This paper reformulates some of the questions raised by extended mind theorists from an enactive, life/mind continuity perspective. Because of its reliance on concepts such as autopoiesis, the enactive approach has been deemed internalist and thus incompatible with the extended mind hypothesis. This paper answers this criticism by showing (1) that the relation between organism and cogniser is not one of co-extension, (2) that cognition is a relational phenomenon and thereby has no location, and (3) that the individuality of a (...) cogniser is inevitably linked with the question of its autonomy, a question ignored by the extended mind hypothesis but for which the enactive approach proposes a precise, operational, albeit non-functionalist answer. The paper raises a pespective of embedded and intersecting forms of autonomous identity generation, some of which correspond to the canonical cases discussed in the extended mind literature, but on the whole of wider generality. In addressing these issues, this paper proposes unbiased, non-species specific definitions of cognition, agency and mediation, thus filling in gaps in the extended mind debates that have led to paradoxical situations and a problematic over-reliance on intutions about what counts as cognitive. (shrink)

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, (...) and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

In this essay I address the question, “What is the subject matter of phenomenological research?” I argue that in spite of the increasing popularity of phenomenology, the answers to this question have been brief and cursory. As a result, contemporary phenomenologists lack a clear framework within which to articulate the aims and results of their research, and cannot easily engage each other in constructive and critical discourse. Examining the literature on phenomenology’s identity, I show how the question of phenomenology’s subject (...) matter has been systematically neglected. It has been overshadowed by an unending concern with phenomenology’s methodological identity. However, an examination of recent contributions to this literature reveals that a concern with articulating phenomenology’s subject matter has gradually increased, although such articulations remain preliminary. In light of this, I delineate, define, and illustrate three layers of phenomenological research, which I term “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” While the delineation of these layers is drawn primarily from classical phenomenological texts, they are defined and illustrated through the use of more contemporary literature. Following the articulation of this subject matter, I briefly consider some of the debates—both foundational and applied—that can be facilitated by the adoption of this framework. (shrink)

In their recent book Radicalizing Enactivism. Basic minds without content, Dan Hutto and Erik Myin make two important criticisms of what they call autopoietic enactivism. These two criticisms are that AE harbours tacit representationalists commitments and that it has too liberal a conception of cognition. Taking the latter claim as its main focus, this paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of AE in order to tease out how it might respond to H&M. In so doing it uncovers some reasons which not (...) only appear to warrant H&M’s initial claims but also seem to point to further uneasy tensions within the AE framework. The paper goes beyond H&M by tracing the roots of these criticisms and apparent tensions to phenomenology and the role it plays in AE’s distinctive conception of strong life-mind continuity. It is highlighted that this phenomenological dimension of AE contains certain unexamined anthropomorphic and anthropogenic leanings which do not sit comfortably within its wider commitment to life-mind continuity. In light of this analysis it is suggested that AE will do well to rethink this role or ultimately run the risk of remaining theoretically unstable. The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing theoretical development of AE by highlighting potential internal tensions within its framework which need to be addressed in order for it to continue to evolve as a coherent paradigm. (shrink)

In this essay we reflect critically on how animal ethics, and in particular thinking about moral standing, is currently configured. Starting from the work of two influential “analytic” thinkers in this field, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, we examine some basic assumptions shared by these positions and demonstrate their conceptual failings—ones that have, despite efforts to the contrary, the general effect of marginalizing and excluding others. Inspired by the so-called “continental” philosophical tradition , we then argue that what is needed (...) is a change in the rules of the game, a change of the question. We alter the normative question from “What properties does the animal have?” to “What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?” This leads us to consider the role of language, personal relations, and material-technological contexts. What is needed then in response to the moral standing problem, is not more of the same—yet another, more refined criterion and argumentation concerning moral standing, or a “final” rational argumentation that would be able to settle the animal question once and for all—but a turning or transformation in both our thinking about and our relations to animals, through language, through technology, and through the various place-ordering practices in which we participate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of (...) ‘articulating an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that self-awareness is intertwined with one's awareness of possibilities for action. I show this by critically examining Dan Zahavi's multidimensional account of the self. I argue that the distinction Zahavi makes among 'pre-reflective minimal', 'interpersonal', and 'normative' dimensions of selfhood needs to be refined in order to accommodate what I call 'pre-reflective self-understanding'. The latter is a normative dimension of selfhood manifest not in reflection and deliberation, but in the habits and style of a person’s (...) pre-reflective absorption in the world. After reviewing Zahavi's multidimensional account and revealing this gap in his explanatory taxonomy, I draw upon Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Frankfurt in order to sketch an account of pre-reflective self-understanding. I end by raising an objection to Zahavi’s claim for the primitive and foundational status of pre-reflective self-awareness. To carve off self-awareness from the self’s practical immersion in a situation where things and possibilities already matter and draw one to act is to distort the phenomena. A more careful phenomenology of pre-reflective action shows that pre-reflective self-awareness and pre-reflective self-understanding are co-constitutive, both mutually for each other and jointly for everyday experience. (shrink)

The life–mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. The biggest challenge faced by proponents of this thesis is to show how an explanatory framework that accounts for basic biological processes can be systematically extended to incorporate the highest reaches of human cognition. We suggest that this apparent ‘cognitive gap’ between minimal and human forms of life appears insurmountable largely because of the methodological individualism that is prevalent in cognitive science. Accordingly, a (...) twofold strategy is used to show how a consideration of sociality can address both sides of the cognitive gap: (1) it is argued from a systemic perspective that inter-agent interactions can extend the behavioral domain of even the simplest agents and (2) it is argued from a phenomenological perspective that the cognitive attitude characteristic of adult human beings is essentially intersubjectively constituted, in particular with respect to the possibility of perceiving objects as detached from our own immediate concerns. These two complementary considerations of the constitutive role of inter-agent interactions for mind and cognition indicate that sociality is an indispensable element of the life–mind continuity thesis and of cognitive science more generally. (shrink)

According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being-with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, (...) sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's account of attunement [Befindlichkeit] through mood [Stimmung] is unprecedented in the history of philosophy and groundbreaking vis-à-vis contemporary accounts of emotion. On his view, moods are not mere mental states that result from, arise out of, or are caused by our situation or context. Rather, moods are fundamental modes of existence that are disclosive of the way one is or finds oneself [sich befinden] in the world. Mood is one of the basic modes through which we experience the (...) world and through which the world is made present to us. Moreover, moods are the lenses through which things, people, animals, events, and aspects in the world matter to us. In this paper, I make the case that Heidegger's insights with respect to mood can and ought to be extended beyond the narrow scope of his fundamental ontology in which they were developed. I argue that contemporary accounts of mood within psychology ought to take these Heideggerian insights seriously and use them when defining, studying, evaluating, and drawing conclusions about the nature of moods. There are three sections to my paper. In section 1, I delineate Heidegger's account of mood. In section 2, I turn to some key studies on mood in psychology, and I elaborate upon some of the main shortcomings in this literature. In section 3, I suggest how psychology might benefit from understanding and utilizing a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenology of mood. (shrink)

Melancholia is an attunement of despair and despondency that can involve radical disruptions to temporal experience. In this article, I extrapolate from the existing analyses of melancholic time to examine some of the important existential implications of these temporal disruptions. In particular, I focus on the way in which the desynchronization of melancholic time can complicate the melancholic’s relation to death and, consequently, to the meaning and significance of their life. Drawing on Heidegger’s distinction between death and demise, I argue (...) that melancholic time leaves the melancholic in an impossible state of existing, where they are both unable to live and unable to die. Turning to the role of the physician, I consider the significant role that clinical interventions might have in resynchronizing the melancholic with time and examine these ideas further through a case study on physician-assisted suicide. In so doing, I demonstrate that the desynchronization of melancholic time should indeed be understood as a matter of life and death. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the Husserlian phenomenology of animality, by focusing on several texts of the 1920s in which the animal is determined as an abnormal variation of the human being. My aim is to address the question of the abnormality of the animal by reintegrating it in its original context, which is Husserl’s theory of normality. I will sketch the general framework of this theory, its articulations and strata, in order to eventually raise some paradoxical issues, specifically (...) in relation to how the question of animality is interpreted through the couple normality/abnormality. (shrink)

