Interpreting Practice: Dilthey, Epistemology, and the Hermeneutics of Historical Life

This paper explores Dilthey’s radical transformation of epistemology and the human sciences through his projects of a critique of historically embodied reason and his hermeneutics of historically mediated life. Answering criticisms that Dilthey overly depends on epistemology, I show how for Dilthey neither philosophy nor the human sciences should be reduced to their theoretical, epistemological, or cognitive dimensions. Dilthey approaches both immediate knowing and theoretical knowledge in the context of a hermeneutical phenomenology of historical life. Knowing is not an isolated activity but an interpretive and self-interpretive practice oriented by situated reflexive awareness and self-reflection. As embedded in an historical relational context, knowing does not only consist of epistemic validity claims about representational contents but is fundamentally practical, involving all of human existence. Empirically informed Besinnung, with its double reference to sense as meaning and bodily awareness, orients Dilthey’s inquiry rather than the “irrationalism” of immediate intuition or the “rationalism” of abstract epistemological reasoning

Encountering Nature: Toward an Environmental Culture

Review of : Encountering Nature: Toward an Environmental Culture by Thomas Hey

Heidegger and the Questionability of the Ethical

Despite Heidegger’s critique of ethics, his use of ethically-inflected language intimates an interpretive ethics of encounter involving self-interpreting agents in their hermeneutical context and the formal indication of factical life as a situated dwelling open to possibilities enacted through practices of care, interpretation, and individuation. Existence is constituted practically in Dasein’s addressing, encountering, and responding to itself, others, and its world. Unlike rule-based or virtue ethics, this ethos of responsive encounter and individuating confrontation challenges any grounding in a determinate or exemplary model of reason, human nature, the virtues, or tradition

Dysfunctional Text Messaging as Related to Social Anxiety, Self-Esteem, Emotional Intelligence, and Attentional Control

Despite the widespread and increasing use and popularity of text messaging since the mid 1990\u27s, the extent of the psychological literature regarding this technology is scarce. Chief amongst these underexplored areas is the relationship that text messaging, as a mode of Nonverbal Asynchronous Communication, has with Verbal Synchronous Communication abilities. For this study, these abilities have been operationalized as social anxiety, self-esteem, emotional intelligence, and attentional control. The available research implies a relationship between these concepts. Despite mostly theoretical links in the literature, no study had attempted to measure many of these relationships empirically. This study examined the relationship between text messaging, social anxiety, self-esteem, emotional intelligence, and attentional control, and explored the nature of these relationships. Participants responded to scales measuring self-perception of text message dependency, problem use of text messaging, and the variables operationalizing Verbal Synchronous Communication abilities. Results of the study show that many of these factors do correlate with dysfunctional text messaging. Implications of these findings, limitations of the study, and suggestions for future research are discussed

Schleiermacher on Language, Religious Feeling, and the Ineffable

This paper is about the relevance of the ineffable and the singular to hermeneutics. I respond to standard criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher by Karl Barth and Hans-Georg Gadamer in order to clarify his understanding of language, interpretation, and religion. Schleiermacher’s “indicative hermeneutics” is developed in the context of the ethical significance of communication and the ineffable. The notion of trace is employed in order to interpret the paradox of speaking about that which cannot be spoken. The trace is not a brute singularity but bears a fundamental relationship to the word—and ultimately the word of God—for Schleiermache

Moral and Political Prudence in Kant

This paper challenges the standard view that Kant ignored the role of prudence in moral life by arguing that there are two notions of prudence at work in his moral and political thought. First, prudence is ordinarily understood as a technical imperative of skill that consists in reasoning about the means to achieve a particular conditional end. Second, prudence functions as a secondary form of practical thought that plays a significant role in the development of applied moral and political judgment. The political judgment of citizens and politicians is prudence regulatively guided by right and virtue. As informed by regulative ideas, prudential judgment negotiates the demands of these ideas in relation to the cultural, political, and social realities of a particular form of life. This sense of prudence is empirically informed and involves a context-sensitive application of morality as well as conceptions of individual and general welfar

Estimates of Red Drum Mortality via Acoustic Telemetry

Subadult (age \u3c 3) Red Drum Sciaenops ocellatus support a valuable recreational fishery, and mortality estimates for young Red Drum are needed for proper management. To obtain these estimates, age-1 and age-2 Red Drum were implanted with acoustic transmitters and external Floy tags in two coastal Alabama rivers (Fowl and Dog rivers). Fates of tagged fish were inferred from stationary receiver detections and active relocations over 1 year. These fates were used in a Bayesian multistate model to estimate instantaneous monthly and annual mortality and emigration rates for each river and overall from both rivers. Instantaneous monthly fishing mortality (F) ranged from 0.001 to 0.112 (annual F = 0.414) in Dog River, from 0.001 to 0.126 in Fowl River (annual F = 0.309), and was 0.001–0.054 (annual F = 0.337) overall. Instantaneous monthly natural mortality (M) ranged from 0.001 to 0.002 (annual M= 0.069) in Dog River, from 0.001 to 0.036 (annual M= 0.178) in Fowl River, and from 0.001 to 0.017 (annual M= 0.090) overall. The overall annual estimate of instantaneous total mortality (Z) was 0.435. The median escapement percentage was estimated at 36.3% (95% posterior credible interval = 19.5–56.0%) using M and Z from the overall model. Unfortunately, the error on this estimate was large and inconclusive as to whether the 30% escapement goal for juvenile Red Drum to the adult population from Dog and Fowl rivers is being met. Monthly residency estimates were typically greater than 0.90, and overall annual residency was estimated at 0.716. Fishing mortality estimates from the current study are higher than recent catch curve estimates that did not include young Red Drum. These results demonstrate that young Red Drum need to be accounted for when generating mortality estimates and provide needed data for the Red Drum recreational fishery

The Effects of Combined Movement and Storytelling Intervention on Motor Skills in South Asian and White Children Aged 5–6 Years Living in the United Kingdom

Early motor development has an important role in promoting physical activity (PA) during childhood and across the lifespan. Children from South Asian backgrounds are less active and have poorer motor skills, thus identifying the need for early motor skill instruction. This study examines the effect of a movement and storytelling intervention on South Asian children’s motor skills. Following ethics approval and consent, 39 children (46% South Asian) participated in a 12-week movement and storytelling intervention. Pre and post, seven motor skills (run, jump, throw, catch, stationary dribble, roll, and kick) were assessed using Children’s Activity and Movement in Preschool Study protocol. At baseline, South Asian children had poorer performance of motor skills. Following the intervention, all children improved their motor skills, with a bigger improvement observed for South Asian children. Early intervention provided remedial benefits to delays in motor skills and narrowed the motor skills gap in ethnic groups