Currently, there is a resurgence of interests in phenomenology in education. This article sheds light on the importance of hermeneutical phenomenology in teaching and learning based on the lived experience of a Sioux Indian adolescent boy, elicited from an ethnographic case study conducted at an alternative high school in the US. Employing narrative inquiry, this article seeks phenomenological ways of understanding students' lived experiences and explores the meaning of the pedagogical practice of hermeneutical phenomenology in education. I delve into how (...) hermeneutical understanding of the phenomena of students' lived experience can catapult both students and teachers into the personal growth and development in a reciprocal way. It is my hope that such an understanding will facilitate an educational aim that focuses on the ontology of being and becoming while students' existence is brought to the center of teaching and learning. (shrink)

This paper formulates the categories of "ethics," "self," and "subject" for an analysis of classical rabbinic ethics centered on the text, "The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan." Early rabbis were concerned with the realms of life that today's scholars describe as ethics and self-cultivation, yet they had no overarching concepts for either the self/person or for ethics. This analysis, then, cannot rely only upon native rabbinic terminology, but also requires a careful use of contemporary categories. This paper first sets out (...) basic features of "Rabbi Nathan" and presents appropriate formulations of the relevant scholarly terms. The latter sections address possibilities for employing and revising these categories in descriptive and comparative studies more broadly, first surveying relevant scholarship on Christian, Muslim, and Manichaean sources, and then turning to ancient East Asian sources with a particular focus upon passages in the "Zhuangzi". (shrink)

Artikkel lähtub Hegeli filosoofilise süsteemi mittemetafüüsilisest tõlgendusest ja keskendub ühele aspektile Hegeli dialektilise meetodi juures, mille iseloomustamiseks oleks autori arvates kõige adekvaatsem kasutada narratiivi mõistet. Artikli tees on kokkuvõtlikult järgmine: Hegeli arvates ei ole filosoofiline tõde väljendatav ühe lause või propositsiooniga, vaid see nõuab tervet väidete jada, kusjuures mõistete määratlused selles väidete jadas peavad suutma teiseneda --- nii nagu kirjandusliku jutustuse käigus võivad teiseneda tegelaste iseloom ja arusaamine asjadest . Lisaks neile kahele omadusele on narratiivile iseloomulik talle omaste struktuurielementide abil (...) loodud terviklikkus, mis võimaldab tal anda edasi sellist mõtet, mis ei sisaldu üheski narratiivi moodustavas lauses üksikult võetuna. Need kolm omadust võimaldavad Hegeli "dialektilisele" meetodile narratiiviteooria vahenditega uut valgust heita ja spekulatiivse tõe loomust paremini mõista. The paper discusses the nature of Hegel's dialectical method and criticizes its wide-spread interpretation according to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. It is argued that there is no evidence of triadic structures in Hegel's works. Rather, the elements or "determinations" ) that make up the body of Hegel's texts, are organized as "series" that form circles, in which, as Hegel maintains, the last element leads us back to the first. If synthesis means creating something new by using the initial elements then it is problematic whether anything becomes synthesized in Hegel texts. The paper argues against interpreting the every third element of the series or the end-points of the series as synthetic unities. Instead, the paper proposes that Hegel's speculative method uses the form of narrative for creating a vessel that is able to express the "speculative truth" which is "fluid" and which requires a "plastic" form of presentation. Narrative can accomplish what a singular proposition and a deductive system cannot, because it consists of a series of claims that is able to express the movement of what is said in each claim, and because its ending creates a point at which the story as a whole obtains a meaning that is not expressed in any particular sentence constituting the story. (shrink)

The theorization of the relays and relationships between the psychic and the social, as well as between the cognitive and the expressive, is still obstructed by the resilience of the egocentric and logocentric subject invented by the discourse of modernity. This article examines the possibilities opened up by the work of Lichtenberg Ettinger for breaking free of phallogocentrism in its various forms as one condition for subverting the normative truths of power/knowledge. It focuses on the sonic dimension of being-in-the-world as (...) one approach that indicates new avenues for research. (shrink)

