This paper uses a declarative mapping sentence approach to explore and amend design thinking - a project development and management technique recently disseminated in Africa. We contend that there are problems in the manner in which design thinking has been exported to Africa, namely, that design thinking is rooted in the linear, binary, human-centric systems present in Western philosophy and that the exportation of design thinking is potentially neo-colonial. We, therefore, attempt to ameliorate these difficulties by decoupling design thinking from (...) its Western philosophical perspectives. We will also seek to broaden the understanding of design thinking by adopting the more communitarian perspective found in philosophy that has been developed in Africa. The amended form of design thinking we present considers the user’s existential paradigms and facilitates a flexible and reflexive process void of deliberate finality. Furthermore, we claim that amending design thinking’s philosophical foundations to incorporate a communitarian perspective has the potential to make design thinking more ecologically-centric. (shrink)

How do we think about the worlds we live in? The formation of categories of events and objects seems to be a fundamental orientation procedure. Facet theory and its main tool, the mapping sentence, deal with categories of behavior and experience, their interrelationship, and their unification as our worldviews. In this book Hackett reviews philosophical writing along with neuroscientific research and information form other disciplines to provide a context for facet theory and the qualitative developments in this approach. With a (...) variety of examples, the author proposes mapping sentences as a new way of understanding and defining complex behavior. (shrink)

This paper presents a case study in the exegesis of Buddhist tantric literature by examining a segment of the corpus of Guhyasam?ja literature and, in doing so, addresses both emic and etic approaches to the hermeneutics of tantric texts. On the most basic level, we discuss the mechanisms for interpreting statements within the root tantra internal to the exegetical tantric literature itself, as exemplified by Candrak?rti’s ‘Brightening Lamp’ commentary and the extensive sub-commentary by Bhavyak?rti. On another level, however, these same (...) exegetical moves can be viewed in terms of the ideas ‘re-use’ and reformulation of the root text, and how they shape the understanding of the role and function of tantric commentary. (shrink)

This book deals with philosophical aspects regarding the perception of spatial relationships in two and three-dimensional art. It provides a structural understanding of how art is perceived within the space created by the artwork, and employs a mapping sentence and partial order mereology to model perceptual structure. It reviews the writing of philosophers such as Paul Crowther and art theorists such as Krauss to establish the need for this research. The ontological model established Paul Crowther is used to guide an (...) interactive account of his ontology in the interpretations of the perceptual process of three-dimensional abstract art to allow the formulation of a more comprehensive philosophical account. The book uniquely combines structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to artistic perception and understanding with a conceptual structure from facet theory, which is clarified with the help of a mapping sentence and partial order mereology. (shrink)