Ecological economics has been repeatedly described as transdisciplinary and open to including everything from positivism to relativism. I argue for a revision and rejection of this position in favour of realism and reasoned critique. Looking into the ontological presuppositions and considering an epistemology appropriate for ecological economics to meaningfully exist requires rejecting the form of methodological pluralism which has been advocated since the start of this journal. This means being clear about the differences in our worldview (or paradigm) from others and being aware of the substantive failures of orthodox economics in addressing reality. This paper argues for a fundamental review of the basis upon which ecological economics has been founded and in so doing seeks improved clarity as to the competing and complementary epistemologies and methodologies. In part this requires establishing serious interdisciplinary research to replace superficial transdisciplinary rhetoric. The argument places the future of ecological economics firmly amongst heterodox economic schools of thought and in ideological opposition to those supporting the existing institutional structures perpetuating a false reality of the world's social, environmental and economic systems and their operation.

Ce travail vise à explorer la notion d’expérience religieuse dans l’oeuvre de William James (1842-1910). Si cette notion est tout à fait centrale dans les Variétés de l’expérience religieuse (1902), elle joue aussi un rôle très important dans bon nombres d’autres oeuvres, si bien qu’il est possible de dire qu’une grande partie du projet empiriste de James se joue au travers de cette question. En réalité, l’un des principaux problèmes que cet empirisme religieux doit affronter consiste à savoir si ces expériences humaines du divin permettent de faire des affirmations vraies, publiques et objectives au sujet de l’existence d’une forme de conscience supra humaine. Si dans, un premier temps, James développera son pragmatisme de manière à poser un lien entre Dieu et ces expériences religieuses en faisant l’économie d’une explication de type causale, il sera contraint, par la suite, d’élaborer une explication métaphysique de la possibilité de ces expériences, ce qui l’amènera à accepter la thèse panthéiste et panpsychiste d’une compénétration des champs de conscience. L’expérience religieuse apparaît alors, par réaction à une forme explicite d’« inquiétante étrangeté », comme une expérience métaphysique de l’intimité avec l’univers. / This work aims at exploring the concept of religious experience in the work of William James (1842-1910).This notion is not only central in The Varieties of Religious Experience, but it also plays a significant role inmany of his other works so much that it is possible to say that a large part of James’s empiricism is at stakein this issue. One of the main problems that this religious empiricism faces consists in knowing if the human experiences of the divine allow some true, public, objective assertions about the existence of aform of supra human consciousness. If, at first, James developed his pragmatism so as to make a link between God and the human experiences of the divine while avoiding metaphysical explanations of acausal type, later on, he felt the necessity to work out a metaphysical explanation, which lead him to accept the pantheist and panpsychist thesis of a possible interpenetration of the fields of individual consciousness. As a reaction to an explicit form of experience of the “uncaniness or the ordinary”, religious experience thus appears, as a metaphysical experience of intimacy with the universe.

Syftet med det här arbetet har varit att undersöka vilka omständigheter som låg till grund för, och kan ha påverkat tillkomsten av Kvarteret Vargen i Visby. Ett kvarter som fullständigt bryter av från all annan arkitektur på hela Gotland. Trots att det har ett formspråk som inte går att finna någon annanstans på ön, är det ändå inte så många som lägger märke till det. Undersökningens utgångspunkt har varit att först skapa en bild kring uppkomsten av kvarteret genom intervju med arkitekt Per Erik Nilsson, vars berättelser sedan har lett vidare till gamla maskinskrivna brev, ritningar, bygglovsanteckningar och svartvita foton i arkiv. Därefter har materialet satts i relation till vilka värderingar som rådde i Sverige och på Gotland vid den här tiden, för att se i vilket sammanhang kvarteret byggdes. Arkitekten som då bodde i Stockholm, kom till Visby för att studera åkermarken som skulle bebyggas knappt en kilometer utanför den medeltida stadskärnan. Istället för att ge beställarna det de först hade önskemål om, gjorde han upp planer för ett bostadsområde som var fyra gånger så stort. Förslaget accepterades utan betänketid och stadsplanen fick ge vika för det nya kvarteret som skulle byggas för både fattiga och rika, ensamstående och flerbarnsfamiljer, i en tid då bostadsbristen var stor men framtidstron ljus. Kvarteret Vargens formspråk passades in mellan de stora fortifikationsbyggnaderna i norr och de små egnahemidyllerna i söder samtidigt som bygget skulle underlättade bostadsbrist och öka livskvalitet. Resultatet blev ett kvarter i funktionalistisk anda spetsat med dekorativa element och lokala material, för funktion och trivsel. Tecknen pekar på att det största skälet till varför kvarteret Vargen ser ut som det gör, är för att bostadsbristen inte tillät beställarna att vara kräsna. Arkitekten fick mer eller mindre fria händer att utforma bostäderna efter eget huvud, bara han kunde förse Visby med fler bostäder.

No description available.

Science and religion are systems that work to organize experience into a manageable understanding of the world. Both of these systems gather information - one through mental/spiritual experience and the other through empirical/physical evidence - and then reorder it within a structured framework. They both work under the premise that truth is both existent and attainable within the context of their system. This separation is viewed as necessary in the knowledge/experience-gathering process, but when that knowledge is accumulated, neither science nor religion has the ability to access or communicate truth in its entirety. Plainly speaking, truth is vast and knowledge is limited. I am especially interested in the limitations of knowledge. These limitations (and their occasional transcendence) are what I seek to explore with my work. W. B. Yeats once said, "Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it." I believe that art has the ability to meld the physical and the spiritual into an unquantifiable object. It melts duality. This makes it an ideal medium in which to explore the relationship between religious (spiritual) and scientific (empirical) learning, while using their methods to make objects embodying knowledge. In my work I visually explore the limits of knowledge and make attempts at understanding through the processes of information-gathering and transformation through ritual.

No description available.

This thesis examines the meanings and uses of the impression in the essays and late novels of Henry James. While James found fault with impressionism in French painting and literature, he repeatedly called the novel an ‘impression of life’, and used the term to figure important moments of perception and action for his protagonists. This thesis offers the first full-length study of the impression on its own terms, rather than through the lens of a wider artistic or philosophical movement, the most obvious example being impressionism. It locates James’s impression within an intertextual history comprising British empiricist philosophy (Locke and Hume), empiricist psychology (William James), British aestheticism (Pater and Wilde), and, looking forwards, twentieth-century theories of the performative (Austin, Derrida, de Man, Butler). It offers a series of close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872-88), his prefaces to the New York edition (1907-09), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). This exploration does not produce any unified definition of the impression in the work of James. It finds, rather, that the impression crystallizes one of James’s main themes, the struggle between art and life, a consequence of the competing empiricist and aesthetic tendencies that the thesis distinguishes within accounts of the impression available to James. The thesis goes on to show that impressions in James may be made as well as received, and so introduces a further distinction, between ‘performative’ and ‘cognitive’ impressions. It argues that what James does with these competing impressions – empiricist and aesthetic, cognitive and performative – is to make them the narrative focus of his late novels and their drama of consciousness.

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Le design urbain, dimension de la pratique urbanistique, consiste principalement en la manipulation de la forme urbaine selon une démarche ciblée et encadrée. Les approches sont aussi nombreuses que diversifiées. On peut néanmoins les classer en deux catégories : les approches visant la forme urbaine en tant qu‟objet qui contient l‟organisation formelle de la ville et celles qui visent le travail sur la forme urbaine afin d‟organiser la dynamique urbaine humaine. Les deux types d‟approches soutiennent différentes démarches d‟aménagement qui contribuent à développer la forme urbaine et la dynamique des lieux. Parmi celles-ci se trouve la vision de type empirique, laquelle vise l‟expérience urbaine à l‟échelle du piéton. Les écrits et les théories à ce sujet sont variés et pertinents. La présente recherche porte sur la transposition des prescriptions empiriques dans la planification d‟un projet qui intègre une démarche de design urbain. Au moyen d‟une étude de cas, la Cité multimédia à Montréal, il s‟agit de comprendre plus spécifiquement comment le canevas maître du design urbain, soit l‟espace public, est étudié et reformulé et ce, en accordant une attention particulière pour la dimension empirique du futur aménagement. Quelles sont les balises ou les composantes qui permettent à la dimension empirique de se déployer dans la conception d‟un projet urbain qui vise une reformulation de la forme urbaine? / Urban design, a dimension of urbanistic practice, principaly consists in urban forms manipulations according to a formal and targeted approach. Approaches are numerous and diversified, altought they can be classified in two categories: those who consider the urban form as an object including the city's formal organisation and those who consider the work on the urban form as a way to organise the city's humane dynamics. Both of them support specific planning approaches that contribute to the urban form and location dynamcs developpement. Among these, the empirical type vision targets the pedestrian scale urban experience. Litterature and theories are various and pertinent. The present research concerns transposition of empirical prescriptions in the planning of a project that includes an urban design approach. Threw a case study, Montreal's Cité du Multimédia, the goal is to understand more specificaly how the public space, urban design's master grid, is studied considering the empiric dimension of the developpement. What are the markers or components allowing the empirical dimension to develop in the planning of a project that includes reformulation of the urban form?

