Foucault's previously unpublished doctoral dissertation on Kant offers the definitive statement of his relationship to Kant and to the critical tradition of philosophy. This introduction and commentary to Kant's least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now. In his exegesis and critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Foucault raises the question of the relation between psychology (...) and anthropology, and how they are affected by time. Though a Kantian “critique of the anthropological slumber,” Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics, explores the possibilities of studying man empirically, and reflects on the nature of time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. Extending Kant's suggestion that any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language, Foucault asserts that man is a world citizen insofar as he speaks. For both Kant and Foucault, anthropology concerns not the human animal or self-consciousness but, rather, involves the questioning of the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence. This long-unknown text is a valuable contribution not only to a scholarly appreciation of Kant's work but as the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. It is thus a definitive statement of Foucault's relation to Kant as well as Foucault's relation to the critical tradition of philosophy. By going to the heart of the debate on structuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences in relation to finitude, Foucault also creates something of a prologue to his foundational The Order of Things. Michel Foucault is widely considered to be one of the most important academic voices of the twentieth century and has proven influential across disciplines. (shrink)

Anthropology is a discipline very conscious of its history. Alan Barnard has written a clear, detailed overview of anthropological theory that brings out the historical contexts of the great debates, tracing the genealogies of theories and schools of thought. His book covers the precursors of anthropology; evolutionism in all its guises; diffusionism and culture area theories, functionalism and structural-functionalism; action-centered theories; processual and Marxist perspectives; the many faces of relativism, structuralism and poststructuralism; and recent interpretive and postmodernist viewpoints. (...) This is a balanced and judicious survey, which also considers the problems involved in assessing anthropological theories. (shrink)

Purpose. The paper considers the establishment of the paradigmatic determinants of the understanding of crime on the basis of fundamental changes in understanding of the essence of a man in ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern and postmodern philosophy. Theoretical basis. The author determines that the understanding of the concept of crime is possible only in the combination of historical, philosophical, legal and sociological approaches. The interpretation of the essence of this concept dynamics and relevant legal practices is based on structuralist, (...) post-structuralist and hermeneutical methodological principles. Originality. The author has proved that the concept of "crime" is not a constant but a historically variable category whose dynamics of meanings is linked to a change in philosophical anthropological paradigms. Its understanding is primarily related to the interpretation of the essence of a man and the imperatives of his behavior. This allows a new understanding of the philosophical foundations of modern criminology. Conclusions. The article establishes that in the history of Western philosophy, there are five anthropological paradigms that differ in a thorough rethinking of the essence of a man. The first cosmocentric regards man as a microcosm, his soul and actions must be in harmony with the harmony of the Cosmos. The second Theocentric considers a man the image and likeness of God, though he is at the same time burdened with original sin. In the era of early Modernism, the third paradigm, which we called cognitive-centric, becomes dominant, since the essence of a man is reduced primarily to his mind. It gradually changes to the fourth – sociocentric, which focuses on the social essence of a man. However, despite its continued existence in our time, at the end of the XX century, there is a transition to the fifth paradigm – postmodernist, which deconstructs the essence of a man, reducing it to the role of an element of power systems. These paradigms, with a certain synchronicity, create the corresponding concepts of "crime": from violation of polis-space laws to identification with sin, from non-observance of mental and moral standards to social deviance. Contemporary understandings of crime are, for the most part, relativistic and constructivist, which is consistent with the postmodern anthropological paradigm. However, the diversity of interpretations of the concept of "crime" that exists in the current scientific literature needs further comprehension. (shrink)

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View Michel Foucaulttranslated and with an introduction by Arianna BoveThis introduction and commentary to Kant's least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now. In his exegesis and critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Foucault raises the question of the relation between psychology and anthropology, and (...) how they are affected by time. Though a Kantian "critique of the anthropological slumber," Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics, explores the possibilities of studying man empirically, and reflects on the nature of time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. Extending Kant's suggestion that any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language, Foucault asserts that man is a world citizen insofar as he speaks. For both Kant and Foucault, anthropology concerns not the human animal or self-consciousness but, rather, involves the questioning of the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence. This long-unknown text is a valuable contribution not only to a scholarly appreciation of Kant's work but as the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. It is thus a definitive statement of Foucault's relation to Kant as well as Foucault's relation to the critical tradition of philosophy. By going to the heart of the debate on structuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences in relation to finitude, Foucault also creates something of a prologue to his foundational The Order of Things.Michel Foucault is widely considered to be one of the most important academic voices of the twentieth century and has proven influential across disciplines. (shrink)

Criticism of post-modernizm and post-colonializm caused to question the mission of anthropology in terms of understanding different societies. Materialist, secular and anthropocentric anthropological approaches based on enlightenment and modern assumptions have faced criticism by many disciplines from philosophy and critical theory to science and quantum theory. Anthropology of religion which is a branch of cultural anthropology is also effected by changes within the broader field of anthropology. The aim of this project is to shed light on (...) the potential of the critical approach, which emerged in anthropology of religion recently and underlined the ontology, to understand religious experiences and practices of different societies. This approach is called ontological turn. In this article, first I point out the historical process in anthropology which led to the turn to ontology. Social structuralism and representationalism which played an important role for the formation of anthropology impacted significantly the ways in which anthropology understands nature and human being. According to these assumptions commonly used in anthropology, while human beings try to understand universal and static natural law principles, they create representations about nature. But, for there is only one nature, there must be only one true representation. This attempt to understand nature through representations created the base for the concepts of belief, knowledge, and mind of Edward Tylor who was the pioneer of cultural anthropology. While the mind refers to rational capacity of human being, belief is an area of irrational representations that human beings pragmatically need. Religious assumptions and practices are listed under incorrect representations. The concept of belief has been frequently used after Tylor as well to understand societies which are located outside of modernity. What ontological turn aims with criticism of conceptual framework is to prevent the domination of Western based reality. Therefore, one of the most emphasized arguments is the multiplicity of reality. This approach of ontological turn is called as taking everything serious. New definitions which are made in a way including the experiences of ethnographic objects mean taking them serious. Acceptance of the concepts by anthropologist in the ethnographic field means acceptance of difference in reality. The act of definition and conceptualizing is the act of creating different realities. In many ethnographic researches, ethnographers choses their concepts before entering to the field. This means that trying to fit differences within existing concepts and confirming the existing thoughts from different perspectives. Understanding ethnographic materials with its own terms or analyzing, explaining or interpreting ethnographic phenomenon by eliminating presumptions was always a concern for anthropology. These questions are asked so commonly that they can be seen as banal questions. The difference of ontological turn is not to ask these questions, but to ask ontological questions as an epistemological approach. The base of this ontological approach is the thought that what forms anthropologists’ perspective are not social or cultural but ontological assumptions. Thus, the question to be asked is how anthropologists’ assumptions about what the world is can be eliminated. To sum up, the idea of taking everything serious in ontological turn aims to eliminate the hierarchy between the subject and object of ethnography. Instead of seeing ethnography as an object of anthropology through modern categories, ontological turn suggests seeing ethnography as a real source to create new concepts and analytical tools. (shrink)

