This thesis is about the relationship between human bodies and instrumental technologies that can be use to measure them. It adopts the position that instruments are technological structures that evoke and manifest particular phenomena of embodied life. However, through their history of association and use in the sciences and scientific medicine, instruments tend to be attached to a particular ontology, that of mechanical objectivity. Embarking from research into the artistic uses of physiological sensor technology in creative practices such as performance and installation art, this thesis asks whether it is possible to use instruments in a way that departs from their association with scientific objectivity. Drawing on philosophers who have developed an understanding of the relationship of instrumental technologies and human bodies as co-constructive, it explores how this model of con-construction might be understood to offer an alternative ontology for understanding the use of instruments in practices outside of science and scientific medicine. The project is therefore suggestive of degrees of freedom and flexibility that are open to exploitation by creative practices in the realm of instrumentation as an alternative to orthodox rationalisations of the value of scientific equipment as authentic, revealing and objective. The major contribution of the thesis is that transfers and synthesises arguments and evidence from the history and philosophy of sciences that serve to demonstrate how the instrumental measurement of human bodies can be considered to be a form of creative practice. It assembles a position based on the work of thinkers from a number of disciplines, particularly philosophy of science, technology, and the medical humanities. These offer examples of ontological frameworks within which the difference between the realm of the instrumental, material, biological, and the objective, and the phenomenal, meaningful and subjective, might be collapsed. Doing this, the thesis sheds light on how physical devices might enter into the interplay of making, mattering and objectifying the immaterial, a realm that it might be considered the role of artists to manifest. Drawing on contemporary, and secondary, accounts of the development of empirical testing in the medical sciences, the thesis agues for the recovery of a romantic account of human physiology, in which the imagination and meaning are active and embodied. It therefore offers to link the bodily and the instrumental through an extended-materialist account in which the physiological, rather than the psychological, is central. Developing a response to constructionist models of the body and instrumentation, the thesis concludes that a model of the poetic may be adopted as a method for understanding the opportunities and imperatives inherent in the avoidance of deterministic approaches to biosignalling technologies. In doing this, the thesis contributes particularly to the creative arts and technology research practices concerned with the use of body sensor technologies in humanistic applications. It complements the existing works by artists in this area that make use of instruments by assembling a number of theoretical readings and interpretations of how instruments work – among them the thermometer, lie detector, and automatograph – which illustrate the argument that that is possible to operate from a theoretical position within which instruments are both material, performative and symbolic.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to clarify and analyze alienation, as a social phenomenon described in two teenage books. The study will also examine the creation of sympathy towards main characters and what impact the novel as a whole could have on it. The intention is also to uncover the role of the Other, as well as to visualize the creation of distance between different ethnic groups. Method: The study is based on a qualitative text-analysis. It includes four different dimensions, including the author’s background and the researcher´s interpretation. Conclusion: The study demonstrates that it´s possible to find values in both of the novels, and therefore makes it possible to create opinions and statements that may contribute to alienation. It also demonstrates that alienation can appear in different forms based on the characters different background. Question formulation: What attitudes and values towards immigration, ethnicity and alienation can be found in the two novels? How are they conveyed in the two novels? What differences and similarities could be found in the characters' ethnic alienation?

This study investigates women’s possibilities to actively participate in societal change in Egypt. It aims at enhancing the understanding of structural conditions for women’s agency and how these enables and/or restrains women’s participation in the aspiration for societal change as well as their aspiration to live a ‘full life’. Egypt was chosen as a field for studying women’s understanding of their opportunities of participation and empowerment before and during the revolution. The informants in the study are all consciously working for awareness and equality in society. Formal education in Egypt is criticized and the country suffers from a high illiteracy rate, making informal education an important way to attain knowledge that can assist women in their quest for societal change. The acknowledgment of participation as a human right is one of the issues women are fighting for in Egypt today. A specific interest in this study is what motivates some women to oppose social, cultural and political structures despite the often high personal cost, and how informal (educational) channels are being used in the quest for societal change. The theoretical construction in which the analysis is carried out is based on frictions between societal structures and agency, using the Capability Approach (Sen, 1999) which aims at understanding what agency women have in societal change. The concept of functionings is used to indicate what someone is able to do and be. By analyzing women’s valued functionings, their conditions and thus their sense of empowerment and their experienced opportunity costs emerge. Central to the analytically framed societal structures and how agency can be perceived within each structure are the social conversion factors, the norms that allow or hinder action. To frame the complexity of women’s conditions for active agency and the outcome of their actions, I use a theoretical framework that will comprise both goals and processes. Sen’s (1999) ideas on social choice along with Archer’s (1995) theory on social change, using her model of structural elaboration / reproduction, have proved useful when investigating women’s valued functionings and attained social changes. The results of the study show that when formal education is not adequate, knowledge is obtained outside the formal educational institutions. This is done through both non-formal and informal learning. However, to get access to informal learning, a number of valued functions have to be gained. These functionings are thus both conditions for change and an end in themselves. I try to show that the costs involved in transgressing the prevailing norms are high, but lack of hope, agency and empowerment are also experienced as a high cost for those who have, in fact, imagined another better life and are in opposition to the inhibitory societal structures. This is, however, a part of what motivates some women to continue to be involved in societal change in order to achieve a life they have reason to value.

