THE CENTRALITY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE IN WOJTYLA’S ACCOUNT OF THE PERSON S u m m a r y The aim of this paper is to illuminate the centrality of lived experience in Karol Wojytla’s account of the person and identify its significance for philosophy and praxis in the contemporary period. Specifically the author intends to pursue the meaning of Wojtyla’s claim that “the category of lived experience must have a place in anthropology and ethics—and somehow be at the center of (...) their respective interpretations.” The paper seeks to recover an important insight into the task of philosophy: according to Karol Wojtyla, if philosophy is to perform its essential function in the recovery of our culture, we have no choice but to turn our attention to the subjectivity of human persons— and this can only be done by taking up the somewhat risky challenge of studying the reality of lived human experience. The paper will analyze Wojtyla’s argument that the problem of human subjectivity is at the epicenter of debates about the human person and will argue that his solution reconciles the dilemma posed by the historical antinomies that have characterized anthropology and epistemology, viz., the “objective” or ontological view of the human being and the “subjectivism” often associated with the philosophy of consciousness, and their corollaries, realism and idealism. At least in the English speaking context, where the validity of individual experience has risen to the level of almost dogmatic significance for social and political life, Father Wojtyla’s claim appears either to have gone unnoticed or to have been rejected. And perhaps, at least on the surface, this is not without reason. The modern interest in human subjectivity is blamed for many contemporary THE CENTRALITY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE IN WOJTYLA’S ACCOUNT OF THE PERSON S u m m a r y The aim of this paper is to illuminate the centrality of lived experience in Karol Wojytla’s account of the person and identify its significance for philosophy and praxis in the contemporary period. Specifically the author intends to pursue the meaning of Wojtyla’s claim that “the category of lived experience must have a place in anthropology and ethics—and somehow be at the center of their respective interpretations.” The paper seeks to recover an important insight into the task of philosophy: according to Karol Wojtyla, if philosophy is to perform its essential function in the recovery of our culture, we have no choice but to turn our attention to the subjectivity of human persons— and this can only be done by taking up the somewhat risky challenge of studying the reality of lived human experience. The paper will analyze Wojtyla’s argument that the problem of human subjectivity is at the epicenter of debates about the human person and will argue that his solution reconciles the dilemma posed by the historical antinomies that have characterized anthropology and epistemology, viz., the “objective” or ontological view of the human being and the “subjectivism” often associated with the philosophy of consciousness, and their corollaries, realism and idealism. At least in the English speaking context, where the validity of individual experience has risen to the level of almost dogmatic significance for social and political life, Father Wojtyla’s claim appears either to have gone unnoticed or to have been rejected. And perhaps, at least on the surface, this is not without reason. The modern interest in human subjectivity is blamed for many contemporary THE CENTRALITY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE IN WOJTYLA’S ACCOUNT OF THE PERSON S u m m a r y The aim of this paper is to illuminate the centrality of lived experience in Karol Wojytla’s account of the person and identify its significance for philosophy and praxis in the contemporary period. Specifically the author intends to pursue the meaning of Wojtyla’s claim that “the category of lived experience must have a place in anthropology and ethics—and somehow be at the center of their respective interpretations.” The paper seeks to recover an important insight into the task of philosophy: according to Karol Wojtyla, if philosophy is to perform its essential function in the recovery of our culture, we have no choice but to turn our attention to the subjectivity of human persons— and this can only