A popular claim in recent philosophy of mind and action is that events only exist once they are over. This has been taken to have the consequence that many temporal phenomena cannot be understood ‘from the inside’, as they are unfolding, purely in terms of events. However, as I argue here, the claim that events exist only when over is incoherent. I consider two ways of understanding the claim and the notion of existence it involves: one that ties existence to (...) the logic of quantification, and another that assimilates the existence of an event to that of a continuant. The first of these, I argue, cannot be the right way to understand the target claim, as there are serious logical obstacles to regarding this notion of existence as temporally variable. The second, on the other hand, leaves it ultimately mysterious what the existence of an event could amount to. I close with the suggestion that the undeniable temporal asymmetries which parties to the debate are interested in are properly understood in perspectival, not ontological, terms. (shrink)

: As Heidegger acknowledges, our understanding is essentially situated and so limited by the context and tradition into which it is thrown. But this ‘situatedness’ does not exhaust Heidegger's concept of ‘thrownness’. By examining this concept and its grammar, I develop a more complete interpretation. I identify several different kinds of finitude or limitation in our understanding, and touch on ways in which we confront and carry different dimensions of our past.

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an ‘ontological death’ in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we (...) can physiologically live through; it can happen numerous times throughout the finite span of our lives. This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s (At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton, Boston, 1991) narrative of critical illness to concretize the experience of ‘ontological death’ and illuminate the unique challenges it poses for health care professionals. I turn to Heidegger’s conception of ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) to address these challenges, arguing for the need of health care professionals to help establish a discursive context whereby the critically ill can begin to meaningfully express and interpret their experience of self-loss in a way that acknowledges the structural vulnerability of their own identities and is flexible enough to let go of those that have lost their significance or viability. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of forgiveness that is sensitive to recent work on anger. Like others, we claim anger involves an appraisal, namely that someone has done something wrong. But, we add, anger has two further functions. First, anger communicates to the wrongdoer that her act has been appraised as wrong and demands she feel guilty. This function enables us to explain why apologies make it reasonable to forgo anger and forgive. Second, anger sanctions the wrongdoer for what she (...) has done. This function allows us to explore the moral status of forgiveness, including why forgiveness is typically elective. (shrink)

Boredom is an affective experience that can involve pervasive feelings of meaninglessness, emptiness, restlessness, frustration, weariness and indifference, as well as the slowing down of time. An increasing focus of research in many disciplines, interest in boredom has been intensified by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, where social distancing measures have induced both a widespread loss of meaning and a significant disturbance of temporal experience. This article explores the philosophical significance of this aversive experience of ‘pandemic boredom.’ Using Heidegger’s work as (...) a unique vantage point, this article draws on survey data collected by researchers in an ongoing project titled ‘Experiences of Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic’ to give an original phenomenological interpretation of the meaninglessness and monotony of pandemic boredom. On a Heideggerian interpretation, pandemic boredom involves either a situative confrontation with relative meaninglessness that upholds our absorption in the everyday world, or an existential confrontation with absolute meaninglessness that forces us to take up the question of our existence. Arguing that boredom during the pandemic makes this distinction difficult to sustain, I consider some of the ways in which pandemic boredom might be seen to expose and then exceed the distinctive methodological limitations of Heidegger’s philosophical interpretation of boredom. (shrink)

This article highlights a neglected, if not wholly overlooked, topic in phenomenology, a topic central to Husserl’s writings on animate organism, namely, animation. Though Husserl did not explore animation to the fullest in his descriptions of animate organism, his texts are integral to the task of fathoming animation. The article’s introduction focuses on seminal aspects of animate organisms found within several such texts and elaborates their significance for a phenomenological understanding of animation. The article furthermore highlights Husserl’s pointed recognition of (...) “the problem of movement,” movement being an essential dimension of animation if not definitive of animation itself. Succeeding sections testify to “the problem of movement” and the need to address it. They do so by answering the following basic questions: What indeed is livingly present in the experience of movement, whether our own movement and the movement of other animate beings, or the movement of leaves, clouds, and so on? What distinguishes kinesthetic from kinetic experiences of movement? How are movement and time related? Just what is the problem of movement and how do we address it? In what way is movement pertinent to receptivity and responsivity? Throughout these sections the article encompasses phenomenological analyses, elaborations, and implications of animation. (shrink)

We discuss the difference between formal and natural languages, and argue that should the language metaphor have any foundation, it’s analogy with natural languages that should be taken into account. We discuss how such operation like reading, writing, sign, interpretation, etc., can be applied in the realm of the living and what can be gained, by such an approach, in order to understand the phenomenon of life.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is an idiographic approach to qualitative research. It is widely used in psychologically-informed studies which aim to understand the meaning and context of specific experiences. In this paper, we provide some background and introduction to the principles and processes underpinning IPA research. We extend this via a practical example, reporting on selected analyses from a study which explores the phenomenology and meaning of loneliness, through interviews conducted with a group of religious women. Through our observations on (...) the complex role of absence for loneliness, we show that IPA can be a powerful tool for exploring and understanding the meaning of salient experiences. We reflect on the significance of the results for advancing theories of loneliness; and on the capacity of the IPA approach to provide researchers with an important and useful phenomenological perspective, through its emphasis on context, and its commitment to integrating convergent and divergent claims. (shrink)

De-anthropocentrism is the leitmotif of philosophy in the twenty-first century, encouraging diverse and competing thoughts as to how this goal may be achieved. This article argues that the method by which we may achieve de-anthropocentrism is ethical rather than metaphysical – it must involve a creation of the self, rather than an interpretation of the given human conditions. Through engagements with the thought of Nietzsche, Levinas, and Foucault, and a close reading of Baudelaire’s poem “La Beauté,” I will illustrate three (...) ethical commitments essential to de-anthropocentrism: to abandon the claim to knowledge associated with human reason, to remain in perpetual quest of an object, and to transgress the given perceptual structure through aesthetic experience. In contrast to Kantian philosophy built upon universal human reason, art is the ethical arena where each artist creates their own way to relate to the object, while de-anthropocentrism occurs – this article argues – when the artist includes the self as the field of creation. Object-Oriented Ontology in my assessment is the only branch of philosophy that truly achieves de-anthropocentrism. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre claims in his 1945 lecture ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ that there are two kinds of existentialism: that of Christians like Karl Jaspers, and atheistic like Martin Heidegger. Sartre's ‘spiritual master’ Heidegger had no problem with Sartre defining him as an atheist, but he had serious problems with Sartre's concept of humanism and existentialism. Heidegger claims that the essence of humanism lies in the essence of the human being. After the Enlightenment, the Western concept of man has been presented (...) in education in the form of Kantian humanistic essentialism. At least in the Finnish educational system, Kantian humanism is almost an official ideological background of all national curriculums. Is such a kind of essentialism and metaphysics plausible in our modern or postmodern times? We examine the Sartre-Heidegger controversy on humanism and the concept of man in education using Freire's humanism and Gelassenheit education as exemplars. (shrink)

Abstract: This introduction to the collection Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic addresses three main questions: (1) What is a virtue theory in ethics or epistemology? (2) What is a virtue? and (3) What is a vice? (1) It suggests that a virtue theory takes the virtues and vices of agents to be more fundamental than evaluations of acts or beliefs, and defines right acts or justified beliefs in terms of the virtues. (2) It argues that there are two important (...) but different concepts of virtue: virtues are qualities that attain good ends, and virtues are qualities that involve good motives. (3) Accordingly, vices are qualities that either fail to attain good ends or involve bad motives. Finally, the introduction summarizes the eleven essays in the collection, which are divided into four sections: the Structure of Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology; Virtue and Context; Virtue and Emotion; and Virtues and Vices. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from various criticisms made in Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology Subject Lessons. Along with Sbriglia and Žižek’s own Introduction to the volume, the article responds to the chapters by Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnston, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, the three in which my own version of OOO is most frequently discussed.

In twentieth-century continental philosophy, German philosophical anthropology can be seen as a sort of conceptual laboratory devoted to human/animal research, and, in particular, to the discontinuity between human and non-human animals. Its main notion—the idea of the special position of humans in nature—is one of the first philosophical attempts to think of the specificity of humans as a natural and qualitative difference from non-human animals. This school of thought correctly rejects both the metaphysical and/or religious characterisations of humans, and the (...) positivistic gradualism, that sees the human being as an animal endowed with a greater degree of certain faculties. At the same time, German philosophical anthropology still takes it for granted that such natural-qualitative novelty is unique in the realm of the living, that in correspondence with humans there is the hiatus, the discontinuity par excellence. The semiotic side of this view is the distinction between signs and symbols developed by Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer: animal signs would be mere proxies for perceptive elements or stimuli, whereas only human symbols could convey complex representation of objects and situations. The goal of this contribution is to criticise the alleged uniqueness of the hiatus and its semiotic implications through the opposite approach of the diffuse discontinuities. This approach that focuses on the semiotic traits of different species-specific environments can be traced back to Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotical phenomenology, which thinks of discontinuities as a normal phenomenon of animal life. (shrink)

