Search results for "Topos theory"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Deliberative Rhetoric of Parliamentary Debate
2018
The chapter deals with the parliamentary moves of debating. Parliamentarisation can be connected to practice of debate pro et contra. Parliamentary rhetoric is no merely eloquence or oratory in the classical sense, but parliamentary politics has modified the deliberative genre of rhetoric to a debate between multiple agents in line with the parliamentary procedure. Parliamentary politics is understood as the activity of all members participating in the debate and rhetoric then considers the styles of politicking as moves in the debate, in which the act of debating enjoys a priority over the final decisions. The chapter presents how different faces of rhetoric—genres, maxims, topoi, figures …
Saying the Saffu and Beating the Law: The Changing Role of Sacred Sites in the Oromo Politico-Juridical System
2013
This chapter presents a semiotic analysis of the role of sacred sites and other physical features and objects in key political/religious rituals of the Oromo people living in the Horn of Africa. Theoretically, it builds on Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of ‘archive’ as an intersection of the topological and the nomological of the place and the law. For Derrida, the place of the archive is not a locatable place, but a topos, the marking of a discourse. In contrast to the European tradition based primarily on archives inscribed in writing and summarised in a codified law, for the traditional Oromo society, laws were part of the oral tradition – a mixture of religion, law and …
Leitbilder im Recht: Grenzen der Ordnung – Chancen der Unordnung
2018
„Guiding principles“ as topoi in German juridical discourse are mainly analyzed with regard to their relation to familiar dogmatic and methodological categories. This article suggests engaging with a deconstructing, psychoanalysis-inspired approach to the guiding principles of legal discourse.
Reading Debates Politically
2017
This chapter focuses on the concept of debate, taking the concept of ‘political literacy’ as point of departure. The concept of political literacy means that it is crucial to be willing and competent to judge actions, situations, practices and institutions in terms of political struggle. What kinds of aims can we identify in various utterances, arguments or topoi, and how may we assess their consequences? Based on this idea of political literacy, our leading thesis in this chapter is that parliamentary debate, as it was formed and is practised in the British parliament at Westminster, forms an approximation to the ideal type of debate. The ideal type allows the classification of the structu…
Categories, Musical Instruments, and Drawings: A Unification Dream
2019
The mathematical formalism of category theory allows to investigate musical structures at both low and high levels, performance practice (with musical gestures) and music analysis. Mathematical formalism can also be used to connect music with other disciplines such as visual arts. In our analysis, we extend former studies on category theory applied to musical gestures, including musical instruments and playing techniques. Some basic concepts of categories may help navigate within the complexity of several branches of contemporary music research, giving it a unitarian character. Such a 'unification dream,' that we can call 'cARTegory theory,' also includes metaphorical references to topos th…
The Politics of Agenda in the Union Debates
2016
The chapter consists of a discussion of the politicisation of the agenda in the Oxford and Cambridge Unions’ public debates roughly between the reform acts in 1832 and 1867. As well as relating the setting of political agenda to the classical rhetorical tradition of inventio, Haapala contrasts the Union practices to the parliamentary setting of debating on both sides of an issue. The chapter also proposes that the Union public debates showed the use of certain rhetorical commonplaces, or topoi, which are named as principle, expediency, character and vote of confidence. Finally, Haapala offers a typology of political agenda setting in the Unions.
Participant Observation: The Personal Commitment in Native Life—A Problematic Methodological Topos
2020
While it is well known that fieldwork started long before Malinowski, it is equally well known that the ethnographic method based on participant observation has been, since the 1920s, taken as a foundation for anthropological research and for the scientific status of the knowledge acquired by its means. This essay has several purposes: highlighting some issues related to Malinowski’s theory and practice of research, which are full of implications not always grasped in their theoretical and methodological complexity; recalling some criticisms that have been put forward in the anthropological debate toward the notion of reflexive observation; discussing some uses and abuses of ethnographic pr…
An interpretation of Finnish religious nationalism: the fourtopoiof theological depoliticisation
2009
. The topic of this article is the relation between ‘politicality’ and theology in the discourse of Finnish religious nationalism during the Winter War of 1939–40 and the Continuation War of 1941–44. I shall draw on the ideas of Kari Palonen and Anthony D. Smith in attempting to thematise theological depoliticisation as an intrinsic element of religious nationalism. Also, I will elaborate its political significance in the Finnish context, where the role of traditional religion in the general development of nationalist thought has been particularly important. The specific focus is on how prominent representatives of the Finnish clergy related to war and nationalist claims in general. My inte…
The Semantics of Musical Topoi
2015
The article introduces an empirical approach to studying music’s extrinsic meanings, based on the idea of musical topos as a set of musical entities that is delimited and furnished with meaning by extramusical associations in a listener population. The proposed methodology involves free, associative responses as well as responses on semantic variables addressing the imagery. After deriving potential topical structures for a given musical domain from the quantitative results, the structures are substantiated by using them to guide a rule-based, qualitative analysis of the free responses. The approach allows a view to the topical organization of a musical domain in which the identity of each …
Ética del discurso: ¿un marco filosófico para la neuroética?
2013
Neuroethics requires a framework of philosophical ethics from which to interprete, integrate and criticiseneuroscientific progress in moral field. This article sets out to: 1) Show to what extent this framework is necessary; 2) Tackle the question of the method for constructing this framework; 3) Compile the main tópoi of the neurosciences that the framework has to interpret and integrate; 4) Propose the ethics of discourse as a philosophical framework for neuroethics; 5) Display certain shortcomings of this framework and put forward the dialogical ethics of cordial reason as being more appropriate.La Neuroética necesita un marco de ética filosófica desde el que interpretar, integrar y crit…