The Discipline of Subjectivity

The Discipline of Subjectivity PDF Author: Ermanno Bencivenga
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400860644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Through an interpretation of Montaigne's philosophical vision as expressed in his Essays, Ermanno Bencivenga contributes to the current debate about the "death of the subject" by developing a view of the self as a project of continuous construction rather than the source and foundation of knowledge. This latter, Cartesian conception of self-consciousness as a logical and epistemological starting point is, Bencivenga contends, delusive: the certainty it provides is more akin to faith than to a cognitive state. How then do we acquire knowledge of the self? Montaigne makes for a productive case study in this regard: he declares that he himself is the matter of his book, and that nothing but the constitution of his own self is his business. A study of Montaigne reveals that the fundamental category missing in the Cartesian conception of the self is that of practical effort. The self is not a ready-made entity, available for inspection and analysis, but something whose generation requires exercise, training, and discipline. It is the result of an operation that must be performed not just once, but, as in all training, over and over again until it becomes second nature. Bencivenga characterizes the particular training required by the project of constituting a subject as a revolutionary, transgressive, critical one, which shares with philosophical activity a profoundly playful irrelevance to the "ready to hand." Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Discipline of Subjectivity

The Discipline of Subjectivity PDF Author: Ermanno Bencivenga
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400860644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Through an interpretation of Montaigne's philosophical vision as expressed in his Essays, Ermanno Bencivenga contributes to the current debate about the "death of the subject" by developing a view of the self as a project of continuous construction rather than the source and foundation of knowledge. This latter, Cartesian conception of self-consciousness as a logical and epistemological starting point is, Bencivenga contends, delusive: the certainty it provides is more akin to faith than to a cognitive state. How then do we acquire knowledge of the self? Montaigne makes for a productive case study in this regard: he declares that he himself is the matter of his book, and that nothing but the constitution of his own self is his business. A study of Montaigne reveals that the fundamental category missing in the Cartesian conception of the self is that of practical effort. The self is not a ready-made entity, available for inspection and analysis, but something whose generation requires exercise, training, and discipline. It is the result of an operation that must be performed not just once, but, as in all training, over and over again until it becomes second nature. Bencivenga characterizes the particular training required by the project of constituting a subject as a revolutionary, transgressive, critical one, which shares with philosophical activity a profoundly playful irrelevance to the "ready to hand." Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Foucault's Discipline

Foucault's Discipline PDF Author: John S. Ransom
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822318699
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
In Foucault’s Discipline, John S. Ransom extracts a distinctive vision of the political world—and oppositional possibilities within it—from the welter of disparate topics and projects Michel Foucault pursued over his lifetime. Uniquely, Ransom presents Foucault as a political theorist in the tradition of Weber and Nietzsche, and specifically examines Foucault’s work in relation to the political tradition of liberalism and the Frankfurt School. By concentrating primarily on Discipline and Punish and the later Foucauldian texts, Ransom provides a fresh interpretation of this controversial philosopher’s perspectives on concepts such as freedom, right, truth, and power. Foucault’s Discipline demonstrates how Foucault’s valorization of descriptive critique over prescriptive plans of action can be applied to the decisively altered political landscape of the end of this millennium. By reconstructing the philosopher’s arguments concerning the significance of disciplinary institutions, biopower, subjectivity, and forms of resistance in modern society, Ransom shows how Foucault has provided a different way of looking at and responding to contemporary models of government—in short, a new depiction of the political world.

Science and Subjectivity

Science and Subjectivity PDF Author: Israel Scheffler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description


Subjectivity and Identity

Subjectivity and Identity PDF Author: Peter V. Zima
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780938276
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Subjectivity and Identity is a philosophical and interdisciplinary study that critically evaluates critically the most important philosophical, sociological, psychological and literary debates on subjectivity and the subject. Starting from a history of the concept of the subject from modernity to postmodernity - from Descartes and Kant to Adorno and Lyotard - Peter V. Zima distinguishes between individual, collective, mythical and other subjects. Most texts on subjectivity and the subject present the topic from the point of view of a single discipline: philosophy, sociology, psychology or theory of literature. In Subjectivity and Identity Zima links philosophical approaches to those of sociology, psychology and literary criticism. The link between philosophy and sociology is social philosophy (e.g. Althusser, Marcuse, Habermas), the link between philosophy and literary criticism is aesthetics (e.g. Adorno, Lyotard, Vattimo). Philosophy and psychology can be related thanks to the psychological implications of several philosophical concepts of subjectivity (Hobbes, Stirner, Sartre).

The Archaeology of Knowledge

The Archaeology of Knowledge PDF Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819256
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge—are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of "things aid" and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault's own methadological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now. Challenging, at times infuriating, it is an absolutey indispensable guide to one of the most innovative thinkers of our time.

Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity

Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity PDF Author: Margaret A. McLaren
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487938
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Argues that Foucault's work employs a conception of subjectivity that is well-suited for feminist theory and politics.

The Subject in Art

The Subject in Art PDF Author: Catherine M. Soussloff
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388537
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Challenging prevailing theories regarding the birth of the subject, Catherine M. Soussloff argues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather in the theory and practice of portraiture in early-twentieth-century Vienna. Soussloff traces the development in Vienna of an ethics of representation that emphasized subjects as socially and historically constructed selves who could only be understood—and understand themselves—in relation to others, including the portrait painters and the viewers. In this beautifully illustrated book, she demonstrates both how portrait painters began to focus on the interior lives of their subjects and how the discipline of art history developed around the genre of portraiture. Soussloff combines a historically grounded examination of art and art historical thinking in Vienna with subsequent theories of portraiture and a careful historiography of philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to human consciousness from Hegel to Sartre and from Freud to Lacan. She chronicles the emergence of a social theory of art among the art historians of the Vienna School, demonstrates how the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka depicted the Jewish subject, and explores the development of pictorialist photography. Reflecting on the implications of the visualized, modern subject for textual and linguistic analyses of subjectivity, Soussloff concludes that the Viennese art historians, photographers, and painters will henceforth have to be recognized as precursors to such better-known theorists of the subject as Sartre, Foucault, and Lacan.

Badiou, Infinity, and Subjectivity

Badiou, Infinity, and Subjectivity PDF Author: Mohammad Reza Naderi
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1666931055
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
In Badiou, Infinity, and Subjectivity: Reading Hegel and Lacan after Badiou, Mohammad Reza Naderi elaborates on the trajectory of Alain Badiou’s philosophy by following a leading thread: the dominance of axiomatic thought and the category of mathematical infinity. According to this primary proposition, axiomatic thought is the only form of thinking adequate to the infinity of being. Using both primary and secondary literature, the author demonstrates two other major propositions: 1) The coherence of Badiou’s intellectual development from the early interventions to the publication of Being and Event, and 2) The formation of a theory Naderi calls “discipline.” By working through three dimensions of disciplinary thinking—interiority, novelty, and beginning—Naderi provides a new framework for understanding the inner structure of what Badiou calls “procedures of truths” and develops a new interpretation that ultimately reveals the inner logic of Badiou’s method.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Human Mind

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Human Mind PDF Author: Line Joranger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131530967X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
One of the main aims of modern mental health care is to understand a person's explicit and implicit ways of thinking and acting. So, it may seem like the ultimate paradox that mental health care services are currently overflowing with brain concepts belonging to the external, visible brain-world and that neuroscientists are poised to become new experts on human conduct. An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Human Mind shows that to create care that is truly innovative, mental health care workers must not only ask questions about how their conceptions of human beings and psychological phenomena came into being, but should also see themselves as co-creators of the mystery they seek to solve. Looking at the human being as a being with a biological body and unique subjective experiences, living in a reciprocal relationship with its sociocultural and historical environment, the book will provide examples and theories that show the necessity of an innovating, interdisciplinary mental health care service that manages to adapt its theory and methods to environmental, biological, and subjective changes. To this end, the book will provide an innovating psychology that offers a broad kaleidoscope of perspectives about the relations between the history of psychology, as a scientific discipline oriented to interpret and explain subject and subjectivity phenomenon, and the social construction of subjectified experience. This unique and timely book should be of great interest to critical and cultural psychologists and theorists; clinical psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists; sociologists of culture and science; anthropologists; philosophers; historians; and scholars working with social and health theories. It should also be essential reading for lawyers, advocates, and defenders of human rights. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315309682 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 licence.

The Taboo of Subjectivity

The Taboo of Subjectivity PDF Author: B. Alan Wallace
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198038603
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This book takes a bold new look at ways of exploring the nature, origins, and potentials of consciousness within the context of science and religion. Alan Wallace draws careful distinctions between four elements of the scientific tradition: science itself, scientific realism, scientific materialism, and scientism. Arguing that the metaphysical doctrine of scientific materialism has taken on the role of ersatz-religion for its adherents, he traces its development from its Greek and Judeo-Christian origins, focusing on the interrelation between the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. He looks at scientists' long term resistance to the firsthand study of consciousness and details the ways in which subjectivity has been deemed taboo within the scientific community. In conclusion, Wallace draws on William James's idea for a "science of religion" that would study the nature of religious and, in particular, contemplative experience. In exploring the nature of consciousness, this groundbreaking study will help to bridge the chasm between religious belief and scientific knowledge. It is essential reading for philosophers and historians of science, scholars of religion, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and religion.