Academia’s mathematical metaphysics are briefly explored en route to an elaboration of the qualitatively rigorous requirements underpinning the calibration and unambiguous interpretation of quantitative instrumentation in any science. Of particular interest are Gadamer’s emphases on number as the paradigm of the noetic, on the role of play in interpretation, and on Hegel’s sense of method as the activity of the thing itself that thought experiences. These point toward and overlap with (1) Latour’s study of the metrological social networks through which (...) technological phenomena are brought into language as modes of being that can be understood, and (2) the way that Rasch’s models for measurement comprise a potential beginning for metaphysically astute, qualitatively and quantitatively integrated, mathematical methods in the social sciences. The paper closes with observations on the general problem that is philosophy, the need to remain open to multiplicities of meaning even as clear understandings are sought and obtained. (shrink)

Judgements concerning proper or appropriate educational endeavour, methods of investigation and philosophising about education necessarily implicate perspectives, values, assumptions and beliefs. In recent years ideas from the complexity sciences have been utilised in many domains including psychology, economics, architecture, social science and education. This paper addresses questions concerning the appropriateness of utilising complexity science in educational research as well as issues relating to the ways in which complexity might be engaged. I suggest that, just like all human endeavour, approaches to (...) research emerge out of discursive communities and can be understood as self‐organising, dynamic and emergent over time. In this formulation, complexity represents one such newly emergent approach. I argue that it is important that researchers partake in critical and reflective discourse about the nature of education and conceptual frameworks, as well as about impacts and legacies of utilising complexity, so as to participate in and influence the ongoing emergence of educational endeavour. I conclude by suggesting a series of caveats for researchers considering using complexity in educational research. (shrink)

This paper explores Jean‐Luc Nancy's philosophical reflection on surviving his own heart transplant. In ‘The Intruder’, he raises central questions concerning the relations between what he refers to as a ‘proper’ life, that is, a life that is thought to be one's own singular ‘lived experience’, and medical techniques, shaped at this particular historical juncture by cyclosporine or immuno‐suppresssion. He describes the temporal nature of an ever‐increasing sense of strangeness and fragmentation which accompanies his heart transplant. In doing so, Nancy (...) opens up the concealed of transplantation in terms of the problematic ‘gift’ of a ‘foreign’ organ, the unremitting suffering intrusiveness of the treatment regimen, and the living of life as ‘bare life’. He uncovers and exposes the relentless uncanniness that pervades the post‐transplant experience, which for him is an example of our humanistic, never‐ending impulse, to alter ourselves. Nevertheless, Nancy offers no answer to this dilemma, but instead calls us to think about the meaning or ‘sense’ of the prolonging of life and deferring of death, which currently drives our medical interventions. (shrink)

While pain is common among seniors, it is not adequately treated or managed. In particular, pain in seniors with dementia is often undertreated and undermanaged. Although the undertreatment of pain among persons with cognitive impairments represents a serious ethical concern for pain clinicians, most writers in the area explain the undertreatment of pain by focusing on issues related to liability, fears of addiction to opioids, and erroneous beliefs that pain is a normal part of the ageing process. We argue that (...) the philosophical notion of personhood must also be given careful attention when considering the problem of pain undermanagement. In this paper, we consider the undertreatment of pain among seniors with dementia, while focusing on the ontology of relationships and on existential philosophy. Moreover, we outline a series of recommendations to help minimize the probability of pain undertreatment in this population and to encourage considerations relating to personhood when treating people with dementia. (shrink)

Why a hermeneutical philosophy of the natural sciences? It is necessary to address the philosophic crisis of realism vs relativism in the natural sciences. This crisis is seen as a part of the cultural crisis that Husserl and Heidegger identified and attributed to the hegemonic role of theoretical and calculative thought in Western societies. The role of theory is addressed using the hermeneutical circle to probe the origin of theoretic meaning in scientific cultural praxes. This is studied in Galileo's discovery (...) of the phases of Venus; the practice of measurement; the different theories and practices of space perception; the historicality and temporality of scientific research communities which ground paradigm change; and the process of discovery. The paper draws particularly from the work of Heidegger. Though envisaging all science and scholarship, the highlighted theme is research in the natural sciences. (shrink)

