This paper considers some foundational concepts in ecological psychology and in enactivism., and traces their developments from their historical roots to current preoccupations. Important differences stem, we claim, from dissimilarities in how embodied experience has been understood by the ancestors, founders and followers of ecological psychology and enactivism, respectively. Rather than pointing to differences in domains of interest for the respective approaches, and restating possible divisions of labor between them in research in the cognitive and psychological sciences, we call for (...) a deeper analysis of the role of embodiment in agency that we also undertake. Awareness of the differences that exist in the respective frameworks and their consequences, we argue, may lead to overcoming some current divisions of labor and responsibility, and contribute to a more comprehensive and complementary way of dealing with a broader range of theoretical and practical concerns. While providing some examples of domains, such as social cognition and art reception, in which we can observe the relative usefulness and potential integration of the theoretical and methodological resources from the two approaches, we demonstrate that such deeper synergy is not only possible but also beginning to emerge. Such complementarity, as we envisage, conceives of ecological psychology that allows felt experience as a crucial dynamical element in the explanations and models that it produces, and of an enactive approach that takes into consideration the ubiquitous presence of rich directly perceived relations among variables arising from enactments in the social and physical world. (shrink)

A história intelectual do século XX tem sido escrita ao longo de um cenário que vê, na morte de Merleau-Ponty em 1961, a linha de divisória entre uma geração existencial e fenomenológica e o evento do estruturalismo imediatamente subsequente. A publicação das notas de leitura de Merleau-Ponty sobre o texto A origem da geometria, de Edmund Husserl, tem mostrado quão frágeis são os alicerces desta leitura simplificadora. Na verdade, enquanto a tradução e introdução de Derrida ao texto de Husserl, de (...) 1962, tornavam-se um texto fundamentador para a geração estruturalista, introduzindo uma reflexão sobre a historicidade e a materialidade da idealidade, foi apenas em 1998, com a publicação das notas da conferência de Merleau-Ponty no Collège de France, em 1959, sobre o mesmo tópico, que se tornou claro quão próximo está o primeiro Derrida do último Merleau-Ponty. Assim como Derrida, Merleau-Ponty identificou, na tensão husserliana entre arqueologia e teleologia, o problema básico da fenomenologia, introduzindo a questão da história e a do meio de transmissão cultural. Comparar tais leituras em seu contexto específico não apenas permite um retrato mais complexo dos debates intelectuais da época, mas também mostra como, com a interpretação de Merleau-Ponty sobre A origem da geometria, a "diferença" de Derrida antecede-se e admite outra genealogia. (shrink)

This article addresses the question whether skiing as a nature sport enables practitioners to develop a rapport with nature, or rather estranges and insulates them from their mountainous ambiance. To address this question, I analyse a recent skiing movie from a psychoanalytical perspective and from a neuro-scientific perspective. I conclude that Jean-Paul Sartre’s classical but egocentric account of his skiing experiences disavows the technicity involved in contemporary skiing as a sportive practice for the affluent masses, which actually represents an urbanisation (...) of the sublime, symptomatic for the current era. (shrink)

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -century philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal (...) figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A General Introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work, and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to natural scientific research has unmistakable parallels to phenomenology. These parallels are clear enough to allow one to say confidently that Goethe's delicate empiricism is indeed a phenomenology of nature. This paper examines how Goethe's criticisms of Newton anticipated Husserl's announcement of the crisis of the modern sciences, and it describes how Goethe, at a critical juncture in cultural history, addressed this emerging crisis through a scientific method that is virtually identical to the method of (...) contemporary empirical-phenomenological research in the human sciences. Goethe's practice of science shares with phenomenology a participatory, morally-responsive, and holistic approach to the description of dynamic life-world phenomena. Delicate empiricism has its own version of the phenomenological epoché, and, like Husserl's technique of imaginative variation, it strives to disclose the essential or archetypal structure of the phenomenon through the endowment of human imagination. However, a close reading of Goethe suggests that the tendency amongst some scholars to distinguish phenomenology as human science from the natural sciences is actually a costly error which unwittingly falls prey to implicit Cartesian assumptions. Goethe, however, manages to avoid these problems by performing from the first a phenomenology of nature's sensibility. (shrink)

In higher education, the conventional design of educational programs emphasises imparting knowledge and skills, in line with traditional Western epistemology. This emphasis is particularly evident in the design and implementation of many undergraduate programs in which bodies of knowledge and skills are decontextualised from the practices to which they belong. In contrast, the notion of knowledge as foundational and absolute has been extensively challenged. A transformation and pluralisation has occurred: knowledge has come to be seen as situated and localized into (...) various 'knowledges', and the status of the body has taken on renewed significance in epistemological debates. Rather than thinking of knowledge as transcending the body, the embodiment of knowledge has become a key factor in understanding the nature of knowledge and what it means to know. In this paper, we adopt a phenomenological perspective in exploring the notion of embodied knowing as it relates to higher education programs and, more specifically, the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used in these programs. (shrink)

