In this paper, I use Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative method of “autohistoría” in concert with theoretical analysis to reflect on my experiences as a queer teacher in the heteronormative United States schooling system. These reflections are aimed at unpacking the ways in which racialization, sexual orientation and coloniality are inseparably tied to living out one’s gender. It is this phenomenon of “Gender-as-Lived” that I urge become a focus of identity development research in education studies and is my central concern in this (...) post-intentional phenomenological study. Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the liminal zone of “nepantla” as an embodied and in-between space of resistance offers to transform the practice of teaching into a vocation of healing. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMost recently, debates on decolonization, transformation, and Africanization raise, again, critical questions about the continuous dominance of the Western practice of philosophy in an African place. Such debates bear particular reference to colonization; however, they are relevant to any place where displacement is an issue and transformation demanded. Yet, the concept of displacement receives surprisingly little attention in these debates or in literature on place. I argue that place and displacement are inherently related, and explore some implications of this relation (...) with regard to the practice of philosophy. My contention is that while displacement is an issue that raises specific challenges to the practice of Western philosophy in an African context, it is in fact a defining feature of philosophy as such in search of its place in the world. In conclusion, I propose what I call a distopological approach towards a philosophical practice that takes seriously its place and inherent relation to... (shrink)

This paper explores the association of children and animals as an element in Western culture's symbolic universe. Three historical discourses found in the West associate animality with immaturity and growing up with the transcendence of this condition. The discourses differ in how they describe and evaluate the original animal-like condition of the child versus the socialized end product. All, however, tend to distinguish sharply between the human and the nonhuman. This paper explores expressions of this tendency in developmental theories that (...) set as the criterion of maturity the actualization of some capacity that is believed to set humans apart from animals. Seeing relationships with animals as marginally important in human development and life is a consequence of these assumptions. Simultaneously, these assumptions also marginalize the body. This constitutes a dual renunciation of body and animal, criticized for its effects both on inquiry and on our realization of the roles and values of nonhuman animals in development. Such research can help reveal the self-organizing nature of the human animal body. (shrink)

This paper describes the moment when a new body technique is acquired, using a case study in which three puppeteers manipulate a single puppet together. Although phenomenology assumes that the world is always “already there” before reflection begins, we can still ask how a sequence of movements is acquired. Struggling to learn puppet choreography in a training session, the learner’s body encounters difficulties because it cannot easily imitate the proper movements. At the same time, the puppet master cannot easily explain (...) those movements because he or she is so familiar with them. The communication between instructor and learner requires a kind of reflection that helps the learner transform and attain competency; this reflection is different from a dualistic disembodied form of thinking thatuses abstract representation. The focus is on the precise coordination of gestures and onomatopoeic utterances that emerge through improvisation in the learner’s trial movements. It is not just “a process of thinking,” but an experience that evokes “a synchronizing change of my own existence, a transformation of my being”, through which the puppeteer facilitates his or her own body’s comprehension of new movements. Using puppetry as an example not only illuminates the phenomenon of learning a bodily skill, but also reveals the dynamics of our bodies, which can enliven our conversation, engender our transformation, and realize our being-in-the-world. (shrink)

Searle suggests biological naturalism as a solution to the mind-brain problem that escapes traditional terminology with its seductive pull towards either dualism or materialism. We reconstruct Searle's argument and demonstrate that it needs additional support to represent a position truly located between dualism and materialism. The aim of our paper is to provide such an additional argument. We introduce the concept of "autoepistemic limitation" that describes our principal inability to directly experience our own brain as a brain from the first-person (...) perspective. The neglect of the autoepistemic limitation leads to inferences from epistemic properties to ontological features - we call this "epistemic-ontological inference." Searle attempts to avoid such epistemic-ontological inference but does not provide a sufficient argument. Once the autoepistemic limitation is considered, epistemic-ontological inference can be avoided. As a consequence, one can escape traditional terminology with its seductive pull towards either dualism or materialism. (shrink)

