The Subject of Modernity

The Subject of Modernity PDF Author: Anthony J. Cascardi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521423786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Anthony J. Cascardi offers an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject of self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth.

The Subject of Modernity

The Subject of Modernity PDF Author: Anthony J. Cascardi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521423786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Anthony J. Cascardi offers an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject of self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth.

Subjects of modernity

Subjects of modernity PDF Author: Saurabh Dube
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526105128
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book thinks through modernity and its representations by exploring critical considerations of time and space. Drawing on anthropology, history and social theory, it investigates the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. Crucially, it understands these antinomies not as errors, but as constitutive elements of modern worlds. The book questions routine portrayals of homogeneous time and antinomian blueprints of cultural space, while acknowledging the production of time and space by social subjects. Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory for the phenomena, it views modernity as involving checkered, contingent and contended processes of meaning and power, which have found heterogeneous historical elaborations over the past five centuries. Bringing together past and present, theory and narrative, it sows the historical, ethnographic and methodological deep into its critical procedures, offering an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology.

Modernity and Subjectivity

Modernity and Subjectivity PDF Author: Harvie Ferguson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919669
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Few concepts have come to dominate the human sciences as much as modernity, yet there is very little agreement over what the term actually means. Every aspect of contemporary human reality--modern society, modern life, modern times, modern art, modern science, modern music, the modern world--has been cited as a part of modernity's distinctive and all-embracing presence. But what is the exact nature of the reality to which the term modern refers? Has not such a promiscuous, ill-defined concept come to obscure and confuse rather than clarify a genuine understanding of our experience? Harvie Ferguson proposes a new view of modernity, arguing that, although it may variously be associated with the Renaissance, the European discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant ruptures with primitive or premodern society, modernity fails as an idea if it only defines itself against what it replaced. Instead, he writes, modernity finds its clearest definition through an exploration of subjectivity. For the modern world there is no higher authority than experience. No longer is the human world subordinate to a divine reality beyond the capacity of its own senses. This idea finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of doubt originated by Descartes. Doubt seemed the radical starting point from which to found a wholly modern philosophy that makes the distinction between subject and object, but those who came after Descartes soon reached the limits of self-discovery and became trapped in deepening levels of despair. This despair in turn found expression in the concepts of self and other, and eventually in a dialectic of ego and world, which distinguishes and links together the most important social, cultural, and psychological aspects of modernity. Moving beyond these dualities of subject and object, mind and body, ego and world, and replacing them with the triad of body, soul, and spirit, Ferguson redraws the map of contemporary experience, finding links with the premodern world that modernity's self-founding concealed.

The Modern Subject

The Modern Subject PDF Author: Karl Ameriks
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791494691
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Contemporary thought often claims the "death of the subject," and postmodernists typically contend that the standpoint of human subjectivity has been surpassed as a foundation for philosophy. A proper appreciation of these influential claims requires an understanding of the main tradition in which the standpoint of subjectivity was articulated, namely the classical philosophy of German Idealism. This book provides such an understanding. The authors assess what is dead and what is alive today in the philosophy of subjectivity, and offer the most thorough study available on the background of the postmodern assault on the primacy of the subject. Tracing this assault back to reactions to Kant, they elucidate the historical and systematic details of the development of the concept of the self in Classical philosophy from Kant to Fichte and Hegel. Manfred Frank, one of Europe's most prominent and prolific writers on neo-structuralism, provides two major contributions--an account of the philosophical foundations of the reaction to Kant in early romanticism (especially Novalis), and a defense of the ineliminability of self-consciousness against its critics in current analytic philosophy. Essays by other contributors-including Henry Allison, Robert Pippin, Daniel Breazeale, Guenter Zoeller, Ludwig Siep, Veronique Zanetti, and Georg Mohr--relate the concept of the self to topics such as freedom, teleology, modernity, and intersubjectivity.

Kantian Subjects

Kantian Subjects PDF Author: Karl Ameriks
Publisher:
ISBN: 019884185X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In this volume, Karl Ameriks explores "Kantian subjects" in three senses. In Part I, he first clarifies the most distinctive features-such as freedom and autonomy-of Kant's notion of what it is for us to be a subject. Other chapters then consider related "subjects" that are basic topics inother parts of Kant's philosophy, such as his notions of necessity and history. Part II examines the ways in which many of us, as "late modern," have been highly influenced by Kant's philosophy and its indirect effect on our self-conception through successive generations of post-Kantians, such asHegel and Schelling, and early Romantic writers such as Holderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis, thus making us "Kantian subjects" in a new historical sense. By defending the fundamentals of Kant's ethics in reaction to some of the latest scholarship in the opening chapters, Ameriks offers an extensiveargument that Holderlin expresses a valuable philosophical position that is much closer to Kant than has generally been recognized. He also argues that it was necessary for Kant's position to be supplemented by the new conception, introduced by the post-Kantians, of philosophy as fundamentallyhistorical, and that this conception has had a growing influence on the most interesting strands of Anglophone as well as Continental philosophy.

