This article sets out to examine the 1950s debate between Enzo Paci and Ernesto de Martino, with particular attention to the Italian reception of phenomenology, but also to other philosophical references that prove decisive for this confrontation, namely Croce’s historicism and Abbagnano’s positive existentialism. We will follow the arguments presented by the two thinkers in Il nulla e il...
This article aims to show that Giovanni Piana’s work provides a valuable and coherent outline for a phenomenology of the unconscious. After a necessary introduction to the topic as it appears in Piana’s writings, the analysis develops along three main lines of inquiry. First, Piana’s account of the structure of consciousness is reconstructed, highlighting its critical distance from the Freudian...
Does our application of concepts in perception have a role in our understanding of the objectivity of what we perceive? I clarify a specific version of this question and present an argument for an affirmative answer: Conceptualism. I develop an objection to the resulting position drawing on Mackie's discussion in “Perception, Mind-Independence, and Berkeley”, offer an alternative...
This paper examines tool-usage in the Zhuangzi through the lens of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. Drawing on the ideography of wo 我 – commonly translated as “I” or “self”– I interpret wo as constitutive through its doings, particularly via the use of tools or equipment. The character wo 我 is derived from the radical for “hand” 手holding a dagger-axe 戈, which I address as a broader...
ABSTRACT In the 1940s, Sartre’s philosophy sparked what Merleau-Ponty called the “battle over existentialism”. This article focuses on Jan Patočka’s contribution to this controversy. In his philosophical anthropology in the second half of the 1940s, Patočka sees human existence as defined by the capacity to maintain a distance from what is pre-given (reality of the physical world, established...
ABSTRACT Building on a phenomenological analysis of the Tunisian Revolution, this article puts forward the concept of critical experience as a type of experience in which the very experiential structures prove subversive of otherwise established orders (e.g. political, ethical, technological, epistemological etc.). In order to trace the anarchic, but generative impulses of such critical...
ABSTRACT This paper argues that Husserl’s personalist ethics provides a new way to understand the meaning of the full concretion of the transcendental ego in his mature phenomenology. Husserl’s late ethics introduces, at the core of his thinking, a notion of contingency that he associates with irrationality and facticity. This central aspect of human life, namely that contingency traverses it...
In this article, I introduce engaged phenomenology as an approach through which phenomenologists can more explicitly and critically consider the generative conditions and implications of their research. I make an explicit link between philosophical insights from critical and generative phenomenology and the ethical and methodological insights offered by engaged research methods-a...
ABSTRACT The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be...
ABSTRACT This article tests the waters concerning a possible integration of Gurwitsch’s theory of consciousness into 4E research. More specifically, it is suggested that radical embodied approaches can benefit from Gurwitsch’s distinction between theme, thematic field and margin in order to methodically grasp how contextual and attentional factors can modulate affordance perception. On the...
ABSTRACT The distinction between minimal self and narrative self has gained ground in recent discussions of selfhood. In this article, this distinction is reassessed by analysing Zahavi and Gallagher’s account of selfhood and supplementing it with Husserl’s concept of person. I argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible and complementary notions of self. Nevertheless, the relationship...
ABSTRACT One long-running conundrum in Husserlian phenomenology revolves around the question of the identity of what Husserl calls the transcendental ego, a mysterious figure that he identifies as the subject of a genuinely transcendental phenomenology. In dialogue with both Husserl and his assistant and collaborator Eugen Fink (as well as recent commentary), I attempt in this article to give a...
In the preface of Precarious Life, the Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler writes: To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its d...
(2011). Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits between Dreyfus and Descartes. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 42, Habit, pp. 78-103.
This paper examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy of time in light of his critique and reconceptualization of Edmund Husserl’s early time-analyses. Drawing on The Visible and the Invisible and lecture courses, I elaborate Merleau-Ponty’s re-reading of Husserl’s time-analyses through the lens of Rudolf Bernet’s “Einleitung” to this work. My question is twofold: what becomes of the...
(1993). Sartre and the Long Distance Truck Driver: The Reflexivity of Consciousness. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 24, The Other, Consciousness and Values, pp. 232-249.
(1992). On the Origin of Organization in Consciousness. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 23, Derrida, Levinas, and Pragmatism, pp. 53-65.
Sartre posed a problem for himself in his discussion of bad faith: how is it possible to deceive oneself, given the unity and translucency of consciousness? Many critics of Sartre interpret translucency as transparency; some, such as M.R. Haight, conclude that Sartre's account of consciousness makes self-deception impossible.A reply to those critics takes the form of showing that translucent...