argues that the Black man knows "whether ever he could have introduced an improvement." (7) As he states, "Am I gratified in my mind by the ill usage of any two--or four legged thing; of any horse or any dog? Not so, I assure you." (8) While attempting to argue against the exploitations of slavery, his associations still operate amidst the animalistic images of horse, dog or any four-legged thing com
{"title":"Carlyle, Mill, Bodington and the Case of 19th Century Imperialized Science","authors":"Amrita Ghosh","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094912","url":null,"abstract":"The latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his notorious anti-emancipationist perspective in \"The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,\" followed by John Stuart Mill's divergent response to him in 1850 titled, \"The Negro Question.\" In 1878, The Westminster Review also published a woman's perspective, \"The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question\" by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. This paper first compares the three essays to show the underlying hegemonic racial discourse and then presents the imperialist subtext that underlies Mill's views. In this, I argue that it is crucial to read these three essays within the scientific discourse of the era, to see how 19th century science, especially phrenology and contemporary researches of evolution became \"hegemonic systems (1)\" which seeped into the normative racial ideologies of the period as seen through these writers. Brian Regal in Race and the Search for Origins of Man mentions that even before the advent of Darwin's theories about evolution there were comparisons between human beings and apes. Regal points out: \"European systematizers ranked groups as superior and inferior using their own faces as the measure.\" (2) As Regal states 'Savage' races were equated with savage beasts in the growing tide of racial stereotypes. Ape imagery dealt with race, class, the spread of empire and even gender issues, as well as evolution and human origins. The ape became a metaphor of everything dark and troubling in European minds.... (3) In the same vein, Patrick Brantlinger also notes: \"The theory that man evolved through distinct social stages--from savagery to barbarism to civilization-led to a self-congratulatory anthropology that actively promoted belief in the inferiority, indeed the bestiality, of the African.\" (4) Researches into the question of human evolution and racial hierarchies were a large part of the discourse of Carlyle's epoch and he shares certain assumptions from such scientific discourses. Although Carlyle doesn't directly depict Africans as apes, he does relegate them to a bestial, animal status, since he views them as \"two-legged cattle (5)\" with \"excellent horse-jaws.\" (6) In addition, Carlyle leaves no hope that Africans would have been capable of making any improvements to the putrefied lands of West Indies; he argues that the Black man knows \"whether ever he could have introduced an improvement.\" (7) As he states, \"Am I gratified in my mind by the ill usage of any two--or four legged thing; of any horse or any dog? Not so, I assure you.\" (8) While attempting to argue against the exploitations of slavery, his associations still operate amidst the animalistic images of horse, dog or any four-legged thing com","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127738862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-12-15DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009485
Markus Gabriel
Heidegger famously criticized Hegel's philosophy for being an ontotheological system. The snag Heidegger finds in ontotheology is that it hypostatizes a first principle on which, to quote from Aristotle, "the universe and nature depend" (Meta. 1072b13-14). According to Heidegger, Hegel presupposes an absolute in the form of an absolute subjectivity from the very outset of his system; an absolute principle, which accounts for the teleology in the various histories Hegel subsequently reconstructs. Heidegger attacks Hegel because he believes that Hegel draws on a determinate version of the ontological difference which, eventually, defines being as an absolute, self-transparent Geist, and beings as its spiritual manifestations. (1) If Heidegger were right in his interpretation of Hegel, Hegel would actually be defining being as Spirit and would, therefore, be determining it as a peculiar kind of thing instead of understanding it as the process of alterations within the ontological difference that Heidegger envisages with his concept of Being. In order to reassess this criticism one needs to first look at Hegel's concept of the absolute. In what follows, I shall argue that Hegel's conception of the absolute is based on a detailed exposition of the dialectical failure of transcendent metaphysics. Hegel denies that there is an absolute beyond or behind the world of appearance. The world we inhabit is not the appearance of a hidden reality utterly inaccessible to our conceptual capacities. But this claim does not entail any kind of omniscience on the part of the philosopher, as many have suspected. It rather yields the standpoint of immanent metaphysics without any first principle on which totality depends. Moreover, Hegel does not claim to finish