In this article the advent of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology is described as a reaction against the predominantly phenomenological bias of French philosophy in the post-war years as well as against the old humanism of existentialism which seemed parochial both in its confinement to a specific tradition of western philosophy and in its lack of interest in scientific approach. Nevertheless, the paradigm of structural anthropology cannot be equated with the field of structuralism, which became a very contestable form of (...) intellectual fashion. The reception of Lévi-Strauss's theory in the English-speaking world carried on both the same enthusiasm and the same distortions and simplifications, to the extent that in the course of anti-structural criticism, the main thrust of the epistemological approach of Lévi-Strauss seems to have been lost, to the collective detriment of social sciences and anthropology. (shrink)

In this innovative introduction, Robert Layton reviews the ideas that have inspired anthropologists in their studies of societies around the world. An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology provides a clear and concise analysis of the theories, and traces the way in which they have been translated into anthropological debates. The opening chapter sets out the classical theoretical issues formulated by Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and Durkheim. Successive chapters discuss Functionalism, Structuralism, Interactionist theories, and Marxist anthropology, while the final chapters (...) address the competing paradigms of Socioecology and Postmodernism. Using detailed case studies, Professor Layton illustrates the way in which various theoretical perspectives have shaped competing, or complementary, accounts of specific human societies. (shrink)

The Human Enterprise presents a wide-ranging but well-integrated analysis of contemporary anthropological theory. The author explains clearly and cogently how to evaluate scientific theories and encourages students to think critically about the nature of theory itself. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, this text should be a stimulating addition to courses on anthropological theory.Part One examines the philosophical foundations of anthropological theory, with particular attention to the nature of scientific inquiry and the mechanisms of scientific progress. The author proposes an original approach to (...) the comparison and evaluation of competing scientific paradigms. Part Two explores the nature of social science and describes distinctive features of anthropology such as the concept of culture and the emic/etic distinction.The author then surveys the range of research strategies employed by anthropologists and presents a detailed analysis of cultural materialism, structuralism, and symbolic anthropology. The final section uses two celebrated issues—the argument about the image of limited good and the sacred cow controversy—to illustrate the current nature of paradigmatic debate and to indicate how a clearer understanding of the nature of paradigms and theory might resolve such controversies. (shrink)

The scientific transformation of the hermeneutic art has been the common goal for the various formalist-structuralist programs of interpretation that have dominated human studies in our century - such as New Criticism in literary analysis, the formalist programs in art history and musicology, the Gestalt and Freudian psychology, structuralism in linguistics and anthropology, etc. In this volume, these formalist-structuralist programs shall be called structural programs of interpretation in Europe and America.

This series of lectures by some of the most distinguished exponents of Structuralism offers a general introduction to the subject and some suggestions as to the direction of its future development. Though well known on the Continent, Structuralist Theory has so far established itself in Britain only in the specialist fields of linguistics and anthropology, while its more general applications remain unexplored.

Organized thematically, this four-volume collection explores the key areas of structuralism - and with a new introduction by the editor to guide the reader through the work, this is an essential collection of secondary sources that provides a valuable tool for research. Taking as their methodological model the successes of the structural linguistics inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure, a group of thinkers in such fields as anthropology, literary and cultural studies, sociology and philosophy developed ambitious programs for the interdisciplinary (...) study of the systems by which human beings make the world intelligible. (shrink)

The cognitive revolution in psychology was a significant advance in our thinking about the mind. Philosophers and social scientists have looked to the cognitive sciences with the hope that the social world will yield to similar explanatory strategies. Dan Sperber has argued for a programme that would conceptualize the entire domain of anthropological theory in cognitive terms. Sperber's 'epidemiology' specifically excludes interpretive, structuralist and functionalist theories. This essay evaluates Sperber's epidemiological approach to anthropological theory. It argues that as a (...) programme for anthropological theorizing, Sperber's epidemiology could not be empirically grounded. Cognitive explanations depend on prior interpretations. While interpretation is a kind of theorizing, it cannot be assimilated to cognitive explanation. The essay concludes by sketching an explanatory coherence framework in which ethnographic interpretation and cognitive explanation are seen as parts of a unified body of anthropological theorizing. (shrink)

This article reframes our understanding of French structural anthropology by considering the work of André Leroi-Gourhan alongside that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. These two anthropologists worked at opposite poles of the discipline, Lévi-Strauss studying cultural objects, like myths and kinship relations; Leroi-Gourhan looking at material artifacts, such as stone tools, bones, arrowheads, and cave paintings. In spite of their difference in focus, these thinkers shared a similar approach to the interpretation of their sources: Each individual object was meaningful only as (...) part of a larger whole. For Lévi-Strauss, structuralism was designed to unlock features of the human mind; for Leroi-Gourhan, to uncover the material processes that underlay human life. Again, in spite of their difference in orientation, both structuralisms produced similar theories of human society. Whether ‘primitive’ or ‘advanced’, all societies functioned the same way: Their institutions worked harmoniously, beyond the intentions of any individual actors, to preserve the stability of the group. This eliminated the basis for thinking one society was superior to another. Finally, the article argues that both Lévi-Strauss and Leroi-Gourhan believed that structural anthropology could found a ‘new humanism’, and thereby rescue modernity from moral degeneration. This ‘new humanism’ could not only produce a universal description of human nature, but also help rethink French colonialism, broker new geopolitical alliances, and prevent the erasure of world cultures. Structural anthropology thus imagined a tight relationship between its social-scientific work and its political-moral mission. (shrink)

William James is usually associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and with his interest in religious experiences. But James also developed a methodology which has received far less attention. James called this methodology "radical empiricism," an approach that requires that (1) all of the ideas and theories in science be grounded in direct experience, and (2) no experience be excluded from scientific purview. This paper describes James' thoughts about radical empiricism, and discusses some of the strengths of, and problems with (...) his view in light of more contemporary science. A biogenetic structural elaboration of James' notion of relations and pure experience is offered, and is used to counter the so called post‐structuralist critique of Jacques Derrida. The relevance of James' views to the anthropology of consciousness is explored, with emphasis upon the necessity ‐‐ anticipated by James ‐‐ of merging a phenomenology with structuralism. (shrink)

Lévi-Strauss's centennial is an opportunity to show his inextricable connections with the evolution of 20th-century thought and what these promise for 21st-century anthropology. He has mapped the philosophical parameters for a renewed ethnography which opens innovative approaches to history, agency, culture and society. The anthropological understanding of history, for instance, is enriched by methodical application of his mytho-logical analysis, in particular his claim that myths are `machines for the suppression of time'. Lévi-Strauss's thought has led to the development of (...) new and invigorated forms of structural analysis, exemplified by the way that his concept of canonical expression has provided the foundation for the sophisticated application of transformational analysis and formalization. (shrink)

Investigating the neo-Kantian origins of structuralism and culturalism, this article analyses the development of Cassirer's thought by following his intellectual progression from knowledge to culture, and from culture to praxis. The article is in two parts. In the first part, the author presents an analysis of Cassirer's relational conception of knowledge. In the second part, the critique of knowledge is superseded by a critique of culture. The author analyses Cassirer's anthropological philosophy of symbolic forms and critically compares it to Simmel's (...) vitalist theory of culture. The article ends with a plea for a practical sociology inspired by Cassirer's return to Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

The first intention of this article is to show, with some essays of Marcel Mauss, how his way of studying cultural facts anticipates the structural analysis method in anthropology.The concept of "fait social total" is confronted with the concept of structure as developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, so that we could see the similarities and the distinctions.As well as reconstructing a decisive period of the history of structuralism within the French philosophical and sociological tradition, this article seeks to show the (...) elements of Mauss1s contribution to structuralist anthropology and in a more general why his contribution to the epistemology of the social sciences. (shrink)

The article offers an alternative story about the structuralism in science, philosophy, and semiotics based on the exposition of Ch. S. Peirce’s philosophical project – pragmatism. Contemporary tendency to consider structuralism as naïve and dead, is put in contrast with the reassessment of the potential of structuralism in natural scien- ces and linguistic anthropology.

