Human Praxis Research Articles

A economia como objeto socialmente construído nas análises regulacionista e da Economia Social de Mercado

RESUMO O artigo discute os argumentos ontológicos em defesa das especificidades dos fenômenos econômicos, comparativamente àqueles encontrados nos sistemas inorgânico e orgânico. Sua posição epistemológica é antipositivista e antineoclássica, sustentando que a tentativa de naturalizar os sistemas socioeconômicos, que marca a Economia, desde os fisiocratas, tem contribuído para enfraquecer seu potencial heurístico, explicativo e preditivo. A problemática é desenvolvida partindo-se de uma análise comparativa entre a Teoria da Regulação e a Economia Social de Mercado, correntes teóricas onde o conceito de instituição e a historicidade inerente às relações de produção e de distribuição são consideradas centrais. Diferentemente dos objetos da natureza, cujas regularidades e processos não foram originalmente criados pela práxis humana, o objeto econômico é social e politicamente construído e precisa ter, portanto, estatuto teórico-metodológico específico. Em consequência, a pertinência das teorias em face das regularidades micro e macroeconômicas observadas não pode ser alcançada por uma abordagem axiomática que faz da Economia uma ciência essencialmente lógico-dedutiva e a-histórica por construção, tampouco pela pressuposição da existência de leis gerais invariantes, puramente econômicas e inescapáveis.

A filosofia da história e da historiografia de Richard Rorty: Questões hermenêuticas

As conceções de Rorty sobre a historiografia filosófica, expostas no famoso artigo «A historiografia da filosofia: quatro géneros», são geralmente conhecidas e discutidas pelas comunidades dos filósofos e dos historiadores; o mesmo não se pode dizer da questão de saber se haverá uma filosofia da história propriamente dita subjacente a tais conceções, na perspetiva da qual as deveríamos enquadrar e interpretar. Neste artigo, analisa-se atentamente esta questão; defende-se que a filosofia da história de Rorty, despedida que foi por ele, em parte, a ideia de fundações para a filosofia e o historicismo associado, é essencialmente uma filosofia na história; e que esse autor progrediu de uma representação escatológica da história, que torna esta praticamente inútil como instrumento de transformação da práxis humana quer em termos individuais quer coletivos, para uma outra, semifundacionalista e semi-historicista, na perspetiva da qual é possível pensar a atualidade do pragmatismo como filosofia social, cultural e política.

Critical Realism's Potential Contribution to Critical Pedagogy and Youth and Community Work: Human Nature, Agency and Praxis Revisited

In the light of late modern, postmodern and post-critical debates the difficulty of establishing a coherent theoretical framework for both critical pedagogy and youth and community work has been noted by several authors. In this article I will make the claim that critical realism, as a stance within the ontological, epistemological and aetiological paradigms, offers a way to ameliorate a number of tensions in critical pedagogy and youth and community work. Margaret Archer's theories around morphogenesis are particularly useful in re-examining the tensions between essentialist and anti-essentialist views of human nature, identity and community, and structure and agency. In terms of praxis, her method allows us to wish to influence others, without descending into positivity or being satisfied with just uncovering highly individualized accounts of temporary meaning making. She also offers a way of performing critical pedagogy that does not instil a ‘knowing hopelessness’ in people, whereby they are aware of their material conditions, but do not feel enabled to act on their oppression.

Philosophy as Paradigms: An Account of a Contextual Metaphilosophical Perspective

The present paper aims at highlighting some of the main characteristics of a descriptive contextual approach to philosophy. Descriptive, in the sense that it centers not on the (normative) question of what philosophy should be, but on what philosophy is, has been, or may be. And contextual, in the sense that it treats philosophy as human praxis situated in and interacting with certain social and historical settings. In order to develop such an account, we engage closely with Kuhn’s paradigm-centered contextual approach to science and examine, following Rorty, how it could be regarded in connection to philosophy. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of two concrete cases to which such an approach may be applied, the division between analytic and continental philosophy at the level of philosophical traditions, and the case of Wittgenstein’s life and thought at the level of individual philosophers.

