Ian McEwan: A Novel Approach to Political Communication
23 Sep 2014-
About: The article was published on 2014-09-23 and is currently open access. It has received 2 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Political communication.
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TL;DR: The moralizing interpreters of Marx and Freud have been identified by as mentioned in this paper as a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, which they call the "school of suspicion" of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thought.
Abstract: Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed that great triumvirate of late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century thought - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - "the school of suspicion," by which he meant those thinkers who taught us to regard with suspicion our conscious understandings and experience, whether the deliverances of ordinary psychological introspection about one's desires ("I really want to be rich!"), or the moral categories political leaders and ordinary citizens apply to themselves and the social world they inhabit ("an inheritance tax is an immoral death tax!"). "Beneath" or "behind" the surface lay causal forces that explained the conscious phenomena precisely because they laid bare the true meaning of those phenomena: I don't really want lots of money, I want the love I never got as a child; survivors have no moral claim on an inheritance, but it is in the interests of the ruling classes that we believe they do; and so on. Recent years have been, in now familiar ways, unkind to Marx and Freud. Yet instead of a frontal assault on the critiques of the explanatory programs of Marx and Freud, the defense of their legacy in the English-speaking world has gradually fallen to those I will call moralizing interpreters of their thought. The moralizing readers de-emphasize (or simply reject) the explanatory and causal claims in the work of Marx and Freud, and try to marry more-or-less Marxian and Freudian ideas to various themes in normative ethics and political philosophy. Explanation of phenomena is abandoned in favor of the more traditional philosophical enterprise of justification, whether of the just distribution of resources or the possibility of morality's authority. So, for example, G.A. Cohen, the most influential of English-language Marx interpreters in recent decades, has declared that "Marxism has lost much or most of its [empirical] carapace, its hard shell of supposed fact" and that, as a result, "Marxists . . . are increasingly impelled into normative political philosophy." (Under the influence of Habermas, the Marxist tradition has taken a similar turn on the Continent.) Similarly, a leading moral philosopher notes that, "Just when philosophers of science thought they had buried Freud for the last time, he has quietly reappeared in the writings of moral philosophers" and goes on to claim that "Freud's theory of the superego provides a valuable psychological model for various aspects of (Kant's) Categorical Imperative." On these new renderings, Marx and Freud command our attention because they are really just complements (or correctives) to Rawls or Korsgaard, really just normative theorists who can be made to join in a contemporary dialogue about equality and the authority of morality. Nietzsche, too, has been transformed by moralizing interpreters, though in a somewhat different way. The crucial development here has been the retreat from the natural reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher engaged in an attack on morality - a reading first articulated by the Danish scholar Georg Brandes more than a century ago - in favor of a reading which presents Nietzsche as fundamentally concerned with questions of truth and knowledge: the moralistic scruples of interpreters are satisfied by treating Nietzsche as concerned with something else, something less morally alarming than a "revaluation of values." I shall argue that, in fact, all three of the great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion have suffered at the hands of moralizing interpreters who have resisted the essentially naturalistic thrust of their conception of philosophical practice. As a matter of both textual exegesis and intellectual importance, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are best read as primarily naturalistic thinkers, that is thinkers who view philosophical inquiry as continuous with a sound empirical understanding of the natural world and the causal forces operative in it. When one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness: that, in short, is the essence of a hermeneutics of suspicion.
35 citations
TL;DR: Louise M. Rosenblatt as mentioned in this paper argued that the reading transaction is a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances, and that the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities cannot explain the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context.
Abstract: Louise M. Rosenblatt s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fieldsliterary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics.Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts.The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading processevoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories.\
24 citations
References
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01 Feb 2013
TL;DR: Gadamer's relevance for ethics lies mainly in the fact that he relied on the notion of phronesis (practical wisdom, prudence) to describe the hermeneutic experience of understanding as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is the founder of modern-day philosophical hermeneutics. His relevance for ethics lies mainly in the fact that he relied on Aristotle's notion of phronesis (practical wisdom, prudence) to describe the hermeneutic experience of understanding and in his strong defense of Aristotle's conception of ethics, with its insistence on custom shaped by education and tradition, which helped usher in a rehabilitation of a practical philosophy that does not follow the Kantian model of a universalistic, normative ethics.
Keywords:
twentieth century;
Aristotle;
twentieth century;
continental philosophy;
ethics;
Kant, Immanuel;
philosophy;
Plato;
Socrates;
practical reason
172 citations
TL;DR: For instance, this paper found that art can cause significant changes in the experience of one's own personality traits under laboratory conditions, and that emotion change mediated the effect of art on traits.
