Search results for "Human condition"
showing 10 items of 14 documents
Matei Visniec: aproximación a un universo dramático a través de sus animales
2014
Matei Visniec (1956) is an author from Romania, who uses both French and Romanian expression in his plays. The coordinates of his dramatic fictional universe bring together the absurd, the symbolic, the fantastic and the conflicts in the city of men, sometimes with accurate historical and current references. Animals, present onstage in many different ways, are very common in his plays. They constitute a strange wildlife between animal and human, between the real and the fantastic.Their presence in this theatrical universe fits into their symbolic aspect, which defies the imagination by means of what is enigmatic and incomprehensible; but it also falls into their committed side to the extent…
The Significance of Treasure Hunting: Past and Present
2012
It is certainly insufficient to explain treasure hunting as a reaction to poverty or a form of greed and avarice.1 Avarice has been seen as a part of the human condition and thus as a non-historical, that is, a quasi-anthropological constant. Anthropological constants hardly ever help to explain the behaviour of historical people. In our case, an alleged human tendency to accumulate material wealth does not explain why some people engaged in treasure hunting whereas others did not. Why did people look for treasure? Why did they talk about treasure? Why were they willing to suffer the repeated failure of treasure hunts and continue to look for hidden riches?
L’ambiguïté de la condition humaine et ses interprétations existentialistes selon Simone de Beauvoir
2018
Simone de Beauvoir perceives existentialism as a philosophy of ambiguity, suggesting that a man should reconcile the contradictions of the human condition. The philosophical essays of the author show the evolution of her thinking. Beauvoir discovers the paradoxes of existentialism, mainly the antimony between responsibility and powerlessness of an individual. Her work captures an image of reality while relativizing philosophical values and maintaining the opposites. Her texts show the ambivalent attitude of the author to existence. Thus, they reflect her point of view, according to which moral consciousness only exists when a person experiences some intellectual dissonance or a sense of fai…
On Thinking the Tragic with Adorno
2016
This article seeks to provide a template for understanding the tragic dimension of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy through a reading of his early collaborative work with Max Horkheimer, the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). While Adorno’s view has often been considered to be tragic, little has been done to reconstruct the tragic dimension of his thought. I argue that the view of the human condition, presented in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is founded on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical convictions that have structural similarities with the positions held by theorists and philosophers of tragedy and the tragic. Since traces of these tragic elements can be found throughout Adorn…
Labor as Action: the Human Condition in the Anthropocene
2020
Abstract The Anthropocene has become an umbrella term for the disastrous transgression of ecological safety boundaries by human societies. The impact of this new reality is yet to be fully registered by political theorists. In an attempt to recalibrate the categories of political thought, this article brings Hannah Arendt’s framework of The Human Condition (labor, work, action) into the gravitational pull of the Anthropocene and current knowledge about the Earth System. It elaborates the historical emergence of our capacity to “act in the mode of laboring” during fossil-fueled capitalist modernity, a form of agency relating to our collectively organized laboring processes reminiscent of the…
Vulnerability and Human Dignity in the Age of Rights
2016
The chapter emphasizes the fragility of human condition and the need for political powers and laws that pursue the protection of all individuals.
Denied and false pregnancies: Opposite settings of a single evolutionary conflict
2016
Aim: A woman in denial of pregnancy is pregnant but remains unaware of her gravid state. In the case of a false pregnancy; the woman is not pregnant but believes she is and presents signs and symptoms of pregnancy. These syndromes correspond to opposite contradictions that were mainly explored separately. Our aim is to explain them by a common and consistent etiology. Method: We explore internal conflicts inherited from the evolutionary transition from solitary animals to social species. Results: The solitary and social characters are contradictory. They induce internal conflicts intrinsic to the human condition. At the reproduction level, those conflicts oppose primitive interests (genes t…
Humanity in Times of Crisis
2014
The belief in a politics of humanity, even in times of crisis, can be argued to serve as the basis of Hannah Arendt’s political thought. By presupposing freedom as a human condition, Arendt’s account of the political addresses what she takes to be humans’ capability to begin something anew, which involves new-born children as well critique of the society. Also, one way in which Arendt may be read, is by holding that the politics of humanity is, fundamentally speaking, grounded in new-born’s embodiment. Although Arendt rejects a direct link between the body and the political respectively, it still seems as if her account of humanity and dignity should be interpreted as depending on the ontol…
Vulnerability in health care - reflections on encounters in every day practice
2013
Vulnerability is a human condition and as such a constant human experience. However, patients and professional health care providers may be regarded as more vulnerable than people who do not suffer or witness suffering on a regular basis. Acquiring a deeper understanding of vulnerability would thus be of crucial importance for health care providers. This article takes as its point of departure Derek Sellman's and Havi Carel's discussion on vulnerability in this journal. Through different examples from the authors' research focusing on the interaction between health professionals and patients, existential, contextual, and relational dimensions of vulnerability are illuminated and discussed. …
Ἀνὰ μέσον ἡδονῆςτε καὶ λύπης: Avidità umana e filantropia alla prova dell’oro in Diodoro
2021
In the Third book of his Bibliotheca, Diodorus Siculus includes an account of the Egyptian gold mines and describes the terrible living conditions of the slaves who are exploited to extract the metal. In this regard, Diodorus’ source is the historian Agatharchides of Cnidus, whose account is handed down by the Byzantine writer Photius. The comparison between the two texts allows scholars to highlight the different historical perspective of Diodorus, which privileges a worldview dominated by philanthropy and compassion for the most peripheral humanity. Further confirmation arises from the description of the Iberian mines (V 35-38), which Diodorus derives from the historian and philosopher Po…