This concise overview of the perception of Islam in eight of the most important German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allows a new and fascinating investigation of how these thinkers, within their own bodies of work, often espoused contradicting ideas about Islam and their nearest Muslim neighbors. Exploring a variety of 'neat compartmentalizations' at work in the representations of Islam, as well as distinct vocabularies employed by these key intellectuals, Ian Almond parses these vocabularies to examine the (...) importance of Islam in the very history of German thought. Almond further demonstrates the ways in which German philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, and Marx repeatedly ignored information about the Muslim world that did not harmonize with the particular landscapes they were trying to paint – a fact which in turn makes us reflect on what it means when a society possesses 'knowledge' of a foreign culture. (shrink)

Introduction -- Leibniz, historicism, and the plague of Islam -- Kant, Islam, and the preservation of boundaries -- Herder's Arab fantasies -- Keeping the Turks out of islam : Goethe's Ottoman plan -- Friedrich Schlegel and the emptying of Islam -- Hegel and the disappearance of Islam -- Marx the Moor -- Nietzsche's peace with Islam.

This book examines a series of common metaphors in the works of Derrida and the Sufism of Muhyddin Ibn 'Arabi, considered to be of the most influential figures in Islamic thought. The author addresses the significant absence of attention on the relationship between Islam and Derrida and also provides a deconstructive perspective on Ibn 'Arabi.

: The status of Ibn 'Arabi and Derrida as thinkers is examined: their disagreements with rational/metaphysical thought on the basis of différance and what Ibn 'Arabi calls al-haqq or the Real. Advantage is taken of the fact that both writers speak of emancipatory projects in their work-the freeing of writing from the shackles of logocentric thought and of the unthinkably Divine (the Real) from the constructs of philosophers and theologians. Just as Ibn 'Arabi believes that no thinker can provide ''a (...) definition of the Real [al haqq],'' Derrida insists that no thinker can escape the history of metaphysics. In the work of both, the reaffirmation of something vital, inconstant, and elusive that defeats all attempts to discuss it plays a common role and evolves according to a common structure. If différance and the Real do seem uncannily analogous-sharing, for example, features like namelessness, radical otherness, intangibility/invisibility/unthinkability, and atemporality, not to mention their paradoxically generative functions-there are also a number of significant differences. (shrink)

This article re‐examines a familiar essay of Benjamin’s, ‘The Task of the Translator’, from a Neoplatonic point of view. Beginning with a brief survey of various other Neoplatonic moments in Benjamin’s work , ‘The Task of the Translator’ is considered as a collection of metaphors on the act of translation – the translation as the ghost of the original, or its blossom, or its mantle. Drawing on varied examples from a diverse canon of Neoplatonists – Plotinus, Pseudo‐Dionysius, Eckhart, Nicholas of (...) Cusa, Ibn ‘Arabi – the article shows not just how each of Benjamin’s metaphors has an unexpectedly esoteric genealogy, but also how they conflict with one another to produce a surprisingly apophatic conclusion on the difficulty of translation. (shrink)

