Aim To define conceptual frameworks and their inherent dichotomies, and integrate them with concomitant concepts to help early nursing doctoral researchers to develop their understanding of and engage with discourse further, so that nursing can demonstrate its ability to contribute to the meta-theoretical debate of doctoral research alongside other practices and theory-based disciplines. Background Conceptual frameworks are central to nursing doctoral studies as they map and contextualise the philosophical assumptions of the research in relation to paradigms and ontological, epistemological and (...) methodological foundations. They shape all aspects of the research design and provide a structure for theorising. They can also be a challenge for researchers and are under-discussed in the literature. Review methods Literature review. Discussion The key aspects of the conceptual framework debate in terms of objectivist, subjectivist paradigms and the wider paradigm debate, including retroduction and abduction, are reviewed here together with consideration of how these apply to nursing doctoral research. Conclusion Conceptual frameworks are pivotal to nursing doctoral research as they clarify and integrate philosophical, methodological and pragmatic aspects of doctoral thesis while helping the profession to be seen as a research-based discipline, comfortable with the language of meta-theoretical debate. Implications for research/practice Conceptual frameworks should form the methodological foundation for all nursing doctoral research. (shrink)

This thesis is a critical assessment of Edith Stein’s critique of Martin Heidegger, which is focused on the definition of the human being. I explore Stein’s ontology of the person from the point of view of her examination of Heidegger’s existential ‘Dasein’ and the way she reaches a very different answer to the same question that Heidegger posed, the question of the meaning of being. To this end I examine key passages of Stein’s most important ontological work Finite and Eternal (...) Being -­‐ An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being along with its appendix Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy of Existence, in which she directly discussed Heidegger’s philosophy, focusing on his work Being and Time. In the first part of this research I draw a historico-­‐philosophical overview of the academic and political background of the period between World War I and World War II in Germany in order to position both authors in context and investigate their philosophical influences as well as their ambiguous relationship with the phenomenological school. The central part is dedicated to Stein’s analysis of Heidegger’s Dasein: I compare and explain both authors’ approaches to the philosophical understanding of human being, person, life, soul and death. This investigation was carried out with both a hermeneutical and terminological analysis. I draw upon the results to demonstrate how Stein’s phenomenology of life experiences enlarges the borders of human finitude to embrace the possibility of its ontological horizon while Heidegger restricts and concentrates the entire ontological question on the Dasein, its existence and ultimately its finitude. My findings provide an assessment of the limits as well as the strengths of Stein’s critique. I demonstrate that Stein attempted to build a bridge between classical ontology and phenomenology, while Heidegger’s distance from the philosophical tradition was rooted in his methodological refusal. I also show how their opposite methods and findings present unexpected similarities and how Stein’s philosophical significance should be reconsidered in the light of her work. This research leads to various implications for today’s philosophical debate and makes it possible to view Stein’s theory of being in a wider ethical context, as presented in the final part of this work. I argue that Heidegger depersonalises and violates traditional ontology to explain the human being only in terms of pure existence, while Stein’s portrait of the ‘fullness’ and the meaning of life contributes to the discussion between philosophy and religion. In the final section of this work I show how some of the elements emerging from Stein’s critique of Heidegger can cast a light on the current ethical discussion about how death is understood and experienced socially, and how best to care for the dying. (shrink)

This article will offer an analysis of Andrej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) with the work of Luce Irigaray to suggest female desire both is and can create monsters. Through the parabolic configuration and ultimate collapse of the transcendental mystical with the carnal, mucosal monsters can be understood as angels enveloping and unfurling configurations of pleasure beyond phallologocentrism. Extending this exploration I will suggests spectatorship as mucosal, and the screen as angelic-monstrous, which through shifting from signifying to mystifying, forms with the spectator (...) a mucosal ethical relation. Irigaray states: “Perhaps the visible needs the tangible but this need is not reciprocal.” She directs us away from the visible as the phallic apprehensible through demarcation of form as solid, subjectivity as rigid and recognition or repudiation as objectifying dialectic distance toward mucous as feminine carnal interaction. (shrink)

Posthuman theory asks in various ways what it means to be human in a time when philosophy has become suspicious of claims about human subjectivity. Those subjects who were historically considered aberrant, and our future lives becoming increasingly hybrid show we have always been and are continuously transforming into posthumans. What are the ethical considerations of thinking the posthuman? Posthuman Ethics asks not what the posthuman is, but how posthuman theory creates new, imaginative ways of understanding relations between lives. Ethics (...) is a practice of activist, adaptive and creative interaction which avoids claims of overarching moral structures. Inherent in thinking posthuman ethics is the status of bodies as the site of lives inextricable from philosophy, thought, experiments in being and fantasies of the future. Posthuman Ethics explores certain kinds of bodies to think new relations that offer liberty and a contemplation of the practices of power which have been exerted upon bodies. The tattooed and modified body, the body made ecstatic through art, the body of the animal as a strategy for abolitionist animal rights, the monstrous body from teratology to fabulations, queer bodies becoming angelic, the bodies of the nation of the dead and the radical ways in which we might contemplate human extinction are the bodies which populate this book creating joyous political tactics toward posthuman ethics. (shrink)

The authors show how networked community-based organisations build in their own educational pathways, which at the same time meet the requirements for sustainability and Sufficiency Economy as recommended by the UN. They liken this to a movement from hierarchic to ‘holarchic’ structures and recommend how this may be adopted in management education.