This essay raises the question of material hermeneutics in Heelan’s philosophy of techno-science. For Heelan, a continental philosophy of technoscience, referring to Husserl and Heidegger and especially to Merleau-Ponty, features hermeneutic contexts of mathematics and measurement as well as laboratory observation, including what the later Heelan spoke of as “portable laboratories,” for the sake of objectivity and “meaning making.” For Paul Feyerabend, this material practice corresponded to the use of both techniques of observation and instrumentation, and not less “propaganda” in (...) the case of Galileo which practice for Heelan included the ontological status of measures and numbers as well as apprenticeship in what Heelan called “contingent local practical cultural milieus.” The essay includes a discussion of Heidegger on mathematics and Bruno Latour on pasteurization. (shrink)

Educators continually ask about the best means to engage students and how best to capture attention. These concerns often make the problematic assumption that students can directly govern their own attention. In order to address the role and limits of attention in education, some theorists have sought to recover the significance of silence or mindfulness in schools, but I argue that these approaches are too simplistic. A more fundamental examination of our conceptions of identity and agency reveals a Cartesian and (...) Kantian foundationalism. This assumed subjectivity establishes too simplistic a conception of the agency of students in directing attention. I critically engage with these conceptions by drawing on a range of diverse sources, primarily modern Continental philosophy and Christian mystical theology. (shrink)

Sylvia Plath wrote in the midst of growing racial tensions in 1950’s and 1960’s America. Her work demonstrates ambivalence towards her role as a middle-class white woman. In this paper, I examine the racial implications in Plath’s color terms. I disagree with Renée Curry’s reading in White Women Writing White that Plath only considers her whiteness insofar as it affects herself. Through a phenomenological study of how whiteness shifts meaning in this poem, I hope to show that Curry’s negative estimation (...) is only partly right. I suggest that embodiment is a problem for Plath in general, and this contributes to her inability to fully examine other bodies. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a critical reading of some aspects of Heidegger’s late philosophy and evaluate how these relate to his nationalist claim that we need to stay rooted in the soil of our homeland. In response to this claim, Žižek suggests thet being-rootless is the primordial state of being-human and that what we represent as our roots are secondary attempts to obfuscate this dimension. First, I will present Heidegger’s philosophy of technology to elucidate his thesis that the essence (...) of modern technology determinates the way we come to experience the totality of beings in our times as “standing reserve”. In the second section, I expound his aesthetics where art is seen as a mode of approaching entities that follows a different logic to that of the Gestell. However, this analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art will reveal a political dimension to the concept of earth which I take to be a reactionary attempt to neutralize the eventual dimension of the Gestell. In the third section, I offer a critical re-interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy following Žižek’s clue. I argue that modern art is characterized by its self-reflexive character which can be deemed transcendental once we accept the ontological dimension of art following Heidegger. These works offer a rooting in our own rootless condition analogous to the grounding in the Abgrund of Hegel’s absolute knowledge. Finally, I offer an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorius Basterds from the perspective of the conceptual framework developed in the previous pages. (shrink)

So much of what we experience in neoliberal capitalism resembles the operation of the camp. How then can we understand the camp as a political technology of labour control recurrent in historical capitalism, and why would we want to? Driven by the perennial imperatives to govern and to accumulate, the camp as a modulation of social control allows us to explore the role of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique in the ‘real subsumption of labour’. The aims here are to question the sanguine expectations (...) of a liberal pastorate that is inextricable from the needs of capital; to articulate the ‘techniques of domination’ experienced in the idiom of neoliberal capitalism; and to find inspiration for corresponding counter-conducts and ‘techniques of the self’. This article offers a kind of historical archaeology of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique by resuscitating Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a surprisingly rich source of insight into the operations of the camp modulation and the counter-conducts it engenders. The analysis to follow works in the space between Marxian and Foucauldian political thought opened up by the new materialisms, and draws upon the recent works of Lordon, Lazzarato, Negri, inter alia, that are currently enriching critical theory. (shrink)

