VULNERABILIDADE E FINITUDE: A ÉTICA DO CUIDADO DO OUTRO

2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (125) ◽  
pp. 433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Newton Aquiles von Zuben
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Care Ethics ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Practical Orientation ◽  
Healthcare Environment ◽  
The Social

A ética do cuidar é uma das perspectivas da ética contemporânea que enfatiza as emoções e as relações humanas, em contraposição à ética da justiça, que privilegia os direitos e os princípios. Este estudo propõe-se apresentar um cenário com as categorias: a corporeidade, na articulação “finitude e transcendência”, e a vulnerabilidade, signos da fragilidade da condição humana. É nesse horizonte de sentido que almeja compreender o significado do cuidar, operando uma ampliação de seu campo semântico para além da prática social vinculada ao âmbito da saúde, podendo assim apresentar-se como uma relevante orientação ética para a ação humana.Abstract: Care ethics is one of the perspectives of contemporary ethics that emphasizes emotions and human relationships in contrast with the so-called ethics of justice, which deals with principles and rights. Through the category of corporeity, as the tension between “finitude and transcendence”, and that of vulnerability, this paper intends to identify signs of the fragility of human condition. The meaning of care-ethics must be comprehended within that horizon of sense, and its semantic field should go beyond the social practice related to the healthcare environment. It is in such a framework that care ethics can present itself as a relevant practical orientation for human action.

scholarly journals Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Brandt ◽  
Katie Clinton
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Practice Model ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Methodological Bias

This essay reflects on how the social practice model of literacy, an approach that defines reading and writing as situated, social practices, under-theorizes certain aspects of literacy, making it hard to account fully for its workings in local contexts. We trace this theoretical blind spot to the ways that the social practice model was formulated as a challenge to the “Great Divide” or “autonomous” models of literacy. We suggest that in rejecting a conception of literacy as a deterministic force, the revisionists critique veers too far in a reactive direction. By exaggerating the power of local contexts to define the meaning and forms that literacy takes and by under-theorizing the potentials of the technology of literacy, methodological bias and conceptual impasses are created. To open new directions for literacy research we suggest more attention be paid to the material dimensions of literacy. Drawing on the work of Bruno LaTour (1993, 1996), we seek to theorize the transcontextualized and transcontextualizing potentials of literacy = particularly its ability to travel, integrate, and endure. Finally, we propose a set of analytical constructs that treat literacy not solely as an outcome or accomplishment of local practices, but also as a participant in them. By restoring a “thing status” to literacy, we can attend to the role of literacy in human action. The logic of such a perspective suggests that understanding what literacy is doing with people in a setting is as important as understanding what people are doing with literacy in a setting.

Embodiment, Materiality, and Power. A Review Essay

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 809-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter van der Veer
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Human Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Ways Of Life

Theories of agency are central to any form of explanation or interpretation of human action in the social and behavioral sciences, including the study of history. In studies of religion, they appear to require even more reflection than usual, because of secular skepticism of religious understandings of agency, involving divine intervention or supra-human powers. The major problem with theories of agency is their immense range and complexity. They involve fundamental notions of emotions and intentions, of habits and social practice, of desire and passion, of passions and interests, of resistance and power, of freedom and un-freedom, of the distinction between subject and object, of interiority and exteriority. As such, they have complicated genealogies in different religious and philosophical traditions. Western philosophical traditions are among the many traditions that have wide-ranging theories about the self and agency and express them in a universalistic language.1 These universalistic claims are perhaps common, but the history of European expansion has implied a universalization of Western thought, so that despite its provincial origin Western thought informs both the understanding and the self-understanding of other societies. From the start, one of the tasks of anthropology and history has therefore been to critique universalistic assumptions about, for instance, agency, by examining other ways of life and traditions. Not only is universalism as such being questioned; the universalization of ideas is being critically analyzed.

Redeeming the Emancipatory Potential of Novelty Caught in Cunning Complexifications

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Milan Jaros
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Action Space ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Social

Competence in knowing and being is about making sense of change, of novelty’s place in the social, its functionality as well as one’s relation to it. The challenge is in acquiring, implementing, and resourcing methods of selecting and connecting things fit for the human condition of today. The main source of development has always been the urge to seek new forms of natural and spiritual order, and creative recasting of the inherited order into a new one. Until recently, such deeds were believed to be acts of Divine revelation. Advances of modernity turned the human action space into contingent networks of man-made quasi-objects grounded in disparate systems of thought and measurement that pattern the social. What will legitimate capacity for recognition and directional taxonomy of innovations? How will the resulting norms affect narratability of life? It is an outstanding intellectual and leadership challenge to develop practices leading to directional thought and fostering an elbow room for playful initiatives. Recent initiatives designed to bring knowing and being up to the demands of the digital age show that no amount of top down instruction, good will or revolutionary fervour, are a substitute for bottom up acquisition and ownership of knowledge and work in which the ultimate measure of value is the degree of personal independence and social emancipation. With it comes competent citizenship and social responsibility any socio-economic system with democratic ambitions cannot do without.    

Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Augmentation ◽  
Public Imagination

This chapter introduces the “Perspectives” section of the Handbook of Living Machines offering an overview of the different contributions gathered here that consider how biomimetic and biohybrid systems will transform our personal lives and social organizations, and how we might respond to the challenges that these transformations will inevitably pose to our ‘posthuman’ worlds. The authors in this section see it as essential that those who aspire to create living machines engage with the public to confront misconceptions, deep anxieties, and unrealistic aspirations that presently dominate the cultural imagination, and to include potential users in questions of design and utility as new technologies are being developed. Human augmentation and enhancement are other important themes addressed, raising important questions about what it means fundamentally to be ‘human’. These questions and challenges are addressed through the lens of the social and personal impacts of new technologies on human selves, the public imagination, ethics, and human relationships.

Reconsidering American Power

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Power ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
To Come

Postcolonial studies, postmodern studies, even posthuman studies emerge, and intellectuals demand that social sciences be remade to address fundamentals of the human condition, from human rights to global environmental crises. Since these fields owe so much to American state sponsorship, is it easier to reimagine the human and the modern than to properly measure the pervasive American influence? Reconsidering American Power offers trenchant studies by renowned scholars who reassess the role of the social sciences in the construction and upkeep of the Pax Americana and the influence of Pax Americana on the social sciences. With the thematic image for this enterprise as the ‘fiery hunt’ for Ahab’s whale, the contributors pursue realities behind the theories, and reconsider the real origins and motives of their fields with an eye on what will deter or repurpose the ‘fiery hunts’ to come, by offering a critical insider’s view.

Humanism in Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Schröder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Secular Humanism ◽  
Group Type ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Environments ◽  
Free Thought ◽  
Multiple Secularities ◽  
Secular Humanist

This chapter addresses secular humanism in Europe and the way it is “lived” by and within its major institutions and organizations. It examines how national and international secular humanist bodies founded after World War II took up, cultivated, and transformed free-religious, free-thought, ethical, atheist, and rationalist roots from nineteenth century Europe and adjusted them to changing social, cultural, and political environments. Giving examples from some selected national contexts, the development of a nonreligious Humanism in Europe exemplifies what Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt call “Multiple Secularities”: different local or national trajectories produced a variety of cultures of secularity and, thus, different understandings of secular humanism. Apart from this cultural historization, the chapter reconstructs two transnational, ideal types of secular humanism, the social practice type, and the secularist pressure group type. These types share similar worldviews and values, but have to be distinguished in terms of organizational forms, practices, and especially policy.

scholarly journals Exploring Chinese people’s attitudes towards “going through the backdoor”

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 183449092199329
Author(s):  
Tulips Yiwen Wang ◽  
Allan B. I. Bernardo
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Adaptive Responses ◽  
Total N ◽  
Perceptions Of Fairness ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
Back Door ◽  
People’S Attitudes

The present investigation explored Chinese people's attitudes toward the social practice of going “through the back door” or zouhoumen. Zouhoumen is an informal approach to achieve one’s goal through personal connections (called guanxi). We propose that Chinese people distinguish between different acts of zouhoumen and propose at least two types that differ in terms of social cognitive aspects, and that the two types evoke different perceptions of fairness that shape attitudes towards zouhoumen. Two experiments (total N = 414) provided evidence for the differentiation between facilitative zouhoumen and expropriative zouhoumen and also explore the role of type of guanxi in attitudes towards the two types of zouhoumen. Both experiments indicated that facilitative zouhoumen was less unacceptable than expropriative zouhoumen, but there were no marked differences in attitudes between zouhoumen involving expressive or instrumental guanxi. The results support a more nuanced theoretical account of a pervasive social phenomenon in Chinese society that we assume is adaptive responses to features of Chinese historical socioeconomic context.

The moral theology of John Paul II: Protestant reading

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-340
Author(s):  
Stephanie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Human Action ◽  
John Paul Ii ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Analogia Entis ◽  
Social Realm ◽  
Normative Order ◽  
Moral Capacity

AbstractThis work critically examines the moral theology of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. In his writings as Wojtyla, and later as John Paul II, the theme of human dignity served as the starting point for his moral theology. This article first describes his conception of human dignity as influenced by Thomist and by phenomenological sources. The Thomist philosophy of being provided Wojtyla with an optimistic view of the epistemic and moral capacity of human persons. Wojtyla argued that because of the analogia entis, humans gain epistemic access to the normative order of God as well as the moral capacity to live in accordance with the law of God. Built upon the foundation of his Thomist assumptions, Wojtyla's phenomenological research enriched his insight into human dignity by arguing in favour of the formative nature of human action. He argued that human dignity rested also in this dynamism of personhood: the capacity not only to live in accordance with the normative order but to form oneself as virtuous by partaking in virtuous acts or to form one's community in solidarity through acts of participation and self-giving. After presenting his moral theology, this article then engages critically with his assumptions from a Protestant perspective. I argue that, while human dignity provides a powerful and beneficial starting point for ethics, his Thomist ontology of being/substance and the optimistic terms in which he interprets human dignity ultimately undermine his social programme. I propose that an ontology of relation provides a better starting point for interpreting human dignity and for appealing for acts of solidarity in the social realm.

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