Simone de Beauvoir and Practical Deliberation

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily R. Grosholz
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Practical Deliberation ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Rational Persuasion ◽  
Editorial Work ◽  
Trade Route ◽  
The University ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

The view that philosophers take of their art and craft changes when they remember that philosophy is not merely descriptive but is also performative. To use J. L. Austin's vocabulary, this change occurs when philosophers admit that their writings have illocutionary and perlocutionary, as well as locutionary, import. Any proposition is at once a judgment made by a thinking person and an expressive utterance presented to an audience; any argument is rational persuasion (even when it is quoted in a logic textbook). To speak with Stanley Cavell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, from their caravansaries along the trade route between Harvard and Cambridge, the change occurs when philosophers admit that their writings always take place in language games and forms of life, so that the search for criteria in framing concepts and for evidence in framing arguments is also a claim to community. Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, urged similar insights and questions on philosophers when he wrote about rhetoric as an extension of logic and ethics. Filtered through the editorial work of Richard McKeon, the Aristotelian tradition at the University of Chicago produced books about practical deliberation that to my mind deserve at least as much attention as those of Cavell and Austin, works by Wayne Booth, Edward Levi, David Luban, Paul Kahn, and Eugene Garver. Notably, their texts deal with works of literature and of law, discursive realms in which narratives of human action are central and irreducible, however much they may be subject to philosophical analysis.

Humanist Engagements

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howell A. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Educational Provision ◽  
The Third ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Law Faculty ◽  
Editorial Work ◽  
Governmental Institutions ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

Bodin arrived in Toulouse c.1550, a brief account of the economy, social composition, and governmental institutions of which opens the chapter. There follow comments on its cultural life and identification of its leading citizenry, with remarks on the treatment of alleged religious dissidents by the city itself, and especially on discordant intellectual influences at work in the University, most notably the Law Faculty and the modes of teaching there. The chapter’s second part reviews Bodin’s translation and edition of the Greek poem Cynegetica by Oppian ‘of Cilicia’, assessing the quality of his editorial work, the extent to which allegations of plagiarism levelled against him were valid, and the nature and merits of his translation. The third section recounts contemporary wrangling over educational provision in Toulouse and examines the Oratio in which Bodin argued the case for humanist-style educational provision by means of a reconstituted college there.

Why preferences can be optional

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jon Marc Asper
Keyword(s):  
Career Paths ◽  
Practical Deliberation ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
The University ◽  
Value Relations ◽  
Instrumental Reasons

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] In practical deliberation, your aim should not always only be to promote objective goodness. Rather, I argue, you should use your own practical evaluations, as long as they are reasonable. Reasonable evaluations are sensitive to agent-centered reasons (e.g., you should not have a favorite child), instrumental reasons (e.g., to have more common interests with others), and rational reasons. This dissertation primarily develops an account of rational reasons for evaluations. Particularly, I investigate which evaluations rationally fit objective values. For many items (e.g., career paths or hobbies), it is plausible that no particular sharp evaluation is rationally required, even though some evaluations are clearly too high or low. For other items (e.g., someone else's pain), their weight in practical deliberation do not depend on the evaluator's perspective. To explain this difference, I defend an interval account of rationally fitting evaluaations, noting that the intervals can collapse to points. Each chapter rebuts an objection to the interval account. Chapter 1 rebuts the objection that value relations cannot be modeled using relations between intervals. I offer different definitions. Chapter 2 rebuts the objection that arbitrarily sharpened evaluations (within the intervals) cannot be practically authoritative. I respond that they must be practically authoritative or else perfect rationality would be possible in principle. Chapter 3 responds to the objection that evaluations cannot be practically authoritative because it is practically impossible to change them. I grant that it is often permissible to change our evaluations, but I rhetorically challenge the objector to deny that such things can (though need not) contribute meaning to a life.