Pragmatism and Political Pluralism - Consensus and Pluralism

A pragmatist thinker like Nicholas Rescher deems the idea that social harmony must be predicated in consensus to be both dangerous and misleading. An essential problem of our time is the creation of political and social institutions that enable people to live together in peaceful and productive ways, despite the presence of not eliminable disagreements about theoretical and practical issues. Such remarks, in turn, strictly recall the “practical” impossibility of settling philosophical disputes by having recourse to abstract and aprioristic principles. In the circumstances, the social model of team members cooperating for a common purpose is unrealistic. A more adequate model is, instead, that of a classical capitalism where - in a sufficiently well developed system - both competition and rivalry manage somehow to foster the benefit of the entire community (theory of the “hidden hand”). Certainly the scientific community is one of the best examples of this that we have, although even in this case we must be careful not to give too idealized a picture of scientific research. Consensus, however, in the Western tradition is an ideal worth being pursued. At this point we are faced with two basic positions. On the one side (a) “consensualists” maintain that disagreement should be averted no matter what, while, on the other, (b) “pluralists” accept disagreement because they take dissensus to be an inevitable feature of the imperfect world in which we live. A pluralistic vision, therefore, tries to make dissensus tolerable, and not to eliminate it. All theories of idealized consensus present us with serious setbacks. This is the case, for instance, with Charles S. Peirce. As is well known, Peirce takes truth to be “the limit of inquiry,” i.e. either what science will discover in the (idealized) long run, or what it would discover if the human efforts were so extended. By taking this path, thus, truth is nothing but the ultimate consensus reached within the scientific community. We can be sure that, once a “final” answer to a question has been found which is thereafter maintained without change, that one is the truth we were looking for. This fascinating theory, however, has various unfortunate consequences. In our day the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has in a way revived these Peircean insights, putting forward an influential theory to the effect that consensus indeed plays a key role in human praxis, so that the primary task of philosophy is to foster it by eliminating the disagreement which we constantly have to face in the course of our daily life. In his “communicative theory of consensus,” furthermore, he claims that human communication rests on an implicit commitment to a sort of “ideal speech situation” which is the normative foundation of agreement in linguistic matters. Consequently, the quest for consensus is a constitutive feature of our nature of (rational) human beings: rationality and consensus are tied together. A very strong consequence derives from Habermas’ premises: were we to abandon the search for consensus we would lose rationality, too, and this makes us understand that he views the pursuit of consensus as a regulative principle (rather than as a merely practical objective). Rescher opposes both Peirce’s eschatological view and Habermas’ regulative and idealized one.

Raising legal giants: The agency of the poor in the human rights jurisprudence of the Nigerian Appellate Courts, 1990-2011

This article examines the extent to which the jurisprudence of the Nigerian appellate courts has expanded, maintained or contracted the opportunities of the poor for exercising as robustly as possible their own 'agency' to act to redress human rights abuses committed against them during the period between 1990 and 2011. In doing so, the article mostly utilises a critical socio-legal framework which situates Nigeria's human rights law relating to the agency of the poor within its historical, social, economic and political context. Specifically, it utilises - among others - the kernel ideas of Upendra Baxi's seminal trade-related market-friendly human rights theory. While it is often assumed that the weak, excluded and deprived are passive victims of their condition, the starting position of the article is that, where sufficient opportunities exist in law and policy, or are allowed by the adequate availability of resources, or are made possible through pro-poor judicial action, the poor are actually able to resist this characteristic and to struggle to transform their life conditions. The main question the article addresses is the extent to which the Nigerian appellate courts have - in the course of developing their human rights praxis - helped to provide or restrict opportunities for poor Nigerians to exercise their agency within the legal system so as to more effectively 'struggle to transform their life conditions'. With what conceptual apparatuses have these courts examined and decided the relevant cases in ways that expand or contract the agency of the poor to seek legal redress and social justice? We argue that many factors interact in this regard to produce certain outcomes, some within and others outside the control of the courts. We also believe that courts should, where necessary, ameliorate the factors within their control such that the poor can more robustly exercise their agency in this regard.

Gêneros discursivos híbridos na era da hipermídia

A pluralidade em devir dos gêneros discursivos foi enfatizada por Bakhtin. Para ele, os gêneros do discurso tendem a crescer à medida que se desenvolvem e se complexificam as esferas da práxis humana. Em função dessa antecipação já anunciada por Bakhtin, o objetivo deste artigo é ampliar a noção de gêneros discursivos para as manifestações que ocorrem nas redes sociais digitais, batizando esse gênero de híbrido, dado o fato de que, nas redes, a discursividade estritamente verbal vaza as fronteiras não só da linearidade típica do verbo, no hipertexto, quanto também da exclusividade do discurso verbal nas misturas que este estabelece com todas as formas das imagens fixas e em movimento e com as linguagens sonoras, do ruído, à oralidade e à música, na multimídia.

