This book tackles the question of why the brain is so difficult to fully understand. In neuroscience, data are acquired and analyzed with astonishing techniques and accumulate rapidly. Nevertheless, try to explain how a person can think or why there is such a condition as schizophrenia, and it appears that we really know little. To approach these difficulties, the authors first present a number of case studies in which the operation of a neural circuit is worked out in some detail (...) and, at the same time, the functional significance of the operation is also understood. These examples are complicated in their biologic specifics but are conceptually straightforward. The examples are hoped to provoke an appreciation for what neuroscience can accomplish. The authors then develop some thoughts on how these issues can be addressed----instead of considering cognition in general, taking instead a subset of cognition that does lend itself to formal description. (shrink)

The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two (...) aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal. (shrink)

Many philosophers have devoted a lot of attention to the work of Richard Wagner. This article provides philosophical accounts of two important aspects of Wagner’s most ambitious work, the tetralogy Ring of the Nibelung. First, I examine how the musical device developed by Wagner known as the leitmotif functions in Act 1 of the second opera of Wagner’s Ring, Die Walküre, through the analysis of leitmotifs presented by Roger Scruton. I shall focus particularly on the perspective that the use (...) of this musical device provides on the love between the siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde depicted in the act. My belief is that Scruton’s account of leitmotifs helps to explain the unique character that has been attributed to this act. The second part of the article presents a more detailed examination of the significance of the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde for The Ring. Besides Scruton’s views, the interpretation of The Ring by Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht will have an important role in this examination. (shrink)

The primary aspects of Clifford Christians's ethical theory may be identified or contextualized in several ways, three of which are employed in this article: 1) a content analysis of his self-reported book, article, and chapter titles; 2) a narrative summary of the themes of his self-selected representative ethical theory essays; and 3) the author's contextualization of Christians' ideas within both intellectual history and communication studies. Although Christians and his work are valued as apex contributions to and leadership within the field (...) of media ethics, three questions are posed to Dr. Christians to which he responded both at the August 2009 AEJMC conference panel in Boston about his intellectual legacy and again in this journal. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to highlight the underlying themes or motifs that recur in Russian war propaganda in the context of the war in Ukraine. Using the method of thematic analysis, I analyzed the messages about the war in Ukraine that Russian opinion leaders and media institutions disseminated through the lens of the "principles of war propaganda" presented and illustrated by Arthur Ponsonby and Anne Morelli. Due to the language barrier and restrictions on access to Russian news sources, (...) we limited our analysis to articles published on the TASS news agency website and Twitter posts, which reproduce and comment on the interventions of Vladimir Solovyov, considered by the United States State Department as "the Kremlin's most energetic propagandist." In total, I analyzed 58 articles from the website of the TASS news agency and 40 Twitter posts with excerpts from the show "Evening with Vladimir Solovyov" on the Russia-1 TV channel. The analysis highlights that the "principles" defined by Arthur Ponsonby and Anne Morelli govern Russian war propaganda, at least in part. Our analysis does not exclude the possibility that Russian propagandists may have used other leitmotifs or public communication themes. Their identification and presentation could be the subject of further research. (shrink)

The leitmotif of Mario Bunge’s work was that the philosophy of science should be informed by a comprehensive scientific philosophy, and vice versa; with both firmly rooted in realism and materialism. Now Bunge left such a big oeuvre, comprising more than 70 books and hundreds of articles, that it is impossible to review it in its entirety. In addition to biographical remarks, this obituary will therefore restrict itself to some select issues of his philosophy: his scientific metaphysics, his philosophy (...) of physics, his concept of mechanismic explanation, his philosophy of social science and technology, and his approach to the demarcation problem. The final section will explore why Bunge, despite the extent and depth of his work, has not achieved a more prominent status in the philosophical community. (shrink)

A leitmotif of the interviews Werner Herzog gave throughout several decades is his portrayal of himself as an anti-intellectualist, an anti-theorist, and an anti-philosopher. The text resorts to an established philosopher, who may have actually welcomed Herzog’s anti-intellectualist and anti-theoretical posture: Ludwig Wittgenstein. They both attempt to do justice – the former cinematically, the latter philosophically – to what is sometimes called the “human condition,” its quirks and fancies included. And they are both concerned with the trouble we experience (...) in putting up with what there is, with what there may be at hand or before our eyes. Thus, the obstinacy of Herzog’s protagonists to achieve something come what may, and the dogmatism of Wittgenstein’s interlocutors to conceive of something in just one way, are two sides of the same coin. This coin is the unbounded attachment to a theory: one’s exclusive manner of acting upon, or looking at, the world around oneself. (shrink)

A leitmotif of Being and Time is the attempt to reverse the classical priority of actuality over possibility: instead of understanding the possible in terms of the actual – as “arising out of the actual and returning to it” – Heidegger insists on grasping possibility as the primordial notion. Nowhere is it more evident than in his complex treatment of death and dying. Death is exactly that possibility which offers nothing actual in terms of which to grasp it; death (...) only is in our ever being-toward it. I focus on Heidegger’s characterization of being-toward-death as rooted in, and a concretion of, Dasein’s being-toward-itself. This approach yields an interpretation of the notorious “possibility of impossibility” formulation that is diametrically opposed to the so-called “world-collapse” interpretations. I then explore why, and in what sense, Dasein’s being-toward-itself needs a concretion and draw conclusions about the organization of Being and Time as whole. (shrink)

