Human Praxis Research Articles

Corporeal Consciousness: The Tattoo as Lived Temporality

The purpose of this article is to explore the foundations of the Sartrian notion of corporeal consciousness. Sartre's philosophy rejects the idea of a substantial body or a separate repository of consciousness. Instead, body and consciousness are two interconnected instances, forming a unified whole. In this view, the body is a temporal and concrete condition essential to human praxis. The act of tattooing the body reveals a skin that is drawn, colored, and shaded. The experience of the tattooed body can be understood through the three ontological dimensions proposed by Sartre.

Towards a theology of human praxis: A proposal from liberation theologies in a neoliberal world

Neoliberalism is an anti-utopian and kind of patron–client theory that threatens not only the human utopian thought, and therefore the human praxis, but also the ‘conditio humana’. Therefore, this threat also challenges the current visions of praxis in contextual theologies. From a dialogue between the traditions of praxis present in Latin American liberation theology and black liberation theology, particularly from a renewed understanding of human relationships in terms of God’s grace and human spirituality-kenosis, it could be possible to overcome the ideological character of neoliberalism by offering some elements for the development of a human praxis oriented to the creation of possible worlds that reproduce the natural circuit of life and acknowledge the rising and dignity of the new subjects.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The critical analysis of the ideological character of neoliberalism implies an interdisciplinary approach that considers the contribution of Christian theology. From the inductive orientation of Latin American liberation theology and black liberation theology, this research proposes some theological elements to discuss the feasibility of a human praxis that orients the creation of possible worlds.

Innovative Application of Artificial Intelligence in the Field of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of College Students in Internet Colleges and Universities.

With the promotion and development of artificial intelligence, the computer major has become a hot major in innovation and entrepreneurship education. It is increasingly essential to carry out a refined evaluation of creativity and venture education to achieve professional differentiation. The purpose of this paper is to study and explore the innovative use of AI in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship of college students in Internet universities. In the article, AI is first introduced. AI is inherently a novel instrument of human praxis, a tool of productivity that embodies human ability and volition. Then we analyze the innovation and venture education on the ground of the BP neural network, and finally, we conduct an empirical study on the innovation and venture on the ground of the BP neural network. Innovation and entrepreneurship refer to entrepreneurial activities based on one or several innovations in technological innovation, product innovation, brand innovation, service innovation, business model innovation, management innovation, organizational innovation, market innovation, and channel innovation. The report analyzes the influencing factors of creative venture education and designs an evaluation model of creative venture education. The test shows that the output of the BP neural network is the actual value, the real worth is reasonable, and the desired worth is also reasonable. The maximum error between the two is 1.64%. The results tend to be generally satisfactory. The BP neural network model can highly generalize students' creative venture abilities, increasing the practical application value and research scope of BP neural networks.

‘I Did Not See it Coming’: Intentional Efforts and Unintentional Effects in Institutional Change

The literature on institutional change is characterized by two views – the consensus view emphasizes mutually supportive efforts amongst organizational actors who drive institutional change, while the frictional view sheds light on potential conflict amongst actors seeking change. Both views assume that human praxis – the transformative efforts of social actors – which emerges from societal contradictions, is directed to create intended changes in institutional targets. This single case study of a social movement organization challenges the assumption by theorizing how such transformative efforts can also unintentionally insert and amplify contradictions within organizations. The analysis uncovers three distinct tactics that help theorize how unintended effects emerge, escalate and are mitigated during an institutional change project. By offering a temporally bracketed multi-level model that complexifies the relationship between institutional change efforts and its effects, this study challenges core assumptions in the literature on institutional change.

La Netopraxis: Una hermenéutica del lenguaje digital

The research conducted addresses the concept of Netopraxis as a hermeneutics of language that seeks to understand, in the phenomenon of the digital, a particular and singular praxis called Net. The Netopraxis not only belongs to the field of a practical philosophy, but also to that of ontology, since it unveils an existential structure through digital language, which, as a clarifying action, unmasks apparent problems and helps to solve real problems in the digital framework. Netopraxis is a functional unit of digitalization, which represents a linguistic act of human praxis and builds a dialogical and relational action between human action and digital action that occurs in the update.

Mapping the human praxis network: an investigation of white matter disconnection in limb apraxia of gesture production.

Left hemispheric cerebral stroke can cause apraxia, a motor cognitive disorder characterized by deficits of higher-order motor skills such as the failure to accurately produce meaningful gestures. This disorder provides unique insights into the anatomical and cognitive architecture of the human praxis system. The present study aimed to map the structural brain network that is damaged in apraxia. We assessed the ability to perform meaningful gestures with the hand in 101 patients with chronic left hemisphere stroke. Structural white matter fibre damage was directly assessed by diffusion tensor imaging and fractional anisotropy mapping. We used multivariate topographical inference on tract-based fractional anisotropy topographies to identify white matter disconnection associated with apraxia. We found relevant pathological white matter alterations in a densely connected fronto-temporo-parietal network of short and long association fibres. Hence, the findings suggest that heterogeneous topographical results in previous lesion mapping studies might not only result from differences in study design, but also from the general methodological limitations of univariate topographical mapping in uncovering the structural praxis network. A striking role of middle and superior temporal lobe disconnection, including temporo-temporal short association fibres, was found, suggesting strong involvement of the temporal lobe in the praxis network. Further, the results stressed the importance of subcortical disconnections for the emergence of apractic symptoms. Our study provides a fine-grain view into the structural connectivity of the human praxis network and suggests a potential value of disconnection measures in the clinical prediction of behavioural post-stroke outcome.

Reading Hegel after Marx: Lukács and the Question of Teleology

ABSTRACT This paper offers a rethinking of the concept of teleology in Marxist theory. In particular, I propose some reflections on György Lukács’s teleology of labour, addressed in The Young Hegel and subsequently reworked in The Ontology of Social Being. Lukács challenged an idealist notion of teleology understood as realisation of a transcendental principle posited a priori. He redefined the concept by showing how Hegel and Marx reintroduced the question of purpose as an essential quality of human labour. Against idealist conceptions, Lukács reimagined teleology as a secular purpose inherent to human praxis and the key to thinking agency within a materialist concept of history. Accordingly, a Marxist concept of teleology should highlight what Ernst Bloch described as the “anticipatory” character of consciousness, whereby teleology means the positing of an end that does not yet exist in reality and that exceeds the temporal horizon of the present. However, in his critique of Hegel, Lukács illustrates the ambivalent and contradictory dimension of teleology, a perspective that constantly relapses into temporal closure and determinism. While proposing a radical reading of Hegel, Lukács oscillates between the two extremes of a dialectical notion of teleology that he nonetheless helped to formulate.

Art History as a Thick Discipline

The text is an attempt to look at art history from the perspective of cultural ontology. Science in general and art history in particular are seen as a kind of practice whose specificity gives identity to particular groups of sciences and disciplines. The practice of the humanities, including art history, is specifically related to signification and is carried out from within axio­logical situations. A reference to meanings (senses and values), constitutive for the humanities, is made, among other things, through the use of thick concepts, i.e. concepts that are both value expressing and descriptive. As I see it, art history uses specific thick concepts which make it possible to distinguish it from other humanistic disciplines. Seeing the integrating factor in the practice of art history makes it possible, at the same time, to preserve its theoretical openness which corresponds to the openness of human praxis, including artistic praxis.

