This thesis inquires into our ‘human nature’ through an interdisciplinary approach that considers some of the radical changes in intellectual thought at those key points in Western culture in which this concept has been centrally deployed. The broad historical sweep that this study covers finds the preoccupation with defining who we are and what we are capable of inextricably linked with the focus, at most of the pivotal moments examined, on a dominant impulse to conceive human beings as moral creatures.

Postmodernism is a variety of meanings and definitions, is used to refer to many aspects of social life from musical forms and styles, literature and fine art through to philosophy, history and especially the mass media and consumer culture. Post modernism is a slippery term that is used by writers to refer to several different things. Featherstone points out the term has been used to refer to new developments in intellectual and cultural theory. The suggestion that our subjective experience of (...) everyday life and our sense of identity has somehow changed significantly in recent years. The view that capitalist or industrial societies have reached new and important stages in their development, the shift from modernity to post-modernity. Consumer culture is also play a vital role in the society, consumer culture may be defined as a day to day change in the taste of consumer behaviour. The term “consumer culture” refers to cultures in which mass consumption and production both fuel the economy and shape perceptions, values, desires, and constructions of personal identity. Economic developments, demographic trends, and new technologies profoundly influence the scope and scale of consumer culture. Social class, gender, ethnicity, region, and age all affect definitions of consumer identity and attitudes about the legitimacy of consumer centred lifestyle. (shrink)

There is a contemporary scepticism towards vision-based metaphors in management and organization studies that reflects a more general pattern across the social sciences. In short, there has been a shift away from ocularcentrism. This shift provides a useful basis for metatheoretical analysis of the philosophical discourse that informs organizational analysis. The article begins by briefly discussing the vision-generated, vision-centred interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality that has characterized the western philosophical tradition. Taking late 18th-century rationalism as the high-point of ocularcentrism, (...) the article then presents a metatheoretical framework based on three trajectories that critiques of ocularcentrism have subsequently taken. The first exposes the limits of the metaphor by, paradoxically, taking it to its limits. The second trajectory seeks to displace the primordial position of the ocular metaphor and replace it with an alternative lexicon based on other human senses. Last, the third trajectory describes how the Enlightenment ocular characterization of the visual and mental worlds has effectively been inverted in the postmodern moment. (shrink)

This thesis explores the relationship between occupations and the ontology of the social. I begin by drawing a distinction between the messianic and the modern as concentrated in the affective transformation of vocation into occupation. I then, in the Introduction, sketch an ontic-ontological contrast proper to the modern, between modernity, as the collective problematization of social diversity, and the contemporary, as the plural ground of need which provides a source for these problematizations. I argue that this distinction will enable me (...) to shed new light on the occupational as a distinctly modern event. In Part I, I begin by providing a reading of Durkheim in which I argue that the occupational is to be understood ontologically, but no longer by means of the theorization of society and social types. This kind of theorization, exemplified in Durkheim's concept of solidarity, contains a fundamental ambiguity between this concept's ontological senses of original diversity and of unity in diversity. Durkheim's thought is thus first intelligible in terms of an implicit evolutionary sense of coherence or `need of wholeness.' However, the explicit evolutionary framework and its central typological difference between the mechanical and organic is an attempt to resolve the ambiguity that must fail because it addresses primarily a distinction of obligation rather than a distinction of need. Obligation is shown to be a concept of facticity which overcodes and obscures the distinction of need. I then go on to argue that sociality can be better accounted for in terms of a continuity of social becoming which is revealed in a perspective of modernity purged of the modernist tendency to metaphorize this continuity in terms such as `solidity' (Durkheim) and `flow' (Tarde). This perspective is the irreducibly plural perspective of the contemporary, which, I conclude Part I by suggesting, lies in a sense of merging with a social outside. In Part II, I turn to investigate the outside by discussing the social thought of Bergson and Deleuze. Bergson's thought is presented as an alternative to the deductivesociologistic approaches of Durkheim and Tarde, because it attempts to critically affirm the smooth duration of social continuity. However, I argue that the notion of `open society' that Bergson presents is still too tied to a model of rare spirituality and hence to the messianic perspective. I then proceed to a social-theoretical analysis of Deleuze's oeuvre, in order to show how he uses elements of a thought of continuity from Tarde (microsociology) and from Bergson (multiplicity), but that he is able to transcend the family-model-centeredness of Tarde and the rare-spiritual-modelcenteredness of Bergson, by theorizing non-modelled figures of transformative affective multiplicity inscribed within the actual, ie. `full particularities'. In my concluding chapter, I show how the intellectual trajectory which takes us from Durkheim to Deleuze can be analysed as a movement from a doctrine or relatively passive notion of social externality towards a more active social image of the outside. In particular, I am concerned to show how this image of the outside can be recontextualized in terms of a movement of occupation that can be thought of as always combining a sense of the contemporary with a sense of modernity. (shrink)

Adapting Western self-critical discourse, the Arab Egyptian intellectual Abdelwahab Elmessiri attempted to Islamize modernity; however, he did this ironically via Western critique itself. This paper follows a comparative approach to show how Elmessiri’s construction of the duality of immanence and transcendence is based on the critiques introduced by Eric Voegelin and Zygmunt Bauman. However, while Bauman saw the role of critical theory as the modest comment on human experience, Elmessiri and Voegelin uncovered the dominance of immanence in Western modernity so (...) as to contrast it with Islamic monotheism and the Christian humanistic legacy, respectively. The critiques introduced by Elmessiri and Voegelin reach their climax when modernity is compared to a form of heretical Gnosticism. (shrink)

Karoline Reinhardt ABSTRACT: IDiversity matters – theoretically and practically, within philosophy and beyond. It is less clear, however, how we are to conceive of diversity. In current debates it is quite common to discuss diversity as a diversity of social identities. In this paper, I will raise five major concerns with regard to this approach ….