The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issues. Their shared notion of (...) “pure experience” is the conceptual cornerstone of their attempt to deal with the philosophical problem of experience. This dissertation is an analysis of “pure experience” and its relevance to several issues in contemporary hilosophy of mind. Drawing upon James’s and Nishida’s “pure experience”, I argue both for a sensorimotor-based, “extended” conception of consciousness and a bodily skills-based account of moral psychology. (shrink)

Race and religion are integral parts of bioethics. Harm and oppression, with the aim of social and political control, have been wrought in the name of religion against Blacks and people of color as embodied in the Ten Commandments, the Inquisition, and in the history of the Holy Crusades. Missionaries came armed with Judeo/Christian beliefs went to nations of people of color who had their own belief systems and forced change and caused untold harms because the indigenous belief systems were (...) incompatible with their own. The indigenous people were denounced as ungodly, pagan, uncivilized, and savage. Hence, laws were enacted because of their perceived need to structure a sense of morality and to create and build a culture for these indigenous people of color. To date bioethics continues to be informed by a Western worldview that is Judeo/Christian in belief and orientation. However, missing from bioethical discourse in America is the historical influence of the Black Church as a cultural repository, which continues to influence the culture of Africans and Blacks. Cultural aspects of peoples of color are still largely ignored today. In attempting to deal with issues of race while steering clear of the religious and cultural impact of the Black Church, bioethics finds itself in the middle of a distressing situation: it simply cannot figure out what to do with race. (shrink)

What explains people's propensity to ask existential questions that they have little hope of resolving, such as: Why are we here? What, if any, is our purpose? What is the structure of the universe? That humans engage in these endeavors has long puzzled evolutionary theorists, as they go beyond the immediate demands of fending for ourselves, seeking safety, finding food, and reproducing, which occupy the daily lives of other animals. In this book, philosopher Helen De Cruz draws on a wide (...) range of disciplines and thinkers, from Aristotle and 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl to Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel and science writer Rachel Carson, showing how awe and wonder lie at the heart of such existential questions. She argues that there is an emotional basis to this drive for inquiry, as wonder and awe are epistemic emotions that help us think about big-picture questions and that motivate the answers we provide to those questions. (shrink)

Mainstream psychology has assumed a notion of the self that seems to rest on a substantialist notion of the psyche that became predominant despite important critical theories about the self. Although cultural psychology has recognized the diverse, dialogical, historical, narrative and performative nature of self, as opposed to the idea of self as entity, it is not clear how it accounts for the phenomenological experience of self as a unified image. In this paper, we offer a theoretical contribution to developing (...) the implications of a genetic approach to self in cultural psychology, taking into account an otherwise overlooked dimension: art and aesthetics. We draw on the work of classical authors relevant to cultural psychology, who, although geopolitically and theoretically diverse, are concerted in understanding human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming: James, Mead, Dewey, Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Vološinov. Overall, the hypothesis developed throughout the paper is that self is produced within psychological individuation as an effect of the aesthetic activity involved in everyday discursive life. We deepen the ideas that self is not an entity but a process of open becoming, and that cultural life entails a radical experience of alterity; but we recognize the psychological importance of the sense of unity and closure generated in this process. We argue that self entails not only the process of becoming, but also an aesthetical effect of unity in becoming. Self as an aesthetic effect emphasizes the self as a discursive and technical process of production, involving a product that, despite not being a finished entity, is felt as unitary and as mine by virtue of a specific transformation of experience. We thus propose to define self, on one level, as an epistemological category that points to the paradoxes of identity and agency in psychological individuation; and, on a different level, as a twofold operation that makes possible the subjective experience of a constitutive effort as much as a transient but experienced identity or agency. (shrink)

This Capstone is written in the portfolio paper format, and strives to synthesize key lessons learned over my three year journey as a Masters in Philosophy student in the Organizational Dynamics program at The University of Pennsylvania. Main themes and key learnings are presented, supported and interpreted through a series of stories inside a larger story, the former being told in the style of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and the latter as a dialogue between an older man and (...) his grandson. The stories themselves, included in the fictional title The Castlebury Tales, each exemplify a value/ key lesson learned in my journey through the OD program. Key themes were selected through combining key themes identified during an exhaustive literature review and through something I’m calling the PennVenn, an artifact that identifies key themes from each course I’ve taken and where/how such themes overlap. A copy of the PennVenn can be found in the Appendix. The Castlebury Tales are read by an older character to a much younger character. The younger character exemplifies the version of myself before I started my Penn journey in January of 2018; the older character from the perspective of one who has had time to reflect on the value of his education at Penn. As the grandfather fields questions from the grandson or finishes an individual story, he takes time to reflect on what he has learned and experienced in life and it is here where supporting literature is entered into the Capstone. Diagrams in the Appendix serve to aid the reader in both the Capstone’s construction and as an aid to understanding the flow of the document overall. (shrink)

Phronesis, a popular Aristotelian concept that emphasizes deliberation and moral action, should replace the phrase ‘research‐based practice’ as the guiding light for nursing practice. Knowledge from research is still essential, of course, but is insufficient by itself for practice. In this paper, the author describes assumptions behind the apparent superiority of research‐based knowledge, and offers a critique of this position. One critique is that by automatically accepting the superiority of research‐based knowledge other types of knowledge (e.g. intuitive, ethical, personal) are (...) devalued. A second critique is that undeliberated, indiscriminate use of research findings may lead to inappropriate nursing practice.Phronesisis then described, and its application to nursing. For example,phronesisrequires that the context of the situation be considered very carefully before acting. Aristotle stated that the goal of personalphronesisis to reacheudaimonia, or genuine happiness or ‘human flourishing’. Infusing nursing practice withphronesismeans that an anthropomorphized discipline'seudaimoniawould be theeudaimoniaof patients. That is, nursing practice would be guided by a desire for patients' genuine happiness or human flourishing. The final section of the paper offers rebuttals to potential criticisms. (shrink)