Hugh J. Silverman

Bio: Hugh J. Silverman is an academic researcher from Stony Brook University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Hermeneutics & Deconstruction. The author has an hindex of 14, co-authored 42 publications receiving 720 citations.

Derrida and Deconstruction

Abstract: 1 Plato's Pharmakon: Between Two Repetitions 2 Mysticism and Transgression: Derrida and Meister Eckhart 3 Derrida and Descartes: Economizing Thought 4 Derrida, Kant and the Performance of Parergonality 5 Derrida, Hegel and the Sign 6 Drawing: (An) Affecting Nietzsche: With Derrida 7 La Cloche 8 On Derrida's "Introduction" to Husserl's "Origin of Geometry" 9 Derrida, Heidegger and the Time of the Line 10 Derrida and Srtre: Hegel's Death 11 Derrida,Levinas and Violence 12 Derrida and Foucault: Madness and Writing

Postmodernism : Philosophy and the Arts

Abstract: The language and politics of postmodernism are analysed, and particular sites' - painting, film, dance, fashion, architecture and photography - are philosophically examined. This book should be of interest to advanced students of philosophy, art criticism and comparative literature.

From Husserl to van Manen. A review of different phenomenological approaches.

Abstract: This paper traces the development of phenomenology as a philosophy originating from the writings of Husserl to its use in phenomenological research and theory development in nursing. The key issues of phenomenological reduction and bracketing are also discussed as they play a pivotal role in the how phenomenological research studies are approached. What has become to be known as "new" phenomenology is also explored and the key differences between it and "traditional" phenomenology are discussed. van Manen's phenomenology is also considered in light of its contemporary popularity among nurse researchers.

Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation

Abstract: The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

Tourism and the forbidden zone: the underserved power of qualitative inquiry

Abstract: The canons of good praxis in the social sciences are changing. Along with the linguistic and hermeneutic (interpretive) challenges to ontology and epistemology exerted by continental philosophers and social theorists in the 20th century, have come dynamic changes in travel and tourism. We start this paper by tracing five important dynamisms in the phenomenology and constructive power of tourism and travel. These five encompass tourism as an agent of seeing, an agent of being, an agent of experience, an agent of cultural invention and an agent of knowing. But are tourism studies equipped with the research tools, approaches, strategies and techniques to explore the proliferation of new communal orders, marginalized voices in the third spaces in-between cultures and spaces, the overstimulation and fluid images cast by media, technology and urban intrusions, and the rapidly changing margins of tourist–host encounters in performative sites? The paper goes on to outline some of the twists and turns that qualitative research has undergone in its attempts to shake itself free of the inheritances of positivism and scientism. The confusion in the meaning of `interpretive research’ is one of the several challenges that are discussed and related to qualitative inquiry in tourism studies. The loss of the `body’ in tourism is another such issue. While foundationalist assumptions of truth, objectivity, and validity are being slowly relinquished, how are qualitative researchers to deal with the new textualities, multi-vocalities and `situated knowledges’ of participant voices and experiences in the ambigious and uncertain interstices of human–societal/tourist–touree encounters? In relating the above issues of and about the so-called `forbidden zone’ of qualitative inquiry to tourism studies, we focus predominantly in this paper on the place and value of `messy texts', `engaged interestedness', `locality/local knowledges’ and the `confirmability’ of qualitative inquiry.

Authenticity in tourism

Abstract: Two food campaigns from Scotland are used to review the impact of commodity production and post-modernism on the construction of authenticity. The recognition that cultural production, including tourism, is thoroughly imaginary directs attention to the politics of whose interests are embedded in cultural representations. The global scale of commodities, finance, media, and population has transformed the terms in which debates about authenticity and ideology take place. The image saturated character of “reality” dissolves the boundaries between a place centered view of authenticity and an aesthetic illusion, and raises questions about the continuing relevance of the traditional concept of authenticity. The paper makes a tentative beginning to a “self” oriented retheorization of what authenticity might be.