John V. Taylor was a missionary statesman, ecumenist, Africanist, onetime General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and later Anglican Bishop of Winchester. His work offers a theology and practice of Christian mission which is faithful to scripture while fully facing the facts of the contemporary world at the beginning of the third millennium. Does Christian evangelism promote sectarianism and violence, or can it contribute to harmony and peace in the global village? Can Christians extol the true significance of Jesus (...) Christ without demeaning others? Who is God and how does God's nature shape ours? This book tackles these and other vital issues by giving the first major account of the life and thought of one of the 20th century's greatest religious thinkers. Here is an example and tutor to any thoughtful Christian. Consistently incarnational and sacramental in his approach, Taylor seeks to live out the truths he discovers in his daily ministry as poet, priest and prophet - inviting those around him to share the way of Christ. Taylor is also author of major works such as "The Go-Between God", his book on the Holy Spirit, and "The Christlike God", where he outlines the distinctive Christian insight into God as the patient, generous, self-sacrificing love we see in Jesus. (shrink)

Bergson's views on communication can be deduced from his theory of selfhood, in which he identifies the human self as heterogeneous duration a complex process that can only be adequately understood from within, when we intuit our own inner life. Another person, accessing us from outside, inevitably distorts and misunderstands our nature because duration is incommunicable. Does Bergsonism assert the failure of communication in principle? No, if we develop Bergson's theory further and identify the process of communication as heterogeneous duration. (...) As such, it is intuited from within by its participants who engage with each other in the process of dealing with the same object. They intuit the process of which they are part and thus intuit each other's involvement in it as well. To appreciate the importance of this implicit mutual communicative engagement we only need to imagine an empty airport with just one passenger or a deserted pleasure beach.Bergson does not have a theory of communication per se but his views on communication can be extracted from his ontology and epistemology. These views may account for some apparent failures of communication conflicts, loneliness, hostility and Bergson uses them to suggest a way out towards better and more harmonious intersubjective relations.Bergson claims that we misunderstand reality in general and each other in particular. Instead of trying to grasp human nature directly in intuition we analyse its being and create a distorted view of one another. If we were able to conceive the human self as it is, we would see it as duration and might be able to reach the state of an open society where people's love towards one another is ontologically backed up by their openness towards each other's being.However, the Bergsonian theory of duration and intuition, promising to resolve the difficulties of communication, reasserts these difficulties metaphysically. The idea of duration entails the impossibility of accessing it from outside, as the genuine view of it is only possible from within. This paper, instead of trying to salvage a model of communication where people strive to intuit each other's uniqueness, locates intuition in the very act of communication. Bergson himself finds intuition in artistic creation where the artist and spectators communicate by intuiting a common object without learning any personal details about each other. We find that communication is itself duration and that the communicating participants are heterogeneous elements of that duration. As such they are subservient to the act of communication that displays features of autonomous existence. Our model of communication, although accepting the impenetrability of one's person for a complete cognitive penetration from outside, allows for the partial fusion of minds engaged in the same act of communication and negotiating the same subject matter. (shrink)

Reality is fundamentally unitary, on the hypothesis under consideration, but the is of this assertion expresses a contingent fact. The necessity expressed in the metaphysical formulation does not refer to reality in itself but rather to the relation between reality and truth. Metaphysical truth is necessary truth in the sense that it relates of necessity to the real. It is necessary with respect to the real; it states what reality is but not what it must be. Thus the question whether (...) reality is one or many is a legitimate metaphysical question and if a true answer can be given it is true necessarily. But it is not necessarily true. For metaphysics does not attempt to establish the ontological necessity of reality. In other words, it may be a necessary truth of metaphysics that reality is both one and many and, yet, an open ontological question whether or not it must be so. (shrink)

The everyday concept of a social group is approached by examining the concept of going for a walk together, an example of doing something together, or "shared action". Two analyses requiring shared personal goals are rejected, since they fail to explain how people walking together have obligations and rights to appropriate behavior, and corresponding rights of rebuke. An alternative account is proposed: those who walk together must constitute the "plural subject" of a goal. The nature of plural subjecthood, the thesis (...) that social groups are plural subjects, and the relation of these ideas to Rousseau's and Hobbes 's, are briefly explored. (shrink)

