The view that narrative artworks can offer insights into our lives, in particular, into the nature of the emotions, has gained increasing popularity in recent years. However, talk of narrative often involves reference to a perspective or point of view, which indicates a more fundamental mechanism at work. In this article, I argue that our understanding of the emotions is incomplete without adequate attention to the perspectival structures in which they are embedded. Drawing on Bennett Helm’s theory (...) of emotion, I argue that the narrative view fails to take into account the influence of perspective on the emotions. In order to address this gap in our understanding of the emotions, I highlight a mode of engagement with literature that prioritizes the perspectival features of a work. Focusing on lyric poetry, I argue that non-narrative artworks are those best placed to highlight this fundamental aspect of our emotional experiences. (shrink)

According to the displacement model of secularization, religious-theological concepts, themes, and values have been reinterpreted in non-religious contexts without fully dispensing with the religious content. Secularization is thus incomplete. The incomplete secularization argument can be used as a lens through which to read Ethan Kleinberg’s deconstructive approach to the past. In his narrative, as reconstructed here, deconstruction promises to bring us closer to a secular relationship to the past than the ontological realism Kleinberg says still dominates contemporary (...) historical theory. By contrasting Kleinberg’s analysis with Hayden White’s, whose oeuvre can be read as structured by the idea of incomplete secularization and a wish to liberate history from religious themes in order to enable a direct confrontation with meaninglessness, I argue that Kleinberg’s deconstructive approach does not fulfill its promise. Rather, it opens up a post-secular historiography in which religious themes might find a place at the very heart of historical reasoning. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing’s work on incomplete symbols and analysis was instrumental in clarifying, sharpening, and improving the project of logical constructions which was pivotal to early analytic philosophy. She dispelled use-mention confusions by restricting the term ‘incomplete symbol’ to expressions eliminable through analysis, rather than those expressions’ purported referents, and distinguished linguistic analysis from analysis of facts. In this paper I explore Stebbing’s role in analytic philosophy’s development from anti-holism, presupposing that analysis terminates in simples, to the more holist (...) or foundherentist analytic philosophy of the later 20th century. I read Stebbing as a transitional figure who made room for more holist analytic movements, e.g., applications of incomplete symbol theory to Quinean ontological commitment. Stebbing, I argue, is part of a historical narrative which starts with the holism of Bradley, an early influence on her, to which Moore and Russell’s logical analysis was a response. They countered Bradley’s holist reservations about facts with the view that the world is built up out of individually knowable simples. Stebbing, a more subtle and sympathetic reader of the British idealists, defends analysis, but with important refinements and caveats which prepared the way for a return to foundherentism and holism within analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Aryeh Goldberg compellingly argues for a Narrative Coherence Standard (NCS) to bolster existing methods of assessing patients' mental capacity. But his account fails to distinguish between the cognitive abilities of children and adults; consequently, worries may be raised about the scope of the NCS, in particular when we consider child patients. In this article, I argue the NCS cannot plausibly apply to children. Since children's self-conception does not arrive fully formed — but rather is a product of both (...) class='Hi'>incomplete cognitive development and socializing factors — I claim children may not possess a sufficiently intimate knowledge of self, and therefore a sufficiently coherent sense of self, as Goldberg demands. Therefore, we should either revise the NCS to accommodate children, adopt an incremental view of consent, or revert to the relevant form of the MacArthur competence criteria to establish children’s capacity to consent. (shrink)

Hume's moral epistemology, focusing on the elevation of character tratis, requires what in contemporary terms is a narrative structure. The moral significance of an action can only be understood when considered in relation to an agent's past actions, beliefs, intentions, social environment and situation. Three features of Hume's writings support this claim: his accounts of moral evidence, of the object of moral evaluation, and of the value of history. Without recognizing the role of narrative, the standard view of (...) Hume's moral epistemology is incomplete. Recognizing this, Hume's History of England can be read as an exercise of moral evaluation. (shrink)