The leitmotif of Freedom in Response, as the title suggests, is a reasoned exposition of the nature of freedom, as it is presented in the Bible and developed by such later theologians as Martin Luther. Oswald Bayer considers Luther's teachings on pastoral care, marriage, and the three estates, bringing in Kant and Hegel as conversation partners, together with Kant's friend and critic, the innovative theologian and philosopher Johann Georg Hamann. Oswald Bayer is a major contemporary Lutheran theologian, but so (...) far little of his work has been translated from German into English. This selection of essays indicates the depth and range of his thought on issues relating to theological ethics. (shrink)

The leitmotif of the article is an analysis and interpretation of disputes about the nature of Slovak philosophy in the contexts of the formation of individual philosophical generations from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century. In the content core of the article, the dispute is about the nature of Slovak philosophy in the first generation of its representatives, which was represented by the followers of the so-called “Štúr School”. As a follow-up to this (...) dispute, the article analyzes the ideological confrontations of followers of religious and secular philosophical thought in Slovakia during the first Czechoslovak republic. It is a dispute between followers of classical (European) positivism and, partly, Masarykism with the representatives of contemporary religious philosophy in Slovakia. At the end of the paper, the trend of disputes about the nature of Slovak philosophy is outlined even in the period after the Stalinist, and, later, the so-called normalization indoctrination of Slovak philosophy. (shrink)

The leitmotif of the German contribution to the 12th Architecture Biennial in Venice, “desire“, is at the same time the topic of a survey among architects ; answers are given through drawings. What are you longing for? The response drawings are highly individual, diversity becomes programme: both in picture language and in the presentation in terms of content, reactions are quite different. But there is one thing they all have in common: the burning desire of something concrete. Sometimes it (...) spreads lightning-like on the observer, sometimes time is required for a contemplative involvement with form and content. The architectural sketch, as it may seem, degenerated into a side product of architectural work within the last years, is back! (shrink)

Running like a leitmotif through Peter Roberts’ recently published philosophico-educational writings there is a humanistic thread, which this article picks out. In order to ascertain the quality of this humanism, Roberts is positioned in relation to a pair of extant humanisms: radical and integral. Points of comparability and contrast are identified in several of the writer’s genre-crossing essays. These texts, it is argued, rectify deficiencies in how the two humanisms envision alternatives to capitalism. Roberts skilfully teases out the non-obvious (...) futurological implications of the work of a diverse array of authors, spanning the boundaries of philosophy, social criticism, and literature. In so doing, he underscores the intimate connection between personal self-transformation and ideal-driven social transformation. Further, Roberts challenges humanists of both radical and integral stripes to reconsider the moral grounds of their critique of capitalism. (shrink)

This study articulates the leitmotif of civilizational analysis (the interaction of power and culture) with regard to the relation between religion and the state within the Islamic civilization or ‘Islamdom’. In a first step, it clarifies, by reference to Marshall Hodgson, the extent to which his view of Islamdom as a transcivilizational ecumene can fit into a comparative type of civilizational analysis. The comparative approach to civilizational analysis can be enriched by reevaluating the specific Islamic pattern of mild legitimization (...) of power through culture, and by integrating into the analysis the resulting field of tension vis-à-vis Western power and its supporting normative paradigms. In a second step, in order to better grasp the forms of power governing this field of tension, the article critically reconsiders Rémi Brague’s characterization of Western European civilization as the outcome of an expansive ‘Roman road’ that matched culture with power by investing into the charisma of corporate entities: first, the church, then the state. Against this double background, the study shows that the culture—power syndrome that is proper to Islamdom as a transcivilizational ecumene does not consecrate a separation of ‘religion’ from the body politic, but promotes the building of expansive patterns of connectedness. (shrink)

Leitmotifs in the life of Jean van Heijenoort.

De-anthropocentrism is the leitmotif of philosophy in the twenty-first century, encouraging diverse and competing thoughts as to how this goal may be achieved. This article argues that the method by which we may achieve de-anthropocentrism is ethical rather than metaphysical – it must involve a creation of the self, rather than an interpretation of the given human conditions. Through engagements with the thought of Nietzsche, Levinas, and Foucault, and a close reading of Baudelaire’s poem “La Beauté,” I will illustrate (...) three ethical commitments essential to de-anthropocentrism: to abandon the claim to knowledge associated with human reason, to remain in perpetual quest of an object, and to transgress the given perceptual structure through aesthetic experience. In contrast to Kantian philosophy built upon universal human reason, art is the ethical arena where each artist creates their own way to relate to the object, while de-anthropocentrism occurs – this article argues – when the artist includes the self as the field of creation. Object-Oriented Ontology in my assessment is the only branch of philosophy that truly achieves de-anthropocentrism. (shrink)

