scholarly journals Nature at the Limits of Science and Phenomenology

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-133
Author(s):  
David Suarez

AbstractKant and Heidegger argue that our subjectivity escapes scientific explanation, while also providing the conditions that enable it. This understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and science places limits on the explanatory scope of the sciences. But what makes transcendental reflection on the structure of subjectivity possible in the first place? Fink argues that transcendental philosophy encounters its own limits in attempting to characterize its own conditions of possibility. I argue that the limits of science and transcendental philosophy entail that nature cannot be conceived as a specific object, or as a totality of objects in the world, but only as the ontological ground of phenomenal manifestation in general. Nature is not identical with anything discoverable in either science or phenomenology; it is, rather, the origin from which discovery of phenomena proceeds.

Author(s):  
Stef Jansen

As part of a belated interest in people's engagements with possible futures, the start of the 3rd millennium has witnessed the emergence of a burgeoning subfield around the anthropology of hope. Anthropologists investigate the objects of people's hopes and their attempts to fulfil them. They also reflect on hope as an affect and disposition, and as a method of knowledge production. Three interrelated but analytically distinguishable concerns can be discerned in the anthropology of hope. First, anthropologists are interested in the conditions of possibility of hoping. Such studies of the political economy of hope explore the circumstances in which hopefulness does or does not flourish, and the unequal distribution of intensities of hoping, and of particular hopes, amongst different categories of people. A second domain consists of anthropological research on the shapes that hoping takes. Studies in this phenomenological vein investigate how hopefulness and hopes appear in the world. How does hoping work over time in people's practices, reflections, and orientations, and with which intended and unintended effects? Third, we find a concern with the relationship between hoping as a subject matter of ethnographic study and anthropology as a form of knowledge production. How do scholarly understandings of hope inform the development of the discipline and, in particular, its engagement with political critique and its capacity to help imagine alternatives?


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (6-7) ◽  
pp. 84-100
Author(s):  
Anna Ilyina

Paper deals with investigation of deconstructive concept of quasi-transcendental in the context of general thematization of transcendental philosophy framework of which deconstruction is thought as a representational version. It was established that quasi-transcendental thinking amounts to such a re-interpretation of theoretical foundation of transcendental discourse in the frame of which moments of critique and hyperbolizing are united.Author brings to light and explores main topics of transcendental thought primarily and foremost subjected to the quasi-transcendental reflection: namely, the problem of relationship between transcendental and empirical and the problem of conditions of possibility. In the first case, an ambivalence of “transcendental-empirical” relation, inherent to transcendental discourse turns out to be sharpened. This relation combines in itself characteristics of opposition and juxtaposition, up to reciprocal conditioning. Transcendental becomes such only with regard to empirical and vise versa. In the second case, questioning on conditions of possibility is reshaped in discourse on conditions of impossibility, which proves to be both critical restriction and hyperbolic extension of the former. Paper shows that development of idea of quasi-transcendental in deconstructive philosophy is an outcome of mutual work of Derrida himself and his eminent commentators. The function and basic senses of concept “quasi”, which it obtains within the scope of deconstructive version of transcendentalism, are determined. In particular, an affinity of Derridian “quasi” with Kantian als ob is ascertained, as well as its connection with both critical attitude and discursive realm of fiction. A peculiarity of concept of ultra-transcendental as variation of notion “quasi-transcendental” is found out.Author explores the relation of quasi-transcendental discourse to empirism and gives reasons for priority of transcendental realm over empirical in Derridian thought. Paper lays bare the relationship of quasi-transcendental thinking with discourse of other, as a fundamental theme of deconstructive philosophy.In sum author claims that (1) importance of the theme of (quasi)transcendental in deconstructive discourse and (2) personal Derrida’s self-identification as quasi-transcendental philosopher serve as crucial reasons for investigation of deconstructive philosophy as a prominent version of transcendental thinking.


