Rethinking Relation-Substance Dualism

Rethinking Relation-Substance Dualism PDF Author: Aurélie Névot
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000999580
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book analyses anthropological debates on “relationism” (referring to methodological and theoretical issues) and sets out to reconsider these discussions with regards to the notion of “substance” (generally associated with the body). Reflecting on the philosophical origins and implications of these two concepts, the author aims to bring them to the heart of contemporary anthropological discourse and addresses the erasure (or blurring) of “substance” in favour of “relation.” The argument put forward is that the conceptual pairing of “substance-relation” should be substituted for the “nature-culture” dualism that has been dominant in structural anthropology. The chapters engage with the work of scholars such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Wang Mingming as part of a decentring and questioning of the tradition in which anthropology is rooted. The book also considers the role that the anthropology of China plays in the re-evaluation of the relationship between relation and substance. The concept of “submutance” is introduced with Chinese ethnographic material to explore the possibility of moving beyond the relation-substance dualism of Western heritage. This is valuable reading for scholars interested in the theory and history of anthropology.

Rethinking Relation-Substance Dualism

Rethinking Relation-Substance Dualism PDF Author: Aurélie Névot
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000999580
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book analyses anthropological debates on “relationism” (referring to methodological and theoretical issues) and sets out to reconsider these discussions with regards to the notion of “substance” (generally associated with the body). Reflecting on the philosophical origins and implications of these two concepts, the author aims to bring them to the heart of contemporary anthropological discourse and addresses the erasure (or blurring) of “substance” in favour of “relation.” The argument put forward is that the conceptual pairing of “substance-relation” should be substituted for the “nature-culture” dualism that has been dominant in structural anthropology. The chapters engage with the work of scholars such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Wang Mingming as part of a decentring and questioning of the tradition in which anthropology is rooted. The book also considers the role that the anthropology of China plays in the re-evaluation of the relationship between relation and substance. The concept of “submutance” is introduced with Chinese ethnographic material to explore the possibility of moving beyond the relation-substance dualism of Western heritage. This is valuable reading for scholars interested in the theory and history of anthropology.

The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism

The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism PDF Author: Jonathan J. Loose
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119375266
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 531

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Book Description
A groundbreaking collection of contemporary essays from leading international scholars that provides a balanced and expert account of the resurgent debate about substance dualism and its physicalist alternatives. Substance dualism has for some time been dismissed as an archaic and defeated position in philosophy of mind, but in recent years, the topic has experienced a resurgence of scholarly interest and has been restored to contemporary prominence by a growing minority of philosophers prepared to interrogate the core principles upon which past objections and misunderstandings rest. As the first book of its kind to bring together a collection of contemporary writing from top proponents and critics in a pro-contra format, The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism captures this ongoing dialogue and sets the stage for rigorous and lively discourse around dualist and physicalist accounts of human persons in philosophy. Chapters explore emergent, Thomistic, Cartesian, and other forms of substance dualism—broadly conceived—in dialogue with leading varieties of physicalism, including animalism, non-reductive physicalism, and constitution theory. Loose, Menuge, and Moreland pair essays from dualist advocates with astute criticism from physicalist opponents and vice versa, highlighting points of contrast for readers in thematic sections while showcasing today’s leading minds engaged in direct debate. Taken together, essays provide nuanced paths of introduction for students, and capture the imagination of professional philosophers looking to expand their understanding of the subject. Skillfully curated and in touch with contemporary science as well as analytic theology, The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism strikes a measured balanced between advocacy and criticism, and is a first-rate resource for researchers, scholars, and students of philosophy, theology, and neuroscience.

The Trouble With Art

The Trouble With Art PDF Author: Roger Sansi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040115632
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Art troubles anthropology. Anthropologists have often taken a philistine, sceptical position of distance towards art and aesthetics as a predominantly Western bourgeois institution. But art, not only as a Western institution, generated its own philistine and iconoclastic revisions and undoings, its anti-art, that have engaged anthropology into its theory and practice. Anthropology is thus part of the trouble with art. But trouble doesn’t necessarily obfuscate, it can also reveal and render visible fault lines and problems; troubles can be assemblages of disparate and even contradictory parts that paradoxically do work together. This volume proposes an anthropology that moves beyond philistinism and the contradictions between critical anthropologies of art and collaborative and experimental anthropologies with art.

UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge

UFOs, the Absurd, and the Limit of Anthropological Knowledge PDF Author: Diana Espírito Santo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040099246
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book offers an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of contemporary UFO phenomena, focusing specifically on Chilean ufology and the ufological “absurd”, nonsensical instances for their experiencers in which there is no conceptual way out. It asks how anthropology can come to terms with what is not said, what is not known, what is in the dark, or even with what both “is” and “is not”. The work draws on three years of participant observation with empirical ufologists, amateur sky watchers, and contactees of varying kinds in Chile. The chapters mobilize three main bodies of literature to elucidate the ufological absurd: negative theology, anthropology of play and deceit, and the physics of dark matter. They explore notions of parallax, paradox, and trickster anthropology. The author takes UFO phenomena, specifically the absurd aspects, as a heuristic with which to posit a conversation between domains; a conversation which highlights darknesses, finiteness, and the limits of representation and media in anthropology, one that could perhaps signal the route to a new language. Consideration is given to how not-knowing can be a space of extreme productiveness for the discipline. The argument put forward is that only by doing an anthropology that looks outside of itself for conceptual inspiration can we come to terms with the non-representable, the un-conceptualizable, the fully paradoxical. This innovative book will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropological theory and religion.

Descartes Was Right! Souls Do Exist and Reincarnation Proves It

Descartes Was Right! Souls Do Exist and Reincarnation Proves It PDF Author: J. Bonk Casimir J. Bonk
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1426924976
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
Challenge the scientific denial of the soul's existence with a book that proves that the brain is not the sole explanation behind human thought and behavior. Casimir J. Bonk, a longtime engineer and student of metaphysics, has found physical scientific evidence of the nonphysical soul through his investigations of reincarnated subjects who can recall experiences from previous lives. Discover why Descartes Was Right! Souls Do Exist and Reincarnation Proves It. For instance: * Dr. Ian Stevenson and others have shown that reincarnated subjects can recall details from past lives, proving that the brain is not the prime location of memory. If memory were physical, it would cease upon death. * By contrasting metaphysical views of the world with scientific theories, an original description of human duality explains the true nature of humanity. * Using an engineer's approach, uncover how the brain really works and why science fails to explain the memories of the reincarnated. Close the gap between the physical and nonphysical worlds and answer the questions about human nature that have haunted the world forever in Descartes Was Right! Souls Do Exist and Reincarnation Proves It.

Reconsidering Difference

Reconsidering Difference PDF Author: Todd May
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271016580
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. Specifically, it has wanted to promote or to leave room for ways of living and of being that differ from those usually seen in contemporary Western society. Given the experience of the Holocaust, the motivation for such a preoccupation is not difficult to see. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing that privileges difference as a philosophical category. Nancy privileges difference as a mode of conceiving community, Derrida as a mode of conceiving linguistic meaning, Levinas as a mode of conceiving ethics, and Deleuze as a mode of conceiving ontology. Reconsidering Difference has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls &"contingent holism,&" takes the phenomena under investigation&—community, language, ethics, and ontology&—and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them.

Rethinking Descartes’s Substance Dualism

Rethinking Descartes’s Substance Dualism PDF Author: Lynda Gaudemard
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030754146
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This monograph presents an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, which differs from the standard reading called 'classical separatist dualism' claiming that the mind can exist without the body. It argues that, contrary to what it is commonly claimed, Descartes’s texts suggest an emergent creationist substance dualism, according to which the mind is a nonphysical substance (created and maintained by God), which cannot begin to think without a well-disposed body. According to this interpretation, God’s laws of nature endow each human body with the power to be united to an immaterial soul. While the soul does not directly come from the body, the mind can be said to emerge from the body in the sense that it cannot be created by God independently from the body. The divine creation of a human mind requires a well-disposed body, a physical categorical basis. This kind of emergentism is consistent with creationism and does not necessarily entail that the mind cannot survive the body. This early modern view has some connections with Hasker’s substance emergent dualism (1999). Indeed, Hasker states that the mind is a substance emerging at one time from neurons and that consciousness has causal powers which effects cannot be explained by physical neurons. An emergent unified self-existing entity emerges from the brain on which it acts upon. For its proponents, Hasker’s view explains what Descartes’s dualism fails to explain, especially why the mind regularly interacts with one and only one body. After questioning the notion of emergence, the author argues that the theory of emergent creationist substance dualism that she attributes to Descartes is a more appropriate alternative because it faces fewer problems than its rivals. This monograph is valuable for anyone interested in the history of early modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind.

Street Youth in Canada

Street Youth in Canada PDF Author: Mark S. Dolson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003858554
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book provides an ethnographic examination of the everyday lives and struggles of street-involved youth in Canada. Based on fieldwork conducted throughout downtown London, Ontario, it features rich ethnographic data as well as theoretical insights informed by continental philosophy. The chapters highlight informants’ experiences of poverty, addiction and poor mental health, and reflect on their relation to the state – including participation in the provincial government’s programme of social assistance provision (Ontario Works). The author considers how social, cultural, political, economic and existential factors influence and shape human subjectivity. They explore the notion of becoming and offer a re-evaluation of individual agency and action, specifically related to the lived experience of informants who are seen as wounded bricoleurs. The study is relevant to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and others with an interest in homelessness.

Wittgenstein and Other Minds

Wittgenstein and Other Minds PDF Author: Soren Overgaard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135198152
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
A compelling new approach to the problem that has haunted twentieth century philosophy in both its analytical and continental shapes. No other book addresses as thoroughly the parallels between Wittgenstein and leading Continental philosophers such as Levinas, Husserl, and Heidegger.

Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching

Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching PDF Author: Richard Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134034202
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Drawing upon a variety of academic disciplines this book explores some of the different means of understanding teaching and learning, both in and across contexts, the issues they raise and their implications for pedagogy and research.