This article re‐examines a familiar essay of Benjamin’s, ‘The Task of the Translator’, from a Neoplatonic point of view. Beginning with a brief survey of various other Neoplatonic moments in Benjamin’s work (where a greater totality or wholeness is referred to), ‘The Task of the Translator’ is considered as a collection of metaphors on the act of translation – the translation as the ghost of the original, or its blossom, or its mantle. Drawing on varied examples from a diverse canon (...) of Neoplatonists – Plotinus, Pseudo‐Dionysius, Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Ibn ‘Arabi – the article shows not just how each of Benjamin’s metaphors has an unexpectedly esoteric genealogy, but also how they conflict with one another to produce a surprisingly apophatic conclusion on the difficulty of translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experimenting with Islam:Nietzschean Reflections on Bowles’s AraplainaIan AlmondIn a letter to his friend Köselitz dated March 13 1881, Nietzsche wrote: "Ask my old comrade Gersdorff whether he'd like to go with me to Tunisia for one or two years.... I want to live for a while amongst Muslims, in the places moreover where their faith is at its most devout; this way my eye and judgement for all things (...) European will be sharpened."1 Various motifs in the work of Paul Bowles—a fascination with cruelty, an obsession with destruction, a predilection for abysses (metaphorical and literal) in the landscapes of his stories—invite some kind of reference to Nietzsche, however brief. Nietzsche's desire to live in the most intense pocket of Islam he could find had, one suspects, less to do with Islam than with his desire for a "trans-European eye"2 —four years after his remarks on Tunisia, Nietzsche would say the same thing about Japan in a letter to his sister.3 Nietzsche's proposed trip to Tunisia would lead to a better understanding of Europe, not Islam, and would provide him with an outside perspective on the European disease of modernity—a different set of lenses for his Kantian spectacles. This conception of Islam was, therefore, a means to self-knowledge, a handy instrument for diagnosing one's own illness, and a useful mirror to observe with greater clarity the more unattractive elements in one's own features. Most of Nietzsche's references to Islam and Islamic culture—and there are well over a hundred and fifty of them in the Gesamtausgabe—become clearer when one keeps this functional, almost anthropological, approach to the Islamic Other in mind.Although there is nothing new about this idea of the Orient as a tool of European self-awareness—as early as the 1780s, Sir William Jones was [End Page 309] already hoping the study of Sanskrit and Arabic would offer a "more extensive insight into the human [read "European"] mind"4 —an awareness of the genealogy of such Western interest in Arabs and Mohammedaner certainly helps us better understand Bowles's own eerie fascination with the faith. The parodies of missionaries, academics, and policemen which we find in stories such as "The Time of Friendship" and "A Distant Episode" confirm the distance Bowles attempted to put between his own texts and those Orientalist traditions of both Christian (i.e., Islam as a pool of potential believers) and Imperialist (Muslims as potential human resources) provenance. In attempting to escape such vocabularies and textual traditions, Bowles ultimately replicates and reshapes their original representations, producing an irony of delicate complexities, which is the object of this article.Near the beginning of Bowles's witty, though somewhat caustic autobiography Without Stopping, a moment takes place that gives an insight into the way, in later years, the narrator would approach different cultures with the intention of constructing new worlds. At age five, Bowles relates how he often found himself alone in his parents large upstate New York house. Abandoned to his own devices, the young narrator began to entertain himself by fabricating and mapping out new countries with his own imagination: "Soon I invented a planet with landmasses and seas. The continents were Ferncowland, Lanton, Zaganokworld and Araplaina. I drew maps of each and gave them mountain ranges, rivers, cities and railways."5 The image is captivating not only for its visual appeal, of a five-year-old Bowles, future author of Sheltering Sky, sitting on the carpet, crayoning out his map of Araplaina. It also suggests the presence, very early on, of what will always be a central motivation in Bowles's fascination with the world of Islam: a desire for novelty, for the really new, as an escape from boredom. Bowles's Tangiers would later provide the very Araplaina he had been seeking all along.In the world of Bowles's North African short stories, a number of common features seem to unite the otherwise disparate collection of tales found in The Time of Friendship and The Delicate Prey. Probably the foremost of these is cruelty. In "The Delicate Prey," the Moungari traveler... (shrink)

I employ these words, I admit, with a glance towards the operations of childbearing–but also with a glance towards those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so …only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity.The question of writing could be opened only if the book was closed. The (...) joyous wandering of the graphein then became wandering without return. (shrink)

I employ these words, I admit, with a glance towards the operations of childbearing–but also with a glance towards those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so …only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity.The question of writing could be opened only if the book was closed. The (...) joyous wandering of the graphein then became wandering without return. (shrink)

Tradition has it that, although we experience darkness, we can neither hear nor hallucinate silence. At most, we hear that it is silent, in virtue of lacking auditory experience. This cognitive view is at odds with our ordinary thought and talk. Yet it is not easy to vouchsafe the perception of silence: Sorensen‘s recent account entails the implausible claim that the permanently and profoundly deaf are perpetually hallucinating silence. To better defend the view that we can genuinely hear and hallucinate (...) silence, we must reject the austere picture of conscious experience which underpins the cognitive theory. According to that picture, conscious experience is a simple relation between subjects and objects. In the absence of an object, there is no relation, and so no experience. By enriching this picture, room can be found for the experience of silence. I explore this idea in two phases. First, I defend the thought that we can hear and hallucinate certain forms of silence, such as pauses, in virtue of experiencing contrastive sounds. Second, I draw on Moore‘s analysis of sensation to suggest that simply experiencing silence is a special form of objectless consciousness. I offer two ways of fleshing out this idea. According to the first, auditory experience possesses a temporal field within which the absence of sounds can be perceived. According to the second, purely Moorean account, it is our capacity to listen in the absence of sounds that underlies the phenomenon of experiencing silence. (shrink)

