This volume contains a selection of essays presented at the international conference on Cultural Crises in Art and Literature, held in Groningen in November 2002, in a special session on the question of the autonomy of the arts. Do we witness, in western culture, the end of the autonomy of the arts as it has been conceptualized and institutionalized since the eighteenth century? Indeed, developments of quite a different nature seem to have contributed to a blurring of boundaries between art (...) and non-art, art and the market, art and politics or ethics, as well as between the arts themselves, and between 'high' and 'low' art. Although this volume does not pretend to map this complex process in its entirety - partly because it is impossible to step out of one's own history - it is meant as a contribution to the elucidation of the process itself, offering some challenging explanations as to the heat of the current debate. (shrink)

The book addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the nascent twentieth century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas---cultural, social, and personal---associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (...) (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Resumen: Las reflexiones de la teoría crítica de la sociedad respecto de la diferenciación moderna de la razón le otorgan al arte -y a su experiencia- una singularidad que se presenta bajo un modo de resistencia. Un momento ejemplar de estas indagaciones se expresa en la discusión acerca del concepto de aura para dar cuenta de la diferencia artística. En este escrito nos proponemos reconstruir los aspectos de un concepto crítico de aura estética a partir de la interpretación de su (...) lugar y significación en la teoría social del arte de Theodor Adorno. Para ello revisamos la polémica que sostuvo con Benjamin en torno al carácter pasado del aura; distinguimos los aspectos de la fundamentación del concepto de aura artística en términos de negatividad estética; y, finalmente, extraemos algunas conclusiones en relación con la contribución teórica de este concepto para la crítica de las ideologías estéticas.: The reflections of Critical Theory of society about the modern differentiation of reason, assign to art -and its experience- a singularity which presents itself as a mode of resistance. A paradigmatic moment of this inquiry is the discussion about aura as a key concept to give account of what artistic difference means. In this paper we propose to reconstruct a critical concept of aesthetical aura by means of an interpretation of its place and meaning in Theodor Adorno’s social theory of art. In order to do that, we revise the controversy with Benjamin around the past character of aura; we distinguish the aspects of the foundation of the concept of artistically aura in terms of aesthetical negativity; and, finally, we extract some conclusions in relation to the theoretical contribution of this concept to the critique of aesthetical ideologies. (shrink)

Fashion is an important source for shedding light on modern aesthetic experience. Not only does fashion represent concrete aesthetic quality that reveals the spirit of the times, but it also epitomizes the social relations in liaison with the aesthetic taste of the times. This essay discusses the relationship between Georg Simmel’s sociological aesthetics and Hegel’s dialectics, demonstrates fashion as a domain in which subject-object relations are operative, and shows how fashion hypostatizes the dialectical relations between mind and body (...) and between the individual and the collective while connecting subject and object. (shrink)

The period that has begun after the last quarter of the 19th century brings an open conflict between the ‘histori- cal’ aspect of modernity and the ‘aesthetical’ one. The situation raises a question about the modern architectural shape’s dependency on architectonic function. Utility, production, profit become the keywords of the ideology; new social utopias and their reflection on the architecture- for-the masses projects emerge. This leads to the urban alienation of the modern man, in spite of the (...) well-intended architectural functionalism and mechanistic comfort, both of them ideologically uphold in order to ensure an easy livelihood for the proletariat. Thus, the late modernity is constrained to retrieve though eclecticism the very values that has denied itself, the mixing of codes that it ‘performs’ nowadays standing for a new ideology, one of “the ending of ideologies”. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the function of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism within Adorno’s thought. In order to do so, I have chosen to focus on the issue of the social significance of the work of art and the role played by the concept of literary material. Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, can be read as a reinterpretation of the idealist aesthetic model based precisely on a non-idealist notion such as that of aesthetic material.If one (...) is to allow a seemingly brutal simplification, there are two ways to think about the social meaning of literature. One identifies somehow the subject of the text, assesses whether or not this challenges the society from which the literary work stems, and on this ground establishes its social character. According to this perspective, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl can be seen as socially engaged literature, while Proust’s Recherche cannot, or can only to a lesser extent. The other approach argues instead that any literary work, and in any of its instances, says something about the society in which it takes shape. In this contribution I would like to focus on this latter approach. In particular, I am interested in understanding how literature is connected to society, that is, through which identifiable elements literary works express certain aspects of society. The Hegelian idealistic idea according to which Greek tragedy expresses the constitutive features of Athenian society, and which is found again and again in the authors who in various ways have taken up Hegel’s legacy, is generally accepted as such and valued for the explanatory opportunities it offers. It is my opinion, however, that one notion in particular can be retrieved within the whole inherited baggage of that aesthetic tradition, which may be able to further clarify the relationship between literature and society. This concept is that of material and the author who has most thoroughly investigated it is Adorno. In this paper I will try to outline the main features of a counterintuitive notion such as that of “literary material” and thereby explain why it plays such an important role in Adorno’s rework of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism. The concept of material, in fact, is key to the definition of another aesthetic category around which, according to Adorno, most of the problems connected to works of art gravitate, that is to say, the notion of form. From Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, one of his most insightful readers, Peter Szondi, draws the main principle for his study of the historical form of modern drama, namely the idea that form is essentially a precipitation, a sedimentation of contents. The work of art, then, at least according to this definition, is essentially identified by its form. Or, better said, the artwork must be interpreted as the way in which a certain (historical) content sediments in a certain external form. That the form of the work of art is precipitated content means, in simple terms, that no effective disjunction can be assumed between form and content. This is how Adorno reinterprets the concept of “identity of form and content” stressed by classical aesthetics. The content is such only insofar as it is precipitated into a certain form. This amounts to saying that no objective distinction can be established between one and the other. Now, if one were to ask how the form is made, Adorno’s answer is quite straightforward: the form is made by means of organization and, precisely, by means of the organization of the material. As one reads in Aesthetic Theory, in fact, “the substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials,” and the particular form of an artwork is defined as the “organization” of its “materials” (Adorno 1970, transl. 1997: 201). The concept of material, therefore, is key to the definition of the very notion of work of art in its constituent components, namely the relationship between form and content. In this paper I will first of all clarify the notion of artistic material in general and subsequently I will turn to strictly literary material. Finally, and this is the main goal of this essay, I will show to what extent this definition of the material possibly contributes to a better understanding of a widely and variedly debated literary phenomenon of our time, namely the form of the so-called postmodern novel. (shrink)

