scholarly journals Towards a conceptual history of the present: Democracy, rights, and freedom in the recent Catalan conflict

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 588-615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wagner
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Current Context ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

Reinhart Koselleck showed that the decades around 1800 witnessed a major transformation of political language. Around 1800, the horizon of expectations gained distance from the space of the experiences that human beings were making, and thus possibilities for the future opened up widely. In particular, the future would be the time during which ‘peoples’ would gain their capacity for self-determination, called popular sovereignty. This would occur in two particular versions that crystallized in the course of the 19th century, namely as ‘nations’ that would unify or liberate themselves from monarchical and/or imperial domination to form the polities proper to them, or as a ‘class’ that embodied the universal interest of humankind and would assert itself in a second revolution, following up on the French Revolution. Political concepts acquired during that period the meaning that they still had in the late 20th century, i.e. the time when Koselleck developed his approach to the history of concepts, but they may be challenged in the present time, and with them the entire self-understanding of modern polities. The recent Catalan conflict serves to better understand this challenge. ‘People’ and ‘nation’ are there used in ways that are reminiscent of this politico-conceptual tradition, but in a highly ambiguous way. On the one hand, they are employed in exactly their historical meaning: the Catalan people and nation are seen to be finally fulfilling their historical role of reaching political self-determination. On the other hand, these concepts are re-deployed to place them in the current context of existing democratic commitments and institutions as well as high interdependence between polities, all the while claiming that Catalan independence opens up a new normative horizon of democracy, rights, and freedom. This article will try to show that this undeclared ambiguity is characteristic of our current situation in general. This is a situation in which the historically created political concepts have sedimented in institutions, and thus appear to have ‘consolidated’ and moved beyond their historicity. At the same time, they remain impregnated with particular historical experiences that can be re-interpreted to be mobilized in political struggles of the present. To assess the validity and acceptability of any such re-interpretation requires explicit reflection about the persistence of historicity in political concepts.

On the nature of chemistry

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Scerri
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent History ◽  
History Of Chemistry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Fundamental Unity ◽  
The 19Th Century

<span>The very nature of chemistry presents us with a tension. A tension between the exhilaration of diversity of substances and forms on the one hand and the safety of fundamental unity on the other. Even just the recent history of chemistry has been al1 about this tension, from the debates about Prout's hypothesis as to whether there is a primary matter in the 19th century to the more recent speculations as to whether computers will enable us to virtually dispense with experimental chemistry.</span>

scholarly journals Kant, Nietzsche and the idealization of friendship into nihilism

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (128) ◽  
pp. 401-417
Author(s):  
Paul van Tongeren
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The 19Th Century

Is friendship still possible under nihilistic conditions? Kant and Nietzsche are important stages in the history of the idealization of friendship, which leads inevitably to the problem of nihilism. Nietzsche himself claims on the one hand that only something like friendship can save us in our nihilistic condition, but on the other hand that precisely friendship has been unmasked and become impossible by these very conditions. It seems we are struck in the nihilistic paradox of not being allowed to believe in the possibility of what we cannot do without. Literary imagination since the 19th century seems to make us even more skeptical. Maybe Beckett provides an illustration of a way out that fits well to Nietzsche's claim that only "the most moderate, those who do not require any extreme articles of faith" will be able to cope with nihilism.

scholarly journals FDB’s centrallagre som kulturarv.

Kulturstudier ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mette Tapdrup Mortensen
Keyword(s):  
Retail Trade ◽  
Industrial Heritage ◽  
Continuous Innovation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Service ◽  
The One ◽  
Storage Distribution ◽  
The 19Th Century

