The notion of coolness is connected with a broad range of different meanings that involve personal attitude, taste, fashion choices but also the recognition of uniqueness and authenticity by others. Moreover, coolness is related to self-confidence and imperturbability, as the usual historical reconstructions of its meaning show. In fact, the manifestation of subjective invulnerability is the expression of the general need to avoid any weakness that could challenge one’s own autonomy through other people’s gaze. In other words, the opposite of (...) cool is to be excessively self-conscious, too dependent on the approval of others, and to be exposed and vulnerable to external judgment. Taking cues from these different meanings, this contribution will try to argue how the need for individual autonomy, social recognition and aesthetic fulfilment are closely intertwined in the practices of coolness, defined as acts of “self-construction” and, in particular, as aesthetic self-fashioning. From this perspective, it will be argued that even the most frivolous search for coolness as a stylistic attitude in everyday’s aesthetic domain like fashion, consumption and lifestyle, plays a role in the dynamics of self-assertion and becomes an instrument for recognition and autonomy. (shrink)

Purpose: The main purpose of this article is to show that the paradigm of viewing the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness in analytic philosophy makes it a pseudo-problem rather than a ‘hard problem’. The objectives of this research included showing the reasons for the authors’ thesis, demonstrating the irreducibility of consciousness as a special layer of reality, and proposing a way to overcome these difficulties. Design/methodology/approach: In this article, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is viewed from the standpoints of the transcendental-phenomenological (...) and dialectical approaches and is analyzed through the prism of the principle of onto-gnoseological uncertainty. Findings: It is shown that the way of formulating the ‘hard problem’ in the analytical philosophical tradition inevitably makes it a pseudo-problem. At the same time, with the consistent realization of the principle of onto-gnoseological uncertainty, the antinomy of solutions to the problems of consciousness is eliminated, which opens up a way to a productive solution of problems related to the interpretation of consciousness both in natural sciences and in philosophy. Originality/value : This research reveals the methodological potential of applying the principle of onto-gnoseological uncertainty to the problems that arise in modern philosophy in connection with the achievements of natural sciences. (shrink)

There are many possible definitions of “technology” and I will discuss some of these in this book. However, in this introduction let me use a definition of Svante Lindqvist who defines technology very intuitively as “those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants, which produce change in the material world.” He says also “the distinction between human “wants” and more limited human “needs” is crucial, for we do not use technology only to satisfy our essential material requirements.” Consequently, from (...) this perspective, a technology that is “broken” could be defined as those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants that are intended to produce changes in the material world that either do not manage to satisfy these wants or do not produce changes in the material world, or both. This is the third edition, updated October 2015. (shrink)

Arendt claims that evil is banal and its perpetrators merely shallow. Deliberate evil she takes to be extremely rare. However, nonrare examples of deliberate evil, whose aim is to spoil one's story, abound in everyday life. Arendt also makes forgiveness personal, not requiring repentance. This prompts a consideration of certain personal relations among philosophers. Heidegger's relation to Husserl shows a betrayal of teacher by student. His seductive and philosophic power over Arendt, a betrayal of student by teacher, should not be (...) dismissed in terms of reductive Freudian notions. Faced with a real feminine predicament, Arendt made the wrong choices: in her exoneration of Heidegger, her report on the Eichmann trial, and her exculpatory doctrine of evil. (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)

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

In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence as its instrument, (...) Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of “realistic and positive” and “idealistic and moral” arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of “loving, knowing ignorance,” a type of “arrogant perception” that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of “arrogant” as well as of “loving” perception and presents an explanation of “loving, knowing ignorance.” The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, and (...) María Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of “‘world’-traveling” may help us deal with “loving, knowing ignorance.” Ultimately, the author suggests that we need to become aware of instances of “loving, knowing ignorance,” especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's commitment to diversity. (shrink)

In this essay, Miriam argues for a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the radical feminist theory of sex-right and compulsory heterosexuality. Against critics of radical feminism, she argues that when understood from a phenomenological’ hermeneutic perspective, such theory does not foreclose female sexual agency. On the contrary, men's right of sexual access to women and girls is part of our background understanding of heteronormativity, and thus integral to the lived experience of female sexual agency.

