This in-depth qualitative study considered how women from two different generations came to understand birth in the context of their own experience but also in the milieu of other women’s stories. For the purposes of this thesis the birth story encompassed personal oral stories as well as media and other representations of contemporary childbirth, all of which had the potential to elicit emotional responses and generate meaning in the interlocutor. The research utilised a hermeneutic phenomenological approach underpinned by the philosophies (...) of Heidegger and Gadamer. This methodology allowed the significance of the experience of engaging with stories to be grasped, and in-depth insights into the meanings and lived experience for women of the phenomenon to be made. Twenty participants were purposively selected, recruited and interviewed. In phase one ten women who were expecting their first baby in 2013 were recruited in order to explore how they understood birth prior to the event and in the light of other women’s stories. Birth stories were revealed as one of many ‘voices’ offering ‘advice’ to women about birth. The women also talked about classes they had attended, books they had read, websites and online forums they had accessed, as well as television programmes and films they had watched. The conversations with the first cohort of women led to further questions about whether the information gleaned from media and virtual birth story mediums creates meaningful knowledge about birth for women. The second phase evolved from this thinking. In phase two interviews with an older cohort of women were undertaken to determine whether women from a different era were more able to translate knowledge into meaning. This was based on the belief that, for this generation of women, stories were mediated by personal contact and not though virtual technologies as in the previous generation of women. Phenomenological conversations with the participants took place in the iterative circle of reading, writing and thinking. This revealed the experience of ‘being-in-the-world’ of birth for the two generations of women and the way of communicating within that world. From a Heideggerian perspective, the birth story was constructed through ‘idle talk’ and took place across a variety of media accessed by women, as well as through face to face conversations. Five central and interrelated interpretive findings emerged. Firstly the stories the women engaged with, had a significant role to play in their understanding and expectations of birth. The ‘norm’ as portrayed in the stories circulating in 2013, for instance, was one which perpetuated what one participant described as the ‘drama of birth’. Secondly, the modern ‘landscape’ of birth created and perpetuated fear of childbirth for many of the women. The stories shared were lacking in detail about women’s lives, and did not necessarily help them to become ‘knowers’ and gain wisdom about birthing. Thirdly, the women birthing in the present day were overloaded with information amassed in an attempt to manage their anxieties about birth as well as to fit the role of the informed patient, and demonstrate their competency as mothers. Fourthly the cultural and spiritual significance of birth was not shared in the circulating stories in either generation. Finally, some of the birthing women felt secure in the ‘system’ of birth as constructed, portrayed and sustained in the stories widely circulated. The data revealed that the lifeworld of birth being sustained in stories was one of product and process, concentrating on the stages and progression of labour and the birth of a healthy baby as the only significant outcome. Taken as a whole this thesis revealed that the information gleaned from birth stories did not in fact create meaningful knowledge and understanding about birth for these women. The study is unique in that no other published research has explicitly identified the premise of the ‘modern birth story’ or the notion of ‘idle talk’ in relation to childbirth. Further no other study has considered the phenomenon of engaging with these types of stories whilst pregnant. This study reveals how engaging with the ‘modern birth story’ and the ‘idle talk’ of birth may influence women’s expectations and consequent experience of birth. (shrink)

Authentic assessment has been proposed as having potential to enhance student learning for a changing world. Conventionally, assessment is seen to be authentic when the tasks are real-to-life or have real-life value. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s work, we challenge this conceptualisation as narrow and limited. We argue that authenticity need not be an attribute of tasks but, rather, is a quality of educational processes that engage students in becoming more fully human. Adopting the mode of authenticity involves calling things into (...) question, challenging public assumptions and striving to take a stand in the situations encountered. In addition to assessing student achievement, then, authentic assessment can enhance integration of what students know and how they act with who they are becoming. (shrink)