The internet provides us with a multitude of ways of interacting with one another. In discussions about how technological innovations impact and shape our interpersonal interactions, there is a tendency to assume that encountering people online is essentially different to encountering people offline. Yet, individuals report feeling a sense of togetherness with one another online that echoes offline descriptions. I consider how we can understand people’s experiences of being together with others online, at least in certain instances, as arising (...) out of their feeling together as a we. Using Walther’s phenomenological framework of communality, I explore whether the following might take place online: habitual communal experiences and actual we-experiences. While neither of these sketches amount to a full account of how we find ourselves with others online, I suggest that they reveal how insights from the phenomenology of sociality can be used to deepen our understanding of online communality. What is more, I suggest that the strength of this approach is that in some cases it allows us to circumvent tricky questions about embodiment online and, in others, prompts us to ask to what extent a fully-embodied interaction is really required for we-experiences. (shrink)

The situation caused by the 2019 coronavirus disease has been representing a great source of concern and a challenge to the psychological well-being of many individuals around the world. For couples in particular, this extraordinary rise in concern, combined with the stress posed by the virus containment measures, such as prolonged cohabitation and lack of support networks, may have increased the likelihood of couple problems. At the same time, however, COVID-19 concerns may have been a stimulus to activate couples’ stress (...) management processes. A couple’s resource, which may have an important role in dealing with COVID-19 concerns and stress, is dyadic coping, i.e., the process through which partners face stress together. Drawing on a sample of 1,823 Italian individuals involved in a couple relationship, the current study tested a serial mediation model in which concerns about COVID-19 predicted psychological well-being, through both explicit stress communication and perceived partner dyadic coping responses. In addition, the study explored whether this dyadic coping process functioned the same way in satisfied and dissatisfied couples. Results showed that concerns about the situation related to COVID-19 significantly threatened individuals’ psychological well-being. However, these concerns positively predicted explicit stress communication, which in turn positively predicted perceived partner’s dyadic coping responses, which finally positively predicted psychological well-being. In addition, in the group of dissatisfied individuals, the association between explicit stress communication and perceived partners’ dyadic coping responses was not significant. The present study adds to the research on couples’ coping by testing for the first time the whole theoretical model of dyadic coping and does so during a global emergency situation. The study also suggests key components of preventive interventions for individuals in couples. (shrink)

Living with people who differ—racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically—is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it. Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather (...) than debate. In _Together_ he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature. (shrink)

Conflicts between morality and prudence are often thought to pose a special problem because the normativity of moral considerations derives from a distinctively moral point of view, while the normativity of prudential considerations derives from a distinctively prudential point of view, and there is no way to ‘put together’ the two points of view. I argue that talk of points of view is a red herring, and that for any ‘prumoral’ conflict there is some or other more comprehensive value – (...) often nameless – that accounts for the relative normative weight of conflicting moral and prudential considerations. The rational resolution of conflict is possible only in virtue of a more comprehensive value that includes the conflicting moral and prudential considerations as parts. (shrink)

This book examines the human ability to participate in moments of joint feeling. It presents an answer to the question concerning the nature of our faculty to share in what might be called episodes of collective affective intentionality. The proposal develops the claim that our capacity to participate in such episodes is grounded in an ability central to our human condition: our capacity to care with one another about certain things. The author provides a phenomenologically adequate account of collective affective (...) intentionality that takes seriously the idea that feelings are at the core of our emotional relation to the world. He details a form of group emotional orientation that relies on the fact that the participating individuals have come to share a number of concerns. Readers will learn that at the heart of a collective affective intentional episode, one does not merely find a set of shared concerns, but also a particular mode of caring. In the end, the argument presented in this monograph makes plausible the idea that the emotions through which humans participate in moments of affective intentional community express our nature. In addition, it shows that the debate on collective affective intentionality also permits us to better understand the relationship between two conflicting philosophical pictures of ourselves: the idea that we are essentially social beings and the claim that we are creatures for whom our personal existence is an issue. Thus, aiming at an elucidation of the nature of our ability to feel together, the book offers a detailed account of what it is to situationally express our human nature by caring about something in a properly joint manner. (shrink)

Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's (...) reasons. -/- In *Fitting Things Together*, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics. -/- Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon. (shrink)