Any comprehensive theory of narrative must accommodate both the justificational and the creative elements of narrative, the activities leading to narrative, and reflections upon the finished product. This examination of four levels of theory reveals the incompleteness of most extant theories, including those of Hayden White and Ricoeur. The four levels are: 1. narrative discourse and temporal language; 2. narrative and historical constructions; 3. narrative objects or stories; and 4. narrative functions and purposes. (...) We remain far from our goal of achieving a comprehensive theory. However, by placing theories and partial theories within a metatheoretical framework, we can see more clearly their nature, ramifications, and limits, thereby differentiating between the contributions and the philosophical fads. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Narratives and the Meaning of NationalismLloyd KramerThe vast, expanding literature on nationalism may well defy every generalization except a familiar, general theme of intellectual history: texts about nationalism have always drawn their perspectives and passions from the evolving political and cultural contexts in which their authors have lived. Modern accounts of nationalism show the unmistakable traces of political, military, and cultural conflicts in every decade of the twentieth (...) century—from the era of nationalist rivalries before World War I to the redefinitions of gender, literature, and history that have emerged in contemporary postmodernism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism.This connection between the texts of nationalist scholarship and the modern contexts of politics and culture suggests why historical narratives of nationalism have become part of the history of nationalism itself. Nationalism’s scholarly interpreters cannot easily separate themselves from the objects of their analysis, and their interpretations are often as diverse and fragmented as the nations they describe. This essay enters the debate on nationalism, describes recurring themes in the historical literature, and replicates a key characteristic of the historiography by stressing that the complexity of nationalism and its interpreters resists every simplifying, comprehensive definition. Histories of nationalism provide a striking example of how the history of ideas never reaches a point of uncontested closure and never finally escapes the political and cultural contexts in which all historical narratives are produced.Like most analysts of nationalism, I assume that it is one of the decisive forces in modern history and that its significance demands careful, critical analysis. It also calls for always incomplete definitions, one of which can be drawn from the German historian Peter Alter. Nationalism is “both an ideology and a political movement which holds the nation and sovereign nation-state to be crucial indwelling values, and which manages to mobilize the political will of [End Page 525] a people or a large section of the population.”1 Nationalist ideas are thus a distinctive form of modern thought that shapes the political actions and cultural identities of individuals as well as groups. The meanings of nationalism and national identity typically depend on various dichotomies that define the nation in terms of its differences from other places or people—the dynamic process of identity formation that has received wide attention in contemporary cultural studies. My own view of the “oppositional” structures in nationalist thinking coincides with the concise description by Peter Sahlins: “National Identity is a socially constructed and continuous process of defining ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.... National identities... do not depend on the existence of any objective linguistic or cultural differentiation but on the subjective experience of difference.”2 Sahlins thus assumes that something called national identity is “there,” but he also insists that national consciousness is a “constructed” identity. Nationalism, in short, does not express or reflect a natural, primordial reality.The assumption that nationalisms are historical rather than natural phenomena shapes most of the scholarly literature, so that the study of nationalism leads to historical analysis rather than to biology or physical geography. Although there have been countless historical studies of nationalism in different periods, cultures, and conflicts,3 my discussion will refer to a small number of narratives that have made especially significant theoretical claims about the nature of nationalism. There is of course no way to analyze such theories without exclusions and generalizations, which I shall provide by focusing mostly on works about Europe and dividing the patterns of historical analysis into the following broad categories: (1) the description of nationalism as a central component of modernization, reflecting and also shaping intellectual, cultural, economic, social, and political transitions from premodern to modern history; (2) the claim that nationalisms are modern religious movements, related to but also displacing earlier religions; (3) the argument that nationalism is a linguistic, literary construction that depends on new forms of communication, intellectuals, and narratives; (4) the description of nationalism as a discourse of gender and ethnicity that shapes individual identities and also expresses anxieties about sexuality, culture, and respectability; and (5) the argument that nationalisms can be divided into categories (good/bad, Western/Eastern, [End Page 526] political/cultural) and phases that represent sharp differences in the development of modern... (shrink)

Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as (...) the role of the emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams. (shrink)

Maya Deren was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon, a dream-like experiment with time and symbol, looped narrative and provocative imagery, setting the stage for the twentieth-century's groundbreaking aesthetic movements and films. Maya Deren assesses both the filmmaker's completed work and her numerous unfinished projects, arguing (...) Deren's overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Combining the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film, Deren created a wholly original experience for film audiences that disrupted the subjectivity of cinema, its standards of continuity, and its dubious facility with promoting categories of realism. This critical retrospective reflects on the development of Deren's career and the productive tensions she initiated that continue to energize film. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conceptual framework of multiversional narrative processing, or multiversionality. Multiversionality is the consideration of multiple possible event sequences for an incomplete narrative during reception, from reading a novel to listening to the story of a friend’s day. It occurs naturally and is experienced in a wide range of cases, such as suspense, surprise, counterfactuals, and detective stories. Receiving a narrative, we propose, is characterized by the spontaneous creation of competing interpretive models of the (...) narrative that are then used to create predictions and projections for the narrative’s future. These predictions serve as a mechanism for integrating incoming information and updating the narrative model through prediction error, without completely eliminating past versions. We define this process as having three aspects: (1) constrained expectations, (2) preference projection, and (3) causal extrapolation. Constrained expectations and preference projections respectively create the bounds and subjective desires for a narrative’s progress, while causal extrapolation builds, reworks, and maintains the potential models for understanding the narrative. We offer multiversionality as a novel framework for thinking about narrative, social cognition, and decision making that presents adaptive benefits and future directions for empirical study. (shrink)

