The thesis focuses on two major aspects. Firstly, it offers a discussion of the evolution of the notion of 'historicity' in the thought of various Russian thinkers and cultural historians with particular reference to the ideas of Berdiaev, Bakhtin and Likhachev. It also addresses the problem of the contribution made to the twentieth-century humanities by the 'Slavonic Renaissance' of the early part of the twentieth century. Secondly, the work examines various views on the issue of historical time and its perception and representation in artistic work, focusing primarily on the specificity of artistic time in the prose of Ivan Bunin. The discussion of this issue is based on four of Bunin's substantial works (The Shadow of the Bird, The Life of Arsen 'ev The Emancipation of Tolstoi and Dark Avenues), examining the problem of historical time from semantic and formal points of view. The analysis of the novel The Life of Arsen 'ev emerges as central to the whole discussion since it approaches the problem of the notion of 'path through life' and its significance both for an understanding of Bunin's work and in relation to the discursive practice of the 1920s and early 1930s in Russia. Moreover, for Bunin this category proves to be both a feature of artistic thinking and of generic significance, extending the boundaries of understanding and portrayal of historical time in its various aspects.

The increasingly unsustainable relationship between society and the environment is drawing considerable attention across disciplines. In sociology this attention has focused largely on developing theoretical frameworks for explicating how various social processes negatively impact the environment, however what sociology has done less well is develop rich understandings of the other side of this relationship, how ecological change can create instability in social processes. To fill this gap I employ an extended case study of the interplay between the social and ecological processes related to the introduction of Asian carp, an invasive species that has set into motion considerable contestations across political, cultural, economic and scientific social processes in the greater Chicago area as well as the Great Lakes. Through this case study I demonstrate how ecological changes, such as the migration of Asian carp, can impact social processes. I then provide an historical analysis of the 1900 reversal of the Chicago River to show how social responses to the Asian carp invasion are structured through previous histories. My aim is to demonstrate that the Asian carp invasion is not, in itself, a single transformative process, but rather a cumulative development generated and constrained via several connected social and ecological histories. My overall aim is to demonstrate the benefit of examining how social histories and ecological histories combine over time, or the historicity of social and ecological interaction. / 10000-01-01

When it comes to assessing the historicity of religious figures, the methodology used by the academy is severely outdated, disjointed, and unsound. Bayes' Theorem, first used with a historical analysis by Richard Carrier in 2014 in relation to the historicity of Jesus, is a methodologically sound vehicle with which to examine what we have all simply, in the past, accepted. This paper addresses the historicity of the Buddha, and its implication on the early śramanic origin stories, by Bayes' Theorem.

