The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation on critical phenomenology with reflections on its method. The key argument is that critical phenomenology should be understood as a form of historico-transcendental inquiry and therefore it cannot forgo the phenomenological reduction. Rather, this methodological step should be centered in critical phenomenology, and appropriated in problematized and rethought forms. The methodological assessment of critical phenomenology has implications also for how we read its canon. The paper shows that while Simone de Beauvoir (...) did not adopt the phenomenological reduction in its full Husserlian meaning, her analyses of experience did not remain on the level of personal or experiential description either. The contention is that if we want to read her as a critical phenomenologist, we should focus on her seminal modification of the historico-transcendental method of phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an alternative phenomenological account of depression as consisting of a degradation of the degree to which one is situated in and attuned to the world. This account contrasts with recent accounts of depression offered by Matthew Ratcliffe and others. Ratcliffe develops an account in which depression is understood in terms of deep moods, or existential feelings, such as guilt or hopelessness. Such moods are capable of limiting the kinds of significance and meaning that one can (...) come across in the world. I argue that Ratcliffe’s account is unnecessarily constrained, making sense of the experience of depression by appealing only to changes in the mode of human existence. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s critique of traditional transcendental phenomenology, I show that many cases of severe psychiatric disorders are best understood as changes in the very structure of human existence, rather than changes in the mode of human existence. Working in this vein, I argue that we can make better sense of many first-person reports of the experience of depression by appealing to a loss or degradation of the degree to which one is situated in and attuned to the world, rather than attempting to make sense of depression as a particular mode of being situated and attuned. Finally, I argue that drawing distinctions between disorders of structure and mode will allow us to improve upon the currently heterogeneous categories of disorder offered in the DSM-5. (shrink)

Husserl is the philosopher who transformed the geological metaphor of sedimentation into a philosophical concept. While tracing the development of Husserl's reflections on sedimentation, I argue that the distinctive feature of Husserl's approach lies in his preoccupation with the question concerning the origins of sedimentations. The paper demonstrates that in different frameworks of analysis, Husserl understood these origins in significantly different ways. In the works concerned with the phenomenology of time consciousness, Husserl searched for the origins of sedimentation in the (...) field of subjective experience, and more precisely, in impressional consciousness. By contrast, in the later works concerned with history, he maintained that the origins of sedimentations lie in the field of historical past that stretches beyond the reach of individual experience. Building on the basis of these resources, I argue that the Husserlian concept of sedimentation has three distinct components of senses: static, genetic, and generative. In the static sense, sedimentations are modifications of retentions and necessary conditions of recollection. In the genetic sense, sedimentations are necessary for the formation of types, habits and moods, and as such, they shape present experiences. In the generative sense, sedimentations refer to what consciousness inherits from the historical tradition. (shrink)

What does Husserlian phenomenology have to offer feminist theory? More specifically, can we find resources within Husserl’s account of the living body ( Leib ) for the critical feminist project of rethinking embodiment beyond the dichotomies not only of mind/body but also of subject/object and activity/passivity? This essay begins by explicating the reasons for feminist hesitation with respect to Husserlian phenomenology. I then explore the resources that Husserl’s phenomenology of touch and his account of sensings hold for feminist theory. My (...) reading of Husserl proceeds by means of a comparison between his description of touch in Ideas II and Merleau-Ponty’s early appropriation of this account in the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as through an unlikely rapprochement between Husserl and Irigaray on the question of touch. Moreover, by revisiting the limitations in Husserl’s approach to the body—limitations of which any feminist appropriation must remain cognizant—I attempt to take Husserl’s phenomenology of touch beyond its initial methodologically solipsistic frame and to ask whether and how it can contribute to thinking gendered and racialized bodies. The phenomenology of touch, I argue, can allow us to understand the interplay between subjective, felt embodiment and social-historical context. In opening up Husserl’s account of touch to other dimensions—intersubjective and affective—sociality is revealed as residing within, and structuring of, touch. Such touch can allow us to think embodiment anew. (shrink)

In the last 50 years, discussions of how to understand disability have been dominated by the medical and social models. Paradoxically, both models overlook the disabled person’s experience of the lived body, thus reducing the body of the disabled person to a physiological body. In this article we introduce what we call the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability. The EE-model combines ideas from enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology with the aim of doing justice simultaneously to the lived experience of (...) being disabled, and the physiological dimensions of disability. More specifically, we put the EE model to work to disentangle the concepts of disability and pathology. We locate the difference between pathological and normal forms of embodiment in the person’s capacity to adapt to changes in the environment. To ensure that our discussion remains in contact with lived experience, we draw upon phenomenological interviews we have carried out with people with Cerebral Palsy. (shrink)

