Kevin Michael Stevenson

Researchers and artists alike have their own unique challenges when it comes to engaging with their craft for the purposes of producing a final product. Both occupations hold their own respective identities when it comes to the labour of their work whilst holding other cultural and linguistic identities. This retrospective autoethnography completed in the third-person narrative aims to explore the experience of creating a musical setting in terms of cultural importance and identity dynamics between artist and researcher. The research attempts to convey how the Propeller Model Approach (PMA) can serve as a theoretical framework by deductively providing emotive codes for the memories analyzed. The researcher’s experiences of creating a musical setting for the WB Yeat’s poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” are recalled in the context of a Canadian Irish recording artist. The secondary literature explores human creativity, philosophy of music and other autoethnographies in conjunction with the four thematic areas of PMA. The results from the research inform of a departure from an intellect-centric view on creativity and provide insight into the music making process.

The European Union today is a cosmopolitan entity that functions in conjunction with political parties. This reliance on parties is one example of cosmopolitanism’s need to replicate the nation-state at supranational and intergovernmental levels. Maintaining the European Union as its case study, this paper explores the plausibility and requirements for demoicracy adoption as the form of governance for the European Union. This paper reveals that demoicracy can permit partyless governance to a greater extent than cosmopolitanism. This not only exposes the concomitant relationship between parties and cosmopolitanism, but also the benefits of partyless governance. The paper informs that parties need to be avoided due to a hindrance of citizen representation. To deepen our understanding of this notion, parties and cosmopolitanism are examined in the paper as extensions of the project of modernity.

The successful development of psychotherapeutic and counselling approaches can reflect the evolution and innovation within the industry of psychological treatment. Measuring the benefits of an approach involves inquiry into how it is conducted, the practitioner conducting it, and even the setting in which it is conducted. The aims of this exploratory study are to discover if a psychotherapeutic approach, the Propeller Model Approach, serves its purpose of increasing self-awareness for clients. Such awareness is distinguished in the study as intrinsic and instrumental and aims to build on the theoretical framework that self-awareness is beneficial to the human condition. In order to conduct the study, a semi-structured interview was conducted with five clients engaged in counselling therapy after an individual online counselling session. Each session utilized the Approach implemented by the practitioner for the study who was also the principal researcher. To understand the nature of the participant experience of the Approach, a phenomenological interpretivist epistemology was adhered to. The use of abduction assisted in connecting the ontological construction of participant feedback from their interaction with the Approach to new potential hypotheses. The data of the feedback was analysed through a reflexive thematic analysis that respected the hermeneutical nature of the coding and thematization of the data. The study serves as an example of evidence-based research into a new psychotherapeutic approach and can guide practitioners interested in utilizing the Propeller Model Approach to counselling therapy or for general exploration into human identity.

The DSM-V supports a medical culture that can be argued to undermine the importance of context for understanding problems of living. This paper will look at three components in relation to DSM-V’s biological model to show how they exacerbate the promotion of medication treatment using the examples of obsessive compulsive disorder, social phobias, anorexia, and the therapy experience of U.S. military troops. First, it will look at the DSM-V’s categorical approach to diagnosis in juxtaposition to a dimensional/holistic approach, framing the former as an exacerbator of medical solutions to problems of living. Second, it will show that the abstraction required for the categorization inherent in the DSM-V does not rely on etiology, rather descriptions which lead to the discrete groupings of disorders for medical matchmaking. Finally, this paper will inform of the repercussions the DSM-V’s categorization and abstraction has on the interpretation of culture in relation to problems of living and why its stigmatization of such problems is an interpretation that contributes to the medicalization of treatment rather than a culture of commitment that incorporates holistic support.

This paper aims to uncover some of the important contributions the phenomenological method can offer to philosophical issues in literary studies. It leads us to the idea that the archetypes found in fiction are intuited phenomenologically. This idea is then linked to a social constructive attainment of meaning for reality. From the intersubjectivity provided by phenomenology, empathy with characters in fiction is then displayed as more than an intellectual activity, as it becomes known to have practical implications. It is framed as involving the same processes as the empathy we have with people in the real world. This equivalency allows for the plausibility of the notion that fiction-making is a necessary process for our interpretations of reality. It designates our involvement in fiction as beneficial to our experience of the real world and supports the notion it can train us to empathize. Such training is displayed to be posssible from phenomenology’s role in the process of empathy. Phenomenology's method de-centers the Cartesian ego to prevent any impasse between internal consciousness and the external world. Since they are bridged together by intentionality, we learn that phenomenology is a method that can contribute to how we conceive of empathy.

This paper will aim to accomplish two things to show Luhmann’s and Hegel’s support of language and communication as dependent on culture, but also their differences with respect to how culture is formed in conjunction with the environment. This paper will firstly show how Hegel distinguishes between the imagination and reason in a different manner from Luhmann, as Hegel considers them logically connected while Luhmann considers them as coextensive. Secondly, this paper will show how reason and imagination create culture through the environment via dialectical idealism in Hegel and a poly-contextural constructivist approach in Luhmann.

