Conceptualizations of Knowledge in Structuring Approaches to Moral Development: A Process-Relational Approach

Like other aspects of child development, views of the nature and development of morality depend on philosophical assumptions or worldviews presupposed by researchers. We analyze assumptions regarding knowledge linked to two contrasting worldviews: Cartesian-split-mechanistic and process-relational. We examine the implications of these worldviews for approaches to moral development, including relations between morality and social outcomes, and the concepts of information, meaning, interaction and computation. It is crucial to understand how researchers view these interrelated concepts in order to understand approaches to moral development. Within the Cartesian-split-mechanistic worldview, knowledge is viewed as representation and meaning is mechanistic and fixed. Both nativism and empiricism are based in this worldview, differing in whether the source of representations is assumed to be primarily internal or external. Morality is assumed to pre-exist, either in the genome or the culture. We discuss problems with these conceptions and endorse the process-relational paradigm, according to which knowledge is constructed through interaction, and morality begins in activity as a process of coordinating perspectives, rather than the application of fixed rules. The contrast is between beginning with the mind or beginning with social activity in explaining the mind.

Reclaiming Education for Health. One Health as an Emerging Paradigm in Response to COVID-19 and other Anomalies

The One Health approach reveals a growing awareness that human health is interdependent with the health of all living beings and therefore requires keeping the entire planetary ecosystem healthy. The COVID-19 crisis has made this interconnection undeniable: by intruding into wild ecosystems, driven by the combined pressures of population growth and extractive economics, the risk of zoonotic diseases for which human immune systems and health care facilities are unprepared has drastically increased; the tremendous impact of this unrestrained colonization of nature is now clear worldwide. One Health has emerged in response to the increasing complexity of health issues. It states that to guarantee the health of humans, considering the health of other-than-human beings is crucial. Various related disciplines should collaborate to face the current health challenges. Despite this growing demand for a more systemic approach, health institutions and professionals appear slow in embracing it; at best, they take a narrow approach to One Health, limited to interactions between domestic animals and humans. This article proposes a systemic analysis that explains this slow uptake of One Health. It explores lock-ins in epistemological and pedagogical patterns, focusing on the university as the site where these are (re)produced. Universities emerged during the Enlightenment when technical discoveries encouraged a mechanistic worldview and a separatist approach to knowledge. The structuring of academia in separate faculties reflects this worldview and paradigm. Even if the issues the planet is facing have become much more complex, universities have not significantly changed their underlying concepts and practices of research and education. In order for professionals to adopt a more systemic approach to health, they need to unlearn this separatist worldview, transcend the disciplinary boundaries, and familiarize themselves with a ‘relational’ paradigm. The article describes a concrete example of a learning programme that is learner-driven and fosters transdisciplinary learning. Two vignettes presented by Ph.D. researchers illustrate the analysis and the response proposed here. The text concludes by proposing leverages needed to unleash the potential of this kind of transdisciplinary learning about health.

Plant Sciences and Phytosemiotics as part of culture

This article is dedicated to the impact of research in the field of biology, behaviorism and cognitive science of plants with upon the change of scientific and cultural discourses. A brief overview is given to vegetation cultural heritage, considering the factors of objectification of plants with acceptance of mechanistic worldview and demystification of nature. The author examines the current changes in comprehension of vegetation based on the new research in the area of electrophysiology and plant behaviorism, providing a short historical background of evolution of the attitude on plants in biology and semiotics. Emphasis is placed on the emergence of phytosemiotics as a part of semiotic system of humans and animals, its transformation into phytosemiotics per se under the influence of new research results in the area of neurobiology of plants and their behavior. The novelty of this work consists in the analysis of new data in the area of behavior and signaling  of plants through the lens of biosemiotics, reconsideration of semiotic reality of plants: despite the fact that plants differ from animals in functionality and fundamentally contrasting morphology, they are still comparable, which put the planst on the same level with animals in semiotic reality, and acquire agency. This leaves a wide field for further research in not only plant biology and behaviorism, but also further development of phytosemiotics, ecosemiotics, ethics, and aesthetics. The author's special contribution is the reinterpretation of the plant semiotic niche: the transition of plants from the iconic semiosis to the index one.

Noetic and Noematic Dimensions of Religious Experience

Phenomenologies of religious experience have been developed by Max Scheler and via Alfred Schutz’s frameworks of “multiple realities” and “finite provinces of meaning.” For both, religious experience resists the pragmatic imperatives of the mechanistic worldview or world of working. Schutz’s paradigm begins with a distinctive noetic religious epoché opening the religious province, in contrast with Scheler’s start with spheres of being (especially the absolute sphere) furnishing the noematic context for religious acts. Scheler’s religious act resembles the religious epoché, but his eidetic analysis highlights the act’s distinctiveness, irreducibility to non-religious acts, and immunity to psychological reductionism. Correlating the religious act with his value theory (the absolute sphere), Scheler better withstands the subordination of religion to the pragmatic imperatives and the absolute to lesser values than does a Schutzian ranking of purposes in the province’s form of spontaneity. Scheler’s absolute personal being, whose revelation one must respectfully wait, supports the Schutzian relaxed tension of consciousness. Respectfulness of persons, the social/communal/critical dimensions of religious experience, religion’s need for critique from theoretical provinces of meaning, and the wariness of idolatrously substituting one’s own finite goods for the absolute can all mitigate the religious imperialism and violence to which absolute commitments can lead.

Mary and Modernity

Because the Reformation was unfavourably disposed toward expressions of the cosmological, mystical, symbolic, and aesthetic dimensions of the Virgin Mary’s spiritual presence, and because secular versions of several concepts in the Reformation became central to emergent modernity, the work of modernizing the Catholic Church at Vatican II resulted in streamlining Mary’s presence and meaning in favour of a more literal, objective, and strictly text-based version, which is simultaneously more Protestant and more modern. In the decades since Vatican II, however, the modern, mechanistic worldview has been dislodged by discoveries in physics and biology indicating that physical reality, the Creation, is composed entirely of dynamic interrelatedness. This perception also informs the Incarnation, the Resurrection, Redemption, transubstantiation, and the full spiritual presence of Mary with its mystical and cosmological dimensions. Perhaps the rigid dividing lines at Vatican II will evolve into new possibilities in the twenty-first century regarding Mary and modernity.

Mind Outside Brain

We approach the problem of the extended mind from a radically non-dualist perspective. The separation between mind and matter is an artifact of the mechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency, intentionality, or experience. We propose to replace it by an action ontology, which conceives mind and matter as aspects of the same network of processes. By adopting the intentional stance, we interpret the catalysts of elementary reactions as agents exhibiting desires, intentions, and sensations. Autopoietic networks of reactions constitute more complex super-agents, which exhibit memory, deliberation and sense-making. In the case of social networks, individual agents coordinate their actions via the propagation of challenges. The distributed cognition that emerges cannot be situated in any individual brain. This non-dualist, holistic view extends and operationalizes process metaphysics and Eastern philosophies. It is supported by both mindfulness experiences and mathematical models of action, self-organization, and cognition.

Romanticism, German

Because Romanticism has many meanings which vary according to time and place, it is best to examine the movement in a specific culture and period. Of all the phases of Romanticism, early German Romanticism is of special importance in the history of Western philosophy. The early German Romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg, Schleiermacher and Schelling – developed influential ideas in the fields of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and politics. The aim of their movement was essentially social and political: to overcome the alienation and disenchantment created by modernity, and to restore unity with oneself, others and nature. In accord with this aim, the Romantics advocated an ethics of love and self-realization, in opposition to hedonism and the Kantian ethic of duty. They championed an ideal of community against the competitive egoism of modern society; and, finally, they developed an organic concept of nature against the mechanistic worldview of Cartesian physics. Romantic ethics, politics and aesthetics should all be seen in the light of their essential cultural goal: to cure humanity of homesickness and to make people feel at home in the world again.

Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

The Nyāya school of philosophy developed out of the ancient Indian tradition of debate; its name, often translated as ‘logic’, relates to its original and primary concern with the method (nyāya) of proof. The fully fledged classical school presents its interests in a list of sixteen categories of debate, of which the first two are central: the means of valid cognition (perception, inference, analogy and verbal testimony) and the soteriologically relevant objects of valid cognition (self, body, senses, sense objects, cognition, and so on). The latter reflect an early philosophy of nature added to an original eristic-dialectic tradition. On the whole, classical Nyāya adopts, affirms and further develops, next to its epistemology and logic, the ontology of Vaiśeṣika. The soteriological relevance of the school is grounded in the claim that adequate knowledge of the sixteen categories, aided by contemplation, yogic exercises and philosophical debate, leads to release from rebirth. Vaiśeṣika, on the other hand, is a philosophy of nature most concerned with the comprehensive enumeration and identification of all distinct and irreducible world constituents, aiming to provide a real basis for all cognitive and linguistic acts. This endeavour for distinction (viśeṣa) may well account for the school’s name. Into the atomistic and mechanistic worldview of Vaiśeṣika a soteriology and orthodox ethics are fitted, but not without tensions; still later the notion of a supreme god, whose function is at first mainly regulative but later expanded to the creation of the world, is introduced. In the classical period the Vaiśeṣika philosophy of nature, including the highly developed doctrine of causality, is cast into a rigorous system of six, later seven, categories (substance, quality, motion, universal, particularity, inherence, nonexistence). Nyāya epistemology increasingly influences that of Vaiśeṣika. The interaction and mutual influences between Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika finally led to the formation of what may be styled a syncretistic school, called Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika in modern scholarly publications. This step, facilitated by the common religious affiliation to Śaivism, occurs with Udayana (eleventh century), who commented on texts of both schools. Subsequently, numerous syncretistic manuals attained high popularity. Udayana also inaugurated the period of Navya-Nyāya, ‘New Logic’, which developed and refined sophisticated methods of philosophical analysis.

“Though I was alone with the unseen, I comprehended it not”: The Relationship Between the Dead and the Living in Margaret Oliphant’s „A Beleaguered City”

Margaret Oliphant 1828–1897 is best remembered today as one of the important prac­titioners the domestic fiction, with her “Chronicles of Carlingford” series considered to be her most enduring achievement. Oliphant’s other interesting group of works are ghost stories and other spiritual tales known as the “Stories of the Seen and Unseen”. A Beleaguered City, a novella first published in 1879, is generally considered to be Oliphant’s most successful supernatural tale. Set in Semur, France, and told by five different narrators, the story focuses on the inhabitants of Semur, who are evicted from their town by the spirits of the dead. This paper aims to demonstrate that Oliphant uses the supernatural not only to cope with her own experiences of bereavement, but that she also engages with contemporary themes: she comments on gender roles, reveals the shortcom­ings of society that places its faith in progress and material wealth, and exposes the limitations of the scientific or the mechanistic worldview which cannot provide an adequate explanation of “the true signification of life”.