<p>I disse år tales meget om velfærdssamfundets eller efterkrigstidens kulturarv. Hvordan skal vi forholde os til de mange bygninger i nye materialer, der samtidigt er udtryk for nye måder at indrette samfundet på? Denne artikel bygger på en undersøgelse af FDB’s centrallagre, der i mere end 50 år har været produktions- og lagringssted for detailhandlens vareflow.</p><p><strong><em>Abstract</em></strong></p><p><em>Since the first member-owned co-operative shops emerged in Denmark in the second half of the 19th century, and organised themselves as the FDB in 1896, the latter’s prime objective has been to provide its members with a wide range of products at the most favourable prices. This has required continuous innovation and change, not least in the second half of the 20th century, as competition in the retailing market intensified. In the mid-1950s, the management of FDB implemented a comprehensive rationalisation of production, transport, storage, distribution and sales, as well as the overall structure connecting these aspects of its enterprise. Drawing on inspiration from the USA, within a decade this process radically transformed both the FDB itself and Danish retail trade in its entirety.</em></p><p><em>In a broader perspective, this rationalisation process and its consequences  is a part of the history of the Danish welfare society, since it concerns the emergence of the modern consumer, as well as technical, economic and administrative innovation of the retail trade. The local co-operative shop with the manager behind the desk and the goods sold loose was replaced by modern self-service shops with standardised equipment, and numerous multi-storey warehouses distributed in the old city centres were in the early 1960s substituted by seven, strategically located central warehouses serviced by fork-lift trucks. The one located in Albertslund functioned from 1964 onwards as the organization’s headquarters.. In 2007 Kulturarvsstyrelsen (The Heritage Agency of Denmark) proclaimed this warehouse in Alberslund, today the headquarters of the Coop, to be one of 25 national sites of industrial heritage.</em></p>

Unifying without Integrating: The East German Collapse and German Unity

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Zatlin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
Cultural Attachment

The demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) came as a surprise to most western observers. For historians of modern Europe, its disappearance remains remarkable for at least two reasons. First, East Germany has ceased to exist in an era when new states are constantly being born. Since the French Revolution unleashed the power of national self-determination as an ordering principle more than 200 years ago, new sovereign states have continued to emerge across the globe, whether through the breakup of multiethnic and colonial empires or the dissolution of pan-Slavic states in eastern Europe. Illiberal governments have been swept aside, often with the result that new states have been cast out of imperial entities by the centrifugal force of cultural attachment. In the history of European political sovereignty during the twentieth century, the particular has triumphed over the universal. Except in the case of the GDR. Against the tide of European history, the GDR has gone from sovereign state (East Germany) to regional designation (eastern Germany). In this sense, the story of the GDR's absorption by a larger polity is a tale of modern state-building told in reverse.

scholarly journals Innovative technologies and living spaces; Updated living standards according to the evolution of homo sapiens

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Alp Karaca
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Life ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Study Data ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Innovative Technology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
The One

Homosapiens is the common family name for contemporary human beings. There are different kinds of homo species but the most recent one with the most improved abilities are human beings of the present era, who have adapted themselves to the new technologies and life conditions by improving themselves. The substantial improvements in technology started with the French Revolution in 1799. Initially, technology helped human beings in the production and industry sectors. Thereafter, in the 1990s, technology penetrated living spaces, firstly helping with household duties and then impacting social life, first with the radio and later with the television. Living spaces started to change through the organisation of spaces, and most houses were organised according to location reserved for the television. This is the biggest change brought about by technology in living spaces. The expectations of human beings were on the rise simultaneously with economic welfare and consumption-based demands. In the 2000s, phyisical limitations occurred, while expectations increased even more. These were constraints over time, materials and economy, and the solution came from technology via virtual reality and generated cyber spaces, which were without limits, economical and surpassed the built environments. Due to the lack of physical conditions, built envionments ceded their place to virtual living spaces and virtual cities. In the present study, data collection was undertaken via a study of innovations within living spaces and also via an observation of social lives within living spaces. The present article aims to present what can be foreseen, on the basis of cause and effect, concerning the impacts of the current evolution on the one hand and massive outbreaks of viruses on the other hand, the impacts on the physical spaces of the homosapiens species that have succeeded in adapting to all the changes that they have come across from their beginnings until the present era, the impacts that both phenomena will have on the current living standards and living spaces of humans and what changes human living spaces will undergo in the ongoing process of evolution. Human beings will continue renewing themselves throughout the said phenomena before concluding their process of evolution.   Keywords: Innovative, technology, living spaces, living standards, homosapiens.

