Thesis (Ph. D.)--Drexel University, 2007. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-186).

This dissertation examines the issue of intercultural understanding. I explore the role played by language in constituting human subjectivity in accordance with the common insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, in order to: (1) affirm the complexity and fragility of the process of building understanding in fight of our immersion in specific cultural-linguistic worldviews; and (2) demonstrate that human beings are ontologically predisposed to achieve understanding, and that this ontological predisposition is enhanced by a constant and inescapable process of crossing "language boundaries" in daily life. I argue that the very manner of human induction into cultural-linguistic worldviews suggests the means by which intercultural understanding might best be fostered: through the bestowal of recognition and the cultivation of dialogical relationships. / I assemble key elements of an assortment of different theories of intercultural understanding in which these techniques are assigned a central role; this exercise generates a Wittgensteinian "perspicuous representation" of the process of crafting intercultural understanding itself, and reveals the unique strengths of two convergent approaches in particular. Both the contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional ideal of intercultural understanding of the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en First Nations of northwestern British Columbia, and the recent writings of Charles Taylor on the subject of international human rights standards comprise variations of what I call the "shared horizons" paradigm. The great advantages of this paradigm are its ability to address the distortive effect exercised by power inequalities upon efforts to create intercultural understanding (demonstrated through a case study of the Gitzsan-Wet'suwet'en land claim), and its amenableness to a variety of distinct culture-specific normative justifications. The shared horizons approach does not offer a blueprint for achieving intercultural understanding, but rather, a modest and adaptable set of principles that can serve as the foundation for efforts to work toward the resolution of intercultural disagreements.

M.Phil. (Philosophy) / The author's choice of a theme is practical. It is a cultural-philosophical analysis·of the views of GLAZER and MOYNUlAN on ethnicity. 1 The result is studied and viewed in relation to philosophical anthropology and the ·genetic method of explanation of culture of CA VAN PEURSEN and by means of his cultural-historfcal three-tier development of the mythological, successively followed by the ontological and the functional. The author then suggests the. principle of sovereignty, within the limited sphere of competence of social structures within the same cultural ·entity to overcome the dialectic struggle for supremacy between social structures (i.e.: nation and state or church and state, etc). Linking this the writer offers a structural analysis of state versus nation (volk) and also rejects a dualistic (soul versus body) concept of man, preferring the model of man as a single integrated existential being. The author finds the views of GLAZER and MOYNIHAN are that ethnic identification is a natural and inevitable fact of human existence. It has its positive aspects (providing identity ... support ... security) and its negative aspects (encouraging isolation ... ethnocentrism ... conflict ... etc). By rejecting humanistic individualism and integration as ideological (therefore ontological) and ethnicity as practical · (therefore functional), and urging governments to recognise ethnicity within the framework of plural democracy, they by implication become the proponents of ethnicity, and culture with them becomes cultural determinism. By so doing they also derived and subscribed to some inevitable pre-empirical and therefore theoretical-philosophical concepts re group identity and the relation betwe€n soul and body and culture versus physical environment. Within each of the cultural-historical development phases posed by VAN PEURSEN the author finds that group identity as the essence of ethnicity is after all, as proposed by GLAZER and MOYNIHAN not so new, and that ethnicity during the course of history was always coined to the supremacy of an identity carrying social structure (i.e. the state in Greek culture; the church in Roman Catholicism; race in national-socialism; the individual in humanistic liberalism; and the state in dialectic materialism; etc). It is in the functional, practical realm that ethnicity has gained ground during the latter part of this century. The rediscovery of group identity signals the bancruptcy of ontological individualism and the appearance of pragmatism, existensialism and the dramatic growth of cultural anthropology and new-conservatism. The author sees existensial man as a unitary being and by so doing disacknowledges an inner spiritual world of the soul against the outer world of nature and body. This one-ness of man makes culture his first nature and not his second, as suggested by GLAZER and MOYNIHAN. Mans cultural identity is expressed in a variety of social structures and by utilysing the principle of sovereignty within each structural sphere of competence, the author wishes to avoid ethnicity or group identity being captured by one structure (i.e. race in national socialism and volk/nation in ethnocentrism) and thereby becoming an operationalism.

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