Ever since Freud pioneered the “talking cure,” psychologists of various stripes have explored how autobiographical narrative bears on self-understanding and psychic wellbeing. Recently, there has been a wave of philosophical speculation as to whether autobiographical narrative plays an essential or important role in the constitution of agentic selves. However, embodiment has received little attention from philosophers who defend some version of the narrative self. Catriona Mackenzie is an important exception to this pattern of neglect, and this paper (...) explores Mackenzie’s work on embodiment and self-narrative with the aim of better understanding the adequacy of autobiographical narrative as an account of the agentic self. I argue that Mackenzie’s narrative account of embodied subjectivity and agency is incomplete, for it over-estimates the reach of narrative and underestimates the cognitive and agentic powers of the lived body. (shrink)

Traditionally, the exploration of the impact of trauma on trauma survivors in South Africa has been focused mainly on the bio-psychosocial aspects. The bio-psychosocial approach recognises that trauma affects people biologically, socially and psychologically. In this article, the author explores a holistic understanding of the effects of trauma on people from communities historically affected by political violence in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Using a participatory action research design as a way of working through trauma, a longitudinal study was conducted in Pietermaritzburg (...) from 2009-2013. At the end of the study, life narratives were documented and published. The textual analysis of these life narratives reveals that, besides the bio-psychosocial effects that research participants experienced during and after the trauma, they also sustained moral and spiritual injuries. Trauma took its toll in their lives emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, morally and in their relationships with themselves, others and God. From these findings, the author argues that the bio-psychosocial approach is incomplete for understanding the holistic effects of trauma on the whole person. Therefore, he recommends the integration of the moral and spiritual aspects of trauma to come up with a holistic model of understanding the effects of trauma on traumatised individuals. The holistic model will enhance the treatment, healing and recovery of trauma survivors. This, in turn, will alleviate the severe disruption of many aspects of psychological functioning and well-being of trauma survivors caused by the effects of trauma. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Memory and Justice:Narrative Sources of Community in Camus's The First ManJohn Randolph LeBlancThere as a certain frustration involved in trying to find Albert Camus's conception of justice in express positive statements. But inasmuch as Camus saw his work in the trope of journey, his complex set of ideas about justice are to be discerned in the narrative structure of his texts. This is particularly so in his (...) last work, the incomplete autobiographical The First Man.1 In the novel, Camus has his protagonist and fictional self Jacques Cormery seek the sources of his orientation to questions of love and justice by attempting to reconstruct the brief life of a father he never knew. It is in the life reconstructed, chiefly through the recollected memories of those who knew the man that Jacques comes to understand his own responses to questions of love and justice. A necessary by-product of the process is that through his questioning, Jacques recreates a community of which he is a product but, until the journey is undertaken, he has never been a part. His journey is, thus, one of self-discovery and inextricably ties justice to community formation. Camus's last novel, I will argue, suggests the importance of memory and narrative to the fundamental questions of political theory, particularly, questions regarding community-formation and the role and nature of justice.IContemporary reflections on the nature of politics take narrative encounters with reality seriously. The significance of narrative to political theory is, I think, tied to the Augustinian recognition that, temporally speaking, we live forward but learn backwards. It is through reconstructing [End Page 140] our experiences as individuals that we learn about who we are and how we got here. Recent political theory has come to recognize that this epistemological structure works at both the individual and the communal level. Michael Walzer, for example, has suggested that a community's culture is the story its members tell so as to make sense of the different pieces of their social life and justice is the doctrine that distinguishes the pieces.2 But distinguishing the pieces can mean and has meant blocking or restricting our access to that reconstruction. While a time-honored political practice, the impulse to control the contents of the narrative by deeming it unworthy or too dangerous to speak became a self-conscious political practice and a particularly dangerous phenomenon in the last century. Controlling the contents of narrative means control in past, present, and future tense. Memory can become a site of resistance because narrative depends on memory for its points of reference. What gets narrated gets remembered. Most often, what does not get narrated either gets lost or must find another way.Narrative and memory have always been political resources, Joshua Foa Dienstag suggests in his important work on memory and narrative in political theory, but the self-conscious control of them is dangerous.3 At the end of a century wherein we perpetrated much we might be tempted to forget, it is increasingly evident that we must remember before we can speak of justice, that is, our stories must be told and heard before we can reconstitute (or re-member) a functional conception of political community. It is in these terms that I want to talk about narrative and its relationship to political community and justice. But what is silenced is as important as what is articulated. Dienstag, who reads political theory as narrative, suggests that, practically speaking, what we have learned is that memory unarticulated is even more dangerous than memory manipulated. Memory unarticulated either festers and becomes a flashpoint for turmoil or is articulated by an interest for its own ends and becomes a tool of control if not oppression. In either case, memory is bastardized to the ends of power politics and distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic experiences becomes the province of politicians. Leaving these distinctions to politicians, I want to suggest, is risky business. When memory represents the absence of a set of experiences rather than their presence, we are confronted by the end of a community rather than its beginning.All cultures, Walzer suggests, have an interest in... (shrink)

