scholarly journals Death and the form of life

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102110245
Author(s):  
Finn Bowring
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Preliminary Discussion ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Ethical Critique ◽  
Insight Into

This article explores the relevance of death to the value of life. After a preliminary discussion of the human experience of mortality, I consider Heidegger’s argument that death is a condition of authenticity, Sartre’s claim that death is an externality that is irrelevant because it cannot be lived and Simmel’s theory that death is a boundary that is transcended by life. While all theories have their merits, I suggest that Simmel’s approach, which articulates well with Levinas’s ethical critique of Heidegger, offers important insight into our responsibility for other people and for the survival of other forms of life.

scholarly journals Dismembering organisation: The coordination of algorithmic work in healthcare

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 546-571
Author(s):  
Simon Bailey ◽  
Dean Pierides ◽  
Adam Brisley ◽  
Clara Weisshaar ◽  
Tom Blakeman
Keyword(s):  
Acute Kidney Injury ◽  
Kidney Injury ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Healthcare Settings ◽  
Expected Performance ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
Insight Into

Algorithms are increasingly being adopted in healthcare settings, promising increased safety, productivity and efficiency. The growing sociological literature on algorithms in healthcare shares an assumption that algorithms are introduced to ‘support’ decisions within an interactive order that is predominantly human-oriented. This article presents a different argument, calling attention to the manner in which organisations can end up introducing a non-negotiable disjuncture between human-initiated care work and work that supports algorithms, which the authors call algorithmic work. Drawing on an ethnographic study, the authors describe how two hospitals in England implemented an Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) algorithm and analyse ‘interruptions’ to the algorithm’s expected performance. When the coordination of algorithmic work occludes care work, the study finds a ‘dismembered’ organisation that is algorithmically-oriented rather than human-oriented. In the discussion, the authors examine the consequences of coordinating human and non-human work in each hospital and conclude by urging sociologists of organisation to attend to the importance of the formal in algorithmic work. As the use of algorithms becomes widespread, the analysis provides insight into how organisations outside of healthcare can also end up severing tasks from human experience when algorithmic automation is introduced.

Towards a Rhetoric of Experience: the Role of Enargeia in the Essays of Montaigne.

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Paul Sharpling
Keyword(s):  
Visual Representation ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Linguistic Expression ◽  
French Renaissance ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
Insight Into

The aim of this paper is to explore the Montaigne's use of enargeia in three essays: ''Des Cannibales,'' ''Des Coches'' and ''De l'exercitation.'' During the French Renaissance, enargeia remained a central means by which writers transferred living experience into language. The elaborate visual possibilities offered by enargeia, encapsulated in the writings of Quintilian, were popularised in France through the diffusion of Erasmus's rhetorical handbook De diuplici copia verborum ac rerum. However, the sense of graphic presence and truth conveyed by Erasmus's handbook came to be challenged through the increasing awareness of the disparity between living experience and verbal language. In his Essais, Montaigne's awareness of the deceptive properties of visual representation allows him to explore, often playfully, the pleasures and instabilities of linguistic expression, and to gain a heightened insight into the perceptual inadequacy which characterize much human behaviour. In this way, Montaigne poignantly demonstrates the instructive nature of rhetorical theories on which he draws to illustrate his understanding of human experience.

Movement in Repose

Qui Parle ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-49
Author(s):  
Aaron Frederick Eldridge
Keyword(s):  
Modern Concept ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Philosophical Ethic ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Point Of Departure

Abstract How does tradition, a transmission of body and language, disclose a form of life? This article takes as its point of departure Talal Asad’s methodological pivot away from the modern concept of “belief” to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “form of life.” It elaborates the philosophical and anthropological implications of a rigorous notion of form of life through Asad’s concept of tradition and Martin Heidegger’s rereading of Aristotle’s physis. Interrupting this theoretical argument, a scene from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with Orthodox Christian ascetics in Lebanon exemplifies the challenge (and insistence) of form of life. The article then turns to consider a powerful reading of form of life grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s theory of emanation and vitalist univocity. While echoing the concerns of this article, Spinoza’s philosophical ethic defers the central question posed by “form of life” by making the latter a world-producing apparatus. That approach to form of life foregrounds the possibility of being other than what one is, rather than the crucial question of “still experience” and its dynamic repose. The article concludes by reading this still experience alongside C. Nadia Seremetakis’s work in Greece, which details the work of stillness and memory, the deathly pain of history, as sites where the cultivation of noncontemporaneous forms of life are brought into relief.

