scholarly journals Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism and Camus’s existentialist philosophy

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 376-386
Author(s):  
Nguyen Dinh Minh Khue
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Medieval Literature ◽  
Existentialist Philosophy ◽  
Existential Perspective ◽  
Insight Into

Lê Tuyên was among the most notable literary critics of South Vietnam during the period 1954 – 1975. He has been best known for being one of the first Vietnamese to adopt and apply phenomenological criticism, especially Bachelardian analysis of the imaginaire and poetic reveries. However, in our opinion, there are other philosophical views rather than Bachelardian thought embedded in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism, one of which is existentialist ideas. In this paper, based on the fact that Lê Tuyên frequently cited Camus and published several articles introducing Camus’s ideas, we would like to discover the notable relationship between Lê Tuyên and Albert Camus with an aim to get deeper insight into the existential perspective in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism. We thus make a comparison between Camus’s existentialist philosophy and Lê Tuyên’s view of human life presented in his works of literary criticism. There are two main similarities. Firstly, Camus and Lê Tuyên both focused on discovering and analyzing the absurdity of human condition. They also both argued that absurdity is not a property of life, but an experience formed in our relationship with the world. Secondly, while analyzing the revolt of heroes and heroines in Vietnamese late-medieval literature agaisnt absurdity, Lê Tuyên agreed with Camus that illusory hopes, metaphysical beliefs and ignorant rebellions should be criticized, but it is crucial to dialogue with life, to fully understand what life is and what we truly are.

On the Harm of Genocide

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Paul Kucharski
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Community Or ◽  
The World ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Individual Human ◽  
The Human Condition

My aim in this essay is to advance the state of scholarly discussion on the harms of genocide. The most obvious harms inflicted by every genocide are readily evident: the physical harm inflicted upon the victims of genocide and the moral harm that the perpetrators of genocide inflict upon themselves. Instead, I will focus on a kind of harm inflicted upon those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, on those who are outside observers, so to speak. My thesis will be that when a whole community or culture is eliminated, or even deeply wounded, the world loses an avenue for insight into the human condition. My argument is as follows. In order to understand human nature, and that which promotes its flourishing, we must certainly study individual human beings. But since human beings as rational and linguistic animals are in part constituted by the communities in which they live, the study of human nature should also involve the study of communities and cultures—both those that are well ordered and those that are not. No one community or culture has expressed all that can be said about the human way of existing and flourishing. And given that the unity and wholeness of human nature can only be glimpsed in a variety of communities and cultures, then part of the harm of genocide consists in the removal of a valuable avenue for human beings to better understand themselves.

Camus and Tragedy in Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Apparent Absence ◽  
The World ◽  
Educational Imagination ◽  
The Human Condition

Tragedy is a central theme in the work of Albert Camus that speaks to his 46 years of life in “interesting times.” He develops a case for the tragic arts across a series of letters, articles, lectures, short stories, and novels. In arguing for the tragic arts, he reveals an epic understanding of the tensions between individual and world manifest in the momentum of liberalism, humanism, and modernism. The educational qualities of the tragic arts are most explicitly explored in his novel The Plague, in which the proposition that the plague is a teacher engages Camus in an exploration of the grand narratives of progress and freedom, and the intimate depths of ignorance and heroism. In the novel The Outsider Camus explores the tragedy of difference in a society obsessed with the production of a normal citizen. The tragedy manifests the absurdity of the world in which a stranger in this world is compelled to support the system that rejects their subjectivity. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus produces an essay on absurdity and suicide that toys with the illusion of Progress and the grounds for a well-lived life. Across these texts, and through his collection of letters, articles, and notes, Camus invites an educational imagination. His approach to study of the human condition in and through tragedy offers a narrative to challenge the apparent absence of imagination in educational systems and agendas. Following Camus, the tragic arts offer alternative narratives during the interesting times of viral and environment tragedy.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
The World ◽  
Subjective Truth ◽  
The Human Condition

Introduces some of the central ideas of existentialism—including subjective truth, finitude, being-in-the-world, facticity, transcendence, inwardness, and the self as becoming—as relevant to an individual living in the contemporary moment. Highlights existentialist concern both for human individuality and for commonly-shared features of the human condition. Emphasizes existentialist attention both to the despairing aspects of human life and to the affirmation of existence as worthy of wonder. Introduces a few key thinkers—Kierkegaard, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche—while also indicating the diversity of existentialism to be emphasized throughout the book. Addresses what existentialism may have to offer in the context of contemporary challenges to objective truth and communal forms of meaning.

AI: A Semiotic Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Walsh Matthews ◽  
Marcel Danesi
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The World ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Human Sense ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a powerful new form of inquiry unto human cognition that has obvious implications for semiotic theories, practices, and modeling of mind, yet, as far as can be determined, it has hardly attracted the attention of semioticians in any meaningful analytical way. AI aims to model and thus penetrate mentality in all its forms (perception, cognition, emotion, etc.) and even to build artificial minds that will surpass human intelligence in the near future. This paper takes a look at AI through the lens of semiotic analysis, in the context of current philosophies such as posthumanism and transhumanism, which are based on the assumption that technology will improve the human condition and chart a path to the future progress of the human species. Semiotics must respond to the AI challenge, focusing on how abductive responses to the world generate meaning in the human sense, not in software or algorithms. The AI approach is instructive, but semiotics is much more relevant to the understanding of human cognition, because it studies signs as paths into the brain, not artificial models of that organ. The semiotic agenda can enrich AI by providing the relevant insight into human semiosis that may defy any attempt to model them.

Bonds of Trust

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 289-309
Author(s):  
Max Schaefer ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Reciprocal Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

This paper seeks to address whether human life harbours the possibility of a gratuitous or non-reciprocal form of trust. To address this issue, I take up Descartes’ account of the cogito as the essence of all appearing. With his interpretation of Descartes’ account of the cogito as an immanent and affective mode of appearing, I maintain that Henry provides the transcendental foundation for a non-reciprocal form of trust, which the history of Western philosophy has largely covered over by forgetting this aspect of Descartes’ thought. I demonstrate that Heidegger’s reading of Descartes serves as a pre-eminent example of this. Because Heidegger overlooks Descartes’ insight into the essence of appearing, and reduces this essence to the finite transcendence of the world, I maintain that Heidegger reduces trust to reciprocal relations of understanding between beings of shared contexts of significance.

scholarly journals The Disease Narrative in Albert Camus’ The Plague

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ya Fen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Medical Science ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Port City ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study

In many literary works, a character’s physical disease or illness also metaphorically references various universal characteristics of the human condition—death, religion, politics and relationships—as they are interworked amidst healthy and unhealthy bodies. In the case of Albert Camus’ The Plague, the epidemic of bubonic plague in the Algerian port city of Oran is considered an allegory for the German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944. The highly infectious disease disrupts citizens’ lives in real time, with consequences that further manifest throughout the world to varying degrees and in varying timeframes thereafter. This paper attempts to explore Camus’s metaphoric connotations of “the plague” within these social, cultural and historical narratives. This interdisciplinary study will also bring together analyses of literary and non-literary texts about the disease narrative, while also addressing literary theories related to medical science in order to better understand the allegorical definitions of illness, death, disability and exile in The Plague.

scholarly journals The Joy of Being as Anthropological Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
Agapov Oleg D. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Human Condition

The joy of being is connected with one’s activities aimed at responding to the challenges of the elemental forces and the boundlessness of being, which are independent of human subjectivity. In the context of rising to the challenges of being, one settles to acquire a certain power of being in themselves and in the world. Thus, the joy of being is tied to achieving the level of the “miraculous fecundity” (E. Levinas), “an internal necessity of one’s life” (F. Vasilyuk), magnanimity (M. Mamardashvili). The ontological duty of any human being is to succeed at being human. The joy of being is closely connected to experiencing one’s involvement in the endless/eternity and realizing one’s subjective temporality/finitude, which attunes him to the absolute seriousness in relation to one’s complete realization in life. Joy is a foundational anthropological phenomenon in the structure of ways of experiencing the human condition. The joy of being as an anthropological practice can appear as a constantly expanding sphere of human subjectivity where the transfiguration of the powers of being occurs under the sign of the Height (Levinas) / the Good. Without the possibility of transfiguration human beings get tired of living, immerse themselves in the dejected state of laziness and the hopelessness of vanity. The joy of being is connected to unity, gathering the multiplicity of human life under the aegis of meaning that allows us to see the other and the alien in heteronomous being, and understand the nature of co-participation and responsibility before the forces of being, and also act in synergy with them.The joy of being stands before a human being as the joy of fatherhood/ motherhood, the joy of being a witness to the world in creative acts (the subject as a means to retreat before the world and let the world shine), the joy of every day that was saved from absurdity, darkness and the impersonal existence of the total. Keywords: joy, higher reality, anthropological practices, “the height”, subject, transcendence, practice of coping

Aristotle and the Agrarians

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-361
Author(s):  
John S. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Ancient Economy ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
The World ◽  
City State ◽  
Insight Into

