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The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume III: The Phenomenology of Knowledge.
... The faculty of the understanding requires that we see the world in terms of entities but we need to employ something more, the faculty of reason, to say that those entities take the form of electrons or beetles. Kant believed that the faculty of reason involves employing principles which are based in reason, describing them as having a "logical objective necessity" (2000, 5:182 see also Cassirer 1953aCassirer [1910Cassirer 1957Cassirer [1929Natorp [1921Buchdahl 1969, p. 516;Kitcher 1986, p. 229;Morrison 1989, p. 162;Reichenbach [1920Rickert [1902Windleband [1910Vaihinger [1911, p. 159). It is the case that we must employ concepts like causation and substance but we can use those principles of reason to decide which particular causes and substances there are. ...
... Both believe that what came from us ultimately stemmed from reason rather than our biological or psychological capacities. They believed that seeing the faculties as biological or psychological would just be a subjectivist position whereas they felt that Kantianism entailed some type of objectivity (Cassirer 1957(Cassirer [1929Natorp 2015aNatorp [1912Windleband 2015bWindleband [1883, p. 283). ...
... The Marburg school took an approach whereby they demarcated a specific fact and then aimed to find the contribution from us which made that fact possible. The specific fact was the best scientific theories in any particular field (Cassirer 1957(Cassirer [1929Krijnen 2015, p. 118;Ferrari 2015, p. 264;Luft 2010, p. 63;Kühn 2010, p. 113;Natorp 2015aNatorp [1912, p. 182). They believed that for science the principles could be traced back to reason. ...
... The more sharply philosophy seeks to determine its object, the more the object, through this very determination, becomes a problem for it." (Cassirer, 1957, p (Cassirer;Heidegger, 2017, p. 172-174). ...
... Cada um fala sua linguagem; e é impensável que a linguagem de um seja transportada para a do outro. E, ainda assim, nos entendemos pelo meio da linguagem.(Cassirer; Heidegger, 2017, p. 175). ...
Although Kant inaugurated his critical philosophy treating about formal conditions for the possibilities to solve problems (Critical Philosophy) he advanced in the 1790s to stablish anthropology as the aim of his philosophy. Considering this, our aim is to show that the reception of Kantian philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries was formalistic and logicist in a way that it has underlined its transcendental aspect when rather it ought to focus on the moral and the pragmatic (in Kantian sense). Thus, the return to Kant promoted by Neokantianism contributed to the forgetfulness and non-thematising the centrality of his Anthropology. It allowed Neokantianism to focus on the conditions for the possibilities of consolidating sciences in the half of 19th century, which has bequeathed to the Kantianism of the 20th century interpretative models of logicist and analytical biases; this left aside any deep reflection on the empirical part of Kant’s philosophy as well because it was considered impure. Also, we will point out that the Ethnographic science does not consider for its constitution any heritage from Kant. Finally, it will be statistically proved by means of analysing the centenary historic of Kant Studien Journal that there has been a very low quantity of papers concerned about pragmatic themes. Kant’s Anthropology has been forgotten by critical fortune when it should have been treated as central.
Keywords:
Logicism; Formalism; Neokantianism; forgetfulness of anthropology
... 3, neo-Kantians value systematicity whereby scientific concepts are placed within a broader framework of science. Causes are important to neo-Kantians because they can be used to connect different parts of science together, producing a system of science (Cassirer 1957(Cassirer [1927Kant 1998 A663/B691;2000 5:183-184;Kitcher 1989, p. 436;Massimi 2008, p. 33). 5 Rather than having any two parts of science being unconnected they can be connected together by specifying one part as the cause of another part. Relating different parts of a science together in a causal manner significantly increases the epistemic goal of building a system of science. ...
I outline how scientifically legitimate psychiatric diagnoses are seen as those which have identified underlying causes. I outline the failure of this approach and the move towards basing psychiatric diagnoses on non-sensitive and non-specific causes. Having outlined a neo-Kantian approach to causes I argue psychiatric diagnoses can be probabilistic bridges between causes and symptoms. Categorical and dimensional diagnoses constitute different causal probabilities. I then show how we can use causes to formulate psychiatric diagnoses but this process needs to be constrained by the aim to limit the number of entities employed. This gives categorical diagnoses a useful role even if the DSM was made dimensional or if RDoC and HiTOP produced relatively homogeneous dimensional diagnoses.
... This is, for example, the position of empiricism (including positivism and, in contemporary times, neopositivism or logical positivism), with which we disagree. Another, to which we adhere, is to understand it in the manner of Edwin A. Burtt (1925), Ernst Cassirer (1956, 1957, Werner Heisenberg (1958), Karl Popper (1962, 1972 and Thomas Kuhn (1970), as an open field that brings together concepts and principles forming a non-empirical basis as fundamental as sensible experience, for the constitution of the sciences and other areas of knowledge, among which we include projective disciplines and design. ...
In this essay we carry out a critical and deconstructive analysis of the dualist foundation established by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in their 1973 paper “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning”. The aim is to escape the aporia launched by the two authors, when they ontologically distinguished scientific and engineering fields from planning and public policy fields, by establishing the concepts of “Wicked Problems” and “Tame Problems”. In order to propose an alternative, monist description, we sought theoretical reference in the same reasoning as Rittel and Webber for their dualist thesis: in Karl Popper’s epistemological demarcation between science and metaphysics, and in Thomas Kuhn’s metaphor of science as puzzle-solving.