Demos distracted

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-162
Author(s):  
Sergei Prozorov
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Human Condition

In Chapter 5 Prozorov argues that the ontological contingency that defines democracy is accessible in our lived experience in states of distraction, characterized by the alternation between captivation and boredom. This alternation makes it possible for us to dwell within plural forms of life in a non-definitive manner, retaining our potentiality for being otherwise. He develops this argument by critically re-engaging with Heidegger’s discussion of curiosity and distraction in Being and Time. Prozorov argues that democracy is existentially experienced in the potentiality for perpetual alternation between captivation and boredom in whatever form of life we dwell in, which constitutes our lives as freeform, always manifesting the possibility of being otherwise than they are. In this manner he grounds the possibility of democratic biopolitics in the aspect of the human condition familiar and available to all, thus demonstrating its realizability.

Swansong biospheres: refuges for life and novel microbial biospheres on terrestrial planets near the end of their habitable lifetimes

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack T. O'Malley-James ◽  
Jane S. Greaves ◽  
John A. Raven ◽  
Charles S. Cockell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Model ◽  
Cold Trap ◽  
Sequence Evolution ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Earth Like Planets ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Complex Forms ◽  
End Stage ◽  
Micro Organisms ◽  
Host Stars

AbstractThe future biosphere on Earth (as with its past) will be made up predominantly of unicellular micro-organisms. Unicellular life was probably present for at least 2.5 Gyr before multicellular life appeared and will likely be the only form of life capable of surviving on the planet in the far future, when the ageing Sun causes environmental conditions to become more hostile to more complex forms of life. Therefore, it is statistically more likely that habitable Earth-like exoplanets we discover will be at a stage in their habitable lifetime more conducive to supporting unicellular, rather than multicellular life. The end stage of habitability on Earth is the focus of this work. A simple, latitude-based climate model incorporating eccentricity and obliquity variations is used as a guide to the temperature evolution of the Earth over the next 3 Gyr. This allows inferences to be made about potential refuges for life, particularly in mountains and cold-trap (ice) caves and what forms of life could live in these environments. Results suggest that in high latitude regions, unicellular life could persist for up to 2.8 Gyr from present. This begins to answer the question of how the habitability of Earth will evolve at local scales alongside the Sun's main sequence evolution and, by extension, how the habitability of Earth-like planets would evolve over time with their own host stars.

scholarly journals CHAINS OF CONNECTION: RETHINKING THE BOURGEOISIE

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 285-301
Author(s):  
THEODORE KODITSCHEK
Keyword(s):  
Graduate School ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Year ◽  
Material World ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

Since his first year in graduate school, Jerrold Seigel has puzzled over the relationship between modernity and the bourgeoisie. Willing to acknowledge the salience of this class in the making of the modern, he grew increasingly troubled by the failure of every effort to give a clear account of its distinctive historical role. To define the bourgeoisie as simply the group(s) in the middle, “all those who are neither peasants nor workers on the one side, nor aristocrats by birth on the other,” might be empirically accurate, he reasoned, but this provided no analytical insight into the processes of history. The Marxist alternative avoids this vacuity, but only by creating a mythology of the ascendant bourgeoisie—a class that by mere dint of its privileged relation to capital is deemed to be capable of entirely transforming the realms of culture, politics, and the material world. Dissatisfied with these conventional approaches, Seigel introduced a fundamentally new way of thinking in his seminal synthesisModernity and Bourgeois Life, which sought to replace the “traditional nominative formulation [of the bourgeoisie's role] with ones that are more adjectival and historical.” Considering “‘bourgeois’, not in terms of the rise of a class,” he has reconceptualized this term to denote “the emergence and elaboration of a certain ‘form of life’.” It is in connection with this project that Seigel developed the two key concepts that will be considered in this essay, “chains of connection” and “networks of means” (MBL, ix, 6, 25).

