Existential Commitment Research Articles

Individuals, Existence, and Existential Commitment in Visual Reasoning

Abstract This article examines the evolution of the concept of existence in modern visual representation and reasoning, highlighting important milestones. In the late eighteenth century, during the so-called golden age of visual reasoning, nominalism reigned supreme and there was limited scope for existential import or individuals in logic diagrams. By the late nineteenth century, a form of realism had taken hold, whose existential commitments continue to dominate many areas in logic and visual reasoning to this day. Physical, metaphysical, epistemological, and linguistic positions underlie both nominalist and realist views. Since the paradigmatic works on visual reasoning in the 1990s, formal diagram systems have been developed that revive either the nominalist or realist perspectives. Unlike in the nineteenth century, these are not motivated by philosophical views. Nevertheless, they may still have an impact on many areas of philosophy and science outside logic.

Collateral damage: the emotional and material costs of political commitment for the followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi

ABSTRACT This article aims to cast light on the backstage of total militancy in the case of the followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi during the Risorgimento and post-Risorgimento. Political engagement is an existential commitment to a cause either in undercover conspiracy networks or in openly volunteering to fight all the way through to parliamentary activity that carries emotional and material costs. These costs can best be approached through the now rich scholarly literature on political emotions and exile, and the still under-investigated collateral effects of nineteenth-century patriotism that can be recovered from the study of the correspondence of families and friends and ego-documents. From Mazzini’s most intimate confessions to the choices made by Giovine Italia’s local leaders or by Garibaldi’s officers on the battlefield or even in the parliamentary arena, the impact of politics on the private horizon reveals the multiple layers of gain and loss, of expectation and disappointment, playing an unavoidable role in the lives of so many Italian men and women. The selected cases illustrate how disruptive political engagement proved to be when it entered the private sphere in the shape of risk, absence or punishment, and yet how fulfilling it was when it offered the ultimate reason for people leaving behind their loved ones and their professional status.

Theologians and their Homes (or the Lack Thereof): The Quest for Truth and the Question of Belonging

Much depends on questions of belonging and home. If one must, by definition, belong to a single home community to do theology, then the use of the term “theology” in both comparative theology and Theology Without Walls is equivocal. Transreligious theologians refuse to stipulate that theology must be done for a theologian's home community. But the term “theology” might be understood in another sense—the existentially invested quest for religious truth that does not require a primary religious home. With this understanding, theology is existentially serious and committed reflection, whereas truth-seeking that entails no existential commitment (with or without a home) might go by another label, such as “philosophy of religion.” After all, the philosopher of religion may well be agnostic or atheist. But two further sets of distinctions must follow: 1) the distinction between a) transformative truth accessed through the specific therapeutic regimes of a particular home tradition and b) public truth that requires no transformation but only publicly defensible epistemological warrants; and 2) the means of arriving at a) transformative truth on the one side and b) publicly available truth claims on the other. What I know by way of experience ( anubhava) or a scriptural revelation ( śruti) is particular to how my tradition accesses transformative truth. When I seek to publicly defend the content of that experience or scripture, I must engage all comers by means of knowing and disputation that are acceptable to all and do not depend on belonging to or accepting the internal norms of a home tradition. Avoiding muddled debates between comparative theology and TWW requires keeping these distinctions in view.

Revisiting the Experience Machine: A Philosophical Note on the Limits of Experience Design

Abstract This study explores the notion of experience, as used in “experience design,” based on American philosopher Robert Nozick's idea of an experience machine and Marc Hassenzahl's notion of experience design. Hassenzahl epitomizes experience as pleasure or fulfillment of needs—an idea that Nozick challenges as he claims that the world people engage with matters in a way that is not reducible to pleasure alone. Nozick's observation, I argue, indicates a sense of care in the broader concept of experience design. I explore this sense of care using John Haugeland's conception of existential commitment, which then necessitates a deepening of the notion of Hassenzahl's experience by connecting it with a sense of commitment and responsibility. This connection makes experience design, then, a concern and care for the normative powers of design.

