Epistemological resistances and the search for alternatives to modernity in intellectual history

The violence of modernity has led to epistemological resistances around the world and the search for alternative ways of reconstructing philosophy. Among the Frankfurt School and early Kyoto School thinkers, for instance, the problem of modernity is framed as an excess of objective rationality, but among the decolonial thinkers of Latin America, the problem is conceptualized as the very myth of modernity itself that has legitimized the colonization and exclusion of non-Europeans. In the search for alternatives modernities, the Kyoto School and Latin American philosophy agree to a vision of inter-civilizational dialogue, which amounts to an engagement of alterity or differences, whereas with the Frankfurt School, albeit struggles to find consensus on how to overcome modernity, aims to merely preclude the problem of reproducing the impulses toward the domination of oneself and others. Nonetheless, all these paradigms have a theoretical point of convergence: that is, since we are all participants of modernity, we are both victims and executioners of its violence, and thus compelled to negate it. This article will discuss how the violence of modernity is experienced, theorized, and then challenged around different continents in order to make visible not just how the violence of modernity is reproduced in different ways but to force ourselves to engage in self-critique in the pursuit to make explicit our own assumptions that repeats the violence of modernity.

Humanism and Gender

Framed in terms of the problems associated with traditional thinking on gender within humanism, this chapter sets about the task of carving out an approach to humanism that would enable flexible, fluid, and malleable understandings of social difference, such as gender, by calling for a re-orientation of humanism that can account for human variability over time, space, and place. Essentially, the chapter argues that humanism’s reliance on fixed categories of reason and human nature has reinforced a White, male logic of domination. First, it suggests a rethinking of humanism as a constructed concept, rather than an idea that somehow metaphysically emanates from some universal core of “human nature.” The chapter suggests a charting of humanism that moves beyond essences insomuch that free-floating “essences” (e.g., gender) collapse the construction (of humanism) back onto, and within, the domain of metaphysics. Next, it looks at origins, attempting to disrupt the science-based situativity in Enlightenment notions of (white, male, objective) “rationality” that were constructed over and against “irrational” categories of difference, such as gender.

Gli «effetti» della tradizione. Trasmutazioni dell’architettura storica nell’opera di Carlo Mollino

“As Daniele Vitale wrote, the elements of historical Alpine tradition seem to be, for Mollino, “pretexts” for an exploration and formal manipulation that seeks its ways and directions. Rural architecture is therefore seen not as the bearer of an “objective rationality”, but as a set of materials that, thanks to the design interpretation, determines unprecedented fields of value. The process that characterizes many of his mountain works rarely follows the linear logic of problem solving but is characterized by a deviation that creates a new value space, a gap that distances it from the outcome considered as a consequential act. Let us think of the device of recovery and distortion of archetypes and conventional configurations of the historical tradition, which become a pretext for reinterpretations that generate new tectonic and formal meanings. Let us consider also their disassembly and reassembly to understand their constructive relationships, static configurations, tectonic logics, which were reused in the creation of his design devices; or the metamorphic and metasemic transmutations of some constructive figures exasperated to the point that, from being part of a whole, they are amplified and hyperbolized until they coincide with the overall architectural configuration. The essay, by retracing some of Carlo Mollino’s numerous projects developed in the Alpine area and some of his main built works, tries to identify some of the conceptual devices employed in his mountain construction site.”

Multiple historical and social layers of interpretation of marital rape in England

This paper sets out to examine the way in which legal reasoning constructed marital rape and eventually officially recognized it after centuries of men’s ascendency over women. Understanding the multiple layers requires cultural and historical awareness of the traditional concept of “marriage” and the practice of religion as well as the very different conditions in which marital rape was envisaged. The main contention of this paper is to show that legal knowledge derives from a patriarchal tradition where the processing of marital abuse and rape hovered between cultural and subjective realities contrary to objective rationality.

Praktische Rationalität – monistisch, nicht dualistisch

After a short survey of some discussions in modern action theory and in the theory of explanation an alternative account of reasons for action is presented and explained. According to this alternative, not mental states of the agent but non-mental facts constitute reasons for action. Some ramifications of this view are discussed with special regard to the question of how to overcome the established dichotomy of subjective and objective rationality.