A Discourse on African Philosophy

A Discourse on African Philosophy PDF

Author: Christian B. N. Gade

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1498512267

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Many have argued that ubuntu was a formative influence on the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa’s famous transitional justice mechanism. A Discourse on African Philosophy: A New Perspective on Ubuntu and Transitional Justice in South Africa challenges and contextualizes this view in a way that not only provides new findings and reflections on ubuntu and the TRC, but also contributes to the field of African philosophy. One of Christian B. N. Gade’s key findings, founded on qualitative interviews in South Africa, is that some former TRC commissioners and committee members question the importance of ubuntu in the TRC process. Another is that there are several differing and historically developing interpretations of ubuntu, some of which have evident political implications and reflect non-factual and creative uses of history. Thus ubuntu is not a shared cultural heritage, in the ethnophilosophical sense of a static property characterizing a group. In fact, throughout this book Gade argues that the ethnophilosophical approach to African philosophy as a static group property is highly problematic. Gade’s research presents an alternative collective discourse on African philosophy (“collective” in the sense that it does not focus on any single individual in particular) that takes differences, historical developments, and social contexts seriously. This book will be of interest to scholars in African philosophy, transitional justice, politics and cultural heritage, and law in South Africa.

Discourse on Method

Discourse on Method PDF

Author: René Descartes

Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand

Published: 2022-12-20

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13:

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" Le Discours de la méthode (sous-titré : Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences) est un texte philosophique publié anonymement par René Descartes à Leyde le 8 juin 1637. Il devait originellement servir d'introduction générale aux traités scientifiques écrits par l'auteur (La Dioptrique, Les Météores et La Géométrie). Il s'agissait pour Descartes « d’en dire assez pour faire juger que les nouvelles opinions, qui se verraient dans la Dioptrique et dans les Météores, n’étaient point conçues à la légère. Toutefois, la célébrité du texte est devenue telle, qu’il est désormais souvent publié seul, comme un essai indépendant. Il est reconnu comme l'une des œuvres fondatrices de la philosophie occidentale."

Divine Discourse

Divine Discourse PDF

Author: Nicholas Wolterstorff

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-10-05

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1107393450

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Prominent in the canonical texts and traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the claim that God speaks. Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that contemporary speech-action theory, when appropriately expanded, offers us a fascinating way of interpreting this claim and showing its intelligibility. He develops an innovative theory of double-hermeneutics - along the way opposing the current near-consensus led by Ricoeur and Derrida that there is something wrong-headed about interpreting a text to find out what its author said. Wolterstorff argues that at least some of us are entitled to believe that God has spoken. Philosophers have never before, in any sustained fashion, reflected on these matters, mainly because they have mistakenly treated speech as revelation.

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity PDF

Author: Jurgen Habermas

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1990-03-14

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 0262581027

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This critique of French philosophy and the history of German philosophy is a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across national cultural boundaries as Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French postmodernism. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across, national cultural boundaries. Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism. Tracing the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity, Habermas's strategy is to return to those historical "crossroads" at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to this outcome. His aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centered reason through the concept of communicative rationality. As The Theory of Communicative Action served to place this concept within the history of social theory, these lectures locate it within the history of philosophy. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about the appropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range of past and present critics and theorists. The lectures on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note since they are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French and German thought. Habermas's dialogue with Foucault—begun in person as the first of these lectures were delivered in Paris in 1983 culminates here in two appreciative yet intensely argumentative lectures. His discussion of the literary-theoretical reception of Derrida in America—launched at Cornell in 1984—issues here in a long excursus on the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. The lectures were reworked for the final time in seminars at Boston College and first published in Germany in the fall of 1985.

A New Philosophy of Discourse

A New Philosophy of Discourse PDF

Author: Joshua Kates

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1350163643

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What would happen if structures, forms, and other stand-alone entities thought to comprise our intellectual toolkit-words, meanings, signs-were jettisoned? How would a work written in a purportedly dead language, like The Iliad, or penned in a foreign tongue be approached if deemed legible without structures such as meaning-bearing signs or grammatical rules? A New Philosophy of Discourse charts a novel course in response to these questions, coining an original concept of discourse, or talk!, that Joshua Kates presents as more fundamental than language. In Kates' conception of discourse, writing and speech take shape entirely as events, situated within histories, contexts, and traditions themselves always in the making. Combining literary theory, literary criticism, and philosophy, to reveal a new perspective on discourse, Kates focuses on literary criticism, literary texts by Charles Bernstein and Stanley Elkin, and the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson and Martin Heidegger. This ground-breaking study bridges the analytical/continental divide, by working through concrete problems using novel and extended interpretations with wide-ranging implications for the humanities.

Lines of Thought

Lines of Thought PDF

Author: Claudia Brodsky

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13:

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It is considerably easier to say that modern philosophy began with Descartes than it is to define the modernity and philosophy to which Descartes gave rise. In Lines of Thought, Claudia Brodsky Lacour describes the double origin of modern philosophy in Descartes's Discours de la méthode and Géométrie, works whose interrelation, she argues, reveals the specific nature of the modern in his thought. Her study examines the roles of discourse and writing in Cartesian method and intuition, and the significance of graphic architectonic form in the genealogy of modern philosophy. While Cartesianism has long served as a synonym for rationalism, the contents of Descartes's method and cogito have remained infamously resistant to rational analysis. Similarly, although modern phenomenological analyses descend from Descartes's notion of intuition, the "things" Cartesian intuitions represent bear no resemblance to phenomena. By returning to what Descartes calls the construction of his "foundation" in the Discours, Brodsky Lacour identifies the conceptual problems at the root of Descartes's literary and aesthetic theory as well as epistemology. If, for Descartes, linear extension and "I" are the only "things" we can know exist, the Cartesian subject of thought, she shows, derives first from the intersection of discourse and drawing, representation and matter. The crux of that intersection, Brodsky Lacour concludes, is and must be the cogito, Descartes's theoretical extension of thinking into material being. Describable in accordance with the Géométrie as a freely constructed line of thought, the cogito, she argues, extends historically to link philosophy with theories of discursive representation and graphic delineation after Descartes. In conclusion, Brodsky Lacour analyzes such a link in the writings of Claude Perrault, the architectural theorist whose reflections on beauty helped shape the seventeenth-century dispute between "the ancients and the moderns." Part of a growing body of literary and interdisciplinary considerations of philosophical texts, Lines of Thought will appeal to theorists and historians of literature, architecture, art, and philosophy, and those concerned with the origin and identity of the modern.

Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies and Beyond

Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies and Beyond PDF

Author: Theresa Catalano

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 3030493792

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This book explores the problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement comprised of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) for scholars, teachers, and students from many backgrounds. Beginning with a Preface by renowned CDA/CDS scholar Ruth Wodak, it introduces CDA/CDS through examples of what its research looks like, delineates various precursors to CDA/CDS and important foundational concepts and theories, and traces its development from its early years until it became established. After the relationship between CDA and CDS is discussed, seven commonly cited approaches to CDA/CDS are outlined, including their connections and differences, their origins and development, major and associated scholars, research focus(es), and central concepts and distinguishing features. After a summary of critiques of CDA/CDS and responses by CDA/CDS scholars, the book provides an overview of its salient connections to other interdisciplinary areas of scholarship such as critical applied linguistics, education, anthropology/ ethnography, sociolinguistics, gender studies, queer linguistics, pragmatics and ecolinguistics. The final chapter describes how scholars use their knowledge of CDA/CDS to make a difference in the world.