My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...) further defining the nature of this family of orientations, I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, social constructionism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Michel Bitbol, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuzian biopolitics), Ken Gergen and John Shotter ( social constructionism), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). I argue that these authors' accounts of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior, and the relation between the body, language and culture remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

In this paper I probe the narratively constructed self as a _proper object of negation_ in the Madhyamaka. The paper borrows idioms and tropes from Western theories of the narrative self to illuminate and contemporize the discussion. Since Mādhyamikas reject the two-tiered interpretation of the Buddhist two truths, they are philosophically unobligated to reduce the self. Although both Mādhyamikas and Ābhidharmikas would accept the conceptually constructed self as conventionally real, they would disagree about its ontological significance. For the latter, the (...) narrative self as a conceptual construct necessitates reduction. Mādhyamikas, who reject the _svabhāva-dharma_ architecture, can be less dismissive of the conventional self. Their conventional self is a narrative construct, but of what kind? The paper tries to answer that question by bringing Mādhyamikas into interlocution with select modern narrative self theorists. It divides into two sub-sections. Each pivots on a theme about the narrative self in contemporary discourse. The first asks how important is ethics for the constitution of the conventional self. The second discusses fictionality of the self in the Madhyamaka. (shrink)

In this paper, we start exploring the affective and ethical dimension of what De Jaegher and Di Paolo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6:485–507, 2007 ) have called ‘participatory sense-making’. In the first part, we distinguish various ways in which we are, and feel, affectively inter-connected in interpersonal encounters. In the second part, we discuss the ethical character of this affective inter-connectedness, as well as the implications that taking an ‘inter-(en)active approach’ has for ethical theory itself.

Are the robots coming? Is the singularity near? Will we be dominated by technology? The usual response to ethical issues raised by pervasive and ubiquitous technologies assumes a philosophical anthropology centered on existential autonomy and agency, a dualistic ontology separating humans from technology and the natural from the artificial, and a post-monotheistic dualist and creational spirituality. This paper explores an alternative, less modern vision of the “technological” future based on different assumptions: a “deep relational” view of human being and self, (...) an ecological view of human–technology relations, and “ubiquitous” spirituality. Moving beyond an ethics of fear and control, it is argued that technology is part of a lived and active whole that is at the same time human, technological, social, and spiritual. Influenced by ecological and Eastern thinking, it is concluded that an ethics of technology understood as a relational ethics of life asks us to adapt and grow within this multi-faced ecology, which is currently—but not necessarily—pervaded by hyper-individualist modernity and its ego-boosting technologies of the self. This growth is only possible by relating to, and learning from, other cultures and from their specific way of pervading and being pervaded. (shrink)

Enactivism has much to offer to moral, social and political philosophy through giving a new perspective on existing ethical problems and improving our understanding of morally ambiguous behaviours. I illustrate this through the case of self-injury, a common problematic behaviour which has so far received little philosophical attention. My aim in this paper has been to use ideas from enactivism in order to explore self-injury without assuming a priori that it is morally or socially wrong under all circumstances, seeking to (...) establish a less implicitly value-laden analysis. Enactivism can help us in making this behaviour more intelligible and contextualising it through examining the relations of individual embodied action and social practices with the help of enactivist theories of habits and affordances. (shrink)

Many teacher candidates get their first taste of life as a full-time teacher in their practicums, during which they confront a host of challenges, pedagogical and ethical. Because ethics is fundamental to the connection between teachers and students, teacher candidates are often required to negotiate dilemmas in ways that keep with the ethical ideals espoused both by the professional body and the community at large. Presenting the case of a teacher candidate who finds herself emotionally depleted in her devotion to (...) students, we look to the ethics of care and virtue for clarifying insights. Care ethics extols intersubjectivity and reciprocity, while virtue ethics enjoins commitment to a noble ideal for its own sake; both perspectives offer useful insights for our case. We argue that the perspectives and practices of contemplative traditions can facilitate the integration of care and virtue ethics, mitigating the risk of disruption in caring relations while minimizing the possibility of a personal p... (shrink)

