Among theorists associated with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse’s position is singular in that he provides us with an unabashedly affirmative theory of politics as liberatory practice. The article discusses Marcuse’s contribution to political thought by pointing out how, in particular, three aspects remain highly pertinent to contemporary thought: (a) his account of freedom as potentiality, to be actualized in political practice; (b) his conception of the political pre-figuration or pre-enactment of a liberated society; and (...) (c) his rehabilitation of the human faculty of imagination that allows us to overcome the reality principle of the status quo by venturing, qua practice, into the realm of the revolutionary surreal, thereby enlarging the horizon of what is politically imaginable. In a final step Marcuse’s contribution is contrasted with contemporary theories of the political. (shrink)

One challenge faced by aesthetics is the development of an account able to trace out the continuities and discontinuities between general experience and aesthetic experiences. Regarding this issue, in this paper, I present an enactive model of some raw cognitive dynamics that might drive the progressive emergence of aesthetic experiences from the stream of general experience. The framework is based on specific aspects of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and embodied aesthetic theories, while also taking into account research in ecological psychology, (...) cognitive sciences, and dynamic systems theory. The model focuses on dynamically relevant nodes at the pre-reflective and the reflective side of experience that would work as nested rhythmic constraints at different cognitive timescales with the potential to shunt experiences toward the aesthetic in everyday situations. My proposal constitutes a way to explore aesthetic experiences from an enactive perspective that regards them as transformative events in which cognitive processes entrain and are entrained by changes taking place in the environment, the brain, and the body. (shrink)

Context: The past few years have presented us with a growing amount of theoretical research (yet that is often based on neuroscientific developments) in the field of enactive music cognition. Problem: Current cognitivist and embodied approaches to music cognition suffer, in our opinion, from a too firm commitment to the explanatory role of mental representations in musical experience. This particular problem can be solved by adopting an enactive approach to music cognition. Method: We present and compare cognitivist, embodied and enactive (...) approaches to music cognition and review the current research in enactive music cognition. Results: We find that, in general, the enactive approaches to human musicality are capable of explaining the basic relationship between a musical subject and a musical object according to a pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic form of understanding related to bodily motor expertise. This explanation does not rely on on sophisticated forms of representation. Implications: Proponents of enactive music cognition should, in our opinion, focus on providing a consistent explanation of the most basic level of musical understanding. Constructivist content: We hope to invite the constructivist community to engage with the discussions on the intersection between music and enactivism. (shrink)

The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the brain. Arguments by O'Regan, Noë, and (...) Myin that seek to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual consciousness in terms of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ are considered. It is suggested that their account does not pay sufficient attention to two other key aspects of perceptual phenomenality: the autonomous nature of the experiencing self or agent, and the pre-reflective nature of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

Some considerations are urgent and others are not. Sometimes we invite criticism if we neglect the urgency of our situation, even if our action seems adequate to respond to it. Despite this significance, the literature does not offer a satisfactory analysis of the normative structure of urgency. I examine three views of urgency, drawn from philosophical and adjacent literature, which fail to explain the distinctive criticism we face when we neglect the urgency of our reasons. Instead I argue that urgent (...) considerations pre-empt our deliberation about less urgent considerations. Urgency, then, is a meta-normative phenomenon, setting standards for how we handle and respond to first-order considerations, requiring that we close deliberation. In the face of urgency, appropriate action is not enough: commitment is called for. This is how we enact appreciation of our practical reasons, independently of our carrying out the action they call for. (shrink)

This paper investigates the embodied dimensions of episodic memory through a phenomenological analysis. Contemporary philosophical theories understand episodic memory as a mental representation of a past event ‘happening in the head’. A philosophical account that seemingly supports an embodied understanding of episodic memory comes from phenomenology. Phenomenology has traditionally understood episodic memory in terms of presentification, which implies a reproduction of the elapsed portion of the consciousness lived during the foreground experience, replicating the previous perceptual activity. However, this appears to (...) be incoherent with the constructive theories of episodic memory, which highlight how subjects shift perspectives in memory or include information not present in the foregoing experience. Thus, according to these contemporary theories, episodic memory is unlikely to imply a replay of the past conscious experience. I argue that if we investigate the embodied dimensions, then it is possible to reconcile the phenomenological approach and the constructive theories. More precisely, I ground the investigation on the analysis of operative intentionality and its role in comparing procedural and episodic memory. I argue that two embodied features qualify the reproductive modification of consciousness: the flexible re-enactment of the previous operative intentionality and the pre-reflective mode of embodied resonance with an agent I am no longer. (shrink)

This paper disputes the theoretical assumptions of mainstream approaches in philosophy of pain, representationalism and imperativism, and advances an enactive approach as an alternative. It begins by identifying three shared assumptions in the mainstream approaches: the internalist assumption, the brain-body assumption, and the semantic assumption. It then articulates an alternative, enactive approach that considers pain as an embodied response to the situation. This approach entails the hypothesis of the sociocultural embeddedness of pain, which states against the brain-body assumption that the (...) intentional character of pain depends on the agent’s sociocultural background. The paper then proceeds to consider two objections. The first questions the empirical basis of this hypothesis. It is argued based on neuroscientific evidence, however, that there is no empirical reason to suppose that the first-order experience of pain is immune to sociocultural influences. The second objection argues that the mainstream approaches can account for sociocultural influences on pain by drawing on the conceptual distinction between narrow and wide content. In response, the semantic conception of pain underpinning the proposal is challenged. Pain experience can occur in pre-reflective, affectively reflective, or cognitively reflective forms, but the semantic conception at most only applies to the last form. The paper concludes that the enactive approach offers a promising alternative framework in philosophy of pain. (shrink)