Background: Clinical and experimental findings have suggested that insomnia is associated with altered emotion processing, such as facial emotion recognition and impairments in executive functions. However, the results still appear non-consensual and have recently been presented by a few number of studies. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether patients with Insomnia disorder will present alterations in recognition of facial emotions and that such alterations will be related to Executive Functions and that Insomnia Disorder patients will (...) exhibit a lower Executive Functions performance when compared to normal controls individuals. Method: A total of 11 individuals diagnosed with insomnia disorder and 15 control participants took part in the present cross-sectional study. They completed questionnaires covering socio-demographic data, a sleep and mood evaluation, and a cognitive assessment. Moreover, they underwent a computerized Facial Emotional Recognition test, consisting of facial emotion labeling and facial emotion matching. Results: Individuals with insomnia presented a lower recognition of facial expressions of fear and sadness in comparison to control volunteers. Perceptual Organization Index was found to be statistically significant lower in the insomnia group compared to the control group. There was a statistically significant association between facial recognition emotional and cognitive processes of in executive functions performance, especially in processes related to the inhibitory control, planning capacity, problem solving and cognitive flexibility in insomnia group. Conclusions: Insomnia disorder impairs the facial emotion recognition of the fear and sadness. Insomniacs with impairment in the facial emotion recognition had impaired performance of executive functions. There is a negative impact on processes related to cognitive-emotional capacity than on processes related to social-emotional recognition. Keywords: insomnia, facial emotional recognition, sleep deprivation, cognition, executive functions. (shrink)

Introduction -- Evidence from children -- Evidence form infants and non-human animals -- Evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology -- Evidence from adults -- The cognitive basis of mindreading -- Elaborating and applying the theory.

Plato of Athens, who laid the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition and in range and depth ranks among its greatest practitioners, was born to a prosperous and politically active family circa 427 BC. In early life an admirer of Socrates, Plato later founded the first institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy, among whose many notable alumni was Aristotle. Traditionally ascribed to Plato are thirty-five dialogues developing Socrates' dialectic method and composed with great stylistic virtuosity, together with (...) the Apology and thirteen letters. The four works in this volume recount the circumstances of Socrates' trial and execution in 399 BC. In Euthyphro, set in the weeks before the trial, Socrates and Euthyphro attempt to define holiness. In Apology, Socrates answers his accusers at trial and unapologetically defends his philosophical career. In Crito, a discussion of justice and injustice explains Socrates' refusal of Crito's offer to finance his escape from prison. And in Phaedo, Socrates discusses the concept of an afterlife and offers arguments for the immortality of the soul. This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition by Harold North Fowler, offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship." -- Publisher's description. (shrink)

I offer an account of the virtue of intellectual humility, construed as a pair of dispositions enabling proper management of one's intellectual confidence. I then show its integral role in a range of familiar educational practices and concerns, and finally describe how certain entrenched educational attitudes and conceptions marginalise or militate against the cultivation and exercise of this virtue.

Although critics often argue that the new atheists are arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded and so on, there is currently no philosophical analysis of this complaint - which I will call 'the vice charge' - and no assessment of whether it is merely a rhetorical aside or a substantive objection in its own right. This Chapter therefore uses the resources of virtue epistemology to articulate this ' vice charge' and to argue that critics are right to imply that new atheism is intrinsically (...) epistemically vicious, and it ends with some remarks about the rationality of allowing such intrinsically vicious doctrines to feature within public debate about important matters concerning science, religion, and politics. (shrink)

