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)

There are many in the social sciences and social philosophy who would aspire to overcome the ‘nature/culture binary’, including some who, with at least an implicit nod toward a putatively ‘anti-essentialist’ process ontology, have set out with an orientation toward a paradigm of ‘biosocial becoming’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013). Such contemporary work, however, in areas such as social and cultural anthropology and sciences studies has often failed to clarify, let alone justify, the warrants of their most basic assumptions and assertions. (...) In what follows, adumbrations will be offered for a comprehensive metaphysics of ‘biosocial becoming’ that can stand accountable both to empirical/descriptive and to normative claims. (shrink)

Within the loose group of studies that are sometimes labelled Heideggerian cinema – studies in which scholars consider film in conjunction with Heidegger's philosophy – little attention has been paid to Heidegger's actual view of cinema. This omission is not only odd but it is also problematic. In the off-hand comments Heidegger directs towards film throughout his collected works he criticises the medium for its covering over of Being, a fact that makes engaging with film through Heidegger's thinking a questionable (...) project. The present article aims to address this omission and to provide a conception of Heideggerian cinema that does not ignore, but answers, Heidegger's criticism. It argues that it is not the technological nature of cinema that is the source of Heidegger's hostility towards the medium but his conception of the film-photographic image as a transparent copy of the world. It is on this basis that cinema is denied the ca... (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)

Heidegger’s 1938–1939 seminar on Nietzsche ’s On the Utility and Liability of History for Life continues Heidegger’s grand interpretation of Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker of presence. Nietzsche ’s conceptions forgetting, memory, and even life itself, according to Heidegger, are all complicit in the privileging of presence. Simultaneous with his seminar, Heidegger is also compiling the notebook, Die Geschichte des Seyns, 1938–1940, wherein he sketches his own conception of history. Examining Heidegger’s criticisms of Nietzsche in the light of his contemporaneous (...) notebook allows us to articulate Heidegger’s concern for history and for “what has-been” as a thinking of the “coming” of being. For Heidegger, to exist historically is to exist as something sent, something arriving, as something that “comes” to us. This coming of history is an ontological determination of all that is, no longer construed as present-at-hand objects, but as always arriving, relational beings. After presenting Heidegger’s view of the coming of history, I return to Nietzsche ’s Utility and Liability of History to draw attention to an aspect of his text that is neglected by Heidegger, that of the political. The concluding sections of Nietzsche ’s text confront the politics of the present, in both senses of the genitive, in order to rally against the closure of society. In the conclusion to the paper, I turn to the political dimension of Nietzsche ’s thinking of history with an eye to how it might elude Heidegger’s interpretation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn traditional Maori discourse, the division between metaphysical concepts and everyday life was non-existent. Because of that lack of delineation, the perception of objects was governed by certain beginning assumptions. Due to colonization, however, entities—and the conception of them—threaten to become unmoored from their primordiality. One example of this tendency lies in the current and common translation of the Maori term IRA as “gene.” This static casting of the erstwhile fluid nature of the phenomenon that IRA indicated has consequences not (...) only for how one perceives the world but, additionally, for both the self and the thing itself. In this article I propose a phenomenological approach to the term IRA, another definition for which is the interjectory “look!” I argue for an interpretation of IRA in light of a Maori metaphysics—one that governs the inherent fluidity of things and the concomitant tentative representation of those things. (shrink)

The present article deals with Heidegger’s research into boredom. The phenomenon cannot be simply described as an emotion but as a fundamental attunement, which represented a pathway to being qua being for Heidegger. Many scholars have argued that the philosopher’s treatment of the phenomenon led to sublimation or transgression in describing it beyond its phenomenological limits. While I agree with the general assessment, I also believe that there is a need to expand the argument further. I will argue that the (...) cause of such transgression lies mainly in Heidegger’s inability to separate the truth from the notion of meaning or sense. (shrink)

The main concern of Agamben's work, prior to the Homo Sacer project, is how to understand the existence of or potentiality for language. Contemporary philosophy casts language as the unsayable presupposition of discourse. Agamben criticises this as an incomplete nihilism that remains within the horizon of metaphysics, and attempts to think the experience of language without an unsayable ground. I examine Agamben's critique of the role of the ineffable in the theory of the subject, and in the thought of Heidegger (...) and Derrida. I contrast this with his account of infancy as an experience that fully assumes the groundlessness of language. (shrink)

