Phenomenal Reality Research Articles

The Late Medieval Debate about the Nature of Phenomenal Reality in Franciscan Theology and Islamic Thought and its Greek Sources

The tendency to question the accuracy of sensory perception is found in various medieval theological traditions, including Franciscan and Islamic. In both these traditions, the source of the idea that we cannot trust our sensory perception seems to have been the Greek commentaries on Aristotle. However, both traditions go beyond ideas contained in Greek Aristotelian literature and independently develop similar arguments and come to similar conclusions about the reliability of sensory perception.

КУЛЬТУРА ДИСКУРСА И ЛОГИСТИЧЕСКИЕ АСПЕКТЫ ВЕРБАЛЬНОГО ПОВЕДЕНИЯ

The article is dedicated to antinomy of discourse of speech activity and logistic of verbal behaviour. The world of objectively existing phenomena is contrasted with the reality of consciousness, manifesting phenomenal reality “for us”. Discourse is analyzed not in connection with the concept of culture of individual speakers, but as a significant phenomenon in any culture. The phenomenon of logos is examined in the light of civilization and mental states of language users. It has been noted that the language combines the receptive and monumental  essence and existence. It is postulated that the linguistic attempt to comprehend the world as the totality of knowable and knowing is feasible on the principles of receptive phenomenology. The opposition between interaction and communication sheds light on the essence of logos and its verbal embodiment in the word of Homo loquens (speaking human).

VPL FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE MONITORING: SAMPLING AND COMPARISON OF PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES

Abstract. In the last decades, ICT strongly support cultural heritage conservation, management, valorisation and communication activities. Digital systems record series of data in real time, facilitating the automation of comparison, control and preventive evaluation activities aimed at the conscious management of the phenomenal reality based on the interrelationship between different information. According to these premises, this contribution presents first results of a research activity aimed at testing VPL parametric tools aimed at mapping environmental data and phenomena involving architectural surfaces and explicitating the comparison between data by graphical alert system. VPL tools are designed for a thematic image colour sampling. The main goal is monitoring the state of conservation of decorated architectural surfaces or artworks placed in unfavourable environmental conditions to facilitate preventive and intervention activities. The case study chosen to test this approach and digital tools is the fresco preserved in the Filangieri Hall of the State Archives in Naples.

Turning Religious Experience into Reality: The Spiritual Power of Himma

The extremely influential mystic, Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn ‘Arabī (d. 634/1240), believes that the most advanced gnostics are imbued with a special power that turns their religious experience into reality. This is the power of himma—the power of existentiation that elite gnostics derive from God’s absolute power of existentiation. Ibn ‘Arabī and his followers assert that this power, which is exercised by the gnostics through an intense and unremitting concentration, actually shapes and forms external phenomenal reality as long as the concentration of the gnostic persists. This paper explores the different types of himmas that can exist, what kind of reality they allow the gnostics to perceive, and what relationship the objects created by himma have with the gnostic who exercised this power.

Linguistic Prejudices in Interviews: An Analysis of Research Projects in a University in Mexico

Traditionally, social research in Mexico has not adjusted so much to a multilingual phenomenal reality as to a monolingualistic social imaginary representation. This means that when researchers analyze their reality, they do so under personal biases; thus, ignoring and hiding the daily multilingual reality. To find out how these linguistic prejudices and biases affect the methods applied, the authors of the present case study analyzed 77 postgraduate theses carried out in 2002-2019 at Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico. These theses applied interview techniques to speakers of national indigenous languages. The results show their study designs tend to linguistically homogenize populations based on a monolingual nationalist imagined community. A prevalence of more than 90 % in the application of linguistically minoritizing interviews evidences the pervasiveness of monolingual attitudes in the academy that limit methodological results and discriminate against studied populations. This means that the detection of linguistically minoritizing interviews can serve as another indicator to assess the university as an entity that exercises linguistic pressure on the communities being studied.

Traces of Truth: Chūgan Engetsu's Konhōron

Abstract: This study examines Konhōron , a Japanese exegesis of a well-known episode from Zhuangzi —a foundational and highly imaginative work of Chinese philosophy. Authored in the fourteenth century by Chūgan Engetsu, a Zen monk and prominent intellectual, Konhōron treats the symbolic significance of two of Zhuangzi 's most enigmatic characters: a gargantuan fish named Kun and an enormous bird named Peng. Chūgan's text offers a finely wrought symbolic reading that integrates yin-yang theory, the trigrams of the Yijing and the Yellow River Chart , the five phases, numerology, and etymological analysis. The present article explicates the key arguments of Chūgan's analysis, in particular his affirmation of language's ability to capture phenomenal reality and of the pedagogical potential of fantasy as a means of expressing larger truths about the world. It further demonstrates how that analysis functioned, in part, as a defense of the use of numerological symbolism and the broader yin-yang framework as hermeneutical tools—a view that ran counter to the mainstream of earlier and contemporaneous commentary.

Postmodern Elements in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Postmodernism is considered a break with 19th-century realism and before that, the project of Enlightenment dealt with the issue of transformation of outer phenomenal reality to an internal consciousness of the human mind. As a result, the using postmodernism subconsciously reveals and manifests their inner consciousness through what they do. It rejects the concept of absolute reality. Mostly, postmodernist writers support the premise that ‘irrational is real’. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1948) is considered to be the leading playwright amongst many others. This play derives its inspiration from European existentialism which was one of the foremost philosophical schools within continental tradition. In Waiting for Godot, there are no pre-determined rules or any unity in time, place or action. The ending of it can be interpreted in many different ways. The author of this paper has tried to put the play in the European context and highlighted the features which are considered to be the hallmark of postmodernism.

Gertler's acquaintance approach to introspective knowledge and internalist requirements for reasons

ABSTRACT Gertler argues that, in some introspective judgments about experience, phenomenal reality intersects with one's grasp of that reality to the effect that one can have knowledge by acquaintance. This new version of the acquaintance theory depends on the idea that some introspective judgments about experience can be justified by the fact that the phenomenal property of an experience is a component of the introspective judgment about the experience. The goal of this paper is to show that even this most promising version of the acquaintance theory is not successful. For this goal, in particular, I argue that even if we grant that, in the relevant cases, the phenomenal property of an experience is a component of an introspective judgment, this fact can hardly play the epistemic role that Gertler envisions. I establish this on the basis of two internalist requirements for reasons, namely, the evaluability condition and the endorsement condition. On the former condition, a reason for justifying a judgment must be the kind of thing that can be evaluated as correct or incorrect. And on the latter condition, having a reason for justifying a judgment requires that the subject endorse the reason as correct.

Nietzsche, Trump, and the Social Practices of Valuing Truth

Nietzsche, Trump, and the Social Practices of Valuing Truth

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland

Reviewed by: The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland Marshall Boswell Mary K. Holland. The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism. Bloomsbury, 2020. viii + 288 pp. Is realism a periodic term or an honorific denoting a novel's success at rendering the real? Does the term refer to a set of formal novelistic conventions, neither more nor less valued than the conventions of surrealism or metafiction, or does it denote a text's ethical adherence to truth and accuracy? And at a time when quantum physics and the impenetrable barriers of postmodern simulacra reduce our grasp of everyday reality to something close to guesswork, does the term even have any value in the context of contemporary fiction? In her remarkable new book, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism, Mary K. Holland cuts through these questions to propose a new and capacious definition of contemporary realism grounded in the clarifying dictum that "changes in how we view the world necessitate changes in how we represent the world" (153). Organizing her study under the umbrella term "poststructural realism" (257), Holland guides her readers through a series of contemporary texts by writers as diverse as David Foster Wallace, Steve Tomasula, Ted Chiang, Ruth Ozeki, and Don DeLillo, demonstrating the startling ways many ostensibly antirealist fictions actually seek to depict our increasingly unstable and elusive interactions with phenomenal reality. From its inception, realism, as envisioned by William Dean Howells and Henry James, always denoted an ethical agenda. Howells's own vague description of realism as "the sincere and conscientious endeavor to picture life" (qtd. in Holland 4) somewhat conceals the underlying telos of realistic narratives—namely, to bring their protagonists to accurately see the underlying texture of the reality they're inhabiting. When James's Isabel Archer encounters Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond in silent contemplation beside the fireplace, she begins to see the machinations that have been going on behind her back all along. As James makes the case elsewhere, the goal is to be one on whom nothing is lost. James Joyce's secular epiphanies grow out of this realist agenda of proper and even transcendent seeing, a point grasped keenly by Erik Auerbach, whose 1946 Mimesis updates realism for the modernist novel via the argument, paraphrased by Holland, that "the external, objective world exists, for the individual and for fiction, in order to provoke the mind's experience of these truths" (11). Not surprisingly, Holland positions her poststructural realism as a continuation of Auerbach's modernist updating. She adds to her genealogy Frederic Jameson's Marxist-poststructural critique, [End Page 378] which she explains as a claim that all forms of realism are ultimately failed "aesthetic modes for delivering ideological content" (28). After listing twenty contemporary realisms coined between 1983 (the "dirty realism" [31] of Raymond Carver and company) and 2014 (Holland's own "metafictive realism" [32]), she narrows her focus to three primary branches of poststructural realism. These branches are metafictive realism, which "uses self-reflective devices to allow language to invoke and connect the reader to the real world" (40); material realism, which "uses language and physical form to draw attention to the physical reality of the book and language's impact on the physical world"; and quantum realism, which invites us "to "consider the quantum reality we live in and its effects on our experience and on literary form." About Wallace, Holland demonstrates that his use of metafictional self-reflexivity seeks not to sever his fiction from the real world but rather to mimic our own self-conscious encounter with postmodern reality, an approach that feels all the more pertinent and urgent after a year of engaging with the world through the self-reflective Zoom. Similarly, she argues that a book such as J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (2013), which includes a novel, a set of notes from two readers, and a scattering of supplementary material including a decoder, "uses the print book to materialize various acts of reading and writing" (135). But Holland's most innovative and startling intervention is her lengthy exploration of quantum realism, which occupies her book's second half. Building on Samuel Coale's Quirks of the Quantum...

G-Donic Happiness: An Alternative to Hedonic and Eudemonic Happiness for Sustainable Consumption

This paper provides a spiritual perspective on happiness referred to as the G-donic approach to happiness which is fundamentally different from the hedonic and eudemonic approaches. The G-donic approach identifies the importance of the spiritual self and argues that it embodies the technology that converts physical resources into happiness. We argue that with G-donic preferences, it is possible to achieve a higher level of happiness with moderate consumption. The G-donic approach encourages living a virtuous life by fulfilling the biological, social, emotional, intellectual, moral, and spiritual needs in a balanced manner. It urges spiritual people to go beyond phenomenal reality to perceive transcendental reality in pursuit of authentic happiness. We use a multi-dimensional human nature model to highlight the relevance and importance of this approach, and modify standard utility models to show how it might result in higher happiness with lower consumption and compare and contrast it with outcomes under hedonic and eudemonic approaches to happiness. The G-donic approach contends that resources and spirituality are substitutes, as well as complements and that a reasonable approach to happiness should seek an optimal mix of both. Unlike popular convention, this deviation from hedonic pleasure due to lower consumption does not result in lower happiness. In fact, we show that, theoretically, it results in an overall increase in happiness as any loss in hedonic is compensated by greater eudemonic and G-donic rewards which increases utility.

Envisioning the World Within or Without Limits: on Representation and Creativity in the Aesthetics of 17th Century China

AbstractThis essay examines a number of statements on painting and visual perception by Chinese literati artists of the late Ming – early Qing periods. It argues that the approaches to pictorial representation and creativity entailed in these statements reveal a considerable impact of Buddhist theories of consciousness. In the theories analyzed, pictorial representation is discussed in terms of ways and modes of how the mind relates to the world. As will be demonstrated, the function of expressing cognitive organization in representation is given more prominence than the function of rendering an external reality. The view of pictorial representation as being essentially what the mind produces in its relation to the world provides a basis for the assumption of a fundamental affinity between the creation of an image and the process how phenomenal reality unfolds by virtue of cognitive operations. This assumption seems to broadly underpin the painting theories discussed. And it is this assumption that provides a clue how and why the literati artists adopt Buddhist theories of cognition to the understanding of art. In the last section of the essay, we turn to the sources which cast still another perspective on artistic practice, namely a practice which captures a single moment of pure direct perception.

Consideraciones Filosóficas y Epistemológicas Sobre la Generación del Conocimiento

Esta investigación tiene como propósito resignificar comprensivamente las relaciones entre filosofía y epistemología en el ámbito constructivo del conocimiento, su valor científico y social, los nuevos entendimientos paradigmáticos, la postura que asume el investigador ante las complejas realidades emergentes, la epistemología social. Es una investigación documental basada en el análisis crítico de los teóricos desde la reflexión hermenéutica y vivencias de la autora, esta triangulación permitió acercarse a nuevos referentes que convoquen otras posturas, estilos de pensamiento, en una construcción de sentido sobre el proceder indagativo al acercarse a la realidad fenoménica, para generar un saber social reordenador. Reflexiono, que el acto de conocer es un proceso volitivo, emocional, sinérgico, constructivo, movilizador de las estructuras de pensamiento al generar alternativas maneras de pensar la ciencia, la realidad y la epistemología que legitima el conocimiento construido; el mundo cambiará y el sujeto debe prepararse para conocer desde las nuevas realidades post pandémicas.

To Sound and to Absorb: Art, Solipsism and the Problem of Mediation in John Banville’s the Blue Guitar and Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

ABSTRACT This article will explore the intertextual links between Banville’s novel The Blue Guitar and Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar” in order to examine the correspondences and disruptions which arise when the esthetic frame claims to impose its own unique sense of order upon the world of sensations and phenomenal reality. Taking my cue from Banville’s use of the epigraph “Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar” from Stevens’ poem – which is in the poem a response to the accusation that artists “do not play things as they are” – I argue that the novel and poem stage a confrontation between the irresponsible solipsism of the artist (as figured both by Oliver Orme’s kleptomaniac tendencies and his inclination to reduce the otherness of social reality into the ambit of the Kierkegaardian esthetic attitude toward the world) and the failure to internalize completely the essence of things as they are, which provides the ethical opening toward being affected by a sense of radical alterity which inheres in an awareness of our being in the world, which is itself an esthetic perception.

UT ANIMALIUM PICTURA: ARISTOTLE'S HEART IN THE POETRY OF GIACOMO DA LENTINI

The essay analyzes the formation of the oft-cited trope of the image engraved (or painted) in the heart, topical in the Sicilian lyric of the thirteenth century, and the ways in which it re-discusses a painstaking issue of Aristotelian physiology. The trope of the “pintura nel core” (figure in the heart), as described in Giacomo da Lentini'sMeravigliosa⋅menteandMadonna mia, a voi mando, is immediately assimilated to the faculty of memory, and the human ability to represent external reality by means ofsigna. This process of formation that happens in the heart and allows the poet to fall in love is reworked in the image of the “pintura” carved like a seal into wax. The lexical choices of Giacomo's poems point to an Aristotelian understanding of sense perception, centered around the key role of the heart, dependent upon the fluidity of its bodily part, and resulting in an internal representation of phenomenal reality. The link between love lyric poetry and physiological learning shows the interdependence of these two fields of medieval culture, and the ways in which a debated scientific issue can be illuminated by the comparative analysis of vernacular literature and philosophical investigation. Giacomo's reworking of these Aristotelian physiological tenets testifies to his poetical ability to engage with medicine and aesthetic representation.

Is Brahman a Person or a Self? Competing Theories in the Early Upaniṣads

In this article, I study the concept of brahman—the exhaustive formulation of truth about the world—in the early Upaniṣads. Based on close reading of two stories appearing in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, the Kauṣītaki and the Chāndogya Upaniṣads, I reconstruct two competing theories about brahman, namely the “theory of puruṣa (person)” and the “theory of ātman (self).” While the theory of puruṣa refers to the creation of human and divine beings as a result of duplication of the anthropomorphic form of the universe, the theory of ātman traces the phenomenal reality in its various forms to the inner, formless self “made of consciousness” capable of creating and projecting forms out of itself. These two theories are discussed in the dialogue between Gārgya Bālāki and Ajātaśatru, the king of Kāśi appearing in two versions in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣads. Bālāki’s theory of puruṣa is further revised and modified in the light of Ajātaśatru’s criticism in the story from the Chāndogya Upaniṣads, in which the god Prajāpati teaches Indra and Virocana about the self.

The field and landscape of affordances: Koffka\u2019s two environments revisited

The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured for the animal. Koffka made a sharp distinction between the “behavioural environment” and the “geographical environment”. We show how this distinction picks out the difference between the environment as perceived by an individual organism, and the shared publicly available environment. The ecological psychologist James Gibson was later critical of Koffka for inserting a private phenomenal reality in between animals and the shared environment. Gibson tried to make do with just the concept of affordances in his explanation of molar behaviour. We argue however that psychology as a science of molar behaviour will need to make appeal both to the concepts of shared publicly available affordances, and of the multiplicity of relevant affordances that invite an individual to act. A version of Koffka’s distinction between the two environments remains alive today in a distinction we have made between the field and landscape of affordances. Having distinguished the two environments, we go on to provide an account of how the two environments are related. Koffka suggested that the behavioural environment forms out of the causal interaction of the individual with a pre-existing, ready-made geographical environment. We argue that such an account of the relation between the two environments fails to do justice to the complex entanglement of the social with the material aspects of the geographical environment. To better account for this sociomaterial reality of the geographical environment, we propose a process-perspective on our distinction between the landscape and field of affordances. While the two environments can be conceptually distinguished, we argue they should also be viewed as standing in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence.

The Use of Blogs as an Example of Internet Entrepreneurship: Turkish Travel Blogs

Blogs have become a phenomenal reality of everyday life since the early 1990s. Blogging practice, which began primarily as a spare time activity then, has now come to be a profession for many. The most outstanding example of this could be observed through the use of travel blogs. Indeed, today travel blogs are significant employment areas within the tourism sector. In terms of cost and saving on time in particular, and richness in information as well as easy access to information, Internet technologies such as blogs have become notable communication and marketing platforms both for tourism supply and for demand. In the process of purchase decision of touristic product having abstract characteristic features, people feel a need for more intense information. Accordingly, with the shift of touristic consumers into one who not only consumes but also produces by interactive feature of Web 2.0, travel blogs can be considered as one of the epitomes of technology entrepreneurship. In this respect, this study approaches travel blogs as an example of Internet entrepreneurship. And in this context it is examined how bloggers use this medium as a new employment area it is examined in this context. A sum of 10 travel blogs has been examined through discourse analysis.

EXPLORING STUDENTS’ WEAKNESSES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE AT SHAQRA UNIVERSITY (HURIMLAA CAMPUS), SAUDI ARABIA

This research explores the reasons for the weaknesses of students of English Language at Shaqra University (Hurimlaa Campus), Saudi Arabia. University records show that students’ marks in these courses are deteriorating and this research paper explores the reasons that might account for this. Spurred by this phenomenal reality, the researcher developed a questionnaire incorporating twenty questions covering four dimensions: educational factors, cultural factors, social factors and attitudinal factors with the ultimate aim of attributing the students' status to justifiable reasons. The analytical method was adapted through which noticeable results showed that almost half of the sample experienced difficulties with both reading and sentence structuring. Nearly 70% of the students surveyed thought that learning English is crucial for communication and understanding. These results suggest that students are aware of the importance of and need for this language, and that these shortcomings can be attributed to educational factors including schools, university, instructors and modules. This humble research does not, however, answer all questions arising from the general stance of the English Language in Saudi Arabia. Further studies are still needed to cover other educational institutions

‘Movement/occurs at the split’: Turning to late modernity in Edward Dorn’s ‘North Atlantic Turbine’

Abstract This article is presented in two parts. The first is an interrogation of the specific spatial practice of ‘A Theory of Truth’, held in conversation with the thesis that Reitha Pattison sets out for Edward Dorn’s early poetry. The specific interrogation of Dorn’s linguistic and spatial practice in ‘A Theory of Truth’ presented here will be braced against certain aspects of Gunslinger (Dorn, 1968). Furthermore, exploring how Dorn’s language manifests a particular political position with regard to the enclosure acts of late capitalism, this article brings to light some tensions in the poetic relationship between Dorn and Charles Olson, and brings forward the strength of William Carlos Williams’ influence on Dorn’s spatializing tactics. The works of Christopher Beach, Michael Davidson and Sherman Paul are essential to this study. In the second, longer part of this argument, the way that Dorn uses language to manifest experience rather than simply to represent space will be set out, allowing a clear analysis of the relationship between spatial process in phenomenal reality and spatial processes in the ‘experienced or imagined’ loci of Dorn’s poem. This part of the article draws in particular on the ideas of Lytle Shaw, Ian Davidson and Justin Katko.