The aim of this paper is to consider the standard objections put against the construction of metanarratives in the philosophy of history. The author distinguishes following intelectual sources questioning the grasp of Entirety in the philosophy of history: anti-naturalistic German philosophy of science, dogmatic Marxism, liberalism and postmodernism. Analysis of the content of these stances allows for disclose of hidden methodological and theoretical premises which are responsible for misunderstanding and critique of the historiosophical discourse.

If Neil Postman, were alive today, what would he say to Prensky, the originator of the term, ‘digital native’, about the ways in which teachers should approach the wonders and perils of e-learning in their classrooms? As the Dean of a faculty of education which is devoted to both creating and critiquing a variety of digital teaching and learning strategies in K-12 and adult education contexts, I have kept a close eye on the developing metanarrative of the twenty-first century (...) skills movement. Arguments and anecdotes from the movement’s proponents concerning teachers’ technological accountability and competencies are attractive and compelling to some educators at the same time as they are oppressive and disturbing to others. In order to deconstruct the technophilic discourses of Prensky, Trilling, and Fadel, I juxtapose their work with Postman’s cautionary tales about totalitarian technocracy in schools. Postman wants educators to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about the ways in which they and their students should interact with technology. Prensky and his followers wish to provide educators with effective ways to involve their students in experiential learning partnerships through the use of serious gaming, e-books, crowdsourcing, and Facebook. As the views of Prensky and Postman are contrasted, a number of interesting issues emerge. What, for instance, is the nature of moral development and cultural identity formation when collective intelligence, hypertexts, and virtual relationships displace traditional textbook and face-to-face modes of learning? In this article, therefore, I attempt to synthesize the opposing perspectives of Prensky and Postman in order to establish a balanced and yet critical theory of the nature of e-learning. (shrink)

Recently, James Smith and Merold Westphal have sought to reconcile Christianity with Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern – “incredulitytowards metanarratives” – by claiming that Christianity is not a metanarrative in Lyotard’s sense. This paper argues that their understanding of theLyotardian metanarrative is too restrictive, and that the term specifically includes Christianity within its scope. Despite this, though, there is a meansby which Christianity and Lyotard can be brought closer together. That method is to understand Lyotard’s refusal of metanarratives (...) as being tosome extent provisional. Combining this idea with Lyotard’s notion of the differend allows Christianity and Lyotardian postmodernism to be found, ifnot in agreement, at least to coexist. (shrink)

Recent discussions concerned with the problematical human relationship with nature have justifiably focused on the important role that language plays in both defining and limiting knowledge of the natural world. Much concern about language among environmental thinkers has been focused at the semantic level—proposing and analyzing definitions of certain key terms, such as anthropocentric, biocentric, wilderness, ecology, or holistic. Work at the semantic level, however, has had very little effect in challenging the scientific metanarrative of nature which is based (...) on the primacy of objective knowledge. Using examples from three postmodern stories, we suggest that the only real challenge to the way humans presently construct and understand their relationship to nature can be found at the narrative level. In our discussion of these stories, we show that nature ceases to be a passive, designified object of the human eye. The result of these narrative shifts is a conception of nature composed of other subjects and otherrealities rather than a nature rendered meaningless by objectivity. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that African-American philosophy emerges from a socio-existential context where persons of African descent have been faced with the absurd in the form of white racism (This paper is a substantially revised version on an earlier article. See Yancy, G. (2011). African-American Philosophy through the Lens of Socio-Existential Struggle. Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 37: 551–574). The concept of struggle, given the above, functions as both descriptive and heuristic vis-à-vis the meaning of African American philosophy. Expanding (...) upon Charles Mills’ concept of non-Cartesian sums, I demonstrate the inextricable link between Black lived experience, struggle, and the morphology of meta-philosophical assumptions and philosophical problems specific to African-American philosophy. Because of the philosophical pretensions of white Western philosophy, with it claims to universal truth and objective knowledge, the particularity of African-American philosophical concerns with questions of embodiment and race is often deemed ersatz or non-philosophical. In this article, I argue that whiteness as the transcendental norm is productive of a form of ignorance endemic to Western philosophical practices that are myopic and hegemonic. Finally, African-American philosophy is theorized as a gift, as a critical counter-narrative that can be deployed to fissure Western philosophy’s narcissism. (shrink)

