Toward the end of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion , Philo catalogues the ‘frivolous observances’, ‘rapturous ecstasies’ and ‘bigotted credulity’ of ‘vulgar superstition’, concluding that ‘true religion, I allow, has no such pernicious consequences: But we must treat of religion, as it has com monly been found in the world’ . This would be a mild enough sort of caveat were it not nigh on impossible to determine exactly what counts as true religion, and how it figures in Hume's argument. (...) Typically, answers to this puzzle have required identifying the positions of the discussants, and then arguing that one of them represents Hume's views. A catalogue of the options may prove instructive. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

In his 2014 book Fiction and Narrative, Derek Matravers mounts a concerted attack on what he terms the ‘post-Walton consensus’ as to the features that distingui.

This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge. First, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merge on the relative claims of reason and authority. Second, his use of antiquarian knowledge to supersede historicist accounts of change in time and to position the plebian social class as the true arbiters of language. Third, his understanding of philological (...) knowledge as an instrument of political change, and a foundational element in the establishment of democracy. By treating the philological imagination as a tool for bringing about political change, Vico’s plebian philology is radically democratic, and a crucial instrument in the struggle against the elite, from antiquity to the present. -/- . (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

The Greek words `pharmakon' and `pharmakos' allude to the complex relations between political violence and the health or disorder of the body politic. This article explores analogies of war as disease and contagion, and contrasts these with metaphors of war as politically healthy and medicinal - as in Randolph Bourne's notion of war as `the health of the state'. It then applies these to the unfolding US `War on Terrorism' through the concept of `pharmacotic war', by way of examining the (...) disturbing political implications of both unfolding US military actions abroad and the scapegoating of internal `enemies' within the United States. The article then critiques various strategies for interrupting the momentum towards a catastrophic `clash of civilizations' between the US and the Islamic world, and proposes a strategy of broadly based, grassroots political mobilization for opposing this trend. (shrink)

Literary genre theory and rhetorical genre theory have stopped speaking to each other. Outside the lively trading station named Bakhtin, exchanges between the two fields are rare. Even though literary scholarship has turned from questions of genre identification to broader examinations of relations among genres, and rhetorical genre theory has focused not only on the social functioning of genres but also on their identifying features, each critical practice is cut off from the resources of the other. It is possible to (...) read very widely in genre theory without encountering a single cross-citation.This article argues that both rhetorical and literary genre theory are constrained by a controlling metaphor of .. (shrink)

This article develops a concept of lyrical sociology, a sociology I oppose to narrative sociology, by which I mean standard quantitative inquiry with its "narratives" of variables as well as those parts of qualitative sociology that take a narrative and explanatory approach to social life. Lyrical sociology is characterized by an engaged, nonironic stance toward its object of analysis, by specific location of both its subject and its object in social space, and by a momentaneous conception of social time. Lyrical (...) sociology typically uses strong figuration and personification, and aims to communicate its author's emotional stance toward his or her object of study, rather than to "explain" that object. The analysis considers many examples and draws on literary criticism, the philosophy of time, and the theory of emotion. It also addresses contemporary debates in ethnography. (shrink)

Many of Menander's comedies are structured according to a rape plot pattern in which a young Athenian citizen usually rapes and impregnates a female citizen prior to the opening of the play. In most cases, the rape leads to a happy ending: the marriage of the rapist and victim. This casual treatment of rape is striking because in all other respects Menander's plays are not only scrupulously faithful to Athenian law, they also use Athenian legal and social norms as their (...) own generic conventions. Although the rape of a female citizen was a serious oense in Athenian law, potentially punishable with death, and a flagrant violation of the norms of Athenian citizenship, Menandrian comedy never morally or legally problematizes rape. This study considers how the comedies neutralize the potential legal signicance of rape and what this tells us about Athenian law and the ideology of democratic citizenship. It argues that by portraying a neutral form of rape, Menander's comedies implicitly articulate those factors which had the potential to bring "rape" within the purview of Athenian legal discourse. Menandrian Comedy's strategic fidelity to the norms of Athenian citizenship also tells us something about the gender ideology of Athenian democratic citizenship, that is, the ways in which relations between the sexes support and sustain civic relations between men in Athenian political culture and democratic ideology. While Menander's romantic plots uphold the laws of citizen marriage, they do not passively enact the legal constructs. In one common variant of the rape plot, the gendered construction of citizenship embedded in Athenian law is specically conjoined to democratic norms. In this type of play, a wealthy young citizen rapes and eventually marries the daughter of a seemingly poor citizen. By using rape to generate matrimonial unions between the rich and the poor, these plays extend democratic norms into the social arena. The formation of marriages across class lines disrupts the eects of intergenerationality in reproducing social and economic inequalities. (shrink)

