This article focuses on the cultural implications of biosemiotics, considering the extent to which biosemiotics constitutes an “epistemological break” with modern modes of conceptualizing the world. To some extent, the article offers a series of footnotes to points made in the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer. However, it is argued that the move towards ‘agency’ represented in biosemiotics needs to be approached with caution in light of problems of translation between the humanities and the sciences. Notwithstanding these problems, biosemiotics is (...) found to represent the potential for one of the most thoroughgoing shifts that cultural analysis has yet seen. (shrink)

This paper starts with questioning the traditional approach to the so-called intercultural communication. Most students of intercultural communication, it seems, use the categories characterising a cultural or ethnic identity, such as Western, Indian, European, Aboriginal and the like, as parameters by reference to which some distinctive phenomena observed in conversational materials should be explained. Even though they may apply these categories correctly, they do not take into account the relevancy of these categories in each interaction.The aim of this paper (...) is to demonstrate that being a Japanese is achieved interactively and that interculturality of intercultural communication is constituted in and through the actual course of the interaction. In the analysis of interviews conducted with foreign students in Japan, it can be seen that the interviewer and the interviewee had to keep on coordinating their conduct throughout the development of their interaction in order that they could be a Japanese and a foreigner relevantly. In this way, what, in the studies of intercultural communication, is presupposed to be simply given, that is, the fact of a person being a Japanese or the like, is shown to be analysable and investigable as an interactive phenomenon in its own right. (shrink)

This paper analyses the American Constitution of 1787 and the Spanish Constitutions of 1812 and 1978. The objective is to analyse their structures and the changes they have undergone throughout history, to find differences that can be explained by the different cultural values that these two groups normally display. As will be seen, the cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance, amongst others, is the one that has a greater presence in this study. The conclusions drawn from this study (...) show that cultural groups change throughout history, but the cultural roots that they inherit seem to be present through the times. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of two extreme positions in the self-understanding of human beings namely ignoring culture or its over-determination. Though Charles Taylor and Antonio Gramsci are widely known to differ from each other in many respects, we endeavor a congruent reading to evolve a comprehensive perspective. We make avail of their concepts, such as background, horizon, and common sense, to comprehend the nature of the culturally constituted self and its relevance for education. For both Taylor and Gramsci, the (...) human self is situated in a cultural framework. Though the relation between self and culture is constitutive and inevitable, culture does not entirely determine or overshadow the self. This stance gives space for upholding freedom, dignity and liberation of the human self in both of them. While preserving the essential role of culture in the formation of the human self, education must not be reduced to identity politics. Education must incorporate culture, be critical of it and pay attention to forming a critical self. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 425-446 [Access article in PDF] Giving Orders: Theory and Practice in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina Vicki Hsueh Indians. Of Edisto Ashapo and Combohe to the South our friends. Of Wando Ituan Sewee and Sehey to the north came to our assistance and were zealous and resolute in it 1000 bowmen In our want supplied us. Q. Spaniards. What we shall (...) doe to the Spaniards if we invade them we brake the peace, if we sit still we loose our reputation with the Indians our friends. Westoes. Inland man eaters. Country. To the northward more sickly, about Ashley River fertile and of a wonderful growth. Tatchequea. A very fruitfull Country 8. days jorney by the North west the Emperor our friend and enemy to the Westoes and to hard for them. Q. Settlem't. 500 people will secure the settlement 1000 perfect it. desires supplys of necessarys till that time Excerpt from Carolina Memoranda in the handwriting of John Locke, Esq., 15 September 1670 Within the last decade, scholars such as James Tully, Barbara Arneil, and Bhikhu Parekh have performed a crucial intervention on modern constitu-tionalism's behalf. 1 Not only has constitutionalism in the modern age been [End Page 425] plagued by assumptions of cultural uniformity and an on-going inability to adjudicate between competing cultural claims, but it has been unable effectively to diagnose those limitations and dilemmas. The root of the problem, James Tully suggests, is ultimately a matter of historical perspective. "[T]he tendency," he writes, "is not to notice the philosophical and ideological debates over the last three hundred years... only the result of these debates is seen—the victorious modern language of constitutional uniformity—and claims for recognition are viewed through its framework as if it were impartial and universal." 2 In response Tully and others have sought to tackle this predicament at its historical root. Identifying modern constitutionalism's colonial origins as a significant part of the problem, their studies address the development of constitutionalism and colonialism as an entwined phenomenon in the early modern period, focusing particularly on the British-American context. In this sense, Locke's Two Treatises of Government stands as an exemplary illustration of the period's entangled colonial and constitutional temperaments. Well-known for its influential articulation of compact and resistance, the Two Treatises, Barbara Arneil argues "were written as a defence of England's colonial policy in the new world against the sceptics in England and the counter-claims of both the aboriginal nations and other European powers in America." 3 Accordingly, present-day constitutionalism continues to bear the weighty legacy of those colonial rationales. "[T]he language of modern constitutionalism," Tully further explains, "which has come to be authoritative was designed to exclude or assimilate cultural diversity and justify uniformity. The design is difficult to see because this 'modern' language has become the customary way of thinking about, reflecting on and envisioning a just constitutional order." Ultimately, Tully submits, citing Wittgenstein, "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably." 4This much-needed thickening of constitutionalism's historical context has enriched our awareness of constitutionalism's vexed origins, as it has proffered potent tools for interrogating current cultural adjudication. Yet, a troubling predicament persists. As if caught within the tenacious grip of the language of modern constitutionalism, Tully, Arneil, and Parekh insistently portray seventeenth-century British-American colonialism solely as a straightforward process of appropriation and assimilation without addressing or incorporating the [End Page 426] complex and contingent elements of that history in its emergence. Lacking the various negotiations and accommodations between settler and indigene in ambition and actualization, their portrayals crucially underplay the dynamic relationship between theories of constitutionalism and practices of colonialism—an approach that ultimately serves to reinscribe the narrative of triumphalist progress within their critiques. 5This problematic is the context for my reading of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,1669... (shrink)

Focusing on the “bian” (changes) of Chinese landscape painting in the Tang Dynasty, this essay seeks to expound a breakthrough in the study of painting in the dynasty. Such a study was once difficult to carry out in the form of pictorial and stylistic analyses due to the lack of physical works. By showing that the prevailing landscape paintings of two representative painters Wu Daozi and Li Sixun were at the time most likely to be dominated by the sutra paintings (...) and pictures of the immortal land, the essay attempts to demonstrate that the meaning of “changes” in landscape painting lies more in the change of style in representing landscape and the attitude of critics towards landscape paintings than in the change of subject matter. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that historical narratives also played a key role in constituting the concept of “landscape painting.” The focus on and analysis of the historical constitution itself provide people with another possible and feasible research approach in addition to the one based on the analysis of works and images. (shrink)

The absence of a clear distinction between notions of the individual and the social or general must, in fact, raise particularly strong reservations about any critical method as preoccupied as French structuralism is with comparisons between art and natural language. To be sure, this preoccupation has led to the isolation of many suggestive likenesses and differences between music and language. Among the likenesses, for example, is the assertion that both language and music constitute semiotic media within which the same techniques (...) for verifying competence and correctness of usage can be applied. Lévi-Strauss is insistent that musical as well as linguistic usage must be subject to verification through reference to some sort of "double articulation," or what will more generally be called here "dual structure," that is, through some method whereby, in effect, speakers and listeners can test each other's competence by altering the relationship between a more general and a more particularized level of a system and observing each other's responses.1 Nattiez essentially rejects this method of verifying competence, but he proposes two others which have analogues in the linguistic theory, respectively, of Zellig Harris and of Noam Chomsky ; interestingly these methods, which appear to be more "modern" than Lévi-Strauss', rely far more heavily on faith in fundamentally unexplainable judgments by single individuals, especially by individual "experts." · 1. Lévi-Strauss' somewhat obscure account of double articulation in Raw and Cooked differs from standard accounts such as André Martinet's and John Lyons' in Noam Chomsky , pp. 19-20. Lévi-Strauss appears to include both phonemes and morphemes in the code level, whereas it is more usual to oppose to the phonemic or sound level a level of meaning which is both semantic and morphemic. Rose Rosengard Subotnik is an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. She has written on Adorno's criticism of nineteenth-century music and is currently studying the relation between nineteenth-century German music and philosophy. She has contributed "Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical Music" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

