Italian Jewry in the Early Modern Era: Essays in Intellectual History

Between the years 1550 and 1650, Italy's Jewish intellectuals created a unique and enduring synthesis of the great literary and philosophical heritage of the Andalusian Jews and the Renaissance`s renewal of perspective. While remaining faithful to the beliefs, behaviors, and language of their tradition, Italian Jews proved themselves open to a rapidly evolving world of great richness. The crisis of Aristotelianism (which progressively touched upon all fields of knowledge), religious fractures and unrest, the scientific revolution, and the new perception of reality expressed through a transformation of the visual arts: these are some of the changes experienced by Italian Jews which they were affected by in their own particular way. This book explores the complex relations between Jews and the world that surrounded them during a critical period of European civilization. The relations were rich, problematic, and in some cases strained, alternating between opposition and dialogue, osmosis and distinction

From nature to spirit : Schelling, Hegel, and the logic of emergence

This thesis is a study of the relationship between 'nature' and 'spirit' in the philosophies of F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. I aim to show that Schelling and Hegel are involved in a shared task of conceiving spiritual freedom as a necessary outcome of nature's inner, rational development. I argue that by interpreting spirit as 'emergent' from nature, the absolute idealists develop a 'third way' beyond Cartesian dualism and monist naturalism. For on the idealist account, nature and spirit are neither ontologically discontinuous, as if separated by an insurmountable 'gap', nor are they identical, as if spirit were simply a 'second nature'. Rather, according to both Schelling and Hegel, spirit emerges from nature as its ontologically distinct and non-natural telos. What makes Schelling's and Hegel's philosophies of nature so unique, however, is not simply that they present spiritual freedom as dependent upon nature, but that the ontological specificity of spirit is shown to be rationally necessary. In fact, neither the early Schelling nor Hegel is concerned with the historical emergence of spirit. Rather, both philosophers see the 'emergence' of spirit as an atemporal feature of being that must be derived through sheer reason—be it Schelling’s method of 'depotentiation' or Hegel's dialectical logic. I therefore argue that by bracketing the question of historical emergence, Schelling and Hegel each develop a distinctive logic of emergence whereby spiritual freedom is shown to be necessary thanks to the ontological structure of the impersonal, natural world. In my concluding chapter, I consider Schelling's argument in his Berlin lectures of the 1840s that the idealist logic of emergence must be supplemented with a speculative consideration of historical emergence if philosophy is to be a complete science of reality. From this perspective, it looks as though both Hegel's and the early Schelling's 'logics of emergence', despite all their promise, presuppose the idea that nature's necessary stages need not express themselves in temporal succession (as do the necessary stages of human history) in order for them to be fully realised. I conclude the thesis by suggesting that Schelling's Ages of the World was meant to overcome this apparent limit of the 'logic of emergence' without abandoning its fundamental aims. For in the Ages, nature's rationally necessary development is presented as unfolding in time, and time is understood as nothing other than the actual development of nature into spirit

Ideology in the age of mediatized politics: a study on the aesthetics and politics of charisma, ordinariness, and spectacle from the 2015 election advertising campaigns in the UK and Greece

This thesis seeks to explore the place and role of ideology in political communication under conditions of mediatization. Exploring the place of ideology, as I will argue, involves exploring the ways political meaning is produced through the mediatic practices of personalisation, conversationalisation and dramatisation, while exploring its role involves exploring the ways political power is exercised through these practices. Particularly, the thesis builds upon an analytics of mediatization according to which ideology lies in, the textually-discursively organised and ordered, performative capacity of mediatic practices to recall and rework institutional symbolisms from the past serving the institutional exercise of power in the present, or the recontextualizing dynamic of media performativity. To operationalise this analytical approach, the thesis employs a paradigmatic case study; the study of political advertisements produced by the two major political parties in Greece and the UK in the run-up to the January and May 2015, respectively, General Elections. The empirical analysis seeks to demonstrate that central to all the ideological mediatic practices is the fusion of the private with the public through different aesthetic regimes, such as the authenticity of charisma, the intimacy of ordinariness, and the ritualism of spectacle, each emerging invested with its own recontextualizing dynamic – the politics of mission, everyday life and belonging. Each, in other words, has its own capacity to emotive-cognitively and spatiotemporally rework institutionally symbolic meanings from the past enacting different forms of institutional agency (e.g. partisan or cross-partisan) and ordering (e.g. displacement, temporalisation or eternalisation) in the present. The overarching contribution of this analysis is to argue/establish that we cannot gain a full understanding of how political parties’ ideology is renegotiated nowadays without a critical interrogation of the recontextualizing dynamic of mediatic performances. Nor can we gain a full understanding of how parties and other political institutions ideologically deal with the pragmatic challenges of the present without a critical interrogation of the aestheticity and affectivity of (mediatized) political discourse

