Herbert Mac Cabe’s Philosophical Anthropology

Politeia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 238-260
Author(s):  
Franco Manni ◽  

From the ideas of Aristotle, De Saussure and Wittgenstein, philosopher Herbert McCabe elaborated an original anthropology. 'Meaning' means: the role played by a part towards the whole. Senses are bodily organs and sensations allow an animal to get fragments of the external world which become 'meaningful' for the behaviour of the whole animal Besides sensations, humans are ‘linguistic animals’ because through words they are able to 'communicate', that is, to share a peculiar kind of meanings: concepts. Whereas, sense-images are stored physically in our brain and cannot be shared, even though we can relate to sense-images by words (speech coincides with thought). However, concepts do not belong to the individual human being qua individual, but to an interpersonal entity: the language system. Therefore, on the one hand, to store images is a sense-power and an operation of the brain, whereas the brain (quite paradoxically!) is not in itself the organ of thought. On the other hand, concepts do not exist on their own.

Author(s):  
Anna Peterson

This book examines the impact that Athenian Old Comedy had on Greek writers of the Imperial era. It is generally acknowledged that Imperial-era Greeks responded to Athenian Old Comedy in one of two ways: either as a treasure trove of Atticisms, or as a genre defined by and repudiated for its aggressive humor. Worthy of further consideration, however, is how both approaches, and particularly the latter one that relegated Old Comedy to the fringes of the literary canon, led authors to engage with the ironic and self-reflexive humor of Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus. Authors ranging from serious moralizers (Plutarch and Aelius Aristides) to comic writers in their own right (Lucian, Alciphron), to other figures not often associated with Old Comedy (Libanius) adopted aspects of the genre to negotiate power struggles, facilitate literary and sophistic rivalries, and provide a model for autobiographical writing. To varying degrees, these writers wove recognizable features of the genre (e.g., the parabasis, its agonistic language, the stage biographies of the individual poets) into their writings. The image of Old Comedy that emerges from this time is that of a genre in transition. It was, on the one hand, with the exception of Aristophanes’s extant plays, on the verge of being almost completely lost; on the other hand, its reputation and several of its most characteristic elements were being renegotiated and reinvented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-71
Author(s):  
Raquel Borges Blázquez

Artificial intelligence has countless advantages in our lives. On the one hand, computer’s capacity to store and connect data is far superior to human capacity. On the other hand, its “intelligence” also involves deep ethical problems that the law must respond to. I say “intelligence” because nowadays machines are not intelligent. Machines only use the data that a human being has previously offered as true. The truth is relative and the data will have the same biases and prejudices as the human who programs the machine. In other words, machines will be racist, sexist and classist if their programmers are. Furthermore, we are facing a new problem: the difficulty to understand the algorithm of those who apply the law.This situation forces us to rethink the criminal process, including artificial intelligence and spinning very thinly indicating how, when, why and under what assumptions we can make use of artificial intelligence and, above all, who is going to program it. At the end of the day, as Silvia Barona indicates, perhaps the question should be: who is going to control global legal thinking?


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (01) ◽  
pp. 41-74
Author(s):  
Ahmed Abdellah Ahmed Alhossany

This study deals with the Quranic treatment of extremism in terms of extremisms concept and semantics, types, causes, images,  and the Quranic approach in its treatment, and we try to link the Muslim to the Quran approach in the treatment of extremism as a problem which the individual and the old and new society suffer; Because extremism can be transformed from mere idea to apparent behavior while demonstrating that extremism in fact transcends the rules of law and divine orders, it is excessive in the commitment to religion on the one hand or negligence in adhering to it, on the other hand, it is not always concerned with bringing the matter but also enters into relinquishing. In addition to the need to be warned that extremism is a method of religiosity and not religion itself, and Islam with its centrist approach rejects such practices and seeks to address them through the curriculum of the Holy Quran


Author(s):  
Manuel Jiménez Sánchez ◽  
Raúl Álvarez Pérez ◽  
Gomer Betancor Nuez

