Humanities Bulletin

Unintentional Intentionality

Iulia Nistor — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Intention is a necessary condition for John Searle’s concept of derived intentionality; it is what bestows the intentionality of mental states on physical phenomena. This may be true for illocutionary acts but not for all instances of intentionality in the physical realm. I discuss cases of unintentional intentionality, starting with the example of the wave-poem by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels (1982) and continuing with cases that implement images rather than text, that is, pareidolia. Furthermore, I criticise the dependency of the intentionality of physical phenomena on the intentionality of mind, suggested by the adjective ‘derived’.

Logically Simple Objects and a Relational View of Reality in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Russell and Carnap

Richard McDonough — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Many philosophers have puzzled over the nature of the logically simple objects, the “substance” of the world, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus (TLP). Such questions are misplaced because TLP is committed to the view that talk of such metaphysically problematical entities is part of the “ladder” that must be “thrown away” after one has climbed it. Further, TLP’s demotion of its logically simple objects to mere logical subjects requires an increased emphasis on the relations between these alleged objects. TLP’s account of its logically simple objects is an application of Russell’s relational view of mathematical objects from his Principles of Mathematics applied to “reality”. Carnap develops an analogous relational or “structural” view of reality in The Logical Structure of the World. Despite important differences between them, these three philosophers can profitably be seen as replacing the traditional emphasis on substances with a relational model of reality.

The Menstrual Cycles: Philosophical and Ethical Insights in a Powerful Tool

Laÿna Droz — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The dismissal of menstrual cycles from the philosophical discussions about how we get knowledge of the world rests on the assumption of a stable and unchanging self, which supposedly conflicts with the inherent dynamicity of changing cycles. Yet, instead of being an epistemological obstacle, this dynamicity can be a tool to better grasp our continuous state of change. It affects the perception of the world and the development of ethical relations with others. Passing through stages in which one feels particularly vulnerable is a reminder of human vulnerability to environmental and social changes. The awareness of this vulnerability can ground decision-making leading to precautionary actions. Plus, readiness to change and flexibility are crucial elements of ethics in a world in which we constantly need to adapt ourselves. The experience of menstruation sheds light on a conception of the self as an ever-changing, vulnerable and adaptive agent.

Paul Draper, Cornel West and a Pragmatic Critique of Natural Theology

Joshua Anderson — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Paul Draper has expressed concerns regarding the current state of the philosophy of religion. Based on insights from Cornel West, in this article I will be giving a pragmatic response to Draper’s article “Partisanship and Inquiry in Philosophy of Religion”. More accurately, this article will be presenting what Draper calls “philosophy of theism” as a pragmatic tool for overcoming partisanship in the philosophy of religion. Ultimately, philosophy of theism is commendable insofar as it can overcome partisanship better than the alternative.

Eros and Demos: Reading John Dewey in the Arab World

Rachid Boutayeb — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The following pages represent an endeavor to explain why Dewey’s understanding of democracy, education, and religion implies great relevance for understanding the present Arab-Islamic crisis. The historicism of Abdallah Laroui, the social theory of Hisham Sharabi, and the political anthropology of Abdellah Hammoudi emphasize that the persistence of political authoritarianism in the Arab world reflects a malaise in the culture or society and above all a crisis of education — an education that remains patriarchal or neo-patriarchal, emphasizing the communal and undermining the individual. The thinkers mentioned above explain that a reform of Demos cannot come about without a reform of Culture. This is another reason John Dewey’s meditations on democracy and education, or democracy as a way of life, are of great importance for today’s Arab societies. Basically, this paper deals with the relevance of Dewey’s work and shows why we cannot achieve a democratic transition without a cultural transition, which includes an education strategy regarding democracy.

Fragmentation and Interruption in Foucault’s Concept of the Subject, Power, and Madness

Justina Šumilova — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The aim of this article is to investigate fragmentation and interruption in Foucault’s concept of the subject, power and madness. The research explores the concept of fragmentation in modernity, particularly in relation to subjectivity, power, and madness. It discusses how the shift towards individualism and the erosion of traditional values have led to a sense of disconnection and fragmentation in society. The research states that fragmentation produces multiplicity of meanings and fragments the concept of the subject in which we have a new kind of fragmented subjectivity that is defined by multiplicity. While fragmentation of the subject can lead to madness, it gives an important linear narrative. The research also delves into the role of power in shaping subjectivity and the ways in which language and discourse contribute to fragmentation. Furthermore, it examines the connection between madness and language, as well as the exploration of madness in literature.