El Protagonismo Dialéctico-Social del Ser Humano en el Desarrollo Intelectual de Rodolfo Mondolfo

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 125-144
Author(s):  
Jesús Víctor Alfredo Contreras Ugarte
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One ◽  
Descriptive Method

Summary: Reflecting on the role humans take into nowadays society, should be of interest in all our social reflections, even for those that refer to the field of law. Any human indifferent and unconscious of the social role that he ought to play within society, as a member of it, is an irresponsible human detached from everything that surrounds him, regarding matters and other humans. Trying to isolate in an irresponsible, passive and comfortable attitude, means, after all, denying oneself, denying our nature, as the social being every human is. This is the reflection that this academic work entitles, the one made from the point of view of the Italian philosopher Rodolfo Mondolfo. From a descriptive development, starting from this renowned author, I will develop ideas that will warn the importance that human protagonism have, in this human product so call society. From a descriptive development, from this well-known author, I will be prescribing ideas that will warn the importance of the protagonism that all human beings have, in that human product that we call society. I have used the descriptive method to approach the positions of the Italian humanist philosopher and, for my assessments, I have used the prescriptive method from an eminently critical and deductive procedural position. My goal is to demonstrate, from the humanist postulates of Rodolfo Mondolfo, the hypothesis about the leading, decision-making and determining role that the human being has within society. I understand, to have reached the demonstration of the aforementioned hypothesis, because, after the analyzed, there is no doubt, that the human being is not one more existence in the development of societies; its role is decisive in determining the human present and the future that will house the next societies and generations of our historical future.

Introduction

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
World History ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World Region ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
History Of ◽  
Northern Atlantic ◽  
The Creation ◽  
History Of Europe

This book examines the temporality of modernity by focusing on the relations between Africa, America and Europe. More specifically, it considers the extent to which the supposed arrival of modernity in Europe affects the ways in which human beings situate themselves in time and history worldwide. It also explores how institutionally entrenched interpretations of modernity based on inequality and oppression are transformed into novel forms that are shaped by the drive to inclusive–egalitarian collective self-determination. In linking the history of Europe to world history, the book shows that what is often referred to as ‘the rise of Europe’ was the creation of an Atlantic world region with increasingly dense but highly asymmetric commercial and communicative ties. This introduction discusses the debate over the relation between the history and the theory of modernity, the connection between the Northern Atlantic West and the origins of modernity, and novel interpretations of modernity in Africa and Latin America.

their own natural seats laid to the view, that we seem by many readers today as humanly constructed, its not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them’ reconstruction in the poem is where we meet. (Defence of Poetry 86). In other words, we do not In his Discourse on Civil Life (1606), Lodowick see beyond, or outside, the virtues to something else Bryskett writes that Spenser is known to be very but rather through them as lenses. Only by so seeing well read in philosophy, both moral and natural, and through them may we share Spenser’s vision of that he intends to appeal to him to learn what moral human life from his moral perspective. It follows that philosophy is, ‘what be the parts thereof, whereby finally nothing outside the poem is needed to under-vertues are to be distinguished from vices’ (21). stand it, except (for us) the shared primary culture of Spenser rightly terms his poem ‘this present treatise’ its first audience. (I adapt the term ‘primary culture’ (in the current sense of the term) for his task is ‘True from the account by N. Frye 1990b:22–23 of ‘pri-vertue to aduance’ (V iii 3.8–9). One chief problem mary mythology’ or ‘primary concerns’ in contrast to is to separate virtue from vice, for what used to be ‘secondary concerns’, such as ideology.) called virtue ‘Is now cald vice; and that which vice To gain ‘an exact knowledge of the virtues’ was hight, | Is now hight vertue, and so vs’d of all’ (V needed to write The Faerie Queene, Spenser calls proem 4.2–3). Raleigh makes the same point in the upon the muses to reveal to him ‘the sacred noursery History of the World 1614:2.6.7: ‘some vertues | Of vertue’ (VI proem 3.1–2). Since he goes on to and some vices are so nicely distinguished, and so claim that the nursery was first planted on earth by resembling each other, as they are often confounded, the Gods ‘being deriu’d at furst | From heauenly and the one taken for the other’; and he praises The seedes of bounty soueraine’, for him the virtues exist Faerie Queene because Spenser has ‘formed right true transcendentally. As this nursery provides what vertues face herein’ (CV 2.3). The problem is noted Sidney calls ‘that idea or fore-conceit’ by which the in the opening cantos of the poem: in the argument poet’s skill is to be judged rather than by the poem to canto i, the Red Cross Knight is called ‘The itself, his effort as a poet is to plant its garden of Patrone of true Holinesse’, but he is so named only virtue in the minds of his readers so that they may after Archimago assumes his disguise. Then readers share his state of being ‘rauisht with rare thoughts are told – in fact, they are admonished – that ‘Saint delight’. Since ‘vertues seat is deepe within the mynd’, George himselfe ye would haue deemed him to be’ (ii however, he does not so much plant the virtues in 11.9), as even Una does. them as nurture what is already there. Today Spenser’s purpose may seem ideologically To spell out this point using the familiar Platonic innocuous but in his day those who called virtue vice, doctrine of anamnesis: while Spenser needed an exact and vice virtue, may well have regarded the poem knowledge of the virtues in order to write his poem, as subversive. But who were they? Most likely, the his readers need only to be reminded of what they pillars of society, such as Burghley (see IV proem already know (even today) but have largely forgotten 1.1–2n), theologians, such as John King who, in (especially today). What he finds deep within the 1597, complained that ‘instead of the writings of minds of his readers may be identified with the Moses and the prophets . . . now we have Arcadia, primary culture upon which his poem draws. It led and the Faëry Queene’ (cited Garrett 1996:139), him to use allegory, which, as Tuve cited by Roche and those religiously-minded for whom holiness 1964:30 explains, ‘is a method of reading in which meant professing correct doctrine; temperance we are made to think about things we already know’; meant life in a moral strait-jacket; chastity meant the and to use proverbs extensively, as Cincotta 1983 rejection of sexual love; friendship meant patriarchal explains, as a means to give authority to his poem. family ties; justice meant the justification of present Being primary, this culture is basic: simply expressed, authority; and courtesy meant the conduct of it is what we all know as human beings regardless of Elizabeth’s courtiers – in sum, those for whom virtue gender, race, religion, and class. It is what we just meant remaining subject to external law rather living know and have always known to be fair, right, and in the freedom of the gospel. just, both in our awareness of who we are and also Although generally Spenser overtly endorses the our relation to society and to some higher reality claims of noble blood, his poem values individual outside ourselves, both what it is and what it ought worth over social rank by ranking middle-class nur-

