scholarly journals POSTMODERN AND NIHILISM (STRATEGIES OF CRITICISM OF NIHILISM IN THE PHILOSPHY OF J.-F. LYOTARD)

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (11(61)) ◽  
pp. 59-63
Author(s):  
A.M. Sidorov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Cultural Paradigm ◽  
Political Response ◽  
Postmodern Philosophy ◽  
New Strategies

The article is devoted to the analysis of the theme of nihilism in postmodern philosophy on the example of one of its main representatives J.-F. Lyotard. Since F. Nietzsche, the term «nihilism» has been used by various theorists to describe the intellectual and spiritual situation of Western civilization in the era of modernity. The last decades of the twentieth century marked by the transition to a new cultural paradigm of postmodernity. But even in postmodernist theories, the topic of nihilism did not disappear, but gave rise to new strategies of comprehension and criticism. J.-F. Lyotard, a key theorist of postmodernity, at all stages of his work tried to understand how the nihilistic logic of the development of civilization in the «postmodern condition» has changed. The article reveals the philosophical and political response proposed by Lyotard to the challenge of the nihilistic suppression of life by the systems of capital, technoscience and repressive rationality.

The Coin of the African Realm

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herbst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Regional Economies ◽  
African Countries ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter examines the politics of the currency in West Africa from the beginning of the twentieth century. A public series of debates over the nature of the currency occurred in West Africa during both the colonial and independence periods. Since 1983, West African countries have been pioneers in Africa in developing new strategies to combat overvaluation of the currency and reduce the control of government over the currency supply. The chapter charts the evolution of West African currencies as boundaries and explores their relationship to state consolidation. It shows that leaders in African capitals managed to make the units they ruled increasingly distinct from the international and regional economies, but the greater salience of the currency did not end up promoting state consolidation. Rather, winning the ability to determine the value of the currency led to a series of disastrous decisions that severely weakened the states themselves.

scholarly journals Hannah Arendt's Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gerwarth ◽  
Stephan Malinowski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Sensitive Issues

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

“A Fall of Snow Maintains the Warmth of the Earth”

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Hanoch Ben-Pazi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Jewish Involvement ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract This essay attempts to shed light upon the European Jewish partnership in the second half of the twentieth century, through an analysis of the persona of the philosopher Léon Brunschvicg, one of the major teachers of Emmanuel Levinas. Beyond the inherent interest in his intellectual stature and prominence as a philosopher, our study will reveal an additional aspect of the French-Jewish partnership at the turn of the century, and will reconsider the import of assimilation—as an enabler of Jewish involvement in Western civilization. The moral and intellectual appreciation that Emmanuel Levinas had for his teacher, Léon Brunschvicg, motivated him to call for a return to Jewish cultural discourse, and to honor the role models whose Judaism found expression not through their national or religious commitments, but rather through their universal concerns.

scholarly journals Secondary Art and the Two-Story House: Kuwabara Takeo and the Comparative Imagination in Mid-Century Japan, 1935–1947

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Adam Bronson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Comparison ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Cross Cultural Comparison ◽  
The Way

This article focuses on the life and ideas of Kuwabara Takeo, a cultural critic and scholar of French literature who became renowned for his 1946 critique of haiku as a “secondary art” in comparison with the novel. By reconstructing Kuwabara's intellectual trajectory from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, I show how this famous essay was in part an effort to respond to Karl Löwith's famous critique of Japanese intellectuals. Löwith argued that Japanese intellectuals were insufficiently critical towards their own culture, due to the way that they compartmentalized practices and ideas associated with either Japanese culture or Western civilization. Kuwabara resisted such tendencies through the practice of cross-cultural comparison. His work gained encouragement from and responded to Löwith's critique in a way that illuminates the role that comparisons played in the intellectual culture of mid-twentieth-century Japan.

