Hisashi Nasu, Lester Embree, George Psathas, and Ilja Srubar (eds.), Alfred Schutz and His Intellectual Partners; Sandra P. Thomas and Howard R. Pollio, Listening to Patients, A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice; Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation.

The concept of lifeworld as posited by Husserl and developed by Schutz reveals key aspects of human social life. What happens when organized forces of human control tear lifeworlds apart? Gebser warned that without a transformation of consciousness humans would destroy their world. Habermas pointed out that humans were destroying lifeworlds with little awareness of the consequences due to the predominance of rational/legal thinking, thus creating “Deathworlds”. Transformative Phenomenology has become a community-of-practice that is an antidote to Deathworld-Making. Transformative phenomenology (...) includes hermeneutics, somatics and leregogic practices and phenomenologists trained in this way exhibit ten qualities of being. We offer the Rising Sun project, a phenomenologically based social innovation, as a case example. The call to maintain and restore lifeworlds is the call to oneness and peace. In the era of growing Deathworlds, we, phenomenologists, are urged to respond and contribute to this call. (shrink)

This study presents original evidence that abstract and concrete concepts are organized and represented differently in the mind, based on analyses of thousands of concepts in publicly available data sets and computational resources. First, we show that abstract and concrete concepts have differing patterns of association with other concepts. Second, we test recent hypotheses that abstract concepts are organized according to association, whereas concrete concepts are organized according to (semantic) similarity. Third, we present evidence suggesting that concrete representations are more (...) strongly feature-based than abstract concepts. We argue that degree of feature-based structure may fundamentally determine concreteness, and we discuss implications for cognitive and computational models of meaning. (shrink)

Hisashi Nasu, Lester Embree, George Psathas, and Ilja Srubar (eds.), Alfred Schutz and His Intellectual Partners; Sandra P. Thomas and Howard R. Pollio, Listening to Patients, A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice; Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation.

This paper is a reflection on the boundaries of academic discourse as I came to be acutely aware of them while attempting to teach a graduate seminar in qualitative research methods. The purpose of the readings in Husserl and Schutz and the writing exercises was to assist students trained in quantitative methods and steeped in positivistic assumptions about research to write phenomenological descriptions of lived experience. Paul could not write the assigned papers due to a diagnosed writing disability but he (...) did submit fictional stories and sketches which beautifully illustrated the concepts of Husserl and Schutz. Paul's disability presented a natural bracketing experiment which brought the positivistic assumptions surrounding academic research and writing to the forefront. I engaged in verbal dialogues with Paul, in which he discussed the philosophical ideas. My work with Paul highlighted the extent to which the academic lifeworld marginalizes those who seek to write from the heart, disguising even the work of those philosophers who wish to uncover direct experiences.The crisis of the sciences is the loss of meaning for life. (Husserl, 1970: 5). (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Background In the wake of mandates for biomedical research to increase participation by members of historically underrepresented populations, community engagement (CE) has emerged as a key intervention to help achieve this goal.Methods Using interviews, observations, and document analysis, we examine how stakeholders in precision medicine research understand and seek to put into practice ideas about who to engage, how engagement should be conducted, and what engagement is for.Results We find that ad hoc, opportunistic, and instrumental approaches to CE exacted significant (...) consequences for the time and resources devoted to engagement and the ultimate impacts it has on research. Critical differences emerged when engagement and research decisionmaking were integrated with each other versus occurring in parallel, separate parts of the study organization, and whether community members had the ability to determine which issues would be brought to them for consideration or to revise or even veto proposals made upstream based on criteria that mattered to them. CE was understood to have a range of purposes, from instrumentally facilitating recruitment and data collection, to advancing community priorities and concerns, to furthering long-term investments in relationships with and changes in communities. These choices about who to engage, what engagement activities to support, how to solicit and integrate community input into the workflow of the study, and what CE was for were often conditioned upon preexisting perceptions and upstream decisions about study goals, competing priorities, and resource availability.Conclusions Upstream choices about CE and constraints of time and resources cascade into tradeoffs that often culminated in “pantomime community engagement.” This approach can create downstream costs when engagement is experienced as improvised and sporadic. Transformations are needed for CE to be seen as a necessary scientific investment and part of the scientific process. (shrink)

The fourteen authors in this collection used phenomenology and hermeneutics to conduct deep inquiry into perplexing and wondrous events in their work and personal lives. These seasoned scholar-practitioners gained remarkable insight into areas such as health care and illness, organ donation, intercultural communications, high-performance teams, artistic production, jazz improvisation, and the integration of Tai Chi into education. All authors were transformed by phenomenology's expanded ways of seeing and being.

Este ensaio tem como objetivo problematizar o papel da internet como agente de difusão de informação, ferramenta produtora de conhecimento e cultura. Os processos participativos em rede, as comunidades virtuais, colocam em evidência as tensões entre um antigo modelo calcado em estruturas de poderes centralizados, e a emergência de uma ordem dispersiva e fragmentária na dinâmica social. É nesse contexto que surgem as polêmicas em torno do Marco Civil da Internet, nosso objeto de estudo. A instauração do Marco Civil, deu (...) lugar à concepção e busca de regulação da internet como patrimônio coletivo. Nosso objetivo é analisar o Marco Civil, no quadro das politicas de promoção do acesso à internet, através de um diálogo entre comunicação, ética e filosofia, questionando seus princípios fundamentais quanto ao pluralismo e a diversidade cultural, a fim de produzir uma reflexão fundamentada sobre os eixos reguladores deste projeto de Lei. (shrink)

Earlier algebraic semantics for Belnapian modal logics were defined in terms of twist-structures over modal algebras. In this paper we introduce the class of BK -lattices, show that this class coincides with the abstract closure of the class of twist-structures, and it forms a variety. We prove that the lattice of subvarieties of the variety of BK -lattices is dually isomorphic to the lattice of extensions of Belnapian modal logic BK . Finally, we describe invariants determining a twist-structure over a (...) modal algebra. (shrink)

This translation of the central books of the Metaphysics aims at no literary value, only literalness.

The purpose of this brief study is to ascertain Peter Lombard's understanding of what the Christian doctrine of creation means and his judgment about whether pagan philosophers were able to reach this doctrine through the light of natural reason. Lombard's views on creation set the foundation for thirteenth-century discussions of creation, since all the scholastic masters of Oxford and Paris commented on Lombard's 'Sentences' and thus recorded their agreement or disagreement with him. Lombard's views are of especial importance for understanding (...) Aquinas's teaching on creation, since Aquinas's first detailed discussion of creation takes place in his Sentences Commentary, bk II, d. 1, q. 1, in which he forcefully presents the essence of creation as demonstrable through philosophy, though knowable more perfectly through faith, and reinterprets the essential meaning of creation using Avicenna's metaphysics. My study thus complements the studies of Timothy Noone, Stephen Baldner, William Carroll, Mark Johnson, John F. Wippel, and Lawrence Dewan on how Aquinas's understanding of creation and of whether Plato and Aristotle taught the doctrine of creation differs from that of the immediate Latin scholastic tradition, though I will not be able to show here how Aquinas adapts some of Lombard's ideas and suggestions even as he moves quite far beyond them in metaphysical sophistication. Additionally, the medieval reception of Plato and Aristotle will be touched upon. (shrink)

Aquinas’s theology, as presented in his Scriptum, is “scientific” in the Aristotelian sense of this term. Some of its arguments for conclusions are based on theology’s “proper” principles—the articles of faith—but many others are purely rational demonstrations. As the basis for his rational arguments in theology, and in particular his treatment of the divine essence in d. 8, he introduces philosophical principles, and offers dialectical arguments for them, which are thoroughly Avicennian. In order to understand Aquinas’s commentary on d. 8, (...) then, it is not just helpful but necessary to see how he makes use of doctrines coming from the Metaphysics of Avicenna’s Book of Healing. So we look first at Aquinas’s source texts in Avicenna, and then at how he makes use of them in his commentary on the Sentences, Bk. 1, d. 8. (shrink)

Aquinas’s theology, as presented in his Scriptum, is “scientific” in the Aristotelian sense of this term. Some of its arguments for conclusions are based on theology’s “proper” principles—the articles of faith—but many others are purely rational demonstrations. As the basis for his rational arguments in theology, and in particular his treatment of the divine essence in d. 8, he introduces philosophical principles, and offers dialectical arguments for them, which are thoroughly Avicennian. In order to understand Aquinas’s commentary on d. 8, (...) then, it is not just helpful but necessary to see how he makes use of doctrines coming from the Metaphysics of Avicenna’s Book of Healing. So we look first at Aquinas’s source texts in Avicenna, and then at how he makes use of them in his commentary on the Sentences, Bk. 1, d. 8. (shrink)

Aquinas’s theology, as presented in his Scriptum, is “scientific” in the Aristotelian sense of this term. Some of its arguments for conclusions are based on theology’s “proper” principles—the articles of faith—but many others are purely rational demonstrations. As the basis for his rational arguments in theology, and in particular his treatment of the divine essence in d. 8, he introduces philosophical principles, and offers dialectical arguments for them, which are thoroughly Avicennian. In order to understand Aquinas’s commentary on d. 8, (...) then, it is not just helpful but necessary to see how he makes use of doctrines coming from the Metaphysics of Avicenna’s Book of Healing. So we look first at Aquinas’s source texts in Avicenna, and then at how he makes use of them in his commentary on the Sentences, Bk. 1, d. 8. (shrink)

Durand of Saint-Pourçain's earliest treatment of cognitive habits is contained in his Sentences Commentary, Book 3, Distinction 23. In the first two questions, he discusses the ontological status of habits and their causal role, establishing his own unique view alongside the views of Godfrey of Fontaines and Hervaeus Natalis. What follows is the Latin text and an English translation of Durand's Sentences (A/B) III, d. 23, qq. 1-2.

It is shown that the 33 complex rays in three dimensions used by Penrose to prove the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem have the same orthogonality relations as the 33 real rays of Peres, and therefore provide an isomorphic proof of the theorem. It is further shown that the Peres and Penrose rays are just two members of a continuous three-parameter family of unitarily inequivalent rays that prove the theorem.