The Structuralist Controversy
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'The Only Secret Is That There Is No Secret': Sense and Nonsense in Deleuze Guillaume Collett
Volume 7 SECRETS ‘The only secret is that there is no secret’: Sense and Nonsense in Deleuze Guillaume Collett University of Kent Abstract his article examines the philosophy of ‘sense’ developed in the 1950s and 1960s by two T French philosophers, Jean Hyppolite and Gilles Deleuze, and seeks to show that the model of sense they develop seeks to oppose phenomenological and hermeneutical conceptions of meaning, which view sense as pointing to a deeper underlying reality. It will show that for Hyppolite and Deleuze, on the contrary, sense is its own reality, pointing to nothing deeper or outside it. On this basis, it argues that if for Hyppolite, ‘the only secret is that there is no secret’, meaning that there is nothing ‘behind’ sense, then for Deleuze, the only secret is that ‘nonsense’ is the underlying basis of sense, and is constantly co-present with it. This framework is then used to explore a Deleuzian post/structuralist theory of the text, in which a text’s ‘secret’ or ultimate signified is nothing else than the production of sense within the text itself, which must be considered as an excess of sense. This excess of sense is nonsensical only to the extent that it resists what Deleuze calls ‘good’ and ‘common sense’, and is not simply opposed to sense, being as it is the very basis of sense. 1 Keywords: sense, nonsense, structuralism, secret, Deleuze, Heidegger. uch of the Anglophone reception of Gilles Deleuze treats his project as alien to Martin M Heidegger’s and as espousing either a brand of realist vitalism, or, increasingly, a brand of post-Kantian critique. -
Reading the World, Writing the Mind: Ideology, Morphogenesis, Revolution
READING THE WORLD, WRITING THE MIND: IDEOLOGY, MORPHOGENESIS, REVOLUTION by Philip Edmond Olsen A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Wilkes Honors College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Concentration in Philosophy Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, Florida May 2014 READING THE WORLD, WRITING THE MIND: IDEOLOGY, MORPHOGENESIS, REVOLUTION by Philip Edmond Olsen This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Daniel White, and has been approved by the members of her/his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ____________________________ Dr. Daniel White ____________________________ Dr. Michael Harrawood ______________________________ Dean Jeffrey Buller, Wilkes Honors College ___________ Date ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Daniel White, for his insight, conversation, and encouragement. I would also like to thank Dr. Michael Harrawood for giving me a lot of books and talking about philosophy with me. Finally, I would like to thank Calvin Bankert, John Carney, Alexa Robinson, Janeen Smith, and Daniel Zengotita for talking to me about things. It all helped. iii ABSTRACT Author: Philip Edmond Olsen Title: Reading the World, Writing the Mind: Ideology, Morphogenesis, Revolution Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Daniel White Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Concentration: Philosophy Year: 2014 In the 1960s, the French Communist thinker Louis Althusser undertook to reorient capitalistic societies toward realizing socialist ideals. -
Terms for Talking About Information and Communication
Information 2012, 3, 351-371; doi:10.3390/info3030351 OPEN ACCESS information ISSN 2078-2489 www.mdpi.com/journal/information Concept Paper Terms for Talking about Information and Communication Corey Anton School of Communications, Grand Valley State University, 210 Lake Superior Hall, Allendale, MI 49401, USA; E-Mail: [email protected]; Tel.: +1-616-331-3668; Fax: +1-616-331-2700 Received: 4 June 2012; in revised form: 17 August 2012 / Accepted: 20 August 2012 / Published: 27 August 2012 Abstract: This paper offers terms for talking about information and how it relates to both matter-energy and communication, by: (1) Identifying three different levels of signs: Index, based in contiguity, icon, based in similarity, and symbol, based in convention; (2) examining three kinds of coding: Analogic differences, which deal with positive quantities having contiguous and continuous values, and digital distinctions, which include “either/or functions”, discrete values, and capacities for negation, decontextualization, and abstract concept-transfer, and finally, iconic coding, which incorporates both analogic differences and digital distinctions; and (3) differentiating between “information theoretic” orientations (which deal with data, what is “given as meaningful” according to selections and combinations within “contexts of choice”) and “communication theoretic” ones (which deal with capta, what is “taken as meaningful” according to various “choices of context”). Finally, a brief envoi reflects on how information broadly construed relates to probability and entropy. Keywords: sign; index; icon; symbol; coding; context; information; communication “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. -
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Christianity By
