Journal articles on the topic 'Metaphysical Science Fiction'
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1
Krstic, Predrag. "Knowledge and foretelling: On imagining future." Theoria, Beograd 55, no. 2 (2012): 85–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/theo1202085k.
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This paper presents and validates opposing notions regarding possibility of knowing the future. The medium for this enquiry is science fiction production in the literature, television and film. It finds that potential for knowing (in this production) demonstrate, illustrate, provokes, but also encounters the same epistemological, ethical and metaphysical quandaries that modern and contemporary philosophy deals with.
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Bijelic, Marijana, and Lucija Mandaric. "SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN SVETOSLAV MINKOV'S SHORT STORIES." Ezikov Svyat volume 21 issue 2, ezs.swu.v21i2 (May 26, 2023): 144–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.37708/ezs.swu.bg.v21i2.18.
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This paper analyses the role of the motifs associated with the development of science and new technologies in Svetoslav Minkov’s short stories. The author developed a rather unusual hybrid genre which consists of fantastical, science-fictional, satirical and absurdist elements. In the first phase all the elements (even those typical of science fiction) are merely in the function of representing an estranged, mystical, diabolical world; whereas in the second one, evil is no longer mystified in the form of a strange diabolical presence – now it becomes clear that the main source of the absurd is a form of capital production as well as the new model of modern pseudo-rationality that reduces the human life to a role in profit making and consumer spending, resulting in its total subservience to the market. After the loss of religious faith, or metaphysical ground, i. e. the ultimate loss of the Father, symbolical and social order have become circumferential systems of production and consumption, so the new man is no longer a child of God, but rather a strange being whose lack of being is represented by metaphors of either an animal or a robot.
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Hughes, Joe. "The greatest deception: fiction, falsity and manifestation in Spinoza’s Metaphysical Thoughts." Intellectual History Review 30, no. 3 (April 21, 2020): 363–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2020.1732698.
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Smolnikov, Andrei. "“Are we not Men?”: Reading the Human-Animal Interface in Science Fiction through John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?”." New Horizons in English Studies 4 (September 4, 2020): 157–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/nh.2020.5.157-171.
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The so-called animal turn in literature has fostered the evolution of animal studies, a discipline aimed at interrogating the ontological, ethical, and metaphysical implications of animal depictions. Animal studies deals with representation and agency in literature, and its insights have fundamental implications for understanding the conception and progression of human-animal interactions. Considering questions raised by animal studies in the context of literary depictions of animals in science fiction, this article threads John Berger’s characterization of the present as a time of radical marginalization of animals in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” through two highly influential science fiction texts: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Applying Berger’s reasoning to these two novels raises issues of personhood, criteria for ontological demarcation, and the dynamics of power, providing an opportunity to clarify, modify, and refute a number of his finer claims. This process of refinement allows us to track conceptions of human-animal interactions through the literary landscape and explore their extrapolations into various speculative contexts, including the frontiers of science and post-apocalyptic worlds.
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MAES-JELINEK, HENA. "Europe and post-colonial creativity: a metaphysical cross-culturalism." European Review 13, no. 1 (January 20, 2005): 91–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1062798705000098.
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In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the meeting between Prospero and Caliban is an allegory of a Renaissance colonial encounter. Although Prospero emphasizes his gift of language to Caliban, he deems him incapable of ‘nurture’ (cultural progress). After the Second World War, the Barbadian novelist Georges Lamming saw in that gift the possibility of a ‘new departure’, which in the following decades was to modify not only Caliban's prospects but most emphatically the European, and specifically, the British cultural scene. I intend to illustrate this transformation through the contribution of postcolonial writers to the metamorphosis of the ‘Great Tradition’ of the English novel. The changes are formal, linguistic but also evince a metaphysical cross-culturalism best exemplified, among others, in the fiction of the Guyanese-born, British novelist Wilson Harris.
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Ravetti, Graciela. "Reorganização de saberes tradicionais em Los sorias, de Alberto Laiseca." Caligrama: Revista de Estudos Românicos 19, no. 1 (September 21, 2014): 143. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2238-3824.19.1.143-166.
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<p><strong>Resumo: </strong>Neste estudo, propõe-se uma consideração sobre a reformulação de saberes tradicionais em termos não metafísicos na obra do escritor argentino Alberto Laiseca, <em>Los sorias </em>(1998), construída a partir da convergência dos temas das religiões, da magia e da astrologia, lado a lado com outros saberes em face de (des)hierarquização.</p> <p><strong>Palavras chave: </strong>Literatura hispano-americana; literatura argentina; romance contemporâneo; ficção científica.</p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p><strong>Abstract: </strong>In this study, we propose a consideration on the reformulation of traditional knowledge in no metaphysical terms in the work of Argentine writer Alberto Laiseca, <em>Los sorias </em>(1998), constructed from the convergence of the themes of religion, magic and astrology alongside with other knowledge in the face of de-hierarchization.</p> <p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Argentine literature; contemporary romance, science fiction, Spanish American literature.</p>
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Soumya Samanta. "East-West Dichotomy in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle." Creative Launcher 6, no. 4 (October 30, 2021): 198–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2021.6.4.30.
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Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle is a historical novel that is set during the Ottoman reign. The novel presents the metaphysical opposition of East and West, self and the other, intuition and reason, mysticism, science and global and local, and the recurring issues of conflict of civilization, identity crisis, and cultural variations. Orhan Pamuk as a postmodern writer tries to bridge the gap between the East and the West through his writings. Although Turkey is at the backdrop in most of his novels, the treatment of themes is universal. The paper proposes the theory of Orientalism by Edward Said, which represents the encounter and treatment of the "Orient." The concept of identity expressed by Pamuk in his wide range of novels also can be related to the “Orient” and “Occident.” The culture of the East has always been portrayed as the binary opposite of Europe in history and fiction. The loss of identity of the East reflected in the works of Pamuk is an outcome of the clash between East and Europe, further leading to chaotic contexts and dilemmatic protagonists. Individuals unable to choose between the traditional self and the fashionable West mourn the lost identity of a country and their self.
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Mahmutćehajić, Rusmir. "ANDRIĆISM." East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 27, no. 4 (July 30, 2013): 619–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325413494773.
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Andrić’s fiction is closely identified with Bosnia and often taken for a faithful reflection of that country’s culture, social relations, and tragic history. Rather than reflecting Bosnian pluralism, however, his oeuvre undermines its very metaphysical underpinnings, in part because his works are so firmly rooted in the European experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the perspective of a dominant modernity, certain cultures and peoples came to be presented as un-European, Oriental, and essentially foreign. Bosnia, which had always been a religiously plural society, now became one where ideological models excluded its Muslim inhabitants. In line with long-standing European practice, Andrić drew an image of the Bosnian Muslim as Turk and the Turk as Bosnian Muslim, converting the real content of Bosnian society into a plastic material for the ideologues of homogenous societies to use in modelling external and internal enemies that were essentially identical. This process required as its precondition the destruction of that enemy through a process described as the social and cultural liberation of the Christian subject. Over time, this exclusion took on forms now termed genocide. In creating this image, Andrić deployed narrative techniques whose function may fairly be characterized as the aesthetic dissimulation of our ethical responsibilities towards the other and the different. Such elements from his oeuvre have been used in the nationalist ideologies anti-Muslimism serves as a building block. In this paper, certain aspects of the ideological reading and interpretation of Andrić’s oeuvre are presented.
