Phenomenology, Misc

Heidegger and Sartre developed the projects of their fundamental ontologies within the framework of the phenomenological approach. The traditional view of reality is based on dualistic oppositions of ideal and material, spirit and body, reality and possibility, and visibility and essence. It is phenomenology that enables elimination of the above-mentioned dualisms and restoration of the world’s ontological unity on a reliable foundation. Though Sartre’s existentialism was exposed to criticism both from right, and from the left intellectuals, and is not a (...) “fashionable” current at present, and the fundamental ontology of Heidegger was estimated by Levinas as ontology of the power subject-centred line, nevertheless the author considers that attention which is paid in these concepts to such phenomena as the voice of conscience, care and freedom represents the most urgent philosophical value nowadays; the author in this regard points to insufficient validity of modern criticism of approaches of Heidegger and Sartre, in particular–reproaches in a subject-centred line from adherents of “ontology of the Other”. (shrink)

I discuss how criticism of social sciences taken up in Sartre's ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ is conditioned by Sartre’s own assumptions concerning nature, the mind-matter relationship, human beings’ bodily dimension. Although he looked at Husserl’s ‘Crisis of the European Sciences’ as a model for his own criticism of the social sciences, he didn't consider the criticism of the concept of nature undertaken by Husserl himself. Such criticism eventually leads to overcome Cartesian dualism. Sartre, on the contrary, superposes phenomenological ways of (...) thinking to an unavowed Cartesian ontology which he never challenged. The consequence is that he looks at the subject and the object, or mind and matter, as radically opposite. Sartre's own vindication of methodological dualism between natural and social sciences – closely following Lukacs – is flawed by heavily relying on an uncritically presupposed ontological dualism. (shrink)

This chapter traces the genealogy of the term atmosphere in the German language, identifies historical semantic shifts, and points to its grammatical specifics. The state of research on atmospheres is briefly summarized and an overview is offered of the various definitions of the term in different disciplines. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s theory of ambient poetics, and on Hermann Schmitz’s “new phenomenology,” four key characteristics of atmospheres are discussed and elaborated: their mereological constitution, their modal structure, their intensification at affective thresholds, (...) and their affective efficacy through suggestions of movement. (shrink)

Abstract. In this article I compare a robotic gamelan sound installation (the gamelatron) and traditional gamelan, as performed in the American gamelan subculture, in order to specify the concept of atmosphere for use within ethnomusicology. I argue that at the level of affect the gamelatron and gamelan afford similar experiences that I call “atmospheres of felt- relation.” At the level of comprehension they are registered as divergent because of their differential alignment to several discursive binaries: live/recorded, human/machine, individual/group, subject/object and (...) body/prosthesis. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is often credited as having offered one of the most thorough phenomenological investigations of the nature of boredom. In his 1929–1930 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, he goes to great lengths to distinguish between three different types of boredom and to explicate their respective characters. Within the context of his discussion of one of these types of boredom, profound boredom [tiefe Langweile], Heidegger opposes much of the philosophical and literary tradition on boredom insofar (...) as he articulates how the experience of boredom can be existentially beneficial to us. In this chapter, we undertake a study of the nature of profound boredom with the aim of investigating its place within contemporary psychological and philosophical research on boredom. Although boredom used to be a neglected emotional experience, it is no more. Boredom’s causal antecedents, effects, experiential profile, and neurophysiological correlates have become topics of active study; as a consequence, a proliferation of claims and findings about boredom has ensued. Such a situation provides an opportunity to scrutinize Heidegger’s claims and to try to understand them both on their own terms and in light of our contemporary understanding of boredom. (shrink)

In this essay I suggest that Heidegger’s Being and Time provides a ground for ethics in the notion of Dasein’s ‘Being-guilty.’ Being-guilty is not a ground for ethics in the sense of a demonstration of the moral ‘ought’ or a refutation of moral skepticism. Rather, Being-guilty serves as a foundation for ethical life in a way uniquely suited to a phenomenological form of ethics, a way that clarifies, from a phenomenological point of view, why the traditional approach to ethics is (...) misguided. The traditional attempt to ground ethics through demonstration or refutation depends upon a misunderstanding of obligation as an imposition that is distinct from, and inflicted upon, the subject in a way that is in need of justification. Heidegger’s conception of Being-guilty, on the contrary, identifies the basis of moral obligation in a form of primary selfobligation that is constitutive of human nature, rather than an imposition upon it. Although primordial guilt or self-obligation does not justify ethical obligation, it does ‘ground’ ethics. For it is the primary source and support of our ethical activity in two distinct senses. First, it serves as the condition for the possibility of our indebtedness to others—it enables us to be morally obligated. It enables moral obligation towards others by determining Dasein as ontologically indebted to care for its own being—a being which is, in turn, ontologically determined as care for others. Second, Being-guilty provides a criterion for distinguishing what we call ethical and unethical behavior. Ethical behavior is distinguished according to the appropriateness of one’s care for the other according to proper recognition of the nature of the Other’s Being as Dasein. (shrink)

This article intends to describe the central themes of Millán-Puelles' thought. The fundamental intuitions of his youth remain over the course of his life and mark a line of creative and personal thinking between Phenomenology and classical philosophy, mainly Thomism. He elaborates a metaphysics of knowledge with a vigorous defence of spontaneous realism. His defence of the real leads him to grant special importance to the study of the unreal. Likewise, he is interested in practical problems, which in his view (...) are intimately linked with metaphysical ones. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs Beauvoir's interpretation of the Marxist and the Freudian contributions to our understanding of the feminine condition. A number of epistemological assumptions derived from Sartre's philosophy are pointed out. Beauvoir's reading of Marx, Engels, and Freud is discussed claiming that her reading is biased by humanistic and historicist assumptions.

