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iii. the first generation

81. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Shazad Akhtar

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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.
82. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Sarah LaChance Adams

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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.
83. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Michael D. Barber

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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.
84. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
David Leichter

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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.

iv. other authors and themes

85. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Caroline Rebecca Lundquist

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There are few phenomena more tragic than rape-resultant pregnancy; faced with such pregnancies, rape victims are forced to make incredibly difficult and often heart-rending decisions. Yet both public and academic discourse on rape-pregnancy fails to acknowledge the profoundly tragic nature of these decisions, and also tends to implicitly or explicitly blame victims who opt for abortion or adoption. This paper critiques the use of praise and blame in relation to rape-resultant pregnancies, emphasizing the harmful effects of moral judgments on pregnant rape victims, and calls instead for a new ethical paradigm that acknowledges the deeply tragic nature of this phenomenon.
86. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 5 > Issue: Part 1
Peter Westmoreland

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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.

87. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2

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88. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Luis Álvarez Falcón

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On September 10th 1951, in the context of the Rencontres internationales of Geneva, Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave his lecture L’homme et l’adversité (“Man and Adversity”). In an accurate diagnosis of European culture, his analysis sprang from the phenomenological premises defined by Edmund Husserl in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie that the post-World War II context modified in its epistemological, moral and political conceptions. !e urgency for an answer to the new situation of mankind’s condition will entail a transfor mation of human knowledge as well as of the sensitive areas of our experience. Consequently, a new experience of our condition will call into question the concept of “humanism” itself, demanding a profound revision of the regression of the dynamisms of experience that have ended up in a loss—or failure—of Western culture’s conceptions. This essay will try to reactivate and upgrade the serene testimony of a thought whose premises lie in the inconclusive origin of a radical crisis: the experience of contingency and adversity.

89. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Carlos Belvedere

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In this article, I deal with the problem of social order from a phenomenological standpoint. In the first place, I summarize Schutz’s position on constitutional analysis and its relevance for the Social Sciences. In the second place, I pose some questions related to the constitution of social realities in Husserl, which have also been acknowledged by Schutz. In the third place, I discuss the significance of the constitutional analysis of the thing in Husserl for a phenomenological approach to social facts in Durkheim’s sense. Finally, I sketch out some features of social order understood as a constituted region.

90. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Adrián Bertorello, Julieta Bereiro

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This work aims at articulating Heidegger and Winnicott’s proposal regarding the issue of the concrete patterns of identity. First, we shall make a brief exposure of the multiplicity of subjective roles in each of the authors. Second, we shall propose a narrativist interpretation of the issue of the self in both of the aforementioned authors. This work shall not only limit to state the mainly narrative structure of Heidegger’s Selbst and of Winnicott’s Self, but it shall also aim at determining a concrete narrative pattern for each of these roles.

91. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Mariana Chu

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As for Brentano, also for Husserl and Scheler love has a main ethical role, but with a wider reach, since the ethical meaning that phenomenologists see in love is founded in its ontological meaning. With the purpose of contributing some leads to the ontological sense of love, this paper approaches Scheler’s determination of the essential structure of love. Thereupon, it shows how it is possible to identify those features in Husserl’s reflection on the implications of loving. This will enable the author to show in which sense Husserl and Scheler coincide in the ethical meaning of love.

92. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Alexis Gros

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This work is part of a wider research project on the contributions that the analysis of the antinomy between social ontology and historicity in Edmund Husserl’s thought can bring to epistemological reflection in the social sciences. In Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie, Merleau-Ponty takes as starting point Husserl’s diagnosis of the critical situation in which both philosophy and the human sciences are submerged since the beginnings of the 20th century. This is the crisis of rationality as basis of every possibility of knowledge, due, among other factors, to the developments of Lebensphilosophie and the dyad historicismsociologism. The urgent situation produced by the breakdown of the basis of reason locks epistemological thought in a difficulty of deciding whether a) to succumb to absolute relativism of historicism, or b) to take refuge in a non-historical rationalism, without paying attention to its critics. In the same way Merleau-Ponty affirms the currency of Husserl’s diagnosis in the France of his time, we reaffirm its actuality for the epistemological reflection on social sciences, in view of the advance of the so-called Post-metaphysical era, which could be seen as a re-edition of a sociologist-historicism. According to Husserl, empirical sciences must be based on eidetical sciences. This is to say, on researches that could discover the essence of the studied object—by means of the Wesensschau—founding regional ontologies. In the case of sociology, empirical research should be supported by a social ontology—which states clearly the essential social categories for all times and places that researchers use without any thoroughness. This ontology should ask itself, for example, about the essence of religion or art. However, how is the Wesensschau possible, if reason is nothing else than a mere historic-contingent product? Social sciences face, still nowadays, the paradox of being forced to base their rigor on the same Lebenswelt that they expect to know. The aim of this article is to present Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the course of this antinomy in Husserl. Our hypothesis is the following: according to the French phenomenologist, Husserl’s thought on the relation between essences and historicity develops this way. a) The first Husserl, who still thinks as a Cartesian, conceives the sphere of essences as absolutely divorced from the contingency of history. b) The Husserl “of the later years”—as Merleau-Ponty refers to him—, that is, the Husserl from the Cartesian Meditations to the Crisis, faces the hard task of basing the essences on the Lebenswelt, and conceives an intrinsic bond between both spheres.

93. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Soraya Guimãres Hoepfner

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This paper proposes a reflection upon philosophy’s role in discussing contemporaneity. By questioning if it is the philosopher’s vocation to think our actuality, the author discusses the character and temporality of philosophical discourse itself. She argues, in a provocative manner, that it is only possible to philosophise about today. Recognizing philosophical discourse’s distinctive character as its possibility of understanding the today beyond today’s facts, she refers to an essential temporal dimension of the contemporary, the same that the temporality of philosophical discourse refers to. Concerning philosophical discourse, the author shows that its reference to the essential dimension of today not only is a signature of distinction from a mere historical-anthropological approach, but precisely that it is what determines its very mode of being. This interpretation is founded on the analysis of two distinct philosophical approaches to contemporaneity. First, it establishes a close dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s thinking of his own contemporaneity, making explicit how he thinks his actuality and how he had an insight into what it is [Einblick in das was ist] as a way of revealing the today in its phenomenological sense. !e second illustration, or the counterpoint, is made by an analysis of the lecture of Giorgio Agamben’s “What is the contemporary?” [Che cos’è il contemporaneo?], which portrays the predominant character of contemporary philosophical discourse about contemporaneity. Such a character is based on a conception of temporality that cannot grasp the essential dimension of the today and, as a result, thinking remains enclosed in the perspective of human agency. Heidegger’s approach to contemporaneity remains in the realm of philosophical discourse by grasping the essential temporality of the today. In general, philosophical discourses in our contemporaneity about contemporary issues remain attached to an interpretation of events in time that reinforces the agency of the human. In short, the author considers relevant the contrast between both discourses in order to claim that philosophical discourse should be always an insight into and beyond the today. The awareness of this essential temporality is what defines its philosophical status and most importantly gives philosophy the task of questioning contemporaneity—of truly thinking the world of today.

94. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Guilherme Peres Messas

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This article develops a phenomenological contribution to the notion of biology in psychopathology and psychiatry. Grounded in the principles of transformation, heterogeneity, proportionality and particularity, a paradigm of phenomenological orientation allocates to biology a role different from that assumed by mainstream psychiatry. First, no clear definition of what is biological may be established a priori as of general application. Second, the research agenda in biological psychiatry necessarily intersects with investigation of the particularities of each individual clinical case. Finally, the continuity of the biological agenda needs to resume the construction and investigation of psychopathological categories that cohere with the reality of the mental universe.

95. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Natalia Petrillo

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In the Logical Investigations, Husserl demonstrates the need to distinguish between the meaning of a linguistic expression and its relationship to an extralinguistic object in reality. Husserl distinguishes two kinds of signs: the “indicative sign” (Anzeichen) and the “expressive sign”, which he also calls “expression” (Ausdruck). He draws the distinction with the claim that an indicative sign “indicates” something but does not express a “meaning” (Bedeutung). In other words, he disentangles the expression, as the sign which expresses a meaning, from its usual entanglement with the indicative sign. In the First Investigation of the Logical Investigations, Husserl dwells on intersubjective discourse only long enough to isolate the expressive sign and attempts to capture the way contents and acts become thematic in communication by contrasting the expressive and the indicative function of the signs. In order to study the logical meaning of a sign, Husserl excludes as irrelevant the indicative sign and devotes his analysis to the logical expressions. The article first clarifies the basic concepts of Husserl’s theory of meaning. To appreciate his observations, we might recall how the process of communication comes up in Husserl (I). Furthermore, an attempt is made in this paper to show that meaning is not restricted to linguistic expressions (II). Since communication is contaminated by indications, it can no longer be totally expressive. As a consequence, it is only when communication is suspended that pure expressivity is regained. In order to restore pure expression, the relation with the other has to be suspended. This means that the process of expression does not owe anything to the empirical world, including the empirically spoken world. It also means that the solitary subject does not need indications in order to have a relation with itself. The reason is the immediate presence of conscious life to itself. According to this, there arises the problem of whether the corporal movements are expressions, too. In response to this difficulty, I will take up Husserl’s considerations of the constitution of intersubjectivity through corporal movements. The main purpose of this article consists in showing a possible way to answer this question. The conclusion summarizes the main points and recalls that there is also another kind of expressions that Husserl did not consider in the Logical Investigations.

96. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Luis Román Rabanaque

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This paper aims to present some aspects of the noematical connections between kinaesthesis and the own Body that can be drawn following Husserl’s static and genetic analyses. These aspects concern: 1) the introduction of the concept of kinaesthesis as the phenomenological residuum of the “muscle sensations”, and in reference to the own Body as the bearer of all sensations; 2) the noematic constitution of the own Body both as a physical thing and as the “organ” of the I, the latter being constituted in turn in a sensing and a moving stratum; 3) the reference of the “I move” as a mode of the “I can (move)” to the I as subject of a system of practical capacities; 4) this system’s genetic structure in the living present as an habitual one whose noematic correlate can be described as a “schema” of possible orientations and typical presentations of things within the world; 5) the difference between kinaesthetical systems in plural and Kinaesthesis in singular as all-compassing unity.

97. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Rosemary R. P. Lerner

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This paper was mostly motivated by Peru’s intense social and economic problems that exploded in an internal armed conflict of exceeding violence, from 1980 to 2000. The A. uses the experience within her country as an exemplification of more global cultural and ideological antagonisms among countries, regions or hemispheres, and to ask whether an encounter beyond cultural differences and reconciliation beyond ideologically motivated antagonisms is at all possible, and upon which bases. Husserl left descriptions that indicate how “plurality” and difference dwell within the most intimate core of one’s “oneness” and “identity”, offering clues as to how we are able to conceive and build “common worlds”, “common truths” and even “objective truth”. The A. finally confronts these transcendental-phenome nological accounts with some elements of certain Amazonian ethnic groups’ worldview, which may seem totally “incompossible” with the Western view that finally nourishes some of Husserl’s basic notions.

98. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Melissa Garcia Tamelini, Daniela Ceron-Litvoc

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The goal of this article is to describe and discuss the concepts of Mania according to a phenomenological-structural approach. The mainstream of psychiatry defines mania on the basis of signs and symptoms, most of them merely behaviors. The phenomenological-structural thinking attempts to illuminate the structure which defines the pathology and determines the phenomena. The manifestation of mania will be divided in fundamental phenomenological categories such as Time, Space, and Interpersonal Contact in a dialogue with postulations of classical authors. The possibility of a similar structure for mania and melancholia is suggested in the last part of the article.

99. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Germán Vargas Guillén

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A discussion of the need to complement phenomenology’s emphasis on description and first-person experience, in accounting for the human production of meaning, with hermeneutics’ emphasis on interpretation and third-person experience, partially through accounting for the roles of corrigibility and argumentation in the phenomenological method.

100. Phenomenology 2010: Volume > 2
Maria Aparecida Viggiani Bicudo

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This paper attempts to present an introduction to Phenomenology and Mathematics. Phenomenology was created and developed by Edmund Husserl. He left an amazing production concerning one of the questions that haunted him throughout his life: “what is the nature of the objectivity of Mathematics”. The following items are here dealt with: the meaning ground of Husserl’s phenomenological conceptions; the meaning of mathematical idealities; and formalization and categorization as constitutive aspects of the Science of Mathematics.