Pierre Gassend, or, as he is widely known, Gassendi, was a French materialist philosopher, physicist, astronomer, theologian and Catholic priest. He was the son of Antoine Gassend2 and Françoise Fabry, and was born on January 22nd in 1592 in Champtercier, a village of Provence, and died on October 24th in 1655 in Paris. He received his first education in the cities Digne and Riez and by the age of twelve he began his initiation to Catholicism. He belonged to the Franciscan (...) Order.3 The continuation of his formal education was supported by the Catholic Church as an aspect of his preparation for priesthood.4 He studied Aristotelian philosophy and Catholic theology for the next eight years at the College of Aix in Provence. Pierre Gassendi is typically remembered for introducing the ancient atomic philosophy of Epicurus in 17th century European thought. Gassendi aspired to articulate a new philosophy of nature, in order to replace Aristotelianism, which had been prominent in the context of scholastic thought for centuries, and had constituted the foundation of physics as well as moral philosophy. Gassendi was a priest and an ardent follower of the new scientific methodology of empiricism and of experimental trial. He devoted his life’s work to bringing together the Christian doctrines with the principles of the new science. Gassendi, along with Francis Bacon and Descartes, was one of the most significant figures who exerted influence on the development of science and mechanistic philosophy in the second half of the 17th century, especially in England. His views can be seen throughout the summary of Francois Bernier, a work that emphasizes the atomic views, and materialistic tendencies, of philosophical thought. Gassendi’s adapted Epicurean philosophy spread to Britain with Opera Omnia and the Abregé of Bernier, and also due to Walter Charleton, who published a modified English translation of parts of Animadversiones in 1648. There was also a group of enthusiastic empiricists, who belonged to the circle of Newcastle, as well as a small Epicurean club whose members were among others Kenelm Digby and Nathaniel Highmore. All of the above saw a deep and pervasive influence of Gassendi’s views on British thought. His influence is seen in the writings of major thinkers, such as Boyle, Locke, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, Reid, and in the early works of Leibniz. The multi-dimensional personality of Gassendi, as a pastor, humanist and physical philosopher, accords with a moral and the physical universe in which the Creator God of the Christian faith holds a prominent role. He has been characterized by many researchers as the founder of mechanical philosophy, and as the successor of humanistic historiography. He was a defender of atomic theory, which was flourishing in the second half of 17th century, and also inspired Locke, one of the major proponents of moral theory. Gassendi’s contribution in moral philosophy is unexceptionable; his notions of freedom and pleasure formed the basis of the liberal tradition of late 17th and 18th centuries. (shrink)

Different people have different perceptions about artificial intelligence (AI). It is extremely important to bring together all the alternative frames of thinking—from the various communities of developers, researchers, business leaders, policymakers, and citizens—to properly start acknowledging AI. This article highlights the ‘fruitful collaboration’ that sociology and AI could develop in both social and technical terms. We discuss how biases and unfairness are among the major challenges to be addressed in such a sociotechnical perspective. First, as intelligent machines reveal their nature (...) of ‘magnifying glasses’ in the automation of existing inequalities, we show how the AI technical community is calling for transparency and explainability, accountability and contestability. Not to be considered as panaceas, they all contribute to ensuring human control in novel practices that include requirement, design and development methodologies for a fairer AI. Second, we elaborate on the mounting attention for technological narratives as technology is recognized as a social practice within a specific institutional context. Not only do narratives reflect organizing visions for society, but they also are a tangible sign of the traditional lines of social, economic, and political inequalities. We conclude with a call for a diverse approach within the AI community and a richer knowledge about narratives as they help in better addressing future technical developments, public debate, and policy. AI practice is interdisciplinary by nature and it will benefit from a socio-technical perspective. (shrink)

Ideas II has been the source of several issues in the broader phenomenological literature. Some of these issues focus on the particular aims of that work and its place within the system of transcendental constitutive and genetic Phenomenology. Others are concerned with its significance in the development of Husserl’s thought on the possibility and direction of a phenomenological philosophy of natural science (still under discussion), along with a systematic phenomenological grounding of the human sciences. Furthermore, the manuscript of Ideas II (...) seems to have contributed to the formation of Heidegger’s views on the nature and status of Husserl’s Phenomenology and of Phenomenology in general. Thus, an examination of the actual meaning of the analyses in Ideas II would contribute significantly to the understanding of a variety of important issues in phenomenological philosophy. Husserl’s so-called “transcendental turn” between 1905 and 1907 represents the beginning of the path to Ideas II. From 1907 onwards, Husserl attempted a clear and systematic development of his ideas on the transcendental constitution of intentional beings in their—whatever—actuality. This is a task he undertook in the Ideas I, in which he expounds the general core of the new discoveries that allowed him to go beyond the analyses of the Logical Investigations. Having established transcendental subjectivity as the ultimate ground where “the Mothers” accomplish their constitutive work, Husserl became convinced that he had discovered the source from which all Being (Sein) arises. [...] In Ideas II, inanimate nature is presented as comprising the most basic region and as the fundament for the constitution of all the other ontological regions (or regions of Being or Being-regions). But, in Part I of that work (the English translation reads “Section One”), we find Husserl providing an analysis of the constitution of naturething (Naturding).1 What is Husserl’s conception of nature-things there? How do they relate to inanimate beings in general? How do they relate to the things that are supposed to be given in simple visual perception or in simple sense or sensory experience? Are they the accomplishment of a predicative or of a pre-predicative intentionality? Are they the subject matter of natural science, and in what sense— and, if not, why? The text of the Ideas II generates puzzlement and confusion, much of which is reproduced in the relevant literature. (shrink)

Dans le champ de la linguistique francaise, Olga Galatanu est de ceux qui ont muni l'analyse du discours et des interactions verbales d'un modele semantique de description. La Semantique des Possibles Argumentatifs qu'elle developpe depuis une vingtaine d'annees adhere aux visions argumentative, stereotypique, referentielle, cognitiviste de la langue, et s'attache a rendre compte de la construction des representations en langue et en discours.<BR> Les articles que ses collaborateurs et amis lui offrent dans ce volume se rapportent de pres ou (...) de loin a la SPA. Certains en partagent les postulats: sens referentiel et denomination, interfaces semantique-syntaxe et semantique-pragmatique, construction discursive du sens, valeurs; d'autres reprennent et developpent des elements specifiques de la SPA: possibles argumentatifs, deploiements argumentatifs, modalites; d'autres encore montrent les convergences et complementarites entre la SPA et des theories voisines.<BR> Les analyses portent notamment sur l'attitude metalinguistique des locuteurs, la malleabilite semantique des mots, la negociation des sens et des valeurs, les principes et strategies discursives qui regulent la communication, l'heterogeneite discursive, la presentation de soi, la construction d'objets discursifs, les actes de langage indirects, etc.". (shrink)

This historical essay presents an analysis of the origins and development of modern pharmacognosy in Ukraine and explores the founding and development of the Department of Pharmacognosy at the National University of Pharmacy (NUPh, Kharkiv), providing an overview of the department`s history, a framework of its educational and methodological processes, primary research directions, and its main achievements. The paper also includes biographical data and outlines the main scientific and pedagogical achievements of prominent individuals who made a significant contribution to the (...) development and formation of pharmacognostic and pharmaceutical science and education in Ukraine. Over the years, the staff of the pharmacognosy department has authored and published 14 monographs, 8 standard training programs, 25 textbooks, practical guides, and training manuals, 47 lecture notes, and 103 educational and methodological developments. Furthermore, 16 doctoral and 77 candidate theses have been defended at the Department of Pharmacognosy. The staff has also secured 63 author’s certificates and 171 patents, and published about 1,050 articles, 1,060 abstracts, and 16 monographs. In addition, the department has developed numerous medicinal products and therapeutic as well as preventive items that have been introduced into medical practice. These achievements create a solid background for the department’s fruitful development and future success. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

3 In live performances seated audiences have restricted opportunities for response. Some 4 responses are obvious, such as applause and cheering, but there are also many apparently 5 incidental movements including posture shifts, fixing hair, scratching and adjusting glasses. 6 Do these movements provide clues to people’s level of engagement with a performance? Our 7 basic hypothesis is that audience responses are part of a bi-directional system of audience- 8 performer communication. This communication is part of what distinguishes live from (...) recorded 9 performance and underpins live performers’ moment-to-moment sense of how well a performance 10 is going. Here we investigate the range of visible real-time movements of audiences in four live 11 contemporary dance performances. Video recordings of performers and audiences were analysed 12 using computer vision techniques for extracting face, hand and body movement data. The 13 meaning of audience movements were analysed by comparing clips of the audience at moments 14 of maximum and minimum movement to expert and novice judges. The results show that audience 15 clips with the lowest overall movement are judged as displaying the highest engagement. In 16 addition, we found that while there is no systematic relationship between audience and dancers 17 movement, hands seem to play an especially significant role since they move significantly more 18 compared to the rest of the body. We draw on these findings to argue that collective stillness is 19 an especially salient signal of audience engagement. (shrink)

Madness and emotion could be said to share, to a certain extent, their definition as kinds of human response to influences from their environment. The connection between madness and emotion is stressed in modern psychological observations establishing strong links between the causation of madness and human emotionality. Despite the fact that similar insights were absent from Greek medical theorists, or indeed from other contemporary writers, this would come as no surprise to either Sophokles or Euripides. Both tragedians handled their material (...) in such a way as to demonstrate how the strong pressures of familial or social influences can lead to mental disturbance. While it is most probably Sophokles who, for the first time, turns to the influence of internal forces in the process of madness, the lack of subject matter in his surviving plays allows us little scope for further comparison. On the other hand, Euripides seems to have dedicated more of his portrayals to madness. These portrayals offer an almost unique opportunity to examine the introduction, not only in drama but perhaps in the whole of Greek literature, of the emotions as contributing factors in madness. (shrink)

Husserl and Cassirer stand, according to their own self-understanding, as key 20th century figures in the cultivation of Enlightenment’s principles and views on humanity, culture, and history. In a word, they both understand European culture and history as a story of progress (§ 1). As I see it, central in a culture and its dynamics is its system of values, and a grounded understanding of the issue of progress presupposes an adequate theory of the standing or constitution as well as (...) of the givenness and transvaluation of values. Neither Husserl nor Cassirer, however, actually advanced any such theory. We are still in need of one in order to account for culture’s formation and dynamics in history. Next, I briefly review Husserl’s and Cassirer’s available problematic views on values (§ 2). Then, in § 3, I examine some of the central problems in the traditional approaches to culture and to values. In § 4, I appeal to Köhler’s very interesting Gestalt theoretical approach to values and pinpoint some of its problems. Next, in § 5, I suggest how we could start the research from below, from the level of the organism, which could eventually shed some new light on the problem of value constitution and givenness. Finally, in § 6, I attempt to sketch an explanation for how we can use this new approach to values in order to understand actual cultural formation and its historicity, in a way that goes further than the whiggish philosophy of history. (shrink)

The paper explores memes, digital artefacts that acquire a viral character and become globally popular, as an aesthetic trend that not only entices but propels and molds subjective, collective and political becoming. Following both Simondon and Bakhtin, memes are first considered as aesthetic objects that mediate individuation. Here, resonance between psychic, collective and technical individuation is established and re-enacted through the aesthetic consummation of self, the collective and the technical in the various performances of meme cultures. Secondly, if memes are (...) followed in the making, from birth to their spill-over onto wider social networks, the very expressive form of meme turns out to be borne by specific technical architecture and mannerisms of a small number of platforms, and, most notably, the image board 4chan. The source of memes’ various forms of power is concentrated here. Memes are intimately linked to 4chan’s /b/ board, the birthplace of Lulzsec and the Anonymous hacking networks. Memes’ architectonics, as an inheritance of a few specific human-technical structures, in turn informs the production of new platforms, forms of networked. (shrink)

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 335-343, September 2012.

In the vast majority of the literature on Kant, the prevailing view is that his conception of analyticity and analytic truths suffers from obscurities and inconsistencies that render it, in the end, unintelligible. In the present paper, I try (i) to underline the meaning of these conceptions of Kant’s, (ii) to bring to the fore a crucial hidden presupposition in his account of analytic truths, and (iii) to present an interpretation that restores an intelligible account of Kantian analyticity and analytic (...) truth. Contrary to the ‘received’ view, I claim that definition is the royal way to Kant’s analyticity and analytic truth, and that the latter cannot be understood apart from a very specific kind of appeal to the intuition of the object falling under the concept being defined. I call this elusive and fragile act “simple intuition,” pointing thus to the medieval notion of apprehensio simplex (and the long history behind it). Then I try to show how this is done with reference to the most suitable species of concepts, the mathematical, and by analogy (and with expectable limitations) to the empirical ones. Of course, the present attempt to reconstruct an intelligible Kantian account of analyticity and analytic truths does not also mean that I endorse it as successful and final in the context of philosophy’s effort to clarify the possibility and kinds of a priori truths. (shrink)

This book analyzes unobvious relations between historical definitions of the face and its contemporary usage in popular culture and social media, like Facebook or Instagram. Bringing together a wide range of methodologies, it includes essays from manifold disciplines of the humanities such as philosophy, literary and art criticism, media and television studies, game studies, sociology and anthropology. The authors focus on both metaphorical and material meanings of the face. They grapple with crucial questions about modernity, modern and postmodern subjectivity, as (...) well as with origins of certain linguistic terms and popular, colloquial phrases based on the concept of the face. (shrink)

The article starts with a brief overview of the kinds of approaches that have been attempted for the presentation of Phenomenology’s view on the emotions. I then pass to Husserl’s unsatisfactory efforts to disclose the intentionality of emotions and their intentional correlation with values. Next, I outline the idea of a new, “normalized phenomenological” approach of emotions and values. Pleasure and pain, then, are first explored as affective feelings . In the cases examined, it is shown that, primordially, pleasure and (...) pain are recordings for our bodily and spiritual states resulting from our confrontation with beings and situations in the world. Delight and distress are, subsequently, approached as the first full-fledged emotive acts that animate or intentionally interpret pleasure and pain in specific ways. The elementary values of agreeableness and disagreeableness appear correspondingly to the latter in relation to the very pleasure or pain and to what has caused them. In other words, agreeable and disagreeable show how what we confront in the world weighs for us, what value it has for the embodied intentional consciousness, for its state and functioning as well as for its existentio-praxial possibilities in the lifeworld. (shrink)

Politics presupposes an understanding of meaning in history, according to which it manages the actions that accord with or serve this meaning (as an ultimate good). The aim of this paper is to examine the process by which meaning in history is formed, as well as its character. To do this, I employ suitably modified phenomenological analyses of intentional consciousness to bring them as close as possible to the thematic of the psychoanalytic unconscious. I first try to sketch the basis (...) on which the modern problem of meaning in history arises and the fundamental responses produced by modern philosophy. Then, I delineate two basic understandings of meaning in history as developed by the founders of Phenomenology, Husserl and Heidegger, which are surprisingly close to those of modern metaphysics. Next, I draft the process by which the topic of the unconscious surfaces in the context of difficulties faced by critical epistemology in its effort to penetrate the unperceivable folds of reality, which should be acknowledged as a precondition of experience but also of action and ethics. After this, a brief phenomenological account regarding action and praxis in response to evil is presented as a specific concretization of this philosophy after its vaccination with the thematic of the unconscious. Next, I examine MerleauPonty’s final, although ultimately failed, attempt to construct a phenomenological proof of the possibility of objective knowledge regarding historical meaning. In addition, I consider how persistent maintenance of the ideologically optimistic reading of history simply concocts political action that crucially exposes humanity to the danger of perpetrating what Arendt called “banal evil.” The question, then, is whether Phenomenology can offer a non-nihilistic understanding of existence, action, and events in history. I argue that a cautious non-Marxist and de-Messianized reinterpretation of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in tandem with an Aristotelian analysis of praxis and Kantian-Arendtian “common sense,” offers a sober, perspectivist, realistic understanding of the place of humans in the cosmos and of the historical course we happen to take in it. (shrink)

BackgroundCurrent preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) technologies enable embryo genotyping across the whole genome. This has led to the development of polygenic risk scoring of human embryos (PGT-P). Recent implementation of PGT-P, including screening for intelligence, has been extensively covered by media reports, raising major controversy. Considering the increasing demand for assisted reproduction, we evaluated how information about PGT-P is communicated in press media and explored the diversity of ethical themes present in the public debate.MethodsLexisNexis Academic database and Google News were (...) searched to identify articles about polygenic embryo screening. This led to 535 news articles. 59 original articles met the inclusion criteria. Inductive content analysis was used to analyse these articles.Results8.8% of articles gave embryo polygenic scoring a positive portrayal, while 36.8% expressed a negative attitude. 54.4% were neutral, mostly highlighting limited practical value of the technology in in vitro fertilization settings. We identified five main ethical themes that are also present in academic literature and the broader debate on reproductive technologies: a slippery slope towards designer babies, well-being of the child and parents, impact on society, deliberate choice and societal readiness.ConclusionsImplementation of embryo polygenic profiling engenders a need for specific recommendations. Current media analysis discloses important ethical themes to consider when creating future guidelines for PGT-P. (shrink)

The relevance of the research. Consideration of continuous professional education as a social institution determines the relevance of the integration approach, which involves the use of a complex of measures for the integration and interdisciplinary of modern scientific knowledge, the search for new contexts of education as a productive direction for the development of scientific research, where non-academic education acts as an activity paradigm requiring theoretical analysis and scientific justification. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the peculiarities of (...) non-academic education as a modern paradigm that allows the formation of a creative specialist to be able of professional and personal self-development, for the theoretical justification of changing the educational field. Analysis of recent research and publications. The concept of continuing education as a modern educational paradigm was considered in works: V. Byashenko [1], V. Voronkova [3], T. Desiatova [4], О. Kyvliuk [8], L. Lukyanova [9], V. Orlov [10] and others. Research methodology. The systematic, informational, synergetic methods and approaches are used for analyzing the modern paradigm of non-academic education in the scientific research. Presenting main material. The making of non-academic education is considered as a socio-cultural phenomenon, which reflects the growing need of an individual in obtaining various educational services. This educational system has such features as: organization, system, professional orientation, continuity, topicality in existing knowledge acquired by a person outside the academic educational system. The main principles of non-academic education according to the research of native and foreign scientists and Ukrainian state programs are: orientation of training to meet the actual needs of its subjects; communication with practice, which manifests itself in the pursuit of life skills and preparation for active participation in society; availability of mobile flexible programs, individual educational strategies aimed at expressing, accepting and respecting individual peculiarities. Conclusions. The modern paradigm of non-academic education acts as an activity form of the development of a personality and a specialist, based on the principles of creating a productive and not reproductive system of transmitting and receiving knowledge, taking into account the whole variety of subjective and objective challenges of our time. (shrink)