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

There is a scarcity of research on men’s experience of bereavement (Reiniche, 2006), particularly in relation to qualitative research that focuses on the meaning of such an experience. This paper seeks to address this scarcity by presenting the findings from a phenomenological study of the lifeworlds of a small number of bereaved men. The study looked specifically at how the loss of a spouse influences men’s experience of meaning, grief and loss. Three men aged between 32 and 54 years old (...) who had all lost their partners to cancer between 3 and 7 years ago were interviewed. The hermeneutic phenomenological method of Van Manen (1990) was used to uncover three key themes, labelled grief and self-reflection, meaning of life and loss, and refiguring the life-world. These themes are discussed in the light of broader existential concerns and the extant literature. (shrink)

It has become commonplace to interpret 'Easter Island' in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others' edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as 'given' (fixed) and exemplary, wrongly suggesting that meanings and morals, like islands, are there to be 'discovered' ready-formed. Gadamer's hermeneutics suggests an alternative understanding (...) which expresses something of the ethical ambiguities involved in giving meaning to the environmental history of Easter Island. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology has proved to be very helpful in guiding nursing researchers’ qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. Modifying Ricoeur's philosophy, a number of nursing researchers have developed their own interpretive methods and shared them, along with their experience, with research community. Major contributors who published papers directly presenting their modifications of Ricoeur's theory include Rene Geanellos (2000), Lena Wiklund, Lisbet Lindholm and Unni Å. Lindström (2002), Anders Lindseth and Astrid Norberg (2004) and Pia Sander Dreyer and Birthe D (...) Pedersen (2009). The aim of this article was to delineate differences among these methods. Descriptive presentation of each method side by side makes clear the differences among them. In addition, Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory is portrayed and compared with the modifications. It is believed that differences that are found can stimulate further thoughts on how to apply Ricoeur's theory in qualitative research in nursing. (shrink)

‘‘Quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio’’. Augustine’s statement made 1,600 years ago still rings true. Paul Ricoeur goes so far as to assert that it is impossible to grasp time conceptually (Ricoeur 1984: 11 ff.). Nevertheless, or perhaps due to these aporias, time remains one of the most significant and intriguing themes for human imagination and philosophy. Nearly a century ago Edmund Husserl raised the hopes for a comprehensive philosophy of time (...) with his Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, published much later in 1928 by Martin Heidegger (but put together in most part by Edith Stein). Husserl’s subsequent steps on the stairway to a philosophy of time remained unpublished until the recent volumes Husserl (2001, 2006). These publications have awakened new interest in Husserl’s philosophy of time, and two recent monographs reconstruct and interpret it with a focus on subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper formulates the categories of "ethics," "self," and "subject" for an analysis of classical rabbinic ethics centered on the text, "The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan." Early rabbis were concerned with the realms of life that today's scholars describe as ethics and self-cultivation, yet they had no overarching concepts for either the self/person or for ethics. This analysis, then, cannot rely only upon native rabbinic terminology, but also requires a careful use of contemporary categories. This paper first sets out (...) basic features of "Rabbi Nathan" and presents appropriate formulations of the relevant scholarly terms. The latter sections address possibilities for employing and revising these categories in descriptive and comparative studies more broadly, first surveying relevant scholarship on Christian, Muslim, and Manichaean sources, and then turning to ancient East Asian sources with a particular focus upon passages in the "Zhuangzi". (shrink)

This article presents Gadamer’s interest in temporality as his strategy for advancing hermeneutics as philosophy of experience, a strategy becoming significantly more salient with the appearance of his 1992 essay, ‘Wort und Bild’. I demonstrate how temporal categories readily demarcate the problem of ontological imbalance so central in Gadamer’s philosophical project, a demarcation that removes any illusion of compatibility between Gadamer and the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. The article also considers some common misunderstandings of Gadamer resulting from a failure to (...) take full account of his interest in temporality, misunderstandings that prohibit recognizing the radical potential of Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy for our understanding of human finitude. A full account of this orientation must begin with a grasp of the exemplariness of art in his philosophy, and in this connection, the article raises the question of Gadamer’s late interest in the distinct exemplariness, not of lyric poetry, but of narrative art. (shrink)