1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Piatt ◽  

From roughly the 16th century onwards, religiously oriented persons have engaged in what might appear to be a losing battle against the scientific community. With each new success of scientific explanation, religious traditionalists have been forced to either renounce or radically reinterpret doctrines which were previously regarded as "factual descriptions" of the way the world is. The situation just described has been changed by recent advances in the philosophy of science. The present view of the status of scientific explanation as found in such thinkers as Feyerabend, Goodman, and Von Fraasen is a far cry from the 17th-19th century respresentational realism. This raises the possibility that we need to reassess the relationship of religious assertions to scientific assertions.


2006 ◽  
pp. 133-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Arystanbekov

Kazakhstan’s economic policy results in 1995-2005 are considered in the article. In particular, the analysis of the relationship between economic growth and some indicators of nation states - population, territory, direct access to the World Ocean, and extraction of crude petroleum - is presented. Basic problems in the sphere of economic policy in Kazakhstan are formulated.


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-192
Author(s):  
Dr. Oinam Ranjit Singh ◽  
Dr. Nushar Bargayary

The Bodo of the North Eastern region of India have their own kinship system to maintain social relationship since ancient periods. Kinship is the expression of social relationship. Kinship may be defined as connection or relationships between persons based on marriage or blood. In each and every society of the world, social relationship is considered to be the more important than the biological bond. The relationship is not socially recognized, it fall outside the realm of kinship. Since kinship is considered as universal, it plays a vital role in the socialization of individuals and the maintenance of social cohesion of the group. Thus, kinship is considered to be the study of the sum total of these relations. The kinship of the Bodo is bilateral. The kin related through the father is known as Bahagi in Bodo whereas the kin to the mother is called Kurma. The nature of social relationships, the kinship terms, kinship behaviours and prescriptive and proscriptive rules are the important themes of the present study.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serena Stefani ◽  
Gabriele Prati

Research on the relationship between fertility and gender ideology revealed inconsistent results. In the present study, we argue that inconsistencies may be due to the fact that such relationship may be nonlinear. We hypothesize a U- shaped relationship between two dimensions of gender ideology (i.e. primacy of breadwinner role and acceptance of male privilege) and fertility rates. We conducted a cross-national analysis of 60 countries using data from the World Values Survey as well as the World Population Prospects 2019. Controlling for gross domestic product, we found support for a U-shaped relationship between gender ideology and fertility. Higher levels of fertility rates were found at lower and especially higher levels of traditional gender ideology, while a medium level of gender ideology was associated with the lowest fertility rate. This curvilinear relationship is in agreement with the phase of the gender revolution in which the country is located. Traditional beliefs are linked to a complementary division of private versus public sphere between sexes, while egalitarian attitudes are associated with a more equitable division. Both conditions strengthen fertility. Instead, as in the transition phase, intermediate levels of gender ideology’s support are associated with an overload and a difficult reconciliation of the roles that women have to embody (i.e. working and nurturing) so reducing fertility. The present study has contributed to the literature by addressing the inconsistencies of prior research by demonstrating that the relationship between gender ideology and fertility rates is curvilinear rather than linear.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siddharth Garg

Objective: The aim of this paper was to examine the relationship between income, subjective wellbeing, and culture among people from a higher socio-economic class across the world. Rationale: Ed Diener proposed the law of diminishing marginal utility as an explanation for differences in subjective wellbeing among different income groups across different countries (Diener, Ng, & Tov, Balance in life and declining marginal utility of diverse resources, 2009). Thus, people with higher incomes would experience less subjective wellbeing due to income, and culture should emerge as a significant predictor. Method: Data from this study came from another study (https://siddharthgargblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/14/love-for-money/). I used an online survey to collect data on annual income in US dollars, subjective wellbeing (WHO-5), and country of residence (Indicator of Culture). 96 responses (Indians = 24, Foreigners = 72) were entered in IBM SPSS and a regression analysis was conducted. The raw dataset used in this study can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8869040.v1Results: ANOVA showed a significant difference (p < 0.05) between Indians and foreigners on levels of subjective wellbeing. Linear regression shows the regression coefficient of culture to be significant (Beta = -.254, p = .014) but the regression coefficient of income was not found to be significant. The overall model was found to explain 8.2% of the variance in wellbeing.Conclusion: The sample of this study is too small to make any kind of generalization; it does lend a little bit of support to the idea of diminishing marginal utility of income on subjective wellbeing and provides a rationale for further research.


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