Symposium

This article aims at understanding the North-American reception of Foucault’s Folie et déraison. After showing how American conceptions of social control facilitated the integration of Foucauldian thinking in North-American academia, I examine the ways by which the advocates of anti-psychiatry and the historians of psychiatry read Folie et déraison, which became emblematic for French Theory. I then present various Anglo-American critiques of Folie et déraison and defend the persistence of a “Foucauldian spirit” against the sci-entifization of psychiatry. All this allows for an assessment of the legacy of Folie et déraison in the North American debates.

This article argues that philosophical hermeneutics, despite its onto-logical character, can inform higher education teaching in a meaningful way. After discussing theoretical aspects of philosophical her-meneutics, focus will turn to pre-understandings and historically effected consciousness. These concepts will lead to hermeneutics’s transformative nature, with the notion of openness serving as a com-mon thread. The review of three further concepts of philosophical hermeneutics—hermeneutical experience, authentic dialogue, and Bildung—will provide insight into openness as a vanishing point without being a culmination. Parallels to Mezirow’s method of trans-formative learning will be drawn and the concept of Bildung, central to philosophical hermeneutics, will be considered through the Hum-boldtian lens to better extract its practical implications, which lay beyond Gadamer’s theoretical focus. Finally, the last section will cement the applicative intent of the article by presenting concrete teaching practices that 􀏔low from philosophical hermeneutics.

The phenomenologist Gerda Walther posits the possibility of a new social act, which she terms telepathy. It is marked by an intimate in-terpersonal union in which ego and alter ego become capable of sharing in the identical lived experience, though distant from one another. Here, there is no fusion or collective identi􀏔ication; rather, in-dividuals, though they live the experience and mind of the other, never lose or transcend their own individuation. Unlike the act of empathy, there is no analogical transfer. This article defends the possibility of a restricted sense telepathy. The author argues that four conditions must be ful􀏔illed for telepathy to occur: recognition of a social drive; a partially willed act of mind that results in the assump-tion of a certain stance, but it also comes upon us as an experience; constitution of subjects as persons marked by a “fundamental es-sence”; and I-splitting.

A growing body of work approaches the current environmental devastation from the perspective of a “crisis of sensitivity”: our inability to care for the living around us is said to be a failure of perception and feeling. The article explores several versions of the narrative of modern insensitivity through a study of Günther Anders and Jane Bennett, highlighting the limitations of such approaches. I suggest the notion of a desensitization apparatus to specify and politicize the diagnosis of a “crisis of sensitivity”.

This paper reconstructs Oskar Becker’s phenomenology of race, a project he called “paraontology.” For Becker, a fervent National So-cialist, paraontology provided a phenomenological account of “na-ture”—a realm of ahistorical essences encompassing both the “super-historical” truths of mathematics and metaphysics and the “sub-historical” forces of “blood and soil.” The impetus for this reconstruc-tion is the re-emergence of this term in contemporary Black studies, where it is used to problematize ontology’s usefulness for thinking black life. This paper asks what the possibility of such an iteration shows about Becker’s project and its investment in non-historical repetition, arguing it reveals a profound disavowal of the historical at the heart of Becker’s project rather than a phenomenological disclosure of the natural.

While essential work in Africana philosophy that illuminates the perils of Western constructs of race and racism has been laid out, scholarship is yet to excavate genealogies of Africana critiques of Western slavery as distinct philosophical themes that can contribute to the understanding of slavery from the vantage of the subjugated. This article is a call for more theorizations of such genealogies.

To be Black means to have ancestors whose humanity has been de-nied by slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and segregation, as well as by many theories elaborated in order to justify and intensify these modes of domination. To be Black also means having to face the enduring legacies of these systems and theories, which predomi-nantly manifest through overexposure to violence and death. Today, premature death and habituation to loss remain constitutive fea-tures of Black experience. Dignity, often de􀏔ined as the inherent value of every single human being, has been a core concept in ethics since Kant, at least. But in both philosophy and modern politics, the claim of respect for the dignity of people has coexisted with deep antiblack-ness. However, apart from the Western understanding of dignity stands another tradition. The concept of dignity is pervasive in Black radicalism, Caribbean philosophy, and African thought since the 18th century. This article draws inspiration from the legacy of these thinkers to elaborate an ethics centred on the speci􀏔icities of racial-ized life.

This article sketches an archaeology of the racial divide between North Africa and “Black Africa” by examining how it belongs to the emergence of modern geography during the nineteenth century. It argues that the de-Africanization of North Africa is inseparable from the racial identi􀏔ication of “Africa proper”—to quote Hegel’s word—with a dehumanizing concept of Blackness. The second part of the article tries to move beyond archaeology in order to analyze counter-geographies of decolonization. It does so by focussing on the ways in which the continental Pan-Africanism of the Algerian revolution has deployed a practical criticism of the divide between North and Black Africa through Fanon.

