What did Heidegger learn and fail to learn from Laozi and Zhuangzi? This book reconstructs Heidegger's philosophy through its engagement with Daoist and Asian philosophy and offers a Daoist transformation of Heidegger on things, nothingness, and freedom. PDF includes the introduction, bibliography, and index.

Este ensayo practica una hermenéutica a Totalidad e infinitoa partir de cinco epígrafes, abocados todos a explorar los múltiples sentidos de la propuesta levinasianaen torno al fundamentotrascendental de lo ético.El primer apartado busca analizar la relación entre lo que Lévinas designa como lafaz del sery el concepto de totalidad; en el epígrafe siguiente se explicita la diferencia existente, en el interior de la comprensión temporal de lo total, entre lohistóricoy loescatológico; en eltercerepígrafe se analizan los móviles que llevan a Lévinas (...) a sustituir lo metafísico por lo ético, revelando a este segundo saber como filosofíaprimera; y, finalmente, el cuarto y el quinto epígrafe quedan dedicados a entender dos conceptos que, entrelazados, condensan la matriz conceptual desde donde Lévinas acentúa la originalidad de su propuesta: el rostro del Otroy la idea de infinito. (shrink)

(English:) The article introduces conspiracy beliefs and considers the most relevant literature in the field. The main purpose of the article is phenomenological: it proposes to understand conspiracy beliefs within the broader genre of what I call general conceptual beliefs (or simply, general beliefs), whose central features are big issues, logical-conceptual fallacies, pseudorationality, bad faith, and monological bias. I claim that general beliefs are functional to a motivationally biased and inherently dishonest communication (the same one that conspiracy narratives share with (...) political extremism, religious fundamenta-lism and other eccentric belief systems), which is essentially conceived for practical and self-representational purposes (not for knowledge). The article argues against the mere stigmatization of this phenomenon and rather seeks to understand it by looking at a broader and murkier region of human experience, for which we are all responsible in some way. -/- (Castellano:) El artículo introduce al análisis de las creencias conspirativas y considera la literatura más relevante sobre el tema. El objetivo del escrito es fenomenológico: entender las creencias conspirativas colocándolas en un género más amplio, las creencias conceptuales generales (o, simple-mente, creencias generales), cuyas carac-terísticas esenciales son: grandes temas, falacias lógico-conceptuales, pseudoracionalidad, mala fe y tendencia monológi-ca. Las creencias generales son funcionales a una comunicación sesgada y tendencialmente deshonesta, la misma que las his-torias conspirativas comparten con ex-tremismos políticos, fundamentalismos religiosos y otros sistemas de creencias excéntricos, cuya finalidad es eminentemente práctica y autorepresentativa (no teorética). El artículo se opone a la mera estigmatización del fenómeno y trata más bien de comprenderlo, observando una región más amplia y turbia de la experiencia humana, de la que todos somos responsables de alguna manera. (shrink)

Selbsttäuschung scheint ein alltägliches Phänomen zu sein. Wir nehmen an Anderen wahr, wie sie mehr oder weniger bewusst einer Einsicht ausweichen, die sie nicht wahrhaben wollen, und die meisten von uns können sich an Situationen erinnern, in denen sie sich selbst etwas vorgemacht haben. Wir können also Beispiele für Selbsttäuschung benennen, unser begriffliches Verständnis von Selbsttäuschung aber ist diffus, und der Versuch, das Phänomen aus philosophischer Perspektive begrifflich genau zu fassen, führt leicht zu starken Spannungen, für die bis heute keine (...) allgemein akzeptierte Lösung gefunden wurde. Auch die Frage, wie Selbsttäuschung prudentiell und moralisch zu bewerten ist, ist kontrovers. (shrink)

The article investigates the concept of self-illness ambiguity (SIA), which was recently re-introduced in the philosophy of psychiatry literature. SIA refers to situations in which patients are uncertain about whether features (symptoms, signs) of their illness should be attributed to their illness or to their ‘selves’. Identification of these features belongs to a more encompassing process of self- definition and -interpretation. The paper introduces a distinction between the notions of self-relatedness, self-referentiality (or: implicit self-signification), self-awareness and self-interpretation. Each of these (...) notions offers a different perspective on SIA, but these perspectives do not exclude one another. A further distinction will be developed between primary, secondary and tertiary forms of self-referentiality. The practical and conceptual relevance of these distinctions will be illustrated with case vignettes. Throughout the paper our findings will placed in the context of other philosophical work on the self, especially in the field of narrative theory (Ricoeur), phenomenology (Ratcliffe) and philosophy of mind. The article closes with a brief discussion about the appropriateness of the term ambiguity and the potential of SIA as concept in the context of clinical psychiatry. Directions for future work will be indicated. (shrink)

In _The Visible and the Invisible_ Merleau-Ponty develops a notion of ‘sensible ideas’ that conceives general meaning as inseparable from its realization in sensible particulars. Such ideas – exemplified by music – are to capture the specificity of the meaning produced by embodied agency and serve as the foundation of all cognition. This article argues that, although Merleau-Ponty overgeneralizes their application, sensible ideas are philosophically important in enabling better understanding of the diverse forms and functions embodied-embedded practices and cognition can (...) take. It begins by outlining Merleau-Ponty’s conception of sensible ideas and showing how this late ‘ontological’ view takes up and refines themes from his earlier works. It then assesses sensible ideas’ assumed foundational role by considering several embodied practices (mathematics, music, painting), arguing that this does not hold generally and that painting better exemplifies sensible ideas than music. I show that whether a practice is accurately described by sensible ideas depends on how it relates the particular and general, and that sensible ideas have a distinctive philosophical role in understanding the non-identity-based meaning constitution characteristic of some embodied-embedded practices. Finally, a comparison with Kant’s aesthetic ideas is used to clarify the close but non-necessary relation between sensible ideas and art. (shrink)

The present PhD dissertation aims to examine the relation between modality and change in Aristotle’s metaphysics. -/- On the one hand, Aristotle supports his modal realism (i.e., worldly objects have modal properties - potentialities and essences - that ground the ascriptions of possibility and necessity) by arguing that the rejection of modal realism makes change inexplicable, or, worse, banishes it from the realm of reality. On the other hand, the Stagirite analyses processes by means of modal notions (‘change is the (...) actuality of what is virtual insofar as it is virtual’). In other words: to grasp what change is, one has to resort to the modal idiom of potentialities, while the fact that there is change is indicative of the fact that nature is full of modal properties. -/- Aristotle’s modal and kinetic realism finds a negative in the figure of the Megaric Diodorus Kronus. The polemical situation of Greek philosophy has indeed the dialectical advantage of not opposing the Aristotelian position to a sui generis straw man. Both in its reduction of modal judgements to temporal quantifications and in its dissolution of the reality of the state-of-being-in-motion in favour of a cinematographic view of processes, the philosophical figure of reductionist antirealism embodied by Diodorus constitutes an alternative that takes the opposite view of Aristotle’s realism. -/- The present study is structured as a discussion between these two positions. In the face of Diodorus’ antirealist challenges, Aristotle articulates modal and kinetic considerations: the answers he gives to Diodorus’ puzzles thus provide valuable insight into his metaphysics. Moreover, the examination of Aristotle’s and Diodorus’ metaphysics, because of their insight and originality, will not fail to interest the philosopher concerned with the metaphysical foundations of modern physics, insofar as the entanglement between modalities and processes is nowadays at the core of mechanics (phase spaces, path integrals, etc.). (shrink)

Central to the philosophical practice is the application of philosophers' work by philosophical practitioners to inspire, educate, and guide their clients. For example, in Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), a philosophical practice methodology developed by Elliot Cohen, philosophical practitioners help their clients to find an uplifting philosophy that promotes a guiding virtue that acts as an antidote to unrealistic and often self-defeating conclusions derived from irrational premises. In this essay, I will explore the existential ethics of Simone de Beauvoir, a French existentialist (...) philosopher, and writer. I present the argument that Beauvoir’s existential ethics, more specifically her articulation of ambiguity, can act as an uplifting philosophy, as per LBT methodology, which could be of value to philosophical practitioners to inspire, educate and guide their counselees for confronting problems of living. I will present my discussion of Beauvoir’s existential ethics in the context of ideological obsession and ideology addiction, which is often supported by the reasoning that underlies the cardinal fallacy of existential perfectionism. I will argue that Beauvoir’s existential ethics could serve as a prophylactic for ideological obsession and ideology addiction. I will also suggest that LBT may be particularly suited when addressing the self-defeating, unrealistic conclusions derived from irrational premises in practical reasoning that may fuel ideological obsession because it could provide a methodology to address irrational beliefs in a way that could mitigate the fragmentation anxiety that may arise when relinquishing maladaptive self-object organizations. (shrink)

Although it is a relatively new phenomenon, the most popular descriptions of post-truth operate within the boundaries of the classical dichotomy between emotion and reason that dates back to Plato’s Phaedrus: both, to some extent, view emotions as impediments to knowledge and our ability to live morally upstanding lives (248a-b). Post-truth, which is seen as a threat to reason, social cohesion, and fact-based knowledge claims, is either viewed as the outcome of the failure of our cognitive apparatus, or a consequence (...) of our unchecked thirst for stories that provoke dramatic feelings. From a feminist point of view, this should give us pause, since the arguments used to dismiss post-truth resemble those that dismissed women’s experiences and emotions as idiosyncratic or irrational. Have post-truth scholars been too hasty in their judgment of emotion-based knowledge claims? In this essay, I explore the transcendental role of emotion in its relationship to epistemic knowledge claims and argue that emotion should be given a more primordial status in the analysis of post-factuality. I do this by exploring the psychoanalytic and phenomenological analysis of affect, especially Sara Ahmed’s feminist phenomenology of embodiment. (shrink)

"Join up, they said! It’s a man’s life, they said!"Cartesian Lineage and Tradition in Being and Nothingness While Descartes is literally present in 27 of 722 pages that Being and Nothingness counts, Hegel appears in 43, Husserl in 46 and Heidegger in 47 of them. Without asserting, and thus without infirming the obvious influence of these three German thinkers on it, one year after his essay of phenomenological ontology, it is nevertheless the filiation and the manner of only the French (...) philosopher that Sartre claims in front of Pierre Lorquet. So, which relative and which model is Descartes for him? And what relationship does Sartre exactly maintain with him? Following the track of the latter in the 1943 treatise, I want to ensure that “the individual of existentialism is Descartes’s true heir”. (shrink)

What forms of consciousness can the subject have of her body in action? This is a recurrent issue in contemporary research on skilled movement and expertise, and according to a widespread view, the body makes itself inconspicuous in performance in favour of the object or goal that the activity is directed to. However, this attitude to consciousness in bodily performance seems unsatisfying for an understanding of skilled action, and the work of several researchers can be seen as responding to this (...) view: Montero, Legrand, Ravn and others in the philosophy of expertise and of dance have developed various notions of consciousness and cognition to account for the mindful processes at play in performance. Two related questions can be distinguished here: 1. Is there an inherent conflict between skilled action and at least more than marginal awareness of that action, or is it possible – and even desirable – to reflect on our own performance without considerably impeding on it? 2. What forms of consciousness pertaining to the body in action must we distinguish in order to answer the first question? This paper gives an overview of this discussion, focusing on the second issue, although the first will come into play in so far as it is linked with the latter question. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of bodily reflection and on dancers’ descriptions, I show that there is, in phenomenological terms, a bodily level of reflection: a fully conscious and exploratory activity that is led by the skilled body, and that is explicitly aimed at by many performers. (shrink)

In this article, I compare the ways in which Baudrillard and Heidegger seek to bring attention to the importance of death for our personal existential situation which has now become repressed in conceptions of existence and society. Heidegger critiques public conceptions of death that serve to cover up its importance. Less well known is that, somewhat in parallel fashion, Baudrillard charts a ‘genealogy’ of the ‘extradition’ of the dead from the centre of the social and he claims that we live (...) currently in a death denying society. This reduces the meaning of our own impending deaths. However, unlike Heidegger, Baudrillard’s ‘genealogical’ critique of the exclusion of death in modern society is not a one-way dismissal because he proposes an alternative social role for death in the form of ‘primitive symbolic exchange’. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is twofold. It first seeks to prove that the notion of facticity in Heidegger’s work saw a major change after Being and Time. While several studies did deal with facticity as it appeared before the magnus opus and show the influence it had on the latter’s development, hardly any have dealt with what happens to facticity after Sein und Zeit. This is mostly because facticity, as it imploded, took on different names which fall under the (...) heading of ground-attunements. Secondly, I will show the ambivalent character of this new facticity, where many essential notions, such as thrownness, truth, attunement and guilt, shifted meanings, sometimes almost imperceptibly or surreptitiously. I will show that this ambivalence comes from the fact that the shift in question allowed for an opening of facticity while at the same time bringing in restrictive limits, and thus a closing-off of certain essential issues. This has left several adumbrated questions, such as responsibility, in abeyance. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the disgust of which Sartre's “nausea” is an expression, by identifying its ontological significance and its role within Sartre's thought. Particular attention is devoted to the phenomenological themes of vision and conversion of the gaze, in the strict correlation they have with disgust. My claim is that Sartre, in his early philosophical work, elaborated a response to the Heideggerian problematic of the correlation between Befindlichkeit and Faktizität. To verify such claim, my paper (...) will analyse the differences between Sartrean and Heideggerian thought with regard to these concepts, and show the extent of the influence that Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas and Aurel Kolnai had on Sartre. (shrink)

The question of the identity or persistence of the self through time may be interesting for philosophers, but it is hardly a burning question for most individuals. On the other hand, the question of who I am, what or who I take myself to be, can be a vital, even burning question for most of us at some time in our lives. This is the notion of personal identity I take up in this paper. It is an identity that is (...) not pre-given a priori but is always in some sense an open question, never completely decided. Here the narrative conception of self is relevant, since it is often a question of what story or kind of story my identity instantiates. This notion of personal identity is inherently temporal, but not in the sense of temporal persistence but of temporal coherence of past, present and future. And here the question of personal identity is inevitably social, since it is largely a question of what group I identify myself with, what social role I take myself to embody. And what complications occur when I identify myself with more than one group? Here many social conflicts and also intrapersonal conflicts have their source. My topic thus turns on ideas of personal identity that are reflected in the popular expressions “identity crisis” and “identity politics.”. (shrink)

The Internet was born in 1960’s, then Internet ethics appeared as a branch of information ethics. It seems, however, our status on the Net is not yet scrutinized. We investigate this problem with the help of philosophers like Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty, and Austin.

Husserl’s transcendental reduction admits of two motivations: the general methodological ban on begging the question, and the principle that a typology of objects ought to be based on a typology of my ways of cognizing them. As Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ agrees with the ‘linguistic phenomenology’ of many analytic philosophers in being at bottom an effort to understand what precisely we mean to say by asserting that there ‘exists’ a ‘consciousness-independent’ or ‘transcendent’ world, the ‘residue’ of transcendental reduction is my subjective (...) consciousness. My cognitive approaches to the latter and to that of somebody else are not only entirely different but ‘complementary’ in the sense of Bohr’s. In the course of searching for an identity criterion for temporal entities lacking a spatial localisation in the world, we can show that the allegedly noetic phenomenon of, say, my now seeing a cat is a noema, to wit, the cat-as-now-beingseen-by-me-in-such-and-such-a-manner. There is no sound base for postulating, over and above the noematic nature of my consciousness, a second, noetic, aspect thereof. (shrink)

Resumen Este trabajo tiene como objetivo reflexionar sobre la tensión individuo-sociedad en la Crítica de la Razón dialéctica, última gran obra filosófica de Jean-Paul Sartre donde el autor intenta articular su perspectiva existencialista con la teoría marxista. Nuestro análisis empieza por reconstruir el contexto en el que esta obra vio la luz, para luego abordar la cuestión de la "socialidad", entre otras nociones clave vinculadas a la teoría sartreana de los conjuntos prácticos. Finalmente, de este análisis extraemos algunas conclusiones para (...) evaluar los alcances y limitaciones de la ontología social esbozada en la Crítica de la Razón dialéctica. ABSTRACT This work has the objective to reflect on the individual-society tension present in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre's last great philosophical work, where the author tries to articulate its existentialist perspective with Marxist theory. Our analysis begins by reconstructing the context in which this work saw the light and then addresses the question of "sociality", among other key notions linked to the Sartrean theory of practical ensembles. Finally, from this analysis we draw some conclusions in order to evaluate the reaches and limitations of the social ontology sketched in Critique of Dialectical Reason. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMuch recent work on self-knowledge has been inspired by the idea that the ‘transparency’ of questions about our own mental states to questions about the non-mental world holds the key to un...

Buddhism has always produced epistemological systems, and those of the Mahāyāna, in particular, always showed knowledge and perception to be inherently delusive. “Higher” forms of Buddhism have a degenerative philosophy of history according to which a sort of Golden Age was disrupted by the rise and gradual development of knowledge and the delusion inherent in it, which have reached their apex in our time – the final phase of the “Era of Darkness.” From this standpoint, this paper intends to show (...) science, in which Marcuse saw an inherent instrumental/technological interest, to have been developed by delusion and to have simultaneously furthered the development of delusion, to the point at which they begot the deadly ecological crisis proper to this concluding phase of the Era of Darkness – which reveals as such the delusion at its root, achieving the latter’s empirical reductio ad absurdum and offering us the possibility of eradicating it and thus healing our minds and, hopefully, our world. (shrink)

eSports practice designates a unique set of activities tethered to competitive, virtual environments, or worlds. This correlation between eSports practitioner and virtual world, we argue, is inadequately accounted for solely in terms of something physical or intellectual. Instead, we favor a perspective on eSports practice to be analyzed as a perceptual and embodied phenomenon. In this article, we present the phenomenological approach and focus on the embodied sensations of eSports practitioners as they cope with and perceive within their virtual worlds. (...) By approaching eSports phenomenologically, we uncover ways in which its unique forms of virtual involvement overlap with as well as differentiate themselves from traditional structures of embodiment. (shrink)

The possibilities are explored of considering nothing as the intended object of thoughts that are literally about the concept of nothing first, and thereby of nothing. Nothing, on the proposed analysis, turns out to be nothing other than the property of being an intendable object. There are propositions that look to be both true and to be about nothing in the sense of being about the concept and ultimate intended object of what is here formally defined and designated as N-nothing. (...) We have been thinking about it already in reading and understanding the meaning of this abstract. Nothing nothings, we shall assert in all seriousness and with a definite formally definable literal meaning. The concept of N-nothing in that sense is a concept with identity conditions like that of any entity, the difference being that the concept of N-nothing is a nonentity and nonexistent intended object. (shrink)

There is converging evidence that high doses of hallucinogenic drugs can produce significant alterations of self-experience, described as the dissolution of the sense of self and the loss of boundaries between self and world. This article discusses the relevance of this phenomenon, known as “drug-induced ego dissolution (DIED)”, for cognitive neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind. Data from self-report questionnaires suggest that three neuropharmacological classes of drugs can induce ego dissolution: classical psychedelics, dissociative anesthetics and agonists of the kappa opioid (...) receptor (KOR). While these substances act on different neurotransmitter receptors, they all produce strong subjective effects that can be compared to the symptoms of acute psychosis, including ego dissolution. It has been suggested that neuroimaging of DIED can indirectly shed light on the neural correlates of the self. While this line of inquiry is promising, its results must be interpreted with caution. First, neural correlates of ego dissolution might reveal the necessary neurophysiological conditions for the maintenance of the sense of self, but it is more doubtful that this method can reveal its minimally sufficient conditions. Second, it is necessary to define the relevant notion of self at play in the phenomenon of DIED. This article suggests that DIED consists in the disruption of subpersonal processes underlying the “minimal” or “embodied” self, i.e., the basic experience of being a self rooted in multimodal integration of self-related stimuli. This hypothesis is consistent with Bayesian models of phenomenal selfhood, according to which the subjective structure of conscious experience ultimately results from the optimization of predictions in perception and action. Finally, it is argued that DIED is also of particular interest for philosophy of mind. On the one hand, it challenges theories according to which consciousness always involves self-awareness. On the other hand, it suggests that ordinary conscious experience might involve a minimal kind of self-awareness rooted in multisensory processing, which is what appears to fade away during DIED. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I demonstrate the pivotal function of consciousness in the second part of Phenomenology of Perception. A new meaning of the notion avoids the alternative between empiricism and intellectualism that gives this second part its structure. Consciousness, bogged down with the world, is neither only a state, nor only an act; in other words, it conveys life, conceived by Merleau- Ponty as a ‘living’ and a ‘making.’ Thus, it has a metaphysical dimension that renders it irreducible to (...) experience. Consciousness, which I show is both ‘original’ and ‘philosophical,’ corresponds to an effective comprehension of contradiction in everything. (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)

This paper offers a reconstruction of Külpe’s theory of cognitive attitudes from the perspective of contemporary debates about cognitive phenomenology. I argue that Külpe’s view contrasts with analytic mainstream approaches to the same phenomena in at least two respects. First, Külpe claims, cognitive experiences are best described in terms of occurrent cognitive acts or attitudes toward sensory, imagistic or intellectual contents. Second, occurrent cognitive attitudes are intransitively conscious in the sense that they are experienced by, or phenomenally manifest to, the (...) subject. I call the combination of those two claims the conscious cognitive attitudes theory. I suggest that, despite some difficulties, this theory offers a worth-considering alternative to contentual and/or nonphenomenological theories of cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

If the self—as a popular view has it—is a narrative construction, if it arises out of discursive practices, it is reasonable to assume that the best possible avenue to self-understanding will be provided by those very narratives. If I want to know what it means to be a self, I should look closely at the stories that I and others tell about myself, since these stories constitute who I am. In the following I wish to question this train of thought. (...) I will argue that we need to operate with a more primitive and fundamental notion of self; a notion of self that cannot be captured in terms of narrative structures. In a parallel move, I will argue that there is a crucial dimension of what it means to be other that is equally missed by the narrative approach. I will consequently defend the view that there are limits to the kind of understanding of self and others that narratives can provide. (shrink)

This paper contrasts Sartre’s account of emotion with Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit and ‘mood’. Sartre’s account of emotion is a strong one: emotions occur only when a more neutral and colourless ‘pragmatic attitude’ is frustrated or breaks down. In this manner, emotion has to be acutely felt in and through the body, which also means that there are many circumstances and states in which we do not undergo any emotion at all. In fact, Sartre’s ‘pragmatic attitude’ is precisely the mode (...) in which we simply go about our business in an emotionless manner. This raises the question as to whether Sartre’s stark opposition between emotional and non-emotional experiences actually holds. I believe Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit and its moods are key in this regard, in that it can be used to nuance the Sartrean account. Indeed, Heidegger famously states that Dasein is never unattuned. In fact, precisely because of the ontological structure of Befindlichkeit, the world always already matters to us in one way or another, with moods being one of our primary ways of experiencing what matters and why. This discussion therefore aims to yield an account whereby faint moods and strong emotions form two poles of the same dynamic. To use a metaphor, moods are the tectonic plates that make the various emotional shakes and quakes possible in any given situation. Finally, I finish with some possible remaining tensions between the two thinkers, as well as a way to look for a possible solution. (shrink)

Nous allons analyser le passage de la conception freudienne de l'inconscient à celle de Lacan, mise en place à partir de son dernier enseignement. Dans celle-ci, l'interprétation n'est plus la seule clé de lecture de l'inconscient. Nous allons montrer l'articulation des deux inconscients avec la notion de «temps», et en quoi, ces deux différentes conceptions déterminent la direction de la cure. Dans la première, l'inconscient est plutôt envisagé à partir du temps passé, alors que dans la deuxième à partir du (...) futur: la contingence devient ainsi l'élément fondamental pour penser l'inconscient. La psychanalyse se montre alors comme une discipline qui ne vise pas seulement à déceler les mécanismes déterminés de l'inconscient, mais aussi comme pratique capable d'accueillir l'inattendu et de l'exploiter dans la cure. Vamos a analizar el pasaje de la concepción freudiana del inconsciente a la de Lacan, concebida a partir de su última enseñanza. En esta, la interpretación no es más la sola clave de lectura del inconsciente. Mostraremos la articulación de ambos inconscientes con la noción de "tiempo", y cómo estas dos diferentes concepciones determinan la dirección de la cura. En la primera, el inconsciente es sobre todo contemplado a partir del tiempo pasado, mientras que en la segunda a partir del futuro: la contingencia se hace así el elemento fundamental para pensar en el inconsciente. El psicoanálisis se muestra entonces como una disciplina que no pretende solamente descubrir los mecanismos determinados del inconsciente, sino también como práctica capaz de acoger lo inesperado y explotarlo en la cura. (shrink)

In recent debates on phenomenal consciousness, a distinction is sometimes made, after Levine (2001) and Kriegel (2009), between the “qualitative character” of an experience, i.e. the specific way it feels to the subject (e.g. blueish or sweetish or pleasant), and its “subjective character”, i.e. the fact that there is anything at all that it feels like to her. I argue that much discussion of subjective character is affected by a conflation between three different notions. I start by disentangling the three (...) notions in question, under the labels of “for-me-ness”, “me-ness” and “mineness”. Next, I argue that these notions are not equivalent; in particular, there is no conceptual implication from for-me-ness to me-ishness or mineness. Empirical considerations based on clinical cases additionally suggest that the three notions may also correspond to different properties (although the claim of conceptual non-equivalence does not depend on this further point). The aim is clarificatory, cautionary but also critical: I examine four existing arguments from subjective character that are fuelled by an undifferentiated use of the three notions, and find them to be flawed for this reason. (shrink)

This thesis wrestles with the normativity of language, its usage and its practices while questioning the signifié-signifiant reality. A structural reading of language designs its translational practices within the source-target framework, thereby essentialising its relationship en passant: everything has meaning as long as we accept the hidden framework of a universal language. Therefore, language outlined as a system of signs is a product of transcendental considerations and consequently it renders practice into a hermeticrealm in which the distinction between eidos and (...) eidolon, right and wrong, familiar and unfamiliar, grammar and gibberish makes perfect sense and in which the translation from A to B is simply a matter of transferring identities. Linguistic power neutralises through its transcendental conditioning ephemera in life and world. We will discover that a phenomenological reading of language is open to layers which questions the dialectic setting of linguistic knowledge production. Phenomenology proposes to study life-world relationships by reducing the power of dialectical denomination to the power of gazing or to the lenses of ambiguity. Theorising language and translational practices within the phenomenological realm follows the concept of being oriented towards body-life-world while laying bare the phenomenon language. This revealing method supersedes empirical considerations since phenomenological methodology questions permanently our very own positioning. Hence, the transfer from A to B will be challenged by possibilities which are temporary: it is about a transfer zone featuring A as A’ to B or A’ in B / C. However, the phenomenological possibility reveals that the price for ephemera is tamed by the condition of its possibilities: indeed, the aporia of linguistic identity in polyvalence requires not only phenomenological brackets but also a transcendental backup. Chapter I and II study the translational practice of language and phenomenology by explaining its analysis via dynamised transcendental conditions. The disillusion of the phenomenological inquiry will be yield by radicalising phenomenological reading of language towards a phenomenographical practice of language. Chapter III goes to the extremes in exposing a language without content. The introduction of the trickster figure Narcissistgrotesque Face will be the anti-metaphor in which the grotesque line up forces us to learn bearing A with B and in which the non-content materiality of linguistic practices resemble le bas matérialisme. Not explanation, understanding and rendering things plausible is the movens for language but it is all about the spur of its enactment, its style and its story telling that renders translational practice visible. Chapter III is a performative practice in which we turn the text into texture. Translation happens then when your are perplex and the translational void enacts you and me. (shrink)

A new framework for phenomenological psychology is proposed based on Husserl’s static and genetic methods. Static phenomenology holds a eidetic psychology centred on the processes of noetic-noematic constitution and elaborates typologies and general notions about human beings in connection with the world. Genetic analysis is research into facticity, it focus on the personal history of a subject, which is constantly in the process of becoming. When the temporal dimension of consciousness is considered, the phenomenological method becomes ‘static’, as it excludes (...) the factitious dimension of self, its personal and individual history, sedimented in layers of meaning, which are in part pre-reflective, non-thematic and anonymous to the self, but which nevertheless continue to influence the experience of itself with the other and with the world. This paper aims to present some of the fundamental principals of genetic phenomenology and it’s application to existential-phenomenological psychotherapy. There are three main aspects underlying genetic-phenomenological analysis as it is being proposed: inner time-consciousness theory, the experiential self and the theory of passive geneses. (shrink)

The phenomenon of birth is here to be presented as a crucial one, discreet though, into Merleau-Ponty and Patočka’s philosophy. So it deserves a confrontation of their respective thoughts. Both of them have radicalised Husserl’s phenomenology into a philosophy of birth. This phenomenological achievement includes an ontology of birth, which feeds an anthropology in a brand new way, presented in the following pages.

Resumen: Los trabajos abordan, desde diferentes perspectivas a la categoría de sujeto como una categoría crucial del pensamiento contemporáneo. El ámbito de preocupaciones es amplio: la perspectiva del filósofo norteamericano S Cavell quien hace una originalísima recepción de la herencia de Austin y Wittgenstein; la perspectiva fenomenológica de Sartre en diálogo y conflicto con la del psicoanálisis lacaniano y las reconceptualizaciones de la ideología realizadas por Louis Althusser; la constitución del sujeto en tensión entre la sujeción al poder y las (...) posibilidadesde resistencia según la perspectiva de Judith Butler; una relectura de la implicación de estructura y sujeto en la perspectiva estructural abierta por Saussure y continuada por Lévi-Strauss, Benveniste y Lacan, tema que recibe un tratamiento circunscripto al pensamiento del argentino Ernesto Laclau, en el que se distinguen distintas etapas; las implicaciones que los eventos fundamentales de la historia del siglo XX acarrean para una conceptualización de la subjetividad en la perspectiva de Theodor Adorno y las limitaciones que la conceptualización de la obra de arte como juego en la obra de Gadamer impone a la concepción moderna de la subjetividad. -/- Índice: Presentación del compilador La crítica de Heidegger a la noción de sujeto: un análisis a partir de la incidencia de su reflexión sobre la técnica y el lenguaje, Luciana Carrera Aizpitarte El juego como auto-representación y modo de ser de la obra de arte en la estética hermenéutica de Gadamer, Paola Belén El yo sobre la línea de ficción: análisis de las concepciones de Sartre y Lacan, Luisina Bolla El poder y el sujeto. Sujeción, norma y resistencia en Judith Butler, Matías Abeijón Theodor W. Adorno: la crítica al sujeto después de Auschwitz, Gustavo Robles Estructura, discurso y subjetividad, Pedro Karczmarczyk Transformaciones, rupturas y continuidades entre la perspectiva de Ernesto Laclau y la tradición (post)estructuralista, Hernán Fair La recuperación del sujeto: escepticismo, autoconocimiento y escritura en S. Cavell, Guadalupe Reinoso . (shrink)

Hegel's influence on post-Hegelian philosophy is as profound as it is ambiguous. Modern philosophy is philosophy after Hegel. Taking leave of Hegel's system appears to be a common feature of modern and post-modern thought. One could even argue that giving up Hegel's claim of totality defines philosophy after Hegel. Modern and post-modern philosophies are philosophies of finitude: Hegel's philosophy cannot be repeated. However, its status as a negative backdrop for modern and post-modern thought already shows its pervasive influence. Precisely in (...) its criticism of Hegel, modern thought is bound up with his thinking. (shrink)