Deconfabulation: Agamben's Italian Categories and the Impossibility of Experience

Agamben’s self-professed epigonism underwrites his entire project, serving as an even more fundamental methodological concept than the signature, paradigm, and archeology. In Infancy and History, Agamben maintains that transcendental experience is no longer a viable source of philosophical insight; philosophers go astray referring their thinking back to an authentic yet esoteric experience that, itself unspeakable, grounds positive philosophical assertions. Neither mysterious nor ineffable, the experience founding philosophy is the completely patent, non-latent, experience of language's pure exteriority. Rather than “deconstructing” metaphysics by exposing its hidden contradictions, philosophy must "deconfabulate," telling fables about philosophy to undo its enchantments, since it is through the fable that the spell of silence, which itself originates in fable, can be broken. This "epigonal" method, which follows after the tradition rather than seeking a new grounding, is itself justified through Agamben’s account, in The End of the Poem, of the Italian, as opposed to Germanic, physiognomy and of a specifically Italian relation to language going back to Dante. To be Italian is to embrace the “deadness” of one’s own language, rejecting the myth of the resurrection of the original potencies of a dead classical language through a living, modern language

Approaches to Second/Foreign Language Teacher Education

In education and lifelong learning, there are a number of schools of thought providing grounds to how learning occurs. In this paper, the author examines the ways in which different views of learning have influenced and informed approaches to second/foreign language teacher education. Three useful references which inform the author’s discussion and to which the author refers extensively are Roberts (1998), Wallace (1991) as well as Williams and Burden (1997). All in all, knowledge-centred and person-centred approaches serve as the fundamentals to the understanding of such stances. The former focuses on modelling and the external factors as a drive that explains how language teachers construct their knowledge about language teaching and learning. Being humanistic and socially individual in nature, the latter is internally formed and reflected, subject to each teacher development perspective and reflection on personal models and experience. Towards the end, the author’s choice of approach of learning for language teaching is also put forward

Austin on Perception, Knowledge and Meaning

Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (1962) generates wildly different reactions among philosophers. Interpreting Austin on perception starts with a reading of this text, and this in turn requires reading into the lectures key ideas from Austin’s work on natural language and the theory of knowledge. The lectures paint a methodological agenda, and a sketch of some first-order philosophy, done the way Austin thinks it should be done. Crucially, Austin calls for philosophers to bring a deeper understanding of natural language meaning to bear as they do their tasks. In consequence Austin’s lectures provide a fascinating start—but only a start—on a number of key questions in the philosophy of perception

Tango And Dance/Movement Therapy: A Partner Dance

This thesis aims to explore the parallels that are present between Argentine social tango and dance/movement therapy. Through a personal embodied inquiry of both the dance form and the therapeutic modality, the author draws a comparison of therapeutic elements such as collective and shared experience, attunement and the therapeutic relationship, expansion of movement repertoire, presence in the here-and-now, and integration of the whole self. The analysis demonstrates that while each form is distinct, there is also commonality and a shared language that grounds them both at the center of movement as a form of therapy. Tango is a social dance in and of itself, and dance/movement therapy embodies many different forms of movements and dances, however, at the heart of both forms is the whole, vulnerable self centered around a collective and shared experience

Living as if God exists: Looking for Common Ground in Times of Radical Pluralism

This paper offers some comments on some metaphysical and epistemological claims of theological realism from the perspective of continental philosophy of religion, thereby taking the work of Soskice and Hick as paradigmatic for this kind of philosophical theology. The first comment regards the fact that theological realism considers religious and theological propositions as ways to depict or represent reality, and hence aims to bring them as much as possible in line with scientific ones. Some contemporary French philosophers criticize such a representing, depicting knowledge of God, because it encapsulates the divine reality in mundane, specifically scientific categories. eventually, theological realism runs the risk of annihilating God’s radical transcendence and reducing religion to an alternative scientific theory. The second comment tries to explore whether one can affirm God’s reality from a practical perspective, as a postulate of reason, and whether such an approach could serve as a common ground for religious and secular ways of life in times of radical pluralism. This comment begins by investigating the regulative character of Kant’s idea of God as the highest idea of reason, which not only orientates our theoretical enquiries, but also our moral actions. Although this idea is only a heuristic fiction for theoretical reason, God’s existence has to be affirmed on practical grounds, as a symbolic reality that gives orientation to people’s lives

The ontology of signs as linguistic and non-linguistic entities: a cognitive perspective

It is argued that the traditional philosophical/linguistic analysis of semiotic phe-nomena is based on the false epistemological assumption that linguistic and non-linguistic entities possess different ontologies. An attempt is made to show where linguistics as the study of signs went wrong, and an unorthodox account of the na-ture of semiosis is proposed in the framework of autopoiesis as a new epistemology of the living

Is Geometry Analytic?

In this paper I present critical evaluations of Ayer and Putnam's views on the analyticity of geometry. By drawing on the historico-philosophical work of Michael Friedman on the relativized apriori; and Roberto Torretti on the foundations of geometry, I show how we can make sense of the assertion that pure geometry is analytic in Carnap's sense

ESSENTIAL PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF AUTOPOIESIS

The structuralist heritage in linguistics continues to obscure the essential properties of natural language as an empirical phenomenon. It is argued that the new framework of autopoiesis possesses a greater explanatory power, as it assumes the connotational na-ture of language. The key notions of representation, sign and signification, interpreta-tion, intentionality and communication, and reciprocal causality, approached from the autopoietic angle, allow for deeper insights into the essence of language which is as a kind of adaptive behavior of an organism involving a system constituted by signs of signs

Toward a new poetics of space in Derek Walcott’s Midsummer

Caribbean self-formation is a project in constructing a new poetics that situates itself against imposed and fixed ideas about culture, language, and personhood. For places like the Caribbean, history is indexed by linguistic and bodily fragmentations, ecological upheavals and transformations, and diasporic wanderings to and from the islands. Literature can then be thought of as an aesthetic project in making sense of the present and visualizing alternatives for the future. Walcott’s Midsummer opens up a space in which to consider the relationship between human beings, landscapes, and culture. Derek Walcott’s Midsummer captures the cadences of life and time in the tropics: the time between a moment, a season, a life, or an era. This particular sequence of fifty-four poems records a full year, the period between one summer and the next. The liminal space of the in-between in Midsummer lends itself to reversals of time, the poems traverse back and forth between the then and now, taking time to linger and take pause in memory and imagination, but also in moments of lived experience. The aperture created between the past and future frees us to think about the multiple, uncertain temporalities of the present, and the position of the poet between two cultures mimes the central ambivalence of midsummer. In these poetic musings, Walcott considers his own positionality vis-à-vis the Caribbean and its colonial past, Europe, high literary culture, and poetry itself. It explores the extent to which place produces literature or that literature produces place and culture, leaving open a productive possibility of rearticulating the conceptual framework for the idea of culture.Englis