This mixed methods research study investigated if explicit instruction could affect EFL teachers’ perceptions and practices of classroom justice considering its three-dimensional conceptualization based on the social psychology theories of justice, encompassing the distributive, interactional, and procedural justice. To this end, 77 Iranian English as a Foreign Language teachers, chosen through maximum variation sampling, attended a four-session online justice-training course. The data were collected both before and after the course intervention through close- and open-ended questionnaires. Quantitative data analysis results, obtained (...) through running paired samples t-tests and Wilcoxon signed ranks tests, indicated that except for the distributive component, the treatment was effective in significantly enhancing the Iranian EFL teachers’ procedural, interactional, and total classroom justice perceptions. Content analysis of the posttest qualitative data, done through MAXQDA, revealed that the participants approved the course usefulness, its significance, and uses of justice enactment strategies in their classroom. Furthermore, they confirmed positive changes in their conceptions and practices of justice because of attending the course and showed enthusiasm in attending more such courses in the future. The convergence of the quantitative and qualitative results in this study demonstrated the effectiveness of the justice-oriented training course for enhancing EFL teachers’ just classroom behaviors. Hence, the results would be fruitful for teacher educators aiming to promote the pre- and in-service EFL teachers’ professional effectiveness through explicit instruction on classroom justice and its use in teacher education programs. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment has been widely adopted by enactivists seeking to provide an account of cognition that is both embodied and embedded. Yet very little attention has been paid to Merleau-Ponty’s later works. This is troubling given that in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty revises his conception of embodied subjectivity because he came to the realization that understanding consciousness through the concepts of subject and object imposed a dualistic framework that he was trying to escape. To overcome (...) this dichotomy Merleau-Ponty more fully develops the radically embodied ontology implicit in his earlier work by introducing the concept of flesh. I argue that the enactive account of subjectivity would be improved by “giving flesh” to the enactive subject, given that the enactive account of subjectivity as grounded in pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness is ultimately rooted in accounts of which the later Merleau-Ponty is critical. Incorporating flesh resolves the underlying problems with the enactive account of subjectivity and makes the account more consistent with the ontological commitments to embodiment and embeddedness. (shrink)

The phenomenology of atmospheres is recently gaining attention in debates on situated affectivity. Atmospheres are defined as holistic affective qualities of situations that integrate disparate affective forces into an identifiable and unitary gestalt. They point to a blurred, pathic, relational, and pre-individual form of experience which has been described in terms of ecological affordances. Despite its relevance in diverse areas of research such as architecture, phenomenological psychiatry and aesthetics, a thorough analysis of the phenomena of affective atmospheres from an enactive-ecological (...) perspective is missing in the literature. This article aims at clarifying how and to what extent affective atmospheres can be accommodated into ecological-enactive understandings of the environment in terms of affordances. To do so, I review four perspectives on ecological affordances – the gibsonian account, the relational account, affective affordances, and the Skill Intentionality Framework (SIF) – and contrast them with the ontological and epistemológical principles that ground the phenomenology of atmospheres. I argue that only the field perspective developed in SIF is compatible with the phenomenology of atmospheres. From this perspective, affective atmospheres can be understood as phenomenological counterparts of context sensitivity, that is, as the holistic and pathic background feelings that make certain affordances more salient than others. As a conclusion, the analysis in this article shows the potential of the phenomenology of atmospheres to enrich the ecological-enactive cognition framework. It also highlights the opportunity to construct a situated understanding of affectivity that is informed by phenomenological perspectives. (shrink)

Purpose: This paper is a brief introduction to enactive cognitive science: a description of some of the main research concerns; some examples of how such concerns have been realized in actual research; some of its research methods and proposed explanatory mechanisms and models; some of the potential as both a theoretical and applied science; and several of the major open research questions. Findings: Enactive cognitive science is an approach to the study of mind that seeks to explain how the structures (...) and mechanisms of autonomous cognitive systems can arise and participate in the generation and maintenance of viable perceiver-dependent worlds -- rather than more conventional cognitivist efforts, such as the attempt to explain cognition in terms of the ``recovery'' of (pre-given, timeless) features of The (objectively-existing and accessible) World. As such, enactive cognitive science is resonant with radical constructivism. Research implications: As with other scientific efforts conducted within a constructivist orientation, enactive cognitive science is broadly ``conventional'' in its scientific methodology. That is, there is a strong emphasis on testable hypotheses, empirical observation, supportable mechanisms and models, rigorous experimental methods, acceptable criteria of validation, and the like. Nonetheless, this approach to cognitive science does also raise a number of specific questions about the scope of amenable phenomena (e.g., meaning, consciousness, etc.) -- and it also raises questions of whether such a perspective requires an expansion of what is typically considered within the purview of scientific method (e.g., the role of the observer/scientist). (shrink)

Daniel Hutto’s Enactive account of social cognition maintains that pre- and non-linguistic interactions do not require that the participants represent the psychological states of the other. This goes against traditional ‘cognitivist’ accounts of these social phenomena. This essay examines Hutto’s Enactive account, and proposes two challenges. The account maintains that organisms respond to the behaviours of others, and in doing so respond to the ‘intentional attitude’ which the other has. The first challenge argues that there is no adequate account of (...) how the organisms respond to the correct aspect of the behaviour in each situation. The second challenge argues that the Enactive account cannot account for the flexibility of pre- and non-linguistic responses to others. The essay concludes that these challenges provide more than sufficient reason to doubt the viability of Hutto’s account as an alternative to cogntivist approaches to social cognition. (shrink)

