Psychologists investigating dreams in non-Western cultures have generally not considered the meanings of dreams within the unique meaning-structure of the person in his or her societal context. The study was concerned with explicating the indigenous system of dream interpretation of the Xhosa-speaking people, as revealed by acknowledged dream experts, and elaborating upon the life-world of the participants. Fifty dreams and their interpretations were collected from participants, who were traditional healers and their clients. A phenomenological methodology was adopted in explicating the (...) data. Themes explicated included : the physiognomy of the dreamer's life-world as revealed by significant dreams, the interpretation of significant dreams as revealed through action, and human bodiliness as revealed in dream interpretations. The participants' approach to dreams is not based upon an explicit theory, but upon an immediate and pathic understanding of the dream phenomenon. The understanding is based upon the interpreter's concrete understanding of the life-world, which includes the possibility of cosmic integration and continuity between personal and trans-personal realms of being. (shrink)

Este artigo começa com uma afirmação de Dewey que retirada do contexto consiste no maior desastre que o pensamento filosófico pode incorrer. Ela explora o valor heurístico da noção de Dewey de um contexto não apenas para a filosofia, mas para o pensamento e a vida como um todo. Contextos possuem poder existencial profundo tanto que os temos encarnados em nós mesmos. Contextos funcionam como panos de fundo, conforme determinam embasamentos, influenciando de maneira ampla como ante-estruturas de nossas formas de (...) sentimentos, nossos padrões de ação, e os idiomas nos quais nos descrevemos, bem como nossos mundos. Dewey também pensa em contextos como espécies de atmosferas ou brumas, conectando-os com as qualidades determinantes das situações problemáticas nas quais nós nos encontramos. Sustento o argumento de Dewey com ferramentas analíticas fornecidas pela análise da encarnação e da natureza tácita de premissas de Michael Polanyi, e pela exploração da noção de atmosferas e espaços harmonizados de Gernot Böhme. O reconhecimento dos diversos tipos de contextos, nos quais as pessoas vivem e a partir das quais elas falam, é essencial para chegarmos aos tipos de confiança que reduzem o apelo à força e possibilitam acordos em significados comuns enquanto reconhecem as raízes existenciais da diferença. (shrink)

Papers in this special issue were written upon invitation. They were then subjected to the usual refereeing process of the Journal of Pragmatics. While we have attempted to cover almost all important areas in which context is employed as a conceptual apparatus, our coverage is clearly limited in scope. Accordingly, instead of a general updated overview of the use of context in every conceivable specific field (let's say the state-of-the-art of interdisciplinary research on context: a colossal/impossible enterprise!), we will offer (...) the readers of this special issue an introduction to the problems involved in the study of context by way of eight papers encompassing eight different areas. These are (in alphabetical order): artificial intelligence, bilingualism, child development, cognitive science, conversation analysis, neuroscience, philosophy of language, and pragmatics. Our goal is to propose a multi-faceted view of context, and to stimulate further investigations of this fertile topic, which permeates our lives. (shrink)