In “Melancholia, temporal disruption, and the torment of being both unable to live and unable to die”, I discuss the way in which the temporal desynchronization of melancholia can disrupt the melancholic’s relation to their own death and, on a Heideggerian interpretation, the meaning and significance of their life. In their thoughtful commentaries, Kevin Aho and Gareth Owen draw out some important points for further elaboration and clarification, the most pressing of which invoke Heidegger’s interpretation of time and the radical (...) temporalities of fundamental attunements. As Aho anticipates, this is the conception of time that underpins my interpretation of melancholia and, because this is important... (shrink)

Environmental ethics is apparently caught in a dilemma. We believe in human species partiality as a way of making sense of many of our practices. However as part of our commitment to impartialism in ethics, we arguably should extend the principle of impartiality to other species, in a version of biocentric egalitarianism of the kind advocated by Paul Taylor. According to this view, not only do all entities that possess a good have inherent worth, but they have equal inherent worth, (...) and in particular no species is superior to any other. In this paper, I elaborate a Heideggerian environmental virtue ethics that slips between the horns of the dilemma. Central to this ethics is the relation of “dwelling” and the many virtues of dwelling, according to which the world is seen as “holy” in a variety of ways. This ethics is importantly local in respect of time and place, but also has universalistic aspects. To understand such an ethics, it is necessary to grasp Heidegger’s notion of truth as “aleithia” or opening, which enables us to escape the metaphysical dilemmas besetting ethics in the analytic tradition, including standard virtue ethics. Elaborating this notion occupies a large part of the paper. (shrink)

Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is central to his attempt to re-instantiate the question of being. This paper examines Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics by looking at the relationship between metaphysics and thought. This entails an identification of the intimate relationship Heidegger maintains exists between philosophy and metaphysics, an analysis of Heidegger’s critique of this association, and a discussion of his proposal that philosophy has been so damaged by its association with metaphysics that it must be replaced with meditative thinking. It is (...) not quite clear, however, how the overcoming of metaphysical thinking is to occur especially given Heidegger’s insistence that relying on human will to effect an alteration in thinking simply re-instantiates the metaphysical perspective to be overcome. While several critics have argued Heidegger has no solution to this issue, instead holding that thought must simply be open to being’s ‘self’-transformation if and when it occurs, I turn to Heidegger’s notion of trace and a number of scattered comments on the relationship between meditative thinking and willing as non-willing to show Heidegger: (a) was aware of this issue; and (b) tried to resolve it by recognising a reconceptualised notion of willing not based on or emanating from the aggressive willing of metaphysics. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz’s theory of the social world, often neglected in philosophy, has the potential to capture the interplay of identity and difference which shapes our action, interaction, and experience in everyday life. Compared to still dominant identity-based models such as that of Jürgen Habermas, who assumes a coordination of meaning built on the idealisation of stable rules, Schutz’s theory is an important step forward. However, his central notion of a “type” runs into a difficulty which requires constructive criticism. Against the (...) background of Schutz’s theory of meaning inspired by Bergson and Husserl, his idea of types “taken for granted until further notice” is shown to express a primacy of identity which, in the final analysis, leads into the implausible scenario of ‘ubiquitous tunnel vision’. This makes it necessary to go beyond Schutz and assume an inherently motivated tendency towards difference in meaning termed ‘spontaneity’. Where spontaneity and the opposed tendency towards identity of meaning work together in the application of types, they enable embodied subjects to interact with the world and with each other in the routine yet flexible and sometimes innovative ways which we all know. (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

In this article I elucidate a conception of small worlds, or ‘ontological’ contexts, within the curriculum that stand out and beyond the horizon of technological‐scientific reality, which might be linked with forgotten, marginal ways of being and thinking. As I attempt to demonstrate, it is possible that such ontological worlds apart from technology's ‘Enframing’ effect might inspire the type of meditative thinking in our classrooms that is consistent with Heidegger's notion of authentic worldly dwelling as it appears in the later (...) writings of the 1930s, or the ‘turn’. (shrink)