the business of philosophy once and for all; on the contrary, his conception of the absolute entails that philosophy is awarded the infinite task of comprehending one's own time in thought. Hegel himself conceives of the absolute as of a process which makes various forms of conceptualizing totality possible. Unlike Heidegger, I do not believe that the concept of the absolute in Post-Kantian Idealism entails a denial of the finitude that looms large in Kant's own system, as Heidegger acknowledges in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. (2) One possible way of interpreting the overall internal development of Post-Kantian Idealism is to regard it as an extended commentary on Kant's concept of the "unconditioned" in the First Critique. In fact one could easily argue that the whole Post-Kantian movement ought to be understood as a development of the Kantian exposition of the "transcendental ideal of pure reason". (3) The epistemological and metaphysical enterprise that is awakened by Kant's analysis of the dialectical consequences of the transcendental ideal primarily depends on a theory of determinacy. However, given that determination cannot be restricted to being a property of concepts qua mental contents or
{"title":"The Dialectic of the Absolute-Hegel's Critique of Transcendent Metaphysics","authors":"Markus Gabriel","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009485","url":null,"abstract":"Heidegger famously criticized Hegel's philosophy for being an ontotheological system. The snag Heidegger finds in ontotheology is that it hypostatizes a first principle on which, to quote from Aristotle, \"the universe and nature depend\" (Meta. 1072b13-14). According to Heidegger, Hegel presupposes an absolute in the form of an absolute subjectivity from the very outset of his system; an absolute principle, which accounts for the teleology in the various histories Hegel subsequently reconstructs. Heidegger attacks Hegel because he believes that Hegel draws on a determinate version of the ontological difference which, eventually, defines being as an absolute, self-transparent Geist, and beings as its spiritual manifestations. (1) If Heidegger were right in his interpretation of Hegel, Hegel would actually be defining being as Spirit and would, therefore, be determining it as a peculiar kind of thing instead of understanding it as the process of alterations within the ontological difference that Heidegger envisages with his concept of Being. In order to reassess this criticism one needs to first look at Hegel's concept of the absolute. In what follows, I shall argue that Hegel's conception of the absolute is based on a detailed exposition of the dialectical failure of transcendent metaphysics. Hegel denies that there is an absolute beyond or behind the world of appearance. The world we inhabit is not the appearance of a hidden reality utterly inaccessible to our conceptual capacities. But this claim does not entail any kind of omniscience on the part of the philosopher, as many have suspected. It rather yields the standpoint of immanent metaphysics without any first principle on which totality depends. Moreover, Hegel does not claim to finish the business of philosophy once and for all; on the contrary, his conception of the absolute entails that philosophy is awarded the infinite task of comprehending one's own time in thought. Hegel himself conceives of the absolute as of a process which makes various forms of conceptualizing totality possible. Unlike Heidegger, I do not believe that the concept of the absolute in Post-Kantian Idealism entails a denial of the finitude that looms large in Kant's own system, as Heidegger acknowledges in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. (2) One possible way of interpreting the overall internal development of Post-Kantian Idealism is to regard it as an extended commentary on Kant's concept of the \"unconditioned\" in the First Critique. In fact one could easily argue that the whole Post-Kantian movement ought to be understood as a development of the Kantian exposition of the \"transcendental ideal of pure reason\". (3) The epistemological and metaphysical enterprise that is awakened by Kant's analysis of the dialectical consequences of the transcendental ideal primarily depends on a theory of determinacy. However, given that determination cannot be restricted to being a property of concepts qua mental contents or ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132409708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-12-04DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941019
G. Harpham
The connection between literature and ethics has been more intuited than demonstrated. The one position that sophisticated people seem willing to defend is that literature does not have an immediate positive ethical impact. And yet, there are radicals who believe that the literature of the past constitutes a judgment on the present. There are liberals who believe that progressive values are embedded in literary critique, and there are conservatives who believe that children who read about patriots will become themselves patriotic. The general fact suggested by this curious disjunction is that while people do not believe that literature teaches people to be ethical, and reject literature that tries to impart ethical advice as manipulative, boring, and somehow unliterary, they-especially those who are heavily invested in literary study-do feel that literature and the study of literature are good in some obscure way, that the interests of literature and the interests of ethics-two discourses defined by "disinterestedness"-are somehow coordinated or co-implicated, even if they are not directly linked. Indirectness is, in fact, the key to the argument I wish to make, which is that literature "teaches ethics" on the condition that the lesson is not learned immediately, directly, or even wittingly. Another way of putting this would be to say that we learn ethics from literature only when, and only what, we do not know we learn. In order for literature to be ethically productive, there must be a gap between the literary experience and ethical understanding-a gap in the first instance of time, in which what we read mutates in the memory, is disassembled and reassembled, is forgotten and found again, loses its specific form or even chunks of its content, to emerge later in partial, distorted, combined, or translated forms. When the text has suffered a sufficient sea-change in our memory, some bits or aspects of it might begin to function in apparently unrelated contexts as a component of our ethical knowledge. This component might even function as part of our "conscience," which appears, apparently out of nowhere, in the form of an autonomous and acontextual guide to the right. What I am suggesting, in short, is that a true account of the ethical productivity of literature should begin with the premise that this productivity is realized only remotely or indirectly, and that a certain unconsciousness or unknowingness-misprision, meconnaissance, misrecognition, misplacement-is its ground-condition. There are many ways literature can teach ethics, but I want to outline three that are defined by this particular kind of indirection. My examples will apply primarily to extended prose narratives. Since they are all taken from "western" literature, the arguments they exemplify may well reflect a cultural bias. I will concede this possibility, but will not readily surrender the more fundamental point, that our sense of what constitutes an ethical conception is inti
{"title":"How Does Literature Teach Ethics","authors":"G. Harpham","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941019","url":null,"abstract":"The connection between literature and ethics has been more intuited than demonstrated. The one position that sophisticated people seem willing to defend is that literature does not have an immediate positive ethical impact. And yet, there are radicals who believe that the literature of the past constitutes a judgment on the present. There are liberals who believe that progressive values are embedded in literary critique, and there are conservatives who believe that children who read about patriots will become themselves patriotic. The general fact suggested by this curious disjunction is that while people do not believe that literature teaches people to be ethical, and reject literature that tries to impart ethical advice as manipulative, boring, and somehow unliterary, they-especially those who are heavily invested in literary study-do feel that literature and the study of literature are good in some obscure way, that the interests of literature and the interests of ethics-two discourses defined by \"disinterestedness\"-are somehow coordinated or co-implicated, even if they are not directly linked. Indirectness is, in fact, the key to the argument I wish to make, which is that literature \"teaches ethics\" on the condition that the lesson is not learned immediately, directly, or even wittingly. Another way of putting this would be to say that we learn ethics from literature only when, and only what, we do not know we learn. In order for literature to be ethically productive, there must be a gap between the literary experience and ethical understanding-a gap in the first instance of time, in which what we read mutates in the memory, is disassembled and reassembled, is forgotten and found again, loses its specific form or even chunks of its content, to emerge later in partial, distorted, combined, or translated forms. When the text has suffered a sufficient sea-change in our memory, some bits or aspects of it might begin to function in apparently unrelated contexts as a component of our ethical knowledge. This component might even function as part of our \"conscience,\" which appears, apparently out of nowhere, in the form of an autonomous and acontextual guide to the right. What I am suggesting, in short, is that a true account of the ethical productivity of literature should begin with the premise that this productivity is realized only remotely or indirectly, and that a certain unconsciousness or unknowingness-misprision, meconnaissance, misrecognition, misplacement-is its ground-condition. There are many ways literature can teach ethics, but I want to outline three that are defined by this particular kind of indirection. My examples will apply primarily to extended prose narratives. Since they are all taken from \"western\" literature, the arguments they exemplify may well reflect a cultural bias. I will concede this possibility, but will not readily surrender the more fundamental point, that our sense of what constitutes an ethical conception is inti","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124335432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-09-22DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941029
