Sensus Communis

Sensus Communis PDF Author: John D. Schaeffer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The concept sensus communis--a term that means a great deal more than its English translation "common sense"--has served as a key principle in the theory of knowledge from the ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment philosophers. John D. Schaeffer shows how the seventeenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico synthesized Greek and Roman ideas of what sensus communis and what this synthesis implies for current discussions of rhetoric and hermeneutics. Arguments for ethical relativism emerge from divisions between sensus communis as an ethical judgment (a concept that Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and others have tried to rescue) and as a linguistic consensus, a division against which Vico argued and which his own concept of sensus communis attempted to reconcile. In extended commentaries on Gadamer, the Gadamer/Habermas debate, and Derrida, Schaeffer shows that Vico offers the possibility of analyzing social phenomena and constellations of power from within the humanist rhetorical tradition. Vico's achievements have powerful implications for relating ethics and hermeneutics to the world of concrete social practice, particularly in an age in which the electronic media have replaced print as the primary means of communication and in which a "secondary orality" (a cast of mind similar to that of nonliterate peoples) is appearing within our literate civilization.

Sensus Communis

Sensus Communis PDF Author: John D. Schaeffer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The concept sensus communis--a term that means a great deal more than its English translation "common sense"--has served as a key principle in the theory of knowledge from the ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment philosophers. John D. Schaeffer shows how the seventeenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico synthesized Greek and Roman ideas of what sensus communis and what this synthesis implies for current discussions of rhetoric and hermeneutics. Arguments for ethical relativism emerge from divisions between sensus communis as an ethical judgment (a concept that Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and others have tried to rescue) and as a linguistic consensus, a division against which Vico argued and which his own concept of sensus communis attempted to reconcile. In extended commentaries on Gadamer, the Gadamer/Habermas debate, and Derrida, Schaeffer shows that Vico offers the possibility of analyzing social phenomena and constellations of power from within the humanist rhetorical tradition. Vico's achievements have powerful implications for relating ethics and hermeneutics to the world of concrete social practice, particularly in an age in which the electronic media have replaced print as the primary means of communication and in which a "secondary orality" (a cast of mind similar to that of nonliterate peoples) is appearing within our literate civilization.

Sensus Communis

Sensus Communis PDF Author: Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Wit and humor
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description


Giambattista Vico on Natural Law

Giambattista Vico on Natural Law PDF Author: John Schaeffer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429575084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This book introduces the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) into the discussion about natural law. For many critics, natural law is not natural but a façade behind which lurks the supernatural – that is, revealed religion. While current notions of natural law are based on either Aristotelian/Thomistic principles or on Enlightenment rationalism, the book shows how Vico was the only natural law thinker to draw on the Roman legal tradition, rather than on Greek or Enlightenment philosophy. Specifically, the book addresses how Vico, drawing his inspiration from Roman history, incorporated both rhetoric and religion into a dynamic concept of natural law grounded in what he called the sensus communis: the entire repertoire of values, images, institutions, and even prejudices that a community takes for granted. Vico denied that natural law could ever furnish a definitive answer to moral problems in the social/public sphere. Rather he maintained that such problems had to be debated in the wider arena of the sensus communis. For Vico, as this book argues, natural law principles emerged from these debates; they did not resolve them.

Markedness Theory

Markedness Theory PDF Author: Edna Andrews
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822309598
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Edna Andrews clarifies and extends the work of Roman Jakobson to develop a theory of invariants in language by distinguishing between general and contextual meaning in morphology and semantics. Markedness theory, as Jakobson conceived it, is a qualitative theory of oppositional binary relations. Andrews shows how markedness theory enables a linguist to precisely define the systemically given oppositions and hierarchies represented by linguistic categories. In addition, she redefines the relationship between Jakobsonian markedness theory and Peircean interpretants. Though primarily theoretical, the argument is illustrated with discussions about learning a second language, the relationship of linguistics to mathematics (particularly set theory, algebra, topology, and statistics) in their mutual pursuit of invariance, and issues involving grammatical gender and their implications in several languages.

