Authority in contemporary historiography

In the following article on the basis of Agamben's and Arendt's philosophical tradition the idea of authority will be examined and interpreted in the light of the Agamben's most provocative and crucial concept-idea of Homo Sacer. Genuine understanding of the concept will be attempted by using genealogical and hermeneutical method. Despite the historical and philosophical richness and depth of material, Arendt's investigation lacks precise definition of the term and also nothing is said about the place and function of authority in modern social and political context. Arendt confines herself with historical elucidation and negative representation of authority. She tells more about what was not its meaning, rather defining it in positive terms. However, opposite can be said on Giorgio Agamben. Methodological resemblance of authors is evident, both chose archeological and historical form of inquiry, but as Agamben characterized his attitude, his aim was to develop the problematic thought and to say what remains unsaid and concealed in other's writings without any ambition of fulfilling it. Therefore, we can interpret the notions of authority and power, as they are mixed with each other in the sovereign's figure of indifference.

Parental Authority. Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of a Legal Institution. Volume I: Parental Authority from a Historical Perspective, eds. J. Słyk, M. Wilczek-Karczewska, 2023

In addition, theory was complemented by the voice of practitioners who work with children on a daily basis, young people, families in crisis, and by those who have educational experience. Each study concludes with a list of references (the exception being historical articles, which also include a list of sources). We hope that this monograph will be an important voice in the discussion on parental authority and will contribute to the development of optimal legal solutions.

Marife, 2022

While presenting the ideas of Saramago, which we consider a name deserving a high appreciation by the world of philosophy and literature, it seems that he acknowledges literature as an opportunity to evaluate within the scope of philosophizing. In this context, , he is a thinker who expressed his philosophical views in a tangible and intelligible manner. Indeed, Saramago constructed a system of thinking that take into account the practical reflections of the theory rather than an intensive abstract theoretical thought, as he did in his every literary-philosophical work. This study aimed to discuss how a Nobel Prize-winning writer, who has created a name for himself by his philosophical beliefs, explained a fundamental issue in political philosophy. One of our goals in doing so was to demonstrate that the philosophical contents of literary texts might be treated in a way that makes them philosophical subjects, and literature could be a tool in terms of introducing philosophical views. As a result, it was presented that a concept such as authority would be discussed in a clear and comprehensible way in literary works. The second goal of our study was the argument that preconceptions about human nature are fundamental while expressing an opinion on facts, situations, and organizations with relation to people. Saramago also attempts to explain the concept of authority in terms of his human conception. Although it is discussed in political philosophy, Saramago approaches the concept of authority from a view of human conception, as we have seen throughout the history of philosophy. This human conception, in contrast to the acceptance of enlightenment, implies that humans are prone to evil, and Saramago is not alone in this belief. Even if it was exemplified with Ibn Khaldun and Hobbes in our study, the most common human conception until enlightenment was in this structure. If we make a comment on Saramago’s human conception, we may emphasize that he was influenced by Camus’s work The Rebel or that they provided solutions to the issues of that period with the same point of view since they were both contemporary. Although he appears to be influenced by Sartre and Nietzsche, it is difficult to consider him an existentialist or nihilistic thinker. That arises an issue because Saramago, unlike the aforementioned philosophers, does not trust people due to their weaknesses despite his attribution of great significance to people. According to him, a human is a being with several Achilles heels. Fear, sadness, and ignorance turn individuals into toys in the hands of religions, then people become slaves of religions for the sake of adding a meaning to their entities. However, people are obliged to authorities and religions that offer legitimacy and establish social standards. Saramago, whose description of the state of nature is similar to that of Hobbes, claims that the rules in the animal kingdom apply among humans in the absence of authority, and people might cannibalize each other. Therefore, human beings need authority in some form or another. After defining the fact that human being requires an authority, Saramago emphasizes the significance of the authority being just. Nonetheless, he does not have goodwill for the authority. After realizing that authority will attempt to maintain its authority by any means, Saramago is also concerned about democracy at this point. He also claims that people are misled by manipulations by democratic authorities. In the final analysis, Saramago may also be considered a political philosopher through his evaluations since he propounded significant insights on numerous subjects regarding political philosophy, and it shall not escape from our attention that the literary style in his works also made several difficult philosophical issues more understandable.

JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2009

Ancient and medieval usages of the Latin noun auctoritas display an intractability that induced one lexicographer not fifty years ago to warn bluntly against trying even to translate it: The word auctoritas belongs to the most significant and lasting coinages of the Latin language. Its meaning is not always easy to ascertain, and attempting to translate it causes even more trouble. A wise person will do better to refrain from the effort. 2 To guard against such difficulties, I will not unfold a full history of auctoritas and auctores from the beginning of the Latin language down to the present day. Furthermore, I will not attempt to address systematically the vast scholarship on authorship, as distinct (sometimes) from auctoritas, in the Middle Ages. 3 Instead, I will aim mainly to sketch attitudes toward authority, and authors, that prevailed among rhetoricians, grammarians, and exegetes through the earlier Middle Ages and to offer a partial list of new stances that developed afterward. In so doing, I will train my sights on literary auctoritas and auctores, those implicated in reading and writing. Even within this restricted ambit, I accept the impossibility of attaining exhaustive completeness. The period I will seek eventually to elucidate may be called the long twelfth century. Centuries are arbitrary slices of time, and major transitions may refuse willfully to take place just as the ninety-ninth year yields to the hundredth. In my definition, the long twelfth century extends from after the Great Schism of 1054 that divided the Greek and Latin branches of Christendom to around the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

2009

This thesis observes how modern leaders of Western society publicly engage in an unrewarding quest for a durably authoritative identity and it asks why rulers are so troubled in cultivating a credible role of authority. The author argues that modern authority itself has disintegrated with the change of its understanding and the diffusion of fixed authoritative roles and that this is accompanied by an identity crisis. He asks how modern rulers respond to the disintegration of a fixed, shared social reality in late modernity, and to the fact that our main legitimating mythologies-such as that of (political) representation, which once ordered the allocation of authority-no longer provide the reassurance and belief in ruler's authority. To understand the nature of authority and its disintegration, the author explores rulers' consciousness by categorising their responses in two archetypical models of authority, inspired by Machiavelli's Prince and Shakespeare's tragic hero. They represent the authority-effects of fear and reassurance and the two modern modes of authority cultivation: increasing social distance and decreasing social distance The thesis argues that modern authority is tragic because the logic by which the dominant archetypical roles try to authorise themselves is self defeating. It illustrates this with a history of authority which describes the characteristically modern drive for the exposure, immanence, and transparency of authority, informed by a desire for emancipation and mastery, and how it is paralleled by a degradation of authority and these typically modern archetypes that continue to determine Western culture. Reintegration of authority would require a more dimensional understanding of the concept. The author trances the four major roots of authority (authorship, authorisation, authenticity, and augmentation), and suggest they represent the subjective, objective, individual, and collective dimensions of authority which together form a whole system of meaning and creation.

eTopoi. Journal for Ancient Studies, 2016

In this paper we would like to discuss some questions concerning authority and knowledge with obvious relevance to our research group Personal and apersonal authorization (B-5). After briefly summarizing how the phenomenon of ‘authority’ is viewed in general, this paper takes up the specific case of authority and tradition. We then consider text as a special case of tradition, and finally knowledge texts as a special case of texts. The most significant section of the paper is the second half, where we sketch out two complementary methods of constructing or representing authority in such texts, one personal and one non-personal. Ancient Greek, religious studies, theology, church history, ancient history and Chinese studies are our areas of expertise, so most of the examples we have chosen come from those fields. But our intention is to draw broad conclusions that could also apply to other traditions as well.

This volume brings together the papers presented at a confer- ence held at the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, March 19-20, 2004. The topic of the conference – the concept of authority – lent itself particularly well to its multi-disciplinary approach. Different forms of authority play decisive roles, and ought to be examined not only in the political sphere but also in the areas of social relations more generally and education. Organized collective life would be impossible without forms of authority, however legitimate. It is thus difficult to imagine constructing a shared knowledge without thinking critically about “authority,” even though we simultaneously need it to focus our criticism. Without authority, knowledge itself would become completely subjective, unstructured, incommunicable and unable to build upon itself. From the cognitive sciences to political and legal philosophy, the subject discussed in this volume remains one of the most fascinating areas of research and analysis in the humanities.