scholarly journals Critical Theory of Religion by Erich Fromm: from Messianic Judaism to Radical Humanism

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 62-78
Author(s):  
E. I. Korostichenko
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Humanistic Psychology ◽  
Erich Fromm ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Theory Of Religion ◽  
Phd Thesis ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Radical Humanism

This paper studies Erich Fromm’s critical theory of religion and looks into the evolution of the philosopher’s views. We analyze key concepts of Fromm’s humanistic psychology, including biophilia, rejection of idolatry, X-experience, classification of religions as humanistic or authoritarian, plea for sustainable coexistence with the environment, and some others. The author demonstrates close connection of these concepts with Judaic tradition, especially the messianism and negative theology of Maimonides. The paper is divided into chapters tracing the evolution of Fromm’s views on religion — from Hasidic Judaism, through following Freud and Marx, to the concept of humanistic religion. The analysis shows that starting from his early works and up to the radical, socialistic humanism as the pinnacle of his thought, Fromm as a philosopher and a strong Israelite draws inspiration from the religious tradition. Notably, his PhD thesis was devoted to the sociology of Hebrew diaspora, Der Sabbath, The Dogma of Christ. However, Fromm’s theory of religion, accordant with the Frankfurt School, combines aspects of Hegel, Marx and Freud’s teachings. Fromm’s views on religion are an original, self-consistent synthesis of diverse ideas, and result in the concept of radical humanism. The paper specifically considers Fromm’s view on idolatry as a form of alienation. Fromm urges to fight against idolatry in a bro.ader sense, finding it in various social phenomena, ranging from consumerism to religious fundamentalism. The paper also reviews the concept of X-experience that Fromm gives in You Shall Be as Gods. The X-experience is a special transcendental experience, separated from its multiple theistic or non-theistic conceptualizations. X-experience is psychological in its nature and leads to diminishing or eliminating narcissism. It constitutes a certain opposition to the alienation caused by idolatry. The work also considers Fromm’s idea of humanistic religion as related to his other concepts. The author supposes that the distinction between authoritarian and humanistic religions is tied to the earlier separation into authoritarian and humanistic ethics that Fromm presents in Man for himself. The impact of Marx and Freud on Fromm’s philosophy of religion is highlighted. While drawing from both, Fromm considered Marx’s theory to be deeper and more significant.

Critical International Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Civil Government

Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

Translation, interpreting and the genealogy of conflict

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Pérez-González
Keyword(s):  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The Public ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
The Media ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Impact

While the growing ubiquitousness of translation and interpreting has established these activities more firmly in the public consciousness, the extent of the translators’ and interpreters’ contribution to the continued functioning of cosmopolitan and participatory postmodern societies remains largely misunderstood. This paper argues that the theorisation of translation and interpretation as social phenomena and of translators/interpreters as agents contributing to the stability or subversion of social structures through their capacity to re-define the context in which they mediate constitutes a recent development in the evolution of the discipline. The consequentiality of the mediators’ agency, one of the most significant insights to come out of this new body of research, is particularly evident in situations of social, political and cultural confrontation. It is contended that this conceptualisation of agency opens up the possibility of translation being used not only to resolve conflict and tension, but also to promote them. Through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, the contributing authors to this special issue explore a number of sites of linguistic and cultural mediation across a range of institutional settings and textual/interactional genres, with particular emphasis on the contribution of translation and interpreting to the genealogy of conflict. The papers presented here address a number of overlapping themes, including the dialectics of governmental policy-making and translation, the interface between translation, politics and the media, the impact of the narrative affiliation of translators and interpreters as agents of mediation, the frictional dynamics of interpreter-mediated institutional encounters and the dynamics of identity negotiation.

Looking Back at the Pandemic Onset: Twitter Chatter Reflects Changes in Alcohol Themes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Ryerson ◽  
Jeffrey Stone
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Use ◽  
Daily Living ◽  
Early Research ◽  
Work Environments ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Looking Back

