This chapter contains sections titled: Make'em Laugh, Make'em Laugh, Make'em Laugh! The Laughing Consciousness Laughing: No Laughing Matter The Joke of Critical Theory Lights Please! References.

Why is nature amenable to mathematical description? This question has received attention in the philosophy of science but rarely from a phenomenological perspective. Nevertheless Husserl’s late essay “The Origin of Geometry,” which has received some critical scholarly attention in recent years, contains the beginning of a striking answer. This answer proceeds from Husserl’s main claim in that essay, which he also makes in the Crisis of the European Sciences, that the original meaning of science has been covered over or “sedimented” (...) by concepts that obscure the true intentional core of scientific meaning. In the first three sections of this paper I develop Husserl’s central insights about mathematics in light of two contemporary critiques of his project of “reactivation” of the original, sedimented meaning of science. In the latter two sections, I argue that accepting Husserl’s account of the original meaning and development of science offers a promising explanation of why nature is amenable to mathematics. This explanation hinges on a conception of the objects and methods of mathematics and the mathematized physical sciences as accomplishments, that is, as constituted contents of consciousness. (shrink)

The article presents an epistemological and partially methodological analysis of cognitive science as a scientific discipline, created as a result of the transformations that took place in the philosophical and psychological concepts of the mind and cognition, which were carried out with the aid of tools and methods of modelling as well as through simulating human cognitive processes and consciousness. In order to describe this interdisciplinary science, and its positions, as well as the stages and directions of its development, it (...) makes use of the epistemological model formulated by Michel Foucault, in which he draws attention to social, ideological and technological conditions of scientific knowledge. The opinions of the leading creators and critics of cognitive science, such as George A. Miller, Howard Gardner, Margaret Boden and José Luis Bermúdez are referenced to and analyzed with the use of this model. The article shows the epistemologically and methodologically divergent status of cognitive science, as well as its cognitive and institutional conditions and challenges, which stand before it after half a century of intensive development. (shrink)

Part one: the search for cosmic consciousness -- R.M. Bucke and the future of humanity -- William James and the anesthetic revelation -- Henri Bergson and the Elan Vital -- The superman -- A.R. Orage and the new age -- Ouspensky's fourth dimension -- Part two: esoteric evolution -- The bishop and the bulldog -- Enter the madame -- Dr. Steiner, I presume? -- From Goethean science to the wisdom of the human being -- Cosmic evolution -- Hypnagogia -- Part (...) three: the archaeology of consciousness -- The invisible mind -- Cracking the egg -- Lost worlds -- Noncerebral consciousness -- The split -- Part four: participatory epistemology -- The shock of metaphor -- The participating mind -- The tapestry of nature -- Thinking about thinking -- The black hole of consciousness -- Other times and places -- Faculty X -- Part five: the presence of origin -- The ascent of Mount Ventoux -- Structures of consciousness -- The mental-rational structure -- The integral structure -- Last words: playing for time. (shrink)

The banking model manufactures human consciousness that is easy to control. It programs individuals to accept and believe in a false concept of reality so that they fail to perceive the connection between human action and their immediate and higher social reality. In this way, it creates submissive subjects for the order of oppression. The oppressed are conditioned and incapable of perceiving the truth. Their critical and creative thinking potential is systematically annulled. This paper aims to reinterpret Freire’s essay on (...) “the Banking Model of Education” using Tyler’s model of curriculum to uncover the practices of the educators at every level of the oppressor-controlled educational system. As Tyler’s model is often termed as a “Product model”, its framework can be useful in analyzing the banking model, which is purely productoriented, to achieve deeper understanding of the process which the banking model adopts to produce a certain type of psyche that can ensure the survival of oppression. (shrink)