Was There Religion Before Modernity? A Dialogue with Brent Nongbri

João Almeida Loureiro — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This article aims to analyze the legitimacy of a thesis that has been gaining traction in recent decades within Religious Studies - namely, that the term religion can only be applied accurately to Protestant Christianity, and that all previous phenomena must be described using different terminology. To this end, we will take Brent Nongbri as our main interlocutor. What Nongbri advocates is simple: the term “religion” stands for the private adherence to a given set of theses; pre-modern peoples did not have any concept with such or similar meaning, therefore, they did not have religion, but something different. We will postulate, on the one hand, that Nongbri's thesis is tremendously fragile, and, on the other, that we are perfectly justified in continuing to talk about religion when referring to pre-modern peoples and cultures.

From Nationalization to Personalization: Towards an Historical Epistemology of the Concept of Culture in American Anthropology

Alexandru Casian — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

In the present days, culture has become a highly personal experience moving from its initial collective locus. As a consequence, the concept has undergone a process of unseen pluralization and expansion of meanings and interpretations. Herder is conventionally held responsible for coining the plural term ‘cultures’ by linking it with the eighteenth-century idea of nation. This conception evolved into a broader approach to look at cultural phenomena as national manifestations. Despite common assumptions, Herder did not ignore the role of the individual locus. Historical epistemology shows how, in the United States, a derivation of the Herderian notions took the pluralization of culture to the next level. By putting emphasis on the psychological and individual elements, the founders of American anthropology, Boas and his followers, revolutionized the conceptual frameworks in human and social sciences. It is possible to argue that personalization of culture is a secondary effect of Herder’s ideas. The Herderian-Boasian vision of culture mirrors the dichotomy between nationalization and personalization that activates strong conceptual mutations and reflects the dilemmas of the twenty-first century.

Antigone and the Sublime: Acts of Impossible Affirmation

Lindsay Parkhowell — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

In this article, I interpret Antigone through the philosophical category of the sublime, which enables her to transcend the order of nature and her empirical self. Through a close textual analysis of the Greek word amechanos (impossible), I argue that Antigone manages to affirm a place for herself within the incoherent kinship legacy left her father Oedipus by resolutely honouring her brother as an end-in-himself. At the same time, this burial also affirms her nature as a “mother bird” opposed to the normative gender roles available within Kreon’s polis. Understanding Antigone as a sublime figure also helps to explain two otherwise inscrutable references in the text: the first when Antigone compares herself to Niobe, and the second when the chorus describe her as the only person to enter Hades “alive”. My argument that Antigone becomes a sublime Idea concludes with an analysis of her through the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis, or as an indeterminate analogy that exists concurrently between the realms of aesthetics (sublimity) and ethics (autonomy).

“The Underpainting and the Overpainting”: Layers of Power and Powerlessness in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait

Maria Antonietta Struzziero — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (2022) revisits late-Renaissance Italian courtly life, with its intrigues of dynastic politics, to explore the short life and mysterious death of Lucrezia de’ Medici, third daughter of Cosimo, Duke of Florence. Lucrezia, aged sixteen in the novel, is married off to the older Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, a pawn in her father’s hands to fulfill his wish for a political alliance between the two families. O’Farrell enters the young woman’s life inspired, as she acknowledges in the Author’s note, by Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842), a dramatic monologue that, in turn, draws inspiration from a portrait of Lucrezia. Both Browning and O’Farrell endorse the rumour that the girl was murdered by her husband, though the official records suggest that she probably died of ‘putrid fever’.

O’Farrell’s historical narrative, the article argues, is both an act of appropriation of a true story and a creative re-reading of it, that intertextually engages with a different source, Browning’s poem. Through the figure of Lucrezia, O’Farrell aims to explore the life of women who are obscured by men, entrapped and circumscribed by a patriarchal society that suffocates their aspirations and expectations, and ruthlessly stifles any attempt at autonomous choices.