This article traces recent developments in European social theory and psychoanalysis on the theory of the human subject. Critically examining the recent psychoanalytic departures of Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche on the status of primary repression as a condition for the constitution of subjectivity, an analysis is presented of the state of the subject in its unconscious relational world. The article suggests ways in which the analyses set out by Kristeva and Laplanche can be further refined and developed, partly (...) through a reconsideration of the intertwining of unconscious representation and repression as developed in the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, Thomas Ogden and others. For existing psychoanalytical accounts the article suggests we should substitute the concept of ‘rolling identification’, the psychical basis of the shift from self-referential representational activity to an elementary form of inter-subjectivity. Rolling identifications are defined as a representational flux that permits human subjects to create a relation to the self-as-object and pre-object relations. Such primal identification, the article suggests, operates through a ‘representational wrapping of self and others’. The article concludes with a consideration of the cultural significance of primary repression, and the politicization of identification. (shrink)

The study of the cultural activity of the Spiritual missions of the Russian Orthodox Church in various regions of Russia is one of the urgent tasks in the context of the problematic field of the theory of regionalism, cultural studies and socio-philosophical knowledge. Russian settlements on the territory of the Yenisei River basin and the entry of ethnic groups and territories of Yakutia and Buryatia into the Russian Empire has become one of the most important stages of the (...) integration of the ethnic groups of Siberia into a single statehood. The Irkutsk Spiritual Mission received a more perfect organization, institutionalized by increasing the number of missionary camps, which for successful Christian activities carried out among pagans allowed the formation of school educational institutions for the education and upbringing of a new Buryat generation of children in the doctrinal Orthodox canons, and Russian cultural traditions. In this regard, one of the key tasks of the missionaries was to establish a rational view of further life in new Christian-type formations, which was realized in socio-cultural activities: providing medical care to sick representatives of other ethnic groups, a friendly attitude to people of a different faith and a sincere desire to guide them on the path of righteousness, etc. It should be noted that the largest share of foreigners in this territory belonged to Buddhists, which was reflected in the influence of lamas on doctrinal issues, including economic ones. Since Buddhism in the Russian Empire belonged to the section of tolerant religions, direct (administrative) pressure on it was impossible. There remained funds of an exclusively spiritual nature, to which Orthodox missionary work was directed. Today in the Russian Federation, Buddhism, as well as Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as some other faiths belong to the category of traditional religions, which organizationally operate within the framework of the modern Russian Constitution. (shrink)

This work seeks to take seriously the common philosophical claim that individual subjects are constituted by their social world. A detailed understanding this claim requires an analysis of what is involved in being a subject, of the nature of 'the social', and of the possible constitutive relationships between these. I begin with a critical history of the idea that subjects are norm-followers, and that social groups constitute individuals by demanding their conformity to norms. I trace this 'conformity theory' through (...) the thought of Rousseau, Hegel, Mead, and Althusser, to its manifestation in contemporary continental and Anglo-American philosophy. I criticize this theory for being unable to sufficiently accommodate creativity and social resistance. I go on to develop an account of subjects as not only norm-followers but also sense-makers, who have identities in virtue of their engagement in narrative dramas. Such subjects are socially constituted in at least two ways: through their 'dialogical' interactions with particular others , and through their position in a public culture which determines what counts as a meaningful possibility for action. This understanding of subjectivity allows me to develop a new account of the nature of social groups--such as groups based on gender, class and nationality--which provides an alternative to the conformity theory. Social groups contribute to individual identities not only by imposing norms, but also by providing sense-making resources, in the form of literary and artistic traditions as well as the actual lives and dramas of members. My account allows us to understand creativity and social resistance as enabled by subjects' membership in social groups, and it reveals how the internal diversity of a group can strengthen rather than compromise its role in individual identities. I end with a discussion of the political implications of my work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 119-134 [Access article in PDF] The Constitution of Rhetoric's Tradition Maurice Charland Rhetoric is not a discipline. That is to say, as a domain of theoretical and practical knowledge, rhetoric is weakly institutionalized, lacking a centralized arbiter and standardized set of procedures for establishing truth claims. It also lacks the basic characteristics that Michel Foucault defines as disciplinary, for while we can identify (...) "groups of objects, methods, their corpus of properties considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools," these are neither universally admitted, nor do they "constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to whoever wishes, or whoever is able to make use of them, without their being any question of their meaning" (1972, 222). On the contrary, despite the fact that rhetoric is usually figured as offering practical and, indeed, positive knowledge, the meaning of its terms is always being questioned and at stake. While we might, by considering terms loosely, seek to identify rhetoric in terms of objects such as "persuasion," or "discourse," these are not exclusively its province. Furthermore, the ends of rhetoric are themselves unclear. Is rhetoric really the art of discovering the available means of persuasion? Or is it an art of citizenship? Or a method of enquiry? It has at times been defined as each. Consequently, none of these methods can fix its identity. At most, we can say that "rhetoric," as a domain of knowledge, signals a commitment to the idea of agency in discourse.Rhetoric, while not disciplinary, nevertheless "hangs together" as a domain of knowledge even though it does not cohere conceptually. It is, or comes close to being, a "discursive formation." That is to say, we can identify a field that produces statements concerning discourse and its operations, which is characterized by certain regularities that articulate with the term rhetoric itself. The first such regularity is the gesture of negation. Rhetoric refuses philosophy (or acts out having been refused by philosophy). [End Page 119] Rhetoric further is defined against other intellectual genres: rhetoric is not poetics, is not political science, is not ethics, though it may "speak" to them. Ultimately, though, this tells us very little about the nature of rhetoric's difference, for while refusal is effective in positing the existence of a boundary between rhetoric and other domains, the location of that boundary and what it contains remains unspecified. Rhetoric must also be attributed an at least provisional sense. This is accomplished by rhetoric's second gesture, which initially appears more substantial. Rhetoric is framed in terms of the positivity of a foundational "tradition." Indeed, the gesture toward tradition is ubiquitous. Consider, for example, both the title and principles of organization of Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg's (1990) anthology, George Kennedy's (1998) recursion to the idea of "tradition" even as he attempts to present rhetoric as a natural and cross-cultural phenomenon, recent feminist works that explicitly address "the tradition," 1 the routine citation of Classical authorities and examples, the recurrence of "new" rhetorics, including Burke's dramatism, Perelman's theory of argumentation, as well as Barthes' semiotics, which are offered as supplements to tradition's lacks, and, finally, the energy devoted to the study of the history of rhetoric. The rhetorical tradition, as something bequeathed or put in play by ancient teachers, appears to offer rhetoric a substance, a literature, and a set of problems, particularly through variants of two other principles of discursive formation identified by Foucault, commentary and the author-function. Even so, the gesture toward tradition does not imply the existence of a historically rooted and fixed corpus or model: "Tradition" is a vague term, there is no unproblematic canon of texts to be commented upon, and tradition itself, rather than Aristotle, Plato, or Cicero, stands as "author." What we debate is the meaning of the "tradition," the uneasy relationship between Socrates and Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, but as positions rather than personae. Furthermore, in the name of rhetoric, ancient and modern texts are often read against the grain, and what is... (shrink)

I approach these questions in the step-by-step, unnuanced manner of the philosopher. In the first section, I characterise the republican tradition in its broad historical sweep, drawing on an earlier book on republicanism, and then, in the second section, I give an account of what the system of culture should be..