In the case of living beings – the very concept of “level” of organization becomes obscure: it suggests a value-based assessment, assigning notions like “lower” and “higher” with rather vague criteria for constructing the ladder of perfection, complexity, importance, etc. We prefer therefore the term “domain”, entities ranking equal. Domains may represent natural entities as well as purely human constructs developed in order to gain understanding of some facets of living things; living, evolved beings as well as those abstract constructs, (...) such as genotype and ‘niche’ which have been developed in the search for better understanding of such living things. Delimitation of such domains is sometimes a question of the dexterity of the researcher, and sometimes draws from the tradition in a given field. Such domains are not completely translatable to each other. Rather, they interact by a process that we call here reciprocal formation. Life is unique among multi-domain systems. In contrast to purely physical systems, life is a semiotic system driven by the historical experience of lineages, interpreted and re-interpreted by the incessant turnover of both individuals and their communities. This paper provides cases of domain interrelations, and addresses two questions: How do new qualities of inter-domain interaction emerge historically? How do new domains emerge in evolution. Two approaches, physical and biosemiotic, are discussed as we seek to get a better understanding of the overarching tasks. (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.

Technoscientific progress brings into question both anthropocentric epistemology and anthropocentric/humanistic ontology, which considers the human being as a self-constructing and self-sufficient entity. Even though, Darwinism recomposes the humanistic disjunction between reality and representation: by defining the human being as the result of an adaptive reflection, it reveals the idealistic character of post-Cartesian thought, which is the backbone of philosophical anthropocentrism. The non-human can be a dialogic entity if and only if it is considered not as “animal-by” but “animal-with”, that is, (...) free to express its authenticity in terms of subjectivity, diversity and uniqueness. Whilst the post-human laboratory celebrates the power of human beings, the post-humanistic perspective emphasizes the conjugation with the non-human. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was convinced that we can learn something about the way we inhabit the world by turning attention to our fundamental moods. It was one important theme of his fundamental ontology in the 1920s. There is, according to Heidegger, an intricate connection between awakening our moods and developing a reflexive stance. He provides us with a rich phenomenological description of different forms of boredom. In this article I approach Heidegger’s conception of boredom from an educational point of view. I (...) am suggesting a reading where the experience of boredom has transformative potentialities that also can illuminate our cultural situation as a whole. By turning away from boredom there is always a possibility of turning away from ourselves. (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)

The qualities of great works of art, their profundity, their insight into the human condition, are epitomised in Brakhage's films, which are, I argue, from the beginning related to and inseparable from a philosophical attitude toward existence. His films emerge out of an authentic 'existential' mode of attunement, a mind-set wherein the potential for human transcendence is framed and filmed within its intractable relationship to death, the most extreme possibility of non-existence. Brakhage not only views existence in a philosophical manner, (...) beyond this, he engages in philosophical inquiry in a fundamental way through the medium of film. The films arise from and respond to what Karl Jaspers views as the ultimate source of philosophy, namely, 'the will to authentic communication,' which embraces 'wonder leading to knowledge, doubt leading to certainty, forsakenness leading to the self.' This amounts to the philosophical struggle to arrive at a sense of metaphysical coherence and existential familiarity, i.e., the precarious undertsanding of belonging to the world in communion with others. This essay seeks to elucidate and detail, through a series of interpretive gestures, the philosophical themes present to Brakhage's silent films by way of a reading that emerges from the phenomenological-ontological tradition in philosophy. In doing so, I hope to interpret Brakhage's filmic art as conveying a legitimate source of human understanding, which contributes to our interpreting and discoursing about the world and our lives in new and revelatory ways. (shrink)

James T. Hong’s experimental documentary, The Denazification of MH is neither anapology for Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism nor a condemnation of thatinvolvement. Rather, the film is a critical philosophical confrontation with Heidegger’s thought and the issue of his involvement withNational Socialism. The film addresses the perennial concern as old as philosophy itself: therelationship between the philosopher’s life and his philosophy. While the film does notadopt a definitive position regarding Heidegger, Nazism, and the issue of personalresponsibility, it does suggest an (...) affirmative response to the question posed by bothLevinas and Blanchot regarding the possibility of philosophizing after Auschwitz.Considering Heidegger’s influence on contemporary philosophy and literary studies,inspiring such films as The Denazification of MH and The Ister , it appears as though it is not only possible, but necessary, to carefully andcritically approach Heidegger in the effort to continue to philosophize in the wake of themost catastrophic event of the 20thcentury, the Holocaust. In his thoroughly researched biography of Martin Heidegger, Rudiger Strafaski states the following regarding thepotential of Heidegger himself to do philosophy in the wake of the German death camps, amatter about which Heidegger remained conspicuously silent. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis review essay of Shawn Loht’s new book, Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, not only offers an ontological reading of the filmic experience inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy but also contributes substantially to the ongoing debate of whether or not film is a medium that is legitimately philosophical. In addition to confronting unique ideas about film that emerge from Loht’s analysis of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology of Dasein, including a reading of later Heidegger of the “Turn,” this (...) essay also seeks to think with and then beyond Loht in a way that might inspire readers to further pursue these issues in relation to a potentially reconceived understanding of the practice of film-as-philosophy. (shrink)

