This study is a kind of applied phenomenology, or more precisely, of applied phenomenological hermeneutics. I argue that phenomenologists hardly analyze concrete phenomena but prefer to engage in theoretical debates, and therefore I call for more applied studies. The case of a patient who suffered a cerebralhemorrhage is used in order to reconstruct how she slowly regained everyday sense-connexions. The case is very interesting as the patient was rather disoriented when waking up from an artificial coma of several weeks, and (...) it took her many years to fully recover. The goal of this paper is to describe some aspects of this process from a subjective perspective as well as from a participant observer’s viewpoint. The data used for this chapter mainly stem from in-depth qualitative interviews. The structures of the life-world of Alfred Schutz are used to analyze the processes of sense constitution. This proves helpful but the data also suggest a revision of Schutz’s analyses in some respects. (shrink)

The paper begins with an overview of the historical roots of philosophical hermeneutics grounded in the work of Husserl and Heidegger. It goes on to explore the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer as a philosophy useful to nursing research. The four concepts of prejudice, the fusion of horizons, the hermeneutic circle and play are discussed, as are the implications these concepts have for nursing research. These concepts have been utilized in the author's own research and examples from this research (...) are given to illuminate how these concepts can be shaped to the purposes of nursing research. While the concepts discussed stem from the work of Gadamer, the ways they have been utilized by the author do not represent a Gadamerian method. Gadamer's project is purely philosophical. (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)

This paper explores the problem of how we perceive built space and the ways that we relate to its abstract representations. Poincaré presented the problem that space poses for the 20th century in his essay ‘The Relativity of Space’, in which the human body and technics are already a part of our spatial perceptions. Merleau-Ponty, the “philosopher of the body”, and Don Ihde, a philosopher of technology, ground their work on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (to different (...) degrees). For Merleau-Ponty, our primordial perception is general, pre-reflective, and ambiguous. One’s own body (body-subject) is the means of having an already inter-subjective world. Merleau-Ponty explicates our irreducible relation to the world by showing that bodily motility, the spatiality of one’s body, and habit acquisition inform our spatial experiences, as well as the syntheses of our perceptions and the unity of the world. Merleau-Ponty describes the constitution of embodiment relations (by means of habit acquisition) with artefacts that mediate our interaction and perceptions in the world. Ihde poses his intentional human-technology (artefactual) relations that transform our perceptions of the world and ourselves. These relations are ever-present in our everyday lifeworld of which built space forms the background or foreground of our projects and actions. In this paper, I provide a phenomenological explication of a specific space to test how both philosophers’ work compare to and/or supplement each other. (shrink)

“Home” is well known from everyday experience, plays a crucial role in all kinds of narratives about human life, but is hardly ever systematically dealt with in the philosophy of medicine and health care. The notion of home is ambiguous, is often used in a metaphorical way, and is closely related to concepts such as house and dwelling. In this paper the phenomenon of home is explored by means of some phenomenological writings of Heidegger, Bollnow, Bachelard and Levinas. Common in (...) their views is that being at home and dwelling mean something more fundamental than an activity we do along with other activities, such as working and travelling. Dwelling, building a house and being at home are fundamental aspects of human existence. Being human is dwelling. While exploring the relevance of this phenomenological perspective for medical theory and practice, the focus is on the care of people suffering from dementia. (shrink)

While it is heartening to see that more researchers in the field of the social sciences are using some version of the phenomenological method, it is also disappointing to see that very often some of the steps employed do not follow phenomenological logic. In this paper, several dissertations are reviewed in order to point out some of the difficulties that are encountered in attempting to use some version of the phenomenological method. Difficulties encountered centred on the phenomenological reduction, the use (...) of imaginative variation and the feedback to subjects. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 8, Edition 1 May 2008. (shrink)

The paper examines needs experienced during the late stage of AIDS with reference to a phenomenological explication of unstructured interviews with persons with acute symptoms of the disease. A distinct pattern of health care needs emerged, characterized by a relative emphasis on the psychosocial as distinct from biomedical or economical aspects of the disease and emotion focused coping strategies. Results are compared with those of other studies and implications for palliative care are discussed. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 1, (...) Edition 1 April 2001. (shrink)

