“When a system gets cold, then images can warm it up - a vitalising journey using storytelling as part of a management system”. This essay wants to show that the rational language used in management and governance needs to come alive. I have spent a long time in business, moving from a rational programming mind to becoming a reflective storyteller, and I now use the metaphorical language of storytelling to add life and vitality to organisations. The form of an essay is used to reflect on practical knowledge and one’s own proficiency. I used storytelling in a workshop to deepen the significance and meaning of a company’s vision. The method reveals, through the process, the management team’s practical knowledge. The method and my own practical knowledge are in a hermeneutic spirit compared to contemporary philosophers. The development of rational thinking and its counterforces are explored. The possibilities of leadership within an organisation’s structures is compared to management research. It leads to the conclusion that the metaphorical language is a language that opens spaces in-between, “the nothingness” and as such opens a tear to the vitality of leaders. / ”När systemet är kallt kan bilder värma – en vitaliserande resa med storytelling i ledningssystem” vill visa att det rationella språk som används för ledning och styrning behöver få liv. Jag har börjat använda storytellings bildspråk för att tillföra liv och vitalitet i organisationer efter ett långt arbetsliv där jag rört mig från rationell programmerare till reflekterande berättare. Essän som form används för att reflektera över den praktiska kunskapen, det egna yrkeskunnandet. Med storytelling som metod har jag genomfört en workshop hos en ledningsgrupp för att fördjupa innebörden av organisationens vision. Metoden synliggör i processen lednings-gruppens praktiska kunskap. I en hermeneutisk anda ställs både metoden och min egen praktiska kunskap mot nutida tänkare. Det rationella tänkandets utveckling och motkrafter utforskas. Ledarskapets möjligheter i organisationers strukturer ställs mot ledarskapsforskning. För att slutligen se på bildspråket såsom ett språk som öppnar upp ett mellanrum, intet, revan som leder in till ledarnas vitalitet.

想像是一種說故事的媒介。說故事的方法有很多種，文字、圖像、音樂，以及影像等等，這些都是將腦中的想像具體化的方式。而作「夢」，也是一種想像，一種不受人、事、時、地、物的影響，最自由的想像行為。 本作品將以「夢」為創作發想，並以〈Night Dream〉以及〈Day Dream〉兩種夢的主題為創作核心，並在故事中加入「反烏托邦」的元素，以音樂作為說故事的媒介，進行想像的實踐，進而完成一張音樂創作專輯。 / Imagination is a media of telling stories. There are many ways to tell stories, which include words, pictures, music, videos, and so on. These are ways of making imaginations become stories. “Dreaming” is also a kind of imaginations, which will not be confined to no matter who, which, what, when, where, and how: it’s the freest attitude of imaginations. This project is to produce a music album. And “Dream” is the theme of this project, which includes both “Night Dream” and “Day Dream”. The idea of “Dystopia” also plays an important role when creating stories. Telling stories through music is the purpose and also the process of making imagination into practice in this project. A music album will be produced as the achievement of this project.

In this thesis I present and defend an interpretation of Kant’s theory of experience as it stands from the viewpoint of his empirical realism. My central contention is that Kant’s is a conception of everyday experience, a kind of immediate phenomenological awareness as of empirical objects, and although he takes this to be representational, it cannot itself amount to empirical knowledge because it can be non-veridical, because in such experience it is possible to misrepresent the world. I outline my view in an extended introduction. In Part I I offer a novel interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of sensibility and sensation. Utilizing a data-processor schematic as an explanatory framework, I give an account of how outer sense, as a collection of sensory capacities, is causally affected by empirical objects to produce bodily state sensations that naturally encode information about those objects. This information is then processed through inner sense to present to the understanding a manifold of mental state sensations that similarly encode information. I also give accounts of how the reproductive imagination operates in hallucination to produce sensible manifolds in lieu of current causal affection, and of the restricted role that consciousness plays at this low level of cognitive function. In Part II I turn to the role of the understanding in experience. I offer a two-stage model of conceptual synthesis and explain how Kant’s theory of experience is a unique blend of conceptualist and non-conceptualist elements. I show that it explains how our experience can provide us with reasons for belief while at the same time accounting for the fact that experience is what anchors us to the world. Finally, I return to non-veridical experience. I confront recent naïve realist readings of Kant and argue that, for Kant, the possibility of non-veridicality is built into the very nature of the human mind and the way it relates to the world.