The article is based on research conducted at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, Radiology Department (Memphis, Tennessee, USA). It examines embodied cognition embedded in radiological diagnostics relating image perception with normative judgment constitution. The research follows the causal thesis in that it is possible to grasp categories and causality via visual experience (causal impressions) and language (causal verbs), which in turn heavily depends on strategies of the enaction of imaging technology and intersubjective corroboration. In this way, the pre-reflective and intersubjective constitution (...) of categorial fulfillments of diagnostic experiences is disclosed by phenomenological ethnography of radiologists’ praxis showing how professional knowledge is structurally interrelated with certain kinesthetic and kinetic experiences, multilayered image apprehension and enactive metaphors. (shrink)

Recent developments in metaphor theory stress its embodied character. This article brings together these transformational insights and considers them through the lenses of Dante’s approach, which we may call proto-phenomenological, to the phenomenon of evil. Despite the substantial work on different aspects of Dante’s oeuvre, concerning philosophy, theology and poetry, there has been little reflection on his specific phenomenological hermeneutics of the body and its importance for the whole poetic project. The article responds to this neglect with an analysis of (...) the logic of embodied metaphor in relation to a specific, pre-modern context. Hence, the conceptual apparatus of embodied cognition and enactive phenomenology is used here as a method to support the thesis that the language of embodied metaphors grounds a new approach to ontological, epistemological and ethical aspects regarding the phenomenon of evil, which are already apparent in Dante’s work. Therefore, another important outcome of this research is the validation of the primacy of poetry on the grounds of this new (embodied) epistemology. (shrink)

I pursue here three related aims. First, I criticise some of the metaphysical claims made on behalf of the so-called `enactive' approach to visual experience. Secondly, I explain why the enactive view of visual experience is hard to square with the evidence in favour of the two-visual-systems model of human vision. Finally, I explore one possible way to develop the `pre-emptive perception' framework and explain why, contrary to first appearances, some of the fundamental discoveries of brain mechanisms, whose function might (...) be to underlie pre-emptive perception, do not really support the enactive approach to visual experience. (shrink)

This article uses an account of dwelling to interrogate the concept of curriculum making. Tim Ingold’s use of dwelling to understand culture is productive here because of his implicit and explicit interest in intergenerational learning. His account of dwelling rests on a foundational ontological claim—that mental construction and representation are not the basis upon which we live in the world—which is very challenging for the kinds of curriculum making with which many educators are now familiar. It undermines assumptions of propositional (...) knowledge and of the use of mental schemas to communicate and share. At the level of critique, then, dwelling destabilizes contemporary ideas of curriculum as textual, pre-specified content for transmission or pre-defined objectives or standardized activity. The positive claims of dwelling are equally challenging, for these are that the world is a domain of relational entanglement in which an organism can be no more than a point of growth for an emergent ‘environment’, and meaning only inheres in these relations. The paper articulates how differentiation (of learner, salient meanings, knowledge, skill and place) are possible in such an ontology, and how curriculum making can be understood from this perspective as being the remaking of relationships between these. (shrink)

Peripersonal space (PPS) is frequently defined as a plastic, pragmatic and goal-directed multisensory buffer that connects the brain-body with its immediate environment. While such characterisations indicate that peripersonal spatiality is profoundly embodied and enactive, comparatively few attempts have aimed to systematically synthesise PPS literature with compatible phenomenological accounts of lived space provided by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, in traditional cognitive neuroscience, neurophysiological activity is thought to map onto discrete ‘cognitive correlates’. In contemporary 4E approaches to cognition, however, phenomenology-derived notions such (...) as ‘pre-reflective cognition’ and ‘motor-intentionality’ frequently appear, yet their neural correlates may be comparatively difficult to pin down. Pre-reflectively, agents seemingly do not thematise spatial properties as operationalised in key experimental paradigms (e.g., spatial rotation tasks) but are instead inherently spatially embedded within the world. To refine this distinction, I survey how tools co-determine this distinctly spatial ‘world-embeddedness’ using a neurophenomenological methodology (Varela, _Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3_(4), 330–349, 1996 ). Specifically, I conduct two neurophenomenological analyses of tool-perception and tool-use, examining both how distance modulates affordance-perception and how tool-use remaps bodily space via the withdrawal of tools from intentional-objects into co-constituting motor-intentionality itself. I conclude by briefly distinguishing this interpretation of spatial cognition from cognitivist frameworks. Thereafter, I briefly highlight the temporal scaffolding underlying PPS while conceptually grounding my account within Embodied Simulation Theory (Gallese, _Reti, Saperi, Linguaggi_, (1), 31–46, 2018 ). What is at stake is thus both an explicitly embodied-enactive account of bodily space that is qualitative and situational instead of quantitative and positional, as well as a viable, interdisciplinary strategy for unifying pre-reflective cognition with neurophysiological data. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on postphenomenology and material engagement theory to consider the material and emergent character of sociality in Homo faber. I approach this through the context of the bow and arrow, which is a technology that has received recent attention in cognitive archeology as a proxy for assessing criteria that made early human cognition distinct from that of other hominins. Through an ethnographic case study, I scrutinize the forms of knowledge that are required to use the technology (...) in the dynamic field of environmental practices that constitute the hunt. I demonstrate that the learning of the skill is a transformational process where beginners develop self and intentionality by attuning subjective capacities for sensory awareness and creative responsiveness. Through mutual participation, the bow and arrow aligns disposition and rapport among those whose life processes are shaped by the skill. As a mechanism of shared experience, the bow and arrow generates a community can together perceive and act creatively in an impermanent world. Through these observations, I argue that early human sociality was built not on a pre-evolved capacity for symbolic representation but on technical experience, and I consider important questions this raises about the nature of evolutionary processes at work in the development of communities through time. (shrink)

