Andy, isnt your -- Isn't your Outlines essay somewhere accessible?
That would help those who share Steve's uncertainties re Urphaenomen
and Vygotsky.
mike
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 3:14 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Ha ha! That's a nice usage, Carol!
I have no idea how long this adoption of Ur- into English has been
going on, but it may be wider than I thought.
Andy
Carol Macdonald wrote:
When one of my colleagues discovered some rampant plagiarism
in students'
essays, he called the core, which was common to them all, the
Ur-essay.
Carol
On 6 January 2011 18:23, Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com
<mailto:stevegabosch@me.com>> wrote:
Yes, very helpful, Andy. Interesting neologism, "Urunit."
Your
explanation gives me an intuitive sense, a place to start
- and some more
questions.
Google translates 'Urphaenomen' as 'primary phenomenon'
while Babel
translates it as 'elemental phenomenon'. One translation
could be seen as
more of a time concept, and the other, spatial, or as you
suggest, cellular.
A little more googling finds 'Ur-' as possibly meaning a
number of closely
related concepts, both in terms of 'essential units', and
also in terms of
'genesis'. A list of English substitutes for the German
'Ur-' includes the
ones you mention, original and prototypical, and a few
others: primary,
elemental, ancient, fore-, primal, greatgrand-, primitive,
primeval, proto-,
and archetypal, in a quick search.
These kinds of meanings makes this term especially
interesting to use in
the dialectical senses you and Mike are giving it. The
mixture of the
simultaneous senses of time and space gives the impression
the word has had
a contradictory evolution. Ur was also an ancient city in
Mesopotamia, one
of the oldest, became a world famous archeological dig,
and is likely the
birthplace of Abraham. A lot seems to be packed into that
two-letter German
prefix and its history!
Did Marx, Engels or Hegel use the prefix 'Ur-' in a
significant way?
And who (if anyone knows) introduced terms such as "ur
characteristic" and
"ur model" into English? What meanings are generally
being given to these
terms?
- Steve
On Jan 6, 2011, at 1:12 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:
I'll respond to your question about the meaning of "ur,"
Steve.
"Ur-" is a prefix that is used in German, actually. It
has been around
since the year dot in German, but it has become a bit
of a fad recently for
English speakers.
Ur- is a prefix which means original or prototypical.
I mostlly know it
from Goethe's idea of /Urphaenomen/ which is the
original of Vygotsky's
"unit of analysis", should I say, the Urunit? This is
because of
Goethe/Hegel/Marx/Vygotsky's idea that in order to
understand some complex
process as a whole (i.e. a /Gestalt/) then you have to
begin with the
simplest unit of it, it's germ or cell. So the
reference is to an
(artefact-mediated) action as the ur- of psychology
and cultivated human
life.
Does that help, Steve?
Andy
Steve Gabosch wrote:
... "Generalizing Dual Stimulation.
* The ur characteristic of higher psychologically
(culturally mediated)
human action is that it operates indirectly,
through the environment.
* DS method is the ur model of human action
incorporates the environment
as tools for action. But it must be generalized
into group as well as
individual circumstances."
Mike urges the non-Russians at the conference to
ask their fellow Russian
attendees what 'ur' means.
So - to our fellow Russian speakers - what does
'ur' mean in Mike's
slide?
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