Search results for "meaning"
showing 10 items of 756 documents
Quests for Health and Contests for Meaning: African Church Leaders and Scottish Missionaries in the Early Twentieth Century Presbyterian Church in No…
2007
This article is a micro-level case study in the cultural history of medicine and healing in Africa. It analyses issues of health, healing and medicine in the early Presbyterian Church in the Northern Malawi region during the first decades of the twentieth century. A central theme is the relationship between the emerging church and African healing theories and practices. The initial focus is on the discussions and debates in the Livingstonia Presbytery, the central meeting forum for the missionaries and African church leaders. The article then shifts to the level of individual congregations and church leaders, consulting congregation papers and oral sources, analysing the role of African cle…
Scattering community
2001
In discussing the cultural history of the 19th century, Walter Benjamin diagnosed the emergence of the modern novel and its form of narration as the sign of a fracturing experience. The split in experience is related to the scattering of a homogeneous idea of space and time, constituted especially during the Enlightenment and in the German historicism. Benjamin's claim reflected the fracturing temporality of modern communities as well as the transformations in the understanding of the meaning of tradition. Here, I begin by discussing Benjamin's conceptions of experience and memory in detail. Secondly, I consider his ideas on history in the framework of challenging the new forms of narratio…
Architectures “on ruins” and ambiguous transparency: the glass in preservation and communication of archaeology
2008
Abstract The contemporary architecture is characterized by an even more marked transparency, as a result of a continuous experimentation all directed towards the search of the built “lightness”, that is towards the “dematerialization” of the architecture and the consequent loss of weight connected to the excess of form. It is in 1851 that a New Architectural Age springs because of the realization of the Crystal Palace, in London – that has addressed towards the experimentation of the glass as an architectural, structural element and of design. Today, part of this experimentation has been applied for some interventions of coverage, protection and communication in situ of the archaeological r…
Archives and documents in the digital age
2017
Este artículo se propone reflexionar sobre algunas de las características del nuevo orden digital. En particular, se centra en las mutaciones que afectan a los conceptos de archivo y documento, así como a sus rasgos más destacados. Partiendo del hecho de que estos registros son fundamentales para cualquier estudioso del pasado, indaga sobre las consecuencias de su desmaterialización. Se examina el significado de ese espacio en algunas de sus dimensiones y se subraya la evidente paradoja que supone conservar y estudiar objetos o datos que son efímeros por naturaleza y que, en su mayoría, nacieron para morir rápidamente. The paper aims to examine and explore on some of the characteristics of …
Marginal Thinking Knowledge and Communication in the Postmodern Era
2020
The paradigm of late modernity and postmodernity, characterized by the sheer living manifestation of the limit, assumes the conscience of the indissoluble, by annulling any hypothesis, interrogation or problematization. The fracturing of the self coincides with the fracturing of knowledge, as an effective dialectic movement, or, in other words, as a state of continuity of the thinking, specific to the human being. The knowledge-seeking relation to the world through exclusion, that is featured by late modernity and postmodernism is manifested, in an extreme(marginal) form, by the de-presentisation of the immanent and the transcendent and by imposing the simulation as a global process of crea…
Schelling’s pantheism and the problem of evil
2017
ABSTRACTAny religious worldview, understood in the sense that ‘life has a purpose’, has to face the problem of evil. The problem of evil has been particularly intensively discussed in the Aristotelian–Scholastic–Christian tradition. The most popular solution has been to deny that anything truly evil actually exists. It is hard to conceive why an omnipotent and perfectly good God would allow evil to appear. Yet, Western culture has been and still is full of imagery of absolute demonic evil. I suggest that this strained dialectic could be best approached by radically rethinking the nature of evil and the theological context in which it has traditionally been thought. In his middle period work…
Paul Ricoeur's Surprising Take on Recognition
2011
This essay examines Paul Ricœur’s views on recognition in his book The Course of Recognition. It highlights those aspects that are in some sense surprising, in relation to his previous publications and the general debates on Hegelian Anerkennung and the politics of recognition. After an overview of Ricœur’s book, the paper examines the meaning of “recognition” in Ricœur’s own proposal, in the dictionaries Ricœur uses, and in the contemporary debates. Then it takes a closer look at the ideas of recognition as identification and as “taking as true.” Then it turns to recognition (attestation) of oneself, in light of the distinction between human constants (and the question “What am I?”), and h…
Habermas’ Universal Pragmatics: Theory of Language and Social Theory
2013
Although Habermas’ universal pragmatics has played a marginal role in studies on pragmatics, it can still make an important and meaningful contribution, precisely because it highlights the system of validity claims that lie in speech acts. This type of analysis allows one to consider the dialogic dynamics that engage speakers in the activity of reciprocal giving and asking for reasons for saying and doing things. The reasons why a speaker knows he or she can say what he or she says in the presence of other speakers constitute an essential element of the production of meaning; and reciprocally identification of the speaker’s reasons by the listener is an indispensable condition of the activi…
The meanings older people give to their rehabilitation experience
2006
Promoting older people's ability to manage at home is important both for themselves and for society, but few studies have explored whether geriatric rehabilitation actually meets the needs of this heterogeneous group. The purpose of this study was to investigate the meanings that older adults attribute to their geriatric rehabilitation experiences. A group of 27 older adults in inpatient rehabilitation were interviewed during the programme and after returning home. Semi-structured interviews were analysed using a qualitative method, which identified three categories of meaning. In the category ‘sense of confidence with everyday life’, rehabilitation was perceived as facilitating everyday li…
Continuity and discontinuity in the semantics of the Latin preposition per: a cognitive hypothesis
2011
Abstract We propose a description of the semantic network of the Latin prepositional phrase per ‘through’ + Accusative in the early stage of this language. Drawing upon the insights of Cognitive Grammar, we analyze the role of the schematic import in the spread from basic to abstract meanings. Finally, we draw a map of the polysemous network of per, showing that the continuity of the different, but consistently linked, meanings does not necessarily imply the unidirectionality of the concrete-to-abstract shifts.