Political Ethics or the Art of Being a Man

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-183
Author(s):  
Pankaj Jha
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
State Building ◽  
Ethical Conduct ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Ideal State ◽  
The World

Turning to Vidyapati’s famous treatise on masculinity, Puruṣaparīkṣā, this chapter explores its framing and genre, its ideas and stories. This Sanskrit text sought to entertain and to educate young men about state building and ideal forms of manliness. The world of Sanskrit political thought found a contemporarized as well as classicized articulation in the text. The text attempted to weave discriminatory regimes of gender and caste into notions of ideal state and ethical conduct. Yet it is done through complex and entertaining stories, deriving its authority from history, common sense, and occasionally the Vedas. Again, the author is seen to be playing upon a conjunction of comparable features of Persian and Sanskrit literary tradition especially where articulations of exemplary masculinity (jawanmardi/paurusa) is concerned. The chapter also shows how a discourse on nīti (political ethics) was actually undergirded by precepts of dharma.

Homeland is Freedom

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Srdjan Cvetkovć ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
High Degree

Mihajlo Mihcylov was not a dissident from the commmist movement, an outcast from the Communist Party, or a man from government structures destroyed in the purges as were the majority of victims during the Tito regime, Mihajlov's bold intellectual resistance to communist totalitarianism was that of a real dissident in Eastern Europe, while many in Yugoslavia served as a faqade of "liberal communism," An umompromising critic, Mihcglov remained in the shadow of the much better known Milovan Djilas, a former senior Commmist Party official who drew intemational attention, Mihajlov's resistance and spiritual breadth, seeking freedom of expression for people of different ideologies, from Serbian right-wing proponents to Croatian nationalists, Djilas and social-reformists, to ultra-left Informbureau sympathizers, testify to his consistent liberal-democratic attitude and Kantian paradigm that every person has the right to political thought and action ifit does not violate the same rights of other humans, A high degree of tolerance for ideological opponents as well as consistency of commitment to human rights and freedoms make him one of the few rebels with common sense so rare in this part of the world, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke of Mihajlov as a man who is a kind of spiritual beacon of anti-totalitarianism.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

The Event Universe

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leemon B. McHenry
Keyword(s):  
Electromagnetic Field ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Physical Theory ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
Linguistic Methods

What kinds of things are events? Battles, explosions, accidents, crashes, rock concerts would be typical examples of events and these would be reinforced in the way we speak about the world. Events or actions function linguistically as verbs and adverbs. Philosophers following Aristotle have claimed that events are dependent on substances such as physical objects and persons. But with the advances of modern physics, some philosophers and physicists have argued that events are the basic entities of reality and what we perceive as physical bodies are just very long events spread out in space-time. In other words, everything turns out to be events. This view, no doubt, radically revises our ordinary common sense view of reality, but as our event theorists argue common sense is out of touch with advancing science. In The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a more adequate basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead’s theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as another key proponent of this theory, W. V. Quine. In this manner, McHenry defends the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

Ghost, Broken Narratives and the Art of Dying

2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Lars Rømer
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Art Of Dying ◽  
The Dead

This article investigates how experiences of ghosts can be seen as a series of broken narratives. By using cases from contemporary as well 19th century Denmark I will argue that ghosts enter the world of the living as sensations that question both common sense understanding and problematize the unfinished death. Although ghosts have been in opposition to both science and religion in Denmark at least since the reformation I will exemplify how people deal with the broken narrative of ghosts in ways that incorporate and mimic techniques of both the scientist and the priest. Ghosts, thus, initiate a dialogue between the dead and the living concerning the art of dying that will enable both to move on.

Causality Then and Now

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Karen Harding
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Mechanical Model ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

Ate appearances deceiving? Do objects behave the way they do becauseGod wills it? Ate objects impetmanent and do they only exist becausethey ate continuously created by God? According to a1 Ghazlli, theanswers to all of these questions ate yes. Objects that appear to bepermanent are not. Those relationships commonly tefemed to as causalare a result of God’s habits rather than because one event inevitably leadsto another. God creates everything in the universe continuously; if Heceased to create it, it would no longer exist.These ideas seem oddly naive and unscientific to people living in thetwentieth century. They seem at odds with the common conception of thephysical world. Common sense says that the universe is made of tealobjects that persist in time. Furthermore, the behavior of these objects isreasonable, logical, and predictable. The belief that the univetse is understandablevia logic and reason harkens back to Newton’s mechanical viewof the universe and has provided one of the basic underpinnings ofscience for centuries. Although most people believe that the world is accutatelydescribed by this sort of mechanical model, the appropriatenessof such a model has been called into question by recent scientificadvances, and in particular, by quantum theory. This theory implies thatthe physical world is actually very different from what a mechanicalmodel would predit.Quantum theory seeks to explain the nature of physical entities andthe way that they interact. It atose in the early part of the twentieth centuryin response to new scientific data that could not be incorporated successfullyinto the ptevailing mechanical view of the universe. Due largely ...

War and Social Policy Development in Switzerland, 1870–1990

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthieu Leimgruber
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
State Building ◽  
Social Citizenship ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Public Private Mix

This chapter explores the trajectory of social policy development in Switzerland and its interactions with state-building and military conflict from the Franco-Prussian war of the early 1870s to the end of the Cold War. This analysis confirms that, despite the fact that Switzerland has remained untouched by war for more than 150 years, military preparation and the world wars have had a crucial impact in the shaping of the distinctive public–private mix that distinguishes the Swiss welfare state from its immediate neighbours. Periods of war thus coincided not only with an expansion of state social insurance but also witnessed the consolidation of existing private social provision. The chapter also highlights how Switzerland’s distinctive militia-based conscription contributed to forge a male-centred social citizenship that lasted for decades after 1945.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

scholarly journals Some 'Philosophicall Scribbles' attributed to Robert Hooke

1980 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Separate Sheet ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Almost All

Among the Hooke manuscripts held in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, is an undated document of four pages, entitled (on a separate sheet): XVI Philosophicall Scribbles’. We shall offer here an edition of this hitherto unpublished document; its contents will be discussed and compared with Hooke’s published theories of the soul, mind action and memory in his ‘Lectures of light’ (I); and some consideration will be given to the general adequacy of Hooke’s epistemology, as revealed in the ‘Scribbles’ and the ‘Lectures of light’, and its place in history. A transcription of the ‘Philosophicall scribbles’ reads as follows: It has pleased y e al wise contriuer of y e Universe to send man into the world almost/ready tempered,/like a peice of soft wax to receiue those impressions and stamps, which he has though[t] it most conuenient to receiue, though altogether unfit for/some/other perhaps, which his infinite wisdom saw good to w th hold. Those stamps are only of five kinds. And are generally comprisd under one name, to wit The Objects of Sense, /and this ? is calld the common sense,/But this is only that passiue facully [ sic ] w ch this lump or mass of bodys come furnished w th all, w ch is much y e same w th what y e bodys of almost all animalls are as well if not in a better manner endowed.

Figurations of the Ecstatic

Janus Head ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-221
Author(s):  
David D. Dillard-Wright ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common

Descriptions of “aesthetic arrest,” those ecstatic moments that lift the common sense subject-object dichotomy, abound in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. These special experiences, found in both artistic and mystical accounts, arise from the daily life of ordinary perception. Such experiences enable the artist, philosopher, or mystic to overturn received categories and describe phenomena in a creative way; they become dangerous when treated as the sine qua non of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic arrest, though rare in consumer society, need not be overwhelmed by the flood of information and can still provide fresh glimpses into the world as lived.

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