Changes that occurred in science in the second half of the twentieth century, led to the emergence of a number of Sciences, the subject of study of which requires the involvement of interdisciplinary methodology and theory of neuroscience, for example, neurobiology, neurolinguistics, neuroanthropology, neurophilosophy, neurophenomenology, etc. One of the features of modern anthropology is that the subject of its research involves an interdisciplinary dialogue, the involvement of methods and theories of socio-human and natural Sciences, which led to the formation (...) of neuroanthropology as a science. One of the trends in the development of neuroanthropological theory is the introduction of biogenetic structuralism in the field of research. The article is devoted to the analysis of the biogenetic structuralism as an example of an interdisciplinary dialogue in which transpersonal and phenomenological approaches are integrated in neuroanthropology. Appeal to the main areas ofneuroanthropologic research allows going beyond the framework of Cartesian dualism and considering issues of the relationship between body and mind in terms of an integrative approach. The biogenetic structuralist neurophenomenological theory is of great importance as a theoretical and methodological basis for cross-cultural studies of consciousness. (shrink)

This book includes chapters on the most representative structuralists (in anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, literature, and history) as well as on their opponents (in Marxism, hermeneutics, and sociology), so that this book about structuralism also put structuralism in its intellectual and political milieu.

This article develops a comparative and recursive approach to political ontology by drawing on the ontological turn in anthropology. It claims that if ontological commitments define reality, then the use of ontology by recent pluralist political theorists must undercut pluralism. By charting contemporary anthropology’s rereading of structuralism as part of a plural understanding of ontology, it will be shown that any political ontology places limits on the political, and thus cannot exhaust political experience. This position will be established (...) through an analysis of the role of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and a comparison with the political ontology represented by perspectivism and potential affinity. Anthropology’s lesson for political theory is that ontology cannot simply be revised and treated in the singular, but that political ontologies must be analysed comparatively to reveal the shortcomings of, and recursively alter, one’s own political frame of reference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary AnthropologyPeter J. RabinowitzThe Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, by Wolfgang Iser; xix & 347 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, $55.00 cloth, $15.95 paper.Iser’s book argues that “the special character of literature is its production through a fusion” (p. xiii) of the fictive (“an act of boundary-crossing which, nonetheless, keeps in view what has been overstepped”) (pp. (...) xiv-xv) and the imaginary (“a featureless and inactive potential”) (p. xvii). As a consequence, he anchors his “different form of heuristics” (p. xiii) in two dense meditations on the history of these terms. The first, chapter 3, teases out the way “fiction” has been “thematized” in philosophical writings—with detailed explications, in particular, of the works of Bacon (who views fiction as an idol), Bentham (“who stands for a paradigm switch” [p. 112] in which fiction becomes “a mode of bridge-building” [p. 123]), Vaihinger (“fiction as a transparent posit” [p. 130]), and Nelson Goodman (who sees fictions in terms of worldmaking). The second, chapter 4, deliberates on the nature of the imaginary, with particular attention to Coleridge (who made “the last significant attempt” to treat imagination as a faculty [p. 186]), Sartre (for whom the imaginary is an act), and Cornelius Castoriadis (who has developed the notion of the “radical imaginary”).But while the book deals exhaustively with the twin terms of its main title, its relation to its subtitle is more vexed. Certainly, this book is not about anthropology in any conventional sense. Although Iser pays lip service to “culture-bound patternings” (p. 297), in fact his inquiry almost entirely ignores the pressures of particular cultural contexts; and to the extent that he deals with “the human condition,” he does so by universalizing from a narrow slice of the Western intellectual tradition. Nor, more surprisingly, is the book really very much concerned with literature. True, the second chapter—the most compelling—offers revealing insights into the literary fictionality of some specific instances of Renaissance pastoral; but it is significant that this analysis precedes, rather than follows from, Iser’s philosophical explorations. And while he returns, in his last chapters, to literature—specifically, to a notion of literature as play—this discussion is almost completely divorced from any engagement with actual literary texts. Glancing references to Tristram Shandy and Finnegans Wake, a slightly longer mention of Beckett’s Imaginary Dead Imagine: these serve as the springboards from which Iser makes sweeping transhistorical, crosscultural pronouncements about “the” text.The Fictive and the Imaginary makes heavy demands on its readers. Although Iser lashes out against “unwieldy structuralist terminology” (p. x), his own style is dense and abstract, and his basic terminology is muddled. For instance, he insists on the term “imaginary,” in contrast to such familiar terms as “imagination,” because it is “comparatively neutral” and “has not yet been permeated by [End Page 188] traditional associations” (p. 305)—yet his analysis often depends pivotally on treating “the imaginary” and “the imagination” as equivalents. Matters are made more difficult yet by Iser’s tendency to conflate two different tasks: elucidating the history of the discourse around the terms and finding the “true” nature of the fictive and the imaginary themselves.Then, too, as the summary above may suggest, the book has organizational quirks. Iser begins by insisting vigorously on a triad, replacing the distinction between fiction and reality with the three-pronged distinction of “the real, the fictive, and... the imaginary” (p. 1). But the definition of the real, oddly exiled to a footnote, is internally inconsistent (it refers simultaneously to “the empirical world” and to “the variety of discourses relevant to the author’s approach to the world”) (p. 305), and in any case, it is soon demoted to a minor character in the argument. Indeed, in the “Epilogue”—on mimesis and literary staging—the notions of the fictive and imaginary have vanished as well. One is left, then, with a clump of chapters that do not cohere into a single book, much less a unified argument. For all its scattered insights, The Fictive and the Imaginary does not meet the high standards set by... (shrink)

This book, the ninth in a series entitled "Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences," treats structuralism as a general intellectual movement spanning several disciplines and as a contribution to philosophy. In part 1, Peter Caws considers structuralism as an intellectual movement as it has manifested itself in such disciplines as linguistics, anthropology, mythology, literary criticism, and psychology. Since so many writers who have contributed to structuralism have not explored its implications with the consistency and thoroughness demanded of (...) philosophers, Caws devotes part 2 to a consideration of structuralism as a "subdiscipline of philosophy." Caws's goal is "not only to make the phenomenon intelligible, but also to acknowledge its challenge and usefulness.". (shrink)

