Introduction: Rights of Nature, Sacred Lands and Sustainability in the Western Tradition

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Cameron La Follette
Keyword(s):  
Western Tradition ◽  
Rights Of Nature ◽  
Sacred Lands

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

Narrative, Intertext and Allusion in the Qur'anic Presentation of Job

1999 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. H. Johns
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Key Words And Phrases ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Job (Ayyūb) is a byword for patience in the Islamic tradition, notwithstanding only six Qur'anic verses are devoted to him, four in Ṣād (vv.41-4), and two in al-Anbiyā' (vv.83-4), and he is mentioned on only two other occasions, in al-Ancām (v.84) and al-Nisā' (v.163). In relation to the space devoted to him, he could be accounted a ‘lesser’ prophet, nevertheless his significance in the Qur'an is unambiguous. The impact he makes is achieved in a number of ways. One is through the elaborate intertext transmitted from the Companions and Followers, and recorded in the exegetic tradition. Another is the way in which his role and charisma are highlighted by the prophets in whose company he is presented, and the shifting emphases of each of the sūras in which he appears. Yet another is the wider context created by these sūras in which key words and phrases actualize a complex network of echoes and resonances that elicit internal and transsūra associations focusing attention on him from various perspectives. The effectiveness of this presentation of him derives from the linguistic genius of the Qur'an which by this means triggers a vivid encounter with aspects of the rhythm of divine revelation no less direct than that of visual iconography in the Western Tradition.

At the Heart of the Death Penalty

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy Kamuf
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Tradition

Derrida's seminar The Death Penalty is to an important extent taken up with unpacking the significance of the fact (a ‘stupefying fact’, he calls it) that there is in our Western tradition no philosophy as such against the death penalty. This essay follows the seminar into the heart of its engagement with that legacy, where it traces out the condition of its own interested abolitionist stand. This condition is named ‘the heart of the other in me’, which is the pulse of every finitude, every ‘my’ life. It also gives the impulse in this essay to follow the thread of the ‘heart’ across the seminar's readings of Rousseau, Genet, Hugo and Camus.

Loving the Other Beyond Death

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-155
Author(s):  
Kas Saghafi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Limit Case ◽  
Western Tradition

Turning to an example provided by Aristotle and taken up by Derrida in Politics of Friendship, which functions as a limit case—loving the other beyond death—I argue that Derrida's short-lived term, aimance, gently and lovingly contests the primacy given either to love or to friendship in the Western tradition, but also to the living act of loving and the figure of the lover, putting pressure on the very conceptual differences between these terms.

scholarly journals Practices of sustainability and the enactment of their natures/cultures: Ecosystem services, rights of nature, and geoengineering

2021 ◽  
pp. 053901842199894
Author(s):  
Frank Adloff ◽  
Iris Hilbrich
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Knowledge Cultures ◽  
Rights Of Nature ◽  
Value Of Nature ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

Possible trajectories of sustainability are based on different concepts of nature. The article starts out from three trajectories of sustainability (modernization, transformation and control) and reconstructs one characteristic practice for each path with its specific conceptions of nature. The notion that nature provides human societies with relevant ecosystem services is typical of the path of modernization. Nature is reified and monetarized here, with regard to its utility for human societies. Practices of transformation, in contrast, emphasize the intrinsic ethical value of nature. This becomes particularly apparent in discourses on the rights of nature, whose starting point can be found in Latin American indigenous discourses, among others. Control practices such as geoengineering are based on earth-systemic conceptions of nature, in which no distinction is made between natural and social systems. The aim is to control the earth system as a whole in order for human societies to remain viable. Practices of sustainability thus show different ontological understandings of nature (dualistic or monistic) on the one hand and (implicit) ethics and sacralizations (anthropocentric or biocentric) on the other. The three reconstructed natures/cultures have different ontological and ethical affinities and conflict with each other. They are linked to very different knowledge cultures and life-worlds, which answer very differently to the question of what is of value in a society and in nature and how these values ought to be protected.

Biblical Politics

1981 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Steven J. Brams
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Military History ◽  
Western Tradition

Courses on political theory customarily start with the writings of Plato and Aristotle, who are rightfully considered the first great political philor sophers in the western tradition. Complementing this theoretical discourse, the wartime politics of ancient Greece, stressing its military history and the beliefs and motives of its leaders, is masterfully rendered by Thucydides.

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