scholarly journals Can philosophy do away with transcendence? A dialogue with Milan Brdar

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Vladimir Milisavljevic
Keyword(s):  
Single Point ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Additional Argument ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Cartesian Cogito ◽  
The One ◽  
New Religion ◽  
Hegelian Philosophy ◽  
Unique Program

The paper examines the interpretation of three major philosophical figures - Descartes, Kant and Heidegger - proposed in the latest monographs by Milan Brdar. I argue that these valuable books can be best understood as parts of his unique program of criticism of the Enlightenment. In particular, they converge in trying to establish a single point - the one of futility of all attempts to found philosophy which dispenses with the transcendence of God. Brdar highlights the limits of the Cartesian Cogito, which is unable to prove anything more than the existence of the self as a thinking being, as well as the necessity of a transcendent God as a warrant for our clear and distinct perceptions. On the other hand, Kant is the very type of philosopher of whom Brdar approves - the one who managed to combine knowledge and faith. As far as Heidegger is concerned, Brdar?s survey of his philosophical evolution, especially of his conception of Being as transcendence and his late turn towards a ?new religion?, is an additional argument for Brdar?s thesis. However, I argue that Hegelian philosophy represents a challenge for Brdar?s intent. On this point I depart from the conclusions on Hegel expounded in the two chapters of his monograph on Kant. In particular, I disagree with his view of Hegel, substantiated by some assertions from his writings, as a philosopher whose panlogism verges on theocentrism. In the final part of the paper I propose instead of several elements of a radically secular reading of Hegel?s logic, phenomenology and philosophy of religion. I also argue that Hegel?s philosophy sharply diverges from the foundationalist pattern of the Cartesian type.

Stories and the Self

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Markus Appel
Keyword(s):  
Meta Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lower Degree ◽  
Contrast Effects ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Self Perceptions ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

Abstract. Two experiments examined the influence of stories on recipients’ self-perceptions. Extending prior theory and research, our focus was on assimilation effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in line with a protagonist’s traits) as well as on contrast effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in contrast to a protagonist’s traits). In Experiment 1 ( N = 113), implicit and explicit conscientiousness were assessed after participants read a story about either a diligent or a negligent student. Moderation analyses showed that highly transported participants and participants with lower counterarguing scores assimilate the depicted traits of a story protagonist, as indicated by explicit, self-reported conscientiousness ratings. Participants, who were more critical toward a story (i.e., higher counterarguing) and with a lower degree of transportation, showed contrast effects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 103), we manipulated transportation and counterarguing, but we could not identify an effect on participants’ self-ascribed level of conscientiousness. A mini meta-analysis across both experiments revealed significant positive overall associations between transportation and counterarguing on the one hand and story-consistent self-reported conscientiousness on the other hand.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

Keeping Company with Sondheim’s Women

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Married Couples ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the eight female characters inCompany, what they do in the musical, and how they function in the show’s dramaturgy, and argues that they elicit the quintessential challenge of analyzing musical theater from a feminist perspective. On the one hand, the women tend to be stereotypically, even msogynistically portrayed. On the other hand, each character offers the actor a tremendous performance opportunity in portraying a complicated psychology, primarily communicated through richly expressive music and sophisticated lyrics. In this groundbreaking 1970 ensemble musical about a bachelor’s encounters with five married couples and three girlfriends, Sondheim’s female characters occupy a striking range of types within one show. From the bitter, acerbic, thrice-married Joanne to the reluctant bride-to-be Amy, and from the self-described “dumb” “stewardess” April to the free-spirited Marta,Company’s eight women are distillations of femininity, precisely sketched in the short, singular scenes in which they appear.

Let the Witness Speak: From Archi-writing to the Community to come

Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-270
Author(s):  
Francesco Vitale
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
The Sacrifice

The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derrida's later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrifice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derrida's early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other.

scholarly journals „Es war kein Job, es war eine Berufung“ – Gouvernementale Führung, fragmentierte Subjekte und <i>contre-conduite</i> in der nichtstaatlichen Entwicklungspraxis

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-181
Author(s):  
Kirsten Linnemann
Keyword(s):  
Critical Distance ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Development Professionals ◽  
Western Values ◽  
The One ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Good Cause ◽  
Development Practice

Abstract. With their donation appeals aid organisations procure a polarised worldview of the self and other into our everyday lives and feed on discourses of “development” and “neediness”. This study investigates how the discourse of “development” is embedded in the subjectivities of “development” professionals. By approaching the topic from a governmentality perspective, the paper illustrates how “development” is (re-)produced through internalised Western values and powerful mechanisms of self-conduct. Meanwhile, this form of self-conduct, which is related to a “good cause”, also gives rise to doubts regarding the work, as well as fragmentations and shifts of identity. On the one hand, the paper outlines various coping strategies used by development professionals to maintain a coherent narrative about the self. On the other hand, it also shows how doubts and fragmentations of identity can generate a critical distance to “development” practice, providing a space for resistant and transformative practice in the sense of Foucauldian counter-conduct.