Graham Priest claims that Asian philosophy is going to constitute one of the most important aspects in 21st-century philosophical research. Assuming that this statement is true, it leads to a methodological question whether the dominant comparative and contrastive approaches will be supplanted by a more unifying methodology that works across different philosophical traditions. In this article, I concentrate on the use of empirical evidence from nonphilosophical disciplines, which enjoys popularity among many Western philosophers, and examine the application of this approach (...) to early Chinese philosophy. I specifically focus on Confucian ethics and the study of altruism in experimental psychology. (shrink)

This paper makes the case that environmental education needs to be taken up as a moral education to the extent that we see the connection between harm and destruction in the environment and harm and destruction within human individuals and their relationship, and proceeds to show this connection by introducing the key notion of human alienation and its psychological factors of wounding, dissociation or split, self and other oppression and exploitation, all of which result in compromised moral agency. To this (...) end, the paper further makes the case that we need to replace the culture of alienation with a culture of healing and reclamation of fundamental humanity manifest as compassion and wisdom, and presents an ideal of moral agency that would emerge when all parts and dimensions of one’s being—body–mind–heart–energetics—are aligned, attuned and integrated, having healed from the body–mind split, mind–heart split, body–spirit split and mind–matter split. Concepts and imagery borrowed from Asian philosophies, such as Buddhism and Daoism, are offered as illustrative resources for the project of reclaiming uncompromised moral agency and its manifestation through compassion and wisdom. These concepts include hungry ghosts, bodhicitta, sunyata and wu-wei. (shrink)

This essay develops the concept of the “social body” as a metaphorical representation of hierarchical relationships in Thailand, as well as the physical embodiment of social, religious, and political structures. To do so, I trace the symbolic coordinates of groups that correspond to conceptions of individual bodies, along with the habituated means of perceiving as part of a collective. I argue that conventional Thai social interactions involve active attention to and care of the “social body,” in which differential roles are (...) necessary for group functioning. Ethnographic descriptions of social interactions in public and semi-private arenas depict the spontaneous and embodied root of moral action in these contexts. The values thus enacted, however, challenge normative ideals of distributive justice and open up questions about “care” for a social body that validates unequal power and resource distribution. (shrink)

A philosophy of management that incorporates the big picture of human experience, all levels, and degrees of awareness in relationship with the world, will better develop and sustain an environment conducive to creative contributions that meet organizational goals. Quantum physics reveals the nature of reality to be connection and creativity engaged in a process of actualizing possibilities. Human beings participate in this process of actualization, as both observer-creator and experiencer of the universe through multiple domains of knowing – a collaborator (...) in Alfred North Whitehead’s panexperientialism. Whitehead’s God of process, the primordial field of creative possibilities, and the consequent nature which holds all the experiences of every actualization, supports human consciousness, as it self-actualizes by engaging and integrating the experience of external and internal events and their effects on awareness. Through understanding the participatory nature of consciousness with God and the world as experienced, deep meaning emerges for human life. Tapping into this deeper meaning through a philosophy of management that acknowledges the full human experience, including the embedded spiritual connection to the creative energy that is God, strengthens an organization’s vision, mission and contributions to a community. This brief overview traces a path toward a preliminary framework for a philosophy of management based on God and the ideas of connection, creativity and process. (shrink)

This paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Enactivism’s Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist ‘world-construction’ which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (_Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,_ _13_(3), 461–475, 2014 ), drawing on Ian Hacking’s ‘entity realism’, which places subjects in worlds comprised of the things that they can successfully manipulate. We review this attempt, and (...) argue that whilst Zahidi rightly urges enactivists towards ‘internal realism’, he cannot sustain a non-negotiable aspect of realism that is crucial for scientific progress – the claim that multiple subjects inhabit _the same world_. We explore Peirce’s pragmatism as an alternative solution, foregrounding his distinction between existence and reality, and his inquiry-based account of cognition. These theoretical innovations, we argue, fruitfully generalize Zahidi’s _manipulation-based_ enactivist realism to a richer, _inquiry-based_ enactivist realism. We explore how this realism’s pan-species monism about truth encourages and supports the investigation of non-human animal cognition, and conclude by considering some implications of our discussion for long-standing realism debates within pragmatism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