While much has been written on phronesis, there is a dearth of empirical work on the how the concept can be developed and implemented in practice, particularly in an educational setting. To address this problem, characteristics of phronesis were identified through a review of current literature and an examination of related themes from a special issue of the Philosophy of Management Journal on the philosophy of innovation. The implementation of the concept was investigated using an illustrative study of ongoing work (...) aimed at embedding phronesis in an innovation educational module. The study will contribute to the nascent debate by providing evidence of embedding Aristotle’s phronesis in the curriculum of future managers, in this case Engineering and Business students, working in cross-functional teams. A schema is proposed, based on concepts distilled from the literature and the illustrative study, to examine whether an educational project cultivates phronesis among the students. (shrink)

The condition of explicit theoretically discursive cognitive performance, as it culminates in scientific activity, is, I claim, the life world. I contrast life world and scientific world and argue that the latter arises from the first and that contrary to the prevailing views the scientific world (actually, worlds, since the classical world is substantially different from the quantum world) finds its completion in the life world and not the other way around. In other words: the closure we used to search (...) in a complete and comprehensive scientific description of all aspects of experience by referring it back to underlying atoms, genes and other scientific objects and the covering laws ruling them, should be sought in a reintegrating and occasionally dissolving of the abstract scientific model in the self-organizational fluidity and superposition-like indeterminateness and non-locality of the life world: “We have to acknowledge the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon” (Merleau-Ponty in his The Phenomenology of Perception). (shrink)

In this first section we start with defining the notions of inconsistency and para-consistency, we give an example of an inconsistency and clarify what according to us is the basic problem with respect to the occurrence of inconsistencies. We are then in a position to state the aim of this paper.

This is the editors' introduction to an edited volume devoted to the relation between phenomenology and naturalism across several philosophical domains, including: epistemology, metaphysics, history of philosophy, and philosophy of science and ethics.

Phenomenology is a useful methodology for describing and ordering experience. As such, phenomenology can be specifically applied to the first person experience of illness in order to illuminate this experience and enable health care providers to enhance their understanding of it. However, this approach has been underutilized in the philosophy of medicine as well as in medical training and practice. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of phenomenology to clinical medicine. In order to describe the experience of illness, we need a (...) phenomenological approach that gives the body a central role and acknowledges the primacy of perception. I present such a phenomenological method and show how it could usefully illuminate the experience of illness through a set of concepts taken from Merleau-Ponty. His distinction between the biological body and the body as lived, analysis of the habitual body, and the notions of motor intentionality and intentional arc are used to capture the experience of illness. I then discuss the applications this approach could have in medicine. These include narrowing the gap between objective assessments of well-being in illness and subjective experiences which are varied and diverse; developing a more attuned dialogue between physicians and patients based on a thick understanding of illness; developing research methods that are informed by phenomenology and thus go beyond existing qualitative methods; and providing medical staff with a concrete understanding of the impact of illness on the life-world of patients. (shrink)

The phenomenological method has been fruitfully used to study the experience of illness in recent years. However, the role of illness is not merely that of a passive object for phenomenological scrutiny. I propose that illness, and pathology more generally, can be developed into a phenomenological method in their own right. I claim that studying cases of pathology, breakdown, and illness offer illumination not only of these experiences, but also of normal function and the tacit background that underpins it. In (...) particular, I claim that the study of embodiment can be greatly enhanced, and indeed would be incomplete, without attending to bodily breakdown and what I term bodily doubt. I offer an analogy between illness and Husserl’s epoché, suggesting that both are a source of distancing, and therefore motivate a reflective stance. (shrink)

The experience of being a therapist can be both gratifying and frustrating at the same time. This article takes the form of a psychoanalytical formulation of the process of therapy and parental feedback sessions conducted with an adolescent diagnosed with bulimia nervosa. It also incorporates the therapist’s experience of being in the room with both the patient and the patient’s parents. Through exploring the concept of ‘mutual recognition’ and being present in the moment, it seems that therapeutic change is able (...) to occur in both the patient and the family. Furthermore, this article explores the difficult process of negotiating feedback sessions with the patient’s parents. The expression of the experiences of both the therapist and patient are brought to life by psychoanalytical theory and phenomenological experience. A phenomenological exploration of experiences allows for the transcendence of conventional investigative research settings as “interpretive phenomenological research cannot be separated from the textual practice of writing”. This article could constitute a protocol as it captures unique data from a setting that is often not easily accessed, and provides data and insights from the perspective of the therapist, which are often not expressed. (shrink)

