A Critique of Archaeological Reason

A Critique of Archaeological Reason PDF Author: Giorgio Buccellati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110704653X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book defines the concept of 'archaeological reason', and provides a new approach to archaeological excavations, philosophical hermeneutics, and digital theory.

A Critique of Archaeological Reason

A Critique of Archaeological Reason PDF Author: Giorgio Buccellati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110704653X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book defines the concept of 'archaeological reason', and provides a new approach to archaeological excavations, philosophical hermeneutics, and digital theory.

A Critique of Archaeological Reason

A Critique of Archaeological Reason PDF Author: Giorgio Buccellati
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781108165075
Category : Archaeology
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The inquiry into the nature of archaeology and its theoretical presuppositions leads to unexpected results. The question about its nature is a question about distinctiveness: what is unique about the discipline that sets it apart from the others? The question about theoretical presuppositions relates to the conditions that make this distinctiveness possible: what is the frame of reference within which such uniqueness can best be understood? Unexpected results emerge when one sees archaeological reason emerge as an independent dimension of human reason and become a mode of thought. As such, it affects the way in which we view reality, so that the theoretical presuppositions loom even larger, and require a correspondingly fuller elaboration"--

A Critique of Archaeological Reason

A Critique of Archaeological Reason PDF Author: Giorgio Buccellati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108165761
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book Here

Book Description
In A Critique of Archaeological Reason, Giorgio Buccellati presents a theory of excavation that aims at clarifying the nature of archaeology and its impact on contemporary thought. Integrating epistemological issues with methods of data collection and the role and impact of digital technology on archaeological work, the book explores digital data in order to comprehend its role in shaping meaning and understanding in archaeological excavation. The ability of archaeologists to record in the field, rather than offsite, has fundamentally changed the methods of observation, conceptualization, and interpretation of deposits. Focusing on the role of stratigraphy as the center of archaeological field work, Giorgio Buccellati examines the challenges of interpreting a 'broken tradition'; a civilization for which there are no living carriers today. He uses the site of Urkesh in Syria, where he has worked for decades, as a case study to demonstrate his theory.

Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason

Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason PDF Author: Gary Gutting
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521366984
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description
An introduction to the critical interpretation of the work of Michael Foucault.

Bridging Times and Spaces: Papers in Ancient Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Armenian Studies

Bridging Times and Spaces: Papers in Ancient Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Armenian Studies PDF Author: Pavel S. Avetisyan
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784917001
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents papers written by colleagues of Professor Gregory E. Areshian on the occasion his 65th birthday. The range of topics includes Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Armenian archaeology, theory of interpretation in archaeology and art history, interdisciplinary history, historical linguistics, art history, and comparative mythology.

Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons

Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons PDF Author: Tuomo Tiisala
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040048471
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book argues that the received view of the distinction between freedom and power must be rejected because it rests on an untenable account of the discursive cognition that endows individuals with the capacity for autonomy and self-governed rationality. In liberal and Kantian approaches alike, the autonomous subject is a self-standing starting point whose freedom is constrained by relations of power only contingently because they are external to the subject’s constitution. Thus, the received view defines the distinction between freedom and power as a dichotomy. Michel Foucault is arguably the most important critic of that dichotomy. However, it is widely agreed that Foucault falls short of justifying the alternative view he develops, where power and freedom are essentially entangled instead. The book fills out the gap by investigating the social preconditions of discursive cognition. Drawing on pragmatist-inferentialist resources from the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), it presents a new interpretation of Foucault’s philosophy that is unified by his overlooked idea of “the archaeology of knowledge.” As a result, the book not only explains why and how power and freedom must be entangled but also what it means ethically to pursue and gain autonomy with respect to one’s own understanding. Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, critical theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

Material Evidence

Material Evidence PDF Author: Robert Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317576225
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Get Book Here

Book Description
How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the detritus of everyday life and the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term. Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material things as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer archaeologists and those in related fields.

Archaeological Theory

Archaeological Theory PDF Author: Norman Yoffee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521449588
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume assesses the real achievements of archaeology in increasing an understanding of the past. Without rejecting the insights either of traditional or more recent approaches, it considers the issues raised in current claims and controversies about what is appropriate theory for archaeology. The first section looks at the process of theory building and at the sources of the ideas employed. The following studies examine questions such as the interplay between expectation and evidence in ideas of human origins, social role and material practice in the formation of the archaeological record, and how the rise of states should be conceptualised; further papers cover issues of ethnoarchaeology, visual symbols, and conflicting claims to ownership of the past. The conclusion is that archaeologists need to be equally wary of naive positivism in the guise of scientific procedure, and of speculation about the unrecorded intentions of prehistoric actors.

Critique of Latin American Reason

Critique of Latin American Reason PDF Author: Santiago Castro-Gómez
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553412
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
Critique of Latin American Reason is one of the most important philosophical texts to have come out of South America in recent decades. First published in 1996, it offers a sweeping critique of the foundational schools of thought in Latin American philosophy and critical theory. Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that “Latin America” is not so much a geographical entity, a culture, or a place, but rather an object of knowledge produced by a family of discourses in the humanities that are inseparably linked to colonial power relationships. Using the archaeological and genealogical methods of Michel Foucault, he analyzes the political, literary, and philosophical discourses and modes of power that have contributed to the making of “Latin America.” Castro-Gómez examines the views of a wide range of Latin American thinkers on modernity, postmodernity, identity, colonial history, and literature, also considering how these questions have intersected with popular culture. His critique spans Central and South America, and it also implicates broader and protracted global processes. This book presents this groundbreaking work of contemporary critical theory in English translation for the first time. It features a foreword by Linda Martín Alcoff, a new preface by the author, and an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta situating Castro-Gómez’s thought in the context of critical theory in Latin America and the Global South. Two appendixes feature an interview with Castro-Gómez that sheds light on the book’s composition and short provocations responding to each chapter from a multidisciplinary forum of contemporary scholars who resituate the work within a range of perspectives including feminist, Francophone African, and decolonial Black political thought.

Archaeology Yesterday and Today

Archaeology Yesterday and Today PDF Author: Jaroslav Malina
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521319775
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, first published in 1990, presents a radical interpretation by Czech philosophers of science of the philosophical, social and political forces shaping archaeology from antiquity onwards. It provides a theoretically sophisticated and cosmopolitan overview of modern archaeology, treating the history of both traditions in a single framework.