scholarly journals Between Philosophy and Self-Reflection

Literatūra ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-33
Author(s):  
Viktorija Daujotytė-Pakerienė

The article aims at highlighting the uniqueness of thinking and academic activity of Donatas Sauka, who for many years was a professor at the Department of Lithuanian Literature of Vilnius University. The article reveals his scholarly ambitions – broad interests, good knowledge of classic Western literature, and an attempt to keep the achievements of natural sciences on the horizon of humanities. However, he harboured artistic and poetic inclinations in his nature; he has translated a number of classical texts required for his research. The philological interests of the professor were permeated by self-reflection. Comparative literature science was his field of research – even though his other interests also competed for his attention, he analysed methodological issues, different scopes of national literatures and paradoxes of literary analysis. He also raised an essential question for comparison – from what and how are clusters of literary identity formed; how they are related to the mental history and language of a nation; how creative incentives are formed and how they operate.

Author(s):  
Hranovska Tetiana ◽  

The article deals with the features of the mobile learning technology emergence. The genesis of mobile learning in the field of distance and e-learning and its development in the field of blended learning are clarified. The foreign experience and research of domestic scientists on the introduction of mobile learning in the educational process of Ukrainian educational institutions are analyzed. The relevance of the application of this innovative learning technology is clarified according to carried out the literary analysis, but there is a lack of study of mobile technologies using in the educational process, in particular in natural sciences study. The author conducted an experimental study in the form of questionnaires to find out the state of mobile education in general secondary education and to identify the readiness of natural subjects’ teachers to use mobile technologies to teach students. Teachers use mobile technology in lessons, mainly for organizing work with e-textbooks and searching for material online, and less often for demonstrating video experiences in the classroom. The barriers to the use of mobile technologies are the follows: lack of information about the educational opportunities of mobile technologies, lack of methods for its use, the influence of administration policy on the educational process, as well as the age of teachers. The article presents examples of mobile technologies that are appropriate to use in teaching natural sciences. Mobile applications are analyzed and their didactic capabilities are identified during specific lesson activities. The results of the study confirmed teachers' readiness to use mobile learning, in particular by using mobile technologies during the lesson. This paper describes the advantages of mobile devices in the application of its distance learning capabilities. The prospects of using mobile technologies in the educational process during pupils study are proved. The article outlines the prospects for future research of the methodology development for using mobile devices in teaching natural subjects.


PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haun Saussy

What is comparative literature? Not a theory or a methodology, certainly (which raises the question of why this article should appear in a series so entitled), though theories and methodologies aplenty occur as part of its typical business. Is there, or can there be, an object of knowledge identifiable as “comparative literature”?When I began hearing about comparative literature in the middle 1970s, there was a fairly straightforward means of distinguishing comparative literature on the university campuses where it was done. The English department pursued knowledge of language and literature in one language; the foreign language departments pursued similar studies in two languages (typically English, assumed to be most students' native language, plus the foreign tongue); and comparative literature committees, programs, or departments carried out literary analysis in at least three languages at once.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Miso Kulic

The question of science is the one that concerns the very foundations of our reality and, in addition to that, it is a question that deals not only with our natural reality, with what was once called the "natural nature", but also with social and technological reality produced by science itself, which for a long time now is our second nature. Science has become not only the instrument by which we try to understand the reality of nature, through the process of creating reality, forming and transforming nature, it has become the reality in which we live itself, and without which, as it seems, we could hardly go on living. However, even though science as an instrument for understanding reality has become the reality which we have produced ourselves, we are still, paradoxically enough, far from answering the essential question: What is science? Since the question of science is at the same time the one of the production of reality, it is obvious that the question "what is science?" does not amount to a self-evident question asked by a scientist regarding his scientific field. It is not only a question concerning the nature of scientific knowledge, or of scientific methods of scientific results achieved. What is at stake here is the insight concerning social and political usage of science, that the reality, which is produced by the sciences, reveals to us even in the forms of its deification, manipulation, ideologization and virtualization. Is persevering in its science-Enlightenment paradigm of human emancipation or does it, on the wave of critical self-reflection spanning all the way through the 20th century, more and more question, as Paul Feyerabend (Against Method) does, the extent of constraints imposed on free thought which it produces itself? Of course, the other side of the questioning itself belongs here too: scientific progress can be evaluated regardless of its consequences, of the dangerous threats it poses to our future: nuclear annihilation, ecological pollution or climate changes which endanger the survival of the living world ? 


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-42
Author(s):  
Eugenija Rudnickaitė

Year 2012 in Lithuania is announced as the Year of Museums, nevertheless the num-ber of museums and educational programs dedicated to Natural Sciences did not increase. Geosciences are very significant part of the whole complex of Natural Sciences. How-ever, geological disciplines are not included in Education Programm of Secondary Schools, therefore Museums of Geology became very important. Lithuania can not brag about a big number of geological museums, and most of them are not close enough for a class trip. Such luxury is only available mainly for schools in Vilni-us. Although, during recent years more and more geological knowledge is available at regional parks new information centers (Gražutės, Sartų, Nemuno kilpų, Ventos, etc.). It is convenient to nearby schools. But what about the rest? The idea of this article is to show, that a geological „museum“ can be found in schools surrounding environment: school yard, close by river slope, dug out quarry, by a water spring or a hill. Specific examples are presented how an unregistered user, visiting Lithuanian Geologi-cal Survey internet site (www.lgt.lt), can find enough information about his schools’ surround-ings geological structure (on the surface and underground), protected geological object (ge-otops), interesting outcrops, probable pollution sources, mineral resources, etc. Key words: museum of geology, Vilnius University, nonformal natural science educa-tion, geology, education, museum, teacher.


