Reading Rhetoric and Poetics

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Emma Gilby
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The One ◽  
Ancient Texts

Chapter 1 looks in detail at how Aristotle’s Poetics, overlapping in various ways with his Rhetoric and his moral philosophy, uses tragedy to interrogate conditions for the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom. It moves on to the rediscovery and translation of these and other ancient texts on rhetoric, poetics, and ethics. Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and other ancient writers obtained a footing in France chiefly through the treatises of Italian and Dutch thinkers. As one starting point for how Descartes interacts with this body of work, this chapter considers the syllabi of Jesuit schools such as the one he attended.

scholarly journals Practices of sustainability and the enactment of their natures/cultures: Ecosystem services, rights of nature, and geoengineering

2021 ◽  
pp. 053901842199894
Author(s):  
Frank Adloff ◽  
Iris Hilbrich
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Knowledge Cultures ◽  
Rights Of Nature ◽  
Value Of Nature ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

Possible trajectories of sustainability are based on different concepts of nature. The article starts out from three trajectories of sustainability (modernization, transformation and control) and reconstructs one characteristic practice for each path with its specific conceptions of nature. The notion that nature provides human societies with relevant ecosystem services is typical of the path of modernization. Nature is reified and monetarized here, with regard to its utility for human societies. Practices of transformation, in contrast, emphasize the intrinsic ethical value of nature. This becomes particularly apparent in discourses on the rights of nature, whose starting point can be found in Latin American indigenous discourses, among others. Control practices such as geoengineering are based on earth-systemic conceptions of nature, in which no distinction is made between natural and social systems. The aim is to control the earth system as a whole in order for human societies to remain viable. Practices of sustainability thus show different ontological understandings of nature (dualistic or monistic) on the one hand and (implicit) ethics and sacralizations (anthropocentric or biocentric) on the other. The three reconstructed natures/cultures have different ontological and ethical affinities and conflict with each other. They are linked to very different knowledge cultures and life-worlds, which answer very differently to the question of what is of value in a society and in nature and how these values ought to be protected.

Ontology and Perception

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Galko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Capacity ◽  
Complex Environment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
The One ◽  
Bodies Of Water ◽  
The Relationship

The ontological question of what there is, from the perspective of common sense, is intricately bound to what can be perceived. The above observation, when combined with the fact that nouns within language can be divided between nouns that admit counting, such as ‘pen’ or ‘human’, and those that do not, such as ‘water’ or ‘gold’, provides the starting point for the following investigation into the foundations of our linguistic and conceptual phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to claim that such phenomena are facilitated by, on the one hand, an intricate cognitive capacity, and on the other by the complex environment within which we live. We are, in a sense, cognitively equipped to perceive discrete instances of matter such as bodies of water. This equipment is related to, but also differs from, that devoted to the perception of objects such as this computer. Behind this difference in cognitive equipment underlies a rich ontology, the beginnings of which lies in the distinction between matter and objects. The following paper is an attempt to make explicit the relationship between matter and objects and also provide a window to our cognition of such entities.

Radical Tense-Indexical Historicality and the De Se

KronoScope ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27
Author(s):  
Carl Humphries
Keyword(s):  
Alternative View ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
De Se ◽  
Temporal Expressions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Self Reference ◽  
A Current ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract “Being is said in many ways,” claimed Aristotle, initiating a discussion about existential commitment that continues today. Might there not be reasons to say something similar about “having been,” or “having happened,” where these expressions denote something’s being located in the past? Moreover, if history – construed not only as an object of inquiry (actual events, etc.) but also as a way of casting light on certain matters – is primarily concerned with “things past,” then the question just posed also seems relevant to the question of what historical understanding amounts to. While the idea that ‘being’ may mean different things in different contexts has indisputable importance, the implications of other, past-temporal expressions are elusive. In what might any differences of substantive meaning encountered there consist? One starting point for responding – the one that provides the subject matter explored here – is furnished by the question of whether or not a certain way of addressing matters relating to the past permits or precludes forms of intelligibility that could be said to be ‘radically historical.’ After arguing that the existing options for addressing this issue remain unsatisfactory, I set out an alternative view of what it could mean to endorse or reject such an idea. This involves drawing distinctions and analogies connected with notions of temporal situatedness, human practicality and historicality, which are then linked to a further contrast between two ways of understanding the referential significance of what is involved when we self-ascribe a relation to a current situation in a manner construable as implying that we take ourselves to occupy a unique, yet circumstantially defined, perspective on that situation. As regards the latter, on one reading, the specific kind of indexically referring language we use – commonly labelled “de se” – is something whose rationale is exhausted by its practical utility as a communicative tool. On the other, it is viewed as capturing something of substantive importance about how we can be thought of as standing in relation to reality. I claim that this second reading, together with the line of thinking about self-identification and self-reference it helps foreground, can shed light on what it would mean to affirm or deny the possibility of radically historical forms of intelligibility – and thus also on what it could mean to ascribe a plurality of meanings to talk concerning things being ‘in the past.’

