Ground Of Reality Research Articles

Are thought experiments a reliable method of doing philosophy? [English translation

In the paper I defend the practice of using thought experiments against the claim that it is not a serious way of philosophical argumentation. At the heart of the criticism leveled against thought experiments is the assumption that the products of imagination, due to their lack of grounding in reality, are fundamentally unreliable. Assuming the existence of an analogy between thought experiments and real experiments, I point out that there are criteria that define the framework of a good thought experiment.
 
 

Transformational Encounter: A Jewish-Catholic Dialogue

In his writings, Pope Francis describes a culture of interfaith and intercultural encounter as the foundation of lasting peace, friendship, and reconciliation among peoples. Far from superficial, a culture of encounter is built upon the slow work of honoring differences and forming social bonds across differences. In the first part of this paper, the authors investigate correspondences between the theology of encounter in the teaching and witness of Martin Buber and Pope Francis, in which the sacred, the ground of reality, and the potential for redemption are revealed in the engaged space “between” self and other. In the second part of the paper, they explore how these ideas are actualized in practices of nonviolence, such as dialogue. In conclusion, they identify how these ideas and role models suggest a road map to build a culture of nonviolence and just peace through encounter within fractured societies throughout the world today.

Revelation and Philosophy in the Thought of Eric Voegelin

Abstract The difference between revelation and natural reason seems to be as obvious as it is indestructible. Despite this conventional view, Eric Voegelin claims that this difference must be “swept aside” and “cleared away” as it obscures the sphere of original meaning and manifestation and posits the divine as an object. According to Voegelin, through recourse to the ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle, we can discover that there is no natural reason at all but instead: “reason is firmly rooted in revelation.” Obviously, this requires a reinterpretation of revelation. It can neither be equated with the content of the Holy Scripture nor should it be confined to the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. Rather, claims Voegelin, we ought to think of it as a primordial attraction, a movement drawing into the search for truth and the ground of reality. Such an approach may raise objections and provoke accusations of either subordinating philosophy to theology or misusing the language. As I attempt to show in the article at hand, Voegelin insists on revelation because it designates the original manifestation of the ground, and both faith and philosophical elucidation are two modes of responding to this appearing.

Is designing therapeutic? A case study exploring the experience of co-design and psychosis

ABSTRACT Background A co-design project, consisting of individual and collective design activities, was organized with clients of a mental health service, in order to explore its potential to support people with psychosis. The group met for approximately two hours, weekly, for six months, participating in design activities and collectively deciding on the project purpose and outcome – a boardgame. Methods The experience of one group participant (Anthony) is explored, selected as the first case study within an Interpretative Phenomenological Analytical (IPA) framework. Following IPA’s ideographic focus, Anthony’s case was purposefully selected, as it portrayed a detailed picture, informing theoretical reflection on designing as therapeutic. The paper includes Anthony’s first-hand account, combined with an analysis of data from three semi-structured interviews, photographic evidence and a reflective diary kept by the lead researcher. Results Results suggest that, for Anthony, design activity: a) helps developing a sense of agency b) is experienced as grounding in reality c) contributes to the development of inter-personal relationships, and d) has a different sense of rhythm than artistic practice. Discussion These results are contextualized within literature on the lived experience of psychosis and suggest that designing can be beneficial for people with psychosis, providing the backdrop for further research and practice.

Review: Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, by Claudia Costa Pederson

Review: <i>Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media</i>, by Claudia Costa Pederson

Nurse Sensemaking for Responding to Patient and Family Safety Concerns.

