INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON HUMANISTIC IDEOLOGY
VOL. 4 NO. 1 SPRING-SUMMER 2011

TOPICS: REALITY AND REPRESENTATION


EDITORIAL: Mihaela GLIGOR, Reality and Representation. The Problem, 7

ARTICLES:
Dana SUGU & Amita CHATTERJEE, Gärdenfors’ Conceptual Spaces and Affective Representations, 11
Abstract: Based on Gärdenfors’ (2000) conceptual spaces model we try to examine an emotion episode from its elicitation to the differentiation into affective processes. An affective-conceptual spaces model is proposed as a framework for representing affective information on the conceptual level.
Keywords: surprise, affective-conceptual spaces model, affective concepts, affective representation.

Ionel NARIŢA, Real World Semantics, 19
Abstract: If the necessary true propositions are the same with the tautologies, then the paradoxes of strict implication appear. In order to avoid such paradoxes, it must be factual necessary propositions. The semantics of possible worlds failed in its attempt to define necessity without paradox. Moreover, the term possible world is self contradictory. There is only one world, the real one. It follows that the possible world semantics must be replaced with real world semantics. In the frame of real world semantics, a proposition is necessary true if and only if it is a consequence of the past. In this way, the modal values of propositions depend on time.
Keywords: possible world, semantics, modal value, heat death.

Gregory JONES-KATZ, Rethinking Deconstruction in America, 31
Abstract: This paper seeks to rethink this narrative of deconstruction in America. The essay is organized into three sections: (1) The first investigates academic debates on deconstruction in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Participants in these debates charged Derrida and de Man with being anti-historical. Repeated outside the academy in the popular press, this accusation conflated Derrida’s and de Man’s work and obscured their philosophies of history. (2) The second section examines the central, yet overlooked, role history played in Derrida’s and de Man’s work. A close inspection also reveals that de Man did not merely deviate from Derrida but in fact opposed his philosophy of history. (3) The third section focuses on the media war of the 1987 de Man Affair to demonstrate how the claim that deconstruction, specifically de Man, was anti-historical reached non-academic audiences. Ultimately, this discussion concealed the centrality of history in Derrida’s and de Man’s work and deeply shaped the reception of deconstruction in the United States.
Keywords: Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, Presence, Intellectual History, Philosophy, 20th Century America.

Petronia PETRAR, Towards a Typology of Spatial Representations, 49
Abstract: My paper is concerned with a tentative categorisation of the various modes of representing space that have shaped and continue to shape modern identity. Viewing the relationship between the subject and space as reciprocal and productive (in the line suggested by French philosopher’s Henri Lefebvre’s seminar work on the Production of Space), it is concerned mainly with the possibilities of representing space in an age of antifoundational, aestheticised thought such as the present stage of “late modernity”. Its theoretical sources are mainly sociological and philosophical, but traced back to a sort of aesthetic variety of active agency that shapes spaces according to its own versions of identity, here tentatively termed as “symbolic”, “allegoric” and “reflexive”.
Keywords: space, representation, modernity, postmodernity, symbolic, allegoric, reflexive.

Corina DOBOŞ, Ceauşescu was my father! Letters about the Children of the Decree at the end of the ‘60s, 67
Abstract: The present paper proposes a Lacanian discourse analysis of 38 private letters addressed to Nicolae Ceauşescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), in 1968. Most of the authors of these letters, found in the National Archives of Romania, were inviting the agnostic, openly anti-religious, general secretary of the RCP to participate to the baptism of their newborns, to be their godfather, and even to give his name, “Nicolae”, to their children. I argue that these requests indicate the transformation of Ceauşescu into the Symbolic Father of the newborn children, and by extension, of the future Romanian nation. Moreover, they show the citizens’ renunciation of their parental functions on behalf of the state: their children are not theirs anymore, but become “children of the decree” (decreţei in Romanian), as the children born in Romania between 1967 and 1971 were commonly called. Ceauşescu, the new “symbolic father”, society’s source of law and prohibition, is articulated at the most intimate structures of the citizens it governs, becoming “Nicolae”, a Symbolic Father, source and custodian of the higher symbolic order of culture.
Keywords: abortion, psychoanalysis, Ceauşescu, communism, Romania, letters.