Yubraj Aryal
My aim in this editorial is to propose an alternative model of identities in opposition to the culturalist account of identities in an attempt to (re) think notions of [cultural] identities through recourse to the idea of affects. (1) In a culturalist account, identities are often defined in terms of race, class and gender. And we have already produced numerous theoretical models to approach culture, politics and history, and their effectivity over the formation of subjectivity as effects of narrative seeing history "... as a kind of production of various kinds of narratives." (2) But here I am attempting to approach subjectivity from the idea of 'noncultural'/'nonnarrated' reality of affects, neither taking any airy transcendentalist turn nor adopting the point of view of any "misty crust" of cultural universalism, but rather from the position of Spinozian ethics of immanence. (3) My sense of 'noncultural' does not deny culture rather expands its horizon opening new fields for [cultural] individuations; rather helps to analyze the content and expression of culture. Additionally, I am also trying to introduce Spinozian view point of affects as a can-be new approach to analyze postcolonial/transnational bodies of literature. What is wrong with the representationalist account of cultural individuations? How can my alternative model of [cultural] identities save an idealistic/humanistic mission for society? These are the two major questions I am intending to address. To start with the first question, I disagree with the idea that who am I is based on in which ethnicity, in which nationality, in which political, religious, ethical systems I grew up. I am not a representation of the summations of these social and geographical abstractions, nor am I the effects of narratives under certain "regimes of power." I am a "pure, pre-extensive spatium in intelligible extension." (4) My intelligible extension is grounded in the real world where I encounter not the "clear and distinct" ideas or causations and effects of some conceptual abstractions that we call narratives of history, ideology, politics and truth but physical affects and affections (5) that my body produces with another body. And my intelligibility of the world cannot be adequately mediated either through any conceptual abstraction. I am my affective investment to the world. In other words, the content of my identity is not the idea of some conceptual abstractions, but rather the expressive power of my body. My body is an immanent force, which encounters other forces in the world and shapes what is in me and possibly cause to shape what is in others. I am a force, a new emergence within me all the time. That emergence is a purely organic process: an appreciative activity and organic vitality and it is affirmative will-to-create new individuations. I am not like "deorganizing the organic" (6) in any ossified representations. I am neither deorganic representation of any abstract stratifications tha
{"title":"Affects: Thinking Identities beyond Culture","authors":"Yubraj Aryal","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941029","url":null,"abstract":"My aim in this editorial is to propose an alternative model of identities in opposition to the culturalist account of identities in an attempt to (re) think notions of [cultural] identities through recourse to the idea of affects. (1) In a culturalist account, identities are often defined in terms of race, class and gender. And we have already produced numerous theoretical models to approach culture, politics and history, and their effectivity over the formation of subjectivity as effects of narrative seeing history \"... as a kind of production of various kinds of narratives.\" (2) But here I am attempting to approach subjectivity from the idea of 'noncultural'/'nonnarrated' reality of affects, neither taking any airy transcendentalist turn nor adopting the point of view of any \"misty crust\" of cultural universalism, but rather from the position of Spinozian ethics of immanence. (3) My sense of 'noncultural' does not deny culture rather expands its horizon opening new fields for [cultural] individuations; rather helps to analyze the content and expression of culture. Additionally, I am also trying to introduce Spinozian view point of affects as a can-be new approach to analyze postcolonial/transnational bodies of literature. What is wrong with the representationalist account of cultural individuations? How can my alternative model of [cultural] identities save an idealistic/humanistic mission for society? These are the two major questions I am intending to address. To start with the first question, I disagree with the idea that who am I is based on in which ethnicity, in which nationality, in which political, religious, ethical systems I grew up. I am not a representation of the summations of these social and geographical abstractions, nor am I the effects of narratives under certain \"regimes of power.\" I am a \"pure, pre-extensive spatium in intelligible extension.