The African human rights system as 'norm leader': Three case studies

Africa (including its human rights system) is rarely imagined or considered an originator, agent and purveyor of ideas, including in the human rights sphere. On this occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the adoption of the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights which founded the African human rights system, it is only fitting that its contributions or otherwise to global human rights praxis, over these four decades, be examined from this perspective. Utilising the theory of the norm life cycle, developed by scholars of international relations who work within 'strategic social constructivism', this article examines how the African human rights system has, or has not, functioned as a 'norm leader' with regard to certain important and increasingly widely-accepted human rights standards. To that extent, the article examines (as examples) certain human rights norms first elaborated and made into legally-binding forms in the African Charter, widely circulated and having achieved a considerable level of global dispersal and adoption, in part, as a result of the work of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. Focusing on three important norms (the right to self-determination, the right to development and the right to the environment) and based on a study of academic and other literature, treaties or instruments, case law and records of international negotiations, the article attempts to respond systematically to this overarching question. The article argues that although the African human rights system clearly is not a state, the critical but globally under-appreciated roles it has played regarding the globalised socialisation of certain human rights ideas fits within, and helps in extending, social constructivist human rights theory and praxis. The article concludes with a reflection on some key limitations that are observable as to how far the system has been able to travel in the direction of norm leadership in human rights law.

Marx and Me

This is the story of how I encountered Marxism and how I have used it to make sense of the world, and hence to inform my political activism. I describe how humanist materialism has helped me interrogate social structures so as to discover underlying interacting forces and the role played by human praxis and understandings. On the way, I examine debates about the researcher as outsider; criticisms of political multiculturalism; difficulties of being a Marxist after the cultural turn when many academics will no longer even engage with Marxist arguments; problems in writing about and working with Islamists; struggles to excavate housing studies from being buried in policy detail; uncomfortable truths about immigration and the reserve army of labour; and warnings from the failure of revolutionary stages theory. I end with lessons from the Kurdish freedom movement on human relationships and bottom-up democracy, and with its inspirational example of a society attempting to live as if in the early days of a better world.

Designing-With/In World Politics

Abstract Why is the praxis of the International Social Sciences (iss) so limited? Why are word counts and abstracts so much more integral to our quotidian workday than datasheets or color palettes? Why do we do little more than write texts and give lectures with – perhaps – the odd foray into photography or film-making? Why are we so reluctant to practically (and so not simply conceptually) engage with the full gamut of material, aesthetic, and technological making? This essay addresses these questions by advocating for the emergence of an International Political Design. It begins from the intuition that conceptual and empirical shifts across iss towards embracing the material-entanglements of world politics, the centrality of affect and emotion to human praxis, and relational ontologies of emergence, prefiguration, and complexity, all logically demand a radical re-thinking of our praxis. Specifically, we argue that limiting our activities to the alphabetical (or visual) mediation of knowledge about world politics constrains our politicality and impoverishes our conceptual and empirical vitality. Considered in conjunction with the contemporary prevalence of global violence, injustice, and oppression, we suggest that integrating a far broader range of material-aesthetic practices into iss is now an ethical imperative. Without taking up that responsibility, we abdicate the possibility of a more worldly and socially-embedded social science. Based on these core contentions, our discussion elaborates on how we might imagine an International Political Design: a conceptually rich, empirically-grounded, and ‘applied’ material-aesthetic approach to iss. We do so in the form of a manifesto or – rather – collage of manifestos that each militates, in one way or another, towards the necessity of designing-with/in world politics.

Examining Relationships and Sex Education through a child rights lens: an intersectional approach

Inspired by Audrey Osler’s call for the development of novel approaches to intersectionality in human rights education praxis, this article presents an undergraduate module on Children’s Rights, examining processes of teaching and learning about rights through the topic of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE). The module, designed for future educators, intersects elements of children’s rights education with the theoretical positions of queer studies and critical pedagogy. Drawing on data from two focus groups, consisting of students following the programme, the author analyses students’ views and attitudes to RSE, using Foucault’s overarching concept of problematisation and the concept of sites of struggle. Data analysis reveals tensions and potential clashes between the students’ professional selves, their personal values, and elements of the theoretical framework adopted in the course. These tensions are nevertheless constructive, highlighting the potential of children’s rights education to contribute to transformative human development.

