Rationality

Both Millikan's brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world and life. The stark differences between their accounts of these fundamental concepts stem from radically different conceptions of the world, the natural and life. I argue that Millikan's teleosemantic approach relies on a teleology of determination by means of the lawfulness of nature that leaves no room for the freedom of self-determination, for reason, or for experience-for the reality of lived human life. In contrast to Millikan's account, Husserl's transcendental phenomenology situates teleology as a function of reason and first-personal experience, part of an extended account of intentionality and meaning according to which the full range of our making sense of the world is conceived as a rational activity that is itself a part of that world, and not an unnatural activity to be separated from it. While Husserl's account of these issues is indeed symptomatic of what Millikan calls "meaning rationalism," I argue that it is immune to the sorts of problems she claims will plague any such account, since these problems arise only against the background of a set of presuppositions about intentionality (representationalism, the "mythiness" of all givens) that Husserl does not share. Husserl's position can itself be understood to be within the bounds of a suitably liberal conception of naturalism, and interpreting him in this way it has the added benefit--contra Millikan--of not divorcing teleology from reason, the latter construed as our first-personal striving to make sense of the world as we experience it--of life.

Much research in the last two decades has demonstrated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision making and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be interpreted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavior and cognition is largely rational. These posit that the gap is due to (1) performance errors, (2) computational limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the experimenter, and (4) a different construal of the task by the subject. In the debates about the viability of these alternative explanations, attention has been focused too narrowly on the modal response. In a series of experiments involving most of the classic tasks in the heuristics and biases literature, we have examined the implications of individual differences in performa...

Some of Law and Economics’ basic claims have come to be criticized as a result of empirical findings that question their viability. Particularly, the premise that agents consistently act rationally and with their self-interest in mind seems problematic. What the consequences of the criticism mean for Law and Economics’ tenability depends largely on the questions whether (1) some elements are unassailable to the alternative’s objections and (2) the alternative is a systematic whole. It is argued that Law and Economics may be salvaged, if it is minimized and its ambitions are tempered. This means focusing on the stable, a priori, elements inherent to it.

The massacre of almost 50 Maidan protesters on February 20, 2014 was a turning point in Ukrainian politics and a tipping point in the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. This mass killing of the protesters and the mass shooting of the police that preceded it led to the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych and gave a start to a civil war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. A conclusion promoted by the post-Yanukovych governments and the media in Ukraine that the massacre was perpetrated by government snipers and special police units on a Yanukovych order has been nearly universally accepted by the Western governments, the media, and many scholars. The Ukrainian government investigation identified members of the special company of Berkut as responsible for killings of the absolute majority of the protesters, but did not release any evidence in support, with the exception of videos of the massacre.
              The question is which side organized the “snipers’ massacre.” This paper is the first academic study of this crucial case of the mass killing. It uses a theory of rational choice and a Weberian theory of instrumental rationality to examine actions of major actors both from the Yanukovych government, specifically various police and security forces, and the Maidan opposition, specifically its far right and oligarchic elements, during the massacre.
          The paper analyzes a large amount of evidence from different publicly available sources concerning this massacre and killings of specifics protesters. Qualitative content analysis includes the following data: about 1,500 videos and recordings of live internet and TV broadcasts from mass media and social media in different countries(some 150 gigabytes), news reports and social media posts by more than 100 journalists covering the massacre from Kyiv, some 5,000 photos, and nearly 30 gigabytes of publicly available radio intercepts of snipers and commanders from the special Alfa unit of the Security Service of Ukraine and Internal Troops, and Maidan massacre trial recordings. This study also employs field research on site of the massacre, eyewitness reports by both Maidan protesters and government special units commanders, statements by both former and current government officials, estimates of approximate ballistic trajectories, bullets and weapons used, and types of wounds among both protesters and the police. This study establishes a precise timeline for various events of the massacre, the locations of both the shooters and the government snipers, and the specific timeline and locations of nearly 50 protesters’ deaths. It also briefly analyzes other major cases of violence during and after the “Euromaidan.” This study includes two video appendixes.
            This academic investigation concludes that the massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. The various evidence that the protesters were killed from these locations include some 70 testimonies, primarily by Maidan protesters, several videos of “snipers” targeting protesters from these buildings, comparisons of positions of the specific protesters at the time of their killing and their entry wounds, and bullet impact signs. The study uncovered various videos and photos of armed Maidan “snipers” and spotters in many of these buildings. The paper presents implications of these findings for understanding the nature of the change of the government in Ukraine, the civil war in Donbas, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine.