Sociological research on moral panics, long understood as “struggles for cultural power,” has focused on the social groups and media conditions that enable moral panics to emerge, and on the consequences of moral panics for the social control systems of societies. In this article I turn instead to modeling the specific cultural process of how the conditions for a moral panic are turned into an actual moral panic, moving the understanding of moral panic away from its Durkheimian origins and towards (...) a process-relational cultural sociology. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theory of myth and Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, the paper posits the cultural process of resignification via synecdoche and metanarrative as the driver of the disproportion, concern, hostility, consensus, and volatility of moral panics. This process can be carefully traced in the case of the Salem Witch Trials; a retrospective reading reveals the same process at work in the “Mods and Rockers” panic analyzed by Stanley Cohen. Beyond moral panics, theorizing resignification as a non-exclusive counterpoint to framing and ideational embeddedness enriches the theoretical repertoire of cultural sociology. “Deep culture” and mythological signification can, using the schema proposed here, be understood as practical accomplishments—rhetorical responses to particular situations that, when performed successfully, legitimate violence and other forms of domination. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Cybernetic Foundations for Psychology” by Bernard Scott. Upshot: Scott’s ideas of a unifying conceptual framework and metanarrative for the seemingly divergent psychology fields may be met with challenges. Four obstacles are presented, which can be addressed in order to mitigate resistance to Scott achieving his goal of cybernetics fulfilling these dual roles in the psychologies.

There are three main types of atonement, namely the ‘classic’ type where Christ is a Victor, the ‘Latin’ type where Christ is satisfaction and the type of ‘humanism’ in which God is Love. These three types contain language of violence. However, the most striking language of violence is the ‘Latin’ type, where God is seen as the Angry one, who is thirsty for blood and asking to be satisfied. The sacrifice of redemption is seen as the idea of ‘bribe to (...) God’. Some theologians reject this idea and look for other alternatives. This article aims to find other alternatives while maintaining the idea of redemption sacrifice. The author uses a Jewish perspective in reading the Bible. From the entire Bible metanarrative, the authors construct the theory of atonement by focusing on the idea of Besorat Hageulah, the Gospel of redemption. On the cross is the sacrifice for redemption that expresses God’s justice and love. The bloodshed on the cross is not to satisfy God, who is angry, but as a sign of God’s love for humans according to the demands of justice ‘life shall go for life’ (KJV, Dt 19:21).Contribution: This article is interdisciplinary in the sense that it touches on issues such as redemption, mercy and peace. In this article, the author has shown how redemption brings peace and love. The implication is in the life of the nation and state as God’s creatures. (shrink)

Risalat-al-Tayr is the symbolic story of the fall of the soul/intellect from the heavenly world, its being captivated in the mundane world, and its effort for liberation and eternal unification with intellectus agens. There are many symbols in the story including bird, hunter, trap, homesickness, journey, captivity, mountain etc. In this treatise, Avicenna proposes a supernaturalistic theory of the meaning of life, according to which the life will be meaningful only if a person discovers an essential goal in her life (...) and tries to reach it. It is necessary for the goal to be actually valuable and for the person to be actually successful in achieving that goal. The only choice for such a goal is God. For Avicenna, the meaning of life is tied to immortality of the soul, existence of God, the epistemic ability of intellect, and the possibility of human evolution to the extent that she will be eternally unified with intellectus agens. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with the theme of ‘process over product’—a theme that is argued to be increasingly problematised as an influential narrative in the construction and transmission of a philosophy of early education. The importance of producing children of ‘competence’ through appropriate educational processes is associated with assumptions regarding what counts as an appropriate educational journey for children before they reach school age. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, and Jean‐François Lyotard, this paper considers the purpose and tensions (...) of articulating process as more important than product in early childhood. It is argued that the articulation of the child as a particular kind of process‐oriented player leads to an uncritical acceptance of technologies of governing the child. Furthermore, discourse asserting the importance of processes of play reveals a crisis in understanding what it means to be a player, and what the purpose of the process of play might be. Process contributes to a narrow understanding of a performative purpose of play as a processing of information. A role of the educator, this paper argues, is then to critically engage with the transmission of the theme of process. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with the theme of ‘process over product’—a theme that is argued to be increasingly problematised as an influential narrative in the construction and transmission of a philosophy of early education. The importance of producing children of ‘competence’ through appropriate educational processes is associated with assumptions regarding what counts as an appropriate educational journey for children before they reach school age. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, and Jean‐François Lyotard, this paper considers the purpose and tensions (...) of articulating process as more important than product in early childhood. It is argued that the articulation of the child as a particular kind of process‐oriented player leads to an uncritical acceptance of technologies of governing the child. Furthermore, discourse asserting the importance of processes of play reveals a crisis in understanding what it means to be a player, and what the purpose of the process of play might be. Process contributes to a narrow understanding of a performative purpose of play as a processing of information. A role of the educator, this paper argues, is then to critically engage with the transmission of the theme of process. (shrink)

In his Gospel, John reveals this key leadership principle: effective leaders harness the power of narrative to illuminate the metanarrative and connect people to it. John uses narrative techniques to make invisible spiritual realities visible and thus succeeds in connecting people to the metanarrative. John forges a link between people and the metanarrative by showing individuals how their own stories fit into the biblical metanarrative, fulfilling his purpose: ‘These are written that you may believe…’. The church (...) is transmitted through the ages by leaders who write. Because the metanarrative is a story and story is accessible to all audiences, the biblical metanarrative is not dependent on culture, time, or context; it transcends the ages, enabling John to lead and write from the present as well as for the future. Thus, John illuminates the metanarrative not only for the infant church but for all Christians to come. Christian leaders today also need to communicate so their people can see their place in the metanarrative of Scripture. (shrink)

Postmodemism's censure of metanarratives expresses a moral claim and moral concern about those who have spawned injustice in the name of Truth. Ironically, while this censure is an indictment against the historic failures of the Christian church, it is also a corroboration of Christian theology. On postmodernism, a moral claim must be understood either instrumentally (emotivism or prescriptivism) or ideally (subjectivism or intersubjectivism), and neither is adequate. Rather, the moral claim requires moral realism. Moral realism, however, is best explained by (...) theism. While sharing many of postmodemism's moral concerns, theism—especially Christian theism—can best enable and satisfy these concerns, whereas postmodernism can only frustrate them. Thus, theism uniquely enables moral accountability, communication, and tolerance. Moreover, Christian theism, in virtue of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, uniquely redeems moral concerns from futility and offers hope to those concerned for justice. (shrink)

This article locates Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019) in the context of the broader trajectory of his career-long critique of the bourgeois centred subject. It argues that, for Jameson, the project of critique requires systematic depersonalisation at the level of thought. Contrary to negative liberal humanist interpretations of depersonalisation, Jameson stresses its hidden, revolutionary potential. Where his earlier work eschewed metanarratives of modernity premised upon shifts in subjectivity, preferring conjunctural or situational analyses, his more recent work – Antinomies of (...) Realism (2013) and Allegory and Ideology in particular – develops a materialist version of just such metanarratives. The article concludes with a detailed application of Jameson’s allegorical method to the figure of the ‘person’ under capitalism, which can be sub-divided into the four levels of: individual, citizen/juridical person, infrastructural personifications, and the realm of social reproduction. (shrink)

This article engages with the arguments forwarded by Perez Zagorin against the possible consequences of postmodernism for history as it is currently conceived of particularly in its "proper" professional/academic form . In an overtly positioned response which issues from a close reading of Zagorin's text, I argue that his all-too-typical misunderstandings of postmodernism need to be "corrected"-not, however, to make postmodernism less of a threat to "history as we have known it," or to facilitate the assimilation of its useful elements (...) while exorcising its "extremes." My "corrections" instead forward the claim that, understood positively and integrated into those conditions of postmodernity which postmodernism variously articulates at the level of theory, such theory signals the possible "end of history," not only in its metanarrative styles but also in that particular and peculiar professional genre Zagorin takes as equivalent to history per se. And I want to argue that if this theory is understood in ways which choose not to give up the "discourse of emancipation" after the failure of its first attempt in the "experiment of modernity," then this ending can be considered "a good thing.". (shrink)

