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1. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Donald A. Landes Introduction: The Everywhere and the Nowhere of Phenomenological Ethics
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As a descriptive philosophy, it might seem that the ethical nowhere has its place in phenomenology. And yet, phenomenology is every-where shot through with normative concerns. This section includes articles from the 2018 conference Toward a Phenomenological Ethics, where two themes emerged regarding the elusive place of the ethical in phenomenology: first, research demonstrates that early phenomenology was indeed oriented by the ethical; second, Critical Phenomenology examines ethical questions in terms of intersubjectivity and oppression. In this introduction, I suggest that the place of the ethical in phenomenology implies a certain paradoxical logic of expression, and I consider the relationship between expression and encroachment. This points to a double responsibility for the cultivation of our own virtual and the virtual that we collectively sustain. I conclude with a brief re􀏔lection on how these ideas might help us to rethink our responsibilities in the age of COVID-19.
2. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Rawb Leon-Carlyle Love and the Shadow of Sacrifice: Husserl at the Limits of Relational Ethics
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In this article, I foreground the role of relationality in Husserl’s later reflections on ethics and self-constitution, with a particular interest in Husserl’s account of sacrifice. I exposit how Husserl’s account of self-constitution and the conflict of absolute values between competing vocations offers a solution to Brentano’s rendering of the obligation to “choose the best among the ends attainable.” I explore the numerous instances in which Husserl uses the parent-child relation to illustrate the absolute value of our relation to an individual and how this absolute value triumphs over other seemingly rational maxims. Although problematic in several ways, Husserl’s account of motherhood grounds his notion of self-constitution in particular relations with others, rather than in a general category of nation or humanity. I conclude by considering how his emphasis on phenomenological constitution and his approach to value and sacrifice may inform future projects in phenomenological relational ethics.
3. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Ellie Anderson Phenomenology and the Ethics of Love
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Phenomenologists have long viewed love as a central form of inter-subjective engagement. I show here that it is also of concern to phenomenological ethics. After establishing the relation of phenomenology to ethics, I show that both classical and existential phenomenology view love as an act of valuing the loved one. I argue that a second act of valuing is latent in phenomenology: valuing the relationship. These values are evident in the phenomenological distinction between true love, which generates a “perspective in difference,” and false love, which seeks union with the beloved manifesting in devotion and/or jealousy. Because culturally dominant heteronormative scripts incline individuals toward false love, lovers should create their own pacts for ethical relationships. I consider consensually non-monogamous relationships as an example.
4. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Alex J. Feldman The Real Effects of Rationality: Foucault’s Position in The Impossible Prison
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Two critical reviews of Discipline and Punish inspired an exchange between Foucault and some prominent historians in 1978. In the texts from this exchange, Foucault addresses their criticism that, by focusing on unrealized plans and programs, such as Bentham’s Panopticon, his book lacks a sense of historical reality. Foucault replies, first, that the true aim of his book is to explore the emergence of a new type of penal rationality, not to insist that the Panopticon itself has been realized. Second, he holds that types of rationality can produce distinctive sorts of effects, regardless of whether the plans and programs to which they are attached are ever fully achieved. This paper seeks to clarify Foucault’s underlying account in these responses of rationality and its efficacy. It also takes up and develops Foucault’s suggestive distinction between two different types of effects: “effects in the real” and “reality effects.”
5. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
List of Book Reviews/Liste des comptes rendus
6. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Kimberly Matheson Points, Plasticity, and the Logic of Contraction in Alain Badiou and Catherine Malabou
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This article presents Catherine Malabou and Alain Badiou as theorists of contraction (a kind of reduction or tightening that accompanies every process of transformation) and its related operations of self-reflexivity and infinite iteration. Trading on these commonalities, the article hopes to draw out Malabou’s and Badiou’s respective formalist commitments. On Badiou’s side, it sharpens the question of what is at stake in something as regulated as a “procedure”; on Malabou’s, it recognizes formal stakes to plasticity that often go unrecognized because of her penchant for biology. The article then concludes with a broad comparison of these two thinkers in terms of their accounts of potential and imagines the critiques each might leverage against the other. Where Malabou might well regard Badiou to be too tightly constraining the shape of the future, Badiou is likely to find in Malabou one more instance of a naïve democratic materialism.
7. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Antonio Calcagno Introduction: Edith Stein’s Rethinking of Phenomenology
8. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Anna Maria Pezzella, Antonio Calcagno Phenomenology and Psychology: Edith Stein’s Contribution to the Investigation of the Psyche
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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.
9. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Angela Ales Bello, Antonio Calcagno The Meaning of Life between Time and Eternity
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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.
10. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Daniele De Santis “Streichen Wir das Bewußtsein, so Streichen Wir die Welt.”: Edith Stein on Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism: Critical Remarks
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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.
11. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Nicoletta Ghigi, Antonio Calcagno Authentic Freedom and Happiness: An Interpretation of the Ethics of Edith Stein
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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.
12. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Sarah Borden Sharkey Is Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being a Kind of “Phenomenological Metaphysics”?
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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.”
13. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Kyle Novak We Still Do Not Know What a Body Can Do: The Replacement of Ontology with Ethology in Deleuze’s Spinoza
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Throughout much of his career, Deleuze repeats a problem he attributes to Spinoza: “we do not even know what a body can do.” The problem is closely associated with Deleuze’s parallelist reading of Spinoza and what he calls ethology. In this article, I argue that Deleuze takes ethology to be a new model for philosophy which he intends to replace ontology. I ground my claim in Deleuze’s sugges-tion that Spinoza offers philosophers the means of “thinking with AND” rather than “thinking for IS.” The argument is developed through Deleuze’s monographs and collaborations on Spinoza and alongside his meta-philosophical critique of the Image of Thought.
14. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
List of Book Reviews/Liste des comptes rendus
15. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Ioannis Trisokkas Phenomenology as Metaphysics: On Heidegger’s Interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
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The article reflects on Heidegger’s “metaphysical” interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This interpretation is driven by two theses Heidegger holds: (1) that the Phenomenology is a necessary part of Hegel’s “system of science” and (2) that the Phenomenology is metaphysics. These two theses contrast with Houlgate’s “epistemological” interpretation, which claims that the Phenomenology is not a necessary part of Hegel’s system of science and that it is not metaphysics. The article shows that while Heidegger has an argument that establishes, contra Houlgate, his second thesis, this very argument has consequences that undermine his first.
16. Symposium: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Joseph Arel Conscience and the Oracular Affirmation of Contingency in Action
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Hegel argues that we must recognize the essential role that contingency plays in moral action. Because the role that Hegel finds for contingency is both outside of one’s control and idiosyncratic, his view represents a significant challenge to the ideas that in morality we only account for what we can control and that our motivations should not be idiosyncratic needs. To bring out this significance, I look at three ways in which Hegel characterizes the relationship between the necessity of the moral law and the contingency of moral action, by drawing on three figures Hegel has emphasized in the history of moral action.
17. Symposium: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
J. Colin McQuillan Philosophical Archaeology and the Historical A Priori: From Kant to Foucault
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Most accounts of the historical a priori can be traced back to Husserlian phenomenology. Foucault’s appeals to the historical a priori are more problematic because of his hostility to this tradition. In this paper, I argue that Foucault’s diplôme thesis on Hegel, his studies of Kant’s Anthropology, his response to critics of The Order of Things, and his later work on Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” all suggest that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy helped to shape his conception of the historical a priori.
18. Symposium: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Elisa Magrì Hegel and the Genesis of the Concept
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According to Habermas, Hegel’s early reflections in Jena on labour and language do not bear upon logical categories. In Habermas’s view, the formative model that Hegel proposes in his early texts on labour and language is lost in his mature philosophy. In this paper, I shall propose an intra-systematic reading of Hegel’s philosophy that challenges Habermas’s dualistic reading. I shall point out the dialectical relation between labour, memory, and the logical concept (Begriff). In doing so, I will emphasize the fact that memory and labour are based on the refutation of the use of mechanical causality in the genesis of the subject, the argument for which is illustrated in the Science of Logic. Finally, I will argue that the genesis of the logical concept coincides with a formative process that is grounded in the Science of Logic and yet underlies the genesis of subjectivity as spontaneous capacity of self-determination.
19. Symposium: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Robert Trumbull The All-Seeing Sovereign: Blindness and Vision in Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars
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This article explores an intriguing, yet underdeveloped line of inquiry in Derrida’s late Death Penalty Seminars concerning the inherent visibility or spectacle of the death penalty. Showing how this inquiry surfaces in Derrida’s engagement with Foucault, the article argues that Derrida’s Seminars offer crucial resources for critically analyzing, and thus rethinking, sovereignty and the principle of capital punishment. In particular, it demonstrates how visibility forms a key component of the structural scaffolding around the death penalty put under pressure by deconstruction. It then develops this claim by drawing salient connections between the Seminars and Derrida’s work on other visual forms.
20. Symposium: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Peter Gratton Foucault’s Last Decade: An Interview with Stuart Elden, Eduardo Mendieta, and Diana Taylor
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At the time of his death in 1984, Foucault’s late career forays into Stoicism and other sets of ancient texts were often little understood, except as part of a larger project on the history of sexuality. Indeed, outside of France and outside of an incipient queer theory, Foucault was often taken up in terms of debates over post-structuralism and postmodernism—themes all but absent from his writings. More than thirty years later, after the publication of all of his lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1970-1984 as well as his collected writings, we have gained a better understanding of the deep continuities in his set of concerns from Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961) to the third volume of his history of sexuality series, Le Souci de soi (1984). Yet many Foucault scholars continue to see momentous shifts in his writings, e.g., from knowledge (1960s) to power (1970s) to ethics (1980s), and the almost bewildering range of texts he covered in the years after finishing the first volume of his history of sexuality series, La Volonté de savoir (1976), lead to very different interpretations concerning what Foucault was attempting to do and how much his rendering of ancient texts differed from his own claims. Stuart Elden’s Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity, 2016) steps into this breach, using archival work to fill in many of the details of this period, from when and on what Foucault was lecturing to listing those with him in that amusing late photo of a beaming Foucault in an ill-fitting cowboy hat. The publication of Elden’s book marks a good time to assess this often misunderstood period in Foucault’s work, and we have gathered Stuart Elden (University of Warwick) and two more of Foucault’s best interpreters, Eduardo Mendieta (Pennsylvania State University) and Dianna Taylor (John Carroll University), to do so.