The aim of this review is to highlight the most relevant contributions on dance in neuroscientific research. Neuroscience has analyzed the mirror system through neuroimaging techniques, testing its role in imitative learning, in the recognition of other people's emotions and especially in the understanding of the motor behavior of others. This review analyses the literature related to five general areas: breakthrough studies on the mirror system, and subsequent studies on its involvement in the prediction, the execution, the control of movement, (...) and in the process of “embodied simulation” within the intersubjective relationship; research focused on investigating the neural networks in action observation, and the neural correlates of motor expertise highlighted by comparative studies on different dance styles; studies dealing with the viewer's experience of dance according to specific dance repertoires, which revealed the relevance of choreographic choices for aesthetic appreciation; studies focused on dance as an aesthetic experience, where both the emotional and the cultural dimension play a significant role, and whose investigation paves the way to further progress both in empirical and in phenomenological research methodologies; collaboration-based experiments, in which neuroscientists and choreographers developed expertise-related questions, especially focusing on the multiple phenomena that underlie motor imagery. (shrink)

This article focuses on the process diary as a qualitative instrument in phenomenological research. The first part of the article provides a brief historical review on the use of diaries in social and health research. The second part of the article presents an example of how the process diary may be used based on the profile of a participant in the study “Aging with Cerebral Palsy”. The third part of the article deals with the challenges of analyzing the data provided (...) by process diaries and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of this method. The article concludes with a brief discussion concerning the kinds of situations where the process diary is a suitable research instrument. This section of the article also touches upon the ethical challenges involved in using the process diary in longitudinal phenomenological research. (shrink)

The following paper explores the foundations of phenomenology, and seeks to provide those new to the discipline with ways of understanding its claims to assist knowers to attend to 'the things themselves'. Practical applications of this mode of inquiry are linked to adult education practice which is the author's field of practice but most of the ideas are readily applicable to social events and practices such as nursing, social work, recreation, history and the like. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume (...) 1, Edition 1 April 2001. (shrink)

This paper explores some of the ways in which phenomenological approaches have been linked to contemporary social science inquiry into human ways of knowing and learning in the fields of education and nursing research. It then looks at four contemporary approaches which draw on phenomenology namely: distinguishing imaginal from rational/logical knowing as an alternative and complementary mode of knowing; using ‘arts based’ or ‘expressive’ approaches to inquiry; developing hermeneutic text making to present research findings and using heuristics in a cyclical (...) approach to understanding forms of human experience. The suggestion is that these approaches could be enriched and deepened by a more explicit exploration of phenomenological approaches and that conversely, some of forms of phenomenological research might be enriched by the use of these approaches. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 4, Edition 1 July 2004. (shrink)

This paper examines Fechner’s introduction to experimental psychophysics from a phenomenological perspective. Horst’s analysis is used to demonstrate the phenomenology that is inherent to classical perceptual psychophysics. Horst argues that the psychophysical event of perception can only be understood as an intentional intertwining of subject and object. From this we move to physiological component of psychophysics—that is, the processes that mediate perceptual awareness. Drawing primarily on the work of Rosen, it is argued the phenomenology provides the most appropriate approach for (...) what could be understood as a contemporary psychophysics—one that borrows from recent trends in physics, neuro-physiology, and perception as classical psychophysics had done. This results in a psychiatric neurophenomenology. Examples of the placebo effect and treatment of traumatic brain injury are used to demonstrate the usefulness of a phenomenological psychophysics, one that ultimately meets the demands of Fechner’s original proposal. (shrink)

Husserl seldom refers to feelings, and when he does, he mainly focuses on their axiological character, which corresponds to a specific kind of value apprehension. This paper aims to discuss the role of feelings in Husserl from a different angle. For this purpose it makes a detour through Husserl’s early account of attention. In a text from 1898 on attention the aspect of interest, which is said to have a basis in feeling, plays an essential role. Although Husserl argues here (...) that every specific interest is dependent on an objectifying act of perception, he at the same time states that every act of perception necessarily has to be accompanied by an interest of some sort. In the latter sense, the genuine motivational force and necessity of this feeling aspect, namely interest, is emphasized. This ambiguity – or even contradiction – shall be the point of departure for the following considerations. The paper argues that it is possible to interpret the role of feelings in intentionality in a different way, namely not as an effect of current perception but as a cause of further perceptions. This tendency is first indicated in the text from 1898 and elaborated further in Husserl’s genetic approach in Experience and Judgment. In Experience and Judgment Husserl develops a broader notion of interest, defining it as a general perceptual drive. This general drive – so the paper will argue – expresses itself in concrete perception as a specific preference: it discloses or makes manifest what is relevant for an individual subject at a given time. (shrink)

Research at the intersections of feminism, biology and philosophy provides dynamic starting grounds for this discussion of genetic technologies and animals. With a focus on animal bodies, I will examine moral implications of the genetic engineering of “domesticated” animals—primarily pigs and chickens—for the purposes of human consumption. Concepts of natural and artificial, contamination and purity, integrity and fragmentation and mind and body will feature in the discussion. In this respect, Margaret Atwood’s novel, Oryx and Crake, serves as a cogent medium (...) for exploring these highly contentious practices and ideas as it provides hypothetical narratives of possibility. Moreover, it is used to highlight contemporary hegemonic assumptions and values in ways that make them visible. Particular attention is paid to issues of growing human organs in pigs for xenotransplantation (resulting, for Atwood, in “pigoons”) and the ultimate end of the intensive factory farming of chickens through the genetic engineering of ‘mindless’ chicken tumours (or, as Atwood calls them, “ChickieNobs”). Integral to these philosophical considerations is the provocative question of the genetic modification of animal bodies as a means to end the suffering of domestic food animals. The ultimate implications of this question include an ongoing sensory and moral deprivation of human experience, potentially resulting in a future mechanomophosis, the extreme manifestation of an existing mechanomorphism. (shrink)

Feelings not only have a place, they also have a time. Today, one can speak of a multifaceted renaissance of feelings. This concerns philosophy itself, particularly, ethics. Every law-based morality comes up against its limits when morals cease to be only a question of legitimation and begin to be a question of motivation, since motives get no foothold without the feeling of self and feeling of the alien. As it is treated by various social theories and psychoanalysis, the self is (...) not formed through the mere acquisition or change of roles, but rather through a process that is susceptible to crises, a process shaped by affective bonds and separations. Learning, which is the theme of pedagogy, loses its hold whenever it is confronted by disinterest and listlessness. In neurobiology, the increased significance of those zones of the brain that are connected with the realization of feelings makes the brain, accordingly, no mere apparatus that processes data, but a living organ that selects and “evaluates” what is “important.” Finally, cross-cultural comparison shows the extent to which the one-sided preference for understanding and willing, which is the mark of Western rationalism, arises from a typical, not to mention a highly masculine attitude toward the world and life, as many different studies on gender difference stress (In reference to this perspective, see Seethaler, Gefühle und Urteilskraft. Ein Plädoyer für die emotionale Vernunft, 1997). The following reflections provide a historical orientation directed toward a new determination of feelings. This new determination of feelings is phenomenological and takes the pathetic character of experience, nourished by the corporeality of experience as its point of departure. (shrink)

A pianist experiences the thingness of the piano as an extension of the body. Although contact occurs only through the player’s extremities, the piano invites the use of the whole body to transmit emotion, transport the player into the body and mind of a composer, and transform the pianist’s ability to hear.

In the target article, Grant Gillett (2009) has taken an important step toward greater synthesis of neuroethics, philosophy, and neuroscience. In his neo-Aristotelian account, Gillett posits a nece...

