Although embodied knowing is fundamental to our experience, no previous study has detailed its role in a specific spiritual group. This thesis offers a new model of embodied situated cognition, and develops an embodied hermeneutics which uses Focusing in phenomenological research. I apply these tools to the first detailed ethnography of Eco-Paganism to reveal powerful processes of connection which have considerable significance for religious studies and ecopsychology. -/- Chapters 2 and 3 survey the literature on Eco-Paganism and (...) embodied cognition. Chapter 4 uses the latter to synthesise a model of embodied situated cognition which I call the 'enactive process model', because it draws primarily on enactivism (inter alia, Varela et al., 1991), and Gendlin's process philosophy (Gendlin, 1997). Current research shows that key aspects of cognition are situated and embodied (inter alia, Varela et al., 1991), such that we often think with place (inter alia, Preston, 2003). This raises epistemological questions which I address in a discussion of embodied philosophy in Chapter 5. I then explain my embodied hermeneutics methodology, and the practical application of the Focusing Interview technique, in Chapter 6. My fieldwork autoethnography, Chapter 7, provides an intuitive, felt understanding of life on a road protest site, and is followed by ethnographies of urban and protest site Eco-Paganism in Chapters 8 and 9. Chapter 10 discusses six processes which create a sense of connection to the organic environment, which include the felt sense (Gendlin, 1981) and the wilderness effect (Greenway, 1995). -/- I conclude that a type of wilderness effect can catalyze the emergence of a complex 'nature based' spirituality amongst site Eco-Pagans, while a less intense form affects urban Eco-Pagans. Eco-Pagans sometimes use these processes of connection to think with a place. The processes of connection and thinking with place are fundamental to embodied situated knowing in Eco-Paganism, and help explain many of its distinctive aspects. By demonstrating the importance of embodied situated knowing in Eco-Paganism, I highlight the potential for further research into processes of connection and the impact of different physical spaces on religious practice in general. (shrink)

This book offers inter alia a systematic investigation of the actual argumentative strategy of Socratic conversation and explorations of Socratic and Platonic morality including an examination ofeudaimonia and the mental conception of health in the Republic as self-control, with a view to the relation of individual health/happiness to social order. The essays cover a period from 1968 to 2012. Some of them are now published for the first time. Self-motion in the later dialogues involves tripartition and tripartition in turn involves (...) embodiment. The Philebus psychology too anticipates Aristotle. The Forms of the Timaeus are patterns, but the two-world picture is abandoned: there is one world constituted by Forms and Place. The Epinomis is arguably genuine. More generally, denying that Plato develops, e.g. exegetically and psychologically, is absurd. There are too many contradictions in the Corpus. The dialogues are artistic wholes and the author's message must be interpreted accordingly: hence in a sense every character is Plato's mouthpiece. Aristotle's idea of the human good or quality of life as optimal mental activity according to the special human capabilities is the root of the modern selfactualization projects. Panaetius (free reason) and Posidonius (science) mark the end of the older Stoa's hard-core materialism and the beginning of a new more 'modern' era. -/- . (shrink)

Since René Descartes famously separated the concepts of body and mind in the seventeenth century, western philosophy and theory have struggled to conceptualize the interconnectedness of minds, bodies, environments and cultures. While environmental psychology and the cognitive sciences have shown that spatial perception is 'embodied' and depends on the aforementioned concepts' interconnectedness, architectural design practice, for example, has rarely incorporated these insights. The article presents research on the epistemological foundations that frame the communication between design theory and practice and (...) juxtaposes it with scientific research on embodied experience. It further suggests that Asian aesthetics, with its long history in conceiving relations and art as interactive, could create a bridge between recent scientific insights and design practice. The article outlines an approach to the interconnectedness of minds, bodies, environments, the sciences and cultures, in favour of a future that is governed by creative wisdom rather than 'smart' efficiency. (shrink)

In his late work (De venatione sapientiae), Cusanus unfolded basic ideas of his brilliant theology. After a long period, this ingenious teaching became clearly recognizable especially in our time. Forward with his face to the back, modern scientific theory adopts nowadays a course to which Cusanus had already pointed centuries ago. Modern thought revolves with unexpected precision and unexpected mysteriousness around two issues of his doctrine of wisdom: (i) The possibility-of-being-made is not a figment of the human brain by (...) which it organizes one's thoughts, but a fundamental and indispensable manifestation of reality. (ii) The possibility-of-being-made refers to something antecedent by which both the feasibility and the being-made get their common shape. This ultimate ground embodies the omnipotent oneness in the form of an infinite fund in which the cause of all reality and of all possibility is timelessly stored. Comparisons with the quantum ontology and the theory of quantum gravity impose themselves. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that our own society's philosophy of death and dying has a largely negative effect on public policies towards the elderly, and that these policies will be changed for the better when and if we come to appreciate our elderly as the principal sources of our collective wisdom. Towards these ends, I shall consider in turn some basic types of theories about death, some basic attitudes towards dying and the duration of dying, some models (...) of aging as they affect and/or embody attitudes towards old age, and finally the place of creative expansion in one's advanced years. (shrink)

This thesis contributes to a better conceptual understanding of how self-organized control works. I begin by analyzing the control problem and its solution space. I argue that the two prominent solutions offered by classical cognitive science (centralized control with rich commands, e.g., the Fodorian central systems) and embodied cognitive science (distributed control with simple commands, such as the subsumption architecture by Rodney Brooks) are merely two positions in a two-dimensional solution space. I outline two alternative positions: one is distributed (...) control with rich commands, defended by proponents of massive modularity hypothesis; the other is centralized control with simple commands. My goal is to develop a hybrid account that combines aspects of the second alternative position and that of the embodied cognitive science (i.e., centralized and distributed controls with simple commands). Before developing my account, I discuss the virtues and challenges of the first three. This discussion results in a set of criteria for successful neural control mechanisms. Then, I develop my account through analyzing neuroscientific models of decision-making and control with the theoretical lenses provided by formal decision and social choice theories. I contend that neural processes can be productively modeled as a collective of agents, and neural self-organization is analogous to democratic self-governance. In particular, I show that the basal ganglia, a set of subcortical structures, contribute to the production of coherent and intelligent behaviors through implementing “democratic" procedures. Unlike the Fodorian central system—which is a micro-managing “neural commander-in-chief”—the basal ganglia are a “central election commission.” They delegate control of habitual behaviors to other distributed control mechanisms. Yet, when novel problems arise, they engage and determine the result on the basis of simple information (the votes) from across the system with the principles of neurodemocracy, and control with simple commands of inhibition and disinhibition. By actively managing and taking advantage of the wisdom-of-the-crowd effect, these democratic processes enhance the intelligence and coherence of the mind’s final "collective" decisions. I end by defending this account from both philosophical and empirical criticisms and showing that it meets the criteria for successful solution. (shrink)

Many eco-pagans explain their intimate relationship with aspects of the natural environment in terms of spirits of place. Such relationships emerge from a situated embodied knowing that enables eco-pagans to think with place; the ambiguity of that phrase is productive. While this process consists in both using a place as a tool to think with and thinking together with a place, it simultaneously defies dualist reduction. These examples of situated embodied knowing challenge conventional dualist notions and we are (...) led to a relational notion of personhood where the self emerges from a matrix of bodymind and place. Because theorising embodied knowing in eco-paganism pushes us beyond ontological dualism, it demands an embodied epistemology and a model of embodied cognition. Philosopher and psychologist Gendlin provides the former, while my enactive process model answers for the second. The enactive process model synthesises Gendlin's process philosophy with the work of Varela and colleagues, who understand cognition as ‘embodied action’, a process they call ‘enactive’. Eco-pagan practice can awaken us from the dualistic dream that we are separate from the ‘wisdom of the body’ and thus models a strategy for re-embodiment. (shrink)

This chapter treats Hubert Dreyfus’ account of skilled coping as part of his wider project of demonstrating the sovereignty of practical intelligence over all other forms of intelligence. In contrast to the standard picture of human beings as essentially rational, individual agents, Dreyfus argued powerfully on phenomenological and empirical grounds that humans are fundamentally embedded, absorbed, and embodied. These commitments are present throughout Dreyfus’ philosophical writings, from his critique of Artificial Intelligence research in the 1970s and 1980s to his (...) rejection of John McDowell’s conceptualism in his 2005 APA Presidential Address. The present chapter articulates Dreyfus’ proposal for a contentless, non-mentalistic form of intentionality by contrasting his position with that of his U.C. Berkeley colleague John Searle and defending it as a plausible alternative to the so-called “Standard Story” of intentional action as the effect of an agent’s mental states. (shrink)

Our current scientific exploration of reality oftentimes appears focused on epistemic states and empiric results at the expense of ontological concerns. Any scientific approach without explicit ontological arguments cannot be deemed rational however, as our very Being can never be excluded from the equation. Furthermore, if, as many nondual philosophies contend, subject/object learning is to no avail in the attainment of knowledge of ontic reality, empiric science will forever bear out that limitation. Putting Jung's depth psychology in dialogue with Patañjali's (...) yoga philosophy is one way to attempt an alliance between dualistic and nondualistic models. Jung's assertion of an unconscious is what notably sets him apart from Patañjali. Furthermore, whereas Patañjali distinguishes between pure consciousness and the contents of consciousness, Jung does not. Although both Jung and Patañjali attempt to ground their work in the direct experience of life, and guide us towards wholeness, looking at Jung through the lens of nonduality, wholeness appears beyond reach. It is through Jung's synchronicity hypothesis where we may be able to forge a bridge between the models. This bridge allows a contemporary argument for an understanding of the ontic reality of pure consciousness, and subsequently the discrimination between things as they are and things as they appear. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 _ _. (shrink)

The notion that shame is a global emotion, one which takes the whole self as its focus, has long enjoyed a near consensus in both the psychological and philosophical literature. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have questioned this conventional wisdom: on their view, most everyday instances of shame are not global, but are instead limited to a specific aspect of one’s identity. I argue that this objection stems from an overemphasis on the cognitive dimension of shame. Its proponents (...) cannot make sense of global shame because they only understand the emotion in terms of an intellectual self-evaluation, where I am ashamed upon assessing myself to have disappointed a particular standard or ideal. However, when shame is understood as arising early on in life from one’s threatened connection with others, and as having affective, embodied, and unconscious aspects alongside its later cognitive ones, the intuition that it feels all-encompassing makes more sense. Our earliest experiences of shame, which are largely devoid of complex cognitive content, are global because they are experienced as casting doubt upon our lovability in general. It is only later, as cognition develops, that we learn to hang this sense of overall defectiveness, which is reawakened in subsequent shame experiences, onto specific parts of the self. While this might lead us in adulthood to intellectually understand our shame as having a local basis, such as a failed norm or ideal, its global phenomenology will remain. (shrink)

Material traces of the past are notoriously inscrutable; they rarely speak with one voice, and what they say is never unmediated. They stand as evidence only given a rich scaffolding of interpretation which is, itself, always open to challenge and revision. And yet archaeological evidence has dramatically expanded what we know of the cultural past, sometimes demonstrating a striking capacity to disrupt settled assumptions. The questions we address in Evidential Reasoning are: How are these successes realized? What gives us confidence (...) in the credibility and robustness, the trustworthiness, of the evidential claims based on archaeological data? And, what constitute best practices in building evidential claims, critically scrutinizing them and putting them to work in archaeological contexts? Rather than retreat to abstractions about how how science operates in the ideal, we approach this question by interrogating a number of close-to-the-ground case studies with the aim of teasing out the wisdom embodied in archaeological practice. The cases we consider – of fieldwork, strategies for working with old evidence, and the role of external resources – illuminate the role of various types of inferential scaffolding and bring into focus practice-grounded epistemic norms that we believe serve archaeologists better than the all-or-nothing ideals of truth and objectivity that dominate programmatic debate. (shrink)

This article explores the meeting of two approaches towards philosophy and education: the philosophy for children approach advocated by Lipman and others, and Schmid’s philosophical concept of Lebenskunst. Schmid explores the concept of the beautiful or good life by asking what is necessary for each individual to be able to develop their own art of living and which aspects of life are significant when shaping a good and beautiful life. One element of Schmid’s theory is the practical application of philosophy (...) through the notions of Bildung, reflection, prudence and practical wisdom, as well as the requirement for each individual to take responsibility for actively shaping their life as an artwork. In this sense, each person is the artist responsible for living their own beautiful life. We argue that there are useful parallels between Schmid’s concept of the art of living and P4C, such as the ideal of a holistic philosophy that is “lived.” The pragmatic approach of P4C focuses on the embodied learner who practices critical, caring and creative thinking. Both P4C and Schmid’s theory are reminiscent of the Aristotelian notion of practical wisdom, which allows for an approach to an education for life that prepares students to develop their own art of living. (shrink)

Cosmopolis A Review of Cosmopolitics -/- 2015/3-4 -/- Editorial Dominique de Courcelles & Paul Ghils -/- This issue addresses the general concept of “spirituality” as it appears in various cultural contexts and timeframes, through contrasting ideological views. Without necessarily going back to artistic and religious remains of primitive men, which unquestionably show pursuits beyond the biophysical dimension and illustrate practices seeking to unveil the hidden significance of life and death, the following papers deal with a number of interpretations covering a (...) wide field extending from belief to theory, from emotions to concepts, from the wisdom of personal experience to the most sophisticated doctrines. Spirit and spirituality are indeed many-faceted notions. They may refer to the intricate world of the interacting spirits which inhabit living beings in animistic traditions, without excluding a “grand force” linking human beings within a dynamic whole on which their very existence rely . They also bear upon more atomistic and either/or approaches of Western philosophy, which have become embodied in Cartesian dualism against a monotheist background, to the point of freezing the essence of individuals and culminating in the extreme individualism that characterizes our contemporaries. However, this equally refers to the opposite conception of materialism, across times and cultures, from ancient India and Greece (Cārvāka, originally known as Lokāyata, or some Buddhist doctrines for the former, Democritus or Lucretius for the latter) to more contemporary materialistic schools, whether modern or postmodern. -/- The following papers look at the contrasting forms of the philosophy and spirit of the human factor set into a whole, with no artificial disjoint between the psychical and the physical levels, as Wittgenstein put it: “And how can a body have a soul?”. This approach is not unrelated to the notion of anthropocene examined in a recent issue of Cosmopolis, with provides another comprehensive framework open to a spiritual life emerging from the very environment that generated it. -/- *** The first section of this issue was edited by Dominique de Courcelles, director at the National French Research Centre (CNRS), whom we wish to thank for collecting relevant studies relating to the religious and political questions, with a view to focusing on the war of ideas inevitably waged behind images, concepts and perceptions, taking an asymmetrical approach. To the extent that they are mindful of global/local interactions and include representations, opinions and beliefs, such disciplines as philosophy, philology, history and social sciences can provide useful studies accounting for new practices in geopolitics and a fair diplomacy. -/- In her introduction, Dominique de Courcelles first poses the question of how the religious and political spheres interrelate, with their corresponding religious demands and humanistic values. She then suggests that the right question today may be breaking with the philosophy of human rights concerned with the defense of human beings against the hazards of arbitrary politics or the instrumental use of religion, in favour of a fair philosophy of humankind, a new humanism. This would consist in recognizing a common loyalty of all towards one interhuman, not only interstate community, to protect it from both the autonomy demanded by individuals and the instrumental use of minorities. -/- Considering the fact of diversity, so important today in terms of both politics and religion, Abdelhai Azarkan looks at the conditions under which tolerance could obtain the double status of right and duty. He revisits to two philosophers, John Locke and Voltaire, who thought about it from the historical reality of religious wars. The former made tolerance into a right, basing his analysis on the political-legal level, while the latter saw tolerance as a duty, from an analysis based on ethical-political criteria. -/- Mathieu Guidère examines what he calls semantic denominationalism, a term which implies religious attributes and identities, whichever national loyalties or personal belonging they may have at the same time. Since the early 2000s, thie phenomenon has expanded tremendously, compounded by the “war on terror” and the over media-oriented terrorist actions. Denominational expressions act as formal names for ordinary and high-profile players in domestic and foreign policies of democratic states. These systems reveal a receding secularization, while the powerful comeback of religious identities signals the failure of nation-states and the weakening of the humanist spirit. -/- Barbara De Poli retraces the history of a contemporary jihadism claiming its Islamic essence and asserting the truth of genuine coranic principles via the war on infidels, with a view to restoring the Caliphate. After defining the term jihad, she shows that even if this contemporary jiadism is spreading in the Muslim world, it radically departs from Islamic law and the received use of the term jihad, in so far as it is rooted in the early radical thinking of Islamic ideologues in the 20th century, starting with with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. This current has been fueled by by international conflicts since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, in which the so-called Western countries bear a major responsibility. -/- Abderrazak Sayadi starts from the Tunisian experience to ask the question of humanist values and democracy within the relationships between the religious and political spheres. As a historian of religion, he is brought to demystify certain islamic principles and to paying attention to the reform of law, seeing the separation of religion and politics as a precondition to a successful democratic gamble and the establishment of a renewed humanism. -/- Dominique de Courcelles reminds us that getting a better knowledge of narrations and words makes it possible to better understand how logical and rhetorical thinking works for those who wage an asymetriccal war, re-enchanting and mystifying the world to better take control. As soon as 1932, an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud made it clear that, in order to free man from fatality and war, education understood as culture was fundamental. Such illustrations as the exécution of Oussama ben Laden and the Caliph’s speech in Mossoul show that a premiminary analysis of images and words is essential to a fair diplomacy conducted by people from civil society, whose culture and wisdom allow justice and force to speak together and better resist war. -/- Marcel Boisard thinks that on the day the guns fall silent, exhausted by war, we will not return to the state borders that have prevailed for a century as an outcome of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. It is time to prepare the “day after”, which will be a huge challenge. To this end, a summit of Middle-East nations is urgently needed to globally decide the fate of those peoples. On the condition that we know who the enemy is and accept to name it, to understand the history of the countries, groups and alliances, and to question any false or self-interested sense of certainty. -/- *** In the second section, Paul Schafer provides the author’s experiences to explain how culture, from the artistic to the biological, has the power to to open the doors to spirituality, from the inner self to the global environment. He asks himself whether a relative permanence of spirituality can arise from the specific moments that characterize it. Laurent Ledoux synthesizes the conclusion of a symposium held on 22 January 2015 on the links between philosophy and management, on the basis of the spiritual dimension conceived as “natural” and the answers it may suggest to the issues that face the organizations in a “contemporaniversal” world. Jacques Rifflet makes that question in a secular perspective, based on the wellsprings of personal commitment before it can be caught by any religious creed or scientific theory. In this sense spirituality, in alliance with reason, both inspires human consciousness and illuminates its destiny. Sami Aldeeb asks himself whether Islam can be reconciled with human rights. Caught between the belief in an absolute and final Word descended from the sky, and evidence showing that any religion is the creation of a given culture and a society situated in time and space, the Makkan and … contexts et médinois call for differentiated, if not opposite answers and exegeses. Bernard Carmona provides the outline of a dialogical framework, which is known to be a feature of debates between the various philosophical schools of classical India, exemplified here by the transdisciplinary perspective of debates within a Buddhist context. *** The articles not focused on the previous topic include a study by Landry Signé on China’s strategy, competing with the United States to control African resources. The author deals with the specific case of China’s rapprochement with Southern Sudan since Sudan was broken up. In the last paper, Goran Fejić and Rada Iveković, return to the essential role that women should play, and comments upon the role of some international legal instruments related in particular to the elimination of all forms of discrimination. The perspective is transnational and transethnic and is based on secular criteria, as regards nation-building and more generally society-building. Considering the persistence of widespread violence, whether in times of armed conflict or in times of peace, the question remains whether it is possible to fully implement rights and justice instruments. (shrink)