It is important to read afresh today the meaning of the Negritude movement without reducing it, as is often the case, to a counter-essentialism in response to the essentialism of the discourse of coloni-alism; to realize that Senghor, Césaire, and Damas were 􀏔irst and foremost global philosophers, that is, thinkers of the plural and decentred world that the Bandung conference of 1955 had promised. Thus, their different perspectives converge as the task of thinking a humanism for our times based on a non-imperial universal, a univer-sal of encounter and translation founded on equality. And, consequently, a socialism that is, in its different translations, a force of emancipation, but also of humanization and spiritualization of the earth. That task is still ours.

What does “life” mean in the protest slogan “Black Lives Matter”? This article draws on a close reading of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal to offer an answer to this question. In his poem, Césaire carefully examines the ways racial and colonial domination distort life. He identi􀏔ies various false accounts of life complicit in domination, and he points toward an alternative. The article com-pares Césaire’s alternative to accounts of life put forward by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry, suggesting that Césaire pushes his cri-tique in a similar direction, but goes further.

In this article, I analyze a concept central to the work of the Beninese philosopher Paulin Jidenu Hountondji: pluralism. Hountondji’s pluralism consists of both a theoretical pluralism, which emphasizes the importance of plurality and debate within philosophy and science, and a politico-economic pluralism, which arises in opposition to the dominative tendencies of cultural nationalism and the capitalist world-system. I contend that at the heart of both Hountondji’s theoretical and politico-economic pluralism rests a concept of negative pluralism, a political principle derived from Hountondji’s immanent critique of his own historical conjuncture. I conclude that Hountondji’s negative pluralism offers a distinct and compelling ac-count of plurality as neither innately nor instrumentally ideal. Instead, Hountondji’s negative pluralism allows us to identify, through a critique of existing political structures, forms of political compul-sion and economic exploitation which function as obstacles to universal emancipation.

This paper explores the question of the meaning of life, not only from the perspective of its temporal unfolding from birth to death but also from the perspective of its own particular meaning and its final cause, to use Aristotelian categories. In order to discuss this argument I refer myself to Edith Stein to show how crucial moments of her own life give rise to important and de􀏔ining philosophical positions that touch upon questions of personal identity, social and communal relations, and a relationship with God.

Edith Stein came to phenomenology after beginning her university studies in psychology. She struggled with the inability of psychology to justify and delineate its founding principles. She found in Edmund Husserl, though his sustained criticisms of psychologism, the possibility of a phenomenological ground for psychology. This article demonstrates how Stein, drawing from but also distancing herself from Husserl, justifies the possibility of a phenomenological psychology framed within a personalist structure of subjectivity and sociality.

This paper presents a systematic discussion of Edith Stein’s critical understanding of Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological idealism. After a brief explanation of the way in which, according to Stein, Husserl’s idealism should be framed, this paper offers an evaluation of her criticism with a special focus on her Introduction to Philosophy lectures of 1920. I argue that if, ultimately, Stein’s rejection of Husserl’s idealism in the text in question is deemed unsuccessful, we must examine the premises on which her own per-spective on the eidetics of nature is based.

One striking feature of Finite and Eternal Being is Edith Stein’s exceedingly rare use of the term “metaphysics.” She uses the term “formal ontology” numerous times, but the term “metaphysics” only appears a handful of times in the body of the text, and even those references are themselves a bit surprising. This could be explained in several ways, some of which may be quite innocent and have nothing to do with whether she understands her project as metaphysical. In the following, however, I would like to explore a differing explanation and argue that (at least, in part) her reason for avoiding describing her work as metaphysical is connected with the type of philosophical critique she wants to make of traditional metaphysics. I will not argue that Finite and Eternal Being should ultimately be read as a phenomenological analysis of being rather than any sort of metaphysical treatise, but I will argue that Stein has explicitly phenomenological reasons for being cautious about using the term “metaphysics.”

This article seeks to advance a way of being in the world of the hu-man person that encompasses both the truest sense of freedom of choice and its result, namely, happiness. Starting from the proposal of a relational ethics in Stein I intend to show how, in the authentic relationship through Einfühlung, it is possible to arrive at the “revelation” of what is deeper in ourselves, i.e., the personal core that characterizes us as unique and unrepeatable entities. The growth and development of our personalities occurs coherently with who we are. But the “choice” to adhere to the authenticity of a deep self is a choice of freedom that also leads one to harmony, to the acceptance of one’s finitude and weaknesses, and thus to living well with who one “really” is. This result coincides with being happy.