Human Existence (human + existence)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


A Guide to Educational Philosophizing After Heidegger

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2008
Donald Vandenberg
Abstract This paper heeds the advice of EPAT's editor, who said he ,will be happy to publish further works on Heidegger and responses to these articles' after introducing four articles on Heidegger (and one of his students) and education in the August, 2005, issue. It discusses the papers in order of appearance critically, for none of them shows understanding of Heidegger's writings and descriptions of human existence in his most important work, Being and Time, nor the work of the internationally recognized educational philosopher who has written about educational problems using Heidegger's perspective (among others) over the past forty years and that should be considered in any application of Heidegger's thought to education if educational philosophy is to become a cumulative discipline. Because philosophy of education is notoriously non-accumulative and requires far more than referring to education in the first and last paragraphs of an article in order to be about an educational problem or phenomenon, the publications of this scholar in the phenomenology of education are mentioned throughout, as are Heidegger's works, to show how the four authors might have benefited from library research to utilize existing understandings and go beyond them. Finally, some suggestions are made about how to read with understanding Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time. [source]


Is culture a golden barrier between human and chimpanzee?

EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2003
Christophe Boesch
Abstract Culture pervades much of human existence. Its significance to human social interaction and cognitive development has convinced some researchers that the phenomenon and its underlying mechanisms represent a defining criterion for humankind. However, care should be taken not to make hasty conclusions in light of the growing number of observations on the cultural abilities of different species, ranging from chimpanzees and orangutans to whales and dolphins. The present review concentrates on wild chimpanzees and shows that they all possess an extensive cultural repertoire. In the light of what we know from humans, I evaluate the importance of social learning leading to acquisition of cultural traits, as well as of collective meaning of communicative traits. Taking into account cross-cultural variations in humans, I argue that the cultural abilities we observe in wild chimpanzees present a broad level of similarity between the two species. [source]


Rhetorical representations of masculinities in South Africa: moving towards a material-discursive understanding of men

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2003
Russell Luyt
Abstract A material-discursive perspective holds advantage in understanding male realities. It seeks to integrate dominant approaches that appear anaemic in their failure to capture the interplay between the material and discursive realms of human existence. Three dominant metaphorical themes in the rhetorical representation of South African masculinities are described in an attempt to illustrate the complexity of embodied masculine experience. In this sense the discussion seeks to reveal the dynamic nature of masculine debate and lived experience across differing contexts. It serves to underline the importance of adopting a material-discursive perspective in understanding men, which recognizes that they do not exist as a homogeneous social group, and as such experience their masculinities in a variable and changing fashion. The theoretical amalgamation of social representations and rhetoric is argued to provide a useful analytical tool in an endeavour of this nature. It is suggested that the rhetorical approach problematizes an overly consensual view of social reality that social representations theory typically promotes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Gothic and the Generation of Ideas1

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2007
Donna Heiland
Gothic writing has remarkable generative power: as Marshall Brown has described it, gothic is a genre with what he calls a teleology, whose "significance lies in what it enabled its future readers to see, in what arguments it provoked, and . . . in what dreams it stimulated" (xix). From a brief discussion of selected early studies of the gothic, this article moves on to consider the extraordinary development of gothic criticism from the 1970s on, when the emergence of feminist and post-structuralist criticism put gothic literature on the map in a new way. Tracing the development and imbrication of the many strands of gothic criticism yields a complex and at times paradoxical picture: gothic has been read as the most rigid and formulaic of literary forms but also as centrally engaged with the notably slippery concepts of sensibility and the sublime; as escapist and as grounded in the realities of human existence; as focused on the individual psyche and as socio-cultural critique; as commenting on class, on gender, on race; as engaged with questions of national, colonial, and post-colonial identity. The field is now so well developed that guidebooks and handbooks to both primary sources and critical approaches have emerged over the last few years to codify and make it accessible. And so the question arises: have we said all that we can about this genre or can we learn still more from it? The closing portion of this article suggests that we can, pointing to gothic and religion as an area of particular interest. Religious issues have been front and center in gothic writing from its inception, and criticism to date has opened up , but hardly exhausted , this potentially rich area of research. [source]


Progress, epistemology and human health and welfare: what nurses need to know and why

NURSING PHILOSOPHY, Issue 3 2005
Clinton E. Betts RN BSc BScN MEd
Abstract, Human Progress is often understood to be a rather natural and obvious truth of human existence. That this is not necessarily so, is indicative of the pervasive social, psychological, and educational inculcation that sustains its ubiquitous acceptance. Moreover, the uncritical and ill-informed understanding of Progress as an unquestioned expression of human beneficence has serious consequences for those concerned with the health and welfare of people. It is argued in this paper that, much of what we might consider deleterious in the socio-political milieu that now confronts us is, to a significant extent, a matter of progressive ideological epistemology and its ensuing manner of human institutionalization. Part one contends that the current socio-political structure of the current postmodern affairs is in reality that of a pervasive postmodern economic ideology. Part two provides a brief overview of the historical and philosophical development of Progress as an idea, including some of the profound effects wrought by it on human affairs in the contemporary world. Finally, Part three presents a discussion of the influential effects of the philosophy of Progress on the epistemology of human health and welfare intervention, specifically that of nursing and its claim to a holistic ethic of Caring. [source]


Philosophy as falling: aiming for grace

NURSING PHILOSOPHY, Issue 2 2000
Sally Gadow RN
Abstract Post,dualist philosophies of nursing acknowledge embodiment as a condition of human existence. Philosophical writing, however, remains abstract and disembodied. A philosophical framework that embraces embodiment needs to recover the materiality of language; its text needs to include language that is not only rational and clear but sensuous and ambiguous. I describe three cultural narratives of women's embodiment and compare them with an imaginative narrative, a nurse's poem about women in labour. I propose, not that philosophers become poets, but that they abandon a dualist position in which language is either literal or metaphorical, adopting instead the poet's approach in which any word or object has unlimited meanings. I argue that, without fixed reference points, language embodies rather than escapes contingency. Finally, I discuss two forms of philosophical writing , irony and motet , that savour contingency, illustrating philosophy as endless redescription, aiming not for finality but for the grace of a dancer's deliberate fall. [source]


LIFE-CENTERED ETHICS, AND THE HUMAN FUTURE IN SPACE

BIOETHICS, Issue 8 2009
MICHAEL N. MAUTNER
ABSTRACT In the future, human destiny may depend on our ethics. In particular, biotechnology and expansion in space can transform life, raising profound questions. Guidance may be found in Life-centered ethics, as biotic ethics that value the basic patterns of organic gene/protein life, and as panbiotic ethics that always seek to expand life. These life-centered principles can be based on scientific insights into the unique place of life in nature, and the biological unity of all life. Belonging to life then implies a human purpose: to safeguard and propagate life. Expansion in space will advance this purpose but will also raise basic questions. Should we expand all life or only intelligent life? Should we aim to create populations of trillions? Should we seed other solar systems? How far can we change but still preserve the human species, and life itself? The future of all life may be in our hands, and it can depend on our guiding ethics whether life will fulfil its full potentials. Given such profound powers, life-centered ethics can best secure future generations. Our descendants may then understand nature more deeply, and seek to extend life indefinitely. In that future, our human existence can find a cosmic purpose. [source]