We find ourselves situated within a world that can be experienced visually, for the first time, in its wholeness. Using conceptual analysis, we intend to show that notions born within the practice of habitation, such as the sense of place, place attachment, and hearth, can help us evaluate the psychological implications of the images of Earth taken from space. We chose a phenomenological approach to human habitation because it allows concepts pertaining to connected and inherently interdisciplinary fields, for instance environmental psychology or human geography, to be reunited under the umbrella of an anthropological interpretation. The sensory and imaginary connotations of the notion of place may be noticed starting from the distinction between space as mathematical abstraction and concrete places being experienced directly. An analysis of the nature of this connection leads to the finding that we actively imagine and reimagine the surrounding world as an unfolding space in which we are constantly attempting to dwell. What is of particular interest for us is the manner in which technologically-mediated visual experience may inspire cognitive representations or may generate profound emotions, such as the attachment to a particular place. Therefore, the value of imagination for the anthropology of habitation is not rendered by its compensatory role, but by its link to ontogenesis. Familiar places, which continue to attract us, are capable of triggering unique imaginary processes, reveries which refer us to the primordial steps of ontogenesis with outmost intensity. The process of subjective appropriation of the world begins with that privileged space of origin specific to each of us, the space which we identify with most intensely. Thus, the psychological impact of the image of Earth from space: we become intensely aware that this planet is our Place within a hostile universe.
Liminality is a sufficiently comprehensive concept to allow the description and interpretation of how we experience change as existing in a “betwixt and between time”. A situation of liminality implies an intrusion, always difficult to manage, of chaos, of the erratic, into the harmony of everyday life. The activation of ecological sensitivities can lead to spontaneous liminal experiences, triggered by the awareness that the world around us is a changing environment. We intend to show that notions from phenomenology, such as home-world and alien-world, allow the interpretation of climate change as a situation of liminality that we experience due to the de-familiarization of the environment. The way we understand and interpret the world we live in is based on its normality, understood as constantly experienced in our daily bodily behavior. The notion of the home-world expresses the inter-subjective way in which we experience the natural world, as a world that is already given to us. Because its environmental meanings are actively imprinted in our lived corporeality, the home-world becomes a foundational standard against which changes in the natural environment are always cognitively compared within intuitive, already-constituted terms. The same world may appear alien to us when we become aware of sufficiently significant changes in the normality of our everyday experience, associated with discontinuities or disturbances. Because it places the familiar and known in tension with the unfamiliar and unknown, a liminal experience is always, at a subjective level, epistemologically transformative. To the extent that the surrounding natural world loses its already-given character, we will perceive it as an alien-world, more or less different from the one in which we lived our daily lives.
Over the last decades, we have witnessed the gradual commercialization of the Earth orbit. The exponential development of private space activities makes this distant natural field, with the overcoming of technological difficulties, more and more hospitable to free initiative and entrepreneurship. However, the orbital space is considered global commons. Through the imaginary case method, we intend to ponder on possible ways to legally regulate the exploitation of the orbital space, namely the application of Pigouvian taxes, on the sustainability of the orbital environment, through ethical considerations originating from the application of the Lockean proviso. Although they are designed to cover the damage caused by that particular polluting activity, which is difficult to estimate and, in our case, almost impossible to quantify in the long run, the Pigouvian taxes are the result of a proactive logic. The tension between civilization and nature turns the world outside the Earth into a wilderness destined for humanization, another area of exercise of the liberal self. Non-legal reasons for the sustainability of the orbital environment may arise from observing the Lockean principle of fair ownership. Between the prohibition of an unreasonable destruction of nature’s goods and the equitable access to extra-terrestrial resources, the human desire for appropriation updates the proviso destined for the colonization of America in the twenty-first century. Given that there are currently no plans to clean the technological waste in orbit, adopting the conservation of the orbital environment as an ethical principle could help to formulate a more environmentally responsible liberalism, as part of a long-term agenda of exploitation in the vicinity of our planet.
We have witnessed, in recent decades, the constant growth of the demand for professionals in the field of social assistance, physical rehabilitation, in health and psychotherapy, occupations that fall into the category of beneficiary-oriented services. Given the fact that, in Romanian public perception the identity of these occupational groups is still in the process of crystallization, I propose an analysis of their organizational activity, which is care work, from an axiological perspective. In order to do that, I first formulate an operational definition of the concept of professional value respecting Rokeach's epistemological rigors: intuitiveness, taking into consideration the conceptual relationship between values, opinions and attitudes while avoiding circular or/and synonymous terms. Professional values can be understood as implicit dimensions of an occupational group culture. In caring professions, the professionalization process implies, in addition to the acquisition of specific knowledge and skills, the emergence of value systems with a normative role vis-à-vis professional activity. Comparing the content of deontological organizational documents, my aim is to help clarify the social identity of these occupations by identifying a set of common values.
The spatio-temporal limitations of human existence can be considered a threat to the significance of our lifes. Ronald Dworkin proposes two competing models or metrics for the evaluation of our activities: the impact model and the challenge model. Using the first model involves assessing the contribution that an individual life brings to the objective value in the world, according to agent neutral and global standards. The second model is based on the assertion that our personal events, achievements and experiences can have ethical value even when they have no impact beyond the particularity of the life in which they appear. The assessment in this case is based on agent relative and localized standards. The purpose of the article is an analysis of how the two models solve the problem of the long term significance of our individual lives. If the ethical value of an individual life is the sum of its consequences, then, to the extent that they have no substantial effects on the world as a whole, human lives are threatened by insignificance. In the second case, it depends only on individual performance as a response to those challenges that we consider important for our own existence. This second view provides a more plausible explanation for how our achievements could remain meaningful even on a cosmic scale..
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