Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View
Chapters (4)
The fact that man can have the ideaa “I” raises him infinitely above all the other beings living on earth. By this he is a person;2 and by virtue of his unity of consciousness through all the changes he may undergo, he is one and the same person — that is, a being altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, which we can dispose of as we please. This holds even if he cannot yet say “I”; for he still has it in mind. So any language must think “I” when it speaks in the first person, even if it has no special word to express it. For this power (the ability to think) is understanding.
Enjoyment is pleasure through the senses, and what delights the senses is called agreeable. Pain is displeasure through the senses, and what produces it is disagreeable. — Enjoyment and pain are opposed to each other not as profit and lack of profit (+ and o), but as profit and loss (+ and -): that is, one is opposed to the other not merely as its contradictory (contradictorie s. logice oppositum) but also as its contrary (contrarie s. realiter oppositum). — We should not use the terms what pleases or displeases to express enjoyment and pain, or the term the indifferent for what comes in between them: these terms are too wide, for they can also refer to intellectual pleasure and displeasure, in which case they would not coincide with enjoyment and pain.
Appetite (appetitio) is the self-determination of a subject’s power through the idea of some future thing as an effect of this power.40 Habitual sensuous appetite is called inclination. If we desire something without using our power to produce the object, this is a wish. A wish can be directed to objects we feel incapable of producing, and then it is an empty (idle) wish. Any empty wish that we could annihilate the time between our desire our desire and our acquisition of what we desire is longing. An appetite that has no definite object (appetitio vaga), that only impels us to leave our present state without knowing what state we then want to enter, can be called a peevish wish (one that nothing satisfies).
From a pragmatic point of view, the universal, natural (as distinguished from civil) doctrine of signs (semiotica universalis) uses the word character in two senses: on the one hand we say that a certain man has this or that (physical) character or, on the other hand, that he has character simply (moral character). In this latter sense there is only one character — a man either has it or has no character at all. Having a certain physical character is the distinguishing mark of man as a being belonging to the world of sense, or nature; having character simply characterizes man as a rational being, one endowed with freedom. The man of principles, from whom we know for sure what to expect, not from his instinct, for example, but from his will, has character. — So in Characterization we can, without tautology, divide what belongs to man’s appetitive power (what is practical) into what is characteristic in his nature,a his natural tendency, b) in his temperament or way of sensing,b c) in his character simply, or his way of thinking.c — The first two tendencies indicate what can be made of a man; the last (moral) tendency shows what man is prepared to make of himself.
... Kant's ethical theory asserts that people are "ends"' in themselves (Kant 1978(Kant , 1996Korsgaard 1996). Treating a person as a "mere means," by using them to "promote your own ends in a way to which [they] could not possibly consent," violates their "dignity" (Korsgaard 2018, 77). ...
... Kant's ethical theory asserts that people are "ends"' in themselves (Kant 1978(Kant , 1996Korsgaard 1996). Treating a person as a "mere means," by using them to "promote your own ends in a way to which [they] could not possibly consent," violates their "dignity" (Korsgaard 2018, 77). ...
The American Political Science Association recently cautioned against the use of misinformation (giving research participants false information about the state of the world) in research with human subjects. This recommendation signals a growing recognition, as experimental research itself grows in prevalence in political science, that deceptive practices pose ethical problems. But what is wrong with misinformation in particular? I argue that while this question certainly has an ethical dimension, misinformation is bad for inference too. Misinformation moves us away from answering questions about the political world effectively. I propose a straightforward, intuitive solution to this twofold problem: tell the truth.
... As três dimensões de Caráter referem-se aos processos sociocognitivos autorregulatórios de ordem superior que moldam o que as pessoas fazem de si próprios intencionalmente e/ou criativamente (Kant, 1996). A heritabilidade das dimensões de caracter é semelhante à das dimensões de temperamento (Gillespie et al., 2003;Zwir et al., 2022). ...