Among Marxists and Communists, Louis Althusser has long had a reputation for theoreticism and scientism, the factors most often cited to explain the eclipse of his work since the 1960’s. According to the standard account, the distinguishing characteristic and major flaw of his work is that it brings everything back to knowledge. In this essay, I interrogate this understanding of Althusser by reconsidering two cornerstones of Althusserian theory that seem most to exemplify his extreme privileging of epistemology: the symptom and (...) the interpellation theory of ideology. I argue not that taking them to work on the epistemological level is wrong but rather incomplete; there exists a not quite acknowledged beyond of knowledge and interpellation in Althusser, which takes the form of a traumaticnarrative of history, enjoyment, and desire. The production of knowledge in Althusser unfolds as a pathos-laden story, which on one level gestures toward the turbulent world history in which he developed his theory: primarily WW II and the post-war Stalinist revelations, along with the conflicts it provoked in the Communist Party, and the French Communist Party in particular. Although not the subject of extended analysis, these events haunt Althusser’s texts in the form of allusions and the surprisingly violent figurative language with which Althusser discusses theoretical labor. I contend that they call to be analyzed as a kind of return of the repressed, best approached through Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytically inflected theory of ideology. (shrink)

This book is a careful study of writings by Paul Ricoeur from his early discussions of phenomenology, through the development of his hermeneutic philosophy, to recent texts on the self and the other. Venema identifies the development of a hermeneutical understanding of identity and selfhood as the central issue that belongs to Ricoeur’s work. He discusses the distinct phases that belong to that work, and the specific concerns that Ricoeur comes to address in those phases, in the light of this (...) issue. The hermeneutical treatment of identity and selfhood begins in a critique of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. Venema develops that critique by focusing, not exclusively but significantly, on the first part of Ideas I. He argues that one finds in transcendental phenomenology claims to a self-transparent and independent ego whose achievements occur with necessity. A critique that discovers immanent problems in these claims is the first step that Ricoeur takes in moving toward a hermeneutical understanding of identity. A second step occurs when Ricoeur focuses on the significance of the imagination. Imagination mediates between the multiplicity of involuntary dispositions and the unifying function of voluntary capacity. It also mediates between the finitude of passive receptivity and the infinite effort to determine what is received with names. This effort, in turn, locates the self in a situation of power over others in a context that nonetheless also calls for the reciprocals constitutions of selves. Venema notes the anomalous character of this position. He claims that it continues to be present in related and basic ways throughout the development of Ricoeur’s work. The analyses of metaphor seriously attempt to exhibit the reciprocity of identity and difference and to contribute to a hermeneutic of reciprocal self-constitution. At the same time, parts of those analyses suggest a primacy of identity over difference in relation to language, selfhood, and Being. This undercuts the claim that selves are constituted through reciprocal relations with each other and with the world. The analyses of narrative uncover an understanding of identity as something that comes about insofar as narrative discourse configures and refigures temporal experience. At the same time the appropriation of narrative possibilities seems to presuppose a voluntary cogito that stands over against the flux of symbolic and narrative discourse. Finally, Ricoeur extends the discussion of identity expressly to include the problem of selfhood. Continuing to define identity in narrative terms, he insists on both the distinction between and the correlation of self-sameness and self-constancy in the identity of the self. However, the way in which his discussions of identity and selfhood combine a semantic analysis of selfreference with a pragmatic analysis of self-designation leads to problems that ultimately render his account of the self’s receptivity of the other inadequate or at least incomplete. (shrink)