The Aesthetic Dimensions of Educational Administration and Leadership provides an aesthetic critique of educational administration and leadership. It demonstrates the importance of aesthetics on all aspects of the administrative and leadership world: the ways ideas and ideals are created, how their expression is conveyed, the impact they have on interpersonal relationships and the organizational environment that carries and reinforces them, and the moral boundaries or limits that can be established or exceeded. The book is divided into three sections. · (...) Section I examines various philosophical traditions in aesthetics as they inform administrative life, focussing on major modern traditions arising from Kant, romanticism and Nietzsche, Collingwood, the pragmatic school, and critical theory. · Section II explores four aesthetic sources for administrative critique - architecture, literature, film, and movement - as they serve both to understand the social construction of administration and leadership and provide a critique of values, roles, power and authority. · Section III examines more topical and applied problems of charisma, heroism, and authority in practice, concluding with a discussion of the aesthetic analysis of politics and power within the context of contemporary educational administration and leadership theory. While presenting a significant departure from conventional studies in the field, the international contributors reflect a continuity of thought on the creation, use and abuse of administrative and leadership authority from the writings of Plato through to contemporary theory. This book should appeal to school administrators and leaders and those aspiring to these roles. (shrink)

If aesthetics is both surface and depth, impassioned immediacy yet also critical distance of judgment, how can this doubleness be held together in one ...

This review explores the present fashion for aesthetics in contemporary sociology. It evaluates the claims that society is undergoing a deep-seated process of aestheticization, and that sociology is experiencing an aestheticization of its epistemological concerns. The aestheticization literature is divided as follows: (1) the re-reading of classical sociological theory through the aesthetic dimension of modernity; (2) the claim that postmodern society involves an `aestheticization of everyday life'; and (3) those sociological theories which stress that contemporary society is more and more (...) like a work of art in its form. The argument is made that the discovery of aesthetics as a way of problematizing sociological reasoning is to some extent rediscovery, returning to various Kantian precepts: the disinterestedness characteristic of aesthetic experiences; the antinomy between the individual and the social aspects of taste; and the work of art as an organism predicated on an inner teleology. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a discussion of R.G. Collingwood's cultural criticism, as a critique of the modern world, referring, beyond social and political institutions, to definite aspects of everyday existence, such as trends in aesthetics and technology, and to the form of rationality that disciplines the general attitudes of men. For this type of criticism, modernity becomes problematic as a 'form of life'. I therefore intend to provide a commentary of certain passages of Collingwood's writings, in (...) order to reconstruct the historical narrative where the genesis and the development of the modern world is represented as a process full of tensions and contradictions, thus allowingme to stress the coexistence of different patterns in cultural criticism. At the same time, I propose to discuss somemethodological and category problems arising from them: principally the explanatory problem about the specific causal relationships that take into account the traits of modern civilization which are the object of criticism, and the normative problem concerning the criteria applied in this criticism. (shrink)

Modernity’s grand plans were designed far from where we stand today. The prerogative of progress as an ideological imperative that defined colonialism as a natural balance between the ‘developed’ societies’ moral duty to rescue ‘underdeveloped’ peoples from their fate of myth and superstition created education. Education that functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic and aesthetics of the status quo and to bring about conformity to the hegemonic cultural form of western (...) technological consumer capitalism. This article explores whose education and for whom was it created by the imperial ideologies, not of nineteenth- or twentieth-century colonialism but for twenty-first-century western technological consumer neo-colonialism. From South Africa’s Apartheid era Liberation before education to Paulo Freire’s practice of freedom, this article questions the practices of new technologies, art and technology education at the edge of the disenfranchised. The traditional frameworks of education are on an ideological and methodological crisis worldwide. The hegemony of knowledge has ruptured away from academia. The linearity of thought has burst open as an omni-directional array. The hierarchy of authorship is contested and the audiences are becoming users and participants. As the ubiquity of information technologies, the emergence of connectedness, cheap chips and the presage of the Internet of things permeates every aspect of a particular section of people clustered in specific cities and spread out around the globe, a unique consciousness is evolving where a new collaboration paradigm is gaining a place of balance between us, nature and our technologies, our positions on social justice, and is evolving a symbiotic outlook at other cultures and societies. (shrink)

The contributors to Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists' and critics' engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking. Demonstrating the continuing relevance of systems aesthetics within contemporary art, the contributors highlight the ways that artists adopt systems thinking to address political, social, and ecological anxieties. They cover a wide range of artists and topics, from the performances of the Argentinian collective the Rosario Group (...) and the grid drawings of Charles Gaines to the video art of Singaporean artist Charles Lim and the mapping of global logistics infrastructures by contemporary artists like Hito Steyerl and Christoph Büchel. Together, the essays offer an expanded understanding of systems aesthetics in ways that affirm its importance beyond technological applications detached from cultural contexts. (shrink)

This paper finds its origin in a debate between Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Octavio Paz (1914-1998) on what is central to the idea of eroticism. Bataille posits that violence and transgression are fundamental to eroticism, and without prohibition, eroticism would cease to exist. Paz, however, views violence and transgression as merely intersecting with, rather than being intrinsic to, eroticism. Paz places focus on imagination, and transforms eroticism from a transgressive, to a ritualistic act. Eroticism thus functions as an intermediary, turning (...) animal sexuality into ceremony and rite. In this paper, I argue that Paz and Bataille are not fundamentally at odds in their conceptualisation of eroticism. Instead, Paz redefines the locus of eroticism by subverting its unsettling aspects. His conception of eroticism gives precedence to the imagination, which in itself is an act of violation. Imagination transgresses normal life, but this transgression – the violation of the habitual world – also introduces a glimpse of the numinous that Paz associates with belongingness. The paper further explores eroticism, as this is perceived today, and argues that it ultimately eliminates the threshold marked by transgression. The rise of the contemporary pornographic society is marked by a loss of imagination and transcendence, which ultimately reduces the subject into a mere automaton that demands instant gratification. (shrink)