This essay takes an epistemological perspective on the question of the ‘art of living with technology.’ Such an approach is needed as our everyday notion and understanding of technology keep being framed in the old categories of instrumentalism and essentialism—notwithstanding philosophy of technology’s substantial attempts, in recent times, to bridge the stark dichotomy between those two viewpoints. Here, the persistent dichotomous thinking still characterizing our everyday involvement with technology is traced back to the epistemological distinction between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract.’ Those (...) terms are often contrasted, and a tendency can be found, in the literature as well as in popular discourse, to either conceptually favor one of both or let them collapse into each other. The current essay makes a plea, in an exploratory manner, and on the basis of insights hailing from among others Gregory Bateson and Alfred Korzybski, to not choose either one of those options, but to practice ourselves in navigating ladders of abstraction. (shrink)

If the bindingness of morality was to rest on something as ‘subjective’ as the non-cognitivist says it does, the grouse goes, and morality itself would come down crashing. Nothing less than an ‘objective’ source of normativity, it is supposed, could hold morality in orbit. Some of these worries automatically morph into worries about the projectivist model of normativity of law as well: one which understands the authority or normativity of law in terms of subjective attitudes taken towards the law. As (...) well as the stock worries about non-cognitivism, there are some additional ones that the projectivist model brings in its wake that it cannot account for the ‘uniform’ bindingness of law and that a subjective source of normativity of law based on mental states is unintelligible. This essay makes the case for acquitting the projectivist model of normativity of law from the above charges. But the route to that necessarily leads through first acquitt... (shrink)

Common to different versions of social constructionism is the definition of discourse as taking place between persons. Experiences which take place in the absence of immediate others, such as thinking to oneself or reading a text, are treated as secondary phenomena, as introjected versions of social utterance-gestures. This article asserts that representative constructionist articulations of between-person relationality rest on abstractions masking a more primary locus of sociality. I offer an alternative formulation of the social as the embodiment of sensate experience, (...) borrowing from Merleau-Ponty's and Gendlin's accounts. Sensate experience is already radically relational before and beyond any notion of sociality as between-person voices-gestures, generating more intimate and mobile possibilities of interpersonal understanding than is offered via discursive readings of terms like social, language and embodiment. Note; Although this paper pertains to social constructionist positions, my central criticism of these approaches applies as well to Deleuze's bio-political notion of sociality. While constructionists restrict their focus to inter-personal communication, Deleuze broadens the notion of language to include the living and material world, which includes the body. This places the site of otherness and sociality within intentionality itself via its entanglement with affect. Nevertheless, Deleuze's treatment of affective-intentional dynamics, rather than dismantling social constructionism's between-person abstractions, manages to import them into bodily process. (shrink)

Most self-reports of heroic action in both reactive and social (proactive) cases describe the experience as involving a kind of necessity. This seems intuitively sound, but it makes it unclear why heroism is accorded strong approbation. To resolve this, I show that the necessity involved in heroism is a nonselfsacrificial practical necessity. (1) Approaching the intentional structure of human action from the perspective of embodiment, focusing especially on the predispositionality of pre-reflective skill, I develop a phenomenological interpretation of Bernard Williams’ (...) notion of “practical necessity” as an endogenous existential necessity. (2) I then offer a view of reactive heroism as instantiating this kind of necessity by literally embodying certain socially affirmed values in a way that is not self-sacrificial. This evinces a deep social bond, and it is this bond, rather than the action itself, is the ground of approbation. (3) I then discuss how this construal of reactive heroism can be extended to cases of social heroism by way of a necessity that is internal to the agent’s individual character. Similarly to reactive cases, a social hero literally embodies a certain ethical commitment such that her actions are likewise instances of nonselfsacrificial practical necessity. (4) I then discuss how the commitment perceived in cases of social heroism pertains to the actualization of “surplus validity,” such that whereas the reactive hero is praised for embodying shared value, the social hero is praised for embodying a commitment to actualizing the concrete potential of such value more fully The approbation accorded to social heroism is therefore tied inextricably to a normative judgment concerning such immanent progressive transformation. (shrink)

Sociobiology is a grand narrative of evolutionary biology on which to build unified knowledge. Consilience is a metaphorical representation of that narrative. I take up the same metaphor but apply it differently. I evoke the image of jumping together, not on solid ground but on the strong, flexible canvas sheet of a trampoline, on which natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities jump together. This image overlaps with the traditional East Asian way of understanding—that is, the “Heaven-Earth-Person Triad.” Using recent (...) insights from cognitive science—metaphor, embodiment, and conceptual blending—I propose the alternative way of “bio-socio-humanities” to understand and experience the world. (shrink)

The enactive approach and the skilled intentionality framework are two closely related forms of radical embodied cognition that nonetheless exhibit important differences. In this paper, I focus on a conceptual disparity regarding the normative character of action and perception. Whereas the skilled intentionality framework describes the norms of action and perception as the capacity of embodied agents to become attuned (i.e., skilled intentionality) to preestablished normative frameworks (i.e., situated normativity), the enactive approach describes the same phenomenon as the enactment of (...) norms (i.e., as sense-making) at different levels of organization that go from individual biological agents to linguistic encounters. I will argue that although both accounts accurately recognize important features of the norms of action and perception, they also have significant shortcomings. Norm-attunement accurately sees normative, ecological frameworks as the necessary set of constraints for the existence of norms at play in sociocultural bodily practices, but it fails to acknowledge the temporal and open-ended character of these norms and frameworks. Norm-enactment, by contrast, acknowledges that norms of action and perception are temporally open-ended, but fails to explicitly recognize that environmental normative frameworks are necessary for the enactment and development of all sort of norms in the interactional domain of an agent-environment system. To overcome these problems, I propose an enactive-ecological approach to norms of action and perception. This approach consists in describing norm-enactment as a result of a developmental process I call norm-development. This process describes the enactment of norms from the background of ecological, normative frameworks. These frameworks are norms enacted in the past of the interactional history of the agent-environment system that remain open to new configurations (new norms) in the present. To clarify conceptually norm-development, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of norms of perception, and more particularly to his concept of spatial levels. Like the enactive approach, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that perceptual norms emerge in the interactional history of the agent-environment system, but he also posits that ecological, normative frameworks, that he calls levels, enable and constrain the emergence of perceptual norms and its development. (shrink)

This essay interprets the meaning of one of the cards in aTarot deck, "The Magician," in the context of process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead. It brings into the conversation the philosophical legacy of American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as well as French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored herein for the purpose of explaining the symbolic function of the Magician in the world. From the perspective of the logic of explanation, the sign of (...) the Magician is an index of nonmechanistic, mutualist or circular, causality that enables self-organization embedded in coordination dynamics. Its action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty. I present a model for process∼structure that uses mathematics on the complex plane and the rules of projective geometry. The corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world enables a particular organization of thought that makes pre-cognition possible. (shrink)

This paper rereads John Dewey's works in the light of complexity theory and self‐organising systems. Dewey's pragmatic inquiry is posited as inspirational for developing a logic of education and learning that would incorporate novelty and creativity, these artistic elements being part and parcel of the science of complexity. Dewey's philosophical concepts are explored against the background of such founders of dynamical systems theory as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Ervin Laszlo, and Erich Jantsch. If, in this process, Dewey's thought appears to undergo (...) some transformation, this would only confirm Jim ) belief that Dewey would welcome, in accord with his own philosophical project, the reconstruction of his own ideas so as to better respond to contingencies and challenges of new times, places and contexts. The paper introduces some elements of non‐linear dynamics, relating them to the problematic of learning and the transformation of habits. Finally, the paper addresses a delicate balance between novelty and confirmation in a self‐organised system, positing it as an issue of pedagogical significance. (shrink)

This article begins by revisiting the current model of values education (moral education) which has recently been set up in Australian schools. This article problematizes the pedagogical model of teaching values in the direct transmission mode from the perspective of the continuity of experience as central to the philosophies of John Dewey and Charles S. Peirce. In this context experience is to be understood as a collective (going beyond the realm of private) and continuous (importantly, non-atomistic) space. As such, human (...) behavior and decision-making are embedded in a broad range of possibilities that may become actualities in the process of responding intelligently to what is perceived in the environment. This article also brings into the conversation some contemporary discourse in bioethics and neuroscience that appears to have an uncanny affinity to Peirce's and Dewey's much earlier conceptualizations. Human intelligence proper arises in the interactions between mind, body, and the environing world: we learn from experience that necessarily has a value-element embedded in this triadic matrix. (shrink)