Hospitals need to prevent, respond to, and learn from safety risks and events perceived by patients and families, who in turn rely on nurses to respond to and report their safety concerns. The aim of the study was to describe the process by which bedside nurses evaluate and determine the appropriate response to safety concerns expressed by patients or their families. A qualitative design was employed. We recruited inpatient bedside nurses in an 811-bed Midwest academic medical center. Nurses provided demographic information and participated in semistructured interviews designed to elicit narratives related to evaluation and response to patient- or family-expressed safety concerns. Data analysis and interpretation were guided by grounded theory. We enrolled 25 nurses representing 22 units. Based on these nurses' experiences, we developed a grounded theory explaining how nurses evaluate a patient or family safety concern. Nurses make sense of the patient's or family's safety concern in order to take action. Achieving this goal requires evaluation of the meaningfulness and reasonableness of the concern, as well as the potential effect of the concern on the patient. Based on this nursing evaluation, nurses respond in ways designed to (a) manage emotions, (b) immediately resolve concerns, (c) involve other team members, and (d) address fear or uncertain grounding in reality. Nurses reported routinely handling safety concerns at the bedside without use of incident reporting. Safety requires an interpersonal and evaluative nursing process with actions responsive to patient and family concerns. Safety interventions designed to be used by nurses should be developed with the dynamic, cognitive, sensemaking nature of nurses' routine safety work in mind. Being sensitive to the vulnerability of patients, respecting patient and family input, and understanding the consequences of dismissing patient and family safety concerns are critical to making sense of the situation and taking appropriate action to maintain safety. Measuring patient safety or planning improvement based on patient or family expression of safety concerns would be a difficult undertaking using only standard approaches. A more complex approach incorporating direct patient engagement in data collection is necessary to gain a complete safety picture.

Black Studies, White Studies, and Afrocentrism

It is with the continued advances in the discipline of African American (Black) Studies that this essay comes to life. Recent articles by Bunzel and Grossman take dubious aim at Black Studies, its instructors, and its organizing principles. Grossman is even so obtuse as to use Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa , a book with virtually no grounding in reality as it relates to African Studies, to help prove her misguided thoughts. The authors are not concerned with Black Studies so much as they are with the fear of losing the privileged position White studies maintains. They use their articles as a poor attempt to discredit or otherwise slander a discipline that they simply do not understand or even attempt to understand. Articles such as “Tales from the Black Studies Ghetto” and “Black Studies Revisited” are clear evidence of the fear and ignorance Eurocentric thinkers are gripped by when dealing with an Afrocentric paradigm.

“Vernatürlichung”: Ursprünge von Friedrich Nietzsches Entidealisierung des Menschen, seiner Sprache und seiner Geschichte bei Johann Gottfried Herder

“Vernatürlichung”: Ursprünge von Friedrich Nietzsches Entidealisierung des Menschen, seiner Sprache und seiner Geschichte bei Johann Gottfried Herder