This article analyses the skills and knowledges involved in multiplayer first-person shooting games, specifically Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360 games console. In doing so, it argues that the environments of first-person shooting games are designed to be intense spaces that produce captivated subjects – users who play attentively for long periods of time. Developing Heidegger’s concept of attunement and Stiegler’s account of retention, the article unpacks the somatic and sensory skills involved in videogame play and discusses how (...) videogame environments cultivate a sense of captivation. In conclusion the article reflects on the politics of captivation for the bodies that engage with these games through the idea of vulnerability as an ‘opening of the body’s capacity for sense’. (shrink)

In ‘Rethinking Nature: Phenomenology and a Non-reductionist Cognitive Science’, Gallagher [2019] sets out to overcome resistance to the idea that phenomenology is relevant to cognitive science. He argues that the relevance in question may be secured if we rethink the concept of nature. For Gallagher, this transformed concept of nature—which is to be distinguished from the classic scientific conception of nature in that it embraces irreducible subjectivity—is already at work in some contemporary enactive phenomenological approaches to cognitive science. Following a (...) summary of Gallagher’s argument, we argue that this rethinking of nature is not necessary to secure the aim in question. We articulate two alternative ways of achieving the relevance of phenomenology to cognitive science. The first, which turns on a minimal notion of naturalism, leaves the classic scientific conception of nature intact. The second, which turns on a practice-based analysis of collaboration between phenomenology and cognitive science, leaves it open which concept of nature one should adopt. As we show, each of the proposals on the table (Gallagher’s own and our two alternatives) comes at a cost. Which of the three proposals is the more attractive will depend on which cost one wants to pay. (shrink)

‘Public moods’ are often referred to in laymen’s accounts of public reactions to social events, yet the concept has rarely been invoked by social scientists. Taking public moods seriously as an analytical concept, this article relies on recent work on the moods of individuals as a means of exploring the moods of the public. To be in a certain mood is to attune oneself to the situation in which one finds oneself. Our mood is the report we give on the (...) state of our attunement. A public mood can either be understood as the mood of a certain age, the mood of an audience which jointly attends to a public performance, or the bonding which takes places between bodies which are in close physical proximity to each other. It is in the public mood that emotions, thoughts and plans for action arise. (shrink)

This article offers a new reading of Heidegger's thesis of the animal in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Framing Heidegger's text through a brief analysis of Protagoras' genetic story of nature and of man's nature in Plato's eponymous dialogue, our reading brings out three key elements common to both texts: living nature as a normative rather than a physical order, the poverty of man's world in relation to the animal, and the attempted redemption of the latter through the acquisition of (...) Weltbildung. Staying with the way Heidegger brings out man's poverty in world in the text allows us (i) to undo once for all the oft-repeated charge of Heidegger's anthropocentric interpretation of the animal, (ii) to stage the hypothesis that philosophy and the life sciences of his day draw upon a common basic experience of the autonomy of life in relation to everything human, all-too-human, and (iii) to demonstrate the normativity and poverty of life. (shrink)

Two major twentieth century philosophers, of East and West, for whom the nothing is a significant concept are Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger. Nishida’s basic concept is the absolute nothing upon which the being of all is predicated. Heidegger, on the other hand, thematizes the nothing as the ulterior aspect of being. Both are responding to Western metaphysics that tends to substantialize being and dichotomize the real. Ironically, however, while Nishida regarded Heidegger as still trapped within the confines of Western (...) metaphysics with its tendency to objectify, Heidegger’s impression of Nishida was that he is too Western, that is, metaphysical. Yet neither was too familiar with the other’s philosophical work as a whole. I thus compare and assess Nishida’s and Heidegger’s discussions of the nothing in their attempts to undermine traditional metaphysics while examining lingering assumptions about the Nishida–Heidegger relationship. Neither Nishida nor Heidegger means by “nothing” a literal nothing, but rather that which permits beings in their relative determinacy to be what they are and wherein or whereby we find ourselves always already in our comportment to beings. Nishida characterizes this as a place that negates itself to give rise to, or make room for, beings. For Heidegger, being as an event that clears room for beings, releasing each into its own, is not a being, hence nothing. We may also contrast them on the basis of the language they employ in discussing the nothing. Yet each seemed to have had an intuitive grasp of an un/ground, foundational to experience and being. And in fact their paths cross in their respective critiques of Western substantialism, where they offer as an alterantive to that substantialist ontology, in different ways, what I call anontology. (shrink)

Hermeneutics as we understand it today is an essentially modern phenomenon. The chapter presents observations that illustrate some of the central ways in which the modern and late modern phenomena of philosophical hermeneutics relate to the ancient philosophical legacy. First, the roots of hermeneutics are traced to ancient views on linguistic, textual, and sacral interpretation. The chapter then looks at certain fundamentally unhermeneutic elements of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Augustinian “logocentric” theory of meaning that philosophical hermeneutics and its heirs sought (...) to call into question, reconsider, and deconstruct. Augustine's De doctrina christiana, can be regarded as an epitome and culmination of the ancient protohermeneutic heritage, theological as well as philological. Finally, Aristotle's practical philosophy, particularly the notion of phronesis, “practical insight”, is designated as an implicit ancient prototype of hermeneutic thinking, the reappropriation of which lay at the core of the Heideggerian and Gadamerian philosophical projects. (shrink)

Joseph Rouse has drawn from Heidegger’s early philosophy to develop what he calls a “practical hermeneutics of science.” With this, he has not only become an important player in the recent trend towards practice-based conceptualisations of science, he has also emerged as the predominant expositor of Heidegger’s philosophy of science. Yet, there are serious shortcomings in both Rouse’s theory of science and his interpretation of Heidegger. In the first instance, Rouse’s practical hermeneutics appears confused on the topic of realism. In (...) the second instance, Rouse suppresses Heidegger’s distinction between existence and essence, and hence fails to grasp the latter’s corollary distinction between scientic research and everyday practice. I argue that, by accepting a correction in his interpretation of Heidegger, Rouse would find the means to resolve the debilitating tensions in his stance towards realism. (shrink)

Although it might seem to elicit only a marginal interest for philosophical inquiry, in 20th century continental philosophy the experience of solitude and loneliness were shown to have unexpected importance and gravity. For philosophers such as M. Heidegger, H. Arendt, H.-G. Gadamer or P. Sloterdijk, solitude and loneliness are to be seen, on the one hand, as an ontological determination of our Being and, on the other, as a cause for some of the most worrisome problems of our times such, (...) as the birth of totalitarianism or the phenomenon of self-alienation wide-spread in the Western bureaucratic societies. But none of the philosophers dealing with these matters offers us a clear positive understanding of what solitude and loneliness actually are nor what the task of philosophy should be with regard to these experiences even though they give us to understand that philosophy has one. The present paper tarries upon this question, approaching it from the other end though an investigation of the status of alterity in Heidegger and Gadamer’s philosophy. (shrink)

The emerging crealectic frame posits that there are three complementary and effectual domains of intelligence, namely analytic, dialectic, and crealectic, being alternatively or complementarily used in human interactions with the world. The focus of crealectic intelligence is the relative possibilization and local realization of absolute possibility, the becoming real, biological, and social of creation. This multimodal externalization and asymptotic unification of a cosmological flux expresses itself via three realms of possibilization: physical, psychological, and philosophical. But the philosophical possible is not (...) merely abstract; it originates a generative process of exteriorizations, interiorizations, dissolutions, and unifications transforming the possible into realities. The term “crealectics,” coined by philosopher and author Luis de Miranda, is a compound of “Creal” and of two possible suffixes: “logos” or “ektos”. The ontological core of crealectics, the Creal, is the immanent process of creation understood as a ubiquitous stream of absolute possibility exteriorizing itself. For a crealectician, philosophy is not the mere logical analysis of truth conditions, but the self-questioning enterprise of thought regarding its own possibilizing and world-making power. (shrink)