\" (4) My intelligible extension is grounded in the real world where I encounter not the \"clear and distinct\" ideas or causations and effects of some conceptual abstractions that we call narratives of history, ideology, politics and truth but physical affects and affections (5) that my body produces with another body. And my intelligibility of the world cannot be adequately mediated either through any conceptual abstraction. I am my affective investment to the world. In other words, the content of my identity is not the idea of some conceptual abstractions, but rather the expressive power of my body. My body is an immanent force, which encounters other forces in the world and shapes what is in me and possibly cause to shape what is in others. I am a force, a new emergence within me all the time. That emergence is a purely organic process: an appreciative activity and organic vitality and it is affirmative will-to-create new individuations. I am not like \"deorganizing the organic\" (6) in any ossified representations. I am neither deorganic representation of any abstract stratifications tha","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126110378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-09-22DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941021
D. E. Schrader
Values guide life. The values of individuals guide the lives of those individuals. The values of communities guide the lives of those communities. The values of individuals function to guide individual lives in a simple enough manner. I value the taste of oranges more than I value the taste of apples. So I will eat more oranges, assuming that oranges are roughly as easy to acquire as are apples. I value time with my family. So I will choose a job that may pay less, but allows me more time to spend with my family. I value honesty. So I will generally tell the truth. The values of communities function in a far more complicated manner. While the process of value development in communities has always been a complicated affair, it is even more complicated now at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is due in large measure to a variety of aspects of globalization, to the increased levels of commerce, communication, and movement of populations that we experience because of the tremendous advances that we have made in communication and transportation technology. The conflicts in values between classes or occupational groups within a single society have been with us from the beginning of human history. Now we have also those conflicts in values that arise from the mutual encounters of cultural traditions that have embodied conflicting traditional values. There is, however, a common mechanism of value emergence that can account for the mediation and development of values within a traditional community of individuals sharing a relatively common body of cultural-historical experience and the mediation and development of values in a modern multi-cultural community, a community of individuals of widely divergent cultural-historical experiences. This same mechanism, in the context of globalization, provides for new possibilities for the emergence of increased agreement on values at a global scale. Moreover, the emergence of values through this mechanism generally will constitute positive progress in the realm of value. Our optimism regarding this conclusion must, however, be tempered by two important sources of caution. My initial optimistic conclusion about the emergence of common values at a global scale depends upon an analysis of the development of human values that involves two general claims about human beings that generally serve to guide the development of values. While I think it is clear that these claims are generally true of human beings and of human communities, there seem to be important exceptions that should temper our optimism and should help to frame more clearly the question of how to achieve a broader level of global harmony. A century ago William James offered an account of the development of moral values that can be generalized to other kinds of value as well. (1) In at least two important ways, James's account accords well with two basic facts about human beings that seem to be well supported by our emerging knowledge of our bi
{"title":"Globalization and Human Values: Promises and Challenges","authors":"D. E. Schrader","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941021","url":null,"abstract":"Values guide life. The values of individuals guide the lives of those individuals. The values of communities guide the lives of those communities. The values of individuals function to guide individual lives in a simple enough manner. I value the taste of oranges more than I value the taste of apples. So I will eat more oranges, assuming that oranges are roughly as easy to acquire as are apples. I value time with my family. So I will choose a job that may pay less, but allows me more time to spend with my family. I value honesty. So I will generally tell the truth. The values of communities function in a far more complicated manner. While the process of value development in communities has always been a complicated affair, it is even more complicated now at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is due in large measure to a variety of aspects of globalization, to the increased levels of commerce, communication, and