Romantic Microethics

PMLA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 136 (5) ◽  
pp. 746-761
Author(s):  
Alexander Freer
Keyword(s):  
Reading Practices ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
General Account ◽  
Close Observation

AbstractEthical thought typically aims to provide a general account of the good. This essay explores a form of localized ethical attention through British Romantic writing that eschews that aspiration, privileging individual cases in all their detail and particularity. This form, which I term “microethics,” is small in two senses, permitting extremely close observation of individual cases and limiting itself to equally small conclusions. It is most recognizable in poetry but recurs across fiction, drama, and philosophical prose. Considering such thinking allows us to assess and extend recent arguments for the value of Romanticism's small and marginal forms. While Romantic microethics develops in opposition to emerging utilitarian thought and the politically repressive conditions of the 1790s, it anticipates a range of later forms, from Adorno's ethical fragments to deconstruction to anthropological method. At once literary and philosophical, it binds both writing and reading practices to acts of singular attention.

Elements for a General Organology

Derrida Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-94
Author(s):  
Bernard Stiegler
Keyword(s):  
Organic Matter ◽  
Planetary Scale ◽  
General Account ◽  
Inorganic Matter ◽  
History Of

These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or when it involves not just organic matter but organized inorganic matter. This organology is also shown to require a modified Simondonian account of the shift from vital individuation to a three-stranded process of psychic, collective and technical individuation. Furthermore, such an approach involves extending the Derridean reading of Socrates's discussion of writing as a pharmakon, so that it becomes a more general account of the pharmacological character of retention and protention. By going back to Leroi-Gourhan, we can recognize that this also means pursuing the history of retentional modifications unfolding in the course of the history of what, with Lotka, can also be called exosomatization. It is thus a question of how exteriorization can, today, in an epoch when it becomes digital, and in an epoch that produces vast amounts of entropy at the thermodynamic, biological and noetic levels, still possibly produce new forms of interiorization, that is, new forms of thought, care and desire, amounting to so many chances to struggle against the planetary-scale pharmacological crisis with which we are currently afflicted.

Death of the General Account

1996 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-7
Author(s):  
Brian O'Neil
Keyword(s):  
General Account

Analyse des interactions didactiques lors de l’enseignement du football à l’école Tunisienne

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 387-404
Author(s):  
Guerchi Maher ◽  
Makram Zghibi
Keyword(s):  
Physical Education ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Video Sequences ◽  
Physical Education Teacher ◽  
Education Teacher ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Close Observation ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Our research focuses on describing what is really happening when a teacher wants to transmit to pupils - girls and boys - knowledge socially marked as masculine. To describe the processes involved in effective didactic interactions between a teacher a pupil and knowledge, we opted for qualitative methodology, consisting on a close observation of the didactic interactions of a teacher with his pupils (girls and boys). Analysis of the interviews focused especially on the nature of knowledge actually transmitted for girls and boys. The studied video sequences permitted to study the didactic interactions more precisely as are actually happening on the pitch. Both tools allowed us to identify the educational intentions of teachers (specialist or not); women or men in the teaching of football. The results show that teachers’ conceptions influence implicitly or explicitly the modalities of their interventions and the nature of football knowledge transmitted to pupils. This makes us think that the impact of social facts (backgrounds) on Tunisian teachers is great. This phenomenon may lock the physical education teacher in some representations modeling masculine and feminine stereotypes and affect his didactic and teaching contribution. Therefore, the teacher must be aware of the impact of the connotation that may have certain “masculine” practices on his interventions and consequently over the pupils learning (either boys or girls).

Leitura crítica: Por uma escola que se posiciona

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fernandes de Oliveira ◽  
Iran Ferreira de Melo
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Learning Assessment ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
Educational Vision ◽  
The Media ◽  
Teaching Learning

With this work, we aim to propose a didactic application of the news genre, from the perspective of critical reading practices in Portuguese language teaching, to approach the experiences of dissident gender and sexuality people who are being viewed and represented by the media hegemonic in Brazil. Therefore, we offer teachers 5 texts and 10 activities that can be used for the development of a didactic project that articulates several areas of knowledge and that is also built from an educational vision that dialogues reading, criticism , teaching, learning, assessment and self-assessment. In this sense, due to the theme we are dealing with, we assume a political-epistemological tone combating gender and sexual violence, with education being our battlefield.