Today, there is an emerging interest for the potential role of hermeneutics in reflecting on the practices related to digital technologies and their consequences. Nonetheless, such an interest has neither given rise to a unitary approach nor to a shared debate. The primary goal of this paper is to map and synthetize the different existing perspectives to pave the way for an open discussion on the topic. The article is developed in two steps. In the first section, the authors analyze (...) digital hermeneutics “in theory” by confronting and systematizing the existing literature. In particular, they stress three main distinctions among the approaches: between “methodological” and “ontological” digital hermeneutics; between data- and text-oriented digital hermeneutics; and between “quantitative” and “qualitative” credos in digital hermeneutics. In the second section, they consider digital hermeneutics “in action”, by critically analyzing the uses of digital data for studying a classical object such as the political opinion. In the conclusion, we will pave the way to an ontological turn in digital hermeneutics. Most of this article is devoted to the methodological issue of interpreting with digital machines. The main task of an ontological digital hermeneutics would consist instead in wondering if it is legitimate, and eventually to which extent, to speak of digital technologies, or at least of some of them, as interpretational machines. (shrink)

Drawing upon the practice of caregiving and the insights of feminist care ethics, I offer a phenomenology of caregiving through the work of Eva Feder Kittay and Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that caregiving is a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. In this light, the Levinasian opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity-based principles is belied in the experience of care. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, (...) this dialectic suggests that they are complementary in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of caregiving, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope. (shrink)

This essay defines ethical resonance through an ethnographic interlude that paves the way for a broader theorization of the concept. It begins by contextually recounting the story of an individual who had stayed at Sevagram, Mahatma Gandhi’s last ashram in 1944, shadowing Gandhi for some 20 days. The young man’s brief meeting with Gandhi in which Gandhi uttered only one sentence transformed him for his lifetime. I reflect on the experience and its narrative qualities to explore the broader question of (...) why one is moved, and moved enough to be altered. I propose that the theorization of resonance in modern physics, in phenomenology, and in 11th‐century Sanskrit poetics is productive for understanding the subjective and the trans‐subjective elements that underlie ethical persuasion. I argue that the idea of resonance helps bridge the affective and the aesthetic in moral self‐formation that occurs in everyday life. (shrink)

The purpose of this inquiry is to explore the experience of Borderline Personality Disorder with the aim of developing a more liberating approach to its diagnosis and treatment. Eight participants diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder were recruited from a psychiatric hospital operated by the Surrey and Borders NHS Trust and an outpatient daycentre based in London, United Kingdom. A narrative approach to methodology was employed to collect and analyse the participants’ life-stories. Themes to emerge from the participant’s narratives were found (...) to coincide with R.D. Laing’s concept of ontological insecurity. Ontological insecurity describes a number of aspects of the participant’s distress. To conclude, some general implications of this research for psychotherapy are briefly explored. (shrink)

Three female physicians were interviewed as part of a comprehensive investigation into the narratives of female and male physicians and nurses, concerning their experience of being in ethically difficult care situations in the care of elderly people. The interviewees expressed great concern for the low status of care for elderly people, and the need to fight for the specialty and for the care and rights of their patients. All the interviewees’ narratives concerned problems relating to perspectives of both action ethics (...) and relational ethics. The main focus was on problems concerning the latter perspective, expressed as profound concern and respect for the individual patient. Secondary emphasis was placed on relationships with relatives and other professionals. The most common themes in an action ethics perspective were too little treatment and the lack of health services for older patients, together with overtreatment and death with dignity. These results were discussed in the light of Løgstrup’s ethics, which emphasize that human life means expressing oneself, in the expectation of being met by others. Both Ricoeur’s concept of an ethics of memory and Aristotle’s virtue ethics are presented in the discussion of too little and too much treatment. (shrink)

The paper examines narrative operations involved in the temporal configuration of experience within a general framework of the phenomenological treatment of temporality. Taking as its point of departure a most basic instantiation of temporal experience, namely that of a ticking clock, it argues that the narrative dynamics which give form and charge the interval between tick and tock with significant duration are directly derived from the time-constituting operations of the embodied mind and, as such, are independent of their linguistic articulations. (...) Thus, it critically invokes Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, more specifically his model of retention-primary impression-protention, first in the context of Francisco J. Varela’s account of the neurodynamics of lived time, and then with reference to David Carr’s argument for continuity between narrative and the world of our experiences and actions. Building on these critical trajectories, the paper outlines how proto-narrative elements of lived time form a basis for the properly narrative operation of emplotment and, in its final section, discusses some of the complex relations between lived time and narrative time by contrasting Carr’s account of narrative with Paul Ricoeur’s model of triple mimesis. (shrink)

