Civic Meaningfulness

This paper starts from qualitative research on volunteering and citizenship, with a special focus on volunteering within a setting of restorative justice and mediation. In a first stage, the author reconstructs two models of meaningfulness as hermeneutical lenses to better understand how volunteers see their engagement and experiences as a source of meaningfulness. The paper argues that a biographical model of meaningfulness (Wolf’s theoretical framework) is in need of a complementary approach to meaningfulness (an existential model of meaningfulness), which focuses on transformational experiences with a strong existential depth. In a second stage, the paper dialogues with the experiences and narratives of the volunteers, and shows how their understanding of citizenship informs, and transforms their ideas of meaningfulness. Both the biographical and the existential approach to meaningfulness appear to be deeply influenced by the volunteers’ civic imaginaries.     

Being-with: Response to Mikael Lindtfelt and Roger Burggraeve

This final comment provides, a theoretical framework on how to conceive the self as presented in the key-note paper ‘Meaningfulness, volunteering and being moved. The event of wit(h)nessing’. This is deemed requisite to achieve a full understanding of how depth in meaningfulness comes about.     

Meaningfulness,Volunteering and Being Moved: The Event of Wit(h)nessing

This paper draws on an in-depth phenomenological analysis of some interviews taken from volunteers, inviting them to reflect on their lived experiences of meaningfulness in the context of volunteering and citizenship. It is found that while some testimonies reinforce the standard conceptions of meaningfulness, other testimonies vary from it. The main challenge of this contribution consists in phenomenologically describing this alternative picture of meaningfulness, depicted as the event of wit(h)nessing. In a final part, the authors consider how volunteering is at times especially prone to further experiences of wit(h)nessing.     

Meaningfulness: Civic or Political? A Response to Erik Claes’s ‘Civic Meaningfulness’

This reply examines to what extent Claes’s qualitative research on volunteers, meaningfulness and citizenship mirrors dimensions of republican citizenship. Republican citizenship brings together the idea of freedom as membership of a self-governing community and the ideal of commitment of those members to the common good of the community. According to the author, the idea of republican citizenship that emerges from the interviews is connected with (1) An experience of meaningfulness that is self-fulfilling, but at the same time places life in a larger context, (2) A deeper inner side of civic engagement, (3) A notion of civic virtue that is not too demanding due to its inner link with self-discovery through active citizenship, (4) A strong awareness of the plurality of ways of living a human life, and not a passive identification with an abstract, homogeneous social whole.     

Civic Meaningfulness ‘Revisited’: A Final Reply to Honohan and Dekker

This final reply responds to Honohan’s invitation to articulate the Arendtian tone of the key-note paper. It spells out the philosophical intuition that the political life of citizens, at least potentially, is capable of making visible what makes human life worthwhile and fully meaningful, and the philosophical curiosity to see whether traces of this deep political awareness can be retrieved in dialogues with volunteers. In response to Dekker’s critical doubts, this final reply clarifies the central stakes of Claes’s paper. The core argument was not to show that the biographical model of meaningfulness is the prevailing approach of meaning in/of volunteering, but to assess the potentials and limits of the model’s interpretive power. Moreover, the paper argues for an alternative, existential model of meaningfulness. This approach refers to deep experiences of meaning that emerge from the practice of volunteering and that shift into powerful political experiences of hope, and a lived sense of equality.     

Civic Meaningfulness: The Political Dimension—A Reply to Lena Dominelli

This article argues, firstly, that voluntary civic practices are not doomed to fall prey to a Big Society rhetoric and a cynical politics of cuts in social spending. It all depends on how these civic practices are promoted and what kind of civic discourse is communicated through the channels of social media and public opinion. Secondly, the author highlights the political importance of connecting meaningfulness with citizenship.     

