Johan Siebers

La philosophie de Bloch est définie, entre autres choses, par son style, révélateur de ce qui ne peut être l’abstraction de ce qu’il veut dire. Ceci est d'ailleurs conforme à d’une philosophie matérialiste. La matière, pour Bloch, engendre de multiples formes. Dans cette philosophie, le langage est le corps de la pensée. Le style de Bloch exprime la mise en avant dans sa métaphysique du non-fini, de l’indéterminé et de la nature utopique du réel qui souvent apparait en marge, dans ce qui est inattendu. Tout comme son ontologie est une ontologie de l'être à venir, du processus d’existence encore incomplet, son langage est défini par une domination du subjonctif. Dans cet article, je soutiens que le matérialisme de cette pensée, nous permet de dépasser la division institutionnelle entre rhétorique et la philosophie qui caractérise l’histoire de la pensée européenne et qui aliène l’engagement envers la vérité, alors que la prévalence du subjonctif amène à une nouvelle conceptualisation de ce que veut dire être, au travers de la parole inscrite dans un monde de possibilité créative.

There has been comparatively little attention for the fundamental ontology of communication in recent philosophy. Nevertheless, from classical metaphysical accounts of relationality and communal being to the analysis of intersubjectivity in phenomenology and to concrete existence as understood by process philosophy, the communicative structure of the act of being has been, if not explicitly then implicitly, a perennial component of metaphysical reflection. Communication theory can be conceived in such a way that it takes this ontological dimension into account. The ramifications of connecting being to communication in this way are explored in discussion with the conceptualizations of communication in integrationism and biosemiotics. An interpretation of Gabriel Marcel’s existential analysis of “my life” is used to show what philosophy as communication theory (in the strong sense of the notion elaborated here) might look like.

This issue of the European Journal for Philosophy of Communication (EJPC) (Empedocles) contains a long experimental text on the love of language and the process of self-expression in language, written by Dutch author Ninke Overbeek. The text, originally written in Dutch, was awarded a grant by the Intellect translation fund. We are grateful to Intellect for making the translation possible and creating the opportunity to publish this type of writing in the journal. In addition to Overbeek’s text, this issue contains a critical book review and a reflective essay on aspects of Buber’s dialogical philosophy.

This article arises out of critical contemplation of ‘skills’ in relation to Higher Education pedagogy as it relates to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. As the emphasis on skills dominates more and more of the discourse about pedagogy in Higher Education, the article aims to make some critical comments about the reductionist approach to education that easily becomes part of skills discourse. In addition to criticising instrumentalist deployment of ‘skills’ in Higher Education policy, the article also considers the supposedly most ‘radical’ perspective on the idea of skill which is implicit in enactivists’ accounts of the embedding of sensorimotor action in cognition. It is argued that such a perspective is undermined by its insistence on a model of direct human-environment interaction which brackets creativity, anticipation and the future. The article suggests that such a perspective would be illumined by dialogue with Ernst Bloch’s concept of the ‘not-yet’.

Complementing earlier efforts to scrutinize the uses of models in the field of media and communication studies, this volume reassesses old perspectives and delineates new theoretical options for communication inquiry. It is the first book to undertake a philosophical investigation of the significance of modelling in the study of the varying phenomena, processes, and practices of communication. By homing in on the manifestations and purposes of modelling in ordinary discourses on communication as well as in theoretical expositions, the essays collected in this book cast new light on the importance of models for communication inquiry. This volume challenges received view of communication models as mere diagrams and opens up new paths of conceptual inquiry in communication research.

This volume creates a conversation between researchers who are actively exploring how working with and reflecting upon time and temporality in the research process can generate new accounts and understandings of social and cultural phenomena and bring new ways of knowing and being into existence. The book makes a significant contribution to the enhancement of the social sciences and humanities by charting research methods that link reflectively articulate notions of time to knowledge production in these areas. Contributors explore how researchers are beginning to adopt tactics such as time visibility, hacking time, making time, witnessing temporal power and caring for temporal disruptions as resources for qualitative research. The book collects fields as disparate as futures studies and history, literary analysis and urban design, utopian studies and science and technology studies, bringing together those who are working with temporality reflexively as a powerful epistemological tool for scholarship and research inquiry. It surfaces and foregrounds the methodological challenges and possibilities raised. In so doing, this collection will serve as a resource for both new and experienced researchers in the humanities and social sciences, seeking to understand the tools that are emerging, both theoretical and methodological, for working with time as part of research design. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of research methods, time and temporality, future studies and the environmental humanities.