The paper aims to disclosure of key points in the development of the German tradition of historiography of philosophy after the 90s of the 18th century. The starting point was the so-called «dispute about the method» of historiography, which erupted in the last decade of the 18th century not without the influence of Kant’s «critical philosophy». Its participants (Reinhold, Fülleborn, Goess, Grohmann, Tennemann, and others) put forward different theses, but they agreed that it is Kant’s philosophy that makes (...) it possible to create a «philosophical history of philosophy». A type of historiography was formed, which was based on the criterion of «progress of philosophy» and Kant’s position was considered as a standard for any historiography. Subsequently, other types of historiography were formed, which followed either the opposite criterion of «regress» or «decadence», or tried to combine both of these criteria (Hegel). In the second half of the 19th century «history of problems» becomes widespread as a principle of research and presentation of the history of philosophy, its main representatives were W. Windelband, N. Hartmann, H. Heimsoeth. Instead, in the second half of the 20th century the dominant type of historiography is the «history of concepts», which finds linguistic and philosophical justification in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. In recent decades, the German tradition of historiography has been enriched by K. Flasсh’s project «historical philosophy» and by D. Henrich program «constellation research». In both of these projects, there is a noticeable attraction to microhistory, going beyond the «classic» texts, discovering hitherto unknown figures and sources that significantly expand the established practice of the historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

The importance of the Low Countries as a centre for the study of foreign languages is well-known. The mutual relationship between the Dutch grammatical tradition and the Western European context has, however, been largely neglected. In this collection of papers on the history of linguistics in the Low Countries the editors have made an effort to present the Dutch tradition in connection with that of the neighbouring countries. Three articles by Claes, Dibbets and Klifman deal with the earliest stages of (...) the development of a grammar for the Dutch vernacular. Several important European figures worked in the Low Countries; their contribution to linguistics is discussed in articles on Vossius (Rademaker), Spinoza (Klijnsmit), and one of the most original phoneticians of European linguistics, Montanus (Hulsker). Vivian Salmon's article is a survey on the relations between English and Dutch linguistics in the field of foreign language teaching. In the 19th century Dutch linguistics had a special relationship with German general and historical linguistics; four articles deal with this period (Jongeneelen, van Driel, le Loux-Schuringa, Noordegraaf). Finally, there are three articles by Kaldewij, Hagen and van Els/Knops on the development of three branches of linguistics in the 20th century: structuralism, dialectology and applied linguistics. This volume should be of interest for all specialists in the history of linguistics in Europe, who are interested in the interdependence of the various traditions. (shrink)

In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language , Saul Kripke presents his influential reading of Wittgenstein’s later writings on language. One of the largely unexplored features of that reading is that Kripke makes a small number of suggestive remarks concerning the possible threat that Wittgenstein’s arguments pose for Chomsky’s linguistic project. In this paper, we attempt to characterise the relevance of Wittgenstein’s later work on meaning and rule-following for transformational linguistics, and in particular to identify the potentially negative impact (...) it has on that project. Although we use Kripke’s remarks to articulate some of the pertinent issues, we return to Wittgenstein’s later writings to address them. We argue that Wittgenstein’s main target in the relevant sections of the Philosophical Investigations is the notion of ‘logical compulsion’, which involves assuming that there is more to applying a word or rule than how we are naturally or “psychologically” compelled to apply. We characterise two of the main lines of argument in the Investigations in terms of the rejection of logical compulsion. We thus propose to address the relevance of Wittgenstein’s writings for Chomsky by considering whether Chomsky’s linguistics presupposes the targeted notion of logical compulsion. We argue that Chomsky’s conception of linguistic competence in terms of successive states of the “language faculty” (containing the principles of universal grammar) does presuppose this problematic notion. Chomsky responded to Kripke by devoting a chapter of his Knowledge of Language to defending this conception of linguistic competence against the Wittgensteinian arguments. We evaluate his response and argue that he has misidentified the threat to his linguistic project as consisting in the attack on its ‘individual psychology’ standpoint, rather than its commitment to logical compulsion. We conclude by arguing that Chomsky’s attempts at defending his individualist or non-communitarian standpoint are undermined by his inability to give a decisive response to Wittgenstein’s attack on logical compulsion. (shrink)

This book argues that languages are composed of sets of ‘signs’, rather than ‘strings’. This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky’s heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories. Yet the concept of ‘compositionality’ itself remains ill-defined, an issue (...) this book addresses. Positioning compositionality as a cornerstone in linguistic theory, it argues that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there exist non-compositional languages, which shows that the concept of compositionality has empirical content. The author asserts that the existence of syntactic structure can flow from the fact that a compositional grammar cannot be delivered without prior agreement on the syntactic structure of the constituents. (shrink)

