Among the main concepts of Michel Henry’s work, it was mostly the immanence concept that has brought more controversy and was Jess understood. It was determinant to Material Phenomenology, due to its radical innovation and it represents the key of its interpretation. To disclose this concept against its opponents means to become aware of the principle of transcendence - not discussed by Husserl and Heidegger - and to legitimate the objective knowledge, science and, at the same time, to oppose to (...) the positivism. However, the main problem here is the inter-subjectivity. Instead of enclosure ego immanence, it enables relationships with others by creating the idea of «inter-immanence». The invisible itself is considered as a fundamental passivity of human subjectivity and of its essential pathos. Thus, the immanence concept is nothing else but self-affection. (shrink)

This article sets out to propose some characteristic features of the intellectual and ethical attitudes which, in the popular belief and scholarly communities alike, stand for ideals worthy of promoting as ones which could underpin a modern society where both believers and unbelievers can feel at home. The “ethos” is construed to be about the sort of behaviour logically stemming from a tolerant outlook on the one hand, and an intellectual commitment to a noble cause worthy of one’s efforts, on (...) the other. (shrink)

The essay examines the Underground Man's ambivalent position in Dostoevskij's hierarchy of values in light of the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment To elucidate the problem of free will in Notes from Underground, I propose to supplement Nietzsche's theory with the concept of ressentiment as developed by Max Scheler, whose endorsement of Christian love as a means of overcoming ressentiment suggests an affinity with Dostoevskij's own deeply religious worldview. With the help of Schelerian phenomenology, I read the novel as an early (...) statement of the problem of Christian freedom in Dostoevskij's oeuvre. Like the "Pro and Contra" section of The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground turns our attention to the "costs" of the Christian ideal: in a world exposed to the ultimate horizon of desire through Christ, those lacking the serenity of faith may be doomed to the merciless torment of ressentiment. (shrink)

This probing study of melancholy invites readers to view "depression" genealogically through the history of its interpretation. It plumbs interior depths where psychology, theology, philosophy, and literary creation intersect. Therapies proposed for the dark mood have included work, prayer, care of the self, and deepening awareness of its indispensable role in the development of consciousness of oneself and God. Reflecting on these historical responses and cures can prompt a personal exploration, making this a practical manual for self-knowing and self-transcending, a (...) philosophical "guide for the depressed.". (shrink)

The aim of this study is twofold. Firstly, it intends to highlight the value of constructivist insights for religious studies by showing that various forms of approach to issues related to religion are mere constructs. In contrast to this viewpoint, the discipline of religious studies had traditionally sought a higher degree of objectivity in the scientific reflection of religious topics, but that has been a fraught path. Secondly, the example it refers to is worthy in itself. The reception of Judaism (...) in contemporary China is not only an under-investigated topic endowed with a great potential to reveal to what extent the Chinese ordinary man as well as the academic succeed to understand Western thought and to differentiate among the varied cultural traditions generally subsumed by them under the notion Western, but it also shows that the constructivist approaches preserve their validity in non-European contexts as well. Judaism’s reception in contemporary China will be pursued on four different levels: popular literature, fake books, articles in the Christian Chinese media and academic productions. The four categories of texts represent four different degrees of comprehension of the object of study, primarily offering information about the worldviews of the authors of the texts. The process of reception of thought is regarded as a form of encounter where the active part is striving to get out of its own mindset and move towards the other. (shrink)

The present study starts from the discovery that reincarnationist ideas have spread massively throughout European and Western thought in general, in a framework where the belief in one life was defining. However, the quandary between the two afterlife interpretations in contemporary Western culture is distinct from similar conflicts in other times or places because post-Christian critique of the Christian tradition shapes how reincarnation theory is understood in the West today. Therefore, the present study shifts the debate from the realm of (...) scientific and philosophical arguments to that of human needs and their cultural overtones. Contemporary reincarnationist theories circulating in the West are re-read through the grid of cultural criticism aimed at the shortcomings of one’s own tradition. As a next step, it is shown that only one of the forms that have developed within the Western tradition is the target of this criticism. The plurality of Christian eschatologies is yet unknown to most contemporary Westerners. This article is a plea for knowledge and contextualisation, which are prerequisites for navigating the ideational universe. Contribution: This article addresses the dilemma between reincarnation and one-life theories as perceived by the contemporary Western mind and deciphers it in the light of human needs and contextual cultural criticism, while also pointing to the internal plurality of the Christian tradition that remains largely unknown to those involved in the debate. (shrink)