In the Logical Investigations, Ideas I and many other texts, Husserl maintains that perceptual consciousness involves the intentional “animation” or interpretation of sensory data or hyle, e.g., “color-data,” “tone-data,” and algedonic data. These data are not intrinsically representational nor are they normally themselves objects of representation, though we can attend to them in reflection. These data are “immanent” in consciousness; they survive the phenomenological reduction. They partly ground the intuitive or “in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, and they have a determinacy of (...) character that we do not create but can only discover. This determinate, non-representational stratum of perceptual consciousness also serves as a bridge between consciousness and the world beyond it. I articulate and defend this conception of perceptual consciousness. I locate the view in the space of contemporary positions on phenomenal character and argue for its superiority. I close by briefly arguing that the Husserlian account is perfectly compatible with physicalism (this involves disarming the Grain Problem). (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to develop a phenomenological understanding of discrimination from the perspective of the discriminator. Since early existential phenomenology, the phenomenon of discrimination has received a great deal of attention. While much of this work has focused on the experience of the discriminatee, recent scholarship has begun to reflect on the intentional structures on the side of the discriminator. In a contribution to this trend, I argue that our sense of what is (ab)normal plays a constitutively (...) significant role in the reiteration and reinforcement of harmful discriminatory practices. More specifically, I argue that Husserl's distinction between two forms of normality, namely, concordance-normality [Einstimmigkeit] and optimal-normality [Optimalität], is an important tool for illuminating otherwise overlooked aspects of the discriminator's experience. I achieve this by demonstrating how these two notions of normality play distinct constitutive roles when comparing deliberate acts of discrimination committed with malintent, compared with more primordial, habitual, and prereflective expectations which are already discriminatory in nucleo. I argue that at the heart of discriminatory practices there is a naïve, normalizing attempt to stabilize concordance at the expense of critical self-reflection, normative revisions, and enriched horizons of expectation. In doing so, this paper provides a novel and important contribution to philosophical discussions surrounding discrimination. (shrink)

Abstract Not much scholarly work is needed in order to stumble across many passages where Edmund Husserl seems to advocate an anti-realist attitude towards the natural sciences. This tendency, however, is not well-received within the secondary literature. While some commentators criticize Husserl for his alleged scientific anti-realism, others argue that Husserl's position is much more realist than the first impression indicates. It is against this background that I want to argue for the following theses: a) The basic outlook of Husserl's (...) epistemology as well as his more substantial comments regarding the natural sciences indeed result in a (sophisticated version of) scientific anti-realism which bears certain resemblances to Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism; b) This scientific anti-realism can be defended against the two most common objections raised in the secondary literature; c) It is only by means of this sophisticated version of scientific anti-realism that phenomenology can circumvent the problem of ?scientific objectivism? (shrink)

This essay is written in two parts. The first is a commentary on the affective politics of philosophy as a discipline. The theme here is philosophy’s reverence problem, an affective bond to the teacher and the text, which is threatened or even injured by feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy emerges as disruptive irreverence in the midst of the discipline, and injured reverence becomes a powerful prereflective motivation for resistance to feminist thought. The second part of the essay is an exploration of (...) the field of inquiry called feminist phenomenology. Is feminist phenomenology simply phenomenology from another point of view, that of the embodied female subject? Is it conducted, in other words, in a space beyond politics and power where the difference of this subject discloses values and meanings that have not yet been thematized in phenomenological inquiry, but which phenomenology is already competent to pursue? Or does feminist phenomenology disrupt or transform phenomenological practice as we traditionally understand it? In this paper, I claim that phenomenology must be critical in order to be feminist, that it must disrupt phenomenological practice rather than simply “applying” it to a new object, “woman.” In the work of Simone de Beauvoir we find a different phenomenological practice that feminists can count as a positive inheritance. The real difference of feminist phenomenology, however, only emerges in the practice itself. In order to capture something about this difference I take the phenomenon of shame as a case study, and compare three recent phenomenological accounts of shame. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Edmund Husserl’s views on the differences between human and animal consciousness, with particular attention to the experience of temporality.In the first section, I situate the topic of animal consciousness in the broader context of Husserl’s philosophy. Whereas this connection has been often neglected, I argue that a phenomenological analysis of non-human subjectivities is not only justified, but also essential to the Husserlian project as a whole.In the second section, I introduce two notions (...) Husserl resorts to when describing the essential difference between human and animal subjectivities, namely “strata of consciousness” and “person.” Drawing on textual evidence, I argue that Husserl does not simply see animals as excluded from the sphere of personhood. Rather, he draws a distinction between two modes of personal life, one of which is said to be unique to human adults.What holds these two modes apart, according to Husserl, is a subject’s relation to time. In the third section, I delve deeper into this topic, asking how we should understand Husserl’s claim that animals live in a “restricted temporality.” I argue that this has less to do with an inability to remember, imagine, or anticipate future events, and more with an inability to explore temporal horizons stretching before one’s birth or after one’s death. By contrast, humans gradually overcome these limitations during ontogeny, thanks to the practice of linguistic communication. This also has consequences for our capacity to engage in genuinely theoretical thought. (shrink)

Abstract: In philosophy, perceptual constancy refers to the puzzling phenomenon of the perception of properties of objects despite our changing experience of those properties. Husserl developed a sophisticated description of perceptual constancy. In this paper I sketch Husserl's approach, which focuses on the suggestion that perception is partly constituted by the continuous interplay of intention and fulfilment. Unlike many contemporary theories, this framework gives us a way to understand the relationship between different appearances of the same object. I will show (...) how Husserl's work connects with contemporary theories which emphasize perceptual constancy from particular perspectives. These theories include appeals to perspectival properties and Cohen's counterfactual theory. Also, I show how Husserl's account shares important themes with Kelly's recent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on perceptual constancy. (shrink)