Judging Appearances

Judging Appearances PDF Author: E.E. Kleist
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401139318
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Kant's Critique of Judgment accounts for the sharing of a common world, experienced affectively, by a diverse human plurality. In order to appreciate Kant's project, Judging Appearances retrieves the connection between appearance and judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Kleist emphasizes the important but neglected idea of a sensus communis, which provides the indeterminate criterion for judgments regarding appearance. Judging Appearances examines the themes of appearance and judgment against the background of Kant's debt to Leibniz and Shaftesbury. Drawing upon treatments by Husserl, Sartre, Ricoeur and Arendt, Kleist delineates the proto-phenomenological method through which Kant uncovers the idea of a sensus communis. Kleist shows that taste is a discipline of opening oneself to appearance, requiring a subject who dwells in a common world of appearances among a diverse human plurality. This volume will prove valuable for anyone interested in a fresh approach to themes at the heart of Kant's aesthetics.

Linguistic Emotivity

Linguistic Emotivity PDF Author: Senko K. Maynard
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027251177
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
Linguistic Emotivity explores expressive and emotive meanings in Japanese from the perspective of the Place of Negotiation theory. The Place of Negotiation theory provides a framework for understanding how linguistic signs function in the place of communication (in cognitive, emotive, and interactional places). The theory finds the indexicality of a sign fundamental and views meanings as being negotiated among interactants who share not only information but, more significantly, feelings. Using analytical tools recognized in conversation and discourse analyses, the book analyzes emotive topics (vocatives, emotive nominals, quotative topics, etc.) and emotive comments (da and ja-nai, interrogatives, stylistic shifts, etc.) in contemporary Japanese discourse. It argues for the importance of emotivity in Japanese, in the context of the Japanese culture of pathos. Linguistic Emotivity challenges the traditional view of language that privileges logos, form, information, and abstraction, and instead, it proposes a philosophical shift toward pathos, expression, emotion, and linguistic event/action.

Aquinas's Theory of Perception

Aquinas's Theory of Perception PDF Author: Anthony J. Lisska
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191083666
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Anthony J. Lisska presents a new analysis of Thomas Aquinas's theory of perception. While much work has been undertaken on Aquinas's texts, little has been devoted principally to his theory of perception and less still on a discussion of inner sense. The thesis of intentionality serves as the philosophical backdrop of this analysis while incorporating insights from Brentano and from recent scholarship. The principal thrust is on the importance of inner sense, a much-overlooked area of Aquinas's philosophy of mind, with special reference to the vis cogitativa. Approaching the texts of Aquinas from contemporary analytic philosophy, Lisska suggests a modest 'innate' or 'structured' interpretation for the role of this inner sense faculty. Dorothea Frede suggests that this faculty is an 'embarrassment' for Aquinas; to the contrary, the analysis offered in this book argues that were it not for the vis cogitativa, Aquinas's philosophy of mind would be an embarrassment. By means of this faculty of inner sense, Aquinas offers an account of a direct awareness of individuals of natural kinds—referred to by Aquinas as incidental objects of sense—which comprise the principal ontological categories in Aquinas's metaphysics. By using this awareness of individuals of a natural kind, Aquinas can make better sense out of the process of abstraction using the active intellect (intellectus agens). Were it not for the vis cogitativa, Aquinas would be unable to account for an awareness of the principal ontological category in his metaphysics.

Common Sense

Common Sense PDF Author: F. L. van Holthoon
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780819165046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
NOTE: Series number is not an integer: n/a

Lyotard and the Political

Lyotard and the Political PDF Author: James Williams
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415183482
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This is the first book to consider the full range of the political thought of Francois Lyotard and its broader implications, tracing its development from his early Marxist essays to his break with the thought of Marx and Freud.

Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition

Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition PDF Author: Glenn Alexander Magee
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801474507
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Glenn Alexander Magee's pathbreaking book argues that Hegel was decisively influenced by the Hermetic tradition, a body of thought with roots in Greco-Roman Egypt. Magee traces the influence on Hegel of such Hermetic thinkers as Baader, Böhme, Bruno, and Paracelsus, and fascination with occult and paranormal phenomena. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition covers Hegel's philosophical corpus and shows that his engagement with Hermeticism lasted throughout his career and intensified during his final years in Berlin. Viewing Hegel as a Hermetic thinker has implications for a more complete understanding of the modern philosophical tradition, and German idealism in particular.