Living sustainably evokes ideas of lived, bodily engagement with and perception of the earth. Yet, modern ways of thinking and speaking have slowly alienated the earth from consciousness. Using phenomenological methods, the author examines the experience of living sustainably, exploring her own background and the idea of restoring the earth to consciousness, before examining the lives of two students dedicated to living sustainably. Components of upholding the earth, in-volving humanity, perceiving differences in studying and embodying sustainability, and engaging in choices (...) fill the experience of living sustainably. (shrink)

The recent move to naturalize phenomenology through a mathematical protocol is a significant advance in consciousness research. It enables a new and fruitful level of dialogue between the cognitive sciences and phenomenology of such a nuanced kind that it also prompts advancement in our phenomenological analyses. But precisely what is going on at this point of ‘dialogue’ between phenomenological descriptions and mathematical algorithms, the latter of which are based on dynamical systems theory? It will be shown that what is happening (...) is something more than a mere ‘passing of the baton’ from phenomenology to mathematics. For this sophisticated naturalization to prove a worthy endeavour it must produce more than just correlation, it must prove some form of interrelation to the extent that phenomenology is deterministic. But such interrelational and deterministic requirements are the start of a slippery slope, and it will be argued that this slope only loses more friction once a further demand of formal and precise descriptions is made of phenomenology. Such deterministic and formally precise demands misconstrue phenomenology’s ideal goal of a unification of genuine/originary reason and truth. Not a deductive and definitive discipline, phenomenology is rather from the outset descriptive and critical. Phenomenology’s descriptive beginnings will thus be employed as an essential barrier to the naturalization of phenomenology. (shrink)

Actions in sport are intentional in character. They are directed at and are about something. This understanding of intentional action is common in continental as well as analytic philosophy. In sport philosophy, intentionality has received relatively little attention, but has more recently come on the agenda. In addition to what we can call ‘action intentionality,’ studied by philosophers like Searle, the phenomenological approach forwarded by Merleau-Ponty has opened up for a concept of ‘motor intentionality,’ which means a basic bodily attention (...) and relatedness to the surrounding world. This conception is very relevant for the study of bodily actions as we find them in sports. However, there may be even deeper layers. The identification of mirror neurons in the brain has opened up for a type of almost ‘muscular intentionality’ whereby a simple bodily movement like grasping a cup to drink seems to be intentionally controlled and orchestrated. My goal in this paper is to discuss the relation between different levels of intentionality, such as a) ‘action intentionality’ operating at a conscious cognitive level, as for instance, when a player shoots a goal in football, b) the ‘motor intentionality’ directing the bodily movements when kicking the ball, and c) the muscular ‘mirror neuron intentionality’ of the goal keeper which is in operation when the keeper is seeing how the kicker’s foot hits the ball. How are these different layers of intentionality related and how can they give a more nuanced and integrated picture of the body–mind in action in sports? (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present a phenomenological description of how athletes in specific risk sports explore human interaction with natural elements. Skydivers play with, and surf on, the encountering air while falling towards the ground. Kayakers play on the waves and with the stoppers and currents in the rivers. Climbers are ballerinas of the vertical, using cracks and holds in the cliffs to pull upwards against gravity forces. The theoretical background for the description is found in the (...) phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The phenomenology of Husserl focused on the theoretical intentionality of the transcendental ego. With Heidegger the human being's concrete and practical interaction with the environing world moved to the foreground. Heidegger's analyses of ?equipmentality? also throw important light on equipmentality in sports and how we deal with tools and equipment in sports. However, in Heidegger's analyses the body resides in the background both as subject and object. The importance of the active body-subject is well documented in the work of Merleau-Ponty, and also Todes. The human being is a bodily ?being-in-the-world? and the body is the active medium through which the world is grasped. The body is however also situated and aligned with the fundamental dimensions of the world, with vertical gravity and with horizontal action space. In this article I show in a concrete way how in some sports we use fundamental characteristics of the environing world in a mode of playfulness. In these sports human beings play in an extreme way with fundamental elements of nature. The article thus puts phenomenology to a test. It should be able to move from general characteristics to specific features of our bodily human involvement with the environing world. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the validity of phenomenology in the psychiatric setting. The phenomenological method - as a mode of research, a method of engagement between self and other, and a framework for approaching what it means to know - has found a legitimate home in therapeutic practice. Over the last century, phenomenology, as a philosophical endeavour and research method, has influenced a wide range of disciplines, including psychiatry. Phenomenology has enabled an enrichment of such practice through deepening the (...) way in which we can come to know the experiences of the other. This knowing-of-the-other is explored here within the context of psychiatric and clinica assessment. The question asked is: How best can we come to know those we work with? What method of engagement can be used to most completely come to understand and narrate the experiences of the individual, and how can this be applied in the context of an assessment aimed at psychiatric or psychological intervention? Elements of phenomenological praxis are presented as definitive of the most integral way of approaching the human subject. Husserlian and Heideggerian notions are explicated and related to phenomenological conceptions of intersubjectivity, in an effort to describe a phenomenology that can be used effectively within the psychiatric setting. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 1 May 2007. (shrink)