In this article I critically discuss a claim made by several writers in philosophy and the social sciences that for an individual to count as a person, a single personality, or the subject of a life, the experiences of the subject in question must take a narrative form. I argue that narrativity is a misleading and, in some ways of understanding it, implausible condition of what it is that adds unity to personhood and personality. I pursue this critique by considering (...) canonical accounts of narrativity in philosophy and literary studies. I consider those connections between events that must hold for the sequence to be considered a narrative: causal, teleological, and thematic connections. I argue that for each of these, the condition that experiential sequences (for a given subject) must have this structure is empty: any life sequence that is reflected upon in an interpretive spirit can meet it. What the condition of narrativity amounts to, then, is the more basic requirement that the person must be able to look upon the factors and events of her life with a certain interpretive reflection, whether or not those factors and events have any particular narrative unity in a traditional sense. (shrink)

This article explores the psychoanalytic points of commonality between stand‐up comedy shows and fascist rallies, arguing that both are concerned with the creation of a “mass” audience. The article explores the political significance of this analogy by arguing that while stand‐up shows are not as regressive as fascist rallies, their “mass” character does run counter to any political aspirations they may have toward the end of critical consciousness raising.

Many scholars have claimed that satire is a genre. At the same time, however, it is also widely acknowledged that satire has changed over the centuries, that it has taken various forms and that it still appears in a variety of other genres. Far from being a drawback in identifying satire as a genre, I will claim that variability is a natural property of genres if the latter are conceived of as dynamic cognitive categories that emerge out of a complex (...) interplay of heterogeneous factors which cluster differently under the effect of different contextual and cotextual attractors. I will assume that, in satire, these factors include a range of linguistic and rhetorical devices which interact in different ways to dynamically bring about specifically intended effects. I will further claim that understanding satire is a context-sensitive complex process which implies setting up and maintaining multiple mental representations, and drawing pragmatic inferences. (shrink)

The idea of narrative has been widely discussed in the recent health care literature, including nursing, and has been portrayed as a resource for both clinical work and research studies. However, the use of the term 'narrative' is inconsistent, and various assumptions are made about the nature (and functions) of narrative: narrative as a naive account of events; narrative as the source of 'subjective truth'; narrative as intrinsically fictional; and narrative as a mode of explanation. All these assumptions have left (...) their mark on the nursing literature, and all of them (in our view) are misconceived. Here, we argue that a failure to distinguish between 'narrative' and 'story' is partly responsible for these misconceptions, and we offer an analysis that shows why the distinction between them is essential. In doing so, we borrow the concept of 'narrativity' from literary criticism. Narrativity is something that a text has degrees of, and our proposal is that the elements of narrativity can be 'sorted' roughly into a continuum, at the 'high narrativity' end of which we find 'story'. On our account, 'story' is an interweaving of plot and character, whose organization is designed to elicit a certain emotional response from the reader, while 'narrative' refers to the sequence of events and the (claimed) causal connections between them. We suggest that it is important not to confuse the emotional persuasiveness of the 'story' with the objective accuracy of the 'narrative', and to this end we recommend what might be called 'narrative vigilance'. There is nothing intrinsically authentic, or sacrosanct, or emancipatory, or paradigmatic about narrative itself, even though the recent health care literature has had a marked tendency to romanticize it. (shrink)

This paper examines the underlying genres of philosophy focusing especially on their pedagogical forms to emphasize the materiality and historicity of genres, texts and writing. It focuses briefly on the history of the essay and its relation to the journal within the wider history of scientific communication, and comments on the standardized forms of academic writing and the issue of 'bad writing'.