Betrayal in Teaching-Learning: A Sword in the Heart

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-21
Author(s):  
Nan Russell Yancey
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Student ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Undergraduate Student ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
New Faculty ◽  
Teaching Learning ◽  
Insight Into

In this article, the human experience of betrayal is explored within teaching-learning, where trust might be expected and the notion of betrayal might seem counterintuitive. To gain insight into this experience, the unique perspectives of an undergraduate student, a graduate student, and a new faculty are considered through the stories they shared with the author about betrayal in teaching-learning. The humanbecoming paradigm provided a unique perspective to view these stories and explore the unlimited possibilities emerging when human dignity and freedom to choose are honored.

scholarly journals Elucidating Forms of Life. The Evolution of a Philosophical Tool

2015 ◽  
pp. 155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Boncompagni
Keyword(s):  
General Attitude ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Expression Form

Although the expression “form of life” and its plural “forms of life” occur only five times in Philosophical Investigations, and generally few times in his works, it is commonly agreed that this is one of the most relevant issues in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Starting from the analysis of the contexts in which Wittgenstein makes use of this concept, the paper focuses on the different interpretations that have been given in secondary literature, and proposes a classification based on two axes of debate: the monistic versus pluralistic interpretation, and the empirical versus transcendental interpretation. After placing some well-known readings in the resulting scheme, an attempt will be made to offer an evolutionary reading of Wittgenstein’s own ideas about forms of life. It will be argued that the empirical and plural view that seems characteristic of his writings in the Thirties, slowly appears to turn towards a monistic view, sometimes with transcendental tones, although within a pragmatic perspective. This turn remains nevertheless rooted in Wittgenstein’s general attitude towards philosophy intended as a conceptual inquiry with clarifying and therapeutic aims.

scholarly journals Forms of Life

2015 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hacker
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Transformation Rules ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Varied History

The phrase ‘Lebensform’ (form of life) had a long and varied history prior to Wittgenstein’s use of it on a mere three occasions in the Philosophical Investigations. It is not a pivotal concept in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But it is a minor signpost of a major reorientation of philosophy, philosophy of language and logic, and philosophy of mathematics that Wittgenstein instigated. For Wittgenstein sought to replace the conception of a language as a meaning calculus (Frege, Russell, the Tractatus) by an anthropological or ethnological conception. A language is not a class of sentences that can be formed from a set of axioms (definitions), formation and transformation rules and the meanings of which is given by their truth-conditions, but an open-ended series of interlocking language-games constituting a form of life or way of living (a culture). Wittgenstein’s uses of ‘Lebensform’ and its cognates, both in the Investigations and in his Nachlass are severally analysed, and various exegetical misinterpretations are clarified.

scholarly journals Exploring Forms of Life in Player Development Pathways: The Case of British Rugby League

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyn Rothwell ◽  
Joseph Stone ◽  
Keith Davids
Keyword(s):  
Football Player ◽  
Rugby League ◽  
Environmental Constraints ◽  
Development Research ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Rugby League Player

Social, cultural, and historical constraints can influence attitudes towards learning, developing, and performing in sport. A recent conceptualization of these environmental constraints in athlete development pathways is a form of life, which describes the values, beliefs, traditions, customs, and behaviors that contribute to an athlete’s development. Although a form of life can have a powerful influence on athlete development, research exploring this relationship is limited. In this article we explore the form of life in British rugby league football player development contexts to clarify how social, cultural, and historical constraints influence the development of rugby league players in the United Kingdom. Twenty-four coaches were interviewed through individual semi-structured interviews to collect the data. Findings show how forms of life in rugby league player development pathways are established and maintained by the complex interactions between the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem that shape and guide the development of players. We recommend that player development pathways in sport underpin practice with a theoretical framework of the learning process to protect athletes from social, cultural, and historical constraints that are not conducive to their development.

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