The first anthology exclusively devoted to Hegel’s linguistic thought.

: The article investigates the earliest appearance of a group of words which are identified in the literature as the shahāda but are rarely defined on the assumption that everyone knows what the shahāda is. The basic argument is that there was more than one version of the shahāda circulating in the Islamic world at the beginning of the eighth decade A.H./690s C.E. and that scholars need to define which version they mean when using the term “shahāda” for this early (...) period. Evidence for the argument includes data from stelae from Aswan to the Fatimid era, the Dome of the Rock and early Muslim coinage. (shrink)

This article explores a sequence of events, a combination of Orthodox Christian village and chapel festivals, associated processions and a cross-border procession, through the theoretical concept of ritualisation. The sequence of events takes place annually in the Finnish villages of Saarivaara and Hoilola, the Pörtsämö wilderness cemetery and the former Finnish municipality of Korpiselkä, located today in Russia; it attracts participants with religious and other motives, including nostalgia and family history. An analysis is made of how different and sometimes contradictory (...) modes of action are structured and intertwined to form a coherent ritual event. On the basis of original anthropological research undertaken near and over the border between Finland and Russia, in Karelia, it emerges that the ritual mastery by Orthodox priests and shared goals and motives of heritage and culture give the journey a necessary structure, which can be studied and explained in terms of ritualisation. (shrink)

Contrary to many of the standard histories of German Idealism, the most recent research suggests that it did not grow smoothly and seamlessly from Kant's critical philosophy into Hegel's mature system, nor did it proceed without serious challenges launched from a wide variety of alternative philosophical perspectives. Probably the most sustained and trenchant assault upon this tradition came from a group of already well-established philosophers and intellectuals who referred to their project as "metacritique," a critical movement spearheaded by such luminaries (...) as J. G. Hamann, S. Maimon, F. H. Jacobi, and J. G. Herder. Employing approaches and arguments clearly prefiguring much later critiques, like those of ordinary language philosophy, logical positivism, and even cognitive psychology, the metacritics attempted to refute the transcendental pretensions of the German idealists through a rigorous linguistic critique of idealist philosophical discourse. This linguistic challenge and its response from the idealist party also drew into its ambit such important figures of the early Romantic movement as August and Friedrich Schlegel and August Ferdinand Bernhardi. Although this extended discussion between the early idealists and their linguistic metacritics formed an important episode of European intellectual history, neither the crucial texts nor an interpretive discussion of them have to date been available to the English-speaking student. The present work fills this important gap in our understanding of the period by offering an extensive interpretive and critical overview of the metacritical challenge and the responses to it, together with English translations of the key texts, each with its own introduction and commentary. This outstanding collection will be useful for any class on German idealism and for providing an accurate historical context for some of the later philosophical charges leveled against this tradition. (shrink)

Written by philosopher Jere Surber, Culture and Critique familiarizes students with both the broad and specialized meanings of cultural studies, providing detailed explanations of theoretical terms, critical strategies, and discursive traditions upon which it is based. In its broad and more theoretical sense, cultural studies indicates a range of modern discourses which, beyond disciplines and their particular theories, employ the notion of culture in a distinctive way and specify certain critical practices as appropriate for analyzing given cultural activities, products, (...) and institutions. In its narrower sense, cultural studies is a recently developed type of discourse, first appearing in several British universities in the 1950s, which, while eclectically drawing on certain theoretical aspects of earlier forms of critical cultural discourse, orients itself toward the analysis and practical critique of concrete contemporary cultural distinctions based on economic and political inequities.A useful reference for reading works in cultural studies, Culture and Critique puts unfamiliar terms and ideas into historical perspective and explains how the founding texts of the discipline first appeared. (shrink)

In recent years, it has become widely accepted that linguistic questions were much more central to the philosophical tradition of German idealism than had been previously thought. However, most of the key texts for this discussion remain largely unknown. The present work makes available, for the first time in English, what is the seminal work for this issue: Johann Gottlieb Fichte's monograph of 1795 entitled On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language, together with other closely related essays. The (...) translations are accompanied by a detailed interpretive essay that seeks to place these materials in their historical context, relate them to the systematic concerns of German idealism, and evaluate them in relation to later approaches to language, especially those of semiotics and poststructuralism. It also explores the role played by the linguistic thought of the German idealists in the emergance of modern "scientific linguistics" with wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as its connections with the origins of German romanticism. While the book draws upon state-of-the-art scholarship in these areas, it is written in such a way as to be accessible to any serious student of philosophy, intellectual and literary history, and linguistics. (shrink)

Dorion Cairns was one of Husserl’s closest pupils, his closest American pupil, and a leading translator, interpreter, and teacher of phenomenology in the United States. His translations of Cartesian Meditations and Formal and Transcendental Logic remain authoritative, his Guide forTranslating Husserl and Conversations with Husserl and Fink are classic texts in the history of phenomenology, and a number of his students from his years at the New School for Social Research are leading figures in contemporary phenomenology.The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (...) is Cairns’s previously unpublished 1933 Harvard dissertation. It is also the first volume of what will likely be six volumes of the Philosophical Papers of Dorion Cairns.The Editorial Committee for this project is comprised of Lester Embree, Fred Kersten , and Richard Zaner, the latter of whom serves as Cairns’s literary executor. Cairns composed the dissertation in the six months .. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Hegel's Linguistic Inheritance Hegel's Early View of Language in the Jena Period (1804–1806) Language in the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Language in Hegel's ‘Mature System’ ( The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences ) (1818–1830) The Philosophy of Language: The Unwritten Volume.

This collection, essentially a Festschrift presented to Paul Weiss on his eighty-fifth birthday, consists of fourteen contributions, primarily by his former students and colleagues past and present, together with an introduction by the editor that provides a helpful historical survey of Weiss's philosophical development. About half of the material seems to have been written specifically for this volume, the rest having either appeared elsewhere or having been presented at a symposium on the philosophy of Paul Weiss held in 1981. The (...) contributions are organized into five sections: Weissian method, the relation between Weiss's work and the sciences, issues concerning the relation between metaphysics and ethics, four essays exploring Weiss's contributions to such areas as sports and architecture, and three final pieces intended perhaps to convey something of a sense of "Weiss in process." The editor also provides a chronological bibliography of Weiss's publications. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an agent-based model for studying the impact of 'myside bias' on the argumentative dynamics in scientific communities. Recent insights in cognitive science suggest that scientific reasoning is influenced by `myside bias'. This bias manifests as a tendency to prioritize the search and generation of arguments that support one's views rather than arguments that undermine them. Additionally, individuals tend to apply more critical scrutiny to opposing stances than to their own. Although myside bias may pull individual (...) scientists away from the truth, its effects on communities of reasoners remain unclear. The aim of our model is two-fold: first, to study the argumentative dynamics generated by myside bias, and second, to explore which mechanisms may act as a mitigating factor against its pernicious effects. Our results indicate that biased communities are epistemically less successful than non-biased ones, and that they also tend to be less polarized than non-biased ones. Moreover, we find that two socio-epistemic mechanisms help communities to mitigate the effect of the bias: the presence of a common filter on weak arguments, which can be interpreted as shared beliefs, and an equal distribution of agents for each alternative at the beginning. (shrink)

The development and utility of genetically modified crops for smallholders around the world is controversial. Critical questions include what traits and crops are to be developed; how they can be adapted to smallholders’ ecological, social and economic contexts; which dissemination channels should be used to reach smallholders; and which policy environments will enable the greatest benefits for smallholders and the rural poor. A key question is how the voices of smallholders who have experience with or desire to use GM technologies (...) enter the larger debate. Africa has the greatest number of smallholders and poor with the least exposure to GM crops. Because of the well-established use of GM crops in South Africa by commercial farmers, we formed a community of practice involving smallholders, extension, researchers, non-profits and agribusiness in KwaZulu-Natal to examine the conditions under which GM crops are used by smallholders, how smallholders interact with GM technologies and what insights smallholders and other stakeholders can provide regarding these questions. One of the advantages of the CoP approach is that it brings stakeholders together in a non-hierarchical way that encourages new ways of thinking and new partnerships. Such interaction around a specific project can enhance the voice of smallholders in a variety of ways. In our project, smallholder participants have increased their knowledge and can make better decisions about GM technologies, which had been barriers for them. Notably, they have also improved their knowledge of maize production practices, accessed new practice networks, and met new researchers and resource providers. They are now being integrated into these networks in a way that should improve their livelihoods and make the wants and needs of smallholders better known. Such knowledge and experience has improved their voice in agriculture and rural development discussions. (shrink)

The following three related contributions jointly serve to lift up elements of the thought of the anthropolo­gist Gregory Bateson that can be fruitfully compared with elements of Michael Polanyi’s thought. In a brief introduction, William Stillwell reviews Bateson’s life and developing interests. Stillwell also provides, in a creative dialog form akin to Bateson’s own dialogs, a short review article on Noel Charlton’s Understanding Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty and the Sacred Earth. The third piece is Jere Moorman’s short 1991 essay (...) (now out of print) discussing Polanyi’s ideas about tacit knowing and their connection with Bateson’s ideas about the double bind. (shrink)

Updates earlier arguments for the plausibility of the thesis that basic aspects of well being are incommensurable, a thesis central to new classical natural law theory. Responds to objections from Jonathan Crowe and Jason Brennan.