This paper carries out an intensive study of Heidegger's famous reflection on the word dao and of his citations from the Daodejing, with the purpose of elucidating his complex relation with Daoist thinking. First I examine whether dao could be said to be a guideword for Heidegger's path of thinking. Then I discuss Heidegger's citations, in six places of his writings, from five chapters of the Daodejing, by situating them in the immediate textual context as well as against the broad (...) background of the fundamental presuppositions and orientations of Heidegger and Laozi's thinking. My examination of Heidegger's citations from the Daodejing has for the first time gathered together all the relevant materials discovered so far. (shrink)

Devoted to the late Paul Virilio (1932–2018) and in the advent of debates surrounding the Anthropocene and in light of corresponding changes to conceptions of scale and image, this paper attempts to extrapolate a Virilian pedagogy of the image. It is Virilio’s work which remains timely and singularly fecund in this area and it is for this reason that it may help to shape a new pedagogy of scale and image. This may allow us to better grasp the decentring of (...) human conceptions of time and space as we come to better understand the vastness of cosmological space and time. To demonstrate this, his work is read in tandem with Félix Guattari’s work on ecosophy and Bernard Stiegler’s work on negentropy to show how Virilio’s critique of the diminishment of perspective diverges from their respective approaches to forge an arresting pedagogy of the image vis-à-vis geographical and ecological conceptions of Earthly spatial and temporal scale. The perceived poverty of Earthly perspective is read in the light of a scalar perspectivism which understands the enormity of the universe and humanity’s microscopic place within it. As Virilio is concerned with the changes in scale which manifest with the onset of globalization, the question arises as to how an applied dromology (that is the philosophy of speed) may work alongside both Guattari’s schizoanalytic and ecosophical research and Stiegler's pharmacology of the image in a way that mounts a robust and unique critique of the mental pollution of the image as such. Here the pedagogical implications are significant as the diminishment of world perspective for Virilio – a consequence of the singular global time of capital – devastates our understanding of the cosmos. This understanding of the poverty of scale and perspective is contrasted with a multiscalar approach to the world, which is itself searching for a philosophical and pedagogical response to the reduction of the world to nothing. (shrink)

Intersubjectivity is a key concept in phenomenology as well as in psychology and especially in psychotherapy, given the reliance of the therapeutic process on its location in relationship. While psychotherapy encompasses a range of what Owen terms “talking therapies”, this paper focuses mainly on the Freudian model of psychoanalysis and its connection with Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology respectively. Freud’s recognition that symptoms have meaning, and that the methodical disclosing of their meaning needs to be guided by the experience of the (...) patient, accords with the emphasis of phenomenology on empathic attunement to the lived experience of the other. Insofar as the orientation of psychoanalysis towards methodically disclosing meaning gives it a hermeneutic dimension, it is also compatible methodologically with the interpretative mode of phenomenology. While Karlsson identifies seven centrally significant “points of connection” between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, Thompson suggests that “psychoanalysis is already phenomenological in its latency …. Indeed, Freud’s principles of technique make little sense outside a phenomenological context”.Can it thus be claimed that, in the quest for intersubjectivity, sufficient common ground exists for meaningful dialogue between psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and phenomenology in general, and between Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in particular? That is what this paper seeks to explore.The paper proceeds from pointing to the ambiguity of the Freudian mode as simultaneously natural scientific and hermeneutic to exploring the fundamental points of difference and commonality between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and in particular the significance of the role of the unconscious and intentionality in psychoanalysis and phenomenology respectively, as well as the orientation of both towards greater understanding of one’s being in the world. Ultimately, however, the authors conclude that, while the points of commonality would seem conducive to dialogue between the Freudian and the phenomenological in the psychotherapeutic domain, their differences in aims and approach, each shaped by a different view of humankind, continue to obstruct it. The quest for it nevertheless remains ongoing, as demonstrated not only by the academic endeavours of theoreticians such as Owen and Karlsson, but by the contemporary urge of second century psychoanalysis for a theoretically coherent turn away from the Cartesian and towards the authentically intersubjectively relational. (shrink)