TALKING TO OURSELVES? ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Think ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (37) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Chris Norris
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
The Public ◽  
Current State ◽  
Academic Philosophy ◽  
The Public Sphere

This essay takes a hard look at the current state of much academic (mainly analytic) philosophy and sets out to diagnose where things have gone wrong. It offers a sharply critical assessment of the prevailing narrowness, cliquishness, linguistic inertness, like-mindedness, intellectual caution, misplaced scientism, over-specialisation, guild mentality, lack of creative or inventive flair, and above all the self-perpetuating structures of privilege and patronage that have worked to produce this depressing situation. On the constructive side I suggest how a belated encounter with developments beyond its cultural-professional horizons – including certain aspects of ‘continental’ philosophy – might bring large (and reciprocal) benefits. I also offer some tentative ideas as to what ‘creativity’ could or should mean as applied to philosophical thinking and writing.

Compressed Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
H. Şule Albayrak
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Depth Interviews

For decades the authoritarian secularist policies of the Turkish state, by imposing a headscarf ban at universities and in the civil service, excluded practising Muslim women from the public sphere until the reforms following 2010. However, Muslim women had continued to seek ways to increase their knowledge and improve their intellectual levels, not only as individuals, but also by establishing civil associations. As a result, a group of intellectual women has emerged who are not only educated in political, social, and economic issues, but who are also determined to attain their socio-economic and political rights. Those new actors in the Turkish public sphere are, however, concerned with being labeled as either “feminist,” “fundamentalist” or “Islamist.” This article therefore analyzes the distance between the self-identifications of intellectual Muslim women and certain classifications imposed on them. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with thirteen Turkish intellectual Muslim women were carried out which reveal that they reject and critique overly facile labels due to their negative connotations while offering more complex insights into their perspectives on Muslim women, authority, and identity.

scholarly journals Girls on YouTube: Gender Politics and the Potential for a Public Sphere

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Szostak
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Self ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Gender Divide ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Insight Into

YouTube is a massively popular video streaming website. It has become so ingrained in daily consciousness that it is almost difficult to conceive of a time in which it did not exist. YouTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Yourself.” It connotes a sense of freedom to be whoever you want to be and communicate this conceptualization of the self with the world. Vlogs, or video blogs, share the same function as a traditional diary except there is no assumption of privacy since the videos are uploaded publicly. Both men and women participate in the production of these videos. However, the experience of male and female YouTubers is quite different. The following paper will explore whether YouTube operates as a public sphere in light of the gender divide that appears to have formed on the site. The four objectives of the paper are as follows: to define the concept of the public sphere, to determine the factors that have contributed to a gender divide on YouTube by analyzing the gendered use of the medium, to examine the reception of the controversial “Girls on YouTube” video by female vloggers, and to evaluate whether YouTube operates as a public sphere in light of the findings of the preceding sections. Ultimately, this paper will give greater insight into whether new media offers the possibility for women's voices to be heard or if it is simply a remediation of older patriarchal technology.

Der Ungewissheit antworten

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-470
Author(s):  
Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
The Public ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Subjective Truth ◽  
The Public Sphere

Abstract Answering the Uncertainty. On the Staging of Truth and the Lust for Unambiguities in Times of Crisis Based on the observation that digital media are changing the nature of the public sphere and that disinformation is a new currency, the question of responsibility and secure knowledge is being raised again and again. There is hardly time for thorough assessments. The much too hastily written judgements of the digital world distort the overall picture because often only fragmentary information is processed. The self-critical examination of one’s own claims to meaning and validity, an argumentative questioning of the self-evident and discourse orientation are decisive educational moments in a time of collapsing contexts and the subjective truth associated with it.

scholarly journals War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Pólemos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Soncini
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Public ◽  
Theatrical Space ◽  
Exact Reproduction ◽  
Legal Space ◽  
Legal Jurisdiction ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Considerable Strain

AbstractThe tribunal plays produced at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, North London have come to represent under many respects the hallmark of the new spate of documentary work on the British stage, often designated as “verbatim drama” in contemporary critical parlance. Expressly envisaged as theatrical interventions into the public sphere, these dramatizations of official public inquiries turn theatrical space into legal space, grounding their claims to veracity in the exact reproduction of the actually spoken. While crucial to their ontological authority, the self-imposed orthodoxy whereby the playwright is the mere editor of words recorded in inquiry transcripts has been put under considerable strain by the very topic that has played a central role in triggering and shaping the format, that of contemporary conflict. A considerable share of recent verbatim work deals with the war on terror, a war increasingly fought outside legal jurisdiction and hence a subject that has thrown into sharp relief the epistemological limits of a form of drama that is entirely dependent on the existence and availability of legal records. This essay looks at the strategies of “re-voicing” whereby Richard Norton-Taylor negotiates the strictures of the code in his tribunal play

scholarly journals Kryzys informacji w zmediatyzowanej sferze publicznej – od mediów tradycyjnych do hybrydowych platform komunikacyjnych

2021 ◽  
Vol 13(49) (1) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Robert Szwed
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Right ◽  
And Control ◽  
Flow Of Information

The free circulation of information in an open and unfettered public sphere is one of the foundations of well-functioning democracies. For theirs proper functioning, access to reliable information is necessary, which — reaching citizens — allows them to make the right decisions and control power. Many factors should be taken into account when analysing the information production process in new and traditional media: publishers-media owners, advertisers-business, communication technologies, public relations institutions, and now algorithms. An important element are also consumers and prosumers of media content, who try to participate in the media flow of information in a more competent or less competent way. The emergence of communication platforms that redistribute information has revolutionized the relationship between the elite, the media, and the public. More importantly, it contributed to the crisis of the public sphere, trust, and defragmentation of societies. Confused citizens are bombarded with information whose sources they cannot assess and disinformation, fake news, and post-truth have permanently entered the popular dictionary, replacing „unfashionable” propaganda and censorship. The aim of the article will be to analyse the current state of the media sphere through the prism of the weaknesses of traditional journalism, insufficient competences of recipients and uncontrolled flow of information controlled by the attention management industry.

The Public Sphere

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 607-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Eder
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Bond ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Do So

The article situates the issue of the public sphere as a phenomenon that is historically bound and culturally specific. According to this point of view, the Western practices and the Western way of thinking about the public sphere appear as a historically particular way of dealing with the more general phenomenon which is the creation of a social bond beyond the family. Looking at the self-contradictory effects of the ‘modern’ Western public sphere, the question is asked whether the public association of self-interested or self-governing individuals might have to be theorized as a partial and insufficient solution to the social bond. A comparative perspective shows that it is not individuals but cultural forms that link people in the public sphere. They do so by providing a narrative basis of discourses and/or markets that in the self-understanding of modernity shape social life.

scholarly journals Between History and Universality: Understanding Identity in the Public Sphere

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Nisar Alungal Chungath
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Public ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The One

Identity is not a fixed and frozen prison-house for the self, but a liquid continuum, affected and shaped by the ‘outside’ or the world. The self, which is situated and which undergoes revisions and transformations, keeps identity as a frame within which it makes sense of things. On the one hand, there is a ‘history’ within which an identity is rooted and through which meaning-making is made possible, and on the other hand, every person aspires to be a ‘universal’ and recognition-worthy human being. Both inherent identity and inherent universality of the self should be considered in their interactions in the public sphere, which has been traditionally viewed as a space of discrete individualities. The ontological force of this argument aside, the paper demonstrates that reduction of an identity without crediting its aspiration for universality and consideration of universality without crediting the historical underpinnings of identity are both acts of violation. 

The Ship of Logic on the High Seas of Discourse

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-104
Author(s):  
Ken Hirschkop
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy ◽  
High Seas

Chapter 3 looks at the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy as it emerges from Gottlob Frege, gains momentum in Bertrand Russell, and finds elaboration in the early and middle work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The characteristic move of linguistic philosophy will be the clarification of presumably ‘muddled’ ordinary statements: the bringing to the surface a lucidity that is lurking within language, needing only to be coaxed out. The author shows how in the works of Frege, Russell, and early Wittgenstein, the drive to clarity entails a stripping away of every intersubjective, rhetorical element in discourse. He then argues that a language clarified by professional philosophers is a substitute for the objectivity of the public sphere. The chapter concludes by showing how intersubjectivity returns first as irony in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and then as the belief that language always ‘works’: that it fails only when external circumstances disturb its inner workings.

Burning for a Cause: Four Factors in Successful Political (and Religious) Self-Immolation Examined in Relation to Alleged Falun Gong “Fanatics” in Tiananmen Square

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-817
Author(s):  
Paul Hedges
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Falun Gong ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Self Immolation

AbstractThis article theorizes the self-immolation of alleged Falun Gong practitioners in Tiananmen Square in 2001 in relation to literature on martyrdom, self-immolation, and political protest. It explores the cultural context in relation to Buddhist traditions of self-immolation, Chinese political protest, and other uses of self-immolation as political protest. It will seek to expand the analysis of why these self-immolations may be said to have “failed” as a form of protest, and present a set of four key factors. Issues of legitimation and authority in the events and their representation will be raised, especially the contested nature of whether the self-immolations were “religious,” looking at the different meanings of this term in Chinese and Western contexts. It is argued that both secular and religious self-immolation can be seen as legitimate in the public sphere.

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