Statistics from both South Africa and the United States of America indicate that the phenomenon of violence amongst youths is increasing. This implies that a larger number of youths are being exposed to the experience of violence and thus present with the complex and multi-dimensional effects of such an experience. Past research has centred mostly on the causative factors that can be statistically represented, with little focus being paid to the juveniles’ in-depth, subjective experience of the phenomenon. For the male (...) adolescent, the experience of the phenomenon of violence is complex, diverse and may span across many aspects of his life, including physical, psychological, personal and social dimensions. Three participants were sourced from the Leeuwkop Juvenile Correctional Facility in Johannesburg and interviewed for the purpose of this study. The participants were selected based on their age (between 13 and 19 years of age) and the type of crime that they had committed (assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, common assault or indecent assault). In accordance with the phenomenological approach, open-ended interviews were used as a research method in order to allow for the participants’ unique and subjective experience of the phenomenon to emerge. The researchers found that the phenomenon of violence is characterised by the juveniles’ experience of external events that provoke a certain response manifesting itself in violent behaviour. The responses described by the participants were mostly emotional in nature and included emotions such as anger, rage and fury. The experience of violence also holds certain consequences for the male juvenile offender. The most common consequence experienced by all three participants was their subsequent arrest and incarceration in a correctional facility. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 11, Edition 1 May 2011, iii-v. (shrink)

This article offers an engagement of the ethics of Badiou, one of the most significant representatives of contemporary continental philosophy, with the question of corporate social responsibility. First, this article displays an account of the complex ethical thinking of Badiou. Then, it seeks to show how Badiou's thought offers an important and distinctive critique of corporate social responsibility as ideology. Precisely, the two main features of the ideological discourse of corporate social responsibility are collaboration and depoliticisation. The Badiouan critique provides (...) a performative efficacy against the seductions of corporate social responsibility discourse within the framework of a universalist ethics. Therefore, a Badiouan analysis argues that an ethical life is incompatible with corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology has long occupied a position amongst Edmund Husserl’s writings of almost singular renown and influence. It is easy to see why this should be so. The Crisis offered the reading public its first glimpse of a new Husserl, or at least one strikingly different in tone, mode of presentation, and thematic emphasis from the Husserl of Ideas I or Cartesian Meditations. In a seeming reversal of the Augustinian dictum that Husserl used to (...) close Cartesian Meditations,“Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.” The Crisis looks outward rather than within, toward the body, history, the intersubjective community, and an analysis of the life-world, arguably Husserl’s most enduring philosophical contribution and the one with which The Crisis is most closely associated. And these concerns are framed against a backdrop o .. (shrink)

This paper introduces the philosophical foundation and practical application of empirical phenomenology in social research. The approach of empirical phenomenology builds upon the phenomenology of the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and the sociologist Alfred Schütz, but considers how their more philosophical and theoretical insights can be used in empirical research. It aims at being practically useful for anyone doing qualitative studies and concerned about safeguarding the perspective of those studied. The main idea of empirical phenomenology is that scientific (...) explanation must be grounded in the first-order construction of the actors; that is, in their own meanings. These constructions are then related to the second-order constructions of the scientist. In this paper, empirical phenomenology is considered in the light of phenomenological philosophy. The paper includes an explication of the approach, which is summarized in seven steps through which the researcher is guided, and considers its implications for qualitative methods such as interviewing and participant observation. (shrink)

There is a two-fold problem the phenomenologist must face: the first has to do with thinking like a phenomenologist given that one is always already steeped in the mundane sphere; the second has to do with the phenomenologist entering into dialogue with those scientists, psychologists, sociologists and other laypersons who still remain in the mundane sphere. I address the first problem by giving an Husserlian-inspired account of the movement from the mundane to the transcendental, and show that there are decent (...) prospects for getting life-world folks to start thinking like phenomenologists. I address the second problem by showing that Husserl has himself caught in a dilemma: either the reduction takes place and no communication is possible between phenomenologist and non-phenomenologist, or the reduction does not take place and the phenomenological method remains a psychological makeshift, supposedly accessible to Husserl and his esoteric followers. (shrink)

Within the Husserlian phenomenological philosophical tradition, description and interpretation co-exist. However, teaching the practice of phenomenological psychological research requires careful articulation of the differences between a descriptive and an interpretive relationship to what is provided by qualitative data. If as researchers we neglect the epistemological foundations of our work or avoid working through difficult methodological issues, then our work invites dismissal as inadequate science, undermining the effort to strongly establish psychology along qualitative lines. The first article in this two-part discussion (...) provides a Husserlian investigation of the meaning of ‘method’ for psychology as a human science. This investigation is undertaken in the light of some researchers’ appropriations of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in the service of non-methodical praxes. The second article will address some implications of the attempt to structure qualitative psychological research along ‘Gadamerian’ lines, taking seriously the references to Gadamer’s work made by researchers such as Van Manen and Smith. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 11, Edition 1 May 2011, 69-85. (shrink)

According to Husserlian scholars such as Mohanty, description and interpretation coexist within Husserl’s work and are envisioned as complementary rather than mutually exclusive approaches to inquiry. This paper argues that exploring the implications of this philosophical complementarity for psychological research would require distinguishing between both the multiple meanings of “interpretation” and the differing modes of interpretation within qualitative data. Husserl’s model of passive and active intentionality and Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity are examined in order to explore their relevance for research. (...) It is argued that interview data can demonstrate both actively and passively intended dimensions, and that the psychological meaningfulness of this complexity points to the relevance of not only Husserl’s static analysis but also his genetic analysis. Likewise, it is argued that Ricoeur’s work on narrativity and narrative identity is invaluable in grasping ways in which narrative data is intrinsically self-interpretive, expresses self-identity, and is both situated within and responsive to the larger social horizon of the ineluctably relational interview context within which it is given. (shrink)

With the increasingly close relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) there has been a growing tendency in the mental health professions to interpret everyday emotional suffering and behavior as a medical condition that can be treated with a particular drug. In this paper, I suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology is uniquely suited to challenge the core assumptions of medicalization by expanding psychiatry's narrow conception of the self as an enclosed, biological individual and recognizing the ways in (...) which our experience of things--including mental illness--is shaped by the socio-historical situation in which we grow. Informed by hermeneutic phenomenology, psychiatry's first priority is to suspend the prejudices that come with being a medical doctor in order to hear what the patient is saying. To this end, psychiatry can begin to understand the patient not as a static, material body with a clearly defined brain dysfunction but as an unfolding, situation existence already involved in an irreducibly complex social world, an involvement that allows the patient to experience, feel, and make sense of their emotional suffering. (shrink)

Fernando Floresin ja Terry Winogradin Understanding Computers and Cognition poikkeaa perinteisistä ohjelmoinnin lähtökohtien pohdinnoista. Teoksessa asetetaan syrjään lähtökohta, jota tekijät kutsuvat rationalistiseksi perinteeksi, ja syvennytään sen sijaan fenomenologiaan. Keskeinen tekijä tässä siirtymässä on representaationhypoteesin hylkääminen. Kirjoittajat nojaavat lähinnä Martin Heideggerin, Hans-Georg Gadamerin ja Humberto Maturanan tuotantoon, mutta tässä artikkelissa lähden liikkeelle Edmund Husserlin fenomenologisesta reduktiosta. Tulkitsen Floresin suorittaneen reduktion hänen päätyessään hylkäämään representaatiot.

Despite their shared origins, medicine and dentistry are not always two sides of the same coin. There is a long history in medical philosophy of defining disease and various medical models have come into existence. Hitherto, little philosophical and phenomenological work has been done considering dental caries and periodontitis as examples of disease and illness. A philosophical methodology is employed to explore how we might define dental caries and periodontitis using classical medical models of disease – the naturalistic and normativist. (...) We identify shared threads and highlight how the features of these highly prevalent dental diseases prevent them fitting in either definition. The article describes phenomenology and the current thought around the phenomenology of illness, exploring how and why these dental illnesses might integrate into a phenomenological model. We discover that there are some features particular to dental caries and periodontitis: ubiquity, preventability and hyper-monitorablility. Understanding the differences that these dental diseases have compared to many other classically studied diseases leads us to ethical questions concerning how we might manage those who have symptoms and seek treatment. As dental caries and periodontitis are common, preventable and hyper-monitorable, it is suggested that these features affect the phenomenology of these illnesses. For example, if we experience dental illness when we have consciously made decisions that have led to it, do we experience them differently to those rarer illnesses that we cannot expect? Other diseases share these features are discussed. This paper highlights the central differences between the classical philosophical notion of disease in medicine and the dental examples of caries and periodontitis. It suggests that a philosophical method of conceptualising medical illness - phenomenology - should not be applied to these dental illnesses without thought. A phenomenological analysis of any dental illness is yet to be done and this paper highlights why a separate strand of phenomenology should be explored, instead of employing those that are extant. The article concludes with suggestions for further research into the nascent field of the phenomenology of dental illness and aims to act as a springboard to expose the dental sphere to this philosophical method of analysis. (shrink)

The Fundamental Ontology and Kurdish experience toward an openness is the title of the webinar series which was held by Radio Kurdistan in August 1,5 and 9, 2021. Here is a brief introduction of the whole text in English. This project aimed to familiarize those interested and to provide basic ideas about phenomenological research. Now this book consists of four contiguous sections:.

