In this article We argue that Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms is an indispensible philosophical-anthropological companion to rhetoric. We propose that appropriating Cassirer's understanding of symbolic forms enables rhetoric to go beyond the dominant perspective of language oriented theory and fully commit to a widened -Understanding of rhetoric as the study of how social meaning is created, performed and transformed. To clearly bring out the thrust of our enlarged rhetorical-philosophical anthropological approach we have structured our argument partly as a contrastive critique of Thomas A. Discenna's recent (Rhetorica 32/3; 2014) attempt to include Cassirer in the rhetorical tradition through a reading of the 1929 debate in Davos between Cassirer and Martin Heidegger; partly through a presentation of the aspects of Cassirer's thought that we find most important for developing a rhetorical-philosophical-anthropology of social meaning.
This essay aims to contribute to the study of social imaginaries by looking at howthe imaginal, the imaginary, the discursive and the political co-operate in creatingsocial meaning. Through a reading of the work of the French graphic artist andpolitical thinker Enki Bilal, and more specifically in his latest, yet unfinished, work LeBug [The Bug], I will explore how the social imaginary dimension currently works,how it politically affects our ways of thinking and of acting. My assumption is thatBilal can, perhaps, help us see and concretise both possibilities and risks saturatingthe present-day social universes. I will substantiate my arguments by looking at theprocesses of creating meaning activated by both writers and readers of comics.
In the late 19th century in northern Spain and southern France prehistoric mural paintings and engravings were discovered. Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge inquires into epistemic questions related to images, depicting and perception that this rich and much debated material has given rise to. Focusing respectively on the historical and scientific circumstances and controversies and on the epistemic and perceptual problems and questions the discovery of these paintings and engravings gave rise to, the book traces the outline of the doxa of cave art studies. It criticizes the different ways of trying to make sense of the cave art. Furthermore it suggests, with the help of both Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of technique and Ernst Cassirer's notion of symbolic form, a yet untried way out of the hermeneutical impasse where the interpretation of the paleolithic pictures finds itself today.
Roland Barthes's position regarding doxa is subtle yet full of personal and political tensions. He understands doxa as public opinion, as bourgeois ideology, which always threatens to invade and pervert his own thinking-to the point that his main concern, at times, seems to be his desire and need to escape doxa. Nevertheless, he is fully aware that, as a human being, there is no avoiding the doxic situation. Thus, Barthes's position regarding doxa is inherently paradoxical. My aim in this short article is to provide a critical commentary on, and try to explicate, Barthes's use of doxa through a close reading of some passages from Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975). In doing so, I also hope to make amends for my earlier, perhaps rather shallow and bleak, understanding of the role of doxa in Barthes's text.
Presenting doxology as a post-phenomenological way of approaching epistemic and perceptual questions, this article draws on the problematic of "cave art" and contemporary cognitive science. Perception and cognition are not reflections of objective reality; they are forms of creative productivity, specific for man and depending on both biological and sociocultural factors. Departing from some of the main ideas of E. Cassirer, L. Fleck, P. Bourdieu and J. Derrida, the author shows the complexities of the interweaving of biological and social factors in the perception process. Analyzing the first attempts at understanding paleolithic mural cave art, the author tries to answer the question of how man creates new knowledge needed for living in our human world (see also [Rosengren 2012, 63-72]). A central tenet is that human knowledge has never been and will never be epistemic (in the Platonic sense), since man does not have direct unmediated access to reality itself. Defending this idea, the author gives a doxological interpretation of Protagoras' homo-mensura thesis (see also: [Rosengren 2014, 171-178]) and, in fact, speaks of the need to abandon the principles of traditional and, as it were, metaphysical theory of knowledge. Instead, he proposes to take a doxic point of departure and proceed from the observed situatedness and the variability of our knowledge.