Signifying in the Ivory Tower

Signifying in the Ivory Tower Wendy Graham My paper focuses on the homologies James forges among business, personal, and aesthetic interests through the lexical strategies of his late fiction. Slogging away at the uncanny reverberations of the term “interest,” page by page, until curiosity and cupidity are rendered virtually synonymous, James’s linguistic fun is the medium of the message that there is no escape from capital but death: [Mr. Gaw] conformed in short to his necessity of absolute interest—interest, that is, in his own private facts, which were facts of numerical calculation altogether: how could it not be so when he had dispossessed himself, if there had even been the slightest selection in the matter, of every faculty except the calculating? (IT 7) In his notes for The Ivory Tower (1914), James reviews the pitfalls he faced in The American Scene (1907), the apprehension that he was out of his depth explaining financial instruments, codicils to wills, amortization of principal and the like: “Enormous difficulty of pretending to show various things here as with a business vision, in my total absence of business initiation” (IT 216). James disparaged the crudity of new wealth in The American Scene by cataloging the material pomp and show of Newport and the Jersey shore: “houses and their candid look of having cost as much as they knew how” (AS 11). Similarly, The Ivory Tower casts a jaundiced eye on “The enormous preponderance of money. Money is their life,” as an axis of community and identity among the denizens of Newport (84). The Ivory Tower supersedes the fact-finding or constative dimension of the earlier work through its improvisation of a middle ground between “the motions of matter and the states of consciousness”—“the most heterogeneous objects we know,” according to Georg Simmel (132). James’s text resurrects the repressed social dimension of the market, in which individuals misconstrue a trumped up “exchange value” as a true measure of a commodity’s production costs and utility—as inherent in the [End Page 68] thing itself. James demystifies commodity fetishism starting with the fetish value of money. Just as a social compact allows money to function as if it were material wealth, rather than its envelope, James’s fictional Newport revolves around the activities of confirmed and reputed millionaires, reminding us that a collective delusion structures the real social activities of men. The performative dimension of James’s late unfinished novel is a perpetual demonstration of the absolute identity, from a functional viewpoint, of language and money within a conceptual framework: “for of what else but money do we ever talk?” (IT 105). Figurative language enables comparisons between things that are qualitatively different, cannily summarized by the phrase, “a treasure of consciousness” (36). Money reconciles the incommensurate aspects of commodities, ignoring qualitative differences in order to streamline the exchange of property: “A definite amount of money can thus determine or measure the value of an object, regardless of whether money and the valuable object possess any identical quality, and so regardless of whether money itself is valuable” (Simmel 133). (Eggs cost $3.00 a dozen; ribbons cost $3.00 each; therefore, a dozen eggs = one ribbon.) Money and language are placeholders of value, symbols without substance. Unwilling to mount a mimetic representation of the financial sector, James resorts to a “symbolic mode of analogical correspondences” between types of human activity in the novel, sweeping aside the ground of reality in favor of rhyming semiotic contexts (de Man 222). The paradoxical assimilation of rhetoric and commerce does not result in a “category mistake,” however, as James does not haphazardly misrepresent the facts pertaining to one category in terms appropriate to the other (Ricoeur 148). He forges a rapprochement between the two through the mediation of the sign, a third term that points to something other than a descriptive reference or literal meaning. The referential function of narrative is suspended throughout, as the reader struggles with the ambiguity of the message and the polysemy of favored terms. The text foregrounds “stereoscopic vision”—the ability to hold two different points of view at the same time (154), all the while urging symmetry between either side of the...

The waves: tensions between creativity and containment in the life and writings of Virginia Woolf.

The line between genius and that edge too far can be a fine one (Charles, 2003). Many creative individuals have struggled to bring their individuality to bear without completely losing touch with their grounding in reality. Some, like Icarus, have flown too close to the flame, whereas others have greatly enriched our lives with treasures mined in travels through their own less conscious regions. Virginia Woolf is one artist who straddled that line, leaving behind a rich legacy through which we can watch an artist struggling both implicitly and explicitly to bring forth her genius without losing hold of her sanity. For Woolf, the roots of her creativity seem to be inextricably entwined with the roots of her madness. In her diaries (1953), we see her struggling to contain the threats posed by the unconscious without losing touch with the bounty offered there, explicitly depicting the unconscious as the container of important patterns she is trying to understand. In her fiction, these same themes often play as a background melody. They emerge more explicitly as we see her playing out, through her characters, tensions between insanity and creativity and between freedom, containment, and constraint (Charles, in press a). These tensions are perhaps most apparent as we look through the successive revisionings of Woolf’s (1931) novel The Waves. The Waves may be viewed as an attempt to descend into and explore the unconscious and to bring forth its riches into the light through the use of metaphor. In this endeavor, Woolf (1953) explicitly attempts to move beyond the constrictions of the narrative form in order to produce a work that is both dense

Foreign Representations and Local Realities

Since the colonial era, environmental degradation in Fouta Djalon has been systematically described and denounced as a direct consequence of agropastoral practices. An extremely pessimistic scenario involving extensive farming practices, population increase, environmental degradation, and emigration has gradually emerged, without solid grounding in reality. Although regularly forecasted, the catastrophe is still to come. Elaboration of this crisis scenario is based on received ideas. These ideas have warped the initial diagnosis, led to an erroneous perception of local economic and social dynamics and of their potential for evolution, and ultimately account for the sometimes fantastic character of representations and predicted evolution of environmental dynamics. This misperception of reality is one cause of the low global efficacy of rural development programs.