Voluntarism and Citizenship: A Response to Lena Dominelli

This article responds to Dominelli’s contribution by mapping three lines of discussion. The first relates to the issue of how to understand voluntary work with regard to the realization of citizenship. The authors argue that this understanding depends on the way citizenship is conceived. Whereas a rights-based conception of citizenship focuses on issues of equal access to voluntary work, a duty-oriented notion of citizenship tends to see voluntarism as embedded in an educational strategy, alongside professionalized social work. The authors plead for an alternative understanding of voluntary work and social work as joined partners in practices of ‘learning democracy’. The second line of discussion revolves around the relation between social and political dimensions of citizenship. With Dominelli, the authors point out how the obscuring of the political dimension risks to nurture societal discourses that put pressure on the welfare state. The third point relates to the difficulties in positioning voluntary work with regard to professional social work. One of these difficulties is the tendency to over-romanticize voluntary work as warm, informal, generous, while giving an exclusively technical reading of social work professionalization.     

On Ultrametricity,Data Coding,and Computation

The triangular inequality is a defining property of a metric space, while the stronger ultrametric inequality is a defining property of an ultrametric space. Ultrametric distance is defined from p-adic valuation. It is known that ultrametricity is a natural property of spaces in the sparse limit. The implications of this are discussed in this article. Experimental results are presented which quantify how ultrametric a given metric space is. We explore the practical meaningfulness of this property of a space being ultrametric. In particular, we examine the computational implications of widely prevalent and perhaps ubiquitous ultrametricity.     

Different Perspectives on Meaning and Meaningfulness

In this comment on Johan Von Essen’s contribution on the meaning of volunteering we make some remarks about Von Essen’s starting point, which reveals a particular perspective on meaningfulness, namely that people perceive reality as meaningful when their actions and the things they encounter are part of a meaningful whole. By introducing another perspective on meaningfulness, namely that the shattering of a meaningful whole is full of meaning, we question if practices of volunteering which occur in face-to-face situations—and thus outside the public realm—can be fully captured by the five predicates that make up the phenomenological structure of volunteering.     

Meaningfulness: A Third Dimension of the Good Life

This paper argues that an adequate conception of a good life should recognize, in addition to happiness and morality, a third dimension of meaningfulness. It further proposes that we understand meaningfulness as involving both a subjective and an objective condition, suitably linked. Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. In other words one’s life is meaningful insofar as one is gripped or excited by things worthy of one’s love, and one is able to do something positive about it. The paper concludes with some speculations about how this conception of meaningfulness might help to explain the conditions under which social volunteering can be especially rewarding.     

意义视野下工程造物与技术造物的划界

工程技术划界问题是工程研究的前提性问题。本文分析了解决这一问题的各种已有方案的不足,以"所造之物对于人们的意义差别"为立论基础,提出了本文的划界标准,将工程定义为"价值普遍的(系统)设施";将技术定义为"价值特殊的(器物)产品"。基于此,讨论了与技术造物相区别的工程造物的若干特殊性质。在结语部分,基于工程造物的普遍性质,呼吁强化对于工程现象的社会学及伦理学研究。     

Symmetry, Quantum Mechanics, and Beyond

The relevance of symmetry to today's physics is a widely acknowledged fact. A significant part of recent physical inquiry – especially the physics concerned with investigating the fundamentalbuilding blocks of nature – is grounded on symmetry principles andtheir many and far-reaching consequences. But where these symmetries come from and what their real meaning is are open questions, at the center of a developing debate among physicists and philosophers of science. To tackle the problems arising in considering the symmetry issue is the main purpose of this paper. Starting with briefly recalling the bases for the discussion – how symmetry enters and operates in physics, its special effectiveness in the quantum domain and the many relevant functions it performs (Sections 1–3), the paper then focus on the general interpretative questions that arise and the sorts of answers that have been given (Section 4).     

Citizenship and Voluntarism: A Meaningful Combination or the Basis for Exploitative Relationships?

The author starts from the observation that citizenship and voluntarism are contested terms with diverse meanings. They have also been appropriated by politicians of various persuasions and imbued with meanings associated with ‘feel good’ factors that emphasize serving in a community. Therefore, voluntarism has the potential to continue the exclusion of minority groups, marginalized individuals and collective groupings at the expense of their citizenship rights, particularly those identified by Hannah Arendt as the ‘right to have rights’ that have been endorsed through public policy but today are being undermined by the ‘age of austerity’ in publicly funded welfare states. Against the background of the political context of UK, and the public rhetoric on the ‘Big Society’, the author examines whether citizenship discourses allied with voluntarism support a meaningful endorsement of altruistic solidarity or whether they endorse exploitative relationships under the guise of meeting the public needs.     