Technology always provides a new perception of the world. However, it is not clear when technology produces “mere” new informations and when it provides something more such as a production of new objects in our world which start to “live” around us. The aim of this paper is to study how technology shapes our surrounding world. The questions which we are going to answer are: Is it really adding new objects to our world? If yes, does every technology have this (...) potentiality? We are going to tackle the problem using a phenomenological and post-phenomenological approach focussing our attention on the perceptual level. Using Husserl’s philosophy we will study how technology are deeply involved in our perception and, thanks to post-phenomenology and its concept of “embodiment relations,” we will be able to determine which kind of technologies have the potentiality to change our surrounding world introducing and producing new objects in it. (shrink)

This article elaborates a relational phenomenology of violence. Firstly, it explores the constitution of all sense in its intrinsic relation with our embodiment and intercorporality. Secondly, it shows how this relational conception of sense and constitution paves the path for an integrative understanding of the bodily and symbolic constituents of violence. Thirdly, the author addresses the overall consequences of these reflections, thereby identifying the main characteristics of a relational phenomenology of violence. In the final part, the paper provides an exemplification (...) of the outlined conception with regard to a concrete phenomenon of violence, i.e., slapping, and a concluding reflection upon its overall significance for research on violence. (shrink)

We are happy to feature four invited submissions by Lisa Guenther, Kym Maclaren, Bonnie Mann, and Gayle Salamon, all of whom respond to the questions motivating our inaugural issue. Both Salamon and Maclaren offer a response to the question “What is critical phenomenology?” by exploring the productive relationship between critical theory and phenomenology. Salamon does this by tracing the history of the term critical phenomenology. Maclaren further explores the productive relationship between critical theory and phenomenology en route to her analysis (...) of intimacy. Focusing on the phenomena of shame and long-term solitary confinement, Mann and Guenther take up that question by performing the work of critical phenomenology. Mann also offers suggestions regarding critical or, as she calls it, feminist phenomenology’s relation to the tradition—both of classical phenomenology and feminist philosophy. Guenther shows how the work of critical phenomenology is already at play in the practices of resistance among prisoners in the Security Housing Unit of Pelican Bay State Prison in California. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to make use of Edith Stein’s phenomenological analyses of empathy, emotion, and personhood to clarify and critically assess the recent suggestion by Axel Honneth that a basic form of recognition is affective in nature. I will begin by considering Honneth’s own presentation of this claim in his discussion of the role of affect in recognitive gestures, as well as in his notion of ‘elementary recognition,’ arguing that while his account contains much of value it (...) also generates problems. On the basis of this analysis, I will try to show that Stein’s account of empathy demarcates an elementary form of recognition in a less problematic fashion than does Honneth’s own treatment of this issue. I will then spell out the consequences of this move for the emotional recognition thesis, arguing that Stein’s treatment lends it further credence, before ending with some remarks on the connection between recognition and emotional personality. (shrink)

The paper investigates phenomenology’s possibilities to describe, reflect and critically analyse political and legal orders. It presents a “toolbox” of methodological reflections, tools and topics, by relating to the classics of the tradition and to the emerging movement of “critical phenomenology,” as well as by touching upon current issues such as experiences of rightlessness, experiences in the digital lifeworld, and experiences of the public sphere. It is argued that phenomenology provides us with a dynamic methodological framework that emphasizes correlational, co-constitutional, (...) and interrelational structures, and thus pays attention to modes of givenness, the making and unmaking of “world,” and, thereby, the inter/subjective, affective, and bodily constitution of meaning. In the case of political and legal orders, questions of power, exclusion, and normativity are central issues. By looking at “best practice” models such as Hannah Arendt’s analyses, the paper points out an analytical tool and flexible framework of “spaces of meaning” that phenomenologists can use and modify as they go along. In the current debates on political and legal issues, the author sees the main task of phenomenology to reclaim experience as world-building and world-opening, also in a normative sense, and to demonstrate how structures and orders are lived while they condition and form spaces of meaning. If we want to understand, criticize, act, or change something, this subjective and intersubjective perspective will remain indispensable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“An Equivocal Couple Overwhelmed by Life”A Phenomenological Analysis of PregnancySara HeinämaaTwo conceptions of human generativity prevail in contemporary feminist philosophy. First, several contributors argue that the experience of pregnancy, when analyzed by phenomenological tools, undermines several distinctions that are central to Western philosophy, most importantly the subject-object distinction and the self-other and own-alien distinctions. This line of argument was already outlined by Iris Marion Young in her influential essay (...) “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” (1984). The other dominant argument is related to the first one, and it states that organic birth is the event that establishes the first experiential separation between the self and the other. On this understanding, the mother-fetus relation would not involve any relations between two corporeal selves; all such relations would be postnatal. This notion has been defended, for example, by Christine Schües (1997; 2000) and Johanna Oksala (2003).1On the other hand, classical phenomenology is dominated by the idea that the rigorous first-person methodology that is essential to phenomenology dictates that the sense of birth must be studied primarily by reflection on the structures of our own recollection or memory. Consequently, the primary sense of human birth would be that of an unattainable limit. This is argued on the basis of the existential fact that we all are born but cannot recall our own birth, or else on the basis of the transcendental fact that the structure [End Page 31] of retention ties each living present to an earlier one and implies that the transcendental ego cannot be subject to generation.2 From this perspective, all analyses and reflections of the experiences of labor, gestation, and pregnancy would be secondary since the sense of birth that these experiences involve is the nativity of another human being and not the nativity of the reflecting self.This paper challenges both the feminist and the classical phenomenological approach. I maintain that careful phenomenological analyses of the experience of pregnancy undermine both notions. Such analyses show, on the one hand, that pregnancy does not imply a nondistinction or self-other fusion but on the contrary involves a specific self-other divide. At the same time, they demonstrate that the sense of birth is more complex than the classical recollection-paradigm suggests and that it includes more components than the signification of an unattainable limit. A proper phenomenology of birth must take into account not only the universal fact that we all are born, but also the equally universal fact that each of us is born from another human being, that is, some other human subject.3 This other human being who “gave” us birth or “from whose flesh we were born” provides us with a unique perspective on our own past, beyond the limits of our own recollection. Her perspective is incomparable to any other external perspective; rather than simply giving us an additional third-person viewpoint on our own organic birth, this one person is able to open a second-person perspective on our pre- and postnatal life and the transition between them—all of which is beyond our own recollection.My argument proceeds by the following steps:First, I develop a fresh discourse on the experience of pregnancy, by studying a set of remarks to be found in Julia Kristeva’s postphenomenological discourse on maternity, on the one hand, and in Simone de Beauvoir’s existential-phenomenological discourse on feminine embodiment, on the other hand. I use these remarks as leading clues for a novel phenomenological study of the experience of pregnancy.4 Contra Young’s influential account mentioned above, I argue that gestation, as experienced by women who live it in the first person, includes a separation between two sensory-motor beings in a nesting relation: the pregnant self and the embryonic other. The alternative account that I provide hinges on my analysis of the experience of fetal movements and the role of touch-sensations and kinesthetic sensations in such experiences. Ultimately, I argue that pregnancy does not erode the self-other boundary or the own-alien boundary but reestablishes both divisions.Second, I compare my account of the experience of pregnancy to Merleau... (shrink)