Background:Even in countries with an opt-out or presumed consent system, relatives have a considerable influence on the post-mortem organ harvesting decision. However, their reflection capacity may be compromised by grief, and they are, therefore, often prone to choose refusal as default option. Quite often, it results in late remorse and dissatisfaction. So, a high-quality reflection support seems critical to enable them to gain a stable position and a long-term peace of mind, and also avoid undue loss of potential grafts. In (...) practice, recent studies have shown that the ethical aspects of reflection are rarely and often poorly discussed with relatives and that no or incomplete guidance is offered. No review of the literature is available to date, although it could be of value to improve the quality of the daily practice.Objectives:The objective was to review and synthesize the main concepts and approaches, theories and practices of ethical reflection support of the relatives or surrogates of potential post-mortem organ donors.Research design:A narrative review was performed in the medical, psychological and ethical fields using PubMed, PsycArticles and Web of Science databases (1980–2020).Results:Out of 150 papers, 25 were finally retained. Four themes were drawn: the moral status of the potential post-mortem organ donor, the principlistic approach with its limits and critics, the narrative approach and the transcendental approach.Discussion:This review suggests an extension of psychological support towards ethical reflection support. The process of helping relatives in their ethical exploration of post-mortem organ donation is psychologically and morally characterized. The need for specialized professionals educated and experienced both in clinical psychology and in health ethics to carry out this task is discussed.Practical impact:This review could contribute to optimize the quality of the ethical reflection support by initiating an evolution from an empirical, partial and individual-dependent support to a more systematized, professionalized and exhaustive support. (shrink)

Forschungsgeschichte - Handbuch/übergreifende Darstellung.

Background: Electroconvulsive therapy is one of the most effective treatments for major depressive disorder. Recently, there has been increasing attention to evaluate the effect of ECT on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. This study aims to compare rs-fMRI of depressive disorder patients with healthy participants, investigate whether pre-ECT dynamic functional network connectivity network estimated from patients rs-fMRI is associated with an eventual ECT outcome, and explore the effect of ECT on brain network states.Method: Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data were (...) collected from 119 patients with depression or depressive disorder, and 61 healthy participants, with an age mean of 52.25 years old. The pre-ECT and post-ECT Hamilton Depression Rating Scale were 25.59 ± 6.14 and 11.48 ± 9.07, respectively. Twenty-four independent components from default mode and cognitive control network were extracted, using group-independent component analysis from pre-ECT and post-ECT rs-fMRI. Then, the sliding window approach was used to estimate the pre-and post-ECT dFNC of each subject. Next, k-means clustering was separately applied to pre-ECT dFNC and post-ECT dFNC to assess three distinct states from each participant. We calculated the amount of time each subject spends in each state, which is called “occupancy rate” or OCR. Next, we compared OCR values between HC and DEP participants. We also calculated the partial correlation between pre-ECT OCRs and HDRS change while controlling for age, gender, and site. Finally, we evaluated the effectiveness of ECT by comparing pre- and post-ECT OCR of DEP and HC participants.Results: The main findings include depressive disorder patients had significantly lower OCR values than the HC group in state 2, where connectivity between cognitive control network and default mode network was relatively higher than other states, Pre-ECT OCR of state, with more negative connectivity between CCN and DMN components, is linked with the HDRS changes. This means that those DEP patients who spent less time in this state showed more HDRS change, and The post-ECT OCR analysis suggested that ECT increased the amount of time DEP patients spent in state 2.Conclusion: Our finding suggests that dynamic functional network connectivity features, estimated from CCN and DMN, show promise as a predictive biomarker of the ECT outcome of DEP patients. Also, this study identifies a possible underlying mechanism associated with the ECT effect on DEP patients. (shrink)

The canonical version of possible worlds semantics for story prefixes is due to David Lewis. This paper reassesses Lewis's theory and draws attention to some novel problems for his account.

Promoting honesty is considered a key endeavor in the betterment of our societies. However, our understanding of this phenomenon, and of its evil twin, dishonesty, is still lacking. In this text, we analyze the main tenets assumed by empirical models of vigilance and sanctions. We approach our analysis in three sections. Initially, we investigate the concept of honesty as assumed by commonly used methodologies in studying honesty. This then leads us to identify the previously overlooked but essential element of epistemic (...) privilege in characterizing honesty. In the third part, we delve into how current explanatory models of honesty lack sufficient consideration of epistemic privilege, resulting in incomplete narratives about honesty. Our analysis of the extant literature suggests that both internal (including the self-concept maintenance theory) and external vigilance models fall short of explaining honesty and dishonesty because of both conceptual problems and empirical inadequacy. Identifying these shortcomings allows us to suggest some possible directions of research. (shrink)