Among the ancients Aristotle is the only thinker who furnishes us with a fully developed philosophical conception of man's relationship to the world about him, and then uses this conception as a basis for the determination of man's life in relationship with nature. Part of this philosophy finds its source in certain conceptions reigning among the ancient Greeks, ideas which he as a product of ancient life and civilization most naturally accepted; but another part of it, and a significant part too, is the result of Aristotle's own insight into human life and its meaning. In such studies we must remember that Aristotle was very critical of much in the Greek city-state; and, as a Macedonian he was more sympathetic with an agrarian economy than with the Ionian city economy. We can never understand Aristotle if we take him to be an Athenian, and assume that his sympathies were with Athenian mercantile democracy. He is not bound down to any one ancient economy and has a critical attitude towards all of them. What he has in mind are certain norms or ideals for human life and its relationship to nature, and on these he bases his whole system of social and economic thought and thus throws light upon the systems of social and economic life historically developed.

scholarly journals Colin McPhee and Balinese Music: A Short Bibliography

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
I Wayan Sudirana
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Western World ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Great Contribution ◽  
The World ◽  
Insight Into

Colin McPhee was a talented pianist and composer who had a deep musicological interest in exploring another musical language. Only a few composers in the western world would have afforded themselves the chance to do exactly the same thing that McPhee did. His life was completely changed by the influence of Balinese music. He published books about music and culture of Bali as well as the aspect of human life in Balinese society. In fact, McPhee’s works engaging in and focusing on Balinese culture are a great contribution to the Balinese and a good way of introducing Balinese culture to the world. For the present and future generations of Balinese musicians, Mcphee’s works of Balinese music will be standing as an important piece of heritage.The paper is a brief biography of Colin McPhee, focusing mainly on his work as an ethnomusicologist. As a Balinese musician and composer, I am primarily interested in his works as they relate to Balinese culture. I will also introduce some of his western music compositions that were inspired by the gamelan[1] music of Bali. I hope that by doing this project, I will gain a better understanding and insight into what Colin McPhee has done for my music as well as for the field of ethnomusicology in general.  Colin McPhee adalah seorang pianis dan komposer berbakat yang memiliki minat musik yang mendalam dalam mengeksplorasi bahasa musik lainnya. Hanya beberapa komposer di dunia barat yang akan memberi kesempatan untuk melakukan hal yang persis sama seperti yang dilakukan McPhee. Hidupnya benar-benar berubah oleh pengaruh musik Bali. Dia menerbitkan buku-buku tentang musik dan budaya Bali serta aspek kehidupan manusia dalam masyarakat Bali. Bahkan, karya McPhee yang terlibat dan berfokus pada budaya Bali merupakan kontribusi besar bagi orang Bali, dan cara yang baik untuk memperkenalkan budaya Bali kepada dunia. Untuk generasi sekarang dan generasi mendatang musisi Bali, karya-karya musik Mcphee akan berdiri sebagai bagian penting dari warisan budaya untuk Bali dan dunia. Makalah ini adalah biografi singkat Colin McPhee, yang utamanya berfokus pada karyanya sebagai seorang etnomusikolog. Sebagai seorang musisi dan komposer Bali, saya terutama tertarik pada karya-karyanya karena mereka berhubungan dengan budaya Bali. Saya juga akan memperkenalkan beberapa komposisi musik baratnya yang terinspirasi oleh musik gamelan Bali. Saya berharap bahwa dengan penulisan paper ini, saya akan mendapatkan pemahaman dan wawasan yang lebih baik tentang apa yang telah dilakukan Colin McPhee untuk musik saya sendiri, serta untuk bidang etnomusikologi pada umumnya.  

scholarly journals "Salvar os corpos", "conectar revoltas": para uma noção de Direito em Camus ["Save the bodies", "connect revolts": for a notion of Law in Camus]

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (46) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Amsterdan Duarte ◽  
Márcio Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Collective Agency ◽  
The World ◽  
Do So

Utilizando, principalmente, as noções de Absurdo, Revolta e Limite, este trabalho procura construir uma noção de Direito a partir do pensamento de Albert Camus. Para tanto, o primeiro passo será, com o autor, identificar e criticar um tipo de Direito que, apresentando-se ainda hoje influente, mimetiza o Absurdo para intensificar o exílio do indivíduo no mundo. Em seguida, buscaremos construir uma noção de Direito que, mantendo intensa articulação com as ideias de Revolta e Limite, constitua-se, simultânea e inseparavelmente, em afirmação radical da vida humana e em expressão do agenciamento coletivo da Revolta. [Using, mainly, the notions of Absurd, Rebellion and Limit, this work aims to build a notion of Law based on the thought of Albert Camus. In order to do so, the first step is to, along with Camus, identify and criticize a kind of Law that, still today, very influential, mimics the Absurd in a way to intensify the individual’s exile in the world. Next, we build a notion of Law that, maintaining an intense connection with the ideas of Rebellion and Limit, represents, simultaneously, a radical affirmation of human life and an expression of the collective agency of Rebellion.]

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