Science is often thought of as a methodical but dull activity. But the finest science, the breakthroughs most admired and respected by scientists themselves, is characterized by elegance." "What does elegance mean in the context of science? Economy is a considerable part of it; creativity too. Sometimes, a suggested solution is so simple and neat that it elicits an exclamation of wonder from the observer. The greatest science, whether primarily theoretical or experimental, reflects a creative imagination." "In this book, the (...) distinguished physiologist and writer Ian Glynn explores some of the finest examples of elegance in science: the delightful simplicity of the laws discovered by Kepler and Newton in the motion of the planets; Galileo's experiments with an inclined plane; the remarkable work of Thomas Young on light; dazzling insights into the counterintuitive workings of our perception demonstrated by Richard Gregory and Vilayanur Ramachandran; and the several breakthroughs that led to Crick and Watson's unravelling of the structure and function of DNA. The result is a fascinating tour through some of the most important episodes in the history of science."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

It is very well known that from the late-1960s onwards Feyerabend began to radically challenge some deeply-held ideas about the history and methodology of the sciences. It is equally well known that, from around the same period, he also began to radically challenge wider claims about the value and place of the sciences within modern societies, for instance by calling for the separation of science and the state and by questioning the idea that the sciences served to liberate and ameliorate (...) human societies. But what is less known is how, if at all, these two sets of challenges were connected, and why Feyerabend felt it important to raise them at all. In this chapter, my aim is to explore these issues by considering why Feyerabend used radical strategies to challenge the authority of science, and what purpose, if any, they were supposed to serve. Why, for instance, did Feyerabend defend alternative medicine, psychical abilities, astrology, magic and witchcraft and why did he argue that ‘Western science’ is complicit in environmental destruction, intellectual imperialism, social oppression, and spiritual destitution. Located in their historical and political context, such defences and arguments seem peculiar, not least because science was recognised not only as a central site of the intellectual and ideological competition between the West and the Soviet Union, but also because Western victory in that site was considered inevitable. What, then, did Feyerabend think he was trying to achieve by raising radical challenges to a central component of the cultural and intellectual prestige of the Western world grounded in appeals to practices and traditions which most would regard as eccentric at best and absurd at worst? My suggestion is that Feyerabend was making a subtler point than one might suppose. For the purpose of these radical challenges was to determine if the members of Western societies would in fact honour the epistemic standards – of tolerance, critical enquiry – which were identified as being characteristic of science and definitive of the social and political values of Western liberal democracy. I suggest that Feyerabend was trying to demonstrate that scientists were, too often, guilty of the same intolerant and dogmatic attitudes which were, according to prevailing propaganda, the property of illiberal totalitarian societies. Science does not reflect the superior epistemic and political values of Western societies but are, in fact, reflective of the same vices ascribed to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then the sciences are not symbols of our epistemic and political values, but quite the reverse, hence Feyerabend’s talk of the ‘dogmatic’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘ratiofascist’ nature of modern science. But there is a positive upshot to Feyerabend’s challenge. For even if the sciences do not yet reflect the epistemic and political values of liberal democratic Western societies, they might yet be reformed so that they are. And there is a parallel between Feyerabend’s strategy and that of many of the other radicals of the time – student activists, environmentalists, and pacifists – namely to test the commitment to tolerance and deliberative debate of the establishment by asking it to seriously engage with ideas and convictions opposed to its own. For both science and society can become ‘tyrannical’ through the same means: by exempting themselves from critical scrutiny, by promoting self-serving ‘myths’ about themselves, and by derogating and excluding alternatives, including the ‘outsider’ perspectives they offer. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Feyerabend is distinctive in virtue of his willingness to offer radical criticisms of the authority of science such that it can fulfil its legitimate ideological role – namely, of symbolising and instantiating our core epistemic and political values – such that we can offer a sincere and meaningful answer to Feyerabend’s question ‘what’s so great about science?’. (shrink)

Philosophers have lately seized upon Sperling's partial report technique and subsequent work on iconic memory in support of controversial claims about perceptual experience, in particular that phenomenology overflows cognitive access. Drawing on mounting evidence concerning postdictive perception, I offer an interpretation of Sperling's data in terms of cue-sensitive experience which fails to support any such claims. Arguments for overflow based on change-detection paradigms (e.g. Landman et al., 2003; Sligte et al., 2008) cannot be blocked in this way. However, such paradigms (...) are fundamentally different from Sperling's and, for rather different reasons, equally fail to establish controversial claims about perceptual experience. (shrink)