The optimistic perspective opened up by the preceding possibilities and promises does not grant that everything in this research project is rosy. Phenomenology may be a philosophy of infinite tasks, but it cannot pass for a philosophy of infinite means. By its very methodological principle, this philosophy is restricted to the elucidation of the phenomena in their horizontal and vertical (as it were) structure or, otherwise put, in their synchronic/diachronic or static/genetic structuring. To this extent, the specifically phenomenologically justified significance (...) of Phenomenology’s discoveries and teachings is restricted to the phenomena themselves, to what is phenomeno-logizable. To be sure, this restriction does not necessarily signal a diminishing of Phenomenology’s dignity as a kind of philosophizing. As we will see, what it signals is a more deeply entrenched self-awareness. Both Husserl and Heidegger nonetheless flirted with (and were sometimes fully enchanted by) the charm of the non-phenomenologizable. It is in the nature of our truth-seeking process in philosophy to frequently find ourselves moving along the boundary that separates the soundly intuitional from the merely speculative. According to Phenomenology’s strict rule, the possible drift into the merely speculative is the philosophical original sin against truth and knowledge, yet Phenomenology does not appear fully innocent of this drift. In this final chapter, we will have the opportunity to see what I believe to be the most crucial trespasses of these self-posed phenomenological limits. Generally speaking, this might be an expected result, given philosophy’s own high expectations in the field of truth and knowledge. The fact remains, however, that without any specific notice both Husserl and Heidegger do on occasion pass from the domain of phenomenological description of the things themselves into a speculative conjecturing of the phenomenologically unchartable. In their efforts to further extend the elucidatory capability of Phenomenology, fully absorbed in following the traces of the phenomena under investigation, they allow themselves to fall down the rabbit hole. (shrink)

Phenomenologists are yet another group of philosophers who have also dealt with the problem of values and valuation. What do they have to say about it? Heidegger, to be sure, emphatically warned that we’d better stop approaching serious philosophical problems in terms of valuing and values. It is actually the result of all the efforts to the contrary, he claimed, that has brought nihilism into history and has continued to enhance it along with the accompanying despair. Values and nihilism are (...) in fact the outcome prepared by the dynamics of the traditional metaphysical dichotomy between a positing subject and a posited there-standing object with properties—valuing and values being just one of its latest expressions. Scheler and Hartmann, on the other hand, devoted their lives to the effort of elucidating valuing and values. However, here we will focus on the thoughts that Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, developed regarding this problem. This is necessary if we want to deepen our understanding of the intensity and the breadth of the work that the phenomenologists he inspired developed on the possibility (or impossibility) of a philosophy of values. It is also necessary for an assessment of the real prospects of such a project, which today seems to attract progressively greater attention. To this effect, the structure of the present paper is as follows. In §2, I describe the basic features of the way Husserl carried out phenomenological-philosophical research. I will focus in particular on the meaning of “intentionality,” of “phenomenological method,” and of “intentional constitution.” In §3, I present Husserl’s idea regarding the possibility and meaning of a phenomenological critique of reason in general. The general outline and fundamental orientation of Husserl’s original project for a critique of the axiological and practical reason as well as of his essentialist-normative philosophy of valuing and of values is presented in §4. Section 5 contains an account of Husserl’s approach to emotive phenomena and to value-appearance in the Logical Investigations (1900/01) and in subsequent treatments of the issue along the lines of that original project. In §6, I present the key issue and the key problem in Husserl’s essentialist-normative Axiology. Finally, in §7 I sum up the conclusions and make some further critical remarks. (shrink)

In this essay, I will show one way in which Ricoeur utilizes Aristotle’s discussions in Rhetoric and Poetics; I will take my point of departure from his hermeneutic theory of metaphor. Here, he reverses the Aristotelian intention by blending the domains of discourse we call mythos and logos in a way which suggests that the latter is subsumed by the former. While one can argue that the two are co-emergent processes, Ricoeur’s formulation undermines one side of the dialectic between them.

