Rational Subject Research Articles

Podobe živali v poeziji Daneta Zajca: hibridizacija ter razpad subjekta in njegovega jezika

Applying the theoretical framework of animal studies, animal depictions in the poetry of Dane Zajc can be divided into two groups. In the first are poems in which the (lyrical) subject maintains a hierarchical dualistic relationship towards the animal, which is a legacy of the modern rational subject; in the second are poems in which the (lyrical) subject exceeds the anthropocentric perspective and the hybridisation of the subject begins. The latter presupposes a permeability of human and animal categories, and with it the permeability of the subject, effectively resulting in its disintegration and a more consistent use of modernist poetic devices.

“More Human Than Human”: “Flattening of Affect,” Synthetic Humans, and the Social Construction of Maleness

We're all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives--flattening of affect, it's called. What I've done ... that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self. Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In Philip k. dick's novel, androids are unable to empathize with or feel for others. Their absence of spontaneous emotional response to hypothetical scenarios is the diagnostic used to distinguish them from humans. Androids' disconnection from others and lack of response constitute the affective to which Pris, an android, refers, understood in Dick's novel as a defect that, when unattributable to mental illness, marks one as other than human. Thus, above, Pris lies to her human interlocutor, misattributing the cause of her flattening in order to provide a human explanation for the feature used to identify androids, who are subject to being retired, a euphemism for their summary execution. In this deficit and its implications for human identity, Pris and her fellow androids (andys) are hardly alone. Dick's novel, Ridley Scott's film adaptation, Blade Runner, and (writer) Ronald Moore and (producer) David Eick's recent Battlestar Galactica television series are a few examples of a trend that proliferates from the 1950s onwards. (1) In such science-fiction texts, humans build and often come into conflict with beings that have been created by humans or have evolved from those created by humans. These beings are almost indistinguishable from humans, except, of course, for that all-important lack of emotional connection: that necessary flattening of affect. While critics generally frame such texts as questioning the nature of the human, (2) they represent specifically gendered anxieties. Synthetic humans are distinguished from humans by a particular form of emotional insufficiency. While they usually do feel, they generally lack abilities to know and understand their feelings, feel in relation to others, and/or empathize with or understand the feelings of others. Commenting on the historical shift in the attributes characterizing synthetic humans, Despina Kakoudaki argues that If for Descartes ... automata differ from people because they have ... no reason, by the early twentieth century artificial people differ from real people because all they have is (181). Andys, replicants, and Galacticas Cylons can all have implanted memories, which means that characters can be synthetic without knowing it. Given that the shift Kakoudaki identifies undermines modernity's ideal of the human-as-rational-subject, it is unsurprising that the Galactica character who most persistently questions whether or not he is a Cylon is Gaius Baltar, whom we initially meet as a scientist with an important role in the human Colonies' defense system and who places great stock in his own rationality. Both Baltar's investment in rationality and his sex are relevant; given white, Western maleness's (and normative masculinity's) association with logic, reason, and denying and flattening affect and femaleness's (and normative femininity's) with emotionality, emotional intelligence, and empathy, any sense that emotionality defines the human has gendered implications. Modernity's rational subject, associated with Enlightenment ideals and the Classical traditions they draw on, is one whose maleness, Westernness, and whiteness has historically been used as the measure against which disenfranchised groups, including women, people of colour, and the colonized, have fallen short, judged insufficiently rational and overly emotional. It is therefore his identity that comes into question when reason is no longer a guarantor of human identity. As Alison Jagger notes, The western tradition has not seen everyone as equally emotional. Instead, reason has been associated with members of dominant political, social, and cultural groups and emotion with members of subordinate groups. …

Schm]alchemy: Magical sites and mischievous objects – episodes in a performative inquiry into the transformative and disruptive potency of stuff

This paper builds on Isabelle Stengers’ suggestion that we need to reclaim magic, sorcery and witchcraft as a means of refuting the stable rational subject. Working with current philosophical and critical ideas around ‘new materialisms’, it emerges from a longstanding set of research preoccupations related to the affective, disruptive and provocative properties of things. The episodic text ruminates on these ideas through a series of ‘site-written’ narratives on the traces of sorcery and radical political histories in the <em>villes </em>and forests of Limousin, France, intercepted by passages of analysis of the author’s involvement (2009 – 2015) in the live art multimedia performance group, <em>Alchemy/Schmalchemy. </em>Adding the pre-fix ‘schm’ to alchemy, the group conjures an intentionally disruptive and mischievous performance space of oscillation, characteristically presenting a hotch-potch of erudition, quackery and avante-gardeist trappings. Simultaneously adhering to and repudiating conventional ambitions of performance, it purposively produces an uncomfortable but potentially creative tension. In its most recent live art ‘manifestation’ (Manchester, 2015), the group worked with a collection of found objects, exploring their potential for distributed agency with participants. In the process, it engaged in a form of practice-based enquiry that has wider ontological, epistemological, aesthetic and political implications. (Alongside the written paper, excerpts from video and text-based items used in live performances – or ‘manifestations’ – are provided, as well as photographic and video documentation of selected performances).