This paper discusses an important phase in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy through a comparative examination of the profound correspondences that exist between his concept of silence and the poetics of another crucial authorial figure of the 20th century: James Joyce. Based on the hypothesis that there are striking resemblances between their early works, that is, between Joyce’s realistic short-story collection Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the article employs mostly close-reading, analytical-interpretative and comparative methods. It argues that silence was an intentional (...) intellectual, aesthetic and ethical choice of both these authors, their way to preserve the autonomy of metaphysics and to honour the beauty of the unspoken. Starting from their common critical treatment of the habitual and largely alienated speech, the discussion connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitudes regarding the imprecision and inadequacy of every-day language and Joyce’s notion of ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the city-life, which he saw as the main motive for writing his collection about fin-desiècle Dublin. On the grounds of their shared views about the limits of words, behind which there are worlds that cannot be properly uttered, the idea of silence – or the highly significant narrative absence – grows to permeate the work of both. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is a call for a new philosophy, or anti-philosophy, which in negating metaphysics in effect preserves its independence from a discursive speech which cannot express it, whereas in the case of Joyce, correspondingly (and almost simultaneously), it is a quest for a new literary mode that will foreground a particular Modernist allusiveness, rhetoric of omission and deliberately incomplete, gnomonical narrative structures. (shrink)

Despite the hadiths and narratives that warn about the interpretation of the Qur’ān by opinion, the question of how Qur’ānic verses can be understood is about the nature of Qur’ānic exegesis. These narratives, which limit the interpretation to the exact field and indicate the invalidity of the specification of the intention with the imprecise information, bring with it the question of how to understand the Qur’ān in each period and society. The issue that has been questioned in the frame of (...) the commentary from the earliest periods is based on the possibility of commenting besides the narration and defining the area that the thought belongs to the commentator. In this context, it is seen that the distinction between the conceptualization of tafsīr-taʾwīl words in classical commentary literature deals with the subject of the tafsīr, their belongings, epistemological values and contexts. Mainly, this study will question whether authors who do not distinguish between tafsīr-taʾwīl categorize the information about commentary in a different context, then it will analyze two basic approaches on tafsīr and taʾwīl. In the paper, it will be suggested that these classifications in the classical literature should be evaluated together within the framework of the search for methodology in exegesis. Summary: The Prophet, who was the first glossator of the Qur’ān, forbade people to talk about the Qur’ān with their own judgments. The prominent people of the companions refused to comment on some words that were closed in meaning (garīb). The words quoted from Abū Bakr and ʿUmar on this subject are quite famous. However, the Qur’ān is a universal book revealed to be understood in all ages and geographies till the doomsday. The fact that all the verses were not interpreted by the Prophet, and the expansions of meaning observed in the Qur’ān wording necessitate the interpretation of the Qur’ān. The fact that the Prophet forbade people to talk with their own judgments about the Qur’ān and the necessity of understanding the Qur’ān in every era constitutes a dilemma that must be explained. The resolution of this issue will both determine the legitimacy of tafsīr (interpretation) and reveal the difference between the Prophet's tafsīr and the tafsīrs by other people. In this context, a distinction was made between the interpretations of the Prophet and of the companions who witnessed the revelation period from the Tabarī (d. 310/923) in the classical tafsīr literature and the interpretations by glossators in terms of their bindingness and information values. Thus, before even starting the interpretation, glossators questioned the possibility of interpretation of the Qur’ān without the tafsīr of the Prophet and the narratives from the companions that have the force of hadith marfūʿ.It is seen in classical tafsīr literature that distinctions between the tafsīr of the Prophet and the interpretations of the glossator are usually constructed on the terms of tafsīr and ta'wil, to which terminological meanings are attributed. In this regard, the methodology of Māturīdī (d. 333/944) is quite specific and clear. According to Māturīdī, tafsīr is an exact field. Only the tafsīr of the Prophet and the narratives of the companions that have the force of marfūʿ can be included in this field. Taʾwīl, on the other hand, is an area based on supposing. Preferences to be made from possible meanings are supposition and related to taʾwīl. The fact that Māturīdī included the explanations of the Prophet and his companions in the tafsīr field and stated that they expressed exact information shows that he regarded this information in the value of the statement of mutakallim. The data included in the field of taʾwīl are not as the data included in the field of tafsīr in terms of their bindingness and information value. The interpretations made in the field of taʾwīl include supposition; so they cannot be attributed to the desire of God. The field that the Prophet forbade people from declaring their own views is the field of tafsīr in the methodology of Māturīdī. The exactness of this field is an indication that the tafsīr is related to God's desire. It is not right to declare an opinion with supposition in the field that is exact and definite. Even though the interpretation in the field of tafsīr is in accordance with the truth, this cannot eliminate the responsibility of the interpreter that make determinations based on supposition in the exact and definite field. Some scholars, such as Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), also classify the narrative-sagacity areas by means of tafsīr-taʾwīl concepts. This classification deals with the data that is the subject of tafsīr in terms of their belongingness. Indeed, tafsīr science includes both the data that are linked with transmission and non-transmittable elements that can be achieved by following a methodology. Non-transmittable elements included in the taʾwīl field by those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity are the meanings reached through linguistic efforts. Language is an element that holds possibilities in itself. Considering closeness of meaning, multi-meanings, metaphors and allusions in the wording, it can be thought that the meanings reached by linguistic methods include supposition. In the methodology of Māturīdī, the field of tafsīr is composed of the explanations of the Prophet and the narratives of the companions who witnessed the revelations while in the classifications of those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity, tafsīr generally includes narratives. When the issue is handled within the framework of the desire of God and the statements of the mutakallim, it seems that the classification of Māturīdī is more punctual. However, it is understood that this approach does not give a satisfactory answer to the subsequent situations and bindingness of the mentioned data. In the classifications based on narrative-sagacity, the narratives in the field of tafsīr are taken as a whole without analyzing their health grades and their signification. However, some of these narrations are not authentic; so, in this respect it is a problematic issue that they are the subjects of the field of tafsīr. Besides, sometimes there can be different narrations about the tafsīr of verses from the companions. The evaluation these narratives in a field attributed to the desire of God may also pose a problem. The linguistic data that both Māturīdī and those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity include in the field of taʾwīl does not appear to have a homogeneous structure -as is the case with the narratives-. Indeed, among this data, there are elements whose meanings are quite hard to determine as well as firm ones that possibly have only one meaning. It is controversial that these expressions, which have only one meaning and to the validity of whose meaning other evidence point out are included in the field of taʾwīl.The distinction between meaning and interpretation fields in tafsīr is very important in terms of tafsīr methodology. This field designation is in a way a description of nature of the science of tafsīr. Thus, in matters where the human intelligence remains insufficient with the tafsīr narratives from the Prophet, the bindingness of the narratives from the companions are clarified; furthermore, beyond the narrative, the validity and the information values of interpretations of the glossator are determined. In this regard, the tafsīr-taʾwīl distinctions made in the classical tafsīr literature provide us with a rich content and a multifaceted point of view. However, when addressed separately, these distinctions present a number of problems in terms of scope and applicability. Our study proposes the evaluation of tafsīr-taʾwīl distinctions in classical literature together while the meaning-interpretation fields are specified in the framework of the search for methodology in tafsīr. Thus, the incomplete aspects of the classification will be eliminated and a much more comprehensive and functional classification will be achieved. At this point, the methodologies of some figures as Tabarī, who is known to have used the terms of tafsīr and taʾwīl in the same meaning, must also be evaluated separately. Indeed, when the works of these names are analyzed, it is seen that these names also distinguish the meaning-interpretation fields in tafsīr, but they do not do this through the tafsīr-taʾwīl concepts. (shrink)