Paul Farmer: A Model for the Theologian

Paul Farmer was a physician, medical anthropologist, and social justice activist. Although influenced by theology of liberation, he was not a professional theologian. Nonetheless, this chapter presents Farmer as a model for the theological ethicist. He presents a dual form of modeling: analytical and praxical. His use of social analysis to uncover the structural causes of impoverishment and exclusion provides a model for the analysis that theological ethicists are called to articulate in an acutely divided and unfair world. Farmer’s modeling is not limited to the analytical or strictly scholarly dimension of the theologian’s work. The main thrust of both his life’s work and his modelling is praxical: a life committed to service, advocacy, and activism at the service of the impoverished. Famer undertook his intellectual work and social analysis within the broader context of an existential commitment to social transformation and justice. He was a paradigm of what Antonio Gramsci called an organic intellectual. The organic intellectual is actively engaged in the construction of a new society. As an organic intellectual, Farmer becomes a praxical model for the theologian. Neutrality is not an option for someone who aspires to a life of authenticity in the footsteps of Jesus.

Intellectual humility in the context of existential commitment

ABSTRACT We present three studies to examine intellectual humility (IH) contextualized to existential challenges across cultures. With samples (N = 1714) drawn from three regions (United States, Hong Kong, Netherlands), we explore the benefits and drawbacks of various configurations of IH and commitment to beliefs. In two studies, we created a measure of IH contextualized to existential concerns (Study 1; N = 344 adults in the U.S.), replicated its factor structure, and identified distinct profiles of belief commitment and IH (Study 2; N = 340 adults in the U.S.). Then, in our primary study (Study 3; N = 1030 adults from the U.S., Netherlands, and Hong Kong), we examined evidence for the cultural generalizability of the measure and profiles. Implications for future research on the measurement of IH, its manifestation across cultures, and its relevance to the existential domain are discussed.

Relinking as healing. On crisis, whiteness and the existential dimensions of decolonization

ABSTRACT In this paper, I present my reading of two paths of existence in texts written by white Danes concerned with crisis. The first obeys the politics of purity and involves an existential commitment to status quo. I call this path whiteness collapsing into itself, inasmuch it remains locked in the confines of the politics of purity, makes impossible both delinking from modernity-coloniality, and relinking, as the process of delving and dwelling in the wider processes of becoming, which I have learnt to know as Mother Earth. The second text attests a decolonizing practice of collapsing whiteness that is creolizing and engages in relinking as healing. I conclude by addressing the importance of deciding to decide to relinking as a radical practice of cultivation of sociality and relationality rooted in specific places which, however, are interconnected precisely because social and relational. Therein, I argue, is the healing.

Recrafting ontology

AbstractA pluriversal encounter that includes interlocutors from other ways of knowing and being requires recrafting how we commonly approach ontology in IR. Our shared ontological register only acknowledges separation as the fundamental existential assumption, and not all lifeways depart from this assumption. The article prods us to move beyond considering ontology as the study of being, a more substantialist reading, to include other fundamental existential commitments so that we can address how distinct presuppositions shape and are shaped by how we perceive and engage existence. With this reorientation, the article first establishes how even relational approaches in the discipline, including variations of constructivism, poststructuralism, and new materialism privilege separation as the primordial condition of existence to the exclusion of any other option. A conceptual toolset is then elaborated to examine how a singular commitment to separation constitutes an ontological parochialism that enforces reductionism, exclusion, and domination towards lifeways that embrace the interconnection as fundamental existential commitment. Even though more effective engagement across pluriversal worlds would be crucial for developing more complex tools for confronting the current planetary crisis, the discipline's reductionist concept of ontology itself keeps us quite far from effectively being able to engage in such an exchange.

Radical Tense-Indexical Historicality and the De Se

Abstract “Being is said in many ways,” claimed Aristotle, initiating a discussion about existential commitment that continues today. Might there not be reasons to say something similar about “having been,” or “having happened,” where these expressions denote something’s being located in the past? Moreover, if history – construed not only as an object of inquiry (actual events, etc.) but also as a way of casting light on certain matters – is primarily concerned with “things past,” then the question just posed also seems relevant to the question of what historical understanding amounts to. While the idea that ‘being’ may mean different things in different contexts has indisputable importance, the implications of other, past-temporal expressions are elusive. In what might any differences of substantive meaning encountered there consist? One starting point for responding – the one that provides the subject matter explored here – is furnished by the question of whether or not a certain way of addressing matters relating to the past permits or precludes forms of intelligibility that could be said to be ‘radically historical.’ After arguing that the existing options for addressing this issue remain unsatisfactory, I set out an alternative view of what it could mean to endorse or reject such an idea. This involves drawing distinctions and analogies connected with notions of temporal situatedness, human practicality and historicality, which are then linked to a further contrast between two ways of understanding the referential significance of what is involved when we self-ascribe a relation to a current situation in a manner construable as implying that we take ourselves to occupy a unique, yet circumstantially defined, perspective on that situation. As regards the latter, on one reading, the specific kind of indexically referring language we use – commonly labelled “de se” – is something whose rationale is exhausted by its practical utility as a communicative tool. On the other, it is viewed as capturing something of substantive importance about how we can be thought of as standing in relation to reality. I claim that this second reading, together with the line of thinking about self-identification and self-reference it helps foreground, can shed light on what it would mean to affirm or deny the possibility of radically historical forms of intelligibility – and thus also on what it could mean to ascribe a plurality of meanings to talk concerning things being ‘in the past.’

La enseñanza en el ámbito universitario

En un estudio interpretativo-narrativo realizado en la UNMdP en el marco del Doctorado en Humanidades y Artes con mención en Cs. De la Educación de la UNR se estudió mediante el enfoque biográfico-narrativo en articulación con la etnografía educativa la dimensión ética de la enseñanza de profesoras consideradas memorables por sus estudiantes. La categoría “enseñanza memorable” emerge de una resignificación y resentidización de los hallazgos investigativos de dicho estudio. Las dimensiones de “memorabilidad” de la enseñanza se plasman en las siguientes macrocategorías: enseñanza logopática, enseñanza apasionada, enseñanza como compromiso existencial y enseñanza terapéutica. A su vez cada macrocategoría alberga diversas categorías que muestran aspectos plenos de sentido para la comprensión de lo que las profesoras creen, sienten, piensan y hacen cuando enseñan. Si bien presentamos de modo muy sintético estos hallazgos, los mismos permiten un acercamiento a la comprensión del entramado de significados y sentidos alojados en prácticas de enseñanza que dejan huella en la subjetividad de los estudiantes.

Weather/season expressions, existential commitment, and the genitive of negation

abstract: This paper presents data from Russian exhibiting seemingly variable unaccusative and unergative behavior. Russian motion-verb-weather/season expressions pass several accepted diagnostics for unaccusativity yet fail the genitive of negation—the diagnostic most widely agreed to show unaccusativity in Russian. I argue this failure results from a presupposition of existential commitment, which can be canceled. Crucial to this analysis is the assumption that Neg0 is always a secondary—not obligatory—licenser and arguments communicating existential commitment exist within a small clause structure. This analysis accounts for seemingly exceptional unergative clauses and has implications for what the genitive of negation reveals about a predicate structure.

Genitive-accusative case alternation in Russian: Exploring the role of definiteness and existential commitment

abstract: In Russian, the direct object of a transitive verb is canonically accusative case-marked. Under sentential negation, the direct object can be accusative or genitive case-marked. There is a long standing debate about whether this case alternation is semantically conditioned. This paper reports on an experiment designed to test whether this case alternation is influenced by definiteness and/or existential commitment. While these predictions were not borne out, this experiment identified three sources of variability in the acceptability of genitive case: i) participant effect; ii) age effect, iii) verb’s effect. These findings provide empirical support for an ongoing language change in Russian, whereby the accusative is becoming the default case under negation. These findings also have implications for further investigations and empirically adequate analyses of Genitive of Negation.

Spiritual Ecology: On the Way to Ecological Existentialism

Spiritual ecology is closely related to inquiries into religion and ecology, religion and nature, and religious environmentalism. This article presents considerations of the unique possibilities afforded by the idea of spiritual ecology. On one hand, these possibilities include problematic tendencies in some strands of contemporary spirituality, including anti-intellectualism, a lack of sociopolitical engagement, and complicity in a sense of happiness that is captured by capitalist enclosures and consumerist desires. On the other hand, spiritual ecology promises to involve an existential commitment to solidarity with nonhumans, and it gestures toward ways of knowing and interacting that are more inclusive than what is typically conveyed by the term “religion.” Much work on spiritual ecology is broadly pluralistic, leaving open the question of how to discern the difference between better and worse forms of spiritual ecology. This article affirms that pluralism while also distinguishing between the anti-intellectual, individualistic, and capitalistic possibilities of spiritual ecology from varieties of spiritual ecology that are on the way to what can be described as ecological existentialism or coexistentialism.

Grounding the transnational: A Vietnamese scholar’s autoethnography

Departing from the dominant trend of favoring flexibility, flattened relations, and deterritorialization in featuring the transnational, this autoethnographic inquiry theorizes and exemplifies how the gravity of place may give rise to the evolvement of scholarship in the context of transnational mobility. I examine my own career trajectory to demonstrate how groundedness results from the dynamics between displacement and emplacement. While recounting my experience of moving back and forth between Western universities and my home institution in Vietnam, I explore issues such as the nation building framework for transnational mobility, scholarly self-formation, and community cultivation. The study centers a mode of emplacement termed ‘existential commitment’. It calls attention to the cultivation of a small, immediate scholarly community as a form of scholarship in the global periphery. The emphasis is on how the transnational can be grounded in local academic practices that address the world at multiple layers and scales.

Now, Imagine an Actually Existing Unicorn: On Russellian Worries for Modal Meinongianism

Modal Meinongianism provides the semantics of sentences involving intentional verbs Priest (Towards Nonbeing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016). To that end, Modal Meinongianism employs a pointed non-normal quantified modal logic model. Like earlier Meinongian views Modal Meinongianism has a characterisation principle (QCP), that claims that any condition whatsoever is satisfied by some object in some world. Recently, Everett (The nonexistent, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, 169, p. 36) has proposed an argument against QCP that, if successful, gives rise to problems identical to those Russell (Mind 14:530–538, 1905, p. 533) raised for Naïve Meinongianism, namely that it allows for true contradictions, and allows us to define anything into existence. Everett claims that the ordinary meanings of “actual” license an inference pattern, such that if an object satisfies Actual A at some world, then that object satisfies A in the actual world. Given that actual world is the designated point of evaluation for truth simpliciter, QCP would fall prey to Russell’s criticisms. As opposed to Everett, I argue that, even if we grant Everett the assumption that “actual” is a modal indexical that rigidly refers to the actual world, it does not conform to the inference pattern above. This is because when an object satisfies Actual A at some world, this alters the assertoric force of “actual”, because “actual” is interpreted in the scope of some modal or intentional operator. I also explain that Everett’s proposed example carries existential commitment because the problematic noun-phrase occurs outside the scope of a modal or intentional operator.

The claim of the past – historical consciousness as memory, haunting, and responsibility in Nietzsche and beyond

ABSTRACTThe article provides a new interpretation of the most widely cited essay on historical consciousness, Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘On the use and abuse of history for life’ from 1874, reconnecting it to current debates in educational science and the role of the historian and educator in a post-colonial situation. It reminds us how historical consciousness is an always contested and critical space, where our existential commitment to justice is also tested. The interpretation moves beyond the standard understanding of Nietzsche as only favouring a life-affirming use of history. It displays how his argument opens the door toward understanding historical consciousness as a transcultural ethical space of an encounter between the dead and the living. It addresses the contemporary debate in education science concerning the relation and preference between a broader and more limited notion of historical consciousness, questioning the possibility of a conclusive theory of historical consciousness for practical-pedagogical purposes. It exemplifies its conclusions in regard to the legacies of the Holocaust and to Apartheid, as also pedagogical challenges.