Elvis and Darmstadt, or: Twentieth-Century Music and the Politics of Cultural Pluralism

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (01) ◽  
pp. 3-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID CLARKE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Ideology Critique ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Cultural Paradigm ◽  
Twentieth Century Music

Abstract[PART 1] Contemporary musical production and consumption have become increasingly pluralist, seemingly bearing out postmodernist accounts of the eroding distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Accordingly, accounts of twentieth-century music ought to be able to narrate these different musical spheres – emblematized by the phenomena of Elvis and Darmstadt – together. While such gestures are not altogether absent from some recent histories of twentieth-century music, the results suggest that a more developed theorization of cultural pluralism is needed, one that also has a political dimension. Liberalism is one polity that espouses cultural pluralism and value pluralism, ideas that are not entirely separable from postmodernist relativism. Both epistemes are limited, however, by a disinclination towards dialectical thought and by the absence of ideology critique. [PART 2] Theoretical concepts from Slavoj Žižek (influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas of radical democracy) hold the potential for a post-Marxian model of ideology critique that might galvanize approaches to musical pluralism. Such an application could be relevant to various kinds of music, without giving a priori preference to one musical style over another – as was the case with Adorno. That said, these ideas have significant resonances with Adorno’s negative dialectics, and are valuable in developing a form ofstrong relativismthat could dialecticize a dialogical approach to musical pluralism. This suggests the possilbity of construing pluralism not as the achievement of stasis (or ‘the end of history’), but as a means of effecting social and historical movement beyond the present cultural paradigm.

scholarly journals Anthropic turn to modernity

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (91) ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
O. V. Haletskyy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Information Society ◽  
Theoretical Justification ◽  
New Science ◽  
Cultural Paradigm ◽  
New Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes

The anthropic turn of philosophy appears as a theoretical justification of the transition in the twentieth century from the state-totalitarian regimes to the globalization-information society, demo-liberal regimes and human rights. Since the middle of the twentieth century through so-called new science arises a new process-creative-centric image of the world in what the development of the anthroponomospherical tendency became the so-called socio-cultural paradigm, what is an increase in the conscious-spiritual factors of development. In the justifications of the anthropic principle of Carter, world-formation is concentrated in man as a personified creation of all cosmic, biological and social-spiritual forces, a continuation and continuater of world creation. The idea of a man as a cosmic being, but capable of his reconstruction, is further developed in a wide anthropocosmism. In the special anthropophilosophy of the first half of the twentieth century. The subject of reflection is the explanation and disclosure of the phenomenological meaning and the essence of human existence, the essence of which is that man is an animal, but is able to transcend himself, due to the spirit.

Evangelical Religion and Popular Romanticism in Early Nineteenth-Century America

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph H. Gabriel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Starting Point

Arnold Toynbee has described our western civilization in the twentieth century as a rationalistic and secular culture. In the sense that an awareness of the importance of science is the starting point of the thinking of our day the generalization seems true. We prize the realism of the objective, analytical approach of science. In a turbulent and swiftly moving age we have substituted relativism for older values once confidently assumed to have universal validity. We have seen scepticism, born of twentieth-century events, erode an old and dynamic belief in progress. We observe Protestantism, its old orthodoxy shaken, striving to make the Christian tradition meaningful and significant for a materialistic generation. We watch the protagonists of democracy striving to hold fast to essential human values and to protect basic freedoms in an age of fear and power.

“Confraternity Among All Dark Races”

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-191
Author(s):  
Keisha N. Blain
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
West African ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽  
A Site ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
New Strategies

This essay examines the political activities of Mittie Maude Lena Gordon (1889-1961) in Depression-era Chicago. A former member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Gordon established her own organization, the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), in 1932. While her decision to form the PME was largely driven by her interest in West African emigration, she also believed that the plight of African Americans was similar to other nonwhites globally and envisioned her organization as a vehicle to unite members of the “dark races.” Building on Garveyism while implementing new strategies of her own, she used her organization as a site for collaboration and exchange with individuals from various parts of the globe. Her activities illuminate the entangled histories of twentieth-century Black nationalism and internationalism.

Toward a Postmodern Theory of Law

1998 ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Ana Julia Bozo de Carmona
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Judicial Process ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Systemic Theory ◽  
Cultural Paradigm ◽  
The World ◽  
New Form ◽  
Theory Of Law ◽  
Legal Concepts

Law at the end of the twentieth century is a practice based on legal-philosophical concepts such as the representational theory of truth, neutrality, universality, and legitimacy. The content of such concepts responds to the tradition of the western cultural paradigm. We share the experience of fragmentation in this cultural unanimity: we live in a world of heterogeneousness and multiplicity that upholds the claims of different concepts of the world and of life shared by dwellers in microspaces. The theory of law should be adapted to take this experience into account. We propose a change in direction oriented toward the creation of operational legal concepts: creative justice, perspectivist rationality, a systemic theory of truth and a judicial process that guarantees the multicultural experience. Postmodernity affirms the urgent need for a new form of legal reasoning.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document