The article deals with the problem of cognition in the framework of the biogenetic structuralist neurophenomenology of Charles Laughlin. The aim of the article is to study the possibilities of applying the biogenetic structuralist theory as a theoretical and methodological basis for the study of consciousness in Laughlin’s theory. A feature of biogenetic structuralism is the interdisciplinary fusion of anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. The methodology of biogenetic structuralism allows exploring universal structures of consciousness, which are caused by (...) the genetically predisposed organization of the human nervous system. Universal structures of consciousness include structures that mediate human language, knowledge of time and space. It is shown that the problem of cognition is realized in neurognostic models, which are compared with the operational environment. Neurognostic models include both the real nature of man as an organism and the external environment of the organism. Laughlin introduces the concept of a cognitive environment to designate a set of neurognostic models that can potentially be captured by the area of consciousness. He relies on the idea of a cognitive environment, which is essentially intentional in its organization. The polar interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the sensory cortex of the human brain gives rise to the intentionality of consciousness. Laughlin explains the work of the human cerebral cortex neurognostically as omnipresent for human consciousness, and independent of the cultural background. The cerebral cortex is a field of neural activity that arises and dissolves in temporal sequences and coordinates with cognitive processes that connect meaning and form into a single structure in consciousness. The experience of consciousness suggests a sensitive sphere of the cerebral cortex ascertains the meaningful, phenomenal world. The biogenetic structuralist methodology allows to development of an idea of the intentional structure and uniqueness of consciousness. The biogenetic structuralist approach is heuristic for modern science because, firstly, this approach creates the maximum opportunity to include data obtained from naturalistic, ethnographic, anatomical, clinical, and experimental sources; secondly, biogenetic data have the widest empirical and phenomenological rationale; thirdly, biogenetic concepts are defined in the context of a holistic understanding of the phenomenon through the uniqueness of consciousness. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationship between the structuralism, especially the anthropological version of the latter in Levi-Strauss and Luhmann’s theory of social systems. The analysis is done through two guiding hypotheses. It reviews the historical background relating structuralism with systems theory and discusses the fundamental concepts that appear in this relationship. Luhmann's systems thinking are contrasted in some of its central concepts with Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist perspective. The paper concludes with a review of the hypotheses presented and some proposals about (...) the perspective of the social systems. El presente artículo aborda las relaciones entre el pensamiento estructuralista, especialmente la variante antropológica de éste en Lévi-Strauss y la teoría de sistemas sociales de Luhmann. El análisis se hace a través de dos hipótesis que guían el desarrollo del texto. Se revisan los antecedentes históricos que relacionan al estructuralismo con la teoría de sistemas y se analizan los conceptos fundamentales que aparecen en esta relación. Posteriormente el pensamiento sistémico de Luhmann se contrasta a partir de algunos de sus conceptos centrales con la perspectiva estructuralista de Lévi-Strauss. El trabajo concluye con una revisión de las hipótesis presentadas y con reflexiones globales acerca de la perspectiva de los sistemas sociales. (shrink)

Ethics and Representationprovides a critique and overview of contemporary post-structuralist theory. Exploring the Kantian and phenomenological background of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and Irigaray, this book raises some key questions and issues in critical theory. These questions are looked at from a number of angles including the notion of point of view and perspective, the critique of anthropologism from Kant to Deleuze, and the relation between representation and modernity. This is an original contribution to ethical and critical theory which situates (...) poststructuralism in its philosophical background, and in the sustained problematic of the enlightenment. (shrink)

The article contains a review of the main arguments proposed by the philosophers of late structuralism against Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly, his theses on semantics. Polemics against the Husserlian conception of semantics are grounded in the structuralists’ opposition to the various theses of Husserl’s phenomenologies. Initially, it was an attempt at combining the logical and linguistic theses of Husserlian phenomenology with the structuralist theses proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, as known from late works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the 1960s, (...) it was an attempt at challenging the status of subjectivity – the subject, including the transcendental ego and the role of consciousness. Simultaneously, it is a polemic against essentialism, in regard to ontological, epistemological and anthropological theses. In the article, I focus on the polemics of the thinkers that reformulated Saussure’s theses, against Husserlian semantics which they considered in reference to the broad understanding of a sign, exceeding the sign of language. (shrink)

This article elaborates on the relationship between structuralism (and to some extent post-structuralism), hermeneutics and pragmatism, starting from what I comprehend as the inherent dilemma articulated in the policy documents concerning the emerging knowledge economy: the tension between innovation and adaptation. In the first section, I delineate a horizon of understanding for my presentation by defining the particular societal transformations in the historical context where the question of creativity and innovation has become of strategic importance. Then, in the second section, (...) I suggest a diagnosis of the new and predominant flexible organization of knowledge within the context of the new creative economy. The third section is a short interlude, where the philosophical implications of these societal transformations are being disclosed, together with the challenges that influence the agenda for a discussion about a constructive philosophical contribution. In the last two sections, I introduce a particular kind of hermeneutical perspective into the discussion by a close reading of one of Paul Ricoeur’s major works from the mid 1970s, here distinctively interpreted as a profound investigation into the micro-mechanisms of the epistemology of creativity. Thus, by the configuration of a hermeneutics of creativity and innovation from these philosophical resources, my intention is to disclose the ontological implications of innovation as well as the anthropological prerequisites for a conception of creativity “with a human face.”. (shrink)

French thought in the twentieth century is typically described as marked by a major fault line, a rupture or grande coupure, that emerged in the 1960s, the heyday of the ‘crisis of the subject.’ Before this time French philosophy, together with associated fields, were focused on issues of subjectivity—first in the vein of Bergsonian vitalism but then shifting, with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in the late 1930s and 1940s, to forms of phenomenology and existentialism inspired first by Husserl and then, even (...) more decisively, by Heidegger.1 But starting mid-century, developments in the ‘human sciences’ of linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis began to offer a different.. (shrink)

The point of departure of this paper is Penrose's definition of conscious action as that in which stimulus and response are linked by a non‐algorithmic relationship, which Penrose defines as ‘understanding’. My purpose is to explore the nature of this understanding by means of a two‐step process. The first step is provided by Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. This theory provides us with a quantitative measure of conscious states that we need to transform into qualitative meaning. In the second (...) step, we obtain this qualitative meaning with the help of the structuralist theory of mind. From this perspective, meaning originates in the set of qualitative contrasts that define the alternative courses of action that might have been implemented. Work on the analogy between quantitative bits and qualitative binary oppositions does not solve the hard problem of consciousness, but it might help to reformulate it in a new, productive way. (shrink)

Structuralism was the major intellectual concern of French philosophy during the 1960s and 1970s. Elsewhere it was not, except in circles influenced by French thought. Lévi‐Strauss seemed to embody this theoretical trend; actually, he was simply its most outstanding figure. That situation was a strange one, in several respects: Lévi‐Strauss was not the initiator of structuralism as such, nor did he aim to cause any upheaval in the field of philosophy. But it is undeniable that most of the thinkers who (...) were (often wrongly and against their will) deemed to be structuralists, or post‐structuralists, or neo‐structuralists, such as derrida (see Article 50), althusser (Article 48), foucault (Article 49), deleuze (Article 51), Serres, lyotard (Article 52), Barthes, lacan (Article 47), Marin, entertained a special relationship with structural linguistics and with Lévi‐Strauss's anthropology. This is what needs to be understood. Thus the following sets of questions will be addressed: (1) Why, and because of what methodological requirements, did Lévi‐Strauss seek explanatory models for some anthropological problems in structural linguistics? (2) How and why did this choice made by Lévi‐Strauss have a decisive influence upon some of the major philosophers in France at that time? What were the fruits, and what were the limits and misunderstandings of the structuralist inspiration, particularly in its anthropological version, in philosophy. In other words, what assessment can be made today of the relationships between philosophy and Lévi‐Strauss's anthropology? (shrink)