This brings together five pieces written by Jacques Derrida as extended lectures. The most important theme is Derrida's redefinition of speech acts and the 'event' as a particular kind of performative. The effects of globalization and mechanization, along with arising issues, provide a second constellation of themes. The first four essays involve a specific act of speech: the lie, the excuse, perjury and profession. The last two essays continue Derrida's powerful series of meditations on professional and institutional questions. The final (...) essay, 'Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul', confronts the task facing psychoanalysis today: coming to terms in new ways with worldwide cruelty and accommodating itself to the modern juridical concepts of crime against humanity. The phrase 'without alibi' (alibi, of course, being another speech act) is used throughout the essay as a leitmotif indicating that the responsibility psychoanalysis has to respond to globalization cannot be evaded. (shrink)

This paper addresses the leitmotif of Alan Holland's work, which is argued here to be a defence of the existence and worth of nonhuman nature. Definitions of politics have always depended on the idea of nature as a contrasting non-political realm, usually turning on the centrality of speech. Referencing the work of Aristotle, Kant and Bentham, I suggest that the instability of the distinction between the human and the nonhuman means that politics, as ‘thing and activity', must itself be (...) unstable. The question of whether there can be a politics without nature is explored through an analysis of the work of Latour, and the conclusion is reached that listening may well be just as important as speaking. (shrink)

The live event grotesque -- Leitmotifs, tropes, and cliches -- Aggressive sensation -- The detail -- Not through the birth canal: religion -- Semen and ash -- The four hour erection -- Go home Socrates -- The vagina and the demon -- Life for sale: religion -- Becoming a lake or a sea.

Like Aristotle, Wittgenstein’s leitmotif was action. Wittgenstein saw action (or behaviour) as the root, manifestation and transmitter of meaning. He repeatedly demonstrated the regress manifest in seeing the proposition, or any kind of representation, as a necessary precursor to thought and action, or at least he pointed out the superfluity of such shadowy inner precursors when instinct and practices can easily be seen to be at the base of all our thought: ‘In philosophy one is in constant danger of (...) producing a myth of symbolism, or a myth of mental processes. Instead of simply saying what anyone knows and must admit’ (Z, §211). Where Aristotle warns us that Plato had been misled by the uniform appearance of a word in different contexts into believing that it had a uniform meaning across uses, Wittgenstein urges us to see the differences in meaning that are often hidden by the uniform appearance of language, insisting that meaning is dependent on use or context. Just as Aristotle in the Categories gave Plato’s forms a linguistic status, so, Wittgenstein took a linguistic turn from his predecessors, giving metaphysics a grammatical reading: both showed that concepts are not entities existing in isolated splendour in some metaphysical realm but simply abstractions from sentences in use. (shrink)

The obedience leitmotif complements the tension centered in the sacrifice and enables the good news of Isaac's salvation to stand as a reaffirmation of the patriarchal promise.

Had more philosophers of science come from chemistry, their thinking would have been different. I begin by looking at a typical chemical paper, in which making something is the leitmotif, and conjecture/refutation is pretty much irrelevant. What in fact might have been, might be, different? The realism of chemists is reinforced by their remarkable ability to transform matter; they buy into reductionism where it serves them, but make no real use of it. Incommensurability is taken without a blink, and (...) actually serves. The preeminence of synthesis in chemistry could have led philosophers of science to take more seriously questions of aesthetics within science, and to find a place in aesthetics for utility. The necessary motion twixt macroscopic and microscopic views of matter in modern chemistry leads to the coexistence of symbolic and iconic representations. And in another way to the deliberate, creative violation of categories. (shrink)

In an effort to meet growing stakeholder demands for transparency, accountability, and responsibility, many large organizations globally have voluntarily adopted the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines. Moreover, triggered by recent management transgressions, the ancient virtue of practical wisdom has gained increased attention from management scholars, who argue that the Aristotelian concept, with its interdisciplinary nature, has the capacity of turning management back into a holistic, contextual, and virtue-orientated practice. Especially the fact that practical wisdom is firmly based on normative values, coupled (...) with the emphasis on experience and practice, makes it well suited as a leitmotif for sustainable and responsible management. This conceptual paper builds on the link between practical wisdom and sustainability. I argue that the GRI may be regarded as an example of procedural practical wisdom in the context of sustainability reporting, specifically in terms of its emphasis on the holistic and situational dimensions, articulated through the concepts of materiality analysis and stakeholder dialogue. Practical implications, limitations, and avenues for further research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of Anderson and Belnap’s selection criteria for an adequate theory of entailment. The criteria are grouped into three categories: criteria pertaining to modality, those pertaining to relevance, and those related to expressive strength. The leitmotif of both this paper and its prequel is the relevant legitimacy of disjunctive syllogism. Relevant logics are commonly held to be paraconsistent logics. It is shown in this paper, however, that both E and R can be extended to explosive (...) logics which satisfy all of Anderson and Belnap’s selection criteria, provided the truth-constant known as the Ackermann constant is available. One of the selection criteria related to expressive strength is having an “enthymematic” conditional for which a deduction theorem holds. I argue that this allows for a new interpretation of Anderson and Belnap’s take on logical consequence, namely as committing them to pluralism about logical consequence. (shrink)