Abstract: An experiment tested the hypothesis that art can cause significant changes in the experience of one's own personality traits under laboratory conditions. After completing a set of questionnaires, including the Big-Five Inventory (BFI) and an emotion checklist, the experimental group read the short story The Lady With the Toy Dog by Chekhov, while the control group read a comparison text that had the same content as the story, but was documentary in form. The comparison text was controlled for length, readability, complexity, and interest level. Participants then completed again the BFI and emotion checklist, randomly placed within a larger set of questionnaires. The results show the experimental group experienced significantly greater change in self-reported experience of personality traits than the control group, and that emotion change mediated the effect of art on traits. Further consideration should be given to the role of art in the facilitation of processes of personality growth and maturation.
170 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1998TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the rejection of the bracketing strategy and the idea of restraint in the context of autonomy and perfectionism, and present three mistakes about autonomy.
Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Perfectionism Part I. The Rejection of the Bracketing Strategy: 2. The idea of restraint 3. Political liberalism and the bracketing strategy 4. Toleration, reasonable rejectability and restraint 5. Public justification and the transparency argument Part II. Autonomy and Perfectionism: 6. Personal autonomy and its value (I) 7. Personal autonomy and its value (II) 8. Three mistakes about autonomy 9. Applications Bibliography Index.
167 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1980
TL;DR: In this paper, Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan present a generational biographical account of the Baby Boomers, the group of Americans who have changed the society more than any other.
Abstract: Jones LY Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, N.Y., United States, 1980. xii, 380 p. The generation of the baby boom is the subject of this book. It is the tale of the group of Americans who have changed the society more than any other. The change began after World War 2, when the 1st boom baby was born. It will continue until sometime after the middle of the 21st century. The baby boom is and will continue to be history's decisive generation. The baby boom generation is the biggest, richest, and the best-educated that America has ever produced. The boom generation has simultaneously shaped the lives of all of the individuals within it. Born into the biggest generation in history, they have been forever affected, and often adversely, by that fact. The attempt is made in this volume to determine what the baby boom is doing to America and to itself. In essence, this is a generational biograpy. It examines history from the perspective of a single generation as it ages. What it reveals is an America since World War 2 dealing with the growth strains of a single generation. Almost every social and economic issue facing America at this time has a population dimension and every population dimension has a baby-boom dimension. This argument rests on 3 different notions about generations: 1) the idea of a "generation" is a useful way of looking at history; 2) a generation is the primary agent of social change; and 3) the impact of a generation, whether on the individuals within it or on the larger culture, is directly related to its size. These assumptions--that a generation is worth study, that a generation is the carrier of social change, and that the size of a generation is its most crucial characteristic--are the ideas that set this book in motion.
154 citations
Book•
28 Jun 1997
TL;DR: Born at the Right Time as mentioned in this paper is the first Canadian history of the baby-boomers and the society they helped to shape, focusing on the first twenty-five years in Canadian society.
Abstract: It is rare in history for people to link their identity with their generation, and even rarer when children and adolescents actually shape society and influence politics. Both phenomena aptly describe the generation born in the decade following the Second World War. These were the baby boomers, viewed by some as the spoiled, selfish generation that had it all, and by others as a shock wave that made love and peace into tangible ideals. In this book, Doug Owram brings us the untold story of this famous generation as it played out its first twenty-five years in Canadian society. Beginning with Dr Spock's dictate that this particular crop of babies must be treated gently, Owram explores the myth and history surrounding this group, from its beginning at war's end to the close of the 1960s. The baby boomers wielded extraordinary power right from birth, Owram points out, and laid their claim on history while still in diapers. He sees the generation's power and sense of self stemming from three factors: its size, its affluent circumstance, and its connection with the 1960s - the fabulous decade of free love, flower power, women's liberation, drugs, protest marches, and rock 'n' roll. From Davy Crockett hats and Barbie dolls to the civil-rights movement and the sexual revolution, the concerns of this single generation became predominant themes for all of society. Thus, Owram's history of the baby-boomers is in many ways a history of the era. Doug Owram has written extensively on cultural icons, Utopian hopes, and the gap between realities and images - all powerful themes in the story of this idealistic generation. A well-researched, lucid, and humorous book, Born at the Right Time is the first Canadian history of the baby-boomers and the society they helped to shape.
147 citations