Donn Welton

Bio: Donn Welton is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Philosophy of architecture & Continental philosophy. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 16 citations.

International Relations and the Search for Thinking Space: Another View of the Third Debate

Abstract: Recent debates in International Relations have seen some of the characteristic dichotomies of the discipline under severe and sophisticated challenge. The proposition, for example, that the study of International Relations, is somehow "independent" of mainstream debates on theory and practice in the social sciences is now widely rejected. The disciplines change in attitude on this issue owes much, in the 1980s, to the influences of an as yet small group of scholars who have infused the "third debate" in International Relations with an appreciation for previously "alien" approaches to knowledge and society, drawn from interdisciplinary sources, which repudiate (meta) theoretical dualism in all its forms. Utilizing the sponge term "postpositivism" Yosef Lapid has concentrated on an important aspect of the "third debate," one which has seen positivist based perspectives repudiated in favor of critical perspectives derived, primarily, from debates on the philosophy of science. This paper takes a broader view of the "third debate" in focusing on some of the broader patterns of dissent in social theory that are now evident in its literature. It argues that for all the differences associated with the new critical social theory approaches, theirs is critique with common purpose. Its purpose: to help us understand more about contemporary global life by opening up for questioning dimensions of inquiry which have been previously closed off and supressed; by listening closely to voices previously unheard; by examining "realities" excluded from consideration under a traditional (realist) regime of unity and singularity. Its purpose, reiterated: the search for "thinking space" within an International Relations discipline produced by and articulated through Western modernist discourse.

Does history have a future? An inquiry into history as research

Abstract: This thesis explores the question of history’s future as a research discipline in the academy and the question of the discipline’s function in ‘pure’ inquiry. Central to the notion of research is the notion of discovery of new knowledge, but what constitutes new historical knowledge rather than simply more historical information is not clear. As the idea of research (which is understood to mean the discovery and creation of new knowledge) is central to the idea of the modern university, the future of history as a research discipline in the research university would seem to depend on the discipline being clear on its research function. Further complicating resolution of this question is the fact that the funding of research is informed by science and technology paradigms where research is defined as ‘pure basic research’, ‘strategic basic research’, ‘applied research’, and ‘experimental development’. Curiously, what these classifications mean for the humanities generally and history in particular, remains unexamined—despite the fact that professional survival depends on the academic convincing sceptical funders of the relevance of humanist research. Do historians do basic research? If basic research is inquiry at the edge of understanding, how, and by whom, is the edge defined? In the first decades of the University of Berlin—the institution that formed the model for the modern research-university—the edge was defined through philosophy and history. Hegelian systematic philosophy, Fichtean philosophy of the subject, and the philosophical historicism of such thinkers as Ranke, Niebuhr, Ast and Boeckh was concerned with the subject’s knowledge of knowledge: there lay the edge. By the end of the nineteenth century no discipline was foundational. Epistemological ‘advance’ had resulted in not only the split of knowledge into that derived from humanities or ‘spirit’ studies (Geisteswissenschaften) and that from science studies (Naturwissenschaften), but also the proliferation of disciplinary specialization that further entrenched the dichotomy. In the twenty-first century, inquiry’s edge has moved on. Climate change, environmental degradation and biological and genetic engineering have posed wholly new existential questions. The Archimedean point from where the edge is viewed is no longer

Bending a habit: critical social theory as a framework for humanistic nursing education

Abstract: Nursing education is currently experiencing a transition away from a focus on behavioral outcomes and toward a focus which better reflects the humanistic, caring aspects of nursing. Nursing educational content and process must reflect this changing focus of healthcare, which itself is transgressing away from the inherent objectivism of acute care toward the more humanistic elements integral to community building. This paper studies this movement from behaviorism to humanism in nursing education and assumes its foundations in the tenets of critical social theory. The roots of critical social theory are examined, followed by an overview of the changes occurring within nursing education today.

Phenomenology and the third generation of cognitive science: Towards a cognitive phenomenology of the body

Abstract: Phenomenology of the body and the third generation of cognitive science, both of which attribute a central role in human cognition to the body rather than to the Cartesian notion of representation, face the criticism that higher-level cognition cannot be fully grasped by those studies. The problem here is how explicit representations, consciousness, and thoughts issue from perception and the body, and how they cooperate in human cognition. In order to address this problem, we propose a research program, a cognitive phenomenology of the body, which is basically motivated by the perspective of Merleau-Ponty. We find a substantial clue in developmental psychological studies on the body and language.