This book explores aesthetic forms of the left to negotiate the political frontiers of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film and literature to illuminate interconnections across regions and countries, and discuss the shifting political contours of the region during the latter half of the 20th century. With a clear focus and conceptualization this volume raises two key questions; how left-wing art generated cultural and social formations, and how aesthetic forms (...) held political value across the region. Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, it traces the trajectories and nuances the left-wing cultural movement took during decolonization, and focuses on connections and continuities across post-1947 India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Following the evolution of progressive culture in the 1950s and 60s, networks of leftist filmmakers and theatre activists in postcolonial Pakistan, and the changing fate of left cultural politics in Sri Lanka and India during the 1970s, this book looks to reinvigorate the entangled histories of the left cultural movement in post-partition South Asia. (shrink)

Pragmatist aesthetics has not yet reached its full potential. This is primarily due to the legacy of John Dewey’s aesthetics. In order to confront the shortcomings and insufficiencies of his aesthetics, pragmatist aestheticians ought to establish a dialogue with continental aesthetics. The attempt to clarify what pragmatist aesthetics can learn from Theodor W. Adorno’s materialist aesthetics is still a desideratum. This essay focuses on two aspects. First, it shows that pragmatist aestheticians can use Adorno’s modern aesthetics in order (...) to gain a deeper and more complex understanding of the social nature or register of form (of what might be termed “die Gesellschaftlichkeit der Form”). Second, the essay demonstrates that Adorno, in contrast to Dewey, is valuable for the endeavor to grasp the significance of the dialectics of harmony and dissonance or organicity and fragmentation when analyzing modern art and literature. (shrink)

The changes in the subject matter of philosophical aesthetics are accompanied today by changes in evaluation, degradation of the traditional notion of beauty and also rejection of the old rigid division between beauty and ugliness, causing the dissolution of the category divides—in the process anti-value often becomes a value understood as a formal criteria. In the artistic critique the rejection of absolutism in favor of pluralism and diversity is accompanied by the functioning of the old categories in their new meanings. (...) One form of such anti-values is represented by the phenomenon of camp. As a specific kind of a paradox-figure, camp unveils the relation between aesthetization and anaesthetization.The new aesthetics is a dual figure, demanding examination of its two contrary aspects: aesthetical and anaesthetical. Camp’s rejection of the existing hierarchy of values, its admiration of what is not obviously ugly rather than of what is definitely not beautiful, brings this phenomenon close to Wolfgang Welch’s trend of anaesthetics. In many ways camp appears to be a theoretical model of modern identity as well as a specific type of a sophisticated aesthetic game. (shrink)

After reading the essays of Mr. Ts'ai and Mr. Chu, I have a few immature opinions. Generally speaking, I feel that in dealing with the errors of their opponents, both Ts'ai I in his criticism of Huang Yüeh-mien and Chu Kuang-ch'ien in his criticism of Ts'ai I are quite accurate and convincing. However, in presenting their own arguments of what is right, both of them are on shaky ground and in error. That is because in one way or another, consciously (...) or unconsciously, they either deny the objective aspect of the existence of beauty or deny the social aspect of the existence of beauty . All of them consider the objective and the social aspects of beauty as being either this or that, as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable opposites. They think that if we acknowledge the social aspect of beauty, we then have to deny the objective aspect, the fact that the existence of beauty does not depend on the subjective conditions of a person ; or if we acknowledge the objective aspect, we have to deny the social aspect, the fact that the existence of beauty depends on the social life of human beings. But in fact it is not like that. On the one hand, beauty cannot be separated from human society; on the other hand, it can have an objective existence which is independent of man's subjective consciousness. It is this question that I shall discuss. (shrink)

The article reveals the philosophical, worldview, aesthetically-axiological aspects of considering the universe as a symbolic phenomenon of the postmodern era. It is emphasized that the analysis of beauty, as the basic category of aesthetics, needs to find out its aggregate nature, depending on the individual and social semantic characteristics of reality. One of the key points of such an analysis is its metaphysical problematic – the direct emergence of constructive emotion into the realm of the transcendental, namely, the (...) view of Man from the Universe from the standpoint of eternity. The timeliness and necessity of considering the problem of the symbolic context of the universe is obvious in the context of the third millennium, the realities of which call into question the very fact of conservation of wildlife on Earth. In the minds of assimilating the finality of the earthly boot, its primarity of progressive stochasticity, in the midst of the amplification of the eschatological context, the people of the era of postmodernity are demonstrating the development of the fastflowing, hardened nonsense. In the philosophical tradition, the symbol is the role of a pure "selfness", not tied to the powerful moment of the object: the symbolic picture does not reflect reality, as it is - the symbol of knowing the "refair" in the sphere of the virtual. It is proved that for the modern man the Universe is the object of not only scientific, technological, but also philosophical, cultural studies, it synthesizes for the unity of the object of scientific interest, a symbol of aesthetic pleasure and a source of formation of appropriate images and archetypes. (shrink)

Modernity theory approaches modern experience as it incorporates a sense of itself as 'modern' (modernity), along with the possibilities and limitations of representing this in the arts and culture generally (modernism). The book interrogates modernity in the name of a fluid, unsettled, unsettling modernism. As the offspring of the Enlightenment and the Age of Sensibility, modernity is framed here through a cultural aesthetics that highlights not just an instrumental, exploitative approach to the world but the distinctive configuration of (...) embodiment, feeling, and imagination, that we refer to as 'civilization', in turn both explored and subverted through modernist experimentalism and reflexive thinking in culture and the arts. This discloses the rationalizing pretensions that underlie the modern project and have resulted in the sensationalist, melodramatic conflicts of good and evil that traverse our contemporary world of politics and popular culture alike. This innovative approach permits modernity theory to link otherwise fragmented insights of separate humanities disciplines, aspects of sociology, and cultural studies, by identifying and contributing to a central strand of modern thought running from Kant through Benjamin to the present. One aspect of modernity theory that results is that it cannot escape the paradoxes inherent in reflexive involvement in its own history. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno died in 1969 and his last major work, Ästhetische Theorie, was published a year later. Only recently, however, have his aesthetic writings begun to receive sustained attention in the English-speaking world. This collection of essays is an important contribution to the discussion of Adorno's aesthetics in Anglo-American scholarship.The essays are organized around the twin themes of semblance and subjectivity. Whereas the concept of semblance, or illusion, points to Adorno's links with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the concept of (...) subjectivity recalls his lifelong struggle with a philosophy of consciousness stemming from Kant, Hegel, and Lukács. Adorno's elaboration of the two concepts takes many dialectical twists. Art, despite the taint of illusion that it has carried since Plato's Republic, turns out in Adorno's account of modernism to have a sophisticated capacity to critique illusion, including its own. Adorno's aesthetics emphasizes the connection between aesthetic theory and many other aspects of social theory. The paradoxical genius of Aesthetic Theory is that it turns traditional concepts into a theoretical cutting edge. (shrink)