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Johnson, Jeffery. "Evidence, Explanation, and the Pursuit of Truth in Literature and Law." Law, Culture and the Humanities 15, no. 3 (August 19, 2015): 705–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1743872115599712.
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My focus is evidence. I understand this concept to be the marshalling of facts (data, etc.) in support of some position. This might be a district attorney presenting evidence to a jury that O. J. is guilty, or a literary critic arguing that Hamlet suffered from an Oedipus complex. But what is the logical connection between the relevant facts and the position they are being used to defend? How are we to distinguish successful cases of the marshalling of evidence – good arguments – from unsuccessful cases – weak arguments? I defend what I take to be a very commonsensical and pedagogically useful theory of [good] evidence. I argue that this view, inference to the best explanation, captures most, if not all, appeals to evidence in everyday contexts, as well as quite specialized domains like science, detective reasoning, and criminal and civil evidence. It also nicely encapsulates the sort of evidence that jurists and critics marshal in defense of particular readings of legal and literary texts. Appeals to evidence in the complicated worlds of teenage romance, detective fiction, criminal law, literary interpretation, and constitutional law all nicely fit the structure and evaluative methodology of inference to the best explanation. But only the diagnoses of lipstick stains, murder victims and bloody gloves can be held to the standards of correspondence and metaphysical realism. Literary and constitutional texts can be explained, and can be better or worse explained, but the truth or falsity of these interpretations is firmly in the realm of the coherence theory.
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Liu, Lydia H. "Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun." Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 1 (January 27, 2009): 21–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021911809000047.
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The fraught encounters between biological sciences and religions such as Buddhism have raised philosophical issues for many. This essay will focus on one of them: Can form ground the truth of life? The author suggests that, along with the introduction of evolutionary biology from Europe, literary realism in China has emerged as a technology of biomimesis, among other such technologies, to grapple with the problem of “life as form.” Focusing on Lu Xun's early interest in Ernst Haeckel and science fiction, especially his translation of “Technique for Creating Humans” and his narrative fiction “Prayers for Blessing,” which drew extensively on a Buddhist avadāna, the essay seeks to throw some new light on the familiar as well as unfamiliar sources relating to Lu Xun's life and works and to develop a new understanding of how the debates on science and metaphysics have developed in modern China.
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Varzi, Achille C., and Amie L. Thomasson. "Fiction and Metaphysics." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63, no. 3 (November 2001): 723. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3071170.
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Malykh, V. S. "TRANSFORMATION OF A FAIRY TALE IN «HYBRID» SCIENCE FICTION (BASED ON AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN PROSE OF THE XXth CENTURY)." Russian Journal of Multilingualism and Education 12 (December 25, 2020): 99–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2500-0748-2020-12-99-109.
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The article introduces and substantiates the concept of «hybrid» science fiction, which combines the elements of science fiction and horror fiction. In «hybrid» fiction, science fiction surroundings cannot rationalize the text, but, on the contrary, they are replaced by motives of supernatural horror. «Hybrid» science fiction, in contrast to «hard» science fiction , develops the idea of unknowability of the Universe. It is worth mentioning here, that «hard» science fiction has been described well enough, but there is a shortage of research work in relation to its «hybrid» version, so this research can be considered as pioneering. We use E. M. Neyolov’s typology that describes the connection between a fairy tale and «hard» science fiction. Basing on this typology, we analyse «hybrid» fiction, in which science fiction scenery was replaced by the anti-rational principle. The research methodology involves a combination of structural, typological and comparative methods. As a material for the study, we use the works of such Russian and American authors as D. Glukhovsky, S. Lukyanenko, G. R. R. Martin, S. King, C. McCarthy, H. P. Lovecraft and others. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the transformation of fairytale discourse in the works of these authors that leads to the genre transition from science fiction to horror fiction. The texts are being analysed from three points of view: system of characters, the structure of space and the direction of time. It is concluded that in «hybrid» science fiction the typological model of the fairy tale was distorted, reconsidered or destroyed, and it is the aberration of the fairytale motif that opens the gate for the genre transformation from «hard» science fiction to horror fiction. For example, the struggle of the superhero with the supervillain is traditional both for fairy tales and for science fiction, but it is replaced by psychologization of the hero and the extreme complication of the metaphysics of the Good and the Evil in «hybrid» science fiction . Besides that, the well-organized space of fairytale and science fiction as well as a close-cut separation of «ours» and «aliens», and also the mythologem of «threshold» are mixed in «hybrid» fiction and lose their symbolical unambiguity. Finally, science fiction and fairytale time in «hybrid» fiction ceases to exist and gives way to the tragic timelessness of chaos and nightmare. Thus, «hybrid» fiction destroys both the canons of «hard» science fiction and the constructs of the fairy tale genre.
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Malykh, V. S. "TRANSFORMATION OF A FAIRY TALE IN «HYBRID» SCIENCE FICTION (BASED ON AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN PROSE OF THE XXth CENTURY)." Russian Journal of Multilingualism and Education 12 (December 25, 2020): 99–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2500-0748-2020-12-99-109.
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The article introduces and substantiates the concept of «hybrid» science fiction, which combines the elements of science fiction and horror fiction. In «hybrid» fiction, science fiction surroundings cannot rationalize the text, but, on the contrary, they are replaced by motives of supernatural horror. «Hybrid» science fiction, in contrast to «hard» science fiction , develops the idea of unknowability of the Universe. It is worth mentioning here, that «hard» science fiction has been described well enough, but there is a shortage of research work in relation to its «hybrid» version, so this research can be considered as pioneering. We use E. M. Neyolov’s typology that describes the connection between a fairy tale and «hard» science fiction. Basing on this typology, we analyse «hybrid» fiction, in which science fiction scenery was replaced by the anti-rational principle. The research methodology involves a combination of structural, typological and comparative methods. As a material for the study, we use the works of such Russian and American authors as D. Glukhovsky, S. Lukyanenko, G. R. R. Martin, S. King, C. McCarthy, H. P. Lovecraft and others. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the transformation of fairytale discourse in the works of these authors that leads to the genre transition from science fiction to horror fiction. The texts are being analysed from three points of view: system of characters, the structure of space and the direction of time. It is concluded that in «hybrid» science fiction the typological model of the fairy tale was distorted, reconsidered or destroyed, and it is the aberration of the fairytale motif that opens the gate for the genre transformation from «hard» science fiction to horror fiction. For example, the struggle of the superhero with the supervillain is traditional both for fairy tales and for science fiction, but it is replaced by psychologization of the hero and the extreme complication of the metaphysics of the Good and the Evil in «hybrid» science fiction . Besides that, the well-organized space of fairytale and science fiction as well as a close-cut separation of «ours» and «aliens», and also the mythologem of «threshold» are mixed in «hybrid» fiction and lose their symbolical unambiguity. Finally, science fiction and fairytale time in «hybrid» fiction ceases to exist and gives way to the tragic timelessness of chaos and nightmare. Thus, «hybrid» fiction destroys both the canons of «hard» science fiction and the constructs of the fairy tale genre.