... Vom ersten Schuljahr an müssen Lernende somit zunehmend ein Bewusstsein dafür entwickeln, dass in der Mathematik mit Darstellungen und nicht mit dem Dargestellten selbst gearbeitet werden kann (Duval 1999;Janvier 1987;Sfard 2000). Diesen Bewusstseinswechsel im Übergang von einem Verständnis eines "Bezeichnenden als Objekt" hin zu einem "Bezeichnenden als Darstellung eines Objektes" benennt Cassirer (1957) als Quantensprung und kennzeichnet damit eine grundsätzliche epistemologische Herausforderung mathematischer Lehr-und Lernprozesse: Mathematische Darstellungen, die zur Repräsentation mathematischer Begriffe genutzt werden, sind nie die Mathematik selbst, sondern künstliche Artefakte. Duval bezeichnet diese Diskrepanz zwischen der Abstraktheit mathematischer Begriffe und der Konkretheit der Darstellungen als den "paradoxical character of mathematical knowledge" (Duval 2000, S. 61). ...
Zusammenfassung
Normen spielen beim Argumentieren mit Darstellungen eine zentrale Rolle. Ein Anliegen der interpretativen mathematikdidaktischen Forschung ist es, die interaktive Aushandlung fachspezifischer Normen aus Sicht der Lernenden zu rekonstruieren. Um diese komplexen Aushandlungsprozesse zwischen verschiedenen Beteiligten untersuchen zu können, bedarf es zunächst eines besseren Verstehens auf der Mikroebene. Der vorliegende Artikel adressiert dieses Forschungsdesiderat exemplarisch für das Argumentieren von Grundschulkindern mit Punktdarstellungen im Kontext von Parität. Zur theoretischen und empirisch basierten Klärung verknüpft der Beitrag zwei verschiedenen Perspektiven des Forschungsfeldes: Eine fachspezifisch-theoretische Perspektive und eine fachspezifisch-empirisch-interaktionistische Perspektive auf Normen. Die Analyse der empirischen Fallstudien zeichnet die situativ orientierenden Bezugnahmen in den Argumentationen der Kinder nach und reflektiert Bezüge zu grundlegenden fachspezifisch-theoretischen Normen.
... Although the term "image" is rather polysemic, there is a sense employed in different disciplinary fields that makes reference to the idea of a (primary visual) representation that is activated in the mind of subjects when they are driven to think of something concretely. In this sense, Cassirer (1957) points out that we humans represent reality in images produced from the multiple relationships that we establish with the world. With regard to these images that Cassirer studies, there is an expression coined within the framework of Gestalt psychology -pregnancy. ...
In this chapter we examine the classic and renewed reasons that can be argued in order to support the need to teach science in compulsory education in the twenty-first century. We also discuss the currently proclaimed educational aims that configure the idea of a “quality science education for all”, traversed by equity and social justice. Science education founded on democratic values crucially needs: 1. explicitly addressing the dominant social imaginary around science and scientists in a critical way, and 2. designing and implementing pedagogies that are founded on, and present students with, a conception of the nature of science that is more aligned with recent philosophical proposals, leaving behind the “dogmatic” image of science. There is literature available on the transmission and strengthening of this dogmatic image through formal science education. Studies suggest that such view on the nature of science, still circulating at school, constitutes a relevant “didactical obstacle” for scientific literacy, and that this might be particularly relevant in the case of students coming from vulnerable backgrounds. Such findings constitute the moving force of this chapter and motivate reflections around the challenge of constructing a more adequate nature of science for a more socially just science education.
... Henri Bergson is almost universally portrayed as the poster child of "French irrationalism," as the philosopher who celebrated any and all aspects of human experience that resist rational treatment. 1 This image of Bergson feeds on a criticism, which Hausman (1999) dubs "the charge of irrationalism" (289), that was leveled against him by some of his earliest and most famous interlocutors, including Russell (1912), Santayana (1913), Cassirer (1957), Monod (1972), Derrida (2001), and Merleau-Ponty (2013)-all of whom accuse him of making a metaphysical cut (between 1 3 space and time) that he cannot rectify. 2 This charge had a profound effect on how Bergson's writings were received in Europe and North America, especially after WWII. Thanks to it, Bergson came to be seen as an anti-scientific and anti-rational philosopher who reveled in the mud of existence and "fail [ed] to engage with the mathematical or logical grounds of an adequate philosophical methodology." ...
This article highlights the mathematical structure of Henri Bergson’s method. While Bergson has been historically interpreted as an anti-scientific and irrationalist philosopher, he modeled his philosophical methodology on the infinitesimal calculus developed by Leibniz and Newton in the seventeenth century. His philosophy, then, rests on the science of number, at least from a methodological standpoint. By looking at how he conscripted key mathematical concepts (especially the concepts of “limit” and “approximation”) into his philosophy, this article invites us to re-imagine Bergson’s place in the history of Western philosophy.
... These perceptual possibilities or guiding points explain how the same sensory content may be understood in different ways. To define the mode of the relationship between meaning and senses he introduced the term symbolische Prägnanz [22] translated as "symbolic pregnance". 4 Symbolic pregnance is the moment of relation between meaning and sensory impression, which enables different modalities of meaning. ...
... 15). Hannah Arendt wrote of the animal laborans, the laboring animal (Arendt 1958), and Ernst Cassirer of the animal symbolicum, the symbolizing animal (Cassirer 1923(Cassirer , 1925(Cassirer , 1929. Reginia Gagnier and John Dupré describe humans as "highly gregarious interdependent social primates" (1998), a more specific and serious taxonomic step above Plato's famous definition of the human as the featherless biped. ...
This special issue explores the conceptions of the human that emerge out of the form and the design of information and communications technologies (ICTs). Geographically, our focus compares two countries with a relatively high level of ICT penetration—South Korea and Singapore—and two countries with a relatively low level—India and Vietnam. In each country we see how different forms of the human emerge, in part out of the ways in which technological infrastructure develop and intertwine with social order. In this introduction we reflect on the long genealogy of “human” and “humanity” and the more recent history of ICTs in Asia.
... For the sake of this article, however, we shall not ponder deeply on this distinction. In the course of 19th and 20th century philosophy, the Kantian a-priori has been subject to various interpretations and modifications, see for example the symbolic constructivism of Ernst Cassirer [29]. We do not wish to engage in the debate how to best conceive of the a-priori in this article. ...
A new philosophy of nature is urgently needed. The received ontological view, physicalism, is unable to account for experiential phenomena and in particular for consciousness in all its varieties. We shall outline the concept of experiencing which should figure as a new conceptual primitive in natural philosophy. Experiencing refers to a process which comprises the interaction of an agent with its world through action based on phenomenal experience. This process can be viewed under two different aspects. One regards the subjective aspect of experiencing, the other one regards it in terms of physical objects. The first case illustrates the “what-it-is-likeness” of experiencing, the second illustrates how experiencing gets “objectified” in nature. We furthermore wish to delineate our concept of experiencing from the concept of (meta-cognitive) awareness. Scientific theories that explain how awareness comes about in sufficiently organized brains should respect the distinction between experiencing and awareness. We also sketch how experiencing could be related to theoretical biology in terms of information processing by organisms. Experiencing is non-exclusive; it refers to a primitive and a-personal natural process and not to a property possessed only by humans or other persons.
Urges psychiatry to get back to human nature because the concept, together with the idea of human freedom and classic and romantic perspectives, is required to calibrate the normal and the pathological in psychiatry. Highlights balance by showing how ‘sickly’ (Goethe) pictures of human nature and human freedom have adverse effects on psychiatry, including its interface with political life. Revisits the classicl and romantic perspectives, considering them in and out of balance in different ways. Distils a tripartite picture of the relationship between human nature, human freedom and mental disorder relevant to future research and teaching on psychiatric formulation and psychiatric ethics.
Stöltzner coined the expression ‘Vienna indeterminism’ to describe a philosophical tradition centered on the Viennese physicist Exner, serving as the ‘historical link’ between Mach and Boltzmann, on the one hand, and von Mises and Frank, on the other. During the early 1930s debate on quantum mechanics, there was a ‘rapprochement’ between Vienna indeterminism and Schlick’s work on causality. However, it was Cassirer’s 1936 monograph Determinismus und Indeterminismus that showed a full ‘convergence’ with major tenets of Vienna indeterminism: the fundamentality of statistical laws, the frequency interpretation of probability, and the statistical interpretation of the uncertainty relations. Yet, Cassirer used these conceptual tools to pursue ‘in parallel’ different philosophical goals. While for the Viennese quantum mechanics represented a fatal blow to the already discredited notion of ‘causality,’ for Cassirer it challenged the classical notion of ‘substantiality,’ the ideas of ‘particles’ as individual substances endowed with properties. The paper concludes that this ‘parallel convergence’ is the most striking and overlooked aspect of Determinismus und Indeterminismus , serving as the keystone of its argumentative structure.
The Kantian legacy has had a key impact on the landscape of theoretical philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Philosophers both in Germany and in Russia saw Immanuel Kant’s ideas as seminal for their philosophical research. The main schools of that era were formed in discussions of the problems and the solutions which were proposed by Kant. The methodological legacy of the critical philosophy effectively became the main benchmark of the thinking of a whole generation of intellectuals. Research into the unity of “form” in the structure of human cognition was also in many ways mediated by the Kantian tradition. To prove this thesis I first look at the philosophy of Gustav Shpet who creatively interpreted the German tradition and proposed an original project of his own, and then I examine the theory of Ernst Cassirer, an outstanding representative of Neo-Kantianism who in the later period of his work proposed considering the phenomena of the humanities to be symbolic forms closest to the spontaneity of the biological. The common feature of the approaches of the two philosophers is their attempt to preserve the integrity of cognition which is destroyed by mathematisation of the common denominator (ultimate categorisation) and hierarchisation of the phenomena of human life. The alternative is the metaphor of mutational change, through which the concept of “form” acquires a new meaning. In conclusion I show that the analysis of the projects of Shpet and Cassirer has heuristic value for the historical-philosophical understanding of the fate of the Kantian philosophy and for modern philosophical culture.
Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms represents a cultural-philosophical approach in which specific modes of objectification, the symbolic forms themselves, establish an independent truth. This truth does not consist in a purely analytical truth, but in the fact that we live along these symbolic forms in a specific stubbornness. When we use language, we live and experience language in its specific autonomy. The same applies to the other symbolic forms developed by Cassirer. Both before the cultural-philosophical phase of creation and within the philosophy of symbolic forms, Cassirer refers to mathematics several times. An interesting tension arises as to whether Cassirer could have understood mathematics as a symbolic form in its own right. On the one hand, cultural-historical considerations in Cassirer’s work speak in favour of this; on the other hand, Cassirer embeds mathematics as a mere formal science in physics and thus in the philosophical form of science as a whole. The article explores this tension—mathematics as a symbolic form—and shows that only indications within the framework of the historical-hermeneutical treatment would speak in favour of such an interpretation. Furthermore, the article argues that a specific, cultural-historical semiotics can be considered for mathematics in Cassirer’s work.
In his transcendental approach, Cassirer argues that an objective world is not given and then simply copied by our cognitive faculties; rather, it is gained through the development of symbolic thought and perception. According to Cassirer, language plays a crucial role in this process of objectification. In this paper, the close relationship between language and symbolism in Cassirer’s philosophy will be delineated. This will also shed light on possible distinctions between human speech and animal communication. Furthermore, the relation of language to the different functions of consciousness and to the symbolic forms of myth and science will be addressed. Finally, based on the former considerations of language and objectification, Cassirer’s conceptions of reality and truth will be explicated and critically evaluated. It will be argued that his approach offers several interesting and promising insights but is nonetheless in danger of falling short in explaining the difference between artefacts and natural kinds.
In this paper, I will deal with the analogy between Cassirer’s interpretation of relativity and his philosophy of culture. As to the structure of the paper, it will be divided into six parts. I will start with a brief introduction, after which I will succinctly outline Cassirer’s reading of Einstein’s theory, and in particular of general covariance. I will then focus on the presentation of his project for a “systematic philosophy” in the last chapter of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and subsequently delve into the lexical references to relativity made in Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. After this, I will tackle Cassirer’s rectorship speech, where relativity and the philosophy of culture are explicitly interwoven, but with the important clarification (already provided in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) that not all kinds of knowledge align with de-anthropomorphized objectivity. The final section contains the concluding remarks.
The article is devoted to the study of the creative heritage of Nikolai Mikhailovich Kochergin (1897—1974) in the field of illustrating Chinese fairy tales. The relevance of the topic is conditioned by the insufficient degree of study of the artist’s heritage in this area with the general interest of practitioners and art theorists in book illustration for children’s literature in the 20th century.
The aim of the article is to theoretically comprehend the artistic heritage of N.M. Kochergin on the basis of revealing the originality of the artist’s creative method of illustrating Chinese fairy tales. The following tasks are solved: to trace the creative path of N.M. Kochergin, in particular, his work in the field of illustrating literature of Eastern and Asian countries; to make a list of illustrated editions of Asian fairy tales by the artist; to reveal the influence of traditions of Chinese Gohua art on the artist’s work, specifically to study the compositional solution, the use of diffused perspective, other expressive means; to analyze the methods of stylization of images and symbols of Chinese culture and folklore in illustrations.
The presented research allows not only to determine the originality of N.M. Kochergin’s creative method of illustrating Chinese fairy tales, but also to identify the specificity of representation of Chinese culture for Russian readers. This problematic can contribute to the emergence of a holistic view of the synthesis and integration of Chinese art and culture in the Russian and world artistic process. The article studies illustrations by N.M. Kochergin for such editions of Asian fairy tales as “Chinese Folk Tales” (1953), “Ten Little Friends” (1954), “The Yellow Stork and the Mountain of the Sun” (1954), “The Liu Brothers” (1955), “Persistent Yun Su” (1955), “Fairy Tales of the Peoples of Asia” (1959).
In this paper, I explore how Cassirer’s early and mature epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of culture make up a coherent and comprehensive view of the mathematical sciences that is fruitful for understanding contemporary science. In Cassirer’s first systematic work, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, the mathematical sciences are understood through the concept of function. This implies that scientific investigation aims at increased unity in a system of functional concepts, rather than at answering the substance-rooted question of what is. In his mature work, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Cassirer expands his inquiry to diverse notions of objects and principles of symbolic forming, recognizing the mathematical sciences as one of many ways of structuring experience, alongside other symbolic forms such as myth and ordinary language. Together, Cassirer’s early and mature works detail the preconditions and idiosyncrasies of the unfolding of scientific objects and situate the mathematical sciences within the totality of human experience. Applying these insights to contemporary interpretations of science suggests connecting common misconceptions of science to challenges in translating objects between symbolic forms. I propose the concepts of domestication and mythification of science as instructive for clearing up such misunderstandings.
In Husserl’s first book, the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891)—a series of logical and psychological investigations on the concept of number, which deploy the two principal sources of Husserl’s formation—he describes a particular phenomenon: figural moments. Chapter 11, § 7, entitled “The Figural Moments,” poses the classical problem of the one and the many, perhaps the most ancient problem in Western philosophy. Plato had already confronted this problem in a very intuitive way in his Theaetetus. Let us take two letters, say m and e, that give rise to the word me when arranged together. Does the combination of these two letters, Plato wonders, form a new object—a word—or is the word simply the sum of the two letters? Does the word, so to speak, simply reduce to the plurality of its given elements? For Plato, of course, the correct response is the first, because to form the word me the elements are not sufficient: contiguity and an order of succession are also necessary; thus, a certain form of unity.
Implicit in Paul Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination is a depth dimension of the productive imagination that unfolds its sources that transfigure reality. The first part of the present essay introduces the problematic of the imagination to which Ricoeur seeks to respond: imagination has been viewed as derivative from perception or the concept and so is merely reproductive. Part two addresses how for Ricoeur the intertwining of experience and meaning allows an opening for the productive imagination to function. This subtext in the Lectures is extended by reference to Ricoeur’s greater exposition elsewhere on the symbolic mediation of action. Part three returns to the Lectures and its appraisal of productive imagination as the “nowhere” and seeks to develop what this nowhere as a point of origin might comprise. Part four draws upon Ricoeur’s work on the religious imagination to extend the nature of the productive imagination and its inspirations.
Rudolf Carnap’s began to write on probability and inductive logic in 1945, marking a surprising shift in his research interests midway through his post-PhD career (1921–1970). His 1950 Logical Foundations of Probability is unquestionably his best-known work in this area, and yet his views afterwards underwent a substantial change over the next two decades, the extent of which was (and remains) often unappreciated. Inevitably some of his views underwent critical examination, both during his lifetime and after, but he was fortunate in being able to benefit in meeting these from the contributions and support of a number of mathematically and philosophically gifted collaborators. This essay traces the origins of his interest, the nature of these shifts, and some of the contributions of the members of his invisible college. Although the special technical contributions of Carnap continue to engage the attention of a small but influential group of individuals, his more general impact was much broader, often shaping as it did the current widespread epistemic and Bayesian view of the field.