The present paper explores patients’ experience of lived space at the hospital and at home. To expand the understanding of the existential meaning of lived space the study revisited two empirical studies and a study of a meta-synthesis on health and caring. Phenomenological philosophy was chosen as a theoretical framework for an excursive analysis. The paper demonstrates that existential dimensions of lived space at the hospital and at home differ significantly. For the patients, the hospital space means alien territory as (...) opposed to the familiar territory of home. To some extent the experienced differences are due to the physical environment; however, as our analysis shows, other and more significant meanings are also involved. For patients, lived space at the hospital primarily concerns the influence of complex institutional power structures and specific cultural and social conventions, e.g. the role of the good patient and the ambiance of hospitals. Home, on the other hand, offers familiar lived space in which patients feel protected and safe. Further, the paper relates patients’ experience of lived space to a phenomenological view of lived space in order to illustrate the radical influence of illness on patients’ lifeworld and experience of lived space. The combination of illness and general discomfort may influence patients’ experience of home negatively; the former experience of home as a sanctuary changes into feelings of being left on one’s own and burdened by too much responsibility. Consequently, in the light of the increasing focus on patients’ self-monitoring at home, it is important for healthcare professionals to recognize the influence of spatial aspects on patients’ well-being both at the hospital and at home. (shrink)

Maternity is a biological process that has increasingly changed into an authoritative medicalized phenomenon and requires techno-medical intervention today. Modern medicine perceives women’s procreative functions as pathological that need medical involvement and control. Medical biologists claim that the female body is destined to procreate in which medical sciences can assist them with techniques. But is a woman’s body biologically evolved merely for procreation? Or is it a sexist interpretation of her socially situated self? How can we justify the idea of (...) universality and neutrality of medical sciences in a social context? Arguing against deterministic biology, existential feminists advocate that female body is not merely a biological fact but rather a social situation under which the maternal act has become the essence of being a woman. Social situations influence medicine in a way that they are used as a rhetorical tool to achieve social desires authoritatively. The present paper explores and examines the increasing medicalization of female body and maternity through the lenses of biological determinism and phenomenological existentialism. I argue that medically supported theories of female body are socially interpreted that perpetuate the traditional role of women as mothers instead of emancipating them from their immanence. The paper discusses how the scientific model of medicine is implicitly influenced by socio-cultural forces and, consequently, tries to reduce social phenomena into biological factors to justify women’s inevitable destiny as motherhood. Thus, we need a de-medicalized model of medicine in order to comprehend the true meaning of maternal body and self. (shrink)

This article focuses on a multi-modal interview approach that has been developed as part of a research project. The goal of the research was to explore and better understand children's embodied experiences and expressions in movement. The multi-modal interview approach emphasizes the non-verbal, giving children an opportunity to focus on "the felt sense", and to express their experiences in a variety of forms and through the use of metaphors. Inspired by Arnold Mindell's work on shifting channels in our ways of (...) experiencing the world, this paper works with an adaptation of Eugene T. Gendlin's "focusing technique" one that significantly expands Gendlin's repertoire of modalities by using drawing, colours, words, sound, music and movement. Narratives have been created using children's voices and expressions. The article includes an example of a narrative that illustrates how the approach has helped children express their movement experiences. The narrative is analysed by means of a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, through which themes/lived meanings of the child's experiences are elucidated. The article closes with a discussion of how the multi-modal interview approach can help to cast light on the relationships between body, movement, and language, and how the approach could also inspire a somatic perspective when teaching movement and dance in schools. (shrink)

In this article I take on the “Transcendentalist Challenge” to naturalized phenomenology, highlighting how the ontological and methodological commitments of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy point in the direction of an integration of the transcendental and the scientific, thus making room for a productive exchange between philosophy and psychological science when it comes to understanding consciousness and its place in nature. Discussing various conceptions of naturalized phenomenology, I argue that what I call an “Integrationist View” is required if we are to make sense (...) of the possibility of productive exchange between phenomenology and the sciences. My main argument is that if we conceive of consciousness as a structure of behavior ontologically prior to the distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity and third- and first-person perspectives, we arrive at a view of the transcendental as not essentially separate from the domain of science, but rather as contingent organizational norms of empirical nature that are best illuminated through a dialectical exchange between phenomenological and scientific approaches. I end by showing how Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the “Schneider case” in an example of such an integration. (shrink)

As an exercise in the ‘theology of disclosure’, the present essay proposes a kind of phenomenological analysis of the act of reading the Bible as Scripture with the goal of bringing to light the theoretical commitments which it implicitly demands. This sort of analysis can prove helpful for the continuing disputes among Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox insofar as it is relevant for one of the principal points of controversy between them: namely, the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and Church as theological (...) authorities. It proceeds by analyzing both the objective and subjective ‘poles’ of the act, and it illuminates the presence of the Church and her Tradition on both sides. The Church—i.e., the community of God’s people—is both that which is immediately encountered in the text, as well as the factor which enables scriptural reading in the first place. The article terminates with an application of the insights of the preceding discussion to the controversy about icons. (shrink)

