Preface

In lieu of an Editorial during the interregnum between the stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of Professor Christopher Stones and the taking up of the position by the thankfully available and willing person recently identified as eminently qualified and competent to take the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology forward, this Preface serves simply to introduce and contextualise the papers included in the current edition of the IPJP.

The authors of the six contributions originate from the United Kingdom, North America, South Africa and Australia, and each demonstrates a different approach phenomenologically to the studies reported on.

In the critical philosophical domain, Gregory Swer - who has been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of the IPJP - considers the implications of the marked similarities between Oswald Spengler's and Martin Heidegger's respective accounts of cultural change and the ultimate yielding of Western civilization to the era of technological modernity. The focus of Swer's paper relates directly to the report by Andrew Bills and Nigel Howard on a case study (conducted 40 years after Heidegger's death, and 80 years after Spengler's) of an Australian school designed, both structurally and ideologically, to prepare its learners for the "digital and robotic work place and employment opportunities", along with the concomitant lifelong learning demands and shared economy ethos, of the technology-driven Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions confronting the millennial generation.

The emphasis of the paper by Bills and Howard on the need for technological learning to be supplemented by entrepreneurial skills in turn relates directly to the psychobiographical focus of the paper by Tinashe Ndoro and Roelf van Niekerk on the relationship between Steve Jobs's personality traits and his unique achievements in the technology-driven entrepreneurial domain. In its focus on the educational significance of

the architectural design of the learning environment, the paper by Bills and Howard also links back to the paper by Liz Smythe, Deborah Spence and Jonathon Gray in Edition 18(2) about the positive effect on the organizational climate and operational efficacy of the architecturally designed communal space around which a hospital was both physically and interactively structured. Inherent in this link is a pointer to an issue which has emerged as prominent among those of current interest phenomenologically, namely the impact on lived human experience of architectural spaces within places.

A. K. O'Loughlin attempts a tentative self-reflective and theoretically elaborated "autohistoria" or autoethnographic analysis of the daily violences experienced in just one week of the life of a genderqueer teacher, in the process explicating the resistances lived in a body politicised by both binary gendering and racialisation. And Eva Cybulska concludes her series of papers on Nietzsche with a both incisive and intriguing consideration of the possible relationship between the probable psychiatric diagnosis of his mental condition as (in contemporary DSM terminology) bipolar disorder and his prolific "philosophical art" with its "kaleidoscopic mood shifts" and often dissonant imagery and themes, as opposed to the music of the gentler rhythm, moods and motifs of his more lyrical "pianissimo writing".

In conclusion, the review by Ian Rory Owen of a recently published book on Husserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity theoretically grounds all the other papers. Proceeding from pointing to central problems in gaining a sound grip on Husserl's actual methods and standpoints, Owen then elucidates the scholarly comment on Husserl's theories in respect of the development of selfhood, empathy in relation to the other, embodied consciousness, and "the manifold ways in which human beings are experientially given to each other": which says, in a nutshell, what the notion of intersubjectivity is about phenomenologically.