Philosophy of Sciene (16)

I have heard rumours of other PhD students who participated the course semesters before that there is a special session in Philosophy of Science, which is supposed to be like walking in the woods close to Vienna. I heard it also through the grapevine that some professors at BWZ are not amused about that kind of teaching in a PhD course. Anyway, I said to myself it is better to get my own ideas about this Lobau session.

According to Wikipedia the most interesting facts about Lobau are that:
• It is a floodplain on the northern side of the Danube and most of it located in Lower Austria but has borders to the Vienna Danube Island
• It was the site of the Battle of Aspern-Essling in 1809, the first major defeat suffered by Napoleon
• There is an oil harbour, which was bombed in the year 1944 during the Oil Champaign of World War II
• It a part of the Danube-Auen National Park and a protected area since 1978
• It is used as a recreational area and is known as a site of nudism
• The area is used by the Austrian Army as training ground

By all means, it took me more than a half an hour for driving from Vienna to Großenzersdorf. I really expected a silent area but I made the experience that the airport Vienna-Schwechat is quite close to this territory by hearing several planes taking off or landing. However, a very nice camp is located within the woods, which is a starting point for walks. A children group was also there, camping in tents. In this camp the whole Philosophy of Science group met in an attractive seminar room with a nice view into the wild. In particular we focused presencing phase of Otto Scharmer's Theory U. The objective was letting-go and entering the field of emerging new knowledge. For that reason we got the task to go outside into the woods and expose yourselves to the silence by finding a place in the nature that fits your present situation. It seems very interesting letting things come. Professor Peschl explained that we should try to get into contact with our inner self and get into a mode of deep listening.



At first I walked with a group of some people but with the time more and more people disappeared and turned off on the road. I stopped at a bench which is situated along the path. It seems that I am risk-averse and that I did not want to get lost in the woods. After calming myself down and coming to a situation which is comparable to meditation, I also thought about the thematic field of our KCT. The guiding questions were what is the fascinating point that really absorbs me in the “homo oeconomicus” model and what is my personal relationship to this field. For me the most interesting point was finding out how people really make decisions and what really drives them to take a respective decision.

After coming back of this letting-go phase the KCT group shared its experiences. Every group-member came back with different impressions and ideas. In order to continue on our common knowledge and experience we agreed to use the common understanding of our thematic field. More or less we are interested not only in stretching the surface but also in looking on details of decision-making. The next steps were to go a step further, into the prototyping phase. We agreed to emphasize the topic how people make decisions. The core idea is to stress the question what drives people in decision-making. The intention is to categorize daily decisions like such which are done automatically, emotionally or need negotiations. We came to the conclusion to use a decision map as guideline for structuring decisions, a role play to present different decision-making scenarios and an experiment of an ethical paradoxon in order to manipulate our class mates' decisions.