Summary: Philosophy Of The Humanities (Area Studies)

Read the summary and the most important questions on Philosophy of the Humanities (Area Studies)

• Week 2

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• Enlightenment epistemology (Theory of knowledge)

  • Trust in reason 
    
  • The idea that knowledge is not transparent --> not obvious

  (e.g. Rationalism --> reason vs. Empiricism --> experience)
  

  • Subject - object distinction 

• Gadamer (20th century writer)

  • Develops the idea of the hermeneutic circle further 
  • Language partly constitutes the world we experience 
  • mutual dialogical understanding 
  • Open up our preconceptions --> interpretive horizon which means that we contextualize our previous understandings 
  • Interpretation: The melting of horizons 
  • We are bound to but NOT caught in horizons

• The interpretive process (various philosophers)

  • The understanding (Verstehen/reliving) of human reality and social action (also small gestures) 
    
  • The plurality of meanings (rational and non-rational) and symbolic dimensions (involving representation, expression) of social phenomena: 

  
  Philosophers:  
  

  • Schleiermacher
  • Dilthey 
  • Cassirer 
  • Weber: calculability (rationalism) --> subjective meaning of social action, incl. Values 
  • Freud: unconscious emotions, such as melancholia 

  
  
  
  
  

• Mariana Ortega (Bodies of color, bodies of sorrow)

  • Self-Other relations
  • Splits between the migrants and the nation; histories of empire, coloniality, racism, xenophobia
  • Visible bodies "invisible" bodies

  
  
  
  
  

  • Towards are more expansive "we" -- coalition building
  • The power of photos to help remember and see how the messiness of history is part of the present
  • Emotional disruption
  • Sorrow: openings to becoming-with (emotion)
  • Intersectionality: race and ethnicity tie into gender and class

  --> Not just black or white but also white-christian, black-christian etc. 

• Week 3

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• Critical Theory (Book notes)

  Current debate of humanities and social sciences, which is defined by 'critical theory' is based on:
  

  • Karl Marx's dialectical material critique of society  
  • Struggle with Hegel
  • Philosophy as unclear and not concrete enough --> More based on knowledge (shift)

  
  
  
  

  • Marxism tends to reject nationalism (like Romantic nationalism)

• Bakhtin: Speeches genres and address

  Each speech genre is directed at an addressee who can be:
  

  • many different, eg. Ethnic groups, families, like-minded people, opponents and enemies
  • Multiplicity of addressees --> specific kinds of genres (judicial, political, etc)

• Critical Theory - Frankfurt School 

  Historicity (like Hegel):
  

  • explore phenomena in their social-historical emergence of functioning 

  
  
  Practice of immanent critique:
  

  • comprehend society from a viewpoint inside it; exhibit tensions between alleged values, ideas promises and reality
  • Within the social framework, you raise questions about the social framework --> dig inside  

  
  
  Maintain an orientation toward social emancipation 
  
  
  Echoes of Marx, but also Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber and Freud 

• Benjamin - "Work of Art" (essay)

  Destruction of aura:
  

  • aura is a mystical, unrepeatable, unexchangeable "here and now" of the art work -> makes possible a new form of social analysis and experience 

  
  
  Promises & Threats:
  

  • Threat - aestheticization of politics: making violence and hierarchy beautiful under fascism 
  • Promise - politicization of art -> art as social and political critique

  
   

• Cultural Studies: Stuart Hall 

  Our engagement with cultural objects:
  

  • is active, not passive
  • involves dialogue with culture and its own socio-cultural context (vs. Adorno)  
  • varies across subaltern and regional communities 

• Angela Davis - Black Radical Thought and Practice 

  • Critical theory as an element of the liberatory praxis of feminists of color 
  • Negation to make space for the possible intersectionality 
  • Support of black liberation movements, such as Black lives matter; critique of the prison-industrial complex 
  • "Soft aesthetics": art's power to inspire the imagination, to have us think differently, to Iliberate the black community and other communities of color