2014 ◽  
pp. 29-29
Keyword(s):  
Primary Culture ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Moral Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

4. Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
James A. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

‘Religion' discusses Hume’s various treatments of religion, particularly in the essay ‘Of Miracles’, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and ‘The Natural History of Religion’. Hume's earlier writings show some interesting implications for religion, including A Treatise of Human Nature and the essay ‘Of National Characters’. Looking at ‘Of Miracles’ shows that Hume’s theme was not the possibility of miracles as such, but rather the rational grounds of belief in reports of miracles. Considering the Dialogues emphasizes the distinction between scepticism and atheism. Meanwhile, ‘Natural History’ emphasizes Hume’s interest in the dangerous moral consequences of monotheism. What is the future for religion? Perhaps Hume was unlikely to have supposed that his writings would do anything to reduce religion’s hold on the vast majority of human beings.

Postmodernism, French critics of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reginald Lilly
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Rational Discourse ◽  
Philosophical School ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Second World

French anti-postmodernism emerged with the generation of philosophers that came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s and counts among its ranks some of the most visible and prolific young scholars in France. Unlike schools of thought such as phenomenology, existentialism or Marxism, French anti-postmodernism has no founding figure, central text or core doctrine; anti-postmodernism (a term seldom, if ever, used by the French) therefore is less a philosophical school than a characterization for a diverse group of thinkers who react against those trends that have dominated French intellectual life since the Second World War, especially Marxism, structuralism, existentialism and deconstruction. These trends, grouped together under the heading of ‘postmodernism’, are seen by anti-postmodernists as the last episodes in a failed intellectual adventure whose origins go back at least to the French Revolution. Critical of nineteenth-century philosophy as having produced, on the one hand, totalizing, speculative philosophies such as those of Hegel and Marx, and, on the other hand, the anti-rationalism of Nietzsche and his postmodern scions, anti-postmodernists (or neo-moderns as the French prefer to say) represent a return to the concept of the individual and of history as the product of free human agency. Reaffirming the efficacy of public, rational discourse, they tend to be interested in political philosophy, taking democracy and its ideals as a model for raising and addressing philosophical issues. Pluralist in their outlook, they value the disciplinary structure of scholarly work; fields such as epistemology, theology, philosophy of science and the history of ideas which were neglected or marginalized by much postmodern thought have enjoyed renewed prestige and interest among the anti-postmodernists.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document