Thesis advisor: John Sallis / In comparing hermeneutic application to Aristotle's concept of phronêsis, Hans-Georg Gadamer insists that historical interpretation is not just a theoretical but also a practical task pertaining to human conduct as such. It is said to involve a similar level of self-understanding that acknowledges one's historical and linguistic situation, bearing strong connections to the intersubjective exercise of judgment and the development of freedom. This dissertation investigates these claims by presenting a detailed analysis of Gadamer's concepts of historical effect [Wirkungsgeschichte] and the reflective consciousness thereof [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein]. I delineate Gadamer's position in part through engagement with contemporary debates and misunderstandings of his stance, and in part by setting it in contrast with several central figures who influenced his notions of tradition and freedom: Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. This contrasting move helps on the one hand to reveal just how fruitful Gadamer's concepts are, and on the other to underscore that Gadamer enacts the very dialogical relation to tradition that he elucidates in his hermeneutics. On the basis of these developments, it is possible to see more clearly the ethical relevance Gadamer takes hermeneutics to have, and to grasp in particular the importance he places upon historical engagement within the humanities. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Meister Eckhart understands that human beings are thrown into meaning, that we live out our lives in meaning and that the source of this meaning is beyond our understanding. We always have an understanding of the world in which we live but we do not determine this understanding and we do not have the ability to understand the source of this understanding. This is the basic principal of philosophical hermeneutics which we also find in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer. However, there did come a time when human beings became arrogant enough to view the world as ‘n collection of objects which can be fully and finally known by manking. During the age of enlightenment man understood himself as the source of meaning and asserted his power over understanding. This arrogance would not last long. During the nineteenth century scalars like Dilthey recognized the fundamental historicity of human being. Dilthey understood that man is bound to the meaning of his age. However, he could not reject the arrogance of the scientific worldview which staked a claim on the possibility of absolute knowledge. Thus he chose to carry this prejudice into the sphere of the human sciences and constructed a new foundation for man’s power over meaning. We who study hermeneutics enjoy praising Heidegger for his insight and contribution towards hermeneutics. It is said that Heidegger discovered the absolute finitude and historicity of human being. This may well be true, but it is a shame that scholars mostly ignore the contribution of Edmund Husserl. In this document I claim that it was Husserl who laid the foundation for the new movement in hermeneutics in Germany of which Heidegger and Gadamer has been the major exponents. In the words of Gadamer, this movement may be called “Philosophical Hermeneutics” since it does not only include a method for understanding but also encompasses a way of thinking about human being in general. In my view the current discourse on the origin and development of philosophical hermeneutics represents a great injustice since the philosophy of Husserl is neglected in this discourse. In this writing I shall try to rectify this injustice by illuminating the contribution that Husserl has made to philosophical hermeneutics. Firstly I will show that Husserl’s philosophy is fundamentally about meaning. In his early distributive psychology he struggles with the question of the origin of concepts. With his concept of intentionally he rejects the traditional ontology of the object in order to make place for the ontological integrity of meaning. Unlike his predecessors he claim that objects are determined by meaning instead of the other way around. In his transcendental phenomenology he goes a step further by proclaiming that the Ego is nothing but pure existence and that consciousness in nothing but he existence of meaning. These insights are easy to overlook due to Husserl’s obsession with epistemology. His philosophy is all but consistent. But it is especially by means of this inconsistency that Husserl makes his contribution to philosophical hermeneutics. We may compare Husserl with Moses. Like Moses he reaches the top of the mountain Sinai where he can look upon the Promised Land. But, unlike Moses, he turns his back on this new land and stares back at the desert of epistemology. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Philosophy / unrestricted

This dissertation is about the political and aesthetic dimensions of Indigenous media in Peruvian Amazonia. It explores how Kukama media-makers use aesthetic mastery to engage in three key political fields in Amazonia: indigeneity, historicity, and environmentalism. I specifically examine the audiovisual discourses and media-making practices coming from an Indigenous radio station called Radio Ucamara, located in the town of Nauta in Northeastern Peru (Loreto region). Drawing on place-based ethnography and digital research methods, I analyze the way this radio station instrumentalizes multiple digital and non-digital media forms to make visible (and also audible) their identities, violent histories, and cosmological worlds amidst their confrontation with the Peruvian neoliberal state and oil companies. The dissertation also contemplates how through these processes of mediatization, Amazonian ontologies, mytho-histories, and identities are being reimagined. For this purpose, I focus both on the analysis of media products (e.g., music videos, documentaries, journalistic reportage, murals, books) and the social dynamics surrounding those creations, to understand the way Kukama media producers take part in ongoing struggles for the revitalization of the Kukama language, seeking justice for the rubber times violence, and stopping the pollution of Amazonian rivers. Following theoretical frameworks derived from the anthropology of media and the anthropology of music and verbal art in Lowland South America, I argue that media aesthetics is becoming a major instrument in building political power in the region.