The Unsocialist Socialists

The Unsocialist Socialists

Solus Secedo and Sapere Aude: Cartesian Meditation as Kantian Enlightenment

Recently Samuel Fleischacker has developed Kant’s model of enlightenment as a “minimalist enlightenment” in the tradition of a relatively thin proceduralism focused on the form of public debate and interaction. I want to discuss the possibility that such a minimalism, endorsed by Fleischacker, Habermas, Rawls, and others, benefits from a metaphysics of critical individual subjectivity as a prerequisite for the social proceduralism of the minimalist enlightenment. I argue that Kant’s enlightenment, metaphysically thicker than much contemporary proceduralism, constitutes a recovery and transformation of a subjective interiority deeply Cartesian in spirit and central to the reciprocity of the community of subjects in What is Enlightenment. This opens a space for a site of resistance to the social. Descartes’ solus secedo describes the analogical space of such a resistance for Kant’s sapere aude. The Meditations thus point forward implicitly to how a rational subject might achieve critical distance from tradition in its various forms, epistemic, ethical, moral, and political.

Should Environmental Concern Pay Off? A Heideggerian Perspective

Organizations often motivate their environmental efforts by arguing that ‘good ethics is good business’. Though instrumental arguments of this nature put environmental concerns firmly on the corporate agenda, it comes at a price. Such reasoning relies on age-old fact-value distinctions, from which perspective rational subjects must gather the facts on how to treat the environment as a useful object. According to this logic, means-to-an-end relationships are the primary motivation for all action. Drawing on the insights of Martin Heidegger, we show how the preoccupation with gathering facts to justify environmental initiatives on the basis of ‘efficiency’ impoverishes our thinking about what is essential to our existence. Heidegger’s thinking allows us to appreciate how our belonging to a particular ethos orientates us in the world in meaningful ways. We therefore advocate an approach to organizational environmentalism that goes beyond ‘the business case’, without appealing to abstract normative principles. This approach also provides new perspectives on what notions such as ‘ecological citizenship’ may entail.

Can the post-Soviet think? On coloniality of knowledge, external imperial and double colonial difference

The article considers the main challenges faced by the post-Soviet social sciences in the global configuration of knowledge, marked by omnipresentcoloniality. In disciplinary terms this syndrome is manifested in the social sciences/ versus area studies divide from which the post-Soviet is either excluded or equalized with postcolonial discourses. The situation can be described as a general invisibility of the post-Soviet space and its social sciences and scientists for the rest of the world and the refusal of the global North to accept the post-Soviet scholar in the capacity of a rational subject. The reasons for this complex intersection of the post-Soviet, postcolonial and other post-dependence factors are both internal and external, political and epistemic. Following the methodological principles of decolonial option the author analyses such specific elements of the post-Soviet stagnant configuration in knowledge production as the external imperial difference and the double colonial difference, the geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge the way they are reflected in the knowledge production and distribution, paying specific attention to the possible ways out of this epistemic dead-end.

‘Pretty healthy’: Authenticity and the incorporation of beauty ideals into health discourse

Abstract This article examines how students at an urban high school in Aotearoa New Zealand navigate the relationship between beauty ideals and authenticity. The students privilege ‘personality’ over appearance, positioning appearance as detracting from personality. They conceive many appearance ideals to be ‘fake’, and believe that to present the self in line with these ideals is to present an inauthentic self. The students frame themselves as media literate, producing ‘sad’ Others who cannot ‘see through’ the mediated construction of beauty ideals. In addition to distancing themselves from these Others, the students use the tropes of fun and selfgrowth to frame their emulation of (and/or desire to emulate) appearance ideals as authentic expressions of their selves, rather than the desire to be seen as attractive. Most effectively, in line with the increasing amalgamation of beauty into health discourses, the students reposition appearance ideals as ‘health’ ideals, thus 28 incorporating appearance ideals into the sphere of the authentic. In doing so, the students distance themselves from the ‘sad’ feminized Other that is consumed with her looks, which allows them to position themselves as empowered rational subjects who adhere to beauty ideals ‘for themselves’ rather than for others.

