Modern philosophy is based on the presupposition of the certainty of the ego’s experience. Both Descartes and Kant assume this certitude as the basis for certain knowledge. Here the argument is ...developed that this ego has its sources not only in Scholastic philosophy, but also in the narrative of the emotional self as developed by both the troubadours and the medieval mystics. This narrative self has three moments: salvation, self-irony, and nostalgia. While salvation is rooted in the Christian tradition, self-irony and nostalgia are first addressed in twelfth-century troubadour poetry in Occitania. Their integration into a narrative self was developed in late medieval mysticism, and reached its fullest articulation in St. Teresa of Avila, whom Descartes read.
The Lesser Evil Helmut Dubiel, Gabriel Motzkin
04/2004
eBook
This book comprises 14 essays by scholars who disagree about the methods and purposes of comparing Nazism and Communism. The central idea is that if these two different memories of evil were to ...develop in isolation, their competition for significance would distort the real evils both movements propagated. Whilst many reject this comparison because they feel it could relativize the evil of one of these movements, the claim that a political movement is uniquely evil can only be made by comparing it to another movement. How do these issues affect postwar interrelations between memory and history? Are there tensions between the ways postwar societies remember these atrocities, and the ways in which intellectuals and scholars reconstruct what happened? Nazism and Communism have been constantly compared since the 1920s. A sense of the ways in which these comparisons have been used and abused by both Right and Left belongs to our common history. These twentieth century evils invite comparison, if only because of their traumatic effects. We have an obligation to understand what happened, and we also have an obligation to understand how we have dealt with it.
Part 1: Approaches 1. Nazism-Communism: Delineating the comparison 2. The Uses and Abuses of Comparison 3. Worstward Ho: On comparing totalitarianisms 4. Imagining the Absolute: Mapping western conceptions of evil 5. Remembrance and Knowledge: Nationalism and Stalinism in comparative discourse 6. Comparative Evil: Degrees, numbers and the problem of measure Part 2: Frames of Comparison 7. The Institutional Frame: Totalitarianism, Extermination and the State 8. Asian Communist Regimes: The other experience of the extreme 9. A Lesser Evil?: Italian fascism in/and the totalitarian equation 10. On the Moral Blindness of Communism Part 3: Legacies 11. Totalitarian Attempts, Anti-Totalitarian Networks: Thoughts on the taboo of comparison 12. If Hitler Invaded Hell: Distinguishing between Nazism and communism during World War II, the Cold War and since the fall of communism 13. The Memory of Crime and the Formation of Identity 14. Mirror-Writing of a Good Life?
Helmut Dubiel is the incumbent of the Max Weber-Chair at New York University. Gabriel Motzkin is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This book assumes that basic ways of thinking about history are hard-wired in the brain. Since different styles of discourse with which we talk about the past are hardwired, Blum infers that a ...protohistorical consciousness is necessary for the existence of language. Historical logics reflect some preconceived part-whole relation. Blum discerns four kinds of part-whole structure, which he terms continuity, quantum, continuum, and dialectic. Blum believes that these part-whole relations rest on universal, prereflective intuitions. He concludes that humans have different prelinguistic intuitions of time. Blum claims that people's variable innate temporality is expressed in their historical style. It follows that historical style antedates history as a genre. Hence we are not talking about historical style, but about how individuals apply their sense of the relation between parts and wholes to the problem of time. Our study of historical context becomes secondary to the assumptions we make about the interface between part-whole relations and time. The temporality of history is derivative of a phenomenon that is not historical. Certain conclusions are suggestive. First, modality precedes tense in evolution. Second, we ourselves are continuing to evolve. Blum believes that we are moving "towards a selection of abstract thinkers ruled by pure reason." Instead of viewing cultures as organisms, it is more profitable to think of the evolution of structures of thinking, and to show that some are more prominent at present than they have been in the past. For Blum, historical thinking is a dependent variable. It depends on tense and modality, which are given before language and culture. Historical thinking reflects a primary experience, but it is not such a primary experience itself.
The author contends that a transition period is conceived in terms of its continuity with preceding or subsequent periods, rather than an entirely discontinuous temporal unit. Thus, in order to ...conceive of a period of transition, one must assume an overarching historical continuity. This contrasts with Reinhart Koselleck's and Michel Foucault's conception of the period of transition to modernity which is at once a break and part of the modern period. By analyzing how time is experienced in terms of contemporary awareness and retrospective consciousness, the author maps out the epistemological determinations that allow for the conception of a period of transition to modernity such as Sattelzeit.
In 1809--the year of Charles Darwin's birth--Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published Philosophie zoologique, the first comprehensive and systematic theory of biological evolution. The Lamarckian approach ...emphasizes the generation of developmental variations; Darwinism stresses selection. Lamarck's ideas were eventually eclipsed by Darwinian concepts, especially after the emergence of the Modern Synthesis in the twentieth century. The different approaches--which can be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive--have important implications for the kinds of questions biologists ask and for the type of research they conduct. Lamarckism has been evolving--or, in Lamarckian terminology, transforming--since Philosophie zoologique's description of biological processes mediated by "subtle fluids." Essays in this book focus on new developments in biology that make Lamarck's ideas relevant not only to modern empirical and theoretical research but also to problems in the philosophy of biology. Contributors discuss the historical transformations of Lamarckism from the 1820s to the 1940s, and the different understandings of Lamarck and Lamarckism; the Modern Synthesis and its emphasis on Mendelian genetics; theoretical and experimental research on such "Lamarckian" topics as plasticity, soft (epigenetic) inheritance, and individuality; and the importance of a developmental approach to evolution in the philosophy of biology. The book shows the advantages of a "Lamarckian" perspective on evolution. Indeed, the development-oriented approach it presents is becoming central to current evolutionary studies--as can be seen in the burgeoning field of Evo-Devo. Transformations of Lamarckism makes a unique contribution to this research.
A Lesser Evil Dubiel, Helmut; Motzkin, Gabriel
01/2004
eBook
This book comprises 14 essays by scholars who disagree about the methods and purposes of comparing Nazism and Communism. The central idea is that if these two different memories of evil were to ...develop in isolation, their competition for significance would distort the real evils both movements propagated. Whilst many reject this comparison because they feel it could relativize the evil of one of these movements, the claim that a political movement is uniquely evil can only be made by comparing it to another movement.How do these issues affect postwar interrelations between memory and history? Are there tensions between the ways postwar societies remember these atrocities, and the ways in which intellectuals and scholars reconstruct what happened? Nazism and Communism have been constantly compared since the 1920s. A sense of the ways in which these comparisons have been used and abused by both Right and Left belongs to our common history.These twentieth century evils invite comparison, if only because of their traumatic effects. We have an obligation to understand what happened, and we also have an obligation to understand how we have dealt with it.
Imagine that a spaceship were to land on earth sent by a superior civilization. The emissaries would descend, speaking of course perfect English, and would inform us that everything we thought we ...knew about science was wrong. We would immediately want to know whether this meant that the science we have is wrong, or whether science itself is a wrong way to go about interpreting reality.
We are quite comfortable with the idea that the science we have may be wrong, although this notion of the relativity of science has not been popular at all times since the scientific revolution.
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