Although wisdom might be considered a quaint concept in a post-industrialised, instrumental and secular world, it deserves serious consideration. This is done primarily from a philosophical perspective and is intended to encourage the reintroduction of wisdom into educational and developmental programmes, especially for managers and leaders. Mindful of the potential naïvete of transplanting systems of thinking from one epoch to another, we nonetheless examine the relevance of pre-modern thought to the post-modern condition. This is done by radically reinterpreting classical Greek (...) texts as Pierre Hadot has done to derive a meaning of "philosophy" and the place of wisdom in the ancient world. The concepts of wisdom, virtue and enacted ethics derived from this re-interpretation are then applied to an ethnographic case study involving a senior executive. This study suggests that a Stoical "wisdom of the moment" philosophy may characterize contemporary leadership practice. (shrink)

The paper investigates the role played by pre-scientific experience in the philosophy of Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl. Such a notion, generally associated with Husserl’s conception of the life-world (Lebenswelt) in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), finds an equivalent and historical antecedent in Royce’s distinction between a world of description and a world of appreciation. The final goal is to show how, despite their different philosophical frameworks, Royce and Husserl agree on the idea that, through the (...) rejection of the world given through mere perception (Lebenswelt/world of appreciation), European sciences have somehow failed their task of universality. As it will be shown, this idea is also due to methodological affinities among the two thinkers. The experience of interconnectedness among individual minds, while precluded in the mere scientific explanation of the world, it becomes possible through the enactment of the Lebenswelt or, as in Royce’s case, through a return to the experience of the world of appreciation. (shrink)

Corporate scandals brought the issue of corporate governance to the forefront of the agendas of lawmakers and regulators in the early 2000s. As a result, Congress, the New York Stock Exchange, and the NASDAQ enacted standards to improve the quality of corporate governance, thereby enhancing the quantity and quality of disclosures by listed companies. We investigate the relationship between corporate governance strength and the quality of disclosures in pre- and post-regulation time periods. If cross-sectional differences in corporate governance policies affect (...) the quality of financial disclosures, the quality of information available to analysts varies with such policies. Specifically, higher quality disclosures, produced as a result of strong corporate governance, should lead to more accurate and less dispersed analysts’ forecasts. Our analysis suggests that voluntary implementation of stronger corporate governance enhanced the quality of disclosures in the pre-regulation period; however, exceeding current corporate governance standards does not appear to result in higher quality disclosures post-regulation. These results suggest that SOX and the stronger regulations enacted by U.S. exchanges were effective in reducing variation in the quality of financial information available to investors. (shrink)

Right after the presentation of Hyginus’s fable in §42 of Being and Time comes a note in which Heidegger affirms that the orientation about care as the being of Dasein (§41) arose in the context of the interpretation of Augustinian anthropology and the foundations obtained by the analysis of Aristotelian ontology. Why such a mention and why is it placed precisely after proving the pre-ontological origin of care as the being of Dasein? Assuming such problem, this paper does not aim (...) only at offering a reading key that justifies such note, but at presenting the importance of the factical and pre-ontological aspects presented, respectively, in Book X of The Confessions of Augustine and in the fable of Hyginus for Heidegger's elaboration of care as an ontological category. For this purpose, three lecture courses will be assumed, especially: Augustine and Neo-Platonism (1921), which will make it possible to perceive the always factical aspect of care, thus evidencing the historical enactment perspective of the hermeneutics of facticity; Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle (1921/1922), which will make it possible to understand the idea of “ontological category” as a first formulation of what, in Being and Time, will be the existentials; and History of the concept of time: prolegomena (1925), which will allow us to realize that care is about being and not having, therefore, that it is not a possession of Dasein, but a condition of its existence. Finally, after justifying the importance of different aspects for care as an ontological category, it will be understood why the ontological interpretation differs from both others. (shrink)

In 1997, the Japanese Diet revised the Bank of Japan law thereby granting the central bank greater independence in monetary policy making. The revision was an attempt by Japan's political class to weaken the authority of the powerful Ministry of Finance over the central bank and augment its own influence. The Bank of Japan, however, gained more autonomy than politicians ever intended, leading to frequent confrontations between the government and the central bank over monetary policy. This paper explores the new (...) strategic relationship that emerged between the Bank of Japan and government and the nature of monetary policy implemented in the post-reform period. We demonstrate that several factors contributed to the Bank's unexpected ability to enhance its independence: the astute leadership of the first post-reform governor Hayami Masaru; the Bank's ability to turn politicization of monetary policy to its advantage; and its pursuit of a strategy achieved by augmenting its own research capacity. On a theoretical level, our findings show that the passage of a new legal framework only marks the completion of one stage of institutional change and the start of the next; post-enactment politics have as much importance as pre-enactment politics in shaping outcomes. In the post-enactment phase, various factors, including the state of the economy and informal institutions or processes, matter greatly and may shift the direction of institutional change away from the intended path. (shrink)

Can the Transsexual speak? I investigate this question through the case of Ella Nik Bayan who self-immolated in Berlin (Germany) on September 14, 2021. I first argue that this self-immolation is unreadable within the current frameworks of Western democracies. The case, however, paradigmatically demonstrates that emancipation within the confines of neoliberal capitalism can only be read under the pretense of a toxic protection. I then move on to claim that Ella Nik Bayan’s self-immolation calls for a completely different political order (...) from the one we currently inhabit, which, with Namita Goswami, I call “ heterogeneous.” I argue that heterogeneous politics is a politics of radical hospitality that opposes institutions of private property in particular. Unlearning private property means to pre-enact a world without the kind of racist, transmisogynist, and antisemitic violence that killed Ella Nik Bayan. Anti-capitalist hospitality sets out to create the social and cultural resources that enable a world beyond (such) violence. (shrink)