This paper provides a reading of Nishitani’s philosophy of culture. It argues that the advent of nihilism is the logical conclusion of what will be called the “fracturing of culture” in which philosophy and religion lose their creative force to revitalize a cultural tradition as the sense of being-in-time that forms the historical life of a historical world. Section two sets out the paradoxical nature of Nishitani’s philosophy of culture as both a transcendental and existential project. Section three draws attention to the fact that a concept of culture always belongs to a concrete culture as part of its own understanding of itself. Section four interprets the advent of nihilism in terms of a crisis of culture that ensues from the loss of the existential understanding of history that grounds a cultural world, that forms the standpoint of a historical event of worlding, the historical life that we are. Section five examines Nishitani’s project in terms of the reappropriation of a lost tradition through an existential receptive reinterpretation of Buddhism. Section six argues that for Nishitani the advent of nihilism comes about as a result of the negation of myth by science and thus the overcoming of nihilism comes about through the recollection of myth. Section seven determines the nature of myth for Nishitani through a comparison with Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s understanding of myth. Three elements of myth are focused on: 1) myth as an existential confrontation with being-in-the-world; 2) this existential being-in-the-world forms an existential being-in-time; and 3) myth is the position of the imagination, a thinking by means of form-images [keizō 形像] (Bild, image). Section seven considers the difference between Cassirer’s and Nishitani’s respective accounts of myth. Section nine examines the nature and function of philosophy, science, and religion in terms of their relation to myth and in terms of how they understand interdependent origination. Section, ten ends the paper by considering what is called the “fracturing” of culture and the advent of nihilism.
Nowhere do we see the beauty of our struggles so clearly as in the world of dreams. This past year saw the passing of one of our most creative and inspiring poets of the world of dreams, Paul Lippmann. In this paper, I speak from and about the world of dreams, recognizing ways in which they call to our attention aspects of experience which, unparsed, leave us caught emotionally. Considered will be the dream itself, its forms and functions, ways in which our emotional tangles within the dream space become visual pictograms. Bion suggested that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to enhance the capacities for feeling, thinking and dreaming. The dreaming process is enhanced by and in the psychoanalytic session. Through the dream work of analyst and analysand, dream elements become more fully elaborated into meaningful symbols that enrich the evolving narratives within the sessions. I will also consider ways in which psychosocial perspectives and psychoanalytic field theory have enhanced our understanding of and ability to make sense of our dreams, providing an enlarged playing field beyond the reconstructive efforts of early psychoanalysis.
What should the philosophical study of religion look like in an epoch of increasing political polarization, cultural ferment, and religious fragmentation? Drawing on the work of Amy Hollywood and others, I argue that philosophers seeking to understand what seem to be incommensurable moral and religious communities ought to attend more fully to the role of spiritual practice and moral formation as irreducible components of certain beliefs and ethical intuitions. However, while such an account might invite a reductive reading in which the object of religious belief is taken to be simply the practice, ritual, etc., I engage the thought of Michael Polanyi to argue that such irreducibly participatory truth claims can be understood to aim at a reality that exceeds the structures of formation and ways of life to which they are indexed.
This article describes the deficiencies of positivist science for generating knowledge for use in solving problems that members of organizations face. Action research is introduced as a method for correcting these deficiencies. When action research is tested against the criteria of positivist science, action research is found not to meet its critical tests. The appropriateness of positivist science is questioned as a basis for judging the scientific merits of action research. Action research can base its legitimacy as science in philosophical traditions that are different from those which legitimate positivist science. Criteria and methods of science appropriate to action research are offered.
This article analyses the state-of-art literature in the field of citizenship studies based on relational approaches. It does so by differentiating between field relationalism (FR) and process relationalism (PR) and comparing, in this context, the framing of citizenship by three leading relationalist scholars in the field: Engin Isin, Margaret Somers and Gurminder Bhambra. In doing so, we focus first on the ways in which they envisage overcoming the analytical dualisms responsible for social exclusion and the hierarchies related to citizenship, and second on their normative assumptions concerning the emancipation of society. We demonstrate that the differences between the two metatheoretical assumptions have important implications for understanding each author’s research objects and methodology, as well as the normative assumptions present in their study of citizenship.
The coevolution of objectivity and subjectivity and the nature of both their division and connection are central to this paper. Section 2 addresses the nature of meaning from the subjective perspective. Initially, I examine the meaningful engagement that exists between the unicellular organism and its environment. In this respect, I focus on the ontological importance of the qualitative biochemical assimilation of the physical rather than on the evolution of form and function. In Section 3, I broaden the discussion to include multicellular organisms and introduce the idea that meaning, at various levels, qualifies different objective and informational constructs of the world. These determine the character of interactive engagement and reveal much about the way in which an agent signifies the external. In Section 4, I review Darwinian evolution from the position of the existential self. I emphasize that meaning is that which qualifies the human concept of objectivity, rather than that objectivity is that which will help humankind qualify or understand meaning. Ultimately, this outlook challenges scientific disciplines that have tended to obscure the relevance of meaning and sought, instead, to explain it from an epistemological footing. In its overall scope, I try to establish the view that the subjective and objective domains are more nuanced, layered, and intertwined ontologically than the default stance that presents a binary juxtaposition between the two.