The COVID-19 global pandemic brought with it massive disruptions across many aspects of daily living including losses of employment and financial opportunities, reduced access to essential resources, lack of engagement in social activities, increases in social isolation, and mass transitions to remote school and work environments. Pre-pandemic research on events with paralleled community-wide effects has demonstrated a resulting increase in alcohol use and misuse as a result of these massive disruptions. However, early research on the impact of the current global pandemic on alcohol use has painted a complex picture. The current study utilized social media content (i.e., Twitter) as a way to investigate the initial impact of the pandemic on our relationship with alcohol. Analyses were also conducted to determine if the pandemic resulted in a shift away from typical weekly patterns related to alcohol use (i.e., increased on weekends vs. weekdays). A 2 (pandemic: pre-pandemic vs. post-pandemic) x 2 (day of week: weekday vs. weekend) ANCOVA was calculated to predict the prevalence of alcohol related tweets while controlling for the total number of tweets. The prevalence of alcohol related tweets significantly increased following the declaration of the global pandemic, however, the pattern of alcohol related tweets across the days of the week did not differ as a result of the pandemic. These results may be a reflection of major shifts in the psychological and social phenomena associated with alcohol as a result of the devastating impacts of the global pandemic.

scholarly journals Modelling the impact of alternative educational qualifications on the New Zealand higher education system

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Education System ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Agent Based Modelling ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
The Impact

Agent-based modelling provides a mechanism by which complex social phenomena can simulated in order to identify how particular features arise from causes such as demographics, human preferences and their interaction with policy settings. The NetLogo environment has been used to implement a simulation of the New Zealand higher education system, using historical data to calibrate model settings to mirror those of the real-world system. This simulation is used to explore how the introduction of an alternative qualification and education paradigm might disrupt established patterns of education and employment.

scholarly journals Fareeha Zafar. Canals, Colonies and Class: British Policy in the Punjab 1880- 1940. Lahore, Pakistan: Lahore School of Economics. 2017. xxii + 317 pages. Price not given.

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-106
Author(s):  
Junaid Alam Memon
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Irrigation Development ◽  
Rich Description ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
British Policy ◽  
The University ◽  
Phd Thesis ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Landed Elite

Fareeha Zafar’s book Canals, Colonies and Class: British Policy in the Punjab 1880-1940 is essentially an edited reproduction of her PhD thesis, The Impact of Canal Construction on the Rural Structures of the Punjab: The Canal Colony Districts, 1880 To 1940. The thesis was completed about 35 years ago at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London (now SOAS, the University of London). She studies the British colonisation process in the Punjab and its effect on the local environment, the production patterns, and social relations, understanding that despite several similar studies on the region, no serious effort had been made to synthesise these issues the way she does in this book. However, in the form of a new book, the synthesis does not add much value as it reiterates the British colonisers’ well-known strategies, namely irrigation development as a tool to settle disarmed forces and nomads and, thereby, strengthening a class of local landed elite to maintain their power in the colonies, their revenue-seeking policies, indebtedness of the landed class and alike. Nevertheless, considering the timing of the original contribution, the book, if read together with the contributions such as Khuhro (1978/1999) and Cheesman (1997), provides a relatively rich description of geographers’ analyses of the British policies, their intentions, and their effects.

scholarly journals The Impact of Religious Atmosphere on Corporate Governance: An Empirical Study Based on the Number of Temples around Listed Companies

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. p11
Author(s):  
Kaikai Liu ◽  
Xinyi Wang ◽  
Jingjing Liang
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Listed Companies ◽  
Economic Behavior ◽  
Risk Averse ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Impact

Religious belief can affect individual’s behavior. It usually induces managers to be more risk averse, thereby mitigating the agency problem and positively influencing governance. This paper conducts an empirical study to analysis the effect of religious atmosphere on corporate governance. It could be figured out that strong religious atmosphere plays an active role in corporate governance. The stronger the influence of religious tradition on listed companies, the less likely the managers are to violate the rules. Through precepts and deeds, these religious traditions are passed on from generation to generation and have become a significant factor affecting human economic behavior.

Elizabeth Bowen and the Pleasure of the Text

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Mutual Engagement ◽  
Poststructuralist Theory ◽  
Theory Of Reading ◽  
The Impact

This chapter recognises that while several authors in the extant criticism have used various lenses of critical theory through which to analyse Bowen’s work, a case for Bowen as a theorist herself has not yet been made. Through an analysis of Bowen’s critical essays, reviews, and depictions of reading and writing in her fiction, this chapter proposes a logic of literary theory as it emerges in her work. Bowen’s theory of reading does anticipate, in some ways, poststructuralist theory as it appears in the work of Roland Barthes, particularly in terms of her syntactical evocations of trauma. Where her work differs (or defers) from theirs, however, is in her insistence upon a kind of mindless and spontaneous memory-work which describes the impact of the reader and the text upon each other and the production of pleasure engendered through this relationship. It is in the process of this mutual engagement, Bowen’s work suggests, that each comes into being. This essay will thus argue for the innovation present in Bowen’s understanding of reading and writing as an anticipation and an inflection of later poststructuralist theory.

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