Ce mémoire porte sur la réception de Heidegger par Corbin et comprend trois parties : l’appropriation spirituelle que fait Corbin de l’analyse heideggérienne de la phénoménologie herméneutique élaborée dans l’introduction et la première partie de Être et Temps ; son appropriation spirituelle de l’analyse heideggérienne de la temporalité et de l’historialité du Dasein traitée dans la deuxième partie de Être et Temps ; enfin, nous nous pencherons sur le problème de l’imagination qui amène Corbin à prendre un chemin différent que celui de Heidegger dans Kant et le problème de la métaphysique et qui mène Corbin à la dimension où un monde spirituel s’ouvre et qu’il comprend à partir de la pensée des grands mystiques irano-islamiques. La réception de Heidegger par Corbin concerne ainsi davantage la manière dont Heidegger élabore la phénoménologie herméneutique et la temporalité et l’historialité du Dasein que l’ensemble du projet heideggérien et sa propre vision du monde, avec laquelle Corbin prend ses distances. La question reste alors de savoir si l’appropriation par Corbin de la pensée irano-islamique est vraiment compatible avec l’analyse heideggérienne. / Among several sources of Henry Corbin's thought, this master thesis concentrates upon his reception of Heidegger and contains three parts: 1/ Corbin’s spiritual appropriation of heideggerian analysis of hermeneutical phenomenology, elaborated in the introduction and the first part of Being and Time ; 2/ his spiritual appropriation of Heidegger’s analysis of the temporality and historicality of Dasein which is dealt with in the second part of Being and Time ; 3/ finally, we will focus on the question of Imagination which leads Corbin to take a different route than Heidegger’s and that brings him to a level where a spiritual world opens up. The reception of Heidegger by Corbin thus concerns more the way Heidegger elaborates his analyse of hermeneutical phenomenology, temporality, and historicality than on the totality of the heideggerian project. The question therefore remains if Corbin’s appropriation of the heideggerian analysis is compatible with his reading of irano-islamic thought.

De multiples plaisirs sont présents dans À la recherche du temps perdu. Ils sont importants pour les personnages en ce que, bien souvent, ils dirigent leur vie, mais aussi parce qu’ils participent à la constitution de portraits : observer les plaisirs d’un personnage permet de le peindre. L’importance du plaisir dépasse le niveau individuel pour atteindre celui du récit (diégèse et narration). Malgré une présence qui tend à l’omniprésence, le plaisir peine à être vécu au présent par des personnages qui le conjuguent plus facilement au passé ou au futur, et en ont une image très négative. C’est que les sens ne sont pas aptes à véhiculer le plaisir, et n’apportent que culpabilité, punition et déception. Il faut alors explorer d’autres voies : apparaissent artifices et perversions, qui finissent aussi par échouer à procurer un plaisir pur. Le héros proustien le trouve dans l’imaginaire, notamment la création littéraire. Paradoxalement, de l’échec du plaisir vient la fertilité créatrice. / Pleasure appears in various guise in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It often directs the characters’ lives or serves to define them: the objects and forms of pleasure enjoyed by the characters constitute indirect portraits of them. Pleasure is not only to be observed on an individual level, but can be analysed on the narrative level. Although it is everywhere to be found, it fails to be actually experienced by characters who more often than not reject it into the past or the future, and entertain a very negative vision of it. The senses indeed appear unable to provide pleasure, and only become sources of guilt, disappointment and retribution. Other paths to pleasure must then be discovered, but artificial paradises or perversions fail to yield real pleasure. The Proustian hero ultimately finds it in the world of imagination, especially through literary creation. Paradoxically, it is from the failure of experiencing pleasure that creative power derives.