Paradigms of historiography of philosophy in India have being changed since late 19th c. till present, depending on the social and cultural context of the history of Indian philosophy as a part of contemporary Indian culture. This change manifests itself in the conceptions of Indian historians concerning the teaching of Buddhist Mahāyāna school of Yogācāra (4th c. and later). Historians of colonial times, basing themselves on the philosophy of Neovedаntism (S. Radhakrishnan, S. Dasgupta), regarded Buddhism as a derivate of late (...) Vedic culture and Yogācāra as a teaching that reflected - though in an essentially transmuted form - the ideology of Upaniṣads. The latter, according to Neovedantists, was based on the postulate of the existence of the single cosmic soul - Brahman, the true human Self (Ātman) being identical to it. Historians of the late colonial and early postcolonial times (P.T. Raju, D.P. Chattopadhyaya, A.K. Chatterjee, partly also S. Dasgupta) brought Yogācāra closer to the teachings of European idealism, mainly to conceptions of G. Berkeley, G.W.F. Hegel, F. Bradley, J.E. McTaggart, trying to demonstrate a principal identity of fundamental problems in Indian and Western philosophy. At the same time, they brought Yogācāra together with the teaching of Brāhmaṇic school, Advaita Vedānta, regarded as another form of Indian idealism. In later times, following the evolution of contemporary Indian culture and changings in its social and political context, historians like D.J. Kalupahana became to analyze Yogācāra as a kind of philosophy of mind. All these facts show the dependence of strategies of historico-philosophical studies in India on its social, political and cultural context: in the Yogācāra teaching mainly those aspects call attention that a historian sees as the closest to the problematic field of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Resumo: A civilização exerce uma profunda influência sobre a linguagem, moldando e promovendo a cultura. No século XVIII, Herder reconheceu a historicidade da linguagem, contextualizando-a dentro do amplo contexto do desenvolvimento humano e da cultura. Este artigo examina o impacto da civilização dominada pelo Ocidente, dos séculos XV ao XX, sobre as línguas asiáticas, identificando várias características-chave. Em primeiro lugar, a Ásia não testemunhou a adoção generalizada de línguas estrangeiras, em larga escala. Em segundo lugar, o empréstimo linguístico extraterritorial na (...) Ásia superou o empréstimo linguístico intrarregional, resultando no surgimento de diversas línguas híbridas. Além disso, a Ásia utilizou várias estratégias para preservar e perpetuar suas línguas e civilizações. A linguagem e a civilização desempenham papéis cruciais, ao se reforçarem mutuamente e avançarem juntas. Portanto, este artigo tem, como objetivo, elucidar a influência da civilização sobre as línguas asiáticas desde a Era das Explorações, revelando as nuances da civilização asiática embutidas nesse processo, e explorar a intricada relação entre civilização e línguas, na Ásia. (shrink)

Semiotic and linguistic studies of the 20th century have been important mostly in two senses — (1) they have opened a road for comparative research on the origin and development of language and other systems of signs adding a new dimension to the history of culture; (2) they have shown a possibility of uniting different fields of humanities around semiotics suggesting a way to trespass separation and atomisation of different trends in investigating culture. In the 21st century (...) one may hope for closer integration of semiotics and exact and natural sciences. The points of intersection with the mathematical logic, computer science and information theory that already exist might lead to restructuring theoretical semiotics making it a coherent and methodologically rigid discipline. At the same time, the continuation of neurosemiotic studies promises a breakthrough in understanding those parts of the work of the brain that are most intimately connected to culture. From this point of view semiotics may play an outstanding role in the synthesis of biological science and humanities. In my mind that makes it a particularly important field of future research. (shrink)

In the early decades of the 20th century, women's access to the historical discipline followed fundamentally two paths. For the first time, some (a small minority) entered the profession as academic historians; others worked outside or on the margins of academia, pursuing their research interests as independent scholars. What did being an independent scholar mean for these women? Was it always a form of externally imposed marginalization? My paper argues that this is not the case. First of all, (...) being an independent scholar did not necessarily mean marginality. Some of these women scholars exerted a deep influence on 20th century historiography, and their work is still influential today. Quite apart from posthumous fame, moreover, it should be noted that the lack of academic affiliation did not necessarily preclude for some of these women the possibility of recognition and influence during their lives. Secondly, we should be careful not to assume that being an independent scholar was invariably an externally imposed marginalization. Some of these women scholars can be defined as ‘obligatory amateurs,’ because they were frustrated in their attempt to pursue an academic career. But others, in contrast, deliberately chose independent scholarship over an academic job, and can thus be defined ‘amateurs by choice.’ What was the motivation behind this choice? I argue that an important factor was the resilience of the amateur tradition in historical writing. The amateur tradition offered a strong counterbalance to women's marginality in academia and a source of positive values and models for their participation in the intellectual life. (shrink)

This article argues that it was not only physical borders that challenged people’s biographies in the 20th century, but also shifts in ideology, discourse and predominant languages. I shall explore the biography of a man called Cornel, a native of Bukovina who was a communist cultural official in Romania’s capital Bucharest in the 1960s and who became a priest in the 1970s. I shall show that not only obvious breaks such as the beginning and end of communist rule, (...) but ideological shifts too within Romanian communism prompted Cornel to thoroughly reassess himself. For Cornel, it was the ‘mini-cultural revolution’ of 1971 under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu that quickly convinced him to leave his job at the Romanian Ministry of Culture and reinvent himself as an Orthodox priest. But was his self-reinvention successful? A thorough analysis of his biography shows that his linguistic biography—oscillating between Romanian, Ukrainian and Russian—contains crucial elements of productive adaptation and continuity that enabled him repeatedly and successfully to circumvent borders imposed by newly emerging policies. His “third” identity as a writer has given him continuity and self-assurance. (shrink)