be done by taking up the somewhat risky challenge of studying the reality of lived human experience. The paper will analyze Wojtyla’s argument that the problem of human subjectivity is at the epicenter of debates about the human person and will argue that his solution reconciles the dilemma posed by the historical antinomies that have characterized anthropology and epistemology, viz., the “objective” or ontological view of the human being and the “subjectivism” often associated with the philosophy of consciousness, and their corollaries, realism and idealism. At least in the English speaking context, where the validity of individual experience has risen to the level of almost dogmatic significance for social and political life, Father Wojtyla’s claim appears either to have gone unnoticed or to have been rejected. And perhaps, at least on the surface, this is not without reason. The modern interest in human subjectivity is blamed for many contemporary THE CENTRALITY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE IN WOJTYLA’S ACCOUNT OF THE PERSON S u m m a r y The aim of this paper is to illuminate the centrality of lived experience in Karol Wojytla’s account of the person and identify its significance for philosophy and praxis in the contemporary period. Specifically the author intends to pursue the meaning of Wojtyla’s claim that “the category of lived experience must have a place in anthropology and ethics—and somehow be at the center of their respective interpretations.” The paper seeks to recover an important insight into the task of philosophy: according to Karol Wojtyla, if philosophy is to perform its essential function in the recovery of our culture, we have no choice but to turn our attention to the subjectivity of human persons— and this can only be done by taking up the somewhat risky challenge of studying the reality of lived human experience. The paper will analyze Wojtyla’s argument that the problem of human subjectivity is at the epicenter of debates about the human person and will argue that his solution reconciles the dilemma posed by the historical antinomies that have characterized anthropology and epistemology, viz., the “objective” or ontological view of the human being and the “subjectivism” often associated with the philosophy of consciousness, and their corollaries, realism and idealism. At least in the English speaking context, where the validity of individual experience has risen to the level of almost dogmatic significance for social and political life, Father Wojtyla’s claim appears either to have gone unnoticed or to have been rejected. And perhaps, at least on the surface, this is not without reason. The modern interest in human subjectivity is blamed for many contemporary maladies, including subjectivism, relativism and the pride of place now given to any individual point of view, no matter how ill informed. Claims about the existence of truth or an objective moral order often cannot find a foothold when confronted with the argument that such realities do not resonate with a particular individual’s personal “experience.” The priority given to subjective personal experience in determining what constitutes right thinking and moral human behavior, assuming that question is even asked, is now a commonplace assumption; it is something alternately deplored or celebrated both by intellectuals and the “man on the street.” Given this situation, that a philosopher of Father Wojtyla’s stature and obvious moral authority should make such an argument is a matter of critical importance, especially for those who seek to ground human action in objective moral norms in an era where an arguably flawed account of human subjectivity clearly has taken center stage. The paper shows that Wojtyla is not adverting to experience as an adjunct to moral relativism or personal preference as an approach to questions of the true and the good. On the contrary, the author shows that the philosopher Karol Wojtyla provides a way to remain grounded in the metaphysical and ontological categories that not only comprise our intellectual heritage, but refer to real and profound truths, while simultaneously accounting for the subjectivity and dynamism of the person. The paper concludes with an argument that this account provides a key hermeneutical device for understanding the enormous importance of the work of Pope John Paul II. (shrink)