This article critically examines the postsecular literature with the aim of dispelling the scepticism about the concept’s theoretical import, critical power and analytical utility. It first presents an overview of the literature identifying two major fields, social theology and politics, within which three major critical leitmotifs are developed: (1) disenchantment and the loss of community; (2) the impossibility of absolute secularity; and (3) the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. In the second section, the shortcomings of problematizations (1) and (...) (2) are highlighted, originating from social theology, and it is argued that they have limited critical potential as they intend to renaturalize the religious. Instead, it is asserted that the concept has critical power when used within the context of a postreligious denaturalization of the secular. In the last section, the focus shifts to the analytical utility of the concept, and the article examines ‘postsecular society’ and ‘postsecularization’ in the light of the previous discussion. (shrink)

This scrupulously researched and rigorously argued book is the first to interpret and evaluate the central topic of Martin Heidegger's philosophy--his celebrated "Question of Being"--in the context of the full range of Heidegger's thought. With this comprehensive approach, Herman Philipse distinguishes in unprecedented ways the center from the periphery, the essential from the incidental in Heidegger's philosophy. Among other achievements, this allows him to shed new light on the controversial relationship between Heidegger's life and thought--in particular the connections between his (...) philosophy and his involvement with Nazism.Philipse begins by explaining which problems an interpretation of Heidegger's question of being should solve, and he specifies which type of interpretation is the best basis for an evaluation of Heidegger's thought. He then identifies various strands or leitmotifs in Heidegger's idea of being, and shows how these strands hang together in the philosopher's work. In doing so, Philipse offers new insights into Heidegger's views on such subjects as human existence, authenticity, logic, and language, and into his readings of such philosophers as Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Philipse then integrates into his interpretation of Heidegger's overall theory the latest scholarship about the philosopher's engagement with Nazism. Finally, Philipse examines the fundamental structures of Heidegger's philosophy and assesses whether Heidegger's views are true, probable, or possess some other epistemic or existential value.As the most thorough interpretation of Heidegger's theory of being now available, this work represents a new phase in the vigorous debate about the philosopher's life and works. (shrink)

The metaphysical and theological writings of John Duns Scotus (1265/6-1308)—one of the most intriguing, albeit if now nigh-forgotten philosophers of the late Middle Ages—were seminal in the emergence of modernity. A Metaphysics of Creation for the Information Age: A Dialogue with Duns Scotus uses the prism of the concept of Creation as the leitmotif to assemble and interpret Scotus’s system of thought in a unified manner. In doing so, Liran Shia Gordon reframes Scotus’s metaphysics such that it confronts the (...) challenges posed by information technology and its impact on our lives, thought, and actions. Surprisingly, although there has been great interest in the emergence and dissemination of information technology through the popular media, there has not yet been a genuine and vigorous philosophical consideration of the multiple ways information technology alters the basic categories by which we perceive and understand reality. Juxtaposing medieval philosophy and information technology offers an unconventional horizon to frame the foundational changes brought about by the information revolution and reassess the relevancy of medieval philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

It may be said that the single track of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is the discernment and elucidation of grammar—its nature and its limits. This paper will trace Wittgenstein’s evolving notion of grammar from the Tractatus to On Certainty. It will distinguish between a ‘thin grammar’ and an increasingly more fact-linked, ‘reality-soaked’, ‘thick grammar’. The ‘hinge’ certainties of On Certainty and the ‘patterns of life’ of Last Writings attest to the fact that one of the leitmotifs in the work of the third (...) Wittgenstein is the grammaticalization of experience. This reflects Wittgenstein’s realisation that grammar can manifest itself as a way of acting. In moves that exceed anything in Philosophical Investigations, the third Wittgenstein makes grammar enactive. We shall see that Wittgenstein’s hesitant but unrelenting link of grammar to the stream of life in no way infringes on the ‘autonomy of grammar’. (shrink)

The most popular of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra ranks among the most remarkable feats of German literature. A symphony of language, it abounds in every kind of wordplay and an intricate network of leitmotifs. This dual-language edition features one third of Nietzsche's work, keeping the most famous concepts intact and encompassing a variety of moods and modes as well as the author's full linguistic scope. Editor Stanley Appelbaum presents accurate English translations on the pages facing the original German, (...) an informative introduction to the author's life and oeuvre, plus notes throughout the text and brief summaries of the omitted chapters. (shrink)

In one of his many metaphorical turns of phrase – a leitmotif in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity — Jürgen Habermas speaks of the path not taken by modern philosophers, a path that might have led them towards his own intersubjective notion of communicative reason. Habermas is especially critical of his predecessors, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, because, he believes, they repudiated the rational potential in the culture of modernity. Whenever Adorno and Horkheimer heard the word ‘culture’, they (...) apparently reached for their revolvers. By the 1940s, their confidence in modern culture had allegedly succumbed to bitter disillusionment. Indeed, on Habermas's view, the confidence of these early critical theorists had been shaken so badly by the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism that their scepticism finally embraced reason itself, ‘whose standards ideology critique had found already given in bourgeois ideals’. Consequently, Adorno and Horkheimer were forced to call into question their own immanent critique of modernity: ideology critique itself came ‘under suspicion of not producing truths’. These philosophers supposedly had little choice but to render their now suspect critique ‘independent even in relation to its own foundations’. (shrink)