Death is common in video games and one of the key elements to achieve bestseller status. From an anthropological perspective, near-death experience in video games enables the player to encounter familiarity with this uncharted phenomenon through interaction–which is necessary to understand and include it naturally in life from a metaphysical point of view–given the recreationalcommunicative nature of video games and their capacity for creating culture and horizons of meaning– not just the video game as a device, but also the full transmedia promotional narrative in which players participate first-hand. In this article, we analyze the anthropological and metaphysical components of the representation of death in video games following the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s theory of the absolutism of reality, as well as the case of Blasphemous and its promotional storytelling to determine how death appears as a sales concept in the publicity due to its place in the players’ common symbolic consciousness.
The article is about a cultural analysis of Kyiv's cultural landscape, which is made up of a complex of elements such as an architectural ensem- ble and public spaces, historical and cultural heritage objects, cultural and creative industries, media, along with external agents such as active consumers and contemplators. We observe the fundamental changes in Kyiv's cultural landscape during the period of independence, as a result of modern changes in everyday culture. The article is based on multidisciplinary researches on the psychological space of Harry Trayandis, Sarah Dawkins, Sophia Nartova-Bochaver, visual anthropology of Benjamin Cope, Nerius Millerus, analysis of the transformation of leisure practices of Neil Brenchby-Barbury-Simbros and others. The scientific developments of Ernst Cassirer, Manuel Castells, Arnold Toynbee, and Tolcott Parsons are important core theories on which the methodology of work is built. The transformation in the overall cultural viewpoint may be seen in the development of urban cultural landscapes, as well as the increased em- phasis on the production of cultural services. If the city used to be a "factory" for producing goods, it is now a market for services. Cities are be- coming more and more places where cultural practices can be carried out. As a result, capital freely flows in the city, fueling the expansion of the cultural environment. Mapping residents' daily cultural practices is evolving into a technique for mapping urban area and industries. Modern geog- raphers like Neil Brenner, David Hervey, and others have recognized 1970s-era spatial alterations in Western cities. The city development, particu- larly its cultural environment, began with Ukraine's independence in 1991. "Antropolis: wspóczesny Gdask w wymiarze symbolicznym" is a signifi- cant resource for us. It is a study of Gdansk's urban anthropology from a German to a Polish city after the city's architectural ensemble was demol- ished during WWII. The experience detailed in the essay is used to propose solutions for the rebuilding of Ukrainian cities. From 1991 to the present, a cultural investigation of the transformative processes of urban cultural landscapes and socio-culture phenomena in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities has not been conducted. The cultural landscapes of Ukrainian cities are being transformed, and the cultural coordi- nates of local communities' social engagement in the alteration of the cultural landscape of cities are being determined.
Science in the modern era has separated from ethical principles and moral-spiritual (metaphysical) aspects, creating a dilemma between science and wisdom or science and moral-spiritual perfection. To understand this dilemma, it is necessary to reexamine the history of Western thought which nevertheless has a positive side in the development of science, even though in the end its epistemological foundation eliminates the universality of science itself. furthermore, it is also necessary to understand how the concept of Islamic thought in the development of science, in general, is based on an epistemology that accepts the ontological status of metaphysics as truth. For that, the most important thing to do is to accept the status of metaphysics as part of science. Because after all, the search for metaphysical reality can be considered a complement to physical science..
We shall address from a conceptual perspective the duality between algebra and geometry in the framework of the refoundation of algebraic geometry associated to Grothendieck’s theory of schemes. To do so, we shall revisit scheme theory from the standpoint provided by the problem of recovering a mathematical structure A from its representations into other similar structures B. This vantage point will allow us to analyze the relationship between the algebra-geometry duality and (what we shall call) the structure-semiotics duality (of which the syntax-semantics duality for propositional and predicate logic are particular cases). Whereas in classical algebraic geometry a certain kind of rings can be recovered by considering their representations with respect to a unique codomain B, Grothendieck’s theory of schemes permits to reconstruct general (commutative) rings by considering representations with respect to a category of codomains. The strategy to reconstruct the object from its representations remains the same in both frameworks: the elements of the ring A can be realized—by means of what we shall generally call Gelfand transform—as quantities on a topological space that parameterizes the relevant representations of A. As we shall argue, important dualities in different areas of mathematics (e.g. Stone duality, Gelfand duality, Pontryagin duality, Galois-Grothendieck duality, etc.) can be understood as particular cases of this general pattern. In the wake of Majid’s analysis of the Pontryagin duality, we shall propose a Kantian-oriented interpretation of this pattern. We shall use this conceptual framework to argue that Grothendieck’s notion of functor of points can be understood as a “relativization of the a priori” (Friedman) that generalizes the relativization already conveyed by the notion of domain extension to more general variations of the corresponding (co)domains.
This paper seeks to make two distinctive sets of contributions through a supplementary reinterpretation of Max Weber in the light of Charles Taylor’s expressivist-hermeneutical theory of human agency. First, it offers a reinterpretation of Weber’s work. Focussing on the concept of stance, the paper highlights that Weber’s theorising on values and their relation to cognition, action and identity is less underpinned by subjectivism, representationalism, emotivism and decisionism than is typically thought. Instead, Weber sets values within a non-naturalist dimension where agents find their bearings and are constituted as such. In this dimension, orientation to meaning takes place; identity, action and thought are constituted; and normative experiences (such as freedom, or responsibility) are made possible. Weber recognised that this non-naturalist dimension has variegated modes, but seemingly studied them in their purest and most logical form (the ‘ideal type’), hence his focus on explicit belief systems and world-images. Second, there is a prospective supplementation of Weber’s theory through Taylor’s notion of expression. For Taylor, we take a stance and orient ourselves expressively through the domain of strongly valued meanings. The notions of strong evaluation and articulation prove central to understanding embodied, symbolic and representational meaning-orientation in the non-naturalist dimensions of values. This supplementary reading places Weber as a central figure in current American, British and French debates about, respectively, the normative nature of human agency; the question of culture, meaning and their different forms and modes of operation; and the question of how to examine identity-formation.