The purpose of this article is to examine two philosophical accounts of thinking—yet examine them anew by considering what I take to be their under-examined relationship. These are the accounts of Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger. It is often supposed that these two philosophers belong to differing, even conflicting, philosophical traditions. However, this article will seek to demonstrate that an unrecognised affinity exists between them on account of their shared endeavour to venture ahead of the ‘beaten tracks’ of Modern Philosophy. (...) In this way, I will seek to challenge a number of preconceptions that inform the way these thinkers are interpreted and utilised by philosophers of education—particularly preconceptions about Ryle that appear to be active in much ‘thinking skills’ literature. Through exploring certain under-attended-to aspects of Ryle's work (including his early essays on phenomenology and his later reflections on the nature of thinking) this article will seek to offer a renewed investigation into these two philosophical accounts of thinking, in terms of both their limitations and the ways of thinking they open. (shrink)

Questions on what it means to live and die well are raised and discussed in the hospice movement. A phenomenological lifeworld perspective may help professionals to be aware of meaningful and important dimensions in the lives of persons close to death. Lifeworld is not an abstract philosophical term, but rather the opposite. Lifeworld is about everyday, common life in all its aspects. In the writings of Cicely Saunders, known as the founder of the modern hospice movement, facets of lifeworld are (...) presented as important elements in caring for dying patients. Palliative care and palliative medicine today are, in many ways, replacing hospices. This represents not only a change in name, but also in the main focus. Hospice care was originally very much about providing support and comfort for, and interactions with the patients. Improved medical knowledge today means improved symptomatic palliation, but also time and resources spent in other ways than before. Observations from a Nordic hospice ward indicate that seriously ill and dying persons spend much time on their own. Different aspects of lifeworld and intersubjectivity in the dying persons’ room is presented and discussed. (shrink)

It is argued that the work of Husserl offers a model for self-knowledge that avoids the disadvantages of standard introspectionist accounts and of a Sellarsian view of the relation between our perceptual judgements and derived judgements about appearances. Self-knowledge is based on externally directed knowledge of the world that is then subjected to a cognitive transformation analogous to the move from a statement to the activity of stating. Appearance talk is (contra Sellars) not an epistemically non-committal form of speech, but (...) talk to which we are fully committed. However, it is a commitment to a certain kind of claim about our experiences, viewed as cognitive phenomena, after a process of transformation. Such reductive and hypostatizing transformations can exhibit the intentional structure of consciousness. Phenomenology thus gives a form of knowledge about our mental states that is first personal but not introspective knowledge in any philosophically problematic sense. The account offered is also, in key respects, dissimilar to Sellars's outer directed view of the origin of self-knowledge. (shrink)

This paper reports on a recent hermeneutic phenomenological study aimed at understanding the experiences of special school teachers in Hong Kong, and specifically visual arts teachers tasked with teaching students with intellectual disabilities. Illustrating the use of a phenomenological research method, the paper outlines the methodology and procedure followed in respect of determining the source of data, conducting phenomenological interviews, and formulating themes. The themes that emerged from the interviews were examined in conjunction with the stories told by the teachers. (...) The special school visual arts teachers who participated in this study have strong emotional and personal connections with their students. In relation to performing their teaching role, the teachers had experienced problems of various kinds, with many of these problems unique to the special school settings. In an effort to tackle these problems and improve their teaching, these teachers engaged in reflection and explored a variety of ways to enhance their students’ learning. Despite the practical learning problems their students experience, the teachers maintained that studying visual arts is beneficial to their students’ whole-person development. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on the nature of teaching visual arts to students with intellectual disabilities. (shrink)

