Showing papers in "Human Studies in 2015"

Financialisation of Valuation

Abstract: This article shows that forms of analysis and calculation specific to finance are spreading, and changing valuation processes in various social settings. This perspective is used to contribute to the study of the recent transformations of capitalism, as financialisation is usually seen as marking the past three decades. After defining what is meant by “financialised valuation,” different examples are discussed. Recent developments concerning the valuation of assets in accounting standards and credit risk in banking regulations are used to suggest that colonisation of financial activities by financialised valuations is taking place. Other changes, concerning the valuation of social or cultural activities and environmental issues are also highlighted in order to support the hypothesis of a parallel colonisation of non-financial activities by financialised valuations. Specifically, the language of finance appears to gradually being incorporated into public policies, especially in Europe—and this trend seems to have gathered pace since the 2000s. Some interpretations are proposed to understand why public policies are seemingly increasingly reliant on financialised valuations.

From Manuscript Evaluation to Article Valuation: The Changing Technologies of Journal Peer Review

Abstract: Born in the seventeenth century, journal peer review is an extremely diverse technology, constantly torn between two often incompatible goals: the validation of manuscripts conceived as a collective industrial-like reproducible process performed to assert scientific statements, and the dissemination of articles considered as a means to spur scientific discussion, raising controversies and civically challenging a state of knowledge. Such a situation is particularly conducive to clarifying the processes of valuation and evaluation in journal peer review. In this article, such processes are considered as specific tests in order to emphasize the uncertain properties of pre-tests manuscripts. On the one hand, evaluation tests are examined at the core of the validation of manuscripts, such as defining the coordination of judging instances (editor-in-chief, editorial committee, outside reviewers) or controlling the modalities of inter-knowledge between reviewers and authors. They are also studied regarding the dissemination of articles, notably through the contemporary conception of a continuing evaluation test termed " post publication peer review ". On the other hand, valuation tests are both part of the validation of manuscripts, such as the weighting of different judgments of the same manuscript and the tensions that these hierarchies cause, and of the dissemination of articles, such as attention metrics recording the uses of articles. The conclusion sketches out how the articulation of these different tests has recently empowered readers as a new key judging instance for dissemination and for validation, potentially transforming the definition of peers, and thus the whole process of journal peer review.

Collective Emotions, Normativity, and Empathy: A Steinian Account

Abstract: Recently, an increasing body of work from sociology, social psychology, and social ontology has been devoted to collective emotions. Rather curiously, however, pressing epistemological and especially normative issues have received almost no attention. In particular, there has been a strange silence on whether one can share emotions with individuals or groups who are not aware of such sharing, or how one may identify this, and eventually identify specific norms of emotional sharing. In this paper, I shall address this set of issues head-on. I will do so by drawing on one of the most elaborate, but rather neglected phenomenological accounts of sociality, namely Edith Stein’s work on communal experiences and her theory of empathy. I wish to show that a suitably amended Steinian account affords us with an intriguing alternative to both phenomenalist and normativist construals of collective emotions. Moreover, I shall argue that it provides a more fine-grained account of the different types of emotional sharing than standard accounts, ranging from face-to-face, or shared, to more robust but less direct, or collective, emotions. Finally, I will propose a tentative answer to the above questions by pointing to non-dyadic or collective forms of empathy.

Subjectivity and Power

Abstract: The statement that an important dualism runs throughout sociological literature belongs to what can be called extended “sociological common sense”. In this context, Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology is often used critically as a paradigmatic example of subjectivism, as it supposedly places exclusive emphasis on actors’ “subjective” interpretations, thereby neglecting “objective” social structures such as power relationships. This article proposes that not only do those characterizations have dualistic grounds, but they also disregard the explicit intention of phenomenology to overcome the dualism between subjectivism and objectivism. The various criticisms directed at the Schutzian paradigm will be confronted with an analysis of the phenomenon of power based on Schutz’s theory of the life-world, in particular his theory of relevance. This theoretical perspective will be replenished by reflections on power as a meaning selection, which specifically allow the hiatus of subjectivism and objectivism to be overcome.

