scholarly journals ‘German Theory’: On Cosmopolitan geographies, counterfactual intellectual histories and the (non)travel of a ‘German Foucault’

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582198969
Author(s):  
Benedikt Korf
Keyword(s):  
Epistemological Question

In this paper, I propose the notion of ‘German Theory’ to allude to the processes of translation and circulation of theoretical ideas discussed in the German humanities and German geography across and beyond the linguistic boundaries of its origin. However, these ideas did not travel, at least not to Anglophone geography. This paper investigates why not, and it maps out the lost theoretical potential that has been foregone as a result. ‘German Theory’ is thus read here as a potentiality that has not actualised. More specifically, this paper studies the reception of Foucault, as it emerged in two distinct territories of thought, each with their own interpretation: first, Kittler’s work on the materiality of discourse in German humanities, and second, the ‘discourse school’ in German geography. The latter’s insistence on the textuality of discourse disconnected their Foucault reception not only from Kittler’s, but equally so from ongoing debates in Anglophone geography. By reflecting on why the ‘German Foucault’ did not travel to Anglophone geography, I raise a speculative epistemological question about the im/potentiality of ‘German Theory’: could a more cosmopolitan theory have emerged from a circulation of these ideas had they travelled across linguistic boundaries?

scholarly journals Teacher training does a epistemological question?

Perspectiva ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Diana Estela Pipkin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Teacher Training ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Classroom Practices ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
Teaching Careers ◽  
The University

What does the learning of social sciences to the trajectories of young citizens? What to teach social sciences in secondary school? Why curricular changes in Argentina did not change classroom practices? We believe that the answers to these questions involve, though not exclusively, in the field of teacher training. Precisely, this paper aims to reflect on the characteristics of the training of teachers of History and Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, taking account both the disciplinary aspects of the pedagogical-comment- from our students and our experience as teachers of these teaching careers. We are concerned to analyze, in particular, the presence / absence of epistemological contained in the careers of these faculties and their implications when thinking teaching.

The Body's Testimony: Dramatic Witness in the Eichmann Trial

Paragraph ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-278
Author(s):  
Cathy Caruth
Keyword(s):  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment

This article takes as its focus the question, raised by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their 1995 book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, of what it means for an event to be constituted by the collapse of its witness. The discussion centres on a reading of the moment Yehiel Dinoor, a writer also known as K-Zetnik and one of the few eyewitnesses at the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, falls out of the stand and into a coma while attempting to provide his testimony. By rethinking this historical trauma as a ‘collapse of witnessing’, I suggest Felman and Laub shift the focus from a purely cognitive or epistemological question — a problem of knowing and not-knowing — to a question of communicating to others: a problem of address. It is the circumstance of having ‘no one to whom one could say Thou’, as Laub puts it (Testimony, 82), that constitutes the Holocaust, for the victims, as what the authors call an ‘event without a witness’.

Kinds or Tails?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edouard Machery
Keyword(s):  
Cluster Analysis ◽  
General Population ◽  
Formal Methods ◽  
Clinical Judgment ◽  
Openness To Experience ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
Distinct Kind

Are psychiatric syndromes the tails of traits distributed over the general population or do they form distinct kinds or taxa? For instance, do individuals suffering from depression form a distinct kind or rather are they the tail of the distribution of neuroticism in the general population? Do people suffering from delusions form a distinct kind or rather are they individuals with an extreme openness to experience? Before being able to answer such questions, we must address a preliminary question: How would we know whether psychiatric syndromes should be treated as taxa or as the tails of distributions defined over the general population? To address this preliminary epistemological question, I first contrast informal methods (e.g., clinical judgment) and formal methods (e.g., cluster analysis), arguing for the superiority of the latter. I then examine some of the formal methods developed in taxometrics, including cluster analysis and Paul Meehl’s taxometric procedures (e.g., MAXCOV or MAMBAC), in order to understand what assumptions about kinds or taxa are built into them.