O Inventário de Temperamento e Carácter – Revisto (ITC-R; Temperament and Character Inventory – Revised; TCI-R) é um instrumento de autorrelato de avaliação das quatro dimensões de Temperamento e as três dimensões de Carácter descritas pelo modelo psicobiológico da personalidade. A compreensão do grau em que as características da personalidade de um indivíduo ou de uma subpopulação de indivíduos diferem do típico da população geral requer a existência de dados normativos da população de referência. O objetivo deste estudo foi descrever as normas da versão portuguesa do ITC-R. Participaram neste estudo indivíduos adultos portugueses (n = 2442), uma amostra estratificada representativa da população portuguesa. Neste artigo, descrevemos os valores das escalas e subescalas do ITC-R para a amostra total, para o género masculino e feminino e para diferentes grupos etários. Para além disso, apresentamos tabelas das normas (percentis). Este artigo dá, portanto, uma contribuição relevante para a avaliação psicológica em Portugal, ao disponibilizar os dados normativos do ITC-R na população portuguesa, elemento fundamental para o desenvolvimento de investigação, avaliação e intervenção utilizando o modelo psicobiológico da personalidade.
... The Armenian historical and cultural heritage in this period was common knowledge not only in Europe, but in wider Eurasia . Kant (1798) discussed the anthropological characteristics of the Armenians, as having a certain special commercial spirit as they wandered from the borders of China to Cape Corso on the coast of Guinea to carry on commerce from North-East to South-West, travelling through the ancient continent in peaceful interaction. ...
In the twenty-first century, changing global power equations are impacting the dynamics of foreign and security policy choices of small states, as they seek to develop alliances and partnerships to offset their geopolitical and geo-economic vulnerabilities. In this context, Armenia’s security orientation is largely seen as consistently intertwined with Russia even after independence. Armenia has also attempted to develop a “normative alliance” with the European Union, relying mostly on its special relations with France. In recent years, various factors including domestic politics, deficit of security, and Russian dominance have led to a gradual re-orientation in the Armenian alliance trajectory towards more multilateral partnerships indicating a tendency towards “hedging” alliances. Conceptualizing from a theoretical foundation relating to small-state alliance options, this paper presents a case for Armenia-India strategic partnerships, given the historical and cultural ties between the two nations and the rapid growth of India as an emergent giant in the multipolar world. In this context of strategic analysis, the Georgia-Armenia-Iran corridor has a potential of vital geo-economic and geopolitical axis for India as well as for Russia, the EU, and China. The position of Armenia with its “both… and” integration approach, approximation with the EU, and strategic partnership with Russia has proved to be insufficient in security issues; however, the friendly disposition of a rising power, such as India, leaves Armenia with the capacity to diversify its security as a local civilizational and geo-economic connector.
... By this he is a person … that is, a being altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, with which one may deal and dispose at one's discretion. Kant, 2006 Kant's view, however, is problematic; as Gruen (2017) has stated, personhood is not coextensive with humanity. Babies and young children, as well as severely mentally disabled, do not have the rational and self-reflective capacities that are required for Kant's notion of personhood. ...
Odontocetes, or ‘toothed whales’, have a complex brain structure and possess rationality, self-awareness, sociability and culture. Cognitive science and modern theories of personhood challenge the notion that humans alone are moral persons. This paper reviews evidence from the cognitive science literature relevant to moral personhood in bottlenose dolphins, orcas, and beluga whales. It applies theories of personhood of Peter Singer, David DeGrazia, and Steven Wise, and finds that odontocetes fulfil criteria to be granted at least borderline personhood. The legal implications of attributing personhood to dolphins remains uncertain. Recognition of dolphin personhood may lead to fundamental legal rights against capture, captivity, and killing; alternatively, the courts may continue to restrict legal personhood and associated protections to human beings. Finally, despite the major influence of personhood on morality and law in the West, the biologically more widespread quality of sentience is sufficient for greater moral considerability and legal protections for nonhuman species.
... The concept of duty to oneself, conditional and unconditional, is born out of this question. For, in addition to rights to ourselves and to use ourselves according to manifold ends (and above all: as ends in themselves), we also have duties towards ourselves -including our own life and dignity, and dignity manifests itself in an individual's right to self-determination(Kant 2006, 3; Stavrianakis 2019, 152). Or recalling É. Durkheim: "suicide is an ethically qualified social phenomenon not reducible to individual psychological reasons (or causes) because of which people end their lives" (Durkheim 1897; Stavrianakis 2019, 161); more exactly, a phenomenon co-determined by societal-level processes related to (dis)integration and (over-or under-) regulation. ...
This is a review of Anthony Stavrianakis’ book Leaving. A Narrative of Assisted Suicide (University of California Press, 2019). Medically-assisted suicide still raises many issues and controversies of various types: ethical, legal, organizational and institutional. The situation varies greatly between countries, and depends on health care policies and socially recognised values. However, the overriding question is as follows: under what conditions should this form of death be allowed? Among the arguments that are well known, recognized and now tame, Stavrianakis’ research brings new light and perspective. The author goes deeper and searches for the real motives driving people to choose this manner of death. He sees the nuances and recounts the difficulties. In this article, I highlight aspects of Stavrianakis’ work that I find relevant and crucial for the issues considered.
The history of the human rights discourse is imbued in Eurocentrism. It is epistemologically and ontologically ideological because it continues to privilege the views, values and priorities of the privileged white male. This acerbic tradition of placing the privileged white male and whiteness at the centre of the human rights discourse has its modern roots in the European Enlightenment.
The idea that we must free ourselves from the mastery of our emotions in order to act morally has been challenged over the past decades as Kant scholars have turned to the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Judgment to regain the centrality of emotions in this tradition. I want to expand the claim about the positive role of emotions in Kant’s moral theory by arguing that certain emotional states should be understood as having an even more fundamental role, namely, as an empirical condition for morality. Therefore, I will show that the structure Kant provides to explain the human mind conceives of our moral experience as relying on what he calls lower faculty of feeling. After sketching Kant’s approach to cognition, I will show how some feelings are indissociable from the human moral experience – and notably, from the ability to act in accordance with our predispositions. I will discuss textual evidence for this view and explain that, although Kant himself failed to devise an explicit taxonomy of emotions, there is a sense in which pathological feelings are to be regarded as a condition for morality.
One must distinguish between the Enlightenment concept and the humanistic concept of humanity. The former indicates a universal deontological ideal; the latter a selective set of personal and social virtues. Kant is a champion of Enlightenment but inherits various aspects of the humanistic tradition that began at the end of the fourteenth century. This tradition, which largely coincides with the so-called Hofliteratur, eclectically combines elements of ancient and Christian ethics and adds a strong pedagogical, aesthetic and socio-political trait to outline a secular morality of self-government. After briefly presenting the Enlightenment “humanist family”, the article examines some figures of the humanistic tradition present in Kantian ethics: the Weltbürger, self-improvement and humanitas. Through them I show the substantial role of education, taste and social interplay. They converge in the sphere of pragmatic anthropology, the moment morals become involved in the dramatic theatre of the world with its dialectic and rhetoric of appearance. Here the ethics of the imperative intersect with ethics as prudence and the art of living. Rational freedom intersects with the contingency of reality and the inscrutability of the psyche. Morality becomes more impure, but also richer and more suited to take up the challenge of being human.
Reflection on education has a central place in Kantian anthropology. The human being can only become human through education. In my analysis of Kant’s standpoint, I identify the characteristics of education that underlie Kantian anthropology: the exclusive predisposition of humans to education, the duty of a human to be educated, the communicative nature of education, education as a product and goal of humanity, the continuous development of education plans and education as a tool to improve humanity. In interpreting the latter idea, I reveal the specific optimism and pessimism of Kant’s pedagogical thought. Further, I analyse the key characteristics of education to transfer Kantian ideas to the present context. I also reformulate current problems in education in comparison to, and with the help of, Kantian pedagogical ideas. These issues are the correlation between Kant’s pedagogical anthropologism and the problem of artificial intelligence, the transformation of the teacher-student relationship, extended adolescence, personal growth of the educator, the consequences of education digitalisation, the advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet in education, the effect of an information society on education, and the role of the state in education. I conclude that commitment to Kantian principles in contemporary education is nominal rather than substantial and that embracing these principles is complicated by the pervasiveness of modern technology in human life. Overall, Kant’s pedagogical theory is the perfect reference point for an optimistic outlook on education.