Existentialist thinkers often publicly acknowledged Husserl’s phenomenology as one of their main points of departure for treatment of such themes as intentionality, comportment, transcendence, and the lifeworld. Several central elements of Husserl’s approach were adopted by the Existentialists, but equal to their gratitude were vigorous declamations of Husserl’s mistakes, dead-ends and failures. Many of the Existentialists’ criticisms of Husserl’s project are well-known and have been rehearsed in various surveys of 20th century thought, but less well-remarked are the discrepancies between their (...) complaints about Husserl’s aborted achievements and what Husserl actually delivered. This paper attempts to uncover the accuracy of some of their assessments of Husserl’s alleged failures and mistakes, whether or not Husserl actually held the position they claim he did, and especially whether or not Husserl was himself aware of some deficiency in his thematic analysis, and thus would have been able to offer a cogent response to critique. In doing so, a good case can be made that Heidegger, for example, quietly adopted some of Husserl’s main insights without credit, slanted his picture of Husserl’s work so that his own reversals had better purchase, or overlooked evidence that Husserl had already moved beyond that position. At least on some key topics, Husserl emerges as an exceptionally self-critical philosopher who had already gained the perspective more usually associated with an Existentialist orientation. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 1, Edition 1 April 2001. (shrink)

In contrast to rigid conceptions of nonhuman animals, several philosophers have put forth ideas that suggest a more flexible and extended vision of other animals. In articulating the condition of humans in the world, philosophers have referenced ideas that necessarily bring other beings in common with humanity. Significantly, conceptions of movement and biological transformation have played a central role in these ruminations, thereby suggesting the importance of geographical variables in human/nonhuman relations. By drawing out the connections between these perspectives, this (...) paper outlines an ethics of extension. (shrink)

This essay explores the experience of suffering in order to see to what extent it can be understood within the context of the human condition without diverting the reality of suffering or denying the meaning of human existence and divine reality. Particular attention is given to describing and interpreting what I call the transcendent dimensions of suffering with the intent of showing that in the experience of suffereing persons come up against the limits of what can be accounted for in (...) ordinary terms and point towards transcendent reality. In religious faith the transcendent dimensions of suffering may be understood to come together with other transcendent dimensions of experience in a more distinctive or focused encounter with transcendent reality. The conception of God that is suggested by the transcendent dimensions of suffering, however, differs from the model of God in western theism as an absolutely transcendent, all powerful, immutable and impassible being. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the ontological implication of Sartre’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological accounts of emotion. I start by looking at Sartre’s notion of the ‘magical world’ in his booklet Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, showing how emotion, for him, reveals the overall structure of ‘human reality’ rather than a dispensable aspect of it. Discussing experiences of the magical world allowed Sartre to ‘bracket’ what he called ‘the determinism of the world’, which predominated naturalist-representationalist psychology of emotion in (...) his time. Then I derive from Sartre’s account of emotion an ontological implication, i.e., that the world is primarily magical. Without at once deciding whether this applies to Sartre, I exhibit how radical it can get by examining Heidegger’s more consistent account of emotion in Being and Time. There, it turns out that the determinist, neutral world championed by representationalism relies on an ‘emotionless emotion’ and thus is not fundamental. Finally, I suggest that, while textual evidences in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions are inconsistent and allow a strong and a weak interpretation of its ontological implication, the former should be favored in consideration of Sartre’s later development. (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)

This essay offers a critique of the culture of specio-vocationalism in American higher education by first drawing on Edmund Husserl’s conception of “world” and connecting this notion to education conceived as a “world-disclosing” activity. The essay will then give an account of how the trends of vocationalization and specialization manifest themselves in contemporary university culture, and how they work together to “de-world” the lives of our students and deprive them of possibilities that are part of what it means to be (...) human. After showing how this impoverishment undermines the world-disclosing function of higher education, the essay will then suggest one way to counter this “de-worlding of world”: the teaching of the situated finitude of the human condition by reminding our students that our knowledge or sense of the world is always only partial. It is this realization that has the potential of placing our students once again before the vastness of the world in wonder and curiosity. In this realization they will gain a better sense of the world as a distant horizon still to be explored in all of its inexhaustible complexity and meaning. At the same time, coming to grips with their own ignorance will imbue them with an intellectual humility that will shield them not only from their own finitude, but the finitude of others as well. (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)

