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I'm hoping that everyone will feel that the value of conviviality is one that we would like to see lived more fully in the world and that we might contribute to this through our e-seminar. I was very impressed by Michael Bassey's Presidential Address to BERA when he focused on the value of conviviality.  You can access Michael's address to BERA by scrolling down to the 1991 Presidential Address at:

http://www.bera.ac.uk/publications/presidential_addresses.php

and seeing if his understanding of conviviality resonates with your experience as you see on the video-clip the responses to Pete's introduction to the celebration on Jacqueline Delong's graduation day.


To help my communication I've posted several short video-clips at:

  http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jack/my_videos.html

Starting with you Pete, while everyone is invited to respond,  I'd like to check that I am justified in using the 'we' in i~we if I claim that we:

i) share an understanding of the living standard of judgement of conviviality (following Polanyi) being expressed through the 1 minute clip of Pete introducing a celebration for Jacqueline Delong on her graduation day.

Like Brian, I smiled at Yaakub's point about feeling 'dumb' on reading Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge. I had a similar feeling when first engaging with Jurgen Habermas' awesome accomplishment in the two volumes of his Theory of Communicative Action. I know that I struggled for several months with the meanings in Polanyi's  book, especially about the logic of affirmation and his meanings of conviviality.  The illumination from this text was transformatory for me in 1971 as I understood the implication of Polanyi's point that in a commitment to personal knowledge a person makes a decision to understand the world from his or her own point of view as an individual claiming originality and exercising judgment responsibly with universal intent. I also like Polanyi's point in his last chapter that his purpose was not to generate a theory, but to strip away the crippling mutilations of centuries of objectivist thought. 

I'm also wondering if we could develop an understanding of world leading standards of judgement that enables each one of us to see that what we are doing in our local contexts in our practitioner research can be understood as world leading in bringing more fully into the world a flow of values that sustain humanity?

Love Jack.