Kantian ethics is widely associated with a dictum stating that the human being possesses an absolute value. This position is famously articulated by Kant in the formula of the categorical imperative which states that each person should always be treated as an ultimate end – not as a mere means. Arguably, we face here a good prima facie case for reckoning Kant among the humanists. In spite of this, I argue – contrary to the popular view – that Kant’s ethical theory should be understood as “nomocentric”, and to that extent as anti-humanistic. Obviously, human beings are special for Kant in a morally important way, but their unique significance is not due to their nature as such, but consists solely in their capacity to fulfil the demands imposed on them by the moral law. While establishing this thesis, I discuss various examples of anti-humanistic pronouncements from Kant’s texts, ranging from the pre-critical period up to the late writings, and thereby show that e.g. Kant’s (in)famous insistence on the claim that saving an innocent human life does not justify a white lie (On the Right to Lie From Philanthropy, 1797) is anything but a slip of the pen on Kant’s part. In thecourse of the argument I also emphasise the subjective component to all teleology in Kant including the teleological account of the categorical imperative, and suggest that Kant’s apparent ambivalence towards humanism is rendered intelligible by paying close attention to his dualistic anthropology.
How can we reconcile religion and Enlightenment in Kant? I begin by analyzing Kant’s conception of a rational religion and the key concepts of radical evil and ethical community. I refer to many instances of overcoming evil in Kant’s work. First, I show that in the Anthropology, the cultivation of society is one possibility, while in the Idea for a Universal History, the unsociable sociability plays a role to accomplish a moral end. In Religion, on the other hand, only an ethical community can defeat evil. Since evil has its source in social relations, only a society of virtue can counteract passions. Second, I ask whether we can reconcile religious faith with rational Enlightenment or if some concepts used in Religion, such as radical evil, are only a disguise for anti-Enlightenment conceptions. Finally, I ask if it is reasonable to argue that we should keep religion as an important social practice or if it always brings a higher risk of anti-Enlightenment outcomes such as fanaticism. I analyze the case of Brazil, where the Evangelical church helped to elect a right-wing president with a very conservative and anti-Enlightenment agenda.
Critics of psychiatry (or “anti-psychiatrists”) such as philosopher
Michel Foucault, sociologist Erving Goffman and physician Ronald David Laing tend to view psychiatry as a form of social control, one of the state institutions of oppression. The concept of “norm” in relation to mental health is understood as culturally conditioned. Psychiatry is used to isolate and “stigmatise” the carriers of non-normative rationality, individuals with different states of mind and patterns of behaviour. Kant has no objections to the practice of forced treatment of the insane, assuming they are declared incompetent. At the same time, Kant considers it necessary to entrust the very procedure of declaring a person incompetent not to medical professionals, but to philosophers. This is due to the fact that Kant sees mental illness as a breakdown, a weakness in cognitive abilities. Kant shares the modernist ideal of a single normative rationality, which is the basis of moral abilities and a guarantee of personal autonomy. In contrast, anti-psychiatry proceeds from the postmodern idea of the diversity of forms of rationality, or refuses entirely to evaluate reason (sanity) as an essential attribute of human nature, thereby justifying the irrational and non-rational aspects of human existence. From this perspective, insane people appear as stigmatised carriers of alternative, non-normative rationality. Accordingly, such people should be protected from any medical coercion, because doctors, when making their decisions, proceed from culturally conditioned criteria of rationality and from a very relative and changing psychiatric norm.
This chapter charts the history of psychiatric classification from the mid to late eighteenth century to the present. Though madness has a long history, formal psychiatric classifications depended upon the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rise of the asylum and the simultaneous emergence of physicians who claimed expertise over the ills afflicting the burgeoning asylum population. To this end, this chapter traces the philosophical preconditions for a science of psychiatric classification and then the various ways in which systems of psychiatric classifications changed with transformations in the social organization of care, medical and psychiatric science, and efforts to either elide or bridge the biological, psychological, and social in making psychiatric disease. The first half focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Europe where our modern conceptions of psychiatric disease were forged. The second half of the chapter follows the evolution of American psychiatric classification in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to make sense of the historical basis of the current globalized and hegemonic vision of what is deemed (or not deemed) as psychiatric disease.
Recent Kant scholarship has argued that sympathetic feeling is necessary for the fulfilment of duty (e.g. Fahmy, Sherman, Guyer, and others). This view rests on an incorrect understanding of Kant and the historical context in which he wrote. In this paper, I compare Kant’s conception of sympathy with Hume's and Smith’s, arguing that Kant adapts central features of Smithian sympathy. I then examine Kant’s lectures on ethics and anthropology, arguing that in them we can distinguish between two types of sympathy: one that is instinctual or pre-reflective, which we might call empirical sympathy, and one that is reflective and properly moral, which we might call rational sympathy. On these grounds I reconstruct an account of Kantian sympathy as a cognitive virtue for which feeling may be useful but not necessary, since its primary purpose is to provide information about the well-being of others, leading to action which honours their worth.
In this chapter we provide a discussion of the role of moral sentiments in economics and economic analysis. We aim to uncover some implications of a moral dimension being absent in the mainstream economic framework. This is discussed with a particular focus on the consequences for social welfare, considering the commons. The first section explores the connection between moral sentiments and Economics as a discipline. Next follows a critical and historical analysis of moral sentiments and the commons, emphasizing the need to provide a redefinition of economic agents through the concepts of embeddedness, reflexivity and personal identity. We argue that reflexivity plays a particularly important role in mediating social choices—even if this dimension of moral sentiments has not yet been fully recognized—and in the paradigmatic shift from endless economic growth towards Eudaimonia as an end. Our concluding remarks argue that bringing ethical considerations to economic analysis enables us to overcome the ‘trade-off’ between normatively ‘good’ moral sentiments and social well-being. We uphold that ‘good’ moral sentiments overlap with social moral sentiments, such as the notion of social love. These social moral sentiments offer the opportunity to enhance public policies thanks to a more applicable consideration of social well-being.
What does outer space smell like? On the one hand, space scientists have used scent as a hint to discover the molecular histories of the cosmos. On the other, Palestinian astronomers, who regularly encounter Israel's vertical military arsenal, joke that it smells like Israel. Based on three years of fieldwork in the occupied West Bank, this article follows these astronomers and reveals how colonial experience can emerge in faraway realms, even past our planet. I position the space sciences alongside these Palestinian perspectives, arguing that such encounters with a superterranean state reveal the increasingly extraplanetary contours of colonial struggle. The Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, in other words, orbits earth. Scale thus emerges not as something that divides the (space) sciences, colonialism, and everyday sensory encounters into separable domains, but as a relational concept through which we can better grasp the dimensions of colonialism, politics, and power today.
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I contend that emotions should be regarded as emerging from our “vital communication” with the solicitations of our physical and social surroundings. My intention is to present emotions as unitary phenomena arising from an incessant flow of motivations that can be later articulated in terms of reasons (in cognitive theories of emotions) or in terms of causes (in affective neuroscience). I further suggest that emotions should be considered a specific kind of conducts, since the way in which a person acts out her emotions shapes their content, regulates their intensity and transforms the amorphous flow of felt motivations into a recognizable emotional stance for which she is held accountable. In conclusion, I put forward a series of arguments explaining why emotion tends toward its expression in conduct as if towards its completion.
Centred around the artistic research project Balthazar—a series of performances that consisted in the live encounter of a non-trained donkey with a group of human performers on stage—the article discusses the human-animal relation in theatre with respect to artistic, aesthetic, biological and philosophical concepts and modes of thought. The article sets out with a critique of the dualisms of human and animal, subject and object, nature and culture in modern ontology, then turns to pragmatic approaches to the living in early twentieth-century theoretical biology (Kurt Goldstein, Jakob von Uexküll), which are finally reflected conceptually through the lens of Alfred North Whitehead’s pragmatist cosmology. Guiding these explorations is the question of action and agency as a relation between the species in theatre.
Typically, Kant describes maxims that violate the moral law as engaging in a kind of comparative judgement: the person who makes a false promise judges it best – at least subjectively – to deceive her friend. I argue that this is not the only possible account of moral failure for Kant. In particular, when we examine maxims of so-called despondency ( Verzagtheit ) we find that some maxims are resistant to comparative judgement. I argue that this is true for at least two reasons: first, the despondent agent has a maxim to avoid suffering at all costs; second, this anxious preoccupation with suffering makes the despondent agent prone to failures associated with the imagination and its role in creating an ideal of happiness.