They examine the currents of thought behind some of the most significant works in Western philosophy, including those by John Locke and David Hume.

Aesthetics, hermeneutics, criticism -- Social Werktreue and the subjectivization of aesthetics -- From musike to metaphysics -- Formalist aesthetics and musical hermeneutics -- Deconstructing the disciplinary divide -- The question of metaphor -- Mimesis and the hermeneutics of music -- Political critique and the politics of music criticism -- Toward a hermeneutics of music criticism.

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.

This paper evaluates the use of synthetic modeling to investigate the relationship between organic and artificial forms of behavioral mal-adaptability. In particular, it addresses the character of organic phobias and the issue of testing the validity of artificial models of these phobias. The two main accounts of organic phobias, the biological or evolutionary and the associative learning explanation, are used as the starting points of this exercise. The learning approach is explored in terms of a probability based model which uses (...) a discrepancy mechanism to represent the artificial phobia, while the endogenous aspect of artificial phobias is discussed in terms of the potential offered by evolutionary learning. Several methods of assessing the construct validity of artificial phobias are outlined. (shrink)

Standard rigid designator accounts of a name’s meaning have trouble accommodating what I will call a descriptive name’s “shifty” character -- its tendency to shift its referent over time in response to a discovery that the conventional referent of that name does not satisfy the description with which that name was introduced. I offer a variant of Kripke’s historical semantic theory of how names function, a variant that can accommodate the character of descriptive names while maintaining rigidity for proper names. (...) A descriptive name’s shiftiness calls for a semantic account of names that makes their semantic values bipartite, containing both traditional semantic contents and what I call "modes of introduction." Both parts of a name's semantic value are derived from the way a name gets introduced into discourse -- from what I refer to as its "context of introduction." Making a name's semantic value bipartite in this way allows for a definite description to be a part of proper name's meaning without thereby sacrificing that name’s status as a rigid designator. On my view, a definite description is part of descriptive name’s mode of introduction. That is, it is part of what determines the content assigned to that name. As it turns out, making a definite description part of a descriptive name’s mode of introduction allows for that definite description to play the role of a mere reference-fixer regarding that name’s content, as Kripke would have it. However, my account allows a definite description to fix a descriptive name’s content actively over time, thereby explaining its inherent shiftiness. (shrink)

A new edition of a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of language, substantially updated and reorganized. The philosophy of language aims to answer a broad range of questions about the nature of language, including “what is a language?” and “what is the source of meaning?” This accessible comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of language begins with the most basic properties of language and only then proceeds to the phenomenon of meaning. The second edition has been significantly expanded and reorganized, putting (...) the original content in a contemporary context and offering substantial new material, with extended discussions and entirely new chapters. After establishing the basics, the book discusses general criteria for an adequate theory of meaning, takes a first pass at describing meaning at an abstract level, and distinguishes between meaning and other related phenomena. Building on this, the book then addresses various specific theories of meaning, beginning with early foundational theories and proceeding to more contemporary ones. New to this edition are expanded discussions of Chomsky's work and compositional semantics, among other topics, and new chapters on such subjects as propositions, Montague grammar, and contemporary theories of language. Each chapter has technical terms in bold, followed by definitions, and offers a list of main points and suggested further readings. The book is suitable for use in undergraduate courses in philosophy and linguistics. Some background in philosophy is assumed, but knowledge of philosophy of language is not necessary. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, (...) our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence. (shrink)

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, (...) biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene–culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music. (shrink)

Items were generated to explore the factorial structure of a construct of fundamentalism worded appropriately for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Results suggested three underlying dimensions: External versus Internal Authority, Fixed versus Malleable Religion, and Worldly Rejection versus Worldly Affirmation. The three dimensions indicate that religious fundamentalism is a personal orientation that asserts a supra-human locus of moral authority, context unbound truth, and the appreciation of the sacred over the worldly components of experience. The 15-item, 3-dimension solution was evaluated across Mexican (...) and American samples. Fit indexes point out the viability of the new inventory across these two samples henceforward referred to as the Multi-Dimensional Fundamentalism Inventory. Additional validity tests supported that the new inventory was negatively correlated with participants’ integrative complexity in a religious domain–specific way. (shrink)

Abstract Christopher Gauker has argued that a cause?effect analysis of the acquisition of communication skills in chimpanzees is adequate to describe the data reported in our work at the Language Research Center. I agree that the cause?effect approach to language function is the only viable method of analyzing language. Language must be studied as a process that functions to organize behavior between two or more individuals. However, the problem of language understanding is not addressed satisfactorily by the perspective offered by (...) Gauker. Some more recent work, particularly with the pygmy chimpanzee ?Kanzi?, is now beginning to explicate a cause?effect analysis of language comprehension. It is argued that in the young chimpanzee, as with children, language comprehension is the driving force underlying the language acquisition process. It is further argued that the transition from comprehension to production is made possible by the capacity for goal?directed observational imitation. (shrink)

Google Trends reveals that at the time we were writing our article on ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ in 2007 almost nobody was searching the internet for ‘Big Data’. It was only towards the very end of 2010 that the term began to register, just ahead of an explosion of interest from 2011 onwards. In this commentary we take the opportunity to reflect back on the claims we made in that original paper in light of more recent discussions about (...) the social scientific implications of the inundation of digital data. Did our paper, with its emphasis on the emergence of, what we termed, ‘social transactional data’ and ‘digital byproduct data’ prefigure contemporary debates that now form the basis and rationale for this excellent new journal? Or was the paper more concerned with broader methodological, theoretical and political debates that have somehow been lost in all of the loud babble that has come to surround Big Data. Using recent work on the BBC Great British Class Survey as an example this brief paper offers a reflexive and critical reflection on what has become – much to the surprise of its authors – one of the most cited papers in the discipline of sociology in the last decade. (shrink)

Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are (...) the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b−1 > ~ 10^11 GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice. (shrink)

Two main uses of categories are classification and feature inference, and category labels have been widely shown to play a dominant role in feature inference. However, the nature of this influence remains unclear, and we evaluate two contrasting hypotheses formalized as mathematical models: the label special-mechanism hypothesis and the label super-salience hypothesis. The special-mechanism hypothesis is that category labels, unlike other features, trigger inference decision making in reference to the category prototypes. This results in a tendency for prototype-compatible inferences because (...) the labels trigger a special mechanism rather than because of any influences they have on similarity evaluation. The super-salience hypothesis assumes that the large label influence is due to their high salience and corresponding impact on similarity without any need for a special mechanism. Application of the two models to a feature inference task based on a family resemblance category structure yields strong support for the label super-salience hypothesis and in particular does not support the need for a special mechanism based on prototypes. (shrink)

This book takes a fascinating look at the linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi--a bonobo who has achieved stunning cognitive and linguistic skills.

We statisticians, with our specific concern for uncertainty, are even more liable than other practical men to encounter philosophy, whether we like it or not. For my part, I like it comparatively well. That is why the honor of opening this session of discussion has come to me, though my background makes my knowledge and idiom somewhat different from your own.

The authors of this article examine deliberative democracy and the value of dialogue in promoting the engagement of communities in deliberation and involvement in public issues. Focusing on the Texas Forum (TF), a member of the National Issues Forum (NIF), the authors discuss how diverse individuals are brought together with the purpose of cultivating public dialogue and discourse about significant policy issues, with a focus on the public's participation in the democratic process. The article addresses changes in civic engagement, dialogue, (...) and the use of technology to mediate civic discourse and create virtual civic communities. The TF and NIF provide practical examples of the work needed in promoting deliberative democracy and civic engagement. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinctive features of the critical agenda associated with the ‘Social Life of Methods’. I argue that although this perspective can be associated with the increasing interest, often associated with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, to reflect on how methods can become objects of inquiry, it also needs to be rooted in the current crisis of positivist methods. I identify the challenge for positivism in terms of the decreasing ability of its procedures to effectively organize increasingly (...) ‘lively’ sources of standardized data, which can now be assembled using aesthetic registers. In developing this argument, I dispute the idea that this development is due to historical shifts linked to the way that methodological devices are playing an increasingly significant role in contemporary social life, which might be argued by writers such as Thrift or Castells. I also argue that by opening up issues of method to the aesthetic, we also recast the relationship between theory and method, pointing to the exhaustion of a certain kind of cultural theory within the social sciences. I contextualize these issues by considering how methods are implicated in the intellectual differentiation between scientific and humanities expertise. Rather than conceiving the ‘Social Life of Methods’ in terms of the rise of instrumentalist modes of governance, it is preferable to place it within the dialectic of transparency and the relationship between the implicit and explicit. These issues are addressed through introducing the papers in the special issue. (shrink)

Churchland proposes a radically new way of representing theories and their acquisition in the terms of connectionist neuro- science. ...

This book takes a fascinating look at the linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi--a bonobo who has achieved stunning cognitive and linguistic skills.