Stanford University

Culture

Heidegger Never Got Beyond Facticity

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(1) The “thing itself” of Heidegger’s thinking was Ereignis. (2) But Ereignis is a reinscription of what Being and Time had called thrownness or facticity. (3) But facticity/Ereignis is ex-sistence’s ever-operative appropriation to its proper structure as the ontological “space” or “clearing” that makes possible practical and theoretical discursivity. (4) Such facticity is the ultimate and inevitable presupposition of all activities of ex-sistence and thus of any understanding of being. (5) Therefore, for ex-sistence – and a fortiori for Heidegger as a thinker of Ereignis – there can be no going beyond facticity.

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Authors
Thomas Sheehan
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13:28
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Legitimacy in the ‘secular church’ of the United Nations

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This article argues that how the United Nations (UN) conceptualizes legitimacy is not only a matter of legalism or power politics. The UN’s conception of legitimacy also utilizes concepts, language and symbolism from the religious realm. Understanding the entanglement between political and religious concepts and the ways of their verbalization at the agential level sheds light on how legitimacy became to be acknowledged as an integral part of the UN and how it changes. At the constitutional level, the article examines phrases and ‘verbal symbols’, enshrined in the Charter of the ‘secular church’ UN. They evoke intrinsic legitimacy claims based on religious concepts and discourse such as hope and salvation. At the agential level, the article illustrates how the Secretary-General verbalizes those abstract constitutional principles of legitimacy. Religious language and symbolism in the constitutional framework and agential practice of the UN does not necessarily produce an exclusive form of legitimacy. This article shows, however, that legitimacy as nested in the UN’s constitutional setting cannot exist without religious templates because they remain a matter of a ‘cultural frame’.

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International Relations
Authors
Jodok Troy
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CANCELED - French Culture Workshop with Radhika Koul

This week's event-- Radhika Koul presents "The Drama of our World: Spectator and Subject in Medieval Kashmir and Early Modern Europe"-- will be postponed until further notice. 
 
Looking forward, The French Culture Workshop proposed Spring Quarter schedule is now available on their webpage. 

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Building 260, Room 252

Pigott Hall

Radhika Koul Speaker Stanford University
Workshops

The poietic mimesis of 18th c. French and Italian Literary Portraits

Literary scholars have generally been loath to analyze description as a practice and technique; as such, it has long suffered from critical disengagement. Academics disparage descriptions as long-winded, unnecessary rhetoric which readers skip on a regular basis. And yet, for unfathomable reasons, authors continue resorting to descriptions in their texts. 

The purpose of Cynthia's dissertation is to uncover the motivations underlying authors’ persistent recourse to descriptions. To that end, Cynthia examines 18th-century French and Italian novels and focus on a particular kind of descriptive element: characters’ “literary portraits”. Cynthia will show how in the 18th century, literary portraits were more than just sums of characters’ physical descriptions and moral traits. Instead, their function was to convey meaningful, crucial information that would eventually influence the outcome of a given text. In addition, Cynthia will demonstrate how this narrative function, disguised as “mere” description, was deployed along three main axes: aesthetic, ludic and pedagogic. Each axis will constitute a chapter of the dissertation, showing, respectively, how literary portraits were justified by three core concerns: aestheticizing the narration, entertaining readers, and instructing them in morality.

A diachronic perspective will identify a century’s worth of patterns and differentiate substantial, long-term changes from fleeting fads, while an interdisciplinary approach will uncover how literary descriptions borrowed/lent techniques from/to other fields of knowledge, such as esthetics, fine arts, anthropology, natural history, and medicine. Cynthia's approach, based on the analysis of descriptive practices, will bring to light the cohesive aspects and interactive relations between those seemingly disparate fields.
 
Cynthia Laura Giancotti-Vialle is a 5th year PhD student in the French and Italian department at Stanford University. She holds a B.A. in French and Chinese Languages and Cultures from the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy and an M.A. in 19th c. French Literature from Paris VII-Paris Diderot. Her current area of research concerns descriptive practices in 18th c. fictional works, but is also interested in  modern life-writing and fictional representations of violence against women. 

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Building 260, Room 252

Pigott Hall

Cynthia Laura Giancotti-Vialle Speaker Stanford University
Workshops

Justin Leidwanger

Building 110, Room 210

 

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Associate Professor of Classics
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Justin Leidwanger is a classical archaeologist with interests in maritime economies and interaction as well as human mobility, especially during the broad millennium of the Roman Empire. The current vantage point for this research is southeast Sicily, where shipwrecks and ports provide primary evidence for connections between south and north, west and east, and the long-term development of communities situated in the middle of an economically, socially, and politically changing world. His current Project ‘U Mari (Sicilian for “the sea”) aims to understand and integrate the diverse maritime heritage of interactions and livelihoods that have defined the central Mediterranean, and to mobilize this heritage in support of local engagement and sustainable development. Aside from archaeological survey and excavation of historic shipwrecks and ports, the project’s diverse focuses include more recent Sicilian fishing communities and their socioeconomic dynamics, archaeological documentation of contemporary refugee journeys to Europe, and a new Museum of the Sea with associated coastal and underwater heritage trails. He is the author of Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (Oxford), and editor or co-editor of three more volumes, including recently Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge).