Misrecognition from other individuals and social institutions is by its dynamic or ‘logic’ such that it can lead to distorted relations-to-self, such as self-hatred, and can truncate the development of the central capabilities of persons. Thus it is worth trying to shed light on how mis recognition differs from adequate recognition, and on how mis recognition might differ from other kinds of mistreatment and disregard. This paper suggests that mis recognition (including nonrecognition) is a matter of inadequate responsiveness to the (...) normatively relevant features of someone (their personhood, merits, needs etc.), and that if the kind of mistreatment in question obeys the general dynamic or ‘logic’ of mutual recognition and relations-to-self, then it may be called ‘misrecognition’. Further, this article considers the multiple connections between misrecognition and human fallibility. The capacity to get things wrong or make mistakes (that is, fallibility) is first of all a condition of misrecognition. Furthermore, there are two lessons that we can draw from fallibility. The first one points towards minimal objectivism: if something is to count as a mistake or incorrect response, there must accordingly exist a fact of the matter or a correct response. The other lesson points towards public equality: if our capacity to get things right on our own is limited, then public, shared norms will probably help. Such norms are easier to know and follow than objective normative truths, and they may contain collective cumulative wisdom; and of course the process of creating public norms embodies in itself an important form of mutual recognition between citizens. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed renewed interest in the past century or so, commentators have attempted to pin down one or another Kierkegaardian concept (e.g., despair, heavy-mindedness, boredom, etc.) as the embodiment of the vice, but these attempts have yet to achieve any consensus. In our estimation, (...) the complicated reality is that, in using slightly different but related concepts, Kierkegaard is providing a unique look at acedia as it manifests differently at different stages on life’s way. Thus, on this “perspectival account”, acedia will manifest differently according to whether an individual inhabits the aesthetic, ethical, or religious sphere. We propose two axes for this perspectival account. Such descriptions of how acedia manifests make up the first, phenomenal axis, while the second, evaluative axis, accounts for the various bits of advice and wisdom we read in the diagnoses of acedia from one Kierkegaardian pseudonym to another. Our aim is to show that Kierkegaard was not only familiar with the concept of acedia, but his contributions helped to develop and extend the tradition. (shrink)

Both professors and institutions of higher education benefit from a vision of academic life that is grounded more firmly in myth than in history. According to the myth created by that traditional vision, scholars pursue research wherever their drive to knowledge takes them, and colleges and universities transmit the fruits of that research to contemporary and future generations as the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Yet the economic and social forces operating on colleges and universities as institutions, as well (...) as on the interests of faculty members within them, are making the myth embodied in the traditional ideal of the academy more and more difficult to sustain. Questions about what an institution of higher education ought to be, about what professors ought to do, and about what relations professors ought to have to the institutions which employ them are being raised and pushed to the fore. These are not theoretical questions, but practical questions of immediate import that must be answered relatively quickly -- and wisely -- if institutions of higher education and professors are not to find themselves inextricably in the grip of forces they cannot change. The myth of disinterested academic research-however beautiful -- and however beneficial -- is under siege. (shrink)

This article explores the history of Vodou from outlawed African dance to revolutionary magic to depoliticized national Haitian religion and popular dance, its present reduction to Diaspora interpersonal healing, and a possible future. My first section, on Kate Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, reveals Vodou as a sociopolitical construction of racist legal oppression of Africana dances rituals, and artistic-political resistance thereto. My second section, on Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, (...) a “postmodern ethnography” of intersectional oppressions and Black female Haitian resistance in the Diaspora, foregrounds the figure of Gedelia, a feminist variant on Papa Gede, central Vodou spirit (lwa) of resurrection and healing. Finally, my last section, on the “observing participant” analyses of Black dance anthropologist Yvonne Daniel’s Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé, finds a dancing Gedelia in her centering of Oyá, a warrior spirit of storms and death. On this basis, I propose the figure of tornadic black angels as a possible magical tool (in Vodou, a pwen, or “point”) intended to re-spiritualize and thereby re-politicize the secularized and whitewashed social Latin dance called “salsa” for social justice. (shrink)

This paper examines Pierre Hadot’s philosophy as a way of life in the context of race. I argue that a “way of life” approach to philosophy renders intelligible how anti-racist confrontation of racist ideas and institutionalized white complicity is a properly philosophical way of life requiring regulated reflection on habits – particularly, habits of whiteness. I first rehearse some of Hadot’s analysis of the “way of life” orientation in philosophy, in which philosophical wisdom is understood as cultivated by actions (...) which result in the creation of wise habits. I analyze a phenomenological claim about the nature of habit implied by the “way of life” approach, namely, that habits can be both the cause and the effect of action. This point is central to the “way of life” philosophy, I claim, in that it makes possible the intelligent redirection of habits, in which wise habits are more the effect than simply the cause of action. Lastly, I illustrate the “way of life” approach in the context of anti-racism by turning to Linda Martín Alcoff’s whiteness anti-eliminativism, which outlines a morally defensible transformation of the habits of whiteness. I argue that anti-racism provides an intelligible context for modern day forms of what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” insofar as the “way of life” philosophy is embodied in the practice of whites seeing themselves seeing as white and seeing themselves being seen as white. (shrink)

