Using a base of philosophical athropology, this article suggests that an ethical analysis of persuasion must include not just the logic human response, but culture and experience as well. The authors propose potential maxims for ethical behavior in advertising and public relations and applies them to two case studies, political advertising and the Bridgestone/Firestone controversy.

A number of writers have picked out the way knowledge in the human sciences reflexively alters the human subject as what separates these sciences from the natural sciences. Furthermore, they take this reflexivity to be a condition of moral existence. The article sympathetically examines this emphasis on reflexive processes, but it rejects the particular conclusion that the reflexive phenomenon enables us to demarcate the human sciences. The first sections analyse the different meanings that references to reflexivity have in the psychological (...) and social sciences, in philosophy and in material life, and they link these meanings to the post-positivist philosophy of the social sciences. The discussion considers the problems raised (most influentially in the human sciences by Foucault) by being reflexive about reflexivity itself. They put a large question mark against hopes for a revived philosophical anthropology. Whatever the philosophical arguments, however, there is clearly a reflexive practice in the humanities and human sciences which there is not in the natural sciences. This leads to the argument that there are different forms of knowledge for different purposes and that it may therefore be divergence of purpose, not reflexivity itself, that creates differences among the sciences. It is the fact and purpose of human self-reflection that marks out the human sciences. If this is so, then it explains why an apparently circumscribed question about the classification of knowledge turns out to be inseparable from ontological and moral questions about human identity. (shrink)

The ArgumentBiology, understood in turn-of-the-century Germany to include psychology, held a central but enigmatic place in the philosopher Ernst Cassirer's work. From his earliest studies with Hermann Cohen through his long engagement with the theoretical biology of Jakob von Uexküll and Adolf Meyer-Abich, Cassirer consistently used the history and practice of biology to examine and delineate a set of characteristic tensions between the natural and cultural sciences. This paper examines Cassirer's treatment of this theme by addressing two contrasting interpretations he (...) gave — in hisPhilosophy of Symbolic Forms and in hisEssay on Man — to the benchmark case from empirical psychology of the “talking” horse “Clever Hans.” The original case involved the horse's ability to signal answers to remarkably complex questions by stamping its hooves, an ability that ultimately appeared to rest on a capacity to detect extremely minute unintentional movement cues in its auditors as it reached the appropriate answer. Due to both Cassirer's shifting description of the case within his philosophy and the case's inherent polyvalence, Cassirer's remarks provide a useful window onto the social, epistemological, and stylistic meaning of his “unified” philosophy of human culture and science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article is written in the field of the philosophy of science. The aim is to express how painting and drawing can be used as part of a phenomenological research method. The painter or drawer is a visual researcher in the process of capturing a holistic and truthful experience of a cultural phenomenon. We will highlight the visual researcher process and how the experience of truth is known throughout this process. The paining and sketches, which we present in this (...) article, are part of a book, together with written narratives and pedagogical theory – on teaching as a phenomenon – called Lærerpraksis og Pedagogisk teori. The paintings and drawings present teaching in a way that complements and expands the written text. The sketches and painting of teaching attempt to establish the truth as unconcealment of a phenomenon. Our argumentation is based on the theories of Gadamer, Cassirer, Panofsky and Heidegger. Gadamer connects humanistic research with artistry and the experience of truth. Cassirer argues that the perception of a cultural phenomenon begins as a holistic understanding to bring forth the symbolic form or essence of the phenomenon. Panofsky transfers the theory of Cassirer into the field of painting. The concept of synthetic intuition is the intrinsic knowing of a painting, which corresponds to Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms. Heidegger’s theory explores how art unfolds and preserves the truth. We will argue that the connection between art and truth could bring forth important perspectives on phenomenological science and turn the research activity closer to an artistic form. (shrink)

This study examines German educational philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s (1903–1991) existential-hermeneutic theory of discontinuous forms of education, unstetige formen der Erziehung. At the core of this theory is a view of human being subjected to education that appears disruptive and critical, influencing the development of disclosing the true powers of a person and unfolding of truths about oneself that could not be uncovered otherwise. Typically, this theory has been interpreted on the continuum of hermeneutic philosophy, as hermeneutic pedagogy with an (...) extension of Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, antisubjectivism and especially his theory of truth as unconcealment. According to this line of interpretation, Bollnow’s project brings an existential addition to classical pedagogical theories, as a level of appealing pedagogy. According to this existentialist view, education in a strict sense cannot really take place: it could not affect the true core of a person, nor this person could be subjected under any pedagogical influence in any meaningful way. The only task left for education is to appeal to the conscience of an already autonomous person. However, in this study it is claimed that this line of interpretation falls short to the fact that Bollnow’s philosophy of education builds heavily on his overall philosophical-anthropological project, which springs from Kant’s first critique and especially, as shown in this work, from Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. The study shows, that Bollnow’s discontinuous forms of education are not resulted from hermeneutic educational reality, with an extension of existential potentiality to authenticity of a person. In fact, one could not derive such a view from mere hermeneutics. Instead, what Bollnow’s structural view of educational reality indicates, is that it should be understood as a phenomenological description of a priori categorical structures. It is claimed in the work, that the discontinuous forms are the products of phenomenological reduction. They are derived from the direct experience within consciousness, from the essence of what is experienced, from the very nature of what is it like to be in a process of becoming human. From this perspective, from the subject-point, education cannot be described as a paradox of freedom and restriction between educator and educatee, nor transmission of culture between generations, but instead could be described as the subjective experience of being educated or educating oneself, disclosing oneself to oneself, which is constituted only by the necessary conditions of these subjective experiences of discontinuity. (shrink)