By situating ecology as an ontological position, this dissertation adapts Jan Zwicky’s notion of resonance to probe imagining as a complex collaborative process involving diverse emergent variables. As a practicing artist, writer, teacher and researcher, I combine theoretical research and (visual arts) practice-based research to posit a sense of imagining that is unsituatable. The structure of this dissertation is grounded in the form of the essay (as a “try” or an “attempt”) which adapts explanatory text, metaphorical text and visual elements as a way to expand qualitative practices that have engaged critically with the politics of accepted forms and structures of academic writing. The project is intended for an off-line format, as a series of six distinct yet interdependent hand-made books that focus on: (1) An Emergent Methodology; (2) Ontology, Form and a Reconstitution of the Individual; (3) Zwicky, Thisness, Ecology & Ontological Ethics; (4) Zwicky, Imagination and the Image; (5) An Envisioning of Imagining as a Resonant Ecological Process and lastly, (6) Moments of Engaging Eco-Imagining in the Post-Secondary Classroom. The research-writing expands a body of work, through visual-textual, theoretical-metaphorical form, to enact imagining as a resonant ecological process that unfolds through the emergence of a complex co-mingling of a deluge of variables. / Graduate

The students in my elementary art classes did not seem to be creating for themselves. They seemed to have the understanding there was only one correct answer in art class, and the art teacher knew what that answer was. By way of research I have found ways to create an atmosphere in my art room that promotes imagination and self expression in children, thus fostering a free and creative reaction from my students. Through understanding how and why one uses their imagination, an art teacher can enhance a student's ability to build and use his or her knowledge base. I believe an art teacher can help students build artistic confidence by using strategies such as introducing new art materials to children in a play atmosphere, planning lessons that are open-ended, giving choices for materials used, and guiding students using mental imagery.

S’entendre annoncer, lors d’une consultation médicale, que la mort est proche, n’est pas sans effet subjectif. Effroi et traumatisme : violence faite à cette illusion d’immortalité protectrice qui soutient le sujet dans sa quotidienneté, ouverture faite sur le gouffre de la déréliction. La clinique que l’on rencontre dans une unité de soins palliatifs met en évidence les effets subjectifs, trop souvent délétères, d’une telle annonce. C’est à partir de celle-ci que se déploie cette interrogation concernant le sujet et ce qu’il parvient à faire –ou non– de cette annonce. Nous serons alors amenés à rendre compte de ce que la mort réelle, annoncée du lieu de l’Autre, a cet effet de produire une néantisation de la fonction symbolique qu’il supporte, en ce que son manque vient subitement à manquer. La clinique propre aux soins palliatifs montre alors les incidences subjectives d’une telle vacillation et les possibles recours du sujet dans ses tentatives pour pallier au défaut del’Autre. / Agree announce during a medical consultation, that death is near, is not without subjective effect. Fear and trauma: violence against the illusion of immortality, which supports the protective subject his everyday life, opening made on the gulf of abandonment. The clinic encountered in a palliative care unit highlights the subjective effects, often deleterious, suchan announcement. It is from this that unfolds this question on the subject and he manages to do-or not-of this announcement. We will then be brought to account for what the actual death, announced the place of the Other, this has to produce an annihilation of the symbolic function that it supports, in that its lack is suddenly missing. The clinic-specific palliative care then shows the implications of such a subjective vacillation and the possible use of the subject inhis attempts to overcome the lack of the Other.

Diploma thesis is devoted to the issue of games in pedagogy, its philosophical basis and its role in language acquisition. It is divided into three parts. In the theoretical part, there is defined a game from the philosophical point of view and its understanding by various authors. The second part deals with the specifics of didactic and language game in general. The practical part brings the specific case of teaching a child who is a foreigner. It also expresses the contribution of such games in pedagogy and teaching the Czech language. Keywords: Language game, didactic game, Czech as a foreign language, child - foreigner, specific teaching methods.

TITLE: Teaching approaches to pupils' concept development about computer programming in SCRATCH AUTHOR: Bc. Hana Šandová DEPARTMENT: Department of information technology and education SUPERVISOR: Doc. RNDr. Miroslava Černochová, CSc. ABSTRACT: This thesis deals with perceptions of pupils about how computers and computer programs work. The main objective is to inquire of pupils (ISCED-2) about how computer and computer programs work, and what ideas influence them. The theoretical part focuses on the history of the use of computers in teaching and an analysis of current approaches to teaching computer science and programming in the Czech Republic and in selected European countries. The practical part is devoted to mapping concepts of pupils aged 11-14 years involved in a teaching experiment organized at two schools in Prague, the aim of which was to examine the impact of teaching programming in "Scratch" over one semester in relation to pupil's ideas about how a computer works and in terms of the development of pupil's computational thinking. KEYWORDS: pupil's imagination, algorithm, programming, computational thinking, Scratch