Being at the Centre

Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri

We can begin to unravel the enigma of heteronymy if we note that a rather similar puzzle arises in the context of dreaming. I may certainly figure within my own dream, and there is therefore a conceptual distinction between the dreaming subject and the subject-within-a-dream. But is it possible for me to have a dream such that, within the dream, I am a subject other than the subject I am? The puzzle is to know what makes it the case that in the dream I am X and not JG: on what grounds should we answer the question ‘Which one is me?’ J. J. Valberg’s proposal is to call attention to what he calls a ‘positional use’ of the first person, distinct from its mundane use as an indexical, and a corresponding positional conception of self. Using ‘I’ positionally, I am the one to whom all this is presented, the one to whom every phenomenal property is directed, or, as Valberg puts it, the one who is ‘at the centre’ of the manifold of presentation which he calls the experiential horizon. The positional conception of self is one which Pessoa quite explicitly puts at the heart of his philosophy. With the positional conception of self to hand, a solution to the enigma of heteronymy is available.

Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri

The authorial act of heteronymic self-transformation is quite different from that of inventing a character in a story. What is fundamental to the notion of a heteronym is that it is an othered I, ‘lived by the author within himself’, that is to say, lived first-personally. A heteronym is not a character because the relationship an author stands in to an invented character is a third-personal one. A closer analogy would be with one of those stories in which each section has a different narrator writing from a first-person position, such as Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Yet a sequence of distinct narrators writing in the first person is still not a display of heteronymy: they are distinct characters taking it in turn to speak about themselves. When one dreams it is not uncommon for one to oneself figure in the dream, as the one to whom the events in the dream are presenting. The ‘subject-within-the-dream’ is both a virtual subject and a simulation of the dreaming subject; and for this reason it would be entirely appropriate to describe the subject-within-the-dream as the dreaming subject’s heteronym in the dream. The idea of heteronymy is also well-captured in Yasumasa Morimura’s multiple self-portraiture under the assumed identities of famous historical artists.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
Francesca Peruzzotti ◽  

Witnessing is an increasingly important theme in the work of Jean-Luc Marion. According to Marion, the witness can be considered an appropriate figure to define the first person, the “I,” without reducing it to subjectivism and without envisaging the intersubjective tie as binary (dual or dialogic), inasmuch as the testimony refers instead to a ternary relation. The present analysis investigates the difference Marion identifies between the religious witness and what seems to be, according to common sense, the regular witness. While in the latter case, the subject is completely foreign to the event to which s/he testifies, in the case of the religious witness, the commitment is total. We will tackle this difference by showing that the fact of testifying always implies a connection with effectivity, which reveals itself through the profound commitment characterizing the witness’s life, up to the point of death. This becomes obvious when considering the role played by the witness’s confessing speech, which establishes an unsurpassable ternary relationship between the witness, the object of the testimony, and the one to whom it is addressed, by deploying an absolute form of the social bond.


2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-187
Author(s):  
E. S. Burt

Why does writing of the death penalty demand the first-person treatment that it also excludes? The article investigates the role played by the autobiographical subject in Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume I, where the confessing ‘I’ doubly supplements the philosophical investigation into what Derrida sees as a trend toward the worldwide abolition of the death penalty: first, to bring out the harmonies or discrepancies between the individual subject's beliefs, anxieties, desires and interests with respect to the death penalty and the state's exercise of its sovereignty in applying it; and second, to provide a new definition of the subject as haunted, as one that has been, but is no longer, subject to the death penalty, in the light of the worldwide abolition currently underway.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea E. Schulz

Starting with the controversial esoteric employment of audio recordings by followers of the charismatic Muslim preacher Sharif Haidara in Mali, the article explores the dynamics emerging at the interface of different technologies and techniques employed by those engaging the realm of the Divine. I focus attention on the “border zone” between, on the one hand, techniques for appropriating scriptures based on long-standing religious conventions, and, on the other, audio recording technologies, whose adoption not yet established authoritative and standardized forms of practice, thereby generating insecurities and becoming the subject of heated debate. I argue that “recyclage” aptly describes the dynamics of this “border zone” because it captures the ways conventional techniques of accessing the Divine are reassessed and reemployed, by integrating new materials and rituals. Historically, appropriations of the Qur’an for esoteric purposes have been widespread in Muslim West Africa. These esoteric appropriations are at the basis of the considerable continuities, overlaps and crossovers, between scripture-related esoteric practices on one side, and the treatment by Sharif Haidara’s followers of audio taped sermons as vessels of his spiritual power, on the other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Gan N.Yu. ◽  
Ponomareva L.I. ◽  
Obukhova K.A.