The methods employed by structuralist anthropology in the European area to free lived Christianity from its categorization as a popular religion steeped in ‘pagan relics’ also facilitate the analytical description of social practices and rituals that in France are part of the anti-clerical struggle of the late 19th century. More than forms of philosophical or militant atheism, the spiritualist movements introduce ‘Science’ as a symbolic entity in order to revive learning of counter-empirical ideas at the heart of a (...) mode of religious transmission that persists today and takes on board the demands of secular societies for religious pluralism. (shrink)

In La Métaphore Vive, spatial understandings pervade much of Ricoeur’s discussion of metaphor in terms of proximity and distance, tension, substitution, displacement, change of location, image, the ‘open’ structure of words, closure, transparency and opaqueness. Yet this is usually where space is discussed within metaphor, and as a metaphor itself, rather than as a precondition or prior system of relations to language interacting with language. Based on reinterpretation of an aspect of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology, diametric and concentric spaces (...) are argued to be such a prior system of relations to language, actively framing metaphor. This article examines the relevance of this prelinguistic spatial discourse to Ricoeur’s framework of metaphor and interrogation of the copula, influenced centrally by Heidegger. Concentric spatial assumed connection and diametric spatial assumed separation offer a framework for understanding, in Ricoeur’s words, the “conflict between identity and difference” in metaphor and early Heidegger’s existential spatiality. (shrink)

Nineteen fifty-eight was an extraordinary year for cultural innovation, especially in English literature. It was also a year in which several boldly revisionary positions were first articulated in analytic philosophy. And it was a crucial year for the establishment of structural linguistics, of structuralist anthropology, and of cognitive psychology. Taken together these developments had a radical effect on our conceptions of individual creativity and of the inheritance of tradition. The present essay attempts to illuminate the relationships among these (...) developments, and to explain the foundational role played by mathematical, logical and information theory in all of them. (shrink)

