Western Rationality Research Articles

Classical Sociologists' views of the Nation and its Main Paradigms About the Origin of the Kurds

This interdisciplinary article addresses two primary investigations: the sociological standpoint on the notion of nation and fundamental approaches concerning the Kurds' origin. Consequently, we seek responses to the following pair of inquiries: Firstly, it delves into the foundational aspects of understanding the origin of Kurds and Kurdish nationalism, questioning its historiography. Secondly, it investigates the categorization of fundamental ideas and approaches regarding nation and nationalism and examines the extent of their influence on Kurdish literature in the related field. The study takes a dual perspective. Initially, it explores the perspectives of classical sociologists such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and George Simmel on the concept of nation. In contrast to historical perspectives, sociologists analyze the notion through the prisms of social solidarity, moral environment, citizenship, Western rationality, and the nation as a superstructure. The second part of the article delves into the core approaches of primordialism, constructionism, and ethno-symbolism. The study concludes that the investigation into the origins of Kurds is a relatively recent development, influenced by a myriad of external and internal factors. Kurdish researchers have conducted their studies within the framework of the three above-mentioned methods, with visible differences of opinion regarding the origin of Kurds and Kurdish nationalism. Simultaneously, a distinct approach is emerging, asserting the uniqueness of the Kurdish issue and suggesting it transcends common modern paradigms.

Ancient Chinese Logic, Buddhism Influences with Western Rationalism and Mathematical Reasoning

Ancient Chinese Logic, Buddhism Influences with Western Rationalism and Mathematical Reasoning

Saying ‘No’ to Power: From Diasporic Knowledge to Reclaiming Ethical Monotheism

ABSTRACT In European philosophies of history, the linear paradigm that has prevailed for centuries as a derivative of Christian salvation history (Heilsgeschichte), ultimately lost its monopoly with the arrival of the “post-age.” The result of this has been that ideas that have survived on the margins, even the cyclical interpretation of time attached to religious traditions, now seem capable of outliving the short-lived belief in continuous progress. According to the cyclical view of history, those who came last will leave first, with those who came first leaving as the last adherents of the driving force of Western rationalization. Thus, within a century, beginning with World War 2, a major turning point has been crossed: Socialism was the first to disappear, and it looks like Secular Liberalism will be the next; then Protestantism, followed by Islam, and so forth. As seductive as these images may appear, they only mirror an auto-destructive thread at the very center of Europe’s troubled Geist. But can anything be done to save the most important European values, and specifically, the ethical drive to say “no” to power, which is perhaps the most important legacy of monotheism? Either as a self-limitation from within powerful institutions or as a mode of resistance on the margins of powerful developments—there is a strong adherence to the good (often named God) that helps people and communities survive their diasporic state. I will present this kernel of ethical monotheism by two relatively unknown twentieth-century examples of “diasporic knowledge”: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), in which she recorded her observations of the devastating effects of empires on Yugoslavia, and two poems by Rosario Castellanos, who decades before the debate on postcolonialism voiced the concerns of displaced indigenous cultures in her Mexican homeland. I suggest that, paradoxically, attention to diasporic voices is one way of realizing the spirit of European self-limitation that is so much needed today to prevent further damage to our societies and environment wrought by the excessive drive for progress fostered by an unethical monorationalism.

Politics, History and Logic in Max Weber

The article illustrates the different meanings of the term “logic” in Weber's work and then proceeds to discuss his approach to the explanation of historical events and in particular to counterfactual analysis. Weber's epistemology is first situated within the neo-Kantian debates of his time as well as legal positivism and historical jurisprudence. The article then focuses on this author's conception of science as a value sphere, on the aims and methods of explanation in the social and historical sciences and on the key concepts of possibility judgements and adequate causation. The central role played by counterfactuals and modal logic is illustrated through the example of the battle of Marathon, which Weber himself saw as the starting point of a causal chain leading to the rise of Western rationalism. The article concludes by highlighting the pioneering role of Weber's counterfactualism for the subsequent development of possible worlds theory and its use in the causal analysis of singular historical events.

