To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

One of the nation's leading military ethicists, Louis P. Pojman argues that globalism and cosmopolitanism motivate the need for greater international cooperation based on enforceable international law. The best way to realize the promises of globalism and cogent moral arguments for cosmopolitanism, Pojman contends, is through the establishment of a World Government.

Capturing the inimitable enthusiasm of Louis Pojman's much acclaimed teaching, PHILOSOPHY: THE PURSUIT OF WISDOM introduces students to all the core topics in philosophy. Beginning with an inquiry into the nature and purpose of philosophy, this text moves through many traditional discussions--such as the existence of God, the problems of knowledge, the freewill/determinism debate, and the foundations of ethics--concluding with an exploration into existentialism and the meaning of life.

L'exposé cartésien de l'argument ontologique s'écarte radicalement de l'esprit originaire de la preuve, chez Saint Anselme. Le Dieu de Descartes, parfait parce que tout-puissant, est bien différent du Dieu du Proslogion, Celui qui est tel que rien de plus grand ne puisse être pensé, fin de la pensée et du désir humains. La preuve d'Anselme conceptualise une expérience humaine qui se pense comme l'expérience chrétienne orthodoxe, décrivant, de ce fait, l'homme en sa vérité. Mais on n'entrera pleinement dans la pensée (...) spéculative que si l'aspiration à Dieu en l'homme est considérée comme l'envers dialectique de l'amour, créateur de l'homme, en Dieu. Chez Hegel, ce n'est pas l'esprit fini qui accomplit la preuve ontologique, mais l'Esprit dans sa totalité. Ce mouvement de l'Esprit vers soi à travers sa division d'avec soi n'est pas un simple processus logique; en sa profondeur, il est le mouvement de réconciliation de la liberté humaine avec la liberté divine, créatrice et rédemptrice. La vérité de la Totalité, et donc, aussi, de l'histoire, dans le Concept, dit également la libre unification de l'homme et de Dieu dans et par la figure historique du Christ. Hegel pense le christianisme sans le réduire, parce qu'il le pense à partir de l'acte préalable de la foi, par lequel la liberté humaine s'ouvre à l'amour divin, posant ainsi l'unité dialectique du Tout. Que la foi puisse être rationnellement exposée ne l'empêche pas d'être la foi, c'est-à-dire la vie en union au Christ, Logos éternel et homme crucifié. On a dit: Un Dieu compris n'est plus un Dieu. Cela n'est vrai que des faux dieux. (shrink)

The Good Rebel is a philosophical work, the methodology of which is nonetheless literary and historical. The book provides an original but historically informed and socially relevant commentary on modern conceptions of personal autonomy. Communitarian authors provide effective critiques of a liberal preoccupation with individualistic personal autonomy. Groarke does not contest the liberal emphasis on autonomy: instead he contests the way in which contemporary liberals define the concept of autonomy.