Now that in the first paper I have analysed the functions of epistemic narrativity for the process of scientific modeling in the follow up paper the analytical perspective will change gears and focus on the semiologic practices of scientific modeling as well as their epistemic functions for the development of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The interformative process, described here can only be understood when multiple levels of modeling are differentiated. We must therefore distinguish three levels of modeling: primary, secondary and tertiary. In order to describe this process of three-fold modeling, I first turn to Einstein’s 1936 text “Physics and Reality,” which presents a metareflection of epistemic practices in theoretical physics. From this it will become clear that it is necessary to distinguish the modeling levels, because each level comprises its own possibilities and restrictions. This differentiation hopefully leads to a better understanding of theoretical modeling in physics from the point of view of literary studies. In the second part of the paper I focus on the process of interformation in physics and discuss the development of the theory of special relativity from a systematical perspective.
I argue that scientific and poetic modes of objectivity are perspectival duals: 'views' from and onto basic natural forces, respectively. I ground this analysis in a general account of objectivity, not in terms of either 'universal' or 'inter-subjective' validity, but as receptivity to basic features of reality. Contra traditionalists, bare truth, factual knowledge, and universally valid representation are not inherently valuable. But modern critics who focus primarily on the self-expressive aspect of science are also wrong to claim that our knowledge is or should be ultimately mediated by ourselves. In objective science, we represent nature as a field of phenomena determined by and within explanatorily-basic physical structures that encode the causal impact of elemental physical forces. These causally-basic forces hence ground the possibility of objective scientific theory, even though (I argue) they are systematically excluded from its representational contents. I show how my notions of force and field emerge partly through my effort to naturalize concepts of 'God' and 'Laws' in 17th-century natural philosophy. In science, we use the structure of basic forces' impact to see corresponding objects. We do not see these forces themselves—and this relates to the 'transcendence' of 'God'. I supplement this historical analysis by critiquing standard accounts of objectivity, and by synthesizing elements from neo-Kantian epistemology and current 'structural' realism into a view that I call 'dynamic structuralism'. Finally, I argue that physics systematically relies on passive characterizations of phenomena like inertia and impressed force. Dynamic alternatives that are just as empirically adequate are possible, but they are non-scientific. Poetic objectivity involves a direct presentation of nature as an order of interacting forces. I elaborate first by developing a novel theory of the relation between beauty and sublimity, mediated by a basic category of 'sensory force' (e.g. a 'singing' tone in a beautiful melody). I then describe the interaction between sensory and affective dimensions of aesthetic experience, in relation to an original historical analysis of passion and 'disinterestedness' in Kant, Schiller and Nietzsche. I synthesize these lines of analysis into a critique of the role of 'expression' in art. I also resist 'spectator'-centric aesthetics, in this connection, by developing an account of artistic objectivity in dialogue with Ruskin's critique of the 'pathetic fallacy'. I contrast artistic objectivity with Romantic ideals of self-expression, while elaborating its positive relation to certain currents within Victorian and Modernist aesthetics, including Imagists' stress on 'exteriority'. My project creatively extends Nietzsche's view that philosophical and scientific theories are 'perspectival' expressions of theorists' drives. It is a virtue of Nietzsche's account that he takes the outlet of strong human drives in creative acts of theorizing to be just one among many higher modes of 'will to power' in nature—many of which are totally impersonal. But Nietzsche is still too focused on self-expression or willing one's own power. Objective science involves external forces' 'expression' in and through us, not just 'expressing' our own powers. And Nietzsche's vitalistic 'will to power' must be replaced by a basic ontology that better accommodates inorganic phenomena, like the 'lawful' order of celestial motions. Thus I aim to de-anthropomorphize and 'de-organicize' post-Kantian notions of willful striving and organic development, while preserving for force the primary ontological and evaluative status that theorists from Schiller and Goethe to Schelling and Schlegel to Emerson and Nietzsche attributed to will or to life.
The historical beginnings of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture remain unclear. For it is not apparent how his major philosophy of culture and the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms , published in the 1920s, emerged from his earlier epistemological work and Substance and Function from 1910. However, this gap can be filled to a certain extent by the “Disposition” of a “Philosophy of the Symbolic” from 1917 that could be reconstructed from Cassirer’s literary estate and is documented in this contribution. In the preceding “Introduction” an overview of Cassirer’s text is given and some consequences for our general understanding of Cassirer’s project of a philosophy of culture are put up for discussion.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the persistence of sacrifice as self-sacrifice in contemporary societies. In order to reach this goal, firstly, we discuss how in the Axial Age (800–200 B.C.E.) an understanding of sacrifice as ritual worship or a ritual practice that involves the immolation of a victim became less prevalent and a new understanding of sacrifice emerges. This new notion of sacrifice focuses on individual relinquishment and gift exchange, that is, on a person sacrificing or relinquishing him/herself as a gift that is given in an exchange relationship for protecting a greater good (a god, a community, a person, a nation, and so on). Secondly, we analyze how this new sacrifice formula had an important impact on the understanding of sacrifice. Most notably, it led people to conceptualize sacrifice as a project or as something that persons could intentionally embrace. Thirdly, and as a result of the previous processes, we attend to the secularization of sacrifice, not in the sense of a de-sacralization of this phenomenon but in the way of sacralization of the mundane realm and mundane things, such as intentional self-sacrificial acts, in social contexts where there is religious pluralism. Insight into how the notion of sacrifice is secularized is found throughout the classic works of Marcel Mauss and Georg Simmel, and these works are discussed in section three. Fourthly, we study the sacredness of the person as a clear type of secular religiosity that develops self-sacrificial forms. Two of these self-sacrificial forms are the actions of 9/11 rescuers and COVID-19 healthcare professionals. A short analysis of both will serve us to illustrate how self-sacrifice is embodied in contemporary societies.
