The central question of my dissertation is “How can we play for our wellbeing?” followed by sub-questions, including “Why is play important to human-being?” “How shall we characterize the notion of play?” “How could play benefit philosophy, art, and education?” I investigate the questions through philosophical research that draws upon the existing literature in the fields of Hermeneutics, Cosmopolitanism, and the philosophies of education about play, philosophy, and education. I argue that play is a joyful aspect of experience that can potentially teach us an aesthetic manner of embracing differences and possibilities, especially concerning our individual growth and engagement in social interactions. To show this, I propose that play orients the player into seeing, thinking, and being differently towards a larger harmony or a fuller being. The player will be driven to respect others and accommodate differences with wonder and hospitality. Meantime, the educative play with its playful spirit can enhance the culture of justice and beauty essential to building a healthy, peaceful, and sustainable human inhabitation.

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Thesis advisor: Angela K. Harkins / Thesis advisor: Giovanni B. Bazzana / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

No description available.

No / The aim of this article is to describe a dialogical approach to inquiry that differs somewhat from those that are now influential in psychology, including Shotter's, Wertsch's, Hermans's and Hicks¿s. Although these authors have very usefully drawn attention to dialogical approaches to understanding experience, the academic style of their writing underplays their own responsivity as participants in these dialogues. Whereas some adopt an authoritative or Magistral genre in reporting dialogue with participants, others adopt an explicitly Socratic dialogue that nonetheless tends towards monologue. We suggest that these ambiguities and paradoxes can be traced to Dilthey and Gadamer and the debate associated with their work about the relative weight to be given to content and experience in interpreting dialogue. Furthermore, we use Bakhtin's classification of genres of dialogue to argue for the benefits of a Menippean genre of dialogue, based on imagination and ethics, both as a corrective to the tendency to monologue in Socratic and Magistral dialogues and as a contribution to our understanding of the possibilities inherent in dialogical inquiry. In particular, Menippean dialogue points us in the direction of inquiry as a personal and creative act that places voices (including the authorial voice) in contact with each other with the capacity to enrich and change each other.

This dissertation will make the case that education at the post-secondary level must be reimagined. Rather than being organized around abstract bodies of information, it must be centered on moments of transformation out of which teaching, learning, knowing and -- in fact -- democratic individuals emerge. This reconstruction of education takes place through two primary moves. First, I make the case that contemporary schooling is grounded in a flawed model of knowing, which draws together mistakes in thinking about the nature of the self, of knowledge, and of the world, which are contained in the epistemological proposition: "S knows that p." In doing so, I argue that the German conception of Bildung must replace "S knows that p" as the guiding paradigm of knowing within educational practice. In doing so, I develop a theory of creative inquiry in order to claim that knowledge emerges from embodied, social action and is a form of artistic practice. Second, I develop a pedagogy, which I call emergent pedagogy, based on the theory of inquiry articulated in the first half. Here, I argue that post-secondary pedagogy must emerge out of the contexts, situations, and communities in which students and faculty are embedded. In this way, pedagogy must be considered a kind of artistic practice in which methods are adapted to and intuited from unique problems experienced by the university community. Ultimately, I show that pedagogy must shift from being viewed as a kind of telling and hearing to a form of participatory making. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: John Sallis / This dissertation raises the question of the political world, and pursues it as central theme in the political thought of Hannah Arendt and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Within the phenomenological tradition, world refers to a referential context of relations between beings, within which those beings appear as meaningful. Since Heidegger, the concept of world has been inextricably linked with that of understanding, the disclosedness that guides any interpretation of beings and allows them to appear as what they are. In what sense is the world political? In what sense does the political constitute a world? For Arendt, the political concerns human beings in their plurality. It concerns the relations between members of a polis, who are related to each other by the world that they share in common in action and speech. The polis is not simply a city or a political entity, but a space within which both things and human beings appear according to a distinctively political mode of disclosedness, a plural understanding. In this, Arendt operates within a hermeneutical ontology, though it is often unthematized or underdeveloped within her work. Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy makes it possible to explicate and develop this ontology, illuminating the complex reciprocal relationship Arendt develops between the worldliness of human beings and the space of appearance that arises out of the exchange of interpretive judgments: the political world. The central theme of the political world serves to uncover the hermeneutical underpinnings of Arendt’s political thought, as well as the political implications of Gadamer’s philosophy. Part I shows how an embryonic and unthematized concept of the political world arises from the analysis of being-with [Mitsein] in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Part II proposes a novel systematic interpretation of The Human Condition, situating the conceptual distinctions of the vita activa within a hermeneutical ontology, with particular emphasis on Arendt’s appropriation and development of the concept of world. Part III turns to Gadamer’s treatment of tradition and historically-effected consciousness [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein] in Truth and Method, arguing that the handing-down of tradition describes an historical activity of plural understanding, from which the political world emerges. Part IV traces the development of Arendt’s theory of judgment in tandem with her account of δόξα, the discursive mode proper to plural understanding, and proposes a revisionist interpretation of her mature theory of judgment. Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, rather than a Kantian extended mentality, emerges as an apt description of the space of appearance that emerges within plural interpretive discourse. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in and the publication of more formal scholarship on philosophical hermeneutics and environmental philosophy--i.e. environmental hermeneutics. Grasping how a human understanding of environments is variously mediated and how different levels of meaning can be unconcealed permits deeper ways of looking at environmental ethics and human practices with regard to environments. Beyond supposed simple facts about environments to which humans supposedly rationally respond, environmental hermeneutics uncovers ways in which encounters with environments become meaningful. How we understand and, therefore, choose to act depends not so much on simple facts, but what those facts mean to our lives. Therefore, this dissertation explores three paths. The first is to justify the idea of an environmental hermeneutics with the hermeneutic tradition itself and what environmental hermeneutics is specifically. The second is to demonstrate the benefit of addressing environmental hermeneutics to environmental philosophy. I do this in this dissertation with regard to the debate between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism, a debate which plays a central role in questions of environmental philosophy and ethics. Thirdly, I turn to environmental justice studies where I contend there are complementarities between hermeneutics and environmental justice. From this reality, environmental justice and activism benefit from exploring environmental justice more deeply in light of philosophical hermeneutics. This dissertation is oriented toward a continuing dialogical relation between philosophical hermeneutics and environments insofar as environments are meaningful.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), patients and providers do not understand the Health Information Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Non-compliance with HIPAA is primarily due to confusion, along with insufficient understanding. HSS has taken measures to simplify the language they use to communicate HIPAA, however, they have not taken steps that consider if one's culture, religious and social perspectives, institutional training, credentials, and comprehension of legal terminology affects medical providers and non-clinical administrative personnel's abilities to understand HIPAA. This research uses bibliometrics to examine the literature from January 2010 – September 2020 that addresses HIPAA's use of legal terminology, literacy level, and institutional training, along with religious and social perspectives, and credentials of medical providers and non-clinical administrative personnel. A total of 107 articles were examined, 42 were assigned article influence scores with values that were less than 1.00, which is a below-average influence score for the article. There were 29 articles with values equal to or above 1.00, which translates to an equal or above-average influence score. The remaining 36 articles did not have article influence scores and were assigned values as not available. Results of the review of the literature indicate that legal terminology, literacy level, training, credentialing and religious and social perspective had no or little effect in understanding HIPAA.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.