To confine scientific narrative to only material and mechanical causes is to ensure incomplete and at times contrived descriptions of phenomena. In the life sciences, and particularly in the field of ecology, causality takes on qualitatively distinct forms at different hierarchical levels. The notion of formal cause provides for entirely natural and quantitative explanations of ecosystem behavior.

This article explores the story of ‘the other Mersault’ whose narrative is published in the posthumous and arguably incomplete work A happy death. That this work is incomplete and that it appears to be a precursor to The outsider, has arguably limited scholarly analysis of its character and plot. However, the themes that are explored in A happy death are significant in their distinction to those themes that are experienced by the other, younger, Meursault. In A happy (...) death the world must be conquered by the will of a young man to find his happiness. He is not an outsider, and he is not content with his lot. Given an opportunity to address this latter concern, he acts upon his life in a search for happiness and in so doing engages in an ultimately frustrating, yet in some way enlightening, quest. In this article Mersault’s search for happiness is plotted in relation to his thinking about time, childhood, happiness and death. His journey is considered in relation to other stories of the search for some greater human condition. It is argued that his will to be happy reveals the absurdity of searching or not searching. This absurdity is considered in relation to the nature and purpose of school in the sense that such a relation to the search for knowledge might free school from its disciplinary tasks … and frees the learner, the child, the teacher, from the violence of having to want to know. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to elaborate on how a distinct concept of the person can be implemented within person‐centred care as an ethical configuration of personhood in the tension between the two predominant cultures of knowledge within health care: naturalism and phenomenology. Starting from Paul Ricoeur's ‘personalism of the first, second, and third person’ and his ‘broken’ ontology, open‐ended, incomplete, and imperfect mediations, placed at the precise juncture where reality is divided up into two separate cultures of (...) knowledge, is identified as crucial for what makes us human. Within this context, Ricoeur's distinct ethical configuration of personhood is based on the homology between the linguistic, practical, narrative, and moral determinations of selfhood—articulated as a hermeneutics of the self, without any methodological break. Person‐centred care is thus recognized as an profound ethical approach to health care based on mediations of ‘horizontal’ (teleological) and ‘vertical’ (deontological) readings of an ethical configuration of personhood by the use of practical wisdom. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show that the value interaction debate is deeply flawed and constitutes a superficial analysis of the relationship between morality and art. I introduce the debate, which concerns whether a moral defect in a work of art is an aesthetic defect, in Section 1. Section 2 establishes the vagueness of two key terms in the discussion, _moral defects_ and _aesthetic defects_. In Section 3, I introduce the naive assumption-uninteresting claim disjunction, identifying five of the (...) six approaches as demonstrating a fundamental naivety about the relationship between morality and narrative art. I show, in Section 4, that four of the six are philosophically uninteresting as they offer an incomplete—and ultimately unsatisfactory—explanation of this relationship. In Section 5, I discuss the quantity and quality of examples employed in the debate, many of which are non-canonical, and some of which are entirely inappropriate. I conclude by recommending a reorientation of the debate to focus on the underlying question of whether the characteristically artistic value is finally or instrumentally valuable. (shrink)

