scholarly journals What is Culturology?

2019 ◽  
Vol ENGLISH EDITION (1) ◽  
pp. 9-39
Author(s):  
Edward Kasperski

Culturology is a distinct reflection on culture that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, whereas the so-called cultural turn in the humanities (the turn that became aware of its cultural background and foundation) became the impetus for its development. The article tries to clarify what the term in question entails, what is the subject of its research, what kind of theoretical assumptions it makes in relation to its subject and what specific learning goals it faces. One of the key questions of culturology concerns culture, it asks about its limits, about the variance of its forms in space and time, and about the extent to which they form − despite differences − a community, unity and a whole. The article emphasizes on one hand the dynamic, processual and creative nature of culture, and on the other its openness, consequently proving the utopian character of aspirations to establish once and for all an unchangeable ‘essence’ of culture as well as its timeless determinants and systemic framework. The article consists of three parts: 1) Context, subject and characteristics of culturology, 2) Delimitations of culture, 3) Acceleration, literacy, multiculturalism, culturalism.

2015 ◽  
pp. 12-49
Author(s):  
Edward Kasperski

Culturology as a distinct reflection of culture that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, and the so-called cultural turn in the humanities (the turn that realised their cultural background and base) became the impetus for its development. The article tries to clarify what is the term in question, the subject of its research, what kind of theoretical assumptions does it make in relation to this subject and what specific learning goals does it face. One of the key question of culturology concerns culture: what are its limits, how its forms may vary in space and time, and whether or to what extent they form − despite differences − a community, unity and totality. The article indicates the dynamic, processual and creative nature of culture on one hand, and its openness on the other, consequently proving the utopian character of aspirations willing to establish once and for all an unchangeable ʻessenceʼ of culture as well as its timeless determinants and systemic framework. The article consists of three parts: 1) Context, subject and properties of culturology, 2) Delimitations of culture, 3) Acceleration, literacy, multiculturalism, culturalism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-369
Author(s):  
James Mumford

Emmanuel Levinas has proven a major figure in twentieth-century phenomenology and ethics, and his work has influenced not only Jewish but also Christian ethical thought. However, Levinas has recently been the subject of trenchant critique by his fellow French philosopher, Jean-Yves Lacoste. Lacoste objects to Levinas’s construal of intersubjectivity as fundamentally ethical: essentially, that we only instantiate our humanity when we take responsibility for the Other. This smacks for Lacoste of ‘unworldliness’, and is thus phenomenologically inadequate, since it extirpates from the domain of elementary experiences everything that does not constitute morality. This raises key questions: (1) how best to interpret Lacoste’s challenge; (2) how successful that challenge is, i.e. whether anything in Levinas’s project survive it; (3) and, if so, how best to understand Levinas’s relevance for Christian ethics. I will address all these issues, contending that, contra Lacoste, Levinas’s position does stand up to inspection at one key juncture. I claim, on phenomenological grounds, that it tells us something of vital importance about some special experiences of obligation, some range of moral encounters: that which arises when the subject, as moral agent, finds himself in an immediate, unbidden, dyadic encounter with the other person.


2005 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-352
Author(s):  
Brian S. Rosner

Whereas knowing God is central to every version of Christian theology, little attention has been paid to the other side of the divine-human relationship. This introductory essay approaches the subject via the brief but poignant remarks of two twentieth-century authors appearing in a work of fiction and in a poem. If C. S. Lewis recognizes the primacy of being known by God, Dietrich Bonhoeffer helps define it and underscores its pastoral value. Both authors accurately reflect the main contours of the Bible’s own treatment. Calvin’s view of the image of God, which T. F. Torrance defines as ‘God’s gracious beholding of man as his child,’ may be of assistance in defining what it means to be known by God.


1968 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ch. Perelman

That the question what is legal logic should still arise today appears paradoxical, for law is after all one of the oldest of human disciplines and logic has in the twentieth century become one of the most developed of the disciplines of contemporary philosophy. Yet comparison of a number of recent works dealing with the subject, all of which, not being without merit, have enjoyed a measure of success, is enough to show that the problem exists and is even strongly disputed.Of four such works, two—those by E. Levi and K. Engisch—do not use the word “logic” in their titles, though they deal with legal reasoning and legal thought. The other two, on the contrary, expressly purport to deal with legal logic. Strangely enough, however, their authors explicitly deny the specific existence of such a discipline, whereas Levi and Engisch underscore, without any hesitation, the specific nature of legal reasoning and the existence of a particular logic, legal logic.Thus in the first paragraph of his work, where Klug attempts to define the concept of legal logic, he states that it comprises the study of the rules of formal logic as used in the judicial application of rules of law (p. 6); that legal logic is therefore practical logic, consisting of the application to law of the rules of pure or theoretical logic which is general logic (p. 7).


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 243-268
Author(s):  
Julie M. Johnson

AbstractThis article positions multidisciplinary artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis at the center of a web that spans Vienna 1900, the Weimar Bauhaus, and interwar Vienna. Using a network metaphor to read her work, she is understood here as specialist of the ars combinatoria, in which she recombines genre and media in unexpected ways. She translates the language of photograms into painting, ecclesiastical subject matter into a machine aesthetic, adds found objects to abstract paintings, and paints allegories and scenes of distortion in the idiom of New Objectivity, all the while designing stage sets, costumes, modular furniture, toys, and interiors. While she has been the subject of renewed attention, particularly in the design world, much of her fine art has yet to be assessed. She used the idioms of twentieth-century art movements in unusual contexts, some of these very brave: in interwar Vienna, where she created Dadaistic posters to warn of fascism, she was imprisoned and interrogated. Always politically engaged, her interdisciplinary and multimedia approach to art bridged the conceptual divide between the utopian and critical responses to war during the interwar years. Such engagement with both political strains of twentieth-century modernism is rare. After integrating the interdisciplinary lessons of Vienna and the Weimar Bauhaus into her life's work, she shared these lessons with children at Terezín.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-282
Author(s):  
JEFFREY WEEKS

Three obvious, superficially simple but actually intensely complex questions embodied in the title immediately confront the reader of Dagmar Herzog's important new book. First, what do we mean by the ‘sexuality’ that constitutes the subject matter? Second, what is demarcated by the Europe that provides the geo-political boundaries of this study? Third, does the ‘twentieth century’ provide a useful temporal unity for the narrative and analysis that is at the heart of the book? Such questions are not mere scholarly nit-picking or academic point scoring, but a tribute to the problematising of the body in space and time that has been a hallmark of the deconstructive and reconstructive energy of recent scholarship on the sexual, and that is now making a welcome entry into mainstream history.


2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-110
Author(s):  
Tatsuya Higaki

Shuzo Kuki is a Japanese philosopher, belonging to the Kyoto school, who lived about a hundred years ago. He learned philosophy in Europe and developed an original theory of contingency, by accommodating the Asiatic way of thinking on the one hand, and Western philosophy (Bergson, Heidegger and neo-Kantianism) on the other. In this article, I show that we can find similarities between his theory of contingency and the philosophy of Deleuze, especially in regard to the subject of temporality and eternal return. Needless to say, the theory of the third time is a crucial theme in Difference and Repetition, and is closely related to the time of eternity, and the original or primitive contingency. Taking into consideration these aspects of time is indispensable in examining in depth the concepts of difference and virtuality. Kuki's theory of contingency, which incorporates early twentieth-century European philosophy, elucidates these concepts in an unexpected way. Therefore, my aim in this article is not to attempt a comparison between Eastern and Western thought by quoting Deleuze, but to illustrate a hidden lineage of thought, which runs from the nineteenth century (neo-Kantianism, Bergsonism, and so on) into the philosophy of virtuality of the twentieth century. This same lineage appears in Japan in Kuki's theory, and Deleuze's thought is, at least in one aspect, a modern manifestation of the same roots.


2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-646
Author(s):  
Arsalan Kahnemuyipour ◽  
Mansour Shabani

AbstractSplit noun phrase topicalizationhas been the subject of intense studies across languages in the syntactic literature of the last few decades. One of the key questions raised for these constructions is whether they involve syntactic movement or base-generation. This paper explores this phenomenon in two understudied Iranian languages, Gilaki (Northwestern Iranian, Caspien) and Persian. In particular, we explore splits in two contexts, possessive constructions and numeral constructions. We develop diagnostics for distinguishing the two derivational possibilities, movement or base-generation, for the cases under investigation. We show that while Gilaki uses both derivational possibilities, movement in possessor split and base-generation in numeral split, Persian only allows for the latter with very similar behavior. We argue that possessor split occurs when the whole possessum DP/DemP moves out of its base position in a small clause. Numeral split occurs when the NP is replaced by a null nominal element, which is associated with an overt or pragmatic antecedent. We end the paper with a discussion of why an operation, movement or base-generation, is available for one construction but not the other.


Numen ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob De Roover

Abstract For centuries, the question whether there were peoples without religion was the subject of heated debate among European thinkers. At the turn of the twentieth century, this concern vanished from the radar of Western scholarship: all known peoples and societies, it was concluded, had some form of religion. This essay examines the relevant debates from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: Why was this issue so important? How did European thinkers determine whether or not some people had religion? What allowed them to close this debate? It will be shown that European descriptions of the “religions” of non-Western cultures counted as evidence for or against theoretical claims made within a particular framework, namely that of generic Christian theology. The issue of the universality of religion was settled not by scientific research but by making ad hoc modifications to this theological framework whenever it faced empirical anomalies. This is important today, because the debate concerning the cultural universality of religion has been reopened. On the one hand, evolutionary-biological explanations of religion claim that religion must be a cultural universal, since its origin lies in the evolution of the human species; on the other hand, authors suggest that religion is not a cultural universal, because many of the “religions” of humanity are fictitious entities created within an underlying theological framework.


Itinerario ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rory Miller

For forty years much of the research on Britain's relationship with Latin America has been dominated by a rather narrow agenda, the boundaries of which were established by radical and conservative writers in the middle third of the twentieth century, just when Britain's role in Latin America was rapidly declining. Essentially this was a debate about power, that of British governments and businessmen on the one hand and Latin American governments and elites on the other. More recently, however, younger historians have begun to break free of the confines established by those writing in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result there is some hope that new research on this topic may offer more of interest to non-specialists and contribute to other historical debates, both in British and Latin American history. The purpose of this historiographical essay, which is based primarily, but not entirely, on the research undertaken in Britain during the last twenty years, is to review the recent literature on British investment in Latin America, and to investigate some of the implications of what we now know about the subject for our understanding of the evolution of Latin American societies.


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