Interdisciplinary Fields

2021 ◽  
pp. 56-76
Author(s):  
Julie Thompson Klein
Keyword(s):  
Women's Studies ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Women’S Studies ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
Trajectories Of Change ◽  
Research And Education

The last chapter in Part I examines the boundary work of major communities of practices classified as fields and interdisciplines. New fields arise, Richard McKeon argued, because subject matters are not ready made to respond to all questions, problems, and issues that arise. He called interdisciplinarity an architectonic art of creating new forms and outcomes. The question of where they fit, however, persists. Lynton Caldwell argued the metaphor of fit prejudges the epistemological question at stake. Many fields arose because of a perceived misfit of needs, experiences, information, and structures of disciplinary organization. This chapter identifies patterns and contingencies of specific fields. It begins by describing catalysts, then draws insights from interdisciplinary majors and taxonomies of research and education. It next compares trajectories and outcomes of individual cases. The following sections illustrate trajectories of change and identities, then draws insights from women’s studies and intersectionality. The chapter closes by asking whether there is a distinctive interdisciplinary logic.

Communities of Learning

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R. Schwehn
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
Communities Of Learning ◽  
Teaching Learning

Thus far I have tried to show that our present-day conception of the academic vocation is based at least in part upon the transmutation of ideas that were originally religious in origin and implication. In the next two chapters, I shall try to show why a reconception of the academic vocation should involve the reappropriation of certain religious virtues. I do not, however, intend this to be an atavistic undertaking: I have no patience for nostalgic returns to medieval syntheses of one sort or another. I shall accordingly argue in this chapter that what I take to be one of the main currents in contemporary thought—the resurgence of the question of community—both invites and to some extent warrants a religiously informed redescription of academic life and the academic vocation. In the next chapter, I will endeavor to provide just such a redescription as a corrective to the Weberian account I have already analyzed. The resurgent interest in the question of community is an exceptionally broad phenomenon that embraces social and political theory, jurisprudence, theology, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, even the history and philosophy of science. I shall, however, restrict my attention here to the manner in which the community question impinges upon activities and aspirations that are central to the tasks of higher education—teaching, learning, knowledge, and truth. At the risk of drastic oversimplification, I will summarize this more restricted development as follows: over the course of the last twenty or so years, the question of community has replaced the epistemological question as foundational for all other inquiries. The answers to basic human questions, such as, What can we know? or How should we live? or In what or whom shall we place our hope? have come to depend, for a large number of intellectuals, upon the answer to a prior question, Who are we? As a way of both documenting and deepening our sense of this decisive shift in the current climate of opinion, I propose to consider briefly two very influential books that appeared within four years of one another, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Parker Palmer’s To Know As We Are Known.

Finding Work: James Agee in the Office

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 766-781
Author(s):  
Donal Harris
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Institutional Affiliation ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
American Media ◽  
Media Corporations

James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) might be the best-known literary product of Agee's uneven career and of Time Inc.‘s golden days at the top of periodical culture. This convergence of author, institution, and text presents a case study for two undertheorized aspects of mid-century American literary history: how the rise of American media corporations, of which Time Inc. is the most successful, provides economic patronage and massive readerships for a generation of writers raised on the tenets of literary modernism and how the “corporate voice” and collective editorial model at these institutions alter conceptions of authorial production. This essay tracks how competing definitions of writing as work—either “for oneself” or “on the clock”—emerge from the context of institutional affiliation. It then shows how the epistemological question of writing as work can be read into the “mental discipline” of Time Inc. magazines’ corporate style (referred to as Time style) and into the recursive elision of authorial control in Famous Men.

scholarly journals MINIMALISM AND THE LIMITS OF WARRANTED ASSERTABILITY MANEUVERS

Episteme ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blake Roeber
Keyword(s):  
True Proposition ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
False Proposition ◽  
Epistemological Question