Today, worldview, spiritual and moral problems that have always been reflected in education and upbringing come to the fore in society. In this situation, there is a demand for philosophical categories. One of the priority goals of education in modern conditions is the formation of a reasonable, reflexive person who is able to analyze their actions and the actions of other people. Modern science is characterized by an understanding of the absolute value and significance of childhood in the development of the individual, which implies the need for its multilateral study. In the conditions of democratization of all spheres of life, the child ceases to be a passive object of education and training, and becomes an active carrier of their own meanings of being and the subject of world creation. One of the realities of childhood is philosophizing, so it is extremely timely to address the identification of its place and role in the world of childhood. Children's philosophizing is extremely poorly studied, although the need for its analysis is becoming more obvious. Children's philosophizing is one of the forms of philosophical reflection, which has its own qualitative specificity, on the one hand, and commonality with all other forms of philosophizing, on the other. The social relevance of the proposed research lies in the fact that children's philosophizing can be considered as an intellectual indicator of a child's socialization, since the process of reflection involves the adoption and development of culture. Modern society, in contrast to the traditional one, is ready to "accept" a philosophizing child, which means that it is necessary to determine the main characteristics and conditions of children's philosophizing.


Author(s):  
Iryna Rusnak

The author of the article analyses the problem of the female emancipation in the little-known feuilleton “Amazonia: A Very Inept Story” (1924) by Mykola Chirsky. The author determines the genre affiliation of the work and examines its compositional structure. Three parts are distinguished in the architectonics of associative feuilleton: associative conception; deployment of a “small” topic; conclusion. The author of the article clarifies the role of intertextual elements and the method of constantly switching the tone from serious to comic to reveal the thematic direction of the work. Mykola Chirsky’s interest in the problem of female emancipation is corresponded to the general mood of the era. The subject of ridicule in provocative feuilleton is the woman’s radical metamorphoses, since repulsive manifestations of emancipation becomes commonplace. At the same time, the writer shows respect for the woman, appreciates her femininity, internal and external beauty, personality. He associates the positive in women with the functions of a faithful wife, a caring mother, and a skilled housewife. In feuilleton, the writer does not bypass the problem of the modern man role in a family, but analyses the value and moral and ethical guidelines of his character. The husband’s bad habits receive a caricatured interpretation in the strange behaviour of relatives. On the one hand, the writer does not perceive the extremes brought by female emancipation, and on the other, he mercilessly criticises the male “virtues” of contemporaries far from the standard. The artistic heritage of Mykola Chirsky remains little studied. The urgent task of modern literary studies is the introduction of Mykola Chirsky’s unknown works into the scientific circulation and their thorough scientific understanding.


Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
João Carlos Brum Torres

O artigo tem por objeto o exame de três registros de gritantes e distintos paradoxos na Doutrina do Direito de Kant. Registros feitos em tempos e contextos históricos diferentes por Friedrich Bouterwek, Marcus Willaschek e Balthazar Barbosa Filho. Bouterwek atribuiu a Kant a mais paradoxal das proposições jamais enunciadas por qualquer autor, a de que a mera ideia de soberania deve obrigar-nos a obedecer como a nosso inquestionável senhor a quem quer que se haja estabelecido como tal, sem que caiba indagar quem lhe deu o direito de comandar-nos. Willaschek aponta a incompatibilidade de duas teses centrais da doutrina kantiana: a do caráter externo dos vínculos jurídicos e a da incondicionalidade obrigacional do direito positivo, pois não é possível entender como é possível termo-nos como obrigados por imperativos jurídicos e, ao mesmo, vermo-nos internamente isentados do dever de obedecê-los. O ponto crítico de Balthazar é alegar que não pode haver na filosofia kantiana uma crítica da razão político e jurídica, simplesmente porque o conceito de imputação, base da normatividade própria dessas esferas, pressupõe uma pluralidade de agentes livres que, justamente, só pode ser uma pressuposição, pois nosso acesso à normatividade prática só pode ter lugar em primeira pessoa. No exame a que o artigo submete essas alegações, o artigo argumenta, em objeção à tese de Balthazar, que o caráter universal e categórico da força que vincula o sujeito quando confrontado com a lei moral em primeira pessoa necessariamente se desvaneceria se, ao mesmo tempo, ele não fosse tomado pela evidência de que a realidade objetiva dos princípios morais é não só instanciável, mas assegurada pela múltipla instanciação. Com relação às dificuldades levantadas por Willaschek e Bouterwek, o artigo argumenta que o princípio exeundum e statu naturali, enquanto norma metapositiva, anterior à divisão do domínio prático entre doutrina do direito e doutrina da virtude, permite ao mesmo tempo compreender a exigência de obediência ao poder constituído e a restrição das obrigações jurídico-políticas exclusivamente ao foro externo.AbstractThe object of the article is to examine three claims about three distinct and allegedly blatant paradoxes in Kant's Doctrine of Right. These three critical points had been made in distinct times and contexts by Friedrich Bouterwek, Marcus Willaschek e Balthazar Barbosa Filho. Bouterwek attributed to Kant the most paradoxical of all paradoxical propositions, the statement that by the mere idea of sovereignty we are obliged to obey as our lord who has imposed himself upon us, without questioning from where he got such right. Willaschek points out the incompatibility of two main theses of Kantian doctrine of right: the claims that the legal bounds are of external character and that they are the source of unconditional obligations, since it seems impossible to understand how it would be possible to be obliged by juridical norms and decisions and at the same time to be exempted of the internal duty of compliance. The radical objection of Professor Balthazar is the claim that in the context of Kantian Philosophy it is impossible to admit a critique of the juridical and political reason because the concept of imputation, ground of the normativity in these domains, requires not only the presupposition of free agents, but a true and secure epistemic access to them, which is, according to him, impossible considering that the moral law and the other practical principles are accessible for us only in the first person. In the course of the appraisal of such claims, the article contest that objection arguing that the universal and categorical force of the normative bound experienced by the subject when confronted with the moral law in the first person would ineluctably vanish if, at the same time, he had not been taken by the evidence that the objective reality of the moral principles is secured by multiple instancing. Regarding the difficulties raised by Willaschek and Bouterwek, the article argues that the principle exeundum e statu naturali, as a norm of meta-positive character, prior to the division of practical domains between the doctrine of right and the doctrine of virtue, is the cue both to the understanding of the requirement of unquestioning obedience to the constituted power and to the restriction of the validity of this requirement only in foro externo.


Author(s):  
András Bárány

This chapter turns to object agreement with personal pronouns in Hungarian. Pronouns are interesting because they do not always trigger agreement with the verb: first person objects never trigger object agreement (morphology), and second person pronouns only do with first person singular subjects. It is proposed that the distribution of object agreement is a morphological effect and argues that all personal pronouns do in fact trigger agreement, but agreement is not always spelled out. This means that Hungarian has an inverse agreement system, where the spell-out of agreement is determined by the relative person feature (or person feature sets) of the subject and the object. A formally explicit analysis of the syntax and the morphological spell-out of agreement is provided.


Author(s):  
Frank S. Levin

Quantum tunneling, wherein a quanject has a non-zero probability of tunneling into and then exiting a barrier of finite width and height, is the subject of Chapter 13. The description for the one-dimensional case is extended to the barrier being inverted, which forms an attractive potential well. The first application of this analysis is to the emission of alpha particles from the decay of radioactive nuclei, where the alpha-nucleus attraction is modeled by a potential well and the barrier is the repulsive Coulomb potential. Excellent results are obtained. Ditto for the similar analysis of proton burning in stars and yet a different analysis that explains tunneling through a Josephson junction, the connector between two superconductors. The final application is to the scanning tunneling microscope, a device that allows the microscopic surfaces of solids to be mapped via electrons from the surface molecules tunneling into the tip of the STM probe.


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