The Epistemological Significance and Implications of Belief Polarization

A principal assumption in the epistemology of disagreement is that we, as rational subjects, assess evidence neutrally in order to justify our beliefs. However, the existence of the phenomenon of Belief Polarization threatens the validity of this basis. Since its introduction into philosophical discussion in Thomas Kelly’s paper titled, Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization, the phenomenon of Belief Polarization has been thoughtlessly overlooked. Given serious consideration, there seem to be widespread epistemological implications due to the existence of Belief Polarization. Specifically, Belief Polarization brings to light significant claims about the nature of justification and belief forming processes, specifically concerning evidence gathering. As this paper will argue, given awareness of Belief Polarization, rational subjects should be less confident in their justification of belief forming processes. In other words, rational subjects should not be fully confident in the objectively based truth-value of their beliefs.

Emptying Śūnyatā: a Critical Reading of Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness

Abstract In this article, invoking some terms of phenomenology and general principles of structural semiotics, I critically examine and reveal some aporetic aspects of Nishitani’s interpretation of Buddhist concept of sūnyatā presented in his seminal work Religion and Nothingness. My critics are directed to deeply ingrained claims among scholars of a “rejection of any form of dualism” and “non-substantial philosophy” as unique characteristics of the Kyoto school or “logic of the East”. My arguments are based on examining how linguistic differentiating articulation and narrative rendering that perform a fundamental role in human cognition are at work in definition of “emptiness” (sūnyatā) too. Thus emptiness is not completely empty; being certain philosophical identity it can be articulated only by differentiation from other identities, and thus different is included in it. Nishitani needed logocentric modes of thought, as a dialectical (m)other for constructing his sūnyatā ontology. Accordingly, the realms that are considered to be secondary or derivative (i.e. sensual and rational, or linguistic representations) appear to be the condition for constituting the primary (suchness of things, sūnyatā). Considering universal mechanisms of the articulation of values I am also asking whether sūnyatā paradigm indeed is so fundamentally different from Western paradigms centered on idea, God, or a rational subject as Nishitani wants to think. Since we find a clear hierarchical differentiation into truth and illusion, authentic and inauthentic modes of thought and time, and initial and derivative ontological realms, features of “strong thought” (in sense of Vattimo) are evident in his work. I am also suggesting, that possibly by considering not sūnyatā or “idea” but human languages as a universal “house of being”, we would be able to “empty” discourses of radical difference and uniqueness, and in this way become post-nationalistically modern. Philosophy, in order not to turn into a onesided ideology, should reflect on its mythological and narratological conditions, i.e. dances on certain semiotic axes. From such a perspective, the gravitational trajectory of human thought, longing for conjunction with the absolute, defined either as God or as sūnyatā, will seem similar rather than different.

Modern Labour Economics: The Neoclassical Paradigm with Institutional Content

Abstract The contribution focuses on the development of labour market economic theory. It shows the increase in relative importance of institutions and the rising relevance of the institutional theories for the labour market economics. The labour market economics was established on the base of the neoclassical paradigm, the fundamental elements are competitive markets with internal forces capable of reaching effective solutions, and rational subjects, maximizing utilities, profits and rents according to their preferences. The Smith's “invisible hand” was restricted by institutions – governments, corporations, and unions with legislation, personal policy, and collective bargaining. The expanding regulations and interventions into labour markets and the effort to explain the reality inevitably leads to the incorporation of more and more institutional theories into the modern labour market economics. The contribution formulates the conclusion that the institutional content is entering into the neoclassical paradigm.

Concept of Freedom in the Philosophy of Fichte

The concept of freedom is the central theme of all philosophy of Fichte. The study aims to determine the meaning of the concept of freedom by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. His fundamental philosophical problematic characterizes as "analysis of the notion of freedom". The methodology of this paper supported in a systematic review of the literature, description, comparison of different concepts and philosophical notions of the nineteenth century on freedom that coming as a result of different research as writings, works and articles. The main issues of the study relates to analysis of the subject as a creative activity, report subject to freedom and concept of freedom as a self-development. Problem that appears has to do with the subject which should be a self conscious that to create his freedom. The whole philosophy of Fichte relates to three main issues: the subject, the activity and freedom. His philosophy is defined as a philosophy of practice and freedom. The basic motive of subjective idealism is search of freedom according to which freedom is a field of opportunities that are offered to us in the world. The meaning of freedom is the form of expression that will, of individual action as something natural. Freedom is not absolute and an empirical given, but it should be a creativity. Real freedom is it that rational subject creates itself.

Humanismo y consumo en la perspectiva de Herbert Marcuse

Este artículo presenta una reflexión sucinta sobre la condición humana, a la luz del sujeto racional y el consumo y uso de tecnología, teniendo como referente a Herbert Marcuse y tomando como temas centrales algunas de sus obras: Tecnología, guerra y fascismo, Eros y civilización y El final de la utopía. En ellas se podrán identificar aspectos de la condición humana en el siglo XX,abordados a través de la racionalidad tecnológica en una sociedad de consumo.

John Locke on Inference and Fallacy, A Re-Appraisal

John Locke, long associated with the “standard” approach to fallacies and the “logical” approach to valid inference, had both logical and dialectical reasons for favoring certain proofs and denigrating others. While the logical approach to argumentation stands forth in Locke’s philosophical writings (such as the Essay Concerning Human Understanding), a dialectical approach can be found in his contributions to public controversies regarding religion and toleration. Understanding Locke’s dialectical approach to argumentation not only makes his work more relevant to the contemporary discipline of informal logic, but this understanding also prompts a reconsideration of Locke’s rhetorical purpose. He approached argumentation dialectically (and logically) because he wanted to appeal to a universal audience of free rational subjects, people not unlike the real historical audience whom Locke addressed: radical Whigs, latitudinarian Anglicans, early-Enlightenment philosophes.

Преодоление коррупциогенных факторов уголовного закона: понятие и основные методы

This article deals with the definition of overcoming the corruptogenic factors of the criminal law; notes its positive role in combating corruption in the criminal justice and highlights the main features: universality, casuistry, functional character, law-enforcement level of the implementation. This article discusses some of the most important ways of overcoming the corruptogenic factors of the criminal law: the uniformity of practical activity (the same understanding and application of the criminal law to all situations with a similar set of actual data and identical criminal-legal nature); motivation (rational explanation subject to enforcement activities of the reasons and circumstances underlying the decision on this or other legal and penal question) and formalization of the decision-making (development and implementation of the criminal law or court practice on certain criteria that must underlie the adoption of any authority of any decisions in criminal matters and to narrow the scope of his discretion); raising the level of legal awareness of subjects of criminal-law relationships.&#x0D;

한국인의 의사소통과 자기표현에 대한 연구 -칼 융의 심리학과 퇴계의 심성론을 중심으로-

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to elucidate the emotion-understanding of Korean and thus to find out the importance of their way of self-expression by exploring the sentiment of Korean as regards their way of communications and self-expression therein. The method of this study is, being presumed the Cheong as the Korean's sentiment, to define the differences of concept between the Cheong traditionally used by them and the emotion employed in the psychology or the theory of consultation. And also, this study examines the aforementioned importance under the presumption that the Cheong in the Korean Culture makes it difficult that their emotion-understanding and self-expression to be perfect in their way of communication. In order to attain such purpose in this study, it investigates how they have seen the emotion-understanding and self-expression as to the way of communication throughout Carl G. Jung's psychology and T·oegye Yi Hwang's theory of Human Mind and Nature respectively in the Occidental and Korean's Ideology. The most important thing, to be enlightened in this study, in the way of communication and self-expression are the emotion come from the big-Self(Self) in Carl G. Jung's psychology and that of the righteous sentiment from the human nature in T·oegye Yi Hwang's theory of Human Mind and Nature. In conclusion, it reveals that our behavior, unvaryingly in the Orient and the Occident, is not the rational subject but the emotional one to be reacted only if our minds are attached mutually.