Three Decolonial Research Methodologies: Interrogating Qualitative Research in English Language Teaching Education

Along this reflection paper, we confront our former understandings of research as women teachers-researchers who intend to take the Epistemologies of the South as ways of being feeling-thinking-doing English language teacher education and research. A personal, academic, and collective journey has intersected and driven us into the decolonial turn to research ELT. Moreover, in this paper, we will share our uncertainties and struggles in an overt attempt to question our personal fine-grained colonial paradigms to find possible ways to demonumentalize research. Our research methodologies are intended to overcome a Western rationality of knowledge production that ingrains the ways through which our knowledge, research, and pedagogical practices are to be constructed. Walking the paths of decoloniality, we have moved from universal to more pluriversal understandings; we have constructed, co-constructed, valued and rescued situated knowledges emerging from our experience in our Global South. In the process, we have lived a mobilization of visions and pathways that destabilize and relocate our practices with a deep relation to that sense of locality that is ours. The aim of the following paper is to socialize how, through our research projects, we have envisioned inter-epistemic relational methodologies, hybrid, and testimonial narratives to portray ways to research English language teacher education with a decolonial spirit.

The Garden City: Infrastructure, spatial politics and resistance behind the nation‐building mode of “tropicality” in Singapore

Abstract“Tropicality” has historically been used as an epistemological tool by colonial settlers and thereafter local rulers to naturalize and espouse Western rationality and modernity. Singapore is no exception to this lingering Western framing, which continues to define state narratives of success and heritage. “Tropicality” as a hegemonic force manifests in infrastructures of large physical networks, institutionalized knowledges, and media representations. This paper dissects three chronological dominant modes of “tropicality”—the colonial, the nation‐building, and the contemporary neoliberal mode—alongside their corresponding subaltern lived worlds that speak of an alternative “tropicality” often unnoticed (Figure 1). These diametric strands are studied through hegemonic infrastructure and everyday acts that resist, appropriate, or hybridize these power‐laden spaces. A heterogenous methodology was adopted, capturing the epistemologies and metis employed in dominant and alternative tropicalities, respectively. Maps, charts, and archives are used to study the former; ethnographic observation, family memory, and affective experiences elucidate the latter. In this paper, I focus on the nation‐building mode of “tropicality”, which shaped Singapore's rapid urbanization in the 1960s. Modernist public housing schemes borrowed from the Tropical Architecture movement are situated within a larger infrastructural field that de‐skilled, cleansed, and civilized an “unruly” population, conflating natural and social order. However, these attempts at creating modern subjects were thwarted by everyday resistance performed at a critical mass, in which displaced populations tapped upon past metis, habitus, and ecological aesthetics to appropriate alienating modern infrastructure. Through these ad hoc infrastructural reconfigurations, a hybrid modern “tropicality” was negotiated. It is through deprivileging infrastructures of “tropicality” and drawing out alternative “infra‐structures” of multiple, lived tropical worlds that we may move toward post‐tropicality—a mentality built on an expanded understanding of how our modern environment is and has been shaped equally by dominant, neocolonial forces and also forsaken memories, practices, and everyday acts of resistance, which hold the key to alternative futures beyond the limited scope delineated by our inherited “tropical modernity”.

Gestão pesqueira e Colonialismo: desterritorialização e r-existências na comunidade pesqueira artesanal da Praia do Siqueira/RJ-Brasil

Abstract Colonial domination, established from the 15th century onwards, remains as a founding element of modern western rationality,, acting as invisibly as efficiently in the production of subalternities. In the epistemological dimension, the coloniality of knowledge institutionalizes the role of modern science in the discrimination of knowledge between false and true. Decolonization as an unfinished project, associated with authoritarian fisheries management models, has forged contexts of environmental injustice. As a factual example, we analyze the imposition of a period of suspension of fishing activity in Lagoa de Araruama-RJ, based on the narratives of the artisanal fishing community of Praia do Siqueira, located on its banks. In developing the research, non-extractive/participatory methodologies were used. It is concluded that the imposed calendar intensifies the processes of deterritorialization of the community, however, despite the violence, these spaces are percolated by r-existence practices.

Bonifica Umana: the psychoanalysis of human reclamation

The concept of land reclamation has often been associated with a metaphorical meaning that extends it to the reclamation of human beings, i.e. in Italian, bonifica umana. This short essay departs from a famous statement by Sigmund Freud who, inspired by a well-known Dutch case, likened the work of psychoanalysis to that of reclaiming land from the sea. The essay then goes on to discuss the policies of reclaiming land under Fascism in Italy in the 1930s, the work of bonifica. Such work was soon called a process of bonifica integrale and finally of bonifica umana, with which it was intended as a proper programme of ‘human reclamation’, based on the eugenic ideas of medical scientist and researcher Nicola Pende as well as in the new Code of Criminal Law inaugurated by the regime in 1930. In other words, in the same way in which, according to Freud, the rational agency of the ego is supposed to emerge, with the help of psychoanalysis, from the chaos of the id, so too the programme of comprehensive and human reclamation was supposed to develop a new rational fascist society and humanity from the pre-existing ‘deadly marshes’, which would metaphorically represent the chaos of social and human life before the establishment of the new fascist regime. Finally, this essay considers the question of whether such views are inherent to the general direction of Western rationalism or are historically confined to Fascism.