The ArgumentDuring the last two decades the debate on the use and abuse of narrative in historiography has taken a new form: ideological instead of methodological. According to poststructuralist critics, the representation of past events and processes in the form of a coherent story turns history into mythology, which is (or serves) conservative ideology. This is so because the fabrication of organic continuity and unity between the past and the present (as well as the future) of society depicts its most (...) fundamental laws and institutions as divine-natural rather than human creations and thereby renders them impervious to any rational or historical refutation. The main aim of this essay is to reclaim some credibility for narrative history against its critics, both ancient and modern, and on both methodological and ideological grounds, by reappraising the role of myth in the constitution of all norms and forms of life. Setting out from the observation that the narratives and other symbolic interpretations of historical reality in which the people believe are as real as the conditions and events in which they actually live, the author calls upon historians not to eliminate, but to illuminate, myths in history, by showing their extension or configuration of historical reality. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding women leaders in working life. Our starting point is in statistics and earlier women-in-management literature, which show that women leaders represent a minority of the managerial population. We assume such underlying mechanisms causing discriminatory practices towards women leaders to exist which have become naturalized and invisible. Our concern is that everyone irrespective of gender should have a fair chance in career progression. This is both a moral and also an economic (...) challenge. The framework we develop in this paper is an alternative approach to studying women leaders compared to traditional women-in-management literature. It aims at revealing the "natural and taken-for-granted" cultural mechanisms behind discriminatory practices. Our framework is based on a critical discursive approach, which draws on ideas of how women''s leadership becomes symbolically represented and constructed in discursive practices. These symbolic constructions, which are mediated through language, often have an ideological loading which positions women leaders and builds their identities in ways that can help to legitimize unequal relations between the genders. However, our framework emphasizes the possibility of multiple discourses and a dynamic view of culture. The cultural constructions of women leaders are, thus, open to change. (shrink)

Commenting on Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of imagination, Paul Ricoeur argues that Sartre fails to address the productive nature of imaginative acts. According to Ricoeur, Sartre's examples show that he thinks of imagination in mimetic terms, neglecting its innovative and creative dimensions. Imagination, Ricoeur continues, manifests itself most clearly in fiction, wherein new meaning is created. By using fiction as the paradigm of imaginative activity, Ricoeur is able to argue against Sartre that the essence of imagination lies not in its ability (...) to reproduce absent objects, but rather in the ability to transform reality through creative acts. Motivated by the intuition that Sartre the writer could not have forgotten to address such crucial dimensions of imagination, I examine Sartre's philosophical and literary work, showing that not only does he develop a notion of productive imagination, he also puts this notion to work by articulating the relationship between imagination, narrative, and identity formation, well before Ricoeur advanced his narrative-identity theory. I argue that Sartre, like Ricoeur and MacIntyre, another representative of narrative-theory whose criticism of Sartre I address in this essay, views imagination and narrativity as necessary conditions for the formation of a coherent and meaningful sense of self. (shrink)

Being diagnosed with cancer can be one of those critical incidents that negatively affect the self. Identity is threatened when physical, psychological, and social consequences of chronic illness begin to erode one’s sense of self and challenge an individual’s ability to continue to present the self he or she prefers to present to others. Based on the notion of illness trajectory and adopting a Ricoeurian narrative perspective, this theoretical paper shall explore the impact of cancer disease on identity and establish (...) the crucial importance of metaphor in the narratives of life with cancer. Findings indicate that in cancer narratives the illness experience supplies the narrative structure with temporal and spatial meeting points that make the narrative comprehensible and meaningful. Cancer forces identity changes not only from having to endure the long-term physical and psychosocial effects of the disease, but also from inevitable existential questions about life’s meaning. Improved medical knowledge today means improved ethnomedical practices. Metaphor can bridge the gap between the cancer experience and the world of technology and treatment, helping patients to symbolically control their illness. (shrink)