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Christianity by Tenzan Eaghll A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto ©Copyright by Tenzan Eaghll 2016 Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Christianity Tenzan Eaghll Doctor of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This dissertation is a study of the origins and development of the French philosopher Jean- Luc Nancy’s work on the “deconstruction of Christianity.” By situating Nancy's work in light of the broader Continental philosophical analysis of religion in the 20th Century, it argues that what Nancy calls the "deconstruction of Christianity" and the "exit from religion" is his unique intervention into the problem of metaphysical nihilism in Western thought. The author explains that Nancy’s work on religion does not provide a new “theory” for the study of religion or Christianity, but shows how Western metaphysical foundations are caught up in a process of decomposition that has been brought about by Christianity. For Nancy, the only way out of nihilism is to think of the world as an infinite opening unto itself, for this dis- encloses any transcendent principle of value or immanent notion of meaninglessness in the finite spacing of sense, and he finds the resources to think this opening within Christianity. By reading Christian notions like "God" and "creation ex nihilo" along deconstructive lines and connecting them with the rise and fall of this civilization that once called itself "Christendom," he attempts to expose "the sense of an absenting" that is both the condition of possibility for the West and what precedes, succeeds, and exceeds it. -
Paul De Man Papers MS.C.004
http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf6p30071t Online items available Guide to the Paul de Man papers MS.C.004 Finding aid prepared by Jeffrey Atteberry and updated by Laura Clark Brown, 1997; machine-readable finding aid created by Audrey Pearson; updated by Alexandra M. Bisio, 2015. Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries (cc) 2015 The UCI Libraries P.O. Box 19557 University of California, Irvine Irvine 92623-9557 [email protected] URL: http://special.lib.uci.edu Guide to the Paul de Man papers MS.C.004 1 MS.C.004 Contributing Institution: Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries Title: Paul de Man papers Creator: De Man, Paul Identifier/Call Number: MS.C.004 Physical Description: 11.8 Linear Feet(25 boxes) Date (inclusive): 1948-1999 Abstract: This collection contains the personal and professional papers of Paul de Man documenting his career as a scholar and literary theorist in the field of comparative literature, and as an academic in the United States. Files primarily contain his manuscripts and typescripts related to literary criticism, rhetoric, and critical theory, and reflect his general interests in Romanticism. In particular, materials document his approach to literary texts that became known as deconstruction. His works focus on writers and philosophers such as Hegel, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Yeats. The collection also contains published and unpublished writings, student papers, notes, teaching notebooks, and related materials. Language of Material: English . Access The collection is open for research. Access to student record material is restricted for 75 years from the latest date of the materials in those files. -
Merleau-Ponty's Last Writings.” the Southern Journal of Philosophy 43.4: 463-474
SENSE, LANGUAGE, AND ONTOLOGY IN MERLEAU-PONTY AND HYPPOLITE [Pre-Print Version. For the final version see Research in Phenomenology 48.1 (2018): 92-118.] Dimitris Apostolopoulos Hyppolite stresses his proximity to Merleau-Ponty, but the received interpretation of his ‘anti-humanist’ reading of Hegel suggests a greater distance between their projects. This paper focuses on an under-explored dimension of their philosophical relationship. I argue that Merleau- Ponty and Hyppolite are both committed to formulating a mode of philosophical expression that can avoid the pitfalls of purely formal or literal and purely aesthetic or creative modes of expression. Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to navigate this dichotomy, I suggest, closely resembles Hyppolite’s interpretation of Hegel’s ‘speculative’ mode of expression. In particular, his emphasis on the ‘mediating’ character of philosophical language, which moves between descriptive and creative expression, suggests a debt to Hyppolite. This reading provides more evidence to think that Hyppolite cannot be straightforwardly understood as an anti-humanist or post- phenomenological thinker, and paves the way for a rapprochement between his work and the broader phenomenological tradition. Keywords: Merleau-Ponty, Hyppolite, Language, Meaning, Ontology §1 Introduction [Merleau-Ponty’s] proper theme, was the problematic of sense [sens] (the sense of all sense), and the location of this problematic could not but be philosophical expression as such. -Hyppolite, Inaugural Lecture to the Collège de France. In his Inaugural Lecture to the Collège de France in December 1963, Jean Hyppolite paid homage to Merleau-Ponty, a thinker that Hyppolite “needed to refer to.”1 Hyppolite claimed his thought was “knotted” with Merleau-Ponty’s, “above all during the final years.”2 But the received view of Hyppolite’s influence on 20th-century French philosophy suggests a greater distance between their respective projects. -
What Is Systems Theory?
