Contracting without Meaning

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-80
Author(s):  
Lisa Siraganian
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
Political Cartoons ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Corporate Person

How do you know what a corporate person is really intending, whoever exactly that person is? This chapter explores a set of initial answers to this question in philosophies of intention like Elizabeth Anscombe’s, in historical political cartoons of the corporation, in legal theories of contracts, and in Frank Norris’s The Octopus, the influential novel about the railroad colossus known as the Southern Pacific. Together, they fill out the problem of collective social intention both as it was understood around the turn of the twentieth century and how it developed subsequently. Although older accounts of contract appeal to intention (“a meeting of minds”), the corporate form’s lack of inner life and composite quality made such a mind-meeting odd to envision. The difficulty of knowing a corporate person’s meaning raised knotty issues of interpretation, and political cartoons provided a popular attempt to work through these issues. Other thinkers, including law professor Ernst Freund and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., resolved these problems in their theories of corporate contracts, which introduced a larger concern of how to interpret any of a corporation’s signs. This issue occupied philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce, and later scholars of contracts such as Arthur Corbin. Ultimately, an attempt to resolve a particular problem of corporate contracts led to a semiological theory committed to the simple literality of signs, in order to negotiate how to live with collective beings without obvious or singular minds.

Towards a Psyche for Psychiatry

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 689-695 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Meares
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
World War I ◽  
William James ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
World War ◽  
The Core

Objective: To draw attention to the absence of a concept of personal existence in standard psychiatric approaches to mental illness. Method: To sketch a shift in Western consciousness which occurred suddenly before World War I, involving a banishment of such notions as self and the awareness of inner life from the discourse of psychiatry, psychology and philosophy, leaving a fundamental vacancy at the heart of these disciplines. Results and Conclusion: The positivist–behaviourist hegemony of the twentieth century involved an implicit devaluation of that which is essentially human. The influence of this tradition brings with it the risk of an understanding and treatment of mental illness which leaves out issues at the core of humanity. I suggest we need to recover something of the manner of thinking of the great figures in psychological thought who were writing before the rise of behaviourism and who were contributing to the origins of dynamic psychiatry. A study of the phenomena of human consciousness was central to their work. Main figures mentioned include: Hughlings Jackson, the great neurologist who considered a career in philosophy; Pierre Janet, a philosopher turned psychiatrist; and William James, a physiologist who became a psychologist and philosopher.

scholarly journals Introduction: Know Thyself

2018 ◽  
pp. xii-20
Author(s):  
Richard G.T. Gipps ◽  
Michael Lacewing
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Free Association ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Temple

This Handbook examines the contributions of philosophy to psychoanalysis and vice versa. It explores the most central concept of psychoanalysis—the unconscious—in relation to its defences, transference, conflict, free association, wish fulfilment, and symbolism. It also considers psychoanalysis in relation to its philosophical prehistory, the recognition and misrecognition afforded it within twentieth-century philosophy, its scientific strengths and weaknesses, its applications in aesthetics and politics, and its value and limitations with respect to ethics, religion, and social life. The book explains how psychoanalysis draws our attention to the reality of central aspects of the inner life and how philosophy assists psychoanalysis in knowing itself. This introduction elaborates on the phrase ‘know thyself’, the words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, and illustrates the connection between matters philosophical and psychoanalytic in relation to the Delphic command by highlighting their mutual concern with truth and truthfulness.

Di Yunge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saul Noam Zaritt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
Political Purpose ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Artistic Achievement ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Eastern European Immigrants

Di yunge is a group of American Symbolist Yiddish writers and critics that achieved prominence during the first two decades of the twentieth century and remained active through the mid-century. The name of the group is Yiddish for ‘the young ones’, referencing not only the youth of its founding members but also the sense of newness and dramatic change that they intended to bring to Yiddish literature of the period. The group was made up largely of Eastern European immigrants to the United States who had experienced the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 and the pogroms that followed in its wake. These young writers arrived in America disillusioned with socialist and nationalist politics and instead sought out new forms of cultural expression that focused on artistic achievement in Yiddish rather than any political purpose. Taking European and Russian forms of Symbolism as models, Di yunge is the first movement in Yiddish literature to emphasize the importance of the aesthetic, focusing on the poetic potential of the everyday and on the inner life of the individual writer. Di yunge was comprised of several of the most important Yiddish writers of the twentieth century, including the poets Mani Leib, H. Leivick, Zishe Landau, I.J. Schwartz, Yoysef Rolnik, and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and the prose writers David Ignatoff, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and Lamed Shapiro. Members of Di yunge were among the first to infuse Yiddish literature with the forms and themes of international modernism.

scholarly journals Semantic volume of the word Conviction in the Words and Homilies of the Russian saints of the 20th century

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 665-672
Author(s):  
Yulia V Koreneva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Court Judge ◽  
Negative Appraisal ◽  
Semantic Difference

