Experience (eBook)

New Foundations for the Human Sciences

Scott Lash (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2018
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-0-7456-9516-7 (ISBN)

Infos

This book is a radical plea for the centrality of experience in the social and human sciences. Lash argues that a large part of the output of the social sciences today is still shaped by assumptions stemming from positivism, in contrast to the tradition of interpretative social enquiry pioneered by Max Weber. These assumptions are particularly central to economics, with its emphasis on homo economicus, the utility-maximizing actor, but they have infiltrated the other social sciences too.
Lash argues for a social sciences based not in positivism's utilitarian a priori but instead in the a posteriori of grounded and embedded subjective experience. His wide-ranging account starts from considerations of ancient experience via Aristotle's technics, continues through a politics of Hannah Arendt's 'a posteriori' public sphere and concludes with the contemporary - with technological experience, on the one hand, and with Chinese post-ontological thought, in which the 'ten thousand things' themselves are doing the experiencing, on the other.
This original book by a leading social and cultural theorist will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, cultural studies and throughout the social sciences.

Scott Lash is Professor and Research Director at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Inhalt

Cover 1
Title page 4
Copyright page 5
Contents 6
Acknowledgements 8
Introduction: Four Types of Experience 10
Coda 17
How to Read This Book 17
Two Pairs of Keywords: A Posteriori and A Priori Substance and Form
Substance and Form 20
1 Have We Forgotten Experience? 23
1.1 In Praise of the A Posteriori 23
1.2 Substance 27
1.3 New Totalitarianisms and Technological Phenomenology: The Chapters 34
2 Experience in Antiquity : Aristotle’s A Posteriori Technics 42
2.1 Technics and Praxis: Aristotle 43
2.2 Against Theoretical Reason: Praxis, Technics, Contingency 46
2.3 Form and Substance: Ancients, Christians and Moderns 52
Untitled 10
3 Subjective Experience : William James’s Radical Empiricism 59
3.1 James’s Radical Empiricism 60
3.1.1 James and Hume: Radical Empiricism and Classical Empiricism 60
3.1.2 Experience and Its Functions 64
3.2 Pragmatism: Activities 70
3.3 Dewey or Formal Pragmatics 74
3.4 Some Conclusions 77
4 Objective Experience : Methodenstreit and Homo Economicus 81
4.1 Methodenstreit: Formalists and Substantivists 84
4.1.1 Historical School: Subjective Experience and Institutions 84
4.1.2 Max Weber: Subjective Experience as Method, Objective Experience as Outcome 89
4.2 Classicals and Neoclassicals 95
4.2.1 Physics and Economics: From Conservation of Substance to Field of Utilities 95
4.2.2 Scottish Enlightenment 100
4.3 Conclusions: The Economic and the Political 102
5 Hannah Arendt’s A Posteriori Politics : Free Will, Judgment and Constitutional Fragility 105
5.1 Ancients and Moderns 105
5.2 Pax Romana and City of God 111
5.2.1 Action and Work 113
5.3 After the Polis: Augustine and Free Will 116
5.4 Politics as Aesthetic Judgment 121
5.5 Conclusions: From Politics to Technological System 133
6 Forms of Life: Technological Phenomenology 137
6.1 Forms of Life: Transformations of Performative Language 137
6.1.1 Forms of Life and Exclusion: Homo Sacer’s Experience 137
6.1.2 Language and Forms of Life 141
6.2 Technological Forms of Life 146
6.2.1 Communicational Forms of Life 146
6.2.2 Entropy or Negentropy 148
6.2.3 Incompleteness: From Predications (Science) to Algorithms (Engineering) 154
6.2.4 System Encounter: War Games or Sex Games? 157
6.3 Conclusions 165
7 Aesthetic Multiplicity : The View and the Ten Thousand Things 169
7.1 Fuzzy Singularities 169
7.1.1 Views 169
7.1.2 Art and Singularities 173
7.2 The Gaze as Multiplicity 175
7.2.1 Beauty: China against Metaphysics 176
7.2.2 Mountains That Breathe (and Perceive) 185
8 Conclusions 193
8.1 Technology 193
8.2 Institutions 195
8.3 Metaphysics or Empirical Multiplicity 200
References 204
Index 211
EULA 222

Rezensionen

"This is a book of amazing scholarly scope. It stands out as an extremely serious study that does not pander to fads and fashions nor seek approval from readers. Here is a major statement that will surprise many who think they are familiar with Lash's thought."
--Philip Smith, Yale University

"In this book, Scott Lash analyses the diverse meanings of a concept key to the social sciences and provides a hermeneutic lens through which the languages of sociology, anthropology, technology and art illuminate one another. A broadening of perspective, engaging with Chinese cosmology at the end of the book, distinguishes Experience as a truly global account of our age."
--Roberto Esposito, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

"In his remarkable book, Scott Lash weaves his way through eras and cultures to construct a possible theory - transcultural and transhistorical - of what most defies theory. The 'empirical' option he gradually develops can indeed, after James and Arendt, erect experience as philosophy's decisive issue."
--François Jullien, Fondation maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.7.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeine Soziologie
• Schlagworte: contemporary social theory • Kultursoziologie • Philosophie • Philosophie in den Gesellschaftswissenschaften • Philosophy • Philosophy of social science • Scott Lash, art, objects, experience, sociology, social theory, technologization, culture, philosophy of social science • Sociology • Sociology of Culture • Sozialtheorie • Soziologie • Zeitgenössische Sozialtheorie
• ISBN-10: 0-7456-9516-7 / 0745695167
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9516-7 / 9780745695167