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Effingham, Nikk. "The Close Possibility of Time Travel." Philosophies 8, no. 6 (December 12, 2023): 118. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8060118.
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This article discusses the possibility of some outlandish tropes from time travel fiction, such as people reversing in age as they time travel or the universe being destroyed because a time traveler kills their ancestor. First, I discuss what type of possibility we might have in mind, detailing ‘close possibility’ as one such candidate. Secondly, I argue that—with only little exception—these more outlandish tropes fail to be closely possible. Thirdly, I discuss whether these outlandish tropes may nevertheless be more broadly possible (e.g., metaphysically or logically possible), arguing that whether they are or not depends upon your favored metaphysics of the laws of nature.
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Simus, Jason. "Metaphors and Metaphysics in Ecology." Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 15, no. 2 (2011): 185–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853511x574487.
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AbstractEcological science has at one time or another deemed nature a machine, an organism, a community, or a system. These metaphors do not refer to any metaphysical entity, but are useful fictions in terms of how they reflect the beliefs and values held by members of a scientific and cultural community. First I trace the history of ecological metaphors from the metaphysical and cultural perspectives. Then I document a gradual transition from a belief in structural natural order to a belief in conceptual natural order. Finally, I conclude by arguing that the metaphysical allegiances of ecological theories have largely been shaped by aesthetic considerations.
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Taylor, John L. "Probing the limits of reality: the metaphysics in science fiction." Physics Education 38, no. 1 (December 20, 2002): 20–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0031-9120/38/1/303.
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Doherty, Ryan Atticus. "The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais." Literature 4, no. 1 (December 22, 2023): 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/literature4010001.
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At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale.
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Kulenović, Emira. "Metafizika biblioteke = Metaphysics of the Library." Bosniaca 26, no. 26 (December 2021): 38–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.37083/bosn.2021.26.38.
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Bibliotekarstvo kao nauka i vještina organizacije znanja i njegovih produkata evoluira te je, kao i sve ostale naučne ili praktične discipline, prisiljeno prilagođavati se vremenu. Na tom svom evolucijskom putu, općeprihvaćene teorije i poimanje biblioteke i bibliotekarstva kao struke se mijenjaju te se sve više udaljavaju od tradicionalnih predstava – gotovo do granice naučne fantastike. Pa ipak, do juče fikcijske, književnoumjetničke predstave, danas se posmatraju na krajnje konstruktivan i racionalan način. Jedan od najzanimljivijih primjera je doživljaj i vizija biblioteke u fikcijskom svijetu Jorgea Luisa Borgesa. Na tragu njegovih profetskih zapažanja utkanih u njegov književni univerzum, mnogi naučnici današnjice iz različitih oblasti kroz multidisciplinarni pristup pokušavaju rekonstruirati i kreirati sliku biblioteke budućnosti preoblikovane na način da može odgovoriti zahtjevima novog vremena. Ponajviše zahvaljujući enormnom tehnološkom razvoju i izazovima koje on sobom nosi, vizije sveopšte ili univerzalne biblioteke, biblioteke bez zidova, čine se izvodive i vode ka preispitivanju postojećih i stvaranju novih teorija o budućoj ulozi biblioteke i suštini bibliotečke prakse. Interesantno je i izazovno iz današnje perspektive struke promišljati na koji način će se poimati biblioteka u bližoj ili daljoj budućnosti, kako će izgledati i koja će od postojećih vizija, naučna ili literarna, biti bliže realizaciji u stvarnosti. = Librarianship as a science and skill of the organization of knowledge and its products is evolving and, like all other scientific or practical disciplines, it is forced to keep up with the times. In this evolutionary path, traditional theories and notions of libraries and librarianship as professions are changing and reaching far beyond the traditional ones – almost to the limits of science fictions. Nevertheless, theories which were until recently considered fictional literary and artistic performances are today already seen from an extremely constructive and rational perspective. One of the most interesting examples is the experience and vision of the library in the fictional world of Jorge Luis Borges. Following his prophetic observations woven into his literary universe, many scholars from various fields, are trying through a multidisciplinary approach to reconstruct and create an image of the library of the future reshaped in a way that can respond to demands of modern times. Mostly thanks to the enormous technological development and challenges it brings, visions of a Universal Library seem feasible and lead to rethinking of existing and creating new theories about the future role of the library and the essence of library practice. It is interesting and challenging from today’s professional perspective to think about the way that library will be understood in the near or distant future, what it will look like and which of the existing visions – scientific or literary – will be closer to realization in reality.
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Burr, Jordan. "Entropy’s Enemies: Postmodern Fission and Transhuman Fusion in the Post-War Era." Humanities 9, no. 1 (March 5, 2020): 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h9010023.
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In the early to mid-twentieth century, thermodynamic entropy—the inevitable diffusion of usable energy in the Universe—became a ubiquitous metaphor for the dissolution of Western values and cultural energy. Many Golden Age science fiction writers portrayed twentieth century technological progress as anti-entropic, a sign of Universal progress and unity which might postpone or negate both cultural and thermodynamic forms of entropy. Following the evolutionary metaphysics of Georg Hegel and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Golden Age science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov imagined the creation of powerful collective beings whose unitary existence signified the defeat of entropy. In contrast, later literary postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Pamela Zoline often accepted and even exalted in the chaotic, liberating potential of entropy. In postmodern fiction, the disorder of entropy was often compared favorably to the stifling hegemony of cultural universalism. More broadly, these two responses might be understood to represent two societal stages of grief-- denial and acceptance—to the new trauma introduced to the world by the parallel concepts of cultural entropy and a Universal “heat death.”
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Posthumus, Stephanie. "Posthuman Conjectures: Animal and Ecological Sciences in Marie Darrieussecq’s Dystopian Fiction." Précisions sur les sciences dans l'oeuvre de Marie Darrieussecq, no. 115 (March 3, 2020): 41–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1067883ar.
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Despite being published over twenty years apart, Marie Darrieussecq’s novels, Truismes (1996) and Notre vie dans les forêts (2017), share many features including their dystopian setting, urgent narrative tone, and themes of hybridity, corporeality and radical revelation. Deconstructing the boundaries between animal and human, nature and culture, human and machine, they invite the reader to move beyond anthropocentrism. In response to this invitation, I propose four posthuman conjectures, tracing the ethos of animal and ecological sciences in the two novels. First, I examine the ways in which the presence of non-human animal worlds requires imagining new subjectivities and writing embodied languages. Second, I move from the animal world to the machine cyborg who remains caught in the effects and affects of the techno-scientific complex in Darrieussecq’s dystopian fiction. Third, I consider the space made in both novels for death and dying as a non-metaphysical phenomenon situating humans in an eco-evolutionary web. Last, I define writing as a form of (post)human technology that the novels use to reject the notion of human superiority and to illustrate language’s capacity to imagine new, less-hierarchical paradigms.
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LATHAM, PETER. "“Irreversible Torpor”: Entropy in 1970s American Suburban Fiction." Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (July 5, 2018): 131–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875818000956.