Introduction: Empathy and Collective Intentionality—The Social Philosophy of Edith Stein

Abstract: Two issues have been at center stage in recent social philosophy, both in the analytic and the continental tradition: on the one hand, the nature of interpersonal understanding, or empathy; on the other hand, the possibility and nature of collective intentionality, shared emotions, and group agency. Indeed, there are not many who have investigated more thoroughly both these issues, and, even if not quite explicitly, their complex interrelation, than the philosopher Edith Stein (1891–1942). This special issue explores Edith Stein’s social philosophy, especially as expounded in her phenomenological writings from the 1910s and 1920s. In particular, it will investigate the systematic links between Stein’s pioneering work on empathy (Stein 1917), and her less known but certainly not less original theory of collective intentionality and community (Stein 1922). One of the main aims of this special issue is to re-describe, re-contextualize, and critically assess Stein’s intriguing phenomenology of social reality in contemporary terms, and, specifically, in relation to the relevant current trends in the philosophy of (collective) emotions, social ontology, social cognition research, social psychology, and political philosophy. If we look at the contemporary philosophical landscape, the issue of empathy and collectivity are typically dealt with separately from one another. Moreover, in stark contrast to Stein—and many other early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Gurwitsch, Scheler, or Walther, who all worked in such diverse areas within social philosophy as social cognition, social ontology or social epistemology, and with a few notable contemporary exceptions (Butterfill 2013; Tomasello 2014; Zahavi

Evaluation as Practical Judgment

Abstract: What does evaluation mean? This paper studies the evaluative process as a practical judgment that links a situation to a set of values in order to decide upon a course of action. In the first part, the article follows Sen’s account of an evaluative process. His critique of the monist, deductive and idealist theory of Rawls leads to a “relational” and “comparative” approach of the evaluation. Incompletedness, comparison, reality and deliberation are the key principles of this methodology. This is close to insights of John Dewey. Nevertheless, Dewey grasps the pragmatic dimension of the process more precisely then Sen. He firstly makes the distinction between prizing and appraisal, valuation and evaluation. And secondly, the singular situation is underlined as a component of any evaluation. Therefore, evaluation requires empirical inquiry and public deliberation. In a third step, the article focuses on the relationship between evaluation and norms in practical judgments. As explained in the paper, norms are close to, but different from, values. As horizons or constrains, norms contribute to the framing of evaluations. In short, evaluation is a complex process linking prizing and appraisal, situated deliberation, values and norms. Any reduction to a single dimension should mislead the practical judgment, as shown on the example of the evaluation of work.

How Editors Decide. Oral Communication in Journal Peer Review

Abstract: The operative nucleus of peer review processes has largely remained a ‘black box’ to analytical empirical research. There is a lack of direct insights into the communicative machinery of peer review, i.e., into ‘gatekeeping in action’. This article attempts to fill a small part of this huge research gap. It is based on an ethnographic case study about peer review communication in a sociological journal. It looks at the final phase of the peer review process: the decisions taken in the oral communication of editors’ meetings. The article describes this meeting as an instrumented talk, supported by written tools and constrained by necessary procedural outcomes. It analyzes examples of interactive negotiations of manuscripts and, in the end, it discusses the procedural rationality of peer review as a public sphere for professional judgment.

Empathy, Emotional Sharing and Feelings in Stein’s Early Work

Abstract: This paper is devoted to the study of the emotions in Edith Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy. After presenting her work embedded in the tradition of the early phenomenology of the emotions, I shall elaborate the four dimensions of the emotional experience according to this authoress (depth, reach, duration and intensity), the link between emotions and values and the phenomenon of the living body. I argue that Stein’s account on empathy remains incomplete as long as we ignore the complex phenomenology of emotions underlying her work.

Empathy and the Melodic Unity of the Other

Abstract: Current discussions on social cognition, empathy, and interpersonal understanding are largely built on the question of how we recognize and access particular mental states of others. Mental states have been treated as temporally individuated, momentary or temporally narrow unities that can be grasped at one go. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition—on Stein and Husserl in particular—I will problematize this approach, and argue that the other’s experiential states can appear meaningful to us only they are viewed in connection with further, non-simultaneous experiential states of the other. I will focus on the temporal structure of mental states which has received less attention in the available literature. Building a comparison between empathy and music perception, I will argue that approaching the problem of other minds from the point of view of particular mental states is like considering music from the point of view of particular notes.