movement of populations that we experience because of the tremendous advances that we have made in communication and transportation technology. The conflicts in values between classes or occupational groups within a single society have been with us from the beginning of human history. Now we have also those conflicts in values that arise from the mutual encounters of cultural traditions that have embodied conflicting traditional values. There is, however, a common mechanism of value emergence that can account for the mediation and development of values within a traditional community of individuals sharing a relatively common body of cultural-historical experience and the mediation and development of values in a modern multi-cultural community, a community of individuals of widely divergent cultural-historical experiences. This same mechanism, in the context of globalization, provides for new possibilities for the emergence of increased agreement on values at a global scale. Moreover, the emergence of values through this mechanism generally will constitute positive progress in the realm of value. Our optimism regarding this conclusion must, however, be tempered by two important sources of caution. My initial optimistic conclusion about the emergence of common values at a global scale depends upon an analysis of the development of human values that involves two general claims about human beings that generally serve to guide the development of values. While I think it is clear that these claims are generally true of human beings and of human communities, there seem to be important exceptions that should temper our optimism and should help to frame more clearly the question of how to achieve a broader level of global harmony. A century ago William James offered an account of the development of moral values that can be generalized to other kinds of value as well. (1) In at least two important ways, James's account accords well with two basic facts about human beings that seem to be well supported by our emerging knowledge of our bi","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"64 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123316186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-09-22DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941025
P. Nicholls, Yubraj Aryal
(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Peter Nicholls on New Modernist Studies. Mr Aryal focused his questions on some most recent issues on new modernist studies.) Y. A.: You worked as the Director for the Center for Modernist Studies at University of Sussex before you recently moved to New York University. From your works, experiences and involvement in the field, could you please tell what is the most recent development in the field of [new] modernist studies today? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] P.N: In the last ten years or so there has been what feels like an explosion of modernist studies. Scholars have become increasingly interested in what might be called the material history of modernism, in an expanded view of the field of cultural production in which art works appeared. There has been a lot of attention to what Lawrence Rainey calls the "institutions of modernism" and to the relation of particular texts to "public culture'. Critics (Mark Morrison, for example) have concerned themselves with the mechanisms of publication and reception through which modernist works made their appearance. We've also seen exciting work on the relation of modernism to psychoanalysis (books by Lyndsey Stonebridge and David Trotter are good examples), along with explorations of its connections to anarchism (Alan Antliff), New Deal politics (Michael Szalay), and the publication of little magazines (three volumes in progress edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker). Modernism is becoming a large-scale phenomenon, then, with significant new inclusions, such as the Harlem Renaissance (see Houston Baker's work). I recently revised my Modernisms: A Literary Guide for a new, expanded edition and one of the things that struck me was a growing sense among critics of European modernism as a rich and highly complex area. In my own work I've always been intrigued by modernism as a plural, transnational set of movements (Marjorie Perloff's The Futurist Moment remains for me a key text, with its dazzling grasp of the continental scene) and it's here that I think really new work will be done. The remarkable collection of materials edited by Timothy O. Benson and Eva Forgacs, Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930, shows just how much, from an Anglo-American critical perspective, we don't really know about. But there are signs that this is beginning to change. The newly-founded European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies held its first conference last year in Ghent and that was a very well-attended and truly international affair. This year the conference is in Poland, and that location indicates a real desire to open up discussion of the many national avant-gardes that remain to be explored. There are significant linguistic difficulties attaching to this move, of course, but I think that we shall soon begin to see our own modernisms in a rather differently refracted light. Y. A.: Your response raised two questions in my mind. I am going to ask you