Music and Postwar Transitions in the 19th and 20th Centuries is the first book to highlight the significance of the idea of 'postwar transition' in the field of music and to demonstrate how the contribution of musicians, composers, and their publics have influenced contemporary understandings of war. At the intersection of four domains including: the relationship between music and war culture, commemorative and consolatory dimensions of music, migration and exile, and the links between music, cultural diplomacy, and propaganda, leading (...) historians, political scientists, psychologists, and musicologists explore disruptions and connections to music through the backdrop of war. In turn, this volume sheds new light on what has been a blind spot in a growing historiography. (shrink)

This paper discusses the development of self-consciousness in the history of philosophy of the 20th century compared with the same development in the natural sciences. The author characterizes this stage of philosophical historiography as the “revolution of relativity.” This movement of self-consciousness was apparent in not only the humanities but also the natural sciences at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Awareness of probability is a fundamental achievement of non-classic physics, which has since reversed its (...) paradigm. In contrast to the Newtonian scheme, quantum theory introduces the category of probability and insists that we can talk about certain physical phenomena only in a probabilistic mode and that the method of observation affects the phenomena observed. Consequently, any “object-subject” and “subject-subject” interaction involves the experience of the researcher, which thereby affects the results. The same model of interpretation lies at the basis of the turn toward self-consciousness in the history of philosophy of the 20th century. The classical history of philosophy is built on idealization and gives an objective description of the philosophical process. Following the other sciences, the philosophy of the 20th century understood that historical and philosophical reality largely depends on the historians of philosophy; that such reality is constructed by certain means; that there is a certain kind of historical and philosophical work; and that, with different strategies, methods and approaches, we obtain different results that are complementary to each other. The 20th century was a time of competing interpretations rather than gradually progressing historical and philosophical systems. This stimulated the search for own ideal of objectivity. For philosophical historiography, this is the hermeneutic ideal of the structural analysis of text or architectonic reconstruction. The historicalphilosophical revolution of relativity promotes the development of critical historiography and revises the foundations of its classical tradition. (shrink)

This paper aims at specifying the complex links which two major and polemically related 18th-century linguistic theories James Harris' universal grammar in Hermes (1751) and John Horne Tooke's system of etymology in the Diversions of Purley (1786, 1804) bear to empiricism. It describes both the ideologicalethical determining factors of the theories and the epistemological consequences dependent upon their respective philosophical orientation (Harris using classical Greek philosophy against empiricism, Tooke criticizing Locke's semantics along Hobbesian lines). The effects within the linguistic (...) theories are examined through a comparison of the theories of determination which follow from divergent theses concerning abstraction. The analysis proposed in this paper exemplifies once more the historical question of the exact location of the compatibility/incompatibility between empiricist and non-empiricist linguistic theories. (shrink)

Seeking a Mnemonic Turn: Interior Reflections in Gadamer's Post-Platonic Thought This paper reflects on trajectories and pathways for philosophical hermeneutics, now, after the death of its founder, Hans-Georg Gadamer in 2002. More specifically, it challenges the notion that Gadamer's thought is simply tied to the linguistic turn of the 20th century. Instead, it considers the possibility that Gadamer's thinking makes for an implicit declaration of its own kind, calling for a mnemonic turn in modern philosophy and present day (...) hermeneutics. Some reference will be made to both rationalist and empiricist models of inquiry insofar as Gadamer attempts to take philosophy beyond, for example, the Ur-grammar of Chomsky's linguistic theories, and into a world of post-Platonic memory. (shrink)

R.C. Pradhan claims in Language, Reality, and Transcendence that, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, “[i]n no case is Wittgenstein interested in the empirical facts regarding language, as for him philosophy does not undertake any scientific study of language” (Pradhan 2009, xiv). I consider Ludwig Wittgenstein’s purportedly anti-scientific and anti-empirical approach to language in light of advances by philosophers and linguists in the latter half of the 20th century. I distinguish between various ways of understanding Wittgenstein’s (...) stance against scientism. Due to the success of more recent work on language, I argue that Wittgenstein’s critique, as interpreted by Pradhan in Language, Reality, and Transcendence, does not undermine the formal study of language. Nevertheless, I argue, the contention of Wittgenstein and Pradhan that language, through grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense), serves a variety of functions still sheds light on the differences in meaning across different discourses. I argue that a synthesis of Wittgenstein’s pluralist theory of meaning with elements of a theoretical study of language offers the best comprehensive account of natural language. I will argue that this conception of language is consistent with elements of Pradhan’s interpretation. As Pradhan notes, “The aim here is not to project one kind of grammatical determination but keep options open for many such grammatical determinations such that the grammatical nuances are not papered over in the name of the unity of grammar” (Pradhan 2009, 28). (shrink)

