World politics, international relations, representative government. Author's works in demand.

This article argues that it was not only physical borders that challenged people’s biographies in the 20th century, but also shifts in ideology, discourse and predominant languages. I shall explore the biography of a man called Cornel, a native of Bukovina who was a communist cultural official in Romania’s capital Bucharest in the 1960s and who became a priest in the 1970s. I shall show that not only obvious breaks such as the beginning and end of communist rule, but ideological (...) shifts too within Romanian communism prompted Cornel to thoroughly reassess himself. For Cornel, it was the ‘mini-cultural revolution’ of 1971 under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu that quickly convinced him to leave his job at the Romanian Ministry of Culture and reinvent himself as an Orthodox priest. But was his self-reinvention successful? A thorough analysis of his biography shows that his linguistic biography—oscillating between Romanian, Ukrainian and Russian—contains crucial elements of productive adaptation and continuity that enabled him repeatedly and successfully to circumvent borders imposed by newly emerging policies. His “third” identity as a writer has given him continuity and self-assurance. (shrink)

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the (...) Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

The language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under any single rubric - 'dialogism,' 'marxism,' 'prosaics,' 'authorship' - because the philosophic foundation of his writing rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The theoretical tension of these positions creates philosophical impasses in Bakhtin's work, which have been neglected or ignored partly because these impasses are themselves mirrored by the problems of antifoundationalist and materialist tendencies in literary scholarship. In Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism Michael Bernard-Donals examines various incarnations (...) of phenomenological and materialist theory - including the work of Jauss, Fish, Rorty, Althusser, and Pecheux - and places them beside Bakhtin's work, providing a contextualised study of Bakhtin, a critique of the problems of contemporary critics, and an original contribution to literary theory. (shrink)

The early Sino-Western contact was through the way in which religion and language interact to produce language contact. However, research on this contact is relatively limited to date, particularly in the realm of English language materials. In fact, there is a paucity of research on Western religions in English Language Teaching textbooks. By applying corpus linguistics as a tool and the Critical Discourse Analysis as the theoretical framework, this manuscript critically investigates the significant semantic domains in ten English language textbook (...) series that are officially approved and are widely used in Chinese universities. The findings suggest that various Western religious beliefs, which are the highly unusual topics in previous Chinese ELT textbooks, are represented in the textbook corpus. The results also show that when presenting the views and attitudes toward Western religious beliefs, these textbooks have adopted an eclectic approach to the material selection. Surprisingly, positive semantic prosody surrounding the concept of religion is evident and no consistent negative authorial stance toward religion is captured. Atheism has been assumed to be in the center of Chinese intellectual traditions and the essence of the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Interestingly, the findings from this study provide a new understanding of Chinese foreign language textbooks in the new era, and its addition to the literature on the study of ELT textbooks, as well as its development worldwide. (shrink)

We offer an analysis of future morphemes as epistemic operators. The main empirical motivation comes from the fact that future morphemes have systematic purely epistemic readings—not only in Greek and Italian, but also in Dutch, German, and English will. The existence of epistemic readings suggests that the future expressions quantify over epistemic, not metaphysical alternatives. We provide a unified analysis for epistemic and predictive readings as epistemic necessity, and the shift between the two is determined compositionally by the lower tense. (...) Our account thus acknowledges a systematic interaction between modality and tense—but the future itself is a pure modal, not a mixed temporal/modal operator. We show that the modal base of the future is nonveridical, i.e. it includes p and ¬p worlds, parallel to epistemic modals such as must, and present arguments that future morphemes are a category that stands in between epistemic modals and predicates of personal taste. We identify, finally, a subclass of epistemic futures which are ratificational, and argue that will is a member of this class. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest of philosophers. (...) Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)