In this paper, I show that a phenomenological concept of normality can be helpful to understand the experiential side of post-truth phenomena. How is one’s longing for, or sense of, normality related to what we deem as real, true, or objective? And to what extent is the sense for “what (really) is” related to our beliefs of what should be? To investigate this, I combine a phenomenological approach to lived normality with a genealogical account of represented normality that sheds light (...) on the social and historical contingency of definitions of normality and their intertwinement with structures of power. It is my contention that such an approach to normality is well-suited to investigate how is and ought are interrelated within subjective experience and practice. This might in turn help overcoming one-sided debates on post-truth, which rely on the strict opposition of objectivity versus subjectivity, universal truth versus subjective experience, facticity versus meaning, or reason versus stupidity. It also sheds light on the ambivalent or contested status of experience within debates of post-truth and feminist theory. I will conclude that post-truth is related to what Hannah Arendt has termed the lack of a common world (i.e., normality), arguing that a plurality of experiences is needed to let the “real world” stand its ground again. (shrink)

Though “dwelling” is more commonly associated with Heidegger’s philosophy than with that of Merleau-Ponty, “being-at-home” is in fact integral to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. I consider the notion of home as it relates to Merleau-Ponty’s more familiar notions of the “lived body” and the “level,” and, in particular, I consider how the unique intertwining of activity and passivity that characterizes our being-at-home is essential to our nature as free beings. I argue that while being-at-home is essentially an experience of passivity—i.e., one that (...) rests in the background of our experience and provides a support and structure for our life that goes largely unnoticed and that is significantly beyond our “conscious” control—being-at-home is also a way of being to which we attain . This analysis of home reveals important psychological insights into the nature of our freedom as well as into the nature of the development of our adult ways of coping and behaving. (shrink)

In this paper I explore a series of fertile ambiguities that Merleau-Ponty’s work is premised upon. These ambiguities concern some of the central methodological commitments of his work, in particular his commitment to transcendental phenomenology and how he transforms that tradition, and his relationship to science and philosophical naturalism and what they suggest about his philosophical methodology. Many engagements with Merleau-Ponty’s work that are more ‘analytic’ in orientation either deflate it of its transcendental heritage, or offer a “modest” rendering of (...) its transcendental dimensions. This is also true, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent, of the work of the more empirically-minded phenomenological philosophers who engage very seriously with Merleau-Ponty—e.g. Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and others. At the same time, many other scholars contest these proto-scientific and more naturalistic uses of Merleau-Ponty’s work on hermeneutical and exegetical grounds, and they likewise criticise the deflated reading of his transcendental phenomenology that tends to support them. By working through some of the key passages and ideas, this paper establishes that the former view captures something pivotal to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. I also extend these interpretations by arguing that, at least around the time of Phenomenology of Perception, his philosophy might be reasonably regarded as a form of minimal methodological naturalism. (shrink)

The discussion of the debate on the two approaches to Husserl’s phenomenology and of the debate between David Carr and Dan Zahavi on the paradox of subjectivity signify a fundamental problem: What is the relationship between subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the world? For this problem, I argue that subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the world are Co-originary in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, in the sense of their structural necessity. I define this co-originary relationship from the perspective of unification of constitution and givenness—this unification establishes (...) their equiprimordial relationship. According to this co-originariness, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the world are not three isolated and independent origins, but are interdependent and absolute origins of sense of being in their own right. In sum, this essay proposes that transcendental co-originariness can be recognized as another way of reading Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper returns to a seminal case in the historical of phenomenological psychopathology, Ludwig Binswanger’s discussion of “Ellen West A woman with a long history of melancholia and disordered eating, Ellen West was treated at Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in 1921, a two-and-a-half month-long stay that resulted in a diagnosis of schizophrenia and Ellen West’s suicide. Binswanger relied on West’s personal writings and clinical history to develop and apply an original approach to case analysis, Daseinsanalyse or “existential analysis.” This paper takes (...) up this case and Binswanger’s analysis to explore the origins of contemporary phenomenological psychopathology, the recent progress in this field, and areas for continued growth. The paper argues that new approaches to exploring the embedded or situated quality of psychopathology are needed for advancing clinical phenomenology, and that feminist and critical phenomenology are among the disciplines that can provide important methodological and theoretical foundations for this work. Without this, the field risks repeating Binswanger’s original mistakes and viewing psychiatric illness solely as the expression of a disturbed individual. (shrink)

It is a familiar story that, where Kant humbly draws a line beyond which cognition can’t reach, Husserl presses forward to show how we can cognize beyond that limit. Kant supposes that cognition is bound to sensibility and that what we experience in sensibility is mere appearance that does not inform us about the intrinsic nature of things in themselves. By contrast, for Husserl, it makes no sense to say we experience anything other than things in themselves when we enjoy (...) sensory perception. Kant’s conception, then, by doing just that, is nonsensical. I argue that Husserl’s account does not deliver on its promise. Things as they are in themselves are just as cognitively out of reach on Husserl’s understanding of them as they are on Kant’s. Further, the charge of nonsense Husserl raises against Kant’s conception of things in themselves applies—indeed, with greater force—to his own. (shrink)

This article investigates the structure of racialized conflict experience. Embarking from a conflict event in Ta-Nehisi Coates's autobiographyBetween the World and Meand contrasting the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz with insights from Black phenomenology, I argue that Coates's experience discloses conflictual, but intertwined, modes of being-in-the-world. Further, it presents an instantiation of a particular kind of conflict, i.e., corporeal conflict. Corporeal conflict applies whenever the body is politicized, i.e., when it becomes the marker for traits representative of a (...) rival political group. Understood this way, racialized conflict is always political. I conclude the article with some remarks on the shortcomings of two dominant conflict theories in political philosophy and the potential for an alternative, phenomenological approach that enables new ways of engaging the other in conflict. The analysis is preceded by a meditation on the role of the White researcher in critical philosophy of race. (shrink)

This paper shows that Husserl is not guilty of Sellars’ myth of the sensory given. I firstly show that Husserl’s account of ‘sensations’ or ‘sense data’ seems to possess some of the attributes Sellars’ myth critiques. In response I show that, just as Sellars thinks that our ‘conceptual capacities’ afford us an awareness of a logical perceptual space that has a propositional structure, Husserl thinks that ‘acts of apprehension’ structure sensations to afford us perception that is similarly propositionally structured. Not (...) only this, but there is much affinity and shared motivation between Husserl and Sellars accounts of the sensory stratum. Reflection on phenomenological considerations prevents Sellars from denying phenomenal non-conceptual content, whilst Husserlian ‘sense data’ are technical designations; dependant parts of perceptual experience grasped in abstraction, necessary for providing a reflective/philosophical account of empirical knowledge. I show that both Husserl and Sellars assert that the proper description of phenomenal content affords it the function of presenting properties of spatial objects during perception, and reiterate the well-known fact that Husserl thinks that perception is of ‘conceptually’ apprehended spatiotemporal objects. (shrink)

This article proposes an analysis of a ritual glitch and resulting “misfire” from the standpoint of a phenomenologically informed anthropology of human interaction. Through articulating a synthesis of some of Husserl‘s insights on attention and affection with concepts and methods developed by anthropologists and other students of human interaction, a case is made for the importance of understanding the social organization of attention in ritual encounters. An analysis of a failed toast during President Obama’s 2011 State Visit to the United (...) Kingdom is used to illustrate how attention is directed toward certain participants, actions, and objects – as opposed to others. Affect-loaded empathic reactions are explained by the protracted temporal unfolding of an action whose successful conclusion – or “repair” - is ostensively and publicly delayed. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl’s ultimate aim was to give an overall philosophical explanation of the totality of Being. In this endeavour, the term “absolute” was crucial for him. In this paper, I aim to clarify the most important ways in which Husserl used this notion. I attempt to show that, despite his rather divergent usages, eventually three fundamental meanings and coordinated levels of the “absolute” can be differentiated in his thought: the epistemological, the ontological, and the theological or metaphysical level. According to (...) Husserl, we can approach this ultimate level of the Absolute, through the method of phenomenological construction. A closer reading of Husserl’s texts shows that his conception of the absolute was astonishingly modern. The main features of the conception—on all three levels—were non-foundationalism, contextualism, openness, and circularity. Each level mutually founds and determines the others. It is a non-foundational Absolute, the moments of which constitute an organic and open totality which is essentially processual. In my interpretation, this theory opens a fruitful working area, which has enormous philosophical potential and is surprisingly up-to-date. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce engaged phenomenology as an approach through which phenomenologists can more explicitly and critically consider the generative conditions and implications of their rese...

There is a paradox that lies at the heart of every investigation of normality, namely, its dependence on its other (e.g., deviation, break, difference). In this paper, I want to show that this paradox is the reason for the dynamism as well as fragility of normality. In this regard, I will not only argue that every normality is fragile, but also that normality can only be established because it is fragile. In the first part of this paper, I will present (...) and re-visit Husserl’s account of normality as concordant and optimal with regard to its dynamic or fragile aspects. In the second part of this paper, I will apply this account to recent findings in phenomenological pathology regarding schizophrenia and depression to show how Husserl’s account could be helpful for differentiating between different aspects (such as concordance and optimality) as well as genetic levels of (disturbances of) normality. (shrink)

This article aims to examine sociality’s multipolar and intentional structure beyond an inter-subjectivist perspective; beyond the view that the social world consists of only subjects and their interaction. The article is divided into four sections. First, I present Benoist’s critique of mainstream inter-subjectivist accounts of phenomenology. Second, I introduce Husserl’s concept of Gemeingeist and provide a preliminary definition of it as a “substrate of habits.” Third, I focus on the sociological and ontological sources of Benoist’s critique, specifically Descombes’ reassessment of (...) Hartmann’s distinction between objective and objectified mind. Finally, I revise my preliminary Husserlian definition of “common mind” drawing both from the distinction between objective and objectified mind and Benoist’s account of habituation as a two-sided correlative phenomenon. Although he often tends to phrase his account in intersubjectivist terms, Husserl’s phenomenology offers valuable tools to address the multipolar structure of sociality, which does not only consist of subjects in their interactions, but foremost, in the way the human mind is embedded in institutions and extended in a range of objects that bear social meaning and that guide and bind human life to an extent that is unique among social animals. (shrink)

Current scientific research on consciousness aims to understand how consciousness arises from the workings of the brain and body, as well as the relations between conscious experience and cognitive processing. Clearly, to make progress in these areas, researchers cannot avoid a range of conceptual issues about the nature and structure of consciousness, such as the following: What is the relation between intentionality and consciousness? What is the relation between self-awareness and consciousness? What is the temporal structure of conscious experience? What (...) is it like to imagine or visualize something, and how is this type of experience different from perception? How is bodily experience related to self-consciousness? Such issues have been addressed in detail in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and developed by numerous other philosophers throughout the 20th century. This chapter provides an introduction to this tradition and its way of approaching issues about consciousness. We first discuss some features of phenomenological methodology and then present some of the most important, influential, and enduring phenomenological proposals about various aspects of consciousness. These aspects include intentionality, self-awareness and the first-person perspective, time-consciousness, embodiment, and intersubjectivity. We also highlight a few ways of linking phenomenology and cognitive. (shrink)

In an Appendix to his Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis dating from the early 1920s, Husserl makes the startling assertion that, unlike the mundane ego, the transcendental ego is immortal. The present paper argues that this claim is an ineluctable consequence of Husserl’s relentless pursuit of the ever deeper levels of time-constituting consciousness and, at the same time, of his increasing reliance on Leibniz’s model of monads as the true unifiers of all things, including minds. There are many structural (...) and substantive parallels between Leibniz’s monadic scheme and Husserl’s later views on the primal ego, and these points of convergence are laid out step by step in this paper. For both theorists, the monad is a self-contained system of being, one “without windows”; a monad’s experiences unfold in harmonious concatenations; a monad is a mirror of its proximate environs and comprises multiple perspectives; the unconscious is a repository of potential activation; and, most importantly of all, a monad knows no birth and death and hence is immortal. In his very last years, Husserl proposed a third ego level, below (or beyond) the mundane ego and transcendental ego - the primal ego. It is neither psychical nor physical; it permits the transcendental ego to carry out its constitutive activities, including the mundane ego’s birth and death in time; it is always in a process of becoming, and so it can never be in a state of only “having-been”, that is, dead: and hence the primal ego’s enduring cannot itself ever come to an end. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

I argue that, on Husserl's account, affectivity, along with the closely related phenomenon of association, follows a form of sui generis lawfulness belonging to the domain of what Husserl calls motivation, which must be distinguished both (1) from the causal structures through which we understand the body third-personally, as a material thing; and also (2) from the rational or inferential structures at the level of deliberative judgment traditionally understood to be the domain of epistemic import. In effect, in addition to (...) recognizing a “space of causes” and a “space of reasons,” Husserl’s account of affectivity and the epistemology of passive synthesis in which it is situated suggest that we should recognize a separate “space of motivations.” Within this space, on Husserl’s phenomenological picture, we can isolate two different sorts of epistemic import, one belonging directly to the passive-synthetic content of experience, as explained in Husserl’s account of association and his closely aligned notion of nonlinguistic sense, and a second—my primary focus—affectivity, which is still relevant for that content, albeit indirectly, and holds epistemic import in its determination not of what that content is but of how it comes to matter for us. (shrink)

In 1999, Dan Zahavi’s Self Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation initiated a critique of the standard interpretation of the distinction between the second and third levels of Husserl’s analysis of time-constituting consciousness. At stake was the possibility of a coherent account of self-awareness (Zahavi’s concern), but also the possibility of prereflectively distinguishing the acts of consciousness (Brough and Sokolowski’s rebuttal of Zahavi’s critique). Using insights gained from Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis rather than the work on time-consciousness, this paper (...) provides a new, more precise vocabulary in which to carry on the debate, in the hopes of bringing it to a mutually satisfactory resolution. After briefly laying out the terms of the Zahavi–Brough/Sokolowski debate (Sect. 2), I then elaborate a three-fold distinction in consciousness from the Analyses (Sect. 3) and relate that back to the issue of objectivity in the debate (Sect. 4). I end by suggesting how this three-fold model from the Analyses helps us preserve the essentially tripartite structure (as Brough and Sokolowski insist we do) while not making one of these levels the object of another (in keeping with Zahavi’s critique) (Sect. 5). (shrink)