This paper analyzes from a pragmatic postphenomenological point of view the performative practice of CREW, a multi-disciplinary team of artists and researchers. It is our argument that this company, in its use of new immersive technologies in the context of a live stage, gives rise to a dialectics between an embodied and a disembodied perspective towards the perceived world. We will focus on W (Double U), a collaborative interactive performance, where immersive technology is used for live exchange of vision. By (...) means of a head mounted omni-directional camera and display the fields of vision of two participants are swapped, which enables the participants to perceive the world through another person’s point of view. This intermedial experience brings a classic dichotomic perception of space to falter: material reality as a ‘live’ condition can no longer be opposed to a virtual mediated reality. In the shifting moment between the embodied and the perceived world, on the fracture between what one sees and what one feels, the distinction between live and mediated is blurred, moreover, can no longer be made. The perception of the body is pushed to the extreme, causing a most confusing corporal awareness, a condition that intensifies the experience and causes an altered sense of presence. In a dynamic cognitive negotiation, one tends, however, to unify the divergent ontologies of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ to a meaningful experience. In this respect, we refer to recent neurological experiments such as the ‘rubber hand illusion’ in order to clarify the spectator’s tendency to fuse both ontologies and to embody a coherent image-world. (shrink)

In this paper I home in on an ethical phenomenon that is powerfully elucidated by means of enactive resources but that has, to my knowledge, not yet been explicitly addressed in the literature. The phenomenon in question concerns what I will term the paradox of moral perception, which, to be clear, does not refer to a logical but to a phenomenological-practical paradoxicality. Specifically, I have in mind the seemingly contradictory phenomenon that perceiving persons as moral subjects is at once incredibly (...) easy and incredibly difficult; it is something we do nearly effortlessly and successfully all the time without giving it much thought and it is something that often requires effort and that we fail at all the time. As I will argue, enactivism offers distinctive resources for explaining the paradoxical nature of moral perception. These resources, moreover, bring out two important dimensions of ethical life that are frequently overlooked in contemporary ethical theory: namely the embodied and socio-technical environment-embedded dimensions of moral perception and moral visibility. As I make my argument, I will be connecting enactivism with insights from David Hume’s and Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy as well as insights from the field of Epistemic Injustice. As such, I aim to situate enactivism within the larger theoretical ethical landscape; showing connections with existing ethical theories and identifying some of the ways in which enactivism offers unique contributions to our understanding of ethical life. While doing so, I will furthermore introduce two forms of moral misperception: particular moral misperception and categorial moral misperception. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence, as well as its increased presence in everyday life, have brought the emergence of many new phenomena, including an intriguing appearance of what seems to be a variant of body dysmorphic disorder, coined “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Body dysmorphic disorder is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder defined as a preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others. Snapchat dysmorphia is fueled by automated selfie filters that reflect (...) unrealistic sociocultural standard. In this paper, we discuss how body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions could arise, using the conceptual resources provided by the active inference framework. We suggest that these disorders involve dysfunctional self-modelling which entails maladaptive internalization of sociocultural preferences during adolescent identity formation. Identity formation is hereby described as cycles of interpersonal active inference that arbitrate between identity exploration and commitment. We propose that impaired self-modelling is unable to reduce interpersonal uncertainty during identity exploration, which, over time, degenerates into uncontrollable epistemic habits that isolate the body image from corrective sensory evidence. In light of these insights, we subsequently explore some of the consequences of image-centered social media platforms on the identity formation process. We conclude that heightened interpersonal uncertainty in this novel context could precipitate the onset of body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions, particularly when selfie filters are involved. (shrink)