The Surprise of a Breast Reconstruction: A Longitudinal Phenomenological Study to Women's Expectations About Reconstructive Surgery

Abstract: While having a breast reconstruction, women have certain expectations about their future breasted bodies. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze these expectations in the process of reconstruction. By applying a qualitative, phenomenological study within a longitudinal research design, this paper acknowledges the temporarily complex, contextualized, embodied, and subjective nature of the phenomenon of expectations. The analysis identified expectations regarding three different aspects of women’s embodiment: (1) their gazed body, (2) their capable/practical body, and (3) their felt body. After reconstruction, these women try to reconfigure—adjust, level or retrospectively rewrite—their expectations. Further, some women face what apparently arrives totally unexpected, namely a strange feeling breast or a failed reconstruction. The development of these women’s expectations can be understood as an active, continuously evolving, difficult and sometimes impossible dynamic of expecting the surprise that is a breast reconstruction. Within this dynamic, women formulate and reconfigure—by definition—unrealistic expectations and validate and try to achieve unexpected futures. We suggest that medical professionals can facilitate this dynamic in various ways.

Stein and Honneth on Empathy and Emotional Recognition

Abstract: My aim in this paper is to make use of Edith Stein’s phenomenological analyses of empathy, emotion, and personhood to clarify and critically assess the recent suggestion by Axel Honneth that a basic form of recognition is affective in nature I will begin by considering Honneth’s own presentation of this claim in his discussion of the role of affect in recognitive gestures, as well as in his notion of ‘elementary recognition,’ arguing that while his account contains much of value it also generates problems On the basis of this analysis, I will try to show that Stein’s account of empathy demarcates an elementary form of recognition in a less problematic fashion than does Honneth’s own treatment of this issue I will then spell out the consequences of this move for the emotional recognition thesis, arguing that Stein’s treatment lends it further credence, before ending with some remarks on the connection between recognition and emotional personality

Edith Stein’s Account of Communal Mind and its Limits: A Phenomenological Reading

Abstract: Edith Stein claims that communal experiences are not reducible to the collection of individual experiences directed to the same object or upon the same content. Based on this intuition she gives a phenomenological description of the intentional structure that is proper to communal experiences regarding to their content, mode, and subject. While expanding on her attempts to reassess Husserl’s description of intentionality in an original social-ontological framework, I will stress her precious distinction between individual consciousness and communal stream of experience. I will argue that, if Stein defines the being of the community through its the communal stream of experience (Erlebnisstrom), the latter has to be interpreted through Husserl’s teleological concept of ideal multiplicity of experiences (Erlebnismannigfaltigkeit). Discussing Stein’s account both against the background of the methodology of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and contextualizing it within the social-ontological struggle that took place in Germany during the Great War, I will focus on her description of we-intentionality and aim to unearth its phenomenological core as well as its methodological limits.

Victims’ Normative Repertoire of Financial Compensation: The Tainted hGH Case

Abstract: Victim compensation now plays a central role in dealing with harm. It can be brought into play by various devices: private or social insurance, the courts or special funds created for specific disasters. With each device, compensation raises complex evaluation issues: is it appropriate to use financial compensation to repair harm? Who should pay and on what basis should the compensation be awarded? What is the nature of the damage? How to evaluate it and how to value the amount of compensation determined? These questions are the subject of intense work of evaluation by both those who create or implement the compensation devices and by those who use them. This article looks more specifically at this work of evaluation by people who have endured a collective disaster and who have had to deal with the devices designed to compensate them.

Intersubjectivity of Dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time : How Authenticity is a Return to Community

Abstract: This essay discusses an alternative interpretation of the term “Dasein” as Heidegger uses it in Being and Time and, in particular, the possibility that Dasein is meant to contain an inherent form of intersubjectivity to which we must “return” in order to achieve authenticity. In doing so, I build on the work of John Haugeland and his interpretation of Dasein as a mass term, while exploring the implications such an interpretation has on Heidegger’s conception of “authenticity”. Ultimately, this paper aims to take seriously Heidegger’s claim to be moving past the isolated Cartesian subject and towards a view of authentic human existence that is cognizant of the way our identities are always formed within a pre-existing community. In addition, since many interpretations of Heidegger have argued that “the Anyone” (Das Man) is representative of all possible forms of community, I consider how this alternative understanding of Dasein as intersubjective can shed new light on critical remarks Heidegger makes about “the Anyone”. Thus, I argue that by reinterpreting Dasein as community, we can find more coherence between Heidegger’s otherwise conflicting conceptions of authenticity and “the Anyone”.