The conflict between aesthetic experience and the modern vision of the world frames aesthetic experience as a defender of the plurality derived from the perspectives of individuals. This signifies that aesthetic experience confronts the unilateralism of modernity’s vision. This article propounds that this role of aesthetic experience is based on its defense of subjectivity and individuality. This defense, when investigated, reveals the compatibility between phenomenology and pragmatism. This compatibility also demonstrates that aesthetic experience should be understood as a phenomenological experience. Therefore, phenomenology and pragmatism reveal a comradery that permits them to work in tandem, defending subjectivity and pluralism in the face of modernity.

Natural scientific views on the human being have the tendency to reduce selfhood toa static object. This tendency arguably derives from the need to objectify the present in which the human being is found. Phenomenology avoids such a reduction by engaging with the present instead of distancing from it for the sake of analysis. This beneficence that derives froma phenomenological view of reality is argued to be a warranted view a counseling therapist should adopt. Not only can a therapist who involves phenomenological perspectives in their practice succeed in viewing their clients non-instrumentally, but such a therapist can also “Be” genuine. The paper conceives of the therapist capable of performing these phenomenological tasks in therapy as adopting a mode of Being which we highlight as akin to the ancient concept: hypostasis. This conception in turn is shown to have epistemological ramifications for the meaning of “understanding”, which is shown quite suitably in the example of therapeutic presence. Heidegger’s Dasein serves as conceptual example of self in the paper to elucidate the connection between hypostasis and understanding throughout.

Human beings can be said to naturally seek familiarity in their environment for survival purposes, and this can explain why the mere-exposure effect, where being merely exposed to external factors in our environment, can increase preference for these factors. Familiarity in this sense can thus be framed as important for affect and preference formation and considered built upon both the subjective process of fluency and the objects of experience being processed. The feeling of uncanniness is often considered the opposite of familiarity, yet within its semantic vicinity. By considering the term ‘uncanny’ as having a double meaning linked to both familiarity and unfamiliarity, however, this paper will show how this ambiguity allows for a semantic relatedness of this concept to process fluency rather than familiarity. This connection will in turn be shown to have ramifications for affect through the proposal of a fourth model of process fluency: The Embodied Fluency Model. Through consideration of Mori’s shinkawan, Freud’s notion of the uncanny, and Heidegger’s connection between uncanniness and Angst, an exploration into conceiving how fluency and uncanniness share attributes that allow for a different view on affect is propounded.

The categorical imperative inherent in Kant’s ethics has had indubitable historical influence on societies worldwide whether in the form of laws, democracy or public deliberation. The Toronto Van Attack of 2018 and its subsequent legal trial is a case example that shows how the categorical imperative can be applied to assist in understanding the reasoning for the case’s guilty verdict. This paper will convey the applicability of the categorical imperative for examining criminal case studies by closing the gap between ethical theory and practice. Such closure will be shown to assist in understanding why a perpetrator of a crime can be found guilty of following a hypothetical imperative to base their actions. The rationale for the verdict in this case will be shown to be based on the perpetrator’s responsibility in the form of maintaining autonomy despite having an autism diagnosis. The perpetrator will be shown to have acted on an irrational will and yet was treated in the legal sense as a rational individual. Such rationality was maintained despite complications with their autonomy in the form of relativism and ethical solipsism.

Did you ever wonder why you see the world around you the way that you do? Ever wondered why you might see everything in your world as a means to an end? Why should you bother following the dictum to ‘live within your means’ when you haven’t even considered ‘living with or within your ends’? You might ask yourself: what is implied here by ends and by means, and why does the latter always seem to come before the former? After all, how do we end anything without a means for doing so? Living With(in) Your Ends provides a crutch for you to lean on while you ponder the means and ends within your life and the world around you. It guides you on how to maintain your true identity without getting ‘sucked into world of means’ where superficiality prospers. Investigating human existence through a lens that values the present moment and which provides for practical consequences, Kevin M. Stevenson, PhD, provides an exploration into the deeper realms of perception and their relationships with time and identity. Living With(in) Your Ends not only provides a conceptual map to follow for leading an authentic life, it also considers some of the historical and philosophical notions that have blessed and plagued human existence. Living With(in) Your Ends will provide you with a framework for healthy reflection and increased awareness of the intersections between yourself and the world.

The status of philosophy is contingent upon the civilizations that embrace or undermine its importance. Such status is never fully understood, nor clear, due in part to its inutility. In a goal-oriented world, philosophizing is pointless if it does not produce material results. One point of philosophy though is not only to recognize, but promote activities which are uniquely human and which therefore artificial intelligence could not possibly simulate. Improvisation, as one such activity, can reveal the importance of philosophy as a discipline by maintaining the relevance of subjectivity. In order to justify the presence of philosophy in the university, one important way is to have philosophy maintain the notion that the mental cannot be reduced to the material or physical. Consequently, phenomenology in philosophy’s defense becomes more relevant the more we realize that philosophy is threatened by the interdependency of materialism, A.I. research, and the corporatization of the university.