The paper offers a systematic reconstruction of the relations that, in Husserl’s work, bind together our shared social world (“the spiritual world”) with shared intentionality. It is claimed that, by sharing experiences, persons create social reasons and that these reasons impose a normative structure on the social world. Because there are two ways in which persons can share experiences (depending on whether these experiences rest on mutual communication or on group’s identity), social normativity comes in two kinds. It is either (...) directed (it has an addressee) or it is collective or absolute (it applies to all group members). Social normativity should be distinguished from axiological normativity: The first is grounded in shared intentionality, the second in values. (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)

Keskityn siihen miten Leibnizilla yksittäiset mielihyvän tai mielipahan tiedostamattomat havainnot voivat kasautua tai tiivistyä ja muodostaa vähitellen tunteita, joista tulemme tietoisiksi.

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)

The human being as a constituted objectivity is a fragile ‘figure’ who lives in through their individual and shared experience. As a constituted objectivity, it influences our experiences, actions and the constitution of our community. Nevertheless, it appears to us, who actually constitute it, as a completely independent and immutable object, as a mere fact our experience has to comply with, and as a normative representation of the human being. This paper inquires - from a phenomenological point of view - (...) about the structure that underlies the norm at work in our experience, as well as in the high- and low-level dimensions of the intersubjective community. Indirectly, such a structure can be identified through the connection between Husserl’s understanding of normality and objectivity. My claim is that normativity can be understood as a necessary function and thus can be distinguished from objectivity and normality. Normativity appears, therefore, as a function of objectivity, which allows one to distinguish the latter from normality. As such, normativity should not be confused with an active agreement or regulation, but rather identified as a necessary constitutive structure arising from experiential intersubjective sense-borrowing performance. At the same time, due to its connection to objectivity, normativity also appears to strongly influence the social production of validity, therefore being endorsed by institutions. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the fields of social cognition and social ontology. Drawing on both classical and more recent phenomenological studies, the article develops an account ofgroup-directed empathy. The first part of the article spells out the phenomenological notion of empathy and suggests certain conceptual distinctions vis-à-vis two different kinds of group. The second part of the paper applies these conceptual considerations to cases in which empathy is directed at groups and elucidates the sense (...) in which individuals can empathically target not only other individual’s emotions, but also shared emotions as such. Clarifying the structure of group-directed empathy, it will also be argued that the latter is, by default, more informative than individual-directed empathy. The third and last section of the paper is devoted to one central consequence of the proposed account: if it is possible to empathize with groups as such, and if empathy necessary builds on body-perception, then both ideas seem to be conducive to the claim that groups as such have a body. (shrink)

Current discussions on social cognition, empathy, and interpersonal understanding are largely built on the question of how we recognize and access particular mental states of others. Mental states have been treated as temporally individuated, momentary or temporally narrow unities that can be grasped at one go. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition—on Stein and Husserl in particular—I will problematize this approach, and argue that the other’s experiential states can appear meaningful to us only they are viewed in connection with further, non-simultaneous (...) experiential states of the other. I will focus on the temporal structure of mental states which has received less attention in the available literature. Building a comparison between empathy and music perception, I will argue that approaching the problem of other minds from the point of view of particular mental states is like considering music from the point of view of particular notes. (shrink)

The current debates dealing with empathy, social cognition, and the problem of other minds widely accept the assumption that, whereas we can directly perceive the other’s body, certain additional mental operations are needed in order to access the contents of the other’s mind. Body-perception has, in other words, been understood as something that merely mediates our experience of other minds and requires no philosophical analysis in itself. The available accounts have accordingly seen their main task as pinpointing the operations and (...) mechanisms that enable us to move beyond body-perception—and here acts such as inference, simulation, and projection have usually been the main candidates. This whole setting, however, seems to rely on a somewhat Cartesian assumption, according to which body-perception fundamentally amounts to the perception of a material thing, res extensa, starting from which we then strive to grasp the other as a res cogitans. Insofar as one begins with the question of how we can discover and understand mindedness in things that cannot be directly perceived as minded, the Cartesian setting is already taken for granted—and this is, in fact, exactly what most of the available proposals seem to be doing. From a phenomenological point of view, the Cartesian setting is untenable and seriously misleads the whole debate. The present article reassesses the role and status of body-perception in empathy. Making use of the Husserlian theory of expressivity in particular, the article engages a phenomenological framework of analysis, challenges the above-mentioned assumption concerning the nature of body-perception, and argues for the immediate nature of empathy. (shrink)

During recent decades various researchers from health and social sciences have been debating what it means for a person to be disabled. A rather overlooked approach has developed alongside this debate, primarily inspired by the philosophical tradition called phenomenology. This paper develops a phenomenological model of disability by arguing for a different methodological and conceptual framework from that used by the existing phenomenological approach. The existing approach is developed from the phenomenology of illness, but the paper illustrates how the case (...) of congenital disabilities, looking at the congenital disorder called cerebral palsy (CP), presents a fundamental problem for the approach. In order to understand such congenital cases as CP, the experience of disability is described as being gradually different from, rather than a disruption of, the experience of being abled, and it is argued that the experience of disability is complex and dynamically influenced by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Different experiential aspects of disability— pre-reflective, attuned and reflective aspects—are described, demonstrating that the experience of disability comes in different degrees. Overall, this paper contributes to the debates about disability by further describing the personal aspects and experience of persons living with disabilities. (shrink)

Our species of hominin, Homo sapiens, is an extremely social animal. We are born with social brains. The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is a methodological approach to social consciousness that offers significant advantages in terms of uncovering and describing the essential structures of our social perceptions and actions. This is especially true in this period of post-neuro-turn social science, because the structures described by Husserlian “pure” phenomenology with its emphasis upon “returning to the things,” performing reductions, and developing the skills (...) available to the phenomenological attitude are in synch with neuroscientific research on the neural correlates of consciousness. For the anthropology of consciousness, the Husserlian methodology allows us to explore consciousness in cross-cultural settings in greater detail and depth of understanding. This is especially the case with respect to the experience of intersubjectivity, the roots of which are found to be part of the inherent life-world that all normal humans depend upon to true their experiences of the environing world, regardless of cultural background. The Husserlian approach to intersubjectivity challenges the discipline of anthropology to move past its knee-jerk distinction between nature and nurture, and its erroneous assumption that human experience is somehow “culture all the way down.”. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the Husserlian phenomenology of animality, by focusing on several texts of the 1920s in which the animal is determined as an abnormal variation of the human being. My aim is to address the question of the abnormality of the animal by reintegrating it in its original context, which is Husserl’s theory of normality. I will sketch the general framework of this theory, its articulations and strata, in order to eventually raise some paradoxical issues, specifically (...) in relation to how the question of animality is interpreted through the couple normality/abnormality. (shrink)

Violence has become a prominent topic in recent phenomenological investigations. In this paper, I wish to contribute to this ongoing discourse by looking at violence in a literal sense as violation of experiential structures, insofar as it is intentionally, purposefully, and strategically imposed on a subject by another agent. Phenomenology provides the descriptive methodology for elucidating such structures. The violation can take the form of a radicalization, in which one of the aspects of polar experiential spectra becomes predominant, i.e. the (...) balance between them is shifted to one extreme. I focus on the relationship between self and other on the one hand, and the relationship between body-as-subject and body-as-object on the other, as prominent topoi in the phenomenological literature. With regard to torture and solitary confinement as forms of extreme violence, I analyze how these structures are disturbed. (shrink)