El movimiento de los pensionistas en 2018 supuso la primera movilización multitudinaria basada en una identidad colectiva de personas mayores en España, y mostró una capacidad de contestación popular sin precedentes en el tema de las pensiones. Este trabajo indaga en el proceso de configuración de la identidad colectiva como estrategia analítica que permite entender la aparición y la naturaleza (exitosa) de la movilización. Siguiendo la conceptualización de Melucci, este proceso se analiza desde una doble perspectiva. Por un lado, como estrategia de actores colectivos que persiguen articular la contestación popular a la política de pensiones puestas en marcha durante la Gran Recesión. Aquí, el análisis se centra en identificar el proceso organizativo en el que se sientan las bases identitarias del movimiento, y que se extenderían con éxito en la fase posterior de contestación masiva. Por otro lado, se presta atención a la naturaleza de la identificación entre los propios pensionistas como resultado de procesos de aprendizaje durante sus experiencias de movilización. Para la primera perspectiva, el trabajo se basa en informaciones obtenidas en noticias de prensa sobre las actividades de protesta y en documentos producidos por las organizaciones del movimiento. La perspectiva individual de los participantes se fundamenta en el análisis de los discursos obtenidos en entrevistas personales focalizadas a participantes. Este doble enfoque, como estrategia organizativa intencionada y como proceso de aprendizaje durante la experiencia de la movilización, ofrece informaciones clave para comprender no solo el proceso, inédito en España, de construcción de una voz propia de los pensionistas sino también para indagar en los procesos de aprendizaje y cambio actitudinal que implican para los participantes corrientes. En un sentido más amplio, esta estrategia de análisis permite igualmente, por un lado, ubicar el proceso de movilización de los pensionistas en una trayectoria temporal más amplia de contestación popular y, en particular, vincularlo a los legados del ciclo de movilización que protagonizó el 15-M. Por otro lado, también permite destacar esos procesos de contestación como espacios de aprendizaje en los que se modelan actitudes, valores y demás elementos de la cultura de protesta. The pensioners' movement in 2018 was the first mass mobilization based on a collective identity of older people in Spain, and showed an unprecedented capacity for popular contestation on the issue of pensions. This paper inquires into the process of collective identity configuration as an analytical strategy that allows us to understand the emergence and (successful) nature of the mobilisation. Following Melucci's conceptualization, this process is analysed from a double perspective. On the one hand, as a strategy of collective actors seeking to articulate popular contestation to the pension policies implemented during the Great Recession. Here, the analysis focuses on identifying the organizational process in which the identity bases of the movement are established and, which were successfully extended in the subsequent phase of mass protest. On the other hand, attention is paid to the nature of the collective identification among pensioners themselves as result of learning processes during their protest experiences. The analysis of the organizational configuration of the movement is based on information obtained from press reports on the protest activities and documents produced by the movement's organizations. The individual perspective of the participants relies on the analysis of the discourses obtained in focused interviews with participants. This dual approach, as an intentional organizational strategy and as a learning process during the mobilization experience, provides key information to understand not only the process, unprecedented in Spain, of building a voice for pensioners, but also to investigate the learning processes and attitudinal change involved for ordinary participants. More broadly, it also allows, on the one hand, to place the process of mobilization of pensioners in a broader temporal trajectory of popular contestation and, in particular, to link it to the legacies of the cycle of mobilization in the wake of the 15-M movement. On the other hand, it also allows us to observe protest as learning spaces in which attitudes, values, and other elements of the culture of protest are modelled.


After having briefly but exhaustively recalled the main lines of Freudian psychoanalytic thought, we have discussed a possible psychoanalytic theoretical model for human symbolic function mainly centred on the action of a set of primary psychic mechanisms rejoined around the negative, in its widest sense according to the works of André Green. A chief aspect of this pattern has turned out to be an underlying, irreducible dialecticity that reflects on the one hand, the typical feature of human symbolic function, and, on the other hand, the main outcome of the unavoidable presence of a basic dichotomy formalized the so-called phallic logic, that is, that primordial, ancestral and irreducible logical nucleus inevitably present in the deepest meanders of human psyche as an inborn structure phylogenetically preformed and ontogenetically re-established during the psychic evolution of any human being.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 54-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durk Gorter ◽  
Jasone Cenoz

