Understanding how people comprehend visual narratives (including picture stories, comics, and film) requires the combination of traditionally separate theories that span the initial sensory and perceptual processing of complex visual scenes, the perception of events over time, and comprehension of narratives. Existing piecemeal approaches fail to capture the interplay between these levels of processing. Here, we propose the Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT), as applied to visual narratives, which distinguishes between front-end and back-end cognitive processes. Front-end processes occur (...) during single eye fixations and are comprised of attentional selection and information extraction. Back-end processes occur across multiple fixations and support the construction of event models, which reflect understanding of what is happening now in a narrative (stored in working memory) and over the course of the entire narrative (stored in long-term episodic memory). We describe relationships between front- and back-end processes, and medium-specific differences that likely produce variation in front-end and back-end processes across media (e.g., picture stories vs. film). We describe several novel research questions derived from SPECT that we have explored. By addressing these questions, we provide greater insight into how attention, information extraction, and event model processes are dynamically coordinated to perceive and understand complex naturalistic visual events in narratives and the real world. (shrink)

The world food economy has undergone a basic transformation during the seventies. Not only did the world have surplus stocks and excess production capacity at the beginning of the decade, but it also appeared that both would be around for a long time to come. Suddenly in 1972 and 1973, they disappeared and the whole world was trying to make it from one harvest to the next. During the mid-seventies global food insecurity was greater than at any time since the (...) war-torn years immediately following World War II. (shrink)

This volume presents political phenomenology as a new specialty in western philosophical and political thought that is post-classical, post-Machiavellian, and post-behavioral. It draws on history and sets the agenda for future explorations of political issues. It discloses crossroads between ethics and politics and explores border-crossing issues. All the essays in this volume challenge existing ideas of politics significantly. As such they open new ways for further explorations BY future generations of phenomenologists and non-phenomenologists alike. Moreover, the comprehensive chronological bibliography is (...) unprecedented and provides not only an excellent picture of what phenomenologists have already done but also a guide for the future. (shrink)

In the first part of this essay it is contended that Schutz''s project is best called the philosophical theory of the cultural sciences; in the last parts it is shown that he offers satisfactory rudiments of a theory of the historical sciences except where the differentia specifica of those sciences is concerned. The central part is devoted to women''s liberation as a case of contemporary history in relation to which Schutz''s thought about the historical sciences needs correction.

This paper raises some minor questions about Lisa Tessman's book, Burdened Virtues. Friedman's questions pertain, among other things, to the adequacy of a virtue ethical focus on character, the apparent implication of virtue ethics that oppressors suffer damaged characters and are not any better off than the oppressed, the importance of whether privileged persons may have earned their privileges, and the oppositional anger that movement feminists sometimes direct against each other.

This volume insists that, if we are to properly face the challenges of the coming century, we need to re-examine international politics and development through the prism of ethics and morality. International relations must now contend with a widening circle of participants reflecting the diversity and unevenness of status, memory, gender, race, culture and class. Contributors to this volume challenge North America's privileged position in world politics, suggest initiatives for improving the quality of human existence in tangible ways, and critique (...) the conventional wisdom on how we think we can create peace and justice. Re-Framing the International shows that, when we develop projects for world reform, we must remember that the most basic prevailing assumptions of modern law, politics, and culture are by no means as obvious, natural, or progressive as we formerly thought. (shrink)

How modern economics is a social rather than historical cultural science, how it can produce adequate accounts in scientific constructs about common-sense constructs, can relate objectivistic accounts to subjective interpretations, how it can be theoretical, and how it hypothesizes marginal utility is all expounded in relation to Schutz’s theory of science, especially what he calls “postulates.”.

How modern economics is a social rather than historical cultural science, how it can produce adequate accounts in scientific constructs about common-sense constructs, can relate objectivistic accounts to subjective interpretations, how it can be theoretical, and how it hypothesizes marginal utility is all expounded in relation to Schutz’s theory of science, especially what he calls “postulates.”.