Degenerating Image of the Construction Industry

There is an extraordinary and unexpected connection between the degenerating image of the construction industry and the low regard contemporary society holds for construction tradespeople. Uncovered through recent research and verified by several think tanks on the subject, the industry’s image is driving potential entrants away from construction trades as a career choice. Understanding the root cause of construction’s image problem forms the foundation for the discovery of solutions, according to Dr. William W. Badger, Director of the Del E. Webb School of Construction, Arizona State University; this is why we invited a select group of construction professionals from across the country to examine our research findings. We asked them to challenge the underlying data, test the information and qualifying factors, assist in setting the future research direction, and further the pursue solutions. A necessary element of research is its grounding in reality. It is therefore necessary to discuss the results and ramifications with knowledgeable people who are not too close to the research. The process includes periodic one-day meetings with a small group of construction professionals in a ‘‘think tank’’ process to discuss the findings and qualifying factors. The research is ongoing, with the objective of fashioning and generating effective solutions ~accomplishable ones! that can correct the bad image and effectively address the labor shortage. The research has defined a specific connection between the skilled labor shortage and the degenerating image of our industry and the low regard contemporary society holds for construction tradespeople. Blue-collar workers have become hugely underappreciated in our country, a prime factor in the poor image the construction industry has with owners, designers, and the general public. Attitudes toward blue-collar work continue to deteriorate, indicating that public relations efforts to improve the construction industry image are not working. And they will not work because the genesis of the problem is not the industry, but the general public’s attitude toward those who choose construction trades as a career path. This is not true for those who choose a construction career at the management level, which is why current recruitment efforts are attracting high school students to construction colleges—but few, if any, to the trades.

Black Studies, White Studies, and Afrocentrism

It is with the continued advances in the discipline of African American (Black) Studies that this essay comes to life. Recent articles by Bunzel and Grossman take dubious aim at Black Studies, its instructors, and its organizing principles. Grossman is even so obtuse as to use Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa, a book with virtually no grounding in reality as it relates to African Studies, to help prove her misguided thoughts. The authors are not concerned with Black Studies so much as they are with the fear of losing the privileged position White studies maintains. They use their articles as a poor attempt to discredit or otherwise slander a discipline that they simply do not understand or even attempt to understand. Articles such as “Tales from the Black Studies Ghetto” and “Black Studies Revisited” are clear evidence of the fear and ignorance Eurocentric thinkers are gripped by when dealing with an Afrocentric paradigm.

Bereavement and Health: The Psychological and Physical Consequences of Partner Loss.

Does the popular notion of a 'broken heart' have some grounding in reality? How can grief affect the body in ways that necessitate medical care and may even be life-threatening? Bereavement and Health constitutes a comprehensive review of what is known about the impact of bereavement on surviving partners. Drawing on the work of psychologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, and psychiatrists, Wolfgang and Margaret Stroebe offer a theoretically coherent perspective focused on conjugal loss. After a thorough discussion of stress and depression models of bereavement, the authors present their own theoretical approach, emphasizing social contacts and the interpersonal nature of grief. They then examine the psychological and medical consequences of bereavement: Are the bereaved at higher risk than those who have not lost a partner? What has research revealed about the causes, symptoms, and outcomes of grief? Key questions about recovery from grief are also addressed: Is the health risk of bereavement severe enough to have lasting or even fatal consequences? Is it possible to identify those bereaved who are at high risk before their health suffers? What are the strategies that are most likely to lead to effective coping? Can attempts at intervention be effective? The Stroebes' combination of theoretical integration and methodological rigor will make Bereavement and Health a standard text for years to come.

The impact of children's books: cases and concepts (Part 2)

This article was originally presented at the Fourth Symposium of the International Research Society for Children's Literature at Exeter University, England, in September 1978. In Part 1 of this article (Cle, Vol. 10, No. 2), I discussed some condit ions of the possibility of an impact of children's books. This approach is in the old German tradit ion of Kant, who pondered over the condit ions o f the possibility of experience. Specifically, I applied three basic concepts of reception theory to children's literature. However, it is wholesome at t imes to leave the castles in the air and touch the ground of reality. After all, not every rabbit is a figment of the imagination; there are also real ones. So we will turn to some results of empirical research.