Outreach Work in Paris: A Moral Ethnography of Social Work and Nursing with Homeless People

Abstract: How do we take care of homeless people? A field study with a humanitarian NGO, the Samusocial de Paris, France, gave the author the opportunity to observe nursing and social work with homeless people. The first part of the article recounts how the public problem of “grande exclusion” emerged in France and the kind of value judgments and controversies it gave rise to. He accounts for his tactics not to take sides for any of the definitions and evaluations available in the public sphere, and to deconstruct the genesis of the public policy of “social emergency” that was built in response to “grande exclusion”. The second part of the article keeps on drawing on pragmatism, shifting from Dewey’s The Public and its Problems (1927) to his Theory of Valuation (1939). It describes social work and nursing as moral and political activities. Care is not only given in face to face relationships, it is also a distributed and coordinated activity, embodied into situational arrangements, made of procedures, technologies, institutions, and people. The author shows how a moral ethnography of outreach work with homeless people gives new insights on the valuation operations performed by professionals on the field. It opens new perspectives in the analysis of situated ethics, in connection with a sociology of public problems and public policies.

The Vocabulary of Reality

Abstract: This article seeks to extricate and explicate the unique vocabulary that was consolidated by the realistic phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius in her establishing book Realontologie, published in 1923. Among the concepts are: “Essence” (Wesenheit), “Bearer” (Trager), Self-adherence (Selbsthaftigkeit), Capability (Konnen), Tangentiality (Tangierbarkeit), Incorporation (Leibhaftigkeit), Internality, “Quiet,” Fullness (Fulle), Depth, Layeredness (Teilbarkeit), Abyss (Abgrund), and others. CM does not always coin them as distinguished concepts, but they function as philosophical concepts due to the meaning she pours into them and the way she uses them. The author suggests that these terms can inaugurate the realistic discourse on reality, which is noticeably almost absent in the modern philosophy that has been almost sweepingly conquered by the literal and advanced idealistic discourse.

On Being a ‘We’: Edith Stein’s Contribution to the Intentionalism Debate

Abstract: It is commonplace to speak of social groups as if they were capable of the same sorts of activities as individuals. We say, “Germany won the World Cup”; “The United States invaded Iraq”; and “The world mourned the passing of Nelson Mandela”. In so doing, we attribute agency, belief, and emotional states to groups themselves. In recent years, much literature devoted to analyzing such statements and their implications has emerged. Within this literature, the issue of “intentionalism,” whether individuals must have a certain self-conception in order to constitute a collectivity, has received surprisingly little attention. While Paul Sheehy has criticized this view, claiming that individuals may be related in such a way as to constitute a collective without their realizing it (Sheehy in J Soc Philos 33(3):377–394, 2002), little other scholarship on the topic exists. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this debate. I will argue, drawing on Edith Stein’s phenomenology of social groups, that intentionalism, as Margaret Gilbert defines it, is false. I begin by establishing Gilbert’s account, Sheehy’s criticism of intentionalism, and what I take to be its shortcomings. I then explicate Stein’s phenomenology of collectives and argue that plural subjects who do not meet intentionalist requirements can exist. Given this, intentionalism must be rejected. Because the intentionalism debate presupposes that there are irreducibly social agents, I do not argue for this claim.

Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination

Abstract: I argue that imagination has an inherently paradoxical structure: it enables one to flee one’s socio-cultural reality and to constitute one’s socio-cultural world. I maintain that most philosophical accounts of the imagination leave this paradox unexplored. I further contend that Paul Ricoeur is the only thinker to have addressed this paradox explicitly. According to Ricoeur, to resolve this paradox, one needs to recognize language as the origin of productive imagination. This paper explores Ricoeur’s solution by offering a detailed study of reproductive and productive imagination in the framework of poetic imagination. My analysis subjects Ricoeur’s distinction between reproductive and productive imagination to a critique that relies upon the principles of classical phenomenology. According to my central thesis, the imaginative powers of language are themselves rooted in perception. This thesis broadens the scope and significance of Ricoeur’s solution by enabling one to resolve the paradox of imagination not only at the level of language-based imagination, but also at the level of dreams and daydreaming as well as at the level of non-language based art. No less significantly, this thesis enables one to open a fresh dialogue between phenomenology and hermeneutics.