On the societal nature of praxis and organic research

In its focus on social practices, the feature article presents an interesting theoretical framework for rethinking not only where and how knowing and learning in science education exhibit themselves but also we might change our own research practice. The framework is not new to me, as I have advocated it explicitly for more than 15 years. But over time it became apparent to me that some particularities of participation in practice may be grounded more strongly in an orientation towards the societal nature of any human praxis. In this forum contribution, I present a theoretical approach built on societal-historical activity theory that also takes activism as a major category for theorizing participation. This approach not only covers the extent of the social practice framework but also allows us to make thematic the production of inequity and restrictions to access science and engineering that are characteristic of many societies.

Dialectics and World Politics: The Story So Far …

The question ‘What is dialectics?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. Theoretical obfuscation and ideological baggage have fostered widespread misunderstandings of the concept. This article is intended to go some way in providing an answer, though one offered as a heuristic in which further developments can be made, rather than as doctrinaire statement of first principles. This introductory account of dialectics proceeds in four steps. It begins with a basic definitional and conceptual outline of dialectics before offering a brief philosophical history of dialectics in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions; its re-emergence from scholasticism through Kant and Hegel; its vivification in Marx’s thought (and subsequent decline under ‘Diamat’); and its development in Western Marxism and on into contemporary political philosophy. The third part then explores the more modest engagements with dialectics that have taken place within IR theory before closing with a discussion of some of the ongoing tensions and key themes in dialectical thought. These center on the question of understanding dialectics as a process of reflection and an objective logic traceable in human praxis, highlighting the ongoing critical and revolutionary essence of dialectics.

La dialogicidad como supuesto ontológico y epistemológico en Psicología Social: reflexiones a partir de la Teoría de las Representaciones Sociales y la Pedagogía de la Liberación

This article discusses the role of dialogicity in the construction of a critical and emancipatory Social Psychology from an interactionist or genetic perspective of the Social Representations Theory. For this purpose we establish connections between the Social Representations Theory of Serge Moscovici and the Pedagogy of Liberation of Paulo Freire. In general both theories consider dialogicity an existential condition of human beings, i.e., one that permeates the ontological, epistemological and ethical fields of human praxis. Said category does not deny the tension and conflict of human relations; on the contrary, it comprehends that these characteristics are what make it possible to articulate dialogical strategies for social change.

Spirituality for democracy: Spiritual resources for democratic participation in the 21st century

The topic invites us to explore spirituality for democracy and to identify and critique the spiritual resources that are needed for democratic participation in the 21st century. The statement specifically focused on for and not of democracy. Modern expressions of democracy are in crisis. Every context is teething with challenges and conflicts between government sand their citizens concerning how much influence through participation should be allowed in the decision-making process of governance. This topic is of extreme importance for academic discourse because the malaise that has crept into contemporary forms of democratic governance calls for urgent attention. Democratic forms of governance are not set in stone. Rather, they are formed as a result of human deliberation and praxis and cultural developments and must therefore remain open for further reformation. It is this intrinsic capacity for renewal that opens democracy to converse with spirituality. This article begins with identifying the key terms that constitute the academic building blocks of this study. The inherent contradictions in the use of these terms are noted in order to arrive at a theoretical construct to converse with the key concepts of spirituality, democracy, spiritual resources and democratic participation.Through the use of the post colonial lenses of Rastafari hermeneutics, a theoretical framework will be employed to map a life-giving path for contemporary expressions of spirituality for democracy and to identify the resources needed for democratic participation.

Quasi-appropriation of dialectical materialism: a critical reading of Marxism in Vygotskian approaches to cultural studies in science education

In this review essay we examine five categories of dialectical materialism proposed by Paulo Lima Junior, Fernanda Ostermann, and Flavia Rezende in their study of the extent to which the articles published in Cultural Studies of Science Education, that use a Vygotskian approach, are committed to Marxism/dialectical materialism. By closely examining these categories (“thesis, antithesis and synthesis,” “unity of analysis,” “History,” “revolution,” “materialism”) we expect to enrich the general discussion about the possible contributions of Marxism to science education. We perceive part of science education practice as orientating toward positivism, which reduces human beings—teachers, learners and researchers—to isolated individuals who construct knowledge by themselves. The very same approach aggravates the inner contradiction of the capitalist society demanding commitments from researchers to continually build innovative science education from human praxis. Nevertheless, it is necessary to situate ourselves beyond a formal commitment with dialectical materialism and hence reach the heart of this method. Besides understanding the researchers’ commitments, we question the extent to which the respective research helps to radically refresh the current view on science, science education practice, and research in science education.

