Cognition and Temporality argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness, and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, the author (...) contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment, and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in the early twentieth century--including Wassily Kandinsky, Stephen C. Pepper, and Andrew Paul Ushenko--have all posited an inherited attentional perspective in individuals, manifested in the logical correspondence between their distinctive verbal and figural grammars. Cognition and Temporality elaborates these claims, arguing that while the styles of well-known artists and writers are conditioned by the public styles of a particular time period, variations in personal style manifest one's inherited form of judgment, and the characteristic grammars that express that form. Through rigorous visual and stylistic analysis, the author demonstrates the expression of these forms among notable writers and artists across history. The result is a wide-ranging and provocative contribution to phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural history. (shrink)

This study examines how Germany and Austria each generated a normative narrative structure that became a template for the historians and others who formulated history within the two cultures. The author demonstrates these narrative structures and indicates both their strengths and weaknesses and ways to broaden their understandings.

Otto Bauer has emerged once more in the thought of Western Marxists. The dominant theoretical voice of the Austrian Social Democrats in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the First Austrian Republic, Bauer was re-examined in the 1970s and ’80s as ‘the third way’ was being explored in European politics by Eurocommunists. Bauer again is being discussed in the twenty-first century as not only a European ‘third way’, but as a model for nations across the globe. Bauer’s vision theoretically as well (...) as tactically between 1919 and 1934, when Austrian fascism ended the political efforts of Austrian Social Democracy, was of a pluralist parliamentary governance that sought through party coalitions and the influence of social experiment a developing societal praxis whose socialist principles would realise eventually Marx’s understanding of a classless society. A gradualism in long-range strategy and tactics would lead democratically to greater collective coexistence embracing differing cultures within and beyond separate nations. Reviewed here are five publications between 2005 and 2011 which are either thoughtfully supportive or critically dismissive of Bauer’s multi-cultural models for the socialist coexistence of communities and nations. Two conference collections and three books on Bauer’s thought and political life enable the contemporary mind to evaluate the seminal promise of Bauer’s Marxist understanding, where for him Marxism was a social-scientific instrument to guide societal development. (shrink)

The volume begins with what is in common to contemporary phenomenological historians and historiographers. That is the understandings that temporality is the core of human judgment conditioning in its forms how we consciously attend and judge phenomena. For every phenomenological historian or historiographer, all history is an event, a span of time. This time span is not external to the individual, rather forms the content and structure of every judgment of the person. It is the logic used by the individual (...) to structure the phenomenon attended. Rather than the phenomenon being seen as something solely external, it is understood by phenomenologists as also of our immediate awareness and thought. Thus, the phenomenological method discerns all judgment as based upon one’s span of attention of inner or outer phenomena.. There is an intentionality to attention. One intends one’s own foci. Attention is the temporal duration of that intending. The volume offers a text that enables contemporary historians, graduate students, and even undergraduates who are well taught, to understand both the history of phenomenology as a method of inquiry, and the contemporary practice of phenomenological historical and historiographical thought. (shrink)

Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253 ce) is one of the most revered figures in the history of Japanese culture. A Zen master regarded by the Sōtō School as its spiritual founder, Dōgen is also considered by many to be Japan's greatest philosopher. (The other major contender is kūkai, with whose philosophy Dōgen's shares a number of features.) Possessed of a prodigious and subtle intellect, and master of a strikingly poetic style, he surely ranks among the world's most formidable thinkers.