Enactment of mandated pre-procedure disclosures in abortion and assisted reproductive technology services has swelled in recent years. Calls to equally regard these mandates as neutral tools in furtherance of patient protection fail to acknowledge key substantive and structural differences in these reproduction-affecting mandates. While ART mandates permit physicians to use their medical judgment to protect presumptively vulnerable egg donors and gestational carriers, abortion disclosures impart scientifically suspect messaging aimed at dissuading women from pursuing pregnancy termination. These and other distinctions (...) counsel in favor of regarding and analyzing abortion and ART mandated disclosures as separate and distinguishable informed consent tools. (shrink)

Recent enactive approach to social cognition stresses the indispensability of social affordance with regard to social understanding and contends that it is affordance that primarily solicits one’s reaction to the other, such that one becomes affected by the other and attends to the other’s situated appearance in the first place. What remains to be explored, however, is the sense in which social affordance is delineated by an affective sphere and the extent to which the affective sphere serves as a meaning (...) constraint for social sense-making. In this paper, we analyze Husserl’s genetic theory of affection, so as to better understand the nature of the social affective sphere. And we argue that social understanding takes places at different levels and it is at the passive and pre-reflective level that the social surroundings are pre-delineated by a sort of affective ambience where the empathizer and the empathizee come into contact. Once this is appreciated, we can better articulate the affective structure of social affordance and its meaning constituents. And we show that, at the passive level, social coupling is in nature an affective intertwinement between oneself and the other and it consists of a particular kind of corporeal intentionality with which one adverts to the other’s presence and responds to the other’s appeal. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between bioethics and the therapeutic standards in HIV prevention research in the developing world, focusing on the closure of the pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) trials in the early 2000s. I situate the PrEP trials in the historical context of the vertical transmission debates of the 1990s, where there was protracted debate over the use of placebos despite the existence of a proven intervention. I then discuss the dramatic improvement in the clinical management of HIV and the (...) treatment access movement, and consider how these contexts have influenced research practice. I argue that as HIV prevention trials oblige researchers to observe the rate at which vulnerable people under their care acquire HIV, there is an obligation to provide antiretroviral treatment to seroconverters and other health care benefits that fall within the scope of researchers' entrustment, both to avoid exploitation and to enact reciprocal justice. I argue against propositions that the obligations to provide specific benefits are vague, fall only upon researchers and sponsors, and create injustices by privileging the few over the many. Finally, I contend that the realisation of a broader standard of care in HIV prevention research broadens the role of research from being a simple tool to produce knowledge to a complex intervention that can play a part in the reduction of health disparities. (shrink)

This article argues that Dewey expresses what seems to be a core enactive commitment to constructivism: that creatures do not encounter pre-existing realities but bring them out by altering their surroundings. He adds that constructivism does not obviate realism because changes, once introduced, really are there in relation to a creature’s capacities. This poses a dilemma. If enaction primarily entails altering the external milieu, then the movement repeats pragmatism, also collapsing a basis upon which many of its authors differentiate their (...) outlooks from ecological psychology’s realism. Yet if constructive activity is largely interior, as enactivists’ language sometimes suggests, then critics may be right in saying that the movement backslides into early Modern solipsism. A broader argument is that enactivists sometimes perpetuate what James characterizes as monistic halfway empiricism. Here, the risk is that researchers hold positions not because of evidence but regardless of it, or stipulate terminological definitions that exclude opposing views ahead of time. Even physics remains ununified, and there may be room for combining antagonistic accounts of mind. Or maybe normally hostile positions like enactivism and functionalism are, with some terminological reframing, reconcilable. The article also touches on historical points, such as the fact that American philosophy and enactivism have Asian and evolutionary influences, or that they react against common schools. The purpose is to clarify the movements in question and identify where enactivists engage in something like halfway empiricism by orienting themselves against enemies based more in fiction than fact. (shrink)

I. The word ‘history’ and its derivatives are used in many different senses among modern philosophers, theologians, and historians. While we need not rehearse here the various meanings of the word in current use, it will serve our purpose to call attention to a very general distinction which seems quite essential to any attempt to do so. Some meanings of ‘history’ or ‘historical’ refer to an actual course of events as they occur or are enacted. Other meanings refer to the (...) recollection, the piecing together, the reconstruction and interpretation of such a course of events after it has occurred, pre-eminently through the scholarly craft of the historian. Admittedly, even this innocent sounding distinction is fraught with difficulties. It is not as though there were an independent access to past events which could dispense with the historian’s methods. But to every event there is one relationship that requires no access at all: that of its participants, who enact it and are directly affected by it. They are in the event and it, so to speak, is in them. Indeed, though there are nonhuman factors in any event, it is the transaction of human participants which makes the event historical, which, in fact, constitutes the historical event. (shrink)

Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of long-term planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecological-enactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for “high-level” or “representation-hungry” capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that (...) stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a non-representational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating pre-reflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use. (shrink)

