In search for the demos: an existentialist dialectical view of nomos and phusis

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2021-9-17

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Oktaykan, Can Berk

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The thesis is propelled towards a rethinking of the preponderant tenets of an existentialist dialectical conception of totalizing projects undertaken by different parts of social totalities. With an overriding interest in reconstruing the present human potentialities that are afforded by the late capitalist relations of domination, production and reproduction, the ontological premises and epistemological preconditions that enable this theorization of praxis are unraveled. Taking his cue from the Adornian modification of the Hegelian dialectics, Spinozist postulation of material action as predicated upon an ingrained element of immanence and the Aristotelian preeminence attributed to dunamis, the author tries to retrace an existentialist pathway through the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Responsive to the call that is emanated by the theoretical peculiarities of traversing that pathway, he, then, endeavors to come to terms with some relevant ideas drawn from the corpus of Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lukács, etc., putting the finishing touches on that theoretical effort by engaging in frequent dialogues with Sartre’s existentialist dialectics. Although not being a thoroughbred historicist himself, he, then, puts the theoretical insights he garnered into a historical perspective, thus working toward the achievement of a multi-level double hermeneutics of human potentialities past and present. That existentialist dialectical attempt to reconstruct a diachronics of re-coded textualities that are organized into antagonistic totalities focuses on the collective projects that have been conducted by archaic and classical communities in order to realize the acuteness of the pain that is inflicted from our curbed human potentialities.

Subject Keywords

Dialectics, Sartrean existentialism, Totalisation, Nomos, Phusis

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/92154

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

C. B. Oktaykan, “In search for the demos: an existentialist dialectical view of nomos and phusis,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2021.