IntroductionIn May 2006, the small group of doctoral students working on ecophilosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at K.U.Leuven invited the Dutch environmental philosopher Martin Drenthen to a workshop to discuss his writings on the concept of wilderness, its metaphysical and moral meaning, and the challenge social constructivism poses for ecophilosophy and environmental protection. Drenthen’s publications on these topics had already been the subject of intense discussions in the months preceding the workshop. His presentation on the workshop and the (...) three critical responses by Wim Bollen, Glenn Deliège, and Richard Kover are published here in a thoroughly revised form on the basis of further and ongoing discussions about the issues involved. Three further contributions to the discussion are added: one by Nathan Edward Kowalski, a young Canadian philosopher who studied in Leuven and wrote his as yet unpublished dissertation on “Evil in Nature,” a second one by Kingsley Goodwin who is currently writing a dissertation on deep ecology at University College in Dublin and, finally, my own unsystematic thoughts inspired by Martin Drenthen’s provocative and stimulating hermeneutics of our postmodern understanding of nature and wilderness, as well as the diverse critical responses to Drenthen’s views by the other contributors. I owe gratitude to all of them for enriching my own ecophilosophical thought and enlarging its horizon although as my fragmentary reflections show at the cost of yet greater uncertainty and more questions about the possibilities of arguing for a radical environmentalist position. Such a position would somehow connect or ground our moral obligation to preserve genuine non-human otherness, wild and free nature, in the non-human meaning of such nature and in our essential need to be in direct and concrete contact with that field of wild non-human meaning because we ourselves belong to nature, because we are not only and purely civilized but are also and most fundamentally wild and free. Three fundamental questions need to be distinguished: the question about our moral obligations regarding nature and its preservation, the metaphysical question about the nature of nature or the meaning of nature, and the question of the metaphysical grounding of our morals in general, and of our moral obligation regarding nature in particular, in the nature or meaning of nature. The complex intertwinement between these three questions is at the heart of Martin Drenthen’s reflections.The authors contributing to the present discussion approach the various issues from markedly different philosophical backgrounds and concerns: critical theory, anthropology, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deep ecology are all to some degree or other brought to bear on the question of what wilderness means for us, why we are fascinated by it and what it actually and in the first place is.Another interesting difference between the five respondents to Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy relates to the place from which they write: while the Canadians Richard Kover and Nathan Edward Kowalski have wilderness of some sort still close at hand, the Belgians Wim Bollen and Glenn Deliège write from a place which has been thoroughly domesticated, cultivated, and industrialised for a long time. Martin Drenthen himself, of course, writes from the same kind of place as these last two, which explains why he only refers to the wilderness that he has read about in novels, seen in movies, or experienced as recreated in the reserves of the Netherlands. The Irish Kingsley Goodwin writes perhaps from a third, intermediate place that is not wild anymore but still much more natural than Belgium or the Netherlands are.The differences in philosophical approach and concern combined with the difference of place generate a rich tapestry of perspectives and voices wrestling with the fundamental questions of our perceived homelessness and alienation from nature, our cultural discontent, our longing for and need for radical alterity, of immanence and transcendence, of who we are and where we belong, and more concretely of whether there is more to ground our efforts to preserve nature than enlightened self-interest and subjective preference. Martin Drenthen deserves praise for inaugurating this fruitful discussion with his intriguing and highly paradoxical effort to hybridize a postmodern deconstruction of the idea and ideal of wilderness as unspoilt and true nature on the one hand with a new metaphysics of wilderness on the other. Arne Naess, who is generally regarded as the founding father of deep ecology, pointed out the positive and stimulating role that vagueness in the expression of ideas can play in political and philosophical debate. Such general and vague but highly suggestive expressions as ‘all life is one’ are not empty at all, as is often claimed; they are rather full of possibilities of ‘precisation’ and differentiation. Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy is certainly not vague to the degree of ‘all life is one,’ but his expositions are similarly pregnant with a wealth of further questions, precisations, distinctions, and conceptual clarifications. Good examples of different kinds are to be found in the contributions of Nathan Edward Kowalski and Richard Kover. Kowalski points out that Drenthen’s notions of culture and wilderness need to be made more precise by distinguishing them from the notions of civilization and wildness such that wild cultures become a conceptual possibility. Richard Kover takes the lead from Drenthen’s question about the reason for our postmodern fascination for wilderness to confront it with our primordial fascination in terms of the dependence in the evolution of our subjectivity and our consciousness on the focused perceptual attention on wild forms.Glenn Deliège situates Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy in its original context of the Dutch debate on the preservation of nature, in particular on the new wilderness paradigm. According to this paradigm, the nature to be preserved should be true and pure, truly natural and wild nature, that is nature outside of and free from the cultivating and domesticating influence of humans. In the Netherlands, however, such nature no longer exists; it can only be preserved after it has first been artificially recreated. Deliège gives an informative summary account of the highly charged three-cornered debate between the adepts of this wilderness-paradigm, the proponents of the more traditional form of conservation of remnants of the typical European landscapes created by pre-industrial farming practices and the modern technocratic functionalists. This debate makes obvious that there are quite different views of the nature of nature and its value. Enter social constructivism: the contested nature of nature is nothing more than a social construct, an idea in a collective mind. The contestation itself is a struggle for authority and power between different such social constructs, any claim to scientific objectivity and objective truth for one’s image of nature is an arrogation of a truth which doesn’t exist and is potentially oppressive by silencing other views. Nature then is up for the grabs of politics, political negotiation, and compromise between various interest groups who all want to get some benefit from nature, some use-value.The problem with Drenthen’s effort to articulate a normative concept of nature which cannot be deconstructed in this way is the extreme formality and emptiness of his metaphysical concept of wilderness as that which is always ‘beyond’, always ‘more’ and which can never be exhausted by any image and construction of nature. Any more concrete determination is mere appearance; the thing in itself is a border concept of that which in fact cannot be grasped conceptually. Glenn Deliège is critical of this formality and emptiness from which it will be impossible to derive any concrete guidance for our conservation practices. He then goes on to defend the Arcadian tradition of our appreciation of nature as giving us a historically well-grounded orientation for those practices. Of course that Arcadian tradition is obviously a cultural construction but that doesn’t make it completely arbitrary and contingent since it is itself ultimately grounded in and open to modification by our concrete sensuous experiences of nature.Deliège here raises the very important issue of the relation between our concrete perceptual and bodily experiences in and with nature and our concepts and metaphysical images of nature. Drenthen himself approaches this issue from the hermeneutical perspective of our need to make sense of our experiences and to articulate their meaning. His confrontation with social constructivism and his effort to salvage something from its relativizing acid lead him, however, into the direction of a highly abstract and empty concept of wilderness.Richard Kover shows that perception is, indeed, the key to a radical critique of social constructivism. He does this with the help of the ecological anthropology of Paul Shepard, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It needs to be said here that Kover takes his leave from an unpublished paper by Martin Drenthen with the title “How to appropriate wilderness appropriately?” – the paper is accessible though on Drenthen’s web-site - in which Drenthen comments and reflects upon three contemporary wilderness-tales, one of them being Werner Herzog’s much-discussed documentary on Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist drop-out who lived thirteen summers among wild grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness before being killed together with his girlfriend by a grizzly bear.Kover tries to show that we are not imprisoned in the mirror-cabinet of our mind or of our human sociality. To make his case, he starts from Paul Shepard’s thoughtful observation that the evolutionary emergence of the mind did not remove us from the natural world but actually connected us deeper with it. Through our mind we evolved more fully into it because our mind is primordially in our senses and in the ability to articulate a perceptual world. The natural world in the form of the system of natural species and their relations is the primary model for perceptual discriminations, for the fundamental discovery of order with its twin-aspects of distinction and discontinuity on the one side and relations and continuity on the other side. Our cognition is essentially perceptually based, our subjectivity is primordially informed by our inherence in the sensible world. Perceptual cognition is inherently intentional and relational, it is not an autonomous mental construction, it is rather in the world and informed by that which is perceived. The other is always intertwined with the subject. We are always already hooked up with the world, with the others, before we start reflecting, thinking, and conceptualizing. This is one of the major themes in Shepard’s work: what this insight means with regard to our relations to non-human otherness, in particular to our perceptual encounter with wild animals. In our encounter with non-human otherness, we are confronted with an essentially ambiguous sense of both affinity and disjuncture. Wild animals demonstrate to us that we are not homeless or alien to this world, that we fundamentally belong to it and are part of it. Their difference, however, shows us that there are different perspectives and ways of being in the world. “Thus the encounter with non-human others inform humans that we are both of the world and simultaneously not the world and there are horizons of significance beyond our own perspective.”Nathan Edward Kowalski comes to a similar conclusion when he situates our morality in the larger moral order of wild nature. According to Kowalski it is indeed a moral order though not our own, an Other to our morality but not simply a negative one. It is, as Drenthen says, a highly paradoxical amoral morality. But what can it mean to speak of morality here? For Kowalski it means that the issue is not merely the theoretical recognition and acknowledgment of axiological transcendence, of non-human values out there, but whether we will appropriately conform to and comport ourselves towards that axiological transcendence so that we can find a human homeland in wild nature instead of turning it into a wasteland. The question then is, how to fit our own human morality into this larger order and greater reality, to subordinate it to that greater reality as a part of it and encompassed but not denied by it so that we can be moral and natural at the same time, tender carnivores hunting the sacred game. Indigenous people follow a moral protocol in their relationship with non-human others which acknowledge and respects their autonomy, their alterity, and the sacred mystery of their different ways of being. They are not befriended but some of them are hunted and eaten – as an exchange in the gift-economy of nature.The problem of the homelessness and alienation from nature is discussed by Wim Bollen from the radically different vantage point of critical theory. In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the human story unfolds as a tragic effort to liberate ourselves from nature and to become fully human through rational control when in the end this effort turns against ourselves and instead of liberation and human flourishing we get social domination and repression of our natural needs. The frustrations and mutilations imposed upon us by a repressive civilization give rise to the regressive desire for a return to a natural existence. Referring to the myth of Odysseus and Circe as interpreted by Adorno and Horkheimer, Wim Bollen equates such a natural existence with animal life. In the light of contemporary knowledge about primitive existence, however, this equation is highly problematic. Palaeolithic foragers were already fully human in all respects. A life without civilization need not be an animal-existence.According to Adorno/Horkheimer, our subjectivity and autonomy have to be wrested from animal-nature through an exertive struggle that cannot but proceed by a threefold strategy of domination: the domination of non-human otherness, of human others, and of our own inner nature. The siren song of nature consists in the temptation to give up that struggle for the promise of an unreflective, non-alienated natural existence without toil.When Odysseus’ men give in to Circe’s seduction they are, however, not transformed into wild animals but into swine. According to Bollen this signifies that we cannot re-wild ourselves, that we remain imprisoned in civilization, either as master-subjects or as domesticated animals. Bollen, by the way, like Drenthen, does not distinguish conceptually between civilization and culture. Since re-wilding for Bollen means the impossibility of returning to animal-existence, which is actually the impossibility of becoming another species since biologically we are animals already, to be imprisoned in civilisation means nothing else than to be imprisoned in our humanity. The fact that we cannot become wild animals again – according to Paul Shepard, however, we are still wild animals – is indeed, as Bollen stresses, a trivial form of alienation. A more meaningful concept of alienation which can be put to critical use must refer to a culturally and historically determined frustration and deficit inside the cultural order that is to be overcome not by an impossible regression but by progressive politics leading beyond the three intertwined forms of domination. Not back to nature but forward towards a reconciliation of culture with nature! Such a reconciliation would neither collapse culture into the immanence of nature nor submerge nature into the transcendence of culture. According with the three forms of domination it would be a three-dimensional form of reconciliation.Odysseus’ men did not got what they thought were promised them: the complete liberation from the burden of being autonomous subjects, of being civilized, but they got something worthwhile, namely a certain from of pleasure, a limited and provisional relief and escape. Bollen sees a critical potential in these piggish pleasures after all and consequently even in the siren song of nature since these pleasures were only experienced because Odysseus’ men gave in to it. But one has to give in to this siren song critically if it is to unfold its liberating potential. The problem with pleasure though in bourgeois society is that it is necessarily betrayed, instrumentalized and sold.Kingsley Goodwin’s paper starts by defending deep ecology against the charge of asserting a naïve and dogmatic metaphysics of nature. For convenience sake, but not quite unproblematically, he identifies deep ecology with the environmental thought of Arne Naess. A metaphysics of nature for Naess is always part of a personal worldview. Worldviews which are partly inspired by ecology Naess calls ecosophies. Naess always stresses the personal character of such a worldview and the irreducible plurality of them. It used to be a common misunderstanding of the platform of deep ecology which Naess conceived together with George Sessions that it expressed in a condensed form the metaphysical beliefs of deep ecology. Naess’ intention, however, was to try to articulate in a general fashion the basic viewpoints on which the supporters of the deep ecology movement agreed. It would be possible then to derive these viewpoints from quite different worldviews. In light of this, I think, that Goodwin’s characterisation of the platform as “pragmatic and activist” is not quite appropriate.Goodwin goes on to compare Drenthen’s conception of wilderness and wildness with the similar position developed by Neil Evernden in his book The Social Creation of Nature. He like Naess in his personal ecosophy stresses the crucial role of perceptual experience of wild otherness to find an antidote to the relativity and contingency of our interpretations of nature. Evernden refers to studies on child development to argue for a non-dualistic and relational conception of the self, similar to Naess’ relational ontology. According to Goodwin, Drenthen, in spite of his hermeneutical approach remains too much indebted to the Western subject/object-dualism. The object, in this case wild nature, is pure otherness.With regard to a compost heap, Goodwin shows that we are not separated from nature by an inseparable gulf, that nature is close at hand, and that we can experience and explore it, appreciate the complex play of identity and difference it consists of, the exchanges and transformations and that we can identify with the organisms involved in these exchanges.*The proceeding remarks only highlight some of the prominent themes and considerations in the various contributions to this topical issue of Ethical Perspectives. Hopefully the reader will feel invited and enticed to read the articles themselves, starting, preferably of course, with the essay by Martin Drenthen, who sparked off this lively discussion on the moral meaning of wild nature. I am honoured and pleased to be able to introduce these rich explorations by such talented young environmental philosophers who are eager to develop environmental philosophy further and lead it into new directions. They all have to wrestle with and find answers to the challenge postmodern deconstruction and social constructivism pose for environmental philosophy. In the face of that challenge, it is even more difficult than it already was to provide solid and convincing arguments for the defence of wild and free nature beyond merely pragmatic arguments in terms of its utilitarian value for us. The reason for that defence is not clear-cut and proves to be just as evasive as the moral meaning of nature itself. But neither that reason nor that meaning are mere phantoms and mirages that vanish when we approach them and try to grasp them. They are more substantial, even if they will never have the solidity of a mathematical proof or a scientific measurement. Their locale is the lifeworld which from the point of view of scientific and logical precision and clarity is a messy place where subject and object, reason and heart, fact and value, experience and thought and, yes, nature and culture cannot be clearly separated. This has important consequences for environmental philosophy and its methodology. Conceptual analysis and logical argumentation have to become sensitive to the richness of experience in the lifeworld and to the diverse efforts of its articulation: i.e., they have to open themselves up and maybe even to subordinate themselves to phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. For me personally this is one of the most important conclusions I draw from the discussion presented here. (shrink)

France saw a great intellectual upsurge in a variety of different academic fields in the 1970s, principally in philosophy, but also in the social sciences, linguistics, anthropology, history, and psychiatry. Different strands of thinking, from the linguistic school of structuralists, Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology, Louis Althusser’s reconsiderations of the basis of Marxism, Derrida’s philosophical critique of phenomenology and structuralism, Lacan’s of Freud and the unconscious, and Michel Foucault’s historical genealogy, all seemed to be coalescing in a reconsideration of (...) the centrality of Man in what had been assumed to be a human-centred universe. Often seen as representing the triumph of subjectivity over objective reality, this chapter will show how the theories of deconstruction were really a critique of the Subject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anthony Close THE EMPIRICAL AUTHOR: SALMAN RUSHDIE'S THE SATANIC VERSES HOBBES, comparing the author ofan action to the owner ofgoods, asserts, "And as the right of possession, is called dominion; so the right of doing any action, is called authority" (Leviathan, Book I, chap. 16). My purpose in this essay is to apply this Hobbesian maxim to the relation Author/Text, expanding somewhat Hobbes's notion of authority. I presuppose that (...) in our day-to-day dealings with our fellow men, we envisage each others' acts as exhibiting purpose and commitment, which make them ours in more than the platitudinous sense that we performed them. By virtue of that, they confer on us a privileged, though clearly not unchallengeable, authority in saying what they are and what they are for. Such, in effect, is the position reached by Austin in How to Do Things with Words, and it broadly corresponds to that of various philosophical writings on human action—by Anscombe, Davidson, and Melden.1 To be sure, we may legitimately consider human behavior from other viewpoints (e.g., structuralist, anthropological, psychoanalytical, Marxist) trained on its unconscious presuppositions. Yet, insofar as such theorizing fails to acknowledge the priority of the Hobbesian perspective, it will seem perverse for a reason that has been well put by Charles Taylor. Precisely because history is made up of purposeful activity, Taylor argues, we need to explain historical patterns in a way that is "intelligible in relation to conscious action" even though they may not "issue from conscious action."2 By this criterion much of our modern literary theory is defective. A vivid measure of the deficiency is provided by the furor over Salman Rushdie's TL· Satanic Verses, culminatingin thefatwa pronounced against Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 248-267 Anthony Close249 him by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989. I take it that for anyone vocationally committed to the practice or study ofliterature and to the cause of freedom of expression, the defense of Rushdie cannot be a matter of indifference. Nor can one be indifferent to the chasm of misunderstanding that separates Rushdie and his apologists from the novel's Muslim opponents. I believe that these two causes—defending Rushdie and bridging the chasm—can be reconciled by offering better explanations ofhis novel in place ofcrude denunciations or, from some non-Muslim quarters, smug and knowing dismissals. Yet, as we shall see, the task of explanation could be considered hamstrung by our modern poetics. I was reminded ofHobbes's textby Rushdie's lucid and cogent defense of his novel in TL· Independent (London, February 4, 1990). Against the accusations that he had deliberately reviled the Islamic faith, he argued as follows. Though TL· Satanic Verses, like many novels that Rushdie esteems, is a work of radical dissent, questioning, and reimagining, it is motivated by a spirit of serious inquiry rather than debunking derision. More particularly, it reflects a determination that underlies all Rushdie's work: "to create a literary language and literary forms in which the experience offormerly-colonised, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression." He continues: "It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis... that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.... [It] celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure." Note the insistence on how these themes flow direcdy from Rushdie's own experience. Two days after the publication of this article, Harold Pinter gave on Rushdie's behalf a lecture on the relationship of literature to religion and society at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In this lecture, Rushdie articulated a Bakhtinian view of the novelist's function: to dramatize ironically and noncommittally the clash of voices, languages, and ideologies in a world without gods and without traditionsanctioned truth. Rushdie referred specifically, I think, to a species of postmodernist novel which we may dub "palimpsest history";3 the species includes Rushdie's works, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra... (shrink)