The following paper explores the foundations of phenomenology, and seeks to provide those new to the discipline with ways of understanding its claims to assist knowers to attend to 'the things themselves'. Practical applications of this mode of inquiry are linked to adult education practice which is the author's field of practice but most of the ideas are readily applicable to social events and practices such as nursing, social work, recreation, history and the like. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume (...) 1, Edition 1 April 2001. (shrink)

The purposes of this paper are twofold: first, I wish to correct a systematic bias in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. This bias is in favor of intuition of essences of meaning and against the intuition of essences of sensation. This bias is explained as a product of Husserl's mind-body dualism. Second, I suggest the possibility of a neurophenomenology from a biogenetic structural point of view. This neurophenomenology merges the knowledge of essences derived from mature contemplation with knowledge of the structures of (...) experience derived from neuroanthropology. After addressing these two issues I proceed to describe the sensorium from a neurophenomenological perspective, and the constituent element of perception, the dot. I hypothesize fat experience arises in the dialogue between prefrontal cortical processes and sensorial processes, that experience is constituted within a field of sensorial dots that arise and dissolve in temporal frames. I conclude that Husserl's view of the phenomenology of time is essentially correct and is both in keeping with findings from current neurophysiology, and amenable to a modem scientific view of consciousness and to many of the religious traditions encountered by ethnographers. The implications of a neurophenomenology for the anthropological study of consciousness are suggested. (shrink)

Digitalization reveals the world in new varieties and forms. This power to unveil not only transforms human outreach and actions, but also changes our conceptions; about whom we are, about our uses and about human horizons for sense-making. In this paper, I explore experience design and the aesthetic turn in contemporary research in human–computer interaction and interaction design. This rather recent interest in aesthetic experience is in my view a move away from a view of digitalization as instances of objects (...) aligned in networks, with certain features, qualities and properties, towards an understanding of digitalization as a relation to the world, to itself, and to what it means to be human (e.g. Technology and the character of contemporary life. A philosophical inquiry. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984, Holding on to reality. The nature of information at the turn of the millennium. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999; Questioning technology. Routledge, New York, 1999; The question concerning technology and other essays. Harper and Row, New York, 1977; Technology and the lifeworld, from garden to earth. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990). As such my attempt in this text is to outline a conceptual account concerning what it might mean to designate digitalization as experienced rather than as what we traditionally think of it—as a cause of what we perceive. The paper is based on some previous work suggesting that a focus on the beauty of digitalization (i.e. the beast) entails the possibility to investigate ambiguous meanings of digitalization, meanings that are intrinsic to digitalization but have so far received little or no attention. My suggestion is that there are aesthetic and/or sublime dimensions inherent in digitalization that involves the realization of meaning that are becoming increasingly important in both use and design of digital materials. Hence, the particular focus on aesthetics as implied by the title of this text refers to a pervasive quality harbouring meaning that through a phenomenological lens could be regarded as the material basis of digitalization. The paper concludes that it is crucial to conduct more thorough studies of the relationship between aesthetics and digitalization if we are truly interested in exploring the potential of digitalization in our lives. (shrink)

The anthropology of consciousness is a field of enormous and demanding scope. In this article, there is no attempt to address all of the current trends in thinking and research; rather, the aim was to draw a line through the field that extends from the 19th century and European philosophies to some contemporary expressions of those philosophies in social science research. In particular, taking the original project of Edmund Husserl, an approach to the phenomenological investigation of the nature of consciousness (...) and, in addition, states of consciousness is proposed in the form of “existential grammars.” The treatment is propaedeutic: The ideas presented here are part of an on-going, long-term project tied to cross-cultural and experimental research on consciousness. However, the short-term outcomes are promising in elucidating the foundational questions not only about consciousness but also about specific areas of interest such as healing and the nature of scientific investigation itself. One important direction in this work is to illuminate, where possible, the pre-reflective rationalities of human experience, of consciousness itself, in such a way that we might generate codes of consciousness ultimately not as the equivalent of genetic models, but as descriptors of the core matrix of consciousness out of which alterations of consciousness might be better understood. (shrink)

Nicolai Hartmann contributed significantly to the revitalization of the discipline of ontology in the early twentieth century. Developing a systematic, post-Kantian critical ontology ‘this side’ of idealism and realism, he subverted the widespread impression that philosophy must either exhaust itself in foundationalist epistemology or engage in system-building metaphysical excess. This essay provides an introduction to Hartmann’s approach in light of the recent translation of his early essay ‘How is Critical Ontology Possible?’ ( 1923 ) In it Hartmann criticizes both the (...) pretensions of epistemology as well as the principal errors of classical ontology, and he proposes a series of correctives that lead to his development of a highly original and elaborate stratified categorial ontology. This introduction explains the most important errors of the ‘old’ ontology, his correctives to them, and further fleshes out these correctives with reference to his mature ontological work. (shrink)

This article is a continuation of the challenge begun by early phenomenologists of the reductionistic scientism of Natural Science Psychology. Inspired by five distinctions of Emmanuel Levinas, it seeks to bring a deeper interruption of the seemingly unalterable force of mainstream psychology to model itself after the hard sciences. Levinas distinguishes the experience of totality from infinity, need from desire, freedom as self-initiated and self-directed from freedom as invested by and for the Other, active agency from radical passivity, and the (...) said from saying. Five commonly accepted characteristics of science, objective, empirical, causal, reducible, and value neutral, are used to compare three approaches to psychology: Natural Science, Phenomenology , and Psychology for the Other. Using the definition of science, “knowing the phenomenon as it shows itself,” this paper argue that Natural Science Psychology is the least “scientific,” Phenomenological Psychology is more scientific, and Psychology for the Other is the most “scientific” with its ethical command to allow the Other to reveal her/himself. This extravagant but compelling claim is illustrated with descriptions of research and therapy. (shrink)

In various publications, Stanley Cavell and Stanley Rosen have emphasized the philosophical importance of what they both call the ordinary. They both contrast their recovery of the ordinary with traditional philosophy, including the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. In this paper, I address Rosen’s claims in particular. I argue that Rosen turns the real situation on its head. Contra Rosen, it is not the case that the employment of Husserl’s epoché distorts the authentic voice of the ordinary—a voice that is (...) clearly audible only from within everyday life. For (pace both Cavell and Rosen) there is no single voice of the ordinary: There are many such voices, not all of which are to be relied upon. Therefore, if we want to achieve an adequate grasp of ordinary experience, and Rosen does want this, we precisely need the epoché to curtail the misleading messages of certain other voices of the ordinary. Moreover, and somewhat surprisingly, this positive evaluation of the Husserlian epoché finds support in Heidegger’s writings from the twenties. I argue that Heidegger, too, believed that the epoché was an indispensable tool for the philosophical attempt to capture ordinary experience. (shrink)

In Fechner's psychophysics, the 'mental' and the 'physical' were conceived as two phenomenal domains, connected by functional relations, not as two ontologically different realms. We follow the path from Fechner's foundational ideas and Mach's radical programme of a unitary science to later approaches to primary, psychophysically neutral experience (phenomenology, protophysics). We propose an 'integral psychophysics' as a mathematical study of law-like, invariant structures of primary experience. This approach is illustrated by a reinterpretation of psychophysical experiments in terms of perceptual situations (...) involving a constructed apparatus and an instructed subject. The problematic notion of 'measurement of sensation' is thus eliminated: 'sensations' are merely indices for classes of perceptually equivalent configurations (states of the apparatus) specified by the instruction. The locus of the measured is in the inter-subjectively shared, communicable world—not inside the subject's mind. Finally we discuss the role of integral psychophysics as a scientia prima , logically and methodically preceding physics and psychology. (shrink)

This article strives to combine conceptions of the person by Semën Frank. From his early critical Marxist works to his metaphysical personalism and late Christian anthropology, he covered normative-ethical, transcendent-epistemological, and "total unity'—ontological questions in equal measure. This diversity will be synthesized in comparisons of his personalist and ontological thought. The text will highlight Frank's different schemes of personal modes of being, i.e. correlations between the 'I-thou' relationship and the absolute being, and move on to contrast his concepts of ontological (...) personality. /// Dieser Artikel untersucht Semën Franks Personalitätskonzeptionen, wie er sie von der Revolutionszeit um 1905 bis in die späte Emigrationszeit entwickelt hat. Von seinen frühen Artikeln - inspiriert durch den kritischen Marxismus -bis zum metaphysischen Personalismus und zur christlichen Anthropologie behandelt er gleichermaßen normativ-ethische, transzendental-epistemologische und identitätsgeleitete, ontologische Fragen. Diese Vielfalt wird nun produktiv zusammengeführt in Gegenüberstellungen seines personalen und ontologischen Denkens. Dazu erarbeitet dieser Text Franks verschiedene Entwürfe personalen Seins, genauer die Korrelationen zwischen der frankschen 'Ich-Du-Beziehung' und dem absoluten Sein um so seine Konzeptionen einer ontologischen Personalität zu kontrastieren. (shrink)

Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I suggest, and (...) can be overcome by revealing that the concept of intentional directedness as he receives it from the Scholastics is quite consistent with the continuity thesis. It is only when intentional directedness is conjoined with intentional inexistence that intentionality and content are consistent with a discontinuity thesis (such as Brentano’s thesis). This makes room to develop an account of intentional directedness that is consistent with the continuity thesis in the form of Peirce’s representational principle. I also argue against a form of the discontinuity thesis in the guise of the derived/underived content distinction. Having shown that intentionality is consistent with the continuity thesis I argue that we should focus on intentionality and representation as bodily enacted. I conclude that we would be better off focussing on representation and intentionality in action rather than giving abstract functional accounts of extended cognition. (shrink)

This article discusses Jaakko Hintikka's interpretation of the aims and method of Husserl's phenomenology. I argue that Hintikka misrepresents Husserl's phenomenology on certain crucial points. More specifically, Hintikka misconstrues Husserl's notion of "immediate experience" and consequently fails to grasp the functions of the central methodological tools known as the "epoché" and the "phenomenological reduction." The result is that the conception of phenomenology he attributes to Husserl is very far from realizing the philosophical potential of Husserl's position. Hence if we want (...) a fruitful rapprochement between analytical philosophy and Continental phenomenology of the kind that is Hintikka's ultimate aim, then Hintikka's account of Husserl needs correcting on a number of crucial points. (shrink)

This book summarizes the intense research that the author performed for his Ph.D. thesis , revised and with the addition of an intuitionistic critique of Husserl's concept of number. His starting point consisted of a double conviction: 1) Brouwerian intuitionism is a valid way of doing mathematics but is grounded on a weak philosophy; 2) Husserlian phenomenology can provide a suitable philosophical ground for intuitionism. In order to let intuitionism and phenomenology match, he had to solve in general two problems: (...) 1) the question of the reciprocal indifference that the authors had toward each other's theorizing which indeed they knew; 2) Husserl's general attitude of accepting classical mathematics, which contrasts with the critical attitude of the intuitionists.Moreover, in the specific case focused on by this book—concerning choice sequences, that is, sequences that can be completely lawless and that were admitted as mathematical entities by Brouwer—van Atten had to handle a further problem: such sequences do not fit the characteristic of omnitemporality that the late Husserl seemed to consider a necessary attribute of entities if they were to be considered mathematical. In as far as they are lawless we cannot predict at any moment how they will develop in the future, hence they are not determined at any particular time—they will be determined only in the future.Let us begin with van Atten's first conviction, i.e., that Brouwerian intuitionism is grounded on a weak philosophy. We have to recall that Brouwer provided a mystical attitude for proposing his intuitionism: man can obtain happiness only by keeping himself closed inside the inner Self. Any attempted movement towards the exterior world is a source of pain: in particular language and the sciences. Mathematics, in order to be morally acceptable …. (shrink)

This paper argues that frege did not significantly influence husserl's departure from psychologism by (1) examining husserl's early logical reflections, Especially those concerning the meaning of the term ""vorstellung"," and (2) determining which parts of husserl's "philosophy of arithmetic", Criticized for its psychologism by frege, Were psychologistic and when husserl rejected them. It concludes that the logical writings show an independent movement toward a non-Psychologistic position and that the psychologism of "philosophy of arithmetic" was abandoned by 1891 apart from any (...) fregean influence. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the idea of deploying workshops in phenomenology -- i.e., teaching the discipline by practising it. I focus on the model proposed by Herbert Spiegelberg, the first person to give systematic attention to this idea and the first to institutionalize it over a period of several years. Drawing on my experience in several of the workshops he led at Washington University, St. Louis, I detail the method he recommended in preparation for a workshop I ten led (...) at the inaugural meeting of To the Things Themselves at the University of New Hampshire. (shrink)

Projects that challenge students to practice service leadership for civic improvement can address the aim of developing civic-mindedness in undergraduates. We conducted two qualitative studies. First, we investigated the learning experiences of four teams of undergraduate business students, who undertook semester-long course-embedded service-learning projects in partnership with four Hong Kong-based social enterprises. The students described five modes of civic engagement as project purposes, mentioned applying six types of service leadership practice for civic improvement, and described eight types of developmental outcome (...) within the domain of civic-mindedness. Comparisons suggested that besides relational support through training and guidance, empowering infrastructure, opportunities to exercise autonomy, and opportunities to demonstrate competence, three project-related features that varied between projects were important in fostering civic-mindedness. These were direct contact with grassroots-based beneficiaries; the experience of making a tangible difference; and linking the campus with the wider community. A second qualitative study indicated that course-embedded team projects with these features that were undertaken in mixed teams that included freshman and senior year business students fostered civic-mindedness for both categories of student. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to clarify what “phenomenological” means in the phenomenological researches of nursing and what “method” is or should beadopted in phenomenological researches of nursing. The essay first defines a traditional classification of the phenomenological researches of nursing by Cohen and Omery, and then gives a new attempt to classify the phenomenological approaches in the theories of nursing. On this basis, the essay reviews some representative “phenomenological” researches of nursing today and addresses critical comments to them. (...) Finally, the essay will make clear what “phenomenological” should mean in the phenomenological research of nursing and what kind of “method” should be adopted in those researches. (shrink)

This article strives to combine conceptions of the person by Semën Frank. From his early critical Marxist works to his metaphysical personalism and late Christian anthropology, he covered normative-ethical, transcendent-epistemological, and "total unity'—ontological questions in equal measure. This diversity will be synthesized in comparisons of his personalist and ontological thought. The text will highlight Frank's different schemes of personal modes of being, i.e. correlations between the 'I-thou' relationship and the absolute being, and move on to contrast his concepts of ontological (...) personality. /// Dieser Artikel untersucht Semën Franks Personalitätskonzeptionen, wie er sie von der Revolutionszeit um 1905 bis in die späte Emigrationszeit entwickelt hat. Von seinen frühen Artikeln - inspiriert durch den kritischen Marxismus -bis zum metaphysischen Personalismus und zur christlichen Anthropologie behandelt er gleichermaßen normativ-ethische, transzendental-epistemologische und identitätsgeleitete, ontologische Fragen. Diese Vielfalt wird nun produktiv zusammengeführt in Gegenüberstellungen seines personalen und ontologischen Denkens. Dazu erarbeitet dieser Text Franks verschiedene Entwürfe personalen Seins, genauer die Korrelationen zwischen der frankschen 'Ich-Du-Beziehung' und dem absoluten Sein um so seine Konzeptionen einer ontologischen Personalität zu kontrastieren. (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)

William James’s reputation in the field of emotion research is based on his early psychological writings where he defines emotions as ‘feelings of bodily changes’. In his later work, particularly in his study of mystic emotion, James comes up with what looks like a completely different approach. Here his focus is on positive feelings of inspiration and joy, but also on downbeat moods like melancholy and depression. He examines how these feeling states give meaning to an individual’s life. Theorists often (...) speculate about a gap between James’s early writings and his later work, and assume that the later James turned from an evolutionary-minded natural scientist into a metaphysical philosopher. In my paper, I follow Ratcliffe in his view that a sharply drawn line between the early and the late work is implausible and that James’s later study of mysticism fits nicely with his early psychology. Drawing on James, I show how in his later work, James develops a theory of embodied emotions that anticipates the role ascribed by twentieth century phenomenology to anxiety and other ‘bad moods’, as possibilities for philosophical reflection and self-understanding. (shrink)

The paths or ways to the transcendental reduction are a pivotal phenomenological notion in Husserl’s philosophy. The metaphor of path, in fact, alludes to the demonstrative proofs of transcendental phenomenology. Nonetheless, Husserlian scholarship has not yet been able to end the disputes surrounding this topic, and as a result, competing interpretations continue to prevail. Since existing theories about the paths have not yet been cataloged or analyzed in their global context, I intend to classify the main existing theories about the (...) paths and evaluate the trend established by Iso Kern. Thus, this paper answers the following questions: how many kinds of theories about the paths are there? And, how plausible is the trend and approach initiated by Kern? In order to evaluate each theory, I will compare the interpretation with its exemplary cases. The key contribution of this investigation is therefore twofold: to distinguish with unequivocal concepts the two main trends of hermeneutical theories in play and to evaluate the plausibility of the aforementioned Kernian one. The paper also attempts to show that the hermeneutical approach initiated by Kern has no contextual examples for its conceptual scheme and should consequently be abandoned in favor of an alternative solution. (shrink)

In this paper the author explores certain fulfilling personal experiences that he describes as the presencing of space, i.e. the way in which an individual’s spatial involvement may put him or her in contact with reality as a whole. These experiences are investigated from a phenomenological perspective, and the differences between them and other similar experiences, such as that of the sublime or topophilia, are highlighted. A neologism is introduced: topoaletheia to name a distinctive type of spatial experience. This concept (...) may enrich the discussion about our involvement with space in our built environments. (shrink)

This paper presents a Heideggerian phenomenological analysis of screens. In a world and an epoch where screens pervade a great many aspects of human experience, we submit that phenomenology, much in a traditional methodological form, can provide an interesting and novel basis for our understanding of screens. We ground our analysis in the ontology of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time [1927/1962], claiming that screens will only show themselves as they are if taken as screens-in-the-world. Thus, the phenomenon of screen is (...) not investigated in its empirical form or conceptually. It is rather taken as a grounding intentional orientation that conditions our engagement with certain surfaces as we comport ourselves towards them “as screens.” In doing this we claim to have opened up the phenomenon of screen in a new and meaningful way. (shrink)

This paper points to two little-discussed interrelated features—among sociologists—about the nature of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions, and that lived experience (Erlebnis) is founded on the non-discursivity of the lifeworld, i.e., the pre-predicative background expectancies from which the discursive arises. I examine the intellectual route of Alfred Schutz who developed his mundane lifeworld theory from appropriating Edmund Husserl’s notions of appresentation and apperception. Harold Garfinkel later extended Schutz’s concept of lifeworld (...) to the empirical investigations of constitutive social orders. By way of conclusion, I warn against a strain of constructionism in sociology, which tends to ignore the two said features of lived experience and inaccurately conceives social realities as essentially the actor’s discursive accomplishments. (shrink)

In his 1958 seminal paper “Saints and Heroes”, J. O. Urmson argued that the then dominant tripartite deontic scheme of classifying actions as being exclusively either obligatory, or optional in the sense of being morally indifferent, or wrong, ought to be expanded to include the category of the supererogatory. Colloquially, this category includes actions that are “beyond the call of duty” (beyond what is obligatory) and hence actions that one has no duty or obligation to perform. But it is a (...) controversial category. Some have argued that the concept of supererogation is paradoxical because on one hand, supererogatory actions are (by definition) supposed to be morally good, indeed morally best, actions. But then if they are morally best, why aren't they morally required, contrary to the assumption that they are morally optional? In short: how can an action that is morally best to perform fail to be what one is morally required to do? The source of this alleged paradox has been dubbed the ‘good-ought tie-up’. In our article, we address this alleged paradox by first making a phenomenological case for the reality of instances of genuine supererogatory actions, and then, by reflecting on the relevant phenomenology, explaining why there is no genuine paradox. Our explanation appeals to the idea that moral reasons can play what we call amerit conferring role. The basic idea is that moral reasons that favor supererogatory actions function to confer merit on the actions they favor—they play a merit conferring role—and can do without also requiring the actions in question. Hence, supererogatory actions can be both good and morally meritorious to perform yet still be morally optional. Recognition of a merit conferring role unties the good-ought tie up, and (as we further argue) there are good reasons, independent of helping to resolve the alleged paradox, for recognizing this sort of role that moral reasons may play. (shrink)

El propósito de este trabajo es relevar la importancia crucial de las cuestiones de la corporalidad y la percepción para la comprensión de las múltiples lecturas que Merleau-Ponty realizó de diversos aspectos de la filosofía bergsoniana. El análisis se enfoca en los cursos dictados por Merleau-Ponty en 1947-1948, donde el filósofo advierte la ausencia de una verdadera teoría bergsoniana del cuerpo percipiente, a pesar de las equívocas figuras de una percepción y memoria corporales que Bergson expone en Matière et mémoire. (...) De acuerdo con esta interpretación, estas figuras sólo reiteran en otros términos los mismos problemas del dualismo ontológico y el asociacionismo psicológico que se proponen superar. Se releva además la persistencia invariante de los mismos ejes críticos a lo largo de la entera producción intelectual de Merleau-Ponty, y la perpetuación hasta las últimas obras de Bergson del mismo modelo perceptivo “intelectualista” criticado por Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

In this essay I address the question, “What is the subject matter of phenomenological research?” I argue that in spite of the increasing popularity of phenomenology, the answers to this question have been brief and cursory. As a result, contemporary phenomenologists lack a clear framework within which to articulate the aims and results of their research, and cannot easily engage each other in constructive and critical discourse. Examining the literature on phenomenology’s identity, I show how the question of phenomenology’s subject (...) matter has been systematically neglected. It has been overshadowed by an unending concern with phenomenology’s methodological identity. However, an examination of recent contributions to this literature reveals that a concern with articulating phenomenology’s subject matter has gradually increased, although such articulations remain preliminary. In light of this, I delineate, define, and illustrate three layers of phenomenological research, which I term “existentials,” “modes,” and “prejudices.” While the delineation of these layers is drawn primarily from classical phenomenological texts, they are defined and illustrated through the use of more contemporary literature. Following the articulation of this subject matter, I briefly consider some of the debates—both foundational and applied—that can be facilitated by the adoption of this framework. (shrink)

This article discusses the [development and] use of a video life-world schema to explore alternative orientations to the shared health consultation. It is anticipated that this schema can be used by practitioners and consumers alike to understand the dynamics of videoed health consultations, the role of the participants within it and the potential to consciously alter the outcome by altering behaviour during the process of interaction. The study examines health consultation participation and develops an interpretative method of analysis that includes (...) image elicitation (via videos), phenomenology (to identify the components of the analytic framework), narrative (to depict the stories of interactions) and a reflexive mode (to develop shared meaning through a conceptual framework for analysis). The analytic framework is derived from a life-world conception of human mutual shared interaction which is presented here as a novel approach to understanding patient-centred care. The video materials used in this study were derived from consultations in a Walk-in Centre (WiC) in East London. The conceptual framework produced through the process of video analysis is comprised of different combinations of movement, knowledge and emotional conversations that are used to classify objective or engaged WiC health care interactions. The videoed interactions organise along an active or passive, facilitative or directive typical situation continuum illustrating different kinds of textual approaches to practice that are in tension or harmony. The schema demonstrates how practitioners and consumers interact to produce these outcomes and indicates the potential for both consumers and practitioners to be educated to develop practice dynamics that support patient-centred care and impact on health outcomes. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy commonly regard as antipodal Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl, the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. This paper, however, establishes that during a formative phase in both of their careers Russell and Husserl shared a range of seminal ideas. In particular, the essay adduces clear cases of family resemblance between Husserl’s and Russell’s philosophy during their middle period, which spanned the years 1905 through 1918. The paper thus challenges the received view of Husserl’s relation to early (...) analytic philosophy and this by pursuing two strategies of exposition. One involves comparing Husserl with Russell, and not, as has been the usual practice, with Frege. The other, which follows the first, foregrounds Husserl’s thinking vis-à-vis Russell’s from 1905 onward, a move that constitutes a break with what has become the standard approach of emphasising the relatedness of Husserl of the Logical Investigations (1900/1) to analytic philosophy. Moreover, this approach discloses two chief grounds of relatedness between the middle Husserl and the middle Russell. One is their shared interest in exploring philosophical “fundamentals”. The second consists of common elements shared by their epistemologies and philosophies of mind. (shrink)

Philosophy and Literature is an internationally renowned refereed journal founded by Denis Dutton at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. It is now published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since its inception in 1976, Philosophy and Literature has been concerned with the relation between literary and philosophical studies, publishing articles on the philosophical interpretation of literature as well as the literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature has sometimes been regarded as iconoclastic, in the sense that it repudiates academic pretensions, (...) insidious jargon and institutional vogue. Dutton, who remains the editor, still writes a regular column. A distinctive feature of Philosophy and Literature was the annual Bad Writing Contest, held from 1995–98, which sought to identify (and publish) the ‘most stylistically lamentable passages’ of academic prose, often to great amusement. (shrink)