Edith Stein and Gerda Walther explain how community comes to be and how it is structured, but they do not develop significant accounts of how communities disintegrate or die, albeit they make passing allusions to how this may happen. I argue that what makes communities vulnerable to their possible demise, following both Stein’s and Walther’s social ontology, is the breakdown of the sense of the communal bond, that is, the failure of the community members’ ability to make sense of their (...) relationship to one another. Just as sense-making and sense-building can help give birth and meaning to communities, sense disintegration and the dying of the sense of a community bespeak a vulnerability that lies at the very core of all communities. In addition to the vulnerability of sense-making, I argue that the lived-body and habit also pose important challenges to the very possibility of community. (shrink)

If community is determined primarily in consciousness as a mental state of oneness, can community exist when there is no accompanying mental state or collective intentionality that makes us realise that we are one community? Walther would respond affirmatively, arguing that there is a deep psychological structure of habit that allows us to continue to experience ourselves as a community. The habit of community works on all levels of our person, including our bodies, psyches and spirits (Geist). It allows us (...) to continue to be in community even though we are not always conscious of it. Husserl would describe this as part of the passive synthesis of Vergemeinschaftung. Walther’s analysis of the passive structure of habit opens up important possibilities for the inner consciousness of time. Drawing from Husserl’s and Walther’s analyses, I argue for the possibility of a communal inner time consciousness, or an inner awareness of timeconsciousness of the community, which gives rise to three constitutive moments: communal retention or communal memory, a sense of the communal present or a communal “now,” and communal protentions or anticipations. Ultimately, I will show how Walther’s treatment of habit demonstrates that time conditions the lived experience of community. One can, therefore, speak of a time of the community—its past, present and future—even though Walther herself does not explicitly develop this possibility. (shrink)

Explores, at different levels, the social emotions of fellow-feeling, the sense of identity, love and hatred, and traces their relationship to one another and to the values with which they are associated. This book reviews the evaluations of love and sympathy in different historical periods and in different social and religious environments.

This article investigates the relationship between emotional sharing and the extended mind thesis. We argue that shared emotions are socially extended emotions that involve a specific type of constitutive integration between the participating individuals’ emotional experiences. We start by distinguishing two claims, the Environmentally Extended Emotion Thesis and the Socially Extended Emotion Thesis. We then critically discuss some recent influential proposals about the nature of shared emotions. Finally, in Sect. 3, we motivate two conditions that an account of shared emotions (...) ought to accommodate: Reciprocal Other-awareness and Integration. Consideration of and discussion of relational accounts of joint attention lead us to the proposal that a construal of socially extended emotions in terms of a constitutive integration of the participating individuals’ experiences is more promising than proposals that simply appeal to various forms of social situatedness, embeddedness, or scaffolding. (shrink)

This book examines the human ability to participate in moments of joint feeling. It presents an answer to the question concerning the nature of our faculty to share in what might be called episodes of collective affective intentionality. The proposal develops the claim that our capacity to participate in such episodes is grounded in an ability central to our human condition: our capacity to care with one another about certain things. The author provides a phenomenologically adequate account of collective affective (...) intentionality that takes seriously the idea that feelings are at the core of our emotional relation to the world. He details a form of group emotional orientation that relies on the fact that the participating individuals have come to share a number of concerns. Readers will learn that at the heart of a collective affective intentional episode, one does not merely find a set of shared concerns, but also a particular mode of caring. In the end, the argument presented in this monograph makes plausible the idea that the emotions through which humans participate in moments of affective intentional community express our nature. In addition, it shows that the debate on collective affective intentionality also permits us to better understand the relationship between two conflicting philosophical pictures of ourselves: the idea that we are essentially social beings and the claim that we are creatures for whom our personal existence is an issue. Thus, aiming at an elucidation of the nature of our ability to feel together, the book offers a detailed account of what it is to situationally express our human nature by caring about something in a properly joint manner. (shrink)