Yubraj Aryal就新现代主义研究采访了Peter Nicholls。阿亚尔先生的问题集中在新现代主义研究的一些最新问题上。)在你最近搬到纽约大学之前，你曾担任苏塞克斯大学现代主义研究中心的主任。从您的作品、经历和对该领域的参与来看，您能否谈谈当今[新]现代主义研究领域的最新发展?潘:在过去十年左右的时间里，现代主义研究似乎出现了爆炸式的发展。学者们对所谓现代主义的物质历史越来越感兴趣，对艺术作品出现的文化生产领域有了更广泛的看法。劳伦斯·雷尼(Lawrence Rainey)所说的“现代主义制度”以及特定文本与“公共文化”的关系引起了很多关注。批评家们(比如马克·莫里森)关注的是现代主义作品的出版和接受机制。我们还看到了关于现代主义与精神分析关系的令人兴奋的研究(林赛·斯通布里奇和大卫·特罗特的书是很好的例子)，以及探索现代主义与无政府主义(艾伦·安特利夫)、新政政治(迈克尔·萨莱)的联系，以及小杂志的出版(彼得·布鲁克和安德鲁·塞克尔正在编辑的三卷)。现代主义正在成为一个大规模的现象，然后，具有重要的新包容性，如哈莱姆文艺复兴(见休斯顿贝克的作品)。我最近修改了我的《现代主义:文学指南》(Modernisms: A Literary Guide)，准备出一个新的扩展版，其中一件令我印象深刻的事情是，欧洲现代主义的批评者越来越感觉到这是一个丰富而高度复杂的领域。在我自己的作品中，我一直对现代主义很感兴趣，认为它是一种多元的、跨国的运动(马乔里·佩洛夫的《未来主义时刻》对我来说仍然是一个关键的文本，它对大陆景观的把握令人眼花缭乱)，我认为真正的新作品将在这里完成。蒂莫西·o·本森和伊娃·福加克斯编辑的《世界之间:1910-1930年中欧先锋派的资料集》展示了从英美批评的角度来看，我们所不了解的东西有多少。但有迹象表明，这种情况正在开始改变。新成立的欧洲先锋与现代主义研究网络去年在根特召开了第一次会议，这是一次出席人数众多、真正意义上的国际会议。今年的会议在波兰举行，这个地点表明了一个真正的愿望，即对许多有待探索的国家前卫艺术展开讨论。当然，这一举动在语言上有很大的困难，但我认为，我们很快就会开始以一种相当不同的折射光来看待我们自己的现代主义。答:你的回答让我想到了两个问题。我一个一个地问。我对你使用“现代主义的物质历史”这个词很感兴趣。如果我们试图在国外殖民主义、帝国主义和国内法西斯主义和资本主义加速崛起的物质条件下阅读欧洲现代主义先锋派作品，它会给我们带来什么样的画面?先锋艺术家在反对法西斯主义、殖民主义和资本主义方面发挥了什么作用?我的问题是，新的现代主义研究如何沿着欧洲资本主义帝国主义社会现代性的路线，试图解读欧洲审美现代性的激进实验?潘:这是一个大而复杂的问题。如果我们看看“历史先锋派”的范围，彼得·伯格称之为二十世纪初实验倾向的扩散，很明显，我们可以区分那些庆祝现代性的运动和那些不庆祝现代性的运动。意大利未来主义是先锋主义的最好例子，它将自己的形式实验主义与资本主义现代性的动态紧密联系在一起，而英美现代主义的主流，如T. ...的作品所示
{"title":"On New Modernist Studies","authors":"P. Nicholls, Yubraj Aryal","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941025","url":null,"abstract":"(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Peter Nicholls on New Modernist Studies. Mr Aryal focused his questions on some most recent issues on new modernist studies.) Y. A.: You worked as the Director for the Center for Modernist Studies at University of Sussex before you recently moved to New York University. From your works, experiences and involvement in the field, could you please tell what is the most recent development in the field of [new] modernist studies today? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] P.N: In the last ten years or so there has been what feels like an explosion of modernist studies. Scholars have become increasingly interested in what might be called the material history of modernism, in an expanded view of the field of cultural production in which art works appeared. There has been a lot of attention to what Lawrence Rainey calls the \"institutions of modernism\" and to the relation of particular texts to \"public culture'. Critics (Mark Morrison, for example) have concerned themselves with the mechanisms of publication and reception through which modernist works made their appearance. We've also seen exciting work on the relation of modernism to psychoanalysis (books by Lyndsey Stonebridge and David Trotter are good examples), along with explorations of its connections to anarchism (Alan Antliff), New Deal politics (Michael Szalay), and the publication of little magazines (three volumes in progress edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker). Modernism is becoming a large-scale phenomenon, then, with significant new inclusions, such as the Harlem Renaissance (see Houston Baker's work). I recently revised my Modernisms: A Literary Guide for a new, expanded edition and one of the things that struck me was a growing sense among critics of European modernism as a rich and highly complex area. In my own work I've always been intrigued by modernism as a plural, transnational set of movements (Marjorie Perloff's The Futurist Moment remains for me a key text, with its dazzling grasp of the continental scene) and it's here that I think really new work will be done. The remarkable collection of materials edited by Timothy O. Benson and Eva Forgacs, Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930, shows just how much, from an Anglo-American critical perspective, we don't really know about. But there are signs that this is beginning to change. The newly-founded European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies held its first conference last year in Ghent and that was a very well-attended and truly international affair. This year the conference is in Poland, and that location indicates a real desire to open up discussion of the many national avant-gardes that remain to be explored. There are significant linguistic difficulties attaching to this move, of course, but I think that we shall soon begin to see our own modernisms in a rather differently refracted light. Y. A.: Your response raised two questions in my mind. I am going to ask you","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123122560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-09-22DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL200941023
Zachary G. Davis