Many have thought that it is impossible to rationally persuade an external world skeptic that we have knowledge of the external world.  This paper aims to show how this could be done.  I argue, while appealing only to premises that a skeptic could accept, that it is not rational to believe external world skepticism, because doing so commits one to more extreme forms of skepticism in a way that is self-undermining.  In particular, the external world skeptic is ultimately committed to believing a proposition P while believing that she shouldn’t believe P, an irrational combination of beliefs.  Suspending judgment on skepticism is also problematic, for similar reasons; and, I argue, epistemic dilemmas are not possible; so, we should believe that skepticism is false.

The logic of signalling theory is emphasised in Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld (2009) and Hamill’s The Hoods (2010), which empirically study violent acts as examples of signalling theory in action. In the contexts of jails and of the hoods in Belfast, as respectively depicted in Gambetta and Hamill’s works, anti-social behaviours and tough attitudes are adopted as well as displayed by individuals for their own self-interest to establish their position in a hierarchical structure, making themselves less vulnerable to the troubled realities they inhabit. Sustaining the thesis of these researchers, signalling theory is thus a valid social mechanism which explains violence by instrumental rationality; given the numerous disruptive consequences that its use might entail, the adoption of violence is often seen as irrational. Nonetheless, according to cost-benefit analysis, in low trust environments such as the underworld’s streets and behind prisons’ bars, individuals’ inability to engage in violence or credible threats of its use would be taken as licence for abuse, tarnishing their reputation and worsening their status among others (Gambetta, 2009). However, in his works Collins exposes counter-arguments to the rational action approach used by Gambetta and Hamill, as he focuses on situations rather than individual motives and highlights the significance of emotions in the explanation of violence.

Anti-ethnocentrism and methodological holism have been the context and form of the solution provided by anthropology to the problem of the proclaimed incommensurability between the cultural planes of truth. As of always, it has been repeated within this discipline, under the guise of different theoretical vocabularies, the attitude of searching to explain what is not understood, with the repeated result of grand explicative failures of what has yet to be fully understood. By appealing to the ideas of the modern hermeneutic philosophy and a delimitation of the notion of symbol, this article proposes a non-methodological strategy of those questions and, by its intervention, a reconsideration of the discipline and the forms of knowledge that it adopts as its aim.


O antietnocentrismo e os modelos holistas têm sido o contexto e a forma da solução dada pela antropologia ao problema da incomensurabilidade entre os planos culturais da verdade. Desde sempre repetiu-se na disciplina, sob diferentes vocabulários teóricos, a atitude de procurar explicar o que não se compreende, com o resultado repetido de esplêndidos falhanços explicativos do que permaneceu assim por compreender. Por recurso às ideias da filosofia hermenêutica moderna e a uma delimitação da noção de símbolo, propõe-se neste artigo uma estratégia não metodológica de consideração dessas questões e, por seu intermédio, uma reconsideração do estatuto da disciplina e das formas de conhecimento que ela toma como objecto.

W artykule tym zastanowić się chcę nad pojęciem „neutralności światopoglądowej”, rozumianym tak, jak to ma miejsce w typowych dyskusjach politycznych. Chodzić zatem będzie o takie rozumienie tego terminu, które występuje, gdy na przykład postulujemy (bądź zwalczamy) neutralność światopoglądową szkoły czy państwowych urzędów. Zgodzić się wypada, że mówienie o światopoglądowości w takich kontekstach nie jest zbyt precyzyjne i łatwo może być mylące. Światopoglądem nazywa się bowiem bardzo różne rzeczy. W szczególności nazywane tak bywały wszelkie przekonania nienaukowe, czy też wartościujące. Celem artykułu nie jest jednak ani analiza tego, czym miałby być „tak naprawdę” światopogląd, ani też tego, co na przestrzeni wieków rozumiane bywało pod tą nazwą. Powtórzę jeszcze raz, że jego przedmiotem jest światopoglądowość w naszkicowanym wyżej, nie zawsze precyzyjnym i być może często niefortunnym, niemniej jednak bardzo solidnie utrwalonym użyciu.
Artykuł składa się z kilku części. Na początku postaram się wyjaśnić, o co nam dokładnie chodzi, gdy mówimy o światopoglądowości w tym znaczeniu, w jakim słowa tego używać chcę tutaj. Pomocny w tym będzie paradygmatyczny przykład, w którego roli wystąpi dyskurs specyficznie religijny. Następnie na tej podstawie spróbuję podać pewne kryteria tak rozumianej światopoglądowości. Ostatecznie sformułuję trzy takie kryteria, które nazwę kryterium treściowym, kryterium epistmicznym oraz kryterium pragmatycznym. Postaram się naszkicować, w jaki sposób kryteria te funkcjonują. Idea jest taka, że mają być one stosowane łącznie, jednak centralną rolę odgrywać będzie kryterium epistemiczne. Wszystkie kryteria cechuje nieostrość, okaże się jednak, że nie jest ona w tym przypadku groźna.