A set of hypotheses is formulated for a connectionist approach to cognitive modeling. These hypotheses are shown to be incompatible with the hypotheses underlying traditional cognitive models. The connectionist models considered are massively parallel numerical computational systems that are a kind of continuous dynamical system. The numerical variables in the system correspond semantically to fine-grained features below the level of the concepts consciously used to describe the task domain. The level of analysis is intermediate between those of symbolic cognitive models (...) and neural models. The explanations of behavior provided are like those traditional in the physical sciences, unlike the explanations provided by symbolic models.Higher-level analyses of these connectionist models reveal subtle relations to symbolic models. Parallel connectionist memory and linguistic processes are hypothesized to give rise to processes that are describable at a higher level as sequential rule application. At the lower level, computation has the character of massively parallel satisfaction of soft numerical constraints; at the higher level, this can lead to competence characterizable by hard rules. Performance will typically deviate from this competence since behavior is achieved not by interpreting hard rules but by satisfying soft constraints. The result is a picture in which traditional and connectionist theoretical constructs collaborate intimately to provide an understanding of cognition. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider a kind of social group that I call ‘epistemic’. It is constituted by its members’ possession of perceptually grounded common knowledge, which endows them with a particular kind of epistemic authority. This authority, I argue, is invoked in the activity of ‘joint reminiscing’—of remembering together a past jointly experienced event. Joint reminiscing, in turn, plays an important role in the constitution of social and personal identity. The notion of an epistemic group, then, is a concept (...) that helps explain an important aspect of a subject’s understanding of who she is. (shrink)

In the present study, we combined first-, second-, and third-person levels of analysis to explore the feeling of being and acting together in the context of collaborative artistic performance. Following participation in an international competition held in Czech Republic in 2018, a team of ten artistic swimmers took part in the study. First, a self-assessment instrument was administered to rate the different aspects of togetherness emerging from their collective activity; second, interviews based on video recordings of their performance were (...) conducted individually with all team members; and third, the performance was evaluated by external artistic swimming experts. By combining these levels of analysis in different ways, we explore how changes in togetherness and lived experience in individual behavior may shape, disrupt, and stabilize joint performance. Our findings suggest that the experience of being and acting together is transient and changing, often alternating phases of decrease and increase in felt togetherness that can be consistently recognized by swimmers and external raters. (shrink)

A critical edition of three works of Bentham, Deontology and The Article on Utilitarianism were previously unpublished. Together with An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, they provide a comrehensive exposition of Bentham's views. Based entirely on manuscripts by Bentham of his amanuenses, this edition's full introduction linking the three works. Each work is supplemented with detailed and critical notes.

To understand how individuals adapt to and anticipate each other in joint tasks, we employ a bidirectional delay–coupled dynamical system that allows for mutual adaptation and anticipation. In delay–coupled systems, anticipation is achieved when one system compares its own time‐delayed behavior, which implicitly includes past information about the other system’s behavior, with the other system’s instantaneous behavior. Applied to joint music performance, the model allows each system to adapt its behavior to the dynamics of the other. Model predictions of asynchrony (...) between two simultaneously produced musical voices were compared with duet pianists’ behavior; each partner performed one voice while auditory feedback perturbations occurred at unpredictable times during live performance. As the model predicted, when auditory feedback from one musical voice was removed, the asynchrony changed: The pianist’s voice that was removed anticipated (preceded) the actions of their partner. When the auditory feedback returned and both musicians could hear each other, they rapidly returned to baseline levels of asynchrony. To understand how the pianists anticipated each other, their performances were fitted by the model to examine change in model parameters (coupling strength, time‐delay). When auditory feedback for one or both voices was removed, the fits showed the expected decrease in coupling strength and time‐delay between the systems. When feedback about the voice(s) returned, the coupling strength and time‐delay returned to baseline. These findings support the idea that when people perform actions together, they do so as a coupled bidirectional anticipatory system. (shrink)

This essay discusses and weaves together three interrelated topics: loneliness as a neglected bioethics problem, solidarity as one potential solution to loneliness, and the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict as a neglected bioethics problem in which loneliness is stark. I first present and define various kinds of loneliness, focusing on ethical loneliness, defined as suffering injustice without a proper repair process. I next discuss current health conditions in Gaza, focusing on healthcare providers who, according to the UN, are being intentionally targeted by Israel. (...) I explain how the various kinds of loneliness are reflected among people in Gaza. I lastly relate together the notions of solidarity, responsibility and personal autonomy, arguing that bioethicists and healthcare providers have a duty to support the people in Gaza, stemming from solidarity and an extended responsibility perspective. (shrink)

