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1. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Zachary Davis Scheler and the Task of Human Loving
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Max Scheler’s late work takes a peculiar turn toward a more speculative approach to phenomenology, particularly the work carried out under the titles of philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. I argue in this paper that this shift in Scheler’s approach does not render this late work as abstract, but rather deepens his investigations into the meaning the most fundamental and concrete human act, the act of love. Scheler’s late work ultimately demonstrates that loving is the task of being human.
2. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Eric Duffy Anguish and Nausea as Calls to Action
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Sartre’s Being and Nothingness intends to establish a “phenomenology of action,” where being-for-itself is structured by the law of consciousness and intentionality. Choice organizes the situation while being determined by the limitation of facticity. Anguish and nausea are twin structures that concern the breakdown of the for-itself’s relation to its freedom and to objects as meaningful, respectively. Sartre’s The Imaginary clarifies the central conceit of the novel Nausea. Finally, the discussion of anguish and nausea provide central insights into Sartre’s theory of subjectivity and phenomenology of action.
3. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Leonard Lawlor What Is the Outside?
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This small essay is part of a book project called “Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy: Towards the Outside” (under contract with Indiana University Press). Examining key texts in Bergson, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault, the book lays out a kind of narrative. The narrative aims to show that these thinkers contain conceptual components from which emerges a research program. There are four components: the overcoming of metaphysics (understood as Platonism); the starting point in immanent, subjective experience; the transformation of immanence into multiplicity; and a new form of thinking adequate to multiplicity. The crucial component is the transformation of immanence into multiplicity. Multiplicity is the outside.
4. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Peter Westmoreland Rousseau’s Phenomenological Model for the Co-Constitution of Self and World
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Vicar in Emile provides a phenomenological model for the co-constitution of self and world out of experiences as they emerge in the first person perspective. Self and world or non-self are intertwined in experience. Self is a spontaneous activity that differentiates and selects items given in experience as belonging to it based on how those items are given: by feelings or sentiments originating in the self or by sensations originating in the external world. Making this differentiation is not easy due to the interpenetration of self and world. Self constitutes itself according to ontological categories of mind and body that sort the sentiments. Self is constituted as a union of mental and bodily sentiments. Self constitutes the world according to how sentiments orient it toward the world and how sensations give the world to the self.
5. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Sarah LaChance Adams The Pregnable Subject: Maternity and Levinas’s Relevance to Feminism
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In Levinas’ Otherwise than Being, the mother appears as the prototype of ethical subjectivity, complete being for the other. Adams argues that Levinas appropriates the maternal perspective without concern for the actual complexities of motherhood. He especially neglects the (very common) experience of maternal ambivalence and women’s desires for independence. Ironically, Adams claims, Levinas provides the most valuable insights to mothering as an ethical practice when he is not speaking of mothers, women, or the “feminine” directly. In particular, he illuminates the temporality of maternal ethics and its complex relationship to freedom.
6. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
David Leichter The Dual Role of Testimony in Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting
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This paper explores some implications of Ricoeur’s conception of testimony. Testimony plays two roles: it enables us to know what actually happened and it reveals how the past continues to be meaningful. However, these two roles generate a peculiar problem: the meaning of the past, as bearing witness, cannot be exhausted by a narrative account of what happened. Furthermore, since testimony situates a people within a tradition and raises suspicion on such a narrative by showing that it does not fully bear witness to the past, Ricoeur’s understanding of testimony opens a site for ethical and political challenges.
7. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Douglas F. Peduti, S.J. Heidegger’s Later Phenomenology: Allowing the Subtle Appearance to Emerge through the Din
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Heidegger’s turn to Being-in-the-World accentuates how human beings have access to the world. Heidegger’s destructive retrieval makes possible the unveiling of hidden Being and the recovery of community that Husserl’s solispsism overlooks. Through Ereignis, Vorsicht, and the falling silent of language on the way to Being, Heidegger’s later thought can achieve the synthesis of multiplicity and unity that Hegel and Derrida were unable to find.
8. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Saulius Geniusas What Does the Question of Origins Mean in Phenomenology?
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In what follows, I address the question of origins in the framework of Husserlian phenomenology. I argue that both the sense and the methodological justification of the phenomenological question of origins derive from the problematics of the horizon. I show that Husserl’s notion of the horizon entails two dimensions of sense: the horizon is a horizon of reference and of validity. As a system of reference, the horizon embraces all the implications that each appearance draws to other appearances. The qualification of the horizon as a system of validity entails a further realization that an actual appearance entails references not only to other actual appearances, but also, and even more importantly, to other potential modes of appearances. I interpret the phenomenological question of origins as the question that traces the concealed senseaccomplishments, which qualify the sense of any appearing objectivity. On the basis of what is stated above, I argue that (1) the horizon as a system of validity clarifies the sense of the question of origins, and that (2) the possibility of the question of origins is secured by the horizon as a system of reference.
9. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Michael D. Barber Ethics, Eidetics, and the Ethical Subject: A Critique of Enrique Dussel’s Appropriation of the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas
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Enrique Dussel’s Etica de la Liberacion en le Edad de la Globalizacion y de la Exclusion is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the last ten years in the current of thought known as “liberation philosophy,” and this book is valuable for the way it seeks to incorporate the thought of Emmanuel Levinas into a philosophy addressing global oppression and exclusion. However, Dussel fails to appreciate fully the distinctiveness of ethical experience according to Levinas as well as the significance of the eidetic features of Levinas’s account in particular for the understanding of subjectivity. Furthermore, in his discussion of subjectivity in the Etica, Dussel neglects how ethical responsibility can produce a powerful subject. As a consequence, he overlooks how this possibility, which in its generality is available to oppressors and victims of globalization alike, can be realized by the victims becoming responsible for other victims and coming to fear, as Levinas puts it, the murder of the other more than their own death.
10. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Bruce Baugh Freedom, Fatalism, and the Other in Being and Nothingness and The Imaginary
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“Hell is other people,” but the absence of the Other, rather than being paradise, would be its own kind of hell: the fatalism of dreams, in which a possibility is no sooner conceived than it is realized. Freedom of action requires a resisting world and a temporal gap between intention and outcome, which requires that things be other than they are for consciousness, which requires the presence of the Other.
11. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Matthew J. Goodwin Art and the Deflagration of Being: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetic Phenomenological Method
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This essay compares artistic and phenomenological methods to show how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s artistic examples develop his method as a distinctly active and transformative phenomenology. This reverses one view that artists complete something like a phenomenological reduction in order to more adequately express the given. Instead, Merleau-Ponty turns to artists who manipulate, torment, and deflagrate being. Rather than avoiding presuppositions, artists employ them through passively constituted habits to see how they change and are reciprocally changed by their materials. Finally, rather than identifying certain artists or works as phenomenological, this recognizes Merleau-Ponty as ushering in a distinctly aesthetic method of phenomenology.
12. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Michael D. Barber Introduction to Volume 5: The Breadth of Phenomenology
13. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Lester Embree The Justification of Norms Reflectively Analyzed
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Beginning from the equivalence of “A warrior ought to be courageous” and “A courageous warrior is good” in Husserl’s Prolegomena, the attempt is made to show how what these statements refer to are constituted in processes especially of valuing and are justified.
14. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Shazad Akhtar Between Oneself and Another: Merleau-Ponty’s Organic Appropriation of Husserlian Phenomenology
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Merleau-Ponty’s “existential” reading of Husserl has long been controversial in phenomenological circles. In this paper I present this reading in a new light by arguing that the style and substance of Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophizing are organically interwoven with his interpretation of Husserl. This is a case of mutual implication: one cannot fully “buy” Merleau-Ponty’s Husserl without accepting certain “Merleau-Pontyean” figures of thought, but reciprocally, one cannot understand these figures without situating them within the stream of Merleau-Ponty’s reading and appropriation of Husserl. The bulk of the paper concentrates on the latter side of the equation through a systematic reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s as a “Husserlian” phenomenology.
15. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
George Heffernan From Violence to Evidence? Husserl and Sen on Human Identity and Diversity: Toward a Postcolonial Phenomenology of Humanity
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In The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) Edmund Husserl describes how the crisis of the European sciences represents a crisis of European humanity, which in turn involves a crisis of human identity. In Violence and Identity: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) Amartya Sen explains how some human beings get others to see themselves in terms of a singular unique identity instead of in terms of their disparate but shared identities. This paper investigates Husserl’s and Sen’s approaches to human identity and diversity and explores their respective applications to and implications for humanity, rationality, and solidarity.
16. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Matthew C. Eshleman The Misplaced Chapter on Bad Faith or Reading Being and Nothingness in Reverse
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This essay argues that Sartre’s notion of bad faith cannot be adequately understood, unless one takes the latter half of Being and Nothingness into serious consideration. Sartre employs a Cartesian methodology; consequently, his analysis proceeds from abstract simples to complex, concrete wholes. As his analysis becomes progressively concrete, Sartre revises two abstract claims made early in the text. Only after one appreciates that Sartre, strictly speaking, abandons a non-egological view of consciousness and an absolute view of freedom can one make sense out of several especially vexing features of bad faith.
17. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 4
Tanja Staehler Heidegger, Derrida, the Question and the Call
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Derrida alerts us to the significance of the question and the call in Heidegger’s philosophy; he claims that, for Heidegger, these two phenomena are always connected. The question emerges for Heidegger as the question of Being whereas the call is originally the call of conscience. Derrida claims that Heidegger imports unquestioned presuppositions into his investigations. A phenomenological perspective on the question and the call asks how, or in what way the question and the call are issued; it also asks from whom and to whom they are delivered. An investigation of the encounter shows that Heidegger’s text provides responses to at least some of Derrida’s criticism. In the end, the question and the call emerge as two ‘figures of the unconditional’ and thus serve to shed a new light on the unconditional in Derrida’s sense, including its ethical dimension.
18. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 4
Susanna Lindberg Schelling’s Organism and Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh
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Merleau-Ponty’s 1956/1957 lectures on Nature show that his late philosophy of the flesh in Le visible et l’invisible was preceded by a study of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. But what is Schelling’s Naturphilosophie like, and what does Merleau-Ponty actually inherit from it? This article gives an overview of the different stages of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, that starts as a transcendental philosophy of natural sciences, develops through a metaphysics of nature’s productivity and takes finally the form of a peculiar ontology of “gravity” and “light.” Then it shows how Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “flesh” repeats Schelling’s idea of nature as “organism,” except for one thing: relying on “perceptive faith” instead of “reason,” it refuses the general overview on the organic totality of nature and rests embedded in the tissue of flesh. Finally, pointing at a critical confrontation with Schelling that is lacking in Merleau-Ponty, the article weighs the pertinence of Schelling’s ideas for us, today.
19. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 4
Petr Kouba Temporality of Madness
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Even though our primal concern is strictly philosophical, this article has also relevance for psychiatry and psychotherapy, as it is focused on the application of Heidegger’s existential analysis in the area of mental disorders. After a critical examination of the works of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and Alice Holzhey-Kunz who based their psychiatric and psychotherapeutic conceptions on the ontological fundament laid by Heidegger’s existential analysis, we try to uncover new thematic possibilities relevant to psychopathological phenomena in the ontological frame of the existential analysis. This brings us to the notion of the third mode of temporality that differs both from the temporality of the authentic existence and from the temporality of the inauthentic existence. Finally, we come to the possibility of the temporal disintegration of Dasein, in which we find the very core of the psychopathological phenomena. The phenomenon of temporal disintegration of Da-sein, however, shows the whole ontological structure of Dasein in a new light which is why it brings us to a fundamental revision of Heidegger’s existential analytics.
20. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 4
Dermot Moran, Hans Rainer Sepp Preface