Author(s):  
Matthias Bormuth

This chapter discusses the psychopathological ideas of Karl Jaspers, one of the founding fathers of phenomenological thinking. Jaspers always admired researchers who used the means of natural sciences in psychiatry, but he relied more on the psychology of understanding conceptualized and exercised in the humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften”) by Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. The chapter first provides an overview of Jaspers’s intellectual biography as a psychiatrist before analyzing his methodological horizons of understanding psychology. It then examines what philosophical considerations motivated Jaspers to draw the “limits of understanding” closer and stricter in the last edition of his book General Psychopathology, first published in 1913. It suggests that these limits can be determined as an existential application of Immanuel Kant’s idea and antinomy of freedom. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Jaspers’s claim that existence-philosophical self-reflection constitutes a necessary supplement to psychotherapy.


Author(s):  
Wolfgang Heuer

This text brings together two ideas, those of Hannah Arendt’s republicanism and Alexander von Humboldt’s cosmopolitanism. Both ways of thinking are seen as alternatives to a republican-biocentric perspective to the current problematic areas of the political and ecological crises. Arendt’s critique of the modern natural sciences and the associated alienation from the earth, which still characterizes the current relationship to nature today, will be presented first. This critique is closely related to Arendt’s thesis of world loss, i.e., the loss of the interpersonal pluralistic sphere. As an alternative to both forms of loss, Arendt develops the concept of an independent sphere of the political based on inter-personality, harmony with nature, and dialogical and consensual politics. While Arendt approaches nature from Kant’s definition of self- and world-relationship and from her own definition of sustainable politics, Humboldt goes the opposite way, that is, from respecting nature as an independent organism to a republican understanding of politics that, like Arendt, rejects the exploitation of humans as well as nature. Arendt and Humboldt both belong to the tradition of the Enlightenment that (in addition to phenomenology, self-reflection, the values of human dignity and human rights, and the unity of understanding and feeling) also includes a cosmopolitanism and freedom of movement for acting and judging citizens.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michalia Arathimos

The fracturing of cultural identity is a common trope in postcolonial literatures. Traditional binaries of 'self' and 'other' are now complicated by cultural hybridities that reflect the intersectionality of migrant identities, indigeneity and the postcolonial national 'self'. Where the binaries 'self' and 'other' do not hold, creative forms like the novel can go some way towards exploring hybrid and 'other' experiences, both as a reinscribing and reimagining of the centre, and as a complex 'writing back'. This thesis investigates the complex positioning of the hybrid or double-cultured individual in Aotearoa in the last forty years. While postcolonial models have been used to expose the exoticisation of the 'other' in fictional texts, Part One of this thesis goes a step further by applying these models to real authors and interrogating their representations as static objects/products in the collective 'text' of media items written about them. Shifts in 'our' national literary identity can be traced in changes in responses to 'other' authors over time. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the first part of this thesis proves that there are differences in the media‟s portrayal of six Māori and 'other' ethnic authors: Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Kapka Kassabova, Tusiata Avia, Karlo Mila and Cliff Fell, beginning with the 1972 publication of Ihimaera‟s Pounamu Pounamu and ending in 2009 with Tusiata Avia‟s Bloodclot. Part One of this thesis mixes media studies, postcolonial literary analysis, and cultural theory, and references the work of Ghassan Hage, Graham Huggan, Margery Fee, Patrick Evans, Mark Williams, and Simone Drichel. Part Two of this thesis is comprised of a novel, Fracture. While Part One constitutes an investigation of the positioning of the 'other' author, Part Two is a creative exploration of two double-cultured and dispossessed indigenous characters' lived experience. The novel follows a Greek-New Zealand woman and a Māori man who go to a rural pā to protest fracking, or hydraulic fracturing. While the first part of the thesis explores the positioning of the „other‟ outside of the white self, the novel aims to portray the effects of such 'othering,' on the individual and demonstrate how the historical/political event can be a real experiential locale for the 'other'.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michalia Arathimos