Individual performance = capability X motivation. This is what you may learn in executive management and leadership programs offered by Business Schools and Consulting firms. At first glance, the blueprint sounds nice and somewhat inspiring. But to what extent such a prescription is relevant to management practice? To answer this question, the general idea as well as the relations between each component of the formula must be examined in more details.

Bioenvironmental management, Plant Nutrition.
"The article on Rational Agriculture is entirely inspired by the words of Jerry Stoller
and his deep understanding of the living processes in the Plant. This small contribution to increasing quality and quantity production, which is certifiably Eco-friendly, owes a depth of gratitude to Stoller Products that have been prominently demonstrated in remote and poverty-stricken locations in Rural Pakistan. The earth-friendly tillers of the soil and especially the contact youth who shouldered the responsibility of applying the Stoller Advantage for the larger interest of Sustainable Poverty Alleviation and Nurturing Nature in order to ensure that Nature continues to Nurture us, are warmly acknowledged and humbly thanked.
Pakistan is expected to be one of the most affected Countries in South Asia by
climate change.3 With 45% of the labor force employed in the agricultural sector and 24% of the National GDP deriving from agriculture,4 the resilience of agricultural production is of high importance to the development of Pakistan’s economy. One adaptation could be to change the time that crop planting takes place. For instance, to counter rising temperatures, farmers could shift planting to cooler times of the year.

This paper draws upon three broad perspectives on the strategic decision-making process in
order to develop a more completely specified model of strategic decision effectiveness in a
different context, namely Egypt. The key variables in this model consist of three strategic decisionmaking
process dimensions (rationality, intuition, and political behavior); seven moderating
variables concerning decision-specific, environmental, and organizational factors; and strategic
decision effectiveness as an outcome variable. A two-stage study was conducted in which the
first stage provided exploratory insights and the second stage investigated hypotheses on the
impact of strategic decision-making process dimensions on strategic decision effectiveness and
the moderating role of broader contextual variables. The second-stage study produced three
major findings: (1) both rational and political processes appear to have more influence on
strategic decision effectiveness than does intuition; (2) strategic decision effectiveness is both
process- and context-specific; and (3) certain results support the ‘culture-free’ argument, while
others support the ‘culture-specific’ argument. Copyright  2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

In this chapter, I want to read particular biblical cases as a means for examining two philosophical problems; namely, how to deal logically with contradictions and the consequences that follow from the alternatives examined regarding the notion of rationality. Considering a perspective according to which rationality is closely connected to a certain idea of logicity, my aim is to show that, on the one hand, in the story of Susanna and the Elders, Daniel’s belief in Susanna’s chastity can be understood as supported by a reasoning that is grounded on classical logic and thus fits perfectly into the classical model of rationality. The narrations of Jesus’s resurrection on the other hand would require a different approach both to contradictions and to the relationship between contradictions and rationality. Otherwise, there is a risk of either shaking up important parts of the Christian creed—such as the idea that God has a salvific plan that is made possible precisely by the resurrection of Jesus—or accepting that believing in the resurrection is irrational. It is worthy to take into account that, for fideists, accepting a religious belief as irrational is no problem because they hold that religious beliefs are a question of faith, and faith is either independent of or adversarial toward reason in the sense that it is not founded, nor can it be founded, on arguments. Something different happens with those who adhere to more rationalistic traditions like natural theology, which attempts to give a rational support to the belief of the existence of God. The Christian believer to which I refer in this work stands on the latter, more rationalistic side. With regard to the rationality of the belief in the resurrection, I contend that in order to be considered rational, one who believes in the resurrection could support that belief with a reasoning grounded on some form of paraconsistent logic. I focus here on da Costa’s C1 system and on the LFI1 system of Carnielli, Marcos and de Amo, but other paraconsistent systems could also be used. In the last section of the chapter, I present some problems that emerge when a perspective like the one proposed here is adopted.