PhaenEx, Vol 1, No 1 (2006) Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Intertwining and Objectification Dorothea OlkowskiIn chapter four of The Visible and the Invisible, titled ``The Intertwining -- The Chiasm,'' Merleau-Ponty considers the relation between the body as sensible, which is to say ``objective,'' and the body as sentient, that is, as ``phenomenal'' body. He makes this inquiry in the context of interrogating the access of such a sensible-sentient or objective-phenomenal body to Being. ``Objectivity'' and the objective body, as Merleau-Ponty defines it in (...) the Phenomenology of Perception, are to be determined in relation to experience. Objectivity requires knowing how it is possible for determinate shapes to be available for experience at all. But the possibility of determinate shapes is also called into question by Merleau-Ponty insofar as the body is experienced as a point of view on things; thus every body would experience a different point of view, even though things are given as abstract elements of one total world. Since the two elements form a system, an intertwining, in which each moment (that of a body with a particular point of view and that of things in the totality of their world) is immediately expressive of each other, objectivity would seem to be hard to achieve. The relationship between body and things, point of view and world, if the relata continually express one another, would appear to be anything but determinate and the question of how objectivity is possible remains unanswered. This essay will explore this question in the light of Merleau-Ponty's (mis-) reading of Henri Bergson and from the point of view of Sartre's original expression of the relation of intertwining. (shrink)

This paper argues that an essential and often overlooked feature of jealousy is the sense that one is entitled to the affirmation provided by the love relationship. By turning to Sartre's and Beauvoir's analyses of love and its distortions, I will show how the public nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one's sense of self can trigger (...) anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one's self-value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person's freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self-perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person's psychic structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love. (shrink)

To study animal welfare empirically we need an objective basis for deciding when an animal is suffering. Suffering includes a wide range ofunpleasant emotional states such as fear, boredom, pain, and hunger. Suffering has evolved as a mechanism for avoiding sources ofdanger and threats to fitness. Captive animals often suffer in situations in which they are prevented from doing something that they are highly motivated to do. The an animal is prepared to pay to attain or to escape a situation (...) is an index ofhow the animal about that situation. Withholding conditions or commodities for which an animal shows (i.e., for which it continues to work despite increasing costs) is very likely to cause suffering. In designing environments for animals in zoos, farms, and laboratories, priority should be given to features for which animals show inelastic demand. The care ofanimals can thereby be based on an objective, animal-centered assessment of their needs. (shrink)

We argue that the projective geometrical component of the Projective Consciousness Model can account for key aspects of pre-reflective self-consciousness and can relate PRSC intelligibly to another signal feature of subjectivity: perspectival character or point of view. We illustrate how the projective geometrical versions of the concepts of duality, reciprocity, polarity, closedness, closure, and unboundedness answer to salient aspects of the phenomenology of PRSC. We thus show that the same mathematics that accounts for the statics and dynamics of perspectival character (...) also accounts for PRSC. More generally, we argue that introducing higher-level geometrical concepts into the theory of PRSC, and into the theory of consciousness broadly, as the PCM does, promises to break longstanding theoretical impasses and dialectical stalemates. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article shows how the “problem of moral luck” and Sartre's concept of “bad faith” are mutually illuminating, since both have to do with confusions about how much we control, or are controlled by, our situations. I agree with three recent proposals that the problem of moral luck results from certain epistemic malfunctions. However, I argue that the problem cannot be dissolved by overcoming these malfunctions because they are rooted in bad faith. Against the currently dominant interpretation, I argue (...) that bad faith is an inescapable condition of human being because, while we are both free and factical, we can only exist as one or the other at once, thus always keeping an aspect of our nature hidden from ourselves. (shrink)

Do you know your own desires in some way that other people cannot know them? Richard Moran claims that his influential theory of first-person authority over beliefs and intentions can also cover desires. However, his deliberative model can apply to desire only if one already has some other way of knowing one’s own desires. Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of pure reflection, on the other hand, portrays a direct epistemic access to one’s own desires that can ground fundamental first-person authority over desires (...) and intentions. (shrink)

Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a different conceptual resource in order to be able to grant some degree of moral consideration (...) to some intelligent social robots: it sketches a novel argument for moral consideration based on social relations. It is shown that to further develop this argument we need to revise our existing ontological and social-political frameworks. It is suggested that we need a social ecology, which may be developed by engaging with Western ecology and Eastern worldviews. Although this relational turn raises many difficult issues and requires more work, this paper provides a rough outline of an alternative approach to moral consideration that can assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purposes. (shrink)