Au moment où des tentatives parcellaires se font jour au sein de l'intelligentsia occidentale pour débusquer les traces du totalitarisme sous toutes ses formes, on ne se doute peut-être pas qu'un philosophe français - l'auteur de L'Essence de la Manifestation-élabore depuis vingt ans déjà une philosophie de l'individu et qu'il apporte les principes d'une critique rigoureuse de l'entité collective. En consacrant un ouvrage à la philosophie de Michel Henry, G. Dufour-Kowalska a songé à ce qui sans doute manque le (...) plus à la pensée contemporaine: un enracinement métaphysique de la critique des idéologies et une philosophie de la réalité humaine que l'essor de ces idéologies a fini par oblitérer. Une philosophie de la vie et de la praxis est la "répétition" au sens heidéggerien, mais aussi la découverte éblouie d'une philosophie réaliste, sans doute unique en notre temps, d'une ontologie de l'homme, pour laquelle la Pensée, le Savoir, le Monde des Idées, sont toujours l'apparence et qui voudrait saisir derrière ces expressions relatives et précaires de la vie humaine la force tranquille d'un absolu qui est cette vie elle-même. La contribution propre de, la pensée de M. Henry à la philosophie en général, écrit l'auteur dans sa conclusion, réside dans ce retour qu'elle accomplit au pays déserté de la métaphysique, dans cette obstination qu'elle manifeste pour arracher à l'oubli et à l'indifférence, comme le faisaient inlassablement les Anciens, le domaine de l'invisible, la face cachée du monde. (shrink)

Through her reading of Euripides'Bacchae, Colridge's "Christabel," de Sade'sPhilosophy in the Bedroom, and Hitchcock'sPsycho author Alina M. Luna finds precedent for a destructive impulse lurking beneath the maternal gaze.

Positive Psychological Coaching is receiving increasing attention within the organizational field because of its potential benefits for employees’ development and well-being. The main aim of this study was to test the impact of a Positive Psychological Micro-Coaching program on non-executive workers’ psychological capital, and analyze how goal-related self-efficacy predicts goal attainment during the coaching process. Following a control trial design, 60 non-executive employees from an automotive industry company participated in a Positive Psychological Micro-Coaching program over a period of 5 weeks. (...) The intervention was grounded in the strengths-based approach and focused on setting a specific goal for personal and professional growth. The program consisted of a group session, three individual coaching sessions, and individual inter-session monitoring. Pre, post, and 4-month follow up measurements were taken to assess the impact on the study variables. Our results reveal that psychological capital increased significantly at post and follow-up times compared to baseline levels. In addition, results confirmed that goal-related self-efficacy predicted goal attainment during the micro-coaching process. Practical implications suggest that short-term positive psychological coaching is a valuable method for developing personal resources, such as psychological capital and to facilitate the goal achievement in non-executive employees, in order to reach work-related goals. (shrink)

_Nauman Faizi’s _God, Science, and the Self (2021)_ is a powerful and philosophically robust exploration of Muhammad Iqbal’s masterpiece _Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam_. In this book, Faizi’s reading of Iqbal takes an analytic approach. He argues that Iqbal uses two distinct epistemic tendencies, which he terms “Representational” and “Pragmatic.” In tracing these tendencies, Faizi posits that Iqbal’s pragmatic tendency serves as a correction for his representational tendency, that the presence of both tendencies causes confusions in Iqbal’s work, and (...) that these are understandable and expected markers of Iqbal writing within epistemological conflict. Faizi’s analytical approach helps explicate Iqbal’s arguments but appears to be in tension with _Reconstruction’s_ non-analytical methodology. _. (shrink)

Focusing on the controversial birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin, this article explores how debates about the safety of these drugs have materialized in risk evaluations and the management of technological risk. Drawing on in-depth interviews with stakeholders and content analysis of legal, medical, and regulatory documents, I highlight how professional contraceptive risk assessment is characterized by systemic uncertainty and doubt, resulting in increased responsibility for users themselves to manage the drugs’ potentially increased risks of venous thromboembolism. The analysis centers (...) on three key areas in the assessment process that denote disagreement: risk measurement in postmarket surveillance data, the distinctiveness of the drugs’ benefits when compared to other contraceptive technologies, and the weighing of the risks and benefits against each other. While professionals negotiate uncertainty both in epidemiological research and in clinical practice, users are constructed as agents who should manage risk individually. Such processes are underlined by a diffusion of responsibility in the systemic management of contraceptive risk. This article suggests, more broadly, that medical technologies can be conceptualized as artifacts that are instrumental in the dispersion of risks. (shrink)

The article elaborates on an interactive approach to language learning applied in an online EFL classroom. It presents a new insight into implementing interactive methods to develop students’ communicative competence. In conditions of world integration, the formation of communicative and life skills is indispensable. Eventually, such an approach to English language learning in distance mode is the most accessible way for teacher-learner interaction to acquire general linguistic expertise and upgrade specific language skills. The study results show that an interactive approach (...) facilitates live communication in online EFL settings, enhances learners’ motivation and autonomy, and fosters quick decision-making reactions. Modern computer technologies offer boundless opportunities for interactive methods application in the online foreign language learning context. A skillful instructor is called to masterly plan computer-mediated classroom activities, creating space to realize each student’s cognitive and communicative potential fully. Students learn to debate, substantiate their viewpoints, brainstorm ideas, do projects, work individually or collaborate in comfortable learning settings. (shrink)

"For both Gadamer’s project of a philosophical hermeneutics as for Heidegger’s early understanding of facticity (Faktizität) as practical knowledge, the problem of application is central and is always linked to the specific conditions under which an individual decides to act within a community. Both also agree on the fact that the sciences of man do involve more than the epistemic subject, this is why the context i.e. the phenomenological concept of ‘world’ becomes part of the understanding process, one that cannot (...) be ignored or transformed into an abstract matter. Understanding is therefore also in a specific way ‘historical’, as the application is dictated by momentary circumstances in life situations, which come before any use of theoretical knowledge and thus do not represent an appendix to theory. While Gadamer continuously insisted on the idea of a practical knowledge (Wissen) that surpasses the separations between theory and praxis, sophia and phronesis, Heidegger radicalized the idea of active thinking as an experience of language in connection to an essential ‘perception’ of Being itself, that goes beyond any subjectivity. The term by which he often characterizes this essential thinking (wesentliches Denken) is Vernehmen: a kind of receptive thinking. This conception of receptive thinking, as some conversations around the Zollikon Seminars and Le Thor/Zähringen will briefly show, lead Heidegger also to some interesting considerations on the human body. Keywords: practical knowledge, historicity, life, body, Vernehmen, phenomenological hermeneutics, world. ". (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss new approaches to investigating increasingly influential, yet under-researched, theoretical assumptions regarding the role dialogic interaction plays in cognitive development. I will present a psychological theory that refines social learning models by integrating them with schema-theoreticperspectives. I will then review Philosophy for Children pedagogy, demonstrating how it can provide a useful context for conducting empirical studies of learning theories that emphasize the use of dialogue for promoting individual argumentation development. Next, I will describe a research (...) design and data-analytic tools used to examine the educational potential of engagement in a philosophical dialogue for the development of argumentation. Finally, I will present preliminary results of a study evaluating the connections between 1) specific features of group interactions experienced by elementary school students and 2) individual student performance on multiple measures of argumentation. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to determine the relationship between the economic well-being of countries and their openness to external markets. The scientific novelty consists in the comparison of two groups of countries with different characteristics and identifying specific patterns of the impact of selected macroeconomic factors on GDP. The article presents an econometric analysis and contains regression equations for each state. Interpretation of the coefficients of the derived models makes it possible to estimate changes in GDP with the (...) change of indicators. As a result, it was revealed that export is the most stable and strongly influencing the economy of all countries macroeconomic factor, and the strength of influence depends on the level of development of the country. The stability of GDP in developing countries is largely achieved through the regulation of internal factors, and in developed countries through exports regulation. (shrink)

A performance appraisal system forms an integral part of any developed management concept. The efficiency of such an appraisal system is fostered in institutions which prioritise quality and continuous improvement, and where innovationfriendly actions are joined by those that build confidence. An efficient appraisal system is characterised as follows: it is systemic in character, regular, universal, flexible, concrete, transparent and simple in application. When implementing a modern appraisal system, care should be taken to adhere to ethically sound principles such as (...) fairness, objectivity, goodness and truthfulness. (shrink)

Gaze following is the ability to use others’ gaze to obtain information about the environment. As such, it may be highly adaptive in a variety of socio-ecological contexts, and thus be widespread across animal taxa. To date, gaze following has been mostly studied in primates, and partially in birds, but little is known on the gaze following abilities of other taxa and, especially, on the evolutionary pressures that led to their emergence. In this study, we used an experimental approach to (...) test gaze following skills in a still understudied taxon, ungulates. Across four species, we assessed the individual ability to spontaneously follow the gaze of both conspecifics and human experimenters in different conditions. In line with our predictions, species followed the model’s gaze both with human and conspecific models, but more likely with the latter. Except for guanacos, all species showed gaze following significantly more in the experimental conditions. Despite the relative low number of study subjects, our study provides the first experimental evidence of gaze following skills in non-domesticated ungulates, and contributes to understanding how gaze following skills are distributed in another taxon—an essential endeavor to identify the evolutionary pressures leading to the emergence of gaze following skills across taxa. (shrink)

We focus on the thesis that action understanding is a function of the mirror neuron system. According to our opinion, understanding is a process that runs through hermeneutic circles from the “Vorverständnis” (“previous understanding”) to steps of deeper understanding. Our critique relates to the narrow neuroscientific definition of action understanding as the capacity to recognize several movements as belonging to one action. After a reconstruction of the model's developments, we will challenge the claims of the model by Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (...) (2010). By analyzing the relation between the experimental results and its interpretation, we will conclude that there is no proof that mirror neuron activity leads to action understanding. (shrink)

Despite changeability of the world, the human mind also ponders on those quantities that remain constant over time. This was the case in ancient times, in the middle ages, and the same applies in modern physics. This paper discusses i.a. Zenon paradoxes, the principle of inertia, and the Emma Noether theorem, ending with the modern, so-called Zeno’s quantum effect. The foot-notes concern the ancient “Achilles” paradox, spot speed, as well as some of the facts taken out of the life-history of (...) Emma Noether, as well as the example of applying her theorem. (shrink)

Despite changeability of the world, the human mind also ponders on those quantities that remain constant over time. This was the case in ancient times, in the middle ages, and the same applies in modern physics. This paper discusses i.a. Zenon paradoxes, the principle of inertia, and the Emma Noether theorem, ending with the modern, so-called Zeno’s quantum effect. The foot-notes concern the ancient “Achilles” paradox, spot speed, as well as some of the facts taken out of the life-history of (...) Emma Noether, as well as the example of applying her theorem. (shrink)

The present study deals with the encounter with modernity in two neighbouring religious spaces: Christian Orthodoxy and Islam. Relying on Eisenstadt’s theory about multiple modernities and on its further developments by Thomas Mergel and Kristina Stoeckl, Islamic and Christian-Orthodox dynamics in relation to the challenges of modernity are examined under two aspects: first, the decoupling between religion and culture as elaborated by Olivier Roy, and second, the development of modernist and fundamentalist currents as phenomena of modernity. The study contributes to (...) the sketching of the profile of Islamic and the Christian-Orthodox modernities, pointing both to some of the commonalities and the differences, and inquiring the nature of their distinctiveness. Further on, it contributes to the theoretic discussion on modernity and its various, contextually shaped forms, shedding new light on the relation between the trigger of social changes and their processual character.Contribution: Inside the Christian Orthodox and the Islamic religious space the decoupling between religion and culture and the development of modernist and fundamentalist currents are analysed as markers of the second modernity that arises from the encounter of the worlds mentioned with the challenges of the first modernity. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to study the demographic situation in the Russian Federation using a system of general and particular statistical indicators, to identify the problems of socio-economic policy and suggest possible ways to solve them. The article examines various factors that influenced the demographic situation in Russia in 2000-2021; demographic problems, the consequences of which affect the socio-economic life of Russian society; the demographic situation that has arisen due to the epidemiological situation in our country. The scientific (...) novelty of the research consists in considering the influence of various factors, including pandemics, on the demographic processes in the Russian Federation. As a result of the study, possible measures were proposed to improve the socio-economic policy of the state. (shrink)

This paper explores environmental protection policies and initiatives, such as conservation, through the lens of an orientalist epistemic injustice. This is a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when the orientalizing of space and access to sovereign systems of knowledge causes the assigning of an unjust deflated or elevated level of credibility to a knower. Under this framework of orientalist epistemic injustice, the author criticizes the credibility excess assigned to Western subjects that perform conservation efforts in third-world countries and the (...) related credibility deficit assigned to indigenous and local knowledge and conservation practices. (shrink)

This introductory paper analyzes the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant sects, which form the core of the Ecumenical movement. The development of the feminine problem in the ecumenical movement took shape in 1948, at the first Conference of the E.C.C., when Sarah Chakko presented a report on the place and role of women in church. Among the most important women’s achievements we must mention: The International Day of Prayer, the creation of the Department on Cooperation of Men and Women in Church (...) and Society (1954), and The Ecumenical Decade for Churches in Solidarity with Women (1988- 1998). Beyond the dogmatic and theological differences between the three sects and between the places that they assign to women, women’s contribution to the development of the Ecumenic Movement is increasing. (shrink)

Physical Education (PE) aims to convey the joy of exercise and by this educate students to lifelong physical activeness. Student motivation in PE decreases during the school career. This study therefore comprehensively analyzes student characteristics determining motivation in PE:General Personality Traits, Physical Self-Concept, Achievement Motive, Motives to be physically active, andSports Interest. This contribution aims to describe students' prerequisites in the PE context by using an aggregated assessment of the abovementioned general plus sport specific characteristics and to detect gender, class, (...) and school type differences. In total, 1,740 German secondary school students (58.1% female, M = 14.39 years) participate in a cross-sectional questionnaire survey. Descriptive analyses and between subjects MANOVAs followed by univariate ANOVAs with pairwise multiple comparison tests are applied. Gender explains the largest proportion of variance across all characteristics. Regarding individual dimensions, genders differed on 12, grades on two and school types on 11 out of 19 dimensions. PE teachers must adapt teaching to different gender dispositions. In general, group differences ascribe special meaning to student perception and teaching behavior. Findings are discussed in terms of their contribution to the research area and their implementation in teaching practice as well as in PE teacher education or professional training, e.g., aligned teaching methods, arranged learning atmospheres, or adjusted content design of PE lessons. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to consider the concept of the happiness. The text refers to several literary examples of the happiness and characterizes “the spectacles of the happiness”. It shows (in the context of Blanchot’s words) manifold destructive practices associated with the happiness with reference to everyday life. The paper compares the life to the structure of the spectacle and analyses “the spectacles of the happiness” in the context of Goffman’s theory (scene and wings, shown and hidden activities). (...) The article expresses criticism of the vision of life based on the spectacular happiness. (shrink)