Dangers in the Incommensurability of Globalization

Socio-Political Volatilities
1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84718-609-6
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 190 Seiten

The thesis of incommensurability concerns the interrelation between subjective culture and objective culture through which the constitutive agency of chaos (incommensurability) emerges. The objectivations/products, the constituents of objective culture, carry their own Being, and this Being transcends the original subjective expressivities/intentions. The constitutive agency of this incommensurable interrelation becomes apparent in an age of globalization where its effects become global, bringing about dangerous socio-political volatilities. To illustrate, global warming has been neither the expressive intention of subjective culture nor a constituent of energy per se as an objectivated product in the context of objective culture. It emerges in the interrelation, an unforeseen incommensurability, a chaos in the culture of energy that threatens the globe/world in various ways. Incommensurability, the cultural form of chaos, is recognized as dramatically foiling human instrumental rationality, spoiling its hubris or belief in its own progress. The doctrine of incommensurability shows that we can not know what we are doing while we are doing it, for the empirical manifestations of chaos are only knowable after the fact and its effects are unpredictable. This book of essays is divided into two parts: the first dealing with contemporary themes in subjective culture and the second with those in objective culture. A few of the pressing topics treated in this volume are: abstracted information of a computer-based society versus locally-based, grounded knowledge, abstracted neo-liberal economics versus place-grounded economics, the geo-politics of peak oil, and the intensification of natural disasters as a consequence of global warming reveal the tenuous character of the contemporary world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Backhaus, Gary

Murungi, John

Über Autor(innen)

Gary Backhaus received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the American University and he is a Visiting Professor at Loyola College in Maryland. He has co-edited over ten volumes, most recently: Symbolic Landscapes; Colonial and Global Interfacings: Imperial Hegemonies and Democratizing Resistances; The Illuminating Traveler: Expressions of the Ineffability of the Sublime. Many of his articles can be found in Human Studies and Analecta Husserliana. He is a phenomenologist that works in the fields of the human and social sciences, humanities, and fine arts. He has a special interest in geographical themes and along with Robert Mugerauer is the series editor for Toposophia: Sustainability, Dwelling, Design.

John Murungi received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University and his J.D. degree from the University of Maryland. He is Chairperson for the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. He is a co-organizer of the annual conferences and co-founder for the International Association for the Study of Environment, Space, and Place. This is the eighth volume that he has co-edited with Gary Backhaus. His other publications concern hermeneutics and the phenomenology of African experience.