In this article we discuss the concept of translanguaging in relation to a holistic view of linguistic landscapes that goes beyond the analysis of individual signs. On the one hand, we look at instances of multilingual signage as a combination of linguistic resources. On the other hand, at the neighborhood level the individual signs combine, alternate and mix to shape linguistic landscapes as a whole. We expand our “Focus on Multilingualism” approach from school settings to the multilingual cityscape. One bookshop and its surrounding neighborhoods in Donostia-San Sebastián illustrate how readers navigate between languages and go across linguistic borders. Through translanguaging we foreground the co-occurrence of different linguistic forms, signs and modalities. At the level of neighborhood emerges the space in which translanguaging goes outside the scope of single signs and separate languages. We conclude that translanguaging is an approach to linguistic landscapes that takes the study of multilingualism forward.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-225
Author(s):  
Arif A JAMAL

AbstractIn considering the articles in this Special Issue, I am struck by the importance of a set of factors that, in my view, both run through the articles like a leitmotif, as well as shape the major ‘take away’ lesson(s) from the articles. In this short commentary, I elaborate on these factors and the lesson(s) to take from them through five ‘Cs’: context; complexity; contestation; the framework of constitutions; and the role of comparative law. The first three ‘Cs’ are lessons from the case studies of the articles themselves, while the second two ‘Cs’ are offered as lessons to help take the dialogue forward. Fundamentally, these five ‘Cs’ highlight the importance of the articles in this Special Issue and the conference from which they emerged on the one hand, while on the other hand, also making us aware of what are the limits of what we should conclude from the individual articles. In other words, taken together, the five ‘Cs’ are, one might say, lessons about lessons.


1862 ◽  
Vol 7 (40) ◽  
pp. 461-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Maudsley

As it has ever been the custom of man to act as if he were eternal, and lavishly to scatter the limited force which he embodies as though the supply were inexhaustible, it produces no unaccustomed surprise to witness the useless expenditure of force which is so frequently made at the present time. It may even, perhaps, be deemed a token of some modesty, that the being, who since his first formation has been continually occupied in metaphysical regions with the investigation of the origin of all things, should be content for a while to amuse himself with physical theories concerning his own origin. That which is to be regretted in the new and comparatively praiseworthy occupation is the old evil of hasty theorizing on the one hand, and on the other hand, the evil, scarcely less ancient, of an impetuous eagerness to demolish any theory, however plausible, which comes athwart a favourite prejudice. What though the anatomist does discover a very close resemblance and very slight differences between the structure of a gorilla and the structure of a human being; there is no need, on that account, that mankind in a feeling of injured dignity should angrily rouse up and disclaim the undesired relationship. Whatever may be said or written, it is quite plain after all that a man is not a gorilla, and that a gorilla is not a man; it is furthermore manifest that gorillas do not breed men now-a-days, and that we have not the shadow of any evidence to guide us in forming; an opinion as to what they may have clone in times past. The negative testimony of Du Chaillu, who says that he searched in vain in the gorilla region for any intermediate race or link between it and man, scarcely adds anything to the conviction of the non-existence of any such link, which has long been universally entertained.*


1940 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. d'E. Atkinson

The derivation given by Hoyle and Lyttleton for an accretion formula proposed by them is examined. A number of arguments against its validity are put forward, especially that on the one hand their capture radius depends on the theorem that if the velocity of certain masses of gas after collision is less than the velocity of escape at the point, they will not in fact escape, while on the other hand it is clear (and is now admitted) that the gas cannot in fact move with this velocity at all. It is also shown that since, ex hypothesi, the individual molecules will all, on the average, retain their hyperbolic velocities, there is not the compelling reason for their capture that there appeared to be in Hoyle and Lyttleton's argument, where only the mean radial velocity of the centre of gravity of the mass was considered. Further, it seems improbable that the temperature of the interstellar matter can be low enough for the initial assumptions of their theory to hold.


AJS Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
Dvir Tzur

The article discusses the image of Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city, as it is described in the novelPreliminariesby S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky), one of Israel's best-known authors. In this novel, which engages with the question of home and borders, borders function as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they define home and create a circumscribed place for the protagonist and his family. On the other hand, the novel dwells on the urge to cross borders and shatter the distinction between home and the world. In this regard, Tel Aviv is sometimes described as a pleasant, “normal” city, yet at other times it is written as a perilous place—since it divides between Jews and Arabs. Tel Aviv is also the place where one can imagine a great future or see a concealed history. It is a total urban experience, encapsulating the individual.


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