A recent turn in the cognitive sciences has deepened the attention on embodied and situated dynamics for explaining different cognitive processes such as perception, emotion, and social cognition. This has fostered an extensive interest in the social and ‘intersubjective’ nature of moral behavior, especially from the perspective of enactivism. In this paper, I argue that embodied and situated perspectives, enactivism in particular, nonetheless require further improvements with regards to their analysis of the social nature of human morality. In brief, enactivist (...) proposals still do not define what features of the social-relational context, or which kind of processes within social interactions, make an evaluation or action morally relevant or distinctive from other types of social normativity. As an alternative to this proclivity, and seeking to complement the enactive perspective, I present a definition of the process of moral sense-making and offer an empirically-based ethical distinction between different domains of social knowledge in moral development. For doing so, I take insights from the constructivist tradition in moral psychology. My objective is not to radically oppose embodied and enactive alternatives but to expand the horizon of their conceptual and empirical contributions to morality research. (shrink)

Various kinds of contemplative practices have been a part of the western philosophical tradition since the Age of Antiquity. Today, however, philosophy as a way of life has ceased to be an integral part of academic practice. The capability to gain knowledge or understanding is believed to come out of pure intellectual endeavor, without exercising the mind and body holistically. This has created a blind spot for philosophy, where no profound pedagogical and moral transformation of subjectivity can be articulated. Furthermore, (...) meditation practices have often been understood as egoistic, apolitical activity. Our purpose is to suggest that this understanding is due to the liberalist and Cartesian tradition of subjectivity today widely proliferated in education. However, through an analysis of a meditation exercise in breathing, it is possible to deconstruct these notions and open novel vistas for thinking about the relationship between truth and subjectivity in education. A simple breathing exercise can dissolve the dualisms ingrained in occidental philosophy and culture - which has many socio-political implications for educational theory and praxis. (shrink)

Several trends in contemporary philosophy have revived the question of the good life. This article addresses the more elaborate notion of an “art of living” in the specific context of the technosphere on the basis of recent works in philosophy of technology. It also brings ideas from Asian philosophy and from Buddhism in particular into the discussion. The focus is on the notion of non-confrontation, which could lead to a decisive change in the methods and scope of technology assessment within (...) the humanities. The art of living in the technosphere emerges as an existential virtuosity that pertains to practical wisdom. (shrink)

Several trends in contemporary philosophy have revived the question of the good life. This article addresses the more elaborate notion of an “art of living” in the specific context of the technosphere on the basis of recent works in philosophy of technology. It also brings ideas from Asian philosophy and from Buddhism in particular into the discussion. The focus is on the notion of non-confrontation, which could lead to a decisive change in the methods and scope of technology assessment within (...) the humanities. The art of living in the technosphere emerges as an existential virtuosity that pertains to practical wisdom. (shrink)

When trying to help teachers cope with the critical situations they face in classrooms, public policies are mainly concerned with improving initial teacher training. I claim in this article that the role of lifelong learning should no longer be undermined and that the design of teachers' training should be supported by a thorough examination of the cognitive processes involved. A faulty view of cognition may explain both our emphasis on initial training and most of the difficulties faced in designing teachers' (...) training. Searching existing alternative metaphors of cognition and investigating new ones constitutes a way of coping with these problems: first to design new forms of training, second to understand the processes involved in innovative training methods that have already been implemented. My focus in this article is precisely the ‘metaphor of cognition’ that underlies innovative teacher training methods. This metaphor is based on Peirce's pragmaticism, and it describes teachers' training as a process of taking and changing habits. This article mainly investigates the links between Peirce's later semiotics, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and Varela's theory of enaction, in order to propose a threefold definition of ‘habit’ and define the notion of ‘educational gesture’, which constitutes a translation of the concept of habit in the field of education and training. (shrink)