This paper draws on the notion of the ‘project,’ as developed in the existential philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre, to articulate an understanding of the existential structure of engagement with virtual worlds. By this philosophical understanding, the individual’s orientation towards a project structures a mechanism of self-determination, meaning that the project is understood essentially as the project to make oneself into a certain kind of being. Drawing on existing research from an existential-philosophical perspective on subjectivity in digital game environments, the (...) notion of a ‘virtual subjectivity’ is proposed to refer to the subjective sense of being-in-the-virtual-world. The paper proposes an understanding of virtual subjectivity as standing in a nested relation to the individual’s subjectivity in the actual world, and argues that it is this relation that allows virtual world experience to gain significance in the light of the individual’s projectual existence. The arguments advanced in this paper pave the way for a comprehensive understanding of the transformative, self-transformative, and therapeutic possibilities and advantages afforded by virtual worlds. (shrink)

Could a person ever transcend what it is like to be in the world as a human being? Could we ever know what it is like to be other creatures? Questions about the overcoming of a human perspective are not uncommon in the history of philosophy. In the last century, those very interrogatives were notably raised by American philosopher Thomas Nagel in the context of philosophy of mind. In his 1974 essay What is it Like to Be a Bat?, Nagel (...) offered reflections on human subjectivity and its constraints. Nagel’s insights were elaborated before the social diffusion of computers and could not anticipate the cultural impact of technological artefacts capable of materializing interactive simulated worlds as well as disclosing virtual alternatives to the “self.” In this sense, this article proposes an understanding of computers as epistemological and ontological instruments. The embracing of a phenomenological standpoint entails that philosophical issues are engaged and understood from a fundamentally practical perspective. In terms of philosophical praxis, or “applied philosophy,” I explored the relationship between human phenomenologies and digital mediation through the design and the development of experimental video games. For instance, I have conceptualized the first-person action-adventure video game Haerfest (Technically Finished 2009) as a digital re-formulation of the questions posed in Nagel’s famous essay. Experiencing a bat’s perceptual equipment in Haerfest practically corroborates Nagel’s conclusions: there is no way for humans to map, reproduce, or even experience the consciousness of an actual bat. Although unverifiable in its correspondence to that of bats, Haerfest still grants access to experiences and perceptions that, albeit still inescapably within the boundaries of human kinds of phenomenologies, were inaccessible to humans prior to the advent of computers. Phenomenological alterations and virtual experiences disclosed by interactive digital media cannot take place without a shift in human kinds of ontologies, a shift which this study recognizes as the fundamental ground for the development of a new humanism (I deem it necessary to specify that I am not utilizing the term “humanism” in its common connotation, that is to say the one that emerged from the encounter between the Roman civilization and the late Hellenistic culture. According to this conventional acceptation, humanism indicates the realization of the human essence through “scholarship and training in good conduct” (Heidegger 1998, p. 244). However, Heidegger observed that this understanding of humanism does not truly cater to the original essence of human beings, but rather “is determined with regard to an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and […] beings as a whole.” (Heidegger 1998, p. 245) The German thinker found this way of embracing humanism reductive: a by-product of Western metaphysics. As Heidegger himself specified in his 1949 essay Letter on Humanism, his opposition to the traditional acceptation of the term humanism does not advocate for the “inhuman” or a return to the “barbaric” but stems instead from the belief that the humanism can only be properly understood and restored in culture as more original way of meditating and caring for humanity and understanding its relationship with Being.). Additionally, this study explicitly proposes and exemplifies the use of interactive digital technology as a medium for testing, developing and disseminating philosophical notions, problems and hypotheses in ways which are alternative to the traditional textual one. Presented as virtual experiences, philosophical concepts can be accessed without the filter of subjective imagination. In a persistent, interactive, simulated environment, I claim that the crafting and the mediation of thought takes a novel, projective (In Martin Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time, the term “projectivity” indicates the way a Being opens to the world in terms of its possibilities of being (Heidegger 1962, pp. 184–185, BT 145). Inspired by Heidegger’s and Vilem Flusser’s work in the field of philosophy of technology as well as Helmuth Plessner’s anthropological position presented in his 1928 book Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, this study understands the concept of projectivity as the innate openness of human beings to construct themselves and their world by means of technical artefacts. In this sense, this study proposes a fundamental understanding of technology as the materialization of mankind’s tendency to overcome its physical, perceptual and communicative limitations.) dimension which I propose to call “augmented ontology.”. (shrink)