Gospels before the Book

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. C. Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Fluid Collection ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Textual Tradition ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
Early Christian Studies ◽  
The Way

What does it mean to read the gospels “before the book”? For centuries, the way people have talked about the gospels has been shaped by ideas that have more to do with the printing press and modern notions of the author than they do with ancient writing and reading practices. Gospels Before the Book challenges several subtle yet problematic assumptions about authors, books, and publication at work in early Christian studies. The author explores a host of underappreciated elements of ancient textual culture, such as unfinished texts, accidental publication, postpublication revision, and multiple authorized versions of the same work. Turning to the gospels, he argues the earliest readers and users of the text we now call the Gospel according to Mark treated it not as a book published by an author but as an unfinished, open, and fluid collection of notes (hypomnēmata). The Gospel according to Matthew, then, would not be regarded as a separate book published by a different author but, rather, as a continuation of the same unfinished gospel tradition. Similarly, it is not the case that, of the five different endings in the textual tradition, one is “right” and the others are “wrong.” Rather, each ending represents its own effort to fill in what some perceived to be lacking in the Gospel according to Mark. The text of the Gospel according to Mark is better understood when approached as unfinished notes than as a book published by an author. Larsen also offers a new methodological framework for future scholarship on early Christian gospels.

Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Normative Ethics ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Normative Authority ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Principal Parts

Nietzsche is one of the most subversive ethical thinkers of the Western canon. This book offers a critical assessment of his ethical thought and its significance for contemporary moral philosophy. It develops a charitable but critical reading of his thought, pushing some claims and arguments as far as seems fruitful while rejecting others. But it also uses Nietzsche in dialogue with, so to contribute to, a range of long-standing issues within normative ethics, metaethics, value theory, practical reason, and moral psychology. The book is divided into three principal parts. Part I examines Nietzsche’s critique of morality, arguing that it raises well-motivated challenges to morality’s normative authority and value: his error theory about morality’s categoricity is in a better position than many contemporary versions; and his critique of moral values has bite even against undemanding moral theories, with significant implications not just for rarefied excellent types but also us. Part II turns to moral psychology, attributing to Nietzsche and defending a sentimentalist explanation of action and motivation. Part III considers his non-moral perfectionism, developing models of value and practical normativity that avoid difficulties facing many contemporary accounts and that may therefore be of wider interest. The discussion concludes by considering Nietzsche’s broader significance: as well as calling into question many of moral philosophy’s deepest assumptions, he challenges our usual views of what ethics itself is—and what it, and we, should be doing.

Merciful Demand

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Hause
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Social System ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Lay People ◽  
The Social

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, increasingly sophisticated ethical thought made its way out of the theology texts and into pastoral guides and sermons, making it possible for a greater number of ethically informed lay people to share pastoral responsibility. One exercise of this responsibility was fraternal correction, through which a person, motivated by charity, rebukes a neighbor for his or her wrongdoing. This essay argues that the practice of fraternal correction is in fact a sort of blaming, since it includes a judgment of blameworthiness and opprobrium for the offender’s bad choice, moral address directed to the offender, the demand for a response, and holding the offender accountable. However, in contrast to other forms of blame, the source of the offender’s accountability to the corrector in fraternal correction is the social system created by the exercise of mercy.

Skin and dry adhesion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changhyun Pang ◽  
Chanseok Lee ◽  
Hoon Eui Jeong ◽  
Kahp-Yang Suh
Keyword(s):  
Material Properties ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Mechanical Interlocking ◽  
Multi Scale ◽  
Skin Patch ◽  
Reversible Adhesion ◽  
Dry Adhesion ◽  
Close Observation ◽  
Dry Adhesives ◽  
Shed Light

Close observation of various attachment systems in animal skins has revealed various exquisite multi-scale architectures for essential functions such as locomotion, crawling, mating, and protection from predators. Some of these adhesion systems of geckos and beetles have unique structural features (e.g. high-aspect ratio, tilted angle, and hierarchical nanostructure), resulting in mechanical interlocking mediated by van der Waals forces or liquid secretion (capillary force). In this chapter, we present an overview of recent advances in bio-inspired, artificial dry adhesives, and biomimetics in the context of nanofabrication and material properties. In addition, relevant bio-inspired structural materials, devices (clean transportation device, interlocker, biomedical skin patch, and flexible strain-gauge sensor) and microrobots are briefly introduced, which would shed light on future smart, directional, and reversible adhesion systems.

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