The Elusive Third Way: The Pyrrhonian Illumination in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty

Elenchos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-362
Author(s):  
Roger E. Eichorn

AbstractI argue in this paper that, like the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, Wittgenstein’s response to negative–dogmatic skepticism in On Certainty turns on the attempt to free us from the demands of traditional philosophy and is therefore not a philosophical position, strictly speaking. Rather, it is a therapeutic metaphilosophy designed to bring into view (i.e., to illumine) the relationship between our everyday epistemic practices and those of philosophy such that we simultaneously come to recognize (a) what I call the pragmatic–transcendental self–standingness of the everyday and (b) its philosophical–rational groundlessness. The Pyrrhonian illumination of the everyday is therapeutic in that it aims to purify our metadoxastic attitudes of dogmatism.

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT SAMET

AbstractDespite recent attention to the relationship between the media and populist mobilisation in Latin America, there is a misfit between the everyday practices of journalists and the theoretical tools that we have for making sense of these practices. The objective of this article is to help reorient research on populism and the press in Latin America so that it better reflects the grounded practices and autochthonous norms of the region. To that end, I turn to the case of Venezuela, and a practice that has been largely escaped attention from scholars – the use of denuncias.


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (9) ◽  
pp. 1358-1378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Brickell

This article examines victims’ purported complicity in the judicial failures of domestic violence law to protect them in Cambodia. It is based on 3 years (2012-2014) of research in Siem Reap and Pursat Provinces on the everyday politics of the 2005 “Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence and the Protection of the Victims” (DV Law). The project questioned why investments in DV Law are faltering and took a multi-stakeholder approach to do so. In addition to 40 interviews with female domestic violence victims, the research included 50 interviews with legal and health professionals, NGO workers, low- and high-ranking police officers, religious figures, and local government authority leaders who each have an occupational investment in the implementation and enforcement of DV Law. Forming the backbone of the article, the findings from this latter sample reveal how women are construed not only as barriers “clouding the judgment of law” but also as actors denying the agency of institutional stakeholders (and law itself) to bring perpetrators to account. The findings suggest that DV Law has the potential to entrench, rather than diminish, an environment of victim blaming. In turn, the article signals the importance of research on, and better professional support of, intermediaries who (discursively) administrate the relationship between DV Law and the victims/citizens it seeks to protect.


Paragraph ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-256
Author(s):  
Andrew Sackin-Poll

This article addresses the question of the relationship between corporeality and the ordinary in the works of François Laruelle. This is done through the formulation of the ‘ordinary body’ that draws from across Laruelle's work on the ordinary, corporeality and photography in order to outline Laruelle's radically immanent account of embodiment. The critical outline of Laruellean corporeality and the ordinary body is drawn out via a critical posing of Laruelle in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari. In doing so, the article indicates the singular difference between Laruelle, on one side, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other, with respect to corporeal immanence and the usage of the everyday and ordinary. The article concludes with an argument that the relationship between the body and the ordinary in Laruelle's thought implies a novel non-philosophical or non-standard ‘poetics’ and usage of the ordinary.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-27
Author(s):  
Eka Permanasari ◽  
◽  
Thomas Lientino ◽  

Kalijodo has a long history in terms of gambling, prostitution, human trafficking and other illicit activities. Although it is a green belt area, the location had always being filled with semipermanent buildings. The area was changed its meaning in 2016 when the late Governor of Ahok with the help of the police and army, eradicated these housing and transformed this place as the community center (RPTRA-Ruang Publik Terpadu Ramah Anak). Together with Yori Antar, Basuki changed Kalijodo into a new center for Jakarta with its mural and skatepark. Former illicit users have been pushed out from the site. Some built a temporary shelter under the highway bridge while others went to their villages. After the fall of Basuki due to the blasphemy crime, the image of RPTRA Kalijodo was contested. Within a day, the area was filled with illegal parking and prostitution returned in different forms taking place under the highway bridge. Layers of meaning and use of Kalijodo transforms rapidly and in results changes the image of the city. Through observation, interviews and archival research, this paper analyses the contestation of the city image by investigating the relationship between the top-down approach and the everyday life uses of space.


Author(s):  
Bruno Bertaccini ◽  
Riccardo Bruni ◽  
Federico Crescenzi ◽  
Beatrice Donati

Logical abilities are a ubiquitous ingredient in all those contexts that take into account soft skills, argumentative skills or critical thinking. However, the relationship between logical models and the enhancement of these abilities is rarely explicitly considered. Two aspects of the issue are particularly critical in our opinion, namely: (i) the lack of statistically relevant data concerning these competences; (ii) the absence of reliable indices that might be used to measure and detect the possession of abilities underlying the above-mentioned soft skills. This paper aims to address both aspects of this topic by presenting the results of a research we conducted in the period October – December 2020 on students enrolled in various degree courses at the University of Florence. To the best of our knowledge, to date this is the largest available database on the subject in the Italian University System. It has been obtained by a three-stage initiative. We started from an “entrance” examination for assessing the students' initial abilities. This test comprised ten questions, each of which was centered on a specific reasoning construct. The results we have collected show that there is a widespread lack of understanding of basic patterns that are common in the everyday way of arguing. Students then underwent a short training course, using formal logic techniques in order to strengthen their abilities, and afterwards took an “exit” examination, replicating the structure and the questions difficulty of the entrance one in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the course. Results show that the training was beneficial.