Dr. Walter S. Avis: A Tribute

1981 ◽  
Vol 26 (S1) ◽  
pp. 141-141
Author(s):  
M. H. Scargill
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Canadian English ◽  
University Of Calgary ◽  
Editorial Work ◽  
University Of Manitoba ◽  
Queen's University ◽  
The University

In the summer of 1954 a small group of scholars met at the University of Manitoba and founded the Canadian Linguistic Association. Among us were Henry Alexander of Queen’s University, J. B. Rudnyckyj of Manitoba, W. S. Avis of R.M.C., G. Dulong of Laval, and J.-P. Vinay of Montreal.My association and friendship with them all began at that time, and in particular I formed a close personal and academic relationship with Wally Avis.Thanks to the support of Wilfred Wees, who has done more than any other Canadian publisher to support studies in Canadian English, Dr. Avis, Dr. R. J. Gregg of British Columbia, and I began work on a series of dictionaries, culminating in 1967 with the publication of the Dictionary of Canadianisms, of which Dr. Avis was editor-in-chief. During the preparation of that work, Dr. Avis and I became close friends. In 1963, he spent a full year at the University of Calgary, and in 1965 he was able to devote the entire summer to editorial work at the University of Victoria.

Beauvoir and the Risks of Freedom

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 224-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Kristeva
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Melanie Klein ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
The Past ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Society Of The Spectacle ◽  
The Status ◽  
The University

Julia Kristeva's recent interest in the work of Simone De Beauvoir stems from a concern to identify transformative possibilities in the “society of the spectacle”—a term Kristeva appropriates from Guy Debord to diagnose contemporary society's reduction of personal identity, sociality, and meaning to the status of mere representation. Over the last fifteen years, the spectacle constitutes one of the central notions employed by Kristeva to measure the significance of twentieth-century figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes (discussed in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt and Intimate Revolt), as well as the three women she addresses in her biographical trilogy on female genius—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. In 1996, in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, Kristeva promised to return to the work of Beauvoir in the light of her analyses of Sartrean revolt. The past several years have begun to fulfill that promise. In 2002 Kristeva dedicated the conclusion to her trilogy on female genius to Beauvoir, and in 2003 she presented a lecture entitled “Beauvoir présente,” subsequently included in La haine et le pardon in 2005. The essay published here was presented in January 2008 as the keynote lecture at a conference in celebration of Beauvoir's centenary, which was initiated by a committee from the University of Paris 7 chaired by Kristeva.

Factors contributing to intentional injuries in Iranian university students

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kobra Abedian Kasgary ◽  
Zeinab Hamzehgardeshi ◽  
Zohreh Shahhosseini
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Demographic Data ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Intentional Injuries ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The University

Abstract Background Intentional injuries refer to injuries resulting from purposeful human action, whether directed at oneself or others. This study was performed to assess intentional injuries in Iranian university students. Methods This cross-sectional study was carried out with 430 female and male university in three higher education institutions located in the northern part of Iran in the year 2015. Samples were chosen through the stratified cluster random sampling method. They were requested to fill out the demographic data form and the Persian version of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey Questionnaire. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used for data analysis via the SPSS v.13 software. Findings Intentional injuries were more frequent in the male university students than female (p < 0.05). Also, 9.1% and 6.7% of the university students were physically injured or sexually assaulted by a boy/girl friend. No statistically significant difference was reported in dating violence between the male and female university students. The logistic regression test showed that the history of stealing money from parents without their permission, son’s preferences in the family and gender are the most important predisposing factors for the university students’ intentional injury. Conclusion It is suggested that health policy makers consider the role of family in programs that have been designed for improving the health of young people.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra B. Bergoffen
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Geographic Distance ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
East And West ◽  
The University

In 1966, when Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre visited Japan at the invitation of the University of Keio and their Japanese editor Mr. Watanabe, their books had been translated, were well known and highly regarded. Though Beauvoir and Sartre knew this, neither realized how powerfully their work resonated with the Japanese. They were unprepared for the more than one hundred journalists and crowds of mostly young people waiting to greet them when they arrived. The existential difference between East and West was not, it seemed, as great as the geographic distance....

In the making: pedagogies from MARS

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 301-312
Author(s):  
Graham Farmer ◽  
Michael Stacey
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Architectural Education ◽  
Knowledge And Skills ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Synergistic Approach ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
The University ◽  
Instrumental View

This paper reflects on experience gained through MARS (Making Architecture Research Studio) at the University of Nottingham. It argues for a densification of design teaching and learning through a direct, practical and tactile engagement with materials and making. It sets out the pedagogical benefits of exploring and theorising the practical, combined with the value and relevance of material practices. As a methodology of design teaching it suggests a multi-level, synergistic approach to pedagogy and practice that can build key knowledge and skills while avoiding a narrowly instrumental view of architectural education and practice. A key aim of the pedagogy of the studio is the development of an empathetic imagination, as clearly articulated by William Hazlitt (1805) in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action:The imagination, by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being.