The question of what “is” someone who is queer in a metaphysical standpoint have been hotly debated in contemporary metaphysics of gender. In my paper I will explore the view of a Phenomenological source and understanding of queerness within the umbrella of gender. Within the realm of gender we can see how queerness is a blob to which gender is both part of and a stand in for the person gender. Using Phenomenological methods based on Husserl’s foundation I can establishes (...) a base for which queerness can be clearly seen. In my paper I will address not only the difference of cis heteronormative phenomenology and the reality that queer people live. This causes a negation in a metaphysical way. The object in which the queer person lives becomes In a way how Hegel understood that if we see a gendered person in the cis reality we can say “this is a man or women” due to the way we correspond cis normative gender. This is where I will try to use Husserl’s “principle of contradiction” and Hegel’s idea of “negation” to show the fluidity of gender in which queerness encompasses. I can clearly demonstrate the “Horizon” in which the limits of cis hetero perspective of understanding of gender and queerness. But in the same thought I will further drive this idea that in a sense the split with in an ontological reality between the lives of cis hetero people and queer people. By giving definitions of what if different such a orientation and performance with the reality that queer people live with such a gender binary ontology. I will then derive some meta-language and construct a realty how communities build themselves from a mutual understanding of this queer ontology. Also real world examples of how the logic of gender effects the way that queer people operate. The counter argument I would argue against a gender nihilism that would try to attack the question that I raise that queerness is a separate state within consciousness. To which I would defended against an individual level of gender identity and understanding. To treat gender in an alienated value. But by using a strong phenomenological structure I would be able to defended by idea that queerness with in gender is a whole different ontological reality that the cis hetero reality. I will then derive some meta-language and construct a realty how communities build themselves from a mutual understanding of this queer ontology. . (shrink)

This article raises the critical issue as to why there has been assumed to be a boundary to legal knowledge. In response to such an issue I focus upon the works of Jacques Derrida who, amongst other things, was concerned with the boundary of the disciplines of Literature, Philosophy and Law. The article argues that the boundary delimits the law as if the inside of a boundary to territorial-like legal space in legal consciousness. Such a space is not possible without (...) the boundary. Derrida’s most insightful essay in this regard is his study of Franz Kafka’s untitled parable in The Trial. The parable represents a man who waits for an invitation to enter the Law until he nears his end. Derrida responds to the parable in his essay, “Before the Law.” This article uses the parable and Derrida’s response to it as a starting-off point for a reconsideration of the boundary of legal knowledge. In this context, Derrida asks this question: “why is Kafka’s parable categorized as Literature or Law?” Such an issue depends upon the boundary of a discipline, according to Derrida. And that focus, in turn, asks whether the boundary pre-exists any text which is represented as “Literature” or “Law” or “Philosophy.” This article claims, however, that Derrida’s theory presupposes that law, as a discipline, encloses a territorial-like space in legal consciousness. Each discipline possesses such a space. So too does the state and the university. Inside this bounded space, officials of the Law are free to consciously deliberate, reflect, and render decisions about the context of the Law. Analytically and phenomenologically before the boundary is taken for granted in an academic discipline, however, there is an unbounded non-law. The aporia of Derrida’s theory of the boundary of the Law is that the official or expert knower of the official language inside the boundary cannot assume the imagined boundary of legal knowledge without implicitly claiming to know the exteriority to the boundary. And yet, officials and expert knowers cannot know such an exterior extra-legality because, by virtue of the boundary as encircling a territorial-like space, knowledge is considered legal only when it exists inside the boundary. “The Law” is the consequence of the imagination of the expert knowers of the language as well as of the non-expert who believes in the bounded territorial-like space. (shrink)

In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine presents Jean-Luc Marion's rethinking of the modern notion of the self by way of an original reading of Saint Augustine through the lens of a phenomenology of givenness. Here he tests the hermeneutic validity of concepts forged in his previous works. His goal is to show that the Confessiones are inscribed within the confessio, that love is an underlying epistemic condition of truth, and that God's call and our response to God (...) are both gifts. Ultimately, Marion points us toward a conception of the self that is at once postmodern and very Augustinian. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss and compare the possibility of thinking that which is most worth our thought in Deleuze’s What Is Philosophy? and Heidegger’s course lectures in What Is Called Thinking?. Both authors criticize the history of philosophy in similar ways in order to reconsider what should be taken as the nature and task of philosophical thinking. For Deleuze, true thinking is the creation of concepts, but what is most worth our thought in fact cannot be thought. For Heidegger, (...) Being calls on us think, and to think rightly is to be underway toward thinking itself, a grateful heeding of Being. In this paper I explore the very possibility to think that which is most worth our thought. I will argue that although for both authors proper thinking as such is possible, thinking what is most worth our thought seems remarkably both possible as impossible. (shrink)

Book review of: Jeff Kochan (2017), Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers).

Final instalment of a book-review symposium on: Jeff Kochan (2017), Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers). -- Author's response to: Paolo Palladino (2018), 'Heidegger Today: On Jeff Kochan’s Science and Social Existence,' Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7(8): 41-46; and Adam Riggio (2018), 'The Very Being of a Conceptual Scheme: Disciplinary and Conceptual Critiques,' Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7(11): 53-59.

Author's response to: Pablo Schyfter, 'Inaccurate Ambitions and Missing Methodologies: Thoughts on Jeff Kochan and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,' Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 8-14. -- Part of a book-review symposium on: Jeff Kochan (2017), Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers).

Author's response to: Raphael Sassower, 'Heidegger and the Sociologists: A Forced Marriage?,' Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 30-32. -- Part of a book-review symposium on: Jeff Kochan (2017), Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers).

