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Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 15, Issue 3/4, 2005
Sources and New Dreams of Western Wisdom

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1. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Editors Editorial
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towards the second turn: wisdom as human perfection — challenge of feminism
2. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Dorothea Olkowski The Myth of the Individual
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The fundamental liberal argument supporting the concept of “individualism” is that all individuals possess the same rights and liberties which define each citizen as an individual. Yet each individual somehow remains a person who defines her/himself as separate and distinct from all others and so who should never be considered to be a part of a concretely real group. Such a presupposition entails others. Liberalism presupposes naturalism, that human nature is fixed and knowable, as well as idealism, the belief that rational persuasion and argument are assumed to be the engines of change, and moralism, the idea that nature and reason must also provide some clues for acting. Ultimately, liberalism also implies volunteerism, the idea that social life is comprised of autonomous,intentional, and self-will actions that follow from the rules for right and wrong, which are themselves derived from reason, whose efficacy is natural. This essay argues that when women and other minorities examine the reasonable and rational public political culture, they may find that these very social structures, which are the ones they are most likely to value are also the site of their greatest oppression.
3. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
W. Scott Cameron The Genesis and Justification of Feminist Standpoint Theory in Hegel and Lukács
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Feminist standpoint epistemology suggests that women (or feminists) are cognitively privileged, since gender-specific forms of oppression produce insights systematically denied to men. Yet if many forms of oppression exist, what happens when they overlap? Some reject such theories as irredeemably essentialist, triumphalist, and relativist, but I argue that their original versions in Hegel and Lukács as supplemented by Sabina Lovibond generate both the strongest arguments for standpoint theories and a way through their deepest difficulties.
a renaissance of myth?
4. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Willis H. Truitt, Galina Iachkina The Destruction of Reason
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It is obvious that scientific knowledge continues its progress in spite of the limitations placed on it by Kuhn’s paradigm theory, and as we have seen, Kuhn admits this progress and seeks to explain it. Scientific discoveries occur almost weekly as we acquire greater and greater knowledge of the world, society, and ourselves. Yet society does not progress; it stagnates and sometimes regresses. Why is it that the vast knowledge we have accumulated is not extended to the improvement of human societies? Why has this humanistic project of the Enlightenment been abandoned?
5. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Simon Glynn The Logos Mythos Deconstructed
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One implication of Godel’s Proof is that, as Barry Barnes has observed, “For people to operate...rationally they need to have internalized some non-rational commitment to rationality”. In which case “The customary Enlightenment formula, according to which the process of demagification of the world leads necessarily from mythos to logos, seems . . .” Gadamer suggests, “. . . to be a modern prejudice”, or myth. Yet some myths are more useful than others, and therefore it may be on pragmatic grounds that, following Nietzsche’s characterization of “. . . logic and the categories of reason as means to . . . useful falsification . . .” we may wish to resist the abandonment of reason that many take to be the corollary of its deconstruction.
6. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Peter M. Schuller The Logic of Mythos in Building Civilization
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The suggestion of this paper is that we need again widely to practice and teach “the science of the soul” (rigorous metaphorical action) in order to produce the renaissance required to keep civilization going. A metaphor is not the saying of one thing while meaning another. In fact, metaphor is not limited to speech and writing. The understanding offered here is that, properly understood and employed, metaphor is a powerful and indispensable precision tool for radical improvement in thought. It is a prime guide and cause effecting leaps of mind from one axiomatic train of thought or mind set to a better, higher, and seemingly incommensurable one. It is at once a tool for teaching those insights which founded the civilization and a training regimen for strengthening rational creativity to solve new problems.
7. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Russell Ford A Fabulous Interruption: Towards a Mythic Politics
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The aim of this essay is to specify the chief concern for post-Marxist political strategy as the discovery or invention of a new political logic. Beginning with Laclau and Mouffe’s influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, this essay extends Lyotard’s well-known diagnosis of the status of metanarratives to a consideration of the conditions for political resistance and dissent. Using concepts drawn from the work of Althusser, Nealon, and others, it reworks Laclau and Mouffe’s appropriation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in order to separate it from any foundational, normative political identity. In conclusion, the essay uses Bergson’s discussion of intuition and fabulation in order to begin to articulate the concepts of a democratic politics.
8. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Paul G. Muscari A Plea for Mythos
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Since of much of modern discourse, extending from cognitivism to connectionism to deconstructivism, has been greatly inclined to look at reality in relation to processes where the personal factor plays little if any causal role, the pursuit of wisdom today has become primarily identified with the logos or the pursuit of a rational account of reality and the rule governing principles behind it. Although there is not space enough to traverse all that is involved here, it will be argued in this paper that the secrets of wisdom will never be revealed if its nature is limited to a singular description of just one function of thought. What is needed if the love of wisdom is to be regained is a more dynamic and symmetrical account—one that considers the reconstructive e nature and generative e capabilities of the human mind as well as the flexibility and complexity of thought; one that realizes that the end stages of logos are only the by-product of insight obtained from more personal and emotionally charged meaning; and one that takes seriously the role of mythos in the thinking process.
the first turn: from mythological wisdom to philosophy
9. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Leonidas C. Bargeliotes, Penelope Triantou The Cognitive Role of Plato’s Use of Mythos
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The paper refers to the contribution of myth to Plato’s cognitive theory. Primarily, it is epigrammatically pointed out the existing difference between Mythos and Logos, on the one hand, and Plato’s attitude towards the myths as well as their use and incorporation into his cognitive model, on the other hand.
10. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Silvia Benso The Wisdom of Love or Negotiating Mythos and Logos with Plato and Levinas
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Inverting the sequence of the traditional terms, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas redefines philosophy as the “wisdom of love”. Through an intertwining of Platonic motifs and Levinasian inspirations, the essay argues for a mutually regulated interplay of mythos and logos as a way to regain a sense of wisdom that remains respectful of the elements of otherness in reality-in particular, respectful of the otherness of the Third who, for Levinas, constitutes the ground for politics. That is, the interplay of mythos and logos results into a mytho-logy in which the logos directing the mythos is the voice of the other which imposes not only the preservation (ethics), but also the institutionalization (politics) of the differences, alterities and incommensurabilities that constitute reality. The consequence of this differently negotiated notion of wisdom is a reconfiguration of philosophy in terms of a mythological politics of bodily, economic testimony in the service of the Third.
11. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Stephanie Theodorou Rethinking the Relation between Mythos and Logos: An Aristotelian Reappraisal of Paul Ricoeur’s Theory of Metaphor
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In this essay, I will show one way in which Ricoeur utilizes Aristotle’s discussions in Rhetoric and Poetics; I will take my point of departure from his hermeneutic theory of metaphor. Here, he reverses the Aristotelian intention by blending the domains of discourse we call mythos and logos in a way which suggests that the latter is subsumed by the former. While one can argue that the two are co-emergent processes, Ricoeur’s formulation undermines one side of the dialectic between them.
not all interpretations are “footnotes to plato”
12. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Sharon M. Kaye Buridan’s Ass: Is There Wisdom in the Story?
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This paper discusses Buridan’s Ass as a thought experiment that has been misunderstood. First, the thought experiment is presented in its traditional form and typical objections to it are discussed. Then the author argues that William of Ockham supplies the background necessary for a more meaningful formulation. Buridan’s Ass is designed to show that each individual must choose how to value the value we discover in the world and that, in so doing, we create individual preferences.
13. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Brian Seitz The Who Has Lost Something but Knows Where to Find It: Iroquois “Law” and the Withdrawal of the Origin
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Inspired by Nietzsche’s insistence that we exploit actual history and Foucault’s extrapolation of Nietzsche’s project, my explication of the logic of originary withdrawal is centered around an analysis of an historical account of origin; here, we turn to the image of the original lawgiver, as depicted in the Iroquois foundation narrative, the narrative that serves to constitute their political community. This analysis helps to cultivate an alternative understanding of political necessity by starting with the traces of a material discourse from the past and, more important, about the past rather than starting with theory.
14. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Ray Munro Liminal Performances: Unveiling the Logos, Revealing the Mythos
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In this paper I will attempt to show that the next step in acting methodology is to move from psychological cognition to meditative thinking—Logos, giving examples of how that Logos becomes word and is then revealed in the text, play or story—Mythos.
15. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Dictionary of Dialogue and Universalism (Draft)
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16. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Władysław Tatarkiewicz — On Perfection (J.K.)
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17. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Selected Contributions on Wisdom as Published in Dialogue and Humanism (1990–1995) and Dialogue and Universalism (1995–2005)
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18. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 15 > Issue: 3/4
Our Contributors
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