ILUMINURAS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (57) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vitória Mendes Alves ◽  
Israel Martins Araujo

Este ensaio visual trata do mundo da vida cotidiana de camponeses agroextrativistas no Pará, especificamente no baixo Tocantins, região das ilhas do município de Mocajuba. Segue o método da etnografia sensorial, discute a relação entre corpo, ambiente e formas de aprendizagem técnica com a virtuosidade dos indicadores socioambientais e argumenta que tais técnicas não são transmitidas, mas ensinadas e aprendidas por meio de um complexo engajamento sensorial com o ambiente.Palavras-chave: Camponeses agroextrativistas. Cotidiano. Trabalho. Etnografia Sensorial. Corpo. Ambiente.  Glueing fragments of the world of life: cuttings from the daily life of peasants from downtown Tocantins paraense Abstract: This visual essay deals with the respect of the everyday life world of agro-extractivist peasants in Pará, specifically in the lower Tocantins, region of the islands of the municipality of Mocajuba. It follows the method of sensory ethnography, discusses the relationship between body, environment and forms of technical learning with the virtuosity of socio-environmental indicators and argues that such techniques are not transmitted, but taught and learned through a complex sensory engagement with the environmentKeywords: Agroextractive peasants. Daily. Work. Sensory Ethnography. Body. Environment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-19
Author(s):  
Benedictus Simangunsong ◽  
Felisianus N. Rahmat

                                                                        Abstrak Budaya memainkan peran yang sangat penting dalam politik karena menjadi cerminan masyarakat dalam menentukan sikap dan pilihan politik atau membentuk karakteristik masyarakat dalam berpolitik. Contoh dari hubungan antara budaya dan politik bisa tergambarkan pada isu kekerabatan  pada pilkada Manggarai Barat 2020 yang dibahas dalam penelitian ini. Fenomena kekerabatan yang dimaksud adalah adanya kecenderungan dari masyarakat Manggarai Barat pada umumnya untuk memilih pemimpin yang seasal atau karena faktor kekerabatan dan kekeluargaan atau dikenal sebagai budaya lonto leok yang masih kuat mempengaruhi kehidupan masyarakat termasuk politik. Penelitian ini menggunakan paradigma interpretif dengan metode penelitian Fenomenologi. Adapun pengumpulan data penelitian dilakukan dengan data primer yaitu melakukan wawancara mendalam dan dokumentasi serta data sekunder berupa studi kepustakaan. Wawancara dilakukan kepada para informan yang melakukan lonto leok menjelang Pilkada Mabar Tahun 2020 dan juga pada pilkada-pilkada sebelumnya. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa makna kekerabatan dalam budaya lonto leok pada proses pilkada di Manggarai Barat adalah kebersamaan dan ketergantungan. Sementara peran budaya lonto leok dalam proses politik adalah pada saat pengambilan keputusan dan menumbuhkan ikatan kekerabatan.   Kata kunci: Budaya, Politik, Kekerabatan, Lonto Leok, fenomenologi, makna kekerabatan                                                                   Abstract   Culture plays a very important role in politics because it reflects the everyday life of society in determining political attitudes and choices or shaping the characteristics of society in politics. One of them many examples about the relationship between culture and politics can be illustrated in the issue of kinship in the 2020 West Manggarai regional election discussed in this study. The kinship phenomenon in question is the tendency of the West Manggarai community in general to choose leaders who are in the same kinship and it is known as the lonto leok culture which still strongly influences people's life, including politics. This study uses an interpretive paradigm with phenomenological research methods. The research data collection was carried out with primary data, namely conducting in-depth interviews and documentation and secondary data in the form of literature study. Interviews were conducted with informants who conducted lonto leok ahead of the 2020 Mabar Pilkada and also in the previous pilkada. The results showed that the meaning of kinship in the lonto leok culture in the election process in West Manggarai was togetherness and dependence. Meanwhile, the role of lonto leok culture in the political process is at the time of making decisions and fostering kinship ties.   Keywords: Culture, Politics, Kinship, Lonto Leok, phenomenology, meaning of kinship  


2019 ◽  
pp. 223-276
Author(s):  
Han-luen Kantzer Komline

Chapter 5 continues to concentrate on developments during the Pelagian controversy, setting forth Augustine’s diverse responses to the question of what the will is under grace. Part I introduces two of Augustine’s central images: the everyday image of a root and the abstract image of the eye of the soul. Part II analyzes a number of other ways Augustine characterizes the good will. Part III assesses the relationship between the good will and the heart in Augustine’s thinking. The overall picture of the good will that emerges during the Pelagian controversy is presented in part IV. For Augustine, rather than having its own independently coherent character, the will is good in relation to God, its maker and redeemer.


2021 ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Francesca Emiliani

What do we talk about when we talk about everyday life? This chapter considers everyday life as a “metasystem” in Moscovici’s terms, a normative system that checks and organizes knowledge and thought. Looking at social representations theory, the chapter considers the structuring power of this metasystem, referring to two kinds of research where the absence (for deprived children) or suspension (in the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy) of everyday life causes delays in children’s development and dismay in adults. The suspension of ordinary life highlights the social representation of “normality.” The structure of the “everyday life” metasystem is largely taken for granted, and this calls into question the relationship between the taken-for-granted and the knowledge that constructs social representations or, in other words, between stability and change in common knowledge.


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