Nostalgia is the emotional effect that causes searching between memories the disappeared home, longed for. In itself, while researching in memories, it implies a certain degree of self-absorption and individuation, because the memories are in extremely particular, a return to the self. When this nostalgia is filled with a restorative eagerness, when it has social and political pretensions, this return translates into a marked distancing between one’s point of view and that of any other, until it becomes a threat to (...) the necessary hermeneutics of the other’s point of view that demands all coexistence. / La nostalgia es el efecto emocional que provoca la mirada que busca entre los recuerdos el hogar desaparecido, añorado. En sí misma, en tanto pesquisa en la memoria, implica cierto grado de ensimismamiento e individuación, pues los recuerdos son en extremo particulares, un retorno al yo. Cuando esta nostalgia se reviste de un afán restaurativo, cuando alberga pretensiones sociales y políticas, dicho retorno se traduce en un marcado distanciamiento entre el propio punto de vista y el de cualquier otro, hasta resultar una amenaza para la necesaria hermenéutica del punto de vista ajeno que demanda toda convivencia. (shrink)

Aesthetics versus Art History? Ernst Cassirer as Mediator in an ongoing Controversy on the Relevance of Art for Life. Against the background of Ernst Cassirer’s cultural philosophy, art studies are to be classified as cultural studies. Central to this is Cassirer’s philosophy as the basis for answering a question that has been posed by the methods of formal aesthetics and iconology since the 19th century but is still unanswered today, namely the question of the relevance of the arts for life. (...) In this way, aesthetics/Kunstwissenschaft and art history gain a new meaning as cultural studies beyond their achievements in the humanities and in epistemology. (shrink)

Do abstract paintings still make sense and if so what do they mean? By reducing the paintings to simple square blots as by Cézanne, to lines as by van Gogh and color traces as by Monet their meaning is fundamentally questioned. But by interpreting these compositions as effective forces or rather affective stimuli a new and different meaning becomes apparent. Landscapes are no longer introduced but made real in the aesthetic experience. Therefore aesthetics or rather aisthetics (perception) can be defined (...) as a notion of experience and knowledge. Thus the notion of an image gets a new understanding: it can be described as an "energetic system". (shrink)

This book offers a theoretical investigation into the general problem of reality as a multiplicity of ‘finite provinces of meaning’, as developed in the work of Alfred Schutz. A critical introduction to Schutz’s sociology of multiple realities as well as a sympathetic re-reading and reconstruction of his project, Experiencing Multiple Realities traces the genesis and implications of this concept in Schutz’s writings before presenting an analysis of various ways in which it can shed light on major sociological problems, such as (...) social action, social time, social space, identity, or narrativity. (shrink)

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” and Bergson’s Matière et mémoire and “La perception du changement,” I ask what resources are available in vision for interrupting objectifying habits of seeing. While both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty locate the possibility of seeing differently in the figure of the painter, I develop by means of their texts, and in dialogue with Iris Marion Young’s work, a more general phenomenology of hesitation that grounds what I am calling “critical-ethical vision.” Hesitation, I argue, stems from (...) affect and leads to critical memory. In hesitation, the seeming coincidence between my habits of seeing and the visible is decentered, revealing these habits and their social reference as the constitutive horizon of my field of vision. Hesitation, then, provides the phenomenological moment within which vision may become at once critically watchful, destabilizing its objectifying habits, and ethically responsive, recollecting its affective grounds. The critical and the ethical are here inseparable. Critically, this vision is an awareness of the structures of invisibility, diacritical and habitual, social and historical, to which my vision owes—dimensions which institute particular ways of seeing and being as norm while eliding others. Ethically, this is the recognition of how seeing is already seeing with others—others whose affective influence is operative within vision, even as their existence is reductively represented or denied. (shrink)

I argue (1) that what (ontic) New Mechanistic philosophers of science call mechanisms would be material Gestalten, and (2) that Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Gestalt theory can help us frame a standing challenge against ontic conceptions of mechanisms. In short, until the (ontic) New Mechanist can provide us with a plausible account of the organization of mechanisms as an objective feature of mind-independent ontic structures in the world which we might discover – and no ontic Mechanist has done so – it (...) is more conservative to claim that mechanistic organization is instead a mind-dependent aspect of our epistemic strategies of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

Many believe that a suitably programmed computer could act for its own goals and experience feelings. I challenge this view and argue that agency, mental causation and qualia are all founded in the unique, homeostatic nature of living matter. The theory was formulated for coherence with the concept of an agent, neuroscientific data and laws of physics. By this method, I infer that a successful action is homeostatic for its agent and can be caused by a feeling - which does (...) not motivate as a force, but as a control signal. From brain research and the locality principle of physics, I surmise that qualia are a fundamental, biological form of energy generated in specialized neurons. Subjectivity is explained as thermodynamically necessary on the supposition that, by converting action potentials to feelings, the neural cells avert damage from the electrochemical pulses. In exchange for this entropic benefit, phenomenal energy is spent as and where it is produced - which precludes the objective observation of qualia. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the enactive theory of color that implies a form of color relationism. I argue that this view constitutes a better alternative to color subjectivism and color objectivism. I liken the enactive view to Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, arguing that both deconstruct the clear duality of subject and object, which is at the basis of the other theories of color, in order to claim the co-constitution of subject and object in the process of experience. I also (...) extend the enactive and phenomenological account of color to the more general topic of the epistemological and ontological status of sensory qualities (qualia), outlining the fields of enactive phenomenology and enactive ontology. (shrink)

El proceso de aprehensión de lo cognoscible, en la filosofía contemporánea, ha sido tratado desde diversas perspectivas, entre ellas la fenomenológica y la analítica. Cada una de estas perspectivas aportan unos presupuestos filosóficos y procesos metodológicos que nos proporcionan marcos de trabajo para indagar en las vías de aprehensión del conocimiento; sin embargo, empleadas por separado son insuficientes y limitadas. En absoluto se trata de procurar un método universal, sino de integrar e indagar sobre diversos presupuestos, procesos, patrones y estructuras (...) para avanzar en la indagación de la aprehensión del conocimiento. En este sentido, en la primera parte, abordaremos la necesidad de tener reglas (definitorias y estratégicas) para ser parte y avanzar en cualquier «juego», en especial el del conocimiento. En la segunda y tercera, describiremos los «métodos» desarrollados por José Ferrater Mora (operaciones filosóficas) y Nicolai Hartmann (pensar sistemático), los que pueden ser un punto de partida, vías a considerar en este proceso. En la parte final, a modo de contraste, se ofrece en un gráfico un esquema metodológico de los dos métodos analizados. (shrink)

Madness and Modernism is undoubtedly one of the most profound and perspicacious treatments of an illness that is utterly baffling to most laypersons and academics alike. Sass artfully brings together two obscure, complex, and unnerving realms -- the schizophrenic and the modern and postmodern aesthetic -- into mutual enlightenment. The comparisons between schizophrenic symptoms such as loss of ego boundaries, perspectival switching, and world catastrophe with modern literature and art is so adroit that it is almost eerie. The reader finds (...) herself peering into a borderline incomprehensible realm with increasing levels of clarity, by which she gains insight into the utterly chaotic, confused, and bizarre. The lucidity Sass brings to the obscure and confused is a reflection of the many contradictions he introduces to his readers as being entirely paradigmatic of both madness and modernism: that of desiring human contact but also shunning it entirely, of being both afflicted by disease but also exercising a sort of agency, and indeed, an ideal intellectual freedom within the confines of such an affliction, of moving both towards an objectifying materiality of the external world and a total subjectivization of perception, of the tendency towards the hyperabstract and the utterly concrete (between being too "far away" or "too close," respectively). Sass is able to make sense of a world in which these contradictions exist side by side simultaneously, and the disconcerting confusion this causes is palpable to the reader. Sass demonstrates not only his penetrating intellect, but also his unwavering patience and empathy, both in the treatment of the subject matter and the treatment of the subjects suffering from this extraordinary illness. The book is required reading for anyone interested in phenomenological psychiatry, or even psychiatry more generally. (shrink)

In this work, I discuss the role of Husserl’s phenomenology in Paolo Parrini’s philosophical view. In the first section, I highlight the presence of both empiricist and constructivist elements in Parrini’s anti-foundationalist and anti-absolutist conception of knowledge. In the second section, I stress Parrini’s acknowledgement of the crucial role of phenomenology in investigating the empirical basis of knowledge, thanks to its analysis of the relationship between form and matter of cognition. In the third section, I point at some lines of (...) development of phenomenology that are revealed by Parrini’s reflection, through the comparison between Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, Mary Hesse’s network model, and the tradition of neutral monism. (shrink)

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “the philosophy and psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays only a little more attention to the former.” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But there (...) still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumenical approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work and draws crucially on Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by these authors. In this article, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject. (shrink)

An increasing number of scholars at the intersection of feminist philosophy and critical disability studies have turned to Merleau-Ponty to develop phenomenologies of disability or of what, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I call "non-normate" embodiment. These studies buck the historical trend of philosophers employing disability as an example of deficiency or harm, a mere litmus test for normative theories, or an umbrella term for aphenotypical bodily variation. While a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenology is a promising starting point for thinking about embodied experiences of (...) all sorts, I here draw a cautionary tale about how ableist assumptions can easily undermine accounts of non-normate experience. I first argue that the omission or misguided treatment of disability within the history of philosophy in general and the phenomenological tradition in particular is due to the inheritance of what I call “the ableist conflation” of disability with pain, suffering, and disadvantage. I then show that Merleau-Ponty’s famous reading of the blind man’s cane is problematic insofar as it omits the social dimensions of disabled experiences, misconstrues the radicality of blindness as a world-creating disability, and operates via an able-bodied simulation that confuses object annexation or extension with incorporation. In closing, I contend that if phenomenology is to overcome the errors of traditional philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty once hoped, it must heed the insights of “crip” or non-normate phenomenology, which takes the lived experience of disability as its point of departure. (shrink)

Reading, even when silent and individual, is a social phenomenon and has often been studied as such. Complementary to this view, research has begun to explore how reading is embodied beyond simply being ‘wired’ in the brain. This article brings the social and embodied perspectives together in a very literal sense. Reporting a qualitative study of reading practices across student focus groups from six European countries, it identifies an underexplored factor in reading behaviour and experience. This factor is the sheer (...) physical presence, and concurrent activity, of other people in the environment where one engages in individual silent reading. The primary goal of the study was to explore the role and possible associations of a number of variables (text type, purpose, device) in selecting generic (e.g. indoors vs outdoors) as well as specific (e.g. home vs library) reading environments. Across all six samples included in the study, participants spontaneously attested to varied, and partly surprising, forms of sensitivity to company and social space in their daily efforts to align body with mind for reading. The article reports these emergent trends and discusses their potential implications for research and practice. (shrink)