The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames to create a 'simulachron', an unreliable virtual world, which problematises the reader's conceptions of the past. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a somatic response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising linguistic norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical 'false friends') and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate sensibilities of the 1ih and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel by the imbedment of sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed peculiar to a given milieu. To self-authenticate its fictions, the novel employs the 'parafictive' devices of a testamentary found artifact, an unreliable narrator and editor, plausible sociologuemes (social conventions) and ideologuemes (ideologies that inform behaviour), along with a density of period minutiae putatively grounded in the record. Any truth effects achieved are then ludically subverted by a process of critique in which structural units of the novel systematically parody the other. The novel is patterned in the structure of a nested diptych, of expositions contra posed in a mutual commentary, which extends from the defining templates of plot and episode to the micro levels of morphemes in polysemic wordplay. The tropes of nested framing and repetition of form and syntagm are defined in the thesis, respectively, as encubi/atio and 'emblematic resonance'. It is argued that these tropes, encoded in a fictive discourse that defies closure, provide a simulation of hermetic form that -when mapped upon the aleatory life world -can be productive of aesthetic affect. The agonistic elements of plot and incident in the novel are figured within the tapas of theatre, foregrounded by the duplicitous self-fashioning of the characters, and by the continual metaleptic shifts or 'frame syncopation' of narrative viewpoint, both intra and extra-diegetic. Frame syncopation is used advisedly to dilemmatise significations at both the structural and syntagmatic levels. The thesis contends that such contrived collisions of narrative interpretation may be the dynamic of affectivity in all aesthetic discourse.

La problématique est de suivre comment Le Clézio, en faisant de l'espace une donnée fondamentale, parvient à en faire une donnée déterminante de l'altérité linguistique et à créer un style qui se construit au fil du changement. Cette caractéristique est aussi génératrice d'une identité particulière: grâce à ces espaces revisités tant par la fiction que par le déplacement, Le Clézio fait de l'écriture un espace d'autocréation et de quête de l'identité personnelle. Loin de s'abandonner à l'autobiographie directe et différente de l'autofiction, l'écriture leclézienne s'interroge sur un possible rapport entre le vivre et l'écrire. Elle se veut une possibilité d'exister et de revivre à chaque fois un passé ancestral que l'auteur n'a jamais connu. En cela, elle est réintégration de l'ailleurs dans une perspective de re-conquête de soi. Le Clézio a opté pour une esthétique du divers qui a fait du déplacement un principe fondamental, une sorte d' « errance sur la terre errante ». C'est pour cela que la langue se fait, elle aussi, mobile, une langue qui change à la frontière de l'Ici, là où le français se fait également voix de l'autre dans toute sa différence et voix de l'auteur. L'errance dont Le Clézio a renouvelé le sens depuis Le Livre des fuites touche tous les détails de la création littéraire. Nous assistons à une mobilité constante qui est plutôt "mobilisme" comme chez Bergson, là où la langue se fait parole écrite perpétuellement renouvelée. Ce choix esthétique a tout un soubassement philosophique qui s'inscrit dans la perspective de la rupture avec la pensée occidentale. Le Clézio revendique une nouvelle manière d'être au monde profondément liée à la circonstance. La mobilité appliquée à tous les détails de l'écriture, se trouve ontologiquement transposée en un devenir autre constant qui se présente comme trait définitoire d'un sujet qui vit mal la sédentarisation. Ainsi, le «je », libéré de toute historialité particulière, est toujours en quête d'un espace vital en perpétuel changement. En fait, l’Etre, dans la perspective leclézienne, est plutôt Etre-à. Loin de la conception cartésienne, Le Clézio fait de l'espace une des principales composantes d'un cogito qui est plutôt praxis dans le sens où le sujet doit quitter le cadre de la pensée, qui est aussi une prison, vers l'ouverture sur le monde. L'être-à leclézien est un passage du penser au vivre et du vivre à l'exister dans le sens d'une habitation poétique. C'est en dépassant l'autoréflexivité que le sujet se réalise en tant qu'entité non exclusivement cérébrale. / The main question is to explain how Le Clézio, while considering space a fundamental dimension, manages to make it a determining factor in the linguistic otherness and thus creates a style that is built all the way through change. This feature generates a unique identity. In fact, thanks to these revisited spaces both by fiction and displacement, Clézio is writing a space of self-creation and quest for personal identity. Far from yielding to direct autobiography which is different from autofiction, Le Clézio’s writing questions a possible relationship between living and writing. His writing claims the possibility to live and relive whenever an ancestral past is evoked and that the author has never known. As such, it is the reintegration of the somewhere in the perspective of self re-conquest. Le Clézio opted for an aesthetic of diversity that has made of displacement a fundamental orientation, a kind of "errance sur la terre errante". That is why language is made mobile. It is a language that changes on the borders of “the Here” and where French itself becomes a voice for the other in all its differences and also a voice of the author. The Errand that Le Clézio has renewed its meaning in Le Livre des fuites affects the very details of literary creation. We are witnessing a constant mobility is rather "mobilism" as with Bergson, where language is rendered a perpetually-renewed written word. This aesthetic choice is a whole philosophical foundation that fits in the context of the break with Western thought. Le Clézio boasts a new way of being in the world profoundly related to circumstantiality. Mobility applied to all the details of writing is ontologically transposed into another constant becoming that delimits a subject who badly lives settlement. Thus, the "I", free of any particular historicity, is still in search of a vital space in perpetual change. In fact, Being, according to Le Clézio is rather Being. Away from the Cartesian conception, Le Clézio renders space a major component of a cogito which is rather praxis in the sense that the subject must leave the framework of thought, which is also a prison, to the opening of the world. The Le Clézien l’être-à is a passage from thinking to living and from living to existing in the sense of poetic dwelling. It is by going beyond self-reflexivity that the subject is self- realized as an entity that is not exclusively cerebral.