Autonomy has risen in esteem, then fallen, only to rise again in recent theorizing about women in society and culture. In this paper, I further bolster the renewed feminist interest in autonomy. I characterize feminist social aspirations in terms of three very abstract goals and then argue that women’s individual autonomy promotes at least two of them in crucial ways. Women’s autonomy will improve the quality of the close personal relationships that pervade women’s traditional moral concems (the first goal) and (...) it will enable women the better to resist traditional, gender-based constraints on their lives (the second goal). My conclusion is tempered, however, by the view that individual autonomy interferes to a significant degree with the solidarity and collective action by women needed to effect feminist social change (the third goal). In passing, I gesture toward a conception of autonomy as a certain kind of narrative of self-development. (shrink)

This highly interdisciplinary volume explores the political and cultural dimensions of citizenship and their relevance to women and gender. Containing essays by leading scholars such as Iris Marion Young, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, and Sandra Bartky, it examines the conceptual issues and strategies at play in the feminist quest to give women full citizenship status. The contributors take a fresh look at issues, going beyond conventional critiques, and examining problems in the political and social arrangements, practices, and conditions that diminish (...) women's citizenship in various parts of the world including both Western and undeveloped nations. (shrink)

After addressing the question of whether Aron Gurwitsch (1901–1973) even had a theory of psychology, which is not obvious unless one collates the many dispersed remarks, a well-documented exposition of that theory is offered that clarifies the data, categories, field, methods, and topics of the versions of psychology he advocated.

He who sees everywhere only nature, nature in the sense of, and, as it were, through the eyes of, natural science, is precisely blind to the spiritual sphere, the special domain of the human sciences. Such a one does not see persons and does not see the Objects which depend for their sense upon personal performances, i.e., Objects of “culture.” (IV: 191).

Originally published in French under the title La Logique de Husserl: Étude sur Logique Formelle et logique transcendentale.

Alfred Schutz’s scattered remarks about cultural anthropology can be related to the rubrics of disciplinary definition, basic concepts, and distinctive methods and also to his notion of the theoretical level in social science by consulting current textbooks. This shows a way in which a theory of this particular science can be developed that would fit into a general Schutzian Wissenschaftslehre of the cultural sciences.

La cultura tiene muchas dimensiones, por ejemplo, la del género; pero, ¿qué pasa con la cultura de una nación tomándola como un todo? ¿Se puede uno aproximar fenomenológicamente a este tema? Usando una pequeña nación como ejemplo y utilizando una historia popular, yo debato aquí, en primer lugar, sobre cómo los objetos culturales concretos son diferentes de los objetos naturalistas una vez que estos se abstraen de todas las funciones o, mejor, usos que tienen. A continuación, describo Taiwan de modo (...) naturalista: geográficamente, geológicamente, ecológicamente, etc., y, después, antropológicamente, con respecto a cómo ha sido poblada. Dejando de lado la abstracción, lo siguiente es evocar aspectos culturales de esta isla para sus ciudadanos, en términos de religión, cultura alta, sistema social, economía y política. Estos aspectos ciertamente son diferentes para otras culturas nacionales, pero todas ellas tienen aspectos de este tipo y partiendo de este ejemplo uno podría ir más allá, a la cultura nacional en general. (shrink)

Although a key aspect of the phenomenological movement is its contribution to value theory and value perception, there has been relatively little attention paid to these themes. This volume in part makes up for this lacuna by being the first anthology on value-theory in the phenomenological movement. It indicates the scope of the issues by discussing, e.g., the distinctive acts of valuing, openness to value, the objectivity of values, the summation and combination of values, the deconstruction of values, the value (...) of absence, and the value of nature. It also contains discussions of most of the major representative figures not only in their own right but also in relationship to one another: Von Ehrenfels, Brentano, Scheler, Hartmann, Husserl, Heidegger, Schutz, and Derrida. (shrink)