This paper draws on a phenomenological study of students’ experience of the demands of a module, Reading and Writing Academic Texts, designed with the specific aim of developing students’ academic literacy. This module is a core, compulsory component of the mixed-mode Bachelor of Education Honours programme offered by the School of Education and Development at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The study thus foregrounds issues of language and literacy, and is contextualized within a “distance” model of (...) teacher education.The paper proceeds with a brief focus on teacher education through “distance” and the role and nature of this form of pedagogical delivery. It then engages directly with phenomenology and the relevance of a phenomenological sensitivity to pedagogical contexts. In order to demonstrate the type of process that can nudge phenomenological sensitivity into being, two aspects of the phenomenological research process that shaped this study – namely, identifying the phenomenon under study, and the phenomenological interview – are presented. The paper concludes with an explanation of the type of data analysis used, and examples of its application in this study. (shrink)

The last few years have seen increasing research interest in moods and atmospheres. While this trend has been accompanied by growing interest in the history of the wordStimmungin other disciplines, this has not yet been the case within philosophy. Against this background, this paper offers a conceptual history of the wordStimmung, focusing on the period from Kant to Heidegger, as this period is, presumably, less known to researchers working with notions like mood, attunement or atmosphere today. Thus, considering this period (...) might provide conceptual resources not yet considered in current debate.Stimmunghas the remarkable feature of encompassing the entire semantic field of mood and atmosphere, insofar as both subjects and objects can literally be inStimmung.Stimmungmight refer to the state or condition of being attuned, which is understood as a dispositional state, as well as the process or act of attuning, which includes self-activating and foreign-determined forms of attuning. The word was first used for the tuning of musical instruments, but was quickly transferred to the fields of aesthetics, psychology, and physiology. This paper will focus on the contrast between the psychological canonization ofStimmungas a type of mental state, and the use ofStimmungas an untranslatable, irreducible metaphor with unique semantic force allowing for original theorizing. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of historical facticity in the phenomenological tradition. I argue that taking historicity into consideration in its factical constitution means transgressing the realm of the primordial or existential temporality. Following Ricoeur’s discussion of the idea of the “referential status of the past,” the question of the material foundation of historical meaning-formation, i.e., relation between temporality and materiality will be brought into the forefront of phenomenological investigations. It is with this context in mind that I argue (...) that exploring the conditions of historicity with regard to its factical and material determinations should assume a realist position in phenomenology. (shrink)

Summary In this essay we seek to clarify the meaning and theoretical implications of the statement by Merleau-Ponty contained in his 1953 course, Le Monde Sensible et le Monde de l’Expression, according to which movement is ‘revealing of being’. This analysis takes up and comments on chapter 7 of Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology (dedicated to the issue of movement) and related experiments in particular. We will show that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ontology of movement emerges from his examination of several (...) exemplary cases. This method of analysis brings to light an idea of similar phenomenology compatible with an experimental phenomenology. (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)

In this paper I will show how the medical image, presented to the patient by the physician, participates in medicine's cold culture of abstraction, objectification and mandated normativity. I begin by giving a brief account of the use of anatomical imaging since the Renaissance to show how images have historically functioned in contrast to how they are currently used in medical practice. Next, I examine how contemporary medical imaging techniques participate in a kind of knowledge production that objectifies the human (...) body. Finally, I elucidate how physicians ought to place the medical image within the context of the lived body so as to create a healing relationship with the patient. In all this I hope to show that the medical image, far from a piece of objective data, testifies to the interplay of particular beliefs, practices and doctrines contemporary medicine holds dear. To best treat her patient, the physician must appreciate the influence of these images and appropriately place them within the context of the patient's lived experience. (shrink)

In the perceptual model of mystical experience, the mystics are said to “perceive” God much like ordinary people perceive physical objects. The model has been used to defend the epistemic value of mysticism, and it has been championed most vigorously by William Alston in his work Perceiving God. This paper is a critique of the model from a phenomenological perspective. Utilizing insights from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, I show that models like Alston’s are based on an inadequate notion of perception, which (...) fails to distinguish perception from other modes of intentionality; the result is that even if we assume the mystics have directly experienced God, it is not clear why we should say they have “perceived” God. Then, using a better and richer concept of perception, I show that the mystical experiences under discussion cannot be truly perceptual, because they lack some salient features of perception. The conclusion is that talks of “perceiving God” can only be analogical or metaphorical, but not literal. (shrink)