A specific interest and attention to translation and to the relation between signs, natural languages, and thought spread out not only from the so called “linguistic turn” in the 20th century, but also from the cross-cultural dimension that gained prominency in the last decades. Interlinguistic translation can thus be considered and analyzed as a particular and fruitful field of study for philosophy, because in that experience we have to face the intimate relationship that intertwine form and content, the (...) contingency of expression and the ideal aspiration to a shared, universal truth. The case of Chinese language and thought provide further material to explore, in order to raise more questions about the links among grammar, morphology, system of writing, and the meanings that those structures intrinsecally brings and convey. Re-considering Hegel’s ideas about alphabetical and non-alphabetical writing, and through a peculiar case study of a poem by Wang Wei, we can learn to appreciate in a new way the alterity of Chinese characters and language. Finally, the act of translation can be seen as a model of ethical understanding, in order take into account the Other, without enclosing it into the frames that have been shaped with our own categories. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

Among the political changes brought about by the First World War was the formation of new countries, including Latvia. This in turn resulted in a strong need for the first national legislative acts and thus a substantial amount of effort to develop Latvian legal terminology which dates back to the beginning of the 19th century. The purpose of the paper is to study the development of Latvian terminology of marriage in the 20th century through analysis of the (...) relevant body of laws. The paper focuses on marriage-related terms extracted from the major legislative acts governing the institution of marriage in the 20th century. The present study adopts the qualitative research approach which constitutes data collection and data analysis. For the purposes of a comprehensive and efficient analysis of the extracted legal terms, marriage terms are divided into the following five thematic groups: 1) engagement; 2) entering into marriage; 3) nullity of marriage; 4) dissolution of marriage ; and 5) consequences of dissolution or nullity of marriage. The paper suggests that the core of the Latvian terminology of marriage has remained stable, as entering into marriage is a solid procedure where two interested parties give notice to a public or religious institution in order to officially register their relationship. Similarly, both parties often feel the need to terminate this relationship just as officially. This stability of fundamental processes contributes to terminological continuity. (shrink)

The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories of psychoanalytic practitioners and histories of psychoanalytic ideas in order to open out an alternative angle of vision on the historiography. For psychoanalytic ideas were (...) in fact omnipresent within American culture at mid-century, and they played a fundamental role in the psychological reworking of race that unfolded in the work of social scientists, literary artists, and cultural critics in the 1940s and early Cold War years, culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, a major landmark in the civil rights narrative. By pursuing the implications of psychoanalysis in anti-racist struggles at mid-century, and with particular attention to Richard Wright and his autobiographical novel Black Boy, I move towards unearthing an alternative historical account of the intersection between psychoanalysis and race, which offers new ways for psychoanalysis and the history of the human sciences to think about this period. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to evaluate the role played by Alfonso Luis Herrera and Isaac Ochoterena in the institutionalization of academic biology in Mexico in the early 20th century. As biology became institutionalized in Mexico, Herrera's basic approach to biology was displaced by Isaac Ochoterena's professional goals due to the prevailing political conditions at the end of 1929. The conflict arose from two different conceptions of biology, because Herrera and Ochoterena had different discourses that were incommensurable, (...) not only linguistically speaking, but also socioprofessionally. They had different links to influential groups related to education, having distinct political and socioprofessional interests. The conflict between Herrrera and Ochoterena determined the way in which professional biology education has developed in Mexico, as well as the advancement in specific research subjects and the neglect of others. (shrink)

The formal sciences, particularly mathematics, have had a profound influence on the development of linguistics. This insightful overview looks at techniques that were introduced in the fields of mathematics, logic and philosophy during the twentieth century, and explores their effect on the work of various linguists. In particular, it discusses the 'foundations crisis' that destabilised mathematics at the start of the twentieth century, the numerous related movements which sought to respond to this crisis, and how they influenced the (...) development of syntactic theory in the 1950s. The book concludes by discussing the resulting major consequences for syntactic theory, and provides a detailed reassessment of Chomsky's early work at the advent of Generative Grammar. Informative and revealing, this book will be invaluable to all those working in formal linguistics, in particular those interested in its history and development. (shrink)

For the purpose of contributing to a clarification of the term process, different kinds of musical processes are investigated: A rule-determined phase shifting process in Steve Reich's Piano Phase (1966), a model for an indeterminate composition process in John Cage's Variations II (1961), a number of evolution processes in György Ligeti's In zart fliessender Bewegung (1976), and a generative process of fractal nature in Per Nørgård's Second Symphony (1970). In conclusion I propose that six process categories should be included in (...) a typology of processes: Rule-determined, goal-directed and indeterminate transformation processes, and rule-determined, goal-directed and indeterminate generative processes. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis was introduced to Greece in 1915 by the progressive educator Manolis Triantafyllidis and was further elaborated by Marie Bonaparte, Freud’s friend and member of the Greek royal family, and her psychoanalytic group in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, the accumulated traumas of the Nazi occupation (1941–1944), the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), the post-Civil-War tension between the Left and the Right, the military junta (1967–1974) and the social and political conditions of post-war Greece led this project and (...) all attempts to establish psychoanalysis in Greece, to failure and dissolution. The restoration of democracy in 1974 and the rapid social changes it brought was a turning point in the history of Greek psychoanalysis: numerous psychoanalysts, who had trained abroad and returned after the fall of the dictatorship, were hired in the newly established Greek National Health Service (NHS), and contributed to the reform of Greek psychiatry by offering the option of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the non-privileged. This article draws on a range of unexplored primary sources and oral history interview material, in order to provide the first systematic historical account in the English language of the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and Greek society, and the contribution of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the creation of the Greek welfare state. In so doing, it not only attempts to fill a lacuna in the history of contemporary Greece, but also contributes to the broader historiography of psychotherapy and of Europe. (shrink)

Outline of the historiographic discussion on 18th-century linguistic theories.