Compromiso existencial con la enseñanza

El ‘compromiso existencial con la enseñanza’ es uno de los principales hallazgos de un estudio interpretativo realizado en la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina. En busca de comprensión de la dimensión ética de la enseñanza universitaria se estudian las narrativas y las prácticas de enseñanza de una profesora memorable de Filosofía que fuera previamente elegida por los estudiantes como ejemplo de buena enseñanza y como tal integra el grupo de profesores memorables identificados por el GIEEC (Grupo de Investigaciones en Educación y Estudios Culturales). El compromiso existencial de la docente está presente tanto en sus dichos como en sus prácticas, éstas se inscriben en el ‘modelo del reconocimiento’ cuya eticidad se manifiesta en la consideración del estudiante como par antropológico, en la hospitalidad en la enseñanza y en la presencia de generosidad y empatía en el vínculo pedagógico. El entramado interpretativo aborda materiales procedentes de una articulación metodológica entre el enfoque biográfico narrativo y la investigación etnográfica en educación.

Living toto corde: Monastic Vows and the Knowledge of God

Monastic vows have been a source of religious controversy at least since the Reformation. Today, new monastic movements recover many elements of the tradition (e.g., community life and prayer, material solidarity and poverty), but vows—understood as a lifelong or binding commitment to obedience, stability and conversion to the monastic way of life—do not appear to capture much enthusiasm. Even the Benedictine tradition in the Catholic Church appears, at least in certain regions, to struggle to attract young men and women to give themselves away through vows. In this context, I ask whether vows should belong to the “future of Christian monasticisms”. I will look at Anselm of Canterbury for inspiration regarding their meaning. For him, monastic vows enact the “total” gift of self or the “total” belonging to God. I will suggest, following Anselm, that such vows enable an existential commitment that is in a unique way morally and intellectually enlivening, and that such vows should remain an element in any future monasticism wanting to stand in continuity with the “Christian monasticism” of the past. During my conclusion, I acknowledge that our imagination regarding the concrete forms the total gift could take may develop.

Truth in Education and Science

The growing number of universities today makes it relevant to consider again the idea of the university. Consulting the classics of the discussion, I argue that we must retain the idealist notions of knowledge, science and truth professed by Newman in his argument for liberal education, although he neglects the possible corruption of the university faculty. The problem of corruption is recognized by Jaspers, criticizing all idealist notions and leaving science and scholarship to rely only on existential commitment. The problem for both classics, however, is that they conceive of academic freedom in an all-too individualist way. Instead, I argue that the idea of the academic republic should be taken seriously, i.e., that a contemporary idea of the university must include suggestions for university government comprising institutional checks and balances. Only such a constitutional notion of academic freedom may counter neo-liberal reification of higher education, science, and scholarship.

Ontological Syncretistic Noneism

In this paper I want to claim, first, that despite close similarities, noneism (as developed in both Routley 1980 and Priest 20162) and Crane’s (2013) psychological reductionism are different ontological doctrines. For unlike the latter, the former is ontologically committed to objects that are nonentities. Once one splits ontological from existential commitment, this claim, I guess, is rather uncontroversial. Second, however, I want to claim something more controversial; namely, that this ontological interpretation of noneism naturally makes noneism be nonstandardly read as a form of allism, to be however appropriately distinguished from Quinean allism in terms of the different scope of the overall ontological domain on which the only particular/existential quantifier that there is ranges. This may orient a noneist towards a syncretistic view of existence, according to which, appearances notwithstanding, existence as a whole is captured both by means of second-order and by means of first-order related notions.