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions (...) of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically reconstruct the development of Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology and “radical embodied cognitive science” out of Berlin-School Gestalt theory. I first lay out the basic principles of Gestalt theory and then identify two ways of revising that theory: one route, followed by enactivism and ecological psychology, borrows Gestaltist resources to defend a pragmatic ontology. I argue, however, that Merleau-Ponty never endorses this kind of ontology. Instead, I track his second route toward an ontology of “flesh.” I show how (...) Merleau-Ponty’s arguments for this ontology depend upon criticisms of Gestalt Psychology to which radical embodied cognitive science remains vulnerable, and show that it leads him to a romantic philosophy of nature. (shrink)

This article critiques the inadequate attention given to the question of meaning in mainstream clinical psychiatry and psychology. The author reviews the history of phenomenological and existential psychiatry, especially the work of Erwin Straus, and highlights the emphasis on the personal world of experience and on such existential dimensions as time and ethical experience. Aaron Beck's school of cognitive therapy appropriates many themes and concepts from phenomenology, including the central concept of meaning, and turns them into a systematic technology for (...) personal change. The author contrasts the phenomenological and cognitive approaches to meaning. The relationship between the cognitive and existential therapies is described by analogy to William James's healthy-minded and morbid-minded religion. (shrink)

Rethinking Existentialism, by WebberJonathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 229.

This introduction to a special section of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences reviews some historical and contemporary results concerning the role of development in cognition and experience, arguing that at this juncture development is an important topic for research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. It then suggests some ways in which the concept of development is in need of rethinking, in relation to the phenomena, and reviews the contributions that articles in the section make toward this purpose.

Volume 27, Issue 1, February 2019, Page 115-119.

This paper discusses the findings of qualitative research that examined the accounts of five “mostly recovered” ex-patients who had experienced transition between two or more eating disorder diagnoses. This study found that, in the minds of participants, the different diagnostic labels were associated with various good or bad character traits. This contributed to the belief in a diagnostic hierarchy, whereby individuals diagnosed with anorexia nervosa were viewed as morally better than those diagnosed with bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorder. Consequently, (...) diagnostic crossover from a “better” to a “worse” eating disorder was often experienced as shameful moral failing, and a new diagnosis impacted the individual’s sense of self-identity. These findings are of significance for both ethicists and clinicians; the paper concludes by outlining the relevance and possible clinical implications of shame in diagnostic crossover and suggesting avenues for future research. (shrink)

Proprioception - the sense by which we come to know the positions and movements of our bodies - is thought to be necessarily confined to the body of the perceiver. That is, it is thought that while proprioception can inform you as to whether your left knee is bent or straight, it cannot inform you as to whether someone else's knee is bent or straight. But while proprioception certainly provides us with information about the positions and movements of our own (...) bodies, I will argue that it does more than that. Surprising as this may sound, one can proprioceive someone else's movement. To show this, I first present the results of some studies that suggest that in seeing others move, we kinesthetically represent their movement in our bodies. I then argue, by means of an analogy to prosthetic vision, that such 'kinesthetic vision' should count as proprioceiving others move. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that ‘good care’ in residential nursing homes is enacted through different care practices that are either inspired by a ‘professional logic of care’ that aims for justice and non-maleficence in the professional treatment of residents, or by a ‘relational logic of care’, which attends to the relational quality and the meaning of interpersonal connectedness in people’s lives. Rather than favoring one care logic over the other, this paper indicates how important aspects of care are constantly (...) negotiated between different care practices. Based on the intricate everyday negotiations observed during an ethnographic field study at an elderly nursing home in Germany, the paper puts forth the argument that care is always a matter of tinkering with different, sometimes competing ‘goods’. This tinkering process, which unfolds through ‘intuitive deliberation’, ‘situated assessment’ and ‘affective juggling’ is then theorized along the conceptualization of a ‘practical ethics of care’: an ethics which makes no a priori judgments of what may be considered as good or bad care, but instead calls for momentary judgments that are pliable across changing situations. (shrink)

