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Wilfrid Sellars’ presented two parallel conceptions of language: functional role semantics and theory of picturing. The aim of my paper is to consider how these two views fit together and what roles they play in his overall philosophical project. First I show philosophical motivations for adopting these conceptions. Functional role semantics contributes to explanation of mental phenomena, it is consistent with Sellar’s critique of the given, it provides a nominalistic account of abstract terms. The picturing theory explains how language can be about the world. The question I also address in this paper is to what extent both of these conceptions are marked by what is the key problem for Sellars - the indispensability of both naturalistic and normative perspective for an adequate account of cognition, intentionality and language. I try to trace the limits of naturalistic explanation in both of his conceptions.

This thesis explores central themes in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and engages with exegetical discussions of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. Metaphysical, therapeutic, and elucidatory interpretations are presented and discussed. The division between showing and saying, which is a key distinction in the Tractatus, is found to be more complicated than the exegetical discourse sometimes suggests. This is argued to count in favour of an elucidatory reading of the Tractatus’ seemingly paradoxical closing remarks. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s account of picturing is shown to have a fundamental role, around which the distinctions between showing and saying and internal and external relations revolve. Even the doctrine of simple objects and atomic facts is rooted in the pictorial view of language. The thesis furthermore defends a dynamic interpretation of internal relations, upon which internal relations are shown through the application of operations, a view that is linked to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of the subject. The result is a view on which, although the limits of language mean the limits of the world, the limits are not drawn once and for all.

THE PUBLIC INTEREST. DO WE HAVE A DUTY? The results of a poll recently published in Romania indicated that 50 % of the population is not interested in understanding the activities of the political police under the communist regime. The poll also showed that 67 % do not want to find out if somebody in their family worked for the Securitate. These figures only confirm what we already knew: there is an obvious refusal to take responsibility for the criminal activities of the regime. More than ha...

While the very first non-communist government in Polish post-war history “demonstrated the truism that only revolutionaries are able to impose austerity,” its executives declared that austerity measures would bring fruits only when all links with the past were broken. The Prime Minister announced in his inaugural speech the need to draw a “bold line” between the inglorious past and the brighter future, and the technocratic finance minister justified the drastic dismantling of socialist indust...

Exhibitions on the communist past are scarce in Romanian museums. In contrast to this scarcity, the commemoration of the “communist tragedy” through memorials, monuments and the hybrid species of memorial-museum is disproportionately present. Only a very skilled and determined museumgoer will be able to discover the few places where aspects of the communist past are permanently exhibited in Romanian museums. In Bucharest, the visitor should be prepared to go underground to find the only perma...

Since the collapse of Communism, three major museums dealing with the recent past have been established in the capital cities of the Baltic states. Two of these—the Museum of Occupations (Tallinn, Estonia, established in 2003) and The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (Riga, 1993)— linked the Nazi and Soviet periods together to present a history of continuous national subjugation and suffering at the hands of foreign powers, lasting from 1940 to 1991. The third—the Museum of Genocide Victims...

How do museums and cinema shape the image of the Communist past in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? This volume is the first systematic analysis of how visual techniques are used to understand and put into context the former regimes. After history “ended” in the Eastern Bloc in 1989, museums and other memorials mushroomed all over the region. These efforts tried both to explain the meaning of this lost history, as well as to shape public opinion on their society’s shared post-war heritage. Museums and films made political use of recollections of the recent past, and employed selected museum, memorial, and media tools and tactics to make its political intent historically credible. Thirteen essays from scholars around the region take a fresh look at the subject as they address the strategies of fashioning popular perceptions of the recent past. "Books on the CEE transformations that deal with media and popular cultures should be welcomed. Past for the Eyes belongs to this extraordinary breed. The book is devoted to the visual representations of the socialist / communist past and the forms they took. The interconnected processes of visualization of the past, and the collective memory sedimentation are the main focus. The book brings together perspectives of linked but still distinctive ways of enquiry: visual studies, cultural studies, area studies, museum studies and contemporary history with its passion for ethnography and oral evidence.

Since the late 1980s, when the changes in Eastern and Central Europe seemed overwhelming and access to previously restricted information grew exponentially, this region could safely claim an unpredictable past. Today, almost two decades after the fall of communist regimes, scholars working on the recent past are paradoxically challenged by the abundance of memory and the variety of witnesses’ accounts, which confront the professional historical narrative with the simple claim “I was there and...

One can look back at the footprints left in the sandand see them as a road.Zygmunt Bauman, From Pilgrim to Tourist From a growing temporal distance, the Soviet historical “episode” seems to entail an emphatic beginning and a somewhat less spectacular but equally distinguishable end. The present article sets out to review the films of the last twenty years dealing with the Soviet period. Despite the declared break with the past, characteristic of transitional societies, a closer look at the so...