The headscarf debate in France exemplifies what is widely perceived as the battle between a culture-free citizenship and a culturally-laden other. This battle, however, presumes the existence of a neutral state that must either tolerate or ban particular cultural differences. In this Article, I challenge that presumption by demonstrating how both cultural difference and citizenship are imagined and produced. The citizen is assumed to be modern and motivated by reason; the cultural other is assumed to be traditional (...) and motivated by culture. Yetcitizenship is both a cultural and anti-cultural institution: citizenship positions itself as oppositional to culture, even as it is constituted by cultural values. Recent scholars of multiculturalism have turned to concepts of citizenship as a solution to the dilemma raised by conflicts over culture. But these concepts of citizenship, namely deliberative democracy and civic participation, replicate the presumption of a culture-less "citizenship" — and thus constitute an ironic choice of solution to the problem of cultural difference. (shrink)

This paper proposes an analysis of the European Constitution from the perspective of its conditions of possibility. The focus is on the conditions that subtend the European constitution, the conditions, the premises that make the European Constitution possible. In the present context of discourse “possibility” is understood in the sense of Kantian critique. But here critique is based on Reasonableness rather than on Reason—in fact a thesis orienting this essay is that the human being to survive (...) and to survive well must quickly change from a rational animal into a reasonable animal. Is the European constitution possible? Where must we search for the necessary conditions that support the European constitution (1) in common historical and cultural traditions, in common practices, in common social behaviours or (2) merely in a shared decision, an accord, a contract, a convention? There exists a third possibility: the idea that Europe has no future without a European constitution founded on awareness that all European Nations participate in a common destiny, which in the era of globalization is the destiny the whole world, indeed of life over the whole planet. Such participation must be based on the logic of otherness and reasonableness of which the human being alone as a semiotic animal is capable. As a semiotic animal, that is, an animal capable of metasemiosis, reflection and critical consciousness, the human being is responsible for all of life over the planet. (shrink)

Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of ‘crisis’ tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept’s constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept of crisis (...) is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of ‘downfall’ and ‘decline’, or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis’s outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography. (shrink)

There is evidence that mental illness is partly socially constituted: diagnoses are historically “transient” (Hacking, _Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory_. Princeton University Press, 1998a; _Mad travelers_. University of Virginia, 1998b) and culturally variable (Toh, _Nature Reviews Psychology_, _1_(2), 72–86, 2022). However, this view risks pernicious relativism. On most social constitution views, mental illness is what (some suitably expert part of) society takes it to be. But this has morally abhorrent implications, e.g., it legitimizes many (...) spurious and harmful diagnoses (like “drapetomania”) and makes mental illness a matter of fashion rather than an objective challenge. This paper defends a conception of mental illness according to which it is partly socially constituted, yet which avoids such pernicious relativism: mental illness consists in an objective inability - a deficit in the skilled metacognitive self-regulation required to be rationally interpretable by one’s community, including oneself. Such reasons responsiveness requires skilled regulation of cognition, conation, and behavior, such that they respect relevant interpretive norms. Because such norms vary culturally, such skills are partly socially constituted. (shrink)

The year 1400 is one of those loudly proclaimed milestones in English literary history in which the vagaries of human life and human chronological systems appear to come together with unusual appropriateness. The year not only of a new century's beginning but of the death of the old century's most important poet, 1400 has often been taken by Middle English scholars to mark one of those crucial transitions between an age of gold and one of brass: between the Age of (...) Chaucer and the glories of Ricardian literature, on the one hand, and that of what is persistently taken, on the other, as the dullness and all-too-proper humility of fifteenth-century writing—dedicated as so much of it seems to be to the sterile elevation and imitation of the beloved “father and master” Chaucer. So well naturalized has this model become, and so much has it consequently influenced the reading habits of Middle English scholars, that it is only now becoming possible to recognize the model as a construct inherited from the fifteenth century itself: a cultural formation, founded on half-truths, which deserves attention as an object, more than a tool, of critical analysis. Thus it has been only recently that serious reflection has begun both on the nature of the changes of which Chaucer's death has been taken as a symbol and on the ideological manipulations for which that year, as the sign of the end of an era, has been used as an only apparently natural substitute. (shrink)

The two main domains of high culture - the arts and the sciences - seem to be completely different, simply unrelated. Is there any sense then in talking about culture in the singular as a unity? A positive answer to this question presupposes that there is a single conceptual scheme, in terms of which it is possible to articulate both the underlying similarities and the basic differences between these domains. This article argues that - at least in respect of ‘classical’ (...) modernity - there is such a framework: the normatively conceived Author-Work-Recipient relation. It allows the disclosure of the paradoxical unity of culture: its two main realms are constituted as polar opposites and thus as strictly complementary. Through such an organization, culture could fulfil an affirmative, compensatory role. At the same time however, it also allowed culture to acquire the character of social critique, a function realized through the antagonistically opposed projects of Enlightenment and Romanticism - projects whose illusions are now evident. (shrink)

We do not know how much clinical physicians carrying out clinical trials in oncology and haematology struggle with ethical concerns. To our knowledge, no empirical research exists on these questions in a Nordic context. Therefore, this study aims to learn what kinds of ethical challenges physicians in Sweden, Denmark and Finland (n = 29) face when caring for patients in clinical trials; and what strategies, if any, they have developed to deal with them. The main findings were that clinical cancer (...) trials pose ethical challenges related to autonomy issues, unreasonable hope for benefits and the therapeutic misconception. Nevertheless, some physicians expressed that struggling with such challenges was not of great concern. This conveys a culture of hope where health care professionals and patients uphold hope and mutually support belief in clinical trials. This culture being implicit, physicians need opportunities to deliberately reflect over the characteristics that should constitute this culture. (shrink)