What enables individuals to act together? Recent discoveries suggest that a variety of mechanisms are involved. But something fundamental is yet to be investigated. In joint action, agents represent a collective goal, or so it is often assumed. But how, if at all, are collective goals represented in joint action and how do such representations impact performance? To investigate this question we adapted a bimanual paradigm, the circle-line drawing paradigm, to contrast two agents acting in parallel with two agents performing (...) a joint action. Participants were required to draw lines or circles while observing circles or lines being drawn. The findings indicate that interpersonal motor coupling may occur in joint but not parallel action. This suggests that participants in joint actions can represent collective goals motorically. (shrink)

People live and age together in social groups. Across a range of outcomes, research has identified interdependence in the cognitive and health trajectories of ageing couples. Various types of memory decline with age and people report using a range of internal and external, social, and material strategies to compensate for these declines. While memory compensation strategies have been widely studied, research so far has focused only on single individuals. We examined interdependence in the memory compensation strategies reported by spouses within (...) 58 older couples. Couples completed the Memory Compensation Questionnaire, as well as an open-ended interview about their memory compensation practices. We found that internal, intra-individual memory compensation strategies were not associated within couples, but external, extra-individual strategies showed interdependence. Individuals’ scores on material/technological compensation strategies were positively correlated with their partners’. Reported reliance on a spouse was higher for men and increased with age. Our open-ended interviews yielded rich insights into the complex and diverse resources that couples use to support memory in day-to-day life. Particularly evident was the extent of interaction and coordination between social and material compensation, such that couples jointly used external compensation resources. Our results suggest that individuals’ reports of their compensation strategies do not tell the whole story. Rather, we propose that older couples show interdependence in their memory compensation strategies, and adopt complex systems of integrated material and social memory compensation in their day-to-day lives. (shrink)

The Covid-19 induced United Kingdom-wide lockdown in 2020 saw choirs face a unique situation of trying to continue without being able to meet in-person. Live networked simultaneous music-making for large groups of singers is not possible, so other “virtual choir” activities were explored. A cross sectional online survey of 3948 choir members and facilitators from across the United Kingdom was conducted, with qualitative analysis of open text questions, to investigate which virtual choir solutions have been employed, how choir members and (...) facilitators experience these in comparison to an “in-person” choir, and whether the limitations and opportunities of virtual choir solutions shed light on the value of the experience of group singing as a whole. Three virtual choir models were employed: Multi-track, whereby individuals record a solo which is mixed into a choral soundtrack; Live streamed, where individuals take part in sessions streamed live over social media; Live tele-conferencing, for spoken interaction and/or singing using tele-conferencing software. Six themes were identified in the open text responses: Participation Practicalities, encompassing reactions to logistics of virtual models; Choir Continuity, reflecting the responsibility felt to maintain choir activities somehow; Wellbeing, with lockdown highlighting to many the importance of in-person choirs to their sense of wellbeing; Social Aspects, reflecting a sense of community and social identity; Musical Elements, whereby the value of musical experience shifted with the virtual models; Co-creation through Singing, with an overwhelming sense of loss of the embodied experience of singing together in real-time, which is unattainable from existing virtual choir models. The experiences, activities and reflections of choir singers during lockdown present a unique perspective to understand what makes group singing a meaningful experience for many. Co-creation through Singing needs further investigation to understand the impact of its absence on virtual choirs being able re-create the benefits of in-person choirs. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Concept of Moral Consensus: The Case of Technological Interventions into Human Reproduction. Edited by Kurt Bayertz. Deciding Together: Bioethics and Moral Consensus. By Jonathan D. Moreno.

The era of ‘big data’ studies and computational social science has recently given rise to a number of realignments within and beyond the social sciences, where otherwise distinct data formats – digital, numerical, ethnographic, visual, etc. – rub off and emerge from one another in new ways. This article chronicles the collaboration between a team of anthropologists and sociologists, who worked together for one week in an experimental attempt to combine ‘big’ transactional and ‘small’ ethnographic data formats. Our collaboration is (...) part of a larger cross-disciplinary project carried out at the Danish Technical University, where high-resolution transactional data from smartphones allows for recordings of social networks amongst a freshman class. With a parallel deployment of ethnographic fieldwork among the DTU students, this research set-up raises a number of questions concerning how to assemble disparate ‘data-worlds’ and to what epistemological and political effects? To address these questions, a specific social event – a lively student party – was singled out from the broader DTU dataset. Our experimental collaboration used recordings of Bluetooth signals between students’ phones to visualize the ebb and flow of social intensities at the DTU party, juxtaposing these with ethnographic field-notes on shifting party atmospheres. Tracing and reflecting on the process of combining heterogeneous data, the article offers a concrete case of how a ‘stitching together’ of digital and ethnographic data-worlds might take place. (shrink)