Can accreditation help a leopard change its spots?

Purpose– Neo-institutional theory suggests that organisations change occurs when institutional contradictions, caused by exogenous and endogenous dynamics, increase over time to the point where change can no longer be resisted. Human praxis will result, but only when sufficiently powerful interests are motivated to act. This paper aims to examine the role that the accreditation of business schools can play in increasing institutional contradictions and hence fostering organisational change towards stakeholder engagement and engagement with social responsibility and sustainability issues. Numerous accreditations are promulgated within the higher education and business school contexts and a number of these relate to, or have aspects that relate to, ethics, social responsibility and sustainability.Design/methodology/approach– The paper first analyses the take up of accreditations across UK business schools and then uses a case study to illustrate and explore stakeholder engagement and changes related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability linked to accreditation processes.Findings– Accreditations are found to be an increasingly common interest for UK business schools. Further, a number of these accreditations have evolved to incorporate issues related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability that may cause institutional contradictions and may, therefore, have the potential to foster organisational change. Accreditation alone, however, is not sufficient and the authors find that sufficiently powerful interests need to be motivated to act and enable human praxis to affect change.Research limitations/implications– This paper draws on previous research that considers the role of accreditation in fostering change that has also been carried out in healthcare organisations, public and professional bodies. Its findings stem from an individual case study and as such further research is required to explore whether these findings can be extended and apply more generally in business schools and universities in different contexts.Practical implications– This paper concludes by recommending that the newly established UK & Ireland Chapter of PRME encourages and supports signatory schools to further embed ethics, social responsibility and sustainability into all aspects of university life in the UK. This also provides an opportunity to engage with the accrediting bodies in order to further support the inclusion of stakeholder engagement and issues related to this agenda in their processes.Originality/value– This paper contributes by introducing accreditation as an institutional pressure that may lead indirectly to organisational change and supports this with new evidence from an illustrative case study. Further, it draws on the role of institutional contradictions and human praxis that engender organisational change.

Professional Praxis in Practical Theology: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

This article discusses the understanding of praxis in practical theology as well as the implications of this understanding for empirical research. It advocates a nominalist understanding of praxis and suggests that definitions of praxis must, in the present context, depend on the theological encyclopedia in use. If practical theology and ethics are organized in separate disciplines, human praxis in general will be the object of ethics while practical theology should concern itself with professional ecclesial praxis. The author understands this praxis in a very broad sense (beyond the church; beyond traditional forms of preaching, teaching, counselling; beyond the focus on professional pastors), not only in terms of the theoretical scope of the discipline but also in respect to the material object to be studied by practical theology. In line with this understanding, the author defines the formal object of practical theology as critically facilitating ecclesial praxis. The methodology of practical theology must be in agreement with this formal object but beyond this, practical theology should not make claims to any special research methods that would be particular only to this discipline. In conclusion, the author offers some answers to the question what practical theology may benefit from theoretical analyses of the present kind.

Der künstliche Baum

According to Konrad’s von Würzburg description of the artificial tree in the city of Troy, narrative practices in courtly romances are to be comprehended as an artificial reconstruction of truth. Since reality is conceived as an order of immutable regularities in the underlying metaphysical episteme , truth could be invented in a plausible way by referring to probability. As Latin tradition allowed poets a broader use of this option than historiographers, learned poets exemplified true regular relations between actions and their consequences by inventing particular factual truth on the basis of probability knowledge from the very beginning of the history of courtly romances. In this way, vernacular romances of antiquity produced a concept of poetical narration of the truth from the learned concept of historia . While the orders of knowledge facilitated the invention of particular factual truth, they made it impossible to conceive the invention of true general regularities. For this reason and according to the pattern of fabula , true general regularities could also be exemplified by invented untrue facts. Essentially, treating Matière de Bretagne implied a decision for this concept of poetical narration, although poets tended to introduce Breton narratives as historiae as well. Because of the differences between premodern and modern epistemic contexts, it must be considered unlikely that the claims of truth and the cognitive values of poetical narration in courtly romances can be explained in an adequate way by terms of fictionality or by concepts of imagination rooted in modern aesthetics. Rather, historical narratology should try to develop methods for reconstructing correlations between cultural probability knowledge and the rhetorical concepts of inventio and evidentia . Since human praxis (understood in an Aristotelian manner) may be conceived as the main subject of premodern narratives, a praxeological narratology might study the topics of social actions in narratives as discoursivizations of practical probability knowledge.