Magical Realism in Indian Literature

Magic realism or magical realism is a genre where magical or unreal elements play a natural part in an otherwise realistic environment. Although it is most commonly used as a literary genre, magic realism also applies to film and the visual arts. An example of magic realism occurs when a character in the story continuous to be alive beyond the normal length of life and this is subtly depicted by the character being present throughout many generations. On the surface the story has no clear magical attributes and everything is conveyed in a real setting and breaks the rules of our real world. Magic realism is term used to describe the everyday reality with supernatural events. The two terms ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ have become to intertwined that strange, unearthly happenings become almost an accepted, even normal part of daily life. Magic realism considers being a postcolonial phenomenon. Magic realism is to be found only in the post colonial texts. The writers of colonized countries incorporate magic realism in their writings as a mode of resistance to western rationalism. There is no place for logic in magic realism. In countries like India, People believe in myths and ghosts as they believe in history. Magical things do not constitute the Indian culture. There is realism also. Diaspora writers’ characters make use of magic realism to escape to a world of fantasy for it provides them pleasure, relief, and an escape from the excruciating pain they experience in an alien land. The term magical realism was introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic in 1952. When Roh coined the term the mean it to create an art category the strayed from the strict guidelines of realism, but the term did not name an artistic movement until the 1940s in Latin America and the Caribbean. Magic realism or Magical realism is a genre of 20th century English literature. This paper deals Magical Realism in Indian literature and its authors.

Kipling's Manipulation of Religions in Kim: A Document of his Imperialist Position

Since the publication of Rudyard Kipling's (1865–1936) Kim (1901), most critics have agreed that the novel falls into the genre of colonial fiction. But they are divided into two groups – defenders and detractors – regarding Kipling's treatment of religions in the novel. The defenders celebrate his accomplishment and sympathy in depicting the devotion and attraction of the Victorian Era towards Buddhism. On the other hand, the detractors blame Kipling for fictionalising the confrontation between pragmatic Western rationality and Eastern mystical irrationality. Against this backdrop, this article revisits the novel with a postcolonial lens to study Kipling's dealings with religions in South-Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It discovers that Kipling employs strategies of surveillance and knowledge of history and ethnography while handling religions in the novel. Such fictional employment of strategy and knowledge in characterising the South-Asian religions seems to have been colonially favourable in the contemporary socio-political context. Accordingly, this article argues that Kipling manipulates religions in his narrative for the sake of imperialism through surveillance of religions, consciousness of history, and ethnographic discourse that reflect his imperialist position.

The Abyss of Meaning: Disenchantment in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Achebe’s magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, circles around a Nigerian community and the life of the Ibo people. It illustrates the life of local people before and after the British colonisation. The novel gives an account of Okonkwo’s life as a highly valued member of an Ibo clan, during the colonisation period. In this article, I intend to argue that the life of this clan was enchanted before colonisation. Later, I seek to elaborate on how this enchanted life is affected by Western civilisation and Christianity and how these elements disenchanted the Ibo people’s worldview. The liveliness of matter for Ibo people and the immateriality of objects for Christians contributed to two opposing ontologies. While Western ontology seeks to define, limit, and measure everything, the Ibo tradition gives space to the elements of magic, wonder, and fear. The sheer forces of Western rationality and Christianity served as potent elements that drained the Ibo culture of meaning. Furthermore, I posit that the emergence of Western tradition within Ibo culture caused Okonkwo’s suicide and identity crises.