The purpose of this article is to reveal the resources of “metaphysics of man” for understanding the phenomenon of education. The creativity of “metaphysics of man” based on understanding a man as a self-founded, free and self-creating creature, allows taking education as a process of molding, forming a person from himself and thereby affirming his anthropological foundations and ideals. Education can be defined as a fundamental characteristic of anthropic identity. The conclusion that the deep meaning of education is in line with the goal of human metaphysics, which consists of the self-elevation of a person above himself and attainment of himself is substantiated. Scheler’s concept of an “educated creature” was taken as an example of a bearer of a metaphysical relation to education, the essential features of which are ontological participation, the culture of the soul, openness to others, and living integrity, freedom, decency, guidance by common sense. The novel nature of the study is in the substantiation of the heuristic meaning of the comparative analysis of the institutional and metaphysical dimensions (modes of existence, aspects) of the educational process, which appeared to us in the form of individual models of education. The institutional and metaphysical models of education differ from each other: 1) according to the forms of communication between the teacher and the student (vertical or subject-object, and horizontal or subject-subject relations respectively); 2) according to the predominance of one of the educational aspects: teaching or learning (the dominance of teaching or the dominance of learning and self-learning); 3) according to the way the student relates to education (consumer relation or relation to education as an inherent value). The main difference between these models is anthropological: whether a person has made a choice in favor of the metaphysical dimension of life. Allowing moving away from practical relation to the education process, the metaphysical model of education introduces a true axiological meaning into it, affirming the commitment to the social and individual good.
Kişinin kendisini ahlaklı hale getirmekle yükümlü olduğu düşüncesi Kant felsefesinde önemli bir yer edinmektedir. Bunun yolu da kişinin rasyonel-özerk bir birey olmasından; yani özgürlüğünü kullanmasından geçmektedir. Kişinin kendisine karşı ahlaki ödevleri vardır; ve kişi ancak bu ödevlere uygun yaşarsa ahlaki bir özne olabilir. Ancak, bazen kusurlu yapısı gereği bazen de kasıtlı bir şekilde, kişinin bu doğrultuda eylemde bulunmadığı görülmektedir. Bu durum kişinin iradesinin ahlak yasası tarafından mı yoksa kendi çıkarını düşünme ilkesi tarafında mı belirlendiğiyle ilgilidir. Kant, insanların özgürlük fikrine göre hareket etmeleri gerektiğini ve iradelerinin duy(g)usal eğilimler veya dışsal unsurlar tarafından değil de ahlak yasası tarafından belirlenmesi gerektiğini söyler. Kant’ın sözü edilen ahlak felsefesi ile eğitime yönelik yaklaşımı arasında doğrusal bir ilişki vardır. Eğitimin ahlaki bir karakter geliştirmesi gerektiğine yönelik yaklaşımı bu doğrultuda ele alınmaktadır. Kant insanları rasyonel-özerk bir kapasiteye sahip olan varlıklar olarak tanımlamakta ve söz konusu bu kapasitelerinin de onları ahlaki bir özne kıldığına işaret etmektedir. İnsan pratikte ahlaki saygınlığını geliştirmek istediğinde ise eğitime ihtiyaç duymaktadır. Çünkü, insanın özsel değerine ilişkin bir analiz yapıldığında ona anlam katan tek şey ahlaktır. İnsanın ahlaki karakterinin nasıl gelişeceğine yönelik bir arayış eğitsel açıdan son derece önemlidir. O nedenle Kant, akademik yaşamının temel amacının iyi karakterler yetiştirmek olduğunu belirtir. Kant’ın bu konudaki yaklaşımı bu makalenin temel tartışma alanını oluşturmaktadır.
This chapter examines the history of the concept of “aesthetics” across multiple disciplines. It concludes with recommendations for conceiving and investigating aesthetics as a cross-cultural endeavor that does not privilege Western ways of thinking about aesthetics and art.
The continuous transnational mobility facilitated by various elements of globalisation, evidently, enhances transcultural consciousness. Despite the increasing interest in transnational mobility among critics, its effect on the different perceptions of new identity formation in Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns has not got the deserved critical attention. Using Achille Mbembe’s perspectives in On the Postcolony , the paper attempts to critically engage the transcultural sensibility of the characters and otherness that occur in their relationships and how all these affect their sense of belonging. Estranged from their supposed indigenous cultural affiliation, the characters are also unable to get integrated into the mainstream western culture. In the text, it is clear that while transnational mobility continues to influence new identity formation, the characters are still perceived with stereotypical indexicalities. Mahjoub’s text depicts the contested place of identity by juxtaposing transculturality and otherness, portraying their effects on the person, the family and the postcolonial state.