This book addresses the topic of the explicit and implicit commitments about persons as a kind in the literature on personal identity and draws out their political implications. I claim that the political implications of a metaphysical account can serve as a test on its veracity in cases in which the object-kind under analysis is itself constitutively normative, as the kind person might be, or in those cases in which counting as a member of the kind in question confers a (...) certain normative status upon those that do so count, which the kind person certainly satisfies. I argue that metaphysical accounts of personal identity often contain certain mistaken background assumptions concerning personhood, often due to a failure to recognize that being a person is environmentally dependent. -/- Because being a person is environmentally dependent, but this is not often noted, let alone incorporated into our theories of persons, although there are exceptions, a closer look at those theories is required if we are to have a just society. In fact, it is a bit surprising that this is the current situation, since the claim that certain members of society are oppressed due to being denied full personhood and its attendant rights has been the basis of several social movements: first-wave feminism, anti-slavery movements, and civil rights movements generally. Historically, these resistance movements aimed at claiming that, unlike how they were treated, they did in fact meet the requirements for personhood that those in more privileged sectors did and should therefore enjoy the same rights as the more privileged. -/- While I agree with the justification for these movements -- that the injustice driving them is that of the denial of the rights of persons -- I advocate for moving away from the idea that the only appropriate response is to count those who make such claims as being members that meet the dominant conception of personhood. Instead, I want to highlight the fact that if being a person is an environmentally dependent fact, theories of the nature of persons must recognize this or risk reflecting and perpetuating the current status quo. -/- For these reasons, those in need of recognition of their rights as persons should not only resist the failure of having them granted but should also question the current understanding of the concept itself, since the very notion may be riddled with normative assumptions typical only of those with certain kinds of privilege. That is, fighting for recognition as persons, without also resisting and questioning the source and objectivity of our current concept of personhood, risks failing to truly challenge the currently unfair social structure in any deep way. -/- There is a risk, however, with taking such a stance -- that it will be fallaciously inferred that there is no fair concept of persons at all to which are owed rights. But this does not follow from the stance I take. All that follows is that we must recognize our fallibility in offering metaphysical theories, particularly when the concept under investigation is normatively sensitive and environmentally dependent in the way that the kind person seems to be. -/- Theories concerning the metaphysics of persons, then, must address the fact that those with privilege not only have more power to assert their rights as persons, but they are also the source of most received views of the concept itself. It is possible, therefore, that our current metaphysical theories may be mis-describing the objective nature of personhood as a kind for politically biased reasons. -/- I argue that one of the particularly pernicious assumptions frequently made is that to be a person is to be a certain kind of psychologically integrated being. This is an ideal we seem to hold dear, since we tend to pathologize the failure to achieve it. I claim, however, that this thesis about persons as integrated is exactly the kind of idea that fails the environmental dependence test, since this state of integration is often only readily had by those who have a certain amount of control over their external environment, which many of us do not enjoy. For those who are not members of the dominant group, a strongly integrated self is sometimes simply not on the horizon, since being subject to the vicissitudes of the external environment often leads to conflict, fragmentation, or disintegration. Having inadequate power over one's own circumstances tends to produce what we might call “fractured selves,” selves that face a multitude of environmental forces, many times thrusting contradictory norms, roles, and traits, upon those subjected to them. -/- The fact that the failure to achieve integration is in fact pathologized makes the integration thesis seriously questionable, since it creates a situation in which those most in need of being conferred the normative status of being a person will fail to get such recognition, and in fact, possibly labelled as "defective" in some way or other. This is unjust for many reasons, at least one of which is that it relies on morally irrelevant facts to determine a person's normative status. -/- The previous issues raise the question of whether the aim of a giving a metaphysical account of persons ought to be understood descriptively or prescriptively, since current metaphysical accounts would fail to count many individuals as persons. However, taking metaphysical accounts as a prescriptive is highly controversial. I doubt that most of those offering explicit metaphysical theories of persons would agree that they are engaged in any kind of prescriptive project. Some psychologists and psychiatrists perhaps may take themselves to be determining whether a person is "healthy" by our current understanding of what it is to be a person, but the idea of having a healthy psychology sufficient for being a fully competent person is vastly different from having a healthy physical body, which does seem to have a more objective basis, although even this is questioned in disability studies. -/- The strong integration thesis, then, as now applied, clearly raises political issues, and has potential negative consequences for many beings that we typically do think of as persons. The integration thesis then needs to be replaced with a more adequately descriptive metaphysical theory or revised in a way so that it avoids these negative political consequences. -/- I see two paths open: (1) maintain the integration thesis as an ideal, and grant those who fail to meet it a temporary kind of normative status equal to that of being a person and push for substantive equal opportunity to achieve integration; or (2) reject the ideal altogether and offer a different account of the nature of being a person that counts so-called "fractured selves" as persons. -/- I believe that path (2) is preferable to path (1) for several reasons. First, it requires no condescension or paternalistic attitudes towards those who fail to be fully integrated; second, it expresses intellectual humility in accepting that standards that appear objective are often, in reality, biased and should not be universally applied; and third, it is more realistic in that it does not assume that there is an infinite amount of resources, and therefore harbors no illusions that equalizing power structures will allow everyone to enjoy the same amount and kind of power currently held by the dominant classes. -/- My own metaphysical account of what matters for survival to persons over time advocates for the idea that persons ought to be understood as constituted not only by internal psychological relations, but also by their relations to their surrounding environments, and this includes relations to inanimate objects. This view, I argue, can accommodate fractured selves as full persons, allowing for various psychological configurations to count as persons. It is also an improvement on views that do happen to recognize the environmental influence on persons -- social constitution views. The reason is that these views argue that persons just are what their environmental social surroundings dictate, which also has potentially negative political consequences, since it threatens to bind persons so closely to socio-cultural contexts that it closes off the possibility of resistance to them. However, because the view I endorse, makes persons environmentally dependent not only on their socio-cultural context, but on the whole of their environment, this makes persons partly independent of socio-cultural contexts, allowing them room to question them, which as noted, I believe they should be. (shrink)

Brand image constitutes one of the most salient, over-defined, heavily explored and multifariously operationalized conceptual constructs in marketing theory and practice. In this Chapter, definitions of brand image that have been offered by marketing scholars will be critically addressed in the context of a culturally oriented discussion, informed by the semiotic notion of iconicity. This cultural bend, in conjunction with the concept’s semiotic contextualization, are expected both to dispel terminological confusions in the either inter-changeable or fuzzily differentiated employment of (...) such terms as brand image, symbol, icon, as well as to address the function of brand image at a deeper level than a mere construct to be operationalized in quantitative studies of purchase drivers. This shift in focus is coupled with a critical turn from the cogito-centric view of the consuming subject through the cognitivist lens of the AI metaphor as decision-making centre at the origin of largely conscious meaning-making, in favor of a psychoanalytically informed approach that considers figurativity as an essential process whereby brand image is formed. In these terms, brand image will be intimately linked to brand images as figurative multimodal expressive units and rhetorical tropes, as figurative syntax, that are responsible for shaping an idiolectal brand language, as well as to distinctive levels of iconicity as textual condition of possibility of a brand language. In order to understand the role of iconicity as fundamental condition of brand textuality, rather than just a procedure for spawning brand images, the discussion is contextualized in a wider framework involving the culturally situated source of brand images, how they become correlated with brand image concepts and how correlations between brand images and brand image result in brand knowledge structures (Keller 1998). This opening up of the discussion on iconicity is enacted against the background of what I call the Brand Imaginarium which involves: (i) a critical engagement with the dominant cognitivist perspective in branding research that prioritizes individual memory in brand knowledge formation, through a cultural branding lens that involves two additional types of memory, viz. communicative and cultural (ii) a critical engagement with the cognitivist perspective on brand knowledge formation that prioritizes conscious processing of stimuli (as ‘brute facts’, rather than as already semiotized expressive units) in a cognitive mechanism from which the faculty of imagination has been expelled, by restoring the importance of imagination in brand knowledge formation, and, concomitantly, by showing that the highly figurative language of brands may not be researched thoroughly unless imagination is posited anew as processing correlate (iii) the adoption of an expansionist approach to the role of the imaginary in brand knowledge formation, from cognitive (or psychic) faculty, to a more sociologically inclined process of inter-subjective mirroring, and concomitantly as imaginary social significations (Castoriades 1985) that are shared by culturally conditioned and habituated subjects that engage in meaningful cultural practices, rather than individual processing monads. (shrink)

Practices – specific, recurrent types of human action and activity – are perhaps the most fundamental "building blocks" of social reality. This book argues that the detailed empirical study of practices is essential to effective social-scientific inquiry. It develops a philosophical infrastructure for understanding human practices, and argues that practice theory should be the analytical centrepiece of social theory and the philosophy of the social sciences. -/- What would social scientists’ research look like if they took these insights seriously? To (...) answer this question, the book offers an analytical framework to guide empirical research on practices in different times and places. The author explores how practices can be identified, characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts and how they might change over time and space. -/- The Constitution of Social Practices lies at the intersection of philosophy, social theory, cultural theory and the social sciences. It is essential reading for scholars in social theory and the philosophy of social science, as well as the broad range of researchers and students across the social sciences and humanities whose work stands to benefit from serious consideration of practices. (shrink)

