Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness
Author: Garry Hagberg File Type: pdf The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of recent times on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding - the human condition, philosophically speaking. Describing Ourselves mines those extensive writings for a conception of the self that stands in striking contrast to its predecessors as well as its more recent alternatives. More specifically, the book offers a detailed discussion of Wittgensteins later writings on language and mind as they hold special significance for the understanding and clarification of the distinctive character of self-descriptive or autobiographical language. Garry L. Hagberg undertakes a ground-breaking philosophical investigation of selected autobiographical writings - among the best examples we have of human selves exploring themselves - as they cast new and special light on the critique of mind-body dualism and its undercurrents in particular and on the nature of autobiographical consciousness more generally. The chapters take up in turn the topics of self-consciousness, what Wittgenstein calls the inner picture, mental privacy and the picture of metaphysical seclusion, the very idea of our observation of the contents of consciousness, first-person expressive speech, reflexive or self-directed thought and competing pictures of introspection, the nuances of retrospective self-understanding, person-perception and the corollary issues of self-perception (itself an interestingly dangerous phrase), self-defining memory, and the therapeutic conception of philosophical progress as it applies to all of these issues. The cast of characters interwoven throughout this rich discussion include, in addition to Wittgenstein centrally, Augustine, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Cavell, among others. Throughout, conceptual clarifications concerning mind and language are put to work in the investigation of issues relating to self-description and in novel philosophical readings of autobiographical texts.
Author: Derek Wilson
File Type: epub
An incisive and absorbing biography of the legendary emperor who bridged ancient and modern Europe and singlehandedly altered the course of Western history. Charlemagne was an extraordinary figure an ingenious military strategist, a wise but ruthless leader, a cunning politician, and a devout believer who ensured the survival of Christianity in the West. He also believed himself above the rules of the church, siring bastards across Europe and coldly ordering the execution of 4,500 prisoners. Derek Wilson shows how this complicated, fascinating man married the military might of his army to the spiritual force of the Church in Rome, thereby forging Western Christendom. This is a remarkable portrait of Charlemagne and of the intricate political, religious, and cultural world he dominated. **From Publishers Weekly Christian warrior, scholar prince, pilgrim saint and emperor, Charlemagne (742814) has influenced modern rulers from Napoleon to Charles de Gaulle. As acclaimed British historian Wilson (Tudor Tapestry Men, Women, and Society in Reformation England) points out in this fast-paced biography, the Frankish king who was named emperor by the pope brought civilization and peace to Europe in the Early Middle Ages. An acquisitive king intent on expanding Francias borders and connecting politics and religion, Charles the Great, according to Wilson, is responsible for the shape of Europe as we know it today. Wilson deftly chronicles Charlemagnes military exploits, political intrigues and religious devotion. In addition to his military leadership, the emperor initiated a revival of humane learning (the Carolingian Renaissance) and the establishment of a clerical hierarchy that could preach, administer the sacraments properly and oversee matters of the empire. Although, as Wilson points out, Charlemagnes sometimes megalomaniacal personality drove his armies to the brink of disaster, he fostered a unity and a culture in his empire that have lasted to modern times. Maps. (On sale June 6) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From School Library Journal AdultHigh SchoolA fascinating introduction to the ruler and his world. Several features help readers navigate this complicated era. A genealogy of the Carolingian dynasty helps keep track of Charlemagnes large family. A time line from his birth (742) to the division of his empire (843) lists significant events in Francia, the Byzantine Empire, Western Christendom, and the Islamic world. Nine maps trace the changes in the borders of the empires and the routes of invaders, and 16 pages of color pictures show how legends about Charlemagne captured the attention of artists and craftsmen through the ages. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, Wilsons account reads like an adventure story. The author comments on the reliability of his sources even as he faithfully quotes them. Charlemagnes intellectual pursuits, his ideas about faith, and his visions for his empires are also covered. Wilson shows how Charlemagnes image changed after his death and over the centuries. Sometimes, he was revered as the worlds greatest warrior at other times, as a saint or a philosopher king. Each age re-created him in a new light, and Wilson demonstrates how the empire he built led to the development of the European identity.Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
Author: Regna Darnell
File Type: pdf
This inaugural volume of The Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition series presents current scholarship from the various academic disciplines that were shaped and continue to be influenced by Franz Boas (18581942). Few of Boass intellectual progeny span the range of his disciplinary and public engagements. In his later career, Boas moved beyond Native American studies to become a public intellectual and advocate for social justice, particularly with reference to racism against African Americans and Jews and discrimination against women in science. He was a passionate defender of academic freedom, rigorous scholarship, and anthropology as a humane calling. The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1 examines Boass stature as a public intellectual in three crucial dimensions theory, ethnography, and activism. The volumes contributors move across many of the disciplines within which Boas himself worked, bringing to bear their expertise in Native studies, anthropology, history, linguistics, folklore, ethnomusicology, museum studies, comparative literature, English, film studies, philosophy, and journalism. This volume demonstrates a contemporary urgency to reassessing Boas both within the field of anthropology and beyond.
