Projection or encounter? Investigating Hans Jonas’ case for natural teleology

This article discusses Hans Jonas’ argument for teleology in living organisms, in light of recently raised concerns over enactivism’s “Jonasian turn.” Drawing on textual resources rarely discussed in contemporary enactivist literature on Jonas’ philosophy, we reconstruct five core ideas of his thinking: 1) That natural science’s rejection of teleology is methodological rather than ontological, and thus not a proof of its non-existence; 2) that denial of the reality of teleology amounts to a performative self-contradiction; 3) that the fact of evolution makes it implausible that only humans actualize purpose; 4) that the concept of metabolism delimits and gestures towards beings performing purposive activity; and 5) that concrete encounters with living organisms are indispensable for the judgment that they are purposive. Lastly, we draw attention to how Jonas’ understanding of teleology and inwardness in nonhuman life in terms of degrees of identity with human life poses a problem for his view. In this way, we hope to clarify what Jonas, as an important source of inspiration for the enactivist project, is proposing.

The Pattern of Upbringing

“Upbringing” refers to the purposive activity of the older generation toward the young in order to further their growth into adulthood. These activities unfold in the intersection of instinct and culture and of individual and society and are, thus, a specifically human activity. They comprise the growth of the body of the children, their introduction into the world of symbols and the world of experience. One of the basic traits of upbringing is pointing out objects, naming them, and thus creating a shared world of things. Among the symbolic activities in upbringing there is the interplay of asking and explaining, of showing and imitating, dialogue, negotiation, discourse, storytelling, and play. The symbolic activities constitute and simultaneously are the basis of experience. Thus, speaking in general terms, upbringing means the arrangement and shaping of the environment to afford valuable experiences to the children and thus further their growth.

Exploration of older prisoner’s social needs, who attended one of two prison initiatives for older people: an inductive phenomenological study

Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore the social needs and experiences of older prisoners who were attending one of two social initiatives in a prison in England. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on an interpretative phenomenological study, conducted in a prison in the South West of England. Older prisoners attending an initiative implemented for those over 55, a purposive activity or a social task group, participated in focus groups, which were audio recorded and thematically analysed. Findings Two overarching themes were identified. Firstly, the need to feel safe: prisoners felt attending an initiative provided them with a safe haven away from noisy and boisterous younger prisoners, who they perceived as different from them and who received preferential treatment. Secondly, being provided with a purpose: prisoners felt they belonged among their peers, which motivated them to attend and support group activities. Research limitations/implications This study was completed in one prison. However, both initiatives supported the social needs of older prisoners and enabled them to leave their cells, although they felt unsafe when not attending an initiative. Originality/value There remains a need to support the process of integrating younger and older prisoners, by the provision of both integrated and separate initiatives, with the aim of developing cross-generational and bi-directional peer support.

Sic vita est: Visual representation in painting of the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY

This article analyzes how the conceptualization LIFE IS A JOURNEY is conveyed within a series of paintings ranging from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century. While the previous research on visual metaphor generally aims to describe how the domains of metaphorical conceptualization interact or discusses the rhetorical effect that visual metaphor is able to induce, this article takes a historical perspective in order to identify the main conceptual aspects shared by the paintings under consideration. It is proposed that the concept of a JOURNEY is associated with a PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY that involves the start of the journey and its termination as two qualitatively different moments that are faced as a collective/shared experience and that are inspired by some human wish. This article also shows how the conceptual potential of metaphor tends to maintain a coherent representation although the paintings represent different historical sensitivities and artistic approaches.

Heideggerian philosophy of science

Heidegger’s importance in the philosophy of science stems less from his scattered remarks about science than from the larger conception of intentionality and ontology that informs them. Heidegger’s earliest major work, Being and Time (1927), displayed everyday practical purposive activity as the most fundamental setting for the disclosure of things in the world. Heidegger claimed that the traditional epistemological conception of a subject who represents objects was derivative from and dependent upon such ongoing everyday practical engagement with one’s surroundings. Science was then supposed to be the practice that allows things to show themselves shorn of their significance within the ’in-order-to-for-the-sake-of’ structure of everyday activity; nevertheless, the sense of scientific claims remained dependent upon the everyday interactions from which they were abstracted. Shortly after writing Being and Time, Heidegger revised his project in ways that also transformed his account of science. His overall project shifted from describing the transcendental structure of the meaning of being, to interpreting the ’history of being’. Science was reinterpreted as an activity (’research’) closely allied with machine technology, and oriented towards more extensive and intensive manipulation and ordering of things. Understood as such, science for Heidegger was an essential manifestation of the modern age. Whereas, earlier, he thought that science presupposed a philosophical ontology, he eventually portrayed science and technology as the conclusion of the philosophical tradition. While philosophical metaphysics and epistemology were thus naturalized, Heidegger was concerned with the possibility of a way of thinking outside this convergence of scientific and philosophical metaphysics.

The Rule of Law and Legal-Process Reasons in Attorney Advising

This is an intervention in long-standing debates in the philosophy of law and the theory of professional ethics. In jurisprudential terms, it elaborates on H.L.A. Hart’s concept of the internal point of view, which is the perspective of one who views the law as creating obligations, not merely affecting one’s prudential calculations. In other words, Hart’s idea is that the law must be capable of normativity. Hart limited this conceptual requirement to judges, who are obligated to take the internal point of view, leaving a deeply important open question concerning the attitude that citizens and their advisors must take with respect to the law. The argument in this Article is that it is a constitutive principle of the professional obligations of lawyers that they regard the law from the internal point of view. From this obligation flow further, more specific duties of good faith in interpretation of the law. The Article therefore connects scholarship on the nature of law with more practical questions concerning the duties of lawyers advising clients. It provides an analytically rigorous approach to evaluating the conduct of lawyers in high-profile scandals such the Panama Papers revelations, the so-called torture memos prepared by lawyers in the Bush Administration, and Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo explaining the firing of FBI Director James Comey. The position defended here differs from both the Nineteenth Century "wise counselor" conception of lawyer professionalism and the standard conception of legal ethics as "zealous advocacy within the bounds of the law." It is in some ways an elaboration on some of my previous scholarship on legal ethics and interpretation of law, but is grounded much more explicitly not only in Hart's notion of the internal point of view but - perhaps surprisingly - also in Lon Fuller's insight that law is a purposive activity characterized by giving reasons of a certain type in justification of one's actions.

Reason, Self-Transcendence, and Modernity in Hegel’s Phenomenology

Chapter 5 displays narrative unity in the “Reason chapter” of Hegel’s Phenomenology by showing how consciousness as reason becomes, and takes successive forms as, purposive activity: first, as organism, then, as end-directed human action, and finally, as human action that is its own end. The successive forms of purposive activity in the chapter are generated as attempts to resolve the overarching tension between rational consciousness’s certainty of itself as an existing individual and its certainty of being all reality. The internal criticism of the successive forms of rational consciousness in the chapter amounts to a general criticism of distinctively modern self-consciousness, particularly of its individualism. It is argued that the alleged resolution of reason’s tension in the transition at the end of the chapter to spirit, in particular, to ethical life, itself contains a tension between the realization of reason, on the one hand, and its repudiation, on the other.

When Affect Supports Cognitive Control – A Working Memory Perspective

The paper delineates a study of executive functions (EFs), construed as procedural working memory (WM), from a motivational perspective. Since WM theories and motivation theories are both concerned with purposive activity, the role of implicit evaluations (affects) observed in goal pursuit can be anticipated to arise also in the context of cognitive control, e.g., during the performance of the Stroop task. The role of positive and negative affect in goal pursuit consists in controlling attention resources according to the goal and situational requirements. Positive affect serves to maintain goals and means in the scope of attention (EF1), whereas negative affect activates the inhibition of non-functional contents, e.g., distractors and irrelevant objects (resulting in attention disengagement; EF2). Adaptation to conflict proceeds via sequential triggering of negative and positive affect (EF3). Moreover, it was demonstrated that the focus on action or reflection changes the scope of contents subjected to implicit (affective) control. Therefore, I suggest that the motivational system, to a large extent, plays the role of the Central Executive. The paper opens a discussion and proposes studies on affective mechanisms of cognitive control.

Metaphor and phraseology from the language of bullfighting in Spanish

Mass-audience events provide languages with fertile sources of metaphor. Such events display pronounced spatial parameters, dynamicity and purposive activity, all of which have been shown to enable metaphor processes. Furthermore, the mass following and the experiential recurrence of such events facilitate conventionalisation and phraseological development. This article examines such a phenomenon, namely, the deployment of metaphorical and phraseological expressions of bullfighting origin in the ordinary use of the Spanish language. Taking evidence from existing inventories plus references to literature and the press, the article categorises the diverse manifestations into coherent patterns in consonance with cognitive linguistics metaphor studies. It shows that the different participants and different aspects of the bullfighting event motivate those patterns. As well as highlighting the cultural specificity of this phraseology, the article also shows its potential in cross-sectional and longitudinal terms – it functions across a variety of contexts as well as in depth in any particular context.

LIFE IS A JOURNEY

The debate between narrativists and ludologists has long enlivened discussions among game theorists. Should videogames be seen as an offshoot of (film) stories, and thus be studied primarily from the perspective of narratology? Or do they represent a truly different phenomenon, and thus require an analytic approach that has nothing to gain from narratology? In this paper we intend not so much to solve this conundrum as suggest how it has arisen in the first place, by showing what journey stories and videogames that involve the movement of the player’s avatar have in common. Our central claim is that both journey stories and such games involve physical movement and quests, and moreover are based on some sort of ‘story’, but that only the stories allow for rich mappings of the conceptual metaphor PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY IS MOVEMENT TOWARD A DESTINATION. If our explanations make sense, they can contribute both to the classification and theorization of videogames and to the expansion of conceptual metaphor theory into the realm of videogames.