Metamodernism: Navigating Discourse and Identity in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life

Rareş-Christian Vasilescu — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This paper investigates the articulation of metamodernism at the beginning of the 21^st century and how this new paradigmatic apparatus of interpretation of the world can be applied to Kate Atkinson’s novel, Life After Life (2013). Metamodernism was firstly formulated by Dutch theorists Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen and comes as a response to postmodernism. Metamodernism explores the topics of informed naivety, affect in fiction, authenticity, transcendence and the function of historical hybridity, while acknowledging and using the postmodernist pastiche and parody, combined with the modernist ambiguity, openness to innovation and importance of grand narratives. This paper examines the applicability of metamodernism to Kate Atkinson’s novel, Life After Life, a historical fiction novel about the multiple lives and deaths of Ursula Todd as she navigates through various historical events in 20th-century Europe, exploring the themes of fate, resilience, and the impact of individual choices on the course of one's life. By incorporating the metamodernist “manifesto”, a theoretical and critical corpus and by using a close-reading method on the novel, this paper demonstrates that metamodernism is a paradigm that tries to adapt to the contemporary state of constant crisis and its applicability to Atkinson’s fiction. This analysis showcases the degree to which metamodernism contributes to understanding the complexity of the 21^st century and whether it fits the aesthetic of the novel.

Lovecraft’s Murder Mystery: Revisit Poe’s Haunted House

Justine Shu-Ting Kao — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

H.P. Lovecraft admired Edgar Allen Poe as his “God of Fiction,” having stumbled upon the literary works of Poe at the age of eight. To Lovecraft, Poe then served to replace Greek mythology and the Arabian Nights as his muse. Unfortunately, the degree to which his writing style and mood were thus significantly influenced by Poe is unknown, since very few of his works completed during his juvenile years remain today. Moreover, he did not admit the implicit influence of Poe until 1935. Joshi attributed Lovecraft’s denial of Poe’s influence to Harold Bloom’s concept of the “anxiety of influence.”¹ However, it is still possible to trace the impact of Poe in Lovecraft’s literary works. Lovecraft’s idea of cosmic decline stemmed from his early reading of Poe, adroitly applying Poe’s gothic setting of terror to his own 20^th-century stories. Throughout his body of work, however, Lovecraft developed a more pessimistic tone of cosmicism, with his Cthulhu Mythos and weird fiction; therein, his works stand apart from Poe’s. The following is a comparison and contrast of Lovecraft’s murder stories and those of Poe.

No Way Out: The (Im)possibility of Posthumanism in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

Codrin Aniculăese — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This article traces two opposed tendencies in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island with respect to the contemporary discourse surrounding posthumanism. On the one hand, the text continuously hints at the emergence of an immersive mode of being which does justice to exteriority, while on the other it subverts the potential for such a being’s actualization. While most of the criticism surrounding McCarthy’s novel has optimistically emphasized the former intimation of a posthuman engagement with materiality, the present reading centralizes the latter tendency, attempting to show that the novel lucidly rejects such an optimistic view. Ultimately, I will attempt to show that McCarthy’s Satin Island critiques a naïve contemporary ‘choice’ to be posthuman.

Ambivalent Domesticities: Exploring the Unfolding and Obscuring of Alternative Social Imaginaries in Laurent Mareschal’s Beiti

Kasper Tromp — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Laurent Mareschal's site-specific installation Beiti is situated ambivalently in our imaginations of Israel/Palestine. Its geometric tile carpet, consisting of herbs and spices, effectuate multisensory experiences of the domestic, a place of memory, family and shared tastes and scents, but also of conflict and dispossession. Adopting a Heideggerian framework, this study will examine the formative hold of power (Macht) over cultures, histories and politics in the region and explore how Beiti simultaneously withdraws and submits to this. Olfactory art theory will help conceptualise how the artwork affects audiences corporeally, through its scents, and how this draws them into various temporal experiences; from the cyclical alternations of nature to personal memories as well as interrupted histories. The article concludes with a strategy to salvage the de-escalatory potential of Beiti's multiple temporal entanglements.