This article studies our philosophical understanding of experience in order to question the current political and theoretical dismissal of experiential accounts in feminist theory. The focus is on Joan Scott's critique of experience, but the philosophical issues animating the discussion go beyond Scott's work and concern the future of feminist theory and politics more generally. I ask what it means for feminist theory to redefine experience as a linguistic event the way Scott suggests. I attempt to demonstrate that the consequences (...) that she draws from such a theoretical move are both philosophically and politically problematic. A critical study of the evidence of experience does not have to imply metaphysical or epistemological foundationalism, as Scott claims, but on the contrary, such a study is indispensable for challenging them. We must hold onto experience as an important resource for contesting sexist discourses and oppressive conceptual schemas. (shrink)

This paper problematizes the analogy that Hubert Dreyfus has presented between phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Dreyfus presents Merleau-Ponty''s modification of Husserl''s phenomenology in a misleading way. He ignores the idea of philosophy as a radical interrogation and self-responsibility that stems from Husserl''s work and recurs in Merleau-Ponty''s Phenomenology of Perception. The paper focuses on Merleau-Ponty''s understanding of the phenomenological reduction. It shows that his critical idea was not to restrict the scope of Husserl''s reductions but to study (...) the conditions of possibility for the thetic acts. Merleau-Ponty argued, following Husserl''s texts, that the thetic acts rest on the basis of primordial pre-thetic experience. This layer of experience cannot, by its nature, be explicated or clarified, but it can be questioned and unveiled. This is the recurrent task of phenomenological philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty understands it. (shrink)

Excellent performance in sport involves specialized and refined skills within very narrow applications. Choking throws a wrench in the works of finely tuned performances. Functionally, and reduced to its simplest expression, choking is severe underperformance when engaging already mastered skills. Choking is a complex phenomenon with many intersecting facets: its dysfunctions result from the multifaceted interaction of cognitive and psychological processes, neurophysiological mechanisms, and phenomenological dynamics. This article develops a phenomenological model that, complementing empirical and theoretical research, helps understand and (...) redress choking. It aims at describing the experience of choking as experience, and to discuss strategies to palliate or prevent its onset at the pragmatic level at which athletes engage the phenomenon experientially. An overview of current empirical research and theoretical models highlights key ideas and points out contentious issues. The model describes the common structure of the choking experience. It identifies four core constitutive elements: A) disruptive proprioceptive and kinesthetic dynamics, B) a malfunctioning background or Jamesian fringe of consciousness, C) dislocated time dynamics, and D) emotional disturbances. The novelty of the remedy is that it is designed to cross disciplinary boundaries between phenomenology, historiography, and hermeneutics, and moreover connects theory to praxis as it looks at Japanese dō, practices of self-cultivation. It focuses on actual do-or-die situations, not putative ones such as important business deals or competing for a medal. To this effect, it examines medieval Japanese swordsmanship and training manuals and also engages risk sports, where death is indeed a real possibility. The manuals, which arise in the context of choke-inducing life or death duels, and risk sports, afford keen phenomenological observations and practical advice that prove invaluable for today’s sports world and beyond. (shrink)

This paper argues that transcendental phenomenology (here represented by Edmund Husserl) can accommodate the main thesis of semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply a matter of what is ‘in the head,’ but depends on how the world is. I first introduce the semantic problem as an issue of how linguistic tokens or mental states can have ‘content’—that is, how they can set up conditions of satisfaction or be responsive to norms such that they can succeed or fail (...) at referring. The standard representationalist view—which thinks of the problem in first-person terms—is contrasted with Brandom’s pragmatic inferentialist approach, which adopts a third-person stance. The rest of the paper defends a phenomenological version of the representationalist position (seeking to preserve its first-person stance) but offers a conception of representation that does not identify it with an entity ‘in the head.’ The standard view of Husserl as a Cartesian internalist is undermined by rejecting its fundamental assumption—that Husserl’s concept of the ‘noema’ is a mental entity—and by defending a concept of ‘phenomenological immanence’ that has a normative, rather than a psychological, structure. Finally, it is argued that phenomenological immanence cannot be identified with ‘consciousness’ in Husserl’s sense, though consciousness is a necessary condition for it. (shrink)

Experientialist semantics has contributed to a broader notion of linguistic meaning by emphasizing notions such as construal, perspective, metaphor, and embodiment, but has suffered from an individualist concept of meaning and has conflated experiential motivations with conventional semantics. We argue that these problems can be redressed by methods and concepts from phenomenology, on the basis of a case study of sentences of non-actual motion such as “The mountain range goes all the way from Mexico to Canada.” Through a phenomenological reanalysis (...) of proposals of Talmy, Langacker, and Matlock, we show that non-actual motion is both experientially and linguistically non-unitary. At least three different features of human consciousness—enactive perception, visual scanning, and imagination—constitute experiential motivations for non-actual motion sentences, and each of these could be related to phenomenological analyses of human intentionality. The second problem is addressed by proposing that the experiential motivations of non-actual motion sentences can be viewed as sedimented through “passive” processes of acquisition and social transmission and that this implies an interactive loop between experience and language, yielding losses in terms of original experience, but gains in terms of communal signification. Something that is underestimated by phenomenology is that what is sedimented are not only intentional objects such as states of affairs, but aspects of how they are given, i.e., the original, temporal, bodily experiences themselves. Since cognitive semantics has emphasized such aspects of meaning, we suggest that phenomenology can itself benefit from experientialist semantics, especially when it turns its focus from prepredicative to predicative, linguistic intentionality. (shrink)