Phronēsis and the Art of Healing: Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenology of Equilibrium in Health

Abstract: In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle places the art of medicine alongside other examples of technē. According to Gadamer, however, medicine is different because in medicine the physician does not, properly speaking, produce anything. In The Enigma of Health, rather than introducing Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronēsis (practical wisdom) as a way of understanding medical practice, Gadamer focuses on how medicine is a technē “with a difference”. In this paper, I argue that, despite the richness of his insights, this focus prevents Gadamer from reaching an adequate account of health and the practice of medicine, and I demonstrate how making phronēsis central via a phenomenological description furthers our understanding of the art of healing in important ways. The paper begins with an exploration of Gadamer’s understanding of phronēsis and technē (via Heidegger) to provide a foundation for a phenomenological analysis of the art of healing. After considering the shortcomings of Gadamer’s analyses, I introduce a working definition of “health” that both captures the spirit of Gadamer’s insights and prepares the ground for a phenomenological description. Finally, I introduce concepts from Merleau-Ponty in order to establish an adequate account of the relation between technē and phronēsis and a more nuanced understanding of experience as unfolding within the expressive trajectories forged by bodies that are subject to the weight of the past and the weight of the ideal. The art of medicine, I argue, needs to be understood as expressive behavior in the context of historically and socially situated individuals, institutions, and open trajectories of sense.

Merleau-Ponty on Causality

Abstract: “Merleau-Ponty on Causality” attempts to reveal Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of causality with respect to the physical, the vital, and the human. The philosophy of causality of both Hume and Mill will be briefly addressed and challenged. Special attention will be paid to Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of causality with respect to human behavior.

Fun in Go: The Timely Delivery of a Monkey Jump and its Lingering Relevance to Science Studies

Abstract: This paper offers an ethnomethodological exploration of fun in Go (the ancient board game), the timely delivery of a ‘Monkey Jump’ (a particular move in Go), and its lingering relevance to science studies (where Go has provided an early analogy for laboratory work). In Go terms, the paper makes a ‘pincer’ move: on the one hand, it explores the analytic potential of ‘fun’ for ethnographic purposes and, on the other hand, it questions its manifest abandonment in some quarters of science studies. In particular, the paper challenges their “curious seriousness” (Garfinkel in Reseaux Hors Ser 8(1):69–78, 1990) whenever grand ontological claims are mixed up with suspended empirical inquiry. That said, the latter criticism does not take the form of a scholarly exercise in conceptual clarification, but remains part and parcel of the author’s ethnography of playing amateur Go, including his dealing with and delivery of a Monkey Jump and reading of Go literature and replaying of professional games (as most amateurs do). The key point of the paper, then, is to demonstrate the heuristic interest of adopting a practitioner’s stance, not only for understanding a technical domain such as Go in its own terms (Livingston in Ethnographies of reason, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008), but also for launching a phenomenological critique of analytic discretion in science studies. Therefore, the second part of the paper re-examines, from an amateur Go player’s stance, Latour and Woolgar’s Go analogy in and for Laboratory Life (1979, 1986a)—an early exemplar of science studies’ ontological bent.

What’s the Right Price for Babysitting? A Case Study in Ethno-Accounting

Abstract: Through a case study, this paper contributes to answer the call to inquiries set by John Dewey in the conclusion of his Theory of Valuation. To move on to ethnography, some requirements explained by Alfred Schutz have also been followed: the study of choices, transactions, and evaluations must be confronted with real situations in real temporality, not with puppets set in motion by social scientists. The present case study is based upon a thorough ethnography of evaluation in a Spanish Moroccan community milieu, conducted in Andalusia and Morocco from 2007 to 2010. The observation discipline, which leads to an original kind of ethnographic data, has been called ethno-accounting (ethnocomptabilite) by the author, as the point is to take into account what people do actually take into account, instead of claiming to assess things and situations directly.

Error, Aberration, and Abnormality: Mental Disturbance as a Shift in Frameworks of Relevance

Abstract: In general, in our ordinary life, we manage to make the difference between “strange” behavior and error or extravagant beliefs. The question is here to know how we do so, and against what background. There are also specialized contexts for evaluating whether certain types of behavior or discourse are normal or abnormal: courts of law and psychiatric hospitals are two examples. In these contexts, judgments are formed against a background of technical or scientific knowledge, but they also result from epistemic means of evaluation that are similar to habitual ones. The paper seeks to highlight this similarity with respect to recognizing mental disturbance. Starting from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, it attempts at extending it by drawing on notions of reciprocal perspectives and of judgments of incongruity. It documents its investigation by analyzing sequences from Malek Bensmail’s documentary, Alienations, which examines the treatment of mental suffering in contemporary Algeria.

Value as a Social Fact: An Adverbial Approach

Abstract: This paper outlines an adverbial approach of value, which it proposes as an alternative to a “nominalistic” one. It starts from a review of a recent book of a French economist, Andre Orlean, who develops, from the instance of money, a theory of value which he thinks valid for all social values. The paper criticizes the main presuppositions of Orlean’s model of value and tries to elaborate a more praxeological and a more social one.

Durkheim as the Founding Father of Phenomenological Sociology

Abstract: In the first place, I discuss the main papers and books on Durkheim published in recent years, where no attention is given to the phenomenological interpretations of his work. Then I expose different phenomenological readings of Durkheim, some of them positive (for instance, Tyriakian’s), some negative (Monnerot and others), some ambivalent (like Schutz’s). Later I find that there is in Durkheim an implicit practice of phenomenology, inspired by Descartes’ Meditations on first philosophy. Consequently, I support Tyriakian’s thesis that there is in Durkheim an implicit phenomenological approach, despite his positivism. Then I wonder whether this tacit approach produces a phenomenological ontology of the social world. I find that it actually does, especially in what regards to social facts considered as things. I argue that Durkheim’s conception of social things is consistent with Husserl’s notion of ideal objectivities. I conclude that Durkheim’s rule of considering social facts as things is part of his phenomenological legacy and that it does not contradict the idea that they also are “states lived”.

Mark Coeckelbergh: Environmental Skill: Motivation, Knowledge, and the Possibility of a Non-romantic Environmental Ethics: New York: Routledge, 2015, 227 pp, $140.00

Abstract: In Environmental Skill: Motivation, Knowledge, and the Possibility of a NonRomantic Environmental Ethics, Mark Coeckelbergh addresses what he takes to be ‘‘the main problem of environmental ethics’’ (p. 1): the problem that even though we know what we should do for the environment, a gap persists between our knowledge and our action. Though we know, for instance, that we should eat less meat, bike to work, and generally consume less, compared to what we know we ought to do, the changes we make in our lives are likely ‘‘disappointingly small’’ (p. xiii). Coeckelbergh traces this problem to the context of environmental thinking and environmental ethics that are both thoroughly steeped in romanticism and enlightenment reason. He argues that these modern ways in which we know and relate to our environment only serve to alienate us from it: they condition us either to yearn for authentic nature and wilderness or to strive to control it through study, efficient management, and manipulation. Thus, both ways of thinking enforce a dualism between human culture and nonhuman nature, which lies at the root of our failure to act, despite all we know about global environmental degradation and our complicity in it. Coeckelbergh envisions a way to bridge this gap between knowledge and action, what he terms the ‘‘problem of environmental motivation’’ (p. 43), through the notion of environmental skill: know-how cultivated from our current practices. We might ‘‘literally revive environmental ethics’’ (p. 100) by shifting away from theoretical knowledge (knowing-that) and abstract moral

A Case Study in the Relationship of Mind to Body: Transforming the Embodied Mind

Abstract: This paper employs ethnographic research methods to study a Buddhist meditation practice that takes the walking body as its object. The mundane act of walking is transformed into a meditative object for the purpose of refining states of embodied consciousness. This meditation practice offers a glimpse of the relationship of body to mind, a fundamental concern within the philosophy of mind. The analytic focus of this paper is the practical nature of meditation work. Aspects of Buddhist Philosophy are explored and compared to analytic themes within Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology.