This paper outlines the basic traits of a responsive phenomenology by focusing on the issue of originary substitution. On the one hand, a phenomenology of alienness or otherness and an ethics of the other in the sense of Levinas will prove to be closely bound up with this sort of substitution. On the other side, this substitution can be concretised by transitional figures such as the advocate, the therapist, the translator, the witness, or the field researcher; they all intervene from (...) the position of a Third without closing the fissure which opens between ourselves and the Other, between the own and the alien. Precisely by focussing on the issue of substitution, we have the opportunity to outline the basis traits of a responsive phenomenology and to discuss some of its institutional consequences. (shrink)

This essay approaches the topic of the political impact of the novel from an unconventional angle. It argues that this impact, recently discussed by philosophers like Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, should be considered the result of a special feature of this genre, namely that the novel is read solitarily and in silence. Reading a novel unplugs the reader from ordinary life and transports him to a world of the self, an individual world. From this position, which will be compared (...) with the position of the subject in transcendental philosophy, the reader is able to see the world around him in a new, individualist and subjective perspective. This perspective may be regarded as at least one of the conditions of modern democratic citizenship. (shrink)

Situated approaches to affectivity overcome an outdated individualistic perspective on emotions by emphasizing the role embodiment and environment play in affective dynamics. Yet, accounts which provide the conceptual toolbox for analyses in the philosophy of emotions do not go far enough. Their focus falls on the present situation, abstracting from the broader historico-cultural context, and on adopting a largely functionalist approach by conceiving of emotions and the environment as resources to be regulated or scaffolds to be used. In this paper, (...) I argue that we need to take situatedness seriously: We need to acknowledge that emotions are not situated in undetermined “contexts” but in concrete socio-culturally specific practices referring to forms of living; and to agree that not only are context and emotions used for the sake of something else but also that the meaning-disclosive dimension of affective intentionality is structured by situatedness as well. To do so, I offer a multidimensional approach to situatedness that integrates the biographical and cultural dimensions of contextualization within the analysis of situated affective dynamics. This approach suggests that humans affectively disclose meaning which is at once product and producer of specific forms of living – and these are always already subjects of critique. (shrink)

This text practices a philosophical voice that deviates from visuo-centric theory and the muteness of its language and instead sings a complex simultaneity of things and thoughts that burn through the walls of the discipline and illuminate the activities at the margins. This philosophical voice sings a refrain of “I,” which brings us back to bring us forward, surprising us in its renewal again and again. It is a body that is, as Samuel Beckett’s Not I, at once not I (...) and I; an idiosyncratic subjectivity that carries its plural name in its mouth. In this way, it further diffracts the sonic possibility of counterfactual slices into simultaneous dimensionalities open to our gaze in the dark, when we have let go of a normative orientation and are able to see the image at its depth. Between text scores, Churten theory, Canto Cardenche, and the breath of a humpback whale, this voice tries not to theorise. It does not want to produce a philosophical message, supporting a “philosophism” which akin to “scientism” treats philosophy as a phenomenon unconnected to cultural values or location, gender or racial specificity. Instead, it aims to practice a philosophy that opens in song to its own anxiety of objectivity, its fear of a reflective centre, and performs a translucent marginality that generates the view of a plural world burning through a permeable skin. (shrink)

Male-to-female transsexualism manifests itself in the form of a discrepancy between the male sex assigned at birth and the subjective experience of belonging to the female gender, which in many cases also involves a somatic transition by cross-sex hormone treatment and genital surgery. Until now, no studies related to MtF transsexualism have been carried out within the framework of a phenomenological/existential approach. This paradigm would make it possible to better articulate the transsexual experience beyond the simplistic diagnostic criteria by which (...) it is currently defined. In this study, I will reread MtF transsexualism in the light of Ludwig Binswanger’s theories on Mannerism and Jean Paul Sartre’s remarks on the self and the body. I will do this largely by focusing on first-hand accounts of the MtF transsexual’s experience, in other words from a first-person viewpoint. Finally, I will present some considerations on the meaning of psychological intervention in this field. (shrink)

Normality, for Husserl, is said in many ways. While the most detailed treatments of this technical Husserlian concept are usually found in discussions concerning the constitutive dimension of the lived body and intersubjectivity, little attention has been paid to the notion of normality understood as the tacit regularity of nature. Indeed, the normal can also be understood as the causal background which is presupposed, tentatively, in the anticipation of uniform processes of change, as well as in poieticinstrumental experiences, that is, (...) in experiences involving the production and use of objects. The subject that elaborates, manipulates or uses objects is installed in nature. Hence, in our productive-instrumental confrontation with objects in the world, we operate under the assumption that the potentially mutable causal scene surrounding our acting life will retain its style. This assumption of normality is the world, in one of the many ways in which Husserl characterizes this concept. The world qua background of normality becomes thematic, retrospectively, precisely when it ceases to cooperate with the agent’s initiatives. This, on my view, is what lies behind Husserl’s assertion that the world is a “super-object” or “higher-level theme”. (shrink)

Though there exists a vast literature dealing with Hannah Arendt's thoughts on evil in general and Adolf Eichmann in particular, few attempts have been made to assess Arendt's position on evil by tracing its connection with her reflections on conscience. This essay examines the nature and significance of such a connection. Beginning with her doctoral dissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumously published studies in The Life of the Mind, Arendt's oeuvre exhibits strong thematic continuity: the triad thinking-conscience-evil (...) forms its most enduring core. A puzzling core, to be sure, considering the controversies triggered, especially regarding her notion of the 'banality of evil'. By placing the role of conscience at the very center of Arendt's lifelong reflections, this essay explores the - in many ways related - influence exerted by St Augustine and Heidegger. Heidegger's conception of conscience in Sein und Zeit is identified as a crucial source for understanding - so the claim holds - why Arendt found Heidegger's philosophy particularly wanting as regards the question of evil. Key Words: Arendt • Augustine • conscience • evil • Heidegger • Socrates • thinking. (shrink)

National legal systems undergo profound changes when they are confronted with undemocratic power seizure. The same occurs when they experience a transition (back) to democracy. Thus far, these two types of transition have been studied in relative isolation. Nevertheless, it seems that both undemocratic usurpers and democratizing regimes affect the role of fundamental rule-of-law principles in similar ways. This article compares both types of transition and suggests that pragmatism and national identity are the driving forces behind similar legal mechanisms, affecting (...) legal principles, in those two forms of transition. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's idea of the state of exception and Ruti Teitel's work on transitional justice, this article shows that both kinds of transition share the same fundamental legal structure. (shrink)

After taking into consideration the most relevant criticisms questioning the capacity of the thinking “I” to grasp itself in a transparent and undistorting way, I will ask what remains of first-person authority with regard to one’s own identity. I argue that first-person authority is not to be abandoned, but rather reformulated in terms of public commitments that nobody else can take up in my place. After recovering the original meaning of Heidegger’s claim “one is what one does,” I turn to (...) Arendt’s performative disclosure of the “who” through political initiative and suggest reading the requirement of public exposure as a model allowing for a better understanding of self-identification. In order to discern more clearly the shape of this new paradigm of self-identification, I draw on Ricoeur’s notion of self-attestation, Crowell’s analysis of our “being-answerable” and Larmore’s account of avowals in which we give ourselves a publicly binding shape. In synthetizing and prolonging the considerations of the abovementioned authors about the performative disclosure of the self, I demonstrate that one’s identity—in the sense of ipseity—is both constituted and manifested by the commitments that the self endorses and for which it is held accountable in front of others. (shrink)

: This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

In this paper, we draw on developmental findings to provide a nuanced understanding of background emotions, particularly those in depression. We demonstrate how they reflect our basic proximity (feeling of interpersonal connectedness) to others and defend both a phenomenological and a functional claim. First, we substantiate a conjecture by Fonagy & Target (International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88(4):917–937, 2007) that an important phenomenological aspect of depression is the experiential recreation of the infantile loss of proximity to significant others. Second, we argue (...) that proximity has a particular cognitive function that allows individuals to morph into a cohesive dyadic system able to carry out distributed emotion regulation. We show that elevated levels of psychological suffering connected to depressive background emotions may be explained not only in terms of a psychological loss, but also as the felt inability to enter into dyadic regulatory relations with others—an experiential constraint that decreases the individual’s ability to adapt to demanding situations. (shrink)

What is characteristic of being aParkinson’s patient? This article intends toanswer this question by means of an analysis ofnovels about people with Parkinson’s disease,personal accounts, and scientific publications.The texts were analyzed from anexistential-phenomenological perspective, usingan adapted version of the existential analysis.Being a Parkinson’s patient is apparentlycharacterized by an existential paradox: lifeappears simultaneously immobile andunpredictably whimsical. This may manifestitself in the person’s corporeality, in hisbeing-in-time and in-space, in his relating tothings and events, his life-world, and in hisbeing-together-with-others as an individual.Finally, some (...) specific characteristics of beinga Parkinson’s patient are described that may berelevant for purposes of adequate care, as isto be specified by further research. (shrink)

There is a surge of attempts to draw out the epistemological consequences of views according to which cognition is deeply embedded, embodied and/or extended. The principal machinery used for doing so is that of analytic epistemology. Here I argue that Dewey's pragmatic epistemology may be better fit to the task. I start by pointing out the profound similarities between Dewey's view on cognition and that emerging from literature of more recent date. Crucially, the benefit of looking at Dewey is that (...) Dewey, unlike contemporary writers, also devises a corresponding epistemology. I then identify two senses in which contemporary analytic epistemology conflicts with e-cog—concluding from that the superiority of the Deweyian framework, at least as it concerns accommodating e-cog. (shrink)

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger’s thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995, 2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger’s thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome (...) the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek–German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger’s antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger's thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995), (2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger's thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome (...) the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek-German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger's antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

In recent years limitations in the biomedical conceptualisation of health and illness have been well documented and a variety of alternative explanations produced to replace or supplement it. One such is Fredrik Svenaeus’s philosophy of medical practice, which is a development of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heideggers’ phenomenological and hermeneutical writings. This paper explores two texts, a short story by H. G. Wells, The Country of the Blind, and a poem by William Carlos Williams, Danse Russe to add further insight (...) into the ideas proposed by Svenaeus. Both texts were written before either Gadamer or Heidegger published their work. Analysis of the texts reveal examples of Heidegger’s understanding of ‘da-sein’, human-being, as the fundamental of human existence—how we relate to our ‘life-world’—together with its conditions including the tools we use to engage with and the moods that interpret the world. Emerging from this core relationship of being are the phenomena of health and illness, which are conceptualised as home-like (Heimischkeit) and un-home-like (Unheimlichkeit) being-in-the-world. In the texts the sense of home-like (and un-home-like) being is an ontological ‘web of significance’, to use Heidegger’s phrase, that creates, rather than results from a person’s psychological state. One factor that is not fully explicated in the philosophical accounts is the role that behaviour (as the physical-relating of a person) plays as a pre-requisite for agency, the ability to act in taken-for-granted ways. A person’s sense of authenticity, the extent to which someone makes their own choices rather than being led by what ‘others’ say, is linked with their ability to physically engage with and relate to their ‘life-world’. Finally, similarities between the ontological wholeness of poetry—the meaning structure of poetry—and of Dasein are noted. (shrink)

When it comes to the relation of modern mathematics and philosophy, most people tend to think of the three major schools of thought—i.e. logicism, formalism, and intuitionism—that emerged as profound researches on the foundations and nature of mathematics in the beginning of the 20th century and have shaped the dominant discourse of an autonomous discipline of analytic philosophy, generally known under the rubric of “philosophy of mathematics” since then. What has been completely disregarded by these philosophical attitudes, these foundational researches (...) which seek to provide pure mathematics with a philosophically plausible justification by founding it on firm logico-philosophical bases, is that the genuine self-foundation of pure mathematics had been done before, namely during the 19th century, when it was developing into an entirely new and independent discipline as a concomitant of the continuous dissociation of mathematics from the physical world. This self-foundation of the 19th-century pure mathematics, however, was more akin to the German-idealist interpretations of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, than the post-factum, retrospective 20th-century researches on the foundations of mathematics. This article aims to demonstrate this neglected historical fact via delving into the philosophical inclinations of the three major founders of the 19th-century pure mathematics, Riemann, Dedekind and Cantor. Consequently, pure mathematics, with respect to its idealist origins, proves to be a formalization and idealization of certain activities specific to a self-conscious transcendental subjectivity. (shrink)

Este trabajo pretende preguntarse si, a pesar del “silencio” de Heidegger ante la teoría de los géneros poéticos de Hölderlin, no es esta misma teoría, y especialmente el poema lírico que caracteriza a la modernidad, la cuestión en la cual se apoya Heidegger para fundamentar su “historia del ser”, de modo que la noción fuerte de _historia _que se maneja en su obra y finalmente el término marcado _das Ereignis _estaría en sintonía con los “trayectos poéticos” que Hölderlin teoriza.

This paper presents a foundation of the intellectual artefact “hermeneutic concept” based on an interpretation of the “Deduction of pure aesthetic judgment” of the third Kantian Critique. Since the denomination for this artefact and the first characterization is found in a Heidegger course, I will proceed by offering the context of discussion in which it arises, namely, the Heideggerian interpretation of the Kantian transcendental schematism. Then, I will give the interpretation of the Deduction that allows us the foundation of the (...) “hermeneutic concept” and, once the route of that foundation is completed, two reading hypothesis will be outlined, one for the place of the third Kantian Critique in Heidegger’s work and another for the aesthetics in general and the Kantian aesthetic in particular. (shrink)

What kind of affective phenomenon is religious zeal and how does it relate to other affective phenomena, such as moral anger, hatred, and love? In this paper, I argue that religious zeal can be both, and be presented and interpreted as both, a love-like passion and an anger-like emotion. As a passion, religious zeal consists of the loving devotion to a transcendent religious object or idea such as God. It is a relatively enduring attachment that is constitutive of who the (...) zealot is, and it expresses itself in a distinctive set of mental and behavioral dispositions. Most importantly, it motivates uncompromising actions and involves intense, hot, and deep emotions. As an anger-like emotion, religious zeal is an occurrent affective state of mind that is intentionally directed towards a specific object, characteristically a person or group of persons. It condemns the violation of a religious norm that is taken to be of absolute validity and general applicability. It motivates an action aiming at vengeance and retaliation, and it involves intense and hot feelings of hostility towards its object. I argue that rather than reducing the complex phenomenon of religious zeal to one of these two manifestations, we should reflect upon the question of how the two distinct conceptualizations relate to each other. (shrink)

A human right to freedom of religion is not equivalent to a right to tolerance. Human rights and tolerance-rules serve for different purposes and are based on different justifications. Tolerance-rules serve to protect a peaceful living together with strangers who share no common values. Human rights serve to protect every individual’s personhood. Religion can only be a matter of human rights, if and so far as it is a condition of development and maintenance of personhood. Discussion about a human right (...) to freedom of religion makes sense only if we can identify a particular scope of protection which concerns only religion and if the freedom of religion is not embraced by wider-framed freedoms. The freedom of religious thoughts and the freedom of religious speech are embraced by the general human rights to freedom of thoughts and freedom of speech. Here, there is no need for a special human right to freedom of religion. The right not to be forced to act contrary to religiously founded moral rules is embraced by the general human right to freedom of conscience. And again, there is no need for a special human right. The target of religious practices in a narrower sense is to become flexible and porous and not to resist the threats of the sacral in order to avoid the destruction of personhood. Therefore, we have to recognize a human right to freedom of religious rites. It protects only the actions of accommodation to the overwhelming power of the sacral. It does not protect, however, any action with which it is intended to rule the world or to rule over others, to organize certain practical challenges, or to discover or to maintain scientific theories or technical means. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the question of how a philosophically enriched view of method might inform both educational theory and educational research. The first part of the paper elaborates recent discussions on “philosophical method” in the educational–philosophical discourse. These discussions point toward the importance of analyzing the conceptual or categorical frameworks of educational processes. The second part of the paper discusses Martin Heidegger’s work Being and Time to capture fully the challenges that a philosophical method faces in investigations of (...) subjectivity: The focus lies on Heidegger’s strategy to situate his philosophical work as a descriptive undertaking and simultaneously as a categorical outline of human existentiality (“ Dasein ”). This work serves to reflect a philosophical as well as empirical attitude or conduct in the final part of the paper, which briefly introduces “categorical research” with some examples. (shrink)

Shame in the deep sense of fear of exposure of human vulnerability (and not in the narrower sense of individual transgression or fault) has been identified as one mood or disposition of philosophical thinking. Philosophical imaginary, disciplinary identity and misogynistic vocabulary testify to a collective, underlying, unprocessed shame inherent to the (Western) philosophical tradition like Le Doeuff (1989), Butler (2004) and Murphy (2012) have pointed out. One aspect of collective philosophical shame has to do with disgust of or denial of (...) embodiment insofar as it poses a threat to ideals of sovereignty and rationality (Nussbaum 2006). Embodiment reveals finitude, being dependent and exposed to others (Sartre 1984; Merleau-Ponty 2012; Landweer 1999; Zahavi 2014), and ultimately points to human vulnerability as rooted in an experience of fear of shame (Gilson 2016). If the inability to process shame of embodiment has resulted in disembodied notions of the human being that may lead to defensiveness, aggression or violence, how can a constructive processing of shame based on an embodied notion of the human being result in a way of philosophical thinking that is more vulnerable? And how can philosophical thinking that has its point of departure in vulnerability, neither in the sense of the victim nor the hero but as a self-conscious emotion, lead to philosophical dialogues that can unsettle vicious cycles of shaming and blaming and are productive for deepening philosophical reflection? Susan Brison’s (2002) work on sexual violence will finally be discussed as an example of such a philosophy. (shrink)

This article develops Thomson’s post-Heideggerian view that ontological education is centrally concerned with disclosing being creatively and responsibly. To disclose being creatively and responsibly is to realize the meaning of being, developing our historical understanding of what being means along with our consequent understanding of what it means for us to be, both communally and in the many facets of our own individual lives. As ontological educators, we disclose our own being by becoming who we are, which we do best (...) by learning-in-public, that is, by ‘teaching learning’. In the teaching and learning that belong together in ontological education, we come into our own by helping others to come into their own as well. Thomson explains and develops the crucially meaningful difference between creatively and responsibly disclosing inchoate meanings, on the one hand, and technologically imposing pre-existing plans and ideas, on the other. Responding to five recent essays on Heidegger allows Thomson to elaborate a non-nihilistic way of understanding education, teaching, learning, and being in our late-modern age of increasing technology. This article thereby articulates and embodies some of the important educational possibilities opened up by a more genuinely meaningful postmodern understanding of being. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the educational‐philosophical implications of Michel Foucault's work: It poses the question whether Michel Foucault's remarks surrounding ‘limit‐experience’ can be placed in an educational context and provide an alternative view regarding the relationship that we maintain to ourselves. As a first step, the significance of ‘limit‐experience’ for Foucault's historicophilosophical investigations, his ‘critical ontology of the present’, is examined. Far from being an external marking point, it can be shown that limit‐experience lies at the centre of Foucault's (...) approaches to the history of thought. As a second step, the resistance of Foucault's work against its integration into the educational realm is examined: Coming from Foucault's ‘limit‐experience’, it is possible to problematize a specific way we speak about learning and education. As a subsequent step, this resistance is given a constructive turn: The practices of writing and reading (related to limit‐experience) could provide a valuable irritation for philosophers of education by exposing them to the challenges of ‘singularity’ in education. It is argued that specifically the writing practice could be helpful for educational studies in order to inquire into the complex relationship of subject, power, and truth within the educational realm. Finally, the possibilities and difficulties of provoking such a writing practice are mentioned. (shrink)

While it is well known that the early Heidegger distinguishes between different ‘kinds of being’ and identifies various ‘structures’ that compose them, there has been little discussion about what these kinds and structures of being are. This paper defends the ‘Property Thesis’, the position that kinds of being (and their structures) are properties of the entities that have them. I give two arguments for this thesis. The first is grounded in the fact that Heidegger refers to kinds and structures of (...) being as ‘characteristics’ and ‘determinations’, which are just two different words for ‘properties’, in the broadest senses of these terms. The second argument is based on the fact that kinds and structures of being play three roles that properties are supposed to play: they are what account for similarities between things, they are what predicates express, and they are what abstract nouns refer to. (shrink)

To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common. Our test case for illustrating this joint (...) work is the fluid and constantly changing world of software development. Our study uses a transactional approach to show how software developers working together continuously make available what they are attuned to, which constitutes their common ground that allows actions and talk to make sense. The common ground enables a common, inherently shared sense of what is happening and how things are going. Rather than having “meaning” in themselves, signifiers (words, gestures, body movements, cursor movements) create and are part of the common ground against which they make sense. Signifiers are motivated by and produce an accented visible that is available to all group members; and this accented visible (including the signs) makes for the common ground. (shrink)

This paper will deal with the relationship between 'life' (Leben) and the 'life-world' (Lebenswelt) 1 as we find these concepts in the writings of Husserl's last years. The emphasis will be upon elucidating this relation- ship from the transcendental point of view. It is well known that Husserl initially introduced the concept of the life-world into his philosophy in connection with the problem of founding the sciences: accordingly, most studies up to date have dealt with the concept within this context (...) - that is, as part of the program for founding the sciences. However, it is important to remember that the life-world is also, for Husserl, a 'way to the transcendental reduction', and as such, can be ultimately clari- fied only by following this way to its end, and by comprehending it in its relationship to transcendental subjectivity. In his later years, Husserl came to think of the 'way of being' (Seinsweise) of transcendental sub- jectivity as 'world-experiencing-life' (welterfahrendes Leben). Thus it is my view that the problem of the 'life-world' is intimately related to that of 'life', and must necessarily be treated in the context of that rela- tionship. (shrink)

This paper investigates the question of what an organ is from a phenomenological perspective. Proceeding from the phenomenology of being-in-the-world developed by Heidegger in Being and Time and subsequent works, it compares the being of the organ with the being of the tool. It attempts to display similarities and differences between the embodied nature of the organs and the way tools of the world are handled. It explicates the way tools belong to the totalities of things of the world that (...) are ready to use and the way organs belong to the totality of a bodily being able to be in this very world. In so doing, the paper argues that while the organ is in some respects similar to a bodily tool, this tool is nonetheless different from the tools of the world in being tied to the organism as a whole, which offers the founding ground of the being of the person. However, from a phenomenological point of view, the line between organs and tools cannot simply be drawn by determining what is inside and outside the physiological borders of the organism. We have, from the beginning of history, integrated technological devices (tools) in our being-in-the-world in ways that make them parts of ourselves rather than parts of the world (more organ- than tool-like), and also, more recently, have started to make our organs more tool-like by visualising, moving, manipulating, and controlling them through medical technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s analysis of organ, tool, and world-making is confronted with this development brought about by contemporary medical technology. It is argued that this development has, to a large extent, changed the phenomenology of the organ in making our bodies more similar to machines with parts that have certain functions and that can be exchanged. This development harbours the threat of instrumentalising our bodily being but also the possibility of curing or alleviating suffering brought about by diseases which disturb and destroy the normal functioning of our organs. (shrink)

This article develops a phenomenological exploration of chronic pain from a first-person perspective that can serve to enrich the medical third-person perspective. The experience of chronic pain is found to be a feeling in which we become alienated from the workings of our own bodies. The bodily-based mood of alienation is extended, however, in penetrating the whole world of the chronic pain sufferer, making her entire life unhomelike. Furthermore, the pain mood not only opens up the world as having an (...) alien quality, it also makes the world more lonesome and poor by forcing the sufferer to attend to the workings of her own body. To suffer pain is to find oneself in a situation of passivity in relation to the hurtful experiences one is undergoing. In making the body and the world more unhomelike places to be in, pain also tends to rob a person of her language. Severe pain is hard to describe because it pushes the person towards the borderlines of imaginable experience and because it makes it hard to see any meaning and purpose in the situation one has been forced into. The analysis of chronic pain in the article is guided by the attempts made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger to understand the nature of human embodiment and existence, and also by descriptions of chronic pain found in the Swedish author Lars Gustafsson’s novel The Death of a Beekeeper. (shrink)

Three metaphors appear to guide contemporary thinking about organ transplantation. Although the gift is the sanctioned metaphor for donating organs, the underlying perspective from the side of the state, authorities and the medical establishment often seems to be that the body shall rather be understood as a resource . The acute scarcity of organs, which generates a desperate demand in relation to a group of potential suppliers who are desperate to an equal extent, leads easily to the gift’s becoming, in (...) reality, not only a resource, but also a commodity . In this paper, the claim is made that a successful explication of the gift metaphor in the case of organ transplantation and a complementary defence of the ethical primacy of the giving of organs need to be grounded in a philosophical anthropology which considers the implications of embodiment in a different and more substantial way than is generally the case in contemporary bioethics. I show that Heidegger’s phenomenology offers such an alternative, with the help of which we can understand why body parts could and, indeed, under certain circumstances, should be given to others in need, but yet are neither resources nor properties to be sold. The phenomenological exploration in question is tied to fundamental questions about what kind of relationship we have to our own bodies, as well as about what kind of relationship we have to each other as human beings sharing the same being-in-the-world as embodied creatures. (shrink)

This paper explores the differences between bringing about self-change by way of antidepressants versus psychotherapy from an ethical point of view, taking its starting point in the concept of authenticity. Given that the new antidepressants (SSRIs) are able not only to cure psychiatric disorders but also to bring about changes in the basic temperament structure of the person—changes in self-feeling—does it matter if one brings about such changes of the self by way of antidepressants or by way of psychotherapy? Are (...) antidepressants a less good alternative than psychotherapy because antidepressants are in some way less authentic than psychotherapy? And, if so, what does this mean exactly? In this paper I try to show that the self-change brought about by way of antidepressants challenges basic assumptions of authentic self-change that are deeply ingrained in our Western culture: that changes in self should be brought about by laborious ‘self-work’ in which one explores the deep layers of the self (the unconscious) and comes to realise who one really is and should become. To become oneself has been held to presuppose such a journey. While the assumed importance of self-work appears to be badly founded on closer inspection, the notions of exploring and knowing oneself appear to be more promising in fleshing out an ethical distinction between psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic practice with the help of the concept of authenticity. Psychotherapy, to a much greater extent than psychopharmacological interventions, involves the whole profile of the self in its attempts to effect a change, not only in the temperament but also in the character of the person in question, and this is important from an ethical point of view. In the article, the concepts of self-change, authenticity, temperament and character are presented and used in order to understand and flesh out the relevant ethical differences between the practice of psychotherapy and the use of antidepressants. Looping, collective effects of psychopharmacological self-change in a cultural context are also considered in this context. (shrink)

Drawing on my article “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, this paper provides a detailed response to the above commentaries by Lisa Adkins, Bridget Fowler, Michael Grenfell, David Inglis, Hans-Herbert Kögler, Steph Lawler, William Outhwaite, Derek Robbins and Bryan S. Turner. The main purpose of this “Reply to my critics” is to reflect upon the most important issues raised by these commentators and thereby contribute to a more nuanced understanding of key questions arising from Bourdieu’s (...) analysis of language. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit presents one of the most striking reflexions on human facticity, i.e. the fact that Dasein fundamentally exists in a world letting Dasein and world be co-extensive. By quoting two central personages in theology, Pascal and Augustine, Heidegger refers to a concept of love that is constitutive for Dasein’s facticity to truth and to knowledge. By investigating the claim that love is as good as absent from Sein und Zeit, the article intends to show that the (...) scanty references to love nevertheless have a central role in Heidegger’s early work and, furthermore, why Heidegger returns to it in his later thinking. Interesting in this regard is the connection between the theological concept of love and Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’. The article places Heidegger’s Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition in the realms of his Dasein analysis focussing on facticity. Taking its methodological cues from Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida, the article shows how the concepts of possibility and impotentiality (Ohnmacht) become essential in Heidegger via his reference to love. Lastly, the article examines to what extent Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit paraphrases the old angelology letting the Dasein concept become its secularisation. (shrink)

The question of truth is one of the oldest philosophical topics, but perhaps it concerns the world today more than ever. Der Beitrag geht auf einen Vortrag zurück, der 2018 in verschiedenen Fassungen beim Nietzsche-Forum München e.V., beim Nietzsche-Forum der Tongji-Universität Shanghai und beim Nietzsche-Kolloquium der Stiftung Nietzsche-Haus in Sils-Maria und 2019 in Machatschkala, Dagestan, gehalten wurde. Nietzsche was a realist about truth and he sought to criticize and reject the idealizations and moralizations that continue to dominate philosophical thinking: he (...) wanted to see how truth really stands. Following Nietzsche we can recognize more clearly that we need illusions in order to live, but that these illusions also endanger the very lives they support. We demand a final truth on which we can rely at all times, and which allows us to live together, such as the truth of God, the truth of reason, or the truth of being. But searching for such a final truth, we face “nothing,” or what Nietzsche described as “nihilism.” At the same time, however, we keep on speaking about truth and truths. How to speak—after Nietzsche—about truth without succumbing to illusion? Starting from Nietzsche’s critique of truth and Heidegger’s metaphysical account of Nietzsche’s position, this article examines how Nietzsche, in contrast to Heidegger’s ontological commitments, allows us to decide about truth on the grounds of perspectivism. While Nietzsche’s position thus seems compatible with that of Niklas Luhmann’s constructivism, Nietzsche still holds on to his truth as the truth of “an evangelist the like of which there has never been” (EH, Destiny 1). (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon both argue that oppression fundamentally constrains the subject’s relationship to and embodied experience of time, yet their accounts of temporality are rarely brought together. This paper will explore what we might learn about the operation of different types of reductive temporality if we read Beauvoir and Fanon alongside each other, focusing primarily on the early works that arguably lay out the central concerns of their respective temporal frameworks. At first glance, it seems that these (...) two models of temporality have radically different emphases. While Beauvoir suggests that reductive temporalities work to sever the future from the past and present, Fanon locates this destructive operation in the heightening of their entanglement. However, I will contend that there are deep affinities between these accounts: For both Beauvoir and Fanon, freedom is bound up with futurity, with its lack therefore cashed out in terms of stagnation, repetition, and the entrapment within a hollow moment that prevents authentic projection. Both resist teleological perspectives; problematize the endeavor to describe the structures of lived temporality in neutral terms; and show that temporality is crucial to the pursuit of a political phenomenology. These resonances, however, should only serve to recast rather than dissolve the tension between their approaches; ultimately, we need to acknowledge the distinctiveness of their differing concerns and aims. (shrink)

No primeiro esforço de aproximaçãoentre analítica existencial e antropologia filosófica,este ensaio procura estabelecer, em lugarde destaque, a idéia de compreensão do sercomo elemento determinante do modo de serno-mundo do ser humano. Dessa primeira idéiadecorrem então os dois teoremas de finitude: ocirculo hermenêutico e a diferença ontológica.Temos, nestes dois pilares da filosofia hermenêutica,um novo modo de fundação e um novomodo de dar-se de todo ente. A diferençaontológica constitui o como tudo é acessível,vem ao encontro, mas ela mesma éinacessível ao pensamento objetificador. (...) Todonosso modo de pensar e conhecer o ente passapor aquilo que é sua condição de possibilidade.Mas todo, a dar-se nesse como é articuladono enquanto, no algo enquanto algoda estrutura da compreensão que é o modo deser do Dasein, a dimensão hermenêutica docirculo do hermenêutico. A articulação dessesdois teoremas da finitude, que são os elementosdeterminantes presentes em todo conhecimentohumano, constitui o modo de ser e omodo primeiro de conhecer do ser do Dasein. Aantropologia filosófica, a partir da analíticaexistencial, encontra nos dois teoremas dafinitude seu estatuto filosófico. (shrink)

The problem of political action has its roots, arguably, in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle seeks to describe an intellectual virtue – phronêsis – that is different from the faculty of theoretical reason but that is nonetheless capable of producing genuinely objective, rational knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what is true. The problem, specifically, is to understand how such a thing is possible, and much of the recent literature appears to suggest that perhaps it’s not. Since rhetoric, (...) persuasion, interest and emotion are obviously central features of political life, it may seem that some kind of non-intellectualist and non-rationalist perspective must be the way to go. I argue, nonetheless, that any such account is, and cannot but be, deeply problematic; and I defend, by way of contrast, a decidedly intellectualistic understanding of political enterprise. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to examine moods, mostly in comparison to emotions. Nearly all of the features that allegedly distinguish moods from emotions are disputed though. In a first section I comment on duration, intentionality, and cause in more detail, and develop intentionality as the most promising distinguishing characteristic. In a second section I will consider the huge variety of moods, ranging from shallow environmentally triggered transient moods to deep existential moods that last much longer. I will explore (...) what their sources are, and how they impact one another, other affective processes, and our being in the world. I follow several eminent emotion researchers and try to carve out their insights, many seemingly mutually excluding each other. As it will turn out, most of them are, in fact, not excluding each other, but contribute to a layered picture of moods that fits well in between emotions and personality traits. Eventually, I will shortly discuss what we can do with our moods. (shrink)

Currently, anomalous lived temporality is not included in the main diagnostic criteria or standard symptom checklists. In this article, we present the Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, a structured interview that can be used by researchers and clinicians without a comprehensive phenomenological background to explore abnormal time experiences in persons with abnormal mental conditions regardless of their diagnosis. When extensive data gathered by this scale are available, it will be possible to delineate well-defined anomalous lived temporality profiles for each psychopathological (...) disorder. This instrument may also prove useful for clinicians by providing a more refined assessment of relevant psychopathological symptoms and an in-depth understanding of the patient’s abnormal behaviour as related to specific types of time experience. In the first part of the article, we provide a brief overview of the phenomenological concept of temporality, including pre-phenomenal and phenomenal time, synthesis, conation and synchronization, and of abnormal time experiences in persons affected by psychopathological conditions. In the following part, we describe the basic structure of the interview that comprises seven categories corresponding to the abnormal features of lived temporality: anomalies of synchrony, of time structure, of implicit time flow, of explicit time flow, and anomalous experiences of the past, the present and the future. The paper also includes a section on administration and scoring of the TATE scale, the complete interview and a Likert table for quantifying the frequency, intensity and interference with daily life of the phenomena explored. (shrink)

This paper argues that Heidegger's phenomenology of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1983) could be a promising addition to the ‘toolbox’ of scientists investigating conscious experience. We describe Heidegger's methodological principles and show how he applies these in describing three forms of boredom. Each form is shown to have two structural moments – being held in limbo and being left empty – as well as a characteristic relation to passing the time. In our conclusion, we (...) suggest specific ways in which Heidegger's phenomenological description can be used in scientific investigations of boredom. (shrink)

An important question one can ask of ethical theories is whether and how they aim to raise claims to universality. This refers to the subject area that they intend to describe or govern and also to the question whether they claim to be binding for all (moral) agents. This paper discusses the question of universality of Luciano Floridi’s information ethics (IE). This is done by introducing the theory and discussing its conceptual foundations and applications. The emphasis will be placed on (...) the ontological grounding of IE. IE’s claims to universality will be contrasted with those raised by discourse ethics. This comparison of two pertinent ethical theories allows for a critical discussion of areas where IE currently has room for elaboration and development. (shrink)