The UN declaration on the rights of peasants, national policies, and forestland rights of India’s Adivasis

ABSTRACT The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) is one of the most ambitious UN declarations. We analyse the policy and legal challenges of protecting these rights vis-à-vis India's indigenous Adivasi peasants. Longstanding social and political mobilizations have enabled Adivasis to secure significant statutory and legal rights, which address the goals of land rights and food sovereignty, sustainable development, and socially just climate action. However, powerful actors and agencies opposed to these rights hold considerable sway over India's political and judicial institutions. For example, contrary to its reputation as an activist court, India's Supreme Court has failed to protect Adivasi rights. Such countermobilization against Adivasi rights, especially by some environmental groups advocating for the enclosure of Adivasi lands for the sake of wildlife and biodiversity conservation, underscores the difficulty of enforcing economic and social rights. This article offers five key insights to inform future human rights advocacy and praxis to protect the rights enshrined within UNDROP. Our analysis identifies synergies between international human rights activism and the national and subnational struggles to protect peasant rights.

Human Praxis as Possible Innovation for Occupational Therapy Practice: An Interpretivist Description from People who Enact Praxis

ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION: The term 'human praxis' has been referred to in an array of theoretical frameworks: philosophy, institutional change, education, and critical theory. Broadly, human praxis denotes human agency towards personal and collective transformation in the wake of various kinds of constrictions, regardless of external interventions. If occupational therapy can understand the mechanisms of human praxis, it could be used as a potential therapeutic tool leading to the improvement of health and well-being within communities at large METHOD: Eight individuals actively living human praxis participated in semi-structured interviews. Purposive sampling, and eligibility criteria based on a description of human praxis synthesized from literature, were employed. Six researchers independently performed a manual qualitative thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews, which served as method triangulation FINDINGS: Data analysis revealed that human praxis exists as a dynamic, and recursive two-phase process, consisting of initiators (Theme I), and continuous enablers (Theme II). In addition, seven categories (constituents) emerged from each of the two themes CONCLUSION: Human praxis can be applied in the conscious facilitation of the interdependence between the various constituents such as the individual and the collective, personal and ongoing shared responsibility, and between conditions of constraint and resilience toward self-determination and growth Keywords: wound management, hand therapy, occupational therapy, International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health.

Teachers at the Center: Place and Education Displacement in Southwest Atlanta

In Southwest Atlanta, urban education reform and gentrification have intersected to create the perfect collision of housing and educational displacement of Black students, Black families, and Black teachers. While Black communities are dealing with the impacts of gentrification, Black schools are simultaneously witnessing shifts that uproot students and their teachers. As a teacher participatory action research (PAR) collective, we share our personal experiences of housing displacement and how it has impacted our students, our communities, and our ability to maintain our positions as community-centered teachers. In this article, we acclimate readers to Atlanta, Georgia, and the Southwest Atlanta region in which we serve. We also illustrate how we have confronted the displacement of our students and ourselves. Finally, we highlight the significance of community-centered teachers operating within a Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom praxis in the struggle against systemic inequities that persistently plague our students and communities.

A Baconian historiola mentis in Spinoza’s Method

Bacon’s influence on Spinoza’s thought is controversial, since this latter seems to underestimate the role of experience in achieving true knowledge. In this paper, I will investigate Spinoza’s reference in Letter 37** to a historiola mentis (little history of mind) a la Bacon as an empirical-historical method to distinguish between different kinds of perceptions. My aim is to explain why Spinoza considers Bacon’s little history of mind a useful tool to proceed towards the knowledge of the excellent things [praestantissimae res]. I will suggest that Spinoza could have been inspired by Bacon’s theory of idols and his historical method, since they help distinguish between different kinds of ideas with no previous knowledge of the first causes. Moreover, Spinoza’s method for interpreting the Scripture in his Tractatus Theologicopoliticus seems to be partially indebted to Bacon’s account of natural and civil history and aims to clarify the practical meaning of the Scripture. According to Spinoza, a historical and empirical method might play a pivotal role by transforming human praxis and behavior according to the order of the intellect. This method has in a strictly practical function and cannot be compared to the true knowledge of things through their first causes. However, it is a fundamental part of the process directing human beings to the knowledge of the most fundamental things.