To get an initial grip of what is and, in particular, what is not at stake in the Phenomenology of SE, it is helpful to distinguish four dimensions of the sociality of emotions. As we shall see, the Phenomenology of emotions, in the sense in which I will [aut]Walther, Gerda’s account, is primarily, though certainly not exclusively, concerned with the fourth dimension. Roughly, the three first layers or levels in which social relations and facts come into play in the affective (...) life of individuals and groups are i) the interpersonal, ii) the Group and intergroup, and iii) the sociological and sociocultural dimensions. Whereas most phenomenologists, and [aut]Walther, Gerda, touch upon the interpersonal and Group-level dimensions and analyzing various collective and GroupPhenomena), the intergroup and sociological and sociocultural levels have been mined extensively by sociologists, as well as cross-cultural and social psychologists. Here is how the social [aut]Parkinson, Brian, [aut]Fischer, Agneta[aut]Manstead, Antony S. R. concisely delineate these dimensions. (shrink)

What kind of reality is legal reality, how is it created, and what are its a priori foundations? These are the central questions asked by the early phenomenologists who took interest in social ontology and law. While Reinach represents the well-known “realist” approach to phenomenology of law, Felix Kaufmann and Fritz Schreier belonged to the “positivist” “Vienna School of Jurisprudence,” combining Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology—and thereby challenging Reinach’s views on how legal reality and the (...) legal a priori were to be conceived. This paper addresses the controversy between these positivist and realist approaches to phenomenology of law, with the goal of introducing the lesser known theories of Kaufmann and Schreier. The special focus on their critique of Reinach’s outline should give us an overview of their positions vis-à-vis the basic and a priori elements of which legal reality consists and the role that phenomenology plays in analyzing them. There is one general tendency to be noted: While the phenomenological legal positivists see the root of legal reality in an act of interpretation according to a “normative scheme of interpretation,” Reinach locates the roots of legal reality in social interaction and argues for the existence of entities independent of any interpretation. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature and limits of player embodiment within digital games. We identify a convergence between everyday bodily actions and activity within digital environments, and a trend towards incorporating natural forms of movement into gaming worlds through mimetic control devices. We examine recent literature in the area of immersion and presence in digital gaming; Calleja’s (2011) recent Player Involvement Model of gaming is discussed and found to rely on a probematic notion of embodiment as 'incorporation'. We go on (...) to further reflect on the nature of player involvement in digital gaming environments by applying insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It is argued that digital embodiment differs so significantly from primordial embodiment that any idea of total immersion is simply fantasy. We subsequently argue that digital game media nonetheless provide us with unique opportunities for exploring the nature of distinctively human forms of embodiment, and so we need more complete and more reliable phenomenological descriptions of the experiences associated with computer games. (shrink)

Phenomenological accounts of sociality in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Scheler, Schütz, Stein and many others offer powerful lines of arguments to recast current, predominantly analytic, discussions on collective intentionality and social cognition. Against this background, the aim of this volume is to reevaluate, critically and in contemporary terms, the rich phenomenological resources regarding social reality: the interpersonal, collective and communal aspects of the life-world. Specifically, the book pursues three interrelated objectives: it aims 1.) to systematically explore the key phenomenological aspects (...) of social reality; 2.) to offer novel, state-of-the-art assessments of both central and lesser-known proponents of the phenomenology of sociality, and 3.) to contextualize this elaborate body of work in light of contemporary social cognition research, the growing literature in analytic social ontology, and current trends in moral psychology, moral phenomenology, and social and political philosophy. The collection brings together original articles by a host of prominent scholars and upcoming young talents to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of the topic. It will be essential reading for those studying phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, empathy, and community, including analytic, social, moral and political philosophers, and will also be of interest for social scientists and social psychologists. (shrink)

Originally published: New York: Random House, 1972.

In this book, his major work, Alfred Schutz attempts to provide a sound philosophical basis for the sociological theories of Max Weber. Using a Husserlian phenomenology, Schutz provides a complete and original analysis of human action and its "intended meaning.".

_Internet_ is een van de eerste boeken waarin het filosofische inzicht -van Plato tot Kierkegaard - betrokken wordt op het debat over de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van het internet. Dreyfus laat zien dat de onstoffelijke, 'vrij zwevende' websurfer zijn oorsprong vindt in Descartes' scheiding van geest en lichaam, en hoe Kierkegaards inzichten in de opkomst van het moderne leespubliek vooruitlopen op de nieuwsgierige, maar elk risico vermijdende internet-junkie. Uitgaande van recente onderzoeken naar het isolement dat veel internetgebruikers ervaren, toont Dreyfus (...) aan hoe het internet, door zijn nadruk op privé-ervaringen, gebruikers berooft van wezenlijke, belichaamde vermogens zoals vertrouwen, stemmingen en betrokkenheid bij met anderen gedeelde lokale aangelegenheden. _Internet_ is verplichte kost voor iedereen die on line is en is geïnteressseerd in onze plaats in de 'e-revolutie'. (shrink)

A survey of current attitudes towards the concept of intentionality provides for an interesting sociology of philosophers. One group regards the notion as a kind of ghost-in-the-machine redivivus, come back to haunt them. The spectral threats posed to a seamless materialist ontology by such things as immateriality, incorrigibility and privacy had seemed exorcised in the first round, at the hands of Ryle and Wittgenstein. But now it appeared that their opponents had been holding in reserve a much more sophisticated concept (...) of mind that required such intractables as mental states that derive their identity from their meanings, meanings themselves as abstract and intensional entities, intentional as opposed to real objects, and the like. (shrink)

A survey of current attitudes towards the concept of intentionality provides for an interesting sociology of philosophers. One group regards the notion as a kind of ghost-in-the-machine redivivus, come back to haunt them. The spectral threats posed to a seamless materialist ontology by such things as immateriality, incorrigibility and privacy had seemed exorcised in the first round, at the hands of Ryle and Wittgenstein. But now it appeared that their opponents had been holding in reserve a much more sophisticated concept (...) of mind that required such intractables as mental states that derive their identity from their meanings, meanings themselves as abstract and intensional entities, intentional as opposed to real objects, and the like. (shrink)

When surveying recent philosophical work on the nature and status of collective intentionality and we-intentions, it is striking how much effort is spent on analysing the structure of joint action and on establishing whether or not the intention to, say, go for a walk or paint a house together is reducible to some form of I-intentionality. Much less work has been devoted to an analysis of shared affects and emotions. This is regrettable, not only because emotional sharing in all likelihood (...) is developmentally prior to and logically more basic than joint action, but also because it might constitute a way of being together with others, which we need to study if we wish to better understand the nature of the we. In the present contribution, my primary aim will be to offer an answer to the following question: does the we-experience, the experience of being part of a we, presuppose, precede, preserve, or abolish the difference between self- and other-experience? In pursuing this task, I will take a closer look at emotional sharing and draw on resources that are too frequently ignored in current social ontology, namely insights found in classical phenomenology and in contemporary research on social cognition. (shrink)

This book investigates three issues in particular which have captured the public imagination as ‘problems’ emerging directly from the contemporary use of communications technology: online anti-social behaviour; the problem of privacy; and the problem of free speech online. Through a critical and philosophical examination of each of these cases in turn, I will argue that these problems have at their root the issue of presence, and are evoking what I call a ‘crisis of presence’. I argue that the use of (...) ubiquitous communication technologies has created a disjuncture between how we think we exist in the world, and how we actually do exist in the world through our use of such devices. The main problem here, I suggest, is a lack of awareness of our own and others’ presence in the world through these technologies, and thus the inability to make proper judgements about the consequences of our social actions and ethical stances in online contexts. By focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, I argue that the real task for networked humanity is the recognition that these problems are at least in part the result of a certain ‘stance’ taken to the world and enabled by technology. The solution therefore, is not to focus exclusively on content and its regulation as much as it is to examine the alienating aspects of the media itself by understanding and resisting the more destructive tendencies in technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction, disembodiment and mediation which increasingly appear in our social encounters and presences. I suggest that such resistance involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, legal and technological regimes. (shrink)