Beyond Reason relates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the "secret" of large-scale form in Wagner's music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.
The knowledge disseminated by universities and mobilized by states to govern populations has been globally dominant for more than a century. It first emerged in the early modern period in Europe and subsequently became globalized through colonialism. Despite the historical and cultural specificity of its origins, modern Western knowledge was thought to have transcended its particularities such that, unlike pre-modern and non-Western knowledges, it was "universal," or true for all times and places. In this bold and ambitious book, Sanjay Seth argues that modern knowledge and the social sciences are a product of Western modernity claiming a spurious universality: that what we treat as the "truths" discovered by social scientific reason are instead a parochial knowledge. Drawing upon and deriving its critical energies principally from postcolonial theory, Beyond Reason traverses many disciplines, including science studies, social history, art and music history, political science, and anthropology, and engages with a range of contemporary thinkers including Butler, Habermas, Chakrabarty, Chatterjee, and Rawls. It demonstrates that while global in their impact, the social sciences do not and cannot transcend the Western historical and cultural circumstances in which they emerged. If the social sciences are not explained and validated simply by the fact that they are "true," it becomes possible to ask what purpose they serve, what it is that they "do." A defining feature of modern knowledge is that it is divided into disciplines, each with its own object of inquiry and corresponding protocols, and thus asking what such knowledge "does" requires asking what purpose disciplines serve. It also requires asking what ways of understanding the world they facilitate and what they disallow. Beyond Reason proceeds to anatomize the disciplines of history and political science to ask what representations and relations with the past and with politics these academic disciplines enable, and what ways of understanding and engaging the world they foreclose.
This series publishes research in the field of interdisciplinary communication studies. It responds to the communication gaps between a range of disciplines in the human and social sciences and humanities and therefore welcomes proposals which integrate a range of diverse approaches (e.g. in branches of philosophy, communication theory, social psychology, media studies, and social theory). Particular emphasis will be placed on theoretical innovation and new methodological approaches.
The author of this book develops a theoretical framework and demonstrates that Hauerwas's claim about the relation between religion and ethics only makes sense within the wider framework of his attempt to set aside Kantian moral tradition.
After the postmodern turn, every tradition seeks the right to have their own rules of rational discourse. The crucial question is: are there ways to communicate between the traditions so that the traditions do not need to give up their identities in order to take part in conversation? Vainio examines the basic assumptions behind well known types of Christian theology and seeks ways in which they might interact with one other and with other non-Christian traditions without capitulation of their identities. Vainio claims that there are religious identities that can be negotiated and communicated, and that there are ecclesiastical doctrines which can be meaningfully discussed among churches. This book explores three key areas: analysis of the uses of 'fideism' within classical Christian theology; clarification of different types of theological method that seek to express the task of theology in contemporary setting; an explanation of the contours of religious identity and rationality which takes seriously both classical Christian identity and pluralistic contexts where most of the Christian communities dwell nowadays. The proposal for "negotiability" of Christian identity draws together ideas from, among others, virtue epistemology, reformed epistemology, communitarianism, and feminist sensibilities.
Resulting from an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy, political science and International Relations about Europe as a political community this volume rethinks the European political project beyond the rigid opposition between universalism and particularism approaching Europe as a space of the exposure of differences to each other.
Maria Duffy describes Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory of memory and addresses central conceptual and methodological issues in his theory of forgiveness and reconciliation. As the many Truth Commissions around the world illustrate, revisiting the past has a positive benefit in steering history in a new direction after protracted violence. A second deeper strand in the book is the connection between Ricoeur and John Paul II. Both lived through the worst period of modern European history (Ricoeur a prisoner of war during WWII and John Paul, who suffered under the communist regime). Both have written on themes of memory and identity and share a mutual concern for the future of Europe and the preservation of the 'Christian' identity of the Continent as well as the promotion of peace and a civilization of love. The book brings together their shared vision, culminating in the award to Ricoeur by John Paul II of the Paul VI medal for theology.
In a postsecular cultural situation the conditions for understanding and communicating a Christian tradition have changed. None of the established religions can any longer claim monopoly in the "marketplace of religions." A claim of this study is that a postsecular situation characterized, among other things, by dwindling memberships in established churches as well as a new visibility of alternative religious expressions, opens up a need to reflect on alternative ways of understanding Christianity in its context. This study focuses on the question, how can a Christian tradition be communicated understandably in a postsecular context? In traditional terms: how can Christian witness be understood in our situation? It is to this need, according to this study, that the ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas provides a meaningful perspective. This perspective becomes relevant because in a postsecular context a Christian church, even a folk church, cannot assume to be in a position of majority or power. There is, therefore, a need to ask how to understand Christianity as a community of witness that is neither in power nor a majority. The study suggests that embodiment of Christian convictions becomes a central factor in a meaningful postsecular notion of witness.
This first volume focuses on a collection of texts from the latter twenty years of Educational Philosophy and Theory, selected for their critical status as turning points or important awakenings in post-structural theory. In the last twenty years, the applications of the postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives have become less mono-focused, less narrowly concerned with technical questions and also less interested in epistemology, and more interested in ethics. This book covers questions of genealogy, ontology, the body and the institution, giving examples of theoretical applications of post-structural theory that testify to the generative and endlessly applicable potential of this work to different fields and avenues of thought. While informed by Foucault’s thinking of the political subjugation of docile bodies to individuals as self-determining beings, the chapters in this book culminate in amalgamations of different schools of educational philosophy, which explore poststructuralist approaches to education. Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, philosophy, education, educational theory, post-structural theory, the policy and politics of education, and the pedagogy of education.