The objective of this paper is to describe cross-country similarities and differences in national pride and to explain national pride variations on the individual and country levels. The analysis in this paper is applied to different measures of national pride, with some of them being relatively complex cognitively and the others more elementary. The paper presents the results of cross-country comparison of national pride based on empirical evidence from the ISSP-2003 database which included data from 45993 respondents from 36 countries and regions. The survey participants estimated their overall level of national pride by responding to the direct one-item question and, separately, they estimated pride of each of ten specific achievements of their countries in various domains. Factor analysis of these ten items yielded two dimensions of domain-based national pride, one of them being the factor of general pride of various country achievements and the other reflects the inverse relations between the prides of elitist and mass achievements of the nation.

The multilevel regression models estimated for the three indicators of national pride confirm the feasibility of dividing these indicators into cognitively processed and normatively imposed national pride. Cognitively processed national pride measured by the domain-based estimates have been affected by objective country achievements and by the level of standards which the achievements are compared against. The normatively imposed national pride measured by direct one-item question has been influenced by the country level of religiosity that indicates the individual willingness to accept normative messages from the state uncritically.

Rational national pride requires some objective grounds to believe in a nation’s perfection, and normative national pride is not so strongly related to objective achievements and therefore can be more easily manipulated. The practical implication of this difference stems from the fact that in their search for objectively grounded national pride people would be eager to foster country achievements and their maintenance of normatively imposed pride requires in many cases just reliably protected wishful thinking.

Descartes and Pascal, two major mathematicians of the early modern age, both reject the logic and use the mathematical method (analysis) to define the rules of the reason. In this paper I will argue that in spite of their common starting point in mathematics, Descartes and Pascal elaborate two different concepts of rationality because they define
the principal mental acts and the epistemological status of mathematical principles (axioms) differently. The differences are due to the nature of the two new branches of mathematics which the two authors had devised. Descartes invented analytical geometry,
while Pascal contributed towards the invention of projective geometry, the calculation of probability and the calculus. These branches of mathematics have different relations to the concept of the infinite, and the different uses of infinite also involve different concepts of rationality.

Romano Guardini was highly valued by Joseph Ratzinger as a lecturer and author of inspiring books. They shared the zealous pursuit for truth, the courage to ask fundamental questions, the boldness to confront the Christian faith with the challenges of contemporary culture, the conviction that the human mind has high cognitive capacities, and the emphasis on the primate of truth in theology. Both authors highlight the reasonable aspect of the Christian faith. After all, faith relies on the fact that God is Truth. Faith and reason are not contradictory. They can complement one another in the process of in-depth cognition. Naturally, as the human mind tries to understand God, it struggles with its own limitations in the face of the mystery which exceeds the capacities of the creation.

Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology”—published in the North American Review in 1877, almost forty years after it was first delivered in lecture form—is not just contradiction, but the arcane inversions, doublings, and self-dismantlings of transcendentalism itself. Between many of Emerson’s pronouncements falls this shadow of Demonology, which I treat as a key aspect of his theories and essays of experience—that is, those in which his contradictions are preeminent, unsettling, and thematic. If Emerson’s transcendental pantheism is suffused with, or structured by, contradiction and doubling, “Demonology” is the essay that most fitfully “performs” those inversions; in which the double emerges as twin and negative; and in which polar opposites become both coterminous and sequential in any direction (and therefore almost never linear in exposition).
Both as the essay and concept I focus on in this article, Demonology is not a tangent or coda to Emerson’s work, but the cumulative residue of an attempt to codify that which resists his overarching theory that all forces, processes and attributes of nature are consistent, explicable, rational, and ultimately commensurate. Both its problematic provenance as an essay revised while Emerson suffered from failing mental acuity, and the way its tenets resist formalization, have led most scholars to treat “Demonology,” as an essay and concept, either as a digression or embarrassment. Critics of the day, however, seemed to realize that a protean Demonology was one of the definitive components of Emerson’s pantheism. I reassess “Demonology”—not just in spite of its inchoate status and troubled provenance, but in part because of it—as an overlooked encapsulation of many of Emerson’s ulterior tenets and a capstone of his metaphysics. In Lacanian terms, the contradictory or seemingly anomalous elements of “Demonology” represent the necessary remainders or gaps in his work that allow Emerson to address nature, a scenario complicated by the fact that the subject of these remainders is remainders. In other words, the subject of the essay is, implicitly, the cause of its own fragmentary nature. In never entirely stable ways, the demonological for Emerson represents specific forces within nature, but is also immanent to the system of nature.
I also attempt to counter the lingering perception of Emerson as both a rationalist and idealist. No consistent transcendentalism generates or allows for Emerson’s inconsistent pronouncements, because the inconsistency precedes the pronouncements at the level of ontology. A negation of the negation, Emerson’s Demonology does not emerge in the register of symbolic spiritual transcendence, nor as part of an uplifting imaginary vision, but as a dark, racialized, feminized, and materialized “real” limit on established conventions.  Emerson’s exposition of nature’s Demonology, both in the eponymous essay and throughout his writings, thereby corroborates some poststructuralist as well as transcendental postulates.  Emerson’s repeated emphasis on limitation, especially the limits of reason, bear some surprising affinities with Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of the Lacanian Real, which is why Žižek offers a useful interpretative language for approaching “Demonology” in particular.

