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)

At one point in We will never have been modern Latour notes that his thinking is a “challenge to philosophy”. This article argues that Latour's challenge lies in his repeated claim that his ontology makes us able to think again about the “passing of time”. If this is indeed the case then, this essay looks to Martin Heidegger to think of the question of temporality and ontology. This essay will in effect find that on a deeper level Latour repeats crucial (...) Heideggerian insights with regard to the ontological difference between being and beings. Yet on other points too Heidegger's impact is notable: for Heidegger too, something has gone wary with modernity and our modern constitution. Here too Latour's metaphors point in a rather Heideggerian direction, for the “invisible” modern constitution has become “visible” in certain ontic events—Latour notes the end of communism. This recalls Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. The article will then focus on Latour's distinction between delegation and what is being delegated, a distinction that pervades the conclusion of his 1991 book. Latour thus introduces a difference between delegation and what is being delegated. How not to recognize a duplicate of Heidegger's ontological difference? And, once recognized, what does this mean for our thinking of being and the thinking of the event of world which has been delegated to us? (shrink)

This paper develops a new interpretation of Heidegger's concept of conscience in order to show to what extent his thought establishes the possibility of civil disobedience. The origin of conscience lies in the self's appropriation of language as inviting a reciprocal response of the other (person). By developing the social dimension of dialogue, it is showsn that conscience reveals the self in its capacity for dissent, free speech, and civil disobedience. By developing the social roots of conscience, a completely new (...) light is cast on the political implications of Heidegger's thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this essay, I shall discuss Gadamer’s interpretation of Celan’s dialogical poetry in his essay “Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du?” (“Who am I and Who are You?”). One may argue that this is Gadamer’s articulation of the problem of the self-other relationship. To understand the question of self and other, it is first of all necessary to return to the poetic word from which the question arises. Speaking is, for Gadamer, the most profoundly self-forgetful action, because when (...) one speaks, one is so deeply “within the word” that one is not turned toward the word but, rather, to what one wants to say with the word. For hermeneutics, interpreting means putting oneself on the task of the poetic text. The proximity between poetizing and interpreting emerges, also in its specificity concerning the proximity between poetizing and thinking. Such a proximity, in turn, divides itself into two extremes: the word that sublates itself, and the word that stands for itself. It is hence the uncertain fullness of language, where, unsurprisingly, both poetizing and interpreting come into themselves, which constitutes the link between the one and the other. Therefore, the interpreted word, intertwined with the poetic word does not replace what it indicates, but merely points beyond itself, to what is other than itself. Both pursue a meaning that points toward an open realm. (shrink)

Focusing on the philosophical puzzle of time and its relation with being and presence the paper explores the volatile relationalities un/tying them in shaping our conceptualisation of memory as re-turning. With such an approach the paper analyses the paradoxes that always haunt any attempt at thinking time, being and presence in their specificity as well as within their general embrace. It is through such play of the specific and general, the paper submits, that the thinking of memory and its acts (...) of re-turning comes to be conceptualised in terms of linear, teleological, homogenous understanding of continuity. Turning towards Bergson and Heidegger’s approaches to the question of time, presence and being the paper attempts to open-up the layered paradoxes that not only shape any act of turning but also the thinking of possible itself as a general category for conceptualising memory as re-turning. Bringing in the question of language and its ontological and temporal concerns, the paper thus brings in the concept of “poetics” to hint at the continuous negotiation that thinking of such interstices in language demands. It is towards such contingencies of the (un)timely, the paper submits, that any attempt at thinking memory as re-turning gestures. (shrink)

The paper exemplifies how we as teachers see children, and indicates ways of understanding the existential educational meanings of what we see. The authors suggest that the phenomenon of seeing is a personal and relational intentional act that opens up, as well as delimits educational practice. A hermeneutic phenomenological approach to education is suggested and the thought of seeing and telling as interwoven representations is put forth. However, despite a phenomenological inquiry’s immense qualities as a pre-reflective experiential source to understanding, (...) the authors believe that phenomenology cannot overcome or erase the aporetic unavailability of a pedagogical practice and a pedagogical-ethical language. The paper intends to show that seeing pedagogically always will be more complex, paradoxical and unsettled than what can be shown and told phenomenologically. (shrink)

What is the core of pedagogical practice? Which qualities are primary to the student–teacher relationship? What is a suitable language for pedagogical practice? What might be the significance of an everyday presentational pedagogical act like for example the glance of a teacher? The pedagogical relation as lived relationality experientially sensed, as well as phenomenologically described and interpreted, precedes educational methods and theories and profoundly challenges educational practice and reflection. The paper highlights the aporetic character of pedagogical practice, reflection and research (...) by suggesting that the pedagogical relation opens up for a practice that is ethically and existentially normative rather than developmentally and socially normative, and thus fundamentally shifts the meaning of education. (shrink)

Starting from the practice of hermeneutic phenomenological writing as it has been advanced by van Manen, this paper addresses the understanding of an ‘experiential givenness’ of the world as basis for our ‘lived writing’; an understanding that is essential to the new phenomenological writer if s/he is to be part of the phenomenological writing process. As the ultimate givenness of the world is the basis of knowledge, we constantly strive to “reach out on life beyond itself” (Gadamer, 1960/1985, p. 62), (...) and thus need the right language to let the phenomenological text speak. The phenomenological writer’s understandings of the chiasm of world and self, the depth of phenomenological awareness, and the interlacement of ethic-aesthetical poetic writing, are qualities discussed as essential for the phenomenological writer to understand in a felt–sensed way in order to write a phenomenological text. A deconstructive approach to (pre)reflective phenomenological writing is put forth by provocatively asking what it means to be involved in, and profoundly enclosed with the “wordliness of the world” (Saevi, 2011a, p. 3). The radical hermeneutic phenomenological openness to what it means to be human and how to encounter the human givenness of phenomenological seeing and writing renders it possible for the writer’s personal voice to evolve. (shrink)

Starting with a decisive scene in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables, the paper searches for a place for trust to reside in the interludes between the situations where it appears in our relations and generously attaches us to each other.

Lee Edelman's controversial book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive represents the most recent articulation of the so-called “antisocial thesis” in queer theory. This thesis–which emerges...

In many of his writings, Castoriadis argues that ‘the discovery of the imagination’ occurs in the works of Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Freud, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although he has systematically encountered and interrogated the works of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Fichte remains an enigmatic absence within the orbit of Castoriadis' work. This study is an attempt to address this enigma through a close reading of Fichte’s The Science of Knowledge.

The purpose of the article is to contribute to the discussion about the relevance of existential issues in contemporary education. Analysis presented in the paper is related to the problems of self-awareness, becoming oneself and self-development. First, the author begins by depicting the meaning of human existence in the light of philosophy. The following aspects have been analyzed: being true to one’s own beliefs and values, recognizing personal truth, making existential choices and finding one’s own voice. A special attention is (...) paid to the language as an essential, constitutive element of being. Second, the article attempts to consider some educational implications resulting from the existential approach to education. Some of the issues discussed are learning to philosophize and to discover meaning, the concept of encounter in education and the role of language in self-development. While describing them the author indicates that the ignoring of crucial existential questions in education contributes to spiritual vacuity in life of young people and reduces educational thinking merely to instrumental, pragmatic problems concerning qualification and transfer of communicative skills. (shrink)

The question of the value of painting—why paintings should matter to us—has been addressed by a number of Phenomenological philosophers. In this paper, I critically review recent discussions of this topic by Simon Crowell and Paul Crowther—while also looking back to work by Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. All the views I discuss claim that painting is important because it can make manifest certain philosophically important truths. While sympathetic to this approach, I discuss various problems with it. Firstly, are these truths (...) verbally explicable, or only communicable through the artwork itself? Secondly, if its truthfulness is the reason why we value painting, can this criterion track our intuitive judgements about relative artistic merit? Thirdly, can the truthfulness of painting be a reason for valuing it if that truth is divorced from its traditional association with Beauty and Goodness? I suggest ways in which the first and second problems could in principle be solved, but argue in response to the third that truth must indeed be seen in the context of other values if it is to explain why painting matters. (shrink)

This paper examines the use of “pleasure” as the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience in post-Kantian philosophy. It shows how the distinctive features of aesthetic experience, such as pleasure, qualify this experience as a platform for social criticism. The key argument is that the autonomy of the aesthetic experience is not “false”, rather it is paradoxical in the strong sense that the fact of its communicative efficacy, which follows from distinctive, “autonomous” aesthetic features, necessarily loads it with functions and expectations (...) that are external to the aesthetic moment. Kant takes a complicated path to qualify aesthetic judgment as disinterested in order that it may eloquently testify for morality. He thereby sets up the cogency of the modern pattern of looking to aesthetic experience as a locus of meaningful communication for ideas that are experientially poor or remote. (shrink)

The central thesis of this paper is that contemporary theoretical physics is grounded in philosophical presuppositions that make it difficult to effectively address the problems of subject-object interaction and discontinuity inherent to quantum gravity. The core objectivist assumption implicit in relativity theory and quantum mechanics is uncovered and we see that, in string theory, this assumption leads into contradiction. To address this challenge, a new philosophical foundation is proposed based on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Then, through (...) the application of qualitative topology and hypernumbers, phenomenological ideas about space, time, and dimension are brought into focus so as to provide specific solutions to the problems of force-field generation and unification. The phenomenological string theory that results speaks to the inconclusiveness of conventional string theory and resolves its core contradiction. (shrink)

This article uses an account of dwelling to interrogate the concept of curriculum making. Tim Ingold’s use of dwelling to understand culture is productive here because of his implicit and explicit interest in intergenerational learning. His account of dwelling rests on a foundational ontological claim—that mental construction and representation are not the basis upon which we live in the world—which is very challenging for the kinds of curriculum making with which many educators are now familiar. It undermines assumptions of propositional (...) knowledge and of the use of mental schemas to communicate and share. At the level of critique, then, dwelling destabilizes contemporary ideas of curriculum as textual, pre-specified content for transmission or pre-defined objectives or standardized activity. The positive claims of dwelling are equally challenging, for these are that the world is a domain of relational entanglement in which an organism can be no more than a point of growth for an emergent ‘environment’, and meaning only inheres in these relations. The paper articulates how differentiation (of learner, salient meanings, knowledge, skill and place) are possible in such an ontology, and how curriculum making can be understood from this perspective as being the remaking of relationships between these. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉLe goût, en tant que faculté d'appréciation esthétique, implique un individu, et pourtant suppose une communauté. Dans cet article, nous constatons qu'une disposition singulière à l’égard des objets de goût est conditionnée par le consentement d'autrui et par l’être-avec autrui. De cette façon, une communauté esthétique est établie. Cette idée de communauté esthétique remonte au sensus communis de Kant et à la notion de préservation de Heidegger : dans les deux cas, c'est la présence d'une communauté qui conditionne l'expérience esthétique.

In much theory there is a tendency to place thought above action, or the opposite, action over thought. The consequence of the first option is that philosophy or scientific evidence gains the upper hand in educational thinking. The consequence of the second view is that pragmatism and relativism become the dominant features. This article discusses how different branches of the Aristotelian tradition can mediate between these two views. I argue, contrary to some other Aristotelian approaches, that thinking and action are (...) both separated and yet prerequisites for each other and point to some educational consequences of this way of thinking. To build this argument I draw on selected aspects of the philosophy of Hanna Arendt, Leo Strauss and John Dewey. (shrink)

This article explores some ideas of Heidegger’s philosophy of art. The thinker criticizes traditional aesthetics and art theory in the context of his existential ontology. A work of art is understood as an opener of the historical human being‘s world. The philosopher‘s view of the artwork is associated with his theory of emotions – the concept of „Befindlichkeit“. It is argued that the integration of emotional phenomena shows the work of art as a place of communication in Heidegger’s philosophy of (...) art. Heidegger‘s conception of art is linked to the aesthetics and art theory. (shrink)

This article explores the significance that environments play in terms of the learning process. In the United States, the legacy of John Dewey's intellectual efforts left a theoretical understanding that views the architectural composition of learning environments as instrumental mediums which house the educational process. This understanding of learning environments is precipitated by a separation of human agents as subjects and their environments as objects. By contrast, Martin Heidegger's theory of ontology, and its reconfiguration of the subject and object relationship, (...) lends itself to an understanding of the architectural composition of learning environments as dwellings. (shrink)

This essay discusses the normative significance of the spatial dimension of conflict events. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with political actors – politicians, officials, and activists – and on Heidegger’s account of spatiality in Being and Time, I will argue that the experience of conflict space is co-constituted by the respective conflict participants, as well as the location where the conflict unfolds. Location and conflict parties’ (self-)understandings ‘open up’ a space that enables and constrains ways of seeing and acting. Yet, (...) a purely transcendental phenomenology will remain oblivious to the quasi-transcendental, societal structures of power that shape a person’s conflict experience. To illuminate these facets of the phenomenon, phenomenology has to join forces with critical theory. Introducing Garland-Thomson’s feminist distinction of fit/misfit, I will illustrate how power shapes conflict space in manifold ways. The essay thereby fills a gap in the philosophical literature that rarely analyses political conflict as a phenomenon sui generis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm has sparked intense debate about the role of narratives in rhetorical scholarship. The theory has subsequently been followed up by numerous criticisms and revisions. This article argues that especially the latter can benefit from a complementary phenomenological perspective that Fisher himself placed within the original paradigm. Through the Heideggerian concepts of building and dwelling, rhetoric within the narrative paradigm may be seen as a primary means for engaging with both individual and communal goals and exigencies, (...) providing a more nuanced account for how people care for and act on the narratives in their lives. (shrink)

The debate regarding representation is haunted by the fact that it takes place within a context of general suspicion whereby everything, it is claimed, is always representation. Such is the hurdle that Foucault identifies and Derrida attempts to elucidate in his debate with Heidegger, in which he takes issue with Heidegger’s critique of the “age of representation.” Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s account of the history of representation leads to a reconstruction that privileges the motifs of dissemination, of envoi (sending or (...) dispatching). In art too, Derrida confronts Heidegger, this time with the aim of re-thinking the relationship between the work and what lies outside and beyond it. By framing the Derrida/Heidegger debate within a consideration of the Lascaux cave drawings, and by examining the positions of Girard, Bataille and Blanchot in relation to the question of the origins of art, it will be possible to re-draw the boundaries of representation insofar as they lie at the intersection between philosophy and art. (shrink)

In a quest after the essence of memory, a crucial distinction is made between the notions of memory and remembrance, following Plato’s distinction between mneme and hypomnesis. T...

The philosophical underpinnings of this article are the Peircian notion of the triadic nature of the sign as iconic, linguistic and indexical, and the use of the sign as a ‘Zeug’ or thing as a means of pointing to or deixis in the context of creative activity in the classroom. This involves Lyotard's conception of desire as the generation of a space where the pupil can be affected by what the world donates. Both deixis and desire take on added value (...) in relation to the psychoanalytic theories of Winnicott in terms of the role of transitional object use in the generation of ‘potential space’, and Nussbaum's notion of tyche or being on the lookout for what the world has to offer. In terms of education, the central section of the article looks at the way these notions can be applied to teaching and learning in the secondary art classroom. This involves the use of what I have termed transitional notation, combining all three Peircian sign modes on a surface of inscription that is ‘ready-to-hand and that operates as what the anthropologist Alfred Gell termed an ‘index of agency’. (shrink)

This essay addresses Jacques Derrida’s theory of metaphor, as it has been handed to literary theory and continental philosophy. Our aim is to reassess the relationship between metaphor and metaphysics, using two distinct critical lenses. We will contrast Derrida’s influential position to an anachronistic author – Giambattista Vico. Vico initiated what is now called the romantic theory of metaphor, but the details of his theory are missing from current discussions. For this reason, Vico’s view is given closer attention. Two new (...) concepts are introduced: mute metaphor and heroic metaphor. These terms help specify precisely how metaphor can be conceived as a process of consciousness rather than a grammatical rule or grammatical exception. Finally, it is suggested that Vico’s theory is preferable to Derrida’s. Vico’s vision of metaphorical language is more fruitful and less problematic than Derrida’s, both methodologically and terminologically. The romanticism espoused by Vico also suggests itself to new modes of contemporary research concerning the purpose and function of metaphor within language. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates current conceptions of pregnancy as a possession of either mother or infant. In opposition to the more common stance that marks birth as the beginning of intercorporeality and perception, pregnancy is instead phenomenologically delineated as a chiasmic relationship between mother and her pre‐infant from a Merleau‐Pontian perspective. This paper maintains that during pregnancy a mother‐to‐be and her pre‐infant are deepened and modified through their intertwining.

To examine Heidegger's pedagogy is to be invited into a particular era and cultural reality—starting in Weimar Germany and progressing into the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In his attempt to reform the German university in a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian and nationalistic mold, Heidegger addressed one group of students and professors and not another. The petit‐bourgeois student and the future philosophers he invited with his ‘logic of recruitment’ into the corps of instructors, would share his coded language with (...) its built‐in taboos and censorship. The result was a rhetoric of absolute self‐reference and a semiotic of pure propaganda, based on the evocation of the ancient Greeks in which the philosopher meant to project all that was properly Germanic. Heidegger's rhetoric is exclusionary; its politics and its philosophy are interpenetrating. His lecture courses grew increasingly poeticized, and thus mired in ambiguity, evasion, elision, avoidance, grandiloquence. Parallels are drawn in this essay between Heidegger and our time. Is Heidegger's insistence on autocratic controls within the German university comparable to the corporate positions taken today by some educators? How does the shifting relation between disciplines affect the role of the specialist? How might the sciences morales or humanities, along with the much maligned ‘humanism’, be redefined morally and holistically? (shrink)

There is no more central issue to education than thinking and reasoning. Certainly, such an emphasis chimes with the rationalist and cognitive deep structure of the Western educational tradition. The contemporary tendency reinforced by cognitive science is to treat thinking ahistorically and aculturally as though physiology, brain structure and human evolution are all there is to say about thinking that is worthwhile or educationally significant. The movement of critical thinking also tends to treat thinking ahistorically, focusing on universal processes of (...) logic and reasoning. Against this trend and against the scientific spirit of the age this paper presents a historical and philosophical picture of thinking. By contrast with dominant cognitive and logical models the paper emphasizes kinds of thinking and styles of reasoning. The paper grows out of interests primarily in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and in the extension and development of their work in Critical Theory and French poststructuralist philosophy. The paper draws directly on some of this work to argue for the recognition of different kinds of thinking, which are explored by reference to Heidegger, and also the significance of styles of reasoning, which are explored by reference to Wittgenstein and to Ian Hacking. (shrink)

There is no more central issue to education than thinking and reasoning. Certainly, such an emphasis chimes with the rationalist and cognitive deep structure of the Western educational tradition. The contemporary tendency reinforced by cognitive science is to treat thinking ahistorically and aculturally as though physiology, brain structure and human evolution are all there is to say about thinking that is worthwhile or educationally significant. The movement of critical thinking also tends to treat thinking ahistorically, focusing on universal processes of (...) logic and reasoning. Against this trend and against the scientific spirit of the age this paper presents a historical and philosophical picture of thinking. By contrast with dominant cognitive and logical models the paper emphasizes kinds of thinking and styles of reasoning. The paper grows out of interests primarily in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and in the extension and development of their work in Critical Theory and French poststructuralist philosophy. The paper draws directly on some of this work to argue for the recognition of different kinds of thinking, which are explored by reference to Heidegger, and also the significance of styles of reasoning, which are explored by reference to Wittgenstein and to Ian Hacking. (shrink)

Whether poetry gives knowledge or not is a question that has been debated from a variety of perspectives, depending on how a society or a culture defines knowledge, and on the function it ascribes to poetry in relation to that definition. The civilizations of Asia and the Middle East have generally taken the line that poetry deals primarily with affects, emotions and feelings. The West has had a more complicated history of responses. One way of making sense of this history (...) is to map rival claims as split over the idea of scientific knowledge, where it affects notions of the poetic function. The mapping, through all its manifold branches, gives clear indications that claims to knowledge – both those made on behalf of poetry, and those denied to poetry – depend more on assumptions, predispositions and cultural conditioning than on rational argument or critical debate. The resulting variety also suggests that the cultural relativism that affects such debates is unlikely to arrive at resolutions except of the contingent kind. (shrink)

This article aims to correlate Vaastu Shastra, an ancient Indian theory of architecture, with Heidegger's 'Building, Dwelling and Thinking' as they explain architecture in relation to the world where we live and build. Design as an evolutionary learning process is fundamentally a hermeneutic. Interestingly, some of the basic principles of Vaastu Shastra are coincidently similar to the points made by later Heidegger. As such, the main concern is to explain how man is related to the building and the universe, i.e. (...) it establishes a relationship between man and nature. In this context, a dwelling place should be a place where environment is always suitable for human beings to live comfortably. In this article, first Vaastu Shastra is discussed, and then attention is drawn to the prominent parallels between Vaastu and Heidegger. (shrink)

Central to Martin Heidegger’s critique of modern technology is the transformation of “things” into “objects.” This article will apply some of the insights gained by Actor-Network-Theory to the several bridges in Budapest, with a special focus on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, in order to argue that modern technology and the creations of that technology can also be “things” in the Heideggerian sense of the term. The result is a view of bridges that is firmly grounded in the physical and geographic (...) impact that bridges can have on space and place. The use of ANT also reveals that Heidegger and one of his main critics, Bruno Latour, arenot as far apart in their thought as the latter might contend. (shrink)

Mixing Actor-Network Theory, empirical philosophy, and Heidegger’s notion of usability, this paper discusses a methodological strategy for approaching and temporarily stabilizing urban life based on an experimental epistemological exercise of decomposing a traffic light in Times Square, New York City, into its practices and relations. This strategy conceives of urban elements and formations as multiplicities of multiple and simultaneous practices and materials (useful things) and pays particular attention to the effervescences and heterogeneous associations they embody and enact. As a contribution (...) to the social approach of knowledge production, this essay explores the creation of concepts using any aspects and components taken from outside, unpacking them as analytical instruments and partial results of multimodal ethnographic practices. In a more concrete scenario, Region of usefulness, a sort of qualitative multiplicity, is proposed here as an unfinished epistemological tool for empirically grasping and representing urban life. It is unfinished since it has to be constantly reconstructed and resignified in relation to other elements and, at the same time, it has to be designed and assembled by following and translating those mixed associations composing urban life, using its modes and affordances as analytical resources for producing objective knowledge, that is, limited, embodied, and temporal. (shrink)

In their defence of the school Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons define it as a source of ‘free time.’ Drawing on Catherine Malabou's compelling reading of Heidegger in her The Heidegger Change, I aim to provide a strong ontological justification for the claims made on behalf of the school concerning free time, common goods, and renewing (changing) the world: the school provides free time; it transforms knowledge and skills into common goods; and it has the potential to give everyone the (...) time and space to renew the world. The paper enquires into what ‘free time as non-productive time,’ ‘common goods,’ and ‘changing the world’ mean on an ontological register, and why therefore the school is so precious and warrants our utmost care in the face of its conservative and progressive critics alike. I discern a single underlying notion, the notion of essence as mutability, constituting the link connecting free time, common goods, and renewal of the world. (shrink)

The present paper explores patients’ experience of lived space at the hospital and at home. To expand the understanding of the existential meaning of lived space the study revisited two empirical studies and a study of a meta-synthesis on health and caring. Phenomenological philosophy was chosen as a theoretical framework for an excursive analysis. The paper demonstrates that existential dimensions of lived space at the hospital and at home differ significantly. For the patients, the hospital space means alien territory as (...) opposed to the familiar territory of home. To some extent the experienced differences are due to the physical environment; however, as our analysis shows, other and more significant meanings are also involved. For patients, lived space at the hospital primarily concerns the influence of complex institutional power structures and specific cultural and social conventions, e.g. the role of the good patient and the ambiance of hospitals. Home, on the other hand, offers familiar lived space in which patients feel protected and safe. Further, the paper relates patients’ experience of lived space to a phenomenological view of lived space in order to illustrate the radical influence of illness on patients’ lifeworld and experience of lived space. The combination of illness and general discomfort may influence patients’ experience of home negatively; the former experience of home as a sanctuary changes into feelings of being left on one’s own and burdened by too much responsibility. Consequently, in the light of the increasing focus on patients’ self-monitoring at home, it is important for healthcare professionals to recognize the influence of spatial aspects on patients’ well-being both at the hospital and at home. (shrink)

Postmodern aestheticism is defined as a way of thinking that privileges the art of continual reversal. The dynamics of reversal operate according to a theoretical model that, historically speaking, has been the vehicle for blatantly masculinist ideologies. This creates problems for feminist thinking that would appropriate the postmodern conception of the subjectivity of the artist or the aestheticist dissolution of the distinction between life and art.