Phenomenological Reality Research Articles

Intersectionality and embodiment: important issues for disability studies

While viewing an intersectional analysis of inequality as fundamental, we published an opinion in this journal (Watermeyer & Swartz, 2023) pointing to how, in practice, it can be (mis)applied in a manner which underestimates the complexity brought by disability’s infinite diversity in forms of embodiment. This observation in no way implies that disability, or any other marker of identity for that matter, is somehow intrinsically more significant than any other. Instead, it indicates the need for due consideration of the palpable, phenomenological reality of diverse forms of embodiment, which bring unique interactions between body‑minds and contexts. In a critique of our contribution, Ned and colleagues (Ned, Motimele et al., 2024) interpret our position as an attempt to exclusively foreground disability, thereby contributing to epistemic violence and the erasure of the experiences of disabled Global South disability studies scholars of colour. Here, we respond to their critique, showing how we fully support arguments which our interlocutors view us as aiming to refute, while also questioning the voracity of observations regarding our scholarship. We then re‑articulate the essential claim of our original paper.

On the Phenomenological Reality of Monsters

On the Phenomenological Reality of Monsters

Phantasmagorical realism in Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2021)

This article proposes a close analysis of the film Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2021). It begins by situating the film within a broader trend in contemporary East/South East Asian and Latin American cinemas, which incorporates elements of the phantasmagorical into an aesthetics of realism. The combination of these seemingly contradictory concepts gives rise to a sophisticated interplay of temporalities. This interplay comprises the present phenomenological reality, layers of the past and the realm of memory associated with posthumous presences, and the unusual occurrences that may belong to the future. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘phantasmagorical realism’, a recurring theme in Weerasethakul’s cinema. This concept is partly influenced by non-European philosophies and belief systems, such as Thai Buddhism and Animism. In Memoria, this is further accentuated by intermedial connections with Latin American magical realism and Chinese classical literature, both of which are also influenced by non-European philosophies and belief systems, including Amerindian Perspectivism and Daoism.

포스트-휴머니즘적 접근과 회집체로서의 학습체계, 그리고 포스트-평생학습론 사유

Lifelong learning research is continuously influenced by new scientific trends. The posthumanist approach that has recently moved into the mainstream is also increasingly influencing the understanding of lifelong learning. The posthumanist approach's 'more-than-human' perspective aligns with the attempt to understand human learning from an object-oriented and flat ontological standpoint. Posthumanism redefines ontology, offering a different perspective from the previous anthropocentric worldview, that is, the modernist worldview. In this transitional phase, we aim to address three meaningful questions:. 1. Why is it important to understand lifelong learning from the perspective of the posthumanist approach? 2. How does this shift in perspective capture the phenomenological reality of lifelong learning? 3. What new dimension does this approach uncover? The posthumanist approach has liberated lifelong learning from the constraints of educational 'essentialism'. In early models of lifelong learning research, humans were depicted as subjective beings, yet they were often confined to reproducing a predetermined world and essence. Although humans have been portrayed as self-directed learners, the actual learning process has always been tied to curriculums, competencies, and fixed outcomes. A truly Copernican shift in learning starts with relocating lifelong learning to an object-oriented perspective. Post-humanism rejects human pretentious subjectivity and reduces the burden of knowledge imposed upon them by the world. The traditional subject-centered learning theory was reinterpreted as object-oriented in this paper. The essence of the post-lifelong learning concept we are discussing is to move away from understanding learning as the accumulation of individual knowledge by Cartesian individuals. Instead, it is about viewing learning in terms of 'extension performed by activity systems'. In this paper, the researchers, first, redefined the concept of learning within the context of the 'more-than-human' dimension. Second, the learning process was redefined as an activity within a learning system that transcends the object-centeredness of learning and encompasses a systematic level including human-material-desire-movement. Third, the learning system was conceptualized based on the idea of assemblage or assemblage ontology. The combination and movement within the system are described as a process of 'becoming' that emerges from and is produced within the system's elements. Fourth, this lifelong learning phenomenon centered around the 'learning system' was differentiated from the previous learning ontology, which was based on isomorphism. We define this new framework as 3.0, that is, post-lifelong learning, marking it as distinct from the previous lifelong learning concepts of 1.0 or 2.0.

Flesh, Body, World: Michel Henry on Incarnation

Henry tirelessly insists that all flesh is an invisible, radically immanent, impressional material in which life arrives in itself. But this raises a theological problem: is the material, visible body of Christ to be excluded from what we understand by incarnation? To answer this and related questions, the problematic of the duplicity of appearing—the appearing of life and the appearing of the world—must be clarified. It is precisely through an analysis of flesh that Henry seeks to establish a rapport between the two modes of appearing, so a study of the flesh should allow us to articulate in one stroke an account of our access to the world and the thingly body. Against a simplistic reading that claims that, for Henry, an unbridgeable gorge separates life and the world, the flesh and the body, I argue that the objective, visible body is real, but that its reality is founded on the more immediate reality of the flesh. I use the results of this inquiry to argue further for two distinct but related senses of the concept “world”, one which names a phenomenological reality and another that picks out an ideological aberration endemic to modernity. While the flesh opens up the reality of the former, the latter is an imaginary and impossible world.

Meta-model of Human Recognition-behavioral Adaptation System

Scientific modeling is a syllogistic system of definitive premise, sound inference and consistent explanation to understand, define, quantify, visualize or simulate feature of the target. Single-model is defined to an informative representation for identifying a property of a target object/phenomenon, and meta-model integrates the relevant single-models to explain phenomenological realities. Human recognition-behavioral adaptation is an information-metabolism system to maintain homeostasis of human-self, and that has been investigated in neurological, psychiatric and psychological aspects. I analyzed human recognition-behavioral adaptation-system via scientific modeling. Neurological meta-model of human recognition-behavioral adaptation system was synthesized as complex-network of the functional neuronal modules, and the meta-model was integrated to Mentality-model in the psychiatric aspect, and to Personality-model in the psychological aspect. The integrated meta-models successfully explained phenomenological realities in the aspects. From the above, I comprehended that the meta-model of human recognition-behavioral adaptation-system has been developed to Biopsychosocial model integrating the biological, psychological and socio-environmental factors.

Space and Time

The genesis of space and time is investigated within the rotational-monadic paradigm. It is established that the essence of the phenomenon of space is revealed through the dialectical synthesis of its two aspects — ideal and material, where the material aspect is represented by the metaphysical construct of protomonad. It is shown that basic physical distinctions such as motion, mass, gravitation find a meaningful hermeneutic through the material aspect of space, which has a purely discrete structure, while the contradiction about finitude — infinity is resolved by juxtaposing metaphysical and ontic spaces, where the Universe is represented as an “egg”. The analysis of temporality is preceded by remarks on the relational and substantive concepts of time, consideration of the discreteness-continuity dilemma, and criticism of the absolutization of discreteness in the temporality representation. It is argued that discreteness and continuity are combined dialectical oppositions through which the temporal reality is actualized, where continuity is hidden from observation in the metaphysical world and discreteness is manifested explicitly in the physical world. Three dimensions of time — Present, Past and Future — are discussed, as a result of which it is stated that in the primary way time is found as an attribute of consciousness and only in the secondary way it correlates with phenomenological reality. New differentiations of time are revealed: interval Present, embracing as a universum other moduses of the Present, and two- component time in the form of cyclic and linear components which allow us to make a justified positive conclusion about the existence of transcendental subjectivity, being the basis of absolute temporality.

Prevalent Genres of Preaching and Its Significance to Young People in this Time of Pandemic

Preaching is a scriptural interpretation of human existence which enables a community to recognize God’s active presence, respond to that presence in faith through liturgical word and gesture, and beyond the liturgical assembly, through a life lived in conformity with the Gospel. Through the act of preaching, the preacher ought to reveal people’s hearts to themselves, give them the power to make judgments that liberate them, and imbue in them the confidence to face their fears with faith, hope and love. Given that young people today, (especially in this time of pandemic) are hungry and sometimes desperate for meaning in their lives, there ought to be a shift in preaching from mere scriptural interpretation to a kind of preaching which takes into consideration the concrete, existential and phenomenological realities of young people. This kind of preaching ought to assume a prophetic dimension if it is to effectively cater to young people or assure unwavering hope in this time of the pandemic (new-normal). In what follows, the paper critically examines some prevalent genres of preaching, how these genres of preaching cater to young people, and the most suitable genre of preaching to be adopted for use in the Nigerian Church today.

Toward a pedagogy of humility as experience

Humility is widely regarded as a moral excellence and telos, hence, openly inculcated-instructed. Character education in and for humility, however, sits uncomfortably against today’s pedagogical maxims such as self-esteem and self-assertiveness. This article looks into this and other tensions from the perspective of humility as experience (phenomenon) instead of humility as goal. Surveying humility qua experience can help us to understand how the mind directs toward objects of cognition with their content, meaning and axiology. Husserl’s phenomenology and its theory of intuition suggests that humility is a personal belief (doxa) that moral agents construct out of their lived-experiences. Through iterations of similar lived-experiences, humility can become a habitus and, arguably, episteme. This process is detailed by intersecting experience of humility with intentionality, phenomenological reduction, and intersubjectivity. It is argued that, in contemporary education, ‘experience’ is widely accepted as learning content and teaching method. Humility as experience has significant implications for the main schools in curriculum studies, namely traditionalists, conceptualists and phenomenologists. This article claims that inculcating humility poses ethical challenges, and the role of education should instead be to explain and present to learners the phenomenological reality of humility.

Response\u2014A Critical Response to \u201cDiscourse Communities and the Discourse of Experience\u201d

In their article Little, Jordens, and Sayers developed the notion of “discourse communities”—as groups of people who share an ideology and common “language”—with the support of seminal ideas from M.M. Bakhtin. Such communities provide benefits although they may also impose constraints. An ethical community would open to others’ discourse and be committed to critique. Those commitments may counter the limitations of discourse communities. Since their paper was published in 2003, the notion of “discourse communities” has been widely adopted and applied in healthcare and beyond. Their ideas were influential in the founding of an ethics centre in Sydney and contributed to articulating the values which underpin this journal. This commentary notes that an ethical community is fragile in responding to current onslaughts on truth and meaning—potencies inherent in discourse communities. The essay takes Bakhtin’s ideas further to explore intrinsic forces at play in dialogue, language, and art. This leads to discussing the centrality of ethics in Bakhtin’s thought. For him, the essence of discourse is a dialogic exchange which comprises both art and ethics. It is art in that self and other are created in the exchange. It is ethical in that “I” am answerable to the other, as a phenomenological reality, in the moment of intersubjectivity.

Archetypes and code biology

As a clinical psychologist, I observe stereotyped formulas of behavior in action every day in the consulting room, despite differences in age, race, or culture; they present themselves as codified rules or typical modes of behavior in archetypical situations. Such circumstances coincide with what C.G. Jung defended: the existence of archetypes stored in an inherited/phylogenetic repository, which he called the collective unconscious – somewhat similar to the notion of an ethogram, as shown by ethology. Psychologists can use a perspective to facilitate understanding the phenomenon: the code biology perspective (Barbieri 2014). This approach can help us recognize how these phenomenological events have an ontological reality based not only on the existence of organic information but also on the existence of organic meaning.We are not a tabula rasa (Wilson 2000): despite the explosive diversification of the brain and the emergence of conscience and intentionality, we observe the conservation of basic instincts and emotions (Ekman 2004; Damasio 2010) not only in humans but in all mammals and other living beings; we refer to the neural activity on which the discrimination behavior is based, i.e., the neural codes. The conservation of these fundamental set-of-rules or conventions suggests that one or more neural codes have been highly conserved and serves as an interpretive basis for what happens to the living being who owns them (Barbieri 2003). Thus, archetypes’ phenomenological reality can be understood not as something metaphorical but as an ontological (phylogenetic) fact (Goodwyn 2019).Furthermore, epigenetic regulation theories present the possibility that the biomolecular process incorporates elements of the context where it takes place; something fundamental to understand our concept – the archetype presents itself as the mnesic remnant of the behavioral history of individuals who preceded us on the evolutionary scale. In short: brains are optimized for processing ethologically relevant sensory signals (Clemens et al., 2015).From the perspective of the corporeal mind (Searle 2002), in this paper, we will show the parallels between code biology and the concept of the archetype, as Jung defended it and as it appears in clinical practice.

Spóźniona zmysłowość w twórczości filmowej Mohsena Machmalbafa

The Belated Sensuality in the Films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. From Apology of Heroic Masculinity to Female Alternative Narratives – Return to the Roots of Aesthetics as a Way of Knowledge This article aims to describe the transformation in the films by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf who started his career as a propaganda filmmaker in the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran. He continued his artistic search adopting polemic attitude and the new strategies based on sensual perception entered his cinema, that emphasized humans’ phenomenological reality, not theological imaginings. Instead of resorting to the traditional cinematic ploys of oppositional filmmakers, such as subversive dialogue, or political symbolism, in movies Gabbeh (1996) and Silence (1998) Makhmalbaf choses the pleasure of the interacting senses. These alternative performative strategies are characterized by individualized narration and their protagonists are far from the patterns of hegemonic masculinity and femininity.

ПСИХОЛОГИЧЕСКОЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ ОДАРЕННОСТИ: ПРОБЛЕМА ТЕОРИИ И МЕТОДА

This article analyzes the current research state on the problem of giftedness in psychology. The authors draw attention to the fact that the leading indicator of giftedness, confirming its phenomenological reality, is a person’s high achievements in various fields of life, such as educational and extracurricular activities, professional activities, etc. This indicator is considered in most modern studies as the basis to understand the sources of giftedness, the possibilities of managing the processes of its development and formation. In view of this prevailing approach to giftedness, three groups of studies currently dominate in psychology, and three fundamen-tally different positions on giftedness exist. In the first approach, giftedness comes down to the phenomenon of creativity or the creative abilities of a person; in the second, to the phenomenon of intelligence and the establishment of the IQ level and the development of individual intellectual abilities. The third approach is aimed at overcoming the reduction of the problem of giftedness to any one indicator and involves the inclusion of many variables (cognitive, personal, social, etc.) in the research plan. The authors argue that the applied approach to giftedness understanding is not constructive, since it does not answer the key questions about the sources of development and the formation of giftedness, its structure, its developing dynamics in the process of school and vocational training, and professional activi-ty. The idea is formulated that the weakness of modern approaches to the study of giftedness, models of its diagnosis is explained by the absence of the theory of giftedness, in which the connection between aptitudes and giftedness of a person is consistently revealed. It is argued that the theory of aptitude and giftedness by V.D. Shadrikov allows one to solve a number of methodological, theoretical and experimental problems in the study of giftedness. This is primarily ensured by establishing of a methodological connection between the theory of aptitude, which distinguishes different types of aptitude (individual aptitude, aptitude of the subject of activity, personality aptitude), and understanding of their systemic relationship, which ensures high and ultrahigh achievements of a person in different areas of life.

Phenomenology of the Iranian Invisible School as a New Field of Study in Discipline of Educational Management

Phenomenology of the Iranian Invisible School as a New Field of Study in Discipline of Educational Management

The 'telegraphic schizophrenic manner': Psychosis and a (non)sense of time.

This paper reads Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as stories of deictic temporal crises. It critically examines the texts, exploring their representations of mental time travel (MTT), and places them into dialectic with health sciences research on autonoesis and episodic memory deficits in people with lived experience of mental health disorders, particularly psychosis or ‘schizophrenia’. The paper uses this dialectic to interrogate how atypical MTT is diagnostically and clinically rendered as pathological, and indicative of psychosis in particular. Similarly, it mines these fictional representations for the insights they might provide in attempting to understand the phenomenological reality of temporal disruptions for people with lived experience of psychosis. The paper moves on to incorporate first-person accounts from people with lived experience, and uses these to refine a Deleuzean static synthesis of time constructed around the traumatic Event and the Dedekind ‘cut’. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the literary texts offer possible insights into the experience of people living with ‘psychotic’ temporal disruptions, and in particular how to re-invest their deictic relations to establish functioning fixity and stability of the self in time.

Фенаменалогія жывога слова: даніна памяці і вартасць незабыўнага

The article elucidates the issues of the general anthropocentric orientation of modern linguistic research, taking into account the “human” factor and through the prism of subjective vision of the world. Scholars believe that a word is not only a way of exchanging thoughts but also a form of interaction of people, a means of stimulating their consciousness, will and emotions, a way to achieve mutual understanding in society, or a failure to achieve it.
 The article examines the phenomenological aspects of the Belarusian word, using the antinomy memorable and unforgettable as a case study. The phenomenon of the unforgettable is associated with the archaeological approach to the obvious reality embodied in the word, the study of the deep semantic structures of the language, its “internal” forms. Using the phenomenological approach, the study seeks to reveal the phenomena of multi-vector word usage in live speech and interpret their semantics. In the focus is the language as the prerequisite for the study of the life world – a phenomenological reality embodied in the continuum of the living word.
 The characteristic features of a living word are justified, and a living word is considered not as a part of a sign system (which is accepted in the traditional approach) but as the reality of metalinguistic creativity. The distinguishing features of a living word are identified: eidetic nature, impressive (graphic) nature, text formation ability, lack of pragmatic significance, non-discursiveness, semantic elusiveness (“diverse semantic vectoriality”).
 The significance of the results of the work is obvious since they stimulate the continuation of the phenomenological study of Belarusian language reality. The linguistic phenomenology in this context can be considered as a promising direction that can explain the principle of linguistic variability of a living word, as well as the contradiction between symbols and their infinity of meanings expressed by them.

History and time: the problem of the new beginning in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy

In his early and especially late works, Walter Benjamin develops his own concepts of history and subject. The latter partly relates to psychoanalytical concepts of subject but differs from those in experimentally and scientifically oriented psychological approaches. Denouncing historicism, which constitutes the basis of the cultural-historical approach in psychology (among others), Benjamin questions both the cyclic and the linear, or progressive, concept of time from the standpoint of the moment of «here and now». In his own words, he conceptualizes time as history that takes place in «now-time of recognizability» (Jetztzeit der Erkennbarkeit). Only that kind of time, according to Benjamin, lets the history take place and begin, differing it from the empty, homogenous flow of mythical time. Benjamin does not solely develop his critique of the myth’s subject. He also critically defines the now-time as history, describing the phenomenological reality of the crisis of subjectivity and the subject of history as such. The paper focuses on the latter and analyzes it with the help of Benjamin’s figures of the storyteller, the critic and the historian, used to describe his own critical work. The paper sheds light on the linguistic nature of the crisis of subjectivity and, in this context, on Benjamin’s ideas of history, freedom and transformation of the subject, as well as on the possibility of something essentially new. In the course of analysis, the author of the article points out some psychological and psychotherapeutic consequences of W. Benjamin’s ideas which can induce psychology to take a critical look at its own understanding of history, subject and development, both from the theoretical and the empirical perspective.

“Ну до встречи / в русской речи”. Проблема субъекта в поэзии Г. Лукомникова-Бонифация 1990–2000-х гг.

The crisis of values and reference points caused by the de-ideologization of the Soviet system in the late 1980s led to the elaboration and re-actualization of poetics, the revamping of avant-garde and post-avant-garde traditions, and focusing on formal rather than on semantic aspects. This approach can be seen as a consequence of the relativism of philosophical and ethical values in the last years of the Soviet Empire. An eloquent example of literary rehash in this period can be found in Boniface’s (G. Lukomnikov’s) minimalist work, wherein the question of the subject seems to be put aside in favour of a demonstration of poetic technique. This approach to the literary work avoids description of reality and speculation on categories of which the narrator cannot be sure. Hence, the poem’s phenomenological reality is restricted to the most habitual and mundane objects, and one of its most widely used techniques turns out to be appropriation, because of the unquestionable authority and historical verifiability of sources from the past. Predecessors’ arguments are substituted for the author’s own thoughts and feelings, but, paradoxically, it is mainly through the manipulation and selection of the tradition to which they refer that poets can express themselves.

Synthetic Knowing: The Politics of the Internet of Things

All knowing is material. The challenge for Information Systems (IS) research is to specify how knowing is material by drawing on theoretical characterizations of the digital. Synthetic knowing is knowing informed by theorizing digital materiality. We focus on two defining qualities: liquefaction (unhinging digital representations from physical objects, qualities, or processes) and open-endedness (extendable and generative). The Internet of Things (IoT) is crucial because sensors are vehicles of liquefaction. Their expanding scope for real-time seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching increasingly mimics phenomenologically perceived reality. Empirically, we present a longitudinal case study of IoT-rendered marine environmental monitoring by an oil and gas company operating in the politically contested Arctic. We characterize synthetic knowing into four concepts, the former three tied to liquefaction and the latter to open-endedness: (i) the objects of knowing are algorithmic phenomena; (ii) the sensors increasingly conjure up phenomenological reality; (iii) knowing is scoped (configurable); and (iv) open knowing/data is politically charged.

Relativity: Towards a New Interpretation

The aim of this paper essentially lies in attributing a new meaning, coherent with phenomenological reality, to several phenomena usually classified as relativistic, such as the alleged increase of the mean lifetime of muons and the gravitational redshift. According to the model herein proposed, all the relativistic equations preserve their validity, albeit with a different connotation. We consider a Simple-Harmonically Oscillating Universe, characterized by a null curvature parameter, postulating the existence of a further spatial dimension, not directly perceivable. Time is considered as being absolute, although instruments and devices of whatever kind, commonly employed to measure it, may be significantly influenced by motion and gravity. The Planck Constant is regarded as a parameter, locally variable and subjected to a cyclic evolution. Time and space are treated as quantized physical quantities.