J. L. Austin was one of the more influential British philosophers of his time, due to his rigorous thought, extraordinary personality, and innovative philosophical method. According to John Searle, he was both passionately loved and hated by his contemporaries. Like Socrates, he seemed to destroy all philosophical orthodoxy without presenting an alternative, equally comforting, orthodoxy. -/- Austin is best known for two major contributions to contemporary philosophy: first, his ‘linguistic phenomenology’, a peculiar method of philosophical analysis of the concepts and (...) ways of expression of everyday language; and second, speech act theory, the idea that every use of language carries a performative dimension (in the well-known slogan, “to say something is to do something”). Speech act theory has had consequences and import in research fields as diverse as philosophy of language, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, linguistics, artificial intelligence and feminist philosophy. -/- This article describes Austin’s linguistic method and his speech act theory, and it describes the original contributions he made to epistemology and philosophy of action. It closes by focusing on two main developments of speech act theory─the dispute between conventionalism and intentionalism, and the debate on free speech, pornography, and censorship. (shrink)

The communist norm requires that scientists widely share the results of their work. Where did this norm come from, and how does it persist? Michael Strevens provides a partial answer to these questions by showing that scientists should be willing to sign a social contract that mandates sharing. However, he also argues that it is not in an individual credit-maximizing scientist's interest to follow this norm. I argue against Strevens that individual scientists can rationally conform to the communist norm, even (...) in the absence of a social contract or other ways of socially enforcing the norm, by proving results to this effect in a game-theoretic model. This shows that the incentives provided to scientists through the priority rule are sufficient to explain both the origins and the persistence of the communist norm, adding to previous results emphasizing the benefits of the incentive structure created by the priority rule. (shrink)

This chapter examines Chomsky's influence on the modeling of linguistic variation, focusing specifically on the notion of parameter. It begins by examining the different conceptualizations of “parameter” in Chomsky's work, from the Government and Binding era, through early Minimalism to more recent approaches which locate variation in phonological form. The idea that grammatical variation should be modeled by abstract parameters is arguably one of Chomsky's most important contributions to linguistic theory, and one which has had significant influence. Two domains of (...) variation (word order and argument expression) are used as case studies to illustrate how Chomsky's ideas have given rise to different kinds of parametric models. Finally, the chapter discusses some of the potential objections to the concept of parameters before concluding. (shrink)

This volume sets out to discuss the role of norms and normativity in both language and linguistics from a multiplicity of perspectives. These concepts are centrally important to the philosophy and methodology of linguistics, and their role and nature need to be investigated in detail. The chapters address a range of issues from general questions about ontology, epistemology and methodology to aspects of particular subfields (such as semantics and historical linguistics) or phenomena (such as construal and code-switching). The volume aims (...) to further our understanding of language and linguistics as well as to encourage further discussion on the metatheory of linguistics. Due to the fundamental nature of the issues under discussion, this volume will be of interest to all linguists regardless of their background or fields of expertise and to philosophers concerned with language or other normative domains. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of CommunicationG. Thomas GoodnightThere are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the years moving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and commenced China’s modern journey toward global reengagement. Revolutions in (...) Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule. Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from the Communist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty-year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholars were at work refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, transforming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication.Thomas B. Farrell and Jürgen Habermas were trained in different traditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works [End Page 421] share a commitment to philosophical inquiry directed toward critique and understanding the cultural, social, and linguistic constitution of communication. As a rhetorician and as a philosopher, these scholars share an evident passion for scholarly argument and for engagement with the controversies of public culture. In different ways, both were at work during the portentous years of transition from the Cold War to new democracies and incipient globalization. Each constructed a guarded program of hope in the possibilities of communicative reflection and reasoning. In the post-World War II era, such a broad, positive vision took long to develop. After the brutal realities of the Holocaust became publicly known in the late 1940s, “the generous faith in rationality and the possibilities of human progress which underlay much of earlier historical thought seems discredited today” (Katznelson 2003, 2). The Enlightenment possibilities for reason had been invested in the technical efficiency of modern institutions that produced the capacity to kill systematically without constraints. Ira Katznelson points to a generation of scholars—including individuals at Chicago, Columbia, the New School, and others—who began in the 1950s to engage in a project that would “shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore” an Enlightenment more critical and less susceptible to co-optation by the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and evil (2003, 2). The work of Farrell and Habermas belongs to the extended post-Holocaust moment, where the possibilities of reflective reason in ethical and moral deliberations were set carefully on a road to personal and collective emancipation.Max Horkheimer saw in the modern, postwar welfare state little reason for optimism. Writing in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War, he concluded: “Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (1974, 22). “Salestalk” by “the surrogates of culture” creates an “illusory triumph of democratic progress that consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived” (Horkheimer 1974, 31). Scientifically engineered propaganda renders public opinion as “a substitute for reason.” With such tools, the forces of barbarism are always waiting in the wings to seize power. Early on, Habermas shared these views. His thesis, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), tracks the opening possibilities of communicative reasoning in the liminal spaces of eighteenth-century coffeehouses where frank talk replaced hierarchically driven politeness, the development of these talks into the practices of deliberative democracy, and the decline of deliberative democracy with the union of the state and mass media in producing spectacles in [End Page 422] support of rituals of legitimation. Habermas broke with Horkheimer over the dissertation, however. A thesis of decline, by itself, leaves open only the route of totalizing critique. While never far from critique of institutional practices, Habermas spent his career in opening a positive... (shrink)

