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1 8 1 Phenomenology and hermeneutics Alas, there are no absolute certainties and there are no definitive resolutions of fundamental ‘crises’. ‘Phenomenology and Sociology’ by Thomas Luckmann in Maurice Natanson, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. I1 The means selected become intermediate goals. Mary F. Rogers, Sociology, Ethnomethodology, and Experience2 Introduction Phenomenology and hermeneutics: the modern passage to epistemology It always appears very fruitful, scientifically, to consider arguments in relation, rather than in opposition. Such a
embedded in the wide frame of liminality. The chapter will end with some conclusions about the film Babel . Three Simmel theorems The term ‘border-crossing’ might suggest that transgression is something which runs counter to the logic of demarcation and in opposition to it. In its logic, however, transgression is always included in demarcation. This brings me to the consideration of the phenomenology of very different manifestations, along with the manifestations of boundaries: two methodological premises that could be useful as a
do, no one else is so capable of it or so ready for it. He could . It’s a free country. But it will take a change of consciousness. So phenomenology becomes politics. 15 When reading Cavell – on anything and also on film – I come away with the strong sense
This book sketches the history, and outlines the character, of ethnomethodology, a distinctive approach to the study of the social world that emerged in U.S. sociology in the 1950s and 1960s.It examines one of its main sources, the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, and its similarities to and differences from the work of Goffman. In addition, there is an assessment of its relationship to sociology and other disciplines, and its central principles are interrogated in detail. Attention is also given to its influence on social research methodology.
Radio / body draws from the philosophical discipline of phenomenology to question a number of prevalent ideas in radio theory and practice. The intention is to shift the basis for comprehending the experience of radio drama from theoretical systems such as semiotics, and abstract metaphors such as ‘visual imagination’ and ‘theatre of the mind’, towards a model that understands it in terms of perceptual, bodily experience of a holistic, graspable world. It posits that radio drama works because the sonic structure created through its dramaturgy expresses the perceptual experience of encountering the auditory world – a ‘listening to a listening’ – and radio dramaturgy can be understood as a process of structuring sounds that listen to the dramatic world. Using this insight, it is posited that conventional radio dramaturgy generates a mode of listening focused on the referential meaning of the sounds, rather than their affective qualities – this is labelled the semantic paradigm of British radio. The history of this paradigm is explored in depth, revealing its emergence to be the product of contingent cultural and technological factors. Now that these factors have changed radically due to the rise of digital technologies, it is argued that a paradigm shift is taking place, with a move towards a more bodily, more resonant dramaturgy.
The heat of Beowulf investigates twentieth-century poets Jack Spicer’s and Robin Blaser’s encounter with Beowulf in order to contextualize their poetics as a comparative horizon by which to understand the aesthetics of the Old English poem anew. The book examines Blaser’s and Spicer’s translations and study of the poem under philologist Arthur G. Brodeur within the context of their avant-garde literary world to generate a series of comparative critical frames for describing the non-representational functions of the aesthetics of Beowulf. After tracing the genealogies of mid-century critical practice and literary modernism that intersect in Blaser’s and Spicer’s engagement with Beowulf, the book examines Robin Blaser’s account of the ‘heat’ of Beowulf in Brodeur’s classroom as a formative moment within his poetics and articulates an approach to non-representational early medieval aesthetics that draws variously on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mary Carruthers’ accounts of medieval rhetoric, medieval sensology, disability studies, and translation theory. The book then argues that the multisensory and even synesthetic world of Beowulf requires a process of ecopoetical, phenomenological translation to become intelligible to vulnerable human corporeality. From here, the book reboots Brodeur’s interest in Beowulf’s aesthetics in a series of chapters on compound diction, variation, and narrative structure. Each of these chapters explores the capacity of the poem’s perceptual process to assist and to impair the human sensorium, offering an account of the activity of the poem as a multisensory phenomenological aesthetics—not conceived of as figure, but as non-representational activity and process.
Epistemology should be the axe that breaks the ice of a traditionalism that covers and obstructs scientific enlightenment. This book explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and Luhmann's systems theory, it examines how each approaches epistemology. The book offers a critique of the Kantian base of critical theory's epistemology in conjunction with the latter's endeavour to define political potential through the social function of science. The concept of dialectics is explored as the negation of the irrational and, furthermore, as the open field of epistemological conflict between rationality and irrationality. The book traces the course of arguments that begin with Dilthey's philosophy of a rigorous science, develop with Husserl's phenomenology, Simmel's and Weber's interest in the scientific element within the social concerns of scientific advance. In structuralism, the fear of dialogue prevails. The book discusses the epistemological thought of Pierre Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze in terms of their persistence in constructing an epistemological understanding of social practice free from the burdens of dialectics, reason and rationality. It also enquires into issues of normativity and modernity within a comparative perspective on modernism, postmodernism and critical theory. Whether in relation to communication deriving from the threefold schema of utterance- information- understanding or in relation to self- reflexivity, systems theory fails to define the bearer or the actor of the previous structural processes. Critical realism attempted to ground dialectics in realism.
In two parts, the book examines, first, the attempts of three thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century to reconcile, in different socio-cultural contexts, the legacy of idealist philosophy with the claims of empirical social science, and, secondly, the trajectory of Bourdieu’s career in France from philosophy student to sociological researcher to political activist. It traces a progression from thought to action, but an emphasis on action informed by thought. It poses the question whether Bourdieu’s attempted integration of intellectualism and empiricism correlated with his particular socio-historical situation or whether it offers a global paradigm for advancing inter-cultural understanding. The book is of interest in confronting the question whether socio-political organization is best understood by social scientists or by participants in society, by experts or by the populace. It will stimulate general consideration of the relevance of a sociological perspective in everyday life and how much that perspective should be dependent on inherited concepts. Part I analyses the work of Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Part II that of Pierre Bourdieu. The book is methodologically meticulous in situating these works socio-historically. It provides an introduction to some ideas in social philosophy and shows how these ideas became instrumental in generating a theory of practice. The book is aimed at post-graduate students and staff in all disciplines in the Humanities, and Human and Social sciences, but, more generally, it should interest all academics concerned about the contemporary social function of intellectuals.
between the subject and its sense of reality of the world it inhabits in the context of the theory of consciousness and existential phenomenology. I am specifically interested here in the role the discussion of hallucination plays in the development and direction of such theory as represented by Sartre’s early work on the imagination, especially his The Psychology of Imagination (published in 1940) and Merleau-Ponty’s response to that in his Phenomenology of Perception (published in 1945). I shall look specifically at how their accounts of hallucination – which I consider
by the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz. His view erects non-biological foundations for human existence and, thereby, challenges the Burtonian biological account. It provides us also with conceptual tools which can be employed to give the problem-solving workshop a phenomenological interpretation. In order to understand the philosophical context of phenomenology a short study of its general features is