Existential Phenomenon Research Articles

Depression, osteoporosis, serotonin and cell membrane viscosity between biology and philosophical anthropology

Due to the relationship between biology and culture, we believe that depression, understood as a cultural and existential phenomenon, has clear markers in molecular biology. We begin from an existential analysis of depression constituting the human condition and then shift to analysis of biological data confirming, according to our judgment, its original (ontological) structure. In this way philosophy is involved at the anthropological level, in as much as it detects the underlying meanings of depression in the original biological-cultural horizon of human life. Considering the integration of knowledge it is the task of molecular biology to identify the aforementioned markers, to which the existential aspects of depression are linked to. In particular, recent works show the existence of a link between serotonin and osteoporosis as a result of a modified expression of the low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 5 gene. Moreover, it is believed that the hereditary or acquired involvement of tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (Tph2) or 5-hydroxytryptamine transporter (5-HTT) is responsible for the reduced concentration of serotonin in the central nervous system, causing depression and affective disorders. This work studies the depression-osteoporosis relationship, with the aim of focusing on depressive disorders that concern the quantitative dynamic of platelet membrane viscosity and interactome cytoskeleton modifications (in particular Tubulin and Gsα protein) as a possible condition of the involvement of the serotonin axis (gut, brain and platelet), not only in depression but also in connection with osteoporosis.

Implications of Eurocentrism for Social Work Education: Trivialization vis‐à‐vis Skin Color

The significance of skin color among people of color and its relative absence in social work literature is arguably attributed to Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism defines human reality via Eurocentric norms, ideas, values and perspectives. Evidence of Eurocentrism in social work is contained in its literature priorities, skin color litigation, brown racism and skin bleaching. Demonstration of the aforementioned social pathologies involving skin color pertaining to people of color is a critical, existential phenomenon. If social work is to remain viable and be sustained in the future, it must conform to the dictates of changes in the population. That will require a commensurate adjustment and a willingness of its intelligentsia to accommodate skin color and other alternative views relative to education and practice.

A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Approach to Understanding Stress-Coping as an Existential Phenomenon Lived by Healthy Adolescents

Based mainly on research conducted as part of a doctoral thesis (Guimond-Plourde, 2004), this paper introduces an epistemological and methodological framework based on the foundations and characteristics of a qualitative/interpretative approach rooted in hermeneutic phenomenology as conducive to disclosing the meaning that healthy adolescents, aged 15 to 17, attribute to the stress they experience in school and to their coping behaviour. Moving from the empirical to the phenomenal makes it possible to evoke a return to dimensions of meaning which have been set aside or forgotten in the lived experience of stress-coping. By thus bringing stress-coping into focus in a new way, it enables us to glimpse the phenomenon anew, with the prospect of revealing what we haven’t yet appreciated. A dual philosophical approach is outlined: a phenomenological perspective apprehends stress-coping as an existential phenomenon, while the hermeneutic focus is on interpreting the links between lived experience and meaning. The kind of knowledge generated by means of this approach offers a new way of understanding that focuses on the unique and personal nature of healthy adolescents’ daily life at school and, as such, provides educators with a sensitive account of adolescents’ experiences of stress in the school context.

A qualitative study into the lived experience of post-CABG patients during mechanical ventilator weaning

Research into mechanical ventilator weaning has predominantly been devoted to analysis and evaluation of predictors of weaning success. Few studies have examined the patient experience of weaning. The aim of this study was to provide a contemporary description of the patient experience of weaning, in order to up-date this aspect of knowledge in the context of newer modalities of mechanical ventilation and sedation. The study had a descriptive qualitative design focusing on the lived experience of post-CABG (coronary artery bypass graft) patients ventilated > or = 24h (n=10). Data were generated using semi-structured depth interviews conducted 2-5 months after hospital discharge. A hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used to analyze the data. The article presents selected themes that emerged during the process of analysis. The main findings relate to general phenomena such as discomfort and impaired communication, psychological phenomena such as loss of control and loneliness, and existential phenomena such as temporality and human interaction. Newer modalities of sedation and mechanical ventilation have not entirely eliminated the discomforts of critical illness; the human aspects of suffering remain. In order to address some of the general, psychological, and existential patient experiences, care should be taken to acknowledge the patient and to respect the patient domain and individual time frames. In nurse-patient communication, it is recommended that caregivers give accurate and unambiguous information.