The quickening pace of technological development on a global scale and its increasing impact on the relation between human beings and their lifeworld has led to a surge in philosophical discussions concerning technology. Philosophy of technology after the “empirical turn” has been dominated by three approaches: actor-network theory, critical theory of technology and postphenomenology. Recently, scholars have started to question the philosophical roots of these approaches. This paper critically questions Ihde’s early adoption of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology in postphenomenology. First, (...) the paper clarifies the central contributions of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology to postphenomenology. It then uses Heidegger’s early work on Aristotle to argue that Ihde’s notion of “use context” is based on a distorted account of Heidegger’s notion of the “totality of relevance”. Correspondingly, it contends that this has led to a misinterpretation of Heidegger’s technology critique. Second, an alternative reading of Heidegger’s ideas concerning technology is offered. This reading traces Heidegger’s use of the concept of telos in the totality of relevance to his discussion of Aristotelian virtue. It is subsequently shown how the question of the temporality of the mode of being of virtue is related to the notion of authenticity, which lies at the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy. Finally, the paper argues that postphenomenology could gain from philosophers who targeted Heidegger’s central notion of authenticity, notably Arendt and Ricoeur. (shrink)

Philosophy of religion, in both its analytic and Continental streams, has been undergoing a renewal for some time now, and I seek to explore this transformation in the fortunes of the discipline by looking at how truth – and religious truth in particular – is conceptualised in both strands of philosophy. I begin with an overview of the way in which truth has been commonly understood across nearly all groups within the analytic tradition, and I will underscore the difficulties and (...) shortcomings of the analytic approach by comparing it with a Continental, and specifically Heideggerian, approach. I then proceed to a conception of truth that is even further removed from the analytic tradition, one that is prominent in the theology of Christianity and which identifies truth with Christ. The point of this detour through divergent understandings of truth is to show how philosophy of religion, whether analytic or Continental, remains entrenched in forms of thinking that will need to be overcome if it is to have a credible future. (shrink)

The perplexing relationship between two of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, has been the subject of much speculation within academic circles. For Arendt, Heidegger was at once, her mentor, her lover, and her friend. In this paper, we juxtapose Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil against her relationship with Heidegger in an effort to consider the question: How does corporeality inform theorizing? In answering this question, we repudiate the conventional reading of the banality (...) of evil, which attributes the theory to Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann during the latter’s criminal trial for the actions that he perpetrated in the operation of the Holocaust. Instead, we argue that the theory is, more compellingly, reflective of Arendt’s deeply personal attempts at making sense of Heidegger’s decision to affiliate himself with the German Nazi Party in the years preceding, and during, the Second World War. Through this revisionist account of the banality of evil, we animate the idea that theorizing is the discursive corollary, and belongs within the phenomenological parameters, of corporeality. Finally, we contend that any constructive understanding of how corporeality informs theorizing will only be realized, when there is a collapsing of the seemingly impervious philosophical boundaries that demarcate between ontology and epistemology. (shrink)

Being and Time argues that we, as Dasein, are defined not by what we are, but by our way of existing, our “existentiell possibilities.” I diagnose and respond to an interpretive dilemma that arises from Heidegger's ambiguous use of this latter term. Most readings stress its specific sense, holding that Dasein has no general essence and is instead determined by some historically contingent way of understanding itself and the meaning of being at large. But this fails to explain the sense (...) in which Being and Time is a work of fundamental ontology, concluding in Heidegger's claim to have found the meaning of Dasein's being in the concept of originary temporality. On the other hand, readings that stress the general sense of “existentiell possibilities” find Heidegger on a fruitless quest for the transcendental conditions necessary for Dasein's existence, which seems to founder on the claims that Dasein is constitutively thrown, factical, and “in-each-case-mine” [jemeinig]. Both readings are problematic and, I contend, result from a failure to disambiguate and explain the ontologically unique relationship between the specific and general aspects of Dasein's essence. I argue that we can better explain this relationship, Heidegger's method for investigating it, and the sense in which Dasein has an essence that is open to philosophical investigation, if we read Being and Time's ontology of Dasein in terms of what Anton Ford calls “categorial” genus-species relationships. (shrink)