Showing papers in "Thesis Eleven in 1994"

World Disclosure and Reference

Abstract: In order to address problematic aspects of the world-disclosing function of language, it is worth briefly surveying the line of thinking in which language has been analysed primarily in relation to its world-disclosing dimension. I mean, of course, the German tradition beginning with Hamann and continued by Herder and Humboldt, which grasped and clarified the world-disclosing function of language, and which culminated in Heidegger’s conception of language. Following Charles ’I’aylor, I will refer to this tradition as the &dquo;Hamann-

The System, the Actor, and the Social Subject:

Abstract: If one had to find a common orientation in the current production of sociological theory, it would probably be around a sensibility to the notion of the subject. The most diverse tendencies and schools tackle it in various ways, sociologists look once again towards philosophy as the interest in Habermas, hermeneutics and analytic philosophy demonstrates.’ French sociologists are discovering or rediscovering schools or authors who had been abandoned

India and Modernity: Towards Decentring Western Perspectives

Abstract: an issue. The fact of being part of the object studied undermines the pretension of objectivity that is characteristic of current sociological theories of modernity. Their mode of cognition runs the risk of confining them to a circular affirmation of their own premises. The fact of being entangled in the object also suggests that reflexion and critique of modernity are restricted to the possibilities immanent in modernity. How can that which is not incorporated in modernity, which resists subsumption by it, be articulated in a situation

The dark knight of faith and the epicurean hero

Abstract: [Extract] John Carroll's Humanism is a book about faith. It is about faith in a religious sense and in a moral sense, and about the dissolution of the bonds of faith in the half-millennium it has taken Modernity to develop. Faith is what sustains a culture, and culture is the only thing that stands between us and chaos, between us and the demons. Carroll's book is about what happens when people lose faith in their culture, and the paralyzing consequences of that. It describes the burden of men and women without faith in anything.

Reviews : Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (MIT Press, 1992):

Abstract: Cohen and Arato argue in the Preface (vii) that &dquo;there is no sufficiently complex theory of civil society available to us today&dquo;. Thus, they see &dquo;the task of this book is to begin the construction of such a theory&dquo;. Nobody could disagree that the construction of their theory is complex. If the reader is not familiar with the subject area then it may well be a laborious effort at times through their 604 pages of critical Habermasian disposition (plus another 140 pages of notes). This is not to accuse Cohen and Arato of unnecessary complexity, the subject area and the questions they are dealing with tend to be inherently complex. Fortunately, this book will not be such a task for those readers familiar with the authors’ substantial number of previous publications. Such readers will recognise many of the arguments and analyses. In fact, much of this book is a reiteration, recasting or extension of Cohen and Arato’s existing work.