This article explores the place of complexity science within education and educational research. The discussion begins with the suggestion that educational research has a history of adopting interpretive frames from other domains with little adaptation. Complexity science is argued to compel a different sort of positioning, one that requires accommodation and participation rather than unproblematized assimilation and application. The argument is developed by considering the following simultaneities in education (and) research: knower and knowledge; transphenomenality; transdisciplinarity; interdiscursivity; descriptive and pragmatic (...) insights; representation and presentation; affect and effect; and education and research. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Simultaneity 1—Knower and Knowledge Simultaneities 2, 3, and 4—Transphenomenality, Transdisciplinarity, and Interdiscursivity Simultaneity 5—Descriptive and Pragmatic Insights Simultaneity 6—Representation and Presentation Simultaneity 7—Affect and Effect Simultaneity 8—Education and Research A Closing Note on Complicity: The Need for Critical Reflection References.

We present select examples of how visual phenomena can serve as tools to uncoverbrain mechanisms. Specifically, receptive field organization is proposed as a Gestalt-like neural mechanism of perceptual organization. Appropriate phenomena, such as brightness and orientation contrast, subjective contours, filling-in, and aperture-viewed motion, allow for a quantitative comparison between receptive fields and their psychophysical counterparts, perceptive fields. Phenomenology might thus be extended from the study of perceptual qualities to their transphenomenal substrates, including memory functions. In conclusion, classic issues of Gestalt (...) psychology can now be related to modern. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop the notion of the experiential workspace, or the phenomenal setting generated by the coupling between the enactive body and its affordance-laden environment, in order to carry out a fine-grained analysis of enactive experiential phenomena, in particular those of ordinary lived experience. My purpose is to shed light on some of the ways that empirical methodologies are intrinsically limited in their ability to capture the native phenomena of enactive, embodied experience. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, (...) I argue that the experiential workspace is characterized by dynamic mutability, emergent norms, and epistemic openness - characteristics that are transphenomenal in nature and thus resistant to empirical measurement. Using concepts from the work of developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky and feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young, I will show how our embeddedness in an intersubjective world makes the experiential workspace a mercurial, labile phenomenon, characterized by inherently transphenomenal features that are resistant to naturalistic analysis or modelling. (shrink)

The Critique of the Transcendental Ego: On Sartre's and Ricoeur's Heidegger InterpretationsAccording Otto Pöggeler Heidegger's main brake with Husserl consists in his rejection of the tran-scendental constitution conceived as the life of an "absolute Cogito," replaced by Heidegger by the "factual life" from which phenomenology should always begin. The author of this paper argues that the problem about the starting point of phenomenology also appears later in the debates between Heidegger and Sartre, as well as in Ricoeur's Heidegger interpretation. Thus, (...) the aim of the article is to analyze to what extent the positions of Heidegger, Sartre, and Ricoeur contradicts or even exclude each other, and to what extent they cross or eventually complement each other. The inquiry shows that Heidegger's accusation of Sartre's forgetting of the question about the sense of being of Dasein is unjustified. Equally untenable is Sartre's critique of Heidegger, that he had bypassed the Cogito as a starting point of the existential analysis, because Sartre's transcendence of the Cogito, which pretends to involve the transphenomenal Being, cannot be derived from it and risks to fall again in the trap of "phenomenalism," which Sartre reproached to Husserl. Ricoeur's Heidegger interpretation brings clarity to this discussion by pulling together the decentration of the subject and the limits of apodicticity of the Cogito. But his elaboration of the hermeneutics of the Self contains the risk of a hyperbolization of the role of language. (shrink)

RESUMEN Tal como el siglo XX fue aquel de la fenomenología, el siglo XXI se caracteriza por el auge de los realismos. Se podría pensar que este cambio marca un giro radical en la filosofía. No obstante, es de recordar que en 1943 Jean-Paul Sartre quiso construir, desde la fenomenología, un neorrealismo absoluto que pueda conservar cierto realismo dentro de la fenomenología. Mediante una lectura de El ser y la nada se propone mostrar que el neorrealismo absoluto impone superar la (...) dicotomía entre idealismo y realismo gracias a la transfenomenicidad de dos seres; y, además, desplazar la tarea descriptiva y constitutiva de la fenomenología hacia un trabajo de revelación. ABSTRACT If the twentieth century was that of phenomenology, the twenty-first is characterized by the rise of multiple realisms. Although one might think that this is a radical turn in contemporary philosophy, it should be remembered that, in 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre tried to establish an absolute neorealism which wanted to preserve a certain realism within phenomenology. Through a reading of Being and nothingness, the author shows that absolute neorealism enables the dichotomy between idealism and realism to be surpassed, thanks to the transphenomenality of two beings and, in addition, imposes a displacement of the descriptive and constitutive task of phenomenology towards a work of revelation. (shrink)