Any complete account of morality should be able to account for its characteristic normativity; we show that enactivism is able to do so while doing justice to the situated and interactive nature of morality. Moral normativity primarily arises in interpersonal interaction and is characterized by agents’ possibility of irrevocably changing each other’s autonomies, that is, the possibility of harming or expanding each other’s autonomy. We defend that moral normativity, as opposed to social and other forms of normativity, regulates and, in (...) some cases, constitutes this very possibility. Agents are thus morally responsible for caring about their own and others’ autonomies in interaction. In our conception, moral normativity is embodied, situated, and deeply affective, and is constituted in social practices and maintained in interaction. We identify at least two necessary conditions for moral normativity to arise as a social practice. The first is our embodied constitution as living beings who are precarious and therefore vulnerable and in need of interaction with others and with the environment. The second is our sociolinguistic nature, which allows us to exponentially expand our possibilities for action and normatively distinguish among them. We finish by drawing a distinction between moral character and the moral content of interactions, which allows us to universally recognize the ethical dimensions of all human interaction while doing justice to the situated character of morals. (shrink)

This paper advances Portelli and Vibert’s (2001) concept of a ‘curriculum of life’ as a central organizing concept in education. A curriculum of life, defined as a “curriculum that is grounded in the immediate daily world of students as well as in the larger social, political contexts of their lives” (Portelli & Vibert, 2001, p. 63) is, de facto, at the centre of student learning. I argue that teachers can engage with this immediate daily world and enact a curriculum of (...) life by practicing mindfulness and complexity thinking as ways of valuing relationships and engagement. Complexity thinking in education, which draws upon themes of emergence, self-organization and non-linearity, leads us to a relational ethics that compels educators to take mindful responsibility for how our actions and responses affect the world. (shrink)

Personality and social development begins before birth in the communication among mother, child and environment, during sensitive periods when the child’s brain and body are plastic and epigenetically co-constructed. Triune ethics theory postulates three evolved, neurobiologically-based ethics fostered by early life experience. The security ethic is self-protective. The engagement ethic is relationally attuned. The imagination ethic can abstract from the present moment and imagine alternatives. Climates and cultures can foster one or another ethic. Ancestral environments were more conducive to moral (...) development. Individuals can adopt self-authorship of their moral character through the development of ethical expertise. Recommendations are made for research and policies that study and support optimal moral development. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the enactive approach to ethics could benefit from engaging a dialogue with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who has given ethics a decisive role in the understanding of our social life. Taking the enactive approach of Colombetti and Torrance as a starting point, we show how Levinas’ philosophy, with the key notions of face, otherness, and responsibility among others can complement and enrich the enactive view of ethics. Specifically, we argue that Levinas can provide, (...) on the one hand, a phenomenological characterisation of ethics itself, of its nature and fundamental meaning, and on the other, an account of how sociality, affectivity and embodiment, as presented in Colombetti and Torrance’s work, combine to bring about the ethical experience. However, we also point out that introducing Levinas to the enactive approach could be challenging. It is not obvious how sense-making and value-making, as centred on the precariousness and potential death of the subject, would account for the ethical experience as grounded on the precariousness and potential death of the other. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the problem of the self through bringing together the insights, while correcting some of the shortcomings, of Indo–Tibetan Buddhist and enactivist accounts of the self. I begin with an examination of the Buddhist theory of non-self ( anātman ) and the rigorously reductionist interpretation of this doctrine developed by the Abhidharma school of Buddhism. After discussing some of the fundamental problems for Buddhist reductionism, I turn to the enactive approach to philosophy of mind and (...) cognitive science. I argue that human beings, as dynamic systems, are characterized by a high degree of self-organizing autonomy. Therefore, human beings are not reducible to the more basic mental and physical events that constitute them. I critically examine Francisco Varela’s enactivist account of the self as virtual and his use of Buddhist ideas in support of this view. I argue, in contrast, that while the self is emergent and constructed, it is not merely virtual. Finally I sketch a Buddhist-enactivist account of the self. I argue for a non-reductionist view of the self as an active, embodied, embedded, self-organizing process—what the Buddhists call ‘I’-making ( ahaṃkāra ). This emergent process of self-making is grounded in the fundamentally recursive processes that characterize lived experience: autopoiesis at the biological level, temporalization and self-reference at the level of conscious experience, and conceptual and narrative construction at the level of intersubjectivity. In Buddhist terms, I will develop an account of the self as dependently originated and empty, but nevertheless real. (shrink)