In this paper I trace the development of Native American constitutionalism in the early twentieth century. Specifically, I focus on the first constitutional government of the White Earth Nation, located in northwestern Minnesota, which in the period from 1913 to 1927 was part of a larger confederative arrangement, called the General Council of the Chippewa. The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of this inter-reservation government for the preservation of White Earth Anishinaabe cultural continuity from which (...) revitalization efforts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century grew. Using archival resources, I pay attention to Anishinaabe governing practices and their ethical dimension that can be understood in the light of Anishinaabe philosophy which was an integral part of everyday life. My findings suggest that the course of institutional development set by the creation of the General Council in 1913 influenced the path of White Earth governance for the rest of the century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Criticism of Culture and the Culture of Criticism:At the Intersection of Postcolonialism and Globalization TheoryRevathi Krishnaswamy (bio)Why have culture in general and literature in particular emerged as key terms in critical theory today? Are we witnessing a dissolution of these categories similar to the earlier dissolution of the category of history, or are we witnessing an entirely novel consolidation of these categories? Has materialism essentially changed the semiotic (...) such that culture is now simply another commodity available for consumption on the world market, or has the semiotic radically subsumed the social such that cultural representation has become one with material reality itself? Has the relationship between the cultural and the economic altered in ways yet untheorized? Finally, what exactly does the culturalist turn in critical theory mean for the practice of postcolonial cultural/literary studies? And precisely what does it portend for the ongoing politics of decolonization?1 I shall attempt to engage these questions by focusing on two dominant theoretical discourses that regulate contemporary knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences: postcolonialism and globalization. While the "culturalist turn" in contemporary criticism has infected many disciplines, these two theoretical fields have been most influential in asserting the primacy or the constitutive role of the cultural in history, economics, and politics. Yet there has so far been relatively little explicit or systematic scrutiny of the links between postcolonialism and globalization theory.2The links are at once considerable and complicated. Despite differences in disciplinary origin (globalization theory in the social sciences, particularly sociology, and postcolonial theory in the humanities, particularly literary criticism), both discourses emerge at the intersection of imperialism, capitalism, and modernity. Both are concerned with the effects of unequal power relations between different geopolitical locations on the globe: postcolonial theory focuses primarily on a (Eurocentric) colonial past and studies how subaltern practices and productions in the non-Western peripheries respond to Western domination, while globalization theory concentrates mainly on [End Page 106] an (Americocentric) post/neocolonial present and examines how contemporary Western practices and productions affect the rest of the world. Furthermore, both theoretical paradigms have sought to question the universality attributed to Western modernity in metropolitan developmental theory by drawing attention to premodern, nonmodern, or alternatively modern formations in the margins. This attempt to dislocate Western modernity (from the theoretical center) has typically taken the form of dismantling those categories deemed to be central to the narrative of Western modernity—categories such as "nation," "nation-state," "culture" and so on. Consequently, both postcolonial and globalization studies have frequently focused on various forms of economic, political, social, and cultural flows that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state and operate in a deterritorialized or transnational fashion. Through these accounts, postcolonial theory has emphasized the cultural basis of history (the cultural constructedness of history as well as the archival value of cultural productions)3 while globalization theory, in turn, has highlighted the cultural basis of the economic (the economic value of cultural productions as well as the cultural production of economic value).But "besides their shared cultural grammar," the relationship between globalization and postcolonialism "is not very clear," notes Simon Gikandi in "Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality," a provocative essay that represents one of few attempts to explicitly articulate the relationship between the two discourses [628]. It is indeed unclear whether contemporary globalization theory has been made possible by the postcolonial challenge to older Eurocentric forms of globalization premised on the centrality of the nation and narrated in terms of modernization or whether postcoloniality itself is a consequence of a globalization premised on the marginalization of the nation, especially in the domain of the cultural and the imaginary. It is unclear whether the postcolonial and the global are one and the same, whether the postcolonial precedes and provides the foundations for global or transnational cultural studies [Eng and Stratton], or whether globalization created the historical and material conditions that both enabled the production of postcolonial theory and eroded its political purchase through incorporation into the Western academy [Ahmad]. What is clear, however, as Gikandi recognizes, is that the cultural and the literary have risen to new levels of prominence in both theoretical fields.The... (shrink)

The connection between Chinese sexism and Confucianism has been a subject of study on the condition of Chinese women in the West since the rise of feminist consciousness in the 1970s. However Confucianism in feminist scholarship is inescapably construed as a misogynous ideology that is incapable of self-rectification in regards to the issue of gender parity. Hence, conceptually the eradication of Confucianism becomes the necessary condition for the liberation of Chinese women, and the adoption of Western ideology let it be (...) Marxist-socialism, Liberalism, or Existentialism is then a logical next step for Chinese women. Yet, such a dichotomization of the West as a superior moral subject and the East as a passive object victimized by their "sexist" tradition is nevertheless an oversimplification of the condition and the liberation of women in the developing world. In the end, it is essentially a neo-colonial discourse in a feminist disguise. This dissertation sets itself up to accomplish two tasks: first, it is to obtain a conceptual clarity of what constitutes Confucianism and its connection with dominant sexist, social practices; second, it is to go beyond a mere critique of Confucianism and feminism as an ally of Chinese patriarchal family structure and Western imperialism respectively, and to lay a foundation for a future construction of a gender theory based on Confucianism as a theoretical ground to explain the cultural construct of Chinese women and to conceive an alternative ethical ground for women's liberation. Eventually, the whole project can be seen as an act of self-affirmation of my ethnic identity as a Chinese and an act of reconciliation with my feminist identity in the modern world. (shrink)

This article traces recent trends in British politics, liberal political theory and human rights law in order to demonstrate why the right of exit – made famous in the political theory of multiculturalism by Chandran Kukathas – may be able to mediate tensions between them. I argue that the right of exit is an insufficient test for consent because some cultures may render some members incapable of effectively exercising their autonomy. I use empirical evidence drawn from legal cases and social (...) science in conjunction with a philosophical account of agency as fundamentally ‘relational’ to unpack and defend this controversial claim. Understanding agency in relational terms sheds light on precisely how oppressive culturally permitted relationships can simultaneously constitute some individuals’ primary identities while serving to harm those very same individuals in the process. This account of agency and culture also avoids both the liberal assumption of a sovereign self and also any essentialism or reification of culture. I suggest that for an individual to have the capacity to effectively use of the right of exit, they must be able to conceive of themselves as an agent, which includes having a sense of their own moral worth and the ability to imagine the possibility of living a different kind of life. (shrink)

The object of the present paper is the philosophical commentary, a form of literature that once predominated in all major philosophical cultures from classical Greece to Renaissance Italy, but which has more recently fallen into comparative disuse. Commentaries on the writings of German thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx and Heidegger have, certainly, kept the form alive to some extent in recent centuries; in the tradition of philosophy that was initiated by Descartes and Locke, however, and which constitutes the contemporary (...) mainstream, the commentary genre has been utilized in systematic ways hardly at all, almost always by those concerned with other traditions, most especially with the philosophy of classical Greece. Why, then , should what has earlier proved so vital a plant in the literature of philosophy be so conspicuously absent from the philosophy of today? And why, uniquely among the canonical texts of contemporary analytic philosophy, should it be the writings of Wittgenstein that have spawned the growth of a commentary literature? (shrink)

Heidegger’s commentaries on Hölderlin’s poetry constitute an essential part of his philosophical heritage. They played a decisive role in the move from a self-enclosed theory of Being to a transcendent openness. Nietzsche confirmed Heidegger’s aversion of the philosophical subjectivism that had come to paralyze all of Western philosophy and, related with it, threatened Western culture with collapse. The time before and during World War I confirmed both the consequences of a philosophical subjectivism and the urgent need for an active (...) political attitude. Heidegger’s support of Nietzsche did not outlast the war nor the information that the will to power’s political interpretation was not Nietzsche’s own but his sister’s and had become a secret weapon in the service of the Nazi party. By that time Heidegger studied Hölderlin’s poetry and understood that also his own philosophy of Being had been rigid and one-sided. From Hölderlin’s poetry he learned the indispensability of passive attitudes. Thus far atheism had served as protection of the absoluteness of a self-enclosed Being. Through the poems of Hölderlin Heidegger learned that Being is not a self-supporting absolute but a transcendent openness that might be expressed actively in religion or in a mystical Gelassenheit. (shrink)

The paper provides an economic interpretation of legal culture. Drawing on analogies from other products and services markets, I argue that combinations of legal language, procedures and conceptual structures constitute a network which, mainly through cost considerations, come to occupy a dominant position in particular jurisdictions. The facts that a particular legal culture will be adopted by political rulers and that practising lawyers can both control entry to the profession and ‘capture’ law‐making processes suggest that legal culture networks may be (...) protected against competition. To the extent that they have monopolistic power, lawyers can exploit the key features of legal culture to extract rents: the law used can be more formalistic, more complex and more technical than is optimal. Whether the monopolistic power of a particular legal culture is sustainable depends on the relative strength of potential competitive forces. These can take the form of alternative cultures becoming available for particular branches of the law, thus partially dismantling the network, or through transfrontier transactions opening up the network to competition from foreign systems. (shrink)

The European Union is strategically committed to the development of nanotechnology and its industrial exploitation. However, nanotechnology also has the potential to disrupt human health and the environment. The EU claims to be committed to the safe and responsible development of nanotechnology. In this sense, the EU has become the first governing body in the world to develop nanospecific regulations, largely due to legislative action taken by the European Parliament, which has compensated for the European Commission’s reluctance to develop special (...) regulations for nanomaterials. Nevertheless, divergences aside, political bodies in the EU assume that nanotechnology development is controllable and take for granted that both the massive industrial use of nanomaterials and a high level of environmental and health protection are compatible. However, experiences such as the European controversy over agri-food biotechnology, which somewhat delegitimized the regulatory authority of the EU over technological safety and acceptability, arguably show that controllability assumptions are contestable on the grounds of alternative socio-economic and cultural preferences and values. Recently developed inclusive governance models on safety and innovation, such as “Responsible Research and Innovation”, widely claim that a diversity of considerations and issues are integrated into R&D processes. Even so, the possibility of more radically alternative constitutions of socio-technical safety seems to be seriously limited by the current ideology of innovation and economic imperatives of the global, knowledge-based, capitalist economy. (shrink)

Since at least the late nineteenth century, a world-level moral culture has developed, providing a space for certain persons to be presented as global moral icons. This global moral space was already pointed to by Kant as an emergent form, and was later theorized by Durkheim. This article shows that an important institutionalization of global moral culture involved the founding of the Nobel Prizes, the subsequent mutations of which were also important in the constitution of that culture. These, and (...) other awards which imitated them, are performative in a profound sense: they simultaneously reflect and help bring into being a planet-spanning culture which demands moral icons which both exemplify and partly constitute it. How the Nobel Prizes and their imitators work to create moral iconicity that is globally relevant is explored. The case of Gandhi is taken as an example of how, despite not being awarded a Nobel Prize, some moral icons are also brought into being through symbolic contact with other such icons, including Nobel Prize winners. The article considers the lingering, powerful, but generally invisible, influence today on world moral culture of the innovations pursued by the early Nobel Prize committees. (shrink)

On what model should a modern multi?cultural democracy work? Spinosa et al. have argued that the political order should be sustained by a set of common values instilled in the citizens, without, however, any common rank order among these values. I argue that the multi?cultural state should rather conform to what I call the Secular Model, according to which the citizens need not share any basic values at all. On the Secular Model, people individually stick to the existing (...) constitution (only) as long as they each feel that they have good reasons to do so. To be sure, each citizen of a multi?cultural state does need a feeling of community identity, a ?we? ideology, but it is desirable that each individual can have more than one such identity. It is also important that each individual can shift as he or she pleases, from one such identity to another. So this kind of identity should not be moulded by the state, but by various different free associations, independent of the state. (shrink)

Recent developments in social theory, and especially in movement research, have deepened our understanding of the self-instituting and self-transformative capabilities of society. However, as the case of Alain Touraine's notion of historicity shows, there is a real danger that social praxis is being reduced to the function of self-thematization and self-programming, enshrining society in a self-referential circle. Ideas of self-transcendence and the non-identity of society with itself cannot be adequately accounted for as long as full scope is not given (...) to the interpretive dimension of human articulation. Moreover, the human ability of self-reflexivity and critique and the recognition of self-transformative faculties are often and principally denied to those societies which do not fit into the framework of modernity, thus subverting claims of universality. Against this Johann Arnason has suggested a return to an anthropology of the social subject which, over and above the constituting faculties, foregrounds the hermeneutical ability of (self-)distantiation and broadens the reference of human action and interpretation, or, rather, transcends the idea of a specific referent: constitutive of the human condition is the opening towards other possibilities, the opening towards the world. What seems required is an interactional approach towards society and culture which takes difference as constitutional, for society as well as social theory, and not as something which can be relegated to a secondary level of complicating conditions. (shrink)

During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by "The Leisure and Cultural Service Department, " the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in "an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China" (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media aspects (...) of the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum's multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland's theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the "affective dimension of politics.". (shrink)

ExcerptIn the spring of 2021, the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, received a non-paper titled “West Balkans—A Way Forward.” The scandalous paper envisaged a redrawing of several national borders in the West Balkans. Among other changes, it proposed “the unification of Kosovo and Albania” and the “joining of larger parts of the Republika Srpska’s territory with Serbia.”1 However, this scandalous proposition, which the EU preferred to meet with silence, was not limited to a redrawing of the borders. What (...) was also scandalous was the ratio of the proposed territorial changes. The redrawing was proposed along the lines of ethnic majorities populating the regions in question (Albanians in Kosovo or Serbs in the Republika Srpska). While the state borders were drawn following a logic of ethnicity, the idea of a multiethnic nation seemed to exceed the imagination of the paper’s authors. For them, nations were to be ethnically homogeneous. (shrink)

This article aims at shedding light on how civic engagement matters for the emergence of a European public sphere. It investigates the citizen's role in constituting it and asks how citizens, being located in different cultural and political contexts, participate in and appropriate EU political communication. First, the article develops a pragmatic approach to the European public sphere emphasizing the importance of citizens' communicative participation and, moreover, considers the transnational and transcultural character of European political communication. It is (...) assumed that the constitution of public spheres – representing social constructions fulfilling democratic functions – ultimately relies on the citizen audience's perception of the impact of common problems and the EU's political decisions as well as on their subsequent participation in public discourses. The second part of the article presents the findings of empirical case studies conducted in France, Italy and Germany to explore citizens' engagement in and appropriation of the European constitutional debate. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most (...) people spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

The work explores the role of mythology in the formation of cultural values, and paradigmatic coordinates as the most stable form of reproducing socio-cultural experience, namely as a mechanism for regulating human behavior, which is relevant for any type of culture. It is considered that the basis of the mythological form of organization of individual and group experience constitute from a sensory-reflexive, contemplative and productive way of understanding the world, and the mechanism of regulation of human behavior consists (...) in the inseparability of the paradigmatic nature of behavior and the justification of its meaning and actions that go beyond the boundaries of individual, social experience in the form of higher meaningfulness, which is the specificity of myth.Attention is focused on a certain kind of interaction between myth and philosophy, where the myth, despite its irrational essence, has not been left out of the attention of philosophical thought. It is emphasized that mythology constantly experienced changes and adaptation to new living conditions, cultural factors and its paradigmatic foundations. But despite everything, from its critical understanding to its rehabilitation in postmodernism, the myth continues to play an important role in influencing human consciousness and shaping worldview. Being actually rehabilitated, the myth is considered as an important factor in the process of forming not only cultural symbols but also narratives. It complements rational knowledge, helps to understand archetypal and symbolic aspects of human reality, which are not always comprehended with the help of rational methods of cognition. (shrink)

This article considers different ways in which keywords and concepts have been, and might be, explored. It summarizes the methodological discussions of a project to analyse 'commonwealth' in the period 1450-1800. 'Commonwealth' was a part of a conceptual field of terms to do with the public good and thus serves as a case study for wider problems of approaching such keywords through a collaboration across disciplines and reflects the importance of recent attempts to provide social and literary contexts for political (...) discourse. Early modern states and their authority are now recognized to be as much socially and culturally as politically constructed, thus widening not only the essential 'context' which students of political discourse must take into account, but also requiring social historians to engage with the language of politics, the metaphors, images and genres of which scholars of literature and art likewise can illuminate. This social and cultural turn to political discourse helps the recovery of the language of vice and virtue which was so intrinsic to the deployment of keywords and concepts. The German conceptual history school is also relevant and useful in requiring us to think about how concepts were constituted and change over time, though its chronological focus needs to be extended to embrace more fully the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Finally, the article offers some pointers about how technology might be utilized to maximize the necessary collaborations that have been outlined. (shrink)

