Science, thought and nature: Hegel’s completion of Kant’s idealism [Special Issue]

Focusing on Hegel’s engagement with Kant’s theoretical philosophy, the paper shows the merits of its characterisation as “completion”. The broader aim is to offer a fresh perspective on familiar historical arguments and on contemporary discussions of philosophical naturalism by examining the distinctive combination of idealism and naturalism that motivates the priority both authors accord to the topics of testability of philosophical claims and of the nature of the relation between philosophy and the natural science. Linking these topics is a question about how the demands of unification—imposed internally, relative to conceptions of the proper conduct of philosophical enquiry—can accommodate realism, a key element in establishing disciplinary parity between philosophy and the natural sciences. The distance that ultimately marks Kant’s and Hegel’s answers to this question justifies the interpretative claim about completion, while the conceptual patterns exemplified in the posing of the question and in their shared assumptions about its philosophical importance justifies the reconstructive claim about “idealist naturalism

Conceptual Patterns of Changes in University Students’ Explanations During DC-Circuit Tasks

Peer reviewe

Filling in the Blanks

Eugene Gendlin claims that he wants "to think with more than conceptual structures, forms, distinctions, with more than cut and presented things" (WCS 29).1 He wants situations in their concreteness to be something we can think with, not just analyze conceptually. He wants to show that "conceptual patterns are doubtful and always exceeded, but the excess seems unable to think itself. It seems to become patterns when we try to think it. This has been the problem of twentieth century philosophy" (WCS 29). As a result he has "long been concerned with what is not formed although always in some form" (TAD 1). In this essay I would like to explore some of the issues surrounding the relation of the unformed and the formed. Gendlin says that "we get beyond the forms by thinking precisely in them" (TAD 1). The two emphasized words have to be considered separately as well as together. In many essays Gendlin's main concern is with the "precisely": can something that is not fully formed and definite still direct us as we carry forward language and action? My discussion begins with that issue; I suggest ways that Gendlin's proposal connects with and differs from some current ideas in epistemology and the philosophy of language. Then my discussion moves to the "in": what sense can we make of the formed being unformed? Finally I suggest that Gendlin's program runs into some difficulties in this connection

Downsizing: Some Aspects ofCommunication and Social Impact

This study, being essentially empirical in nature, is based on primary data relating to Indian organizations. The primary data has been collected through a sample survey based on a questionnaire focusing on the following aspects of organizational communication: (a) Nature of Communication, focusing on the proportion of working time spent in talking and listening and also the perceived extent of non-verbal communication. (b) Communication Content, focusing on the communication of compliments and criticism across levels. (c) Communication Outcomes, focusing on the communication goof-ups and the degree of satisfaction with ones communication dealings within the organization. An attempt has been made in the study to try and examine communication dealings by differentiating between the people working in the Corporate & Academic organizations; and Males & Females. The study highlights significant differences between males and females in terms of several aspects of organizational communication. There are a few differences in some aspects of organizational communication between the people working in the corporate and academic organizations. In most cases, the differences in the given aspects of organizational communication across categories and levels observed in this study seem to corroborate the broad conceptual patterns emerging from the available literature on organizational communication.

Investigating the Effects of Exploratory Semantic Search on the Use of a Museum Archive

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in how new technologies can support the more effective use of online museum content. Two particularly relevant developments are exploratory search and semantic web technologies. Exploratory search tools support a more undirected and serendipitous interaction with the content. Semantic web technology, when applied in this context, allows the exploitation of metadata and ontologies to provide more intelligent support for user interaction. Bletchley Park Text is a museum web application supporting a semantic driven, exploratory approach to the search and navigation of digital museum resources. Bletchley Park Text uses semantics to organise selected content (i.e. stories) into a number of composite pages that illustrate conceptual patterns in the content, and from which the content itself can be accessed. The use made of Bletchley Park Text over an eight month period was analysed in order to understand the kinds of trajectories across the available resources that users could make with such a system. The results identified two distinct strategies of exploratory search. A risky strategy was characterised as incorporating: conceptual jumps between successive queries, a larger number of shorter queries and the use of the stories themselves to acclimatise to a new set of search results. A cautious strategy was characterised as incorporating: small conceptual shifts between queries, a smaller number of longer queries and the use of composite pages to acclimatise to a set of new search results. These findings have implications for the intelligent scaffolding of exploratory search

Modelos conceptuales sobre las relaciones entre digestión, respiración y circulación

Conceptual patterns of the relations digestionlcirculatory system and breathinglcirculatory system, found in a sample of non-university students whose ages range between 11 and 17 years old are described in this work. These patterns show that students' conceptions are relatively organized in their conceptual structure and in spite of being sometimes incomplete and wrong, they seem to be coherent for them, even making up real theories that they use to explain any problematic situation connected with these processes

Introduction

\u27A second epoch of colonisation\u27 - this is how Wole Soyinka characterises Western theoretical practice as it applies itself, even with the best of intentions, to the cultural productions of the non-Western world. And it would be fair to say that post-colonial writing - by which we mean writing that is grounded in the cultural realities of those societies whose subjectivity has been constituted at least in part by the subordinating power of European colonialism - contains hundreds of such statements: statements which lay bare the material, often devastating, consequences of a centuries-long imposition of Euro-American conceptual patterns onto a world that is at once \u27out there\u27 and yet thoroughly assimilable to the psychic grasp of Western cognition

Native Language (L1) Transfer in Second Language Learning: From Form to Concept, the Implications

The influence that a student’s first language (L1) can have on their acquisition of a second language (L2) has been frequently noted by language teachers (Swan, 1997; Jarvis, 2007) and documented in the literature for decades. However, thinking has gradually evolved in terms of the form that influence could take. Early research work focussed on transfer of syntax or form, but recently the role that L1 conceptual information plays in transfer has come to the fore. The 1960s saw a plethora of contrastive studies inspired by the work of Robert Lado (1957), where languages were analysed using the prevailing structuralist approaches to language description. These contrastive studies were conceived with the view to predicting the types of errors speakers of one language would make while learning another, and this became known as the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) (Lado, 1957). This view was based in the behaviourist paradigm of the time which saw language learning as habit formation. This implied that learning a new language meant the transfer of elements and features from the first language to the target language, and that old ‘habits’ may interfere with second language acquisition (Aarts, 1982). Pairs of languages were compared in terms of their similarities and differences looking at linguistic units in relation to the overarching system to which they belonged (see Vinay & Darbelnet, 1960; Agard & Di Pietro, 1965, for examples). However, the CAH was severely criticised in the late 1960s, as it did not seem to be able to predict any classroom errors that language teachers had not already noticed, and was not able to offer any solutions with regard to how to deal with these errors (Corder, 1967).peer-reviewe