Hypotheses about a mysterious ancient civilization were born in the eighteenth century among European intellectuals, who vied with each other to report on the high culture of India, supposedly having a universal mission. The impetus for this was the national consciousness awakened in European society back in the Renaissance. The European scientific community of the nineteenth century formed the term “Aryans”, which was originally used as a neutral term to define the Indo-European language family, as well as ancient (...) culture, and was synonymous with the term “Indo-Europeans”. The ethnonym “Arius” itself comes from the oldest Indian and Iranian sacred texts and meant “noble” or “luminous”. However, starting at the end of the 19th century, it began to be used to define “racial theories”, and later a specific nation, justifying their “natural right” to rule over the so-called “unelected” peoples. In the first half of the twentieth century, the term “Aryans” was used by the leaders of the Third Reich, which led to its final distortion, and the synonymous meaning “Indo-Europeans” was barely used. Since the second half of the twentieth century, the development of Indo-European/Aryan theories has taken on a new meaning, largely due to archaeological science. After the fall of the Iron Curtain scientists gained access to the civilizations of the Black Sea steppes and the Dnieper region of Ukraine, which was significantly limited during the communist years. At the end of the twentieth century, scientists received archaeological data not previously taken into account in Indo-European studies. Thus, with the development of research, the archaeological culture of Trypillia from the territory of Ukraine acquires the significance of the Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European culture, which, to a large extent, expands the idea of the ancient history of Europe. The paper considers the swastika symbol as a stereotypical marker of the Indo-European/ Aryan logos and its ideological inversion in the first half of the 20th century. Indo-European hypotheses underwent their significant formation and development precisely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This particular period is historiographically well-covered in terms of research and therefore is included in this paper. At the same time, the paper also highlights new and promising methods of Indo-European issues researching that have already begun to be implemented in the twenty-first century. Since the formation and development of various Indo-European hypotheses in historical retrospect and an interconnected form is still an under-researched topic and has not been comprehensively considered in special scientific works, the author aims to carry out the above-mentioned research work. The study of the Indo-European hypotheses development covers the topics of the linguistic origin, worldview, local and racial hypotheses, examines Indo-European searches in the research of Ukrainian scholars, and reveals the subtopic of Trypillian culture and its specific symbolism, which corresponds to the above research topic. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the revision of the classical thesis concerning secularism the progressive domination of the discussion around the issue of the civil society. These two poles facilitated the development of a series of historiographic approaches that particularly touched on the areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europeís history. Here we are concerned with three central cases of historiographic discourseís production, as indicators of the dominant ìparadigmîís change: the first concerns the role of the Russian church in the pre-Revolutionary period; (...) the second, the issue of secularization and its relations with Islam in the Ottoman Empire; and finally the third, the problem of internal fragmentation of the Orthodox millet with the establishment of Greek autocephalus Church in 1833 and (self-sufficiency) and later the Bulgarian Exarchate. These new approaches were intended to solve various long-standing problems and for the most part resulted in solutions within existing opposites of historiographic schools of thought. (shrink)

Historians, the good ones, mark a century by intellectual and social boundaries rather than by the turn of the calendar page. Only through fortuitous accident might occasions of consequence occur at the very beginning of a century. Imaginative historians do tend, however, to invest a date like 1800 with powers that attract events of significance. It is thus both fortunate and condign that Abiology@ came to linguistic and conceptual birth with the new century. Precisely in 1800, Karl (...) Friedrich Burdach, a romantic naturalist, suggested that his coinage Biologie be used to indicate the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological, and psychological perspective.i Many other neologisms of the period (and Burdach issued quite a few) were stillborn or survived only for a short while. Biologie, though, fit the time, and with slight adjustment received its modern meaning two years later at the hands of the Naturphilosoph Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus. In his multi-volume treatise Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802-1822), Treviranus announced: AThe objects of our research will be the different forms and manifestations of life, the conditions and laws under which these phenomena occur, and the causes through which they have been effected. The science that concerns itself with these objects we will indicate by the name biology [Biologie] or the doctrine of life [Lebenslehre].@ii Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, also in 1802, employed the term with comparable intention.iii In the work of both of these biologists, the word became immediately associated with the theory of the transmutation of speciesCa new term in recognition of the new laws of life. Treviranus thought the progressive deposition of fossils.. (shrink)