The myth that women had equal rights and were emancipated in the Soviet Union masks the reality that the Soviet state, like all totalitarian states, is a manifestation of patriarchal ideology. The true democratization of Russian society requires the rejection of masculinist ideology and constitutes one of the most important social and cultural challenges.

Two seemingly opposing philosophies, Plato’s and Heidegger’s, are brought together by reading the philosophy of politics in the Republic through the existential-analytic lenses of Being and Time and also by using the former in order to explore the philosophico-political potential of the latter. Plato’s thematic of errancy (αμαρτία) is shown to interlock harmoniously with Ηeidegger’s thematic of the fall (Verfall). This provides a single, penetrating interpretation of how philosophy thinks humans are supposed to respond to the predicament of their original (...) condition (painfulness connected with injustice, meaninglessness, etc.). It turns out that in these otherwise antipodean versions of philosophizing, the view emerges, according to which the original difficulty can be fully overcome. The question whether the aforementioned predicament can be actually fully overcome (or rather not) however, would form the basis for a novel phenomenology of the political. (shrink)

The evolution of Husserl’s thought did not follow a linear route. Time and again, crucial changes were taking place in its course. The content of fundamental concepts was shifting; successive discoveries of new thematics were happening; incessant expansions of the ever-under-rework teachings to new fields of application were being developed. The evaluation of Husserl’s work in its entirety becomes, thus, an extremely difficult task. The huge bulk of the writings, the multifariousness of their thematics, and the successive reforms and shifts (...) in it make the understanding of even the overall plan wherein the intermediate findings fall very difficult. One thing, though, is certain. In order to overcome all these obstacles to approaching Husserl’s work, we must first deepen our understanding of his method, the phenomenological method of philosophizing. Whatever is said in Husserl’s Phenomenology makes sense and has its value only to the extent that it is a result of ‘the’ phenomenological reduction. (shrink)

The paper presents the main ideas of systematic research of the phenomenon of the human body as an essential characteristic of human being and the fundamental philosophical concept. It allows one to scrutinize the concept of the human body as a necessary research tool in the humanities. The human body is analyzed in the process of its conceptualization in the history of philosophy, in relation to which its logic and main phases are defined. The paradigms of the understanding of the (...) human body are identified as resomatization strategies of contemporary thinking. It allows one to claim that evolution of philosophy is inalienable from the process of conceptualization of the phenomenon of the human body. Using an ontological grounding of the human body as a key philosophical concept ensures reconciliation of philosophical anthropology and ontology. (shrink)

Proximity and interpersonal contact are prominent components of social connection. Giving affective touch to others is fundamental for human bonding. This brief report presents preliminary results from a pilot study. It explores if exposure to bonding scenes impacts the activity of specific muscles related to physical interaction. Fingers flexion is a very important component when performing most actions of affectionate contact. We explored the visuo-motor affective interplay by priming participants with bonding scenes and assessing the electromyographic activity of the fingers (...) flexor muscle, in the absence of any overt movements. Photographs of dyads in social interaction and of the same dyads not interacting were employed. We examined the effects upon the electromyographical activity: during the passive exposure to pictures, and during picture offset and when expecting the signal to perform a fingers flexion task. Interacting dyads compared to matched non-interacting dyads increased electromyographic activity of the fingers flexor muscle in both contexts. Specific capture of visual bonding cues at the level of visual cortex had been described in the literature. Here we showed that the neural processing of visual bonding cues reaches the fingers flexor muscle. Besides, previous visualization of bonding cues enhanced background electromyographic activity during motor preparation to perform the fingers flexion task, which might reflect a sustained leakage of central motor activity downstream leading to increase in firing of the respective motor neurons. These data suggest, at the effector level, an implicit visuo-motor connection in which social interaction cues evoke intrinsic dispositions toward affectionate social behavior. (shrink)

Progressively Husserl started referring to the whole sphere of the life of intentional acts in terms of praxis. Perception, imagination, judgement, scientific consciousness, etc., are all seen as practices. What is the meaning of this move? A seemingly self-evident possibility is that intentionality is praxial, because even perception is not completely free from empty intending moments that demand fulfilment; and all fulfilment is attained by means of bodily activities that enable our senses to acquire the relevant contents. I reject this (...) approach as insufficient and misguided. I argue that perception and intentionality in general is praxial because consciousness, in all of its constituting syntheses, is or becomes organized as a practice-structure. Intentional consciousness organizes its contents according to rules so as to accomplish the evident or true givenness of its intended correlates. (shrink)