scholarly journals Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self: Game Studies and the Late Work of Michel Foucault

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
The Self ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This paper aims to critically introduce the applicability of Foucault’s late work, on the practices of the self, to the scholarship of contemporary computer games. I argue that the gameplay tasks that we set ourselves, and the patterns of action that they produce, can be understood as a form of ‘work on the self’, and that this work is ambivalent between, on the one hand, an aesthetic transformation of the self – as articulated by Foucault in relation to the care or practices of the self – in which we break from the dominant subjectivities imposed upon us, and on the other, a closer tethering of ourselves through our own playful impulses, to a neoliberal subjectivity centred around instrumentally-driven selfimprovement. Game studies’ concern with the effects that computer games have on us stands to gain from an examination of Foucault’s late work for the purposes of analysing and disambiguating between the nature of the transformations at stake. Further, Foucault’s tripartite analysis of ‘power-knowledge-subject’, which might be applied here as ‘game-discourse-player’, foregrounds the imbrication of our gameplay practices – the extent to which they are due to us and the way in which our own volitions make us subject to power, which is particularly pertinent in the domain of play.

scholarly journals Islam Nusantara as Strategy for Indonesian Nasionalism Inauguration

ADDIN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 247
Author(s):  
Badrun Badrun
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Study Program ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Grassroots Level ◽  
The One ◽  
New Religion ◽  
Islamic Institutions

<p>The discourse on Islam Nusantara has become quite popular discussion among Indonesian society in the last two to three years. Not only in the grassroots level, Islam Nusantara also becomes a study in several Islamic institutions in Indonesia. In fact, there are some Islamic universities that have opened Islam Nusantara study program. On the one hand, many groups welcomed the studies of Islam Nusantara after being proclaimed by <em>Nahdliyyin</em> in the 33<sup>th</sup> NU Congress in Jombang, 2015. But on the other hand, there are some groups who reject Islam Nusantara and considered it as heresy in Islam. Essentially, Islam Nusantara is not a new movement, not a new mazhab, not a new ideology, and certainly not a new religion. Islam Nusantara is Islam that exists in the nation and is not sourced from the nation. However, Islam Nusantara accepts and accommodates national cultures as long as it does not contradict the Islamic rules (sharia). It means, Islam Nusantara compromises the culture, appreciates the land where they live, but it does not eliminate tradition as long as it is still in harmony with Islamic sharia. This can become the foundation of our nationalism inauguration. In other words, Islam Nusantara does not only discuss about religious issues, but also about nationalism.</p>

Entreprenøren som figur under neoliberalismen - Kapitalisme, individ og velfærdsorganisering

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luise Li Langergaard
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Entrepreneurship ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Economic Innovation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Welfare State

The article explores the central role of the entrepreneur in neoliberalism. It demonstrates how a displacement and a broadening of the concept of the entrepreneur occur in the neoliberal interpretation of the entrepreneur compared to Schumpeter’s economic innovation theory. From being a specific economic figure with a particular delimited function the entrepreneur is reinterpreted as, on the one hand, a particular type of subject, the entrepreneur of the self, and on the other, an ism, entrepreneurialism, which permeates individuals, society, and institutions. Entrepreneurialism is discussed as a movement of the economic into previously non-economic domains, such as the welfare state and society. Social entrepreneurship is an example of this in relation to solutions to social welfare problems. This can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of the neoliberal understanding of the entrepreneur, but it also, in certain interpretations, resists the neoliberal understanding of economy and society.

Uncommon Measure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoon Sook Cha
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Relative Power ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
Special Character ◽  
The One

This chapter, a reading of “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” considers Weil’s claim about the special character of force, that in being assumed and redeployed by those whom it subjects, flattens the relative power of humans. The chapter argues that the claim directs us to the possibility of a new relationality that forfeits sovereign modes of power without that forfeiture thereby signifying an equitable power between the self and the other, such as it is in supplication. Referencing Maurice Blanchot, it is argued that supplication establishes an “uncommon measure” between the suppliant and the one supplicated, not by virtue of any power the suppliant has, but by laying bare his human presence. In this context, one’s subjection to force offers a certain opening to the other even as it marks the precariousness of one’s own human being.

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-103
Author(s):  
Miriam Driessen
Keyword(s):  
Wage Differentials ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Interest ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
Employment Security ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
The One ◽  
Chinese Managers

Whereas Chinese road builders are modest about improving their own lives, they are confident about their ability to transform the lives of Ethiopian others. This chapter discusses Chinese management’s attempts to fashion young Ethiopian men into industrious laborers, modeling them on the self-sacrificing worker subject that helped realize China’s economic miracle throughout the 1990s and 2000s. What Ethiopian laborers lack, in Chinese managers’ eyes, is a sense of urgency and a drive to develop the self. Yet their attempts to fashion Ethiopians into committed laborers are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, management seeks to enhance the productivity of the local workforce and speed up the building works. On the other hand, they have a fundamental interest in upholding the image of the Ethiopian worker as indolent, for it confirms Chinese moral superiority and justifies wage differentials and inequalities in employment security.

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