The paper is focused on Genesis 1 – 3 where the primordial man [adàm] is created ‎and he was given the proper name Adam [adàm]. ‎ In Hebrew man and Adam are the same word, spelled the same way – [adàm]. ‎Different translations of Genesis 1-3 use for the first time the proper name Adam in ‎different places versions Gen 2:25; The German Luther ‎Bible Gen 3:8; Some English Protestant versions Gen 3:17; Bulgarian Protestant and many ‎English Protestant versions Gen (...) 3:20-21). The paper decodes the phenomenon by ‎studying the Hebrew original and several semiotic views on common and proper names ‎‎. Through these opinions the ‎important question “Who wrote the Bible?” is discussed. The analysis interfaces the new ‎linguistic relativity theory.‎ Four layers of symbolism are decoded: 1. The man became Adam; 2. The two men in ‎Gen 1:27 and in Gen 2:7 man [adàm] ‎is made by earth, ground [adamà]; 3. The two men in the New Testament ; 4. Edom, Adam and cultural discourses in both Testaments.‎. (shrink)

It is well-known that as a term, Nietzsche’sÜbermenschderives from Lucian of Samosata’shyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances by reflecting on the context of that origination from Lucian’sKataplous– literally, “sailing into port” – referring to the soul’s journey (ferried by Charon, guided by Hermes) into the afterlife. TheKataplous he tyrannos, usually translatedDownward Journey or The Tyrant, is a Menippean satire of the “overman” who is imagined to be superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly (...) life and the same tyrant after his (comically unwilling) transport into the underworld. As a reflection on the life and the death of Zarathustra, this essay also explores the politics of kingship for Empedocles as reformer in terms of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Nietzsche’s unpublished drafts on the same topic. InThus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, including the “values” of our all-too-worldly and all-too-human concerns, no matter whether in terms of perceived political/economic advantage, or indeed in the pursuit of more trivial satisfactions. (shrink)

This article provides a broad overview of the problem of irony to contemporary hermeneutics. It offers a thematic account of the effects of irony on interpretation, and argues that the problems of irony are embedded within the relation between the free play of irony and the regulative role of interpretative discourse. It argues, against hermeneutic theories such as that of Hans‐Georg Gadamer, that the “problems” which irony poses for interpretation can be seen as symptomatic of irony's identification: that irony is, (...) essentially, problematic. It argues that any account of irony needs to account for the value of irony as a problem, rather than subsuming such problems into larger models of understanding. The article explores this notion by looking at the interpretative “discourse of irony” and noting its thematic features. It is argued that the account of irony as a negation of meaning is intrinsically tied to the construction of a sovereign economy in response to the excesses of ironic possibility, but that such a construction is determined only by the stepping‐away from the initial ironic possibilities which enabled its construction. Using the work of Gadamer as an example, the article argues that this in itself does not close irony, but produces yet more irony which frustrates the interpretative act while lending itself to interpretative possibility. (shrink)

In now classic article, James Clifford offers a novel perspective on ethnographic texts. Inspired by literary studies he uses contemporary ethnographic works to question ethnography’s claims of scientific objectivity and a clear distinction between allegorical and factual. If ethnography aims to keep its contemporary relevance, it should specifically focus on allegory as an intrinsic quality of ethnographic texts This kind of analysis may assume that any ethnographic text accounts for facts and events but at the same time it tackles the (...) moral, ideological or even cosmological issues. According to Clifford, ethnography has been dominated by a “pastoral” allegorical register which allowed an ethnographer to occupy a privileged position to interpret other, non-writing cultures. Clifford notices that this register is loosing support in the modern world since the difference between illiterate and literate cultures is not relevant anymore. Ethnographic pastoral is now replaced with self-reflexive and dialogical forms of ethnographic writing, analyzed by Clifford by the example of Marjorie Shostak’s book Nisa: The Life and Words of a!Kung Woman. (shrink)