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)

Phenomenological descriptions are supposed to be revelatory and coincide with the self-showing of the things themselves. These features of phenomenological descriptions lead to the peculiar character of their expression, which has the effect of making them difficult to communicate. That is, the problem with communicating the findings of phenomenological researches is a consequence of the descriptive nature of the endeavor and the disclosive character of phenomenological descriptions. In the Logical Investigations Edmund Husserl recognized that the problem has three facets: how (...) does one state the findings of phenomenological researches, how can one effectively communicate these findings, and how can these communications be persuasive? In this essay I elaborate on these problems and then show that Heidegger’s method of formal indication was designed to solve these problems just as Husserl understood them. We can thus take formal indication as a model for dealing with these problems—and for informing phenomenological discourse—because it solves them with a single strategy. (shrink)

This article inquires into a paradoxical position held by the concept of ‘nature’ in Derrida's thought. While a pivotal part of his project of deconstruction is devoted to a critique of the metaphysical privileging of nature over its others (technics, culture, and so on), the same project also aims at dismantling the hierarchical binary opposition of man/animal. Insofar as the term ‘animal’ or ‘animality’ to a large extent overlaps with nature, these two strands of his thought appear to stand in (...) a significant tension with each other. I explore this conceptual tension by re-examining Derrida's early critique of the notion of nature – specifically in his reading of Rousseau – in conjunction with his later engagement with the question of animality. As my reading shows, deviating from his early approach, his later work indicates the way in which animal others (and, by extension, all living and non-living others) are indeed constituted by supplementarity and yet, in their irreplaceable singularity, exceed the very structure of supplementarity. This opens up a new way of conceiving nature, no longer as originary presence nor simply as an effect of supplementary play, but in terms of the aporetic relation between supplementarity and what may be termed ‘the unsupplementable’. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse through an ontological approach the concept of φύσις/nature as the never-ending emergence of the beings and their being kept into steadfast appearance and presence. On the basis of Martin Heidegger’s interpretation, we will try to show that φύσις is not a mere sum of natural objects; φύσις could be better understood via our recognition of its pervading our own being and our own being/presenting as φύσις and through φύσις’ ceaseless eventuation in our (...) lives and thought. (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)

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)

Although transpersonal psychologies of self realization emphasize individual development, earlier shamanic traditions also showed a central societal aspect and group based consciousness. Indeed, many have understood the transpersonal movement as developing towards an abstract globalized neo-shamanism. That altered states of consciousness, whether as integrative realizations of the numinous or as dissociative “hypnoid” states, could be felt and shared collectively was a familiar concept to the first generation of sociologists, who saw all consciousness as social and dialogic in form. Durkheim, in (...) particular, foresaw a globalized spirituality of the future, his “cult of man,” in which modern individuation would progress to the point where all we would have in common for the collective representations of spiritual awareness would be our shared sense of human beingness. This view foreshadowed De Chardin, and is presented explicitly or implicitly in Jung, Gurdjieff, Heidegger, Maslow, and Almaas. The implications of a societal, collective face of transpersonalism for a future planetary spirituality are pursued in terms of both a global ecological consciousness and the potential transpersonal significance of SETI. (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)

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)

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)

There is much debate on how to understand Kant’s transcendental idealism in the context of the Critique of Pure Reason. Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics offers an innovative reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but is often overlooked due to the violence it allegedly does in its interpretation. This paper offers a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenological or ontological interpretation of transcendental idealism by drawing on Heidegger’s interpretation of the Critique. First, I draw a connection between the two uses of (...) noumena in the Critique and, in doing so, draw attention to how the noumena relies on a concept of the proper which gains its meaning from outside the system. I then bring together Kant and Heidegger on the question of the place of truth and the role of the noumena. I claim not only that the ‘noumena’ reveals a ‘shrinking back’ from the ontological release of aletheia; but also, and as a consequence, that the ‘noumena’ does not represent ‘another world,’ but rather is the grounds of the constitution of the phenomenal world itself. Thus, I argue that the noumena is the being of the phenomena, and I do so through looking at objects, faculties, and ethics in the Critique. Finally, I claim that the understanding and reason must both be receptive: even the self-given is ultimately being given. (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.