The following is an advertisement for scalar epistemic consequentialism. Benefits include an epistemic consequentialism that (i) is immune from the no-positive-epistemic-duties objection and (ii) doesn’t require bullet-biting on the rightness of epistemic tradeoffs. The advertisement invites readers to think more carefully about both the definition and logical space of epistemic consequentialism.

A central theme in the scholarly literature on Enlightenment Europe concerns the increased focus on the role of reason in the development of European thought, especially in the context of the new science and natural philosophers’ radical successes in this burgeoning field. As a consequence, there is a tendency in both philosophical scholarship and teaching to bind philosophy and science tightly together and emphasize the way in which one aspect of rationality in early modern philosophy led to the development of modern science. While there is certainly much that is correct in this approach, one motivation for pluralizing philosophy’s past is that this story leaves out a great deal that is important in Enlightenment views of reason. Margaret Cavendish provides a compelling example of a thinker from this period who was not only engaged in the scientific enterprises of her day, but included within her purview disciplines we typically categorize today as belonging squarely to the humanities. Her philosophical work opens a window into how enlightenment thinkers conceived of the role, and arguably more importantly, the limits of reason and the sciences. In contrast with the traditional interpretation of the modern period, I argue that reason was significantly broader in scope — its developments in science were paralleled by equally important advances in the music, art, literature, medicine, philosophy, etc. Cavendish’s work forces us to recognize the lack of a sharp boundary between these areas; philosophy was able to act as a bridge between the sciences and humanistic disciplines. Integrating Cavendish into the canon helps us to see that the narrow focus on the scientific version of reason within Enlightenment philosophy creates a false distinction between science and the humanities and misses out on central, humanistic features of philosophy that make its practice fruitful. I use the example of Cavendish to make a broader point about the nature of higher education today. With the increased focus on so-called “practical” skills, vocational, and STEM focused education, I argue that we have lost focus on the end for the sake of which we pursue education: to live well. Cavendish provides us an opportunity to re-evaluate the narrowly scientific conception of reason during the 17th and 18th centuries as well as our current outlook on why we pursue education. In doing so, I make a case for a well-rounded liberal arts education.

1. Justification of the universe (rationality and the value of the universe). 2. Nihilistic variant of "redemption" (Mainländer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre). 3. Gnostic-idealistic variant of "redemption" (Hegel, Martinetti). 4. Gnostic-syncretic variant of "redemption" in the New Age. 5. Philosophical aspirations and theology of cosmic redemption.

The meaning of the meaning – logical-rational and holistic-spiritual approach

In my paper I compare logical-rational to holistic-spiritual approach to what constitutes the meaning of an expression or text and how they are formed. The first approach was significantly shaped by Frege's work and influenced by effort for utmost objectivity; afterwards is continued in logical positivism. Later development of analytic philosophy reveals impossibility of entire objective and univocal meaning. This can get philosophy closer to an understanding of meaning in spiritual traditions, especially in those of their streams which put the accent on experiential and holistic aspect of knowledge, understanding and meaning.
The meaning of the meaning – logical-rational and holistic-spiritual approach

In my paper I compare logical-rational to holistic-spiritual approach to what constitutes the meaning of an expression or text and how they are formed. The first approach was significantly shaped by Frege's work and influenced by effort for utmost objectivity; afterwards is continued in logical positivism. Later development of analytic philosophy reveals impossibility of entire objective and univocal meaning. This can get philosophy closer to an understanding of meaning in spiritual traditions, especially in those of their streams which put the accent on experiential and holistic aspect of knowledge, understanding and meaning.

Due to the rapidly changing norms and constant developments in technology, media and communication educators and practitioners are expected to (re)evaluate the functioning of ethics and reasoning in this field. This chapter discusses the relationship between ethics, reasoning, and the media, and the
integral role of ethical reasoning education for communication and media professionals. Ethical systems and theories are discussed to inform the debate on the importance of ethics and reasoning education. Globalization and the growing interconnectivity of global media systems are presented, providing insight on how different media systems function around the world. The large impact that the media have on
society necessitates the possession of rational and ethical skills; thus, the connection between reasoning and ethics is explained.

Many advocates of deliberative democracy see in the Internet a new opportunity for the development of public spaces, public spheres, and places where deliberation can take place. An important element of the notion of the public sphere in general and of deliberation specifically, is the quality of the debate. In the past decade, many studies have been conducted to evaluate online discussions in light of the ideal notion of the public sphere. However, a wide gap exists between theoretical approaches and the actual operationalization of such theories for empirical research. In an attempt to bridge this gap we develop a method for examining the extent to which Internet forums meet the normative requirements of rational-critical debate, reciprocity, and reflexivity. The methodological approach consists of a textual analysis of the contributions made to an online forum. The coding scheme presented in this article is based on a case study (UK Online) and guided by the theoretical notions of deliberative democracy.

In 1999, Gayatri Spivak complained that, ”[l]et me say at once that there is plenty of incidental imperialist sentiment in Frankenstein. My point, within the argument of this essay, is that the discursive field of imperialism does not produce unquestioned ideological correlatives for the narrative structuring of the book”1  On the one hand, within the novel, the visibility and depiction regarding imperialism is unquestioned. On the other hand, it does not, at least not in Spivak's interest, provide an ideal perspective from which to interpret Shelley's motivation behind the narration in the text. Her judgement is convincing, but, in 2008, Graham Allen claimed that there were hopeless desires to determine a single, closed, interpretatively finalized reading for the novel.
So what is Frankenstein? In recent years, once again, the aspect of imperialism in Frankenstein has brought attention, in light of the creation of the European Union (EU).2 It is important not to ignore that Mary Shelley treated Britain and Europe, in the Frankenstein's manuscript, as an “imagined community” in 18183; however, seeing colonialism and imperialism as a binary co-existence4, I would argue that the discourse of colonialism captivates the world's, or specifically Europe's attention.  Therefore, regarding Frankenstein, why and how does the creature becomes 'the Other' in the colonial discourse? Why he is the monster throughout the whole of the narrative as well as in the literariness aspect ? Using Homi Bhabha's discussion of colonialism, this paper will endeavor to answer these questions.

Keywords: Subaltern, Colonialism, Race, the Other, Violence.

L'ouvrage offre des outils rhétoriques pour la maîtrise de trois enjeux de l'écriture de l'histoire: comment produire un discours acceptable sur un sujet polémique? Comment mettre en mots les intuitions de la phase de découverte? Peut-on tirer des leçons de l'histoire et comment les formuler?

Résumé

Le présent travail, qui relève de la sociologie de la connaissance, vise à décrire l’évolution institutionnelle, les types d’argumentation et le vocabulaire des discours sur la magie et la sorcellerie à partir de la Renaissance. Nous analysons les controverses, les essais de synthèse, les points de rencontre et de rupture observés notamment depuis l’institutionnalisation des sciences humaines au début du XXe siècle. Nous essayons de préciser la manière dont la sorcellerie en tant qu’objet de savoir et système de croyances est étudiée et utilisée par de nombreux discours, de la littérature à la médecine. Nous soulignons l’importance des facteurs sociaux et idéologiques dans la constitution des savoirs, l’émergence des discours scientifiques et les controverses savantes. Par ailleurs, nous souhaitons clarifier la manière dont les travaux sur la sorcellerie conduisent leur auteur à remettre en question leur propre domaine d’études.

Abstract

This work, which belongs to the sociology of knowledge, aims to describe the institutional evolution, the types of argumentation and the vocabulary used in rational discourse about magic and witchcraft since the Renaissance. We examine the controversies, summaries, meeting points and breaks noted since the institutionalisation of the human sciences at the start of the twentieth century. We attempt to pinpoint the ways in which, as a subject of knowledge and system of beliefs, witchcraft is used in various types of discursive reasoning, from literature to medicine. We highlight the importance of social and ideological factors in the makeup of different types of knowledge, the emergence of different aspects of scientific discursive thought and learned controversy. In addition, we seek to clarify the way works dealing with witchcraft prompt researchers to raise questions about their own field of study.