The comic dramatists of the fifth centuryb.c.were notable for their preoccupation with poetics – that is, their frequent references to their own poetry and that of others, their overt interest in the Athenian dramatic festivals and their adjudication, their penchant for parody and pastiche, and their habit of self-conscious reflection on the nature of good and bad poetry. I have already explored these matters at some length, in my study of the relationship between comedy and literary criticism in the period (...) before Plato and Aristotle. This article continues the story into the fourth century and beyond, examining the presence and function of poetical and literary-critical discourse in what is normally called ‘middle’ and ‘new’ comedy. (shrink)

Can history serve to uphold democracy as an ethical standard of governance? The author suggests that the basic and cross-temporal cornerstones of morality, the family and religion, serve as "intermediate" social structures in attaining the central virtues of a moral democracy.

This dissertation, by presenting comprehensive analyses of six poems by the Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, investigates the poetical forms and the poetical philosophies in these texts. The poems represent specific philosophic spheres of Weöres' poetry. The analyses emerge from the formal elements, and aim to shed light upon the structural coherences between the texts and their philosophical contexts. This method of analysis also complies with Weöres' views on the aesthetics of poetics and his method of writing, where form and structure (...) always played an outstandingly important role. The complex methods used in the analyses are very much influenced by the views and methods of a text stylistics that looks at the literary work as a global entity. Taken together, these analyses illustrate the focal points of a remarkable poetical form and a most profound philosophical context in the poems of an outstanding Hungarian poet. (shrink)

. I sketch a synthetic integration of several levels of explanation in addressing how myths, narratives, and stories engage human beings, produce their sense of identity and self‐understanding, and shape their intellectual, emotional, and embodied lives. Ultimately it is our engagement with the metanarratives of religious imagination by which we address a set of existentially necessary but ontologically unanswerable metaphysical questions that form the basis of religious belief. I show how a multileveled understanding of evolutionary biology, history, neuroscience, psychology, narrative, (...) and mythology may form a coherent picture of the human spirit. Neuropsychological functions involved in constructing and responding to the narratives by which we form our identities and build meaningful lives include memory, attention, emotional marking, and temporal sequencing. It is the neural substrate, the emotional shaping, and the narrative structuring of higher cognitive function that provide the sine qua non for the construction of meaning, relationship, morality, and purpose that extend beyond our personal boundaries, both spatial and temporal. This includes a neural affect system shaped by our developmental dependency, the dynamic narratives of self formed in the development of identity and reconstructed over the life span, drawing on culturally available mythic and storied forms. Narrative constitutes our movement in moral space and may have the potential both for healing and for disruption for us as individuals and as a species, providing a contingent solution to the alienation and fragmentation of personhood, relationship, and community. (shrink)

Este artículo establece un diálogo entre el concepto de medio –presentado por Marshall McLuhan– y el concepto de mito–enarbolado por Roland Barthes– para evidenciarsus similitudes de trasfondo, y de este modo acercar el trabajo de estos dos pensadores quienes, no obstante susdistintos puntos de partida, logran confluir conceptualmentepara comprender de mejor manera la idea del macro-mito, y reconocer el efecto que esta construcción tiene sobre la reconocida sentencia de McLuhan: el medio es el mensaje.

This article develops a theory about the narrative foundations of public policy. Politicians draw on specific types of narratives in order to connect the policies they are proposing, the needs of the public, and their own needs for legitimacy. In particular, politicians are drawn to policy narratives in which they themselves occupy the central and heroic character position, and where they are able to protect the scope of their jurisdictional authority. We demonstrate how this works through a historical analysis of (...) congressional debate about the nonprofit sector in the United States. Two competing narratives framed these debates : a selfless charity narrative, in which politicians try to empower heroic charity workers and philanthropists, and then stay out of the way; and a masquerade narrative, in which fake charities are taking advantage of the nonprofit tax exemption, in order to pursue a variety of noncivic and dangerous activities. Members of Congress quickly adopted the masquerade narrative as the dominant framework for discussing the nonprofit sector because it provided a more powerful and flexible rhetoric for reproducing their political legitimacy. By developing innovative elaborations of the masquerade narrative, while remaining faithful to its underlying narrative format, politicians were able to increase the persuasive impact of their legislative agendas. We argue that the narrative aspects of political debate are a central component of the policy-making process because they link cultural and political interests in a way that involves the mastery of cultural structure as well as the creativity of cultural performance. (shrink)

(1988). Approaches, opportunities and priorities in the rhetoric of political inquiry: A critical synthesis. Social Epistemology: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 21-42.

: Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially "The Land Ethic," there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative underpinnings of (...) the stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory—which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold—and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching "community" than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Second, the narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration. (shrink)

With the last Holocaust survivors quietly passing away, one might also expect to see accountability debates slowing to a trickle. Surprisingly, however, recent years show an upswing in corporate World War II-related atonement debates. Interest in corporate participation in mass atrocity has expanded worldwide; yet what constitutes ethical corporate behavior during and after war remains understudied. This article considers these questions through a study of the French National Railways’ roles during the German occupation and its more recent struggle to make (...) amends. This study demonstrates that ethical business leadership requires taking responsibility for past as well as current decisions. Most executives grappling with complex corporate histories work in isolation, in part because the scholarship on business ethics fails to provide guidance. Without such guidance, corporations often respond to accusations about their pasts with carefully crafted statements and legal strategies rather than deep expressions of moral leadership. To assist in remedying this tendency, this paper simultaneously encourages companies to engage in deeper reflection on corporate history, while urging scholars to help guide corporations through critical ethical conversations. (shrink)

In this dissertation I address the question, how does power operate in day-today consuming in a consumer society? My theoretical framework has two bases. One base is Foucault's theories of power, including but not limited to his work on normalization, surveillance, examination, confession, and identity. The other base is narrative theory, including the relevance of narratives to personal and social identities, the role of narratives in creating social order, the impact of narratives on such things as the organization of space (...) and time, and the effect of narratives in creating coherence and directionality across operants of power. I suggest that many of the mechanisms of power identified by Foucault have unmistakable narrative features, and that by combining narrative and Foucauldian perspectives a more comprehensive understanding of the operation of power in day-to-day life is attainable. I apply my theoretical framework to data collected using autoethnographic methods. Specifically, I spent one year keeping a detailed journal of my and my family's experiences relating in the broadest sense to consuming. During this period we lived in a middle-sized Canadian city. To heighten my awareness of the taken-for-granted aspects of power and consuming we alternated lifestyles each month, living months 1,3,5,7,9, and 11 as conventional Canadian consumers, and months 2,4,6,8,10, and 12 as committed environmentally-mindful consumers. In addition, I conducted - interviews of small samples of conventional and environmentally-committed consumers; I undertook a content analysis of print advertising delivered to our house; and I conducted background research on various issues relating to consumerism. My research indicates that Foucauldian operants of power are used extensively to support consuming, and that; in addition, many narrative structures are also employed as operants of power, including charms and stories. These operants of power are aligned with one another to form coherent patterns through the effects of metanarratives. I argue that, despite claims by Lyotard (1984) and others, modern consumer societies are highly narrative, and have defining metanarratives. In addition, environmentally-based opposition to the dominant metanarrative of consuming has a metanarrative of its own, but is distinctly lacking in operants of power. (shrink)

Straipsnio tikslas – atlikti lyginamąją Williamo Shakespeare’o Audrosir Tomo Venclovos bei Antano Miškinio lietuviškųjų vertimų analizę, nagrinėjant, kaip prasminiai elementai perkeliami į vertimus. Tyrimas apima dramos erdvėlaikio ir personažų kūrimo aspektus. Jis atskleidžia, kad vertimuose dingsta teatrinės erdvėlaikio reikšmės, bet išlieka mitinės erdvės prasmė. Analizuojant personažų kūrimo principus ir jų perkėlimo į vertimus problematiką, pastebima, kad vertimuose išsprūsta tam tikros daugialypių pagrindinių personažų reikšmės, o schematiškų antraeilių personažų reikšmės lieka nepakitusios. Reikšmės perkėlimo ir recepcijos problemas vertimuose lemia žodžių daugiareikšmiškumas, dingę (...) originalo žodžiai ir frazės, o tuo pačiu ir reikšmės, lietuviškasis kultūrinis bei politinis kontekstas. (shrink)