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Although entropy has been identified as a theme in urban American fiction of the 1960s, it is far more significant in a strand of 1970s suburban fiction, in Joseph Heller'sSomething Happened(1974), John Updike'sRabbit Is Rich (1981), and the stories of Raymond Carver. I argue that in these texts the suburbs function as closed systems, subject to entropy, and that the suburbanite protagonists have a heightened sense of physical and metaphysical entropy, a reflection in part of the prevailing sense of irreversible economic and cultural decline and decay in that decade
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Tucker, Aviezer. "Scientific Historiography Revisited: An Essay on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of History." Dialogue 37, no. 2 (1998): 235–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0012217300006958.
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RésuméLa pragmatique et la sémantique de l'historiographie révèlent une fragmentation croissante qui s'étendpar-delà les écoles jusqu' aux historiens individuels. Alors que les scientifiques normalisent les donnéespour qu'elles s'ajustent aux théories, les historiens interprétent lews théories, de manières incompatibles entre elles, pour qu'elles s'ajustent aux différents cas historiques. Les difficultés qui en découlent dans la communication historiographique remettent en cause les philosophies herméneutiques de l'historiographie et redonnent un nouvel intérêt à la question d'une historiographie scientifique. Mais les réponses existantes sont philosophiquement obsolètes. Une façon de reformuler le problème est de partir de la complexite du chaos et de l'unicité de l'histoire. Seule la science peut évaluer si les propriétés d'un domaine donné en interdisent une approche scientifique. Or la science s'étend par réductions méthodologiques explicatives, en ramenant des propriétés d'événements complexes, chaotiques et uniques, qui sont familières, mais d'un niveau plus él–ve, à des propriétés ou interrelations non familières et d'un niveau moins éléve. La culture disciplinaire de l'historiographie, cependant, empêche le développement par essais et erreurs de telles tentatives de réductions scientifiques, qui seules permettraient d'évaluer lespossibilités d'une historiographie scientifique, laquelle, dans la situation présente, relève de la science-fiction.
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Bogdanova, Olga V., and Elizaveta A. Vlasova. "Gogol’s "personality anatomy" in Abram Tertz’s narrative In the Shadow of Gogol." Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, no. 483 (2022): 5–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.17223/15617793/483/1.
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The article aims to analyze the content and narrative systems of Andrei Sinyavsky’s “philological prose” based on the material of Abram Tertz’s narrative In the Shadow of Gogol and to prove the involvement of his “literary essay” in modern Gogol studies. The authors explore the little-studied text of Sinyavsky-Tertz, trace the history of the perception of In the Shadow of Gogol by modern Gogoliade, review a number of critical provisions of modern science about the Russian comedian, and on this foundation to justify the scholarly potential of the neotraditionalist researcher. The main methods the authors used in the study are historical-literary, comparative-historical, intertextual, in their unity and complementarity. The comprehensive approach showed the new facets of Sinyavsky- Tertz’s creative talent. The analysis identified the main research strategy of the “free” investigation by Tertz – the structural and compositional integrity of the work, the setting of the research aim and objectives, the choice of the research methodology, the use of references and bibliography, the following of the logic, analytical thinking, focus of final conclusions, etc. The format of the research (for example, a “dissertation”), which Sinyavsky-Tertz resorted to, allowed the authors to trust the research hypothesis proposed in the work and related to the understanding of the personality of the “Tertzian” Gogol, an artist and thinker. In Sinyavsky-Tertz’s opinion (contrary to the traditional scholarly view), Gogol did not experience a “spiritual crisis” in the last years of his life, but by the end of the first volume of Dead Souls and the final Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends he returned to his origins and authenticity rising above his own literary works that served him as “material” support in his metaphysical quest and approaching the transcendent philosophical understanding of universal truth. Sinyavsky-Tertz subjects Gogol’s “personality anatomy” to associative and metaphorical analysis, and comprehends it in several stages: (1) on the basis of a detailed literary analysis of the texts of the comedy The Government Inspector and the novel-poem Dead Souls, and (2) in the course of a comparative analysis of the discourses of fiction and journalism (mainly epistolary ones). Combining the various components of Gogol’s creative personality leads the researcher to realize the unity and integrity of the path of Gogol-the writer and Gogol-the thinker, avoiding the “mystical crisis” (or “madness”), its gradual and cross-cutting evolution towards a deeply philosophical perception of the world and person. The authors reveal solidarity to Sinyavsky-Tertz’s position and draw a conclusion that the researcher’s judgments are substantiated and persuasive. The results obtained show that Sinyavsky’s hypothesis is valid for a number of criteria and can (should) be perceived by modern Gogol studies as a research conception that opens up new perspectives for understanding Gogol’s personality and works.
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Sekulic, Nada. "Culture of signifiers: Difference between Lévi-Strauss' and Derrida's notion of structure." Sociologija 45, no. 1 (2003): 61–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/soc0301061s.
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The anthropology was developed on the notions of primitive man, primitive culture and society. These notions were generated through mixture of scientific and fictional approaches to social reality, so that it was very difficult to prove them. Therefore, the scientific and cognitive value and significance of these models have been questioned in anthropology from the beginning. Structural critique of the theory of primitive mentality relativizes the relationship between fictional and science language, by conveying that the general mind capacities are grounded in the principles of fictional and/or irrational thinking, rejecting the idea that they relate to the previous phases of the mind development. Structural approach considers culture to be a system of signifier s, built on spontaneous semiotic processes. Derrida recognizes structural (Levi-Strauss's) approach as a beginning of new type of discourse, partially released from the metaphysical heritage, introducing into anthropology decentralization of stable structure, changes of cognitive status and importance of fictional language stressing the fictional aspects of scientific approaches. Consequently anthropology is not considered as a grounded empirical science any more, but as a discursive game based on non-decisive discursive transformations. Derrida's approach supports the interpretation of culture as a system of signifiers; avoiding the initial problem posed, but not solved by the structural critique of the theory of primitive mentality - that is the question if it is possible to supplement realistic discourse with the fictional one and what the consequences result from it.
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ROBERTS, JOHN. "The flat-lining of metaphysics: François Laruelle’s ‘science-fictive’ theory of non-photography." Philosophy of Photography 2, no. 1 (September 20, 2011): 129–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/pop.2.1.129_7.
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Cover, J. A., and Charles Crittenden. "Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54, no. 1 (March 1994): 225. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2108371.
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Sousedík, Prokop. "Zavádění předmětů v aristotelismu." Studia Neoaristotelica 19, no. 4 (2022): 33–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/studneoar20221946.
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The main purpose of this paper is to contest the Aristotelian notion that the objects of metaphysics, mathematics and physics are all abstract, which is the reason why these disciplines constitute a homogeneous class. For a reflection on the way how objects are introduced into scientific discourse leads to the conclusion that some of these objects (especially the mathematical ones) are fictions of reason an that their nature is defined purely by their mutual relationships. From this it follows that, far from being theoretical sciences, the respective disciplines are justifiedly classified as arts.
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Kaitaro, Timo. "« Manuscrit de Mr Dangicourt » : système métaphysique néantiste d’un disciple de Leibniz." Sjuttonhundratal 6 (October 1, 2009): 40. http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/4.2759.