Purpose: The purpose of the article is to consider two interrelated problems: the development of technology and its impact on human destiny. In this light, it reveals the aspect of conditionality of the development of modern technology achievements in psychology and philosophy, and analyzes the role of technology as a means of increasing freedom of society from the blind forces of nature. Also, it reveals methods of the resolution of contradictions found in the evolution of technique, alongside socio-political ways of dealing with negative consequences of technological development.
In the present paper, the author aims at laying the foundations of a symbolics of technical gesture, according to the thesis that symbolic faculty is another face of the technological one, and that they are both in truth two sides of the same coin. Accordingly, the author suggests to rename the whole dimension as “meta-environmentality”. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a specific comparison between Cassirer’s definition of “animal symbolicum” and its scientific consistence in the light of modern palaeontology. “Animal symbolicum” is here compared with Leroi-Gourhan’s homo technologicus, and Cassirer’s ideas on human identity tested starting from paleoanthropological data. The result of the inquiry lead us to recognize the urgency of integrating Cassirer’s argument with the primacy of the technological capacity, but a deep analysis of the characterizing attributes of the latter compels us to uphold the symbolic attitude of the technological dimension. The author then sketches a basic description ofthe guidelines of a symbolic theory of technology (especially §§ 6-7), and tries to show how the basic elements of such an approach were familiar both to Cassirer and Leroi-Gourhan. As a consequence of the whole theory, the author elaborates a chronological analysis of human identity, whose basic result is the determination of the future as main temporal dimension of human acting.
This chapter elicits the problems that have arisen from splitting seeing into receptivity on the one hand and intellectual spontaneity on the other. It explores possible alternative theoretical approaches. Seeing as a way of disclosing the apparent, perceptible world cannot be explained in purely either physiological or cognitive terms. Specific to the faculty of seeing is its proximity to processes of understanding, thinking and interpreting. When someone notices something in someone else, they are not merely decoding certain sensory signs, but seeing and understanding at the same time. Sight and insight, seeing and ways of seeing are therefore intertwined in a way that needs to be explained against the background of an entirely different theoretical framework.
The traditional definition of symbolism in psychoanalysis is that symbols represent an unconscious meaning for the individual. Thoughts, dreams, art, psychic problems etc. are seen as expressions of dynamic unconsciousness. The unconsciousness is postulated to drive the individual at least as much as his or her conscious will because of the life preserving drives and defences. The objective of defences such as repression, projection , identification and denial is to keep forbidden impulses, wishes and wants unknown to the individual. This ensures that s/he could stay in psychic balance without the experiencing of too much angst or losing control. This protection from unconsciousness occurs in the daytime as well as during the night where the diverse phases of dreamwork are seen to cover the sleeper from waking up. (Freud, 1900/1995; Wolberg, 1954.) However, my approach to symbolism in psychoanalysis differs from this classical definition even though I consider it an important part. My view expands the early insights of psychoanalysis in symbolic processes to cover all the experiences the individual finds meaningful. My conception lies in the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and his phenomenology. For Cassirer all the experiences of individual are always meaningful and phenomena cannot be separated from their meaning. He postulates that there are always many layers of meaning around a phenomenon.
Psychoanalysis is a transformational process through which meanings become visible and foreclosed identity may be further constituted. Winnicott (1971) marks the crucial developmental function of the relationship that is good enough to tolerate the separateness of the other. The analyst’s ability to “take the transference” enables the patient to locate himself in relation to another mind and being in ways that did not happen sufficiently in childhood. This process requires the signification of personal meanings that can become consensual without subverting one’s own becoming in the process. The dream provides idiosyncratic images that can demarcate conceptual space in ways that can enable the individual to move from the sign to the symbol; from what Kleinians term the symbolic equation, to the symbol proper, the domain of language and consensual meanings. I describe a case in which one young man used his dreams as a way of moving from a universe in which meanings could not be made into one in which he could build meanings in relation to his own experience and ideas.
This chapter presents an overview of the Neo‐Kantian movement in philosophy that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that was concentrated geographically in Germany. Following a summary of the institutional and intellectual context surrounding Neo‐Kantianism, the chapter explores the core philosophical principles associated with the movement, attending in particular to the ways in which Neo‐ Kantian philosophers appropriate and depart from the core tenets of Kant's critical philosophy. After briefly surveying the context in which Neo‐Kantianism took shape, the chapter surveys the two major “schools” into which the movement crystallized around 1880: the Marburg School, comprised primarily of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and the Baden, or Southwest School, comprised principally of Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Both schools of Neo‐ Kantianism are marked by a rich and fascinating process of internal conceptual development.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-12579-0#toc
The chapter addresses the question of humans enchanting robots in the sense that humans tend to perceive robots and think about them as more than just machines as a result of performing magical thinking. It explores the field of Human Robot Interactions and discusses a specific part of robot ethics controversies that seek to rethink our thinking about humans and robots. Next, it examines both classic and more recent anthropological, psychological, and philosophical accounts of magic to identify various analogies between magical thinking, on the one hand, and various phenomena diagnosed by HRI as well as some philosophical ideas regarding robots, on the other. In doing so, it analyzes the reevaluations of the status of magic and magical thinking from the second part of the nineteenth century to the present moment.
Marketing thinking is profoundly dominated by the empiricist world view and the logical empiricist paradigm. This article argues that marketing can be enriched by opening up to alternative paradigms that capture subjective experiences, conflicts, and liberating forces.
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