Notion Of Ideas Research Articles

Structuring Flexibility in Entrepreneurial Teams

In an inductive multiple case study of six early stage entrepreneurial teams, we explore why some entrepreneurial teams persevere with their venture ideas, while other teams engage in a pivot. Comparisons of the cases reveal that the variation is due to how entrepreneurial teams organize their teamwork in spaces as well as the ability to modularize the venture ideas. Teams that enact idea inflexibility are not able to modularize their venture ideas, as they solely meet within purposeful spaces, in which they have conversations about pre-defined topics. In contrast, entrepreneurial teams that enact idea flexibility and are thus able to adapt their ideas enable discussions in open spaces in addition to meeting in purposeful spaces. Within these open spaces, the teams achieve idea modularization. Overall, the notion of idea (in)flexibility has consequences for how entrepreneurial teams cope with setbacks. We propose an emergent model explaining how entrepreneurial teams work together to develop their venture ideas and how this has an impact on the team.

The Knower, the Sayer, and the Doer in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It

This essay addresses the connections between Emersonian and Wordsworthian concepts and Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs through It, specifically those ideas of the Knower, the Sayer, and the Doer from Emerson’s “The Poet,” Emerson’s concept of what constitutes poetry and “The Poet,” as well as Wordsworth’s notions of poetic creativity. As discussed in the essay, Emerson’s concepts of the Knower, the Sayer, and the Doer line up with the three central characters of the novella—The Reverend Maclean, Norman Maclean (both the author and the narrator), and Paul Maclean respectively. It is the unique blending of Romantic poetic leanings and religion that make all three the characters they are, which the author represents through the use of fishing as metaphor. The difficulties faced by the Sayer, as he tries to relate the story of past events and “spots in time,” are central to my argument, as they present the central conflict of the novel and offer the readers a contradiction as well, as the character who’s known as the Sayer should have no trouble expressing himself. However, it is with Wordsworth’s notion of ideas reflected on in tranquility that allow the Sayer to tell the story of his brother, the great poet/artist in a Romantic sense.

Ekphrasis meets teichoscopy: the panoramic landscape in Góngora’s Soledad primera

Pictorial poetry underwent a revival in Habsburg Spain. It is therefore not surprising that one of the landmark Baroque poems of the Spanish Golden Age, the Soledades, written by Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), should have excelled in providing visual descriptions of the natural world. This essay will address the reflection of Horace’s famous pronouncement ut pictura poesis (painting is like poetry) in Góngora’s work, paying particular attention to the panoramic landscape admired by the pilgrim from a cliff in the Soledad primera, lines 182–211. The first thesis is that this passage delivers a pictorial representation of the scenery where the action of the poem will take place through a mise en abyme. The second thesis is that it also offers an agudeza paradoja — to use Gracián’s terminology — for there is a paradoxical dissonance between the objectives of (i) offering a total vision by placing the protagonist on a high vantage point (teichoscopy), and (ii) poetically describing the landscape he sees as a dazzling work of art (ekphrasis). This paradox will be resolved by resorting to art theory, and more particularly, to Erwin Panofsky’s notion of Idea.

What an Ideal Is

What I intend to do in the following pages is to focus on what might be termed the most important turn in the very dimension of ideality throughout the history of Western culture: the introduction of the notion of ideal drawn from Plato’s notion of idea, and especially its singular contemporary destiny. In the first part of the article, I am going to analyze Kant’s introduction of the notion of ideal and Hegel’s reading of it, and I am going to argue that the former affirms a dualistic relationship which the latter negates. In the second part of the article, I am going to reason on the actual effects of both the affirmation and the negation of the dualism between the ideal and the real, especially focusing on the forms of totalitarianism and anarchism which characterized the twentieth-century history of Western culture. This will lead me to argue that we should try to avoid both the bad uses of the ideal (namely, the idealization of the real and the debasement of the real through the ideal) and the death of the ideal (namely, forms of epistemological and ethical anarchism) in order to work on a notion of ideal which could be an exceedingly promising tool for us to change and improve the real. This change and improvement can be achieved through the affirmation of the dualistic relationship between the ideal and the real, and more specifically through what I will call an evolutionary notion of ideal versus a revolutionary notion of ideal.

Switching labels: The role of Weberian ideas in market change. A case study of the German wine market

How do cultural ideas shape market construction? What do ideas ‘do’ to actors in markets? The paper presents an empirical case study of the reconstitution of the German wine market following an EU legislative intervention. I use Bourdieu's theory of fields to analyse the actors’ economic, social and cultural capitals and the impact of these capitals on the actors’ positioning in the political debate. Sensitised by recurring problems in the empirical data analysis, I then, however, argue that Weber's notion of ideas, as presented in his famous switchmen metaphor, is better suited than, or indeed should serve as a complement to, Bourdieu's frame of analysis. It is better suited, I argue, because it refers to a unique and irreducible source of culture while Bourdieu's capitals remain ‘tools' in a struggle for power and dominance in the field.

