The works by the American mythologist, Joseph Campbell, as well as the poetry of John Keats, especially his “Ode to a Nightingale,” offer new ways to reimagine our relation to the earth, to the dead and to language’s continued vitality. Beginning with a brief overview of some of the major tenets of Campbell’s guiding force of the “monomyth,” which gathers all the various world mythologies as inflections of one universal story, the essay then moves into a discussion of Keats’ poem (...) in order to reveal the power of poetic utterance in reconfiguring a vital mythology. If there is to be a renewed mythos, it may come out of a revisioned care of language itself as a transport vehicle towards the transcendent or invisible realms of being that poetry exposes us to through its aesthetic and linguistic corridors. The purpose of yoking mythology to poetry is to realign consciousness along a mytho-poetic axis of insight and understanding. (shrink)

This paper discusses the issue of legitimacy and, in particular the processes of building, losing, and repairing environmental legitimacy in the context of the Deepwater Horizon case. Following the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010, BP plc. was accused of having set new records in the degree of divergence between its actual operations and what it had been communicating with regard to corporate responsibility. Its legitimacy crisis is here to be appraised as a case study in the discrepancy between symbolic and (...) substantive strategies in corporate greening and its communication. A narrative analysis of BP’s “beyond petroleum”-rebranding and the “making this right”-campaign issued in response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster discusses their respective implications for corporate change. Further, the question is addressed why BP’s green image endeavors were so widely accepted at first, only to find themselves dismissed as corporate greenwashing now. The study concludes that where a corporation’s “green narrative” consistently evokes established narratives, its legitimacy will be judged against narrative, rather than empirical truth. Thus, the narrative will be more willingly accepted as speaking for the issuing company’s legitimacy, irrespective of whether it reflects substantive greening or not. (shrink)

The disembodiment of cognitive science has resulted in curricula with disembodied concepts and practice. The emergence of the embodied cognitive science provoked public reflections on the nature of the curriculum. This has elevated the body from the ‘peripheral’ position to the ‘central’ position, acting as the subject in action and becoming the bridge to experience transformations. Meanwhile, the nurturing role of the environment for the mind is attracting increasingly more attention, and the environment, the body, and the mind jointly constitute (...) a dynamic system that prompts the transformation and restructuring of learners’ experience. The reshaping of the relationship between the body and education and the integration of physical experience and mind-building have led us to examine curriculum from a completely new perspective, and curriculum construction is thus transformed to the dynamic generation of interaction among the body, the mind, and the environment based on group experiences. To be precise, there are three basic dimensions in the construction of an embodied curriculum: returning to the life-world and promoting the integration of the curriculum narrative framework and the student’s learning trajectory; introducing the embodied experience and realizing the continuous interactions among the learner’s body, mind, and environment; and integrating the functions of technologies to provide a powerful mediating tool for the construction of embodied curriculum. (shrink)

Is it possible to connect with the God‐who‐may‐be without paying attention to the tapping on the wall from the other side? Kearney remains within the orbit and the idiom of so‐called postmodern philosophy while he expresses phenomenologically the relationship with God as ultimate other. If we are to remain within the confines of postmodern philosophy to articulate such presence, access to what Rilke calls “heart‐work” as opposed to “work of sight” might best be glimpsed through excavation of “decisiveness” in the (...) musings of the later Heidegger. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief consideration of how narrative, in the form of people’s own stories, potentially figures in health and social care provision as part of the impulse towards patient-centred care. The rise of the epistemological legitimacy of patients’ stories is sketched here. The paper draws upon relevant literature and original writing to consider the ways in which stories can mislead as well as illuminate the process of making individual treatment care plans.

We propose conscious awareness as a mechanism for creating “shared value”; a form of value that Porter describes as putting social and community needs before profit. We explore the mechanism empirically in an entrepreneurial context and find that spiritual practices increase conscious awareness which, in turn, shapes entrepreneurial intentions and venture characteristics focused on shared value.

This contribution explores the question to what extent religious narratives can move the adherents of religious communities to violence or teach wisdom and compassion, drawing on Ricoeur’s work on narrative, ethics, and biblical interpretation. It lays out Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity, urging him to connect his account of phronesis more fully with his analysis of threefold mimesis in his earlier work. It considers his biblical hermeneutics in light of this work on identity and moral action and suggests that bringing (...) these various dimensions of his work together more fully than he himself does would provide a more substantive account of how identity is shaped in religious contexts. It might on the one hand help us to understand more fully a turn to fundamentalism or religious violence and on the other hand draw more clearly on the phronetic resources within religious traditions, especially as they are expressed in ritual behavior, to combat violence and teach wisdom and compassion. (shrink)

The thesis contends that education and literary studies can make a valuable contribution to ethics and ethical development of persons, their relations with others and with the world. It promotes an approach to ethics education through dialogic enquiry based on theories and practices associated with comparative literature and philosophical enquiry. These involve students sharing experiences and meanings as they participate in interpretive communities and communities of philosophical enquiry. There are two main components to the research: ethically focused studies of literary (...) texts and the design, implementation and evaluation of a module in Ethics Education using literature and film as stimuli for Dialogic Enquiry. The literary analyses are influenced by reader-response theory. While recognizing the importance of the author or the contexts of production and receptions of texts, reader-response theory focuses on the experience of the reader as she/he responds to literary texts, and on her/his role in actively co-authoring the meaning of texts. Readers may form or join interpretive communities that share an ethos of practice. The literary narrative fictions studied include fairy tale, contemporary European cinema and neo-Western crime drama, each of which offers a valuable way of thinking about education. The module in ethics education, designed for Transition Year students, is based on movements in Philosophy with Children. Students formulate and explore ethical questions raised in response to themes or issues of literary texts. Dialogic communities of ethical inquiry may emerge from this. Students, participating in these dialogic communities of ethical inquiry, get to test out and develop their moral sense, understood in terms of reason, feeling, memory and imagination. The literary analyses demonstrate the ethically educative promise of literary texts, and the responses of students to this course and the growth of their ethical engagement suggest that this is a promising approach to ethics education. Such an educational experience may be ethical in matter, theory and practice and continue to find expression as praxis beyond the covers of books and walls of classrooms. (shrink)

This article examines the storytelling aspect in philosophizing with rehabilitating cancer patients in small Socratic dialogue groups. Recounting an experience to illustrate a philosophical question chosen by the participants is the traditional point of departure for the dialogical exchange. However, narrating is much more than a beginning point or the skeletal framework of events and it deserves more scholarly attention than hitherto given. Storytelling pervades the whole Socratic process and impacts the conceptual analysis in a SDG. In this article we (...) show how the narrative aspect became a rich resource for the compassionate bond between participants and how their stories cultivated the abstract reflection in the group. In addition, the aim of the article is to reveal the different layers in the performance of storytelling, or of authoring experience. By picking, poking and dissecting an experience through a collaborative effort, most participants had their initial experience existentially refined and the chosen concept of which the experience served as an illustration transformed into a moral compass to be used in self-orientation post cancer. (shrink)

Books reviewed:Mark BevirThe Logic of the History of Ideas.

Artikkel lähtub Hegeli filosoofilise süsteemi mittemetafüüsilisest tõlgendusest ja keskendub ühele aspektile Hegeli dialektilise meetodi juures, mille iseloomustamiseks oleks autori arvates kõige adekvaatsem kasutada narratiivi mõistet. Artikli tees on kokkuvõtlikult järgmine: Hegeli arvates ei ole filosoofiline tõde väljendatav ühe lause või propositsiooniga, vaid see nõuab tervet väidete jada, kusjuures mõistete määratlused selles väidete jadas peavad suutma teiseneda --- nii nagu kirjandusliku jutustuse käigus võivad teiseneda tegelaste iseloom ja arusaamine asjadest . Lisaks neile kahele omadusele on narratiivile iseloomulik talle omaste struktuurielementide abil (...) loodud terviklikkus, mis võimaldab tal anda edasi sellist mõtet, mis ei sisaldu üheski narratiivi moodustavas lauses üksikult võetuna. Need kolm omadust võimaldavad Hegeli "dialektilisele" meetodile narratiiviteooria vahenditega uut valgust heita ja spekulatiivse tõe loomust paremini mõista. The paper discusses the nature of Hegel's dialectical method and criticizes its wide-spread interpretation according to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. It is argued that there is no evidence of triadic structures in Hegel's works. Rather, the elements or "determinations" ) that make up the body of Hegel's texts, are organized as "series" that form circles, in which, as Hegel maintains, the last element leads us back to the first. If synthesis means creating something new by using the initial elements then it is problematic whether anything becomes synthesized in Hegel texts. The paper argues against interpreting the every third element of the series or the end-points of the series as synthetic unities. Instead, the paper proposes that Hegel's speculative method uses the form of narrative for creating a vessel that is able to express the "speculative truth" which is "fluid" and which requires a "plastic" form of presentation. Narrative can accomplish what a singular proposition and a deductive system cannot, because it consists of a series of claims that is able to express the movement of what is said in each claim, and because its ending creates a point at which the story as a whole obtains a meaning that is not expressed in any particular sentence constituting the story. (shrink)

This article challenges a prominent claim in moral philosophy: that autonomy is a personal ideal, according to which individuals are authors of their own lives. This claim is philosophically dubious and ethically pernicious, having excluded women from positions of rational authority. A reading of Ibsen's A Doll's House illustrates how this conception of the ideal of autonomy misrepresents the reality of individuals' lived experiences and imposes a gendered identity which subordinates women to a masculine narcissism. In Ibsen's play the woman, (...) as a doll confined to home, remains dependent on an autonomous man. It would seem that men in modern philosophy could see only their own image as rational agents reflected in their ethics; but, in fact, this position is self-defeating. The recognition of our contingencies and so, vulnerability, motivated Kant himself to try to make the moral realm secure with something necessarily common to all human beings: our capacity to reason. The unwitting upshot of Kant's ethics has been the restriction of reason to a purely formal function; but this autonomy of reason undermines itself in being unable to guide the writing of the rational agent's own life. I propose instead to preserve the capacities of moral rationality, while urging the incorporation of ethical practices previously devalued by their association with vulnerability, such as attention, affection and relationality. My philosophical challenge is, first, to develop an internal critique of ethics which exposes its authoritative imposition of a gender identity and, next, to propose a revised conception of autonomy, namely, not just writing our own story, but reading the stories in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

This article presents hospitality as a pivotal value in the context of increasing diversity that characterises the complex relations in which leadership emerges. After reviewing the concept of Otherness in philosophy, the notion of hospitality as developed by Richard Kearney in relation to his philosophy of religion is introduced. The case of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Chief Albert Luthuli is then presented as a biographical leadership study from the African context to illustrate how hospitality as open response to radical Otherness (...) may inspire collaboration and foster positive change. The article then addresses ways in which the notions of hospitality and Otherness present new opportunities to leadership studies for responding to the relational challenges of the globalised world. Amidst an increased scholarly focus on relationality and the need for relational intelligence, globalisation routinely confronts leaders and their followers with radical Otherness. Through dialogue between theology, philosophy of religion and leadership studies and by presenting a case from the African context, the article offers in print what is called for in the global context, namely an open response to the alterity of the Other that enables collaboration amidst increasing diversity. CONTRIBUTION: Proceeding from a transdisciplinary engagement, the article illustrates that leadership studies stood to benefit from dialogue with theology and philosophy of religion, which offers ways of addressing the Otherness that characterise the globalised context of leadership. (shrink)

. The use of narrative to communicate and convey particular points of view in society has increasingly become the focus of academic attention in recent years. In particular, MacIntyre. (1985, 1988, 1990, 1999) has paid attention to the role of narrative in the conflict between different traditions when developing his virtue approach to ethics. Whilst there has been continued debate about the application of virtue approaches, some arguing that it is incompatible with business, I disagree and have already argued for (...) a form of virtue that will focus business on society’s needs rather than better business itself. Here I continue to develop the argument in two ways. First, I will explore the predominant business narrative and offer some comment on the ‘virtues’ that it promotes. However, rather than accepting this narrative, I want to challenge it with a narrative from the environmental tradition. I consider how adopting the virtues promoted by an environmental narrative it would shape business practices and challenge current business conventions. As a second step, I will focus on how we can change managers’ perceptions of business to reflect these environmentally based virtues. (shrink)