Based in a holistic exposition and appraisal of Gramsci’s writings that are of relevance to education in neoliberal times, this book--rather than simply applying Gramsci's theories to issues in education--argues that education constitutes the leitmotif of his entire oeuvre and lies at the heart of his conceptualization of the ancient Greek term hegemony that was used by other political theorists before him. Starting from this understanding, the book goes on to compare Gramsci's theories with those of later thinkers in (...) the development of a critical pedagogy that can confront neoliberalism in all its forms. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The authors of this article set the main purpose of understanding the ideological potential of Kant’s philosophical heritage from the viewpoint of its influence on the spread and legitimization of the self-made man idea in the worldview transformations of the modern world. _Theoretical basis._ Historical, analytical, and hermeneutic methods became fundamental for achieving the goal. The study is based on Kant’s works, as well as on the works of modern researchers of his ideological heritage. _Originality._ The analysis shows that (...) the idea of the Self-made-man, which originated in the ancient world and gradually spread in the Western culture of the Middle Ages, early Modernism, and especially the Enlightenment, receives significant additional impulses in the context of Kant’s rethinking of the metaphysical foundations in the theory of knowledge and morality. Perhaps, the systematic theoretical substantiation of people’s abilities to use their own mind, their intellectual, and therefore moral autonomy, and freedom of will as the fundamental principles of personal Self-determination and Self-realization became the most important consequence of this rethinking. This, in turn, became the theoretical and moral-legal basis for further legitimization in the modern and postmodern world of the ideal of a person who creates oneself. _Conclusions._ The importance of Kant’s philosophy in the context of idea generation of the self-made man is hard to overestimate. It is entirely imbued with a leitmotif appeal to the individual to have the courage to use his/her own mind, to be independent and self-sufficient in assessments, choices, and actions, and therefore also responsible for their consequences, in the end, to be primarily an end, not a means. Thanks to this, a person, according to Hegel, finds an unconditionally strong and stable center in oneself. In fact, by strengthening the position of human-centric philosophy, as well as the moral and legal foundations of liberal humanism, Kant’s ideas provided further ideological legitimation in the orientation of an objectively growing individual towards actively placing Self-reliance and Personal responsibility on one’s own destiny as the key principles of the Self-made-man concept. (shrink)

Between 1873 and 1876, Felix Klein published a series of papers that he later placed under the rubric anschauliche Geometrie in the second volume of his collected works (1922). The present study attempts not only to follow the course of this work, but also to place it in a larger historical context. Methodologically, Klein’s approach had roots in Poncelet’s principle of continuity, though the more immediate influences on him came from his teachers, Plücker and Clebsch. In the 1860s, Clebsch reworked (...) some of the central ideas in Riemann’s theory of Abelian functions to obtain complicated results for systems of algebraic curves, most published earlier by Hesse and Steiner. These findings played a major role in enumerative geometry, whereas Plücker’s work had a strongly qualitative character that imbued Klein’s early studies. A leitmotif in these works can be seen in the interplay between real curves and surfaces as reflected by their transformational properties. During the early 1870s, Klein and Zeuthen began to explore the possibility of deriving all possible forms for real cubic surfaces as well as quartic curves. They did so using continuity methods reminiscent of Poncelet’s earlier approach. Both authors also relied on visual arguments, which Klein would later advance under the banner of intuitive geometry (anschauliche Geometrie). (shrink)

The relationship between the individual and society is the leitmotif of Georges Gurvitch’s work. Beginning from the early Russian-language books on the philosophy of law and ending with the works on sociology published in France and the USA at the final stage of his career, Gurvitch studied the individual person and collective units as interacting sides of the collective social subject. He sought to overcome the struggle between individualism and collectivism which found its ideological expression in the rivalry of (...) the French (Emile Durkheim) and German (Max Weber) schools of sociology. Gurvitch formulated the concept of society as dynamic interaction and mutual determination of the individual and collective unit. In his Russian-language works, written before his emigration, he maintained that it was in the sphere of law that one could determine how the individual and society mutually condition each other and determine the direction of social development. In the late 1920s and early 1930s in his teaching on social law, Gurvitch formulated the concept of sociability which enabled him to focus attention not on the confrontation, but on the interaction of the individual and society. In the concept of “normative fact” he defined the being of society and embodied the dialectical interaction between singularity and multitude. In the late 1930s in his teaching on microsociology, he introduced criteria of sociability, recording individual (intensity of the fusion of individual minds) and collective (the force of social pressure) aspects of the process of social development. Proceeding from these criteria Gurvitch developed a gradation of sociability, expressing it in the scheme “mass — community — communion” which enabled him to analyse the formation of collective units and determine the features of their existence. In his article “Mass, Community, and Communion” (1941) he presented the forms of sociability which enabled him to describe the mutual conditioning of individuals and collective units. Gurvitch’s article spells out the key principles of his philosophy and sociology of law which overcome individualism and collectivism in his account of society. (shrink)

Bourdieusian Prospects considers the ongoing relevance of Bourdieu's social theory for contemporary social science. Breaking with the tendency to reflect on Bourdieu's legacies, it brings established and emergent scholars together to debate the futures of a specifically Bourdieusian sociology. Driven by a central leitmotif in Bourdieu s oeuvre, namely, that his work not be blindly appropriated but actively interpreted, contributors to this volume set out to map the potentials of Bourdieusian inflected social science. While for many social scientists the (...) empirical and theoretical developments of the twenty-first century mark a limit point of Bourdieusian social theory, this collection charts both how and why a Bourdieusian sociology has a future, which is crucial for the ongoing development and roll out of an engaged, relevant and critical social science. ". (shrink)

You can’t build if you don’t dwell first. This sentence is counterintuitive. It is usually thought that first you build, and then you dwell where you have built. But if you don’t dwell where you want to build, you may not understand the landscape, and the building will be weak or crippled.In Latin, “to dwell” is habitare, which comes from the verb habere, “to own.” The phrase “You can’t build if you don’t dwell first” can be considered the leitmotif (...) of the “Yes to Life” Congress, held in Vatican City in 2019. The goal of the conference was to overcome prejudices and preconceptions about the correct approach to end-of-life cases in perinatology. Overcoming prejudices about this particular stage of life is hard in... (shrink)

Utopias are embedded in contexts from which they derive meaning and significance. As a vehicle for speculation, intervention, and creativity, narrative utopia reflects the circumstances of its times, including its culture's relationship to the past. This article offers a survey of ways in which utopias engage with the problematics of historical memory both by looking to the past in the “real” world or in a mythical world and by positing fictional peoples with their own historical memory/ies, as instanced in legends, (...) libraries, works of art, and so on. The erasure or falsification of memory, on the other hand, appears as an important leitmotif of the dystopian imagination. By pointing out a variety of examples and issues, the article will attempt to bridge the existing gap between utopian studies and cultural memory studies. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze, arguably the best-known theorist of virtuality, describes the virtual as part of an ontology of becoming and multiplicity: he sees the virtual as a characteristic of being which is directly opposed to, but simultaneously constitutive of the actual aspect of reality, as a force that works mostly invisibly, but powerfully within the interstices of the material world, introducing constant flux into reality through its negotiations with the actual.1 This conception of the virtual represents something of a leitmotif (...) for the forty-four essays collected in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. The collection offers a wide range of approaches to virtuality as a philosophical and aesthetic concept as well as a... (shrink)

A sequential reading of Horace’s Odes shows that the Pyrrha poem is connected with various others by means of subject matter, structure, choice of words, and metre. In the centre of this complex of allusions we find the figure of Achilles in the transvestite disguise he used to hide on the island of Scyrus, where, according to Hyginus, he was known by the name of Pyrrha. In the epic tradition, Scyrus seems to have been counted among the Cycladic Isles, while (...) at the same time, that particular episode in the hero’s life belongs to the period narrated in the epic cycle. Through this connection, the Scyrian Achilles may shed light on the meaning of Horace’s warning against travelling the sea that extends between the Cyclades in ode 1. 14, the first ode written in the same metre as 1. 5. In the final part of the article, Horace’s allusive technique, described by him in metaphors of weaving and spinning, is compared to the modern concept of the leitmotif. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Prospects for a Mahāyāna Theology of EmptinessA Continuing DebateJohn P. KeenanTwo articles in recent issues of Buddhist-Christian Studies—Lai Pan-chiu’s “A Mahāyāna Reading of Chalcedon Christology: A Chinese Response to John Keenan” 1 (2004) and Thomas Cattoi’s “What Has Chalcedon to Do with Lhasa? John Keenan’s and Lai Pan-chiu’s Reflections on Classical Christology and the Possible Shape of a Tibetan Theology of Incarnation” 2 (2008)—discuss my book The Meaning (...) of Christ: A Mahāyāna Theology (1989),3 prompting me to add my voice to the conversation.In “A Mahāyāna Reading of Chalcedon Christology: A Chinese Response to John Keenan,” Lai Pan-chiu reads from the perspective of a Chinese Christian thinker my formulation of a Christology informed by Indian Mahāyāna philosophy. He would prefer to configure a rather different Mahāyāna theology, wherein the polarity expressed in traditional Chalcedonian theology would be reinvested in a Chinese Mahāyāna dynamic, with its ability to hold in creative tension what are often seen as exclusionary opposites. Lai proposes to take as leitmotif for this project the Chinese Mahāyāna theme of Buddha Nature (C. fóxìng ) and its Indian precursor of Tathāgatagarbha (Skt. “matrix of the Buddha”) thought. Although—for reasons I will discuss below—I would not myself choose this approach in writing Christology for a western audience, I certainly would commend Lai Pan-chiu’s effort to do so for a Chinese audience and beyond.In “What Has Chalcedon to Do with Lhasa? John Keenan’s and Lai Pan-chiu’s Reflections on Classical Christology and the Possible Shape of a Tibetan Theology of Incarnation,” Thomas Cattoi contends that Lai has not gone far enough in responding to The Meaning of Christ. Cattoi himself then proceeds with a critique of Mahāyāna theology that reveals both his own unwavering commitment to traditional ontological theology and his apparent disinterest in engaging Buddhist Mahāyāna philosophy in depth. He makes little or no reference to the Mahāyāna philosophical themes that I discuss in detail in The Meaning of Christ—themes that I then employ to enunciate a Mahāyāna Christology. Moreover, the alternative “Tibetan Christology” that Cattoi proffers in this article also appears to avoid any deep or detailed engagement [End Page 3] with Mahāyāna thought. He seems satisfied to employ Tibetan Buddhist terminology simply to reaffirm what we have long affirmed in the Greek, emphasizing the embodiment of Christ as the unicum, the one and only embodiment of God, and the transformation of the very fabric of the universe effected thereby.4 His Christology functions as a description of that transformation and, to my lights, leaves scant room for any Trinitarian theology of the Spirit. He argues against the notion that any discourse can empty the ontological claims of “the Christian position.” For him, only the ontological theology of our Greek ancestors is adequate—apparently culturally privileged because providentially inspired.I will address herein some of the many, often convoluted, issues raised, for these issues are basic to Mahāyāna theology and to critiques against its viability. I choose not to detail the many instances in which Thomas Cattoi misreads, mischaracterizes, and misrepresents my work; I must only trust that those who have read The Meaning of Christ are well aware that Cattoi’s characterizations of that book reflect neither its content nor its tone.5 I shall use this space instead to further clarify the shape of a Mahāyāna theology that employs the principal themes of Mādhyamika and Yogācāra, and will discuss in a more general way Cattoi’s fundamental inattentiveness to those themes and to the manner in which they inform Mahāyāna theology.6 I shall also discuss Lai Pan-chiu’s very interesting proposal for a Chinese Mahāyāna theology.Ontology and MahĀyĀna Realms of UnderstandingMahāyāna theology is not Cattoi’s “Mādhyamika dualism.”7 Mahāyāna theology does not represent a Buddhist “position,” but rather the emptiness of all... (shrink)