This article develops a phenomenology of suffering with an emphasis on matters relevant to medical practice and bioethics. An attempt is made to explain how suffering can involve many different things—bodily pains, inability to carry out everyday actions, and failure to realize core life values—and yet be a distinct phenomenon. Proceeding from and expanding upon analyses found in the works of Eric Cassell and Elaine Scarry, suffering is found to be a potentially alienating mood overcoming the person and engaging her (...) in a struggle to remain at home in the face of loss of meaning and purpose in life. Suffering involves painful experiences at different levels that are connected through the suffering-mood but are nevertheless distinguishable by being primarily about my embodiment, my engagements in the world together with others, and my core life values. Suffering is in essence a feeling , but as such, it has implications for and involves the person’s entire life: how she acts in the world, communicates with others, and understands and looks upon her priorities and goals in life. Suffering-moods are typically intense and painful in nature, but they may also display a rather subconscious quality in presenting things in the world and my life as a whole in an alienating way. In such situations, we are not focused directly upon the suffering-mood—as in the cases of pain and other bodily ailments—but rather, upon the things that the mood presents to us: not only our bodies, but also other things in the world that prevent us from having a good life and being the persons we want to be. Such suffering may in many cases be transformed or at least mitigated by a person’s identifying and changing her core life values and in such a manner reinterpreting her life story to become an easier and more rewarding one to live under the present circumstances. (shrink)

A large slice of contemporary phenomenology of medicine has been devoted to developing an account of health and illness that proceeds from the first-person perspective when attempting to understand the ill person in contrast and connection to the third-person perspective on his/her diseased body. A proof that this phenomenological account of health and illness, represented by philosophers, such as Drew Leder, Kay Toombs, Havi Carel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kevin Aho, and Fredrik Svenaeus, is becoming increasingly influential in philosophy of medicine and (...) medical ethics is the criticism of it that has been voiced in some recent studies. In this article, two such critical contributions, proceeding from radically different premises and backgrounds, are discussed: Jonathan Sholl’s naturalistic critique and Talia Welsh’s Nietzschean critique. The aim is to defend the phenomenological account and clear up misunderstandings about what it amounts to and what we should be able to expect from it. (shrink)

This paper builds a three-part argument in favour of a more transcendentally focused form of ‘postphenomenology’ than is currently practised in philosophy of technology. It does so by problematising two key terms, ‘constitution’ and ‘postphenomenology’, then by arguing in favour of a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach that draws on the work of Foucault, Derrida, and, in particular, Deleuze. Part one examines ‘constitution’, as it moves from the context of Husserl’s phenomenology to Ihde and Verbeek’s ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that the term tends (...) towards different senses in these contexts, and that this renders its sense more problematic than the work of Ihde and Verbeek makes it appear. Part two examines ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that putatively ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze may be better characterised as ‘postphenomenologists’, and that approaching them in this way may allow better access to their work from a philosophy of technology perspective. Part three argues for a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach to philosophy of technology. In doing so, it argues for a rewriting of contemporary philosophy of technology’s political constitution: since an ‘empirical turn’ in the 1990s, I argue, philosophy of technology has been too narrowly focused on ‘empirical’ issues of fact, and not focused enough on ‘transcendental’ issues concerning conditions for these facts. (shrink)

In his argument for the possibility of knowledge of spatial objects, in the Transcendental Deduction of the B-version of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes a crucial distinction between space as “form of intuition” and space as “formal intuition.” The traditional interpretation regards the distinction between the two notions as reflecting a distinction between indeterminate space and determinations of space by the understanding, respectively. By contrast, a recent influential reading has argued that the two notions can be fused into (...) one and that space as such is first generated by the understanding through an act of synthesis of the imagination. Against this reading, this article argues that a key characteristic of space as a form of intuition is its nonconceptual unity, which defines the properties of space and is as such necessarily independent of determination by the understanding through the transcendental synthesis of the imagination. The conceptual unity that the understanding prescribes to the manifold in intuition, by means of the categories, defines the formal intuition. Furthermore, this article argues that it is the sui generis, nonconceptual unity of space, when takenas a unity for the understanding by means of conceptual determination, that first enables geometric knowledge and knowledge of spatially located particulars. (shrink)

Ong and Derrida are concerned with presence—for Ong the presence of the other; for Derrida the presence of the signified. These seemingly disparate epistemological meanings of 'presence' actually share some striking similarities, but differ about how reason should be figured, that is, what metaphors should be used to conceptualize reason. This disagreement is fundamentally about what Ong called 'analogues for intellect.' After describing the history of Ong's and Derrida's concept of presence, we indicate how the ethical and religious implications Ong (...) and Derrida draw from 'presence' proceed logically from the analogues for intellect that each assumes. We will conclude, first, that these implications reveal a conflict of traditions—philosophy and rhetoric—but we also indicate how Ong's own rhetoric may permit dialogue between traditions. (shrink)

Magda B. Arnold's theory of emotion is examined from three historical viewpoints. First, I look backward from Arnold to precursors of her theory of emotion in 19th century introspectionist psychology and in classical evolutionary psychology. I try to show that Arnold can be regarded as belonging intellectually to the cognitive tradition of emotion theorising that originated in Brentano and his students, and that she was also significantly influenced by McDougall's evolutionary view of emotion. Second, I look forward from Arnold to (...) the influence she had on Richard S. Lazarus, the theorist who deserves the most credit for popularising the appraisal approach to emotion. Here, I try to document that Lazarus’ theory of the stress emotions preserved most assumptions of Arnold's theory. Finally, I look back at Arnold from today's perspective and address points of success of the appraisal paradigm in emotion psychology, as well as some remaining problems. (shrink)

