Albert Camus – L’Etranger – The outsider to be read with the Myth de Sysphus
The individual in the world. How should he/she behave? How far should he/she follow up social norms? How far should he/she be an individual. What is a normal behaviour? What is an odd behaviour? Who determines this?
How free are we? How determined are we?
Jean Paul Sartre - Existentialism
I was asked about unearthing new knowledge through analysis of the way people have dressed themselves, behaved, who received graduate qualifications, who worked where, etc. And answered in my moodle.
What is more being than non-being? What is more universally and collectively human and ontology (the study of human beings in and with the world) than the interrelationship with death?
Death is the one part of life that is known and assured in advanced when birth takes place. It is the one thing that connects and interrelates all living things. It is the one sure thing in life. Life means death. When you are born it means you will die sometimes within the next hundred years (Camus). If you are than you will not be. When you will not, you were. This is universal and the one thing in life that is assured (Sartre; Heidegger; Camus). Dying means you were and existed so death means life and non-being means being.
Studying death, the way it is conveyed, expressed, treated, revered, feared and seen reflects a lot on the study of human beings and human existence within all the disciplines - it really is a transdisciplinary study that uses, interrelates and crosses al disciplines.
I put this post in my moodle site at http://learn.nmmu.ac.za/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=10559
because I want to start putting in context the paradigms of and debates around positivistic quantitative research and post-positivistic qualitative research. We can use this paradigmic debate dialectically and avoid the propositional elimination of either or and the dismissal of one paradigm/model in order to validate the other
How to study human phenomena scientifically and rigorously? What is more valid, rigorous, scientific and reliable? The quantitative, positivistic and experimental approach OR the qualitative, post-positivistic and natural approach? The dialectical approach of Both?