This essay is, first, a theoretical and historical study of some classical scientific ways of studying human being in the world. The more readily accessible and more commonly discussed "models" of being human were chosen for review here, but structuralism is included because I believe it will have ,the same impact in America as it has had in France, and I hope that American readers might be forewarned about what may be ideologically at stake before the technical, and fruitful, aspects (...) of the movement become an academic fad in the United States. The subjects included are mainline experimental psychology from Wundt to Skinner, with its relatively shortlived functionalist and Watsonian-behaviorist formulations; holistic psychology from Brentano through Stumpf, Husserl, and Goldstein to Maslow, Rogers, and contemporary "third force" psychology; and the psychoanalytic model, for which the only paradigm is Freud himself. Preeminence is given to psychological paradigms, since their subject matter lies closest to the classical philosophical tradition from which "philosophical anthropology" emerged. (This book is, in the final analysis, a prolegomenon to an articulated philosophical anthropo logy. ) Sociological models are also considered: the "classical" tradition from Comte to the present, and Marxist anthropology from the manu scripts of 1844 to the present. The structuralist model, from Durkheim to Chomsky, is also considered, since it cuts across and gives new dimensions to all the foregoing models. The essay is, second, a phenomenological critique of these historico theoretical considerations. (shrink)

According to the traditional interpretation, Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology deposes the concept of man and the notion of human nature from its central place in human and social sciences. While it’s necessary to acknowledge Lévi-Strauss’ distance vis-à-vis all philosophy based on intentionality, experience and consciousness of subject, we argue that the most interesting purpose of the structural anthropology lies elsewhere. Not only Lévi-Strauss never declared himself being part of anti-humanism movement, but most of all, his famous polemics with Sartre (...) at the end of La Pensée sauvage should be interpreted as part of his fight against ethnocentrism. The project of “dissolving the man” can be thus read as deconstructing the idea that western man makes of himself in the light of ethnological findings about universal structures orchestrating all human societies. We further show that the notion of subject survived its very death announced by the most radical structuralist thinkers and that structural method could be effectively employed in order to study different techniques and modes of subjectivation, revealing that “becoming subject” is a process structured by our language, symbolic universe and ethical teleology. (shrink)

Every structure, therefore also every institution, is inhabited by an “empty box”, a mobile space that can never be filled, which sets the elements in motion. This idea – which finds one of its many formulations, perhaps the most famous, in Deleuze’s Structuralism – is the outcome of a long and fruitful path, from Durkheim, through Mauss, to the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. To understand its genesis and follow its evolutionary path, it is necessary to focus attention on Marcel Mauss’s (...) work and on his way of thinking about institutions. (shrink)

This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philologist by training, an author of scholarly studies on the nineteenth-century poet Leopardi, and a Marxist by conviction. With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism. Whereas the philosophical (...) legacy of the later Engels has been decried by most prominent Marxists since the 1920s, Timpanaro eloquently defends its essential purpose and relevance, by unfashionably re-emphasising the permanent weight of nature within history. In doing so, he returns to the heritage of Lucretius and Leopardi, and argues for a more consistent materialism that is at once more pessimistic and more hedonistic than any other contemporary version of Marxism. Timpanaro emphasises the insuperable limits of frailty and mortality as unalterable conditions of society whose transformation is the goal of revolutionary socialism. Timpanaro vigorously attacks what he regards as the widespread entente between a diluted Marxism and a fashionable idealism in the west, whether in the form of an “existentialist” or a “structuralist” union of the two. The aversion of the former to the work of Darwin and Engels receives a spirited refutation, no less than the indulgence of the latter towards the work of Saussure or Levi-Strauss. A special introduction written for this English edition deals with the phenomenon of the recent revival of “vulgar materialism” in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the fields of psychology and anthropology, and its relationship to racism. On Materialism will be one of the central focuses of cultural and intellectual controversy within and beyond Marxism in the next decade. (shrink)

In The Order of Things (OT), Foucault recounts the birth and imminent death of Man as an object of study for science and philosophy. Foucault's point is that this very notion of “Man” is dependent on a particular transformation in the history of Being. The mere formulation of this hypothesis opens up a whole series of questions. First, is it true that Man has only become an object of concern in the late eighteenth century. Secondly, if Man has indeed only (...) recently become an object of theoretical interest, is Foucault's description and explanation of this process correct. Thirdly, why should we overcome the concept of “ Man”. Fourthly, in what sense was structuralism deemed to help us overcoming the limitations of this paradigm. In conclusion, if OT has to be overcome, it seems that it should be on grounds slightly different from those usually advanced. (shrink)

Structuralism is often associated with a program, in keeping with the Durkheimian tradition, of reducing social norms to a kind of causality. On this reading, Émile Durkheim's collective representations became, in Claude Lévi-Strauss' work, cognitive or logical constraints. If so, then structuralism falls under Wittgenstein's objections to treating rules as causes. What this article shows, however, is that this reading of structuralism is misguided. The necessity and justification of introducing structural methods, first in linguistics and then in anthropology, as (...) well as the general concept of the sign, were rooted in the perception of a problem too often overlooked: that of the characterization of the data in the social and cultural sciences. Just as Saussure showed that the real problem of linguistics is not, what does it mean? but what are the units of language?, so Lévi-Strauss showed that social sciences should not be concerned with the causes of human behaviors but instead with the categorization of actions. In both cases, it appears that an individual action is the actualization of a common practice, habit, or custom that, itself, cannot be reduced to a set of observable features but must be defined by its differential position in a system. Structural anthropology thus leads to a truly ontological problem, which resonates interestingly today, in the context of the “ontological turn.”. (shrink)

"Although its original applications were in linguistics and anthropology, structuralism has also cut across sociology, history, philosophy, psychiatry, criticism, the comparative study of arts and letters, classical studies, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The present folume is a full record of the proceedings of an international symposium. Participating were many of the leading figures of the structuralist dialogue, and thus the volume is a useful demonstration of the movement, its aim and methods." [Choice].

Zusammenfassung In den folgenden Ausführungen werden die Dynamiken und Wirkungen interreligiöser Dialoggruppen beleuchtet. Es werden konstruktionstheoretische strukturelle und sozialpsychologische Perspektiven miteinander in Verbindung gebracht, um den Blick dafür zu öffnen, inwiefern der interreligiöse Dialog als eine spezifische Auseinandersetzung mit religiösen und gesellschaftlichen Grenzen zu beschreiben ist, in der die Akteure Identität und Alterität rekonfigurieren. Schließlich ist die Frage interessant, ob etwas Neues anstelle der bestehenden konfessionellen und institutionalisierten Grenzziehungen tritt. Bei dieser Betrachtung gerät auch in den Fokus, wie Religion in (...) diesem Rahmen verhandelt und definiert wird, was schließlich die Frage aufwirft, wie sich Religionswissenschaftler*innen zu wandelnden konfessionellen Grenzziehungen im interreligiösen Dialog methodologisch verhalten. (shrink)