Essential Structures

Author(s):  
Peter J. Adams

This chapter provides the first example of an enabling frame and draws on Martin Heidegger’s seminal work on personal mortality in his writings on the concepts of Being, time and finitude. The discussion focuses particularly on his interpretation of personal mortality, or being-toward-death, as an integral part of what structures individual existence. As such, talk about existence after death becomes nonsensical because death is tightly bound to what it means to be alive. The discussion also introduces Heidegger’s understanding of finitude and its relationship to my-death. His concept of finitude will be developed in a different way in the next chapter.

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Vivienne Dunstan

McIntyre, in his seminal work on Scottish franchise courts, argues that these courts were in decline in this period, and of little relevance to their local population. 1 But was that really the case? This paper explores that question, using a particularly rich set of local court records. By analysing the functions and significance of one particular court it assesses the role of this one court within its local area, and considers whether it really was in decline at this time, or if it continued to perform a vital role in its local community. The period studied is the mid to late seventeenth century, a period of considerable upheaval in Scottish life, that has attracted considerable attention from scholars, though often less on the experiences of local communities and people.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Petr Kouba

This article examines the limits of Heidegger’s ontological description of emotionality from the period of Sein und Zeit and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik along the lines outlined by Lévinas in his early work De l’existence à l’existant. On the basis of the Lévinassian concept of “il y a”, we attempt to map the sphere of the impersonal existence situated out of the structured context of the world. However the worldless facticity without individuality marks the limits of the phenomenological approach to human existence and its emotionality, it also opens a new view on the beginning and ending of the individual existence. The whole structure of the individual existence in its contingency and finitude appears here in a new light, which applies also to the temporal conditions of existence. Yet, this is not to say that Heidegger should be simply replaced by Lévinas. As shows an examination of the work of art, to which brings us our reading of Moravia’s literary exposition of boredom (the phenomenon closely examined in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik), the view on the work of art that is entirely based on the anonymous and worldless facticity of il y a must be extended and complemented by the moment in which a new world and a new individual structure of experience are being born. To comprehend the dynamism of the work of art in its fullness, it is necessary to see it not only as an ending of the world and the correlative intentional structure of the individual existence, but also as their new beginning.


Author(s):  
Michael D. Hurley

Newman has been much vaunted as a ‘master’ of non-fiction prose style, and justly so. His felicity of phrasing is astonishing: so precise, so elegant, so vivid. This chapter admires Newman’s stylistic achievements too, but with a view to explaining why Newman himself baulked at such praise, by insisting instead on the importance of veracity over verbalism. While a number of different writings by Newman are surveyed in the course of the chapter, the argument comes to focus in particular on his seminal work of faith, Grammar of Assent, a book that took him some twenty years to write, which almost killed him, and which best exemplifies his suggestive but enigmatic definition of ‘style’ as ‘a thinking out into language’.


Author(s):  
Arthur W. Walker-Jones

This chapter examines the Jezebel.com website as a feminist interpretation of the biblical story of Jezebel, in order to discuss the ways digital media make reading more transparent, intertextual, and holistic. Donna Haraway’s article “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” is a seminal work for both ecofeminism and the digital humanities. This articles uses her understanding of the cyborg and naturecultures to argue that Jezebel has become a cyborg online. Cyborgs and digital media could be used to reinforce the nature–culture dualism that is related to male–female dualism and has legitimated patriarchy and the environmental crisis. This chapter, therefore, argues that the identification of cyborg naturecultures in reading both the biblical stories and digital cultures is particularly important for ecofeminist approaches to the Hebrew Bible.


Elenchos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-243
Author(s):  
Dora Suarez

AbstractIn this piece, I propose a reading of Plato’s Gorgias that pays special attention to the role that the fictional audience plays in the unfolding of the dialogue. To this end, I use some of the insights that Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts–Tyteca conveyed in their seminal work, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation in order to argue that thinking about the way in which Socrates’ arguments are shaped by the different audiences that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles aim to address and represent provides us with a new hermeneutical understanding of what is at stake in each of the different interactions Socrates engages in throughout the dialogue. In unpacking the way in which Socrates appropriates Gorgias’ particular audience, transforms Polus’ universal audience, and challenges Callicles’ elite audience, I provide an outline of the difficulties that Plato’s Socrates has to overcome in order to achieve the ‘community of minds’ that Perelman and Olbrechts–Tyteca identify as the bedrock of fruitful argumentation. Having done this, in the last section I turn to Plato’s Phaedrus, for the purpose of making evident that thinking about Plato’s deployment of rhetorical audiences is a crucial step in the effort to expose the implicit continuity that links the discussion of rhetoric delivered by the Gorgias to that of the Phaedrus.


Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852110115
Author(s):  
Anna Clot-Garrell

Total institutions have undergone profound changes since Erving Goffman published his seminal work Asylums in 1961. This article explores the persistence and transformation of total institutions under late-modern conditions. Based upon empirical research conducted in a female Benedictine monastery, I analyse changes in the physically bounded structure of a total institution. Specifically, I address the trend towards greater permeability and flexibility of enclosed total spaces. Inspired by Georg Simmel’s spatial insights, I examine how boundaries are historically reshaped through changing relations of distance and proximity to wider society, and how these shifts alter the material expression and configuration of power that originally characterised the monastery’s totality. This article claims the ongoing relevance of Goffman’s conceptualisation to accommodate such modifications and illustrates how, in certain cases, adaptations of total institutions to contemporary conditions can be understood as involving the reconfiguration, rather than the dismantling, of totality.


1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
George C. Abbott

The British experience with federations is not a happy one. Attempts to combine its smaller and poorer colonies into some form of larger political and economic union as part of its decolonization process are generally reckoned to have failed. Almost without exception, the individual colonies decided to go it alone, to seek independence on their own, that is.The former West Indian colonies are a case in point. Notwithstanding several attempts to bring them closer together, they have shown a remarkable tenacity to retain their individual existence and identity. The 1958 Federation, the most ambitious attempt to weld them into a nation, ended in failure after only three years and much internal wrangling. The larger islands of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago went on to become independent on their own. A further attempt to amalgamate the remaining units, the so-called "Little Eight" into a Federation of the Eastern Caribbean also failed, after which Barbados sought independence on its own.


1981 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Brow

An adequate understanding of the complex connections between changes in the social relations of production and changes in the bases of group formation demands an historical approach in which consciousness and its ideological products are viewed dynamically, not as the mechanically determined superstructural reflections of material relations but as an active and constituent components of everyday social life. The concepts required for such an analysis are developed here, drawing on the seminal work of both Marx and Weber, as well as on more recent scholarship, and are applied to recent changes in agrarian relations and ideological practice in Anuradhapura District, Sri Lanka.


1981 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
D J Rossiter ◽  
R J Johnston

A computer program is designed to produce all of the electoral constituencies for an English local authority, within the constraints imposed on the Parliamentary Boundary Commissioners. This builds on the seminal work of Gudgin and Taylor, and introduces size constraints, evaluates shape, and evaluates the electoral consequences of swings in voter opinion.


2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARGRET SELTING

The notion of Turn-Constructional Unit (TCU) in Conversation Analysis has become unclear for many researchers. The underlying problems inherent in the definition of this notion are here identified, and a possible solution is suggested. This amounts to separating more clearly the notions of TCU and Transition Relevance Place (TRP). In this view, the TCU is defined as the smallest interactionally relevant complete linguistic unit, in a given context, that is constructed with syntactic and prosodic resources within their semantic, pragmatic, activity-type-specific, and sequential conversational context. It ends in a TRP unless particular linguistic and interactional resources are used to project and postpone the TRP to the end of a larger multi-unit turn. This suggestion tries to spell out some of the assumptions that the seminal work in CA made in principle, but never formulated explicitly.


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