The rapidly aging populations of the post-industrial countries is forcing to what amounts to a type of paradigm shift in the concept of the welfare state. Not only must the distribution of goods and services be re-calibrated to adjust to an older population, but the entire dynamic of the social as well. Present and past conditions of the welfare state have not been favorable to the aged, particularly for older women, minorities, and the poor. (1) Social and institutional practices of age discrimination continue to serve as means to impoverish persons economically, politically and existentially. The type of shift the welfare state undergoes will determine the extent to which social injustice grows with its aging population. There is no concept more elemental to aging than the concept of time. It is how age is measured and as such functions as the fulcrum for social division, categorization, and, consequently, social injustice. How the welfare state adjusts to its aging populations is conditioned by its standard of time. In this paper, I show how a phenomenological investigation of the experience of aging disrupts the standardization of time. Rather than reduce all temporal experience to the same, a phenomenological description recognizes that every age has its own time and integrity. Part 1 of this study describes how time consciousness is transformed by the experience of aging, demonstrating the unique and heterogeneous quality of one's life time. Part 2 suggests how phenomenology can function as a type of critical gerontology in examining the management and production of discrimination in the time of aging. I. The Experience of Aging and the Structure of Time-Consciousness Aging may in fact be as natural to us as death, but it is certainly an experience of which we are much more familiar. Unlike death, getting older is not an alien or impossible experience, but something we experience directly in every moment of our lives. Despite the relative proximity between death and aging, aging has been an experience generally ignored in the philosophical and phenomenological traditions. (2) A central factor contributing to this prejudice is the presupposition that time has an essential and universal structure that remains identical throughout the course of one's life time. A critical description of the experience of aging calls this presupposition into question. Because aging is a process often attributed exclusively to the body, we often find ourselves describing the process of aging in biological terms such as the breakdown or steady exhaustion of the body. Yet, biological descriptions of this type are not the descriptions of aging, but rather descriptions of being aged. Children, for example, exhibit a keen sense of getting older, while at the same time enjoying an increase in biological capacity and power. The physical body may serve as an external sign or evidence of aging and as a consequence become a part of the experience of aging. It is however,
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Pub Date : 2009-03-22DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094910
A. Hadfield
Reading the writings of any culture which is unfamiliar, distant in time or space, undoubtedly requires both knowledge and leaps of faith. Stephen Greenblatt, probably the most widely read commentator on Renaissance literature in the last twenty years characterised his task as 'the desire to speak with the dead': This desire is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, a motive organized, professionalized, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, Middle-Class shamans. If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them ... the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living. (1) Greenblatt's point is that we must translate the words of dead writers into our own idiom in order to be able to speak to them and comprehend their world. Critics are not unlike intermediaries between the mundane and the spiritual. Were the writers of the sixteenth century people who were completely different from us, who had totally alien conceptions of themselves to those that we possess, who would have found the most basic assumptions that most of us who read their work tend to make-that men and women should have equal rights, that everyone should be allowed to play some part in deciding who should govern the country in which they live and be equal before the law-ridiculous, blasphemous, or treasonable? Or were they really, beneath the obvious differences-education, clothes, housing--quite like us? How does either position affect our reading of the texts in question? How much do we really need to know in order to be able to speak with the dead? (2) I raise these questions, which may seem rather banal to some readers, for a number of reasons. They constitute, in a crude form, the basis of the central difference of opinion between scholars who study the Renaissance, a difference which has often been the only point of contact between the world of scholarship and wider journalistic and political debates. Some critics argue that it is impossible to understand the early modern period without appreciating the vast historical gulf between then and now; others see analogies between the two periods enabling them to compare and contrast both societies and their respective literatures. Students of literature are used to being told that the central conflict in literary studies is between those 'traditional' critics who believe in timeless, universal human truths and avant garde left-wing critics who insist that literature is culturally specific and speaks to us only from its particular historical moment. However, to draw up battle lines so straightforwardly is misleading and confusing. The first point one needs to make is that if we cannot read a work beyond its specific historical context then how can we ever understand anything? Unl
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