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<p>Dangicourt’s Manuscript: The metaphysical system of nothingness from a disciple of Leibniz</p><p>The collection of clandestine philosophical manuscripts at the Helsinki University Library contains, among other typical seventeenth and early eighteenth century texts, an exchange of letters between Pierre Dangicourt and Alphonse Des Vignoles (1725−1726). Both belong to the circle of thinkers close to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Starting from some mathematical conjectures concerning the incommensurability of the sides and the diagonal of a geometrical square, Dangicourt develops a metaphysical system according to which ‘original material’ (la matière originale) of the universe is ‘nothingness’ (néant) and criticises the view according to which the universe consists of extended and existing composite parts. Des Vignoles presents a criticism of Dangicourt’s ideas. In a letter to Dangicourt, Leibniz also presents criticisms of Dangcourt’s system by insisting on the fictional nature of mathematical abstractions.</p>
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Serikov, Andrei E. "Ritual Behavior as One of the Foundations of Mathematics in Fiction and Reality." Semiotic studies 4, no. 2 (July 7, 2024): 35–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.18287/2782-2966-2024-4-2-35-42.
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The Machineries of Empire cycle by American science fiction writer Yoon Ha Lee consists of more than 30 works, including three novels translated into Russian. The metaphysics of the universe in this cycle is something like this: the laws of nature and, accordingly, the operation of certain technologies (including military ones) depend on the mathematical properties of the calendar being practiced, and the properties of the calendar (i. e. mathematics) are supported by the practice of rituals, including ritual torture. Lee's fiction paradoxically combines the usually counterposed ideas that mathematics can be a social construct and that the physical world can be merely a realization of transcendental mathematics. In Machineries of Empire, mathematics is constructed, maintained by ritual-based consensus, and as a result becomes the basis of reality. How can this relate to our life, our science and philosophy? If we take seriously the ideas of the cognitive scientists that all real mathematics as we know it, unlike Plato's mathematics, is based on human ability and experience, we must also seriously ask what role ritual plays in it. This article emphasizes the following idea: the very identification of numbers, geometric figures and mathematical operations must arise through repeated ritual repetition so that those who practice mathematical rituals can easily, as a self-evident and obvious aspect of the ritual, identify properties of objects that are significant from a mathematical point of view and distinguish them from non-essential ones.
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S. Vakhshtayn, Victor. "“Law & Order” at the “Roadside Picnic”. Book Review: Meillassoux K. (2020) Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction. Perm: Giele Press." Sociology of Power 33, no. 4 (2021): 241–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.22394/2074-0492-2021-4-241-250.
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Pfitzer, Gregory M. "The Only Good Alien is a Dead Alien: Science Fiction and the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating on the High Frontier." Journal of American Culture 18, no. 1 (March 1995): 51–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734x.1995.1801_51.x.
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Thomas, J. L. H. "Against the Fantasts." Philosophy 66, no. 257 (July 1991): 349–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0031819100064949.
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Amongst Kant's lesser known early writings is a short treatise with the curious title Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics, in which, with considerable acumen and brilliance, and not a little irony, Kant exposes the empty pretensions of his contemporary, the Swedish visionary and Biblical exegete, Emanuel Swedenborg, to have access to a spirit world, denied other mortals. Despite his efforts, it must be feared, however, that Kant did not, alas, succeed in laying the spirit of Swedenborg himself to rest once and for all, for there has arisen in our own day, and within philosophy itself, a movement of thought, if such it can be called, which, like that of Swedenborg, is founded upon an unbridled and unhealthy exercise of the imagination, and apparently believes that philosophical problems can be discussed and resolved by the elaboration of fantastical, and at times repulsive, examples; if we require a name for this contemporary pretence at philosophy, we could take as our model the Italian word for science fiction, fantascienza, and call it ‘fantaphilosophy’: it is my aim to show that this fantaphilosophy is a phantom philosophy.
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Zymomria, Mykoła. "The Rules of How Reality Works Through the Prism of Post-Postmodern Prose." Czytanie Literatury. Łódzkie Studia Literaturoznawcze, no. 9 (December 30, 2020): 347–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2299-7458.09.18.
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The reviewer analyses the monograph Problematic-Thematic Units and Philosophical-Esthetical Parameters of the British Post-Postmodern Novel (Kyiv, 2020) written by Dmytro Drozdovskyi, a Ukrainian scholar from Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, member of The European Society for the Study of English (Bulgarian branch). In the monograph, the author has outlined the theory of the post-postmodern novel based on the analysis of the key novels of contemporary British fiction (David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Sarah waters, Mark Haddon, etc.). The review states that the Ukrainian scholar has developed the theory proposed by Fredric Jameson regarding the post-postmodern features of Cloud Atlas and also discusses the concept of meta-modernity as one of the sections in the post-postmodern literary paradigm in the UK. Drozdovskyi argues that meta-modernism cannot be the only term that explains all the peculiarities of contemporary British fiction, which also cannot be outlined as meta-modern but as post-postmodern. The scholar provides a new theory of the novel based on the exploitation of real and unreal historical facts and imagined alternative histories and multifaceted realities. Furthermore, the reviewer pays attention to the contribution this monograph has for world literary studies spotlighting the theory of literary meta-genre patterns, as Drozdovskyi provides a theory according to which literary periods can be divided into those in which the carnival is the dominant meta-genre pattern (like postmodernism) and those that exploit the mystery as the meta-genre pattern (post-postmodernism). The reviewer analyses the key thematic units explained by Drozdovskyi as the key ones that determine the semiosphere of the contemporary British novel (post-metaphysical and post-positivist thinking of the characters, medicalisation of the humanitarian discourse, and the representation of the temporal unity of different realities). The scholar also states that the post-postmodern British novel exploits the findings of German Romanticism and Kant’s philosophy.
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Kolar, D., and M. Kolar. "Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Literature- Intersection of Science and Art." European Psychiatry 66, S1 (March 2023): S973. http://dx.doi.org/10.1192/j.eurpsy.2023.2069.
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IntroductionPhilosophy and psychoanalysis have mutually influenced each other in many ways. Ancient Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato were frequently cited by Freud in his works and the origins of certain psychoanalytic concepts can be found in their works. The philosophical works of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre and many others had a significant impact on the development of psychoanalytic ideas. The intersection of philosophy and literature was best depicted in Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the metaphysical novel.ObjectivesThe goal of this presentation is to perform a comprehensive historical review of the relationship between psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature.MethodsDifferent philosophical schools from ancient philosophy to classic German philosophy and philosophy of existentialism have been explored in their relationship with psychoanalysis and world literature. Among world literary classics, we selected only those who best represent the role of psychoanalysis in the modern literary critics and on the other hand the influence of philosophy on literature.ResultsEarly origins of the relationship between philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature can be found in the text of ancient philosophers and writers. The great Sophocles’ tragic drama Oedipus the King was the foundation for Freud’s concept of Oedipus complex. The Socratic dialogue, a technique best elaborated by his student Plato was the antecedent of modern psychotherapy. Later in history philosophical works of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and many others had a significant impact on the development of psychoanalytic ideas. There is a number of other philosophical fictions in the world literature written by Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Proust and many others and some of these literary woks may have characteristics of psychological novel as well. Literary critics is an important field for the application of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic theory has been always in forefront of Shakespearean studies. Marcel Proust is a writer who gave a significant contribution to modern literary studies. He wrote about the interactive process between the reader and text and emotional impact of reading. Proust recognized the similar psychological processes that we can see in psychoanalytic setting.ConclusionsThis comprehensive historical review of the relationship between psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature demonstrates that all these disciplines have much in common, particularly in their intention to approach truth from different angles. Psychoanalysis is a science and applies scientific methodology in its theory and treatment. Certain branches of psychoanalysis like Jung’s analytic psychology are sometimes closer to philosophy and art than to science. Philosophy as a humanistic discipline has always been in between science and art.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared
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Singh, Dr Jayshree, and Dr Chhavi Goswami. "Relocating Heteronormativity and Questioning Feminism: A Study in the Fiction of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 7, no. 2 (February 28, 2019): 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v7i2.7075.