Ideia, ser objetivo e realidade objetiva nas "Meditações" de Descartes

O objetivo deste artigo é responder à questão: a teoria cartesiana das ideias é realista direta ou representacionalista? Para responder a essa questão, analiso as noções de ideia, ser objetivo, realidade objetiva e essência nas "Meditações" de Descartes. Eu procuro mostrar que do ponto de vista da apreensão das essências das coisas externas, Descartes é um realista direto. Mas como algumas provas da existência são inferenciais, eu mostro também que deste ponto de vista a teoria cartesiana é representacionalista.

Fragments of a conversion: handling bodies and objects in pagan and Christian Scandinavia ad 800–1100

The article discusses aspects of changing relationships between the living and the dead in Scandinavia in the Viking Age (800 – 1050AD) and the beginning of the Early Middle Ages (1050 – 1100AD). This period was characterized by the change of religion from Paganism to Christianity. The changes and variations in the treatment of the deceased' bodies and the grave goods are explored in a number of case studies. Fragmentation and wholeness in relation to changing world views are analysed, through a discussion on personhood: On what constituted a person in this period, and how persons were deconstituted through the acts of the burial during a period of religious change. Parallel ways of handling of bodies and objects in the graves are examined, demonstrating that treating the bodies and the grave goods were a means of negotiating or handling different notions of ideas of the body, death and the afterlife.

Hutcheson, Perception, and the Sceptic's Challenge

Francis Hutcheson's theory of perception, as put forth in his Synopsis of Metaphysics, bears a striking similarity to that of John Locke. In particular, Hutcheson and Locke both have at the centre of their theories the notion of ideas as representational entities acting as the direct objects of all of our perceptions. On first consideration, one might find this similarity wholly unremarkable, given the popularity of Locke's Essay. But the Essay was published in 1689 and the Synopsis in 1742, and during these years Berkeley had published a substantive attack on Locke's representative realism and the sceptical conclusions he saw it implying. Further, Hume had argued in 1739 that in accepting a Lockean account of perception, we (at least when thinking as philosophers in our studies) are left without any sure knowledge of external objects, even their existence. Despite this, Hutcheson apparently feels no obligation to address either Berkeley's idealism or Hume's scepticism in the Synopsis. The question addressed in this article is, Why did he not see any force to such arguments, and thus why did he feel no onus to attempt to offer an explicit refutation of Berkeley and Hume?

Kant and Plato

Abstract It is commonly assumed that Kant is indebted to Aristotle not to Plato. In this paper we argue, however, that the following four central topics in Kant's philosophy must be recognized as having Platonic roots. 1. The idea that metaphysics is a system of synthetic apriori judgements and the idea that such judgments require pure intuition. 2. The idea that geometrical objects have a certain purposiveness. 3. The notion of dialectic. 4. The notion of ideas and their role in the sphere of cognition and morality.

Benjamin: A Literary Critic?

Benjamin: A Literary Critic? Svend Erik Larsen (bio) Benjamin’s Aura One cannot get around Walter Benjamin in the study of modern urban culture and its literature. In that context, whether he would like it or not, he has become haloed in an aura of mastery. For good reason: his analyses of the nervous dynamic of the modern city are unique, and his influence can be traced in many examples of urban analysis, even if he is neither cited nor named explicitly. His sense of the decisive role that minutiae play in one’s experience of the city, and his ability to transform the marginal into the typical through broad associative cross-sections breaking up established intellectual categories and types of text, make his work both necessary and stimulating for any cultural analysis of the state of the modern city. Benjamin had no desire to be a specialist within literary criticism or any other specific discipline. He was a visionary diagnostician of culture. As it happens, very large parts of his oeuvre take literature as their subject, or at least as their substance: early works on art criticism in German Romanticism, on Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften (The Elective Affinities) and, most exciting, on Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) with the important notion of allegory. There are also numerous reviews, surviving notations, short author introductions, radio speeches, and occasional references to literature side by side with more comprehensive treatments of Baudelaire, woven into broader analyses of Paris, of surrealism, and of Brecht. Not to mention his translations of Proust. However, his interest in literature does not automatically make him an outstanding literary critic. Since the 1960s, Benjamin’s importance has been upheld, to a great degree, by a literary and aesthetic interest in the cultural history of modernity, with emphasis on the city as its locus. But his particular themes of cultural analysis led him to overwork certain texts, and certain aspects of texts, and caused him to omit others. The focal point of this essay is to examine how the analysis of culture and the analysis of literature mutually define and limit each other in Benjamin’s work. [End Page 135] Literature as Illustration Most of Benjamin’s literary analyses have an opposite orientation to that of his analyses of the city. The latter are sensitive to fragmentation, to the network of details in a directly perceived—which is to say, aesthetic—experience of one’s surroundings, with all its structures of conflict and paradoxes. Conversely, the thread running throughout Benjamin’s literary studies is their concentration on the synthesizing motifs or themes of the works involved. These analyses are not greatly concerned with literature’s aesthetic aspects, its transgressions and paradoxes, nor with the history of particular genres and their gradual or abrupt changes. In his book on tragedy, Benjamin stresses that an artwork should be carried by an idea, 1 and the concluding sentence of his dissertation on art criticism emphasizes, too, the idea behind a work of art. 2 His most detailed presentation of the nature of ideas is found in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. In contrast to the analytical character of a concept, bound to specific formal languages and leading to unity, if not uniformity, an idea is a principle that makes “the extreme reach a synthesis,” that is, not a unity but a totality in which the contrasting elements, similar to Leibniz’s monads, are still active. The constant reference to the dialectic character of the synthesis also adds a Hegelian touch to Benjamin’s notion of idea. Like the monad, the idea has no specific manifestation of its own: it “can not be thought of as an object of observation, not even by the intellect” (Ud 1.1:215). It occurs in various sign complexes—“semiotics” (Ud 1.1:342)—that represent such a principle, for instance, the arts or any other cultural artifact down to the most trivial, as became clear in Benjamin’s work on Paris. The point is that no type of sign complex in advance has priority over any other for the unfolding of the idea (see Ud 1.1:350). Benjamin chooses works that are...

Hume's System: An Examination of the First Book of his "Treatise." (review)

David Pears. Hume's System:An Examination ofthe First Book ofhis " Treatise." Oxford: University Press, 1990. David Hume's appeal that the Enquiries "may alone be regarded as containinghisphilosophicalsentiments andprinciples" 2 is once again denied in Hume's System: An Examination of the First Book of his "Treatise,"hy David Pears. In his postscript Pears explains his neglect ofthe Enquiries: the Ught that it [Enquiry ConcerningHuman Understanding] does throw is softer and more diffuse, whereas the Treatise is a young man's book in which the structure of his thought emerges more starkly and with sharper outlines, (p. 199) While tracking the main themes of his rigorous treatment of Hume, I will show that the gratitude we owe Pears is qualified by some minor difficulties. In at least one case, when dealing with Hume's account ofperception, Pears ought to have consulted the softer light of the Enquiry. Pears' account of the first book of the Treatise constitutes an attempt to redress the balance upset by past Hume scholarship. He maintains that Hume's theory ofmind addresses both ofthe questions that have served as platforms for opposing interpretations of the Treatise. Some commentators have concentrated solely on Hume's theory ofidea derivation as it responds to the question, What ideas may we legitimatelyhave? Others have explored Hume's account ofthe role of ideas in thought as it responds to the question, What may we legitimately believe? When we succumb to the temptation tofavour one of these questions, we fail to appreciate the relationship between Hume's account ofmeaning and his account oftruth. The temptations are admittedlypowerful. As apsychological version ofsemantic theory, Hume's account ofmeaning is strikingly similar to that of the Logical Positiviste. But the failure of such interpretations to account for the bulk of Hume's discussion in any but dismissive ways can lead us to consider Hume's notion ofidea derivation an "inherited framework on which he constructed his naturalistic system" (Pears, 9). Pears insists that these two thrusts, meaning and truth, occupy positions of equal importance in Hume's theory. Hume answers both questions, and his answers are related. Neither a sceptical positivist nor an unqualified naturalist, Hume is something in between, a "cautious naturalist" (ibid., viii, 64). Volume XIX Number 1 227 CHRISTIAN K. CAMPOLO In his first four chapters Pears separates and exposes the two strands of Hume's theory of mind. Along the way he pauses to patch several inadequacies which his treatment reveals. He then applies this two-pronged theory to the three central problems of the Treatise: causation, personal identity, and perception. Hume himself addresses each of these problems without abandoning his deceptively simple theory ofidea derivation: all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.* If we substitute 'word' for 'idea' and 'thing' for 'impression', we arrive at a formulaverymuch like Russell's atomism. In a sense, Humeis also an atomist. The simplicity of his 'simple' perceptions is that of phenomenologicalindivisibility. YetHume's concerns are broader than Russell's. ForHume's principle accountsevenforthemeaninglessideas (images) that occur as mere data. Whatever their status, all ideas are caused by impressions of which they are exact replicas. Tidy though it may be, this theory can account neither for ideas not derived from impressions nor for the variety ofways in which ideas participate in thought. Pears suggests that Hume need not worry about impressionless ideas ifhe will both restricthis theory ofidea derivation to meaningful ideas and allow that meaningless ideas can be derived laterally from other ideas. Pears recognizes that such measures would cost Hume his atomism, while he takes it for granted that Hume's empiricism would be left intact (p. 27). But I suspect that such measures would challenge Hume's empiricism by altering the sort of simplicity exhibited by 'simple' perceptions. If simple ideas can be derived from other ideas, can the parent ideas still be phenomenologically indivisible? The other problem is more troublesome. Nothing intrinsic to an image tells us whether it is meaningful or meaningless, general or specific, a memory or a fantasy, a beliefor a conjecture. Hume's theory ofidea derivation accounts onlyforcontent...