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, Lukács laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text. For (...) this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which Lukács wrote at the time of Soul and Form, and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Lukács's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Lukácsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience. (shrink)

Should Marxists support universal basic income (UBI), i.e., a regular cash income paid to all without a means test or work requirement? This paper considers one important argument that they should, namely that UBI would be instrumentally effective in helping to bring about communism. It argues that previous answers to this question have paid insufficient attention to a logically prior question: what is Marx’s account of communism? In reply, it distinguishes two different accounts: a left-libertarian version that associates (...) communism with the freedom to live and work how one wants, and a perfectionist version that associates communism with the overcoming of alienated labour and self-realisation in work. It argues that UBI would make steps towards the left-libertarian account but not the perfectionist account. Ultimately, then, the question “should Marxists support basic income?” is shown to partly depend on which account of communism Marxists want to bring about. (shrink)

In this paper, we present results of cross-linguistic studies of Japanese and English knowing how constructions that show radical differences in knowledge-how attributions with large effect sizes. The results suggest that the relevant ability is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge-how captured by Japanese constructions. We shall argue that such data will open up a gap between otherwise indistinguishable two conceptions of the very topic of knowledge-how, or the debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, namely a debate about the nature of (...) knowledge-how and a debate about the state captured by “know how”, which we call the knowledge-how interpretation and the state interpretation, respectively. Consequently, the results have not only various possible philosophical implications that have not been considered or discussed in the literature but also provide new topics in the theory of knowledge-how, including the question of which interpretation of the topic is correct itself. (shrink)