At least after 1907, Husserl recognized that in the Phenomenology of the LI (1901), i.e., in Eidetic Descriptive or Pure Eidetic Psychology, elements that were silently presupposed were actually in need of phenomenological clarification and reconsideration. This was also the case with regard to the problematic ontological status of the world, as it is experienced in the natural attitude. In order to overcome this difficulty, Husserl invents the method of transcendental reduction and, on its basis, transforms the Eidetic Phenomenological Psychology (...) of the LI into the Transcendental Phenomenology, which, in a systematic form, is first expounded in the Ideas I (1913). The transcendental reduction is conceived of as a widening and a radicalization in comparison to the possibilities of the psychological reduction that was already at work, albeit silently, in the LI. [...] Despite this, as Husserl repeatedly complained, the meaning of Transcendental Phenomenology was never completely understood by even his closest disciples and collaborators. This is no surprise. As we know, the series of difficulties one must face in the effort to appropriate Husserl’s Phenomenology, let alone the passing from the LI to the Ideas I, are disheartening, if not totally repelling. In Chap. 2, we have already seen and confronted various difficulties in the exposition of the teaching of the reduction, as well as some representative recent misappropriations of the meaning of the transcendental reduction. We have done the same with regard to the specific confusions related to the—notorious—notion of “unintelligibility.” In the present chapter, we will focus on another misappropriation of Husserl’s phenomenological method, the one for which Heidegger himself was responsible, and which the Heideggerians continue to follow unquestioningly. (shrink)

Scheler developed the fundamentals of his theory of emotions and values wanting to overcome the common-sensical empiricist and the critical rationalist approaches to ethics. Both refused that there are laws of essence as regards the character, deployment, evolution, and interconnection/opposition of the emotions and their relatedness to values. Scheler distinguished between mere feeling states and the intentional feelings of something (principally of values). Moreover, he claimed that a normative inner organization of intentional emotive phenomena can be discovered. Thus, a corresponding (...) phenomenological ethics of values, based on the ‘rationality’ of the emotive life itself, appears possible for the first time. After a comprehensive elucidation of Scheler’s and phenomenology’s approach to the matter, I critically reconstruct in some detail Scheler’s analysis of emotions as intentional experiences. I examine the way in which Scheler understands intentionality and the way in which he silently applied it in the case of emotive experiences. He articulates three relevant proposals. Intentional feeling functions are turned toward feeling states as their intentional objects. He also suggests that, e.g., a snow-covered mountain, whose beauty has amazed someone, is also an intentional correlate of this amazement as intentional feeling. Scheler finally maintains his fundamental thesis that values are the intentional objects of intentional emotive phenomena. However, he does not develop a clear and coherent analysis of how the three candidates for the place of the intentional object of an emotion intermingle or are otherwise interconnected. In the end, I survey some other closely related problems, regarding his understanding of reduction and of the status of values, and attempt to trace them all back to Scheler’s phenomenological realism. This examination, however, shows that we can use the latter’s analyses as preparation for a demythologized, this time, concrete phenomenological theory of emotions and values, in the direction of a future critical transcendental and persuasive phenomenological praxeology. (shrink)

Heidegger connected his name with the endeavor of renewing the question regarding Being (Seinsfrage). In BT (1927), he attempted to bring the issue of Being and everything concerning it back to the fore, by investigating the question of what the things themselves (die Sache selbst) are in its case. In this way, he managed to maintain his distance from the inherited and uninterpellated theories and speculations around "Being" (είναι). At the time, he continued to think that the precondition for arriving (...) at the very things themselves was—more or less—the phenomenological method that Husserl introduced in his breakthrough phenomenological opus, the Logical Investigations (1900-01). On this basis, in his "What is Metaphysics?” (1929) (WM). Heidegger explicitly maintained that the truth with regard to the issue of Being could and should be mediated—no matter how paradoxical this may sound—through the question regarding Nothing (Nichts). Parmenides, to be sure, had warned that nothing (μηδέν) is not, for that which is the έόν, and that only with what is can understanding (νοείν) and speaking (λέγειν) be correlated. The possibility of arriving at truths depends on propositions that say “is” with regard to what is, and “is not" with regard to what is not. Heidegger, however, thought that the most important issue for philosophy as ontology (but even for humans as beings engaged in praxis) was Nothing (Nichts)—and, moreover. Nothing as Being! But how could someone conceive of and bring to language these obviously limit subject matters? Haven’t we seen that Logic, following Parmenides' instruction, has progressively burked all talk of Being, and barred all talk about Nothing? (shrink)