The philosophical line of inquiry opened by Edmund Husserl remains one of the most inspiring ones for contemporary thinking, insofar as it places the experiential dimension at its center. Yet its initial disposition rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding. While phenomenology scolded the traditional representationalist accounts, for which we never have the things themselves, but ever only internal representations of it, its major advanced consisted in stressing that in experience, we have the things in themselves and not just emissaries or representatives. (...) However, this advance, which we will qualify as the " principle of selfhood " led to imprudently make another assumption, that is that in experience, we do not only have the things themselves (principle of selfhood) but that we also have them immediately (principle of immediacy). A deconstructive analysis of experience provides such a postulation to be problematic: what appears (phainestai) is never given right off the bat, but appears through something else (dia phainestai). The paper indicates where a deconstruction of Husserl's theoretical framework is necessary, and sketches the transformations of phenomenology into a kind of thinking that makes space for the intermediaries of experiences. Diaphenomenology starts off with the assumption that whatever appears appears through something. Experience has to be conceived of as transphenomenality. A diaphenomenological perspective moves away from both a foundationalist account of subjectivity (where the ego is the ground for all appearances) and a merely accusative account of it (where the ego is nothing but a pole of affections). It describes the modes in which the subject is actor, albeit not author of her experiences. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with Slavoj Zizek's constructed opposition between Spinoza and Hegel. Where Zizek views Hegel's non-dualistic relational epistemology as a substantial improvement over Spinoza's purported dogmatic account of a reality which is external to the perceiver, I argue that Hegel inherited such an epistemology from Spinoza. Ultimately, it is Spinoza who provides Hegel with the conceptual tools for knowledge of the "transphenomenal" within the context of human finitude.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre explains that being-in-itself is transphenomenal and becomes a phenomenon only through the process by which consciousness qualifies itself as its negation. Thus, there can be no phenomenon except as the object that consciousness negates. This ontology of phenomena proves contradictory because one does not understand how consciousness can negate what does not appear to it, especially if it needs to do so as an existentialist freedom, which has to choose the end towards which it negates (...) being. Sartre's theory of facticity as 'body' then comes as an alternative conception of phenomena, answering these problems by ultimately tending to present being-in-itself as a non-objective, hence non-conscious, phenomenon. Intentional consciousness thus becomes a transcendental condition for objectivity only and not for phenomenality in general. (shrink)

This paper concerns broadly with the works of such ethical postmodern theorists as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Giles Deleuze, focusing on how we can contribute to the development of their ideas by discussing Laozi and Zhuanzi’s Taoism, Buddhism, and modern Korean Neo-Confucianism of Toe-gae Lee. I claim that for criticism and art, literature, film and culture as well as philosophy itself, we are now facing this new need of another notion of subjectivity that not only accepts difference but takes the (...) position of whole positivity toward the Other. This different view of subjectivity that can be called "the sublime subjectivity" or the sublime totality of a human being or a society is essentially an aesthetic one, rather than one that depends upon logic, and it is vital to take advantage of Oriental ideas. From the perspective of the ethics of Levinas, I first place the sublime, jouissance, or pure enjoyment, at the heart of literary criticism. The pure sensibility of the sublime, or jouissance, unlike the raw feelings of pleasure, is an aesthetic sensibility beyond the ontological unity of feelings of pleasures and pains. Then with the Oriental thought, I make an attempt to contribute to the development of the ideas on the ethics of the relation of the reader and the literary text’s language. Laozi’s Taote Ching, Chuanzi, Diamond Sutra, and Toe-gae Lee’s notion of Taeguk are briefly explored in view of the aesthetic transphenomenal dimension and the sublime totality. (shrink)

This is a reissue of Professor Natanson’s 1951 monograph, the first such study of Being and Nothingness to appear in English. After an introductory essay on the nature of existentialism, the author begins a brief but lucid exposition of the major issues of Sartre’s masterwork: the quest for a phenomenological ontology, temporality, nothingness, the problem of the Other, the Self, including the categories of freedom, situation, and death, and the nature of existential psychoanalysis. The remainder of the book is devoted (...) to an evaluation of Sartre’s enterprise from the viewpoint of Husserl’s phenomenology. Natanson’s fundamental objection hits upon a point which clearly distinguishes Sartre from Husserl, viz., the former’s insistence that intentionality be understood as justifying a metaphysical realism through a kind of ontological argument whereby consciousness is consciousness of transphenomenal Being, the realm of the en-soi. According to Natanson, this crucial Sartrean move is not phenomenological except in a Hegelian sense. And if the influence of Heidegger’s concept of "revelation" is admitted, the author points out that this, too, is a distortion of Husserlian method. In fact, he finds Sartre’s book a methodological melange of quasi-phenomenology, "revealing intuitions" of Being, and outright psychologism. (shrink)