Narrative views of the self argue that we constitute our self in self-narratives. Embodied views hold that our self is shaped through embodied experiences. In that case, what is the relation between embodiment and narrativity in the process of self-constitution? The question demands a clear definition of embodiment, but existing studies remains unclear on this point (section 2). We offer a correction to this situation by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body that highlights its habituality. On this account, the (...) body has an inherent tendency to cultivate an organization of habits through its history of engagement with the world (section 3). Next, we explore its role in narrative self-constitution by distinguishing between two aspects of the narrative self, the narrated I and the narrating I (section 4). We argue on phenomenological grounds that self-narratives are informed by bodily perspectives in both respects. Furthermore, a focus on the habituality of the body allows for a better explanation of self-constitution than those based on implicit self-narratives (section 5). For these phenomenological and theoretical reasons, we conclude that narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice (section 6). (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

A dissociated area of medical research warrants bioethical consideration: a proposed transplantation of a donor’s entire body, except head, to a patient with a fatal degenerative disease. The seeming improbability of such an operation can only underscore the need for thorough bioethical assessment: Not assessing a case of such potential ethical import, by showing neglect instead of facing the issue, can only compound the ethical predicament, perhaps eroding public trust in ethical medicine. This article discusses the historical background of full-body (...) transplantation, documents the seriousness of its current pursuit, and builds an argument for why prima facie this type of transplant is bioethically distinct. Certainly, this examination can only be preliminary, indicating what should be a wide and vigorous discussion among practitioners and ethicists. It concludes with practical suggestions for how the medical and bioethics community may proceed with ethical assessment. (shrink)

Sylvia Plath wrote in the midst of growing racial tensions in 1950’s and 1960’s America. Her work demonstrates ambivalence towards her role as a middle-class white woman. In this paper, I examine the racial implications in Plath’s color terms. I disagree with Renée Curry’s reading in White Women Writing White that Plath only considers her whiteness insofar as it affects herself. Through a phenomenological study of how whiteness shifts meaning in this poem, I hope to show that Curry’s negative estimation (...) is only partly right. I suggest that embodiment is a problem for Plath in general, and this contributes to her inability to fully examine other bodies. (shrink)

In athletics, coaches and athletes share a unique and important relationship. Recently Jowett and her colleagues (Jowett & Cockerill, 2003; Jowett & Meek, 2000; Jowett & Ntoumanis, 2003, 2004; Jowett & Timson-Katchis, 2005) utilized relationship research (focusing on, for example, marital, familial and workplace relationships) from conjoining fields, and in particular social and cognitive psychology, to develop and test a four-component model (4 C’s) that depicts the most influential relational and emotional components (closeness, commitment, complementarity and co-orientation) of coach-athlete relationships. (...) Proceeding from a review of the literature on human touch communication to examine research on the power of touch to exchange relational and emotional messages (Hertenstein et al., 2006), the present study explores coaches’ and athletes’ collective experiences of communicating via touch, utilizing in-depth interviews with eight college coaches and athletes. A phenomenological approach was used to gather, analyze and interpret the data, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/1962) philosophical exploration of perception and human experience, which emphasizes the body as a means of communicating with the world. The findings indicate that touch between coaches and athletes increased at major events when emotions and tensions ran high. In addition, touch involved showing appreciation, instructing, comforting and giving attention, and affected perceptions of relationships. The findings also show that touch communication is influenced by societal factors, such as gender, relational stage, and what spectators, parents and other athletes may think. By illustrating how touch is enacted and experienced by a group of college coaches and athletes, the study represents an initial step toward understanding touch communication in the coach-athlete dyad. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

The article reviews Suzi Adams’s book on Cornelius Castoriadis, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation, by debating the options and possible deficits in Castoriadis’s notion of creativity. While Adams criticizes Castoriadis for neglecting the overarching – and horizontal – worldliness that must ultimately condition creativity in various instances of interpretation, in the most expanded sense as a cosmology, the review ponders an alternative approach which focus on Castoriadis’s creativity seen as a notion of a lateral and emergent positing of the novel, (...) ‘creations ex nihilo – but not in nihilo or cum nihilo’, with the statement in one of the last exposures of his thought. (shrink)