Diana-Viorela BURLACU, Sexist and Non-Sexist Language, 81
Abstract: The present article focuses on some lexical aspects of the English language claimed to be sexist, namely on the so-called “generic” nouns and pronouns, some man-compounds denoting occupations, derivations from “male” words, derogatory meanings for “female” words, as well as on the lexical order in some expressions or fixed phrases. The viewpoint is only apparently feminist, it is definitely impartial, the author merely trying to describe and analyse certain linguistic facts and, at the same time, to offer unbiased alternatives to some uses of English, considered now more and more obsolete.
Keywords: “androcentric generics”, gender-neutral language, female term, male term, sexism.

Traian PENCIUC, Carmen, Nietzsche’s Muse. Elements of Nietzsche’s thinking in Bizet’s Carmen, 95
Abstract: Nietzsche’s fascination for Bizet’s opera is not the outcome of an accidental caprice. We shall look for the metaphoric illustrations of his philosophical thinking contained in this opera – which was not intended to be Nietzschean at all – and which are the canters that emanate fascination and horror towards the audience, but have inspired the philosopher as well.
Keywords: Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bizet, opera Carmen, superman, metaphor.

Raluca BOBOC, From Wisdom Inhabiting Bodies to Words Inhabiting Reality. Representations of Corporeality in Jewish Sapiential Literature, 109
Abstract: In support of reflections on the spiritually unifying standpoint on the human being held to be the hallmark of Jewish wisdom tradition, the analysis put forward is an exercise of looking, by way of philological interpretation, into the book of Proverbs and discussing the representations of corporeality in it in relation to the sapiential component. A most representative piece of Jewish sapiential literature, foreign from any type of dichotomy, assuming that the world of appearance is real and that wisdom can be found in all creation, the writing is investigated to the conclusion that it describes the body of the sage or finder of wisdom as being fully and totally inhabited by wisdom. The sage, whose portrait is slowly being constructed from bits and pieces, appears as an initiate in the secret connection between words of wisdom and reality, hereby putting together a most unique representation of reality as one inhabited by words.
Keywords: (models of) corporeality, wisdom, words, sapiential literature, Jewish tradition, Proverbs, inhabiting, reality, representations of the body, subjective body, dichotomies.

Sarunya PRASOPCHINGCHANA, Communication of Representations, 121
Abstract: Museums are the keepers and interpreters of civilizations, where one can explore different artistic endeavors. Moreover, museums are now established as a means of communication of human culture to the viewers. The visitors expect ready background knowledge from the museum’s exhibition. So, this article deals with the representation of the Buddha in symbolic and imagery forms in the museums of Eastern India; and, whether museums can create and maintain an effective communication in educating the public through visual interpretation on the moral principles of the Buddha and Buddhist identity.
Keywords: representation, communication, evaluation, symbolic, imagery.

Virgil DRĂGHICI, Gödelian Incompleteness(some logical and philosophical aspects), 143
Abstract: The present paper considers two philosophical applications of Gödel’s theorem: as an argument against the thesis meaning in use and as an argument against the mechanical treating of human arithmetical thinking (Lucas/Penrose argument). I argue that both arguments are closely related, by exposing the logical and mathematical facts behind them. More precisely, I focus on the connection between Gödel’s original theorem and its versions (Turing and Kleene), used in both arguments. Finally, a third version of Gödel’s theorem will reveal, by showing the strong connection of this result with paradoxical constructions, the theoretical means to obtain it: a concept of self-reference and a concept of negation.
Keywords: Gödel’s theorem, Lucas/Penrose argument, meaning and use, halting problem of a Turing machine, self-reference, paradox.

REVIEWS, 165
Wendy DONIGER: William Dalrymple, Nine Lives. In search of the sacred in modern India, Bloomsbury, 2009, 288 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4088-0061-4
Mihaela GLIGOR: Mikael Aktor and Robert Deliège (Eds.), From Stigma to Assertion. Untouchability, Identity and Politics in Early and Modern India, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2010, 232 pp., ISBN: 978-87-635-0775-2
Mihaela GLIGOR: Diana-Viorela Burlacu, A Pragmatic Approach to Pinteresque Drama, Cluj-Napoca, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, 2011, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-973-133-898-9

CONTRIBUTORS, 181