Search results for ""Author Algis Mickunas""

The usual notion of incarceration suggests specific locations in a given society: prisons or, in gentler form, psychiatric institutions. This notion will be incorporated in the text in various and much broader contexts. We investigate civilizations and their specific cultures in terms of their compositions which may "incarcerate" a person without specific facilities: More recent and still continuous examples are Fascistic and Communist empires, or traditional autocratic and theocratic systems. In addition, there are civilizations which, while open and democratic, might exclude various groups from participation due to education, race, or class status -- and such exclusion may not be regarded as "incarceration." One prevalent form of autocratic incarceration is the control of education and literature available to the citizens. There are other forms which subject a group, or an entire civilization, to "incarceration" due to colonialisms and their usual "monological" imposition of totalizing discourse as a criterion for what is civilized and what is not, all the way to what is human and what is not adequate to be regarded as human. The monological form also applies to totalising discourses in modern "sciences" and technical fields, offering "explanations" of every facet of human behaviour. The trend is a push for "education" only in technical fields. It is also imperative to investigate the various contemporary trends in cultural theories which propose multi-cultural "methods" without attending to the issue of the illogical nature of such methods. Finally, we address the current debates of global migrations, immigrations, and the issues as to the status of persons caught in such movements with regard to "legal" questions. This issue is confronted by the emergence of "populisms" and "nationalisms" worldwide, and a usually avoided question, "Why there is a denouncement of the West by members of various civilisations and their cultures, and yet the demand that only the West should welcome "the others".

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The usual notion of incarceration suggests specific locations in a given society: prisons or, in gentler form, psychiatric institutions. This notion will be incorporated in the text in various and much broader contexts. We investigate civilizations and their specific cultures in terms of their compositions which may "incarcerate" a person without specific facilities: More recent and still continuous examples are Fascistic and Communist empires, or traditional autocratic and theocratic systems. In addition, there are civilizations which, while open and democratic, might exclude various groups from participation due to education, race, or class status-and such exclusion may not be regarded as "incarceration." One prevalent form of autocratic incarceration is the control of education and literature available to the citizens. There are other forms which subject a group, or an entire civilization, to "incarceration" due to colonialisms and their usual "monological" imposition of totalizing discourse as a criterion for what is civilized and what is not, all the way to what is human and what is not adequate to be regarded as human. The monological form also applies to totalizing discourses in modern "sciences" and technical fields, offering "explanations" of every facet of human behavior. The trend is a push for "education" only in technical fields. It is also imperative to investigate the various contemporary trends in cultural theories which propose multi-cultural "methods" without attending to the issue of the illogical nature of such methods. Finally, we address the current debates of global migrations, immigrations, and the issues as to the status of persons caught in such movements with regard to "legal" questions. This issue is confronted by the emergence of "populisms" and "nationalisms" worldwide, and a usually avoided question, "Why there is a denouncement of the West by members of various civilizations and their cultures, and yet the demand that only the West should welcome "the others."

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The debates concerning global terrorism focus on "radical Islam" and the way it can be "moderated" or pacified by appeals to its peaceful side. These debates include the discussion of the clash of civilisations, tolerance and its limits, and military means to defeat the perpetrators. Such cultural clashes appear in various parts of the globe, including India, Pakistan, and even among sects of the same civilizations. This monograph explores the nature of these cultural clashes and the resurgence of global terror to look at a more fundamental set of issues, including the misguided search for truth, resulting in Western post-modernism and "post-truth", spanning the globe in the guise of multi-culturalism. The analysis of this context leads to questioning the basic composition of civilisations, their compatibility, and radical differences, leading to a dimension of awareness that has not been addressed by scholars studying civilisations. What is at issue is the inevitable "anarchistic terror," which includes most unpredictable acts by "unsuspected" individuals, not only from Islam, but also by those emboldened by a specific mode of awareness. This level "dissolves" the various claims that the fundamental clash is among civilizations and points to two, modern, Western levels of this dissolution: literature and theory. The former calls for the collapse of anything resembling features of the world that are accessible to human awareness. The second level places the world at an arbitrary service for human "needs". The result is made manifest by the claims from anarchistic terrorists that the modern West is "Satanic" and destructive of the created order of all things, which is a totally anarchistic point of view, while the answer from the modern West points to the fundamental anarchism of those who terrorise "Western" ways. The analysis of this context shows that both sides are anarchistic and face an inevitable collision without any possible justification. The collision is designed to unfold into a final domain that requires an "ontological" account of how such a collision in human life is possible, without relying on previously inadequate explanations. The text includes contemporary "turmoil" in global relationships, the various trends toward "autocracy" and "strong man" solutions to our predicaments. Such tendencies appear in the phenomenon of the conjunction of state and religion, so well pronounced in Russia, in Confucian China, the Middle East, the United States, and in European nations. It is to be noted that such solutions do not depend only on personality cults, but above all, on "legitimating" their stories. The point is that such stories are equally anarchistic.

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Existential philosophy has perhaps captured the public imagination more completely than any other philosophical movement in the twentieth century. But less is known about the phenomenological method lying behind existentialism. In this solid introduction to phenomenological philosophy, authors David Stewart and Algis Mickunas show that phenomenology is neither new nor bizarre but is a contemporary way of raising afresh the major problems of philosophy that have dominated the traditions of Western thought. The authors carefully lead the reader trough the maze of terminology, explaining the major problems phenomenology has treated and showing how these are a consistent extension of the traditional concerns of philosophy. In concise, uncluttered, and straightforward terms, the history, development, and contemporary status of phenomenology is explained with a copiously annotated bibliography following each chapter. Nothing in print combines the extensive introductory materials with a guide to the massive literature that has been produced by phenomenological and existential studies.

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Events in the contemporary world are available through a great variety of media and most of them consist of images, seemingly reflecting some "reality". Yet there is no clear understanding what constitutes reflection, image, cultural symbolic designs and who is the reflecting Self. The text investigates the difference between visuality, images, vision and the different concepts of reality which are at the base of our understanding of the great varieties of means for reflection - from theological to technical.

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This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves. “The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded. It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.… Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.” Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin. From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis

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