For Vajrayana Buddhism, the now is an interval, a boundary, a point of tension and suspension with an atmosphere of uncertainty. It is a bifurcation point of variable length; its name is “bardo.” The bardo is immersed in the conventional, or “seeming” reality. It emerges from what is called the “unstained” ultimate or primordial emptiness or “basal clear light.” Further, the ultimate is not the sphere of cognition. Cognition, including cognition of time, belongs to conventional reality. Buddhahood, in contrast, is (...) a condition of uncompounded knowledge where basic mind blossoms without temporal or other cognitive distinctions, unmade, unfabricated, luminous and pristine. Cyclical existence involves both the ultimate and the conventional as it moves through six bardos—all of which are the effulgent of the basal clear light—until Buddhahood. The six are: the bardo of this life ; the bardo of dream; the bardo of meditation; the bardo of dying; the bardo of dharmata ; and the bardo of existence. Each realm is both ultimate and conventional, and has specific initiation-based yogas to investigate these differences. The process of transition from one to the next involves at least three bodies, one mind, and aspects of speech. In each bardo, the character of the now as embodiment and temporal knowing varies yet a complete and consistent cross-bardo yogic wisdom leads to its total cessation in the basal clear light; the now is extinguished. The author presents, from the viewpoint of a knowledgeable practitioner of over 30 years, an essay on Vajrayana Buddhist time, drawing implications for Fraser’s time typology. The essay will draw from English translations of significant older, tantric texts on dream yoga, deity yoga, the Chod, tantric time, the bardo of death, and empowerment. Useful practices that can be applied by the audience to test the tradition and author’s assertions will be suggested. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding and (...) topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

Religion-based AI chatbots serve religious practitioners by bringing them godly wisdom through technology. These bots reply to spiritual and worldly questions by drawing insights or citing verses from the Quran, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, or other holy books. They answer religious and theological queries by claiming to offer historical contexts and providing guidance and counseling to their users. A criticism of these bots is that they may give inaccurate answers and proliferate bias by propagating homogenized versions (...) of the religions they represent. These “embodied spiritual machines” may likewise bear bias against women, their gender, and their societal roles. This paper crafts a concept intended to address this GPT issue by reimagining, modifying, and implementing a feminist approach to these chatbots. It examines the concepts and designs of these bots and how they address women-related questions. Along with the challenge of bringing gender and diversity-sensitive religious wisdom closer to the people through technology, the paper proposes a re-engineered model of a fair religion-based AI chatbot. (shrink)

Regarding the influence of François Rabelais on the Giordano Bruno‟s works, up to now the criticism have only taken into consideration the lexical and thematic analogies. This article individualizes, in a passage of the Oratio Valedictoria, a literal quotation from the Gargantua et Pantagruel, showing that Rabelais was a direct source of inspiration for Bruno. The protagonist of the passage is the pythagorean Apollonius of Tyana, a character well known by the Nolan, who mentioned him in many occasions. He represents (...) the ideal medium with the oriental wisdom, that had so much influence on the thought of Bruno. Besides, he embodies the model of the "natural magician" in which the philosopher repeatedly identified himself, both in his works and life. (shrink)

This article reflects on whether today, there is a need for a ‘new’ educational ideal of rationality. To articulate that objective, a critical analysis is made of the pedagogical ideas underlying two conflicting trends: transhumanism and critical thinking. First, the distinctive identity of the transhumanist philosophical movement is examined in terms of its partial ascription to, and, given its attempts to overcome it, its renunciation of Humanism. In the face of the apparent promises and pitfalls that techno-science portends for pedagogical (...) discourse, a distrust of reason is imminent. Contrary to such an assumption, critical thinking, as the embodiment of rationality in Israel Scheffler’s conception, illuminates the inconsistencies of scientific imperialism that conceal the moral-rational aspects of teaching. In view of the above, the discussion focuses on the relationship between theory and practice, justification and commitment, fallibility and wisdom; in short, between the moral and the rational of any educational ideal to be proposed.___________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________ -/- Questo articolo riflette sulla necessità di un “nuovo” ideale educativo di razionalità. Per articolare tale obiettivo, viene effettuata un’analisi critica delle idee pedagogiche alla base di due tendenze in conflitto: il transumanesimo e il pensiero critico. In primo luogo, si esamina l’identità distintiva del movimento filosofico transumanista in termini di parziale ascrizione e, visti i suoi tentativi di superamento, di rinuncia all’Umanesimo. Di fronte alle apparenti promesse e insidie che la tecno-scienza comporta per il discorso pedagogico, si profila una sfiducia nella ragione. Contrariamente a tale ipotesi, il pensiero critico, in quanto incarnazione della razionalità nella concezione di Israel Scheffler, illumina le incongruenze dell’imperialismo scientifico che nascondono gli aspetti morali-razionali dell’insegnamento. Alla luce di quanto detto, la discussione si concentra sul rapporto tra teoria e pratica, giustificazione e impegno, fallibilità e saggezza; in breve, tra morale e razionale di qualsiasi ideale educativo da proporre.___________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________HOW TO CITE / CÓMO CITAR: Castillo, P. (2023). Does There Exist a Need for a ‘New’ Educational Ideal of Rationality? The Crossroads between Transhumanism and Israel Scheffler’s Conception of Critical Thinking. Encyclopaideia: Journal of Phenomenology and Education, 27(66), 49-61. (shrink)

According to a venerable ideal, the core aim of philosophical practice is wisdom. The guiding concern of the ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese traditions was the nature of the good life for human beings and the nature of reality. Central to these traditions is profound recognition of the subjection to adversities intrinsic to human life. I consider paradigmatic exemplars of wisdom, from ancient Western and Asian traditions, and the ways that experiences of adversity shaped their life. The suggestion (...) is that these exemplars, if any, will show how to live wisely in adversity. (shrink)

Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions (...) by modeling wisdom on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities. (shrink)

While many scholars join in the call for an experiential shift in thinking and living, it is not always clear how it could be done. Recent environmental philosophy has illuminated the significance of re-animating human–environment relations on an experiential level for endeavouring a new (or renewed) ethical, experiential, and, indeed, existential stance of the human as part of the environed embodiment. In relation to this call, I explore embodied critical thinking (ECT) as a tool for recognising, revitalising, and reflecting (...) embodied, enactive, and embedded thinking that comes from a felt sense. Thus, this chapter employs some of the TAE (Thinking at the Edge) steps for ECT research as a practical approach to facilitating and embracing a new way of thinking that is crucial for reconnecting humans with their lived environments, but also for emancipating research practices to enable research that goes out from such a renewed connectivity. In particular, the chapter traces the application of Eugene Gendlin’s move of instancing to showcase the use of embodied knowing and felt sense in environmental contexts. Thus, it showcases how, in fundamental ways that speak directly to and from our embodied embeddedness, ECT has an emancipatory impact in ways that resonate with lived experiences. (shrink)

What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I argue that wisdom consists in knowledge of how to live well, and that this knowledge of how to live well is constituted by various further kinds of knowledge. One concern for this view is that knowledge is not needed for wisdom but rather some state short of knowledge, such as having rational or justified beliefs about various topics. Another concern is that the emphasis on (...) knowing how to live well fails to do justice to the ancient tradition of ‘theoretical wisdom’. I address both of these concerns in filling out the account. (shrink)

Is the self narratively constructed? There are many who would answer yes to the question. Dennett (1991) is, perhaps, the most famous proponent of the view that the self is narratively constructed, but there are others, such as Velleman (2006), who have followed his lead and developed the view much further. Indeed, the importance of narrative to understanding the mind and the self is currently being lavished with attention across the cognitive sciences (Dautenhahn, 2001; Hutto, 2007; Nelson, 2003). Emerging from (...) this work, there appear to be a variety of ways in which we can think of the narrative construction of the self and the relationship between the narrative self and the embodied agent. I wish to examine two such ways in this paper. The first I shall call the abstract narrative account, this is because its proponents take the narrative self to be an abstraction (Dennett, 1991; Velleman, 2006). Dennett, for example, refers to the self as a centre of narrative gravity, to be thought of as analogous to a mathematical conception of the centre of gravity of an object. The second I shall call the embodied narrative account and this is the view that the self is constituted both by an embodied consciousness whose experiences are available for narration and narratives themselves, which can play a variety of roles in the agent’s psychological life. (shrink)

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe, and learning how to become civilized. The first problem was solved, in essence, in the 17th century, with the creation of modern science. But the second problem has not yet been solved. Solving the first problem without also solving the second puts us in a situation of great danger. All our current global problems (...) have arisen as a result. What we need to do, in response to this unprecedented crisis, is learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second. This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. Unfortunately, in carrying out this programme, the Enlightenment made three blunders, and it is this defective version of the Enlightenment programme, inherited from the past, that is still built into the institutional/intellectual structure of academic inquiry in the 21st century. In order to solve the second great problem of learning we need to correct the three blunders of the traditional Enlightenment. This involves changing the nature of social inquiry, so that social science becomes social methodology or social philosophy, concerned to help us build into social life the progress-achieving methods of aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science. It also involves, more generally, bringing about a revolution in the nature of academic inquiry as a whole, so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to become wiser by increasingly cooperatively rational means. The scientific task of improving knowledge and understanding of nature becomes a part of the broader task of improving global wisdom. The outcome would be what we so urgently need: a kind of inquiry rationally designed and devoted to helping us make progress towards a genuinely civilized world. We would succeed in doing what the Enlightenment tried but failed to do: learn from scientific progress how to go about making social progress towards as good a world as possible. (shrink)

Embodied Cognition is the kind of view that is all trees, no forest. Mounting experimental evidence gives it momentum in fleshing out the theoretical problems inherent in Cognitivists’ separation of mind and body. But the more its proponents compile such evidence, the more the fundamental concepts of Embodied Cognition remain in the dark. This conundrum is nicely exemplified by Pecher and Zwaan’s book, Grounding Cognition, which is a programmatic attempt to rally together an array of empirical results and (...) linguistic data, and its successes in this endeavor nicely epitomize current directions among the various research provinces of Embodied Cognition. The untoward drawback, however, is that such successes are symptomatic of the growing imbalance between experimental progress and theoretical interrogation. In particular, one of the theoretical cornerstones of Embodied Cognition —namely, the very concept of grounding under investigation here—continues to go unilluminated. Hence, the advent of this volume indicates that—now more than ever—the concept of grounding is in dire need of some plain old-fashioned conceptual analysis. In that sense, Embodied Cognition is grounded until further notice. (shrink)

The experience of embodiment is a central theme in phenomenological philosophy and has recently received increasing attention also within psychological science. In the present paper we argue (1) that the experience of embodiment represents a fundamental synthesis of having a body (the body as an object) and being a body (the body as felt “from within”); (2) that this synthesis is basic to an individual’s experience of self-identity; (3) that each individual, as an existential task, has to develop their specific (...) version of the embodiment synthesis; (4) that these syntheses can be more or less harmonious or disharmonious, and that disharmonious syntheses are associated with psychological distress and psychopathology. Different phenomenological accounts of possible variants of disharmonious embodiment, as found in the literature on eating disorders, are discussed and compared. Finally, some research implications and clinical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Everything and every word about spirituality have already been said but the practical utility of spiritual wisdom in day to day life to achieve success and live a blissful life is lacking. Spiritual wisdom not only shows us the path of salvation and freedom but also helps us to figure out the solutions for every problem in all walks of human life and civilization. Spirituality is a well-defined, scientific way to get any goal in life whether it is (...) for justified worldly desires or to fulfil the urge of salvation with a blissful route. The book is an important read for the present generation, i.e. our youth as well as the persons those who want to touch the divinity within. Due to the universal nature of Spiritual Wisdom, it is bound to be on the shelves of the coming generation as spiritual science is not something that can be restricted to any one generation. The book itself contains the aura of mysticism and a touch of the great teaching taken from the scriptures. The book will teach how spiritual wisdom may change a person’s life. (shrink)

This book delves into the embodied ground of thinking, illuminating the transition from theorising about the embodied mind to actively practising embodied thinking in research, teaching, and learning. The authors speak from immersing themselves in novel methods that engage the felt, experiential dimensions of cognition in inquiry. -/- The turn to embodiment has sparked the development of new methodologies within phenomenology, pragmatism, and cognitive science. Drawing on Eugene Gendlin’s philosophical work on felt understanding, and Francesco Varela’s enactivist (...) approach, contributors explore innovative embodied thinking methods such as Focusing, Thinking at the Edge, micro-phenomenology, and mindfulness practices. They demonstrate the practical applications of these methods in research, teaching, and learning, highlighting their liberating and empowering potential for researchers and students. In an age marked by information overload and societal polarisation, methods of embodied thinking provide an innovative edge to critique, complementing more traditional approaches to critical thinking with listening skills and reflexive care. -/- This book shows how heeding the essential, yet often overlooked, embodied grounds of critical and creative thinking can deepen and strengthen each of research, teaching, and learning. It will interest philosophers of education and educators in higher education in particular, as well as researchers and postgraduate students from philosophy, and the cognitive and social sciences, who are curious about how embodied thinking can enrich research, teaching, and learning. (shrink)