More than fifteen years have passed since the change of the political regime in Eastern Europe, but the countries of the former Soviet bloc still face the fundamental challenge of how to deal with the events of their recent past, how to come to terms with the legacy of Socialism and its local versions. There are countless ways of approaching these issues, but I will focus on the possibilities of interpretation provided by creative documentaries. The material for my analysis is Péter Forgács’s...

THE UNFINISHED PRESENT: INTERPRETATIVE CONFLICTS OF MEMORY AND HISTORY “Budapest is a city without time. If you visit here, you will not feel that you are in the nineties. (…) Here the politicians want to win World War I in Parliament.” This remark by Jenő Menyhart, underground musician and emblematic figure of the 1980s in Hungary, uttered in his subjective, sarcastic style, explicates the symbolic battle for possession of the past in post-socialist Hungary. Labeling the historical conscious...

Péter Apor (b. 1971) is a research fellow at Pasts Inc., Center for Historical Studies at the Central European University. His dissertation on communist representations of history in Hungary was defended at the European University Institute in Florence in 2002. His main research themes include the politics of history and memory, popular culture, and the history of historiography. Gabriela Cristea (b. 1980) is a research assistant at the Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest. She received her MA ...

The “Velvet Revolution” in November 1989 brought about enormous changes in the political and social environment: the communist -regime was abolished and after forty-one years democracy was reestablished in Czechoslovakia. In art, the most important change brought by the Revolution was the end of censorship. Since 1989 artists have been allowed to do as they wish—as long as they can find the funding. Film in socialism was funded exclusively by the state, but since about 1990 the state has not ...

The visual record of Hungary’s transition to democracy is marked with comfortably familiar (if not canonical) images of key events and personalities. No visual representation of the Hungarian transition which takes its topic and itself seriously is complete without the black-and-white film of Imre Nagy, the prime minister of the 1956 revolt, listening to his death sentence, followed by the images of the immense crowd at his reburial ceremony before the catafalque on Heroes’ Square. The story ...

About 60 km from Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, lies a small town which currently represents the primary case of what can be described as a “museum of Socialism in the country.” The town has nothing that can be compared to Budapest’s Statue Park, nor is it a place where the heritage of the socialist period is put on display, decontextualized and recontextualized in a post-socialist mode. It would be wrong to suggest that the town was once the location of a labor camp or a prison for the socialist...

…history-as-problem has much less of an audience thanhistory-as-dream, history-as-escapism, than History. This article explores the ways the national past of ex-Yugoslavia is cinematically remembered, with particular focus on the role played by the combination of documentary and fictional material in the creation of diverse cinematic memories in mainly but not exclusively post-Yugoslav cinema. The primary issue I address is the role of documentary “interventions,” the use of remembrance and m...

It was a cold Monday in early December 2006. On the way to work I passed a tram stop. A black and white poster with heavy red lettering “Thou Shalt not Kill” hung on the wall of a tram shelter. It hung between two colorful posters, one with a girl saying “I am looking for a mummy and a daddy”—part of a social campaign for adoption—and another “Apocalypto by Mel Gibson”—a movie advertisement. My first idea was that the black and white poster must relate to the fairly controversial antiabortion...

If one conclusion from these three chapters would be that very little religious gets permanently thrown away, another would be that people embody history, literature, images. History is important, because what happened to our families, our towns, our nations, our peoples in the past—our wars, our defeats, our prosperity, our hunger, our enslavement, our enslaving, our persecution—is hammered into our way of being as surely as a genetic code, affecting the way we are raised and the way we rais...

“Painting possesses a truly divine power in thatnot only does it make the absent present(as they say of friendship), but it also representsthe dead to the living many centuries later, sothey are recognized by spectators with pleasureand deep admiration for the artist.”Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, 1435 Illustrating the two previous chapters about visits by pilgrim strangers and images that seemed to come alive were statues, paintings, engravings, and photographs. This chapter deals with...

Toribia del Valintroduced one of the ways of connecting with the divine: the visit of a supernatural with counsel and instructions for a specific purpose, in her case to end a drought in 1931. Because Toribia saw the visitor and no one else did, we call this a vision, or, from the point of view of a believer, an apparition. Her vision introduced new information into the constellation of grace in the zone around Casas de Benítez. If all had gone well and rain had fallen as predicted, it would ...

Photography brought an immediacy to the depiction of visions, but at the same time presented a basic problem, one that has always been present for people seeing others have visions: by definition one cannot see what only seers see (Fig. 47). For documentary photos of visionaries, the proof and the attraction of the photos, like that of many mystical paintings and sculptures of the baroque period, was the transformation of the seer’s faces and their bodies by what they saw looking upwards (Fig...