The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that the truthful life was at risk of being lost in Western technological culture in the name of increasing control, efficiency, and agility. As the risk is actualised, so the human essence as truth maker is obscured and life itself feels poorer. This thesis draws on Heideggerian philosophy to demonstrate the loss in two dominant styles of contemporary strategic management: the world-picturing and, more recent, agile style. It builds a theory of post-agile strategic practice, which (...) I call adaptive, to address this loss. Consistent with Heideggerian philosophy, I utilise a transformative disclosure methodology and a literary, paradigmatic case reading method to address the questions: Why is agile strategic management so unsatisfying? How do Heideggerian scholars shed light on this dissatisfaction? How do Heideggerians understand the emerging style and what strategic management practices can I propose for the future? After introducing agile strategic management and the impoverishment of life that it fosters, I set out how Heidegger’s philosophy of truth, thinking, and the sacred both sheds light on the problem and suggests a remedy for it. I closely read paradigmatic texts of the world-picturing and agile strategic management styles to demonstrate how business strategy theorisation lines up with extraordinary closeness to Heidegger’s philosophical assessment. I then analyse three Heideggerian prototypes for an adaptive style of strategy practice, concentrating on one paradigmatic text to identify their principal weakness: the omission of the sacred. I illustrate and contrast paradigmatic cases of both the agile and adaptive styles drawn from the beer industry and draw on the adaptive case to construct a theory of adaptive strategy practice, which addresses the problem of the loss of truth, suggesting pedagogical and strategic management practices. I conclude by summarising its findings and contributions, noting some limitations and connections to other studies and suggesting further lines of research. (shrink)

How leaders and managers respond to not knowing is highly relevant given the complex, ambiguous, and chaotic business environment of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the literature from a variety of disciplines, the paper explores the dominant, unfavorable conceptualization of not knowing. The authors present some potential ethical implications of a negative view of not knowing and suggest how organizations would benefit from identifying any unhelpful aspects of the culture that may encourage unethical, undesirable, and/or hasty actions in situations of (...) not knowing. The paper specifically illustrates how patience, courage, honesty, integrity, and humility are integral to negative capability in the contexts of not knowing. Finally, the paper calls for deeper inquiry into the role of virtue ethics in preparing managers and leaders for not knowing and urges organizations to embrace negative capability in not knowing rather than engaging in damaging delusion. (shrink)

Within the context of health and social care education, attempts to define ‘scholarship’ have increasingly transcended traditional academic conceptions of the term. While acknowledging that many applied disciplines call for a kind of ‘actionable knowledge’ that is also not separate from its ethical dimensions, engagement in the caring professions in particular provides an interesting exemplar that raises questions about the nature and practice of ‘actionable knowledge’: how is such knowledge from different domains integrated and sustained? This paper is theoretical and (...) wishes to outline some philosophical ideas that may be important when considering the characteristics of the kind of scholarship for caring practices that draw on deep resources for creativity and integration. Firstly, there is an attempt to clarify the nature of scholarly practice by drawing on Aristotle’s notion of ‘phronesis’ . Secondly, a more meditative approach to the integration of knowledge, action and ethics is highlighted. Finally, its implications for scholarship are introduced, in which scholarly integration may best be served by more contemplative ways of being and thinking. Drawing on Heidegger and Gendlin, we consider the challenges of contemplative thinking for pursuing scholarly practice. We articulate contemplative thinking as an unspecialized mode of being that is given to human beings as an intimate source of creativity. The sense in which unspecialization can be cultivated and practised is discussed. (shrink)

Synthetic biology, an emerging field of science and technology, intends to make of the natural world a substrate for engineering practice. Drawing inspiration from conventional engineering disciplines, practitioners of synthetic biology hope to make biological systems standardized, calculable, modular, and predictably functional. This essay develops a Heideggerian reading of synthetic biology as a useful perspective with which to identify and explore key facets of this field, its knowledge, its practices, and its products. After overviews of synthetic biology and Heidegger’s account (...) of technology, I discuss calculability, utility, function, setting-upon, and ordering, with the aim of discussing the manner in which synthetic biology works to render the biological world intelligible as something to be used, rather than something that is in and of itself. Having developed this Heideggerian reading, I proffer a number of corrections to his account that enable a more accurate, nuanced understanding of synthetic biology. Specifically, I discuss the notion of Ge-stell and submit that multiple systems of “enframing” may help to make Heidegger’s argument more robust. I suggest that synthetic biology may work to reveal the natural world as a standing-reserve of function. (shrink)