According to an existing “environmental” narrative, the financial crisis of 2007-2009 was due in part to executive compensation packages in the financial services industry that incentivized excessive risk-taking. Also according to this narrative, those who have a duty to protect society – principally, government regulators, but also firms themselves – are open to blame for how executives were paid, and must take steps to change executive compensation. This narrative is important but incomplete. I offer a supplementary (...) “agential” narrative. According to this narrative, executives are open to blame for the financial crisis for taking socially excessive risks. Moreover, since executives can play a role in shaping their compensation, they have an obligation to ensure that it does not incentivize them to take such risks. (shrink)

The epistemological and sociological consequences of post-modernity include the inability to show moral strangers, in terms they can see as binding, the moral wrongness of activities such as abortion. Such activities can be perceived as morally disordered within a content-full moral narrative, but not outside of the context it brings. Though one can salvage something of the Enlightenment project of justifying a morality that can bind moral strangers, one is left with moral and metaphysical views that can be recognized (...) as impoverished and incomplete by those who live their lives within the embrace of a content-full moral narrative. The cardinal dualism of post-modemity is not that which separates mind from body, but the gulf between the morality binding moral strangers and that binding moral friends. Keywords: dualism, human embryo, personhood, post-modernity CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Historical scholarship often relies on intermittent adjustments rather than radical innovation. Through a close reading of three different universal histories published between 1690 and 1760, this essay argues that the secularization of world history in the age of Enlightenment was an incomplete and often unintended process. Nonetheless, one of the most significant changes in this period was the centering of universal history in Europe, a process that accompanied the desacralization of the story of man. Once human progress was embraced (...) as a universal process, the story of the development of the arts and sciences gradually eclipsed the non-European cultures that had formerly played a central role in the Christian narrative of human history. (shrink)

Reflexivity, or the systematic attempt to include the spokesperson in accounts of the social world, is a magnetic signature and inherent riddle of all modern thinking about knowledge and science. Turning the narrative back upon the narrator may sharpen our critical wits about the `inescapable perspectivity' of human knowledge; but self-referential accounts may also trigger endless loops of meta-theorizing and lose track of the object itself. Negotiating the twin pitfalls of spiralling meta-reflexivity and flat naturalistic accounts, I argue for (...) a reflexive `one step up', which adds one storey to the story. It explores, through critical discussions of the work of Harding and Bourdieu, how reflexivity may promiscuously combine with conflicting objectivist and constructivist epistemologies, and how reflexive accounts invariably appear to run in a circle. This performative circularity, it is argued, does not invalidate the reflexive effort but defines its major strength. Constitutive circularity graces both world-accounts and self-accounts with a radical uncertainty and incompleteness; which implies, among other things, that we must shift part of the burden of reflexive work to our friends, or rather: to our best enemies. (shrink)

The Eurocentric canon remains the predominant focus of music education often excluding the role of music and experiences of Black individuals and people of color. This singular perspective creates an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of the comprehensive nature of music and the humans who create, perform, and engage with it. In this article, the author shares her experience as a Black music educator and her aspirations for a music profession that incorporates the full range of human music engagement and (...) expression. The paper begins with a reflection on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness followed by an exploration of the nuances, complexities, contradictions, and beauty of being a Black educator in a primarily white field. Subsequently, the essay presents four conceptual principles for a reimagined, inclusive music education approach, drawing inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s “new science of the Word.” These principles advocate retelling the music education narrative to incorporate historically marginalized voices, reorienting music education to be human-centered, embracing interdisciplinary approaches to view music teaching and learning, and acknowledging the power of music in uplifting the human condition. Finally, this paper proposes a pathway for reconciling diverse identities prevalent in American culture with music education and academia. (shrink)