Hen epi pollon. The Origin of Husserl’s Eidetic Variation and the Divide Between Plato and Aristotle on the Universal

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 121-145
Author(s):  
Aurélien Djian ◽  

It is commonly known that Husserl’s eidetic variation is of paramount importance for phenomenology. For if phenomenology is a science of pure essences and formulates scientific laws about such essences, there has to be something like a method to follow in order to discover and test such eidetic truths; and this method is dubbed as eidetic variation. Now, a crucial aspect of this method has not been under active consideration yet: namely, as Husserl stresses in Experience and Judgment, that the eidetic variation is somehow to be related to the Greek notion of “hen epi pollôn”: the one over the many. An expression first used by Aristotle in the context of his dispute with Plato on the status of intelligible objects as universals. Accordingly, it seems clear that, by using this expression, Husserl wanted to refer his method to this Aristotle/Plato divide. The aim of this paper is to take this claim seriously, and to show, by an historical detour which takes into consideration this dispute, in which sense this method can be considered as a crucial contribution to the tradition to which phenomenology belongs, namely the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition.

Author(s):  
Francesco Crifò

AbstractGreek-speaking people have been sailing the Mediterranean for millennia. At various stages of their development from Latin, the Romance languages have been influenced by their idiom. In Italy and in its islands, this role has been particularly evident due to the many rich and culturally active colonies in Southern Italy before and during the Roman period on the one hand, and through the later Byzantine occupation, which lasted several centuries in some areas, on the other. In this article, after a brief summary of the historical background (2.), the characteristics of the lexical borrowings from Greek in the local idioms of Southern (3.) as well as of Central and Northern Italy (4.) will be sketched. Here and there, and in the conclusions (5.), the status quaestionis and the latest orientations of the research will also be broadly outlined.


2014 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
María J. SOTO-BRUNA
Keyword(s):  
The Many ◽  

This article deals with the arguments which the metaphysical work of Dominicus Gundissalinus uses in order to explain the kind of unity found in the many, as well as the status of multiplicity, which proceeds from a being who is both one and unique. From the notion of a creating cause the article will show the possibility of the existence of the many, having as background the thesis which appears in the texts of Gundissalinus: omne creatum a creante esse diversum.


Author(s):  
Francesco Crifò

AbstractGreek-speaking people have been sailing the Mediterranean for millennia. At various stages of their development from Latin, the Romance languages have been influenced by their idiom. In Italy and in its islands, this role has been particularly evident due to the many rich and culturally active colonies in Southern Italy before and during the Roman period on the one hand, and through the later Byzantine occupation, which lasted several centuries in some areas, on the other. In this article, after a brief summary of the historical background (2.), the characteristics of the lexical borrowings from Greek in the local idioms of Southern (3.) as well as of Central and Northern Italy (4.) will be sketched. Here and there, and in the conclusions (5.), the status quaestionis and the latest orientations of the research will also be broadly outlined.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Rachel Fensham

The Viennese modern choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser's black coat leads to an analysis of her choreography in four main phases – the early European career; the rise of Nazism; war's brutality; and postwar attempts at reconciliation. Utilising archival and embodied research, the article focuses on a selection of Bodenwieser costumes that survived her journey from Vienna, or were remade in Australia, and their role in the dramaturgy of works such as Swinging Bells (1926), The Masks of Lucifer (1936, 1944), Cain and Abel (1940) and The One and the Many (1946). In addition to dance history, costume studies provides a distinctive way to engage with the question of what remains of performance, and what survives of the historical conditions and experience of modern dance-drama. Throughout, Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition (1958) provides a critical guide to the acts of reconstruction undertaken by Bodenwieser as an émigré choreographer in the practice of her craft, and its ‘materializing reification’ of creative thought. As a study in affective memory, information regarding Bodenwieser's personal life becomes interwoven with the author's response to the material evidence of costumes, oral histories and documents located in various Australian archives. By resurrecting the ‘dead letters’ of this choreography, the article therefore considers how dance costumes offer the trace of an artistic resistance to totalitarianism.


Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-54
Author(s):  
Oyeh O. Otu

This article examines how female conditioning and sexual repression affect the woman’s sense of self, womanhood, identity and her place in society. It argues that the woman’s body is at the core of the many sites of gender struggles/ politics. Accordingly, the woman’s body must be decolonised for her to attain true emancipation. On the one hand, this study identifies the grave consequences of sexual repression, how it robs women of their freedom to choose whom to love or marry, the freedom to seek legal redress against sexual abuse and terror, and how it hinders their quest for self-determination. On the other hand, it underscores the need to give women sexual freedom that must be respected and enforced by law for the overall good of society.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


Author(s):  
Wesley J. Wildman

Subordinate-deity models of ultimate reality affirm that God is Highest Being within an ultimate reality that is neither conceptually tractable nor religiously relevant. Subordinate-deity models ceded their dominance to agential-being models of ultimate reality by refusing to supply a comprehensive answer to the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in the wake of the Axial-Age interest in that problem, but they have revived in the twentieth century due to post-colonial resistance to putatively comprehensive explanations. Subordinate-deity ultimacy models resist the Intentionality Attribution and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Rational Practicality dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the subordinate-deity class of ultimacy models are discussed.


Author(s):  
Frank S. Levin

Surfing the Quantum World bridges the gap between in-depth textbooks and typical popular science books on quantum ideas and phenomena. Among its significant features is the description of a host of mind-bending phenomena, such as a quantum object being in two places at once or a certain minus sign being the most consequential in the universe. Much of its first part is historical, starting with the ancient Greeks and their concepts of light, and ending with the creation of quantum mechanics. The second part begins by applying quantum mechanics and its probability nature to a pedagogical system, the one-dimensional box, an analog of which is a musical-instrument string. This is followed by a gentle introduction to the fundamental principles of quantum theory, whose core concepts and symbolic representations are the foundation for most of the subsequent chapters. For instance, it is shown how quantum theory explains the properties of the hydrogen atom and, via quantum spin and Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, how it accounts for the structure of the periodic table. White dwarf and neutron stars are seen to be gigantic quantum objects, while the maximum height of mountains is shown to have a quantum basis. Among the many other topics considered are a variety of interference phenomena, those that display the wave properties of particles like electrons and photons, and even of large molecules. The book concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of interpretational and philosophic issues, introduced in Chapters 14 by entanglement and 15 by Schrödinger’s cat.


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