The continuing power of racist ideology threatens liberal democracy, for racism is more than a personal bias or a social construction. It is an ideological framework that reduces human beings to an existence along a color-coded spectrum, with people designated as “white” at the top of the hierarchy and people designated as “black” at the bottom. One has to see this ideology clearly in order to choose a proper response and then act accordingly. First, the reality of “race” has been (...) exposed as unscientific and illusory, and as based not on biology or genetics, but on a legacy of empowerment for some and enslavement for others. Second, this racist ideology, part of our disenchanted, secular age, is exposed as a continuing form of enchantment in its manner of seeing the world, opening the possibility for a spiritual response. Third, dismantling this racist ideology requires a reimagining of “blackness” as a source of life and spirituality, as a way of countering and rewriting the dominant racist narrative. Fourth, a postsecular spiritualty, based on the work of Pope Francis—that emphasizes the importance of protecting our common human dignity, of caring for each other, and of “walking together”—can be engaged as a path for action in the battle against racism. (shrink)

Two partners plan to rob a bank. The first recruits a driver while the second purchases a shotgun from a gun dealer. The driver knows he’s taking part in a robbery, although not a bank robbery. The gun dealer should have checked his customer’s police record before the sale, but failed to do so. The bank is robbed, a guard is killed, and the robbers escape, only to be caught later. “They committed bank robbery,” a prosecutor will say. But does (...) “they” include the gun dealer, whose lax standards made the robbery possible? “They conspired to rob the bank”—but does “they” here include the driver, who didn’t know it was a bank they were robbing? “They killed a bank guard”—but does it matter which robber inside the bank pulled the trigger? (shrink)

Collective action is a widespread social phenomenon, ranging from intricate duets to routinized, hierarchical cooperation within bureaucratic structures. Standard accounts of collective action (such as those offered by Bratman, Gilbert, Searle, and Tuomela and Miller) have attempted to explain cooperation in the context of small-scale, interdependent, egalitarian activities. Because the resulting analyses focus on the intricate networks of reciprocal expectation present in these contexts, they are less useful in explaining the nature of collective action in larger or more diffuse social (...) contexts. I argue here instead for a minimalist account of collective action, which explains collective action across a broad range of contexts by reference to individuals’ overlapping “participatory intentions,” i.e., intentions to do one’s part in a collective act. Participatory intentions are, formally, simply species of individual instrumental intentions, although their objects make irreducible reference to collective acts. (shrink)

Financially significant relationships between corporations and non-profit organizations have increased in recent years. NPOs offer access to interests and ideologies that are lacking within most for-profit organizations. These partnerships form a unique bridge between for-profit and non-profit goals and offer significant potential to produce innovative ways of “doing business by doing good.” Exploration of the structural implications of these relationships, however, has been limited. The potential for ideological imbalance in these relationships, particularly for the NPO, has been poorly described. We (...) explore the structure of Corporate–NPO relationships from the NPO's perspective under high pressure conditions such as large relational investments or negative pressure from stakeholders. Using data collected from 20 NPOs in Australia, we identified the use by NPOs of both formal and informal governance mechanisms within their partnerships. These mechanisms acted to align and defend important goals of the NPO. They allowed the NPO and their corporate partners to be simultaneously “together and apart.” Our study offers important insight toward the study of cross-sector relationships and the role of governance mechanisms. (shrink)

WINNER BEST SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY BOOK IN 2021 / NASSP BOOK AWARD 2022 -/- Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by herself. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral (...) agents hold jointly, but not as unified collective agents. To think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of “massively shared obligations” to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty. (shrink)

There is considerable debate about the demands citizenship places upon us in our everyday lives. Living Together as Equals distinguishes two different ways of thinking about citizenship both of which shed some light on the demands that it makes upon us.

Crises in therapist-patient relationship can also become a challenge in clinical supervision. However, success and failure in establishing and maintaining constructive relationships in therapy and supervision is not only subject to a lucky fit of personal characteristics (therapist A gets along well/badly with client B; supervisee A gets along well/badly with supervisor C). Rather, we can identify determining field conditions in the overall therapeutic and supervisory situation for this outcome. We do not only focus on the persons involved, but also (...) on their environment, the task to be accomplished together, further framework conditions and the power relations resulting from their mutual influence-in the supervised case of therapy as well as in supervision itself. We want to examine the structure and dynamics of these relationships from a genuine Gestalt psychological perspective. What contributes to a cooperative atmosphere? When do goals get out of sight? What can make the atmosphere hostile? How do such developments become accessible in supervision? (shrink)

Is moral philosophy more foundational than political philosophy? In other words, is "how to live?" more fundamental than "how to live together?" We were trained to say yes, but there was never any reason to believe it. Must rigorous reflection on how to live aim to derive necessary truths from timeless axioms, ignoring ephemeral contingencies of time and place? In the 1800s, philosophy left the contingencies to emerging departments of social science. Where did that leave philosophy? Did cutting ties to (...) empirical reality checks leave philosophers with deeper questions? Better answers? Here too, our practices suggest that we assume the answer is yes, but the truth appears to be no. To recover a measure of relevance to questions that truly need answers, theorizing about how to live together might take its cue from philosophy's current renewing of ties with political economy. We can ask which principles have a history of demonstrably being organizing principles of actual thriving communities at their best. (shrink)

In this article, we give much needed attention to the nature and value of corporate prayer by drawing together insights from theology, philosophy, and psychology. First, we explain what it is that distinguishes corporate from private prayer by drawing on the psychological literature on joint attention and the philosophical notion of shared situations. We suggest that what is central to corporate prayer is a “sense of sharedness,” which can be established through a variety of means—through bodily interactions or through certain (...) environments. Second, we argue that corporate prayer, when understood as a kind of shared situation, enables common knowledge, as well as a kind of alignment between participants. Through this process, participants’ attention is focused on the same target and affiliation between participants increases. Thus, we suggest, one benefit of understanding corporate prayer as a shared situation is that it establishes and deepens a sense of community in such a way that common purposes and goals can be enacted more effectively. (shrink)

This book examines the human ability to participate in moments of joint feeling. It presents an answer to the question concerning the nature of our faculty to share in what might be called episodes of collective affective intentionality. The proposal develops the claim that our capacity to participate in such episodes is grounded in an ability central to our human condition: our capacity to care with one another about certain things. The author provides a phenomenologically adequate account of collective affective (...) intentionality that takes seriously the idea that feelings are at the core of our emotional relation to the world. He details a form of group emotional orientation that relies on the fact that the participating individuals have come to share a number of concerns. Readers will learn that at the heart of a collective affective intentional episode, one does not merely find a set of shared concerns, but also a particular mode of caring. In the end, the argument presented in this monograph makes plausible the idea that the emotions through which humans participate in moments of affective intentional community express our nature. In addition, it shows that the debate on collective affective intentionality also permits us to better understand the relationship between two conflicting philosophical pictures of ourselves: the idea that we are essentially social beings and the claim that we are creatures for whom our personal existence is an issue. Thus, aiming at an elucidation of the nature of our ability to feel together, the book offers a detailed account of what it is to situationally express our human nature by caring about something in a properly joint manner. (shrink)