Badiou and Wittgenstein focus in their works on potentialities of innovation in the realm of thought as well as in the realm of politics. These innovations manifest themselves especially when two seemingly contrasting jurisdictions of thought – present in politics and logic – meet and merge. For Badiou a set-theoretical process of enforcement may change pre-established templates of a political doxa. For Wittgen-stein it is the spontaneity of concept-formation that crisscross referential relations within the “space of reason” and through performative (...) enactments makes visible unexpected places of unprompted innovation. For both Wittgenstein and Badiou, the subject is of vital importance in this union of politics and logic. It is both a “limit of the world” as well as a “supernumerary agency”. Characterized as such, it can provoke new worlds to appear with the aid of what I will call in the following paragraphs self-proclaimed logics of scission. (shrink)

This article examines precontextualization: the rhetorical act of previewing and contextualizing a future discursive event. I examine how an NBC News broadcast selected verbal–visual representations of the past in order to enact a context for an upcoming discourse moment: Colin Powell’s 2003 United Nations address. The article draws on appraisal analysis, multimodal video analysis and scholarship on the rhetoric of futurity. I show that the NBC journalists who precontextualized Powell’s address on the night before its delivery presented viewers with a (...) supportive context for understanding Powell’s argument. By representing Saddam Hussein as deceptive and even deserving of future violence, the journalists essentially pre-confirmed arguments that Powell employed the next day. More importantly, because the news representations were presented as factual, they allowed viewers little space to consider alternative viewpoints – and little reason to question or resist the seemingly inexorable push for war. (shrink)

This paper offers a biosemiotic account of the poetic aspects of gesture and speech in schizophrenia. The argument is that speech and gesture are not the mere expression of pre-verbal thoughts. Instead, meaning is enacted by the temporal and semantic coordination of speech and gesture. The bodily basis of language is highlighted by the fact that, failing to create language that is organized around topics, individuals with schizophrenia often rely on poetic associations in directing their utterances. Accordingly, the analysis of (...) schizophrenic speech and gesture based on McNeill’s Growth Point theory is enriched with reference to both Cowley’s (2007b) views on language as distributed social coordination, and Alexander’s (Biosemiotics 2(1):77–100, 2009) description of formal causes in nature. Schizophrenic language can be seen as a hypertrophied manifestation of the discourse-scaffolding function of poetic associations in speech and gesture. The analysis of schizophrenic language shows that language behavior need not be built on pre-verbal thoughts and important aspects of schizophrenic language, such as metalinguistic awareness and semiotic agency, can be clarified by applying concepts from biosemiotics. (shrink)

Václav Havel’s concept of “living within the truth” in an authoritarian regime frames Marguerite La Caze’s readings of international cinema, highlighting forms of resistance in which seemingly pre- or nonpolitical aspects of life—such as professional labor, exile, and truth telling—can be recognized as political when seen against a backdrop of general acquiescence. La Caze’s case studies cross genres, historical eras, and national contexts: the apartheid regime in South Africa, in A Dry White Season; post-Suharto Indonesia, in The Look of Silence; (...) 1980s East Germany, in Barbara; the Chilean military dictatorship, in No; contemporary Iran, in A Separation; and current-day Saudi Arabia, in Wadjda. This book explores the films’ use of image, sound, narrative, and character in dialogue with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Aimé Cesaire, Hannah Arendt, Sara Ahmed, and W. E. B. Du Bois to reveal how cinema depicts ordinary people enacting their own philosophies of defiance. (shrink)

This paper details the ways that gender structures our senses of agency on an enactive framework. While it is common to discuss how gender influences higher, narrative levels of cognition, as with the formulation of goals and in considerations about our identities, it is less clear how gender structures our more immediate, embodied processes, such as the minimal sense of agency. While enactivists often acknowledge that gender and other aspects of our socio-cultural situatedness shape our cognitive processes, there is little (...) work on how this shaping takes place. In order to provide such an account, I will first look at the minimal and narrative senses of agency (Gallagher 2012), a distinction that draws from work on minimal and narrative selves (Zahavi 2010). Next I will explain the influence of the narrative sense of agency on the minimal sense of agency through work on intention-formation (Pacherie 2007). After a discussion of the role of gender in the narrative sense of agency, I’ll expand on work by Haslanger (2012) and Young (1980) to offer three ways in which gender influences the minimal sense of agency, showing the effect that gender has on how we perceive our possibilities for interaction in a phenomenologically immediate, pre-reflective manner. (shrink)

In this essay we explore extensive modes of enactive engagement among humans, physical and computational media richer than the modes represented by classical notions of interaction and relation. We make use of a radically material and a potential-theoretic account of event to re-conceive ad hoc, non-pre-schematized activity in responsive environments. We can regard such activity as sense-making via dehomogenization of material that co-articulates subjects and objects.