Affiliated faculty of The Europe Center
Fellow of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center
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Repetition, Recurrence, Returns: How Cultural Renewal Works (Transforming Literary Studies)

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Repetition is constitutive of human life. Both the species and the individual develop through repetition. Unlike simple recall, repetition is permeated by the past and the present and is oriented toward the future. Repetition of central actions and events plays an important role in the lives of individuals and the life of society. It helps to create meaning and memory. Because repetition is a central aspect of human life, it plays a role in all social and cultural spheres. It is important for several branches of the humanities and social studies. This book presents studies of an array of repetitive phenomena and to show that repetition analysis is opening up a new field of study within single disciplines and interdisciplinary research. Recommended for scholars of literature, music, culture, and communication.

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Lexington Books
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Joan Ramon Resina
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SGS Summer Film Festival: Kon-Tiki (Norway, 2012)

(Note the new location this year. Please use the lower-level door on the left for an accessible entrance.)

SAPP Center Parking map

Kon-Tiki video cover


Kon-Tiki is the story of legendary Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his epic crossing of the Pacific on a balsa wood raft to prove that it was possible for South Americans to settle in Polynesia in pre-Columbian times.  View the trailer. Based on the 1951 award-winning documentary,

The film will be followed by Q&As moderated by Christophe Crombez, Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center.

 

 

This screening is part of the 2019 Stanford Global Studies Summer Film Festival, "Earth: Habitat for All."  For more information, please visit the Summer Film Festival webpage.

2019 SGS Summer Film Festival Poster

 

 

Sapp Center Auditorium
Room 111
376 Lomita Drive, Stanford, CA 94305

Christophe Crombez

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-0249 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center
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Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.

Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program, and is responsible for the Minor in European Studies and the Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.

Furthermore, Crombez is Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. He is Vice-Chair for Research at the Department for Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation.

Crombez has also held visiting positions at the following universities and research institutes: the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, in Florence, Italy, in Spring 2008; the Department of Political Science at the University of Florence, Italy, in Spring 2004; the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, in Winter 2003; the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, in Spring 1998; the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Summer 1998; the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in Spring 1997; the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in Spring 1996; and Leti University in St. Petersburg, Russia, in Fall 1995.

Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.

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Senior Research Scholar Q&A Moderator The Europe Center
Film Screenings

The World Heritage Bluff: Comparing Vienna’s historic city center with Ephesos

To listen to the audio recording of this talk, please visit our multimedia page.

While Ephesos was inscribed in the UNESCO world heritage list in 2015, Vienna is in danger of losing the title because of building projects in the city center. From these two rather different examples, the whole UNESCO process including application, inscription, and monitoring will be critically reviewed and the question of accuracy, independency, and scrutiny of UNESCO and related organizations raised. National exertions of influence will be reflected upon, as they often contradict expert evaluations. In conclusion, the issue ought to be addressed whether something like “World Cultural Heritage,” in the sense of global responsibility, actually exists, and whether the national administration of the world heritage sites in fact excludes this aspiration. Ultimately the overriding question is raised as to how a consciousness for cultural heritage, apart from touristic-economic incentives and beyond national (in many cases regional) borders, can be created.

 

Sabine Ladstätter headshot


Sabine Ladstätter studied Classical Archaeology, Prehistory, Protohistory and Ancient History at the Universities of Graz and Vienna, culminating in a Master's degree (University of Graz) in 1992 and a Doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in 1997. Between 1997-2007 she held the position of Research Assistant at the Institute for the Cultural History of Antiquity at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After her Habilitation at the University of Vienna in 2007 she moved to the Austrian Institute of Archaeology, the directorship of which she assumed in 2009. At the same time, the directorship of the excavations at Ephesos was assigned to her. Awards for Scientist of the Year in 2011 in Austria, and for the best popular scientific book in Austria in 2014, are proof of her engagement in the areas of scientific communication and public outreach. She is a member of the German Archaeological Institute and of the Archaeological Institute of America, as well as numerous national and international scientific and editorial boards, and is a referee for leading research promotion institutions. Visiting professorships at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Paris (2016) and Stanford University (2019) underscore her engagement in the fields of education and teaching, also attested by her supervision of academic degrees at a variety of European universities.

Sabine Ladstätter

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Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor (2018-2019)
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Sabine Ladstätter studied Classical Archaeology, Prehistory, Protohistory and Ancient History at the Universities of Graz and Vienna, culminating in a Master's degree (University of Graz) in 1992 and a Doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in 1997. Between 1997-2007 she held the position of Research Assistant at the Institute for the Cultural History of Antiquity at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After her Habilitation at the University of Vienna in 2007 she moved to the Austrian Institute of Archaeology, the directorship of which she assumed in 2009. At the same time, the directorship of the excavations at Ephesos was assigned to her.

Awards for Scientist of the Year in 2011 in Austria, and for the best popular scientific book in Austria in 2014, are proof of her engagement in the areas of scientific communication and public outreach. She is a member of the German Archaeological Institute and of the Archaeological Institute of America, as well as numerous national and international scientific and editorial boards, and is a referee for leading research promotion institutions. Visiting professorships at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Paris (2016) and Stanford University as the 2018-2019 Visiting Austrian Chair Professor,  underscore her engagement in the fields of education and teaching, also attested by her supervision of academic degrees at a variety of European universities.

Professor Ladstätter taught for the Department of Classics the course Classics 359: An Archaeology of Ephesos (Winter Quarter).

Director, Austrian Institute of Archaeology
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