Theater rehearsals are (usually) confronted with the problem of having to transform a written text into an audio-visual, situated and temporal performance. Our contribution focuses on the emergence and stabilization of a gestural form as a solution for embodying a certain aesthetic concept which is derived from the script. This process involves instructions and negotiations, making the process of stabilization publicly and thus intersubjectively accessible. As scenes are repeatedly rehearsed, rehearsals are perspicuous settings for tracking interactional histories. Based on videotaped (...) professional theatre interactions in Germany, we focus on consecutive instances of rehearsing the same scene and trace the interactional history of a particular gesture. This gesture is used by the director to instruct the actors to play a particular aspect of a scene adopting a certain aesthetic concept. Stabilization requires the emergence of shared knowledge. We will show the practices by which shared knowledge is established over time during the rehearsal process and, in turn, how the accumulation of knowledge contributes to a change in the interactional practices themselves. Specifically, we show how a gesture emerges in the process of developing and embodying an aesthetic concept, and how this gesture eventually becomes a sign that refers to and evokes accumulated knowledge. At the same time, we show how this accumulated knowledge changes the instructional activities in the rehearsal process. Our study contributes to the overall understanding of knowledge accumulation in interaction in general and in theater rehearsals in particular. At the same time, it is devoted to the central importance of gestures in theater, which are both a means and a product of theatrical staging. (shrink)

China is currently afflicted by enormous environmental problems. This book, drawing on ancient and modern Chinese environmental thinking, considers what it is that makes an environment a desirable place for living. The book emphasises ideas of beauty, and discusses how these ideas can be applied in natural, agricultural and urban environments in order to produce desirable environments. The book argues that environment is both a product of nature and of human beings, and as such is potentially alterable by culture. (...) The book explores the three aspects of environmental beauty whereby such alteration might be beneficially made: integrated and holistic; ecological and man-made; and authentic and everyday. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Aesthetic Turn: Reading Eliot Deutsch on Comparative PhilosophyJoseph GrangeThe Aesthetic Turn: Reading Eliot Deutsch on Comparative Philosophy. Edited by Roger T. Ames. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Pp. xiv + 225. Hardcover $42.95.The quality of the eleven contributions to The Aesthetic Turn: Reading Eliot Deutsch on Comparative Philosophy, edited by Roger T. Ames, which celebrates the work of Eliot Deutsch, is one measure of the man. The other (...) is the man himself. It is no exaggeration to say that his efforts as a philosopher and editor of Philosophy East and West helped lay the foundation for the flourishing discipline now called comparative philosophy. In this work, some of the more important philosophers engaged in this worldwide effort comment on particular aspects of Deutsch's philosophy. The results are an exceptional tribute to an exceptional philosopher. Deutsch's responses show an open and gracious intelligence at work, one that is constantly learning from the insights of others.Arthur Danto offers his understanding of the relation between mysticism and art in Deutsch's philosophy. Deutsch's response brings the reader back to the formative years at Columbia University and the still simmering debate over what constitutes a genuine work of art. By revisiting this debate on the ontological status of the modern and the commonplace in a work of art we are provided flashes of insight into Deutsch's understanding of the mystical dimension of "radiant form" as the source of beauty in art. Graham Parkes offers a meditation on the form of the Zen rock garden and thereby prompts an enlightening discussion of the place of the arbitrary and the perfect in aesthetic experience. Essays by J. N. Mohanty and Thomas Kasulis inquire into Deutsch's theory of truth as the real presence of ontological "rightness" and the "fulfillment" of attention. The influence of Advaita Vedānta on Deutsch's thought is nicely brought out as is the continuity of his ideas with other classical European views of truth. Gerald Larson explores the role of the "Tradition Text" in Deutsch's comparative philosophy. Postmodern philosophers could learn from Deutsch's careful handling of historical sources even as he appropriates the moving center of Indian philosophy for his own philosophical projects.One of the most brilliant essays in this festschrift is contributed by Herbert Fingarette. By bringing together the art of "wei wuwei" and the act of suffering, understood as the process of letting be what is really happening, Fingarette restores to suffering its genuine spiritual core. To suffer is not just to suffer pain but rather to "Suffer the Way to be. Do not interfere. Be like water—passive, and yet in the end powerful" (p. 74). Deutsch is moved by this extraordinary essay to offer an exceptional restatement of the central doctrine of the Bhagavad Gītā and his own theory of free action and its relation to authentic art: "This power is compelling for others. It attracts, because it is evident; it calls because one recognizes its possibilities for oneself; it demands because it sets a standard by which one measures, as it were, one's own attainment as a person" (p. 193). The continuing presence of normative [End Page 116] thinking in the pursuit of liberation demonstrates just how serious and well-disciplined is the Asian understanding of moksha. This profound meditation by two wise men is one of the highlights of this book.But Deutsch can also be very tough. The exchange between him and Daya Krishna on the possibility of effective worldly action, given the tenets of the Advaita Vedānta school, offers the spectacle of two very powerful minds struggling with ultimate issues of deep metaphysical concern. Deutsch's response involves careful distinctions to be drawn between concepts such as person, self, and individual. These in turn allow him to paint a very concrete portrait of the acting person as first of all and always a loving being. The continuing relevance of forms of idealistic thinking to a largely secular world is given a robust defense in Deutsch's review of his lifelong efforts to craft a theory of the person as having within its very being the moral, social... (shrink)

The article соnsiders the socio-cultural aspects of the standard model (SM) in elementary particle physics and history of its creation. SM is a quantum field gauge theory of electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions, which is the basis of the modern theory of elementary particles. The process of its elaboration covers a twenty-year period: from 1954 (the concept of gauge fields by C. Yang and R. Mills) to the early 1970s., when the construction of renormalized quantum chromodynamics and electroweak (...) theory wеre completed. The socio-cultural aspects of SM are explored on the basis of a quasi-empirical approach, by studying the texts of its creators and participants in the relevant events. We note also the important role of such an “external” factor as large-scale state projects on the creation of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, which provided personnel and financial support for fundamental research in the field of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics (the implementation of thermonuclear projects took place just in the 1950s, and most of the theorists associated with the creation of SM were simultaneously the main developers of thermonuclear weapons, especially in the USSR). The formation of SM is considered as a competition between two research programs (paradigms) – gauge-field and phenomenological, associated with the rejection of the field concept. The split of the scientific community of physicists associated with this competition is going on during this period. It’s accompanied by a kind of “negotiations”, which in the early 1970s lead to the triumph of the gauge field program and the restoration of the unity of the scientific community. The norms and rules of the scientific ethos played the regulatory role in this process. The scientific-realistic position of the metaphysical attitudes of the majority of theorists and their negative attitude to the concepts of philosophical relativism and social construction of scientific knowledge are emphasized. Some features of the history of SM creation are also noted, such as the positive role of aesthetic judgments; “scientific-school” form of research (in the USSR), its pros and cons; a connection to historical-scientific “drama of ideas” with “dramas of people” who made a wrong choice and (or) “missed their opportunities”. (shrink)

In a series of articles written for the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850, later published by Friedrich Engels as The Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx looked back on the failed French revolution of 1848 and attempted to explain how the democratic aspirations that inspired the February assault on the July Monarchy-and promised to fulfill the dashed hopes of 1789, 1792, and 1830-also led to its termination in the reactionary popular dictatorship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular sovereignty, which had so (...) often defined the emancipatory visions of two generations of radical activists and thinkers was now not only an obstacle to genuine emancipation, but a plebiscitary source of power for newly emergent forms of political domination. Bonapartism became, for Marx, an important way of understanding the complex internal dynamics of popular-and later "populist"-authoritarianism. It is an analysis that continues to resonate powerfully today. The national enthusiasm that propelled the revolution forward, and which overturned the hated regime of Louis Phillippe in three glorious days, had successfully established for the first time in history a parliamentary republic based in universal male suffrage. The Second Republic's provisional government was immediately thrown into a legitimation crisis, however, by the underlying sectional, parliamentary, and class conflicts lurking beneath its illusory foundation in the people's unitary will. When the popular classes of Paris returned to the barricades in June to protest the conservative government's closure of the National Workshops-and to convert the political revolution into a social revolution based in the "right to work"-they were abandoned by their fellow citizens and thousands were massacred in the streets by Cavaignac's National Guard. The "fantastic republic" built around the pretensions of national unity, Marx proclaimed, quickly "dissolved in powder and smoke." Tocqueville described the June days as a "slave's war," and in its aftermath the Party of Order quickly consolidated its power against any furthering of revolutionary aspiration. (shrink)

... composed by Herms Niel as a Durchhaltefanfare, a fanfare of perseverance, for the German troops that had been surrounded on the Crimea peninsula by ...

In the context of the main principles, modernity has affected the relationship of individuals with society in two ways; either by promoting a comprehensive individualization or by paradoxically surrendering individual freedoms to new relations due to the many risks it carries. In the modernization process, religion has been affected not only in the context of traditional and everyday patterns; but also, it has been significantly influenced in terms of its dimensions corresponding to the public space. This study examined the relationship (...) between religion and modernization in the sample of Theology Faculty at Sivas Cumhuriyet University which is an organized and official field of religion. The aim of the research is to understand and explain the aspects of modernization in theology faculties that look at individual identity through some concepts such as religion and world designs, pluralism, perspectives on lifestyles, attitudes towards gender, and consumption. In line with these goals, the article problematizes the relations between the attitudes and behaviors of the participants due to modernization and the religious theory of orthodox Islam, political secularism, globalization, and socioeconomic and cultural environments. Within a qualitative method, the research was planned as a "single event" study. With the help of semi-structured interview questions, the data obtained from a sample group consisting of male and female students from different classes by techniques such as "problem-centered interview", "narrative", "participated observation" were theoretically analyzed from interactionist, ethnomethodological, and phenomenological perspectives. Considering its sources, theology in Turkey was shaped under the intense influence of Jacobin and elitist political secularism during the first three quarters of the Republic. In the last quarter of its century-old history, it can be said that a conservative, Islamist secularism was effective there. In this context, the status accorded to religion by the political institution in its authoritarian structure in Turkey, on the one hand, makes sense in terms of the shape and direction of religion and society relations, on the other hand, it gives an idea about the general situation of theology as an official educational institution and the contents of the roles and functions expected from it. For this reason, it is understood that the future of theology in Turkey will be shaped depending on the politics, religion, human, and society paradigms of the political bureaucracy for now, whether in terms of human resources and public visibility or within the scope of the relations of institutional religion with society. All these are related to the social realities as well as the central position and character of politics in the society in Turkey. Besides, these realities strongly show the close relationship of theology with Turkish modernization. For this reason, in this study, political secularism has been seen as an important component of religion and modernization relations in theology. However, this relationship is not with a one-sided point of view that secularism affects theology; from the perspective that theology also affects the direction and forms of modernization and secularization in Turkey, it is discussed in a mutual way. As a matter of fact, as it can be seen, while theology was functionalized for the construction of the nation-state and a secular society paradigm in most of the history of the republic, it also produced an alternative, Islamic secularization related to a postmodern ethics by approaching the ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic designs of religion and world of environmental movements in more modern periods. Today, theology students, like every student, are faced with fluidizing all the artificial and natural boundaries of modernity and their traditional environments outside their own borders, and at the same time being a member of a wider world without borders. These developments, which clearly point to a change in attitude and attitude towards the secular field, are not only for theology students to reach new values in religion and world relations; it has also been important in the context of their entering into very important conflicts and tensions in the context of their individual identities. Finally, when it was associated with “orthodox Islam”, it was seen that this new socialization environment and the tension created by these created a series of alienation in theology in the context of gender, lifestyles, leisure activities, and consumption. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over." (...) --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

Through the close analysis of musical performance and tradition, the scholarly contributiors to Island Songs provide a global review of how island songs, their lyrics, and their singers engage with the challenges of modernity, migration, and social change uncovering common patterns despite the diversity and local character of their subjects"--Cover p. [4].

The Architecture Machine: Industrial Design and Theories of Racial Evolution -- The Bauhaus and the Aura of Authorship: Class and Race in the Age of Technological Reproducibility -- Post-War European Modernism: Or, What the Primitive Hut Really Said -- Bricolage, Megastructure, Interface: Yona Friedman and the Humanitarian Machine -- The Earth Unfolded: Aspen, Africa, and the Geopolitics of Environment -- Harlem Speaks to Aspen: Environmental Politics versus Environmental Design -- Pentecostal Technologies: The Architecture Machine (Again) -- Technological Sovereignty and the (...) Global South -- Conclusion: The Present and Future of Spiritual Ergonomics. (shrink)

Does art need to be beautiful? Can humour be beautiful? What is the relationship between beauty and mimetic behaviour? What does literature have to do with beauty? What are the limitations of neuroscientific approaches to beauty? Are the experience of beauty and the production of â oeartâ confined to anatomically modern humans? Is the experience of beauty confined to humans at all? These are just some of the questions discussed in this volume. It gathers together authors from different areas (...) of research, including philosophy, history of philosophy, history of ideas, cognitive biology, neuroscience, anthropology and paleoanthropology, in order to investigate some of the most debated aspects of the problem of beauty and aesthetic experience. The volume will appeal to both the general reader and the specialist in the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences. (shrink)

There are two approaches that dominate contemporary opera performances. The first may be characterised as producing a subtle, aesthetic and stylistic means of expression. The second runs up visual, interpretation and content means to their maximum expressivity and the audience is exposed to violence, sex and experience disgust. This paper analyses specific productions by renowned European theatre and opera directors, in order to shed light on the way in which opera directors cope with the threat of terrorism, sexual violence, and (...) the impact of the mass media upon the moral belief system of modern man. Within the context of the bold productions of European theatre-makers Slovak opera theatre seems conservative, gravitating towards the aesthetic aspect of opera. (shrink)

The hermeneutic movement in philosophy and criticism has done us a service by directing our attention to the role of critical interpretation in understanding the humanities. But it has done us a disservice also because it does not recognize any comparable role for interpretation in the natural sciences and in this way sharply separates the two fields of scholarship and experience.1 Consequently, I shall argue, the central truths and virtues of hermeneutics have become encumbered with a whole string of false (...) interferences and misleading dichotomies. These distortions have had two effects. On the one hand, they have rationality which are crucial goals of the natural sciences; and, on the other hand, they have encouraged an exaggerated idea of the extent to which difference in personal and/or cultural standpoint rule out any such goal for the humanities. Once we recognize that the natural sciences too are in the business of "construing" reality, we shall be better able to preserve the central insights of the hermeneutic method, without succumbing to the misleading implications of its rhetorical misuse.Physics, in particular, has always required its participants to adopt an interpretive standpoint, and this standpoint has changed more than once during the historical development of that science. Yet this variable standpoint has done nothing to undercut the commitment of physicists to rationality and objectivity: on the contrary, they have made it one of their chief aims to discover just what aspects of reality, or nature, lend themselves to interpretation and understanding as considered from any particular standpoint. If we can drive this wedge between scientific objectivity and hermeneutic relativity in the case of physics, we are free to return to the humanities and apply the same distinction there too. It has too often, and too readily, been assumed that whatever needs to be interpreted in order to be understood will, to that extent, become a matter of taste or subjectivity; and, as a result, any claims to rationality and objectivity in the critical realms–whether moral or aesthetic, political and intellectual–have been too hastily surrendered.The current sharp distinction between scientific explanations and hermeneutic interpretation was launched by Wilhelm Dilthey nearly a century ago; and, in justice to Dilthey, we need to bear in mind that the interpretive element in natural science was far less evident then than it is today. Scientists nowadays view the world from a new and less rigid standpoint. This period which Frederick Ferre calls "postmodern science," differs from the older one of "modern science" in just those respects that enable us to reconcile the rational claims that have always been central to the natural sciences with a new hermeneutic richness and variability.1. Some will respond that Edmund Husserl, for one, spoke of the natural sciences as being, in their own way, "interpretive"; but the role allotted to natural science by the phenomonologists and their successors—I have in mind Hans Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermass much as Martin Heidegger and Husserl—I an impoverished and unhistorical one. The hermeneutic philosophers have not, in this respect, fully recognized either the plurality or the historical variability of the interpretive modes adopted in one or another of the natural sciences for different intellectual purposes and at different stages in their historical development.Stephen Toulmin is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He is author of, among other works, Foresight and Understanding, Human Understanding, and Knowing and Acting and is currently at work on volume 2 of Human Understanding. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "The Inwardness of Mental Life," appeared in the Autumn 1979 issue. (shrink)