Paulo Freire is undeniably a prominent figure who greatly influenced 21st century higher education. More specifically, architectural education been greatly affected by Freire’s thinking in relation to producing a design project with dialogue and consciousness. This study aims to implement Freire’s thoughts in contemporary design studios, where the core courses of architectural education occur. This study employs a narrative methodology and in-depth interviews with third-year students from the design studios of two universities, one public and another private. The study investigates (...) the impact of the concept of ‘dialogue’ on student creativity, and ‘banking education’ thought of Freire to determine how this idea affects students’ consciousness of their learning process. Therefore, this research attempts to apply three of Freire’s key thoughts that have been discussed in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: ‘dialogue’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘banking education’. As a result, banking education applied by local-experienced instructors in the public university has confused students when applying given information to the theoretical part of their projects, which directed them to show fewer creative concepts. On the other hand, the students had greater consciousness of their learning process, awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in regard to the concepts of their design projects, and involvement in their classes when they felt a dialogue by the abroad-experienced instructors in the private university. This study shows that architectural education in that region requires a serious consciousness of Freirean theory. (shrink)

In 1746 the French philosophe Condillac published his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge , one of many attempts during the century to determine how we organize and validate ideas as knowledge. In investigating language, especially written language, he found not only the seriousness he sought but also a great deal of frivolity whose relation to the sober business of philosophy had to be addressed somehow. If the mind truly reflects the world, and language reflects the mind, why is (...) there so much error and nonsense? Whence the distortions? How can they be remedied? In The Archeology of the Frivolous , Jacques Derrida recoups Condillac's enterprise, showing how it anticipated--consciously or not--many of the issues that have since stymied epistemology and linguistic philosophy. If anyone doubts that deconstruction can be a powerful analytic method, try this. (shrink)

John Dewey adopted a child-centered point of view to illuminate aspects of education he believed teacher-centered educators were neglecting, but he did so self-consciously and self-critically, because he also believed that ‘a new order of conceptions leading to new modes of practice’ was needed. Dewey introduced his new conceptions in The Child and the Curriculum and later and more fully in Democracy and Education. Teachers at his Laboratory School in Chicago developed the new modes of practice. In this article, I (...) explore Dewey’s new conception of education and compare it with the apparently opposed views of R. S. Peters and Paulo Freire. In doing so, I show that, despite their criticisms of Dewey, whether explicit or implicit, these influential philosophers, representing quite different traditions in philosophy of education were in substantial agreement with him. I also show that, despite our own differences, as important as they are, seeing teachers and learners at work in a rapidly changing society, now on a global scale, in classrooms which are also changing, driven largely by new technologies, the conception of education Dewey, Peters, and Freire developed can provide us with the foundation we need to understand the changing teacher–learner relationship and the purposes their shared activities serve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Queering Buen AmorGregory S. Hutcheson (bio)The naturalization of both heterosexuality and masculine sexual agency are discursive constructions nowhere accounted for but everywhere assumed....—Judith Butler, Gender TroubleAmérico Castro’s España en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judíos (1948) not only instigated the “culture wars” that rocked Hispanism in the mid-twentieth century, but also made the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor a centerpiece of debate.1 In a crucial chapter of his study, (...) Castro tackles head-on Eurocentric readings of the Libro de buen amor by arguing for its cultural hybridity, or in more extreme terms, its fixedness in the cultural prerogatives of Arabic-speaking al-Andalus. “Los métodos usados para entender la poesía románico-cristiana fallan,” he affirms in an opening salvo, “porque el Libro de Buen Amor es un reflejo castellano de modelos árabes [The methods used to comprehend Romance-Christian poetry are doomed to failure because the Libro de buen amor is a Castilian reflection of Arabic models]...” [España en su historia 355]. By relocating the author’s poetic impulse in the Arab world, Castro seeks to explain not only the Libro de buen amor’s open, “arabesque” structure—its spontaneous gliding from holy to profane, serious to comical, generic-abstract to concrete-sensible—but also the ambiguous nature of buen amor. For Castro, buen amor is the simultaneous compulsion toward spiritual transcendence and sexual fulfillment, best understood within the context of an Islamic theological system in which sexual desire is not categorically opposed to godliness.Not surprisingly, Castro’s scholarship was judged harshly by his critics as historical revisionism of the most pernicious sort, a deliberate erosion of those values and certainties that make it possible to read Spain as a full player in the march of Western civilization. Most vehement in his attack was Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, who authored the two volumes of his España: Un enigma histórico (1956) as both an explicit defense against the “magnetic seduction” [1: 9] of Castro’s prose and a reaffirmation of national consciousness. Sánchez-Albornoz’s take on the Libro de buen amor falls neatly in line with the thinly disguised nationalism of his opus as a whole. He rejects soundly Castro’s claims of cultural hybridity in favor of a Libro de buen amor located safely on this side of the cultural “abyss” between Latin Christendom and the Islamic world. What is more, he resists the queernesses that spin out of Castro’s scholarship, the threat of contamination of the national character in unspeakable ways. If Spain had been exposed to the cultural proclivities of al-Andalus, Sánchez-Albornoz argues, so too would it have been exposed to al-Andalus’s “ambiguous” notion of love, a love “que no excluía las ‘amistades particulares,’ ni la sentimental inclinación, e incluso la pasión carnal, de varón a varón [that did not exclude ‘special friendships,’ nor sentimental inclination–and even carnal passion [End Page 104] –between one man and another]” [458].2 Here Sánchez-Albornoz slams the closet door shut by constructing Spain as the bastion of straight desire and Juan Ruiz as its virtual posterboy: “En el clérigo de Hita triunfaba la robusta, natural y simplista concepción heterosexual del amor de la Castilla de su época [There triumphed in the cleric of Hita a robust, natural, uncomplicated heterosexual concept of love characteristic of the Castile of his period]” [458–59].I begin with the Castro/Sánchez-Albornoz polemic because it exposes the presence and functions of “normativity” in Libro de buen amor studies throughout much of the twentieth century. With few exceptions, readings prior to Castro’s overlooked what was odd about the Libro de buen amor in order to engage in an obsessive archaeology of sameness, a plotting of conventional values and meanings that served to render the work as familiar, if not necessarily equal to other master works of the Western canon. Félix Lecoy emerged as the doyen of this critical school, publishing in 1938 an excruciatingly detailed study of the work’s language, structure, and sources whose primary objective was... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Queering Buen AmorGregory S. Hutcheson (bio)The naturalization of both heterosexuality and masculine sexual agency are discursive constructions nowhere accounted for but everywhere assumed....—Judith Butler, Gender TroubleAmérico Castro’s España en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judíos (1948) not only instigated the “culture wars” that rocked Hispanism in the mid-twentieth century, but also made the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor a centerpiece of debate.1 In a crucial chapter of his study, (...) Castro tackles head-on Eurocentric readings of the Libro de buen amor by arguing for its cultural hybridity, or in more extreme terms, its fixedness in the cultural prerogatives of Arabic-speaking al-Andalus. “Los métodos usados para entender la poesía románico-cristiana fallan,” he affirms in an opening salvo, “porque el Libro de Buen Amor es un reflejo castellano de modelos árabes [The methods used to comprehend Romance-Christian poetry are doomed to failure because the Libro de buen amor is a Castilian reflection of Arabic models]...” [España en su historia 355]. By relocating the author’s poetic impulse in the Arab world, Castro seeks to explain not only the Libro de buen amor’s open, “arabesque” structure—its spontaneous gliding from holy to profane, serious to comical, generic-abstract to concrete-sensible—but also the ambiguous nature of buen amor. For Castro, buen amor is the simultaneous compulsion toward spiritual transcendence and sexual fulfillment, best understood within the context of an Islamic theological system in which sexual desire is not categorically opposed to godliness.Not surprisingly, Castro’s scholarship was judged harshly by his critics as historical revisionism of the most pernicious sort, a deliberate erosion of those values and certainties that make it possible to read Spain as a full player in the march of Western civilization. Most vehement in his attack was Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, who authored the two volumes of his España: Un enigma histórico (1956) as both an explicit defense against the “magnetic seduction” [1: 9] of Castro’s prose and a reaffirmation of national consciousness. Sánchez-Albornoz’s take on the Libro de buen amor falls neatly in line with the thinly disguised nationalism of his opus as a whole. He rejects soundly Castro’s claims of cultural hybridity in favor of a Libro de buen amor located safely on this side of the cultural “abyss” between Latin Christendom and the Islamic world. What is more, he resists the queernesses that spin out of Castro’s scholarship, the threat of contamination of the national character in unspeakable ways. If Spain had been exposed to the cultural proclivities of al-Andalus, Sánchez-Albornoz argues, so too would it have been exposed to al-Andalus’s “ambiguous” notion of love, a love “que no excluía las ‘amistades particulares,’ ni la sentimental inclinación, e incluso la pasión carnal, de varón a varón [that did not exclude ‘special friendships,’ nor sentimental inclination–and even carnal passion [End Page 104] –between one man and another]” [458].2 Here Sánchez-Albornoz slams the closet door shut by constructing Spain as the bastion of straight desire and Juan Ruiz as its virtual posterboy: “En el clérigo de Hita triunfaba la robusta, natural y simplista concepción heterosexual del amor de la Castilla de su época [There triumphed in the cleric of Hita a robust, natural, uncomplicated heterosexual concept of love characteristic of the Castile of his period]” [458–59].I begin with the Castro/Sánchez-Albornoz polemic because it exposes the presence and functions of “normativity” in Libro de buen amor studies throughout much of the twentieth century. With few exceptions, readings prior to Castro’s overlooked what was odd about the Libro de buen amor in order to engage in an obsessive archaeology of sameness, a plotting of conventional values and meanings that served to render the work as familiar, if not necessarily equal to other master works of the Western canon. Félix Lecoy emerged as the doyen of this critical school, publishing in 1938 an excruciatingly detailed study of the work’s language, structure, and sources whose primary objective was... (shrink)

This book is an important introduction to the critical interpretation of the work of the major French thinker Michel Foucault. Through comprehensive and detailed analyses of such important texts as The History of Madness in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, Professor Gutting provides a lucid exposition of Foucault's 'archaeological' approach to the history of thought - a method for uncovering the 'unconscious' structures that set boundaries on the (...) thinking of a given epoch. The book also casts Foucault in a new light, relating his work to two major but neglected influences: Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science and Georges Canguilhem's history of science. This perspective yields a new and valuable understanding of science, balancing and complementing the more common view that he was primarily a social critic and theorist. An excellent guide for those first approaching Foucault's work, the book will also be a challenging interpretation and evaluation for those already familiar with his writings. (shrink)

This book provides a critical reading of Foucault's writings on the archaeology of political economy, analyzing some of Foucault's contributions to the methodology of economics, historiography of economic thought and studies on Adam Smith's context and writings. It reconstructs Foucault's archaeology, relating it to current debates in economics.

This paper defends Michel Foucault’s notion of archaeology of knowledge against the influential and putatively devastating criticism by Dreyfus and Rabinow that Foucault’s archaeological project is based on an incoherent conception of the rules of the discursive practices it purports to study. I argue first that Foucault’s considered view of these rules as simultaneously implicit and historically efficacious corresponds to a general requirement for the normative structure of a discursive practice. Then I argue that Foucault is entitled to that view (...) despite the charges to the contrary by Dreyfus and Rabinow. I also explain in detail how the argument by Dreyfus and Rabinow arises from a misunderstanding of Foucault’s archaeological project as transcendental inquiry, while archaeology of knowledge is, in fact, a diagnostic project. The result is a novel understanding of the notion of archaeology of knowledge that enables a reassessment of Foucault’s philosophical work in connection with current debates regarding the relationship between reflection and practice in the structure of thought. (shrink)

A process-based approach to archaeology combines traditional third-person data collection methods with first- and second-person inquiries. Drawing from the traditions of cognitive archaeology, transpersonal psychology, and ecopsychology, this mixed-methods approach can be thought of as a movement toward a more holistic or “integral” archaeology. By way of example, a prehistoric rock art site on Ometepe Island, Nicaragua is explored from the inside (through the researcher's lucid dreaming incubations) as well as in relationship with the researcher's embodied presence (an exploration of (...) environmental hermeneutics). These multiple perspectives can be seen to situate the researcher's worldview and biases within the context of the study as well as perhaps lead to new questions about the significance of these cognitive artifacts. (shrink)

This is a comment to Graham Harman’s 2019 response to an article by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen (2018) in which they propose that a materially grounded, archaeological perspective might complement Harman’s historical approach in Immaterialism (2016). Harman responds that his book is indeed already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology studies media with a low density of information. History, Harman holds, ends up in too much (...) detail, while archaeology has the advantage of lending itself to the imagination. Hence, his reading of history had the aim of tempering the historical information overload, in effect making the book a work of archaeology. In this comment, I want to do three things: (1) critique the idea that archaeological and historical media are inherently different with regard to their densities of information, (2) discuss how archaeology and history approach their media, and (3) reflect on conceptualisations of “archaeology” outside the discipline itself. (shrink)

The dissertation makes two principal claims. First, it offers a variation of what has recently been called the "non-metaphysical" interpretation of Hegel's philosophy. I argue that Hegel's theory as a whole is not a monistic ontology of the world-substance called "spirit." Rather, Hegel's "philosophy of spirit" is an account of "cultural formations" in the same sense as Cassirer's philosophy of culture is a theory of "symbolic forms," and Foucault's archeology is a theory of "discursive formations." The "cultural formations" in Hegel (...) include social institutions such as family and civil society, and cultural practices such as science, art, and religion. Cultural formations come into existence as products of human activity in the course of history. Hegel's philosophical theory consequently can be interpreted as a philosophy of culture. Hegel maintains that human being is essentially a cultural being and is essentially determined by its In-der-Kultur-Sein rather than simply and "abstractly" by its In-der-Welt-Sein . ;The second principal claim concerns Hegel's "dialectical" method. I argue that Hegel develops a non-essentialist, non-universalistic, and non-foundationalist philosophical method, that can still distinguish between truth and falsity, good and bad. The method, which Hegel called "speculative," can in modern philosophical terms be most properly called "phenomenological." It is phenomenological in the sense that it proceeds from the givenness of experience, and that it describes the structures of this experience. The difference between Hegel and Husserl lies in the fact that Hegel does not restrict the subject of experience exclusively to the consciousness of a single human individual. The subject of experience in Hegel can be a social group, such as family, estate, or a nation, but also a group of agents involved in a particular social practice, as for example in Hindu religion, or in Ancient Greek craftsmanship. This feature enables Hegel to widen significantly the scope of the phenomenological research and to apply it to communal, historically and culturally determined experience. (shrink)

In recent years, Brentano’s theory of consciousness has been systematically reassessed. The reconstruction that has received the most attention is the so-called identity reconstruction. It says that secondary consciousness and the mental phenomenon it is about are one and the same. Crucially, it has been claimed that this thesis is the only one which can make Brentano’s theory immune to what he considers the main threat to it, namely, the duplication of the primary object. In this paper, I argue that (...) the identity reconstruction is untenable, and I defend an alternative, which I name the unity reconstruction. According to the unity reconstruction, secondary consciousness is a real part of the mental phenomenon it is about, and hence is distinct from it. I contend that this thesis does not in itself lead to the duplication of the primary object, and that what should be blamed is rather a controversial thesis about the intentional structure of secondary consciousness—a thesis which Brentano ultimately abandoned. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies by examining Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. Although the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as an advancement upon moral and medical authority and a replacement of it by sociopolitical knowledge, I argue that the more comprehensive frame in which these models circulate—the “models framework”—requires the more nuanced approach that historical epistemology offers. In particular, the models framework requires (...) greater use of epistemology as an analytical tool for understanding the historical construction of disability. Thus, I turn to Foucault’s History of Madness in order to both excavate one particular archaeological strand in the text—the archaeology of cure—and to demonstrate how this narrative disrupts some of the key assumptions of the models framework, challenging DS to consider the epistemological force of non-medical fields of knowledge for framing disability and procedures for its cure and elimination. I conclude by arguing that DS must develop historical epistemological methodologies that are sensitive to the complex overlays of moral, medical, and social knowledge, as well as attend to the social construction of scientific and biomedical knowledge itself. (shrink)