scholarly journals Williams on Ethics, Knowledge, and Reflection

Philosophy ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Knowledge ◽  
Ethical Point ◽  
The One

The author begins with an outline of Bernard William's moral philosophy, within which he locates William's notorious doctrine that reflection can destroy ethical knowledge. He then gives a partial defence of this doctrine, exploiting an analogy between ethical judgements and tensed judgements. The basic idea is that what the passage of time does for the latter, reflection can do for the former: namely, prevent the re-adoption of an abandoned point of view (an ethical point of view in the one case, a temporal point of view in the other). In the final section the author says a little about how reflection might do this.

scholarly journals Violence in social memory intimate beliefs regarding operation storm in the Croatian and Serbian publics

2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-68
Author(s):  
Gordana Djeric
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Silence Suppression ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The One ◽  
Performance Character ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Manipulation Strategy

This text is part of a research conducted under the working title "What do we talk about when we are silent and what are we silent about when we are talking? - premises for the anthropology of silence about the nearest past." In the first part the author investigates the meaning of silence in the Croatian and Serbian press right before and during Croatia's Operation Storm. The ratio between silence, suppression of information and forgetting, on the one hand, and social memory, on the other, has been elaborated in the final part of the text by following reports about the anniversaries of Operation Storm in both Croatian and Serbian publics. The starting point lies in the belief that the phenomenon of silence (and suppression of information), being an immanent part of each discourse, represents an important factor in the creation of social relationships and system of value models, that it has important communication and cognitive functions and that the performance character lies in its essence. In short, silence makes it possible to form the prevailing image about this event, even if it does not construct it indirectly - through speech. The author has elaborated on the meaning of silence in the context of Operation Storm partly because studies about the breakup of Yugoslavia frequently mention silence as a manipulation strategy employed by some of the sides in the conflict (or analysts dealing with Yugoslav topics), while not a single study systematically investigates the semantic of silence and suppression of information in these conflicts. Most importantly, taking into account the frequency of direct silence in the newspaper discourse and rhetoric strategies that point at silence indirectly from the context and discourse, the author focuses on the relationship between the event (situation) and silence. In order to shed light on the way in which Operation Storm is remembered, i.e. forgotten, in the stakeholders' publics and political imageries, she follows the dailies - Vecernje Novosti Politika, Danas (Belgrade) - Vecernji List, Jutarnji List, Magazin supplement of the Jutarnji List (Zagreb), as well as texts about Operation Storm in weeklies such as the NIN and Vreme of Belgrade or Globus of Zagreb in the period between August 2, 1995 and mid-August 2006.

scholarly journals Art as a Critique of Language: On the Continuity of the Tradition of the Avant-Garde Aesthetic in the Modern and the Postmodern

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-303
Author(s):  
Susanne Kogler
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Conceptual Knowledge ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
New Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Traditional Language ◽  
Art Philosophy ◽  
Language Of Music ◽  
The One

That art functions as a corrective to rational-scientific insights is one of the formative thoughts of art philosophy. The fact that artistic expression represents a corrective to linguistically-rationally affected insight also ranks among the constants of art philosophy in the 20th century. “Expression is the opponent of articulating something” can be read, for instance, in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory with regards to the character of language in art and Jean François Lyotard wrote on aesthetic experience: “What happens to us is by no means something which we would have controlled, programmed or conceptually apprehended beforehand”. The uneducible, conceptually unattainable is also at the centre of current art production of the 21st century. On the basis of Lyotard’s and Adorno’s positions, the article shows that one should acknowledge a constancy of the topos of art as non-conceptual knowledge on the one hand as the continuing function of a tradition defined from the philosophical aesthetics of modernity to post-modernity and orientated on the artistic avant-garde. On the other hand and beyond this a continuous line of tradition of New Music becomes clear, leading to the expressionistic avant-garde of the 20th century which represented the starting point for Adorno’s music philosophy, through Lyotard’s focus on John Cage, up to the avant-garde of New Music in the era of post modernity. Specific features of contemporary art, such as rebellion against linguistic standards, an understanding of expressivity that opposes the traditional language of music and operates on the verge of silence, as well as the utopian vision of a modified reality which aims at transcendency enable a conception of art as non-conceptual knowledge, corresponding with the positions of art philosophy in modernity and post-modernity in important points. The relevance of focusing on this line of tradition for musicology lies in the fact that it sheds new light on the musical avant-garde and its further function and, last but not least, that it opens new perspectives in understanding contemporary artistic productions.