Analytic ethics often neglects the exploration and appreciation of morality as it is actually practised on a day-to-day basis. But by looking at how, in a practical sense, we are able to interact with others in a morally appropriate way we can construct a compelling picture of what some of our most pervasive obligations are. This thesis takes such an approach through the concept of understanding – understanding essentially taken here to involve those processes involved in detecting and correctly responding to beings typically possessing inherent moral significance. In the first two chapters ‘understanding' and the understanding approach are themselves explicated, and placed in the context of several other related approaches in the English-speaking tradition – Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Nel Noddings' ethics of care and Richard Hare's preference utilitarianism. This approach is then used to provide us with an alternative idea about what our moral reasoning suggests to be of fundamental ethical significance, and of what kinds of activity morality recommends to us. The activity explored in most detail here is that of engaging with fiction – or more broadly, fictive imaginings. While understanding shows us that fictional characters and events themselves cannot have an inherent moral valence or significance, it also shows us when and how it is possible and appropriate to ethically assess fictive engagement, be it as creator or consumer. This is seen after exploring how and in what ways our moral understanding can be appropriately applied to and exercised by fictions at all, and why fiction should be of particular interest to the understanding agent, looking at the work of Martha Nussbaum, Jenefer Robinson, Peter Lamarque and others on aesthetic cognitivism. Ultimately this leads us to discern a minimal ethical constraint on our interpretation of fiction and art in general, further proving understanding's usefulness.

This research examines a multi-level language ability ESL secondary school classroom in relation to Lave and Wenger’s (1991) community of practice and Dörnyei and Ottó’s (1998) L2 motivation conceptual frameworks. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies were employed. Case study data were collected through monthly interviews, semi-monthly observations, and monthly written journals over 3 months in Toronto from 6 participants (5 students and 1 teacher). Also, students who had been in Canada 5 years or less, and ESL teachers were invited to complete an on-line questionnaire. Results indicate that the multi-level classroom positively and negatively impacts participation and motivation. Participants define the most striking factor to impact participation and motivation as themselves; this links the two conceptual frameworks because “self-regulation” in the Actional Phase (Dörnyei & Ottó, 1998) can be better understood by legitimate peripheral participation or the ability to “imagine” and “align” oneself (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In this multi-level classroom, self-regulation is when students actively imagine possible selves who are aligned with their family or peer goals, or when faced with disengagement, students envision new roles for themselves in the classroom to overcome barriers and realign themselves with shared family or peer goals. In these cases, alignment drives imagination; however, students also use imagination to create alignment. When lower level learners see advanced students as possible selves, they feel hope for their future. Similarly, advanced learners recall their past selves when seeing their lower level peers and feel empathy for them. This interaction cements student alignment and sets a context conducive to cooperative learning which enhances students’ abilities to remain aligned with their families. Overall, this research highlights the interplay of imagination and alignment which impacts student identity. Moreover, it reveals that one aspect of the Post-actional Phase in Dörnyei and Ottó’s (1998) model, “self-concept beliefs,” can be enhanced by the notion of identity in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) framework. Finally, these findings could serve to change policy and improve programming and serve as an archive for future research.

This dissertation argues that music is always ideological. For this thesis two lines of argument are given. The first states that music is always ideological because it requires verbal discourses about itself. The second line of argument states that music is always ideological because it influences the listener affectively. That language is necessary for talk about music is trivial. The point is rather that talk about music is necessary for auditive behaviour to turn into complex cultural artefacts. Without language humans would have no more music than birds, whales or duetting apes. At the other extreme, musical experiences are affective in nature. To have a musical experience is to experience an affective unfolding through time. Affect (as distinguished from the emotions) refers to the amodal properties of perception-such as intensity, shape, rhythm-and lies at the heart of human communication. With its roots in early mother-infant interaction, affective communication is inherently social. Together with discourses about music, the affective properties of musical experiences makes music into an extremely subtle, and thereby efficient, ideological manipulator in various types of social contexts. Finally, the theoretical conclusions reached will be exemplified by introducing a virtual listener, the various facets of whose listening experiences are captured by different analytical methods and listening reports as applied to some of the "serious" music by Frank Zappa. Central for the explanation of these listening experiences are the "passions," that is, the affects, moods and emotions that the music evokes in the listener, or that the listener takes the music to express. / <p>The attached fulltext is a revised version of the original thesis.</p>

