Notion Of Reality Research Articles

Projecting Liberalism Into a Realist World: David P. Forsythe and the Political Science of Human Rights

Using a claim from David Fosythe in his Human Rights and International Relations, this paper discusses the ways in which the empirical political science of human rights has explored how human rights have projected liberalism into a realist world. It extends Forsythe's notion of realism to the domestic level and shows how scholarship in the field since the 1980s has sought to examine the ways that power and self-interest can be constrained through institutions and norms of the kind articulated through an appeal to human rights. The discussion shows that findings in the literature largely confirms Forsythe's fundamental insight. The human rights project is not impossible in a realist world; rather it interacts with the realist world in ways that mean we will always and everywhere see great variation in the promotion and protection of human rights. And this variation is due to the presence of different institutional arrangements, structural constraints and the behavior of powerful states that at times is in alignment with the broad aims of the human rights movement.

Entre a realidade jornalística e a realidade social: o jornalismo como forma de acesso ao cotidiano

O artigo propõe considerar reportagens sobre transtornos mentais publicadas em revistas semanais brasileiras, nos últimos 15 anos, como peças publicitárias para estimular o consumo de edicamentos, especificamente, de antidepressivos. Investiga, então, o nexo entre consumo e subjetividade contemporânea pelo estudo das estratégias retóricas que permitem ao indivíduo se conceber como um
 possível doente e, assim, consumidor de medicamentos.
 Duas estratégias são enfatizadas. Uma contorna o estigma associado à doença mental por separar o sofrimento da moral; a outra analisa o uso de testes como modo de gerar uma incerteza no indivíduo sobre a normalidade de seus estados mentais.
 
 Palavras-Chave
 Mídia. Consumo. Subjetividade. Doença Mental. Antidepressivos.

Is the World Beautiful? Moriyama Daidō’s Provocation of the History of Photography

Divided into five sections, Fukagawa’s essay begins with the suggestion that Moriyama disagrees with the idea that the “world is beautiful.” During the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, Moriyama was part of a group of Japanese photographers who sought a revolution in photographic expression. The second part explains the notion of the “equivalent” gaze in Moriyama’s work, while the third considers Moriyama’s pioneering approaches in relation to the history of photography. Moriyama questioned modernist theories and the notion of realism and kumi shashin that characterized postwar photography in Japan. Part four focuses on Moriyama’s search for a new relationship between photographer, photography, and the world. The essay ends with a reflection on Moriyama’s work since the 1970s, quoting Victor Shklovsky to describe Moriyama’s restoration of the medium of photography.

Idealizm transcendentalny w perspektywie Kantowskiego pojęcia realności

The main aim of this paper is to try to answer the question of the nature of Kantian project of the transcendental philosophy. Is it, in real, as Kant by himself says, that his philosophy, as the critic of the pure theoretical reason presupposes, is merely the preparation the ground under the metaphysics, and merely asks the question of the possibility of metaphysics at all, or rather Kant's system of the theoretical philosophy called by Kant as formal or transcendental idealism can be classified as one of the main ontological systems: ontological realism or idealism, in the classical sense. I think the crucial notion, which can help to solve this problem, is the notion of reality used by Kant in several meanings and contexts which I am going to examine in this article.

Idealism, New-Realism and Pragmatism: The American Debate on Reality from Royce to Lewis

In the first decades of the twentieth century new realistic tendencies arose in the United States as a reaction to the idealism dominating American academia. The foremost idealist at that time was Josiah Royce and the first realistic tendency against his idealism was directed by Ralph B. Perry and William P. Montague. In 1910 they promoted the manifesto of the American new realism.In this paper I offer an analysis of the debate that led to the birth of the new realism: it will provide a different perspective on the history of American philosophy and will open new reflections on the impact of the debate.In this debate “reality” was faced as an epistemological issue rather than an ontological one: the origin of this trend was an ambiguity in Royce’s work. Although initially new realists moved on the ground prepared by Royce, later they attempted to release the notion of reality from epistemology and to return it to metaphysics, claiming the priority of logic in both fields. However, the trend was definitive...