Theodor W.Adorno was one of the towering intellectuals of the twentieth century. His contributions cover such a myriad of fields, including the sociology of culture, social theory, the philosophy of music, ethics, art and aesthetics, film, ideology, the critique of modernity and musical composition, that it is difficult to assimilate the sheer range and profundity of his achievement. His celebrated friendship with Walter Benjamin has produced some of the most moving and insightful correspondence on the origins and objects of (...) the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. This unprecedented collection, devised and assembled by one of Europe's rising social theorists, distills the best from published assessments and responses to Adorno's oeuvre. The collection is divided into 4 volumes: Volume 1: Philosophy, Ethics and Critical Theory Part 1: Negative Dialectics Included here are contributions on the concept of totality in the writings of Adorno and Lukacs; Adorno and Bourgeois Philosophy; the relationship between Adorno and Kierkegaard; Adorno's Critique of Idealism; Adorno and Linguistics; Adono and Habermas. Part 2: Ethics and Redemption This is comprised of contributions on Adorno and Truth; Adorno's Inverse Theology; and Adorno and the Ineffable Part 3: Critical Theory, Ideology Critique and Social Science Included here are contributions on Adorno's relation to the Positivist Dispute; the Popper-Adorno Controversy; Adorno and Empirical Research; and Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Volume 2: Aesthetic Theory Part 1: Art and Politics in 'Aesthetic Theory' This includes material on the De-Aestheticization of Art; Adorno, Utopia and Mimesis; Adorno and autonomous art; Adorno and Dialectics; Adorno, Marxism and Art; Art and Criticism in Adorno's Aesthetics; Adorno's concept of the Avant-Garde. Part 2: Philosophy of Music This includes contributions on Adorno's music and social criticism; Adorno and nostalgia; Adorno, Heidegger and the meaning of music; Adorno and Wagner. Part 3: On Jazz The material included here addresses questions of Adorno and Popular Music; Adorno's encounter with jazz; Adorno, Jazz and Society; and the reasons for Adorno's apparent hatred of jazz. Volume 3: Social Theory & The Critique of Modernity Part 1: On 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' Included here are chapters on the dialectic of enlightenment and post-functionalist thought; dialectic of enlightenment as genealogy critique; the relationship between the dialectic of enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity; Adorno's critique of progress; Adorno and theories of subjectivity; and the dialectic of enlightenment and rationality. Part 2: Anti-Semitism This consists of material on Adorno and Horkheimer; and Adorno and Public Sphere Part 3: Popular Culture and Capitalism Included here are contributions on Adorno and Sport; Adorno's alleged left-wing elitism; Adorno's critique of astrology and the Occult; Benjamin and Adorno on Disney; Adorno, Totalitarianism and the Welfare State; and Adorno and Mass Society. Volume 4: Cultural Theory and the Postmodern Challenge Part 1: 'Damaged Life': Exile in America This section includes Leo Lowenthal's insightful recollections of Adorno; Adorno and the primal history of subjectivity; Adorno and Los Angeles; Adorno's relation to American culture; and Adorno's exile in England. Part 2: Film Theory This section includes chapters on Adorno and the Culture Industry; Benjamin, Adorno and Contemporary Film Theory; Adorno, Aesthetics and the Social. Part 3: Wellmer and Adorno Included here are papers on Aesthetic, Psychic and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer; and New German Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Part 4: Jameson on Adorno Included here are papers on Jameson, Adorno and the persistence of the Utopian; and a Marxism for Postmodernism Part 5: Modernism and Postmodernism This section contains papers on Adorno, Foucault and the Modern Intellectual; Adorno, Foucault and Two forms of the Critique of Modernity; Adorno and the Habermas-Lyotard Debate; Adorno, Postmodernism and Edward Said; Adorno, Heidegger and Postmodernism; Adorno and the Decline of the Modern Age; The literary process of modernism; Adorno, Tradition and the Postmodern Part 5: The Feminist Response Included here are contributions on Adorno and Judith Butler; Adorno, Art Theory and Feminist Practice; and Gender in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. The collection comes with a superb Introduction to Adorno by Gerard Delanty which elucidates the main contributions of this penetrating and enduring thinker. Comprehensive and consistently illuminating, the collection includes the thought on Adorno from some of the most distinguished commentators on social theory. Included here are selections from the writings of Susan Buck-Morss, Martin Jay, Agnes Heller; David Frisby; Johann Arnason; Richard Wolin; Andrew Bowie; Robert Hulnot-Kentor; Leo Lowenthal; Richard Rorty Axel Honneth; Albrecht Wellmer; and Jurgen Habermas. The result is a peerless research resource allowing readers to delve into all aspects of Adorno's extraordinary accomplishments in social thought, philosophy and cultural criticism. It will be required reading for students of the Frankfurt School, Marxism, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics and Social Theory. (shrink)

Huizinga never resolved his incompatible inclinations to view history as serious, scholarly, rational, intellectual and as playful, imaginative, aesthetic, and contemplative. The social aspects of the extra-scientific approach, which saw culture as an activity of the elite serving the noble and beautiful, account for Huizinga's aversion to the modern democratization of society in the larger role played by the masses, and in turn for his methodological errors: idealizing the past and treating the West, both non-totalitarian and totalitarian, (...) as a single culture. Huizinga, blind to the economic and political realities from which he divorced culture, demanded renewed spiritual values rather than socio-political reform. (shrink)