Le paradoxe d'Allais

De tous les problèmes conçus par la théorie de la décision, le paradoxe d’Allais est peut-être celui qui aura suscité l’intérêt le plus persistant. La théorie y a consacré assez de travaux techniques remarquables pour qu’il soit désormais possible à l’histoire et à la philosophie des sciences de l’examiner réflexivement. Dans sa partie historique, l’article restitue le contexte d’apparition du paradoxe – le colloque de Paris, en 1952, auquel assistaient les principaux théoriciens de la décision du moment. L’axiomatique de von Neumann et Morgenstern en 1947 leur avait donné des raisons nouvelles d’approuver l’hypothèse de l’utilité attendue, et le contre-exemple d’Allais visait précisément à ébranler leur conviction. Les questions de la controverse étaient de type normatif, mais elles se perdirent quand le « paradoxe d’Allais » gagna tardivement la célébrité dans les travaux des années 1980. Ceux-ci le traitèrent comme une simple réfutation empirique et ils en firent l’enjeu de « théories de l’utilité non espérée » qu’ils développaient de même sous le seul angle empirique. Dans sa partie philosophique, l’article cherche à évaluer ce déplacement d’interprétation. D’un certain côté, les théoriciens de la décision firent bien de libérer leur travail expérimental des complications du normatif, car ils parvinrent ainsi à des résultats éclairants : l’hypothèse de l’utilité espérée était empiriquement réfutée, la responsabilité principale en revenait à l’axiome d’indépendance de von Neumann-Morgenstern, et l’étape suivante était de transformer adéquatement cet axiome. D’un autre côté, ils eurent tort de négliger un trait fondamental de leur domaine : les comportements observés ne sont informatifs que si les agents sont prêts à les assumer de manière réfléchie, c’est-à-dire à leur prêter une certaine valeur normative. D’après la reconstruction proposée ici, Allais ne voulait faire porter les expériences de choix que sur des sujets rationnels, ou bien sélectionnés au départ, ou bien révélés comme tels par l’expérience. L’article développe ces intuitions en revenant aux travaux des années 1970, aujourd’hui très peu connus, qui, sous l’influence d’Allais, proposèrent des traductions expérimentales de la rationalité, et il invite finalement la théorie de la décision à diversifier ses méthodes en s’inspirant de ces tentatives originales.

Burke, Godwin, and the Politics of Honor

Recently, Kwame Anthony Appiah claimed, “We may think we have finished with honor, but honor isn’t finished with us.” With Appiah in mind, this essay explores honor as a central ethic of modernity by situating it within William Godwin’s late eighteenth-century masterpiece Caleb Williams , a novel whose protagonist is both attracted to and repelled by chivalric honor and its role in public life. The novel, it is argued, stages a cultural battle in the 1790s between two contrasting versions of honor: an ethos rooted in sentimentalism to which even the most rational subject must acquiesce (as described by Edmund Burke) and a staid virtue of collective dignity—one that presupposes by nearly a century the concept of public solidarity.

Evolution of Concepts of Household's Role in Providing Onward Economic Development

This article provides the research study results of alternative schools and trends, within the scope of which the analysis of the households’ essence as the subject of economic relations having influence on the dynamics of basic macroeconomic indicators was carried out. The conducted research allowed to reveal economic ideas concerning households as the basic unit of traditional economics (pre-market household epoch), rational subjects of economic relations focused on maximization of their own utility (free market epoch) and contractual relationship agents making decisions under the conditions of uncertainty of external environment (regulated market epoch). Special attention is given to the economic views of the Russian economic school representatives.

In the Aftermath of Critique We Are Not in Epistemic Free Fall: Human Rights, the Subaltern Subject, and Non-liberal Search for Freedom and Happiness

The article challenges the claim that human rights, which have constituted one of the central tools by which to establish the truth claims of modernity, can produce freedom and meaningful happiness through the acquisition of more rights and more equality. Third World, postcolonial and feminist legal scholars have challenged the accuracy of this claim, amongst others. The critiques expose the discursive operations of human rights as a governance project primarily concerned with ordering the lives of non-European peoples, rather than a liberating force; and that the pre-given rational subject of human rights is contingent and one of the prime effects of power. I examine the problems with the liberal humanism of human rights by examining not only how it is linked to a specific understanding of the `good life’, freedom and happiness, but also how it closes off other emancipatory possibilities. The acquisition of human rights as objects that an individual has by virtue of being human, represent the terminal limits of human rights, rather than the moment when the human subject becomes empowered and liberated. I draw on queer affect theory to make a critique of happiness, to which I argue human rights are linked, and how the failed or unhappy subaltern subject exposes its normative composition. I discuss the resulting depth of the despair produced from the realisation that this political project cannot realise its promise of freedom and meaningful happiness, compelling a `turn away’ from human rights as an emancipatory project and a `turn towards’ other non-liberal philosophical traditions, in the search for alternative understandings of and space for freedom and happiness. I explore these possibilities specifically within the philosophical tradition of non-dualism (Advaita).