Based on detailed descriptions of human–machine ensembles, this article explores how humans and machines work together to see specific things and unsee others, and how they come to co-configure one another. For seeing is not an automated function; whether one is a human or a machine, vision is gradually enskilled and mutually co-constituted. The analysis intersects three different ways of human–machine seeing to shed further light on the workings of each one: an airport, where facial recognition algorithms collaborate with border (...) guards to grant passage to particular travellers and not to others; a luggage-scanning system, where potential security threats are assessed by a complex of X-rays and human intro-spection; and a hospital operating room, where human–machinic surgical robots find their way and operate on the insides of human bodies, touching only by seeing. In these examples, human and machine ways of seeing merge together, seeing in particular apparatuses of material, political, organisational, economic and fleshy components. The article analyses the practical work of human–machinic collaboration and explores how the different material and social constituents, not necessarily always working from the same agenda, come to configure what can be seen and sensed and what cannot. (shrink)

Enactivists frequently argue their account heralds a revolution in cognitive science: enactivism will unseat cognitivism as the dominant paradigm. We examine the lines of reasoning enactivists employ in stirring revolt, but show that none of these prove compelling reasons for cognitivism to be replaced by enactivism. First, we examine the hard sell of enactivism: enactivism reveals a critical explanatory gap at the heart of cognitivism. We show that enactivism does not meet the requirements to incite a paradigm shift in the (...) Kuhnian sense—there is no internal crisis in cognitivism. Nor does it provide inherently better explanations of cognition as some have claimed. Second, we consider the soft sell of enactivism: enactivism provides a more attractive, parsimonious, or clear-eyed lens on cognition. This move proves to boil down to a misunderstanding of how theories are selected in science. Instead we lend support to a broader and more desirable way to conceive of enactivism, the recent proposal that enactivism is a philosophy of nature. We explain how a philosophy of nature does more than support a single research paradigm by integrating scientific questions into a cohesive picture. (shrink)

Competent decision-making is required for informed consent. In this paper, I aim, from a phenomenological perspective, to identify the specific facets of competent decision-making that may form a challenge to depressed patients. On a phenomenological account, mood and emotions are crucial to the way in which human beings encounter the world. More precisely, mood is intimately related to the options and future possibilities we perceive in the world around us. I examine how possibilities should be understood in this context, and (...) how, in depression, decision-making might be compromised. I suggest that, based on this analysis, a specific emphasis and alertness in assessments of competence in depressed patients is called for. In fact, close attention should be paid to the range of future possibilities depressed patients are able to perceive. In addition, providing environmental cues to these patients might be one way of enhancing their decision-making capacity. The practical suggestions arrived at are open to empirical research. (shrink)

Drawing on methodological approaches used by visual anthropologists, film theorists and debates prevalent in the cultural studies literature, this paper is interdisciplinary in approach and attempts to tackle the challenge of collecting and analyzing embodied, sensuous and pre-reflective ‘data’ by advocating the value of integrating videography into research methodologies. The paper is illustrated with an examination of underwater videography footage, featuring scuba divers coming to terms with their surroundings. By considering the ways in which those featured in the film relate (...) to the onscreen images, upon watching the footage, the paper explores how we might begin to study and represent the ‘unrepresentable’ senses of, for example, touch and the somatic senses, including proprioception, in addition to the heightening or modification of these. (shrink)

As Merleau-Ponty points out, our sense of time is that of passage. This demands that we think of time both as extended—that is, as including the past and the future—and as now, the latter being conceived as the point of expiration. The difficulty comes when try to think these separately. To consider time as extended is to think of it in terms of space—i.e., in terms of the “parts outside of parts” definitive of space. The simultaneous existence of such parts (...) seems to exclude expiration. When, however, we consider time in terms of expiration, we face the problem of when the now expires. It cannot cease to exist in itself, since then it existed. It also cannot cease in another now, since then it did not exist. Such difficulties indicate that something is missing—something presupposed by both, which would allow us to think of expiration and temporal extension together. In this article, I argue that what is missing is the body. Its self-presence is behind these two aspects of time. (shrink)

