DOCSLIB.ORG

Marxism and Deconstruction Ryan, Michael

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Marxism and Deconstruction Ryan, Michael Marxism and Deconstruction Ryan, Michael Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.68454. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/68454 [ Access provided at 29 Sep 2021 16:43 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Michael Ryan Marxism and Deconstruction A Critical Articulation Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3206-9 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3206-4 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3205-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3205-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3207-6 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3207-2 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. MARXISMAND DECONSTRUCTION MARXISM AND DECONSTRUCTION A Critical Articulation Michael Ryan The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London Copyright © 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Originally published, 1982 Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1984 Second printing, 1986 Third printing, 1989 The Johns Hopkins University Press 701 West 40th Street Baltimore, Maryland 21211 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ryan, Michael, 1951- Marxism and deconstruction. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Communism-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Criticism-Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Derrida, Jacques-Addresses, essays, lectures . I. Title. HX73.R9 335.43 81-48185 ISBN 0-8018-3248-9 (pbk .) For Gayatn· In memory of Walter Rodnev (1942-1980) Philosophy has become secularized, and the striking proof thereof is that the philosophical consciousness itself has been pulled into the torrent of struggle .... If the construction and preparation of the future is not our business, then it is the more certain what we do have to consummate-I mean the ruthless criticism of all that exists . I am therefore, not in favor of planting a dogmatic flag; quite the contrary. We should try to help the dogmatists to clarify their ideas. -Karl Marx Articulation is difference .... The relationship ... is one of seriality without paradigm. -Jacques Derrida Contents Abbreviations x1 Preface xm Introduction 1 1 Deconstruction: A Primer, A Critique, The Politics Of 9 2 Marx and Derrida 43 3 Deconstruction and Dialectics 6S 4 The Limits of Capital 82 5 From Derrida to Habermas and Beyond, via Lacan 103 6 The Metaphysics of Everyday Life 117 7 Reason and Counterrevolution 132 8 Marxism after Deconstruction 159 9 Postleninist Marxism-Socialist Feminism and Autonomy 194 Conclusion 213 Notes 223 Index 231 ix Abbreviations AFP Henry Kissinger, American Fore([fn Pohcy (New York, 1977). BF Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, Be­ yond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Sociahsm (Lon­ don , 1979). Cap 1 Karl Marx , Capital Volum e One , trans. Ben Fowkes (New York, 1977). Cap 3 Karl Marx, Capital Volume Three, trans. Ernest Untermann (New York, 1977). Grit Jean Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London, 1976). CSF Karl Marx , "The Class Struggles in France ," in Surveys from Exile (London, 1975). CT Stanley Hoffmann, Contemporarv Theory in International Relations (Englewood Cliffs, 1960). cw Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (Moscow, 1976). DHE American Assembly, Disorders in Higher Education (Englewood Cliffs, 1979). Diss Jacques Derrida, La dissemination ( Paris, 1972 ). Ecrits Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977). EW Karl Marx, Ear(v Works, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1975 ). FIA Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (London, 1974). Gram Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976). Grun Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicholaus (London, 1973). LCW V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1964). LI Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc abc," G(vph 2: Johns Hopkins Tex­ tual Studies (Baltimore, 1977). MEW Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin, 1962-68). XI x11 ABBREVIATIONS NGC Rainer Nagele, "The Provocation of Lacan," New German Cri­ tique, no. 16 (Winter 1979), pp. 7-29. OLI Paul Hirst, On Law and Ideology (Atlantic Highlands, 1979). PA Pn'orities for Action (New York, 1973). Pos Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris, 1972). PSE Planning a Socialist Economy, ed. L. Y. Berri (Moscow, 1977). PT Andreas Faludi, Planning Theory (London, 1973). Rev Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848 (London, 1973). SP Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, 1973). TSV Karl Marx, Theon·es of Surplus Value (Moscow, 1971). VH Stanley Hoffmann, "A View from Home : The Perils of Inco­ herence," Foreign Policy (Elmsford, 1979), pp. 463-91. WD Jacques Derrida, Wn'ting and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chi­ cago, 1977). Preface A "critical articulation" neither makes similarities into identities nor rigorously maintains distinctions. It is more akin to the weaving together of heterogeneous threads into a new product than to the scholarly and disinterested comparison of homo­ geneous masses whose distinction is respected. This book might be called an alloy, rather than a comparative study. The alloying of the two dis­ tinct entities into a new compound requires an account of the materials used, but merely to enable the location of common properties that fa­ cilitate the making of the alloy. Not all deconstruction can be used for this endeavor. Except for the work of such radical critics as Gayatri Spivak 1 and others who use it to analyze institutions, political discourse, and ideology, American decon­ struction is too far removed from the concerns of marxism to be of any value in an articulation of the sort undertaken here. The work of Jacques Derrida, the initiator of the deconstructive critique of metaphysics, is more accessible to this process. Marxisms abound, and Alvin Gouldner argues that there are at least two major schools, the "scientific" and the "critical." 