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A Critical Study of the Selected Novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni deals significantly with the post-feminist literature written by women novelists belonging to the Indian origin. She has delineated upon the thinking women of the Indian diaspora, whose mental faculty compels them to introspect their so long stereotypical status quo in the prevailing customs, traditions, myths, patriarchy, motherhood and marital life, that they have inherited or imbibed genetically to the alien lands far from their imaginary homelands. Due to literacy, technology, science, employment, migration, and the equal opportunities, economic independence, their sense of metaphysics has set equilibrium with their non-conventional discomfort zones and they have attempted to cross customized thresholds of comfort zones. They have advanced further from the set paradigms of women’s image which have been popularly prevalent from the historical perspective. the selected writings of the Indian – American diaspora woman author indicates that the dimensions of contextualizing in-betweenness, hybridity of thought in women’s personality and psyche have although been issues of conflicts and contradictions both in private and public space; however, they are more thoughtful to revamp and retrace their old-patterned trajectories for breaking the track of ice-ceiling. They have challenged fragile zones of both expectations and realities. Women characters in the novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Contemporary Indian-American Diaspora Woman Novelist) have been projected with the capacities of self-emancipation in their own negative and positive perspective; they represent the modus operandi of self-sufficient, self-independent and self-exploratory to emancipate their lives, although, in their quest of being free, they deviate. They acknowledge the fact of mutual understanding and acceptance of differences which are the metaphorical ways of resistance. They attempt to oscillate their self-disintegration and self-denigration. The selected novels discuss the double standards of society/community in terms of the expected standards and reality standards and that’s what makes sense in the author’s creative-writing scholarship that analytically, dexterously, meaningfully and emotionally brings out a contemporary critique on the choices, changes and commonalities confronted by women, against women, and for women. The author explores uncommon reoccurrences of gender existential needs, responsibilities and roles in order to demystify the stereotypical, sociological and psychological myths with regard to women’s thoughts and actions.
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Choe, Keysook. "Kwisin in Chosŏn Literati Writings: Multilayered Recognition, Cultural Sensibility, and Imagination." Journal of Korean Studies 24, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 3–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/21581665-7258029.
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AbstractThis paper investigates Confucian literati’s multilayered recognition of kwisin in the Chosŏn dynasty by focusing on three distinct genres: philosophical writings, ritual writings, and fictionalized writings. Multifaceted concepts of kwisin in these three genres are analyzed through interpretive lenses such as philosophical thought, cultural sensibilities, and literary imagination. In the context of philosophy, Chosŏn literati developed the traditional concept of kwisin as spiritual beings in accordance with the Confucian paradigms. In the context of empirical cultural fields, however, sadaebu collected fantastic stories as contemporary cultural research with the aim of publishing encyclopedic collections. In such works, Chosŏn intelligentsia exhibited a dual position: one criticizing the worship of kwisin by the lower classes, the other recognizing such as a cultural tradition. Although literati criticized fictional stories containing ghosts, they penned their own versions with female apparitions, maintaining their patriarchal Confucian ideology by “otherizing” these ghosts of unclear familial lineage. Fictional narratives in which kwisin appeared fostered communication across ideology, folk knowledge, and experiential sensibility and embraced the metaphysical recognition and everyday sense of kwisin. Gendered kwisin stories played the cultural roles of criticizing and reflecting social paradox and received a wide range of social sympathy, from the elite class to commoners.
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Priest, Eldritch. "Melodies, Moods, and The Zone as a Hole." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, no. 23 (October 15, 2020): 45–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i23.396.
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I traveled to Chernobyl in June 2018 with a small group of academics and artists to think about what dwelling in and passing through a zone of exclusion might entail, not in a metaphysical sense but also not not in a metaphysical sense. As I learned, thinking about The Zone (as I’ll call it) is not a straightforward affair. On the one hand The Zone is exactly what you might think it is – a radioactive territory whose crumbling ruins and growing wildlife bear witness to the failure of the soviet nuclear dream. Yet on the other it’s also not what you think it is, like a hole is not the nothing it appears to be but a something that, strictly speaking, it isn’t. Because of this ontological uncertainty The Zone is not only something to wander in but something to be wondered about. And as such, it may be better dreamed than simply thought of. Drawing on my zonal meanderings and a speculative-pragmatic form of acoustic ecology, as well as employing a liberal dose of poetic licence, I develop a fabulation that takes a stroll through a forgotten cemetery, an improvised melody played beneath a secret radar array, and a daydream had in a dilapidated post office as expressive of a thought experiment whose meaningful result is more a fictional achievement than a factual reckoning. Images and sounds from my peregrinations through The Zone figure in this work as elements that advance a story about a future people displaced by climate change who evolve the ability to lure affections from environmental spaces by casting melodies into them. In this future history we learn about the costs of noise and the nature of holes; we discover that media travel backwards in time, and we sense not what The Zone is but what mood it’s in. Article received: April 25, 2020; Article accepted: May 30, 2020; Published online: October 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper
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Prus, Elena. "Artistic Anthropology from the Perspective of Transhumanist Ethics." Intertext, no. 1/2 (57/58) (October 2021): 39–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.54481/intertext.2021.1.04.
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Japanese-born British Kazuo Ishiguro is a fiction writer rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, whose polymorph opera is appreciated for the literary quality of books. The memory, the identity, the nostalgia, the self-illusion and the capacity of individual to overpass own limits are topics constituting Ishiguro personal brand. The literary approach was often an anticipation of ontological realities, a view of the future. Never Let Me Go (2005) is a novel about the ethics matters arisen by the problem of cloning bioengineering in formulas of artistic anthropology. The novel was catalogued differently: as dystopic story with fantastic elements about an alternative universe created by the genetic engineering and as a love story disguised in alternative story. Inscribing in the bloodline of Huxley, the innovation of Ishiguro consisted in the fact that he has represented “the cloning kitchen” from a totally different perspective than that of previous novelists – the one of cloned beings, whose true mission is to become living donors of organs for transplantation. There is however in this tensioned atmosphere human elements: the pupils practice arts and fell in love, proving a sensitive capacity of the soul. The artistic conflict consist in the confrontation between humanists and representatives of medical industry, the last taking the control. Ishiguro’s novels do not give solutions, “the clones’ nation” does not try to protest or to escape. The global matters the novel arises inscribes in treating the science as a continuation of the metaphysics, as updating of the spirit by transforming experimentally the living, as delegation of the moral.
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Saler, Michael. "A Century of Weird Fiction 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell." Victorian Studies 64, no. 4 (February 2023): 722–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.38.
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Mokoena, Lerato Likopo. "The Ontological Status of Yahweh and the Existence of the Thing we call God." Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions 11, no. 4 (January 30, 2023): 141–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ft.v11i4.9s.
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The essence of deities has captured our imaginations for as long as we can remember. Does a God exist, or is the divine entity just a figment of our dreams, a projection? Is God what Aribiah Attoe calls a “regressively eternal and material entity” or what Gericke calls “a character of fiction with no counterpart outside the worlds of text and imagination”? This paper aims to wrestle with those questions from a theological perspective and to look at the ontological status of Yahweh and how that worldview lends itself to African Traditional Religions in conversation with Attoe's method of inquiry from the perspective of African Metaphysics. This paper aims to be a part of the larger project undertaken by the author, showing that philosophy can and should be an auxiliary discipline in Old Testament Studies as it has been seen, both fields have ways of similar arguing and coming to the same conclusions. This paper is intended to be an interlocutory exercise or experiment and does not seek to validate any hypothesis about either view.
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Wyllie, Barbara. "Rodgers , Michael Sweeney , Susan Elizabeth Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction (review)." Slavonic and East European Review 97, no. 2 (April 2019): 349–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/see.2019.0075.
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Manzatto, Antonio. "Em torno da questão da verdade (On the question of the truth) - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2012v10n25p12." HORIZONTE - Revista de Estudos de Teologia e Ciências da Religião 10, no. 25 (March 18, 2012): 12–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.5752/p.2175-5841.2012v10n25p12.
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A questão sobre a verdade, se não for bem colocada, pode dificultar o encontro e o diálogo entre teologia e literatura. A elaboração da ficção não é necessariamente distanciamento da verdade, nem o discurso teológico é o único verdadeiro. A metafísica tradicional já afirmava o belo e o verdadeiro como transcendentais. Hoje, mesmo em ciências, debate-se sobre a compreensão da verdade uma vez que tal conceito não é simples nem unívoco. Reconhecendo que há diversas ordens de verdade e diferentes caminhos para atingi-la, o texto enfoca as distintas maneiras de se colocar o problema da verdade em literatura e em teologia, mas de maneira a facilitar um real diálogo entre elas mostrando, por uma rápida referência aos estudos bíblicos, que tal diálogo é possível e mesmo desejável. Ali, não há que se opor, por exemplo, a verdade histórica à verdade literária, que é aquela apresentada pelo texto, mas busca-se alcançar a “verdade de salvação”, aquela que vai se relacionar de maneira mais direta com a fé.Palavras-Chave: Verdade. Teologia e Literatura. Narração. Estética. História. AbstractThe question about the truth becomes difficult the dialogue between theology and literature. The development of fiction does not mean a separation of the truth. In turn, the theological discourse is not the only true. Traditional metaphysics has already affirmed the beautiful and the true as a transcendental. Nowadays, even in science, there is a debate about the understanding of the truth since this concept is not simple, nor univocal. The text recognizes that there are several orders of truth and also different ways to achieve it. In other words, the paper looks at different ways of putting the question of truth in literature and in theology, aiming to facilitate the dialogue between them.Keywords: Truth. Theology and Literature. Narration. Aesthetics. History.- DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2012v10n25p12
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St.John, Graham. "DMT Gland." International Journal for the Study of New Religions 7, no. 2 (February 20, 2017): 153–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/ijsnr.v7i2.31949.
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With clinical psychiatrist Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule as a vehicle, the pineal gland has become a popularly enigmatic organ that quite literally excretes mystery. Strassman’s top selling book documented ground-breaking clinical trials with the powerful mind altering compound DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) conducted at the University of New Mexico in the early 1990s. Inflected with Buddhist metaphysics, the book proposed that DMT secreted from the pineal gland enables transit of the life-force into this life, and from this life to the next. Since that study, the hunt has been on to verify the organ’s status as the “lightening rod of the soul” and that DMT is the “brain's own psychedelic.” While the burden of proof hangs over speculations that the humans produce endogenous DMT in psychedelic quantities, knowledge claims have left the clinic to forge a career of their own. Exploring this development, the article addresses how speculation on the DMT-producing “spirit gland”—the “intermediary between the physical and the spiritual”—are animate in film, literature, music and other popular cultural artefacts. Navigating the legacy of the DMT gland (and DMT) in diverse esoteric currents, it illustrates how Strassman’s “spirit molecule” propositions have been adopted by populists of polar positions on the human condition: i.e. the cosmic re-evolutionism consistent with Modern Theosophy and the gothic hopelessness of H. P. Lovecraft. This exploration of the extraordinary career of the “spirit molecule” enhances awareness of the influence of drugs, and specifically “entheogens,” in diverse “popular occultural” narratives, a development that remains under-researched in a field that otherwise recognises that oc/cult fandom—science fiction, fantasy and horror—is a vehicle for religious ideas and mystical practices.
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Roversi, Corrado. "In defence of constitutive rules." Synthese 199, no. 5-6 (October 20, 2021): 14349–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03424-w.
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AbstractAlthough the notion of constitutive rule has played an important role in the metaphysical debate in social and legal philosophy, several authors perceive it as somewhat mysterious and ambiguous: the idea of a specific kind of rules that are supposed to be “magically” constitutive of reality seems suspicious, more a rationalistic fiction than a genuine explanation. For these reasons, reductionist approaches have been put forward to deflate the explanatory role of this notion. In this paper, I will instead try to defend constitutive rules. My thesis is that the notion of constitutive rule is explanatorily helpful because it gives a complete account of an important phenomenon in the social and legal domain, namely, that of artifactual entities endowed with statuses that can have emergent normative properties. Conceiving of these entities as rule-constituted artifacts is an important part of what H. L. A. Hart called “the internal point of view” toward law, and for this reason constitutive rules should be included in an explanation of that point of view as an integral part of the life of institutions. The structure of my argument will be as follows. First, I will provide an example of an important phenomenon in the internal point of view, namely, the fact that individuals can have normative reactions not about the specific regulation of an institution but about its underlying purpose and rationale—what in the legal domain is called the ratio of a norm. Then I will identify two reductionistic approaches on constitutive rules. The first approach is exemplified by Brian Epstein’s idea that the phenomena explained by constitutive rules are better explained in terms of metaphysical (grounding/anchoring) relations. The second kind of reductionism is instead exemplified by the idea (held by several authors, among whom Alf Ross, Riccardo Guastini, Frank Hindriks, and Francesco Guala) that the phenomena explained by constitutive rules can be accounted for in terms of regulative rules plus a certain terminology. I will try to show that neither of these approaches can explain normative reactions to the ratio of an institution from an internal point of view: While the first cannot explain the fact that the reaction is strongly normative, the second cannot explain the fact that the reaction is about the ratio of a normative entity. Constitutive rules can instead explain both things and should be preserved as an important notion for the analysis of institutional ontology. By way of constitutive rules we create something: immaterial, rule-based institutional artifacts that can have emergent normative properties.