Re-educating thinking: philosophy, education, and pragmatism

Abstract John Dewey stated that ‘[h]owever far apart philosophy and educational theory may later have become, in their beginnings they were strictly identical.' Dewey's ‘progressivism' in Democracy and Education rests on this communion. A self-reflective philosophical education by the community, about the community, for the community, would create the conditions for the advance of social justice. But new progressive ideas championing redistributive justice might appear to be in worryingly short supply. That is one reason, among many, why Philip Kitcher’s The Main Enterprise of the World is to be welcomed. His rethinking about education amounts to a radical re-education of our thinking about social justice, seeking redistribution of wealth, reduction of privilege, and a redefinition of what is valuable for people and planet in regard to production, distribution, and consumption. I will summarize his book and offer critical thoughts on it relating to three themes: the relation of his proposed Deweyan Society to some current and powerful criticisms of Western rationality; his proposals for classrooms; and the extent to which its own pragmatic philosophical justifications are open to deeper philosophical and educational significance.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Lucid Dreaming: The Place of Oneirogenesis in the Science of Deduction

ABSTRACT This article examines a much-underrated aspect in the Holmesian canon: dreams and the potential for dream-rehearsals by virtue of the brain’s “dream drugstore” faculty. Frequently described as “dreamy-eyed” or the “dreamer” of Baker Street, Holmes possesses powers of visiting scenes of crime “in spirit,” exhibiting powers of oneirogenesis. This unorthodox criminological strategy marks him as a critic of Western rationality, placing him in a genealogy dating back to Thomas De Quincey (who recorded vivid hallucinogenic dreams) and The Moonstone’s character Ezra Jennings (practically the first sleuth in Victorian English literature). In the Holmesian canon, (lucid) dreaming plays a subliminal role, which calls to question what this repressed unorthodoxy in Holmesian investigations implies for the detective’s preeminent science of deduction. Representations and adaptations that do not account for Holmesian oneirogenesis, are incomplete projections of the, ultimately and absolutely, human and oneirically harnessed faculties of the Victorian detective.

Dreaming Philosophers: The Daoist and the Metaphysician

Is this just a dream? Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi and metaphysician Descartes both considered this question but came to very different conclusions. In his Dream Hypothesis, Descartes imagined that all of his beliefs about the external world could be mistaken, which led him to the realization that the only thing that he could be certain of was his own existence: “I think therefore I am.” But what am “I”? “I am a thinking thing”, he said and concluded that the existence of one’s mental self is clear, certain and indubitable, while the existence of a physical world was open to doubt. Zhuang Zi, in a similar vein, dreamt that he was a butterfly, and, on awakening, could not be sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. Rather than drawing a distinction between dreams and reality, or between certainty and dubitability, however, he concluded that our identities, like everything else in the world, are fluid and subject transformation and transmutation. The very different treatments of the dream scenario by these two thinkers stem from fundamentally different assumptions embedded in the two philosophical traditions. Analyzing them side by side, we realize how the resources of each intellectual tradition cast light on the unquestioned assumptions underlying the philosophy of the other. This cross cultural engagement highlights the ways in which these two varieties of skepticism fall short of complete, universal skepticism and potentially points the way towards a synthesis of the resources of Western rationalism and philosophical Daoism that may lead to novel formulations of radically skeptical world views.

The Law Between Secularism and Theology

This study aims to describe the legal nature between secularism and theology. The research method used is a literature study with a qualitative descriptive approach using content analytics. The results of the research are secularism and theology is part of the school of natural law (kodrati). Secularism i.e. the rejection of religious thought from life even denies the existence of God from the reality of life whereas the center of life through reason and even secularism can resemble a new religion, hence the law is secular based solely on the will of the people's reason alone. That the legal nature of the theological dimension in the Islamic perspective, namely the narrative based on the revelation of Allah and the Sunnah of the Apostle, shows that a set of rules is extracted from and based on the revelation of the Quran and Sunnah. Law in Islam is seen as having two dimensions, namely Shari'a and fiqh. Sharia is fundamental and absolute values, impossible to change, while jurisprudence is a special field formulated by fuqaha'. Secularism in the sense of rationalism in Islam has always been guided by nash which is like thinking of a mujtahid, so the result is not too far from the truth values that nash teaches. Western rationalism, on the other hand, relies solely on the ability of reason alone, so that it is often found that a law is finally amended again because it is incompatible with the values of justice, good and bad.