Using Rappaport’s notion of liturgical orders, the essay argues that the fixity of features in some ritual scenes in the Iliad may denote a high communicational register and level of sanctity. The features of commensal and oath-sacrificing scenes are compared and contrasted – death is highlighted in oath-sacrifice, muffled in commensal sacrifice. There is a relative paucity of figurative language in ritual scenes, except in the case of the “pitiless bronze” which takes the life of the lambs and boar in (...) the oath-sacrifices of Books III and XIX. This figurative paucity is to be contrasted to the plenum of such language in scenes which depict battlefield killings. Finally the features of the cremation sacrifices of Iliad XXIII are examined against those of commensal and oath-sacrifices. The focalization on the “bulls cut down bellowing” in the precremation feast is startling because it jars with typical commensal sacrifices, but may be explained by the broken nature of the narrative and its punctuation by an oath-making ritual leitmotif. In contrast, the actual cremation sacrifices are situated within a strongly formalized liturgical order which does not permit focalization on dying victims, despite the references to poinē which introduce and conclude the funeral sacrifices.« Des bœufs mugissants égorgés ». Leitmotive rituels et pressions poétiques au chant XXIII de l’Iliade. En utilisant la notion d’ordres liturgiques de Rappaport, l’étude affirme que la fixité des traits de certaines scènes rituelles de l’Iliade pourrait refléter un registre communicationnel élevé, ainsi qu’un niveau de sacralité. Les traits des scènes de sacrifice alimentaire et de sacrifice juratoire sont comparés et mis en contraste – la mort est soulignée dans le sacrifice juratoire, dissimulée dans le sacrifice alimentaire. La rareté relative de langage figuré caractérise les scènes rituelles, à l’exception du « bronze sans pitié » qui prend la vie des agneaux et de l’ours dans les sacrifices juratoires des chants III et XIX. Une telle rareté s’oppose au foisonnement de ce type de langage dans les scènes qui décrivent les tueries sur le champ de bataille. Enfin, les traits des sacrifices de crémation du chant XXIII sont examinés en regard de ceux des sacrifices alimentaires et juratoires. La mise en perspective des « bœufs mugissants égorgés » dans la célébration qui précède la crémation est frappante, dans la mesure où elle détonne par rapport aux sacrifices alimentaires typiques, mais peut s’expliquer par la nature décousue de la narration et l’insertion ponctuelle du leitmotiv d’un rituel juratoire. Par contraste, les véritables sacrifices de crémation s’insèrent dans un ordre liturgique fortement formalisé qui ne permet pas la mise en perspective des victimes mourantes, en dépit des références à la poinē qui introduit et referme les sacrifices funèbres. (shrink)