2 Scientific marxism is grounded in the axioms of the Soviet Union's celebrated metaphysics, "dialectical materialism." It interprets the world in one way at all times, and, therefore, it remains closed to new advances in philosophy and critical analysis, such as deconstruction. Because critical marxism is less the designation for a school or a system, and more the provisional tag for a plurality of movements, it can more easily be articulated with decon­ struction. In economic theory, critical marxist movements tend to be charac­ terized by a rejection of the model of authoritarian central state com­ munism. They favor models of socialism which are dehierarchized, egali­ tarian, and democratic. Whereas the Soviet model privileges productive forces (technology, heavy industry, and the like) over productive rela- Xlll XIV PREFACE tions, thus permitting the preservation of capitalist work relations, criti­ cal marxists demand a complete transformation of the form of work and of all social power relations , in the "private " as much as in the "public" sphere. They see capital and patriarchy as equally important adversaries. Historically, patriarchy precedes free enterprise capitalism as a mode of oppression, and in the so-called socialist countries it postdates capitalism as a mode of oppression. Capitalism and patriarchy are inseparable in practice, though distinct in theory. Therefore, a socialism that removes capital while preserving patriarchy remains a form of oppression from the point of view of critical marxism. Critical marxists depart from the leninist tradition in that they call for political organizational forms that are not exclusive, elitist, hierarchical, or disciplinarian. The postrevolutionary "arrangement of things ," to use Marx's phrase, should include the political advances made by the bour­ geoisie (such as democracy and civil rights), just as a socialist economy must necessarily presuppose the technological and economic advances that capitalism produces. Socialism should not destroy all "bourgeois rights" (hypocritical as some of them may be) and return to seventeenth­ century absolutism . Democratic socialism would further the displacement and defusion of power relations, the institution of radical democracy, and the development of forms of self-mana14ement and of self-14overn­ ment. Deconstruction consists of a critique of metaphysics in all its classic and current forms-idealism, transcendental phenomenology, crude materialism, logical positivism, and so forth. The closest approximation of deconstruction on the left is the work of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin . More recently, the work of Tony Bennett, Ernesto Laclau, Paul Hirst , and others in En14land has reflected aspects of Derrida's work . Derrida published his major works between 1967 and 1975. Al­ though he continues to publish significant
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Beyond Good and Evil—1
    Nietzsche & Asian Philosophy Beyond Good and Evil—1 Beyond good and Evil Preface supposing truth is a woman philosophers like love-sick suitors who don’t understand the woman-truth central problem of philosophy is Plato’s error: denying perspective, the basic condition of all life On the Prejudices of Philosophers 1) questioning the will to truth who is it that really wants truth? What in us wants truth? Why not untruth? 2) origin of the will to truth out of the will to untruth, deception can anything arise out of its opposite? A dangerous questioning? Nietzsche sees new philosophers coming up who have the strength for the dangerous “maybe.” Note in general Nietzsche’s preference for the conditional tense, his penchant for beginning his questioning with “perhaps” or “suppose” or “maybe.” In many of the passages throughout this book Nietzsche takes up a perspective which perhaps none had dared take up before, a perspective to question what had seemed previously to be unquestionable. He seems to constantly be tempting the reader with a dangerous thought experiment. This begins with the questioning of the will to truth and the supposition that, perhaps, the will to truth may have arisen out of its opposite, the will to untruth, ignorance, deception. 3) the supposition that the greater part of conscious thinking must be included among instinctive activities Nietzsche emphasizes that consciousness is a surface phenomenon conscious thinking is directed by what goes on beneath the surface contrary to Plato’s notion of pure reason, the conscious
    [Show full text]
  • Nietzsche's Revaluation of All Values Joseph Anthony Kranak Marquette University
    Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects Nietzsche's Revaluation of All Values Joseph Anthony Kranak Marquette University Recommended Citation Kranak, Joseph Anthony, "Nietzsche's Revaluation of All Values" (2014). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 415. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/415 NIETZSCHE’S REVALUATION OF ALL VALUES by Joseph Kranak A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Milwaukee, Wisconsin December 2014 ABSTRACT NIETZSCHE’S REVALUTION OF ALL VALUES Joseph Kranak Marquette University, 2014 This dissertation looks at the details of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the revaluation of all values. The dissertation will look at the idea in several ways to elucidate the depth and complexity of the idea. First, it will be looked at through its evolution, as it began as an idea early in Nietzsche’s career and reached its full complexity at the end of his career with the planned publication of his Revaluation of All Values, just before the onset of his madness. Several questions will be explored: What is the nature of the revaluator who is supposed to be instrumental in the process of revaluation? What will the values after the revaluation be like (a rebirth of ancient values or creation of entirely new values)? What will be the scope of the revaluation? And what is the relation of other major ideas of Nietzsche’s (will to power, eternal return, overman, and amor fati) to the revaluation? Different answers to these questions will be explored.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Marxism and Educational Theory Mike Cole Summary While Marx
    1 Marxism and Educational Theory Mike Cole Summary While Marx and Engels wrote little on education, the educational implications of Marxism are clear. Education both reproduces capitalism and has the potential to undermine it. This entry, therefore, takes each of these propositions in turn. With respect to reproduction, it is informative to look at key texts by Althusser and Bowles and Gintis (and the latter’s legacy). As far as challenging capitalism is concerned, considerations are given of both theoretical developments and practical attempts to confront neoliberalism and enact socialist principles, the combination of which Marxists refer to as praxis. There have been constant challenges to Marxism since its conception, and the entry concludes with a look at two contemporary theories - Critical Race Theory and its primacy of ‘race’ over class - and intersectionality which has a tendency to marginalize class. Keywords: Marxism, Educational Theory, education and the reproduction of capitalism, Althusser, Bowles and Gintis, education and the undermining of capitalism, Rikowski, Neary and Saunders, contemporary theoretical challenges to Marxism. Marx and Engels on Education As Ronald F. Price (1977, p. 68) has argued, Marx’s vision of communism as the transcendence of alienation, and of a period when people become increasingly self-conscious and self- determining has manifold implications for education. However, for Marx and Engels the transformation of society is to come about through class struggle, and class action, rather than as a result of the spread of enlightened opinion throughout society; thus education did not figure prominently in their work, at least in the sense of being educated formally in institutions.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ontological-Ontic Character of Mythology
    Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-25-2017 12:00 AM The Ontological-Ontic Character of Mythology Jeffrey M. Ray The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. John Verheide The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Jeffrey M. Ray 2017 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, History of Philosophy Commons, and the Metaphysics Commons Recommended Citation Ray, Jeffrey M., "The Ontological-Ontic Character of Mythology" (2017). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 4821. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4821 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract This thesis submission interrogates the concept of mythology within the opposing philosophical frameworks of the world as either an abstract totality from which ‘truth’ is derived, or as a chaotic background to which the subject brings a synthetic unity. Chapter One compares the culturally dominant, classical philosophical picture of the world as a necessary, knowable totality, with the more recent conception of the ‘world’ as a series of ideational repetitions (sense) grafted on to material flows emanating from a chaotic background (non-sense). Drawing on Plato, Kant, and Heidegger, I situate mythology as a conception of the false—that which fails to correlate with the ‘world’ as a necessary whole.
    [Show full text]
  • The Dialectic of Freedom 1St Edition Pdf Free Download
    THE DIALECTIC OF FREEDOM 1ST EDITION PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Maxine Greene | 9780807728970 | | | | | The Dialectic of Freedom 1st edition PDF Book She examines the ways in which the disenfranchised have historically understood and acted on their freedom—or lack of it—in dealing with perceived and real obstacles to expression and empowerment. It offers readers a critical opportunity to reflect on our continuing ideological struggles by examining popular books that have made a difference in educational discourse. Professors: Request an Exam Copy. Major works. Max Horkheimer Theodor W. The latter democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. American Paradox American Quest. Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism. Forgot your password? There have been two English translations: the first by John Cumming New York: Herder and Herder , ; and a more recent translation, based on the definitive text from Horkheimer's collected works, by Edmund Jephcott Stanford: Stanford University Press, Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser. Peter Lang. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. Archetypal literary criticism New historicism Technocriticism. The author concludes with suggestions for approaches to teaching and learning that can provoke both educators and students to take initiatives, to transcend limits, and to pursue freedom—not in solitude, but in reciprocity with others, not in privacy, but in a public space.
    [Show full text]
  • Thesis Eleven 11 E Critical Theory and Historical Sociology L E
    THE_141_1_Covers.qxp_Layout 1 01/08/17 4:22 pm Page 1 n e t v thesis eleven 11 e critical theory and historical sociology l e Performative Jozi s Guest editors: Noëleen Murray and Peter Vale i Introduction s Johannesburg: Colonial anchor, African performer e Peter Vale and Noëleen Murray 7 h 1 t Articles 0 2 Melancholy mapping: A ‘dispatcher’s eye’ and the locations of loss in t t Johannesburg s h Ed Charlton u g e u Woza! Sweetheart! On braiding epistemologies on Bree Street s A Mpho Matsipa i / s 1 Babel Re-Play e 4 Cynthia Kros and Georges Pfruender 1 l r e Acropolis now: Ponte City as ‘portrait of a city’ e v Svea Josephy b e m thesis eleven n Wrapping Johannesburg: A boxing story u Christine Dixie and James Sey n critical theory and historical sociology Satellite cities: Photographic essay Svea Josephy t11 Friday 20th July 2012 Yewande Omotoso n u Review essay m Writing Johannesburg b Performative Jozi Naomi Roux e r 1 Book review 4 1 Vale Murray Charlton Matsipa / • • • A u • Kros • Pfruender • Josephy • Dixie g u s • Sey • Josephy • Omotoso • Roux t 2 0 1 7 journals.sagepub.com/home/the SAGE ISSN 0725-5136 journals.sagepub.com/home/the THE_141_1_Covers.qxp_Layout 1 01/08/17 4:22 pm Page 2 thesis eleven thesis eleven t11 t11 Coordinating Editors Commissioning Editors Review Editor Peter Beilharz Simon Marginson Peter Beilharz Trevor Hogan David Roberts Aims and Scope: The purpose of this journal is to encourage the development of social theory in the broadest sense.
    [Show full text]
  • 10753820.Pdf
    https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Outside of a Logocentric Discourse? The Case of (Post)modern Czech “Women’s” Writing Jan Matonoha Degree: MPhil Form of Study: Research Department of Slavonic Studies School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Glasgow May 2007 © Jan Matonoha, 2007 ProQuest Number: 10753820 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10753820 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
    [Show full text]
  • Irish Foreign Affairs
    Irish Foreign Affairs Volume 9, Number 2 June 2016 “Every nation, if it is to survive as a nation, must study its own history and have a foreign policy” —C.J. O’Donnell, The Lordship of the World, 1924, p.145 Contents Editorial: Hiroshima p. 2 The 1938 Capture and San Pedro Imprisonment of Frank Ryan Manus O’Riordan p. 7 The Breaking of British Imperial and Financial Power 1940 – 1945 Feargus O Raghallaigh p. 11 Thoughts on Lord Esher (Part Three) Pat Walsh p. 14 James Connolly and the Great War Why Connolly and Larkin Supported Socialist Germany in World War 1 Pat Muldowney p.17 Habsburgia and the Irish: Postscript Pat Muldowney p.20 Documents Domenico Losurdo The Germans: A Sonderweg of an Irredeemable Nation? Part 2 p. 21 Submission by Jews for Justice for Palestinians to the Chakrabarti Inquiry into anti-Semitism and other Forms of Racism within the Labour Party. p. 27 A Quarterly Review published by the Irish Political Review Group, Dublin Editorial Hiroshima The President—that is the President of the World—visited the editorial material included in the Athol Books reprint of Hiroshima, where the modern world began on 6th August 1945. Bolg An Tsolair, the Gaelic magazine of the United Irishmen.) He said he did not go there to apologise. Why did he go? To formalise the precedent set by the nuclear bombing to It was Jefferson, the democrat of early US history, who establish that the deliberate killing of civilians of an enemy proclaimed sovereignty over the entire territory to the Pacific country for a political purpose is a legitimate, and even a while great tracts of it were still populated by natives, and commendable military tactic? What other purpose could there he warned that they would be exterminated if they resisted have been for the visit, since the notion that it might have been progress.
    [Show full text]
  • Generic Affinities, Posthumanisms and Science-Fictional Imaginings
    GENERIC AFFINITIES, POSTHUMANISMS, SCIENCE-FICTIONAL IMAGININGS SPECULATIVE MATTER: GENERIC AFFINITIES, POSTHUMANISMS AND SCIENCE-FICTIONAL IMAGININGS By LAURA M. WIEBE, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright by Laura Wiebe, October 2012 McMaster University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2012) Hamilton, Ontario (English and Cultural Studies) TITLE: Speculative Matter: Generic Affinities, Posthumanisms and Science-Fictional Imaginings AUTHOR: Laura Wiebe, B.A. (University of Waterloo), M.A. (Brock University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Anne Savage NUMBER OF PAGES: vi, 277 ii ABSTRACT Amidst the technoscientific ubiquity of the contemporary West (or global North), science fiction has come to seem the most current of genres, the narrative form best equipped to comment on and work through the social, political and ethical quandaries of rapid technoscientific development and the ways in which this development challenges conventional understandings of human identity and rationality. By this framing, the continuing popularity of stories about paranormal phenomena and supernatural entities – on mainstream television, or in print genres such as urban fantasy and paranormal romance – may seem to be a regressive reaction against the authority of and experience of living in technoscientific modernity. Nevertheless, the boundaries of science fiction, as with any genre, are relational rather than fixed, and critical engagements with Western/Northern technoscientific knowledge and practice and modern human identity and being may be found not just in science fiction “proper,” or in the scholarly field of science and technology studies, but also in the related genres of fantasy and paranormal romance.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation
    Chapter 2 The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation Carl F. Craver Abstract According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331– 496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity.
    [Show full text]
  • Connolly in America: the Political Development of an Irish Marxist As Seen from His Writings and His Involvement with the American Socialist Movement 1902-1910
    THESIS UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE JAMES CONNOLLY IN AMERICA: THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF AN IRISH MARXIST AS SEEN FROM HIS WRITINGS AND HIS INVOLVEMENT WITH THE AMERICAN SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 1902-1910 by MICHEÁL MANUS O’RIORDAN MASTER OF ARTS 1971 A 2009 INTRODUCTION I have been most fortunate in life as regards both educational opportunities and career choice. I say this as a preface to explaining how I came to be a student in the USA 1969-1971, and a student not only of the history of James Connolly’s life in the New World a century ago, but also a witness of, and participant in, some of the most momentous developments in the living history of the US anti-war and social and labour movements of 40 years ago. I was born on Dublin’s South Circular Road in May 1949, to Kay Keohane [1910-1991] and her husband Micheál O’Riordan [1917- 2006], an ITGWU bus worker. This was an era that preceded not only free third-level education, but free second-level education as well. My primary education was received in St. Kevin’s National School, Grantham Street, and Christian Brothers’ School, Synge Street. Driven to study - and not always willingly! - by a mother who passionately believed in the principle expounded by Young Irelander Thomas Davis – “Educate, that you may be free!” - I was fortunate enough to achieve exam success in 1961 in winning a Dublin Corporation secondary school scholarship. By covering my fees, this enabled me to continue with second-level education at Synge Street. In my 1966 Leaving Certificate exams I was also fortunate to win a Dublin Corporation university scholarship.
    [Show full text]
  • Postcolonialism
    10 Postcolonialism The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination. Che Guevara, speech to the United Nations, December 11, 1964 he 1960s saw a revolutionary change in literary theory. Until this dec- Tade, New Criticism dominated literary theory and criticism, with its insistence that “the” one correct interpretation of a text could be discovered if critical readers follow the prescribed methodology asserted by the New Critics. Positing an autonomous text, New Critics paid little attention to a text’s historical context or to the feelings, beliefs, and ideas of a text’s read- ers. For New Critics, a text’s meaning is inextricably bound to ambiguity, irony, and paradox found within the structure of the text itself. By analyzing the text alone, New Critics believe that an astute critic can identify a text’s central paradox and explain how the text ultimately resolves that paradox while also supporting the text’s overarching theme. Into this seemingly self-assured system of hermeneutics marches philos- opher and literary critic Jacques Derrida along with similar-thinking scholar- critics in the late 1960s. Unlike the New Critics, Derrida, the chief spokesperson for deconstruction, disputes a text’s objective existence. Denying that a text is an autotelic artifact, he challenges the accepted definitions and assump- tions of both the reading and the writing processes. In addition, he insists on questioning what parts not only the text but also the reader and the author play in the interpretive process.
    [Show full text]