This thesis engages ethnographically with actors whose practices constitute contemporary Swedish universities and who pose and respond to everyday questions of ethics and multilingualism. In contradistinction to the discursively monolingual horizon of contemporary academia, the thesis thinks questions of language differently, contributing to the growing body of knowledge on socially and linguistically diverse practice in internationalising university life. By analysing the discursive practices of university students, administrators, teachers, and researchers, it aims to illuminate potential new ways of engaging, learning, and knowing that might be more justifiably described as ethical and multilingual. With participants who fulfil the key missions of an academic institution in the faculties of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, the thesis provides a full and nuanced sense of university life in Sweden, relevant to those working in, or in relation to higher education institutions across the globe. The thesis is based on three studies which all focus on participant representations and interactions to reveal the different ways in which the dominant discourse relating to language, multilingualism, and ‘internationalisation’ is being reproduced, responded to, and transcended. Study I engages with research and teaching staff to explore the extent to which their practices and representations relate to the ideologically double monolingual language policy, debate, and scholarship in Sweden. Revealed through various language ideological processes, participant representations were found to reproduce a dual monoglossic logic and linguistic order, favouring a Swedish and English linguistic repertoire to the extent that other multilingual research and social practices were rendered invisible and problematic. Studies II and III move beyond study I’s foregrounding of participants’ representations to instead focus on participants’ engagement in everyday ‘ethical events’, a notion inspired by the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. They are here defined as interactions involving that which is not known, normative, or ordinarily visible, but for which all involved are called upon to take responsibility. Such events allow for the analysis of interactions in which interlocutors voice and respond to social, linguistic, and epistemic difference. Study II uses a Derridean notion of hospitality to illuminate ethical events in which administrators’ responses to multilingual interlocutors point towards the challenges and potential for ethical becoming and improved sociality in an internationalising university. Study III engages with international students compelled to perform in order to question and sometimes transcend the norms seen and felt to govern classroom engagement, learning, and knowing. The thesis summary locates the studies within the changing political discourse of higher education in Sweden and beyond. It also provides a framework for the three studies that works to show that questions of ethics and multilingualism are particularly pertinent for critical engagement with contemporary university life. Overall, the questions posed in this thesis highlight the multilingualism yet to be convincingly responded to in the sectoral, national, and institutional policy, planning, and debate on internationalisation and language in higher education. The thesis’ focus on ethical events emphasises both the exhaustion and the potentiality of spaces in which actors struggle to foster improved sociality, mutual responsibility, and more truly international academic practice.
Keywords: Ethics, multilingualism, ethical event, responsibility, hospitality, Levinas, higher education, internationalisation, linguistic anthropology, linguistic ethnography, language policy and planning, language ideology.
This article examines how Kant’s conceptualizations of natural history and teleological judgement shape his understanding of human difference and race. I argue that the teleological framework encasing Kant’s racial theory implies constraints on the capacity of non-whites to make moral progress. While commentators tend to approach Kant’s racial theory in relation to his political theory, his late-life cosmopolitanism, and his treatments (or non-treatments) of colonialism, empire and slavery, the problem I focus on here is that race is itself only intelligible in relation to a teleological natural history limiting certain races’ capacities to engage in humanity’s moral vocation.
The 1929 encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland is considered one of the most important intellectual debates of the twentieth century and a founding moment of continental philosophy. At the same time, many commentators have questioned the philosophical profundity and coherence of the actual debate. In this book, the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of the Davos debate, Simon Truwant challenges these critiques. He argues that Cassirer and Heidegger's disagreement about the meaning of Kant's philosophy is motivated by their different views about the human condition, which in turn are motivated by their opposing conceptions of what the task of philosophy ultimately should be. Truwant shows that Cassirer and Heidegger share a grand philosophical concern: to comprehend and aid the human being's capacity to orient itself in and towards the world.
Electronic money has been around for about 10 years, but it did not become as popular as initially hoped in the 1990s. However, in 2000, Suica by East Japan Railway Company and Edy by BitWallet, Inc. began to spread as more common electronic money, and electronic money began to be used in earnest. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, the mechanisms and systems necessary for the further diffusion of the new e-money that began to emerge in the beginning of 2000s, drawing on the experiences of the 1990s.
We live in the fourth industrial revolution, based on the Internet and digital technology. Our society is in the process of digital transformation (DX). Naturally the future of money depends on this process.It is quite clear that we need to reach a social consensus on how to collect digital information, how to use it socially, and where to store it. It is time to share information and statistics socially, to allow the agents (the government, the company, the individual researcher, etc.) to use them openly and to store them safely. In the fourth industrial revolution, data play a central role, and all infrastructures and analytical tools are focused to facilitate data analysis. The future role of money will find its place in the digital society accordingly.
The purpose of this chapter is to identify remaining research interests in money in the age of digitalization and put my past research topics in perspective. I have no intention to conduct a comprehensive review of the history of money, nor to search for the origin of money.
This chapter considers the role of currency under a rapidly changing society in Iraq. In particular, we will focus on the new currency regime after January 15, 2004.The new currency system included six denominations (50, 250,1,000, 5,000, 10,000, and 25,000 dinars). As the minimum denomination of the old Saddam dinar was 250 dinar, the minimum denomination dropped to 50 dinars in the new currency system and difficulties with small payments were eased. However, it remained a big problem without smaller change below 50 dinars. In this chapter, we consider the small change problem in which small denominations are not available in market transactions.
In this chapter, I would like to describe my views on the development of a cashless society. We will first examine statistics related to cashless payments. When calculated to include bank transfers/account transfers, the cashless payment ratio reaches as high as 92% in Japan, which is not a low figure even among developed countries.With regard to the choice of payment method, empirical studies and observed facts indicate that the cost structure is much more complex than the cost function considered by economic theorists, and that there are differences among retailers in their attitudes toward pricing and discounts.
Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008) is an electronic cash system designed to work without central management. Despite recent enthusiasm, Bitcoin (BTC) and other so-called cryptocurrencies are not ideal as means for payment, because of instability of their market prices against major currencies. This chapter explores the problem of such instability from the viewpoint of economics and proposes a new monetary policy for stabilizing the values of these cryptocurrencies. First, we begin by describing the institutional details of Bitcoin.
In this chapter, issues of different coins and notes in terms of denomination are determined seemingly by the Ministry of Finance. But in fact, they are determined by the market mechanism in a broad sense. This is our basic framework as to how the choice of optimal currency denomination can be made. If money is a general good, differences in the use-value would be adjusted both in terms of price and quantity by the market mechanism. The price of money (legal tender) is fixed as its face value, thus there is no room for price adjustment. If the use-value or money demand among coins and notes differs, it would be a quantity that is adjustable. We will investigate how coins and notes with different denomination would circulate in the market.
The purpose of this chapter is to empirically examine the impact of e-money on the amount of money in circulation by type of money, taking into account as much as possible the structural changes in the financial system, including policy changes such as the increase in the consumption tax rate and the introduction of bank ATM charges.
This book proposes a radical new reading of the development of twentieth-century French philosophy. Henry Somers-Hall argues that the central unifying aspect of works by philosophers including Sartre, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida is their attempt to provide an account of cognition that does not reduce thinking to judgement. Somers-Hall shows that each of these philosophers is in dialogue with the others in a shared project (however differently executed) to overcome their inheritances from the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions. His analysis points up the continuing relevance of German idealism, and Kant in particular, to modern French philosophy, with novel readings of many aspects of the philosophies under consideration that show their deep debts to Kantian thought. The result is an important account of the emergence, and essential coherence, of the modern French philosophical tradition.
Since Freud's earliest psychoanalytic theorization around the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of the unconscious has exerted an enormous influence upon psychoanalysis and psychology, and literary, critical and social theory. Yet, prior to Freud, the concept of the unconscious already possessed a complex genealogy in nineteenth-century German philosophy and literature, beginning with the aftermath of Kant's critical philosophy and the origins of German idealism, and extending into the discourses of romanticism and beyond. Despite the many key thinkers who contributed to the Germanic discourses on the unconscious, the English-speaking world remains comparatively unaware of this heritage and its influence upon the origins of psychoanalysis. Bringing together a collection of experts in the fields of German Studies, Continental Philosophy, the History and Philosophy of Science, and the History of Psychoanalysis, this volume examines the various theorizations, representations, and transformations undergone by the concept of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German thought.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.