Is an appropriate causal connection to the past experience it represents a necessary condition for a mental state to qualify as an episodic memory? For some years this issue has been the subject of an intense debate between the causalist theory of episodic memory (CTM) and the simulationist theory of episodic memory (STM). This paper aims at exploring the prospects for an embodied approach to episodic memory and assessing the potential case for causalism that could be founded on it. (...) In a critical section, it argues that the empirical data to which STM appeals are both incomplete and inconclusive, and on closer examination even provide support for a proceduralist version of CTM. In a constructive section, it elaborates on the notion of a necessary causal connection in terms of particular procedural patterns acquired at encoding and operative at retrieval, grounding this move on recent empirical data about eye movements in mnemonic mental imagery. (shrink)

We face grave global problems. We urgently need to learn how to tackle them in wiser, more effective, intelligent and humane ways than we have done so far. This requires that universities become devoted to helping humanity acquire the necessary wisdom to perform the task. But at present universities do not even conceive of their role in these terms. The essays of this book consider what needs to change in the university if it is to help humanity acquire the (...) wisdom it so urgently needs. (shrink)

We discuss Sharon Ryan’s Deep Rationality Theory of wisdom, defended recently in her “Wisdom, Knowledge and Rationality.” We argue that (a) Ryan’s use of the term “rationality” needs further elaboration; (b) there is a problem with requiring that the wise person possess justified beliefs but not necessarily knowledge; (c) the conditions of DRT are not all necessary; (d) the conditions are not sufficient. At the end of our discussion, we suggest that there may be a problem with the (...) very assumption that an informative, non-circular set of necessary and sufficient conditions of wisdom can be given. (shrink)

This paper asks about the ways in which embodimentoriented cognitive science contributes to our understanding of phenomenal consciousness. It is first argued that central work in the field of embodied cognitive science does not solve the hard problem of consciousness head on. It is then argued that an embodied turn toward neurophenomenology makes no distinctive headway on the puzzle of consciousness; for neurophenomenology either concedes dualism in the face of the hard problem or represents only a slight methodological (...) variation on extant cognitive-scientific approaches to the easy problems of consciousness. The paper closes with the positive suggestion that embodied cognitive science supports a different approach to phenomenal consciousness, according to which the mind is massively representational, cognitive science has no use for the personal-level posits that tend to drive philosophical theorizing about consciousness and mind, and the hard problem is illusory. (shrink)

In this commentary upon the article “Mindfulness in Global Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda”, we articulate how scal-ing mindfulness technologies as multilevel public health interventions requires the framework of embodied cognition for a scientific articulation of the nuanced dynamics of mindfulness as a therapeutic technology. Embodied cognition contends that the body and bodily activity in the world are constitutive facets of mind. Mindfulness understood in terms of its embod-ied, enacted, extended, and embedded dimensions describes a broad set of (...) contemplative practices that utilize the circular structure of embodiment to intervene in the complex feedback structure of the mind–body system, influencing cycles of organismic self-regulation and enactments of self-world perception. We contend that to advance the discussion, initiated by Oman, about mindfulness in public health, attention must be given to reconceiving mind–body linkages, the nature of awareness, and the vital role of non-conceptual direct experience in mindfulness interventions. This provides grounds for reconceiving mindfulness as a skillful mode of embodied social cognition and for recognizing diverse cross-cultural contemplative technologies as useful for adapting mindfulness-based interventions to specific populations needs. We also arrive at a novel model of the decentering skills fostered through mindfulness via non-conceptual attention to the processes underlying cognition. It also models mindfulness-based exposure therapy, understood not behaviorally, but through insights generated via intentionally orienting towards internal representation in order to uncover habituated patterns by which we enact both self and world perception. In this way, we may better articulate the nature of mindfulness and thus its effective application to population-scale problems. (shrink)

Introduction: Over the past twenty-five years the sporting body has been studied in a myriad of ways including via a range of feminist frameworks (Hall 1996; Lowe 1998; Markula 2003; George 2005; Hargreaves 2007) and gender-sensitive lenses (e.g. McKay 1994; Aoki 1996; Woodward 2008). Despite this developing corpus, studies of sport only rarely engage in depth with the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting and exercizing body (Wainwright and Turner 2003; Allen-Collinson 2009) at least from a phenomenological angle, and in relation (...) to female embodiment. It seems that a more corporeally-grounded, phenomenological perspective on women’s sporting embodiment would be a welcome addition to extant studies. In this chapter I suggest that employing a feminist phenomenological framework can provide a powerful lens through which to explore the subjective, richly-textured, lived-body experiences of sport and exercise. Phenomenology of course offers only one of a multiplicity of avenues to investigate the body in sport, and this chapter provides just a small glimpse of its possibilities. To-date studies of sporting experience employing a phenomenological theoretical framework remain surprisingly under-developed (Kerry and Armour 2000), as do those using its ethnomethodological offspring (Coates 1999; Burke et al. 2008). Further, as Fisher (2000) notes, the significance of the interaction between phenomenology and feminism has only relatively recently begun to be explored. It seems timely, therefore, to address this intriguing, potentially productive, but sometimes uneasy nexus, focusing upon female running embodiment in this case. (shrink)

An important debate in the current philosophy of wisdom is whether knowledge is necessary for wisdom. In this paper I argue that knowledge is necessary to explain wise actions. Towards this, firstly, I individuate two modal properties relevant for wise actions: (i) counterfactual robustness: an action performed in the actual world is wise only if it leads to or is constituted by the goals of living well in all nearby worlds; (ii) rational robustness: an action performed for the (...) sake of living well is wise only if, in all nearby worlds, when an agent has sufficient reasons to perform the action, she performs the action. Secondly, I argue that these two modal properties are best explained in terms of two central features of knowledge: (a) safety: if the agent knows that a certain action will help her successfully reach the relevant goal(s) of living well, or is constituted by those goal(s), then in all the nearby worlds, her belief that the action will help her successfully reach the goal is true; (b) stability: the agent's knowledge that the action will help her successfully reach the goal(s) of living well, or is constituted by those goals, entails that her belief that the action will help her successfully reach the goal(s), or is constituted by those goals, isn’t based on any reason that could easily have been defeated by misleading evidence. (shrink)

Embodied cognition is sweeping the planet. On a non-embodied approach, the sensory system informs the cognitive system and the motor system does the cognitive system’s bidding. There are causal relations between the systems but the sensory and motor systems are not constitutive of cognition. For embodied views, the relation to the sensori-motor system to cognition is constitutive, not just causal. This paper examines some recent empirical evidence used to support the view that cognition is embodied and (...) raises questions about some of the claims being made by supporters. (shrink)

