Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
February 13, 2019
Jaakko Belt
12 citations
The distinction between minimal self and narrative self is common in discussions of selfhood. This article reassesses that distinction by analyzing Zahavi and Gallagher's account and supplementing it with Husserl's concept of person. The two notions of self are compatible and complementary, but their relationship needs clarification. Issues of embeddedness, the interplay between passivity and activity, and problems of uniqueness and persistence are better understood through Husserl's analysis of person, including position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. The person is related to its environment, other people, and its past, mediating between the minimal self's perspectival ownership and the narrative self's authorship.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
October 8, 2018
D. Hobbs
4 citations
The article addresses a longstanding puzzle in Husserlian phenomenology: the identity of the transcendental ego, the subject of transcendental phenomenology, and its relation to the empirical ego of the individual phenomenologist. Drawing on Eugen Fink's concept of a "personal union" between these two egos in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation and on Husserl's First Philosophy lectures, the author develops an account in which the transcendental ego is a mode of self-investigation by the phenomenologist. This interpretation, the author argues, preserves the transcendental status of phenomenology while deflecting certain criticisms.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
June 18, 2025
Jakub Čapek
1 citation
Jan Patočka's philosophical anthropology in the 1940s defined human existence by the capacity to distance oneself from pre-given reality, echoing Sartre's existentialism. However, Patočka rejected Sartre's ethical implications and the notion that self-consciousness entails an inner duplication and negation of consciousness itself. While Patočka still conceived consciousness as negation, he offered a different account of what it negates by interpreting Socratic knowledge of not-knowing existentially. This opened an original perspective in the debate over existentialism, distinct from other participants.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
June 12, 2026
Bill Brewer
The paper examines whether applying concepts during perception helps us understand that what we perceive is objective—existing independently of our minds. It clarifies a specific version of this question and argues for an affirmative answer, a position called Conceptualism. The author then develops an objection to Conceptualism based on J.L. Mackie's work, offers an alternative Anti-Conceptualist account of perceptual objectivity, and explains where both the argument for Conceptualism and Mackie's response to it go wrong.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
December 4, 2025
Agnė Veisaitė
This paper argues that the Chinese character wo 我, usually translated as “I” or “self,” contains a tool metaphor (a hand holding a dagger-axe) that reveals selfhood as constituted through tool-using activities. Drawing on Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, the author contends that the wo-self, like Dasein, is embedded in social roles and tool-bearing practices. By analyzing skill stories in the Zhuangzi alongside references to rectifying tools, the paper proposes that the tool metaphor can either reinforce inherited circumstances and social roles (ming 名/命) or provide a means to cut through them. The author further argues that self-forgetting in skilled activities arises not from absorption in action alone but through dialogical attunement to non-human presence.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
January 31, 2022
R. Ritunnano
Adopting a critical phenomenological stance in psychiatric practice can address instances of hermeneutical injustice that arise when clinicians dismiss the communication of patients with psychosis as meaningless or unintelligible. The author argues that shifting from individualistic to interactionist views of understanding, which account for contextual, historical, and relational backgrounds of meaning co-constitution, can remedy such unintelligibility. A proposed corrective involves attentiveness to the person's subjectivity, sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and hermeneutical flexibility as an openness to alternative horizons of possibility.