Myśl społeczna Zygmunta Baumana przed Marcem 1968: Od "mechanistycznej" o "aktywistycznej" wersji marksizmu

The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman before March 1968: from the “Mechanistic” to the “Activistic” Version of Marxism
 In the middle of the 1960s Bauman indicated two ways of interpretation of Karl Marx’ thought. The former he defined as “mechanistic”, the latter as “activistic”. He stated that the representatives of the mechanistic one emphasise the concept of historical necessity. They aim at exploring the direction of social processes and making people conscious of it. The representatives of the activistic version of Marxism concentrate on the role of human praxis. They emphasise the role of individual initiative in making history. The typology made by Bauman is useful not only in making research of Marxist thought, but in outlining the evolution of his own very early sociology as well. When he began his academic career in Poland he had strongly believed in the laws of history and had anticipated the quick “leap to the Kingdom of Freedom”. However, in the course of time his view on this subject had changed. Short before his expulsion from Poland he accepted the “activistic” interpretation of Marxism, based on the indeterministic vision of society. In this paper I present this evolution and indicate the social and political factors that contributed to it. Another aim of this article is to evaluate the very early Marxist thought of Zygmunt Bauman.

Faith in the year of faith. Ratzinger’s proposal

J. Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as a pope and author of the idea promulgating the Year of Faith is presented in the paper with his concept of faith. The striking element of Ratzinger’s theology is a personal approach to faith. Faith as an encounter triggering conversion is a fully positive and existencial experience of God, who engages the whole person and personality (unitotality of faith), the reason and love. This attitude of faith builds human praxis and shapes interpersonal relations. Here comes the phenomenon of the Church, which the Pope treats as a source and place of faith, especially with reference to liturgy, owing to which the true relation with the Trune God is established and developed.

SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY IN THEOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS: THE POTENTIAL OF LOVE FOR INTERFAITH ENCOUNTER

This article investigates the nature and significance of hermeneutics in theological thinking. Two principal approaches to hermeneutics in theology, i.e. a hermeneutics of revelation and a hermeneutics of signification, are examined and their respective implications for theological thinking are discussed within a Christian horizon. However, it is argued that all religious traditions need to come to terms with their respective linguistic and hermeneutical condition and with the plurality of interpretations arising from the necessary interplay between subject and object in every act of interpretation. A concept of love as critical human praxis is proposed as the most appropriate way of dealing with differences of understanding sacred texts, traditions and human experiences in this universe, culminating in the call for a hermeneutics of love in theology.

Freedom from Poverty: NGOs and Human Rights Praxis by Daniel P. L. Chong

Freedom from Poverty: NGOs and Human Rights Praxis by Daniel P. L. Chong

‘Sacrament of the Dynamic Transcendence of Christianity’: Cornelius Ernst on the Church

AbstractThe new ontology of meaning proposed by Fr Cornelius Ernst OP as a means of articulating the Thomistic synthesis in the idiom of the modern era coheres around ecclesiology. Drawing upon the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Ernst sees meaning as the distinctively human praxis by which man ‘subdues’ and ‘transcends’ the world to which he belongs, thereby transposing it into the world that belongs to man. The Church, as the Body of Christ – who is personally the ontological meaning of history – is the distinctively Christian linguistic community of meaning, in which ultimate meaning – the ‘meaning of meaning’, i.e. God – is present in each successive era. Established in the illuminating event of Christ's incarnation, the Church is the sacramental institution that makes present Christ's re-integration of the plurality of human meanings, realising itself as a concrete community within the world, and realising the world authentically within itself. As the sacrament of the Trinitarian mediation of meaning, therefore, the Church is irreducibly both human institution and mystical communion, serving as the ontological a priori of faith, and thus the authentic locus of Christian theology.