Urdoxa

Urdoxa is a portmanteau of the German prefix "Ur-" and ancient Greek "doxa", meaning "primary" or "first" doctrine. For Plato and Aristotle, the notion of "doxa" meant "opinion" (for an interesting treatment of the Greek conception of Urdoxa, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell). The term gained in popular coinage in the work of Edmund Husserl whose phenomenological project was indexed on attempting, via the descriptive method, to ground the notion of a proto-doxa or urdoxa of experience. The term has since paled in poststructuralist discourse, and usually carries a negative connnotation insofar as it assumes a transcendental subjectivity which overly privileges a humanistic conception of Being (see Michel Foucault, "The Order of Things"). Against such anthropocentricity, the term has fallen into relative disuse. Two other notable uses of the term have appeared in the last five years: a progressive musical ensemble by the name of Thork produced an album entitled 'Urdoxa', and a novel by a Canadian author, Kane X. Faucher, also bears this term as its title.