This study addresses the relation of people to divine beings in contemporary and historical communities, as exemplified in three strands. One is a long tradition of visions of mysterious wayfarers in rural Spain who bring otherworldly news and help, including recent examples. Another treats the seeming vivification of religious images—statues, paintings, engravings, and photographs apparently exuding blood, sweat and tears in Spanish homes and churches in the early modern period and the revival of the phenomenon throughout Europe in the twentieth century. Of special interest is the third strand of the book: the transposition of medieval and early modern representations of the relations between humans and the divine into the modern art of photography. Christian presents a pictorial examination of the phenomenon with a large number of religious images, commercial postcards and family photographs from the first half of past century Europe. To Edith Christian Minear, Silvia Ravelo Arrom, Dave Cronon, and all who, named and unnamed, look out from the photographs on these pages.

In France, as the prospect of conflict with Germany increased, starting June 30, 1913, first two girls, then scores of adults, began to have visions in the village of Alzonne, 10 kilometers from Carcassonne. The visions started in poplars on the bank of the River Fresquel, then spread to the sky above the highway that passed through the town and also to the cemetery. In all there were over a hundred seers (some from Carcassonne and Bordeaux), until, in March 1914, the diocese decided the whol...

Composite images, whether by photomontage, multiple exposure, sandwiched negatives, or other techniques, provided other solutions to the depiction of visions. Since the earliest days of their craft, photographers had experimented with combinations. The postcard trade encouraged the notion of absence combined with fondness, and combining images was a good way to picture the virtual reunion created by the card when sent. The period of 1895 to the end of World War I, which included massive migra...

For several years the medievalist Lisa Bitel and the photographer Matt Gainer attended the monthly visions of María Paula Acuña, a mother of six in her fifties, in the Mojave Desert of California. I went twice, taking students. Typically, hundreds of Latino-American pilgrims would be waiting when María Paula and her female acolytes arrived in a van. A procession on foot would pause when María Paula had her vision of Our Lady of the Rocks and people took pictures of the sky. Then later at the ...

Photomontage was used in real, studio portraits as well (the examples I have are Spanish, French, Belgian, Dutch, Russian and Italian) to unite couples and familles separated by emigration, military service, imprisonment or death. For separation is an intimation of death, death once removed. In the composite photographs we see an emulation, whether on the part of the studio photographers, their clients, or both, of the commercial cards centering on presence and absence. Indeed, in the case of...

The Construction industry is in need of theorisation of the process of utilising innovations. Considering the specific idiosyncrasies, the construction industry theories about innovations should be developed or tested incorporating the current profile of innovations in the construction industry. In this context, the perceptions of the practitioners in the industry about the innovation of interest should be taken into account as well. Nevertheless, the literature review reveals that construction researchers have used different constructs and measures to picture the status quo of an innovation. The existing body of knowledge lacks a unified agreed-upon model providing a picture of the cross-sectional state of an innovation while meeting the requirements of researchers and decision makers. This paper addresses the aforementioned knowledge gaps by utilising a qualitative approach. The process of the study encompasses extracting the appropriate constructs from the extant literature to establish a conceptual model. Accordingly, a model will be presented and ultimately confirmed based on the results of five unstructured interviews conducted within academia in South Australia. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing a model incorporating the constructs that provide cross-sectional pictures of the status quo of innovations within construction context. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

International audience; This article uses Lonely planet books published about Greenland between 1991 and 2005 to do a diachronic study. The central theme of these books is the will of their authors to highlight close-knit communities specific of main readership, backpackers. Criticize other tourists should be a way to create a collective identity and a singular way to discover wilderness and culture, the most important attractions of the island. Nevertheless this collective identity can be questioned in comparison to previous study and fieldwork.; Cette étude livre une analyse diachronique des différents guides Lonely planet publiés sur le Groenland entre 1991 et 2005. Dans ces ouvrages les auteurs manifestent leur volonté de créer un "entre soi" propre au lectorat principal, les backpackers. La création de cette identité collective se fait par la critique des autres touristes et dans la manière singulière de découvrir la "wilderness" et la culture, principales raisons du succès touristique de l'île. Toutefois, cette identité collective semble remise en question par la confrontation du contenu des guides avec des travaux antérieurs et avec la réalité du terrain.

This text describes three tools on which a methodic analysis of geographical iconography can be based on and how it works. The pictures chosen formats, the arrangement and the layout of the pictures as well as the iconographic way of commenting them, strongly help to identify iconographic systems. Several practical examples specify this method and its limits in the contemporary history of french geography.; Ce texte décrit trois outils sur lesquels peut s'appuyer une méthode d'analyse de l'iconographie géographique. L'étude des formats des images, des dispositifs de mise en page et des postures de commentaire des images permet d'identifier des systèmes iconographiques. Plusieurs exemples concrets précisent la méthode proposée et ses limites dans l'histoire contemporaine de la géographie française.