This article explores the cultural dimension in democratic struggle from the vantage point of the public sphere. It proposes that in the public sphere there take place competing and changing interpretations over the `public' through continuous articulation of two analytically distinct representations of public interest - democratic and communal discourses. In an empirical study of the recent credibility crisis in Hong Kong, the author demonstrates first, how the governing coalition sought to maintain its authority through a discourse of `administrative efficiency' (...) embedded in the hegemonic narrative of success, and second, how the challenging discourse of democracy regained momentum through de-mystification of the hegemonic narrative in the event of governing crises. The case study of the recent bird flu crisis offers a specific account of political and cultural challenge to bureaucratic paternalism in the postcolonial context. It is argued that the challenge was powerfully presented as the crisis became a dramatic moment of meaning reconstruction through ironic narrativizing and democratic encoding in the public sphere. (shrink)

This paper aims to develop a complex articulation of the civic meaningfulness of voluntary work that clarifies its political importance as a countervailing narrative pointing beyond dominant neoliberal and consumptive articulations of a good life. To start with, it sketches a hermeneutic perspective on civic meaningfulness based on the work of Paul Ricoeur. Subsequently, it introduces the ideas of ‘ethical complexity’, ‘epistemological complexity’ and ‘diapoiesis’, building on insights from critical complexity thinking and relational biology. It argues that these notions can (...) provide a bridge between hermeneutic perspectives on meaning and values, on the one hand, and questions of meaning and values on the level of scientific and technological developments and within professional organizations, on the other. Thus a broader, more complex picture emerges of the civic meaningfulness of voluntary work in our times. (shrink)

Narrative theories currently dominate our understanding of how selfhood is constituted and concretely individuated throughout personal history. Despite this success, the narrative perspective has recently been exposed to a range of critiques. Whilst these critiques have been effective in pointing out the shortcomings of narrative theories of selfhood, they have been less willing and able to suggest alternative ways of understanding personal history. In this article, I assess the criticisms and argue that an adequate phenomenology of personal history must also (...) go beyond narrative. Drawing on a distinction between history and narrative, I outline an account of historical becoming through a process of sedimentation and a rich notion of what I call historical selfhood on an embodied level. Five embodied existentials are suggested, sketching a preliminary understanding of how selves are concretely individuated on a pre-narrative level. (shrink)

This study investigates how business leaders dynamically narrate their aspirational ethical leadership identities. In doing so, it furthers understanding of ethical leadership as a process situated in time and place. The analysis focuses on the discursive strategies used to narrate identity and ethics by ethnic Chinese business leaders in Indonesia after their conversion to Pentecostal–charismatic Christianity. By exploring the use of metaphor, our study shows how these business leaders discursively deconstruct their ‘old’ identities and construct their ‘new’ aspirational identities as (...) ethical leaders. This leads to the following contributions. First, we show that ethical leadership is constructed in identity talk as the business leaders actively narrate aspirational identities. Second, the identity narratives of the business leaders suggest that ethical leadership is a context-bound and situated claim vis-à-vis unethical practice. Third, we propose a conceptual template, identifying processes of realisation and inspiration followed by significant shifts in understanding, for the study of aspirational ethical leadership. (shrink)

This article examines the storytelling aspect in philosophizing with rehabilitating cancer patients in small Socratic dialogue groups. Recounting an experience to illustrate a philosophical question chosen by the participants is the traditional point of departure for the dialogical exchange. However, narrating is much more than a beginning point or the skeletal framework of events and it deserves more scholarly attention than hitherto given. Storytelling pervades the whole Socratic process and impacts the conceptual analysis in a SDG. In this article we (...) show how the narrative aspect became a rich resource for the compassionate bond between participants and how their stories cultivated the abstract reflection in the group. In addition, the aim of the article is to reveal the different layers in the performance of storytelling, or of authoring experience. By picking, poking and dissecting an experience through a collaborative effort, most participants had their initial experience existentially refined and the chosen concept of which the experience served as an illustration transformed into a moral compass to be used in self-orientation post cancer. (shrink)

Books reviewed:Mark BevirThe Logic of the History of Ideas.