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird aufgrund der kommentierten Quellen die Tatsache erhellt, dass der Kantsche Anspruch auf Legitimität des Erkenntnisverfahrens, wie er in seiner Transzendentalphilosophie zum Ausdruck gebracht wurde, von drei Momenten des Gedankenprozesses in der Philosophie der Deutschen Aufklärung vorangekündigt wird: a) der Verschiebung der Problematik der deutschen Philosophie vom „Harmonie“-Gedanken der so genannten Leibniz-Wolff-Schule und ihrer Gegner hin zur Fragestellung nach der „Realisierung der Begriffe“ bei Tetens, in der sich der Mensch als sinnstiftendes Wesen dartut, b) dem bereits bei Thomasius in Sprachparallelen zu Kant auftretenden „empiriorationalistischen“ Moment, das die gesamte Periode des Kampfes um die Wolffsche Lehre begleitet und bei Lambert eine neue Form (a priori durch Erfahrung) bekommt, c) dem Verständnis der Denkbarkeit bzw. Begreifbarkeit als Mitteilbarkeit, das schon in der Frühaufklärung (von Thomasius implizit, von Tschirnhaus explizit) anzutreffen ist und von den Zeitgenossen Kants rehabilitiert und von Tetens als Frage nach der Intersubjektivität (das „Objectivische“ als das „unveränderlich Subjectivische“) betont wird. Mit den Werken von Lambert und Tetens, in denen Gott fast keine Rolle mehr spielt, emanzipiert sich das philosophische Denken endgültig von der religiösen Furcht und dem „metaphysischen Schauder“, die während der Barockzeit durch den Triumph der wissenschaftlichen Revolution hervorgebracht worden waren. In der Philosophie der beiden Zeitgenossen Kants versteht sich der Mensch nicht mehr als „intellectus ectypus“, sondern zum ersten Mal als potentieller Gesetzgeber der Natur. Folglich macht diese Tatsache klar, dass Kant auf bereits gestellte Fragen zu antworten hatte. / The current dissertation, which is based on documented sources, elucidates the fact that the Kantian claim of the legitimacy of the cognitive process, as this claim is expressed in the Kantian “Transcendental Philosophy”, had its precursor in three major elements of the philosophical evolution in the German Enlightenment: a)The shifting of the philosophical problematic in the German Enlightenmentfrom the “harmony”-thinking of the Wolffians and their detractors, to Tetens’ posit of the “realization” of concepts, according to which a human being is proven as a meaning-establishing entity; b) The “empiriorationalistic” element in Thomasius, which finds parallels in Kantian formulations, remains active during the whole controversy surrounding the Wolffian teaching, and then acquires a new form in Lambert (a priori through experience); c) The understanding of “conceivability” as “communicability”, which is already present in the early German Enlightenment, implicitly in Thomasius and explicitly in Tschirnhaus, does not come under discussion in the era of Wolff. However, this element comes under the spotlight by Kant’s contemporaries, especially highlighted in Tetens’ question of intersubjectivity (the objective as the “unchangeably subjective”). The representatives of German Enlightenment Philosophy after 1760 freed from the metaphysical shudder caused by the “scientific revolution”, are the very first to comprehend the human intellect, not as “intellectus ectypus”, but as the legislator of nature. In this way, German philosophical thought is to abandon once and for all the baroque world-view. The systems of Lambert and Tetens show clearly that Kant elaborated on questions that they had already posed in an elementary form.