This book provides a philosophical theory explicating the cognitive contribution of metaphor. Metaphor effects a transference of meaning, not between two terms, but between two structured domains of content, or ‘semantic fields’. Semantic fields, construed as necessary to a theory of word-meaning, provide the contrastive and affinitive relations that govern a term’s literal use. In a metaphoric use, these relations are projected into a second domain which is thereby reordered with significant cognitive effects. The book provides a revision and refinement (...) of ‘the semantic theory of metaphor’. Taking into account pragmatic considerations and recent linguistic and psychological studies, the book aims to forge a new understanding of the relation between metaphoric and literal meaning. It illustrates the thesis with sensitive and systematic analyses of metaphors found in literature, philosophy, science, and everyday language. Keywords:,, . (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different approaches (...) to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons ed. by Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru and Andrei TerianLaura Elena Savu WalkerMatei, Alexandru, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, editors. Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons. Bloomsbury, 2021. 376pp.Far from “mourning” the demise of theory, this timely and thoughtfully curated essay collection testifies to its “renewed vitality,” its compelling presence “across (...) fields, domains of life, and geocultural boundaries,” and its power to build an ever-expanding world community of practioners who are forming what has come to be known as a “theory commons” (ix). As the collection’s editors point out, theory’s new lease on life hinges on ensuring both the democratic workings of this “world discourse formation” (1) and on the responsible theorizing of the very notion of community in “a world threatened by all kinds of anti-communal actions and reactions, from runaway globalization to exacerbated tribalism and tunnel-vision politics” (x). Working on the margins, specifically, out of a Romanian “lab” called The Critical Theory Institute (CTI), which opened its doors in early 2000, the contributors seek to revise the “standard history of theory,” one whose “Western origins, authority, and cultural compass ” strike them as “exceedingly reductive” (3). This project of geotheoretical repositioning and recalibration aims to recast theory as a “quintessentially cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, trans- and intercontinental undertaking” (4). As such, it carries on the project, launched in a previous volume, Romanian Literature as World Literature (2018), of fashioning an alternative to the nation-state paradigm that has long shaped literary and intellectual histories. In both of these works, Romanian critics and theorists have tuned into a wide range of voices, and tapped into a shared conceptual and methodological apparatus—itself the product of “an ethno-linguistic medley of traditions” (8). This approach informs what editors see as the “epoch-making” (17) discursive paradigm that has taken shape in globally networked post-Cold War societies (17), a viral model of cultural influence that fosters an ontology of “contact, contagion, of infection, dissemination, and horizontal accumulation” (15).To give us a sense of theory’s complex genealogy and evolution, the editors reference the Bulgarian critic Galin Tihanov, who has attributed [End Page 122] important developments in contemporary theory to the achievements of theorists (Nikolai Trubetskoi, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, and Georg Lukács) and schools of thought (Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle). In “Traveling Theory” (1983) and “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (2000), Edward Said called attention to the migratory nature of contributions made, for instance, by Georg Lukács, whose theories moved across different European locales in this period. Since then, contemporary theory has branched out to integrate the travels and travails of scholars affiliated with theory labs located in Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and last, but not least, Romania (10).Theory in the “Post” Era highlights five characteristics that distinguish theory in the “post” era from earlier forms: 1) It has a “reluctantly epoch-alist” thrust (19; original italics), which assumes that the “post” lexicon entails “rupture, discontinuity, and opposition” (19), radical departures, tentative claims, provisional conclusions, and ex-centric perspectives; 2) it adopts a “self-reflexive and experimental” (20; original italics) stance in which theorists invoke inherited approaches or invent new ones; 3) it introduces a “transdisciplinary” (21; original italics) scope that allows authors to interrogate the foundations, aims, and methods of theoretical discourse and practice across several knowledge domains, from which they “borrow whole vocabularies and toolkits” (21); 4) it is “nationally, transnationally, and ecologically affiliative” (20) in ways that allow theorists to “think with others at a distance” (21) about global issues; and 5) it is programmatic, placing critical and theoretical concerns in the service of “the ethical, the political, and the communal” (22). Organized around three main themes (“Aesthetics,” “Temporalities,” and “Critical Modes”), the essays juxtapose discussions of pivotal historical events and cultural phenomena with literary analyses of Romantic era “classics,” modernist experiments, and postmodern works of the post-Communist era, a corpus that includes, but is not limited to, landmark works of national culture that are now part of a fast-expanding planetary... (shrink)

The expression “linguistic Kantianism” is widely used to refer to ideas about thought and cognition being determined by language — a conception characteristic of 20th century analytic philosophy. In this article, I conduct a comparative analysis of Kant’s philosophy and views falling under the umbrella expression “linguistic Kantianism.” First, I show that “linguistic Kantianism” usually presupposes a relativistic conception that is alien to Kant’s philosophy. Second, I analyse Kant’s treatment of linguistic determinism and the place of his ideas in the (...) 18th century intellectual milieu and provide an overview of relevant contemporary literature. Third, I show that authentic Kantianism and “linguistic Kantianism” belong to two different types of transcendentalism, to which I respectively refer as the “transcendentalism of the subject” and the “transcendentalism of the medium.” The transcendentalism of the subject assigns a central role to the faculties of the cognising subject. The transcendentalism of the medium assigns the role of an “active” element neither to the external world nor to the faculties of the cognising subject, but to something in between — language, in the case of “linguistic Kantianism.” I conclude that the expression “linguistic Kantianism” can be misleading when it comes to the origins of this theory. It would be more appropriate to refer to this theory by the expression “linguistic transcendentalism,” thus avoiding an incorrect reference to Kant. (shrink)

Introduction. PHilosophy of Language and Linguistics: The Formal Turn Piotr Stalmaszczyk Gottlob Frege, Philosophy of Language, and Predication Piotr Stalmaszczyk Philosophy, Linguistics and Semantic Interpretation Christian Bassac An Unresolved Issue: Nonsense in Natural Language and Non-Classical Logical and Semantic Systems Elzbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska Varieties of Context-Dependence Tadeusz Ciecierski The Logos of Semantic Structure Marie Du í, Bjørn Jespersen and Pavel Materna The Good Samaritan and the Hygienic Cook: A Cautionary Tale About Linguistic Data Chris Fox The Meaning of Multiple Quantified Sentences: (...) Where Formal Semantics Meets Psycholinguistics Justyna Grudzinska The Hybrid Theory of Reference for Proper Names Filip Kawczynski On the Nature of Statistical Language Laws Agnieszka Kulacka Vagueness and Contextualism Joanna Odrowaz-Sypniewska The Myth of Semantic Structure Jaroslav Peregrin Scalar Implicatures, Communication and Language Evolution Salvatore Pistoia Reda Semantics and Contextuality: The Case of Pia s Leaves Stefano Predelli Is Logico-Semantical Analysis of Natural Language Expressions a Translation? Jirí Raclavský Beyond the Fregean Myth: The Value of Logical Values Fabien Schang Modal Calculus of Illocutionary Logic Andrew Schumann Subjectivity in Philosophy and Linguistics Barbara Sonnenhauser Asymmetrical Semantics Mieszko Talasiewicz Truth: An Anti-realist Adequacy Condition Luca Tranchini Belief Reports: Defaults, Intentions and Scorekeeping Giacomo Turbanti On Truth in Time Bartosz Wieckowski Order William J. SUllivan Indexes. (shrink)

Al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations have transformed Arab politics over the last decade.

This paper argues against both conceptual and linguistic analysis as sources of a priori knowledge. Whether such knowledge is possible turns on the nature of concepts. The paper's chief contention is that none of the main views about what concepts are can underwrite the possibility of such knowledge.

Volume of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn, ed. Keith Brown.

There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (Barsalou, 1999;Bergen, Chang, & Narayan, 2004;Bergen, Narayan, & Feldman, 2003;Narayan, Bergen, & Weinberg, 2004;Richardson, Spivey, McRae, & Barsalou, 2003;Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001;Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). This imagery can have motor or perceptual content. Three main questions about the process remain under‐explored, however. First, are lexical associations with perception or motion sufficient to yield mental simulation, or is the integration of lexical semantics (...) into larger structures, like sentences, necessary? Second, what linguistic elements (e.g., verbs, nouns, etc.) trigger mental simulations? Third, how detailed are the visual simulations that are performed? A series of behavioral experiments address these questions, using a visual object categorization task to investigate whether up‐ or down‐related language selectively interferes with visual processing in the same part of the visual field (followingRichardson et al., 2003). The results demonstrate that either subject nouns or main verbs can trigger visual imagery, but only when used in literal sentences about real space—metaphorical language does not yield significant effects—which implies that it is the comprehension of the sentence as a whole and not simply lexical associations that yields imagery effects. These studies also show that the evoked imagery contains detail as to the part of the visual field where the described scene would take place. (shrink)

György Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. _Soul and Form_ was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, Lukács laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text. For (...) this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which Lukács wrote at the time of _Soul and Form_, and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Lukács's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Lukácsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience. (shrink)

Contact Info: Paul Pietroski Department of Linguistics University of Maryland Marie Mount Hall College Park, MD 20742 USA Email: [email protected] Phone: +1 301-395-1747..