A consideration of reflexive practice within the critical projects movement

This paper offers a theoretical commentary on some of the new directions in project management theory offered by the critical projects movement. Specifically it examines the implications of a specific approach to knowledge – dialectics – that is implicitly mobilized within this movement. It examines the dialectic provenance of much of this thinking: dialectics is afforded an implicit importance within critical project management as it offers a more reflexive approach to both understand and manage projects. In pursuing this examination, this paper positions the critical projects movement within a broader set of critical studies of reflexive management. We examine how these understandings of reflexivity might inform project management itself and help shed light on some important assumptions that critical project thinkers will need to address whilst using dialectic thinking. The aim is to open up new debates within these modes of thinking, and to encourage further explorations of their implications for understandings of practice amongst those interested in more reflexive approaches to project management practice and research

Critical Foundations of the Contextual Theory of Mind

The contextual mind is found attested in various usages of the term complement, in the background of Kant. The difficulties of Kant's intuitionism are taken up through Quine, but referential opacity is resolved as semantic presence in lived context. A further critique of rationalist linguistics is developed from Jakobson, showing generic functions in thought supporting abstraction, binding and thereby semantic categories. Thus Bolzano's influential philosophy of mathematics and science gives way to a critical view of the ancient heritage acknowledged by Plato.\ud \u

On the public discourse of religion : an analysis of Christianity in the United Kingdom

Debates over the involvement of religion in the public sphere look set to be one of the defining themes of the 21st century. But while religious issues have attracted a large degree of scholarly attention, the public discourse of religion itself, in terms of the effort to assert and legitimize a role for faith in the public realm, has remained notably under-researched. This article marks an initial step to address this deficiency by deconstructing the public discourse of Christianity in the United Kingdom. It argues that, while appealing for representation on the grounds of liberal equality, the overall goal of this discourse is to establish a role for itself as a principal source of moral authority, and to exempt itself from the evidentially-based standards and criteria that govern public life

Politics in robes? The European Court of Justice and the myth of judicial activism

What characterizes the EU today is that it is not only a multi-level governance system, but also a multi-context system. The making of Europe does not just take place on different levels within the European political framework, executed by different groups of actors or institutions. Rather, it also happens in different and distinguishable social contexts - distinct functional, historical, and local frameworks of reasoning and action - that political science alone cannot sufficiently analyze with conventional and generalizing models of explanation. The European law is such a context, and it should be perceived as a self-contained sphere of argument and action that generates impetus for integration. Therefore, the role of the European Court of Justice in the process of integration may only be adequately captured by examining European law as an independent space of reasoning and action. --European Court of Justice (ECJ),Integration through Law,Integration Theory,Regional Integration,Rationalism,Trivial Rationalism,Context Rationality,Context of Law,Context Analysis,Judicial Politics

Searching for truth in the post-truth era: an examination of detective fiction from Poe to present

During the 2016 election, terms such as “fake news” and “post-truth” became commonplace as well as talks of “two Americas,” suggesting that truth and reality were relative to one’s perspective. Trust in foundational institutions like church, school, and government has become shaky at best, leading many scholars to believe we have entered a post-truth age. In my dissertation, I attempt to tackle the question of truth by examining people whose job it is to uncover the truth: detectives. I trace a philosophical history of detective novels through three different time periods described as modern, postmodern, and contemporary in order to argue that truth is located in intersubjectivity, explaining that successful detectives, through their ability to identify another’s perspectives, can discover motive and belief in order to bring cases to closure, where others cannot. In the modern period, I examine ways in which Edgar Allan Poe’s detective August C. Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes solve mysteries by assuming a rational world where everything is neatly ordered. This allows truth to be a function of rationality and solvable by applying logic. Following this analysis, I turn to the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to examine the way order and meaning became increasingly elusive after two world wars and the atomic bomb, leading to an existential crisis and the postmodern era. The postmodern era is characterized by the endless deferral of meaning, making it impossible for the detectives in this section to reach closure. I begin with Jorge Louis Borges and Samuel Beckett, transitional authors associated with late modernism, who laid the groundwork for an upheaval of traditional Cartesian rationality by pushing its boundaries to the limits. Following these late modernist examples, I turn to the postmodern novels Libra by Don DeLillo and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon to exemplify the problem of knowledge construction in a world that has become increasingly paranoid. The rise of paranoia has been caused by both philosophical and historical reasons. From modernist critiques of transcendental meaning to the rising distrust in the state after the Vietnam war, there became a lack of faith in a common background from which to build knowledge. In both cases, the lack of agreement on the nature of reality renders the detectives unable to discover truth and achieve closure. In the contemporary era, I explore the ways in which globalization and the rise of digital technology have increased the speed and density of information networks, further complicating the idea of discovering the truth regarding any complex event. In this chapter, I examine Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves as a representative case of the problem of closure in a hypermodern world that is connected by a blending of physical and digital networks. I do find a hopeful example in HBO’s drama The Wire where detectives are able to stabilize a network by limiting their environment and narrowing their scope, albeit temporarily. In so doing, the detectives show that it is possible to discover the truth, if one can “triangulate” in Donald Davidson’s sense. Finally, I conclude by showing the dangers of believing that these critiques of truth and closure have resulted in a “post-truth” era, where people live in diverse worlds based on preexisting categories such as culture, or language. Through the works of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and Donald Davidson, I argue for a way out of the problems of relativism through a phenomenological perspective grounded in being-in-the-world. This approach results in the conclusion that objectivity is intersubjective