Phenomenology of music has been a perspective trend of phenomenological aesthetics for more than a hundred years. The topic of the paper is fixation the main problems and vectors of development of phenomenology of music. The authors execute an analysis of Roman Ingarden’s position in the discussions concerning the methodological and ontological problems of phenomenology of music. The paper aims at revealing succession in Roman Ingarden’s solutions to the phenomenology of music problems. The other aim is reflection on the originality (...) of Ingarden’s ideas in the context of phenomenological interpretations of music in 20th and 21st centuries. The solution to these tasks allows the authors to fix key problems and identify the principal positions of phenomenology of music. The main sources of the comparative and historical analysis are the studies carried out by Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Clifton, and Ihde. The most important ontological problems of phenomenology of music are: spatiotemporal constitution of music, reduction of a work of music to its performance, and ontological status of a work of music. The analysis of Ingarden’s position on these problems allows us to characterize it as something different from the existing versions. According to the conception, the time of music is a special type of time, that is, quasi-time. A piece of music is a purely intentional, heteronomous, and intersubjective object. There are a number of methodological specificities of Ingarden’s approach: a refusal of reduction of musical theoretical data, a tendency for independence of a piece of music from conscious and mental processes, and an interpretation of a piece of music as a non-sounding phenomenon. In conclusion, the authors demonstrate how the originality and radical nature of Ingarden’s conclusions made his position defenseless against critique and simultaneously marked the tendency in the contemporary phenomenological studies of music. (shrink)

Using the film the Wizard of Oz, an illustrative comparison is made between the Scarecrow's learning experiences and our own. Like we often do, the Scarecrow reduces his potential learning and thinking abilities to nothing more than the formal operations presumably at work in the brain. Ostensibly lacking this brain, the Scarecrow solves nearly all the problems encountered in the journey to Oz. A neurophenomenological description of the Scarecrow's experiences reveals his prereflective, situated learning, and embodied cognition. These ways of (...) learning are often ignored and devalued in our educational system. Can this same method reveal our own subjugated knowledges? Herein, neurophenomenology is demonstrated as a critical pedagogy that critiques and liberates subjugated knowledge and supports a richer assessment of human learning and thinking. (shrink)

Can we see the expressiveness of other people's gestures, hear the intentions in their voice, see the emotions in their posture? Traditional theories of social cognition still say we cannot because intentions and emotions for them are hidden away inside and we do not have direct access to them. Enactive theories still have no idea because they have so far mainly focused on perception of our physical world. We surmise, however, that the latter hold promise since, in trying to understand (...) cognition, enactive theory focuses on the embodied engagements of a cognizer with his world. In this paper, we attempt an answer for the question What is social perception in an enactive account? In enaction, perception is conceived as a skill, crucially involving action, an ability to work successfully within the set of regularities, or contingencies that characterize a given domain. If this is the case, then social perception should be a social skill. Having thus transformed the question of what social perception is into that of what social skill is, we examine the concept of social contingencies and the manner in which social skills structure—both constrain and empower— social interaction. Some of the implications of our account for how social and physical perception differ, the role of embodiment in social interaction and the distinction between our approach and other social contingency theories are also addressed. (shrink)

This paper sets out to demonstrate that a phenomenological reflection on language highlights the possibilities of authenticity in communication, and as such provides a very necessary complement to the dominant linguistic perspectives: the syntactic and grammatical perspective, Saussurean linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics. While the syntactic and grammatical perspective, which predominates in the educational context, presents language as an institutionalized, authoritarian and self-contained system, Saussurean linguistics provides a view of language as a complex, self-contained, technical system, as such reflecting the (...) nature of modern society. The third perspective, systemic functional linguistics, describes templates of specific genre, models which aid students to construct their own, while simultaneously discouraging individual selfexpression. In contrast, a reflective phenomenological perspective identifies and encourages authentic self-expression. The paper concludes by considering ways to reconcile the impetus in language teaching towards, on the one hand, the language of institutional authority, and, on the other, individual self-expression. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006. (shrink)

This article examines the temporality of organ transplantation with a focus on memoirs where the recipient has received an organ from a deceased donor. I argue that death constitutes life. That is, this absent presence – that the organ is materially present but the person is dead and therefore absent – is the foundation for rethinking relationality as constituted through the haunting presence of those who remain central to the continuity of life but who are not alive in any strict (...) definition of the term. This article is therefore attentive to the various meanings of haunting, drawing on queer theory to show how narratives of haunting are derealised experiences and thus a struggle for epistemological authority over specifically transplantation and relationality more broadly. It draws out how these epistemological challenges reimagine ontology as a haunted experience, and thus an intimate tie between the living and the unknown – and somewhat present – dead. (shrink)