It is clear that we have to do something in our time concerning global warming yet before we can actually change the world, we must first understand our world. According to Heidegger, technology itself is not good or bad, but the problem is, that technological thinking (calculative thinking) has become the only form of thinking. Heidegger saw that the essence of technology nowadays is enframing – Ge-stell, which means that everything in nature is ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand). Enframing (as apparatus) is one (...) way of uncovering, which for Heidegger meant truth. Truth can appear in many ways and the danger is that this truth of representational-calculative thinking becomes the only truth. We claim that the calculative way of thinking must be changed and we posit that Gelassenheit (slow thinking, releasement, letting-go) is the remedy. It does not mean some kind of mysticism or irrationality. The notion of Gelassenheit includes the idea of to let learn. We as teachers and educators have to learn how to think outside of the technological ‘Ge-stell’ and start thinking and acting in radically new ways. Like Arne Naes and Michael Zimmerman we connect the overcoming of technological ‘Ge-stell’ with so called deep ecology. We have to ‘learn to think’ and act within the deep ecology. We call for an educational ecological imperative. Every teacher and educationalist has to think what they can do (not as private person but as professionals) in order to prevent the coming eco-catastrophe. (shrink)

In response to the interruption of all levels of education following COVID-19, we start by underlining the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. Next, we inquire into the question of presence in physical and virtual classrooms, and offer a discussion of presence as “being-here-now,” a “movement toward becoming,” and as gelassenheit or “releasement toward things.” We highlight the materiality of communication, and the performative production and transformation of the classroom space. Finally, we illustrate how performative writing enhances the (...) sense of being-here-now, and facilitates the co-inhabiting of online learning spaces that lack co-presence of bodies in the same physical environment. (shrink)

This paper considers the particular ways in which the familiar letter and twenty-first century technologies like the Internet differingly shaped and shape our experience of distance and presence. It follows Heidegger, Dreyfus, and Borgmann in critiquing the kinds of experience and action the Internet makes possible, and—by way of Benjamin’s concept of “aura”—argues that while mediated communication over distance might have never been easier, faster, or cheaper, this increase in our effective power comes at the cost of a diminution of (...) the affective power of the messages carried. (shrink)

Often called the first of its kind, Frankenstein paved the way for science fiction writing. Its depiction of a then impossible scientific feat has in our time become possible and is essentially recognizable in what we now refer to as bioengineering, biomedicine, or biotechnology. The fiction of Frankenstein has as it were given way to scientific fact. Of more importance, however, is the challenge Mary Shelley’s novel presents to the ostensibly high-minded and well-intentioned hopes and promises of the scientist/technologist. Finally, (...) the fictional character, Victor Frankenstein, has come to serve as the poster child and whipping boy for all scientific and technological irresponsibility, so much so that thanks to him we are able to free ourselves and our scientists from any real responsibility, since none of us ever would or could be as monstrous as Frankenstein. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by Heidegger’s invitation to think the essence of technics through a dialogue between technics and art. This dialogue is approached with the help of several artworks belonging to what can be called the “technological turn” in art. First, I draw a schematic picture of notions of instrumentality, rationality, totality, and teleology inherited from classical philosophy of art and technology and challenged by contemporary art. I underline the Romantic claim that art overcomes these features thanks to its (...) freedom and ask, referring to the work of Gilbert Simondon, whether technology could also be liberated from its subordination to utilitarian ends. Second, I look at how certain contemporary works of art attempt to solve some of these problems. Artists who seize technical objects generally seek to make their functioning visible and problematic by distorting, interrupting, or otherwise modifying the technical dispositif—this is when a machine becomes a work of art. I show how this happens in certain works of Rebecca Horn, Jean Tinguely, Anaïs Tondeur, Eduardo Kac, and Tomas Saraceno. In conclusion, I show how art can liberate technology by liberating it from utility and instrumentality and by exposing it as such in its functioning. On the other hand, I argue that technology can liberate art, both through artistic techniques and nonartistic technological processes. (shrink)