Democracy has been a flawed hegemony since the fall of communism. Its flexibility, its commitment to equality of representation, and its recognition of the legitimacy of opposition politics are all positive features for political institutions. But democracy has many deficiencies: it is all too easily held hostage by powerful interests; it often fails to advance social justice; and it does not cope well with a number of features of the political landscape, such as political identities, boundary disputes, and environmental (...) crises. Although democracy is valuable it fits uneasily with other political values and is in many respects less than equal to the demands it confronts. In this volume prominent political theorists and social scientists present original discussions of such central issues. Democracy's Values deals with the nature and value of democracy, particularly the tensions between it and such goods as justice, equality, efficiency, and freedom. (shrink)

The official Afrikaans Bible translations, published in 1933/1953, 1983 and 2020, influenced Reformed theology, sociopolitical perceptions and the role of the church in society. These issues bled through in the translations via the hermeneutical scope of the different eras. This study focuses on the influence of the hermeneutic foundations of the translators on the content, style and linguistic choices in these translations. The differences between the translations are quite obvious to the reader and a reflection of the fact that different (...) translation strategies were followed. There were vastly different sociopolitical and religious contexts prevailing during the different translation projects. Not only did the sociohistorical setting in South Africa undergo dramatic changes, but internationally there were historic events, such as the two World Wars, the rise and fall of communism, globalisation and the rapid development of technology and the Internet. No official hermeneutic strategies were documented or self-reflectively employed by the translators of the Afrikaans Bibles and therefore this study will approach the hermeneutics of the translations from a descriptive point of view. Sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts together with developments in theological reflection will provide the background for understanding the prevailing hermeneutics of the translations.Contribution: A new Afrikaans Bible was released in 2020, and a need arose to put the Afrikaans translations in applicable hermeneutical contexts. This discussion provides insights into the hermeneutical backgrounds of the three official Afrikaans translations. This contributes to the knowledge base of Afrikaans Bible translations and provides new insights into the hermeneutics of these translations. (shrink)

L’article porte sur le rapport entre communisme et féminisme dans l’entre-deux-guerres en prenant comme point de départ un débat transnational entre chercheuses d’horizons divers, débat paru dans une revue sur l’histoire des femmes et du genre dans les pays d’Europe de l’Est fondée récemment. Trois approches différentes permettent d’éclairer la position ambiguë du féminisme dans les organisations communistes et l’Internationale communiste. Dans un premier temps, ce sont les opportunités et les limites de l’égalité formelle offerte aux femmes communistes qui sont (...) abordées, puis les positions théoriques les plus innovantes et leur réception. Enfin trois cas de femmes cadres serviront d’exemples pour illustrer les négociations nécessaires, dans la pratique, pour concilier les attentes contradictoires propagées par le régime stalinien et les organisations communistes. (shrink)

This volume is the first attempt to explicitly investigate how the multiplicity of religions and forms of spirituality interconnect with the multiplicities of language, such as digital lingo and the language of science. This book analyzes how religious and linguistic multiplicities become a pluralism, that is, how they enter into polyphonic relations, as well as how they interconnect, grow together, and why they often clash. The contributors are renown international scholars working in interreligious dialogue, philosophy and sociology of religion, history (...) of religious arts, and the crossroads of religion and science. This text provides the setting for a dialogue on a rich variety of religious languages and traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Jainism, and Christianity. Each chapter connects these traditions either in profound interreligious means, or with linguistic codes such as: vernacular speeches, sacred dialects and technological language. Some linguist examples are the impact of Artificial Intelligence on religious beliefs, the synergy between science and religion in the alchemist tradition and in magic, as well as the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and current religious practices. This volume contributes to interfaith studies and teaching, to sociology and philosophy of religion, and finally to the history and anthropology of religion and the sacred arts. It is intended for students, researchers, instructors and professionals alike. (shrink)

This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original situations of communication, this view rejects both autonomist and direct continuity views of the art-everyday relation. We start by (...) situating the idea of linguistic bodies within the enactive approach, spelling out relevant aspects concerning the significance of language for human life and perception (Sect. 2). Then we embark on a discussion of aspects of Shaun Gallagher’s and Alva Noë’s enactivist perspectives on art experience, highlighting places where their views align with and depart from ours (Sect. 3). The last two sections aim to lay out the transformative view in more detail, proposing a pluralistic understanding of art media and a view of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought (Sects. 4 and 5). (shrink)