Dana Riesenfeld - Böcker

Clichés We Live By shows how clichés - those everyday phrases we love to hate - shape our world. It traces their trajectory from modernity to the contemporary digital and artificial intelligence eras, revealing their pervasive presence and their paradoxical nature as both banal and profound. The book historicizes the clichés, situating its emergence in modern print culture, and offers the first comprehensive roadmap of theoretical perspectives, proposing an integrative approach. Drawing on philosophy of language and rhetoric, the authors treat clichés as events in time, defined less by objective repetition than by a subjective impression of triteness. Like déjà vus, clichés evoke a visceral sense of "here we go again," interpreted variably by users and receivers. Viewing them as negotiable constructs, the authors explore their manifestations in popular discourse and literary works: through self-conscious endorsement, repetitive hoarding, creative appropriation, and celebratory embrace. The book also examines the interplay between clichés and AI language models, highlighting their shared characteristics as statistical, collective, and curiously ownerless forms of language. AI simultaneously relies on and challenges clichés, raising questions about the boundaries of human and machine-generated banality and originality. Far from being trivial, clichés emerge here as dynamic cultural forces we inevitably live by.

clichés We Live By shows how clichés - those everyday phrases we love to hate - shape our world. It traces their trajectory from modernity to the contemporary digital and artificial intelligence eras, revealing their pervasive presence and their paradoxical nature as both banal and profound. The book historicizes the clichés, situating its emergence in modern print culture, and offers the first comprehensive roadmap of theoretical perspectives, proposing an integrative approach. Drawing on philosophy of language and rhetoric, the authors treat clichés as events in time, defined less by objective repetition than by a subjective impression of triteness. Like déjà vus, clichés evoke a visceral sense of "here we go again," interpreted variably by users and receivers. Viewing them as negotiable constructs, the authors explore their manifestations in popular discourse and literary works: through self-conscious endorsement, repetitive hoarding, creative appropriation, and celebratory embrace. The book also examines the interplay between clichés and AI language models, highlighting their shared characteristics as statistical, collective, and curiously ownerless forms of language. AI simultaneously relies on and challenges clichés, raising questions about the boundaries of human and machine-generated banality and originality. Far from being trivial, clichés emerge here as dynamic cultural forces we inevitably live by.

The Rei(g)n of Rule is a study of rules and their role in language. Rules have dominated the philosophical arena as a fundamental philosophical concept. Little progress, however, has been made in reaching an accepted definition of rules. This fact is not coincidental. The concept of rule is expected to perform various, at times conflicting, tasks. Analyzing key debates and rule related discussions in the philosophy of language I show that typically rules are perceived and defined either as norms or as conventions. As norms, rules perform the evaluative task of distinguishing between correct and incorrect actions. As conventions, rules describe how certain actions are actually undertaken. As normative and conventional requirements do not necessarily coincide, the concept of rule cannot simultaneously accommodate both. The impossibility to consistently define ‘rule’ has gone unnoticed by philosophers, and it is in this sense that ‘rule’ has also blocked philosophical attempts to explain language in terms of rules.

Assembling an unprecedented range of considered responses to the noted contributions to philosophy made by Marcelo Dascal, this collection comprises the work of his many friends, colleagues and former students. Beginning with a series of articles on Dascal’s influential insights on philosophical controversy, this volume continues with explorations of Dascal’s celebrated scholarship on Liebnitz, before moving on to papers dealing with his philosophy of language, including interpretations by Dresner and Herring on the phenomenon of emoticons. Taken as a whole, they provide a compelling commentary on Dascal’s prolific and voluminous publications and include fresh perspectives on the theory of argumentation and the ethics of communication.   The material collected here extends to political philosophy, such as Morris-Reich's paper exploring the ways in which German social scientists confront issues of antisemitism, the psychology of genius, and the origins of norms in society and culture. Much of the analysis is directly connected to, or influenced by, the philosophical themes, ideas and concepts developed throughout the years by Marcelo Dascal, while others have a looser connection to his work. All of them, however, attest to the remarkable and multifaceted philosophical persona of Marcelo Dascal, who is the guiding light of the rich conceptual dialogue running through this book. ​  ​