Трансформации кантовского учения о постулатах в «кембриджском прагматизме» (Ч. С. Пирс, У. Джеймс, Дж. Ройс)

The “Cambridge pragmatists”, Charles S. Peirce, William James and Josiah Royce, are at least in two respects significantly indebted to Kant: first, as von Kempski, Apel and Murphey have shown, with regard to the epistemological issues investigated in pragmatism; secondly, with regard to the various pragmatic approaches to religion, something which has been long overlooked. These approaches are best understood as innovative re-readings of Kant’s postulates of freedom, immortality, and God. Since Hilary Putnam pointed out — in his 1992 book Renewing Philosophy — that James’s essay, “The Will to Believe”, in spite of having received a great deal of hostile criticism, is in “its logic, in fact, precise and impeccable”, James’s thoughts are considered by many contemporary philosophers (by Charles Taylor, e.g., and by Hans Joas) as particularly inspiring. James’s approach is based on the modern experience of secularism and interprets Kant’s “postulate” as the “option” to believe. A deepening of the debate on the relevance of Kant’s analysis of the horizon of religious hope with regard to human praxis for a pragmatism-inspired philosophy of religion can be expected from a detailed discussion of the thoughts of Peirce and Royce, of thoughts, which, in complex ways, relate to, as well as criticise, James’s individuum-focused interpretation of religious faith.

Freedom and Praxis in Plotinus’s Ennead 6.8.1-6

In this paper, I argue that Plotinus does not limit the sphere of free human agency simply to intellectual contemplation, but rather extends it all the way to human praxis. Plotinus’s goal in the first six chapters of Ennead 6.8 is, accordingly, to demarcate the space of freedom within human practical actions. He ultimately concludes that our external actions are free whenever they actualize, in unhindered fashion, the moral principles derived from intellectual contemplation. This raises the question of how the freedom of practical actions might relate to the freedom of intellectual contemplation. After considering two previously offered models – a model of double activity, and an Aristotelian model of practical syllogism – I offer a third alternative, namely a model of moral attunement, according to which our rational desires assume a kind of ‘care of the soul’ through active supervision. Practical life is thus imbued with freedom to the extent that the soul supervises its actions to conform to its will and choice of the good.

THE ETHICS OF INTERPRETATION - NEW VOICES FROM THE USA

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, in her 1987 SBL Presidential Address, argued for a paradigm shift in the ethos and rhetorical practices of biblical scholarship. In this article, recent contributions by four important spokespeople from the USA, all of them with influence in South African scholarship circles, are compared, to show that all of them, although in different ways, emphasize the importance of such a shift, in which the ethos of scholarly interpretation itself comes under focus. Two of them, Thiselton and Tracy, come from the tradition of hermeneutics, and the other two, Wueller and Fiorenza herself, from the tradition of rhetorical criticism. They agree that the ethos of biblical scholarship must not be that of value-free scientism, but that of responsibility, life-orientated human praxis, aware of its own socio-political role and function of power. Acknowledge this would involve nothing less than a revolutionary change of paradigm in many circles, with serious effects for institutionalized biblical scholarship itself.

O problema da fundamentação da moral e a ética feminista

Este artigo tem como tema o problema filosófico da fundamentação da moral com o objetivo de apresentar o sentido e a validade de uma ética feminista. Parte-se da hipótese de que uma ética feminista se distinguiria das éticas antigas e apresentaria uma alternativa adequada ao problema da fundamentação da moral, bem como dos conflitos morais atuais, em especial, pelo tipo de solução que propõe, a qual segue uma lógica construída mediante uma práxis humana determinada. Em outros termos, o objetivo deste artigo é ajudar a compreender como um conteúdo da moralidade surgido de elementos históricos, temporais, culturais pode ser construído; nesse caso, ligado às condições das mulheres surgidas no meio social. Para tanto, será apresentada uma nova concepção de ética e o exemplo de uma ética capaz de orientar uma solução para conflitos morais atuais, a ética feminista do cuidado de Carol Gilligan.