This article responds to Lash and Thoburn's articles in this volume by arguing for the value of Gramsci's strategic concept of hegemony today. It places post-hegemony theories as replicating one particular reading of Gramsci as a theorist of ideology and politics only, a reading that was deepened by certain appropriations of post-structuralist theory in the 1980s. It argues that the Prison Notebooks contain a richer legacy of concepts and historical methods, many of which are applicable to today's global reach of (...) power and communication. In particular, Gramsci was concerned with the relations between Fordist innovation and changes in state, civil society, intellectual formations and ways of living. He was especially interested in popular 'common sense', which, in his view, was the starting point of political work and could be the product of a renovative political activism. His ideas remain relevant to understanding recent transitions, especially since 11 September 2001, and the reach and limits of global neo-liberal hegemonies today, including the role of neo-liberal intellectuals and of a deepened individualism in everyday life. They also offer resources for counter-hegemonic strategies. Although Lash and Thoburn grasp a crucial coagulation of power today, their superseding of hegemony is based on an impoverished reading of the history of Gramscianism in cultural studies, and on a collapse of key complexities and local differences which is typical of some versions of social theory. (shrink)

Nurse philosopher Sally Gadow (1999) has proposed the relational narrative between patient and nurse as a ‘postmodern turn’ for nursing ethics. She has conceptualized this moral approach as the construction by patient and nurse of a coauthored narrative describing the good they are seeking, as well as the means to achieve this good. The purpose of this article is to provide an elaboration of Gadow's seminal conceptualization of relational narrative based on her writings and those of other philosophers. The article (...) will further develop relational narrative's foundations in relationship and narrative and will explore engagement as a dimension essential to its creation and growth. The elaboration first builds on the notion of relationship as foundational to this postmodern moral perspective. Narrative then is advanced as being at the heart of the patient–nurse relationship and their relational narrative, based on an exploration of narrative's role in the moral realm as an epistemology for patient and nurse. Finally, the dialogic and embodied engagement expressed by a relational narrative is developed as a critical element of the ethic. (shrink)

Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially "The Land Ethic," there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative underpinnings of the (...) stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory—which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold—and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching "community" than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Second, the narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration. (shrink)

This article develops a theory about the narrative foundations of public policy. Politicians draw on specific types of narratives in order to connect the policies they are proposing, the needs of the public, and their own needs for legitimacy. In particular, politicians are drawn to policy narratives in which they themselves occupy the central and heroic character position, and where they are able to protect the scope of their jurisdictional authority. We demonstrate how this works through a historical analysis of (...) congressional debate about the nonprofit sector in the United States. Two competing narratives framed these debates : a selfless charity narrative, in which politicians try to empower heroic charity workers and philanthropists, and then stay out of the way; and a masquerade narrative, in which fake charities are taking advantage of the nonprofit tax exemption, in order to pursue a variety of noncivic and dangerous activities. Members of Congress quickly adopted the masquerade narrative as the dominant framework for discussing the nonprofit sector because it provided a more powerful and flexible rhetoric for reproducing their political legitimacy. By developing innovative elaborations of the masquerade narrative, while remaining faithful to its underlying narrative format, politicians were able to increase the persuasive impact of their legislative agendas. We argue that the narrative aspects of political debate are a central component of the policy-making process because they link cultural and political interests in a way that involves the mastery of cultural structure as well as the creativity of cultural performance. (shrink)

Creating one's identity is an on-going process, which is greatly dependent on language. Having this idea as a starting point in the study of religiosity, sharing self-reported experiences can be seen as an integral part in constructing one's religious identity and personal conviction. In this article, I would like to present the idea of bringing together narrative research and the psychological approach to the study of religious experience with the help of personal experience stories about God's guidance told by Christian (...) believers who are members of a charismatic revival movement. (shrink)

Is Present Time a Precondition for the Existence of the Material and Public World?. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2013.782591.