Projecting Liberalism into a Realist World: David P. Forsythe and the Political Science of Human Rights

Using a claim from David Fosythe in his Human Rights and International Relations, this paper discusses the ways in which the empirical political science of human rights has explored how human rights have projected liberalism into a realist world. It extends Forsythe's notion of realism to the domestic level and shows how scholarship in the field since the 1980s has sought to examine the ways that power and self-interest can be constrained through institutions and norms of the kind articulated through an appeal to human rights. The discussion shows that findings in the literature largely confirms Forsythe's fundamental insight. The human rights project is not impossible in a realist world; rather it interacts with the realist world in ways that mean we will always and everywhere see great variation in the promotion and protection of human rights. And this variation is due to the presence of different institutional arrangements, structural constraints and the behavior of powerful states that at times is in alignment with the broad aims of the human rights movement.

Varieties of Twentieth Century American Naturalism

naturalism dominated twentieth century American philosophy.1 Naturalism is a philosophical worldview that relies upon experience, reason, and especially science for developing an understanding of reality. Naturalism demands that these three modes of understanding together shall control our notion of reality. Varieties of naturalism emerge because the many essential factors of experience, reason, and science can be coherently related in numerous ways. All naturalisms demand that experience, reason, and science be taken most seriously so that no fourth mode of understanding can be permitted to override them. This triadic unity moderates the excesses of phenomenalism and idealism, and filters out spiritualism and supernaturalism for their introduction of radical and mysterious discontinuities into knowledge and reality. Scientific method and knowledge play a crucial role in all naturalisms. Varieties of naturalism may be distinguished along three dimensions: the degree of ontological confidence given to science; the breadth of explanatory discretion given to science; and the number of scientific fields permitted to describe reality. From the logically possible combinations resulting from these dimensions, seven viable varieties of naturalism are distinguished and contrasted. Each of these varieties of naturalism has had champions in the course of twentieth century American philosophy, such as Dewey, Whitehead, Santayana, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Churchland, Putnam, and Searle. The conclusion discusses the three major competitors during the twentieth century for the title of the “genuine” naturalism: Reductive Physicalism, Non-Reductive Physicalism, and Perspectival Pluralism. The struggles among these great naturalisms and the other viable varieties of naturalism have been bequeathed to the twenty-first century, and their outcomes may decide the ultimate fate of naturalism itself.

Bakhtin’s realism and embodiment: Towards a revision of the dialogical self

How can we understand socially constituted selfhood? H. Hermans has addressed this question with the notion of the Dialogical Self that he draws from the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. We focus on Bakhtin’s discussion of realism in relation to how he has been interpreted by Hermans. This notion of realism (which we coined ‘‘expressive realism’’) highlights how sociality is inseparably related to embodied experience, thus making way for a sociocultural psychology that takes into account life as it is experientially lived. We point out how Hermans’ vision of the Dialogical Self neglects such embodied experience. This discussion leads to the claim that Bakhtin sees the self as social insofar as our most primary embodied experience is social, where Hermans anchors the sociality of self in inter-subjective exchange. Accordingly, an extension of the Dialogical Self is offered through discussion of these points.

The First Quantum Machine

A humanmade object that moves in ways that can be described only by quantum mechanics might lead to tests of our notion of reality.

Unamuno, Freud y Strindberg: los sueños en Amor y pedagogía y Niebla

A number of critics have discussed the use of dreams in Niebla (1914), one of the best-known novels in Spanish literature. Some have contended that the dreams in Niebla are used to highlight a number of philosophical issues, e.g. God’s power over man or the author’s own existential worries. Others have claimed that the usage of dreams was inspired by Calderon’s play La vida es sueno (1635). This article shows that Unamuno resourced to dreams in his earlier novel Amor y pedagogia (1902), where traces from Freud’s theories are patent, in order to challenge the notions of realism imposed by Realist novelists. In Amor y pedagogia dreams connect reality with fantasy, and conscious thinking with unconscious thinking. In Niebla, Freudian notions of dream and reality herald Surrealism. Rather than borrowing from Calderon, dreams in Amor y pedagogia and Niebla are a Modernist feature, employed before by Strindberg. A brief discussion of Strindberg’s Ett Dromspel (1901) shows that Unamuno’s Niebla aligns clearly with the Modernist tendencies.

