experience

John McDowell and Richard Rorty draw on Kant’s influential account of experience. For Rorty, Kant is the antagonist who succumbs to foundationalism or what Sellars calls the Myth of the Given and Wittgenstein is the hero who helps in overcoming the siren call of the Myth. McDowell, however, is ambivalent toward Kant. With Sellars, he applauds Kant as the hero who helped us vanquish the Myth of the Given. But he argues that Kant failed to recognize the full strength of his account of experience and capitulated to a subjective idealism. Wittgenstein, for McDowell, is the hero who helps us achieve an account of experience that gets to the things themselves. I adjudicate the philosophical and the exegetical tensions between Rorty and McDowell and support the latter’s approach to experience and to the reading of Kant and Wittgenstein.

Realist fiction, which had a pivotal place in 19th. Century literature, has lost its central position in the contemporary literary scene as modernism, postmodernism and poststructuralism have raised some serious challenges against it, advocating experimentalism in fiction, instead. Still, in our age, when globalization and capitalism breed different forms of marginalizations and injustices in societies, it is the realist fiction that better than any other form can depict the struggles and pains of these marginalized lives. Thus, realist fiction deserves to be considered a major genre of our time rather than a second-rater. This paper attempts to investigate into the present state of realist fiction in the literary scene, and it argues that, with the significant theoretical backing from the postpositivist realist critics, it can move toward reclaiming its position in literature today. Postpositivist realists base their defense of realist fiction on the notion that the representation of reality, identity and experience in realist fiction, in spite of being theory-mediated and affected by ideologies and discourses, is possible, as these objects of representation are real and important for being real. The paper maintains that the postpositivist support can favorably affect the present place of realist fiction. Still, the rightful realist fiction of our time, in tune with the developments in the theories of knowledge and fiction, unlike the 19th. century realist fiction, has patches of experimentalism, while keeping its realistic ethos, which further indicates that the contemporary fiction is the fiction of an era affected by postpositivist realist concepts.

The purpose of this research is to explore the social media trend in communication in Kuwait by utilizing the technology acceptance model. Social media has been gaining extraordinary adoption in past years that requires further investigation into user’s adoption habits, the various kinds of social media, and its effect on their perceived usefulness and ease of use of social media. The study consists of a total of 250 participants that were asked to complete a questionnaire in a random sample. Important findings indicate that the highest number of participants uses Facebook, and the second highest number of participants use Twitter. In terms of usage habits, the highest number of participants uses social media for chatting and connecting with family and friends. The second highest number of participants uses social media for reading posts. In terms of perceived usefulness, the highest numbers of participants perceive social media as ‘usefulness’, and the second highest numbers of participants feel that ‘social media is faster’. In terms of perceived ease of use the highest numbers of participants feel that social media is an easy way to communicate, and the second highest numbers of participants feel that social media does not require a lot of effort. In terms of gender it has been evident that females feel higher perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of social media than males. The study bears theoretical and practical implications that show TAM can be successfully applied to examine social media in the context of Kuwait population. Furthermore, results of this study can be further generalized to neighboring GCC countries as they share similar geographic, economic, cultural, and financial factors.

The current study investigated the relationship between teachers’ creativity, motivation and job satisfaction. In so doing, the role of demographic factors, i.e. gender, teaching experience and teaching context was also taken into account. To conduct the study, a total of 103 EFL teachers at both institute and school contexts were selected. The teachers were recruited on a voluntary basis, and the sample included teachers from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, coming from both genders and either of the teaching contexts. Three questionnaires (Teacher Creativity Questionnaire, Teacher Motivation Questionnaire, and Job Satisfaction Scale) were employed to gather the data, which were then analyzed through a number of analyses, including Spearman’s Rank Order Correlation, Multiple Regression Analysis, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test. Findings revealed the existence of a significant correlation between teachers’ motivation and their job satisfaction. Furthermore, teachers’ motivation in comparison with their creativity had a greater predictive power with regard to job satisfaction. However, demographic factors did not have a significant role in job satisfaction. The findings can offer insightful implications for educational authorities, teachers, school leaderships and academicians to help promote job satisfaction in different instructional contexts.

The aim of the present research is to investigate the relation between phenomenology and language, and to comprehend the cognitive experience by reading a literary work or an aesthetic text. It also addresses the process of pure perception and visualization of an object in the mind and the relation of body to the world within the phenomenal field. The present study delves into John Berger’s A Painter of Our Time (1958) in order to examine the painterly process of expressing an array of human sensations and experience of the world, eventually revealing the truth. The phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty enables an intersubjective interaction between “body”, “experience”, language and “perceptual world”. This study thus seeks to address the mechanics of the painter’s mind, exploring the root of being and eventually explaining his style and mute meaning. Focusing on whether visualizing, reading, and thinking through a work of art in a text, could provide an aesthetic experience of the text ultimately brings an aesthetic judgment of a work of art based on the knowledge gained through the literary text. Consequently, the readers, positioning themselves in the synesthetic and experience of the text, develop a new visual and aesthetic experience of the world.

The product resulting from the design process can be depicted as a text carrying the meaning whose readers are its users. Among the prominent theories dealing with the category of the meaning in the text, the reception hermeneutic in epistemology, and the experience approach in design, have been discussed in this research. This study aimed to find out whether it is possible to compare the author with the designer, after assuming the product as a text. It also addressed the type of interaction with the user from a reception hermeneutic perspective in the experience design approach. In this regard, subjects such as understanding, reception, and generally, interpretation of the product have also been studied using library sources and the descriptive-analytical method. The results indicate that the phenomenon of the text reading in the reception hermeneutic approach is comparable to the experience at the thinking level in the process of user-product interaction. In other words, text reading can be equated with product experience.

An effective language classroom is a multifaceted and intricate setting that involves various dimensions and has gained increasing recognition in the academic literature. Insufficient information is available regarding the experiences and perceptions of EFL learners regarding productive English language classrooms. This research focused on understanding how Iranian students who are learning English as a foreign language feel about and have experienced effective learning in the classroom. The present study was based on a phenomenological study in which participants’ perceptions about effective learning in class were examined. The research utilized the critical incident interview method to gather information from 30 MA EFL students with extensive English learning experience, who were deemed capable of contributing valuable insights on the topic. Therefore, participants were selected through purposive sampling. The process of analyzing data has yielded identification of significant themes of 1) attention to learners’ opinions 2) material transfer 3) teaching enthusiasm 4) instructors’ competence 5) learning environment and 6) learning process. The present study’s findings have led to the provision of recommendations for researchers in the realm of language learning.

Purpose: Women studies have always been of interest to researchers. The issue of women's presence in business and management is one of the most important issues in the field of women's studies. This study sets to investigate the effect of characteristics of female managers who were either member of board or CEO on earning quality. Methodology: To this end, we collected necessary data such as financial statements from 102 Tehran Stock Exchange listed companies. The data belongs to period stretching from 20 Feb 2015 to 20 Feb 2020. To test our hypotheses, multivariate regression with panel data and also EViews software were utilized. The results show that the presence of female managers has a positive as well as meaningful effect on earning quality. Findings: Furthermore, the results of our second and third hypothesis indicate that the training skills of female managers and their experience in the board have a positive and significant relationship with the quality of companies’ earnings. Conclusion: According to the results of the research, it is recommended that women be used more in managerial positions and the existing misconceptions that have prevented skilled and experienced women from appearing should be discarded.