Imaginary (sociology)
The imaginary (or social imaginary) is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. It is common to the members of a particular social group and the corresponding society. The concept of the imaginary has attracted attention in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media studies. Definitions The roots of the modern concept of the imaginary can be traced back to Jean-Paul Sartre's 1940 book ''The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination'' in which Sartre discusses his concept of the imagination and the nature of human consciousness. Subsequent thinkers have extended Sartre's ideas into the realms of philosophy and sociology. For John Thompson, the social imaginary is "the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life". For Manfred Steger and Pa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Value (ethics)
In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of some thing or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live (normative ethics), or to describe the significance of different actions. Value systems are proscriptive and prescriptive beliefs; they affect the ethical behavior of a person or are the basis of their intentional activities. Often primary values are strong and secondary values are suitable for changes. What makes an action valuable may in turn depend on the ethical values of the objects it increases, decreases, or alters. An object with "ethic value" may be termed an "ethic or philosophic good" (noun sense). Values can be defined as broad preferences concerning appropriate courses of actions or outcomes. As such, values reflect a person's sense of right and wrong or what "ought" to be. "Equal rights for all", "Excellence deserves admiration", and "People should be treated with respect and dignity" are r ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Real
In continental philosophy, the Real refers to reality in its unmediated form. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is an "impossible" category because of its inconceivability and opposition to expression. In depth psychology The Real is the intelligible form of the horizon of truth of the field-of- objects that has been disclosed. As the Real Order of the Borromean knot in Lacanianism, it is opposed in the unconscious to the Imaginary, which encompasses fantasy, dreams and hallucinations. In depth psychology, the Real can be described as a " negative space", analogous to a "black hole", a philosophical void of sociality and subjectivity, a traumatic consensus of intersubjectivity, or as an absolute noumenalness between signifiers. Lewis states that the Real can be a presence or is a substance and cites Derrida's claim that the real is authenticity. Jacques Lacan defines the ''Real'' as a '' plenum'', a nature beyond culture that is contradistinct from ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Representation (arts)
Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else.Mitchell, W. 1995, "Representation", in F Lentricchia & T McLaughlin (eds), ''Critical Terms for Literary Study'', 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements. Signs are arranged in order to form semantics, semantic constructions and express relations. For many philosophers, both ancient and modern, man is regarded as the "representational animal" or ''animal symbolicum'', the creature whose distinct character is the creation and the manipulation of signs – things that "stand for" or "take the place of" something else. Representation has been associated with aesthetics (art) and semiotics (signs). Mitchell says "representation is an extremely elastic notion, which extends all the way from a stone representing a man to Ulysses (novel), a novel representing the day in the life of s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin (14 April 1903 – 7 October 1978) was a French philosopher, theologian, and Iranologist, professor of Islamic studies at the École pratique des hautes études. He was influential in extending the modern study of traditional Islamic philosophy from early ''falsafa'' to later and "mystical" figures such as Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, and Mulla Sadra Shirazi. With works such as ''Histoire de la philosophie islamique'' (1964), he challenged the common European view that philosophy in the Islamic world declined after Averroes and Avicenna. Born into a Protestant family in Paris in April 1903, Corbin received a Catholic education, obtaining a certificate in Scholastic philosophy from the Catholic Institute of Paris at age 19. Three years later he took his "license de philosophie" under the Thomist thinker Étienne Gilson. He studied modern philosophy, including hermeneutics and phenomenology, becoming the first French translator of Martin Heidegger. In 1928, Louis Massig ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every entity within it. To articulate the basic structure of being, ontology examines the commonalities among all things and investigates their classification into basic types, such as the Theory of categories, categories of particulars and Universal (metaphysics), universals. Particulars are unique, non-repeatable entities, such as the person Socrates, whereas universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color ''green''. Another distinction exists between Abstract and concrete, concrete objects existing in space and time, such as a tree, and abstract objects existing outside space and time, like the number 7. Systems of categories aim to provide a comprehensive inventory of reality by employing categories such as Substance t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Institution
An institution is a humanly devised structure of rules and norms that shape and constrain social behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions. Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality. Institutions are a principal object of study in social sciences such as political science, anthropology, economics, and sociology (the latter described by Émile Durkheim as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning"). Primary or meta-institutions are institutions such as the family or money that are broad enough to encompass sets of related institutions. Institutions are also a central concern for law, the formal mechanism for political rule-making and enforcement. Historians study and document the founding, growth, decay and development of institutions as part of political, economic and cultural history. Def ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Benedict Anderson
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 – December 13, 2015) was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States. Anderson is best known for his 1983 book ''Imagined Communities'', which explored the origins of nationalism. A polyglot with an interest in Southeast Asia, he was the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University. His work on the "Cornell Paper", which disputed the official story of Indonesia's 30 September Movement and the subsequent Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966, led to his expulsion from that country. He was the elder brother of the historian Perry Anderson. Biography Background Anderson was born on August 26, 1936, in Kunming, China, to an Irish and Anglo-Irish people, Anglo-Irish father and English mother. His father, James Carew O'Gorman Anderson, was an official with Chinese Maritime Customs. The f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Self-government
Self-governance, self-government, self-sovereignty or self-rule is the ability of a person or group to exercise all necessary functions of regulation without intervention from an external authority. It may refer to personal conduct or to any form of institution, such as family units, social groups, affinity groups, legal bodies, industry bodies, religions, and political entities of various degrees. Self-governance is closely related to various philosophical and socio-political concepts such as autonomy, independence, self-control, self-discipline, and sovereignty. In the context of nation states, self-governance is called national sovereignty which is an important concept in international law. In the context of administrative division, a self-governing territory is called an autonomous region. Self-governance is also associated with political contexts in which a population or demographic becomes independent from colonial rule, absolute government, absolute monarchy, o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Social Contract
In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is an idea, theory, or model that usually, although not always, concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment, it is a core concept of constitutionalism, while not necessarily convened and written down in a constituent assembly and constitution. Social contract arguments typically are that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order. The relation between natural and legal rights is often a topic of social contract theory. The term takes its name from '' The Social Contract'' (French: ''Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique''), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. Although the antecedents of soci ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Margrave Taylor (born November 5, 1931) is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. His work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize, Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the Kluge Prize, John W. Kluge Prize. In 2007, Taylor served with Gérard Bouchard on the Bouchard–Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation with regard to cultural differences in the province of Quebec. He has also made contributions to moral philosophy, epistemology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of action. Early life and education Charles Margrave Taylor was born in Montreal, Quebec, on November 5, 1931, to a Roman Catholic Francophone mother and a Protestant Anglophone father by whom he was raised biling ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fantasy (psychology)
In psychoanalytic theory, fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery. Fantasies are generally associated with scenarios that are impossible or unlikely to happen. Sexual fantasy, Sexual fantasies are a common type of fantasy. Conscious fantasy In everyday life, individuals often find their thoughts "pursue a series of fantasies concerning things they wish they could do or wish they had done ... fantasies of control or of sovereign choice ... daydreams." George Eman Vaillant in his study of defence mechanisms took as a central example of "an immature defence ... ''fantasy'' — living in a 'Walter Mitty' dream world where you imagine you are successful and popular, instead of making real efforts to make friends and succeed at a job." Other researchers and theorists find that fantasy has beneficial elements — providing "small regres ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein (; ; Reizes; 30 March 1882 – 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein's work primarily focused on the role of ambivalence and moral ambiguity in human development. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existentialism, existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad fantasy (psychology), idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life. Life Melanie Klein was born into a History of the Jews in Austria, Jewish family and spent most of her early life in Vienna, Austria, Vienna. She was ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |