CHAPTER I. The Mind of the Enlightenment

2009 ◽  
pp. 3-36
Keyword(s):  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Mind

Internalism, externalism, and transcendental idealism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Zahavi
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Final Part ◽  
The Mind

Whereas a certain popular (Fregean) interpretation of Husserl’s theory of intentionality makes Husserl into an internalist and methodological solipsist, the aim of Chapter 4 is to show that Husserl’s commitment to transcendental idealism prevents his theory from being either. I first discuss competing interpretations of Husserl’s concept of the noema, and argue that the Fregean interpretation misreads the transcendental character of Husserl’s phenomenology. I next present an interpretation of Husserl’s transcendental idealism that highlights its difference from metaphysical idealism and shows why Husserl’s conception of the mind–world relationship cannot be adequately captured within the internalism–externalism framework. In the final part of the chapter, I discuss how the claim that Husserl is a methodological solipsist fails to engage properly with his account of transcendental intersubjectivity, and how that latter account eventually transforms the very character of the transcendental project.

Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Cevolini
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Filing Cabinet ◽  
The Social ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Card Index ◽  
Social Use ◽  
The Mind

Thanks to a grant of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Bielefeld University has started a fifteen-year project (2015–2030) that includes the production of a critical edition of Niklas Luhmann’s extant works and manuscripts, as well as the digitalization of his famous card index. This valuable enterprise has rekindled interest in what many scholars hold to be a ‘holy grail’: a marvelous instrument that aided great creativity and scientific production by the German sociologist. Indeed, people feel that looking inside the filing cabinet is like looking inside the mind of a genius at work. This article suggests a different point of view, rooted in the Enlightenment project of the sociologist of Bielefeld. The main hypothesis is that in the use of a card index as a surprise generator, there is nothing particularly surprising if one considers the evolution of knowledge management in early modern Europe. Rather, the question should be: how it is possible to explain the evolutionary improbability of the social use of ‘machines’ as secondary memories for knowledge management and reproduction? This article provides some suggestions for research and tries to determine where Luhmann’s card index comes from.

Reading Forgiveness in a Marrano Idiom

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Banki
Keyword(s):  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Gift

This chapter offers a reading of Jacques Derrida’s concept of forgiveness, in relation to what he and Jean-Luc Nancy call “the deconstruction of Christianity.” Against a certain powerful tradition of the Enlightenment, which extends from Voltaire to Heidegger (including Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche), Derrida and Nancy argue that it is not possible today to speak from a position that is purely and simply disenchanted from what is called religion, and in particular, from an experience of faith. This audacious claim does not, despite appearances, mean the abandonment of all critical and deconstructive vigilance with regard to the metaphysical heritage of Christianity (and/or monotheism in general) but rather, I argue, a deeper, more responsible way of addressing it. In this chapter, I identify the specificity of Derrida’s concept of forgiveness with the reference to the tradition of Marrano ‘Jews,’ with which he explicitly identifies. In other words, by articulating his concept of forgiveness (pardon) in terms of the gift (don), Derrida thinks in the language of Christianity something quite different from what Christianity has up until now has thought forgiveness to be.

Uncentred Minds

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
Fernando Pessoa ◽  
The World ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

In this chapter I explore the relationship between Fernando Pessoa and Buddhism. I first introduce the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43), a contemporary of Pessoa but someone of whom he certainly had never heard. One way to read her remarks is as directed against the positional use of ‘I’, against the deployment in thought and speech of a positional conception of self. One should abandon forms of self-consciousness that are grounded in one’s thinking of oneself as the one at the centre of a landscape of sensation. For Weil, it is precisely such contact with reality as attention makes possible which holds the uncentred mind together, preventing its content being ‘a phantasmagoric fluttering with no centre or sense’. The uncentred mind would thus be a sort of conformal and aperspectival map of reality, standing in correspondence with the world without any privileged perspectival point. With these distinctions in mind, we say more of the mind of Alberto Caeiro, and address the question whether he is a Buddhist heteronym.

Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment

1995 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter ◽  
Larry Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Mind

Fighting Fundamentalism with Pluralism

2020 ◽  
pp. 994-1015
Author(s):  
Madhavi Sunder
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
Traditional Authorities ◽  
Coordination Tool ◽  
The Arab Spring

What role can social media play in helping to bring forth social revolutions, inciting change not in government or laws but in social attitudes and real world behaviors? Social change relates not only to regime change but to change in people’s way of thinking. In this chapter, I argue that social media during the Arab Spring was used as more than a mere coordination tool promoting efficient street demonstrations. Bloggers and Facebook users employed these technologies in many of the same ways that the printing press was employed during the Enlightenment period—to upend traditional authorities, to engender popular participation in debates over governance and values, and to foster care and empathy for fellow citizens. Contrary to popular perception, the Arab Spring demonstrates how today’s technological tools can go the next mile and transform not just politics but societies themselves. In the particular context of religious democracies, through examples, the chapter explores how nonstate actors are helping to influence constitutionalism and other lawmaking in Muslim majority states by using technologies to elaborate plural normative and legal options, thus undermining fundamentalist stranglehold on social and legal authority.

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