This paper describes the evolution of the family role face – specifically, the roles of father, mother and child – in a concrete period of the Spanish social history -from the end of 19th century to the 1960s. To achieve this goal, a corpus of theater plays is analyzed from a functional and pragmalinguistic perspective in a socio-historical context. The focus is on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the projection of role face in the expression of directive speech (...) acts and their possible modulation through two pragmatic strategies: mitigation and intensification. Based on the results of the analysis, a sociopragmatic interpretation is carried out by identifying the connection between the choice of pragmalinguistic strategies and the need of the speakers’ autonomy face and affiliation face in different roles as family member in the given period. The results point to a progressive solidarity in father-child relationships during this period. On the one hand, that is based on the erosion of the authoritarian component of parental roles. On the other hand, it is anchored in the consolidation of proximity, closeness (‘confianza’) and affectivity. From a methodological point of view, the present study confirms the possibility of characterizing a sociopragmatic aspect (role face) on the basis of pragmalinguistic elements, i.e. the linguistic expression of directive speech acts, and its modulation through mitigation and intensification. (shrink)

Marianna Charitonidou's books discuss the problem of changes in the creation of architecture in the 20th century. The author showed representatives of four generations of architects of this period. The first group is represented by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The second generation was described as a group of opponents to the CIAM environment centered around the Team X grouping and the activities of Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van Eyck. Generation three was discussed (...) based on the work of Aldo Rossi and Giancarlo Da Carlo. Generation four, active since the 1980s, was linked to the activities of Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. (shrink)

Drawing on recent publications on studies in historiography of philosophy in French-, English-, and German-speaking philosophy, the author clarifies the subject matter and tasks of studies in historiography of philosophy as a historico-philosophical approach, in particular, counting among such subjects the images of philosophy's past constructed by histories of philosophy, as well as the historiographical attitudes of historians of philosophy and the contexts and factors that determine these historiographical attitudes. The article analyses the conceptions and implementations of three projects of (...) studies in historiography of philosophy that have taken place in Ukraine in recent decades: the project of “History of Historico-philosophical Science”, led by Yu. Kushakov in the 1980s and 2000s and dedicated to the study of historico-philosophical conceptions of German and Russian philosophers of the 19th and early 20th; S. Rudenko's study of post-Soviet methodological approaches to the history of Ukrainian philosophy (2012); and the Ukrainian part of the bilateral project “Philosophy in the system of national culture: comparative analysis of historico-philosophical studies in Belarus and Ukraine” (2011-2012), led by V. Yevarousky and S. Yosypenko. Based on the results of the latter project and on his more recent research, the author outlines the socio-political, general philosophical and institutional context in which the historiography of Ukrainian philosophy was formed and functioned during the 20th century; analyses the images of the history of Ukrainian philosophy created by D. Tschižewskij and V. Horskyi, which embody two extreme points in the development of the historiography of Ukrainian philosophy in the 20th century; and points out the changes in the general philosophical and institutional context of historico-philosophical research in independent Ukraine and the consequences of these changes for the further development of the historiography of Ukrainian philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of the three phases of the interaction between logic and linguistics on the nature of universal grammar. It then attempts to reconstruct the dynamics and interactions between these approaches in logic and in linguistic theory, which represent the major landmarks in the quest for the individuation of the universal structure of language.

Peirce's Law of Triviality: The Implementation of the Trivium of Logic, Rhetoric and Grammar. Basic Categories for Linguistics and Literature Studies from a Universal Semiotic Theory This article focuses on the aspects that refer to linguistics in the works of Charles S. Peirce. His pragmatic philosophy implemented many other sciences and among them is the traditional trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, which Peirce divided into different kinds of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. While the impact of the work of Peirce (...) on theses sciences is weak, the integration of the sciences in his philosophy is interesting as a step in the history of science and his work is an example for ecclecticism and historism of science in the 19th century and the universalism of science deducted from a philosophy that uses the sign as an unitarian principle. Triple constructions are a very common feature in the writings of Peirce, and the trivium is an example of an academic construction Peirce implemented. (shrink)

This article contributes to the project of historicizing the emergence of printed books as a mass cultural form in the 20th century and after, in addition to exploring the political-economic struggles both occasioning and occasioned by their constitution as such. In doing so, it both models and reflects on what a possible historiography of technology "after social constructionism" might look like. More specifically, it attempts to account for the behind-the-scenes or "back office" processes through which commodification takes place (...) in the sphere of book distribution, and it does so by focusing principally on communication and information technologies such as the international standard book number (ISBN) and machine readable bar codes. This history, overall, complements the more hopeful narratives of mass culture's democratizing potential, by telling a story about how increased opportunities for middle class social advancement depend on intensified - and intensely technological - work processes for those employed in the sphere of commodity distribution. This essay demonstrates, moreover, how dominant metaphors and frameworks that have guided Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) research (e.g., "actor-networks," "seamless webs," and so forth) must be amended to account better for power, contradiction, and antagonism within the history of technology. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to identify early and recent Pentecostal studies in the West and to highlight the main difference between them. Today there are more than 250 million Pentecostals in the world, and together with the charismatic movement there are more than 500 million. Having begun to spread in the 20th century, the movement claims to be the fastest growing religious phenomenon in human history. In attempts to interpret the phenomenon of the movement's growth, there (...) have been several gradually emerging approaches: explaining the origin of the movement as supernaturally "coming from heaven"; searching for the origins of Pentecostalism in other Christian movements; presenting the emergence of the movement as the result of social and psychological factors such as poverty, marginalization, and the desire to escape from modern society; and the multicultural approach. The paper analyzes the works of Western historians and theologians of Pentecostalism since the second half of the 20th century. The result shows a turning point between early and late studies, namely that late studies aim to revise the history and include participants in the movement around the world, not just in North America, explore the contribution to the development of the movement of local ministers who have long remained in the shadow of Western missionaries, emphasize the diversity of ideologies and social influences that have shaped the movement. It also highlights three major contemporary areas of research: historical, characterized by studies of Pentecostalism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; theological, focusing on the development and shaping of theoretical theology as a result of the movement's institutionalization; and religious studies, practiced primarily from the perspective of the sociology of religion. (shrink)

