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The Self and Social Relations
Full text linkThe central subject of this thesis is the nature of the self. I argue against an atomistic conception which takes the human self to exist self-sufficiently and prior to social relations, and in favour of a holistic conception which takes the self to be constitutively dependent on social relations. I defend this view against criticisms that a holistic account undermines the need for what I call 'critical distance' between subjects and their communities. This involves answering the charges that such constitutive dependence: 1) removes the possibility for individuals to determine themselves freely apart from the communities in which they engage; and 2) deprives us of an external standard with which to engage critically with those constitutive communities.
I argue that the above criticisms are encouraged by reliance on a certain epistemological picture. This picture involves a foundationalist construal of knowledge that ultimately depends on a notion of an immediately given epistemic content that can serve to give us an absolute conception of an objective reality with which we can do away with partial or relative conceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit. It is this that leads the critic to demand a standard external to communities, which in turn encourages a notion of the self and freedom that can ultimately be grounded apart from the "distortions" of social practice.
I directly attack the notion of an immediately given epistemic content through a series of transcendental arguments, showing that the condition of possibility for our forming any conception of ourselves or the world is participation in social forms of life. I further argue that properly human identities are essentially shaped by the self-conceptions these forms of life make available to us. Since freedom can no longer depend on radical detachment, I offer a new account of freedom as a social achievement, based on a notion of rational progress which allows us to develop ourselves and our social world critically, drawing only on those standards available within our practices.
With the notion of an immediately given epistemic content undermined, I have shown not only that freedom and rational progress are consistent with a holistic account, but that in fact they depend on such a holistic account
Dialectic as the truth of reality and thought: a prolegomenon to the reconceptualisation of dialectic
Full text linkDialectic has been rejected or dogmatically accepted by many philosophers. The modern history of dialectic began with Kant who, however, regarded it as deceptive. Fichte and Schelling contributed to the formation of the theory of dialectic by developing the concepts such as the absolute, spirit, reason and speculation. Hegel did the further clarification of those concepts by exhibiting their necessary interconnection, which was systematically expounded in Science of Logic. Dialectic in Logic can be grasped with three key concepts: (1) the absolute, (2) contradiction and sublation, and (3) the identity of thought and being. In Logic, through the doctrines of being, essence and the concept, the necessary development of categories is expressed as the selfmovement of the absolute, which culminates in the absolute idea. Logic is for Hegel the exposition of God as the thought which thinks of itself. Therefore the truth of logic is the thought's returning to itself as a full circle of the descriptions of thought itself. Dialectic is the activity of this self-thinking thought. Contradiction immanent in every category, and its sublation, is the generator of all the development of categories. Only through the whole process of logic can the identity of thought and being be known as the truth. However, as the later generations argued, Hegel's interpretations was biased as his emphasis was on the self-identity of thought to itself. Dialectic is to be re-grasped with the emphasis on the self-development of reality. This entails the cognition that the reality enforces the human mind to recognise the dynamism of ever-moving reality that is dialectical. However, dialectic is not to be regarded as the collection of principles, but to be re-conceptualised as the necessary development, and thus the explication, of reality through our thought. Dialectic is this truth as the identity of reality and thought
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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