Although the title of the study contains even two questions, who is Zarathustra? and who is the »Who«?, it cannot be claimed that the main goal of this study is to answer them. In particularly, it cannot be claimed that these questions are answerable at all. The questions serve as leitmotif for displaying the untimely program of Nietzsche and the deconstruction of Derrida, showing analogy aspects between them, which are related to the critique of western metaphysics and its language (...) as well as to de(con)struction of the concepts of subject and identity. (shrink)

This essay attempts to present Hegel as a secular theologian and to argue that the theological dimension of Hegel’s thought is central to his entire philosophy and is, in fact, the leitmotif that draws together all of his work. The task of overcoming the dualism between the sacred and the secular provides the driving spirit of all Hegel’s endeavors, from his juvenilia to the mature thought of his Heidelberg and Berlin periods. A secular theology demonstrates its commitment to secularity (...) through three main affirmations: (1) the full reality and significance of this world, (2) the autonomy of the different fields of culture and knowledge besides that of religion, and (3) the epistemological authority of reason and shared experience in determining the real and the true. Hegel’s secular theology, however, has an ambiguous relationship with most forms of theism, including panentheism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics by Claire CarlisleSanja SärmanCARLISLE, Claire. Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021. 288 pp. Cloth, $29.95; paper, $22.95Spinoza has variously been read as presenting a fully naturalized theology (Steven Nadler), as a secretive Marrano philosopher of immanence cleverly hiding his true allegiances in plain sight (Yirmiyahu Yovel, see also Leo Strauss) and as (...) a God-intoxicated man (Novalis). Rarely have the assessments of a man's religion been so varied and conflicted. In an exemplarily searching spirit, Claire Carlisle explores the issue while keeping the question of what religion is an open one. The book comprises nine chapters—essayistic in form but scholarly in content—devoted to examining the issue from different angles.The leitmotif of Spinoza's religiosity is, for Carlisle, being-in-God, a term of art that denotes at once a metaphysical reality and a spiritual project. We are inevitably in God: This is an ontological as well as a conceptual dependence-relation. Being-in-God is participatory dependence on God's own being. In illuminating the relation between God and non-God, Carlisle draws on the rich Catholic tradition. For example, being in-God means being in another (God) without ever being the other of God, to whom all being belongs. This asymmetrical take on the otherness-relation clearly echoes Nicholaus of Cusa's thoughts about God as non-aliud, and Carlisle cites him, not as an ancestor of Spinozism but as a cotraveler along a certain pathway for understanding God.Although being-in-God is an indisputable reality, it is also a spiritual challenge. Since we are by necessity in-God, the spiritual task will paradoxically consist in becoming what we already are, and thereby gaining freedom-in-necessity.In my view, Carlisle's reading reaps rich fruit from its assumption that ontology and normativity are not, indeed cannot be, sequestrated within Spinoza's thought. Moreover, its study of the affectivity—the qualia, even—of being-in-God presents us with a welcome counterweight to descriptions of Spinoza's system from without. Differently put, for Carlisle, the question "What is it like?" can sensibly be asked about being-in-God. Inspired by Spinoza's earliest work, Carlisle sketches a philosophical diagnosis of the devout person who is compelled ("necessitated") by the work she has to do and therefore enjoys an enviable singularity of purpose: Following Latour and Foucault, Carlisle sees a distinctively spiritual quality in certain modes of attention. Attending to oneself and others as they are in-God instills calm; in other words, on Carlisle's reading, the affective aspect of being-in-God is characterized by being at rest with oneself and others (quies is Latin for "rest"). Her careful reading of the Latin text exposes a network of acquiescentia (and cognate terms) in Spinoza's work, somewhat obfuscated through Curley's English translation, which variously renders the word as "esteem" and "satisfaction": What the text gains in stylistic points, it may lose in spiritual significance. In the Ethics, acquiescentia in se ipso is a kind of self-esteem or self-confidence that becomes religiously poignant when mediated through the insight that one is in God: [End Page 347] Through the realization of being in-God, one's calm yet affective appreciation of oneself becomes indistinguishable both from one's love of God and from God's love of oneself. This is an interesting phenomenal perspective on Spinoza's doctrine of the third kind of knowledge.At times, one could perhaps wish for a more systematic discussion of core concepts, such as that of infinity. For example, Carlisle cites Spinoza's idea that we cannot bridge the infinite distance which separates us from God but does not explicitly discuss how this infinite distance is to be reconciled with ontological intimacy; while we sense the proper response, it is not demonstrated.In the end, Carlisle's work successfully shows that we cannot understand Spinoza's religiosity if we model it after our late-modern concept of religion—a construct that, as the historian Peter Harrison has argued, was... (shrink)

This commentary on Bengt Brülde's paper on mental disorder in this edition argues that this insightful analysis of the way values inform the concept of mental disorder may also apply to physical disorders. Using the example of the way values are ascribed in both visual and performing arts, and using Rudyard Kipling's leitmotif " but is it art?" taken from his poem "The Conundrum of the Workshops", the question of what is 'good' art is addressed using the same questions (...) applied in the paper to mental disorder. It is concluded that the questions: where is the evaluative element located? what kind of values or evaluations do we rely on? are there specific standards against which to judge the value? how do the judgments enter the picture? can be applied just as usefully to physical disorders. (shrink)