In this article I consider how the problem of social (intersubjective) cognition relates to time-consciousness. In the first part, I briefly introduce Husserl’s account of intersubjective cognition. I discuss the concept of empathy (Einfühlung) and its relation with time-consciousness. I argue that empathy is based on pre-reflective awareness of the other’s harmony of behaviour. In the second part, I distinguish pre-reflective (passive) and reflective (active) empathy and consider recent empirical research in the field of social cognition. I argue that these (...) levels of empathy are related with different levels of intersubjective temporality. By the intersubjective temporality I do not understand being in the same moment of objective time (so called clock time) but rather the shared experience of time and sharing temporal structure of actions. In the final part, I gather my considerations together and propose a general three-level framework of intersubjective temporality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Time Together and Time ApartNeha Choksi (bio)The drawings to scale on the following pages depict multiple views I outlined while holding in my hand a single, small particolored stone. The silhouette leaves a hole for the stone to inhabit, were it still to exist. The colored pigment that shapes the absence of the stone is made by pulverizing this same stone.I pushed the pigment aside on the recto to (...) create the evacuated silhouette. Imagining the hole bored through to the other side, I colored the verso, too. All the pigment from the stone was used up in painting these multiple views.________The Crete Senesi area in Tuscany, where I found the stone, is formed from tiny fragments of small shells and sea organisms compacted with sediments of clays and sands from a sea that covered it millions of years ago. I fancy the stone contains evidence of the missing sea.I dislocated this stone during one of my multiple walks on a local strada bianchi near my temporary residence in a tiny village in Tuscany. I shared a summer there with six other artists and the coordinator as part of the Amant Residency Siena. I painted one stone view per member of our group. I made these drawings as a gift for them, for us, for our time together, and our time apart.October 11, 2023 Mumbai7 cotton paper sheets with stone pigment paint on recto and verso Each 7 ¾ x 5 inches [End Page 64] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 65] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 66] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 67] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 68] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 69] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 70] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 71] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 72] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 73] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 74] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 75] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 76] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 77] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 78]Neha Choksi Neha Choksi, in her work across performance, moving image, sculpture, and installation, probes lived experiences that negotiate relationships in unconventional settings. Harnessing stone to plant, animal to friends, publics to philosophy, her materially bound art engages the terms of our existence in ways personal and planetary. Choksi’s work has been widely exhibited, screened, or performed in the United States, Asia, the Middle East, Australia, the UK, and Europe; and is in notable public collections worldwide. Recent honors include the Amant Siena Studio & Research Residency, the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, and the India Today Best New Media Artist of the Year Award. A monograph on a single artwork, Dismantling, was published in 2018. She currently co-edits Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Bombay.Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc... (shrink)

Discussions of joint attention often focus on examples that involve multiple interacting thinkers who align their attention by triangulating upon an object (e.g., by pointing, gaze following, orienting, etc.). However, not all forms of attending together seem to involve this kind of interpersonal coordination. When an audience attends to a talk, they do not do so by engaging in the perspective-driven alignment of attention that is characteristic of joint attention. Nor do students learning in a digital environment (e.g., on Zoom) (...) triangulate a perspective in the manner typical of joint attention. One might conclude that accounts of joint attention must be broader than have typically been proposed and cannot require coordinated interactions which draw upon the participant’s perspective. I argue that this argument fails because there are multiple forms of attending together, and the processes that enable collective attention in conference talks and Zoom classrooms are different from those that enable the more familiar interaction-based forms of joint attention. By distinguishing joint attention and collective attention, this essay seeks to better understand both the ways in which the digital environments demand a broader concept of joint attention, as well as the place of attending together in digital environments. (shrink)

This contribution explores the role that the Sense of Responsible Togetherness (SoRT) exerts with reference to Participation and Sense of Community. The study was conducted on a university campus, as campuses represent places where academic and community lives go hand in hand and the community is heterogeneous. A questionnaire with the SoRT scale, the Participation scale and the Italian Scale of the Sense of Community (SISC) was administered to 130 university students. SoRT had a significant indirect effect on the (...) students’ Participation via their Sense of Community, suggesting that the promotion of individuals’ Sense of Responsible Togetherness within their community, along with the emotional and affective bond to it, may allow us to recover symbolic and physical spaces in which participation can be fostered. A need for and significance of interventions aimed at promoting collective actions within intermediate systems (groups, educational systems, work ones, etc.). (shrink)

In this paper we reflect upon our multi-year reading group as a site of decolonial feminist praxis that motivates reading in a different register from how we were trained to read as academics in the humanities. In collaborative study we willingly open ourselves to change, to being worked on by one another and by the texts we read. Our reading together has initiated the undoing of settler colonial academic subjectivity and the co-creation of new forms of scholarly subjectivity grounded in (...) relations of care, openness to transformation, and a growing commitment to epistemic justice. In giving an account of our group history and process we reflect on our complicities with settler-colonialism in the university and consider the ways that reading together has cultivated our capacities to listen to counter-narratives, formulate institutional and self critique, and engage in epistemic reparations. (shrink)

Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with (...) themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field. (shrink)

Workplace positivity expert Shola Richards (Making Work Work) explores a radical new concept for rethinking our personal, professional, and social lives: togetherness.

