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Specific Notion (specific + notion)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%

Selected Abstracts

Singing Our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2004
February 2, Portland, Presidential Address to the International Studies Association
This paper focuses on the relationship between International Relations theory and ethics. It poses the question of the complicity of the discipline in the events of September 11, 2001. The paper begins with a discussion of Weber's notion of science as a vocation, and links this to the commitment in the discipline to a value-free conception of social science, one that sharply separates facts from values. The paper then examines the role of ten core assumptions in International Relations theory in helping to construct a discipline that has a culturally and historically very specific notion of violence, one resting on distinctions between economics and politics, between the outside and the inside of states, and between the public and the private realms. Using the United Nations Human Development report, the paper summarizes a number of forms of violence in world politics, and questions why the discipline of International Relations only focuses on a small subset of these. The paper then refers to the art of Magritte, and specifically Velazquez's painting Las Meninas, to argue for a notion of representation relevant to the social world that stresses negotiation, perspective, and understanding rather than notions of an underlying Archimedean foundation to truth claims. In concluding, the paper asserts that the discipline helped to sing into existence the world of September 11 by reflecting the interests of the dominant in what were presented as being neutral, and universal theories. [source]

The Slingshot Argument: An Improved Version

RATIO, Issue 2 2002
Dalia Drai
In the paper I exploit Frege's notions of sense and synonymity in order to amend the slingshot argument. The main emendation is to replace the assumption about logical equivalence by an assumption about synonymity. While the replaced assumption begs the question about the reference of sentences, the replacing assumption has much more theoretical support from Frege's general conception of sense and reference and the relation between them. In the paper I use a specific notion of synonymity which I believe is faithful to Frege's discussion of the subject. I notice that if a stronger (and to my mind implausible) notion of synonymity is used, my version of the argument fails. The failure is explained by showing that this stronger notion of synonymity enables the assignment of facts, and not truth values, as the references of sentences. [source]

The Self-Referential European Polity, its Legal Context and Systemic Differentiation: Theoretical Reflections on the Emergence of the EU's Political and Legal Autopoiesis

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 4 2009
Jiri Priban
It highlights the role of statehood in those debates and suggests moving beyond the constraints of institutionalist and constructivist perspectives by adopting specific notions from the theory of autopoietic social systems. The following part describes the EU political system as self-referential, functionally differentiated from the system of European law, and internally differentiated between European institutions and Member State governments. Although the Union transgresses its nation-state segmentation, the notions of statehood and democratic legitimacy continue to inform legal and political semantics of the EU and specific responses to the Union's systemic tensions, such as the policy of differentiated integration legislated by the flexibility clauses. The democratic deficit of instrumental legitimation justified by outcomes, the most recent example of which is the Lisbon Treaty, subsequently reveals the level of EU functional differentiation and the impossibility of fostering the ultimate construction of a normatively integrated and culturally united European polity. It shows a much more profound social dynamics of differentiation at the level of emerging European society,dynamics which do not adopt the concept of the European polity as an encompassing metaphor of this society, but makes it part of self-referential and self-limiting semantics of the functionally differentiated European political system. [source]

THE SHAPING OF EXPERIENCE

BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY, Issue 4 2005
Kenneth Wright
ABSTRACT This paper explores how we sometimes manage, and often fail, to communicate the ,feel' of live experience. Since poetry makes a craft and vocation of this pursuit, the writings of poets are brought to bear on the process. I introduce the idea of containing forms, using the term containment in its everyday sense. My argument, however, owes much to Winnicott, Stern and Bion, Winnicott's transitional object exemplifying an early containing structure, and Stern's ,attunement' suggesting ways that later containing structures might arise out of mother-infant dialogue. Bion's more specific notions of containment and transformation are not explored. Following Langer, I suggest that feeling is better communicated through presentational rather than discursive symbols, such forms being concrete, sensory, and isomorphic in some way to that which is being shared. With such presentational symbols, resonance and dialogue between forms are more important than explanatory meaning and some implications of this for therapeutic discourse are discussed. [source]