This article is intended to raise the question of whether sacrifice can be regarded as constituting a deep ethical structure in the relationship between patient and carer. The significance of sacrifice in a patient-carer relationship cannot, however, be fully understood from the standpoint of the consistently utilitarian ethic that characterizes today’s ethical discourse. Deontological ethics, with its universal principles, also does not provide a suitable point of departure. Ethical recommendations and codices are important and can serve as general sources of (...) knowledge when making decisions, but they should be supplemented by an ethic that takes into consideration contextual and situational factors that make every encounter between patient and carer unique. Caring science research literature presents, on the whole, general agreement on the importance of responsibility and devotion with regard to sense of duty, warmth and genuine engagement in caring. That sacrifice may also constitute an important ethical element in the patient-carer relationship is, however, a contradictory and little considered theme. Caring science literature that deals with sacrifice/self-sacrifice indicates contradictory import. It is nevertheless interesting to notice that both the negative and the positive aspects bring out the importance of the concept for the professional character of caring. The tradition of ideas in medieval Christian mysticism with reference to Lévinas’ ethic of responsibility offers a deeper perspective in which the meaningfulness of sacrifice in the caring relationship can be sought. The theme of sacrifice is not of interest merely as a carer’s ethical outlook, but sacrifice can also be understood as a potential process of transformation towards health. The instinctive or conscious experience of sacrifice on the part of the individual patient can, on a symbolic level, be regarded as analogous to the cultic or religious sacrifice aiming at atonement. Sacrifice appears to the patient as an act of transformation to achieve atonement and healing. Atonement then implies finding meaningfulness in one’s suffering. The concept of sacrifice, understood in a novel way, opens up a deeper dimension in the understanding of suffering and makes caring in ‘the patient’s world’ possible. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's vision of 'messianicity' in his book Specters of Marx and the essay 'Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone' has been widely appreciated by scholars. Yet little fundamentally critical engagement appears to have been made with some important historical-sociological questions raised by Derrida's ideas in these texts. Drawing on earlier reference-points in 20th-century critical theory and sociology, the present article argues for some objections to Derrida's presentation of the significance of religious (...) messianism in modern Western social and political thought. The central claim defended is that Derrida invidiously marginalizes some important non-messianistic idioms, sources and traditions of thinking about religious history and its bearing on contemporary social and political self-understanding. (shrink)

This article proposes that time is not so much constituted by time-consciousness as given by technical inscriptions of time. The `digital gift' of time that comprises one fundamental mode of this giving of time correlates with Aristotle's conception of time as `the number of movement according to the before and after'; more specifically, it furnishes a minimal form of temporal difference — a minimal before-after structure — that proves useful for exploring how the experience of time has changed today. The (...) article argues that we increasingly live time not, as philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues, through neo-Husserlian temporal objects like the cinema that model the flow of time through our consciousnesses, but rather with the aid of artworks that eschew the objectal in favor of the processual. In works like Wolfgang Staehle's Empire 24/7, Pierre Huyghe's L'Ellipse and Lynn Kirby's Six Shooter, we confront open-ended digital structures that provide us with a technically-specific mediation of the minimal before-after structure and allow us to participate in more heterogeneous enframings of time that move beyond the temporal ratios of human perception. The article closes with a brief discussion of contemporary Chinese art that serves to broaden the proposed `digital aesthetic' of time beyond the `digital' construed narrowly as a concrete technical platform. (shrink)

Being in a mood—such as an anxious, irritable, depressed, tranquil, or cheerful mood—tends to alter the way we react emotionally to the particular objects we encounter. But how, exactly, do moods alter the way we experience particular objects? Perceptualism, a popular approach to understanding affective experiences, holds that moods function like "colored lenses," altering the way we perceive the evaluative properties of the objects we encounter. In this essay, I offer a phenomenological analysis of the experience of being in a (...) mood that illustrates the limitations of the colored lens metaphor and demonstrates the basic inadequacy of the perceptualist account of moods. I argue that when we are in a mood, it is common to experience a kind of "emotional disconnection" in which we perceive evaluative properties that would normally elicit strong emotional reactions from us, but nonetheless we find that, in our present mood, we remain emotionally numb to these perceptions. Such experiences of "seeing but not feeling" are difficult to understand from within the perceptualist paradigm. Building on the work of Martin Heidegger, I sketch an alternative, phenomenological analysis of moods that can better account for experiences of emotional disconnection. On this alternative account, being in a mood does not merely alter the content of our perceptions but, rather, alters the way we interpret the overall significance of what we perceive, relative to a certain situational context. (shrink)

Narrative is rarely mentioned in philosophical discussions of collective intentionality and group identity despite the fact that narratives are often thought important for the formation of action intentions and self-identity in individuals. We argue that the concept of the ‘we-narrative’ can solve several problems in regard to defining the status of the we. It provides the typical format for the attribution of joint agency; it contributes to the formation of group identity; and it generates group stability.

