scholarly journals Świat czy wydarzenie? W stronę ontologii wojny

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Adam Woźniak

The world or an event? Towards an ontology of war: This paper is an attempt to rethink the ontology of war. Its main object is to determine the ontological status of war and the connection between strategies of armed conflict prevention and the way this status is understood. If to overcome metaphysics we need to reconsider its basis then maybe a similar strategy should be applied in order to overcome war. The source of war is understood here not only in temporal terms, but also as its essence — the ontological basis. The first part of the article invokes several conceptions from the twentieth century (that, of course, refer to much older texts), according to which, war was to be overcome by variously understood progress. In those conceptions, as well as in the critical approaches from the beginning of the 21st century, war is treated as an event, a state of affairs. In the next part of my paper, based on Margaret Mead’s anthropological diagnosis, I propound a conception of war as an invention, and therefore — technology. The issue of war is further considered in the context of the twentieth-century philosophy of technology. A thesis is put forward according to which understanding the influence of techne of war over episteme should be the essence of thinking of war prevention. In this study, war is treated as a technology that determines perception. For critical reflection upon war, I use twentieth-century philosophical conceptions linking technology with cognitive processes, especially those formulated by Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan.

Author(s):  
Adam Wozniak

This paper is an attempt to rethink the ontology of war. Its main object is to determine the ontological status of war and the connection between strategies of armed conflict prevention and the way this status is understood. If to overcome metaphysics we need to reconsider its basis then maybe a similar strategy should be applied in order to overcome war. The source of war is understood here not only in temporal terms, but also as its essence – the ontological basis. The first part of the article invokes several conceptions from the twentieth century (that, of course, refer to much older texts), according to which, war was to be overcome by variously understood progress. In those conceptions, as well as in the critical approaches from the beginning of the 21st century, war is treated as an event, a state of affairs. In the next part of my paper, based on Margaret Mead's anthropological diagnosis, I propound a conception of war as an invention, and therefore – technology. The issue of war is further considered in the context of the twentieth century philosophy of technology. A thesis is put forward according to which understanding the influence of techne of war over episteme should be the essence of thinking of war prevention. In this study, war is treated as a technology that determines perception. For critical reflection upon war, I use twentieth century philosophical conceptions linking technology with cognitive processes, especially those formulated by Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan. Woniak A. wiat czy wydarzenie? W stron ontologii wojny // Argument. 2020. Vol. 1/10. Pp. 133-150.


Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Scott Peeples

Edgar Allan Poe has long occupied a problematic place in discussions of American literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, an intensive reexamination of his relationship to nineteenth-century print culture and the controversies of Jacksonian America reframed our understanding of his work. Whereas scholars once regarded his dark fantasies as extraneous to American experience, we now recognize the complex and nuanced ways in which Poe’s work responded to and questioned core assumptions of American culture. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe offers a wide-ranging exploration of Poe, rereading his works through a variety of critical approaches and illuminating his ultimate impact on global literature, art, and culture. The introduction to the volume traces the development of scholarship on Poe from the time of his death in 1849 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring the future possibilities for the study of Poe in the digital era.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Blas Arroyo

AbstractBased on a corpus composed entirely of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, mainly private letters from the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries (c. 1960), this paper analyses the results of a variationist study on the historical evolution undergone by the Spanish modal periphrases with three distinct auxiliary verbs (haber, tener, deber). Using the heuristic tools of the comparative method, the data show that variation has been constrained by a handful of common factor groups over almost five centuries. Nonetheless, with the odd exception, these factors have conditioned each verb in a different way. Moreover, the sense of this variation changes as time goes by, with especially relevant reorganisation in the first part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, there is a notable association between these constraints and the degree of markedness and the frequency of the conditioning contexts, giving support to a usage-based approach to language change in which cognitive processes such as entrenchment play a decisive role. These data also allow a particular profile to be traced for each modal verb in the history of Spanish, in which tener and haber finally undergo a complementary distribution, whereas deber follows a different pattern. After several centuries of stagnation, tener becomes the star in the deontic firmament of spontaneous communication, diffusing abruptly as a change from below in the twentieth century, and replacing haber, which had been the unmarked variant for centuries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 294-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosanne Anholt