György Márkus, as a leading member of the Budapest School led by György Lukács in Hungary, is closely concerned with aesthetics. His final unfinished writings in political exile in Sydney were focused on the question of modern cultural autonomy. From the 1960s to the new century, from Budapest to Sydney in Australia, he established a new form of Neo-Marxist aesthetics on the basis of critical theory drawn from Lukács to the Frankfurt School. His aesthetics includes three dimensions: an aesthetics (...) of praxis, a reconstruction of Lukács’s aesthetics and a theory of aesthetic modernity. His aesthetics is characteristic of analytic philosophy, especially ‘categorical analysis’. It shifts from philosophical aesthetics in the Hungarian period, which is based on an ontological foundation, that is, materialist phenomenology, to social or sociological aesthetics in the Australian period concerning social modernity, institution, constitution, culture, and so on. This is a turn from a philosophical paradigm to a structural one as regards aesthetics, which indicates a break with Lukács’s late return in the early 1960s to Hegelian inspired Ontology of Social Being. Márkus is strictly and essentially an essayist in fragments, who distinguishes himself from the other members of the Budapest School in this way. Ironically, this genre is once again influenced by the young Lukács’s aesthetics. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, there has been an increased focus on gender in the research literature concerning British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, which most likely is caused by the increasing interest in the social aspects of gender inspired by poststructuralist thinking. Although such readings have been illuminative and fruitful, focusing on the social and the interconnections between Wollstonecraft and modernity seems to have brought with them a neglect of two interesting aspects of Wollstonecraft’s notion about gender. On the (...) one hand, her thoughts on the body seem somewhat underexposed, while her impact on the subsequent British romanticists is equally neglected. The article focuses on these two aspects. Here the analyses are based on Wollstonecraft’s discussions with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke about the relations gender has to nature, bodies, and aesthetics; discussions which inform a conception of gender that the later romantics would take inspiration from. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of neurorobotics looks to neuroscience to overcome the limitations of modern robotics technology, to robotics to advance our understanding of the neural system’s inner workings, and to information technology to develop tools that support those complementary endeavours. The development of these technologies is still at an early stage, which makes them an ideal candidate for proactive and anticipatory ethical reflection. This article explains the current state of neurorobotics development within the Human Brain Project, originating from a (...) close collaboration between the scientific and technical experts who drive neurorobotics innovation, and the humanities and social sciences scholars who provide contextualising and reflective capabilities. This article discusses some of the ethical issues which can reasonably be expected. On this basis, the article explores possible gaps identified within this collaborative, ethical reflection that calls for attention to ensure that the development of neurorobotics is ethically sound and socially acceptable and desirable. (shrink)

What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated - from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the (...) Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space - an astro-culture - in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come. (shrink)

This is a follow-up article of Strauss 2011. In order to transcend the shortcomings present in the dialectical legacy regarding normativity, this article further explores key elements within the dialectical tradition focused on the basic motive of nature and freedom and the effect it had on modern social contract theories which aimed at reconstructing human society from its “atoms,” the individuals . The transition to an alternative approach commences with a discussion of the distinction between conditions and what (...) is conditioned. It concerns a correlation found within all aspects of reality, namely that between the law side or norm side on the one hand and the factual side on the other. The basic assumption of this alternative view is found in the idea of ontic normativity which is rooted in a non-reductionist ontology. Against this broader background shortcomings in Kelsen’s theory of law are briefly traced to the dialectic of the causal and non-causal , before a positive characterization of the concept of a principle is given. It turned out that it is a compound basic concept in which terms from different modal aspects of reality are encapsulated at once. The recognition of ontic normativity therefore also enables a distinct methodology, the transcendental-empirical method, which makes it possible to distinguish between the pre-positive nature of a principle, as a universal and constant starting-point for human action, and the historically varying ways in which such a principle can be made valid, ( enforced ) through a competent organ disposing over an accountable will and capable to interpret the unique historical circumstances in which the principle has to be positivized (given a positive form or shape ). The nature of modal norms is highlighted in terms of various examples, such as jural, historical, logical and aesthetic principles, with special reference to Derrida’s understanding of credit as economic trust or economic faith. In order to make this transcendental-empirical method understandable a more detailed account of the nature of modal aspects is given. The emphasis on ontic normativity also helps us to steer clear of conceptions of natural law , historicism and the shortcomings present in the idea of a social construction of the world . The guiding perspective flowing from this analysis is that modal norms can be articulated through an analysis of analogical structural moments on the law sides of the normative aspects. The last part of this article briefly introduces the distinction between modal and typical norms without entering into a discussion of the latter. (shrink)

This is a follow-up article of Strauss 2011. In order to transcend the shortcomings present in the dialectical legacy regarding normativity, this article further explores key elements within the dialectical tradition focused on the basic motive of nature and freedom and the effect it had on modern social contract theories which aimed at reconstructing human society from its “atoms,” the individuals. The transition to an alternative approach commences with a discussion of the distinction between conditions and what is (...) conditioned. It concerns a correlation found within all aspects of reality, namely that between the law side or norm side on the one hand and the factual side on the other. The basic assumption of this alternative view is found in the idea of ontic normativity which is rooted in a non-reductionist ontology. Against this broader background shortcomings in Kelsen’s theory of law are briefly traced to the dialectic of the causal and non-causal, before a positive characterization of the concept of a principle is given. It turned out that it is a compound basic concept in which terms from different modal aspects of reality are encapsulated at once. The recognition of ontic normativity therefore also enables a distinct methodology, the transcendental-empirical method, which makes it possible to distinguish between the pre-positive nature of a principle, as a universal and constant starting-point for human action, and the historically varying ways in which such a principle can be made valid, through a competent organ disposing over an accountable will and capable to interpret the unique historical circumstances in which the principle has to be positivized . The nature of modal norms is highlighted in terms of various examples, such as jural, historical, logical and aesthetic principles, with special reference to Derrida’s understanding of credit as economic trust or economic faith. In order to make this transcendental-empirical method understandable a more detailed account of the nature of modal aspects is given. The emphasis on ontic normativity also helps us to steer clear of conceptions of natural law, historicism and the shortcomings present in the idea of a social construction of the world. The guiding perspective flowing from this analysis is that modal norms can be articulated through an analysis of analogical structural moments on the law sides of the normative aspects. The last part of this article briefly introduces the distinction between modal and typical norms without entering into a discussion of the latter. (shrink)

This review covers the content of reports and discussions at the 12th Kant Readings Conference held in April 2019 and organised by the research unit of the Academia Kantiana of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad. Traditionally, Kant Readings have been thematically universal, embracing all the areas of Kant’s legacy. This time the conference focused on practical philosophy, i.e. the historical grounds and modern significance of Kant’s ethical thought as compared to other philosophical projects of the Enlightenment era. (...) Due attention was paid to the reception of the ethics of Kant and the Enlightenment by philosophers in Russia and the West. Breakout groups discussed aspects of interconnection between the Enlightenment ethics and esthetics as well as interdisciplinary problems at the interface of philosophy of politics and philosophy of education, including ways to counter various forms of intellectual enslavement. The possibilities of applying Kant’s ethical principles were discussed in close connection with the interpretation of the latest trends in the development of science and technology. It was noted that the intellectual and social communication environment of today has much in common with that of the Enlightenment era, which makes the philosophical strategy proposed during that era amenable to adaptation and development. (shrink)