Meaningful Civicness for the Many: A Comment on Erik Claes

This comment on Erik Claes values his treatment of in-depth interviews to gain a better understanding of how volunteers make sense of their activities, but it questions the representativeness, meaningfulness and civicness of what is found. Meaning as deep personal commitment to an objective value (Susan Wolf) is probably quite exceptional. The values and goals of Claes’s volunteers are deeply human and wide-ranging, but too ignorant of disagreement, power and politics to be called civic.     

Meaning in Life: Meeting the Challenges

Responding to comments by Cheshire Calhoun and Arnold Burms, this piece clarifies some of Wolf’s ideas about the relation between meaningfulness in life, on the one hand, and reasons of love, fulfillment, and objective value, on the other. Meaning tends to come from activities whose reasons are grounded in love of a worthy (objectively valuable) object, and not necessarily from reasons having anything to do with an interest in meaningfulness itself. But what counts as a worthy object cannot be determined either from a totally neutral and impersonal point of view or from the points of view of specific other people who matter to the subject.     

The Art of Living with Technology: Turning Over Philosophy of Technology’s Empirical Turn

In this article we seek to lay bare a couple of potential conceptual and methodological issues that, we believe, are implicitly present in contemporary philosophy of technology (PhilTech). At stake are (1) the sustained pertinence of and need for coping strategies as to ‘how to live with technology (in everyday life)’ notwithstanding PhilTech’s advancement in its non-essentialist analysis of ‘technology’ as such; (2) the issue of whether ‘living with technology’ is a technological affair or not (or both); and (3) the tightly related question concerning the status of the methodological bedrock of contemporary PhilTech, the ‘empirical turn.’ These matters are approached from the perspective of the philosophical notion of the ‘art of living,’ and our argumentation is developed both as a context for and on the basis of the contributions to the special issue ‘The Art of Living with Technology.’     

建立科技图书使用规范科技名词的保障体系

为保障科技图书使用规范科技名词,应建立全国科技名词委、科技图书作者、科技图书编辑三位一体的使用规范科技名词保障体系。科技图书作者应提高科技名词素养和使用规范科技名词的意识,在科技图书写作过程中自觉使用规范科技名词;科技图书编辑也应提高科技名词素养,增强对科技图书中的科技名词把关的能力;全国科技名词委的作用也应得到加强。     

“磷、膦、钅粦”“氨、胺、铵”系列名词辨析

系统分析和归纳了“磷、膦、钅粦”“氨、胺、铵”系列名词的定义和知识点,探讨了易混淆、错用的各类情况,为科技编辑及其他技术人员正确、规范使用该系列名词术语提供借鉴。     

地质学科技期刊中四组常见词使用辨析

科技期刊及其编辑在促进科技术语规范化表达的进程中承担着重要责任。在地质学科技论文编校过程中,经常发现学科术语的混用、错用现象。文章列举了四组常见词汇,通过中国知网文献检索发现其混淆使用现象比较普遍。借助词典、地质行业标准、全国科技名词委审定公布的科技名词及百度学术搜索引擎,对“勘查”“勘察”、 “降水量”“降雨量”的词义及使用语境进行分析,对“平硐”“平洞”、 “硐室”“洞室”的正误使用进行辨析。最后提出建议:期刊学科编辑需要加强对科技术语规范化表达的重视,工作中遇到把握不准的词要查证辨析,做到改必有据;编辑部可以通过期刊网站等平台公布易混淆词汇,促进作者和读者重视科技术语的规范化表达,并在科技论文写作中正确使用。     

提升编辑科技名词素养促进科技名词规范应用

为提高我国科技名词的应用水平,编辑应提升自己的科技名词素养:(1)学习有关政策、规定、规范科技名词和术语学知识;(2)掌握常见的科技名词错误类型,熟悉非规范科技名词;(3)发挥规范科技名词与作者之间的桥梁作用。