Download or read book The Limits of Meaning written by Matthew Engelke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are "meaningful events." But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem "meaningless"? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addition to the anthropology of religion, offering fresh debates on a classic topic and drawing attention to meaning in a way that other volumes have for key terms like "culture" and "fieldwork.
Download or read book The Limits of Meaning written by Matthew Eric Engelke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are "meaningful events." But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem "meaningless"? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addition to the anthropology of religion, offering fresh debates on a classic topic and drawing attention to meaning in a way that other volumes have for key terms like "culture" and "fieldwork.
Download or read book The Limits of Meaning written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Anthropology of Christianity written by Fenella Cannell and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-07 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse
Download or read book A Concept of Limits written by Donald W. Hight and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of conceptual foundations and the practical applications of limits in mathematics, this text offers a concise introduction to the theoretical study of calculus. Many exercises with solutions. 1966 edition.
Download or read book Contingency and the Limits of History written by Liane Carlson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars have spent very little time considering the genealogy of contingency itself—or what its history means for its role in politics. In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and etymological roots in “touch,” contending that much of its critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy, where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical destabilization brought about by the body’s collision with a changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation, and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental philosophy and critical theory’s most cherished concepts, this book reveals the limits of historicist accounts.
Download or read book The Island of Knowledge written by Marcelo Gleiser and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why discovering the limits to science may be the most powerful discovery of allHow much can we know about the world? In this book, physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence, the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge. In so doing, he reaches a provocative conclusion: science, like religion, is fundamentally limited as a tool for understanding the world. As science and its philosophical interpretations advance, we face the unsettling recognition of how much we don't know. Gleiser shows that by aband.
Download or read book Meaning Truth and the Limits of Analysis written by David Wiggins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws together work by David Wiggins on topics to do with language, meaning, truth, and the limit of semantic analysis, from 1980 to 2020. Each chapter draws upon previously published material, but that material has been revised, sometimes significantly, for republication here. Opening with a selective account of a century's work in the philosophy of meaning, from Frege and Wittgenstein to the late twentieth century, the book engages first with the nuts and bolts of sentence-construction: predicates and the copula, quantifiers, names, existence treated as a second-level predicate, and adverbial modification. The following five chapters then treat of definition and (as dreamt of by Leibniz and others) the terminus of semantic analysis; the idea of natural languages as real things with a history; the idea of truth conceived as correlative with inquiry (C. S. Peirce) and, finally, the properties we look for in truth itself--the marks, as Frege or Leibniz might have said, of the concept true.
Download or read book The Limits of Interpretation written by Umberto Eco and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents four theories describing the limits of literary interpretation, challenging "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation" that diminishes the meaning and the basis of communication. -- Back cover.
Download or read book The Limits of My Language written by Eva Meijer and published by Pushkin Press. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Moving, poetic, cogent and honest." -- Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon An intimate study of depression that draws on personal experience and a deep knowledge of philosophy—perfect for fans of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison The Limits of My Language is both a razor-sharp analysis of depression and a steadfast search for the things great and small -- from philosophy and art to walking a dog or sitting quietly with a cat -- that make our lives worth living. Much has been written about the treatment of depression, but relatively little about its meaning. In this strikingly original book, Eva Meijer weaves her own experiences and the insights of thinkers from Freud to Foucault and Woolf into a moving and incisive evocation of the condition. Depression is more than a chemical problem—the questions that occupy someone with depression are fundamentally human, and they touch on other philosophical questions that concern language, autonomy, power relations, loneliness, and the relationship between body and mind. But this book-length essay is also about the other side, such as animals, trees, others, art: about consolation, and hope, and the things that can give life meaning. The Limits of My Language explores how depression can make us grow out of shape over time, like a twisted tree, how we can sometimes remould ourselves in conversation with others, and how to move on from our darkest thoughts.
Download or read book The Limits of History written by Constantin Fasolt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time. So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis—gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning—Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it, the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends. With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, The Limits of History demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present. A work of both intellectual history and historiography, it will prove invaluable to students of historical method, philosophy, political theory, and early modern European culture.
Download or read book The Virtues of Limits written by David McPherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-14 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the place of limits within a well-lived human life and develops and defends an original account of limiting virtues, which are concerned with recognising proper limits in human life.
Download or read book The Limits of Tolerance written by Denis Lacorne and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern notion of tolerance—the welcoming of diversity as a force for the common good—emerged in the Enlightenment in the wake of centuries of religious wars. First elaborated by philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire, religious tolerance gradually gained ground in Europe and North America. But with the resurgence of fanaticism and terrorism, religious tolerance is increasingly being challenged by frightened publics. In this book, Denis Lacorne traces the emergence of the modern notion of religious tolerance in order to rethink how we should respond to its contemporary tensions. In a wide-ranging argument that spans the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian republic, and recent controversies such as France’s burqa ban and the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, The Limits of Tolerance probes crucial questions: Should we impose limits on freedom of expression in the name of human dignity or decency? Should we accept religious symbols in the public square? Can we tolerate the intolerant? While acknowledging that tolerance can never be entirely without limits, Lacorne defends the Enlightenment concept against recent attempts to circumscribe it, arguing that without it a pluralistic society cannot survive. Awarded the Prix Montyon by the Académie Française, The Limits of Tolerance is a powerful reflection on twenty-first-century democracy’s most fundamental challenges.
Download or read book Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language written by Hanne Appelqvist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The limit of language is one of the most pervasive notions found in Wittgenstein’s work, both in his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his later writings. Moreover, the idea of a limit of language is intimately related to important scholarly debates on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, such as the debate between the so-called traditional and resolute interpretations, Wittgenstein’s stance on transcendental idealism, and the philosophical import of Wittgenstein’s latest work On Certainty. This collection includes thirteen original essays that provide a comprehensive overview of the various ways in which Wittgenstein appeals to the limit of language at different stages of his philosophical development. The essays connect the idea of a limit of language to the most important themes discussed by Wittgenstein—his conception of logic and grammar, the method of philosophy, the nature of the subject, and the foundations of knowledge—as well as his views on ethics, aesthetics, and religion. The essays also relate Wittgenstein’s thought to his contemporaries, including Carnap, Frege, Heidegger, Levinas, and Moore.
Download or read book The Limits of Expression written by Patricia Kolaiti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically new view of the interplay between language, literature and mind.
Download or read book What Money Can t Buy written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?In his New York Times bestseller Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don't honor and that money can't buy?
Download or read book The Limits of Realism written by Tim Button and published by . This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tim Button explores the relationship between minds, words, and world. He argues that the two main strands of scepticism are deeply related and can be overcome, but that there is a limit to how much we can show. We must position ourselves somewhere between internal realism and external realism, and we cannot hope to say exactly where.