Quantum Mechanical Effect of Path-polarization Contextuality for a Single Photon

Using measurements pertaining to a suitable Mach-Zehnder (MZ) type setup, a curious quantum mechanical effect of contextuality between the path and the polarization degrees of freedom of a polarized photon is demonstrated, without using any notion of realism or hidden variables—an effect that holds good for the product as well as the entangled states. This form of experimental context-dependence is manifested in a way such that at either of the two exit channels of the MZ setup used, the empirically verifiable subensemble statistical properties obtained by an arbitrary polarization measurement depend upon the choice of a commuting (comeasurable) path observable, while this effect disappears for the whole ensemble of photons emerging from the two exit channels of the MZ setup.

Fokus på fiktionen stoppar mordet på Mozart!

How to Stop the Constant Killing of Mozart by Focusing Fictionality
 This text is a slightly expanded version of a conference speech, delivered at the University of Umeå 2010-10-14. My purpose is to point out the didactic potential of Aristotle’s mimesis theory, and in particular the idea that the human ability to create fictional worlds constitutes a special way of understanding reality (or rather the notions of reality that we are provided with by our senses and rational thinking). This idea is seen as a prerequisite of the exceptionally dialogic character of Russian literary theory from Potebnya to Bakhtin, and in order to show what that dialogic attitude really means, the contrary formalistic position of Boris Shklovsky – and especially his inability to understand the Aristotelian standpoint of Potebnya – is discussed in some detail. Proposing literary transfer as a modern key to dialogic reading, I try to illustrate what it might contribute even to a super reading of Homer like the one Erich Auerbach carries through in his Mimesis. Finally, I point out, with examples from French scholar Jean-Marie Schaeffer, how make-believe-theory can help to restore the reader as a human being and the literary text as a work of art – and thereby to stop the still on-going killing of Mozart that the Russian formalists, according to Bakhtin (in his – or Mevedev’s? – »Scholarly Salierism«) committed themselves to so long ago.

Unidentified narrative objects: notes for a rhetorical typology

This article attempts to circumscribe a field of enquiry around what Wu Ming 1 defined as ‘unidentified narrative objects’. It demonstrates how, within narratives such as Asce di Guerra (2000) [Axes of War] by Wu Ming and Vitaliano Ravagli, Gomorra (2006) [Gomorrah] by Roberto Saviano, Dies irae (2006) [Day of Wrath] by Giuseppe Genna and Sappiano le mie parole di sangue (2007) [My Words be Bloody] by Babsi Jones, a recurrent series of modal figures defines the relationship between literature and the real. Starting from Gomorra, the article attempts to delineate a taxonomy, to make sense of the continuous overlapping and re-bidding between the textual and the extra-textual fields at stake in the novels. The aim is both to clarify how these novels take up a liminal literary position and to deepen our understanding of their own peculiar form of realism. The notion of realism in this context refers less to a stylistic construct according to specific compositional codes than to a ‘textualization of the real’, wherein reality presents itself within the texts through a system of references external to the text itself.

Which Observations Should We Believe?: An Activity Using the Pulfrich Pendulum

Illusionists use mirrors to create appearances that conflict with our notions of reality. This paper discusses an activity involving the Pulfrich effect that, in the end, makes use of a mirror to distinguish between appearance and reality.

Paulo and the Birds: Towards a Magical Realist Approach to Ethnography

This article explores how magical realism can be used as an analytic to study culture. I propose a magical realist epistemology that seeks to dismantle binaristic impulses by allowing for competing notions of reality to co-exist. This displacement of Western notions of “truth” compels Western ethnographers and their readers to imagine an alternative world where the magical and the mundane are mutually sustaining.

Borges and Cervantes: Truth and Falsehood in the Narration

Jorge Luis Borges’ relation with Cervantes has not been studied enough. In this article, we will see how Borges knew and admired Cervantes, and how Don Quixote was a powerful influence in Borges’ short stories. Borges uses some of Cervantes’ narrative devices (different narrators, the questioning of the narration, the lack of memory…) to undermine the truth of the narration. He does so, like Cervantes, as part of a literary game, but also because it suits his own notions of reality—the questioning of the narrative truth represents the impossibility of understanding reality as a whole, whereas the emphasis on the story as a fiction embodies the idea of reality as a dream.