AbstractContextualists and pragmatists agree that knowledge-denying sentences are contextually variable, in the sense that a knowledge-denying sentence might semantically express a false proposition in one context and a true proposition in another context, without any change in the properties traditionally viewed as necessary for knowledge. Minimalists deny both pragmatism and contextualism, and maintain that knowledge-denying sentences are not contextually variable. To defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists like Patrick Rysiew, Jessica Brown, and Wayne Davis forward ‘warranted assertability maneuvers.’ The basic idea is that some knowledge-denying sentence seems contextually variable because we mistake what a speaker pragmatically conveys by uttering that sentence for what she literally says by uttering that sentence. In this paper, I raise problems for the warranted assertability maneuvers of Rysiew, Brown, and Davis, and then present a warranted assertability maneuver that should succeed if any warranted assertability maneuver will succeed. I then show how my warranted assertability maneuver fails, and how the problem with my warranted assertability maneuver generalizes to pragmatic responses in general. The upshot of my argument is that, in order to defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists must prioritize the epistemological question whether the subjects in those cases know over linguistic questions about the pragmatics of various knowledge-denying sentences.

scholarly journals Limites ingenii definire: Bourdieu's epistemological question and its significance for archaeology

Sociologija ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-397
Author(s):  
Marko Teodorski
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Scientific Thinking ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
The Relationship

The paper presents and discusses Bourdieu's perspective on the relationship between observer and observed. The term 'symbolic violence' will also be discussed, as it is an inevitable element of this relationship. The discussion starts from the assumption that scientific thinking itself engages in a particular process of construction of its object, so that the researcher inevitably 'transfers' him or herself into the observed object. Following Bourdieu, I would like to specify this distortion, this inequality in positions, as 'symbolic violence' and to expound some of the questions that revolve around this term.

scholarly journals A HISTORIOGRAFIA DA GEOGRAFIA ACADÊMICA E ESCOLAR: UMA RELAÇÃO DE (DES)ENCONTROS / The Historiography of Academic and School Geography: the Relation of Meetings and Disencounters

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 343
Author(s):  
Victória Sabbado Menezes
Keyword(s):  
Historical Review ◽  
School Practices ◽  
Academic Production ◽  
Geography Teaching ◽  
Geographic Thought ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academic Geography

O presente artigo tem o intuito de apresentar a historiografia da Geografia acadêmica e escolar, uma vez que suas trajetórias estão interligadas. Tem-se como objetivo compreender o ensino de Geografia no Brasil no contexto hodierno a partir de um resgate histórico da relação de encontros e desencontros entre Geografia escolar e acadêmica. Para tanto, realizou-se uma revisão bibliográfica concernente à epistemologia da Geografia visando analisar como as correntes do pensamento geográfico e as discussões teóricas desenvolvidas em âmbito acadêmico refletiram-se no espaço escolar. Portanto, (re)pensar o ensino de Geografia na contemporaneidade está associado a uma questão epistemológica e pressupõe (re)pensar o diálogo estabelecido entre universidade e escola.ABSTRACTThis article aims to present the history of academic and school geography, since their paths are related to each other. It has been aimed to understand the geography teaching in Brazil in today's context from a historical review of the relation between school and academic geography. To this end, we carried out a biographic review through a survey and study of works concerning especially the epistemology of geographical science and geography teaching in order to analyze the currents of geographic thought and theoretical discussions triggered in academic location that reflected in the school. It was found that there was progress in the geographical academic production over the decades with the development of different theoretical lines, but aspects such as Humanistic Critical and Cultural are nonexistent or barely visible in school practices. So rethink the teaching of geography in contemporary times is associated with an epistemological question and requires rethinking the dialogue between university and school.Keywords: School Geography; Academic Geography; Epistemology; Geography Teaching

Collective Narrative Expertise and the Narbs of Social Media

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ananda Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Knowledge Creation ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
The Social ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Collective Narrative

A fundamental epistemological question that has been the focus of much deliberation over time is: how do we know what we know? One of the answers to this question has been found in the theories of narrative asserting that humans learn through stories, ranging from religious epics to personal anecdotes. The social media phenomenon offers a unique form of narration that utilizes “narbs,” narrative bits that tell the stories of specific individuals who may be, but often are not, traditional experts. Yet, as a collection, these narbs could become the authoritative narrative about a particular issue where expertise is located in the collective. This chapter examines the theoretical basis of knowledge creation through narrative, and how the narbs of social media users are creating dynamic bodies of information. The chapter offers a lexicon for categorizing narbs and provides an analytical frame for examining them. The overall aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that interaction and new modes of gathering and disseminating information and knowledge in the digital environment require different and emergent expertise in narrative construction and interpretation.

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