ABSTRACT This essay explores ways to “write together” the awkwardly jointed histories of “science” and “medicine”—but it also includes other “arts” (in the old sense) and technologies. It draws especially on the historiography of medicine, but I try to use terms that are applicable across all of science, technology, and medicine (STM). I stress the variety of knowledges and practices in play at any time and the ways in which the ensembles change. I focus on the various relations of “science” (...) and “medicine,” as they were understood for a succession of periods—from mainly agricultural societies, through industrial societies, to our biomedical present—trying to sketch a history that encompasses daily practices and understandings as well as major conceptual and technical innovations. The model is meant to facilitate inquiry across topics and across times, including those to come. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to consider this practice of “communitarian” reading—reading aloud, reading together—as a defining aspect of the cultures of reading among Bengali women in the nineteenth century. I wish to contest the privileging of “silent” reading as a “modern” mode of reading and the subsequent celebration of the protean incorporeality of the “silent” reader, in the works of prominent scholars of readership, arguing that the privileging of “silent” reading as the predominant “modern” mode of reading does not (...) offer a sufficient framework for the study of reading practices of the “historical” “woman reader” in the age of colonial “modernity” in a terrain such as that of Bengal. The article thus engages with alternate frameworks of considering the practice of reading aloud, drawing upon diverse feminist scholarship on practices of reading to argue in favor of considering the practice of “communitarian” reading as a form of female sociality for Bengali women in the nineteenth century, at a time when public spaces remained largely inaccessible to women. (shrink)

Uma Narayan attempts to clarify what the feminist notion of the 'epistemic privilege of the oppressed' does and does not imply. She argues that the fact that oppressed 'insiders' have epistemic privilege regarding their oppression creates problems in dialogue with and coalitionary politics involving 'outsiders' who do not share the oppression, since the latter fail to come to terms with the epistemic privilege of the insiders. She concretely analyzes different ways in which the emotions of insiders can be inadvertantly hurt (...) by outsiders and suggests ways in which such problems can be minimized. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a peacemaker in a polarized world? It can feel as if the world-and the church-has never been more polarized. But when we feel worn down by the chasms dividing us, we can take hope from the early Christian vision of God uniting all things in Christ, a hope that can lead us to act. Stuck Together explores Bible stories and narratives ancient and modern that inspire us to open hearts and minds to persons with (...) whom we disagree as we gain confidence in our own convictions. Drawing from Scripture, from his own life journey, and from the witness of others, author J. Nelson Kraybill demonstrates how even small steps of reconciliation by confessionally grounded Christians can have big effect and give loving Christian witness in a polarized church and society. (shrink)

Sociobiology is a grand narrative of evolutionary biology on which to build unified knowledge. Consilience is a metaphorical representation of that narrative. I take up the same metaphor but apply it differently. I evoke the image of jumping together, not on solid ground but on the strong, flexible canvas sheet of a trampoline, on which natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities jump together. This image overlaps with the traditional East Asian way of understanding—that is, the “Heaven-Earth-Person Triad.” Using recent (...) insights from cognitive science—metaphor, embodiment, and conceptual blending—I propose the alternative way of “bio-socio-humanities” to understand and experience the world. (shrink)

The broad use of social networking and user-generated content has increased the online footprint of many individuals. A generation of healthcare professionals have grown up with online search activities as part of their everyday lives. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have given the public new ways to share intimate details about their public and private lives and the lives of their friends and families. As a result, careproviders have the ability to find out more about their patients with just (...) the tap of a key or the click of a mouse. This type of online searching for patient information is known as patient-targeted googling or PTG.This article provides an overview of the emergence of PTG, identifies the potential benefits and possible pitfalls of engaging in PTG, and explores current ethical frameworks that guide decisions about PTG. The article describes the development of a critical thinking tool developed by the Behavioral Health Ethics Committee at CHI Health, that can serve as a best-practice model for other hospitals and health systems. Called TTaPP (Together Take a Pause and Ponder), this tool is designed to help healthcare professionals across settings practice collaborative critical thinking skills as they consider the ethical questions of whether or not to engage in PTG. Finally, this article suggests areas for further study, including ways to prompt collaboration and appropriate documentation by maximizing electronic medical records systems, exploring the effectiveness of the TTaPP tool as a way to promote a culture of collaborative critical thinking practices, and the attitudes of patients and the public regarding PTG. (shrink)

We often go out to the movies, theater, or ballet, preferring to share the experience with others rather than watch at home alone. We do the same with food and drink, for instance, by going to tasting rooms to sample wines and talk with others. To have these sorts of experiences, we plan, coordinate, and engage in a range of complex social practices. These practices often lead to the formation of audiences, and philosophers since Aristotle have argued that the success (...) of certain art forms depends on audience reactions.1 In addition, many processes of aesthetic education involve individuals learning about aesthetic objects and judgments together. If so, then understanding how groups experience aesthetic objects... (shrink)