Counselor educators can utilize the ideas of philosopher Michel Foucault in preparing preservice school counselors for their work with K?12 students in public schools. The Foucaultian ideas of governmentality, technologies of domination, received truths, power/knowledge, discontinuity, and archaeology can contribute to students' understanding of the hidden power relations in the assumptions and techniques of counseling. Because most students enter counseling programs without a background in Foucault, it falls to counselor educators to incorporate his ideas into the curriculum. This article describes (...) areas in which Foucaultian ideas can be introduced into the counseling curriculum, in particular, in the practicum courses. (shrink)

This article addresses the ways in which art and philosophy have been discursively used to conceptualize critical political changes and frame narratives of liberation by including and excluding primitive consciousness simultaneously. More concretely, it analyzes the contribution of art and philosophy to the understanding of history and post-history through different representations of black bodies, black desires, and black agencies in the novels She (1886) by Rider Haggard and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) by W. E. B. Du Bois. (...) At stake is the question of the archeology of the past as a living memory in the post-historical time. This past is politically relevant especially if its cognitive fossils negate the idea of exhausted primitive consciousness in the modern world and give meanings to incongruous bedfellows such as civilization and slavery, neoliberalism and poverty, democracy and Nazism, globalization, terrorism and racism, liberalism and homophobia. Arguably, the triumph of scientific ideas has left us with a perpetual quest for liberation rather than the actualization of liberation as a world phenomenon. I hypothesize the relation between exhaustible elements of technical consciousness simulating progress and their inexhaustible materiality at critical historical junctures as a struggle for taste and self-determination. Critical in this relation is the sense that not only primitive stages of consciousness are never fully exhausted at historical junctures, but that one never comes close to thinking about genuine liberation without engaging with real world matters both domestic/intimate and foreign. (shrink)

Modernity’s grand plans were designed far from where we stand today. The prerogative of progress as an ideological imperative that defined colonialism as a natural balance between the ‘developed’ societies’ moral duty to rescue ‘underdeveloped’ peoples from their fate of myth and superstition created education. Education that functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic and aesthetics of the status quo and to bring about conformity to the hegemonic cultural form of western (...) technological consumer capitalism. This article explores whose education and for whom was it created by the imperial ideologies, not of nineteenth- or twentieth-century colonialism but for twenty-first-century western technological consumer neo-colonialism. From South Africa’s Apartheid era Liberation before education to Paulo Freire’s practice of freedom, this article questions the practices of new technologies, art and technology education at the edge of the disenfranchised. The traditional frameworks of education are on an ideological and methodological crisis worldwide. The hegemony of knowledge has ruptured away from academia. The linearity of thought has burst open as an omni-directional array. The hierarchy of authorship is contested and the audiences are becoming users and participants. As the ubiquity of information technologies, the emergence of connectedness, cheap chips and the presage of the Internet of things permeates every aspect of a particular section of people clustered in specific cities and spread out around the globe, a unique consciousness is evolving where a new collaboration paradigm is gaining a place of balance between us, nature and our technologies, our positions on social justice, and is evolving a symbiotic outlook at other cultures and societies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Patient's Perspective:Engaging With the OtherGiovanni Stanghellini*, MD, DPhil Honoris Causa (bio)Homo homini salusOne century after the first conference gathering first-generation clinical phenomenologists in Zurich in 1922, today's psychiatry is far from exploring phenomena from the patient's perspective—that is, "letting-be" the Other, and "giving or compromising"—that is, engaging with the Other (Doerr-Zegers, 2022).The motto of phenomenology has been since its beginning "To things themselves!". Edmund Husserl—the founder of (...) phenomenology in the field of philosophy—exhorted to go back to the things themselves, that is, to render self-evident in fully fledged intuitions that what is usually given in preformed abstractions like "concepts," "judgments," "truths," and so on (Husserl, 1970).Clinical phenomenology has taken up Husserl's motto and added another: "To understand is to cure." Put together, the result is: "To cure is to understand the things themselves." But what does exactly mean "To the things themselves"? And what does it mean "to understand"? What is the use of understanding in the clinical setting? And, ultimately, what does the "cure" consist of?What Are the "Things Themselves" in PsychiatryIn the clinical setting, the "things themselves" (Stanghellini & Ikkos, in press) are the patients' own experiences, that is the patient's psychopathological world as experienced in the first person's perspective—what clinical phenomenology calls the "phenomena." Clinical phenomenology's very conception of the object of psychiatry, that is the patient's abnormal experiences lived in the first-person perspective and embedded in anomalous forms of consciousness and existential patterns, has been vastly oversimplified by current assessment procedures (Stanghellini, 2013). Today, there is a risk that clinical blinkering results in clinicians being only able to view the symptoms relevant to diagnosis and classification and excludes the scrutiny of the diverse and varied nature of what is really there in the patient's experience—the essential prerequisite to understanding his/her condition (Stanghellini & Broome, 2014). This oversimplification has been reinforced by reliance on techniques (e.g., an emphasis on behavioral symptoms and on reliability rather than validity) that are unable to capture the subtle distinctions [End Page 287] in experience that constitute the essentials of the "things themselves" in psychopathology, and to acknowledge that what the patient manifests is not a series of mutually independent, isolated symptoms, but rather certain meaning-structures of interwoven experiences, beliefs, and actions, all permeated by biographical details (Nordengaard & Parnas, 2013).The Problem of the Causes and Meanings of PhenomenaTo go to the "things themselves"—to "let them be"—we should acknowledge that to understand is neither to interpret nor to explain. It is not to interpret, i.e. to attribute a meaning, that is, to replace a manifest content, considered superficial and misleading, with a latent content, considered profound and authentic. Psychiatry as a branch of bio-medicine (as it is known) does not principally deal with meanings, but certainly not because it aims to the "things themselves." Psychiatry first and foremost deals with the causes of phenomena, that is, it tries to explain (scire per causas)—not to understand. The dream of psychiatry is to trace the causes of the symptoms to neutralize the symptoms in statu nascendi. Psychiatry is (would like to be) a science of the mechanisms leading to the formation of mental symptoms.Compared with the intentions of psychiatry, the intentions of psychological hermeneutics, which deals with revealing the meanings of phenomena, may seem a relief and progress, at least if seen from a "humanitarian" angle. The dream of psychology—or at least of certain psychology (such as that of psychoanalytic inspiration)—is to bring to light the authentic meaning of a symptom. Hermeneutic psychology, for example, a psychoanalytic one, is (would like to be) an archaeology of the symptom, unearthing its profound significance.I am not arguing against explanations and interpretations per se, rather underscoring the way these may stand in the way of engaging with the patient in a third mode of approaching clinical phenomena, that is understanding. Both psychiatry's attempts at explanation and hermeneutic psychology's attempts at interpretation may suffocate... (shrink)

Playing an irreplaceable role for the whole speedy development in East Asia, Hong Kong is an example of a multicultural cosmopolitan urban centre in the Pacific Rim with strong ties with the Atlantic. However, with regards to mainland China, Hong Kong has always held a marginal position, carrying multiple marginal labels. In recent years, Hong Kong has been struggling to move beyond its Chinese/Western identities, simultaneously searching its own native insular self. This is shown in the way contemporary intellectuals approach (...) Hong Kong’s memory. As an example, this paper looks at Dung Kai-cheung’s novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. Although Rey Chow describes the Hong Kong situation as namely, “the struggle between the dominant and the subdominant within the native culture itself”, I would like to argue that Dung Kai-Cheung does not engage in the sort of radical anti-colonial, nationalist discourse that could be read through the lens of The Empire Writes Back. Rather, he seeks a new form of anti-colonial discourse which advances a reconciliatory cosmopolitan vision of multicultural coexistence in a marginocentric city. (shrink)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with one thinker (...) in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)

Archaeology of Play proposes that play's antithesis is not seriousness, but rather one-dimensionality. It argues that the rediscovery of the Platonic-Aristotelian tripartivism lends to a more expansive appreciation of play in terms of three rhetorical registers, namely, skholé, agon, and paidia.

Resumo: Este artigo analisa a educação para a liberdade em Paulo Freire, considerando seus desafios e perspectivas em tempos de construção da resistência. Considera-se que as formulações freireanas de uma educação para a liberdade permitem a mobilização e a organização das lutas x se manifestam no contexto da crise do Capital. O artigo cumpre os seguintes objetivos na análise dos contributos de Paulo Freire: abordar sua atuação política e intelectual em favor de uma educação para a liberdade; destacar as influências (...) do pensamento social em sua formulação crítica de educação e identificar os eixos teórico-políticos de sua concepção de uma educação para a liberdade para a construção da resistência. Realizou-se uma revisão bibliográfica que se fundamentou na análise de obras de Paulo Freire, de produções que repercutem sua atuação política e intelectual e de sistematizações que se apropriam das formulações teórico-metodológicas freireanas. As referências nas contribuições de Paulo Freire guardam a educação como ato inerentemente humano, traduzindo a liberdade como fundamento ontológico do ser social, que se relaciona com os processos pedagógicos orientados pelo diálogo consciente, crítico, coletivo em favor da transformação. Palavras-chave: Paulo Freire; Educação; Liberdade. Education for freedom in Paulo Freire: challenges and perspectives in times of resistance building Summary: This article analyzes the education for freedom in Paulo Freire, considering challenges and perspectives in times of resistance building. It is considered that Freire's formulations of an education for freedom allow the mobilization and organization of the struggles of the working class, resisting the current advances of an ultraconservative, authoritarian and fascist character that are manifested in the Capital crisis. The analysis fulfills the following objectives in the analysis of Paulo Freire's contributions: to approach his political and intellectual performance in favor of an education for freedom; to highlight the influences of social thought in its critical formulation of education and to identify the theoretical and political axes of its conception of an education for freedom for the construction of resistance. A bibliographic review was carried out that was based on the analysis of Paulo Freire's works, of productions that reflect his political and intellectual performance and of systematizations that appropriate the Freirean theoretical-methodological formulations. The references in Paulo Freire's contributions keep education as an inherently human act, translating freedom as an ontological foundation of the social being, which is related to the pedagogical processes guided by conscious, critical, collective dialogue to the transformation. Keywords: Paulo Freire; Education; Freedom. Educación para la libertad en Paulo Freire: desafíos y perspectivas en tiempos de construcción de resistencias Resumen: Este artículo analiza la educación para la libertad en Paulo Freire, considerando sus desafíos y perspectivas en tiempos de construcción de resistencias. Se considera que las formulaciones de Freire permiten la movilización y organización de las luchas de la clase trabajadora, resistiendo los actuales avances de carácter ultraconservador, autoritario y fascista que se manifiestan en la crisis del Capital. El análisis cumple los siguientes objetivos: acercar la actuación política e intelectual de Paulo Freire en una educación para la libertad; destacar las influencias del pensamiento social en su formulación crítica de la educación e identificar los ejes teóricos y políticos de su concepción de una educación para la libertad para la construcción de resistencias. Se realizó una revisión bibliográfica basada en análisis de la obra de Paulo Freire, de producciones que reflejan su desempeño político e intelectual y de sistematizaciones que se apropian de las formulaciones teórico-metodológicas freireanas. Los referentes en los aportes de Paulo Freire mantienen la educación como un acto inherentemente humano, traduciendo la libertad como fundamento ontológico del ser social, que se relaciona con los procesos pedagógicos guiados por el diálogo consciente, crítico, colectivo a favor de la transformación. Palabras clave: Paulo Freire; Educación; Libertad. Data de registro: 12/03/2021 Data de aceite: 19/01/2022. (shrink)