Mary Chilton Callaway. Jeremiah Through the Centuries

Mary Chilton Callaway. <i>Jeremiah Through the Centuries</i>

„Чаемое будущее” и „идти вперед” – категория будущего в научном творчестве Михаила Михайловича Бахтина

In the article the scientific works of Mikhail Bakhtin are considered as one text with its own single metaplot. The motive of moving forward (“going forward”) is analyzed and treated as the basis of Bakhtin’s progressive outlook, his hopes for the future and for the dialogue in the Great Time. Attention is drawn to a specific period of the Russian thinker’s intellectual life, that is associated with the departure from the ideas of solipsism. The concept of “I – others” is considered a turning point and is compared with the Copernican revolution, which is carried out in the philosophical worldview of a Russian scientist and then transferred to the studies of the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. It reveals, in particular, the philosopher’s gradual departure from individual reality and his approach towards personalism. The future for Bakhtin is a creative, active category that determines the present. At the same time it is noted that the forward movement as expressed by the Russian thinker is ambivalent and associated with the turn to the past and the source. Along the way the concepts of memory, the curvature of progress, the idea of historical inversion, etc. are also studied. Besides, Bakhtin’s criticism of the Enlightenment idea of progress, Western rationalism and humanism are mentioned. In this regard Bakhtin’s concept of the rebirth acquires great importance, in which, under the influence of movement towards the future, the past is updated.

Spiritual practices of zen buddhism in the conditions of globalization challenges of modern times

The article studies the specifics of Zen Buddhism spiritual practices that influence the spread of their popularity in the contemporary Western globalised world. Zen Buddhism insists on the need for inner spiritual experience, which is directly opposed to authority and external revelation. Zen Buddhism primarily emphasises individual effort in overcoming the separation of the world into opposites, which is the result of the thinking activity. The difference between the religious system of Zen Buddhism is that Zen Buddhism, with its enlightenment, does not depend on sacred books and texts (as, for example, in Christianity, which formed the Western world system); Zen is also primarily non-verbal. The experience of enlightenment cannot be shared with others. Zen practice is a cultivated path, which at the same time has no ultimate goal or meaning; here the path (life in the inevitable) is already a "satori" here and now, which constantly flows through human existence. The relevance and novelty of the study are due to the highlighting of the features of spiritual practices of Zen Buddhism as a way of self-knowledge of a person, "returning to oneself", which ensures its active spread in modern Western society. It is determined that the essence of Zen Buddhism mysticism is that the most real is the abstract, and vice versa. The whole system of spiritual practices is the product of this essential inner spiritual experience. This mysticism often prevents us from measuring the depth of the Eastern mind in terms of Western rationalism because it denies logical analysis by its very nature. The Eastern mind is synthetic. It does not attach too much importance to insignificant trivialities. Still, it strives for an intuitive understanding of the whole, which reaches the spiritual philosophy of Zen in the daily practical challenges of the globalised world. The features of the influence of the spiritual system of Zen Buddhism on Japanese art are also analysed. The conclusions underline that Zen Buddhism has had a significant impact both directly on the religious and cultural life of the Japanese and world culture in general. The popularity of the spiritual practices of Zen Buddhism in Western society is due to their idea of breaking a person out of the subject-object dichotomy, which leads to the separation of the spiritual essence of man, and causes social conflicts. Zen has unique aesthetics, which include a high appreciation of moderation, asymmetry, imperfection, simplicity, and naturalness. In simple beauty and simplicity (transformation of "poverty" into a kind of minimalism), the Japanese find a unique charm and a source of true beauty.

Война и кризис глобального псевдолиберального цивилизационного проекта

Introduction. War in the nuclear age regardless on the options of limited or local nuclear military conflict represents the apogee of the global crisis of humanity. Theoretical analysis. The purpose of the article is to identify the signs and prerequisites of the crisis of the global liberal civilizational project. The novelty of the research is manifested in the author's argumentation of the relationship of the philosophy of the war of western rationalism with pseudo-liberal modeling of modern civilizational dynamics. In the process of problem research the principle of historicism, socio-cultural approach and methods of critical philosophical reflection are used. The author proves that the key feature of the pseudo-liberal metamorphosis is the orientation of the political strategy of the ruling circles of the United States to achieve the status of a "hegemon country". This practically means abandoning the democratic principle in constructing a polycentric model of the world order. Conclusion. The prerequisite for such a conceptual revolution is the discrepancy between the liberal idea of freedom and the democratic demands of equality, which gave rise to contradictions in the concept of "freedom in inequality". The consequence of this divergence of liberalism and democracy is characterized by the transition from dialogue to war as the priority way of solving political problems. The article consistently highlights the theoretical and moral prerequisites for the transformation of a civilizational project into a pseudo-liberal one.

Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science

Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science