scholarly journals The new international legal order and new states in the Balkans

2006 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 272-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dusko Dimitrijevic
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
State Behavior ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
New States ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The One ◽  
Further Development

In this study the author attaches a great importance to the theoretical examination of the concept of the New International Legal Order that was embodied in the last decades of the 20th century. The starting point for that reflection is the dissolution of the SFR Yugoslavia that illustrates one of the fundamental legal precedents. Reminding that the basic principle for the post-modern State behavior must be the one that includes minimal disturbance of the existing international legal relations, the author stresses that "the Yugoslav case" was customized in the way to respond to the new reality where the principle of effectiveness played an essential role in valuation of the statehood. It could also be one of the greatest catalysts for all further 'development rules' of international law.

scholarly journals Between Kantian Rationalism and Moral Mysticism: The Search for the Grounding of Morality in the Philosophy of A. Jokubaitis

Politologija ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Aistė Noreikaitė
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Moral Subject ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
Implicit Normativity

Although it is common to associate the thought of A. Jokubaitis with political philosophy, this article argues that his texts also allow us to talk about a specific moral philosophy of A. Jokubaitis. At the center of it we find an attempt to articulate and discuss the grounding ideas of morality. The article argues that the first two ideas – an idea of unconditional character of morality and an idea of ontological grounding – are related to Kant’s influence on A. Jokubaitis philosophy. These two ideas allow us to explain morality as an autonomous part of reality, which is different from the empirical one but nonetheless real. This part of reality is grounded in the first-person perspective of a moral subject and can be characterized by implicit normativity and unconditionality. The first-person perspective structures a radically different relation to our reality, which allows us to be agents, not simply spectators. Such an interpretation of Kant allows to associate A. Jokubaitis with his contemporary Kantians, such as Ch. Korsgaard, B. Herman, O. O’Neill, and A. Reath. However, the third idea, the one of a person, which becomes more visible in his book Politinis idiotas, transcends the Kantian conception of practical reason and encourages to perceive morality and its grounding in a much wider context. The concept of a person allows A. Jokubaitis to distance himself from Kantian rationalism and integrate social and mystical aspects of morality, which he has always found important.

scholarly journals A Justiça Parcial e a Ganância enquanto virtude e vício do caráter na Ética a Nicômaco: ação interpessoal, emoção e prazer

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-145
Author(s):  
André Luiz Cruz Sousa
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

The aim of this paper is to study a set of three issues related to the understanding of partial justice and partial injustice as character dispositions, namely the distinctive circumstance of action, the emotion involved therein and the pleasure or pain following it. Those points are treated in a relatively obscure way by Aristotle, especially in comparison with their treatment in the expositions of other character virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. Building on the expression ‘capacity towards the other’ (δύναμις ἐν τῷ πρὸς ἕτερον), the paper highlights the interpersonal nature of the circumstances of just and unjust actions, and points how such nature is directly related to notions such as ‘profit’ (κέρδος) or ‘getting more’(πλεονεκτεῖν) as well as to the unusual conception of excess, defect and intermediacy in Nicomachean Ethics Book V. The interpersonal nature of just and unjust actions works also as the starting-point for the interpretation both of the pleasure briefly mentioned in 1130b4 as characterizing the greedy person and of the emotion involved in acting justly or greedy, which is mentioned in an extremely elliptical way in 1130b1-2: the paper argues, on the one hand, that the pleasure felt in acting justly or unjustly concerns not only the goods that are the object of just or unjust interactions, but also the way such interactions affect the people involved; on the other hand, it argues that the emotion actuated in just or unjust interactions relates to the agent’s concern or lack of concern with the good of those people.

scholarly journals Jak możliwa (do pomyślenia) jest dobrowolna niewola? O nowożytnych formach rządzenia, ideologii i spektaklu władzy

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 101-110
Author(s):  
Mateusz Falkowski
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Etienne De La Boetie ◽  
The One ◽  
Voluntary Servitude

The article is devoted to the famous The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie. The author considers the theoretical premises underlying the concept of “voluntary servitude”, juxtaposing them with two modern concepts of will developed by Descartes and Pascal. An important feature of La Boétie’s project is the political and therefore intersubjective – as opposed to the individualistic perspective of Descartes and Pascal – starting point. It is therefore situated against the background of, on the one hand, the historical evolution of early modern states (from feudal monarchies, through so-called Renaissance monarchies up to European absolutisms) and, on the other hand – of the political philosophy of Machiavelli and Hobbes.

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