This paper reports on the experiences of creative practice graduate researchers and academic staff as they seek to comply with the requirements of the Australian National Statement on the Ethical Conduct of Research Involving Humans. The research was conducted over a two-year period as part of a wider project ‘iDARE – Developing New Approaches to Ethics and Research Integrity Training through Challenges Presented by Creative Practice Research’. The research identified the appreciation of ethics that the participants acquired through their experience (...) of institutional research ethics procedures at their university. It also revealed a disjunction between the concepts of ethics acquired through meeting institutional research ethics requirements, the notion of ethics that many researchers adopt in their own professional creative practice and the contents of professional codes of conduct. A key finding of the research was that to prepare creative practice graduates for ethical decision-making in their professional lives, research ethics training in universities should be broadened to encompass a variety of contexts and enable researchers to develop skills in ethical know-how. (shrink)

In this article, I provide a guide to some current thinking in empirical moral psychology on the nature of moral intuitions, focusing on the theories of Haidt and Narvaez. Their debate connects to philosophical discussions of virtue theory and the role of emotions in moral epistemology. After identifying difficulties attending the current debate around the relation between intuitions and reasoning, I focus on the question of the development of intuitions. I discuss how intuitions could be shaped into moral expertise, outlining (...) Haidt’s emphasis on innate factors and Narvaez’s account in terms of a social-cognitive model of personality. After a brief discussion of moral relativism, I consider the implications of the account of moral expertise for our understanding of the relation between moral intuitions and reason. I argue that a strong connection can be made if we adopt a broad conception of reason and a narrow conception of expertise. (shrink)

Intellectualist theories attempt to assimilate know how to propositional knowledge and, in so doing, fail to properly explain the close relation know how bears to action. I develop here an anti-intellectualist theory that is warranted, I argue, because it best accounts for the difference between know how and mere “armchair knowledge.” Know how is a mental state characterized by a certain world-to-mind direction of fit (though it is non-motivational) and attendant functional role. It is essential of know how, but not (...) propositional knowledge, that it makes possible performance errors and has the functional role of guiding action. The theory is attractive, in part, because it allows for propositional, non-propositional and perhaps even non-representational varieties of know how. (shrink)

In everyday life, situations in which we act adequately yet entirely without deliberation are ubiquitous. We use the term “situated normativity” for the normative aspect of embodied cognition in skillful action. Wittgenstein’s notion of “directed discontent” refers to a context-sensitive reaction of appreciation in skillful action. Extending this notion from the domain of expertise to that of adequate everyday action, we examine phenomenologically the question of what happens when skilled individuals act correctly with instinctive ease. This question invites exploratory contributions (...) from a variety of perspectives complementary to the philosophical/ phenomenological one, including cognitive neuroscience, neurodynamics and psychology. Along such lines we try to make the normative aspect of adequate immediate action better accessible to empirical research. After introducing the idea that “valence” is a forerunner of directed discontent, we propose to make progress on this by first pursuing a more restricted exploratory question, namely, ‘what happens in the first few hundred milliseconds of the development of directed discontent?’. (shrink)

This paper explicates how we might positively understand the distinctive, nonconceptual experience of our own actions and experiences by drawing on insights from a radically enactive take on phenomenal experience. We defend a late-developing relationalism about the emergence of explicit, conceptually based self-awareness, proposing that the latter develops in tandem with the mastery of self-reflective narrative practices. Focusing on the case of human newborns, Sect. 1 reviews and rejects claims that the capacities of actors to keep track of aspects of (...) themselves—e.g. their bodies, body parts, movements, activities, actions and experiences—when coordinating what they do equates to or is best explained by positing minimal, tacit awareness of their experiences as their own. Section 2 then considers and resists more familiar arguments, based on the so-called reflexivity thesis, that take such minimal self-awareness to be implied wherever there is any kind of phenomenal experience. In place of these ideas, we promote an alternative proposal of what is involved when agents keep track of aspects of themselves, drawing on a radically enactive conception of basic experience. Section 3 concludes by proposing that our first conceptual, explicit sense of self is something that only arrives on the scene once we become able to hold our own—through the support of others—in discursive, narrative practices that give us a conceptual grip on what it is to be a temporally extended self that persists over time. (shrink)