Ought you to cultivate your own virtue? Various philosophers have argued that there is something suspect about directing one’s ethical attention towards oneself in this way. These arguments can be divided between those that deem aiming at virtue for its own sake to be narcissistic and those that consider aiming at virtue for the sake of good behaviour to involve a kind of doublethink. Underlying them all is the assumption that epistemic access to one’s own character requires an external point (...) of view that is, in principle, available to anyone. If cultivating virtue is concerned with forming one’s dispositions, as these appear to the external point of view, then these charges of narcissism and doublethink can be brought. However, there is another kind of access to one’s own character. Since character is manifest in the practical structure of experience, reflection on that practical structure itself is reflection on one’s character. Neither the charge of narcissism nor the charge of doublethink can be brought against this phenomenological cultivation of the practical structure of experience. Although not sufficient alone to provide all the information required for the task, phenomenological reflection is essential to the ethical cultivation of virtue. (shrink)

This paper explores certain facets of Christine Korsgaard’s paper, ‘Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good’. Korsgaard’s account requires that an animal be able to experience ‘herself trying to get or avoid something’. The claim that animals possess such self-awareness is regarded by many as problematic and, if this is correct, it would jeopardize Korsgaard’s account. This paper argues that animals can, in fact, be aware of themselves in the way required by Korsgaard’s account.

Fitness and recreation centres populate today’s modern urban communities and cater to a wide range of people seeking health, fitness and social connection through physical activity. While women’s experiences in these spaces have received some scholarly attention from feminist scholars and scholars of the body, little research has explored women’s lived experiences of the change room. In this paper, I argue that everyday spaces such as change rooms and locker rooms are important spaces in which social understandings of the female (...) body manifest. In such spaces, the materiality of the body and the social meanings ascribed to the female body are illuminated and negotiated by those who inhabit and move through them. Using Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as theoretical guides, I discuss how it is for women to see and be seen in a public change room, and how these spaces illuminate the complex relationship women have with their bodies in contemporary society. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch a reconstruction of the basic psychoanalytic conception of the mind in terms of two historical resources: the conception of the subject developed in post-Kantian idealism, and Spinoza's laws of the affects in Part Three of the Ethics. The former, I suggest, supplies the conceptual basis for the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, while the latter defines the type of psychological causality of psychoanalytic explanations. The imperfect fit between these two elements, I claim, is reflected in (...) familiar conceptual difficulties surrounding psychoanalytic theory and explanation. (shrink)

I examine the phenomenological philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre as possible responses to contemporary studies of interpersonal relatedness in cognitive science, especially the experimental studies of infant's imitating simple facial gestures of adults. I discuss the implications and the challenges raised by the experimental studies to the dominant phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, but also envision how phenomenology may help to interpret the findings about infantile imitation in ways that favor the embodied perceptual connectedness between the self and the other, without (...) recourse to the inner private mind postulate endorsed by the theory of mind and shared by the experimental researchers of imitation. (shrink)

In this paper I consider contemporary expressions of what Freud called the primal crime and collapse of paternal law through an exploration of the cinema of the Danish-American Director Nicolas Winding Refn. Introducing the paper I outline Freud’s theory of the law, crime, and civilization, where social order and its transgression become caught in an endless cycle, before moving on to explore Winding Refn’s cinema. Following this work, where I centrally show how Freud founds the law upon structures of the (...) family and criminality, I consider Winding Refn’s early Danish films, specifically the Pusher trilogy and Bleeder, in order to show how he imagines the collapse of law and order into crime and violence through stories of the ruined family. Moving on, I explore the consequences of this situation through reference to Winding Refn’s middle period films, Bronson and Valhalla Rising, where first crime completely dominates the law, and second this situation conjures the idea of escape from the dystopia of violence and crime into some other utopian space. Finally, I explore Winding Refn’s later works, Drive, Only God Forgives, and The Neon Demon. In these films Winding Refn imagines the ruins of the family and the oedipal law of the father who is no longer on the scene and tells the story of the desperate orphaned child who grows up without the socio-symbolic structures in place in tell them how to live. At this point Winding Refn’s crime system is more or less entirely normalised with the result that it generates the idea of utopian possibility in order to imagine potential escape from the nihilistic horror of an asocial system where exchange is everything. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is an unprecedented task to interpret Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a fundamental philosophy of happiness. Although happiness has been discussed in many psychologies, Csikszentmihalyi’s positive psychology defines happiness as “flow”, a psychic state of ongoing immersion guided by intrinsic motivations and rewards. In this paper, I interpret our transcendental consciousness as a radical “flow” maker and claim that in our transcendental life, happiness is what we ourselves are. Then, I propose this not only as an appeal to a change (...) of attitude for happiness, but also as a deep hermeneutics of the mental skills and activity designs suggested by positive psychology. In this way, worldly happiness dictums can be profoundly re-examined. Understood as such, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology leaves us the task of how to make a concrete form of qualitative or hermeneutical research on happiness out of it. (shrink)