Little is known about how the idea of ‘resilience’ translates into practice. It has nonetheless emerged as a dominant theme in the governance of crises, such as political instability, armed conflict, terrorism, and large-scale refugee movements. This study draws on interviews with humanitarian and development practitioners in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon working under the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan to explore how resilience is interpreted and translated on the ground. Results suggest that resilience is translated as the economic self-reliance of refugees, and the capacity for crisis management of refugee-hosting states, enacted through ‘localization’ and strengthening the ‘humanitarian-development nexus.’ The prominence of the political and economic context and the power relations between crisis response actors that it generates reveals the limits of what a buzzword like resilience can achieve on the ground. The findings highlight the need for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to engage in continuous critical reflection on whether the ways in which resilience policies and programmes are implemented actually improve the ability of systems and vulnerable populations to recover from crisis, as well as on the validity of the assumptions and interpretations on which such policies and programmes are built.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 826-832
Author(s):  
Kizhan Salar Abdulqadr ◽  
Roz Jamal Omer ◽  
Ranjdar Hama Sharif

This paper examines the short poems of Ezra Pound, a group of works that have long been the subject of academic discussion in the field of literary analysis. Although Ezra Pound is typically considered a Modernist poet, some clear elements of Victorianism can be discerned within his revolutionary forms of poetry. The paper will offer a historical and biographical background to Pound's work before moving on to an analysis and discussion of the poet's short poems. While previous studies of Ezra Pound's poetry have adopted various critical approaches, we believe that this is the first study that compares the influence of Modernism and Victorianism on the work of this important figure in English verse of the early twentieth century.


Author(s):  
L. C. Green

In HisDe Jure Belli ac Paris, Grotius, quoting Cicero, stated that “there is no Middle between War and Peace,” and this sentiment seems to have received general agreement well into the twentieth century. Thus, inJansonv.Driefontein Consolidated Mines, Lord Macnaghten stated: “I think the learned counsel for the respondent was right in saying that the law recognises a state of peace and a state of war, but that it knows nothing of an intermediate state which is neither one thing nor the other — neither peace nor war.” One might have thought that the English courts would have abandoned this view in the light of their own experience during the Manchukuo incident, for by 1939 inKawasaki Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha of Kobev.Bantham S.S. Co.the Court of Appeal was prepared to concede that “war” might exist for some commercial purposes but not in so far as other legal relationships were concerned.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Steven Hicks

Inspired by Marshall McLuhan, pianist Glenn Gould dedicated his career to polemics against the concert hall tradition. Through radio/television broadcasts, written works and contentious recorded catalogue, Gould advocated adoption of the new electric media environment of the mid-twentieth century, challenging musical traditions of centuries past. Gould also used telephonic technology to mediate contact with the outside world. Gould has been acknowledged by such authors as Paul Théberge as putting into practice the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. In this study, I follow Robert Logan’s work in media ecology and general systems and investigate Gould’s polemics through systems theory. In particular, I employ Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, offering a model of society through which we may observe the effects of electric technology via the notion of functional de-differentiation of social systems as discussed by authors such as Erkki Sevänen. I suggest that Gould’s polemics are not just commentary on musical tradition but the media environments in which those traditions arose and show how we too can find solace in sound.


This volume asks a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: Could international law have been otherwise? In other words, what were the past possibilities, if any, for a different law? The search for contingency in international law is often motivated, including in the present volume, by the refusal to accept the present state of affairs and by the hope that recovering possibilities of the past will facilitate a different future. The volume situates the search for contingency theoretically and within many fields of international law, such as human rights and armed conflict, migrants and refugees, the sea and natural resources, and foreign investment and trade. Today there is hardly a serious account that would consider the path of international law to be necessary and that would deny the possibility of a different law altogether. At the same time, however, behind every possibility of the past stands a reason – or reasons – why the law developed as it did. Those who embark in search of contingency soon encounter tensions when they want to recover past possibilities without downplaying patterns of determination and domination. Nevertheless, while warring critical sensibilities may point in different directions, only a keen sense of why things turned out the way they did makes it possible to argue about how they could plausibly have turned out differently.


Last Acts ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter

The introduction outlines a theoretical framework for the book. Through a brief survey of critical approaches to Hamlet, it considers the common alignment of early modern drama with mourning and argues that new critical perspectives emerge if we focus on the experience of the dying subject instead. William Perkins’s 1595 tract, A Salve for a Sick Man, illustrates how death was understood around Shakespeare’s time. By situating Perkins’s text in relation to ancient Stoicism and twentieth-century phenomenology, the introduction explicates what is distinctive about the understanding of dying found in the ars moriendi tradition and argues for the theoretical sophistication and continuing influence of the genre.


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