A perceived national emergency creates the temptation to abandon principled constraints to official action in order to pursue whatever is thought necessary to confront the crisis. Principled constraints are thought good precisely when they are least needed - during normal times - and thought obstructionist when they are most needed to guide and constrain official action - during times of perceived exceptional circumstances. We are accustomed to thinking of constitutional rights not as absolutes, but as subject to balancing against compelling (...) governmental need. When compelling government interest is expressed in terms of necessity, otherwise prohibited actions, such as torture, may be justified in specific circumstances. In this Article, I argue that we should reject the temptation to rely on necessity to justify extralegal responses to emergencies. Moreover, we should also reject the claim that the Constitution contains a core principle of necessity that frees executive officials to act unfettered by other constitutional constraints under some circumstances. One problem with necessity is that it displaces constitutional commitments to constrained action because necessity, not constitutional principle, becomes the ultimate authority for official action. A second problem with necessity is that when it is used to justify the practice of torture, it undermines the liberal conception of the person that grounds the political legitimacy of the State. Finally, when we prioritize necessity, we change how we look at the world in ways that have pervasive legal and cultural consequences for how we employ other constitutional rights. When we rely on necessity to override principled commitments, such as the prohibition against torture, we change our practices and principles, creating the conditions for changing fundamental aspects of our constitutional culture. I argue that although it is always subject to change, our constitutional culture does not support a worldview that legitimates treating persons as objects of torture, and that arguments to change our culture in light of the needs of necessity are insufficient. (shrink)

Memory modification technologies (MMTs)—interventions within the memory affecting its functions and contents in specific ways—raise great therapeutic hopes but also great fears. Ethicists have expressed concerns that developing and using MMTs may endanger the very fabric of who we are—our personal identity. This threat has been mainly considered in relation to two interrelated concerns: truthfulness and narrative self‐constitution. In this article, we propose that although this perspective brings up important matters concerning the potential aftermaths of MMT utilization, it fails (...) to tell the whole story. We suggest that capturing more tangible potential consequences of MMT use, namely, its psychological ramifications is crucial both in ethical considerations and in making decisions regarding the permissibility of such interventions. To this end, we first examine what current MMTs are capable of and what are the prospects of emerging MMTs. Subsequently, we outline the relationship between memory and personal identity; specifically, we indicate that concepts of self‐defining memories and narrative identity are crucial to considering how MMTs may influence one's psychological functioning. On this basis, we analyze potential consequences of narrative disruption that may be the result of the use of MMTs; more precisely, we consider its potential effects on mental health, well‐being, and personal agency, and outline the ethical dilemmas that decision‐makers face in this context. We conclude by considering the broader cultural context that may have influence on policymaking regarding permissibility of memory modification interventions. (shrink)

The work of Foucault and Elias has been compared before in the social sciences and humanities, but here I argue that the main distinction between their approaches to the construction of subjectivity is the relative importance of space and time in their accounts. This is not just a matter of the “history of ideas,” as providing for the temporal dimension more fully in theories of subjectivity and the habitus allows for a greater understanding of how ways of being, acting (...) and feeling in different spaces are related but largely unintended. Here I argue that discursive practices, governmental operations and technologies of the self (explanatory claims of both Foucault and the Foucauldian tradition) take shape as processes within the continuities of the figurational flow connecting people across space and time. Continuity should not be understood as stability or sameness over time, but as the contingent relations between successive social formations. As Elias argues, there is a structure or order to long-term social change, albeit unplanned, and this ultimately provides the broader social explanation for the historicity of the subject. Though discursive practices happen in particular spaces, we must recognise these spaces, and the practices therein, as socially constructed over time in response to largely unplanned moral and cultural developments. (shrink)

In his Ideas I (1913), with his thought experiment of world-annihilation, Husserl becomes persuaded that the beings of which we are conscious do not simply lie ‘out there’ in themselves, enjoying an independent (realistic) existence. Our experience of beings in a world, qua total horizon of beings, is the achievement of our intentional consciousness, which unfolds its overall constitutive possibilities. It is because of this that in our everyday meaningful comportments, we are always intentionally correlated with what is “Vorhanden” for (...) us. In what we know as Ideas II, Husserl sought to offer concrete analyses of such intentional constitutions. He distinguished three fundamental spheres of intentional objectities: inanimate material nature, animate or psychic nature, and spirit or culturality. These constitute, as Husserl puts it, three different regions of Being, comprising beings that are meaningfully given in the three corresponding kinds of intentional correlation. Thus, he divided the problem of intentional constitution into three corresponding sub-problems. Now, according to Husserl’s Phenomenology, some intentional interdependence holds between these three regions of Being. In the way the matter was approached in Chap. 5 of the present book, the region of inanimate material nature, which comprises the nature-things (Naturdinge), is presented as being the most fundamental. The constitution of animate-psychic nature is, in its turn, thought of as presupposing inanimate nature-thinghood as its intentional foundation. Spirit and culturality, finally, presupposes the first and, somehow, the second region. It is generally thought that Husserl was of the view that, for us, primordial consciousness is the perceptual experience of nature-things; simple sensory perceptual things. That is, on the lowest level of our conscious life, we are intentionally correlated with simple perceptually appearing things. Our experience of cultural beings or, more broadly speaking, things of value (goods) like tools, books, etc., is intentionally derivative and founded upon the former. In his Being and Time (1927), Heidegger, who had already been influenced by Husserl’s discussion of the aforementioned ontological regions, claimed that primordially, intentional experience presents us with a world where equipment and other beings like us appear. Moreover, the givenness of beings as nature-things, or simply as sensory perceptual beings, is the result of a theoretical construction. In what I would like to call “standard” or “received” Heideggerian criticism of Husserl’s Phenomenology, it is held that Husserl starts his analysis at a high level of theoretical intentionality. What Husserl takes as primordial intentionality, the story goes, is an experience that is possible only as attentive-observational and thematic givenness of beings; nature-things can appear only in ‘elaborate’ derivative experience of such a kind. In addition, in this judgmental constitution of nature-things, the properties attributed to them appear to belong to science. This thesis, Heidegger maintains, makes Phenomenology unfaithful to its very dictum that calls us to remain close “to the things themselves.” If Phenomenology were to stay close to how things indeed are, it would discover that primordially, we are not correlated with theoretically constituted vorhanden nature-things, but with zuhanden equipment of different kinds. Positing nature-things or perceptual things as the ultimate fundament of intentional givenness moves us away from the original sense of Phenomenology and accepts phenomenologically unjustified prejudices. (shrink)

Constructing a cultural ontology I reject the primordiality of everydayness, presupposed by Heidegger, in order to reveal the cultural constitution of all ways of being, from everyday life to the most unusual activities of individuals and communities. The cultural constitution of being is displayed with the help of the idea that meanings, i.e., references, senses and values , are structures of all ways of being. In the following exposition the cultural (...) class='Hi'>constitution of being is analyzed in its interrelations with the commonality of being, its temporality, and historicity. (shrink)

As the gravity of anthropogenic climate change is dawning on humanity, essential political aspects of the climatic situation remain unexplored. This article argues that our entering the Anthropocene amounts to a constitutive moment: a moment in which new principles of coexistence are being declared. Drawing on, as well as critically engaging with, the work of Bruno Latour and Hannah Arendt, I introduce and explicate the metaphor declarations of dependence to make sense of what scientists, activists, academics and journalists are (...) doing, in political terms, when they announce the Anthropocene. Theoretically as well as practically, this metaphor opens for a more helpful understanding of the fraught relationship between science and the public on the issue of anthropogenic climate change. I end by considering the possibility that this metaphor, literally construed, can help us make today the first day in the rest of our lives in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

A pioneer work in comparative philosophy, this book approaches the question of being through a range of traditions: the Greek, the Christian, the post-Nietzschean European, the Hindu, and the Buddhist. _The Question of Being_ therefore is both a fresh, cross-cultural approach to a vital issue and also an example of comparative philosophy in action. The editor's introduction clarifies historically the concept of comparative philosophy from A. du Perron's journey to Persia in the late 18th century to the work (...) of such modern thinkers as Deussen, Jung, and Aurobindo. Chapters by Owens and Kahn are concerned with the questions of being in Greek philosophy; Gadamer, Adamczewski, and Scharff relate Heidegger's though variously to Plato and the Greeks, the Upanishads, and the question of being. From the Eastern perspective: Halbfass examines the Indian realist school of Vaisesika with reference to Aristotle; Arapura writes of Advaita Vedanta thought of sat and brahman; Sprung discusses the importance of the Buddhist middle way in relation to the question of being and Mohanty contrasts Vedanta, Nyaya, and Buddhist theories about being. Each chapter is historical and yet not merely so: the pervasive theme ensures treatment of the historical material in a contemporary philosophical context. Ultimately this book demonstrates that all philosophical problems reach beyond the bounds of any one tradition, being essentially human. Every chapter contains a carefully selected bibliography. (shrink)