What is Systems Theory? Systems theory is an interdisciplinary theory about the nature of complex systems in nature, society, and science, and is a framework by which one can investigate and/or describe any group of objects that work together to produce some result. This could be a single organism, any organization or society, or any electro-mechanical or informational artifact. As a technical and general academic area of study it predominantly refers to the science of systems that resulted from Bertalanffy's General System Theory (GST), among others, in initiating what became a project of systems research and practice. Systems theoretical approaches were later appropriated in other fields, such as in the structural functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann . Contents - 1 Overview - 2 History - 3 Developments in system theories - 3.1 General systems research and systems inquiry - 3.2 Cybernetics - 3.3 Complex adaptive systems - 4 Applications of system theories - 4.1 Living systems theory - 4.2 Organizational theory - 4.3 Software and computing - 4.4 Sociology and Sociocybernetics - 4.5 System dynamics - 4.6 Systems engineering - 4.7 Systems psychology - 5 See also - 6 References - 7 Further reading - 8 External links - 9 Organisations // Overview 1 / 20 What is Systems Theory? Margaret Mead was an influential figure in systems theory. Contemporary ideas from systems theory have grown with diversified areas, exemplified by the work of Béla H. Bánáthy, ecological systems with Howard T. Odum, Eugene Odum and Fritj of Capra , organizational theory and management with individuals such as Peter Senge , interdisciplinary study with areas like Human Resource Development from the work of Richard A. -
Suicide-Authors: a Deconstructive Study by Lilia Loman
Suicide-Authors: A Deconstructive Study By Lilia Loman ( Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................. 1 Part I ............................................................................................................ 6 1. Theorising Suicide .......................•.............................................................. 6 2. Memorial Texts: Suicide as a Posthumous Performance ..................•...........•.. 33 3. The Deaths of the Suicide-Author ............................................................... 71 Part II ........................................................................................................ 99 4. Speaking to/about the Dead: Plath's Belated Witnesses ................................ 99 5. "The blood jet is poetry": Plath in Her Own Words ...................................... 134 6. "Burning the Letters": The Plath-Hughes Dialogue ...................................... 168 ,., Conclusion ..........•.........................•...•...................•................................... 194 Works Cited ..........................................................•..•.•.............................. 199 Abstract The purpose of this thesis is to problematise the relationship between suicide and the author. On the basis of a deconstructive approach, it will study the effect of the self-inflicted death of the writer, namely the emergence of a dual figure, the "suicide-author". -
Review Article Reading (Deconstructing) J. Hillis Miller: Humanist and Pluralist Daniel R
Review Article Reading (Deconstructing) J. Hillis Miller: Humanist and Pluralist Daniel R. Schwarz Cornell University Miller, J. Hillis. Communities in Fiction. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 303 Pp. xvi+313. In his day, J. Hillis Miller, now in his eighty-eighth year, was one of the most influen- tial of literary scholars, among the leaders in introducing phenomenology and, later, deconstruction to an Anglo-American audience. His early books The Disappearance of God (1963), Poets of Reality (1965), and The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968) were greatly influenced by Georges Poulet and the Geneva school. Fiction and Repetition (1982) was written under the umbrella of Derridean Deconstruction. All four were required reading for a generation of graduate students. I wrote a full chapter on what we might now call Miller’s early work and what was certainly his most influential period in my The Humanistic Heritage: Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller; here I discussed his relationship to the Anglo-American tradition. I cannot say that I have kept up with all of his more than thirty books. In 2005, Stanford University Press thought he had enough of a following to publish The J. Hillis Miller Reader, bringing together examples of his work with commentary by others on his work. With some regret, I wonder if a major press would do such a volume in 2015 or whether his place in the firmament has somewhat faded. I saw Miller on occasion when I still went to MLA and at times when he still lived on the East Coast, and found him a generous colleague, which meant a great deal to me as young aspiring scholar working my way through the ranks. -
The Unfinished Project of Theoretical Biology from a Schellingian Perspective