This philosophical anthropology tries to explore the basic categories of man’s being in the worlds using a special quantum meta-ontology that is introduced in the book. Quantum understanding of space and time, consciousness, or empirical/nonempirical reality elicits new questions relating to philosophical concerns such as subjectivity, free will, mind, perception, experience, dialectic, or agency. The authors have developed an inspiring theoretical framework transcending the boundaries of particular disciplines, e.g. quantum philosophy, metaphysics of consciousness, philosophy of mind, phenomenology of space and (...) time, and ontological relativity. (shrink)

At the bedside, nurses are expected to be precise when they read indications on screens and on the bodies of patients and decide on the meaning of words framed by the context of acute care. In academia, although there is no incident report to fill when we misread or misrepresent complex philosophical ideas, the consequences of inaccurate reading include misplaced epistemological claims and poor scholarship. A long and broad convention of nursing phenomenological research, in its various forms, claims a philosophical (...) grounding in the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, and other thinkers. But for nearly two decades, nurse phenomenologists' knowledge claims have been challenged by well‐informed criticisms, most notably by John Paley. At the heart of criticism lies an observation that Continental phenomenological thought is misrepresented in many nursing sources and that nursing phenomenology, both descriptive and interpretive, cannot appeal to the authority of either Husserl or Heidegger. Taking these criticisms seriously, I am asking, Is phenomenology after Paley possible? If misreading seems to be an issue, how can – or should – we read rigorously? My thinking through these questions is influenced by the ideas of Jacques Derrida. Under a condition of a play of language, of Derridian différance, when meaning is never self‐identical and never fully arrives, I suggest that one has to negotiate meanings through reading for differences. I develop this idea in relation to the methodological conventions of phenomenological nursing research and argue for a careful rereading of the whole field of phenomenological nursing research. Such rereading presupposes and necessitates interdisciplinary engagement between nursing and the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Greater familiarity with research practices of those disciplines that stress theoretical and writing rigour might make visible the limits of nursing research approaches and their quality criteria. An understanding of philosophical and theoretical works – a condition of quality scholarship – depends on our reading of both originary texts and contemporary literature from the humanities and the social sciences. This understanding, far from obliging researchers to always trace (often erroneously) their work to its philosophical roots, opens other, often more sound, methodological possibilities. (shrink)

Marx's call for a materialism capable of engaging reality as ‘sensuous human activity’ opens a question about the role of representation in relation to data. Images have increasingly been seen as significant forms of data in the history of education. Derrida's theory of the spectre—a variation on the positions established in his earlier works on the trace, the supplement and differance—offers a way of rethinking visual images, their relations with existing discourses of knowledge and with positioned subjects who makes sense. (...) Two early twentieth-century photographs are explored here in relation to ideas derived from Derrida as an exercise in the philosophy of representation. (shrink)

The paper examines the evolution of Marek Siemek’s “dialogical principle.” The early version of this principle, sketched in the essay “Dialogue and Its Myth”, meets several criteria of the phenomenology of dialogue and even hermeneutics. However, Siemek has continued to change his concept of dialogue over the decades. In his recent book, Freedom, Reason, Intersubjectivity, he explores transcendental preconditions of free and reasonable activism, i.e., the Fichtean “limitative synthesis” of I and Non-I and its applications in social interrelations. He no (...) longer considers the empirical, anthropological, and phenomenological aspects of dialogics and mutual recognition. He also replaces mutuality with reciprocity, asymmetry with symmetry, and phenomenology with transcendentalism. (shrink)

The issue of whether the phenomenology presented in Ideen I was a metaphysical realism or an idealism came to the fore almost immediately upon its publication. The present essay is an examination of the relation of Gustav Shpet, one of Husserl’s students from the Göttingen years, to this issue via his understanding of phenomenology and, particularly, of the phenomenological reduction, as shown principally in his early published writings. For Shpet, phenomenology employs essential intuition without regard to experiential intuition. If we (...) look on transcendental idealism as the label for this methodology, which disregards but does not deny either the empirical or its correlative species of intuition, then Shpet was such an idealist, all the while adhering to a metaphysical realism. In this way, Shpet could proclaim phenomenology to be the fundamental philosophical discipline without precluding the possibility of other philosophical disciplines insofar as they were conducted in relation to consciousness taken not as the “possession” of a human individual, but eidetically and thus not a “possession.”. (shrink)