A New Philosophy of Modernity and Sovereignty

A New Philosophy of Modernity and Sovereignty PDF Author: Przemyslaw Tacik
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350201286
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Tackling important philosophical questions on modernity – what it is, where it begins and when it ends – Przemyslaw Tacik challenges the idea that modernity marks a particular epoch, and historicises its conception to offer a radical critique of it. His deconstruction-informed critique collects and assesses reflections on modernity from major philosophers including Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Arendt, Agamben, and Žižek. This analysis progresses a new understanding of modernity intrinsically connected to the growth of sovereignty as an organising principle of contemporary life. He argues that it is the idea of 'modernity', as a taken-for-granted era, which is positioned as the essential condition for making linear history possible, when it should instead be history, in and of itself, which dictates the existence of a particular period. Using Hegel's notion of 'spirit' to trace the importance of sovereignty to the conception of the modern epoch within German idealism, Tacik traces Hegel's influence on Heidegger through reference to the 'star' in his late philosophy which represents the hope of overcoming the metaphysical poverty of modernity. This line of thought reveals the necessity of a paradigm shift in our understanding of modernity that speaks to contemporary continental philosophy, theories of modernity, political theory, and critical re-assessments of Marxism.

Acoustemologies in Contact

Acoustemologies in Contact PDF Author: Emily Wilbourne
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1800640382
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment—this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of ‘the canon’ in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery.

Alternative Modernity

Alternative Modernity PDF Author: Andrew Feenberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520915701
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In this new collection of essays, Andrew Feenberg argues that conflicts over the design and organization of the technical systems that structure our society shape deep choices for the future. A pioneer in the philosophy of technology, Feenberg demonstrates the continuing vitality of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He calls into question the anti-technological stance commonly associated with its theoretical legacy and argues that technology contains potentialities that could be developed as the basis for an alternative form of modern society. Feenberg's critical reflections on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-François Lyotard, and Kitaro Nishida shed new light on the philosophical study of technology and modernity. He contests the prevalent conception of technology as an unstoppable force responsive only to its own internal dynamic and politicizes the discussion of its social and cultural construction. This argument is substantiated in a series of compelling and well-grounded case studies. Through his exploration of science fiction and film, AIDS research, the French experience with the "information superhighway," and the Japanese reception of Western values, he demonstrates how technology, when subjected to public pressure and debate, can incorporate ethical and aesthetic values.

Education, Modernity, and Fractured Meaning

Education, Modernity, and Fractured Meaning PDF Author: Donald W. Oliver
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780887069420
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
An indictment of the ideology of modernity, which has resulted in our leading incoherent and fragmented lives, Oliver and Gershman’s book explores the profound paradigmatic differences that exist among the world’s people and describes a rich theory of knowing and being, commonly called “process philosophy.” The promise of process philosophy is in its potential to allow us to participate more fully in the flow of all of time and nature. But what does it mean for a teacher and student in the learning situation to have a process point of view? The authors also discuss many of the various implications in regard to language, space, power relationships, and time as they place process philosophy in the educational context.

Modernity Theory

Modernity Theory PDF Author: John Jervis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137496762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Modernity theory approaches modern experience as it incorporates a sense of itself as ‘modern’ (modernity), along with the possibilities and limitations of representing this in the arts and culture generally (modernism). The book interrogates modernity in the name of a fluid, unsettled, unsettling modernism. As the offspring of the Enlightenment and the Age of Sensibility, modernity is framed here through a cultural aesthetics that highlights not just an instrumental, exploitative approach to the world but the distinctive configuration of embodiment, feeling, and imagination, that we refer to as ‘civilization’, in turn both explored and subverted through modernist experimentalism and reflexive thinking in culture and the arts. This discloses the rationalizing pretensions that underlie the modern project and have resulted in the sensationalist, melodramatic conflicts of good and evil that traverse our contemporary world of politics and popular culture alike. This innovative approach permits modernity theory to link otherwise fragmented insights of separate humanities disciplines, aspects of sociology, and cultural studies, by identifying and contributing to a central strand of modern thought running from Kant through Benjamin to the present. One aspect of modernity theory that results is that it cannot escape the paradoxes inherent in reflexive involvement in its own history.