My dissertation project investigates Paul Feyerabend's later work, focusing on his epistemological and ontological positions. This thesis analyzes Feyerabend's later pluralistic philosophy and his view of historicity of knowledge from examples of the interpretation of the transition from archaic pre-rational epistemological framework to Greek and Western rationalism. The first part outlines Feyerabend's philosophical development along with his continuously changing philosophical views and offers an account of Feyerabend's critical reception among the philosophical community. The second part focuses on Feyerabend's interpretation of archaic Greek thought. Feyerabend presents a pre-rational epistemological framework in his concept of "paratactic aggregate." Feyerabend's idea is based on an analysis of late geometric figurative art and on development of Snell's linguistic research in the scope of Homeric psychology. Feyerabend highlights this original archaic worldview and explains the rise of rationality in classical Greek philosophy and culture primarily as the result of a complex idiosyncratic socio-historical process and not as progress in the development of man's reasoning. The purpose of this part of my thesis is to demonstrate how Snell's and Feyerabend's interpretation of this archaic...

This dissertation examines the Hunt circle's public activities and its historical significance in terms of public-sphere theory proposed by Jurgen Harbermas. Recent studies on Romantic literature have attended to how Romantic writers' literary practices were conditioned upon their contemporary history, as opposed to the traditional notion of Romanticism based on an affirmation of individual creativity. Although these studies meaningfully highlight the historicity inherent in seemingly individualistic Romantic texts, they have frequently failed to assess the way in which this historicity of Romantic texts is connected to Romantic writers' own will to engage with public issues by placing too much emphasis on how history determines individuals' activities. In this sense, the notion of public sphere offers a productive theoretical framework by which to read the historicity of Romantic literature without disavowing an individual writer's role in historical proceedings, since it underscores a historical process in which a communal interaction between individuals constitutes a progress of history. By focusing on this significance of public-sphere theory, this dissertation suggests that the Hunt circle, whose members' communal literary practices were aimed at achieving the public good in the tumultuous post-Napoleonic era, serves as a model of this process-based historical theorization. Chapter I examines the significance of public-sphere theory in assessing how the Hunt circle engaged in its contemporary history. Chapter II elucidates the nature of the public sphere that Leigh Hunt's and his circle's activities created and discusses the problems that this public sphere faced in the historical context of the early nineteenth century. Chapter III shows how the Hunt circle exposed a sense of anxiety and instability in the face of the commercialized literary public sphere by examining John Keats's literary practices. Chapter IV highlights Percy Bysshe Shelley's public ideal which aimed for a unified and inclusive public sphere beyond class boundaries and traces how this ideal was frustrated in the ensuing historical proceedings. Chapter V deals with the final phase of the Hunt circle and its disintegration by observing the ways in which Mary Shelley memorialized the Hunt circle for the feminized reading public of the Victorian period. By illuminating the nature of the Hunt circle's activities for the public, this dissertation ultimately aims to reassess how literary intellectuals in the Romantic period struggled to sustain the traditional calling of men of letters in their contemporary public sphere.