Die Natur ist als Thema in der Phänomenologie von Husserl bis zu Schmitz wenig bearbeitet worden. Der Grund ist teilweise in der respektvollen oder auch kritischen Distanz vieler Phänomenologen zur Naturwissenschaft zu suchen, teils darin, dass es auf dem Feld der Selbstgegebenheit - Leib, Gefühl, zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen - zunächst die eigentlichen Entdeckungen zu machen galt. Selbst die Leibphilosophie wurde nicht als ein Teil einer Phänomenologie der Natur entwickelt. Doch ist der Leib nicht die Natur, die wir selbst sind? Im vorliegenden (...) Band unternehmen Forscher verschiedener Herkunft die gemeinsame Anstrengung, mit dem Thema Natur der Phänomenologie ein neues Forschungsfeld zu eröffnen. Dabei wird nicht nur an die phänomenologische Bewegung angeknüpft, sondern auch an aristotelische goethische Naturwissenschaft, soweit sie als phänomenologisch betrachtet werden kann. Damit wird die Absicht verfolgt, die Phänomenologie der Natur als eine alternative Erkenntnisweise im Unterschied zur herrschenden naturwissenschaftlich-technischen zu entwickeln. Nach der Entfaltung des Programms wird zunächst die goethische Naturwissenschaft als ein Paradigma von Naturphänomenologie dargestellt. Dann werden die Beiträge aus der phänomenologischen Bewegung (Husserl, Klages, Schmitz) durchmustert. Und schließlich werden Fallbeispiele gegenwärtiger phänomenologischer Erforschung der Natur vorgeführt. Dabei geht es einerseits um Beiträge von seiten goetheanischer Wissenschaft (Botanik und Wärmelehre), andererseits um Beispiele, die im Rahmen der Naturphilosophie entstanden sind (Phänomenologie von Wind und Wetter, Phänomenologie des eigenen Leibes als Natur, Phänomenologie der Stoffe). (shrink)

This chapter discusses how phenomenologies of pregnancy challenge traditional philosophical accounts of a subject that is seen as autonomous, rational, genderless, unified, and independent from other subjects. Pregnancy defies simple incorporation into such universal accounts since the pregnant woman and her unborn child are incapable of being subsumed into traditional theories of the subject. Phenomenological descriptions of the experience of pregnancy lead one to question if philosophy needs to reject the subject altogether as central, or rather to revise traditional descriptions (...) of the subject. The chapter examines both options and argues for the later. The exploration of pregnancy in feminist theory upholds the value of working from the subject’s lived experience, but indicates that it is possible without viewing the subject as a disembodied universal agent. Finally, it discusses how phenomenologies of pregnancy are attuned to discussing difference thereby aiding philosophies that take into account the political, historical, and cultural conditioning that shape experience and theory. (shrink)

: El análisis de las disposiciones de ánimo (Gesinnungen) ofrecido por Alexander Pfänder constituye un primer capítulo de lo que se podría denominar “fenomenología de la conciencia emotiva” o “crítica de la razón afectiva”. Este fenomenólogo de la primera hora ofrece un detallado examen fenomenológico de este tipo especial de vivencias intentando, al mismo tiempo, mostrar su relevancia moral. Este trabajo pretende enmarcar y reconstruir dicho análisis en el marco de un intento más general de insistencia en la importancia que (...) el mundo de los afectos puede tener para la ética. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the concept of symbol and tries to outline its function as a means of communication. In order to describe the communicative qualities of symbol, it is necessary to show its ethical nature. The paper analyses the role symbols play in intersubjective relations, in the construction of the individual’s reality, and in the human ability to attribute meanings and assign functions.The conceptual frame- work for the understanding of what symbol is, how it works, and how it is (...) made is a particular combination of phenomenology and pragmatism, which lies on the theory of ‘appresentation’, as we can find it in Alfred Schütz’s viewpoint. The paper invites a reflection on the power of symbol, particularly on its power to communicate the incommunicable. (shrink)

Buddhism teaches that ‘self’ as a substantial, enduring entity is an illusion. But for self to be an illusion there must be something in our experience that is misinterpreted as self. What is this? The notion of an experiential self plays an important role in phenomenological investigations of conscious experience. Does the illusion of self consist in mistaking a purely experiential self for a substantial self? I argue against this and locate the source of the illusion in time-consciousness. It is (...) the essence of consciousness to flow, but the flow of consciousness presupposes an experiential present. The experiential present — an abiding sense of ‘now’ — is the dimension through which experiences are experienced as streaming. It is this, I argue, that is misinterpreted as an enduring self. I support my account by arguing that the synchronic and diachronic unity of consciousness can be accounted for in terms of impersonal, temporal experience, and that conceiving of consciousness as the presence-dimension rather than as the I-dimension affords a solution to the brain-bisection puzzle. (shrink)