Reading W.K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” in evidentialist terms is standard. However, evidentialist accounts face several longstanding interpretive issues over the Shipowner Story and Clifford’s Motto. This article defends an evidentialist reading. But what distinguishes it from others is that it interprets “The Ethics of Belief” according to Clifford’s “first principle of natural ethics”, a principle he articulates in prior writings, and which comes down to social trust. I reorient Clifford’s evidentialism by returning to his core moral principle and (...) argue that doing so can establish coherence across Clifford’s writings on ethics and can help resolve the relevant interpretive issues. (shrink)

How should we deal with apparent causation involving events that have not happened when omissions are cited as causes or when something is said to prevent some event? Phil Dowe claims that causal statements about preventions and omissions are ‘quasi-causal' claims about what would have been a cause, if the omitted event had happened or been caused if the prevention had not occurred. However, one important theory of the logic of causal statements – Donald Davidson's – allows us to take (...) causal statements about omissions and preventions as direct causal statements about events that are counterfactually described. This analysis provides a basis for solving a number of puzzles about ‘negative' events. Any ‘intuition' of difference between causal statements employing such descriptions and others employing positive descriptions of events is also explained. With omissions, where this intuition has some basis, it is shown that nevertheless omissions do really cause outcomes. (shrink)

I argue that we can profitably understanding Feyerabend’s work in at least the latter half of his career in terms of a series of experiments with ways of conceptualising and criticising scientism, under the aegis of a ‘critique of scientific reason’. The critique of science’s self-understanding was the more sophisticated and successful, while the critique of scientific modernity was more erratic and less effective, due mainly to the failure to take up the necessary resources.

A collection of answers to the philosophical questions on people's minds-from the big to the personal to the ones you didn't know you needed answered. Based on real-life questions from his Ask a Philosopher series, Ian Olasov offers his answers to questions such as: - Are people innately good or bad? - Is it okay to have a pet fish? - Is it okay to have kids? - Is color subjective? - If humans colonize Mars, who will own the land? (...) - Is ketchup a smoothie? - Is there life after death? - Should I give money to homeless people? Ask a Philosopher shows that there's a way of making philosophy work for each of us, and that philosophy can be both perfectly continuous with everyday life, and also utterly transporting. From questions that we all wrestle with in private to questions that you never thought to ask, Ask a Philosopher will get you thinking. (shrink)

In his book The Things We Mean, Stephen Schiffer advances a subtle defence of what he calls the ‘face-value’ analysis of attributions of belief and reports of speech. Under this analysis, ‘Harold believes that there is life on Venus’ expresses a relation between Harold and a certain abstract object, the proposition that there is life on Venus. The present essay first proposes an improvement to Schiffer’s ‘pleonastic’ theory of propositions. It then challenges the face-value analysis. There will be such things (...) as propositions only if they possess conditions of identity and distinctness. By analyzing Frege’s theory of propositions (Gedanken), I argue that such conditions may be found for the special case of beliefs and sayings advanced as premises and conclusions of deductive arguments. These conditions, however, are not applicable to most ordinary beliefs and sayings. Ordinary attributions and reports, then, do not place thinkers and speakers in relations to propositions. A bonus is exposure of the fallacy in the Putnam-Taschek objection to Frege’s theory of sense and reference. (shrink)

This outstanding reference source to epistemic injustice is the first collection of its kind. Over thirty chapters address topics such as testimonial and hermeneutic injustice and virtue epistemology, objectivity and objectification, implicit bias, gender and race.

Ian Normile begins this study from the premise that critical thinking is often conceptualized and practiced in problematically narrow and instrumentalized ways. Following Ronald Barnett, he suggests that the idea of critical being can help expand the theory and practice of critical thinking to better meet the needs of education and society. Essential to this effort is greater consideration of how critical thinking articulates with other aspects of being. Normile uses two examples of “non-critical” experiences that he argues can help (...) critical thinking expand into critical being. First, he explores the emotive power of wonder as a source of inspiration and emotional education, and as an essential aspect of critical thinking. He then argues that curiosity, wonder, contemplation, and critical thinking are complementary aspects of critical being. The second example is the Chinese concept of wu-wei, a form of efficacious non-critical action. Normile argues that inevitable breakdowns in wu-wei provide opportunities for critical reflection while the unlearning common to both wonder and wu-wei facilitates receptivity to new perspectives and possibilities beyond the boundaries of the familiar; in this state, one is capable of facilitating the metacritique that is essential to truly transformative critical thinking. Normile concludes with some brief thoughts on implications for practice as a starting point for further inquiry. (shrink)

