The One and the Many

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Dmitri Nikulin
Keyword(s):  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 1 examines the relation of the one to the many in Plotinus, which is fundamental for his thought. It establishes a system of axiomatic claims about the one, such as that there is a principle of the whole, which is also the principle of being that transcends being; that the act of producing is ontologically prior to and more perfect than what is produced; and that everything perfect produces of necessity. It further argues that both the one and otherness transpire in the constitution of three different representations of the many, which are the ideal numbers, the intellect that thinks the plurality of the noetic objects, and matter. Otherness, then, inevitably appears as dual and ambiguous, as both the rationally conceivable principle of negativity and also as pure indefiniteness, in which respect it is similar to matter.

Forster's Metaphysical Novel

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Cyrtjs Hoy
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
The Body ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Howards End ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Partial View ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ideal

Howards End can be termed a metaphysical novel for the good reason that it is concerned with metaphysical problems. These are implicit in the clash of motive and purpose that directs the novel's action; they present themselves in terms of conflicting principles whose reconciliation serves to define the action's meaning. The principles at variance here are in themselves metaphysical opposites—the real and the ideal, the tangible and the intangible, the body and the soul, the many and the one—and they all have reference to a single overwhelming question: wherein lies the reality of experience? Does it consist in the inner life of personal relations, as Helen Schlegel declares? Or is it to be sought in the outer world of practical affairs, as her sister Margaret comes to maintain? How, in any case, is it to be known: through the agency of the flesh or of the spirit? And once known, how is knowledge of it to be preserved in a world where permanence and stability are conditioned by time and change? The answer, a single one, is implied in the words “only connect” that stand on the novel's title page. What must be connected, to state the matter in so many words, is the inner life of intellect and spirit, and the outer life of the physical and the sensory. These, the conflicting halves of experience, must be reconciled, for—and this is the burden of all Forster's work—because they are halves they are mutually dependent, and one without the other cannot adequately endure. The intellect and the spirit are dependent for their very embodiment on the physical and the sensory, faculties which they in turn altogether transfigure when the halves are fused. The contradictory elements that are inherent in the duality of body and soul are reconciled when the duality itself is resolved. The result is the comprehensive and harmonious vision of experience wherein the earthly partakes of the eternal, the particular testifies to the universal, and multiplicity becomes but another attribute of the one. The partial view gives way before a vision of the whole, and the paradoxical quality of experience takes on another dimension as one comes to discern the reality behind the appearance, the substance beneath the accidents.

The Difficulties of Applied Ethics

2018 ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
Barry Hoffmaster ◽  
Cliff Hooker
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Expected Utility ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Moral Problem ◽  
Logical Inference ◽  
Formal Rationality ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

A second kind of formal rationality, complementary to the maximizing expected utility in Chapter 1, is logical inference. In much of moral philosophy and in standard bioethics decision making is applied ethics. Moral theories are taken to be comprised of principles that are applied to the facts of cases to deduce conclusions about what ought to be done. The canonical depiction of bioethics, for instance, consists of the four principles of non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy, and justice. The real examples in this chapter expose the many failings of that applied ethics. Most of the cases are about when to die and how to die, but the term ‘euthanasia’ is indeterminate. The crucial notion of ‘autonomy’ also is indeterminate. Both need to be clarified and specified. But how is this to be done? Similarly, when principles and rules conflict, as they often do, how is the one that prevails to be determined? There are no higher principles or rules that can be applied to get the right answer in any of these cases. More broadly, what makes a problem a moral problem, and what does being a moral problem mean? These issues require non-formal rational deliberation, not the formal rationality of deduction.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
State Building ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
The Middle Ages

The introduction gives a critical rereading of the historiographical debate regarding the processes of state building at the end of the Middle Ages, highlighting its limitations in the lack of interest shown in the ideal reasons for the political conflict. This then gives rise to the interpretative proposal that forms the basis of the present work, which aims to shed light on the many conflicts that, in relation to legitimacy of power, tore medieval society apart. With this in mind, the introduction focuses on an analysis of the sources that are potentially useful for the study of these particular aspects, on the risks underlying their use, and on the expected results. The last part discusses the structure of the work and justifies the decision to divide it into two, clearly divided parts, dedicated to the communal age on the one hand and the post-communal era on the other.

Costumes and Choreography from Bodenwieser's Trunk: The Coat as Affective Memory

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Rachel Fensham
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Creative Thought ◽  
Cain And Abel ◽  
Embodied Research ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Selection Of

The Viennese modern choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser's black coat leads to an analysis of her choreography in four main phases – the early European career; the rise of Nazism; war's brutality; and postwar attempts at reconciliation. Utilising archival and embodied research, the article focuses on a selection of Bodenwieser costumes that survived her journey from Vienna, or were remade in Australia, and their role in the dramaturgy of works such as Swinging Bells (1926), The Masks of Lucifer (1936, 1944), Cain and Abel (1940) and The One and the Many (1946). In addition to dance history, costume studies provides a distinctive way to engage with the question of what remains of performance, and what survives of the historical conditions and experience of modern dance-drama. Throughout, Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition (1958) provides a critical guide to the acts of reconstruction undertaken by Bodenwieser as an émigré choreographer in the practice of her craft, and its ‘materializing reification’ of creative thought. As a study in affective memory, information regarding Bodenwieser's personal life becomes interwoven with the author's response to the material evidence of costumes, oral histories and documents located in various Australian archives. By resurrecting the ‘dead letters’ of this choreography, the article therefore considers how dance costumes offer the trace of an artistic resistance to totalitarianism.

AFRICAN WOMEN AND FORBIDDEN GROUNDS: FEMALE SEXUALITY AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN AFRICAN LITERATURE

Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-54
Author(s):  
Oyeh O. Otu
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
African Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
African Women ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Sexual Repression

This article examines how female conditioning and sexual repression affect the woman’s sense of self, womanhood, identity and her place in society. It argues that the woman’s body is at the core of the many sites of gender struggles/ politics. Accordingly, the woman’s body must be decolonised for her to attain true emancipation. On the one hand, this study identifies the grave consequences of sexual repression, how it robs women of their freedom to choose whom to love or marry, the freedom to seek legal redress against sexual abuse and terror, and how it hinders their quest for self-determination. On the other hand, it underscores the need to give women sexual freedom that must be respected and enforced by law for the overall good of society.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis L. F Lee ◽  
Joseph M Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Media System ◽  
System P ◽  
Connective Action ◽  
Integrated Media ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 1 introduces the background of the Umbrella Movement, a protest movement that took hold in Hong Kong in 2014, and outlines the theoretical principles underlying the analysis of the role of media and communication in the occupation campaign. It explicates how the Umbrella Movement is similar to but also different from the ideal-typical networked social movement and crowd-enabled connective action. It explains why the Umbrella Movement should be seen as a case in which the logic of connective action intervenes into a planned collective action. It also introduces the notion of conditioned contingencies and the conceptualization of an integrated media system.

Emerson's Memory Loss

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

Academic Freedom and the Politics of Truth

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Academic Freedom ◽  
Democratic Deliberation ◽  
Public Mind ◽  
Epistemic Practice ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One ◽  
Rational Inquiry ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter argues that academic freedom is justified because it is an inherently epistemic practice that serves the ideals of democracy. With Dewey, it is argued that “The one thing that is inherent and essential [to the idea of a university] is the ideal of truth.” But far from being apolitical, the value of pursuing truth and knowledge—the value that justifies academic freedom, both within and without the public mind—is a fundamental democratic value, and for three reasons: the practices of academic inquiry exemplify rational inquiry of the kind needed for democratic deliberation; those practices serve to train students to pursue that kind of inquiry; and those practices are important engines of democratic dissent.

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