<p>The fracturing of cultural identity is a common trope in postcolonial literatures. Traditional binaries of 'self' and 'other' are now complicated by cultural hybridities that reflect the intersectionality of migrant identities, indigeneity and the postcolonial national 'self'. Where the binaries 'self' and 'other' do not hold, creative forms like the novel can go some way towards exploring hybrid and 'other' experiences, both as a reinscribing and reimagining of the centre, and as a complex 'writing back'. This thesis investigates the complex positioning of the hybrid or double-cultured individual in Aotearoa in the last forty years. While postcolonial models have been used to expose the exoticisation of the 'other' in fictional texts, Part One of this thesis goes a step further by applying these models to real authors and interrogating their representations as static objects/products in the collective 'text' of media items written about them. Shifts in 'our' national literary identity can be traced in changes in responses to 'other' authors over time. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the first part of this thesis proves that there are differences in the media‟s portrayal of six Māori and 'other' ethnic authors: Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Kapka Kassabova, Tusiata Avia, Karlo Mila and Cliff Fell, beginning with the 1972 publication of Ihimaera‟s Pounamu Pounamu and ending in 2009 with Tusiata Avia‟s Bloodclot. Part One of this thesis mixes media studies, postcolonial literary analysis, and cultural theory, and references the work of Ghassan Hage, Graham Huggan, Margery Fee, Patrick Evans, Mark Williams, and Simone Drichel. Part Two of this thesis is comprised of a novel, Fracture. While Part One constitutes an investigation of the positioning of the 'other' author, Part Two is a creative exploration of two double-cultured and dispossessed indigenous characters' lived experience. The novel follows a Greek-New Zealand woman and a Māori man who go to a rural pā to protest fracking, or hydraulic fracturing. While the first part of the thesis explores the positioning of the „other‟ outside of the white self, the novel aims to portray the effects of such 'othering,' on the individual and demonstrate how the historical/political event can be a real experiential locale for the 'other'.</p>


Literatūra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-77
Author(s):  
Ona Dilytė-Čiurinskienė

The article employs the egodocumentary approach to examine how the private writings of Albertas Dilys (1920–2000), political prisoner and Lithuanian scholar of the 1920s generation, records and reflects upon his refusal to compromise under the circumstances of the Soviet occupation. Dilys was part of the generation who were born on the eve of the creation of the State of Lithuania – between 1917 and 1922 – and who, having graduated from the schools of the newly independent state, entered university by the end of 1930s with a distinct aim to contribute to the European culture worthy of a free nation. However, the Second World War and the alternating Nazi and Soviet occupations brought an end to these youthful ideals. Because the existential choices made by these young people pulled the generation apart and, in regard to the Soviet oppression, disseminated it both geographically and axiologically, defining its conceptual coherence is somewhat problematic. Yet, reflecting on separate individual choices may help us understand the people’s motivation and the paradigms which bring this generation together on the one hand and break it up on the other.Rather than appraise the decisive generational self-conceptions in the context of 1944, the case of Albertas Dilys enables us to look into the different manifestations of conscious existential resolve, its origins, and consequences. The notion of the 1920s generation here describes the humanities students with literary aspirations who first studied at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas and then at Vilnius University. As high-school pupils, most of them took part in the Ateitis movement, which was a Catholic organisation opposed to the Lithuanian government of the day. At university, they joined Šatrija, a society dedicated to the study of art, literature, and philosophy.At the centre of the present research are documents testifying to Dilys’ personal existential quest and self-realisation in the context of repressions and further oppression: his memories, correspondence, notes, journals. To frame the research material, the article makes partial use of intertextual and sociocritical analysis. Dilys’ egodocumentary accounts are examined in light of historically reliable biographical and background facts. This article aims to discover and highlight in Dilys’ egodocuments his testimonies of self-reflection, personal resolve and its consequences and, by means of comparative analysis, to look for similar premises in the accounts of other contemporaries in order to indicate the epistemological gaps in the research field of the 1920s generation.Dilys’ case is by no means typical; cases like his have been deemed marginal in most sociological and sociocultural research. The history of existential choices and reflection on it, as testified in Dilys’ egodocuments, have a distinct character: emphasis is placed on inner resistance, whose parallels extend into the spiritual maturity derived from youthful ideals, the quest for the meaning of life, and the adoption of an ethical position at the expense of career development and professional life and subjection to ostracism and relative poverty. This egodocumentary research reveals the complexity of uncompromising choices and their consequences in a repressive and oppressive society. Dilys’ egodocuments are strongly oriented toward the past as well as the ideal of youth and the pastoral world of the parental home. Similar utopian undertones and pathos as well as solidarity with the 1920s generation of idealists trapped in a historical downfall – characteristically, this generation is perceived from passéist perspective, in retro-spective projection that centers on the youthful past – crop up in the accounts of other former members of Šatrija. The paradigm of Dilys’ existential choices calls for a further inquiry into the life of the 1920s generation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 321-335

In these reflections, instead of just summarizing the contributions on the societal impact of COVID-19 in the countries discussed in this thematic issue, we develop considerations on the nature of its substance and various related methodological issues. This is based especially on the outcomes of Working Paper 17 of the International Association on Social Quality (IASQ 2019) and the study about the conditions for interdisciplinary research in the natural sciences, in the human sciences, and between both fields of knowledge (Westbroek et al. 2020). Both documents were available for the authors of this issue’s articles. For understanding the overwhelming COVID-19 pandemic as well the increasing challenges caused by climate change, bio-degeneration, and the ongoing pollution of nature, new steps for bridging the natural and the human sciences are a conditio sine qua non for understanding the complexity of the multidimensionality of critical situations that demand comprehensive approaches.


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