This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of retreat from Marxist (...) positions on the postmodern left. Antonio Gramsci is distinguished by its range of philosophical grasp, its depth of specialized historical scholarship, and its keen sense of Gramsci's position as a crucial figure in the politics of contemporary cultural theory. (shrink)

The article discusses the philosophy of sportive existence, as put forward by Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Ortega is widely recognized as the major figure in Hispanic philosophy in the 20th century. Sports are an integral aspect of Ortega's philosophical output, both as aids toward understanding more general issues in ontology and philosophical anthropology and as explicit topics for reflection and analysis in and of themselves. Issues to do with sports and the sportive aspects of life were central to (...) Ortega's reflections on the nature of the human condition. Ortega argued that in many ways, the figure of the sportsperson represented more than any other symbol the human being's quintessence. (shrink)

The anti-utopian technology critique of Ellul, Postman, and other important social analysts has been the primary mode of critical response to technological developments since the 1950s. However, this mode of technology critique has had a disappointingly small effect on the way we, as a society, receive technology. Rather than attribute this failure to the negativity of the anti-utopian perspective, this article suggests that there are other important and largely overlooked factors at work—in particular, the critics' inability to speak about technology (...) in a way that relates to us as social individuals coping with the contingencies and realities of the day-to-day use of technological devices. The purpose of this analysis is not to suggest that we abandon as irrelevant the work and ideas of technology critics such as Ellul and Postman but, on the contrary, to find a way to reframe their important ideas for wider acceptance. (shrink)

Academics and practitioners: nurses as intellectuals In the author's experience, nurse educators working in universities generally accept that they are ‘academics’, but dismiss suggestions that they are ‘intellectuals’ because they see it as a pretentious description referring to a small number of academics and aesthetes who inhabit a conceptual world beyond the imaginative capacity of most other people. This paper suggests that the concept of the ‘intellectual’, if not the word itself, be admitted into nursing discourse through the adoption of (...) a non‐élitist Gramscian understanding, similar to the more recently formulated conception of the reflective practitioner. According to the Italian Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci, intellectuals are those people who develop ways in which to construct the conditions of their own existence, a possibility he believed was open to all. It is suggested that, from a Gramscian perspective, all nurses are intellectuals to varying degrees, and nurse educators should not only be nurturing their own intellectualism but also the potential for intellectualism as it exists within each individual. The ways in which this project are related to Habermasian critical theory are also briefly outlined. (shrink)

Murray Edelman's work raised significant theoretical and methodological questions regarding the symbolic nature of politics, and specifically the role played by non‐rational beliefs (those that lack real‐world grounding) in the shaping of political preferences. According to Edelman, beneath an apparently functional and accountable democratic state lies a symbolic system that renders an ignorant public quiescent. The state, the media, civil society, interpersonal relations, even popular art are part of a mass spectacle kept afloat by empty symbolic beliefs. However suggestive it (...) is, the weaknesses of Edelman's theoretical and methodological approach, and the relative strengths of more recent research on the politics of cultural symbols, render Edelman's work unable to serve as either model or springboard for the contemporary study of political symbols. (shrink)