An Ontological Framework for Spatial Socioeconomic Units

Author(s):  
Athanasia Darra ◽  
Marinos Kavouras
Author(s):  
Anne Sophie Meincke

Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However, so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma: reductionist theories explain personal identity away, while non-reductionist theories fail to give any informative account at all. This chapter argues that this dilemma emerges from an underlying commitment, shared by both sides in the debate, to an ontology that gives priority to static unchanging things. The claim defended here is that the dilemma of personal identity can be overcome if we acknowledge the biological nature of human persons and switch to a process-ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary. Human persons are biological higher-order processes rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated.


2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Yaco ◽  
Arkalgud Ramaprasad

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework that creates a common language to enhance the connection between the domains of cultural heritage (CH) artifacts and instruction.Design/methodology/approachThe CH and instruction domains are logically deconstructed into dimensions of functions, semiotics, CH, teaching/instructional materials, agents and outcomes. The elements within those dimensions can be concatenated to create natural-English sentences that describe aspects of the problem domain.FindingsThe framework is valid using traditional social sciences content, semantic, practical and systemic validity constructs.Research limitations/implicationsThe framework can be used to map current research literature to discover areas of heavy, light and no research.Originality/valueThe framework provides a new way for CH and education stakeholders to describe and visualize the problem domain, which could allow for significant enhancements of each. Better understanding the problem domain would serve to enhance instruction informed from collections and vice versa. The educational process would have more depth due to better access to primary sources. Increased use of collections would reveal more ways through which they could be used in instruction. The framework can help visualize the past and present of the domain, and envisage its future.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-210
Author(s):  
Grigorios Chrysostom Tympas

Despite the prevalence of phenomenological perspectives in most modern scientific fields addressing religion and spirituality, including psychology of religion, ontological inquiries retain an important position in certain fields, such as modern sociology (e.g., Weber, Giddens' concept of ‘ontological security’). Ontological and phenomenological approaches, alongside certain principles that function as interpretative tools in the social sciences (e.g., reductionism, teleology, supervenience), can be synthesised to construct a pluralistic methodology for understanding anew the dynamics between the ‘psychological’ and the ‘spiritual’. This paper attempts to articulate an ‘evolutional’ approach to the spiritual as an ‘emergent’ property arising from multiple factors beyond the psychological and the metaphysical (such as social and cultural constructs). This holistic understanding of the spiritual will be then applied to Jung's notion of the ‘Self’ to understand further its spiritual and/or ontological potential.


2019 ◽  
pp. 271-301

The existence of a situational concept indissolubly spatial and temporal in the Bolivian altiplano, better defined by the aymara term pacha, in the south-central Andes is well sustained by ethno-historic and ethnographic accounts. However, the implications of this concept for archaeological research have not been considered enough. Is especially suggestive that, the past being necessarily a place, humans may have conceived various ways to physically interact with their pasts through ceremonialism. This chapter considers the implication of this idea within a framework of archaeology of time, applying a fractal model of the pacha concept in its various nested scales. In order to illustrate the material forms that the idea of relating with the entities of a “place of the past” can adopt, this chapter discusses three case-studies along a historic sequence. The chapter finishes with some thoughts about the specific material conducts that can be adopted, even within the same ontological framework.


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