From its very beginning, sociological thought has been concerned with a topic central to our daily lives: social distance. Since inception, the concept of social distance has referred to the relationships of familiarity and strangeness between social groups, which is experienced in the social world in terms of “We” and “They”. This article covers the main tenets of a Schutzian phenomenological approach to the study of social distance and group relationships. Specific focus is placed on the different attitudes and valuations (...) of the in-group towards the out-group considered as a stranger, the invisible excess of meaning that emerges in these types of social relationships and the conceptual construction of the Other that explains the phenomenon of discrimination. (shrink)

This paper explicates Husserl’s usage of what he calls “radical Besinnung” in Formale und transzendentale Logik. Husserl introduces radical Besinnung as his method in the introduction to FTL. Radical Besinnung aims at criticizing the practice of formal sciences by means of transcendental phenomenological clarification of its aims and presuppositions. By showing how Husserl applies this method to the history of formal sciences down to mathematicians’ work in his time, the paper explains in detail the relationship between historical critical Besinnung and (...) transcendental phenomenology. Ultimately the paper suggests that radical Besinnung should be viewed as a general methodological framework within which transcendental phenomenological descriptions are used to criticize historically given goal-directed practices. (shrink)

The essay examines the idea of ―biological space and time‖ found in Evan Thompson‘s Mind in Life and Gilles Deleuze‘s Difference and Repetition. Tracking down this ―new Transcendental Aesthetic‖ intersects new work done on panpsychism. Both Deleuze and Thompson can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That‘s what ―Mind in Life‖ means: mind and life are coextensive; life is a sufficient condition for mind. Deleuze is not just a biological panpsychist, however, so we‘ll have to confront full-fledged panpsychism. At (...) the end of the essay we‘ll be able to pose the question whether or not we can supplement Thompson‘s ―Mind in Life‖ position with a ―Mind in Process‖ position and if so, what that supplement means both for his work and for panpsychism. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz is, without a doubt, one of the phenomenologists that contributed the most to the reflection on how to apply insights from phenomenological philosophy to the, empirical and theoretical, human and social sciences. However, his work tends to be neglected by many of the current advocates of phenomenology within these disciplines. In the present paper, I intend to remedy this situation. In order to do so, I will systematically revisit his mundane and social-scientifically oriented account of phenomenology, which, as (...) I shall show, emerges from a theoretical confrontation with the Husserlian distinction between transcendental phenomenology and phenomenological psychology. (shrink)

What types of unity and disunity belong to a group of people sharing a culture? Husserl illuminates these communities by helping us trace their origin to two types of interpersonal act—cooperation and influence—though cultural communities are distinguished from both cooperative groups and mere communities of related influences. This analysis has consequences for contemporary concerns about multi- or mono-culturalism and the relationship between culture and politics. It also leads us to critique Husserl’s desire for a new humanity, one that is rational, (...) cooperatively united, and animated by a universal philosophical culture. Reflecting on culture, a spiritually shaped and shared domain of the world, draws us to reflect also on ourselves as social and rational animals, and to ask, what should we reasonably hope for—and aim for—in a human culture that expresses and supports our shared lives of reason? Aristotle is used for occasional comparisons and contrasts. (shrink)

In his paper, “The Dorsal Stream and the Visual Horizon,” Michael Madary argues that “dorsal stream processing plays a main role in the spatiotemporal limits of visual perception, in what Husserl identified as the visual horizon” (Madary 2011, p. 424). Madary regards himself as thereby providing a theoretical framework “sensitive to basic Husserlian phenomenology” (Madary 2011). In particular, Madary draws connections between perceptual anticipations and the experience of the indeterminate spatial margins, on the one hand, and the Husserlian spatiotemporal visual (...) horizons, on the other. I argue that Madary’s arguments, for a Husserlian view of the two visual systems, are not convincing. When the notion of visual horizon is adequately understood as a constitutive notion, there will be reason to regard the connections between dorsal processing and the Husserlian spatiotemporal horizons as tenuous at best. (shrink)

Today many philosophers of mind accept that the two cortical streams of visual processing in humans can be distinguished in terms of conscious experience. The ventral stream is thought to produce representations that may become conscious, and the dorsal stream is thought to handle unconscious vision for action. Despite a vast literature on the topic of the two streams, there is currently no account of the way in which the relevant empirical evidence could fit with basic Husserlian phenomenology of vision. (...) Here I offer such an account. In this article, I show how the empirical evidence ought to be understood in a way that is informed by phenomenology. The differences in the two streams are better described as differences in spatial and temporal processing. Rather than simply “unconscious,” the dorsal stream can be better described as making a special contribution to what Husserl identified as the visual horizon. (shrink)