Author: Mahmoud Darwish
File Type: epub
One of the Arab worlds greatest poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day). Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage. Ibrahim Muhawis translation beautifully renders Darwishs testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity. Sinan Antoons foreword, written expressly for this edition, sets Darwishs work in the context of changes in the Middle East in the past thirty years.**
Author: Mark Doyle
File Type: pdf
Communal Violence in the British Empire focuses on how Britons interpreted, policed, and sometimes fostered violence between different ethnic and religious communities in the empire. It also asks what these outbreaks meant for the power and prestige of Britain among subject populations. Alternating between chapters of engaging narrative and chapters of careful, cross-colonial analysis, Mark Doyle uses outbreaks of communal violence in Ireland, the West Indies, and South Asia to uncover the inner workings of British imperialism its guiding assumptions, its mechanisms of control, its impact, and its limitations. He explains how Britons used communal violence to justify the imperial project even as that project was creating the conditions for more violence. Above all, this book demonstrates how communal violence exposed the limits of British power and, in time, helped lay the groundwork for the empires collapse. This book shows how violence, and the British states handling thereof, was a fundamental part of the imperial experience for colonizer and colonized alike. It offers a new perspective on the workings of empire that will be of interest to any student of imperial or world history. **Review Doyles book is useful and original in focusing on specific instances of communal conflict and state response. Vivid and closely-grained studies ... alternate with analytical chapters assessing the strategies and failures of British authorities. * Cercles * Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, this book draws together the local and imperial in impressive ways. Doyle masterfully explores the details of riots from the West Indies to Ireland to India, and demonstrates the ways in which these riots and the states response fused communalism and nationalism to ultimately corrode the authority of the British Empire. By identifying and analyzing broader themes present in a variety of communal riots, this book provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the intersections between internal violence and the imperial experience. * Jill C. Bender, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA, author of The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire * Treating communal disorder as a distinct analytical field, Mark Doyles comparative approach to the causes and effects of riots in the Victorian Empire is consistently insightful. Communal violence in the Indian sub-continent, British Guiana, and Ireland - the three cases that Doyle examines - profoundly reshaped ideas of authority and attachment, at same time highlighting the hypocrisies of imperialist claims of benevolent modernisation. * Martin Thomas, University of Exeter, UK * About the Author Mark Doyle is Associate Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of Fighting the Devil for the Sake of God Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast (2009).
Author: Sandra Umathum
File Type: pdf
Jerome Bels Disabled Theater, a dance piece featuringeleven actors with cognitive disabilities from ZurichsTheater Hora, has polarized audiences worldwide. Some have celebrated the performance as an outstanding exploration of presence and representation others have criticized it as a contemporary freak show. This impassioned reception provokes important questions about the role of people with cognitive disabilities within theater and danceand within society writ large. Using Disabled Theater as the basis for a broad, interdisciplinary discussion of performance and disability, this volume explores the intersections of politics and aesthetics, inclusion and exclusion, and identity and empowerment. Can the stage serve as a place of emancipation for people with disabilities? To what extent are performers with disabilities able to challenge and subvert the rules of society? What would a performance look like without an ideology of ability? The book includes contributions by Jerome Bel, Kai van Eikels, Kati Kro, Andre Lepecki, Lars Nowak, Yvonne Rainer, Gerald Siegmund, Yvonne Schmidt, Sandra Umathum, Scott Wallin, Benjamin Wihstutz, and the actors of Theater Hora. **
Author: Christian Fuchs
File Type: pdf
How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and social media such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic criticaltheorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry.Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.
Author: Marcel Cartier
File Type: epub
In the Spring of 2017, activist, journalist and hip-hop artist Marcel Cartier was given exclusive access to the structures set up in the predominately Kurdish areas in northern Syria. Over the course of more than a month, Cartier travelled across the terrain known as Rojava, experiencing the radical grassroots revolution that is sweeping the region. He spoke with commanders of the Peoples Protection Units (YPG), visited womens organisations, saw the cooperatives and communes in action that have transformed the concept of democracy, and found his understanding of revolution challenged and reinvigorated. Unique in its access, emotion and humanity, Serkeftin A Narrative of the Rojava Revolution, is a beautiful account of a contradictory and complex process that is fundamentally changing society in the midst of the 21st centurys most brutal civil war. Meaning victory, the Kurdish word serkeftin captures the spirit of optimism in the catastrophe that has engulfed this beautiful country since 2011 and has simultaneously brought the possibility of freedom ever closer. **About the Author Marcel Cartier is an activist, journalist and critically acclaimed hip-hop artist. Born in Germany to Finnish and American parents, he was active in the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York 2011 and has been an organizer with the U.S. anti-war and socialist movements. He has worked for a variety of media outlets and is currently U.S. and Europe policy editor for The Region. He lives in Berlin.
Author: Sophie A. de Beaune
File Type: pdf
This book presents new directions in the study of cognitive archaeology. Seeking to understand the conditions that led to the development of a variety of cognitive processes during evolution, it uses evidence from empirical studies and offers theoretical speculations about the evolution of modern thinking as well. The volume draws from the fields of archaeology and neuropsychology, which traditionally have shared little in the way of theories and methods, even though both disciplines provide crucial pieces to the puzzle of the emergence and evolution of human cognition. The twelve essays, written by an international team of scholars, represent an eclectic array of interests, methods, and theories about evolutionary cognitive archaeology. Collectively, they consider whether the processes in the development of human cognition simply made a better use of anatomical and cerebral structures already in place at the beginning of hominization. They also consider the possibility of an active role of hominoids in their own development and query the impact of hominoid activity in the emergence of new cognitive abilities.
Author: E. Patrick Johnson
File Type: pdf
Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnsons work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the regions thriving black lesbian communities. At once transcendent and grounded in place and time, these narratives raise important questions about queer identity formation, community building, and power relations as they are negotiated within the context of southern history. Johnson uses individual stories to reveal the embedded political and cultural ideologies of the self but also of the listener and society as a whole. These breathtakingly rich life histories show afresh how black female sexuality is and always has been an integral part of the patchwork quilt that is southern culture. **Review An amazing work that reflects Johnsons passion, care for his subjects, sharp analytical skills, and standing in the field.--Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Spelman College A courageous and eminently readable book that will be celebrated and cherished by a generation of readers inside and outside the academy.--Nan Alamilla Boyd, San Francisco State University About the Author E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University and author of Sweet Tea Black Gay Men of the South.