Many studies have highlighted a substantial "bureaucracy domination" in procedures relating to migrants’ access to territory. This form of domination is marked by highly discretionary and arbitrary practices, enacted by the administrative authorities of the state. Only minor attention, however, has been devoted to the arbitrariness of judicial decisions and to the judicial role in general in the numerous proceedings that increasingly affect the path of migrants. This path is the main object of this paper. The study focuses on Italian (...) case law in expulsion and detention proceedings of irregular third country national citizens and asylum seekers and presents qualitative empirical research on decisions issued by the competent national authorities. The results have been analysed using a selection of theoretical tools, all referable to the general concept of the rule of law. The judicial decisions on pre-removal detention proceedings in two case studies are examined: the jurisprudence on detention of irregular migrants, in different offices of the Justice of the Peace in Italy; and the case law on detention of asylum seekers in the Ordinary Tribunal of Rome. The assumption underlying the research is that various conceptions of the rule of law may have different explanatory power when it comes to explaining the empirical results. To verify this hypothesis, the study proposes an overview of the main rule of law doctrines in the Western tradition of political and legal thought and applies the method of historical-conceptual analysis. As a result, the explanatory power of six theoretical models of the rule of law was verified against the data with the view to highlight the virtues and vices of the respective explanatory frameworks. This article reaches a two-fold conclusion. First, as far as the explanatory frameworks are concerned: the results of the two case studies cannot be fully explained by any of the models considered in this study. This fact alone casts doubts on the explanatory power of these theories and calls for further research on judicial decision-making more generally. Secondly, a key finding of the study regarding the notions of discretion and arbitrariness is that the judicial approach which assures the highest protection of rights is also the one that is most easily influenced by arbitrariness. The author argues that this paradox can be easily dissolved by paying attention to the plural dimensions of arbitrariness. If we consider arbitrariness from a legal point of view, i.e. as an illegal decision, it is unsurprising that the authority that most uses its discretionary powers is also the one most at risk of abusing these discretionary powers and hence of exercising arbitrary power. However, if we consider arbitrariness from the point of view of philosophical-political theory, i.e. as a form of domination characterised by the absence of sufficient justification, it is unsurprising that the judicial approach which assures the highest protection of rights is also the one that takes its own role as guarantor of these rights and of the constitutional democratic legal order as such most seriously. This judicial approach thus most often risks exercising its power in criticisable ways, as compared to an authority much more in line with the requirements of law enforcement agencies. Keywords: migration, discretion, justice, arbitrariness, civil rights, Rechtsstaat, expulsion, mixed constitution. (shrink)

Ignorant speech, which spreads falsehoods about people and policies, is pervasive in public discourse. A popular response to this problem recommends countering ignorant speech with more speech, rather than legal regulations. However, Mary Kate McGowan has influentially argued that this ‘counterspeech’ response is flawed, as it overlooks the asymmetric pliability of conversational norms: the phenomenon whereby some conversational norms are easier to enact than subsequently to reverse. After demonstrating that this conversational ‘stickiness’ is an even broader concern for counterspeech than (...) McGowan suggests—it applies not just to oppressive or hateful speech, but also to ordinary policy-related misinformation—I argue that a more sophisticated account of counterspeech can nevertheless overcome it. First, the stickiness objection overlooks the distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ counterspeech. Instead of directly negating a distorted proposition, positive counterspeech affirms a correct proposition that is inconsistent with the falsehoods at hand. This, I contend, allows it to counter ignorant speech without triggering the properties that render it sticky. Second, the stickiness objection presupposes an unrefined conception of counterspeech’s temporality. Counterspeech should be understood as a diachronic process, which not only follows, but also pre-empts, ignorant utterances. Drawing on speech-act theories of silencing, I argue that pre-emptive counterspeech can condition the conversational context so as to prevent subsequent ignorant utterances from enacting sticky conversational norms. Thus, this theoretically-refined conception of counterspeech helps appreciate how verbal responses might overcome the stickiness of conversational norms; and, in doing so, it reveals that this stickiness need not provide reasons to prefer legal remedies to counterspeech. (shrink)

In Igbo traditional religion (ITR), there are different means through which therapy and healing are achieved. One such means is through the Nsukka-Igbo Ọmabe masquerade festival rituals and performance theatre. To seek out this aspect of the cultural festival that has been under-researched, this study delves into detailed discussions of the pre-arrival, arrival, events in between, departure and postdeparture of the Ọmabe masquerade festival. Relying on a qualitative method, the study analytically and descriptively discusses the data gathered through participatory observations (...) and interview sessions with some of the devotees possessing sufficient knowledge of the masquerade tradition and festival. Photographs have been included to flesh out the narratives, as well as enrich and enhance the readers’ engagement with the article. Also, relevant materials from extant literature are quoted and cited. The study examined the rituals, music, performances and other interesting key components of the festival and found that the traditional practice through masquerade festivals such as the Ọmabe is therapeutic, leading to emotional activation and healing. Undoubtedly, this has been sustaining its re-enactments in the face of neoreligious intolerance, urbanisation, modernity and globalisation that have been adversely affecting cultural practices. Contribution: The article critically engages with the reappraisal of the Ọmabe cultural heritage festival among the Nsukka-Igbo people, providing thought-provoking, impactful research as well as insightful reading towards achieving an understanding of its rituals, materiality and performance theatre and their accompanying therapy and healing benefits. Bearing in mind that HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies focuses on religious issues and that the ‘masking festival’ is a part of Indigenous religious practice, the author considers this article to be suitable for its objectives. (shrink)

Theories of personal identity in the tradition of John Locke and Derek Parfit emphasize the importance of psychological continuity and the abilities to think, to remember and to make rational choices as a basic criterion for personhood. As a consequence, persons with severe dementia are threatened to lose the status of persons. Such concepts, however, are situated within a dualistic framework, in which the body is regarded as a mere vehicle of the person, or a carrier of the brain as (...) the organ of mental faculties. Based on the phenomenology of embodiment, this paper elaborates a different approach to personal identity in dementia. In this perspective, selfhood is primarily constituted by pre-reflective self-awareness and the body memory of an individual, which consists in the embodiment and enactment of familiar habits, practices and preferences. After describing the different types of body memory, the paper develops a phenomenology of dementia as a loss of reflexivity and meta-perspective. This is contrasted with the preservation of individual forms of body memory even in the later stages of the illness. The ethical consequences of an embodied approach to dementia are outlined. A final look is given to narrativistic and constructionist concepts of the self in dementia. (shrink)

In this important new work in political and constitutional theory, Michael J. Perry elaborates and defends an account of the political morality of liberal democracy: the moral convictions and commitments that in a liberal democracy should govern decisions about what laws to enact and what policies to pursue. The fundamental questions addressed in this book concern the grounding, the content, the implications for one or another moral controversy and the judicial enforcement of the political morality of liberal democracy. The particular (...) issues discussed include whether government may ban pre-viability abortion, whether government may refuse to extend the benefit of law to same-sex couples and what role religion should play in the politics and law of a liberal democracy. (shrink)

The DSM characterizes major depressive disorder partly in temporal terms: the depressive mood must last for at least two weeks, and also must impact the subject "most of the day, nearly every day." However, from the standpoint of phenomenological psychopathology, the long-lasting quality of the condition hardly captures the distinctiveness of depression. While the DSM refers to objective time as measured by clocks and calendars, what is especially striking about depression is the distortions to lived time that it involves. But (...) is there any relation between a) these disruptions to temporal experience and b) the tendency for depressive symptoms to persist and endure? To explore the connection between lived time and objective time, I investigate the embodied and enactive nature of intentionality among subjects suffering from depression. What I call 'affective framing' is a spontaneous, pre-reflective way of filtering information that involves bodily attunement and allows subjects to focus their attention on what they feel is important. I will argue that affective framing ordinarily has a forward-looking temporal structure and a "teleological direction" that is rooted in our embodiment. However, depression involves a distortion in future-directed intentionality, so that a subject becomes temporally desituated and cut off from the future. This contributes to many of the characteristic features of depression, including apparent lack of motivation, inability to imagine future possibilities, alterations in lived time, and a sense that one is "stuck." To gain a better understanding of this disruption to the futuredirected structure of affective framing in cases of depression, I look to concepts from complex dynamic systems theory and the notion of 'habit.' My proposed account aims to shed light on how a disruption to future-directedness impacts bodily attunement and reinforces depression as a long-term condition. (shrink)

In this paper, we advance the thesis that music-making can be advantageously understood as an exploratory phenomenon. While music-making is certainly about aesthetic expression, from a phenomenological, cognitive, and even evolutionary perspective, it more importantly concerns structured explorations of the world around us, our minds, and our bodies. Our thesis is based on an enactive and phenomenological analysis of three cases: the first concerns the study of infants involved in early musical activities, and the two latter are phenomenologically inspired interviews (...) with an expert jazz improviser, and members of a prominent string quartet. Across these examples, we find that music-making involves a dual intentionality - one oriented towards the exploration of the sonic, material, and social environment, and one oriented toward the self, including the exploration of bodily awareness and reflective mental states. In enactivist terms, exploration is a fundamental way of making sense of oneself as coupled with the world. Understanding music-making as a pre-eminent case of exploration helps us explicate and appreciate the developmental, sensorimotor, and more advanced cognitive resources that exist in music-making activities. (shrink)

In the wake of several highly publicized lawsuits over drugs recalled for safety – most notably, Vioxx and Paxil – the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry have faced increasingly intense public scrutiny over the drug testing and approval process. Critics blame the FDA's shorter pre-market approval process that has resulted from the enactment of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which effected, among other changes, an increased number of reviewers, a higher review load for each reviewer, (...) and the implementation of “user fees” from companies submitting drugs for review. While many have posited that the lack of safety in some FDA-approved drugs was caused by the enactment of PDUFA, the results of a recent study from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development have indicated that there is no statistically significant correlation between the number of drugs recalled for safety and the enactment of PDUFA. (shrink)

An extensive literature has focused on the impact of new public management oriented structural changes on academics’ practice and identity. These critical studies have been resolute in concluding that NPM inevitably leads to a degeneration of academics’ ethos and values. Drawing from the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we argue that these previous analyses have overlooked the moral agency of the academics and their role in ‘moralizing’ and consequently shaping the ethical nature of their practices. The paper provides a new (...) theoretical understanding of NPM-oriented reforms in light of the virtue ethics approach, thereby directing the attention to the moral character and moral agency of academics. Our analysis of interviews collected in the business department of a Danish university provides an example of how individuals have divergent ethical understandings of these structural changes and enact/resist pre-defined social roles in different ways. While in some cases the NPM agenda of the institutions has triggered internal moral conflict and a crisis of moral character, in other cases the new logic resonates with academics’ values and evaluative standards. Partially departing from the theoretical ground of MacIntyre, we conclude that academics can play a crucial role in shaping the morality of NPM-oriented institutions and in transforming these settings into suitable contexts for the cultivation of virtues. (shrink)

In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means (...) to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities. (shrink)

This paper aims at expanding theories of metaphorical reasoning to other tropes. Asking why figurative language tends to fall into a limited number of patterns, it first examines approaches that offer an answer – ranging from antique rhetoric theory, Hans Blumenberg, Harald Weinrich, Donald Davidson, and Roman Jakobson to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. By then turning to Giambattista Vico, it puts forth the argument that a limited set of pre-structured ways of embodied reasoning is hard-wired in and enacted by (...) different aspects of children’s ways of playing – and provides the foundation for structures ofthinking inthe adult life. (shrink)

Phenomenologists were concerned with showing that essential structures of being, knowable by rational insight, are found more abundantly than commonly thought. Reinach shows that in the civil law there are essential structures, such as the structure of promising or of owning. These pre-positive structures provide the civil law with a foundation that can be known by philosophical insight. Though the enactments of the civil law are changeable, essential foundations are not. Of particular significance is Reinach's concept of a social act, (...) that is, of an act that addresses another and has to be heard by the other in order to be complete. Reinach shows that the essence of legally relevant acts, such as promising, comes to evidence when they are understood as social acts. (shrink)