We argue that the concept of practical wisdom is particularly useful for organizing, understanding, and improving human-machine interactions. We consider the relationship between philosophical analysis of wisdom and psychological research into the development of wisdom. We adopt a practical orientation that suggests a conceptual engineering approach is needed, where philosophical work involves refinement of the concept in response to contributions by engineers and behavioral scientists. The former are tasked with encoding as much wise design as possible into (...) machines themselves, as well as providing sandboxes or workspaces to help various stakeholders build practical wisdom in systems that are sufficiently realistic to aid transferring skills learned to real-world use. The latter are needed for the design of exercises and methods of evaluation within these workspaces, as well as ways of empirically assessing the transfer of wisdom from workspace to world. Systematic interaction between these three disciplines (and others) is the best approach to engineering wisdom for the machine age. (shrink)

Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, (...) or cue memories. Others can move skilfully, without stopping to think, in complex and changing environments thanks to the cumulative expertise accrued in their history of fighting fires, or dancing, or playing hockey. The forms of memory involved in these cases may be distinct, operating at different timescales and levels, and by way of different mechanisms and media, but they often cooperate in the many contexts of our practices of remembering. (shrink)

What is the nature and structure of phronesis or practical wisdom? According to the view widely held by philosophers and psychologists, a person S is wise if and only if S knows how to live well. Given this view of practical wisdom, the guiding question is this: What exactly is “knowing how to live well”? It seems that no one has a clear idea of how to answer this simple but fundamental question. This paper explores knowing how to (...) live well (or “life know-how”) by showing how its nature and structure can be understood through contemporary epistemology of knowledge-how. I will achieve this by doing the following. In Section I, I highlight the two as-yet unanswered “integration questions” about life know-how. In Section II, I explain why the epistemology of knowledge-how has good potential to address the integration questions. In Sections III and IV, I construct two positions—intellectualism and anti-intellectualism—for the epistemology of life know-how and show how they address the two integration questions. In Section V, I show how the epistemology of life know-how established in the previous sections can be used in the philosophy of wisdom and the psychology of wisdom. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of empathy as the form of experience directed at embodied unities of expressive movement. After outlining the key differences between simulation theory and the phenomenological approach to empathy, the paper argues that while the phenomenological approach is closer to respecting a necessary constitutional asymmetry between first-personal and second-personal senses of embodiment, it still presupposes a general concept of embodiment that ends up being problematic. A different account is proposed that is neutral on the explanatory (...) role of the first-person sense of embodiment, which leads to an emphasis on the transformative nature of empathy and a broadening of the scope of possible targets of empathic awareness. (shrink)

According to embodied cognition, the philosophical and empirical literature on theory of mind is misguided. Embodied cognition rejects the idea that social cognition requires theory of mind. It regards the intramural debate between the Theory Theory and the Simulation Theory as irrelevant, and it dismisses the empirical studies on theory of mind as ill conceived and misleading. Embodied cognition provides a novel deflationary account of social cognition that does not depend on theory of mind. In this chapter, (...) l describe embodied cognition’s alternative to theory of mind and discuss three challenges it faces. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 606-622, May 2022.

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s original account of “higher-order” cognition as fundamentally embodied and enacted. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy inspired theories that deemphasize overlaps between conceptual knowledge and motor intentionality or, on the contrary, focus exclusively on abstract thought. In contrast, this paper explores the link between Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentionality and his interpretations of our capacity to understand and interact productively with cultural symbolic systems. I develop my interpretation based on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of two neuropathological modifications of motor intentionality, the (...) case of the brain-injured war veteran Schneider, and a neurological disorder known as Gerstmann’s syndrome. Building on my analysis of Schneider’s sensorimotor compensatory performances in relation to his limitations in the domains of algebra, geometry, and language usage, I demonstrate a strong continuity between the sense of embodiment and enaction at all these levels. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations, I argue that “higher-order” cognition is impaired in Schneider insofar as his injury limits his sensorimotor capacity to dynamically produce comparatively more complex differentiations of any given phenomenal structure. I then show how Merleau-Ponty develops and specifies his interpretation of Schneider’s intellectual difficulties in relation to the ambiguous role of the body, and in particular the hand, in Gerstmann’s syndrome. I explain how Merleau-Ponty defends the idea that sensorimotor and quasi-representational cognition are mutually irreducible, while maintaining that symbol-based cognition is a fundamentally enactive and embodied process. (shrink)

Some embodied theories of concepts state that concepts are represented in a sensorimotor manner, typically via simulation in sensorimotor cortices. Fred Adams (2010) has advanced an empirical argument against embodied concepts reasoning as follows. If concepts are embodied, then patients with certain sensorimotor impairments should perform worse on categorization tasks involving those concepts. Adams cites a study with Moebius Syndrome patients that shows typical categorization performance in face-based emotion recognition. Adams concludes that their typical performance shows that (...) embodiment is false. Moebius patients must draw on amodal (non-embodied) emotion concepts. In this paper, I review face-based emotion recognition studies with Moebius patients yielding conflicting results and diagnose these conflicts as a difference in experimental design. When emotion labels are provided, patients have typical performance, but when labels are not provided patients are severely deficient. I then show how an embodied, psychological constructionist view of emotions predicts and explains these performance differences. The upshot is that embodied theories of concepts are vindicated. (shrink)

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply ‘wisdom’), which is the understanding required to make reliably good decisions about how we ought to live, is something we all have reason to care about. The importance of wisdom gives rise to questions about its nature: what kind of state is wisdom, how can we develop it, and what is a wise person like? These questions about the nature of wisdom give rise to further questions about proper methods for studying (...) wisdom. Is the study of wisdom the proper subject of philosophy or psychology? How, exactly, can we determine what wisdom is and how we can get it? In this chapter, we give an overview of some prominent philosophical answers to these questions. We begin by distinguishing practical wisdom from theoretical wisdom and wisdom as epistemic humility. Once we have a clearer sense of the target, we address questions of method and argue that producing a plausible and complete account of wisdom will require the tools of both philosophy and empirical psychology. We also discuss the implications this has for prominent wisdom research methods in empirical psychology. We then survey prominent philosophical accounts of the nature of wisdom and end with reflections on the prospects for further interdisciplinary research. (shrink)