In his Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time (1925), Heidegger develops what at first sight could be seen as a masterful presentation of the “three fundamental discoveries” of Husserl’s Phenomenology: intentionality, categorial intuition, and the new conception of the a priori. Nevertheless, closer examination of the text discloses a series of subtle but serious problems. Our interest here will be restricted to Heidegger’s presentation of his understanding of Husserl’s theory regarding the intentionality of perception and of categorial (...) intuition. In §6 of that work (48/64), we read that Husserl’s discovery of categorial intuition means two things. Firstly, it means that there is an experience of objectities in which we also have a simple apprehension of categorial constituents, i.e., of the elements which the tradition, in a “crude” fashion, called “categories” (48/64). Secondly, it means that this apprehension is already present in every experience and, as Heidegger explains a few lines later, according to what he has “already suggested” in his preceding analyses of the fundamental discovery of intentionality (in §5), categorial intuition is found even in every perception (48/64). Heidegger insists on this claim, and at several points of his presentation (see, e.g., §6.b.“), he repeats the idea that the intentional act of perception is, after all, permeated with categorial elements, with “categorial intuition.” Now, how should we understand this dense and heavy idea? Is it a hidden criticism of Husserl’s views on perception, or is it Heidegger’s sincere understanding of Husserl’s original discovery? The relevant literature seems to take Heidegger’s reading as a true depiction of Husserl’s theory of categorial intuition. However, as we will see, this reading of the latter theory is far from self-evident, a fact that also casts doubt on the corresponding stance regarding its actual motive. In this chapter, I plan to cast new light on the details of Husserl’s theory, and thus also on this fold of the philosophical relation between Husserl and Heidegger. (shrink)

The role of bacterial variation in the waxing and waning of epidemics was a subject of lively debate in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century bacteriology and epidemiology. The notion that changes in bacterial virulence were responsible for the rise and fall of epidemic diseases was an often-voiced, but little investigated hypothesis made by late nineteenth-century epidemiologists. It was one of the first hypotheses to be tested by scientists who attempted to study epidemiological questions using laboratory methods. This paper examines how (...) two groups of experimental epidemiologists, the British group led by W. W. C. Topley and Major Greenwood, and an American group directed by Leslie T. Webster at the Rockefeller Institute, studied the role of variations in bacterial virulence in the course of laboratory epidemics of mouse typhoid. Relying on Ludwik Fleck’s concept of thought styles and thought collectives, the paper analyzes the fundamental conceptual differences between these two groups of researchers and analyzes the kinds of innovations they introduced as they attempted to integrate bacteriological and epidemiological approaches. The paper shows that the stylistic differences between the two groups can be understood better in the context of the institutional histories and disciplinary relations of epidemiology and bacteriology in the two countries. (shrink)

This article offers an anthropological perspective on autism, a condition at once neurological and social, which complements existing psychological accounts of the disorder, expanding the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in which autism has been predominantly examined, to the socio-cultural one. Persons with autism need to be viewed not only as individuals in relation to other individuals, but as members of social groups and communities who act, displaying both social competencies and difficulties, in relation to socially and culturally (...) ordered expectations of behavior. The article articulates a socio-cultural approach to perspective-taking in autism in three social domains: participating in conversational turn-taking and sequences; formulating situational scenarios; and interpreting socio-cultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. Providing ethnographic data on the everyday lives of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome, the article outlines a cline of competence across the three domains, from most success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings. Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical approaches to society and culture, illuminating how members of social groups are at once shaped by, and are agents of, social life and cultural understanding. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that critical posthumanism is a crucial tool in nursing philosophy and scholarship. Posthumanism entails a reconsideration of what ‘human’ is and a rejection of the whole tradition founding Western life in the 2500 years of our civilization as narrated in founding texts and embodied in governments, economic formations and everyday life. Through an overview of historical periods, texts and philosophy movements, I problematize humanism, showing how it centres white, heterosexual, able‐bodied Man at the top of (...) a hierarchy of beings, and runs counter to many current aspirations in nursing and other disciplines: decolonization, antiracism, anti‐sexism and Indigenous resurgence. In nursing, the term humanism is often used colloquially to mean kind and humane; yet philosophically, humanism denotes a Western philosophical tradition whose tenets underpin much of nursing scholarship. These underpinnings of Western humanism have increasingly become problematic, especially since the 1960s motivating nurse scholars to engage with antihumanist and, recently, posthumanist theory. However, even current antihumanist nursing arguments manifest deep embeddedness in humanistic methodologies. I show both the problematic underside of humanism and critical posthumanism's usefulness as a tool to fight injustice and examine the materiality of nursing practice. In doing so, I hope to persuade readers not to be afraid of understanding and employing this critical tool in nursing research and scholarship. (shrink)