The Alienation Effect in the Historiography of Philosophy

Author(s):  
Dominik Perler

It has often been said that we should enter into a dialogue with thinkers of the past because they discussed the same problems we still have today and presented sophisticated solutions to them. I argue that this ‘dialogue model’ ignores the specific context in which many problems were created and defined. A closer look at various contexts enables us to see that philosophical problems are not as natural as they might seem. When we contextualise them, we experience a healthy alienation effect: we realise that problems discussed in the past depend on assumptions that are far from being self-evident. When we then compare these assumptions to our own, we reflect on our own theoretical framework that is not self-evident either. This leads to a denaturalisation of philosophical problems—in the past as well as in the present. The author argues for this thesis by examining late medieval discussions on mental language.

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 800-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferath Kherif ◽  
Sandrine Muller

In the past decades, neuroscientists and clinicians have collected a considerable amount of data and drastically increased our knowledge about the mapping of language in the brain. The emerging picture from the accumulated knowledge is that there are complex and combinatorial relationships between language functions and anatomical brain regions. Understanding the underlying principles of this complex mapping is of paramount importance for the identification of the brain signature of language and Neuro-Clinical signatures that explain language impairments and predict language recovery after stroke. We review recent attempts to addresses this question of language-brain mapping. We introduce the different concepts of mapping (from diffeomorphic one-to-one mapping to many-to-many mapping). We build those different forms of mapping to derive a theoretical framework where the current principles of brain architectures including redundancy, degeneracy, pluri-potentiality and bow-tie network are described.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Judith Middleton-Stewart

There were many ways in which the late medieval testator could acknowledge time. Behind each testator lay a lifetime of memories and experiences on which he or she drew, recalling the names of those ‘they had fared the better for’, those they wished to remember and by whom they wished to be remembered. Their present time was of limited duration, for at will making they had to assemble their thoughts and their intentions, make decisions and appoint stewards, as they prepared for their time ahead; but as they spent present time arranging the past, so they spent present time laying plans for the future. Some testators had more to bequeath, more time to spare: others had less to leave, less time to plan. Were they aware of time? How did they control the future? In an intriguing essay, A. G. Rigg asserts that ‘one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, sometime in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weight-driven clock.’ It is the intention of this paper to see how men’s (and women’s) perception of time in the late Middle Ages was reflected in their wills, the most personal papers left by ordinary men and women of the period.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gubara Hassan

The Western originators of the multi-disciplinary social sciences and their successors, including most major Western social intellectuals, excluded religion as an explanation for the world and its affairs. They held that religion had no role to play in modern society or in rational elucidations for the way world politics or/and relations work. Expectedly, they also focused most of their studies on the West, where religion’s effect was least apparent and argued that its influence in the non-West was a primitive residue that would vanish with its modernization, the Muslim world in particular. Paradoxically, modernity has caused a resurgence or a revival of religion, including Islam. As an alternative approach to this Western-centric stance and while focusing on Islam, the paper argues that religion is not a thing of the past and that Islam has its visions of international relations between Muslim and non-Muslim states or abodes: peace, war, truce or treaty, and preaching (da’wah).


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-55
Author(s):  
Riikka Korppi-Tommola

Abstract The reception of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and John Cage’s visit to Helsinki in 1964 revealed local, Finnish aesthetic priorities. In the dance critics’ texts, Cunningham’s style seemed to create confusion, for example, with its mixture of styles visà-vis avant-garde music. Music critics, mainly avant-garde and jazz musicians, had high expectations for this theatrical event. In their reviews, comparisons were made between Cunningham’s style and the productions of Anna Halprin. In this paper, I analyse the cultural perspectives of this encounter and utilize the theoretical framework of Thomas Postlewait’s pattern of cultural contexts. Additionally, I follow David M. Levin’s argumentation about changes in aesthetics. Local and foreign conventions become emphasized in this kind of a transnational, intercultural encounter. Time and place are involved in the interpretations of the past as well as later in the processes of forming periods.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Smiljan Gluščević