A standard interpretation of Hume’s naturalism is that it paved the way for a scientistic and ‘disenchanted’ conception of the world. My aim in this paper is to show that this is a restrictive reading of Hume, and it obscures a different and profitable interpretation of what Humean naturalism amounts to. The standard interpretation implies that Hume’s ‘science of human nature’ was a reductive investigation into our psychology. But, as Hume explains, the subject matter of this science is not restricted (...) to introspectively accessible mental content and incorporates our social nature and interpersonal experience. Illuminating the science of human nature has implications for how we understand what Hume means by ‘experience’ and thus how we understand the context of his epistemological investigations. I examine these in turn and argue overall that Hume’s naturalism and his science of man do not simply anticipate a disenchanted conception of the world. (shrink)

In relationships ‘I’ and ‘you’ become ‘we’; despite individual differences, couples obtain an interdependent identity due to their shared interactions. During a serious illness, biological and biographical disruptions can put any reciprocal relationship under strain. Through intermedial analysis of Judith Fox’s photographic project, I Still Do: Loving and Living with Alzheimer’s, I will explore ways the couple make sense of illness, how illness is communicated through text and image and also to identify the limits of representation. Here the photographs, I (...) argue, solidify their relationship and echo the stuck-in-the-present state of mind brought on by Alzheimer’s. (shrink)

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic (...) interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

This article develops a critical theory of human–computer interaction intended to test some of the assumptions and omissions made in the field as it transitions from a cognitive theoretical frame to a phenomenological understanding of user experience described by Harrison et al. as a third research paradigm and similarly Bødker :24–31; Bødker, Interactions 22):24–31, 2015) as third-wave HCI. Although this particular focus on experience has provided some novel avenues of academic enquiry, this article draws attention to a distinct bridge between (...) the conventional HCI disciplinary concerns with predominantly task-based digital work and use context and a growing business interest in consumer experiences in digital environments. Critical HCI addresses the problem of experience in two interrelated ways. On one hand, it explores the role market logic plays in putting user experiences to work. On the other hand, it engages with ontological understandings of experience hitherto realized in HCI by way of a phenomenological matrix. The article concludes by bringing in an old thinker to consider experience in novel ways that relate ontological concerns to a broader political concept of experience capitalism. (shrink)

After a brief perusal of the various meanings of phenomenology in psychopathology, the contributions to schizophrenia of phenomenological psychology in the European sense are reviewed. The last twenty years are deemed fruitful and productive. Following the central themes and motives of this literature allows us to come to a different and perhaps wider understanding of schizophrenia than that proposed currently by mainstream psychiatry. These diverse investigations converge in seeing as the core of schizophrenia the disorders related to inter-subjectivity and ipseity (...) , in turn related to what Bleuler had once called Autism. Finally, a critical discussion of the limitations and the strengths of the phenomenological approach is offered. (shrink)

From a medical perspective, exercise and physical activity are valuable tools for losing weight, through an increase in energy expenditure. However, beyond this instrumental value, physical activity has meaning for the person experiencing it. Among individuals categorized as obese, that meaning is often problematic. The aim of this paper is to produce essential knowledge about one young man's embodied experiences of practicing martial art. Through a phenomenological analysis of research material concerning the young man’s passionate relationship to martial arts, we (...) identify ways in which someone who has a body often regarded negatively, might still derive great pleasure from his movement experiences. (shrink)

It is now conventional wisdom that conscious experience — or in Nagel’s canonical characterization, “what it is like to be” for an organism — is what makes the mind-body problem so intractable. By the same token, our current conceptions of the mind-body relation are inadequate and some conceptual development is urgently needed. Our overall aim in this paper is to make some progress towards that conceptual development. We first examine a currently neglected, yet fundamental aspect of consciousness. This aspect is (...) the spontaneity of consciousness, by which we mean its inner plasticity and inner purposiveness. We then sketch a “neurophenomenological” framework for thinking about the relationship between the spontaneity of consciousness and dynamic patterns of brain activity as studied in cognitive neuroscience. We conclude by proposing that the conscious mentality of sentient organisms or animals is active and dynamic, and that this “enactive” conception of consciousness can help us to move beyond the classical dichotomy between materialism and dualism. (shrink)

Research Question: What are patients’ experiences of technology in adult intensive care? Research Objectives: -To explore patients’ perceptions of receiving care in a technological environment -To explore patients’ perceptions of how technology has influenced their experience of care Background: Technology is fundamental to the physical recovery of critically ill patients in intensive care (ICU), however, there is a suggestion in the literature that its presence may dehumanise patient care and distract the nurse from attending to patients’ psychosocial needs. Little attention (...) has been paid to patients’ perceptions of receiving care in a technological environment. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to explore patients’ experiences of technology and care within ICU. Methods: This study was informed by Heideggerian phenomenology. The research took place in a university hospital in England. Nineteen participants who had been a patient in ICU were interviewed using a semi-structured approach. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed utilising Van Manen’s framework. Findings: Resulting themes were ‘My Useless Body’ which describes how participants experienced their body as dysfunctional, disconnected and invaded by technology, ‘Making Sense of It’, which describes how participants rationalised their experiences by constructing a story, and ‘Technology and Care’, which describes how and why participants endured technologies in ICU. Conclusions: The disintegrated body is central to the critically ill’s experiences in ICU. Families play an important role in helping patients make sense of their experiences by filling in gaps in memory and helping them to sort the real from unreal memories. Families therefore require support and information resources in fulfilling this role. Patients experience technology and care as a series of paradoxical relationships: alienating yet reassuring, uncomfortable yet comforting, impersonal yet personal. Nurses maintaining a close and supportive presence and providing personal comfort and care may minimise the invasive and isolating potential of technology. (shrink)

This paper comprises a feminist phenomenological exploration of women’s experiences with breast augmentation and breast reduction. Situating the results of semi-structured interviews in the context of body schema, this study discloses how women perceive, think, feel and respond to bodily change created by elective breast surgery. Women’s narratives express that breast augmentation and reduction shifted their conception of the lived body and its possibilities by provoking bodily reorientations and adjustments as well as changes in bodily sensations. In contrast with body (...) image studies that emphasize elective breast surgery as transforming attitudes towards the body, this phenomenological investigation reveals that elective breast surgery also galvanizes a relearning of the world and a rearticulation of embodied doing. (shrink)

Philosophy’s essence depicted by Socrates lies in its role as pedagogy for living, yet its traditional treatment of ‘body’ as a hindrance to ‘knowledge’ in fact severs it from life, transforming it into ‘an escape from life’.The philosophy/life dichotomy is thus an inherent flaw preventing philosophy as traditionally taught and engaged in, from fulfilling its original goal. Recent rejections of the Cartesian nature of Western curriculum, such as O’Loughlin’s ‘Embodiment and Education: Exploring creatural existence’, constitute an important theoretical paradigm shift, (...) yet still fail to translate to substantial pedagogies which explore the ‘body’ and its relation to ‘mind’ directly. This article suggests a reorientation of philosophy teaching from its present disembodied pedagogy, towards an embodied-lived-philosophicalpractice. By the description and exemplification of modern postural yoga I will depict the twofold role of the ‘body’ in philosophy teaching: 1) The ‘body’ as pedagogical vehicle serving the emergence of philosophical discourse, and 2) The body as yielding livingness to mean embodied-lived-philosophy as opposed to disembodied-lofty-philosophical escape from life. It will thus be suggested that yoga be incorporated as an integral part of philosophy teaching reclaiming its educational ethos. (shrink)

This paper explores the theme of torture in the Colombian Truth Commission’s Final Report, focusing on its characterization of torture as a way of annulling a person’s identity. Drawing on Jean Améry’s approach, I argue that torture destroys the victim’s world and explore the further implications of this assertion. I begin by highlighting how the history of torture distorts legal and medical practices, masquerading as a quest for truth while exercising a farce of power, disintegrating the victim’s lived body. By (...) delving into Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh,” I also explain how torture erodes the carnal trust that connects us to the world and enables proper communication. Consequently, torture results in an utter negation of the self and the world. In conclusion, I suggest that torture as understood as the destitution of a person’s world, can serve as a paradigm for comprehending the experiences of violence faced by victims in Colombia. (shrink)

The societal dynamism of modernity results in the theoretical upgrading and the actual development of personal reflective capacities, for example abstract reasoning, Kantian morality, and the development of the idiocentered perspective. These capacities are created in the disembedding of prereflective capacities, for example context-sensitive intelligence, care-morality, and mundocenteredness. The reflective capacities become the prerequisite of further modernization. The development-potential offered by the demands of modernity is accompanied by a risk of assimilative stress, for example pseudological reasoning, varieties of postmodernism, making (...) a fetish of the medium, and the forfeit of the morality of care. (shrink)

This paper proposes an understanding of literary narrative as a form of social cognition and situates the study of such narratives in relation to the new comprehensive approach to human cognition, enaction. The particular form of enactive cognition that narrative understanding is proposed to depend on is that of participatory sense-making, as developed in the work of Di Paolo and De Jaegher. Currently there is no consensus as to what makes a good literary narrative, how it is understood, and why (...) it plays such an irreplaceable role in human experience. The proposal thus identifies a gap in the existing research on narrative by describing narrative as a form of intersubjective process of sense-making between two agents, a teller and a reader. It argues that making sense of narrative literature is an interactional process of co-constructing a story-world with a narrator. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centered approaches that have dominated both structuralist and early cognitivist study of narrative, as well as pragmatic communicative ones that view narrative as a form of linguistic implicature. The interactive experience that narrative affords and necessitates at the same time, I argue, serves to highlight the active yet cooperative and communal nature of human sociality, expressed in the many forms than human beings interact in, including literary ones. (shrink)

This article studies the role of entrepreneurship in business ethics and promotes a resource-based ethics. The need for and usefulness of this form of ethics emerge from an analysis of contemporary business ethics that appears to be inefficacious and from a moral business practice formed out of the relationship between the veal calf industry of the VanDrie Group and the Dutch Society for the Protection of Animals in their development and implementation of a Welfare Hallmark for calves. Both organizations created (...) jointly a new meat segment in the market by trust-building and partnership. The relationship shows a remodeling of capabilities of both organizations in the light of co-creation of values. The VanDrie Group established an effectuation of moral goals by being socially sensitive and resource-minded. The DSPA created openings for dialogue by being pragmatic in its ideals. Philosophically, this article sketches a resource-based ethics with Deweyan concepts as end-in-view and transactionality of means and ends. Both organizations show in their entrepreneurship the ability to create, what is called "Room for Maneuver" by exploring, socializing, individualizing, and growing. By maneuvering they set off a form of co-evolution between business and ethics. This article demonstrates what actual moral entrepreneurship can do in bringing about moral change by combining effectively social, policy, norm, and economic related values. (shrink)

This paper outlines several of the challenges that are inherent in any attempt to communicate subjective experience to others, particularly in the context of a clinical interview. It presents the phenomenological interview as a way of effectively responding to these challenges, which may be especially important when attempting to understand the profound experiential transformations that take place in schizophrenia. Features of language experience in schizophrenia—including changes in interpersonal orientation, a sense of the arbitrariness of language, and a desire for faithful (...) communication of experience —are described, together with discussion of their relevance for the interview context. Furthermore, the interview presents a unique context in which both intersubjective and interpersonal aspects of experience will be described as well as evoked. It is proposed that phenomenological interviewers should not only be familiar with these and other experiences that can occur in schizophrenia, but also capable of applying the techniques of phenomenological and hermeneutic methods in order to understand the descriptions of interviewees with sensitivity and accuracy. (shrink)

In this paper, I use Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative method of “autohistoría” in concert with theoretical analysis to reflect on my experiences as a queer teacher in the heteronormative United States schooling system. These reflections are aimed at unpacking the ways in which racialization, sexual orientation and coloniality are inseparably tied to living out one’s gender. It is this phenomenon of “Gender-as-Lived” that I urge become a focus of identity development research in education studies and is my central concern in this (...) post-intentional phenomenological study. Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the liminal zone of “nepantla” as an embodied and in-between space of resistance offers to transform the practice of teaching into a vocation of healing. (shrink)

On the basis of extensive research on the relationship between physical activity, exercise and health, as well as strong support from policymakers and practitioners, the “Exercise is Medicine” initiative has become something of a linchpin in the agenda for modern healthcare reform and reflects a broader acceptance that the philosophy of health politics must shift from social engineering to performativity. However, in spite of the avowed commitment to encouraging individuals to take on a more reflexive relation to their health, it (...) remains unclear as to whether an initiative such as this is, unambiguously, a good thing. In this paper, a number of cautionary remarks are made with respect to “Exercise is Medicine” in principle as well as in practice. Firstly, it is argued that equating exercise with medicine is to equate it with a definition of and relation to the body to which it is not entirely akin. And secondly, it is argued that any proposed alignment of the fitness and healthcare industries needs further critical examination, a realigning of interests, and a thorough reconsideration of their suitability of fit. (shrink)

Based in narrative phenomenology, this article describes an example of how lived time, self and bodily engagement with the social world intertwine, and how our sense of self develops. We explore this through the life story of a woman who lost weight through surgery in the 1970 s and has fought against her own body, food and eating ever since. Our narrative analysis of interviews, reflective notes and email correspondence disentangled two storylines illuminating paradoxes within this long-term weight loss process. (...) Thea’s Medical Weight Narrative: From Severely Obese Child to Healthy Adult is her story in context of medicine and obesity treatment and expresses success and control. Thea’s Story: The Narrative of Fighting Weight is the experiential story, including concrete examples and quotes, highlighting bodily struggles and the inescapable ambiguity of being and having one’s body. The two storylines coexist and illuminate paradoxes within the weight loss surgery narrative, connected to meaningful life events and experiences, eating practices and relationships with important others. Surgery was experienced as lifesaving, yet the surgical transformation did not suffice, because it did not influence appetite or, desire for food in the long run. In the medical narrative of transforming the body by repair, a problematic relationship with food did not fit into the plot. (shrink)

Every day we make choices, but our degree of investment in them differs, both in terms of pre-verbal experience and verbal justification. In an earlier experimental study, participants were asked to pick the more attractive one among two human faces, and among two abstract figures, and later to provide verbal motivations for these choices. They did not know that in some of the cases their choices were manipulated. Against claims about our unreliability as conscious agents, the study found that in (...) about half the cases the manipulations were detected. In the present study, we investigated whether varying degrees of choice investment could be an explanatory factor for such findings. We analysed the verbal justifications of the participants along a set of semantic categories, based on theoretical ideas from phenomenology and cognitive linguistics, and formulated a matrix of eleven markers of choice investment. We predicted a greater degree of investment when motivating choices of faces than figures, manipulated than actual choices, and detected than non-detected manipulations. These predictions were confirmed, but with various strength. This allows us to argue for both consilience and differences between pre-verbal choice investment and the corresponding verbal motivations of the choices made, and thus for conscious awareness of choice making. (shrink)