For years now, autonomy has been discussed as one of the central values in health care. Understood as self-realization, it is opposed to paternalism which is conceived as an intolerable occurrence of heteronomy. Although different concepts have been developed to nuance this opposition, when it comes to health care discourse, heteronomy is still the enemy of autonomy. In our article, we defend the thesis that autonomy is only achievable as heteronomy. We are not arguing for an expansion of the meaning (...) of autonomy, but are attempting to conduct an analysis which lays bare the ‘disrupting’ attendance of heteronomy within the principle of autonomy. Autonomy does not begin where heteronomy ends, but can only begin if heteronomy is already involved. To emphasize this, we prefer to elaborate a new concept: ‘oughtonomy’. This concept is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s distinction between ‘difference’ and ‘differance’. We will develop the concept of oughtonomy from a deconstructive reading of Kant’s idea of autonomy, inspired by philosophers such as Jacob Rogozinski, Jean-Luc Nancy and others. In addition to a first exploration of this concept, this article also discusses the possible consequences of oughtonomy for current debates concerning health care. Our quest for a new understanding of autonomy is motivated by the concern that, although the accent on autonomy as self-realization and independence has many advantages, we should also bear in mind the countless disadvantages. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, some of the most distinctive features of the modern age derived from the adoption of a process-imaginary in science, history, and administration. This article examines Arendt’s work, identifying what it calls the ‘process-frame’ in her criticism of imperialism, economy, and the biologization of politics. It discusses an interpretation in which ‘natality’ presents a completely alternative mode of temporality, a resistance to the process-frame. This interpretation, it is argued, needs to be specified by taking into account that political (...) action both interrupts and starts processes of its own. To confine and overcome the negative effects of process-framing, it is important to emphasize action as a world-building activity – something capable of establishing a relatively stable area of the common world by initiating processes of its own. Second, it is also important to cultivate ways of thinking and perceiving particular acts as meaningfully independent of all-embracing processes. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been with us for many years, and yet grasping phenomenology remains a difficult task. Heidegger, too, experienced this difficulty and devoted much of his teaching to the challenge of working phenomenologically. This article draws on aspects of Heidegger’s commentary in progressing the teaching and learning of phenomenology, especially as this pertains to research in fields such as education. Central to this task is elucidation of what I believe to be the most important feature of phenomenology—what Heidegger referred to (...) as the ‘starting point’ of phenomenology. I have written this article in the manner of a phenomenological workshop with the intention of inviting the reader to engage experientially with this starting point. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHeidegger maintained that Nietzsche was a metaphysical thinker. What did he mean by that? Not that Nietzsche advanced purely theoretical doctrines that might be perfected or refuted by rational argument. Instead, he meant that Nietzsche’s thinking is a ‘representational thinking’ that preserves a commitment to a conception of truth as correctness. Nietzsche’s apparent denials of the intelligibility of truth, Heidegger argues, are in fact expressions of our growing insensitivity to truth understood as unconcealment. Nietzsche’s thinking is thus deeply attuned to (...) metaphysics as Heidegger came to understand it in the late 1930s, namely as a forgetting of being, beginning with Plato. His interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought, particularly the idea of eternal recurrence, changed less because he changed his mind about Nietzsche than because he reconceived the philosophical tradition since Plato as metaphysical, and so reframed his own project as an attempt to think beyond metaphysics. (shrink)

The last few years have seen increasing research interest in moods and atmospheres. While this trend has been accompanied by growing interest in the history of the wordStimmungin other disciplines, this has not yet been the case within philosophy. Against this background, this paper offers a conceptual history of the wordStimmung, focusing on the period from Kant to Heidegger, as this period is, presumably, less known to researchers working with notions like mood, attunement or atmosphere today. Thus, considering this period (...) might provide conceptual resources not yet considered in current debate.Stimmunghas the remarkable feature of encompassing the entire semantic field of mood and atmosphere, insofar as both subjects and objects can literally be inStimmung.Stimmungmight refer to the state or condition of being attuned, which is understood as a dispositional state, as well as the process or act of attuning, which includes self-activating and foreign-determined forms of attuning. The word was first used for the tuning of musical instruments, but was quickly transferred to the fields of aesthetics, psychology, and physiology. This paper will focus on the contrast between the psychological canonization ofStimmungas a type of mental state, and the use ofStimmungas an untranslatable, irreducible metaphor with unique semantic force allowing for original theorizing. (shrink)

Studies that compare human and animal behaviour suspend prejudices about mind, body and their relation, by approaching thinking in terms of behaviour. Yet comparative approaches typically engage another prejudice, motivated by human social and bodily experience: taking the lone animal as the unit of comparison. This prejudice informs Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s comparative studies, and conceals something important: that animals moving as a group in an environment can develop new sorts of “sense.” The study of animal group-life suggests a new way (...) of thinking about the creation of sense, about the body, the brain, and the relation between thinking and nature. (shrink)