This paper explicates how we might positively understand the distinctive, nonconceptual experience of our own actions and experiences by drawing on insights from a radically enactive take on phenomenal experience. We defend a late-developing relationalism about the emergence of explicit, conceptually based self-awareness, proposing that the latter develops in tandem with the mastery of self-reflective narrative practices. Focusing on the case of human newborns, Sect. 1 reviews and rejects claims that the capacities of actors to keep track of aspects of (...) themselves—e.g. their bodies, body parts, movements, activities, actions and experiences—when coordinating what they do equates to or is best explained by positing minimal, tacit awareness of their experiences as their own. Section 2 then considers and resists more familiar arguments, based on the so-called reflexivity thesis, that take such minimal self-awareness to be implied wherever there is any kind of phenomenal experience. In place of these ideas, we promote an alternative proposal of what is involved when agents keep track of aspects of themselves, drawing on a radically enactive conception of basic experience. Section 3 concludes by proposing that our first conceptual, explicit sense of self is something that only arrives on the scene once we become able to hold our own—through the support of others—in discursive, narrative practices that give us a conceptual grip on what it is to be a temporally extended self that persists over time. (shrink)

This paper offers an introduction to the philosophy and science of embodied learning, conceived as both the stabilizing and expansionary process that sustains order and novelty within learners’ worlds enacted through observing and describing. Embodied learning acknowledges stability and change as the purposeful conjoined characteristics that sustain learners. It is, in many respects, a composite theory that represents work from various disciplines. This ‘naturalized epistemology’ conceives a world of fact inevitably imbued with the values that our own structural histories guarantee (...) us observers, whether acknowledged or not within our reflective awareness. These values, however, are not simple sets of preferences, for they are constituted in our individual learning histories that, for good or bad, influence the course of future learning. This conservational element of our condition is only half the story, however. The more radical aspect resides in the expansionary capacity of embodied observers to change, to enact worlds that are not pre‐given but, rather, brought forth by learners as observers and describers. Furthermore, embodied learning seeks a grounding for understanding in the often‐unexplored epistemological terrain between positivist absolutism or its mirrored polar opposite, postmodern nihilism. Its epistemological stance derives from its ontology, which is grounded in the profound obviousness that ‘everything said is said by someone’. (shrink)

The disavowal of positivist science by many educational researchers has resulted in a deepening polarization of research agendas and an epistemological divide that appears increasingly difficult to span. Despite a turning away from science altogether by some, and thus toward various forms of poststructuralist inquiry, this has not held back the renewed entrenchment of more narrow definitions by policy elites of what constitutes scientific educational research. The new sciences of complexity signal the emergence of a new scientific paradigm that challenges (...) some of the core assumptions of positivism, while offering the potential to develop a new kind of social science that demands both rigour and imagination in coming to understand the emergence and behaviours of social systems and the subsystems that comprise them. The language, concepts and principles of complexity are central to the development of a new science of qualities to complement the science of quantities that has shaped our understanding of the physical and social worlds. Accomplishing this task promises to 1) open up new investigations that have thus far been beyond the purview of scientific study, 2) allow the study of social phenomena as fully embodied, or at least as more robust models than those represented in the abstracted empiricism upon which the sciences of quantities are predicated, and 3) allow for more coarse‐grained explanations and predictions of social phenomena to be legitimated as scientific. Both educational research and educational practice stand to gain from this expansion of the scientific repertoire to include rigorous and imaginative investigations of phenomena characterized by change and transformation. (shrink)

Domestic eco-efficient technologies, such as recycling bins and compact florescent light bulbs, are integral to the eco-modernisation project. To date, however, little research has examined their role in the production of 'sustainable citizens'. In response, this paper explores the productivities of commonplace domestic objects. It draws on qualitative research into a Sydney-based sustainable living programme called 'GreenHome', to examine how participants' environmental ethics became articulated through objects' use. This forges a form of embodied 'techno-ethics' that permeates socio-material relations beyond the (...) immediate. Therefore, this examination of the quotidian deployment of eco-efficient technologies, whilst not denying the problematic nature of technologically-dependant futures, suggests some positive outcomes from individuals' enrolment in domestic eco-modernisation. (shrink)