This Paper claims that, contrary to the common assumption of Anglo-American jurists, collective rights are secondary to a analytically and experientially prior culture. Culture constitutes the identity and content of a collective right. The thrust of my Paper examines the disjunction between collective rights and the culture constituting a collective right. The clue to the disjuncture is that a collective right is assumed to be a rule or principle signified or represented in a written language. A rule or principle is (...) a concept. A culture, in contrast, is constituted from an experiential knowledge in an unwritten language. -/- I raise two contexts where a collective right cannot be identified without a consideration the analytically prior culture of the social group protected by a collective right: peremptory norms in international law and affirmative discrimination clauses in constitutional law. I then highlight a crucially important factor generating the unwritten language of a culture: namely, the collective memories of a group. Although a personal memory is experienced in a context-specific event, a member of a group absorbs its collective memory. The collective memory of the group exists before one is a member. Such a memory may defer to some event centuries earlier. The event may possess a mythic or even false character which cannot be verified except as a myth or historical falsity. One cannot be accepted as a member of a group without the group’s collective memory. Shared assumptions and expectations characterise a collective memory generating a culture. Such assumptions and expectations constitute meant objects. Meant objects are not posted by some source 2 external to the individual members. Meant objects are experienced. A jurist cannot analyze the signified collective rights without examining the social culture said to be represented by the boundary of the collective rights. One may be able to rationally justify a collective right in terms of its source, such as a basic constitutional text, the regularity of behaviour of lawyers and judges or some ultimate concept such as dignity. Such a rational justification, however, does not address why an individual is obligated to defer to the collective rights of an in-group in a state. One has to examine the social-cultural assumptions and expectations presupposed in the content of such collective rights in order to understand why the rights are obligatory. Such an examination dissolves the traditional boundary of legal knowledge which has excluded cultural phenomena generating the collective rights. (shrink)

This essay claims that a rupture between two languages permeates human rights discourse in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought. Human rights law is no exception. The one language is written in the sense that a signifying relation inscribed by institutional authors represents concepts. Theories of law have shared such a preoccupation with concepts. Legal rules, doctrines, principles, rights and duties exemplify legal concepts. One is mindful of the dominant tradition of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence in this regard. Words have been thought to (...) copy ready-made concepts. Acts of intellectualisation and the accompanying analytic technique have excluded a consideration of a very different sense of legal language. The second sense of a language concentrates upon unwritten acts of meaning which lack a discrete and assignable author. This essay aims to unconceal the importance of an unauthored language. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early writings, particularly his Logical Investigations, I shall argue that an unwritten language embodies the written language with acts of meaning. An act of meaning confers one’s experiential body into the content of a concept signified in a written language. In order to understand the importance of such pre-legal acts of meaning in human rights laws, I begin by outlining how universal human rights have been signified as universal by virtue of their content-independence. I then raise the problem of the exclusion of social-cultural phenomena as elements of human rights laws. The clue to this exclusionary character of human rights law rests in the analytic leap from an unwritten to a written legal language. The essay then addresses the effort to link legality with the social world: namely, the effort of grounding legality in a social convention. I examine how a social convention itself is conceptualized, leaving the remainder of acts of meaning. This failure of social conventions to access social-cultural phenomena encourages me to turn to acts of meaning as such acts were understood by Edmund Husserl in his earlier works. Meaning-constituting acts exist prior to intuitions and prior to social conventions. This priority exists analytically as well as phenomenologically. In order to exemplify this prior character of acts of meaning, I retrieve Antigone’s experiential knowledge in Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s unwritten laws are characterized by an absence of mediating concepts. I then identify several elements of an act of meaning in an unwritten language: the experiential body as the source of the acts of meaning, praeiudicia (prejudgements), collective memories, the act character of meaning, and the act of interpretation of social behaviour. My final section raises the prospect of whether human rights can be considered universal if acts of meaning are that important in the identity of a law. (shrink)

Peter Fitzpatrick’s writings prove once and for all that it is possible for a law professor to write in beautiful English. His work also proves once and for all that the dominating tradition of Anglo-American legal philosophy and of law teaching has been barking up the wrong tree: namely, that the philosopher and professional law teachers can understand justice as nested in empty forms, better known as rules, doctrines, principles, policies, and other standards. The more rigorous our analysis or decomposition (...) of the forms, we have believed, the more closely do we access the identity of laws. Justice has been assumed to be a matter of intellectually accessing such analysed forms. Fitzpatrick’s articles and books embody an implicit critique of the analytic view of law and of justice. My entry point into this critique is his preoccupation with Jacques Derrida’s theory of laws as universals and with Derrida’s theory of justice as an inaccessible immediacy or presence in context-specific or concrete experienced events. Each event is experienced in an official’s decision. Such a decision represents what Derrida, Fitzpatrick, and Hegel call ‘individuality’. -/- Derrida’s theory of law presents a conundrum. Derrida misses the possibility that law may exist by virtue of its content rather than its form. Derrida misses this possibility because, heavily influenced by Kant (in Derrida’s theory of law), Derrida associates law with universals. This is so because Kant (and Derrida) are preoccupied with the identity of what counts as a law (lois) rather than with a law’s legitimacy. A universal cannot exist unless it is legitimate, and it is legitimate, I claim, by virtue of its content. In his association of law with universals, Derrida presupposes that legal knowledge exists with reference to a territorial-like boundary. The forms are represented or signified by signs (signifiers) within a boundary of the ultimate form (the state, the nation, or humanity). This ultimate form as a universal, like the discrete rules or forms, lacks socially contingent content. A boundary separates knowable universals from the unknowable world on the exteriority of the boundary. The unknowable world is constituted by concrete events experienced in context-specific circumstances. In his legal theory Derrida hones in upon the decision as the experienced event. In a decision, one is present or immediate with the event. Derrida considers such immediacy as justice. The immediacy, however, can only be represented as a sign (sometimes called a signifier). The sign, in turn, represents an empty signified or form, according to Derrida. Because the immediacy remains a representation rather than a presentation of the experienced event, laws as universals cannot be just. The rupture between the inaccessible immediacy of a decision on the one hand and the represented empty forms on the other is critical to Derrida’s theory of law. -/- I claim that this rupture permeates Derrida’s writings about law because Derrida possesses a territorial-like sense of legal knowledge. I shall argue to this effect as follows. In the first section I shall explain the importance of Fitzpatrick’s exposure of the vacuity of the foundation of the system or structure of universals. In the second section I shall flesh out two elements of Derrida’s legal theory: law as form and the ipseity or concrete event that the form excludes from law. This takes me to the third section, where I shall elaborate how Derrida’s legal theory presupposes knowledge as territorial. I shall argue in the final section that this very sense of territorial knowledge prevents justice from accessing law and law from accessing justice. I conclude with the hint of a very different sense of law, one that draws from experiential knowledge in contradistinction to territorial knowledge. (shrink)