Qui a écrit la première histoire du christianisme ? La recherche historienne moderne a rarement hésité à pointer le doigt vers Eusèbe de Césarée, ainsi que le rappellent dans ce dossier les contributions de M. Fédou et de M. Heinzelmann. Une telle reconnaissance devait amener une dégradation de la qualité historienne de l’œuvre lucanienne, évangile et Actes des Apôtres, reconnue jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle. Ainsi, jusque dans les années 60 du XXe siècle, la recherche sur cette œuvre devait être dominée par (...) cette tonalité lourde. Une révision de ces attitudes, dont certaines se sont manifestées dès le début de ce même siècle, s’est depuis engagée, grâce notamment à une meilleure connaissance et acceptation des caractéristiques de l’historiographie ancienne. C’est donc un véritable historien qui se révèle désormais dans l’œuvre lucanienne, légitimant du même coup le concept d’histoire théologique, et rendant à Luc sa place, la première, bien avant Eusèbe de Césarée.Who wrote the first history of Christianity? Modern historical research has rarely hesitated to designate Eusebius of Caesarea, as the contributions of M. Fédou and M. Heizelmann recall here. Such recognition led to downgrading the historical quality of Luke’s writings, the Gospel and Acts of the Apostles, which had been accepted until the 18th century. Thus, up until the 1960’s, research on these writings was dominated by this overriding approach. A revision of these attitudes, some of which arose in the early 20th century, has since emerged, especially due to a better understanding and acceptance of the characteristics of ancient historiography. Hence, Luke now appears as a true historian, thereby legitimizing the concept of theological history and once again acknowledging Luke’s place as the first historian of Christianity, well before Eusebius of Caesarea. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.2 (2000) 116-136 [Access article in PDF] Being, Time, and Definition: Toward a Semiotics of Figural Rhetoric Carol Poster For if History in the transferred sense of particular books called "histories," is rather apt to be false: nothing but History in the wider and higher sense will ever lead us to the truth. The Future is unknown and unknowable. The Present is turning to Past even (...) as we are trying to know it. Only the Past itself abides our knowledge. --George Saintsbury, A Letter BookDefining and classifying figures of speech and thought have been among the more important tasks of rhetoricians and grammarians for more than two millennia. The inventional focus, however, of much modern rhetorical theory has tended to relegate figuration either, on the one hand, to the domains of literary criticism or linguistics (the heirs of ancient grammar) or, on the other hand, to an ancillary position. The concomitant marginalization of the study of figures has had a significant effect upon contemporary scholarship in historical rhetoric. Many of the seminal scholarly works on the history of rhetoric have denigrated or minimized the importance of figural rhetoric. As Brian Vickers (1990, 294-95) has mentioned, George Kennedy and numerous other historians of rhetoric (e.g., Clarke 1996, 34) tend to condemn the teaching of figural rhetoric as dreary, tedious, and otiose. Often, the very periods themselves in which the study of the figures was pursued most vigorously and extensively are omitted from or condemned by modern scholarly discussion. As Marjorie Curry Woods has pointed out (1995, 73-78), biases against the medieval period, especially as found in Charles Sears Baldwin (1928) and Kennedy (1963, 1980) have in many ways defined the contours of our discipline, especially our attitudes toward the study of figures and tropes. Late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the periods of "decline" so deplored by Baldwin, Vickers, Kennedy, and others, were those in which figural rhetoric flourished, and both the sheer [End Page 116] volume of extant figural treatises and the continuity of figural rhetoric from the Hellenistic period through such contemporary semipopular books as Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase (1982) and William Espy's The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary (1983) demand attention from the historical scholar. Along with the trivialization of figures in contemporary rhetoric has come a drastic oversimplification of the semiotics of figural terminology, which, in turn, contributes to the trivialization of many recent accounts of figures. To recover a more complex understanding of the semiotics of figural terms, we must start with a historical understanding of figuration, because rhetorical terms are encased in numerous historical strata that determine our understandings of them. 1 As Richard Rorty (1984, 49-75) argues concerning the historiography of philosophy, rational and historical reconstruction are mutually interdependent. A brief history of figural rhetoric From antiquity through the present, lists of figures have either occupied substantial sections of general treatises on rhetoric or grammar or have been the subject of specifically figural handbooks. Use of what we might term highly figured speech appears to predate the development of theoretical models for analysis of figures by many centuries. The Homeric epics, which were to provide the standard examples of rhetorical figures for many subsequent centuries, use patterns of speech later to be named and classified as rhetorical figures, but neither figural terminology nor self-conscious reflection upon figures qua figures appears in the epics. Similarly, although Gorgias was renowned for his use of the "Gorgianic" figures that later took his name, there is no evidence that he attempted systematic catologuing or development of specialized terminology for the figures. The testimonia describing his use of poetic words and figures (DK82a1, DK82a2, DK82a4, DK82a32--translated in Sprague 1972) do not attribute to him any invention of technical terminology.The question of invention of specific terminology for rhetorical figures is part of a more general historical question of the development of rhetoric as a self-conscious field. As Thomas Cole (1991) and Edward Schiappa (1991) have pointed out, the first... (shrink)

