Animality, Self-Consciousness, and the Human Form of Life: A Hegelian Account

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 176
Author(s):  
Abott
Keyword(s):  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life

scholarly journals Playing ethics and teaching morality: how wittgenstein could help us to apply games to the moral living

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Janyne Sattler
Keyword(s):  
Language Game ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Moral Engagement

ABSTRACT: In Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations the notion of a 'language game' gives human communication a regained flexibility. Contrary to the Tractatus, the ethical domain now composes one language game among others, being expressed in various types of sentences such as moral judgments, imperatives and praises, and being shared in activity by a human form of life. The aim of this paper is to show that the same moves that allow for a moral language game are the ones allowing for learning and teaching about the moral living, where persuasion takes the place of argument by means of a plural appeal. For this purpose, literature would seem to be one of the best tools at our disposal. As a way of exemplifying our moral engagement to literature I proceed at last to a brief analysis of Tolstoy's Father Sergius, to show how playing this game would help us accomplish this pedagogical enterprise.

Form of Life, Buddhism, and Human Rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-135
Author(s):  
Don Selby
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Central Line ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
National Human ◽  
Partial View

Stanley Cavell took up anthropological works for consideration in a way that we might characterize as staccato, and has informed anthropological work in increasing and increasingly sustained ways. As these works show, it is difficult to lift, so to speak, a single concept—say, the ordinary—out of Cavell’s work, and treat it as if it were discrete, unentangled with neighboring concepts like language, or the uncanny, or nextness, to suggest only a few candidates. Still, what I will do here is highlight the fertility of Cavell’s elaboration on Wittgenstein’s ‘form of life’ for my ethnographic work on human rights in Thailand. I set out to show that were we to attend only to the register of cultural forms (more or less specifiable sets of customs, traditions, norms, values, habituated practices), as human rights debates that hew to cultural relativisim or ‘Asian values’ do, we would develop a partial view of how human rights emerged in the progressive, democratic moment surrounding and following the 1997 Thai constitution. More narrowly, the case I make, the case that one cannot make if one only takes form of life in the conventional sense of describing only social conventions, is that a central line of thought in the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand about what human rights were turned not on the nature of rights, but on a picture of the human. The picture at issue was one importantly inscribed within a certain, controversial school of Buddhist thinking. This paper will examine specific contests within Buddhism over what a human being is, with the particular claims to rights that flow from different pictures of the human. That is, it will take these debates, as they appeared in struggles over human rights, as pitching irreconcilable notions of the human form of life against one another. First, though, it is necessary to provide some orientation for readers unfamiliar with Thailand.

Culture as a Human Form of Life

1992 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuval Lurie ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life

Homo religiosus: does spirituality have a place in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics?

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID MCPHERSON
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life

AbstractIn this article I seek to show the importance of spirituality for a neo-Aristotelian account of ‘the good life’. First, I lay out my account of spirituality. Second, I discuss why the issue of the place of spirituality in the good life has often either been ignored or explicitly excluded from consideration by neo-Aristotelians. I suggest that a lot turns on how one understands the ‘ethical naturalism’ to which neo-Aristotelians are committed. Finally, I argue that through a deeper exploration of the evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life as ‘meaning-seeking animals’ we can come to better appreciate the importance of spirituality for human beings throughout recorded history up to the present and why we can be described ashomo religiosus.

Textures of the Ordinary

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veena Das
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Urban Families ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Social

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question—how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does not lie in some foundational idea of the universal as that of human nature or the human condition but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other within overlapping forms of life. The book shows how reality as ordinary and domestic is impaired not only by catastrophic events but also by the repetitive and corrosive soft knife of everyday violence and deprivation. It advances a view of ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. The book also presents a picture of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable and ethnography is treated as intimately connected to autobiography as a form of reflection emanating from the impersonal regions of the self.

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