Linda Martín Alcoff and others have emphasised that the discipline of philosophy suffers from a ‘demographic problem’. The persistence of this problem is partly the consequence of various forms of resistance to efforts to address the demographic problem. Such resistance is complex and takes many forms and could be responded to in different ways. In this paper, I argue that our attempts to explain and understand the phenomenon of resistance should use a kind of explanatory pluralism that, following Quassim Cassam, (...) I call multidimensionalism. I describe four general kinds of resistance and consider varying explanations, focusing on those focused on vices and social structures. I argue that vice-explanations and structural- explanations are both mutually consistent and mutually entailing. If so, there is no need to choose between vice explanations and structural explanations or any other kinds of explanation. We can and should be multidimensionalists: using many together is better. (shrink)

Gerald Cohen's critique of John Rawls's theory of justice is that it is concerned only with the justice of social institutions, and must thus arbitrarily draw a line between those inequalities excluded and those allowed by the basic structure. Cohen claims that a proper concern with the interests of the least advantaged would rule out 'incentives' for 'talented' individuals. I argue that Rawls's assumption that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society does not arbitrarily restrict the concerns (...) of political justice, as Cohen claims. Further, I argue that it does not allow 'deep' inequalities within a just basic structure. When properly understood, Rawls's theory of justice is strongly egalitarian, taken as a theory of fairness in the way the burdens and benefits of social cooperation are distributed, even if it is not as egalitarian as Cohen wishes. (shrink)

The original comic version of T'Challa is a traditional monarch, whose actions demonstrate his concern for maintaining power and securing his nation. In fact, with his strategic use of violence, his demonstrations of empathy and humanity, and his embrace of religious symbolism, T'Challa was classically “Machiavellian” in the comics. "Panther's Rage" chronicles T'Challa's return to Wakanda after an extended stay in the United States as a costumed superhero, most notably with the Avengers. Machiavelli would approve of T'Challa's embrace of violence. (...) Machiavelli was keenly aware of how a ruler should be perceived by his subjects, suggesting that a successful ruler will appear to possess five key qualities that meet with the approval of his subjects: mercy, faith, honesty, humanity, and religion. T'Challa is never as cruel as some of Machiavelli's models, but he does preserve his divinely ordained kingdom by employing fear and religion to stay in power. (shrink)

Containing over 750 in-depth entries, this is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date dictionary of critical theory available. It covers the whole range of critical theory, including the Frankfurt school, cultural materialism, cultural studies, gender studies, film studies, literary theory, hermeneutics, historical materialism, internet studies, and sociopolitical critical theory. Entries clearly explain even the most complex of theoretical discourses, such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. There are biographies of important figures in the field, with feature entries for those who (...) have heavily influenced areas of the discipline, e.g. Deleuze. -/- Entries are fully cross-referenced and contain further reading where appropriate. To provide extra information this edition features an appendix of recommended web links, which are accessible via the Dictionary of Critical Theory companion website, where they are also checked regularly and kept up to date. -/- Covering all aspects of the subject from globalization and race studies, to queer theory and feminism, this multidisciplinary A-Z is essential for students of literary and cultural studies and is useful for anyone studying a humanity subject requiring a knowledge of theory. (shrink)

This companion volume to Archaeology as Long-term History focuses on the symbolism of artefacts. It seeks at once to refine current theory and method relating to interpretation and show, with examples, how to conduct this sort of archaeological work. Some contributors work with the material culture of modern times or the historic period, areas in which the symbolism of mute artefacts has traditionally been thought most accessible. However, the book also contains a good number of applications in prehistory to demonstrate (...) the feasibility of symbolic interpretation where good contextual data survive from the distant past. In relation to wider debates within the social sciences, the volume is characterised by a concern to place abstract symbolic codes within their historical context and within the contexts of social actions. In this respect, it develops further some of the ideas presented in Dr Hodder's Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, an earlier volume in this series. (shrink)