This article revises Foucault's account of biopolitics in the light of the impact of the molecular and digital revolutions on `the politics of life itself'. The confluence of the molecular and digital revolutions informationalizes life, providing an account of what it is to be a living thing in terms of complex adaptive and continuously emergent, informationally constituted, systems. Also revisiting Foucault's The Order of Things and its interrogation of the modern analytics of finitude, the article argues that our contemporary politics (...) of life is therefore distinguished by the quasi-transcendentals that now distinguish informationalized life: circulation, connectivity and complexity. Here, too, the article argues, the figure of Man, which once united the quasi-transcendentals of life, labour and language, is replaced by the contingency that now unites circulation, connectivity and complexity. Observing that a life of continuous emergence is also one in which production is continuously allied with destruction, such a life is lived as the continuous emergency of its own emergence. This account of contemporary biopolitics, together with its emergency of emergence, contrasts, in particular, with that offered by Agamben in his appropriation of Schmitt. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool for determining students' spiritual health and life orientation. For this purpose, the Spiritual Health and Life-Orientation Measure (SHALOM) inventory developed by Fisher (2010) is adapted to Turkish. The adaptation study was carried out on 1591 high school students in three study groups studying in Ankara and Muş. The original English measure consisting of four dimensions and twenty items was translated into Turkish, factor analysis, validity and reliability (...) tests were conducted on the sampling data. As a result of the study, the Turkish-adapted inventory consists of four dimensions (personal, social, environmental and transcendental) which resemble the original inventory. In addition, internal consistency coefficients of the inventory dimensions were in perfect harmony with the original inventory and served the purpose of the scale. In Conclusion The Turkish adaptation of the SHALOM Inventory can be used in different disciplines of psychology, educational sciences, and social sciences. Summary: The concept of religion, which is an important dynamic and carrier of the social field, has gone into a double distinction since the second half of the 18th century; the concept of spirituality has begun to be refined from the concept of religion. The concepts of religion and spirituality are very difficult to define; While the concept of religion focuses ideology and rules of belief, spirituality centers on individual experiences and interrelationships that extend religion. For this reason, different spirituality and religion definitions are made from different perspectives and different spirituality scales were developed within this framework. However, the results of these studies differ significantly from each other; this means that spirituality was defined and conceptualized based on the scale that was used. Early period studies on spirituality mostly focus on religion, health, psychology and work life. In these studies, after defining the concept of spirituality; the relationship between the concept and health, religion, psychology and business life or necessity for human life is discussed. In the West, until the 1950s, the concepts of religion and spirituality were used interrelated. However, today these two concepts are almost completely separated from each other.Literature consists of numerous inventory development studies to measure spirituality. The fact that the inventory works based on different conceptual foundations makes it difficult to draw a general, meaningful and consistent conclusion about spiritual health and life orientation. Furthermore, spirituality measurements reflecting the religion and values ​​of a particular culture cannot be comprehensive or universal. At this point, Fisher criticizes the measurement tools developed for the purpose of measuring spirituality: in terms of "mixing religion and spirituality", "relying on the world of values", "not taking into account cultural differences", "and questioning only the mystical/spiritual experience". As a result, it can be said that no measurement developed in the conceptual structure of the West does not take into account the cultural flexibility and accept its spiritual values as universal or prevalent.The SHALOM inventory developed by Fisher, which adapted to the Turkish culture in present study, is based on four basic (individual, social, environmental and transcendent) areas that constitute the world of interpersonal relationship. In this study, spirituality, as in Fisher's work, emphasizes the interaction with certain concepts of different intensities that are considered as independent from religion and above religions. In this context, the concept of spirituality communicates with one's personal space, social position, nature, and transcendental power. This adaptation study will provide useful information and comments on the students' spiritual health levels. This is the most important motive behind the idea of adapting the SHALOM inventory developed by Fisher to the Turkish culture. In addition, by adapting the SHALOM inventory, which is emphasized to have cultural flexibility and adapted to different languages, a new and different measurement tool will be available to understand the nature of the concept of spirituality.This research was carried out to adapt the inventory of Spiritual Health and Life Orientation scale developed for students to Turkish culture. This inventory adaptation study was performed with the data collected from three working groups in Ankara and Muş provinces and 1591 high school students. The first study group was carried out with 414, the second study group with 788, and the third group with 389 high school students. While the data collected from 414 students were used for Exploratory Factor Analysis (AFA) analysis, data collected from 788 students were used for Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In addition, 389 students were used to determine the criterion validity of the inventory. The original language of the SHALOM inventory, which is intended to be adapted into Turkish, is English, and translation studies are conducted separately by three linguistic experts who know the grammar and semantic characteristics of both languages. After the translation studies, the scale was applied to the sampling group and AFA was performed on the sample data. The AFA results showed that a factor roof resembling the original inventory was formed. Determining factors are given appropriate names (personal, enviromental, social and transcendental) by taking into consideration the theoretical names and the dimension names in the original form of the SHALOM. The structure was confirmed by DFA, and as a result of the DFA, X2/sd (1.72) ratio and IFI (0.96) fit indicator was found to be the appropiate fit for the model tested. As a result, it is understood that the Spiritual Health and Life Orientation Inventory consists of four dimensions as in the original inventory, the internal consistency coefficients of the inventory dimensions are in harmony with the original inventory and serve the purpose of the scale. In conclusion the Turkish adaptation of the SHALOM Inventory can be used in different disciplines of psychology, educational sciences, and social sciences. Spirituality should not only be defined within the framework of Western theories, but the nature and likelihood of the spirituality predicted by Islam should be discussed. Moreover, the types and dimensions of Islamic spirituality should be determined by taking into account the cultural subjectivity of an Islamic character. In the study of spirituality, the human model which modernity presents universally should not be accepted as the only truth. It should be tried to develop human models that come from Islamic culture and history and which are specific to us and define us. This should be taken into account not only in mental health / religious studies, but also in psychology of religion in general. In addition, culture-specificity should be given importance, and the experience gained from the cultural accumulation developed by the Turkish civilization with the Islamic doctrine should lead to the studies of spirituality. In this respect, this study aims to adapt the value and spiritual orientation of a different culture to Turkish culture, but it is problematic to construct the concept with Western values. Although Western values are similar to Islamic values and principles, it is envisaged that it may be difficult to measure the concept of spirituality in practice. (shrink)

Working through Balaska’s deeply perceptive, elegantly written, and profoundly honest book, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, a reader steeped in the recent academic literature about either or both of its main figures may come to feel herself placed at what is, itself, a certain kind of limit. The limit I mean is the limit of a familiar type of theoretical discourse about the constitution and structure of language and subjectivity as Wittgenstein and Lacan treat them: it includes the (...) discourses that seek, for instance, to articulate how language and sense are constituted in the Tractatus, and thus what is really meant by “logical form” and “nonsense” there; or those that aim to comprehend the true relationship of our biological nature to language, culture, and the advent of freedom in Lacan; or, again, those that try to find, in either thinker’s works, the precise location of the delicate logical buttonhole that would alone permit us entry, from within everyday language and life, to the absoluteness of an ineffable beyond. These discourses all treat of language and life, but handle these phenomena at arm’s length, theorizing the structure of each and the form of their relationship in such a way as to establish, ultimately, their mutual convertibility to one another, their mutual absorption into a third, more inclusive term, or adduce translations from the dense theoretical matrices of one thinker’s treatment of them to the other’s. Balaska’s book, doing none of these things, rather succeeds in bringing out how an interconnected reading of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Lacan may speak to and inform our response to a certain kind of experience that is characteristic for both thinkers, and typical as well of those moments and occasions of our lives in which we may find ourselves drawn to reflect on what meaning is and how we relate to it. (shrink)