Using a U.S. and a Canadian example, in this article we argue that news reports of murder, especially of the heavily covered signal crimes that become part of community storytelling, often employ predetermined formulas that probe intrusively into the lives of those involved in the murder but ultimately come away with only cheaply sketched, stick-figure portraits. The thesis is that crime coverage that is formulaic tends to produce cynicism and a distance between the reader and those involved in the crime. (...) However, a deeper and more caring probe into the causes and consequences of crime could lead the community to wider conversations about responsibility, social justice, and reconciliation. What is required to expand the reporting of murder stories is more of the ethic of care that can serve to both deepen the public's understanding of the individual crime and widen the community's dialogue about its significance. (shrink)

An intensification of interest in early childhood by government, parents, and employers, focuses primarily on the provision of private early childhood education services outside of the home. With a focus on New Zealand, the paper argues that the form of early education now promoted is a particular form of care and education that moves children away from family and community narratives embedded in the historical, cultural and humanist intentions of the national curriculum Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996). It argues (...) that current early childhood policy directions, largely driven by global economic agendas, pay scant regard to the lived experiences of children and families. Working with Ricoeur's narrative identity, Ricoeur's ‘capable subject’ is considered in order to examine the emerging purposes and aims of early childhood education, with a particular focus on just institutions for children and families. (shrink)

This paper identifies the difficulties in confronting novel history from both a rigorous scientific and artistic literary perspectives and suggests a practical reconciliation—in the form of a discussion and metaphorical opening space—between the two apparent poles of historical understanding and their accompanying genres, types, and tropes.

Heyes does well to argue that some of the apparently innate human capabilities for cultural learning can be considered in terms of more general-purpose mechanisms. In the application of this to language, she overlooks some of its most interesting properties. I review three, and then illustrate how mindreading can come from general-purpose mechanism via language.

Wolterstorff defends the claim not only that ‘God speaks’ through the Bible but also that the reader gains ever new insights upon subsequent readings of it. I qualify this project with the philosophical hermeneutics he rejects—namely that of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Wolterstorff thinks what he calls ‘authorial discourse interpretation’ provides warrant for religious communities believing that ‘God speaks’ to them through a text. In developing this hermeneutic, he dismisses the viability of Gadamer and Ricoeur's approach because, Wolterstorff asserts, their form (...) of interpretation is merely an operation performed on an artifact. While a cursory study of Gadamer and Ricoeur might support such dismissal, particularly Ricoeur's emphasis on writing's obliteration of dialogue, a closer study guided by the hermeneutic priority of questioning complicates Wolterstorff's caricature. If writing obliterates dialogue, what happens to questions and responses? My thesis is that dialogue with another is preserved through the hermeneutical arc. I demonstrate this through specifying distinct logics of question and answer that occur in the reading process, and I delimit these logics by way of appeal to contemporary literacy pedagogy and its taxonomies of questions. A voice does speak with and listen to a reader in the event of reading, in this case a God who is not behind but before the text. Isolating this other who speaks and listens provides reinforcement for constructive theological work aligned with Gadamer and Ricoeur's hermeneutics, and answers for the experience of hearing ‘God speak’ differently through sacred texts. (shrink)

Phenomenological, process-based and post-Marxist approaches have stressed the immanent nature of the ontogenesis of our world. The concept of performativity epitomizes these temporal, spatial and material views. Reality is always in movement itself: it is constantly materially and socially ‘performed’. Other views lead to a pre-defined world that would be mostly revealed through sensations. These transcendental stances assume that a subject, although pre-existing experience, is the absolute condition of possibility of it. In this paper, we develop another view of performativity, (...) one that re-introduces transcendence in the analysis but sees in it something dialogical to the process itself. We draw from the notions of visibility-invisibility and continuity-discontinuity in order to show how everyday activity both performs and makes visible the world. From that perspective, modes of visibility appear as conditions of possibility of performativity itself. We draw some implications for the conceptualization of management practices. (shrink)