The Novel in a Time of Terror: Middlesex, History, and Contemporary American Fiction

Jeffrey Eugenides's 2002 Middlesex, a critically acclaimed historical novel, has been praised as an expansive, epic portrait of the American twentieth century from its immigrant roots to the present. (1) It takes its readers from a Turkish village in the 1920s to the race riots of the late 1960s, following a Greek and then Greek American family across time and the world, spinning an interestingly twisted yarn in the voice of the family's latest product, whose gender identity, complicated by a genetically inherited hermaphroditism, is at the center of his story. The novel displays a particular historical imagination, as all historical novels do; it depends on a set of notions about the relationship between past, present, and future, about cause and effect, and about the possibilities and problems that attempts to understand and represent the past entail. And, as is also the case with all historical novels, its historical imagination can tell us something about the historical imagination of its times. While it is no longer common in current critical discourse to discuss works in terms of aesthetic failure or success, I believe that Middlesex fails aesthetically and that it is important to talk about it in these terms because how it fails says something about its historical imagination and the historical imagination of its times. At the root of its failure, I'll argue, is the way it imposes a false closure on its narrative of the main character's gender crisis. This closure represents something other than a poor aesthetic choice. Rather, its falseness--the unearned, unwarranted character of the novel's ending--is unintended, and so it represents a failure that is especially indicative of the unconscious effect of its historical imagination. The way Middlesex ends is in part due to, and thus can tell us something about, the way history felt in America in 2002. The formal phenomenon of closure is closely linked in the literature and thought of the second half of the twentieth century to the existential phenomenon of contingency. The felt relation of a time, a writer, or a particular kind of historical imagination to the fact of contingency informs the way stories are told, in particular the nature of their endings (and not just in the recent past, as Frank Kermode has shown). Postmodernism, though, has been especially invested in the connection between closure and contingency. In an early (1972) statement of postmodern doctrine made in the first issue of boundary 2, the postmodern journal he cofounded, William Spanos describes the relationship between closure and contingency after midcentury: Only after the existentialist philosophers revealed that the perception of the universe as a well-made fiction, obsessive to the Western consciousness, is in reality a self-deceptive effort to evade the anxiety of contingent existence by objectifying and taking hold of it, did it become clear to the modern writer that the ending-as-solution is the literary agency of this evasive objectification. (152) The distrust of closure is widely articulated in postmodern thought, early (as in statements by Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, John Barth, et al.) and late (Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Brian McHale, et al.). The story that I will tell through my reading of Middlesex, however, is that of the changing nature of that distrust in recent years. What endings mean, and why writers embrace them or avoid them, depends in part on how contingent existence feels and how public discourse and constructions of history deal with that feeling. As a result, events that reawaken a sense of contingency and challenge already constructed narratives--in particular, historical traumas--can affect the shape of literary endings. This is especially the case, I will argue, for historical literature, work whose focus is explicitly on the past and always implicitly, as a result, on the way that history ends--on the way the past leads to the precarious present and, ultimately, the future. …

Terapia ocupacional social: o caminho se faz ao caminhar

It is a social occupational therapy theoric analysis by two perspectives. The first one understands illness as a social and individual, medical and existential phenomenon with several meanings. This perspective is also a critical way to see - that was created since the 80s of the XX century - the dichotomies between individual-society, men-nature, men-culture. These dichotomies make us think the individual totally discontinued, out of the society and out of the environment. It seems like outstanding parts or parts linked in a mechanic way to the whole. The second part discusses the necessity to think the way to Occupational Therapy become able to be a conflict mediator an also to be a place of cultural negociation.

Ethics, Management, and the Existentialist Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship and management are commonly treated as members of the same family of concepts. In the wake of a recent reinterpretation of entrepreneurship as an existential phenomenon, there is no longer reason to take for granted the kinship between entrepreneurship and management. Indeed, it is possible to interpret entrepreneurship and management as antitheses on one compelling ethical criterion: voluntary exercise of the word “no” about one’s own projects. The implications of this ethical split between entrepreneurship and management reach from management education to entrepreneurship research to the distinctiveness of the field of business ethics.

The Role of Caring in a Theory of Nursing Ethics

The development of nursing ethics as a field of inquiry has largely relied on theories of medical ethics that use autonomy, beneficence, and/or justice as foundational ethical principles. Such theories espouse a masculine approach to moral decision “making and ethical analysis. This paper challenges the presumption of medical ethics and its associated system of moral justification as an appropriate model for nursing ethics. It argues that the value foundations of nursing ethics are located within the existential phenomenon of human caring within the nurse/patient relationship instead of in models of patient good or rights-based notions of autonomy as articulated in prominent theories of medical ethics. Models of caring are analyzed and a moral-point-of-view (MPV) theory with caring as a fundamental value is proposed for the development of a theory of nursing ethics. This type of theory is supportive to feminist medical ethics because it focuses on the subscription to, and not merely the acceptance of, a particular view of morality.

Metaphorical Revelations: A Description of Metaphor as the Reciprocal Engagement of Abstract Perspectives and Concrete Phenomena in Experience

Metaphor is examined from an experiential perspective and its structure is metaphorically revealed to consist of (a) a verbal vehicle signifying an abstract mnemonic perspective, (b) a verbal tenor referring to a concrete existential phenomenon, (c) an ongoing sense of occasion, and (d) an immediate context of possible stimulation. The interaction between tenor and vehicle is seen as a complementary synthesis of past and present aspects of experience as mediated by expectations appropriate to an ongoing situation that is subject to environmental constraints. The novelty of metaphor is traced to anomalies in expectation. Verbal metaphors are examined as public revelations of private perspectives serving to direct communal attention toward stressful events. The power and beauty of metaphor are sought in its double accountability to both abstract and concrete phases of experience.