This essay builds on a review of Iain Thomson’s recent monograph, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, the theme of which is Heidegger’s post-Kehre thinking. Through a series of close textual exegeses, and attentive analyses of concepts, Thomson traces the philosopher’s concern to envisage a means of escaping the late-modern comprehension of being. The latter is characterized, in Thomson’s interpretation, by the ‘technological’ or Nietzschesque understanding of ontology in terms of the eternally recurring will-to-power, according to which objects are identified as intrinsically (...) meaningless, optimifically available, utilitarian resources. Thomson argues that Heidegger’s engagement with modern painting seeks to develop an alternative paradigm, characterized as a concrete, phenomenological attempt to show how modernity can be transcended from within through reflection on art. Thomson amplifies Heidegger’s conviction that modernity implicitly influences the conceptual substrate of modern aesthetics into a critique of the motivating framework that continues to normatively determine the continuing grounding assumptions of the philosophy of art. I show that Thomson’s book, by revisiting Heidegger in this form, importantly intimates a way of transcending the philosophical disenfranchisement of art, by releasing art from its alethic alienation and reversing the inured philosophical narrative that still defines the relationship between representation and truth and, in the process, leads to a potentially radical reevaluation of aesthetic value. (shrink)

In this article I will consider John D. Caputo’s hermeneutics of deconstruction or what he calls ‘radical hermeneutics’, with ‘undecidability’ as its major theme, in conversation with Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘resolute existence’. Through an examination of the different positions of Caputo, Heidegger, and also Kierkegaard, Derrida and Meister Eckhart on the possibility of repetition, the hermeneutical circle and the mystical way of prayer and faith, I am arguing that deconstruction is not the end of hermeneutics, it is not the (...) final destination of an interpretative task, and thus deconstructive hermeneutics has to concede a reconstructive process. Further, I am arguing that Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’ is too reductionist to keep any meaning for the hermeneutic enterprise to aspire to. I am contending, rather, that it is resolute existence that theology aspires to as it is a move beyond ‘undecidability’. (shrink)

Based on insights of phenomenology, this article aims to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of embodied space and place of and for leader- and followership in organisations. From an interrelational perspective, the “spacing” and implacement of leadership and followership will be interpreted as local-historical and as local-cultural processes. Linked to questions of distance of leadership, embodied face-to-face interaction will be critically compared with distant, non-localised, displaced relationships and tele-presence mediated by information and communication technology. In addition to outlining some links (...) to “potential space” and place-responsiveness by concluding some implications, problems and perspectives on research of embodied space and place forleadership in organisation are discussed. (shrink)

Resonances between Heidegger's philosophy and Eastern religious traditions have been widely discussed by scholars. The significance of Heidegger's thinking for education has also become increasingly clear over recent years. In this article I argue that an important aspect of Heidegger's work, the relevance of which to education is relatively undeveloped, relates to his desire to overcome Western metaphysics, a project that invites an exploration of his connections with Eastern thought. I argue that Heidegger's desire to deconstruct the West implies the (...) deconstruction of conventional views of learning because both aim to undercut the representational nature of thinking in order to recover thinking as a form of contemplation. Consequently, education should not be conceived as the acquisition of a more or less correct mental picture, but suggests the opposite: the relinquishing of all images in a contemplative aporia. (shrink)

The article examines the reduction of architecture to the dimension of utility which results in placelessness. The modern redefinition of science as “knowing-making” is essential to this reduction, although it has fundamental and forgotten importance. Drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s and George Grant’s critique of technology, and the ideas of Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Charles-Francois Viel, the significance of the complex relations between theory and practice in architecture will be explored in the context of Kimberly Dovey’s notion of the cycle of lived-space. (...) A re-definition of modern “knowing-making” reveals a semioticlevel which contains new possibilities for meaningful and environmentally attuned architecture within the technological framework. I suggest “designing-building” as an alternative, understood as a process of poetic recreation of meaningful spaces. (shrink)