ABSTRACT MACHINES AND NEW SOCIAL SPACES

This essay elaborates a theoretical framework within which four examples of the virtual reality novel are examined. The framework draws on Pierre Lévy's book, Becoming Virtual(1998), as well as philosophical discussions of the concept of the virtual in writings by Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In contrast to the opposition between the possible and the real, the dynamic of the virtual is understood as a potential power or agency actualized in a process that can change the basis of our current notions of reality. More specifically, the essay suggests that the material operations of today's computer technology are the source of this virtual power and that we can see how it is variously represented in the virtual reality novel. While each of the four novels depicts living or acting within virtual reality spaces, they differ markedly in how these experiences are integrated into larger narrative concerns, which include the decoding and recoding of the human body, cultural identity, sexuality and control, and the new apparatuses of surveillance and communication this technology will soon bring about.

We May not Know Reality, but it Still Matters – A Functional Analysis of ‘Factual Elements’ in the Theatre

Postmodernism has revolutionised our concept of Knowledge, establishing it firmly as a relative concept that is created and valid only in a specific discourse. As a result of this re-examination, our notion of Reality has been changed irrevocably. Although many concepts, such as the dichotomy of fact and fiction, continue to be used in everyday life, they are now highly contentious from a theoretical point of view. Describing the relationship between theatre and the world that surrounds it (our everyday ‘reality’) becomes increasingly difficult in such a context, particularly with regard to theatrical forms that are characterized by their extensive use of material borrowed from the world outside the play. Using Gladiator Games and Vincent in Brixton as examples, this article demonstrates that neither the return to theoretically outdated concepts nor the radical relativism of postmodernism can offer satisfactory interpretations of documentary and biographical theatre. As a solution to this dilemma it suggests a functional approach that overcomes the schism between modern and postmodern concepts. Inspired by the sociology of knowledge, it acknowledges that the perception of these plays is characterized by the idea of different degrees of reality or factuality without granting these notions the status of absolute ontological categories. A discussion that focuses on the similarities between these plays and discourses outside the theatre can then provide useful insights into their reception and production. At the same time it suggests that the sense of acceptable and unacceptable uses of such material can be maintained without evoking the ideas of historical accuracy and Truth.

Gott und die Welt Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Religion

The church sees itself as the general administrator of the transcendent. But at the same time, based on the genesis, it claims as well the competence to explain the creation of the physical world. Here, however, it recoils more and more from the natural sciences. Even the idea of biological evolution is no longer flatly rejected. However, the reinterpretation of the natural laws and the notion of reality within the framework of the evolutionary epistemology show that the explanatory power of the natural sciences is no longer unquestionable. This, no doubt, has consequences for the relationship of natural and transcendental sciences. Of far more impact, however, can be the trend that the dispute between religion and sciences is shifting from the nature sciences towards the social sciences. Problems we have with our natural environment and to be solved by nature sciences are replaced more and more by problems we have with our social environment and to he solved by the social sciences. Already nowadays the central paradigm of mankind is the solution of social problems. Mastering the climate, for example, though primarily a physical problem becomes more and more a social subject. If the churches want to keep up here they have to shift from the supply orientation as provided by the bible towards the demand orientation presented by political and other social organisations. This could begin to threaten the theological importance of the churches.

Dangerous Ideas: the Spell of Breaking the Spell

AbstractBy investigating the philosophical premises behind Daniel Dennett's latest book, Breaking the Spell, this article sets out to present and critically discuss the range of validity which the theory of natural selection can consistently claim for itself. Deduced from a materialist notion of reality, which brings nature and culture on a common agenda, the explanation of religious ideas as products of meme-transmission exposes itself to the charge of reductionism and have thus provoked hostile responses from religious people as well as scepticism from some quarters of humanities. Far from arguing that Dennett should have exempted the sensitive field of religious belief from the intrusion of scientific investigation, this article criticizes the notions of religion as well as science, from which these investigations are set ashore, and remains uncompromising on the possibility of taking a moral stand on the premises of a theory of natural selection. Instead the article advocates for a more modest version of the theory that leaves room for other approaches with regard to self-understanding on a level of intersubjectivity.