The phenomenological attitude is essential for practising phenomenology. Many refer to wonder and wonderment as basic attitudes and ways of being present with and listening to phenomena. In this article a critical view is placed on the typically psychologically-loaded language and tonality that is used by phenomenological researchers in the human sciences in order to describe the wonder and openness they try to be a part of when doing phenomenology. With reference to the difference between Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s views on (...) Socratic dialectics the author points to an ontological dimension in the phenomenology of wonder that cannot be reached by taking only an emotional-bodily-oriented approach (the psychological approach) or an aesthetical-intuitiveoriented approach (the late Heidegger poeticised philosophizing). Instead this dimension must be reached through a Socratic questioning and Community of Wonder. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

In this article, I argue against a widespread misconception concerning the nature of things in Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre’s conception of the nature of things concerns the idea that outside of consciousness a single undifferentiated mass of brute being exists which is divided into definitive things by consciousness. I propose a different reading of Sartre’s realism. Such a reading is based primarily on Nausea, Being and Nothingness and Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self states that, contra common conception, there is (...) no brute being outside of consciousness, but rather, a vast multitude of different things. (shrink)

Consumer society has negated Freud's thesis presented in Civilization and its Discontents. The hindrance of desire affirmation is no longer the foundation of discontent. The inverse is now true. A seemingly limitless number of desires have been manufactured and administered with a solitary route to their affirmation via consumption. Because of this, consumer society's members find themselves in a lifeworld of aimless striving, dissatisfaction, disappointment and boredom. I demonstrate that the attempt to flee the sufferings of estranged labour through consumption (...) has pushed consumer society into a new web of suffering brought on by a continual development of manufactured desires, creating a minor yet perpetual pain that is best understood in the light of a sociologized and historicized Schopenhauerian philosophy. (shrink)

This paper recognizes that we become bored in our post-modern, consumerist Western world and that boredom is related to this existence and hidden within it. Through Heidegger, it seeks to provide a way to structure our understanding of boredom and suggest ways of acknowledging its cause, and then to allow it to liberate our authentic appreciation of the world of our workplace and what can be learnt through it. Using the approach of focusing on being in a societal workplace environment, (...) and the link to Heidegger’s notion of mood, revealed in Being and Time, boredom’s fundamental role is shown as a complex temporal manifold. Our superficial attempts to deal with things in datable time means that we miss the essential importance of the temporal manifold through which our being is revealed and where the Augenblick, (moment of vision) is the authentic present and temporalises itself of the authentic future (Heidegger in Being and time (trans: J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). Blackwell, Oxford, 1962 , p. 338). For Heidegger this is to be understood as ecstasis (ibid, p. 338) when the resolute Dasein “is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered (ibid, p. 338). Such resoluteness enables the private capabilities to arise in public practice, not, however, in the conformity of what ‘one does’ (Das Man) but as an authentically choosing being. The challenge of an ontological pedagogy, regardless of its place of revelation that this prescribes a possibly be edifying mission for Dasein. Instead of chasing away boredom through busyness, a moment of vision could produce creative and authentic ways of being. (shrink)

Postphenomenologists and performativists criticize classical approaches to phenomenology for isolating human subjects from their socio-material relations. The purpose of this essay is to repudiate their criticism by presenting a nuanced account of phenomenology thus making it evident that phenomenological theories have the potential for meshing with the performative idiom of contemporary science and technology studies. However, phenomenology retains an apparent shortcoming in that its proponents typically focus on human–nonhuman relations that arise in localized contexts. For this reason, it seems to (...) contrast with one of the core assumptions behind practical ontologies: that socio-practical significance extends beyond an agent’s immediate situatedness in a localized context. Turning to Heidegger’s phenomenology and his notion of ‘de-distancing’, the essay explores how localized phenomena that pertain to human experience connect with global practices and, thus, the possibility of consilience between phenomenological research and present-day STS. (shrink)

Summary of Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience.

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)

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)

The aim of this article is to highlight and discuss two problems of the biological philosophy of technology. In particular, I will analyse the work of André Leroi-Gourhan and Gilbert Simondon, and I will show that the meaning of the analogy between technical and natural objects that underlies the approach of the biological philosophy of technology remains problematic and the biological approach to technology is very effective for analysing tools and machines, but is not sufficient to describe the so-called information (...) technologies. In the last part of the article, I will argue that, in order to understand information technologies, it is necessary to integrate the biological approach to technology with a grammatological approach. I will try to show that, next to the tool and the machine, there is a third category of technical objects that can be better described using the notion of “writing” proposed by one of the masters of the so-called French Thought, Jacques Derrida. (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)