Bronwen Rees interviews Professor Apichai Puntasen about the attempts to introduce the King’s ideas of Sufficiency Economy into Thailand. The core of this philosophy is developing compassion and co-operation rather than competition.

Pluralism is one of the most problematic concepts in the social sciences. Despite a bourgeoning debate on the nature of pluralism and its relevance for economics, consideration of pluralism within economics has a short history. This paper identifies the key stages in the development of the pluralism debate within economics. This paper identifies developments in the philosophy of science, the disarray in economic methodology, the consequent pleas for tolerance in economics, and the wider orthodoxy-heterodoxy debate as key factors in shaping (...) the nature and direction of the pluralism debate. The paper concludes with some reflections on the impact of the pluralism debate for economic pedagogy, and postulates returning to the philosophy of science and epistemology as a fruitful direction for discussing and implementing pluralism in economics. (shrink)

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to assess both the philosophical underpinnings and contributions to knowledge made by research in the field of strategy in the five years between 2002 and 2006. Design/methodology/approach: The paper begins with a review of the literature on the philosophy, purpose, process and outcome of management research which leads to the development of a conceptual model. Following this, almost 4,000 articles from 23 journals are assessed on the basis of their philosophical underpinnings and contribution (...) to knowledge. Findings are reported and implications are discussed. Findings: Most strategy research, especially in higher ranked journals, comes from a positivist perspective. Across all journals, most contributions to knowledge are in the form of stretching theory. There is a limited amount of reflective work in the strategy literature. Practical implications: Given the form and content of strategy research, it is increasingly unlikely that research will make the crossover from the academic to the practitioner world. Originality/value: This paper provides a better understanding of the process through which academic management research can be carried out and the barriers to this process. The paper provides a number of important insights into the nature of strategy research. (shrink)

Table of Contents. Introduction: Five Theses of Actually Existing Schizoanalysis of Cinema, Ian Buchanan (Cardiff University, UK) 1. Schizoanalysis and the Phenomenology of Cinema, Joe Hughes (University of Edinburgh, UK) 2. Schizoanalysis and the Cinema of the Brain, Gregg Lambert (Syracuse University, USA) 3. Losing Face, Gregory Flaxman (University of North Carolina, USA) and Elena Oxman (University of North Carolina, USA) 4. Disorientation, Duration and Tarkovsky, Mark Riley (Roehampton University, UK) 5. Suspended Gestures: Schizoanalysis, Affect and the Face in Cinema, (...) Amy Herzog (CUNY, USA) 6. Schizoanalysis, Spectacle and the Spaghetti Western, David Martin-Jones (University of St Andrews, UK) 7. Cinemas of Minor Frenchness, Bill Marshall (University of Glasgow, UK) 8. Delirium Cinema or Machines of the Invisible?, Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) 9. Off Your Face: Schizoanalysis, Faciality and Cinema, Anna Powell (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) 10. An Ethics of Spectatorship: Love, Death and Cinema, Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK). (shrink)

Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship, arguing that cinema spectatorship represents a unique encounter of desire, pleasure and perversion beyond dialectics of subject/object and image/meaning; an extraordinary 'cinesexual' relationship, that encompasses each event of cinema spectatorship in excess of gender, hetero- or homosexuality, encouraging all spectators to challenge traditional notions of what elicits pleasure and constitutes desiring subjectivity. Through a variety of cinematic examples, including abstract film, extreme films and films which present perverse sexuality and corporeal reconfiguration, Cinesexuality encourages (...) a radical shift to spectatorship as itself inherently queer beyond what is watched and who watches. Film as its own form of philosophy invokes spectatorship thought as an ethics of desire. Original, exciting and theoretically sophisticated – focusing on continental philosophy, particularly Guattari, Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray and Serres – the book will be of interest to scholars and students of queer, gender and feminist studies, film and aesthetics theory, cultural studies, media and communication, post-structural theory and contemporary philosophical thought. Contents: Series editors' preface: for the love of cinema; Spectatorship: an inter-kingdom desire; A cinema of desire: cinesexuality and asemiosis; Cinemasochism; Baroque cinesexuality; Baroque becomings; Zombies without organs; Necrosexuality; The ecosophy of spectatorship; Bibliography; Index. (shrink)