Major thinkers of the twentieth-century explored the conditions for the possibility of perception, language, and thought, and Merleau-Ponty in particular addressed the physical body as a condition of existing and being situated in the world. Although French philosopher Simone Weil has not been recognized as belonging in this stream of philosophical history, this article seeks to demonstrate that Weil was a pioneering phenomenologist of the body; for remarkably like Merleau-Ponty—yet more than a decade before him in the early 1930s—Simone Weil’s (...) thinking centered on the foundational role of the body in structuring thought and ordering the world. The body is the first and primary orderer of experience for Weil: it grasps relations intuitively, pre-linguistically, and mediates action and thought. Weil’s body-thinking reconfigures the basis of thinking itself, positing that bodily movement is the factor sine qua non that enables ordered spatial-temporal perception, a perception on which the most abstract reaches of language and thought depend. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the video game Asteroids’ enduring appeal turns on its ability to be read as futurist text. I connect Asteroids’ black and white aesthetic to the phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack’s notion of postfuturism. Central to postfuturism is a change from representations of space as deep to representations of space as surface, incapable of concealment. I consider materials designed to absorb almost all visible light—which I call holoblacks—as pushing past representations of space as surface into a paradigm (...) of non-representation of space or space as non-representation. I argue that this non-representation is what is meant by Martin Heidegger in the concept of a thing. I therefore offer an interpretation of Heidegger’s Lichtung, or clearing, in which holoblacks act as a vehicle for the gathering, disclosure and nearing of world which I call ‘clearance futurism’. I conclude by reading Asteroids as a clearance futurist text. (shrink)

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, (...) health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

One must technologize bodies to conceive of organ transplantation. Organs must be envisioned as replaceable parts, serving mechanical functions for the workings of the body. In this way, it becomes possible to imagine exchanging someone’s organs without changing anything essential about the selfhood of the person. But to envision organs as mechanical parts is phenomenologically uncomfortable; thus, the terminology used to describe the practice of organ retrieval seems to attempt other, less technological ways of viewing the human body. In this (...) paper, I analyze three common metaphors that currently contextualize the process of organ retrieval in English-speaking communities: harvesting the agrarian body, procuring the commodified body, and receiving the gifted body. These powerful images constrain the gaze toward the body in important ways. Every gaze both obscures and reveals. While each of these three metaphors makes sense of some aspects of organ retrieval, each of them is ultimately subject to being overtaken by what Jeffrey Bishop calls the technological imaginary. This imaginary deploys a gaze that obscures important elements of what it means to be human and does violence to parts of the phenomenological experience of transplantation and bodily existence. I argue that no matter how hard one tries to avoid the technological aspect of transplantation practices by embracing nonviolent metaphors—even the metaphor of gifting, which seems the most promising—it will never be possible to fully resist organ transplantation’s violence toward our phenomenological sense of embodiment. (shrink)

Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of grief, I give a phenomenological analysis of transformative experiences as involving the restructuring of systems of practical meaning. On this analysis, an agent’s experience of the world is structured (...) by practically significant possibilities that form organized systems on the basis of the agent’s projects and relationships. Transformative experiences involve shifts to systems of possibility, that is, changes to habitual meanings and to how an agent’s projects are situated in relation to one another. I employ the enactivist notion of sense-making to analyze how an agent rebuilds the meaning structures disrupted by a transformative experience. In an unchosen transformative experience, an agent adjusts to a significant disruption through a process of sense-making in precarious conditions. By establishing new patterns of bodily and social interaction with the world, one alters the practical meanings of one’s surroundings, and thereby reconstitutes oneself as an intentional agent. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss in the light of phenomenological philosophy, whether it can be argued that men and women have different lifeworlds and how this may legitimize the segregation of men and women in empirical nursing research. We analyzed peer-reviewed papers from 2003-2012 and scrutinized the arguments used for dividing men and women into separate groups in empirical nursing studies based on phenomenology. We identified 24 studies using gender segregation and posed the following questions: 1. What (...) is the investigated phenomenon as explicated by the authors? 2. What arguments do the authors use when dividing participants into gender specific groups? The analysis showed that a variety of phenomena were investigated that were all related to a specific medical condition. None appeared to be gender-specific, though the authors argued for a sole focus on either women or men. The most common argument for segregating men and women were reference to earlier studies. A few studies had references to methodology and/or philosophy as argument for a segregation of men and women. Arguments for gender segregation in empirical nursing studies based on a phenomenological approach tend to build on the conviction that experiences of health related phenomena are gendered. However, it seems to be difficult to identify conclusive arguments for this division within phenomenological philosophy. Therefore we recommend that segregation should be used with caution. Otherwise other research approaches may be more suitable. (shrink)