This thesis proposes that astronomical ideas and forces structured the poetic, religious and philosophical imaginings of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Despite the widespread scholarly predilection for interdisciplinary enquiry in the field of literature and science, no study has been undertaken to assess the impact and imaginative value of mathematics and astronomy upon Wordsworth and Coleridge. Indeed, it is assumed they had neither the resources available to access this knowledge, nor the capacity to grasp it fully. This is not the case. I update the paradigm that limits their familiarity with the physical sciences to the education they received at school and at Cambridge, centred principally on Euclid and Newton, by revealing their attentiveness to the new world views promulgated by William Herschel, William Rowan Hamilton, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and the mathematicians of Trinity College, Cambridge, including John Herschel, George Peacock, and George Biddell Airy, amongst others. The language of astronomy wielded a vital, analogical power for Wordsworth and Coleridge; it conditioned the diurnal rhythms of their thought as its governing dynamic. Critical processes were activated, at the level of form and content, with a mixture of cosmic metaphors and nineteenth-century discoveries (such as infra-red). Central models of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s literary and metaphysical inventions were indissociable from scientific counterparts upon which they mutually relied. These serve as touchstones for creative endeavour through which the mechanisms of their minds can be traced at work. Exploring the cosmological charge contained in the composition of their poems, and intricately patterned and pressed into their philosophical and spiritual creeds, stakes a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination. The incorporation of astrophysical concepts into the moulds of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s constructions manifests an intelligent plurality and generosity which reveals the scientific valency of their convictions about, variously, the circumvolutions of memory and the idea of psychic return; textual revision, specifically the ways in which language risks becoming outmoded; prosody, balance, and the minute strictures modifying metrical weight; volubility as an axis of conversation and cognition; polarity as the reconciling tool of the imagination; and the perichoretic doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The ultimate purpose is to show that astronomy provided Wordsworth and Coleridge with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned.

Ce mémoire comprend deux volets : une étude théorique et un texte de création littéraire. Dans un premier temps, il s’agir d’étudier le rôle du désir dans la démarche thématique et philosophique employée par l’écrivain Wilson Harris dans son roman The Palace of the Peacock. Ainsi démonterons-nous dans le premier chapitre que Harris se sert – de façon paradoxale – du désir empirique pour faire valoir les limites mêmes de celui-ci. Nous aborderons dans le deuxième chapitre le rapport problématique qu’entretient, chez Harris, la subjectivité féminine avec la subjectivité masculine. En particulier, nous examinerons la représentation de ce rapport sous la forme de métaphores ayant trait à l’environnement et à l’anatomie. Nous avancerons que le caractère problématique que revêt le rapport entre subjectivités féminine et masculine dans le roman est en quelque sorte nécessitée par l’écriture même de Harris. Dans le troisième chapitre, nous prendrons part aux débats sur la poétique qui animent la littérature contemporaine afin de situer notre propre élan vers la création littéraire. En même temps, nous entreprendrons une tentative de récupération de certains des concepts théoriques formulés par Harris, en lien avec notre propre poétique. S’ensuivra notre projet de création littéraire, intitulé HEROISM/EULOGIES, qui constitue le quatrième et dernier chapitre du mémoire. Ce texte, extrait d’un projet d’écriture créative plus vaste, trace les mouvements d’un certain nombre de sujets à travers une Amérique imaginée. / This study contains two parts: a theoretical component and a literary text. The theoretical component discusses desire as a thematic and philosophical methodology in Wilson Harris’s The Palace of the Peacock. Chapter one argues that Harris paradoxically makes use of forms of empirical desire to demonstrate its epistemological limits. Chapter two discusses the problematic situation of female subjectivity in relation to male subjects, through environmental and anatomic metaphors, which Harris’s writing necessitates. Chapter three discusses contemporary poetics in order to situate my impetus for literary writing and attempts to salvage some of Harris’s theoretical concepts in dialogue with my own poetics. Chapter four contains the creative writing project, HEROISM/EULOGIES—an excerpt from a larger project—that charts the movement of various subjects across an imagined American landscape.

This project has evolved from my own observation of our deteriorating living environments. I am exploring the development of a visual story to represent my contemplation of humankind's consumption, and how it endangers the balance of the natural world. Through drawing and animation, I hope to develop a visual language and an approach to storytelling that will inspire people to think about balancing economic, environmental, and ethical issues in design and development, and to advocate a simple honest life and noninterference with the necessary course of natural events.

This thesis expansively and inclusively puts forth the imaginings, research, processes and experiences behind my two thesis exhibitions, "Journeys into the unknown: a series of science architecture tasks and events, space-bound explorations and far-travels, discoveries and misses (near and far), imaginative space-gazing and related investigations, observations, orbits, and other repetitious monitoring tasks" and "Timed travel: asystematic accounts of regular and geometrical timekeeping, orbital flight, repetitive rotations and other journeys into actual time and slow space." It begins with an abstract interpretation of the dial: a tool not limited to scientific measurement but, instead, a gauge of an object’s overall position and general status. Equal parts scientific information, abstracted and fictionalized instruments and facts, and the personal experiences which provided these concrete informational elements with psychological and metaphorical meaning, this document is as much a record of time as it is an elucidation of my artistic practice and methodology.