Going beyond the theory/practice and discourse/matter divides -- Learning and becoming in an onto-epistemology -- The tool of pedagogical documentation -- An intra-active pedagogy and its dual movements -- Transgressing binary practices in early childhood teacher education -- The hybrid-writing-process: going beyond the theory/practice divide in academic writing -- An ethics of immanence and potentialities for early childhood education.

This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space of transit, a series (...) of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexivity and interpretation as inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher understood as separated from the data. Through my example, I argue that diffractive analysis can make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that can have transformative and political consequences. (shrink)

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education 1 and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education . 2 These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary that dominates ECE (...) and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators. (shrink)

ブッダとは誰か?仏教とは何か?3・11の震災後の言葉を探して仏教に問いかける―仏教と真剣に向き合う僧侶、研究者との対話を通して、仏教の「新しいいま」が見えてくる。.

This study examined the ability to comprehend conventional and non-conventional implicatures, and the effect of proficiency and learning context on comprehension of implicature in L2 Chinese. Participants were three groups of college students of Chinese: elementary-level foreign language learners, advanced-level foreign language learners, and advanced-level heritage learners. They completed a 36-item computer-delivered listening test measuring their ability to comprehend three types of implicature: conventional indirect refusals, conventional indirect opinions, and non-conventional indirect opinions. Comprehension was analyzed for accuracy and comprehension speed. (...) There was a significant effect of implicature type on accuracy, but not on comprehension speed. A significant effect of participant group was observed on accuracy, but the effect was mixed on comprehension speed. (shrink)

Transcendental reflection does not simply withdraw from natural life and go somewhere else. On the contrary, it is a self-elucidation of natural life performed within this life itself. However, natural life has an inherent automatic system for concealing itself. Therefore, in order to make manifest the truly natural state of natural life, we need a deliberate method of outfoxing the natural attitude as it constantly tries to trick us. If so, the transcendental perspective is closely related to Husserl’s perplexing concept (...) of “primal I”. It expresses a primitive perspective of our experience that cannot be identified with the first-person perspective. Phenomenology is not merely an investigation of experience from the first-person point of view, but a philosophical thinking from a “zero person” perspective that makes it possible for us to understand the relativity of our own first-person experience, and how it is related to other first-person experiences and the third-person perspective. (shrink)

Husserl’s theory of the phenomenological reduction is often explained by a radicalchange of attitude. Such an explanation is useful but sometimes misleading. TheIdea of Phenomenology clearly shows that the original idea of the reduction wasachieved through a radicalized critique of evidence. Although Husserl’s appealto evidence has often been criticized as an unjustified limitation of philosophicalthinking, a close examination of Husserl’s lectures reveals that the very ‘limitation’ to the phenomenological evidence breaks our naturalinclination toward objective identities and liberates our thinking from (...) the naturalbut misleading division between ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence.’ Thus, thephenomenological reduction can be interpreted as a transition from the thinkingwithout regard to evidence to the philosophizing intrinsically mediatedby evidence, which can secure access for intuitive analysis to every conceivabletype of givenness insofar as it manifests itself. (shrink)

Diese phänomenologische Studie bietet im historisch orientierten ersten Teil eine umfassende mentalitätsgeschichtliche Analyse der Deutung und Bewertung des Lachens von der europäischen Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Kritisch analysiert werden die vier wichtigsten und folgenreichsten Argumentationsmodelle: - die ethisch orientierte platonisch-stoisch-augustinische Argumentationstradition, die dem Lachen misstrauisch bis feindlich gegenübersteht; - die anthropologisch orientierte Argumentationstradition, die von Aristoteles über Joubert und Kant bis herauf zu Plessner und Schmitz reicht und die das Lachen als ein proprium hominis deutet und rechtfertigt; - die physiologisch-mechanistisch-energetische (...) Argumentationstradition, die mit Descartes beginnt und mit Freud immer noch nicht beendet ist; - die evolutionsgeschichtlich-ethologische Argumentationstradition, die von Darwin begründet wurde und heute die wohl dominanteste ist. Der zweite, systematische Teil führt die anthropologisch orientierte Argumentationstradition auf der Grundlage der Neuen Phänomenologie von Hermann Schmitz fort und beschreibt das Lachen in seinen drei Grundtypen als Bekundungs-, Interaktions- und Resonanz-Lachen auf den verschiedenen ontogenetischen Stufen von Lachmündigkeit als Spiel von personaler Emanzipation und personaler Regression wie auch als synergetischsynästhetisches Gesamtverhalten bei verschiedenen Einstellungen und in verschiedenen Situationen. Die beiden letzten Kapitel bieten Überlegungen zur Lebensfunktion des Humors und Empfehlungen zum Vertrauen in die je eigene Leiblichkeit als dem tragenden Grund personalen Seins. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a possible reinterpretation of phenomenology using a newly defined concept of ‘mediation.’ First, I address the question: What are the ‘things themselves’ that are given as the result of the phenomenological epoché? I would answer that they are neither material objects nor merely subjective experiences, but rather specific occurrences of ‘mediations.’ Second, under the influence of the Japanese philosopher Hajime Tanabe, I will define ‘mediation’ as a non-separable occurrence of differentiating and connecting. Third, I shall (...) claim that the concept of ‘phenomenon’ itself should be reinterpreted in terms of its character of mediation. Then, I will discuss central issues in phenomenology such as intentionality, time, and intersubjectivity in order to test the applicability of the proposed concept of mediation. To conclude, I shall summarize the potential of the idea that phenomenology can be reinterpreted using the concept of mediation. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Lived Experience and Cognitive Science Reappraising Enactivism’s Jonasian Turn” by Mario Villalobos & Dave Ward. Upshot: Villalobos and Ward seem to disclose a fundamental problem without solving it - a problem to which neither the Jonasian nor the Maturanian inference can offer a solution. It should be addressed by a phenomenological analysis of our basic experience of aliveness.

日常においてはいつも素通りされている豊かな経験の世界がある―。“自明”であるがゆえに眼を向けられることのないこの経験の世界を現象学は精査し、われわれにとっての「現実」が成立する構造を明るみに出す。創始 者フッサール以来続く哲学的営為の核心にあるものは何か。そしていまだ汲みつくせないその可能性とは。本書は粘り強い思索の手触りとともに、読者を生と世界を見つけなおす新たな思考へと誘う。.

In the course of the debates on Priscian's notion of the perfect sentence, the philosopher Peter Abelard developed a theory that closely resembles modern accounts of propositional attitudes and that goes far beyond the established Aristotelian conceptions of the sentence. According to Abelard, the perfection of a sentence does not depend on the content that it expresses, but on the fact that the content is stated along with the propositional attitude towards the content. This paper tries to provide an analysis (...) and a consistent interpretation of Abelard's arguments within the framework of the mediaeval models of language and mind. (shrink)

In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We remain skeptical about solutions based on deep neural networks and cognitive robotics, which in our opinion do not fundamentally address the problem. We agree with the enactive approach to cognitive science that things appear as intrinsically meaningful for living beings because of their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals. But this approach inherits the problem of (...) failing to account for how meaning as such could make a difference for an agent’s behavior. In a nutshell, if life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, then there is no conceptual room for meaning to play a role in its own right. We argue that this impotence of meaning can be addressed by revising the concept of nature such that the macroscopic scale of the living can be characterized by physical indeterminacy. We consider the implications of this revision of the mind-body relationship for synthetic approaches. (shrink)

In this book, Martin Lenz provides the first reconstruction of intersubjective accounts of the mind in early modern philosophy. Some phenomena are easily recognised as social or interactive: certain dances, forms of work and rituals require interaction to come into being or count as valid. But what about mental states, such as thoughts, volitions, or emotions? Do our minds also depend on other minds? The idea that our minds are intersubjective or social seems to be a recent one, developed (...) mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries against the individualism of early modern philosophers. By contrast, this book argues that well-known early modern philosophers often started from the idea that minds are intersubjective. How then does a mind depend on the minds of others? Early modern philosophers are well known to have developed a number of theories designed to explain how we cognize external objects. What is hardly recognized is that early modern philosophers also addressed the problem of how our cognition is influenced by other minds. This book provides a historical and rational reconstruction of three central, but different, early modern accounts of the influence that minds exert on one another: Spinoza's metaphysical model, Locke's linguistic model, and Hume's medical model. Showing for each model of mental interaction (1) why it was developed, (2) how it construes mind-mind relations, and (3) what view of the mind it suggests, this book aims at uncovering a crucial part of the unwritten history of intersubjectivity in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs a controversy between a pupil of Alberic of Paris and Peter Abelard which illustrates two competing ways of reconciling different ancient traditions. I shall argue that their accounts of the relation between sentences and thoughts are incompatible with one another, although they rely on the same set of sources. The key to understanding their different views on assertive and non-assertive sentences lies in their disparate views about the structure of thoughts: whereas Abelard takes thoughts to be compositional, (...) the opponent's arguments seem to rely on the premise that the mental states which correspond to sentences cannot be compositional in the way that Abelard suggested. Although, at a first glance, Abelard's position appears to be more coherent, it turns out that his opponent convincingly argues against weaknesses in Abelard's semantic theory by proposing a pragmatic approach. (shrink)

Managers of multinational companies often favour an aggressive tax avoidance strategy that pushes the legal limits onto the advantage of shareholders and the disadvantage of the spirit of democratically legitimized tax laws. The public and media debate whether such aggressive behaviour is immoral. Aggressive tax avoidance is a subset of the aggressive legal interpretations potentially observable in all fields which places little weight on the will of a democratically legitimized legislation. A thorough ethical analysis based on the deontological approach of (...) Kant demonstrates that aggressive tax avoidance as a special case of operating on the edge of legal boundaries is potentially immoral. Applying the Kantian “contradiction of conception or will” test shows that this maxim might not be conceived or willed as a general law of nature. If all natural or legal persons aggressively interpret laws on all subjects and in every imaginable situation, then central principles of the system of law we all rely upon would be severely compromised. Therefore, aggressive tax avoidance by managers of multinational companies may violate the managers’ moral duty to obey not only the letter but also the intention or spirit of the law. The validity of the argumentation depends critically on the formulation and interpretation of the respective maxims and on assumptions about the legal system. Preserving central elements of Kantian philosophy, the article demonstrates the complexity of a philosophical argumentation which tries to justify the moral intuitions that underpin the common negative evaluation of aggressive legal strategies in business. (shrink)

This article discusses ethical problems related to postsecondary–K-12 collaborative work involving instructional technologies. Technology related school-university collaboration in particular can give rise to some ethical dilemmas, due to the variety of skills, interests, and obligations of participating teachers, tech specialists, professors, and school administrators. Participants, in promoting narrow interests and concerns too immoderately, can lose sight of a learning-driven framework for decision making. Ethics are implicated, because student learning should be at the heart of the codes that guide all educators (...) in their professional behavior. This article begins by identifying potential advantages of using technology to enrich teacher education classes. The article then describes problems related to initiating access to K-12 classrooms and to negotiating a plan of action. The article seeks to reconcile the concerns of school administrators’and information technology officers’typical concerns with those of K-12- and university-based instructors. (shrink)

Brecht hat im Laufe seiner geistigen Entwicklung eine ganze Reihe von ideologischen Positionen eingenommen und für sein poetisches Werk fruchtbar gemacht, von denen die marxistische nur eine von vielen war. Deshalb stellt dieser neue Blick auf Brecht sein Werk als einzelne Stationen einer nach allen Seiten offenen Entwicklung dar und konzentriert sich dabei auf die Positionen, die bisher in der Forschung zu kurz gekommen, übersehen oder schlichtweg geleugnet worden sind: die nationalprotestantischen Anfänge des jungen Dichters, die enge Orientierung an der (...) Philosophie von Max Stirner in den frühen Augsburger Dramen und die ebenso enge Orientierung an Lao-Tse in den späten klassischen Werken. (shrink)

The Condemnation of 1277 is one of the most salient events in arguing about the nature and boundaries of philosophy. My aim is not to add another estimation of the Condemnation as a clash of faith and reason, but rather to consider the concept of philosophy at work. To sidestep deciding on a particular notion of philosophy in advance, I will focus on the kind of disagreement displayed in the document of the Condemnation. With a side-glance to contemporary argumentation theory, (...) I shall argue that the disagreement we encounter fulfils crucial criteria of what is known today as deep disagreement. We will see that we are in fact dealing not with one concept of philosophy but two different kinds of philosophy. At the same time, it will turn out that the reception has mainly focused on one kind of philosophy only, namely the rationalist approach attacked in the Condemnation. (shrink)

The development of phenomenological philosophy in Japan is a well-established tradition that reaches back to the early 20th-century. The past decades have witnessed significant contributions and advances in different areas of phenomenological thought in Japan that remain unknown, or only partially known, to an international philosophical public. This volume offers a selection of original phenomenological research in Japan to an international audience in the form of an English language publication. The contributions in this volume range over classical figures in the (...) phenomenological movement, recent trends in French phenomenology, and contemporary inter-disciplinary approaches. In addition to this diverse engagement with European thinkers, many of the contributions in this volume establish critical and complimentary discussions with 20th-century Japanese philosophers. (shrink)

Political scientists should put aside questions about whether voters are rational or irrational, informed or uninformed, and questions about how flawed democracy is. Although they are interesting, these questions are secondary. Answering them in no way helps people—it does not help them with their violent neighborhoods, their declining incomes, their flooded homes, or their dying crops. Instead, researchers should focus on the first-order question of how to improve democratic accountability.

In reply to the question whether articles of faith can be demonstrated, William of Ockham articulated a peculiar thesis: Even though it is impossible to prove articles of faith in this life, the blessed in heaven could demonstrate our creditive propositions. In contrast to traditional views, William held that both conclusions drawn in heaven and conclusions drawn in this life are subject to the same criteria. This assumption led to a controversy between William's contemporaries, namely, Walter Chatton and Adam Wodeham, (...) who discussed whether theories of propositions are applicable to articles of faith. This essay tries to explain why the problem of demonstrating creditive propositions arose and in what way William's answer gave a new meaning to the dispute. (shrink)

In der 1970 gegründeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien veröffentlicht. Gründungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe, Günther Patzig und Wolfgang Wieland. Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von Jürgen Mittelstraß mitherausgegeben.

This paper relates Arendt's critique of a labor society to her thoughts on the "good life." I begin with the claim that in the post-mass production era, Western societies, traditionally centered around gainful employment, encounter a decrease in the relevance of labor and can thus no longer rely on it as a resource for individual or social meaning. From Arendt's perspective, however, the current situation allows for the possibility of a transition from a society based on labor to a society (...) centered around activities. I explore Arendt's different types of activities-labor, work, action-with respect to the question of justice between the genders. (shrink)

The first is of a more historical nature, the second of philosophical concern: what was the place occupied by angels in the medieval world-view and what was ...

Modern Philosophy, the third volume in the history of philosophy series edited by Etienne Gilson, is a comprehensive critical study of philosophical thought from Descartes to Kant. Containing detailed discussions of individual figures, both major and minor, it treats not only their metaphysical and epistemological views but also their philosophies of art, religion, morals, and politics. It presents the historical settings in which they wrote and shows the dialectical interplay among their views. As Gilson and Langan point out, there inevitably (...) is some arbitrariness in deciding what to include or emphasize in a volume such as this, but, in my opinion, it would be difficult to give a more balanced and complete survey than theirs. (shrink)