scholarly journals Undoing the Psychologizing of the Psychological

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-73
Author(s):  
Arata Hamawaki
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Propositional Attitude ◽  
Human Action ◽  
First Person ◽  
Sharp Boundary ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Logical Order ◽  
Propositional Form

In “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” first published in 1965, and later collected in Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell wrote: We know the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the “psychologizing” of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives. Frege, of course, insisted on distinguishing between what is thought in any act of thinking, the content of thought, which he conceived of as having a propositional form, and the thinking of it. A thought is what can be common to different acts of thinking, whether of one’s own or of another. It is thus essentially public, essentially shareable, unowned. By contrast the thinking of a thought is necessarily someone’s, necessarily owned, and so in that sense private. Frege depsychologized logic, by excluding the psychological from it. The logical must bear no trace of the psychological, for if that were not so, there would be nothing that could be true or false—and so no judgment, no belief, no propositional attitude, as thoughts have subsequently come to be called. There would be in Thomas Rickett’s memorable words, merely “mooing.” The first person is consequently banished from the logical order, for a first person thought is constituted by the thinking of it. But in depsychologizing logic as he did, Frege seemed to have psychologized psychology. Thus, in speaking of the Investigations as undoing the psychologizing of psychology, I take it, Stanley meant that it seeks to undo what Frege did. However, this doesn’t mean undoing what Frege undid, that is, erasing the sharp boundary between the logical and the psychological, but rather to not cede the psychological to psychology: what the PI calls for is to further what Frege began, but, as it were, against Frege. In other words, Stanley saw Wittgenstein as reintroducing the first person as essential to the logical order, the order of what we think.

scholarly journals Professor, does your university (want to) know what you are doing?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bård Smedsrød ◽  
Leif Longva
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Scholarly Publishing ◽  
Scientific Journals ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Scientific Staff ◽  
Major Interest ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Editorial Work ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
The University

To make sure that resources are used optimally in maximizing the production of graduates (bachelors, masters and PhDs) and research (scientific publications in various channels), universities are constantly intensifying and improving their ways of recording and counting the achievements of their scientific staff. Teaching hours and scientific papers are meticulously monitored, and administrative staff is increasingly occupied making sure that this registration results in a true and just picture of the way human resources are being spent, and reveal how the production system may become more effective.However, in addition to research and teaching, there are some rather important work tasks that we all agree are very important, but nevertheless goes under the radar of the university counting regimes: Reviewing tasks. The scientists at the university spend time (frequently a lot of time) doing reviewing work for free for scientific journals. Our scientists also spend a lot of time working as reviewers for national and international funding bodies and in a great number of committees to evaluate the quality of job applicants. And they serve as quality referees in advanced exams such as master and PhD dissertations. Most of these tasks are pivotal to the scientific society and the society in general, yet not realized by the university. The truth is that many of these tasks, which can only be carried out by merited scientists, exist only in a kind of shadow land at the universities.A recent survey presented in a master thesis at the University of Tromsø documented that 15-20.000 hours per year is spent by UoT scientists to work for free for scientifical journals (Maria Refsdal (2010): “Peer review at the University of Tromsø : a study of time spent on reviewing and researchers’ opinions on peer review”). Does the university take any interest in the fact that as much as 20.000 hours paid for by tax payers money is given away for free to the scientific journals who would not survive if it weren't for this work? The answer appears to be “no”.We believe that a key for academic institutions to regain control over the scholarly publishing regime and force it to change into an all true open access system, is to make sure that they take a major interest in the reviewing tasks carried out by scientists.Recently researchers across the world have started a boycott of the publisher Elsevier, and declaring they do not wish to publish in Elsevier’s journals, nor do any refereeing or editorial work for these journals (http://thecostofknowledge.com/). The boycot came about as a protest against the high subscription prices. An interesting question is: Does the University have any view on researchers’ boycotts like this?We claim that universities as employers and managers of public research funding, by taking interest in what their employees do and not do, the university may have a forceful tool to lead the publishing houses in directions as desired by the university and the society.Would a closer control of the reviewing tasks of scientists jeopardize what we regard as free academic activity? To some extent it probably would. Is that what it takes for academia to regain control of the activity of scholarly publishing? We believe that the reviewing process represents the most powerful weapon to make the publishing houses understand that they are here to serve the academics and the society, not the other way round.

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