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and the content has not been altered or updated since archiving.
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If you require an alternative, accessible format of any information found on this site,
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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?__________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca