Women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with a depressive disorder as men. Before trying to explain this difference, we must first understand how women experience depression. We explore the phenomenon of depression through women’s experiences, using Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method. An essential meaning structure describes the development of depression: The women find themselves entrapped in a personal mission which had backfired. Motivated by shame and guilt from the past, they overinvest in work or others’ emotions to relieve internal (...) pain. They feel deeply sensitive to, and responsible for, other persons’ distress while ignoring their own feelings and needs. Gradually their emotional body grows awry and acts in increasingly alienating and threatening ways. Ultimately they feel forced to submerge in their emotional body; they succumb to depression. We reflect on this structure on the basis of Minkowski, Scheler, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and in relation to contemporary research on depression. (shrink)

The experience of being famous was investigated through interviews with 15 well-known American celebrities. The interviews detail the existential parameters of being famous in contemporary culture. Research participants were celebrities in various societal categories: government, law, business, publishing, sports, music, film, television news and entertainment. Phenomenological analysis was used to examine textural and structural relationship-to-world themes of fame and celebrity. The study found that in relation to self, being famous leads to loss of privacy, entitization, demanding expectations, gratification of ego (...) needs, and symbolic immortality. In relation to other, or world, being famous leads to wealth, access, temptations, and concerns about family impact. Areas of psychological concern for celebrity mental health include character-splitting, mistrust, isolation, and an unwillingness to give up fame. Being-in-the-world of celebrity is a process involving four temporal phases: love/hate, addiction, acceptance, and adaptation. Findings are presented in the form of a Composite Textural Description and two Individual Structural Descriptions. (shrink)

The present article consists of four parts, and the first part examines the concept of life-world from the phenomenological perspective and argues that the characteristic features of the life-world would be through inspection, analysis and description of the life as we encounter it devoid of scientific explanations. The second part of the paper develops the idea that religion finds its meaning and significance only in the domain of life-world because the phenomena that one experiences in the religious acts take place (...) primarily in a pre-theoretical way. Thus, it is argued that the operative dimension of phenomenology of religious consciousness involves a new understanding of subjectivity—a passive plane of subjectivity—whose locus is differently conceived by Husserl, Scheler and Heidegger. The third part of the paper draws attention to the religious phenomena whose intended structures and meanings go beyond mediation and suggests that symbols form a realm between objectively given things and subjectively intended meanings. In other words, religious symbols serve as indispensable mediating bridges. The final part of the paper proposes that religious experiences like all other experiences, though are rooted in life-world, yet it transcends its worldly contents. (shrink)

Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I suggest, and (...) can be overcome by revealing that the concept of intentional directedness as he receives it from the Scholastics is quite consistent with the continuity thesis. It is only when intentional directedness is conjoined with intentional inexistence that intentionality and content are consistent with a discontinuity thesis (such as Brentano’s thesis). This makes room to develop an account of intentional directedness that is consistent with the continuity thesis in the form of Peirce’s representational principle. I also argue against a form of the discontinuity thesis in the guise of the derived/underived content distinction. Having shown that intentionality is consistent with the continuity thesis I argue that we should focus on intentionality and representation as bodily enacted. I conclude that we would be better off focussing on representation and intentionality in action rather than giving abstract functional accounts of extended cognition. (shrink)

The epistemological chasm between how we (implicitly and subjectively) perceive or imagine the actual world and how we (explicitly and “objectively”) think of its underlying entities has motivated perhaps the most disconcerting impasse in human thought: the explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical properties of the world. Here, I advocate a combination of philosophical skepticism and simplicity as an informed approach to arbitrate among theories of consciousness. I argue that the explanatory gap is rightly a gap in our understanding, (...) but one that is not surprising; and we being observers biased by our first-person perspective and our existence may both hinder and (the realization we have them) assist our reasoning. Further, I unfold the concept of observer into two distinct notions based on its functional and phenomenal aspects, and exploit this device to elucidate the subject-observer relationship. Then, I proceed to analyze the philosophical zombie dilemma. Lastly, I contend that from a skeptical viewpoint, panpsychism (or neutral monism) is the most parsimonious doctrine accounting for the explanatory gap, and suggest that it would be possible to make headway in the hard problem of consciousness by uncovering non-trivial causal relationships between qualia states and functional states, if routine and controlled manipulation of neural circuits were easily available. (shrink)

The main topic of this paper is the mind-body problem. The author analyzes it in the context of Hus- serlian phenomenology. The key texts for the analysis and interpretation are Descartes’ magnum opus “Meditations on the First Philosophy” and Husserl’ last work “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”. The author claims that already in Descartes’ text instead of one mind-body problem, one can find two: the ontological mind-body problem (mind-brain relation) and conceptual one (“mind” and “body” as concepts). (...) In Descartes’ “Meditations”, the ontological level is explicit, while the conceptual level is implicit. In Husserl’s “Crisis”, on the other hand, the situation is different: the conceptual level of the problem (as the opposition between transcendental phenom- enology and natural sciences) is explicit, while the ontological level is implicit. Nevertheless, it seems that Husserl has answers to both the “traditional” as well as the “conceptual” mind-body problems. (shrink)

The main topic of this paper is the mind-body problem. The author analyzes it in the context of Hus- serlian phenomenology. The key texts for the analysis and interpretation are Descartes’ magnum opus “Meditations on the First Philosophy” and Husserl’ last work “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”. The author claims that already in Descartes’ text instead of one mind-body problem, one can find two: the ontological mind-body problem (mind-brain relation) and conceptual one (“mind” and “body” as concepts). (...) In Descartes’ “Meditations”, the ontological level is explicit, while the conceptual level is implicit. In Husserl’s “Crisis”, on the other hand, the situation is different: the conceptual level of the problem (as the opposition between transcendental phenomenology and natural sciences) is explicit, while the ontological level is implicit. Nevertheless, it seems that Husserl has answers to both the “traditional” as well as the “conceptual” mind-body problems. (shrink)

There are an abundance of studies regarding the development of sexual identity and sexual orientation that have served as the foundational underpinnings for exploring sexual orientation development. To date, however, findings from these studies have failed to constitute a significant resource for understanding the gay man’s experience of acknowledging to himself that he is attracted to other men. By identifying the essential constituents of this experience, this existential-phenomenological study provides a starting point for further exploration. Written narrative accounts were obtained (...) from seven men who identified sexually as gay and a method of existential-phenomenological analysis was applied to reveal the prereflective constituents of the experience described. The analysis yielded a new perspective on the experience of gay men and their attraction to other men that has the capacity to change the way practising clinicians, educators, counsellors and future researchers treat and understand the Queer community. (shrink)

The search for the best strategy in literacy education is a lingering phenomenon. From time to time one strategy is claimed to work best, only to be critically challenged and replaced by another. There is always debate about what the best strategy is. The belief that there is supposed to be only one best strategy is not consistent with the fact that there are diverse views on what it should be. This paper argues that the search for the best strategy (...) is not looking for the best among various practices. Instead, it calls for a critical examination of our underlying philosophical beliefs about it. Hence, the discussion of the best strategy is divided into three philosophical phases: objectivist, deconstructivist, and praxis. The search is argued to be taking a journey of philosophical investigations rather than finding a certain practice superior to all others. (shrink)

The aim of what follows is to explore how to raise the question of Being by way of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. Phenomenological ontology is a way of approaching and conducting philosophy exemplified in the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s, and specifically in his magnum opus Being and Time. In preparation to raise the question of Being a more nuanced understanding of Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses on truth and language are summarized. Following, the manner in which Being is referenced is analyzed (...) before considering the way of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. In conclusion, existing attempts and continuing efforts into the question of Being in education through phenomenological ontology are shared. At a time when decontextualized and reductive ways of knowing and being are becoming the norm within education, phenomenological ontology offers new possibilities for scholarship and practice. The present inquiry does not offer solutions in the traditional sense but rather traces a path that opens and keeps in tension the question of Being in education in order to support further study. (shrink)

The article analyzes the philosophical concept of the “porous self” of J. Rivera. The originality of this concept in the post-phenomenological project is determined by the role of theological constructions that modify the primal experience of self-consciousness. This modification allows us to interpret the phenomenological description of the human self as different from the classical — “porous” temporality, i.e., correlating through “two entrances”—the internal and external—with eternity. Within this approach, the primary phenomenon of the constitution of the "porous" self becomes (...) the inner word, which in the appeal to eternity turns out to be the original self-awareness of the self as a temporality. The secondary phenomenon of the constitution of the “porous” self is not the mundane temporality of M. Heidegger, but Epektasis as an intense striving towards the end of time in General. The worldly temporality of the self, transformed by faith, is phenomenologically revealed as open to eternity in each of its moments. The third phenomenon of the temporality of the self is Memoria, whose interpretation reveals how the structure of the inner consciousness of time by E. Husserl can be framed ontologically and harmoniously integrated into the theological concept. The article shows how, based on this understanding of both the internal and external openness of the “porous” self for eternity, the integral structure of its temporality is formed. The temporality of the porous self is a modification of Husserl’s time diagrams and the intertwining of two streams of temporality at the same time from past to future and from future to past, which itself constitutes a phenomenal field of events of self. This understanding of temporality sets new perspectives for the phenomenological analysis of subjectivity. (shrink)

Informed by the investigative thrust of phenomenological inquiry and the ‘phenomenology of intersubjectivity’, the overarching aim of this article is to provide an accurate illumination of the experience of being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, and thus being ‘a labelled individual’. This article is based on research that sought to understand the impact of the psychiatric label upon labelled individuals interpersonal and intersubjective presence as experienced outside the psychiatric institution. The principle question asked was: “What is the experience of being (...) a labelled individual in the world?”. It was discovered that psychiatric labelling unfolds as a disconnection and dislocation from co-existence with others. Moreover, labelling had the effect of robbing such individuals of their subjectivity, rendering them lonely, misunderstood and viewed as somehow defective, disabled and wrong. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 3, Edition 1, November 2003. (shrink)

We present a model of a fundamental property of consciousness as the capacity of a system to opt among presented alternatives. Any system possessing this capacity is "conscious" in some degree, whether or not it has the higher capacity of reflecting on its opting. We argue that quantum systems, composed of microphysical particles, as studied by quantum mechanics, possess this quality in a protomental form. That is, such particles display the capacity to opt among alternatives, even though they lack the (...) ability to experience or communicate their experiences. Human consciousness stands at the opposite end of the hierarchy of conscious life forms as the most sophisticated system of which we have direct acquaintance. We contend that it shares the common characteristic of a system capable of opting among alternatives. Because the fundamental property of consciousness is shared by human beings and the constituents of elementary matter in the universe, our model of consciousness can be considered as a modified form of panpsychism. (shrink)

The epistemology and phenomenology of contemporary society tend to be deepened, and the philosophical challenges never are minimal that we may be called to face with the kind of post-modern chaos from the rapidly changing phenomena of the global community. The ballast held on the identity of faculty members as a teacher and researcher now turns due so as to be recast with our intrinsic of routine performance. I considered their quality as bent on the intellectual strife on the method (...) and the kind of attitude, say, evaluation and consultation. In this paper, the authors have presented some thought and implications that triangulated the triad, i.e., research methodology, program evaluation and consulting illustration on the college research program rankings. The author is hoped that the discourse can help the academicians to share the attribute of different methods as well as the dimension of evaluation and consulting, perhaps essentially related with their work role in terms of teaching and researching. Keywords: Research Method, Qualitative Studies, Mixed Method, Program Evaluation, Theory and Philosophy, Program Rankings, Consulting, Journal Writing. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the claim recently defended by Josh Weisberg that a certain version of the self-representational approach to phenomenal consciousness cannot avoid a set of problems that have plagued higher-order approaches. These problems arise specifically for theories that allow for higher-order misrepresentation or—in the domain of self-representational theories—self-misrepresentation. In response to Weisberg, I articulate a self-representational theory of phenomenal consciousness according to which it is contingently impossible for self-representations tokened in the context of a conscious mental (...) state to misrepresent their objects. This contingent infallibility allows the theory to both acknowledge the (logical) possibility of self-misrepresentation and avoid the problems of self-misrepresentation. Expanding further on Weisberg’s work, I consider and reveal the shortcomings of three other self-representational models—put forward by Kreigel, Van Gulick, and Gennaro—in order to show that each indicates the need for this sort of infallibility. I then argue that contingent infallibility is in principle acceptable on naturalistic grounds only if we attribute (1) a neo-Fregean kind of directly referring, indexical content to self-representational mental states and (2) a certain ontological structure to the complex conscious mental states of which these indexical self-representations are a part. In these sections I draw on ideas from the work of Perry and Kaplan to articulate the context-dependent semantic structure of inner-representational states. (shrink)

This study aims at discovering the essential constituents involved in the experiences of guilt and shame. Guilt concerns a subject’s action or omission of action and has a clear temporal unfolding entailing a moment in which the subject lives in a care-free way. Afterwards, this moment undergoes a reconstruction, in the moment of guilt, which constitutes the moment of negligence. The reconstruction is a comprehensive transformation of one’s attitude with respect to one’s ego; one’s action; the object of guilt and (...) the temporal-existential experience. The main constituents concerning shame are its anchorage in the situation to which it refers; its public side involving the experience of being perceptually objectified; the exclusion of social community; the bodily experience; the revelation of an undesired self; and the genesis of shame in terms of a history of frozen now-ness. The article ends with a comparison between guilt and shame. (shrink)

The article introduces the phenomenological idea of 'natural attitude' in the field of dance. Three phenomena, which very clearly show the embodiment of the natural attitude and its resistance to the requirements of dance, are analyzed. The 'controlling gaze' is the natural tendency to look at the limbs andfollow their movements instead of proprioceptive control The 'chess play' is a natural tendency of moving on the flat surface and ignoring the volume of movement. The 'seduction' is a natural tendency to (...) lose the body-self because of an interference with the others body. The dancing body has constantly to deal with these natural inclinations. And a dance teacher has to understand this split between 'ought' and 'is'. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are gestalt principles underlying intersubjective interactions and that this means that intersubjective ‘units’, can be recognised as unified gestalt wholes. The nub of the claim is that interactions within a ‘plural subject’ can be perceived by others outside this plural subject. Framed from the first-person perspective: I am able to recognise intersubjective interactions between multiple others who are not me. I argue that the terminology of gestalt structures is helpful in framing and understanding (...) the non-reducible make-up of these relational units. I consequently defend the legitimacy of the claim that we can attend to more than one other person at once, holding multiple others as a single focus of attention insofar as we can attend to multiple others as a gestalt whole. I argue that it is therefore legitimate to talk about attending to, perceiving and addressing multiple others at the same time, in the second-person plural. I argue that this can be identified in the phenomenology of such interactions and in an analysis of the core underlying structures of these interactions. (shrink)

This paper explores foreign travel as an affective experience, embodied practice and form of learning. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on tourism and pilgrimage in the Himalayan region, the phenomenological notions of “home world” and “alien world” are employed to discuss how perceptions of strangeness and everyday practices are shaped by enculturation and socialisation processes. It is shown that travellers bring the habitus and doxa acquired in the home world to foreign situations, where these embodied knowledge schemes and abilities for skilful (...) coping can break down. In a home world, cultural patterns offer actors “trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world” that allow everyday experience to go largely unnoticed and unquestioned. In alien worlds, however, travellers – as strangers – encounter differences and disturbances that disrupt experience and cause things normally overlooked to become “lit up”. Using Husserlian and Heideggerian notions of “light breaks” and Dewey's theory of challenge, the author argues that foreign travel generates a form of embodied learning. This occurs first on the level of the pre-reflexive body that is affected and solicited by the new and unfamiliar demands of an alien world. Ultimately, through continuous adjustment of habits and practices in foreign environments, an embodied cosmopolitanism is generated via accumulated travel experience. This calls attention to the role of the lived body in travel experience, as well as the role of place and environment in shaping human practices, perceptions and modes of dwelling. (shrink)

This paper points to two little-discussed interrelated features—among sociologists—about the nature of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions, and that lived experience (Erlebnis) is founded on the non-discursivity of the lifeworld, i.e., the pre-predicative background expectancies from which the discursive arises. I examine the intellectual route of Alfred Schutz who developed his mundane lifeworld theory from appropriating Edmund Husserl’s notions of appresentation and apperception. Harold Garfinkel later extended Schutz’s concept of lifeworld (...) to the empirical investigations of constitutive social orders. By way of conclusion, I warn against a strain of constructionism in sociology, which tends to ignore the two said features of lived experience and inaccurately conceives social realities as essentially the actor’s discursive accomplishments. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl was one of the very first to experience the direct impact of challenging problems in set theory and his phenomenology first began to take shape while he was struggling to solve such problems. Here I study three difficulties associated with Frege's use of sets that Husserl explicitly addressed: reference to non-existent, impossible, imaginary objects; the introduction of extensions; and 'Russell's paradox'.I do so within the context of Husserl's struggle to overcome the shortcomings of set theory and to develop (...) his own theory of manifolds. I define certain issues involved and discuss how Husserl's theory of manifolds might confront them. In so doing I hope to help bring Husserl's theories about sets and manifolds out of the realm of abstract theorizing and prompt further exploration of uncharted philosophical territory rich in philosophical implications. (shrink)

This paper continues to explore the relationship between the imagination and learning. It has been claimed by Maxine Greene, amongst others, that imagination is the most important of the cognitive capacities for learning; the reason being that ‘it permits us to give credence to alternative realities’. However little work has been done on what constitutes this capacity for the imagination. This paper draws on Husserl and Wittgenstein to frame a model of imagination that derives from the perspective of the ‘transcendental (...) phenomenology’ of Husserl. The claim is made that by learning to be in the world in certain ways we must be able to construct imagined worlds with their own logics and presentations. This claim is supported by a discussion of the parameters required for owning and accepting to the self sensory and cognitive perceptions and beliefs. Imagination is also a necessary condition for the understanding of empathy; of grasping what it is like be another person. In this sense imagination can be better grasped through the category of ontology rather than epistemology. It can also, on the basis of ontology, be argued that understanding and acknowledging other cultures is a matter of being, imaginatively, in the other world. Some implications for approaches to teaching and learning are outlined. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide a noetic analysis of emotional trauma. It highlights three essential features of trauma, as well as one non-essential feature, and attempts to make sense of them phenomenologically. The first essential feature of trauma that the paper considers is the disbelief that pervades traumatic experience. When traumatized, we cannot believe that the traumatic event has taken place. This is because we will, not for the event not to have happened—we cannot will something that is in the (...) past—but to believe that it did not happen so as to shield ourselves from our painful emotional response to it. The second essential feature of trauma is our inability to distinctly categorially intuit the central state of affairs around which our trauma revolves. The traumatic situation is literally unthinkable by us, for it is incongruent with both our expectations regarding the subject of the trauma and our horizon of sense more generally. The third essential feature of trauma is the temporal disorientation that it brings about. Such disorientation arises from our prolonged and single-minded attention to an increasingly complex categorial object: the traumatic situation. Finally, the paper considers a non-essential feature of trauma, namely, how traumatic experience can motivate phenomenological and scientific reactions. (shrink)

While it is heartening to see that more researchers in the field of the social sciences are using some version of the phenomenological method, it is also disappointing to see that very often some of the steps employed do not follow phenomenological logic. In this paper, several dissertations are reviewed in order to point out some of the difficulties that are encountered in attempting to use some version of the phenomenological method. Difficulties encountered centred on the phenomenological reduction, the use (...) of imaginative variation and the feedback to subjects. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 8, Edition 1 May 2008. (shrink)

Using the 1991 police beating of Rodney King as case study, this paper draws on Husserlian phenomenology to establish a coherentist account of knowledge as situated with respect to its concrete circumstances of production (e.g., social, cultural, historical, political). I take as my point of departure Gail Weiss's phenomenological investigation into the jury's assessment of evidence in the "Rodney King incident," and in particular, her interest in Husserl's conception of the "horizon" as a structure of consciousness that mediates what is (...) present in perceptual awareness. Making use of Anthony Steinbock's work on Husserlian phenomenological method — drawn from his extensive study of Husserl's unpublished manuscripts — I develop an epistemological framework that treats knowledge claims as inextricably bound to the horizons of meaning from which they arise, and provides standards of epistemic responsibility pertaining to an agent's "framing" of evidence. (shrink)

The paper is guided by three goals. First, it shows that the methodological standpoint of classical Husserlian phenomenology provides us with reliable tools to resist the grand narratives that proliferate during times of war. Second, it demonstrates that phenomenology provides much-needed methodological support for hermeneutically-oriented reflections on war. Third, it shows how the gruesome reality of World War One introduced a practical turn in Husserl’s phenomenology by forcing Husserl to rethink the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics. Tracing the development of (...) phenomenological metaphysics in Husserl’s Fichte lectures, Kaizo articles and private correspondence, the paper shows that, in response to war, Husserl deliberately chose not to engage in straightforward reflections on war, but instead to write about the prospects of peace. Reflections on cultural renewal necessitated him to rethink phenomenology as practical philosophy. The entanglement of praxis and theoria in Husserlian phenomenology relies upon the establishment of a metaphysically-grounded conceptual bond that ties reason to love and faith, which in its own turn suggests that a human being is not merely animal rationale, but also animal amans and animal religiosum. Ultimately, the possibility of cultural renewal relies upon a metaphysical broadening of Husserl’s conception of philosophy as rigorous sciences. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from examining the debate regarding the question of whether a systematic literature review should be undertaken within a qualitative research study to focusing specifically on the role of a literature review in a phenomenological study. Along with pointing to the pertinence of orienting to, articulating and delineating the phenomenon within a review of the literature, the paper presents an appropriate approach for this purpose. How a review of the existing literature should locate the focal phenomenon within a (...) given context is illustrated by excerpts from the first author’s literature review within a descriptive phenomenological study. Also discussed is the important issue of when the researcher should fully enter the attitude of the phenomenological reduction and how this may influence the study. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from examining the debate regarding the question of whether a systematic literature review should be undertaken within a qualitative research study to focusing specifically on the role of a literature review in a phenomenological study. Along with pointing to the pertinence of orienting to, articulating and delineating the phenomenon within a review of the literature, the paper presents an appropriate approach for this purpose. How a review of the existing literature should locate the focal phenomenon within a (...) given context is illustrated by excerpts from the first author’s literature review within a descriptive phenomenological study. Also discussed is the important issue of when the researcher should fully enter the attitude of the phenomenological reduction and how this may influence the study. (shrink)

The London and Bauer monograph occupies a central place in the debate concerning the quantum measurement problem. Gavroglu has previously noted the influence of Husserlian phenomenology on London's scientific work. However, he has not explored the full extent of this influence in the monograph itself. I begin this paper by outlining the important role played by the monograph in the debate. In effect, it acted as a kind of 'lens' through which the standard, or Copenhagen, 'solution' to the measurement problem (...) came to be perceived and, as such, it was robustly criticized, most notably by Putnam and Shimony. I then spell out the Husserlian understanding of consciousness in order to illuminate the traces of this understanding within the London and Bauer text. This, in turn, yields a new perspective on this 'solution' to the measurement problem, one that I believe has not been articulated before and, furthermore, which is immune to the criticisms of Putnam and Shimony. (shrink)

Digitalization reveals the world in new varieties and forms. This power to unveil not only transforms human outreach and actions, but also changes our conceptions; about whom we are, about our uses and about human horizons for sense-making. In this paper, I explore experience design and the aesthetic turn in contemporary research in human–computer interaction and interaction design. This rather recent interest in aesthetic experience is in my view a move away from a view of digitalization as instances of objects (...) aligned in networks, with certain features, qualities and properties, towards an understanding of digitalization as a relation to the world, to itself, and to what it means to be human (e.g. Technology and the character of contemporary life. A philosophical inquiry. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984, Holding on to reality. The nature of information at the turn of the millennium. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999; Questioning technology. Routledge, New York, 1999; The question concerning technology and other essays. Harper and Row, New York, 1977; Technology and the lifeworld, from garden to earth. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990). As such my attempt in this text is to outline a conceptual account concerning what it might mean to designate digitalization as experienced rather than as what we traditionally think of it—as a cause of what we perceive. The paper is based on some previous work suggesting that a focus on the beauty of digitalization (i.e. the beast) entails the possibility to investigate ambiguous meanings of digitalization, meanings that are intrinsic to digitalization but have so far received little or no attention. My suggestion is that there are aesthetic and/or sublime dimensions inherent in digitalization that involves the realization of meaning that are becoming increasingly important in both use and design of digital materials. Hence, the particular focus on aesthetics as implied by the title of this text refers to a pervasive quality harbouring meaning that through a phenomenological lens could be regarded as the material basis of digitalization. The paper concludes that it is crucial to conduct more thorough studies of the relationship between aesthetics and digitalization if we are truly interested in exploring the potential of digitalization in our lives. (shrink)

Group process consultants use themselves as instruments of intervention at the micro, meso and macro levels, and therefore need to have a deep sense of personal self-awareness and self-regulation as they serve as complex dynamic containers of group consultation processes. In this paper, I proceed from an ethnographic perspective to describe, reflect on and explore my emotional and cognitive lived experiences as consultant to participants’ diversity encounters during a Robben Island Diversity Experience (RIDE) event in South Africa. Nineteen participants attended (...) the event. It became clear that discussions were enhanced when the consultant was able to tap into somatic experiences as an additional source of information. The understanding of my consulting role experience may assist both current and emerging consultants in this and similar paradigms to gain insight into the impact of their own psychological disposition and socio-demographic profiles in contributing towards the deconstruction or formation of a good-enough consulting container. (shrink)

The author introduces the existential psychology of the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. The article describes several theoretical ideas and perceptual metaphors derived from Frankl’s scholarship that make it useful as a philosophical and historical underpinning for the practice of autoethnography. Frankl asserted that each individual’s disposition, situation, and position work together to create a uniquely valuable and incommutable individual perspective. This incommutability suggests that the value of autoethnographic social science is based on the opportunities derived from the (...) particular, not the general. Frankl’s work also demonstrates that transsubjectivity is best facilitated when several autoethnographers take advantage of their unique combinations of disposition, situation and position rather than when a single autoethnographer tries to move into multiple positions simultaneously. Psychologists who publish autoethnography may find Frankl’s ideas and metaphors useful for conceptualizing and defending their own scholarship. (shrink)

A materialist view of economics presumes that from material possession flows the best of life’s satisfactions. A postmaterialist view claims instead that the best of human satisfactions come not just from material possessions but from the experience of life’s social, cultural and natural wonders as well. This article sets out a theory of postmaterial experience economics and uses survey research findings from the World Values Survey to establish whether or not postmaterial orientations to economic experience exist in global society and (...) whether Schwartz’s basic human values and Inglehart’s postmaterial values predict orientations to postmaterial experience. Expanded global participation in postmaterial experience matters economically because it can lead to increased unemployment from reduced demand for material goods if not off... (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of how to develop a theory of interpretation of social action that takes into consideration culture-specific claims about intentions while simultaneously allowing for a pan-human, universal dimension of intentionality. It is argued that to achieve such a goal, it is necessary to agree on a basic definition of intentionality and on the conditions that allow for its investigation. After briefly discussing the limitations of applying an ‘narrow’ notion of intention to the analysis of other languages (...) and cultures, a more general and basic analytic notion of intentionality is proposed, that is, as aboutness. By applying this more general notion of intentionality, we can then examine both the content of intentional acts and the conditions that allow for their study across cultural contexts through ‘bracketing’. This is made possible by the social ontology of intentions, which is what enables the analysis of human conduct and its interpretation. Our methods and hypotheses must be evaluated over and against such an existential premise. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment—namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant’s love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the permanent attachment (...) to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant. (shrink)

Husserl has often stood accused of Eurocentrism given his disquieting coupling of philosophy as universal science with Europe. And yet, however much this accusation has clouded the appeal of transcendental phenomenology, the nature of this charge remains obscure: whether Husserl’s chauvinism is merely a personal opinion punctuating his writing or is instead closely connected to the methods of phenomenology has been left unexplored. This paper offers itself as a corrective, looking to get a clearer picture of how precisely Eurocentrism afflicts (...) transcendental phenomenology. The overarching aim of doing so is to chart the possibilities for the development of a non-Eurocentric, decolonial phenomenological thinking which exploits the enduring appeal of Husserl’s commitment to presuppositionlessness. The first part of the paper considers the relationship between the phenomenological reduction and eidetic variation, showing that, by Husserl’s own lights, phenomenological science seeks to expel all forms of prejudice. Part two, however, shows that the entrance of Eurocentrism into phenomenology is not simply accidental, in two distinct senses. The first, which takes off from Merleau-Ponty’s (implicit) critique of Husserl, argues that Husserl in his late work is insufficiently attentive to the empirical dimension: Eurocentrism thus stems from the overly transcendental emphases of this project and its inability to engage with concrete human diversity. The second draws on Derrida’s (explicit) critique of Husserl, arguing that it is precisely the admission of concrete historico-cultural facts into phenomenology that compromises the universal by identifying it with the particularities of Europe. I thus show that Eurocentrism does indeed insinuate itself in Husserl’s methods—_not_, however, in a manner that renders transcendental phenomenology irredeemable. Given the opposition between these two insightful criticisms, however, I argue that the challenge for a decolonial vision of phenomenology is formidable. (shrink)

The intersection between philosophy and psychedelics is explored in the book “Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience”. The authors aim to develop a dialogue between the two disciplines and explore the various frameworks for understanding exceptional experiences that psychedelics have afforded human beings. The book delves into foundational, ontological, and epistemological questions, including the hard problem of consciousness, the metaphysical understanding of the self, and the aesthetic meaning of the sublime in psychedelic experience. The book provides valuable exploration of (...) questions concerning prevailing metaphysical frameworks, epistemic belief structures, and modes of inquiry, and the effort made by the authors to bring into dialogue multiple dialectics and practices, perspectives and methods is commendable. (shrink)

One of the still unsolved problems in liberal anarchism is a definition of social constituency in positive terms. Partially, this had been solved by the advancements of liberal discourse ethics. These approaches, built on praxeology as a universal framework for social formation, are detached from the need of any previous or external authority or rule for the discursive partners. However, the relationship between action, personal identity, and liberty within the process of a community becoming solely generated from the praxeological a (...) priori remains largely disputed. In order to develop a testable constitutional model, this study revises how the “ontological turn” was introduced into liberal theories and redefines the concept of liberty. Liberty is usually understood as a moral goal or measurement for just actions, as the generative principle of all social existence - individual and interpersonal. For this purpose, the function of performative contradiction within the mechanism of interpersonal “encounter”, as part of the co-generative process of the individual becoming and social formation was explored through the production of a game-based narrative historiography grounded on 19th century life writings. This narrative historiography was developed in the context of Swiss history, with a “design-based” research approach, and resulted in a prototype for networked storytelling through which the transformative learning process could be visible and the negotiation of competing individual visions of the future could be re-enacted. (shrink)

A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera. Traditionally, following Aristotle, these have been thought of as highest genera of entities (in the widest sense of the term), so that a system of categories undertaken in this realist spirit would ideally provide an inventory of everything there is, thus answering the most basic of metaphysical questions: “What is there?”. Skepticism about the possibilities for discerning the different categories of ‘reality itself’ has led others to approach (...) category systems not with the aim of cataloging the highest kinds in the world itself, but rather with the aim of elucidating the categories of our conceptual system. Thus Kant makes the shift to a conceptualist approach by drawing out the categories that are.. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the notion of a limit. It questions whether a putative opposition of philosophical “camps” emphasized in recent years is actually tenable. This opposition is taken to hold between classical approaches in a Kantian spirit, operating with the notion of necessary limits to human cognition and sense-making, and a recent “speculative” turn in philosophy championed by Quentin Meillassoux, looking to overcome such limits. The paper’s contention against this dichotomy is that the rhetoric of unlimitedness depends on ideas (...) about limits that are rooted in the very Kantian way of thinking it claims to oppose. What is more, these ideas are just as questionable for they, in turn, rely on a notion of “the Absolute” which they claim to undermine. The paper investigates these foundations of modern thought about limits and finitude in perception and thought, and the consequences these ideas have had. It closes by arguing that the notion of a limit as it has been formative for recent philosophy is inconsistent, and that our focus in philosophy should rather rest on the contextual conditions of thought: on this picture, thoughts articulate a contextually determined grip on reality, which presupposes that reality is used in a certain way. (shrink)

Bu yazının temel amacı, statik fenomenoloji içerisinde kalarak, Husserl düşüncesini oluşturan bazı temel kavramları incelemek ve düşünürün özgün yaklaşımını yakalamaktır. Yazının daha dolaylı amacı, Husserl fenomenolojisinin, genellikle sunulanın aksine, bir zihin felsefesi, algı teorisi ya da tartışmalı bir idealizmden daha fazlası olduğunu ortaya çıkarmaktır. Buna ek olarak, Husserl’i kendisinden önce gelen filozoflarla kıyaslayarak okumak kadar kendisinden sonra gelen filozofların Husserl yorumlarından öğrenmenin de düşünürü anlamayı zorlaştırdığı fikri yazının arka planını oluşturmaktadır. Açık ki Husserl radikal bir dünya deneyimi ve öznellik anlayışına (...) sahiptir. Husserl bu radikal öznellik anlayışı ile deneyimi, metafizik ve insan-merkezci bir anlayışın sınırlarına hapsolmadan anlamaktadır. Yani Husserl bir taraftan ego’yu somut bir ego olarak incelemiş diğer taraftan da ontolojik bir dünya ve insan anlatısı ileri sürmekten kaçınabilmiştir. Elbette bu Husserl’in temel başarısıdır ve bu Husserl’in, bilinci, halihazırda bilim, felsefe ve diğer tüm başarılarına sevk eden kökensel anlamı ile birlikte ele almasına dayanır. Bu bağlamda, bahsettiğimiz dolaylı amacı da hatırlarsak, bu yazıda bilincin anlam verici aktivitesi, dünyayı anlamlandırma süreçleri ve bunun nasıllığı olarak okunmamaktadır. Amacımız, Husserl’in bilincin yaşantısına neden nüfuz etmeye çalıştığını ve aslında neyi ortaya çıkarmaya çalıştığını görmektir. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

The model of consciousness developed here is a cooperative venture between mind, brain, body, nature, culture, community, and family. The overall unity of consciousness is provided by the loop of engagement that conducts intentional action into the ambient. Each successive round of engagement between subject and world generates a gap of disparity between remembrance of purpose or intent and the effect achieved on the operative level of understanding within a larger taxonomic scheme in experience. That gap sends a delta signal (...) that arouses various parameters of motivation to form a configuration that constitutes a felt situation within subjective experience. That delta signal and felt situation are nothing other than our subjective experience of consciousness. Situated intelligence is the first-person awareness stimulated by a particular complement of motivational parameters. (shrink)