A key consequence of globalisation is the integrative approach to reality whereby emphasis is placed on interdependence. Religion being an expression of human culture is equally affected by this cultural revolution. The main objective of this paper is to examine how religious affiliation, among Christians, influences attitudes towards the application of psychological sciences to the assuagement of human suffering. The sociological theory of structural functionalism was deployed to explain attitudinal appraisal. Ethnographic methodology, through quantitative analysis of administered questionnaire, was also (...) used. The study reveals that religious tenets largely shape attitudinal appraisal and redefine the borders of globalisation’s metanarratives. (shrink)

Decolonisation discourse has gained significant momentum in South Africa with the rise of the various #MustFall movements that strive to rid South Africa of its colonial vestiges. But does South Africa need another national metanarrative that envisions an ideal South Africa and champions utopian social ideals? Following the logic of Johan Degenaar and Dirkie Smit, this contribution argues that we should refrain from developing social meta-narratives that seek to frame a single South African identity and social ethos. However, we (...) do need a grammar for peaceful coexistence that goes beyond legal and procedural considerations to establish basic parameters for a constructive social discourse that promotes peaceful coexistence. Such a grammar cannot be imposed unilaterally on social groupings but should be framed by a public discussion aimed at reaching a consensus among social imaginaries on the rules of discourse. Drawing on Reformed thinkers such as John Calvin and John Althusius, the essay continues to discuss the contribution that the Reformed tradition can make to such a grammar. The last part of the essay proceeds to apply the proposed grammar as a benchmark to evaluate the validity of decolonisation discourse. (shrink)

Pragmatism has enjoyed a major resurgence in Anglo-American philosophy over the course of the last decade or two, and Robert Brandom’s work – particularly his 1994 tome Making it Explicit (MIE) – has been at the vanguard of this resurgence (Brandom 1994).2 But pragmatism comes in several surprisingly distinct flavours. Authors such as Hubert Dreyfus find their roots in certain parts of Heidegger and in phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and they privilege embodied, preconceptual skills as opposed to discursive practices as (...) the basic sites of meaning and agency (Dreyfus 1991; Dreyfus 1992; Todes 2001). With strong inheritances from Dewey and Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty has championed a pragmatism whose core emphasis is on the rejection of transcendental truth and high metaphysical theorizing (Rorty 1982), and this anti-theoretical banner has been taken up by several prominent ethicists, among others. For his part, Brandom, who purports to offer a systematic theory of language and meaning grounded on a foundation of pragmatic normative relationships between speakers, looks back instead to Sellars and Quine for his stripe of pragmatism. Near the start of MIE, he writes: The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. (Brandom 1994, xiii) Despite his professed pragmatism, Brandom is no foe of high theory or metanarratives, and he is vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while our bodily encounters with the world in perception and in action serve as language entry and exit points respectively.. (shrink)

The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market category disappeared, even though considerable (...) quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery. (shrink)

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Duke University Press, 1991.

The aim of this essay is to specify the chief concern for post-Marxist political strategy as the discovery or invention of a new political logic. Beginning with Laclau and Mouffe’s influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, this essay extends Lyotard’s well-known diagnosis of the status of metanarratives to a consideration of the conditions for political resistance and dissent. Using concepts drawn from the work of Althusser, Nealon, and others, it reworks Laclau and Mouffe’s appropriation of Gramsci’s (...) concept of hegemony in order to separate it from any foundational, normative political identity. In conclusion, the essay uses Bergson’s discussion of intuition and fabulation in order to begin to articulate the concepts of a democratic politics. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Citation Information -- Introduction -- 1 The Philosophy of Early Childhood: Examining the Cradle of the Evil, Rational and Free Child -- 2 Child-Rearing: On Government Intervention and the Discourse of Experts -- 3 Out of Place: Economic Imperialisms in Early Childhood Education -- 4 The Politics of Processes and Products in Education: An Early Childhood Metanarrative Crisis? -- 5 Narrative Identity and Early Childhood Education -- 6 Global Crisis: Local Reality? (...) An International Analysis of 'Crisis' in the Early Years -- 7 Otherness 'Without Ostracism or Levelling': Towards Fresh Orientations to Teacher Foreigners in Early Childhood Education -- 8 Meetings Across the Paradigmatic Divide -- 9 An Encounter with 'Sayings' of Curriculum: Levinas and the Formalisation of Infants' Learning -- 10 My Feelings: Power, Politics and Childhood Subjectivities -- 11 In Early Childhood: What's Language About? -- Index. (shrink)