The article deals with the differences of the notion of 'object' or 'thing' in natural languages, concluding that some languages are by their structure more object-biased while others are more event-biased and proceeds to analyse how two common Japanese words, mono and koto , both meaning 'thing', have been treated in 20th-century Japanese thought, notably in the philosophical works of Watsuji Tetsurô, Ide Takashi, Hiromatsu Wataru and Kimura Bin. All of these thinkers represent different schools and trends (Watsuji (...) could be called a cultural particularist, Ide was an Aristotle scholar, Hiromatsu a Marxist and Kimura is a psychiatrist), but come to similar conclusions in this respect, allowing us to regard event-biased and object-biased linguistic constructions as manifestations of two different, but equally necessary cognitive faculties. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 23 The essay examines the recent discussion about a “crisis of testimony” in historiography. Central to this discussion is the question of how it is possible for human testimony to convey information about the limit experiences of 20th century history. Given that the credibility of testimony is assessed by appealing to our previous understanding of what is credible, testimony to limit experiences risks being dismissed as unbelievable or implausible. This issue has recently been addressed (...) in the work of Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White and Gert-Jan van der Heiden among others. In the first part of this essay, I show that the current idea of a crisis of testimony is a consequence of focusing too exclusively on the content of extraordinary testimony. I argue that such a focus has affinities with David Hume’s reductionist understanding of testimonial knowledge; even though the authors discussed cannot properly be labelled reductionists themselves. In the second part of the essay, I open up the issue of extraordinary testimony from a perspective that places the relationship between the speaker and the addressee at the heart of testimonial knowledge. My aim is to show that if we attend to the way in which testimonial knowledge involves dependence on the authority of another person, then the current idea of a crisis of testimony will dissolve itself. In conclusion, I argue that there is an important ethical dimension to the question of understanding extraordinary testimony. (shrink)

The theoretical debate in linguistics during the past half-century bears an uncanny parallel to the politics of the (now defunct) Communist Bloc. The parallels are not so much in the revolutionary nature of Chomsky's ideas as in the Bolshevik manner of his takeover of linguistics (Koerner 1994) and in the Trotskyist (“permanent revolution”) flavor of the subsequent development of the doctrine of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) (Townsend & Bever 2001, pp. 37–40). By those standards, Jackendoff is quite a party (...) faithful (a Khrushchev or a Dubcek, rather than a Solzhenitsyn or a Sakharov) who questions some of the components of the dogma, yet stops far short of repudiating it. (shrink)

This paper surveys the parallel fates of the notion of the empirical in philosophy of science in the 20th century and the notion of experience as evidence in one important line of debate in historiography/philosophy of history. The focus concerns the presumably crucial role some notion of the empirical plays in the assessment of knowledge claims. The significance of 'the empirical' disappears on the assumption that theories either determine what counts as experience or explain away any apparently discordant (...) evidence. One consequence of this has been the suggestion that the analysis of meaning somehow replaces or supplants that played by evidence qua fact. This dispute impacts in parallel ways the turf wars between philosophers of science and practitioners of science studies as well as disputes in historiography between literary theorists and those not so kindly disposed. The parallels suggest why historiographic debate has stalled for three decades. (shrink)

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is rightly regarded as a thinker who extended the development of the so-called expressivist conception of language and world that Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) and especially Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) initially articulated. Being immersed as Humboldt was in the intellectual climate of German Romanticism, he aimed not only to provide a systematic foundation for how he believed linguistic research as a science should be conducted, but also to attempt to rectify what he saw as the deficiencies (...) of Kant’s philosophical system. My aim in this paper is to show how an expressivist thinker like Humboldt has the conceptual resources from within his own framework and, perhaps surprisingly, with some help from the 20th century philosopher of language and mind, Donald Davidson, to reject a criticism commonly made against expressivist conceptions of language and world. This is the charge that this sort of expressivism threatens the objectivity of the world by emphasizing the role of language in the constitution and disclosure of the world. Cristina Lafont makes just this charge against Humboldt (and other philosophers in the German expressivist-hermeneutic tradition). Specifically, she argues that expressivist philosophers of language are all ultimately committed to some pernicious form of linguistic idealism and relativism. In this paper, I first present Humboldt’s reflections on language and give some textual evidence for why he is often read – mistakenly in my view – as a linguistic idealist and relativist. Second, I briefly sketch Lafont’s charge of linguistic idealism and relativism against Humboldt. Third and finally, I show how she misunderstands Humboldt’s expressivist conception of language and world by connecting my rebuttal to her criticism with Davidson’s argument that successful communication does not require the sharing of explicit rules or conventions that govern in advance the use and understanding of words. (shrink)