For the first time the article analyzes the semantics of the word conviction in the words and teachings of Russian saints of the twentieth century. The material is extracted from symphonies in the works of saints and from collections of sayings of Russian elders of the twentieth century. The article analyzes the semantics of the use of this word in religious texts as the implementation of religious discourse in comparison with the codified meaning of modern dictionaries. It is shown that the lexeme conviction is included in the etymological-word formative nest of semantics of different words in the modern Russian language ( court, judge, condemn, reason, judgment, fate, judicial , etc.) of the Indo-European root *dhe- (: *-dh-o: *dh-i-) with the semantics of establishment, action, and in addition with the prefix su- , which means combining or mixing, has negative appraisal and is Church Slavism in the Russian language not only by phonetic and orthographic signs, but primarily by semantic signs. The semantic difference in the religious and non-religious use of this word in the Russian and Church Slavonic language element is in the significative side, since in the Orthodox concept-sphere and the Russian religious discourse, conviction is associated with a number of conceptual ideas about the inner life of a person. Conviction is semantized as a destructive state of a person, violating the integrity of his personality and alienating him from God (the article identifies at least three semantic-cognitive features). Such semantic content clearly differs from lexicographical data in modern language, therefore the meaning of a word in Church Slavonic text space is understood as basic, and modern usage is understood as a narrowing of the original semantics.

Why life presupposes semiosis

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deely
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
New Science ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure

Abstract“Semiosis” comes to us from Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) as a coinage derived from Locke’s 1690 coinage of “semiotics”. In early to late-middle twentieth century, however, with the notable exception of Juri Lotman (1922–1993), who knew Locke’s work, this “new science” for studying signs was known rather as “semiology”, the name proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who was ignorant of Locke’s earlier proposal. Drawing upon Locke’s original terminology, Thomas A. Sebeok distinguished between anthroposemiotics as the exclusive realm of “semiology” and

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Michael Barnes, SJ
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Important Influence ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
The People ◽  
The Church

The book opens with a particular experience of learning ‘in the middle of things’—in the middle of a library. The experience of finding something unexpected (and in some sense ‘finding oneself’ in the act of searching) opens up an introductory consideration of the ‘Jewish matrix’, the religious world of the people of Israel, which forms the inner life of the Church through its liturgy and prayer and structures all its relations, both within the Church and without. The proposal for a theology of dialogue is set within the context of the Shoah as the dominating religious event of the twentieth century which has had an enormously important influence not just on contemporary Jewish–Christian relations but on theological reflection more generally. A theology of dialogue begins here, with intrinsically Jewish ways of thought about God’s presence to human beings.

8. Historical and anthropological jurisprudence

2020 ◽  
pp. 233-250
Author(s):  
Raymond Wacks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Romantic Movement

This chapter, which discusses the development of historical and anthropological jurisprudence, first identifies the characteristics that distinguish the Western legal tradition from other systems. It then discusses the German Romantic Movement, which found its most powerful spokesman in jurist, Friedrich Karl von Savigny; its foremost champion in England was Sir Henry Maine. Maine exercised a significant influence over what has come to be called anthropological jurisprudence or legal anthropology, an approach to law that developed in the twentieth century and which was recognized as essential to an understanding of law by the American realist judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

8. Historical and anthropological jurisprudence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Wacks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Romantic Movement

This chapter, which discusses the development of historical and anthropological jurisprudence, first identifies the characteristics that distinguish the Western legal tradition from other systems. It then discusses the German Romantic Movement, which found its most powerful spokesman in the jurist, Friedrich Karl von Savigny; its foremost champion in England was Sir Henry Maine. Maine exercised a significant influence over what has come to be called anthropological jurisprudence or legal anthropology, an approach to law that developed in the twentieth century and which was recognized as essential to an understanding of law by the American realist judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

scholarly journals The Architect and the Revolution: Architectural Life in Russia in Times of Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilya Pechenkin ◽  
Yulia Starostenko ◽  
Anna Vyazemtseva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Virtual Absence ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Special Studies ◽  
First World ◽  
The Revolution

When describing the history of twentieth-century Russian architecture, it is common to separate (and even oppose) the pre-revolutionary decades and the early Soviet period of the 1920s. Thus, the revolutionary months of 1917 proper have been completely overlooked by researchers as unworthy and capable of shaking the existing historiographical model. Such an approach, dictated by ideological considerations, is no longer justified today and requires revision. The study of periodicals of the second half of the 1910s and archival materials, a great number of which have not been introduced into academic circulation, convince us that the years of the First World War and the revolution were marked by significant changes in the minds of architects. Many things which had previously seemed fundamental for the collective identity of architects became subject to problematisation, and aesthetic categories were replaced by political criteria in the professional press. The architectural process started to be described by its participants in terms of struggle, while the self-identification of members of the architectural corporation lay between the search for survival tactics and taking part in the transformation of the country’s inner life. The novelty of the data presented in this article is due to the virtual absence of special studies devoted to this extremely important period in twentieth-century Russian architectural history.

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