The article deals with the archaeological material recorded over the past decade on the island of Silba and on its seabed. The island is located on the most important seafaring route that led from the northern to southern Adriatic. The source of the earliest – albeit scarce – information about its population is the island’s prehistoric hill-fort. As for the life on the island in Antiquity and Late Antiquity, the graves and sarcophagi recorded there can be used as evidence of it. In terms of the number of finds, the seabed off Silba is much richer than the island itself, particularly the area near Sveti Ante Cove and Cape Arat, where Antiquity remains and Modern Age glass objects were found. Grebeni – the neighboring group of three reefs – were also included in the excavations. They were fatal for numerous ships of the Antiquity, as well as for one Late Medieval ship and one Modern Age ship. The most important finds include those from a mid-1st-century AD ship (a large quantity of material which is mostly unique for the Adriatic), a bell from the second half of the 13th century, and a ship with mid-17th-century cannons, anchors and ceramics. We should add to these the find of a shipwreck with Baetical amphorae (type Dr. 20) – the first such find on the Adriatic seabed. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammy Ayres ◽  
Dylan Kerrigan

Using Hauntology, this paper illustrates how the supposed demise of a socio-political and economic system – colonialism – still impacts on and has something to offer contemporary political analysis in Guyana’s gaols. Drawing on Fiddler’s spatio-hauntology alongside the work of Derrida and Gordon this paper shows how hauntology provides an alternative theoretical framework to look at the intergenerational transmission of trauma, which can be traced back to colonialism and slavery. It acknowledges the impact structural violence has on the collective imaginary and how this – consciously and unconsciously – shapes the psychosocial material underpinning contemporary Guyanese identities, desires, experiences, social action, and systems of punishment which includes prisons – its buildings, space, regimes, processes, sounds, laws and rationale. Guyana’s prisons contain phantoms of the past. Only by acknowledging Guyana’s ghosts and the phantasm of past trauma is it that we can begin to understand contemporary Guyana and Guyanese society, which includes their jails.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Chen Ying ◽  
Tan Chee Lay

<p><em>This study adopted the theoretical framework of narrative mediation to investigate a storied conflict talk between a landlord and her tenant in which the mediator played the role of a story recipient in the co-construction of stories with disputants. The focus of this research is on the function of questions posed by the mediator in the production of turning points which are favourable to the evolution of “better-formed” stories. The results of this study indicate that there are at least two types of questions mediators ask: 1) the questions that can help disputants reflect on their imperfectness; 2) the questions that awaken disputants’ memories of their good stories from the past. It is shown that the de-legitimacy for Self laid a foundation for the production of a good story towards a meaningful outcome for the mediation. The inadequacy of the context formed by first having legitimacy for Other followed by the de-legitimacy for Self led to the failure of destabilizing the problematic story in the mediation. The lack of the dominant party’s legitimacy for Other resulted in the absence of legitimacy from the marginalized side and would likely cause unfavourable consequences to the mediation in the long term.</em></p>


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Marcuzzo

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the nature of research methods in the history of economic thought. In reviewing the "techniques" which are involved in the discipline, four broader categories are identified: a) textual exegesis; b) "rational reconstructions"; c) "contextual analysis"; and d) "historical narrative". After examining these different styles of doing history of economic thought, the paper addresses the question of its appraisal, namely what is good history of economic thought. Moreover, it is argued that there is a distinction to be made between doing economics and doing history of economic thought. The latter requires the greatest possible respect for contexts and texts, both published and unpublished; the former entails constructing a theoretical framework that is in some respects freer, not bound by derivation, from the authors. Finally, the paper draws upon Econlit records to assess what has been done in the subject in the last two decades in order to frame some considerations on how the past may impinge on the future.


Author(s):  
Tom Conley

Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the ‘other’ and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau’s writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing (écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Downes ◽  
Liz Kelly ◽  
Nicole Westmarland

Over the past ten years the theoretical framework of ‘coercive control’ has been increasingly applied, critiqued and now underpins a criminal offence. While many argue that it more accurately reflects experiences of victimisation, there has been little exploration of coercive control through the accounts of perpetrators. Through two phased interviews with 64 men attending UK Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes, we examine how and why men use coercive tactics and how unpicking gender norms enabled some men to recognise and reduce their use of coercive control. We argue that coercive control is more dynamic, contestable and open to change than previous research has suggested. Some men did manage to take steps away from investing in traditional masculine norms and reduce their use of coercive tactics. However, this was an uneven and contradictory process which took time ‐ involving painful realisations of loss and harm alongside a discovery of the benefits associated with letting go of restrictive gender norms. Understanding how and why men invest in or dismantle gender norms that underpin coercive control has important implications for theory and for practice, particularly the content and focus of work with domestic violence perpetrators.


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