20th-century theories of personal identity

2018 ◽  
pp. 126-147
Author(s):  
Jens Johansson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
20Th Century

Paul Grice

Philosophy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Benton
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Logical Paradoxes ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Paul Grice ◽  
British Philosopher

Herbert Paul Grice (b. 1913–d. 1988) was a British philosopher and linguist, and one of the pivotal figures in philosophy during the 20th century. He wrote in many areas of philosophy, including the metaphysics of personal identity, logical paradoxes, the analytic/synthetic distinction, the philosophy of perception, philosophical psychology, and ethics. He also wrote on historical figures such as Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant. But his most significant contributions came in philosophy of language and mind, on meaning, intention, presupposition, conversation, and the theory of communication. Grice argued for an intention-based theory of meaning, and he was the first to illustrate the distinction between what came to be called semantic and pragmatic meaning, that is, between what a speaker’s utterance (or its utterance “type”) means in the abstract, and what else a speaker can mean by uttering it in a particular context. Grice highlighted this by an appeal to his framework of the Cooperative Principle and its Conversational Maxims, which are plausibly assumed by conversational participants and provide mechanisms for the ways in which speakers can “conversationally implicate” something beyond the literal meaning of what they say, and for how hearers can recover those “implicatures.’” Grice’s enduring influence on these topics helped found the burgeoning discipline in philosophy of language and linguistics now known as “pragmatics” (compare the Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy article on “Pragmatics”).

TERRITORIAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY AND AN ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVE IN CORMAC MCCARTHY ’ S “ CHILD OF GOD ”

Via Latgalica ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 192
Author(s):  
Inese Vičaka
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Political System ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Appalachian Region ◽  
Human World ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Child Of God

The notion of belonging has often been examined from the perspective of location and the politics of relations to space and culture. The paper explores, how Cormac McCarthy’s novel “Child of God” (1973) maps out and interrogates the notion of belonging – the protagonist Lester Ballard’s belonging to his nation, community and the limits imposed or the labels attached to Lester Ballard and the rest of the Appalachian community. The paper also dwells on the issue of borders expressed in C. McCarthy’s text: the border of territorial and national identity, the border of Lester Ballard as the victim’s personal identity and the border of his physical place – the Appalachian region within an existential realm of conflicting political system and cultural context in the 20th century. It is possible to draw parallels with Latgale region in Latvia, which had struggled for maintenance of its territorial and national identity for years, especially in the 20th century, when Latvia intelligentsia was unwilling to accept the identity and culture of Latgale region. For many years, it had been a periphery of periphery, marked by isolation and dominated by internal and external forces and struggles against the ongoing oppression of its distinct, regionally and historically rooted identity and language. The paper as well examines “Child of God” text from an ecocritical angle, unveiling the metaphorical and symbolic level, on which relationship with the nonhuman and human world is conveyed.

Theorizing the Subject

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidonie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Object Relation ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
The Subject

Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question “What is man?,” inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes’s cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject’s rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.

Development of Reading Remediation for Dyslexic Individuals

2016 ◽  
Vol 224 (4) ◽  
pp. 240-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mélanie Bédard ◽  
Line Laplante ◽  
Julien Mercier
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Behavioral Data ◽  
Educational Neuroscience ◽  
Reading Remediation ◽  
Functional Brain ◽  
Neurophysiological Data ◽  
Brain Correlates ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Brain

Abstract. Dyslexia is a phenomenon for which the brain correlates have been studied since the beginning of the 20th century. Simultaneously, the field of education has also been studying dyslexia and its remediation, mainly through behavioral data. The last two decades have seen a growing interest in integrating neuroscience and education. This article provides a quick overview of pertinent scientific literature involving neurophysiological data on functional brain differences in dyslexia and discusses their very limited influence on the development of reading remediation for dyslexic individuals. Nevertheless, it appears that if certain conditions are met – related to the key elements of educational neuroscience and to the nature of the research questions – conceivable benefits can be expected from the integration of neurophysiological data with educational research. When neurophysiological data can be employed to overcome the limits of using behavioral data alone, researchers can both unravel phenomenon otherwise impossible to document and raise new questions.

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