This essay retrieves Lon Fuller's theory of language and the role of experience in such a theory. The essay distinguishes meaning from signification. A sign signifies or represents an object. Meaning is experienced before one ever signifies an object. Signification is cognitive. Meaning is bodily. Fuller locates meaning in what Hart excluded from legality as "pre-legal." In the pre-legal realm, meant ob­jects draw from memories and expectations. The memories may have been personally or collectively experienced. The analysis of rules takes (...) signification for granted, however. When meaning is privileged. we appreciate why interpretation figures importantly in the role of the lawyer/official. So too, shared meanings, "located' in experienced time, explain understanding and communication between members of a group. As a consequence of Fuller's insights, meaning pre-conditions communication as well as the analysis of the signified rule. Since traditional analytical jurisprudence holds out that lawyers/officials analyse rules, both jurisprudence and the analytic project, Fuller cautions, risk being estranged from the lived meanings of the pre-legal realm. Instead, jurisprudes, lawyers and officials risk locking themselves into a fictitious world of dead concepts which are better known as rules. (shrink)

Kafka’s The Trial describes how K slowly loses his familiar language. He does speak a language but his language becomes monologic towards others and the language of others becomes monologic towards K. There seems to be no other person who, in a private and professional life, can respond to K’s words and gestures in a manner which K can understand. The others embody their own meanings into K’s words. Such meanings only possess value within the discourses of self-styled legal experts (...) and officials who act in K’s name. The officials and experts assume that their own meanings are authoritative. K fails to gain access to their meanings. The question posed by Husserl’s phenomenology of language is ‘why?’ Conklin argues that K’s experiences seem not unlike Lyotard’s sense of a different or ‘untranslatable gap’. K remains on the fringe or outside what the experts take as an authoritative language. As a consequence, K’s experiential body slowly dies. This death paradoxically occurs at the same moments that the experts believe that they are addressing ‘K’s case’. Conklin explains the paradox by retrieving Husserl’s sense of a meaning-conferring act and the failure of K’s meaning-conferring acts from being fulfilled in the language of the legal experts. (shrink)

Games Studies reveals the performative nature of playing a character in a virtual-game-world (Nitsche 2008, p.205; Pearce 2006, p.1; Taylor 2002, p.48). Tbe Player/Character relationship is typically understood in terms of the player’s in-game “presence” (Boellstorff 2008, p.89; Schroeder 2002, p.6). This gives the appearance that living-into a game-world is an all-or- nothing affair: either the player is “present” in the game-world, or they are not. I argue that, in fact, a constitutive phenomenology reveals the Player/Character relationship to be a (...) multi-dimensional matter of empathy. I advance a broadly Schutzian framework, drawing on his 1932 discussions of “face-to-face encounters” and ”historical predecessors,” showing how at- tention to empathy reveals a variety of “presences” that different kinds of Player/Character relationships afford. The central determinants of empathetic affordances which I focus on here are (i) how much players know about a character (especially the character’s past) and (ii) how players learn this information.The purpose of this discussion will be to show that a phenomenological analysis reveals that the relationship between a player and their character is complex, highly variable, and inherently social. Furthermore, it will add to the growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that video games are rich social objects deserving of study. (shrink)

This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences from norms. Though film would seem to privilege vision, viewing this (...) film helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts the norms of the corporeal schema. (shrink)

By extending Husserl’s own historico-critical study to include the conceptual mathematics of more contemporary times – specifically category theory and its emphatic development since the second half of the 20th century – this paper claims that the delineation between mathematics and philosophy must be completely revisited. It will be contended that Husserl’s phenomenological work was very much influenced by the discoveries and limitations of the formal mathematics being developed at Göttingen during his tenure there and that, subsequently, the rôle he (...) envisaged for his material a priori science is heavily dependent upon his conception of the definite manifold. Motivating these contentions is the idea of a mathematics which would go beyond the constraints of formal ontology and subsequently achieve coherence with the full sense of transcendental phenomenology. While this final point will be by no means proven within the confines of this paper it is hoped that the very fact of opening up for the possibility of such an idea will act as a supporting argument to the overriding thesis that the relationship between mathematics and phenomenology must be problematised. (shrink)