Swinburne Research Bank http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au Author: Gare, A. Title: Overcoming the Newtonian paradigm: the unfinished project of theoretical biology from a Schellingian perspective Year: 2013 Journal: Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology Volume: 113 Issue: 1 Pages: 5-24 URL: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2013.03.002 Copyright: Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. This is the author’s version of the work, posted here with the permission of the publisher for your personal use. No further distribution is permitted. You may also be able to access the published version from your library. The definitive version is available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ Swinburne University of Technology | CRICOS Provider 00111D | swinburne.edu.au Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 1 Overcoming the Newtonian paradigm: The unfinished project of theoretical biology from a Schellingian perspective Arran Gare* Philosophy, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia Keywords: Reductionism; Emergence; Epigenesis; Biosemiotics; Relational biology; Teleology; Biomathics ABSTRACT: Defending Robert Rosen’s claim that in every confrontation between physics and biology it is physics that has always had to give ground, it is shown that many of the most important advances in mathematics and physics over the last two centuries have followed from Schelling’s demand for a new physics that could make the emergence of life intelligible. Consequently, while reductionism prevails in biology, many biophysicists are resolutely anti-reductionist. This history is used to identify and defend a fragmented but progressive tradition of anti-reductionist biomathematics. It is shown that the mathematico-physico-chemico morphology research program, the biosemiotics movement, and the relational biology of Rosen, although they have developed independently of each other, are built on and advance this anti-reductionist tradition of thought. -
Effects of the Agrégation De Philosophie on Twentieth- Century French Philosophy
Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on Twentieth- Century French Philosophy AL A N D . S C HRI ft much attention has been paid to developments in French philosophy over the past half century, and it has been frequently noted that the recent history of French philosophy differs significantly from its counterparts in England, Germany, and the United States. While many reasons for these differences have been suggested, in what follows I would like to suggest that there is an important and unique French institution—one with no equivalent in the English-speaking or German academic systems—that has had a significant impact on developments in French philosophy throughout the twentieth century. This institution is the Agrégation de Philosophie, and its effects are virtually unknown among philosophers outside France. Even within France—while knowledge of and experience with the agréga- tion is part of the intellectual formation and career of virtually every academic educated in France, including every philosopher teaching in a university and the majority of philosophers teaching the classe de philosophie in French lycées—French philosophers themselves seem relatively unaware and uninterested in the history of the agrégation and the effects that this history has had on philosophical practices in France. What I hope to do in the following pages is explain how the agréga- tion de philosophie works, and suggest that its impact on the education of French philosophy students and the teaching corps in both the university and lycée helps explain a number of developments in French philosophy over the past century. I will also explain why the French philosophical tradition differs from its American counterpart in some very significant ways. -
ED 355 570 ABSTRACT Most of What Communication Scholars Theorize
DOCUMENT RESUME ED 355 570 CS 508 098 AUTHOR Lanigan, Richard L. TITLE Roman Jakobson's Semiotic Theory of Communication. [Revised.] PUB DATE 19 Nov 91 NOTE 10p.; Revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association (77th, Atlanta, GA, October 31-November 3, 1991). PUB TYPE Speeches/Conference Papers (150) Viewpoints (Opinion/Position Papers, Essays, etc.) (120) EDRS PRICE MFO1 /PCO1 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Communication (Thought Transfer); Information Theory; *Language Role; Models; *Semiotics IDENTIFIERS Discourse; *Jakobson (Roman) ABSTRACT For most of the 20th century, Roman Jakobson's name will have been synonymous with the definition of communication as a human science, i.e., communicology. Jakobson is the modern sourceof most of what communication scholars theorize about andpractice as human communication, and he will be the source of howcommunication scholars shall come to understand communication in the future asthe theoretical and applied use of semiotic principles of epistemology. Roman Jakobson alone offers a theory of communication(derived from Jakobson's immediate correction in 1950, on linguistic and semiotic grounds, of an ill-fated information theory) groundedin the study of human language as Aristotle's trivium of an integratedpractice of thought, speech, and inscription, i.e., logic, rhetoric,and grammar, all of which are explicated by a semiotic understandingof what it means to be human. Analysis ofJakobson's model of communication indicates that it is inherently semiotic in origin, rather than linguistic as he himself believed. (A figure representing aspectsof communication theory and information theory is attached.)(RS) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.