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Bilchi, Nicolas. "Immersed, yet distant: Notes for an aesthetic theory of immersive travel films." Mutual Images Journal, no. 10 (December 20, 2021): 191–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.32926/2021.10.bil.immer.
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The purpose of this article is to highlight a few stylistic and aesthetic principles, common to the genre of the travel film (both documentary and fictional), as employed by immersive media and devices from the twentieth century – such as the Hale’s Tours of the World, Todd-AO, and Cinerama – up to today’s digital systems like Virtual Reality and 4D Cinema. I will discuss how the different experiences of simulated travels, proffered by those media, are all related to a broader aesthetic tendency in creating what I label as enveloping tactile images. Such images are programmed to surround the viewer from every side, thus increasing their spectacular dimension, but at the same time they strive to temper and weaken the haptic solicitations aroused in the viewer by the immersive apparatus itself. In this sense I propose that the spectator of immersive travelogue films is ‘immersed, yet distant’: she is tangled in the illusion of traversing an enveloping visual space, but the position she occupies is nonetheless a metaphysical one, not different from that of Renaissance perspective, because even if she can see everything, the possibility to interact with the images is denied, in order to preserve the realistic illusion. By analysing the stylistic techniques employed to foster the viewer’s condition of non-interactive immersion in the enveloping world presented by the medium, I will consequently address the topic of the conflict that such immersive aesthetics establish with traditional forms of audiovisual storytelling.
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Effingham, Nikk. "Exterminous Hypertime." Philosophies 6, no. 4 (October 13, 2021): 85. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/philosophies6040085.
Full textAbstract:
This paper investigates ‘exterminous hypertime’, a model of time travel in which time travellers can change the past in virtue of there being two dimensions of time. This paper has three parts. Part one discusses the laws which might govern the connection between different ‘hypertimes’, showing that there are no problems with overdetermination. Part two examines a set of laws that mean changes to history take a period of hypertime to propagate through to the present. Those laws are of interest because: (i) at such worlds, a particular problem for non-Ludovician time travel (‘the multiple time travellers’ problem) is avoided; and (ii) they allow us to make sense of certain fictional narratives. Part three discusses how to understand expectations and rational decision making in a world with two dimensions of time. I end with an appendix discussing how the different theories in the metaphysics of time (e.g., tensed/tenseless theories and presentism/eternalism/growing block theory) marry up with exterminous hypertime.
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Effingham, Nikk. "Exterminous Hypertime." Philosophies 6, no. 4 (October 13, 2021): 85. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/philosophies6040085.
Full textAbstract:
This paper investigates ‘exterminous hypertime’, a model of time travel in which time travellers can change the past in virtue of there being two dimensions of time. This paper has three parts. Part one discusses the laws which might govern the connection between different ‘hypertimes’, showing that there are no problems with overdetermination. Part two examines a set of laws that mean changes to history take a period of hypertime to propagate through to the present. Those laws are of interest because: (i) at such worlds, a particular problem for non-Ludovician time travel (‘the multiple time travellers’ problem) is avoided; and (ii) they allow us to make sense of certain fictional narratives. Part three discusses how to understand expectations and rational decision making in a world with two dimensions of time. I end with an appendix discussing how the different theories in the metaphysics of time (e.g., tensed/tenseless theories and presentism/eternalism/growing block theory) marry up with exterminous hypertime.
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O'Connor, Erin. "“Fractions of Men”: Engendering Amputation in Victorian Culture." Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 4 (October 1997): 742–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500020892.
Full textAbstract:
In 1866, theAtlantic Monthlypublished a fictional case study of an army surgeon who had lost all of his limbs during the Civil War. Written anonymously by American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow” describes not only the series of wounds and infections which led to the amputation of all four of the soldier's arms and legs but also the after-effects of amputation. Reduced to what he terms “a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape,” Dedlow finds that in disarticulating his body, amputation articulates anatomical norms. His observation of his own uniquely altered state qualifies him to speak in universal terms about the relationship between sentience and selfhood: “I have dictated these pages,” he says, “not to shock my readers, but to possess them with facts in regard to the relation of the mind to the body” (1866:5). As such, the story explores the meaning of embodiment, finding in a fragmented anatomy the opportunity to piece together a more complete understanding of how the body functions—physically and metaphysically—as a whole.
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A, Leclerc. "The Second Person in Dialogue." Philosophy International Journal 6, S1 (January 3, 2023): 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.23880/phij-16000s1-011.
Full textAbstract:
I first present a conception of the relata involved in the dialogic relation. I and thou are persons endowed with a first-person perspective and concepts through which they can represent themselves as distinct of anyone or anything else. Then I briefly discuss the epistemology and metaphysics of persons as agents. I adopt a realist view against any epistemological projects denying (or feigning to deny) the existence of the second person. Then I expose the complementary view of the secondperson perspective, which close the gap between the first- and third-person perspectives. I expose some historical milestones recognizing the importance of the second-person perspective in dialogue. After an examination of the conditions for the use of mental terms, I propose an analysis of dialogue in sequences of illocutionary acts, stressing the importance of perlocutionary plans. Any dialogue worthy of the name involves mutual understanding. In my reconstruction, I use distinctions proposed by Burge, Dummett and Austin. There are degrees of understanding in dialogue. In the highest degree, we have a real “meeting of minds.” Finally, a genuine dialogue is different from a fictional dialogue. I also suggest, taking side with Descartes, that the interaction man-machine cannot be classified as genuine dialogue.
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Drikker, Alexander S., and Oxana A. Koval. "Horizons of memory: childhood memoriesas an experience of figurative comprehension of timein the philosophy of Walter Benjamin." Philosophy Journal, no. 3 (2021): 52–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/2072-0726-2021-14-1-52-67.
Full textAbstract:
The article outlines Walter Benjamin’s philosophical theory of time, which formed the basis of his conception of history. It is a famous alternative to a number of existing models. Benjamin’s approach to understanding time is characterized by a unique methodology. It is based on artistic images and not on abstract categories and linear patterns of a philosophical and historical discourse. On the one hand, such images allow Benjamin to capture the characteristic properties of a concrete time, which are often difficult for historical science to grasp, and on the other hand, they make a strong impression on the reader because they require an emotional involvement in the text. The book “Berlin childhood around 1900”, often attributed to the genre of a poetic prose, is a visual representation of Benjamin’s philosophical ideas. The fragmentary style of narration and its metaphorical nature are intended to demonstrate a different way of experiencing the present moment – when the signs of the future clearly appear in the fragments of the past. The fusion of all three temporal modes in an instant he calls “Jetztzeit” (just now), which is difficult to articulate in the language of rational metaphysics, is embodied in the allegories of “Berlin childhood”. Selected fragments of this work are analyzed in the present paper. They capture each of the three time dimensions in the current “now” mode: the fragment “The otter” symbolizes the past, “Loggias” symbolizes the future and “The sock” symbolizes the present. Childhood memories, which do not usually appear in philosophical reflections, serve as a source of the birth of images: on the one hand, they supply sensual material from personal experience, on the other hand, they suggest a synthesizing principle, because a child is more sensitive to the unity of fiction and reality. Benjamin’s “memorial letter”, seen from this angle, turns out to be a strategy to think poetically about the world, time, and history.