Systemic existential conditions are indelible aspects of a client's reflective and nonreflective modes of consciousness, and therefore fall within the purview of philosophical counseling. This paper focuses on the experience of the dehumanization that is a function of the monetization of all aspects of post-modern neoliberal society. Monetization demands radical self-abandonment, self-anesthesia, auto-aggressive self-exploitation and addiction for functionality within the system. The bankrupt logic of pandemic terrorism confirms that monetization has become the preeminent measure of value. Monetization distorts both reason (...) and value, concealing a covert nihilism masquerading as the new metaphysics. The symbiotic natural world evidences a level of cooperation and coexistence that escapes monetization. Therefore, a monetized society is a society at odds with the world ecosystemand life itself. Caught in a labyrinth ofmonetized dehumanization, clients often participate in the fictional metanarrative of belief in unlimited individual possibility as a hedge against anxiety, depression, powerlessness, anomie, and the logical loop of cognitive dissonance. (shrink)

Within cultural history there is a widespread eschewal of speculative reasoning. This article notes the complicity of the general postmodern avoidance of metanarratives with Anglo-Saxon empiricism and locates the major problem facing cultural history in postmodernism's conflation of trajectories and teleologies. Any discussion of the directionality of history is imputed to be a full-blown teleology. Using previous discussions from different fields, the difference between a teleology and trajectory is defended and, after clarifying certain confusions, it is argued that trajectories, as (...) following the working of generative mechanisms, are necessary to theorize in order to make interesting progress within the field of cultural history. (shrink)

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with a recent trend toward the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is (...) the central problem addressed in this article and one to follow. I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is introduced to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology. (shrink)

Lyotard defines being postmodern as an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’. Such incredulity includes, in particular, skepticism vis-à-vis Enlightenment ideals like autonomy. Motivated by such skepticism, several educational scholars put into question education for autonomy as it is practiced in the formal settings of national school systems. More specifically, they criticize that practices of autonomy education can have certain normalizing and ideological e￿ects that undermine the aim of creating autonomous subjects. This article examines these critiques of education for autonomy and argues that (...) they are best understood as calls for reforming educational practices, and not as outright rejections of education for autonomy. Thus, since the allegedly ‘postmodern’ critiques of autonomy education cannot be plausibly understood as radical ruptures with Enlightenment ideals, the article concludes that these critiques represent (merely) constructive self-critical reflections on what Habermas dubbed the ‘unfinished project of modernity’. (shrink)

Anthropological inquiry has often been considered an agent of intellectual secularization. Not least is this so in the sphere of religion, where anthropological accounts have often been taken to represent the triumph of naturalism. This metanarrative, however, fails to recognize that naturalistic explanations could sometimes be espousedforreligious purposes and in defence of confessional creeds. This essay examines two late nineteenth-century figures – Alexander Winchell in the United States and William Robertson Smith in Britain – who found in anthropological analysis (...) resources to bolster rather than undermine faith. In both cases these individuals found themselves on the receiving end of ecclesiastical censure and were dismissed from their positions at church-governed institutions. But their motivation was to vindicate divine revelation, in Winchell's case from the physical anthropology of human origins and in Smith's from the cultural anthropology of Semitic ritual. (shrink)

Postmodernism has evoked great controversy and it continues to do so today, as it disseminates into general discourse. Some see its principles, such as its fundamental resistance to metanarratives, as frighteningly disruptive, while a growing number are reaping the benefits of its innovative perspective. In Political Theory and Postmodernism, Stephen K. White outlines a path through the postmodern problematic by distinguishing two distinct ways of thinking about the meaning of responsibility, one prevalent in modern and the other in postmodern perspectives. (...) Using this as a guide, White explores the work of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Habermas, as well as 'difference' feminists, with the goal of showing how postmodernism can inform contemporary ethical-political reflection. In his concluding chapter, White examines how this revisioned postmodern perspective might bear on our thinking about justice. (shrink)

This article looks at the contribution of secularisation debates to a critical theory of society. As the relations between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ aspects of modern life grow more vexing, it argues critical theory must eschew its previous secularisation-as-progress metanarrative. Instead, processes of secularisation are better understood as those relationships between public and private beliefs and practices that take place at the boundaries between modern society’s commitment to procedural institutions and substantive value commitments. The article then revisits four different (...) understandings of secularisation that, coming from a variety of intellectual traditions, help us redefine it beyond an exclusive focus on institutional religions: normative questions on the rise and decline of autonomous values; temporal questions on the self-positing of modernity as an historical epoch; political questions on the desacralisation of modern sovereignty and practical questions on the non-technological dimensions of technology. This framework is put to the test in relation to the procedural challenge of democratic fallibility and the substantive challenge of planetary survival. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have paid little attention, positive or negative, to Lyotard’s book The postmodern condition, even though it has been popular in other fields. We set out some of the reasons for this neglect. Lyotard thought that sciences could be justified by non-scientific narratives. We show why this is unacceptable, and why many of Lyotard’s characterisations of science are either implausible or are narrowly positivist. One of Lyotard’s themes is that the nature of knowledge has changed and thereby so (...) has society itself. However much of what Lyotard says muddles epistemological matters about the definition of ‘knowledge’ with sociological claims about how information circulates in modern society. We distinguish two kinds of legitimation of science: epistemic and socio-political. In proclaiming ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ Lyotard has nothing to say about how epistemic and methodological principles are to be justified. He also gives a bad argument as to why there can be no epistemic legitimation, which is based on an act/content confusion, and a confusion between making an agreement and the content of what is agreed to. As for socio-political legitimation, Lyotard’s discussion remains at the abstract level of science as a whole rather than at the level of the particular applications of sciences. Moreover his positive points can be accepted without taking on board any of his postmodernist account of science. Finally we argue that Lyotard’s account of paralogy, which is meant to provide a ‘postmodern’ style of justification, is a failure.Author Keywords: Lyotard; Postmodernism; Science; Knowledge; Legitimation; Philosophy of science. (shrink)

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed (...) in this article and its companion piece, which appeared in Sociological Theory, volume 3, number 2 (1995). I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is used to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology. (shrink)

This essay is framed by conflict between Christianity and Darwinian science over the history of the world and the nature of original human personhood. Evolutionary science narrates a long prehuman geological and biological history filled with vast amounts, kinds, and distributions of apparently random brutal and pointless suffering. It has also unveiled an original human person with animal psychosomatic heredity. This narrative seems to discredit Christianity's metanarrative of the Fall—Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The author contends that the Augustinian (...) story and its character of Adam are implausible, anyway, for reasons of theology and apologetics. He proposes that Christians adopt instead a Supralapsarian metaphysics of original human personhood and existence that grows from the intuitions of Irenaeus. The outcome will be improved Christian theology, more persuasive theodicy, and, above all, peace with Darwinian science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scrutinizing Studio Art and Its StudyHistorical Relations and Contemporary ConditionsElizabeth M. Grierson (bio)Yet art is nevertheless an inquiry, precise and rigorous.—Maurice BlanchotIntroductionThe modern disciplines of art and art history have been going through significant revisions since the 1980s, when the objective domain of knowledge was placed in a contested position by the multiplicity of narratives characterizing postmodern social spaces. Whether there was or was not any disciplinary "crisis" at (...) that time is not at issue here.1 What is of concern is to identify the ways the academy—and specifically the art academy—sought to respond by rethinking disciplinary knowledge and thereby problematizing traditional methodologies of scholarly inquiry. Through the academic privileging of aesthetics and scientific discourses, modern knowledge brought with it a metanarrative appeal to the transcendence of the human spirit through art and religiosity, coupled with the identification of the rational human subject as agent of progress. This discussion is concerned with asking how these metanarratives were intervened or interrogated through art and its study and how those moments of displacement could be identified and analyzed. Ultimately, we may address the question of how discourses of power operate to normalize social practices and silence difference in institutional practices of art and art education. [End Page 111]Crisis in the DisciplinesIn 1982 an issue of Art Journal was dedicated to the theme of the crisis in the disciplines. However, as Donald Preziosi2 points out, if the disciplines of art and art history were deemed by Art Journal to be in crisis, there was only one article (by Oleg Grabar) in that journal issue that addressed this crisis and problematized "the history of the discipline and its methodological prospects for the future."3 In other words, if there was a crisis, and art educators or art historians were feeling it, what constituted the crisis was not yet being addressed. What is of interest is that this was a time when the object of study was under reconsideration and art and its history were part of a revisionist climate of scrutiny and reconsideration. This being so, there was significant expansion to the way fine arts and art history were being approached in the 1980s and 1990s in response to revisionist scholarship. This trend continued to be reinvigorated with the transformations of digital technologies in the 2000s.Art academies of the early 1990s in New Zealand and Australia were starting to grapple with methodological regimes of art history as a discipline in the context of intellectual challenges of postmodernity. Directing these issues to artists and their scholarly needs, educators were opening the discrete academic disciplines to wider intellectual, social, and cultural possibilities of inquiry. Standing before a "great" work of art and proclaiming its greatness had lost its meaning. Jean-François Lyotard had written it thus: "The time is past when we can plant ourselves in front of a Vernet and sigh along with Diderot, 'How beautiful, grand, varied, noble, wise, harmonious, rigorously coloured this is!'"4Threading throughout this discussion is the way one particular art academy was facing this challenge in those postmodernist years of the 1990s. The account tells of processes and principles of pedagogical change, but the implications of this case are not limited to one academy in one location. It was the early 1990s, and the writers of the first degree nominated as "visual arts" in New Zealand were addressing some of the issues of disciplinarity in fine arts and art history. This was the first degree situating what might be called a postmodernist pedagogical approach to fine arts studio and its study. This was at a time when changes in the New Zealand Education Act (1989, 1990) enabled degrees in art to be formally accredited and resourced in tertiary institutions beyond the long-established universities of Auckland (North Island) and Canterbury (South Island). This political move gave opportunity for educational innovation in the pedagogies of fine arts and art history. It was in this context that one independent art school in Auckland, ASA School of Art, seized the moment to work toward a more interdisciplinary notion of practice and theory. Given the opportunity to introduce a more... (shrink)

In this essay, I consider the rival liberal and communitarian accounts of justice emerging in complex, pluralist societies. I argue that we err in posing the question of human rights as a Hobson's choice between a formal, universal metanarrative, as envisioned in philosophical liberalism, or as a merely local, ethnocentric narrative of the western bourgeoisie, as in the communitarian critique. For human rights are best viewed rhetorically, as establishing the possibility of rationally persuasive argument across our varied narrative traditions. (...) The essay concludes by attending to the role of religious belief in the public reason of a postmodern society. (shrink)

This article looks at Marcel Gauchet’s major metahistorical statement, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1985), and uses it to advance a series of claims about the place of secularization in debates within and about French politics, especially in relation to modern French history. The argument is put forward that Gauchet’s work is best understood as offering an alternative philosophy of history to Marxism that could serve to support a broadly republican realignment of French politics in (...) the 1980s. Revisionist historiography concerning the French Revolution likewise played a role in this development, and served as a prerequisite of sorts to Gauchet’s broader historical project. The article also considers Gauchet’s work in light of postmodern skepticism of the utility of historical metanarratives. (shrink)

Several attempts have been made recently to apply Darwinian evolutionary theory to the study of culture change and social history. The essential elements in such a theory are that variations occur in a population, and that a process of selective retention operates during their replication and transmission. Location of such variable “units” in the semantic structure of cognition provides the individual psychological basis for an evolutionary theory of history. Selection operates on both the level of cognition and on its “phenotypic” (...) expression in action in relation to individual preferred sources of psychological satisfaction. Social power comprises the principal selective forces within the sociocultural environment. Sociocultural evolution takes place both as a result of the unintended consequences of action and through the struggle of individuals and groups in pursuit of opposing interests. The implications for historiography are methodological in that evolutionary theory of history sharpens the focus of explanatory situational analysis, and interpretive in that it provides a paradigmatic metanarrative for the understanding of historical change. (shrink)

The authors of the article with reference to the discussions about the status of knowledge in the postmodernism discourse and the "crisis of the intellectual" presented in the works by J.F. Lyotard and Z. Bauman, consider these issues in the context of other social challenges. Interpreting the conducted empirical research results, the research also focuses on the multidisciplinary theoretical analysis of philosophical, psychological and pedagogical literature. The authors note that in the absence of metanarratives, the phenomenon of intellectuals and intellectual (...) work is transformed: postmodern epistemology has changed the opportunities of mass education about how things should stand / what to have / how to act into the multiple / polyphonic / variable / fragmentary / collage dissemination of knowledge. As an argument in the "crisis of intellectuals" discussion, the authors analyze the educators` need and motivation sphere emphasizing constant knowledge enhancement to be a priority for them, which logically affects professional identity reconstruction carried out through self-reference. The paper presents an opinion that intellectuals lack self-perception as a reference social group. We conclude that in the information society, public interaction with the media affecting the reconsideration of the intellectual`s role and status serves as a basis for their legitimation. The results of the conducted survey enable us to conclude that raising educators` intellectual level affects their competences in professional practices. The status of the intellectual-educator is legitimized by their activity in training sessions, discussions, meet-ups and other events. The study presents an algorithm for constructing the intellectual-educator in the conditions of social reality challenges. The research substantiates demand for the intellectual-educator who is IT literate, capable of professional reflection, open to change, motivated for continuous self-development, ready for the reconstruction of professional identity from a knowledge transmitter to an erudite, a creative coach, a supervisor and a moderator. (shrink)

This study is based on Post-cyberpunk in order to highlight the prominence of Postcyberpunk as an emerging representative genre of Postmodern Literature. Technological progress has altered the ontology of being a human in an era of information technology, thus this study aims to critically discuss the issues of id entity and representation. Although ample critical work has been done on genre Postcyberpunk yet this study is unique in a way that it is a collection of different discursive practices related to (...) identity crises presented in selected Post-cyberpunk narratives. It targets to critically analyze the alternations and transformations in representation of identity in the backdrop of Postmodernist Deconstruction of Metanarratives by Lyotard. Apart from the deconstruction of metanarratives this study signifies the relevance of Post-cyberpunk as Postmodernist Literature that represents society through multidimensional discursivity such as capitalism, hypercasaulization, imperialism, religion, economy and technology. This study aims to deconstruct the metanarratives of identity that were considered to be permanent and claimed to be power narratives. It equally represents the deconstruction of center/margin dichotomy by bringing mininarratives into the center. The method adopted for research is SocioCognitve Approach by van Dijk from Critical Discourse Analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article asks whether the philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend can be reasonably classified as postmodernist, a label applied to him by friends and foes alike. After describing some superficial similarities between the style and content of both Feyerabend’s and postmodernist writings, I offer three more robust characterisations of postmodernism in terms of relativism, ‘incredulity to metanarratives’, and ‘depthlessness’. It emerges that none of these characterisations offers a strong justification for classifying Feyerabend as ‘postmodern’ in any significant sense. Indeed, what (...) does emerge is that Feyerabend’s work was fundamentally informed by a humanitarian vision of the value of science that is, in fact, strikingly modern. (shrink)

Often associated with themes in political philosophy and aesthetics, the work of Jean-François Lyotard is most known for his infamous definition of the postmodern in his best-known book, La condition postmoderne, as incredulity towards metanarratives. The claim of this article is that this famous claim of Lyotard is actually embedded in a philosophy of technology, one that is, moreover, still relevant for understanding present technoscience. The first part of the article therefore sketches Lyotard’s philosophy of technology, mainly by correcting three (...) common misconceptions: that La condition postmoderne would only be about metanarratives, whereas in fact, it is mainly about what replaces them, namely performativity; that performativity would be shorthand for capitalism, whereas in reality, capitalism is the latest instance of a longer history of performativity; and that Lyotard’s reflections on science and technology would be restricted to this book alone, whereas in reality, a well-articulated philosophy of technology, centered around the concept of technoscience, is found in his later work. The second part of the article then aims to highlight the contemporary relevance of this philosophy of technoscience through a brief examination of two contemporary technosciences: synthetic biology and data science. (shrink)

In "The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, " Lubica Ucnik examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patocka. For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened to (...) undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary life-world: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl s concerns in today s context, Ucnik first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patocka. Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka. Ucnik provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.". (shrink)